8
The distant death of a female body in Carla Guelfenbein’s Contigo en la distancia
Stephen M. Hart
Contigo en la distancia (2015) by the Chilean novelist, Carla Guelfenbeim, begins like Laura Restrepo’s Delirio (2004) and Alejandra Jaramillo Morales’s Acaso la muerte (2010), with the mystery of an inert, female body. There is also the common thread of a mysterious concoction of death, madness and torture associated with the inert female body discovered in the opening pages of these two Colombian novels, although Guelfenbeim’s novel is different in that the death happens peacefully in a hospital, the madness is literary and the torture is psychological. The fact that the main female protagonist of Contigo en la distancia, Vera Sigall, dies peacefully, indeed, makes it more difficult to argue that this novel is primordially focussed on violence against women (VAW), as are the other three novels studied in this section and in Section I (Delirio, Acaso la muerte, and Fuerzas especiales). But the case can be made of Guelfenbein’s novel as long as we re-baptize the oppression felt by the fairer sex in terms of epistemic violence. For Contigo en la distancia is more literary in tonality than the other three novels because of its deliberative elusiveness. Thus it starts seemingly as a murder mystery but then gradually – a little like the roaming camera-eye in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mama también (2001) that gets bored with the script – seems to tire of its genre-destiny and takes to exploring other avenues of emplotment, which take the reader by surprise, ranging from the sudden emergence of the jealous and jilted wife syndrome, to the reversal of the relationship between biography and the novel form to such an extent that a real biographer gets a walk-on part, and followed by many mise-en-abyme scenes; that said, the novel really takes flight when asserting itself as an over-obvious roman à cléf in which the female protagonist is a Chilean version of the famous Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector, and ends up as the tale of how a graduate student discovers that the famous writer on whom she decided to write her doctoral thesis happens to be the grandmother she never knew. Guelfenbein’s novel, like Delirio, Acaso la muerte and Fuerzas especiales, is as much an imaginative re-creation as a non-empiric ideation of reality (see the definitions in Chapter 4), but Contigo en la distancia is different in that the air breathed by the characters in the novel is not full of oxygen so much as full of literature, full of events that occurred in novels, in poets’ lives and in their heads.
Like all good novels Contigo en la distancia starts small. Daniel pays a visit on his elderly neighbour, Vera Sigall, knocks on her door, receives no answer and then decides to investigate:
I dug around in my pocket for your house key and discovered I’d forgotten it. I rang the doorbell, but there was no response. I waited for a few seconds and tried again, and then again, more and more insistently. I remembered the bum’s eyes, brutal and defeated at the same time; they stood out in my memory like a dissonant note in a music score. I turned and walked toward the left side of the yard, and Arthur, with his weary gait, followed me. […] I took a long look through one of the side windows. The stripes of filtered sunlight reinforced the darkness of the hall.
It took a few seconds for me to see you. You’d fallen to the foot of the staircase, where the light practically didn’t reach. Your inert body lay like a toppled tree next to the standing lamp I’d given you for your last birthday. I ran to the patio in the back. The door to the kitchen was wide open. It looked as though someone had been there and – in too much of a hurry? – forgotten to close the door. Who? I wondered.
I crouched down beside you. Your hands were curled into claws, as if they’d been scratching invisible bodies before they surrendered. A pool of blood encircled your head. You also had a long scratch on one arm, a reddish streak that ran from your wrist to your elbow. Your nightgown was bunched up around your hips, and your pubis, smooth and white, showed between your open, elderly legs. I covered you as best I could with your nightgown, and only then did I grab you by the shoulders and shake you. ‘Vera, Vera!’ I shouted.
You seemed so slight, so fragile. Everything took on the appearance of a dream.
1 Carla Guelfenbein, In the Distance with You, translated from the Spanish by John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2018), pp. 5–6. Spanish original: ‘Busqué la llave de tu casa en mi bolsillo y descubrí que la había olvidado. Toqué el timbre, pero no hubo respuesta. Aguardé algunos segundos y luego insistí un par de veces más. Recordé los ojos del vagabundo, brutales y derrotados a la vez, la nota disonante que salta de la pauta. Di la media vuelta hacia el costado izquierda del jardín y Arthur me siguió con su paso cansino. (…) Me asomé por una de las ventanas laterales y miré hacia el interior. El sol se filtraba en estrías que exacerbaban la penumbra del vestíbulo. No fue hasta un par de segundos después que te vi. Habías caído a los pies de la escalera, donde la luz casi no te alcanzaba. Tu cuerpo, como un árbol derribado, yacía inerte junto a la lámpara de pie que yo te había regalado para tu último cumpleaños. Corrí hacia el patio trasero. La puerta de la cocina estaba abierta de par en par. Parecía que alguien hubiera estado allí y, por el apuro, hubiese olvidado cerrarla. “¿Quién?”, me pregunté. Me acuclillé a tu lado. Tus manos estaba crispadas, como si hubieran arañado cuerpos invisibles antes de rendirse. Un charco de sangre rodeaba tu cabeza. Te habías también rasmillado un brazo y una senda rojiza corría desde tu muñeca hasta tu codo. Tu camisa de dormir se había recogido sobre tus caderas, y tu pubis, lampiño y blanco, se asomaba entre tus piernas abiertas y envejecidas. Te cubrí cuanto pude con la camisa de dormir y solo entonces, cogiéndote por los hombros, te remecí. “Vera, Vera!” grité. Me pareciste tan liviana, tan frágil. Todo adquirió la apariencia de un sueño’; Contigo en la distancia (Barcelona: PenguinRandomHouse Grupo Editorial, 2015), pp. 13–14. It was important to reproduce this long quote in its entirety because it contains all the clues about the various hypotheses about how the fall, which the novel subsequently investigates, occurred. The first hypothesis is that Vera Sigall’s fall occurred as a result of a struggle with the vagrant mentioned in the first paragraph above quoted (‘I remembered the bum’s eyes, brutal and defeated at the same time’). This is evident if we go back to the first two paragraphs of the novel:
Somewhere on the plant, there was someone responsible for your death. That certainly grew stronger as each day passed, bludgeoning my conscience, making itself unbearable. But who? Why? I never imagined the answer might be so close I could turn around and meet myself.
