by Sergio Pitol
11 SEPTEMBER
A month full of surprises and goings-on. I receive late payments from everywhere. I’m living in my new apartment, very much like a ship’s bow. Félix and Virginia came by to pick me up for dinner at the home of Beatriz and Óscar Tusquets. They’re about to start a new publishing house. I was delighted to meet them and have the opportunity to talk to them. They invited me to collaborate in their new endeavor. After a long conversation, we discussed and discarded various projects; in the end we agreed to create a new collection: The Heterodox, for writers and texts alike. They gave me their address, and as a first step in the collaboration they commissioned a translation of a selection of letters by Malcolm Lowry. That’s good news. First, I have to translate The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, which Planeta commissioned a few days ago. It will appear in the collection Great Authors of Our Century. I can hardly believe that I’m living in this beautiful apartment, in such a pleasant neighborhood, sleeping on clean sheets, meeting such stimulating people, receiving so many offers of work. I close my eyes, see the dirty hippies, the ignoble streets, my squalid room, and the only thing that occurs to me is to quote a sentence from Galdós that María Zambrano used to repeat frequently: “The clouds moved and everything became a caricature.” I need to stick by my decisions, not to return to Mexico right now, forget England for the moment, and stay longer in Barcelona, and devote myself fully to publishing and to literature.
14 SEPTEMBER
Carmen Balcells held a boisterous reception in a luxury hotel for Max Aub, who, from what I’m told, has returned to Spain for the first time since his exile. The gauche divine showed up in force. I felt happy. Max introduced me to Carlos Barral, Castellet, Gil de Biedma, to everyone. Later a discussion with Azúa at Los Caracoles ended very bitterly. Federico Campbell arrived today from Rome, and we had a long, delightful conversation about mutual friends in Mexico and Italy. I authored five articles for Seix Barral. I became a member of the Council of Reading a few days ago. My novel, unfortunately, has been interrupted. A piece of news left me dumbfounded. My brother Ángel called from Mexico to tell me that Francisco Zendejas had published news of my death in Excélsior, to the obvious consternation of my family. Suddenly I’m frightened by the possibility that it might be an omen, so to cheer myself up I tell myself, and to a certain extent it works, that the person who died was a shadow that I barely recognize today, and who was a prisoner the entire summer in the Escudillers. After Ángel’s call I was so nervous that I went up to Myriam Acevedo’s apartment to have a cup of coffee. I mentioned, among other incidents from my past life, the encounter with the man in the bar who said he had met me in Switzerland. Something he said to me had a profound effect on her, something like, “Tell your company that I need an Argentine passport and for them to deliver twenty thousand dollars to me.” She insisted on knowing what company he was referring to. I told her twenty thousand times that I didn’t know, that that was what had frightened me, because it all had been a case of mistaken identity. Then out of the blue she asked me: “Do you know a spy? Are you sure that one of your friends isn’t a spy?” “I suppose so,” I told her. “Possibly in Warsaw or in Belgrade, or right here, people come up to me to try and find out what I think about the regime. But you can’t know if they are spies,” I said. “Yes, but one can find out. Examine your friends,” she added. And so on for a long while; I went down to my apartment with a greater sense of unease than when I left. Surely she and her husband must feel hounded by informants who want to know what they are doing in Spain, if they plan to return to their country, etcetera, and that must have her very neurotic. “Don’t talk about anything to anyone; you don’t know what kind of world you’re moving in,” was the last thing she said to me.
FRIDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER
I took a blood test just in case. “Everything’s perfect,” the doctor said, smiling. Amazing!
SATURDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER
I was finally able to finish the prologue to Nostromo. I situated it primarily in the political realm, which I believe to be the novel’s central theme. It’s a work of great unevenness. Conrad talks too much about Nostromo’s remarkable qualities, about his invincible influence on individuals and the masses; however, once he introduces him, he inflicts on him a monotonous tone, a pedantry that serves only as a prop. He appears pretentious and insipid, limited, capable of nothing but clichés. The love scenes, as is almost always the case in Conrad, seem to take place between cardboard figures. The “passionate” dialogues between Nostromo and Viola, in spite of the air of panpipes and tambourines that the author imprints on them, and perhaps because of that very thing, are less than flat. I dined last night with Beatriz and a group of her friends, writers, translators, theater people, all young, at Can Masana, and when she introduced me she commented to someone that I had lived in Peking. Lived in China? For most of them it’s next to impossible to obtain a passport to cross the French border. I mentioned in passing my disappointment; the climate I endured there for six years, the steps toward the Cultural Revolution, the fanaticism, the absolute intolerance. I said how after eight days traveling by train, upon arriving to Moscow, I felt as if I were in the middle of Babylon. To some of them it seemed like an exaggeration. When I told them that I had just lived for three months in Escudillers they were almost more surprised than by my stay in Peking; the atmosphere immediately became more relaxed. Fortunately, they must have thought they were not talking to an ideologue but with a mad man. Once again, I felt like a survivor. Boudou Saved from Drowning, I could have shouted; but I didn’t, so as not to seem pedantic.
