“Figs and Jasmines” is included in The Novices of Lerna, a rediscovered masterpiece of Argentine fantastic literature that introduces Ángel Bonomini to English-language readers for the first time.

Bonomini’s enigmatic fictions are shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, and remain eerily prescient in their meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation.

Though The Novices of Lerna garnered praise and admiration from the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Aldolfo Bioy Casares when it first appeared in 1972, Bonomini fell mysteriously into obscurity and remained for decades one of the great untranslated treasures of Argentine letters… until now!

FIGS AND JASMINES

Death used to be different. Something has changed in the way we think about death or the way we die. It’s not that I’ve changed. Maybe it’s just time, pure time, that makes us see the same things as if they were different. Buenos Aires used to be a city of boys with Erector Sets, it was a city of ladies who played the violin, children witnessed masked carnivals, and every neighborhood had blacksmiths because the city and the countryside were more blended together. The bakers, the milkmen, the wicker peddlers, the trash collectors; everyone had horse-drawn carts. Even the dead were carried away in shiny hearses led by shiny-hooved horses. On summer afternoons, for example, after we’d taken our baths, we’d go out in the street and play with our friends. Races around the block and games of rango y mida, cops and robbers, and tip-cat were organized on street corners. When the first shadows began to slip over the tops of the plátanos, our aunts and grandmas would call us in to eat. Later, the lucky ones would take a trip to the ice cream parlor four blocks away for a second dessert. They would eat chocolate ice cream sandwiches with wafers bearing familiar phrases like, “Farewell, pretty gal” or “That’s my cup of tea.” It was the age of wisteria, of coleus, of pinstripe pants and thick denim, the age of white berets and red berets. We’d smoke sarsaparilla. Some men wore garters on their shirt sleeves and chatelaines; everyone wore straw hats in the summer and high boots year round. We would hurt each other’s feelings by calling each other saps, and if you had a big head, your nickname was Zeppelin. Back then, dying was romantic. Not just anyone died. Those who died were very old and very young. Unlike now, when anyone can die. My house had a fig tree. I don’t know if the fig tree held any prestige. I don’t even remember us talking about it, but it was the most important part of the house. And not just because it was in the middle of the courtyard, or because its generous branches spread over our roofs and those of our neighbors. It was important in a way that was somewhat secret and profound. In a home, certain objects will take on a special value for no apparent reason. In my home it was the fig tree. Our fig tree bore white figs, not black ones. For me, white figs are more dignified than black ones. As a child, when I’d visit a home with a black fig tree, I’d feel an overwhelming certainty that the people who lived there were our inferiors. Our home also had numerous jasmines. I’ve always found jasmines to be sickeningly sweet. They give me the same pain in the back of my palate that one gets after eating too much dulce de leche. But I do enjoy remembering those jasmines from my childhood. They were probably the same as all the other jasmines, but to me there was something special about them. I’m talking about those jasmines with fleshy white petals, the ones that turn brown in the place where their petals break off. I enjoy remembering the fig tree and how the wind would fill with its vegetal aroma as it passed sonorously through its branches. And I enjoy remembering those figs and the sticky milk they released when they were plucked before their time. Those figs seemed to stick to the hands of anyone who wouldn’t let them ripen. My grandmas and aunts wouldn’t let me eat more than four or five figs at a time because otherwise I’d get sores in the corners of my mouth. As for the jasmines, their intoxicating scent filled the house, imposing a different tone of voice on summer nights—I wasn’t allowed to go out to play until after I’d taken my bath and watered them. I hated that chore, and yet, I carried a certain attachment to those jasmines because of things I knew about them that I now prefer to remember hazily. The figs and jasmines of my childhood, that time when dying was a little bit magical and a little bit sordid, and, at the same time, something one had no right to do. Yet, impossible as it may seem, dying held a certain appeal. It was like securing a sort of glory or family sainthood. Those who died were always being talked about or alluded to. Secretly, they continued to rule the lives of the living. I’m going to say something foolish: people could kill themselves out of sheer egomania because in the end they’d wind up more relevant dead than alive. I remember my childhood filled with the smell of Faber No. 2 pencils, the smell of jasmine, the soft sound of the wind moving the branches of the fig tree. I remember how the jasmines would brown where their petals had broken off, and how your hands would get sticky from touching the fig tree’s milky stems, and I insist that dying back then was to fill a house, a neighborhood, a city, the world. But those who died were guilty. It was as if they’d snapped a petal off one of the jasmines or plucked a fig before it had ripened. They were the embodiment of betrayal. Needless betrayal. I felt they were guilty of mixing love with hate. To be precise: it was at that time I began to feel disgust for the dead. Hate, shame, resentment, but especially disgust. I’d also had the chance to die. Mine was with the measles. My fever wouldn’t go down. I noticed a circle of terrified and anguished people had formed around me. The doctor stayed by my side all night long giving orders carried out with fear. I was sure sinister things would happen if I decided to die. Aside from the flowers and the weeping and my school friends and the neighbors and people visiting and mourning and a hundred other predictable scenes, the same thing would end up happening to me: they’d turn me into a family saint, a household hero for having died. They’d set up an altar with my picture and some little candles and the silver metal vase. And in November, they’d fill the vase with dahlias from the garden. The same thing would happen: “If he were alive, he would have said…” Everything that occurred after my death would be determined by my absence. And so, I chose to live, but not so much because I wanted to go on living, but because dying disgusted me. You don’t understand anything when you’re a kid. And sometimes, when I was eating a fig and watering the jasmines, I’d think it was better to play the fool and simply let the days go idly by.

Translated by Jordan Landsman

The Novices of Lerna is now out via Transit Books.