The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  Not too long ago, I went through some of my books while preparing them for re-publication, a task that has never been pleasing; I was surprised to discover that a place from my childhood appeared on several occasions, a place it would never have crossed my mind to think about, a setting that entered my writing surreptitiously, which served as an unconscious frame to a mysterious event: a crime that was never completely solved. It surprised me because in real life I had only been there on two or three occasions while I was still very small. Upon recalling those excursions, upon dislodging them from the place where my memory was hiding them, they burst into my conscience as one of the most startling episodes of my childhood. The place is the Ojo de Agua where the river Atoyac is born; a few days ago I discovered that it was one of the sacred places of the Totonacas.

  I was living at the Potrero sugar mill. Some families used to organize occasional excursions to the region’s picturesque sites, among them the natural spring at Ojo de Agua. The round-trip—bathing in the river, the picnic—took an entire day. We rode in a Jeep until we arrived at the village of Paraje Nuevo, and, from there, we walked on foot along the paths that the peasants cleared for us with their machetes in the middle of the jungle. One of the high points of the trip was crossing the river on a rope bridge.

  It was like crossing a bottomless abyss; it’s possible my childlike eyes magnified it disproportionately, as tends to happen. The bridge lacked the usual board planks common to hanging bridges. Instead there were just three or four ropes braided together. My feet slid slowly along the bottom rope as my hands held the upper one. There were probably twenty or twenty-five of us, including the children. There were some young American couples; the American women were wearing pants and seemed to possess the same sporting ability as their husbands. The Mexican women would not have dared wear pants even if they were threatened with being thrown from the cliff. I remember that they were carried across, tied to the men’s arms, some shouted, terrified, while others laughed hysterically. We children rode astride the adults’ shoulders, or tied to their backs. The operation took a good amount of time, because in addition to our crossing, large straw baskets containing food, drinks, plates, silverware, and other paraphernalia had to be transported across. We then crossed another patch of jungle until we arrived at a spot, the other climatic moment, from where we were able to contemplate paradise: the spring, located beneath a curtain of rocks that my memory reproduces like a great Wagnerian scene. As we neared the place we began to perceive certain mysterious movements in the water and in the brush along the bank. They slowly began to take shape and definition; they were otters, the marvelous water dogs that had inhabited the region from the beginning of creation. If they had stayed there, nothing would have happened to them; there was a tacit agreement not to disturb them. The peasants in the region watched over their pups and occasionally, when the time was right, sacrificed a few males to sell their pelts.

  Not long ago I decided to return to that sanctuary, to the magic garden from my childhood. It’s possible to travel to Paraje Nuevo today by car and continue in the same vehicle along dirt roads all the way to the river’s edge. There are scarcely any vestiges of the original jungle left. It has been replaced by sugar cane. There are no longer any difficult passes. The atmosphere of mystery has disappeared. At a certain moment, I decided not to continue; I turned around and retraced my steps. I didn’t dare go as far as the spring. Everything had deteriorated in an unbearable way. The animal life had disappeared, just as the vines from my childhood and the giant ferns, the huge climbing plants with enormous leaves, which back then surrounded the pool and climbed up the mountain, had disappeared. The natural world that existed until a few decades ago and took centuries to be created is now just a memory, just like the Babuino bookstore, the Mondino and Pietro trattorias, the Café Viena, the Tívoli, the Lírico, and so many other things.

  Xalapa, May 1994

  2Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni

  DREAMS, NOTHING MORE

  Happy dreams tend to be scarce and difficult to remember. We awake from them with a smile on our lips; for an instant, we relish the slightest fragment our memory retains, and our smile quite possibly grows into a full laugh. Yet as soon as we get out of bed that happy dream disappears forever. At no time during the day does it occur to us to repeat or build on the happiness that we experienced.

