This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

U — Urbanities

I believe in cities. Nature makes me too anxious. The terror she inspires in me strikes me as nearer rather than dearer. I am seduced by natural beauty. I can spend hours flying above the white thrones of the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, in a state of virtual ecstasy. How I would love to lose myself in the delicate, everlasting beauty of a Russian birch forest! The Irish coast, that turbulent ocean fortress that defends an entire continent, takes my breath away. And I could bury myself forever and ever in the lime-green clarity of the Caribbean, transparent tomb of all the silver and gold of the ghost cities of Indian America. And is there anything quite as serene, undulating, and blessed with eternity in movement as those wheat fields that are waves, the green followed by the gray-brown, followed by the tremulous blue of the Palouse, in Idaho?

And then I hear the sardonic voice of Schopenhauer: “For once, try to fully be nature,” and then I emerge from my calendar dreams, my guilty rapture, my grudging separation from those people who so unconditionally revel in natural beauty. What is the intrinsic defect that prevents me from speaking with a true love of nature, desiring and desirable at the same time? For I admire nature, but I fear it as well. I envy it. All natural things and beings always seem to be in just the right place. We, as human beings, displace ourselves, we wish we could be something or somewhere else, we are always out of place, unlike the Colorado canyons or the waterfalls of the Zambezi River or the tigers of Bengal — that is, if there are any left in the world by now. Even migratory species fulfill cycles of eternal return that are comparable to the superlative beauty of the wild cherry tree as it comes into bloom time after time. Yes, we admire the order of natural beauty. But we know that behind its creation lies catastrophe. And we fear that the next catastrophe will not be the work of nature (with all the peril and convulsion she carries with her) but rather the hand of apocalypse, one that is worse than any earthquake or tidal wave: the final act of vengeance that human beings will perpetrate against nature. Today, for the first time, we possess the verifiable suspicion that we could die along with nature, at the very same moment. In times past, no matter what obstacle nature faced — stay here, abandon me — we always knew that nature would outlast us. The inevitable death of the human being has been accepted by a natural environment that, until now, has served as a consolation to us because it survives. Today, our own madness could orchestrate a simultaneous catastrophe. I die, and nature dies with me. Après nous, le néant. .

I have never believed that there exists an original bucolic Golden Age to which one day we shall return so that we may become as we were in those early times — that is to say, complete. The primeval Golden Age, Ovid’s very explicit dream that is expressed, almost verbatim, by Don Quixote with his goatherds:

Fortunate the age and fortunate the times called golden by the ancients, and not because gold, which in this our age of iron is so highly esteemed, could be found then with no effort, but because those who lived in that time did not know the two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were owned in common. . In that time all was peace, friendship, and harmony. . there was no fraud, deceit, or malice. .

It is a regressive dream, one that brings us back to the illusion of that which never was. All the virtues we have lost but yearn to recover, we attribute to nature. It is a revolutionary dream: one in which we turn back to our starting point in order to discover the promise of the future. This, in the end, becomes utopia’s desired incarnation, more than just a pretext reminiscent of origin. The return to nature is also the dream of the New World. America is invented (desired, discovered) by Europe so that in another part of the world, in an ideal là-bas, a perfect and natural society may be reborn — the very one that the Renaissance (More, Campanella, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cervantes) both dreamed of and denied. In Europe, it was denied by realpolitik, Machiavelli, the Borgias, and irresponsible power; the Fuggers and money with interest, Luther and the religious war with nationalism; Isabel, Ferdinand, and racial intolerance. The terrible Thirty Years’ War and its Mothers Courage dragging their bundles of rags and eating the scraps of their old illusions: with this image, Brecht ends the Renaissance.

