This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Zurich

In early 1950, just after my twenty-first birthday, I traveled to Switzerland to continue my studies at the University of Geneva and the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales. Employed by the Mexican mission to the International Labor Organization (ILO), I served as secretary to Roberto Córdova, the Mexican member of the International Law Commission of the United Nations. All of this lent a terribly formal air to my arrival in Switzerland. Geneva, as always, was a very international city. I made friends with international students, diplomats, journalists. I met a beautiful Swiss student and fell in love with her, though our clandestine encounters were thwarted by two circumstances.

First, I was expelled from the strict pension where I was living on the Rue Emile Jung, for the clandestine reasons mentioned above. And second, my girlfriend’s parents ordered her to stop running around with a young man who came from such a dark, uncivilized country whose inhabitants, as the rumor went, ate human flesh.

The day my girlfriend broke it off with me, I consoled myself by going to a cinema on Rue Mollard to see Carol Reed’s celebrated movie The Third Man, which at the time was the greatest cinematic spectacle in the world. Its heroine was Alida Valli, one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, and who years later would be my neighbor at the San Angel Inn neighborhood in Mexico City. In The Third Man, Valli was a perfect mask of frozen sensuality with clear, flashing, vengeful, resigned eyes.

Most important, however, the movie featured Orson Welles. I had first seen Citizen Kane as a child in New York, and from that day onward, I have always regarded it as the greatest talkie ever made in Hollywood. Its formal beauty, its bold lighting, its camera angles, and its great attention to detail were values that converged to tell the Great American Story: Money: how to make it and how to spend it. Happiness: how to search for it and never find it. Power: how to attain it and how to lose it. Kane was at once both the American Dream and its antithesis, the American Nightmare.

Now, at the Cinema Mollard, Welles emerged from the shadows of the Vienna sewers as Harry Lime, the cynical black marketeer who justifies his illegal activities with a phrase that became famous around the world and that affected Switzerland quite directly.

“In Italy under the Borgias,” said Orson Welles as Harry Lime, “they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

I don’t recall how this observation was received by the audience in Geneva. I do know, however, that I had moved from that puritanical pension to a bohemian attic flat on the Place du Bourg-de-Four and from there, in the company of a Dutch cohort, I began to explore the dark side of cuckoo-land, the night life of Geneva. We discovered seamy cabarets teeming with third-rate Harry Limes, prostitutes with bleached blond hair eternally seated with their poodles at the Café Canonica, and a pair of beautiful dancers whom the Dutchman and I quickly befriended. My gleeful ardor, however, was somewhat dampened when I asked the ballerina out for a Saturday date, only to be responded to with a “Oh, no. Saturday is my husband’s day.”

Ah, the ghost of Calvin. Even the cabaret dancers were no more than animated cuckoo clocks, it seemed. After all was said and done, was Harry Lime right?

Before going to Geneva I had read Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes, which had filled my mind with visions of a city of political intrigue, teeming with Russian exiles and fearsome anarchists. But even in the tragic hothouse atmosphere Conrad described, there was nevertheless something that resembled cuckoo-land: the protagonist Sofia Antonovna says to the traitor Razumov, “Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony.”

He might very well have added, “And the Swiss, too?” As a Mexican, I have never appreciated generalizations regarding my country or any other for that matter (with the one exception of the United States: I am, after all, Mexican). Reading Conrad in Geneva, I could only echo his thoughts that “there are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.”

And so, in the summer of 1950, I was invited by some very old and dear German Mexican friends, the Wagenechts, to visit them in Zurich. I had never been to Zurich before and harbored the preconceived notion that it was the very crown of the Swiss prosperity that stood out in such stark contrast with the rest of Europe, still convalescing from the war — London, where they were still rationing the most basic of items; Vienna, occupied by the four victorious powers; bombed-out Cologne; Italy, with no heating, its third-class trains packed tight with men in ratty pants carrying suitcases held together with twine; children collecting cigarette butts on the streets of Genoa, Naples, Milan. .

It was a beautiful city, Zurich. The balmy days of June exhaled the last deadening breaths of May and heralded the imminent arrival of the July heat. It was difficult to separate the lake from the sky — it was as if the waters had become pure air and the firmament, the very mirror of the lake. The feeling of tranquility, dignity, and reserve was irresistible and only heightened the physical beauty of the surroundings. Where are all the gnomes? I would ask myself. Where is all that gold hidden away? In this city where the Nibelungen ostensibly made themselves visible, dressed in frock coats and top hats as in George Grosz’s caricatures?

