by Sergio Pitol
We walk to the taquería next door to the Insurgentes movie house. We reflect with increasing pleasure on certain scenes from the movie and the frenzied intolerance of the priggish cinephiles. It’s been a day blessed by laughter. I feel in optimum condition to go home and make some progress for a couple of hours on the gruesome and wanton story of Lewis’s monk.
Suddenly a newsboy comes in with the latest edition of the paper. The headline takes up half the page. Rubén Jaramillo has been executed. We buy the paper. They talk about Jaramillo in the vilest of terms, as if he were a dangerous beast that has finally been hunted down. They’ve also killed his four children and his pregnant wife Epifanía. The tone is celebratory: another victory against the Bolshevist threat. Carlos gives me a brief summary of Jaramillo’s life: he was a Methodist pastor who had fallen out with the Morelos government because of a series of abuses that took place in the countryside. He lived in a village near Cuernavaca, where the price of land has increased enormously. Land speculation had set its sights on them. Jaramillo became a natural leader of the region; he stopped the tenant farmers from being evicted. Holding the paper in my hands is degrading; it expels a foul odor. “Dead dogs don’t bite!” it seems to shout. As we leave the restaurant, Carlos takes a taxi to return to Portales, and I walk few blocks home. My brief walk is enveloped in feelings of unreality, anger, and horror. Everything I’ve seen the last few days becomes a façade, which a harsh Mexico has taken it upon itself to smash to bits.
NOW
Not a single intellectual celebrated that crime, nor attempted to mitigate publicly the government’s responsibility. The journalists at the service of the State made sure to do that. They seemed to become intoxicated with fame as they carried out the task; they knew the greater his infamy the higher their reward from the public treasury would be. Writers had yet to lend themselves to that task. That would come later; during the Salinas presidency it would become a succulently “lucrative” profession. Fernando Benítez devoted a supplement in La Cultura en México, which he edited at the time, to Jaramillo’s murder. He visited the region of Morelos himself, with Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea, where the events had occurred. The accounts they wrote were splendid and brave.
My desire to stay in Mexico disappeared that night. Soon after, I left the country. Carlos stayed and persisted in his projects, thanks to which he managed to accomplish a large part of the program he confided to me in 1962 at the María Bárbara. Since then, he’s written brilliant books, needless to say; they are a testament to chaos, its rituals, its slime, its greatness, infamy, horrors, excesses, and forms of liberation. They are also an account of a Rocambolesque and ludic world, delirious and macabre. They are our esperpento. Culture and society are his two great domains. Intelligence, humor, and fury have been his greatest advisors. I’m convinced that the current catalyst to create, in spite of everything, a civil society, is due to his efforts.
In his own way, Carlos Monsiváis is a constantly expanding polygraph, a one-man writers’ union, a legion of heteronyms that out of eccentricity sign the same name. If you have a question about a biblical text, all you have to do is call him—he’ll answer it immediately; the same if you need a bit of information about a movie filmed in 1924, 1935, or whatever year you like; you want to know the name of the regent of the city of Mexico or of the governor of Sonora in 1954; or the circumstances under which Diego Rivera painted a mural in San Francisco in 1931, which José Clemente Orozco dubbed “Assitorium”; or the possible transformation of Tamayo’s work during his brief Parisian period, or the fidelity of a line of poetry that may be dancing in your head by Quevedo, Góngora, Sor Juana, Darío, López Velarde, Gorostiza, Pellicer, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Paz, Villaurrutia, Novo, Sabines, of any great poet of our language, and the answer will appear immediately: not just the verse but the stanza in which it is located. He is Mr. Memory. He is also an incomparable historian of mentalities: an intensely receptive and sharp essayist—if you don’t believe me, just read the pages he has written on Onetti, Novo, Beckford, Hammett; a remarkable movie critic; a student of Mexican painting who has produced excellent pages on Diego, Tamayo, Gerzso, María Izquierdo, and Toledo; and a lucid political essayist. He is the chronicler of all our misfortunes and our marvels, more of the former, considering that the Mexico in which we’re living has been fertile in misfortunes and, in turn, the marvels appear exceptional as miracles often do; he is the documentarian of the extremely fertile gamut of our national imbecility. His weekly columns capture the statements of the great minds of our minuscule universe; in them speak financiers, bishops, senators, deputies, and governors, the President of the Republic, the “communicators,” the cultured doyens. The result is devastating. Next to him, the discoveries of Bouvard and Pécuchet would look like the apothegms of Plato or Aristotle. To these attributes, others can be added: bibliophile; collector of a thousand heterogeneous things; felinophile, Sinologist—Carlos Monsiváis is all this and more. And, in addition, as readers may have already surmised: he is my closest friend.
