by Sergio Pitol
After translating The Gates of Paradise, someone handed me Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind. When I finished reading it, I had the feeling that someone had just given me an inexplicable beating. I found it inconceivable that the exiled poet had been able to incorporate into his book such a hurtful and offensive biography of a writer whom the best Poles considered a paradigm of national dignity. The fact that Milosz would begin this text by recounting an intimate childhood friendship, almost a brotherhood, and would recount some of the most heinous moments shared during the German occupation, as well as after, seemed to make the insult more powerful. It was like someone’s boasting of having stabbed someone in the back, only later to reveal flippantly that the dead man was his own brother. The Captive Mind appeared in the U.S. in 1951 during the harshest moments of the Cold War, and, as always with a political book written with honesty, it irritated both the left and right. It was in no way a mere political pamphlet but an autobiographical account that included an infinite number of nuances, that tried to explain to the foreign reader the complex knot of passions and experiences that made the history of his country something very different from that of other European nations. It was not about a world of absolute good and evil but the result of circumstances inherited over centuries, a feverish world, strained by history. When Milosz received the Nobel Prize, he made one of his first trips to Poland after a thirty-year absence. There was an emotionally charged event during which the poet read his work. In the front row sat Andrzejewski. They were, apparently, no longer enemy brothers.
Shortly before beginning these pages, I reread The Captive Mind and found it remarkable; the immense changes in Poland, unthinkable during the period in which Milosz wrote, put many things into perspective and clarified others. There is a passion evident in the book not too different from that experienced during a civil war: discovering that a brother has gone to the opposing camp is an affront that cannot be forgiven, the wound that takes longest to heal, many threads become entangled at once, very delicate tapestries move in an unpredictable way, stage by stage, the brother’s past conduct is examined, and in each of them grounds for reproof are found, an unbearable tension is reached until a trigger, any trigger, produces the explosion. Milosz alludes repeatedly to the extraordinary pride and unbearable arrogance with which Andrzejewski carried himself; he recognizes his almost suicidal activity and value of his work during the darkest years of the German occupation, but forever regrets the major role such activity disguised; he even goes so far as to reproach him for being so perfect during the terrible years when life was constantly at stake. He finds that same organizational drive, that is, leadership, during the period of Communist militancy. He minimizes the quality of Ashes and Diamonds, which he points to as a sample of ideological literature, about which he is mistaken.
Surely Andrzejewski must have been insufferable, both in his role as Catholic intellectual and as well as that of Communist writer. We now know that these events are only a fragment of a longer history that was far from being finished when The Captive Mind appeared. Everything that followed exacted a heavy price. Renouncing with a minute handful of writers his membership in the Communist Party in protest of the Russian military occupation in Hungary in 1956 was not a joking matter. A decision of that caliber in a country where the Party was in power, and doing so during those years, had something of the unreal and much of the truly heroic about it. One left the Party by death or expulsion, and it is well known what was meant by expulsion. Writing and publishing the literature that Andrzejewski produced thereafter also exacted an enormous toll. It is possible that his personal liberation, and his decision not to make concessions, was based on the fiendish pride that was the most visible characteristic of his personality. Perhaps, deep down, driven by some earlier religious zeal, he would have liked to have been a martyr and to have died as such. He did not. He managed instead to leave behind perfect pages, of which The Gates of Paradise is perhaps the clearest proof.
When the Polish author spoke in the Bristol’s café of the great literary challenges and the desire to achieve the greatest possible form as a maximum virtue, I thought of The Gates of Paradise. The difficulties involved were immense. To begin with, the novel consists of only two single sentences, the first consisting of one hundred and fifty pages; the other, just five words.
