by Sergio Pitol
The ambitious young provincial sits at the opposite end of the same bench where, facing the sun, the beautiful woman with raven hair is seated. She opens in front of him a copy of The Banner of Youth or Life of Warsaw; she flips through it with disinterest only to let it fall on her lap and lights a cigarette that she smokes with obvious suggestiveness. Then, with an angelic face and oblivious air, he apologizes to his bench mate and shows her a page from the newspaper as if asking her a question. She turns toward him with a stern look of surprise on her face; she examines the paper and proffers a dry response. Little by little, the seriousness disappears from both their faces. He makes a comment and his smile grows wider; she raises a delicate, reproving finger and shakes it at the young man as if indicating that such things can be said in his village but never in a city like Warsaw, much less to a woman he doesn’t know, but he eventually wins her over with his laugh, and they finally engage in a playful conversation. The young man gets up, takes a few steps around the bench and sits down again, but this time he sits next to his neighbor so he can speak quietly. He probably says something to her about being lonely in the strange city, his fears, and his uncertainties.
After finishing my coffee, I return to my desk and begin to organize my papers. I am translating a story by Iwaszkiewicz entitled “Tatarak.” My dictionary tells me that the word means “aromatic calamus” or “sweet rush,” and that it is an aquatic plant that grows in lakes and ponds of the Baltic region. It is a magnificent story; the ending is tragic and filled with an intense and contained despair; it is about a romantic relationship or, more specifically, the development of a physical passion between a mature woman and a boy whose only attraction is his youth and the naturalness of his manner. Death is lurking throughout the story, but we only notice it at the end, when the boy appears trapped by the roots of the sweet rush. Quotidian lives, worthy, wasted, onto which their owners try to imprint an essential decency. The erotic element is very powerful, but its strength lies in the bowels of its language; the characters may not be aware of it, but their movements, their destiny, seem to be governed by it. All of a sudden, the twilight atmosphere causes me to think, obliquely, of the movie Senso by Visconti. Both the story and the film share a blurred sexuality. They are stories en travesti, or, at least, so it seems. The differences are vast: instead of the hysteria, the operatic madness of the film, there is in the story only opaqueness, a quasi-muteness, one of the greatest qualities in all of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s work. I work with great pleasure, resolving doubts, trying to maintain the same breath that the prose has in Polish. I get up to make sure I have an ironed white shirt and that my black shoes are shined, because that night I’m going to the theater with Zofia Szleyen to see her translation of The Youthful Deeds of the Cid by Guillén de Castro. I’ll pick her up an hour before the function for a light dinner. Going to the theater has been, since childhood, a substitute for a visit to paradise. This past year in Warsaw has been magnificent; in addition to the excellent Polish productions, I’ve seen the Royal Shakespeare Company, and also the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, the Stabile di Genoa, the Maly Theatre of Moscow, the Piraikón of Athens. No less! It is perhaps the only distraction about which I have no regrets; the stage fascinates me, gives me ideas, and renews my energy. The angel of order has taken it upon himself to organize a perfect day for me. Going to the theater is an immense source of pleasure, yes, but it’s also an intellectual activity: I feel no remorse.
