The Magician of Vienna

by Pitol, Sergio; Henson, George; Bellatin, Mario

  When I look back I detect rather poor results. The years I have lived lose shape; the past to me looks like a handful of tattered photographs, yellowed and abandoned inside a piece of furniture that no one goes near. As for the present, I find myself seventy years old, and I reside in a city where I never thought I would live, but where I fit perfectly, entirely oblivious to the cosmopolitan setting that framed a good part of my past. That has disappeared. I see my past like a set of fragments of dreams not entirely understood.

  I recall a banquet celebrated in honor of a celebrated foreign writer, a truly wise man, in an extremely elegant palace in Rome. Someone brought up the subject of old age, I believe in reference to Berenson, and the guest of honor scandalized those present when he said, in a thunderous voice that silenced the other conversations, that there were moments in which he recalled fondly a venereal disease contracted during his adolescence on a boat and the crude treatments it required, especially compared to the loathsome maladies that plague old men and end up becoming his Nemesis: those of the bladder, the prostate, the sciatic nerve, itchy scalp, chills, weakening of the sphincter, amnesia, trembling hands, and at that moment the elegant guests, elderly in their great majority, raised their thunderous voice and in unison declared that they, both men and women, did not feel their age at all, that they didn’t even notice it, that they’d never felt in better shape, that their capacity for creation had expanded, that their final use of language was truly sumptuous, profound, Attic, or baroque, that each one wrote better than the other, while the priapic old man listened to the emphatic, heated, and hysterical tones of that tribe of old-age deniers, with their eyes half-closed, as if they enjoyed absenting themselves from the present and drowning themselves in the pleasures of the past: the feats of his incontinent penis, the medal-like stains discovered in his underwear. His only manifestation of life was a mocking smile at those assembled.

  There are days when I awake convinced that no act in my life has been the result of choice, but rather of predetermination. If free will intervened, it did so in a craven way. Have I, then, been a fungible figure, whose desires, projects, dreams, initiatives did not emerge from within me but instead were imposed from without? Am I perchance a marionette commanded by someone unknown? “Yes, you are!” I hear. And that thing I’ve called “my will” is scarcely sufficient to allow me to select one of many dishes available on a restaurant menu? To order a plate of shellfish instead of steak, to prefer asparagus at room temperature to mushrooms? Has my ability to choose come to this, the scope of my free will? It seems so.

  Not even the restaurant on the outskirts of Palermo, where I opted for the mushrooms over the asparagus at room temperature, whose façade adorned with ancient popular motifs drove me to cross the street and enter its rooms, was the right choice, but of course one doesn’t realize this until much later. It was evident that I should wind up at that establishment, where something happened that linked events from my past with others from the future that, of course, were not possible for me to envision then. Everything was foreshadowed, worked out to the most minute detail, and it was evident that my time had not yet arrived. Bursts of shrapnel rang out, the air filled with smoke, I felt an excruciating pain in my forehead and shoulder; I must have fallen to the floor. When I awoke, I saw around me a world of nurses, doctors, policemen, women caterwauling, and corpses or wounded, like me, strewn across the floor. I have been at the point of death many times, once in an automobile accident, another as the result of surgical intervention. But what I am recalling now was a settling of accounts between shadowy Sicilian mafias. At times I surmised that I would die in a violent and shady accident before turning fifty, and in a public place, to add insult to injury. I relished in advanced the items in the press, the mystery, the gossip, the scandal. On that occasion the corpses were many; I don’t know how many mafiosos nor how many accidental tourists went on to a better life. In the ambulance I heard a nurse tell the orderly that she thought the narco (she was referring to me) wouldn’t make it to the hospital alive. But I did, I left there on my own two feet; and several years have passed since then, and I continue to write and every morning I go for a walk with my dogs along the winding paths of the hill in my garden. Today I’m unable to fathom how I survived. I’ve been saved from three dangerous crises, I’ve arrived at the final threshold and was able to go back only to turn on the TV one morning, November 25, 1998, and learn from a newscast the most extraordinary news anyone could ever imagine. The filthy hyena cried with rage today, his birthday, when he discovered that he could not yet leave, as he expected, the psychiatric hospital where he had been secluded.

