Three Prose Pieces by Fabio Morábito

Translated by Curtis Bauer

To Transcend The Face

I often run around a track and, when I approach it, I am still too far away to distinguish the
runners by their faces, but I can recognize them by the way they run, which is unmistakable, and
over time this is how I’ve become familiar with each one. Our ability to recognize subjects by
the way they run is the same that allows us to become intimate with a character in a novel. In 19th
century novels authors felt compelled to give an exhaustive description of every character, from
the color of her hair and eyes, even his clothing. They took a photo of them, literally. But it was a
useless photo since the characters acquired a face through their actions and words, a subjective
and different face for every reader, a memorable, unphotographable face. The modern novel
assimilated this lesson and now we know that the reader doesn’t need to attach a face to the
characters. They relate to them through low-frequency waves, such as those used by elephants to
communicate over great distances. These waves have a long reach because they skip over the
faces, which are a secondary detail, and they adjust to/bend around what is most meaningful
which, in the case of the elephant, can be the size of another herd, its location and the direction it
moves. For both us and elephants, the low frequency sacrifices the face to inform us about the
behavior of the other, which allows us to recognize a body from a distance without going into
details, and one of the reasons that we are disappointed with a movie when we compare it to the
novel that inspired it is that it shows us the faces of the characters, which we had been saved
from by reading the book. That is why good actors are those who carry us toward that singular
and unphotographable face, which is behind the outward face, and the art of the novel, in a
similar manner, is the art of transcending the face, transporting us to the submerged and unique
dimension of our behavior, to our deep style, where there are no masks.

Kafka And Names

Kafka’s best stories always begin with a name: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning…”;
“someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”; “it was already dark when K. came to the
village.” Kafka clings to a name as a castaway to a plank. He never retreats from this stronghold.
Once he’s found a protagonist he doesn’t let him go for a second and as the story unfolds he
harvests new names reluctantly, bound by the mechanics of the story; if it were up to him he
would keep only one character, with only one name, and this name would be reduced to only one
letter and that letter would always be the same, the emblematic K. of his own last name. He has
an aversion to proper names because they tear the fabric of the narrative, which he conceives as a
continuous secretion; you only need to look at how infrequently he uses new paragraphs; he is
the writer of new sentences; his prose pattern is a murmur in continuous expansion; he chooses
to name at the beginning of the story when the reader is unprepared and can withstand this bitter
pill, but once that story has weighed anchor he is careful to name as little as possible. He was one
of the few to be conscious of the anomaly of proper names, those words which specify a single
individual and are therefore a kind of language black hole. Let us not forget that he was
bookkeeper in an insurance company. His meticulously uniform style has the neatness of account
books. He dreamed perhaps of writing a book without anything shocking, methodically
sequential like a ledger. In his diary he confessed: “When writing a story I don’t have the time,
which would be necessary, to expand in all directions.” It is what a spider desires: to weave a
fabric of endless associations, without leaving a single space uncovered. Therefore he avoids
proper names, which, through their innocence, ease linguistic tension and form openings,
magical gaps. And they also form, in the peaceful relaxation of writing, impenetrable castles.
Everything that a proper name possess within itself and there is no way to argue with that!

Dostoevsky

Reading Dostoevsky reminds us that human life is, first and foremost, dialogue. None of his
characters are word deprived. As soon as the name of a character is mentioned, the story seems
committed to lead us, no matter how many twists and turns may be required to do this, to hear
his voice, because only a voice grants his characters a statute of reality. It is important that when
Dostoevsky feels obliged to narrate a series of events which we need to understand the story, he
does so like someone opening a parenthesis. He often calls these sections “summaries” and
seems to apologize to the reader for having to use them. He treats them like foreign bodies and as
soon as he can he goes back to his dialogues, which are the true developers of the plot. The
characters’ thoughts are dialogic, intimate disputes that each have with themselves. Dostoevsky
would never have been able to write the story of Robinson Crusoe. He would have thought it was
a waste of time to tell us how a castaway manages to convert his island into a comfortable home.
Ultimately Robinson Crusoe shows us that it is possible to live without any dialogue. For
Dostoyevsky the human being is a castaway, but a castaway in the midst of other castaways,
each one on an island he will never be able to leave. Today we find his dialogues extravagant
and the power that sustains them, which is the attraction each character feels toward the other,
seems incomprehensible. Our fellow human no longer awakens our curiosity. We are dedicated
to making our small island more and more comfortable. These impulsive and infantile characters
seem ridiculous, and the ridiculous is a constant in the stories of this Russian writer, the
ridiculous that is always an excess of curiosity, of expansion, of surrender and interference,
contrary to Robinson Crusoe, whose saga can be seen as the most complete victory over
ridiculousness, the triumph of a man who has removed all surprise and excesses from his
surroundings.

Fabio Morábito was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1955 to Italian parents. He moved to Milan
when he was five, and when he was fifteen he moved to Mexico City, where he currently lives
and works in the Autonomous University of Mexico. Morábito is the author of four books of
poetry (including De lunes todo el año (1992) [Monday All Year Long], which won the
Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize, and Delante de un prado una vaca [In Front of a Pasture, a
Cow] (Visor, 2013)), two novels (including Caja de herramientas [Tool Box] (Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1989), which was translated into English by Geoff Hargreaves and published by
Xenox Books in 1996)), five books of short stories (including La vida ordenada [An Ordered
Life] (Tusquets, 2000) and Grieta de fatiga [Rift of Fatigue] (Tusquets, 2012)), and three books
of essays (including El idioma materno [Mother Tongue] (Sexto Piso, 2014). Morábito is also a
prolific translator, and he has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Aminto de
Torquato Tasso, among many other Italian poets and prose writers. In addition to Geoff
Hargreaves’s English translation of the book Tool Box, his writing has been translated
into German, French, Portuguese, and Italian.

Curtis Bauer is a poet (most recently The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press)) and a
translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish (most recently Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio
González Iglesias (Alice James Books) & From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz (Vaso
Roto Editions)). He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.