Where There's Love, There's Hate

  PRAISE FOR ADOLFO BIOY CASARES

  “Bioy Casares has a charm and a sinister wit and a sudden sadness that only an assured literary performer could deliver.”

  —JOHN UPDIKE, THE NEW YORKER

  “One of the most innovative and imaginative names in Argentine writing.”

  —KATE BOWEN, THE ARGENTINA INDEPENDENT

  “Bioy Casares is now Argentina’s most distinguished living man of letters and is considered a founding father of the new novel in all of Spanish America.”

  —THE NEW CRITERION

  PRAISE FOR SILVINA OCAMPO

  “Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious.”

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES

  “I think Silvina Ocampo is a genius, one of the greatest. She lived a little in the shadow of her sister Victoria on the one hand and of her husband Bioy Casares and Borges on the other. She was an extravagant woman when writing her stories, short and crystalline, she was perfect.”

  —CÉSAR AIRA

  “Silvina’s impressive literary production at least equals that of her husband Bioy in terms of quantity and possibly even far exceeds him in terms of quality, linguistic ability and influence.”

  —KATE BOWEN, THE ARGENTINA INDEPENDENT

  “Ocampo’s readers will participate in an unforgettable banquet. Luckily for many of us, Ocampo’s universe is constantly expanding.”

  —PÁGINA/12

  WHERE THERE’S LOVE, THERE’S HATE

  ADOLFO BIOY CASARES (1914–99) was born into a wealthy family in Buenos Aires and wrote his first novella—for a cousin with whom he was in love—at the age of eleven. He published his first book, Prólogo (Prologue), just four years later. He met Jorge Luis Borges in 1932, beginning a lifelong friendship that produced many collaborations, including the invention of the mock detective Don Isidro Parodi. Also, through Borges’s friend Victoria Ocampo he met his future wife: her sister, Silvina, whom he married in 1940. Bioy’s most famous work is The Invention of Morel (1940), which inspired the film Last Year at Marienbad. He won many awards during his career, including the 1991 Cervantes Prize and the French Legion of Honor. He died in Buenos Aires in 1999.

  SILVINA OCAMPO (1903–93) was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six siblings. As a young woman she traveled to Europe to pursue a career as a painter, studying under Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger. She published her first work of fiction, the story collection Forgotten Journey, when she returned to Argentina in 1937. By this time she had begun a relationship with her future husband Adolfo Bioy Casares. She went on to publish several volumes of award-winning poetry, stories and children’s books, and was twice awarded the Argentine National Literature Prize. With Borges and Bioy Casares she edited the groundbreaking 1940 Anthology of Fantastic Literature. She died in Buenos Aires in 1993.

  SUZANNE JILL LEVINE has translated the work of Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Jorge Luis Borges. Among her books is The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.

  JESSICA ERNST POWELL won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo’s Woman in Battle Dress.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  WHERE THERE’S LOVE, THERE’S HATE

  Originally published as Los Que Aman, Odian by

  Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires

  Copyright © 1946, Heirs of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

  Translation copyright © 2013, Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Ernst Powell

  Design by Christopher King

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-151-5

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction: By Suzanne Jill Levine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  INTRODUCTION

  BY SUZANNE JILL LEVINE

  This quirky novella, originally published in 1946, is the only known work of fiction by Silvina Ocampo with her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares. Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Los Que Aman, Odian, literally “Those Who Love, Hate”) is a genre-bender, like so much of the better-known fiction of Bioy Casares: a tongue-in-cheek mystery somewhere between detective spoof and romantic satire.

  In a remote seaside resort in Argentina infidelities engender “little murders” among the wealthy bourgeoisie and those who serve them, and in a tradition shared with Agatha Christie’s Then There Were None, the reader begins to suspect every character. The principal narrator is Professor Huberman, portrayed as a self-involved pseudo-intellectual who fancies himself to be an amateur detective as well as a literary critic. He pontificates, “When will we at last renounce the detective novel, the fantasy novel and the entire prolific, varied, and ambitious literary genre that is fed by unreality? When will we return to the path of the salubrious picaresque and pleasant local color?” In the very first chapter he meets a wealthy couple who are writers—“dabblers in literature and fortunate with livestock”—an ironic wink at the couple writing this novella who were, indeed, devoted to “unreality.”