The truth is I wouldn’t trade Barcelona for any city in the world.
3Known as Escudellers in Catalan, Franco mandated the change of all Catalan street names during his dictatorship, hence Pitol would have known the street as Escudillers in 1968. Today, the street is once again known by its original Catalan name, Carrer dels Escudellers. —Trans.
A VINDICATION OF HYPNOSIS
Suddenly, during a pause in his monologue, Federico Pérez cautioned me not to become too lost in circumlocution. I should lay everything on the line, he said. I replied that I had already done that the very day I made the appointment by phone. I was trusting that his treatment by hypnosis, about which I had heard great things, would help me give up smoking. If I had gone into too many details at the beginning of my explanation, it was to clarify what my relationship with tobacco was and had been. I do not remember his exact words, but he did allude to the evasiveness and circumlocutions in my speech. He added that he thought it was a manifestation of insecurity, a defense mechanism behind which I was hiding. I do not know if the doctor’s intervention, his interruption and description of the structure of the story, which unbeknownst to me had become unnecessarily and painfully labyrinthine, was part of the treatment, an attempt to stimulate a particular reaction, the beginning of subjugation. I defended myself with literary arguments. I took refuge in the fact that my writing was fundamentally built on those devices. That is its visible expression. I feel incapable of describing any action, no matter how simple, in a direct way. I said that other writers were able to do that, which did not mean I was less competent than they. In my case, plain and naked exposition, without flourishes, without detours, without echoes or shadows, fatally diminishes the efficiency of the story, converts it into a mere anecdote; a vulgarity, when all is said and done. From the very beginning, what I had always done was scatter a series of points onto the blank page as if they had fallen there by chance, with no visible relationship between them; until one suddenly began to spread out, expand, sprout tentacles in search of others, and then the others would follow its example: the points would become lines running across the page to find their sisters, either to subordinate or serve them, until that initial group of solitary points morphed into an increasingly complex and intricate character, with gaps, creases, ironies, blurrings, and glaring darkness. That was my writing or, at least, the ideal of my writing. I could have added, but I rest
rained myself, that my exposition could be the reflection of a specific way of conceiving literature, or rather, that the apparent loss of direction in language had created in me a second nature from which I could not escape. To the extent that I did not know how to talk about anything, not even the weather, without detours, and that, in itself, had nothing to do with personal insecurity, as it is usually understood, but rather with a lack of confidence, abstract, of course, in the possibility of communication and persuasion in the ontological loneliness of being. The narrator who, as a rule, appears in my novels rehearses several starting points in the pursuit of a truth, a revelation, and in the effort will lose his way a thousand times, stumble constantly, and will maintain the pace with great difficulty between suffering hallucinations and sleepwalking, only in the end to declare himself defeated. He will come to know that absolutes do not exist, that there is no truth that is not conjectural, relative, and, therefore, vulnerable. But searching for it, no matter how ephemeral, partial, and inconstant it may be, will always be his objective. The narrator might be Sisyphus and Icarus at the same time. His only certainty is that along the way he might have touched a few strands in a marvelous and deplorable tapestry, obscured sometimes by ominous stains or by a sudden and immediate iridescence that, upon seeing it, gives meaning to his efforts.
Of course, apart from demonstrating to Federico, whom I expected to miraculously free me from nicotine, an oral expression polluted by some stylistic processes, I refrained from adding everything else. It seemed like an abuse to ask a doctor to return my lost health to me and to blurt out to him on an empty stomach a speech on the radical solitude of man and the impossibility of attaining by rational means the truth or of arriving at it by approximations and estimates. The pretentious enunciation of those clichés was considerably watered down. Federico allowed me speak a bit more about the history of my tobacco use and its tribulations. Then he explained in a cursory way what his method consisted of and, just like that, I was hypnotized. At that moment, the most profound experience I’ve known in my adult life began. I’ve tried to decipher it on various occasions and after a few lines, I give up. The only thing I can do, and I won’t try to do any more, is transcribe the process.
