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THE MAGICIAN OF VIENNA

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E. M. FORSTER

THE MIMETIC APE. Reading Alfonso Reyes revealed to me, at the appropriate time, an exercise recommended by one of his literary idols, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, consisting of an imitation exercise.¹ He himself had practiced it with success during his apprenticeship. The Scottish author compared his method to the imitative aptitude of monkeys. The future writer should transform himself into an ape with a high capacity for imitation, should read his preferred authors with an attention closer to tenacity than delight, more in tune with the activity of the detective than the pleasure of the aesthete; he should learn by which means to achieve certain results, to detect the efficacy of some formal processes, to study the handling of narrative time, tone, and the organization of details in order to apply those devices later to his own writing; a novel, let us say, with a plot similar to that of the chosen author, with comparable characters and situations, where the only liberty allowed would be the employment of his own language: his, that of his family and friends, perhaps his region’s—“the great school of training and imitation,” added Reyes, “of which the truly original Lope de Vega speaks in La Dorotea:

How do you compose? I read,

and what I read, I imitate,

and what I imitate, I write,

and what I write, blot out,

and then I sift the blottings-out.”²

An indispensable education, provided the budding writer knows to jump from the train at the right moment, to untie whatever tethers him to the chosen style as a starting point, and knows intuitively the right moment at which to embrace everything that writing requires. By then he must know that language is the decisive factor, and that his destiny will depend on his command of it. When all is said and done, it will be style—that emanation of language and of instinct—that will create and control the plot.

When in the mid-fifties I began to sketch my first stories, two languages exercised control over my fledgling literary vision: that of Borges and that of Faulkner. Their splendor was such that, for a time, they overshadowed all others. That subjugation allowed me to ignore the telluric risks of the time, the monotone costumbrismo and the false modernity of the narrative prose of the Contemporáneos, to whose poetry, at the same time, I was addicted. In this splendid group of poets, some—Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, Salvador Novo—also excelled for their essays. They had availed themselves during their early years of the lessons of Alfonso Reyes and of Julio Torri. Nevertheless, when they made incursions into the short story, they inevitably failed. They believed they were repeating the brilliant effects of Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Bontempelli, whom they venerated, as a means of escaping the rancho, the tenebrous jungle, the mighty rivers, and they succeeded, but at the expense of careening into tedium and, at times, into the ridiculous. The effort was obvious, the seams were too visible, the stylization became a parody of the European authors in whose shadow they sought refuge. If someone ordered me today, pistol in hand, to reread the Proserpina rescatada [Rescued Prosperpina]³ by Jaime Torres Bodet, I would probably prefer to be felled by bullets than plunge into that sea of folly.

I must have been seventeen when I first read Borges. I remember the experience as if it happened just a few days ago. I was traveling to Mexico City after spending a holiday in Córdoba with my family. The bus made a stop in Tehuacán for lunch. It was Sunday so I bought a newspaper: the only thing about the press that interested me at the time was the cultural supplement and the theater and movie guide. The supplement was the legendary México en la Cultura, arguably the best there has ever been in Mexico, under the direction of Fernando Benítez. The main text in that edition was an essay on the Argentine fantastical short story signed by the Peruvian writer José Durand. Two stories appeared as examples of Durand’s theses: “The Horses of Abdera” by Leopoldo Lugones and “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer completely foreign to me. I began with the fantastical tale by Lugones, an elegant example of postmodernismo, and proceeded to “The House of Asterion.” It was, perhaps, the most stunning revelation in my life as a reader. I read the story with amazement, with gratitude, with absolute astonishment. When I reached the final sentence, I gasped. Those simple words: “‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ Theseus said. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself,”⁴ spoken as if in passing, almost at random, suddenly revealed the mystery that the story concealed: the identity of the enigmatic protagonist, his resigned sacrifice. Never had I imagined that our language could reach such levels of intenseness, levity, and surprise. The next day, I went out in search of other books by Borges; I found several, covered in dust on the backmost shelves of a bookshop. During those years, readers of Borges in Mexico could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Years later I read the stories written by him and by Adolfo Bioy Casares, signed with the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. Delving into those stories written in lunfardo posed a grueling challenge. One had to sharpen his linguistic intuition and allow himself to be carried away by the sensual cadence of the words, the same as that of fiery tangos, so as not to lose the thread of the story too quickly. They were police mysteries unraveled from an Argentine prison cell by the amateur of crime, Honorio Bustos Domecq, a not-so bright man with a healthy dose of common sense, which linked him to Chesterton’s Father Brown. The plot was of least importance; what was superb about them was their language, a playful, polysemic language, a delight to the ear, like that of the serious Borges, but nonsensical. Bustos Domecq allows himself to establish a euphonious proximity between words, to surrender to a bizarre, rambling, and torrential course that gradually sketches the outlines of the story until arriving in an invertebrate, secretive, parodic, and kitschy fashion to the long-awaited climax. On the other hand, the verbal order of the books by the serious Borges is precise and obedient to the will of the author; his adjectivization suggests an inner sadness, but it is rescued by an amazing verbal imagination and contained irony. I have read and reread the stories, poetry, literary and philosophical essays of this brilliant man, but I never conceived of him as an enduring influence on my work, as was Faulkner, although in a recent rereading of my Divina garza [Divine Heron] I was able to perceive echoes and murmurs close to those of Bustos Domecq.

To establish a symmetry, it is necessary to mention the language of Faulkner and its influence, which I willingly accepted during my period of initiation. His Biblical sonorousness, his grandeur of tone, his tremendously complex construction, where a sentence may span several pages, branching out voraciously, leaving readers breathless, are unequalled. The darkness that emerges from the dense arborescence, whose meaning will be revealed many pages or chapters later, is not a mere narrative process, but rather, as in Borges, the very flesh of the story. A darkness born of the immoderate crossing of phrases of a different order is a way of enhancing a secret that, as a rule, the characters meticulously conceal.

‘THE MAGICIAN OF VIENNA.’ “Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book,” says Borges. “The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of his memory and imagination.”⁵

The book accomplishes a multitude of tasks, some superb, others deplorable; it dispenses knowledge and misery, illuminates and deceives, liberates and manipulates, exalts and humbles, creates or cancels the options of life. Without it, needless to say, no culture would be possible. History would disappear, and our future would be cloaked in dark, sinister clouds. Those who hate books also hate life. No matter how impressive the writings of hatred may be, the printed word for the most part tips the balance toward light and generosity. Don Quixote will always triumph over Mein Kampf. As for the humanities and the sciences, books will continue to be their ideal space, their pillars of support.

There are those who read to kill time. Their attitude toward the printed page is passive: they repine, revel, sob, writhe in laughter; the final pages where all mysteries are revealed will ultimately allow them to sleep more soundly. They seek those spaces in which the elementary reader always takes great delight. To satisfy them, the plots must produce the greatest excitement at a minimum cost of complexity. The characters are univocal: ideal or abysmal, there is no third way; the former will be virtuous, magnanimous, industrious, observant of every social norm; they are excessively kind-hearted even if their superficial philanthropy sometimes tarnishes the whole with cloyingly saccharine registers; by contrast, the wickedness, cowardice, and pettiness of the indispensable villains know no bounds, and even if they attempt to turn over a new leaf, an evil instinct will prevail over their will that is sure to haunt them forever; they’ll end up destroying those around them before turning on themselves in their desire for unremitting destruction. In short, readers who are addicted to the struggle between good versus evil turn to the book to amuse themselves and to kill time, never to dialogue with the world, with others, or with themselves.

In popular novels, beginning with the nineteenth-century feuilletons of Ponson du Terrail, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval, female orphans appear in abundance, defenseless all; to the tragedy of orphanhood the narrator sadistically adds other troubles: blindness, muteness, shrewishness, paralysis, and amnesia, above all amnesia. When these female orphans lose their memory and are rich to boot, they become easy prey for fortune hunters. Clearly the wide array of male fauna who wander through these stories have PhDs in evil. One of their specialties is pretending to be deserted husbands or lovers. When they happen upon one of these fragilely forgetful young women and discover their circumstances, they go about laying claim to nonexistent children whom the aforementioned amnesiacs took out for a stroll years ago, never to return; they almost always convince them of, and threaten to denounce them for, having brutally murdered the children whom they detested; they inform them that during the weeks prior to their disappearance they did nothing but talk about the visceral hatred they displayed for the accursed offspring born of their womb, and that they implored God with the ferociousness of hyenas that He rid them of these detestable children. Thus, seizing on the horror they feel for themselves and the panic they instill in them, these lotharios enslave the damsels carnally, seize control of their assets, force them to sign before a notary a thick stack of papers that consign their real estate, their jewelry deposited in safe deposit boxes, their bank accounts, and investment documents scattered in national and international banks to these insatiable wolves, who were precisely that, counterfeit husbands and lovers who had so suddenly and suspiciously surfaced.

Some, the most credulous, were convinced that in their previous incarnation—a term they used to allude to their existence prior to their amnesia—they had been nuns, and in that capacity had committed unspeakable blasphemies and countless depravities, such as strangling the portress of the convent, the gardener, or even the Mother Superior, only to wander the world lost for years thereafter, until being found, identified, and reunited with the vast fortune that their deceased parents had deposited into some banking institution.

