A Brilliant Darkness

The Argentine theory of Ettore’s disappearance was put forward by Erasmo Recami and has its source in Carlos Rivera, a Chilean physicist at the Catholic University in Santiago. Picture the man, sitting alone at a table of the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires, bored to death. To kill time, he scribbles a few mathematical formulae on the paper tablecloth.

“I know someone else in the habit of writing equations on the tablecloth,” the waiter tells him, bringing him down to Earth with a start. “It’s a client who comes here to eat, sometimes just for a coffee. His name is Ettore Majorana, and he was an important physicist in Italy a long time ago. But he’s been in Argentina for many years.”

It’s 1960. Ettore would have been fifty-four.

With perfect idiocy, Rivera doesn’t follow up the lead there and then. True, the waiter had no idea how to find this Ettore-who-wrote-formulae-on-the-tablecloth, but he could at least have noted the contact details of the waiter. As it was, when the clue was properly followed up later on, not even the waiter could be traced.⁶⁸

This was not the first time that Ettore had haunted Rivera in Buenos Aires. Some ten years earlier, in 1950, en route to Germany, he was staying at a small family hotel owned by a certain Signora Talbert. Again he was writing equations, this time on a pad of paper in his room. His notes concerned the Majorana statistical laws, and that’s what he’d penned in glaring capital letters at the top of the page. Signora Talbert was hovering in the background doing the cleaning, when she suddenly exclaimed:

“Majorana? But that’s the name of the famous Italian physicist who’s very good friends with my son. They see each other all the time! He doesn’t do physics anymore; like my son, he’s an engineer now. He left Italy because he couldn’t stand Fermi, an impossible fellow. He said he didn’t even want to hear his name!”

A phone call from the son providentially discontinued the Signora’s chattering and when she returned to the room she was uncomfortable, withdrawn, and refused to continue the conversation.

When Rivera seeks out Signora Talbert in 1954, he finds the hotel boarded up. The neighbors tell him that one night mother and son disappeared without notice and were never seen again. They were renowned anti-Perónists, and Rivera (along with many future sources) blames their disappearance on the “Perón purges.” Rivera even speculates that Ettore could have met the same fate.

After Rivera’s testimonies and their popularization in the press in the mid- 1970s, sightings of Ettore in Buenos Aires spread like the plague. The leading proponent of the Argentinian theory became physicist Erasmo Recami, who found further traces of Ettore in Buenos Aires. Take, for example, the widow of the Guatemalan writer Miguel Asturias. Meeting Recami in Taormina, Sicily, Signora Blanca de Mora says without ado:

“But what’s the big deal about Ettore Majorana? In Buenos Aires everyone knew him. I met him often at the house of the sisters Manzoni, descendents of the great novelist.”

She alleges that one of these sisters, Eleanora, a mathematician, even dated him! But Eleanora is dead, and attempting to verify this testimony quickly becomes a comedy of errors for both Recami and Maria Majorana. Eleanora’s sister, Lilo, has moved to Caracas, her address is found but then lost together with all traces of her. Then Lila, Blanca’s sister, who was closer to the events, is brought into the correspondence. She admits to knowing Ettore, then takes it all back and refuses to put anything into writing, thereby making the story even more suspicious.

Recami broaches the matter with the authorities in 1979, but by now we are in the era of Videla’s military dictatorship, and he encounters a wall of silence. The head of the Physics Department at Buenos Aires University promises to help “within the limits prescribed by the law.” He then proceeds to deny the existence of the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires, a noted landmark: a bit like denying the existence of elephants at the zoo while standing before their cage. Maybe by denying reality in such a blatant way, he was sending Recami a ciphered message: “Don’t believe anything I say; my words are being censored.”

Who was this Ettore Majorana? A figment of the imagination of frenzied women? A psychopath?

There is no Majorana in the Buenos Aires phone book, but in 2007 there were twenty-nine Maioranas, sixty-one Maioranos, two Mayoranas, ten Mayoranos, and one Maoirana. Some people can’t spell. When I told Fabio that there were some one hundred Majoranas living in Buenos Aires he grinned mischievously before asking:

“And you think they might all be Ettore’s children?”

As it happens, there is a district of Buenos Aires called Palermo. I stayed there when I visited. The city’s Italian heritage is reflected everywhere, but they write “ñoquis” for “gnocchi,” and “al pomodoro” becomes “con tomatitos.” I’ve always been fond of these cultural distortions: In England anything cooked with tomato is “à la Portuguese”; in Italy “alla Portoghese” signifies leaving a restaurant without paying the bill. It looked as if there were far more women than men on the streets, but it could have been just my impression. There weren’t that many casualties in the Malvinas/Falklands war.

