Читать книгу The Art of Flight - Sergio Pitol - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt was enough just to leave the train station and catch a glimpse from the vaporetto of the façades along the Grand Canal as they came into view to experience the feeling of being one step away from my goal, of having traveled years to cross the threshold, unable to decipher what that goal was and what threshold had to be crossed. Would I die in Venice? Would something arise that could in an instant change my destiny? Would I, perchance, be reborn in Venice?
I was arriving from Trieste; I had not searched for Joyce’s house or for traces of Svevo, nor had I done or seen anything that was worthwhile. I had arrived in the city the evening before, and as I attempted to find lodging in a hotel, an employee detected some anomaly or other in my visa, an error in the expiration date, I believe, which rendered my stay in the country illegal. I was allowed, reluctantly, to spend the night in the hotel lobby. Early that morning I caught the return train; when it stopped in Venice I decided to get off. It must have been seven in the morning when I first set foot on Venetian soil. I would spend the rest of the day there and continue on to Rome on the night express. It is written that misfortunes never come singly: after checking my bag at left-luggage I discovered I had lost my glasses; I searched my pockets and ran to the platform, hoping to find them on the ground, but the sea of travelers and porters bustling about forced me to abandon my search. Most likely, I thought, I had left them at the hotel in Trieste or on the train car I had left in such a rush.
All of this must have taken place in mid-October of 1961. I suddenly found myself in the Piazzetta, eager to begin my tour. My near-sightedness in no way dulled the wonder. I arrived at the Piazza San Marco and drank my first coffee at the Caffè Florian, that place of legend profiled by every writer and artist who ever visited Venice. Next door to the Florian, I bought a guidebook. Seeing up-close—reading, for example—presented little problem. After the coffee, guidebook in hand, I began to walk. The details eluded me, the contours faded; immense multicolored spots, luxurious glows, and perfect patinas appeared all around me. I saw the sparkle of timeworn gold where most certainly there was flaking on a wall. Everything was submerged in mist, like in the mysterious Views of Venice painted by Turner. I walked among shadows. I could and could not see, I caught fragments of a shifting reality; the feeling of being trapped between light and dark grew increasingly more pronounced as a fine, trembling drizzle gradually created the chiaroscuro in which I was moving.
As the mist concealed my view of palaces, piazzas, and bridges, my happiness grew. I walked so long that even now I have the impression that the day encompassed a multitude of days. As I walked, ecstatic, I repeated over and over a phrase from Berenson: “Color is the greatest gift the Venetians have given us,” words I remembered having read at the beginning of The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. I return to the book today to verify the quote and discover that not only had I caused it to lose its nuance but I had also deformed and contracted it, as no doubt happened with everything I discovered in Venice during that first encounter. Berenson writes: “Their mastery over colour is the first thing that attracts most people to the painters of Venice. Their colouring not only gives direct pleasure to the eye, but acts like music upon the moods, stimulating thought and memory in much the same way as a work by a great composer.” By shortening the quote I was attempting to approximate its meaning. Yes, color—that predominant gray I perceived, with backgrounds of ochre, sienna reds, bottle greens, and constant golds—not only became a source of pleasure for my weary eyes, it also stimulated my mind, my imagination, and my memory in an extraordinary way.
As I entered San Marco, the vastness of the space overwhelmed me. For a while I followed a group to whom a tour guide was explaining in laggard and pedantic French certain characteristics of Byzantine art. In that magnificent space I experienced the day’s only moment of doubt. It was difficult for me to make up my mind whether its grandeur was an obvious sign of the splendor of Byzantium, or a first step toward the aesthetic of Cecile B. DeMille, that titan of Hollywood. During subsequent, more relaxing visits, I concluded, with Solomonic wisdom, that both poetics are interwoven in that glorious basilica in remarkable harmony. I then moved on to a room located in an adjacent palace, where I saw an exhibition of Bosch. It was trial by fire! I had to look at the paintings from a considerable distance, which for me meant stumbling into total darkness. Had my knowledge of modern art been less rudimentary, I would have been able to compare some of those paintings with Malevich’s famous Black Square or with one of the enormous canvases in black by Rothko, of whose existence of course I was unaware.