We were discussing how Federico Pérez began to hypnotize me. He gave me the instructions necessary to cross the threshold of my inner self; at a given moment he discovered that I was in a trance and could therefore begin the treatment. I should add that I submit to any curative experience with the credulity of a child. I become the tamest lamb that anyone ever imagined. All personal resistance disappears. Allopathic or homeopathic doctors, magnetists, shamans, acupuncturists, curanderos, it doesn’t matter: I surrender my faith immediately and entirely to them. Any hint of skepticism disappears. The afternoon of 14 October 1991, the same thing happened, except magnified. I knew through Juan Villoro, his brother-in-law, that Federico worked miracles, and that he had broken the creative paralysis produced by writer’s block, as if the void that existed between the page written several years ago and the most recent one had never existed. I was convinced that if he had achieved that, freeing me from nicotine would be child’s play for him. A woman in Prague with magnetic powers had passed her hands over my chest a few times and the desire to smoke had disappeared instantly, as if my fingers had never touched a cigarette. A few years later, on a plane, someone offered me one, I lit it almost without realizing it, and the torture began anew. Suddenly, while I listened to Federico’s words, I began to feel in my chest and on my arms the same heat that invaded me when the magnetist in Prague passed her hands a few centimeters from my body.
I went to Córdoba yesterday. I spent a good while going through family photo albums with my uncle Agustín Deméneghi and my cousin Luis. In them, I found two photographs that I brought home. One is of my mother and my sister Irma, taken shortly before their deaths; I’m almost sure that it’s the last photo of my mother. She’s leaning on a white automobile; the landscape is rustic, and she has in her arms a beautiful little girl of three or four years of age. My mother’s face is sullen, severe; she had made decisions that would change her life, and ours, my uncle told me. Her demeanor is different than in other photographs I know of her. Her seriousness contrasts with the radiant happiness of the girl who’s holding out her arms to the person taking the picture. The other photo is of my sister Irma, sitting on a tricycle, taken a few days later. The transformation is startling. She looks like another girl, whose only similarity to the other is her extremely blonde, straw-like hair; but no trace of the happiness that previously lit up her face remains. In the few days that separated one from the other something monstrous had happened: the death of my mother. That would explain the tragic withdrawal. My tiny sister, a year younger than I, was not able to survive that tragedy. A few weeks later, she would also die. Looking at those portraits fills me once again with an inextinguishable anger and pain.
Federico Pérez asks me to remember a few moments in my life I consider to have been important. And suddenly, without having to make the slightest effort, a curious mix of images begins to parade before me, as if an invisible projector were reflecting them before my eyes. They are significantly enlarged photos, where even the minutest details appear with surprising clarity. There is no chronological order, or any other sort, to their appearance; at least I’m not able to find the threads that unite them. Especially because they pass before me with dizzying speed. I appear with family members, with friends, in the middle of the crowd. The chronology seems to have gone berserk. One image may be from a few days ago, the next from fifty years ago, only to jump forward twenty years, then repeat scenes of three days in a row. I move back and forth in time without any perceptible meaning. I see myself as a child, adolescent, old man, elementary pupil, student in law school, diplomat, teacher, hard worker, shirker, happy, worried, furious, sick, riding a chestnut horse, in the cabin of a German ship, on the deck of the Leonardo da Vinci, in the theater, on the street, extremely drunk, in the middle of the snow, under the India’s sun, hospitalized in a cast from head to toe, reading a book whose title I can’t make out because my fingers are obscuring it, in Venice, in Potrero, in Istanbul, Cadaqués, Córdoba, Palermo, Moscow, Marienbad, Bogotá, and Belize, in places that I can’t even identify. I seem to see thousands of people around me, a mass of people whom I don’t know or don’t remember, people walking down the street where I walk, who eat in the same restaurant where I’m eating, on a train, mere passersby, and, of course, friends and family. In spite of the fact that I’m in a trance, it still amazes me that none of those images alludes to an important moment in my life, as Federico Pérez had asked me to do. On the contrary, it’s nothing more than a bewildering collection of banalities. They lack sound: there’s no noise or words. Their power is purely visual. They’re photographs, it must