El Fausto Criollo
By Jessica Sequeira
Following The Unnamable’s interview with Jessica Sequeira, I’m pleased to share her story, El Fausto Criollo.
— Ben
In the pub, a dog stood on its hind legs and did tricks for the people stabbing their forks into greasy chips by the twos and threes, transporting them in the direction of their open mouths. I found the smell of cooked food to be vaguely nauseating, yet it felt good to be surrounded by so much life. As afternoon wore on, the demographic shifted from middle-aged professors, tucked away with faded volumes and glasses of wine, to younger students with belligerent voices, passionately debating ideas like natura naturans, that is, whether nature creates itself in an unfolding of being or is made by an outside force, as well as the corollary question, whether in the case that a healing should be required after violence, this must come from nature or God. I didn’t follow the discussions closely, and if they got too loud I put on headphones and did a crossword puzzle, or drew people from memory I’d met long ago, since no doubt to sketch those nearby would make all parties uncomfortable. Once again I was in the bar at the peak hour for inebriation. I’d been drinking espresso after espresso, which sent my nerves into a state of jittery excitement, and topping this with a few gin tonics compounded the euphoria. So I can’t trust my impressions of the conversation that reached me slantwise, in heavy Irish accents.
‘To live as if one believes in God. That’s what Pascal said, no? The safe option.’
‘Curly haired Pascal?’
‘The very one.’
‘He wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t go all the way. If you believe in God you might be capable of anything.’
‘Anything. Do you know that in the eyes of the law, risk is defined as exposure to danger, as departure from the shore of safety to expose oneself to peril?’
‘Mother of God, where’d you pull that from? Ay, you’ve got that device.’
‘. . . one that might bring profit or the destruction of assets, including one’s body.’
‘There you have it. Pascal had the bomb in his hand and didn’t throw it. I don’t blame him and others for staying in the cocoon. A sweet woman and drink at day’s end, who can blame ’em. But when the matter’s subtler . . .’
‘I know what you’re speaking of.’
‘We’re not businessmen you know. Profit’s not our aim.’
‘I know what you’re on about.’
‘Our sweet land . . . Did I tell you my dream?’
‘Just don’t bore me.’
‘I saw a black cat, kind of mangy, putting its paw over words in the dictionary. Abstract ones, human and rhetoric and justice and criminal, normative and civil and utopia and freedom.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It showed them to me but couldn’t explain because it hadn’t got vocal cords. A vestige of its original condemnation by God.’
‘I hate dictionaries.’
‘Do you now?’
‘Every definition points to another and where do you get. Nowhere. Neighboring words aren’t on speaking terms and are sometimes even at war. Terroir is a combination of soil, climate and environment that gives wine a distinctive character. Terrier is an active, short-bodied breed of dog. What do those have in common? Tell me that.’
‘And tenderness and terror are neighbors—but will you let me finish.’
‘So what did you say to this mangy kitty.’
‘Right. I said Kitty, put the dictionary away. Let’s clothe the children and take up the Berettas as needed.’
‘Down with words.’
‘Aye, that’s just what I said to Kitty. Down with the Word.’
I hadn’t turned around for the whole conversation, but when I got up for another round I was surprised to see two ruddy-faced men in the black cassocks of priests, glints of revolution in their eyes and faces radiant with happiness. I went home feeling happy myself, those voices having worked their magic.
It never takes much to reorient a mood.
