The Art of Flight

EVERYTHING IS IN ALL THINGS

YES, I TOO HAVE HAD MY VISION

It was enough just to leave the train station and catch a glimpse from the vaporetto of the façades along the Grand Canal as they came into view to experience the feeling of being one step away from my goal, of having traveled years to cross the threshold, unable to decipher what that goal was and what threshold had to be crossed. Would I die in Venice? Would something arise that could in an instant change my destiny? Would I, perchance, be reborn in Venice?

I was arriving from Trieste; I had not searched for Joyce’s house or for traces of Svevo, nor had I done or seen anything that was worthwhile. I had arrived in the city the evening before, and as I attempted to find lodging in a hotel, an employee detected some anomaly or other in my visa, an error in the expiration date, I believe, which rendered my stay in the country illegal. I was allowed, reluctantly, to spend the night in the hotel lobby. Early that morning I caught the return train; when it stopped in Venice I decided to get off. It must have been seven in the morning when I first set foot on Venetian soil. I would spend the rest of the day there and continue on to Rome on the night express. It is written that misfortunes never come singly: after checking my bag at left-luggage I discovered I had lost my glasses; I searched my pockets and ran to the platform, hoping to find them on the ground, but the sea of travelers and porters bustling about forced me to abandon my search. Most likely, I thought, I had left them at the hotel in Trieste or on the train car I had left in such a rush.

All of this must have taken place in mid-October of 1961. I suddenly found myself in the Piazzetta, eager to begin my tour. My near-sightedness in no way dulled the wonder. I arrived at the Piazza San Marco and drank my first coffee at the Caffè Florian, that place of legend profiled by every writer and artist who ever visited Venice. Next door to the Florian, I bought a guidebook. Seeing up-close — reading, for example — presented little problem. After the coffee, guidebook in hand, I began to walk. The details eluded me, the contours faded; immense multicolored spots, luxurious glows, and perfect patinas appeared all around me. I saw the sparkle of timeworn gold where most certainly there was flaking on a wall. Everything was submerged in mist, like in the mysterious Views of Venice painted by Turner. I walked among shadows. I could and could not see, I caught fragments of a shifting reality; the feeling of being trapped between light and dark grew increasingly more pronounced as a fine, trembling drizzle gradually created the chiaroscuro in which I was moving.

As the mist concealed my view of palaces, piazzas, and bridges, my happiness grew. I walked so long that even now I have the impression that the day encompassed a multitude of days. As I walked, ecstatic, I repeated over and over a phrase from Berenson: “Color is the greatest gift the Venetians have given us,” words I remembered having read at the beginning of The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. I return to the book today to verify the quote and discover that not only had I caused it to lose its nuance but I had also deformed and contracted it, as no doubt happened with everything I discovered in Venice during that first encounter. Berenson writes: “Their mastery over colour is the first thing that attracts most people to the painters of Venice. Their colouring not only gives direct pleasure to the eye, but acts like music upon the moods, stimulating thought and memory in much the same way as a work by a great composer.” By shortening the quote I was attempting to approximate its meaning. Yes, color — that predominant gray I perceived, with backgrounds of ochre, sienna reds, bottle greens, and constant golds — not only became a source of pleasure for my weary eyes, it also stimulated my mind, my imagination, and my memory in an extraordinary way.

As I entered San Marco, the vastness of the space overwhelmed me. For a while I followed a group to whom a tour guide was explaining in laggard and pedantic French certain characteristics of Byzantine art. In that magnificent space I experienced the day’s only moment of doubt. It was difficult for me to make up my mind whether its grandeur was an obvious sign of the splendor of Byzantium, or a first step toward the aesthetic of Cecile B. DeMille, that titan of Hollywood. During subsequent, more relaxing visits, I concluded, with Solomonic wisdom, that both poetics are interwoven in that glorious basilica in remarkable harmony. I then moved on to a room located in an adjacent palace, where I saw an exhibition of Bosch. It was trial by fire! I had to look at the paintings from a considerable distance, which for me meant stumbling into total darkness. Had my knowledge of modern art been less rudimentary, I would have been able to compare some of those paintings with Malevich’s famous Black Square or with one of the enormous canvases in black by Rothko, of whose existence of course I was unaware.

I then set off for the Galleria. I toured its rooms overflowing with wonders: Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio: the immense legacy of form and color that Venice has bequeathed to the world. I cannot remember if I followed a group, as I did in San Marco, or whether I relied on my guidebook, pausing before some of the paintings. Afterward, I become lost. All I know is that I walked aimlessly for several hours, wandered down countless streets, crossed the great Rialto Bridge several times, and other less majestic ones, even some in ruins that crossed the small canals in less affluent neighborhoods. I boarded the vaporetto on several occasions and continued moving; I drank another coffee at the Florian and ate gloriously in a trattoria I happened upon by accident. As I walked, I became lost from time to time in my tiny guidebook. I tried to find Palladio’s buildings, those spaces that Hofmannsthal considered more worthy of being inhabited by gods than by men; I did not know then that outside of two or three churches the rest of his work is located on dry land, in Vicenza specifically. I thought I had found the Palazzo Mocenigo where Byron lived two years of scandalous orgies and prolific creation; the Palazzo Vendramin where Wagner lodged, and that other one where Henry James took an apartment in order to write The Aspern Papers. I began to imagine which one belonged to Juliana Bordereau, the centenarian protagonist who guards the much coveted papers, and the house where Robert Browning died, and the one where Alma Mahler attended to her daughter’s deathbed, and the one where Schnitzler’s daughter committed suicide just days after marrying. The very name of the city links the annals of love with moments of death. It is no wonder that one of the great titles of literature is Death in Venice. I saw towers, battlements, and balconies. I saw pointed arches and columns, bronze horses and marble lions. I heard Italian and German and French spoken all around me, as well as the Venetian dialect, peppered with words from Old Castilian, which once upon a time my ancestors must have spoken in those narrow streets. I paused in front of the Teatro La Fenice, whose splendid interior I had just seen in a movie by Visconti. In the vestibule, a large poster by Picasso announced a recent performance by the Berliner Ensemble: Mutter Courage.

That night, as I boarded my train, I felt as though I knew Venice like the back of my hand. What a poor naïve devil! Fatigue was getting the best of me; all of the sudden I began to feel the incredible effort I had exerted that day: my eyes, my temples, the back of my neck, my joints all hurt. I struggled to open my suitcase to take out my pajamas. The first thing I pulled out was a jacket; I felt my glasses in one of the pockets. The miracle had been completed: I had crossed the threshold, the steel blue egg of Leda was beginning to hatch, and opposites were uniting at the bottom of tombs. Where was all this esoteric logorrhea coming from? I did not finish putting on my pajamas. I remembered a line from the end of To the Lighthouse: “Yes, I have had my vision,” and I fell asleep. I repeated it again in the morning as I woke up, when the train was about to arrive in Rome.

PAST AND PRESENT

The year was 1965. I had been living in Warsaw for two years. One day the postman handed me a letter from Vence, a village in the South of France. It was signed by Witold Gombrowicz. Could it be a joke? I could scarcely believe it was real. I showed it to some Polish friends, and they were stunned. A young Mexican who was living in Warsaw had just received a letter from Gombrowicz! It couldn’t be! It was impossible! I nodded, ecstatic. “Like everything in Gombrowicz’s life,” I told myself.

He explained in the letter that someone had given him the Spanish translation of The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski, which I had done, and that he found it satisfactory. So he invited me to collaborate with him on the translation of his Argentine Diary, which the publishing house Sudamericana was to publish in Buenos Aires. It was the beginning of a significant improvement in my living conditions. Suddenly, I began to receive offers from various places. The sources of my income were Joaquín Mortiz at Ediciones Era and the Universidad Veracruzana Press in Mexico; Seix Barral and Planeta in Barcelona; and Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. Until then, I had only managed to place a few translations here and there. From that moment on, in just three or four hours a day, I managed to earn a regular income that in Poland in those days was a tidy little sum. In addition to Polish literature, I was receiving offers to translate Italian and English authors. For the next six or seven years I worked primarily as a translator; the profession I had begun in Warsaw allowed me to live full-time in Barcelona and part-time in England.

As I recall that time, I do not think that “I was living another life,” as people usually say, but rather that the person I’m talking about was not entirely me; instead, that person was a young Mexican who shared my name and some of my habits and idiosyncrasies.

One of the obvious bonds I share with that young man living in Warsaw is his inordinate love for reading. The freedom he enjoyed then is scarcely visible in his writings, but perhaps it was placed into a reservoir for later use, when, paradoxically, his spirit of freedom had withered. Recalling his irresponsibility, his cheek, his taste for adventure, produces in the writer of these lines a kind of vertigo.

I have trouble writing. My hand freezes when I recall the time when living was akin to being a noble savage and realize, without rancor, that society, its offices and its conventions, eventually achieved their mission. But not entirely! Perhaps my opposition to the ways of the world is more radical now, but it manifests itself in sullenness rather than joy — in convictions. It is no longer a mere emanation of nature.

During my stay in Warsaw I was master of my time, my body, and my pen. And while it is true that freedom in Poland was far from absolute, it is also true that the Poles took advantage as best they could, and with an intensity that bordered on frenzy, of the spaces opened up during de-Stalinization, especially artistic spaces. I owe to that period the pleasure of reading texts that would certainly have been different had I been living in my own country or in any of the cultural metropolises. Free from the burden of trends, from the capillas, Mexico’s literary coteries, and from any pressing need for information, reading became an act of sheer hedonism. I read the Poles, of course, and everything in that world was discovery; I read what my friends sent me from Mexico: Mexican and Latin American literature. Hopscotch was a revelation. Other books that were treasures were Francisco Delicado’s The Portrait of Lozana; a great deal of Tirso de Molina; Canetti’s Auto da Fé; Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless; Tibor Déry’s Mr. G.A. in X; Milan Fust’s The Story of My Wife; and, in particular, the ample collection of the British Council library: Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans; the theater of the Restoration, especially Sheridan and Congreve; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget; and, of course, everything, or almost everything, by Conrad, the reading of whom was different in a Polish milieu; and Henry James and Ford Madox Ford and Firbank and many others. The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power.

Around the same time as Gombrowicz’s letter, I received another from the publisher Don Rafael Giménez Siles, encouraging me to write an autobiography. He had invited a dozen writers from my generation and from the even younger one. He was interested, he said, in knowing how we young writers perceived the world and, more importantly, how we came to terms with our circumstances within it.

One aspect of the biographies would be their brevity, consistent with the short journey made by their writers. I began to write the account reluctantly and with very mixed feelings, but convinced of the need to have a presence, however small, in my country. Unlike the other authors included, I had written very little: two small books of short stories. I was certain that my life, and not just my literary one, had just started; nevertheless, I wrote the autobiographical essay out of vanity, or frivolity, or inertia.

I finished the requested text in a few days. As I wrote it, I felt trapped in an endless continuum. The recent episode was still very close to me, within a stone’s throw, and none of its lines had been brought to a close yet. I could compare my past to one of those extremely destructive hurricanes that strike a particular region with ferocity and, then, for weeks, travel for thousands of miles, but without moving from the spot where they built their greatest strength, to which they return time and time again to unleash their wrath. That was how I viewed my life: my childhood or what I tried to and could remember about it, my days at university, and a few trips, all of it was present in my memory as a single, rather confusing entity. The distance from Mexico, the perspective that it gave me, the strangeness of the new setting, helped to transform the past into a shapeless mixture of elements.

In late 1988 I returned to Mexico permanently. During my absence I published several books; some were translated into other languages. I received awards, all those things! I returned to the country with the idea of devoting my time and energy exclusively to writing. I felt an almost physical need to live with the language, to listen to Spanish all the time, to know it was around me, even if I did not hear it. The Mexico City I encountered seemed foreign and stubbornly complex. I persevered for four years without being able to assimilate it, nor assimilate myself to it. After I arrived, I began to receive publishing proposals; one was to rework that early autobiography, adding a second part that would bear witness to the previous twenty years. I had never reread it. When I did, I felt disgusted, with myself, and, above all, with my language. I did not recognize myself in the least in the image I sketched in Warsaw in 1965. I was struck immediately by a demure tone and false modesty that were irreconcilable with my relationship to literature, which has always been visceral, excessive, even wild. I sensed a plea for forgiveness emanating from the text for having been written and published. They were pages of immense hypocrisy. The writer’s task seemed like a third-rate activity. In short, it would not have bothered me to declare — because at the time I believed it — that I enjoyed writing less than reading, or that it was an ill-defined and precarious experience compared to other things that life offered me. That would have been fine. What I found strange was the virtuous schoolboy mask I was hiding behind, in halftone, the hypocritical ramblings of the Pharisee.

Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me. I can now distinguish the various stages of my life with sufficient clarity — the autonomy of the parts and their relation to the whole — which I was previously unable to do. I have begun to remember with respect and emotion not only my youth but that of others because of the innocence it represents — its blindness, intransigence, and destiny. That alone allows me to conceive of an infinite, unknown, and promising future.

LUNCH AT THE BELLINGHAUSEN

In 1978 or 1979 I spent a few months in Mexico City. At the time, I was a cultural attaché to our embassy in Moscow. I had saved my vacation days for two years so that my stay in Mexico would make more sense than on previous occasions, when I felt I was and was not in my country. Two months was a more respectable amount of time. During the first days of my stay I received a telephone call from Julieta Campos, then director of the Mexican PEN Club, inviting me to participate in a series of presentations of writers from various generations. In each session an older writer and a younger one, a literary newcomer, would read recent texts and then discuss them with the audience. She told me that she was thinking of pairing me with Villoro; we then talked about other things, some of which, with respect to the literary performance, were unclear to me.

After hanging up the phone it occurred to me that there was something about the proposition that did not make sense, that there was not sufficient distance between his generation and mine. It would have made more sense to be paired with Juan de la Cabada, Fernando Benítez, or Luis Cardoza y Aragón, my seniors. I was more than surprised when I learned a few days later that the Villoro with whom I would be introduced was Juan, Luis’s son; I had been assigned the role of the elder. I was forty-five years old, but until fairly recently I was still being mentioned among Mexico’s young writers. I suppose it was in part because of my absence, which made me difficult to identify, and the paucity of my work.

That was the first sign that things were no longer what they had been. That first public reading I did in Mexico gave me the opportunity to read a story that I had just written after several years of unbearable hibernation. It was also the beginning of a great friendship that binds me to Juan Villoro.

A mature author requires no introduction, or does he? The truth is the majority of my work appeared after that night when I passed the mantle to a very tall, hyperactive adolescent, who read with an impressive display of energy the story “El mariscal de campo” (The Field Marshal).

The act of reading, at that meeting of generations, a text that marked my return to writing made me feel, once the nightmare had ended and the celebratory teasing had begun, that I had reached maturity in a rather equivocal situation, that I had behaved like an adolescent writer and Juan like the master who was returning from all the experiences. I read with almost unbearable tension, without knowing if I would be able to make it to the end of a paragraph or even a sentence. I was afraid of having an embolism or a heart attack before getting to a stopping point, unlike the excruciating ease of the beardless youth who seemed to be conquering not just the audience but the entire world.

But in spite of the confusion, I was able to surmise that the equivocal relationship between age and writing would over the years become something eminently comical. The march toward old age, and, let’s say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience, and in which the scenes are characterized quite often by their parodic quality, like a laughable but also harsh theatrical illusion.

Let us look at an example:

I accompany Carlos Monsiváis to the Bellinghausen to meet Hugo Gutiérrez Vega, who had just arrived in Mexico to celebrate the New Year. Every time he returns to the country, whether from Madrid, Río, Washington, Athens, from whatever city his diplomatic career takes him, Carlos and I meet him at the same place to eat. Without fail, we begin to talk as if only a few weeks had passed since our last meal, which is one of the surest signs of friendship. On this occasion, he was coming from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is Consul General.

Hugo’s magnanimity is known to everyone. I am indebted to him, among other expressions of affection, for having put me in contact with some friends of his from the University of Bristol, where I was lecturer for a year in the Spanish department. We are the same age; I think I am even a couple of years his senior, but this does not prevent me from remembering him as an older brother; in fact, he and Lucy were like a big brother and big sister — and extraordinarily so! — during my stay in England.

In short, we met and were glad to be chatting again at the Bellinghausen. After the obligatory comments — our ailments, our friends, the situation in the country — Hugo manages to turn the conversation to one of his favorite topics: Romania, or rather, Romanian literature. He is elated that the Latin Union of Romance Languages Prize, awarded a few days ago in Rome, was given to the Romanian Alexandru Vona, whom he knows well. He won it for a single novel, he tells us, which Vona finished writing in 1947 and was finally about to have published. The novel, Bricked-up Windows, has shaped his destiny. It continues to be his destiny! The few intimate friends whom the Romanian author had allowed to read the novel claimed that his narrative style revealed such a sublime and rigorous quest for form that, if one were to make comparisons, the only names that might come to mind would be the great writers of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Broch, or Musil. For decades, the novelist lived with the certainty that he would never see his work published. Nevertheless, he continued to care for it, refining it in secret. His first surprise must have been its publication in 1993 in its original language, Romanian; then came the translation to French, and now the prize awarded him unanimously by an exceptionally brilliant jury comprised of, among others, Vincenzo Consolo, Luigi Malerba, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Rubem Fonseca, and our dear friend Álvaro Mutis. And from Vona, Hugo bounces to other writers he knows — some personally, others by their work — because one of his greatest passions, perhaps the most eccentric, is, you may have already guessed by now, Romanian literature.

Hugo speaks with characteristic passion as he moves within his sphere; the names he cited elude me, with the exception of the most obvious: Cioran, Eminescu, Eliade, Gian Luca Caragiale; the same thing, I imagine, happens to Monsiváis. He recounts the exploit of a poet and Hispanist — was it Gialescu? — who, although gravely ill from osseous tuberculosis, devotes the rest of his life to translating Góngora’s Soledades which he does so masterfully that today it is considered one of the most remarkable renderings of the Andalusian poet’s work in any foreign language. From there, I begin to get lost, my mind wanders, and not because Hugo’s discussion fails to interest me, rather because I discover that an old man, the doyen of all the world’s old men, the quintessential Nestor, is waving ardently at me from at a faraway table. I watch him stand up suddenly and begin to walk, very slowly, dragging two feet that by all appearances are attempting to rebel against him; he moves his arms as if he were feeling his way or attempting to propel himself. He smiles as though our presence in the restaurant both surprised him and filled him with happiness.

He is wearing stylish clothes, greenish-gray flannel trousers and a slightly wrinkled checkered jacket, which adds a discreet elegance to his figure. His white mane is full and unruly. His face has a pinkish hue, like that of a baby, but scored in every direction with wrinkles of varying lengths and depths, which seems out of place with his infant-like coloring. He reminds me of the last photos of Auden: “My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain…” The only one among us who could not see him was Carlos, because this radiant specter of happiness was approaching from his rear. The names of classmates came to mind suddenly en masse; at that moment, I tried to imagine the face of a younger man, to return it to adolescence and assign it a name, but it was impossible.

Waiting on the tip of my tongue were all the platitudes that one says at moments such as this: “It’s great to see you, old man, especially in such good shape! Obviously, life has treated you well, am I right? Now I know why our colleagues call you Dorian Gray. But they’re wrong, you’re in much better shape, much better of course,” and other such nonsense, only to buy time and give the other person the opportunity to say something that will allow me to identify him.

He opened his arms just a step from our table, as I was about to stand and embrace him. Fortunately, I stopped; I would have made a spectacle of myself. The old timer walked past us without stopping, without even looking at us, his smile growing bigger, and his arms flailing even more. He stopped at the table right behind ours. I was saved from having to repeat such drivel and listen to him do the same. Someone at the table next to us said: “You’re looking good, Flacus! Just look at him! I’m so jealous, Flacus!” And the salvo of hot air that the occasion demanded continued; the gamut of banalities that language has accumulated for such cases. I turned around to watch the show. It was a long table, with some ten people, everyone fawning over Flacus, who, with a content look he attempted to mitigate with words of modesty, responded: “Don’t be so sure, not everything that glimmers is gold; I don’t always feel as good as today; don’t be so sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover…!”

I breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, I realized that we had all stopped talking. What was curious was that the three of us, Hugo and I from the beginning of the old man’s march, and Monsiváis from the time he walked by the table, thought that he was a friend from our youth whom we were not able to place. Perhaps an actor from our generation, a young leading man with a brief but intense career, retired from the profession many years ago. But that possibility turned out to be, without our knowing why, unconvincing.

We devoured our dessert and downed our coffee, as if trying to escape that character who was so close to us. The suspicion that someone could at that very moment be saying the same thing about us made us a little uneasy to say the least. In short, one must grow accustomed to such discomfort upon reaching a certain age.

EVERYTHING IS ALL THINGS

After the first “vision,” I returned to Venice at least a dozen times. I have wandered every corner of it, and read with interest and pleasure many of the texts that have been written about it, its history, its art, and its customs. There also exists a store of fiction set in Venice. In almost every one of these novels it is considered more than just a setting; rather, it becomes a character. Sometimes it is the protagonist itself.

Puritans, by training, by creed, or by temperament, tend to demonize it; in some, the rejection coincides with an irresistible attraction, and that duality is transformed into delirium. Ruskin passionately described each of its stones, and at the same time was horrified by the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. Evil dwells in the heart of Venice; it is a sea of abomination; its contaminating power is the work of the devil, they say. Should an innocent person manage to escape from there, he does so with a damaged soul. Some are even denied that privilege. They succumb; such is the case of Aschenbach from Death in Venice. Half of mankind allows itself to berate it, lecture it; they attempt to reform it, redeem it from its sins and vices; they demand it cease to exist in order to purge its sins; they rejoice in its decline; only its sinking — death by water — will succeed in purifying it.