And in that first never-ending sentence weaves a complex and dark story in which, unhindered by a single period to fragment it, the confessions of the five adolescents who lead this illusory crusade become intermingled, a crusade that will never succeed in reaching the gates of Jerusalem and that will not even get close to them. It has been thirty years since I translated this enigmatic book whose center seems to shift at every moment. I was afraid that it had aged. Not so, its poetics has weathered time perfectly, and its meaning, in spite of how explicit its confessions seem, seems even more secretive now. We come to know in great detail the love story of each of the adolescents who appear partially and piecemeal during the general confession by an insistent iterative exercise. We come to know the dramas that darken their lives, but could that be the goal of the story? Or did the author simply create a particularly refined style and a purely formal architecture for the pleasure of experiencing new narrative processes? Those questions distract us in order to keep the novel’s very center hidden and wrapped in armor, to the point of preventing us from knowing with absolute certainly in which section it is located.
Four adolescents from the village of Cloyes march toward Jerusalem to deliver the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the infidels: Maud, the daughter of a blacksmith; Robert, the miller’s son; Blanche, the daughter of a carpenter; and Jacques, a shepherd who does not know who his parents are. Accompanying them is Alexis Melissen, a Byzantine Greek, Count of Chartres and Blois, titles he inherited from his late adoptive father. Everything begins when the shepherd Jacques ventures down to the village square one night, as if suffering hallucinations, and interrupts a feast with these words:
“The Lord God Almighty has revealed to me that because of the blindness and cowardice of kings, princes and knights, it is fitting that the children of Christ should go, for the love of God, unto the relief of the city of Jerusalem that is fallen into the hands of the infidel Turk, God the all-powerful has chosen ye, for the confident faith and innocence of children, greater than all the powers on land and sea, are able to accomplish the most holy miracles, therefore possess your hearts with pity, for the Holy Land and for the desolate sepulchre and tomb of Jesus…”27
In The Children’s Crusade Schwob presents in succession the children’s monologues, as well as those of some characters who participated in this unprecedented enterprise. Andrzejewski, on the other hand, strives for simultaneity. In the endlessly interwoven opening sentence, the author integrates the stories of the four crusaders from Cloyes with that of Alexis Melissen, who voluntarily joins the group of modest artisans who heed the divine call. The exercise of confession sets the tale in motion. A unique receptacle has been created into which the information extracted from their confessions, as well as the self-confession of the old priest, flows and is collected. The call to the crusade is submerged in a complex tapestry of passions: loves of gleaming purity alongside others born of bloodshed, nourished by it, hidden beneath ominous burdens. Every character, both chaste and lascivious, has learned that suffering is the shadow of all love, that love divides into love and suffering, and that this will be one of the musical lines that will run throughout the book. The words of each of the children are echoed by those of the others; each confession modifies, expands, or clarifies those of their companions. A system of constant reiterations links the diverse monologues in the mind of the confessor, which provides the illusion of simultaneity. The long-awaited multum in parvo of the epigrammatic poets is achieved here through excess, fragmentation, and verbal interaction.
The novel begins with a cruel dream, filled with horrors and terrifying omens. The old priest dreams of two adolescents who move wi
th great difficulty through an implacable desert. One of them falls prostrate on the sand; before dying, his moribund lips emit an exhortation to the other to continue the journey until he reaches Jerusalem’s immense Gates of Paradise and carry out the magnificent task that has been entrusted to him: the liberation of the Sepulcher of Christ. The other, even weaker and more defenseless, continues the march at a faltering pace, feeling the empty air with his hands, as if he were about to touch with them, the long-awaited walls. Suddenly, he turns his face toward the priest and sees his empty eyes, eyes that will never behold the towers or the walls of the holy city. At that moment, the priest discovers with horror that the martyred face is that of the enlightened leader Jacques de Cloyes. The revelation terrifies him. It is necessary to find the source of the evil dream to understand its meaning. He decides to undertake a general confession, to probe the children’s souls, to discover whether one harbors a dark sin, and, of course, to absolve it. At the end of the third day the general confession will end with that of the five children of Cloyes, the first to begin the march. The priest is determined to forgive everything. Nothing will stop the crusade. His long life as confessor has taught him that the desire for faith can also be born from suffering, misfortune, and destruction, and that the same poisoned sources are capable of generating a miracle. And that miracle can be none other than the rescue of the Sepulcher of Christ. He will be present at the supreme moment. He senses that his death is near, but that death will attain a greatness that his life has never known. Assisting in the mission undertaken by the children, entering with them into Jerusalem, prostrate at the finally-liberated tomb of the Lord, will endow his existence with the highest meaning to which it is possible to aspire.
