by Sergio Pitol
At times, this first incitement surfaces, for a moment or for several days, then troubles the eventual author, only to later withdraw inexplicably into one of the blackest holes of memory, waiting for the opportune moment to reappear with accumulated strength. No one can predict how long the inspiration will take to mature. It can be a matter of days or decades. At twenty, Thomas Mann sketched the outline of a novel that he would write fifty years later, Doctor Faustus, a book that would be enough to guarantee immortality for any author.
The paths to creation are imprecise. They are full of wrinkles, mirages, delays. They require the patience of a saint, a good deal of abandonment, and, at the same time, an iron will in order to not succumb to the traps the unconscious lays to block the writer. It is well known that the struggle between Eros and Thanatos always lies at the root of creation. But the end of the battle is always unforeseeable.
I spent my childhood at a sugar mill in Potrero, Veracruz, a place, without a doubt, as unhealthy as the farms in New Guinea, the Upper Volta, or the Amazon must have been during the same period. Between brief intervals of physical activity there were long periods during which I was bedridden with fevers caused by malignant tertian malaria. Reading became my only pleasure. I gladly and by necessity became a full-time reader. From the usual childhood readings—all of Verne, Treasure Island, The Call of the Wild, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—I dove into the novels of Dickens, and then, without delay, into Creole Ulysses by Vasconcelos, War and Peace, the Mexican poets of the Contemporáneos group, Freud, Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and foreign languages. I read everything that fell into my hands. I reached adolescence carrying an almost unbearable weight of readings. If one adds to this the fact that I lived at my grandmother’s house, and that the only people who frequented the house were her sister-in-law, her childhood friends, and, occasionally, her near one-hundred-year-old nanny, who did everything possible so the conversation would avoid any contemporary topic and remain frozen in a kind of vanquished utopia, a subverted Eden, the world before the Revolution, when one could travel to take waters, not just in Tehuacán but also in Italy—to reclaim a health that ultimately served no purpose, since the time that was worth living had been left behind, lost and destroyed—my subsequent destiny can be understood. If one adds to the accumulation of poorly digested readings the incessant flow of oral literature intended to keep the house removed from the present, and thus from reality, it is not at all surprising that at some point I would pass from the category of reader to that of aspiring writer.
I arrived in the capital at sixteen to take classes at the university. Although I enrolled in law school, I spent most of my time in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. If it is true that the latter was, overall, much more attractive than law—going from classes on the history of historiography to those on medieval Italian literature, and from the history of modern art to the literature of the Golden Age, was infinitely more pleasing than attending classes in law school, where I was forced to listen to incomprehensible disquisitions on business law or civil procedure—, it is also true that I owe the direction of my destiny toward and for literature to law school, and in particular to one teacher, Don Manuel Martínez de Pedroso, professor of Theory of the State. The students who were most committed to the study of law, the most organized, those with the best grades in all their subjects, disoriented by the absence of a previously established syllabus and the maestro’s refusal to designate a textbook, defected two or three weeks after the beginning of the term. Don Manuel Pedroso was one of the most cultured persons I have ever known, and perhaps, for that reason, there was nothing bookish about him. His sense of order was demonstrated in the most oblique way one could imagine. Once only a handful of faithful remained in his class, the maestro from Seville would begin his paideia in earnest. He imparted it in the most heterodox way conceivable at that time—and possibly any other—for the teaching of law. Pedroso would talk to us about the ethical dilemma embedded in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”; about the antagonism between obedience to power and free will in Sophocles; about the notions of political theory expressed by the Henrys and the Richards in the historical dramas of Shakespeare; about Balzac and his dynamic conception of history; about the points of contact between the Renaissance utopists and their antagonists—which for Pedroso were only superficial—the theorists of political thought, the first visionaries of the