The eleventh reading occurred in 1968, after the Tlatelolco massacre, after the university was occupied by the army, after the march of tanks through the streets of Mexico. It was a tense and exceptionally political reading in which “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and “Denmark is a prison” were the key phrases of the tragedy. Elsinore Castle becomes a prison, where the protagonists constantly lay traps and spy ceaselessly and without rest. Polonius sends messengers to Paris to follow the steps of Laertes, his son, and to send reports of his conduct. Polonius also, with the backing of the King and Queen, spies constantly on Hamlet. The King summons Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to the castle to provoke Hamlet and to discover what he is plotting. Hamlet himself asks Horatio to scrutinize the King’s face during the performance recommended to the players. All characters set upon each other; every gesture or word is cautiously examined to discover the mysteries of the souls of others. My friend Esguerra, after his eleventh reading, became convinced that Hamlet was a political tragedy. Shakespeare, in his historical dramas, presents his spectators with an X-ray of the workings of absolute power. No character is exempt from its contamination if he hopes to survive. Many times my friend had believed that the melancholy prince of Denmark was the perfect archetype of indecision, sorrow, and quietism, but in the end it turns out he is not. His rejection of action, his reputation for absenteeism do not prevent him throughout the tragedy from killing Polonius, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, committing regicide, and bearing the utmost responsibility for the suicide of Ophelia.
When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, terror was gripping London. In 1601, the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex, his Maecenas and friend, was discovered, and he was executed. The wings of the Tower of London filled day after day with the most illustrious youth of England. The Queen did not spare her one-time favorite, and not even his beheading satisfied her. It was necessary to destroy his seed, his family and friends, the philosophers and poets who had once surrounded him. Little is known of Shakespeare during the two years that this nightmare lasted. His was, there is no doubt, the only pen of prestige in the kingdom that did not sing the glories of Elizabeth of England at the time of her death in 1603.
This rereading influenced those that followed, especially the last, that the now elderly Gustavo Esguerra completed in his hospital bed a few hours before expiring. In this reading he was surprised afresh that in the final act Hamlet would accept the invitation of Claudius, the illegitimate king, the murderer of his father, the corrupter of his mother, his bitter enemy, to engage in a fencing match with Laertes, which caused him to wonder if Shakespeare might have considered at this point in the work that the purpose that had led him to write it had been accomplished, and therefore, that his only interest was to finish it. And what better way to start the laborious denouement than having Hamlet exchange a few blows of the sword with the overwhelmed Laertes, whose father he had murdered, and whose sister, the delicate, fragile, and accursed Ophelia, he had caused to lose her mind and also her life! To achieve this end, it was necessary that one of the foils be envenomed, the same one that would be missing a button on the tip, and if all else failed, a glass of wine would be poisoned, as was the entire atmosphere of Denmark.
It is the most implausible part of the drama, the most resistant to comprehension.
Might that false duel of sport serve as mere support to the drama’s carpentry? Might Hamlet be obeying his demiurge while at the same time rebelling against the pen? Might he be compelled to accept a duel prepared by the King, who has bet a large sum on the victory of his stepson, which would imply an affront to everything that Hamlet has hitherto represented, and to Laertes as well, with whom he would play sportingly after having killed his father and caused the suicide of his sister? Or might it be a subtle process by which the author might try to insinuate that, if indeed Claudio is a monster for killing the legitimate king, and Gertrude, upon marrying him, has become his accomplice and is as guilty as he, then Hamlet, in whom from the beginning the author has forced us to place our faith, is not the young hero able to bring order to this senseless world but rather a hopelessly frivolous youth who has inadvertently killed several people, some entirely innocent, and not the culprit designated by the ghost of his father? Or might he simply want to show us that the Prince’s unbearable sorrows have ended up deteriorating his mental faculties? As simple as that? Perhaps so, one must remember that when we met him he was a young philosopher newly arrived from Wittenberg University, beset by infinite doubts; shortly thereafter he is introduced to us as the architect of an exemplary punishment destined for the murderer of his father, and later as a false madman. Why not assume then that in the end the pressures and disorder of this world and the next, which the dead inhabit and from where he receives instructions, have ended up plunging him into madness? Is it possible that from so much pretending he has chosen to take refuge in it, and thus escape all the grief that overwhelms him?
