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MANUAL FOR DEVOTEES OF SERGIO PITOL

Mario Bellatin

Afternoons on Times Square tend to possess a certain exaltation that is impossible to understand whether it comes from the hundreds of people who cross the corner of Broadway and 42nd, or from the immense billboards that turn real people into insignificant beings and the characters that appear on the signs into the symbol of exaltation of that which is human. Most of the time, the people chosen to see their images represented on a scale hundreds of times greater than reality aren’t acclaimed models. They are simply people who appear just as they are in ordinary life, perhaps as a reaffirmation that anyone can reach the heavens offered in the amplified images. One might ask which of those groups is truly participating in the celebration that that public space attempts to become. Would it be the beings frozen in the advertisements or the anonymous passersby? Perhaps neither of the two are capable of recognizing themselves as the beneficiary of this privilege, offered without an apparent limit. Standing on this corner, obstructing with my body the assortment of walkers so often calculated in different PR offices, I tried to compare the relationships between the anonymous and the representation of its essence that it claims to offer there. The device that Sergio Pitol tends to use to present us with memorable characters, it seems to me, is similar, basing them almost always only on ordinary prototypes who, in daily life, we would shy away from knowing just the bare minimum of their qualities. How is it possible that a group of the mentally handicapped, of beings living in their own sad realities, trapped almost always in detestable modes of existence, oftentimes making a display out of contemptible behaviors, suddenly turn into our leading characters? What strange and enthralling creative touch is capable of stretching the plausible to this point?

There is a dance club located near the docks along the Hudson, next to one of the city’s largest old meat warehouses. It is known as The Mother, although some attendees call it by other names. On some occasions the fun consists of watching guys beating themselves in a display of the maximum joy that it is possible to reach while undertaking such an act. At the end of that particular spectacle, an enormous cow heart typically appears, which is furiously bitten by the participants. Despite what some might suppose, this show encourages the jocular more than the perverse. I think that it would be important to reflect on how it is possible that laughter and celebration are positioned in the midst of the grotesque scenes that are staged there. In an endless succession according to the program established as part of the routine, that stage customarily hosts living portraits of the gesticulations between owner and slave, of the masked sadist and the weak creature, of the child tortured in his infancy, and of the girl attacked on a solitary embankment. Flyers are distributed at the entrance, where a nearby date promises to dedicate a session to the pleasure that can be obtained by indiscriminately shooting at one’s classmates. What mechanisms, I asked myself then, operate so that this party might suddenly establish itself in this space? How is it possible, likewise, that a mysterious murder committed years ago in a building in Colonia Roma, in Mexico City, could be the detonator for the delirium with which Sergio Pitol begins one of his novels? How to achieve it with the apparent seriousness and false innocence that runs page after page through the book El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade]?

After a night at The Mother and a voyeuristic walk down the dock where Christopher Street ends, little enthusiasm remains to worry about the concrete aspects of life. Nonetheless, I had to call my house in Mexico. I had thought to utilize this day—the next day I would return to my home—to try to discover once and for all which artifices Sergio Pitol really utilizes to transform tragedy into carnival and vice versa, to make the most constructed buffoonery end in the most terrible of misfortunes. I made the call, during which I found out about the absurd and implausible situation that a blind drug dealer, having arrived from abroad during my absence, was using my dining room table as the center of his illicit operations. It might seem like a lie, but a blind man—a photographer, for further reference, and no less than the onetime spouse of Jessica Lange—was utilizing my telephone line to make his contact with the mafia and, it seemed, my address was the place agreed on for the delivery of an order of intoxicants. In my pocket that morning I carried Sergio Pitol’s Carnival Triptych.¹ The copy had spent the entire night with me. The three collected novels had accompanied me during that intense night spent in New York. In Mexico I live in Colonia Roma. My dining room table would be hosting dark acts. Suddenly the building on the Plaza Río de Janeiro appeared in my head, solidified in Sergio Pitol’s fictions, the terrace where William Burroughs celebrated joyful meetings, and the entrance hall of my house surrounded by police agents pointing their guns at my head. One more story for the famous neighborhood, where all of those events took place.

