by Sergio Pitol
18 NOVEMBER (PRAGUE)
I was officially invited, in my capacity as ambassador rather than writer, to the opening of an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Egon Erwin Kisch, the famous interwar journalist. I attended. As I approached a display, I recognized the photo of a house. Of course, it was a house in the Roma neighborhood, located not far from Plaza Rio de Janeiro. Beside it there were photos of Kisch with famous people of the time: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Carlos Chávez, Pablo Neruda, Dolores del Río; but beside them were a hodgepodge of international celebrities of every stripe: Buster Keaton, the wonderful Paulette Goddard, Orson Welles, Prince Drohojowski, the Soviet ambassador, Louis Jouvet, Jules Romains, Anna Seghers, and many other faces. Very elegant people beside intellectuals dressed in proletarian-looking jackets, actors, writers, communist leaders, countesses and princesses, Mexican intellectuals, Hollywood luminaries. A world of highly contrasting shades brought together in Mexico by the war. I can only imagine the degree of confusion such a divine galaxy of stars must have caused in a city as provincial as Mexico was at the time. A non-stop comedy of errors.
19 NOVEMBER
I entered the Café Slavia, sat at a table with a view of the river and the castle, and began to write my novel. I made a rough outline of the first five chapters.
20 NOVEMBER
Last night, I finished the full outline of my novel, and today I started filling in some details and incidents of some chapters. I need to decide the tone, the temperature of the language. But the heavy work, the novel’s carpentry, is already there. I made very detailed notes for one of the chapters: the scene in which Martínez, the blackmailer, seeks information about the past of the German Hispanist, Ida Werfel, and her family. Ida tells him about The Garden of Juan Fernández by Tirso de Molina, in which no one is who they are believed to be; the blackmailer takes it personally, an oblique reference to his secret activities, and flies into a fit of rage that drives him to the brink of madness… No one wants to talk about the German woman who lives locked in an apartment that has become a pigsty. “How do you expect me to know who he is? Do you think I’m the phonebook or something?” says Aunt Hedwig gruffly to the protagonist. “I haven’t wanted to know anything more about that building since I left it,” Delfina Uribe replies. “And you, what right do you have to question me?” Pedrito Balmorán shouts. “With all due respect, my rule is never to interfere in the lives of the tenants,” the doorman replies.
19 DECEMBER
Everything is working out so well for me, the novel is moving along so quickly that I fear it’s nothing more than an outbreak of graphomania. Tomorrow, I’ll start working on the chapter on Delfina Uribe.
25 DECEMBER
The structure is very simple. Gogol used it in Dead Souls: a stranger arrives at a place and begins to visit different people one by one to address a particular topic. The detective novel has used it almost from its beginning; many of the Agatha Christie novels are structured this way. Ambler’s splendid novel The Mask of Dimitrios is the perfect model. In the detective novel, the character who undertakes this journey and convinces people that they must open the door and answer his questions is a police officer or a private detective. Ambler uses a novelist who, if I remember correctly, is also a journalist. This makes his intrusion into private spaces and other people’s lives seem normal. I thought my character would be a journalist, then I turned him into a historian who’s researching a particular period: the World War as seen from Mexico.
1984
17 FEBRUARY
I spend hours reviewing the volumes of photos by the Casasola brothers in the embassy library. I’m able to see what people wore to the races, to the opera or, simply, to walk down the street. The entire Who’s Who of the period appears in these books. This allows me to visualize the characters.
17 JUNE (IN MOJÁCAR)
I’ve been in Mojácar for two weeks. I’m working from morning to night. I think that what breathes life into the novel is kind of cheerful expressionism, if such an expression is possible, resulting from many years of parodic games, improvisations, and a caricatured invention of reality practiced with Luis Prieto and Carlos Monsiváis; but also from certain effects from American movies of the thirties and forties, especially those by Lubitsch, and the later Italian movies, Fellini above all; from the constant reading of plays and their application in the construction of dialogue, as well as certain devices from opera in the creation of staging; the relationship between movement and the grouping of characters (solos, duets, quartets, with or without choruses, etc.) is also operatic. I should also cite the impulse born of a genre that I love, the comedy of errors, those by Tirso and Shakespeare, especially, and in the novel Our Mutual Friend by Dickens.
