Guillermo Martínez - The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers

Guillermo Martínez - The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers

In times of extreme need we hold on to ridiculous idols as though they suddenly matter more now that everything has turned sour. When a parent is sick we remember the value of prayer; when waiting for the doctor's pronouncement we start to calculate odds and think: maybe the one in a million won't be me. And maybe it won't. Chance is a funny thing.

Take a coin toss. It's 50/50 whether the coin will be heads, or tails. But what are the odds of four heads in a row? It's 1/16. Now, this makes sense. But what if I've already flipped three heads? Surely it would be difficult for me to get the last, fourth head – the odds are high. But no, they aren't. We're back to 50/50 for the last toss. It just doesn't seem that way at the time.

The same applies, the narrator of Guillermo Martínez's The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers, understands, to the strange fact that there are a set number of days in which a person will be alive – we can safely assume that from birth to death the number of days will not exceed 35,000 or so. We can also assume, with someone we love, that one day we will have a nightmare in which they die. What are the odds the nightmare will occur the day before they really do die, acting in effect as a kind of terrible premonition? Immense. But depending on the circumstances, it could seem almost inevitable.

Again, chance is a funny thing. It's the primary concern of Martínez's short story, in which the narrator's daughter lies gravely ill in hospital. There are indications that the narrator was, in a previous life (for the onset of a child's serious illness causes the Before of the Now to become, sadly enough, a previous life), a completely rational man, given to relying on intellect and reason as absolutes for determining the course of life. Indeed, a course he teaches explicitly deals with chance, and the confusion it's seemingly illogical nature causes.

The man writes a five-digit number on the board. This is the number of days in a person’s maximum lifespan. Our relative might die on any one of these days. The prophetic dream could also occur on any given night, on any one of these days. But then the probability that the prophetic dream will come true is the same as the probability that these two independent events will coincide: the night of the dream and the day of the death. And that number is one we know how to calculate.

The man writes an equation, stops for a moment at the equal sign, as if he were performing a long mental calculation, and jots down a second number, nearly twice as long as the first. It’s a large number, but not so very large, he says. In Tokyo, in Buenos Aires, in New York, every night, routinely, someone kills a loved one in his dreams. Of course this person will be absolutely astonished if we try to convince him by any rational means that there was no mystery, no premonition, just the trivial evidence of a statistic, almost as inevitable as the fact that every lottery game has a winner.

The challenge Martínez has given himself is to delve into the problem of chance, which is an inherently difficult concept to extract from the conventional (wrong) wisdom of its use and meaning, while also creating sufficient empathy for “the father”, who remains the primary character, and also his ill-daughter, whose sickness is so severe she never speaks, and is rarely present in scenes. But when she is:

The sheet drapes the small, thin body up to the neck; a tangle of blonde hair clings to the sweaty face, and the head remains still, at the same, slightly forced, angle, as though cruelly tugged upward by the tube emerging from the nose. Someone has replaced the IV bag during the night, as well as the damp cloth on her forehead. He, who had fallen asleep to the piercing cries of the little girl in the third bed and then, still half-asleep, had heard the loud, asthmatic snores of the boy on the respirator, like a swimmer about to go under, now wondered about the body’s different strategies against death, and whether his daughter’s deep torpor, that impenetrable stillness, was a kind of self-contained resistance or the sign of final surrender.

The effect of the text is near to physical, sickening recreation of what it's like to sit quietly and helplessly alongside the hospital bed of a dying relative. Martínez handles both the aspects of chance, and the illness of the daughter, well, linking them together paragraph after paragraph, until the two become impossible to extricate. The “I Ching”, an ancient Chinese text beloved by the daughter and derided by the father, keeps everything together. It purports to provide answers, couched in impenetrable language, and its adherents believe it in much the same way Westerners cling to, say, astrology, or the writings of Nostradamus. Which is to say it's all nonsense, but desperate people cling to whatever will provide solace.

The father's journey is in effect one from reason to superstition. He doesn't want to go there, but reason didn't save his daughter (nor, we discover, in previous years a son). He resists giving in to the tempting “answers” of the I Ching, and even at the end of the story we aren't quite sure whether he has fully crossed over and become a believer. Much of this ambiguity comes from Martínez' decision to keep the narration calm and collected, almost neutral. Although we are ostensibly within the father's mind, there is in truth another layer placed upon his emotions, separating the intensity of his feeling from the text. We are told how he feels and what he thinks; Martínez leaves aside the alternate rage and paroxysms of grief and powerlessness.

He pauses, as if he’s lost the thread; he’s just recalled, with devastating clarity, the nightmare he had in the hospital at dawn. He turns to the blackboard for an instant, pretending to be looking for chalk, and turns around again to face the class. What’s not so common, he says, is for the relative to actually die the next day. But then again, what does “not so common” mean? Our close relative, like all human beings, one day must die.

The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers by Guillermo Martínez is a short story from Words Without Borders' October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue. All of the work reviewed is freely available online.

See Also

Other stories from the Words Without Borders October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue include:
---Bettencourt, Lúcia - Borges's Secretary
---Bizzio, Sergio - Magic!
---Brau, Edgar - The Key
---Delaney, Juan José - The Two Coins
---Giardinelli, Mempo - God's Punishment
---Schewblin, Samanta - Preserves
---Shua, Ana María - Octavio the Invader

Also of interest: Index of short stories under review