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224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
Doctor Don Diego de Zama!… The forceful executive, the pacifier of Indians, the warrior who rendered justice without recourse to the sword. Zama, who put down the native rebellion without wasting a drop of Spanish blood, winning honors from his monarch and the respect of the conquered.
Something deep inside me canceled out these promising external perspectives. I saw everything before me in good order, possible, realized or realizable. Nevertheless, it was as if I, I myself, might generate failure. Not that I judged myself guilty of this failure; it was as if the guilt were an inheritance and had little to do with me. I was equipped with a kind of advance resignation. Everything is possible, I saw, and in the end every possibility can be exhausted.
All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.Don Diego de Zama begins his tale with an immediate affinity with this stagnant corpse, seeing in it the horrors of his own existence. A few pages later he once again finds a perfect metaphor for his condition in the fate of a species of fish ‘must devote nearly all their energies to the conquest of remaining in place.’ Much like in Benedetto’s first book, a loosely connected series of stories aptly titledMundo Animal (Animal World, as collected in the new Nest in the Bones: Stories by Antonio Benedetto), animal metaphors and nature imagery is employed towards an accruing sense of dread and absurdity such as the narrator of Mundo Animal allowing birds to nest in his skull only to be picked apart from the inside or Zama noticing the fruitless efforts of beasts in the wild.
Entitled Ugarte, it was about a series of moments in the life of Juan de Ugarte, a bureaucrat in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century. Some (mainly Spanish) critics had dismissed it as Kafka in the colonies…and later Bolaño continues, very astutely addressing the prose as ‘a cold book, written with neurosurgical precision.’ While ‘Kafka in the colonies’ is used dismissively, it isn’t altogether inaccurate. Within Sensini, we find the caricature of Benedetto as an aging author with a son, Gregorio, who has ‘disappeared’ during the Dirty Wars. The narrator suspects the name as being a nod to Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis. Bolaño was laying much of the groundwork of interpretation for Zama--pronounced in Spanish with a sibilant S like Sama--by playfully making the novel Zama like a literary child lost in the chaos of the mid twentieth century and pointing out that the title is a play of Kafka’s Samsa².Much like Gregor Samsa, Zama is trapped in the horrors of his situation.
If he clings to the one who no longer is, and to her alone, then he loves a dangerous fantasy. It will lead to sickness and distress, perhaps horror.He must come to terms with reality as it is, not as he fantasizes it should be. Zama fails to heed the sagacious warning and continually slips into madness.
Yet another woman felt authorized to furnish me with her protection. I was a fragile man, therefore, and visibly so.Having to accept the help of a woman he feels sexually diminished and later rapes her before begging her for money (Zama often lashes out at women by taking them by force, which is extremely problematic but builds to the effect of examining a fragile male ego. Much like modern day with groups such as Meninist wearing their despicable t-shirts to be intentionally offensive in place of actually having to face the reality of gender politics, Zama is most brash and distasteful when he feels socially, emotionally, or intellectually threatened). What seems to aggravate Zama’s fragile ego most is the ease of ability for these women to act--such as Piñares flicking away a poisonous spider and crushing it in bed not long after Zama’s own inability to do so--while his entire efforts fail to form any action.
I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.Without spoiling the violent and shocking conclusion, let me simply say that the final dozen pages are some of the finest I have encountered and a satisfying fate for a man whose entire existence is centered on efforts of mobility.
“Yo era un tenaz fumador. Una noche quedé dormido con un tabaco en la boca. Desperté con miedo a despertar. Parece que lo sabía: me había nacido un ala de murciélago. Con repugnancia, en la oscuridad busqué mi cuchillo mayor. Me la corté. Caída, a la luz del día, era una mujer morena y yo decía que la amaba. Me llevaron a prisión.”Siguiendo con la parte fácil, la trama versa sobre un asesor letrado que en un largo y entrecortado soliloquio nos relata la espera a la que se ve obligado sufrir en una ciudad de segunda de la América colonial hasta que el rey se avenga a concederle su anhelado destino en donde poder reunirse por fin con su mujer. Esa larga espera, complicada con problemas económicos y cosquilleos retozones, enfrenta a este hidalgo de medio pelo consigo mismo, obligándole a encarar culpas y auto-decepciones. Zama es un Oblomov antipático, incapaz de encauzar su vida y siempre presto a salvar su culo aunque ello conlleve descarrilar la vida de los demás.
