The Part About Amalfitano (Week Three, Post #5, pp. 163-228)
Suzanne Duchamp, Le Ready-Made Malheureux de Marcel (1920). Oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of Research Gate
After being introduced to the Santa Teresa professor Amalfitano, assigned to serve as the local guide for our critics in their search for Archimboldi, we now get an in-depth look at Amalfitano’s life and peculiar mind.
You may recall that the Chilean Amalfitano moved to Santa Teresa from Barcelona to take a teaching job at the University of Santa Teresa. Accompanying him was his teenage daughter, Rosa. The story of Rosa’s mother, Lola, and her abandonment of Rosa and Amalfitano when Rosa was only two years old is a tragic account, and another case of artistic mania (and related insanity).
Lola becomes obsessed with a Spanish poet who then was resident at an insane asylum near San Sabastian and concocts a plan with her friend Imma to visit him there and become a sort of disciple. She invents a story about having met the poet years ago at a party and having slept with him, wanting to have his baby. But Amalfitano doesn’t believe this story because he was the one who introduced Lola to the poet’s work, and the poet is openly gay. Lola, Imma, and fellow disciples believe that the poet is “a genius, an alien, God’s messenger.” Lola and Imma embark on their mission, and Amalfitano does little to resist. Except for one brief visit years later, Lola never returns to her family, and Amalfitano ends up raising Rosa alone.
I used the word “peculiar” to describe Amalfitano’s mind, which seems accurate but also, I think, the way that Amalfitano himself might describe it. Let’s take, for instance, the case of the found geometry text. Amalfitano discovers it within a box of books that he had shipped to Santa Teresa from Barcelona. He has no recollection of ever owning this book, Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geometrico (Biography of Rafael Dieste), or boxing it up with other books before he left Barcelona. He is bothered by the mystery of how this book ended up in one of his boxes. Almost on impulse Amalfitano hangs the book on his outdoor clothesline, an idea that he borrows from the artist Marcel Duchamp’ art piece, “Unhappy Readymade.” Photograph of "Marcel Duchamp's Unhappy Readymade" | Duchamp Research Portal
One of a series of “readymades” created by Duchamp, the “Unhappy Readymade” was a geometry book hung by strings on the balcony of Duchamp’s sister’s apartment. With respect to the “Unhappy Readymade,” Duchamp told an interviewer that in exposing this “book full of principles” to the weather, “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.”
After hanging the geometry book, Amalfitano feels much calmer. When Rosa questions her father as to why he did this, Amalfitano replies, “to see how it survives the assault of nature.” He also tells her to forget it is there, although he is often drawn to look at it blowing in the wind.
The following day Amalfitano finds himself subconsciously drawing geometric patterns and writing the names of famous philosophers and thinkers at various points on the lines and axes of the shapes. When Amalfitano stops to consider these unintentional doodles, he is perplexed by them, not understanding what they mean. Later in the chapter as we read about the mysterious voices that address him and the text describing the telepathic powers of an indigenous tribe in Chile, it feels as though there is a correlation among these things that Amalfitano is experiencing.
Things to think about as we continue to read “The Part About Amalfitano,” which I will address in the next post:
How do the themes of fate/coincidence and order/chaos thread through Amalfitano’s life in Santa Teresa?
There are a few brief mentions of the femicides in this chapter. Are they the underpinning for Amalfitano’s contemplations, dreams, and paranoia, or is something else going on?
I found Amalfitano’s memory of and commentary on, the bookish pharmacist’s reading habits very illuminating:
“Even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown…when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
Is that what Bolaño is doing with this novel?
I just want to comment about Amalfitano's descent into madness real quick. It seems to begin not just from being unable to figure out where the geometry book came from but when Rosa goes out to the movies one night.
“And it was then, just then, as if it were the pistol shot inaugurating a series of events that would build upon each other with sometimes happy and sometimes disastrous consequences, Rosa left the house and said she was going to the movies with a friend.”
Amalfitano knows how dangerous the city is and fears desperately for his daughter's life every time she goes out. It is eating away at him subconsciously and his mind turns all of his focus into the mystery of Dieste’s geometry book. When Rosa leaves for the movies that night Amalfitano walks in his backyard and tries to find his shadow and “although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west, he couldn't see it.” Shadows (having no shadow) have been brought up earlier and seem to be related to losing one's humanity or soul. And so begins the hanging of Dieste’s book on the clothesline and the voice. He is giving the geometry book the same fate that he has received, leaving it hanging “exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life.” Amalfitano draws his diagrams of philosophers, looking to see if they can tell him anything useful about his predicament, only to be baffled by all the names and connections he draws up. Philosophy, intelligence, etc. can not save you here. Madness is contagious, did he catch it from Lola or the city?
Does anyone else think Amalfitano’s name has to be a combination of Amalfi and Positano? I was mesmerized by the part about Lola and wondered about her significance in all this…is she a junkie? Is there a link in the female characters we have met so far that will mean something when we get to the femicides? It’s definitely not flattering, for sure. Something in the writing and how it makes me feel reminds me of Love in the Time of Cholera.