  I am thinking of a writer who has not succumbed to the vegetative stage of his craft; he writes without obligations, he flatters neither the powerful nor the masses, he lives in states of enlightenment and pauses of apathy, that is, moments of passive search, of the reception of images, or of lines that, at some time, might be of some use to him. In his emphatic moments he manages to say that literature has been the thread that connects all the periods of his life. This is why he has no difficulty admitting that he did not choose this craft, rather literature itself has been what incorporated him into its ranks.

  I adore hospitals. They return me to the security of childhood: all my meals are next to the bed at the precise hour. All I have to do is ring a bell and a nurse appears, sometimes even a doctor! They give me a pill, and the pain disappears; they give me a shot and in just a moment I go to sleep; they bring me a bedpan so I can urinate, they help me get up so I can go do number two; they bring me books, tablets, pens. They told me they were bullet grazes, that there was no risk, that it was just a matter of patience, of rest and recuperation; I obey every word, like a diligent child, but the fever doesn’t disappear, moreover, at night it rises perilously, I have bandages everywhere and a cast on my foot; one morning they inserted a huge needle through my back to extract fluid from my pleura, I couldn’t bear the pain, I fainted, and awoke in my room. When I opened my eyes I saw at my bedside several books and a card with the name of the honorary consul of Mexico in Palermo. It was he who left me those readings, all in Italian: The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Calvino; The Leopard by Lampedusa; Landolfi’s La pietra lunare [The Moonstone] and Leopardi’s Canti. If the consul chose them he has ideal taste, I thought; he need only have brought me something by Svevo or Gadda to earn a cum laude. I understand almost everything they say to me in Italian, despite the accent and the Sicilian idioms; I can also speak it, but in those first days I found it difficult to read. I leaf through the books, the newspapers, and I scarcely understand anything. However, I enjoy reading the poetry of Leopardi just to feel its music on my lips; the rhythm is the only thing I perceive, and that simple emotion makes me cry. Horrendous photos appear in the newspapers and magazines. Soldiers with perverse faces, tanks, rows of prisoners in chains, and I must call the nurse, who tells me things I misunderstand.

  I seem to remember that on my worst days, when I couldn’t even fasten my eyes on my books, it pleases me to think of language, that marvelous gift that was granted us from the beginning. The writer knows that his life lies in language, that his happiness or his misfortune depend on it. I have been a lover of the word, I have been its servant, an explorer of its body, a mole that digs in its undersoil; I am also its inquisitor, its advocate, its executioner. I am the guardian angel and the wicked serpent, the apple, the tree, and the devil. Babel: everything turns to confusion because in literature there scarcely is a term that means the same thing to different people, and I’ve grown tired of ruminating on that hopeless dilemma in which I at times place too much importance on whether a young man is transformed into a writer because Goddess Literature has so ordained it or, quite the opposite, he does it for more normal reasons: his surroundings, his childhood, the school that he attends, his friends and readings and, above all, instinct, which is fundamentally what has led him to his vocation. What’s more, outside of the work, nothing matters.

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sp; I don’t recall how much time I spent there before regaining passable health. There came a time when it was just a matter of waiting, of irritation, of reading, of letters that flew from Palermo to Mexico and from Mexico to Palermo. When my temperature lowered, a priest began to visit me; he appeared saying that he regularly visited patients to offer them spiritual ministration. In the beginning, he inquired about my presence in the restaurant where a mafia don was celebrating a family party and a rival band showed up to ruin it for him, later he began to insinuate that what had just happened in Chile was the healthy manifestation of a society asphyxiated by communism, a victory of believers over the enemies of Christ, and day after day he dialed up the volume, intoning hurrahs to the military and the provincial hero, the great general, who risked his life for the cause of God. I didn’t want to argue, I felt bad, and the coup d’état, that senseless cruelty, the disdain for life upset me too much. I told him grudgingly that I did not share his opinion; that I was receiving other news from Mexico, nothing like his, and I asked him to allow me to sleep because I was suffering from a splitting headache. During the course of his visit a nurse entered, a Spanish nun, Andalusian, who quietly arranged my papers and books, took my temperature, blood pressure, and almost always prolonged her visit in order to remain in the room after the priest left. She then warned me, told me not to talk, not to even answer him, that the man was a devil, a fanatic of tyranny who adored Franco, her country’s executioner; she’d then suddenly look at her watch, stop as if surprised in the middle of a phrase, then run out in a hurry. Sometimes she’d leave me her copy of Unitá or Paese Sera so I could read the news about Chile. I can’t recall her name, perhaps I never knew it, I think of her as the red nun of Jaén. She was not young at the time, so she more than likely has died; but I would like that not to be the case, that she still be alive and had seen the morning newscast, that she know that today in London a special court of the House of Lords ruled that neither his advanced age nor his position as senator should exempt the old torturer of Chile, committed for a month in a luxury asylum on the outskirts of London, from being tried for crimes against humanity. The old sewer rat cried, he was planning to celebrate his birthday with friends and family, and he started crying when he heard the news. He was sure that everything would be in order for his return to the country that for many years he had turned into hell.