“Esa noche soñé que por barco llegaba una mujer solitaria y sonriente, sólo para mí, necesitada de mi amparo, que se confiaba a mis brazos y mezclaba con la mía su ternura. Pude precisar su rostro, gentil, y un vello rubio que le hacía durazno el cuello y me ponía goloso.”Ese enfrentamiento con el hombre que es en realidad deviene en corrupción, en un agua estancada que propicia el nacimiento de todo tipo de bichos malsanos que, en un medio como es la penuria económica y el fracaso en sus empresas, se desarrollan con prontitud deviniendo en delirio y fiebres que confieren al relato un cierto tono onírico.
“Me pregunté, no por qué vivía, sino por qué había vivido. Supuse que por la espera y quise saber si aún esperaba algo. Me pareció que sí.”Y aquí viene la parte más difícil: la sintaxis del lenguaje que obliga muchas veces a releer en busca de puntos de apoyo y que a medida que avanza la degradación del protagonista el texto se va volviendo más y más lacónico hasta, en ocasiones, hacerse oscuro de tan condensado; la mezcla que termina produciéndose de ensueños, desvaríos y alucinaciones con esa realidad siempre sospechosa tanto en cuanto la conocemos a través de los pensamientos del infeliz protagonista; el simbolismo y el uso de imágenes que recorren toda la novela y que mi pésimo bagaje cultural me impide interpretar con toda seguridad. Todo ello, digo, me hace sospechar que muy posiblemente no haya más que arañado parte de lo que la obra lleva dentro… y, ¿saben una cosa?, eso también es parte del éxito que la novela ha tenido conmigo.
"Resuelva de una o más maneras, igual o distinto a mí, quien me lea. Que el libro no termine con la lectura de la letra, que lo mío sea un estímulo de aptitudes creadoras de los otros y, a su merced, vaya más lejos de donde yo pude llevarlo."
“… [I cannot] modify what [I] once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future?… I saw the past as a shapeless, visceral mass, yet still somehow perfectible. It had its noble elements but among them I couldn’t help but recognize something—the main thing—that was viscous, unpleasant, and elusive to the grasp, like the intestines of a freshly disemboweled animal. I did not repudiate this element but accepted it as part of myself, possibly an indispensable part, even if I’d played no role in bringing it into existence. I hoped, rather, to be myself, at last, in the future, by dint of what I might become in that future. Perhaps I believed I was that man already, living in accordance with the image that awaited me further ahead. Perhaps this present Zama who claimed to resemble the Zama to come was built upon the Zama who once was, copying him, as if timidly venturing to interrupt something.”
’Acknowledging my own impassioned disposition, I must shun all stimuli that are contrived or deliberately pursued. There is no excuse when instinct has forewarned us but we do not heed the warning… I must not even lay eyes on them so as not to dream of them and render myself susceptible and bring about my downfall.”
When the tribe grew accustomed to carrying on without eyesight, it was happier. Each one could be alone with himself. Shame, censure, and recrimination no longer existed: Punishment was not necessary. They turned to one another out of collective need and common interest: to hunt a deer or put a roof on a rancho. A man sought out a woman and a woman sought out a man for love. Some of them, to isolate themselves even further, beat their own ears until the tiny bones within them were crushed.It seems that Di Benedetto was a follower of Franz Kafka, and that he adopted the name of Zama because of its resemblance to Gregor Samsa of "The Metamorphosis." Whatever the case, this is one of those books which I think will only grow upon the reader. Even Jorge Luis Borges has written that "Di Benedetto has written essential pages that have moved me and that continue to move me."