I must admit that all my potential for irony, well established on the shores of Lake Leman, fell to pieces the night my friends invited me to dinner at the Baur au Lac, a hotel by the lake. In reality the restaurant was a barge, a terrace that floated on the lake. Reached only by a narrow gangplank, it was lit by Chinese lanterns and flickering candles. As I unfolded my stiff white napkin amid the tinkling sounds of silver and glass, I looked up and my eyes came to settle on the group at the table next to us.

Three ladies were dining with an older gentleman in his seventies; he was as stiff and elegant as the starched napkins, dressed in a white double-breasted dinner jacket and an immaculate shirt and tie. With his long, delicate fingers he sliced a cold pheasant with the utmost refinement. Even as he ate, he seemed as erect as a candle, and his bearing was one of military severity. His face betrayed “a growing fatigue,” but his lips and jaw were set in a semblance of pride that sought desperately to hide his exhaustion. His eyes shone with “fiery and playful caprice.”

On that summer night in Zurich, as the carnival lights twinkled against those of the restaurant upon the features that I finally recognized, the face of Thomas Mann was a theater of hushed, implicit emotions. He ate, letting the ladies do the talking; he was, to my very captivated attentions, the creator of times and spaces in which solitude is the mother of a “beauty unfamiliar and dangerous” but also the soul of the perverse and the illicit. There was no way I could prove the accuracy of my intuition that evening of my youthful, if distant, encounter with an author who had literally shaped the writers of my generation. From Buddenbrooks to the great novellas to The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann had been the securest link in our Latin American literary connection to Europe. Because if Joyce was Ireland and the English language, and Proust was France and the French language— well, Mann was even more than Germany and the German language. As young readers of Broch, Musil, Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Kafka, and Lernet-Holenia, we knew that the German language was more than just Germany. It was the language of Vienna and Prague and Zurich, sometimes also that of Trieste and Venice. But it was Mann who pulled all of them together into a European language based on the European imagination — a whole that was far greater than its various parts. To our young Latin American minds, Mann was already what Jacques Derrida would later call “the Europe which is what has been promised in the name of Europe.” Watching Mann eat his dinner that evening in Zurich, the two spaces of that spirit, Europe and Zurich, became united together in my mind and would remain as such forevermore. Thanks to that meeting without a meeting, I crowned Zurich as the true capital of Europe that night.

It was odd. It was impertinent. Did I dare approach Thomas Mann — me, a twenty-one-year-old Mexican student with many nights of reading under my belt but with little of the intellectual sophistication that was still so far beyond my grasp? In a memorable essay, Susan Sontag recalls how she, at an even younger age, penetrated the inner sanctum of Thomas Mann’s home in Los Angeles in the 1940s, and discovered that though she had precious little to say, she had plenty to observe. I had nothing to say but, like Sontag, much to observe as well.

And there he was again the next day, at the Hotel Dolder, where he was staying. Dressed all in white, dignified but one degree short of the stiffness of the previous night, his eyes were somehow more alert, more horizontal. Out on the courts, a group of young men played a game of tennis but he had eyes for only one of them — who seemed to be the Chosen One, Apollo in tennis whites. To be sure, he was a very beautiful young man, no more than twenty, twenty-one years old. My age. Mann could not take his eyes off him and I couldn’t take my eyes off Mann. I was witnessing a scene from Death in Venice, only thirty-eight years later, when Mann was no longer thirty-seven (his age when he wrote the sublime novella of sexual desire) but seventy-five, older even than the feeble Aschenbach, yearning for young Tadzio from afar on the Lido — where, twenty years after seeing Mann in Zurich, I saw Luchino Visconti in the company of Carlos Monsiváis, filming Death in Venice with Silvana Mangano, a woman who encompassed all forms of beauty and desire, even those of androgyny.

That morning in Zurich, the situation was replayed— astoundingly, famously, painfully the same. Mann — dignified man of letters, Nobel Prize winner, septuagenarian — could not hide, from me or anyone else, his passionate ache for a twenty-year-old boy playing tennis on a court at the Hotel Dolder one radiant morning in Zurich in June of 1950. That was when a young woman found her father, seemed to chide him affectionately, and forced him to abandon his passionate post and return with her to everyday life — not only that of the hotel but that of this tremendously disciplined author whose Dionysian impulses were forever being controlled by the Apollonian dictate to enjoy life only if you are able to give it form.