  Surely my world of yesterday must be archived, ordered, and classified in my memory, from the comfort of my mother’s breast to the radiant moment in which I write these lines. At times I perceive an echo of the sensations and emotions of my past life, I glimpse expressions, hear voices. The impulses from which my first stories were born come to me intermittently like golden reflections. There I am, in the mid-1950s: I can still sense the energy of that ghost. I dream of violent rainstorms and lightning that obstructs the horizon with giant tree-like forms, like immense phosphorescent x-rays. I rejoice at having survived the disorder, the chaos, the terror, the ill health. My first stories appear now to have been an attempt to expel my childhood from me. I find it strange; I always believed that those narratives were a tribute to my childhood, to rural life, to my early illnesses, to my neurasthenia praecox, and it turns out that perhaps there was never any of that. Deep down, masked, I attempted to free myself from every kind of bond. I simply wanted to be myself. How distressing! And to achieve that longed-for independence I leaned—and very consciously—on those literary methods employed by two authors that I admired: Jorge Luis Borges and William Faulkner.

  During that first stage, my writing tended toward severity. The characters of those stories display a permanently tragic rictus. It was a world devoid of light, despite being set in the Mexican tropics, very close to the ocean. Everything was withered and rotting in the old hacienda houses; life bled in a slow, continuous movement toward disintegration. The greatest fear of the old people seemed to reside in the next visit to the cobbler, and that he might remark that their English shoes would not stand another repair. They knew that they’d not go out into the street barefooted, but deep down they almost preferred that to putting their feet in ghastly national shoes. The houses were inhabited by old relatives, spinsters of various ages, cranky and ill-tempered servants and pathetic children, sickly, hypersensitive, incomparably sad, whose eyes poured over every corner of the house, even the slightest movements of the inhabitants, whose disjointed gestures and squeaking voices foretold the imminent collapse of that world. The women and the few young men who remained in those ramshackle mansions must have left an impression of disability, of shock, of loss in the world; the capable, the “lively,” the secure, once the revolution had ended, had headed for the big cities or had simply preferred to die.