24 JUNE
I don’t think there will be the slightest doubt in the reader’s mind that the plot revolves around a settling of accounts between the various Mexican fascist groups during the days immediately following the official declaration of war. The character Briones is a spent cartridge. He’s trapped, doomed before the fact. What remains unclear—but the lack of clarity, the gap in the story, seems necessary to me—is his past in Berlin. The death of his first wife, for example, the agreements he reached in Germany, and with whom, before returning to Mexico. Should I allude more openly to his sexual impotence so that the reader will begin to question the ghostly aspect of their married life? What role does the Jewish doctor, whose ex-wife, also Jewish, Briones ends up marrying, play? But these, in my judgment, are matters for another novel.
26 JUNE
My stay in Mojácar and the novel are finished. Its title: El desfile del amor (Love’s Parade). Day after tomorrow, I’ll be in Barcelona to hand it over to Jorge Herralde at Anagrama.12 From there, I’ll fly to Prague where I’ll await, terrified, if there is a finding, the jury’s verdict.
12Publisher Jorge Herralde is the founder of the prestigious publishing house Editorial Anagrama and namesake of the Herralde Novel Prize, which the novel Pitol references here would win that same year. The prize, which is awarded to an unpublished text and includes publication, has been responsible for launching numerous literary careers. Subsequent winners include Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Juan Villoro. —Trans.
CHARMS
As is known, a charm is an object or animal to which supernatural properties are attributed, beneficial to whomever possesses it.
I do not own anything to which I could honestly ascribe the qualities of a charm, much less one that might have protected me throughout my life. Outside of a few pictures and some books, nothing in my house comes from my childhood, adolescence, or my early youth. I have had paintings that I got rid of, not unlike someone who frees himself of a heavy burden, but with very little emotion. I was fortunate during my travels to find some bibliographic gems, and I also ended up getting rid of those. I have lived in many cities, which involves changing residences frequently; only once did I feel regret when leaving one. Perhaps I have enjoyed the kind of instability I was living, and the huckster-like pleasure of getting rid of my things. I only keep letters, but I do not attribute charm status to them.
I would love for Sacho, a dog I worship, to be my charm; unfortunately, he is not. When he walks up to me, I see in his eyes that I am his, the only powerful and absolute charm he has known in his life. I have collected and sometimes bought small stones, amber and jade beads, whose subsequent loss for a few days made me feel vulnerable to the dangers of the world. But such a feeling soon fades. So, I used to believe in their protective power, but not in excess. Where I glimpse a higher power beyond all reason is in reading. If I receive good news while reading a certain book, it will never lose its magnetic power or its expiatory capacity; so, on the eve of a trip, awaiting an important decision or the news of an X-ray, for example, I must necessarily repeat the readings that have already proved their virtues. My four decisively propitiatory books are: Borges’s The Aleph; The Duenna by Richard Sheridan; and The Court of
Carlos IV and The Baggage of King Joseph by Benito Perez Galdós.
Similarly, I have eliminated books whose reading coincided with a piece of devastating news, a serious setback, or the announcement of a necessary surgery. Thus I have lost books that otherwise would have seemed impossible to let go of. In any event, I consider it fortunate that lightning has not struck those writers who are very important to me: Cervantes, Rulfo, Sterne, or Henry James—that is, those without whom it would be torture to live. This adds to the frequent reading of my favorite authors a trembling uncertainty, a chill, an intensity of emotion, in the face of the terrifying fear that something nefarious might happen during their reading—that a fax might arrive unexpectedly, a phone call, a visitor with horrible news—and that I might be forced to say goodbye to them forever.