Its defenders at times employ disconcerting arguments. Berenson becomes rhapsodic over its colors. He marvels at its extraordinary school of painting, the only one in Italy that lacks “primitives,” because it was born with a handful of masterpieces. The celebrated aesthete asserts that Venice was the first modern European nation, but the reasons underlying this assertion seem rather paradoxical: “Since there was little room for personal glory in Venice, the perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found at first scant encouragement there, and the Venetians were saved from that absorption in archeology and pure science which overwhelmed Florence at an early date. […] As it was, the feeling for beauty was not hindered in its natural development.” Venetian painting is created, and he insists on this point at various times, to be simply an object of pleasure.

What Berenson highlights — his admiration for beautiful and healthy bodies; his love for colorful and sumptuous decoration; the disposition toward pleasure, carnival; the permanent use of the mask and erotic extravagance — is what scandalizes Puritans. On the other hand, anyone who has the slightest propensity for sensuality will in La Serenissima feel as if he were in the Temple of Venus. It is no wonder Casanova is known world-over as the son of Venice.

Venice is boundless and unfathomable. There is always something to see on the next trip, because a church is under restoration, a painting is on loan, the museums are on strike, a thousand reasons. Each trip means corrections, amplifications, surprises, dedications, and demystifications. During my first trips Longhi did not even exist for me, yet today he is one of the painters I am most drawn to. I waited many long years to be able to see Carpaccio’s amazing mural St. George and the Dragon. For many years, time and again, I walked the long route from La Fenice et des Artistes hotel, where I always stay, to the church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, and each time I encountered an unexpected obstacle: closed for restoration, admission denied due to some special ceremony, the walls draped in thick curtains without any explanation whatsoever. During my last trip, when I was finally able to see that and the other frescoes the San Giorgio holds, I felt as if I had at long last planted a pike in Flanders.

The first time, it bears repeating, I saw the city without seeing it. Instead I saw it in fragments, emerging and disappearing, with incorrect proportions and altered colors. The spectacle was at once unreal and marvelous. Over the years I have corrected that vision, each time more magnificent, each time more unreal. In some way my travels around the world, my entire life, have had that same character. With or without glasses, I’ve never achieved more than glimpses, approximations, mutterings in search of meaning in the narrow space that runs between light and darkness. I’ve dreamt that I was a voyager in that fantastic ship of fools painted by Memling, which I once contemplated with amazement in the Naval Museum of Gdansk. What are we, and what is the universe? What are we in the universe? These are questions that leave us speechless, and that we are accustomed to answering with a joke so as not to seem ridiculous.

We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by different times, hobbies, and creeds. As I write these pages, I can divide my life into one long, enjoyable, gregarious phase, and another, the most recent, in which solitude seems to me a gift from the gods. For many years, going to parties, lunches, tertulias, cafés, bars, restaurants was a daily pleasure. The transition to the other extreme occurred so gradually I’m unable to explain the process’s distinct movements. My years in Prague coincided with an intense inner energy. Writing became an obsession; I believe the unbearable social life that I was obliged to lead, for reasons of protocol, in some way nourished the novels I wrote there with anecdotes, episodes, gestures, phrases, and habits.

I live in Xalapa, a provincial capital surrounded by exceptional landscapes. In the morning I go out to the countryside, where I have a cabin, and I spend several hours writing and listening to music. From time to time I take a break to play with my dog in the garden. I return to the city for the midday meal, and in the afternoon I write again, listen to music, read, and sometimes I watch an old movie on videocassette. I talk to friends on the phone. After six p.m., except on rare occasions, nothing can make me leave the house. I am indebted to the architect Bernal Lascuráin, to his imagination, to his taste and his talent, for the pleasure of inhabiting these houses, each one built as a complement to the other. If I had to live under house arrest in them, I would be perfectly happy. I work until two or three in the morning. That rhythm of life which others might find maddening is the only one that appeals to me.

Those things of importance that happen to us in life are due to instinct, Julien Green says. “All sexualities are a part of the same family: instinct. But there is something in it that always escapes us, of which we are conscious. It is what makes our life exciting. Every human being carries a mystery of which he is unaware.” What doesn’t matter, I suppose, what is the same for everyone in the world, what makes an epoch trivial, is created naturally by society. We condition ourselves to it without realizing it; that is one of its great labors and the source of a thousand misfortunes. But then one believes he is behaving like a robot, acting mechanically, marching like a sleepwalker, like an army of tiny little men, and, in the end, it turns out that the force of instinct has worked in the opposite direction. As a child Rosita Gómez dreamt of being a stripper and ended up being an honest bank teller; she never learned to dance, not even waltzes. Marcelino Góngora dreamt of being in the mafia, the head of a criminal gang, the terror of the underworld, yet before the end of adolescence he was a sacristan in his village church. The book that someone intended to write, and for which he took countless notes for years, suddenly came to a standstill, ceased to be a project; something unexpected, beyond his control, began to take shape. That’s how things work. Ask again what we are, where we are going, and a fist in the mouth will rid you of the few teeth you have left.

And from instinct, which is a mystery, I would like to shift to the subject of tolerance, which is an act of will. There is no human virtue more admirable. It implies recognition of others: another way of knowing oneself. An extraordinary virtue, says E.M. Forster, although hardly exciting. There are no hymns to tolerance, as there are, in abundance, to love. It lacks poems and sculptures that extol it. It is a virtue that requires a constant effort and vigilance. It has no popular prestige. If one says of a man that he is tolerant, most people instantly believe that his wife has cheated on him, and the rest make him out to be a fool. One would have to return to the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, to Diderot, to the encyclopédistes, to find the true meaning of the word. In our century, Bakhtin is one of its paladins: his notion of dialogism allows for the possibility of responding to different and opposite meanings equally. “We only harm others when we’re incapable of imagining them,” writes Carlos Fuentes. “Political democracy and civilized coexistence between men demands tolerance and the acceptance of values and ideas different than our own,” says Octavio Paz.

Norberto Bobbio offers a definition of the “civilized” man that embodies the concept of tolerance as daily action, a working moral exercise: The civilized man “lets others be themselves irrespective of whether these individuals may be arrogant, haughty, or domineering. They do not engage with others intending to compete, harass, and ultimately prevail. They refrain from exercising the spirit of contest, competition, or rivalry, and therefore also of winning. In life’s struggle [civilized men] are perpetual losers. […] This is because in this kind of world there are no contests for primacy, no struggles for power, and no competitions for wealth. In short, here the very conditions that enable the division of individuals into winners and losers do not exist.”¹ There is something enormous in those words. When I observe the deterioration of Mexican life, I think that only an act of reflection, of critique, and of tolerance could provide an exit from the situation. But conceiving of tolerance as it is imagined in the Bobbio’s text implies a titanic effort. I begin to think about the hubris, arrogance, and corruption of some acquaintances, and I become angry, I begin to list their attitudes that most irritate me, I discover the magnitude of contempt they inspire in me, and eventually I must recognize how far I am from being a civilized man.

In the second entry of Lezama Lima’s diaries, dated October 24, 1939, the Cuban writer writes of the relationship between Voltaire and Frederick II. In the beginning, the rapport between the monarch and the philosopher seemed perfect: “Both constantly lose all sense of measure in their praise.” But a single criticism by Voltaire regarding the spelling mistakes that spoil Louis XIV’s prose is enough to poison the relationship. A king is a king and therefore his greatness cannot be dishonored by a solecism or a spelling mistake; a philosopher, no matter how genius, is only a philosopher and should know his place. Caesar est supra grammaticam, that must never be forgotten. The age-old connection between writer and prince has been undermined by misunderstanding; it is a dangerous friendship. A novelist must learn to carry on a dialogue with others, but especially with himself, he must learn to scrutinize and listen to himself; this will help him know who he is. If he fails, instead of a novel, he will build a verbal artifact that attempts to simulate a narrative form, but whose breathing will be wrong. It will, perhaps, pick up something in the atmosphere. The author knows that he will please either Caesar or the masses, it makes no difference; he has written it for one of those two deities. A few years later, it will end up on the scrapheap. Literature is worse than la belle dame sans merci, that woman beloved and feared by the symbolists. When they play tricks on her, when she senses that she’s being used for spurious reasons, her revenge can be ferocious.

To begin by invoking the annals of Venice and to end bogged down in a literature of lies is a vulgarity. This fact allows me to realize how far I am from the civilized man that Bobbio envisions. Rather than yield to that irritation, I would like to comment on the attitude of two writers who have been decisive as models for my life of retirement: Luis Cernuda and Julien Gracq. It is well known that temperament is destiny, and in temperament I feel that I belong to the same family as those writers. From the outside, and out of slapdashness, one might think that it is a question of authors determined to read life instead of live it. The truth is a little more complex and at the same time much simpler.

One might think that renouncing a large portion of the world’s customs is a way to make arrogance, and occasionally pride, pass for humility. This is not the case. For me it’s a matter of intense relaxation, a pure form of hedonism. Walking through my garden; seeing all my books collected at last, knowing that I have reached the desert island with more options than the ten titles demanded by polls; being far from everything — without refusing to observe the world — scrutinizing it, reading it, trying to decipher its signs, sensing its movements, is overall a pleasure. This does not exclude traveling, dreaming of walking once again the streets of Lisbon, Prague, Marienbad, Venice…

Venice has been a frequent setting in my literature. It is an imagined Venice like Hofmannsthal’s, an ideal Venice, which produces in me the certainty of man’s biological unity with everything that surrounds him and his mythical fusion with the past.

I once wrote:

“All times deep down are a single time. Venice comprises and is comprised of all cities, and the young tourist who, Baedeker in hand and eyes half-closed, stops to contemplate a whimsical façade on the Via degli Schiavoni, the collar of his raincoat raised to protect his weak bronchial tubes from the prevailing dampness, is the same young Levantine with almond eyes and curly hair who contemplates with amazement the riches of the market that runs along the recently erected Rialto Bridge, and also the slave with a coarse mop of dirty-green hair captured in a Kashubian village on the Baltic coast in order to dig the first palafittes of what would later become the most colorful, the most eccentric, the most spectacular of all cities. Each one of us is all men. I have been, the protagonist seems to proclaim, Othello and also Iago and also Desdemona’s lost handkerchief! I am my grandfather and those who will be my grandchildren! I am the vast stone that lays the foundation for these wonders, and I am also its cupolas and estipites! I am a lad and a horse and a piece of bronze that represents a horse! Everything is all things! And only Venice, with its absolute individuality, could reveal that secret.”

Xalapa, February 1996

1 Translated by Teresa Chataway. Throughout the text, Pitol quotes from a variety of literary texts written in Spanish and in other languages. Because he does not cite the quotations, it is impossible to know the source of the translated quotations. For consistency, where possible, I have opted to use published English translations of all quotations. A full bibliography of these translations and their sources is included in the Appendix. Unless otherwise noted by a footnote, all translations of these quotations are mine. —Trans.

WITH MONSIVÁIS THE YOUNGER

ONE DAY IN 1957

I’m waiting for Monsiváis in the Kilos on Avenida Juárez, opposite the El Caballito statue. We agreed to meet at two, have lunch, and go over the final pages of the text I was to publish in the Cuadernos del Unicornio (The Unicorn’s Notebooks). I don’t know how many times I’ve reread the proofs, but I’ll feel more secure if he takes a look at them. Carlos was the first person to read the two stories that will make up the notebook; the first, “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,” is dedicated to him. I see him almost daily, even if just in passing. We met three years ago — yes, in 1954—during the days preceding the “Glorious Victory.” At that time we were participating in the University Committee for Solidarity with Guatemala; we collected protest signatures, distributed fliers, attended a rally together that began in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. We saw Frida Kahlo there, surrounded by Diego Rivera, Carlos Pellicer, Juan O’Gorman, and some other “greats.” She was already living entirely against the grain; it was her last public appearance: she died shortly thereafter. From then on I began to see Carlos regularly: in the café at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters; at a cineclub; in the editorial office of Estaciones; or in the home of mutual friends. More than anywhere else, I ran into him at bookstores.

Not long after we met, he came to my apartment, on Calle de Londres, when the Juárez neighborhood had not yet become the Zona Rosa, to read a story that he had just finished: “Fino acero de niebla” (Fine Steel of Mist), about which the only thing I remember is that it had nothing to do with the Mexican literature of our generation. The language was popular, but highly stylized; and the structure was very elusive. It demanded that the reader more or less find his own way. The fiction written by our contemporaries, even the most innovative, seemed closer to the canons of the nineteenth century next to his fine steel. Monsiváis brought together in his story two elements that would later define his personality: an interest in popular culture — in this case the language of the working-class neighborhoods — and a passion for form, two facets that do not usually coincide. When I expressed my enthusiasm after the reading, he immediately snapped shut, like an oyster trying to dodge lemon drops.

He had just finished reading when Luis Prieto arrived. He greeted Carlos warmly, and Carlos immediately shoved the pages into a folder, as if they were compromising documents. Luis told us that he had just come from Las Lomas, from a very entertaining gathering with a group of English philosophers, followers of Ouspensky; one of them, who was very rich, Mr. Tur-Four, or Sir Cecil Tur-Four, as the group’s members referred to him, had proposed building a place for meditation — a temple, to be exact — The Eye of God, on the outskirts of Cuautla, where the community would be able to perform the necessary rites. Some thirty people had attended to express their gratitude. Luis said he didn’t understand why they had invited him. It didn’t surprise me; I had accompanied him on many of his adventures through the impenetrable labyrinth of eccentricity that lay hidden within the city at the time, a world that included locals and foreigners, teachers, notaries, archeologists, old Balkan countesses, Chinese restaurateurs, Italian mediums, famous actresses, anonymous students, choreographers, rural school teachers, and opulent collectors of African, Oceanic, and pre-Hispanic art that had traveled the world, exhibited in the most famous museums, but also others, much more modest, who collected cigarette boxes, beer bottles, and shoes. Luis was also a friend of two nuns who had been cloistered during the time of religious persecution; one of them, congenitally ill-natured, a Mexican, and daughter of an Englishman, Párvula Dry, who at the slightest provocation would recount to whomever was standing in front of her, even a perfect stranger, her thorny post-convent odyssey, her arduous journey toward the Truth. The other never spoke; instead she just agreed solemnly with whatever her spokeswoman said. Every time I saw them with Luis, Párvula Dry would repeat, in almost the exact same words, that if both she and the other, the former Mother Superior, had managed to find themselves, it was due not to psychoanalysis, to which they had both turned, nor to tantric Buddhism, which is a mere fallacy, nor to the teachings of Krishnamurti, from which they learned nothing, but to their discovery of Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Luis was like a fish in water with these over-the-top characters. He eventually described the meeting in detail, the characters in attendance, the events that transpired; he told us that, in the middle of Mr. Tur-Four’s report on the progress of the construction of The Eye of God, a very large man, monster-like in his obesity, fell suddenly into a trance and from his lips the Maestro, Ouspensky of course, violently insulted the patron and the two dissolute nuns who were manipulating him, whose mere presence, he said, sullied their Work. He described the uproar that occurred in the room at these words and his astonishment when several of the participants, instead of attempting to silence the giant who continued his trance-induced tirade, began to savagely insult each other. Some fell into a trance and produced conflicting messages. A skeleton-like woman, who in her normal state sounded like a bird chirping when she spoke, emitted a thunderous voice with which she threatened the snake, the worm who claimed to be the Maestro’s messenger, with expulsion from the sect, and added that the former nuns, slaves of papism in the past, had already been redeemed and that, like the magnanimous Sir Cecil Tur-Four, they were absolutely necessary to the revelation of the Truth. Some fell into convulsions only to hurl increasingly inappropriate insults at each other; Luis Prieto deepened his voice and in a cavernous tone announced: “The session has been suspended!” At that moment they all came out of their trance, stood up and, like good Englishmen, said their goodbyes with the greatest propriety imaginable, except for a single elderly woman who became flabbergasted and kept repeating in English, “Two-four, stop! Two-four, stop!” and who had to be carried out on a stretcher. Luis reproduced the session in so many different voices and so many details that it looked as if a demiurge were recreating that amazing theosophical pandemonium before our eyes. Until then, for as long as I had known Carlos, I had never seen him laugh so much, nor could I imagine that a person so introspective and ensconced in books would be so receptive to such madcap humor. It was the first time I heard his inimitable guffaw. Luis and I began to tell variations of the story, adding characters, exaggerating some scenes for effect, and, to my surprise, the neophyte not only laughed like Rabelais but also contributed very skillfully to the construction and deconstruction of that verbal puzzle, the great game, of which Luis’s verbal synopsis had been only a starting point.

Those stories took place three years prior to the day I’m waiting for Carlos at the Kikos on Avenida Juárez. I wait for him as I read ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the intense, truculent, and painful tragedy by John Ford. Of all the works of Elizabethan theatre that I know, including those by Shakespeare, Ford’s tragedy is one of those that most impress me. I began to read it when I arrived at the restaurant, and I’m almost finished when the incestuous brother explodes in anger upon discovering that he’s been betrayed. It’s a literary period that I frequent more and more. I would like to study it in depth, systematize my readings, take notes, and establish the chronology of the period. But the same thing always happens: at the moment of greatest fervor I become sidetracked by other subjects, other periods, and I end up not studying anything in depth. Carlos is always late, but on this occasion he goes too far; it’s possible that he won’t even show. I’m famished; I decide to order the daily special. I eat and continue reading Ford. By the time dessert arrives I reach the end, which leaves me terrified. At that moment Carlos arrives. He’s coming from the Radio Universidad, where he took part, he says, in a taping on science fiction. He orders only a hamburger and a Coke. He places the proofs next to his plate and reads them in a few minutes as he eats. He makes one or two corrections. He then takes out a couple of pages from a book, marks through a few words, adds others, changes the last lines completely. He asks me to go with him to the Excelsior, which is next door, so he can deliver the piece that he just corrected; it will only take a moment. In no time we’ll be at Juan José Arreola’s house to deliver the proofs. Waiting for us there is José Emilio Pacheco, who today will submit his manuscript of La sangre de medusa (The Blood of Medusa), which will also be published in the Cuadernos de Unicornio. La Zaplana, Mexico’s largest bookstore, is located on the ground floor of the building immediately adjacent to the Kikos; we’re unable to resist the temptation to glance at the bookstore’s tables and shelves. Each of us leaves with an immense package under his arm. We’re proud of the rapid growth of our libraries (Monsiváis’s will eventually exceed thirty thousand volumes). We return to the Kikos to ask them to sell us some cardboard boxes because it’s impossible to move through the street or get on a bus with so many books in our hands. While they look for the boxes we drink coffee and examine our finds. During our four-year friendship, our reading lists have expanded and overlapped. We both purchased Conrad by coincidence that day. I pick up Victory and Under Western Eyes, and he picks up Lord Jim, The Outcast of the Islands, and The Secret Agent. We both read an abundance of Anglo-Saxon authors, I prefer English, and he North Americans; but the end result is a mutually beneficial influence. We leaf through our purchases. I talk about Henry James, and he about Melville and Hawthorne; I about Forster, Sterne, and Virginia Woolf, and he about Poe, Twain, and Thoreau. We both admire the intelligent wit of James Thurber, and we declare once more that the language of Borges constitutes the greatest miracle that has happened to our language in this century; he pauses briefly and adds that one of the highest moments in the Castilian language is owed to Casiodoro de Reina and his disciple Cipriano de Valera, and when I ask, confused by the names, “And who are they?” he replies, scandalized, that they are none other than the translators of the Bible. He tells me that he aspires one day to write prose that exhibits the benefit of the countless years he’s devoted to reading biblical texts; I, who am ignorant of them, comment, cowering slightly, that the greatest influence I’ve encountered is that of William Faulkner, and there he checkmates me when he explains that the language of Faulkner, like that of Melville and Hawthorne, is profoundly influenced by the Bible, that they are a non-religious derivation of the Revealed Language. Suddenly, he points out that it’s gotten late, that we have to rush to the Excelsior to deliver his piece. I ask him if it’s “The Idiot Box,” and he immediately changes the subject. “The Idiot Box” is a very acerbic column about television and its effects, which are very disconcerting to Carlos. Television! Who in the hell cares about television! Certainly no one I associate with. We arrive at the editor’s office. The section chief, to whom he must turn in his piece, has gone upstairs to a meeting. He might be back in a half hour. We sit wherever we can. A journalist sitting next to us, talking on the phone, says that things in Mexico are getting worse because of the government’s softness, that it’s giving in more and more to union pressure, that if the authorities do not intervene and eradicate the leprosy, the country will unravel. We continue to talk about books, which implies that literature is the subject to which we constantly return, although frequently interrupted by bursts of commentary of all kinds — cinema, the city, problems that concern us at the moment, the university, our lives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies — until we arrive at that subject which most entertains and amuses us: our novel, to the writing of which we have devoted hundreds of hours of conversation, without ever having written a word. Our novel, we confess, is in some way determined by the parodic humor of the young Waugh. We also know that it is equally determined by the impudence and imagination of La familia Burrón, the comic strip by Gabriel Vargas, and by the daily fireworks of Luis Prieto. Before beginning our work, and to exercise our mind a bit, we make a succinct summary of what is being written in Mexico, the authors worth reading, those it’s better to toss in the trash; those who pass are, of the contemporaries: Gorostiza, Pellicer, Novo, and Villaurrutia; The Labyrinth of Solitude and Freedom under Parole by Octavio Paz, which just came out; Juan José Arreola’s prose and the two superb books by Rulfo. We feel a genuine veneration for Pedro Páramo. We’ve heard very good things about two novels, one recently published, another about to be, but already widely commented on: the first is Balún Canán, by Rosario Castellanos; the other, Where the Air Is Clear, by Carlos Fuentes. And we no longer have time to delve into our parodic novel because an employee approaches to tells Carlos that the section chief is about to leave; to our utter amazement he adds that he’s been in his office for an hour. Carlos jumps up, hastily follows the employee and disappears behind a door. Ten minutes later he returns, calm. He’s almost certain that his piece will appear in tomorrow’s edition.