The Argentinean Palermo is a very fashionable place to be, full of posh restaurants and designer-clothing shops, more so than the Sicilian Palermo. With Ettore in mind, I set off through the city, toward the center, seeking out the locations where he’d been sighted. First, the Hotel Continental. How could anyone deny its existence?

Founded in 1927, the hotel is housed in an impressive building with nine floors, on the wedge formed by a wide diagonal avenue intersecting a grid system, a sort of Broadway of Buenos Aires. Fernlike bundles of leaves hang from the cacarandá trees outside. It’s hard to see exactly what the hotel would have looked like in Ettore’s time, but it must always have been grandiose. Today it’s too business-oriented for the likes of Ettore and me. The meeting rooms have names like Portfolio, Concepto, Estratégia. Artsy-fartsy decor attempts to hide the nature of the clientele. If you’re polite to the servants, they’re completely taken aback with surprise.

Down the road, at number 671, is the Ministerio del Interior (Registo Nacional de las Personas), just the place to ensure you know your identity. By the entrance a tramp is eating food laid down directly on the ground. Still further down the avenue is the Plaza de Mayo, where the eponymous madres congregated at one time to complain about the desaparecidos—the disappeared ones. Maybe at the Ministerio they were so busy forging identities for runaway Nazis that they lost the identities of other people. Ettore’s mother should have come here to complain, too. The Catedral Metropolitana provides an island of peace—until you have to shake off the beggars and pickpockets. Tourists let pigeons shit on their heads for the sake of that perfect photo to send home.

I went to the hotel dining room, where Ettore had been sighted, and ordered an eccentric meal of oysters (hot and cold), a glass of white wine, and nothing else. There was I, a single man sitting at the Continental’s dining room, writing formulae on a paper pad, like “Ettore” and Riviera did on the tablecloth more than half a century ago. Back in the 1950s, the tablecloths may have been made of paper, but nowadays they’re fine soft leather—you’d certainly be thrown out if you wrote on them. Discretion was the word of the day among the waiters. They didn’t look at what I was writing; the service was impeccable. (A lone man in a restaurant writing notes—they probably thought I was a quality-control agent hired to evaluate waiter performance; a concomitant display was put on.)

My mind wandered, assisted by the wine and a pervading lassitude. And that’s when I had a perfect vision of who this Buenos Aires “Ettore” might have been. A poem was already lodged in my mind:

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Fernando Pessoa is one of the most famous Portuguese poets, but he published almost nothing while still alive. Among the papers he left behind when he died, a large number of poems were found, attributed to a variety of what he called “heteronyms” . . . not exactly pseudonyms because he was them; not mere alter egos, but the result of a case of “multiple personality disorder” that entered the history of literature in a spectacular way. Three of these heteronyms wrote outstanding poetry: Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Alvaro de Campos; but there were half a dozen others we don’t know much about because they were revoltingly mediocre. Pessoa would arrive at his local café and inform his friends who he was on that particular day. According to his friends, he didn’t need to. It was obvious.

Some of the heteronyms “died” before Pessoa’s death in 1935, but others were allegedly still “alive” and could have attended his funeral. Ricardo Reis, for example, went away to Brazil while Pessoa was still alive and was never heard from again. It can be said that Pessoa brought the concept of ghostwriter to a new level.

Like “Ettore” at the Continental, Pessoa sat alone in restaurants but asked for the table to be laid for two or three and for wine to be poured for his invisible guests.⁶⁹ I once saw a guy in a restaurant sitting alone at a table set for a large party, keeping up an animated if silent conversation, his gestures and soundless laughter revealing when a particularly witty joke had been told, the wine flowing freely. He wasn’t disturbing anyone else, but the owner still called the police and had him ejected. I never patronized that restaurant again.

And that is where my mind drifted, in the dining room of the Continental, when I saw before me this “Ettore” of Buenos Aires. Truth and myth, life and death, the boundaries of the self, or the lack thereof. . . . Could the Argentine Ettore have been impersonated by a mythomaniac?

In José Saramago’s book, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, that Pessoan heteronym returns from Brazil after Pessoa’s own death. One night, in his large Lisbon house, Ricardo Reis wakes to the sound of footsteps. He gets up to find a man sitting in his living room. He sighs with relief:

“Ah, it’s you . . . what a fright you gave me! I thought it was a ghost.”

Fernando Pessoa is smiling back at him.

The Pessoan irony of the Argentinian theory. . . . The possibility that somebody may have impersonated Ettore in Argentina, possibly as innocently as Pessoa impersonated his ghosts. But an impersonator choosing for an alter ego a man who has disappeared? What genius! Pirandello and Pessoa would both have been impressed.

