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Issue 105 Fall 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Margo Glantz at 38 Jesús María, October 2006.
My conversation with Margo Glantz (b. Mexico City, 1930) was supposed to have taken place last summer. But Mexico’s political temperature was running so high, it kept anyone from doing anything at all except read newspapers, trade rumors, and experience anxiety over a post-electoral crisis that, in the end, only managed to tear apart what was already divided. Those who’d voted for the leftists believed either that the right had won or that the elections were fraudulent. Among those who believed there had been a fraud, some disapproved of the protesters paralyzing downtown Mexico City, while others supported them. Among the protesters’ supporters, some wanted to hold a convention in order to structure a national resistance movement, and others didn’t. The ones who believed in the urgency of holding a Convention could have been for or against founding a new party or naming the leftist candidate Shadow President. In a nutshell: too much to argue about, yet impossible to avoid.
Ultimately, what happened is that no one had really believed the conservatives might make off with the presidency again. We were suffering from universal irreconcilable differences: every single Mexican was in a rotten mood, and on a mission to make the other 99 million 999 thousand 999 Mexicans give back what they owed him. Neither Margo nor I had the willpower, or sense of purpose, or whatever it takes to embark upon an interview. Then she took off for a series of conferences in Australia and New Zealand. We exchanged e-mails and set up an appointment for after her return.
I picked her up at her home address: Callejón del Horno, in Coyoacán. It was early October, and an autumn wind gusted through the city, carrying with it the scent of the high sierra. Margo was still readapting herself to the Northern Hemisphere after her Austral odyssey, having slept 48 enviable hours that she had apparently earned the hard way among koalas, heads of Latin American literature departments, and international airports. As always, she looked like a slightly dazed princess: extremely elegant, and with her mind elsewhere. So what’s the plan? she asked as we walked toward the car. We’re going to La Merced, I told her, to visit where your parents lived after they arrived from Russia.
Next we went to pick up Raúl González, who has gained a certain degree of celebrity both for the product shots he takes for Purina, or Whiskas, and for his portraits of authors in their natural environments. He’s also taken the time to become the strangest species of fauna in the visual arts: he’s a microphotographer. While all his colleagues endeavor to publish their stuff in Wallpaper, he swells up with pride because his shots of natural fibers were featured in Nature. González’s quests are esoteric: for the past 15 years, he’s been portraying basic natural structures in search of a secret aesthetic order in the world; he’s a Humboldt of sorts but on a molecular level, which has led to a naturalist body of work that is quickly becoming seminal. If he finds a pattern, he tracks it from the mitochondria in rat hair to the aerial geometry in flocks of swallows, or to soccer fields pictured from the skies, or even to star nebulas.
Thus, it was fairly obvious that our conversation wasn’t going to begin with a brainy digression about the feminine body in literature—one of the topics that has made Margo a classic both in fiction and in theory—but rather, with Australian fauna. I turned on the recorder as we descended from the tunnel on Chapultepec Avenue into the Historic Downtown area of Mexico City. We were discussing some oyster-colored rodent when Margo observed that to her, the strangest animal of all seemed to be the platypus. Raúl asked her if she meant the one that looks like an ornitorrinco and, in one of her typical gestures, she denied it: No, no, no, she said, it’s something else entirely. It likes the water and lays eggs, but it has hair like a seal and it’s a mammal. Wait, it’s the one with a beak and a beaver tail, right? Raúl asked. Yes, Margo confirmed. Then it is like an ornitorrinco, I said. She denied it again: No, no, no, the platypus is nothing like an ornitorrinco. A silence is then perceived in the recording, during which, I imagine, Raúl and I exchange disconcerted glances. Also, the noise from the street enters the scene: we’d exited the tunnel and were back in the sunlit world filled with Margo Glantz’s equivocations, which are laden with meaning.
