We die twice. The first time physically. The second time when the last person who knows our name slips into the beyond. There is an infinity between these deaths, but deaths they are nonetheless. And there is something important in dividing death in this way. In brings into focus that what the nature of death is for us, whatever kind of animal human beings are.
Death not only comes for us all but long before it claims us, we encounter it. When was the first time you saw something die, saw your father pummel a fly or crush a cockroach? When was the first time, looking at an old dusty family photo you asked about a face you did not recognize, and learnt there was such a thing as being ‘no longer with us’, ‘in a better place’ or somewhere upstate. How embedded in our cultural mind’s eye is the image of the family pet that passes or has to be put down, the importance we attach to such a moment, supposing it will make our children wiser and more mature?
As we go about our lives, we see death approaching. We have near death experiences, watch loved ones grow weak and sick, witness the irrepressible march of time. It is there in our receding hairlines and tired eyes, in the increasing slowness with which we approach the world. Before we ourselves die, we must carry the names of the dead within us. Those who die young have not really lived. Not because of a lack of experience – though this may be true – but because they encountered their own death before any others.
The ultimate non-experience is thus part of our experience. The horizon of our finitude is the infinitude of the abyss, the great nothingness that awaits us.
For literature however, these experiences are difficult to convey. Experience comes to us in language. So death and madness (the decay of language and thought into nonsense), being render silent (for example, by being transmogrified into a bug) are the same problem for literature. How to write the non-linguistic, how to write the liminal, the ineffable, and incommunicable.
This issue is at the heart of Beyond, a short story collection by Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), a Uruguayan writer. This collection of Quiroga’s stories, translated by Elisa Taber, all address madness or death. In this way Quiroga follows the lead of his most obvious influence Edgar Allen Poe.
Quiroga, at the time of death in 1937 was considered to be a writer of “comparative obscurity”, whose works were, nonetheless “true glories of American literature.” Quiroga now enjoys relative posthumous fame. His Cuentos de la selva (Jungle Tales, 1918) is on the curriculum in Argentina’s primary schools. He is said to have influenced Gabriel Marìa Márquez and Julio Cortázar. I asked a dear friend, from the Dominican Republic, if she was familiar with Quiroga: “of course, we studied him in high school.” It would be a mistake to say that Quiroga is unknown in the English-speaking world, but that his short story collections appear in English under either the auspices of university presses or incredibly cheap, order to print paperbacks (presumably using expired copyrights), reveals a contemporary author our collective monolinguism has once again left by the wayside. An unfortunate error.
It is worth making a biographical remark about Quiroga. For his tales - of loss, despair, madness and death - come from a life marked by tragedy. His father died shortly after his birth in a hunting accident. His stepfather, afflicted by illness, killed himself. A seventeen-year-old Horatio was the first upon the scene. In 1902 he accidentally shot and killed his best friend. The jungle of Misiones looms large in Quiroga’s life and his stories. His first wife killed herself because he insisted on living there.
In 1935 Quiroga fell sick. Suffering from prostate cancer, his second wife abandoned him in Misiones. It is under these conditions that many of the stories in Beyond were written. He eventually travelled to Buenos Aires for treatment, where he learned his condition was incurable and inoperable. He took cyanide, ending his life and his suffering.
George D. Schade’s introduction to Quiroga’s The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1976, trans.Margaret Sayers Peden) ends the summary of his life there. But in the days leading up to Quiroga’s suicide a strange series of events took place. Quiroga, in the hospital and terminally ill, hears of a man suffering from elephantiasis who is forced to stay in the hospital’s basement. Quiroga demands the man, Vicente Batistessa, be brought up. They share a room and become friends. It is Batistessa who administers the cyanide, a final act of friendship to his new long suffering friend.
This story is hard to confirm – it appears on Wikipedia, unsourced – but it is plausible. For there are two Quirogas. Quiroga is not merely a recounter of horrid tales whose life reflect his art. For there is also Quiroga the humanist, the lover of life. It is this element that makes his stories more than mere tales of horror.
Quiroga’s prose is best described as efficient; his mastery lies in his story telling – with the notable exception of him describing a divan as “wide as a coffin”, an image the resonates through his story ‘Vampire’ – yet this is intentional. In his ‘Manual of the Perfect Short Story Writer’ he espouses a lean, direct and unadorned vision of literature. The sparseness of his prose has a dual effect. It brings into focus the object of the story, as if we were just as obsessed as his protagonists, and it dims the surrounds, giving his environments a darkness and claustrophobia.
Quiroga’s frequent discussions of madness, however, force literary experimentation to the fore. In ‘The Express Train Conductor’, a train conductor, dismissed from a medical exam that morning as being perfectly sane, loses it. The story, narrated by said conductor, builds from an just slightly unhinged narration to a maximum gauge intensity. In the moments before madness descends, the conductor decides that the train, going at the maximum speed it safely can, is not going fast enough. He admonishes the boilerman:
“My friend!” I scream, “And our courage? Didn’t the boss recommend nerve? The train is running like a cockroach.”
