Читать книгу The Journey - Sergio Pitol - Страница 11

19 MAY

Two hours into the flight and the feeling of having forgotten, as is always the case, things I will need during the trip. Mrs. A., a television official, whom I run into frequently in airports and on airplanes, and also at diplomatic receptions, suddenly changed places and came to sit beside me. From that moment on, she talks non-stop. It’s the same every time I see her, and no matter what we’re talking about, she manages to change the subject, always to the same one, which, apparently, obsesses her. She travels frequently, attending film and television festivals in Spain and Latin America. She loves to talk about her trips and her experiences; she almost always is besieged by brutish and impatient hot-blooded men who give off a smell of sweat and from whom she only manages to free herself with great difficulty. By the end of the episode, she grows demure, contradicts herself, blushes, so her listeners will draw a more unchaste conclusion. I am certain that if given enough rope, she’d lower herself to the bottom of the pit, wallow in the muck with delight, her own intimate confidant, relishing those episodes of a strictly sexual nature. Undoubtedly she has repeated these unpleasant and tiresome confessions many times before, because her speech is mechanical, dispassionate, devoid of even a hint of eroticism. After weeks of perfect health my rhinitis has returned. I didn’t sleep well last night, nor did I did finish packing, so today I had to wake up early in order to finish. I had a dream on the plane: I was at the Posada de San Angel about to leave, saying good-bye to some friends. Suddenly, Mauricio Serrano, a classmate from university, walked by and stopped to talk to me. I said to him, “I read recently that you had died in an accident, is it true?” (And yes, of course it was, I had read that the actual person, whom I call here Mauricio Serrano, had died in an airplane accident. His private plane had crashed in the Chihuahua or Sonora desert, I don’t remember which. We were classmates in law school. He was very thin then and extremely tall. I remember him as one of the first students who attended classes without a tie but in very elegant sportswear, which at that time was almost a provocation. I must have only talked to him four or five times in my life, and about nothing, the weather, even less. We belonged to different worlds. I knew he had made a lot of money, but I don’t remember how.) The dead man, without answering me, walked toward another group. Minutes later, on my way to the bathroom, I saw him again, leaning against a tree, a pine tree I believe. I suggested that we go have a drink somewhere. We made the rounds of several bars, but no place would let us in, as if they sensed something was wrong. In the few places that did let us in, the dead man ordered dozens of limes, which he sucked on desperately. I guess he needed them to maintain his simulacrum of life, so he sucked them furiously, as if he were afraid to enter a state of putrefaction. We arrived in Colonia Juárez, to a building on Calle Londres where I lived for several years in my youth, in such a way that made the trek very long. The inside of my apartment was the same as before, except that the walls were bare, without any of the wonderful paintings from before. The dead man began to bore me, to annoy me, he did everything possible so he wouldn’t have to leave. It seemed as if he had something to tell me, but he didn’t know how, as if he had a message for me, perhaps that I would die soon, a greeting from the other world, something, anything, but everything he said was trivial. His vocabulary was very limited, his topics of little interest. I felt the same irritation that has always produced in me a cloud of termites against which I have fought all my life to protect my time. Finally, when I succeeded in getting him to leave, his color was frightening. “I won’t be able to last without decomposing, no matter how many limes I eat,” he said as he left. I woke up suddenly; I thought that the dream was real. No longer seeing the fireplace in my old studio and to be sitting instead in an airplane seat gave me a terrible shock. But only for a moment. Had Serrano been a messenger from the other world? Had he conveyed his message in such a hermetic way that—because I was distracted or because all I could think of was getting rid of him—I was unable to grasp it? My dream must have lasted an instant, because the functionary hadn’t even noticed. Drunk with conceit, she was telling me how the three Brazilian actors who accompanied her in San Salvador, plus a Cuban boxer, had at the same time pulled out their penises in a garden, in front, behind, and on both sides of her, and begun to urinate without a single drop—she was intent on making this point clear—touching her skirt, like mascarons shooting their streams toward the center statue of a fountain.

Hours later

In Moscow, near the city center. The city imposes its urban design on me, its spectacularness and power. “Moscow is the third Rome, and there will not be a fourth,” is one of the Slavophil slogans from the sixteenth century, which has governed the Russian subconscious ever since. How wonderful to drive along Gorky Street! It was enough just to arrive to perceive the change. There’s discussion about the new political moment, the new plays, the new cinema, and the new problems that everyone faces: the new, the new, the new against the old seems to dominate the present moment. Shortly before landing, Mrs. A. confided in me the repulsion that the changes in the Soviet cinema cause her. “Irresponsibility can cause disasters,” she said, “and these people are not ready for such changes; they need to be educated first, if not they’ll create problems. The Georgians are the worst, the least reliable. They’ve made a one hundred and eighty degree turn, which means turning their back on their rich cultural tradition; they would curse it if they could, erase it. Their social criticism is too strident, ridiculous, crude. Nothing good can come of it, as you will see.” I accept these displays of rancor with absolute bliss. Then, from here, from the hotel, I began to call my friends, I sensed their enthusiasm. My encounter with the city is so strong that I can’t write anything coherent about it. I walked more than three hours without stopping anywhere. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll read my lecture on Lizardi and The Mangy Parrot at the Library of Foreign Languages. I feel overwhelmed. Worse than that: I try to put images from the past in order, but I’m not entirely able. That night, I see the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov on television, speaking openly with the audience. Yes, gentlemen, the world was beginning to move! It’s midnight. The only thing I feel like doing is going out again, to the bars I know well. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll take a very hot bath and go to bed with Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar. I’m returning to his pages after forty years. I know, it’s peculiar to arrive in Moscow with Jules Verne, but I couldn’t help myself.