Night falls. A bus drops us at the corner of the Chapultepec movie house, just a short walk from where Arreola lives. When we arrive, he complains about our delay. José Emilio is about to leave. We convince him to stay awhile. Arreola is also about to leave. He has committed to attending the premier of Pirandello’s Henry IV at Bellas Artes. He assures us that the next day he’ll take the proofs to press. Our Cuadernos will appear very soon. He shows us a few sheets of stunning Dutch paper and gives us a lesson on watermarks. It’s obvious that he’s in a hurry to leave, but he agrees to sit for a moment to chat. He urges Carlos to submit material for a Cuaderno. José Emilio and I mention that he has a magnificent story. In unison we shout: “Fino acero de niebla!” Carlos bursts out laughing, covers his face with a cushion, and then promises vaguely that he’s revising something he’s about to finish. Arreola begins to talk about Pirandello, recalling the staging of his works when the great Italian companies toured Mexico; the best, according to him, was that of Mimi Agugli. He then turns to Louis Jouvet; he did not miss a single performance when his company was in Mexico, or in Paris, when he lived there. Theater is the genre that combines all literary perfections, he declares; he suddenly stands, marches around the room, and recites entire scenes while imitating all the characters from Farce of the Chaste Susana by Diego Sánchez de Badajoz; later, he retracts, in no way is theater the most important genre, such a claim is an aberration; he then discusses poetry and thereafter takes out a volume of Proust and reads to us, in perfect French, the chapter in which Albertine is surprised while asleep. Suddenly, a young man, visibly irritated, who has been listening to him, and who has remained silent throughout our stay, stands and barks that if he and Arreola do not leave at once they’ll never make curtain time. We all go out into the street. Arreola and his companion get in a taxi, and the three of us — José Emilio, Carlos, and I — walk up the Paseo de la Reforma, turn right on Niza, and walk to a taquería next to the Insurgentes movie house, where we would often go at night to eat soup and sample the most delicious selection of tacos imaginable. While we eat, we return to the subject of literature, each of us reiterating our preferences. To the usual names, we add others: Alejo Carpentier and Juan Carlos Onetti, and, thanks to José Emilio, poets are also introduced: Quevedo, Garcilaso, López Velarde, Neruda, Vallejo, Huidobro, the Generation of ’27. José Emilio eats quickly and says goodbye; he has to turn in a translation the next day. Some writers we barely know approach our table to sit and chat. They’re obsessed with defining the topics our generation is obligated to address. They begin to enumerate their projects; they know what they must do for the next five years at least. We eat without paying too much attention to the ambitions of our newly arrived guests. Later, we discuss a fabulous book, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in which both biographer and biographee appear alternately as the remarkable characters they were, but they also prefigure traits belonging to Mr. Pickwick or, closer to home, to the comic strip character Don Reginito Burrón, which makes its reading even more enjoyable. We also discuss detective novels to avoid the formulaic and insipid conversation that dominates the table, and only out of politeness do we answer the questions that our acquaintances occasionally ask, without telling them that the only project that interests us is writing a satirical novel in which we would portray them as a bunch of grotesque and pompous idiots.

Perhaps we’re aware that we’ll never write a line of that novel, but perhaps we also sense that such a daily game can be one of the sources that will inspire our later work, that is if it is ever written. We cannot foretell the future, nor do we want to; the only thing that matters to us is the present and the immediate future; to think, for example, about what the coming days offer, how the complex situations that each of us confronts in his personal life will unravel, and with the same intensity, what books we will read in the days to come.

THE RETURN HOME

I return to Mexico in mid-1962. I’m excited to get back to my old habits and haunts. Nevertheless, I do everything possible to return to Italy. I do not have steady employment; I manage on a hodgepodge of jobs I do at home. After the absolute freedom I enjoyed in Rome, the idea of going back to an office is difficult for me to accept. During this time, I translate The Monk, the gothic novel by M.G. Lewis, which is published in installments in Salvador Elizondo’s magazine Snob. I do readers’ notes for Joaquín Díez-Canedo. Max Aub has given me small jobs at Radio Universidad: snippets to celebrate the anniversaries of famous writers; I also participate in a book review program, also at Radio, with Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis. The Coordination of Cultural Diffusion, which oversees Radio Universidad, is enjoying a golden age under the direction of Jaime García Terrés. To start with, there is no censorship. Rosario Castellanos adds a very informal character to the program; everyone is able to express his or her opinion with no strings attached. We celebrate on the program the release of Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz; we dust off the work of Martín Luis Guzmán, which of late the author himself has not even paid much attention to. We discuss the new postwar Spanish narrative, the existence of which has been difficult to accept in Mexico. The prevailing opinion is that since the fall of the Republic it is impossible for anything worthwhile to emerge; that a new literature can only be born with the disappearance of Franco. Discussing, much less praising, new authors like Sánchez Ferlosio, Goytisolo, Martín-Santos, Aldecoa, bothers a lot of people who believe that to do so legitimizes the Franco regime. It’s a nuisance but it’s impossible to compromise with this kind of intolerance.

Since that day in 1957 I described before, many things have happened: there have been shockwaves that have provoked reactions against the government apparatus and its institutions; unexpected social movements have arisen; labor leaders have emerged who question the old codgers immobilizing the social organism. Corruption was condemned in many areas. There were protest marches and strikes nationwide; railway workers, teachers, telephone operators, and other union groups filled the streets and took control of them. There were impressive demonstrations. I remember one organized in support of teachers in which the participation of intellectuals was particularly important; there were not only young people but also those we considered our teachers. In a row ahead of Monsiváis and me were Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, both functionaries of the Foreign Service. We marched in front of the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs just as the employees were leaving. Some diplomats applauded when they saw their colleagues in the march; others, horrified, could not believe their eyes.

The response was immediate: a disproportionate crackdown. From 1958 to 1960 riot police seemed to take control of the city, surprised, perhaps, by the obstinacy of students and workers who, in spite of the beatings, arrests, and torture, continued to express their dissatisfaction, handing out fliers, marching in the streets, singing subversive songs, ridiculing the government. The jails filled with political prisoners. Monsiváis, José Emilio, a dozen other writers, and I went on a hunger strike called by José Revueltas, in solidarity with the strike that Siqueiros and other political prisoners had undertaken in Lecumberri. We were living day to day, with a recklessness that could only be attributed to naïveté. We took for granted that nothing would happen to us, and it was senseless to worry beforehand. We did not possess a desire to be martyrs — on the contrary. Personally, the experience helped me to rid myself of a feeling of over-protection that was beginning to hinder me. Somehow we understood that the country needed changes, that the political institutions were rusty, that it was unhealthy for a nation to be perpetually governed by a single party. But we did not expect the violent reaction from the groups in control. They were only able to respond to dialogue with beatings, arrests, and even murder.

Every time I reread La segunda casaca (The Second Turncoat), that remarkable national episode by Benito Pérez Galdós, I’m moved by a statement made by the protagonist Salvador Monsalud:

I have always believed the same thing, and I very much fear, even after victory, that things in my country will continue to seem to me as bad as before. This is such a horrible mixture of ignorance, bad faith, corruption, and weakness that I suspect the evil is too deep for revolutionaries to repair. Among these, one sees everything: there are men of much merit, good heads, and hearts of gold; but there are also unruly ones who seek only noise and chaos; not to mention those filled with good faith yet lacking in intelligence and common sense. I have observed this group they are caught up in, unable to unite the greatness of ideas with the pettiness of their ambitions; I have felt a certain fear for principle; but after pondering it, I have concluded by affirming that the evils that revolution may bring will never be as great as those as absolutism. And if they are — he continued contemptuously — they well deserve it. If all this is to continue to bear the name of nation, everything must be turned upside down, that common sense which has been offended be avenged, drawing and quartering such ridiculous idolatry, such foolishness, and barbarism erected in living institutions; there must be a complete renovation of the patria, no vestiges of the past should remain, and everything must be plowed under with noise, crushing the foolish who insist on carrying an outmoded artifice on their shoulders. And this must be done quickly, violently, because if it is not done this way it will never be done… Here the doors of tyranny must be torn down with ax blows in order to destroy them, because if we open them with their key, they will be left standing and will close again.

This is what Salvador Monsalud proclaimed, the unblemished hero, the character whom Galdós treated with the greatest sympathy, as if he wanted to share the same exploits with him. But, unlike Monsalud, we did not think it was necessary to change everything, to turn everything upside down, rather simply to ensure that the Constitution be followed, that our legislative practice be real, and not a mere pretext that gives rise to oratorical pirouettes and flourishes; that the rights of the citizens be respected, that the corrupt leaders and uncivil rulers disappear, those scourges capable of tarnishing any system, and through momentary disharmony reach social harmony. After the repression began we no longer thought the same; we wished, like Monsalud, for everything to be uprooted so that nothing would ever be the same, and one of the options that we envisioned was socialism, whether democratic socialism like Sweden or Finland, or real socialism like that of Eastern Europe, or even a socialism sui generis like that of China. It was the period of the “Hundred Flowers,” not of the Cultural Revolution; I had just read a couple of very suggestive books: The Long March, by Simone de Beauvoir, and Into China, by the magnificent Claude Roy; both writers portrayed that world as a utopia in progress; an ideal vision built with real elements. In other words, the radical Monsalud, at first a purely literary character, ended up being our contemporary. We were tied to him by a common desire for justice, cleanliness, and decency. We also shared with him his doubts about what could happen after the change, if in fact there was one, and at the same time we were captivated by his adventurous life, not at all stifled by his political activity. We were anti-dogmatic by nature. E.M. Forster’s book Two Cheers for Democracy became my spiritual guide; since then, I always have it by my side.

I can say with confidence that during those three years—1958, 1959, 1960—our lives did not take the same course as those of the positive characters in Soviet literature and film. I would dare to believe that the opposite was true, and the proximity of some closed-minded, rigid, and dogmatic revolutionaries was the best antidote. Our ability to live happily remained intact, even if the spaces had become more limited and enclosed; perhaps that very thing made them more intense. Friendship in those days became almost fraternity. Carlos and I continued to observe the tireless cycle of the human comedy: its glories, its agonies, its tricks, and its tragedies, but also its foolishness, its pettiness, its infinite capacity to embody the grotesque, the pretentious, and the seedy. We did everything possible so that the turmoil in the streets did not overwhelm our readings, and that in the event it did influence our conversations — it was impossible, not to mention undesirable, to avoid it — it did not excessively dominate or weaken them. We continued to go to the same cineclubs, cafés, theaters; we saw each other with the same or greater frequency, we discussed every imaginable subject, but literature especially.

Exhausted by some personal conflicts, anxious because of a fallow period that I had begun to associate with the political maelstrom, I decided to take a break and leave the country for a time; I thought about a trip to New York to recharge my batteries, or to Havana to witness firsthand that new revolutionary reality that certain well-known intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Leiris were celebrating, but I ended up traveling to Europe. I sold what I had — books and paintings — which allowed me to spend a few weeks in London, a few days in Paris and Geneva, and an extended period of time in Rome.

While I was away many things happened.

On my return to Mexico, I find a modified reality. The climate of official antagonism has increased, moving into other sectors. Financiers have not forgiven López Mateos for having defined his government as leftist, even if it was within the Constitution. The nationalization of industries, especially those of light and power, creates in these circles a feeling close to panic. China has been allowed to hold an exhibition in Mexico on the advances achieved by the Revolution. What exasperates them above all is this unprecedented foreign policy during the presidential sexennial. More than one hundred thousand people protest in front of the Palacio Nacional against free textbooks, which they consider an assault on the religious sensibilities of the nation. Fliers are circulated revealing that the president’s wife is a Protestant. Overnight, notices appear on the doors and windows of tens of thousands of houses that read: “In this house we are Roman Catholics, and do not accept either Protestant or Communist propaganda.”

Moreover, a new and anti-dogmatic political thought has taken root. A group of intellectuals — made up of Víctor Flores Olea, Carlos Fuentes, Jaime García Terrés, Enrique González Pedrero, Francisco López Cámara, and Luis Villoro — founded a dissident publication: El Espectador, which carried a significant weight of opinion, especially among intellectuals.

At the same time, first imperceptibly then with an irresistible rhythm, a joyful spirit of carnival, of libertarian revelry, began to spread. Mexico is becoming a fiesta. My neighborhood, Juárez, is becoming the city’s Zona Rosa, teeming with galleries, restaurants, and cafés where everyone meets. I’ve returned with the intention of staying only a brief time and of picking up some translations to do in Italy. My desire to leave, however, wanes with each passing day. Monsiváis and José Emilio have become important cultural figures in the city. Their talent and their immense capacity to work have opened many doors for them, both at the University and in cultural supplements and magazines, which at that time are the only venues available to writers. Carlos’s program Cine y Crítica, which is broadcast by Radio Universidad, has become very popular, thanks in no small part to his cultural breadth and polemical character, but most of all to his humor, that never-ending rainstorm that falls on the desert of solemnity that characterizes our medium.

ANOTHER DAY, IN 1962

I go to Coyoacán to eat at the home of Vicente and Albo Rojo. José Carlos Becerra has arrived from Cuernavaca and says that he encountered military reserves on the highway. Twice they stopped his car and made him get out; they searched inside the car and the trunk. It wasn’t anything personal, he says; from what he was able to ascertain, they were searching all cars and buses. The newspapers are reporting that in the last few days there have been uprisings in different areas of Morelos and that panic is spreading in Cuernavaca. They accuse an agrarian leader, Rubén Jaramillo, of having taken up arms. The poet Becerra says that the talk of panic is a lie; they’re trying to create panic, perhaps as a pretext to arrest Jaramillo.

Monsiváis arrives during coffee. The get-together takes on a new life. Carlos remarks that the struggle between the solemn and the anti-solemn is beginning to cause tension in certain quarters. Lists are immediately made; everyone contributes names. In some cases, the opinion is unanimous; in others, there are doubts and reservations, nuances are noted. Examples are cited, of intellectuals as well as public figures, solemn in perpetuity, who, so as not to lose their clients, pretend to have loosened up. Luis Prieto comments that in the penultimate ordinary meeting of the association “Friends United for a Culture of Modesty,” several members remarked that they were alarmed by the disappearance of their own presence in their homes as well as at their businesses; their grandchildren, and also their employees, servants, and gardeners were all talking in front of them as if they did not exist — which they attributed to having succumbed to an excess of solemnity. They meet the first Tuesday of each month, Luis adds; the women in one of their homes, and the gentlemen in a room at the Bankers’ Club. Every few months both sexes celebrate a plenary meeting at the country club. Luis had to go as a representative of the attorney De la Cadena, a friend of his grandfather since childhood, who could not attend that day because it was his ninetieth birthday, which he wanted to celebrate with family. He presented a letter that authorized him to vote for de-solemnization provided that it was carried out gradually and judiciously. During that session, they voted unanimously to ask their tailors to dress them in the latest style, not all at once, since that would be unbearable, but little by little, pian piano. The other decision, although it must be noted that it was not unanimous, was to be initiated into modern music because they know it to be the centerpiece of the anti-solemn view. For this session, the banker Don Arturo María Junco, certain of the outcome of the vote, had already contracted a movie projectionist with equipment necessary to show a film: “Modern music, ma non troppo!” he said. The projectionist chose films by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. When the title appeared on screen: The Gay Divorcee, the uproar was overwhelming. A divorcee! And gay! A gay divorcee? Never! Could it be that they were members of an association called “Friends United for a Culture of Debauchery?!” Fortunately, the man from the theater had another film: Pies de seda.

“Shall We Dance?” Monsiváis said immediately in English.

“As the projection progressed,” Luis continued, “something began to move inside the hearts of those watching. When it was over, they asked the projectionist to replay some musical numbers, and in one of them, Don Arturo María stood up and to everyone’s surprise began to do a few discreet tap steps, then spun like a top, waving a lace tablecloth that he had removed from the table, tossing it into the air, and running rhythmically to catch it before it fell. He moved about with remarkable ease, as if during his entire life he had done nothing but dance. A musical number was replayed, and on that occasion four or five others began to tap with him, and although the difference between Don Arturo María and the new enthusiasts was astronomical, the audience’s joy was absolute.”

“But how can you be sure, Luis, that whatshisname had not danced before?” Someone added: “I assure you he’s probably a smooth operator who’s fooled his entire fraternity.”

“He insisted he wasn’t, and I have no reason to disbelieve him,” Luis responds. “Even he seemed to be surprised by his exploits. He was ecstatic. This month I had to go back to the Bankers’ Club because old man De la Cadena overdid it on his birthday and is being insufferable, and this time the meeting was entirely different. Most showed up in shoes appropriate for dancing with disheveled hair, which some had dyed, or so it seemed, and print ties that they would never have dared to wear before voting for modernization. And, you guessed it, to top it all off, they themselves demanded that The Gay Divorcee be shown. ‘Modesty be damned!’ they shouted. At the end, just as before, there was a replay of musical scenes and dancing. Don Arturo María was out of control and unrecognizable. At one point, he turned to his brother-in-law, Rafael de Aguirre, stuck out his hand and said to him: ‘Hey, Fallo, now it’s your turn to be Ginger for a while and I’ll be Fred.’ Don Rafael was horrified. ‘What, you’re going to be Fred?’ he stuttered. ‘That’s right, and you’re Ginger; you understood me perfectly.’ I thought Don Rafael was going to collapse from an embolism, but his brother-in-law calmed him down: ‘Remember, Fallo, in this kind of dance one barely touches the tips of the fingers; or didn’t you notice? Did you watch the movie or did you fall asleep? In these numbers, each person twirls however he wants.’ ‘But what about my beard, Fatso? Won’t it look bad if Ginger has a beard?’ ‘We’ll all pretend that you don’t have one, or that we don’t see it, Fallo,’ his cousin Don Graciano de Aguirre, the dean of the Association, said forcefully. That said, the poor devil began to remove the cilices that were torturing his legs; ‘So I don’t lose my agility,’ he said, and also removed the scapulars because it seemed disrespectful to drag Our Lady of Pilar and above all the Virgin of Guadalupe into those dances. So they began to dance. Everyone else formed a semicircle and made choreographed movements with their arms and legs to enhance the couple’s artistry. When it was over, they decided unanimously to hire a choreographer to teach them how to stage more complex numbers; upon hearing this, the projectionist took a card from his pocket and handed it to the dean. It read: ‘Párvula Dry: Dance Teacher: Flamenco, Conga, Cuchichí, Mambo, and Other Rhythms.’ ‘We’ve entered a new era,’ the dean said. ‘Our Association has taken an historic step. On the one hand, it will improve our circulation, of which we’re in dire need, but also, and most of all, we’ll surprise our wives at October’s plenary session. Can you imagine, gentlemen, the looks on their faces? They’ll be so proud of us. Neither they nor anyone else will be able to brand us as solemn, do you realize? First thing tomorrow, I’ll contact Doña Párvula Dry.’”

Luis’s story is very famous, and it grows richer with each re-telling; characters we all know filter through it. The name Párvula Dry printed on the card becomes increasingly more important until she becomes the story’s protagonist. Upon discovering the size of her pupils’ fortunes, Párvula Dry will take advantage of them, scam them, promise to take them on a triumphant world tour, when in reality the most she will do is book them in Barcelona’s Bodega Bohemia, a Goyaesque dive where old variety singers are heckled and jeered by a ruthless public. Once there, she’ll escort the group, now called “Friends United of the Voluptuous Terpsichore,” in the front door then vanish out the back, only to reappear in Capri, where she’ll buy a sumptuous residence that once belonged to Gloria Swanson; thus beginning a new chapter in her stormy existence. By the end, the story undergoes so many changes that it ends up making no sense, but we all amuse ourselves to death.

Carlos and I take a bus that drops us in Bucareli, not far from the Paseo de la Reforma, which works out beautifully because we’re able to spend a moment in the Librería Francesa, where they have set aside for him two or three of the last issues of Cahiers du Cinéma; we stroll in the direction of the María Bárbara hotel, where the group Nuevo Cine is holding a meeting. Carlos’s library, from what I’ve seen, has branched out; it continues to be fundamentally a literary library, but now has sections devoted to social sciences, anthropology, history of Mexico, cinema, photography. Mine no longer exists; having sold almost all of my books before leaving for Europe, and the few I bought in Italy — with the exception of a volume of Rivadeneyra’s edition of Tirso de Molina, which I found by chance in a bookstore in Milan and brought with me to Mexico — are still in Rome, at Zamprano’s house, in boxes and suitcases that await my return.

As we walk to the café we also stop at the Británica. Carlos buys a few English magazines and half a dozen books on pop music and photography that, he assures me, are indispensable. I find The Gothic Revival by Clark, a study of that genre known as the Gothic novel that emerged in England in the eighteenth century — replete with horror, eroticism, occultism, orientalism, sadism, and gruesomeness — in which Lewis’s The Monk is set, which I’m translating at the moment. We finally arrive at the María Bárbara, to my surprise, before the meeting is scheduled to start, which gives us time to chat alone for a while, more or less seriously, something we rarely do.