I remember the moment when I ran across the neighbourhood vagrant, right after I bought the bread for our breakfast. His eyes, at once wounded and menacing, came to rest on me.
2 In the Distance with You, p. 3; Spanish original: ‘En algún lugar del planeta alguien cargaba con tu muerte. Esta certeza creció con los días, las semanas, los meses, golpeó mi conciencia hasta volverse insoportable. Pero ¿quién?, ¿por qué? Nunca imaginé que la respuesta pudiera estar tan cerca que, al dar la vuelta, me encontraría conmigo mismo. Recuerdo el momento, cuando después de comprar el pan para nuestra desayuno, me crucé conel vagabundo del barrio. Sus ojos heridos y a la vez amenazantes se detuvieron en mí’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 11. The neighbourhood vagrant is the prime suspect and his importance is underlined by the fact that he was present at the ‘crime scene’, as Daniel, one of the main witnesses, records. The detail that he had a wounded and menacing air about him, as portrayed in the second paragraph of the novel and brutal and defeated in the seventh, indicates the presence of an aggression that could have led – a reader might deduce – to an attack on another individual. There is some evidence, after all, that a struggle may have taken place and that there may have been a sexual motive, as suggested by Vera’s open legs when she was found.
The second hypothesis – and this is the one that the detective called on to investigate the case, Segundo Álvarez, initially favours – is that it was Daniel himself who committed the crime. This would mean that he tried – rather like Dr James Sheppard in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), who used his role as narrator to conceal his identity as the murderer – to mask his involvement by actually reporting the incident. The first meeting between Daniel and Segundo Álvarez indicates the level of the detective’s suspicion:
I was deep in thought when the doorbell rang. The sound made me jump. I opened the door to a man of slight build and short stature. ‘I’m Detective Segundo Álvarez,’ he said by way of greeting.
He had an elongated face. His eyes were so black that it was impossible to tell where the irises stopped and the pupils began.
‘Do you mind if I take a look around?’
He had on jeans and an impeccable blue parka. You could sense the care he took with his appearance; he wore his thinning hair combed back and had recently shaved. Nevertheless, the large bags under his eyes spoke a of life that wasn’t in any way orderly or easy. I showed him the place at the foot of the stairs where you’d fallen, and the pool of blood, which was now dry. I mentioned that I’d found the kitchen door wide open that morning. Then we went up to the second floor. My cell phone rang while we were climbing the stairs; I tried to ignore it, but the detective gave me an expectant look. I took the phone out of my pocket, glanced at the screen, and silenced the call.
‘You’re not going to answer it?’
‘I didn’t recognise the number,’ I lied.
3 In the Distance with You, p. 30; Spanish original: ‘Estaba sumido en mis pensamientos cuando sonó el timbre. El ruido me hizo dar un salto. Al abrir la puerta, me encontré con un hombre de complexión enjuta y baja estatua. – Soy el inspector Segundo Álvarez’ me saludó. Tenía el rostro alargado. Sus ojos eran tan negros que era imposible distinguir dónde terminaba el iris y dónde comenzaba la pupila. – Le importa que eche una mirada? Vestía jeans e impecable parka azul. Podía intuirse el esmero que ponía en la apariencia, el escaso cabello peinado hacia atrás y la barba recién afeitada. Sin embargo, las grandes bolas que caían de su ojos hablaban de una vida no del todo ordenada ni fácil. Le mostré el lugar donde habías caído en el vestíbulo y la mancha de sangre ya reseca. Le comenté que había encontrado esa mañana la puerta de la cocina abierta de par en par. Luego subimos al segundo piso. En las escaleras sonó mi celular, intenté ignorarlo, pero el inspector me miró expectante. Lo saqué de mi bolsillo, le di una ojeada a la pantalla y corté. – ¿No va a contestar? – Era un número que no conozco – mentí’; Contigo en la distancia, pp. 32–33. There are a number of details in this passage that are intriguing – including Daniel’s imagined interpretation of the bags under Detective Segundo Álvarez’s eyes as indicating that his life ‘wasn’t in any way orderly or easy’ – but the most intriguing is the phone call Daniel receives, which he does not take and which the detective finds suspicious (‘You’re not going to answer it?’). But it is not only the detective who finds it suspicious: we, as readers, do too. Daniel simply tells us that he ‘lied’, but he does not tell us who the person is who is calling him or why he felt the need not to take the call or –perhaps most important – why he decided not to take the call in front of the detective. This is an important detail, and its relevance only becomes clear later on in the novel when we realize that Daniel does have a secret to hide which he wants to conceal from everyone – including his wife, the detective and us.
