The Scent of Buenos Aires
by Hebe Uhart
tr. Maureen Shaughnessy
(Archipelago Books, Oct. 2019)
Reviewed by Sam Carter
“They’re sensible,” the narrator says as she arranges her plants in “Guiding the Ivy,” one of Hebe Uhart’s most famous stories. “They adapt to their pots.” For the narrator, this is an activity concerned less with managing the growth of this greenery than with the tangled processes of observation and reflection that the plants provoke. This disposition—of not exerting too much control, of not straining toward art—differs dramatically from the range of behaviors typical to humans: “some people—small-minded people—acquire a stature that masks their true nature, while others—generous and openhearted—can be trampled and confused by the weight of life.” It is an almost offhand remark, but just as “Guiding the Ivy” sets the tone in opening The Scent of Buenos Aires, the career-spanning collection of Hebe Uhart’s short stories, so does this premise undergird the author’s entire life. Uhart, who died a little more than a year ago, was both generous and openhearted, on and off the page, but life never trampled this legendary figure of contemporary Argentine literature. Her stories instead exhibit a clarity that emerges from roots in the everyday, rather than in the extraordinary, and as a result they resemble plants that are perfectly adapted to pots. They are not merely decorative: they steadily, unobtrusively oxygenate the world around them.
Ivy, however, rarely remains confined to a clay container, and “Guiding the Ivy” unfurls in the same sinuous way as the title plant, with thoughts intertwining and branching out unexpectedly. There is, for instance, a brief meditation on witches that sits comfortably alongside recollections of conversations with cab drivers about the appalling manners of the younger generation in Buenos Aires. We quickly realize that what the narrator says about her favorite ivy—“I sense where it wants to go and it senses where I want to guide it”—could just as easily have been said by Uhart about her own approach to a story This intricate interplay of sensations and intentions might seem impossible, but Uhart uses it to intimate an important point about interacting with a world that we shape and that shapes us: one has to be perceptive without being presumptuous, engaged without being exacting.
Such explorations of subtlety permeate the work of this writer who, after moving to Buenos Aires in order to study philosophy, stayed there for many years to teach it. Although Uhart claimed that, for her, philosophy and writing were always separate activities, it seems impossible that the former did not occasionally wend its way into the latter. What does seem accurate, however, is her assessment that she was never a philosopher but rather a teacher of philosophy. She was, in other words, entirely at home conveying the methods and moves of this field of thought, but she did not find it to be the best means for articulating what she wanted to say.
And that may be why Uhart did not only teach philosophy. For many years she also led a writing workshop out of her home in the Argentine capital, where such instruction is an essential element of the city’s thriving literary culture. There she trained a range of writers in the techniques of verbal and visual observation that she considered fundamental to the creation of powerful prose and that, with the exception of a figure like Manuel Puig, she found largely lacking in recent Argentine literature. Uhart’s diagnosis of many of her compatriots was that they suffered from “vertiginous navel-gazing,” meaning that they rarely wrote for (or even listened to) anyone outside a small circle of friends and critics. As a result, the workshop, which worked with participants’ texts and examined other pieces Uhart deemed worthwhile, avoided the usual suspects—Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez, Rulfo—and instead looked at Chekhov (one of Uhart’s favorites) as well as Erskine Caldwell and Clarice Lispector (to whom Uhart is occasionally compared). Of particular interest were cronistas, or writers of nonfiction chronicles, from Brazil and elsewhere who could help students learn to exercise their powers of observation. Uhart herself moved toward this form later in life, and it is no coincidence that the title of one of her collections of chronicles is Visto y oído (Seen and Heard), which explicitly acknowledges what she emphasized were a writer’s most valuable tools.
Uhart thus helped shape a generation of writers in Argentina as both a teacher and a writer, her influence both diffuse and impossible to ignore. And while early in her career her work went through cycles of discovery and rediscovery, by the end of her life she hardly lacked for recognition either at home or elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. Now, for the first time, English-language readers have access to a range of her stories in The Scent of Buenos Aires, a collection that Archipelago Books has just brought out. Yet for many years translator Maureen Shaughnessy has been making Uhart’s writings available to readers of various journals, and what she has given us here is the opportunity to discover the true extent of Uhart’s talents. As Shaughnessy explains, she first fell in love with Uhart’s sense of humor and the way she “pays attention to the way real people speak, setting aside what the characters say and focusing on how they say it.” Shaughnessy has, in turn, helped us hear English as Uhart might have heard it, displaying a remarkable prowess amidst the relentless demand for idioms and other creative turns of phrase that Uhart’s prose often presents.
Shaughnessy’s comments also echo what Uhart’s peers have often emphasized. As César Aira, Alejandra Costamagna, Martín Kohan, and Jorge Volpi explained in 2017 when awarding her the Premio Iberoamericano de Narrativa Manuel Rojas, a prestigious Chilean literary prize, “Hebe Uhart has been defined as a person who looks, and when it is said that she ‘looks’ what is really meant is that she ‘listens.’” Graciela Speranza, for her part, describes much the same thing by combining vocality and visuality: “If she speaks through the voices of others it is because she wants to see the world through someone else’s eyes in order look at other things and see more.” Testament to her influence is the fact that the recent wave of younger Latin American writers to find success in English, like Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin, are unanimously indebted to her.