I tell Carlos that I’m thinking more and more about staying in Mexico, and he encourages me to stay. He tells me that the struggle against solemnity that he has undertaken is more than just mere entertainment, or a simple act of amusement, although there is much of that. He’s convinced that the years of the recent past, those in which the riot police were a permanent fixture in the streets, could only have happened by virtue of a fossilization of mindsets and, therefore, of institutions. Everything is frozen: legislation; the cult of heroes, transformed into concrete statues or fountains with meaningless quotations that refer to nothing real; the official rites of the revolution are as vacuous as everything else. The mindset of politicians has become a part of that same fossilized structure. We have to begin to laugh at everything, to the point of chaos if necessary, and create an environment in which the sanctimonious become worried, for a large part of their ills and ours come from their limitations. Laugh at them, ridicule them, make them feel powerless; this is the only way anything can change. A Sisyphus-like effort, no doubt, but one worth undertaking, and one that eases the monotony of life. If it is impossible to humanize the faces of reinforced concrete that politicians hope to acquire from their first measly little position, then at least it will be possible to expose some cracks. Young people are fed up will all the nonsense. They won’t even set foot in the Museum of Anthropology so they don’t have to see the hieratic expressions of their leaders on the massive stone statue of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation. Everyone must learn to laugh at those ridiculous and sinister puppets that address the nation as if history were told through their mouth, not the living one, never that, rather the one they’ve embalmed. Anything new frightens them. When people finally see them for the rats they are, the parrots they are, and not as the magnificent lions and peacocks that they believe themselves to be, when they discover — of course it will take time! — that they are an object of ridicule, not of respect or fear, change will finally arrive; for that to happen they have to lose their base; they’re prepared to respond to even the most violent insult, but not to humor.

This is what we’re discussing when the friends Monsiváis is meeting arrive: José Luis González de León, Luis Vicens, José de la Colina, Paul Leduc, Tomás Pérez Turrent, Manuel Michel, Emilio García Riera, Juan Manuel Torres, among others. They’re meeting to discuss cinema, and on this specific occasion to plan the publication of some Cuadernos. Juan Manuel Torres tells me that he’s writing about the first divas — the Italians, la Menichelli, la Terribile-González, and la Borelli — and the erotic impulse they represent, which emerged around the birth of the cinema and is still present in it today. They then move to a long table at the back of the café to talk; I stay where I am and read the chapter about Lewis in the book I just purchased at the Británica. When they finish, we’ll go to the cinéclub to see Johnny Guitar, which is part of a season titled something like “The Tribulations of Eros.”

Off we go. It’s a rather idiosyncratic Western, in which the protagonists of the duel, an element that is essential to this genre, are two women. The fight is not between a villain and a hero, that coarse but law-abiding cowboy who is usually John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Randolph Scott. Instead the villain is an insufferable woman. The indispensable leading lady is Joan Crawford. The conflict is between the owner/hostess of a saloon where the cowboys entertain themselves gaily and a raging puritan who devotes every waking moment to combating vice. For Joan Crawford there isn’t a single moment of rest; the other woman harasses and pursues her, and lays the most treacherous traps for her until she is led to the gallows. At the last minute, with the noose around her neck, it looks as if a hero is about to save her, although I mostly imagine this and don’t see it because of the commotion in the theater. We’re sitting, as we have for several years, very close to the screen, in the third row on the right. From the beginning, we find the movie intensely amusing. The villainess’s horrific tantrums and the palavering in which the heroine defends herself create a glorious dialogue. At times they sound like oracles; and others like grocers. Something about it is reminiscent of Ionesco’s world and the humor of the early silent pictures. Our cackles echo throughout the theater, although we’re surprised that ours are the only ones. The audience begins to shush us, insult us, and call for us to be thrown out of the theater. The commotion prevents me from enjoying the ending. When the lights turn on, a few spectators, almost all friends of ours, of course, curse at us. We’re a couple of Pharisees, ignoramuses; our materialist distortion keeps us from detecting and appreciating a new treatment of Myth. Are we not able to see that the true face of hate is love? Has it escaped us that the relationship we saw on screen is governed by the concept of l’amour-fou? We’ve witnessed an extraordinary case of l’amour-fou, and two or three of our friends repeat in unison — I’m not sure whether seriously or in jest — that l’amour-fou means mad love, yes: the mad, mad love proclaimed by the surrealists, with the great Breton in the lead. Did we even know who André Breton was?

We walk to the taquería next door to the Insurgentes movie house. We reflect with increasing pleasure on certain scenes from the movie and the frenzied intolerance of the priggish cinephiles. It’s been a day blessed by laughter. I feel in optimum condition to go home and make some progress for a couple of hours on the gruesome and wanton story of Lewis’s monk.

Suddenly a newsboy comes in with the latest edition of the paper. The headline takes up half the page. Rubén Jaramillo has been executed. We buy the paper. They talk about Jaramillo in the vilest of terms, as if he were a dangerous beast that has finally been hunted down. They’ve also killed his four children and his pregnant wife Epifanía. The tone is celebratory: another victory against the Bolshevist threat. Carlos gives me a brief summary of Jaramillo’s life: he was a Methodist pastor who had fallen out with the Morelos government because of a series of abuses that took place in the countryside. He lived in a village near Cuernavaca, where the price of land has increased enormously. Land speculation had set its sights on them. Jaramillo became a natural leader of the region; he stopped the tenant farmers from being evicted. Holding the paper in my hands is degrading; it expels a foul odor. “Dead dogs don’t bite!” it seems to shout. As we leave the restaurant, Carlos takes a taxi to return to Portales, and I walk few blocks home. My brief walk is enveloped in feelings of unreality, anger, and horror. Everything I’ve seen the last few days becomes a façade, which a harsh Mexico has taken it upon itself to smash to bits.

NOW

Not a single intellectual celebrated that crime, nor attempted to mitigate publicly the government’s responsibility. The journalists at the service of the State made sure to do that. They seemed to become intoxicated with fame as they carried out the task; they knew the greater his infamy the higher their reward from the public treasury would be. Writers had yet to lend themselves to that task. That would come later; during the Salinas presidency it would become a succulently “lucrative” profession. Fernando Benítez devoted a supplement in La Cultura en México, which he edited at the time, to Jaramillo’s murder. He visited the region of Morelos himself, with Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea, where the events had occurred. The accounts they wrote were splendid and brave.

My desire to stay in Mexico disappeared that night. Soon after, I left the country. Carlos stayed and persisted in his projects, thanks to which he managed to accomplish a large part of the program he confided to me in 1962 at the María Bárbara. Since then, he’s written brilliant books, needless to say; they are a testament to chaos, its rituals, its slime, its greatness, infamy, horrors, excesses, and forms of liberation. They are also an account of a Rocambolesque and ludic world, delirious and macabre. They are our esperpento. Culture and society are his two great domains. Intelligence, humor, and fury have been his greatest advisors. I’m convinced that the current catalyst to create, in spite of everything, a civil society, is due to his efforts.

In his own way, Carlos Monsiváis is a constantly expanding polygraph, a one-man writers’ union, a legion of heteronyms that out of eccentricity sign the same name. If you have a question about a biblical text, all you have to do is call him — he’ll answer it immediately; the same if you need a bit of information about a movie filmed in 1924, 1935, or whatever year you like; you want to know the name of the regent of the city of Mexico or of the governor of Sonora in 1954; or the circumstances under which Diego Rivera painted a mural in San Francisco in 1931, which José Clemente Orozco dubbed “Assitorium”; or the possible transformation of Tamayo’s work during his brief Parisian period, or the fidelity of a line of poetry that may be dancing in your head by Quevedo, Góngora, Sor Juana, Darío, López Velarde, Gorostiza, Pellicer, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Paz, Villaurrutia, Novo, Sabines, of any great poet of our language, and the answer will appear immediately: not just the verse but the stanza in which it is located. He is Mr. Memory. He is also an incomparable historian of mentalities: an intensely receptive and sharp essayist — if you don’t believe me, just read the pages he has written on Onetti, Novo, Beckford, Hammett; a remarkable movie critic; a student of Mexican painting who has produced excellent pages on Diego, Tamayo, Gerzso, María Izquierdo, and Toledo; and a lucid political essayist. He is the chronicler of all our misfortunes and our marvels, more of the former, considering that the Mexico in which we’re living has been fertile in misfortunes and, in turn, the marvels appear exceptional as miracles often do; he is the documentarian of the extremely fertile gamut of our national imbecility. His weekly columns capture the statements of the great minds of our minuscule universe; in them speak financiers, bishops, senators, deputies, and governors, the President of the Republic, the “communicators,” the cultured doyens. The result is devastating. Next to him, the discoveries of Bouvard and Pécuchet would look like the apothegms of Plato or Aristotle. To these attributes, others can be added: bibliophile; collector of a thousand heterogeneous things; felinophile, Sinologist — Carlos Monsiváis is all this and more. And, in addition, as readers may have already surmised: he is my closest friend.

Xalapa, January 1996

THE WOUND OF TIME

“On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series.”² As the reader may have already noticed, this is the beginning of “The Aleph,” that great miracle by which Jorge Luis Borges enriched our lives.

From a certain age, every change one discovers in the environment takes on an offensive character, an agonizing personal mutilation. As if with that change, someone were giving us a macabre wink, and the new advertising for American cigarettes, just like Beatriz Viterbo’s death, were turning into an unexpected memento mori, an announcement of our future and inevitable death.

Thirty-five years ago, in Rome, I frequented a small bookstore in the Via del Babuino. It was run by a couple whose age was hard to discern, except that they were more young than old. I enjoyed chatting with them and hearing their recommendations. They were book people through and through. Their shelves reflected a confident and cultivated taste. Later on, each time I passed through Rome I would venture at least once to their store. It was impossible not to as it was on the way to the Piazza del Popolo. I watched them age without ever losing the conviction of their intuition and good literary judgment. The classics fit perfectly there with the new currents of thought and modern narrative forms. They had no patience for light literature, self-help books, or superficial theosophy. These genres fell outside their circle of interests; I imagine it would have disgusted them to welcome into their store readers who were addicted to those kinds of books.

So I saw them from time to time. On one occasion, I found only the woman behind the counter. Her husband, she told me, had died a few months before, from a blood clot, I think. Years later, on a different visit, I saw her sitting in a chair, with the look of someone who was completely detached from reality: she neither moved nor spoke; she didn’t seem interested in anything; her stare was fixed and blank. A slightly younger woman attended to the customers; I think I heard her say she was a cousin. I told her about the relationship that had bound me to the store since I was a young man: my first Ariosto, my first novels by Pavese. She told me that her cousin had succumbed to a deep depression; no treatment had been able to bring her out of it. She was afraid of leaving her in the apartment alone, something might happen to her, she might need help. So every morning she dressed her and took her to the bookstore, and that brought her back to life. “Look how good she feels; she’s spent her entire life here; being here cheers her up, of course it cheers her up.” If the vegetative state I witnessed could be considered a sign of revival, she must have felt awful at home, I thought.

In the spring of 1966, I spent a few days in Italy. When I passed the bookstore it was closed; what’s more, it was nonexistent. The windows on either side of the door that night and day had displayed the latest titles had disappeared. The sign with the bookstore’s name had disappeared. I felt the wound of time, its malignancy, with terrible intensity. That disappearance was a way of punishing the immense happiness of the young man who one day appeared there, rummaged through the bookshelves, and left with copies of Orlando Furioso, Il campagno, and Tra donne sole under his arm.

In every city where I lived I’ve experienced similar circumstances. Running into such changes diminishes not only the pleasure of traveling but also the concrete awareness of the past. Sometimes I have to go out of my way in order to avoid walking by a place where one of these incidents has happened…To not see, for example, in a city in central Italy that where there was once a theater there is now a discotheque whose flashing neon lights take the place of those that more discreetly announced Paolo Stampa and Rina Morelli in a play by Goldoni, or that in place of a middling café where I used to sit and write in Rome there now stands a tacky souvenir store for garden-variety tourists.

Still in Rome, for many years now I’ve stopped walking down that narrow street, which also leads to the Piazza del Popolo, whose eccentricity lies in one side being called Via della Penna and the other Via dell’Oca. It’s the only street that I know like that. On one side of the street lived Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, and on the other there were two trattorias essential on my life’s map: Mondino’s and, a few steps away, Pietro’s. Mondino had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; afterward, for the rest of his life, he was a diehard anti-fascist. He ran his trattoria with his wife and son. Together they cooked and served. Customers ate at long tables around the stove. The clientele was made up of students, young intellectuals, theater students, poor artists, and foreign scholars. They were divided between communists and existentialists. They all had a single common hero: Sartre, who at the time was very close to the Italian Communist Party. His Criticism of Dialectical Reason was the most oft-quoted book among the patrons. Philosophy and, above all, Marxism were constant topics of discussion. At times there were discussions that threatened to erupt into war. Someone would then tell a joke, and laughs would win the day. It smelled like sweat, smoke, onion, and olive oil. When I had no money, I ate for free because it gave Mondino great pleasure to talk about Machado in Spanish and for me to listen to him recite Machado’s poetry, which he knew by heart. At night I would eat at the neighboring trattoria, Pietro’s, a Calabrese who detested bohemian culture, the young crowd, extremist ideas, and, therefore, Mondino, I suppose. There I would meet María and Araceli Zambrano, other literati, important journalists and filmmakers, but seldom famous people, because the establishment was rather modest. The central figure was María, who had in fact transformed the trattoria into a salon. Prominent Hispanists and intellectuals, as well as visitors from Spain and Latin America who were passing through Rome, would sit around her. Whenever a group of young Spaniards came in, María would light up. She’d talk to them about her Republican youth, about her teacher Ortega y Gasset, about the writers of her generation, the Civil War, defeat, and then exile. She became a tragic figure: Hecuba, Cassandra, and, of course, Antigone. Swathed in the smoke of her cigarette, looking up, the words would pour out, as if a higher spirit inhabited her body, had possessed her, and was using her mouth to speak. She did not raise her voice. She spoke as if in a trance, inhaled her cigarette, and paused to exhale the smoke. Just then, before beginning the next sentence, the atmosphere became charged with an almost unbearable intensity; the young Spaniards looked as if a sacred current were running through them, and me along with them, as well as the entire restaurant, whether the dinner guests understood Spanish or not. She did not like to end on a note of pathos. Once attained, she would transition effortlessly to recounting anecdotes about Cernuda, Lezama Lima, or Prados, with whom she maintained intimate correspondence. I imagine that when the young people returned to Spain, what they remembered most of Rome was the moment they had seen and heard María Zambrano. At times, I could not withstand so much intensity, and I would leave there with a fever and spend several days ill in the boarding house where I lived. María and Araceli have died, as have Mondino and Pietro. Their trattorias today have other names and another look. Above all, the atmosphere of elation and generosity, of frenzy, and of anguish and hope that characterized Rome prima del miracolo economico has disappeared. Revisiting the past means, among other heartaches, contemplating a world that is, and at the same time has ceased to be, the same.

Take Mexico, for example. Think about the changes that have occurred in the last half-century — the devastation of the capital, the degradation of the atmosphere, the moral pollution — and you will have a vision that borders on catastrophe. A dystopia staged by an expressionist director. When I entered university, the city was inhabited by four and a half million people; today that number seems to top more than twenty, and I say “seems” because no one can provide an exact figure. Any common memory, every possible collective imagination, tends to be smashed to bits in these circumstances; the social link that replaces their functions is crass TV, the creator of timid mythologies.

I would like to move beyond, to the extent possible, apocalyptic visions; and pause instead on areas of imprecise determination, on small details: writing, reading, dreams, anything that eschews the grandiose, the plaintive, an apostolic zeal, and didactic pontificating.

I spent several years outside the country. Traveling to Europe meant going to Veracruz, boarding a ship, and crossing the ocean. If someone wanted to take a more luxurious trip, faster and with fewer stops, he had to go to New York, and sail from there on one of the spectacular floating cities of the time: the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, the Leonardo da Vinci, for example. When in 1988 I decided to return to Mexico for good, passenger ships had ceased to exist several years before and were reduced to serving as cruise ships in the summer.

It is hardly surprising that during that long period of absence my memory would occasionally relive unusual episodes that were both fond and forgotten. A letter from Mexico could momentarily recover images I thought lost: a dusty, yellowed, and sometimes implausible hic et nunc managed to emerge from among the deceased, radiant and adorned with every possible prestige. Even an encounter with someone who had traveled through Mexico could cause my immediate surroundings to disappear and transport me back to the infernos or paradises of the past. Every instant recovered from oblivion turned suddenly into a concentration of the universe. Time and space knew extraordinary permutations. As if by alchemy the Café Viena on the Paseo de la Reforma would appear in my memory: its atmosphere, its furniture, and the indisputable aroma of Central European pastries. It was only much later, when I had the opportunity to frequent similar establishments on my march through Europe’s imperial cities — Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Salzburg, Marienbad, Karlsbad — that I realized that Café Viena was a tiny outpost of Habsburg culture. My memory returns me to a long table in the back of the café, beneath an immense rectangular mirror. Don Manuel Pedroso holds court, surrounded by a flock of lads who were probably between eighteen and twenty years old. A genuine interest in what they are hearing and an intense zest for life lessens their slight tendency toward snobbishness. They listen captivated as their mentor talks about Góngora, Balzac, Hobbes, and Dostoyevsky; about his time as a teacher in Seville and Madrid; about episodes and figures from the Spanish Republic; about theories of love in Stendhal and Proust; about studying philosophy and law in Germany; the emergence and height of expressionism, the Bauhaus, Rilke, and the Duino Elegies, of which he’s committed long fragments to memory; about the Italy of Burckhardt, Goethe, Berenson; about the charms of Slavic, French, Andalusian, and Mexican women. He invites his friends to converse with us; one day he brings Américo Castro, who’s passing through Mexico, and talks to us about Cervantes and Tirso de Molina, and declares that he disagrees entirely with the thesis he had espoused on Tirso in his youthful prologue to the comedies published in Espasa’s Clásicos Castellanos, that his ideas about Spain’s Golden Age had changed radically, and not just the Golden Age but also the whole of Spain’s cultural formation. He was the most important visitor our tertulia ever had and, much to the annoyance of Pedroso, we listened to him rather with sarcasm and inattention because of the ridicule to which Borges had subjected him in Other Inquisitions. At Professor Pedroso’s tertulia, the logos and its rigors coexist in total harmony with the trivial; Alicia Osorio, Lupina Mendoza, Ivonne Loyola, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Luis Prieto, and yours truly listen to the maestro intently, we celebrate his wit, we agree, question, dare to raise objections, which the maestro himself encourages. Finally, we say our goodbyes, aware that life is full of wonder, among other reasons, because we know that we will meet again next Saturday in the same café where, unbeknownst to us, our destiny is taking shape.

Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. Mine relives the enthusiasm I felt as I left Bellas Artes after hearing Arrau, Rubenstein, Callas, and the Teatro Tívoli — no less venerated — where the audience’s pleasure became frenzied before the gyrations of the famous “exotic” dancers of the time — Su Mu-Key, Tongolele, Kalantán; or the Lírico after applauding the legendary Josephine Baker; or the endless walks through the city’s many different neighborhoods where I talked nonstop with Luis Prieto, Lucy Bonilla, Gustavo Londroño, Carlos Monsiváis, Luz del Amo, Ricardo Regazzoni about books, movies, politics, or private matters; we argued, fought, and always reconciled as we made fun of the false (and even genuine) glories of this world…Everything was real, everything was true and, unfortunately, unrepeatable.

Not too long ago, I went through some of my books while preparing them for re-publication, a task that has never been pleasing; I was surprised to discover that a place from my childhood appeared on several occasions, a place it would never have crossed my mind to think about, a setting that entered my writing surreptitiously, which served as an unconscious frame to a mysterious event: a crime that was never completely solved. It surprised me because in real life I had only been there on two or three occasions while I was still very small. Upon recalling those excursions, upon dislodging them from the place where my memory was hiding them, they burst into my conscience as one of the most startling episodes of my childhood. The place is the Ojo de Agua where the river Atoyac is born; a few days ago I discovered that it was one of the sacred places of the Totonacas.

I was living at the Potrero sugar mill. Some families used to organize occasional excursions to the region’s picturesque sites, among them the natural spring at Ojo de Agua. The round-trip — bathing in the river, the picnic — took an entire day. We rode in a Jeep until we arrived at the village of Paraje Nuevo, and, from there, we walked on foot along the paths that the peasants cleared for us with their machetes in the middle of the jungle. One of the high points of the trip was crossing the river on a rope bridge.

It was like crossing a bottomless abyss; it’s possible my childlike eyes magnified it disproportionately, as tends to happen. The bridge lacked the usual board planks common to hanging bridges. Instead there were just three or four ropes braided together. My feet slid slowly along the bottom rope as my hands held the upper one. There were probably twenty or twenty-five of us, including the children. There were some young American couples; the American women were wearing pants and seemed to possess the same sporting ability as their husbands. The Mexican women would not have dared wear pants even if they were threatened with being thrown from the cliff. I remember that they were carried across, tied to the men’s arms, some shouted, terrified, while others laughed hysterically. We children rode astride the adults’ shoulders, or tied to their backs. The operation took a good amount of time, because in addition to our crossing, large straw baskets containing food, drinks, plates, silverware, and other paraphernalia had to be transported across. We then crossed another patch of jungle until we arrived at a spot, the other climatic moment, from where we were able to contemplate paradise: the spring, located beneath a curtain of rocks that my memory reproduces like a great Wagnerian scene. As we neared the place we began to perceive certain mysterious movements in the water and in the brush along the bank. They slowly began to take shape and definition; they were otters, the marvelous water dogs that had inhabited the region from the beginning of creation. If they had stayed there, nothing would have happened to them; there was a tacit agreement not to disturb them. The peasants in the region watched over their pups and occasionally, when the time was right, sacrificed a few males to sell their pelts.

Not long ago I decided to return to that sanctuary, to the magic garden from my childhood. It’s possible to travel to Paraje Nuevo today by car and continue in the same vehicle along dirt roads all the way to the river’s edge. There are scarcely any vestiges of the original jungle left. It has been replaced by sugar cane. There are no longer any difficult passes. The atmosphere of mystery has disappeared. At a certain moment, I decided not to continue; I turned around and retraced my steps. I didn’t dare go as far as the spring. Everything had deteriorated in an unbearable way. The animal life had disappeared, just as the vines from my childhood and the giant ferns, the huge climbing plants with enormous leaves, which back then surrounded the pool and climbed up the mountain, had disappeared. The natural world that existed until a few decades ago and took centuries to be created is now just a memory, just like the Babuino bookstore, the Mondino and Pietro trattorias, the Café Viena, the Tívoli, the Lírico, and so many other things.

