by Sergio Pitol
And he will return to his old habits; he will leave unexplained gaps between A and B, between G and H , he will dig tunnels everywhere, will put into action an ongoing program of misinformation, he’ll emphasize the trivial and ignore those moments that normally require an intense emotional charge. While writing, he dreams with delight that his tale will confuse law-abiding citizens, reasonable people, bureaucrats, politicians, sycophants and bodyguards, social climbers, nationalists and cosmopolitans by decree, pedants and imbeciles, society matrons, flamethrowers, fops, whitewashed tombs, and simpletons. He aspires for the ubiquitous mob to lose its way in the first chapters, to become exasperated, and to fail to grasp the narrator’s intention. He will write a novel for strong spirits, whom he will allow to invent a personal plot sustained by a few points of support laboriously and joyously formulated. Each reader would find at last the novel he has at some time dreamt of reading. The opulent, the incomparable, the delectable Polydora will be every woman of the world: the protosemantic Polydora, as her refined admirers, as if spellbound, are wont to call her, but also the dandies—what are you going to do!—, the distinguished Mrs. Polydora, as she is known to officials, wealthy merchants and professionals, unlike the masses, who call a spade a spade and refer to her simply as “the best ass in the world.” For some she will be a saint, for others the mother of all whores, and to a third group both things and many more. The bewildered reader will discover that not even Father Burgos, her long-suffering confessor, knows how to react to the abrupt spiritual oscillations of this untamed lady whose conduct he curses one day only to bless her exalted piety with his tears the next. And what about Generoso de Chalma, the famous bullfighter, her lover, her victim? That abominable figure might be a hero and a buffoon, a mystic, a labyrinth, the powerful head of a drug cartel, the innocent victim of a cruel vendetta, and a despicable snitch in the pay of the police, depending on how the reader’s whims or emotional needs sketch him. The only thing that the potential addicts of this novel could agree on would be to confirm that the times we live in, the same as the narrative, are abominable, cruel, foolish, and ignoble, awkward to the imagination, to generosity, to greatness, and that none of the characters, neither the best nor the worst, deserve the punishment of living in them. I have never written that novel; unfortunately, I am not that hero. But by just remembering Beckmann’s first triptych, I would have liked to be.
If my visits to New York’s Museum of Modern Art dazzled me by showing me the courage of the contemporary artists in their relentless pursuit, the emotion I experienced in the vast spaces of the Metropolitan in contemplation of the Titians, Rembrandts, Vermeers, Goyas, and other splendors it contains was no less. I learned that nothing remarkable in the arts can happen if a connection is not established with past achievements; irrefutable proof of this is Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, housed in this very museum. By failing to maintain a living dialogue with the classics, the artist, the writer, runs the risk of spending his life reinventing the wheel. I know nothing more reductive than the cult of style. The task of the writer consists of enriching tradition, even if he venerates it one day and comes to blows with it the next. Either way, he will be aware of its existence. This is why problems of form, techniques, and possibilities of genres, and their capacity for transformation have both attracted and interested me.
Instead of fading after my first outings, the urge to travel became more obsessive. I began 1961 with a strong sense of annoyance. I was sick of my circumstances and also the world. The press was reporting the unrest that was beginning to alter some young writers in different parts of the world, one of those fevers that appears every few years. They were leaving home, security, work, and undertaking to travel the globe. They were leaving New York and California to settle in Mexico and then taking the leap to Tangier or Marrakesh. Or they settled in Paris, Rome, Capri, Rhodes, Santorini, and sometimes even in a small shantytown in the Philippines or Ceylon. I felt corned in Mexico; I got the bug, sold almost all my books and some paintings, and I hit the road. In the middle of June I boarded a ship in Veracruz and crossed the ocean. I spent a few weeks in London, a few days in Paris, and finally settled in Rome. Like Cervantes, I thought I had reached the undisputed center of the Universe. There I met María Zambrano, who among other things introduced me to Galdós, on whom she was writing memorable pages at the time. I made several trips around Italy, but always returned quickly to Rome, as if any minute spent away would be wasted. For the first time, I felt healthy and immensely free. I was twenty-eight years old and extremely eager to conquer the world. The result of that stay was my return to writing. One night, in a middling café, I began to outline a story that, for better or worse, I am still writing. That trip that was supposed to last a few months lasted twenty-eight years, my age when I arrived in Europe.