  On the contrary, the others, the distressing dreams—the terrifying ones, the monstrous nightmares—are capable of not leaving us alone, even for several days. They demand that we undertake an anxious search that is seldom crowned by complete success. We cling to any loose thread in an attempt to piece together the plot, and, little by little, dark, tangled fragments begin to appear, vague parodies of scenes, scraps we take advantage of to reconstruct the oppressive nighttime experience. We’re fully aware that we’re fabricating a narrative act that corresponds only in part to the ominous atmosphere that upset us at night. Specialists say that the function of these disturbing dreams consists of externally discharging unnecessary energy, of a poisonous kind, created, for some strange reason, by our own organism. Dreaming implies a defense or an omen. Dying means the end of one period and the announcement of a better one. A rebirth! We have undergone an internal cleansing without having willingly participated. Later, as we search consciously through the dream’s residue, we weave it into a story to which we attribute pertinent faces and gestures to give shape to the ghosts that multiply beneath the surface. As we recognize them, but now completely awake, we destroy them, annihilate their evil powers, and we push them out of our psychic space. If this were not so, what sense then would the effort invested in recovering and reuniting the lost fragments make? Only a collective masochism, more widespread than desirable, could sustain that possibility. And I don’t think things are heading in that direction.

  I must have been twenty or twenty-one years old (I’m guessing because that was when I began to live by myself in an apartment on Calle de Londres) when an unknown figure, who seemed to encapsulate the infinite spectrum of human evil, began to appear in my dreams. His face displayed nothing but evil. At first glance, he might have looked like an ordinary man, but glancing at him a second time produced fear—being close to him, speaking to him, even more. I awoke terrified. Hours later, when I went down to the street, I recognized the sinister individual about whom I had dreamt. I was dumbfounded. I had read something in Jung about the premonitions contained in certain dreams. The Swiss author related the experience of some patients of his who had dreamt about a catastrophe and had later been the victim of a similar accident. A parapsychological premonition. I thought that the dream was trying to forewarn me of a demonic force that was surrounding my home. I had not dreamt of an imaginary being but rather a real one, whom I had seen with my own eyes a few yards from the building where I lived. That afternoon, I visited a psychologist friend of mine, and I told her about the incident. She believed that I had possibly seen someone who had, perhaps because of a single detail, transformed into the frightening person of my dream. That is, by some mechanism of identification, I had erased the original features of the man I dreamt about and had attributed to him those of the individual who passed by me on the street. Since then I am aware that a large part of what we believe we remember are in fact inventions after the fact, and that this condition makes them indispensable for analytical work.

  One never dreams so much as when undergoing psychoanalysis. He wakes up at any hour of the night and writes down on the first piece of paper within reach what he just experienced in the shadows. It would seem that dreaming only makes sense upon relating the experience to the psychoanalyst and scoring points in his analysis. One of the patient’s greatest pleasures is subjecting himself to the exercise of interpreting what he has dreamt, sketching a first exegesis and listening to the analyst solicit another interpretation because the first one seems too obvious, or too flat, or too vague; then explaining one after another until the moment arrives when the pati
ent is no longer talking about his nightly visions but rather certain real problems he has approached by way of the dream without realizing it. And that, I imagine, can only happen when one is under the almost silent tutelage of a specialist; I doubt anyone is willing to subject himself to the same effort when he’s alone. Most commonly, the dreamer re-examines his visions alone for a few minutes and tries to make sense of them by mere formula; in reality, he doesn’t attempt to interpret the dream, he doesn’t try to find its meaning, he resigns himself to submitting to the process of putting it in order so he can recount it to the first person he traps. And then, upon recounting it to a third person, upon giving it some kind of coherence, an exercise of fictionalization, of distancing, of “defamiliarization,” is unintentionally produced, which in and of itself can be therapeutic.