I then set off for the Galleria. I toured its rooms overflowing with wonders: Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio: the immense legacy of form and color that Venice has bequeathed to the world. I cannot remember if I followed a group, as I did in San Marco, or whether I relied on my guidebook, pausing before some of the paintings. Afterward, I become lost. All I know is that I walked aimlessly for several hours, wandered down countless streets, crossed the great Rialto Bridge several times, and other less majestic ones, even some in ruins that crossed the small canals in less affluent neighborhoods. I boarded the vaporetto on several occasions and continued moving; I drank another coffee at the Florian and ate gloriously in a trattoria I happened upon by accident. As I walked, I became lost from time to time in my tiny guidebook. I tried to find Palladio’s buildings, those spaces that Hofmannsthal considered more worthy of being inhabited by gods than by men; I did not know then that outside of two or three churches the rest of his work is located on dry land, in Vicenza specifically. I thought I had found the Palazzo Mocenigo where Byron lived two years of scandalous orgies and prolific creation; the Palazzo Vendramin where Wagner lodged, and that other one where Henry James took an apartment in order to write The Aspern Papers. I began to imagine which one belonged to Juliana Bordereau, the centenarian protagonist who guards the much coveted papers, and the house where Robert Browning died, and the one where Alma Mahler attended to her daughter’s deathbed, and the one where Schnitzler’s daughter committed suicide just days after marrying. The very name of the city links the annals of love with moments of death. It is no wonder that one of the great titles of literature is Death in Venice. I saw towers, battlements, and balconies. I saw pointed arches and columns, bronze horses and marble lions. I heard Italian and German and French spoken all around me, as well as the Venetian dialect, peppered with words from Old Castilian, which once upon a time my ancestors must have spoken in those narrow streets. I paused in front of the Teatro La Fenice, whose splendid interior I had just seen in a movie by Visconti. In the vestibule, a large poster by Picasso announced a recent performance by the Berliner Ensemble: Mutter Courage.
That night, as I boarded my train, I felt as though I knew Venice like the back of my hand. What a poor naïve devil! Fatigue was getting the best of me; all of the sudden I began to feel the incredible effort I had exerted that day: my eyes, my temples, the back of my neck, my joints all hurt. I struggled to open my suitcase to take out my pajamas. The first thing I pulled out was a jacket; I felt my glasses in one of the pockets. The miracle had been completed: I had crossed the threshold, the steel blue egg of Leda was beginning to hatch, and opposites were uniting at the bottom of tombs. Where was all this esoteric logorrhea coming from? I did not finish putting on my pajamas. I remembered a line from the end of To the Lighthouse: “Yes, I have had my vision,” and I fell asleep. I repeated it again in the morning as I woke up, when the train was about to arrive in Rome.
The year was 1965. I had been living in Warsaw for two years. One day the postman handed me a letter from Vence, a village in the South of France. It was signed by Witold Gombrowicz. Could it be a joke? I could scarcely believe it was real. I showed it to some Polish friends, and they were stunned. A young Mexican who was living in Warsaw had just received a letter from Gombrowicz! It couldn’t be! It was impossible! I nodded, ecstatic. “Like everything in Gombrowicz’s life,” I told myself.
He explained in the letter that someone had given him the Spanish translation of The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski, which I had done, and that he found it satisfactory. So he invited me to collaborate with him on the translation of his Argentine Diary, which the publishing house Sudamericana was to publish in Buenos Aires. It was the beginning of a significant improvement in my living conditions. Suddenly, I began to receive offers from various places. The sources of my income were Joaquín Mortiz at Ediciones Era and the Universidad Veracruzana Press in Mexico; Seix Barral and Planeta in Barcelona; and Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. Until then, I had only managed to place a few translations here and there. From that moment on, in just three or four hours a day, I managed to earn a regular income that in Poland in those days was a tidy little sum. In addition to Polish literature, I was receiving offers to translate Italian and English authors. For the next six or seven years I worked primarily as a translator; the profession I had begun in Warsaw allowed me to live full-time in Barcelona and part-time in England.
As I recall that time, I do not think that “I was living another life,” as people usually say, but rather that the person I’m talking about was not entirely me; instead, that person was a young Mexican who shared my name and some of my habits and idiosyncrasies.
