dead letters
Luis ran off with his dead brother’s fiancée—even before his brother was quite dead—so it’s understandable that he might want some relief from the past. So it’s understandable that he’d like some relief from the past. In fact, he’d like complete freedom from the past, a clean break, which is why he and Laura moved from Argentina to Paris after his brother Nico’s death. This desire for a clean break is also why the letters from his mother have the capacity to unsettle him [Ù94]. By their very existence these letters already reproached him, just for leaving at all, even if his mother had not begun to speak in them of Nico as though Nico were still alive.1
It’s with the arrival of one of these letters that Luis’ story – which Julio called “Cartas de Mamá” – actually begins.. But this letter is even more extraordinary than the usual because Mamá has written that Nico, whom Luís knows to be dead, is coming to Europe. Up to this point, Luís had always figured his mother’s references to Nico to be mistakes, wishful slips of the tongue. She’d written “Nico” when in fact it was Cousin Victor who had come by to visit her, asking after Luis. But now Luis can’t pretend – now he thinks he knows that his mother has lost it. He’s like Petrone, from “The Condemned Door” [Ù44], in his wishful belief that the eruption of the exceptional into daily life can be beaten back with rationalizations. He doesn’t see how it could be that Nico, who is dead, could come to Paris in the boat.
He might have seen that even if Nico is dead and his mother is nuts, everything will happen as if Nico was actually living right there with them. For the crucial fact of this story is that Mamá has invented Nico in language, just as Julio resuscitated the dead “Che” in his own writing [Ù7], and we know very well, even if Luis doesn’t, that invention produces real effects [Ù8]. The effect, in this case, is to introduce Nico and the past into the present, when the fragile life together of Luis and Laura has depended entirely on repressing that past. The shit has hit the fan and there’s nothing more to do but, as Luis and Laura do at the end of the story, resign themselves to living in the world of Mamá’s invention.
Their chance to confront the past in a wholesome, skillful way has passed. The first letters from Mamá were like a second chance, a wake-up call. Language, with the first slightly odd letters, was just pushing open at the door of the present. At that point they made the mistake of not opening it and greeting it. Instead they threw themselves heavily against the guest at the door with such misplaced dismissals as “error” or “craziness”.
But language as invention, the way Mamá uses it, will not be denied. Nico is coming she says and sends by certified mail – so that her invention will be sure to find its mark – the details of his arrival. Now Luis and Laura both go, unbeknownst to the other, to the station, just to confirm for themselves that Mamá really is crazy. They see a man who could be Nico, but is not. Nico had not come. And yet, everything from now on will be as if he had. Mama’s infected them. That evening at home, in an apartment that had once been just right for two, the couple agree that he—“él,” though no one says his name—has lost a lot of weight. I should say so. He’s been dead for several years.
1 Julio Cortázar, “Cartas de Mamá,” Las armas secretas [1958] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 179-193.