The Art of Flight

THE NARRATOR

Thinking about the foreboding moments of a work of fiction inevitably takes me back to that famous interview in which William Faulkner confessed that the inspiration for one of his novels came from seeing the “drawers” of a little girl who was attempting to climb a tree. Day after day, he would see those panties and that tree at the most unexpected times. He would pour himself a whiskey, and the intimate garment would appear among the ice cubes; he would try to read a newspaper, and the little girl’s thighs would appear floating on the printed page; he would see a puckered and wizened neighbor woman walk down the street, and could not help but superimpose the small buttocks of the girl who was climbing the tree on the behind of that dismal advertisement against lust. That initial image would begin at some moment to branch out. It occurs to me that one day the writer must have imagined a little boy beneath that tree who struggled between shame, humiliation, and the animal need to stare at the naked legs and intimate garment of the little girl who was his sister. There, in a nutshell, is the essence of one of the most extraordinary novels of our century, which recounts Quentin Compson’s erotic attraction for his sister Caddy and its tragic development. Its title: The Sound and the Fury.

At times, this first incitement surfaces, for a moment or for several days, then troubles the eventual author, only to later withdraw inexplicably into one of the blackest holes of memory, waiting for the opportune moment to reappear with accumulated strength. No one can predict how long the inspiration will take to mature. It can be a matter of days or decades. At twenty, Thomas Mann sketched the outline of a novel that he would write fifty years later, Doctor Faustus, a book that would be enough to guarantee immortality for any author.

The paths to creation are imprecise. They are full of wrinkles, mirages, delays. They require the patience of a saint, a good deal of abandonment, and, at the same time, an iron will in order to not succumb to the traps the unconscious lays to block the writer. It is well known that the struggle between Eros and Thanatos always lies at the root of creation. But the end of the battle is always unforeseeable.

I spent my childhood at a sugar mill in Potrero, Veracruz, a place, without a doubt, as unhealthy as the farms in New Guinea, the Upper Volta, or the Amazon must have been during the same period. Between brief intervals of physical activity there were long periods during which I was bedridden with fevers caused by malignant tertian malaria. Reading became my only pleasure. I gladly and by necessity became a full-time reader. From the usual childhood readings — all of Verne, Treasure Island, The Call of the Wild, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—I dove into the novels of Dickens, and then, without delay, into Creole Ulysses by Vasconcelos, War and Peace, the Mexican poets of the Contemporáneos group, Freud, Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and foreign languages. I read everything that fell into my hands. I reached adolescence carrying an almost unbearable weight of readings. If one adds to this the fact that I lived at my grandmother’s house, and that the only people who frequented the house were her sister-in-law, her childhood friends, and, occasionally, her near one-hundred-year-old nanny, who did everything possible so the conversation would avoid any contemporary topic and remain frozen in a kind of vanquished utopia, a subverted Eden, the world before the Revolution, when one could travel to take waters, not just in Tehuacán but also in Italy — to reclaim a health that ultimately served no purpose, since the time that was worth living had been left behind, lost and destroyed — my subsequent destiny can be understood. If one adds to the accumulation of poorly digested readings the incessant flow of oral literature intended to keep the house removed from the present, and thus from reality, it is not at all surprising that at some point I would pass from the category of reader to that of aspiring writer.

I arrived in the capital at sixteen to take classes at the university. Although I enrolled in law school, I spent most of my time in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. If it is true that the latter was, overall, much more attractive than law — going from classes on the history of historiography to those on medieval Italian literature, and from the history of modern art to the literature of the Golden Age, was infinitely more pleasing than attending classes in law school, where I was forced to listen to incomprehensible disquisitions on business law or civil procedure—, it is also true that I owe the direction of my destiny toward and for literature to law school, and in particular to one teacher, Don Manuel Martínez de Pedroso, professor of Theory of the State. The students who were most committed to the study of law, the most organized, those with the best grades in all their subjects, disoriented by the absence of a previously established syllabus and the maestro’s refusal to designate a textbook, defected two or three weeks after the beginning of the term. Don Manuel Pedroso was one of the most cultured persons I have ever known, and perhaps, for that reason, there was nothing bookish about him. His sense of order was demonstrated in the most oblique way one could imagine. Once only a handful of faithful remained in his class, the maestro from Seville would begin his paideia in earnest. He imparted it in the most heterodox way conceivable at that time — and possibly any other — for the teaching of law. Pedroso would talk to us about the ethical dilemma embedded in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”; about the antagonism between obedience to power and free will in Sophocles; about the notions of political theory expressed by the Henrys and the Richards in the historical dramas of Shakespeare; about Balzac and his dynamic conception of history; about the points of contact between the Renaissance utopists and their antagonists — which for Pedroso were only superficial — the theorists of political thought, the first visionaries of the Modern State: Juan Bodino and Thomas Hobbes. Sometimes in class he would lecture at length about the poetry of Góngora, whom he preferred to any other Spanish-language poet, or about his youth in Germany, where he carried out the first Spanish translation of Das Kapital and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, one of the first expressionist plays to circulate in the Hispanic world; about his activities during Spain’s civil war during which, from the beginning, his title of marqués did not prevent him from placing himself at the service of the Republic; about his experiences in the terrifying Moscow of the Great Purge, where he was the last ambassador of the Spanish Republic. He frequently thrashed us with caustic sarcasm, but he also celebrated our victories. Pedroso urged us to read, to study languages, but also to live. He enjoyed the stories we’d share with him, inventing some details and exaggerating others, about our nightly rounds through a circuit of dives from which we miraculously escaped unscathed. One of the triumphs of the Mexican baroque manifested itself at the time in the complexity of the capital’s nightlife, governed and lived with unbounded imagination. It seems that the sense of danger one experienced upon entering one of those dives was the product of impeccable staging and mise-en-scène, spaces that were in no way innocent but also enormously entertaining and not at all dangerous. With Pedroso, the temptations of the world lived in harmony with the rigors of knowledge. Humor was one of his key traits. Even the most dramatic episodes of the civil war could, just before reaching the height of pathos, be transformed into an endless parade of scenes of indescribable comedy. When the term ended, one knew the theory of the State with greater clarity than those students who deserted to drink from more canonical waters. Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea have written excellent pages about him.

Reading Jules Verne had fueled in me a certain desperation to travel and become lost in the world; perhaps compensation for my childhood seclusion. In early 1953 I traveled abroad for the first time. It was a trip to South America. I planned to disembark in Venezuela, travel through Colombia and Ecuador to reach Peru, where I would embark again for Mexico. Letters of introduction from Alfonso Reyes provided immediate access to various Venezuelan intellectuals and foreigners residing in Venezuela. While there, I met the essayist Maríano Picón Salas, the most respected Venezuelan on the continent, Alejo Carpentier, Juan David García Bacca, and many others. In my early days in Caracas, Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World, which had been published in Mexico, appeared in bookstores, whose reading, of course, left me dazzled. Carpentier became one of three Hispano-American authors who, during my university years, constituted my personal Olympus; the others were Borges and Onetti, to whom I have added half a dozen other names. What attracted me most to the Cuban writer was his rhythm, the austere melody of his phrasing, an intense verbal musicality with classical resonances and modulations that came from other languages and other literatures. To the quality of his language Carpentier added the allures of the Caribbean, its intricate geography, its fascinating history, the crossroads of myths and languages, political reflection; all of which was integrated into perfect plots. Explosion in a Cathedral is one of the most extraordinary novels in the Spanish language, a tale about the influence of the Enlightenment on the islands and the continent, and a bitter and profound reflection on political ideals — revolution, its triumph, its transformation into raison d’État—ideals held in public proclamations but denied and fought in practice. I never encountered the same tension in anything Carpentier wrote later.

Venezuela was suffering at the time under the cruel and obtuse military dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez. I remained in Caracas for several months instead of undertaking the ambitious itinerary I had previously outlined. I celebrated my twentieth birthday there. I wrote an occasional article for El Papel Literario, the cultural supplement edited by Picón Salas, as well as a few poems I hoped to publish as soon as I returned to Mexico. Love poems, of course. My guardian angel protected and saved my literary future: I misplaced the poems. When I reread them thirty years later, I was petrified; to say they were atrocious would be to praise them. Had I published them, it is very likely that my relationship to literature would have been dealt a mortal blow. In any case, I lived for the first time the incomparable experience involved in creation. During those months, I witnessed a political and social unrest that was all but nonexistent in the circle in which I moved in Mexico.

When I returned home, I enrolled in a course in dramatic theory and technique with the intention of learning to write theater. I was certain that my vocation was pointing me in that direction. The playwright Luisa Josefina Hernández assigned us some Greek tragedies and gave us the task of adapting their themes to our century, to create Mexican Electras, Orestes, Iphigenias, and Oedipuses. I sketched my dramatic outlines in accordance with her instructions, and when I began to develop them I was surprised that, instead of a tragedy, a short story was taking shape. They were twilight recreations of life on ranches and haciendas of my native Veracruz, in which I summarized the family mythology that I had assimilated for as long as I could remember. An inexplicable alchemic impulse, which I felt incapable of resisting, caused the dialogues and stage directions to disappear and, in their place, a narrative web began to take shape, which included the history of those foreign families, whose arrogance I surely exaggerated, scattered around Huatusco and its surroundings, where my great-grandparents had settled a century before.

At twenty-five I published my first book of stories: Tiempo cercado (Corralled Time) and thus began to expel the toxins I had accumulated since childhood. Living in Veracruz meant being periodically engulfed in the fiesta. At the time, however, I was unable to discern what I would later learn in Bakhtin, namely that the feast makes up the primary and indestructible ingredient of human civilization; it may weaken, it may degenerate even, but there will never be a force that can eclipse it completely. “The feast,” says the Russian philosopher, “has no utilitarian connotation (as has daily rest and relaxation after working hours). On the contrary, the feast means liberation from all that is utilitarian, practical. It is a temporary transfer to the utopian world.”⁴ Although I was immersed in the feast, I did not allow it access to those tales of Veracruz that suffered conspicuously from its absence; in those stories, evil appears as a factotum; it constitutes a closed universe, univocal, reluctant to recognize, much less celebrate, “the world’s inexhaustible mutation.” Those family histories that depict the deterioration of immense houses that are possessed over time by humidity, weeds, and the devil held for me a single virtue: they allowed me to cut an umbilical cord that refused to be severed. When I wrote my first books, Tiempo cercado and Infierno de todos (Everyone’s Hell), which brought together those tales whose somber tone and rigid literary devices did not reconcile with the exuberant nature from which they emerged, I learned how to tell stories, to recreate some of the characters that my grandmother resurrected as she spoke about her lost Huatusco. But, above all, I rid myself of a world that belonged only vicariously to me, and I felt obligated to recount exploits and disasters closer to my experience. My guardian angel during that time was William Faulkner, whose Yoknapatawpha County I attempted to recreate among the coffee plantations, palm trees, and dark tropical rivers.

During the time I wrote those stories, I traveled to New York. It must have been 1956. Only in recent years have I realized the vast education those two very different trips provided me. I have since gone to many museums, but none of those visits succeeded in repeating the wonder produced by those in New York, above all the Museum of Modern Art. For weeks I was appalled by the scale of my ignorance but took delight in the extraordinary surprises that my efforts to diminish that ignorance afforded me. What a difference between Guernica in its natural state and its miniature reproductions in magazines or cultural supplements! I discovered many of the trends in contemporary art, and I was won over or unsettled (which, in the end, is the same thing) by some of them. During that period the Expressionists did not yet enjoy the prestige they enjoy today. It was difficult to find them outside of a few German museums. On a wall of the Museum of Modern Art hung The Departure, the first of the new triptychs painted by Max Beckmann. Unlike traditional polyptychs that narrate a story — the tragic life of a martyr, the road to conversion of an excessively degenerate pagan that ends up becoming Pope, the exploits of a warrior who subjects vast territories to catechization, the vicissitudes of an emperor desperate to hold his empire together despite the push of an enemy infidel — where each panel represents a segment of the story so that the whole can provide us with the complete vision, Beckmann’s triptychs are flooded with strange figures engaged in unfathomable acts. A rich tapestry emerges before our eyes where certain signs are repeated over and over like pillars of a personal mythology. No sum is possible, and, therefore, the progressive sequence of a story is never achieved. In the triptych I am referring to, the side panels are a catalogue of sordid and brutal acts. In the left panel, a sinister-looking villain is torturing three people — two men and a woman. One has been mutilated: his hands cut off, the stumps still bloody. In the right panel, a young woman holding an oil lamp is walking with the corpse of a half-nude man trussed vertically to her body: the corpse is positioned head-down, the feet reach the woman’s neck, and the head the floor; behind her a bellboy is walking blindfolded, carrying a big fish in his hands. Beside him, a modestly dressed character is playing a drum energetically. The radiant central canvas stands in contrast to the sordidness going on in the side panels: a man wearing a crown and a woman holding a baby in her arms are standing beside a mysterious male figure with his face covered. The blue sky and sea shine as if it were varnish, in contrast to the absence of sunlight and the violence cloistered on the sides. I imagine the triptych’s title, The Departure, refers to that scene. The couple and their son, the king and queen of creation, are abandoning the cruel, turbid, and incomprehensible world that surrounds them. The brightness of the colors in the center, accentuated by the space in which the royal protagonists are situated, immediately attracts the observer’s eye.

The many acts encapsulated in one of Beckmann’s works can, at first sight, produce a mistaken effect. It could be taken for the illustrations of a literary work. However, the sensuality of the color and the extraordinary power of the line undo that mistake. It is not painted literature but pure painting: it is natural that people use these elements to try to create a personal story. When explaining to a friend the panel on the right where a corpse, naked from the waist down and trussed to the body of a beautiful woman, beside whom a man, who doesn’t even see them, is playing a drum, Beckmann states: “The body tied to you is a part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs and failures, the murder everyone commits at some time in his life — you can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry that corpse while Life plays the drum.” If someone who had not read Beckmann’s explanation stood in front of the triptych and translated that fragment similarly, I would slit my throat. Each spectator must decipher the elements as best he can, drawing on life lessons or personal experiences; this, which seems inevitable, does not mean enriching or impoverishing the aesthetic pleasure. Of course certain general elements catch the eye: an anxious tension between the power of Life and the presence of Death, and other indirect tensions resulting from a series of confrontations between closure and openness, health and illness, dignity and humiliation. I cannot think of any other feature at the moment, but deep down I would want to discover some sort of coherence in that tumultuous collection of figures and enigmatic situations; I would turn it into stories, into plots that would have nothing in common with the painter’s version.

I lingered before that triptych for a long time, filled with amazement and contradictory feelings that alternated between fascination and rejection. Over the years, I have been able to see a large part of Beckmann’s work in German museums and in international exhibitions of Expressionist art, and I’ve consulted some excellent monographs. But the image that lingers in my memory is that of my first encounter, my astonishment before the accumulation of so many unlikely elements in the same space. On certain occasions, after looking at Beckmann’s paintings, I’ve felt the temptation to incorporate into my stories situations and characters whose mere proximity could be considered scandalous; to establish, in a fit of bravura, the threads necessary to set into motion all kinds of incompatible incidents until they could be shaped into a plot. Dreaming about writing a novel replete with contradictions, most only superficial; to create from time to time zones of shadows, deep fissures, abysmal caverns, so that the reader can travel on his own the story’s vast spaces.