“Cockroach?” He responds, “We are at the limit…two pounds over. This carbon is not like the one we had last month.”
“We have to run, my friend! And your nerve? I found mine.”
“What?” murmured the man.
The boilerman will fail to shovel enough coal, amidst the talk of nerves – the boilerman becomes the “timorous one” – it is the conductor who loses it. Seeing the boilerman immobile, not shoveling, he lashes out: “‘Wretch! You’ve abandoned your post!’ I roar, launching myself from the sandpit.” After this incident, a sudden shift of register: “Spectacular Tranquillity. In the field, at last, outside the railway routine.” Ironic, as is the talk of nerves, insofar as one must assume the train, with the boilerman now incapacitated, is hurtling along at some ungodly speed.
The conductor snaps out of, has the train diverted, slams on the breaks. And in the story’s final moments the position of the narrator shifts:
But what descended from the train afterwards, whose grinded breaks had stopped it by the detour bumper; what was pulled from the locomotive, meowing horribly and writhing like a beast, was but a rag for the rest of his days in the asylum. The psychiatrists believe that saving the train – and the 125 lives it carried- evidenced professional automatism, not very rare, and that those with this kind of illness tend to recover their judgment.
We believe that the sense of duty, profoundly rooted in the nature of man, is capable of containing for three hours the tide of madness that is drowning him. But one does not recover from such mental heroism.
Is this the voice of our conductor? Throughout Beyond the narration comes from a strange place. In ‘Vampire’ a man with a nervous disposition (“the sound of a gunshot would finish me off”) calmly retells the story that led to his condition. In ‘The Son’ a father’s son disappears into the jungle of Misiones. He is late returning. The father searches to him, finds him, is reunited. But:
Smiles, hallucinating happiness. Since that father walks alone. He has found nobody and his arm rests on a void. Because behind him, at the foot of a pole and with legs raised, tangled in the barbed wire, his well-loved son lies under the sun, dead since ten that morning.
In carrying us beyond, Quiroga must be somewhere beyond the beyond.
There is one story, near the end of the collection that hints to where these stories may be coming from, that points to this beyond the beyond. The experiences of Quiroga’s story collection are liminal: madness and death. But there is a third, worldly, element that is also there. It is not horrifying, and it is only present in some of the stories. You may know it by its common name: love.
Quiroga announces his thematic early on. The book’s first and titular story is a story of two lovers. A girl’s parents have forbidden her from seeing her love. Her lover and her agree to die by suicide together. They awake as ghosts, in the room in which they have died. And for awhile they live and love, as best they can in their spectral form. And when their loves fades they pass from the liminal, the in between, to the beyond.
Quiroga solidifies this theme in a late story, ‘His Absence.’ This is the only redemptive story in the book, and one of great imagination and power. The story’s protagonist, Julio Roldán Berger, suffers a nervous episode as marriage with his girlfriend, Nora, looms. He comes to six years later, on a mountainside. He has not been comatose, however. He has been absent. He has lived life for six years, and it is a marvellous life he has lived. He has written a groundbreaking work of philosophy, The Open Sky, which has been herald as a work of genius not seen since Kant. He is engaged to a girl called Nora. Yet it is a different Nora, more beautiful and enchanting than the old one.
Berger is now forced to live a lie. He is not the author of The Open Sky. He is not the man who Nora fell in love with. After living with Nora for a few months he is forced to confess. This could be a moment of horror, but Quiroga turns into a moment of redemption:
I add, “Losing the author of The Open Sky won’t weigh on you?”
“Who?” asked Nora with feigned perplexity. “I don’t know that gentleman. I only know…”
And what her lips don’t utter, her eyes and mouth do in the form of an anxious and oppressed secret.
And as if this truly sever testimony did not suffice, Nora gets up and takes The Open Sky from the shelf, returns to sit on my knees, and with her arm around my neck, she tears the pages from the book, one by one, and throws them into the fire, which we watch burn in wonderment.
“Now” she says, bringing her free arm to join the one that intoxicates me, “that gentleman is dead…”
It is a strange moment. Indeed, it is one of madness. The man you married has told you he does not recall the years of your relationship, that he is not the man you meet and fell in love with. He has only been truly himself the last few months. And to lean into, not away from, this terrible secret is to behave as if one were possessed. In this moment madness and love cannot be so easily distinguished. Quiroga’s great insight, in these stories, is to see that death is only death because we love, that we die twice because those we love and who love us carry us in their memories, and all this is a form of madness. The beyond Quiroga narrates from is in fact a within. It was, after all, a friend who helped Quiroga pass into the beyond.
This may sound like an immense sentimentalism. But Quiroga is not bleary-eyed about this topic. The stories of madness, death and despair are unsentimental and horrifying. The opposite of sentimentalism is a pure cynicism, as unrealistic as its counterpart. We can be redeemed in small ways. Yet the same facet of human life that can save us may also drive us into the beyond, the great abyss which in its incomprehensibility gives our lives their definition and meaning.