One of the obvious bonds I share with that young man living in Warsaw is his inordinate love for reading. The freedom he enjoyed then is scarcely visible in his writings, but perhaps it was placed into a reservoir for later use, when, paradoxically, his spirit of freedom had withered. Recalling his irresponsibility, his cheek, his taste for adventure, produces in the writer of these lines a kind of vertigo.
I have trouble writing. My hand freezes when I recall the time when living was akin to being a noble savage and realize, without rancor, that society, its offices and its conventions, eventually achieved their mission. But not entirely! Perhaps my opposition to the ways of the world is more radical now, but it manifests itself in sullenness rather than joy—in convictions. It is no longer a mere emanation of nature.
During my stay in Warsaw I was master of my time, my body, and my pen. And while it is true that freedom in Poland was far from absolute, it is also true that the Poles took advantage as best they could, and with an intensity that bordered on frenzy, of the spaces opened up during de-Stalinization, especially artistic spaces. I owe to that period the pleasure of reading texts that would certainly have been different had I been living in my own country or in any of the cultural metropolises. Free from the burden of trends, from the capillas, Mexico’s literary coteries, and from any pressing need for information, reading became an act of sheer hedonism. I read the Poles, of course, and everything in that world was discovery; I read what my friends sent me from Mexico: Mexican and Latin American literature. Hopscotch was a revelation. Other books that were treasures were Francisco Delicado’s The Portrait of Lozana; a great deal of Tirso de Molina; Canetti’s Auto da Fé; Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless; Tibor Déry’s Mr. G.A. in X; Milan Fust’s The Story of My Wife; and, in particular, the ample collection of the British Council library: Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans; the theater of the Restoration, especially Sheridan and Congreve; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget; and, of course, everything, or almost everything, by Conrad, the reading of whom was different in a Polish milieu; and Henry James and Ford Madox Ford and Firbank and many others. The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power.
Around the same time as Gombrowicz’s letter, I received another from the publisher Don Rafael Giménez Siles, encouraging me to write an autobiography. He had invited a dozen writers from my generation and from the even younger one. He was interested, he said, in knowing how we young writers perceived the world and, more importantly, how we came to terms with our circumstances within it.
One aspect of the biographies would be their brevity, consistent with the short journey made by their writers. I began to write the account reluctantly and with very mixed feelings, but convinced of the need to have a presence, however small, in my country. Unlike the other authors included, I had written very little: two small books of short stories. I was certain that my life, and not just my literary one, had just started; nevertheless, I wrote the autobiographical essay out of vanity, or frivolity, or inertia.
I finished the requested text in a few days. As I wrote it, I felt trapped in an endless continuum. The recent episode was still very close to me, within a stone’s throw, and none of its lines had been brought to a close yet. I could compare my past to one of those extremely destructive hurricanes that strike a particular region with ferocity and, then, for weeks, travel for thousands of miles, but without moving from the spot where they built their greatest strength, to which they return time and time again to unleash their wrath. That was how I viewed my life: my childhood or what I tried to and could remember about it, my days at university, and a few trips, all of it was present in my memory as a single, rather confusing entity. The distance from Mexico, the perspective that it gave me, the strangeness of the new setting, helped to transform the past into a shapeless mixture of elements.
In late 1988 I returned to Mexico permanently. During my absence I published several books; some were translated into other languages. I received awards, all those things! I returned to the country with the idea of devoting my time and energy exclusively to writing. I felt an almost physical need to live with the language, to listen to Spanish all the time, to know it was around me, even if I did not hear it. The Mexico City I encountered seemed foreign and stubbornly complex. I persevered for four years without being able to assimilate it, nor assimilate myself to it. After I arrived, I began to receive publishing proposals; one was to rework that early autobiography, adding a second part that would bear witness to the previous twenty years. I had never reread it. When I did, I felt disgusted, with myself, and, above all, with my language. I did not recognize myself in the least in the image I sketched in Warsaw in 1965. I was struck immediately by a demure tone and false modesty that were irreconcilable with my relationship to literature, which has always been visceral, excessive, even wild. I sensed a plea for forgiveness emanating from the text for having been written and published. They were pages of immense hypocrisy. The writer’s task seemed like a third-rate activity. In short, it would not have bothered me to declare—because at the time I believed it—that I enjoyed writing less than reading, or that it was an ill-defined and precarious experience compared to other things that life offered me. That would have been fine. What I found strange was the virtuous schoolboy mask I was hiding behind, in halftone, the hypocritical ramblings of the Pharisee.
Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me. I can now distinguish the various stages of my life with sufficient clarity—the autonomy of the parts and their relation to the whole—which I was previously unable to do. I have begun to remember with respect and emotion not only my youth but that of others because of the innocence it represents—its blindness, intransigence, and destiny. That alone allows me to conceive of an infinite, unknown, and promising future.
In 1978 or 1979 I spent a few months in Mexico City. At the time, I was a cultural attaché to our embassy in Moscow. I had saved my vacation days for two years so that my stay in Mexico would make more sense than on previous occasions, when I felt I was and was not in my country. Two months was a more respectable amount of time. During the first days of my stay I received a telephone call from Julieta Campos, then director of the Mexican PEN Club, inviting me to participate in a series of presentations of writers from various generations. In each session an older writer and a younger one, a literary newcomer, would read recent texts and then discuss them with the audience. She told me that she was thinking of pairing me with Villoro; we then talked about other things, some of which, with respect to the literary performance, were unclear to me.
After hanging up the phone it occurred to me that there was something about the proposition that did not make sense, that there was not sufficient distance between his generation and mine. It would have made more sense to be paired with Juan de la Cabada, Fernando Benítez, or Luis Cardoza y Aragón, my seniors. I was more than surprised when I learned a few days later that the Villoro with whom I would be introduced was Juan, Luis’s son; I had been assigned the role of the elder. I was forty-five years old, but until fairly recently I was still being mentioned among Mexico’s young writers. I suppose it was in part because of my absence, which made me difficult to identify, and the paucity of my work.
That was the first sign that things were no longer what they had been. That first public reading I did in Mexico gave me the opportunity to read a story that I had just written after several years of unbearable hibernation. It was also the beginning of a great friendship that binds me to Juan Villoro.
A mature author requires no introduction, or does he? The truth is the majority of my work appeared after that night when I passed the mantle to a very tall, hyperactive adolescent, who read with an impressive display of energy the story “El mariscal de campo” (The Field Marshal).
The act of reading, at that meeting of generations, a text that marked my return to writing made me feel, once the nightmare had ended and the celebratory teasing had begun, that I had reached maturity in a rather equivocal situation, that I had behaved like an adolescent writer and Juan like the master who was returning from all the experiences. I read with almost unbearable tension, without knowing if I would be able to make it to the end of a paragraph or even a sentence. I was afraid of having an embolism or a heart attack before getting to a stopping point, unlike the excruciating ease of the beardless youth who seemed to be conquering not just the audience but the entire world.
But in spite of the confusion, I was able to surmise that the equivocal relationship between age and writing would over the years become something eminently comical. The march toward old age, and, let’s say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience, and in which the scenes are characterized quite often by their parodic quality, like a laughable but also harsh theatrical illusion.
Let us look at an example:
I accompany Carlos Monsiváis to the Bellinghausen to meet Hugo Gutiérrez Vega, who had just arrived in Mexico to celebrate the New Year. Every time he returns to the country, whether from Madrid, Río, Washington, Athens, from whatever city his diplomatic career takes him, Carlos and I meet him at the same place to eat. Without fail, we begin to talk as if only a few weeks had passed since our last meal, which is one of the surest signs of friendship. On this occasion, he was coming from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is Consul General.
Hugo’s magnanimity is known to everyone. I am indebted to him, among other expressions of affection, for having put me in contact with some friends of his from the University of Bristol, where I was lecturer for a year in the Spanish department. We are the same age; I think I am even a couple of years his senior, but this does not prevent me from remembering him as an older brother; in fact, he and Lucy were like a big brother and big sister—and extraordinarily so!—during my stay in England.