  It seems to me that people abuse the word oneiric when describing phenomena that escape the usual notion of reality. It’s said that The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Haywain Triptych are marked by an oneiric register. In those paintings, as in all paintings by Bosch, there are people with more legs and arms than necessary, men and women with roots on their feet and thorny branches on their head, make-believe animals, rats ridden by riders as monstrous as they are, bodies made up of nothing but a disproportionate head that is sprouting a pair of feet, outlandish machines, gnomes hatching from bleeding eggs, men birthing flocks of crows from their anuses. Anyway, we’re all accustomed to describing those excesses as oneiric, just as we classify as oneiric “The Nose,” that brilliant short story by Gogol in which one morning a man wakes up without a nose and spends the ensuing days looking for it, then making it return to where it belongs. The nose continuously disguises itself in an effort to evade its owner, until one day it becomes a powerful field marshal, without anyone on the streets of Petersburg exhibiting the slightest surprise at its metamorphoses.

  Could someone possibly dream such fantastic and extravagant worlds as those? I can’t even imagine it. My personal experience is so limited that it cannot conceive of anyone in his right mind being able to arrive at such enviable excesses. Perhaps alkaloids or other chemical stimulants could provoke such images. In any case, I would venture to say that the starting point of the works of Bosch, as well as those of Gogol, lies in wakefulness, not in dreaming: they are the fruits of imagination and fantasy. Oneiric mechanisms are different. I have never in my dreams seen myself with a body and face different than my own. My organs are always where they should be, and during the course of the dream I never turn into a jaguar, or a vampire, or an axolotl. I don’t float in the air; on the contrary, I fly in a plane like God intended. I take in everything around me, but I’m more than a mere camera. I’m a camera, and I’m myself, lost, pursued, trapped, and judged.

  Borges recounts a dream that leaves me very disturbed because it refutes the rule I maintain. The writer dreamt that he had met a friend who seemed to be hiding his right hand; at a certain moment Borges realizes that it has turned into a bird’s claw.

  If anything characterizes my nightmares it is their infinite ability to cause anxiety. They are not as rich in motifs as Bosch’s paintings. They only differ from reality in time and space, as well as their combinatorial capacity, which in dreams exhibit a dizzying freedom. One can be in one place that turns into another and then another and so on infinitely, and talk to an interlocutor who during the conversation demonstrates the ability to mutate. A is X, and then Y, and then R, only to become A again. Nothing can ever be taken for granted or trusted.

  When I returned to Mexico at the end of 1988, for several years I always dreamt that I was in European settings, even in some that in reality I do not know, like Oxford or Copenhagen. It was impossible for me to recognize those cities but I knew I was in them, in the same way that I knew that a house was in a certain region of Italy, or Spain, or Portugal without any local element appearing to verify the attribution.

  I have noticed that in the last few years there is less action in my dreams; what gives them the character of nightmare is knowing that I am dreaming and am not able to awaken. I repeatedly try to wake up but it’s pointless, I can’t get out of the hole even though there isn’t anything unusually terrifying inside; what is frightening is not being able to avoid it. Monotony deforms reality and creates an uncertainty that is nothing but the door to terror. It is in that moment of torment when a voice I recognize awakens me and announces that the orange juice and coffee are ready. All the suffering, the fear and anguish disappear as if by magic in the face of the quotidian with which the day begins. Is that not enough to drive anyone crazy?

  From 1968 on I’ve kept a dream diary. It’s remarkably narrative in nature. It contains a main story and an underground world that nourishes it. The agonizing nature arises from the desire to escape from what I have dreamt and the impossibility to do it. Let’s take a look:

