IN A PAMPAS OF DREAMS

In a Pampas of Dreams.Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Puplicado en Guardian, 25 de julio de 1990. Inglaterra.

Manuel Puig was born, as he loved to say, "in a little town in the pampas." This was true, but he was born again in a movie house where the little town disappeared, engulfed in a pampas of dreams. Those public dreams he made private. He spent more time dreaming in a movie than living the life of town. He always wanted to leave town and go to the city where movies were made. Misinformed (he was of Italian stock on his mother's side), he went to Rome to study at Cinecittá. Like Blanche Dubois he wanted magic and instead they gave him neorealism. He dispised his teachers, including famous phoneys like Cesare Zavattini, and he decided to write a script on spec.Nobody wanted it.Luckily for us the script became Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, the first novel ever to make the stuff dreams are made of: movies were the fabric of its plot.Hollywood movies, not reality, were Manuel's source of inspiration: he never read a book if he could help it but he had a babel of a film library at home, with a priceless collection of old and rare Argentine and Mexican movies.But the prize was Hollywood.Betrayed by Rita Hayworth was not published in Spanish until 1969 because neither in Spain nor in South America was there a publisher who could understand this book about a small town in the pampas, bathed in the glow of screen goddess. His next novel, Heartbreak Tango, was published in Spanish with the title Those Little Painted Lips. Jorge Luis Borges, whom Manuel called an evil old man, said to a journalist from Newsweek at the time: "Imagine, a novel titled with a lipstick." But Manuel's book sold more than one hundred thousand copies in Argentina alone.Manuel had finally forced the Argentinians to recognize that small people in a smoll town could be heroes and the movies could become another pampas, the final frontier. Of course he had detractors, Julio Cortázar for instance, who nevertheless ended up by writing a book called We Love Glenda So Much. Glenda being Glenda Jackson. This could never been done before Manuel's time. Manuel was a brave man. He was a homosexual who never tried to hide behind the skirts of an ideology. He used to sign his letters to friends with a plain "Sally", and really lived in a world of women and movies. Everbody he knew was christened again with a woman's given name, a movie star's of course. Once, after he became famous, I advised him to hire an agent. "What for, darling? he asked. "I'm my own agent. Can't you see I'm a career woman?" And he was. He became a dollar millionaire before he died, and his books were the most translated ones from Argentina after Borges's.He had patterned his career (and his life) after Joan Crawford, and having troubles at the time with a very rough Mexican lover he claimed, "Saint Joan saved me.Thank God she made Autumn leaves!" In Autumn Leaves Joan Crawford is almost killed by her psychotic lover who throws her heavy typewriter at her. She is a writer, you see. Well, she's a writer of sorts: she is a typist. Manuel called my daughters Linda Darnell (the Spanish ingénue in Blood and Sand) and Gale Sondergaard, Dragon Lady in The Letter. Later he couldn't even remember their real names. He connected a chart of South American novelists in which they suddenly became stars in an imagined Metro -Goldwyn-Mayer roster -"with more stars than in heaven." A very funny (and sharp) appreciation of his colleagues. I still keep it after more than twenty years.Here's a sample of his annoted list. Borges was Norma Shearer ("Oh, so dignified"), Carpentier was Joan Crawford ("Oh, so finery"), Asturias was Greta Garbo, "only because of the Nobel flavor." Rulfo was Greer Garson, Cortázar Heddy Lamarr, Lezama Lima was Lana Turner, Carlos Fuentes was Ava Gardner (explanation:"Glamour surrounds her, but can she act?"), Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams ("Oh, so disciplined") and Puig himself was Julie Christie. There were two minor writers and they became respectively Connie Francis (Metro disowns her) and Pamela Tiffin, with a rebuff: "No more starlets!"The uncanny thing is that if you read the real names, then the film names and each caption, it shows that Manuel was what he disclaimed constantly to be -a literary critic of the first order. Though he was made of movies. Once, giving a course on creative writing at Columbia University, he was being introduced to students when he said suddenly:"This is Columbia University? I thought it was Columbia Picture." The studio, of course, that made Rita Hayworth a star.Manuel died, like that other great pop persona, Andy Warhol, of unfore seen complications after a minor operation. I hope he wasn't betrayed by Columbia Picture and that they recalled Rita Hayworth down to earth just in time.Manuel had left New York, where he lived in the seventies, because he thought the city had become an open sewer. He left Río de Janeiro after fifteen years of much love because it had become as violent and as dirty as New York, only worse. In a true appointment in Samarra (the movie) he chose tranquil, backward Cuernavaca as a refuge into which he moved only last October. As in movies, as in his novels, as in his masterpiece Kiss of the Spider Woman, made of posible love in a cell, the narrator a Scheherazade with two thousand and one movies to tell, death came to the spider man. Like the consul in Under the Vocano he discovered that Cuernavaca was deadly only too late.

Este artículo forma parte de:

"Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica."
Una biografía multimedia en formato CD-ROM.
Investigación, entrevistas y compilación a cargo de Gerd Tepass.
Buenos Aires, junio de 2008.
ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9