A perfect model for this style of light literature is The Magician of Vienna, a novel that sails under triumphant flags in more than a dozen languages and has fascinated all strata of society, with the exception of the contemptuous sector of the illiterate, of course. The author introduces us to an immense, complex, and (if we may disclose a bit of the plot) mysterious firm, Imperium in Imperio, a center of immense power that operates a multitude of branches in Mexico City. Its offices and workrooms are scattered everywhere, in the skyscrapers of Reforma, in the upscale neighborhoods of Polanco and Las Lomas, in the palaces of the colonial sector, in sheds and even huts in the city’s most squalid neighborhoods. Of course, each sector is incommunicado from the other. Save a few members, everyone would be surprised, indeed, they’ll be aghast, to discover the names of their colleagues. People of every social class collaborate in this criminal enterprise. The base is comprised of the foulest ruffians from the capital’s roughest barrios; conversely, the apex, whose role is to serve as the empire’s protective façade, boasts the perfect hostesses, the supreme beauties of the moment, some foreign titles of nobility, the great couturiers and their models, the highest paid soccer players, the worlds of finance and entertainment. And between these poles operates a web of brilliant professionals: detectives, attorneys, notaries, psychiatrists, doctors; that is, a multibrain whose function is to enhance reality. In short, a perfect pyramid, led by an enigmatic character-turned-legend, thanks to the thousands of stories circulating about him. His house is located on Vienna Street, in the borough of Coyoacán, just a few blocks from the house where Trotsky was assassinated. All that is known of him is that he studied psychology in his youth, without graduating, and later supported himself with little success as a seer, magician, or shaman. No one knows how he came into his fortune. Aided by an extraordinarily effective team, this extraordinary man succeeded in ascertaining the whereabouts of hundreds of missing amnesiacs, studying their families and financial backgrounds, not to mention their tragic circumstances; women whom he doesn’t pursue as ruthlessly as in the old dime novels; rather, he manages to coax them with considerable ease by introducing them to a gang of super-hunks: Brazilians, Italians, Cubans, and Montenegrins, and why not? He later reveals that they are their former husbands or fiancés whom they had married or were about to marry just days before succumbing to the amnesia that left them in a void for several years.

What is surprising is that none of these women becomes startled or expresses the slightest doubt as to the identity of these men; each claimed to have recognized the man of her life by the scent of his cologne, deodorant, or by the loins of these young men, corroborating the shaman’s oft-held thesis on the mnemonic power of perfumes.

Maruja La noche-Harris, the highly controversial literary critic, to put it mildly, wrote a solemn defense of the book. She proffered the thesis that amnesia was a parable of the virginity of memory, of course, that scourge imposed on our time by computers. Memory, as we know, is today artificial; it is deposited into a device to be retrieved at our pleasure with the mere push of a button or a few codes, such that if a young woman, romantic and starry-eyed like so many others, goes out onto the street and asks herself something to dispel her ennui, which as a rule is the motivation for her outing, she is unable to orient herself because her responses have been stored in the computer. There lie the birthdates of her children, their names, their zodiac signs, the dates on which the Aztecs arrived at the site where the great Tenochtitlán was erected, the names and characteristics of the most magnificent hotels in Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo in Mexico and Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, of the caravels of Columbus and of his captains, Don Vladimiro Rosado Ojeda’s lectures, which she attended as a young girl, on the laggard transfiguration that architecture has undergone from the Romanesque to Bauhaus, the vices of each of the Roman emperors, the list of films in which Tyrone Power appeared, the most picturesque streets of London… Everything! Absolutely everything! And at the moment she discovers that she’s unable to answer because she doesn’t have the artificial memory on-hand, she inevitably succumbs to panic. She makes a near fatal effort to contemplate those questions the answers to which no one can evade: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?, then falls to the ground. When she comes to, she’s in a clinic; she doesn’t remember who she is, much less her home address, or where she was going. To make matters worse, a curious young man who allegedly rendered first-aid has stolen her purse with her identification. At that moment, a nameless woman is born, devoid of family, home, memories, newly unemployed, and, even worse, educated for nothing.

Señora La noche-Harris infers from her reading of The Magician of Vienna an urgent call to return to the old days of rote memorization, since a brain with frequent relapses into nothingness remains under the absolute control of institutions, dogmas, all types of power, public and private, ecclesiastical, familial, and above all, the worst of all, that of the senses, an elegant allusion, if ever there was one, to the abundance of procuresses, panderers, and pimps who populate the novel.

A rigorous defamiliarization, as called for by Shklovsky, an intelligent dissolution of pathos, and a method generously parodic of the romance novel’s devices contribute to the architecture of its remarkable ending: from the bunker inhabited by the shaman on Vienna Street, a convoy of buses, trucks, and motorcycles departs every three or four months for clandestine airstrips and ports. In addition to contraband, they carry shipments of extremely beautiful women who will travel to to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf emirates. At each port of destination, a well-organized squadron belonging to the network and at the service of the Magician of Vienna will deliver them, like door-to-door service, to palatial homes or brothels so lavish they recall those from the pages of Arabian Nights. There is no need to add that, in addition to the young orphaned women from well-to-do families, those opulent dolls who, after regaining their memory, recovered their fortunes only to hand them over a few months later to the stallions the shaman has chosen for them, other libidinous beauties were sent, obviously born to families of more modest means. It is impolite, La noche-Harris points out, to reveal all the details of the plot; suffice it to say that in the last chapters we learn of the triumph of those multinational hunks who were hired and trained to serve as sex objects, or worse: as fornicating robots, feigning for a brief time to be the husbands or lovers of a string of extremely loving women whom every so often they were required to misplace. A sense of revolt arose out of the awareness of their degradation. Their hearts proved not to be bulletproof and made room for feelings they had never known before. Slowly but surely, these men moved into the light: their pagan instinct, their romantic nature, and a congenital chivalry led them into battle, and one night they lynched the shaman and his henchmen, set fire to the immense house on Vienna Street, freed the women they loved from their cells, as well as hundreds of unknown young women, made public their deed in a press conference, and revealed the shady international businesses that were concocted on Vienna Street, borough Coyoacán. The trial was not complicated; just weeks later these brave men were acquitted by an exceptionally decent judge, a humanist, who understood that it was not merely a matter of a sordid and mechanical coup d’état against a company but a healthy release of energy born of a love of justice and love itself. Indeed, shortly thereafter, the same judge who acquitted the gallant young men performs their nuptials to the saintly young women they idolized.

Maruja La noche-Harris declared at the book launch that to classify The Magician of Vienna as a light novel was to diminish the work. It could only be light if one were thinking of its absolute and captivating charm, but owing to its subject it belonged to the most noble literary caste of our century: Kafka, Svevo, Broch, and the contemporary Spanish writer Vila-Matas. Names that someone surely must have whispered in her ear. The press published some of the concepts of this literary criticism the following day:

As with all great books, we can read The Magician of Vienna for what it seems to tell us. The surface enchants; we follow the destinies of innumerable characters, entering a drawing room, suffering the passion of love, visiting military headquarters, experiencing the disasters and senselessness of the war of the sexes, relishing the joys of the ironic happy ending, through a horizontal, infinitely meticulous reading. We can, on the other hand, consider the novelistic surface a veil, behind which a secret truth is hidden: in that case, we concentrate our attention on a number of points that seem to us to hide a more intense thickness.⁶

Reading that paragraph confused those who had on other occasions stumbled upon Señora La noche-Harris’ abrupt and at times rather salty prose, but to learn that someone has managed to improve herself in her craft never fails to produce joy. Two days later, a reporter found that this paragraph came from a biography of Tolstoy written by Pietro Citati. La noche-Harris had applied to The Magician of Vienna words that the Italian biographer had dedicated to no less than War and Peace; La noche-Harris’ contribution was minimal: where Citati writes, “an infinitely meticulous reading,” she adds “a horizontal, infinitely meticulous reading,”⁷ and where the Italian biographer writes: “disasters and senselessness of war,” she expands the concept as follows: “disasters and senselessness of the war of the sexes,” which infects the paragraph with a cheerful flutter of madness.

I cannot know if The Magician of Vienna can be considered the best example of an industry product, but it at least seems to come close. For now, it has generously benefited its publisher, bookstores, and author. There is nothing alarming in this: this genre of storytelling has always existed. Since the novel’s beginnings, a wide range of subgenres has managed to find shelter under its skirts. Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, magnificent authors if ever there were, also coexisted with storytellers who were more widely read but bereft of prestige. They wrote and published stories similar to those that the current light literature produces, and enjoyed legions of eager consumers of a treatment that alternated between severe chills and bouts of maudlin sentimentality. The language must have been rather rudimentary, since illiteracy at the time was spectacularly high, and had to favor those who still had trouble with the printed letter. Those authors became rich but did not achieve fame, the press barely mentioned them, they circulated in spheres different from those of the literati. Their lives were anonymous, which did not seem unusual to anyone, not even to them. For a long time, the relationship, or rather the lack of relationship, between the two groups was transparent. In general, they were content with the position they occupied. Things are different now, which in many ways is grotesque, not to mention unpleasant. The creators of light literature demand the same treatment that, as a rule, would be extended to Stendhal, Proust, Woolf. How about that!

Despite the complex interests that revolve around the book, the sophisticated marketing mechanisms, the cutthroat competitiveness in the market, there continues to exist a readership receptive to the form, demanding readers whose palate would not tolerate such grisly stories or the lachrymose flavor of the feuilleton, a public that fell in love with literature during adolescence, and contracted even earlier, in childhood, the addiction to traveling through time and space through books. Within that audience can be found a tiny group that is truly a supergroup, that of writers, or the adolescents and young people who will become writers in a near future. For them, reading is one of the greatest pleasures life has afforded them, but also the best school any of those striplings attended before publishing, in a cultural supplement, in a very modest magazine, or on a supremely elegant plaquette, the poems, short stories, or essays with which they’ll make their debut into the world of letters. First readings are critical to the fate of a would-be writer. And he, years later, will discover the importance that those long hours held when he was obligated to forego thousands of celebrations to be alone with Anna Karenina, The Charterhouse of Parma, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, only to arrive later to Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, To the Lighthouse, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Pedro Páramo, where one more or less signs on.

Thanks to these readings and those yet to come, the future writer will be able to conceive of a plot as distant from reality as that of The Magician of Vienna, to do everything possible to exacerbate its garishness, its vulgar extravagance, to transform its language into a palimpsest of ignorance and wisdom, inanity and exquisiteness, until achieving an absurdly refined book, a cult novel, a snack for the happy few, like those of César Aira and Mario Bellatin.

