by Sergio Pitol
Federico gives me new instructions: walk slowly until you arrive to the hotel, breathe deeply, and be careful when crossing the street.
“If when you arrive to your hotel,” he says, as we say goodbye, “you feel bad, call me. If tonight, no matter what time, you feel bad, don’t hesitate to call me at home. You can count on our help at any moment.”
I went out into the street. Still stunned, I began to walk slowly. The walk from Federico’s house to my hotel normally takes a half hour at a relaxed pace. I was sure that the walk would exceed my energy. I thought about walking three or four blocks and then taking a taxi. All I wanted to do was lie down, take a sedative, and forget about the hypnosis, its revelations, and its results. I kept walking, and with each step I felt, almost physically, that a wound my body had harbored secretly for more than fifty years was beginning to heal. As I progressed, I could feel the improvement. The only thing I was conscious of was that I was leaving an illness behind me. I began to realize that I had lived all those years just to prevent that monstrous pain from repeating itself, to block the circumstances that might provoke it. My life’s meaning had consisted of protecting myself, fleeing, wrapping myself in armor. Suddenly I noticed on the sidewalk ahead a bougainvillea that was climbing a tree and flowering in its branches. It looked like a marvelous spectacle unlike anything I had seen before. My fatigue disappeared as if by magic. When I arrived at the hotel, everything had bloomed. I went directly to the restaurant, I ate like a barbarian, everything tasted exquisite; I arrived to my room, lay down on the bed, and began to read an interview with Cioran. I jotted down in my notebook: “We’re a terrible mixture, and in each individual coexist three, four, five different individuals, so it’s normal that they don’t agree with each other”; it wasn’t relevant, but it soothed me; and with that news I fell asleep.
The next morning I awoke with an unfamiliar feeling, as if my dialogue with myself were different. Many things had become coherent and explainable: everything in my life had been nothing more than a perpetual flight. There had been fantastic experiences, yes, extraordinary, which I could never regret, but they had also been a nucleus of agony that demanded that I close them off and look for new ones.
My debt of gratitude to Doctor Federico Pérez del Castillo, who allowed me to understand this, is infinite.
Xalapa, August 1994
SIENA REVISITED
For Laura Molina Montmany
I must confess that I am deaf in my left ear, which produces in me mood changes that, at their worst, could be confused with idiocy and also dementia. If at a social gathering, especially a dinner, the guest to my left is by nature very talkative, I’m already lost. I say the wrong thing, instinctively, by chance; imprecisions and nonsense abound, until the failed interlocutor slowly moves away, tired of repeating his questions and of hearing answers that have little or nothing to do with the questions. This is the source of incredible inhibition for me, and once inhibited, tense and fearful, I’m no longer responsible for my behavior.
In the spring of 1993 I took a brief trip to Europe to celebrate my sixtieth birthday. I chose three cities that were foundational in my life: London, Rome, and Barcelona. Warsaw was missing. I wanted to be in Rome at the same time as Augusto Monterroso and Bárbara Jacobs at the presentation of the Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature, which was being presented to Monterroso. I wrote to Lia Ongno, who at that time was finishing a translation of one of my novels, to let her know that I would be in Rome the day of the award, certain that she, as translator of the honoree, would be present, and that way we could meet and find time to resolve some questions regarding the text about which she had written me. Lia, on her end, informed Antonio Melis, head of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Siena, an old friend of mine, about my upcoming trip to Italy, who, in turn, sent me a fax, inviting me to give a lecture in his department, where, I should add, the chair of Portuguese Studies is held by Antonio Tabucchi, the person who introduced Pessoa to Italy, his translator and commentator, and, most importantly, an exceptional novelist.
I visited Siena briefly at the beginning of 1962, having spent the December holidays with my mother’s family. Christmas in Bologna and New Year’s Eve in Bonizzo castle. At the end of the last century, my great-grandfather Domenico Buganza crossed the ocean with his three daughters, Preseide, Agnese, and Catarina, the youngest, who was my grandmother, to educate them in Italy. Only two returned: my grandmother and her sister Agnese. The other, the oldest, married in Italy, and has since then lived in that castle, from which she has scarcely moved during her very long life.
