The Magician of Vienna

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

  The headman grunted and stirred; then a flicker of consciousness revived in him.

  He raised his head. “The white woman? Why here,” he patted his distendedpaunch. “You and I and the big chiefs—we have just eaten her.”

  Then he falls forward into a deep sleep.

  What savagery! To cause such a charming young woman to die, the only one capable of redeeming Basil Seal, and in such a manner even more so. To know that someone has participated unknowingly in an act of cannibalism is dramatic in many ways, but to dine on the body of a loved one is a truly tragic experience. Shakespeare used it in the diabolical tragedy Titus Andronicus. To incorporate it into a comic novel would seem impossible. Only a great writer like Waugh dared to do so, without compunction.

  That cruel and superlative ending closed the first stage of Waugh the satirical novelist.

  Two years later he publishes A Handful of Dust, a magnificent novel, absent the former comicality despite a few parodic and even grotesque strokes, where rage and the rejection of modernity are his elements. Its trauma reflects a parallel true story: the failure of his marriage.

  Cyril Connolly reviewed the novel:

  Evelyn Waugh, as a novelist, seems also to me to be in a predicament. I regard him as the most naturally gifted novelist of his generation (the round-bout thirty). He has a fresh, crisp style, a gift for creating character, a mastery of dialogue, a melancholy and dramatic sense of life—and he is a satirist. The anarchist charm of his books (of which Black Mischief is the best example) was altered in a Handful of Dust to a savage attack on Mayfair from a Tory angle. And though there on safe ground, it is going to be difficult for him to continue, since Tory satire, directed at people on a moving staircase from a stationary one, is doomed to ultimate peevishness [Example, Beachcomber.] A Handful of Dust is a very fine novel, but it is the first of Evelyn Waugh’s novels to have a bore for a hero.

  Connolly turned out to be prophetic. During the years that followed, Waugh became just that. He wrote biographies of a religious bent: Edmund Campion (1935), the Catholic martyr tortured and executed in the Elizabethan period; The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959), the virtues of an eminent priest whom he knew and admired, an excellent scholar in Biblical subjects, and a rather bland novel, Helena (1950), about the mother of Constantine, whom she convinced to convert the Romans to Christianity, and other novels: Unconditional Surrender, a trilogy, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which little by little alienated him from his former readers. There are exceptions: The Loved Ones, in which he revives his parodic character, and Brideshead Revisited, a masterpiece, in which he connects in an extraordinary way the happy world of Oxford, his youth, his friends, and the religious preoccupations of his middle age; and also a short autobiography, his last work, Little Learning, an emotional chronicle of his childhood, adolescence, and his youth, which ends in the failed attempt at suicide.

  His final years were difficult. He never managed to understand the changes that arose in the world in the aftermath of the Second World War. His was not the working-class England, he detested it, as well as the new English literature, the angry young men, Amis, Osborne, Sillitoe, who had come from the tough neighborhoods, an insult to Britain’s cultural legacy. But the definitive blow came from the Catholic Church, owing to the reforms articulated from the Vatican in the 1960s. He felt as if he had been stripped of a deeply loved and essential spiritual treasure. He became fanatical; he wrote letters to the press and to priests manifesting his nonconformity and signaled the peril of a rupture within the Catholic world that would cause civilization to regress; he demanded his friends, those who were Catholic of course, share his preoccupations and rage at the Vatican’s position. On 7 January 1964 he writes to Daphne Acton, a South African friend:

  It has been a sad disappointment to me that the Pope escaped from Palestine with a buffeting. I hoped for assassination. He has two very fine houses of his own in Italy. I think it very vulgar of him to go touring with the television. All of this talk of ecumenism is exceedingly painful to my sour & crusty nerves. In a happier age Küng would have been burned at the stake.

  He had stopped writing, and almost never left his country estate. It was during this desperation that death came. In 1966, at sixty-three years of age.

