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SERGIO PITOL, RUSSIAN BOY

by Álvaro Enrigue

There is a story that Sergio Pitol used to often tell when he still led a public life, and which he recorded in The Art of Flight. At the beginning of the eighties he spent a two-month vacation in Mexico City, after having lived for years in Barcelona, Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow. At the time, he was 45 and had six or seven published books; he had translated Conrad and James and had been the editor of the legendary collection Los Heterodoxos, published by Tusquets in Spain and with a wide circulation throughout the Americas. Shortly after arriving in Mexico, he received a call from the PEN Club, inviting him to participate in a series of dialogues between writers of different generations—a reading, followed by a public talk, between a veteran author and a novice. He accepted, and they announced that he would read with Juan Villoro. The event almost ended in disaster for Pitol: he thought, as he ascended the stage—twenty-three years and a pile of books older than Villoro—that he was to be the novice at the table. Nothing better describes Pitol’s eccentricity: he was a referential figure for an entire literature, and he still thought of himself as a promising writer.

It is this eccentricity sine qua non that allowed Pitol to become first a cult author and then the writer who reintroduced Mexican literature’s beautiful secular tradition: authors of genreless books, more disposed to suggest a conversation than impose a monolithic idea of the world through a fiction populated with anecdotes and symbolic characters.

Read in the order published, Pitol’s books tell the story of a detachment. The author who began writing spellbinding yet conventional stories about the remote region of Mexico where he grew up gradually shed the themes and languages that gained prestige during the twentieth century: the peculiarity of a regional culture, the relevance of nationality, the Latin American soul in the solitude of exile.

Simultaneous to this detachment—suicide in its time—from the proven themes of regional writing, Pitol implemented a riskier experiment: to shed, too, the superstitions of literary form—or perhaps expand them. Gradually, his books ceased to be novels or collections of short stories or essays, and became literary sessions in which the distance between fiction, reflection, and memory is irrelevant. Books that are everything at the same time—what his contemporary Salvador Elizondo called, half philosophically, half ironically, “books to read.”

At the time of the publication of The Art of Flight and The Journey, the gesture to forswear genre was seen as defiantly post-modern: in order for writing to be total, it had to dispense with the market-related conventions that asphyxiated Latin American literature during the late twentieth century, in which the large publishing houses seemed to have imposed a short-sighted and dull literary taste as the only option for bookstores.

Over time, it is possible to see clearly that while it is true that the acclaim both books received was unexpected, it is also true that Pitol was not acting like a desperate innovator, rather like the attentive reader of a tradition that always found literary genres claustrophobic. Nor did the books of Martín Luis Guzmán, Nellie Campobello, José Vasconcelos, and Alfonso Reyes—founders of Mexico’s literary modernity—possess a clear genre. From the same generation as Sergio Pitol, authors like Margo Glantz, Alejandro Rossi, or Salvador Elizondo himself, all brilliant and relatively unknown outside of Latin America, continued to stress that the country’s most resilient literary production consisted of writings free of generic conventions.

Sergio Pitol’s later books, then, are not capricious. They are grounded in a tradition and are the product of a process in which he has worked in a consistent and serene way over the last twenty years: human experience lacks value until it is transformed into writing; but if the obtuse geometry of genre writing is imposed onto that, its irrational foundation is betrayed. “Inspiration,” Pitol notes in The Magician of Vienna, “is the most delicate fruit of memory.” It is not a new idea: it lies at the bottom of the writing of St. Augustine, Montaigne, and Camus. For the author, the genius that moves literature is correspondence: experience, as Pitol himself says, is just “a set of fragments of dreams not altogether understood.”

This is why The Art of Flight begins with the myopic description of Venice: in order to see what has value in the world, one must leave their everyday eyeglasses on the desk. The reality is there, but is only meaningful when it is removed by the erasure that implies selecting and assembling a series of episodes, readings, notations. This is also why The Journey includes essays, but also diary pages, anecdotes, and stories so circular that they could not be entirely true but are related as if they were. Literary imagination, according to Pitol, does not progress in the rational order that the novel, essay, or short story demand. It is more like a sea sponge than a freeway. It is a solid block, without a basis, but full of inner paths that connect ideas, notes, invented memories.

The beginning of The Journey could not be more classic. The author, tired and a bit sick, locks himself away to write in a sort of tropical Montaigne’s tower: a modest, cultured, and provincial city on the Gulf of Mexico. He recalls his years as ambassador in Prague and notices that his favorite city of the many in which he has lived is the only one about which he has never written anything. Surprised, he checks his diaries from the time and discovers a hole: they contain only notes about meetings, readings, and petty office problems—not a word about his outings through the never-ending city, its splendid museums, its powerful cultural life. What he does find in his notebooks, however, is a travel diary to Russia that, over time, grew in significance: it records the moment of the Soviet Thaw.