In short, we met and were glad to be chatting again at the Bellinghausen. After the obligatory comments—our ailments, our friends, the situation in the country—Hugo manages to turn the conversation to one of his favorite topics: Romania, or rather, Romanian literature. He is elated that the Latin Union of Romance Languages Prize, awarded a few days ago in Rome, was given to the Romanian Alexandru Vona, whom he knows well. He won it for a single novel, he tells us, which Vona finished writing in 1947 and was finally about to have published. The novel, Bricked-up Windows, has shaped his destiny. It continues to be his destiny! The few intimate friends whom the Romanian author had allowed to read the novel claimed that his narrative style revealed such a sublime and rigorous quest for form that, if one were to make comparisons, the only names that might come to mind would be the great writers of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Broch, or Musil. For decades, the novelist lived with the certainty that he would never see his work published. Nevertheless, he continued to care for it, refining it in secret. His first surprise must have been its publication in 1993 in its original language, Romanian; then came the translation to French, and now the prize awarded him unanimously by an exceptionally brilliant jury comprised of, among others, Vincenzo Consolo, Luigi Malerba, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Rubem Fonseca, and our dear friend Álvaro Mutis. And from Vona, Hugo bounces to other writers he knows—some personally, others by their work—because one of his greatest passions, perhaps the most eccentric, is, you may have already guessed by now, Romanian literature.
Hugo speaks with characteristic passion as he moves within his sphere; the names he cited elude me, with the exception of the most obvious: Cioran, Eminescu, Eliade, Gian Luca Caragiale; the same thing, I imagine, happens to Monsiváis. He recounts the exploit of a poet and Hispanist—was it Gialescu?—who, although gravely ill from osseous tuberculosis, devotes the rest of his life to translating Góngora’s Soledades which he does so masterfully that today it is considered one of the most remarkable renderings of the Andalusian poet’s work in any foreign language. From there, I begin to get lost, my mind wanders, and not because Hugo’s discussion fails to interest me, rather because I discover that an old man, the doyen of all the world’s old men, the quintessential Nestor, is waving ardently at me from at a faraway table. I watch him stand up suddenly and begin to walk, very slowly, dragging two feet that by all appearances are attempting to rebel against him; he moves his arms as if he were feeling his way or attempting to propel himself. He smiles as though our presence in the restaurant both surprised him and filled him with happiness.
He is wearing stylish clothes, greenish-gray flannel trousers and a slightly wrinkled checkered jacket, which adds a discreet elegance to his figure. His white mane is full and unruly. His face has a pinkish hue, like that of a baby, but scored in every direction with wrinkles of varying lengths and depths, which seems out of place with his infant-like coloring. He reminds me of the last photos of Auden: “My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain…” The only one among us who could not see him was Carlos, because this radiant specter of happiness was approaching from his rear. The names of classmates came to mind suddenly en masse; at that moment, I tried to imagine the face of a younger man, to return it to adolescence and assign it a name, but it was impossible.
Waiting on the tip of my tongue were all the platitudes that one says at moments such as this: “It’s great to see you, old man, especially in such good shape! Obviously, life has treated you well, am I right? Now I know why our colleagues call you Dorian Gray. But they’re wrong, you’re in much better shape, much better of course,” and other such nonsense, only to buy time and give the other person the opportunity to say something that will allow me to identify him.
He opened his arms just a step from our table, as I was about to stand and embrace him. Fortunately, I stopped; I would have made a spectacle of myself. The old timer walked past us without stopping, without even looking at us, his smile growing bigger, and his arms flailing even more. He stopped at the table right behind ours. I was saved from having to repeat such drivel and listen to him do the same. Someone at the table next to us said: “You’re looking good, Flacus! Just look at him! I’m so jealous, Flacus!” And the salvo of hot air that the occasion demanded continued; the gamut of banalities that language has accumulated for such cases. I turned around to watch the show. It was a long table, with some ten people, everyone fawning over Flacus, who, with a content look he attempted to mitigate with words of modesty, responded: “Don’t be so sure, not everything that glimmers is gold; I don’t always feel as good as today; don’t be so sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover…!”
I breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, I realized that we had all stopped talking. What was curious was that the three of us, Hugo and I from the beginning of the old man’s march, and Monsiváis from the time he walked by the table, thought that he was a friend from our youth whom we were not able to place. Perhaps an actor from our generation, a young leading man with a brief but intense career, retired from the profession many years ago. But that possibility turned out to be, without our knowing why, unconvincing.