No wonder then that Segundo Álvarez launches his grilling techniques on Daniel straightaway afterwards:
‘Mr. Daniel Estévez, right?’
‘Exactly right.’ I said solicitously.
‘What is your relationship with the lady?’
‘I’m her neighbour.’
‘And how did you get in here?’
‘I have a key. She gave it to me several years ago.’
‘Why didn’t you call us immediately?’
‘Because at first I thought it had been an accident.’
‘And what makes you now think that it wasn’t?’
I explained again about the handrails and the stairs, I told him about your agility and about what good physical shape you were in for your age. I showed him into the kitchen, and we sat at the table in front of the window. I didn’t want that scene to end in the living room, in front of your books and your most prized possessions. I offered the detective a cup of coffee, but he turned it down. He examined the room. I insisted that my having found it wide open was irrefutable proof something out of the ordinary had happened. He asked me who was in your life; he wanted the names, addresses, and phone numbers of any relatives, friends, and acquaintances of yours who might have had some business with you. And as I knew little or nothing about any of that, my replies to his questions, which at first had come without hesitation, gradually turned stammering and unsure.
4 In the Distance with You, p. 31; Spanish original:‘– Señor Daniel Estévez, ¿verdad? – Exactamente – respondí solícito. ¿qué relación tiene usted con la señora? – Soy su vecino. ¿Y cómo entró aquí? –Tengo una llave. Ella me la entregó hace ya algunos años. – ¿Por qué no nos llamó de inmediato? – Porque al principio pensé que había sido un accidente. –¿Y qué le hace pensar ahora que no lo fue? Volví a explicarle lo del pasamanos, la escalera, le conté de tu agilidad y el buen estado físico en que te encontrabas a pesar de los años. Lo hice pasar a la cocina y nos sentamos a la mesa a la ventana. No quería que esa escena se llevara a cabo en la sala, ante tus libros y tus pertenencias más preciadas. Le ofrecí un café que rechazó. El inspector examinó la puerta. Yo insistí que haberla encontrado abierta de par en par era una prueba fehaciente de que algo fuera de lo común había ocurrido. Me preguntó con quién vivías, nombres y señas de tus parientes, tus amigos, conocidos que pudieran tener algún asunto complicado contigo. Y como yo de todos eso sabía poco, mis respuestas, que en un comienzo surgieron sin vacilaciones empezaron a ser balbucientes e inseguras’; Contigo en la distancia, pp. 33–34.The above quotation shows that there is enough evidence in the early sections of the novel to suggest that Daniel is rather suspicious. The passage also reveals something else which is very important about Daniel: the devotion he feels for Vera. The devotion is expressed via the second person, which is used consistently throughout the novel in those chapters in which Daniel speaks in the first person (‘I told him about your agility…’). This is initially disarming for the reader since we will not immediately know who the ‘you’ is in Daniel’s chapters, and we need to work it out. This technique – which is common in Latin American fiction ever since it was introduced magisterially into fiction by Carlos Fuentes in his novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) – is an important feature of the novel since it not only indicates Daniel’s obsessiveness, it also creates a distance between his narrative and the reader. As a result of Vera’s prior occupation of the second-person grammatical horizon of the novel, the reader, in effect, feels excluded from that space that he or she customarily, or by default, inhabits when reading a novel or, indeed, a magazine or a newspaper. That exclusion of the reader from the second-personal grammatical space of the novel by Daniel is experienced by the reader as a distance created by Daniel. We know that this is important because distance is a significant leitmotif of the novel as indicated by the novel’s title (literally, ‘With You in the Distance’), but we may also suspect that Daniel is introducing this distance deliberately because he has something to hide. And we soon find out that he does, indeed, have something to hide, and this secret is related to the third person who is suspected as having been involved with Vera’s fall. As a result of his investigations Detective Segundo Álvarez discovers that Daniel’s account of his whereabouts during the week preceding Vera’s fall does not add up and, as Daniel finally has to admit, he was with another woman:
The version I gave the detective, however, wasn’t completely accurate. I hadn’t camped there on the Saturday, but during the week. I’d spent Saturday night and he following Sunday with Teresa.
I’m not proud about what I’m about to tell you, although in any case you probably know it already. Teresa, the woman who was with me when I visited you that Sunday, the one I introduced as a childhood friend, was a lover. […]
Although the notion may sound ridiculous, it suddenly occurred to me that our clandestine visit to your house and your fall a few hours later might be connected in some hidden and unthinkable way.