Xalapa, January 1996
THE WOUND OF TIME
“On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series.”2 As the reader may have already noticed, this is the beginning of “The Aleph,” that great miracle by which Jorge Luis Borges enriched our lives.
From a certain age, every change one discovers in the environment takes on an offensive character, an agonizing personal mutilation. As if with that change, someone were giving us a macabre wink, and the new advertising for American cigarettes, just like Beatriz Viterbo’s death, were turning into an unexpected memento mori, an announcement of our future and inevitable death.
Thirty-five years ago, in Rome, I frequented a small bookstore in the Via del Babuino. It was run by a couple whose age was hard to discern, except that they were more young than old. I enjoyed chatting with them and hearing their recommendations. They were book people through and through. Their shelves reflected a confident and cultivated taste. Later on, each time I passed through Rome I would venture at least once to their store. It was impossible not to as it was on the way to the Piazza del Popolo. I watched them age without ever losing the conviction of their intuition and good literary judgment. The classics fit perfectly there with the new currents of thought and modern narrative forms. They had no patience for light literature, self-help books, or superficial theosophy. These genres fell outside their circle of interests; I imagine it would have disgusted them to welcome into their store readers who were addicted to those kinds of books.
So I saw them from time to time. On one occasion, I found only the woman behind the counter. Her husband, she told me, had died a few months before, from a blood clot, I think. Years later, on a different visit, I saw her sitting in a chair, with the look of someone who was completely detached from reality: she neither moved nor spoke; she didn’t seem interested in anything; her stare was fixed and blank. A slightly younger woman attended to the customers; I think I heard her say she was a cousin. I told her about the relationship that had bound me to the store since I was a young man: my first Ariosto, my first novels by Pavese. She told me that her cousin had succumbed to a deep depression; no treatment had been able to bring her out of it. She was afraid of leaving her in the apartment alone, something might happen to her, she might need help. So every morning she dressed her and took her to the bookstore, and that brought her back to life. “Look how good she feels; she’s spent her entire life here; being here cheers her up, of course it cheers her up.” If the vegetative state I witnessed could be considered a sign of revival, she must have felt awful at home, I thought.
In the spring
of 1966, I spent a few days in Italy. When I passed the bookstore it was closed; what’s more, it was nonexistent. The windows on either side of the door that night and day had displayed the latest titles had disappeared. The sign with the bookstore’s name had disappeared. I felt the wound of time, its malignancy, with terrible intensity. That disappearance was a way of punishing the immense happiness of the young man who one day appeared there, rummaged through the bookshelves, and left with copies of Orlando Furioso, Il campagno, and Tra donne sole under his arm.
In every city where I lived I’ve experienced similar circumstances. Running into such changes diminishes not only the pleasure of traveling but also the concrete awareness of the past. Sometimes I have to go out of my way in order to avoid walking by a place where one of these incidents has happened…To not see, for example, in a city in central Italy that where there was once a theater there is now a discotheque whose flashing neon lights take the place of those that more discreetly announced Paolo Stampa and Rina Morelli in a play by Goldoni, or that in place of a middling café where I used to sit and write in Rome there now stands a tacky souvenir store for garden-variety tourists.