Xalapa, May 1994

2 Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni

DREAMS, NOTHING MORE

Happy dreams tend to be scarce and difficult to remember. We awake from them with a smile on our lips; for an instant, we relish the slightest fragment our memory retains, and our smile quite possibly grows into a full laugh. Yet as soon as we get out of bed that happy dream disappears forever. At no time during the day does it occur to us to repeat or build on the happiness that we experienced.

On the contrary, the others, the distressing dreams — the terrifying ones, the monstrous nightmares — are capable of not leaving us alone, even for several days. They demand that we undertake an anxious search that is seldom crowned by complete success. We cling to any loose thread in an attempt to piece together the plot, and, little by little, dark, tangled fragments begin to appear, vague parodies of scenes, scraps we take advantage of to reconstruct the oppressive nighttime experience. We’re fully aware that we’re fabricating a narrative act that corresponds only in part to the ominous atmosphere that upset us at night. Specialists say that the function of these disturbing dreams consists of externally discharging unnecessary energy, of a poisonous kind, created, for some strange reason, by our own organism. Dreaming implies a defense or an omen. Dying means the end of one period and the announcement of a better one. A rebirth! We have undergone an internal cleansing without having willingly participated. Later, as we search consciously through the dream’s residue, we weave it into a story to which we attribute pertinent faces and gestures to give shape to the ghosts that multiply beneath the surface. As we recognize them, but now completely awake, we destroy them, annihilate their evil powers, and we push them out of our psychic space. If this were not so, what sense then would the effort invested in recovering and reuniting the lost fragments make? Only a collective masochism, more widespread than desirable, could sustain that possibility. And I don’t think things are heading in that direction.

I must have been twenty or twenty-one years old (I’m guessing because that was when I began to live by myself in an apartment on Calle de Londres) when an unknown figure, who seemed to encapsulate the infinite spectrum of human evil, began to appear in my dreams. His face displayed nothing but evil. At first glance, he might have looked like an ordinary man, but glancing at him a second time produced fear — being close to him, speaking to him, even more. I awoke terrified. Hours later, when I went down to the street, I recognized the sinister individual about whom I had dreamt. I was dumbfounded. I had read something in Jung about the premonitions contained in certain dreams. The Swiss author related the experience of some patients of his who had dreamt about a catastrophe and had later been the victim of a similar accident. A parapsychological premonition. I thought that the dream was trying to forewarn me of a demonic force that was surrounding my home. I had not dreamt of an imaginary being but rather a real one, whom I had seen with my own eyes a few yards from the building where I lived. That afternoon, I visited a psychologist friend of mine, and I told her about the incident. She believed that I had possibly seen someone who had, perhaps because of a single detail, transformed into the frightening person of my dream. That is, by some mechanism of identification, I had erased the original features of the man I dreamt about and had attributed to him those of the individual who passed by me on the street. Since then I am aware that a large part of what we believe we remember are in fact inventions after the fact, and that this condition makes them indispensable for analytical work.

One never dreams so much as when undergoing psychoanalysis. He wakes up at any hour of the night and writes down on the first piece of paper within reach what he just experienced in the shadows. It would seem that dreaming only makes sense upon relating the experience to the psychoanalyst and scoring points in his analysis. One of the patient’s greatest pleasures is subjecting himself to the exercise of interpreting what he has dreamt, sketching a first exegesis and listening to the analyst solicit another interpretation because the first one seems too obvious, or too flat, or too vague; then explaining one after another until the moment arrives when the patient is no longer talking about his nightly visions but rather certain real problems he has approached by way of the dream without realizing it. And that, I imagine, can only happen when one is under the almost silent tutelage of a specialist; I doubt anyone is willing to subject himself to the same effort when he’s alone. Most commonly, the dreamer re-examines his visions alone for a few minutes and tries to make sense of them by mere formula; in reality, he doesn’t attempt to interpret the dream, he doesn’t try to find its meaning, he resigns himself to submitting to the process of putting it in order so he can recount it to the first person he traps. And then, upon recounting it to a third person, upon giving it some kind of coherence, an exercise of fictionalization, of distancing, of “defamiliarization,” is unintentionally produced, which in and of itself can be therapeutic.

It seems to me that people abuse the word oneiric when describing phenomena that escape the usual notion of reality. It’s said that The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Haywain Triptych are marked by an oneiric register. In those paintings, as in all paintings by Bosch, there are people with more legs and arms than necessary, men and women with roots on their feet and thorny branches on their head, make-believe animals, rats ridden by riders as monstrous as they are, bodies made up of nothing but a disproportionate head that is sprouting a pair of feet, outlandish machines, gnomes hatching from bleeding eggs, men birthing flocks of crows from their anuses. Anyway, we’re all accustomed to describing those excesses as oneiric, just as we classify as oneiric “The Nose,” that brilliant short story by Gogol in which one morning a man wakes up without a nose and spends the ensuing days looking for it, then making it return to where it belongs. The nose continuously disguises itself in an effort to evade its owner, until one day it becomes a powerful field marshal, without anyone on the streets of Petersburg exhibiting the slightest surprise at its metamorphoses.

Could someone possibly dream such fantastic and extravagant worlds as those? I can’t even imagine it. My personal experience is so limited that it cannot conceive of anyone in his right mind being able to arrive at such enviable excesses. Perhaps alkaloids or other chemical stimulants could provoke such images. In any case, I would venture to say that the starting point of the works of Bosch, as well as those of Gogol, lies in wakefulness, not in dreaming: they are the fruits of imagination and fantasy. Oneiric mechanisms are different. I have never in my dreams seen myself with a body and face different than my own. My organs are always where they should be, and during the course of the dream I never turn into a jaguar, or a vampire, or an axolotl. I don’t float in the air; on the contrary, I fly in a plane like God intended. I take in everything around me, but I’m more than a mere camera. I’m a camera, and I’m myself, lost, pursued, trapped, and judged.

Borges recounts a dream that leaves me very disturbed because it refutes the rule I maintain. The writer dreamt that he had met a friend who seemed to be hiding his right hand; at a certain moment Borges realizes that it has turned into a bird’s claw.

If anything characterizes my nightmares it is their infinite ability to cause anxiety. They are not as rich in motifs as Bosch’s paintings. They only differ from reality in time and space, as well as their combinatorial capacity, which in dreams exhibit a dizzying freedom. One can be in one place that turns into another and then another and so on infinitely, and talk to an interlocutor who during the conversation demonstrates the ability to mutate. A is X, and then Y, and then R, only to become A again. Nothing can ever be taken for granted or trusted.

When I returned to Mexico at the end of 1988, for several years I always dreamt that I was in European settings, even in some that in reality I do not know, like Oxford or Copenhagen. It was impossible for me to recognize those cities but I knew I was in them, in the same way that I knew that a house was in a certain region of Italy, or Spain, or Portugal without any local element appearing to verify the attribution.

I have noticed that in the last few years there is less action in my dreams; what gives them the character of nightmare is knowing that I am dreaming and am not able to awaken. I repeatedly try to wake up but it’s pointless, I can’t get out of the hole even though there isn’t anything unusually terrifying inside; what is frightening is not being able to avoid it. Monotony deforms reality and creates an uncertainty that is nothing but the door to terror. It is in that moment of torment when a voice I recognize awakens me and announces that the orange juice and coffee are ready. All the suffering, the fear and anguish disappear as if by magic in the face of the quotidian with which the day begins. Is that not enough to drive anyone crazy?

From 1968 on I’ve kept a dream diary. It’s remarkably narrative in nature. It contains a main story and an underground world that nourishes it. The agonizing nature arises from the desire to escape from what I have dreamt and the impossibility to do it. Let’s take a look:

24 APRIL 1994

I’m about to open the door of my house when a young man walks up to me and asks if I’ll let him walk Sacho this evening. The proposition suits me because I have to write an article that I should have already finished. He comes by the house at five, the time of the evening walk. He tells me that he’ll take the dog to Los Berros Park. Sacho leaves with him willingly, which surprises me considerably. But he doesn’t return at the agreed time. The next morning, very worried, I go out to ask the neighbors if they know anything about Sacho, if they’ve seen him with a young man with such and such description, and no one knows anything about the dog or his companion. At noon, Sacho shows up at the house in terrible shape, thirsty and irritable. He’s alone, wearing a leather collar that isn’t his; something about the collar attracts my attention, but I don’t know exactly what. It has an engraving that suggests something dangerous. About that time, the murder of a local politician is made public. Rumors spread throughout the city. That night, on the evening news, I find out that a suspicious person had been walking a dog where the crime was committed. A newswoman describes the dog, which sounds exactly like Sacho. I am absolutely convinced that the criminal, or one of his accomplices, is the one who took Sacho. I can’t figure out what led me to allow a stranger to take him. My anxiety grows as the day passes. They might suspect that Sacho is involved in a conspiracy and that even I might be in league with these criminals. What’s more, Sacho is behaving very rudely; I’ve rarely seen him so unpleasant, as if he were resentful and blamed me for unpleasantness that took place the evening and night before. But, where could he have spent the night? Could he lead me there? And what would be accomplished by trying? I’m at a total loss. I tell myself that the whole thing is a dream; I struggle to leave the dream before the police come to question me, but I can’t. It’s precisely Sacho’s barking that awakens me from the never-ending dream. He’s very irritated. I’m barely able to put on his collar and make him go outside for his morning walk.

17 AUGUST 1995

I’ve rented an apartment in a small city on the coast, perhaps in Spain, in a region unfamiliar to me. The building is humdrum, squat, devoid of ornamentation. From time to time I run into a sullen-looking married couple on the street; both of them dressed without any sense of style, as if they were hiding behind tasteless clothes, but who, in spite of everything, carry themselves with a certain degree of dignity. Both are wearing mouse-gray raincoats that accentuate their anonymity. One day we happen to meet in the lobby as we collect our mail; later we begin to say hello, to make conversation about the weather, we even begin to take walks together. We talk about books, history, architecture, but without ever going beyond the usual banalities. We never talk about ourselves, our professions, our past, not even why we chose to live in such a lackluster building. To say “we” speak is an exaggeration; the husband is the one who does all the talking, he’s a pale man, on the cusp of old age, always smiling but with a sly, dirty smile that produces a feeling of rejection, at least in me. I never pay too much attention to what he says; nonetheless, I don’t mind going out with them; on the contrary, I prefer going out with them to being alone. On one occasion, when the husband went upstairs to retrieve something from the apartment, something, I don’t know what, drove me to say to his wife:

“Your husband knows so much about so many things! I never get tired of listening to him!” It was an obviously foolish comment because his wife looked at me stunned.

“I would never have imagined,” she replied, “that you were so limited. He seems like a complete idiot to me.”

From then on, she almost never went out with us, and the few times she did she never failed to show disgust when her husband spoke. Walking alone with him grew tiresome. I had nothing in common with anything he said, although he assumed that I shared his opinions. I began to avoid him, but he contrived ways to run into me. On several occasions I refused to go with him; he would pretend not to hear me and continue rambling beside me. The situation became insufferable. One day, I ran into his wife at the pharmacy and complained about the harassment that her husband was subjecting me to. She looked at me with contempt and told me that I deserved it, that for weeks I did nothing but egg the moron on. After that, I made the guy feel like he was insufferable, that I preferred to stay home, or take my walks alone. At first, he didn’t lose his composure, sometimes he would act like a martyr and comment somewhat wryly on my arrogance; later, he began to suggest in a veiled way that I should watch out, that he might harm me, that I shouldn’t underestimate his capabilities, that if he wanted to he could have me kicked out of the building; what’s more, out of the city, maybe even the country; his dark smile, his evil stare grew in those moments. Little by little, the dream begins to transform into a nightmare; the action grinds to a stop, his threats, whispered in an unctuous tone, become constant. I know it’s just a dream, but I can’t do anything to stop it. I seem to be condemned for the rest of my life to be unable to get away from him, to try to avoid his presence unsuccessfully, to listen to his threats, as if everything had become an endless cycle, without escape, and that was the circle of hell where I belonged.

21 APRIL 1992

I’ve moved to Rome, where I just bought a house. It must be on the outskirts of the city; it looks very poor: the furniture is sparse, old, rickety, and dust-covered. Suddenly, I see an electric cable sparking. The sparks erupt into small flames and begin to scorch a beam. I live alone, with no one to help me in cases like this. I leave to go look for an electrician, but the situation doesn’t seem to concern me very much, as if the short circuit were as unimportant as an armoire door that doesn’t close correctly. I go out onto the street with a ladder in one hand and a suitcase in the other. I notice that Sacho has followed me; I let him come with me because it’s time for his walk. I hide the ladder and the suitcase in a clump of flowers, in a small, rather plain traffic circle. I discover an entrance to the Pincian Hill, and I enter with Sancho through a gate that is unfamiliar to me. We walk by an aviary; massive cages house thousands of beautifully colored exotic birds. We begin to climb the hill; as I walk by a little store, I start to crave some bread and cheese. They won’t allow Sacho to come in, so I leave him on the sidewalk with instructions not to move while I’m gone. I leave him by a back door by mistake; I take advantage of the opportunity to walk around and enjoy the scenery. At a given moment, I discover that I’m lost. I walk around aimlessly, uneasy; I can’t stop thinking about Sacho. I walk into a café and tell everyone inside about my circumstance, that I lost my dog, that I can’t find him. I ask them to reorient me so I can return to the entrance of the part of the Pincian where the aviary is. A young man offers to take me, saying he knows the way perfectly because he’s a bread distributor for all of the businesses along the way. Before leaving, he selects, with a fatal lack of urgency, two huge loaves of bread, and then, as we walk, he explains to me how important bread is to the Romans, in particular that kind of heavy, dark bread; he says that by eating it they take communion, they reaffirm their identity. I listen to him in desperation. I mention that we’ve gone the wrong way, that I’m feeling farther and farther away from the place where Sacho lies abandoned. He replies smugly that he knows these surroundings better than anyone, that we’re taking a direct route. We walk silently for a long time. As we turn the corner, Saint Peter’s cupola appears in front of us. The Vatican! I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve followed a mad man or someone totally irresponsible, which is the same thing. I insult him, and he leaves eating his bread. I can’t understand how we could have passed the river without noticing. We’ve walked through half of Rome; I’m farther than ever from my poor dog, and it’s starting to get dark. I’m certain that he’s also desperately looking for me. In the worst-case scenario, someone will appreciate his coat, realize what a good dog he is, and take care of him. Sacho won’t have to wander the streets. I, on the other hand, won’t be able to survive his getting lost. I’ll feel guilty for having abandoned him. I remember that I left a suitcase and a ladder somewhere, unusual objects to carry along when going to look for an electrician; I also remember that my house had caught fire. So many hours have passed that nothing will be left but ashes. I went out to the street without identification, or perhaps they’re in the lost suitcase. I have no friends in the city to go to. I’ll go to the consulate tomorrow to request assistance going home. I’ll return to Mexico penniless; but I don’t care about that, the real tragedy is returning without Sacho.

At that moment, I wake up in despair, feeling that the rest of my life will be bleak, that I’ll never recover, that it’s all been my fault. I have a hard time convincing myself that I’ve been resurrected, that is, that I’ve returned to reality, that I’m in my room, that the agony that I just lived was a mere dream; at that moment, I discover that Sacho is asleep just three feet from my bed. I look at the clock, it’s very late, an hour after his walk time. Because it’s Sunday we’re alone in the house. I immediately put on his leash, and we take our usual walk through the center of Coyoacán. He turns his head every so often as if to make sure I’m there, as if he had dreamt that I had gotten lost in an immense park in a strange city.

2 JULY 1993

I’ve been living in a house in the country for some time, in some uncertain region of Italy. It’s a large house, tastefully furnished, extremely comfortable; a place where writing is a delight. From my desk I can see a beautiful cherry orchard, and at the end of the orchard, a cabin, where a Mexican professor of Italian literature lives as a guest. He spends his vacation there while finishing a translation of a classical drama. When he arrived, I offered him a room in the main house, but he opted for the solitude and independence of the cabin. At midday, he comes to eat with me and some other people, because there are always guests in the house; they come to eat lunch or dinner, have drinks, engage in conversation, spend the weekend, several days, an entire season. I like the house, the scenery, and the way of life. Not far from the house, on the bank of a river, a child’s corpse appeared one day. Someone had strangled him and thrown him in the water. A young literature student who arrived in the region recently discovered the body, already in a state of decomposition, and notified the police. All evidence points to his innocence. On the day of the murder, as determined by the pathologist, he was out of the country. He has proof and witnesses. Nonetheless, a cloud of suspicion begins to grow around him. No one in the village believes in his innocence, which becomes evident at every turn.

One night I’m hosting a very formal dinner, like when I was a diplomat, with some twenty guests around the table. At opposite ends of the table are myself and an elderly doyenne of emphatic gestures and expressions, possibly an actress. Suddenly, the student bursts into the dining room. He’s terrified; he says that he’s being followed, that they want to kill him. In a magnanimous gesture the elderly woman orders him to sit beside her. He’ll be safe there. Seconds later, a peasant, also very frantic from the chase, enters the room and stands before a window, covering it with his imposing body. His motionlessness intensifies the fierce look on his face. Two men appear in the kitchen door and stand in front of the two other windows. Suddenly, the room is filled with men and women shouting, among them the gardener and cook; they’re carrying knives, clubs, and ropes in their hands. They form a sinister circle around us. The young man, overcome with fear, stands, attempts to flee, but they manage to restrain him and take him outside. I explain the situation to my guests, about the murdered child, the discovery of his body. I insist that the evidence supports beyond doubt the lad’s innocence. I’m still speaking when we hear a horrible scream coming from the orchard. We’re frozen with fear, silent. The execution has taken place. The cook, the gardener, and a man I don’t know appear and withdraw to the kitchen without saying a word. Their hands and clothes are covered in blood. I interrogate my guests with my eyes; I’m convinced that one of them is the murderer, but I don’t know which one. Our silence lasts a few minutes, until broken by the elderly woman:

“Petrilli never liked me. My Amneris was much better than her Aida. It’s not unusual. From the beginning of rehearsals, the relationship between the sopranos, mezzos, and contraltos turns into a fierce battle.”

They begin to serve the consommé. My dinner guests talk about opera, singers, conductors, and performances that are memorable for their splendor or for their disaster, about Turandot, Der Rosenkavalier, Tosca, and Così Fan Tutte. I too take part, after all I’m pretending to be a good host, but little by little the lynching of the student, the faces contorted by hatred, the blood-soaked hands, begin to hang over the guests like an unbearable weight. The conversation that began with so much exuberance becomes subdued. The guests stare and scrutinize each other, ask trick questions. The suspicion that the boy’s murderer can be found at the table takes over. I’m terrified that someone might suspect me. I could offer irrefutable proof of my innocence. But what would it matter? The student also had proof, which did nothing to help him escape execution. My anxiety intensifies. I can’t wake up.

Xalapa, March 1995

TEST OF INITIATION

Imagine an eighteen-year-old youth who suddenly decides to become a writer and consumes the better part of his nights scribbling literary articles. His tastes, you must understand, are unintentionally ecumenical. He writes about Eugene O’Neill and his theater, about a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World, which he had just read, about a trip to Mexico told by Paul Morand. His interests are as varied as his ignorance is vast. Needless to say, the judgments he makes are not conspicuous for their originality, and his prose is only slightly less than flat. Undoubtedly, none of his pages exceed the level of a school assignment. Someone, perhaps a friend from law school, surprised by his talent, suggests that he send his articles to the cultural supplement (rather shoddy, in fact) of an important daily where a friend of his father works, and he embraces the suggestion with enthusiasm. Once the articles are submitted, his friend naturally assumes the role of advocate and spokesman, making an exaggerated defense of his writings, of his love for reading, and of other personal qualities that are unrelated. If they accept his writings, the author thinks, he will have taken the first step on a path toward the stars.

Several months went by without a single article appearing in the supplement. Having recovered from such a chilly reception, the budding literato gives up his night job. He’s still too green for literature: a sound conclusion. But one Sunday he goes out to buy newspapers in the provincial city where his family lives, and where he usually spends all his holidays. On the way home he decides to stop at a café and leaf through one of the newspapers he’s carrying under his arm. From the front page of the cultural supplement, the title of one of his articles leaps out at him, the one in which he commented on O’Neill’s theater. The sense of excitement that some authors claim to experience when they see their first published text and their name printed below the title eludes him. The exact opposite happens. He’s momentarily paralyzed; then, slowly, a feeling of shame that ends in nausea pours over him. The mere thought of returning home with the newspaper seems impossible. He suddenly realizes that he’s become an unclean animal, and at that moment he has the evidence that proves it. He’s afraid to go home. He feels incapable of enduring a single comment; the most discreet praise, any sign of surprise or celebration of his talent, unknown to his family, would drive him hopelessly mad, at least that’s what he believes as he stares blankly at the newspaper. Finally, he decides to tear out the page, fold it up, and hide it in his jacket pocket. He leaves the rest of the supplement on the table. When he reaches the dreaded place, he deposits the papers in the living room, and slips off to his room where he stays locked up the rest of the afternoon. He rereads the article without grasping its meaning. “Without understanding a lick,” was all he could think of to say. But this time, unlike in the past, the expression fails to reassure him. Only in a handful of old translations of foreign novels has he run across these words. To read that Nastasya Filipovna, desperate and exhausted, implores her prince to speak with greater clarity, otherwise to leave her in peace lest she not understand “a lick” of the lofty and passionate sermons with which he overwhelms her, or for Emma Bovary to repeat in one of her final heart-rending meditations, that she has not understood “a lick” about life, not only destroyed the desired pathos but also rendered laughable the situations written to move the reader. He is only able to discern the titles scattered throughout the article because they’re written in a different font and in bold: The Great God Brown, Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire under the Elms, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, and a few others. Those dramas that have so impressed him seem as hollow and ridiculous as his own prose. He wants nothing more than to disappear from the world, to invent a chilling story to persuade his brother that he desperately needs to borrow money so he can travel to Veracruz, where he will board the first boat weighing anchor and become lost in the world without leaving the slightest trace. Or just plain die. He doesn’t even dare pour his heart out to his grandmother, his usual confidant.