5 In the Distance with You, pp. 148–50; Spanish original: ‘La versión que le daba al inspector, sin embargo, no era del todo cierta. No había acampado allí el sábado, sino durante la semana. Esa noche y el domingo que le siguió los pasé con Teresa. No me produce orgullo decirte lo que te voy a contar, aunque es probable que tú lo supieras de todas formas. Teresa, la mujer con quien te visité ese domingo, y a quien te introduje como una amiga de infancia. Era mi amante. (…) Aunque la idea resultara disparatada, de pronto pensé que nuestra visita clandestina a tu casa y tu caída unas horas más tarde podían estar ligadas de una forma oculta e impensable’; Contigo en la distancia, pp. 133–34. The lie is discovered by the detective who compares his account with his wife’s and finds the discrepancy (‘Both you and our wife maintain that you arrived back home on Sunday night. Where were you from Saturday morning to Sunday night?’;
In the Distance with You, p. 147),
6 Spanish original: ‘Ambos con su mujer sostienen que usted llegó a su casa el domingo por la noche. ¿Dónde estuvo desde la mañana del sábado hasta ese domingo por la noche?’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 132. and it is clear from other sections of the novel that Daniel’s wife, Gracia, suspects he is having an affair:
I called Gracia and told her I would spend the night in the hospital. She didn’t take the news well. ‘Are you alone?’ she asked me.
‘And who would I be with?’ I asked in my turn.
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
7 In the Distance with You, p. 83; Spanish original: ‘Llamé a Gracia y le dije que pasaría la noche en la clínica. No se lo tomó bien. – ¿Estás solo? – me preguntó. – ¿Con quién podría estar? – le pregunté yo a mi vez. – No lo sé. Tú dime’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 77.The third suspect, hinted at in Daniel’s words about there being a connection ‘in some hidden and unthinkable way’ between Vera’s fall and Daniel’s visit with Teresa, is Gracia, who – as the hypothesis goes – had suspected the affair as a result of seeing Daniel visit Vera’s apartment with another woman. It would seem logical that, after seeing Daniel with another woman, she might have visited Vera to find out what was going on, confronted her and, as a result perhaps of Vera’s refusal or inability to confirm the identity of the other woman, had flown into a rage and thrown Vera down the stairs.
It should be underlined that this version is never relayed to the reader by Gracia herself and we only know about this hypothesis as a result of Daniel’s imaginary reconstruction of the event, which occurs when the novel is nearing its climax:
All at once, I saw everything clearly. Gracia went to your house. She was upset when she got there. After seeing me with Teresa the previous evening. She hadn’t slept all night, and the harder she tried, the more her nerves had betrayed her. She surely entered by the kitchen door. She knew it was always unlocked for me, a fact that seemed unacceptably intimate to her. You must have heard something, and maybe you called down from upstairs. ‘Is that you, Daniel?’; and probably – it was what you always did – you started talking to me right away, as if the conversation had begun long before, or was the remnant of an unfinished dialogue; it’s even possible that you mentioned, from the upper floor, something about my visit the previous day, mine and Teresa’s; nor is it implausible that Gracia, dismayed by your words, and above all by what she was doing, didn’t answer you but walked further into the house, silently, without any clear idea of what she was doing in your home, or of what, at that moment, she hoped to accomplish there. Maybe the encounter took place when you appeared, looking down from the upper floor, and she looked up from below and saw you as serious and threatening. I didn’t discard the possibility that Gracia, with her fists clenched and her arms folded over her stomach, insulted you and accused you of the harm she knew you’d done to our marriage. She probably blamed you for all our problems, including those that preceded you, the ones that had always been with us. She was desperately looking for someone to blame for everything she hadn’t been able to resolve or understand. Yes, as far as Gracia was concerned, you were always the culprit, and the knowledge that he could foist her own responsibility for things off on you gave her, without her realising it, a fragile but effective equilibrium. While she was talking to you, the tone of her voice probably kept rising, and she probably kept shouting as she climbed the stairs. I couldn’t imagine her laying hands on you and making you stumble and fall. Not that. Because that would have entailed seeing Graciaas a more violent woman that I was ready to admit, or bear.