Modern State: Juan Bodino and Thomas Hobbes. Sometimes in class he would lecture at length about the poetry of Góngora, whom he preferred to any other Spanish-language poet, or about his youth in Germany, where he carried out the first Spanish translation of Das Kapital and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, one of the first expressionist plays to circulate in the Hispanic world; about his activities during Spain’s civil war during which, from the beginning, his title of marqués did not prevent him from placing himself at the service of the Republic; about his experiences in the terrifying Moscow of the Great Purge, where he was the last ambassador of the Spanish Republic. He frequently thrashed us with caustic sarcasm, but he also celebrated our victories. Pedroso urged us to read, to study languages, but also to live. He enjoyed the stories we’d share with him, inventing some details and exaggerating others, about our nightly rounds through a circuit of dives from which we miraculously escaped unscathed. One of the triumphs of the Mexican baroque manifested itself at the time in the complexity of the capital’s nightlife, governed and lived with unbounded imagination. It seems that the sense of danger one experienced upon entering one of those dives was the product of impeccable staging and mise-en-scène, spaces that were in no way innocent but also enormously entertaining and not at all dangerous. With Pedroso, the temptations of the world lived in harmony with the rigors of knowledge. Humor was one of his key traits. Even the most dramatic episodes of the civil war could, just before reaching the height of pathos, be transformed into an endless parade of scenes of indescribable comedy. When the term ended, one knew the theory of the State with greater clarity than those students who deserted to drink from more canonical waters. Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea have written excellent pages about him.
Reading Jules Verne had fueled in me a certain desperation to travel and become lost in the world; perhaps compensation for my childhood seclusion. In early 1953 I traveled abroad for the first time. It was a trip to South America. I planned to disembark in Venezuela, travel through Colombia and Ecuador to reach Peru, where I would embark again for Mexico. Letters of introduction from Alfonso Reyes provided immediate access to various Venezuelan intellectuals and foreigners residing in Venezuela. While there, I met the essayist Maríano Picón Salas, the most respected Venezuelan on the continent, Alejo Carpentier, Juan David García Bacca, and many others. In my early days in Caracas, Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World, which had been published in Mexico, appeared in bookstores, whose reading, of course, left me dazzled. Carpentier became one of three Hispano-American authors who, during my university years, constituted my personal Olympus; the others were Borges and Onetti, to whom I have added half a dozen other names. What attracted me most to the Cuban writer was his rhythm, the austere melody of his phrasing, an intense verbal musicality with classical resonances and modulations that came from other languages and other literatures. To the quality of his language Carpentier added the allures of the Caribbean, its intricate geography, its fascinating history, the crossroads of myths and languages, political reflection; all of which was integrated into perfect plots. Explosion in a Cathedral is one of the most extraordinary novels in the Spanish language, a tale about the influence of the Enlightenment on the islands and the continent, and a bitter and profound reflection on political ideals—revolution, its triumph, its transformation into raison d’État—ideals held in public proclamations but denied and fought in practice. I never encountered the same tension in anything Carpentier wrote later.
Venezuela was suffering at the time under the cruel and obtuse military dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez. I rem
ained in Caracas for several months instead of undertaking the ambitious itinerary I had previously outlined. I celebrated my twentieth birthday there. I wrote an occasional article for El Papel Literario, the cultural supplement edited by Picón Salas, as well as a few poems I hoped to publish as soon as I returned to Mexico. Love poems, of course. My guardian angel protected and saved my literary future: I misplaced the poems. When I reread them thirty years later, I was petrified; to say they were atrocious would be to praise them. Had I published them, it is very likely that my relationship to literature would have been dealt a mortal blow. In any case, I lived for the first time the incomparable experience involved in creation. During those months, I witnessed a political and social unrest that was all but nonexistent in the circle in which I moved in Mexico.
