The Magician of Vienna

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

  A SHORT TREATISE ON EROTICISM. Juan Manuel Torres once made me read a text by Jan Kott: A Short Treatise on Eroticism. I look for it on my shelf of Polish literature and find in the English edition the quote I was thinking of the day after a tour of Bukhara at night as we were preparing to fly to Samarkand. It reminded me of the wedding ceremony of Kyrim and Dolores. I’ll try to translate: “In darkness the body is split into fragments, into separate objects. They have an independent existence. It is my touch that makes them exist for me. Touch in a limited sense. Unlike sight, it doesn’t embrace the entire person. Touch is invariably fragmentary; it decomposes. A body experienced through touch is never an entity; it is just a sum of fragments that exist side by side.”26

  MONSIVÁIS THE CATECHIST. Shortly before dying, Isaiah Berlin made certain declarations that happened to offend the spokespeople of contemporary happiness. One of the greatest attributes of the English humanist was his dynamic universality. Berlin studied and translated eminent German philosophers, the Russian novelists of the great era, the Italian thinkers of the Renaissance. It is inevitable to associate him with his peers, at least with those who were most familiar to him: Hegel, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Herzen, Vico, Hume, Stuart Mill. Nevertheless, at the end of his life he declared that the most harmful enemy of culture was contemporary cosmopolitanism, for having transformed the world into an immense desert of monotony, a plain of vulgarity. Where there doesn’t exist a culture of one’s own, he held, the reception of another is reduced to a mere imitative mechanism, apt only to capture the most banal, the most insignificant of the model that one hopes to absorb. Only where a tradition exists can one assimilate universal knowledge. What was happening? Had the old citizen of the world transformed into a costumbrista, into a protector of the customs and glories of his native land? Certainly not. It is difficult to imagine a less provincial mind than his. No one fought like he with such effective intelligence the nefarious dreams of ideological nationalism. But the crusaders of postmodernity believed immediately that the maestro had turned in an instant into a relic of the past. To speak of national cultures in a world governed by globalization must seem like utter nonsense to them.

  Very well, if it is a question of purely literary matters and specifically of literary language, the reader’s experience has convinced me that no work will endure if it is not firmly rooted in an intense linguistic tradition. Of course, one cannot demand of the writer an idiomatically closed vocation, since those born and educated in multilingual spaces can be counted among the most extraordinary of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Beckett, Kuśniewicz, Babel, Canetti, and to some extent Nabokov and Borges, where the different languages employed daily tend to strengthen the one the author chose to express himself literarily. Before returning to the topic of the creator and his affiliation with a determined linguistic tradition, allow me to quote two paragraphs of a biographical sketch of Carlos Monsiváis, the author of A New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians:

  Not long after we met, he came to my apartment, on Calle Londres, when the Juárez neighborhood had not yet become the Zona Rosa, to read a story that he had just finished: “Fino acero de niebla” [Fine Steel of Mist], about which the only thing I remember is that it had nothing to do with the Mexican literature of our generation. The language was popular, but highly stylized; and the structure was very elusive. It demanded that the reader more or less find his own way. The fiction written by our contemporaries, even the most innovative, seemed closer to the canons of the nineteenth century next to his fine steel. Monsiváis brought together in his story two elements that would later define his personality: an interest in popular culture—in this case the language of the working-class neighborhoods—and a passion for form, two facets that don’t usually coincide. After expressing my enthusiasm during a reading, he immediately closed up, like an oyster trying to dodge lemon drops.