It is here that Pitol’s process of writing becomes extreme. His diary is rewritten and edited so that it reads like footage from a documentary filmed at the very moment Perestroika was received by the people of the Soviet Union amid feelings of hope and skepticism. Brought into play by a series of essays on Russian literature, with pages dedicated to the mysteries of the craft of writing and the projection of memories whose connections are not clear until the reader reaches the last line of the volume, the diary produces reverberations that resignify it as it goes along. One must not forget here that the Soviet opening occurred shortly before the transition to democracy in Mexico, which is the precise time Pitol wrote The Journey. The year 2000, when it was published, was the same year in which Mexico’s long transition toward a system that ultimately guaranteed basic civil liberties ended. His stark mockery of Soviet commissars and his dithyramb on citizens intoxicated by the idea of freedom represent an oblique look at the fiesta that was Mexico in those years full of hope.

But The Journey is not a political book—or, rather, it is much more than that. It is framed by three scenes that by reflecting on each other reveal the personal vision of the writing of an author who is at his creative peak. In the introduction on Prague, there is a scene, part terrible and part comic, in which Pitol, wandering the alleys of the city’s old quarters, notices an old man sprawled on the ground, unable to get up, who is cursing at pedestrians. When the novelist approaches, he discovers that the man is not drunk, but rather has slipped in his own shit, and every time he attempts to get up slips on it. Later on, when Pitol finally reaches Tbilisi, Georgia, he attends a supra given in his honor by an association of writers and filmmakers. He has been, since arriving to the city, in ecstasy: he finds it awake, vibrant, critical, and infinitely freer and more cheerful than Moscow or Leningrad. In that state of excitement, he gets up from the banquet to go urinate and, because the bathroom is closed, one of the guests suggests that they go down to the river to relieve themselves, which is normal. Having had a little too much wine, he accepts the invitation and discovers a disturbing scene: in Tbilisi shitting in public is not only a socially acceptable act, but also an opportunity to socialize. In the last episode of the book, Pitol returns to his childhood in the tiny town of Potrero, Veracruz, where the entire community earns a living from a sugar mill. Because he was a sickly child, he was prone to loneliness and isolation. One of his favorite outings consisted of getting lost in the mill’s naves on Sundays—when it was closed—to reach the place where accumulated huge mountains of bagasse, the unusable crap left behind from the production of sugarcane. There, buried among the vegetable waste, he fantasizes about an illustration from a children’s book in which there appears a Slavic child named “Iván, the Russian boy,” and imagines himself as his twin. He later confesses that of all the images he has had of himself, that one—the most delirious—is still the one that seems to him “to be the real truth.”

The odyssey that The Journey relates is not, as it seems at first glance, the one Ambassador Pitol made to the Soviet Union of the Thaw, but that of the solitary child who accumulated faces, names, memories, and turned them into a book. Among the many things included are the notes that the author made to write Domar a la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron]—perhaps his best novel and a truly wild book—which recounts the discovery of a rite of spring in which an entire community in the state of Tabasco is inundated with shit by its inhabitants in an emancipatory paroxysm.

The Journey is at once a lesson in subtlety and in destruction. It is a book that, in order to rescue one tradition, dynamites another. It is a volume about how a writer constructs. About freedom and its lack; that final, indomitable freedom which is letting go, allowing things to come out: narrating. This is why the book does not function, like almost all the others, as a progressive sequence of stories, ideas, and images, but rather like a hall of mirrors, in which a series of narratives reflect on each other: eschatological tales; a body of essays on the humiliations suffered by Russian writers who chose to pay the price for speaking their mind; a collection of documentary vignettes in which the reader watches live the Soviet generation that was becoming emancipated, fertilized by the sacrifice of those authors and the autobiographical framework of the writer who chose not to comply with any parameters to become who he wanted to be: a Russian boy.

There is a memorable story in the Havana diary with which The Magician of Vienna, the final book in Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” ends: as a young man, while traveling to Europe by boat, Pitol passed through Cuba. One night in Havana he got drunk as a sailor and passed out. The next morning he woke up in his room wearing someone else’s shoes, which worried him until he discovered they were Italian, new, superbly cut, and fit him perfectly. For Sergio Pitol everything is in everything and writing is the only way to reveal the secret connections that give meaning to reality. Writing exists so that our shoes fit us.

New York, February 2015