Schweblin has recalled an episode that highlights Uhart’s perceptiveness both as a narrator and as a person, which is to say the way she could not only quickly pick apart a text but also rapidly read a room. At a writers’ round table organized by a cultural center in Buenos Aires, Schweblin remembers that Uhart, who was the last to speak, recognized that the crowd had grown weary of stories of the writing life. Sensing their boredom, she decided to change things up: “I’m going to tell you about a dream,” she began, “I dreamed I was fucking Maradona.” Uhart proceeded to recount this oneiric, erotic encounter with the Argentine soccer star, displaying a keen awareness of the risks of too much self-seriousness. And much like the delivery of this Maradona anecdote, Uhart’s stories rely on an obliqueness that sneaks up on you and that partially explains her uniqueness.
In the collection’s eponymous story, a young woman takes a quick trip from Moreno (where Uhart herself grew up) to Buenos Aires. In this portrayal of the differences between two places separated by just twenty miles but are culturally whole worlds apart, she attends to scents with visceral effect: in the capital city, “it smelled almost as if the walls were impregnated with sulfur.” (Another excellent olfactory evocation: “That blanket of a dog smelled like velvet.”) Yet this story is arguably even more attuned to listening. The narrator not only employs sophisticated eavesdropping strategies in order to piece together adult exchanges but also remains confused by the source of “that certainty adults had” when speaking. By the end, though, we realize that Uhart is most concerned with the shifts between narrative and experience and the clashes that might result. Whereas the story begins with the narrator’s frustrations with the depictions of separated couples that appear in romance novels, it closes with her own decisions about how to convey her first encounter with a separated couple in Buenos Aires. “When I got home, I told my mother everything, like I always did—with sound effects, stressing certain parts, etcetera,” she explains, “But I kept a few details to myself.” Part of what makes Uhart’s work so fascinating is that here the act of omission is not an overt exercise of authorial control but rather a means of constructing character. We end up with a more compelling portrait when asked to imagine what this figure might leave out than if we had been told which details disappeared.
Another way of saying “keep a few details to yourself” is “don’t give everything away,” which was the response that Liliana Villanueva received when she announced that she was publishing a book that would collect some of Uhart’s lessons. Villanueva, who had attended the workshop for nearly ten years, easily got Uhart’s approval; it was a fellow participant who urged her not to be so indiscriminate. But, as Villanueva suggests in the introduction to Las clases de Hebe Uhart (The Classes of Hebe Uhart), “even were I to try, it would be impossible to include the totality of her classes if we keep in mind the fact that, luckily for those of us who are her students, the workshop continues, evolves, and incorporates new lessons and readings.” One of the maxims that did make it in—and Villanueva recalls it being repeated rather frequently—was that “the art of writing is digressing and knowing how to come back.” What sets Uhart apart in this respect is that she keeps the sense of digression quite open and, perhaps even more importantly, does not narrowly restrict what it means to return. It’s less a question of circling back to the same spot than of straying once more into the same vicinity.
This emphasis on coming back is part of what maintains a strict separation between Uhart’s work and the childlike elements it can contain. As Alejandra Costamagna has said, “Seemingly naïve but tremendously sharp, Hebe Uhart’s vision is one that could belong to a child, but a child who has up her sleeve the reflective tools of an adult.” Those reflective tools manage the controlled drift that allows Uhart to occasionally capture the wonder or estrangement produced by a child’s gaze without becoming beholden to it. It also ultimately illustrates another dictum Uhart once offered: “You have to know how to leave a story or a party. There’s nothing worse than those who stay too long.” She left us too soon, to be sure, but not before leaving behind a legacy concerned not so much with making an entrance (one never gets the sense that she viewed the first line as the centerpiece of a story) as with making a proper exit.
One of Uhart’s other recommendations did address openings, but it was pitched toward how to find your way into a character’s voice. “You enter through a fissure,” Uhart would say, emphasizing how it was often a matter of locating the crack in a façade, or the maddening gap between expectations and reality, that opened up narrative possibilities. She exploits this strategy to great effect in “Travelers and Tourists,” a story of a middle-class mother who has traveled to Naples with her husband and their son. Here the aperture is between aspiration and actuality, for it recounts not only the frustrations of traveling but also the frequently frustrated desire to shed one’s status as a tourist. (Shaughnessy here does an excellent job of keeping the idiomatic variety of the original alive in the translation, exhibiting an ease and ear that are equally impressive.) And yet even as the story satirizes the worldview of this Argentine woman in Italy, it also convincingly captures the conflict between what she had hoped for and what she ultimately encountered. Behind the story’s humorous surface lies a deft depiction of the assembling, adjusting, and abandoning of expectations.
