Myself with Others: Selected Essays

How I Started to Write

I

I was born on November 11, 1928, under the sign I would have chosen, Scorpio, and on a date shared with Dostoevsky, Crommelynck, and Vonnegut. My mother was rushed from a steaming-hot movie house in those days before Colonel Buendía took his son to discover ice in the tropics. She was seeing King Vidor’s version of La Bohème with John Gilbert and Lillian Gish. Perhaps the pangs of my birth were provoked by this anomaly: a silent screen version of Puccini’s opera. Since then, the operatic and the cinematographic have had a tug-of-war with my words, as if expecting the Scorpio of fiction to rise from silent music and blind images.

All this, let me add to clear up my biography, took place in the sweltering heat of Panama City, where my father was beginning his diplomatic career as an attaché to the Mexican legation. (In those days, embassies were established only in the most important capitals — no place where the mean average year-round temperature was perpetually in the nineties.) Since my father was a convinced Mexican nationalist, the problem of where I was to be born had to be resolved under the sign, not of Scorpio, but of the Eagle and the Serpent. The Mexican legation, however, though it had extraterritorial rights, did not have even a territorial midwife; and the Minister, a fastidious bachelor from Sinaloa by the name of Ignacio Norris, who resembled the poet Quevedo as one pince-nez resembles another, would have none of me suddenly appearing on the legation parquet, even if the Angel Gabriel had announced me as a future Mexican writer of some, albeit debatable, merit.

So if I could not be born in a fictitious, extraterritorial Mexico, neither would I be born in that even more fictitious extension of the United States of America, the Canal Zone, where, naturally, the best hospitals were. So, between two territorial fictions — the Mexican legation, the Canal Zone — and a mercifully silent close-up of John Gilbert, I arrived in the nick of time at the Gorgas Hospital in Panama City at eleven that evening.

The problem of my baptism then arose. As if the waters of the two neighboring oceans touching each other with the iron fingertips of the canal were not enough, I had to undergo a double ceremony: my religious baptism took place in Panama, because my mother, a devout Roman Catholic, demanded it with as much urgency as Tristram Shandy’s parents, although through less original means. My national baptism took place a few months later in Mexico City, where my father, an incorrigible Jacobin and priest-eater to the end, insisted that I be registered in the civil rolls established by Benito Juárez. Thus, I appear as a native of Mexico City for all legal purposes, and this anomaly further illustrates a central fact of my life and my writing: I am Mexican by will and by imagination.

All this came to a head in the 1930s. By then, my father was counselor of the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and I grew up in the vibrant world of the American thirties, more or less between the inauguration of Citizen Roosevelt and the interdiction of Citizen Kane. When I arrived here, Dick Tracy had just met Tess Truehart. As I left, Clark Kent was meeting Lois Lane. You are what you eat. You are also the comics you peruse as a child.

At home, my father made me read Mexican history, study Mexican geography, and understand the names, the dreams and defeats of Mexico: a nonexistent country, I then thought, invented by my father to nourish my infant imagination with yet another marvelous fiction: a land of Oz with a green cactus road, a landscape and a soul so different from those of the United States that they seemed a fantasy.

A cruel fantasy: the history of Mexico was a history of crushing defeats, whereas I lived in a world, that of my D.C. public school, which celebrated victories, one victory after another, from Yorktown to New Orleans to Chapultepec to Appomattox to San Juan Hill to Belleau Wood: had this nation never known defeat? Sometimes the names of United States victories were the same as the names of Mexico’s defeats and humiliations: Monterrey. Veracruz. Chapultepec. Indeed: from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. In the map of my imagination, as the United States expanded westward, Mexico contracted southward. Miguel Hidalgo, the father of Mexican independence, ended up with his head on exhibit on a lance at the city gates of Chihuahua. Imagine George and Martha beheaded at Mount Vernon.

To the south, sad songs, sweet nostalgia, impossible desires. To the north, self-confidence, faith in progress, boundless optimism. Mexico, the imaginary country, dreamed of a painful past; the United States, the real country, dreamed of a happy future.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For a Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness — in this, as in many other things, we are quite Italian: furberia, roguish slyness, and the cult of appearances, la bella figura, are Italianate traits present everywhere in Latin America: Rome, more than Madrid, is our spiritual capital in this sense.

For me, as a child, the United States seemed a world where intelligence was equated with energy, zest, enthusiasm. The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you. The United States is a world full of cheerleaders, prize-giving, singin’ in the rain: the baton twirler, the Oscar awards, the musical comedies cannot be repeated elsewhere; in Mexico, the Hollywood statuette would come dipped in poisoned paint; in France, Gene Kelly would constantly stop in his steps to reflect: Je danse, donc je suis.

Many things impressed themselves on me during those years. The United States — would you believe it? — was a country where things worked, where nothing ever broke down: trains, plumbing, roads, punctuality, personal security seemed to function perfectly, at least at the eye level of a young Mexican diplomat’s son living in a residential hotel on Washington’s Sixteenth Street, facing Meridian Hill Park, where nobody was then mugged and where our superb furnished seven-room apartment cost us 110 pre-inflation dollars a month. Yes, in spite of all the problems, the livin’ seemed easy during those long Tidewater summers when I became perhaps the first and only Mexican to prefer grits to guacamole. I also became the original Mexican Calvinist: an invisible taskmaster called Puritanical Duty shadows my every footstep: I shall not deserve anything unless I work relentlessly for it, with iron discipline, day after day. Sloth is sin, and if I do not sit at my typewriter every day at 8 a.m. for a working day of seven to eight hours, I will surely go to hell. No siestas for me, alas and alack and hélas and ay-ay-ay: how I came to envy my Latin brethren, unburdened by the Protestant work ethic, and why must I, to this very day, read the complete works of Hermann Broch and scribble in my black notebook on a sunny Mexican beach, instead of lolling the day away and waiting for the coconuts to fall?

But the United States in the thirties went far beyond my personal experience. The nation that Tocqueville had destined to share dominance over half the world realized that, in effect, only a continental state could be a modern state; in the thirties, the U.S.A. had to decide what to do with its new worldwide power, and Franklin Roosevelt taught us to believe that the first thing was for the United States to show that it was capable of living up to its ideals. I learned then — my first political lesson — that this is your true greatness, not, as was to be the norm in my lifetime, material wealth, not arrogant power misused against weaker peoples, not ignorant ethnocentrism burning itself out in contempt for others.

As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination, and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats. It was the impression of a country identified with its own highest principles: political democracy, economic well-being, and faith in its human resources, especially in that most precious of all capital, the renewable wealth of education and research.

Franklin Roosevelt, then, restored America’s self-respect in this essential way, not by macho posturing. I saw the United States in the thirties lift itself by its bootstraps from the dead dust of Oklahoma and the gray lines of the unemployed in Detroit, and this image of health was reflected in my daily life, in my reading of Mark Twain, in the images of movies and newspapers, in the North American capacity for mixing fluffy illusion and hard-bitten truth, self-celebration and self-criticism: the madcap heiresses played by Carole Lombard coexisted with the Walker Evans photographs of hungry, old-at-thirty migrant mothers, and the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire did not silence the heavy stomp of the boots of Tom Joad.

My school — a public school, nonconfessional and coeducational — reflected these realities and their basically egalitarian thrust. I believed in the democratic simplicity of my teachers and chums, and above all I believed I was, naturally, in a totally unselfconscious way, a part of that world. It is important, at all ages and in all occupations, to be “popular” in the United States; I have known no other society where the values of “regularity” are so highly prized. I was popular, I was “regular.” Until a day in March — March 18, 1938. On that day, a man from another world, the imaginary country of my childhood, the President of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, nationalized the holdings of foreign oil companies. The headlines in the North American press denounced the “communist” government of Mexico and its “red” president; they demanded the invasion of Mexico in the sacred name of private property, and Mexicans, under international boycott, were invited to drink their oil.

Instantly, surprisingly, I became a pariah in my school. Cold shoulders, aggressive stares, epithets, and sometimes blows. Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency. This was not reserved for me or for Mexico: at about the same time, an extremely brilliant boy of eleven arrived from Germany. He was a Jew and his family had fled from the Nazis. I shall always remember his face, dark and trembling, his aquiline nose and deep-set, bright eyes with their great sadness; the sensitivity of his hands and the strangeness of it all to his American companions. This young man, Hans Berliner, had a brilliant mathematical mind and he walked and saluted like a Central European; he wore short pants and high woven stockings, Tyrolean jackets and an air of displaced courtesy that infuriated the popular, regular, feisty, knickered, provincial, Depression-era little sons of bitches at Henry Cooke Public School on Thirteenth Street N.W.

The shock of alienation and the shock of recognition are sometimes one and the same. What was different made others afraid, less of what was different than of themselves, of their own incapacity to recognize themselves in the alien.

I discovered that my father’s country was real. And that I belonged to it, Mexico was my identity yet I lacked an identity; Hans Berliner suffered more than I — headlines from Mexico are soon forgotten; another great issue becomes all-important for a wonderful ten days’ media feast — yet he had an identity as a Central European Jew. I do not know what became of him. Over the years, I have always expected to see him receive a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences. Surely, if he lived, he integrated himself into North American society. I had to look at the photographs of President Cárdenas: he was a man of another lineage; he did not appear in the repertory of glossy, seductive images of the salable North American world. He was a mestizo, Spanish and Indian, with a faraway, green, and liquid look in his eyes, as if he were trying to remember a mute and ancient past.