I get up again; I go to the bookcase just to make sure I have The Youthful Deeds of the Cid. Before returning to my work, I pause again at the window. I sit for a moment to take in the view. Night is about to fall, but there’s a clarity in the air that outlines the figures perfectly. The characters have changed. The benches in the garden have new occupants, younger, more casual and playful, with binders and folders under their arms or piled on benches; without a doubt, they’re students. The garden paths seem busier. Suddenly, there in the back, where the thick hedgerow usually conceals the lovers, I’m able to make out one of the couples that was beginning to form during my previous break. They say goodbye with an unconvincing formality. Who could it be but the fellow from the provinces and the sensual woman who had to meet her husband at the door of the cinema Skarpa? He walks toward the Krakowskie Przedmieście, she toward a side alley, the one that passes directly beneath my window. She walks with an air of superiority; just steps from the sidewalk, but still within the garden, she stops, opens her purse, takes out a hand mirror, looks at herself, then, satisfied, returns it to her purse; not a single hair has been left out of place. She looks at her watch; she thinks perhaps about her husband, about the scene that awaits her, but this only accentuates her smile, reinvigorates her step, and renders her triumphant; she has become a lioness. By contrast, the young man seems to take pleasure in his disheveled appearance. He’s walking in shirtsleeves; he flips an old summer jacket around with one hand as if it were a mill blade. His seraphic appearance is gone; his tousled hair and the loss of sexual appetite in his step announce his conquest with satyric pride—and how!—mission accomplished. He whistles as he walks. A few steps later he casually touches the crotch of his trouser to make sure the buttons are correctly fastened. A warm breeze, with all the aromas of spring, penetrates the window; the murmur of life begins to arrive to my studio with greater intensity. I sit down in front of my papers, but it’s hard for me to concentrate.
Minutes later, I close the dictionary and put away the drafts my translation of “Tatarak.” I consider myself fanatical about literary work and life. The combination of these qualities is a source of terrible conflicts. I take another folder out of the armoire, unfold other papers on the table, the material I’m about to send to the poet and translator Díez-Canedo: Los climas (The Climates), a book of short stories. With each revision, I discover new atrocities, and I make generous corrections. A never-ending process! The story that interests me most is about a hallucination suffered by a young Mexican who visits his friend, Juan Manuel Torres, in Lodz and returns by train to Warsaw, consumed with fever, one particularly cold winter night. He sits across from an elderly woman who reminds him of a family member, his aunt, whom he knows only from photographs, one of his grandmother’s sisters, who according to family tradition died at sea returning from her honeymoon. The account fuses two stories—the most visible: the journey by train of the feverish boy, his incoherent travel impressions, the encounter with his friend and his discovery of Poland; the other: a hallucination caused by delirium, where the elderly woman on the train is the supposedly dead sister of his grandmother. Reality and delirium treated with the same language. It was the first story I wrote in Poland; I have rewritten it a thousand times, but I find that the language still possesses a repulsive mawkishness and that the “gothic” story, in order not to fail, should be written in an almost transparent language, where unreality is inserted into the real without the seams being visible. I begin to cross out and superimpose words, add lines, omit adjectives, and an insidious anxiety gets the better of me, a sudden sense of claustrophobia. I tell myself that the Spartan rules I’ve imposed on myself are more appropriate in a notary office, in a government agency, anywhere except where a writer works. Does being locked up in a room, leafing through dictionaries, omitting or adding a word here and there not already imply a betrayal to literature? I have spoken ad nauseam of the importance of literature in my life. I have added that if I am still in Warsaw it is because I find the ideal atmosphere for writing here. But write about what, if the material that could nourish a story is down there, in the park, on the street, in the corner coffee shop? The places where life is, those things that don’t happen in this garret where I force myself as punishment, as penance, to lock myself up in front of a typewriter and dictionaries. Would I perhaps have to keep rummaging forever into my childhood and write about my life as a child in Potrero and an adolescent in Córdoba for the rest of my life? I am sick of it. My freedom begins in the stories that I am now correcting.
It is well known that there is no tide without a counter-tide, action without reaction. And the undertows tend to be brutal. Perhaps in a bar, on a walk, in a party, I will suddenly regret not being in my garret, where I could take notes on the Shakespeare of Jan Kott, whose recent reading left me in awe, and study in an orderly fashion the Romantic poets, crucial to Polish literature, and then leap to Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schultz, and, in addition, read Borges, Cortázar, Neruda and Vallejo, Cervantes, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Paz, and Fuentes, and write letters that I owe, and, above all, write stories, make up stories, write, write, write instead of drink like a Pole and go about life from binge to binge, instead of ruining my health, altering my nervous system, wasting my faculties, time, and energy only later to fully become the loser that at this moment I feel predestined to be.