I do not know the training of today’s young people. I imagine it to be very different from the writers of my generation owing to the visual and electronic revolution. I amused myself recently glancing at the several volumes of magnificent interviews published by the Paris Review. They are interviews with great poets and novelists from different countries and languages. They were published during three decades beginning in the fifties. Most of these authors would today be between 80 and 100 years old, or more, if they were alive. Almost all contributed to the transformation of twentieth-century literature. They speak insistently about their reading, especially those of their formative period, and all, without exception, were early, insatiable, omnivorous readers and, by the same token, refer passionately to the old masters, from the Hellenic legacy and the classics of their language to the indispensable figures of world literature. Cervantes is almost always present in their statements. William Faulkner read Don Quixote tirelessly, at least once a year. Other frequently mentioned names are: Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Poe, Melville, Conrad, Dickens, and Sterne. All of the interviewees claim to have read with special interest those works that arose during the periods of greatest splendor in the literature of their country. My generation was nourished by the Spanish classics, which are also ours, and those of other literatures, from their origins to the nineteenth century and later, with the great literary expression that came to us immediately after the Second World War: Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Svevo, Gadda, Pavese, Vittorini, Malraux, Sartre, Camus, and the Spanish-Americans Borges, Onetti and the early Carpentier.

THE TRUE READING, REREADING. No one reads in the same way. It embarrasses me to state such a banality, but I will not retreat: diverse cultural formation, specialization, traditions, academic trends, and, above all, personal temperament can determine the different impressions that a book has on different readers. I just read The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty, an exceptional storyteller from the Southern United States. I read and reread her with close attention; things seem very simple in her narratives, they’re the trifles of daily life or horrible moments that seem anodyne; her characters are eccentric and at the same time very modest, as are their surroundings. One might think they’d be desperate in the tiny space they inhabit, but it’s possible they haven’t even noticed there’s another world outside their town. They are authentically “odd”—provincial, yes, but hers is not a costumbrista literature. They in no way behave like a herd. Another noteworthy Southern writer, Katherine Anne Porter, once pointed out that Eudora Welty’s characters are haunted figures who, for good or for bad, are surrounded by an aura of magic. This seems to me a perfect definition. Within her pages those minute human monsters never appear as caricatures, but rather are drawn with normalcy and dignity.

I have commented on the virtues of this gentlewoman to my writer friends on several occasions; they know little about her, she doesn’t interest them; they say they have read one story or another that they barely remember. They are certain when, on the defensive, they immediately affirm that she lacks the greatness of William Faulkner, her celebrated contemporary and fellow Southerner, whose plots and language have been compared so many times to the stories and language of the Bible. Miss Welty’s books are far from being that; what’s more, they are its reverse: a parade of diminutive, loveable, tragico-grotesque presences who move like frantic marionettes in a minor city buried in an amusing and at the same time cruel dream of Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama during the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century. The readers of this author are not legion. For the chosen—and almost everywhere I have lived I have found a few of them—to read her, to talk about her, to remember characters or details from one of her stories is equivalent to a perfect gift. Those readers as a rule are vitally related to the literary craft, they are curious, intuitive, civilized, they are dispersed around the globe, locked equally in ivory towers, palatial mansions, or austere rooms for rent. The mere mention by an enthusiast of the name of one of those cult idols—Bruno Schulz, Schwob, Raymond Roussel,⁸ or Firbank—is sufficient for their readers to appear. To some it is an inexplicable enigma that their friends, writers such as they, sensitized by the study and daily practice of literature, fail to share their fervor for these exceptional figures, and instead worship authors who are triumphant only because of the whims of the period or because of a specific marketing campaign.

Literary history provides disconcerting phenomena, one of which is the fall of celebrity, the sunset of certain gods—not the authors of bestsellers; that would be normal, their products are destined to that. I am referring to those writers who for decades represented the wisdom and morality of the century; any one of their scarcely uttered sentences would create jurisprudence in the eternal universe. One such was Giovanni Papini. He was, for many decades, a god in the Spanish-speaking world. Today he is tolerated nowhere, much less in Italy; the mere mention of his name is distasteful, as if one were referring to a venereal disease. Borges, on the other hand, considered him a master and tenaciously defended until the end of his life the “originality” of the now disgraced author; moreover, he declared that the Florentine’s muddled prose had influenced his own. One finds himself before two irreconcilable poles: the petulant ostentation of Papini and the precise transparency of the Argentine. It is difficult to comprehend, yet at the same time I admire his fidelity.

It is natural that over time every writer should acknowledge belonging to a certain literary family. Once kinship is established it is difficult to escape; it would be so if it were for ideological or religious reasons, but not aesthetic ones. During adolescence, when every reader is still a wellspring of generosity, one may read with enjoyment, with enthusiasm, and even copy in an intimate notebook entire paragraphs from a book that, when reread years later, when his taste has been refined, he discovers with surprise, with scandal, even with horror, that it was all an unpardonable mistake. To admire as a masterpiece such a revolting load of tosh! To consider as a fountain of life that clumsy language that doubtlessly had been stillborn? How disgraceful!

In certain circumstances the beheading of a literary great is permitted by readers who venerated him just a few years before, not only in his country and in his language, but throughout the whole world, which never ceases to be another oddity. During my adolescence, Aldous Huxley was a leading international figure; Point Counter Point and, above all, the prophetic Brave New World were read with passion. The mere name Huxley came to mean the most rigorous aesthetic exactitude. He was also a paladin of freedom, although his sermonizing possessed such hubris that he seemed a character from the Counter-Reformation who imposed democracy. He caused us even to doubt the literary virtues of Charles Dickens, whom he treated with outright contempt, to the point of considering The Old Curiosity Shop the most plaintive and deplorable romance novel in the world; he fought the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considered a middling, vulgar, and sensationalist versifier. Today the name Huxley has been eclipsed; he belongs more or less to literary history, but in living literature his place is modest. Dickens and Poe, on the other hand, continue their fascinating march to the stars. I find a beautiful line in a study on Malevich by Luis Cardoza y Aragón: “And I realize that whoever has not reread Reyes has not read him.” Rereading a great author reveals to us everything we lost the moment we discovered him. Who during adolescence has not felt run through while reading The Trial, The Brothers Karamazov, The Aleph, Residence on Earth, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, To the Lighthouse, La Celestina, or Don Quixote? A new world opened before us. We closed the book stunned, transformed within, despising the ordinariness of our daily lives. We were different beings, we longed to be Alyosha, and we feared ending up like the poor Gregor Samsa. And yet, years later, upon revisiting some of those works, it seemed as if we had never read them, we encountered other enigmas, another cadence, other wonders. It was another book.

UNTIL ARRIVING AT ‘HAMLET.’ A book read in different periods is transformed into many books. No reading resembles the previous ones. Upon discovering, as in the case of Papini or others, that writing had nothing to do with our preoccupations or our dreams, that we find it atrophied and hollow, we conclude that it must have been imposed by mere moral or religious circumstances, the politics of the time, and it was enough that social conditions change to discover that it was devoid of form, destined to become hopelessly lost in the void.

Even returning to works validated by centuries of indisputable excellence can bring surprises. Like bathing in the river of Heraclitus, subsequent readings of a classic will never be the same, unless the reader is an absolute chump. The Hamlet that a dazed and awestruck student read in adolescence, immediately after seeing the film version by Lawrence Olivier, has little to do with a third rereading done at twenty-six, when a rigorous review of the work made him conceive of human destiny as a relentless pursuit of universal harmony, even if to achieve that purpose one would have to sacrifice his life and the life and the happiness of beings like Hamlet, Ophelia, and Laertes, passionate youths, slain in combat against villainy and rottenness, to make way for the battle-worn Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, who would restore peace and harmony to Denmark. Without suffering and sacrifice, it used to be said, the dawn could never brighten on the horizon. The name of that reader is of no importance, not even his circumstances, although knowing one or others might allow us to trace the chronicle of a long relationship between a man and his favorite books; to speak, as well, of the impulse that exists between reading and rereading. I’ll concede only that he studied a career for which he hadn’t the slightest vocation because his parents chose it for him. While in university he later audits courses in the Faculty of Arts and Letters with greater diligence than those in Law, in which he is enrolled. He doesn’t care much for work; he lives comfortably thanks to an income he received as an inheritance. He recounts and repeats to whomever cares to listen that he doesn’t merely live to read but rather reads to live. His reading list is enormous, ecumenical, and arbitrary, in both genres and styles, languages and periods. He delights maniacally in making lists, of authors, their titles, the number of times he has read each of their books, everything. There is in this, I suppose, a tiny kernel of madness. He reads and rereads at all hours, and records the details in large notebooks. The list of writers he frequents, those with whom he feels at home, is the following, in order of greatest to least: Anton Chekhov, arguably his favorite author, whom he could read every day and at any hour; he knows some of his monologues by heart; this is the author who, of all his favorites, is most impenetrable to him. He surmises that within the work of this exceptional Russian, beneath a veneer of transparency, there hides an impregnable core that transforms him into the darkest, most remote, most mysterious of all the authors he has read. The following are, in order: Shakespeare, Nikolai Gogol, Benito Pérez Galdós, Alfonso Reyes, Henry James, Bertolt Brecht, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlo Goldoni, George Bernard Shaw, Carlos Pellicer, Luigi Pirandello, Witold Gombrowicz, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alexander Pushkin. Of course, there are authors whom he prefers more than those listed: Marcel Schwob, Juan Rulfo, Miguel de Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Choderlos de Laclos, Laurence Sterne, but for one reason or another, he has read the former more. Of course, it would be madness to prefer Agatha Christie, who appears on the list of the most read, to Miguel de Cervantes, who is not. And it is obvious that Gustavo Esguerra—at last I allow his name to slip out!—whom I know well, prefers the plays of Lope, of Calderon, or of his favorite Tirso de Molina to those of Goldoni, and that he also admires Hermann Broch or Carlo Emilio Gadda more than several of the listed. In the same way, he has seen and read Hamlet more than other works of Shakespeare that he prefers, such as The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, King Lear. But fate, who knows why, decreed it so, and led him to rub elbows with some more than with those with whom he should. So, my friend Esguerra, Gustavo Esguerra, discovered Hamlet at twelve and continued to frequent him until just a few hours before he died. Each reading added to and eliminated fresh nuances from the former.

