That was my first active foray into literature, my leap into writing.
It never failed to amaze me that the resulting texts had no connection, at least in appearance, with the historical circumstances of the moment. On the contrary, it harkened me back to times before my own existence. I didn’t write about the capital, where I lived, but rather about the small town where my grandmother lived for many years, where my parents were born, were adolescents, and were married, where my brother was also born. The plots, the characters, the shower of details with which I attempted to create the appropriate atmosphere came from stories that during my childhood and adolescence I heard my grandmother tell again and again. They were stories nestled in an eternally yearned-for Eden: the world that the revolution had turned to ashes. I’ll forever find it strange that of all the reminiscences made by my grandmother and her friends of the same age of that proclaimed paradise, the only thing I retained was an endless string of disasters, evil, and revenge that led me to suspect that in my legendary San Rafael (the name that concealed Huatusco) the presence of the devil far exceeded that of the angels. Perhaps that is the reason for the too frequent mention of the devil in those early stories, which freezes the development of the plot, paralyzes the characters and creates an unnecessary and cumbersome climate of wickedness.
I had managed by way of these stories to unburden myself of some uncomfortable ghosts. They might not be those of the present, but indeed those I lived with during my childhood. As I look back, the time that passed from the moment I traced in Tepoztlán with a sleepwalker’s hand the story of a tragic misunderstanding—the story of the fruitless obedience of Victorio Ferri, a child consumed by madness, who, convinced that his father is the devil, commits, to be kind, all manner of vileness that might seem appropriate for the son and heir of evil, only to discover while dying that none of it had been worthwhile, that the happiness he detected in the face of his father is due to the certainty that he is a step away from freeing himself of him, to discover it at the gates of death—even today, forty years later, as I write these pages, it compels me to repeat what I said on other occasions: what unifies my existence is literature; all that I have lived, thought, longed for, imagined is contained in it. More than a mirror it is an X-ray: it is the dream of the real.
I owe to Infierno de todos [Everyone’s Hell] having extricated myself from a lapsed world that wasn’t mine, that was related only tangentially to me, which allowed me to approach literature with greater fidelity to the real. I noticed this with greater clarity during a period of tenacious reading of Witold Gombrowicz. For him, literature and philosophy must emanate from reality, because only then would they, in turn, have the ability to infer from it. Everything else, the Polish writer insisted, was tantamount to an act of onanism, to the replacement of the language of the inane cult of writing for writing’s sake and the word for word’s sake. When speaking of the real and reality I am referring to a vast space, different from what others understand for those terms when they confuse reality with a deficient and parasitic aspect of existence, fueled by conformity, bad press, political speeches, vested interests, telenovelas, light literature, romance as well as self-help.
When Infierno de todos was published I was living in Warsaw. I had undertaken a trip three years earlier to Europe, which at the beginning I imagined would be very brief. I traveled to all the essential places before settling in Rome for a period of time. Thereafter, for different reasons and motivations, I remained outside Mexico, changing destinations frequently, almost always by random interventions, until the end of 1988, when I returned to the country. During those twenty-eight European years my stories recorded an incessant to-and-fro. They are, in some way, the logbooks of my worldly wanderings, my mutations, and my internal settlements.
To cut loose the moorings, to confront without fear the vast world and to burn my ships were events that time and again changed my life and, consequently, my literary labor. During those years of wandering, the body of my work was formed. If I received any benefit, it was the chance to contemplate my country from a distance and, therefore, paradoxically, to sense that it was closer. A mixed feeling of approximation and flight allowed me to enjoy an enviable freedom, which surely I would not have known had I stayed at home. My work would have been another. The journey as a continuous activity, the frequent surprises, my coexistence with different languages, customs, imaginations, and mythologies, my diverse reading options, my ignorance of styles, my indifference for metropolises, their demands and pressures, the encounters good and bad; all affirmed my vision.
