He was a very good detective, according to Elizabeth, but his personal life was chaotic; he knew too much about everyone not to be plagued by jealousy and widespread mistrust. She gave me the feeling that she too had some history with the detective and had also been investigated by him. “The other issue,” she said, as though able to read my thoughts, “is that he’s always armed and can turn violent.” I accompanied her back to her apartment but, despite her insistence, declined her offer to stay and went to the Port Authority terminal to catch a bus that went across New Jersey and would drop me in my town.
I arrived after midnight. Everything was deserted and dark, and only the parked cars gave any sense that the place was not uninhabited. I found some mail in the box, but nothing important, unpaid bills, advertisements. Just as I was about to enter the house, I saw my neighbor coming out of the laundromat where she’d gone to wash her clothes. She couldn’t sleep at night either, she told me, as though she thought I’d been out to combat my insomnia. She spoke English with a slight European accent and told me that she was Russian, a retired professor of Slavic literature, and that her husband had died two years before. I could come over to her house anytime I wanted for tea and a chat. She was older, small, agile, energetic; she had fine features and pale eyes, quite piercing. One of those women who is beautiful at any age, with a malicious air that the years had not erased. She spoke with such animation and such grace that she didn’t seem old at all, really; rather, she had the appearance of an actress playing the role of a lady who was getting on in years. (“Women my age don’t grow old, dear, they just go mad,” she said to me one day.)
Chapter Two
1
Classes started at the beginning of February. I was teaching three hours per week, Monday afternoons in room B-6-M of the library, and the seminar had moderate attendance (six students enrolled). It was an elite group, of course, very well educated, and it displayed the conspiratorial air shared by doctoral students in the years they spend together writing their dissertations. It’s a very strange kind of education, one that’s unknown in Argentina. In fact, it bears more resemblance to a gym in the Bronx where young boxers are coached by old, semi-retired champions who punch them and shout orders over the ring, always running the risk of ending up on the mat. To me, it seems to be one of the few initiation rites still prevailing in the Western world; it may well be that medieval priories possessed that same air of discretion, privilege, and tedium, because the students here are almost entirely cloistered and move within a closed-off circle, living together—like the survivors of a shipwreck—with their professors. They know that no one in the outside world is particularly interested in literature, that they’re the essential curators of a glorious tradition in crisis.
And so, the six recruits that I had sitting around the table were tense and expectant like young, inexperienced killers locked up in a federal prison. Universities are replacing ghettos as the sites of psychological violence. On the very day I arrived, a young assistant professor from a nearby university had barricaded himself in his house in Connecticut and killed a policeman; he remained there in a standoff for twelve hours until the FBI arrived. He was demanding that they reconsider his promotion to associate professor, which they’d rejected, and he thought it was an injustice, a disregard for his achievements and his publications. The funny part was that, in the end, he promised he’d give himself up if they guaranteed that he could have weapons in prison. He was right, it’s in prison where weapons must be used, but they refused, and the young man killed himself.
Campuses are peaceful and elegant; they’re intended to leave experience and passions outside, but beneath them flow the high waves of an underground animosity: the terrible violence of well-educated men. The chair of Modern Culture and Film Studies was Don D’Amato, a veteran of the Korean War, and everyone said it was for that very reason that he’d been chosen to head the new department. Soon, men with experience in prison and war will become the professors responsible for leading university administration forward.
Maybe this is the way I view things after what happened (the accident, the mishap, the setback, as the police here call it), as if the events were a result of the lofty and complex education of the elite in North American academia. In any case, when I sat down on the first day to begin my seminar on Hudson, I felt free and happy, just as I do every time I start a course, inspired by the atmosphere of tense complicity wherein we repeat the immemorial rite of conferring our own era’s ways of reading and its cultural knowledge—and prejudices—onto a new generation.
I was interested in writers who were tied to some double identity, bound up in two languages and two traditions. Hudson fully embodied that subject. The son of North Americans, he was born in Buenos Aires in 1838, raised on the fiery Argentine Pampa in the mid-nineteenth century and finally, in 1874, left for England,