The eleventh reading occurred in 1968, after the Tlatelolco massacre, after the university was occupied by the army, after the march of tanks through the streets of Mexico. It was a tense and exceptionally political reading in which “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and “Denmark is a prison” were the key phrases of the tragedy. Elsinore Castle becomes a prison, where the protagonists constantly lay traps and spy ceaselessly and without rest. Polonius sends messengers to Paris to follow the steps of Laertes, his son, and to send reports of his conduct. Polonius also, with the backing of the King and Queen, spies constantly on Hamlet. The King summons Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to the castle to provoke Hamlet and to discover what he is plotting. Hamlet himself asks Horatio to scrutinize the King’s face during the performance recommended to the players. All characters set upon each other; every gesture or word is cautiously examined to discover the mysteries of the souls of others. My friend Esguerra, after his eleventh reading, became convinced that Hamlet was a political tragedy. Shakespeare, in his historical dramas, presents his spectators with an X-ray of the workings of absolute power. No character is exempt from its contamination if he hopes to survive. Many times my friend had believed that the melancholy prince of Denmark was the perfect archetype of indecision, sorrow, and quietism, but in the end it turns out he is not. His rejection of action, his reputation for absenteeism do not prevent him throughout the tragedy from killing Polonius, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, committing regicide, and bearing the utmost responsibility for the suicide of Ophelia.

When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, terror was gripping London. In 1601, the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex, his Maecenas and friend, was discovered, and he was executed. The wings of the Tower of London filled day after day with the most illustrious youth of England. The Queen did not spare her one-time favorite, and not even his beheading satisfied her. It was necessary to destroy his seed, his family and friends, the philosophers and poets who had once surrounded him. Little is known of Shakespeare during the two years that this nightmare lasted. His was, there is no doubt, the only pen of prestige in the kingdom that did not sing the glories of Elizabeth of England at the time of her death in 1603.

This rereading influenced those that followed, especially the last, that the now elderly Gustavo Esguerra completed in his hospital bed a few hours before expiring. In this reading he was surprised afresh that in the final act Hamlet would accept the invitation of Claudius, the illegitimate king, the murderer of his father, the corrupter of his mother, his bitter enemy, to engage in a fencing match with Laertes, which caused him to wonder if Shakespeare might have considered at this point in the work that the purpose that had led him to write it had been accomplished, and therefore, that his only interest was to finish it. And what better way to start the laborious denouement than having Hamlet exchange a few blows of the sword with the overwhelmed Laertes, whose father he had murdered, and whose sister, the delicate, fragile, and accursed Ophelia, he had caused to lose her mind and also her life! To achieve this end, it was necessary that one of the foils be envenomed, the same one that would be missing a button on the tip, and if all else failed, a glass of wine would be poisoned, as was the entire atmosphere of Denmark.

It is the most implausible part of the drama, the most resistant to comprehension.

Might that false duel of sport serve as mere support to the drama’s carpentry? Might Hamlet be obeying his demiurge while at the same time rebelling against the pen? Might he be compelled to accept a duel prepared by the King, who has bet a large sum on the victory of his stepson, which would imply an affront to everything that Hamlet has hitherto represented, and to Laertes as well, with whom he would play sportingly after having killed his father and caused the suicide of his sister? Or might it be a subtle process by which the author might try to insinuate that, if indeed Claudio is a monster for killing the legitimate king, and Gertrude, upon marrying him, has become his accomplice and is as guilty as he, then Hamlet, in whom from the beginning the author has forced us to place our faith, is not the young hero able to bring order to this senseless world but rather a hopelessly frivolous youth who has inadvertently killed several people, some entirely innocent, and not the culprit designated by the ghost of his father? Or might he simply want to show us that the Prince’s unbearable sorrows have ended up deteriorating his mental faculties? As simple as that? Perhaps so, one must remember that when we met him he was a young philosopher newly arrived from Wittenberg University, beset by infinite doubts; shortly thereafter he is introduced to us as the architect of an exemplary punishment destined for the murderer of his father, and later as a false madman. Why not assume then that in the end the pressures and disorder of this world and the next, which the dead inhabit and from where he receives instructions, have ended up plunging him into madness? Is it possible that from so much pretending he has chosen to take refuge in it, and thus escape all the grief that overwhelms him?

My friend, the long-time reader, the moribund Gustavo Esguerra, ponders from his sickbed whether perhaps Hamlet’s willingness to take part in that absurd fencing match might be a mere theatrical convention of the time, where so often excess exceeds coherence, and he was counting on the author’s willingness as well as that of a complacent public provided it received a brilliant performance, opulent in its movements, tropes, and characters of all kinds, everything drenched in spilt blood, according to the appetite of the time, at the end of that excessive tragedy. Hamlet will behave as the man who must restore order in the universe that has been brutally distorted. The guilty will be eliminated; Shakespeare conceived the sporting duel knowing that the denouement was within sight. In a single scene both the King and Queen will die, and with them Hamlet and Laertes, divided friends whom only the approach of death will reunite. The valiant Fortinbras would enter; unblemished by guilt he would bid a resounding farewell to the corpse of the Prince and peacefully gird the crown. Would darkness withdraw from Denmark? Would the stench of rottenness evaporate? In this old kingdom, rid of tribulation, would history begin again? As a man of the theater, Shakespeare was obsessed more with staging than by the publication of his works. In a good performance, Hamlet’s willingness to cross swords with Laertes produces no objection, as happens in reading. By contrast, the scene works splendidly and offers a perfect ending. Esguerra relates the scene to another excessively sensationalist one, where the Prince throws himself into the tomb where the body of Ophelia lies; he senses a possible connection between the two situations, but he fails to establish it. In his search, he recalls lines uttered by the trembling, orphaned Ophelia as she wanders aimlessly the halls of Elsinore.

For Gustavo Esguerra, as for every reader, it was impossible to capture all the mysteries contained in a play by Shakespeare. In his youth, he was dazzled by their intense plots and verbal music. It could not be otherwise! Each reader, according to his abilities, goes about deciphering some of their enigmas over time. Around the middle of the sixties, Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary arrived in his hands. In its pages Kott became convinced of the importance of penetrating, through the Shakespearean text, the contemporary experience, its inquietude and its sensitivity.

There are many subjects in Hamlet. There is politics, force opposed to morality; there is discussion of the divergence between theory and practice, of the ultimate purpose of life; there is tragedy of love, as well as family drama; political, eschatological and metaphysical problems are considered. There is everything you want, including deep psychological analysis, a bloody story, a duel, and general slaughter. One can select at will. But one must know what one selects, and why.⁹

Hamlet appears to obey his creator, but he always attempts to evade him. For this reason, it is possible to examine and understand him in different ways. In the last hour of his life, Gustavo Esguerra recalled, as I have said, a few lines of Ophelia, whose existence he seemed never to have noticed. A line from Act IV, precisely the scene where the forlorn maiden stumbles upon the King and Queen, now lost in a delirious verbal maze. Her madness is evident, yet in that dense drama of crimes and punishment the sibylline phrase seems to allude to something very important, very concrete, perhaps an admonition to the heart of the audience: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”¹⁰ The old Esguerra, exhausted, repeats it in an increasingly anguished voice. Beside him are a doctor and a nurse. They have just given him an injection. The doctor shakes his head, implying that all is lost. The patient still has the strength to repeat:

“‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be,’ a phrase that would fit perfectly in a play by Pirandello, don’t you think, Doctor?”

These were his dying words.

I’D LIKE TO TAKE A CHANCE. It pleases me to imagine an author who isn’t intimidated by the thought of being demolished by critics. Surely he would be attacked for the novel’s extravagant execution, characterized as a worshipper of the avant-garde, although the very idea of the avant-garde for him is an anachronism. He would withstand a storm of insults and foolish attacks from anonymous frauds. What would truly terrify him would be that his novel might arouse the interest of some foolish and generous critic who claimed to have deciphered the enigmas buried throughout the text and interpreted them as a shameful acceptance of the world that he detests, someone who said that his novel should be read “as a harsh and painful requiem, a heartrending lament, the melancholy farewell to the set of values that in the past had given meaning to his life.” Something like that would destroy and sadden him, would cause him to toy with the idea of suicide. He would repent of his sins; condemn his vanity, his taste for paradox. He would blame himself for not having clarified, just to achieve certain effects, the mysteries in which his plot delights, for having not known how to renounce the vain pleasure of ambiguities. Over time, he would be able to recover; he would forget his past tribulations, his longing for atonement, such that when he starts writing his next novel he will have already forgotten the moments of contrition as well as his efforts to make amends.

And he’ll return to his old habits; he’ll leave unexplained gaps between A and B, between G and H, will dig tunnels everywhere, will put into action an ongoing program of misinformation, will emphasize the trivial and ignore those moments that normally require an intense emotional charge. While writing, he dreams with delight that his tale will confuse law-abiding citizens, reasonable people, bureaucrats, politicians, sycophants and bodyguards, social climbers, nationalists and cosmopolitans by decree, pedants and imbeciles, society matrons, flamethrowers, fops, whitewashed tombs, and simpletons. He aspires for the ubiquitous mob to lose its way in the first chapters, to become exasperated, and to fail to grasp the narrator’s intention. He’ll write a novel for strong spirits, whom he’ll allow to invent a personal plot sustained by a few points of support laboriously and joyously formulated. Each reader would find at last the novel he has at some time dreamt of reading. The opulent, the incomparable, the delectable Polydora will be every woman of the world: the protosemantic Polydora, as her refined admirers, as if spellbound, are wont to call her, but also the dandies—what are you going to do!—the distinguished Mrs. Polydora, as she is known to officials, wealthy merchants and professionals, while the masses, who call a spade a spade, refer to her simply as “the best ass in the world.” For some she’ll be a saint, for others the mother of all whores, and to a third group both things and many more. The bewildered reader will discover that not even Padre Burgos, her long-suffering confessor, knows how to react to the abrupt spiritual oscillations of this untamed lady whose conduct he curses one day only to bless her exalted piety with his tears the next. And what about Generoso de Chalma, the famous bullfighter, her lover, her victim? That abominable figure might be a hero and a buffoon, a mystic, a labyrinth, the powerful head of a drug cartel, the innocent victim of a cruel vendetta, and a despicable informer in the pay of the police, depending on how the reader’s whims or emotional needs sketch him. The only thing that the potential addicts of this novel could agree on would be to confirm that the times we live in, just as in the narrative, are abominable, cruel, foolish, and ignoble, disinclined to imagination, to generosity, to greatness, and that none of the characters, neither the best nor the worst, deserve the punishment of living in them. Regrettably, I have never written that novel.