  By contrast, my next narrative stage, the second, was vitally forceful. Having recently entered university in Mexico City, I began to travel. It was a way of contradicting my childhood confinement in rooms impregnated with the saccharine odor of potions and medicinal herbs. I was in New York and New Orleans, in Cuba and Venezuela. In 1961 I decided to spend a few months in Europe, and I delayed some thirty years in returning home. During that time, I wrote two books of short stories and my first two novels: El tañido de una flauta and Juegos florales [Floral Games]: I’m amazed by my productivity during that hectic time. While it seemed like a godsend during my childhood to have contracted malaria given that, apart from the strain of fever, I had the advantage of always staying in the house, where I read novels endlessly and pitied my brother for having to occupy his time in such unappealing activities as going to school in the morning and playing tennis or horseback-riding in the afternoon; during my youth, on the other hand, I was happy not to live boxed-in anywhere. I moved through the world with absolutely extraordinary freedom, I read for nothing but hedonistic reasons; I had eliminated from my environment any obligation that I found irksome. Fourteen years passed between the end of my university studies and receiving my degree. I did not belong to any coterie, nor was I a member of the editorial board of any publication. By the same token, I did not have to submit to the taste of a tribe, nor to the styles of the moment. Tel Quel was to me dead letter. I was free to shape my Olympus. I frequented the Central Europeans when, outside of Kafka, no one read them here: Musil, Canetti, von Horváth, Broch, Von Doderer, Urzidil; I was fascinated to be introduced to that tradition; I then went on to the Slavs, whom I’ll not list because I’d fill more than a page with names. In every country where I’ve traveled, I’ve made good friends, some of them writers. I’ve always needed to converse about literature; discussion with those few writer friends centered if anything on our readings and, when we knew each other better, on the methods that each one employed, the traditional ones and those we believed we were discovering on our own. The only alteration from that way of life was a period of two and a half years in Barcelona, a city in which I arrived absolutely broke, without a cent in my pocket; I found my modus vivendi in the publishing environment, which allowed me to connect in no time with the literary world. But even so I remained far removed from any literary competitiveness. One might think that it was a bad situation. But to me it seemed fantastic. I enjoyed absolute, delirious freedom. I felt at once like the noble and the ignoble savage. I was the only person who dictated my rules and imposed my challenges. In Barcelona I finished writing my first novel: El tañido de una flauta. My experience in that city was very intense; definitive, I would say, but I kept my own literature secret. It was not yet the time to reveal myself.

  During that long European stay, I’d send my manuscripts to Mexico. Then I’d forget about the matter. A year later I’d receive a parcel with copies of the book, my friends would send me bibliographic notes, few, very few, one or two as a rule. For twenty-five years I was sustained by that minute handful of readers.

  In this second period, writing becomes a continuum of personal circumstances; it receives from the immediate surroundings the rewards and also the leftovers. My books of stories and my first two novels are a true mirror
of my movements, a chronicle of my heart, a record of my readings, and a catalogue of my then curiosities. They are the ship’s log of a very turbulent time. If I read a few lines from one of those books I immediately know not only where and when I wrote them, but also what my passions were at the moment, my readings, my projects, my possibilities and tribulations. I could say what things I had seen in the theater or at the movies during the surrounding days, whom I called on the phone each day, and many other trivial details, a circumstance which I’ve never dreamt of going without. One of my books is titled Los climas [The Climates], another No hay tal lugar [There’s No Such Place]; the first title alludes to the variety of spaces, the second negates it. Between both extremes can be found the breath of my novels.

  The following movement, the third air of my narrative, is marked by parody, caricature, laxness, and by a sudden and jubilant ferocity. The period’s corpus is comprised of three novels: El desfile del amor (1984), Domar a la divina garza (1988), and La vida conjugal (1991). Now, from a distance, the emergence of this playful and absurd vein in my writing doesn’t surprise me. Rather, I should be surprised by the lateness of its appearance, above all because if anything abounds in my list of preferred authors it is the creators of a parodic, eccentric, and desacralizing literature, where humor plays a decisive role, better still if the humor is delirious: Gogol, Sterne, Gombrowicz, Beckett, Bulgakov, Goldoni, Borges (when he’s himself, but especially when he’s transformed into Bustos Domecq), Carlo Emilio Gadda, Landolfi, Torri, Monterroso, Firbank, Monsiváis, César Aira, Kafka, Flann O’Brien, amongst others, Thomas Mann for example, whose inclusion in this group at first sight appears suspicious only because he surpasses genre, is the creator of a splendid genre of parody of our century. Since the publication of the last novel, various critics have viewed this suite of novels as a single work divided in three parts, and shortly after it was referred to as a carnival triptych. I ruminated on El desfile del amor for several years. One day in Prague I sketched out in a few hours the novel’s general outline. From that moment on and for several months I wrote it frantically, with a speed heretofore unknown. It was my hand that was thinking. Moreover, the pen flew, and it was she who directed the maneuvers. I watched with amazement the infinite changes that were happening unabated: the birth of new characters or the disappearance of others whom I had considered indispensable. And the things that those people said! I’d blush just transcribing them. It was a story of political crimes, and of the subsequent police investigation that, as is customary in such cases, went nowhere. The characters were very prominent people: long-standing families and the new revolutionary caste, but also artists and intellectuals, an extortionist, a mysterious castrato, and various foreigners of every stripe.