The Suicides

As translator Esther Allen points out in her afterword, it was fellow novelist Juan Jose Saer who first referred to Antonio di Benedetto’s novels Zama, The Silentiary and The Suicides as a “Trilogy of Expectation.” Now, almost ten years after the first, the third and final novel has appeared in her translation. Unlike the previous novels – Zama is set at the end of the 18^th century and The Silentiary shortly after World War Two – The Suicides feels contemporary with its original publication in 1969. Its nameless narrator, a journalist, also feels closer to Benedetto himself, whose father died when he was eleven, possibly by his own hand. The novel begins:

“My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.”

And so the story takes on an urgency that goes beyond the journalist’s deadline when the narrator is asked to investigate a photograph of two suicides:

“There’s terror in their eye. But their mouths are grimacing in sombre pleasure.”

Their expression echoes the contradictions of the narrator. As he explores death, his mind frequently strays to sex – “Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside,” he thinks as he leaves the office. A girlfriend, Julia, does not prevent him looking for other sexual encounters, or even relationships, symbolic of a more general sense of dissatisfaction with his life. (His relationship with Julia is perhaps best summed up when he says, “she accedes to my desires, as docile as ever”). He is paired with a photographer, Marcela, whom he freely admits to disliking, yet determinedly attempts to discover if she is single. There is also a dichotomy between his ability to look clearly at the darker side of life and his need for escape, which often takes the form of a science fiction film at the cinema.

The initial photograph leads to a wider investigation into suicide for a series of articles which are apparently never written. A key component of the novel is the interpolation of facts on the subject provided by Bibi, the agency translator. The narrator and Marcela visit the scene of a double suicide, two boys, and speak to the father, though the suggestion of a relationship (“Why’d they do it? Things weren’t working out between them?”) is ignored by the police officer. The idea of a suicide pact will provide the novel with its conclusion.

Though the article the narrator is writing has a nominal deadline, the novel moves inward rather than forward as his research widens, and the urgency seems to come from his fear that he, too, is a suicide. He remembers walking with his grandfather:

“Then he would proclaim in his Italian dialect that I understood perfectly, ‘Twelve – twelve suicides there have been among us.”

Julia, too, is sucked into his obsession with death when she asks her class to write on the topic – an assignment which the principal and parents regard with distaste. The incident both demonstrates the narrator’s egotism (he has little thought for the problems he has caused her – “I tell myself that in the end, it’s all so much theatre”) and society’s reluctance to face the inevitable. As the novel progresses the proposed series of articles on suicide increasingly resembles the narrator’s life, When the editor laments the lack of publication possibilities (“It won’t be any use, there are no buyers…”):

“I ask whether the series is cancelled. He says not yet.”

The novel is full of striking incident – a woman who claims to hear voices, a body exhumed with a missing hand – but it is the narrator’s own journey which holds the reader’s real attention, told in a tone that seeks the cynicism of the hardboiled detective but is secretly too earnest for that role. Whether it is a true trilogy or not, the publication of all three novels in English is to be celebrated.