  24 APRIL 1994

  I’m about to open the door of my house when a young man walks up to me and asks if I’ll let him walk Sacho this evening. The proposition suits me because I have to write an article that I should have already finished. He comes by the house at five, the time of the evening walk. He tells me that he’ll take the dog to Los Berros Park. Sacho leaves with him willingly, which surprises me considerably. But he doesn’t return at the agreed time. The next morning, very worried, I go out to ask the neighbors if they know anything about Sacho, if they’ve seen him with a young man with such and such description, and no one knows anything about the dog or his companion. At noon, Sacho shows up at the house in terrible shape, thirsty and irritable. He’s alone, wearing a leather collar that isn’t his; something about the collar attracts my attention, but I don’t know exactly what. It has an engraving that suggests something dangerous. About that time, the murder of a local politician is made public. Rumors spread throughout the city. That night, on the evening news, I find out that a suspicious person had been walking a dog where the crime was committed. A newswoman describes the dog, which sounds exactly like Sacho. I am absolutely convinced that the criminal, or one of his accomplices, is the one who took Sacho. I can’t figure out what led me to allow a stranger to take him. My anxiety grows as the day passes. They might suspect that Sacho is involved in a conspiracy and that even I might be in league with these criminals. What’s more, Sacho is behaving very rudely; I’ve rarely seen him so unpleasant, as if he were resentful and blamed me for unpleasantness that took place the evening and night before. But, where could he have spent the night? Could he lead me there? And what would be accomplished by trying? I’m at a total loss. I tell myself that the whole thing is a dream; I struggle to leave the dream before the police come to question me, but I can’t. It’s precisely Sacho’s barking that awakens me from the never-ending dream. He’s very irritated. I’m barely able to put on his collar and make him go outside for his morning walk.

  17 AUGUST 1995

  I’ve rented an apartment in a small city on the coast, perhaps in Spain, in a region unfamiliar to me. The building is humdrum, squat, devoid of ornamentation. From time to time I run into a sullen-looking married couple on the street; both of them dressed without any sense of style, as if they were hiding behind tasteless clothes, but who, in spite of everything, carry themselves with a certain degree of dignity. Both are wearing mouse-gray raincoats that accentuate their anonymity. One day we happen to meet in the lobby as we collect our mail; later we begin to say hello, to make conversation about the weather, we even begin to take walks together. We talk about books, history, architecture, but without ever going beyond the usual banalities. We never talk about ourselves, our professions, our past, not even why we chose to live in such a lackluster building. To say “we” speak is an exaggeration; the husband is the one who does all the talking, he’s a pale man, on the cusp of old age, always smiling but with a sly, dirty smile that produces a feeling of rejection, at least in me. I never pay too much attention to what he says; nonetheless, I don’t mind going out with them; on the contrary, I prefer going
out with them to being alone. On one occasion, when the husband went upstairs to retrieve something from the apartment, something, I don’t know what, drove me to say to his wife:

  “Your husband knows so much about so many things! I never get tired of listening to him!” It was an obviously foolish comment because his wife looked at me stunned.

  “I would never have imagined,” she replied, “that you were so limited. He seems like a complete idiot to me.”

  From then on, she almost never went out with us, and the few times she did she never failed to show disgust when her husband spoke. Walking alone with him grew tiresome. I had nothing in common with anything he said, although he assumed that I shared his opinions. I began to avoid him, but he contrived ways to run into me. On several occasions I refused to go with him; he would pretend not to hear me and continue rambling beside me. The situation became insufferable. One day, I ran into his wife at the pharmacy and complained about the harassment that her husband was subjecting me to. She looked at me with contempt and told me that I deserved it, that for weeks I did nothing but egg the moron on. After that, I made the guy feel like he was insufferable, that I preferred to stay home, or take my walks alone. At first, he didn’t lose his composure, sometimes he would act like a martyr and comment somewhat wryly on my arrogance; later, he began to suggest in a veiled way that I should watch out, that he might harm me, that I shouldn’t underestimate his capabilities, that if he wanted to he could have me kicked out of the building; what’s more, out of the city, maybe even the country; his dark smile, his evil stare grew in those moments. Little by little, the dream begins to transform into a nightmare; the action grinds to a stop, his threats, whispered in an unctuous tone, become constant. I know it’s just a dream, but I can’t do anything to stop it. I seem to be condemned for the rest of my life to be unable to get away from him, to try to avoid his presence unsuccessfully, to listen to his threats, as if everything had become an endless cycle, without escape, and that was the circle of hell where I belonged.