I spent the following weeks filled with these strange resonances. Speaking in English made me uneasy; I make mistakes more often than I’d like and then attach onto those mistakes the threatening implications that words sometimes hold for me. Down the street there are pizzerias to go to, and the pavement is a nice, bluish slate gray. I could never think that in English, I’d start translating it straight away: En el fondo de la calle hay una pizzería y el asfalto (el pavimento) brilla agradable bajo la luz azulada.
My exterior life was peaceful and monotonous. I did my shopping at Davidson’s grocery and cooked for myself at the house or went out to eat at the professors’ club, facing the gardens at Prospect House. Every now and then I’d get into Professor Hubert’s Toyota and visit other villages nearby. Old one-horse towns that held traces of battles from the Revolutionary War or the cruel Civil War. Sometimes I would walk along the banks of the Delaware, a canal that connected Philadelphia to New York in the nineteenth century and had been the main route of commerce. Irish immigrants had excavated it with shovels, and it had a very complex system of locks and dams, but now it was out of operation and had been converted into a wooded walking path with luxurious houses on the hills overlooking its calm waters. It was frozen this time of year, and children with yellow jackets and red caps flew along like birds over the transparent surface on their skates and sleds.
One of my pastimes was observing my neighbor. She was the lone image of peace in my solitary mornings. A diminutive figure, tending flowers in a little private garden in the middle of the lifeless ground. From the shadows of my room on the top floor, I could see her go down to the park every morning, walking with careful little steps because of the snow, and then lift the yellow cloth that she used to protect the greenhouse flowers that she grew along one side, under the shelter of a stone wall. She tried to keep the sprouts going through the frost and the lack of sunlight and the desolate winter air. I think she spoke to them, to the plants, and the sound would reach me as a gentle murmur in a strange tongue, like some soft and unfamiliar music. Sometimes I thought I could hear her whistling; I don’t remember having heard many women whistle, but one morning I heard her intoning Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Reality does have background music, and in this case that Russian melody—a rather light tune—was very fitting for the atmosphere and my state of mind.
3
I’d read Hudson several times over the course of my life and, in the past, had even visited the ranch—Los Veinticinco Ombúes—where he was born. It was near my house in Adrogué, and I would ride my bicycle to kilometer 37 and go up the dirt path among the trees until I came to the farm amid the fields. We all enjoy nature when we’re very young, and Hudson—like so many writers who convey those childhood emotions—seemed to retain that quality throughout his life. Many years later, in 1918, while ill for six weeks in a house near the sea in England, he had a kind of extended epiphany that allowed him to relive his early days of happiness in La Pampa with a “marvelous” clarity. Propped up on the pillows and equipped with a pencil and notebook, he worked ceaselessly, in a state of feverish happiness, writing Far Away and Long Ago, his wondrous memoir. That relationship between illness and memory bears some resemblance to Proust’s involuntary memory, but, as Hudson himself explained, “It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion.” Rather, it was a kind of illumination, as if he were back there once again and could see clearly into the days he’d once lived. The prose that emerged from those memories remains one of the most memorable literary moments in the English language and, paradoxically, is also one of the luminous events in the faded literature of Argentina.
Maybe he wrote in that way because his English was blended with the Spanish of his childhood; uncertainties and errors do appear in the original versions of his writings, revealing Hudson’s lack of familiarity with the language he was writing in. One of his biographers records that he often paused, searching for a word, and would immediately turn to Spanish for a substitute in order to keep going. It was as if his childhood language always remained close to his literature, and there was some deep place where those lost voices lingered on. He wrote in English, but his syntax was Spanish, and it retained the soft rhythms of a desert orality from the plains of El Plata.
In 1846, the Hudsons left Los Veinticinco Ombúes and traveled to Chascomús, where his