Was that past mine as well? Could I dream the dreams of the country suddenly revealed in a political act as something more than a demarcation of frontiers on a map or a hillock of statistics in a yearbook? I believe I then had the intuition that I would not rest until I came to grips myself with that common destiny which depended upon still another community: the community of time. The United States had made me believe that we live only for the future; Mexico, Cárdenas, the events of 1938, made me understand that only in an act of the present can we make present the past as well as the future: to be a Mexican was to identify a hunger for being, a desire for dignity rooted in many forgotten centuries and in many centuries yet to come, but rooted here, now, in the instant, in the vigilant time of Mexico I later learned to understand in the stone serpents of Teotihuacán and in the polychrome angels of Oaxaca.

Of course, as happens in childhood, all these deep musings had no proof of existence outside an act that was, more than a prank, a kind of affirmation. In 1939, my father took me to see a film at the old RKO — Keith in Washington. It was called Man of Conquest and it starred Richard Dix as Sam Houston. When Dix/Houston proclaimed the secession of the Republic of Texas from Mexico, I jumped on the theater seat and proclaimed on my own and from the full height of my nationalist ten years, “Viva México! Death to the gringos!” My embarrassed father hauled me out of the theater, but his pride in me could not resist leaking my first rebellious act to the Washington Star. So I appeared for the first time in a newspaper and became a child celebrity for the acknowledged ten-day span. I read Andy Warhol avant l’air-brush: Everyone shall be famous for at least five minutes.

In the wake of my father’s diplomatic career, I traveled to Chile and entered fully the universe of the Spanish language, of Latin American politics and its adversities. President Roosevelt had resisted enormous pressures to apply sanctions and even invade Mexico to punish my country for recovering its own wealth. Likewise, he did not try to destabilize the Chilean radicals, communists, and socialists democratically elected to power in Chile under the banners of the Popular Front. In the early forties, the vigor of Chile’s political life was contagious: active unions, active parties, electoral campaigns all spoke of the political health of this, the most democratic of Latin American nations. Chile was a politically verbalized country. It was no coincidence that it was also the country of the great Spanish-American poets Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda.

I only came to know Neruda and became his friend many years later. This King Midas of poetry would write, in his literary testament rescued from a gutted house and a nameless tomb, a beautiful song to the Spanish language. The Conquistadors, he said, took our gold, but they left us their gold: they left us our words. Neruda’s gold, I learned in Chile, was the property of all. One afternoon on the beach at Lota in southern Chile, I saw the miners as they came out, mole-like, from their hard work many feet under the sea, extracting the coal of the Pacific Ocean. They sat around a bonfire and sang, to guitar music, a poem from Neruda’s Canto General. I told them that the author would be thrilled to know that his poem had been set to music.

What author? they asked me in surprise. For them, Neruda’s poetry had no author, it came from afar, it had always been sung, like Homer’s. It was the poetry, as Croce said of the Iliad, “d’un popolo intero poetante,” of an entire poetizing people. It was the document of the original identity of poetry and history.

I learned in Chile that Spanish could be the language of free men. I was also to learn in my lifetime, in Chile in 1973, the fragility of both our language and our freedom when Richard Nixon, unable to destroy American democracy, merrily helped to destroy Chilean democracy, the same thing Leonid Brezhnev had done in Czechoslovakia.

An anonymous language, a language that belongs to us all, as Neruda’s poem belonged to those miners on the beach, yet a language that can be kidnapped, impoverished, sometimes jailed, sometimes murdered. Let me summarize this paradox: Chile offered me and the other writers of my generation in Santiago both the essential fragility of a cornered language, Spanish, and the protection of the Latin of our times, the lingua franca of the modern world, the English language. At the Grange School, under the awesome beauty of the Andes, José Donoso and Jorge Edwards, Roberto Torretti, the late Luis Alberto Heyremans, and myself, by then all budding amateurs, wrote our first exercises in literature within this mini-Britannia. We all ran strenuous cross-country races, got caned from time to time, and recuperated while reading Swinburne; and we were subjected to huge doses of rugby, Ruskin, porridge for breakfast, and a stiff upper lip in military defeats. But when Montgomery broke through at El Alamein, the assembled school tossed caps in the air and hip-hip-hoorayed to death. In South America, clubs were named after George Canning and football teams after Lord Cochrane; no matter that English help in winning independence led to English economic imperialism, from oil in Mexico to railways in Argentina. There was a secret thrill in our hearts: our Spanish conquerors had been beaten by the English; the defeat of Philip II’s invincible Armada compensated for the crimes of Cortés, Pizarro, and Valdivia. If Britain was an empire, at least she was a democratic one.

In Washington, I had begun writing a personal magazine in English, with my own drawings, book reviews, and epochal bits of news. It consisted of a single copy, penciled and crayonned, and its circulation was limited to our apartment building. Then, at age fourteen, in Chile, I embarked on a more ambitious project, along with my schoolmate Roberto Torretti: a vast Caribbean saga that was to culminate in Haiti on a hilltop palace (Sans Souci?) where a black tyrant kept a mad French mistress in a garret. All this was set in the early nineteenth century and in the final scene (Shades of Jane Eyre! Reflections on Rebecca! Fans of Joan Fontaine!) the palace was to burn down, along with the world of slavery.

But where to begin? Torretti and I were, along with our literary fraternity at The Grange, avid readers of Dumas père. A self-respecting novel, in our view, had to start in Marseilles, in full view of the Chateau d’If and the martyrdom of Edmond Dantès. But we were writing in Spanish, not in French, and our characters had to speak Spanish. But, what Spanish? My Mexican Spanish, or Roberto’s Chilean Spanish? We came to a sort of compromise: the characters would speak like Andalusians. This was probably a tacit homage to the land from which Columbus sailed.

The Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros was then in Chile, painting the heroic murals of a school in the town of Chillán, which had been devastated by one of Chile’s periodic earthquakes. He had been implicated in a Stalinist attempt on Trotsky’s life in Mexico City and his commission to paint a mural in the Southern Cone was a kind of honorary exile. My father, as chargé d’affaires in Santiago, where his mission was to press the proudly independent Chileans to break relations with the Berlin — Rome Axis, rose above politics in the name of art and received Siqueiros regularly for lunch at the Mexican Embassy, which was a delirious mansion, worthy of William Beckford’s follies, built by an enriched Italian tailor called Fallabella, on Santiago’s broad Pedro de Valdivia Avenue.

This Gothic grotesque contained a Chinese room with nodding Buddhas, an office in what was known as Westminster Parliamentary style, Napoleonic lobbies, Louis XV dining rooms, Art Deco bedrooms, a Florentine loggia, many busts of Dante, and, finally, a vast Chilean vineyard in the back.

It was here, under the bulging Austral grapes, that I forced Siqueiros to sit after lunch and listen to me read our by then 400-page-long opus. As he drowsed off in the shade, I gained and lost my first reader. The novel, too, was lost; Torretti, who now teaches philosophy of science at the University of Puerto Rico, has no copy; Siqueiros is dead, and, besides, he slept right through my reading. I myself feel about it like Marlowe’s Barabbas about fornication: that was in another country, and, besides, the wench is dead. Yet the experience of writing this highly imitative melodrama was not lost on me; its international setting, its self-conscious search for language (or languages, rather) were part of a constant attempt at a breakthrough in my life. My upbringing taught me that cultures are not isolated, and perish when deprived of contact with what is different and challenging. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other. No culture, I believed unconsciously ever since then, and quite consciously today, retains its identity in isolation; identity is attained in contact, in contrast, in breakthrough.

Rhetoric, said William Butler Yeats, is the language of our fight with others; poetry is the name of our fight with ourselves. My passage from English to Spanish determined the concrete expression of what, before, in Washington, had been the revelation of an identity. I wanted to write and I wanted to write in order to show myself that my identity and my country were real: now, in Chile, as I started to scribble my first stories, even publishing them in school magazines, I learned that I must in fact write in Spanish.

The English language, after all, did not need another writer. The English language has always been alive and kicking, and if it ever becomes drowsy, there will always be an Irishman …

In Chile I came to know the possibilities of our language for giving wing to freedom and poetry. The impression was enduring; it links me forever to that sad and wonderful land. It lives within me, and it transformed me into a man who knows how to dream, love, insult, and write only in Spanish. It also left me wide open to an incessant interrogation: What happened to this universal language, Spanish, which after the seventeenth century ceased to be a language of life, creation, dissatisfaction, and personal power and became far too often a language of mourning, sterility, rhetorical applause, and abstract power? Where were the threads of my tradition, where could I, writing in mid-twentieth century in Latin America, find the direct link to the great living presences I was then starting to read, my lost Cervantes, my old Quevedo, dead because he could not tolerate one more winter, my Góngora, abandoned in a gulf of loneliness?

At sixteen I finally went to live permanently in Mexico and there I found the answers to my quest for identity and language, in the thin air of a plateau of stone and dust that is the negative Indian image of another highland, that of central Spain. But, between Santiago and Mexico City, I spent six wonderful months in Argentina. They were, in spite of their brevity, so important in this reading and writing of myself that I must give them their full worth. Buenos Aires was then, as always, the most beautiful, sophisticated, and civilized city in Latin America, but in the summer of 1944, as street pavements melted in the heat and the city smelled of cheap wartime gasoline, rawhide from the port, and chocolate éclairs from the confiterías, Argentina had experienced a succession of military coups: General Rawson had overthrown President Castillo of the cattle oligarchy, but General Ramírez had then overthrown Rawson, and now General Farrell had overthrown Ramírez. A young colonel called Juan Domingo Perón was General Farrell’s up-and-coming Minister of Labor, and I heard an actress by the name of Eva Duarte play the “great women of history” on Radio Belgrano. A stultifying hack novelist who went by the pen name Hugo Wast was assigned to the Ministry of Education under his real name, Martínez Zuviría, and brought all his anti-Semitic, undemocratic, pro-fascist phobias to the Buenos Aires high-school system, which I had suddenly been plunked into. Coming from the America of the New Deal, the ideals of revolutionary Mexico, and the politics of the Popular Front in Chile, I could not stomach this, rebelled, and was granted a full summer of wandering around Buenos Aires, free for the first time in my life, following my preferred tango orchestras — Canaro, D’Arienzo, and Anibal Troilo, alias Pichuco — as they played all summer long in the Renoir-like shade and light of the rivers and pavilions of El Tigre and Maldonado. Now the comics were in Spanish: Mutt and Jeff were Benitín y Eneas. But Argentina had its own comic-book imperialism: through the magazines Billiken and Patorozú, all the children of Latin America knew from the crib that “las Malvinas son Argentinas.”