I was speaking from a public telephone located on Washington Square. In front of me there was a gigantic cage reserved for the neighborhood dogs to exercise. Each one of their owners wore a small bag like a glove prepared to pick up their pet’s excrement. It was amazing the way that they were attentive to the slightest scatological action of their dogs. The very diligent way in which they picked up the lump without leaving the slightest vestige. Those inhabitants, I was sure, surely without knowing it, had to be the men from The Mother, enslaved on that occasion by the filth of their animals. Those subjects must have belonged to the same family as Licenciado Dante G. de la Estrella, submerged and finally struck by lightning by his stories about shit in Domar a la divine garza [Taming the Divine Heron]. They had by dint to be devotees of the Child of Agro, of the scatological brotherhood of the Holy Incontinent Child that Sergio Pitol so brilliantly describes, perhaps as a metaphor for everyday social fanaticism.

Despite it all, the blind drug dealer continued giving his instructions from my dining room table. My night on the town was squandered. My plan to sit in some cafe in the Village to write about the Carnival Triptych that I carried with me went to hell. True catharsis was triggered then. From that moment on both time and space changed. In the same way that in Sergio Pitol’s pages the building on the Río de Janeiro Plaza stopped being the building on the Río de Janeiro Plaza, which any one of us can go to observe—it is located, as many know, before an absurd representation of a David statue, which displays a somewhat exaggerated backend with regard to the original—so also my dining room table quit being my dining room table to become a space of distress. It happened, likewise, with time. The perspective, the manner of measuring the spaces, the order that hours are sequenced in suffered a disruption. I entered the frozen space of the characters that impudently fornicate beneath the moonlight on the docks of Christopher Street, and the space of the amplified models exposed on the billboards of Times Square. I understood then that the difference between those models and the hundreds of people that pass beneath them lies in the different temporal proportions that each one has. They were of different sizes because they had their own times, and very different ones at that. I believed that in that manner I had found, perhaps without meaning to, one of Sergio Pitol’s keys. The creation not of happenings or extraordinary characters, but rather of the rigorous construction of altered times and spaces. Where—in what reality—can beings like Marietta Karapetiz and her brother Alexander live, if not in that meticulously and bizarrely designed by Sergio Pitol? While it is true that we all believe we know or have at least heard of a Jacqueline Cascorro, protagonist of La vida conyugal [Married Life], at the moment of facing Carnival Triptych we realize that that is a lie. We haven’t known—nor will we ever come upon—a real Jacqueline Cascorro, what we have perceived in our reading is the exquisite subtlety of a writer capable of reaching the highest peak with the apparently simple resource of casting a fleeting gaze at the futile. But the worst thing of all is what we are not conscious of the trick on first impression. Perhaps we realize the scam only when, months after the experience, we have Jacqueline Cascorro as a model to judge some such and such person. The question could be, in what moment does a character of that nature turn into an emblem that we will perhaps use during our entire existence? The challenge that Pitol poses is incredibly dangerous, since to our disgrace there are too many Miguel de Solares, Enma Werfels, Delfina Uribes, and Nicholas Lobatos in the world. It is such a risky adventure that the best test this master’s brilliance is how his prose becomes more and more vigorous after doing wonders with figures of this ilk. In the manner that these human characters have been tamed. In the form in which we face the horrors of the everyday with the satisfaction of a child that dies of happiness after having smashed a snail with a stone.

After my phone call I remained frozen in action. As I said, I never used any of the cafes—as was my intention that morning—to try to discover a great writer’s stratagems. The question of how to confront the matter of the blind drug dealer became obsessive. I saw myself surrounded by the police. By characters of the same nature as those who appear in Carnival Triptych, turning a blind ear to my absurd explanations. I racked my brain trying to remember the name of the attorney who got William Burroughs out of jail three days after the murder of his wife. I didn’t return to Times Square to look for the relationship between those depicted and the walkers. I didn’t spend my last night at The Mother, where the show would feature those who establish their relations in the shadows of trees in public parks.