America thus becomes the contradiction of Europe, its utopia. But u-topos is the place that does not exist. How can America — a place that indeed exists — be the place that exists only in the imagination? From Vespucci, Columbus, and the chroniclers of the Indies to Neruda, Carpentier, and García Márquez, we appear to be Europe’s utopia, the felicitous return to the land of origins. Neruda most often sings to an idyllic, pre-Hispanic America, where the boorish conquistadors robbed the gold in the mines but left behind the gold of their language. Carpentier goes back in time, traveling to the seed of all civilization at the source of the Orinoco. But it is García Márquez who closes the doors to regression with lock and key after discovering the reclaimed paradise. The communities that have experienced those symbolic “hundred years of solitude” will have no other opportunity on this earth. The opportunity, García Márquez implies, of regressing to the u-topos, though yes, the opportunity of building a better city, a Latin American civitas, for the future. In this sense, utopia reassumes its true face. It is a project for the future.

The dream of a Golden Age, nevertheless, is a persistent one. At some time in the past, there must have existed an elemental age of natural joy and harmony. We may live in misfortune, but we must have been born into happiness. An abundantly loving mother, embracing all her children, making no distinctions among them, must have preceded the wretched patriarchy that imposes the survival of the fittest, appoints his firstborn heir, descendants, property, boundaries, and declares war to defend all those things. . Even if this theory were true, I can’t help but think that, as with all human endeavors, nature is perfectly indifferent to the question of matriarchy and patriarchy. Perhaps we all suffer the offenses we have perpetrated against nature. For one thing, we can be certain that nature is utterly indifferent to our fragility, our vulnerability, our fatal disappearance from earth. . The setting sun does not know its own beauty. The canyons of Colorado do not know their own magnificence.

I am a creature of the pavements. I prefer cities because neither they nor I are under any illusion about our respective permanence. A city is an accidental tribe, Dostoevsky said. But I am far better able to identify my mortal condition, my precarious destiny with that accidental tribe, precisely because of its accidental condition, its unpredictable and reckless movement, than with a natural environment idealized to the very apex of happiness and immortality, only to fall over and over again into the depths of the most destructive depravity. Nature’s beauty is so deceitful. The metropolis is hostile but does not hide this fact. Natural beauty can be unfaithful: the lovely mask of an original or imminent chaos. For that reason I admire — though also fear — the city as a response to nature, so tumultuous and savage. Can’t cities just as easily fall into the very same condition that makes us fear the harshness of the natural world: the selva selvaggia? The only difference is that the urban jungle is a jungle of our own making.

Cities risk danger, cities fall to their knees, they grow sick and they die. Our century, like no other, has shown itself capable of eliminating entire cities. Not even Scipio in his confrontation with Numantia or Carthage destroyed cities with the barbarity and technical skill of which we have been capable in our time, from Sarajevo to Sarajevo, with Verdun and Guernica in between, Chungking and Dresden, Hiroshima and Baghdad. . History is urbanicide. Some cities survive. Others disappear forever. Babylon no longer exists. The Cuzco of the Incan civilization is a ghost. The Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs is a petrified, tremulous underground above which we find the successive cities of Mexico— the indigenous, the Baroque, the neoclassical, the nineteenth-century, the modern. Rome continues to add almost geological layers to its age of antiquity. There are the partially subterranean cities. They invite us to penetrate their labyrinths. How easy it is to lose ourselves in them and never again see the light of day.

I adore the cities that instead of burying or hiding themselves away, stretch out, show themselves off, expose their spaces like jewels spread out on velvet. Paris is the perfect city in this sense. It changes, but it does not hide. It expands, but it does not disappear. Those of us who are inveterate lovers of this city can bemoan the disappearance, here and there, of a bookshop, a café, a market. . But in its essence, Paris does not change. The literary and musical references are always there. A novel by Balzac is a novel by Proust is a novel by Le Clézio. A poem by Villon is a poem by Apollinaire is a poem by Prévert. A song by Piaf, by Patachou, by Jean Sablon or Georges Brassens, or the marvelous Barbara, never grows old. The places cited are encircled forever by names like Pigalle, Montparnasse, the Rue LePic, the Pont Mirabeau, the Place Dauphine where dead leaves will fall forevermore.