It pleases me to imagine an author who isn’t intimidated by the thought of being demolished by critics. Surely he would be attacked for the novel’s extravagant execution, characterized as a worshipper of the avant-garde, although the very idea of the avant-garde for him is an anachronism. He would withstand a storm of insults and foolish attacks from anonymous frauds. What would truly terrify him would be that his novel might arouse the interest of some foolish and generous critic who claimed to have deciphered the enigmas buried throughout the text and interpreted them as an shameful acceptance of the world that he detests, someone who said that his novel should be read “as a harsh and painful requiem, a heartrending lament, the melancholy farewell to the set of values that in the past had given meaning to his life.” Something like that would destroy and sadden him, would cause him to toy with the idea of suicide. He would repent of his sins; condemn his vanity, his taste for paradox. He would blame himself for not having clarified, just to achieve certain effects, the mysteries in which his plot delights, for having not known how to renounce the vain pleasure of ambiguities. Over time, he would be able to recover; he would forget his past tribulations, his longing for atonement, such that when he starts writing his next novel he will have already forgotten the moments of contrition as well as his efforts to make amends.

And he will return to his old habits; he will leave unexplained gaps between A and B, between G and H, he will dig tunnels everywhere, will put into action an ongoing program of misinformation, he’ll emphasize the trivial and ignore those moments that normally require an intense emotional charge. While writing, he dreams with delight that his tale will confuse law-abiding citizens, reasonable people, bureaucrats, politicians, sycophants and bodyguards, social climbers, nationalists and cosmopolitans by decree, pedants and imbeciles, society matrons, flamethrowers, fops, whitewashed tombs, and simpletons. He aspires for the ubiquitous mob to lose its way in the first chapters, to become exasperated, and to fail to grasp the narrator’s intention. He will write a novel for strong spirits, whom he will allow to invent a personal plot sustained by a few points of support laboriously and joyously formulated. Each reader would find at last the novel he has at some time dreamt of reading. The opulent, the incomparable, the delectable Polydora will be every woman of the world: the protosemantic Polydora, as her refined admirers, as if spellbound, are wont to call her, but also the dandies — what are you going to do! — , the distinguished Mrs. Polydora, as she is known to officials, wealthy merchants and professionals, unlike the masses, who call a spade a spade and refer to her simply as “the best ass in the world.” For some she will be a saint, for others the mother of all whores, and to a third group both things and many more. The bewildered reader will discover that not even Father Burgos, her long-suffering confessor, knows how to react to the abrupt spiritual oscillations of this untamed lady whose conduct he curses one day only to bless her exalted piety with his tears the next. And what about Generoso de Chalma, the famous bullfighter, her lover, her victim? That abominable figure might be a hero and a buffoon, a mystic, a labyrinth, the powerful head of a drug cartel, the innocent victim of a cruel vendetta, and a despicable snitch in the pay of the police, depending on how the reader’s whims or emotional needs sketch him. The only thing that the potential addicts of this novel could agree on would be to confirm that the times we live in, the same as the narrative, are abominable, cruel, foolish, and ignoble, awkward to the imagination, to generosity, to greatness, and that none of the characters, neither the best nor the worst, deserve the punishment of living in them. I have never written that novel; unfortunately, I am not that hero. But by just remembering Beckmann’s first triptych, I would have liked to be.

If my visits to New York’s Museum of Modern Art dazzled me by showing me the courage of the contemporary artists in their relentless pursuit, the emotion I experienced in the vast spaces of the Metropolitan in contemplation of the Titians, Rembrandts, Vermeers, Goyas, and other splendors it contains was no less. I learned that nothing remarkable in the arts can happen if a connection is not established with past achievements; irrefutable proof of this is Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, housed in this very museum. By failing to maintain a living dialogue with the classics, the artist, the writer, runs the risk of spending his life reinventing the wheel. I know nothing more reductive than the cult of style. The task of the writer consists of enriching tradition, even if he venerates it one day and comes to blows with it the next. Either way, he will be aware of its existence. This is why problems of form, techniques, and possibilities of genres, and their capacity for transformation have both attracted and interested me.

Instead of fading after my first outings, the urge to travel became more obsessive. I began 1961 with a strong sense of annoyance. I was sick of my circumstances and also the world. The press was reporting the unrest that was beginning to alter some young writers in different parts of the world, one of those fevers that appears every few years. They were leaving home, security, work, and undertaking to travel the globe. They were leaving New York and California to settle in Mexico and then taking the leap to Tangier or Marrakesh. Or they settled in Paris, Rome, Capri, Rhodes, Santorini, and sometimes even in a small shantytown in the Philippines or Ceylon. I felt corned in Mexico; I got the bug, sold almost all my books and some paintings, and I hit the road. In the middle of June I boarded a ship in Veracruz and crossed the ocean. I spent a few weeks in London, a few days in Paris, and finally settled in Rome. Like Cervantes, I thought I had reached the undisputed center of the Universe. There I met María Zambrano, who among other things introduced me to Galdós, on whom she was writing memorable pages at the time. I made several trips around Italy, but always returned quickly to Rome, as if any minute spent away would be wasted. For the first time, I felt healthy and immensely free. I was twenty-eight years old and extremely eager to conquer the world. The result of that stay was my return to writing. One night, in a middling café, I began to outline a story that, for better or worse, I am still writing. That trip that was supposed to last a few months lasted twenty-eight years, my age when I arrived in Europe.

My time abroad can be divided into two periods: one that was anarchic, insane, amazing, and always extraordinarily enriching that lasted twelve years; and another, as a member of the diplomatic corps, which spanned the remaining years. During the first, I supported myself however I could and managed to survive with minimal assistance, classes, and editorial activities. I lived in Rome, Peking, Warsaw, Barcelona, and London, each of which left a different mark on my life. In Barcelona I translated for Seix Barral, and at Tusquets edited a collection called Heterodoxos. I remember fondly the work sessions with Beatriz de Moura and other friends in which we spoke with intense enthusiasm about our projects. During a period where the political atmosphere was decidedly orthodox! Of every three or four titles, the censors allowed us to publish maybe one. We lived and worked ignoring the dictatorship. When a Heterodox saw the light of day we celebrated with devotion. During that time, Anagrama was born, and at its first book launch I met Jorge Herralde. We became fast friends. I have translated several books for him, written prologues for others, and later published all my novels with his press. Thanks to the Herralde Prize my work began to be noticed in Mexico. I met Lali Gubern at Leteradura, her wonderful bookstore, and even now the existence of that open space in a period of extreme intolerance seems miraculous. Immediately after being paid for a translation at Seix Barral, I went to Leteradura and headed without hesitation to the table displaying the attractive books from De Donato, the collection that included the Russian formalists and avant-gardists; some of the books I most value: Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose; the Complete Theater of Mikhail Bulgakov; the three volumes on Tolstoy by Boris Eichenbaum — all came from that splendid table. I visited Luis and María Antonia Goytisolo, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Carlos Trías, Félix de Azúa. On two occasions, I exchanged a few words with Enrique Vila-Matas, although our friendship was born and grew far from Barcelona: in Warsaw, in Paris, in Venezuela’s Mérida, in Morelia, Xalapa, and Veracruz. My second period abroad spans my diplomatic life in Paris, Budapest, Moscow, and Prague. The bond that links both experiences, and which, more precisely, unites every moment in my life, has been literature.

In his diaries, Leo Tolstoy noted that he could only write about what he had known and lived personally. His admirable work draws on the experiences he accumulated during his life; it is a kind of parallel biography. Shortly before his death, the aforementioned Max Beckmann wrote: “I can only say that in art everything is a matter of discrimination, address, and sensibility, regardless of whether it is modern or not. Truth should emanate from work. Truth through nature and a self-discipline of iron.” Like Tolstoy, I can only write about what I have lived. My narratives have been a logbook that records my movements. A spectrum of my preoccupations, happy and unfortunate times, readings, perplexities, and jobs. And, like Beckmann, I am convinced that the lived must submit itself to a process of discrimination. The selection of materials must coincide with the appearance of a form. From that moment on, the form will determine the work’s fate, without giving a damn whether it is modern or not.

For years, I used the settings I visited as a backdrop against which my characters compare who they are (or rather, what they imagine themselves to be) to other values. Usually they are Mexicans living abroad, filmmakers attending a film festival, politicians on vacation in Rome or Venice, Mexican students passing through Vienna, Warsaw, or Samarkand. The cheap exoticism that surrounds them barely matters; what is important is the moral dilemma they contemplate, the value judgment they must make once free of their traditional support, their habits, the alibis that for years they have used in an attempt to numb their conscience.

During my last six years abroad I was an ambassador in Prague, which implied permanent dealings with representatives of power — foreign and domestic officials at the top, in the middle, at the bottom — and with some ambassadors, all with imperial pretensions. They as well as I expressed ourselves in an official and stratified language that feigned grandeur: a conceited language, completely devoid of humor. Shortly after my arrival in Prague, I was invited to an exhibition in celebration of the centenary of Egon Erwin Kisch, who lived in political exile in Mexico during the Second World War. There I saw photos of Kisch with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Dolores del Río, José Clemente Orozco, and Carlos Chávez, with Polish princes, Mexican politicians, German communist leaders, Spanish refugees, and two Hollywood movie stars, Buster Keaton and Paulette Godard, all gathered at a single celebration. I was struck (and no other verb seems more exact) with the idea to write a novel set in Mexico in 1942, the year in which Mexico declared war on the Axis powers. The novel should at all times be a comedy of errors, an amusing story of mistakes that would inevitably lead down crime alley. Evoking that time, consulting the edition of photographs by the Casasola brothers, remembering the sayings and expressions that were in common use during my childhood, was like a holiday for me. In two weeks, I had the general outline of the novel completed. El desfile del amor (Love’s Parade) seemed to construct itself. I was surprised to see it come together, dictate its own laws and obey them, create its plots and subplots, its hidden relationships. I seemed to hear the protagonists’ voices, detect their specific timbres. I was merely a secretary taking dictation. El desfile del amor introduced me into an area where until then I had only dabbled superficially: parody. I felt transported to the fields of Gombrowicz, those of Bustos-Domecq. As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness. The complete transformation of my narrative world began in earnest. When I finished the novel, I began to jot down a few notes about a possible story that could take place in the town of Tepoztlán, where I would also use vague memories of Rome and Istanbul, a scatological story, with dislocated language, an homage to the absurd, the Spanish género chico, that owes much to barracks humor. It was Domar a la divina Garza (Taming the Divine Heron). It was followed by another, La vida conyugal (Married Life), where in the very proper and measured language employed at the family dinner table when there are respected guests, I describe forty years of joyous marital breakdown. Shortly after finishing it, I discovered that El desfile del amor, Domar a la divina garza, and La vida conyugal formed a natural triptych, without any preconceived idea. The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging. Perhaps the origin of this trilogy goes back almost forty years ago, when I saw the first triptych by Beckmann. As always happens in writing, that long meander, from a few images lost in my memory to setting them down on paper, continues to be a mystery to me.

Mexico City, November 1991

4 Translated by Hélène Iswolsky

THE DARK TWIN

Justo Navarro writes in his prologue to Paul Auster’s The Red Notebook: “You write life, and life seems like a life already lived. And the closer you get to things in order to write them better, to translate them better into your own language, to understand them better, the closer you get to things, the more you seem to distance yourself from things, the more things get away from you. Then you grab onto what’s closest to you: you talk about yourself as you approach yourself. Being a writer is to become a stranger, a foreigner: you have to start to translate yourself. Writing is a case of impersonation, forging an identity: writing is passing yourself off as someone else.”

I recently reread Tonio Kröger, Thomas Mann’s coming-of-age novel, which I had long since forgotten; I considered it a defense of the writer’s loneliness, of the necessary segregation from the world to accomplish the task destined for him by a higher will: “One must have died if one is to be wholly a creator.”⁵ Tonio Kröger is a bildungsroman, the story of a literary and sentimental education. But the divorce between life and creation that Kröger proposes forms only the initial phase of the novel; the result of that education favors the opposite solution: the artist’s reconciliation with life.

The Romantics abolished all dichotomies: life, destiny, light, shadow, sleep, wakefulness, body, and writing meant for them only fragments of a hazy, imprecise, but in the end, indivisible universe. The exaltation of the body and the passion of the spirit were their greatest desires. The romantic poet conceived of himself as his own laboratory and battlefield. In this story from 1903, Mann incorporated one of the ideals of the period: the idea of ethics as aesthetics, distancing the spirit entirely from all earthly vulgarity. Symbolism is a late offshoot of Romanticism, at least one of its trends. Tonio Kröger is a writer of bourgeois extraction; it fills him with pride to live only for the spirit, which implies a rejection of the world. He fulfills his destiny with the guilty conscience of a bourgeois who is ashamed of the mediocrity of his environment. Hence his asceticism is carried out with almost inhuman rigor. At the end of the novel, following some experiences that connect him to life, Kröger reveals to his confidante, a Russian painter, the conclusion to which he arrives: “You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me… I don’t know which of the two hurts me more bitterly. The bourgeois are fools; but you worshippers of beauty, you who say I am phlegmatic and have no longing in my soul, you should remember that there is a kind of artist so profoundly, so primordially fated to be an artist that no longing seems sweeter and more precious to him than his longing for the bliss of the commonplace. I admire those proud, cold spirits who venture out along the paths of grandiose, demonic beauty and despise ‘humanity’—but I do not envy them. For if there is anything that can turn a littérateur into a true writer, then it is this bourgeois love of mine for the human and the living and the ordinary. It is the source of all warmth, of all kindheartedness and of all humor.”⁶ End of quote. Tonio Kröger, German writer.

If I confused my recollection of the novel with the image of the writer’s total reclusion, his isolation, it is due in no small part to one of his phrases, “One must have died if one is to be wholly a creator,” which has been quoted a thousand times as an example of the writer’s decision to not commit to anything but himself.

Even if such an attitude is eventually rejected by Tonio Kröger, it is still not surprising to find its echo in Mann’s own reflections on old age. His autobiographical pages show his astonishment in the face of his popularity; the warmth with which he is treated by family, friends, and even strangers does not appear to reconcile with the reclusion that was necessary for him to complete his work. The reaction of the elderly Mann is much more convincing than Kröger’s final confession, where his love of humanity disguises a declamatory and programmatic tone that fails to touch the depth of the complex relationship between writing and life. “You move away from yourself when you approach yourself…,” Navarro says. “Writing is impersonating someone else.”

I cannot imagine a novelist who does not use elements of his personal experience, a vision, a memory from childhood or the immediate past, a tone of voice captured in a meeting, a furtive gesture glimpsed by chance, only to incorporate them later into one or more characters. The narrator-writer delves deeper and deeper into his life as his novel progresses. It is not a mere autobiographical exercise; writing a novel solely about one’s own life, in most cases, is a vulgarity, a lack of imagination. It is something else: a relentless observation of one’s own reflections in order to be able to realize multiple prostheses inside the story.

No matter what, the novelist will continue to write his novel. Never mind that other non-literary works may demand his time. He will focus on his story and will make progress on it in his spare time, on weekends, or holidays, but, even if he himself doesn’t realize, he will at all times be implicated secretly in his novel, inserted into one of its folds, lost in its words, pushed by “the urgency of fiction itself, which always carries a certain weight,”⁷ to quote Antonio Tabucchi.

I imagine a diplomat who was also a novelist. I would place him in Prague, a wonderful city, as is well known. He has just spent an extended holiday in Madeira and attends a dinner at the Portuguese Embassy. The table is a vision of elegance. To his right sits an elderly doyenne, the wife of the ambassador of a Scandinavian country; on the left, the wife of an official from the Embassy of Albania. The tone of the ambassador’s wife is imperious and decisive; she speaks to be heard by those sitting around her. The writer, who has just arrived from Madeira, remarks that he has gotten the better of winter by two months. But he has just begun to talk when she commandeers the conversation to say that the best years of her youth were spent precisely in Funchal. She began her speech not with the city’s gardens, nor in the beauty of the mountains, the seascape, the mild climate, nor with the virtues and defects of its inhabitants, but with its hospitality. She declared that tourism in Madeira had always been very exclusive and as an example of refinement commented that at the Reid they served tea with cucumber and butter sandwiches on dark bread, as was de rigueur in the last century; she spoke at length of her stay on the island where she lived during the war; she said that her father had always been a prudent man, so when the conflict seemed inevitable he decided to move with his family to Portugal, first to Lisbon and later to Madeira, where they settled permanently.

