SHARMISTHA MOHANTY

Sergio Chejfec: A Tribute

The Argentinian novelist Sergio Chejfec has a collection of carved wooden figures from Venezuela, figures from popular art--of saints, doctors who have performed miracles, legendary lovers joined together. Though most of the figures are tall, Sergio keeps them on a low table so one looks down at them. This produces an unexpected feeling of tenderness. There are at least twenty figures on the table. Real people have created real people in their own image facing the difficult, the ambiguous. Their gaze is somber, silent. The togetherness of the figures gives rise to a forbearance they may not have revealed separately.

“They have lots to say to each other at night,” Sergio says, with a slight smile.

 This is the last thing I look at before I leave Sergio’s apartment. Like his brief novels that I admire and that I need to read over and over to grasp their elusive, active truth, I know I will need to come back and stand before these figures again. They leave something disturbed and unfinished in me as I walk the five blocks back to my hotel. I simply have not completed my looking. But the knowledge that I will see them again, for a longer time, as Sergio is now a good friend, calms me as I walk.

I wrote the two paragraphs above in 2017 after a visit to New York City. Sergio Chejfec passed away very unexpectedly and tragically on April 2nd of this year. It is for me a deep personal loss as much as a literary one. He was certainly one of the world’s most profound writers of prose. Not enough people knew his work. “They say I’m a writer’s writer,” he once told me.

I wrote on the inside cover of Baroni:A Journey, published by Almost Island,  “As in all of Chejfec’s work, there is a kind of active, dynamic truth that is constantly in transformation. A masterly language penetrates the heart of things, yet keeps them elusive, paradoxical, and, in the end, almost ungraspable—a brief encounter still unravelling…”

Our friendship began from the very first meeting we had in a crowded café on the Upper West side in New York City. His translator, Margaret Carson, Sergio and I were scrunched together at a corner table. I had already read his singular work, Baroni: A Journey and we at Almost Island had published an excerpt. The conversation moved towards the publication of it, as a book, in English. No one had really made him an offer. I thought New Directions would be the perfect place. And he lived right there, in New York. He looked at me and then thought a bit. Suddenly he said, why should we always go to these kinds of people? Why should they have this power always to decide? Why can’t you publish it through Almost Island. (We had published four books by that that time, poetry and experimental prose.) I would love that, he said. It would mean something to me.

This is not what I was expecting. Of course I was honoured, but I said we are a small press in India, very far away from where you live. It doesn’t matter at all, he said. And that’s how Almost Island came to publish Baroni: A Journey, in a penetrating  translation by Margaret Carson and with an inimitable design by Siddartha Chatterjee.

We met many times after that. In New York, in Kochi where I invited him to be part of the Kochi Biennale curated by Sudarshan Shetty, in New Delhi for the tenth Almost Island Dialogues where Baroni was released, and in Bombay at my home.

On one of those first meetings in New York he had a party at his place for me with about ten people, all Argentinians, poets, novelists, critic. It is there that I met the incredible poet Mercedes Roffe. It is there that the final design of his Baroni was approved by Margaret, Sergio and myself. It is there, on one of my visits, that I did a brief reading of poems and Mercedes Roffe heard it and later translated twenty poems into Spanish for her Plaquettes Series at Ediciones Pen Presse.

And in the meantime I read every single work of his that had been translated into English.

He never came to India without gifts—the American Bourbon which he knew I loved, sometimes a book, once it was Anne Carson’s Float, another time a book he had written to accompany the work of an artist. In him compassion and caring came without any overt idealism; he saw through things easily without making quick judgments. And he had a wonderful, understated sense of humour which manifested his individual gaze.

When he was visiting me at my home, we were discussing how it is to travel in a country without knowing the language. He said, “Yes it is difficult if you look at it from the human point of view, but not otherwise.”

The last time we met was in June 2019. I had asked him whether there was a place in New York where I could see the tango. And of course Sergio had looked around and found a place. Not great, he said, but it’ll do. Till you go to Argentina, he said. After dinner, Sergio, his long time partner the scholar Graciela Montaldo, and I went to midtown and entered a small hall where everyone was doing the tango. He pointed out to me the ones who had learnt it in classes and how their bodies moved, and the ones who had inherited it from their childhood and culture and the greater ease with which they danced, no matter how old.

That evening we had dinner at his home, like we always did, a home with Graciela Montaldo’s quiet, kind presence. He never took me to a restaurant but cooked dinner at home, and he was a subtle cook. He always cooked some form of beef, which was the most moist and succulent I have ever had. Sergio explained that he bought his beef from an Argentinian shop and that he knew his beef cuts very well. At the end of the evening of tango we returned to Sergio’s place where he had kept two or three boxes of books for me, Almost Island books, that I needed to collect. I waited in the cab, he brought the boxes down and put them in. I closed the door and I remember his face leaning in to ask, “Are you ok with these? Will someone help you with them at your hotel?” And the last question, “You have cash? Do you need some?” 

In January, before he knew he was ill, I received a mail saying he wanted to send me a new essay he had written. And also that he wanted me to see his country and that he was trying to organize a residency for me in Buenos Aires. That was the last message I had from him.

I am grateful and proud that Almost Island could publish Baroni: A Journey, one of his most brilliant works, and I am grateful that I have read him well, and that I knew him. I am still trying to come to terms with his passing.

Photo: Chejfec at the Kochi Biennale, Dec. 2016. Photo credit Valerie Mejer.