Two very important things happened. First, I lost my virginity. We lived in an apartment building on the leafy corner of Callao and Quintana, and after 10 a.m. nobody was there except myself, an old and deaf Polish doorkeeper, and a beautiful Czech woman, aged thirty, whose husband was a film producer. I went up to ask her for her Sintonía, which was the radio guide of the forties, because I wanted to know when Evita was doing Joan of Arc. She said that had passed, but the next program was Madame Du Barry. I wondered if Madame Du Barry’s life was as interesting as Joan of Arc’s. She said it was certainly less saintly, and, besides, it could be emulated. How? I said innocently. And thereby my beautiful apprenticeship. We made each other very happy. And also very sad: this was not the liberty of love, but rather its libertine variety: we loved in hiding. I was too young to be a real sadist. So it had to end.

The other important thing was that I started reading Argentine literature, from the gaucho poems to Sarmiento’s Memories of Provincial Life to Cané’s Juvenilia to Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra to … to … to — and this was as good as discovering that Joan of Arc was also sexy — to Borges. I have never wanted to meet Borges personally because he belongs to that summer in B.A. He belongs to my personal discovery of Latin American literature.

II

Latin American extremes: if Cuba is the Andalusia of the New World, the Mexican plateau is its Castile. Parched and brown, inhabited by suspicious cats burnt too many times by foreign invasions, Mexico is the sacred zone of a secret hope: the gods shall return.

Mexican space is closed, jealous, and self-contained. In contrast, Argentine space is open and dependent on the foreign: migrations, exports, imports, words. Mexican space was vertically sacralized thousands of years ago. Argentine space patiently awaits its horizontal profanation.

I arrived on the Mexican highland from the Argentine pampa when I was sixteen years old. As I said, it was better to study in a country where the Minister of Education was Jaime Torres Bodet than in a country where he was Hugo Wast. This was not the only contrast, or the most important one. A land isolated by its very nature — desert, mountain, chasm, sea, jungle, fire, ice, fugitive mists, and a sun that never blinks — Mexico is a multi-level temple that rises abruptly, blind to horizons, an arrow that wounds the sky but refuses the dangerous frontiers of the land, the canyons, the sierras without a human footprint, whereas the pampa is nothing if not an eternal frontier, the very portrait of the horizon, the sprawling flatland of a latent expansion awaiting, like a passive lover, the vast and rich overflow from that concentration of the transitory represented by the commercial metropolis of Buenos Aires, what Ezequiel Martínez Estrada called Goliath’s head on David’s body.

A well-read teenager, I had tasted the literary culture of Buenos Aires, then dominated by Sur magazine and Victoria Ocampo’s enlightened mixture of the cattle oligarchy of the Pampas and the cultural clerisy of Paris, a sort of Argentinian cosmopolitanism. It then became important to appreciate the verbal differences between the Mexican culture, which, long before Paul Valéry, knew itself to be mortal, and the Argentine culture, founded on the optimism of powerful migratory currents from Europe, innocent of sacred stones or aboriginal promises. Mexico, closed to immigration by the TTT — the Tremendous Texas Trauma that in 1836 cured us once and for all of the temptation to receive Caucasian colonists because they had airport names like Houston and Austin and Dallas — devoted its population to breeding like rabbits. Blessed by the Pope, Coatlicue, and Jorge Negrete, we are, all eighty million of us. Catholics in the Virgin Mary, misogynists in the stone goddesses, and machistas in the singing, pistol-packing charro.

The pampa goes on waiting: twenty-five million Argentinians today; scarcely five million more than in 1945, half of them in Buenos Aires.

Language in Mexico is ancient, old as the oldest dead. The eagles of the Indian empire fell, and it suffices to read the poems of the defeated to understand the vein of sadness that runs through Mexican literature, the feeling that words are identical to a farewell: “Where shall we go to now, O my friends?” asks the Aztec poet of the Fall of Tenochtitlán: “The smoke lifts; the fog extends. Cry, my friends. Cry, oh cry.” And the contemporary poet Xavier Villaurrutia, four centuries later, sings from the bed of the same lake, now dried up, from its dry stones:

In the midst of a silence deserted as a street before the crime

Without even breathing so that nothing may disturb my death

In this wall-less solitude

When the angels fled

In the grave of my bed I leave my bloodless statue.

A sad, underground language, forever being lost and recovered. I soon learned that Spanish as spoken in Mexico answered to six unwritten rules:

• Never use the familiar tu—thou — if you can use the formal you—usted.

• Never use the first-person possessive pronoun, but rather the second-person, as in “This is your home.”

• Always use the first-person singular to refer to your own troubles, as in “Me fue del carajo, mano.” But use the first-person plural when referring to your successes, as in “During our term, we distributed three million acres.”

• Never use one diminutive if you can use five in a row.

• Never use the imperative when you can use the subjunctive.

• And only then, when you have exhausted these ceremonies of communication, bring out your verbal knife and plunge it deep into the other’s heart: “Chinga a tu madre, cabrón.”

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment. It is the mirror of an overabundance of history, a history that devours itself before extinguishing and then regenerating itself, phoenix-like, once again. Argentina, on the contrary, is a tabula rasa, and it demands a passionate verbalization. I do not know another country that so fervently — with the fervor of Buenos Aires, Borges would say — opposes the silence of its infinite space, its physical and mental pampa, demanding: Please, verbalize me! Martin Fierro, Carlos Gardel, Jorge Luis Borges: reality must be captured, desperately, in the verbal web of the gaucho poem, the sentimental tango, the metaphysical tale: the pampa of the gaucho becomes the garden of the tango becomes the forked paths of literature.

What is forked? What is said.

What is said? What is forked.

Everything: Space. Time. Language. History. Our history. The history of Spanish America.

I read Ficciones as I flew north on a pontoon plane, courtesy of Pan American Airways. It was wartime, we had to have priority; all cameras were banned, and glazed plastic screens were put on our windows several minutes before we landed. Since I was not an Axis spy, I read Borges as we splashed into Santos, saying that the best proof that the Koran is an Arab book is that not a single camel is mentioned in its pages. I started thinking that the best proof that Borges is an Argentinian is in everything he has to evoke because it isn’t there, as we glided into an invisible Rio de Janeiro. And as we flew out of Bahia, I thought that Borges invents a world because he needs it. I need, therefore I imagine.

By the time we landed in Trinidad, “Funes the Memorious” and “Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote” had introduced me, without my being aware, to the genealogy of the serene madmen, the children of Erasmus. I did not know then that this was the most illustrious family of modern fiction, since it went, backwards, from Pierre Ménard to Don Quixote himself. During two short lulls in Santo Domingo (then, horrifyingly, called Ciudad Trujillo) and Port-au-Prince, I had been prepared by Borges to encounter my wonderful friends Toby Shandy, who reconstructs in his miniature cabbage patch the battlefields of Flanders he was not able to experience historically; Jane Austen’s Catherine Moreland and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who like Don Quixote believe in what they read; Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, who takes his hopes to be realities; Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, an idiot because he gives the benefit of the doubt to the good possibility of mankind; Pérez Galdós’s Nazarín, who is mad because he believes that each human being can daily be Christ, and who is truly St. Paul’s madman: “Let him who seems wise among you become mad, so that he might truly become wise.”

As we landed at Miami airport, the glazed windows disappeared once and for all and I knew that, like Pierre Ménard, a writer must always face the mysterious duty of literally reconstructing a spontaneous work. And so I met my tradition: Don Quixote was a book waiting to be written. The history of Latin America was a history waiting to be lived.

III

When I finally arrived in Mexico, I discovered that my father’s imaginary country was real, but more fantastic than any imaginary land. It was as real as its physical and spiritual borders: Mexico, the only frontier between the industrialized and the developing worlds; the frontier between my country and the United States, but also between all of Latin America and the United States, and between the Catholic Mediterranean and the Protestant Anglo-Saxon strains in the New World.

It was with this experience and these questions that I approached the gold and mud of Mexico, the imaginary, imagined country, finally real but only real if I saw it from a distance that would assure me, because of the very fact of separation, that my desire for reunion with it would be forever urgent, and only real if I wrote it. Having attained some sort of perspective, I was finally able to write a few novels where I could speak of the scars of revolution, the nightmares of progress, and the perseverance of dreams.

I wrote with urgency because my absence became a destiny, yet a shared destiny: that of my own body as a young man, that of the old body of my country, and that of the problematic and insomniac body of my language. I could, perhaps, identify the former without too much trouble: Mexico and myself. But the language belonged to us all, to the vast community that writes and talks and thinks in Spanish. And without this language I could give no reality to either myself or my land. Language thus became the center of my personal being and of the possibility of forming my own destiny and that of my country into a shared destiny.