The story that appears at the end of Infierno de todos, “Cuerpo presente” [Lying in State], dated in Rome in 1961, represents the closure and farewell to the vicarious world I had written about until then. Thereafter a new narrative period arises in which I use the settings I visited as backdrops for the dramas lived by some characters, mostly Mexicans, who unexpectedly faced the different beings living inside them, whose existence they don’t even suspect. There are inner itineraries whose stops include Mexico City, cities in Veracruz, Cuernavaca, and Tepoztlán, but also Rome, Venice, Berlin, Samarkand, Warsaw, Belgrade, Peking, and Barcelona. My characters are usually students, businessmen, filmmakers, writers, who suddenly and unexpectedly suffer an existential crisis that leads them to doubt momentarily the values that have sustained them by means of an umbilical cord of extraordinary resistance. Breaking that link or remaining attached to it becomes their essential dilemma.
If it is true that the impulses of childhood will accompany us until the moment of death, it is also true that the writer must keep them at bay, prevent them from turning into a lock so that writing doesn’t become a prison, but rather a reservoir of freedoms. My experience in Rome introduced me to new milieus, to other challenges, and to endless hesitation. It allowed me to close the door on a period and perceive other possibilities.
A further step. I visited Warsaw in early 1963. I didn’t know anyone in the city. The first night I attended a theater by chance near my hotel. Without understanding a word, I was awe-struck. Upon returning to the hotel I was disturbed by the resemblance to my grandmother that I noticed in one of the employees at reception, an elderly woman. Not only her face, but also her gestures; her way of drawing the cigarette to her lips and exhaling the smoke seemed identical. It was like a hallucination. I forced myself to believe that it was an effect of the theatrical excitement, and I went to my room. The next day I went to Łódź, where Juan Manuel Torres was studying film. He infected me with his enthusiasm for Poland and its culture; he spoke of its classics and its romantics as if in a mystic trance. That evening I returned to Warsaw on a train that was delayed several hours because of a tremendous storm. I had climbed into the car with an aching flu. Numbed by the cold, overcome with fever, almost delirious, I could barely make it to the hotel upon arriving in Warsaw. During the reception the same elderly woman as the night before attended to me again, and again with a cigarette in her mouth. I greeted her with absolute informality, I told her that if she didn’t stop smoking her health would continue to be bad, that at that late hour she should already be sleeping. She answered in Polish, and I was horrified to discover that it wasn’t my grandmother. I spent the next day in bed per physician’s orders. I began to write a story about the feverish confusion between that Polish woman and my grandmother. I tried to reproduce the delirium of the previous day from the moment I boarded the train in Łódź. I noticed that it retrieved from me a new tonality and, more importantly, that it drew me toward a necessary operation: severing the umbilical cord that connected me to my childhood.
Years later in Barcelona, I managed to finish El tañido de una flauta [The Sound of the Flute],11 my first novel. I was at the time thirty-eight years old and had very little work under my belt. Upon writing it, I established a tacit commitment to writing. I decided, without knowing that I had, that instinct should come before any other mediation. It was instinct that would determine form. Even now, at this mome
nt, I struggle with Reality’s emissary that is form. One doesn’t seek out form, of that I am certain, but rather opens himself to it, waits for it, accepts it, battles it. And, so, form is always the victor. When this doesn’t happen the text is always a bit spoiled.
El tañido de una flauta was, among other things, a tribute to Germanic literatures, especially Thomas Mann, whose work I have frequented since adolescence, and Hermann Broch, whom I discovered during a stay in Belgrade and whom, awestruck, I read and reread in torrents for almost a year. The central theme of El tañido… is creation. Literature, painting, and film are the central protagonists. The terror of creating a hybrid between the story and the treatise drove me to intensify the narrative elements. In the novel several plots revolve around the central story line, secondary, tertiary plots, some positively minimal, mere larvae of plots, necessary to cloak and mitigate the long disquisitions on art in which the characters become entangled. Little news has pleased me so much as a revelation by Rita Gombrowicz about the literary tastes of her celebrated husband. One of his passions was Dickens. His favorite novel, The Pickwick Papers.