What is this? Why is this? History, prestige, esprit, continuity, powerful evocations? No. It is light. To say “the city of light” is a platitude that some innocents believe to be a reference to the public lighting scheme. They don’t realize that it refers to nothing less than a miracle: “Every afternoon, in Paris, one miraculous moment dispels the accidents of the day — rain or fog, sweltering heat or snow — to reveal, as in a Corot landscape, the luminous essence of the Île-de-France” (Una familia lejana [Distant Relations]).

Paul Morand, with whom I coincided on various occasions at the pool of the Automobile Club of France on the Place de la Concorde, told me that in his last will and testament he had included a provision stating that his skin should be used as a suitcase so that he might be able to travel for all eternity. Venice — or rather the Venices, in plural — was one of the favorite cities of that self-proclaimed “widower of Europe.” For Morand, Venice was more than just a city; it was the confidante of his silent soul, the portrait of a man in a thousand different Venices. I, who spent six months living opposite the Chiesa de San Bastian, decorated by Veronese in that half of Venice that is the Dorsoduro, experience Venice as a city that requires absence in order to preserve its glory, which is the glory of wonder. As humans we possess the remarkably consistent capacity for turning the marvelous into the routine. When I realized that I was walking through San Marco looking at nothing more than the tips of my shoes, I finally broke free from my routine so that I might recover that feeling of wonderment, so that I might remember and write of Venice as the city where no footprints are left behind upon the stone or the water. In that place of mirages there is no space for any ghost other than that of time, and the marks it leaves behind are imperceptible. The lagoon would disappear without the stone it reflects, and the stone would disappear without the waters that reflect its image. What weak competition, I think to myself, are the transient bodies of men in the face of this enchantment. Whether we are solid or spectral is of little importance. It is all the same. All of Venice is a ghost. And it does not issue entrance visas to any other ghost. Here, nobody would recognize them as such. And so, they would cease to exist. No other ghost exposes itself to quite so much.

For me, the loveliest cities in Europe, in addition to Venice, are Prague and Cambridge. Prague, the dead lover of the Vltava. Prague, the city abandoned by its writers: Rilke, Werfel, Kundera, the exiles that left so that they could break “the curse of Prague.” The city of ghettos, isolation, emotional walls, prohibited territories, the city of impersonal documents, where the true language is that of the passport, the identity card, the bureaucratic slip of paper that decides who is and who is not a person.

I speak of the city I visited in the winter of 1968. I had traveled there with Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez to support our friend Milan Kundera and the impossible battle for the Prague Spring. I don’t know if there is any lovelier, sadder city in all of Europe. The most poignant spot is the Old Jewish Cemetery, a cramped, narrow plot of land encroached upon by old, soot-stained buildings. Instead of expanding horizontally, this cemetery rose upward: layer upon layer of tombs, earth upon earth. A geological ghost of the Jewish world of Bohemia. A tangle of dead leaves, black earth, and black tombs. The graves of Prague are like totems. One would have to burrow deep down, like a mole, to reach the very last man buried there. His name is Gregor Samsa. He doesn’t move. He is suspended above the void that is both his tomb and urban precipice; there he clings with hands and feet above the void of Prague, the “little mother with claws,” as Kafka called it.

Yet is there any other urban space that so majestically, with such admirable unity and purity of form, preserves its physiognomy, ever-changing and ever-singular, spanning the years from the High Middle Ages to the Baroque?