I saw it that morning. For Mann, the artistic form preceded the forbidden flesh. Beauty was to be found in art, not in the formless, fleeting, and ultimately rotten carcass of our desires. It was a dramatic and unforgettable moment for me: a true commentary on the life and work of Thomas Mann — the arrival of his daughter Erika, visibly admonishing her father for his weaknesses, gently pushing him to return, if not to the order of cuckoo-land, to the order of the spirit, literature, and the artistic form, where Thomas Mann could have his cake and eat it too, be the master and not the plaything of his emotional life.

I sat down to eat lunch with my German Mexican friends in the dining room at the Dolder. The young man who waited on us was the one whom Mann had been admiring that morning. He hadn’t had time to bathe and smelled lightly of healthy, athletic perspiration. The headwaiter imperiously turned to him— “Franz”—and he went scurrying off to another table.

And so there was something of mystery in Zurich, something more than cuckoo clocks. There was irony. And rebellion. There was the Café Voltaire and the birth of Dada, in the middle of the bloodiest war ever waged on European soil. There was Tristan Tzara giving rationalism the finger: “Thought is made in the mouth.” And there was Francis Picabia creating art out of nuts and bolts. There was Zurich, telling a decaying, bloodstained, hypocritical world that sanctioned death in the trenches in the name of some kind of superior rationalism, “All that we see is false.” From this simple premise, uttered by the impertinent, monocled Tzara from his spot at the Café Voltaire, sprang a revolution of sight and sound and humor and dream and skepticism that in the end buried the complacency of nineteenth-century Europe, though it could not prevent the barbaric events still to come. Was Europe still not quite “what had been promised in the name of Europe”? Could it ever be? Would Europe be reduced to the night and shadows of Treblinka and Dachau? Yes, if we accepted the notion that everything that came out of Zurich— Duchamp and the Surrealists, Hans Richter and Luis Buñuel, Picasso and Max Ernst, Arp, Magritte, Man Ray — was not “what had been promised in the name of Europe.” But it was. The thing that had always been promised in the name of Europe was the criticism of Europe — Europe’s own warning to herself against her own arrogance, smugness, and surprised confusion when the first blows of adversity finally began to fall. It was the same warning that the artists of Zurich had issued in 1916. And it should be issued once again, now that the ghosts of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Islamism are rearing their heads again, reminding us once more of Joseph Conrad’s words in Under Western Eyes, that “there are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.”

Who had seen these phantoms, painted them, given them corporeal horror? Another citizen of Zurich, Füssli, the greatest of the pre-Romantic painters. Füssli, who from the eighteenth century had embodied all the themes of the dark night of the romantic soul just as Mario Praz described them in his celebrated book Flesh, Death, and the Devil in Romantic Literature. Füssli and the Belle Dame Sans Merci, Füssli and the beauty of the Medusa, Füssli and the Metamorphoses of Satan, Füssli and André Gide’s warning that not believing in the Devil means giving him all the advantages of surprising us. The baptismal waters of Romanticism — the beauty of the horrible — spring from Füssli, citizen of Zurich. Darkness shattered by unattainable light. The joy in crime that the anti-cuckoo Harry Lime embodied so well. The Fatal Man and Fatal Woman who have bewitched our impossible imaginations, from Lord Byron to Sean Connery and from Salomé to Greta Garbo. .

Zurich, as repository of the archetypes of the modern world? Why not, if we take a broad view of things? James Joyce sang lusty songs in the Café Terrasse, playing with the words in joyous anticipation of Ulysses, his work in progress. Lenin was a habitué of the Café Odeon before he left for Russia in a famously sealed railway car. Did the two ever meet for real, as Beckett recalled, or did they only encounter each other in Tom Stoppard’s play? Didn’t all these ghosts walk upon the waters of the lake in Zurich?

And yet, for me, dazzling as a Füssli painting and shocking as all the Dada pranks may be, tensely opposite as the Zurich life and work of Joyce and Lenin may be, it is always Mann, Thomas Mann, the good European, the contradictory European, the critical European, who comes back to my heart and mind as the figure I most closely identify with the city of Zurich.