But nothing is shared in the abstract. Like bread and love, language and ideas are shared with human beings. My first contact with literature was sitting on the knees of Alfonso Reyes when the Mexican writer was ambassador to Brazil in the earlier thirties. Reyes had brought the Spanish classics back to life for us; he had written the most superb books on Greece; he was the most lucid of literary theoreticians; in fact, he had translated all of Western culture into Latin American terms. In the late forties, he was living in a little house the color of the mamey fruit, in Cuernavaca. He would invite me to spend weekends with him, and since I was eighteen and a night prowler, I kept him company from eleven in the morning, when Don Alfonso would sit in a café and toss verbal bouquets at the girls strolling around the plaza that was then a garden of laurels and not, as it has become, of cement. I do not know if the square, ruddy man seated at the next table was a British consul crushed by the nearness of the volcano; but if Reyes, enjoying the spectacle of the world, quoted Lope de Vega and Garcilaso, our neighbor the mescal drinker would answer, without looking at us, with the more somber stanze of Marlowe and John Donne. Then we would go to the movies in order, Reyes said, to bathe in contemporary epic, and it was only at night that he would start scolding me: You have not read Stendhal yet? The world didn’t start five minutes ago, you know.

He could irritate me. I read, against his classical tastes, the most modern, the most strident books, without understanding that I was learning his lesson: there is no creation without tradition; the “new” is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past. Borges said that Reyes wrote the best Spanish prose of our times. He taught me that culture had a smile, that the intellectual tradition of the whole world was ours by birthright, and that Mexican literature was important because it was literature, not because it was Mexican.

One day I got up very early (or maybe I came in very late from a binge) and saw him seated at five in the morning, working at his table, amid the aroma of the jacaranda and the bougainvillea. He was a diminutive Buddha, bald and pink, almost one of those elves who cobble shoes at night while the family sleeps. He liked to quote Goethe: Write at dawn, skim the cream of the day, then you can study crystals, intrigue at court, and make love to your kitchen maid. Writing in silence, Reyes did not smile. His world, in a way, ended on a funereal day in February 1913 when his insurrectionist father, General Bernardo Reyes, fell riddled by machinegun bullets in the Zócalo in Mexico City, and with him fell what was left of Mexico’s Belle Epoque, the long and cruel peace of Porfirio Díaz.

The smile of Alfonso Reyes had ashes on its lips. He had written, as a response to history, the great poem of exile and distance from Mexico: the poem of a cruel Iphigenia, the Mexican Iphigenia of the valley of Anáhuac:

I was another, being myself;

I was he who wanted to leave.

To return is to cry. I do not repent of this wide world.

It is not I who return,

But my shackled feet.

My father had remained in Buenos Aires as Mexican charge d’affaires, with instructions to frown on Argentina’s sympathies toward the Axis. My mother profited from his absence to enroll me in a Catholic school in Mexico City. The brothers who ruled this institution were preoccupied with something that had never entered my head: sin. At the start of the school year, one of the brothers would come before the class with a white lily in his hand and say: “This is a Catholic youth before kissing a girl.” Then he would throw the flower on the floor, dance a little jig on it, pick up the bedraggled object, and confirm our worst suspicions: “This is a Catholic boy after…”

Well, all this made life very tempting. Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Buñuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt. The priests at the Colegio Francés made sex irresistible for us; they also made leftists of us by their constant denunciation of Mexican liberalism and especially of Benito Juárez. The sexual and political temptations became very great in a city where provincial mores and sharp social distinctions made it very difficult to have normal sexual relationships with young or even older women.

All this led, as I say, to a posture of rebellion that for me crystallized in the decision to be a writer. My father, by then back from Argentina, sternly said, Okay, go out and be a writer, but not at my expense. I became a very young journalist at the weekly Siempre, but my family pressured me to enter law school, or, in the desert of Mexican literature, I would literally die of hunger and thirst. I was sent to visit Alfonso Reyes in his enormous library-house, where he seemed more diminutive than ever, ensconced in a tiny corner he saved for his bed among the Piranesi-like perspective of volume piled upon volume. He said to me: “Mexico is a very formalistic country. If you don’t have a title, you are nobody: nadie, ninguno. A title is like the handle on a cup; without it, no one will pick you up. You must become a licenciado, a lawyer; then you can do whatever you please, as I did.”

So I entered the School of Law at the National University, where, as I feared, learning tended to be by rote. The budding explosion in the student population was compounded by cynical teachers who would spend the whole hour of class taking attendance on the two hundred students of civil law, from Aguilar to Zapata. But there were great exceptions of true teachers who understood that the law is inseparable from culture, from morality, and from justice. Foremost among these were the exiles from defeated Republican Spain, who enormously enriched Mexican universities, publishing houses, the arts, and the sciences. Don Manuel Pedroso, former dean of the University of Seville, made the study of law compatible with my literary inclinations. When I would bitterly complain about the dryness and boredom of learning the penal or mercantile codes by heart, he would counter: “Forget the codes. Read Dostoevsky, read Balzac. There’s all you have to know about criminal or commercial law.” He also made me see that Stendhal was right that the best model for a well-structured novel is the Napoleonic Code of Civil Law. Anyway, I found that culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

Sex was another story, but Mexico City was then a manageable town of one million people, beautiful in its extremes of colonial and nineteenth-century elegance and the garishness of its exuberant and dangerous nightlife. My friends and I spent the last years of our adolescence and the first of our manhood in a succession of cantinas, brothels, strip joints, and silver-varnished nightclubs where the bolero was sung and the mambo danced; whores, mariachis, magicians were our companions as we struggled through our first readings of D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and André Gide, T. S. Eliot and Thomas Mann. Salvador Elizondo and I were the two would-be writers of the group, and if the realistic grain of La Región Más Transparente (Where the Air Is Clear) was sown in this, our rather somnambulistic immersion in the spectral nightlife of Mexico City, it is also true that the cruel imagination of an instant in Elizondo’s Farabeuf had the same background experience. We would go to a whorehouse oddly called El Buen Tono, choose a poor Mexican girl who usually said her name was Gladys and she came from Guadalajara, and go to our respective rooms. One time, a horrible scream was heard and Gladys from Guadalajara rushed out, crying and streaming blood. Elizondo, in the climax of love, had slashed her armpit with a razor.

Another perspective, another distance for approximation, another possibility of sharing a language. In 1950 I went to Europe to do graduate work in international law at the University of Geneva. Octavio Paz had just published two books that had changed the face of Mexican literature, Libertad Bajo Palabra and El Laberinto de la Soledad. My friends and I had read those books aloud in Mexico, dazzled by a poetics that managed simultaneously to renew our language from within and to connect it to the language of the world.

At age thirty-six, Octavio Paz was not very different from what he is today. Writers born in 1914, like Paz and Julio Cortázar, surely signed a Faustian pact at the very mouth of hell’s trenches; so many poets died in that war that someone had to take their place. I remember Paz in the so-called existentialist nightclubs of the time in Paris, in discussion with the very animated and handsome Albert Camus, who alternated philosophy and the boogie-woogie in La Rose Rouge. I remember Paz in front of the large windows of a gallery on the Place Vendôme, reflecting Max Ernst’s great postwar painting “Europe after the Rain,” and the painter’s profile as an ancient eagle; and I tell myself that the poetics of Paz is an art of civilizations, a movement of encounters. Paz the poet meets Paz the thinker, because his poetry is a form of thought and his thought is a form of poetry; and as a result of this meeting, an encounter of civilizations takes place. Paz introduces civilizations to one another, makes them presentable before it is too late, because behind the wonderful smile of Camus, fixed forever in the absurdity of death, behind the bright erosion of painting by Max Ernst and the crystals of the Place Vendôme, Octavio and I, when we met, could hear the voice of el poeta Libra, Ezra, lamenting the death of the best, “for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization.”

Octavio Paz has offered civilizations the mirror of their mortality, as Paul Valéry did, but also the reflection of their survival in an epidemic of meetings and erotic risks. In the generous friendship of Octavio Paz, I learned that there were no privileged centers of culture, race, or politics; that nothing should be left out of literature, because our time is a time of deadly reduction. The essential orphanhood of our time is seen in the poetry and thought of Paz as a challenge to be met through the renewed flux of human knowledge, of all human knowledge. We have not finished thinking, imagining, acting. It is still possible to know the world; we are unfinished men and women.

I am not at the crossroads;

to choose

is to go wrong.

For my generation in Mexico, the problem did not consist in discovering our modernity but in discovering our tradition. The latter was brutally denied by the comatose, petrified teaching of the classics in Mexican secondary schools: one had to bring Cervantes back to life in spite of a school system fatally oriented toward the ideal of universities as sausage factories; in spite of the more grotesque forms of Mexican nationalism of the time. A Marxist teacher once told me it was un-Mexican to read Kafka; a fascist critic said the same thing (this has been Kafka’s Kafkian destiny everywhere), and a rather sterile Mexican author gave a pompous lecture at the Bellas Artes warning that readers who read Proust would proustitute themselves.

To be a writer in Mexico in the fifties, you had to be with Alfonso Reyes and with Octavio Paz in the assertion that Mexico was not an isolated, virginal province but very much part of the human race and its cultural tradition; we were all, for good or evil, contemporary with all men and women.

In Geneva, I regained my perspective. I rented a garret overlooking the beautiful old square of the Bourg-du-Four, established by Julius Caesar as the Forum Boarium two millennia ago. The square was filled with coffeehouses and old bookstores. The girls came from all over the world; they were beautiful, and they were independent. When they were kissed, one did not become a sullied lily. We had salt on our lips. We loved each other, and I also loved going to the little island where the lake meets the river, to spend long hours reading. Since it was called Jean-Jacques Rousseau Island, I took along my volume of the Confessions. Many things came together then. A novel was the transformation of experience into history. The modern epic had been the epic of the first-person singular, of the I, from St. Augustine to Abélard to Dante to Rousseau to Stendhal to Proust. Joyce de-Joyced fiction: Here comes everybody! But H.C.E. did not collectively save the degraded Ego from exhaustion, self-doubt, and, finally, self-forgetfulness. When Odysseus says that he is nonexistent, we know and he knows that he is disguised; when Beckett’s characters proclaim their nonbeing, we know that “the fact is notorious”: they are no longer disguised. Kafka’s man has been forgotten; no one can remember K the land surveyor; finally, as Milan Kundera tells us, nobody can remember Prague, Czechoslovakia, history.