There is nothing more different from Prague than the beauty of Cambridge, whose “backs” are a necklace of precious stones, a successive parade of serene, immortal, architecture worthy of endless praise: from St. John’s to Trinity to King’s College to Queen’s and Peterhouse; I cannot think of another university complex that marries such beauty with such great service, such tradition with such creation. This is the university of Erasmus and Samuel Pepys, of Wordsworth and Byron. There is the tree from which, gravely, the apple fell down upon Isaac Newton. But if there is one artist who comprises all the secret symmetries of Cambridge, it is Christopher Wren. I spent the most perfect year of my life reading and writing and gazing out, from my room at Trinity College, at the asymmetric quadrilateral of Wren’s Neville’s Court. This is an asymmetry that, breaking the apparent symmetry of Cambridge, opens the door to a mystery that can be called architecture as a prophecy of the past. . Cambridge assimilates the inhabitant, more than the visitor, to a life of work, discipline, and the pleasures shared by both solitude and companionship. I have never encountered a student body as informed or sharp-witted as that of Cambridge. And there is no uninterrupted succession of architecture more beautiful than those Cambridge backs. And accompanying the absolute serenity of immutable architecture is the fastest sky my eyes have ever seen. What pure delight it is to lie down on some green space in Cambridge, hands clasped behind the neck, to contemplate the passage of those “clouds of glory,” as Wordsworth called them in the great poem of English Romanticism, The Prelude, comparing them with “God, who is our home,” before the “shades of the prison-house begin to close” upon us. .

Granada, Ronda, Córdoba, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, Oviedo, Ávila, Cáceres. My rosary of Spanish cities goes beyond architectural beauty to embrace a human conviction. I imagine the ideal European city. Italian architecture. French cuisine. English theater. German music. And filled with Spaniards. One way to classify cities is by the number of friends we have in them. And outside of Latin America, I can’t think of a single place where I have more friends than the cities of Spain. I am at home in Madrid, Barcelona, Mallorca, Sevilla. .

I always return to Paris — another city of friends — because it is where beauty and life coalesce so perfectly. There is no other European city where I have lived quite so intensely — politically, intellectually, romantically. My son was born there. I learned to love my wife there. There are cities I only visit — those in the north of Europe, the cities of the United States — and there are others in which I live. Mexico, as an act of amorous masochism, is my most well-lived city. It is my people, my history, my cross, my suffocation, my test, my challenge: remember me as beautiful, little mistress of New Spain, don’t gaze down upon me as I fall to my knees, most accessible Virgin of Guadalupe, don’t gaze up at me as I lie down, inaccessible whore of Orozco. .

I hear the echoes of kettledrums above the noise of engines and jukeboxes, amid the sediment of bejeweled reptiles. The serpents, animals with history, sleep heavy in your urns. Your eyes gleam with the voracious suns of the high tropics. In your body, a barbed-wire fence. Don’t give up, brother! Summon all that you have in you, sharpen your knives, and refuse. Do not speak, do not pity, do not love. Let all your nostalgia and all your loose ends emigrate. Every day, start at birth. And recover the flame at the moment of that contained, imperceptible strumming, at the moment of the streetside barrel organ, when it seems as though all your memories have suddenly become clear, tight. Recover them on your own. Your heroes will not return to help you. You have come here, without knowing it, to find me at this plateau of funereal jewels. This is where we live, where our aromas blend together on the city streets, the smells of sweat and patchouli, new brick and subterranean gas, our idle and tense flesh, though never our gazes. We have never knelt together, you and I, to receive the same host; torn apart together, created together, only to die for ourselves, isolated. Here we fall. But what is to be done about it? Endure it, brother. And wait to see if one day my fingers touch yours. Come, let yourself fall into the lunar scar of our city, that city that is a panoply of sewers, glass of vapor, and mineral frost, the city that is the presence of all our forgotten memories, city of carnivorous precipices, of immobile pain, immense brevity, stagnant sun, long scorches, city of low flames, city up to its neck in water, city of picaresque lethargy, of black nerves, of three navels, of the contagious laugh, of warped stenches, rigid city between air and worms, old city in lights, old city in its cradle of birds of ill omen, new city living alongside sculpted dust, city living alongside the immense sky, city of dark varnish and stones, city beneath the resplendent mud, city of viscera and ropes, city of violated defeat (city that we could not suckle in the light of day, the secret defeat), city of humble outdoor markets, meat from clay pots, city that is the reflection of fury, city of desired failure, city in a tempest of domes, city that is the trough of the rigid jaws of the brother drenched in thirst and scabs, city woven in amnesia, resurrection of childhoods, incarnation of feather, city of bitches, city of starvelings, sumptuous villa, city of lepers and sunken pestilence, city. Incandescent prickly pear. Eagle without wings. Serpent of stars. This was what we were given. What can we do about it, in the most transparent region of the air.⁶

