{"id":136235,"date":"2019-05-09T11:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T15:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136235"},"modified":"2019-05-09T14:00:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T18:00:40","slug":"listen-to-hebe-uhart-now-that-shes-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/09\/listen-to-hebe-uhart-now-that-shes-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen to Hebe Uhart, Now That She\u2019s Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read Hebe Uhart\u2019s short story \u201cCoordination<\/a>,\u201d which appears in the Spring 2019 issue.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Hebe Uhart. Photo: Agustina Fern\u00e1ndez.<\/p><\/div>\n

In section 16, grave 34 of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires, pumpkins and tomatoes now grow. Pumpkins and tomatoes, just like that. A scene that could have been written by Hebe Uhart, who, since October 12, 2018, has lain in a grave there. An image worthy of her stories: reality interrupted by strangeness. \u201cA story is a little plant that\u2019s born,\u201d Uhart used to say that Felisberto Hern\u00e1ndez used to say. Hern\u00e1ndez was one of her go-to authors, along with Natalia Ginzburg, Fray Mocho, and Simone Weil. Uhart starts her magnificent story \u201cGuiding the Ivy\u201d by announcing, \u201cHere I am arranging the plants so they don\u2019t overcrowd one another, pulling off dead leaves, and getting rid of ants.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Some time ago, at the launch party for one of her books, Hebe Uhart\u2014born in 1936 in Moreno, Argentina, author of some fifteen volumes of stories, novels, and chronicles, winner of the 2017 Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award, rural schoolteacher, philosophy professor in her youth and leader of literary workshops until the end of her days, curious in the extreme, chronic traveler, and admirer of the animal kingdom\u2014confessed the following:<\/p>\n