Xalapa, February 1996
READINGS
THE GREAT THEATER OF THE WORLD
The events described in The Court of Carlos IV take place in the year 1807. Galdós, through Gabriel Araceli, the narrator-protagonist of the first series of the National Episodes, allows himself to begin the story with an event that transpired two years before: the premiere of Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s comedy, The Maidens’ Consent. Araceli, in fact, acknowledges his participation in the performance that tarnishes the process of personal dignification in which Galdós has consciously and tenaciously implicated him.
The historical event depicted in the Episode involves a palace plot hatched by the Prince of Asturias against his parents, the King and Queen. Delaying this account in order to recreate the rather droll circumstances of a theater performance might seem disproportionate and even incongruous. And, yet, it is not. The novel’s architecture requires the initial appearance of a dramatic scene that insinuates the interplay between life—as everyday reality or historical fact—and the theater. The novel thus opens with the premiere of a work that endeavored to change Spanish theater, to free it from the extravagances that plagued it and to introduce, at last, dramatic precepts and a didactic and moral zeal. An effort that, from the beginning, was opposed by old playwrights, actors, and in large part by the audience, who considered a theater based on rules to be a foreign imposition—French, for added insult!—an affront not only to their theatrical tastes and preferences but also to national sentiment. The very idea of subjecting the theater to rules, “the dramatic unities” of place, time and action—catchphrases that few were able to understand and, therefore, were interpreted in the most outlandish ways—was an outrage. The French were different, this was well known. Let them keep their Corneille and Racine and their exacting rules! That Lope de Vega had not allowed himself to be inveigled by such nonsense made him far superior to the foreigners. That the unities came from France made the affront even more visceral. To establish a set of symmetries, Galdós closes The Court of Carlos IV with a representation of Othello in a palace theater, a rather free Spanish translation of a French variation of Shakespeare’s play, a piece absolutely foreign to any of those precepts “obsequiously obeyed” by the Frenchified Moratín. The tale opens and closes framed by two theatrical performances. But there’s more. Some of the actors who stage Othello are professionals (including one who existed in real life: the great Isidoro Máiquez) who belonged to the renowned company of the Teatro del Príncipe; others are aristocrats who were acting aficionados. There are love affairs between the nobility and members of the theatrical world, scenes of jealousy, intrigue, and heinous acts of revenge that, from beginning to end, imbue this Episode with an intense theatrical coloring. If the actors are performing all along, the members of the court who have temporarily joined them do so even more.
Gabriel Araceli, whom readers met in Trafalgar, the first Episode of the series, has undergone visible changes in his attitude and lifestyle. He has awakened, sharpened his wit, and is much more aware of himself as an individual. The pretensions of the courtly city and, above all, his daily interaction with actors have given him a presence he could have hardly acquired in Vejer, the small Andalusian town where we left him. Araceli believes that he has had an exceptional run of luck; shortly after arriving in Madrid, dogged by hunger and difficulties of an unspecified nature, he manages to enter the service of Pepa González, an actress widely celebrated in Madrid for her talent, wit, and, above all, her beauty. During discreet soirées at his mistress’s home, Gabriel attends not only to people of the theater but also to more illustrious personages who, it appears, are unable to find either the happiness or informality that reign in the actors’ homes or in other places, to which they sometimes refer, quietly of course, that attract the cream of Madrid’s demimonde, where knives are brandished when least expected and singing and dancing are abruptly interrupted, transforming the tertulia into a raucous free-for-all.
It is not surprising that because of his connection to theater people and their coterie Gabriel Araceli might at times escape the role assigned to him by Galdós: that of the exemplar of virtues of a ruling class that, out of nowhere, was destined to occupy the space that the nobility had begun to lose. From his youth, Gabriel, whom military honors would soon transform into a member of the new redemptive class, was to represent the ideals of the new society that was taking shape and be the champion of unimpeachable morals. That burden, similar to that which weighed on the “positive hero” of the ideological literature of the twentieth century, tends to diminish in some episodes his verisimilitude as the protagonist, and strips him of the essential inner life necessary to become an entirely convincing character. But the boundless energy of the social fabric that surrounds him saves him from becoming a mechanical doll. Galdós endows him with keen powers of observation, a facility for establishing relationships between characters and situations, the qualities necessary for the proper development of a novel, apt for enriching its dramatic moments, ennobling the heroic ones, and heightening the joyous ones. All this at the cost of suppressing in large part his life of instinct.