My friend, the long-time reader, the moribund Gustavo Esguerra, ponders from his sickbed whether perhaps Hamlet’s willingness to take part in that absurd fencing match might be a mere theatrical convention of the time, where so often excess exceeds coherence, and he was counting on the author’s willingness as well as that of a complacent public provided it received a brilliant performance, opulent in its movements, tropes, and characters of all kinds, everything drenched in spilt blood, according to the appetite of the time, at the end of that excessive tragedy. Hamlet will behave as the man who must restore order in the universe that has been brutally distorted. The guilty will be eliminated; Shakespeare conceived the sporting duel knowing that the denouement was within sight. In a single scene both the King and Queen will die, and with them Hamlet and Laertes, divided friends whom only the approach of death will reunite. The valiant Fortinbras would enter; unblemished by guilt he would bid a resounding farewell to the corpse of the Prince and peacefully gird the crown. Would darkness withdraw from Denmark? Would the stench of rottenness evaporate? In this old kingdom, rid of tribulation, would history begin again? As a man of the theater, Shakespeare was obsessed more with staging than by the publication of his works. In a good performance, Hamlet’s willingness to cross swords with Laertes produces no objection, as happens in reading. By contrast, the scene works splendidly and offers a perfect ending. Esguerra relates the scene to another excessively sensationalist one, where the Prince throws himself into the tomb where the body of Ophelia lies; he senses a possible connection between the two situations, but he fails to establish it. In his search, he recalls lines uttered by the trembling, orphaned Ophelia as she wanders aimlessly the halls of Elsinore.
For Gustavo Esguerra, as for every reader, it was impossible to capture all the mysteries contained in a play by Shakespeare. In his youth, he was dazzled by their intense plots and verbal music. It could not be otherwise! Each reader, according to his abilities, goes about deciphering some of their enigmas over time. Around the middle of the sixties, Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary arrived in his hands. In its pages Kott became convinced of the importance of penetrating, through the Shakespearean text, the contemporary experience, its inquietude and its sensitivity.
There are many subjects in Hamlet. There is politics, force opposed to morality; there is discussion of the divergence between theory and practice, of the ultimate purpose of life; there is tragedy of love, as well as family drama; political, eschatological and metaphysical problems are considered. There is everything you want, including deep psychological analysis, a bloody story, a duel, and general slaughter. One can select at will. But one must know what one selects, and why.9
Hamlet appears to obey his creator, but he always attempts to evade him. For this reason, it is possible to examine and understand him in different ways. In the last hour of his life, Gustavo Esguerra recalled, as I have said, a few lines of Ophelia, whose existence he seemed never to have noticed. A line from Act IV, precisely the scene where the forlorn maiden stumbles
upon the King and Queen, now lost in a delirious verbal maze. Her madness is evident, yet in that dense drama of crimes and punishment the sibylline phrase seems to allude to something very important, very concrete, perhaps an admonition to the heart of the audience: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”10 The old Esguerra, exhausted, repeats it in an increasingly anguished voice. Beside him are a doctor and a nurse. They have just given him an injection. The doctor shakes his head, implying that all is lost. The patient still has the strength to repeat:
“‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be,’ a phrase that would fit perfectly in a play by Pirandello, don’t you think, Doctor?”
These were his dying words.
I’D LIKE TO TAKE A CHANCE. It pleases me to imagine an author who isn’t intimidated by the thought of being demolished by critics. Surely he would be attacked for the novel’s extravagant execution, characterized as a worshipper of the avant-garde, although the very idea of the avant-garde for him is an anachronism. He would withstand a storm of insults and foolish attacks from anonymous frauds. What would truly terrify him would be that his novel might arouse the interest of some foolish and generous critic who claimed to have deciphered the enigmas buried throughout the text and interpreted them as a shameful acceptance of the world that he detests, someone who said that his novel should be read “as a harsh and painful requiem, a heartrending lament, the melancholy farewell to the set of values that in the past had given meaning to his life.” Something like that would destroy and sadden him, would cause him to toy with the idea of suicide. He would repent of his sins; condemn his vanity, his taste for paradox. He would blame himself for not having clarified, just to achieve certain effects, the mysteries in which his plot delights, for having not known how to renounce the vain pleasure of ambiguities. Over time, he would be able to recover; he would forget his past tribulations, his longing for atonement, such that when he starts writing his next novel he will have already forgotten the moments of contrition as well as his efforts to make amends.
And he’ll return to his old habits; he’ll leave unexplained gaps between A and B, between G and H, will dig tunnels everywhere, will put into action an ongoing program of misinformation, will 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’ll write a novel for strong spirits, whom he’ll 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, while the masses, who call a spade a spade, refer to her simply as “the best ass in the world.” For some she’ll 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 Padre 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 informer 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, just as in the narrative, are abominable, cruel, foolish, and ignoble, disinclined to imagination, to generosity, to greatness, and that none of the characters, neither the best nor the worst, deserve the punishment of living in them. Regrettably, I have never written that novel.