DREAMING REALITY. Returning to one’s first texts demands that the adult writer, and I say this from personal experience, use all of his defenses so as not to succumb to the bad emanations that time goes about saving. It would be better to take a vow never to look back! One runs the risk that the return becomes an act of penance or atonement or, a thousand times worse, that it grows soft in the face of ineptitudes that should embarrass him. What the author can scarcely afford, and only passingly, is to document the circumstances that made possible the birth of those initial writings and to confirm, with rigor but without scandal, the poor respiration that his language manifests, the stiffness and pathos imposed on them beforehand.

My first stories ended irremissibly in an anguish that led to the death of the protagonist or, in the most benign of cases, insanity. To find access to dementia, to seek shelter in it, meant glimpsing an ultima Thule, paradise, the island of Utopia, where all tribulations, anguish, and terrors were abolished forever.

The year was 1957, and I was twenty-four. I moved with delight in a circle of intense eccentricity in which friends of different ages, nationalities, and professions coexisted with absolute naturalness, although, as was to be expected, we, the young, prevailed. Outside the orthodoxly eccentric sector, which already had a foot planted in manias and obsessions, we were characterized by our fervor for dialogue, as long as it was amusing and intelligent, our capacity for parody, our lack of respect for prefabricated values, false glories, petulance and, above all, self-complacency. At the same time, mandatory compliance to a tacit but rigid system of behavior was obligatory, such that even if we entered into the heart of absurdity we should not forget good manners. In essence, but also in form, our best defense lay in a certain snobbishness of which today it is impossible to be certain whether we were or were not aware.

One fine day, I noticed that my time and my space had been saturated and contaminated by the outside world and that the din reduced in a lamentable way two of my greatest pleasures: reading and sleeping. It was, it seems to me, the first announcement of a radical distaste, of a diffuse anxiety; in fact, a real fear. Because I had begun to notice that the absorbent worldliness, in which my friends and I aspired to behave like the young protagonists of the earlyfirst Evelyn Waugh, where any situation could get out of hand and transform into an immense folly, and where laughter was the most effective remedy to purify the pools of conceit and solemnity that one could store inadvertently, was beginning to become something very different from the model we proposed. Among the participants in this joyful lifestyle, an attitude began to appear that shortly before had seemed unimaginable to us. Sometimes, when playing the hackneyed game of truth or dare, where a group of friends sitting in a circle on the floor spins a bottle so that someone might ask the person whom the bottle points to any intimacy, any secret proclivity about which he was suspect, rather than being a fun experience, became repugnantly sordid. Instead of witty phrases, it produced cursing, complaints, screams, and obscenities. An intolerable burden had been imposed on us: we passed from play to massacre, from carnival to howling. A newly-married lad suddenly slapped his wife, a sister crudely insulted her brother and his girlfriend, a pair of friends destroyed in a cruelly scandalous way a close friendship of many years. Day after day, hysteria, suspicions, and animosities grew. Everyone seemed to have fallen in love with everyone and jealousy became a collective passion. Our company seemed to feed only on repellent toxins. We began to lose our style.

It became necessary to escape, to move to pastures new, to leave the magma. I rented a house in Tepoztlán and refurbished it so as to spend extended periods there. Tepoztlán was then a tiny village, isolated from the world, lacking even electric lights. The ideal retreat. I spent splendid days there; I took long walks through the countryside and, above all, I read. I remember on my first stay I buried myself fervently in the prose of Quevedo and the novels of Henry James. At times it seemed that spiritual health was getting closer. It was like living in Tibet without the need to subject oneself to its mystical discipline. The process should not have been so simple, but something happened that from that point on brought me closer to the balance I had longed for. On one occasion, I withdrew there to complete a translation that had been commissioned in a rush. The first day, in the afternoon, I sat down to begin the task, but instead started writing and was unable to stop until dawn. In a few weeks I wrote my first three stories: “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,” “Amelia Otero,” and “The Ferris.” Every line alleviated anxieties from the immediate past (the almost still present) and produced in me a sense of astonishment different from any I had known until then. I wrote, as is usually said, in a kind of fever, in a medium’s trance, but with the irreconcilable difference that, during the exercise, my will consciously ordered the flow of language. I was witnessing, then, the emergence of a form, the application of a mathematics of chaos. That magnificent experience had nothing to do with the insipid writing of a few articles of mine published three or four years earlier.

That was my first active foray into literature, my leap into writing.

It never failed to amaze me that the resulting texts had no connection, at least in appearance, with the historical circumstances of the moment. On the contrary, it harkened me back to times before my own existence. I didn’t write about the capital, where I lived, but rather about the small town where my grandmother lived for many years, where my parents were born, were adolescents, and were married, where my brother was also born. The plots, the characters, the shower of details with which I attempted to create the appropriate atmosphere came from stories that during my childhood and adolescence I heard my grandmother tell again and again. They were stories nestled in an eternally yearned-for Eden: the world that the revolution had turned to ashes. I’ll forever find it strange that of all the reminiscences made by my grandmother and her friends of the same age of that proclaimed paradise, the only thing I retained was an endless string of disasters, evil, and revenge that led me to suspect that in my legendary San Rafael (the name that concealed Huatusco) the presence of the devil far exceeded that of the angels. Perhaps that is the reason for the too frequent mention of the devil in those early stories, which freezes the development of the plot, paralyzes the characters and creates an unnecessary and cumbersome climate of wickedness.

I had managed by way of these stories to unburden myself of some uncomfortable ghosts. They might not be those of the present, but indeed those I lived with during my childhood. As I look back, the time that passed from the moment I traced in Tepoztlán with a sleepwalker’s hand the story of a tragic misunderstanding—the story of the fruitless obedience of Victorio Ferri, a child consumed by madness, who, convinced that his father is the devil, commits, to be kind, all manner of vileness that might seem appropriate for the son and heir of evil, only to discover while dying that none of it had been worthwhile, that the happiness he detected in the face of his father is due to the certainty that he is a step away from freeing himself of him, to discover it at the gates of death—even today, forty years later, as I write these pages, it compels me to repeat what I said on other occasions: what unifies my existence is literature; all that I have lived, thought, longed for, imagined is contained in it. More than a mirror it is an X-ray: it is the dream of the real.

I owe to Infierno de todos [Everyone’s Hell] having extricated myself from a lapsed world that wasn’t mine, that was related only tangentially to me, which allowed me to approach literature with greater fidelity to the real. I noticed this with greater clarity during a period of tenacious reading of Witold Gombrowicz. For him, literature and philosophy must emanate from reality, because only then would they, in turn, have the ability to infer from it. Everything else, the Polish writer insisted, was tantamount to an act of onanism, to the replacement of the language of the inane cult of writing for writing’s sake and the word for word’s sake. When speaking of the real and reality I am referring to a vast space, different from what others understand for those terms when they confuse reality with a deficient and parasitic aspect of existence, fueled by conformity, bad press, political speeches, vested interests, telenovelas, light literature, romance as well as self-help.

When Infierno de todos was published I was living in Warsaw. I had undertaken a trip three years earlier to Europe, which at the beginning I imagined would be very brief. I traveled to all the essential places before settling in Rome for a period of time. Thereafter, for different reasons and motivations, I remained outside Mexico, changing destinations frequently, almost always by random interventions, until the end of 1988, when I returned to the country. During those twenty-eight European years my stories recorded an incessant to-and-fro. They are, in some way, the logbooks of my worldly wanderings, my mutations, and my internal settlements.

To cut loose the moorings, to confront without fear the vast world and to burn my ships were events that time and again changed my life and, consequently, my literary labor. During those years of wandering, the body of my work was formed. If I received any benefit, it was the chance to contemplate my country from a distance and, therefore, paradoxically, to sense that it was closer. A mixed feeling of approximation and flight allowed me to enjoy an enviable freedom, which surely I would not have known had I stayed at home. My work would have been another. The journey as a continuous activity, the frequent surprises, my coexistence with different languages, customs, imaginations, and mythologies, my diverse reading options, my ignorance of styles, my indifference for metropolises, their demands and pressures, the encounters good and bad; all affirmed my vision.

The story that appears at the end of Infierno de todos, “Cuerpo presente” [Lying in State], dated in Rome in 1961, represents the closure and farewell to the vicarious world I had written about until then. Thereafter a new narrative period arises in which I use the settings I visited as backdrops for the dramas lived by some characters, mostly Mexicans, who unexpectedly faced the different beings living inside them, whose existence they don’t even suspect. There are inner itineraries whose stops include Mexico City, cities in Veracruz, Cuernavaca, and Tepoztlán, but also Rome, Venice, Berlin, Samarkand, Warsaw, Belgrade, Peking, and Barcelona. My characters are usually students, businessmen, filmmakers, writers, who suddenly and unexpectedly suffer an existential crisis that leads them to doubt momentarily the values that have sustained them by means of an umbilical cord of extraordinary resistance. Breaking that link or remaining attached to it becomes their essential dilemma.

If it is true that the impulses of childhood will accompany us until the moment of death, it is also true that the writer must keep them at bay, prevent them from turning into a lock so that writing doesn’t become a prison, but rather a reservoir of freedoms. My experience in Rome introduced me to new milieus, to other challenges, and to endless hesitation. It allowed me to close the door on a period and perceive other possibilities.

A further step. I visited Warsaw in early 1963. I didn’t know anyone in the city. The first night I attended a theater by chance near my hotel. Without understanding a word, I was awe-struck. Upon returning to the hotel I was disturbed by the resemblance to my grandmother that I noticed in one of the employees at reception, an elderly woman. Not only her face, but also her gestures; her way of drawing the cigarette to her lips and exhaling the smoke seemed identical. It was like a hallucination. I forced myself to believe that it was an effect of the theatrical excitement, and I went to my room. The next day I went to Łódź, where Juan Manuel Torres was studying film. He infected me with his enthusiasm for Poland and its culture; he spoke of its classics and its romantics as if in a mystic trance. That evening I returned to Warsaw on a train that was delayed several hours because of a tremendous storm. I had climbed into the car with an aching flu. Numbed by the cold, overcome with fever, almost delirious, I could barely make it to the hotel upon arriving in Warsaw. During the reception the same elderly woman as the night before attended to me again, and again with a cigarette in her mouth. I greeted her with absolute informality, I told her that if she didn’t stop smoking her health would continue to be bad, that at that late hour she should already be sleeping. She answered in Polish, and I was horrified to discover that it wasn’t my grandmother. I spent the next day in bed per physician’s orders. I began to write a story about the feverish confusion between that Polish woman and my grandmother. I tried to reproduce the delirium of the previous day from the moment I boarded the train in Łódź. I noticed that it retrieved from me a new tonality and, more importantly, that it drew me toward a necessary operation: severing the umbilical cord that connected me to my childhood.