My time abroad can be divided into two periods: one that was anarchic, insane, amazing, and always extraordinarily enriching that lasted twelve years; and another, as a member of the diplomatic corps, which spanned the remaining years. During the first, I supported myself however I could and managed to survive with minimal assistance, classes, and editorial activities. I lived in Rome, Peking, Warsaw, Barcelona, and London, each of which left a different mark on my life. In Barcelona I translated for Seix Barral, and at Tusquets edited a collection called Heterodoxos. I remember fondly the work sessions with Beatriz de Moura and other friends in which we spoke with intense enthusiasm about our projects. During a period where the political atmosphere was decidedly orthodox! Of every three or four titles, the censors allowed us to publish maybe one. We lived and worked ignoring the dictatorship. When a Heterodox saw the light of day we celebrated with devotion. During that time, Anagrama was born, and at its first book launch I met Jorge Herralde. We became fast friends. I have translated several books for him, written prologues for others, and later published all my novels with his press. Thanks to the Herralde Prize my work began to be noticed in Mexico. I met Lali Gubern at Leteradura, her wonderful bookstore, and even now the existence of that open space in a period of extreme intolerance seems miraculous. Immediately after being paid for a translation at Seix Barral, I went to Leteradura and headed without hesitation to the table displaying the attractive books from De Donato, the collection that included the Russian formalists and avant-gardists; some of the books I most value: Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose; the Complete Theater of Mikhail Bulgakov; the three volumes on Tolstoy by Boris Eichenbaum—all came from that splendid table. I visited Luis and María Antonia Goytisolo, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Carlos Trías, Félix de Azúa. On two occasions, I exchanged a few words with Enrique Vila-Matas, although our friendship was born and grew far from Barcelona: in Warsaw, in Paris, in Venezuela’s Mérida, in Morelia, Xalapa, and Veracruz. My second period abroad spans my diplomatic life in Paris, Budapest, Moscow, and Prague. The bond that links both experiences, and which, more precisely, unites every moment in my life, has been literature.
In his diaries, Leo Tolstoy noted that he could only write about what he had known and lived personally. His admirable work draws on the experiences he accumulated during his life; it is a kind of parallel biography. Shortly before his death, the aforementioned Max Beckmann wrote: “I can only say that in art everything is a matter of discrimination, address, and sensibility, regardless of whether it is modern or not. Truth should emanate from work. Truth through nature and a self-discipline of iron.” Like Tolstoy, I can only write about what I have lived. My narratives have been a logbook that records my movements. A spectrum of my preoccupations, happy and unfortunate times, readings, perplexities, and jobs. And, like Beckmann, I am convinced that the lived must submit itself to a process of discrimination. The selection of materials must coincide with the appearance of a form. From that moment on, the form will determine the work’s fate, without giving a damn whether it is modern or not.
For years, I used the settings I visited as a backdrop against which my characters compare who they are (or rather,
what they imagine themselves to be) to other values. Usually they are Mexicans living abroad, filmmakers attending a film festival, politicians on vacation in Rome or Venice, Mexican students passing through Vienna, Warsaw, or Samarkand. The cheap exoticism that surrounds them barely matters; what is important is the moral dilemma they contemplate, the value judgment they must make once free of their traditional support, their habits, the alibis that for years they have used in an attempt to numb their conscience.
During my last six years abroad I was an ambassador in Prague, which implied permanent dealings with representatives of power—foreign and domestic officials at the top, in the middle, at the bottom—and with some ambassadors, all with imperial pretensions. They as well as I expressed ourselves in an official and stratified language that feigned grandeur: a conceited language, completely devoid of humor. Shortly after my arrival in Prague, I was invited to an exhibition in celebration of the centenary of Egon Erwin Kisch, who lived in political exile in Mexico during the Second World War. There I saw photos of Kisch with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Dolores del Río, José Clemente Orozco, and Carlos Chávez, with Polish princes, Mexican politicians, German communist leaders, Spanish refugees, and two Hollywood movie stars, Buster Keaton and Paulette Godard, all gathered at a single celebration. I was struck (and no other verb seems more exact) with the idea to write a novel set in Mexico in 1942, the year in which Mexico declared war on the Axis powers. The novel should at all times be a comedy of errors, an amusing story of mistakes that would inevitably lead down crime alley. Evoking that time, consulting the edition of photographs by the Casasola brothers, remembering the sayings and expressions that were in common use during my childhood, was like a holiday for me. In two weeks, I had the general outline of the novel completed. El desfile del amor (Love’s Parade) seemed to construct itself. I was surprised to see it come together, dictate its own laws and obey them, create its plots and subplots, its hidden relationships. I seemed to hear the protagonists’ voices, detect their specific timbres. I was merely a secretary taking dictation. El desfile del amor introduced me into an area where until then I had only dabbled superficially: parody. I felt transported to the fields of Gombrowicz, those of Bustos-Domecq. As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness. The complete transformation of my narrative world began in earnest. When I finished the novel, I began to jot down a few notes about a possible story that could take place in the town of Tepoztlán, where I would also use vague memories of Rome and Istanbul, a scatological story, with dislocated language, an homage to the absurd, the Spanish género chico, that owes much to barracks humor. It was Domar a la divina Garza (Taming the Divine Heron). It was followed by another, La vida conyugal (Married Life), where in the very proper and measured language employed at the family dinner table when there are respected guests, I describe forty years of joyous marital breakdown. Shortly after finishing it, I discovered that El desfile del amor, Domar a la divina garza, and La vida conyugal formed a natural triptych, without any preconceived idea. The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging. Perhaps the origin of this trilogy goes back almost forty years ago, when I saw the first triptych by Beckmann. As always happens in writing, that long meander, from a few images lost in my memory to setting them down on paper, continues to be a mystery to me.