That night I put on a comedy, something I hadn’t done for a while, a dark one to be sure but a comedy all the same. I’d return to it over and over. Its name was El fausto criollo, its director Luis Saslavsky. Do you know him? He was famous for his eternal sunglasses and irony, and his movies, Industry of Matrimony, Five Kisses, The Rats, dozens more. To be honest, I’m not sure if he’s famous anymore, or even alive. Two gaucho friends, El Pollo and Laguna, sit under a tree sucking yerba mate while their horses, a little way off, dip their noses in the sea. Every now and then, the horses touch, their flanks pressing up against each other nice and close. I can see why at some point the gaucho culture was read as featuring camp, kitsch elements conducive to a special form of male friendship, but anyway, let me get back to the topic at hand, because I’m interested in a different, less obvious form of getting up nice and close: the way that payment via the soul gets up nice and close to the exaltation of lyrical harmony, the way that the moment of the sale gets up nice and close to the moment of music. The first gaucho tells his friend what he saw one night at the opera, a version of Faust by Charles Gounod. For him, that night, the phantasmagoria became the real. He relates everything as if he were the star of the show, with a naïveté that may or may not be innocent. In the opera, which becomes the rest of the movie itself, filmed in the theatrical style of 1979, the devil goes about changing appearances. Sometimes he’s painted white with a little green under his eyes, sometimes he turns into a she, a woman. I have many faces, you’ll see, you’ll see, he or she says. But what most calls my attention is that after signing the contract with the devil, Fausto immediately grabs a guitar and plays, as if the devil were the impulse for his folkloric music. Over the next few days, I watched this scene with a kind of obsession, noting every detail of how, just after the feather scratches the parchment, the man becomes young, handsome, talented at music. He holds out his hands, looks at them with astonishment, looks at the devil, then grabs his guitar and strikes up a melancholy yet triumphant tune, as if this were the only natural thing to do in the wake of having sold one’s soul. The song has strange lyrics, when the worm becomes a butterfly, as if the moment of transformation has produced its own musicalization. When I got tired of listening to this, I watched the clip again without sound, focusing on the way the man moves around the room with his back to the viewer, singing to himself and the devil, unaware of the spectators watching him (in the opera, in the movie), voice tragic yet mouth smiling, as the freakishly painted archfiend looks on with the self-satisfaction of a mime. This scene melds into another filled with green fog, in which fantastical creatures dance in a circle. Then, changing appearance as ever, the devil disguises himself as . . . a devil, wearing a red costume as part of a carnaval. He takes the form of himself, a kitsch parody with something of the bad joke about it, as when people show up to an All Souls party with no costume and say I’m dressed as me. Sometimes people act as doubles as a form of aspiration, imitating a favorite actor for instance, while other times doubling has an effect of estrangement, which has its own power. That’s the case of the devil, made up in garish colors more real than the real, as in a distorting mirror. When the devil dressed in this exaggerated costume bursts onto the scene again, a band is playing in the plaza, not jazz but the precursor to jazz, the big band music popular in little towns of the country at the start of the 20th century. A sudden rainfall makes everyone go inside, and when Fausto enters the house, so does the devil. People don’t want the music to stop, they’re in a festive spirit. A guitar’s passed around. One man serenades Margarita, the beloved blonde Faust loves, who shares a name with me. Which came first, I ask myself, the coincidence of my name with the one in the story, or my involvement in the story because I glimpsed my name in the synopsis? How does destiny work? The fact is, Faust gets jealous. You can see it on his face. Then the devil whispers something in his ear, the name of a song or the lyrics to sing, though it seems a little long for the first and a little short for the second. Maybe it’s something else entirely. And Faust sings Margarita Margarita the heavens saw you, so pure it opened all its windows to celebrate your whiteness, and so on and so forth, but it doesn’t work, since as soon as Margarita notices what’s going on, as soon as she gets wise to this dubious counter-serenade, she discreetly slips out the door: immune, it would seem, to the devil’s music. Is such a thing possible, or did the devil deliberately pass Fausto a song he knew would fail? In this tale the pact isn’t for music that can manipulate affections, but for youth and the vaguer knowledge and worldly pleasures, which the devil, as a good lawyer, might twist any way he likes. These days one might look a bit more closely at the subclauses to make sure that effect follows from event, fulfilment from desire, but it’s too late. Faust has to finish out his song, take humiliation chin up; he can’t just stop. By the time he gives a final strum, there’s pain on his face, as if he’s discovered that music isn’t a pill that you take or a military command that produces immediate response. One thing doesn’t necessarily lead to another, and love can’t be forced, maybe the only emotion that can’t be. In the film love is often mistaken for carnal love, as in the scene just before during carnaval, when everyone sings