  It might be useful to consider this work an inevitable early offspring of Adolfo and Silvina’s love of literary creation, shared humor, and often unconventional life together, as well as one of the many stories and book projects—including the groundbreaking 1940 Antología de la literatura fantástica—that came out of their conversations with their friend Jorge Luis Borges. In 1942 Borges and Bioy published their first collaborative detective fiction, Six Problems for Don Isidro, about a detective modeled after Poe’s Auguste Dupin, who solves crimes—in parodic mode—from his jail cell. They took collaboration to another level, creating various fictional writers who produced a literary universe parallel to their individual creations. The Uruguayan literary critic and Yale
scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal referred to this third writer, who in some ways did not resemble either Bioy or Borges, as “Biorges.” Aside from their collaborative fictions written under pseudonyms such as Bustos Domecq, they would also translate and publish an international detective series called El septimo sello or “The Seventh Seal.”

  It was in the summer of 1971 that I first met Adolfo Bioy Casares—called Bioy by friends and Adolfito by Silvina, family and those who knew him since childhood—though in the Southern Hemisphere it was a mild, sunny winter day. I was in Buenos Aires with my good friend, that same Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and his young colleague Alfred MacAdam. I was even younger than Alfred, and this was a literary event for both of us, entering the elegant Casares–Ocampo apartment with its high ceilings and dark wooden shelves lined with what seemed to be thousands of books from floor to ceiling. A housemaid in uniform had opened the door and led us silently from a shadowy foyer into the book-lined salon.

  We sat awaiting the writer who was already a legend to us as readers as well as from Emir’s anecdotes. The saying goes (or went) that the Argentines speak Spanish like Italians, dine like Frenchmen, and dress like Englishmen. This adage fit Bioy like a glove, except that his speech was more “criollo”—native-born, that is, more refined—unlike the Italianate of first or second-generation immigrants who spoke the slang “lunfardo” that Bioy and Borges would caricature in their collaborations. Bioy entered the room with a lively step: he was strikingly handsome, rather slight, and looked athletic despite his age—aside from his notable donjuanismo, he had devoted himself to tennis in younger years. (Apparently, I would later learn, he would often use “tennis” as a pretext for amorous morning assignations with willing young women.) His grayish white hair was combed back neatly and under his thick eyebrows twinkled smiling blue eyes; a strong, sensual mouth countered the British elegance of his mien and attire.

  As if a theatrical effect were being sought, Silvina was the next to enter, jangling bracelets and graciously offering us cocktails—that is, whiskey. In her slacks and silk blouse Silvina was a striking apparition, a short, sharp-featured woman in dark glasses who spoke with a notably nasal intonation. I often wondered, when later doing my first translation of Bioy’s work—the comedic yet nightmarish satire A Plan for Escape—whether the nasal voice of a bizarre character in this novella were not inspired by Silvina’s idiosyncratic upper-class Argentine speech.

  I remember little from this initial meeting except that the conversation, a dialogue that had been interrupted some years back, was an intense and lively exchange of gossip, in-jokes and literary references—and that the experience of being there was magical, the Bioys’ sitting room almost a timeless space of literature, like Melquiades’s room in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but which is now ravaged by time, living in memory and in formerly lost objects like the novella we celebrate on this occasion.

  That evening, or the next morning, Bioy called to invite Emir and me to dinner with Silvina and Borges, who often dined with them and whom I had met a year earlier on one of his lecture tours to the United States. That dinner is mentioned in the huge diary of Bioy’s conversations with Borges from the 1940s through the 1980s, recently published in Spanish, in which Bioy’s leitmotif throughout the book is “had dinner with Borges.” This repeated notation was not an exaggeration: Borges, Bioy and Silvina would meet almost nightly in the forties and beyond, for dinner and to work on joint projects amongst and through the gossip and jokes. Hence, our evening with them had the added attraction of being included in their nightly ritual. Life has its highs, and those twelve days in Buenos Aires were certainly a zenith: with Emir I was meeting the crème de la crème of Argentina’s literary life, including Tomas Eloy Martinez; the filmmaker Torre Nilsson and his spirited wife, the writer Beatriz Guido; the wonderfully poker-faced journalist Homero Alsina Thevenet, who could imitate Groucho Marx even better than Guillermo Cabrera Infante; the writer Pepe Bianco, who had been an editor of Sur magazine under the directorship of Victoria Ocampo; Hector Libertella; and Luisa Valenzuela and her mother Luisa Mercedes Levinson, to mention a few. I was in Buenos Aires on a literary mission of my own, working with Manuel Puig on the translation of his second novel, Heartbreak Tango. Now of course I look at these names and sadly observe how most of them, like Bioy and Silvina, are gone, inhabitants of an irretrievable past.

  This irretrievable past is what urgently justifies our translation and publication now of this little book, precious in the present because it enriches our enjoyment and knowledge of that lost world, and nurtures our engagement with what Silvina considered yet another reason to write, that is, “not to forget what is most important in the world: friendship and love, wisdom and art.”