DREAMING REALITY. Returning to one’s first texts demands that the adult writer, and I say this from personal experience, use all of his defenses so as not to succumb to the bad emanations that time goes about saving. It would be better to take a vow never to look back! One runs the risk that the return becomes an act of penance or atonement or, a thousand times worse, that it grows soft in the face of ineptitudes that should embarrass him. What the author can scarcely afford, and only passingly, is to document the circumstances that made possible the birth of those initial writings and to confirm, with rigor but without scandal, the poor respiration that his language manifests, the stiffness and pathos imposed on them beforehand.
My first stories ended irremissibly in an anguish that led to the death of the protagonist or, in the most benign of cases, insanity. To find access to dementia, to seek shelter in it, meant glimpsing an ultima Thule, paradise, the island of Utopia, where all tribulations, anguish, and terrors were abolished forever.
The year was 1957, and I was twenty-four. I moved with delight in a circle of intense eccentricity in which friends of different ages, nationalities, and professions coexisted with absolute naturalness, although, as was to be expected, we, the young, prevailed. Outside the orthodoxly eccentric sector, which already had a foot planted in manias and obsessions, we were characterized by our fervor for dialogue, as long as it was amusing and intelligent, our capacity for parody, our lack of respect for prefabricated values, false glories, petulance and, above all, self-complacency. At the same time, mandatory compliance to a tacit but rigid system of behavior was obligatory, such that even if we entered into the heart of absurdity we should not forget good manners. In essence, but also in form, our best defense lay in a certain snobbishness of which today it is impossible to be certain whether we were or were not aware.
One fine day, I noticed that my time and my space had been saturated and contaminated by the outside world and that the din reduced in a lamentable way two of my greatest pleasures: reading and sleeping. It was, it seems to me, the first announcement of a radical distaste, of a diffuse anxiety; in fact, a real fear. Because I had begun to notice that the absorbent worldliness, in which my friends and I aspired to behave like the young protagonists of the earlyfirst Evelyn Waugh, where any situation could get out of hand and transform into an immense folly, and where laughter was the most effective remedy to purify the pools of conceit and solemnity that one could store inadvertently, was beginning to become something very different from the model we proposed. Among the participants in this joyful lifestyle, an attitude began to appear that shortly before had seemed unimaginable to us. Sometimes, when playing the hackneyed game of truth or dare, where a group of friends sitting in a circle on the floor spins a bottle so that someone might ask the person whom the bottle points to any intimacy, any secret proclivity about which he was suspect, rather than being a fun experience, became repugnantly sordid. Instead of witty phrases, it produced cursing, complaints, screams, and obscenities. An intolerable burden had been imposed on us: we passed from play to massacre, from carnival to howling. A newly-married lad suddenly slapped his wife, a sister crudely insulted her brother and his girlfriend, a pair of friends destroyed in a cruelly scandalous way a close friendship of many years. Day after day, hysteria, suspicions, and animosities grew. Everyone seemed to have fallen in love with everyone and jealousy became a collective passion. Our company seemed to feed only on repellent toxins. We began to lose our style.
It became necessary to escape, to move to pastures new, to leave the magma. I rented a house in Tepozt
lán and refurbished it so as to spend extended periods there. Tepoztlán was then a tiny village, isolated from the world, lacking even electric lights. The ideal retreat. I spent splendid days there; I took long walks through the countryside and, above all, I read. I remember on my first stay I buried myself fervently in the prose of Quevedo and the novels of Henry James. At times it seemed that spiritual health was getting closer. It was like living in Tibet without the need to subject oneself to its mystical discipline. The process should not have been so simple, but something happened that from that point on brought me closer to the balance I had longed for. On one occasion, I withdrew there to complete a translation that had been commissioned in a rush. The first day, in the afternoon, I sat down to begin the task, but instead started writing and was unable to stop until dawn. In a few weeks I wrote my first three stories: “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,” “Amelia Otero,” and “The Ferris.” Every line alleviated anxieties from the immediate past (the almost still present) and produced in me a sense of astonishment different from any I had known until then. I wrote, as is usually said, in a kind of fever, in a medium’s trance, but with the irreconcilable difference that, during the exercise, my will consciously ordered the flow of language. I was witnessing, then, the emergence of a form, the application of a mathematics of chaos. That magnificent experience had nothing to do with the insipid writing of a few articles of mine published three or four years earlier.
The Magician of Vienna Page 4