The Theologian of the Abyss
“He claimed that God did not exist, and if He did exist, must be an idiot.”
Daniel Guebel is something of a puzzle. While this prolific author of more than two dozen books—including novels, plays, and short story collections—is critically respected in the Argentine literary world, having been awarded the National Literature Prize and the Argentine Academy of Letters’ novel prize, the meaning of his work remains slightly enigmatic, even to his admirers. In style and stature he sits somewhere between the sly metafictionalist Jorge Luis Borges and the neobaroque experimentalist Osvaldo Lamborghini. A master of paradox, Guebel explores the places where significance and nonsense, chaos and clarity, ambition and failure meet, in prose at once lyrical and syntactically thorny. Much like a Talmudic text, his writings constantly seek to destabilize their own provisional conclusions; language accrues but never reaches certainty. In the loving process of crafting his labyrinthine structures, Guebel renders the intellectual as sensual, collapsing the two into a strange unity.
Though Guebel has been publishing in Spanish since 1987, none of his books had appeared in English until last year, when my translation of his 2016 novel The Absolute came out with Seven Stories Press. In this sprawling historical novel, Guebel traces six generations of the Deliuskin-Scriabin family, made up of geniuses and madmen. In June, it will be followed by my translation of his 2018 novel The Jewish Son. This slim, semi-autobiographical volume examines the narrator’s relationship with his father through the lens of Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father; although a shorter, more personal work, it is just as vast and elusive.
“The Theologian of the Abyss,” originally published in Guebel’s 1992 collection El ser querido (The Dear One), appears here in English for the first time. The story has the gnomic weightiness of a Kafka parable, cut with Guebel’s distinctive sense of irony. It begins with a humble shoemaker and the old dichotomy of the functional and the ornamental, but soon explodes into a metaphysical journey across the cosmos. In this miniature fable, no less than in his longer works, Guebel once again carries us beyond the limits of speech and certain knowledge, into the realm of mysteries that the mind can never fully capture, but finds beauty in straining to grasp.
Listen to Daniel Guebel read "The Theologian of the Abyss" in the original Spanish.
Listen to Jessica Sequeira read "The Theologian of the Abyss" in her translation.
(English follows the Spanish, below.)
Su mujer se lo recordó antes de abandonarlo: Con su talento, gracia e inventiva hubiese podido convertirse en un diseñador a la moda, pero su obstinación en reformar el gusto ajeno lo condenaba a ese destino de encierro y joroba, inclinado sobre la horma de zapatos en su localcito al fondo de la galería comercial de ese barrio perdido. Por supuesto, ella tenía razón, pero ¿qué iba a hacerle? Para la clientela femenina el calzado pertenece al arte de la elegancia, que lo subordina todo al efecto, pero él creía que la función hace al estilo y no a la inversa y entonces reparaba sandalias y chatitas y tacos aguja y puntas y botas imponiendo el criterio de la sencillez y la comodidad por sobre el lujo y así adelantaba su ruina. Entretanto, dispares lecturas de teólogos perdidos le mostraron que lo simple es una construcción trabajosa y que el verdadero pensamiento, la verdadera manera de obrar (al menos en el terreno de la fe), procede más por adición que por supresión. Sin embargo, él decidió que la arquitectura del cielo debía construirse de acuerdo a su propio criterio del despojamiento.
Su método simplificador sería de utilidad universal, pero aplicado en principio a la iglesia católica, en cuya doctrina lo instruyeron sus mayores. Basándose en los dichos de los profetas del Antiguo Testamento, objetó primero el boato ceremonial de las elecciones de los papas y luego su misma necesidad. Hecho esto, se dedicó a repudiar las enseñanzas del catecismo y la conveniencia del bautismo de las criaturas. Sin saber que seguía paso a paso el proceso de secularización de las distintas herejías protestantes, la emprendió luego contra el dogma de la Virginidad de María y la Inmaculada Concepción de Jesús, que recibió sus parrafadas más hirientes. Liquidado el tema, se ensañó con la Santísima Trinidad: aborreció su absurdo lógico-matemático, se burló de la idea de consustancialidad o dependencia de uno respecto de los otros dos (“Parece una mesa de borrachos, donde ninguno puede irse y nadie puede quedarse solo”), detestó la relación entre el Padre y el Hijo –a uno lo comparó con Odiseo ausente y al otro con una Penélope llorona-, continuó repudiando el dogma de la resurrección de Jesús y por último decidió emprenderla con el mismo Dios, entero o en partes. Según su análisis, y basándose en la teoría de que el Universo es inmanente y no trascendente y que su diseño es de una simpleza tal que descarta la preexistencia de mente alguna, aseguró que Dios no existía y que de existir tenía que ser un idiota. Pero Yahvé, que había leído sus escritos y tiene gustos barrocos, de un golpe de su mano esponjosa lo arrojó al cielo para que observara las bellezas de la creación, estrella a estrella, galaxia a galaxia, forma a forma. Un espíritu vulgar y avaro intentaría en este punto calcular la medida de tiempo empleada, averiguar si fue una travesía instantánea o si nuestro teólogo de suburbios fundió la experiencia con el tiempo y recorrió la totalidad subido a la constante de la expansión cósmica -de haberse dado el segundo caso, todavía seguiría dando vueltas por allí. Pero lo cierto es que su viaje tuvo medida y en su transcurso conoció estrellas habitadas por sociedades de pájaros, estrellas repletas de máquinas que se empeñan en chocar contra paredes, estrellas que son proyecciones holográficas de un ombligo mocho, planetas de barro donde una lluvia negra se precipita sin pausa sobre mantos blancos que cuelgan rígidos como piedras hacia la altura, galaxias abarrotadas de planetas espejados donde bañistas retozan día y noche a la orilla de lagos de concreto y van soltando chillidos de alarma mientras se muerden las extremidades.