8 In the Distance with You, p. 319; Spanish original: ‘De pronto lo vi todo con claridad. Gracia llegó alterada a tu casa. Después de verme con Teresa la tarde anterior, no había dormido en toda la noche, y por más esfuerzos que debió de hacer, su nervios la traicionaron. Seguramente entró por la puerta de la cocina. Ella sabía que estaba siempre sin cerrojo para mí, un hecho que le parecía de una intimidad inaceptable. Tú debiste escuchar algo, y desde el segundo piso tal vez preguntaste: “¿estás tú, Daniel?”; es probable – como solías hacer – que ya comenzaras a hablarme , como si la conversación se hubiese mucho antes, o fuera el retazo de un dialogo que había quedado inacabado; es posible incluso que desde el segundo piso, hubieras mencionado algo de nuestra visita del día anterior con Teresa; tampoco es implausible que Gracia, consternada ante tus palabras, y sobre todo ante lo que hacía, no te hubiera contestado y hubiese seguido su camino hacia el interior en silencio, sin saber muy bien qué era lo que estaba haciendo ahí, ni lo que esperaba de ese momento. Tal vez el encuentro se produjo cuando tú te asomaste desde el segundo piso, y ella, desde abajo, te miró seria, amenazante. No descarto la posibilidad de que Gracia, con los puños apretados y los brazos cruzados contra su vientre, te insultara e incriminara por el daño que ella estaba segura le habías infligido a nuestro matrimonio. Es probable que te culpara de todos nuestros males, incluso lo que te antecedían, los que venían con nosotros desde siempre. Desesperada buscaba a alguien a quien culpar de todo lo que no había sabido resolver o entender. Sí. Tú siempre fuiste para Gracia la culpable, y saber que podía depositar su propia responsabilidad de las cosas en ti le otorgaba, sin ella saberlo, un frágil pero efectivo equilibrio. Es probable que mientras te hablaba, su voz hubiera ido subiendo de tono, que gritando subiera las escaleras. Fui incapaz de vislumbrarla zarandeándote, tú trastabillando y luego cayendo escaleras abajo. Eso no. Porque implicaba ver en Gracia a una mujer más violenta de lo que estaba dispuesto a admitir y soportar’; Contigo en la distancia, pp. 275–76.Of all of the hypotheses presented in the novel, this is the most robust. Although Gracia never admitted that she entered the apartment, there is independent evidence that this did in fact occur, as provided by the neighbourhood vagrant who stated that he saw Gracia entering the apartment on the evening before Vera was found.
9 In the Distance with You, pp. 267–68 ;Contigo en la distancia, pp. 231–32. As Daniel mentions in the above-quoted excerpt, Gracia had a motive to do this since she wanted to exact her revenge on her wayward husband. She also attempted to incriminate her husband by telling Detective Segundo Álvarez that she had seen her husband enter the apartment the night before the crime was discovered. And this is essentially why, as discussed above, Segundo Álvarez gives Daniel such a grilling. Even if the novel does not provide enough evidence to conclude which of these two suspects – Daniel or Gracia – was the culprit who pushed Vera down the stairs, one thing is for sure: the energy in
Contigo en la distancia simmers in the juice of the fraught relationship between Daniel and Gracia, and adultery is the crime that lies at the heart of Guelfenbein’s novel. This is made clear by the crucial literary reference to Calderón, the mysterious psychiatrist and Complutense University professor, whom Vera had seen the week before her fall, and referred to – surely not coincidentally – just before Detective Segundo Álvarez accuses Daniel of committing adultery in chapter 20.
10 In the Distance with You, pp. 146–47; Contigo en la distancia, pp. 131–32. The reference is, of course, to Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), Spain’s pre-eminent Golden Age dramatist, famous for his plays about adultery and wife-murder.
11 Examples of plays in which death is seen as the inevitable result of adultery are Calderón’s El médico de suhonra (1637), A secreto agravio, secreta venganza (1637) and El pintor de su deshonra (1640s). And it should be added that this is not the only literary allusion in this multi-layered novel. Indeed, it could be argued that this novel is as much about the distance created by literary resonance as it is about the distance between people who have fallen out of love. Given that
Contigo en la distancia focusses on a whodunit adultery mystery based on the tension between the different accounts of the two parties, it is clear that this novel re-writes one of the classics of Brazilian literature, Machado de Assis’s
Dom Casmurro (1899), which focuses on the tragedy that ensues when an unreliable narrator accuses his wife of amatory misdemeanours.
12 The Brazilian connection is also articulated via the reference to Clarice Lispector’s work and person, discussed below.Literature is at the core of the evidence relating to the fourth suspect who can be accused of directly or indirectly causing Vera’s death, as a result of which she fell down some stairs, and this is the poet Horacio Infante, Vera’s former lover with whom she had a passionate affair over a long period of time. We hear the details of this love affair in the chapters that are recounted in the first person by Horacio Infante (chapters 12, 15, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 37, 43, 45, 47, 50). Though it is impossible that Horacio might have pushed Vera down the stairs – he was not in Santiago at the time and had left the country – it is possible that a letter containing shocking news Vera received from Horacio may have caused her to fall or propel herself down the stairs. I will return to this shocking news below. However, it ought to be underscored at this point that the hypothesis that Horacio was directly responsible for Vera’s fall is not strong mainly because the scratches and other red marks on Vera’s skin suggest that a violent act preceded the fall (i.e. that she was attacked and then pushed down the stairs), which diminishes the robustness of the (fifth) hypothesis that she attempted to commit suicide. Despite being a weak contender for the role of Vera’s murderer, Horacio Infante plays a crucial role in the novel in terms of the literary sub-plot that shapes this novel, which is more significant, I would argue, than its whodunit resonance with which I have been concerned in the first half of this chapter. As commentators have already noted with regard to this novel, Vera Sigall is a projection of the famous Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector (1920–77).
13 Diane Cole, ‘Three Tales of Sleuths and Mystery of the Summer’, The New York Jewish Week, 27 June 2018; https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/three-tales-of-sleuthing-and-mystery-for-the-summer-season/. But the engagement with Lispector’s person and work goes much further than this since
Contigo en la distancia is a veritable palimpsest, and a multi-layered one at that, of Lispectorian paraphernalia. The first indication of Vera Sigall’s role in the novel as a pseudonymic famous writer is when Daniel refers to a review of her work: ‘An important critic had praised your work in the
New York Times, and the daily papers in our country reprinted that review’.