In The Court of Carlos IV, Gabriel experiences moments of joyful rebellion against the demiurge. It must not be forgotten that he is in the prime of his life, moves in a social circle free of rigor, and carries himself with great ease in settings where aristocrats, actors, and even less reputable characters are accustomed to exchanging partners. If in the first chapters we find Gabriel chastely in love with a sweet neighbor, a young seamstress, we can also imagine him as the possible future lover of a great lady of the Court, a beautiful countess of exceptional powers at Palace with whom he dreams of repeating that infamous story whose protagonists are the Queen María Luisa de Parma and Manuel Godoy, her minister, whom she plucked out of a barracks and transformed into the most powerful man in the kingdom. Gabriel has become so independent of the fate imposed on him by his creator that, now blinded by the beauty of the supreme Amaranta whose “ideal and stately beauty roused a strange emotion akin to sadness,”13 as her adolescent lover describes her with happy intuition, he embarks on an adventure that overtakes, disillusions, and humiliates him, but that provides him a unique view of the world from above, of its unprecedented powers and also—alas!—its secret vulnerability.
If Trafalgar constitutes an initiation test under the sign of the Epos, The Court of Carlos IV will place before our hero another, more difficult, kind of test. Gabriel has penetrated the world of fiction with weapons and heroic deeds; he has yet to discover other scenarios where battles are fought in secret and surreptitiously, battles that possess another dimension and are fraught with traps and unknown risks. Araceli enters a minefield, the same one that members of the royal family and their closest retinue tread.
Gabriel will walk away from this Episode more cautious than from other apparently more dangerous ones, like the heroic military sieges and memorable battles. Here, the plot flows through two parallel channels: a public one—the conspiracy of the Prince of Asturias, the future Fernando VII, to murder his mother and dethrone his father; and a private one—a relationship of love and jealousy, whose threads have been cleverly woven to
lead to a crime of passion. The two plots continuously intertwine and support each other. The public one is an affair of State; the private one, which gives the story its true body, functions through a mechanism widely used in Renaissance drama; we find it in several of Shakespeare’s comedies, many of Lope’s and Calderon’s, and almost obsessively in Tirso: Pepilla Isidoro loves González Máiquez, who doesn’t even notice her. Máiquez loves the Duchess Lesbia, the Queen’s lady in waiting and secret agent of the Prince of Asturias, who despises him. Lesbia loves Don Juan de Mañara, a handsome officer of the King’s guard and also agent of the Prince of Asturias, who is deceiving her with a wench from the slums of Madrid. Everyone is jealous of everyone. Two of the characters from the romantic entanglement are already embroiled in the Palace plot. The Countess Amaranta, who neither loves nor is loved by anyone, participates in a scheme to punish Lesbia’s disloyalty. The fake knife with which Máiquez, in the role of Othello, will punish the wantonness of Desdemona, played by Lesbia, will be replaced at the last moment by a real one that will be plunged into the heroine’s chest. At that moment, Gabriel will act with great courage and race to prevent the crime.
The tone of the Episode is unmistakably Goyaesque. It could not be otherwise. The very title recalls Goya’s most celebrated painting, The Family of Carlos IV. Goya was the official court painter of the Crown. In that role, he painted a series of portraits of Carlos IV and the Queen María Luisa, of Fernando as Prince of Asturias and as King of Spain, of the rest of the infantes, the royal children, the large canvas on which the entire family appears, as well as a remarkable portrait of Godoy. The actor Isidoro Máiquez was also painted by Goya; his portrait hangs today in the Museo del Prado, near the King and Queen and the infantes. Amaranta, in a fit of capriciousness and defiance, had Goya paint her nude, which leads us immediately to associate her with The Nude Maja. The curtains for the performance of Othello, we are told, were also painted by Goya. The Aragonese painter is present everywhere and at all times.