Decreation, by Roberto Segrov

Intro by Rick Harsch

I wrote a book called The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas. Phillip Freedenberg wrote me back when that was how you had to order books from corona\samizdat. He wanted me to send him a copy of Eddie Vegas. He soon told me he was going to write a book about a man waiting for that book, mine, to arrive. I said, good, he said, well, and he wrote like a madman for six months, creating America and the Cult of the Cactus Books, which became a sort of creature that sought out suitable clients for its own cult. The book went to Colombia, where it found Adolfo Villafuerte, some say because he was at the time the tallest writer in Bogota. Villafuerte knew that there was some kinship between Cactus Boots and his friend, Roberto Segrov, particularly because of Segrov’s recently published ‘metafictional’ Anatomía del Abismo. He arranged to order a copy of Cactus for Segrov.

This led to a certain atomic relationship between the two writers of Bogota and a vein of literature running through Buffalo, New York, and Izola, Slovenia. Corona\samizdat published a novel each by Villafuerte and Segrov in Spanish. Because Villafuerte’s novel, Entre Lunas, was much shorter, it was the one that attracted a translator. Soon it will be published in English. Soon I will send Segrov an unopened box of copies of Anatomía del Abismo. Copies, I say. Books that reach people are spoken of as singular items. Segrov must never refer to Anatomía del Abismo as a book. It remains in the plural.

Because of his height, perhaps, it is known that Villafuerte was in the United States, specifically New York, for about half a year. Segrov remains sequestered in Bogota. That is the end of the story I have to record here.

Disembodiment appears to be both a quality of Segrov and a concept that has seized his writing mechanism, which he has willed to a specialist in performing autopsies on writers who we have, I presume, all more or less become aware of, a ghostly figure well over one hundred years old, who emerged from the jungles of Bogota some time after the Enlightenment to learn various sciences and who knows what to look for within the corpse of a writer.

Remaining in Bogota, Segrov nonetheless inserted his fictional habits—take that both ways—into my life, as well as the environs where I allow my life to roam—centered in Izola, Slovenia. He wrote a story in Spanish, that awoke one day in English, and leapt like a certain mythical batlike creature from Indian literature called a vetala--which hangs upside down from a tree and inhabits bodies under various conditions, which may account for the events described herein—I say it leapt like a vetala onto the cinema screen where it was captured in a fragment that appears to have been but the first two pages of a story that mocks an unfinished film called Portrait of a Man Drowning. The Story was called “Portrait of a Drowning Man”. Yet the story bled into a fragment of its inherent multiplicity. In the story, a Segrov-like figure (can the man hosting a vetala be anything more than suspected of doing so?) dreams of an Izola at night and wakes in the morning to begin drawing a map of a town on his bedroom wall. At some point he may recognize it as Izola, where he has never been. His wife takes a naïve interest, suspecting nothing, and tells him it must be a coastal city. In the film, Segrov disappears. It’s a short film, which may explain that.

What we have here in this book, is the full story “Portrait of a Drowning Man”, at the end of this book of short stories. We have no answers otherwise, and fewer trails to follow once we have examined “Portrait of a Drowning Man”. We are in contact with Segrov, but we have no idea of his aspect, his essence, his raison d’etre, if he has one. I never work hard at exegesis: Segrov appears to have at some point had something we can only understand as similar to a laboratory accident that has had a disturbing outcome, leaving him altered by fraught alchemy to become oversaturated with disembodiment.

I’ve just received his manuscript of short stories, that I believe is titled Decreation. At the same time, as soon as I typed Roberto Segrov’s Decreation, I realized that this introduction could only be this short story, and it would be a refusal to investigate his decreation.

You will see why when you read his stories. I have just finished his 7^th, 8^th, maybe 9^th, story, and I was unable to go on, fearing that dislocation precedes disembodiment and uncertain what has become of Segrov. A vetala, he has leapt from the page and steered me into what I will call his book of concerns (I nearly wrote fascinating concerns, but my intention is not to please him…Nor is it to appease myself). The concerns, I will hesitate to say, are very much a distillation of a century and a half of writing that have colonized me—watch for the results of my autopsy—from Latin America over my decades of reading. His eyes are skewed like Onetti’s; like Borges, he has a simple map in his hand but lost his glasses, both pair, the ones he uses for finding his glasses are not properly lost, rather he stepped on them; he contains the dying Melancholy Ruffian and a sedated Erdosain, gifts from Roberto Arlt. He has Cortazar’s fictional lope (while Villafuerte has his height).

I rarely stop reading from excess of amazement, but for readers who prefer last lines before the autopsy, I will admit that such was the case just now.