I did not yet know this as I spent many reading hours on the little island of Rousseau at the intersection of Lake Geneva and the Rhône River back in 1951. But I vaguely felt that there was something beyond the exploration of the self that actually made the idea of human personality possible if the paths beyond it were explored. Cervantes taught us that a book is a book is a book: Don Quixote does not invite us into “reality” but into an act of the imagination where all things are real: the characters are active psychological entities, but also the archetypes they herald and always the figures from whence they come, which were unimaginable, unthinkable, like Don Quixote, before they became characters first and archetypes later.

Could I, a Mexican who had not yet written his first book, sitting on a bench on an early spring day as the bise from the Jura Mountains quieted down, have the courage to explore for myself, with my language, with my tradition, with my friends and influences, that region where the literary figure bids us consider it in the uncertainty of its gestation? Cervantes did it in a precise cultural situation: he brought into existence the modern world by having Don Quixote leave his secure village (a village whose name has been, let us remember, forgotten) and take to the open roads, the roads of the unsheltered, the unknown, and the different, there to lose what he read and to gain what we, the readers, read in him.

The novel is forever traveling Don Quixote’s road, from the security of the analogous to the adventure of the different and even the unknown. In my way, this is the road I wanted to travel. I read Rousseau, or the adventures of the I; Joyce and Faulkner, or the adventures of the We; Cervantes, or the adventures of the You he calls the Idle, the Amiable Reader: you. And I read, in a shower of fire and in the lightning of enthusiasm, Rimbaud. His mother asked him what a particular poem was about. And he answered: “I have wanted to say what it says there, literally and in all other senses.” This statement of Rimbaud’s has been an inflexible rule for me and for what we are all writing today; and the present-day vigor of the literature of the Hispanic world, to which I belong, is not alien to this Rimbaudian approach to writing: Say what you mean, literally and in all other senses.

I think I imagined in Switzerland what I would try to write someday, but first I would have to do my apprenticeship. Only after many years would I be able to write what I then imagined; only years later, when I not only knew that I had the tools with which to do it, but also, and equally important, when I knew that if I did not write, death would not do it for me. You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die. Love is the marriage of this desire and this fear. The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

IV

My first European experience came to a climax in the summer of 1950. It was a hot, calm evening on Lake Zurich, and some wealthy Mexican friends had invited me to dinner at the elegant Baur-au-Lac Hotel. The summer restaurant was a floating terrace on the lake. You reached it by a gangplank, and it was lighted by paper lanterns and flickering candles. As I unfolded my stiff white napkin amid the soothing tinkle of silver and glass, I raised my eyes and saw the group dining at the next table.

Three ladies sat there with a man in his seventies. This man was stiff and elegant, dressed in double-breasted white serge and immaculate shirt and tie. His long, delicate fingers sliced a cold pheasant, almost with daintiness. Yet even in eating he seemed to me unbending, with a ramrod-back, military bearing. His aged face showed “a growing fatigue,” but the pride with which his lips and jaws were set sought desperately to hide the fact, while the eyes twinkled with “the fiery play of fancy.”

As the carnival lights of that summer’s night in Zurich played with a fire of their own on the features I now recognized, Thomas Mann’s face was a theater of implicit, quiet emotions. He ate and let the ladies do the talking; he was, in my fascinated eyes, a meeting place where solitude gives birth to beauty unfamiliar and perilous, but also to the perverse and the illicit, Thomas Mann had managed, out of this solitude, to find the affinity “between the personal destiny of [the] author and that of his contemporaries in general.” Through him, I had imagined that the products of this solitude and of this affinity were named art (created by one) and civilization (created by all). He spoke so surely, in Death in Venice, of the “tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul” that as I, paralyzed with admiration, saw him there that night I dared not conceive of such an affinity in our own Latin American culture, where the extreme demands of a ravaged, voiceless continent often killed the voice of the self and made a hollow political monster of the voice of the society, or killed it, giving birth to a pitiful, sentimental dwarf.

Yet, as I recalled my passionate reading of everything he wrote, from Blood of the Walsungs to Dr. Faustus, I could not help but feel that, in spite of the vast differences between his culture and ours, in both of them literature in the end asserted itself through a relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds of narration. A novel should “gather up the threads of many human destinies in the warp of a single idea”; the I, the You, and the We were only separate and dried up because of a lack of imagination. Unbeknownst to him, I left Thomas Mann sipping his demitasse as midnight approached and the floating restaurant bobbed slightly and the Chinese lanterns quietly flickered out. I shall always thank him for silently teaching me that, in literature, you know only what you imagine.

The Mexico of the forties and fifties I wrote about in La Región Más Transparente was an imagined Mexico, just as the Mexico of the eighties and nineties I am writing about in Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn) is totally imagined. I fear that we would know nothing of Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London if they, too, had not invented them. When in the spring of 1951 I took a Dutch steamer back to the New World, I had with me the ten Bible-paper tomes of the Pléiade edition of Balzac. This phrase of his has been a central creed of mine: “Wrest words from silence and ideas from obscurity.” The reading of Balzac — one of the most thorough and metamorphosing experiences of my life as a novelist — taught me that one must exhaust reality, transcend it, in order to reach, to try to reach, that absolute which is made of the atoms of the relative: in Balzac, the marvelous worlds of Séraphita or Louis Lambert rest on the commonplace worlds of Père Goriot and César Birotteau. Likewise, the Mexican reality of Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz existed only to clash with my imagination, my negation, and my perversion of the facts, because, remember, I had learned to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico.

This was, finally, a way of ceasing to tell what I understood and trying to tell, behind all the things I knew, the really important things: what I did not know. Aura illustrates this stance much too clearly, I suppose. I prefer to find it in a scene set in a cantina in A Change of Skin, or in a taxi drive in The Hydra Head. I never wanted to resolve an enigma, but to point out that there was an enigma.

I always tried to tell my critics: Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre. Do not look for the purity of the novel according to some nostalgic canon, do not ask for generic affiliation but rather for a dialogue, if not for the outright abolition, of genre; not for one language but for many languages at odds with one another; not, as Bakhtin would put it, for unity of style but for heteroglossia, not for monologic but for dialogic imagination. I’m afraid that, by and large, in Mexico at least, I failed in this enterprise. Yet I am not disturbed by this fact, because of what I have just said: language is a shared and sharing part of culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

I went back to Mexico, but knew that I would forever be a wanderer in search of perspective: this was my real baptism, not the religious or civil ceremonies I have mentioned. But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.

Neruda, Reyes, Paz; Washington, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Geneva; Cervantes, Balzac, Rimbaud, Thomas Mann: only with all the shared languages, those of my places and friends and masters, was I able to approach the fire of literature and ask it for a few sparks.

How I Wrote One of My Books

ONE, yes, one girl, twenty years of age, in the summer of ’61, over twenty-five years ago, crossed the threshold between the small drawing room of an apartment on the Boulevard Raspail and entered the bedroom where I was waiting for her.

There was a rumor of discontent and a smell of explosives in the French capital. These were the years when de Gaulle was finding a way out from Algeria and the OAS, the Secret Army Organization, was indiscriminately blowing up Jean-Paul Sartre and his concierge: the bombs of the generals were egalitarian.

But Paris is a double city; whatever happens there possesses a mirage which seems to reproduce the space of actuality. We soon learn that this is a form of deceit. The abundant mirrors of Parisian interiors do more than simply reproduce a certain space. Gabriel García Márquez says that with their army of mirrors the Parisians create the illusion that their narrow apartments are double the real size. The true mystery — Gabriel and I know this — is that what we see reflected in those mirrors is always another time: time past, lime yet to be. And that, sometimes, if you are lucky, a person who is another person also floats across these quicksilver lakes.

I believe that the mirrors of Paris contain something more than their own illusion. They are, at the same time, the reflection of something less tangible: the light of the city, a light I have attempted to describe many times, in political chronicles of the events of May 1968 and of May 1981 and in novels such as Distant Relations, where I say that the light of Paris is identical to “the expectation that every afternoon … for one miraculous moment, the phenomena of the day — rain or fog, scorching heat or snow — [will] disperse and reveal, as in a Corot landscape, the luminous essence of the Île de France.”

A second space: a second person — the other person — in the mirror is not born in the mirror: she comes from the light. The girl who wandered in from her living room into her bedroom that hot afternoon in early September more than twenty years ago was another because six years had gone by since I first met her, in the budding grove of her puberty, in Mexico.

But she was also another because the Light that afternoon, as if it had been expecting her, defeated a stubborn reef of clouds. That light — I remember it — first stepped through timidly, as if stealing by the menace of a summer’s storm; then it transformed itself into a luminous pearl encased in a shell of clouds: finally it spilled over for a few seconds with a plenitude that was also an agony.

In this almost instantaneous succession, the girl I remembered when she was fourteen years old and who was now twenty suffered the same changes as the light coming through the windowpanes: that threshold between the parlor and the bedroom became the lintel between all the ages of this girl: the light that had been struggling against the clouds also fought against her flesh, took it, sketched it, granted her a shadow of years, sculpted a death in her eyes, tore the smile from her lips, waned through her hair with the floating melancholy of madness.

She was another, she had been another, not she who was going to be but she who, always, was being.

The light possessed the girl, the light made love to the girl before I could, and I was only, that afternoon, “a strange guest in the kingdom of love” (“en el reino del amor huésped extraño”), and knew that the eyes of love can also see us with — once more I quote Quevedo—“a beautiful Death.”

The next morning I started writing Aura in a café near my hotel on the rue de Berri. I remember the day: Khrushchev had just proclaimed his Twenty-Year Plan in Moscow, where he promised communism and the withering away of the state by the eighties — here we are now — burying the West in the process, and his words were reproduced in all their gray minuteness in the International Herald Tribune, which was being hawked by ghostly girls, young lovers jailed in brief prisons of passion, the authors of Aura: the dead girls.

