The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  If prison was for Švejk a sign of obvious moral progress, the madhouse then seems to him like a perfect replica of Eden. The protagonist is tireless when singing the magnificence of these tiny paradises. “I’m blowed if I can make out why lunatics kick up such a fuss about being kept there. They can crawl about stark naked on the floor, or caterwaul like jackals, or rave and bite. If you was to do anything like that in the open street, it’d make people stare, but in the asylum it’s just taken as a matter of course. Why, the amount of liberty there is something that even the socialists have never dreamt of. The inmates can pass themselves off as God Almighty or the Virgin Mary or the Pope or the King of England or our Emperor or St. Vaclav, although the one who did him was properly stripped and tied up in solitary confinement. […] I tell you, the life there was a fair treat. You can bawl, or yelp, or sing, or blub, or moo, or boo, or jump, say your prayers or turn somersaults, or walk on all fours, or hop about on one foot, or run round in a circle, or dance, or skip, or squat on your haunches all day long, and climb up the walls. Nobody comes up to you and says: ‘You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, call yourself civilized?’ I liked being in the asylum, I can tell you, and while I was there I had the time of my life.” To Švejk, the only access to utopia, then, is found in the world of the insane.

  As his adventures go by, the protagonist’s heavenly innocence begins to disappear; everything around him seems to grow tense. A foul stench of excrement permeates his surroundings with increasing intensity.

  If in the first part of the novel an occasional scatological allusion helps to create one of those festive atmospheres derived from the old medieval and Renaissance tradition where feces, as Bakhtin shows, were always “a wellbeing of body and spirit,” what is certain is that as the protagonist approaches the front, this element of laughter wrinkles and blackens. The space of hardships that Švejk moves through is transformed into a spectral field whose elements are mud, feces, and blood. Švejk, a rough and incomplete being, an embryonic golem, moves with a somnambulistic step into a landscape populated by latrines. The bodies constantly return their constitutive matter to the ground. Critics attribute such importance to latrines as if the final victory depended on them. The front is transformed into an area of corporal expulsion, where one speaks only of urinals, enemas, diarrhea, suppositories, stained underwear, and fecal stench. More than the military element, Ripellino points out, war is to Hašek a continuous defecation, a bodily act and a diarrheal mud. “Immersed in the filth of the war, the Hapsburg Empire is revealed as an excremental entity, a foul-smelling region of dirty underwear, of enemas and suppositories.”

  In short: an Empire drowning in its own excrement.

  Švejk, the forced pilgrim, begins to shed his friendly bonhomie and resemble a tragic character. He is unable to do it completely because his memory serves as a counterweight that establishes the necessary stability. The world that Švejk recalls is capable of reducing the brutality of war to a mere escalation of the absurd. His voice, despite the incongruity of his speech, continues to be a human voice, and reminds us that until recently men were bound by bonds different to those that the army establishes, ties that were created by mutual sympathies; they were men in the middle of men, not anonymous sleepwalkers with military step.

  The story of Švejk reveals and summarizes the anarchy and lyricism of Prague’s demimonde. Like the characters of Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Jarry, from whom he descends, the protagonist remains in perpetual motion. The novel gives off a certain stench of urine, of the den of miscreants, of poorly digested alcohol. Throughout his ordeal, Švejk keeps moving, not to mention talking. He has no regrets, he doesn’t swear, he simply tries to ignore what happens around him; he doesn’t read books, he barely manages to thumb through a newspaper. His wisdom comes from purely personal experiences, from recounting the actions of the many people upon whom he’s stumbled during his life. Through the river of anecdotes that slows the narrative action (but whose appearance in itself is already the novel), foolishness unpunished, the total absurdity upon which all human destinies depend, is manifested. Sometimes these small tales interpolated within the plot are very simple, which does not subtract from their efficacy: “But such is human existence,” says Švejk. “Man goes around making mistakes and only death stops him. That’s what happened one night to the man who found a rabid dog, frozen half to death; he took it to his room and put it in the bed where he slept with his wife. As soon as the dog came into heat, it began to bite the entire family, ripping the youngest child, who slept in the crib, to pieces and devouring him.” As in Kafka, life reveals itself as a mere transit through different proceedings of an endless trial. But what anguish and heaviness there is in the author of The Trial, in Hašek it is resolved in a cruelty that on the surface always seems to end in a joke. Other times, his digressions disguise an abstraction that intensifies the absurdity of the story, especially those related to the administration of justice: “‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ said Švejk. ‘You’ll be all right in the end, just like Janetchek at Pilsen. He was a gipsy, and in 1879 they were going to hang him for robbery and murder. But he didn’t worry and he kept saying that he’d be all right in the end. And so he was. Because at the last moment they couldn’t hang him, because it was the Emperor’s birthday. So they didn’t hang him till the next day, when the Emperor’s birthday was all over. But he was in luck’s way again, because on the day after he was reprieved and there was going to be another trial, on account of some new evidence that showed it was another fellow named Janetchek who’d done it. So they had to dig him up out of the prison cemetery and give him another, proper burial in the Catholic cemetery at Pilsen, and then it turned out that he wasn’t a Catholic at all, but an evangelical.”