  Another quote:

  We both read an abundance of Anglo-Saxon authors, I prefer the English, and he North Americans; but the result is a mutually beneficial influence. We leaf through our purchases. I talk about Henry James, and he about Melville and Hawthorne; I about Forster, Sterne, and Virginia Woolf, and he about Poe, Twain, and Thoreau. We both admire the intelligent wit of James Thurber, and we declare once more that the language of Borges constitutes the greatest miracle that has happened to our language in this century; he pauses briefly and adds that one of the highest moments in the Castilian language is owed to Casiodoro de Reina and his disciple Cipriano de Valera, and when I ask, confused by the names, “And who are they?” he replies, scandalized, that they are none other than the translators of the Bible. He tells me that he aspires one day to write prose that exhibits the benefit of the countless years he’s devoted to reading Biblical texts; I, who am ignorant of them, comment, cowering slightly, that the greatest influence I’ve encountered is that of William Faulkner, and there he checkmates me when he explains that the language of Faulkner, like that of Melville and that of Hawthorne, is profoundly influenced by the Bible, that they are a non-religious derivation of the Revealed Language.

  And a third quote, from Monsiváis himself, which I have taken from his Autobiografía precoz [Precocious Autobiography], written and published in 1966:

  My true place of training was Sunday School. There, during my contact with those who accepted and shared my beliefs, I prepared to withstand the derision of an official primary school where the Catholic children insulted the obvious protestant minority, represented always by me. There, in Sunday School, I also learned verses, many verses from memory, and I could in two seconds find any Biblical quote. The high point of my childhood occurred one Palm Sunday when I recited, forwards and backwards against the clock, all the books of the Bible in record time: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, etc.

  This explains in some way the exceptional texture of the author’s writing, its multiple patinas, its reticences and revelations, the expertly employed chiaroscuros, the variety of rhythms, its secret fervor. Monsiváis did not only read during his childhood and youth the reformed translation of the Bible, but also the comics of the period, the biographies of Emil Ludwig and Stefan Zweig, the largely tedious translations of the narrative of the North American Left: Upton Sinclair, Dreisser, John Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the detective novels of the hard-boiled genre, especially those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as Castilian poetry, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. Biblical language had to accept, not without resistance I imagine, rhythms and words that were mostly antagonistic to it; its surface was cloaked in an alien tonality that progressively permeated it. The already manifested passion for popular culture managed to penetrate and become incorporated into the majestic edifice constructed by Casiodoro de Reina. Perhaps for this reason that initial “Fino acero de niebla” was different from what was in vogue in Mexico at the time, in the same way everything he has written since is different from what we his contemporaries write. A revelatory fire lying inside the sacred word manages to set in motion all the energies of its language.

  If one compares the splendor of the nineteenth-century novels of New England to those written in our language during the same period, the latter are diminished instantly. The mere idea of establishing an analogy produces unsettling stress and humility. On the one hand, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Turn of the Screw. On the other, Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera [The Portrait of Don Gonzalo González of González-town], El buey suelto [The Unfettered Ox], Pequeñeces [Trivialities] ,Morriña [Homesickness]. The first, as Monsiváis said forty years ago, are a prolongation of the revealed word; those in our language arise out of nowhere. Behind them are two centuries of Counter Reformation, where instead of the Bible only sermons were read. There are, of course, two immense exceptions: Galdós and Clarín.

  One would think I was an evangelist proselytizer. Nothing of the sort. I am referring only to the potentiality that precursors lend to writing duri
ng one of language’s moments of greatest splendor. Monsiváis achieved that connection with the unsurpassable language created by Casiodoro de Reina in the mid-sixteenth century. Others have found it in Cervantes, in Tirso, in Lope or Calderón, in Quevedo and Góngora, in Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in Darío, and later refined in Vallejo and Jorge Guillén, in Valle-Inclán, Neruda, López Velarde, Borges, Cernuda or Paz. When the encounter with great language doesn’t happen, literature grows dark.

  At the same time, I imagine that the feat that Monsiváis realized one triumphant Sunday when in few hours he recited verse after verse of the holy scriptures, other memorious children have also attained. Mark Twain recounts that a classmate of Tom Sawyer’s recited twenty four thousand verses in the town’s Sunday School from memory and lost his wits.27 I can imagine that similar victories must have delighted other children who later would become tailors, elevator operators, doctors, or financiers, without such a feat of memory propelling them to ever create a literary text. Writing is, after all, a result of chance, of instinct, an involuntary act of thousands of hours of reading every year, in short, a fatalism. Monsiváis, therefore, was destined to be a writer. But he would have been a very different one if his ear had not been trained from childhood in the puissant language of Casiodoro de Reina, the Spanish of the sixteenth century.

