The Past

The Past, by Argentine novelist Alan Pauls, is about obsessive love and self-destruction, and is a strange, unsettling read.

Protagonist Rimini is good looking and easy going; his partner Sofia is eccentric and strong. Their relationship seems inviolable and eternal to their friends, but 'occasionally Rimini faltered. He wavered, ran away from Sofia. He was enraged at his own weakness.' They split after twelve years, but Sofia cannot accept that they are no longer a couple, 'two people like us cannot separate.' She writes Rimini letters and leaves endless messages on his answering machine about sorting through all the photos she has of their time together, but he is scared to look at them 'for fear of being sucked into an emotional whirlpool and drowning in it.' Sofia’s presence becomes ominous, almost like that of a stalker.

Then Rimini meets Vera, a sexy, wild, volatile young woman who moves in with him. He is a professional translator with a steady flow of work. All seems well. But the past clings to Rimini like a limpet. When Vera is at her shop, he spends the day alone in the apartment and alternately translates, snorts cocaine and masturbates. 'Cocaine acted as a brutal piston that cleared his head of everything there had been in it the last time he had taken the drug the previous evening.' Vera makes jealous scenes and becomes increasingly paranoid.  

During a university lecture by a visiting academic star, Rimini abandons Vera after meeting and seducing Carmen, a fellow interpreter. They move in together and have a baby boy, Lucio. In this relationship Carmen is the breadwinner as Rimini’s mind begins to falter, blanking out words, thereby destroying his ability to translate. Earlier, Sofia had undermined Rimini’s relationship with Vera; now she does the same to his relationship with Carmen. Sofia kidnaps his little son, later returning the toddler with a letter: 'Lucio is new and adorable … I had to keep something of yours….' Carmen divorces Rimini and, with the help of her clever lawyer, bans him from going anywhere near their child.

Rimini’s odyssey takes a hellish turn now that he has lost everyone and everything. He becomes a recluse. His father’s personal trainer who 'is used to dealing with fallen people' comes to the rescue. Rimini gets a job as a tennis coach at a chic tennis club, where he services  one of his wealthy fifty-something clients like a gigolo: 'Nancy seemed to have suffered from that kind of thorough scraping that surgeons sometimes give to women’s infected uteruses. Not her body, whose vitality, despite being very forced, was genuine enough, but her soul, which some monstrous knife (far worse than any surgeon’s implement) seemed to have scraped every corner of. She was like a bare pouch, with nothing inside, condemned to a relentless aging process. And since she had no secrets, nothing she could keep from the surface of the world, the only thing Nancy could do was multiply: she replaced discretion, reticence and a sense of shame with a logic of greed and possession…'

Rimini spots a small painting in Nancy’s bathroom. It is by Riltse, a pioneer of “Sick Art,” whom Rimini and Sofia had known and revered. Rimini cannot help himself and he steals it. He is rescued from prison by Sofia and through this act she finally gets him back.

Throughout the novel, Rimini has no sense of himself and just drifts from one fuck to another, clueless, lost and prey to his desires. Buenos Aires provides a bewitching backdrop to a cast of soulless characters who are all weighed down by the past, to a greater or lesser degree. There is a dark Pulp Fiction-style humour to certain scenes — such as when Sofia’s father dies after an S&M session with his long-time whipping mistress, or when Rimini evades the coke-fuelled advances of a repulsive TV celebrity singer. The language in the novel is extraordinary and convoluted, sucking the reader into a maze — Nick Caistor has pulled off a feat of translation, duly recognised by his being awarded the 2008 Valle-Inclán Prize.

A plum pudding of a book stuffed with literary and artistic references, The Past is utterly absorbing and addictive.