My apprenticeship continued. For years I continued to write stories and novels, endeavoring not to repeat methods I had already used. My last six years in Europe were spent in Prague, the most secret, the most inconceivably magical of all known cities. There I jumped headlong, as compensation for the dry world of protocol in which I moved, into parody, ridicule, the grotesque, elements that I had greatly enjoyed in oral form my whole life, but which until then I had refused to integrate into my stories.
As a tacit or explicit homage to some of my tutelary gods: Nikolai Gogol, H. Bustos Domecq, and Witold Gombrowicz, among others, I wrote El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade], Domar la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron],12 and La vida conyugal [Married Life], a trilogy of novels closer to the carnival than any other rite. I have written elsewhere about the experience:
As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness, in the grotesque…The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels that make up the Carnival Triptych suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging.13
In Xalapa, where I settled in 1993, my last book was born, The Art of Flight,14 a summa of the enthusiasms and desacralizations that, as it unfolds, become subtraction. Classical manuals of music define the fugue as a composition of many voices, written in counterpoint, whose essential elements are variation and canon, that is, the possibility of establishing a form that sways between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics, the gavotte and the mambo. In a technique of chiaroscuro, the distinct texts contemplate each other, enhance and deconstruct at every moment, as the final purpose is a relativization of all instances. Having abolished the worldly environment that for several decades encircled my life, and having hid from my sight the settings and characters that for years suggested the cast that populates my novels, I was obligated to transform myself into an almost unique character, which was at the same time agreeable and unsettling. What was I doing in those pages? As always the appearance of a form resolved in its own way the contradictions inherent in a fugue.
The stories contained in Infierno de todos, my first book, naïve and clumsy, stiff in their wickedness, susceptible to whatever disqualification that might be ascribed to them, reveal, however, some constants that support what might pompously be designated as my ars poetica. The tone, the plot, the design of the characters are the work of language. My approach to the phenomena is parsimoniously oblique. There is always a mystery that the narrator approaches deliberately, laggardly, without, when all is said and done, managing to reveal the unknown purpose. In the approach to that existing hole in the middle of the story, in the revolutions that the word makes around it, the function of my writing takes place. Writing is to me an act akin to weaving and unraveling many narrative threads that are arduously plaited, where nothing is closed and everything is conjectural; the reader will be the one who tries to clarify them, to solve the mystery posed, to opt for some suggested options: sleep, delirium, wakefulness. Everything else, as always, is words.
KNOWING NOTHING. When I translated Gombrowicz’s Argentine diary, I found a fragment that interested me a great deal and I almost believed to be my own: “Everything we know about the world is incomplete, is inaccurate. Every day we are presented with new information that nullifies previous knowledge, mutilates or widens it. Because this knowledge is incomplete it is as if we knew nothing.”
WALTER BENJAMIN ATTENDS THE THEATER IN MOSCOW. The romantic episode included in Benjamin’s Moscow Diary can only be understood as a treatise on despair. In 1924 he met Asja Lācis, a Latvian revolutionary, in Capri, and fell in love from the first moment. According to Gershom Sholem, a close friend of Benjamin, Lacis wielded a decisive influence over him. They met again in Berlin that same year. The next year, Benjamin traveled to Riga to be with her for a few days. In early 1926 he takes another trip, this time to Moscow, where he remains two months. Communication with Asja regrettably deteriorates. To begin with, Asja is maintaining a romantic relationship with Bernhard Reich, a director of German theater living in Moscow. Committed to a sanitarium for nervous disorders, Benjamin sees her little, in bursts, and their encounters in general are unpleasant. On the other hand, he must see Reich continuously; moreover, shortly after his arrival he is obliged to offer him lodging in his own hotel room, because the place where Reich lives is cold and humid and, as a result, injurious to his health. A few days later, as in a Chaplin film, Reich takes possession of the bed, and Benjamin spends his nights seated in a chair. The diary records moments of deep depression owing to Asja’s coldness, to her demands, to her scorn.