As the confession progresses a moral conflict begins to loom, which the author was unable to do without and which functions as the strongest pillar of the story; without that ethical reflection the novel would still be amazing, but would run the risk of suffering from a decorative and archaeological saturation, as is the case with Flaubert’s Salammbô, which would be entirely foreign to his intentions. Those battles between instinct, faith, and reason that Andrzejewski considered essential in the work of Dostoevsky are also present in his account and confer on them a modernity that could render incidental the fact that the action transpires in the early twelfth century.
“It’s no use,” Alexis Melissen confesses, attributing these thoughts to his adopted father, “all is vain apart from shame and prejudice, the satisfaction of the senses does not still desire and lust, for as soon as one desire is satisfied a hundred others awaken even more imperiously actions born of the purest desires end in remorse and infamy and perhaps there are no pure desires, the need for violence and cruelty takes possession of man’s nature, he flees from it in a trembling and shame-filled solitude, then, drawn back once more into the ravening pack, driven by folly and the furies of physical strength, again he goes murdering and violating right and left until the moment of awakening arrives and then man finds himself once more alone in his solitude but because of the criminal gravity of his folly even more solitary than before and in that absolute solitude, in the prison of his flesh and spirit, he searches desperately and in vain for some way out, but there is no way out, he snatches blindly and vainly at what appear to be promises of salvation, but he can forget himself only in violence, a violence bereft of illusions, naked and black as hatred…”
The fatality with which man is drawn to crime, as if it were his only possible destiny, finds in that abstract struggle (like that contained in the mystery plays) the grace, the redemption, or the reason to save him. The search for good is as present in man as his instinct toward evil. The confessor knows this well: “No man could be evil all this life, and it can happen that when he has lost all hopes and all illusions a man kills this man in him and voluntarily takes his own life in a second of time and yet still goes on living, but in order to kill within him the need for love and the need for hope he has to live through many long, painful years, like a drowning man grasping at air, seizing a handful of water, now when the man in him is still not entirely dead and still walks the somber haunts of evil, if there be even the feeblest glimmer of good, of yearning for good in him, the man will crouch over that little wavering flame in order to delude himself in moments of solitude that what he sees there then, uncertain and weak, could still, with a favorable wind, be transformed into an immense blaze.”
The ending is terrible. The last confessant, Jacques de Cloyes, who was thought to be illuminated by the grace of God, cannot be absolved. What the child believes to be an illumination in fact is not. The confessor understands that he must stop the march of madness, of innocence, of passions, and of lies. He also understands that his initial dream, that of a blind youth with hands groping the air while another dies in the desert was a premonition; that if he does not stop the thousands of children, they will perish along the way, and that he, poor and old, will not be granted the grace to reach Jerusalem with them, that he will not be witness to the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher. He stops and cries out in the middle of the night in an attempt to stop the children, but to no avail. Plunged into darkness, strengthened by their chants, the children will continue the march. Their voices will drown the words of the only man who has managed to understand the reason. And the heavy arm of a cross will knock him down, and the children will pass over his dying body as over a mere rough spot on the ground, and one after another will walk on him until his entire body is sunken into the mire.
Is the story perhaps a metaphor that draws us closer to events that occurred in a recent past? Will this march that progresses blindly amid chants and canopies and crosses toward an impossible end that rejects reason serve as an allusion to the permanent trepidation that has shaken our century, where the status of some words has led to nothing but unrest, cruelty, and madness? It is evident that God has not inspired the crusade. The illuminated pastor, in the constant transfer of passions that the novel records, wants to become someone else, to save his soul and free it from terrible guilt. Only chance, that night when Jacques de Cloyes went out into the square, interrupted a party, and implored the children to deliver the Holy Sepulcher, could prevent him from being branded insane. A moment was enough to save him, the acceptance of a girl who loves him, and then that of the boy who loves that girl, and so on to infinity. From that moment, once again, the energy of error showed its efficacy. Thousands of children abandoned their homes, traveled the roads of Europe, adding their voices and steps to a cause already lost.
