by Sergio Pitol
More praise for Sergio Pitol:
“Pitol is not just our best living storyteller, he is also the strongest renovator of our literature.”
—ÁLVARO ENRIGUE, author of Sudden Death
“One of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable and eccentric… [His] voice…reverberates beyond the margins of his books.”
—VALERIA LUISELLI, author of Faces in the Crowd
“[The Art of Flight] is the most celebrated of Pitol’s novels… It travels through readings—from Antonio Tabucchi to [William] Faulkner and Thomas Mann—through cities, films, notebooks, and recordings, melancholy memories, hypnosis, and dreams.”
—Letras Libres
“The bountiful work of [Sergio Pitol] is one of the most original in the Spanish language.”
—El País
“[The Art of Flight] combines cultural density with autobiographical vigor…a landscape that is classic, desolate, ironic, parodic, and very lively.”
—CARLOS MONSIVÁIS
Deep Vellum Publishing
2919 Commerce St. #159, Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org·@deepvellum
Copyright © 2015 by Sergio Pitol
Originally published as El arte de la fuga in 1997 by Ediciones Era, Mexico City, Mexico Introduction “Pitol baja la lluvia” for The Art of Flight © 2004 by Enrique Vila-Matas
Translation copyright © 2015 by George Henson
First edition, 2015
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-07-7 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015930299
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Esta publicación fue realizada con el estímulo del PROGRAMA DE APOYO A LA TRADUCCIÓN (PROTRAD) dependiente de instituciones culturales mexicanas.
This publication was carried out with the support of the PROGRAM TO SUPPORT THE TRANSLATION OF MEXICAN WORKS INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES (PROTRAD) with the collective support of Mexico’s cultural institutions.
—
Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz·annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Deep Vellum titles are published under the fiscal sponsorship of
The Writer’s Garret, a nationally recognized nonprofit literary arts organization.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Contents
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INTRODUCTION BY ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS
I.MEMORY
EVERYTHING IS IN ALL THINGS
YES, I TOO HAVE HAD MY VISION
PAST AND PRESENT
LUNCH AT THE BELLINGHAUSEN
EVERYTHING IS ALL THINGS
WITH MONSIVÁIS THE YOUNGER
ONE DAY IN 1957
THE RETURN HOME
ANOTHER DAY, IN 1962
NOW
THE WOUND OF TIME
DREAMS, NOTHING MORE
TEST OF INITIATION
DIARY FROM ESCUDILLERS
A VINDICATION OF HYPNOSIS
SIENA REVISITED
II.WRITING
THE NARRATOR
THE DARK TWIN
DROCTULF AND OTHERS
THE MARQUISE WAS NEVER CONTENT TO STAY AT HOME
ON RECONCILIATIONS
AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH
WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL
TRAVELING AND WRITING
AN ARS POETICA?
HERE COMES THE PARADE!
CHARMS
III.READINGS
THE GREAT THEATER OF THE WORLD
OUR CONTEMPORARY CHEKHOV
ŠVEJK
BOROLA AGAINST THE WORLD
TWO WEEKS WITH THOMAS MANN
THE GATES OF PARADISE
OUR ULYSSES
PEREIRA DECLARES
IV.ENDING
JOURNEY TO CHIAPAS
I.THE BEGINNINGS
II.WATER FROM THE SAME RIVER
III.FROM THEN UNTIL NOW
V.TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
VI.BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TRANSLATED TEXTS
AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
PITOL IN THE RAIN
By Enrique Vila-Matas
Life and literature are fused in Sergio Pitol. And I wonder now if there is anything more Cervantesesque than his passion for confusing life and literature. Somewhere in The Art of Flight, Sergio tells us that he is the sum of “the books I have read, the paintings I have seen, the music I have heard and forgotten, and the streets I have walked. One is his childhood, his family, some friends, a few loves, and more than a few annoyances.”