  AND IN BARCELONA? I talk to Ralph, the hippy with the iodine-colored hair. He reminds me of someone, but I can’t think of whom. Despite the fact that his features are very manly, there’s something beneath them that reminds me of a woman that I know, but I’m not able to put my finger on it. There’s an excessive concentration in his expressions; he wrinkles his face even when he laughs, which suggests a fit of hysteria. Our conversation is very disorganized: “What do you study?” “Oh, that was four years ago. Since then I’ve lived ‘on the road,’ a reference no doubt to Kerouac. Nepal, India, Turkey”; he remains silent, lost in a daydream. He suddenly adds: “I did a lot of business in Tétouan. There’s no one here who can help me,” “A good business, hash?” “Quiet, man, I don’t do it here. It’s six years in prison. I may go to London soon,” “It’s an expensive city,” I tell him. “Nothing’s expensive for me. I don’t have any money, it’s all the same. If I’m hungry, I beg for pesetas. I’ll show you a place where you can get soup for six pesetas. All you have to take is a bowl or a cup.” A long silence, I drink three cognacs, one after another. “I live in the cheapest neighborhood in the city,” he adds. “Twenty-five pesetas a day, that’s nothing.” I’m still waiting for money from Mexico. I owe the hostel two weeks’ rent. Whose expression is that? Where have I seen those gestures? Perhaps at the movies, Jean Harlow, in China Seas, but stamped on a man’s face. No one could image the chill that ran through me when he mentioned the six-peseta soup, indeed, taking your own bowl. As he told me, he seemed sure I’d soon be at the point of utilizing that resource.

  VILA-MATAS. On the morning of July 6, 2001, I learned that the Rómulo Gallegos Prize had been awarded to one of the writers I most admire and love, the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas. I’ve known him for more than thirty years, even before he was initiated into literature, very young, and I have followed his trajectory, from his complex early experiments to his perfect words of recent years. I consider his friendship to be an extravagant and majestic gift from the gods. On one occasion, it must have been in 1972, he took a flight from Barcelona to Cairo, and, for I don’t know what reason, passed through Warsaw. He was to have a layover there for several hours. We had scarcely just met in Barcelona, but he dared (he was tremendously shy) to phone me to say that he was there with a woman friend for a few hours. I invited them to dinner, and those hours turned into an entire month of great fun. It was in fact the beginning of our friendship. I thought of him as my secret twin, my partner in crime, in readings, in trips, until the relationship changed two years ago. With his most recent books, Enrique had become my teacher. Sometimes I dream that I am visiting him, and I greet him, calling him Sire. In short, the joy that accompanied the news was such that one would think I had received the prize. Shortly thereafter, I arrived at the home of Juan and Margarita Villoro to join them in a family celebration. The news had already reached them, so the celebration with the Villoros merged with that of the prize. I was impressed that a majority of those in attendance displayed a joy similar to my own. Perhaps because for more than a dozen years Enrique had become ours. His frequent visits to Mexico City, to Guadalajara, to Morelia, to Veracruz had accustomed us to admiring his personal attributes and deepened our admiration for his work as a writer.

  There have been known to exist literary prizes that give off an odor of corruption, of scandal, of cynicism and lack of transparency, which linger in one’s memory for decades. Quite the opposite of what Vila-Matas arouses. In part, I suppose, because it’s impossible for this dandy with the gestures of Buster Keaton to pose for his readers or his friends as a conceited, imperial, and pompous intellectual, but rather as a mere man of letters who never gives an absolute, conclusive, or totalitarian r
esponse. His elegance, his courteousness, his common sense would prevent him from doing so.

  The individuality of his writing is radical, rigorous, and perfect; his wise back-and-forth, between play and discipline, sets this human specimen apart from everyone else, whom no one can copy, because any imitation would be foolish and discordant. However, a careful reading could help a determined young writer in search of unprecedented spaces to escape conventions, to break chains, to desacralize any canon. And not only the youth, but also those of my generation, those of us who are on the threshold of seventy, he causes to feel a libertarian hunger, a desire to recover our wings.

