The Sufferable Gaucho

Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne. Dalkey Archive Press, 295 pages. 2025.

In a cellar on Garay Street, in the center of Buenos Aires, once there was an Aleph. Or it seemed like an Aleph. Borges wavers, then he forgets. Whether the world or only the image of the world was held in Carlos Argentino Daneri’s basement, his building was demolished in the forties, and his Aleph was buried beneath it. Argentina remains in its place, above, and exerts a special attraction on writers fated to achieve greatness—critical first, then commercial. Take Karl Ove Knausgaard. In a creative slump in 2008, he decided to write his life and to name it “Argentina.” His closest friend convinced him instead to retitle his book after Hitler’s. Traces remain. In a memorable scene, Karl Ove retreats to his desktop after dinner with friends, and he opens Google Earth and pans to Patagonia. He scrolls up the coast from Tierra del Fuego, past desert and pampa to River Plate’s stadium, and crosses town to La Boca. He reminisces about the television broadcast of the 1978 World Cup. Near the end of the second volume, wearing the jersey of the Argentine national team, he gets slide tackled. His collarbone breaks.

Then you have W.G. Sebald. In Vertigo on the train to Venice from Vienna, his narrator falls asleep. He dreams of an Austrian mountain, and below he sees an Argentine pampa he calls “infinitely vast.” In The Rings of Saturn, Borges is invoked by name, and Sebald quotes at length from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Our world is to be replaced by Tlön, or has been replaced already, and Sebald, a true Borgesian, alters the original text. Borges does not prepare his version of Thomas Browne in a “country villa,” as The Rings of Saturn has it, but in a hotel in Adrogué, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Adrogué is where Borges finished “The South,” the most personal work of a personal writer. Incidentally Roberto Bolaño ended his career, and his life, with his response to the story, having hand-delivered the typescript of The Insufferable Gaucho to his editor the day before he last checked into the hospital, spitting blood.

The attraction to Borges can be confused with an attraction to Argentina, confused in turn with a pop Argentina invented in the Global North, a hideout for Nazis, Southern governors, travel writers, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid. Argentina is a metonym for both mystic periphery and timeless classic. Many of Argentina’s greatest writers, meanwhile, are expats or exiles. Juan José Saer left for Paris, Julio Cortázar for Paris, Manuel Puig for Brazil and Mexico, Ricardo Piglia for Davis and Princeton, and Juan Rodolfo Wilcock for Rome, where he left Spanish for Italian. Alejandra Pizarnik became Pizarnik in Paris, not in Buenos Aires. William Henry Hudson, or Guillermo Enrique Hudson, was raised by Yankees in the Pampas, but he moved to England in the 1870s and wrote in Spanish-colored English. His first novel, The Purple Land, or The Purple Land that England Lost, follows the adventures of a young Briton who flees Argentina for Montevideo. Witold Gombrowicz, the other great literary adoptee, lived more than two decades in Buenos Aires, until the Ford Foundation invited him to Europe. In 1963, after he boarded his ship to Spain, a crowd of disciples called across the gangway to ask his advice. Gombrowicz shouted, “Kill Borges!” Twenty-three years later, Borges died in Switzerland—triumphant.

Two years ago, Enrique Vila-Matas, who is from Barcelona, gave an interview in Buenos Aires. He asked, “Could it be that I’m rioplatense?” (Rioplatense Spanish, named for the Río de la Plata, is the dialect spoken by most Argentines and Uruguayans.) “I’m sure I have been at times,” he continued, “on my incursions into Buenos Aires. It’s just that wherever I find myself, that’s where I’m from.” Vila-Matas likes to play coy. On his website, he comes closer to issuing a straight verdict. Apparently a publisher in Argentina approached him and offered him a chance to confirm his argentinidad by publishing a collection of essays with his press. “A proposal attractive and dishonest enough to let happen,” Vila-Matas tells us. Argentine or not, he has often been compared to Borges—but he does not read like Borges. He tends toward compression, but not an extreme compression. He exercises a high degree of clarity, and precision, but he does not have the master’s extraordinary purity of style. His work does not arrive an indisputable classic as if from the distant past. Vila-Matas’s affinity for Borges, and for the Argentine canon he frames, is a common strategic approach. He works from the same toolbox. His tools are citation, plagiarism, the misquote, hyperbole, the autofictional feint, and the metafictive deception. He builds a case on authority while hollowing tunnels below.

Montano’s Malady, reissued this month by Dalkey Archive Press in Jonathan Dunne’s translation, is not so classical, but it performs the Borgesian drama of reception. It proceeds from a novella disguised as a diary to a decoding of the text, interleaved with a dictionary of other diarists that includes Kafka, Gombrowicz, Katherine Mansfield, and the narrator’s mother. Then comes the text of a talk at a conference, followed by a diary more formally like a diary, despite some dream-journal characteristics and a flight to the second person. The fifth and final section is an account of another conference, in Switzerland, where the Catalan narrator understands nothing.