  And so we arrive at the New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians, that triumph of style, which recreates the difficult times during which New Spain was transformed into a setting where, with fervor, with daring, with extreme piety, but also—why not say it?—with few brains and frequent fits of madness, the catechism made its appearance in the newly conquered territories. We find ourselves in a labyrinth where the ludic goes hand in hand with the sacred, where reason and faith and the rhetoric that sustains that faith walk hand-in-hand. It is, of course, a conscious tribute to Casiodoro de Reina and his language, which at times appears as such, but also as parody. A layman in this terrain, and I am one, knows beforehand that he is lost. There are sentences of great extravagance that when interjected into a paragraph recall the flavor or the sound of medieval Castilian. In one, Huitzilopochtli shouts to one of his devotees: “You are to me like dross of silver on a vessel.”28 In another: “Brethren, I am called to deliver you from fire and tribulation. Armageddon is nigh. Curse not divine powers, and repent while there is time. The sheep have been summoned.” It is not important to know which words or phrases proceed textually from Biblical writings and which do not; the author’s will to style reconciles everything. In this book of miracles, spells, wonders, incantations, tricks, and inept exorcisms, of saints and rogues who pretend or believe in good faith to be saints, or of characters who are, as in the Autos Sacramentales, abstract entities that debate among themselves like the Sacred Cow and the Pious Fraud, the Halo, the Prayer, the Sin, the Penitence, and the Veil of the Magdalene, everything is pleasure for the ear and wonder for reason. Perhaps only a layman with sufficient Christian grounding could have approached with such innocence the external manifestations of the religious world with the same detachment with which a chronicler approaches a subject, observes it, listens both to the protagonists and the witnesses, to later give his own testimony without believing or disbelieving too much of what is seen or heard.

  Monsiváis manipulates several registers in his book. By abstaining from theological reasoning, he focuses on the rhetorical manifestation of debate. Thus is born the chronicle of the misfortunes of the Lord’s servants who arrived in the land of Indians, where, truth be told, most don’t manage to get anything right, since both their faith and the strategy designed to convert the conquered to it collide with the mysteries of the new land and the infinite labyrinth of interests, wonders, manias, and whims concocted by the ecclesiastical and administrative mechanism of the conquistadors. These are fables of losers; if the prelates, archdeacons, monks of various orders, and catechists did not manage to orient themselves, what could be expected then of the Indians, either the submissive or the recalcitrant, ontologically dizzied by the sudden irruption of so many deities, authorities, and sacred enigmas? If they managed not to succumb to the soldiers’ sword or the white-hot iron of the encomendero, the inquisitor’s stake awaited them patiently and even with indifference, knowing it would welcome them at any moment into its bosom. How to respond with strict orthodoxy to the artful examinations of the confessors? How to understand in the abysmal Otomí and the more than primitive Náhuatl of the Galician or Extremaduran priests, which they had studied in a matter of weeks and believed they had mastered, and which they demeaned as perverse and nonsensical, the obscure organigram of the Most Holy Trinity itself, which, as we already know, does not fail to pose serious hurdles to comprehension even when explained in the clearest language? The chroniclers of the sixteenth century offer testimonies of those failed encounters. I recall grosso modo the ill-fated destiny of Amatlécatl, Juan de Dios Amatlécatl, after his baptism, who, once converted and awakened by the new teachings, traveled about proclaiming these new theological beauties, confusing and lumping together in passing, Tonantzintla more, two or three or more episodes. He told whomever would listen that the Most Holy Trinity was one and three and all existing divine persons. “It is God the Father, God the Son,” he said, “and it is Adam and Eve and also a Dove God and a serpent that offers apples and a fish. Those prodigious characters conceived the world and also the great Tenoxtitlán, and they gave valor and fierceness to their sons to annihilate very quickly those great hijos de puta, the evil Tlaxcaltecas, and put an end to their seed forever,” adding still other bewildering reasons that were quick to lead the stunned exegete to the purifying flames. And those who did not die in them were struck down by the lightning bolt of Huitzilopochtli or the whip of Texcatlipoca for having doubted the magical ability of the old gods. No matter what they believed, whether they believed or disbelieved, their destiny was the same: death for heresy, for blasphemy, for simony, for sacrilege, for apostasy, for demonic possession.