* * *

TWO, yes, two years before, I was having a few drinks with Luis Buñuel in his house on the Street of Providence, and we talked about Quevedo, a poet the Spanish film director knew better than most academic specialists on baroque poetry of the seventeenth century.

You have already noticed, of course, that the true author of Aura (including the dead girls I have just mentioned) is named Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, born on September 17, 1580, in Madrid and supposedly deceased on September 8, 1645, in Villanueva de los Infantes; the satirical and scatological brother of Swift, but also the unrivaled poet of our death and love, our Shakespeare, our John Donne, the furious enemy of Góngora, the political agent for the Duke of Osuna, the unfortunate, jailed partisan of fallen power, the obscene, the sublime Quevedo dead in his stoical tower, dreaming, laughing, searching, finding some of the truly immortal lines in the Spanish language:

Oh condición mortal Oh dura suerte

Que no puedo querer vivir mañana

Sin la pensión de procurar mi muerte.

(Oh mortal state Oh man’s unyielding fate

To live tomorrow I can have no hope

Without the cost of buying my own death.)

Or maybe these lines, defining love:

Es yelo abrasador, es fuego helado,

es herida que duele y no se siente,

es un soñado bien, un mal presente,

es un breve descanso muy cansado.

(It is a freezing fire, a burning ice,

it is a wound that hurts yet is not felt,

a happiness desired, a present evil,

a short but, oh, so tiring rest.)

Yes, the true author of Aura is Quevedo, and I am pleased to represent him here today.

This is the great advantage of time: the so-called author ceases to be such; he becomes an invisible agent for him who signed the book, published it, and collected (and goes on collecting) the royalties. But the book was written — it always was, it always is — by others. Quevedo and a girl who was almost dust in love, polvo enamorado. Buñuel and an afternoon in Mexico City, so different from an afternoon in Paris but so different also, in 1959, from the afternoons in Mexico City today.

You could see the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl the smoking mountain and Iztaccihuatl the sleeping lady, as you drove down Insurgentes Avenue, and the big department store had not yet been erected at the corner of Buñuel’s house. Buñuel himself, behind a mini-monastery of very high brick walls crowned by crushed glass, had returned to the Mexican cinema with Nazarín and was now playing around in his head with an old idea: a filmic transposition of Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, which hangs in the Louvre and which describes the drama of the survivors of a naval disaster in the eighteenth century.

The survivors of the good ship Medusa at first tried to behave like civilized human beings as they floated around in their raft. But then, as the days went by, followed by weeks, finally by what seemed like an eternity, their imprisonment on the sea cracked the varnish of good manners and they became salt first, then waves, finally sharks: in the end they survived only because they devoured each other. They needed one another to exterminate one another.

Of course, the cinematic translation of the terrible gaze of the Medusa is called The Exterminating Angel, one of Buñuel’s most beautiful films, in which a group of society people who have never truly needed anything find themselves mysteriously incapable of leaving an elegant salon. The threshold of the salon becomes an abyss and necessity becomes extermination: the shipwrecks of Providence Street only need each other to devour each other.

The theme of necessity is profound and persistent in Buñuel, and his films repeatedly reveal the way in which a man and a woman, a child and a madman, a saint and a sinner, a criminal and a dreamer, a solitude and a desire need one another.

Buñuel was inventing his film The Exterminating Angel and crossing back and forth, as he did so, over the threshold between the lobby and the bar of his house, looking for all the world like a pensioned picador from old Cagancho’s cuadrilla. Buñuel’s comings and goings were, somehow, a form of immobility.

A todas partes que me vuelvo veo

Las amenazas de la llama ardiente

Y en cualquier lugar tengo presente

Tormento esquivo y burlador deseo.

(Everywhere I turn I see

The menace of the burning flame

And everywhere I am aware

Of aloof torment and mocking desire.)

Since we had been talking about Quevedo and a portrait of the young Buñuel by Dali in the twenties was staring at us, Eluard’s poetic formula imposed itself on my spirit that faraway Mexican afternoon of transparent air and the smell of burned tortilla and newly sliced chiles and fugitive flowers: “Poetry shall be reciprocal”; and if Buñuel was thinking of Géricault and Quevedo and the film, I was thinking that the raft of the Medusa already contained two eyes of stone that would trap the characters of The Exterminating Angel not only in the fiction of a shadow projected on the screen but within the physical and mechanical reality of the camera that would, from then on, be the true prison of the shipwrecks of Providence: a camera (why not?) on top of Lautréamont’s poetical meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.

Buñuel stopped midway between lobby and bar and asked aloud: “And if on crossing a doorsill we could instantly recover our youth; if we could be old on one side of the door and young as soon as we crossed to the other side, what then…?”

* * *

THREE, yes, three days after that afternoon on the Boulevard Raspail, I went to see a picture that all my friends, but especially Julio Cortázar, were raving about: Ugetsu Monogatari: The Tales of the Pale Moon After the Rain, by the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. I was carrying around with me the first feverish pages of Aura, written in that café near the Champs-Elysées as I let my breakfast of coffee and croissants grow cold and forgot the headlines of the morning Figaro. “You read the advertisement: this kind of offer is not made every day. You read it and then reread it. It seems addressed to you and to nobody else.”

Because “You are Another,” such was the subjacent vision of my meetings with Buñuel in Mexico, with the girl imprisoned by the light in Paris, with Quevedo in the freezing fire, the burning ice, the wound that hurts yet is not felt, the happiness desired, the present evil which proclaims itself as Love but was first of all Desire. Curiously, Mizoguchi’s film was being shown in the Ursulines Cinema, the same place where, more than thirty years before, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou had first been screened to a vastly scandalized audience. You remember that Red Cross nurses had to be posted in the aisles to help the ladies who fainted when Buñuel, on the screen, slashes the eye of a girl with a razor as a cloud bisects the moon.

The evanescent images of Mizoguchi told the beautiful love story adapted by the Japanese director from the tale “The House among the Reeds,” from the collection of the Ugetsu Monogatari, written in the eighteenth century by Ueda Akinari, born in 1734 in the red-light district at Sonezaki, the son of a courtesan and an unknown father. His mother abandoned him when he was four years old; he was adopted and raised by a family of paper and oil merchants, the Ueda, with infinite love and care, but also with a profound sense of nostalgia and doom: the happy merchants were unclassed by commerce from their former military tradition; Akinari contracted the pox and was saved perhaps by his adoptive mother’s contracting of the disease: she died, he was left crippled in both hands until the God of Foxes, Inari, permitted him to hold a brush and become a calligraphist and, thus, a writer.

But first he inherited a prosperous business; it was destroyed by fire. Then he became a doctor: a little girl whom he was treating died, yet her father continued to have faith in him. So he gave up medicine. He could only be a lame writer, somehow a character in his own stories, persecuted by bad luck, poverty, illness, blindness. Abandoned as a child, Akinari spent his late years dependent on the charity of others, living in temples or the houses of friends. He was an erudite. He did not commit suicide, yet died in 1809.

So with his sick hand miraculously aided by the God of Foxes, Ueda Akinari could take a brush and thus write a series of tales that are unique because they are multiple.

“Originality” is the sickness of a modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In so doing, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death.

This is the subject of one of the great dialogues by the magnificent Italian poet and essayist of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi. Read Leopardi: he is in the wind. I was reading him with joy in the winter of ’81, then met Susan Sontag in New York the following spring. She had been surprised by a December dawn in Rome reading Leopardi: like Akinari, infirm; unlike him, a disillusioned romanticist turned pessimistic materialist and maybe, because he knew that in mankind, “outside of vanity, all is pain,” he could write some of the most burning lyrical marvels in the Italian language and tell us that life can be unhappy when “hope has disappeared but desire remains intact.” For the same reason, he could write the biting dialogue of Fashion and Death:

FASHION: Lady Death! Lady Death!

DEATH: I hope that your hour comes, so that you shall have no further need to call me.

FASHION: My Lady Death!

DEATH: Go to the Devil! I’ll come looking for you when you least desire me.

FASHION: But I am your sister, Fashion. Have you forgotten that we are both the daughters of decadence?

Ancient peoples know that there are no words that do not descend from other words and that imagination only resembles power because neither can reign over Nada, Nothing. Niente. To imagine Nothing, or to believe that you rule over Nothing, is but a form — perhaps the surest one — of becoming mad. No one knew this better than Joseph Conrad in the heart of darkness or William Styron in the bed of shadows: the wages of sin are not death, but isolation.

Akinari’s novella is set in 1454 and tells the story of Katsushiro, a young man humiliated by his poverty and his incapacity for work in the fields who abandons his home to make his fortune as a merchant in the city. He leaves his house by the reeds in the care of his young and beautiful wife, Miyagi, promising he will return as the leaves of autumn fall.

Months go by; the husband does not return; the woman resigns herself to “the law of this world: no one should have faith in tomorrow.” The civil wars of the fifteenth century under the Ashikaga shoguns make the reencounter of husband and wife impossible. People worry only about saving their skins, the old hide in the mountains, the young are forcibly drafted by the competing armies; all burn and loot; confusion takes hold of the world and the human heart also becomes ferocious. “Everything,” says the author, reminding us that he is speaking from memory, “everything was in ruins during that miserable century.”

Katsushiro becomes prosperous and manages to travel to Kyoto. Once settled there, seven years after he bid farewell to Miyagi, he tries to return home but finds that the barriers of political conflict have not fallen, nor has the menace of assault by bandits disappeared. He is fearful of returning to find his home in ruins, as in the myths of the past. A fever takes hold of him. The seven years have gone by as in a dream. The man imagines that the woman, like himself, is a prisoner of time and that, like himself, she has not been able to stretch out her hand and touch the fingers of the loved one.