  Czech critics strenuously ignored Hašek’s work for several years. They found the popular vulgarity of the stories of Švejk repellent. But the success of the work abroad changed its destiny. Once again, the generous hand of Max Brod decided the fate of a creator. Just as he had done with Kafka, whose novels he published against the express instructions of the author, or with Leos Janacek, whose libretti he translated into German so that his operas could be sung outside of Czechoslovakia, when the moment was right, he also threw in with Hašek. He translated The Good Soldier Švejk into German, and published the first major critical text on the book. The novel was read voraciously in Austria and Germany. The memory of the recently lived war allowed very different audiences to crystallize in this book their rejection of a disastrous period. One did not have to wait long for its fame to begin to permeate the literary circles of the new Czechoslovakian Republic, reluctant to accept this novel of life in the barracks. Over the years, paradoxically, Hašek’s book became the first contemporary classic in the Czech language, and Švejk one of the country’s emblematic figures.

  Mexico City, December 1991

  19The surname Švejk appears in various English translations and editions as Schweik, Schwejk, and Švejk. The quotes that appear here have been taken from Paul Selver’s 1930 translation for Doubleday & Co, which uses the Germanized spelling Schweik. Selver’s translation was later reissued by Penguin Classics using the Czech spelling Švejk, which I have chosen to replicate. All other aspects of the translation remain the same. —Trans.

  20Translated by Paul Selver

  21Translated by Katherine Parthé

  BOROLA AGAINST THE WORLD

  I’m rereading materials for a book I’m endeavoring to write. It is meant to be a record of my journey—the history of a still-unfinished education. As I read, I find leftovers of snobbishness I thought I had rid myself of: among others, the tendency to quote visibly famous readings. It is not a question of invention or forgery, in no way am I interested in pretending to be a reader that I am not; it’s just that I have excluded other more “plebeian” books or, shall we say, more “ordinary” ones, which have been tremendously important in my life.

  I have always resis
ted consuming books that are trendy or fashionable. My map of readings has been drawn more or less at random, by fate, temperament, and very much by hedonism. I am fascinated by the eccentrics. For over forty years I have been an avid reader of the novels of Ronald Firbank, when in England his audience was all but non-existent; also of the esoteric novels of H. Myers, which only a tiny handful of faithful have approached. I wrote about Flann O’Brien when the readers of At Swim-Two-Birds numbered scarcely a few dozen—all willing to die for that exceptional book.

  I try to watch myself, to be careful not to manufacture tastes, fence myself in. I could cite impressive titles; swear that each one is a bedside book. I would be lying. On a trip to New York, a thousand years ago, a female friend pressured me to acquire the six volumes of The Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki in the tenth century and translated into English by the eminent Arthur Waley. My friend claimed to be sure that when I returned to Mexico I would devour them immediately, that those books written ten centuries ago had been patiently awaiting me; she did not say that they would come to influence my literature because at that time I did not have the slightest idea that one day I would begin to write. The influence did not happen, for the simple reason that even today there are still books with uncut pages in my small Japanese section. I have not read the Alexiad by Anna Comnena, which I found in a magnificent secondhand bookshop next door to the Hotel Metropol in Moscow—an edition in perfect condition, translated into English by Elizabeth Dawes. The manager of the bookshop lectured me on the work, to which he always referred as “the golden rose of Byzantine letters.” He assured me, among other things, that it was one of Bakhtin’s passions. I have leafed through it once, but so far have not found the energy to go any further. Anyway, as long as I am confessing, I will state that I have not even read Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, a book that changed the lives of Borges, Mann, and many other famous writers. At this point, it is possible that I will never get to it, but on the other hand, I am certain that I will still reread several of Dickens’s, an author who in my youth caused more than a few select spirits to wrinkle their nose.

  Reading is a secret game of approximations and distances. It is also a lottery. One arrives at a book by unusual means; one stumbles upon an author by apparent coincidence only to never be able to stop reading him. I have quoted in articles, in interviews, in the body of my own novels several writers to whom I consider myself indebted, but never, as far as I can remember, did I mention one of my principal sources. Recently, while writing some notes on Carlos Monsiváis, I found in his anthology of chronicles some pages dedicated to Gabriel Vargas. Stumbling upon the image of Borola, seeing her, nearly naked, shake her long-legged body, marked a beautiful reunion. She sang and danced to her battle hymn:

  I move my hips a lot.

  I shake them when I walk.

  Why do you give up on me?

  I can’t help it, you see…

  Doing cucuchí, cucuchí…

  Doing cucuchí, cucuchí…

  I move cautiously, doing arabesques, as if afraid to arrive at this obligatory confession: My debt to Gabriel Vargas is immense. My sense of parody, my play with the absurd, come from him and not, as I would like to be able to boast, from Gogol or Gombrowicz. Who is Gabriel Vargas? you might ask. Well, he is a fabulous cartoonist, one of whose comic strips, perhaps the most famous, was called La familia Burrón.