Something else not quite right about the Argentinean theory is the notion that Ettore became a “desaparecido” during the Perón purges. Everyone I talked to (right and left wing) said that this is a conspicuous anachronism. In the 1950s, during Perón’s first reign, people were jailed, maybe even roughed up. Abducted and killed, no. It may have happened in a couple of cases, but no more. Not to the tune of 30,000 as during the Videla’s “dirty war” of 1976 to 1983.

At the Buenos Aires book fair a “comrade in arms” of my anarchist days comes to meet me. We haven’t seen each other for over twenty-five years.

At last I shout his name. We hug as he smiles, embarrassed. It turns out that it’s not his real surname, just a decoy necessary during the dictatorship days but which he no longer uses.

Later we meet in Palermo. A massive thunderstorm is raging. I hear insistent mewling, but can’t locate its source. Finally, through the corner of my eye, I glimpse a spot moving high above the ground. It’s a black cat, moving with great purpose along ledges and roofs. They’re lucky, I’m told. Lightning strikes the building opposite, creating a great commotion.

My friend has changed dramatically since the days he slept on the streets and sold fake jewelry in Algarve. He grunts with appreciation as he browses designer clothes flashing from the elegant shop windows. He’s dressed in the same refined style, unlike me. I poke fun at him. He defends himself:

“That’s not capitalistic! It wouldn’t cost that much to dress the whole working class like this.”

The night unrolls, the Malbéc flows. He tells me how sexually demanding Argentinean women can be (details provided) but that it suits him well. He’s on a playboy-style vacation from his girlfriend of more than thirty years. I remember her very well from their Portuguese days.

I knew that they’d been in Portugal as exiles, that she’d been a “desaparecida” before they ran away. She’d been abducted by the state police and for many months he couldn’t even find a record of her existence in jail, not knowing if she was dead or alive. I recall her telling me why she’d chosen Portugal for her exile. It was a matter of superstition.

One night they collected her and her mates from the cell, made them dress in rags, and shoved them into a truck. For a long while they were driven deep into the countryside. Finally they arrived at an old warehouse in the middle of nowhere. It had all the symptoms of the “standard,” and they prepared for the merciful bullet.

Inside the warehouse there were seats and a movie projector. They were made to sit, the lights went out, and they were shown a documentary on Our Lady of Fátima, the Madonna who appeared to three little shepherds in Portugal in 1917. And then they set them free.

As the evening unfolds, my friend’s mood changes. Comments on passing beauties have now given way to stories about atrocities. I try to curb the Malbéc (he’s had a triple bypass operation recently), but it’s too late. At a furious pace he tells me of the people taken at night and what happened to them, of the castrations, rapes, sophisticated tortures; of the pregnant inmates who were made to have their babies, so that they could be taken away and given up for adoption to sterile military couples; of when it was logistically impossible to kill so many people, so they started dropping planeloads of them, drugged and loaded with sandbags, straight into the sea.

“Nowadays, if you want to insult someone in Argentina really badly, you call him milico—a military. It’s worse than hijo de puta.”

As his rage surges, his slurred speech spirals toward the fixed point, the thing he’d been thinking about all along. By now he has tears in his eyes. He wipes them with the napkin.

“You know they gave her electric shocks in the vagina. . . .”

I don’t feel I have the right to ask him to stop, to spare me the unspeakable. I let his fury and tears take their course, torrents of gruesome details pouring out, feeling less and less capable of any distance. I find myself saying, in my Borat-style Spanish:

“That a curse be upon those fuckers!”

He pauses at long last. An incongruous smile appears on his face and he says:

“Well it is. After the pregnant inmates’ scandal came out, all their teenage offspring started to ask for DNA tests, not believing it’s their real parents.”

We laugh, hysterically. I suppose that’s the evolutionary purpose of laughter. Laughter, sometimes, is not funny.

The storm is now gone, and above the square we can see the stars in a limpid sky. Perched on the roof opposite I spot the same black cat I’d seen earlier in the evening, still broadcasting to the entire universe. Although I’m sure Ettore was never in Buenos Aires, except in a Pessoan sense, a powerful vision comes to my mind. In that vile world my Argentinean friend evoked, live forcible desaparecidos, people who disappeared without any real mystery, other than that of how certain “human” beings can accumulate so much filth in their minds. Ettore’s story, in this context, is like a manifesto of freedom. A statement of liberty. “I shall be a desaparecido of my own will. A decision I’ve taken because I wanted to. Because disappearing infused sense into my life, in all the inscrutability that sense can have. Because it spared me the atrocities a normal life might have forced upon me.”