Fireflies. Luis Sagasti
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Praise for Luis Sagasti
‘Luis Sagasti has achieved what we all want: to fuse life and art. Innovative, playful, and beautifully executed, FIREFLIES remains a perfect refutation against anyone that dares pronounce the crisis of literature. An homage to the power of storytelling. A book to be reckoned with.’
Carlos Fonseca, author of COLONEL LAGRIMAS
‘A work of wonderful analogies and disparate historical footnotes, one that constantly tries to find answers to the unspoken questions about unusual events and actions.’
Morning Star
‘This is a book that explains how the world works. Sagasti tells us in an instant what in fact takes very long to tell. The book is simply genius.’
Enrique Vila-Matas, author of DUBLINESQUE
‘Two thumbs up for this magnificent book by Luis Sagasti. A sidereal, vertiginous book that has to be read as slowly as possible so it doesn’t end too soon. One hundred pages of pure intelligence, to be enjoyed listening to Sun Ra.’
L’Arbre Vengeur (France)
‘From reality to fiction, from life to myth. FIREFLIES is a wonderful book that draws its strings from the real lives of artists and the myths they build around themselves and their work. Between reality and fiction, there is but one step. Sagasti produces here a magnificent constellation of stories, and in doing so pays tribute to art.’
Fnac (France)
‘A hypnotic blend of erudition and imagination, FIREFLIES examines and celebrates the art of storytelling. It’s a book full of surprising connections and unforgettable images, shot through with a boundless curiosity and a contagiously mischievous spirit. Like Borges before him, Sagasti has produced a rare thing: a work of fiction as learned as it is fun. From the first page to the last, I read it with an intense feeling of excitement and a growing certainty that Sagasti is one of the most remarkable writers at work today.’
Gary M. Perry, Foyles (London)
Luis Sagasti
Fireflies
Translated by Fionn Petch
Contents
To Camila and Jeremías
There goes Captain Beto through space,
a photo of Carlitos on the console
a pennant of River Plate
and a very sad card of a saint.
LUIS ALBERTO SPINETTA
1. Fireflies
The world is a ball of wool.
A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.
When you can’t, you pluck at the surface to bring up a strand and then break it with a sharp tug. Once you find the other end, you can tie the two threads of yarn together again. One of grandma’s little tricks.
Some people think the world is a ball of wool from a lamb that sacrificed itself long ago so everyone could stay warm.
And they find this idea comforting.
And there are others who think that, in fact, the world is held up by threads. As if the ball of yarn were elsewhere. So headlines appear that try to explain things like who pulls the strings of the world. Magazine covers: two threatening eyes against a black background. And there are writers who write whole books about this. Conspiracy theories. An explanation that arises from intellectual laziness: the idea that a shadowy group has chosen to weave the plots of all of our lives. Just like that. Because: a) they are pure and good; b) they want to keep hold of their wealth; c) they are evil, really evil; or d) they hold a secret that would be the end of all of us if we were to find it out – and of them too, of course. For those who see the world this way, any conspiracy – because there have always been conspiracies – is just the visible result of a greater conspiracy. And the smaller conspiracies are all interconnected. Man never reached the moon. Paul McCartney died in 1967 and was replaced by a lookalike. Christ descended from the cross and had twins with Mary Magdalene. Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Francis Bacon. The Lautaro Lodge was a branch of the Freemasons, who are a branch of the Rosicrucians, who are a branch of the Gnostics, and the tree proliferates so wildly that not only does it leave us unable to see the wood but it also fills everything with shadows, making way for those two threatening eyes that want us to understand that there’s something out there it’s better we don’t know about. Because – and this we do know – conspirators always leave clues, as if everything were one big game of hide and seek. For people who think like this, any secret is part of the plot because when people conspire they breathe low and in unison, as if whispering a secret.
We shouldn’t believe them, though it’s right to believe in secrets. After all, childhood is nothing but the progressive revelation of well-kept secrets. To reveal them all at the same time would be to reveal nothing. The darkest dark and the whitest light are equally blinding. Like discovering that your dad has already bought all your Santa presents for the next five years.
How do we know when there are no more secrets? When do we find that out? Or is there nothing to learn?
There are secrets that make the world work in a particular way. But they shouldn’t be called secrets. Omissions would be more prudent. For the machine to keep running, it’s better not to mention certain things. Every family holds a terrible secret that, as soon as we sense what it might be, is no longer mentioned.
And there are still others who believe that these threads in fact sustain the world from the inside, as if the world were the great ball of wool and we were insects, like ants or flies, crawling or flying around it. A ball of wool someone is using to knit something. Or perhaps no one is knitting anything at all. There’s just a great shroud with no Penelope, growing without purpose in the eternal silence of infinite space.
One thing we can be sure of is that, for hundreds of thousands of years, the ball of yarn has been revolving without