“That is how he was,” she continued, “so excessively prudent that we spent five years away from home without our country ever having declared war. It was as if Madeira remained outside the world; correspondence and newspapers arrived with such delay that when news finally arrived, it was already so outdated that one could scarcely be bothered. We settled in Funchal, which goes without saying; where else on the island would we have done so?”

The guests around her ate and nodded; they were only permitted an occasional comment of amazement or agreement, at most a fleeting question that would encourage her to continue her monologue. She spoke of an outing she once took accompanied by her mother to greet countrymen who were going through difficult times. On that afternoon, she wore an absolutely delightful dress of silk chiffon by Edward Molyneux, a combination of lilac flowers on an ocher background, a pleated skirt, which required yards and yards of fabric for its construction. She met that afternoon the man who would become her future husband, making a vague gesture toward the other end of the table where the ambassador, immersed in gloomy silence, was seated. For a moment, the writer was perplexed; something in the man’s face had changed over the holidays.

“We crossed Funchal until we arrived at a mansion on the outskirts that had seen better times, on whose terrace lay in deck chairs two youths covered in bandages and in casts from head to toe, taking air; both were convalescing from an accident. They lived there with their parents, a sister, and an English nurse who attended them. They belonged to an old family from my country, yes, the best kind of people, with large sums of money deposited in banks in different countries, although to see them no one would have thought as much; it was a house with little furniture, frighteningly ugly; the garden had become overgrown and where it was not overrun by weeds there were huge holes, like volcano craters.”

The dinner guests’ attention began to wane. Upon noticing signs of retreat, the old woman raised her voice even more and cast disapproving glances at the deserters, but she was defeated; conversations in small groups or pairs had already spread. Determined, she addressed the writer exclusively, hinting that he should consider it a privilege to hear such intimacies and memories of a place she considered off-limits to strangers.

“I approached the lounge chairs where the young men were lying” she continued, “and one of them, Arthur, quickly raised his partially plastered arm with his free hand, grabbed my big porcelain brick-colored buckle and pulled me to him, moaning and gasping; the pain from the effort must have been tremendous. ‘A sudden outburst of amorous passion,’ my mother, who was very wise, commented later. It may have been, but I think the poor, ailing creature was glad to see an impeccably dressed young woman, wrapped in beautifully colored fabrics, since he was always looking at his mother and sister — the nurse does not count — who were dressed like prisoners, which, I can assure you, was almost a crime in Funchal, whose elegance rivaled that of Estoril itself. Ah, such wonderful salons, and terraces, and garden parties! My greatest amusement at soirées was guessing the designers. Who had dressed the Princess Ratibor? Schiaparelli! And General Sikorski’s niece? Grès! She was transformed into a Greek sculpture. And the very rich Mrs. Sasseson? None other than Lelong! Yes, Sir, Lucien Lelong himself! My mother and I devoted our time at those parties to detecting which was an authentic Balmain, Patou, or Lanvin, and which were copies made by the Island’s prodigious seamstresses. Those were moments of splendor. One needed the Gotha within reach to avoid taking risks; one could be ruined at every step with the central European and Balkan titles. Of Arthur’s many wounds the only truly serious one was his knee, which had been shattered in a dynamite explosion. That is why the poor fellow still walks with a limp and not because of sciatica as he would have people believe, much less the bouts of gout as the Finnish doctor has been spreading. Yes, Arthur fell in love with my buckle; he loved the color, and asked me to wear it with all of my dresses. It may seem rather immodest on my part, but the belt buckle made him walk again; he began to stand; of course, he fell almost every time, howling in pain; we yelled to him amid applause that nothing could be learned without suffering. Now look at him, he’s like a colt! Were it not for me, he might well be prostrate in his deck chair.”

At that moment someone interrupted the storyteller, and the novelist took the opportunity to meet the woman who was eating silently to his left. She smiled at him widely and repeated the same words she had said at the beginning of the dinner, which is to say she pointed to her plate and said in broken English, “Is good.” It pleased him enormously that a mere two words could make up a conversation because he was deaf in his left ear, and conversations on that side were almost always torture for him; misunderstandings often occurred, his responses seldom coincided with people’s questions; in short, it was a nightmare.

The admirer of Madeira once again demanded his attention, and he, to extricate the monologue from the exhausting world of fashion, asked if the two young men had been injured in military action. The woman looked at him sternly and haughtily, and finally answered that the Finnish doctor, not the current but the previous one, had spread a malicious rumor that Arthur and his brothers had exploded the dynamite in order to avoid their military obligation, which was both slanderous and preposterous; none of them feared recruitment for the simple reason that their country was neutral. They had transported the dynamite in a small boat in order to eliminate an islet that was obstructing the view from the house. The oldest brother died, the other was paralyzed for life, and Arthur, the youngest, barely survived. He dreamt of devoting himself to organizing and directing safaris in Central Africa. When he recovered, contrary to what everyone might expect, he devoted himself to studying, and later joined the Foreign Service.

They were now having dessert; the woman from Albania touched his arm slightly, pointed to her plate and said, “Is good,” and then, expounding for the first time that night, added, “Is very many pigs,” or something that sounded close, and began to laugh delightfully. The wife of the Nordic ambassador appeared insulted. Not wanting to lose her preeminence, she made a comment about desserts in Madeira, especially those at the Reid and the Savoy, but the writer, infected by the gratuitousness of the Albanian woman’s humor, suddenly interrupted the ambassador’s wife with a comment about Conrad, his travels and his layovers, and said that he would have liked to know what he said when talking to ladies in Southeast Asia.

“Who?”

“Joseph Conrad. I imagine he must have occasionally received invitations; that he must not have spent all his life talking to merchants and sailors, and that he also spoke to wives, daughters, the sisters of British officials, of shipping agents. What do you think he talked to them about?”

The woman must have thought his deafness had caused him to become lost, and that it was necessary to assist him:

“The Portuguese women dressed with impeccable taste, some in Balenciaga, but their conversation did not always match the hauteur of their attire; they always seemed uninteresting to me, not to mention they were also incredibly stingy. They demanded prompt and impeccable work, but for payment they were a calamity. Well, all of them, not just the Portuguese, were dreadfully tightfisted,” she exclaimed with sudden bitterness. “The war was a pretext to exercise their greed. They wanted to be queens, and they almost were: princesses, countesses, wives of bankers, in exile, yes, but with their fortunes safe, all of them, without exception, were unable to appreciate the work that conferred their elegance. They were willing to waste an entire morning in order to begrudge a dressmaker the few escudos needed to survive. Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I shall not take it back: they were all dreadfully tightfisted.”

The hosts stood; the twenty-two guests followed suit, and they all moved slowly toward the salon to take coffee and liqueurs and smoke at their leisure. The writer approached, not without a certain morbid curiosity, the husband of the woman to whom he had listened throughout dinner, an elderly man who looked as if he were made of knots arranged haphazardly on bones, a face composed of arbitrarily positioned pits and protrusions, a porcelain prosthetic eye capable of disturbing even the most phlegmatic interlocutor, and a leg that lacked movement. He spoke as intensely as his wife in the presence of two functionaries from the Portuguese embassy who listened to him dispassionately about the preparations for the upcoming wild boar hunt in the Tatras, which only six or seven very skilled hunters would attend. The writer realized for the first time that he was looking at him with his prosthetic eye, which he always had covered with a black patch. The writer was surprised that the old codger, one-eyed and quasi-paralytic, was awaiting the event with such strange enthusiasm. As soon as he was able, the writer interrupted to say that he had just spent the holiday in Madeira and that he had taken advantage of the time to relax and read. He did not dare add “to write” because the porcelain gaze from the fake eye and the glimmer of confusion that emerged from the real one transformed instantly into a dark horror that bordered almost on dementia. The embassy staff took advantage of the moment to slip away and attend to another solitary guest.

The old man recovered his wits; he asked mockingly, as if he had not heard the writer’s words, if he had decided to participate in the boar hunt, if he had oiled his old rifle and counted his cartridges, but, just like his wife, he did not wait for the answer and between groans added that they would leave from Bratislava the following Friday at four thirty in the morning, and that the hunt would last two days. The writer attempted to add that he only went on pheasant hunts, more than anything else because of the accompanying accoutrements: campfires in the snow, hunting music, horns, dinner at the castle. The old man frightened him again as he stared at him with the brutal coldness of his prosthetic eye and the maniacal fury of the other, and just when he expected to be labeled decadent, or “artistic,” he was surprised to hear the old man say, his voice stifled, almost unintelligible, that he too had once been to that inferno, that he recalled with horror that abominable island, although the verb recalled was perhaps not appropriate, because he never recalled that desolate place, unless someone was foolhardy enough to mention it to him, which, as it were, rarely happened. He was very young then, naive, uncorrupted, you might say, he did not know how to defend himself, much less possess the physical capabilities to do so, when a pack of hungry she-wolves, of she-wolves that were hyenas and vultures, attacked him, beat him with belts and straps, threw him to the ground, bit him, and took advantage of him and his purity. That dark confidence ended with a groan, and then, without saying goodbye, he turned, leapt toward a group of guests most certainly to remind them that the wild boar hunt was to take place next week in Slovakia. He then turned suddenly with military precision, retraced his steps, and faced him once again, as if the conversation had never ended.

“Don’t think,” he said with an expression marked by sullenness, “that I did not notice my wife’s unusual garrulousness at the table tonight. She did not allow anyone to speak, is that not right? One can never understand women; they spend the whole day immersed in the dreariest silence, and then, when least expected, they turn into magpies. What had her so excited?”

The writer commented that it had been a very instructive conversation; that in an environment as rigid as diplomacy, where women were accustomed to talking about trivialities, it was refreshing to meet a woman who could discuss such interesting topics.

“Topics? What topics?” he asked, as if carrying out a police interrogation. “Answer immediately! To what topics are you referring?”

“Your wife reveled in imagining what Conrad said to European women, the English in particular, in the Malaysian ports. She speculated on how Conrad might describe the dress of those long-suffering colonial women.”

“What are you saying, what, about whom was she talking?” It was evident that the response had flummoxed him.

“About the great Joseph Conrad, your wife’s favorite novelist.”

The old man made a violent gesture with his hand, which could be interpreted as “go to hell!” and he withdrew, hopping like a giant cricket.

Once home, the writer recalled the woman’s monologue about her elegant youth in Madeira and her husband’s subsequent comments. It seemed as if he had heard two versions of the same highly dramatic situation without having understood much about it, not even what about it was dramatic. And that was precisely the kind of exciting element necessary to create, to begin to invent, a plot. The enigmas were many: a dynamite explosion that takes place on a boat, the absurd explanation of wanting to blow up a reef to improve the view of a house where no one was interested in aesthetics, the couple’s relationship, the buckle, the belts, the woman’s coldness during this part of the story and, at the same time, the almost crazed excitement with which she described the chiffons and silks and brocades. A few days later, he remarked to some colleagues how strange the encounter with the couple made him feel. He learned that the Finnish doctor had said once that the ambassador’s wife had been a dressmaker in her youth, a woman who could reproduce a dress from a mere photograph. He tries to invent a story; the porcelain eye torments him; he begins to imagine scenes and even begins to give them dialogue; the ambition of the dressmaker, spurred by a greedy mother, to trap the suffering boy, heir to a large fortune. He imagines the girl and her mother as third-class guests at some get-togethers, admiring the dresses from the great ateliers of Paris, as well as those they had cut and sewn with their own hands. Whenever they discovered one of theirs they would exchange looks of complicity and joy.

A writer often listens without hearing a word spoken; other voices trap him. The voice of a real person disappears or becomes mere background music. Sometimes a few words send him to one imaginary character or another. Other times — and that’s what’s so surprising! — the writer doesn’t even know that the voices he tries to incorporate into a character, or a plot, are not intended for that story, that lurking under the plot exists another one, waiting for him.

The day arrives when he sits down to work. He has failed to resolve the enigma of the dynamite; he looks for the relationship of the explosive with the craters in the garden of the house in Funchal. Surprisingly, out of the blue, a new character has emerged, a young theosophist who joins the dressmaker and her mother in their daily outings to visit the patient. Sometimes, only the two young women make the visit. Others, the theosophist goes to the injured young man behind her friend’s back. The discovery of the young theosophist girl is tantamount to discovering a gold mine. He sees her, hears her, and knows what she’s thinking. Her body is very small, her head larger than it should be, but she is far from a monster; at least not physically. There is something about her, however, something frightening: her rigidness, the harshness of her look, her sullen appearance. A fluid contempt for the world seems to exude from each of her pores. The author sees two young women of markedly dissimilar appearance walking down the road that leads to the mansion where the injured man lies: one is blonde and tall, a bit ungainly, well dressed; the other, the theosophist, is wearing a blouse and skirt of an almost military cut. At that moment, she recommends ferociously to the dressmaker something new and wicked to do to the patient. Anyone who saw them would think they were an ostrich and wild boar crossing, without noticing — so lost were they in thought — a flower garden’s beauty.

When the novelist finally begins his story, Funchal and its surroundings, all of Madeira and its characters, disappear completely. Only his new discovery, the theosophist, survives. There she is: sitting in a restaurant in the lobby of the Hotel Zevallos; yes, facing the main square in Córdoba, Veracruz, where she moves much more naturally than on the flowering avenues of Funchal, which is not to say that she has become pleasant or polished or relaxed, nothing of the sort. The world is revealed to the writer at that moment. He has begun to translate himself. “Writing is a case of impersonation, forging an identity: writing is passing yourself off as someone else.” At that moment, he is now that someone else. By transplanting the location, the young woman maintains her physical characteristics and is still a theosophist. She has returned to her hometown after living with her mother and sister in Los Angeles, California for twenty years, where the three had feverously read Annie Besant, Krishnamurti, and, above all, Madame Blavatsky. Upon her mother’s death, she travels to Córdoba, which she left when she was six or seven, to claim an inheritance. She stays at the home of family friends, perhaps distant relatives. Everyone knows her as “Chiquitita,” a nickname from her childhood and one that fills her with a heavy rage that she dares not show. Her resources are negligible, which is why she doesn’t leave the family who has welcomed her; every day she notes in a diary her petty expenses. She has forbidden herself any kind of luxury. A lawyer friend of her mother advises her to contact one of the opposing parties, her tío Antonio, for example, who is the most amenable. The same lawyer is responsible for arranging the interview. Chiquitita follows his instructions and meets her uncle for lunch one day in the lobby of the Zevallos. He addresses her nonchalantly, as if everything between them were perfect. “What a gorgeous niece I have!” he says as he greets her, adding: “You look much better in person, caramba, I mean, what a beauty!” But the young woman at no time lowers her guard; she frowns sullenly throughout the meal. She’s the same prickly person she ever was. Watching him drink glass after glass of beer during the meal repulses her. She reprimands him somewhat severely, commenting on the incompatibility of drunkenness and legal affairs. Her uncle laughs, amused, and calls her cutie pie, kitten, and pipsqueak. At the end, over dessert, her relative agrees to talk about the matter they met to discuss. He insists that he doesn’t see the need to go to court, the case should be settled amicably, as should all things among family; that she must, however, understand that the property in dispute does not belong to her, that before leaving Córdoba her mother was compensated appropriately, that while she was alive she received a monthly payment. Just then, he’s about to add that in spite of everything the family has considered giving them a sum, the amount of which would be determined when they signed a waiver renouncing their claim, but doesn’t manage to say it because Chiquitita beats him to the punch. She berates him with a string of disconcerting adjectives and a tone so sarcastic and petulant that the brute becomes enraged and responds with a remark so vulgar that it frightens her. He can be heard shouting, so every local will know, that if anyone in Córdoba remembers her mother, it’s because of her whoring-around, that he personally would see to it that she and her sister don’t see a penny, that he would prove that they were both daughters of someone other than his brother, her mother’s husband in name only, and that therefore they had no right to any part of the inheritance. He then adds sarcastically that the best thing she can do is find a husband, or an equivalent, to scratch her belly and support her. Suddenly, the beast of a man gets up and leaves the restaurant. Stunned, Chiquitita remains at the table, not so much because of the violent way she’s been treated, or because of the references to her mother’s loose behavior, nor because she discovers that recovering the portion of the assets that belongs to her is going to be more — much more! — difficult than she imagined, not even because of the scandal involved, but because of the mere inability to pay the tab. Overcome by rage, and on the verge of tears, she asks the waiter if he’ll accept the watch that hangs around her neck for a half hour, the time needed to go where she’s staying and pick up the money to cover the bill.