I indulge in these sad meditations as I put my papers in their respective folders; I hasten to shave, get dressed and put on a tie. “The angel of order is still with me,” I feel reassured knowing that soon I will dine with Zofia; I’ll listen to her speak at length about her truest loves: Cervantes, Lope, Valle-Inclán, Lorca, and, above all, Tirso, whose Don Gil of the Green Breeches is by far her favorite work. And I find myself in that perfect dream when the phone rings. It’s Marek Keller. He has a performance tonight, he says; he’ll leave an invitation for me in the box office; afterward, there will be a party at Maja Berezowska’s house—“that old libertine,” as good people exclaim whenever anyone mentions her name. I am certain it will be an extremely entertaining gathering; just thinking of the radiant mob that awaits me that night is enough to feel overcome with joy. I know from experience that after the party someone will improvise another more modest one with fewer guests, and that perhaps the night will end in a raucous tour of those spots in Warsaw with the worst reputation. Almost without realizing it, I call Zofia to beg off and invent something so absurd that it ends up being convincing. I race to the theater where Marek’s Mazowsze is playing; afterward, I’ll allow myself to fall into the much anticipated well of chaos from which I will likely not emerge until breakfast time tomorrow.
Xalapa, May 1995
TRAVELING AND WRITING
For Julio Ortega
I amused myself recently rereading some fragments in an autobiographical notebook written some thirty years ago. I was hoping to find in its pages the atmosphere that enveloped the first years of my stay in Europe. A well-known editor of the time, Don Rafael Giménez Siles, invited a dozen young writers to tell their life stories. He seemed to be convinced that such an act would encourage a generation even greener than ours to find its path to literature. I doubt that those allegedly exemplary lives have fulfilled that purpose. The project was in many ways ridiculous; those of us who were chosen were engaged, to varying degrees, in an intense sentimental and literary education that in no way corresponded with a desire to trawl the enigmas of the past and use them to interpret the signs that governed our fate, let alone serve as examples and mentors for the very young writers whom in due time would take our place. I wrote those notes in Warsaw in early 1966. I had left Mexico five years earlier, visited several countries, and prolonged my stay mainly in two cities, Rome and Warsaw.
As I reread the text, I was left suddenly with this question: “Why do I get chills every time I think about returning to my country, which, of course, will have to happen, like it or not, someday?” Then I mentioned the circumstances that had prompted me to undertake this journey and to extend it indefinitely. It began with a sense of professional frustration: I was working at a publishing house where all my projects were systematically thwarted. It infuriated me to see that the practice of literature and the inevitable squabbles that resulted from it often concealed a noticeable intellectual disdain and hinted at aspirations that had little or nothing to do with literature. Some young intellectuals were beginning to seek a more intimate relationship with power than with the muses. My feelings toward political opposition groups, particularly the left, with whose ideals I identified most, were decidedly contradictory; I wanted them to grow stronger, but at the same time their methods seemed confusing to me, limited and far removed from any element of reality. More than anything, the empty rhetoric of official discourse sickened me, as well as the conformity of large swaths of the population to the restrictions of our democratic life and the backwardness of the country. I said all that to myself then, and it was true. But now I am able to see that in large part the state of frustration was related to having published a few years earlier a first book of stories that went unnoticed, and that after that I had stopped writing.