Al finalizar la visita, Dios lo regresó de nuevo a la tierra, pero a cambio de su don le arrancó la lengua. Privado de narrar lo visto, el zapatero comenzó a amasar plastilina, formando pequeñas esferas que pintaba de diversos colores y luego arrojaba a un arroyo de los márgenes. En el curso oscuro de esa corriente contaminada con efluvios cloacales y descargas clandestinas de desechos industriales, con esas bolitas que flotaban durante un instante y luego se hundían en la podredumbre, él recuperaba la experiencia y el sentido de lo vivido y anunciaba el nuevo orden de los mundos.
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His wife reminded him before she left him: With his talent, flair, and power of invention, he might have been a fashion designer, but his insistence on reforming others’ tastes condemned him to that hunched, secluded fate, bent over a rack of shoes in a little stall at the back of a commercial gallery in a lost neighborhood. She was right, of course, but what could he do about it? For the female clientele, footwear belongs to the art of elegance, which elevates effect above all other considerations, while he believed that style serves function, not vice versa. And so, as he repaired sandals and flats and stilettos and pointy-toed pumps and boots, he imposed the criteria of simplicity and comfort over luxury, thus effecting his own swift ruin. His various readings of obscure theologians showed him that simplicity is a laborious construction, and that true thought, the true way of working (at least in the terrain of faith), proceeds by addition rather than subtraction. All the same, he decided that the architecture of the heaven he wanted to build should be based on his methods of trimming down.
His simplifying approach would be universally applicable, but was especially pertinent to the Catholic Church, in whose doctrine his elders had educated him. Drawing on the sayings of the prophets of the Old Testament, he objected first to the ceremonial ostentation of papal elections and then to their very necessity. Having done so, he then dedicated himself to repudiating the teachings of the catechism and the advisability of infant baptism. Unaware that he was following, step by step, the secularization process of different Protestant heresies, he then launched an attack on the dogma of Mary’s Virginity and the Immaculate Conception of Jesus, which received his most offensive sermons. And having settled this topic, he showed no mercy to the Holy Trinity. He loathed its logical-mathematical absurdity, he mocked the idea of consubstantiality or dependence of one on the other two (“like a table of drunks where nobody can leave and nobody can manage on his own”), he detested the relation between Father and Son—comparing the former to absent Odysseus and the latter to weeping Penelope—and he continued by repudiating the dogma of Jesus’s resurrection, before he finally decided to take up arms against God himself, as a whole or divided into parts. According to his analysis, and based on the theory that the Universe is immanent and not transcendent and that its simple-minded design rules out the preexistence of any mind, he claimed that God did not exist, and if He did exist, must be an idiot. But Yahweh, who read his writings and has a taste for the baroque, cast him into the sky with a blow of his cloudy hand, so he might observe the beauties of creation, star by star, galaxy by galaxy, form by form. A vulgar and miserly spirit, in this situation, would try to calculate the time spent on the voyage, to see if it was instantaneous or if our theologian of the suburbs fused experience with time, traveling through the totality raised to the power of the constant of cosmic expansion—if the second case were true, he might even now still be journeying. What’s beyond a doubt is that his trip lasted for at least some time, and during its course he came to know of a great many things: stars inhabited by societies of birds, stars throbbing with machines hell-bent on crashing against their walls, stars that were holographic projections of a cut-off umbilical cord; planets of mud where black rain falls without cease upon vertical white blankets, hanging rigid as stone and extending toward the heights; galaxies crammed with shining planets where bathers frolic day and night on the shores of concrete lakes, releasing alarmed shrieks as they bite at each other’s limbs.
When the visit was over, God sent him back to Earth, but in exchange for the gift, pulled out his tongue. Deprived of the ability to narrate what he had seen, the shoemaker began to knead modeling clay to make little spheres, which he then painted with different colors and cast into a gutter on the outskirts of town. In the dark course of that current, contaminated with outpourings of sewage and clandestine discharges of industrial waste, those little balls floated for a moment and then sank into rot, as he recovered the experience and meaning of what he had lived and presaged a new order of worlds.
Daniel Guebel has published over twenty-five books, including novels, short stories, and plays. He won Argentina’s National Literature Prize as well as the Argentine Academy of Letters’ novel prize. The Jewish Son won the Buenos Aires Book Fair’s award for literary criticism.
Jessica Sequeira is a writer, editor, and translator living in Santiago, Chile. She is the author of A Luminous History of the Palm, Golden Jackal / Chacal Dorado, A Furious Oyster, Rhombus and Oval, and Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age, and has translated many Latin American authors.