Still in Rome, for many years now I’ve stopped walking down that narrow street, which also leads to the Piazza del Popolo, whose eccentricity lies in one side being called Via della Penna and the other Via dell’Oca. It’s the only street that I know like that. On one side of the street lived Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, and on the other there were two trattorias essential on my life’s map: Mondino’s and, a few steps away, Pietro’s. Mondino had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; afterward, for the rest of his life, he was a diehard anti-fascist. He ran his trattoria with his wife and son. Together they cooked and served. Customers ate at long tables around the stove. The clientele was made up of students, young intellectuals, theater students, poor artists, and foreign scholars. They were divided between communists and existentialists. They all had a single common hero: Sartre, who at the time was very close to the Italian Communist Party. His Criticism of Dialectical Reason was the most oft-quoted book among the patrons. Philosophy and, above all, Marxism were constant topics of discussion. At times there were discussions that threatened to erupt into war. Someone would then tell a joke, and laughs would win the day. It smelled like sweat, smoke, onion, and olive oil. When I had no money, I ate for free because it gave Mondino great pleasure to talk about Machado in Spanish and for me to listen to him recite Machado’s poetry, which he knew by heart. At night I would eat at the neighboring trattoria, Pietro’s, a Calabrese who detested bohemian culture, the young crowd, extremist ideas, and, therefore, Mondino, I suppose. There I would meet María and Araceli Zambrano, other literati, important journalists and filmmakers, but seldom famous people, because the establishment was rather modest. The central figure was María, who had in fact transformed the trattoria into a salon. Prominent Hispanists and intellectuals, as well as visitors from Spain and Latin America who were passing through Rome, would sit around her. Whenever a group of young Spaniards came in, María would light up. She’d talk to them about her Republican youth, about her teacher Ortega y Gasset, about the writers of her generation, the Civil War, defeat, and then exile. She became a tragic figure: Hecuba, Cassandra, and, of course, Antigone. Swathed in the smoke of her cigarette, looking up, the words would pour out, as if a higher spirit inhabited her body, had possessed her, and was using her mouth to speak. She did not raise her voice. She spoke as if in a trance, inhaled her cigarette, and paused to exhale the smoke. Just then, before beginning the next sentence, the atmosphere became charged with an almost unbearable intensity; the young Spaniards looked as if a sacred current were running through them, and me along with them, as well as the entire restaurant, whether the dinner guests understood Spanish or not. She did not like to end on a note of pathos. Once attained, she would transition effortlessly to recounting anecdotes about Cernuda, Lezama Lima, or Prados, with whom she maintained intimate correspondence. I imagine that when the young people returned to Spain, what they remembered most of Rome was the moment they had seen and heard María Zambrano. At times, I could not withstand so much intensity, and I would leave there with a fever and spend several days ill in the boarding house where I lived. María and Araceli have died, as have Mondino and Pietro. Their trattorias today have other names and another look. Above all, the atmosphere of elation and generosity, of frenzy, and of anguish and hope that characterized Rome prima del miracolo economico has disappeared. Revisiting the past means, among other heartaches, contemplating a world that is, and at the same time has ceased to be, the same.
Take Mexico, for example. Think about the changes that have occurred in the last half-century—the devastation of the capital, the degradation of the atmosphere, the moral pollution—and you will have a vision that borders on catastrophe. A dystopia staged by an expressionist director. When I entered university, the city was inhabited by four and a half million people; today that number seems to top more than twenty, and I say “seems” because no one can provide an exact figure. Any common memory, every possible collective imagination, tends to be smashed to bits in these circumstances; the social link that replaces their functions is crass TV, the creator of timid mythologies.
I would like to move beyond, to the extent possible, apocalyptic visions; and pause instead on areas of imprecise determination, on small details: writing, reading, dreams, anything that eschews the grandiose, the plaintive, an apostolic zeal, and didactic pontificating.