in chorus women can be divided into expensive and cheap: a world-weary country aphorism. At the moment of that blow to his pride Fausto looks emotionally naked, stripped of any protective layer, whatever the equivalent of a gaudy devil costume for the sentiments might be. For many it’s the intellect, paired with a cynical, egotistical attitude toward life. The devil tries to sway Fausto in this direction, reminding him of his pact and criticizing him for such singular love for Margarita, saying stupid boy, don’t make youth just one day of carnaval. A glint of the knife as threat, and Fausto’s convinced. Shortly afterward he plunges into decadence. He kisses Margarita and takes her into his bedroom without serious intentions, for a start, and when she tells her friends about it as they wash their clothes in the river under the sun, one laughs at her. Fausto? But Fausto Laguna takes other women! Margarita sinks into a depression, and when her brother the captain hears of it, he wants revenge. Unfortunately he’s away at war, next to a heap of dead bodies piled up on a cart. It’s the Battle of Tuyutí, 24 May 1866. Paintings by Cándido López show us the scene. A single bullet, says a soldier, but a little further in and I wouldn’t have been here to tell you the tale. What is the pain of a young woman beside all this? A withered carnation, a flower with stripped petals, a tear-soaked handkerchief. All the same, Margarita’s friend is worried about her. She takes her ring to a witch who casts it in a cauldron with a few choice ingredients. Up shoots a green flame. Doomed! screeches the witch. Margarita is pregnant. Her friend implores her to go to the church to consult the priest, and so she goes, along the way distracted by the big eyes of an owl, the body of a skeleton, a silhouette in green light, the swirling wind, the mists . . . she falls. She’s helped along by a neighbor woman, and the two walk in a direction away from the church. There will be no salvation. A neighbor informs the police: as soon as they got to the ranch, the lovely stranger gave birth; the child was stillborn; they tossed it down the well. Meanwhile, elsewhere, a band with two guitars and an accordion strikes up. Fausto is in bed with three whores, who put boots on him, admire themselves in the mirror, and accept his payment, a meager handful of patacones. Outside he makes a boy lick his boots, taking delight in power. Margarita’s brother Valentín arrives on the scene at last, seeking vengeance, and the two go at it with swords. The captain is braver and more skillful, but the devil is on Fausto’s side, and intervenes at various moments during the skirmish. A shadowy skull appears as Fausto stabs the captain. Spectators gasp. When the captain’s friend attacks, Fausto kills him too. Fausto looks on in horror as his doubled self, the devil, makes short work of his enemies. What has he done? When Margarita hears of events, she runs to her brother, just about dead. He’s already requested extreme unction. When she reaches his side he says he has something to tell her, and in his weak voice, hardly more than a whisper, he at last gets it out. May your bones rot in infinite hell. This breaks her. When Margarita is dragged to a cell, she offers no resistance. Fausto bribes a guard to let him in. He tries to convince her to escape with him, but she says she’s condemned to forever burn in the flames; in any case she’d never be able to escape, since the true prison is inside her. Fausto decides to come clean. I was old and sold my soul to be young and make you love me, he says. But look, all we’ve managed to do is suffer. Everything doubles yet again. Fausto makes another pact with the devil. If Margarita can go to heaven, he’ll accept going to hell. Margarita dies at last, content, in love. That’s when the music starts, a serene, beautiful, continuous music as Margarita’s body floats up the heavenly stairs, a music that gives a feeling of peace. It’s on a ridiculous electric organ and in a strange key, yet all the same it’s divine. Bliss. The work ends, the curtain falls, the two gauchos ride into the sunset, the story ends—and thus is the tale told. Where they’re headed, the province of Buenos Aires, seems a natural habitat for the devil with its small towns, infinite hells, and flatlands where evil can unfurl with nothing to stop it, as the horses look on, blinking. But I suppose any city can be an inferno, from Santiago de Chile, where evil spreads out its particles as noxious yellow smog that clings to the land, smug politicians who turn up their noses at the masses with spicy food and piquant language, and, until recently maybe, an atmosphere of do whatever it takes to get a leg up, to New York, where skyscrapers shoot toward the skies, nourished by the blood at their roots. That said, you can find paradises anywhere too. To Saslavsky’s credit, he doesn’t even think in categories of heaven and hell, good and evil, self and other, devil and dust. His cinema moves instead between shifting, transparent layers of possibility, maybe because he was seventy-six when he made this movie that satirizes good and evil alike, and seems to look toward death with hope, but also suspicion of moral categories and easy concepts. Curling up in bed after watching the film for the thousandth time, I thought of the devil. I still wasn’t convinced he exists, but I did believe there’s a temptation to manipulate others beings despite their wishes, taking advantage of their ignorance. But of course there are also ways to manipulate one’s self, to close one’s eyes to the world and embrace the gentleness of sleep in the faith that tomorrow, despite it all—despite so much—we’ll reach the horses, we’ll reach the sea.