When I returned home, I enrolled in a course in dramatic theory and technique with the intention of learning to write theater. I was certain that my vocation was pointing me in that direction. The playwright Luisa Josefina Hernández assigned us some Greek tragedies and gave us the task of adapting their themes to our century, to create Mexican Electras, Orestes, Iphigenias, and Oedipuses. I sketched my dramatic outlines in accordance with her instructions, and when I began to develop them I was surprised that, instead of a tragedy, a short story was taking shape. They were twilight recreations of life on ranches and haciendas of my native Veracruz, in which I summarized the family mythology that I had assimilated for as long as I could remember. An inexplicable alchemic impulse, which I felt incapable of resisting, caused the dialogues and stage directions to disappear and, in their place, a narrative web began to take shape, which included the history of those foreign families, whose arrogance I surely exaggerated, scattered around Huatusco and its surroundings, where my great-grandparents had settled a century before.
At twenty-five I published my first book of stories: Tiempo cercado (Corralled Time) and thus began to expel the toxins I had accumulated since childhood. Living in Veracruz meant being periodically engulfed in the fiesta. At the time, however, I was unable to discern what I would later learn in Bakhtin, namely that the feast makes up the primary and indestructible ingredient of human civilization; it may weaken, it may degenerate even, but there will never be a force that can eclipse it completely. “The feast,” says the Russian philosopher, “has no utilitarian connotation (as has daily rest and relaxation after working hours). On the contrary, the feast means liberation from all that is utilitarian, practical. It is a temporary transfer to the utopian world.”4 Although I was immersed in the feast, I did not allow it access to those tales of Veracruz that suffered conspicuously from its absence; in those stories, evil appears as a factotum; it constitutes a closed universe, univocal, reluctant to recognize, much less celebrate, “the world’s inexhaustible mutation.” Those family histories that depict the deterioration of immense houses that are possessed over time by humidity, weeds, and the devil held for me a single virtue: they allowed me to cut an umbilical cord that refused to be severed. When I wrote my first books, Tiempo cercado and Infierno de todos (Everyone’s Hell), which brought together those tales whose somber tone and rigid literary devices did not reconcile with the exuberant nature from which they emerged, I learned how to tell stories, to recreate some of the characters that my grandmother resurrected as she spoke about her lost Huatusco. But, above all, I rid myself of a world that belonged only vicariously to me, and I felt obligated to recount exploits and disasters closer to my experience. My guardian angel during that time was William Faulkner, whose Yoknapatawpha County I attempted to recreate among the coffee plantations, palm trees, and dark tropical rivers.
During the time I wrote those stories, I traveled to New York. It must have been 1956. Only in recent years have I realized the vast education those two very different trips provided me. I have since gone to many museums, but none of those visits succeeded in repeating the wonder produced by those in New York, above all the Museum of Modern Art. For weeks I was appalled by the scale of my ignorance but took delight in the extraordinary surprises that my efforts to diminish that ignorance afforded me. What a difference between Guernica in its natural state and its miniature reproductions in magazines or cultural supplements! I discovered many of the trends in contemporary art, and I was won over or unsettled (which, in the end, is the same thing) by some of them. During that period the Expressionists did not yet enjoy the prestige they enjoy today. It was difficult to find them outside of a few German museums. On a wall of the Museum of Modern Art hung The Departure, the first of the new triptychs painted by Max Beckmann. Unlike traditional polyptychs that narrate a story—the tragic life of a martyr, the road to conversion of an excessively degenerate pagan that ends up becoming Pope, the exploits of a warrior who subjects vast territories to catechization, the vicissitudes of an emperor desperate to hold his empire together despite the push of an enemy infidel—where each panel represents a segment of the story so that the whole can provide us with the complete vision, Beckmann’s triptychs are flooded with strange figures engaged in unfathomable acts. A rich tapestry emerges before our eyes where certain signs are repeated over and over like pillars of a personal mythology. No sum is possible, and, therefore, the progressive sequence of a story is never achieved. In the triptych I am referring to, the side panels are a catalogue of sordid and brutal acts. In the left panel, a sinister-looking villain is torturing three people—two men and a woman. One has been mutilated: his hands cut off, the stumps still bloody. In the right panel, a young woman holding an oil lamp is walking with the corpse of a half-nude man trussed vertically to her body: the corpse is positioned head-down, the feet reach the woman’s neck, and the head the floor; behind her a bellboy is walking blindfolded, carrying a big fish in his hands. Beside him, a modestly dressed character is playing a drum energetically. The radiant central canvas stands in contrast to the sordidness going on in the side panels: a man wearing a crown and a woman holding a baby in her arms are standing beside a mysterious male figure with his face covered. The blue sky and sea shine as if it were varnish, in contrast to the absence of sunlight and the violence cloistered on the sides. I imagine the triptych’s title, The Departure, refers to that scene. The couple and their son, the king and queen of creation, are abandoning the cruel, turbid, and incomprehensible world that surrounds them. The brightness of the colors in the center, accentuated by the space in which the royal protagonists are situated, immediately attracts the observer’s eye.