Years later in Barcelona, I managed to finish El tañido de una flauta [The Sound of the Flute],¹¹ my first novel. I was at the time thirty-eight years old and had very little work under my belt. Upon writing it, I established a tacit commitment to writing. I decided, without knowing that I had, that instinct should come before any other mediation. It was instinct that would determine form. Even now, at this moment, I struggle with Reality’s emissary that is form. One doesn’t seek out form, of that I am certain, but rather opens himself to it, waits for it, accepts it, battles it. And, so, form is always the victor. When this doesn’t happen the text is always a bit spoiled.

El tañido de una flauta was, among other things, a tribute to Germanic literatures, especially Thomas Mann, whose work I have frequented since adolescence, and Hermann Broch, whom I discovered during a stay in Belgrade and whom, awestruck, I read and reread in torrents for almost a year. The central theme of El tañido… is creation. Literature, painting, and film are the central protagonists. The terror of creating a hybrid between the story and the treatise drove me to intensify the narrative elements. In the novel several plots revolve around the central story line, secondary, tertiary plots, some positively minimal, mere larvae of plots, necessary to cloak and mitigate the long disquisitions on art in which the characters become entangled. Little news has pleased me so much as a revelation by Rita Gombrowicz about the literary tastes of her celebrated husband. One of his passions was Dickens. His favorite novel, The Pickwick Papers.

My apprenticeship continued. For years I continued to write stories and novels, endeavoring not to repeat methods I had already used. My last six years in Europe were spent in Prague, the most secret, the most inconceivably magical of all known cities. There I jumped headlong, as compensation for the dry world of protocol in which I moved, into parody, ridicule, the grotesque, elements that I had greatly enjoyed in oral form my whole life, but which until then I had refused to integrate into my stories.

As a tacit or explicit homage to some of my tutelary gods: Nikolai Gogol, H. Bustos Domecq, and Witold Gombrowicz, among others, I wrote El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade], Domar la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron],¹² and La vida conyugal [Married Life], a trilogy of novels closer to the carnival than any other rite. I have written elsewhere about the experience:

As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness, in the grotesque…The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels that make up the Carnival Triptych suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging.¹³

In Xalapa, where I settled in 1993, my last book was born, The Art of Flight,14 a summa of the enthusiasms and desacralizations that, as it unfolds, become subtraction. Classical manuals of music define the fugue as a composition of many voices, written in counterpoint, whose essential elements are variation and canon, that is, the possibility of establishing a form that sways between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics, the gavotte and the mambo. In a technique of chiaroscuro, the distinct texts contemplate each other, enhance and deconstruct at every moment, as the final purpose is a relativization of all instances. Having abolished the worldly environment that for several decades encircled my life, and having hid from my sight the settings and characters that for years suggested the cast that populates my novels, I was obligated to transform myself into an almost unique character, which was at the same time agreeable and unsettling. What was I doing in those pages? As always the appearance of a form resolved in its own way the contradictions inherent in a fugue.

The stories contained in Infierno de todos, my first book, naïve and clumsy, stiff in their wickedness, susceptible to whatever disqualification that might be ascribed to them, reveal, however, some constants that support what might pompously be designated as my ars poetica. The tone, the plot, the design of the characters are the work of language. My approach to the phenomena is parsimoniously oblique. There is always a mystery that the narrator approaches deliberately, laggardly, without, when all is said and done, managing to reveal the unknown purpose. In the approach to that existing hole in the middle of the story, in the revolutions that the word makes around it, the function of my writing takes place. Writing is to me an act akin to weaving and unraveling many narrative threads that are arduously plaited, where nothing is closed and everything is conjectural; the reader will be the one who tries to clarify them, to solve the mystery posed, to opt for some suggested options: sleep, delirium, wakefulness. Everything else, as always, is words.

KNOWING NOTHING. When I translated Gombrowicz’s Argentine diary, I found a fragment that interested me a great deal and I almost believed to be my own: “Everything we know about the world is incomplete, is inaccurate. Every day we are presented with new information that nullifies previous knowledge, mutilates or widens it. Because this knowledge is incomplete it is as if we knew nothing.”

WALTER BENJAMIN ATTENDS THE THEATER IN MOSCOW. The romantic episode included in Benjamin’s Moscow Diary can only be understood as a treatise on despair. In 1924 he met Asja Lācis, a Latvian revolutionary, in Capri, and fell in love from the first moment. According to Gershom Sholem, a close friend of Benjamin, Lacis wielded a decisive influence over him. They met again in Berlin that same year. The next year, Benjamin traveled to Riga to be with her for a few days. In early 1926 he takes another trip, this time to Moscow, where he remains two months. Communication with Asja regrettably deteriorates. To begin with, Asja is maintaining a romantic relationship with Bernhard Reich, a director of German theater living in Moscow. Committed to a sanitarium for nervous disorders, Benjamin sees her little, in bursts, and their encounters in general are unpleasant. On the other hand, he must see Reich continuously; moreover, shortly after his arrival he is obliged to offer him lodging in his own hotel room, because the place where Reich lives is cold and humid and, as a result, injurious to his health. A few days later, as in a Chaplin film, Reich takes possession of the bed, and Benjamin spends his nights seated in a chair. The diary records moments of deep depression owing to Asja’s coldness, to her demands, to her scorn.

Benjamin had traveled to the Soviet Union in the hope of making a decision he had postponed during the last two years. Should he or should he not join the German Communist Party, or merely remain as a fellow traveler? His arrival to the country of the Soviets coincides with one of the most nebulous periods of history, around the denouement of the fierce battle that had raged for two years between the forces of Trotsky and those of Stalin. The approaching end causes the battle to become more insidious, more implacable. The shockwave is permanent, though beneath the surface; only the facts and bubbles rise to the surface. Benjamin is amazed by the impersonality of the responses. No one appears to have a direct opinion on anything. The responses are always elusive: There are those of the opinion that… It is said that… Some think… In this way personal responsibility disappears. When he speaks and holds personal opinions in front of others, Reich and, especially, Asja reprimand him, they tell him that he has understood nothing, that it is impossible for him to navigate such a setting; in short, he should stop expressing nonsense that could compromise him as well as them. The day of his arrival, Reich invites him to dine at the restaurant of the Union of Writers, where they hear that, in a theater in the city, a work in praise of the whites is being performed, and that at the premiere the police had to disperse a communist demonstration that was protesting such an effrontery. In an entry dated December 14,¹⁵ that is, eight days following his arrival, Benjamin records his opinion on that theatrical piece that seemed to produce so much conflict:

They were performing Stanislavsky’s production of The Days of the Turbins. The naturalistic style of the sets was remarkably good, the acting without any particular flaws or merits, Bulgakov’s play itself an absolutely revolting provocation. Especially the last act, in which the White Guard “convert” to Bolshevism, is as dramatically insipid as it is intellectually mendacious. The Communist opposition to the production is justified and significant. Whether this final act was added on at the request of the censors, as Reich claims, or whether it was there all along has no bearing whatsoever on the assessment of the play. (The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theaters. It was as if there were not a single Communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight.)¹⁶

During his stay in Moscow, Benjamin allows himself no respite. He pursues his beloved and is permanently spurned, he translates pages of Proust, writes an entry on Goethe for the New Soviet Encyclopedia under preparation, visits museums, attends the theater—especially that of Meyerhold, which fascinates him—pays visits, including one to Joseph Roth, who has traveled there at the expense of an important newspaper in Frankfurt, and buys beautiful wooden pieces to add to his collection of popular toys. The arguments that Roth expounds in opposition to Stalin seem unserious to him, banal anticommunist statements to satisfy the great capital, “[Roth] had come to Russia as an (almost confirmed) Bolshevik and was leaving it a royalist”; the proletariat expression in the literature of the Soviet Union seemed indispensable to him, but the absence of theoretical reflection and the canonization of excessively elemental forms discouraged him. His privileged intelligence becomes lost in the permanent comedy of errors that he lives in the Moscow of disinformation, of half-truths and lies with veneers of doubtful virtue. When Benjamin submits his text on Goethe, painstakingly contemplated, Karl Radek, a high functionary close to Trotsky and protector of certain writers on the edge of dissidence, rejects it as if it were a primitive sectarian pamphlet; according to Radek, “The phrase ‘class conflict’ occurs ten times on every page.” Benjamin, who had taken the text to the offices of the Encyclopedia, pointed out this wasn’t entirely true, adding, what’s more, that it was impossible to speak about the activity of Goethe that occurs during an era of great class conflict, without employing that expression. Radek added, apparently with disdain: “The point is to introduce it at the right moment.” Benjamin accepts that he has lost the match given that the “wretched directors of this project are far too insecure to permit themselves any possibility of a personal opinion, even when faced with the feeblest joke by someone in a position of authority.” As for the work by Bulgakov that so irritated the Communists and that he, Benjamin, had described as “an absolutely revolting provocation,” it remained in the theater on higher orders. Stalin, no less!, saw it fifteen times, according to the archives of the Moscow Art Theater. As I was saying: an exhausting comedy of equivocations.