In mid-June 1961, I left Veracruz on the German ship Marburg. One morning, in the middle of the ocean, the bulletin we were given at breakfast announced that the ship, just as all units of the German merchant navy, would have to forego the originally scheduled stops (Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam) and proceed without delay to a German port, where it should await further instructions. The officers, waiters, and German passengers showed signs of nervousness that we had not previously seen in them. We were treated with a condescending arrogance. They were custodians of secrets that concerned us, but were apparently forbidden to reveal. They had suddenly become our masters! That morning, among the passengers, there began to circulate a wide range of rumors, all catastrophic. That a new world war was about to break out was the first. Soon it had morphed into the aforementioned catastrophe had already begun. In the blink of an eye, the passengers’ imaginations had plunged into delirium. As the day went on, the recent destruction of Rotterdam was accepted as fact; thereafter, it was confirmed that there had been a coup d’état in Rome and that the Vatican was under siege; that the Pope had been physically assaulted as he attempted to leave his apartments; that in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Milan banks had suspended operations; that Rotterdam was not the city destroyed by bombs but Marseille; that it had not been Marseille but Dresden; that it had not been Dresden but Rotterdam; not Rotterdam, on the contrary, someone had heard from a very trustworthy source, a German woman, that the cities destroyed were Marseille, Bristol, and Salerno. In the bar, groups of passengers gathered around the radio for hours, trying to tune in to European stations, none of which confirmed the rumors that were spreading on board. There was talk, yes, of a very serious conflict emerging between the two German States, the division of Berlin, which, in the opinion of the more discerning passengers, was an attempt to prevent widespread panic. After dinner, the Captain brought us together to inform us of the itinerary change and the reasons that had necessitated it. We would disembark in Bremerhaven, the port closest to Bremen. The line would cover our passage by rail to our initial ports of destination, if by then the trains were still working as scheduled. The Cold War, he said, savoring the news with delight, was no longer cold, and we were standing on the threshold of a serious conflict with unpredictable consequences. In a single night they had built a wall dividing Berlin, making prisoners of all the inhabitants of the eastern sector. He fired off sentences with a dryness that scarcely matched the profusion of gestures and grimaces that accompanied them. All of a sudden, he had become one of the most baleful characters of the expressionist cinema. At every turn he interrupted his rant to receive from a subordinate’s hands cards that, we supposed, contained the latest news sent by telegraph. After reading the messages, his words became drier, his gestures more outrageous; he was a ventriloquist’s dummy whose movements escaped the master’s control. I was traveling with passage to Antwerp, where I would board a ferry that would take me to England. If the circumstances were as bad as they seemed, the Captain added, and if it were not possible to leave from Bremen, he recommended that we immediately contact the consular representatives of our respective countries. Deep down, I was as excited as the German officers, my blood raced with the same muddy drunkenness as theirs. I was ecstatic to find myself in one of those moments that could become a turning point of history. It did not occur to me in the least that my freedom, much less my life, might be in
danger if war broke out. On the contrary, in radical opposition to my pacifist ideas, I considered the opportunity to be the beginning of a chain of exciting new events capable of wresting me from the stupor I was experiencing. Like the Germans from Marburg, I felt an exhilarating charge of electricity run through me, except, unlike them, I was convinced that the outbreak of war would once again mean the defeat of Germany and the beginning of a new world. At moments the session took on an intensity of Wagnerian proportions. Conversely, during the next four or five days, the last of the trip, the conversations turned melancholy. I ate with Belgian and Dutch passengers; the exuberance of the first day had waned; wild rumors were no longer circulating; nobody ventured hypotheses. They behaved more with the resignation of hostages than that of free men. Of our arrival to the German port, I remember, above all, the harried confusion of the landing and the difficulties hours later loading the luggage onto a crowded train that was departing for Holland. I did not receive passage to Antwerp but to a small Dutch port from where a ship would leave for Dover. Before leaving Bremen, I was able to visit a magnificent exhibition of recent works by Picasso with a young Swiss couple I had met on board. With the greatest irresponsibility, we abandoned our trunks and suitcases in the lobby of a completely deserted gallery and toured for a while its sepulcher-like halls. “It would be easy for us to steal a picture,” the husband told me, and for a moment the idea worked us into to a frenzy. Everything was possible during what we believed to be a time of war. Fortunately, it was not.