The afternoon dragged on, like a nightmare. But, to his surprise, no one discovered the crime. No one came by the house or called to congratulate him. The apathy toward literature from those around him left him perplexed and disappointed. The remaining articles he submitted appeared the following Sundays. He had returned to Mexico City; his friends’ comments left him undaunted. He did not care whether anyone read them or not, whether anyone liked them or not, even if it wasn’t entirely true. In any case, he did not succumb to the vice of writing again for some time.

Over the years he has come to believe that he would have preferred to be discovered that Sunday when his guilt was made public. Not only that, but also to be mocked and condemned; everything would have been easier, cleaner. His relationship with the world could have been cleared of many cobwebs. Now, more than forty years after that incident, he’s content with merely acknowledging the event. He tries to examine the circumstances, to elaborate a few hypotheses. Why was that rite of initiation bathed in horror? Did it have something to do with a late detachment of his umbilical cord, a bloody separation of his body from those around him? He arrives at the conclusion that the exercise is becoming a pointless guessing game, that to continue it would send him into a labyrinth of astonishment. He would become lost in marshes without ever touching solid ground.

Perhaps he owes to that experience his inability to write at home, as if it were an activity to be avoided at all costs. Writing in the same space where he lives was for much of his life equivalent to committing an obscene act in a holy place. But that’s anecdotal. What is certain is that his fall into uncleanness that characterized, at the end of his adolescence, his confrontation with the word, his printed word, has conditioned his most personal, most secret, most unwitting manner of writing, and has transformed the exercise into a joyful game of concealment, an approach to the art of flight.

Xalapa, December 1994

DIARY FROM ESCUDILLERS³

(At the end of 1968, I left the Mexican embassy in Belgrade, where I was carrying out my first diplomatic mission. I refused to continue to collaborate with the Mexican government after Tlatelolco. I returned to Mexico and found the atmosphere to be unbreathable. A female friend promised to help me find a job in London as a translator at The Economist, which was about to begin publishing in Spanish. It was almost certain that I would begin working in October. I would be able to spend the summer in Poland as a guest of Zofia Szleyen. My attendance at a conference on Conrad, I thought, would allow me to obtain a visa. I stopped in Barcelona to deliver the translation of Cosmos, by Gombrowicz, to Seix Barral, which I had almost finished, thinking it would only be a matter of a couple more weeks’ work. I arrived in Barcelona on June 20, 1969, at midnight, at the Francia station. I did not know the city. I asked the taxi driver to recommend a pleasant and moderately priced hotel. He took me to a place out of this world, which ended up being a hostel on Calle de Escudillers. I was planning to wait there for some money that was being sent from Mexico to continue my trip, as well as the invitation to the conference in Warsaw, or the personal invitation from my friend Zofia, without either of which I would not be able to obtain a Polish visa. Instead of the three weeks I intended to spend in Barcelona, I stayed three years. The memory of those times, of wonderful friends, of constant surprises still moves me today. My time there, in spite of the initial snags and a few spectacular surprises that at the moment seemed like the impending Last Judgment, only to end up disappearing into the air, constituted a daily exercise of freedom.)

BARCELONA, 22 JUNE 1969

One A.M. It’s raining. My tiny room traps all the noise from the neighborhood. A very acute depression this afternoon…tremors. I’ll never drink again. It must be the hangover from a monstrous cognac drunk, or some horrid liquor they passed off as cognac. After I settled into the room I went out and toured all the city’s bars near the hostel. Limitless excitement about the city’s nightlife. I walked without stopping along La Rambla and Escudillers, driven by curiosity or rather by the necessity to become acquainted with what will be my neighborhood for the next few days. I still haven’t been able to tackle Cosmos. I wrote two letters. One to Neus, another to Díez-Canedo, giving them my address for the checks I’m expecting. The trip to Spain was very exciting. As the train approached the border, I heard songs of the Fifth Regiment, which some teenagers were singing in the compartment next to mine. To interrupt the climax I made small talk with a plump, toothless French girl seated across from me. Collioure, Perpignan, Argelès, names I heard spoken so many times by Don Manuel Pedroso, by Max Aub, Garzón del Camino, Ara and María Zambrano: a crescendo of excitement. By the time I arrived at the border, I would forever hate the French girl, who was missing two front teeth, because of the contempt she expressed for the Spaniards and their songs. “To us they’re primitive, they think they’re going to save the world with their songs, no matter what they do, they’ll always be primitive,” smiling as she said it, her lips creased like the Mona Lisa, hiding her oral cavity.

Yes, my neighborhood is bustling, which is fine, although it seems like they go overboard just a bit. Something tells me this isn’t my city. I find it excessively noisy, deafening, and insane in its hyperactivity. The guardia civil stopped two hippies this afternoon beside my hotel and beat them mercilessly. A group of them walk along La Rambla frequently; a mix of intelligent and delicate faces with others that are excessively barbarian: young people of both sexes decked out in Afghani, Indian, or Nepalese blouses and jackets, alongside others who barely cover their flesh in rags; Germans, English, French, Scandinavians; they barely speak to Spaniards. They hang out in the Dingo, a bar located beside the Plaza Real, which is also beside my hostel. My room, because of its modesty, takes me back to Vittoria, Rome, 1961. Apparently, I’m neither maturing nor making progress.

23 JUNE

No, I do not get this city. Yesterday afternoon I went to the movies. I did the same today. Double feature: one of the movies was the really ancient Ahí está el detalle, with Cantinflas. A way of escaping reality, it seems, of blotting out the racket where I live. I’m starting to feel a bit like a coward. I walk a lot, but I never leave La Rambla or Escudillers. My biggest entertainment: watching the expressions and habits of the exotic hippies, who also never leave the Plaza Real and its surroundings, and who usually hole up in the Dingo. Racket, scandal at all hours, enough to drive anyone crazy! I should have changed hotels the day after I arrived; instead I sent everyone this address, and now I have to grin and bear it until my correspondence gets here. You can get by here on a few pesetas a day.

7 JULY

Terrible insomnia. I fall asleep around seven or eight in the morning, which causes me to stay in bed until evening, and I wake up furious that I’ve wasted the day, which makes it impossible to have any kind of normal work schedule. I visited Pepe and María del Pilar Donoso. We talked at length about friends from Mexico, about Pepe’s illnesses, the novel he’s writing. The plot, which he explained in broad terms, is fascinating. I ask them about their life in Barcelona, and they respond vaguely, as if they wanted to avoid the subject. New friendships: a young married couple, both writers; he works at Seix Barral; she’s finishing university. The extreme seriousness they’ve established between themselves surprises me. Last night I finished my revisions of Cosmos, by Gombrowicz. I’m in a panic, at wit’s end. My money situation is getting dire. The trip to Warsaw appears uncertain. Not many letters from Mexico. Today I’m going back to Jean Franco’s book. The hippies are an enigma to me, an amazing phenomenon. The only thing I knew about them came from the press. I saw them in London a few months ago, but there the city absorbed them, despite openly shooting heroin in the metro and public toilets. In Barcelona they stand out from the rest of the city, its customs, Spain, even in this neighborhood that is the height of obscenity, but an obscenity of another kind, that has taken centuries to create. This mix of multiple nationalities, unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, is a novelty I still haven’t been able to digest. I exchanged a few words in the Dingo with a hippie with hellishly dirty, iodine-colored hair. They walk around in groups; in general they’re boring and sullen. This one seems more independent, more upbeat, and bordering on a sense of humor. I’m starting to get used to Barcelona; but to be completely comfortable I’d need a more obvious element of foreignness, like other European cities I’ve lived in. A greater distance from the language and customs could help me adjust to the paralysis I’m experiencing.

WEDNESDAY, 9 JULY

I woke up today at three in the afternoon, yesterday at four thirty, which is definitely not normal. I work until two in the morning and then I’m completely tense for five or six hours, unable to sleep, not even able to read. In this way, time seems to dissolve in my hands. A waste that reminds me of the worst times of my life, the most squalid I’ve ever lived, and even worse. I haven’t seen any of Barcelona, I don’t know it. Actually, what has made me this way, paralyzed, frozen, is my lack of resources, perhaps even the expectation of an impending departure. I feel sick. I’ll inquire about a doctor that’s not too expensive. On Monday I’ll receive a partial payment for translation of Cosmos. I have to finish the Jean Franco translation in twenty days. Is it crazy to stay in Barcelona, in this hovel, in this disgusting neighborhood, drowning in debt?

11 JULY

Today, at noon, I witnessed a murder, just two meters from me, on the corner of Los Caracoles. Both the murderer and the victim were probably a little over twenty. I mean, I think he killed him. He plunged a knife into his stomach. Afterward, the hotel owner’s nieces, the girls who do the cleaning, asked me: “Did a lot of people gather around? Did they catch the thug? He didn’t get away, did he?” I didn’t know what to tell them, I still don’t know for sure what happened. The only thing I remember is that the guy who was stabbed fell against the wall, then, looking more surprised than anyone, tried to throw his body forward, but wasn’t able to. Instead, he doubled over like an accordion that was closing. Did I really witness them pull the bloody knife from his body, or am I making it up? My memory is blurry. I kept walking. I went inside a secondhand bookshop, where the smell of mold made me queasy. I’m sure I bought Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, in an edition by Janes that I wasn’t familiar with. But the truth is when I got back to my room I didn’t have it.

SUNDAY, 20 JULY

I saw a live broadcast of the first men on the moon. They looked like giant pandas. It was as if I were not seeing them. There was no element of surprise because I had already read about it in my childhood, but in a more attractive form, in Verne and in Wells. I had also seen it happen with more glamour in the movies. Today makes a month since I arrived, and I still don’t know Barcelona. Brutalizing work. Activities this month: translations of Gombrowicz and Jean Franco. Permanent lack of money. Friendship with the De Azúas. Little news from Mexico. Too many movies and weekly visits to the Donosos’ home. Urgent needs: a few days at the beach, clothes, books, money, friends, a doctor.

22 JULY

I talk to Ralph, the hippie with the iodine-colored hair. He reminds me of someone, but I can’t think of whom. In spite of the fact that his features are very manly, there’s something beneath them that reminds me of a woman I know, but I’m not able to put my finger on it. There’s an excessive concentration in his expressions; he wrinkles his face even when he laughs, which hints at a fit of hysteria. Our conversation is extremely chaotic: “What do you study?” “Oh, that was four years ago. Since then I’ve lived on the road: Nepal, India, Turkey”; he remains silent, lost in a daydream. He suddenly adds: “I did a lot of business in Tétouan. There’s no one here who can help me.” “Is that a good business, hash?” “Quiet, man, I don’t do it here. It’s six years in prison. I may go to London soon.” “It’s an expensive city,” I tell him. “Nothing’s expensive for me. I don’t have any money, it’s all the same. If I’m hungry, I beg for pesetas. I’ll show you a place where you can get soup for six pesetas. But you have to take a bowl or a cup.” A long silence, I drink three cognacs, one after another. “I live in the cheapest neighborhood in the city,” he adds. “Twenty-five pesetas a day, that’s nothing.” I’m still waiting for money from Mexico. I owe the hostel two weeks’ rent. Whose expression is that? Where have I seen those gestures? Perhaps at the movies, Jean Harlow, in China Seas, but imprinted on a man’s face. No one could imagine the chill that ran through me when he mentioned the six-peseta soup, honestly, taking your own bowl. As he said it to me, he seemed sure I’d be taking advantage of it soon. The invitation from Warsaw hasn’t come. Tonight we’ll go see a film by Richard Lester with John Lennon and Michael Crawford.

THURSDAY, 24TH

Wonderful movie! An excellent film by Lester, very Brechtian, a plea against war in the vein of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. Talking to Ralph always turns out to be predictable and at the same time overwhelming. At times his face is monstrous. “Have you been to Madrid?” I ask him. “What’s it like?” He answers: “Really bad. The people are mean. They won’t give you money. They tell you, go get a job! They threw me in jail for a month, you know? Here in Barcelona the people are nice, kind of silly.” He says he pays his room and board by selling blood at a clinic. I thought the pricks on his arms were from heroin. I’m not convinced that they’re not. Sometimes a wild look comes over his face. I’ve become destitute. The money from Mexico hasn’t arrived. I owe the hostel again. I’ll start the prologue to Conrad’s Nostromo tomorrow. And my novel? I’ll start it tomorrow too.

SATURDAY, 26 JULY

I didn’t sleep last night trying to organize my schedule. I was still awake at four in the morning. If I got into bed, I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until well into the morning, and then I’d stay in bed most of the day. I decided not to sleep at all. I started work on my novel; what I read seemed utterly stupid. Does it make any sense to continue it? Perhaps the death of the old woman with elephantiasis is ruining the whole thing. What if I changed the ending? The scenes in Venice will hold up better, although they still require a lot of work. Later I began to read Mann, the Mountain, for the third time in six months. The first book by Mann I read was Doctor Faustus, about fifteen years ago. A task that at times seemed impossible. Nonetheless I continued. When I finished, I felt drunk. I had cleared the highest hurdle and crossed the finish line without suffering a single scratch. Then I set out to read the rest of his works, with the exception of his Joseph tetralogy. None impressed me as much as Faustus. I tried several times since adolescence to read The Magic Mountain. It was a book that we had at home and was widely recommended. I was never able to make it beyond page fifty. But during a long trip I took on a Yugoslavian freighter a few months ago, I was finally able to read it from start to finish. When I got to the last word I closed the book, and the next day I started to reread it, this time closely, which was the happiest reading I can remember. I’ve less than fifty pesetas in my pocket, and the money still hasn’t arrived. I have to pay rent again. No one writes me from Mexico. I haven’t heard from Zofia; I’m afraid she’s going through hard times in Warsaw, where a wave of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism has erupted. Maybe that’s why the invitation hasn’t arrived. Not being able to spend the rest of the summer there, which would cost me nothing, would spoil my plans and put me in a financially difficult situation. What a life! Horrible! Things being as they are, within a year I’ll have finished my first novel. I’m constantly changing the title.

SUNDAY, 27 JULY

The novel is turning out to be very hard for me. A lot more than I expected. I write chapters then undo them. It’s turning out to be a structural novel, if you can call this kind of novel that. I’ve gained something by not killing the protagonist. I redid the first two chapters, and now I’m revising the third, where Paz Naranjo and Gabino Rodríguez appear furtively, as does Carlos Ibarra; this way, all three stories will begin to intersect. There’s a line from Hamlet that would make a good title. I do not have it handy. Something like The Music of a Flute. So just like that I’m back to being poor? And miserably so! In a way I would never have guessed in my wildest imagination!

SUNDAY, 2 AUGUST

I worked on the chapter dealing with the meeting between Carlos Ibarra and Ángel Rodríguez, and Paz Naranjo’s reaction. A truly difficult chapter. I half-heartedly outlined a few pages. I’m no longer anxious about my poverty, but it doesn’t allow me to work like I should. I would need an apartment, and I only have ten pesetas in my pocket. I’ve not received confirmation of my trip, nor payment for the Jean Franco translation. In the event I do not go to Warsaw, I’d still have to stay two months in Barcelona to reorganize my finances. That’s good. When I saw this moment approaching, I was unable to sleep. The mere thought of the day when I’d be peseta-less kept me awake all night. I asked Ralph if poverty scared him. “No,” he answered instantly. “When you don’t have money, you learn to do without things.” And that’s what’s happening to me now. Last week the thought of running out of toothpaste left me petrified; when it finally ran out I brushed my teeth with soap. The only thing I know for sure is you won’t see me standing in a soup line. There are things that I can’t do: wash my own clothes, for example. I prefer to sell something, the few books I have left, and keep paying for laundry service, or walk around dirty, plain and simple.

17 AUGUST

Last week went from bad to worse. I’m still waiting for payment for the translation of Franco’s book. On the other hand, Era sent me a check, but for some reason I never fully understood, the bank refused to cash it. I had to return it and ask for it to be reissued. What’s more, the telegram from Poland still hasn’t arrived. All this time I’ve had to work in unbearable conditions. I just finished translating Behind the Door, a novel by Giorgio Bassani. The book interested me very little, and I imagine the results are very poor, but I get paid tomorrow and will be able to catch up on the back rent. The horrible light, the noisy neighborhood, the sleepless nights, the chaotic schedule, and the agonizing wait for the mailman, have all become routine these last two months. It’s not surprising I suffered a breakdown all of a sudden. One day, I was unable to work. Everything hurt. I went to bed with a very high fever and the feeling that I had a rock in the pit of my stomach. The next day I received a telegram from Díez-Canedo. He had wired me five hundred dollars. My fever went away immediately. I went to the bank. Apparently the transfer process is very complicated: first the money arrives to Madrid, then goes to a currency exchange office, which transfers a payment request to Barcelona. In all, it means waiting a few days. I left the bank, bought the laxative recommended to me by the hostel owner’s nieces; I took it and have spent three days with horrible stomach pains. If I’m not able to collect the money, and if the invitation from Zofia doesn’t arrive, I’ll never be able to leave this hellhole. What a bloody nuisance! Sometimes I feel like postponing the trip to Poland and renting a furnished apartment. On Craywinckel, at the foot of Tibidabo, for example, in the building where the De Azúas and Myriam Acevedo live. That wouldn’t be bad at all. First, I’d have to spend a week at the beach. I desperately need a change of atmosphere, a bit of rest, and the sea air. What a wonderful, incredibly generous person, Félix! Thanks to his help at Seix Barral I’ve managed to survive.

23 AUGUST

In Los Caracoles. I’m writing these lines beneath an autographed photo of Mistinguett. I’d like to have more friends, become better organized. How many times have I written, thought, and said the same thing? The trip to Poland still seems possible. But it’s not that important anymore. I just want to write. Suddenly everything that lay hidden and managed to survive being crushed beneath the awareness of poverty has come to life again. A desire for everything! An appetite for everything! All I need is to learn how to sleep decently again. I continue to work on the Conrad introduction. Translating in such a compulsive way has become mind-numbing. Will I be able to incorporate Ralph and his four years “on the road” into my novel? Make him perhaps a character in a chapter that’s a reflection on radical exile? I survived! Yes, I’m alive. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

SATURDAY, 30 AUGUST

Dreadful days. Reading Mandiargues’s La Marge strengthened my resentment for the vast and sickening bordello that is my neighborhood. Last night I witnessed an especially grotesque spectacle in a dive where I drink coffee. A black lad, who looked like a doll, was having a drink at the bar and looking out onto the street. He was dressed impeccably, his face touched up with makeup, possibly under the effect of some drug, his pupils dilated beyond description. He must have been rich; he was dressed like a king. It seemed as if his only possibility in life was suffering. He exuded it. The display of such suffering was able to thrive in numerous literary sources; there was a great deal of the hysterical exhibitionism from Tennessee Williams, but more of the languid affectation of M. Delly. A little black princess of the moor. He was surrounded by an escort of battle-hardened Arab bodyguards; one raised the cup to his mouth, another wiped his lips with a napkin, he seemed to not even notice them, his eyes were fixed on the door, as if he were waiting for someone, a lover or a drug supplier. The five or six bodyguards surrounding him stared menacingly at the clientele, like thugs. Now, as I write this, it occurs to me that he might have been kidnapped, and they were waiting for the ransom that would set him free. How gruesome! His servants displayed too much servile respect for that to be true. In any event, it’s rare to find such a flamboyant character and entourage in an out-of-the-way place like this. Perhaps I’m writing this just so I do not have to deal with what happened in the Dingo…A week ago when I was there a guy walked up and sat at my table: his face wasn’t completely unfamiliar; maybe because it was a look that had been practiced carefully so everyone would recognize it. He said hello matter-of-factly, and commented that we had not seen each other since our rendezvous in Lausanne, a city I’ve never even set foot in. He was drunk, or at least pretended to be. I asked where he was from. “Ecuador,” he replied. “You look like you’re Catalan.” “Well, I’m not.” I was beginning to dislike his presence at the table, his tone. I asked for my bill. Then he said: “Okay, let’s go somewhere else.” “I’m not going anywhere; I’m out of money.” “Come have another drink.” “Thanks, but I can’t with this headache.” His tone changed abruptly. He whistled between his teeth menacingly: “Go and tell them at your company right now that I need money. I want twenty thousand dollars and an Argentine passport.” At that moment several sinister-looking guys came into the bar; one of them seemed to be motioning to the man who was talking to me, who got up and walked, randomly and after making a complicated detour, to the table where the others had just sat down. A minute later, a huge brawl broke out, but in a made-up, theatrical sort of way, which my “acquaintance from Lausanne” took part in. So I took advantage of the opportunity to slip out of the place, frightened to death. It seemed obvious to me that I had been mistaken for someone else. And in police novels those kinds of mistakes usually end you up in the morgue. Tomorrow will be my last day in this neighborhood. I’m moving in the opposite direction. It’s wonderful being able to escape! Every cell in my body rebels against the existence of this disgusting labyrinth: against the limping, midget, haggard-looking, hunchbacked whores who fill its streets when night falls. Against the charade that rules the sex trade. It will be marvelous to escape tomorrow to my apartment in Craywinckel! It feels like pus that’s impossible to wash off has splattered all over me. I wouldn’t care in the least if someone decided to dynamite all of this. “I shall latch onto my God who destroys me!” This statement might not even be five percent true, but today I’m in complete agreement with that five percent. I’m an absolute prude.