  Vila-Matas’ prose is easy to read. His construction, on the other hand, is the result of a rigorous workshop, where the play of words is processed with extreme exactitude. His activity is that of an artisan but also that of an alchemist. The author delights in using the most anodyne, trivial, and grey words from an insignificant conversation only to later ignite them with tones of delirium, madness, exaltation, poetry. From there his monologues are born, murmurs of sudden desolation, and he glides, with absolute naturalness, toward a panorama of polished eccentricity. In his stories he deals with an external and remarkably visible world. Bits of the human comedy captured with an eye far from that of a prosecutor or inquisitor, but rather treated with a benevolent tolerance. The protagonists’ gesticulations are as irascible, as maddening as their speeches.

  An example of his carpentry: in his A Brief History of Portable Literature (1985), the first book to make the strong presence of his writing felt, we encounter a vast collage of phrases spoken by celebrated authors from the past, but placed in the mouths of other characters, writers and artists who are likewise celebrated, but of a different kind than the others. In their mouths, the phrases acquire a pomposity at times risible or at times a rigor mortis, merely because they are spoken by someone who belongs to another time or geography. In the midst of this human comedy, the author glimpses mystery, the darkest of enigmas submerged beneath quotidian trivialities.

  His world never departs from literature: Kafka, Beckett, Gombrowicz, Melville, Robert Walser are some of the most frequent visitors to these pages.

  Enrique Vila-Matas was recognized as a writer of note in Mexico before his own country. His peculiarity adjusted easily to our national setting. Beginning with A Brief History of Portable Literature, his work was followed by an increasingly wider audience of distinguished readers: Augusto Monterroso, Bárbara Jacobs, Juan Villoro, Rosa Beltrán, Álvaro Mutis, Vicente Rojo, Alejandro Rossi. Two critics noted his originality from the start: Christopher Domínguez Michael and Álvaro Enrigue. In Spain, the first, and for a time almost only, were two splendid critics: Juan Antonio Masoliver and Mercedes Monmany. Today his readers in our language are legion.

  The Rómulo Gallegos Prize chose El viaje vertical [The Vertical Journey], a conventional novel at first glance, but one that, at a given moment, proves to be quite the opposite. It is his most enigmatic book; a story of equivocations, even if we don’t know exactly what they are. Every time he approaches reality we have the feeling that the author is playing with dynamite. The ending becomes lost in a fog of mere conjecture. It is a bildungsroman, despite the fact that the septuagenarian protagonist is of a less-than appropriate age for it. As always, there is in the body of the writing a dialogue between essay and fiction, a reflection on literature and also the comparison between it and the general bewilderment that is life. From his earliest work, he has frequently posed a scene of descent, a fall, the internal journey within us, an excursion to the end of night, the absolute negative of returning to Ithaca; in sum: the desire to travel without returning. Masoliver in his magnificent review perceives in the book an inevitable tone of apology. Very well. But without didacticism or a shadow of phariseeism.

  El viaje vertical lends prestige to the Venezuelan prize. Recently, Vila-Matas wrote and published two memorable works: Bartleby & Co., in my view the most perfect of his books, an absolute masterpiece, and another one of chronicles, short essays, notes: Desde la ciudad nerviosa [From the Nervous City], which forms a triptych absolutely unequaled in Spanish-langauge literatures.

  ON WHEN ENRIQUE CONQUERED ASHGABAT AND HOW HE LOST IT. Enrique and I have coincided in many places: conferences, symposiums or symposia as the learned say, lectures, book launches and author appearances, roundtables, conventions, festivities of one kind or another, and for me it has always been a source of encouragement and celebration. In these places we meet mutual friends and make new ones. We are experts in dodging those who attend these events to proclaim the truth, the whole truth, which they go about proclaiming everywhere. Enrique has enumerated in various articles almost all the cities where we have met; I say “almost” because he never mentions our days in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan; what’s more, I don’t recall that we ever clarified what happened there.