I think about the streets I’ve had the chance to walk with him. There are streets, side streets, and backstreets traveled in Ashgabat, Veracruz, Caracas, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Prague, Desvarié, and Kabul. And I’m reminded especially of a rainy day in Aix-en-Provence, where we went to pay tribute to Antonio Tabucchi. I remember the day because there was a pounding rain and Sergio was constantly losing his glasses; the latter was not at all unusual, his penchant for losing and then finding his glasses being legendary. That day he lost them several times, in various bookstores and cafés, as if that were a perfect antidote for not losing his umbrella. I recalled the day that Juan Villoro had found in Pitol’s tendency to lose his glasses a clue to illuminating new aspects of his poetics: “Sergio writes in that hazy region of someone who loses his eyeglasses on purpose; he pretends that his originality is an attribute of his bad eyesight…”
For Villoro, Pitol does not seek to clarify but rather distort what he sees. In The Art of Flight, Pitol tells us that, on his first trip to Venice, back in 1961, he misplaced his glasses upon his arrival, he misplaced them while wondering if he would find death in Venice, death in the city of his ancestors. We also found death and mist, misplaced eyeglasses, and the compact fusion of life with literature on another rainy day, this time in Mérida, in the Venezuelan Andes. We had climbed to four thousand feet and, upon descending into the city, Sergio became alarmed because he thought his blood pressure was too high. We went into a pharmacy where a fourteen-year-old boy, who obviously didn’t know what he was doing, took his blood pressure. “You have five thousand four hundred pesos of blood pressure,” the boy said. Sergio grew faint and startled. “You should be dead,” the boy added. “Ay!” Sergio screamed, and I can still hear today the echo of that scream unleashed in the middle of that Andean city. I explained to him that blood pressure was not measured in pesos and that, besides, the number didn’t make sense, but Sergio remained peaked, and I ended up accompanying him to a nearby clinic where—true to his nature—he would forget his glasses. There, a nurse, who was dressed in an innocent yet almost obscene way (in an unbelievable miniskirt), after a brief examination, would only say that he was in no danger. “None,” she told him. “Oh, Miss,” Sergio added, “it’s as if you had saved my life.” Was that obscene nurse literature itself? Sergio always said that literature had saved his life. Shortly thereafter, he had to once again look for his glasses.
In these anecdotes of rainy days past lies the silhouette of his Cervantesesque life, since, as he says, “Everything is all things.” Reading him, one has the impression of being in the presence of the best writer in the Spanish language of our time. And to whomever asks about his style, I will say that it consists in fleeing anyone who is so dreadful as to be full of certainty. His style is to say everything, but to not solve the mystery. His style is to distort what he sees. His style consists in traveling and losing countries and losing one or two pairs of eyeglasses in them, losing all of them, losing eyeglasses and losing countries and rainy
days, losing everything: having nothing and being Mexican and at the same time always being a foreigner.
Translated by George Henson
MEMORY
EVERYTHING IS IN ALL THINGS
YES, I TOO HAVE HAD MY VISION
It was enough just to leave the train station and catch a glimpse from the vaporetto of the façades along the Grand Canal as they came into view to experience the feeling of being one step away from my goal, of having traveled years to cross the threshold, unable to decipher what that goal was and what threshold had to be crossed. Would I die in Venice? Would something arise that could in an instant change my destiny? Would I, perchance, be reborn in Venice?
I was arriving from Trieste; I had not searched for Joyce’s house or for traces of Svevo, nor had I done or seen anything that was worthwhile. I had arrived in the city the evening before, and as I attempted to find lodging in a hotel, an employee detected some anomaly or other in my visa, an error in the expiration date, I believe, which rendered my stay in the country illegal. I was allowed, reluctantly, to spend the night in the hotel lobby. Early that morning I caught the return train; when it stopped in Venice I decided to get off. It must have been seven in the morning when I first set foot on Venetian soil. I would spend the rest of the day there and continue on to Rome on the night express. It is written that misfortunes never come singly: after checking my bag at left-luggage I discovered I had lost my glasses; I searched my pockets and ran to the platform, hoping to find them on the ground, but the sea of travelers and porters bustling about forced me to abandon my search. Most likely, I thought, I had left them at the hotel in Trieste or on the train car I had left in such a rush.