I follow Chekhov\u2019s advice, which I believe in absolutely: forget about the content of what the characters say and pay attention to how they say it, look at how the characters move, how they walk, how they are silent. I\u2019m interested in people\u2019s specificity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How we move, how we walk, how we keep quiet: that is what Uhart observes in each of us. But also how we pause, how we sneeze, what onomatopoeias we use, how our being is revealed through everyday gestures that at times can contradict the ideas we claim to hold. It\u2019s through these minute observations, and her repudiation of generalities, that the writer unfurls her tentacles to construct her characters. And along the way she sets the coordinates for a wisdom of her own, old and at the same time very simple: one of permanent awe. In the pages of her books are the primordial questionings, the first attempts to understand the world\u2014\u201cthe who-am-I\u2019s and the what-am-I-like\u2019s,\u201d as the protagonist of one of her stories says. What are we? Where are we going? Where did we come from? The classic questions of philosophy are in her pages anchored to the most domestic of situations. Hebe Uhart trains her eye on the things we witness so often that eventually we stop seeing them. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Hebe Uhart has been gone for more than six months, and I still can\u2019t talk about her in the past tense, so alive and fresh is her memory. A few days before she died, when she\u2019d been admitted to the hospital, she took out a pen and paper and described what she saw. Her humor, her enormous curiosity, her sense of the absurd, and her ability to see what the rest of us do not were more alive than ever. \u201cI\u2019m in an intensive care room, in a small clinic,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe beds are against the wall and full of gadgets that make noise all day long, two of them in conversation: dum<\/em>, dum<\/em>, says one, and the other answers piff<\/em>.\u201d And further on: \u201cA student I\u2019ve been close with for many years came to visit me and I told her I was ashamed to be seen with my ass in the air, exposed. Sententiously, Coca told me, Hebe, we\u2019ve all got asses. It\u2019s a Socratic truth, one that corresponds to the moment when Socrates sought absolute consensus before continuing. Sure enough, Socrates, we\u2019ve all got asses.\u201d And toward the end she observes: \u201cI spent the whole time I was in intensive care thinking about the bathroom, about where it was. I thought about the bathroom as if it were London or Paris, and now that they\u2019ve moved me to intermediate care, there\u2019s a sign nearby that says EXIT<\/small>, and the bathroom\u2019s right there, what a relief. I feel like I\u2019ve been upgraded.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Seemingly naive but tremendously sharp, Hebe Uhart\u2019s vision is one that could belong to a child, but a child who has up her sleeve the reflective tools of an adult. An adult with the gaze of a child who, in turn, has the gaze of an adult. And that cross between the supposed unformed perception of childhood and the supposed experience of adulthood generates a new language, as genuine as it is unpredictable. It\u2019s a living, highly oral language that Uhart deploys. And this emphasis also supposes an exploration of specific words: their sounds, their origins, the associations they awaken, their possible music. And even the invention of her own lexicon, one that tends to be friendlier. Both trains and primitive instruments, for example, go tu-ru-tu<\/em>. Or certain resorts where the beachgoers have money \u201cstupidize\u201d people. There\u2019s the woman from the story \u201cImpressions of a School Principal\u201d who sees the teacher correct children who say earthwern<\/em> instead of earthworm<\/em>. And she concludes: \u201cLike the children, I prefer earthwern<\/em> to earthworm<\/em>. It\u2019s more humble, shadier, more intimate. Earthworm<\/em> is a little dry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus Uhart\u2019s narrators linger over expressions, refrains, commonplaces, or incorrect\u2014according to purist parameters of language\u2014articulations, but the point is not to highlight the defect, but rather to assimilate it and destabilize expressive inertia. A character from the short novel Memoirs of a Pygmy<\/em> comments on an elderly man, for example, by saying: \u201cHe wears his years well.\u201d And the protagonist then wonders: \u201cHow can one wear their years well, when years are immaterial?\u201d And the reader can go on pulling at that thread of questioning: Where does that old man wear his years? From where has he brought them? What does he do with those years?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Hebe Uhart\u2019s writing is her way of looking and listening (one of her books of chronicles is called, precisely, Visto y o\u00eddo<\/em>\u2014Seen and heard<\/em>). Her stories follow an order that isn\u2019t guided by the impact of events but rather by the desire to capture detail, to store the observed microcosmos in her memory and then to bring the stories back as if they were occurring now, in this world, and the reader were listening to them in real time. But what is really captured by the antennae of this writer\u2014the most antisolemn author Argentina has ever seen, the most exquisitely colloquial\u2014are those intangible, at times outrageous, shoots that sprout from the common, everyday beings she creates. It\u2019s as if she brought them down straight from above, and as if once they were at home and well-secured, she extracted their speech\u2014idioms and nonsense included. Perhaps I should mention that in these scenes, there are no revelations or knockouts, and the anecdotes are not nice and round, perfect as a circle.\u00a0 And no one will perceive secret plots lurking in her countless stories; what is truly important here is Uhart\u2019s exceptional gaze.<\/p>\n