The many acts encapsulated in one of Beckmann’s works can, at first sight, produce a mistaken effect. It could be taken for the illustrations of a literary work. However, the sensuality of the color and the extraordinary power of the line undo that mistake. It is not painted literature but pure painting: it is natural that people use these elements to try to create a personal story. When explaining to a friend the panel on the right where a corpse, naked from the waist down and trussed to the body of a beautiful woman, beside whom a man, who doesn’t even see them, is playing a drum, Beckmann states: “The body tied to you is a part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs and failures, the murder everyone commits at some time in his life—you can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry that corpse while Life plays the drum.” If someone who had not read Beckmann’s explanation stood in front of the triptych and translated that fragment similarly, I would slit my throat. Each spectator must decipher the elements as best he can, drawing on life lessons or personal experiences; this, which seems inevitable, does not mean enriching or impoverishing the aesthetic pleasure. Of course certain general elements catch the eye: an anxious tension between the power of Life and the presence of Death, and other indirect tensions resulting from a series of confrontations between closure and openness, health and illness, dignity and humiliation. I cannot think of any other feature at the moment, but deep down I would want to discover some sort of coherence in that tumultuous collection of figures and enigmatic situations; I would turn it into stories, into plots that
would have nothing in common with the painter’s version.
I lingered before that triptych for a long time, filled with amazement and contradictory feelings that alternated between fascination and rejection. Over the years, I have been able to see a large part of Beckmann’s work in German museums and in international exhibitions of Expressionist art, and I’ve consulted some excellent monographs. But the image that lingers in my memory is that of my first encounter, my astonishment before the accumulation of so many unlikely elements in the same space. On certain occasions, after looking at Beckmann’s paintings, I’ve felt the temptation to incorporate into my stories situations and characters whose mere proximity could be considered scandalous; to establish, in a fit of bravura, the threads necessary to set into motion all kinds of incompatible incidents until they could be shaped into a plot. Dreaming about writing a novel replete with contradictions, most only superficial; to create from time to time zones of shadows, deep fissures, abysmal caverns, so that the reader can travel on his own the story’s vast spaces.
It pleases me to imagine an author who isn’t intimidated by the thought of being demolished by critics. Surely he would be attacked for the novel’s extravagant execution, characterized as a worshipper of the avant-garde, although the very idea of the avant-garde for him is an anachronism. He would withstand a storm of insults and foolish attacks from anonymous frauds. What would truly terrify him would be that his novel might arouse the interest of some foolish and generous critic who claimed to have deciphered the enigmas buried throughout the text and interpreted them as an shameful acceptance of the world that he detests, someone who said that his novel should be read “as a harsh and painful requiem, a heartrending lament, the melancholy farewell to the set of values that in the past had given meaning to his life.” Something like that would destroy and sadden him, would cause him to toy with the idea of suicide. He would repent of his sins; condemn his vanity, his taste for paradox. He would blame himself for not having clarified, just to achieve certain effects, the mysteries in which his plot delights, for having not known how to renounce the vain pleasure of ambiguities. Over time, he would be able to recover; he would forget his past tribulations, his longing for atonement, such that when he starts writing his next novel he will have already forgotten the moments of contrition as well as his efforts to make amends.