All of this must have taken place in mid-October of 1961. I suddenly found myself in the Piazzetta, eager to begin my tour. My near-sightedness in no way dulled the wonder. I arrived at the Piazza San Marco and drank my first coffee at the Caffè Florian, that place of legend profiled by every writer and artist who ever visited Venice. Next door to the Florian, I bought a guidebook. Seeing up-close—reading, for example—presented little problem. After the coffee, guidebook in hand, I began to walk. The details eluded me, the contours faded; immense multicolored spots, luxurious glows, and perfect patinas appeared all around me. I saw the sparkle of timeworn gold where most certainly there was flaking on a wall. Everything was submerged in mist, like in the mysterious Views of Venice painted by Turner. I walked among shadows. I could and could not see, I caught fragments of a shifting reality; the feeling of being trapped between light and dark grew increasingly more pronounced as a fine, trembling drizzle gradually created the chiaroscuro in which I was moving.
As the mist concealed my view of palaces, piazzas, and bridges, my happiness grew. I walked so long that even now I have the impression that the day encompassed a multitude of days. As I walked, ecstatic, I repeated over and over a phrase from Berenson: “Color is the greatest gift the Venetians have given us,” words I remembered having read at the beginning of The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. I return to the book today to verify the quote and discover that not only had I caused it to lose its nuance but I had also deformed and contracted it, as no doubt happened with everything I discovered in Venice during that first encounter. Berenson writes: “Their mastery over colour is the first thing that attracts most people to the painters of Venice. Their colouring not only gives direct pleasure to the eye, but acts like music upon the moods, stimulating thought and memory in much the same way as a work by a great composer.” By shortening the quote I was attempting to approximate its meaning. Yes, color—that predominant gray I perceived, with backgrounds of ochre, sienna reds, bottle greens, and constant golds—not only became a source of pleasure for my weary eyes, it also stimulated my mind, my imagination, and my memory in an extraordinary way.
As I entered San Marco, the vastness of the space overwhelmed me. For a while I followed a group to whom a tour guide was explaining in laggard and pedantic French certain characteristics of Byzantine art. In that magnificent space I experienced the day’s only moment of doubt. It was difficult for me to make up my mind whether its grandeur was an obvious sign of the splendor of Byzantium, or a first step toward the aesthetic of Cecile B. DeMille, that titan of Hollywood. During subsequent, more relaxing visits, I concluded, with Solomonic wisdom, that both poetics are interwoven in that glorious basilica in remarkable harmony. I then moved on to a room located in an adjacent palace, where I saw an exhibition of Bosch. It was trial by fire! I had to look at the paintings from a considerable distance, which for me meant stumbling into total darkness. Had my knowledge of modern art been less rudimentary, I would have been able to compare some of those paintings with Malevich’s famous Black Square or with one of the enormous canvases in black by Rothko, of whose existence of course I was unaware.