The novelist thinks about his heroine’s ensuing movements; he begins to mentally style the language; he imagines he will finish the story in a few days and return to the abandoned plot in Madeira, its characters, the dressmaker (now rid of her theosophist friend), the dynamite explosion, the exercises the injured young man does to regain movement, his falls, the cruel discipline to which he is subjected, unaware that Chiquitita’s triumphs and tribulations during her stay in Córdoba would not end anytime soon, that the story he had just started would turn into a novel he would have to live with for several years and where perhaps there might appear a young farmer from Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, who was left paralyzed and blind in one eye mishandling dynamite, and an astute seamstress determined to have him and his property. Over time, the novelist will come to forget that the story came from a dinner at the Portuguese embassy in Prague. And were the social event ever able to penetrate his memory, he would only vaguely remember an ambassador’s wife, probably French, for having unleashed an endless monologue about Parisian haute couture and its most celebrated names. In short, he would consider this incident as one of many moments of diplomatic routine during which he overheard exasperatingly detailed descriptions of locations and situations only to forget them a moment later, and he would never connect it with the appearance of Chiquitita, her misfortunes in Córdoba, and her intrepid fight to defeat — by human intervention, unimaginable tricks, and astral assistance — her enemy relatives until recovering the portion of the inheritance that belonged to her as well as a portion that did not. A novelist is shocked at the sudden appearance of an uninvited character; he often confuses sources, the migration of the characters, the transmutation of karma, to quote Chiquitita and also Thomas Mann, who understood those surprises very well.

The last novel by José Donoso, Dónde van a morir los elefantes (Where Elephants Go to Die), carries an epigraph from William Faulkner that illuminates a novelist’s relationship with his work in progress: “A novel is a writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man.”

A novelist is someone who hears voices through the voices. He crawls into bed, and suddenly those voices force him to get up, to look for a sheet of paper and write three or four lines, or just a couple of adjectives or the name of a plant. These features, and a few others, cause his life to bear a striking resemblance to that of the deranged, which doesn’t bother him in the least; on the contrary, he thanks his muses for having transmitted these voices to him without which he would feel lost. With them he goes about drawing the map of his life. He knows that when he is no longer able do it, death will come for him, not the final death but living death, silence, hibernation, paralysis, which is infinitely worse.

Xalapa, July 1994

5 Translated by David Luke

6 Translated by David Luke

7 Translated by Tim Parks

DROCTULFT AND OTHERS

I

Borges points out that it was on page 278 of the book Poetry, by Benedetto Croce, that he found an abbreviated text of the Latin historian Paul the Deacon that deals with the fate and death of Droctulft, the reading of which moved him profoundly. On the surface, it is a simple story; at its core, it is exemplary: Droctulft, a barbarian and fierce Lombard, marches with the men of his tribe toward the south. A common, one might say utilitarian, desire drives them: to sack the rich cities of the south; and another desire, more animal, more pleasing, and perhaps more intense: to destroy them. Upon contemplating Ravenna, the warrior switches sides and dies in defense of the city he had planned to attack. Borges’s text is brief and bears the title, “History of the Warrior and the Captive.” In the paragraphs dedicated to the warrior, the reader perceives a sense of amazement and an emotion that the author rarely lavished on his writing. It would seem that he had immediate circumstances in mind, perhaps related to that fatal discord that marks our history, one of whose poles is civilization and the other barbarism.

“Let us imagine” Borges says, “sub specie aeternitatis, Droctulft, not the individual Droctulft, who no doubt was unique and unfathomable (all individuals are), but the generic type formed from him and many others by tradition, which is the effect of oblivion and of memory. Through an obscure geography of forests and marshes, the wars brought him to Italy from the banks of the Danube and the Elbe, and perhaps he did not know he was going south and perhaps he did not know he was fighting against the name of Rome. Perhaps he professed the Arianist faith, which holds that the Son’s glory is a reflection of the Holy Father’s, but it is more congruous to imagine him a worshiper of the Earth, of Hertha, whose covered idol went from hut to hut in a cow-drawn cart, or of the gods of war and thunder, which were crude wooden figures wrapped in homespun clothing and hung with coins and bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the boar and the bison; he was light-skinned, spirited, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe, but not to the universe. The wars bring him to Ravenna and there he sees something he has never seen before, or has not seen fully. He sees the day and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole whose multiplicity is not that of disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, amphitheaters, vases, columns, regular and open spaces. None of these fabrications (I know) strikes him as beautiful; he is touched by them as we now would be by a complex mechanism whose purpose we could not fathom but in whose design an immortal intelligence might be divined. Perhaps it is enough for him to see a single arch, with an incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters. Suddenly he is blinded and renewed by this revelation, the City. He knows that in it he will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he also knows that it is worth more than his gods and his sworn faith and all the marshes of Germany. Droctulft abandons his own and fights for Ravenna.” The barbarian dies in its defense; the city entombs him with honors. Borges concludes: “He was not a traitor (traitors seldom inspire pious epitaphs); he was a man enlightened, a convert.”⁸

This text seems to me to be the greatest tribute that one can pay to civilization. The best of Rome evokes the triumph of order over chaos, the proliferation of avenues and gardens, of valleys planted methodically with vineyards and olive groves, highways, aqueducts and amphitheaters, but also the creation of coexistence for the sake of law where man may be wolf to man, as Plautus said, and then Hobbes, and then half the world. Justinian is still present in our contemporary legislation.

There is one aspect of the Roman legacy that especially touches me: its permeability to other cultures. For years Rome sent its best sons to the School of Athens, and incorporated their deities, rechristening the large cast of the Greek Olympus; indeed, the cult of worship to those gods coincided with others: Isis and Osiris, Mantra, and also with the beliefs of Christians and Jews; and even in periods of persecution that religious coexistence was never successfully eradicated. That character of synchrony in diversity is what really interests me about the Latin world. Narrowing boundaries and enclosing oneself inside them has always been synonymous with impoverishment.

II

Literature has never felt at home among dogmatic strictures; it rebels against even the very canons it creates once it considers them unnecessary. It also becomes nonconformist when one tries to situate it within a single region. The desire to abolish cultural boundaries takes place at the very moment someone fixes the actual borders, those necessary to the tribe, to the raison d’État. The Renaissance circulated ideas, themes, styles, tones, and methods. One of its highest attributes is universality. Marsilius of Padua and his disciples translated Plato; Shakespeare rewrote texts by Bandello; Cervantes was seduced by Italian innovations and also, according to what is known today, by Arab narrative forms to which he was introduced during his captivity in Algiers; Juan Ruiz Alarcón wrote a masterpiece, The Suspicious Truth, which Corneille rewrote with the title of Le menteur and much later Goldoni with the title Il bugiardo; there were variants of La Celestina in many languages; Garcilaso and Boscán introduced Italian meter in Spain, not without receiving the occasional scoff from the guardians of the Spanish language. Later, during the romantic fever, what poet did not want to be Manfredo and Lara and the Corsair and Don Juan? Good and mediocre, superb and dreadful, reduced to bleak student lodgings, or installed in the library of a magnificent palace, in Puebla or in Morelia, in Lisbon or Coimbra, in Paris, in Petrópolis, Vilnius, Milan, Seville, and Naples, both in metropolises and lost villages; Byron’s verses dazzled, enlightened, and enchanted an ardent pleiad of youths enamored of poetry and also of their own youth, of love, and of death. At the end of last century, the Hispano-American modernistas began to imitate by way of apprenticeship the French Symbolists, only to discover later their own registers, and thus were able to change poetry in the Spanish language. The influence of Darío, Borges, Neruda, Lezama Lima, Vallejo, Rulfo, and Onetti, to mention only a few, has produced among us a vast legion of imitators, probably mostly bad; what really matters is that this work establishes a level of quality that is impossible to ignore. It would be an aberration, after reading Rubén Darío, to claim that the Spaniard Núñez de Arce is a great poet. One can — and should — write in a way that is different and even antagonistic to these writers. The mere existence of a great creator erases many of his contemporaries and multitudes of predecessors whose mediocrity only becomes obvious after the appearance of a greater figure.

The totalitarian mentality accepts diversity with difficulty; it is by its nature monological; it allows only one voice, which is emitted by the master and slavishly repeated by his subjects. Until recently, this mindset exalted national values as a supreme cult. The cult of the Nation produced a paralysis of ideas and, when prolonged, an impoverishment of language. The cards, somehow or other, were in plain sight, and the game was clear. But the outlook has changed recently. That same mindset suddenly seemed to grow weary of exalting the “national” and its most visible symbols. It claims to have modernized; it discovers the pleasure of being cosmopolitan. Deep down, it is the same, even if the rhetorical adornments look different. It now encourages contempt for the classical tradition and humanist training. It tolerates only superficial reading. If this trend succeeds, we will have entered the world of robots.

I defend the freedom to find encouragement in the most diverse cultures. But I am convinced that these approaches are only productive where there is a national culture forged slowly by a language and certain specific customs. Where there is little or nothing, subjugation is inevitable, and the only thing that is created is a desert of vulgarity. Those who have never hidden their disdain for the risk that inheres in a living culture, their distrust of imagination and games, may feel satisfied. Vulgarity becomes the norm. I am convinced that not even the lack of readers can banish poetry. Without that conviction, it would be unbearable to continue living.

III

On several occasions I have associated my fate with that of Droctulft. If in certain periods Russian and Polish writers, in others, the English, the Central Europeans, the Latin Americans, Italians, or the Spanish Golden Age, have played a hegemonic role in my education, it has never occurred to me that this might transform me into a writer foreign to my own language. Something of them was possibly incorporated into my literature after passing through different filters to some area of my conscience, not the deepest, not in those secret folds of being where the first experiences of the world or the embers of first loves reside, where the true source of imagination is found. Writing is enriched by reading. Who doubts that! But the act only becomes fruitful if it is able to brush the shadow of a personal experience, a specific stereotype, perhaps a genetic memory. The writer is doomed from the start, even the one who has changed languages, to respond to the signs imprinted on him by culture. “We are all the past,” I return to Borges, “we are our blood, we are the people we have seen die, we are the books that have made us better, we are gratefully the others.” And that confidence in what we are prevents us from distorting those situations; it would seem ridiculous to us if someone sat down at his worktable with the awareness of being a Colombian, Brazilian, or Mexican writer. That is already assumed and deep down doesn’t even matter, because the very instant he begins to write the only thing he must know, what really counts, is that language is his homeland. And keeping that in mind, the rest are trifles.

Xalapa, November 1995

8 Translated by James E. Irby

THE MARQUISE WAS NEVER CONTENT TO STAY AT HOME

A feeling of disaster is haunting the world. The novel records it and, in doing so, is resplendent. The more rotten it smells in Denmark — and today Denmark seems to be a large part of the universe — the more indispensable the novel becomes. Ultima Thule: a reflection of an indomitable impulse to survive, of the preservation of form over chaos, sacrifice over apathy, spirit over unformed matter — the novel is that and more. Fueled by extreme tensions, witness to violent upheavals, nourished at times by caviar and quail and other times by carrion, it reappears on the international stage today with enviable health. It blooms with a fullness that roses would envy. Behold it: protean, generous, bold, ubiquitous, skeptical, cheeky, and unmanageable. Each crisis of society causes it to regenerate. When necessary, it sheds its skin. It grows with adversity. It is experiencing today one of its greatest moments, and, as a result, there are probably those among us who are beginning to predict its next extinction. Perhaps they have already chosen its coffin and burial place. This prophecy is part of the customs of our century. Each time the novel is reinvigorated, someone announces its death knell. The truth is no one can defeat it.

Ortega y Gasset announced its death, as did Breton. Paul Valéry alluded to it in passing with a phrase that became instantly famous. André Breton reproduces a comment by Valéry that refers to his refusal to write one because he is incapable of anything as banal as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Is it possible that the author of The Graveyard by the Sea might have, out of politeness, uttered this sentence just to please Breton — who scorned this literary genre — that is, by chance, just to move the conversation along and thus avoid a lull? Or, perhaps at that moment, Valéry was thinking of some of the novelists fashionable at the time, Paul Morand or André Maurois, for example, in whose pages one might always see a marquise leave her home at five o’clock to take tea at the Ritz, perhaps a few minutes late? God only knows!

The truth is, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock” is an ideal incipit for stimulating the affectation of a certain type of reader who rejoices at hearing about marquises, princesses and baronesses, as well as the Cinderellas who, after enduring every imaginable hardship and humiliation, end up marrying marquis, princes, or barons. The absence of her ladyship’s name in itself instills a degree of confidence; it takes for granted that the novel is about the marquise, or one of the marquises, from the neighborhood. Perhaps reading about the Marquise de La Rochefoucauld or the Marquise de Varennes would have intimidated the reader a bit, but a simple marquise inspires confidence; there is something comforting in her concise, almost homespun simplicity, an aroma of hot chocolate and freshly baked cinnamon buns.

It is also possible that Valéry, distracted by other interests or busied by other subjects and other times, did not recognize that the novel was no longer what it once was, and that far from Morand, Maurois, and Montherlant, who had their own appeal, new writers in France and, above all, in other latitudes were determined to transform narrative language and were beginning their novels in a very different way:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.

There is an explicit coarseness present in this paragraph. Its reading does not produce a delightful chill heralding the appearance of a marquise on the street. Instead of a lady dressed by Molyneux or Schiaparelli, frantic to arrive promptly for an engagement, which could well change her life, with the handsome son of an Italian banker, or to go to her jeweler’s shop to have him adjust the setting to one of her famous emerald stud earrings, or to the office of a seedy pawnbroker to hock them then and there, we find ourselves in the presence of a fat man, a few pedestrian barber utensils, and an untied yellow gown that establish a pronounced oxymoron, that is still very funny, with the liturgical Latin: “Introibo ad altare Dei.”

Let’s consider the beginning of another novel:

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut.

The reference to the gender of the protagonist, his aggressiveness toward the head of a Moor hanging from the rafters, the similarity with an old soccer ball immediately produces in us a slight bewilderment. What world have we entered? The brutality of striking a head, whether of a Moor or anyone else, immediately dissolves, and is made unreal by the levity of the narrative tone. There is instead a kind of peculiar humor that is enhanced by comparing the head to a soccer ball and his dry hair to a coconut. We cannot be sure whether the exquisite lady wished to leave her home at five to witness such an uncommon spectacle. She was not prudish, no, nothing of the sort, rather she lacked humor and was therefore extremely disquieted by certain eccentricities; she did not know how to behave, and that was the worst thing that could happen to her. Instead of going out that evening she was left to play with a pair of moss-green kid gloves, waiting for a telephone call that never came. In the end, she was so prostrate with anger that she could have chewed the gloves to shreds.

