Nineteen seventy-eight came and went, and Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians did not appear. Another year slipped by, and then another year, and still there was no book.
By 1981 , the publishing company was on its last legs . The editor I had originally worked with was long gone, and it was difficult for me to find out any information. That year, or perhaps the year afte,r that, or perhaps even the year after that (it all blurs in my mind now), the company finally went under. Someone called to tell me that the rights to the book had been sold to another publisher. I called that publisher, and they told me, yes, they were planning to bring out the book. Another year went by, and nothing happened. I called again, and the person I had talked to the previous year no longer worked for the company. I talked to someone else, and that person told me that the company had no plans to publish Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. I asked for the manuscript back, but no one could find it. No one had even heard of it. For all intents and purposes, it was as if the translation had never existed.
For the next dozen years, that was where the matter stood. Pierre Clastres was dead, my translation had disappeared, and the entire project had collapsed into a black hole of oblivion. This past summer (1996), I finished writing a book entitled Hand to Mouth , an autobiographical essay about money. I was planning to include this story in the narrative (because of my failure to make a copy of the manuscript, because of the scene with the publisher in his office), but when the moment came to tell it, I lost heart and couldn 't bring myself to put the words down on paper. It was all too sad, I felt , and I couldn't see any purpose in recounting such a bleak, miserable saga.
Then, two or three months after I finished my book, something extraordinary happened. About a year before, I had accepted an invitation to go to San Francisco to appear in the City Arts and Lectures Series at the Herbst Theater. The event was scheduled for October 1996, and when the moment came I climbed onto a plane and flew to San Francisco as promised. After my business on stage was finished, I was supposed to sit in the lobby and sign copies of my books. The Herbst is a large theatre with many seats, and the line in the lobby was therefore quite long. Among all those people waiting for the dubious privilege of having me write my name in one of my novels, there was someone I recognized - a young man I had met once before, the friend of a friend. This young man happens to be a passionate collector of books, a bloodhound for first editions and rare, out-of-the-way items, the kind of bibliographic detective who will think nothing of spending an afternoon in a dusty cellar sifting through boxes of discarded books in the hope of finding one small treasure. He smiled, shook my hand, and then thrust a set of bound galleys at me. It had a red paper cover, and until that moment, I had never seen a copy of it before. "What's this?" he said. "I never heard of it. " And there it was, suddenly sitting in my hands: the uncorrected proofs of my long-lost translation. In the big scheme of things, this probably wasn't such an astonishing event. For me, however, in my own little scheme of things, it was overwhelming. My hands started to tremble as I held the book. I was so stunned, so confused, that I was scarcely able to speak.
The proofs had been found in a remainder bin at a second-hand bookstore, and the young man had paid five dollars for them. As I look at them now, I note with a certain grim fascination that the pub date announced on the cover is April 1981. For a translation completed in 1976 or 1977, it was, truly, an agonizingly slow ordeal.
If Pierre Clastres were alive today, the discovery of this lost book would be a perfect happy ending. But he isn 't alive, and the brief surge of joy and incredulity I experienced in the atrium of the Herbst Theatre has by now dissipated into a deep, mournful ache. How rotten that the world should pull such tricks on us . How rotten that a person with so much to offer the world should die so young.
No matter that the world described in it has long since vanished, that the tiny group of people the author lived with in 1963 and 1964 have disappeared from the face of the earth. No matter that the author has vanished as well. The book he wrote is still with us, and that is nothing less than a victory, a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate. At least there is that to be thankful for. At least there is consolation in the thought that Pierre Clastres' book has survived.
Pierre Clastres' Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is to be published with this preface later this year.
BRICK/6