Two or three days before my arrival, they gave my tía Preseide calming infusions to soothe her nerves, in preparation for her great-nephew’s surprise visit from Veracruz. When I introduced myself, she stood up and threw herself into my arms with the force of a hurricane, only to make me repeat again and again the important events from the family history that had happened on the other side of the Atlantic during her sixty-year absence. Except during the war years, correspondence between her and my grandmother had never been interrupted. Still she wanted to hear firsthand everything she had read over the years. She asked me about ranches, towns, people whom I’d never heard mentioned; I answered as best I could, which is to say clumsily. Suddenly she looked at me with contempt; she must have thought that she had before her an impostor who was pretending to be, who knows to what ends, the grandson of Catarina Buganza-Buganza, her youngest sister. At times she’d grow tired and would send me to the garden or to see the collection of Etruscan pieces that belonged to her granddaughter’s husband, on display in another part of the castle, or she’d ask her son-in-law, Noradino, a mathematician and tía Argia’s husband, to take me to see the surroundings, the river banks where my aunts and grandmother had strolled so many times at the beginning of the century. The truth is that apart from the snow there was little or nothing to see except a thick, milky white mist that obscured everything. I can remember, while almost half-asleep, taking a pair of car trips, one to Ostiglia, a small city, plunged into darkness and the closest to the castle, that according to my uncle had been, during some period, I do not remember which, the outer limit of the Roman empire; the other, to a small architectural jewel—or did it just seem that it was because I was able to see churches and palaces that were not covered in fog?—Mirandola, whose most illustrious son was none other than Pico della Mirandola. I spent those days enveloped by a very intense emotion. I sensed in those settings the presence of my grandmother; my grandmother the child, my grandmother the adolescent, my grandmother on the eve of returning to Mexico. I wrote her a letter from Ostiglia relating my reunion with the family, the conversations with tía Preseide, of which she, my grandmother, was the primary topic of conversation; I comforted her, reassured her that I was on my best behavior, drinking moderately, minding what I said. I told her about the condition of the property; a section was heavily damaged, but for years they had stored the materials needed to begin the work behind the garden in large sheds: tons of old Saracen bricks, acquired primarily in Calabria and Sicily from ancient buildings now in ruins, all to be used for the restoration.
The night of January 1, after dinner, very late, I said goodbye to the family; to my elderly great-aunts and uncles forever, as they would die shortly afterward. Early the next morning, my tío Noradino took me to Ostiglia, in whose tiny railway station we said goodbye. I boarded a beautiful toy train, a relic from the early days of the railway, I imagine: two small cars with seats lined with a thick threadbare velvet but still very elegant. I don’t believe that small narrow gauge train could have ever, not even in its prime, reached a heady speed, and by early 1962, many decades of work, wars, and bad times had rendered it nearly inoperable, and, with the mountains of snow that were covering the tracks that day, reduced it to an almost total inertia at times. The trip to Bologna took longer than expected. At the station in Ostiglia, when we said goodbye, my tío Noradino gave me a beautiful black l
eather wallet, full of enormous, meticulously folded bills. “To start off the year,” he said. I thanked him profusely for the unexpected gift that helped me not only to start the year but also for much longer. When I arrived in Bologna, the train on which I had reserved a seat had already departed, and I had to wait for another one that night. As they unloaded an automobile from a freight car, I tried very hard to bribe a railroad employee on that same platform to secure me a berth or, at least, a seat in first class; I was afraid to travel in a crowded second-class car with that much money in my pockets. People were returning to Rome and to the cities in the south in droves after the holidays; the platforms were packed. The young owner of the automobile that had been removed from the train asked me where I was going. I told him Rome, and he offered to take me to Siena, which meant taking me a good distance. He was on his way back from London, where he had attended an international theater festival. He had spent the New Year in Paris, taken the train to Bologna, where he had agreed to pick up the car that belonged to a family member. We talked about theater. He had finished his law degree, if I remember correctly, but he had not yet taken the bar. He possessed that good education characteristic of young people from well-to-do liberal families in which knowledge and pleasure are understood to be naturally integrated. He told me that the theater festival for the most part had been political, and that it was quite good. And that led us to talk for a while about politics. He was a socialist, a fervent admirer of Pietro Nenni, and was convinced that an intermediate force between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party was necessary for Italy’s good political health. If the votes for the socialists and communists were combined, he said, the victory against the right would be convincing. In some areas—health, education, and international politics—the two parties voted frequently on the same side; but if that happened in every case, if they managed to merge into a single political organism, the socialists would run the risk of being absorbed, as had happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia, by the other party. As we approached Piacenza, my host informed me that we would be passing through the city center, which meant I would be able to see the Carthusian monastery by daylight and contemplate the works of Luca and Andrea della Robbia, which I had never seen. I remember the pleasure that the architectural structure of the certosa gave me, in which the color of the majolica was a cry of joy. I was completely ignorant insofar as applied arts, which I considered a trivial form of decoration. I owe no small part of my education to the many trips I took hitchhiking across Italy that year.