The first quote is from 1922. They are the first lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the second, from 1928, belongs to the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. A few years later, in the heart of Europe, Vienna to be precise, a young military engineer began a novel that would fill four large volumes that would remain unfinished on the author’s death. A novel that still radiates throughout universal narrative:

A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapour in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

You have probably recognized it by now; this is the first paragraph of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930. A stunning twist, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn, has occurred in writing. It would seem to be a section of a scientific essay, or rather a weather report written by a highly skilled employee. However, it is a novel. In these ten lines, full of isotheres and isotherms, of monthly aperiodic fluctuations and phases of the moon, of Venus and of the rings of Saturn, in addition to other phenomena that are incomprehensible to us mere readers, a mystery is communicated, in just eight words of quiet language, that, in the end, clarifies for us that it was a beautiful day in August 1913. This wordy pomp and, moreover, its subsequent clarification, grates on the nerves of our acquaintance, the marquise. For as long as she can remember, she has detested those Teutonic witticisms that, in her view, demonstrate a monumental lack of tact and taste. That beautiful day, she did not go out at five or any other time; she spent her time leafing through some magazines and writing several drafts that she angrily crumpled up, until she was finally able to write a dry, so very, very dry letter, in which she ended a long-standing romantic relationship. She then began to laugh like a mad woman, took sedatives with champagne, and soon had to be put to bed.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, a North American, a Southerner to be exact, began one of the most beautiful novels ever written as follows:

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or husband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed Voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

These are the first lines of Absalom, Absalom!, the brilliant novel that William Faulkner published in 1936. If our friend — I imagine that by now we can allow ourselves such familiarity — had gone out that day at five to take part in the conversation that Quentin Compson held with Miss Coldfield, she would surely have been on tenterhooks. She had dealings in recent years with many highly esteemed Americans: the Gereths, the Prest-Coovers, Mrs. Welton, and Howard Blendy, a young diplomat of whom she was a trifle enamored. Aristocracy of another kind, so to speak; rich, sophisticated, lighthearted, quite the opposite of that sleepwalking couple from the South that reminded her of a pair of ill-tempered crows who mumbled in some nonsensical language. Her education — although she’s not entirely sure about this — is firmly rooted in Descartes, which, combined with other limitations that the reader has probably noticed, cause her to rebel against that ecstatic verbal delirium. To hear that children’s feet have an air of impotent rage and that the summer dust was “biding and dreamy and victorious,” affects her in such a way that she could have slapped anyone who dared repeat those words to her.

Several years passed, almost forty since Ulysses appeared, until, in 1960, Julio Cortázar took Paul Valéry’s remark and crushed it with joyous abandon. The first sentence of The Winners reads:

“The marquise went out at five,” Carlos Lopez thought. “Where in the hell did I read that?”

Our poor, dear, old, powdered marquise! The years have taken their toll on her. She had imposed on herself a long and strict internal exile, and had completed it with exemplary rigor. The Argentine writer’s attack had wrested her out of her lethargy.

She lay awake all night, plagued by two opposing impulses. On the one hand, she felt the temptation to repair to a convent where she would take a vow of perpetual silence. An innate pride compelled her to punish the world by turning away and making her contempt known. The sacred music, the smell of wax and incense, the proximity of angels, the locks of hair on the floor around her, the coarse habit of cloister, the tears, all of it, everything, drew her closer to God. It was possible, she thought, hopeful, that some writer understood the nobility of her gesture and would one day be tempted to write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock. A simple black tailleur by Patou accentuated her elegance as she left the house alone. A car took her to the gate of the convent that would house her earthly body for the rest of her days.” An instant later, she recalled the allegations against Ives-Etienne, her niece’s fiancé, who was also a distant nephew of hers, a brash and insolent boy, though not devoid of a certain charm, who, to the astonishment of his entire family, sympathized with the so-called popular causes. Suddenly, the old woman saw herself marching through the streets, erect like a steel stiletto, her left fist raised. She heard her voice suddenly become powerful, her cries of hatred for militarism, and her commitment to the fight in Algeria. Her brave decision to betray her class to march arm in arm with the downtrodden and the oppressed moved her to tears. Her courageous attitude would certainly inspire some author, who would one day write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock only to fall all at once into a sea of flags.” And then he would describe with elegance the moment she leaned her arm on the arm of a metal worker to continue the march. They were wrapped in the music of L’Internationale, and they felt protected, secure in their cause, convinced that victory was near.

For a moment some other ideas swirled around her feverish mind. She dreamt, for example, that she was the heroine of libertine novels; she smiled ambiguously as she thought of certain terribly lascivious images, but those visions did not last, and the woman returned stubbornly to the previous dichotomy. At times she trembled, sobbed, admired the courage that was needed to cloister herself in the strictest order of silent nuns and, immediately, was even more dazzled by her own erect figure, rallying from a platform of the Mutualité to a throng of workers and students, or by the feat of having chained herself to the bow of a ship that would deliver arms to Southeast Asia. But such is life. Clinging to the possibility that she would once again grace the pages of some yet-to-be-published extraordinary novel, her heart grew weak, faltered, until a sudden blow shattered it completely.

The next day, the marquise went out at five o’clock. She did it inside a modest coffin. So far, to my knowledge, no one has recorded her departure.

Xalapa, July 1994

ON RECONCILIATIONS AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH

“In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel of John. I do not know if that was the first, but surely it is the highest praise language has ever received. “In the beginning of all literature we find form,” declared the young Shklovsky during the second decade of the twentieth century, the brilliant theoretician from the Russian Formalist School, which revolutionized linguistic and literary studies. And around the same years, Stephen, James Joyce’s adolescent artist, will discover that “in the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.” That is to say, he sets the moment when the creation of form begins through language, the emergence of literature.

Perhaps the greatest enlightenment of my youth was the language of Borges; reading it allowed me to turn my back both on the telluric as well as the bad prose of the period. I read him for the first time in México en la cultura, the remarkable literary supplement edited by Fernando Benítez. The Borges story appeared as an illustration to an essay on fantasy literature by the Peruvian José Durand. It was “The House of Asterion”; I read it with amazement, gratitude, and boundless wonder. Upon arriving at the final sentence, I had the feeling that an electric current was running through my nervous system. The words: “‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus, ‘the minotaur scarcely defended himself,’” said in passing, as if by accident, revealed the hidden mystery of the story: the identity of the strange protagonist and his resigned sacrifice. I was speechless. I never imagined that language could reach such levels of strength, subtlety, and strangeness. I left immediately to look for books by Borges; I found almost all of them, covered in dust, on the shelves of a bookstore; during those years, one could count the Mexican readers of Borges on two hands.

Literary genres and their transmigrations emerged from the union between form and language. The novel, by its mere existence, is representative of freedom; everything in it is possible provided the following elements are present: lively language and the intuition of a form. The novel is the polyphonic genre par excellence; it recognizes only the limits demanded by these two components: word and form, to which we may add another: time, a specifically fictional time. And one more: a proximity to society, its records: the never-ending round: the human comedy: vanity fair, all that.

Xalapa, May 1995

WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL

The undersigned, a writer who vaguely sensed his vocation for literature in a sugar mill in Veracruz, also encountered — and violently so! — the dark upheaval that afflicted Tonio Kröger in Wiesbaden: the struggle between the temptation of the world and the solitude essential to the creative process. That is, a hunger for the world and at the same time its rejection. For Kröger, steeped in a tradition where, for centuries, energy and discipline have been revealed to be a mere extension of nature, arriving at the correct solution seems no longer to possess merit. The world of Veracruz, as is well known, has virtues and charms that the Germans do not know, but that makes it prone, as few are, to all sorts of temptations. To resist a desire, whatever it may be, signifies a loss, being no one, living in error. The effort to reconcile life experience with the practice of writing made me feel oppressed for many years, disorganized, diminished. Now, when the world has become smaller to me, to the point of almost vanishing, that apparent struggle has become for me disconcertingly trivial. Either way, it has left a mark on my life. It has been a source of agony, but also, secretly, the most extraordinary creative stimulus.

I try to reproduce an afternoon in Warsaw, where the fragile balance between life experience and discipline threatens to cause crisis at any moment. From the top floor of the Hotel Bristol, I watch the lively crowd that roams the Krakowskie Przedmieście, perhaps the city’s most beautiful avenue. People stop to admire the lilacs in the park beneath my room, to take some sun, eat pastries and ice cream, talk. The park’s layout is rectangular; the front, which is narrower and borders the Krakowskie Przedmieście, is civilized, a tamed garden where benches abound so that passersby can rest and mothers can watch their children run on the sandy trails. The back of the park is deep: a tangle of wild bushes, a bit of English forest, they say, where games less innocent than children’s are played. My desk is situated at an angle in front of the window. The sun illuminates my workplace from the left, as the manuals recommend.

As a rule, I would rise late, study Polish for a couple of hours, walk around town until mealtime, and, then, from four on I would sit down to work and would not leave the hotel until nine or ten at night, occupying the time preparing an anthology of contemporary Polish short stories, reading, selecting, translating, and constantly revising my translations. I would also devote time to working on a collection of stories I intended to send to Mexico. At night, I would socialize or read. While working, I would get up occasionally to make coffee, which, as a rule, I would drink on the large stone window ledge.

On the afternoon in question, the spectacle in the street and garden was both attractive and troubling. A sunny day in mid-May. The lilacs have appeared, a floral vision that is the first certain announcement of spring. The movement of the passersby is very festive. It must be Friday, when the activity is greater than any other day of the week. The heavy furs, the leather and simple wool coats have disappeared to make way for lighter clothing or trench coats. Most of the men are no longer wearing hats; the women wear hats made of straw or light fabric, adorned with small bouquets of artificial flowers. Among the young people of both sexes, one frequently sees sunglasses that protect their almost transparent blue or green eyes from the timid spring sun. On the balconies of nearby buildings, geraniums are in bloom.

During one of the breaks I devote to coffee, I see three young men enter the garden at about the same time but from different points; one is wearing a military uniform, one is obviously a university student, and the third seems, I don’t know why, to be a boy who has just arrived from the provinces to carry out a commission in Warsaw or, perhaps, determined to remain in the capital indefinitely and set in motion, like Lucien de Rubempré, the still unclear threads of his ambition and transform his will into supreme law. To be someone! What does it mean for him to reach such heights? He is very young and possesses an imagination as passionate as it is limited. To become the husband of the daughter of a Rockefeller or an Onassis, should they one day decide to holiday in Poland? Or, at the very least, marry a less famous heiress, the daughter of a Polish millionaire living in Hamburg or Chicago, the owner of a beautiful cottage on the Baltic coast? This is his plan. Indeed, he considers any other attempt to shape his future to be pointless. I can also see three beautiful girls sitting on three different benches in the garden. One, a charming blonde would justify her presence there by the fact that she works in the bookshop across the street; she’s waiting for the cashier — with whom she commutes daily on the trolleybus back to her neighborhood — to leave work; another, even more blonde, would tell whomever bothered to ask that she studies French literature and is waiting for some friends who will be there at any moment with the necessary books so they can do a translation exercise together that afternoon; the third, not as young but more attractive, with a full, perfectly shaped figure and short black hair that reveals a perfect neck, who’s wearing nicer clothes and shoes made with better materials, would say curtly that she was unable to resist the temptation to enjoy a few minutes of sun while she waits to go to a movie; she would say it in a contained, intense, and somewhat dismissive tone, which suggests a sensuality that the two blondes lack and which always causes the listener to want to divert his gaze toward the more gifted parts of her body; she would then add in a stern, almost pedagogical voice, that she’s attending an international film festival at the Skarpa cinema, without mentioning that her husband would be waiting for her there just before the function begins.

The ambitious young provincial sits at the opposite end of the same bench where, facing the sun, the beautiful woman with raven hair is seated. She opens in front of him a copy of The Banner of Youth or Life of Warsaw; she flips through it with disinterest only to let it fall on her lap and lights a cigarette that she smokes with obvious suggestiveness. Then, with an angelic face and oblivious air, he apologizes to his bench mate and shows her a page from the newspaper as if asking her a question. She turns toward him with a stern look of surprise on her face; she examines the paper and proffers a dry response. Little by little, the seriousness disappears from both their faces. He makes a comment and his smile grows wider; she raises a delicate, reproving finger and shakes it at the young man as if indicating that such things can be said in his village but never in a city like Warsaw, much less to a woman he doesn’t know, but he eventually wins her over with his laugh, and they finally engage in a playful conversation. The young man gets up, takes a few steps around the bench and sits down again, but this time he sits next to his neighbor so he can speak quietly. He probably says something to her about being lonely in the strange city, his fears, and his uncertainties.

After finishing my coffee, I return to my desk and begin to organize my papers. I am translating a story by Iwaszkiewicz entitled “Tatarak.” My dictionary tells me that the word means “aromatic calamus” or “sweet rush,” and that it is an aquatic plant that grows in lakes and ponds of the Baltic region. It is a magnificent story; the ending is tragic and filled with an intense and contained despair; it is about a romantic relationship or, more specifically, the development of a physical passion between a mature woman and a boy whose only attraction is his youth and the naturalness of his manner. Death is lurking throughout the story, but we only notice it at the end, when the boy appears trapped by the roots of the sweet rush. Quotidian lives, worthy, wasted, onto which their owners try to imprint an essential decency. The erotic element is very powerful, but its strength lies in the bowels of its language; the characters may not be aware of it, but their movements, their destiny, seem to be governed by it. All of a sudden, the twilight atmosphere causes me to think, obliquely, of the movie Senso by Visconti. Both the story and the film share a blurred sexuality. They are stories en travesti, or, at least, so it seems. The differences are vast: instead of the hysteria, the operatic madness of the film, there is in the story only opaqueness, a quasi-muteness, one of the greatest qualities in all of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s work. I work with great pleasure, resolving doubts, trying to maintain the same breath that the prose has in Polish. I get up to make sure I have an ironed white shirt and that my black shoes are shined, because that night I’m going to the theater with Zofia Szleyen to see her translation of The Youthful Deeds of the Cid by Guillén de Castro. I’ll pick her up an hour before the function for a light dinner. Going to the theater has been, since childhood, a substitute for a visit to paradise. This past year in Warsaw has been magnificent; in addition to the excellent Polish productions, I’ve seen the Royal Shakespeare Company, and also the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, the Stabile di Genoa, the Maly Theatre of Moscow, the Piraikón of Athens. No less! It is perhaps the only distraction about which I have no regrets; the stage fascinates me, gives me ideas, and renews my energy. The angel of order has taken it upon himself to organize a perfect day for me. Going to the theater is an immense source of pleasure, yes, but it’s also an intellectual activity: I feel no remorse.

I get up again; I go to the bookcase just to make sure I have The Youthful Deeds of the Cid. Before returning to my work, I pause again at the window. I sit for a moment to take in the view. Night is about to fall, but there’s a clarity in the air that outlines the figures perfectly. The characters have changed. The benches in the garden have new occupants, younger, more casual and playful, with binders and folders under their arms or piled on benches; without a doubt, they’re students. The garden paths seem busier. Suddenly, there in the back, where the thick hedgerow usually conceals the lovers, I’m able to make out one of the couples that was beginning to form during my previous break. They say goodbye with an unconvincing formality. Who could it be but the fellow from the provinces and the sensual woman who had to meet her husband at the door of the cinema Skarpa? He walks toward the Krakowskie Przedmieście, she toward a side alley, the one that passes directly beneath my window. She walks with an air of superiority; just steps from the sidewalk, but still within the garden, she stops, opens her purse, takes out a hand mirror, looks at herself, then, satisfied, returns it to her purse; not a single hair has been left out of place. She looks at her watch; she thinks perhaps about her husband, about the scene that awaits her, but this only accentuates her smile, reinvigorates her step, and renders her triumphant; she has become a lioness. By contrast, the young man seems to take pleasure in his disheveled appearance. He’s walking in shirtsleeves; he flips an old summer jacket around with one hand as if it were a mill blade. His seraphic appearance is gone; his tousled hair and the loss of sexual appetite in his step announce his conquest with satyric pride — and how! — mission accomplished. He whistles as he walks. A few steps later he casually touches the crotch of his trouser to make sure the buttons are correctly fastened. A warm breeze, with all the aromas of spring, penetrates the window; the murmur of life begins to arrive to my studio with greater intensity. I sit down in front of my papers, but it’s hard for me to concentrate.