How many times was he there? Can we really separate Mann from Zurich? What a long life he lived there, with all the comings and goings between his villa at Kusnacht and his homes at Erlenbach and Kilchberg; places of rest, spaces for work. But then there is also the Zurich to be remembered as the setting of certain high points in Mann’s life. The 1921 visit, when he dared to raise his speech fee to 1,000 marks. The day in 1926 when he read “Disorder and Early Sorrow” to students. The joyous 1936 celebration of his sixtieth birthday; he had chosen Zurich not as a foreign place but as “a homeland for a German of my ilk.” Zurich as “an ancient seat of Germanic culture, where the Germanic fuses into the European.” The disturbing visit in 1937, on the precipice of the Nazi night and fog, preparing Lotte in Weimar as a desperate attempt at a new Aufklärung, a new Enlightenment, ignoring Gerhart Hauptmann’s refusal to shake hands with the philosophical desire for “other times,” perhaps better ones. And then his struggles to keep his son Klaus off drugs — a world, wrote Mann, “where moral effort. . earns no gratitude of any kind.”

And then there is the Thomas Mann who returns to Zurich after the war, to embark upon a period of ceaseless activity, as if age and exhaustion held no sway. The room at the Hotel Baur au Lac, endlessly invaded by mail deliveries, requests for interviews, tiny scraps of glory in the writer’s boots, more and more until they became an insufferable nuisance. And then retreating to the beauty of a young man he yearned for, waiting for “a single word from the boy” and knowing that nothing, nothing in the world can empower an old man to love again.

And then, on August 15, 1955, “the throne became vacant.” And I turned around and looked back on that serendipitous encounter in Zurich in the spring of 1950, and wrote, “Thomas Mann, out of his solitude, had finally found the affinity he sought between the personal fate of the author and that of his contemporaries. ” Through Mann, I had imagined that the products of his loneliness and this affinity were called art (created by one) and civilization (created by all). He had spoken with such assurance in Death in Venice about the duties imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul, that I, paralyzed by my admiration of him, saw him that night in Zurich as something so distant that I was unable to imagine anything at all comparable in our own Latin American culture, where the extreme demands of a ravaged and often silenced continent very often annihilate the voices of men and turn the voice of society into a hollow political monster, sometimes even killing it or turning it into a kind of sentimental, pathetic dwarf.

Yet as I looked back on my impassioned reading of all that Thomas Mann wrote, from “The Blood of the Walsungs” to Doktor Faustus, I could not help but feel that despite the vast differences separating his culture and my own, both (that is, Europe, Latin America, Zurich, Mexico City) were cultures where literature, in the end, asserted itself through a relationship between the visible and invisible worlds of narrative, between nation and narration. A novel, said Mann, should weave together the threads of many human destinies in the task of crafting a single idea. The “I,” the “you,” and the “we” were dried and separated out by our own lack of imagination. I understood what Mann was saying and I was able to put those three “people” together many years later, when I wrote my novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz).

But then the 1950s meandered into the 1960s and we turned our attentions to another citizen of Zurich: Max Frisch and I’m Not Stiller. We got wind of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and “The Visit.” We even realized that Jean-Luc Godard was, in fact, Swiss and that the proverbial cuckoo was as dead as the equally proverbial duck, as dead as the equally proverbial doornail. Harry Lime emerged from the sewers, only to become fat and smug, doing television spots about drinking “no wine before its time.” Welles himself suffered the same fate as Kane, indulgent and tragic, and perhaps he left behind scraps of his tremendous talent in the hands of hard, tragic, implacable Swiss writers like Frisch and Dürrenmatt, those whom Harry Lime saw as nothing more and nothing less than cuckoo clocks.

I have two endings for my tale of Zurich; one is much closer to my age and my culture. It is the image of the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, a Spanish Republican and Communist who was sent to the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald at age fifteen and who, when he was liberated by the Allied troops in 1945, could not recognize his own face, that of an emaciated young man who had been rescued from death, who would never speak of his wrenching experience until his face said to him, “You can speak again.”

In his extraordinary book, La escritura o la vida (Writing or Life), Semprún waits patiently until he is fully restored to life, even if it takes him decades (and it does) to speak about the horror of the camps. And so, one day, in Zurich, he dares to enter a bookshop for the very first time since his liberation so many years earlier, and he surprises himself by staring at his reflection in the shop window. Zurich has given him back his face. He does not need to rediscover the horror. Recovering his face is enough to tell us the whole story. The life of Zurich surrounds him.

The second ending is closer to my own memories. It happened that night in 1950 when, without him knowing it, I left Thomas Mann sipping his demitasse as midnight was approaching and the floating restaurant of the Baur au Lac gently swayed and the Chinese lanterns slowly flickered and went out.

I will always be grateful to that night in Zurich for silently teaching me that in literature, you know only what you can imagine.