With those reflections out of the way, we return to my dispatch from the Argentine front of the gigantomachy. I mean the friendship between Guthmann and Cortázar, their conversation. One may say I have a vested interest in it, because Cortázar’s Rayuela showed my generation (the one that came of age in Argentina around 1960), more so than films, even great films, the possibilities of conversation. And Cortázar acknowledged, in some of the still unpublished letters, that he had Fredi in mind when he wrote the conversations and ruminations in Rayuela. Here is a poem Cortázar wrote in Rome, in September of 1953, and dedicated to Fredi Guthmann. It was published in the recent book already mentioned, La gran respiración bailada, as an envoi.

Rome, 1953: by then, Fredi was back from India, had retired from the War and had stopped writing poems. Moved by Roman palazzi, classic ruins, and the fresh charity of ubiquitous drinking fountains, Julio exhorts his friend, advises him about Time in the manner of Horace, and with heartfelt rhetoric asks him not to desert his Southwestern post, not to quit the battle for presence, for the War can be won "if the bird sings."

Julio’s profusion of poetic images is hardly Horatian, rather the symptom of an age of high speeds and semiotics. The Sea, of course, and the boat, the wave, the flashing fish, the orange suspended in the blue; the River as flowing road; the summer insects: the cricket, the cicada with its echoes of Plato and La Fontaine; the sponge, the gourd, the wicker twig. They all belong to an old repertoire; even his dominant image of Time, the stuccoed, tapestried room, harks back to Baudelaire’s room in La chambre double (Le Spleen de Paris), but it gives us an opening into Cortázar’s poetics. We are surrounded by stuccoed walls¾ billions of marble fragments joined by the gypsum of consciousness¾ tapestries woven with countless images, perhaps of courtly love and the hunt¾ yet to the poetic dweller’s disciplined eye, those walls are falsely thick: sing, and somehow multiplicity will yield to oneness, fragmentation to reunion. The Western War can be won, Parmenidean Eternity can be attained in a way that would have puzzled the Eleatics: by adding yet more images, my own, my modern own, to the countless already there on the walls. Not, certainly, by adding yet more tapestries of courtly love or the hunt, but images of multiplicity and fragmentation, images expressive of our being surrounded by tapestries and stucco, in a palazzo strewn with ruins. "Look, drink from every fountain": sing by inspired juxtaposition, by collage. Those poetics, brilliantly inaugurated in English by Eliot’s (and Pound’s) Wasteland, are based on a total trust in the beneficent powers of the image. I mean the pure image, with no transcendent reference.

Guthmann’s poems, too, show great trust in the poetic image; maybe because of this, Louis Soler has written of him as a Surrealist poet. What himself would have thought of it, I do not know, nor do I know how Fredi responded to his friend’s exhortation of 1953. Perhaps by saying, "No, Julio, whether you notice it or not, you are stuck inside that stuccoed, tapestried room: through images there is no way out of the image; the way lies elsewhere." And I would like to speculate further on Fredi’s reaction, fifteen years later, to Cortázar’s La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, showpiece of the poetics of collage. I am inclined to think Fredi was grateful for the recognition, pleased to see himself called "collector and lightning-rod of piantados," "master" and "Shaman of Santa Fe Avenue." What might have been his feelings, though, while reading other sections of the book?

Take, for instance, the one titled in English, "What Happens, Minerva?" On the margin, Cortázar recommends Something Else Press, of New York, especially to "those Latin-Americans who still believe that John Coltrane, Ionescobeckett (sic), Jim Dine or Heinz Karel (sic!) Stockhausen are the avant-garde of something, when the poor guys can do nothing now but remove the moths from their vest." In larger font, Cortázar recommends certain "happenings" as truly avant-garde, as activities which, much to the disgust of humanist bourgeois, "bore a hole into the present time, peeping through which we glimpse at something less unbearable than what we bear every day." His examples: one titled Lawful Dance, where you stand on a city corner and wait for the green light, cross the street, wait again, cross the street again, and so on. Another: you take the métro at Vaugirard and get off at Châtelet. Another: you read Le Monde while walking under the arches of the rue de Rivoli. These last two are called "anonymous theater," and its creators, "playwrights." Cortázar waxes lyrical in praise of a "concerto" by Philip Corner, consisting in tearing a grand piano to pieces and auctioning those among the "audience." These and similar activities are deemed "a necessary terror."

I think Fredi must have sadly shaken his head, and perhaps recalled André Breton once writing that the most artistic act is to shoot into a crowd. Why should terror be necessary, Fredi must have asked, if simply by singing like the cricket, the cicada or the bird, we may attain to Presence, Oneness and Reunion? No, something’s gone terribly wrong: the way through images, through images of images, images with nothing behind them, images shining with their own prestige, that way leads to terror, and this terror is not a sombre idiot destroying a Steinway, nor Breton threatening to shoot into a crowd; it is the old, old terror of Time the Killer and its attendant thugs, Fashion and Boredom. Terrorists who, in their desperate scramble for the new, fail to notice that they are merely repeating Baudelaire¾ "Plonger au fond du gouffre pour trouver du nouveau!"¾ and mimicking Rimbaud. The whole thing about avant-gardism, an avant-garde devouring a previous one, reducing it to moth-eaten gilets, only to be devoured by the next one, what is it if not the very essence of Time the Killer? Is this, then, the promised victory? I imagine Fredi must have asked such questions, with growing sadness, around 1968.

By that time, when someone suggested he should publish his poems, Fredi would reply, "Mon heure est passée". I have this from Natacha, but I wonder if he truly meant it. He might have been understandably reluctant to face the childish games, the humiliations, the shame that never fail to pester the poet (especially of a certain age) who tries to get his poems published. Or did he mean that poems necessarily belong to certain moments, and that the moment for his poems had passed? Then poetry, as well as the other arts, would be forms of the art of prostitution; minor, pale forms at that, for if Time the Killer reigns supreme, if all hope for Eternity has vanished, poetry is a game with symbols which are only shadows of the flesh, poor substitutes for la vraie vie, la vraie jouissance.

Fredi Guthmann died in 1995; I am sorry I never met him. Or perhaps I did: in the early 60s I frequented the house of Félix Gattegno and his French bookstore on Calle Viamonte, in Buenos Aires, and since he was a friend of Fredi’s, it is likely that Fredi and I shook hands and said civilities. I was very young, and had Fredi whispered in my ear, "I have cried a war too vast," probably I would have just smiled, as he feared. Thirty-something years later and having read his poems, typed on large sheets with black ribbon, I assure him now that we of younger generations are not pacified, we have not become pent-up brothers, not entirely, not yet. We may have abandoned the typewriter for word processors, we may be of middling, maybe dwarfish stature, but the battle between the giants and the gods, the gigantomachy about presence and being, still goes on, unabated, ferocious, and we are sticking to our guns. Here, at the end, it occurs to me that the title of this skirmish could have been: Retrieving the Soldier Fredi Guthmann.