Minutes later, I close the dictionary and put away the drafts my translation of “Tatarak.” I consider myself fanatical about literary work and life. The combination of these qualities is a source of terrible conflicts. I take another folder out of the armoire, unfold other papers on the table, the material I’m about to send to the poet and translator Díez-Canedo: Los climas (The Climates), a book of short stories. With each revision, I discover new atrocities, and I make generous corrections. A never-ending process! The story that interests me most is about a hallucination suffered by a young Mexican who visits his friend, Juan Manuel Torres, in Lodz and returns by train to Warsaw, consumed with fever, one particularly cold winter night. He sits across from an elderly woman who reminds him of a family member, his aunt, whom he knows only from photographs, one of his grandmother’s sisters, who according to family tradition died at sea returning from her honeymoon. The account fuses two stories — the most visible: the journey by train of the feverish boy, his incoherent travel impressions, the encounter with his friend and his discovery of Poland; the other: a hallucination caused by delirium, where the elderly woman on the train is the supposedly dead sister of his grandmother. Reality and delirium treated with the same language. It was the first story I wrote in Poland; I have rewritten it a thousand times, but I find that the language still possesses a repulsive mawkishness and that the “gothic” story, in order not to fail, should be written in an almost transparent language, where unreality is inserted into the real without the seams being visible. I begin to cross out and superimpose words, add lines, omit adjectives, and an insidious anxiety gets the better of me, a sudden sense of claustrophobia. I tell myself that the Spartan rules I’ve imposed on myself are more appropriate in a notary office, in a government agency, anywhere except where a writer works. Does being locked up in a room, leafing through dictionaries, omitting or adding a word here and there not already imply a betrayal to literature? I have spoken ad nauseam of the importance of literature in my life. I have added that if I am still in Warsaw it is because I find the ideal atmosphere for writing here. But write about what, if the material that could nourish a story is down there, in the park, on the street, in the corner coffee shop? The places where life is, those things that don’t happen in this garret where I force myself as punishment, as penance, to lock myself up in front of a typewriter and dictionaries. Would I perhaps have to keep rummaging forever into my childhood and write about my life as a child in Potrero and an adolescent in Córdoba for the rest of my life? I am sick of it. My freedom begins in the stories that I am now correcting.

It is well known that there is no tide without a counter-tide, action without reaction. And the undertows tend to be brutal. Perhaps in a bar, on a walk, in a party, I will suddenly regret not being in my garret, where I could take notes on the Shakespeare of Jan Kott, whose recent reading left me in awe, and study in an orderly fashion the Romantic poets, crucial to Polish literature, and then leap to Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schultz, and, in addition, read Borges, Cortázar, Neruda and Vallejo, Cervantes, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Paz, and Fuentes, and write letters that I owe, and, above all, write stories, make up stories, write, write, write instead of drink like a Pole and go about life from binge to binge, instead of ruining my health, altering my nervous system, wasting my faculties, time, and energy only later to fully become the loser that at this moment I feel predestined to be.

I indulge in these sad meditations as I put my papers in their respective folders; I hasten to shave, get dressed and put on a tie. “The angel of order is still with me,” I feel reassured knowing that soon I will dine with Zofia; I’ll listen to her speak at length about her truest loves: Cervantes, Lope, Valle-Inclán, Lorca, and, above all, Tirso, whose Don Gil of the Green Breeches is by far her favorite work. And I find myself in that perfect dream when the phone rings. It’s Marek Keller. He has a performance tonight, he says; he’ll leave an invitation for me in the box office; afterward, there will be a party at Maja Berezowska’s house—“that old libertine,” as good people exclaim whenever anyone mentions her name. I am certain it will be an extremely entertaining gathering; just thinking of the radiant mob that awaits me that night is enough to feel overcome with joy. I know from experience that after the party someone will improvise another more modest one with fewer guests, and that perhaps the night will end in a raucous tour of those spots in Warsaw with the worst reputation. Almost without realizing it, I call Zofia to beg off and invent something so absurd that it ends up being convincing. I race to the theater where Marek’s Mazowsze is playing; afterward, I’ll allow myself to fall into the much anticipated well of chaos from which I will likely not emerge until breakfast time tomorrow.

Xalapa, May 1995

TRAVELING AND WRITING

I amused myself recently rereading some fragments in an autobiographical notebook written some thirty years ago. I was hoping to find in its pages the atmosphere that enveloped the first years of my stay in Europe. A well-known editor of the time, Don Rafael Giménez Siles, invited a dozen young writers to tell their life stories. He seemed to be convinced that such an act would encourage a generation even greener than ours to find its path to literature. I doubt that those allegedly exemplary lives have fulfilled that purpose. The project was in many ways ridiculous; those of us who were chosen were engaged, to varying degrees, in an intense sentimental and literary education that in no way corresponded with a desire to trawl the enigmas of the past and use them to interpret the signs that governed our fate, let alone serve as examples and mentors for the very young writers whom in due time would take our place. I wrote those notes in Warsaw in early 1966. I had left Mexico five years earlier, visited several countries, and prolonged my stay mainly in two cities, Rome and Warsaw.

As I reread the text, I was left suddenly with this question: “Why do I get chills every time I think about returning to my country, which, of course, will have to happen, like it or not, someday?” Then I mentioned the circumstances that had prompted me to undertake this journey and to extend it indefinitely. It began with a sense of professional frustration: I was working at a publishing house where all my projects were systematically thwarted. It infuriated me to see that the practice of literature and the inevitable squabbles that resulted from it often concealed a noticeable intellectual disdain and hinted at aspirations that had little or nothing to do with literature. Some young intellectuals were beginning to seek a more intimate relationship with power than with the muses. My feelings toward political opposition groups, particularly the left, with whose ideals I identified most, were decidedly contradictory; I wanted them to grow stronger, but at the same time their methods seemed confusing to me, limited and far removed from any element of reality. More than anything, the empty rhetoric of official discourse sickened me, as well as the conformity of large swaths of the population to the restrictions of our democratic life and the backwardness of the country. I said all that to myself then, and it was true. But now I am able to see that in large part the state of frustration was related to having published a few years earlier a first book of stories that went unnoticed, and that after that I had stopped writing.

In mid-June 1961, I left Veracruz on the German ship Marburg. One morning, in the middle of the ocean, the bulletin we were given at breakfast announced that the ship, just as all units of the German merchant navy, would have to forego the originally scheduled stops (Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam) and proceed without delay to a German port, where it should await further instructions. The officers, waiters, and German passengers showed signs of nervousness that we had not previously seen in them. We were treated with a condescending arrogance. They were custodians of secrets that concerned us, but were apparently forbidden to reveal. They had suddenly become our masters! That morning, among the passengers, there began to circulate a wide range of rumors, all catastrophic. That a new world war was about to break out was the first. Soon it had morphed into the aforementioned catastrophe had already begun. In the blink of an eye, the passengers’ imaginations had plunged into delirium. As the day went on, the recent destruction of Rotterdam was accepted as fact; thereafter, it was confirmed that there had been a coup d’état in Rome and that the Vatican was under siege; that the Pope had been physically assaulted as he attempted to leave his apartments; that in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Milan banks had suspended operations; that Rotterdam was not the city destroyed by bombs but Marseille; that it had not been Marseille but Dresden; that it had not been Dresden but Rotterdam; not Rotterdam, on the contrary, someone had heard from a very trustworthy source, a German woman, that the cities destroyed were Marseille, Bristol, and Salerno. In the bar, groups of passengers gathered around the radio for hours, trying to tune in to European stations, none of which confirmed the rumors that were spreading on board. There was talk, yes, of a very serious conflict emerging between the two German States, the division of Berlin, which, in the opinion of the more discerning passengers, was an attempt to prevent widespread panic. After dinner, the Captain brought us together to inform us of the itinerary change and the reasons that had necessitated it. We would disembark in Bremerhaven, the port closest to Bremen. The line would cover our passage by rail to our initial ports of destination, if by then the trains were still working as scheduled. The Cold War, he said, savoring the news with delight, was no longer cold, and we were standing on the threshold of a serious conflict with unpredictable consequences. In a single night they had built a wall dividing Berlin, making prisoners of all the inhabitants of the eastern sector. He fired off sentences with a dryness that scarcely matched the profusion of gestures and grimaces that accompanied them. All of a sudden, he had become one of the most baleful characters of the expressionist cinema. At every turn he interrupted his rant to receive from a subordinate’s hands cards that, we supposed, contained the latest news sent by telegraph. After reading the messages, his words became drier, his gestures more outrageous; he was a ventriloquist’s dummy whose movements escaped the master’s control. I was traveling with passage to Antwerp, where I would board a ferry that would take me to England. If the circumstances were as bad as they seemed, the Captain added, and if it were not possible to leave from Bremen, he recommended that we immediately contact the consular representatives of our respective countries. Deep down, I was as excited as the German officers, my blood raced with the same muddy drunkenness as theirs. I was ecstatic to find myself in one of those moments that could become a turning point of history. It did not occur to me in the least that my freedom, much less my life, might be in danger if war broke out. On the contrary, in radical opposition to my pacifist ideas, I considered the opportunity to be the beginning of a chain of exciting new events capable of wresting me from the stupor I was experiencing. Like the Germans from Marburg, I felt an exhilarating charge of electricity run through me, except, unlike them, I was convinced that the outbreak of war would once again mean the defeat of Germany and the beginning of a new world. At moments the session took on an intensity of Wagnerian proportions. Conversely, during the next four or five days, the last of the trip, the conversations turned melancholy. I ate with Belgian and Dutch passengers; the exuberance of the first day had waned; wild rumors were no longer circulating; nobody ventured hypotheses. They behaved more with the resignation of hostages than that of free men. Of our arrival to the German port, I remember, above all, the harried confusion of the landing and the difficulties hours later loading the luggage onto a crowded train that was departing for Holland. I did not receive passage to Antwerp but to a small Dutch port from where a ship would leave for Dover. Before leaving Bremen, I was able to visit a magnificent exhibition of recent works by Picasso with a young Swiss couple I had met on board. With the greatest irresponsibility, we abandoned our trunks and suitcases in the lobby of a completely deserted gallery and toured for a while its sepulcher-like halls. “It would be easy for us to steal a picture,” the husband told me, and for a moment the idea worked us into to a frenzy. Everything was possible during what we believed to be a time of war. Fortunately, it was not.

The motive for that trip had been a reading of Bernard Berenson on some peculiarities of the Byzantine legacy in Sicily, illustrated with splendid photographs of the monumental apse at Cefalù. However, just before leaving, I decided to remove Italy from my trip in response to a bitter argument with some elderly aunts, for whom that country, that of our ancestors, was a beacon whose light reached all the way to their home in Colonia del Valle, allowing them to forget at times the thick darkness in which they claimed to be stagnating, in the land of Indians where our ancestors had mistakenly settled. Chance governed, above all else, my stay abroad. I lived, as I have already said, many years in Europe and, yet, I was never able to see the Byzantine apse at Cefalù or the Flemish paintings that I would presumably find in Antwerp. One morning in Paris, in early August 1961, almost without realizing it, I found myself in line at the Italian consulate to apply for a visa to travel to the country I had sworn never to set foot in, and from which, after arriving, it was a year before I was able to extricate myself.

The prelude to my arrival in Europe was marked by that grave international disturbance that involved the building of the Berlin Wall. Many extremely important events took place over the next thirty years; among others, ultimately, the collapse of that wall. But I never witnessed any of them. Either they had just occurred when I arrived somewhere, or they were about to happen as I was about to leave. Only once did I find myself in the middle of a popular uprising. It was in Istanbul. I was traveling with an Englishwoman and a Polish friend as absent-minded as me. Suddenly, we saw an agitated and raucous crowd that spilled out into the streets and squares of the city’s center. There was a constant sound of gunfire; occasionally, groups of police, guns drawn, would stop our taxi, force us to get out, and subject us to a rather thorough body search. The driver acted as if it were a cheerful routine. There was no reason to take the incidents seriously, he told us with a reassuring smile. In the restaurants, the waiters quickly lowered the metal shutters, and we remained locked in for a while, hearing knocks at the door and screams from outside. The headwaiter approached the table with a beaming smile. Nothing was going on, boys playing games, mischief, excessive happiness, everything was in order; it would only be a matter of minutes until we could leave. The same thing happened in the Grand Bazaar, in the museums. There was merrymaking everywhere, singing students, boys roused by the mere joy of being young. Public order was perfect. Under the circumstances, we visited everywhere that the Baedeker guidebook recommended. Any excess was possible, we thought, in that unlikely city, although the noisy eccentricity of local customs and celebrations had begun to wear on us. Days later, far from Turkey, while reading Le Monde, I discovered that my trip to Istanbul had coincided with an attempted coup. The tourist services had worked to perfection, just as in Death in Venice, where everyone, from the manager of the grand hotel to the most humble gondoliers, did everything possible to exaggerate the festive mood so that the tourists would not suspect the city was being ravaged by the plague. In those days of peril, ignorance of civil drama stripped all meaning from the facts. Nothing that I read later about “les émeutes de Stamboul” existed as a real experience for me. However, perhaps because of that ambiguous and oblique quality, I introduced Istanbul into one of my novels as a scene that was not intended to be convincing in any way, and the trip on the Marburg, as well as the landing in Bremen, more precisely, have only served me as anecdotes, unable to crystallize into a narrative.

In Europe, I held various jobs, and at times I managed to survive without one. I moved frequently from one side of the famous wall whose appearance marked my arrival to the other. The thread that ties these years together, I’ve always known, is literature. All my personal experiences, in the end, have converged. For many years, my experiences traveling, reading, and writing merged into a single experience. The trains, the boats, and the airplanes have allowed me to discover worlds that were either wonderful or sinister, but all of them were surprising. Travel was the experience of the visible world; reading, on the other hand, allowed me to undertake an inner journey whose itinerary was not confined to space but rather let me move freely throughout time. Reading meant accompanying Mr. Bloom to the taverns of Dublin at the beginning of this century, Fabrice del Dongo through post-Napoleonic Italy, Hector and Achilles through the streets of Troy and the military camps that for many years surrounded it. And writing meant the possibility of embarking toward an elusive goal and fusing — thanks to that dark, inscrutable, and much-talked about alchemy one comes closer to the process of creation — the outside world and that subterranean one that inhabits us.

I was in Germany recently. Passing through Wiesbaden, I set out to find the house where Turgenev lived and wrote most of his work. Suddenly, I came across a raucous protest of neo-Nazi youths who were celebrating the second anniversary of German reunification with a bloodcurdling uproar. The disgust I felt as a result of a protest fraught with violence caused me to abandon my search for the palace where the Russian writer had lived. The next day, at more or less the same time, I was in Milan walking to the church of Santa María delle Grazie to once again see The Last Supper. As I approached the dazzling stonework of that noble building, one of Bramante’s best, I was barely able to contain my excitement. I felt like applauding in front of everyone to celebrate that remarkable triumph of form. In a full state of grace, the march I had witnessed the day before in Wiesbaden crossed my mind. It is impossible to imagine a more crushing disparity! It was revealed to me once more with an almost physical intensity that in the face of a permanent irradiation of works of art, in the face of its finality and fullness, everything else is incidental, tangential, and superficial. Works of art express, and do so once and for all, the best energy humans are capable of producing. Any political episode pales or becomes diluted before the splendor of a work of Palladio, Giorgione, Orozco, or Matisse, in the same way that before a literary work one discovers everything common and irrelevant contained in the language of practical politics, of business, of worldly ceremonies, that language that Galdós defined as “the daily diet and training-school of ordinary minds.”⁹

Shortly after having settled in Italy, Bernard Berenson said that man is the perfection of the universe; the spirit, the perfection of man; and art, the combination and summary of all human perfections.

I think about Mikhail Bakhtin, about the many years that the Russian thinker was confined to a tiny village lost in the immensity of the Siberian tundra where he was serving a sentence of banishment. Knowing how to read and write allowed him to survive; in a region of illiterates, he was in charge of drawing up the administrative documents of the local kolkhoz. The living conditions might have been very different from those of Berenson, who wrote in a beautiful castle in Tuscany with the aid of a private library of forty-five thousand volumes, surrounded by paintings and objets d’art and a circle of friends that included several of the most eminent figures of our century. The conclusions of both humanists, however, are similar: ultimately, the spiritual life is the only one that counts. Only the fruits of thought and artistic creation truly justify man’s presence in the world. With an energy characteristic of the Titans, Bakhtin was able to establish a delivery network so that some friends and disciples could send him the materials needed for his research. These were highly specialized books, in six or seven languages, difficult to obtain in Stalin’s Russia. With them, he was about to finish while in Siberian exile a refreshingly learned book: Rabelais and His World, an erudite and passionate defense of the body and the human spirit against all forms of repression and intolerance. In it, the Russian humanist outlines an idea that several decades later thinkers as diverse as the Spaniard María Zambrano and the Pole Leszek Kolakowski would take up: against the discourse of power, the philosopher and the poet would impose the supreme efficacy of the jester’s devices. The steely rigidness of the Prince — his immense power — would be ineffective to the halting step, the astonished gaze, and the vacuous smile of the clown. Nothing irritates the powerful like the ridiculing of their gestures and words, to be transformed not into an object of worship but one of mockery, among other reasons because their language usually exists on the edge of parody. By making a handful of minor alterations and intensifying a few gestures, Chaplin was able to transform a speech by Hitler into a perfect example of the grotesque. Over time, the circumstances surrounding Bakhtin’s life will be remembered as one of many heinous periods that history insists on repeating with mediocre imagination. His books, on the other hand, will remain as an immense triumph of intelligence.

What exploit by Napoleon could be compared in splendor or permanence with War and Peace, the National Episodes, The Charterhouse of Parma, or The Disasters of War—works that paradoxically grew out of the existence of these exploits?

For the writer, language is everything.

Form, structure, and every element of a story — plot, characters, tone, gestuality, revelation, or prophecy — are all products of language. It will always be language that announces what paths to follow. Robert Graves said that the primary obligation of the writer is to work without granting himself a truce in, from, with, and about the word.

The exceptional moments in literature occur when the author, no matter what course he follows when starting a work, manages to immerse himself into the deep currents of language in order to, in this way, lose his own identity. E. M. Forster suggests that at the core of every great creation beats a longing for anonymity. In the imaginary world of Tlön, dreams Borges, “there is no concept of plagiarism: it has been established that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous.” “Every poet,” Octavio Paz concludes, “is only a pulse in the river of language.” A literary work is revealed as genius when the author succeeds in finding the dark current that carries vestiges of everything spoken since the time language was born, that is to say at the moment the writer feels he is transcribing a dictation, when the word makes its appearance even before being convened. If that moment is produced, life is saved! Thus the best pages of literature possess something at once luminous and unfathomable. All of us, as readers, have witnessed at some time this wonder. Speechless, astonished, excited, we have been conscious of the miracle that emerges from a page, one in which language and instinct have merged and the will of reason is overtaken by an energy that is greater, a page whose beauty is absolutely impossible to explain in its entirety. I am thinking of a very short story by Chekhov: “The Student.”

Like Berenson, I have concerned myself with the construction of “the house of life,” that is, the effort to understand the relationship between the individual and society, and the wish that this relationship be governed by the concepts of virtue and justice. Four years ago, shortly after returning definitively to Mexico, the wall that was a prelude to my first landing in Europe collapsed. A hopeful air spread across the world. It seemed that at last an age of freedom, fullness, tolerance, and prosperity had begun for everyone. At the same time, a dangerously narrow view was integrating the idea of democracy into a purely commercial mechanism: free trade. The results are obvious. The press repeats the unwelcome words everywhere: crisis, unemployment, recession, disillusionment, instability.

I returned to a Mexico very different from the one I left in 1961. It’s clear that there exist today signs of a civil society that was unthinkable when I left. It is an encouraging phenomenon that coexists with images of profound devastation: an uninhabitable city, a degraded landscape, an almost nonexistent sky. In Coyoacán, in the Plaza de la Conchita, upon opening the door of my house, I have seen doves fall like rotten fruit, poisoned by acids that contaminate the air. And in the main square, also in Coyoacán, I have witnessed scenes similar to others I witnessed some fifty years ago that lay hidden in the depths of my memory. There were the squalid Indian women dressed in rags who arrived at the coffee plantations during harvest time, the same ones who arrived at the end of the workday, kneeling beside their husband or children whose hair they carded with furtive and stern expressions. Seeing them in Coyoacán, dedicated to the same labor, I once again seemed to hear the snap of lice crushed with thumbnails. The indigenous women of my childhood spoke Popolaca or Mixe; those of Coyoacán — possibly Otomí. Instead of cutting coffee, they sell poorly executed weavings while their offspring beg for alms around them.

Do those ghostly presences that appear around my home not prove the futility of a language that conceives of itself as velvet-like and triumphant, even when it does not cease to be a regrettable stammer?

Traveling and writing! Activities that are both marked by chance; the traveler and the writer will only be certain of the departure. Neither of them will know for sure what will happen on the way, let alone what fate awaits them upon their return to their personal Ithaca.

Xalapa, March 1993

9 Translated by Robert Russell

AN ARS POETICA?

I was invited to attend a biennale of writers in Mérida, Venezuela, where each of the participants was to explain his own concept of an ars poetica. I lived in terror for weeks. What did I have to say on the subject? The best I could do, I told myself, would be to draft an Ars Combinatoria. Or, more modestly, to enumerate certain issues and circumstances that in some way define my writing.

Regrettably, my theoretical grounding, throughout my life, has been limited. Only later in life, during a stay in Moscow, did I begin to take an interest in the work of the Russian formalists and their disciples. I met Viktor Shklovsky, who invited me to his studio where I listened to him talk for an entire morning. I was speechless! I was at a loss to explain how I had been able, until then, to do without that universe filled with brilliant provocations. I decided to study, as soon as I finished with the Russians, the fundamentals of linguistics, the various theories on form, to address the Prague School, then structuralism, semiotics, the new currents, Genette, Greimas, Yuri Lotman, and the Tartu-Moscow School. The truth is, I never got beyond the study of Russian formalism. I did read, with indescribable pleasure, the three volumes that Boris Eichenbaum dedicated to the work of Leo Tolstoy, Tynyanov’s book on the young Pushkin, Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, since his literary theory was also based on concrete works: those of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Sterne, Dickens, and Bely. My interest grew more intense when I got to Bakhtin and read his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky. When I attempted to delve into more specialized texts, the so-called “scientists,” I felt lost. I was confused at every turn; I did not know the vocabulary. It was not without regret that little by little I began to abandon them. From time to time I suffer from abulia, and I dream about a future that will afford me the opportunity to become a scholar. Lacking any knowledge in classical rhetoric, how could I dare lecture on an ars poetica?

In Mexico, during my adolescence, I was a devoted and frequent reader of the work of Alfonso Reyes, which includes several titles on literary theory: El deslinde (The Demarcation), La experiencia literaria (The Literary Experience), and Al yunque (To the Anvil). I read them, I imagine, for the pure love of their language, for the unexpected music I found in them, for the ease with which he suddenly illuminated the most necessarily obscure topics. In a poem to the memory of the Mexican writer, Borges declares:

In his labors he was helped by mankind’s

hope, which was the light of his life

to create a line that is not to be forgotten

and to renew Castilian prose.¹⁰

His modesty was such that even today few are aware of his extraordinary achievement: transforming — and in the process reinvigorating — our language. As I reread his essays, I continue to be amazed by a prose that is unlike any other. Cardoza y Aragón maintains that anyone who has not read Reyes’s work cannot claim to have read his.

I owe to our great polygraph, and to several years of tenacious reading, my passion for language; I admire his secret and serene originality, his infinite combinatory ability, his humor, his talent for inserting everyday expressions, seemingly at odds with literary language, into a masterful exposition on Góngora, Virgil, or Mallarmé. Even though I may have been deaf to the theoretical reason present in Reyes, I am indebted to him for introducing me to the various fields to which I might otherwise have been slow to arrive: the Hellenistic world, medieval Spanish literature, the Golden Age, Brazil’s sertão novels and avant-garde poetry, Sterne, Borges, Francisco Delicado, the detective novel, and so much more! His tastes were ecumenical. Reyes carried himself with a slight air of confidence and extreme courtesy, moving with an insatiable curiosity through many different literary spheres, some unenlightened. He complemented the hedonistic practice of writing with other responsibilities. The teacher — because he was that too — conceived of sharing with his flock everything that delighted him as a kind of ministry. He was a patient and hopeful shepherd who endeavored to, and in some cases succeeded in, cultivating generations of Mexicans; my generation’s debt to him is immeasurable. During a time of closed windows and doors, Reyes urged us to embark on every journey. As I recall him, I am reminded of one of his first stories, “The Dinner,” a horror story situated in an everyday setting, in which, at first sight, everything seems normal, anodyne, one might even say a bit saccharine. Between the lines, however, little by little, the reader begins to sense that he is entering an insane, perhaps criminal, world. That “dinner” must have hit the right spot. Years later, I started writing. Only now do I realize that one of the roots of my narrative lies buried in that story. A large part of what I have done since is little more than a mere set of variations on that story.

My apprenticeship has been the result of an immoderate reading of stories and novels, of my efforts as a translator and the study of some books on facets of the novel written almost always by storytellers, such as E. M. Forster’s classic Aspects of the Novel, or the exhaustively prepared Notebooks of Henry James, or the fragmentary Notebook of Anton Chekhov, as well as a long list of interviews, articles, and essays on the novel by novelists, not to mention, of course, conversations with people from the profession.

These decalogues, enumerations of instructions for use by aspiring young writers, have proven fascinating to me for the mere fact that they allow me to read the authors’ work again in an unforeseeable light. The precepts that Chekhov wrote to guide his younger brother who was determined to take up the literary profession are a clear explanation of the poetics that the Russian author had forged. They are not the cause but rather the result of a work in which the author outlined and defined his world and his literary specificity. But will we understand Chekhov’s world better because we know those precepts taken from his own professional experience? I think not. In return, the knowledge of the craftsmanship he employed to write his remarkable stories surely intensifies the pleasure of reading them. Knowing those precepts allows us to discover, if not his conceptual world, then surely some secrets of his style, or, rather, the mysteries of his carpentry. Only if we apply as a rule the same precepts to Dostoyevsky, Céline, or Lezama Lima must we disqualify them as storytellers, because both their universe and their methods and purposes are in total opposition to the Russian writer. Indeed, could Horacio Quiroga’s decalogue be applied to the work of Joyce, Borges, or Gadda? I am afraid not. For no reason other than they belong to different literary families. In the end, each author has to create his own poetics, lest he be content to be the succubus or the acolyte of a teacher. Each will establish, or perhaps it would be better to say that he will find, the form that his writing demands, since no narrative is possible without the existence of form. And in this way, the hypothetical creator must be guided by his own instincts.

One learns and unlearns at every turn. The novelist must understand that the only reality he is responsible for is his novel, and therein lies his fundamental responsibility. Everything he has lived, his personal conflicts, social preoccupations, his good and bad loves, his readings and, of course, dreams, must come together in it, because the novel is a sponge that will wish to absorb everything. The author will take care to feed and strengthen it, preventing any tendency toward obesity. “A novel is in its broadest definition,” Henry James maintained, “a personal, a direct impression of life.”

Having quoted this great storyteller, I should admit that I owe some of the crucial lessons about the craft to reading him. I was fortunate enough to translate into Spanish seven of his novels, including one of the most fiendishly difficult to be found in any literature: What Maisie Knew. Translating allows one to enter fully into a work, to know its bones, its structure, its silences. James validated for me a trend that was present in my very first stories: a furtive and sinuous approach to a fringe of mystery that is never entirely clear and that allows the reader to choose the solution he believes most fitting. To achieve this, James adopted a highly effective solution: the removal of the author as an omniscient subject who knows and determines the behavior of his characters and in his place one or, in his most complex novels, multiple “points of view,” through which the character tries to arrive at a meaning of some incident he has witnessed. Through this device, the character constructs himself, in an attempt to decipher the universe around him: the real world undergoes a process of deformation upon being filtered through consciousness. We will never know to what extent that narrator (that “point of view”) dared to confess in the story, nor what portions he decided to omit, nor the reasons that led to one decision or another.

Similarly, even before reading James, my stories were characterized by their representation of an oblique view of reality. In general, there is a hole in them, an ominous void that is almost never covered. At least not entirely. The structure must be very solid so that the vagueness that interests me does not become chaos. The story must be told and retold from different angles and in it each chapter functions to add new elements to the plot and, at the same time, blur and contradict the schema that the previous elements have established. A kind of Penelope’s weave that is continuously done and undone, in which a plot contains the germ of another plot that will in time lead to another, until the moment when the author decides to end his story. It is a literary convention that can be arduous, but is in no way novel. The origin of this literary tradition dates back to One Thousand and One Nights. In the Far East, this device has been employed frequently and has produced works that we must inevitably call masterpieces: Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, written in China in the eighteenth century, and the short story “Rashomon,” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, written in early twentieth-century Japan. Its Occidental counterpart is easier to trace. We find it, of course, in the Quixote, in The Canterbury Tales; it reemerges in the Enlightenment, with amazing energy, in Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, by Diderot; in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa; and in that wonder of wonders, Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. In our century, this type of novel, whose composition has always been associated with Chinese boxes or Russian matryoshka dolls, and which today theorists call mise en abyme (placed into abyss), has found a legion of fans. Allow me to cite three remarkable titles: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.

The writing of my first novel, in the late sixties, coincided with a universal attempt to discredit narrative, a hatred of storytelling. Expressing even a moderate interest in Dickens, to cite just one example, could be considered a flagrant provocation or a confession of ignorance or provincialism. It was a time of never-ending innovation. Literature, cinema, visual arts, theater, all switched languages with extreme frequency. I was excited about many of these innovations, as was almost every member of my generation. We were convinced that a renovation of form was essential in order to return the novel to the state of health it needed. We applauded the innovations, even the most radical ones; but, in my case, the interest for the new never diminished my passion for plot. Without it, life to me has always seemed diminished. Relating real things and undoing, while at the same time enhancing, their reality has been my calling. Whatever doubt I had vanished when I read Galdós. Even if admitting it in Spain is at times scandalous, he has been my true teacher. In his work, as in that of Goya, I discovered that the quotidian and the delirious, the tragic and the grotesque, do not have to be different sides of a coin, rather they are able to be a single fully integrated entity.

But, to return to the storyteller’s ars poetica: Does a single, valid universal principle exist? Golden rules of compulsory application? Does each period add new norms and proscribe others? And yet I still wonder: Is it not true that what is a source of energy for most writers can also be poison for some of them? Are there cases in which a writer, by violating the canon, succeeds in creating masterpieces? Jan Potocki and Jane Austen are contemporaries, but their works seem to illustrate genres that bear no resemblance to each other.

A basic rule, articulated by Gide: “Never take advantage of momentum already gained.” Does each book, then, have to start from zero? We have been witnesses to the fall of authors who for years were our idols, whose audacity we admired without reservation; we came to think that their prose and their vision not only renewed narrative language but also modified our perception of existence until, paralyzed, suspicious of our own faculties, we began to discover through one of their books that their language left us cold, that we had become insensitive to their subjugation, only to be convinced in the end that the faculties that should be regarded with suspicion were not ours but those of the formerly idolized writer, whose prose was devoured by a vegetative language from which he could not or did not know how to defend himself, whether out of slapdashness, self-indulgence, or exhaustion; a language that, like a golem, had begun to mark the rules of the game, only to go its own way, to confuse the author, to convert him into a mere amanuensis. Félix de Azúa recalled once a conversation with Eduardo Chillida in which the sculptor told him that in his youth he suddenly felt surprised by the ease with which he carried out his work until, frightened by his extraordinary skill, he forced himself to sculpt with his left hand so he could again feel the tension of the material. It seems clear to me that Gide’s warning requires no mechanical change of style, devices, themes, or language. It does not require the writer — in each novel, drama, or poem — to transform himself into someone else. That would be foolish, a masquerade. How do we understand, then, the work of Henry James, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Valle-Inclán, Borges, Saramago, and Gombrowicz, for example, for whom excellence depends on the permanent exacerbation of a personal style? In the end, it is really a matter, I imagine, of preventing language from passing, by sheer inertia, from one book to another and becoming a parody of itself, lulled by the energy of the momentum gained. The only influence that one must defend oneself against is one’s own, declares the master of clarity, Bioy Casares. But there, as in everything that has to do with writing, lies the instinct of the writer who will have the last word.

Another definitive rule: never confuse the act of writing with the art of writing. The act of writing does not tend to intensify life, which is the goal of the art of writing. The act of writing will scarcely allow the word to possess more than a single meaning; in the art of writing, a word is by nature polysemantic: it speaks and is silent, reveals and obscures. The act of writing is reliable and predictable, the art of writing never is; it rejoices in delirium, in darkness, in mystery and in disorder, no matter how transparent it may seem. Marguerite Duras: “Writing comes like the wind, it’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.”¹¹

Writing for me has meant — if I may borrow a phrase from Bakhtin — leaving a personal testimony of the world’s constant mutation.

Xalapa, September 1993

10 Translated by Harold Morland

11 Translated by Mark Polizzotti

HERE COMES THE PARADE!

1980

19 APRIL (ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO MEXICO)

I keep toying with the idea of writing a novel with a detective plot. Convert the building where I live into a setting with the typical (or topical) characteristics of a microcosm. I’m thinking about a dominant figure, a kind of monster: a very fat woman who lives with a son whom she hides. The tenants: people in some way tied to movements organized thirty or forty years ago by the radical right; also a few intellectuals whom the others see as rabble; and poor tenants, protected by rent control, whom no one ever sees. And a lonely, maniacal, and annoying madman named Pedrito…

26 MAY (IN MEXICO)

I had dinner last night with my niece Elena Buganza. She told me about the thesis she’s preparing for her licenciatura en letras degree. As I listened to her, I had an idea that could be the engine of my novel. Her thesis deals with the work of Bernardo Couto Castillo, a decadent from the late nineteenth century. A young Mexican aristocrat who died at twenty-one, disowned by his family and demonized by the people of good conscience of the time. I imagine, from what little I know, he probably died from an excessive use of absinthe and a violent fit of syphilis. “He enjoyed every vice, even the most perverse,” wrote one of his contemporaries. My niece searched for Couto’s grave and could not find it. She then located some of his relatives and went to see them in search of information about his life and work. When they heard she was researching him and had already gathered some relatively obscure texts, they grew uneasy and closed the door in her face. They probably feared that details that could once again tarnish the family’s reputation would come to light. I am tempted to write a kind of Aspern Papers, except, instead of love letters in my novel it would be secrets that compromised the honor of a poet who has gone down in history as a moral example.

1981

9 MAY

…set everything in the late thirties or early forties. I would like this detective novel to also shed light on certain political issues. Unfortunately, the characters I’m thinking about are too parodic and could only serve as incidental figures (Pedrito Balmorán, for example). A clandestine committee has tried a fellow party member in secret and sentenced him to death. Another man, named Martínez (a blackmailer, among other things), is murdered in jail so he can’t reveal the details of the trial. Someone had paid Martínez to falsely confess that he was the perpetrator. They had promised him all sorts of things: to prepare his getaway, a substantial reward, etc…but I’m missing something… something related to the Central European Jews who began to arrive in Mexico, fleeing Nazism? Some sort of scam? A marriage of convenience undertaken so a woman could leave Europe? Jealousy, betrayals, vendettas, and all that trove of grisly emotions that complement these topics? I can’t figure out how to begin. Everything boils down to the incidental characters, good only for creating atmosphere. The tenants of the building live their life dreaming of a new Cristero uprising and triumph of God on earth…fierce hatreds and rivalries at the core of the rightwing organizations…

1982

11 MAY (PASSING THROUGH MADRID)

As I walked through the city center this morning, I thought obsessively about the building where I live in Mexico, in Plaza Rio de Janeiro, and about my hypothetical novel…A character who was nine years old in 1942 returns thirty years later to visit the building where during his childhood a crime was committed that was never solved. He questions several tenants: his Aunt Hedwig, the bookseller Balmorán, the doorman; and thus the plot begins to take shape. An old German woman who never has visitors lives in the building. I’ll need to spend a few days locked in the archives…by the end, readers will have learned several things, all more or less trivial, eccentric, but the mystery will not be completely revealed to them.

12 MAY (IN MEXICO)

The story unfolds at the level of masks. The faces will never be seen. The biggest enigma lies in the identity of the protagonists.

12 JUNE

…a novel that isn’t a mere divertimento but a moral reconstruction of the period…Try to get the microcosm to shed some light on our present. A novel with a more or less hidden moral? No, thank you. Although, at the end of the day, why not take that risk? Attempt a search for the truth, a reflection on the past and its persistence over time. The conclusion is almost topical: the truth, the true truth of the truth, is not likely to be within our reach. We rely only on certain intuitions that allow us to approach it, perhaps to brush against it. Knowing a phenomenon only partially is as if we did not know it at all. However, it is impossible to conform and maintain a passive attitude. An ethical obligation requires us to continue our search. The building in Plaza de Rio de Janeiro becomes a house of Babel.

15 JUNE

…I’m thinking that a theme I tried to develop for several years in a short novel that I never managed to finish (the relationship between a brilliant mother and a timid and unsociable adolescent) will have to be incorporated into this novel. A celebrated hostess holds a dinner for a famous painter and his son who has just returned to Mexico after spending a couple of years or more in a boarding school in the United States.

17 JULY

…another parallel theme: a possessive mother, a possessive son. Widowhood. The mother falls in love again and is eager to remarry. The son sets out to undo the relationship. He embarks on a long trip with his mother through Europe. She begins to deteriorate, succumbs to morphine, becomes a nymphomaniac. Years later, on the skids, they return to Mexico. On the verge of death, she calls him, insults him terribly, and curses him.

1 SEPTEMBER

…the same old story. I abandoned the project about the house in Plaza de Rio de Janeiro to replace it with two stories, two variations of the relationship between mothers and children. I should attempt to summarize all the themes that come to mind into a single plot.

21 SEPTEMBER

Luis Prieto told an amazingly absurd and extraordinarily amusing story last night about a fake Mexican castrato from the nineteenth century that I am planning to develop. A chronicle of the life of the castrato would be the document that saves Pedrito Balmorán and creates panic in a family of whitewashed tombs that fear the revelation of family secrets.

1983

3 JANUARY

Silvia Molina lent me a stack of documents that belonged to her father. They detail the subversive activities of the German colony in Mexico during World War II.

18 NOVEMBER (PRAGUE)

I was officially invited, in my capacity as ambassador rather than writer, to the opening of an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Egon Erwin Kisch, the famous interwar journalist. I attended. As I approached a display, I recognized the photo of a house. Of course, it was a house in the Roma neighborhood, located not far from Plaza Rio de Janeiro. Beside it there were photos of Kisch with famous people of the time: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Carlos Chávez, Pablo Neruda, Dolores del Río; but beside them were a hodgepodge of international celebrities of every stripe: Buster Keaton, the wonderful Paulette Goddard, Orson Welles, Prince Drohojowski, the Soviet ambassador, Louis Jouvet, Jules Romains, Anna Seghers, and many other faces. Very elegant people beside intellectuals dressed in proletarian-looking jackets, actors, writers, communist leaders, countesses and princesses, Mexican intellectuals, Hollywood luminaries. A world of highly contrasting shades brought together in Mexico by the war. I can only imagine the degree of confusion such a divine galaxy of stars must have caused in a city as provincial as Mexico was at the time. A non-stop comedy of errors.

19 NOVEMBER

I entered the Café Slavia, sat at a table with a view of the river and the castle, and began to write my novel. I made a rough outline of the first five chapters.

20 NOVEMBER

Last night, I finished the full outline of my novel, and today I started filling in some details and incidents of some chapters. I need to decide the tone, the temperature of the language. But the heavy work, the novel’s carpentry, is already there. I made very detailed notes for one of the chapters: the scene in which Martínez, the blackmailer, seeks information about the past of the German Hispanist, Ida Werfel, and her family. Ida tells him about The Garden of Juan Fernández by Tirso de Molina, in which no one is who they are believed to be; the blackmailer takes it personally, an oblique reference to his secret activities, and flies into a fit of rage that drives him to the brink of madness… No one wants to talk about the German woman who lives locked in an apartment that has become a pigsty. “How do you expect me to know who he is? Do you think I’m the phonebook or something?” says Aunt Hedwig gruffly to the protagonist. “I haven’t wanted to know anything more about that building since I left it,” Delfina Uribe replies. “And you, what right do you have to question me?” Pedrito Balmorán shouts. “With all due respect, my rule is never to interfere in the lives of the tenants,” the doorman replies.

19 DECEMBER

Everything is working out so well for me, the novel is moving along so quickly that I fear it’s nothing more than an outbreak of graphomania. Tomorrow, I’ll start working on the chapter on Delfina Uribe.

25 DECEMBER

The structure is very simple. Gogol used it in Dead Souls: a stranger arrives at a place and begins to visit different people one by one to address a particular topic. The detective novel has used it almost from its beginning; many of the Agatha Christie novels are structured this way. Ambler’s splendid novel The Mask of Dimitrios is the perfect model. In the detective novel, the character who undertakes this journey and convinces people that they must open the door and answer his questions is a police officer or a private detective. Ambler uses a novelist who, if I remember correctly, is also a journalist. This makes his intrusion into private spaces and other people’s lives seem normal. I thought my character would be a journalist, then I turned him into a historian who’s researching a particular period: the World War as seen from Mexico.

1984

17 FEBRUARY

I spend hours reviewing the volumes of photos by the Casasola brothers in the embassy library. I’m able to see what people wore to the races, to the opera or, simply, to walk down the street. The entire Who’s Who of the period appears in these books. This allows me to visualize the characters.

17 JUNE (IN MOJÁCAR)

I’ve been in Mojácar for two weeks. I’m working from morning to night. I think that what breathes life into the novel is kind of cheerful expressionism, if such an expression is possible, resulting from many years of parodic games, improvisations, and a caricatured invention of reality practiced with Luis Prieto and Carlos Monsiváis; but also from certain effects from American movies of the thirties and forties, especially those by Lubitsch, and the later Italian movies, Fellini above all; from the constant reading of plays and their application in the construction of dialogue, as well as certain devices from opera in the creation of staging; the relationship between movement and the grouping of characters (solos, duets, quartets, with or without choruses, etc.) is also operatic. I should also cite the impulse born of a genre that I love, the comedy of errors, those by Tirso and Shakespeare, especially, and in the novel Our Mutual Friend by Dickens.

24 JUNE

I don’t think there will be the slightest doubt in the reader’s mind that the plot revolves around a settling of accounts between the various Mexican fascist groups during the days immediately following the official declaration of war. The character Briones is a spent cartridge. He’s trapped, doomed before the fact. What remains unclear — but the lack of clarity, the gap in the story, seems necessary to me — is his past in Berlin. The death of his first wife, for example, the agreements he reached in Germany, and with whom, before returning to Mexico. Should I allude more openly to his sexual impotence so that the reader will begin to question the ghostly aspect of their married life? What role does the Jewish doctor, whose ex-wife, also Jewish, Briones ends up marrying, play? But these, in my judgment, are matters for another novel.

26 JUNE

My stay in Mojácar and the novel are finished. Its title: El desfile del amor (Love’s Parade). Day after tomorrow, I’ll be in Barcelona to hand it over to Jorge Herralde at Anagrama.¹² From there, I’ll fly to Prague where I’ll await, terrified, if there is a finding, the jury’s verdict.

12 Publisher Jorge Herralde is the founder of the prestigious publishing house Editorial Anagrama and namesake of the Herralde Novel Prize, which the novel Pitol references here would win that same year. The prize, which is awarded to an unpublished text and includes publication, has been responsible for launching numerous literary careers. Subsequent winners include Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Juan Villoro. —Trans.

CHARMS

As is known, a charm is an object or animal to which supernatural properties are attributed, beneficial to whomever possesses it.

I do not own anything to which I could honestly ascribe the qualities of a charm, much less one that might have protected me throughout my life. Outside of a few pictures and some books, nothing in my house comes from my childhood, adolescence, or my early youth. I have had paintings that I got rid of, not unlike someone who frees himself of a heavy burden, but with very little emotion. I was fortunate during my travels to find some bibliographic gems, and I also ended up getting rid of those. I have lived in many cities, which involves changing residences frequently; only once did I feel regret when leaving one. Perhaps I have enjoyed the kind of instability I was living, and the huckster-like pleasure of getting rid of my things. I only keep letters, but I do not attribute charm status to them.

I would love for Sacho, a dog I worship, to be my charm; unfortunately, he is not. When he walks up to me, I see in his eyes that I am his, the only powerful and absolute charm he has known in his life. I have collected and sometimes bought small stones, amber and jade beads, whose subsequent loss for a few days made me feel vulnerable to the dangers of the world. But such a feeling soon fades. So, I used to believe in their protective power, but not in excess. Where I glimpse a higher power beyond all reason is in reading. If I receive good news while reading a certain book, it will never lose its magnetic power or its expiatory capacity; so, on the eve of a trip, awaiting an important decision or the news of an X-ray, for example, I must necessarily repeat the readings that have already proved their virtues. My four decisively propitiatory books are: Borges’s The Aleph; The Duenna by Richard Sheridan; and The Court of Carlos IV and The Baggage of King Joseph by Benito Perez Galdós.

Similarly, I have eliminated books whose reading coincided with a piece of devastating news, a serious setback, or the announcement of a necessary surgery. Thus I have lost books that otherwise would have seemed impossible to let go of. In any event, I consider it fortunate that lightning has not struck those writers who are very important to me: Cervantes, Rulfo, Sterne, or Henry James — that is, those without whom it would be torture to live. This adds to the frequent reading of my favorite authors a trembling uncertainty, a chill, an intensity of emotion, in the face of the terrifying fear that something nefarious might happen during their reading — that a fax might arrive unexpectedly, a phone call, a visitor with horrible news — and that I might be forced to say goodbye to them forever.

Xalapa, February 1996