14 In the Distance with You, p. 4; Spanish original: ‘Un importante critico del New York Times había elogiado tu obra y los diarios de nuestro país habían reproducido la reseña’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 12. But from that point onwards the plot thickens often in a Borgesian way and often via the chapters in which Emilia Husson, who is writing a doctoral thesis on Vera Sigall’s work, tells her story in the first person (chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 41, 44, 46, 48, 51, 53). One of the first indications that Vera Sigall is a pseudonym of a famous writer occurs in chapter 10, when Emilia refers to some documents she has discovered among Vera Sigall’s papers, and she says: ‘It was the first inkling I’d got of Vera’s history. The text had been written by her father and is not be found in Benjamin Moser’s literary biography’.
15 In the Distance with You, p. 78; Spanish original: ‘Era el primer atisbo real que tenía de la historia de Vera. El textohabíasidoescritoporsu padre y no se encontraba en la biografíaliteraria de Benjamin Moser’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 74. The text referred to here is
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009), and it is clear that the text has been mined for a number of details that are drawn from Lispector’s life and ascribed to Vera Sigall.
16 Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (London: Haus, 2009). Emilia also refers later on to some critics who have written on Sigall’s work but points to the originality of her own thesis – she has discovered that there is an important intertextuality between the work of Vera Sigall and that of Horacio Infante:
Besides Benjamin Moser, two academics and an important critic had studied Vera’s work in detail. All three of them had a good command of Spanish, as was evident from their observations and the acuity of their analyses. However, none of these studies mentioned what I’d discovered. Probably none of them knew much about Infante’s poetry. Obviously, Vera was employing allusions. But the fact that what she’d done was a standard practice didn’t in any way lessen the value and mystery of my discovery. Or at least, that was what I wanted to believe. I thought that maybe it was a secret code, a game that both had agreed to. Perhaps in Infante’s verses, which I wasn’t completely familiar with, there were also excerpts from Vera’s work.
17 In the Distance with You, p. 128; Spanish original: ‘Además de BenjaminMoser, dos académicos y un importante crítico habían estudiado la obra de Vera en detalle. Los tres dominaban el español. Esto era evidente en sus observaciones y la agudeza de sus análisis. Sin embargo, en ninguno de sus estudios se hacía mención a lo que yo había descubierto. Era probable que ninguno de ellos conociera en profundidad la poesía de Infante. Lo de Vera caía en el campo de las alusiones. Pero el hecho de que fuera un recurso válido no le quitaba valor ni misterio a mi descubrimiento. O eso quería creer al menos. Pensé que quizás se trataba de un código oculto, un juego que ambos habían acordado. Tal vez en los versos de Infante, que yo no conocía a cabalidad, hubiese también extractos de la obra de Vera’; Conmigo en la distancia, p. 115. There is a publisher’s note in the English translation edition of
Contigo en la distancia and its words are gently ironized in this novel: ‘This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.’
18 See frontispiece of In the Distance with You; there is no such statement in the original Spanish text; see Contigo en la distancia. For it is in the interstice between reality and fiction that this novel operates, skirting as it does, rather impishly, between the world of fiction and the real world. Vera Sigill in Guelfenbein’s novel, like Lispector, is of Ukranian extraction,
19 In the Distance with You, p. 255; Contigo en la distancia, p. 221. she has a mother who contracted syphilis and died while giving birth to her,
20 In the Distance with You, p. 96; Contigo en la distancia, p. 89. and she is a Jewess
21 In theDistancewithYou, p. 111; Contigo en la distancia, p. 101. who has a slight accent.
22 In the Distance with You, p. 122; Contigo en la distancia, p. 110. But then some of the details are transformed from the life into the fictional version; the first most obvious difference is that Lispector was a Brazilian novelist while Vera is a Chilean novelist. Lispector’s husband was called Maury Gurgel Valente,
23 Moser, Why This World, p. 143. but he becomes Pérez in Guelfenbein’s novel.
24 In the Distance with You, p. 258; Contigo en la distancia, p. 224. Lispector had a son called Pedro,
25 Moser, Why This World, p. 253. whereas Vera’s is called Julián. Vera’s passionate love affair with the poet Horacio Infante is based on Lispector’s passionate love affair with the poet Paulo Mendes Campos, who was married to an Englishwoman called Joan Abercrombie.
26 Moser, Why This World, pp. 254–56. There are also a number of references to scenes in Lispector’s fiction, which are re-created in
Contigo en la distancia. There is a scene, for example, in chapter 30 when Emilia feels that she is falling in love with Daniel:
I looked at him. I had the sense of being in a place with no history and no weight. A diaphanous place, created that very instant.
‘Do you remember what Octavio says to Sinalefa?’ He was referring to characters in The Highest Trapeze.
I laughed. ‘He says lots of things to her!’