I spent several years outside the country. Traveling to Europe meant going to Veracruz, boarding a ship, and crossing the ocean. If someone wanted to take a more luxurious trip, faster and with fewer stops, he had to go to New York, and sail from there on one of the spectacular floating cities of the time: the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, the Leonardo da Vinci, for example. When in 1988 I decided to return to Mexico for good, passenger ships had ceased to exist several years before and were reduced to serving as cruise ships in the summer.
It is hardly surprising that during that long period of absence my memory would occasionally relive unusual episodes that were both fond and forgotten. A letter from Mexico could momentarily recover images I thought lost: a dusty, yellowed, and sometimes implausible hic et nunc managed to emerge from among the deceased, radiant and adorned with every possible prestige. Even an encounter with someone who had traveled through Mexico could cause my immediate surroundings to disappear and transport me back to the infernos or paradises of the past. Every instant recovered from oblivion turned suddenly into a concentration of the universe. Time and space knew extraordinary permutations. As if by alchemy the Café Viena on the Paseo de la Reforma would appear in my memory: its atmosphere, its furniture, and the indisputable aroma of Central European pastries. It was only much later, when I had the opportunity to frequent similar establishments on my march through Europe’s imperial cities—Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Salzburg, Marienbad, Karlsbad—that I realized that Café Viena was a tiny outpost of Habsburg culture. My memory returns me to a long table in the back of the café, beneath an immense rectangular mirror. Don Manuel Pedroso holds court, surrounded by a flock of lads who were probably between eighteen and twenty years old. A genuine interest in what they are hearing and an intense zest for life lessens their slight tendency toward snobbishness. They listen captivated as their mentor talks about Góngora, Balzac, Hobbes, and Dostoyevsky; about his time as a teacher in Seville and Madrid; about episodes and figures from the Spanish Republic; about theories of love in Stendhal and Proust; about studying philosophy and law in Germany; the emergence and height of expressionism, the Bauhaus, Rilke, and the Duino Elegies, of which he’s committed long fragments to memory; about the Italy of Burckhardt, Goethe, Berenson; about the charms of Slavic, French, Andalusian, and Mexican women. He invites his friends to converse with us; one day he brings Américo Castro, who’s passing through Mexico, and talks to us about Cervantes and Tirso de Molina,
and declares that he disagrees entirely with the thesis he had espoused on Tirso in his youthful prologue to the comedies published in Espasa’s Clásicos Castellanos, that his ideas about Spain’s Golden Age had changed radically, and not just the Golden Age but also the whole of Spain’s cultural formation. He was the most important visitor our tertulia ever had and, much to the annoyance of Pedroso, we listened to him rather with sarcasm and inattention because of the ridicule to which Borges had subjected him in Other Inquisitions. At Professor Pedroso’s tertulia, the logos and its rigors coexist in total harmony with the trivial; Alicia Osorio, Lupina Mendoza, Ivonne Loyola, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Luis Prieto, and yours truly listen to the maestro intently, we celebrate his wit, we agree, question, dare to raise objections, which the maestro himself encourages. Finally, we say our goodbyes, aware that life is full of wonder, among other reasons, because we know that we will meet again next Saturday in the same café where, unbeknownst to us, our destiny is taking shape.
Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. Mine relives the enthusiasm I felt as I left Bellas Artes after hearing Arrau, Rubenstein, Callas, and the Teatro Tívoli—no less venerated—where the audience’s pleasure became frenzied before the gyrations of the famous “exotic” dancers of the time—Su Mu-Key, Tongolele, Kalantán; or the Lírico after applauding the legendary Josephine Baker; or the endless walks through the city’s many different neighborhoods where I talked nonstop with Luis Prieto, Lucy Bonilla, Gustavo Londroño, Carlos Monsiváis, Luz del Amo, Ricardo Regazzoni about books, movies, politics, or private matters; we argued, fought, and always reconciled as we made fun of the false (and even genuine) glories of this world…Everything was real, everything was true and, unfortunately, unrepeatable.