Outsider Everywhere

The scene is something like this: one leaden winter morning the Chrobry, a luxury liner that set sail in Poland and has been travelling across the Atlantic Ocean for over twenty days, approaches Buenos Aires. The passengers include diplomats, businessmen, politicians and writers invited by the shipping company to cover the vessel’s maiden voyage. They include Witold Gombrowicz, a young avant-garde writer with piercing eyes and a disdainful grimace. From the estuary of the River Plate, the city looks mysterious, almost smudged, its lines seeming less refined than those of Paris but more modern than Warsaw’s. The passengers disembark to discover this distant country, cold and damp, their hands in their pockets. Beyond the new port’s small promenade Retiro, the Torre de los Ingleses and Calle Florida appear. Some go back onto the ship, where they are met with multiple receptions laid on for ambassadors and personalities from the Polish and Argentinian community. But not Gombrowicz. He keeps walking. He returns to the ship to sleep before going out again. Over several days, he exhausts those streets, those faces, those features of the men and women of the South. Something opens. Or breaks, perhaps. Something becomes detached.

Much later, in Trans-Atlantyk, he will write: ‘I was looking as if through a Telescope, and, seeing Strangeness everywhere, Unfamiliarity and Puzzle.’

As the warm welcomes, teas and receptions continue, news comes in from across the ocean. The tension between the major countries is rising. Germany and the Soviet Union sign their non-aggression pact. War seems imminent. The Chrobry is ordered to return to Europe with all its crew. Gombrowicz goes to the port, puts his luggage on the ship, says his goodbyes and boards. But when the alarm sounds, indicating that the ship is ready to depart, he acts on impulse. Carrying his two cases, he quickly descends the gangway onto the dock. He will not return to Poland, to the war that seems so likely. He has 200 dollars and just a few changes of clothes. He hardly knows anyone. And no one knows him.

Some say it was 20th, others 21st, others 22nd August 1939. He himself gave different dates in his Diary, in the book of interviews called A Kind of Testament and in the novel Trans-Atlantyk. The story, which he also told in person to anyone who would listen during his time in Argentina, is that the outbreak of war anchored him to this distant land. But that wasn’t exactly the case. The anchor was dropped on impulse a few days after the war started.

Much later, he wrote in his Diary: ‘I don’t know if I will be speaking lucidly enough when I say that from the first, I fell in love with the catastrophe that I hated, that, after all, also ruined me. My nature told me to greet it as an opportunity to join with inferiority in darkness.’

Later still, he said that walking off the ship that afternoon holding his two cases, trying to understand what he had just done, was the most tragic moment of  his life.