文艺；书评；阿根廷小说；爱的代价；

　　The junta's policy of eliminating its enemies still fascinates Argentina's novelists；

　　军政府清除异己的政策至今仍吸引着阿根廷小说家；

　　Purgatory. By Tomás Eloy Martínez. Translated by Frank Wynne.

　　《炼狱》，Tomás Eloy Martínez著，Frank Wynne译。

　　An Open Secret. By Carlos Gamerro. Translated by Ian Barnett.

　　《公开的秘密》，Carlos Gamerro著，Ian Barnett译。

　　Open Door. By Iosi Havilio. Translated by Beth Fowler.

　　《敞开的门》，Iosi Havilio著，Beth Fowler译。

　　7 Ways to Kill a Cat. By Matías Néspolo. Translated by Frank Wynne.

　　《杀死一只猫的7种方式》，Matías Néspolo著，Frank Wynne译。

　　It seems appropriate now that Argentina's investigation into the fate of its desaparecidos—the 8,960 people officially known to have “disappeared” under the military dictatorship of 1976-83—was headed by a writer. Ernesto Sábato, who died in April at the age of 99, described his task as a “slow descent into hell”. Ever since “Never Again”, his 1984 report on the “dirty war”, generations of Argentine novelists have followed Sábato into the inferno.

　　1976-83年，在这段军事独裁时期阿根廷有8960人被官方确认为 “失踪”，对这些失踪者命运的调查，可以说走在最前沿的是一位作家。Ernesto Sábato，今年4月逝世，终年99岁，他将这项工作描述为“缓缓沉入地狱”。自从他对这场“肮脏战争”的报道《再也不会》（Never Again）于1984年发表后，一代代阿根廷小说家跟随Sábato走入这段地狱般的历史。

　　For Argentine society, the chapter never closes. Continuing revelations about hundreds of adopted children who were abducted with their parents, or born in custody, have resulted in DNA tests and legal challenges by a campaigning group, “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo”. Two of these fine recent novels revisit events during the junta. The others—both exceptional debuts—focus on a disturbing present, yet are haunted by unexplained disappearances.

　　对于阿根廷社会来说，这一篇章永不会结束。当年数百儿童随父母一同遭到绑架，有的或出生在拘留所中，这些儿童随后被他人收养。随着他们身世不断被揭开，一个名为“五月广场祖母协会”的人权组织呼吁进行DNA鉴定，并质疑法律的公正性。最近一批优秀小说中有两部回顾了军政府时期的事件。其余几部均是杰出的处女作小说，故事围绕现代生活展开，但人们同样被不明原因的失踪事件困扰，终日惶惶不安。

　　Tomás Eloy Martínez (pictured above), a prominent journalist, novelist and academic who spent years in exile and died in 2010, is known for his explorations of the psychology of Peronism, among them “Santa Evita” (1995). In “Purgatory” (2008), his last novel, an Argentine cartographer in suburban New Jersey senses that her husband has returned to her, no older than when he disappeared 30 years earlier. After years of searching, she remains impervious to evidence of his death as it would confirm that her father, a cheerleading propagandist for the junta, connived in his killing. The novel alludes to the mixture of hypocrisy and collusion that characterised that period, and the banal sentimentality of its distractions—flying saucers, soap operas, fatherland and fútbol (the infamous 1978 World Cup hosted and won by Argentina). The heroine's state of denial and her ghostly and erotic delusions mirror a country still struggling with reality.

　　托马斯·埃洛伊·马丁内斯（Tomás Eloy Martínez）（见上图）是一位杰出的新闻工作者、小说家和学者，曾度过数年流亡生活，在2010年去世。他以庇隆主义心理学研究著称，代表作《圣埃维塔》（Santa Evita）（1995）。《炼狱》（Purgatory）（2008）是马丁内斯的最后一部小说。家住新泽西郊区的阿根廷制图师终于与丈夫重聚，但她发觉丈夫和30年前失踪时一样年轻。这些年她不停寻找，虽有证据证明丈夫的死亡，但她始终不为所动，因为这也可能证实她的父亲，一名军政府高级参谋，参与了这起谋杀。小说影射了当时社会的伪善，人与人相互勾结，精神生活和日常消遣平庸乏味——飞碟、肥皂剧、谈论国事和足球（由阿根廷举办并夺冠的不甚光彩的1978年世界杯）。小说中的女主角拒绝接受现实，终日魂劳梦断，反应出一个国家仍在与现实抗争的社会现状。

