Doppelgängers
Silvia Prieto, Alina Reyes, and the doubling of the self in the age of social media
Silvia Prieto – a 1999 comedy by one of my favourite Argentine writers and directors, Martín Rejtman – tells the story of a young porteño woman who one day resolves she needs a change of life. It is always hard to summarise one of Rejtman’s films without engaging in an exercise of enumeration. And this is generally a long enumeration, as his films (as much as his short stories) are relentless, always escaping from audience and reader in a vertiginous forward flight. Here it should suffice to say that the change Silvia manages isn’t really meaningful; that it entails several banalities like buying a canary that doesn’t sing, taking several odd jobs, manically chopping chicken on a chopping board, and stealing someone’s suit jacket.
The only real life-changing event in the film comes when Silvia learns of the existence of another Silvia Prieto. Her first impulse is to murder her. Instead she ends up meeting her and taking a bottle of shampoo as a present to mark the occasion, as if this was the most normal thing to do. And perhaps it is; I don’t know. To make your mind up watch the film when you have a chance. And read Rejtman too — he is criminally under-translated into English but hopefully this is something that will change soon1.
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More than twenty years ago, I used to work in the call centre of a telephone company in Argentina. One of the first things I did, after logging in for the first time, was what everyone in my place would have done: I looked for my name in the database2. I was convinced that I was the only Fernando Sdrigotti, because my surname is quite rare in Argentina (and elsewhere).
To my surprise and disappointment I found another Fernando Sdrigotti, living in the same city as I. Much like Silvia Prieto I felt wronged. One of the few positive things of going through life with my name and surname — a sense of uniqueness — was cancelled then and there. I wrote the number down (no need to write down the name), and as Silvia I later called my doppelgänger.
Unlike Silvia I hanged up before he answered. I never considered meeting him and taking a bottle of shampoo to mark the occasion. But I might have considered murdering him.
“Lejana” — distant. That’s the name of a story by Julio Cortázar, published in his first (and best book), Bestiario (1951). To the best of my knowledge the story was translated into English only once, by the great Paul Blackburn, with the title “The Distances”, and published in 1963, in a book called Blow Up and Other Stories, which is a collection compiled from Bestiario, Final del Juego (1956) and Las armas secretas (1959)3. Please be warned that if you haven’t read the story already I will spoil it for you. So perhaps go and read it now, come back later, as this piece ins’t going anywhere, literally and metaphorically.
“Lejana” tells the story of Alina Reyes, a wealthy woman from Buenos Aires who suffers from insomnia and concocts palindromes and anagrams to keep herself entertained at night. After the anagram “Alina Reyes es la reina y...” (Alina Reyes is the queen and...), she arrives at the possibility of an existencial palindrome, a human antipode: an Alina Reyes that isn’t the queen — a poor and suffering woman living somewhere else. Through Alina’s diaries we learn that this woman lives in Budapest, at least that’s what our Alina Reyes feels.
A strange obsessive connection develops between Alina and Alina until Alina Reyes — recently married — travels to Budapest with her husband. When she arrives at Budapest the narration changes from first person (present) to third person (past). And soon we learn how Alina goes for a walk alone one day and meets a woman on a bridge, yes, her double. They hug and the story ends with Alina Reyes watching a woman walk away, while she’s left shuddering in the cold.
The woman she watches walk away is Alina Reyes4.
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I forgot about my doppelgänger for some years, until someone told me they had befriended a Fernando Sdrigotti on Facebook, but that this man wasn’t me. I looked for him and this is how I reconnected with my doppelgänger, now living in another city (coincidentally the city where my father grew up), playing guitar in a cover band (this could have been me as well), a bit older than me, but not necessarily that older either — in many ways we could have been the same person. Now safe in another continent, distant, I took courage and messaged Fernando Sdrigotti on Facebook, explaining that we shared a name and that I was a writer living in London, that I knew of his existence from that call centre database a long time ago, and that it would be good to get in touch, connect, as we both shared a very uncommon name. A couple of days later he replied to my message with a "how interesting…". And then he disappeared into the virtual nebula, blocking me in the process.
Everybody knows that upon meeting one's doppelgänger something terrible will occur — one might die, the selves might switch, the sense of uniqueness might dissolve, and who knows what other dark possibilities there are. I can’t blame my doppelgänger for avoiding me like the pest. And to be fair, if a self-appointed writer reached out to me unsolicited I would block him too. Whether we share a name or not.
Fernando Sdrigotti... Drifting tornadoes... Isodont redrafting... Doritos fringed tan... Disintegrator fond… Fernando Sdrigotti is forgotten and...
I wrote about Martín Rejtman’s work in Under the Influence, a book of essays edited by Joanna Walsh, and published by Gorse in Ireland.
These were of course the days before you could Google yourself when you need to figure out whether you exist or not
Cortázar’s “Axólotl” plays with similar themes. I won’t spoil that one for you; not totally. You can read Paul Blackburn’s translation here.
Very nice, Fernando. Intensely readable. It has structure, literary reference, plot, and mystery (doubles as a mysterious affront to identity). Have you checked to see if there are more Fernando Sdrigottis? One is bad enough. There are multiple Douglas Glovers. One is a well known cinematographer. One is dead and missing in the Vietnam war. One is on a sex offender list.