XXV
I sat down at the table, and once again the foolish woman asked me which painters I
preferred. I awkwardly mentioned a couple names: Van Gogh, el Greco. She looked at
me with irony and said to herself:
“Well.”
Then she added:
“I can’t stand people who are too great. I’ll tell you,” she went on, looking at Hunter,
“that those fellows like Michael Angelo, or el Greco annoy me. Their grandeur and their
dramatics are so aggressive! Don’t you think that’s really bad taste? I believe that an
artist ought to accept the duty of not drawing too much attention. Their excesses of
dramatism and uniqueness disgust me. Just think, wanting to be unique is to imply that
everything else is mediocre, which to me is a very dubious form of art. I think if I were
to paint or to write, I would do things that never draw attention.
“I am sure of that,” Hunter commented sarcastically.
After that, he added:
“I am very sure that you would never want to write something like, for example, The
Brothers Karamazov.
“Quelle horreur!” Mimi exclaimed, directing her tiny eyes toward the sky. After that
she finished her thoughts saying, “that included all those nouveaux riche of the mind,
including that moine, what was his name?... Zozime?”
“Why don’t you say Zozimo, Mimi? Unless you decide to say it in Russian.”
“Now you’re starting your perfectionist foolishness again. You know Russian names
can be said in many different ways. Like that character in a farce: “Tolstoy or Tolstua,”
that can, and ought to be said in two different ways.”
“That must be why,” Hunter said, “that in a Spanish translation I read (from Russian,
according to the editorial) they put Tolstoy with an umlaut on the second o.”
“Yes, I love these kind of things,” Mime declared happily. “I once read a French
translation of Chekhov where, for example, you find some word like ichvochnik (or
something like that) and there is a footnote. You go to the bottom of the page and find
out it means, I’ll say, for example, porteur. Imagine, then they don’t explain why, in that
case, they do not have, in Russian, words like malgré or avant. Isn’t it strange? I’ll tell
you that I love things like this in translations, especially when they are Russian novels.
Could you stand to read a Russian novel?”
“She directed that question all of a sudden at me, not expecting an answer and looking
again at Hunter, she continued saying:
“The fact is that I have never been able to finish reading a Russian novel. There are
thousands of characters, and yet it turns out that there are only four or five. When you
start out, you get accustomed to a man called Alexandre, but then he is called Sacha, then
Sachka, Sachenka, until he has a grandiose name like Alexandre Alexandrovich Bunine,
and finally, it is only Alexandre Alexandrovich. Whenever you get used to something, it
changes again. It never stops, and each character is like a whole family. You can’t tell
me that it isn’t the same for you too.”
“I’ve already told you, Mimi, that there is no reason to say Russian names in French.
Instead of saying Tchékhov, why don’t you say Chekhov, which seems more normal?
Besides, that “same” is a terrible Gallicism.”
“Please, don’t be so boring, Luisito,” Mimi begged. “When are you going to learn not
to say what you think? You’re so boring, so épuisant… don’t you think so?” she said,
looking at me.
“Yes,” I answered, hardly knowing what I was saying.
Hunter looked at me ironically.
I felt terribly sad. Some say I am impatient. Even now, I am amazed that I listened
with so much attention to those idiocies and, also, that I can still remember them so well.
The strange thing is that while I listened to them I tried to cheer myself, thinking, “These
people are frivolous, and superficial. People like this can’t be of much interest to Maria.
This kind of people could never be rivals.” And, nevertheless, I was still not able to feel
happy. In a very serious way, I felt that someone was telling me that I should be sad.
And when I couldn’t figure out what it was that was, I became ill-humored and nervous,
no matter how much I tried to calm down, promising myself that I would figure this out
once I was alone. I thought for a while that the cause of my sadness could be the fact that
Maria was not there, but then I thought that this absence irritated me more than it made
me sad. No, it wasn’t that.
Now they were talking about detective novels. While that was happening, I heard the
woman ask Hunter if he had read the latest novel, The Seventh Circle.
“What for?” Hunter answered. “All detective novels are the same. Once a year is all
right, but one every week makes me think that the reader has very little imagination.”
Mimi was indignant. What I mean is she only pretended to be indignant.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They are the only kind of novels that I can read now.
I have to say that I really find them fascinating. Everything is so complicated, and the
detectives are so marvelous, and they know all the facts of the Ming dynasty, graphology,
Einstein’s theory, baseball, archeology. chiromancy, political economy, statistics of the
growth of rabbits in India, etc. And they are so infallible it is amazing. “Isn’t that right,”
she asked, looking at me again.
She asked me so unexpectedly that I didn’t know what to say.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said anyway.
Hunter looked at me ironically again.
“I am going to tell Georgie that detective novels disgust you”, Mimi added, looking at
Hunter with severity.
“I didn’t say they disgusted me; I said they’re all the same.”
“I’ll tell Georgie anyway. It’s a good thing that not everyone has your pedantry. For
example, senor Castel likes them, isn’t that right?”
“Me?” I asked, horrified.
“Of course,” Mimi carried on, not even waiting for my answer, and turning to Hunter
again, “if everyone were as savant as you are, I couldn’t live with it. I am sure you must
have some theory about detective novels.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Hunter agreed, smiling.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Mimi insisted, looking at me again, as though she was using me as
an example, “I know him quite well. Come on, you have no scruples about saying what
you think. You must be dying to explain everything about it.”
Hunter didn’t have to be begged to do just that.
“My theory,” he explained, “is the following: the detective novel represents the same
thing as the novel of chivalry at the time of Cervantes. And even more: I think one could