　　Craven complicity is at the heart of Carlos Gamerro's “An Open Secret”, a literary thriller first published in 2002 that has the makings of a classic. The perfect crime is “one committed in the sight of everyone—because then there are no witnesses, only accomplices.” A veteran of the war in the Falklands (or Malvinas as they are known in Argentina) returns in the 1990s to his hometown in the pampas to probe the disappearance in custody of a troublesome young journalist during the weekend of Diego Maradona's football debut 20 years earlier. He finds a “conspiracy of chattiness” rather than of silence, over a murder the whole town was in on.

　　懦弱的同谋是Carlos Gamerro小说《公开的秘密》（An Open Secret）的中心内容，该书最早出版于2002年，是一部有实力成为经典作品的惊悚小说。完美的犯罪是“众目睽睽之下的犯罪——因为这样没有目击者，只有同谋。”一位参加过福克兰群岛（阿根廷称之为马尔维纳斯群岛）战争的老兵上世纪90年代回到他在潘帕斯草原的家，对一起事件进行调查：20年前迭戈·马拉多纳首次登场比赛，就在那个周末，一个被拘留的麻烦缠身的年轻记者莫名失踪。他发现这并不是一场沉默的阴谋，而是“人人都在谈论的阴谋”，这起谋杀在全城人尽皆知。

　　Mr Gamerro, who was born in 1962, departs from a previous generation's reverence for eyewitness testimony and memorialising the dead. The tone is hard-boiled, its cynicism alleviated by rare lyrical flights, and the desaparecido emerges as a spoilt mama's boy and unsavoury womaniser. The “involuntary martyr” is no hero. The perspective is that of a generation seeking the unadulterated truth about their parents and grandparents during the “dirty war”—and hence their own identity. Amid the torrential self- justification of the townsfolk, from barbers to bankers, the subject becomes language itself, which is used to excuse and obfuscate. The stark epigraph is from William Burroughs: “To speak is to lie/To live is to collaborate.”

　　Gamerro出生于1962年，对于历史见证者的证言和对死者的纪念方式，他没有像上一代人那样完全表现出敬畏。小说语调冰冷，偶有的情感抒发使文章少了些愤世嫉俗之感。失踪者被塑造成受妈妈宠爱的男孩的形象，喜欢拈花惹草，令人反感。“非自愿的牺牲者”绝非英雄。作者将视角投向一代人追寻真相，探查“肮脏战争”期间父辈和祖父辈最真实的经历——同时这也是对自己身份的探寻。从理发师到银行家，市民们自我辩护的话语铺天盖地而来，人人自顾开脱，令真相扑朔迷离，而这部分语言也构成了小说的主体。书中令人警醒的题词源自威廉·柏洛兹（William Burroughs）的语句：“语言即谎言/生存即勾结。”

　　The bereaved mother in “An Open Secret” appears mad, though the madness is all around her. In “Open Door” by Iosi Havilio, who was born only in 1974, Argentina resembles an asylum. A young veterinary assistant relates how her female lover went missing. She fears that she may have seen her commit suicide off a bridge in Buenos Aires's old port. Between trips to the morgue to identify corpses, she visits a pampas village named Open Door, after the psychiatric hospital that was founded there in 1898 as an “agricultural work colony”. In the countryside she moves between two partners: an ageing gaucho—whose name is the same as his ailing horse, Jaime—and an amoral, druggie country girl with plaits.