‘He says something about how when he looks at her, he can see inside her, he can see a mighty, luminous sphere, wrapped in gauze.’
27 In the Distance with You, p. 248; Spanish original: ‘Lo miré. Tuve la impresión de estar en un sitio sin historia, sin peso. Diáfono. Que se gestaba en ese mismo instante. – ¿Recuerdas lo que dice Octavio a Sinalefa? – se refería a los personajes de El trapecio más alto. – Es que le dice tantas cosas! – reí. – Le dice algo así como que al mirarla ve adentro de su ser una esfera luminosa y fuerte, envuelta en una gasa’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 215.This scene has resonances of the primordial and transcendent meetings between Otávio and Joana, as poetically described in Lispector’s first novel,
Perto do coração selvagem (
Near to the Wild Heart; 1943).
28 Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), pp. 151–60. In this way Guelfenbein creates a new mosaic of meanings from Lispector’s fiction; given that Octavio and Sinalefa become Otávio and Joana, and
The Highest Trapeze an allusion to
Near to the Wild Heart, Daniel and Emilia, though characters in Guelfenbein’s novel, in effect are shown to be re-creating and re-experiencing the transcendence of love experienced by the characters in Lispector’s fiction. Pointing in a similar direction is Daniel’s conversation with the vagrant in chapter 32, in which he quizzes him about what he saw on the day that Vera was pushed down the stairs. Here we see what at first flush looks like a dialogue between a rich, middle-class creative practitioner and a powerless subaltern, in which he wants to use the vagrant’s testimony in order to incriminate his wife. After the vagrant tells Daniel that he saw his wife enter the building, we read:
‘Did you talk to the detective about this?’ I asked, unable to restrain myself.
‘It’s none of his business.’
‘But what about you? What do you think?’ I felt like a child looking for an adult who could assure him that the earth was round and he wasn’t going to fall off of it.
The man gave me a sidelong glance and smiled ironically, displaying his mistreated teeth. ‘What I think isn’t important. What’s important is what you think.’ He wiped his mouth on his overcoat sleeve and looked across the street. He considered our conversation over.
29 In the Distance with You, p. 269; Spanish original: ‘ –¿Lo comentó con el inspector? – le pregunté, sin poder resistirme. – No es asunto de él. – Pero usted, ¿qué piensa? – me sentía como un niño en busca de un adulto que le confirme que el mundo es redondo y que no va a caerse de él. El hombre me miró de soslayo y sonrió irónico, dejando al descubierto sus dientes maltratados. – Lo que yo piense no tiene importancia. Lo importante es lo que usted piense – declaró. Se pasó la manga del abrigo por la boca y miró hacia el otro lado de la calle. Había dado por terminada nuestra conversación’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 232. In this gesture of reflecting the question back onto his interrogator, the subaltern has turned the tables on his superior, and this scene is strongly reminiscent of the relationship between the middle-class writer and narrator, Rodrigo S.M. and the poor girl from north-east Brazil, Macabéa, in Lispector’s masterpiece, A Hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star; 1977). Despite her apparently trivial death, Macabéa triumphs over Rodrigo S.M.:
Laid out and dead, Macabéa looked as imposing as a dead stallion. The best thing is still the following: not to die, for to die is not enough. It fails to achieve my greatest need self-fulfilment.
Macabéa has murdered me.
She is finally free of herself and of me.
30 Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), p. 85.Contigo en la distancia re-creates and re-fashions events from Lispector’s life and ideas and scenes from her novels in order to create a multi-layered literary palimpsest that is underpinned by a deep sense of the structural inter-relationship between life and literature. There is, as we see, a playful intertextuality at work in Guelfebein’s novel, which is, at times, rather Borgesian. In chapter 31, when Horacio is describing his love affair and new life with Vera, he describes their literary tastes:
During the hours when we were alone, Vera and I came together with renewed passion. There were also shared readings, including poems by Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, and César Vallejo, along with stories by Chekhov and by a Brazilian writer, a woman named Clarice Lispector, who like Vera had a Ukrainian background; her first book, which had reached Vera’s hands by way of a Brazilian diplomat, had dazzled her.
31 In the Distance with You, p. 255; Spanish original: ‘En esas horas que estábamos solos, Vera y yo nos encontrábamos con renovada pasión. También estaban las lecturas compartidas. Leíamos juntos a Rimbaud, a T. S. Eliot, a César Vallejo, los cuentos de Chéjov y a una escritora brasilera, ClariceLispector, que al igual que Vera tenía orígenes ucranios y cuyo primer libro, que había llegado a sus manos a través de un diplomático brasilero, la había deslumbrado’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 221.Rather like Borges’s tale of Pierre Menard, Vera is, of course, reading about herself because she is Clarice Lispector; the scene, therefore, in which Vera is described as ‘dazzled’ by Lispector’s work is mockingly Pirandellian.