IN BERNHARD’S VIENNA. Some time ago in Rome, in the fall of 1961 to be precise, I accompanied the Zambrano sisters to a literary banquet. I don’t recall if it was to celebrate the launch of a literary journal or a new publisher series. The locale was a restaurant in the Piazza del Popolo. The faction of Italy’s intelligentsia most privileged by fame seemed to have gathered there. I knew scarcely anyone, but the group dazzled me: the way they moved, greeted one another, approached or avoided others, how they drew a cigarette to their mouths. Everything was luxurious, brilliant, concentrated. It recalled a scene by Antonioni with hints of Fellini, and also of Lubitsch. The presence of those it was impossible not to recognize: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Pasolini, Carlo Levi. Who had not seen their photos in the press or on the cover of their books?

María and Araceli Zambrano had lived until a few years before in the piano nobile of the palace on whose ground floor the restaurant was located. Listening to them, one would think that they had never been happy, except in that apartment with sprawling balconies above the piazza. Some guests, who were accustomed to seeing them in that setting, greeted and congratulated them as if they were the hostesses. One writer greeted the philosopher with obvious affection, and she seemed to feel at last inter pares and no longer among shiny but in the end tinpot puppets. Suddenly I found myself seated at his table with my Spanish companions. I saw him only on that single occasion, but he was the intellectual who most impressed me during that time in Italy. From that day on, I read his literary page in Il Espresso weekly, and those readings complemented the profound impression that he left on me that day. I admired his intelligence, his heterodoxy, and above all the casual and elegant irony that charged his words with mystery. It was Paolo Milano, a celebrated and at the same time almost secret man of letters, a Jew, as his name indicates, who in 1939 had to emigrate to New York to avoid the racial laws of fascism. On that occasion I learned of his deep passion for the theater and his stunning erudition on North American literature. Seated beside him was an odd couple: a Sicilian aristocrat of intelligent conversation, and a small man, disheveled, with a slight hump and intense eyes that reminded me inescapably of Raskolnikov’s. He worked as a literary assistant to Fellini, I believe. Minutes later two guests approached the table on different flanks; one of them was robust, with a sacramental appearance, one of those men who seem never to have had a youth, with slightly exaggerated gestures and expressions, and the other, thin, nervous, eccentric, with intensely dark hair, carrying perhaps forty well-worn years. Both walked up to greet María Zambrano. The older one was Mario Praz, the most eminent Italian scholar of English literature and author of a contemporary classic: The Romantic Agony. Upon seeing Paolo Milano, he suddenly stiffened; he mumbled vague words of greeting, did an about-face, and sat at the table beside us, directly behind Araceli Zambrano. The other man, Rodolfo Wilcock, an Anglo-Italian born in Argentina, was an eccentric and intelligent character, also a friend of everyone. I was the only stranger at the table. They were all friends and, however, I felt that an unbearable electric tension had formed around the table. The Zambrano sisters had ceased to be the perfect hostesses from before to become two terrified women, not knowing where to take refuge, or at least where to bury their head. All the helplessness of the world had engulfed them. Praz turned to ask the Sicilian countess if she had understood something that had been published in the press that morning. And before she could answer, Paolo Milano exclaimed in a loud voice: “No, non ho capito, sai, sono un mediocre senza rimedio,” and smiled with the serenity of Buddha. Everyone burst into laughter; myself included, without knowing at what, or why. Praz turned his back, clearly bothered, and did not direct his attention to our table again. Détente was long in coming. María and Ara Zambrano were susceptible to certain fears, and Mario Praz was considered an absolute jinx in Rome, the gettatore par excellence; to top it off, the Zambrano sisters had sensed several months before that Wilcock possessed those same evil powers, although less infallible as those of Praz. I imagine that the panic had had an effect on the table, and that was why, at the beginning, only the brave Milano had spoken. He detested Vittorini, his novels, his translations and prologues, his journals, his character, his literary taste, his human quality, and he said all this with a candid voice and friendly smile, as if he were enumerating the writer’s best attributes; later he directed his darts at the Mann family, which he met in his youth, at the end of the twenties or beginning of the thirties, at a spa on the Adriatic, where his family had a house next to the one the Manns occupied every summer. They seemed caricaturesque. They would appear in three taxis, and Katia Mann would take charge of supervising the unloading of the trunks and suitcases. Any act, no matter how quotidian, was transformed into a ceremony. There emanated from that house during the entire season an air of grandeur royal. He made Katia feel guilty that Thomas, her husband, had not become the good writer that he promised to be. If anyone else had hurled those charges at two writers whom I revered, I would have seen red, but with Milano it was hard to be offended. All of a sudden the topic of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem came up. The conversation turned general. We spoke of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and its diverse manifestations. And at a given moment Milano said that the most sinister stories he knew about the subject came from Austria, specifically from Vienna, and he related events from March of 1938, heard in turn, he clarified, from the mouth of the English writer John Lehmann, who witnessed them. On March 15, 1938, the annexation of Austria by Germany was declared. On that day a crowd of one million Austrians deliriously saluted the Führer in Heroes’ Square. Lehmann had spent a long period of time in Vienna. Like his friends, Isherwood and Auden, he was attracted to the Germanic intensity of the time, the contact between high culture and plebeian life, between pure spirit and corporal plenitude, and also the lack of sexual taboos that in their country remained as steadfast as in the Victorian era. But Lehmann was bothered and frightened by the vulgarity of Berlin, the tone of the three-penny operas in which blows and guffaws were mixed gaily. He preferred, instead, to reside in Vienna, in a perfect flat. The building was occupied by well-known families: highly qualified professionals, aristocrats, people of leisure, of elegance, and perfect manners. It pleased Lehmann to witness the casual meetings between neighbors in the great hall on the ground floor, to watch them greet each other with a courteousness that seemed to emanate from their very blood, draw their hand to their hat, bow slightly, make passing comments about some aspect of the weather, or the performance of an opera by Wagner, Mozart, Richard Strauss, bow their head again woodenly, bid farewell, and go on their way. In the face of the indifference of the British, the young and winsome Lehmann felt as if he were in a high school of manners that seemed to transmit greater meaning to his life. Suddenly, the writer began to notice a tension in the city, a growing anxiety and excitement in the street, in the cafés, outside the theaters, even though in his building perfect manners, implacable diction, movements regulated with military precision did not exhibit the least modification. Everything continued this way until the fateful March 15, 1938. That day and night there began an orgy of blood presided over by the old deities that apparently persist in the fog of the Germanic soul. This circle of perfectly cultivated ladies and gentlemen were dragged to their most distant origins, the cave, the fire around which they listened to the nearby howling of wolves. That day they themselves became wolves. Their howls were more terrifying than those of the beasts. Upon leaving his apartment Lehmann witnessed a terrible scene in the hallway. His immediate neighbors, a reputed Viennese attorney, accompanied by his two sons, university students, were dragging an elderly married couple downstairs from the rooms on the floor above. Their swollen bodies trembled with convulsions; muffled cries escaped from the elderly woman’s bleeding mouth. Suddenly, the doorwoman appeared with a large leather sack, kneeled before the old woman and took off her shoes. Lehmann, paralyzed with fear, muttered something, he didn’t even know what, to which one of the youths, pointing to the bodies, replied only: “Juden! Juden!” From the other floors could be heard ferocious voices as well as the cries of the victims.

I was in Vienna this year, after a twelve-year absence. My arrival coincided with a mass rally of three hundred thousand people who protested against the return of Nazism to the country, precisely in Heroes’ Square, the same one where one million Austrians frenziedly cheered Hitler. During the ensuing days I was forced to tolerate the taxi drivers, business employees, hotel staff, who upon seeing that I was a foreigner felt obligated to enlighten me. We were finally liberated, they would say. Haier¹⁷ has liberated us from the tyranny of socialists and Jews. I left Vienna days ahead of schedule; I felt as if I were breathing poisoned air.

Paolo Milano’s tale in Rome, in the end almost a gasp, has made me, more than any other spoken or written testimony, viscerally abhor national socialism. As I left the restaurant, someone said, Fellini’s literary assistant I believe, that something like that could happen anywhere in the world, except the repetition of acts like those, to which Ara Zambrano responded that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves and began to recount almost incoherently the circumstances surrounding her years in German-occupied Paris, and the interrogations to which the Gestapo subjected her while her husband rotted in their dungeon, before executing him.

Herman Bosch was arrested at his home the day following Hitler’s arrival in Heroes’ Square. That same day, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, his wife, received a telephone call warning them that a group of Nazi youths had listed them as Jews and Communists. They were saved by a hair’s breadth. The Swiss musician Rolf Liebermann watched from a window at the Opera as the barbarians dragged sculptures from the house of Mahler’s daughter. Broch himself writes to a friend that he could describe his time in prison as “comfortable” in relation to the terror that he experienced later in the streets, where all he heard was the rhythmic cry: “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!” (One people, one State, one leader), chanted all the time by the masses. It was the same demented chorus that Professor Schuster’s widow hears for many years, that drove her to her death in the final scene of the last, extremely intense drama by Thomas Bernhard: Heroes’ Square.

THE JEWS IN MEXICO. “A pause here: I look around and notice that my story has turned into a portrait gallery and that other characters have appeared from what my parents have said,”¹⁸ writes Margo Glantz at the beginning of chapter 41¹⁹ of that beautiful and extremely original book called The Family Tree, the first to deal with the tribulations and triumphs experienced by a Jewish family during the last fifty years in Mexico. A family whose photo, taken shortly before disembarking at a Mexico port together with their “ship brothers,” shows us a group in which some of its members look like Kafka and all the women like Ottla, Kafka’s favorite sister.²⁰ One of those “brothers” could perfectly be the Karl Rossmann of Amerika.

The figure who at the beginning of that chapter 41 appears on the lips of Jacobo Glantz is that of Bashevis Singer; in other chapters it will be that of Blok, those of Mayakovsky and Einstein, those of Lunacharsky and Alejandra Kollontai, that of Chagall, that of Nabokov, those of a few actors from the Jewish theater of Mexico, those of an infinite number of names of interchangeable relatives disseminated in muddy villages of the Ukrainian steppe, in Mexico, in the United States, in the ports of Odessa and Leningrad.