We devoured our dessert and downed our coffee, as if trying to escape that character who was so close to us. The suspicion that someone could at that very moment be saying the same thing about us made us a little uneasy to say the least. In short, one must grow accustomed to such discomfort upon reaching a certain age.
After the first “vision,” I returned to Venice at least a dozen times. I have wandered every corner of it, and read with interest and pleasure many of the texts that have been written about it, its history, its art, and its customs. There also exists a store of fiction set in Venice. In almost every one of these novels it is considered more than just a setting; rather, it becomes a character. Sometimes it is the protagonist itself.
Puritans, by training, by creed, or by temperament, tend to demonize it; in some, the rejection coincides with an irresistible attraction, and that duality is transformed into delirium. Ruskin passionately described each of its stones, and at the same time was horrified by the customs and traditions of its inhabitants. Evil dwells in the heart of Venice; it is a sea of abomination; its contaminating power is the work of the devil, they say. Should an innocent person manage to escape from there, he does so with a damaged soul. Some are even denied that privilege. They succumb; such is the case of Aschenbach from Death in Venice. Half of mankind allows itself to berate it, lecture it; they attempt to reform it, redeem it from its sins and vices; they demand it cease to exist in order to purge its sins; they rejoice in its decline; only its sinking—death by water—will succeed in purifying it.
Its defenders at times employ disconcerting arguments. Berenson becomes rhapsodic over its colors. He marvels at its extraordinary school of painting, the only one in Italy that lacks “primitives,” because it was born with a handful of masterpieces. The celebrated aesthete asserts that Venice was the first modern European nation, but the reasons underlying this assertion seem rather paradoxical: “Since there was little room for personal glory in Venice, the perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found at first scant encouragement there, and the Venetians were saved from that absorption in archeology and pure science which overwhelmed Florence at an early date. […] As it was, the feeling for beauty was not hindered in its natural development.” Venetian painting is created, and he insists on this point at various times, to be simply an object of pleasure.
What Berenson highlights—his admiration for beautiful and healthy bodies; his love for colorful and sumptuous decoration; the disposition toward pleasure, carnival; the permanent use of the mask and erotic extravagance—is what scandalizes Puritans. On the other hand, anyone who has the slightest propensity for sensuality will in La Serenissima feel as if he were in the Temple of Venus. It is no wonder Casanova is known world-over as the son of Venice.
Venice is boundless and unfathomable. There is always something to see on the next trip, because a church is under restoration, a painting is on loan, the museums are on strike, a thousand reasons. Each trip means corrections, amplifications, surprises, dedications, and demystifications. During my first trips Longhi did not even exist for me, yet today he is one of the painters I am most drawn to. I waited many long years to be able to see Carpaccio’s amazing mural St. George and the Dragon. For many years, time and again, I walked the long route from La Fenice et des Artistes hotel, where I always stay, to the church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, and each time I encountered an unexpected obstacle: closed for restoration, admission denied due to some special ceremony, the walls draped in thick curtains without any explanation whatsoever. During my last trip, when I was finally able to see that and the other frescoes the San Giorgio holds, I felt as if I had at long last planted a pike in Flanders.
The first time, it bears repeating, I saw the city without seeing it. Instead I saw it in fragments, emerging and disappearing, with incorrect proportions and altered colors. The spectacle was at once unreal and marvelous. Over the years I have corrected that vision, each time more magnificent, each time more unreal. In some way my travels around the world, my entire life, have had that same character. With or without glasses, I’ve never achieved more than glimpses, approximations, mutterings in search of meaning in the narrow space that runs between light and darkness. I’ve dreamt that I was a voyager in that fantastic ship of fools painted by Memling, which I once contemplated with amazement in the Naval Museum of Gdansk. What are we, and what is the universe? What are we in the universe? These are questions that leave us speechless, and that we are accustomed to answering with a joke so as not to seem ridiculous.