When I finally arrived in the dining room of my house in Colonia Roma, the blind drug dealer had disappeared. I found only a large photo of my female Xoloitzcuintle, which the blind man had taken on a previous visit, left there as a gift. One of Sergio Pitol’s preferred tactics had been put into practice again. That of making us reach—readers as well as characters—situational limits so that suddenly, without any apparent cause, everything can be resolved in the most basic of absurd ways. In that moment reality cleared up in the same way as the murder of the poor German—excuse me, Austrian—boy turned out to be diluted, which gives rise to the inquiries of the character in Desfile del amor. The supposedly terrible unraveling of the story of the blind drug dealer, which I plotted during the endless hours of my return journey, didn’t turn out to be more than a grotesque grimace of the same situation in which the prodigious wanderings of Marietta Karapetiz are transformed. In place of finding my house surrounded, I found a blown-up photo of my favorite dog.

Hours later I went to pick up my pet from the hotel for animals where she stayed during the days of my absence. At comparing her with the photo, I did not know which of the two was more real. This scene didn’t have a writer to register it. There wasn’t a magnificent edition with three novels to hold it. There didn’t exist a revealing prologue by Antonio Tabucchi—present in the Anagrama edition—nor a writer’s confession by Sergio Pitol himself to explain its reason for being. Perhaps when, more calmly, I face the absurd and utopian task of discovering which contraptions Sergio Pitol really uses to spellbind existence according to his wishes, I will come to intuit what that sense can be. Perhaps it would be a good idea to make from the occurrences one finds in the work of Sergio Pitol a manual to survive situations made up of both the farcical and the sinister. Where we don’t know if we should cry, despair, or break into a raucous laugh. Meanwhile, let’s light a candle and offer a laxative to Our Holy Child of Agro, who seems to need it urgently so that we don’t continue being dirtied with reality as it presents itself to us in its ordinary way.

The situation that I describe happened twenty years ago. Sometime after it occurred, Sergio Pitol dazzled us with the appearance of three memorable books whose genre it is hard to describe. Between narrative nonfiction, diary, essay, and fiction: The Art of Flight, The Journey, and The Magician of Vienna. Principally in the last of those, The Magician of Vienna, this new undefined and unique genre of Sergio Pitol’s reaches one of its peaks. Life narration, travel stories, notes from a diary the deliriums of a feverous and, therefore, brilliant mind. But it is at this time when life returns many of the stratagems that he used in his most delirious fictions to the author, Sergio Pitol. It is then that the prophetic character of the illuminated one’s writing becomes reality: Sergio Pitol gradually begins to lose his speech. It begins with the forgetting of a word in a certain circumstance. The author is capable of forgetting, for example, the word wine and is, nevertheless, capable of recounting the history of wine, from its most remote origins, just for the purpose of finding it. The prophecy present in his books advances. Not just words but entire phrases become absent. Then the surrounding reality also begins to transform itself. Life is one more scene from The Magician of Vienna. The author loses his faculty of writing, the dogs age and go blind, harmful beings settle around him. The author trapped in his own fiction. Suffering a process of regression, where he himself comes to be the personification of the child that comes into view in “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,”² or in the passage where he discovers, fifty years after the fact, that his mother died by drowning in a river and his younger sister died from her sadness at the loss. Nothing of that writing remains but the ghost of writing itself. The halo of the admired creator, the master of life, the creator that marked the trail to follow. The curse, in other words—I repeat it—of the genius transformed into a Prophet of the twenty-first century. We can read The Magician of Vienna not just as a work of literature but as one of the Holy Books in which we store humanity’s imaginary.

Translated by David Shook

1 Sergio Pitol’s Carnival Triptych consists of the novels El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade, 1984], Domar a la divine garza [Taming the Divine Heron, 1989], and La vida conyugal [Married Life, 1991], which will be published in English for the first time by Deep Vellum in 2018. Of interest, the three volumes of Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory, written and published in the decade following the Carnival Triptych, of which The Magician of Vienna is the third and final volume, following The Art of Flight and The Journey, recount stories of Pitol’s life lived through literature and each one contains the genesis of Pitol’s inspiration for the corresponding novel in the Carnival Triptych. — Ed.

2 Reference to the first short story Pitol ever published in 1957, which appeared in English translation for the first time in Gulf Coast only in 2016. It is included in the English translation of Pitol’s Collected Best Stories, forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2017. — Ed.