　　《公开的秘密》中失去儿子的母亲显得有些精神失常，事实上这种荒诞不经充斥于她周边。《敞开的门》（Open Door）作者Iosi Havilio，是一位出生于1974年的年青作家。在阿根廷，open door被视为精神病院。故事中一个年轻的兽医助理在叙述她的女朋友失踪的情形。她似乎看到她从布宜诺斯艾利斯旧港口的一座桥上跳了下去，她很担心。在几次前往太平间辨认遗体的过程中，女主角拜访了一个潘帕斯小镇。小镇名叫敞开的门，是以1898年在此建成的精神病院得名，这里一直是“农业耕种殖民地”。在乡下她往返于两个情人之间：一个是老成的高楚牧人——名字和他的病马一样，Jaime；另一个是梳着辫子，不明事理、吸毒成瘾的乡下女孩。

　　As sexual encounters unfold in the woman's alienated voice, the characters merge with the village “loonies”. Events, like interchangeable lovers, have equal weight, from a stable fire to the brewing of maté tea, in an ambiguous tale that verges on dark comedy. A suspected UFO turns out to be the spotlit film set for a commercial. In an asylum without walls, there is “nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty”; ultimate control is when people no longer feel they are being coerced. With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labour under an illusion of liberty, manipulated by forces outside the frame.

　　故事在女主角迷茫的声音中继续上演，浪漫情事随之展开，书中人物逐渐加入到小镇“疯子”的行列。对于女主角和各位情人之间发生的各种故事，作者给予了同等的笔墨，从描写马厩的热火到冲泡马黛茶的情节，整个故事寓意隐晦，充满黑色喜剧味道。一个疑似UFO的物体原来是为商业广告设置的聚光灯。在没有围墙的精神病院，“可以无限幻想绝对自由”；当人民不再感到压迫，即是统治的最高境界。小说巧妙地暗示了整个社会都在一种自由的假象下劳作，而操纵这一切的是外围的势力。

　　What those malign forces might be is more explicit in “7 Ways to Kill a Cat” by Matías Néspolo, another debut novelist of Mr Havilio's generation. His shantytown tale from southern Buenos Aires, which recalls the “City of God” slum in the Rio favelas, is set during Argentina's 2001 financial crash, with protesters defying tear gas, from teachers to lorry drivers. It opens in a barrio at the “wolf's mouth”, where the asphalt and streetlights give out, with two peso-less youths butchering a cat for meat. As they become embroiled in a lethal turf war between drug lords, the narrator, Gringo, probes the mystery of his mother's disappearance, and that of his cousin—a reformed gangster turned pavement hawker.

　　这些邪恶势力究竟是什么，《杀死一只猫的7种方式》（7 Ways to Kill a Cat）对此进行了详尽的记述。作者Matías Néspolo，与Havilio是同时代人，也是一位初次亮相的作家。小说以2001年阿根廷经济危机为时代背景，当时从教师到卡车司机，都参与到抗议者队伍中，公然反抗警察镇压。这部窝棚区故事取材于布宜诺斯艾利斯南部，让人想到位于里约贫民窟的“上帝之城”贫民区。故事在有着“狼口”之称的地区展开，这是柏油路和路灯的尽头，两个身无分文的青年为了填饱肚子正在宰杀一只猫。之后他们卷入与毒枭争夺地盘的致命斗争，故事的叙述者Gringo对两起神秘失踪事件展开调查，一位是他的母亲，另一位是他的表兄——曾是一个恶棍，改过自新后成了街边小贩。

　　Gringo, torn between moral scruples and the need to “look after number one”, learns that there are only two ways to kill a cat: civilised or savage. A police crackdown on the marchers prompts him to retaliate in what he sees as a “seriously civilised fashion”. One of the characters in “An Open Secret” claims bitterly that in Argentina, “the winners make history and the losers write it.” To judge from these novels that scour the past and mourn the future, it seems nobody won.

　　Gringo在道德和“一己私欲”之间倍受折磨，他意识到杀死一只猫只有两种方式：文明的方式或野蛮的方式。警察对游行者的镇压迫使他以一种自认为“极度文明的方式”展开报复。《公开的秘密》中有人曾悲愤地说，在阿根廷“胜利者创造历史，失败者记录历史。”纵观这些追寻过去、忧心未来的小说，这里似乎并没有赢家。