We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by different times, hobbies, and creeds. As I write these pages, I can divide my life into one long, enjoyable, gregarious phase, and another, the most recent, in which solitude seems to me a gift from the gods. For many years, going to parties, lunches, tertulias, cafés, bars, restaurants was a daily pleasure. The transition to the other extreme occurred so gradually I’m unable to explain the process’s distinct movements. My years in Prague coincided with an intense inner energy. Writing became an obsession; I believe the unbearable social life that I was obliged to lead, for reasons of protocol, in some way nourished the novels I wrote there with anecdotes, episodes, gestures, phrases, and habits.
I live in Xalapa, a provincial capital surrounded by exceptional landscapes. In the morning I go out to the countryside, where I have a cabin, and I spend several hours writing and listening to music. From time to time I take a break to play with my dog in the garden. I return to the city for the midday meal, and in the afternoon I write again, listen to music, read, and sometimes I watch an old movie on videocassette. I talk to friends on the phone. After six p.m., except on rare occasions, nothing can make me leave the house. I am indebted to the architect Bernal Lascuráin, to his imagination, to his taste and his talent, for the pleasure of inhabiting these houses, each one built as a complement to the other. If I had to live under house arrest in them, I would be perfectly happy. I work until two or three in the morning. That rhythm of life which others might find maddening is the only one that appeals to me.
Those things of importance that happen to us in life are due to instinct, Julien Green says. “All sexualities are a part of the same family: instinct. But there is something in it that always escapes us, of which we are conscious. It is what makes our life exciting. Every human being carries a mystery of which he is unaware.” What doesn’t matter, I suppose, what is the same for everyone in the world, what makes an epoch trivial, is created naturally by society. We condition ourselves to it without realizing it; that is one of its great labors and the source of a thousand misfortunes. But then one believes he is behaving like a robot, acting mechanically, marching like a sleepwalker, like an army of tiny little men, and, in the end, it turns out that the force of instinct has worked in the opposite direction. As a child Rosita Gómez dreamt of being a stripper and ended up being an honest bank teller; she never learned to dance, not even waltzes. Marcelino Góngora dreamt of being in the mafia, the head of a criminal gang, the terror of the underworld, yet before the end of adolescence he was a sacristan in his village church. The book that someone intended to write, and for which he took countless notes for years, suddenly came to a standstill, ceased to be a project; something unexpected, beyond his control, began to take shape. That’s how things work. Ask again what we are, where we are going, and a fist in the mouth will rid you of the few teeth you have left.
And from instinct, which is a mystery, I would like to shift to the subject of tolerance, which is an act of will. There is no human virtue more admirable. It implies recognition of others: another way of knowing oneself. An extraordinary virtue, says E.M. Forster, although hardly exciting. There are no hymns to tolerance, as there are, in abundance, to love. It lacks poems and sculptures that extol it. It is a virtue that requires a constant effort and vigilance. It has no popular prestige. If one says of a man that he is tolerant, most people instantly believe that his wife has cheated on him, and the rest make him out to be a fool. One would have to return to the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, to Diderot, to the encyclopédistes, to find the true meaning of the word. In our century, Bakhtin is one of its paladins: his notion of dialogism allows for the possibility of responding to different and opposite meanings equally. “We only harm others when we’re incapable of imagining them,” writes Carlos Fuentes. “Political democracy and civilized coexistence between men demands tolerance and the acceptance of values and ideas different than our own,” says Octavio Paz.
Norberto Bobbio offers a definition of the “civilized” man that embodies the concept of tolerance as daily action, a working moral exercise: The civilized man “lets others be themselves irrespective of whether these individuals may be arrogant, haughty, or domineering. They do not engage with others intending to compete, harass, and ultimately prevail. They refrain from exercising the spirit of contest, competition, or rivalry, and therefore also of winning. In life’s struggle [civilized men] are perpetual losers. […] This is because in this kind of world there are no contests for primacy, no struggles for power, and no competitions for wealth. In short, here the very conditions that enable the division of individuals into winners and losers do not exist.”1 There is something enormous in those words. When I observe the deterioration of Mexican life, I think that only an act of reflection, of critique, and of tolerance could provide an exit from the situation. But conceiving of tolerance as it is imagined in the Bobbio’s text implies a titanic effort. I begin to think about the hubris, arrogance, and corruption of some acquaintances, and I become angry, I begin to list their attitudes that most irritate me, I discover the magnitude of contempt they inspire in me, and eventually I must recognize how far I am from being a civilized man.