The human and the sacred, the rational and the oneiric, the individual and the herd, love without hope and the assault of the body, the shadow of a dark present and the haziness of a time lost in the dawn of the twelfth century, an ancient history difficult to verify and an uncertain hope in the future—all will be added to Andrzejewski’s tireless sentence (that syntax that now seems familiar because great novelists have employed and even exaggerated in recent years, but in 1957, when The Gates of Paradise appeared, it was absolutely unheard of) and will help transform it into the masterpiece that it undoubtedly is.
Xalapa, November 1995
27Translated by James Kirkup
OUR ULYSSES
I must have been eleven or twelve when I first heard the name José Vasconcelos mentioned. Once, while on holiday in Mexico City, where one of my aunts on my father’s side lived, I picked up a book someone had left on a chair and glanced at it absentmindedly. It was Vasconcelos’s The Storm. I was turning the pages mechanically, almost by inertia, more or less disinterested, when my aunt appeared—she had generously provided me with the canonical readings that corresponded to my changes in age: fairytales, Verne, London, Stevenson, Dickens; I think during the period in reference we had made it to Tolstoy. She seemed surprised to see that particular book in my hands. Without giving the matter too much importance, she casually suggested that I read something else; the book dealt with issues that were too complex—she told me—and since I did no
t know enough about the history of Mexico, I would only be bored. I thanked her for her advice. At home they had tried to interest me in the voluminous encyclopedia of Mexican history, México a través de los siglos, where from the opening statement of purpose I felt lost. Everything would have remained there had my aunt that night during dinner not mentioned the incident, adding some mysterious reference to my precociousness. She commented that she had found me absorbed in one of the more lurid passages of the book, which, if true, had occurred unbeknownst to me. That comment led to a heated discussion. A doctor who was an intimate family friend vociferously expressed his admiration for the Maestro and his revulsion for the immoral manner in which the country had repaid his efforts. His books claimed not one but many truths that no one in Mexico had had the courage to utter, adding that, unlike so many hypocrites and prigs, he was not appalled that the Maestro—for years when anyone mentioned Vasconcelos’s name, they placed before it the word “Maestro,” a term that instantly added a patina of greatness and martyrdom—had described his passions in such a stark fashion. The Maestro could allow himself the luxury of talking about his lovers and about any other matter he damn well pleased. “Read it,” he told me, “don’t allow them to keep anything from you; read it, it’ll do you good. You’ll find out what it means to be a real man in the midst of a bunch of lackeys and cowards.” Later, the conversation became even livelier with anecdotes about the personage—his past, his women, his presidential campaign, his defeat, and his faith in Mexico—whom the nation had failed to appreciate.
After returning from the holidays, I found at our house Creole Ulysses and The Storm. Works, I suppose, that appeared obligatorily on the bookshelves of every enlightened middle-class family in Mexico. I mentioned the lively discussion that took place in Mexico City, and to my surprise, my uncle (my guardian) did not find it amusing. The very mention of Vasconcelos immediately imposed a tone of sober respect. He confirmed Vasconcelos’s extraordinary worth, the admiration he deserved, and added that, in fact, I was not yet old enough to read these books, the memoir The Storm in particular, which dealt with personal issues about which it made no sense for me to know. Naturally, I concluded that these issues were the Maestro’s “women.” My grandmother spent much of her time buried in novels. She did not share my uncle’s notion of progressive readings in relation to my age; all of her books were at my disposal. If I had been allowed to read Zola’s Nana and, on the other hand, was not allowed to go near the pages of The Storm, it must mean they contained truly apocalyptic scenes. Perhaps it was a book similar to those written by Peral or “El Caballero Audaz,” two of the most vulgar pornographers of the time, whom a classmate of mine had discovered in his older brother’s bedroom, and whom we read in secret, more bewildered than excited.