Benjamin had traveled to the Soviet Union in the hope of making a decision he had postponed during the last two years. Should he or should he not join the German Communist Party, or merely remain as a fellow traveler? His arrival to the country of the Soviets coincides with one of the most nebulous periods of history, around the denouement of the fierce battle that had raged for two years between the forces of Trotsky and those of Stalin. The approaching end causes the battle to become more insidious, more implacable. The shockwave is permanent, though beneath the surface; only the facts and bubbles rise to the surface. Benjamin is amazed by the impersonality of the responses. No one appears to have a direct opinion on anything. The responses are always elusive: There are those of the opinion that… It is said that… Some think… In this way personal responsibility disappears. When he speaks and holds personal opinions in front of others, Reich and, especially, Asja reprimand him, they tell him that he has understood nothing, that it is impossible for him to navigate such a setting; in short, he should stop expressing nonsense that could compromise him as well as them. The day of his arrival, Reich invites him to dine at the restaurant of the Union of Writers, where they hear that, in a theater in the city, a work in praise of the whites is being performed, and that at the premiere the police had to disperse a communist demonstration that was protesting such an effrontery. In an entry dated December 14,15 that is, eight days following his arrival, Benjamin records his opinion on that theatrical piece that seemed to produce so much conflict:
They were performing Stanislavsky’s production of The Days of the Turbins. The naturalistic style of the sets was remarkably good, the acting without any particular flaws or merits, Bulgakov’s play itself an absolutely revolting provocation. Especially the last act
, in which the White Guard “convert” to Bolshevism, is as dramatically insipid as it is intellectually mendacious. The Communist opposition to the production is justified and significant. Whether this final act was added on at the request of the censors, as Reich claims, or whether it was there all along has no bearing whatsoever on the assessment of the play. (The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theaters. It was as if there were not a single Communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight.)16
During his stay in Moscow, Benjamin allows himself no respite. He pursues his beloved and is permanently spurned, he translates pages of Proust, writes an entry on Goethe for the New Soviet Encyclopedia under preparation, visits museums, attends the theater—especially that of Meyerhold, which fascinates him—pays visits, including one to Joseph Roth, who has traveled there at the expense of an important newspaper in Frankfurt, and buys beautiful wooden pieces to add to his collection of popular toys. The arguments that Roth expounds in opposition to Stalin seem unserious to him, banal anticommunist statements to satisfy the great capital, “[Roth] had come to Russia as an (almost confirmed) Bolshevik and was leaving it a royalist”; the proletariat expression in the literature of the Soviet Union seemed indispensable to him, but the absence of theoretical reflection and the canonization of excessively elemental forms discouraged him. His privileged intelligence becomes lost in the permanent comedy of errors that he lives in the Moscow of disinformation, of half-truths and lies with veneers of doubtful virtue. When Benjamin submits his text on Goethe, painstakingly contemplated, Karl Radek, a high functionary close to Trotsky and protector of certain writers on the edge of dissidence, rejects it as if it were a primitive sectarian pamphlet; according to Radek, “The phrase ‘class conflict’ occurs ten times on every page.” Benjamin, who had taken the text to the offices of the Encyclopedia, pointed out this wasn’t entirely true, adding, what’s more, that it was impossible to speak about the activity of Goethe that occurs during an era of great class conflict, without employing that expression. Radek added, apparently with disdain: “The point is to introduce it at the right moment.” Benjamin accepts that he has lost the match given that the “wretched directors of this project are far too insecure to permit themselves any possibility of a personal opinion, even when faced with the feeblest joke by someone in a position of authority.” As for the work by Bulgakov that so irritated the Communists and that he, Benjamin, had described as “an absolutely revolting provocation,” it remained in the theater on higher orders. Stalin, no less!, saw it fifteen times, according to the archives of the Moscow Art Theater. As I was saying: an exhausting comedy of equivocations.
The Magician of Vienna Page 5