In the second entry of Lezama Lima’s diaries, dated October 24, 1939, the Cuban writer writes of the relationship between Voltaire and Frederick II. In the beginning, the rapport between the monarch and the philosopher seemed perfect: “Both constantly lose all sense of measure in their praise.” But a single criticism by Voltaire regarding the spelling mistakes that spoil Louis XIV’s prose is enough to poison the relationship. A king is a king and therefore his greatness cannot be dishonored by a solecism or a spelling mistake; a philosopher, no matter how genius, is only a philosopher and should know his place. Caesar est supra grammaticam, that must never be forgotten. The age-old connection between writer and prince has been undermined by misunderstanding; it is a dangerous friendship. A novelist must learn to carry on a dialogue with others, but especially with himself, he must learn to scrutinize and listen to himself; this will help him know who he is. If he fails, instead of a novel, he will build a verbal artifact that attempts to simulate a narrative form, but whose breathing will be wrong. It will, perhaps, pick up something in the atmosphere. The author knows that he will please either Caesar or the masses, it makes no difference; he has written it for one of those two deities. A few years later, it will end up on the scrapheap. Literature is worse than la belle dame sans merci, that woman beloved and feared by the symbolists. When they play tricks on her, when she senses that she’s being used for spurious reasons, her revenge can be ferocious.
To begin by invoking the annals of Venice and to end bogged down in a literature of lies is a vulgarity. This fact allows me to realize how far I am from the civilized man that Bobbio envisions. Rather than yield to that irritation, I would like to comment on the attitude of two writers who have been decisive as models for my life of retirement: Luis Cernuda and Julien Gracq. It is well known that temperament is destiny, and in temperament I feel that I belong to the same family as those writers. From the outside, and out of slapdashness, one might think that it is a question of authors determined to read life instead of live it. The truth is a little more complex and at the same time much simpler.
One might think that renouncing a large portion of the world’s customs is a way to make arrogance, and occasionally pride, pass for humility. This is not the case. For me it’s a matter of intense relaxation, a pure form of hedonism. Walking through my garden; seeing all my books collected at last, knowing that I have reached the desert island with more options than the ten titles demanded by polls; being far from everything—without refusing to observe the world—scrutinizing it, reading it, trying to decipher its signs, sensing its movements, is overall a pleasure. This does not exclude traveling, dreaming of walking once again the streets of Lisbon, Prague, Marienbad, Venice…
Venice has been a frequent setting in my literature. It is an imagined Venice like Hofmannsthal’s, an ideal Venice, which produces in me the certainty of man’s biological unity with everything that surrounds him and his mythical fusion with the past.
I once wrote:
“All times deep down are a single time. Venice comprises and is comprised of all cities, and the young tourist who, Baedeker in hand and eyes half-closed, stops to contemplate a whimsical façade on the Via degli Schiavoni, the collar of his raincoat raised to protect his weak bronchial tubes from the prevailing dampness, is the same young Levantine with almond eyes and curly hair who contemplates with amazement the riches of the market that runs along the recently erected Rialto Bridge, and also the slave with a coarse mop of dirty-green hair captured in a Kashubian village on the Baltic coast in order to dig the first palafittes of what would later become the most colorful, the most eccentric, the most spectacular of all cities. Each one of us is all men. I have been, the protagonist seems to proclaim, Othello and also Iago and also Desdemona’s lost handkerchief! I am my grandfather and those who will be my grandchildren! I am the vast stone that lays the foundation for these wonders, and I am also its cupolas and estipites! I am a lad and a horse and a piece of bronze that represents a horse! Everything is all things! And only Venice, with its absolute individuality, could reveal that secret.”
Xalapa, February 1996
1 Translated by Teresa Chataway. Throughout the text, Pitol quotes from a variety of literary texts written in Spanish and in other languages. Because he does not cite the quotations, it is impossible to know the source of the translated quotations. For consistency, where possible, I have opted to use published English translations of all quotations. A full bibliography of these translations and their sources is included in the Appendix. Unless otherwise noted by a footnote, all translations of these quotations are mine. —Trans.