  I scarcely noticed the omission two or three weeks ago as I was rummaging in some trunks for my Moscow diaries, looking for details that might help me write a detective novel whose protagonist would be Gogol. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the real Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the Russian. I haven’t decided yet if this writer with an ultra-mysterious life will be the victim, the investigator of a murder, or the criminal. My diaries, as a rule, collect resonances of my readings, not all of them, of course, rather those that truly interest me. Gogol is one of my giants; I read and reread him with delight. I am aware that Tolstoy and Chekhov are bigger than he, I wouldn’t trade them for anyone, I have found in them paths to salvation; however, my passion for Gogol has another tessitura, a bit perverse, more contagious and dark; an eccentric and brilliant writer who, at a particular moment, who knows why and when, became or pretended to be mad. Often during my stay in Moscow I became obsessed with Gogol, that small, damaged figure so like his characters; I read his work intensely, I frequented the theaters where The Inspector General was being performed, always leaving marveled by the play, the direction, and, above all, the acting of the various youth who at moments approached brilliance.

  In short, I’ll not attempt to describe here my relationship to that writer or his ambit, nor my novel project where he’ll be one of the principal characters, nor the notes that I’m making on his work, of his biographers, and his literary scholars. The search for my notes on Gogol returned me to my days in Moscow; on every page I fully sensed echoes of my existence in that city, I returned to the grand avenues where I strolled, the conversations with my friends at the bar of the Hotel Metropol, I remembered what I bought at some antique shops, the concerts I attended, the parties, the idle time at the embassy, the extremely long ride from my office to my first apartment on the edge of the city; so I’ve devoted my weekends immersed in reminiscences of the Soviet capital and how I settled into it. What an enormity of life I’d forgotten! I found fictitious names and nicknames so that if anyone read my diaries surreptitiously they’d not be able to discern who my friends were; some names are repeated frequently, at first not even I knew who they were, they accompanied me on the street, we went to restaurants and bars, utterly fantastic homes whose walls were adorned with magnificent icons, splendid examples of late nineteenth-century painting, and, among the most sophisticated, some by Goncharova, Malevich, and the young Chagall, but also tiny apartments, untidy and dirty, filled with books, where young artists lived. I was a cultural attaché with the rank of counsellor, so I frequently visited the great figures of the theater and cinema, the virtuosos of music, academics, to arrange project festivals, or concerts and expositions in Mexico City, fellowships, etcetera, almost natural relationships that were impossible for even the ambassadors to maintain. As I read my diaries I noticed a constant air of future life. I glimpsed between the fogs that the archaic gerontocracy, which the upper echelons of immense power had become, was breaking apart everywhere, despite the fact that the most profound changes would not be immediate. So when perestroika emerged I was not at all surprised; the most cultured sectors, the scienti
sts, the writers and artists, the professionals, the students were almost all prepared.

  I read an entry in my diary from 23 April 1979. Enrique is there, not in person but in voice. It had been years since I saw him last; he knew vaguely through mutual friends that I had left Paris and returned to Barcelona. Well, that April 23 the phone rang. I answered and almost immediately recognized his voice. No sooner did he say hello than he blurted out that he was in Uzbekistan, seriously, the Republic of Uzbekistan, in Soviet Central Asia, and he said it as naturally as if I were in Barcelona and he in Sitges or Cadaqués. He had been invited as part of a group of journalists, film critics to be exact, to a film festival in Tashkent; at that moment he was in Samarkand; yes, the exhausting but absolutely unimaginable trip had, of course, been worthwhile. He added that he was certain that Cecil B. DeMille must have known the city: the wonderful capital of Tamerlane! He went on without taking a breath: “Tomorrow we’ll fly to Tashkent, is that how you say it?, because the festival opens that night. Can you get away for a few days? We’ll see some of the festival, talk, and we can even travel the area a bit. I’ll be by for you tomorrow at your house or your office, I have your numbers. We have to see each other.” And he hung up. I wasn’t sure if he was still sleep or was awake. I mumbled: Cecil B. DeMille, Tamerlane, Tashkent, a festival and Enrique Vila-Matas’ voice, no less.