  In mid-1953, after spending a few months in Venezuela, upon returning to university, I ran into two dear friends, Alicia Osorio and Luis Prieto. They greeted me with all the warmth in the world, only to start talking seconds later about Borola, Reginito, Cristeta, and Ruperto, and laughing hysterically as they celebrated the hijinks of those zany characters. Every time I tried to interject into the conversation some incident from the trip, my stops in Havana and Curaçao, the season in Caracas and, above all, stories from the sea-crossing on the Francesco Morosini and the Andrea Gritti, my first boats, they appeared to be listening to me, but at the first pause, they’d return to the world of Borola. The next day, Luis brought to school the latest issue of La familia Burrón. From that day on, I was a devoted reader for many years.

  Occasionally Luis Prieto, Monsiváis, and I would run into each other at dinner at the homes of mutual friends, and on more than one occasion at the gatherings we unleashed torrents of laughter as we discussed one of the comic strip’s new episodes. Nothing mattered to us outside of whatever was happening to Borola Burrón. Our more tolerant friends, when they realized the waters we were swimming in, treated us like victims of late measles from which we would eventually recover. But there were those who took Borola’s circumstances personally, as if her horrifying stories penetrated hidden parts of their being; they began to behave with exaggerated Proustian refinement; they cooed like doves about Vermeer, Palladio, the china they had inherited from grand-maman, their first summer on the Côte d’Azur. They switched from Spanish to French in the middle of brilliant and witty phrases, as if every gesture, every word, functioned to maintain as much distance as possible between them and the tenement-patio where the Burróns lived. They were annoyed by the specter of a Mexico that they did not wish to acknowledge—a radiant, barbaric, innocent, and grotesque Mexico that they could not accept, with a much more vibrant language than the foppish grisaille in which they communicated. Distancing oneself from that world meant not remembering the aunt who ran away with a nobody and ended up working in a French dry cleaners, a very respectable business, certainly, even elegant, but a dry cleaners nonetheless; or the grandfather’s rambling deathbed confession about the origin of his fortune, which, in the end, could be the product of senility, but for a long time troubled the family. Someone else might recall the uncle who showed up once or twice a year with grease spots on his tie or lapels. And then begin to talk again, now in a shrill voice, about Vermeer, the moment when Swann first entered the Guermantes’s house, César Frank’s sonata, and other niceties.

  Luis Prieto and I visited Don Alfonso Reyes every other week. One day, either by chance or by choice, the conversation turned to Gabriel Vargas and his comic strip; he applauded the appeal of its popular speech and extraordinary melodic styling. When we repeated it, no one believed it.

  We were blaspheming! When he said the same thing later in a newspaper interview, some must have thought that, like the aforementioned grandfather, our polygraph was doddering.

  The Vargas comic strip recreated the prevailing melting pot of Mexico City and its immense mid-century social mobility. La familia Burrón was organized around a married couple: Don Regino Burrón, the sole proprietor and operator of El Rizo de Oro, a beauty salon in a poor neighborhood, and his wife Borola Tacuche, who lives a life of eternal conflict. Don Regino is a paragon of modest virtues—wisdom, honesty, thrift—but is also the most perfect expression of ennui and lack of imagination. Borola, on the other hand, represents anarchy, abuse, cheating, excess, and at the same time imagination, fantasy, risk, insubordination, and, above all, the unfathomable possibilities of the joy of living. Determined to conquer the world, to make it to the top, she takes everything on: business, politics, and entertainment. She fails at everything. She returns defeated from each experience to her lair, the cacophonous courtyard from which apparently it is impossible to escape. But at the very moment she returns to her faithful Reginito’s side to apologize for her shenanigans and to swear never to return to her old ways, she’s already plotting a new adventure even more outrageous than the last. The secondary characters, the other family members, move in opposing circles. There’s tía Cristeta, the millionairess who lives with Marcel, her pet alligator with which she takes a plunge every morning in a pool of champagne; and there’s Borola’s brother, Ruperto, a hapless gangster and perpetual fugitive from justice whose face we never see. The main couple is only able to reconcile for a time: revolt and submission do not a happy marriage make. The world outside this courtyard of destitute houses is governed and sustained by corruption and arrogance: corrupt
police, corrupt inspectors, corrupt judges, and corrupt bureaucrats. I imagine that the vast majority of readers, myself included, sided with Borola, for whom all the recriminations, sermons, moralizing, and advice go in one ear and out the other. The effect is the same as that produced by many of the English novels that scrutinize Victorian morality. Who does not prefer the unscrupulous Becky Sharp over the whitewashed tombs who inhabit Vanity Fair? Who among us who has read Treasure Island at the appropriate age does not prefer Long John Silver, the ruthless and seductive pirate, to the solemn gentlemen who advise Jim Hawkins in his business and who, let us not forget, will share in the coveted treasure on which the novel is based?

  In a world of insufferable yuppies, the name Borola is an anachronism. Recalling her sends me back to a vibrant time and a place now gone.

  Xalapa, February 1996

  TWO WEEKS WITH THOMAS MANN

  For Juan Villoro