But more than a Pirandellian novel,
Contigo en la distancia is in essence a Flaubertian novel about how literature creates love rather than, let us say, simply describing it. Carla Guelfenbein’s novel is described in the promotional material as a thriller, and it is true that the novel
Contigo en la distancia opens with a mystery which, as discussed above, the characters attempt to solve: thus the writer Vera Sigall is discovered by her neighbour at the bottom of a stairway and there are signs that her fall was not entirely innocent. But the novel soon reveals itself to be angular and coded in that the investigation leads to a series of discoveries that have more to do with the characters’ inner lives, their hang-ups, their fascination with love, and – most important – their fascination with literature. So, as some critics have pointed out, it should not have been marketed as a thriller.
32 TonstantWeader notes of the novel that ‘calling it a thriller does it an injustice by creating expectations it has no intention of fulfilling’, ‘In the Distance with You’, Goodreads, 6 June 2018; https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2413866607. The point is well taken, but surely more to the point is the fact that the novel starts with a dead (or almost dead) body in order to deconstruct the genre of the thriller, in that – very much as in Gabriel García Márquez’s
Crónica de una muerte anunciada – the mystery around the author of the murder that is the backbone of any self-respecting whodunit is not the main focus of attention. Indeed, as one critic has suggested, the novel almost loses interest in clarifying whether or not Vera Sigall fell or was pushed, and it concludes with a different type of bombshell, the skeleton that lurks in the cupboard of so many Latin American novels, that is, who your father is (but more of this below).
One critic has even gone as far as to criticize the author for not having the decency to come clean after 406 pages and say what really happened on the stairway of Vera Sigall’s apartment.
33 Tara Cheesman, ‘Messy Human Beings: On “In the Distance with You”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 31 August 2018; https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/messy-human-beings/. My view is that the most robust hypothesis, however, is that it was Gracia who pushed Vera Sigall down the stairs in a fit of jealousy when she saw her husband, Daniel, entering Vera Sigall’s apartment with his lover, Teresa. The case for the other three suspects each has its flaw: the vagrant, because he is unconcerned about the detective asking him questions and he shows no intention of fleeing the crime scene; Daniel because he shows no hostility whatsoever towards Vera, he visits her in hospital every night, and – more importantly – he is in awe of her; and Horacio because he was not in Chile at the time Vera was pushed and, indeed, he loves her. That said, we must recognize that the whodunit gradually recedes from the limelight of the novel as it progresses, and the novel’s bombshell is that the PhD researcher, Emilia Husson, who is working on the Vera Sigall archive, discovers, as a result of reading a manuscript written by her own father whom she had never known – her parents had told her years before that ‘My father wasn’t my father’ (
In the Distance with You, p. 9) – was, in fact, Julián, that is, Vera Sigall’s only son, who had been buried on 5 September 1977,
34 In the Distance with You, p. 393; Contigo en la distancia, p. 339. leaving Horacio to pass on this secret to his daughter. In some ways it is a fairy-tale ending because Emilia inherits not only the archive she has been studying, but also the rights to her grandmother’s work as well as her estate (including her house),
35 In the Distance with You, p. 392; Contigo en la distancia, p. 342. though Emilia – like the reader! – is too overwhelmed by this discovery to take it in fully. But when travelling home Emilia achieves her Joycean epiphany:
I reached into my bag, took out the stone Daniel had given me, and held it against my cheek. He was in the touch, and so were Vera and Julian. That was when I knew I would write our story, Vera’s and Horacio’s, Daniel’s and mine, and how they’d intertwined until they arrived at this moment. I could also include Horacio’s text. He’d told me in a letter that I could do whatever I wanted with the manuscript. Writing the story would be a way of uniting myself with Vera, of brining to light what had remained in darkness. In the same way that my father discovered his dead stars when they got closer to the sun.
36 In the Distance with You, p. 406; Spanish original: ‘Saqué de mi bolso la piedra que me había regalado Daniel y me la llevé a la mejilla. En su tacto estaba él, también estaban Vera y Julián. Fuen entonces cuando supe que escribiría nuestra historia. La de Vera y Horacio, la de Daniel y la mía, y cómo estas se fueron entrelazando hasta llegar a ese momento. Podría también incluir el texto de Horacio. En su carta me había expresado que podía hacer lo que quisiera con él. Sería una manera de unirme a Vera, de traer a la luz lo que había permanecido en la oscuridad. De la misma forma que mi padre descubría sus estrellas muertas cuando estas se aproximaban al sol’; Contigo en la distancia, p. 351.Though she never speaks directly to the reader in this novel Vera Sigall’s presence pervades the atmosphere created by the book in the reader’s mind. Her inert, dying body is lying in hospital during the present tense of the novel, that is, the time at which the reader meets the book’s reality as described on the first page until he turns the last page in order to finish the book. Daniel finds her unconscious body on the first page of novel, and she expires seven-eighths through the novel when Daniel hears from Esther that she has stopped breathing in her hospital bed. We do, of course, hear about Vera Sigall’s life – her struggles and her love affairs, particularly with Horacio – but these memories are mediated by the reader’s awareness that her life is slowly draining away as the novel progresses. But Vera Sigall’s body becomes a relic, a place of pilgrimage to which the main characters of the novel turn their thoughts – and their feet – when they need direction in life. Contigo en la distancia is a homage to Brazil’s greatest twentieth-century writer but it is also a homage to the value of human stories, their ability to lift us when we are down, to celebrate life, love and literature.