In that sense, it could be said that nothing happens in Uhart\u2019s stories. And that\u2019s probably true. But we would have to specify: nothing extraordinary<\/em>. And specify as well that it\u2019s not the kind of nothing that masks an everything, as in Carver or Hemingway. Because Uhart\u2019s nothing is the strangeness of life: a philosophical position that arises from the ordinary. It\u2019s not philosophy versus<\/em> domestic life. Not elevated thought versus<\/em> the trivial matters of the day-to-day. The depth of thought here is housed, rather, in the ordinariness of the banal situation. Because in these pages, thought and life cannot be separated. It is existential reflection starting from the preparation of a cake, for example. (\u201cI wanted to make a cake that was light and fluffy. I didn\u2019t want to make cookies because they don\u2019t have that third dimension,\u201d she notes at the beginning of the story \u201cThe Cake.\u201d) Or it\u2019s the image of an ivy vine that responds by growing very slowly, secure in its reserve. (\u201cSometimes I call the iridescent ivy \u2018stupid\u2019 because it forms into pointless arabesques,\u201d she writes in \u201cGuiding the Ivy.\u201d) Or a patio \u201cin a state of deliberation,\u201d or a dress that seems to say \u201cnever again will you love me\u201d (in the novel Camilo asciende<\/em>, Camilo ascends). Or vines of pumpkins and tomatoes growing peacefully in a cemetery.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Rural school principals, Italian immigrants, a crazy aunt, an experienced brother, an Ecuadoran in Rosario, a German in Buenos Aires, neighbors, pygmies, travelers, nieces, people who dance alone, who come or go to visit, people who are left behind, a dog named Milonga, people who long for the same life as always, the life of the everyday, chickens, a couple of horses named Sisobra and Comer\u00eda (roughly translated, \u201cif any\u2019s leftover\u201d and \u201cI\u2019d eat it\u201d), people who ascend, people who resist ascending, people in conflict with modernity, untamed by the should<\/em>s, young ladies practicing for ladies, people who learn \u201cthe art of saying one thing while thinking another.\u201d People who ask metaphysical questions at inopportune moments, people who can\u2019t look at their watches to show others that it\u2019s late because they don\u2019t wear watches: eccentrics. Enchanting and outrageous beings. Hebe Uhart\u2019s characters are made of an almost palpable material. They are alive, and they seem to emerge from the page to tell us, \u201cThis one here is me, that one over there could be you.\u201d<\/p>\n

See them. See, for example, this man from the novel Mudanzas<\/em> (roughly, Relocations<\/em>):<\/p>\n

Oftentimes the father didn\u2019t know how he felt: he knew he wasn\u2019t well, but he couldn\u2019t calibrate how badly off he was. Accustomed to resisting fatigue, he kept tabs on himself by watching the expression on his dog Milonga\u2019s face. The dog had several expressions. One: \u201cUntil death do us part\u201d (this was the most disturbing). Another, at the slightest movement from his master: \u201cChin up, life goes on.\u201d But if the master\u2019s movements were doubtful or overly cautious, the dog\u2019s expression was of a prognosis TBA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Listen to them. Above all listen<\/em> to her characters. Listen to the narrator of \u201cLeonor,\u201d one of the author\u2019s best stories, when she describes the dance and song of a little girl imitating Raffaella Carr\u00e1. And see how the writer offers, in passing, her own conception of the story as a genre:<\/p>\n

When she sings \u201cFiesta, qu\u00e9 fant\u00e1stica es la fiesta<\/em>,\u201d her voice is pleasant enough, but it\u2019s not dynamic. She\u2019s too occupied by matching the lyrics with the steps. Besides, she has a frail little voice that sounds as if she hasn\u2019t quite grasped the importance of exclamation points or whole phrases, which contain a beginning, middle, and ending.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Listen to Hebe Uhart while you read her. Listen to her now that she\u2019s gone. And know that, if she were here, she would be the one to listen to us and observe the way we read, she would take note of how we move, how we walk, how we keep quiet. And she would extract, without our noticing, the small shoots that spring up from our gestures like little plants that sprout in the wild, and that only she, with her perennial perceptive capacity and her verbal intelligence, could ever detect.<\/p>\n

\u2014Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hebe Uhart\u2019s short story \u201cCoordination<\/a>\u201d appears in the Spring 2019 issue. The first collection of Uhart\u2019s short stories to be translated into English, <\/em>The Scent of Buenos Aires<\/a> (translated by Maureen Shaughnessy)<\/em>, will be published by Archipelago Books this fall.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alejandra Costamagna is a Chilean fiction writer who has published five story collections and five novels. Her most recent novel, <\/em>El sistema del tacto, was a finalist for the 2018 Herralde Prize and will be published in English by Transit Books in 2020. In 2003, she received a grant from the Iowa International Writing Program, and in 2008, she won the Anna Seghers Literary Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.<\/em><\/p>\n

Megan McDowell is an award-winning literary translator who has translated works by prominent Latin American writers, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, Diego Zu\u00f1iga, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. She is from Kentucky and lives in Santiago, Chile.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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