Montano’s Malady is the second installment in the “Trilogy of the Metaliterary Cathedral,” which begins with Bartleby & Co. and ends with Doctor Pasavento. The trilogy is loose, but the end of Montano’s Malady points to its sequel, and the beginning alludes to its prequel. In the first part, the novella, Montano is introduced as the narrator’s son, the author of a book that sounds like Bartleby & Co., a text about writers who give up writing. His titular malady is “literature sickness,” a condition expressed in Montano as the inability to continue to write. Its expression in his father is an inability to continue to experience life without the mediation of literature. The son overcomes his condition by writing a story that explodes a conceit from “Shakespeare’s Memory,” one of Borges’ final stories, and the dad, after several failed stabs at a cure in Chile and the Azores, finds some relief in sex. In the second part, father and son are unmasked as the fictions of a writer who publishes using his mother’s name, “Rosario Girondo.” Rosario the younger is patient zero for Montano’s malady, and he is the true author of the book that resembles Bartleby & Co. Thumbing through a French translation of The Aleph and Other Stories in a Nantes bookstore, he develops his novella’s premise and his writer’s block is cured. He shuts the book and leaves the store, but the other literature sickness, Montano’s father’s mania, is tenacious. It will work to animate and excuse the formal games to come. A few pages on, to fortify these games’ reception—mostly his parasitism’s reception—he directs us to another favorite, Alan Pauls’s The Borges Factor.

It may sound cute. It is not. Vila-Matas keeps stakes high. The main thread, apart from the theme of diaries and diarists’ lives, is a struggle with the “enemies of the literary,” whom he never plainly defines. The illiterate are mentioned, as are the directors of publishing houses. “Pigs” are imprecated. At the start they’re identified with Kafka’s moles, and Rosario locates their headquarters in tunnels in an Azorean volcano. They later appear in his brain. The war is presented as almost real, then metaphorical—then, definitively real. Rosario goes on trips of indeterminate reality, and he meets or is accompanied by an unruly cast of phantoms. His wife is the most plausible, an agent who maybe cheats on him with “the ugliest man in the world,” Tongoy. Tongoy, Rosario’s close friend and a great comic invention, is modeled on the inarguably real and hideous Daniel Emilfork. His ugliness is charismatic. With time, he diminishes into a voice in Rosario’s head.

How might a sick, lonely diarist, cuckolded by a delusion, go about waging war? The urge to fix definitions, to tease the real from the fictional, is a trap set for the enemy. Montano’s malady is a bioweapon. Under its influence the literary can strike from the book into the world, and any movement, however small, can be traced to something written. A biography of Thomas Browne is not just read, but thrown. Montano’s pupils dilate when he grows angry, a tic his father disarms by recalling a passage from Ernst Jünger. A suggestion from Gombrowicz that fans of his Ferdydurke reveal themselves by touching their right ear is followed by Tongoy and Rosario. Rosario’s most potent defense against the unliterary moles is to subject them to Kafka’s moles, the invisible creatures of “The Burrow.” Sources get confused and hold the enemies of the literary back.

The battle is fought on improbable terrain. A memorable exchange is set in Kafka’s deathplace. Rosario, who begins to call himself “Walser,” makes a pilgrimage to the former sanatorium in Kierling. He is welcomed into Kafka’s room by the old woman who lives there now. She claims to have not read Kafka, but she does like Stephen Hawking, who says “amazing things” on the television. Rosario reflects happily on their distance from his malady, but the images and references in her room and conversation closely align with a Borges poem, his ode “Susana Bombal.” Thus enemies of the literary are spit, and we are spit, out of life and back into books. What comes next, in the hereafter? According to Rosario, who cites the dead, it is like “swimming in the pampas at night,” where threads of theft and reception cannot be reliably traced. Vila-Matas awaits us there. He erases the boundary between the fictive and the real, and in the new field, he moves with his own set of sources and myths.

“The writer is an engineer of contexts,” writes Pauls in The Borges Factor, and Borges, who lived outside his fictions in a kind of eternal literary conference, would envy Vila-Matas his tools. He keeps a column at El País, “Café Perec,” where he launches a new anecdote, finds a new connection, or adds a new brace to his canon—the spaceship from 8½ comes to mind—roughly every two weeks. Other writers in Spain have columns, but Café Perec is only one spoke in a more unusual production. Google his name with any other writer’s and something by Vila-Matas himself, in or out of Café Perec, tends to make the first page. If it was not written by Vila-Matas, it is copied to enriquevilamatas.com, and if nothing appears, you’re wrong—you’ve got the wrong canon. In and around his work, he inserts his voice in the footnotes to Kafka, Musil, and Robert Walser.