11 SEPTEMBER

A month full of surprises and goings-on. I receive late payments from everywhere. I’m living in my new apartment, very much like a ship’s bow. Félix and Virginia came by to pick me up for dinner at the home of Beatriz and Óscar Tusquets. They’re about to start a new publishing house. I was delighted to meet them and have the opportunity to talk to them. They invited me to collaborate in their new endeavor. After a long conversation, we discussed and discarded various projects; in the end we agreed to create a new collection: The Heterodox, for writers and texts alike. They gave me their address, and as a first step in the collaboration they commissioned a translation of a selection of letters by Malcolm Lowry. That’s good news. First, I have to translate The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, which Planeta commissioned a few days ago. It will appear in the collection Great Authors of Our Century. I can hardly believe that I’m living in this beautiful apartment, in such a pleasant neighborhood, sleeping on clean sheets, meeting such stimulating people, receiving so many offers of work. I close my eyes, see the dirty hippies, the ignoble streets, my squalid room, and the only thing that occurs to me is to quote a sentence from Galdós that María Zambrano used to repeat frequently: “The clouds moved and everything became a caricature.” I need to stick by my decisions, not to return to Mexico right now, forget England for the moment, and stay longer in Barcelona, and devote myself fully to publishing and to literature.

14 SEPTEMBER

Carmen Balcells held a boisterous reception in a luxury hotel for Max Aub, who, from what I’m told, has returned to Spain for the first time since his exile. The gauche divine showed up in force. I felt happy. Max introduced me to Carlos Barral, Castellet, Gil de Biedma, to everyone. Later a discussion with Azúa at Los Caracoles ended very bitterly. Federico Campbell arrived today from Rome, and we had a long, delightful conversation about mutual friends in Mexico and Italy. I authored five articles for Seix Barral. I became a member of the Council of Reading a few days ago. My novel, unfortunately, has been interrupted. A piece of news left me dumbfounded. My brother Ángel called from Mexico to tell me that Francisco Zendejas had published news of my death in Excélsior, to the obvious consternation of my family. Suddenly I’m frightened by the possibility that it might be an omen, so to cheer myself up I tell myself, and to a certain extent it works, that the person who died was a shadow that I barely recognize today, and who was a prisoner the entire summer in the Escudillers. After Ángel’s call I was so nervous that I went up to Myriam Acevedo’s apartment to have a cup of coffee. I mentioned, among other incidents from my past life, the encounter with the man in the bar who said he had met me in Switzerland. Something he said to me had a profound effect on her, something like, “Tell your company that I need an Argentine passport and for them to deliver twenty thousand dollars to me.” She insisted on knowing what company he was referring to. I told her twenty thousand times that I didn’t know, that that was what had frightened me, because it all had been a case of mistaken identity. Then out of the blue she asked me: “Do you know a spy? Are you sure that one of your friends isn’t a spy?” “I suppose so,” I told her. “Possibly in Warsaw or in Belgrade, or right here, people come up to me to try and find out what I think about the regime. But you can’t know if they are spies,” I said. “Yes, but one can find out. Examine your friends,” she added. And so on for a long while; I went down to my apartment with a greater sense of unease than when I left. Surely she and her husband must feel hounded by informants who want to know what they are doing in Spain, if they plan to return to their country, etcetera, and that must have her very neurotic. “Don’t talk about anything to anyone; you don’t know what kind of world you’re moving in,” was the last thing she said to me.

FRIDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER

I took a blood test just in case. “Everything’s perfect,” the doctor said, smiling. Amazing!

SATURDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER

I was finally able to finish the prologue to Nostromo. I situated it primarily in the political realm, which I believe to be the novel’s central theme. It’s a work of great unevenness. Conrad talks too much about Nostromo’s remarkable qualities, about his invincible influence on individuals and the masses; however, once he introduces him, he inflicts on him a monotonous tone, a pedantry that serves only as a prop. He appears pretentious and insipid, limited, capable of nothing but clichés. The love scenes, as is almost always the case in Conrad, seem to take place between cardboard figures. The “passionate” dialogues between Nostromo and Viola, in spite of the air of panpipes and tambourines that the author imprints on them, and perhaps because of that very thing, are less than flat. I dined last night with Beatriz and a group of her friends, writers, translators, theater people, all young, at Can Masana, and when she introduced me she commented to someone that I had lived in Peking. Lived in China? For most of them it’s next to impossible to obtain a passport to cross the French border. I mentioned in passing my disappointment; the climate I endured there for six years, the steps toward the Cultural Revolution, the fanaticism, the absolute intolerance. I said how after eight days traveling by train, upon arriving to Moscow, I felt as if I were in the middle of Babylon. To some of them it seemed like an exaggeration. When I told them that I had just lived for three months in Escudillers they were almost more surprised than by my stay in Peking; the atmosphere immediately became more relaxed. Fortunately, they must have thought they were not talking to an ideologue but with a mad man. Once again, I felt like a survivor. Boudou Saved from Drowning, I could have shouted; but I didn’t, so as not to seem pedantic.

The truth is I wouldn’t trade Barcelona for any city in the world.

3 Known as Escudellers in Catalan, Franco mandated the change of all Catalan street names during his dictatorship, hence Pitol would have known the street as Escudillers in 1968. Today, the street is once again known by its original Catalan name, Carrer dels Escudellers. —Trans.

A VINDICATION OF HYPNOSIS

Suddenly, during a pause in his monologue, Federico Pérez cautioned me not to become too lost in circumlocution. I should lay everything on the line, he said. I replied that I had already done that the very day I made the appointment by phone. I was trusting that his treatment by hypnosis, about which I had heard great things, would help me give up smoking. If I had gone into too many details at the beginning of my explanation, it was to clarify what my relationship with tobacco was and had been. I do not remember his exact words, but he did allude to the evasiveness and circumlocutions in my speech. He added that he thought it was a manifestation of insecurity, a defense mechanism behind which I was hiding. I do not know if the doctor’s intervention, his interruption and description of the structure of the story, which unbeknownst to me had become unnecessarily and painfully labyrinthine, was part of the treatment, an attempt to stimulate a particular reaction, the beginning of subjugation. I defended myself with literary arguments. I took refuge in the fact that my writing was fundamentally built on those devices. That is its visible expression. I feel incapable of describing any action, no matter how simple, in a direct way. I said that other writers were able to do that, which did not mean I was less competent than they. In my case, plain and naked exposition, without flourishes, without detours, without echoes or shadows, fatally diminishes the efficiency of the story, converts it into a mere anecdote; a vulgarity, when all is said and done. From the very beginning, what I had always done was scatter a series of points onto the blank page as if they had fallen there by chance, with no visible relationship between them; until one suddenly began to spread out, expand, sprout tentacles in search of others, and then the others would follow its example: the points would become lines running across the page to find their sisters, either to subordinate or serve them, until that initial group of solitary points morphed into an increasingly complex and intricate character, with gaps, creases, ironies, blurrings, and glaring darkness. That was my writing or, at least, the ideal of my writing. I could have added, but I restrained myself, that my exposition could be the reflection of a specific way of conceiving literature, or rather, that the apparent loss of direction in language had created in me a second nature from which I could not escape. To the extent that I did not know how to talk about anything, not even the weather, without detours, and that, in itself, had nothing to do with personal insecurity, as it is usually understood, but rather with a lack of confidence, abstract, of course, in the possibility of communication and persuasion in the ontological loneliness of being. The narrator who, as a rule, appears in my novels rehearses several starting points in the pursuit of a truth, a revelation, and in the effort will lose his way a thousand times, stumble constantly, and will maintain the pace with great difficulty between suffering hallucinations and sleepwalking, only in the end to declare himself defeated. He will come to know that absolutes do not exist, that there is no truth that is not conjectural, relative, and, therefore, vulnerable. But searching for it, no matter how ephemeral, partial, and inconstant it may be, will always be his objective. The narrator might be Sisyphus and Icarus at the same time. His only certainty is that along the way he might have touched a few strands in a marvelous and deplorable tapestry, obscured sometimes by ominous stains or by a sudden and immediate iridescence that, upon seeing it, gives meaning to his efforts.

Of course, apart from demonstrating to Federico, whom I expected to miraculously free me from nicotine, an oral expression polluted by some stylistic processes, I refrained from adding everything else. It seemed like an abuse to ask a doctor to return my lost health to me and to blurt out to him on an empty stomach a speech on the radical solitude of man and the impossibility of attaining by rational means the truth or of arriving at it by approximations and estimates. The pretentious enunciation of those clichés was considerably watered down. Federico allowed me speak a bit more about the history of my tobacco use and its tribulations. Then he explained in a cursory way what his method consisted of and, just like that, I was hypnotized. At that moment, the most profound experience I’ve known in my adult life began. I’ve tried to decipher it on various occasions and after a few lines, I give up. The only thing I can do, and I won’t try to do any more, is transcribe the process.

We were discussing how Federico Pérez began to hypnotize me. He gave me the instructions necessary to cross the threshold of my inner self; at a given moment he discovered that I was in a trance and could therefore begin the treatment. I should add that I submit to any curative experience with the credulity of a child. I become the tamest lamb that anyone ever imagined. All personal resistance disappears. Allopathic or homeopathic doctors, magnetists, shamans, acupuncturists, curanderos, it doesn’t matter: I surrender my faith immediately and entirely to them. Any hint of skepticism disappears. The afternoon of 14 October 1991, the same thing happened, except magnified. I knew through Juan Villoro, his brother-in-law, that Federico worked miracles, and that he had broken the creative paralysis produced by writer’s block, as if the void that existed between the page written several years ago and the most recent one had never existed. I was convinced that if he had achieved that, freeing me from nicotine would be child’s play for him. A woman in Prague with magnetic powers had passed her hands over my chest a few times and the desire to smoke had disappeared instantly, as if my fingers had never touched a cigarette. A few years later, on a plane, someone offered me one, I lit it almost without realizing it, and the torture began anew. Suddenly, while I listened to Federico’s words, I began to feel in my chest and on my arms the same heat that invaded me when the magnetist in Prague passed her hands a few centimeters from my body.

I went to Córdoba yesterday. I spent a good while going through family photo albums with my uncle Agustín Deméneghi and my cousin Luis. In them, I found two photographs that I brought home. One is of my mother and my sister Irma, taken shortly before their deaths; I’m almost sure that it’s the last photo of my mother. She’s leaning on a white automobile; the landscape is rustic, and she has in her arms a beautiful little girl of three or four years of age. My mother’s face is sullen, severe; she had made decisions that would change her life, and ours, my uncle told me. Her demeanor is different than in other photographs I know of her. Her seriousness contrasts with the radiant happiness of the girl who’s holding out her arms to the person taking the picture. The other photo is of my sister Irma, sitting on a tricycle, taken a few days later. The transformation is startling. She looks like another girl, whose only similarity to the other is her extremely blonde, straw-like hair; but no trace of the happiness that previously lit up her face remains. In the few days that separated one from the other something monstrous had happened: the death of my mother. That would explain the tragic withdrawal. My tiny sister, a year younger than I, was not able to survive that tragedy. A few weeks later, she would also die. Looking at those portraits fills me once again with an inextinguishable anger and pain.

Federico Pérez asks me to remember a few moments in my life I consider to have been important. And suddenly, without having to make the slightest effort, a curious mix of images begins to parade before me, as if an invisible projector were reflecting them before my eyes. They are significantly enlarged photos, where even the minutest details appear with surprising clarity. There is no chronological order, or any other sort, to their appearance; at least I’m not able to find the threads that unite them. Especially because they pass before me with dizzying speed. I appear with family members, with friends, in the middle of the crowd. The chronology seems to have gone berserk. One image may be from a few days ago, the next from fifty years ago, only to jump forward twenty years, then repeat scenes of three days in a row. I move back and forth in time without any perceptible meaning. I see myself as a child, adolescent, old man, elementary pupil, student in law school, diplomat, teacher, hard worker, shirker, happy, worried, furious, sick, riding a chestnut horse, in the cabin of a German ship, on the deck of the Leonardo da Vinci, in the theater, on the street, extremely drunk, in the middle of the snow, under the India’s sun, hospitalized in a cast from head to toe, reading a book whose title I can’t make out because my fingers are obscuring it, in Venice, in Potrero, in Istanbul, Cadaqués, Córdoba, Palermo, Moscow, Marienbad, Bogotá, and Belize, in places that I can’t even identify. I seem to see thousands of people around me, a mass of people whom I don’t know or don’t remember, people walking down the street where I walk, who eat in the same restaurant where I’m eating, on a train, mere passersby, and, of course, friends and family. In spite of the fact that I’m in a trance, it still amazes me that none of those images alludes to an important moment in my life, as Federico Pérez had asked me to do. On the contrary, it’s nothing more than a bewildering collection of banalities. They lack sound: there’s no noise or words. Their power is purely visual. They’re photographs, it must not be forgotten. Unlike dreams, or the memories we evoke or that assail us unexpectedly, the details in these portraits that hypnosis offers me are very precise. I identify jackets, sweaters, coats that I wore on such and such occasion, whether bought at Harrods or in the wool market at Santa Ana Chiautempan in the state of Tlaxcala. The details of the clothes acquire almost hyper-realistic effects. I’m fascinated. Then, all of a sudden, just as the terrifying visions of the Apocalypse must have appeared unexpectedly to Saint John, an image looms before my eyes and stops; it doesn’t allow another to replace it; in fact, it’s the last image of the session. The only difference is that it has movement. My brother Ángel and I are sitting on the floor, watching doves come and go from the sunny terrace where we are. I must have been about five years old, which would make my brother eight. We’re wearing short pants. I recognize the house and the landscape around it. We’re on the outskirts of Atoyac, a town in Veracruz, at the home of Pepe Conzzati, a young friend of the family. I recognize the place because in the years that followed I went there many times with my uncle and grandmother. But on the day that corresponds to the image, and in the days that followed, we never saw the owner of the house. Perhaps he left very early and returned at night after we were already asleep. We only see an old woman, the sirvienta, who comes out to the terrace where we spend the better part of the day to get us and takes us inside at mealtime. She probably also puts us to bed. We stay at the house for several days, which frees us from all funeral services. Just as in the other images, there’s no sound in this one either. My brother and I are sitting, as I said, on the terrace, facing each other, with our legs outstretched on the ground. Ángel looks like a corpse. His face is terrible: his eyes are opened wide. He gets up and goes to sit by me, and I begin to cry. I can’t hear my words or my crying; I can only see it. At that moment, I am no longer the hypnotized patient looking to give up smoking. I feel possessed by the little boy I was and who is before my eyes. Apparently I no longer need the image; I become the crying boy. I know that I’ve gone with my mother and my brother and our little sister Irma to spend a few days with my uncle. His house is in a place called Potrero. My grandmother has also arrived from Huatusco. For a few days, everything is happiness. More than anyone else they celebrate Irma, the youngest; they lift her over their heads, kiss her, and she laughs, laughs, laughs…One day there was a lunch in the house’s garden. Several people came: the Mosses, the Scullys, the Cárdenases, and I suppose the Celmas too, who were my uncle’s best friends. Some of the guests decided to go that afternoon, after lunch, to Atoyac, to swim in the river, in a place called Idiot’s Pond. My uncle, my grandmother, Ángel, and I left later in the car to meet them at the pond. As soon as my uncle stopped the car, two peasants race to tell him something that he repeated to my grandmother. They started running down a path that snaked the length of the river. Surprised by their behavior, my brother and I followed as best we could. I fell several times, my brother helped me up. We arrived after everyone else to a wide clearing, under immense trees, with leaves so intensely green they were almost black; mango trees, I think. The family friends and several ranchers from the region were moving helplessly from one side to the other, some dressed, others half-dressed, some still in bathing suits. My grandmother was crying; some women were hugging her, restraining her so she wouldn’t run to my mother’s body; they were all crying; some peasant women, standing next to the group, were wailing. My uncle was trying to remove the water from my mother’s body. Ángel and I were snatched from the ground by surprise. A very tall man began to run with us in his arms. We’re now in his house. We haven’t seen him again. A very old woman feeds us and puts us to bed at night. My father is already dead and now my mother is too. I don’t know if this is our house. The old woman tells us that we won’t see her again until we die. We spend our days on the terrace watching the doves. I want to die. I don’t know what I say, but Ángel gets mad, he shakes me by the arm and then he starts to cry like me. I feel my face bathed in tears, I shake uncontrollably; they are real convulsions. In the distance, I hear Federico Pérez’s helpful voice. I begin to come out of a deep hole. The convulsions begin to abate. My face is soaked from crying; I feel tears running down my cheeks, toward my mouth, my neck. Federico’s voice and his proximity slowly soothe me. As soon as I can speak, I repeat incoherently everything I experienced in the trance. I tell Federico about the experience, from the first innocuous images to the pain from which I am still unable to free myself. I’m entirely out of hypnosis, or so I think, but the echo of the terror continues to stun me.

Federico gives me new instructions: walk slowly until you arrive to the hotel, breathe deeply, and be careful when crossing the street.

“If when you arrive to your hotel,” he says, as we say goodbye, “you feel bad, call me. If tonight, no matter what time, you feel bad, don’t hesitate to call me at home. You can count on our help at any moment.”

I went out into the street. Still stunned, I began to walk slowly. The walk from Federico’s house to my hotel normally takes a half hour at a relaxed pace. I was sure that the walk would exceed my energy. I thought about walking three or four blocks and then taking a taxi. All I wanted to do was lie down, take a sedative, and forget about the hypnosis, its revelations, and its results. I kept walking, and with each step I felt, almost physically, that a wound my body had harbored secretly for more than fifty years was beginning to heal. As I progressed, I could feel the improvement. The only thing I was conscious of was that I was leaving an illness behind me. I began to realize that I had lived all those years just to prevent that monstrous pain from repeating itself, to block the circumstances that might provoke it. My life’s meaning had consisted of protecting myself, fleeing, wrapping myself in armor. Suddenly I noticed on the sidewalk ahead a bougainvillea that was climbing a tree and flowering in its branches. It looked like a marvelous spectacle unlike anything I had seen before. My fatigue disappeared as if by magic. When I arrived at the hotel, everything had bloomed. I went directly to the restaurant, I ate like a barbarian, everything tasted exquisite; I arrived to my room, lay down on the bed, and began to read an interview with Cioran. I jotted down in my notebook: “We’re a terrible mixture, and in each individual coexist three, four, five different individuals, so it’s normal that they don’t agree with each other”; it wasn’t relevant, but it soothed me; and with that news I fell asleep.

The next morning I awoke with an unfamiliar feeling, as if my dialogue with myself were different. Many things had become coherent and explainable: everything in my life had been nothing more than a perpetual flight. There had been fantastic experiences, yes, extraordinary, which I could never regret, but they had also been a nucleus of agony that demanded that I close them off and look for new ones.

My debt of gratitude to Doctor Federico Pérez del Castillo, who allowed me to understand this, is infinite.

Xalapa, August 1994

SIENA REVISITED

I must confess that I am deaf in my left ear, which produces in me mood changes that, at their worst, could be confused with idiocy and also dementia. If at a social gathering, especially a dinner, the guest to my left is by nature very talkative, I’m already lost. I say the wrong thing, instinctively, by chance; imprecisions and nonsense abound, until the failed interlocutor slowly moves away, tired of repeating his questions and of hearing answers that have little or nothing to do with the questions. This is the source of incredible inhibition for me, and once inhibited, tense and fearful, I’m no longer responsible for my behavior.

In the spring of 1993 I took a brief trip to Europe to celebrate my sixtieth birthday. I chose three cities that were foundational in my life: London, Rome, and Barcelona. Warsaw was missing. I wanted to be in Rome at the same time as Augusto Monterroso and Bárbara Jacobs at the presentation of the Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature, which was being presented to Monterroso. I wrote to Lia Ongno, who at that time was finishing a translation of one of my novels, to let her know that I would be in Rome the day of the award, certain that she, as translator of the honoree, would be present, and that way we could meet and find time to resolve some questions regarding the text about which she had written me. Lia, on her end, informed Antonio Melis, head of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Siena, an old friend of mine, about my upcoming trip to Italy, who, in turn, sent me a fax, inviting me to give a lecture in his department, where, I should add, the chair of Portuguese Studies is held by Antonio Tabucchi, the person who introduced Pessoa to Italy, his translator and commentator, and, most importantly, an exceptional novelist.

I visited Siena briefly at the beginning of 1962, having spent the December holidays with my mother’s family. Christmas in Bologna and New Year’s Eve in Bonizzo castle. At the end of the last century, my great-grandfather Domenico Buganza crossed the ocean with his three daughters, Preseide, Agnese, and Catarina, the youngest, who was my grandmother, to educate them in Italy. Only two returned: my grandmother and her sister Agnese. The other, the oldest, married in Italy, and has since then lived in that castle, from which she has scarcely moved during her very long life.

Two or three days before my arrival, they gave my tía Preseide calming infusions to soothe her nerves, in preparation for her great-nephew’s surprise visit from Veracruz. When I introduced myself, she stood up and threw herself into my arms with the force of a hurricane, only to make me repeat again and again the important events from the family history that had happened on the other side of the Atlantic during her sixty-year absence. Except during the war years, correspondence between her and my grandmother had never been interrupted. Still she wanted to hear firsthand everything she had read over the years. She asked me about ranches, towns, people whom I’d never heard mentioned; I answered as best I could, which is to say clumsily. Suddenly she looked at me with contempt; she must have thought that she had before her an impostor who was pretending to be, who knows to what ends, the grandson of Catarina Buganza-Buganza, her youngest sister. At times she’d grow tired and would send me to the garden or to see the collection of Etruscan pieces that belonged to her granddaughter’s husband, on display in another part of the castle, or she’d ask her son-in-law, Noradino, a mathematician and tía Argia’s husband, to take me to see the surroundings, the river banks where my aunts and grandmother had strolled so many times at the beginning of the century. The truth is that apart from the snow there was little or nothing to see except a thick, milky white mist that obscured everything. I can remember, while almost half-asleep, taking a pair of car trips, one to Ostiglia, a small city, plunged into darkness and the closest to the castle, that according to my uncle had been, during some period, I do not remember which, the outer limit of the Roman empire; the other, to a small architectural jewel — or did it just seem that it was because I was able to see churches and palaces that were not covered in fog? — Mirandola, whose most illustrious son was none other than Pico della Mirandola. I spent those days enveloped by a very intense emotion. I sensed in those settings the presence of my grandmother; my grandmother the child, my grandmother the adolescent, my grandmother on the eve of returning to Mexico. I wrote her a letter from Ostiglia relating my reunion with the family, the conversations with tía Preseide, of which she, my grandmother, was the primary topic of conversation; I comforted her, reassured her that I was on my best behavior, drinking moderately, minding what I said. I told her about the condition of the property; a section was heavily damaged, but for years they had stored the materials needed to begin the work behind the garden in large sheds: tons of old Saracen bricks, acquired primarily in Calabria and Sicily from ancient buildings now in ruins, all to be used for the restoration.

