Augusto Monterroso - Complete Works and Other Stories

Everyone knows that Central Americans, with a few irritating exceptions, do not generally enjoy great height. But regardless of what people say, it is not a racial problem. There are Indians in the Americas who surpass many Europeans in this regard. The fact of the matter is that poverty and the malnutrition that goes with it, combined with other, less spectacular factors, are the reason that my compatriots and I always invoke Napoleón, Madero, Lenin, and Chaplin when we need to prove, for whatever reason, that a man can be very short and still be courageous.

I am regularly the butt of jokes about my meager height, which almost amuses and consoles me because it gives me the feeling that with no effort on my part, and through my deficiency, I am making a contribution to the fleeting happiness of my disconsolate friends. And when I happen to think of it, I too make jokes at my own expense, which later come back to me as the fruits of somebody else’s creativity. What can you do? This has become so common a practice that even people who are shorter than I am manage to feel a little taller when they tell jokes about my height. One of the better witticisms calls me a representative of the Low Countries, and there are others along the same lines. I can see how people’s eyes shine when they believe I am hearing this for the first time! Then they go home and face the economic, artistic, or conjugal problems that overwhelm them, and feel somehow as if they have the courage to resolve them.

In any event, the malnutrition that leads to diminished stature also leads, no one knows why, to a fondness for writing verse. When I meet someone shorter than five feet, three inches, on the street or in a gathering, I recall Torres, Pope, or Alfonso Reyes, and I sense, or am almost certain, that I have encountered a poet. In the same way that true dwarves tend to be embittered, those of middling height are generally sweet-natured and given to melancholy and contemplation, and paradoxically enough, the muse seems more comfortable in abbreviated, even deformed bodies: the aforementioned Pope, for instance, as well as Leopardi. Whatever traces of a poet Bolívar possessed came from this. It may be true that the size of Cleopatra’s nose still has an influence on human history, but perhaps it is no less true that if Rubén Darío had reached a height of six feet, two inches, poetry in Spanish would never have gotten past Núñez de Arce. With the exception of Julio Cortázar, how can one comprehend a poet six feet, six inches tall? Consider Byron, who was lame, and Quevedo, who was knock-kneed; no, poetry does not hop, skip, or jump.

Now I’ve reached the point I wanted to make.

The other day I happened to see the guidelines for a Central American poetry festival that has been held in the city of Quezaltenango, Guatemala, since 1916. Along with the usual statement of requirements and prizes that one would expect in this kind of competition, these guidelines also set down, I believe for the first time in history, and I hope for the last, the condition that moved me to compose these lines, although I am still uncertain how it should be interpreted.

Clause E of the paragraph entitled “Submission of Work” reads as follows:

“Each work must be submitted with a separate sealed envelope that is labeled with the poet’s pen name and the title of the work, and contains a single sheet with the author’s name, signature, address, brief biography, and a photograph. Contestants are also requested to indicate on the reverse side their height in inches in order to facilitate arrangements for the ceremonial crowning of the Festival Queen and her court of honor.”

Their height in inches.

Once again I think of Pope and Leopardi, akin only in their having heard (with bitterness or with sadness) in the small hours following a night of revelry the couples laughing as they passed the rooms each shared with cruel insomnia.

The cards and gifts you send and receive year after year or that we send and receive with a somewhat foolish feeling that overwhelms you or us but which slowly, because of an interweaving of memories and forgetfulness, you or we stop sending or receiving, like those trains that pass with no hope of ever passing one another again, or rather, now for self-criticism, since the comparison with trains is really not very good because you would have to be a very stupid train not to meet up again with the trains you’ve met — like those bourgeois drivers who, just because they are who they are, when they drive their cars feel free of something they cannot name if you ask them what it is and once, only once in their lives, meet up with you at a red light and you exchange foolish knowing glances with them for a moment while you discreetly but meaningfully arrange your hair or adjust your tie or check your earrings or take off or put on your glasses, depending on how you think you look best, with the melancholy suspicion or optimistic certainty that you are never going to see them again but nonetheless live that brief moment as if something important depended on it, or perhaps something not so important, that is, those fortuitous meetings, those conjunctions, just to give them a name, when nothing happens, when nothing needs explanation, when you don’t need to understand each other, when you shouldn’t understand each other, when nothing needs to be accepted or rejected, oh!

The two greatest humorists you know are Kafka and Borges. “The Lottery in Babylon” and The Trial are sheer joy from beginning to end. Recall Max Brod telling us that when Kafka read him passages from this novel, Kafka almost fell on the floor laughing at what happened to K. Still, the book has a tragic effect on you. It is also appropriate to recall the response to Don Quixote: its first readers laughed; the romantics began to weep when they read it, except for the scholars, such as Don Diego Clemencín, who rejoiced if he happened to find a correct sentence in Cervantes; and the moderns don’t laugh or cry over the book because they prefer to do their laughing or crying at the movies, and perhaps they are right.

For his own amusement, he writes three pages of false exegesis of one of Góngora’s octaves. He piles inanity upon inanity, attributing them to a provincial critic. He types a clean copy. He is certain that everyone who reads it will burst into uncontrollable laughter. He shows his work to four friends who are writers. One understands the joke from beginning to end. Two, enlightened by his example, figure it out a third of the way through, and smile very cautiously. The fourth takes everything with complete seriousness, makes two or three observations just to have something to say, and the author is overcome by embarrassment.

He writes a serious note in which he clarifies once and for all the meaning of the so-called “recalcitrant stanza” by Góngora (“the hedgehog pouch of the chestnut”). He shows it to his four friends. The first denies the validity of his thesis, the other three laugh in amusement, and he is overcome by embarrassment.