I then set off for the Galleria. I toured its rooms overflowing with wonders: Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio: the immense legacy of form and color that Venice has bequeathed to the world. I cannot remember if I followed a group, as I did in San Marco, or whether I relied on my guidebook, pausing before some of the paintings. Afterward, I become lost. All I know is that I walked aimlessly for several hours, wandered down countless streets, crossed the great Rialto Bridge several times, and other less majestic ones, even some in ruins that crossed the small canals in less affluent neighborhoods. I boarded the vaporetto on several occasions and continued moving; I drank another coffee at the Florian and ate gloriously in a trattoria I happened upon by accident. As I walked, I became lost from time to time in my tiny guidebook. I tried to find Palladio’s buildings, those spaces that Hofmannsthal considered more worthy of being inhabited by gods than by men; I did not know then that outside of two or three churches the rest of his work is located on dry land, in Vicenza specifically. I thought I had found the Palazzo Mocenigo where Byron lived two years of scandalous orgies and prolific creation; the Palazzo Vendramin where Wagner lodged, and that other one where Henry James took an apartment in order to write The Aspern Papers. I began to imagine which one belonged to Juliana Bordereau, the centenarian protagonist who guards the much coveted papers, and the house where Robert Browning died, and the one where Alma Mahler attended to her daughter’s deathbed, and the one where Schnitzler’s daughter committed suicide just days after marrying. The very name of the city links the annals of love with moments of death. It is no wonder that one of the great titles of literature is Death in Venice. I saw towers, battlements, and balconies. I saw pointed arches and columns, bronze horses and marble lions. I heard Italian and German and French spoken all around me, as well as the Venetian dialect, peppered with words from Old Castilian, which once upon a time my ancestors must have spoken in those narrow streets. I paused in front of the Teatro La Fenice, whose splendid interior I had just seen in a movie by Visconti. In the vestibule, a large poster by Picasso announced a recent performance by the Berliner Ensemble: Mutter Courage.
That night, as I boarded my train, I felt as though I knew Venice like the back of my hand. What a poor naïve devil! Fatigue was getting the best of me; all of the sudden I began to feel the incredible effort I had exerted that day: my eyes, my temples, the back of my neck, my joints all hurt. I struggled to open my suitcase to take out my pajamas. The first thing I pulled out was a jacket; I felt my glasses in one of the pockets. The miracle had been completed: I had crossed the threshold, the steel blue egg of Leda was beginning to hatch, and opposites were uniting at the bottom of tombs. Where was all this esoteric logorrhea coming from? I did not finish putting on my pajamas. I remembered a line from the end of To the Lighthouse: “Yes, I have had my vision,” and I fell asleep. I repeated it again in the morning as I woke up, when the train was about to arrive in Rome.
PAST AND PRESENT
The year was 1965. I had been living in Warsaw for two years. One day the postman handed me a letter from Vence, a village in the South of France. It was signed by Witold Gombrowicz. Could it be a j
oke? I could scarcely believe it was real. I showed it to some Polish friends, and they were stunned. A young Mexican who was living in Warsaw had just received a letter from Gombrowicz! It couldn’t be! It was impossible! I nodded, ecstatic. “Like everything in Gombrowicz’s life,” I told myself.
He explained in the letter that someone had given him the Spanish translation of The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski, which I had done, and that he found it satisfactory. So he invited me to collaborate with him on the translation of his Argentine Diary, which the publishing house Sudamericana was to publish in Buenos Aires. It was the beginning of a significant improvement in my living conditions. Suddenly, I began to receive offers from various places. The sources of my income were Joaquín Mortiz at Ediciones Era and the Universidad Veracruzana Press in Mexico; Seix Barral and Planeta in Barcelona; and Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. Until then, I had only managed to place a few translations here and there. From that moment on, in just three or four hours a day, I managed to earn a regular income that in Poland in those days was a tidy little sum. In addition to Polish literature, I was receiving offers to translate Italian and English authors. For the next six or seven years I worked primarily as a translator; the profession I had begun in Warsaw allowed me to live full-time in Barcelona and part-time in England.
As I recall that time, I do not think that “I was living another life,” as people usually say, but rather that the person I’m talking about was not entirely me; instead, that person was a young Mexican who shared my name and some of my habits and idiosyncrasies.
One of the obvious bonds I share with that young man living in Warsaw is his inordinate love for reading. The freedom he enjoyed then is scarcely visible in his writings, but perhaps it was placed into a reservoir for later use, when, paradoxically, his spirit of freedom had withered. Recalling his irresponsibility, his cheek, his taste for adventure, produces in the writer of these lines a kind of vertigo.