The night of January 1, after dinner, very late, I said goodbye to the family; to my elderly great-aunts and uncles forever, as they would die shortly afterward. Early the next morning, my tío Noradino took me to Ostiglia, in whose tiny railway station we said goodbye. I boarded a beautiful toy train, a relic from the early days of the railway, I imagine: two small cars with seats lined with a thick threadbare velvet but still very elegant. I don’t believe that small narrow gauge train could have ever, not even in its prime, reached a heady speed, and by early 1962, many decades of work, wars, and bad times had rendered it nearly inoperable, and, with the mountains of snow that were covering the tracks that day, reduced it to an almost total inertia at times. The trip to Bologna took longer than expected. At the station in Ostiglia, when we said goodbye, my tío Noradino gave me a beautiful black leather wallet, full of enormous, meticulously folded bills. “To start off the year,” he said. I thanked him profusely for the unexpected gift that helped me not only to start the year but also for much longer. When I arrived in Bologna, the train on which I had reserved a seat had already departed, and I had to wait for another one that night. As they unloaded an automobile from a freight car, I tried very hard to bribe a railroad employee on that same platform to secure me a berth or, at least, a seat in first class; I was afraid to travel in a crowded second-class car with that much money in my pockets. People were returning to Rome and to the cities in the south in droves after the holidays; the platforms were packed. The young owner of the automobile that had been removed from the train asked me where I was going. I told him Rome, and he offered to take me to Siena, which meant taking me a good distance. He was on his way back from London, where he had attended an international theater festival. He had spent the New Year in Paris, taken the train to Bologna, where he had agreed to pick up the car that belonged to a family member. We talked about theater. He had finished his law degree, if I remember correctly, but he had not yet taken the bar. He possessed that good education characteristic of young people from well-to-do liberal families in which knowledge and pleasure are understood to be naturally integrated. He told me that the theater festival for the most part had been political, and that it was quite good. And that led us to talk for a while about politics. He was a socialist, a fervent admirer of Pietro Nenni, and was convinced that an intermediate force between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party was necessary for Italy’s good political health. If the votes for the socialists and communists were combined, he said, the victory against the right would be convincing. In some areas — health, education, and international politics — the two parties voted frequently on the same side; but if that happened in every case, if they managed to merge into a single political organism, the socialists would run the risk of being absorbed, as had happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia, by the other party. As we approached Piacenza, my host informed me that we would be passing through the city center, which meant I would be able to see the Carthusian monastery by daylight and contemplate the works of Luca and Andrea della Robbia, which I had never seen. I remember the pleasure that the architectural structure of the certosa gave me, in which the color of the majolica was a cry of joy. I was completely ignorant insofar as applied arts, which I considered a trivial form of decoration. I owe no small part of my education to the many trips I took hitchhiking across Italy that year.

Between Pistoia and Siena, our conversation revolved primarily around two subjects: English literature and Italian art, in particular the primitive and the Renaissance painters. Before entering law school at a very young age, he had spent a year in London to learn the language and to experience living away from his family. During that time, and for several years before, my readings were preferably English. I made a comment about the Italian influence in English literature; not just beginning with the Romantics, who were fleeing the philistinism of their country in droves, but long before, since the Renaissance. Their debt to Bandello, for example, was noteworthy, and a considerable part of his work was set in Italian cities, and I cited in passing, since we were on our way to Siena, a commentary by Robert Greene about the city’s raucous university life, where he heard about practices that took place as a matter of routine and that would have been unimaginable in his country. My travel companion politely corrected the name, believing that I was citing Graham Greene, and I explained to him that no, I was referring to Robert Greene, a contemporary of Shakespeare to whom some scholars attributed the authorship or, at least, his collaboration in the writing of Titus Andronicus, who in his youth traveled throughout Italy and probably stopped for a time in Siena, which he cites as a compendium of all the excesses of the pagan world. The young law student became a bit confused. He changed the conversation to more pedestrian topics and suggested that upon our arrival in Siena I stay at the station; since the snow had begun to fall again and we were progressing at a cautious speed, we would arrive late at night; so I should check my bag and rest for a while in the waiting room. There wouldn’t be any problem because it was a station with little activity; then, at daybreak, I could go out and walk through the city since the colors of the murals and palaces were illuminated at that hour in such a way that only then would I be able to experience the hue that the entire world knows as sienna red in all its splendor. He suggested I visit the cathedral before leaving the city and the art museum to see the masterpieces of Sienese painting, those by Simone Martini, Ambrogio, and Pietro Lorenzetti, and especially those of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the founder of the Sienese school, and its most important proponent. He recommended that I write down the name so I wouldn’t forget it. I replied without pretension that I knew who he was, I had seen one of his pieces in the National Gallery in London, and that I knew the majority of his works in reproduction. And then I blurted out, also casually, some ideas by Berenson, whose books, which I had become acquainted with and studied in Mexico, I always carried with me during my trips to Italy. I talked about the sumptuousness of his greens and metallic golds, of the technique he had inherited from Bizancio that he managed to make them look more like bronze bas-reliefs than paintings. Duccio was extraordinary, I insisted, no one doubted it, but he lacked Giotto’s genius, whose work summarized those tactile values, which for Berenson were everything. And then there was another silence similar to the one that followed my comment about Robert Greene and his memories of Siena.

During the first months of my stay in Italy, I often experienced the feeling that people expected me, and all young Latin Americans, to possess a wealth of hardened, tropical views, different ways of thinking, myths, rebellions, and new strategies that would perhaps help redeem the Old World: the aggiornata representation of the beau savage with Borgesian memories and flashes of Che Guevara. It flattered and at the same time disappointed them to feel their culture being recognized. Those adventures through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the avant-garde, after all, belonged to them. The claim seemed absurd to me, and sometimes I responded with provocations, but the European experience made me conscious, in spite of the sincerity of my intentions, that I ran the risk of learning everything solely from books, by rote, a self-indulgence that lacked the foundation that the necessary environment provides. It’s not that I was interested in submitting to any methodology, nor that I had academic ambitions; nothing interested me less than weakening the hedonistic nature of my readings, their purely casual organization. Nor was I going to ignore my almost innate disposition to seize everything the world had to offer. That was not the point; I intuitively understood that I needed to affirm the source of my own language and culture. I could recite a list of palaces and churches built by Palladio or Brunelleschi, and on the other hand, I possessed overwhelming gaps in the Mexican baroque, the truncated horizon of the Olmec and Maya, to cite just a few examples. I knew that I needed to capture that past in order to move freely in the world. It was the marrow needed to sustain the complex being I aspired to be. Without an affirmation of his language, the traveler loses the capacity to aspire to translate the universe; he will become a mere interpreter on the level of a tour guide.

Once in Siena, my traveling companion telephoned a few friends at whose home we had dinner, and then he accompanied me very late to the station, where our paths parted. I spent a few hours in the waiting room. I wasn’t able to sleep. That wait was like a reality check that rendered phantasmagoric my memory of the family rituals of Bonizzo, the complicated medieval maneuvers to heat the beds for the purpose of keeping them warm at night, the beauty of the spaces, the marvelous dinners prepared under the direction of my tía Argia, the good manners, the fire in the hearths, the Etruscan pieces. In contrast, I was enveloped in the smoke of dreadful cigarettes, coarse accents, and endless guffaws. It was like stepping onto foreign soil. There were few who slept. Men and women of different ages killed time recounting episodes of their lives, family intimacies, jobs and job searches; the youngest talked about unrealistic projects, recounted with a joy and innocence that managed to transform the most scabrous passages — and believe me there were! — into dialogues of pastoral purity.

I left there at dawn to go see the walls, awash in sienna red. I ate breakfast and walked to the museum, ready to experience ecstasy before the Byzantine splendor of the great Duccio. But it was still a holiday and no museums were open. I could have stayed in Siena a couple of days, but I could not resist the temptation of going to Rome, of introducing myself to Canova, to tell Araceli and María Zambrano and their friends about my family experience in Bonizzo, and to find out how they had spent the holidays, and to make plans for the following days. I thought I would return very soon. So I decided to walk only a bit through the city’s center, to enjoy its splendor and a while later take the bus that would leave me in Rome.

Thirty years had to pass, however, for me to again see the walls of that exceptional city.

I returned to deliver a talk on my most recent novels at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Siena during the course of an afternoon devoted to Hispano-American culture. The event would begin at five or six in the afternoon; I would speak, then there would be a music program organized by the students, perhaps a discussion, and it would conclude with a dinner at a home not far from Siena.

I had arrived in Florence, where I called Melis to coordinate our trip to Siena, the day before the event. She would come by, she said, to pick me up at my hotel the next day at seven in the morning. Later, I called Antonio Tabucchi’s number in Florence. I was told that he was at his home in Vecchiano, a town near Pisa, and they gave me his telephone number. I tracked him down shortly thereafter; I told him that I was in Florence and that the next day I was leaving with Professor Melis for Siena, where that evening I was to meet with the students. He replied that he already knew, but regrettably was not going to be able to attend. He had to get some papers in order and then take care of some tax-related matters, which had him very anxious. He had no idea when he might be able to leave his appointment, but he suggested I go to Vecchiano from Siena and stay a few days at his home. He assured me that I would like the region and that there were sites of interest in Pisa. I explained to him that I would be delighted to accept his invitation, but my schedule was very tight. I would be leaving Siena the morning following the event; I was to be present when the award was presented to Augusto Monterroso in Rome and then return to Barcelona, where I had already committed to meet Jorge and Lali Herralde. In short, we would have to see each other another time.

I had admired Tabucchi since Anagrama had published The Woman of Porto Pim and Indian Nocturne. I awaited the arrival of each of his books after their release in Italy, and I arranged for their immediate delivery. I had written about them. I would have liked immensely to talk to him about one of his novels, The Edge of the Horizon, which reminded me of Conrad at his best, as elusive and multivalent as The Secret Sharer. The Edge of the Horizon possesses that absolutely intimate quality nourished by the everyday fantastic found in the best of Tabucchi’s stories. The reader is witness, and in a certain way accomplice, to a secret battle that takes place nonstop between allusion and elusion. The more precise the details, the more mysterious the story becomes.

I spent the rest of the day at the Uffizi. The long stroll itself through the visual splendor of the Renaissance made the trip worthwhile. Everything there is magnificent. I lingered in the hall of the Sienese three hundred, as if I were anticipating what I would see the next day. Two of the works on exhibit, the Madonna in Maestà, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, and Simone Martini’s The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus left me so amazed that when I thought of Siena the referent was not my conference but rather the previous visit I made to the Museum of Art. After the Uffizi Gallery, I walked through the city for a few hours; when I arrived at the hotel, I fell into bed like a ton of bricks.

I left Florence for Siena at 7:00 A.M., accompanied by Antonio Melis. The first news that met me was so awful that I rejected it out of hand, as if I had not yet awakened and were trapped in a nightmare. It was the 27th of May, 1993. Antonio turned on his car radio, where we heard the confirmation. A huge explosion had occurred the night before at the Uffizi, which resulted in seven deaths, several injuries, and the destruction of part of the building. We made the drive from Florence to Siena in a state of shock. Melis tried to clarify for me somewhat Italy’s labyrinthine political and social reality: the collapse of the Christian Democracy, whose monopoly on power had lasted more than a half century, corruption, the judicial proceedings against politicians, the ties to the mafia, drug trafficking; in short, everything that had rocked Italy for a couple of years. The catastrophe that had taken place that day could be one of the consequences of that fall into disgrace. It was perhaps an effort to destabilize Italy, to strike at its most sensitive sites, to deter the police investigations into the nexuses between political and criminal power, or, if not, to live with its consequences. I arrived in Siena very distraught. The idea of having been in those precincts for several hours, shortly before the explosion, at perhaps the same time as the criminals as they studied the last details, added to my unease. If it were a nightmare, I would feel as if I were being watched, investigated, surrounded, I would end up feeling guilty, yes, I would doubt myself, rack my brain trying to prove my innocence without being convinced myself. Someone would swear that I had been seen in the car disguised as a taxi or an ambulance that introduced the dynamite into the museum. We all know how nightmares are. When we arrived in Siena we learned that only a few paintings had been affected, and none destroyed. The deaths and injuries were the result of the dynamite having been placed in a section where part of the museum’s custodial staff lived.

Antonio Melis drove me to the university and introduced me to Lia Ogno, who then took me to the hotel where I would be staying, which was not very far. I had most of the day free. I walked with Lia through the city’s medieval center, through wonderful alleys, through plazas whose preservation seemed miraculous. We said goodbye in the main Piazza del Campo. I picked up my pace and looked for the museum. I needed to embrace it. The gate to the entrance was draped by an enormous black fabric. All museums and art centers in Italy were closing their doors for two days in mourning and protest for the attack against culture carried out in Florence.

Once again, I had been forbidden the opportunity to experience the masterpieces of Sienese painting. Two of the attractions that had made my trip to Siena appealing had vanished. I would not see Duccio de Buoninsegna’s The Kiss of Judas, nor would I meet in person Antonio Tabucchi. Talking to him, learning his points of view, hearing his interpretation of some of his texts had become so essential to me, as compulsive as it had been for the American editor, a matter of pride and dishonor, of life and death, to have in his hands the letters that the celebrated Jeffrey Aspern had written to Juliana Bordereau in the novel by Henry James.

But in the end I did see Tabucchi. I shudder as I relive the episode. Recalling my behavior still causes me stress. Since this book in a certain way is a collection of reparations and regrets, an attempt to allay anxieties and cauterize wounds, I’ll take the liberty of sketching in a few lines the circumstances of the encounter.

That afternoon I held my talk with the students and teachers. I spoke before a warm audience about my career as a writer, my ties to Italy, my recognizable influences, some philias and many phobias, viable and impossible projects. During the course of my talk, I saw Tabucchi enter through the door in the back. I recognized him immediately; I had seen pictures of him in his Anagrama editions and in the press; so I could not have been mistaken; he entered with wife María José, a very beautiful woman, with a splendidly intense expression. At the end of the talk, we introduced ourselves. Previously our relationship had been mediated by correspondence and numerous phone calls. The invisible presence of Jorge Herralde, our friend and mutual editor in Barcelona, served as a point of reference. The musical performance was about to begin. Speaking before the audience had left me extremely thirsty and rather fatigued. I asked if there was anywhere I could get a coffee; I needed at least two cups immediately. He said we could go somewhere, that there was a pleasant café near the university. I do not know if it was the excitement of the day, or the fear of not being able to hear him due to the deafness I mentioned earlier and responding foolishly to questions, but the fact is as soon as we sat down, after commenting briefly on the morning’s terrible news, I began to talk about his latest book, a short, smart, and delightful text about the imaginary dreams of characters to which he was devoted. It was the book of a curious, sharp, and refined intellectual, and, at the same time, one not locked away in an ivory tower — an author in solidarity with life. The twenty characters who were dreaming represented very diverse signs that the author, by bringing them together, was reconciling: Apuleyo, Rabelais, Goya, Leopardi, Stevenson, Rimbaud, Chekov, Pessoa, Mayakovsky, García Lorca, and Freund, among others. The book’s title was Dreams of Dreams; it had been released very recently in a beautiful edition by Sellerio. I began almost immediately to talk nonstop, without allowing him to contribute; I began to list authors whose dreams would be worth imagining; Henry James, for example, must have some very complex ones, locked in a labyrinthine and elliptical syntax that trying to follow would have driven even the most competent psychoanalyst insane. It would have been an arduous task not only to decipher one of his dreams but also to understand his language, not become lost in the many folds of the single, never-ending and surely dark sentence in which he described them. And Borges’s dreams! Lezama Lima’s, Góngora’s, and I don’t know how many others! I spoke nonstop until we realized that time had flown by and we needed to return to the university so we could at least be present at the end of the musical performance. We returned. The concert ended, and the preparations began that would lead us to the house in the country where we were invited to have dinner. The Tabucchis invited me to ride with them in their car. Naturally, I sat in the front seat, which meant that my good ear faced the window and the deaf one toward Tabucchi and, partially, María José, who was sitting in the backseat.

They asked me the usual questions that well-mannered people ask: how my trip had been, where I was coming from, how did I feel in Italy, those necessary preliminary questions that tend to relax the interlocutor, create a climate of trust and, at the same time, the necessary conditions for what will become the body of the conversation. I answered that I had flown from Mexico to London, from there to Rome, and then traveled to Florence by train, where I met Antonio Melis with whom I drove to Siena.

I should have stopped there. Or perhaps I could have described my shock that morning upon learning about the destruction of a place where I had been a few hours before the catastrophe, a place that should be considered invulnerable for having endured five centuries of wars, invasions, floods, and sackings, from which it had always emerged intact. That would have been the correct thing to do, would it not? But the events did not transpire that way. After relating my itinerary, as I have already said, I began to talk about my experience in the taxi that drove me from my London hotel to the airport. I said that the driver struck up a conversation, perhaps out of politeness, to keep me entertained during the long ride, which made me rather uncomfortable in the first place because of the effort required to hear and make myself heard in those vehicles of such excessive dimensions, and because as a rule English cabbies speak with accents very difficult to understand, each one more exotic than Cockney, in which one loses words and entire sentences. The driver was a man of more or less my age, portly, and with a face similar to the one in those classical illustrations by which we’ve come to know Mr. Pickwick. He began to talk about his experiences as a tourist. He recalled with disconcerting precision, like an English incarnation of Borges’s Funes, the names of all the hotels in which he had stayed, the restaurants where he had eaten, the dishes he had ingested, as well as their condiments, the brands of cigarettes, soaps, and toilet paper, and the price in local currency of each of these products, which he immediately translated into pounds sterling. He had been to Mexico on one occasion and recalled everything I had never noticed. He did not show the slightest artistic or historical curiosity for the countries he had visited, nor excitement for the landscape; no human interest in the inhabitants of those places nor curiosity about their problems. Everywhere he went he amused himself by finding the English products that were on the market and finding out their price, comparing it to the price in London and in the process determining the profits made by the merchants. To be honest, I was fed up; I answered in monosyllabic words; I wanted to read the morning paper, but cutting him off in mid-sentence would be very awkward. So I reconciled myself passively to not encouraging the conversation. He told me that he walked as much as he could, both while traveling and in London. He thought that society had begun to break down because people had become unaccustomed to walking. I do not know if in response to one of his questions or motu proprio I told him that I took a walk twice a day; that I walked my dog an hour in the morning and another hour at night. He asked me the name and breed of my dog. His name is Sacho, and he’s a wonderful bearded collie. You should have heard the fuss! He told me the story of his dog, also a bearded collie, with which he had lived for fifteen years. When she died, several years earlier, he suffered an extreme depression. He stopped working; a time arrived when he did not leave the house, he thought the end was near. A few Sundays he mustered the strength to go to Mass, it turns out he was Catholic. On one occasion, shortly before the end of mass, he heard a voice that said to him: “She’s fine where she is and is taking care of you from there.” His depression disappeared; he was able to return to a normal life and to work. His emotion seemed authentic, even after so many years. I adored him. I could have traveled to the ends of the earth to hear the everyday details of his relationship with his dog. Just then we were arriving at the house in the country. “It has an air of Chekov,” was Tabucchi’s comment.

We dined outdoors, on a terrace; I ended up sitting in the middle of a small group of professors and beside María José and Antonio Tabucchi. I do not know how I came up with the topic, what provoked it, whether the Devil made me do it, but suddenly I heard myself telling the story about the escape and death of Carranza — yes, the departure of Don Venustiano from Mexico City and his tragic final hours! — the arrival of the president and his entourage to Buenavista station, the commotion, the chaos that reigned, the hundreds of coaches, one containing the national treasury; another the official archives, the first desertions, and then, during the trip, the different attacks of which the presidential train was a target, the lack of water and coal for the engines, the telegram from the governor of Veracruz refusing to recognize him as head of State, the impossibility of going on and of turning back, his flight on horseback to the village of Tlaxcalantongo, the final bullet that cut short his life.

Where was all of this going? To talk for two hours in great detail about the flight and death of a Mexican president from the revolutionary period whom no one knew, on the terrace of a country house near Siena! Suddenly, I realized that the only person in the group speaking was me; by then we were having coffee, and the guests were beginning to say goodbye.

I would have liked for Tabucchi to clarify moments from The Edge of the Horizon, to talk about one of the stories that I liked most, “Saturday Afternoon,” to know more about his interest in Portugal, in Pessoa, to talk, if he wanted, about what he was writing. I emerged from what seemed like a trance and was horrified, more embarrassed than I had ever felt. I apologized as best as I could and added that I was usually rather quiet, which is true, that the parrot I had become was a side to my personality that I did not even know. And María José, with a smile for which I shall forever be thankful, told me that she thought my story about the old president was both tragic and beautiful. Tabucchi presented a small book to me before I left; the text of a lecture he had given not long before in Tenerife. When I got back to the hotel, I read it in one sitting, and once again I was impressed by the quality of his intelligence. I felt even more embarrassed.

In short, it was one of those nights when one would rather be shot.

Xalapa, April 1996