The proofs of precarious humanity surround Katsushiro; bodies pile up in the streets; he walks among them. Neither he nor the dead are immortal. The first form of death is an answer to time: its name is forgetting, and maybe Katsushiro’s wife (he imagines this) has already died; she is but a denizen of the subterranean regions.

So it is death that, finally, leads Katsushiro back to his village: if his wife has died, he will build a small altar for her during the night, taking advantage of the moon of the rainy season.

He returns to his ruined village. The pine that used to identify his house has been struck by lightning. But the house is still there. Katsushiro sees the light from a lamp. Is a stranger now living in his house? Katsushiro crosses the threshold, enters, and hears a very ancient voice say, “Who goes there?” He answers, “It is I, I have come back.”

Miyagi recognizes her husband’s voice. She comes near to him, dressed in black and covered with grime, her eyes sunken, her knotted hair falling down her back. She is not the woman she had been. But when she sees her husband, without adding a word, she bursts out crying.

The man and the woman go to bed together and he tells her the reason why he has been so late in returning, and of his resignation; she answers that the world had become full of horror, but that she had waited in vain: “If I had perished from love,” she concludes, “hoping to see you again, I would have died of a lovesickness ignored by you.”

They sleep embraced, sleep deeply. As day breaks, a vague impression of coldness penetrates the unconsciousness of Katsushiro’s dream. A rumor of something floating by awakens him. A cold liquid falls, drop after drop, on his face. His wife is no longer lying next to him. She has become invisible. He will never see her again.

Katsushiro discovers an old servant hidden in a hut in the middle of a field of camphor. The servant tells the hero the truth: Miyagi died many years ago. She was the only woman who never quit the village, in spite of the terrible dangers of war, because she kept alive the promise: we shall see each other once again this autumn. Not only the bandits invaded this place. Ghosts also took up their lodgings here. One day Miyagi joined them.

Mizoguchi’s images told a story similar yet different from Akinari’s tale. Less innocent, the contemporary filmmaker’s story transformed Miyagi into a sort of tainted Penelope, a former courtesan who must prove her fidelity to her husband with greater conviction than a virgin.

When the village is invaded by the troops of Governor Uesugui sent from Kamakura to fight a ghostly and evasive shogun in the mountains, Miyagi, to save herself from the violence of the soldiers, commits suicide. The soldiers bury her in her garden, and when her husband finally returns, he must appeal to an old witch in order to recover the spectral vision and spectral contact with his dead wife.

* * *

FOUR, no, four years after seeing the film by Mizoguchi and writing Aura, I found in an old bookshop in the Trastevere in Rome, where I had been led by the Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, an Italian version of the Japanese tales of the Togi Boko, written by Hiosuishi Shoun and published in 1666. My surprise was quite great when I found there, written two hundred years before Akinari’s tale and three hundred before Mizoguchi’s film, a story called “The Courtesan Miyagino,” where this same narrative is told, but this time with an ending that provides direct access to necrophilia.

The returning hero, a Ulysses with no heroism greater than a recovered capacity for forgetting, does not avail himself of a witch to recover his embodied desire, the courtesan Miyagino, who swore to be faithful to him. This time he opens the tomb and finds his wife, dead for many years, as beautiful as the day he last saw her. Miyagino’s ghost comes back to tell her bereaved husband this tale.

My curiosity was spurred by this story within the story of Aura, so I went back to Buñuel, who was now preparing the script for his film The Milky Way, reading through the 180 volumes of the Abbé Migne’s treatise on patristics and medieval heresies at the National Library in Paris, and asked him to procure me right of entry into that bibliographical sanctuary, more difficult to penetrate, let me add, than the chastity of a fifteenth-century Japanese virgin or the cadaver of a courtesan of the same era and nationality.

Anglo-Saxon libraries, I note in passing, are open to all, and nothing is easier than finding a book on the shelves at Oxford or Harvard, at Princeton or Dartmouth, take it home, caress it, read it, take notes from it and return it. Nothing more difficult, on the contrary, than approaching a Latin library. The presumed reader is also a presumed kleptomaniac, a convicted firebug, and a certified vandal: he who pursues a book in Paris, Rome, Madrid, or Mexico City soon finds out that books are not to be read but to be locked up, become rare and perhaps serve as a feast for rats.

No wonder that Buñuel, in The Exterminating Angel, has an adulterous wife ask her lover, a dashing colonel, to meet her secretly in her library. What if the husband arrives? asks the cautious lover. And she answers: We’ll tell him I was showing you my incunabula.

No wonder that Juan Goytisolo, when he invades a Spanish library in his Count Julian, fruitfully employs his time squashing fat green flies between the pages of Lope de Vega and Azorín.

But let me return to that bibliographical Leavenworth which is the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: Buñuel somehow smuggled me in and permitted me to grope in the dark, with fear of imminent discovery, for the ancestry of the Japanese tales of the Togi Boko, which in their turn were the forebears of Akinari’s tales of the moon after the rain, which then inspired the film by Mizoguchi that I saw in Paris in the early days of September 1961, as I searched for the form and intention of Aura.

Is there a fatherless book, an orphan volume in this world? A book that is not the descendant of other books? A single leaf of a book that is not an offshoot of the great genealogical tree of mankind’s literary imagination? Is there creation without tradition? But again, can tradition survive without renewal, a new creation, a new greening of the perennial tale?

I then discovered that the ultimate source of this story was the Chinese tale called the “Biography of Ai’King,” part of the collection called the Tsien teng sin hoa.

Yet, could there conceivably be an “ultimate source” for the story that I saw in a Parisian movie house, thinking I had found in Mizoguchi’s dead bride the sister of my Aura, whose mother, I deceived myself, was an image of youth defeated by a very ancient light in an apartment on the Boulevard Raspail and whose father, deceitful as well, was an act of imagination and desire on crossing the threshold between the lobby and the bar of a house in Mexico City’s Colonia del Valle?

Could I, could anyone, go beyond the “Biography of Ai’King” to the multiple sources, the myriad, bubbling springs in which this final tale lost itself: the traditions of the oldest Chinese literature, that tide of narrative centuries that hardly begins to murmur the vastness of its constant themes: the supernatural virgin, the fatal woman, the spectral bride, the couple reunited?

I then knew that my answer would have to be negative but that, simultaneously, what had happened did but confirm my original intention: Aura came into this world to increase the secular descent of witches.

* * *

FIVE, at least five, were the witches who consciously mothered Aura during those days of my initial draft in a café near the rue de Berri through which passed, more or less hurried and/or worried by the urgent, immediate events of this world, K. S. Karol the skeptical reporter, Jean Daniel the questioning journalist, and Françoise Giroud the vibrant First Lady of the French press, all of them heading toward the pressroom of L’Express, the then great weekly that they had created to fight against bombs and censorship and with the close cooperation — it is hallucinatory to imagine it today — of Sartre and Camus, Mendès-Franee and Mauriac.

These five bearers of consolation and desire, I believe today, were the greedy Miss Bordereau of Henry James’s Aspern Papers, who in her turn descends from the cruelly mad Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, who is herself the English daughter of the ancient countess of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, she who jealously keeps the secret of winning at cards.

The similar structure of all three stories only proves that they belong to the same mythical family. You invariably have three figures: the old woman, the young woman, and the young man. In Pushkin, the old woman is the Countess Anna Fedorovna, the young woman her ward Lisaveta Ivanovna, the young man Hermann, an officer of the engineering corps. In Dickens, the old woman is Miss Havisham, the girl Estella, the hero Pip. In Henry James, the old woman is Miss Juliana Bordereau, the younger woman her niece Miss Tina, the intruding young man the nameless narrator H.J. — “Henry James” in Michael Redgrave’s staging of the story.

In all three works the intruding young man wishes to know the old lady’s secret: the secret of fortune in Pushkin, the secret of love in Dickens, the secret of poetry in James. The young girl is the deceiver — innocent or not — who must wrest the secret from the old woman before she takes it to the grave.

La señora Consuelo, Aura, and Felipe Montero joined this illustrious company, but with a twist: Aura and Consuelo are one, and it is they who tear the secret of desire from Felipe’s breast. The male is now the deceived. This is in itself a twist on machismo.

And do not all three ladies descend from Michelet’s medieval sorceress who reserves for herself, be it at the price of death by fire, the secrets of a knowledge forbidden by modern reason, the damned papers, the letters stained by the wax of candles long since gone dead, the cards wasted by the fingers of avarice and fear, but also the secrets of an antiquity projecting itself with greater strength than the future?

For is there a secret more secret, a scandal more ancient, than that of the sinless woman, the woman who does not incite toward sin — Eve — and does not open the box of disgrace — Pandora? The woman who is not what the Father of the Church, Tertullian, would have her be, “a temple built on top of a sewer,” not the woman who must save herself by banging a door like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, but the woman who, before all of them, is the owner of her time because she is the owner of her will and of her body; because she does not admit any division between time, body, and will, and this mortally wounds the man who would like to divide his mind from his flesh in order to resemble, through his mind, his God, and through his flesh, his Devil?

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam rebukes the Creator, challenges him, asks him:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay

To mould me Man, did I sollicitte thee

From darkness to promote me, or here place

In this delicious Garden?

Adam asks his God, and even worse,

… to reduce me to my dust,

Desirous to resigne, and render back

All I receav’d, unable to performe

The terms too hard, by which I was to hold

The good I sought not.

This man divided between his divine thought and his carnal pain is the author of his own unbearable conflict when he demands, not death, but at least, because she is worse than death, life without Eve — that is, life without Evil, life among men only, a wise creation peopled by exclusively masculine spirits, without this fair defect of nature: woman.