  It would require a microscopic reading to define the distinctive touches of each of these two authors that combine to lend peculiar charm and style to this eccentric “mystery.” Both writers were famous for surreal whimsy, ironic dialogues, playful “Borgesian” erudition, private jokes, and a profound sense that to be human is to be absurd. Silvina confessed, in her introduction to Leopoldina’s Dream, a Penguin anthology of her stories edited and translated by Daniel Balderston, that she wrote both to explain herself and to forget, “to find something others might find in Ovid in my un-happiness or in my other self.”

  It is safe to say that among the many lines of investigation in the novella is the misplaced passion of a young boy, a child, and this is certainly an element we might consider to be Silvina’s contribution. In the words of scholar Fiona Mackintosh, Ocampo “fits quirkily into the highly intellectual society of which she was part, returning frequently to children or childlike characters and making their world her world: she scrutinizes the workings of nostalgia, demythifying childhood innocence, and proposes a flexible attitude to the perceived boundaries between childhood and adulthood.”

  That flexibility regarding boundaries, which enabled both writers to liberate the child within, also characterizes the fluid interplay of genre in Silvina’s own stories and Bioy’s unique and prolific fictions. Fantasy, romance, satire, parody, detective tales, science fiction—all these modes feed into the world of Bioy Casares (most famously in The Invention of Morel, but also in such fascinating novels as A Plan for Escape, The Dream of Heroes, Asleep in the Sun, and in A Russian Doll and Other Stories), as do fantasy and satire in Silvina’s stories, which are more perverse (and perhaps more “surreal” in the sense of inexplicable) than Bioy’s. As Borges wrote about his dear friend Silvina in his preface to Leopoldina’s Dream, “In Silvina Ocampo’s stories there is something I have never understood: her strange taste for a certain kind of innocent and oblique cruelty; I attribute this to the interest, the astonished interest, that evil inspires in a noble soul.”

  While we could define Bioy and Silvina’s narrative art from many points of view and with numerous terms, definitions are ultimately reductive, which is one reason I suppose why I have often returned to the ventriloquism of translation, which allows me to trace on a parallel path my engagement with a written work. The task of this translation has been made even more pleasurable by adding the element of collaboration with fellow translator Jessica Ernst Powell. Jessica and I first began this translation in my workshop at the University of California several years ago, and it has been an enjoyable odyssey into the challenges of the writing, working together to find the mot juste—and I gallicize here because, like many of their compatriots, Bioy and Silvina lived an identity more European than “third world,” as Latin America was then categorized. Their ideal capital was Paris, bien sûr. And so, far from both Europe and Argentina, in this encapsulated paradise of Santa Barbara, both of us have brought to you in English the story of the murder at Bosque del Mar.

  1

  THE LAST DROPS OF ARSENIC (ARSENICUM album) dissolve in my mouth, insipidly, comfortingly. To my left, on the desk, I have a copy, a beautiful Bodoni, of Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon. To my right, the fragrant tea tray, with its delicate china
ware and its nutritive jars. Suffice to say that the book’s pages are well worn from innumerable readings; the tea is from China; the toast is crisp and delicate; the honey is from bees that have sipped from acacia flowers and lilacs. And so, in this encapsulated paradise, I shall begin to write the story of the murder at Bosque del Mar.

  To my way of thinking, the first chapter begins in a dining car, on the night train to Salinas. Sharing my table were a couple who were friends of mine—dabblers in literature and fortunate with livestock—and a nameless young woman. Bolstered by the consommé, I explained my intentions: in search of a delectable and fruitful solitude—that is to say, in search of myself—I was on my way to the new seaside resort that the most refined nature enthusiasts amongst us had discovered: Bosque del Mar. I had cherished the idea of this trip for some time now, but the demands of the office—I belong, I must admit, to the brotherhood of Hippocrates—had postponed my vacation. The married couple reacted with interest to my frank declaration: although I was a respected physician—I invariably follow in the footsteps of Hahnemann—I also wrote screenplays, with varying degrees of success. Now, Gaucho Films, Inc. had commissioned me to write an adaptation of Petronius’ tumultuous book, set in present-day Argentina. A seclusion at the beach was de rigueur.

  We returned to our compartments. A short time later I was enveloped in thick railway blankets, my spirit still singing with the pleasurable sensation of having been understood. A sudden doubt tempered my joy: Had I acted rashly? Had I just handed, to that amateur couple, all the necessary elements to steal my ideas? I knew that it was useless to dwell on it. My spirit, ever malleable, sought refuge in the anticipated contemplation of the trees by the ocean. A pointless effort. I was still a night away from those pine groves … Like Betteredge with Robinson Crusoe, I resorted to my Petronius. With renewed admiration I read this paragraph: