The Art of Flight

THE GREAT THEATER OF THE WORLD

The events described in The Court of Carlos IV take place in the year 1807. Galdós, through Gabriel Araceli, the narrator-protagonist of the first series of the National Episodes, allows himself to begin the story with an event that transpired two years before: the premiere of Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s comedy, The Maidens’ Consent. Araceli, in fact, acknowledges his participation in the performance that tarnishes the process of personal dignification in which Galdós has consciously and tenaciously implicated him.

The historical event depicted in the Episode involves a palace plot hatched by the Prince of Asturias against his parents, the King and Queen. Delaying this account in order to recreate the rather droll circumstances of a theater performance might seem disproportionate and even incongruous. And, yet, it is not. The novel’s architecture requires the initial appearance of a dramatic scene that insinuates the interplay between life — as everyday reality or historical fact — and the theater. The novel thus opens with the premiere of a work that endeavored to change Spanish theater, to free it from the extravagances that plagued it and to introduce, at last, dramatic precepts and a didactic and moral zeal. An effort that, from the beginning, was opposed by old playwrights, actors, and in large part by the audience, who considered a theater based on rules to be a foreign imposition — French, for added insult! — an affront not only to their theatrical tastes and preferences but also to national sentiment. The very idea of subjecting the theater to rules, “the dramatic unities” of place, time and action — catchphrases that few were able to understand and, therefore, were interpreted in the most outlandish ways — was an outrage. The French were different, this was well known. Let them keep their Corneille and Racine and their exacting rules! That Lope de Vega had not allowed himself to be inveigled by such nonsense made him far superior to the foreigners. That the unities came from France made the affront even more visceral. To establish a set of symmetries, Galdós closes The Court of Carlos IV with a representation of Othello in a palace theater, a rather free Spanish translation of a French variation of Shakespeare’s play, a piece absolutely foreign to any of those precepts “obsequiously obeyed” by the Frenchified Moratín. The tale opens and closes framed by two theatrical performances. But there’s more. Some of the actors who stage Othello are professionals (including one who existed in real life: the great Isidoro Máiquez) who belonged to the renowned company of the Teatro del Príncipe; others are aristocrats who were acting aficionados. There are love affairs between the nobility and members of the theatrical world, scenes of jealousy, intrigue, and heinous acts of revenge that, from beginning to end, imbue this Episode with an intense theatrical coloring. If the actors are performing all along, the members of the court who have temporarily joined them do so even more.

Gabriel Araceli, whom readers met in Trafalgar, the first Episode of the series, has undergone visible changes in his attitude and lifestyle. He has awakened, sharpened his wit, and is much more aware of himself as an individual. The pretensions of the courtly city and, above all, his daily interaction with actors have given him a presence he could have hardly acquired in Vejer, the small Andalusian town where we left him. Araceli believes that he has had an exceptional run of luck; shortly after arriving in Madrid, dogged by hunger and difficulties of an unspecified nature, he manages to enter the service of Pepa González, an actress widely celebrated in Madrid for her talent, wit, and, above all, her beauty. During discreet soirées at his mistress’s home, Gabriel attends not only to people of the theater but also to more illustrious personages who, it appears, are unable to find either the happiness or informality that reign in the actors’ homes or in other places, to which they sometimes refer, quietly of course, that attract the cream of Madrid’s demimonde, where knives are brandished when least expected and singing and dancing are abruptly interrupted, transforming the tertulia into a raucous free-for-all.

It is not surprising that because of his connection to theater people and their coterie Gabriel Araceli might at times escape the role assigned to him by Galdós: that of the exemplar of virtues of a ruling class that, out of nowhere, was destined to occupy the space that the nobility had begun to lose. From his youth, Gabriel, whom military honors would soon transform into a member of the new redemptive class, was to represent the ideals of the new society that was taking shape and be the champion of unimpeachable morals. That burden, similar to that which weighed on the “positive hero” of the ideological literature of the twentieth century, tends to diminish in some episodes his verisimilitude as the protagonist, and strips him of the essential inner life necessary to become an entirely convincing character. But the boundless energy of the social fabric that surrounds him saves him from becoming a mechanical doll. Galdós endows him with keen powers of observation, a facility for establishing relationships between characters and situations, the qualities necessary for the proper development of a novel, apt for enriching its dramatic moments, ennobling the heroic ones, and heightening the joyous ones. All this at the cost of suppressing in large part his life of instinct.

In The Court of Carlos IV, Gabriel experiences moments of joyful rebellion against the demiurge. It must not be forgotten that he is in the prime of his life, moves in a social circle free of rigor, and carries himself with great ease in settings where aristocrats, actors, and even less reputable characters are accustomed to exchanging partners. If in the first chapters we find Gabriel chastely in love with a sweet neighbor, a young seamstress, we can also imagine him as the possible future lover of a great lady of the Court, a beautiful countess of exceptional powers at Palace with whom he dreams of repeating that infamous story whose protagonists are the Queen María Luisa de Parma and Manuel Godoy, her minister, whom she plucked out of a barracks and transformed into the most powerful man in the kingdom. Gabriel has become so independent of the fate imposed on him by his creator that, now blinded by the beauty of the supreme Amaranta whose “ideal and stately beauty roused a strange emotion akin to sadness,”¹³ as her adolescent lover describes her with happy intuition, he embarks on an adventure that overtakes, disillusions, and humiliates him, but that provides him a unique view of the world from above, of its unprecedented powers and also — alas! — its secret vulnerability.

If Trafalgar constitutes an initiation test under the sign of the Epos, The Court of Carlos IV will place before our hero another, more difficult, kind of test. Gabriel has penetrated the world of fiction with weapons and heroic deeds; he has yet to discover other scenarios where battles are fought in secret and surreptitiously, battles that possess another dimension and are fraught with traps and unknown risks. Araceli enters a minefield, the same one that members of the royal family and their closest retinue tread.

Gabriel will walk away from this Episode more cautious than from other apparently more dangerous ones, like the heroic military sieges and memorable battles. Here, the plot flows through two parallel channels: a public one — the conspiracy of the Prince of Asturias, the future Fernando VII, to murder his mother and dethrone his father; and a private one — a relationship of love and jealousy, whose threads have been cleverly woven to lead to a crime of passion. The two plots continuously intertwine and support each other. The public one is an affair of State; the private one, which gives the story its true body, functions through a mechanism widely used in Renaissance drama; we find it in several of Shakespeare’s comedies, many of Lope’s and Calderon’s, and almost obsessively in Tirso: Pepilla Isidoro loves González Máiquez, who doesn’t even notice her. Máiquez loves the Duchess Lesbia, the Queen’s lady in waiting and secret agent of the Prince of Asturias, who despises him. Lesbia loves Don Juan de Mañara, a handsome officer of the King’s guard and also agent of the Prince of Asturias, who is deceiving her with a wench from the slums of Madrid. Everyone is jealous of everyone. Two of the characters from the romantic entanglement are already embroiled in the Palace plot. The Countess Amaranta, who neither loves nor is loved by anyone, participates in a scheme to punish Lesbia’s disloyalty. The fake knife with which Máiquez, in the role of Othello, will punish the wantonness of Desdemona, played by Lesbia, will be replaced at the last moment by a real one that will be plunged into the heroine’s chest. At that moment, Gabriel will act with great courage and race to prevent the crime.

The tone of the Episode is unmistakably Goyaesque. It could not be otherwise. The very title recalls Goya’s most celebrated painting, The Family of Carlos IV. Goya was the official court painter of the Crown. In that role, he painted a series of portraits of Carlos IV and the Queen María Luisa, of Fernando as Prince of Asturias and as King of Spain, of the rest of the infantes, the royal children, the large canvas on which the entire family appears, as well as a remarkable portrait of Godoy. The actor Isidoro Máiquez was also painted by Goya; his portrait hangs today in the Museo del Prado, near the King and Queen and the infantes. Amaranta, in a fit of capriciousness and defiance, had Goya paint her nude, which leads us immediately to associate her with The Nude Maja. The curtains for the performance of Othello, we are told, were also painted by Goya. The Aragonese painter is present everywhere and at all times.

A powerful and perhaps more troubling referent than the plot itself is represented by the distant, and for the majority of Spaniards, blurry, figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army enters Spain the day a dinner is held at the home of Pepilla González, where comedians and courtiers meet to work out the final details of the performance of Othello. No one in the course of the Episode knows for sure what Napoleon proposes upon entering Spain, and each person attempts to reconcile that enigma in the way that best suits their interests.

“Someone who performs or plays a role in theaters is commonly known as a comediante,” states the first edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. The comediante appears to be someone other than who he in fact is; his function is to portray someone else. One day he pretends to be the king, and the next day he is a laborer, saint, or ship’s captain. That ability to pretend, that ability to create ecstasy out of nothing — shipwrecks, love affairs, dethronements — tends sometimes to filter in a perverse way into the comediante’s personal life. Isidoro Máiquez, for example, during the rehearsals for Othello, becomes delirious; jealousy has overtaken him, fueled, among other reasons, by malicious anonymous letters informing him that he has been nothing but a whim to “his Duchess,” a common plaything of a refined lady who, incidentally, has replaced him with Don Juan de Mañara, a gentleman in his own right. In the drama’s final scene, Máiquez’s personality has vanished; he has been entirely transformed into a crazed Moor, a murderer. The version represented differs in some aspects from the original drama. The proof of Desdemona’s infidelity is found in an impassioned letter that she has supposedly written to her lover. An anonymous hand has forged her handwriting and signature. Faced with this evidence, Othello can no longer doubt her guilt. The letter seals the couple’s fate. Desdemona must inevitably die at the hands of the Moor. A letter in which Lesbia attempts to assuage Mañara’s jealousy has fallen into the hands of someone intent on punishing her. She reprimands him for daring to imagine that a woman of her stature might be interested in a ridiculous little comedian. Someone has removed the paper that Othello must read before the prostrate body of Desdemona, replacing it with the letter in which Lesbia ridicules him to reassure Juan de Mañara, and that same someone has replaced the stage dagger with a real knife. The Marquesa’s die is cast: she will die that night before her lover’s eyes, before those of her ferocious husband, and those of the very distinguished audience made up of the kingdom’s great nobility. Only Araceli’s timely intervention manages to avert the disaster.

Gabriel will discover from personal experience that the same functions of representation and the same to-and-fro between being and seeming that so unsettles comedians is repeated at Court, only there the reality of being gradually atrophies, while the function of seeming, of pretending, grows disproportionately larger. Court life requires a permanent ability to make believe. Its ceremonies become a never-ending performance that demands more complex dramatic talents and more stylized techniques than those required on the stage. One acts there not only in the performance of protocol, but also in the royal chambers, in the visits that the courtiers pay to each other in their respective palaces, in the theater, the bullfights, in walks in the countryside and, above all, in the passageways where they pretend to be who they are not, when they attend de ocultis the dinners of the fashionable comedians and bullfighters of the day, the popular dances and festivals, or even less desirable establishments where it was possible to rub elbows with the picaresque of every stripe that flourished in the slums of Madrid.

Living at the service of comedians or being a page in the palace precincts means participating in a perpetual representation, pretending to perform one activity when, in fact, one performs another. In the first chapter of The Court of Carlos IV, the young Araceli describes a heterogeneous list of duties that he must fulfill that constitutes in itself a delightful passage of local color. Among them, there are two that are mere affectation: “To walk out on the square of Santa Ana, pretending to look into the shops, but in reality listening with covert attention to what was being said in the knots that collected there of actors or dancers, and trying to discover what those of la Cruz theatre had to say against those of el Príncipe”; the other: “To call every day at the house of Isidoro Máiquez under pretext of asking him some question with reference to the dresses in the play; but, in reality, to ascertain whether a certain person happened to be with him — whose name I reserve for the present.” That is, to feign one interest when the real interest is another, a quite despicable one, I might add; to hear what is being said on the street only to repeat it later to a master; to ask something trivial about a garment when in fact the intention is to discover who is visiting whom, how those being observed carry themselves during the visit, what they talk about. They are of course the activities of an informant, a cop, a spy. Another mandatory activity was “to frequent the gallery of the theatre de la Cruz in order to hiss The Maidens’ Consent, a play that my mistress held in at least as much aversion as the others by the same author”—a provocative activity that complemented that of being a spy. The role of a page at court was very similar, exalted not only by the majesty of the settings and the rank of the protagonists but also by the cruelty of the measures the page must employ. The Countess Amaranta casts a spell over the callow Andalusian whom she invites to be her servant. She offers him the acquisition of a bright future as long as he becomes her slave. His astonishment will disappear within a few days, as soon as the Countess gives him his first instructions. To begin with, she will place him in another home from where he must inform her of everything that happens. Even if this arrangement shocks him, he will continue to be her page. Confident of the spell she exerts over the boy who was plucked from González’s home and carried off to the Escorial, Amaranta launches a far-reaching plan that will solve her problems forever. His role would consist of observing from behind tapestries or curtains, listening behind doors, winning the hearts of the handmaids of the ladies-in-waiting and of the ladies themselves, to obtain secrets of all kinds and become a major power in the Palace. By then, the Countess would secure for him letters patent of nobility; once titled, and with her help, he would enter the Royal Guard. Her power would become extraordinary: “A guardsman has indeed an advantage which princes themselves have not, for while these know nothing beyond the palace they live in — which is the reason why hardly any king governs well — the soldier is equally familiar with the palace and the street, the folks outside as well as those within; and this more general knowledge enables him to make himself useful to all parties and to pull the wires of a vast number of springs. A man who knows what he is about here is more powerful than all the potentates on earth; he can make his influence silently felt to the uttermost ends of the kingdom without its ever being suspected by those who give themselves such airs, calling themselves ministers and councilors.”

The fate assigned to Gabriel Araceli, that of becoming one of the future redeemers who would reclaim Spain, who have arisen from almost nothing — or, in his case, from absolutely nothing — prevents him from accepting the career of indignities proposed by the Countess. Again and again, he will place ahead of her and other members of the nobility the obligations that his honor and dignity require, even if at every turn he is met with hurtful and bitter comments in return. Honor and dignity are attributes characteristic of a gentleman, not of an insignificant louse who dares to claim them for himself. However, unwittingly and by chance, Gabriel will continue to find himself in situations that will allow him to hear terrible secrets, compromising not only for certain people but also for the affairs of the Crown; he will learn the contents of letters and messages that could cost very important persons their life and liberty; he will witness scenes concerning the security of the kingdom. It goes without saying that Galdós will not allow his creation to obtain any personal benefit from such secrets.

Many of Gabriel’s duties in service to Pepita González were, not surprisingly, closely related to the theater. One, already mentioned, was to campaign against The Maidens’ Consent; another, “to accompany her to the theatre, where it was my part to hold the sceptre and crown till she came off after the second scene of the second act in The False Czar of Muscovy to reappear transformed into a queen, to the utter confusion of Orloff and the magnates who had supposed her to be an itinerant tart-seller.” It was also his duty “every afternoon to take a pot of leftover stew, crusts of bread, and other scraps of food to Don Luciano Francisco Comella, a dramatist whose plays until recently had been much celebrated, who was always starving in a house on the Calle de la Berenjena, with his hunchback daughter, who helped him in his dramatic work.” Galdós digresses at every turn on theatrical topics, sometimes insignificant, others of greater importance, such as the battle waged by the neoclassicists against the verbal diarrhea and tacky scenery of the theater of the time, a trend led precisely by Comella, the author, among other rubbish, of All Lost in a Day for a Mad and Blind Love and The False Czar of Muscovy, which had earned Pepita standing ovations in the past. This astracanada theater felt threatened by the loathsome dramatic unities postulated by an equally loathsome Moratín. But let us return to the first question: why begin the history of the palace conspiracy with the premiere of The Maidens’ Consent, which took place two years before?

Miguel de Cervantes scatters throughout the Quixote a wide range of authors’ names and book titles. This reference is not intended to boast of the author’s culture. These cultural references are there because they play a decisive role in the narrative structure: they support the protagonist’s motives and the mad ideas; they determine the profile of other characters; and they allow stylized mirror games, such as comparing a work in progress: the very history of the hidalgo of La Mancha, to its fake derivations, such as Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quixote. Playing with other books infuses a new style into the art of storytelling and demonstrates the relationship of the novel with the Renaissance culture that surrounds it. Cervantes’s eagerness to intertextualize had few successors in Spanish narrative. Galdós is one of the few writers in our language who employed and renewed this device. The war Luciano Comella and his followers wage against Fernández de Moratín is without a doubt the transplantation of a struggle between the old and the new that is beginning to insinuate itself in Spain. The brutal struggle between playwrights is a kind of first call in the debate between a stagnant and incoherent culture and the effort to establish the order and the task of tidying up in every corner of the kingdom. The fact that Moratín’s work deals with the education of society, and women in particular, appears as a response to that frenzied court where the majority of its members are not educated at all, and where the only roads available to arrive at a goal are pretense and intrigue. That exercise of intertextuality may precede the same diegesis of the Episodes. The device allows Galdós to avoid sinking into long didactic explanations, the very kind that renders so many of his contemporaries’ works unreadable. By listing Pepilla González’s readings, her omissions and literary shortcomings, Galdós is able to provide us, for example, with perfect subtlety, the image of her person, more powerfully than would have been possible in a store of pages that contain an infinite number of details about her habits, virtues, and weaknesses. Gabriel Araceli comments — and here we sense again the voice of the former narrator, not that of the page, who could scarcely translate his feelings in such a learned way — that the actress was not known for her good literary taste, among other reasons because whoever approached her always had Ovid and Boccaccio in mind rather than Aristotle. A remarkable way of saying everything, without going into details.

Ortega y Gasset points out in his essay on Goya how decisive the popular veneer was for Spanish culture in the eighteenth century: “In the second half of that century the masses were housed in life forms of their own invention, with an enthusiasm aware of itself and with ineffable delight, without looking sideways at the aristocratic customs in anxious flight toward them. Meanwhile, the upper classes were only happy when they abandoned their own ways, and they became saturated with plebeianism.”

Regarding that plebeianism alluded to by Ortega, Carmen Martín Gaite, in Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain, studied the changes that took places in Spanish society at the end of the eighteenth century due to the introduction into court life of traditions and customs viewed until then with contempt by people of higher rank. Martín Gaite amply illustrates this desire for debasement to which Ortega alluded. We are introduced to a world in which ladies and gentlemen competed to speak, dress, and behave like their maids or footmen, with the relaxation of customs that this implied. Jean-François de Bourgoing, a French traveler in Spain, writes: “There are, among both sexes, persons of distinguished rank, who seek their models among the heroes of the populace, who imitate their dress, manners, and accent, and are flattered when it is said of them, ‘He is very like a majo.’ — ‘One would take her for a maja.’”¹⁴ And other authors of the time lament that “ladies and even the señoras of the highest birth, have been transformed into so many other majas in their dress, their conversation, and their manners as to be indistinguishable from that despicable class of people […] and they have reached such a point in the degradation of their respective graces, lordships, and excellencies that when they have a cigar in their mouths they resemble even more the most vulgar women of this low caste […]. In general, all those fops eager to practice their majismo, to be seen on the Pradera de San Isidro, and learn from their footmen the jota, the guaracha, the bolero, in short, their songs and dances, boasted of courting an actress.” Another traveler picks up on the rumors that were spreading through Madrid about the Duchess of Alba, advanced in her desire for unprejudiced modernity: “Several years past,” they say, “she had already put aside any appearance of dignity to the point of going out in search of adventure in the public squares, her lack of scruples reaching such a degree that she even counted toreros among her lovers. At midnight, they would gather in the middle of the Prado to have a tertulia and play music.”

The plebeianization of the aristocracy covers an unfilled spiritual space. It was a means of escape from the ailing morality in use; perhaps also a vital response to the apparent backwardness before an enlightened Europe, and, above all, before the greatness of a lost past. That taste for popular customs and expressions becomes the Hispanic embodiment of Volksgeist (the spirit of the people) celebrated by the German Romantics and disseminated at a rapid pace across the rest of Europe. The greatest exponent of that popular spirit in Spanish art was Francisco de Goya. It could be said that if the Volksgeist produced an immense figure in the art of Europe, it was precisely that of Goya. The Spanish artist painted the populace in a thousand ways, as mere ornamentation, with an almost Arcadian tone, in the tapestries for the Royal Palace, as a collective hero in The Second of May 1808, as a tragic character in The Third of May 1808, as a demonic protagonist in many of his witches’ covens, as maker of a thousand disasters in his etchings, and as magnificent representative of the absurd in an extraordinary painting, the absurdity of absurdities, carnival itself — Bakhtin in the raw! — which is that small glory called Burial of the Sardine.

The aristocracy assumed majismo in an absolutely theatrical way; pretending to be what it was not, making daily rituals a form of spectacle. Living in the theater and dramatizing life to the unthinkable. For many of the characters in The Court of Carlos IV, the descent among the rabble is like taking the waters: a powerful source of life. Among them, the Queen María Luisa, no less! And the Duchess Lesbia and Don Juan de Mañara and, on a smaller scale and more in the past, the Countess Amaranta.

If Galdós lingers on Moratín’s The Maidens’ Consent, it is not due to any special appreciation for his prescripts, which he never accepted, but to moral imperatives. For the young liberal writer who undertakes in 1873 the task of fictionalizing a century and a half of Spanish history, that is, after the Prim Revolution and on the eve of the First Republic, educating Spain marks the beginning of regeneration; once placed in this terrain, the education of women seems essential to the efficient running of the country he believed to be on the horizon. The Maidens’ Consent was one of the first calls to educate young women and a warning against the education in convents, where pretending was considered an ideal standard of social co-existence. Moreover, the implementation of a neoclassical theater with its unities of place, time, and action suddenly made the theater of Luciano Comella obsolete with all its disparate theatrical effects, its booming titles, its historical improbability, and its cheap sentimentality. The collapse of this false, ludicrous ostentation and the return of dignity to theatrical language must have seemed to Galdós like signs that were already pointing to the mature and industrious Spain that he desired.

In fact, this new theater that excited a handful of spectators and terrorized the old guard had a short life in Spain. Alfonso Reyes reminds us that Spanish humanism has always distinguished itself because of its aversion to a strict adherence to convention. Therefore, no great work of art in Spain has been born of narrow precepts. Galdós himself, however much sympathy he might have felt for Moratín and his didactic theater, places in the mouth of Araceli, in passing, a comment that to us seems like an unrepressed sigh of relief. Once again, the speaker is not the young page who was the protagonist of the story but the old Don Gabriel de Araceli who, recalling Moratín’s importance during his time, wrote: “No one could deny him the honor of having revived the true spirit of Spanish comedy, and The Young Maidens’ Consent has always seemed to me a work of great genius in spite of the part I took at the first performance of that play — as the reader may remember,” concluding, “He died in 1828, but his letters and papers reveal no trace of his having known the works of Byron, Goethe, or Schiller; he went to his grave believing in Goldoni as the greatest poet of his day.” A superb way to dot the i’s and cross the t’s because, until recently, the stature attributed to the Venetian playwright in Spain was more or less the same as that enjoyed by the brothers Álvarez Quintero.

In Galdós, exercises of intertextuality and meta-fiction complement and constitute each other. In The Court of Carlos IV, a complex and almost imperceptible game between Gabriel Araceli, the very young central character, and the same Gabriel sixty-something years later as he is writing his memoirs, takes place. The circumstances viewed through the eyes of the young narrator are recounted with the voice of someone who is living amazing times. On those occasions the space is covered with a bright light and that brightness endows the page’s movements with an exceptional agility. Gabriel’s complicated maneuvers to dodge the weighty commissions of comedians and aristocrats, and finally, of constables, the speed of his movements, his personal grace, the repetitive game of hide-and-seek that allows him to survive risks, inevitably evoke the quintessential page, the marvelous Cherubino, less Beaumarchais’ than Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s. The author’s sporadic interventions, in the voice of the former page turned prosperous octogenarian, exist to correct or broaden assertions made by the young protagonist, if not to inform the reader about events following the period during which the Episode takes place. In 1805, the year in which The Maidens’ Consent was published, Moratín was a living author, and even lived twenty years more in exile in Bordeaux; the judgment regarding his ignorance of Byron, Goethe, and Schiller constitutes one of the additions of the old Araceli to the past. The young Gabriel would not have been able, for obvious reasons, to make that comment. The use of more or less disguised meta-fictional techniques provide a ripple that animates the story without creating unnecessary difficulties.

In The Court of Carlos IV, the war between the dramatic schools is ubiquitous and permanent. The same happens with the comediantes; a sworn enmity reigns between those from the theater of Caños de Peral, those from the de la Cruz, and those from the del Príncipe. In the Palace, something worse is taking place: the fight to the death between the supporters of the Crown Prince and those of his royal parents. The majority of the courtiers are loyal to the Prince’s cause, while the group favorable to the King and Queen diminishes. The palace residents, both those of the noble floors as well as those on the lower floors, are protagonists of an internal struggle. Intrigue flourishes everywhere; the hatreds are Spanish, that is, frightening; only blood seems to be able to appease them. Not long after this Episode begins we meet Lesbia and Amaranta at the dinner of Pepa González; upon their arrival they pretend to be on good terms, but the allusion to the palace dispute is enough to cause the masks to fall and the hatred to present itself in its fullness.

The genre of the historical novel that Galdós writes often acquires an antiheroic tone. The characters are never the noteworthy protagonists of history, but rather everyday individuals who, for some reason, are positioned at a given time beside the noteworthy and are witness to their misfortunes. Important historical events occupy much less space in these narratives than human conflicts. The established interrelationship between real and fictional characters demands of Galdós a special novel structure, to which he must have arrived by pure instinct. The architecture of some of the Episodes is superior to that of his thesis novels written during the same period—Doña Perfecta, Gloria, The Family of León Roch—in which the stories possess a prefabricated and stiff quality, and where the action is reduced to a succession of almost always predictable scenes. In the majority of the National Episodes, the historical event is known only through the reflection projected onto the social swarm. Often that reflection illuminates incidental, almost faceless, characters who in a few sentences lend the requisite accuracy or inaccuracy to, and pass judgment on, the historical event; that participation, however, gives them a momentary face before returning to the shadows. Thanks to that wonderful institution known as the tertulia, the uniquely Spanish version of the salon, which is as vibrant as or more so than the street, history is reflected every night through a prism of a thousand faces. Everyone expresses and maintains an opinion, unleashes his passions, expresses his truth in a violently biased manner according to his stake in it, until suddenly all that remains of that historical event are words rendered unintelligible from constant rumination, quarter or half-truths, distorted shadows of great figures, faces in chiaroscuro, the suppuration of tumors of a society whose spokesmen have been, in appearance only, selected at random.

In addition to the conspiracy present in The Court of Carlos IV, there is another rather blurred event kept in the background: the march of Napoleon’s troops into Spanish territory, an event that will condition the ten Episodes of the First Series in which Galdós proposes to give us the terrifying and exciting image of French intervention in Spain and the heroic reconquista of its sovereignty won by the Spanish people. Notwithstanding the magnificent epicness of the subject, the author seems to revel in an exaggerated lack of urgency in order to approach any historical record. Only from the twelfth chapter of The Court on do we witness Gabriel Araceli enter the Palace — that is, the court of Carlos IV. Throughout all the previous chapters, we have known the exacerbation of popular passion for the Prince, the general repudiation of the King and Queen and the immeasurable hatred for Godoy, the Prince of Peace, Prime Minister of the Kingdom, and favorite of the Queen. Fernando is vested with all conceivable virtues, and the King and Queen with vices and defects in abundance, and Godoy with all the ills of the troubled kingdom. Whether in the royal premises, the palaces of the nobility, or Madrid’s most ramshackle cottages, the people yearn for change. Fernando’s popularity is able to withstand all attacks. Once the conspiracy is discovered, and the Prince faces a possible death sentence, that popularity is transmuted into worship. After having confessed his participation in the frustrated crime, begged forgiveness from the King and Queen, sworn vows of repentance, and shamefully denounced several of his friends as the true conspirators, no one in Madrid is able to believe the news. In the mind of the people, there can be only two possibilities: either that ignoble confession bears at the bottom a forged signature or, if it is authentic, it must have been extracted from the barrel of a gun pointed at his chest. In this way, Fernando adds to his many honors already won another of overwhelming force: martyrdom. The news of the advance of French troops fills the Madrileños with joy; everyone assumes that Napoleon’s intention is to rescue the Prince from the hands of his executioners and place the crown on his brow.

The morning that the news of the military invasion spreads, Araceli has gone out shopping for his mistress. Hans Hinterhäuser notes that the vitality of Galdosian characters crystallizes in not only an aesthetic but also a moral category. Gabriel’s morning walk amply demonstrates this. Each of the acquaintances he encounters is convinced — as if having heard it from the most reliable of sources — that Napoleon and his myrmidons are advancing with the purpose of ridding Spain of all its woes. The dialogical carnival takes place, the triumph of heteroglossia; Galdós grants his creatures all the space they require, giving each of them a unique and unmistakable voice to express themselves freely. Both the National Episodes and the so-called Contemporary Novels share attributes that Bakhtin identifies in Dostoevsky when coining the terms polyphony and heteroglossia. “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.”¹⁵ The novels of Galdós’s early period, written at the same time as the first two series of Episodes, represent, on the other hand, polyphonic negation; the protagonists do not participate of their own will, but rather recite a role dictated by the author. They are divided sharply into black and white, according to their political and religious convictions. The author manipulates them unscrupulously and does not allow them to develop. In the Episodes, however, perhaps because he considers them minor works, mere exercises for teaching national history, the freedom denied in those first “serial novels” is allowed.

If the tertulia—whether it takes place in a house, a casino, or a café—is the perfect venue for polyphonic flow to occur completely, the other is the street. Let us return to Gabriel’s shopping excursion: an acquaintance of his confides to him that Napoleon has undertaken the conquest of Portugal to then give it to Spain, a country he loves, and, above all, to rid Spain of Godoy, “an impostor, insolent, lustful, deceitful, and designing.” A priest is sure that Napoleon has taken this step to punish the excesses of Godoy against the Church, and concludes that he will place the Prince of Asturias on the throne to restore abused ecclesiastical rights in the Kingdom; the playwright Luciano Francisco Comella, the unrivaled enemy of any dramatic precept, swears that Napoleon is coming to do away with Godoy, who could be forgiven for all his sins but never his protection of bad poets, giving short shrift to good, national poets, Spaniards like him, who did not accept that mishmash of ridiculous foreign precepts with which Moratín and other gaiter-clad poetasters tried to trick simpletons. Everyone vents his spleen. They agree on two points: one, that Godoy was corrupt, wasteful, immoral, an influence peddler, polygamist, enemy of the Church who, moreover, aspired to sit on the throne of the kings of Spain; and, the other, that Spain would only be happy and recover its past grandeur when the infante Fernando took the crown. Gabriel only found one person, a modest knife-grinder, who despised the delusions of the others. Neither the King and Queen nor the Prince deserved his trust. “Napoleon,” he said, “would invade the kingdom, get rid of the parents and the son, and put one of his relatives on the throne, as he had done in the other countries he had conquered,” words that produce in the page the effect of an ice water bath. The drunkenness produced by the collective rumor seemed to vanish.

As Amaranta’s servant, who lodges at the Escorial, Gabriel witnesses an extraordinary event. The day of his arrival he wanders the corridors near his mistress’s apartments in the interior of the Palace. He sees there an imposing procession returning the Prince to his room as a prisoner. The sepulchral chiaroscuro of that scene again evokes Goya.

Gabriel spends only three or four days in the Escorial — long enough to reveal to him part of the rich variety of human baseness, and for him to comprehend the foul air and minefield that are part and parcel of living off the royal family. His experience in Madrid had accustomed the young protagonist to comedians — their habits, their whims, and their weaknesses. He need only step foot in the Palace in order to witness scenes that exceed in theatricality those previously enjoyed in the theater. Except that the monarchs represented by Isidoro Máiquez seem much more dignified and majestic to him than the one who wears the true crown. The flesh and blood king turns out to be “of middle stature, thick-set with a small face and high color, and devoid of any single feature which could suggest a distinction imprinted by Nature on his physiognomy between a king of blue blood and a respectable grocer.”

The scene in which Gabriel sees him for the first time constitutes the novel’s climactic moment: the Crown Prince is being led by his father through a dark corridor dimly lit by a single candlestick. Accompanying the King and the Prince are palace guards. The conspiracy has been uncovered: Fernando has just given a statement and is led to his quarters, where he will remain from then on as a prisoner. “His anxious, gloomy face revealed the bitterness in his soul.” A palace purge has followed the arrest of the Prince. No one feels safe in the royal premises, neither gentlemen nor ladies of the court, neither officers nor servants. Gabriel witnessed several spectacular arrests and senses fear and confusion in both courtiers and servants. Everything becomes fiction, pure theater; impure theater. The edifice of the State is about to collapse, but the King, as if he were aware of nothing, entertains himself in the hunt from morning to night at the royal reserves. No member of the family seemed to serve any purpose: a proclivity for laziness and a widely cultivated ignorance render them incapable of reacting to the storm that is brewing. Palace residents move incoherently, stunned by the Prince’s confession and his betrayal. His only hope lies in the arrival of the French army, the resulting liberation of the Prince and his ascent to the throne. Hidden involuntarily behind a tapestry, Gabriel overhears a conversation between Amaranta and Queen María Luisa. The Queen implores her loyal maid to intervene with the Minister of Mercy and Justice so that Lesbia is not questioned. She knows too many secrets; she may implicate her. She may have kept letters and objects that can be presented as evidence. Her appearance in the case was to be avoided by all means necessary. Having forgotten briefly about the danger, they speak glibly about past trysts and the distribution of governmental posts or ecclesiastical benefices and sinecures. The Queen wants Godoy to grant a bishop’s miter to the uncle of her youngest son’s wet nurse; he is opposed for petty reasons, simply because the aforementioned uncle has been a contrabandist and is semiliterate. But she is going to pressure Godoy — she says boasting of her powers — to force him to sign the appointment; otherwise, the crown will refuse to ratify the secret treaty with France that would grant her favorite sovereignty over the Algarves, which the French have promised after they occupy and divide Portugal. Look, if you do not make Gregorilla’s uncle a Bishop, we will not ratify the treaty, and you will never be King of the Algarves! Only a Queen could say such things.

A complex episode in the history of Spain plays out in the house of Carlos IV: a palace revolt, a frustrated parricide, Napoleonic troops advancing on national territory; the secret treaties with Napoleon have not been ratified. Danger lurks everywhere. Life at Court at times hangs in the balance. But in the den of the Grandees of Spain nothing seems to achieve greatness. The Queen amuses herself rambling about her love affairs, the hatred she feels for those who “slander” her, the machinations she must contrive to block the path of some ladies and gentlemen who support her son’s cause, and the negotiations with her favorite. Her concept of justice slithers along the ground; the great qualities she recognizes in Caballero, the Minister of Mercy and Justice, her friend and ally, lie in his ability to conceal her indiscretions. “He is our great friend. Ever since he found a means of accusing and sending to prison the sentry and the civilian who recognized us when we went in masks to the fête of Santiago, I am greatly in his debt. Caballero does nothing but what we tell him; he is capable of making Lords of Appeal out of markers from the bullring if we ordered it. He is a capital fellow and does his duty with the docility that becomes a true minister. The poor man takes great interest in the welfare of the country.” No heroics, no true agony can thrive in this world of frightened puppets, besotted and whimpering, lacking the slightest notion of State; the welfare of the kingdom, her Majesty believes, lies in incarcerating those who have discovered her presence in an inconvenient place, and in an obedient minister, a simple accomplice, who promptly obeys her wishes.

Gabriel contemplates the scene exactly as he might follow a performance from a box at the Teatro del Príncipe; because in The Court of Carlos IV the theater as world and the world as theater appear to be one and the same. Palace life is for him so dramatic, so theatricalized, that the boundaries between the real and the fictional, the realistic and the unreal, seem to constantly blend together. Situations that could be tragic with other characters the closer they get to the circle of Carlos IV and his favorites are highly ribald. The mechanism is one of farce with piquant details. The Queen is one of the targets at which they aim; popular fury against her is unanimous — for being a libertine, predatory, a fool, ridiculous, ugly. In that theater where Gabriel has appeared, the comments he overhears accentuate the comedic toy-like character that the royal family represents. A kitchen assistant reveals to him that the Queen’s teeth are false, and she has to remove them to eat, and she doesn’t allow anyone to see. “‘You see,’ the scullion went on, ‘they are quite right in accusing the Queen of deceiving the people and trying to persuade them to believe the thing that is not. How can she expect her subjects to love a sovereign who wears other people’s teeth?’”

The only mechanism that seems to sustain him and lend an appearance of life to that rusty building is intrigue. There is no one in Court who does not scheme, from the monarchs to their grooms. And this activity generates a vitality, fictitious perhaps, but effective. Gabriel discovers the strength of this practice by observing the machinations of his protector: “Amaranta was not merely a cunning and intriguing woman; she was intrigue incarnate; she was the very demon of palaces — that terrible spirit which makes history, with all her sense and dignity seem sometimes the genius of mystification and mistress of falsehood — that terrible spirit which has brought confusion on our race and made nations enemies — debasing monarchies and republics alike, and despotic governments no less than free ones. She was the incarnation of that hidden machinery, of which the outer world knows nothing, but which reaches from the gates of a Palace to the King’s chambers, and on whose springs, worked by a hundred hands, depend honors, dignities, nay, life itself; the noble blood of armies, and the glory of nations. Greed, bribery, injustice, simony, arbitrary and licentious authority…”

In this world where dignity and greatness are mere appearances, the desire to be someone grows stronger in Gabriel. They may scoff at his aspirations for rank and honor, but no one will stop him. Gabriel senses that he and those like him who were born and raised in the midst of the harshest reality will eventually survive the disaster. It will be they who steer the ship we see on the verge of capsizing. Galdós seems to give his hero wings in order to soar. Forty years later, when he writes the final Episodes, his vision will be more skeptical, but, at the same time, more certain.

Galdós anticipates a device that Franz Werfel will employ successfully in this century in Juarez and Maximilian, a play in which, from beginning to end, he was able to make the presence of the Mexican hero felt without his ever appearing on the scene. In each of the chapters of The Court of Carlos IV the name of the most powerful man in Spain is mentioned; he is damned and cursed forever; we know the places he visits, the comments he makes, when he arrives to the Palace, and even what he eats, but he never appears. He is an invisible man who for many years has pulled, at his discretion and pleasure, the strings of the kingdom only to become ensnared in the tangled web of his own making. His fate, like that of the King and Queen, like that of the Spain we visited, is sealed. The curtain is about to fall. Other dramas, comedies, and farces will be performed. Other characters will be the protagonists. Another chorus, riotous, monstrous and generous, naive and cunning, clueless, intuitive, manipulated, mean and tender, is about to enter the stage. Forever a giant. The Spanish people! In the Episodes that follow, their presence will be definitive.

Xalapa, September 1994

13 Translated by Clara Bell

14 Translated by Maria G. Tomsech

15 Translated by Caryl Emerson

OUR CONTEMPORARY CHEKHOV

Cyril Connolly asserts that the writer must aspire to write a work of genius. Otherwise, he is lost. This preemptory requirement is, of course, stimulating, a crack of the whip to banish idleness, conformity, the temptation of easiness. But it must arrive when the time is right if he does not want to herd the sheep toward the wolf. Whosoever seeks his soul will lose it, say the Gospels. Did the young Joyce know as he was struggling with the Dubliners that Ulysses lay in his future? Were Mann and Kafka aware of what destiny held for them when they were writing their first stories? Did the young Cervantes, when writing his first lines of verse, which were presumably mediocre, imagine himself as the immortal author of the Spanish language? It occurs to me that one could interpret Connolly’s assertion in a less dramatic way: Every writer should from the beginning remain faithful to his potential and try to refine it; have the greatest respect for language, keep it alive, update it if possible; not make concessions to anyone, least of all to power or to trends; and contemplate in his work the boldest challenges it is possible to conceive. At least that was the way Chekhov came to be the great writer he is. He wrote at first, when he noticed his facility for inventing stories, to earn money to support his family; it took a few years to discover that being a writer required more than relating a funny anecdote or a dramatic episode. Daily practice made him aware of the possibilities of the craft. He was always faithful to his intuition, exceptionally demanding of himself, indifferent to the judgment of others, alien to any temptation of power, to all forms of excess or falsehood, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a personal narrative method. As a result, he bequeathed to humanity a handful of brilliant works.

The Seagull marks the transformation of the contemporary theater. This is a beautiful and moving work that no one was able to understand in its first performances. It breaks sharply with Russian tradition. And not just with Russian tradition; today’s theater, especially the Anglo-Saxon, is still in its debt. In the play, which is set at the end of the nineteenth century, there is a young poet, Treplieff, who does his utmost to create a new literary language; Treplieff belongs to the symbolist literary school. Chekhov makes use of the classical device of theater within theater, and includes in The Seagull the performance of a monologue by Treplieff, a verbal delirium, a distortion that is not a recreation but a parody of symbolist language. If Chekhov’s sympathy for the young poet and his plight are evident from the beginning to the end of the work, it is also true that his literary activity is treated with a slight disdain. A fragment of the monologue is included in the middle of the first act of The Seagull. A beautiful and aspiring actress, who embodies the “Spirit of the Universe,” delights in informing us that all living beings have been extinct for several thousand years and that the earth has not given birth to any new species. The Spirit of the Universe opens her mouth only every one hundred years to reveal the relentless struggle waged for centuries against the Devil, the King of Matter. She is convinced that the day will come when she will be able to defeat him. “After a fierce and obstinate battle,” the Spirit exclaims, “that could last many millennia, I will conquer the source of the Forces of Matter. Matter and Spirit will merge in glorious harmony, the earth will populate itself again, and the Kingdom of Universal Freedom will be born.” The monologue, as the reader has probably noticed, is tedious, naïve, and prosy. The constant use of abstractions, the contempt for real people and their trivial problems, the search for infinity, all correspond to Chekhov’s notion of symbolist literature. It is well known that he detested romanticism and distrusted the new school that was beginning to flourish in Russia. He saw symbolists as a new incarnation of the romantics. The symbolists never forgave Chekhov for that parody. He was considered an insignificant writer of local customs. He, however, considered himself a realist. Words like “realism” and “realist” are often discredited today; they are applied cautiously and rather derisively, and leave a sense of imprecision and exude an odor of vulgarity. In a conversation with Serena Vitale, Viktor Shklovsky declared shortly before he died: “The truth is I have never been able to understand what the term realism means, and I’m not talking just about socialist realism, just plain realism. It’s a useless designation that means nothing in literature!”

To be clear, when Chekhov defined himself as a realist writer, he did so with the same calm conviction with which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky accepted the term. For them and their contemporaries, the adjective had a precise meaning. Chekhov would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that there is not a single major essay today that does not linger on his work’s intense symbolic charge. The Seagull, where he parodied that current, is perhaps the most symbolist — from the very title! — of his dramas.

Even if Chekhov considered his literature to belong to the Russian realist tradition, he was aware of the fundamental differences between his work and that of his predecessors and contemporaries. His quests and intentions could not have been more dissimilar. The epic breath of Tolstoy, the spiritual exaltation of Dostoevsky, and the pathos of Andreyev were viscerally foreign to him. His work marks not only the end of a literary period; it also brings to a close a historic world. He is, as Vittorio Strada has accurately observed, a transitional writer situated between two worlds. Chekhov’s originality was disconcerting to his contemporaries and, during his early period, truly incomprehensible. “Even today,” the Italian critic adds, “he remains the most difficult writer in Russian literature, because under a maximum of apparent transparency lies hidden a core that resists all critical formulations.”

One of the modes of Chekhovian narrative is its fragmentation, sometimes its pulverization. This is not capricious, rather a formal response to one of his fundamental concerns. The world of Chekhov seems to turn on a single axis: lack of communication. The breakdown in communication occurs especially among the most sensitive and generous people, and affects the most delicate relationships: lovers, friends, parents, and children. Little by little, the characters lose their voice, they become frozen by their words, and when they are forced to speak they coagulate language, infect it, so what could be a celebration of reconciliation becomes a duel of enemies or, worse still, a contemptuous indifference.

In 1888, with “The Steppe,” Chekhov initiated a new form of writing whose originality seems to have gone unnoticed, at least at the time. For eight years he had written stories and novels. The world in “The Steppe” is seen through a child’s eyes, but the language is not the language of childhood, rather it struggles to reach other levels. The challenge was more demanding than it seemed at first sight. Chekhov was not content to follow the child’s gaze and translate in perfect language his discoveries, passions, fears; he proposed something more complex: to fuse his own view of the universe with the limited perceptions of a child protagonist. Hence a new poetics was born. The perceptions of the child, Yegorushka, constitute the main body of the story, but the refined descriptions of nature, the digressions and reflections on it could scarcely be attributed to him. The story corresponds to a child’s gaze, but it is written in a style not always accessible to that gaze.

“Chekhov,” says Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “does not contemplate nature only from an aesthetic point of view, even if all of his works contain a multitude of tiny, elegant brushstrokes that document the subtlety of his powers of observation. Like every true poet, he feels a profound affection for nature, an instinctive understanding of his unconscious life. He not only admires it from a distance like a serene and observant artist, but he also absorbs it fully as a man and leaves his indelible mark on all his ideas and feelings.” In “The Steppe” the description of nature and the reflections on it are Chekhov’s; the perception of human events belong to the child protagonist.

It is the retelling of a child’s first steps through the world. As he travels across the steppe he comes to know the unpredictable world of adults and the no less disturbing world of nature. He confronts dangers from which, in the end, he will emerge invictus. His experience possesses all the features of an initiatory rite. For the author, it is a question of a journey as well as a challenge. It is a journey toward a new narrative form. Like the steppe, the story lacks fixed boundaries at the beginning and the end.

There appears in the story a character destined to grow in importance in the Chekhovian universe. He lacks any appealing quality. Neither Gogol nor Turgenev, Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky could portray him because he did not exist during their lifetime. He is an entrepreneur, the representative of the new capitalism that is beginning to take shape in Russia. That character’s name in “The Steppe” is Varlamov; Varlamov, not unlike the representatives of the new Russian intelligentsia — Stanislavsky, Diaghilev, and Chekhov himself — was probably the son or grandson of serfs. To Chekhov these energetic and active men who were beginning to lead the world were necessary but also deeply odious. Yegorushka hears about Varlamov from every character he encounters along his journey across the steppe. He is in charge. However, when he finally sees him more than halfway through the novel he is surprised by his appearance. He expected to see a kind of tsar but what he finds is an insignificant man in a white cap and plain corduroy suit. He’s the “short, gray, large-booted little man on the ugly nag who was talking to peasants at an hour when all decent people are still abed.”¹⁶ Twice he sees him use the whip: once to beat Jewish innkeepers; a second time to whip a character that was unable to give him accurate information. Such is his way of communicating with the world: his language. It does not escape Yegorushka that however insignificant he may look there was a sense of strength and control over his surroundings in everything about him, even in the way he held the whip.

Varlamov’s fists decide the fate of all those who inhabit or travel the steppe. He exists on the same level as, if not above, nature. During a march in a storm at night, Yegorushka, half-asleep, is able to see, through the flashes of lightning, his fellow travelers. The image transmitted to us is like that of Breughel’s blind men. The old men lean on each other, one’s face is deformed due to chronic swelling in his jaw, another drags his swollen feet; another, ahead of them, like a sleepwalker, a former cantor who has lost voice, trudges along. Covered in coarse straw mats, they crawl beside the wagons. These monstrous figures, nature’s castoffs, are the future portrait of what the handsome, strapping young men, newcomers to the trade, walking behind them, will become.

As a rule, the first paragraph of a Chekhov story gives us the essential data and tone of the story. We should not expect major surprises in the story, rather a mere germination of a seed that is already found in the overture. On the first page of “The Name-Day Party,” we learn that Olga Mikhailovna is pregnant, that she lives in a provincial mansion surrounded by vast gardens where, on that day, her husband’s Saint’s Day is being celebrated, and that the celebration has fatigued and irritated her. Everything suggests that the story will be told from her point of view. We also learn that she does not live in harmony with the world around her. She has just been served an eight-course meal, and the endless clamor that accompanied it has exhausted her to the point of fainting. We have the feeling that the society around her irritates her more than what could be considered natural. There appears in her reflections a tension that foreshadows hysteria and foretells a dramatic denouement. That tension is expressed within the dichotomy that always interested Chekhov: the confrontation between society and nature; the former represented by the behavior of the party guests, the latter by the son the woman carries in her womb. Olga Mikhailovna flees the party in the first paragraph to hide momentarily in a garden path where amid the smell of freshly cut hay and honey and the buzzing of bees she surrenders herself to the emotions of the tiny being she carries inside her womb so that they may take complete control over her. But this raptio in the middle of nature lasts only momentarily. Society prevails, and that place in her thoughts that was to be occupied by the child is invaded by a feeling of guilt for having abandoned her guests and by a marital quarrel, which is inevitable in all of Chekhov’s stories. Her husband has just railed against some recent reforms: trial by jury, freedom of the press, and the education of women — three victories won by liberal society over the autocracy. She disagrees with her husband’s position just to annoy him. And this fact brings us closer to the real source of her problems. The dilemma between nature and society finds a viable channel to express itself: the naked opposition between man and woman. Overcome by jealousy, the protagonist only notices her husband’s defects and surely magnifies them. Piotr Dmitrich’s affectation awakens a morbid hatred in her. But, is she as real a character as she seems? Does she truly live the enlightened ideas that she proclaims? Or does she merely take advantage of some abstract concepts, at moments such as this, in order to feel superior to her husband? Possibly. The fact is that we see something cold and possessive in her agitation, a blind desire to take control of men that renders her odious to us. Both are fed up with the party that began in the morning and will last until midnight. The drama unfolds throughout the seemingly never-ending hours that transpire during the festivities. The inability to speak, to communicate, begins to take control of her, until she can no longer withstand the pressure inside, and it spills out in a fit of near-madness. Resentment, spite, and rage triumph. The ending is tragic. Society prevails in the worst possible way over nature, the biological instinct. The couple, who during the party have played a complicated game of masquerade, end up destroying the unborn life. The original, the important, the essentially Chekhovian, is constituted by the construction of the story through a storm of details, almost all apparently trivial. A single act, two or three words spoken in passing, is enough to recreate an atmosphere and suggest a past. The trivial suddenly becomes important, significant.

When in “Peasants,” Nikolai Tchikildyeev, sick and despondent, arrives to his birthplace, he finds a dark, dirty, and miserable place that in no way corresponds to his nostalgia, where life in the village seemed radiant, beautiful, and tender. The initial silence is broken when his little daughter calls a cat and another girl, only eight years, the only human who receives them, exclaims:

“He can’t hear. He’s deaf. They gave him a beating.”

Everything has already been said! The blows that have burst the cat’s ear are sufficient to mark the space where Nikolai Tchikildyeev has arrived, and how bitter his days will be before death rescues him. The universe of cruelty is the same in a rustic peasant hut as in the opulent houses of the new bourgeoisie, like the one the protagonist inhabits in “A Woman’s Kingdom,” or the one belonging to the new rising class of merchants that appears in that extraordinary story, horror among horrors, titled “In the Ravine.” If a moral message can be inferred from the Chekhovian characters it is to resist succumbing to the mercilessness and vulgarity distilled by the domestic tyrants who populate the netherworlds where they are trapped. Confronting them is next to impossible. But we must resist, suffer, not yield, work, nor allow ourselves to be pulled under. If they achieve this, they will have won.

In a famous essay on Chekhov, written a few months before his death, Thomas Mann points out: “If references are to be made and praises bestowed, then I must certainly mention ‘A Tedious Tale,’ for it is my favorite among all Chekhov’s stories, an outstandingly fascinating work which for gentleness, sadness, and strangeness has no equal in the literary world.”¹⁷ This is a story that can be read from several perspectives, that remains open to interpretation by the reader, and that despite the warmth and pity that the author shows toward his creatures is but the agonizing portrait of a downfall. An old professor, the protagonist, discovers at the end of his days that no matter how noble his efforts to achieve something in life may have seemed, deep down his life has been meaningless; it differs in no way from that of Tolstoy’s insensitive Ivan Ilych. And as for the simplest question—“What is to be done?”—with which his young pupil, the only person in the world in whom he has taken any interest, confronts him, he cannot (or will not) but answer, “I don’t know, Katya. Upon my honor, I don’t know!”

As Chekhov’s health failed and the end was looming, his social ideas began to radicalize. He signed documents and protests, expressed solidarity with persecuted students; he distanced himself from Suvorin, his editor, his Maecenas, and until then his confidant and closest friend. In a particularly severe letter ending their relationship, he writes: “Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.”

From a young age he was an admirer of Comte, a committed positivist. He once wrote, referring to the Gospel teachings of Tolstoy, that the peasant is turned into a compendium of all virtues: “Tolstoy’s morality no longer moves me. I don’t find it sympathetic deep inside my heart. Peasant blood runs in my veins. Don’t talk to me about the virtue of muzhiks! I have believed in progress since I was very young. Objective reflections and my sense of justice tell me that in electricity and in steam there is more love for man than in chastity, fasting, and denial of the flesh.”

However, his faith in reason, science, and progress did not stop — because his writing was a pure exercise in freedom — some of his stories from adopting an almost evangelical tone. In one of his last short stories, “In the Ravine,” evil and usury are assimilated into a lie, and the only nobility is connected to suffering, the rhythms of nature, the earth, manual labor, with religiosity as intense as that of the late Tolstoy that he disliked so much. The only difference is that in Chekhov, the preacher disappears and only the writing remains. In a letter he writes: “Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. […] That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom — freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.”¹⁸ In his narratives and plays, these clear concepts would be transformed into a storm of details, would fragment, become dust, ashes, unfinished sketches, apathy, vague intonations. Paradoxically, this apparent insignificance would infuse his work with meaning and value. Perhaps that is what allows us to read him as a contemporary.

Xalapa, August 1993

16 Translated by Ronald Hingley

17 From “The Stature of Anton Chekhov” by Thomas Mann.

18 Translated by Constance Garnett

ŠVEJK¹⁹

In the opening scene of The Good Soldier Švejk, the author, Jaroslav Hašek, places his protagonist at the very center of history: of Bohemia, his country, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of Europe, and of the world. In Sarajevo, Švejk is told that the heir to the imperial throne has just been assassinated. In the subsequent episodes of Hašek’s antiheroic tale, history will gradually lose its gifts and privileges, it will fade into a distorted backdrop against which a series of disproportionate and grotesque actions unfolds, whose protagonists are the poor soldier who gives the title its name, his friends and tavern mates, and his comrades in arms, all of whom lack any aspiration to grandeur, prestige, or glory. And, too, as the story progresses, a more abstract plot takes shape: the absurdity that governs and weaves the infinite network of relationships created by power within society and manipulated from above, and, ultimately, the neglect of an insignificant man, who in novels is but an infinitesimal part of a crowd, an easily interchangeable subordinate, committed, almost always, to being unaware of his neglect. The Good Soldier Švejk illustrates how this candid and irreducibly anarchic being, the protagonist, suddenly sees himself trapped by a seemingly perfect machine, and describes further the tools of wit that a homunculus is capable of employing to avoid being destroyed by mechanisms that he will never succeed in or be interested in understanding.

This character, always surprised but never intimidated, who ambles through a labyrinth of bridges and corridors, courts and galleries, until arriving at the front lines, navigates various court proceedings as enigmatic as those brought against Mr. K., his neighbor in Prague. Neglect and lack of pretexts, rather than reduce this Bohemian Sancho, have given him a freedom that the sedentary man would be unable to conceive of. Trapped in a seemingly impregnable and treacherous prison and administrative world, Švejk will have no choice but to topple it or cause it to explode. Because the Švejks of the world, men with doltish faces, are the perfect gravediggers of any empire. Dogged and guileless, they are destined to be implacable moles, cheerful and voracious termites, and time bombs ready to demolish any system considered to be monolithic, rigorous, and univocal. They have as their golem another of the illustrious characters of Prague: the vitality of the imprecise and the unfinished. They are unpleasant, they are vulgar, and above all, they are indestructible. Like cockroaches, they will manage to survive any disaster.

In the opening paragraph of Hašek’s novel, Mrs. Müller, a charwoman at a squalid rooming house, announces to her tenant, Švejk, a hawker of dogs: “So they’ve killed our Ferdinand!”²⁰ The action takes place in Prague. The author makes clear immediately that an army medical board has certified our protagonist an “obvious imbecile.” They’re talking about none other than the Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, the heir to the Empire’s throne. From that moment on, a dialogue of the deaf takes place between heraldry and ordinariness at ground level. Mrs. Müller will settle on the highest branches of the ruling dynasty; her tenant, on much more villainous levels. Of course, Švejk will triumph, and although the novel endeavors to address the decline and fall of an empire, it will forever be, from the beginning to end, a chronicle of disorderly factions, those most contemptuous of perfection that society embodies. Hašek’s novel is a chronicle that revels in its vulgarity, in the absence of virtues, in bodily filth, and, in due time, in scatophilia.

Švejk, all the while rubbing his knees with an anti-rheumatic liniment, asks the question that anyone would think to ask upon hearing the Christian name of someone who has been killed: “Which Ferdinand, Mrs. Müller?” adding, before the interlocutor can answer, that he only knew two Ferdinands, one the delivery boy of the chemist Prusa, who had once drunk a bottle of hair lotion by mistake, and the other Ferdinand Kokoška, who collected dog waste from the streets. He concludes, “They wouldn’t be any great loss, either of ’em.”

Thus, from the beginning, an irrepressible and bawdy verbal stream flows from the protagonist’s mouth. Švejk’s speech recalls those drunken, incoherent, and unhinged tirades heard in taverns in the wee hours of the morning. After hearing that the assassination involved a member of the imperial family, he comments that a customer at the pub had told him not long ago that someday all the emperors in the world would be brought down, which forced the tavern owner to have him arrested, but the bloke landed a punch on the landlord and two on the policeman. He adds that they then took him away in a drunk cart until he returned to his senses, and while the dizzied reader is unable to grasp what the rain of punches was all about — who gives them or who receives them or why they happened in the first place—Švejk returns suddenly to the death of the Crown Prince, without a doubt the most commented upon incident at the time in every corner of the Empire. But the manner in which he explains his reflections is extremely chaotic: “Yes, Mrs. Müller, there’s queer things going on nowadays; that there is. That’s another loss to Austria. When I was in the army there was a private who shot a captain. He loaded his rifle and went into the orderly room. They told him to clear out, but he kept on saying that he must speak to the captain. Well the captain came along and gave him a dose of C.B. Then he took his rifle and scored a fair bull’s eye. The bullet went right through the captain and when it came out the other side, it did some damage in the orderly room, in the bargain. It smashed a bottle of ink and the ink got spilled all over some regiment records.” Like us, the readers, Mrs. Müller is completely lost. She ponders everything for a moment, trying to understand the story, then, unwisely, asks her tenant the fate of the soldier. Švejk’s response is instantaneous: “‘He hanged himself with a pair of braces,’ said Švejk, brushing his bowler hat. ‘And they wasn’t even his. He borrowed them from a jailer, making out that his trousers were coming down. You can’t blame him for not waiting till they shot him. You know, Mrs. Müller, it’s enough to turn anyone’s head, being in a fix like that. The jailer lost his rank and got six months as well. But he didn’t serve his time. He ran away to Switzerland and now he does a bit of preaching for some church or other. There ain’t many honest people about nowadays, Mrs. Müller.’” And soon after these longwinded and unnecessary circumlocutions, he returns to the topic: “‘I expect that the Archduke was taken in by the man who shot him. He saw a chap standing there and thought: Now there’s a decent fellow, cheering me and all. And then the chap did him in.’”

In that inornate beginning, overwhelmed by the character’s verbal incontinence, we glimpse Hašek’s narrative intention: to degrade history, History in uppercase, until it becomes a trivial series of foolish tales. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne constitutes one of the most consequential events in our century. The shot that ended the life of the Archduke marked the beginning of the First World War, an event that would change Europe’s political landscape and, in the medium or long term, the world. The collapse of the empire would give rise to a new series of nation states. Bohemia, the country where Švejk lived, would unite with Slovakia to form the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Inside Russia, the other great empire of Continental Europe, a transformation of the social, political, and economic structures would take place that would introduce others that until then had been regarded with the conflicting emotions of loathing and hope. Utopia was becoming a reality. Borders everywhere would change. There would be a new distribution of colonial territories and spheres of influence. For Švejk, the assassination of Ferdinand of Habsburg is reduced to the level of the death of the druggist Prusa’s delivery boy, that idiot who accidentally ingested a hair lotion, that of Kokoška, the collector of dog excrement on the streets of Prague, or the soldier who hanged himself with the jailer’s suspenders. The episodes of greater historical significance are trivialized upon being compared with the most anodyne human detritus. Hereafter, this device will become one of the hallmarks of the best contemporary Czech narrative. The tone of the Švejk’s soliloquies resembles the delirium of those drunkards who remember everything only to confuse everything. Hašek’s world is a world upside down, where the mechanisms of power are confused with carnival and where plot and language constitute a marked unity with a Rabelaisian seal.

Angelo María Ripellino believes that The Good Soldier Švejk belongs to the tradition of Habsburgian literature. “Even if it does so with harshness and bitterness and without a minimum of sympathy, the book expresses the agony of the Empire, the Finis Austriae, the twilight of Kakania, of that — as Musil said — misunderstood and now non-existent nation that was in so many ways an unappreciated model.” Hašek’s book, in fact, does not reveal any sympathy for this world or any of its myths. He does not delight in ironizing the extreme complexity of a culture in the process of growing dark as Musil does in The Man Without Qualities, or in the heroic military exploits regarded for centuries as the most valuable foundation of that dual monarchy — royal and imperial — as occurs in the novels of Lerner-Holenia, or in the bitter and melancholy memory of its gradual dissolution, as in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, or the delusional pathos with which Andrzej Kuśniewicz, one of the great chroniclers of that collapse, a Pole born in Galicia, one of the eastern regions of the Empire, who, in The King of the Two Sicilies and Lesson in a Dead Language, describes the death rattle of the final agony. Hašek doesn’t feel the slightest nostalgia for that defeated world on the verge of extinction. The information we have about the character testifies to his disdain for everything related to that political entity, its culture, its customs, its religion. Above all, he detested the judicial and administrative mechanisms in whose labyrinth Švejk, just like the characters of Kafka, his contemporaries, stumble endlessly, as an example that no one, no matter where he was, could permanently escape its tentacles.

Humor abounds in Hašek’s account: a malignant, barracks humor that emerges more from the belly than the intellect, more characteristic of popular culture than of the refined strata of Bohemian society. Hašek’s laughter comes from the earth and never manages — because neither does he try — to climb upward. A humor centered, to use Bakhtin’s words, on the movements of the belly and the bum. According to the Russian thinker, popular humor has a spring, dawn, and morning character par excellence: “More precisely, folk grotesque reflects the very moment when light replaces darkness, night-morning, winter-spring.”

If the humor that permeates and becomes a foundation of the narrative has this luminous character in the early chapters, where Švejk still remains far from the front, in the last chapters, as the good soldier sinks into battlefields, he changes and connects, even if only in some aspects, with the Romantic root, always present in the Germanic world, where the absence of the solar element is a condition and is the only light capable of penetrating the darkness. The most powerful aspect of German Expressionism was nourished by this violent, blasphemous, and derogatory foundation. Hašek’s world at one point coincides with the vision of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the early Kokoschka. His tone, says Wolfgang Kayser, “is sinister, dreadful, and distressing.” During Švejk’s journey, the cheerful and luminous tone at the beginning will gradually change signs, and by the time he arrives on the battlefield, it will become fecal. The soldiers march, defecate, kill, defecate again, and, in the end, die, sometimes in the very act of defecating. The war appears as a stage swept by the harshest winds, or reduced to a sordid, drunken brawl like those that might take place at any beer hall in Prague. The adventures and reflections of the delusional character who is Švejk, the dog merchant turned soldier, are resolved through an alchemical pass from dread to laughter. “Fear,” and here I return to Bakhtin, “is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter.” Alexander Herzen underscores the revolutionary character of laughter: “No one laughs in church, at court, on parade, before the head of their department, a police officer, or the German boss. House serfs have no right to smile in the presence of their masters, only equals can laugh among themselves. […] To cause men to smile at the god Apis is to deprive him of his holy status and turn him into a common bull.”²¹ And Victor Hugo adds that the great geniuses of literature distinguish themselves by committing to that which the mediocre avoid: excess and disproportion. Hašek revels in these: Švejk is the embodiment of an absence of limits.

Every era mocks certain subjects that were venerated in the past. Shakespeare laughs at the notion of the heroism contained in the Homeric poems, demolishes epos, and treats the subject as if the immense movement of troops from every corner of the Hellas to the walls of Troy, and the incessant battles where dying meant an act of obedience to the commands of the gods, were nothing more than a frivolous byplay that illustrated the marital conflict between a whore and a cuckold, as attested by the characters of Troilus and Cressida, as splendid as contemptible, the Greek Thersites and the Trojan Pandarus, whose commentaries on war and its leaders are noteworthy for their sarcasm. A very black humor runs through all tragedy. There seems to be an insurmountable rupture between this kind of humor and laughter. The same occurs in the fables of Swift, the work of Beckett, in all of the theater of the absurd. A frozen grimace accompanies their reading. Hašek’s humor is similar. Comparing in the first lines of his novel the most prized offshoot of the Habsburgian dynasty to a collector of street droppings reveals his intention. A few lines suffice to demystify Olympus. The divine Apis suddenly becomes a tame ox.

During the entire course of Švejk’s hazy slog, we never stumble upon anyone who possesses the stuff from which heroes, poets, or saints are made. The vast humanity that inhabits the pages of the novel — the officers who lead the military operations as well as the anonymous starving and drunken multitude that marches toward death — is not characterized by its epic spirit. The world of war is reduced to inarticulate cries, swearing, arrests and corporal punishment, deprivation of every kind, stupidity, robbery, incessant transit from one court to another, from prison to a military commission, from the hospital to the madhouse, from the ward to the battlefield. Amid the roar can be heard Švejk’s indefatigable mumbling. And how reasonable that voice unexpectedly begins to seem to us as it attempts to superimpose itself onto chaos! In a world that has lost all reason Švejk’s incongruent memories, the thousand absurd anecdotes that he reels off in excruciating detail with unrelenting logorrhea seem to border almost on sanity.

The author maintains an attitude of permanent ambiguity toward his creation. Is Švejk, “officially weak-minded — a chronic case,” as he likes to introduce himself, truly mentally retarded, or is he a clever impostor, a sly rogue who manages to fool the authorities all the time? His greatest blunders are always accompanied by an angelic look and an expression of absolute purity. The doubt is never resolved. One of Hašek’s great successes is to never reveal to the reader exactly who Švejk is.

Švejk renders candid testimony of every stop along his judicial odyssey. “Nowadays” he says, “it’s great fun being run in. There’s no quartering or anything of that kind. We’ve got a mattress, we’ve got a table, we’ve got a seat, we ain’t packed together like sardines, we’ll get soup, they’ll give us bread, they’ll bring a pitcher or water, there’s a closet right under our noses. It all shows you what progress there’s been.”

In an edition of the Corriere della Sera from the end of 1987, I read a story about the political perspectives that were visible at that time in Czechoslovakia; the Italian correspondent gathered opinions from writers and artists. Significant changes were beginning to take place in Eastern Europe. Unexpectedly, warm winds were blowing from Russia that seemed to announce that the end of a hibernation that had extended far too long. The Corriere article was titled: “In Prague the soldier Švejk still prevails.” One of the interviewees, whom the Italian journalist referred to by first name only, Ludvik, commented: “The country is rife with Švejkism: it’s a great literary creation, but from a moral point of view, it’s a catastrophe. Czechoslovakia is full of Švejks: hypocrites, opportunists, incompetents. Conformity and concealment know no bounds.” At that time, it was impossible for intellectuals like Ludvik to know if the official lie was exposed, strengthened, and laid bare, precisely because of the work, whether conscious or unconscious, of Švejkism. A falsehood published in the press received so much praise, acceptance, and exaggerated approval by an entire army of complacent Švejks, expressed in a tone that never rid itself of a vague taste of parody that, by contrast, was suggestive of a lie. The official statement, which was repeated with exaggerated emphasis by insane voices, was transformed immediately into a caricature. In the world of the Švejks nonsense is exemplary, an achievement of modern times. Error is extolled as a virtue. Servile adjectivization can reach aberrant levels. Švejk, for example, thinks that a prison system is exemplary because the toilets are placed under the inmates’ noses.

If prison was for Švejk a sign of obvious moral progress, the madhouse then seems to him like a perfect replica of Eden. The protagonist is tireless when singing the magnificence of these tiny paradises. “I’m blowed if I can make out why lunatics kick up such a fuss about being kept there. They can crawl about stark naked on the floor, or caterwaul like jackals, or rave and bite. If you was to do anything like that in the open street, it’d make people stare, but in the asylum it’s just taken as a matter of course. Why, the amount of liberty there is something that even the socialists have never dreamt of. The inmates can pass themselves off as God Almighty or the Virgin Mary or the Pope or the King of England or our Emperor or St. Vaclav, although the one who did him was properly stripped and tied up in solitary confinement. […] I tell you, the life there was a fair treat. You can bawl, or yelp, or sing, or blub, or moo, or boo, or jump, say your prayers or turn somersaults, or walk on all fours, or hop about on one foot, or run round in a circle, or dance, or skip, or squat on your haunches all day long, and climb up the walls. Nobody comes up to you and says: ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, call yourself civilized?’ I liked being in the asylum, I can tell you, and while I was there I had the time of my life.” To Švejk, the only access to utopia, then, is found in the world of the insane.

As his adventures go by, the protagonist’s heavenly innocence begins to disappear; everything around him seems to grow tense. A foul stench of excrement permeates his surroundings with increasing intensity.

If in the first part of the novel an occasional scatological allusion helps to create one of those festive atmospheres derived from the old medieval and Renaissance tradition where feces, as Bakhtin shows, were always “a wellbeing of body and spirit,” what is certain is that as the protagonist approaches the front, this element of laughter wrinkles and blackens. The space of hardships that Švejk moves through is transformed into a spectral field whose elements are mud, feces, and blood. Švejk, a rough and incomplete being, an embryonic golem, moves with a somnambulistic step into a landscape populated by latrines. The bodies constantly return their constitutive matter to the ground. Critics attribute such importance to latrines as if the final victory depended on them. The front is transformed into an area of corporal expulsion, where one speaks only of urinals, enemas, diarrhea, suppositories, stained underwear, and fecal stench. More than the military element, Ripellino points out, war is to Hašek a continuous defecation, a bodily act and a diarrheal mud. “Immersed in the filth of the war, the Hapsburg Empire is revealed as an excremental entity, a foul-smelling region of dirty underwear, of enemas and suppositories.”

In short: an Empire drowning in its own excrement.

Švejk, the forced pilgrim, begins to shed his friendly bonhomie and resemble a tragic character. He is unable to do it completely because his memory serves as a counterweight that establishes the necessary stability. The world that Švejk recalls is capable of reducing the brutality of war to a mere escalation of the absurd. His voice, despite the incongruity of his speech, continues to be a human voice, and reminds us that until recently men were bound by bonds different to those that the army establishes, ties that were created by mutual sympathies; they were men in the middle of men, not anonymous sleepwalkers with military step.

The story of Švejk reveals and summarizes the anarchy and lyricism of Prague’s demimonde. Like the characters of Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Jarry, from whom he descends, the protagonist remains in perpetual motion. The novel gives off a certain stench of urine, of the den of miscreants, of poorly digested alcohol. Throughout his ordeal, Švejk keeps moving, not to mention talking. He has no regrets, he doesn’t swear, he simply tries to ignore what happens around him; he doesn’t read books, he barely manages to thumb through a newspaper. His wisdom comes from purely personal experiences, from recounting the actions of the many people upon whom he’s stumbled during his life. Through the river of anecdotes that slows the narrative action (but whose appearance in itself is already the novel), foolishness unpunished, the total absurdity upon which all human destinies depend, is manifested. Sometimes these small tales interpolated within the plot are very simple, which does not subtract from their efficacy: “But such is human existence,” says Švejk. “Man goes around making mistakes and only death stops him. That’s what happened one night to the man who found a rabid dog, frozen half to death; he took it to his room and put it in the bed where he slept with his wife. As soon as the dog came into heat, it began to bite the entire family, ripping the youngest child, who slept in the crib, to pieces and devouring him.” As in Kafka, life reveals itself as a mere transit through different proceedings of an endless trial. But what anguish and heaviness there is in the author of The Trial, in Hašek it is resolved in a cruelty that on the surface always seems to end in a joke. Other times, his digressions disguise an abstraction that intensifies the absurdity of the story, especially those related to the administration of justice: “‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ said Švejk. ‘You’ll be all right in the end, just like Janetchek at Pilsen. He was a gipsy, and in 1879 they were going to hang him for robbery and murder. But he didn’t worry and he kept saying that he’d be all right in the end. And so he was. Because at the last moment they couldn’t hang him, because it was the Emperor’s birthday. So they didn’t hang him till the next day, when the Emperor’s birthday was all over. But he was in luck’s way again, because on the day after he was reprieved and there was going to be another trial, on account of some new evidence that showed it was another fellow named Janetchek who’d done it. So they had to dig him up out of the prison cemetery and give him another, proper burial in the Catholic cemetery at Pilsen, and then it turned out that he wasn’t a Catholic at all, but an evangelical.”

Czech critics strenuously ignored Hašek’s work for several years. They found the popular vulgarity of the stories of Švejk repellent. But the success of the work abroad changed its destiny. Once again, the generous hand of Max Brod decided the fate of a creator. Just as he had done with Kafka, whose novels he published against the express instructions of the author, or with Leos Janacek, whose libretti he translated into German so that his operas could be sung outside of Czechoslovakia, when the moment was right, he also threw in with Hašek. He translated The Good Soldier Švejk into German, and published the first major critical text on the book. The novel was read voraciously in Austria and Germany. The memory of the recently lived war allowed very different audiences to crystallize in this book their rejection of a disastrous period. One did not have to wait long for its fame to begin to permeate the literary circles of the new Czechoslovakian Republic, reluctant to accept this novel of life in the barracks. Over the years, paradoxically, Hašek’s book became the first contemporary classic in the Czech language, and Švejk one of the country’s emblematic figures.

Mexico City, December 1991

19 The surname Švejk appears in various English translations and editions as Schweik, Schwejk, and Švejk. The quotes that appear here have been taken from Paul Selver’s 1930 translation for Doubleday & Co, which uses the Germanized spelling Schweik. Selver’s translation was later reissued by Penguin Classics using the Czech spelling Švejk, which I have chosen to replicate. All other aspects of the translation remain the same. —Trans.

20 Translated by Paul Selver

21 Translated by Katherine Parthé

BOROLA AGAINST THE WORLD

I’m rereading materials for a book I’m endeavoring to write. It is meant to be a record of my journey — the history of a still-unfinished education. As I read, I find leftovers of snobbishness I thought I had rid myself of: among others, the tendency to quote visibly famous readings. It is not a question of invention or forgery, in no way am I interested in pretending to be a reader that I am not; it’s just that I have excluded other more “plebeian” books or, shall we say, more “ordinary” ones, which have been tremendously important in my life.

I have always resisted consuming books that are trendy or fashionable. My map of readings has been drawn more or less at random, by fate, temperament, and very much by hedonism. I am fascinated by the eccentrics. For over forty years I have been an avid reader of the novels of Ronald Firbank, when in England his audience was all but non-existent; also of the esoteric novels of H. Myers, which only a tiny handful of faithful have approached. I wrote about Flann O’Brien when the readers of At Swim-Two-Birds numbered scarcely a few dozen — all willing to die for that exceptional book.

I try to watch myself, to be careful not to manufacture tastes, fence myself in. I could cite impressive titles; swear that each one is a bedside book. I would be lying. On a trip to New York, a thousand years ago, a female friend pressured me to acquire the six volumes of The Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki in the tenth century and translated into English by the eminent Arthur Waley. My friend claimed to be sure that when I returned to Mexico I would devour them immediately, that those books written ten centuries ago had been patiently awaiting me; she did not say that they would come to influence my literature because at that time I did not have the slightest idea that one day I would begin to write. The influence did not happen, for the simple reason that even today there are still books with uncut pages in my small Japanese section. I have not read the Alexiad by Anna Comnena, which I found in a magnificent secondhand bookshop next door to the Hotel Metropol in Moscow — an edition in perfect condition, translated into English by Elizabeth Dawes. The manager of the bookshop lectured me on the work, to which he always referred as “the golden rose of Byzantine letters.” He assured me, among other things, that it was one of Bakhtin’s passions. I have leafed through it once, but so far have not found the energy to go any further. Anyway, as long as I am confessing, I will state that I have not even read Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, a book that changed the lives of Borges, Mann, and many other famous writers. At this point, it is possible that I will never get to it, but on the other hand, I am certain that I will still reread several of Dickens’s, an author who in my youth caused more than a few select spirits to wrinkle their nose.

Reading is a secret game of approximations and distances. It is also a lottery. One arrives at a book by unusual means; one stumbles upon an author by apparent coincidence only to never be able to stop reading him. I have quoted in articles, in interviews, in the body of my own novels several writers to whom I consider myself indebted, but never, as far as I can remember, did I mention one of my principal sources. Recently, while writing some notes on Carlos Monsiváis, I found in his anthology of chronicles some pages dedicated to Gabriel Vargas. Stumbling upon the image of Borola, seeing her, nearly naked, shake her long-legged body, marked a beautiful reunion. She sang and danced to her battle hymn:

I move my hips a lot.

I shake them when I walk.

Why do you give up on me?

I can’t help it, you see…

Doing cucuchí, cucuchí…

Doing cucuchí, cucuchí…

I move cautiously, doing arabesques, as if afraid to arrive at this obligatory confession: My debt to Gabriel Vargas is immense. My sense of parody, my play with the absurd, come from him and not, as I would like to be able to boast, from Gogol or Gombrowicz. Who is Gabriel Vargas? you might ask. Well, he is a fabulous cartoonist, one of whose comic strips, perhaps the most famous, was called La familia Burrón.

In mid-1953, after spending a few months in Venezuela, upon returning to university, I ran into two dear friends, Alicia Osorio and Luis Prieto. They greeted me with all the warmth in the world, only to start talking seconds later about Borola, Reginito, Cristeta, and Ruperto, and laughing hysterically as they celebrated the hijinks of those zany characters. Every time I tried to interject into the conversation some incident from the trip, my stops in Havana and Curaçao, the season in Caracas and, above all, stories from the sea-crossing on the Francesco Morosini and the Andrea Gritti, my first boats, they appeared to be listening to me, but at the first pause, they’d return to the world of Borola. The next day, Luis brought to school the latest issue of La familia Burrón. From that day on, I was a devoted reader for many years.

Occasionally Luis Prieto, Monsiváis, and I would run into each other at dinner at the homes of mutual friends, and on more than one occasion at the gatherings we unleashed torrents of laughter as we discussed one of the comic strip’s new episodes. Nothing mattered to us outside of whatever was happening to Borola Burrón. Our more tolerant friends, when they realized the waters we were swimming in, treated us like victims of late measles from which we would eventually recover. But there were those who took Borola’s circumstances personally, as if her horrifying stories penetrated hidden parts of their being; they began to behave with exaggerated Proustian refinement; they cooed like doves about Vermeer, Palladio, the china they had inherited from grand-maman, their first summer on the Côte d’Azur. They switched from Spanish to French in the middle of brilliant and witty phrases, as if every gesture, every word, functioned to maintain as much distance as possible between them and the tenement-patio where the Burróns lived. They were annoyed by the specter of a Mexico that they did not wish to acknowledge — a radiant, barbaric, innocent, and grotesque Mexico that they could not accept, with a much more vibrant language than the foppish grisaille in which they communicated. Distancing oneself from that world meant not remembering the aunt who ran away with a nobody and ended up working in a French dry cleaners, a very respectable business, certainly, even elegant, but a dry cleaners nonetheless; or the grandfather’s rambling deathbed confession about the origin of his fortune, which, in the end, could be the product of senility, but for a long time troubled the family. Someone else might recall the uncle who showed up once or twice a year with grease spots on his tie or lapels. And then begin to talk again, now in a shrill voice, about Vermeer, the moment when Swann first entered the Guermantes’s house, César Frank’s sonata, and other niceties.

Luis Prieto and I visited Don Alfonso Reyes every other week. One day, either by chance or by choice, the conversation turned to Gabriel Vargas and his comic strip; he applauded the appeal of its popular speech and extraordinary melodic styling. When we repeated it, no one believed it.

We were blaspheming! When he said the same thing later in a newspaper interview, some must have thought that, like the aforementioned grandfather, our polygraph was doddering.

The Vargas comic strip recreated the prevailing melting pot of Mexico City and its immense mid-century social mobility. La familia Burrón was organized around a married couple: Don Regino Burrón, the sole proprietor and operator of El Rizo de Oro, a beauty salon in a poor neighborhood, and his wife Borola Tacuche, who lives a life of eternal conflict. Don Regino is a paragon of modest virtues — wisdom, honesty, thrift — but is also the most perfect expression of ennui and lack of imagination. Borola, on the other hand, represents anarchy, abuse, cheating, excess, and at the same time imagination, fantasy, risk, insubordination, and, above all, the unfathomable possibilities of the joy of living. Determined to conquer the world, to make it to the top, she takes everything on: business, politics, and entertainment. She fails at everything. She returns defeated from each experience to her lair, the cacophonous courtyard from which apparently it is impossible to escape. But at the very moment she returns to her faithful Reginito’s side to apologize for her shenanigans and to swear never to return to her old ways, she’s already plotting a new adventure even more outrageous than the last. The secondary characters, the other family members, move in opposing circles. There’s tía Cristeta, the millionairess who lives with Marcel, her pet alligator with which she takes a plunge every morning in a pool of champagne; and there’s Borola’s brother, Ruperto, a hapless gangster and perpetual fugitive from justice whose face we never see. The main couple is only able to reconcile for a time: revolt and submission do not a happy marriage make. The world outside this courtyard of destitute houses is governed and sustained by corruption and arrogance: corrupt police, corrupt inspectors, corrupt judges, and corrupt bureaucrats. I imagine that the vast majority of readers, myself included, sided with Borola, for whom all the recriminations, sermons, moralizing, and advice go in one ear and out the other. The effect is the same as that produced by many of the English novels that scrutinize Victorian morality. Who does not prefer the unscrupulous Becky Sharp over the whitewashed tombs who inhabit Vanity Fair? Who among us who has read Treasure Island at the appropriate age does not prefer Long John Silver, the ruthless and seductive pirate, to the solemn gentlemen who advise Jim Hawkins in his business and who, let us not forget, will share in the coveted treasure on which the novel is based?

In a world of insufferable yuppies, the name Borola is an anachronism. Recalling her sends me back to a vibrant time and a place now gone.

Xalapa, February 1996

TWO WEEKS WITH THOMAS MANN

13 JANUARY 1995

I returned to Mann’s diaries; the first volume. They comprise two different periods: the years 1918–21 and 1933–37. I was only familiar with the Spanish edition, a selection focused above all on his personal affairs, where is evidenced an attempt to discover the dark aspects — and secret areas — of the author’s life, which were already a source of scandal in Germany when the diaries appeared. The English version emphasizes, on the other hand, Mann’s political tribulations and moral dilemmas during those two especially troubling periods of his life. I read one edition and then the other, following a strict chronological order. This arrangement allows me a completely new reading, much richer than the partial reading I had done in Lanzarote when the Spanish version appeared. The first period comprises the end of the war in 1914, the defeat and sanctions imposed by the Allies. Mann had just published Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, a book in praise of Prussia, of drunken nationalism. By that time Mann was a celebrated writer whose life seemed to be collapsing around him. The German defeat stuns him. His hatred for a “French-style” democracy is brutal, and he renews the conflict with his brother Heinrich, the democrat and, therefore, the victor. His scorn for the concept of democracy leads him to make unimaginable leaps, completely unexpected and incompatible with his world for the purpose of hitting his target. On 24 March, 1919, at a moment of extreme agitation, he writes: “Rejection of the peace terms by Germany! Revolt against the bourgeois windbags. Let us have a national uprising now that we have been worn to shreds by the lying claptrap of that gang — and in the form of communism, for all I care; a new August 1, 1914! I can see myself running out into the street and shouting, ‘Down with lying Western democracy! Hurrah for Germany and Russia!’”²² This represents, of course, a momentary outburst. It is natural that he would not be attracted to the Bavarian Soviet Republic; it celebrates Heinrich, his enemy brother, excessively; what’s more, its tinge is too plebeian and Judaizing (Katia, his wife, is Jewish, but because she belongs to a very rich family it is as if she were not). The notebooks that contain this portion of the diaries were saved by chance. Mann used them to recreate the period’s atmosphere while he was writing Doctor Faustus. Fortunately, he did not include them among the other notebooks that were burned during his stay in California. As it turns out, he did not want to leave any testament in his diaries of his behavior before 1933, the year in which his political exile began. I read this portion of his diaries with astonishment, lamenting that there no longer existed a bridge that connected this moment to the beginning of the author’s conversion to the abominable cause of which he later became an apostle: democracy.

The diaries from both periods have something in common. In them we find the author in total defeat, lacking terra firma on which to stand. They are writings filled with turmoil and anger, with confusion, humiliation, and outbursts of irrational violence, physical and nervous illness. Mann is one of the authors whom I’ve read obsessively since adolescence. Calvino, in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, considers The Magic Mountain to be the book key to understanding our century, because it contains the issues and problems that continue to concern us today. The Magic… is for me the most difficult test to which the spirit can be subjected, the very camera with which to reproduce the spectrum of a way of thinking. The fool will lose himself in the folds of its prose and will believe that its thousand pages contain a degree of foolishness comparable only to his own. There will also be those who approach the work with priestly veneration and will be, in spite of whatever they may think, the least apt to understand the book. Their fatuous severity will prohibit them from understanding Mann, a fundamentally parodic writer; a thinker, yes, but one who subjected thought to the corrosive acid of relentless irony.

24 JANUARY

A little over thirty years ago I met the great Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. We met for the first time in Warsaw in a café in the Hotel Bristol to resolve some doubts that had arisen in my work. I was translating The Gates of Paradise at the request of Joaquín Díez-Canedo. I had the impression that the author did not care if the translation was good or bad. It seemed strange to him that his novel, which related an obscure medieval episode — the fantastical children’s crusade that marched toward Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from impious hands — would interest anyone in Mexico. He dealt quickly with the questions relevant to the book, and we then began to talk about other topics. He asked me about my professional experience. I listed among my translations Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He seemed to perk up. He told me that the writers who most interested him were Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann. Before the war, in his youth, he had become excited by a few French Catholic novelists, but the brutal experiences — the occupation, the destruction of Warsaw, everything that happened afterward — had erased that enthusiasm. He did not deny that Mauriac could be a competent storyteller, but thought his sermonizing was petty. Conrad and Mann had become giants for him during those dreadful years. Only the person who had read Doctor Faustus could understand the devastation to the soul caused by the German occupation. When he realized that I was able to speak with ease about those authors, Andrzejewski’s attitude changed. We went over the translation again, and he clarified a few things for me. And then he continued to talk about Conrad and Mann.

26 JANUARY

Kundera on The Magic Mountain: “Thus a vast background is meticulously depicted before which are played out Hans Castorp’s fate and the ideological duel between two consumptives: Settembrini and Naphta: the one a Freemason and democrat, the other a Jesuit and autocrat, both of them incurably ill. Mann’s tranquil irony relativizes these two learned men’s truths; their dispute has no winner. But the novel’s irony goes further and reaches its pinnacle in the scene where, each surrounded by his little audience and intoxicated by his own implacable logic, they both push their arguments to the extreme so that no one can any longer tell who stands for progress and who for tradition, who for reason and who for the irrational, who for the spirit and who for the body. Over several pages we witness an enormous confusion where words lose their meaning, and the debate is all the more violent because the positions are interchangeable.”²³

27 JANUARY

Reading Thomas Mann’s diaries, his memories of his children, of his wife, at times produces an uncomfortable feeling: there is too much intensity in the family drama, excessive complexities, the more evasive the account becomes the more shadows it casts; each fissure, each silence, seems to conceal a torture, an upheaval. One has a feeling of scrutinizing characters through a keyhole. We see only a part of the action; everything else remains in the shadows. It embarrasses us to be pilfering through other people’s lives and at the same time we cannot help but do it. A few months ago I experienced the same feeling of sneaking into a world where I was not invited when I visited the residence where Mann lived for a little over a decade in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, with Efraín Kristal, a close friend and expert on Mann. We took advantage of the goodwill of the army of Mexican gardeners who were pruning the trees near the garden; our common language served as our password. Strolling the lawns, being on the terrace I had seen so many times in photographs where Mann usually took coffee with his family and a handful of privileged visitors, seeing the grove that surrounded the house with such grandeur that one can only classify it as Wagnerian, overwhelmed me with emotion. I imagined the wonder that the son of the North must have experienced each time he arrived home and happened upon a landscape comparable only to the beginning of creation, which he had glimpsed during his childhood in the albums or stories of his Brazilian mother. In that house Mann finished the last volume of Joseph and His Brothers; it was there that he conceived, wrote, suffered, and finished Doctor Faustus.

29 JANUARY

During the day, I did nothing but read Mann’s diaries. His exile in Switzerland, the nervous crises that cause him to fear that he had plunged into madness. His comparison of the image of Germany and Germanness prevalent in the first section of the diaries (1918–21) and the second (1933–37) is rather interesting. On the 23rd of March of 1933, having just gone into exile, he writes: “At breakfast one of these necessarily unresolved talks with Katia about Germany and the terrifying side of its character.” The fact that Germany feigns possessing a different (and superior) fate than the rest of the world becomes an obsession for Mann. Already in the first section of the diaries he had written: “I am surprised to see that Jakob Schaffner had written that ‘the German people in the depth of their soul believe that its peculiarity in the world will never be understood or permitted; the German nation must exist in opposition to the world or it must cease to exist.’ This is exactly what I maintain in my Reflections, even though I express it differently.” This character of uniqueness defended in 1918 changes direction radically during his years of exile: “But this is the only nation in Europe that does not fear and abhor war; rather it deifies it,” he writes on 7 September, 1933. “Wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers, whom they take for mythic heroes,” he notes on October 14 of the same year. “Rychner […] speaks of the isolation of Germany and her painful preoccupation with herself. For an analysis of this aspect of Germany, always out for different things from what the world needs, see Nietzsche,” he opines seven days later on October 21. That preoccupation, that rejection of the notion of a different fate for Germany, which he had so exalted in the past, will permeate Mann’s writing until his death. Germany’s loneliness in the world! The world’s inability to understand Germany! On January 11, 1934 he notes: “During our stroll at sunset I thought again about the novel about Faust. Such a symbol of the freedom of the character and fate of Europe will be, perhaps, not only happier but also more correct and adequate than an oratorical and condemnatory confession about the present.”²⁴ Years later, he would add: “In the moving admiration of Leonard Frank [toward the first chapters of Doctor Faustus] I sensed a kind of warning, of avoiding contributing with my novel the creation of a new German myth, praising the demonic character in Germans.”

30 JANUARY

To understand the range of elements that bubble in Mann’s Faustian cauldron, one only need look at the fragments of the diary that Mann incorporates in The Story of a Novel, the account of how he wrote Doctor Faustus. The vigor and curiosity of the old writer in exile are worthy of a titan. Those pages are testimony to the complexity of his endeavor. The annotations correspond to different orders: geographic, political, theological, medical, historical, musical, in addition to references to the political news of the day and to the tribulations and joys of family life and of his intimate group of friends: “Read an excellent article in The Nation, a piece by Henry James on Dickens. […] Written in 1864 at the age of twenty-two. Amazing! Is there anything like it in Germany? The critical writings of the West are far superior… Extensive reading of Niebuhr’s book, The Nature and Destiny of Man… Till after midnight reading in its entirety Stifter’s wonderful Rock Crystal. […] The coal miner strike, serious crisis. Government takeover of the mines. Troops to protect those willing to work — which will be few…Read some curious things on the inglorious defeat of the Germans in Africa. Nothing of Nazi fanaticism’s ‘to the last drop of blood…’Talking in the evening with Bruno Frank on the new strike wave here and the administration’s responsibility for it. Concern about the North American home front… Heaviest bombing of Dortmund, with more than a thousand planes. All Europe in invasion fever. Preparations of the French underground organization. Announcement of the general strike. The garrisons in Norway are instructed to fight ‘to the last man’—which never happens. In Africa 200,000 prisoners were taken. Superiority of materiel in quantity and quality explains the victory…Expectation of the invasion of Italy. Undertakings against Sardinia and Sicily are in the offing…In the evening read Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Shakespeare is pertinent. It falls within the magic circle — while around it sounds the uproar of the world. Supper with the Werfels and the Franks. Conversation on Nietzsche and the pity he arouses — for his and for more general desperation. Meetings with Schoenberg and Stravinsky planned…Calculations of time and age relationships in the novel, vital statistics and names…On Riemenschneider and his time. Purchases. Volbach’s Instrumentenkunde [a handbook on musical instruments]. Notes concerning Leverkühn as musician. His given name to be Anselm, Andreas, or Adrian. Notes on Fascist ideology of the period. Gathering at the Werfels with the Schoenbergs. Pumped S. a great deal on music and the life of a composer. To my deep pleasure, he himself insists that we all must get together more often….On May 23, 1943, a Sunday morning little more than two months after I had fetched out that old notebook, and also the date on which I had my narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, set to work, I began writing Doctor Faustus.”²⁵

1 FEBRUARY

Juan García Ponce published in 1972 an exceptional essay on Mann’s work: Thomas Mann Alive. It was published by Era. It is inexplicable to me that it has not been reissued. A book that critics, aspiring critics, everyone should study closely.

2 FEBRUARY

Mann’s anger is fierce, visceral, Olympian. He unleashes on a general target: Western democracies — particularly the French — during the first period; and Nazism during the second. He also returns to another topic in particular: the intellectuals who support these movements. During his exile he believes that the entire non-rationalist philosophical tradition is responsible for the tragedy Germany is experiencing. Even Bergson is accused of being a precursor of the Nazi model. Everything that sustains Mann’s work — instinct, the irrational, myth — ends up being frantically condemned by him in moments of desperation. Kundera says: “There is a fundamental difference in the way philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s or Musil’s, and so on. But just try to draw a coherent philosophy out of their writings! Even when they express their ideas directly, in their notebooks, the ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought…”²⁶ Indeed, there is an ongoing discussion in Mann’s great books — with others, with who he has been, and with who he is when he writes in his diary — but the novelist’s instinct transforms it, gives it another dimension, confers on it a different meaning. In a single diary entry he can state one idea and end up sustaining its opposite. All of this material, by the time it reaches the novel, will come out of chaos, will be coherent and cease being formless without losing the intensity it had in real life, that is, in the diaries.

3 FEBRUARY

All throughout the day I did nothing but read Mann’s diaries and take notes. Afterward, I read the autobiography of Klaus, his son, to compare each one’s version on certain episodes. I did not finish reading until after three a.m. Despite being tired, I was not able to fall asleep right away, so I took a higher dose of Lexotan than normal. The plot woven between their two lives overwhelmed me with sadness. The young Klaus’s thrilling ascent and his unhappy decline, his fragility, and the maddening upheaval of history are the elements of the story. The relationship between Klaus and his father is marked by darkness, bursts of passion, and distance. They seek and at the same time establish their distances. The son’s autobiography outlines his initial triumphs and his final anguish. The victories were short-lived; anguish, on the other hand, accompanied him for years. Let us consider Klaus’s diaries: “October 24, 1942: Terrible sadness. I want to die. October 25: I want to die. October 26: I want to die. How long will I be able to hold out? October 27: I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. Death seems the ideal solution. I would like to die. Life is unbearable for me. I have no desire to live. I want to die.” Five years later he would commit suicide after several failed attempts. In his diary, Thomas Mann embodies Settembrini, but also Naphtha. Sometimes both at the same time. What is remarkable is that he seems not to notice except in a chance moment, like when he reads the following words in an essay by Gide: “While in the war of 1914 the best of French thinkers fought alongside France, the best German thinkers rebelled against Prussia…” Mann is surprised, as if this included him, but not entirely. “That I have attempted, in Reflections, to contribute to and fight in favor of Prussianism is something that will remain ambiguous and strange, like an odd paradox.” Gombrowicz commented that his mother claimed a number of virtues, firmly convinced that she possessed them in full, when the truth was that in real life she possessed defects that were antagonistic to those virtues. Mann often speaks of his modesty, his life as a recluse, his exclusion from the world, when in fact his life constitutes a daily and ongoing relationship with fame. The slightest sense of failure is unbearable for him; it causes him to become ill. Photos from his exile in Switzerland bear witness to the everyday drama. His face, like all his faces, possesses something demented, distraught; they are faces of vampires, of possessed men. They are marked by insecurity. Years later in California, restoration, embellishment, and supreme elegance will all be regained. His work discipline is exemplary, admirable, and heroic throughout his life. Knowing that he is the owner of a word that others are anxiously awaiting — a single word to awaken or reassure his flock — gives him in due course a sense of continuity.

4 FEBRUARY

His admiration for Kafka is constantly growing. In April 1935, Mann writes, “I resumed reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I would dare say that Kafka’s legacy represents the most brilliant German prose written in the past decades. Is there anything in German that is not mere provincialism alongside him?”

5 FEBRUARY

Mann’s characters embody the greatness of our species: Joseph, Jacob, biblical heroes; Goethe; a medieval pope who becomes a saint; Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who transforms contemporary music. They are all eagles who soar in the highest heaven. Kafka’s, on the other hand, barely have names, some only receive an initial. They move through streets as oppressive as the sewer drains. They move like moles, puppets, sleepwalkers. Mann is the subject of tributes attended by heads of state, crowned heads, hundreds of prestigious guests. Kafka meets with a few close friends in café Arco, a modest locale in Prague. The thought that someone might host a banquet in his honor could only occur to him in a fever-induced dream. Mann! Kafka! Everything between them would seem to belong to different worlds. But in the world of great literature profound coincidences are often recorded. Those differences that the idle and foolish delight in pointing out are almost always superficial. Art, when it is worthy of receiving that name, is a testament to having reached its ultimate limit, of reaching resolutely the goal that bears the sign of the extreme. Mann dixit.

Xalapa, February 1995

22 Translated by Richard and Clara Winston

23 Translated by Linda Asher

24 This entry is missing from the English translation. —Trans.

25 Translated by Richard and Clara Winston

26 Translated by Linda Asher

THE GATES OF PARADISE

Jorge Luis Borges writes in a preface to Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade: “At the beginning of the twelfth century, two expeditions of children departed Germany and France. They thought they could cross the sea unharmed. Did not the words of the Gospel authorize and protect them? ‘Let the children come unto me and forbid them not’ (Luke 18:16). Had not the Lord declared faith is enough to move a mountain (Matthew 17:20)? Hopeful, ignorant, happy, they set out to the ports of the South. The foretold miracle did not happen. God allowed the French column to be kidnapped by slave traders and sold in Egypt; the German one became lost and disappeared, devoured by barbaric geography and (it is surmised) by plagues.”

Borges cites, as a precursor of the narrative form chosen by Schwob, The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning, “a long narrative poem that reveals through twelve monologues the intricate history of a crime, from the point of view of the murderer, his victim, the witnesses, the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, even Robert Browning,” a device widely used before and after by the English novel. I could immediately cite an extensive list of titles employing the same analytical method, where the reader looks over a series of monologues in his eagerness to elucidate a specific mystery. The cast of characters includes some who are directly implicated in that mystery, not necessarily involving a criminal act (it can refer to an obscure relationship, a hard to explain friendship, the secret rites of a religious sect, many other activities). Wilkie Collins ingeniously employed that architecture in The Moonstone and created a canon from which the majority of this century’s detective novels draw. The characters that produce these particular versions can be reliable, uncertain, or unreliable; the first utilize all their resources in an attempt to arrive at the truth; the others persist in corrupting, impeding, and distorting that process. Ultimately, in good or bad faith, every witness is in some way unreliable. Even the most upright, scrupulous one ends up contaminating his version with his own emotional baggage, his philias and phobias, or simply because he occupies a specific position relative to the incident about which he must give witness. Consider Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights, where even the well-intentioned characters, even when attempting to explain it, assist in confusing an already too intricate story. Closer to our time, these suspicious truths, oblique and conjectural, become more obscure due to the complexity of modern narrative forms. In Akutagawa’s Rashomon, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo the reader is forced to continually reconstruct a plot that is constantly changing, in which the apparent certainties that any of the protagonists allows you to anticipate are partially or completely invalidated by the testimony of the next.

In The Children’s Crusade, that perfect hallucination by Marcel Schwob, each monologue is followed by a more intense and disturbing one: they are the voices of those who make up the long column marching toward the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher, and also those of some characters related to it in one way or another. We hear the voice of popes, lesser clergy, and merchants, of children, and a leper. From this disharmony a song of innocence is born, at the same time one of its counterpoints insinuates a suspicion of that innocence. It is a story that contradicts at every moment its unassuming appearance. The language is stripped of any hint of opulence, any desire for ornamentation, in search of an essential nakedness, without damaging at any moment its extreme elegance. The sudden appearance of blind and mute children, of leprous witnesses, in this march that takes place amid pious songs, assimilates the cruelty of the world and its sacred character into a single vision. The leper’s monologue is perhaps the most fantastic prize that reading has ever given me. I have read this wonderful story by Schwob countless times, and when I arrive at the leper’s words, I am as amazed and moved as intensely as the first time. The mystery encapsulated in those two pages occurs, I imagine, by the brush of the monstrous and redemption, or of abjection and grace. This is undoubtedly the result of a process of verbal alchemy, a symbolist vision awash in astrological flourishes. It is well known that Schwob was a symbolist writer, but he was also a theosophist. The essential material of The Children’s Crusade seems to have been collected and amassed in a secret path between the twenty-two paths that lead to the Tree of Life.

In 1959 a contemporary version of The Children’s Crusade was published in Poland. Its author, Jerzy Andrzejewski, a stranger to the symbolist aesthetic as well as to any theosophical temptation, managed to create with this ancient topic a monologue of extreme tension whose linguistic core is even more impenetrable than that of Schwob’s story. The publication of this novel represented a challenge at the time. The refined stylization of form, his stubborn refusal to make concessions to the reader, was the clearest expression of rejection of the official aesthetic. And although it is true that Andrzejewski had not previously succumbed to the inanities of socialist realism, such a departure stunned the Polish intellectual community, not to mention the censors and Party ideologues. Moreover, the intense homoerotic current that sustains the novel angered many sectors, both Party officials and conservatives. Two years earlier, in 1957, another of his novels, The Inquisitors, had provoked heated debate. It was a bold invective against Stalinist terror and intimidation. Thereafter, Andrzejewski became an uncomfortable presence for many Poles. He did not seek to flatter the government or the Church. His courage seemed suicidal, the proof of which was not only these novels but also his many outbursts, both public and private, his statements, and the documents that carried his signature.

I lived in Warsaw from 1963 to 1966, a surprising period in many ways. A few years earlier, in 1956 in Moscow, during the famous 20^th Congress of the Communist Party, an incredible document was read condemning Stalin’s crimes, which in Poland translated into a spring that lasted several years. Beginning in 1957, censorship began to yield ground; Witold Gombrowicz’s novels were able to be published, as well as “difficult” works by authors from within, the aforementioned novels by Andrzejewski, and Kazimierz Brandys’s Mother of the Kings, Leszek Kolakowski’s The Key to Heaven, and Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott, which would have caused serious problems for the author had it circulated a few years earlier. During that time, a prewar avant-garde repertoire reappeared in the theater, especially Witkiewicz’s dramas of the grotesque; the contemporary works by Slawomir Mrozek also premiered. Bruno Schulz’s work was published again, and included in the index of socialist realism. There was a lot of experimentalism and energy in the theater, cinema, music, and, to a certain extent, in literature. Before I left Poland, the situation was beginning to change — for the worse, of course, and the spaces that had been gained were gradually closed.

Shortly after I settled in Warsaw, I received a copy of an Italian translation of The Inquisitors. I read it immediately. It seemed unimaginable that in an Eastern European country something like it could be published. The story was set in fifteenth-century Spain, the central character was Torquemada, and the setting was the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition. There was something shocking about reading that book at that time. Its similarity to the mechanisms, to the methods, and even to the language of the repressive organs of the immediate past was astounding. A theatrical version, directed by Andrzejewski himself, attracted crowds that remained in the theater, breathless, as if they were attending a mystical session or an exorcism. The Poles recognized the cruelty of the times they had endured — the destitution, the unscrupulousness, the surveillance, and the inhuman punishments — everything attenuated by the belief that the end justifies any kind of means. And that end was sublime, delusional, and redemptive: the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, no less! The audience recognized its executioners in the play, they heard a language similar to one they had been subjected to, but at the same time they were obligated to recognize the personal role they had played in one way or another in the cruel masquerade. It was obviously the work of a moralist; the theatrical version had the steely character found in the morality plays of English medieval drama used to reinforce catechization, not unlike Spain’s autos sacramentales. The difference between The Inquisitors and its contemporaries, the moralizing and didactic works of socialist realism, was vast; Andrzejewski’s literary mastery was undeniable, thanks to which the abstract character that the subject demanded did not come off as hollow sermonizing. The reader and viewer received the balm they needed because, despite the discursive tone, a feeling of mercy emanated from the work, not only toward the offended and humiliated but also and especially toward men who in their youth had joined, with passion and absolute faith, a cause in which they believed, only to discover years later that instead of serving God they had become followers of the devil. Their lives shattered suddenly into bits of ash and rubble. Their commitment and zeal had only served the forces of evil. As they lost their faith they also saw themselves stripped of all dignity and self-respect, yet they refused to allow society to treat them like dung.

Around that time, I read Ryszard Matuszewski’s Profiles of Contemporary Polish Artists to familiarize myself with contemporary Polish literature; a purely informative book, not dogmatic, but yes, as far as I remember, too cautious — one of those phlegmatic literary panoramas, a bit bland and sparing in terms of ideas — but decidedly useful. I searched for Andrzejewski’s biographical sketch. Matuszewski profiled the young Catholic pre-war intellectual and follower of Jacques Maritain; he spoke of the success of his first novel, Mode of the Heart, of the presence in the work of echoes of Joseph Conrad and two French Catholic writers, François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. He also spoke of Andrzejewski’s activity in the resistance during the period of occupation, of his distancing from the right-wing groups he had frequented in the past, until arriving at the discovery, once Poland was liberated, of a devastated, amorphous, and lost, but at the same time hopeful, society, which he described in his first major novel, Ashes and Diamonds (1948), in which he treated with evenhandedness the men of the new regime as well as the desperate youth who shed their blood and others’ on the altar of a dead Poland, of exhausted values, of the former marshals. Matuszewski referred to Andrzejewski as a new type of Polish writer: a moralist. The profile ended there; it did not treat the novelist’s new works: The Inquisitors and The Gate of Paradise; I do not know, nor do I now have means to verify, if it was because the Profiles were published before the appearance of those novels, or if out of caution, or fear of unpleasant consequences, he might have preferred not to comment on those books that seemed to give off a strong odor of sulfur.

So when I arrived in Poland Andrzejewski’s celebrity had already been established. To his enthusiasts he represented the moral consciousness of the nation, a lone voice in the midst of a multitude of opportunists, of triflers or imbeciles, and during the years I lived in the country I was witness to infinite, never-ending, and violent arguments about his personality, his opinions, and his life. Filmmakers, young writers, and university students all revered him. The dogmatists, people of reason, those on the left as well as the right, condemned him. The former were proud of his clarity, his literary talent, his consistency, and, above all, his courage — a superlative quality in Poland; the latter, the representatives of order, Catholics or Communists, abhorred him. He was the worst possible example for Polish youth; the sordidness of his life, the places and people he frequented would have — they argued — led him many years before, in a truly respectable country, to prison. That this arrogant pervert — friend of Jews, perhaps Jewish himself by some branch of the family — dared speak about public morality made them tremble with rage. I lived for a long period of time at the Hotel Bristol in the center of Warsaw where there was a small café-bar whose atmosphere could be dazzling. There I was able to see up close Marlene Dietrich, Jacques Brel, Peter Brook, Arthur Rubinstein, Claudio Arrau, Giorgio Strehler, Ella Fitzgerald, and Luchino Visconti. These colorful and illustrious guests stayed in the Bristol when they came to Warsaw; the locale was also frequented by Polish writers and artists. They would have had to chain me in my room to stop me from showing up there every evening. On several occasions, I saw Andrzejewski in conversation with Andrzej Wajda, the director who had adapted his novel Ashes and Diamonds into an extraordinary film. They were working, it seemed, on a new script; they read, drank vodka, and argued endlessly. Eventually, they were joined by so many famous actresses and actors that their table became the café’s center of attention.

I do not recall who introduced us, but I do remember at our first meeting he spoke specifically of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He said, dismissively and shrugging his shoulders, that the Poles would never be able to understand Dostoevsky. They tried to approach him from only a religious perspective. They had turned Romano Guardini’s book into a primer from which they were afraid to stray. Reading Dostoevsky was for them a form of prayer. “If someone were to tell them that what was truly important was to pay attention to the struggle in any of its chapters between instinct and reason and the feeling of victory and defeat that the contenders shared after the fight, my countrymen would be dumbfounded, because that’s not how it is written in their prayer book. All they care about is that, you know, prayer — not just the Catholics, the Communists too,” and he shrugged his shoulders again as if trying to rid himself of a heavy burden, while the shadow of a flash of lightning passed through his eyes. On another occasion, I heard him comment that of the Hispano-American authors translated into Polish, which were then still very few, the only one that interested him was Carpentier. Not The Lost Steps, he clarified, where the opulence of language and the masterful architecture was wasted on an insignificant topic: the futile search for the sources of creation and the attempt to find them in their most primitive veins — the forest — as opposed to the elements developed over centuries by thought. Stravinsky had already done that at the beginning of the century. The opposition seemed obsolete to him. “Only the most primitive Polish nationalists could hold such nonsense. For them folklore is the greatest gift that mankind has received from the gods.” Explosion in the Cathedral was another matter. “Anyone who lived through the German occupation and the hardest chapter of the totalitarian state could read that book as if the story of betrayed ideals were part of his own experience. When I got to the last paragraph I returned to the beginning to reread that exceptional book.” He declared that in literature he only appreciated real challenges and the search for great form, and that in Poland novelists had become so lazy and demoralized that nobody dared to undertake such an ambitious effort as Carpentier had in that book. Someone mentioned then a recent novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and asked with feigned innocence if it was not perhaps the equivalent he was looking for. Andrzejewski again shrugged his shoulders, cast a burning look, smiled sarcastically, and said something in slang that I did not understand but that provoked a perverse laugh from all those present.

By then, I had already read The Gates of Paradise and recommended the book to several Spanish-language publishers. One day a contract arrived with instructions to give it to the author for his signature. I phoned him and we met at noon at the Bristol’s café—a neutral time, devoid of tertulias or extravagant characters. It seemed to surprise him that one of his novels — and particularly that one! — was going to be published in Mexico, a country he did not know except for a few characters and episodes from the revolution and those from the movies. It was the first time I talked to him alone. He received my enthusiastic comments about his novel with skepticism, as if it were a joke he had to tolerate. He lashed out incessantly at the limitations of the Poles, but at the same time — and to my surprise — he related the value of every literary work to the circumstances of his country, its historical tragedies, its bloody past and mediocre present, which seemed to me to be a more sophisticated and slightly comical form of nationalism. When he was convinced that I knew the authors, that I had translated Conrad, and that I was obsessed with Mann, everything changed. During the following weeks we meet four or five times to solve some problems of translation; during our short breaks, I asked him about Polish writers. Usually, when I mentioned the name of an author he would make a gesture with his hand as if shooing a fly and mutter: “His brain is smaller than a flea’s,” or “Let’s not waste time talking about that idiot.” He respected Bruno Schulz greatly. It is strange, but I cannot recall a single opinion about Gombrowicz, whom out of necessity we must have talked about. Although at midday we talked about literature, when I met him later in a nightclub on Foksal Street, the subject was completely different. Even in lighthearted moments he was stern, even theoretical. What I know is that during our daytime sessions, as well as our informal evening encounters, he always erected an invisible wall around the table, seemingly by his own choice, beyond which the world ceased to exist.

After translating The Gates of Paradise, someone handed me Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind. When I finished reading it, I had the feeling that someone had just given me an inexplicable beating. I found it inconceivable that the exiled poet had been able to incorporate into his book such a hurtful and offensive biography of a writer whom the best Poles considered a paradigm of national dignity. The fact that Milosz would begin this text by recounting an intimate childhood friendship, almost a brotherhood, and would recount some of the most heinous moments shared during the German occupation, as well as after, seemed to make the insult more powerful. It was like someone’s boasting of having stabbed someone in the back, only later to reveal flippantly that the dead man was his own brother. The Captive Mind appeared in the U.S. in 1951 during the harshest moments of the Cold War, and, as always with a political book written with honesty, it irritated both the left and right. It was in no way a mere political pamphlet but an autobiographical account that included an infinite number of nuances, that tried to explain to the foreign reader the complex knot of passions and experiences that made the history of his country something very different from that of other European nations. It was not about a world of absolute good and evil but the result of circumstances inherited over centuries, a feverish world, strained by history. When Milosz received the Nobel Prize, he made one of his first trips to Poland after a thirty-year absence. There was an emotionally charged event during which the poet read his work. In the front row sat Andrzejewski. They were, apparently, no longer enemy brothers.

Shortly before beginning these pages, I reread The Captive Mind and found it remarkable; the immense changes in Poland, unthinkable during the period in which Milosz wrote, put many things into perspective and clarified others. There is a passion evident in the book not too different from that experienced during a civil war: discovering that a brother has gone to the opposing camp is an affront that cannot be forgiven, the wound that takes longest to heal, many threads become entangled at once, very delicate tapestries move in an unpredictable way, stage by stage, the brother’s past conduct is examined, and in each of them grounds for reproof are found, an unbearable tension is reached until a trigger, any trigger, produces the explosion. Milosz alludes repeatedly to the extraordinary pride and unbearable arrogance with which Andrzejewski carried himself; he recognizes his almost suicidal activity and value of his work during the darkest years of the German occupation, but forever regrets the major role such activity disguised; he even goes so far as to reproach him for being so perfect during the terrible years when life was constantly at stake. He finds that same organizational drive, that is, leadership, during the period of Communist militancy. He minimizes the quality of Ashes and Diamonds, which he points to as a sample of ideological literature, about which he is mistaken.

Surely Andrzejewski must have been insufferable, both in his role as Catholic intellectual and as well as that of Communist writer. We now know that these events are only a fragment of a longer history that was far from being finished when The Captive Mind appeared. Everything that followed exacted a heavy price. Renouncing with a minute handful of writers his membership in the Communist Party in protest of the Russian military occupation in Hungary in 1956 was not a joking matter. A decision of that caliber in a country where the Party was in power, and doing so during those years, had something of the unreal and much of the truly heroic about it. One left the Party by death or expulsion, and it is well known what was meant by expulsion. Writing and publishing the literature that Andrzejewski produced thereafter also exacted an enormous toll. It is possible that his personal liberation, and his decision not to make concessions, was based on the fiendish pride that was the most visible characteristic of his personality. Perhaps, deep down, driven by some earlier religious zeal, he would have liked to have been a martyr and to have died as such. He did not. He managed instead to leave behind perfect pages, of which The Gates of Paradise is perhaps the clearest proof.

When the Polish author spoke in the Bristol’s café of the great literary challenges and the desire to achieve the greatest possible form as a maximum virtue, I thought of The Gates of Paradise. The difficulties involved were immense. To begin with, the novel consists of only two single sentences, the first consisting of one hundred and fifty pages; the other, just five words.

And in that first never-ending sentence weaves a complex and dark story in which, unhindered by a single period to fragment it, the confessions of the five adolescents who lead this illusory crusade become intermingled, a crusade that will never succeed in reaching the gates of Jerusalem and that will not even get close to them. It has been thirty years since I translated this enigmatic book whose center seems to shift at every moment. I was afraid that it had aged. Not so, its poetics has weathered time perfectly, and its meaning, in spite of how explicit its confessions seem, seems even more secretive now. We come to know in great detail the love story of each of the adolescents who appear partially and piecemeal during the general confession by an insistent iterative exercise. We come to know the dramas that darken their lives, but could that be the goal of the story? Or did the author simply create a particularly refined style and a purely formal architecture for the pleasure of experiencing new narrative processes? Those questions distract us in order to keep the novel’s very center hidden and wrapped in armor, to the point of preventing us from knowing with absolute certainly in which section it is located.

Four adolescents from the village of Cloyes march toward Jerusalem to deliver the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the infidels: Maud, the daughter of a blacksmith; Robert, the miller’s son; Blanche, the daughter of a carpenter; and Jacques, a shepherd who does not know who his parents are. Accompanying them is Alexis Melissen, a Byzantine Greek, Count of Chartres and Blois, titles he inherited from his late adoptive father. Everything begins when the shepherd Jacques ventures down to the village square one night, as if suffering hallucinations, and interrupts a feast with these words:

“The Lord God Almighty has revealed to me that because of the blindness and cowardice of kings, princes and knights, it is fitting that the children of Christ should go, for the love of God, unto the relief of the city of Jerusalem that is fallen into the hands of the infidel Turk, God the all-powerful has chosen ye, for the confident faith and innocence of children, greater than all the powers on land and sea, are able to accomplish the most holy miracles, therefore possess your hearts with pity, for the Holy Land and for the desolate sepulchre and tomb of Jesus…”²⁷

In The Children’s Crusade Schwob presents in succession the children’s monologues, as well as those of some characters who participated in this unprecedented enterprise. Andrzejewski, on the other hand, strives for simultaneity. In the endlessly interwoven opening sentence, the author integrates the stories of the four crusaders from Cloyes with that of Alexis Melissen, who voluntarily joins the group of modest artisans who heed the divine call. The exercise of confession sets the tale in motion. A unique receptacle has been created into which the information extracted from their confessions, as well as the self-confession of the old priest, flows and is collected. The call to the crusade is submerged in a complex tapestry of passions: loves of gleaming purity alongside others born of bloodshed, nourished by it, hidden beneath ominous burdens. Every character, both chaste and lascivious, has learned that suffering is the shadow of all love, that love divides into love and suffering, and that this will be one of the musical lines that will run throughout the book. The words of each of the children are echoed by those of the others; each confession modifies, expands, or clarifies those of their companions. A system of constant reiterations links the diverse monologues in the mind of the confessor, which provides the illusion of simultaneity. The long-awaited multum in parvo of the epigrammatic poets is achieved here through excess, fragmentation, and verbal interaction.

The novel begins with a cruel dream, filled with horrors and terrifying omens. The old priest dreams of two adolescents who move with great difficulty through an implacable desert. One of them falls prostrate on the sand; before dying, his moribund lips emit an exhortation to the other to continue the journey until he reaches Jerusalem’s immense Gates of Paradise and carry out the magnificent task that has been entrusted to him: the liberation of the Sepulcher of Christ. The other, even weaker and more defenseless, continues the march at a faltering pace, feeling the empty air with his hands, as if he were about to touch with them, the long-awaited walls. Suddenly, he turns his face toward the priest and sees his empty eyes, eyes that will never behold the towers or the walls of the holy city. At that moment, the priest discovers with horror that the martyred face is that of the enlightened leader Jacques de Cloyes. The revelation terrifies him. It is necessary to find the source of the evil dream to understand its meaning. He decides to undertake a general confession, to probe the children’s souls, to discover whether one harbors a dark sin, and, of course, to absolve it. At the end of the third day the general confession will end with that of the five children of Cloyes, the first to begin the march. The priest is determined to forgive everything. Nothing will stop the crusade. His long life as confessor has taught him that the desire for faith can also be born from suffering, misfortune, and destruction, and that the same poisoned sources are capable of generating a miracle. And that miracle can be none other than the rescue of the Sepulcher of Christ. He will be present at the supreme moment. He senses that his death is near, but that death will attain a greatness that his life has never known. Assisting in the mission undertaken by the children, entering with them into Jerusalem, prostrate at the finally-liberated tomb of the Lord, will endow his existence with the highest meaning to which it is possible to aspire.

As the confession progresses a moral conflict begins to loom, which the author was unable to do without and which functions as the strongest pillar of the story; without that ethical reflection the novel would still be amazing, but would run the risk of suffering from a decorative and archaeological saturation, as is the case with Flaubert’s Salammbô, which would be entirely foreign to his intentions. Those battles between instinct, faith, and reason that Andrzejewski considered essential in the work of Dostoevsky are also present in his account and confer on them a modernity that could render incidental the fact that the action transpires in the early twelfth century.

“It’s no use,” Alexis Melissen confesses, attributing these thoughts to his adopted father, “all is vain apart from shame and prejudice, the satisfaction of the senses does not still desire and lust, for as soon as one desire is satisfied a hundred others awaken even more imperiously actions born of the purest desires end in remorse and infamy and perhaps there are no pure desires, the need for violence and cruelty takes possession of man’s nature, he flees from it in a trembling and shame-filled solitude, then, drawn back once more into the ravening pack, driven by folly and the furies of physical strength, again he goes murdering and violating right and left until the moment of awakening arrives and then man finds himself once more alone in his solitude but because of the criminal gravity of his folly even more solitary than before and in that absolute solitude, in the prison of his flesh and spirit, he searches desperately and in vain for some way out, but there is no way out, he snatches blindly and vainly at what appear to be promises of salvation, but he can forget himself only in violence, a violence bereft of illusions, naked and black as hatred…”

The fatality with which man is drawn to crime, as if it were his only possible destiny, finds in that abstract struggle (like that contained in the mystery plays) the grace, the redemption, or the reason to save him. The search for good is as present in man as his instinct toward evil. The confessor knows this well: “No man could be evil all this life, and it can happen that when he has lost all hopes and all illusions a man kills this man in him and voluntarily takes his own life in a second of time and yet still goes on living, but in order to kill within him the need for love and the need for hope he has to live through many long, painful years, like a drowning man grasping at air, seizing a handful of water, now when the man in him is still not entirely dead and still walks the somber haunts of evil, if there be even the feeblest glimmer of good, of yearning for good in him, the man will crouch over that little wavering flame in order to delude himself in moments of solitude that what he sees there then, uncertain and weak, could still, with a favorable wind, be transformed into an immense blaze.”

The ending is terrible. The last confessant, Jacques de Cloyes, who was thought to be illuminated by the grace of God, cannot be absolved. What the child believes to be an illumination in fact is not. The confessor understands that he must stop the march of madness, of innocence, of passions, and of lies. He also understands that his initial dream, that of a blind youth with hands groping the air while another dies in the desert was a premonition; that if he does not stop the thousands of children, they will perish along the way, and that he, poor and old, will not be granted the grace to reach Jerusalem with them, that he will not be witness to the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher. He stops and cries out in the middle of the night in an attempt to stop the children, but to no avail. Plunged into darkness, strengthened by their chants, the children will continue the march. Their voices will drown the words of the only man who has managed to understand the reason. And the heavy arm of a cross will knock him down, and the children will pass over his dying body as over a mere rough spot on the ground, and one after another will walk on him until his entire body is sunken into the mire.

Is the story perhaps a metaphor that draws us closer to events that occurred in a recent past? Will this march that progresses blindly amid chants and canopies and crosses toward an impossible end that rejects reason serve as an allusion to the permanent trepidation that has shaken our century, where the status of some words has led to nothing but unrest, cruelty, and madness? It is evident that God has not inspired the crusade. The illuminated pastor, in the constant transfer of passions that the novel records, wants to become someone else, to save his soul and free it from terrible guilt. Only chance, that night when Jacques de Cloyes went out into the square, interrupted a party, and implored the children to deliver the Holy Sepulcher, could prevent him from being branded insane. A moment was enough to save him, the acceptance of a girl who loves him, and then that of the boy who loves that girl, and so on to infinity. From that moment, once again, the energy of error showed its efficacy. Thousands of children abandoned their homes, traveled the roads of Europe, adding their voices and steps to a cause already lost.

The human and the sacred, the rational and the oneiric, the individual and the herd, love without hope and the assault of the body, the shadow of a dark present and the haziness of a time lost in the dawn of the twelfth century, an ancient history difficult to verify and an uncertain hope in the future — all will be added to Andrzejewski’s tireless sentence (that syntax that now seems familiar because great novelists have employed and even exaggerated in recent years, but in 1957, when The Gates of Paradise appeared, it was absolutely unheard of) and will help transform it into the masterpiece that it undoubtedly is.

Xalapa, November 1995

27 Translated by James Kirkup

OUR ULYSSES

I must have been eleven or twelve when I first heard the name José Vasconcelos mentioned. Once, while on holiday in Mexico City, where one of my aunts on my father’s side lived, I picked up a book someone had left on a chair and glanced at it absentmindedly. It was Vasconcelos’s The Storm. I was turning the pages mechanically, almost by inertia, more or less disinterested, when my aunt appeared — she had generously provided me with the canonical readings that corresponded to my changes in age: fairytales, Verne, London, Stevenson, Dickens; I think during the period in reference we had made it to Tolstoy. She seemed surprised to see that particular book in my hands. Without giving the matter too much importance, she casually suggested that I read something else; the book dealt with issues that were too complex — she told me — and since I did not know enough about the history of Mexico, I would only be bored. I thanked her for her advice. At home they had tried to interest me in the voluminous encyclopedia of Mexican history, México a través de los siglos, where from the opening statement of purpose I felt lost. Everything would have remained there had my aunt that night during dinner not mentioned the incident, adding some mysterious reference to my precociousness. She commented that she had found me absorbed in one of the more lurid passages of the book, which, if true, had occurred unbeknownst to me. That comment led to a heated discussion. A doctor who was an intimate family friend vociferously expressed his admiration for the Maestro and his revulsion for the immoral manner in which the country had repaid his efforts. His books claimed not one but many truths that no one in Mexico had had the courage to utter, adding that, unlike so many hypocrites and prigs, he was not appalled that the Maestro — for years when anyone mentioned Vasconcelos’s name, they placed before it the word “Maestro,” a term that instantly added a patina of greatness and martyrdom — had described his passions in such a stark fashion. The Maestro could allow himself the luxury of talking about his lovers and about any other matter he damn well pleased. “Read it,” he told me, “don’t allow them to keep anything from you; read it, it’ll do you good. You’ll find out what it means to be a real man in the midst of a bunch of lackeys and cowards.” Later, the conversation became even livelier with anecdotes about the personage — his past, his women, his presidential campaign, his defeat, and his faith in Mexico — whom the nation had failed to appreciate.

After returning from the holidays, I found at our house Creole Ulysses and The Storm. Works, I suppose, that appeared obligatorily on the bookshelves of every enlightened middle-class family in Mexico. I mentioned the lively discussion that took place in Mexico City, and to my surprise, my uncle (my guardian) did not find it amusing. The very mention of Vasconcelos immediately imposed a tone of sober respect. He confirmed Vasconcelos’s extraordinary worth, the admiration he deserved, and added that, in fact, I was not yet old enough to read these books, the memoir The Storm in particular, which dealt with personal issues about which it made no sense for me to know. Naturally, I concluded that these issues were the Maestro’s “women.” My grandmother spent much of her time buried in novels. She did not share my uncle’s notion of progressive readings in relation to my age; all of her books were at my disposal. If I had been allowed to read Zola’s Nana and, on the other hand, was not allowed to go near the pages of The Storm, it must mean they contained truly apocalyptic scenes. Perhaps it was a book similar to those written by Peral or “El Caballero Audaz,” two of the most vulgar pornographers of the time, whom a classmate of mine had discovered in his older brother’s bedroom, and whom we read in secret, more bewildered than excited.

Just three or four years later, as a student in preparatory, I was able to devour — with passion and astonishment — those first two autobiographical volumes; later in university, I continued with the remaining two, but I did so then with waning interest and too often defeated by exasperation and displeasure. Nowhere did I stumble upon the risqué scenes I expected. The figure of Vasconcelos was already well known to me; I had read and heard none too enthusiastic comments about him, some brutal, some apathetic; all of them iconoclastic. For example, he was no longer called Maestro, unless the word was accompanied by a sarcastic tone of irony or scorn.

After reading Creole Ulysses and The Storm I felt electrified by the energy of the prose. Reading was becoming an extraordinarily sensual experience. Vasconcelos, at his best, is a writer of the senses. Voluptuousness penetrates his language. I saw images, yes, but I also shared the tastes of desserts and delicacies, I sensed an array of aromas, from the sweat of the horses of troops on the move to the perfume of the opulent women evoked in certain passages. I suppose had I read Mme. Blavatsky during that eager period of initiations I would not have fallen into such deep trances. I recognized the character’s heroic spirit but, fortunately, he was a hero who refused to allow himself to be transformed into a statue. I often became lost in the details. I knew the revolutionary period only in broad terms, and the frantic sequence of events and characters made me dizzy. The story of his passionate, tumultuous, and ill-fated love for a woman named Adriana did not seem at all unusual to me; I had often read similar things in novels and had seen worse in the movies, to the extent that I thought that it was completely normal, commonplace, something that awaited every man upon reaching a certain age. It seemed inconceivable to me that some readers would be scandalized by certain passages of his life because, of course, at the time I did not understand, and I only managed to during a later reading, to what extent the personal story recounted by Vasconcelos violated the traditional notion of Mexican respectability: that a man of his rank openly spoke out against marriage; that he opposed marriage as an institution; that he reveled in his wife’s insufferable nature and preferred to live for many years in the company of a woman who at every turn encouraged excesses of elation, passion, contempt, hatred, and even disgust, aware that the woman was cheating on him — at times with very close friends — and who, aware of her infidelities, would attempt to make her return to him, pleading and threatening, and that after insulting her would reassure her, prepare her food, and wash her clothes; who in his youth had been in love with a girl from the underworld and had accepted money from her to finance his carousing and drunkenness; and finally, distraught by the insolence of such whores would, like a madman, track them down in taverns and inns and then beg for their forgiveness: one could watch all these things on screen or read about them quietly in a novel of any nationality and time; but that a Mexican man, a gentleman who was also a macho, would live it — which, although sad and regrettable, was little more than personal tragedy — and confess it, especially in print. The fact that the person sharing such unfortunate intimacies, his darkest moments, with the world was a man who had known the smell of gunpowder up close and held important public positions and was recognized by the youth of the continent as the Teacher of America, represented a transgression of customs that was difficult to forgive. Societal pressure eventually triumphed. In the last edition of his Memoirs, published during his lifetime by a Catholic publisher, Vasconcelos suppressed those passages. Families could once again sleep peacefully.

As an adolescent, reading all of that meant nothing; it did not exist. What is astonishing, however, was sharing in some way the fate of an exceptional man and his capacity for adventure; a man born not to obey orders of which his conscience would not have approved in advance; who had known prison, poverty, victory; who had participated in conspiracies and uprisings; a man able to relate the accomplishments and vicissitudes of his political activity with the same intense mystical aura with which he spoke of his philosophical discoveries and amorous exploits.

I was excited to learn, for example, that Vasconcelos had crossed most of the country on horseback, accompanied by a small band of loyalists and his mistress, Adriana — a woman who on that occasion was worse than the most destructive plague imaginable — venturing for days and days along the riskiest trails of the Sierra Madre, fleeing his enemies, constantly at risk of being ambushed, until finally crossing the Rio Grande and knowing that for the time being his life was safe; only to then find him almost immediately in the library of San Antonio, Texas, gathering materials for his Aesthetics; and a few weeks later in Paris, attending the historic premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Such was his life, and it was prodigious; that one day he would be conspiring for or against Pancho Villa, and in the next chapter studying Pythagoras or Plotinus in New York, or touring the Metropolitan Museum after diligently reviewing Burckhardt to better understand the painters of the Italian Renaissance. The upheavals in Mexico and his visions of the wider world alternate and overlap constantly. Sexual passion, intellectual desire, and a resolve to transform the country through spirit are the constants of the young Vasconcelos. Another, which spans everything, is the notion of “Glory,” which he considers inherent to his person; he senses it from childhood, develops it in his youth, and defends it by any means necessary in the moments following the disaster.

That first reading, of course, was incomplete, and could not be otherwise. But it left me with the impression of having come into contact with a man of surprising originality and multiple visions. Further readings have refined, stylized, or altered that view. I do not share the majority of the opinions that Vasconcelos sustains; despite that, however, my astonishment, admiration, and recognition of his courage to confront the world and, above all, his refusal to follow the herd, still remain.

In 1956, at the request of the editor Rafael Giménez Siles, I visited Vasconcelos on two occasions at the National Library, the Biblioteca México, to clarify some doubts that arose while correcting the proofs of the first volume of his Collected Works, which were being prepared by one of the many publishing houses belonging to Don Rafael. He had put me in charge of the first volume. The purpose of the visits, if I remember correctly, was to standardize the spelling of some names that the author employed arbitrarily. On both occasions, he received me in his office, in the company of the ambassador of the Dominican Republic. Vasconcelos had become in his final years a very pleasant man, always smiling, but at the same time very distant. He seemed not to take interest in the fate of that edition that would finally bring together all his books, some having been out of circulation for thirty or forty years. I stressed the desirability of standardizing the different ways he had written some geographical or biographical names and, above all, the various spellings of Russian and Asian names, sometimes copied from a French or English transcription, as well as obvious misprints in the original editions. He asked me to leave him the proofs and the list of possible corrections and return a few days later to pick them up. I went to see him a second time and again found him talking with the same diplomat. He apologized for not being able to review the papers. He then began to review the proofs with me, as well as the list that the proofreader had sent. With each of the items he would pause thoughtfully for a moment, continue his interrupted conversation with Trujillo’s ambassador, and finally give his opinion; after five or six consultations of a relatively long list, he said there was no point in worrying about such minutiae, that the publisher should decide for him, that he had full confidence in Giménez Siles, and when it was all said and done the only thing that mattered were his thoughts and not such insignificant trivialities.

I had long since ceased to admire him. His articles in the press were dreadful. His defense of Francoism, of the totalitarian regimes in Latin America, his sympathies with the most reactionary sectors within the country, his raging anti-indigenism, his anti-Semitism, his disdain for modern literature — all preached in a tiresome and humorless way — turned their reading into a tedious enterprise. His philosophical books, of which he had long boasted, no longer interested anyone; his books on the history of Mexico no longer convinced anyone but the most intractable conservatives. His stories and literary meditations had aged. The youth had turned their back on him, and even his memoirs had paid a heavy price. None of this seemed to discourage him. On the contrary, he enjoyed the fight. If for a quarter century he had continuously said that Mexico was a debased nation and that all the revolutionary governments after Madero had been made up of thieves and scoundrels, he accepted as acknowledgment of his integrity the insults that the nation and the handful of crooks and incompetents hurled at his person. He seemed to be aware of the role he played: even if Mexican society no longer supported him and rejoiced in his downfall, even if it turned its back when he was ready to redeem it, even if politicians and their followers regarded him as a clown (a term that seemed to offend him more than any other, having said so many times, he continued to behave as he liked, in order to show what the politicians had managed to do to the country and even to him. If the world had grown debased and unhinged, if reason had lost its way, he would play a role commensurate with the circumstances. The real culprit was not the individual but the machinery of corruption manufactured by the governments that betrayed the Revolution.

To understand Creole Ulysses and his other memoirs it is worth recalling certain events. Vasconcelos begins to write his first volume in 1931, two years after his defeat in the presidential elections. He never recognized the official results. During the campaign he and his supporters were repeatedly harassed and ridiculed. Some Vasconcelists were killed, many others imprisoned. José Vasconcelos had been, at home and abroad, the great symbol of the revolution: educator of the nation, literary apostle, thinker, and, most importantly, the creator of an authentic and extraordinary cultural renaissance in the country, an effort in which all his gifts and prestige came together. Even now, our debt to the period of cultural renewal initiated by him seventy ago years is still immense. Universal education and textbook distribution became national causes during that period. They were christened “the years of the eagle” by Claude Fell in an excellent book on the period, borrowing an exhortation that Vasconcelos himself used with teachers. Although immense, it was the only triumph of his political life. The three times he ran for elected office he was defeated. First, as a potential candidate for a deputy position during the period of Francisco Madero; then in 1924, following his brilliant tenure in the Secretariat of Public Education, as candidate for governor of Oaxaca; and finally in 1929 as candidate for the presidency of the Republic. The rest is known by everyone: long years of exile, vain attempts to maintain a political presence in Mexico from abroad, long stays in Spain, speaking tours in South America, an invitation to the United States where several universities opened their doors to him. Gradually, active politics began to take a backseat, and the void left by that pursuit was filled by what he considered his essential vocation: philosophy. During this period, while working on his Aesthetics, he also wrote his autobiographical books to which he attributed a rather utilitarian character and in which he defended himself against the smear campaign orchestrated by his detractors; at the same time he went on the offensive and began to war ferociously against his enemies, old and new — those who had suddenly become turncoats. In his zeal to disparage his detractors he committed more than one injustice, sometimes by mere whim, or out of personal disagreement — and even over aesthetic disagreements.

The years of disillusionment, frustration, and resentment following the electoral defeat of 1929 play a major role in the development and content of the narrative about his life he would soon undertake. Upon leaving Mexico he discovered that his intellectual stature lacked the dimension he attributed to it, deluded by the arrogant conviction of his greatness, the blind devotion that his disciples and closest collaborators rendered, and, also, by the praise of some foreign intellectuals who had been invited to Mexico during his term as secretary.

Dialogue was not his forte, it never had been. One of the few childhood friends who dared to address him during the height of his career with the same familiarity as years before, during the period of the legendary meetings of the Mexican Youth Athenaeum, was Alfonso Reyes, who in a short period of particularly active correspondence offered the following advice: “…as I am in conversation with you, I am rereading some of your things, as I want to absorb everything you have published all at once, before continuing with my Hindustani studies. I must make two caveats that my experience as a reader demands: first, try to be clearer in defining your philosophical ideas; sometimes you only say half of what you should. Rise above yourself: read yourself objectively, do not allow yourself to become bogged down or consumed by the course of your feelings. To write you must think with your hand also, not just your head and heart. Second, put your ideas in successive order: do not insert one into another. You have paragraphs that are confusing by dint of addressing completely different things, and that do not even seem to be written seriously. One thing is the vital order of ideas, the order in which they are generated in every mind (which is only of interest to the psychologist and his experiments), and another is the literary order of ideas: which should be used, like a language or common denominator, when what we want is to communicate with others.” Following this direct and cordial advice communicated in a letter of May 25, 1921, the tone of their correspondence continues to cool over a period of years to the mere exchange of formal, friendly cards.

While in exile, Vasconcelos visits José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, who received him and some close disciples in his office. Shortly before his death, Vasconcelos expressed disappointment at the meeting: “He did not make a good impression on me, nor I on him.” There could be no dialogue: the Mexican’s philosophical tools — a composite of vitalism, irrational energy, Bergson, Hinduism, Schopenhauer, refutations of Nietzsche, messianism, Dionysian exaltation — all nineteenth-century concepts, at time taken from second-rate treatises — in no way reconciled with the philosophical discourse that Ortega had resolved to introduce in Spain through the journal Revista de Occidente. In Buenos Aires, one of his former strongholds, he was considered by modern writers to be a completely dispensable figure, an eccentric character, irascible and obsolete. His old liberal and socialist friends no longer interested him, and the group from the journal Sur, where his companions from the Athenaeum, Reyes, and Henríquez Ureña, were like fish in water, represented for him the caste of literati “preoccupied with the trivialities of style,” which he hated. He began touring the world, like a ghost, and that wandering deeply colors the emotional and conceptual content of his memoirs.

The more distant Creole Ulysses is from the present, the more imbued it becomes with a brilliance, a passion, and an innocence that do not appear in subsequent volumes. It is, from beginning to end, the account of a sentimental education and a chronicle of numerous initiatory experiences. It is the transcription of the astonished gaze of a child who engages in the task of becoming acquainted with and recognizing the world; a task that is renewed in each of the character’s biological changes. The world is real, there is no doubt; what differs, and therein lies one of the largest enigmas of this formidable book, are the perceptions that the author attributes to the character: the child, the adolescent, the young student, the successful professional, and, later, the revolutionary he was before writing the book. Not only do the opinions disagree, they are often radically different from those he sustained in letters, books, speeches, and interviews before 1929.

The only explanation that comes to mind is that Creole Ulysses belongs to a different genre than the other three books that make up his so-called Memoirs. Is it really an autobiography? Creole Ulysses is usually included in collections of “novels of the Revolution,” while in literary histories it is placed in the same section with Luis Martín Guzmán’s Shadow of the Caudillo and Maríano Azuela’s The Underdogs. Historians of literature and critics are right. Creole Ulysses can be a novel whose protagonist is called José Vasconcelos, just as the main character in In Search of Lost Time is called Marcel. Both authors fictionalize their circumstances, their setting; they linger on their love for their mother and on other loves; they narrate their initiation into an aesthetic universe, their passion for Bergson and a thousand other situations. If they had met, they would not have had anything to do with each other; on the contrary, it is much more likely that they would have despised each other. And even though they never met, Vasconcelos was viscerally repulsed by Proust the figure and his style. Just as Swann’s Way is a work of fiction closely linked to Proust’s real life — a life that is filtered, distorted, created with liberties that characterize the novelistic creation, which the historian or memoirist cannot take — in Creole Ulysses the Mexican author fashions and recreates at his discretion a series of events he has lived. The character José Vasconcelos inherits from the author José Vasconcelos his temperament and messianic vision, as well as many other coincidences: date of birth; parents and siblings; travels around the country and to cities of the world; an insufferable wife; and a mistress named Adriana who drives him mad daily; his studies and mutual friends; and the same revolution in which author and protagonist do battle and triumph and are ultimately defeated. The objective circumstances may be identical, but the novelist can afford to breathe into his creature feelings, emotions, ideas, philias, and phobias that are radically different from his own. This is what the novel is for! Under the guise of establishing the novelistic nature of his character, Vasconcelos makes him proffer opinions that he, the author, did not sustain during the time in which he situates them. To accomplish this, “he develops a theory of social resentment that he applies to his earliest memories,” as the Argentine Noé Jitrik points out.

If anything gives unity to the account, it is the process of constructing a will and the incessant exercise of that will in shaping a destiny. “Will can move mountains” is the motto of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a character with whom Vasconcelos identifies on more than one occasion. They are wedded by the use of a superhuman power to forge their destiny. Both conceive of themselves as creators of a personal future outside the normal where even chance is a product of energy itself. “The art of bravery in act, is this: to stand with choice-free foot amid the treacherous snares of life.”²⁸ That statement by Gynt seems to govern the entire existence of our Ulysses, and he employs it consciously in the organization of his memories.

Like characters in Stendhal — an author whom he loathed with the same intensity with which he despised Proust, Flaubert, and Mallarmé—Vasconcelos knew, very early, that will is all that is opposed to reality no matter how steely and impenetrable the latter may be. And he builds his life around this conviction. If reality conquers him, his will ignores the defeat. The result: an unpredictable personality even for himself. He never imagined, for example, that his autobiographical books would, from the moment they appeared, reduce the rest of his work to nothing. His Aesthetics comes out the same year as Creole Ulysses. He is convinced that this treatise is the culmination of his philosophical thought. He places all this faith in it and not in Ulysses. However, the autobiography rendered dead that collection of reflections on art and nature. It could not be otherwise: an egotist of such dimensions could only capture all of his powers in the story of his life.

“Vasconcelos’s biography,” writes Jorge Cuesta in an article published shortly after the appearance of Ulysses, “is the biography of his ideas. This man has had ideas that live, ideas that love, suffer, enjoy, feel, hate, and become inebriated; those ideas that only think are indifferent and even odious. Creole Ulysses is, for this reason, the book in which Vasconcelos’s philosophy discovers its genuine, authentic expression. Those books in which he has expounded it in a purely doctrinal mode are almost unreadable.” And then he adds: “As inconsistent, as poor, and as confused as his doctrine is when it is viewed as thinking, it is even more vigorous, impressive, and fascinating when viewed as living.”

In the first preface to Creole Ulysses, the author not only explains the reasons for the title but also introduces a theme that will become a constant throughout the tetralogy, eventually constituting an axis and assuming an obsession in all his latter endeavors: criollismo as the Mexican nation’s only possible zone of regeneration. “The title that has been given to the whole work is explained by its content. A destiny that soars like a comet, blazing across the sky, before burning out during long periods of darkness, and the turbulent atmosphere of present-day Mexico justifies the analogy with the classical Odyssey. As for the adjective criollo, I chose it as a symbol of the defeated ideal within our homeland…Criollismo, that is, culture of a Hispanic type, in its ardent and unequal struggle against a counterfeit indigenismo and an Anglo-Saxonism that dresses up in the rouge of the most deficient civilization known to history; those are the elements that have waged battle in the soul of this Creole Ulysses, as in that of each of his countrymen.”

Creole Ulysses reflects the character’s life from his birth until the military coup of Victoriano Huerta, and Vasconcelos’s preparations to participate once again in revolutionary action. This is the story of a long march toward his personal depths; it begins with the immediately postnatal state from which emerge his oldest memories, wrapped “in a caressing and melodious feeling, a physical extension, a section barely cut off from a warm, protective, almost divine presence. The voice of my beloved mother guided my thoughts, determined my impulses. One might say I was tied to her by an invisible and voluntary umbilical cord that lasted for many years after the rupture of the physiological bond,” until the moment of affirmation of an independent personality. The rupture of the aforementioned cord took longer than necessary to occur, which comprises almost all of the book’s pages. They were years marked by his love for his mother and despair for her loss; then by the temptation of the flesh and the subsequent feeling of condemnation, of abjection, of horror of the body and atonement mitigated only by the certainty that “glory” awaited him in a still imprecise future; years marked also by the astonishing discovering of his own country during his travels and also by his participation in political life, which causes him to discover the weight of the Porfirian dictatorship and the paths to fight and defeat it. All this is but a glimpse, the preamble to the apotheosis to which he would later arrive. Apotheosis in action and in thought. And also of the flesh.

All these things and more nourish this first volume, a suggested point of departure and waiting period before the arrival of the fatal revelation that he will seek to develop and demonstrate obsessively at the end of his memoirs and will not abandon for the rest of his life: the bitter conviction that Mexico is a vile and irredeemable country. Between the two options proposed by Sarmiento for our continent, Vasconcelos had wagered with all the strength he could muster in favor of civilization and against barbarism. He had believed in a ferocious, delirious, and messianic way that a person’s will, his own in particular, could move not only well-worn mountains but also souls — an enterprise that was much more difficult and complex than expected. He fought to become the Quetzalcoatl that would defeat forever Huitzilopochtli, the eagle that in the end would finally devour the snake. Of course, he failed.

Upon remembering the past fifty years later, the recent political defeat behind him, we find that Ulysses, the child, is already aware that the nation has two enemies, one external — the Yankees — another internal: the Indians. His first memories are situated in Sasabe, scarcely more than a hamlet, an enclave in the Sonora desert, a border post with the United States, where life passes by in perpetual fear; whether of the Americans, who appear out of nowhere to lower the Mexican flag and raise the Stars and Stripes, forcing the Mexicans to retreat and accept the imposition of a new boundary line; or of the Apaches who show up from time to time to loot and destroy the few villages in the region. Later he will glimpse his only salvation, port, and hope when he comes into contact with the mainland, where the Hispanic presence becomes visible.

After recalling his adolescence in Campeche, he notes: “In the beautiful tropical garden the band still brought together families for open-air concerts, but the beautiful girls of languid carriage, light complexion, and black eyes became increasingly rare. The beautiful, sensual caste yielded to the crude natives of the interior who in hushed groups listened to the concerts from a distance as if waiting for the moment to occupy the homes that the whites abandoned.” In the Vasconcelos universe, the Indian is everywhere, lying in wait at all times. He is just around the house, in the garden weeds, under rocks, shape-shifted into a vine, water, thunder. He is backwardness, the embodiment of brutal gods, cunning patience, evil calculation, lightning and punishment. “Within Durango and the main district centers,” he writes later, “the population is criolla, but it barely leaves the city limits; the Indian lives in conditions similar to those known in the times of Aztecs. It is for want of spirit and organization that the Indian continues in its backwardness.” The tone becomes almost frantic in the last volumes. When evoking the archaeological discoveries made in Uxmal and Chichén Itzá when he was Secretary of Public Education, he will say years later: “As the digger’s pick advances, there appear year after year new wonders: but everything is uniformly barbaric, cruel, and grotesque. No sense of beauty; the decoration is nothing more than simple paleographic work. Since they had no efficient alphabet they used drawing and relief as language, which distorts and delays the possibility of a disinterested musical development, which is the essence of art; utilitarian decor that, as such, elicits no aesthetic emotion, only the astonishment of their guesswork and the aberrations of the human soul.” He came to detest archaeologists and scholars of pre-Hispanic cultures of any kind. “Petty scoundrels” at the service of Yankee interests to reduce the footprint of European culture on the continent, the fruit of an abhorrent mestizaje, the result of mixing of two detestable races: Indian and Jewish.

“In Veracruz and Campeche the vigor of the race had become so weak that it allowed Indians and Blacks to become part of Europe’s vitality,” he states, and evoking a trip to Oaxaca and the visit he pays to two elderly sisters of his mother, he was distressed by “the plight of those old ladies, the vestiges of a generation exhausted by their own creative effort and ultimately defeated by the harsh environment, absorbed by markedly inferior races.” In the decline of those old women, he sees “all the drama of the defeat of the white man of Spanish race, replaced gradually by the mestizo and threatened by the return of the Indian.”

This is too much, I know. However, Vasconcelos never uttered these outrages during the time in which he situates his autobiographical novel. His work offers us the greatest proof. In 1920, in Hindustani Studies, he states categorically that only mestizo races were capable of great creations; in 1925, in The Cosmic Race, he glimpsed the future of humanity in the emergence of mestizaje that was shaping Latin America. This region of the world was the custodian of a new spiritual energy, which renewed ancient myths and recreated the Dionysian spirit. In 1926, in Indology, he makes a confession that refutes the racial resentment that, little by little, grew increasingly more virulent. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have no black blood, but I possesses a small portion of indigenous blood, and it is to it that I believe I owe a greater sensitivity than that of the majority of whites; I have the seed of a culture that was already brilliant when Europe was still barbaric.”

Creole Ulysses is also the record of an initiation into the world of culture, of the handling of ideas, of a spiritual journey, in short, of a path to the stars. If on other subjects his pronouncements were at times retroactive and he made them appear valid at a time when they were not, there was one on which his thought was always consistent: his contempt for what he considered unnecessary stylistic frills. He explains at the beginning of Ulysses that after learning to read, the only thing that interested him was content, not form. This statement will become an irrefutable principle, strengthened by the certainty that his fate would infallibly lead him to glory. “At ten years old, I felt alone and unique and called to lead…A certain disposition of my temperament and the habit of translating since childhood has left me with this indifference and lack of talent for form.”

Regarding his membership in the group of intellectuals who formed the Youth Athenaeum (Antonio Caso, Alfonso Reyes, Luis Martín Guzmán, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Julio Torri, among others), he has serious reservations: “For my part I never valued knowledge for knowledge’s sake. On the contrary: knowledge as a means to reach the supreme essence; morality as a ladder for glory, without empty stoicism, such were my standards, and they were firmly directed toward the conquest of happiness. There was no cult of worship for that which is half or in-between; all my vehemence was directed toward the conquest of what is essential and absolute […] My colleagues read, cited, compared for the mere love of knowing, I selfishly peered into all knowledge, all information, material useful for organizing a theory of being in its entirety. Using a botanical term much in vogue in our country, I took for criticism only what it could contribute to the eclosion of my personality. I myself was the sprout immersed in the elements and eager to flower.” A credo that is equivalent to carrying with arrogant pleasure a heavy stone tied around one’s neck. The limitations of some philosophical texts come from this permanent blindness in which he took pride. There is never in him a disinterested, contemplative attitude toward language, nor toward ideas. Nor is there emotion or surprise for literary achievement. Rather there is something akin to outrage in his contempt for form, in the non-recognition of the intrinsic value of word or thought, but instead a manifest calling to utilize any element that will allow him to attain power, salvation, and glory. “Due to the contagion of the literary-esque environment, I took on the thankless task of writing descriptions of each of these dances [those of Isadora Duncan]. I read these pieces in the Athenaeum, and they were poor and faulty in style. They did not reveal what I had wanted to put into words. No literature would have sufficed for an essay into which I poured the echoes of the Cosmos. Someone assured me: ‘Your subject would require the style of Mallarmé.’ It is impossible to convince them that a Pater, a Mallarmé, interpreters of decadence, cannot bear the weight of a new, vigorous, and complete vision of the world. I did not lack style, rather accuracy, and clarity of concept. My concept was so great that when it unfolded it created its own style, built its own architecture. In turn, I thought: my literary colleagues will one day say that Pythagoras’s writings need to be retouched by a Flaubert […] Many of them were the precursors of those who today disdain Balzac for his neglect of form yet support the follies of Gide or Proust, which proves that the professionals of style eternally ignore the brilliance of messages that contain spirit.”

Vasconcelos is enamored of his shortcomings; he is obsessed by them. This personality type by nature imposes its ideas on others. However, they in no way hinder him from accomplishing the cultural program that he outlined and undertook when he was appointed Secretary of Education. A program that, plainly speaking, can be described as titanic. For this period of wonders alone, his name deserves to go down in history. To discredit him, some within the United States press and all of the conservatives in Mexico accused him of a Soviet-style educational and cultural program with Bolshevik intentions. The brilliant educational reform and cultural renaissance that he began always were, at the time and for many years after, plagued by misunderstanding, undermined by suspicion, envy, and the mistrust of his inferiors. Nevertheless, his energy prevailed. To achieve his goals, he surrounded himself with the most talented writers in the country, not only those committed to his educational ideals but also those devoted to the cult of form, as well as musicians, painters, and architects of all ages and movements, even those who admitted to not understanding, or who openly did not share them. In this regard, he was absolutely ecumenical. During his tenure, almost every writer who formed our literary avant-garde debuted; and the first murals — to the horror of people of reason, the “culturally Hispanized”—were painted. He called on all artists to collaborate with him, without turning them into bureaucrats. And that in itself was a miracle.

Much has been written on Vasconcelos’s educational and cultural crusade. It will suffice to quote a few lines of Daniel Cosio Villegas, an intellectual known for his skepticism and even a certain coldness toward his peers: “So, yes, there was an evangelical zeal to teach others to read and write: then, yes, every Mexican felt in his heart of hearts that the educational effort was as urgent as quenching thirst or appeasing hunger. They then began the great murals, monuments that aspired to depict for centuries the country’s anguish, its problems, and its hopes. There was a faith in the book, and in the book of eternal quality…”

Creole Ulysses covers the first thirty-three years of the author’s life. It closes with the murder of Francisco Madero. For many years his relationship with women and with ideas had been contentious and incomplete. But it was much more difficult for him to live without them. His dealings with the former were stained with subsequent feelings of abjection. His relationship with ideas had been until then merely a necessary catalyst for getting rid of the positivist thought that permeated the era. It seemed that everything he had lived — from his childhood to the end of his university studies — was waiting for something to unify him. Harmony would only come to him through the Revolution: his support for Madero; his activity during the anti-reelection campaign; victory over the Porfiriato; the dawn of a new Mexico; and, in the end, the first defeat. This period of political activity reaches in the book a brilliance, a mythical aura unrivaled in our literature. Here, the long awaited harmony is glimpsed. All the threads lead toward the unity of being: the triumph of the flesh — free now of anguish and recrimination — political success; the cosmic link. “As surprising as he has been and continues to be,” Cuesta says, “and as incomprehensible the causes that motivate him are, Vasconcelos’s thought is so intimately linked to the revolutionary movement that it is impossible to consider one separate from the other.”

Thirty-five years have passed since the death of our Ulysses. By the end of his life, he was a mere shadow of himself. There remains little trace of his philosophical thought; his battles, his fury, his contradictions, and his unpredictable changes of allegiances have ceased to stir passions. Of him there remains, above all, a testament of insubordination. The example of an individuality that refused to submit to any rule imposed from without. There remains the splendid faith of an apostle who saw salvation in the spirit and who turned the book into his favorite instrument. There remains the splendor of his prose, which illuminates all of Creole Ulysses and many other fragments in the other memoirs. There remains the image of a man who, wanting to save everything, becomes lost completely. There remains the memory of his redemptive power. And for all this, in a world where submission is the rule, we will never be able to thank him enough.

Xalapa, July 1994

28 Translated by William and Charles Archer

PEREIRA DECLARES

Writing about Antonio Tabucchi has always placed me on the threshold of the impossible. Dazzled by his writing, my greatest temptation is to reproduce it abundantly, to fill pages with his quotations, find a common thread, and deploy them in an order best for sharing with the reader the pleasure of reading him. His prose is hard to imitate; it possesses its own melody, an emotional tension moderated by intelligence. His writing is conjectural and at the same time precise. In his novel Requiem: A Hallucination, a ghostly Pessoa pleads with the narrator: “Please, don’t abandon me to all these people who are so certain about everything, they’re dreadful.”²⁹

Misunderstandings, ambiguities, grey areas, false evidence, imagined realities, and dreams mottled by a terrible reality, the search for what we already know is lost, backward games, voices from the gates of hell — these are elements that we often find in Antonio Tabucchi’s world. Another one: a perfect elegance born of simplicity. Tabucchi’s elegance is like melancholy, always clinging to the shadow of the story, or buried in the subsoil of language.

Tabucchi declares that he aspires to write for a reader who expects neither solutions nor words of consolation but rather questions. The presumed reader should be willing to be visited, to host the imponderable, to modify mental categories, lifestyles, to introduce new ways of approaching the human condition: to force destiny rather than be condemned to an early requiem.

In a lecture delivered in Tenerife in 1991, entitled “The Twentieth Century, Balance and Perspectives,” Tabucchi asserts: “A writer who knows everything, who is already familiar with everything should not publish a book. The only certainty that I have is that everything is relative, that there is another side to everything. It is, above all, this area where I like to investigate, where nothing is immediately visible.” And later: “The man given to us by the literature of our time is a solitary and broken man, a man who is alone but no longer knows himself and has become unrecognizable […] One must reclaim the right to dream. This may seem, at first, like an insignificant right. But, upon further reflection, it will seem like a great prerogative. The man who is still able to nourish illusions is a free man.”

And that brings us to Pereira and what he declares in the novel that bears his name. Tabucchi takes risks that few authors are willing to take. Pereira Declares is, among other things, a political novel, which in itself will cause some to furrow their brow. It narrates events that occurred in Lisbon during the span of a month, between late July to late August 1938, a period during which the Salazar regime strengthens its totalitarianism and locks Portugal away in a seamless dictatorship that will last thirty-five cruel years. It is, indeed, a political novel, but different in every way from the ideological narrative of socialist realism. The only thing that Tabucchi’s novel shares with stories of an ideological character is its parabolic nature. And this is perhaps the source of its greatest challenge. Every character that participates in an apologue exemplifies a virtue or a vice that will ultimately be unmasked and punished or rewarded; all of their words and actions are predetermined in general terms to achieve this purpose. However, in order to be novelistically valid, it must have its own breath, assume those virtues or defects as an individual expression, otherwise the language will always give off a whiff of pamphleteering.

Pereira, the protagonist of Tabucchi’s novel, like Ariel from The Tempest, is built of “such stuff as dreams are made on.” However, as he fulfills his destiny he becomes imbued with reality, a tragic reality. In the end, we find him transformed into an extraordinarily animated character, one of the most lovable of contemporary narrative. He enjoys the double privilege of maintaining his individuality and of becoming a symbol.

Who, then, is Pereira, what does he do, what problems does he face? Well, he is an old journalist, an infernally fat widower, plagued with ailments, whom doctors have given only a few years to live. Not long ago, he began to edit the weekly literary page of a second-rate evening paper. He becomes obsessed, almost maniacally, with obituaries. Several things could explain this phenomenon, perhaps because his father was the owner of a funeral home called La Dolorosa, or that his wife suffered from tuberculosis during their entire marriage, to which she eventually succumbed, or the conviction that his heart problems would lead him to an early grave. But, too, because during the radiant summer of 1938, he began to sense that Lisbon reeked of death, that all of Europe reeked of death. Pereira is Catholic. The immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the flesh are topics on which he meditates incessantly. The first illuminates him; the second terrifies him. Imagining that the vast quantity of fat that smothers him will be resurrected makes him dizzy. Pereira, plain and simple, is a good man, immersed in a world that he finds increasingly more disgusting. His cult of death leads him to create an obituary column for the literary page he edits, to prepare in advance the obituaries of writers whom he admires; but, for some reason, he refuses to be the one to write them. To this end, he contacts a young man, who has recently graduated university, from the Faculty of Philosophy, Francisco Monteiro Rossi, whose essay precisely on the subject of death he has just read.

Pereira Declares at times sends me to one of the author’s earlier novels, which I revere: The Edge of the Horizon. At first glance they might seem like opposites. An old Pereira moves under Lisbon’s radiant blue sky. Spino, the protagonist of The Edge of the Horizon, on the other hand, carries out his investigations under a hazy sky in a city steeped in humidity and darkness. Pereira’s search ends with the discovery of personal freedom, the performance of an act of protest, which at the time disguises a heroic quality: by revealing himself he discovers the society that surrounds him. Spino, however, isolates himself little by little from society as if trying to suppress a metaphysical sign. How, then, are these stories alike? On the one hand, the theme of death is always present in both. Pereira imagines a collection of obituaries at the service of his cultural page. Death and eventual resurrection are his obsessions. Spino works in a hospital morgue, he is in constant contact with corpses. In both novels, personal identity is the underlying theme. In both, the result is the same: each of the characters marches toward the revelation of a destiny that is incubating inside him.

Upon meeting with the young Monteiro Rossi and his girlfriend, Pereira’s via crucis and final resurrection begin. “He asked himself: Am I living in another world? And he was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead.”³⁰ The journalist, however, is predestined to remain alive, even if each of his meetings with the young couple leads him to difficult situations, to truly atrocious moments. And perhaps therein lies the most difficult challenge that Tabucchi has assumed: to not introduce a young communist in the thirties as a cruel and callous sectarian, which today is usually considered mandatory. The young Monteiro Rossi and his friends are communists, yes, and are aware of the need to strengthen the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War, among other things, because Franco’s victory would mean the continuation of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. He knows nothing about the purges in Moscow and, if anyone had spoken to him about them, he would think it was a lie invented by fascist propaganda, or the punishment of a group of traitors who committed crimes before being executed. The same thing Kio would have thought, the character from Malraux’s The Human Condition, one of the most beloved heroes during my youth, whose death moved me as if it he had been one of my closest friends. In this way, Tabucchi shatters a rigid form of contemporary “politically correct thought,” that of turning any communist militants living during the years of the Soviet purges into monsters of abjection, into active accomplices in the crimes of Stalin, and into builders of the extermination camps. That would be like condemning Walter Benjamin, Picasso, Tibor Déry, and hundreds of intellectuals who believed in the possibility of changing the world. The young hero of Pereira Declares could be one of them. Not long ago, Jérôme Garcin reported that during a conversation with Julien Gracq this remarkable writer above suspicion had addressed the situation in the thirties: “The Revolution was a job and an article of faith. He was a communist then and was active in the Confédération générale du travail (the CGT). He didn’t miss a single meeting […] He remembers with amusement almost being discharged in 1938 for being the only teacher at the Lycée de Quimper to participate in a banned strike. He continues to evoke that period of collection drives, of meetings and illusions during which he headed a section and delivered the Party word to the trawlers of Douarnenez, to the tuna boats of Concarneau, and to the lobster boats of Guilvinec, in cafés where the chouchen inflamed the minds of the seaman. Gracq surrendered his card in 1939, when the German-Soviet pact was announced. Did he get out in time? No, he retorts, it was already too late. From the first trials in Moscow, he says in retrospect, I should have made a clean break. But he adds he would have been deprived of the beautiful moments of fraternity in the secret and harsh Finistère, where he learned about a universe at once pure and Manichean.”

Censorship, distrust of his newspaper, and police surveillance barrel down on Pereira. It seems the meeting with the young couple who write delusional and unprintable obituaries was a curse for the old and infirm journalist, who becomes increasingly more engaged with the “pure and Manichean” world to which his protégés belong. In the end, he will become another man. His obstacles to survival will surely become greater, but he will have the certainty of having saved his soul. His victory will be immense. The only obituary he manages to write is that of the young Monteiro Rossi. It will also be the most beautiful page of the novel.

We do not know to whom Pereira is speaking, to whom he declares what happened during that terrible summer of 1938. Perhaps he shares his testimony with fellow exiles, one of them the novel’s supposed author, who glosses, details, and shades everything the journalist declares in order to transmit it later to the reader, who in fact becomes the true recipient of the testimony. The method is perfect. It allows both proximity and distance. And those two words: “Pereira Declares”—repeated throughout the novel — work as a refrain that accentuates the melody of perfect prose.

Xalapa, July 1995

29 Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

30 Translated by Patrick Creagh