Between Pistoia and Siena, our conversation revolved primarily around two subjects: English literature and Italian art, in particular the primitive and the Renaissance painters. Before entering law school at a very young age, he had spent a year in London to learn the language and to experience living away from his family. During that time, and for several years before, my readings were preferably English. I made a comment about the Italian influence in English literature; not just beginning with the Romantics, who were fleeing the philistinism of their country in droves, but long before, since the Renaissance. Their debt to Bandello, for example, was noteworthy, and a considerable part of his work was set in Italian cities, and I cited in passing, since we were on our way to Siena, a commentary by Robert Greene about the city’s raucous university life, where he heard about practices that took place as a matter of routine and that would have been unimaginable in his country. My travel companion politely corrected the name, believing that I was citing Graham Greene, and I explained to him that no, I was referring to Robert Greene, a contemporary of Shakespeare to whom some scholars attributed the authorship or, at least, his collaboration in the writing of Titus Andronicus, who in his youth traveled throughout Italy and probably stopped for a time in Siena, which he cites as a compendium of all the excesses of the pagan world. The young law student became a bit confused. He changed the conversation to more pedestrian topics and suggested that upon our arrival in Siena I stay at the station; since the snow had begun to fall again and we were progressing at a cautious speed, we would arrive late at night; so I should check my bag and rest for a while in the waiting room. There wouldn’t be any problem because it was a station with little activity; then, at daybreak, I could go out and walk through the city since the colors of the murals and palaces were illuminated at that hour in such a way that only then would I be able to experience the hue that the entire world knows as sienna red in all its splendor. He suggested I visit the cathedral before leaving the city and the art museum to see the masterpieces of Sienese painting, those by Simone Martini, Ambrogio, and Pietro Lorenzetti, and especially those of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the founder of the Sienese school, and its most important proponent. He recommended that I write down the name so I wouldn’t forget it. I replied without pretension that I knew who he was, I had seen one of his pieces in the National Gallery in London, and that I knew the majority of his works in reproduction. And then I blurted out, also casually, some ideas by Berenson, whose books, which I had become acquainted with and studied in Mexico, I always carried with me during my trips to Italy. I talked about the sumptuousness of his greens and metallic golds, of the technique he had inherited from Bizancio that he managed to make them look more like bronze bas-reliefs than paintings. Duccio was extraordinary, I insisted, no one doubted it, but he lacked Giotto’s genius, whose work summarized those tactile values, which for Berenson were everything. And then there was another silence similar to the one that followed my comment about Robert Greene and his memories of Siena.
During the first months of my stay in Italy, I often experienced the feeling that people expected me, and all young Latin Americans, to possess a wealth of hardened, tropical views, different ways of thinking, myths, rebellions, and new strategies that would perhaps help redeem the Old World: the aggiornata representation of the beau savage with Borgesian memories and flashes of Che Guevara. It flattered and at the same time disappointed them to feel their culture being recognized. Those adventures through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the avant-garde, after all, belonged to them. The claim seemed absurd to me, and sometimes I responded with provocations, but the European experience made me conscious, in spite of the sincerity of my intentions, that I ran the risk of learning everything solely from books, by rote, a self-indulgence that lacked the foundation that the necessary environment provides. It’s not that I was interested in submitting to any methodology, nor that I had academic ambitions; nothing interested me less than weakening the hedonistic nature of my readings, their purely casual organization. Nor was I going to ignore my almost innate disposition to seize everything the world had to offer. That was not the point; I intuitively understood that I needed to affirm the source of my own language and culture. I could recite a list of palaces and churches built by Palladio or Brunelleschi, and on the other hand, I possessed overwhelming gaps in the Mexican baroque, the truncated horizon of the Olmec and Maya, to cite just a few examples. I knew that I needed to capture that past in order to move freely in the world. It was the marrow needed to sustain the complex being I aspired to be. Without an affirmation of his language, the traveler loses the capacity to aspire to translate the universe; he will become a mere interpreter on the level of a tour guide.
Once in Siena, my traveling companion telephoned a few friends at whose home we had dinner, and then he accompanied me very late to the station, where our paths parted. I spent a few hours in the waiting room. I wasn’t able to sleep. That wait was like a reality check that rendered phantasmagoric my memory of the family rituals of Bonizzo, the complicated medieval maneuvers to heat the beds for the purpose of keeping them warm at night, the beauty of the spaces, the marvelous dinners prepared under the direction of my tía Argia, the good manners, the fire in the hearths, the Etruscan pieces. In contrast, I was enveloped in the smoke of dreadful cigarettes, coarse accents, and endless guffaws. It was like stepping onto foreign soil. There were few who slept. Men and women of different ages killed time recounting episodes
of their lives, family intimacies, jobs and job searches; the youngest talked about unrealistic projects, recounted with a joy and innocence that managed to transform the most scabrous passages—and believe me there were!—into dialogues of pastoral purity.