London is good to me, for it is where I write in peace because nobody calls me, nobody knows me. I look out the window. I don’t go out into the relentless rain. My voyage is my desk. My tropics are made of paper. I hear the incongruous telephone. The answering machine serves as testimony of my absence. I am here. I am not here. I write and I write. All I need to hear and understand, I hear from the mouths of my six or so English friends.

Nevertheless, I cannot abandon the cities that witnessed my growth, shaped me, and educated me. Panama, the city that calls itself the corazón del mundo y puente del universo (the heart of the world and the bridge of the universe), even though it is only a scar of the sea in the middle of the jungle. Montevideo, which I knew with no skyscrapers but full of old-world grace, the perfect capital city dreamed up for its writers, if not by its writers: Felisberto Hernández, Juan Carlos Onetti, and the ghost of Lautréamont. . And Quito, golden equatorial doubloon whose inhabitants only request, “En la tierra, Quito, y en el cielo, un hoyito para ver a Quito” (On earth, Quito, and in heaven, a crevice through which to gaze upon Quito). And then Rio de Janeiro, the cidade maravilhosa where, as I mention elsewhere in this volume, I learned about literature perched atop Alfonso Reyes’s knees. Isn’t literature, then, the lie that reveals the truth in a Janic city, that “río de enero, río de enero, fuiste río y eres mar” (river of January, river of January, once river, now sea) that Reyes himself sang? Santiago de Chile, where liberty and poetry were forever fused, Santiago of the Frente Popular, the beautiful women with eyes like grapes and schools of British discipline where the desire to write constituted a lack of discipline that was transformed into order and lessons in constancy in the face of the overwhelming obligation to prove, day in and day out, that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. . Buenos Aires, where I became a man and loved and walked about freely, and read Borges and refused to repeat the fascist mottoes of the regime, and understood why tango is a sad thought that one dances, and how a man could fall in love to the point of dishonor because of a woman like Mecha Ortiz or Tita Merello. Next to the lion-colored river, said Lugones, Buenos Aires is a city that was founded twice, the city where the Atlantic and the Pampa came together, equally vast and equally featureless, and gave Buenos Aires, a city privileged by distance and absence, the melancholy of being unique, of not being quite like anything else and bearing the cross of wanting to be like another city, Paris or Babel. There may be no other city as solid, as constructed, as “built” in Latin America, but there is also no other city quite so lost in the mist of its language, literature, music in motion, so wounded by its broken promises, inconceivable cruelties, its “disappeared,” its tortured, its atrocities that cannot begin to equal the carnivalesque shock left behind by its dictators, its embalmed saints, its presidential ballerinas, its palace sorcerers. Buenos Aires endured all this and continues on, perhaps because the city exists thanks to a miracle, because the cannibals didn’t eat it, and perhaps then that is why Buenos Aires eats meat. Founded twice, it could be refounded a hundred times over.

Washington was the city of my childhood, which was punctuated by summer vacations in Mexico under the charge of my splendid, valiant grandmothers. Washington remained with me as a long, burning, Faulknerian summer, with the smell of black men’s sweat, of rotting parks, of slow, heavy rivers, of scratches the flavor of raspberries, of blazing movie theaters where Hollywood concealed the miseries of the Depression behind the erotic charm of Fred and Ginger dancing, the anarchistic, outrageous comedy of Laurel and Hardy, the marvelous reinvention of the comic Eve — as exemplified by Irene Dunne and Carole Lombard, accessible and ironic compared with the inaccessible sexual remove of Greta and Marlene, the divas of Europe. Why do I remember all of this as part of a summer I scarcely lived through, rather than the winters when I would ride my sled to school and was rewarded, each week, with two unforgettable trips to the movie theater, clutching my father’s hand?