Mexico City, November 1991
4Translated by Hélène Iswolsky
THE DARK TWIN
For Enrique Vila-Matas
Justo Navarro writes in his prologue to Paul Auster’s The Red Notebook: “You write life, and life seems like a life already lived. And the closer you get to things in order to write them better, to translate them better into your own language, to understand them better, the closer you get to things, the more you seem to distance yourself from things, the more things get away from you. Then you grab onto what’s closest to you: you talk about yourself as you approach yourself. Being a writer is to become a stranger, a foreigner: you have to start to translate yourself. Writing is a case of impersonation, forging an identity: writing is passing yourself off as someone else.”
I recently reread Tonio Kröger, Thomas Mann’s coming-of-age novel, which I had long since forgotten; I considered it a defense of the writer’s loneliness, of the necessary segregation from the world to accomplish the task destined for him by a higher will: “One must have died if one is to be wholly a creator.”5 Tonio Kröger is a bildungsroman, the story of a literary and sentimental education. But the divorce between life and creation that Kröger proposes forms only the initial phase of the novel; the result of that education favors the opposite solution: the artist’s reconciliation with life.
The Romantics abolished all dichotomies: life, destiny, light, shadow, sleep, wakefulness, body, and writing meant for them only fragments of a hazy, imprecise, but in the end, indivisible universe. The exaltation of the body and the passion of the spirit were their greatest desires. The romantic poet conceived of himself as his own laboratory and battlefield. In this story from 1903, Mann incorporated one of the ideals of the period: the idea of ethics as aesthetics, distancing the spirit entirely from all earthly vulgarity. Symbolism is a late offshoot of Romanticism, at least one of its trends. Tonio Kröger is a writer of bourgeois extraction; it fills him with pride to live only for the spirit, which implies a rejection of the world. He fulfills his destiny with the guilty conscience of a bourgeois who is ashamed of the mediocrity of his environment. Hence his asceticism is carried out with almost inhuman rigor. At the end of the novel, following some experiences that connect him to life, Kröger reveals to his confidante, a Russian painter, the conclusion to which he arrives: “You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me… I don’t know which of the two hurts me more bitterly. The bourgeois are fools; but you worshippers of beauty, you who say I am phlegmatic and have no longing in my soul, you should remember that there is a kind of artist so profoundly, so primordially fated to be an artist that no longing seems sweeter and more precious to him than his longing for the bliss of the commonplace. I admire those proud, cold spirits who venture out along the paths of grandiose, demonic beauty and despise ‘humanity’—but I do not envy them. For if there is anything that can turn a littérateur into a true writer, then it is this bourgeois love of mine for the human and the living and the ordinary. It is the source of all warmth, of all kindheartedness and of all humor.”6 End of quote. Tonio Kröger, German writer.
If I confused my recollection of the novel with the image of the writer’s total reclusion, his isolation, it is due in no small part to one of his phrases, “One must have died if one is to be wholly a creator,” which has been quoted a thousand times as an example of the writer’s decision to not commit to anything but himself.
Even if such an attitude is eventually rejected by Tonio Kröger, it is still not surprising to find its echo in Mann’s own reflections on old age. His autobiographical pages show his astonishment in the face of his popularity; the warmth with which he is treated by family, friends, and even strangers does not appear to reconcile with the reclusion that was necessary for him to complete his work. The reaction of the elderly Mann is much more convincing than Kröger’s final confession, where his love of humanity disguises a declamatory and programmatic tone that fails to touch the depth of the complex relationship between writing and life. “You move away from yourself whe
n you approach yourself…,” Navarro says. “Writing is impersonating someone else.”
I cannot imagine a novelist who does not use elements of his personal experience, a vision, a memory from childhood or the immediate past, a tone of voice captured in a meeting, a furtive gesture glimpsed by chance, only to incorporate them later into one or more characters. The narrator-writer delves deeper and deeper into his life as his novel progresses. It is not a mere autobiographical exercise; writing a novel solely about one’s own life, in most cases, is a vulgarity, a lack of imagination. It is something else: a relentless observation of one’s own reflections in order to be able to realize multiple prostheses inside the story.
No matter what, the novelist will continue to write his novel. Never mind that other non-literary works may demand his time. He will focus on his story and will make progress on it in his spare time, on weekends, or holidays, but, even if he himself doesn’t realize, he will at all times be implicated secretly in his novel, inserted into one of its folds, lost in its words, pushed by “the urgency of fiction itself, which always carries a certain weight,”7 to quote Antonio Tabucchi.