Unlike them, Vila-Matas cannot be a classic. He is a machine for making classics. His project is in perpetual motion, and in the footnotes he can stay dangerous, hold onto his identity, and endure as long as his referents. Meanwhile, on the periphery, he can lose himself with the literature-sick, who cannot be reduced to types. A hat, a humpback, an umbrella, Tongoy’s enormous ears—his work overflows with accessories. He borrows more from writers’ lives than their work, but he has a gift for the bathetic sublime that he surely honed on Walser. His medium is specificity, not the generality of the woman in Kierling, and he always seems at play. He hides and he misdirects us, and in Montano’s Malady, he refuses to name some of his most obvious and important sources—Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, Kafka’s “The Burrow,” Journey to the End of the Night. In another essay on Borges, “The Borges Legacy,” Pauls tells us that “Argentine writers are Argentine to the extent they are displaced and out of place, have fallen—so to speak—off the map: Argentine because they are peripheral.” The Borges legacy, the Argentine inheritance, is to take dislocation as a gift. Vila-Matas is a kind of anti-Borges. He manipulates contexts, he tends the classics of several languages, but he cannot do it all coolly. The work of receiving his work and others’ comes under threat from the instincts of the purist—his romantic attachment to misfits, recluses, and Bartlebys. His context manipulates him back.

The trilogy’s longest, most uneven, and least formally inventive volume is the last, Doctor Pasavento. It’s also the best. He sheds some of the multiplicity of Montano’s Malady and Bartleby & Co., and devotes himself to Walser. The eponymous Pasavento is a novelist, not a doctor, and “Doctor Pasavento” is one of several guises behind which he attempts to disappear. Later he calls himself “Pynchon.” Throughout, he struggles to balance the wish to evaporate with the hope that someone will find him, or at least that someone will try. Borges, the impersonal celebrity, on television and in the arena, is played against Walser, the individual, cloistered in his asylum. For Pasavento no writer is closer to Walser than the Anglo-Argentine Hudson, a favorite of Borges, and after he makes a pilgrimage to Walser’s sanatorium, where he stays a week and a half, he leaves to follow Hudson—into Patagonia, he claims.

To the south of his new home in “Patagonia,” however, he sees an ombu tree. Hudson was a naturalist partly raised on a property with twenty-five ombus. He would tell us, if anyone would, that the ombu grows in the Pampas, to the north of Patagonia. Pasavento too must be in the Pampas or lost in an amalgam of settings lifted out of Hudson’s work. He tells us he lives near El Calafate, a real town in Patagonia, but Pasavento can see farther. He sees gauchos in “infinite space.” A campfire scene from Hudson’s The Purple Land, in which gauchos tell each other ghost stories and believe them without reservation, is here inverted. One gaucho tells of waiting on his wife’s ghost, who does not exist and never arrives, and the other gaucho accuses him of making up his memories. It’s a triumph of the real, until Pasavento reveals his whole Patagonian idyll was imagined. Without the admission, its reality could not be distinguished from much that precedes or follows, despite its implausibility.

In his Pampas or Patagonia, Vila-Matas resolves the contradiction between classic and romantic, idiot and seer, architect and rogue. He can live in his contexts, he can change them, and he can possess them with or without citation. He can write them down and ride past the end of the night, if he wants it. He expands the zone of literary combat into a borderless pampa, which impossibly borders on El Calafate. Like the world that was once on Garay Street, it has coordinates, but it has no end.

Vila-Matas does not ride alone like Walser, but it could be that he better understands the risks. Taking on the infinite, wherever it is found, requires a strategy and a team. In a garret on the rue Saint-Benoît, a young Vila-Matas was once Marguerite Duras’s tenant, and to have arrived at his “Metaliterary Cathedral,” he may have begun his planning there. The team could not have been easy to assemble:

Gombrowicz, cryptographer and expert in intelligence. Antonio Tabucchi—can talk to ghosts. Thomas Pynchon, master of disguise, and Katherine Mansfield—exterminator. Céline, expert in counterintelligence. Bartleby, scrivener—metaphysical sentry. “Max” Sebald, demolitions specialist, and Kafka, specialist in tunnels. Musil, their assistant—terrorist, engineer. Pizarnik, she can see in the dark. And Borges, Borges, Borges—duelist, poet, linguist, professor, mapmaker, strategist. For a long time now, whenever they began, they have been riding the Pampas together. They can write day and night, and sleep in the saddle—pointed south, forever, and searching, maybe, for Walser.