  In this singular catechism, the author achieves the miracle of reconciling a dry parodic tone with a curiosity not lacking in sympathy for those catechists who have arrived from faraway lands and who have been immersed in terrible doubts, perhaps because of their innocence, which made them a perfect target for punishment and derision, but also because of their almost total lack of intelligence.

  The Era edition, prepared with superb taste by Vicente Rojo, does honor to Francisco Toledo’s prints and adds new fables, subsequent to the earlier editions. Some are still situated in the colonial period; others are set in the present. In the new fables the tale is infected with a contemporary rhythm and thuggish body-language. Their protagonists would seem to be acolytes of the Great Lords of Almoloya.29 From this change of epochs nostalgia arises, as today’s anything-goes attitude causes the old fables to appear as harsh vignettes coated in a noble patina of hagiography; their immediacy to the modern renders them immobile, giving New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians a new architecture and charging it with a new tension. If in the original fables a conflict functions in a parodic way, in the new ones everything is transformed into teasing, festive energy, urban picaresque, outrageous feats performed by scoundrels endowed with imagination but wholly devoid of manners. Perhaps it will be they who reach Glory, because the ways of the Lord, we have been told, are inscrutable.

  The New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians, an eccentric book among the eccentric, is also one of the most perfect that exists in all of Mexican literature.

  EVEN THE ODD ONES. The “odd ones,” so named by Rubén Darío, or “eccentrics,” as they are known today, appear in literature like a plant shining in the wasteland or in a provocative and absurd discourse, brimming with happiness amid an unpleasant dinner and half-hearted conversation. Books by “odd ones” are essential; thanks to them, to their courage to undertake difficult challenges that normal authors would never dare to commit. They are the few authors who turn writing into a celebration.

  Their colleag
ues, the scowlers, the most virulent, those who believe that a work’s prestige is measured by the number of medals that the powerful have placed on their chests, will always look at them askance. What’s more, they detest them. When on some occasion they hear or read a tribute to them, they become visibly annoyed, employ a barracks humor, scurrilous and ribald, which cannot be reconciled to their customary dignity. The gestures, expressions, and smiles with which they generally manage affairs as they move in meeting rooms are transformed into monstrous sneers. And if ever transported to the hospital, or to a psychiatric clinic, and while there, trussed to a bed, they succeed, in a stifled voice, in informing the doctor or the nurses that those who pass for writers and whom they describe as eccentrics are nothing more than bumblers, impostors, tricksters, until, exhausted, they reach a truce, procured by various pills of varying colors and an intravenous injection, and upon awakening from the sedative, in a hushed voice, strained and faltering, they continue their diatribe, explaining that their ire was not directed so much at those deceitful and opinionated buffoons, who are nothings, as much as at the editors who published the trash, or the critics of the cultural supplements and magazines who surrounded them with ill-fated publicity and, above all, the readers who allowed themselves to be manipulated like simple marionettes.

  Time, as always, takes care to put everything in order. Surely there must have existed eccentrics who thought themselves brilliant writers when they were just graphomaniacs who lacked culture, imagination, linguistic intuition, or were mere idiots and even lunatics. They would not go down in history, and no one would vindicate them. Whereas those who survived became classics, without enemies, and were transformed into respectable people. But those who are alive and are beginning to be known will clash with a pack of litigators and interrogators.