not be forgotten. Unlike dreams, or the memories we evoke or that assail us unexpectedly, the details in these portraits that hypnosis offers me are very precise. I identify jackets, sweaters, coats that I wore on such and such occasion, whether bought at Harrods or in the wool market at Santa Ana Chiautempan in the state of Tlaxcala. The details of the clothes acquire almost hyper-realistic effects. I’m fascinated. Then, all of a sudden, just as the terrifying visions of the Apocalypse must have appeared unexpectedly to Saint John, an image looms before my eyes and stops; it doesn’t allow another to replace it; in fact, it’s the last image of the session. The only difference is that it has movement. My brother Ángel and I are sitting on the floor, watching doves come and go from the sunny terrace where we are. I must have been about five years old, which would make my brother eight. We’re wearing short pants. I recognize the house and the landscape around it. We’re on the outskirts of Atoyac, a town in Veracruz, at the home of Pepe Conzzati, a young friend of the family. I recognize the place because in the years that followed I went there many times with my uncle and grandmother. But on the day that corresponds to the image, and in the days that followed, we never saw the owner of th
e house. Perhaps he left very early and returned at night after we were already asleep. We only see an old woman, the sirvienta, who comes out to the terrace where we spend the better part of the day to get us and takes us inside at mealtime. She probably also puts us to bed. We stay at the house for several days, which frees us from all funeral services. Just as in the other images, there’s no sound in this one either. My brother and I are sitting, as I said, on the terrace, facing each other, with our legs outstretched on the ground. Ángel looks like a corpse. His face is terrible: his eyes are opened wide. He gets up and goes to sit by me, and I begin to cry. I can’t hear my words or my crying; I can only see it. At that moment, I am no longer the hypnotized patient looking to give up smoking. I feel possessed by the little boy I was and who is before my eyes. Apparently I no longer need the image; I become the crying boy. I know that I’ve gone with my mother and my brother and our little sister Irma to spend a few days with my uncle. His house is in a place called Potrero. My grandmother has also arrived from Huatusco. For a few days, everything is happiness. More than anyone else they celebrate Irma, the youngest; they lift her over their heads, kiss her, and she laughs, laughs, laughs…One day there was a lunch in the house’s garden. Several people came: the Mosses, the Scullys, the Cárdenases, and I suppose the Celmas too, who were my uncle’s best friends. Some of the guests decided to go that afternoon, after lunch, to Atoyac, to swim in the river, in a place called Idiot’s Pond. My uncle, my grandmother, Ángel, and I left later in the car to meet them at the pond. As soon as my uncle stopped the car, two peasants race to tell him something that he repeated to my grandmother. They started running down a path that snaked the length of the river. Surprised by their behavior, my brother and I followed as best we could. I fell several times, my brother helped me up. We arrived after everyone else to a wide clearing, under immense trees, with leaves so intensely green they were almost black; mango trees, I think. The family friends and several ranchers from the region were moving helplessly from one side to the other, some dressed, others half-dressed, some still in bathing suits. My grandmother was crying; some women were hugging her, restraining her so she wouldn’t run to my mother’s body; they were all crying; some peasant women, standing next to the group, were wailing. My uncle was trying to remove the water from my mother’s body. Ángel and I were snatched from the ground by surprise. A very tall man began to run with us in his arms. We’re now in his house. We haven’t seen him again. A very old woman feeds us and puts us to bed at night. My father is already dead and now my mother is too. I don’t know if this is our house. The old woman tells us that we won’t see her again until we die. We spend our days on the terrace watching the doves. I want to die. I don’t know what I say, but Ángel gets mad, he shakes me by the arm and then he starts to cry like me. I feel my face bathed in tears, I shake uncontrollably; they are real convulsions. In the distance, I hear Federico Pérez’s helpful voice. I begin to come out of a deep hole. The convulsions begin to abate. My face is soaked from crying; I feel tears running down my cheeks, toward my mouth, my neck. Federico’s voice and his proximity slowly soothe me. As soon as I can speak, I repeat incoherently everything I experienced in the trance. I tell Federico about the experience, from the first innocuous images to the pain from which I am still unable to free myself. I’m entirely out of hypnosis, or so I think, but the echo of the terror continues to stun me.