Uhart moves from traveling to a world away to recognizing what feels like a world apart. As the narrator of “At the Hair Salon” explains in an unexpected parallel, the titular space “feels entirely separate from the outside world, as far removed as the cinema.” Yet what’s projected there are bits of reality and not frames of fantasy. Time, for instance, remains the same in this environment that actually sharpens one’s sense of just how quickly it passes. “My conversation with the hairdresser leads me to reflect on all the time and effort we spend on small talk,” the narrator remarks, “which in turn makes me feel tired and resentful.” Social class proves to be similarly inescapable as Uhart draws our attention to the hierarchies whose presence is as unmistakable as that of the chairs, sinks, and pedicure stations. But even as she highlights these large-scale phenomena, Uhart never loses sight of the small-scale details in order to render the experience. When describing one of the women who washes her hair, for instance, she singles out the way “she scrubs my head with her pointy fingernails. If she really went to town, my scalp would bleed. Instead, she rations out the assault like a cat.” This last sentence also embodies another of Uhart’s epigrams: “the adjective closes, the metaphor opens up.” And it’s true that, on almost every level, her prose displays an unmistakable lightness that foregrounds the progression among ideas, eschews too much specificity, and offers ample room for seemingly aleatory association.
The salon that appears in the story is one where Uhart often went. When Mariana Enriquez visited it with Uhart while writing a profile of her, the salon’s owner looked up the story online and read it there in the salon. “I’m not really one to read, but I liked it,” he said. “Someone tells you she went to the salon and you say ‘how boring’ but not her, she makes it entertaining, you’re hooked.” Part of the reason is that Uhart always veers away from what’s expected, which also means that she ultimately steers clear of any association with autofiction. Indeed, if Uhart objects to the long history of navel-gazing among Argentine writers, one doubts she would approve of a genre that so regularly turns inward.
Uhart does, however, occasionally subject the literary world she knew so well to her same singular scrutiny. In “Coordination,” the moderator of a round table on rural and urban literature at the Buenos Aires Book Fair watches helplessly as the discussion gets out of hand. “If I’m with two people who start to argue or dig in their heels about something, I immediately come up with a third alternative to appease them both,” this moderator explains. “I know how to mediate, but not how to coordinate.” Uhart then weaves the disagreements among audience members—“it was as if each and every one of them wanted to voice their anger, but in isolation”—together with brief reflections on Argentina’s long history of literary texts constructing ideas of both nature and nation. Demands for specificity in representation (“Have you all forgotten the provinces?”) are at odds with the potential force of generalizations, and mediating between the two, Uhart seems to suggest, remains far more difficult than we often acknowledge—regardless of whether it happens onstage or on the page.
“Events Organization” serves as a natural counterpart to “Coordination” since it centers on the logistics of organizing a lecture series. Here the narrator has been asked to escort visitors around San Andrés, a small provincial town, for a reason. “They chose me because I know all about literature and painting,” he remarks, “but also because I’m profoundly discreet: I don’t discuss subjects I’m not familiar with, but I’m very good at disguising when I’m ignorant about something.” He conveys the many indignities that he suffers while shepherding speakers around town—everything from accompanying a man who drunkenly stumbles off the airplane to being the unwitting accomplice of another who seems to want to score some drugs. Yet even though all of this will drive him away from the town, it has not made him any less interested in this kind of work: as the end of the story explains, he will now pursue a one-year fellowship about events organization in the Netherlands. Here Uhart swerves, as she so often does, away from a character who could have easily carried an entire novel. But because she’s already doled out enough to make the story feel substantial, it feels less like a swerve intended to avoid something on the road and more like one onto the shoulder to examine something that’s just caught the driver’s eye.
Such scenes of fascination feature everywhere in the collection, perhaps most notably in “Hello Kids.” Later in life, Uhart began pursuing her longstanding interest in animals, and this story recounts the twinned processes of contemplating primates at the zoo and watching those who watch them. The most intriguing members of this latter category, for Uhart at least, are children who regularly anthropomorphize. “Mommy, he got a blow-dry,” remarks one; others point to possible cases of hiccups and hemorrhoids. But there’s also an undercurrent of philosophical reflection that goes beyond the brief nod to Spinoza as Uhart considers how the categories that different species construct might come into conflict. “Perhaps the notion of strength—which for us is different from beauty—is an all-encompassing concept for them, some sort of fascination,” the narrator observes. Together with the children’s ostensibly innocent utterances, such asides bring categories of all kinds into question, and here Uhart privileges the animal world as a way of engaging in these processes of defamiliarization.
In a brief introductory piece from Animales (Animals), the last collection she published during her lifetime, Uhart recalls seeing a woman in Rio de Janeiro walking down the street with a hand monkey. As its name suggests, this creature can sit in your palm, but this woman instead carried her primate companion on her shoulder. As Uhart remembers it, “she produced in me a great envy, as if she had a happier and fuller life than mine.” Was this envy performative? Knowing how Uhart viewed the world, such a line feels more like a longing for another set of eyes, looking on alongside her own and bringing her into contact with ideas that cannot be expressed in language. And it is because we can now hold these stories in our hands that her insights serve as that second set of eyes, her perspective shaping ours as we look at the world around us.
Sam Carter is an editor at Asymptote whose work has appeared online at Public Books, Full Stop, and The New Republic.