Today I detest Washington. Everything that loomed large in my childhood became dwarflike in my older age: the parks, the avenues, the houses, the politics, the politicians. . Comparable to a great cemetery of Greek mausoleums, Washington, like Buenos Aires, is an invented city, one without preexistence. But whereas Buenos Aires conjugates Pampa and ocean with the poetry of Cortázar, the music of Discépolo, and the voice of Goyeneche, Washington is nothing but a cemetery that stretches out toward the vast nothingness of Highway 1 that runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the European entrance to the Asian exit, to a New York that has grown more and more repetitive, arrogant, vulgar, and, paradoxically, friendlier, more original and welcoming, but always Gotham, city of unbearable energy that imposes itself upon us, sucks our very existence from us, makes us believe that its vitality also belongs to us, passive and deceived by the whirlwind of the Big Apple and its nightmare of cocktail parties where nobody gives anyone else more than a fleeting glance and two seconds of conversation, but where the presentation of the film Hamlet can spark, at intermission time, some of the most animated and lucid debate ever heard among an audience of young people. .

My present distance from New York may very well be due to my former closeness. The New York where I lived during the 1960s was a tribal space of childhood recognition. We were a gang of friends, we shared women, reading, bars. The enthusiastic fervor of the age was what united us. The mutual discovery of the new Latin American literature by the North Americans, and the literature of North America by the Latin Americans united us as well. Manhattan stretched out to the farthest tip of Long Island and its tribe of young, dynamic playwrights, all the way up to Martha’s Vineyard and then back down Second Avenue to end up inevitably in the fiefdom of Elaine’s with all its habitués, and then the glorious young women showing off miniskirts, long manes of hair, and bodies that undulated to the rhythm of the Watusi amid the lights and shadows of the Peppermint Lounge, before waking up, melancholy, to the sound of the marvelous Cannonball Adderley and compensating for all that we lost out on in the nighttime with summer mornings in our penumbral bedchambers, barely allowing the July heat to filter through the brisk shadows of a youth we imagined would never end. . And as I have not rediscovered that thing that I can only evoke in my memory, I unfairly blame the city that I once felt was so very much mine and that now seems so foreign to me. Nowadays, who plays the African flute of the melancholy Brother Yusef Lateef in a city that has succumbed to celebrity, money, and Darwinian disdain? Oh, the paradox: the first and only world power, so full of itself, indulges in the luxury of scorning international information. With the exception of the two coasts — New York and Los Angeles — one looks in vain for international news on television or in the newspapers.

And one terrible day — September 11, 2001—horror would wake up New York, eradicating all its egotistical liturgy and resuscitating all its solidarity, all its heroism, all its human fraternity at this its most frightful hour. For how long? I don’t know. I only know that nobody can destroy the energy of New York.

It takes longer to fly from New York to Los Angeles than to London or Paris. A Los Angeles increasingly lost in its labyrinth of freeways and its continental shock: how is it possible? This is where America ends, this is where everything crumbles into the sea, where there is no more frontier to conquer. California, the slide area. And then, right there in the middle of the continent, a great city, in love and beloved, the city that loves itself and makes its visitors fall in love with it: Chicago, that toddlin’ town, the city of broad shoulders, where the men take their wives out to dance. .

