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A Last Interview with Manuel Puig

1991; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/40147594

1945-8134

Manuel Martí Puig, Ronald Christ,

Latin American Literature Studies

By RONALD CHRIST The last time I talked to Manuel Puig, he was calling from the airport, as he usually did when just passing through New York; this time he especially wanted to know about our friend Gregory Kolovakos. That was April 1989, and Gregory was dying of AIDS, as we all knew. Already grieving the recent death of another friend, Enrique Pezzoni, the brilliant editor and publisher in Buenos Aires, we commiserated; and he came as close to raging as I ever heard: Will this plague ever end? In less than six months Manuel himself was dead, not an AIDS victim but a postoperative casualty in a relatively backwater hospital, like one of his characters. There had been no difficulty in removing the source of Manuel's gall, if indeed he ever really had any; but his heart relinquished him. Gregory had also linked us ten years before, when he suggested to the relatively new gay magazine Christopher Street that I might be the person to interview Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman was big at the time, and I knew the book well. Earlier, Seaver Books had been interested in Puig but unable to see the worth of his latest novel, and so I suggested my editing the early chapters over a weekend in order to demonstrate that the translation, not the novel, was the problem. Jeanette Seaver liked the result, considered it, but finally begged off; so the translator revised his work, more or less in line with my initial editing, and the novel predictably came out from Dutton. In those days Gregory and I worked together at the Literature Department of what was then the Center for InterAmerican Relations, and his recommendation to Christopher Street only extended our daily endeavor in one more useful, friendly way. For me this interview turned out like the others I had done with Manuel hilarious hard work but with differences: his earnestness replaced the cautious defensiveness I knew so well; his effort exceeded the usual pickiness, and he revised laboriously, when we talked (having me turn off the machine while we worked something out, rehearsed a line); later he rewrote, cut, and expanded everything; and still later he had us recite it to make sure his script worked. On one hand, certain points truly mattered to him: he wanted to clarify the political importance of the notorious footnotes in Kiss of the Spider Woman, for instance. On the other, he cared about getting the star attributions right. The latter worry I first encountered on a flight back from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Manuel and I had participated in one of the many conferences organized there by Zunilda Gertel. I was apologizing to him for having perhaps spoken too long during my section of the program (I had seen his lips twitch, pulled on individual strings, and his mouth jerk as I did the critics job of comparisons, literary history, and the like). He wasn't interested. Who was I like? he asked. Guessing, I mumbled some old actress's name. ffoitf? I tried again. Better: Well, but don't you think I had just a little Claudette Colbert? Telling him I hadn't thought about it, but, yes, when he answered the question from that dark-haired fellow about halfway back, he had tilted his head to the side, chin slightly up, eyes big, bright and telling him that suited. And How were you? Turned out how I was was a mix too, and none too flattering, in my eyes, at the time at least. Of course this was all twinkling, yet as we refined more and more how we were like this one or that, I saw the serious critical purpose: he was judging, denotatively as well as connotatively, according to a scale as delicate and intricately calibrated as that used to appreciate the Japanese tea ceremony or the tango. Years later, in the interview, his seeming jokes on star readings engaged his full intelligence and sensibility no less, just as in Under a Mantle of Stars the Daughter's line to the effect that it does not matter who you are but how you are represents Puig's profound superficiality to a T. (By the way, we read every line of that translation aloud too, switching parts, changing inflections, discussing, and there's only one phrase I left in that I think he was wrong about.) After all our rush and work, the interview appeared without our seeing galleys, without the section on the footnotes and without our ever being paid. Manuel gnashed, Gregory sulked a little, and I finally deposited the papers, along with lots more, at the University of Texas's Humanities Research Center in Austin, which has generously assisted me in preparing this definitive version. The record straight, my promise kept, I dedicate it to Manuel and Gregory, whose stubborn frailty gave us so much.