But this life among masculine angels shall be a life alienated, mind and flesh separated. Seen as Eve or Pandora, woman answers from the other shore of this division, saying that she is one, body inseparable from soul, with no complaints against Creation, conceived without sin because the apple of Paradise does not kill: it nurtures and it saves us from the schizoid Eden subverted by the difference between what is to be found in my divine head and what is to be found between my human legs.

The secret woman of James, Dickens, Pushkin, and Michelet who finds her young granddaughter in Aura has, I said, a fifth forebear. Her name is Circe. She is the Goddess of Metamorphosis and for her there are no extremes, no divorces between flesh and mind, because everything is transforming itself constantly, everything is becoming other without losing its anteriority and announcing a promise that does not sacrifice anything of what we are because we have been and we shall be: “Ayer se fue, mañana no ha llegado, / Hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto; / Soy un fue, y un seré, y un es cansado” (Yesterday is gone, tomorrow has not come, / Today is endlessly fleeing; / I am an I was, an I shall be, an I am tired).

Imitating old Quevedo, I asked the Aura papers, feverishly written as the summer of ’61 came to an end: “Listen, life, will no one answer?” And the answer came in the night which accompanied the words written in the midst of the bustle of commerce and journalism and catering on a grand Parisian avenue: Felipe Montero, the false protagonist of Aura, answered me, addressing me familiarly:

You read the advertisement. Only your name is missing. You think you are Felipe Montero. You lie to yourself. You are You: You are Another. You are the Reader. You are what you Read. You shall be Aura. You were Consuelo.

“I’m Felipe Montero. I read your advertisement.”

“Yes, I know … Good. Please let me see your profile … No, I can’t see it well enough. Turn toward the light. That’s right…”

You shall move aside so that the light from the candles and the reflections from the silver and crystal reveal the silk coif that must cover a head of very white hair and frame a face so old it must be almost childlike …

“I told you she’d come back.”

“Who?”

“Aura. My companion. My niece.”

“Good afternoon.”

The girl will nod and at the same instant the old lady will imitate her gesture.

“This is Señor Montero. He’s going to live with us.”

* * *

SIX, only six days before her death, I met La Traviata. My wife, Sylvia, and I had been invited in September of 1976 to have dinner at the house of our old and dear friends Gabriella and Teddy van Zuylen, who have four daughters with the green eyes of Aura who spy on the guests near four paintings by Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Alberto Gironella, and Pierre Alechinsky, without anyone being able to tell whether the girls are coming in or out of the paintings.

“I have a surprise for you,” said our hostess, and she sat me next to Maria Callas.

This woman made me shake violently, for no reason I could immediately discern. While we dined, I tried to speak to her at the same time that I spoke to myself. From the balcony of the Theater of Fine Arts in Mexico City I had heard her sing La Traviata in 1951, when she was Maria Meneghini Callas and appeared as a robust young woman with the freshest, most glorious voice that I had ever heard: Callas sang an aria the same way that Manolete fought a bull: incomparably. She was already a young myth.

I told her so that night in Paris. She interrupted me with a velocity at once velvet-smooth and razor-sharp in its intention: “What do you think of the myth now that you’ve met her?” she asked me.

“I think she has lost some weight,” I dared to answer.

She laughed with a tone different from that of her speaking voice. I imagined that, for Maria Callas, crying and singing were acts nearer to song than to speech, because I must admit that her everyday voice was that of a girl from the less fashionable neighborhoods of New York City. Maria Callas had the speaking voice of a girl selling Maria Callas records at Sam Goody’s on Sixth Avenue.

This was not the voice of Medea, the voice of Norma, the voice of the Lady of the Camellias. Yes, she had slimmed down, we all knew it, without losing her glorious and warm voice, the voice of the supreme diva. No: no one was a more beautiful woman, a better actress, or a greater singer on an opera stage in the twentieth century.

Callas’s seduction, let me add, was not only in the memory of her stage glory: this woman I now saw, thinned down not by her will but by her sickness and her time, nearer every minute to her bone, every second more transparent and tenuously allied to life, possessed a hypnotic secret that revealed itself as attention. I really think I have never met a woman who lent more attention to the man she was listening to than Maria Callas.

Her attention was a manner of dialogue. Through her eyes (two black lighthouses in a storm of white petals and moist olives) passed images in surprising mutation: her thoughts changed, the thoughts became images, yes, but only because she was transforming ceaselessly, as if her eyes were the balcony of an unfinished and endless opera that, in everyday life, prolonged in silence the suffused rumor, barely the echo, of the nights which had belonged to Lucia di Lammermoor and Violetta Valéry.

In that instant I discovered the true origin of Aura: its anecdotal origin, if you will, but also its origin in desire, since desire is the port of embarkation as well as the final destiny of this novella. I had heard Maria Callas sing La Traviata in Mexico City when she and I were more or less the same age, twenty years old perhaps, and now we were meeting almost thirty years later and I was looking at a woman I had known before, but she saw in me a man she had just met that evening. She could not compare me to myself, I could: myself and her.

And in this comparison I discovered yet another voice, not the slightly vulgar voice of the highly intelligent woman seated at my right; not the voice of the singer who gave back to bel canto a life torn from the dead embrace of the museum; no, but the voice of old age and madness which, I then remembered (and confirmed it in the Angel record I went out hurriedly to buy the next morning), is the unbelievable, unfathomable, profoundly disturbing voice of Maria Callas in the death scene of La Traviata.

Whereas the sopranos who sing Verdi’s opera usually search for a supreme pathos achieved thanks to agonizing tremors and an attempt to approach death with sobs, screams, and shudders, Maria Callas does something unusual: she transforms her voice into that of an old woman and gives that ancient voice the inflection of madness.

I remember it so well that I can almost imitate the final lines: “E strano! / Cessarono / Gli spasmi del dolore.”

But if this be the voice of a hypochondriac old lady complaining of the inconveniences of advanced age, immediately Callas injects a mood of madness into the words of resurgent hope in the midst of a hopeless malady: “In mi rinasce — m’agita / Insolito vigore / Ah! Ma io rittorno a viver’.” Only then does death, and nothing but death, defeat old age and madness with the exclamation of youth: “Oh gioia!”

Maria Callas invited Sylvia and me to see her again a few weeks later. But before that, one afternoon. La Traviata died forever. But before, also, she had given me my secret: Aura was born in that instant when Maria Callas identified, in the voice of one woman, youth as well as old age, life along with death, inseparable, convoking one another, the four, finally, youth, old age, life, death, women’s names: “la juventud,” “la vejez,” “la vida,” “la muerte.”

* * *

SEVEN, yes, seven days were needed for divine creation: on the eighth day the human creature was born and her name was desire. After the death of Maria Callas, I reread The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The novel is far superior to Verdi’s opera or to the numerous stage and film adaptations because it contains an element of delirious necrophilia absent from all the descendants.

The novel begins with the return to Paris of Armand Duval — A.D., certainly the double of Alexandre Dumas — who then finds out that Marguerite Gautier had died. Marguerite Gautier, his lover lost through the suspicious will of Duval père, who says he is defending the family integrity by demanding that Marguerite abandon Armand, but who is probably envious of his son and would like Marguerite all for himself. Anyway, Duval fils hurries desperately to the woman’s tomb in Père Lachaise. The scene that follows is surely the most delirious in narrative necrophilia.

Armand obtains permission to exhume the body of Marguerite. The graveyard keeper tells Armand that it will not be difficult to find Marguerite’s tomb. As soon as the relatives of the persons buried in the neighboring graves found out who she was, they protested and said there should be special real estate set apart for women such as she: a whorehouse for the dead. Besides, every day someone sends her a bouquet of camellias. He is unknown. Armand is jealous of his dead lover: he does not know who sends her the flowers. Ah, if only sin saved us from boredom, in life or in death! This is the first thing that Marguerite told Armand when she met him: “The companion of sick souls is called boredom.” Armand is going to save Marguerite from the infinite boredom of being dead.

The gravediggers start working. A pickax strikes the crucifix on the coffin. The casket is slowly pulled out; the loose earth falls away. The boards groan frightfully. The gravediggers open the coffin with difficulty. The earth’s humidity has made the hinges rusty.

At long last, they manage to raise the lid. They all cover their noses. All, save Armand, fall back.

A white shroud covers the body, revealing some sinuosities. One end of the shroud is eaten up and the dead woman’s foot sticks out through a hole. Armand orders that the shroud be ripped apart. One of the gravediggers brusquely uncovers Marguerite’s face.

The eyes are no more than two holes. The lips have vanished. The teeth remain white, bare, clenched. The long black tresses, dry, smeared onto the temples, cover up part of the green cavities on the cheeks.

Armand kneels down, takes the bony hand of Marguerite, and kisses it.

Only then does the novel begin: a novel that, inaugurated by death, can only culminate in death. The novel is the act of Armand Duval’s desire to find the object of desire: Marguerite’s body. But since no desire is innocent — because we not only desire, we also desire to change what we desire once we obtain it — Armand Duval obtains the cadaver of Marguerite Gautier in order to transform it into literature, into book, into that second-person singular, the You that structures desire in Aura.

You: that word which is mine as it moves, ghostlike, in all the dimensions of space and time, even beyond death.

“You shall plunge your face, your open eyes, into Consuelo’s silver-white hair, and she’ll embrace you again when the clouds cover the moon, when you’re both hidden again, when the memory of youth, of youth reembodied, rules the darkness and disappears for some time.

“She’ll come back, Felipe. Well bring her back together. Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back.”

Felipe Montero, of course, is not You. You are You. Felipe Montero is only the author of Terra Nostra.

* * *

Aura was published in Spanish in 1962. The girl I had met as a child in Mexico and seen re-created by the light of Paris in 1961, when she was twenty, died by her own hand, a few years ago, in Mexico, at age forty.