The North American landscape invites all kinds of generalizations regarding uniformity, void, the immense and tedious plains, ignorance, lack of information, provincialism. . But those very stereotypes are what spur a person to prove it wrong, to celebrate the discovery of an unknown house by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Midwestern plains; Goya’s marvelous portrait of Pedro Romero, the founder of modern bullfighting, in Fort Worth, Texas; the largest, most complete bookstore in the world, tucked in between the lovely rivers of Portland, Oregon; Richard Ford on a quiet street in the hushed nostalgia and elegance of New Orleans; William Styron and his dog walking along the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard; the Plaza hotel’s perfect martini; Dorothea Straus conquering the streets of Manhattan every afternoon with the stride of an Amazon and an outfit straight out of the Belle Epoque; a bordello of Chinese gay men in San Francisco; the original manuscripts of the Spanish colony in the Ann Arbor Library; the melodious laughter and the warm breasts of the girls in Boulder, Colorado; the proud profile of the Chicano student in San Antonio, Texas; the heady aroma of ink, wood, and leather in Harvard’s Widener Library; the ironic wisdom of the great Democrats, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith.

And so I reach a conclusion. Cities cannot bear to be compared. And “America” is a uniform illusion that is dreamed of in Hollywood like Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse: “I dance, therefore I am.” There is the “America” that endlessly bemoans the loss of its innocence in Boston or Long Island (Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald). There is the “America” that was never innocent in the first place (Richard Wright’s Natchez, Mississippi, James Baldwin’s Harlem), and the “America” that was always violent, corrupt, and supremely indifferent to the national idyll (Chandler’s Los Angeles, Hammett’s Poisonville).

There is one city to which I owe my passage from adolescence to adulthood, where I disciplined my life, focused my mind, and organized my work as a writer. That city, for me, is Geneva: my incomparable attic flat on the Place du Bourg-de-Four, the Forum Boarium founded by Julius Caesar; the Café de la Clémence right in front, for conversations with friends; the Café Canonica with the view of the lake for chatting up hookers with dyed-blond hair and lapdogs; the university for meeting and falling in love with women who bore the scent of youth and love-filled awe; the disciplined, ancien régime atmosphere of the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales and its coterie of star internationalists such as Brierly, Bourquin, Ropke, Scelle, who graced me with their teachings; the bookshops of the Vieille Ville where I would buy old editions of the French classics and read them in the tranquillity of the Île Jean-Jacques Rousseau between the Rhône and the Léman. .

Cities of supreme peace and contemplation. The Sevilla of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish equilibrium. Jade-colored Oaxaca, the only city with a peacefully unified silhouette of the indigenous and the Spanish. A Berlin resurrected, amid the dreams rocked back and forth by the proximity of a hundred lakes. Cartagena de Indias, the perfect city of the colonial Caribbean, encircled by walls to fend off the English pirates of yesteryear and the drug-trafficking guerrillas of today: the miraculous oasis of a ghostly, blood-squeezed country. Savannah, Georgia, a city that Borges must have invented, plazas that branch off into streets, which lead to more plazas that branch off into more streets in an infinite, perfect geometric web, though in the end it is as desolate as a de Chirico painting.

There is no city without climate. Temperature is the vengeance of a nature that, when all is said and done, cannot be dominated by roof or street, by door, by the heat of a fireplace or the ice in a freezer. Nature all around us tells us, over and over again: choose. Nobody, nature says to us, can escape the dilemma between abandoning me to escape my suffocating embrace— even if the price is that of an errant orphanhood — and remaining forever in my savage and protective jungle, even if the price is that of abdicating the risks of freedom. .

Mexico: summer will arrive with the cry of dust defeated. London: spring will bloom in two youthful breasts behind a sheath of transparent organdy. New York: autumn will wear a crown of gold. Paris: winter will be a river of mist.

And outside the cities, the lakes and the fluvial waterways, forests and lands die at an unprecedented velocity. We are at risk of losing the equilibrium of the biosphere and condemning our descendants to live and die without nature. “The universe requires an eternity,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. “And in the heavens,” he added, “the verbs preserve and create are synonyms.” Preserve and create are our rival verbs at the dawn of this new century.