“The Jews,” says Margo Glantz, quoting Bashevis Singer, “do not record their history, they have no sense of chronology. It would seem that instinctively they know that time and space are mere illusion.”²¹ And The Family Tree adheres to that postulate. On the lips of Jacobo and Lucía, the author’s parents, and also on her own, history zigzags through past and present, it harks back to a village where Jacobo attends his first primary school to study prayers and the Hebrew alphabet, to the Department of Odessa, where Lucía plays the piano, then skips to the moment when the author is working in Acapulco on the final proofs of her book, to the recounting of her trip to Odessa fifty years after her family’s separation to see and touch the relatives that remained there and, throughout seventy-one brief chapters, allows us to glimpse her biography and to know the fabulous and day-to-day history of her parents. Jacobo seems to be air; Lucía the solid ground that he shakes, from which he extracts its substances to spread around the world. Margo observes them with love, with curiosity, with imprudence. “Oh, Margo, I’ve a lot to do, leave me in peace,” her mother implores her. “Okay, but we’re going to leave it here, I’ll put something together for you, I need to think about it, you can’t talk just like that,”²² Jacobo cuts her short.

Perhaps the couple is prototypical within the Jewish community. If any book reminds me of these genealogies, it is Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops. The figure of her father is that of a demiurge; he creates never-ending, fantastic images within which he lives; day-to-day reality barely brushes against him. Fifty years in Mexico pass between a haberdashery and a bakery, one shoe shop or another, a café, a famous restaurant. Jacobo meanders along Álvaro Obregón with a mule loaded with baskets of bread, while studying a dentistry textbook; at night he pulls the teeth of stallkeepers from La Merced Market. All these events happen to him on an earthly plain. He inhabits another world, that of poetry and color. Jacobo reads poetry incessantly, he translates and writes it. He’ll become one of the most important contemporary poets of the Yiddish language and an original painter. Lucía’s energy keeps him going.

Margo Glantz has succeeded in recreating all the magic of these lives in her story, to which she has added the color and aroma that emanate from the family she describes; she provides a glimpse of a few personal preoccupations, her proximity and distance to the world she recounts, and, above all else, has managed to create a fluid and rigorous form, the only one that the genealogical abyss allows.

FORMS OF GAO XINGJIAN. Suddenly, at random, detached from nothingness, or what one conceives as “nothingness,” memory manages to rescue a solitary, unexpected image, disconnected from the present, but also from its normal surroundings: its time, its place, its minute history, where because of apathy, disinterest, the wear of old age, it is only able to sparkle brightly for a few seconds then return to the primeval chaos from which it emerged.

Sometimes, an image reiterates its presence and demands to be rescued from forgottenness. And if whoever frees it happens to be a writer, he’ll be showered with bliss, he’ll feel as if he were on the verge of conceiving a new story, perhaps the best he has ever written, because the details he has just remembered about his childhood could be what was needed to sketch that long-awaited perfect plot that inexplicably eludes him just as he’s at the point of capturing it. He again feels this time that he’ll be victorious, he has heard the imperious voice of the muses, the message, the announcement, that which crystalizes in “inspiration,” a term scorned by every pedant in the world, and also by his cousins, the pretentious, but one, however, the writer I’m thinking about reveres. Yes, that, inspiration, goddess of the symbolists and of the modernista poets, from Darío to Valle-Inclán. Yes, he says, inspiration, and repeats: inspiration, inspiration and its many mysteries vindicated by Nabokov, the very same that the “scientists” of literature encapsulate in extravagant, profane, and ridiculous terms, increasingly distant from what literature is.

In my personal experience, inspiration is the most delicate fruit of memory.

I return home from an intense session with my massage therapist. I should have visited him weeks before, and as a consequence of the delay the pain in my back, shoulders, neck, and the nape of my neck had grown infinitely worse. The doctor went to work, repeating all the while that it was my fault that my back has turned to stone, that my muscles were in knots, that working them out was going to take him much more time and effort than that required in a normal session, as I, in pain, moaned in desperation. Shortly after, as I feel my physical fortune renew, the relaxation of my muscles, the harmony of the organism, my memory blesses me with a glimpse of the Temple of Heaven, the most elegant, powerful and at the same time light edifice that I know. In my memory the temple appears in the distance, a circular building, built with dazzling white marble, surrounded by walls of the same material. I see large curved surfaces; they are walls that rise to heaven, and something like a foaming marble lace around the grand structure. I want to applaud upon seeing that landscape from where I am situated. It is the absolute victory of form over chaos. On various occasions, when I have to explain the concept of form, I mention the Temple of Heaven to illustrate precisely what I want to express, a resource I always keep behind the scenes, the subconscious, that space where fog reigns, yes, the Temple of Heaven, and also, why not!, the Peking Opera. A perfect and precise form governs all elements in both creations, converts them into ancillary details, into mere bases to celebrate a rite and to perceive one of the world’s majestic celebrations.

For some time now, as the result of a hypnotic experience, I have tried to explain my relationship with those visions, to halt to the extent possible their occurrence, to recuperate what is still alive in them, to detail every trait of their surroundings.

If I think about my past I discover that I’ve occupied myself in detestable jobs, but at the time I didn’t notice; or in other formidable ones, which I despised at the time and only later was able to adequately appreciate. But there were also others, very few, that are now the source of as much joy as in times past, when I held them. One of them was my collaboration with a program on Radio Universidad de México, coordinated by a dear friend, the Colombian Milena Esguerra. It was called: Ventana abierta al mundo [Open Window to the World], and was made up of interviews, chronicles, and reviews of activities that were supposedly the most important in the great cities of the world. Participating in that Ventana, being a part, if only minimally, of its creation, fascinated me. I felt as if I were in a dream: an apostle of culture, of the opening to the world of my country, and at the same time I lived formidable experiences, dealt with interesting characters, broadened my knowledge, all that. I sent reports from London, Rome, Warsaw, and, even though at times it’s hard for me to believe, from the mysterious and ancient city of Peking.

So upon returning home, after a grueling massage session, I went about reconstructing my first visit to the Temple of Heaven. I recall that my hosts and I stopped to rest during the trek toward the building, midway from the long marble streamer that encircles it, from where we had a marvelous all-encompassing view. To one side, with an arm stretched out toward the immense conical roof covered in glazed tiles of many vivid colors, was Professor Chen, a philologist from the University of Peking, a specialist in French literature. In fact, the greater part of his life had been spent in France. I imagine that, at that moment and with that gesture, he’s providing a description of the building that surely must have gone well beyond my possibilities of reception. I’m in ecstasy. It must be November of 1962. Beside the professor is his son, a student in the Faculty of French Letters, where his father teaches. Both, like all Chinese, are wearing the navy blue uniform of Mao Zedong. Except the fabric of the professor’s is visibly more refined than that of his son’s uniform, and the creases of his pants were perfectly pressed. The student uniform, on the other hand, was as modest as that of the masses that populate the streets.

Another Sunday, the same Professor Chen invited me to visit the Summer Palace, accompanied on that occasion by his wife and son, and after touring the gardens and strolling together to the lakes that surrounded the graceful pavilions, they invited me to eat in the palace restaurant. It was open to the public, the professor told me, but to an extremely reduced public, of six or seven tables. Mrs. Chen informed me that it was the best restaurant in the capital, and perhaps in all China. “The chef here enjoys tremendous prestige,” she said, “he was the head chef of the last empress,” and added with a certain snobbishness: “Yes, sir, the soup that you are eating at this very moment comes from the recipe book of an imperial kitchen, perhaps the one preferred by the dowager empress herself.” It seemed on that day it fell to her to do all the talking; she spoke enthusiastically about the theater—that may have been her profession, I don’t recall—and about their major authors, all important since before the advent of communism: Kuo Mo-jo, Lao She, Ts’ao Yu, whom I read shortly thereafter in English or French translations, and at the end she paid a passionate tribute to the Peking Opera. She grew visibly disillusioned when I told her that I had not seen a single performance during their triumphal tours throughout Europe. She added shortly after leaving the restaurant that the three wonders of China, its most refined achievements, were: the architecture of the Temple of Heaven, to which her husband had accompanied me, the Peking Opera of specific periods—the Ming, the Tang, namely!—which I could still see and hear on stage because they continued to be part of the current repertory. And the third: the delicious cuisine of Szechuan, which we had just eaten. Her son, smiling, said that his mother had been born in Szechuan, and therefore was unable to be objective. We laughed and as we got up from the table the four of us began to applaud.

To end our encounter, we went to have coffee at the home of a married couple who were friends of the Chens and fond of that drink. The host was an architect and, like Professor Chen, had lived a long period of his childhood in France, and his wife, also an architect, was actually French. For this reason, they enjoyed coffee. I was received cordially. The architects were younger than the Chens, and perhaps for that reason the solemn expressions of protocol were tempered in them. And that night I began to realize some things: during Stalinism, the Party ideologues did not follow Soviet methods in an orthodox way; at least in the world of culture, there existed certain oases protected from the venomous darts of the ultra-sectarian members of the party. The two couples with whom I was taking coffee were partisans of, or at least were close to, a political movement similar to European social democracy, whose leader was Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, creator and first president of the Republic of China, shortly before the First World War, and also vice president of the Republic during the communist period, very likely an honorary title, but one that allowed her to protect a number of vulnerable people and to find them respectable jobs. The vice president belonged to China’s richest family of financiers, which were not banned, since some Chinese political and cultural personages, like Chu Teh, the minister of Defense, the hero of the Long March, Chou En-lai, the most powerful vice-president of the republic, came from Mandarin families, the Chinese aristocracy, as did several respected writers of the period: Kuo Mo-yo, Pa-kin, and many others. They all had the opportunity to leave for Taiwan or Hong Kong when the old regime collapsed, or to return to Europe or to the United States, as others did; however, they remained in China and entered into an agreement, perhaps tacit, to be accepted in the country as long as they complied with certain conditions. Moreover, during the year 1962, there existed a group of private industrialists who ran their companies. The condition for enjoying certain guarantees depended, above all, on not having collaborated with the Japanese during their occupation of the country in the Second World War nor having been informers for the government of Chiang Kaishek, nor having betrayed opponents of that regime. Among the efforts of the widow of Sun Yat-sen, which were many, a minor one was the publication abroad in various languages of a propaganda magazine: China Reconstructs, where many non-communist intellectuals were welcomed, as well as some foreigners who had married Chinese citizens, such as the architects in whose home I went to take coffee with Professor Chen and his wife.