The months I spent in Belgrade were rich in suggestions. As I wrote the novella, I outlined subjects for other stories, because I took for granted that Juegos florales was not going to be my only intervention in that genre. In the morning I would go out and amble the city, in the evening I’d read and reread Hermann Broch and, as always, the English, and at night I’d write. I began a diary, which I still continue now in fits and starts, where I recorded a maelstrom of ideas: a little girl who tries to poison a sickly old woman whom she adored; a delegation of Mexican filmmakers at the Venice Biennale, where one of the worst directors of national cinema feels annoyed because he believes the winning Japanese film to be a copy of one he made in his youth; a painter residing in London, who has earned great renown in Europe, returns to Xalapa, his native city, where the local artists believed his prestige to be a mere invention, the fruit of a mere publicity campaign carried out by him and a friend with good relationships in the press, and many other plot germs suggested by my readings, memory, or imagination. I decided to turn some of those ideas into other short novels. I continued to write Juegos florales, but also three stories I had chosen from notes in my diary. That is to say, I was writing four novellas at the same time; after a few weeks I noticed that the three new novels were beginning to find meeting points, that their characters were able to travel fluently through the different spaces and that the plot threads were becoming intertwined. The three stories were transforming, moving away from their beginnings, taking on life; whereas Juegos florales was becoming more and more taut, it was losing what little vitality it already lacked from the beginning, the language became withering, strained, dead letter. I finished it quickly, as I had anticipated, but I found it contemptible. I had hopes that a serious revision of style might resurrect it. But, for that, I would have to allow it to sleep for a time. Every time I read a page, my instinct became paralyzed, my linguistic inspiration didn’t work, and a writer knows that instinct and inspiration are his greatest weapons, the secret forces of reason. He also knows that those forces acquire at a given moment broad autonomy that allows them to transform into literature what was scarcely an outline before, an unfinished project, or a mere composition. When I wrote the words the end, I put it away in a folder and devoted myself exclusively to the other narrative body, where the other stories were fusing; the novel was like an animal that grew and played at metamorphosis at every turn. I was no longer thinking of three sibling stories but rather an absolute unity. I found the title: El tañido de una flauta, in a line from Hamlet: “‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” The months went by, I left Belgrade, settled in Barcelona and remained there for two and a half years.
The Barcelona that I experienced between 1969 and 1972 was one of the most alive cities in Europe. One could tell, feel it in the air, that the totalitarian spirit was being undermined, that it was only a matter of time before it exploded and broke into pieces. There were libertarian currents of different types, and the cultural life was a reflection of those circumstances. Libraries and publishing houses oriented towards renovation were being created: Anagrama, Tusquets, among others. The youthful revolution that ran through Europe in 1968 left a strong echo in Spain. We were living in a world of ideas and of emotions open to any change. Every cell in my body participated in the drunkenness. Only in Barcelona, out of all the years I was absent from my country, did I participate actively in literary life, and did I have a close relationship with writers and editors, above all the young ones. From those discussions—and there every conversation was a discussion—with my then friends, El tañido de una flauta was nurtured. The novel absorbed above all the relationship between artist and world. Its sign was creation.
The central theme of El tañido… is creation. Literature, painting, and film are its central protagonists. The terror of creating a hybrid between the short story and the essayistic treatise drove me to intensify the narrative elements. In the novel, various plots churn around the central narrative line; important, secondary, and some positively minute plots, mere larvae of plots necessary to cloak and attenuate the long aesthetic disquisitions in which the characters become entangled.
I sent the novel to Mexico shortly before changing scenery. I traveled to England to teach at the University of Bristol. I arrived in London a month before the beginning of classes in order to spend time in the city that I liked so much. I thought that the respite was going to be welcome, but it wasn’t, at least not entirely; I was afflicted with melancholy. I thought at first that it might be nostalgia for Barcelona, my friends, my work at the publishing houses, the endless nights of revelry, the political intensity, but I began to glimpse that my unease was owed to the absence of my novel. I’d no longer be able to add or subtract anything from it, nor fine tune the dialogues, nor sit in front of the typewriter to copy the pages scribbled with so many corrections. I felt like an orphan of the novel; the manuscript must have arrived at Era, my publisher in Mexico. I resolved that as soon as I settled into Bristol I would begin from the first day an in-depth revision of Juegos florales, the novel that lay imprisoned in a folder for several years. I then felt prepared to do it; the experience of El tañido de una flauta gave me confidence. But after reading the manuscript again I was horrified; it was worse, much worse than I remembered. For several months I struggled to redo it, I tried to erase, to the degree possible, the real circumstances from which it came, to invent secondary characters, to imagine different scenes. After six months, I gave up. All I had to do was read a chapter to be convinced that the language did not breathe, the action was mechanical, and the characters were poorly manipulated marionettes. I decided once again to put those Floral Games away in their folder.
Then came the years of Foreign Service. I started off in Warsaw, then went to Paris, Budapest, and Moscow; literarily they were unproductive years; from time to time I wrote articles. Nevertheless, my diary records during those years a permanent interest for writing. During that lapse of impotence, I outlined in my diary projects, fragments of novels, truncated dialogues, descriptions of characters, mounds of details, but when I began to organize those materials, the story told in Juegos florales interjected itself, like an evil specter, and everything congealed. In Warsaw, during a grave moment of neurasthenia, I destroyed the manuscript, but not even that was sufficient to placate the curse. I began to grow accustomed to my sterility. My connection with literature was being sustained solely through reading. I returned to the Russians, my passion since adolescence. Chekhov, Gogol, and Tolstoy had forever been my tutelary figures. There, in Eastern Europe, the horizon expanded before me, I read the Romantics carefully, the symbolists, and the avant-gardists, I discovered Biely, Khlebnikov, Bulgakov, among others; if during that time someone had asked me what ten books I would take with me to a desert island, I am sure that my list would contain at least seven Russian titles. The originality of that literature, its immense energy, its eccentricity are so surprising, as is the country. Rainer Maria Rilke took a several-months-long trip through Russia in 1900. On July 31 of that year, aboard a boat in the Volga, he writes: “All that I had wrote until then was but a picture of country, river, world. Here was the real thing in natural size. I felt as if I had watched the Creation; few words for all that is, things made on God the father’s scale.”52 To speak of literature or music until the wee hours of the morning, consuming vodka with young Russians, was also a unique and exhilarating experience. At the Taganka Theatre I saw an adaptation of The Master and Margarita of such absolute perfection that when the curtain came down I felt for the first time that I had gone to the theater, that everything I had seen until then was just a trivial game of amateurs. In Moscow I managed to rid myself of Juegos florales, that ill-fated shadow that had cast itself years before on the blank page. All of a sudden I started writing, and in no time I finished four stories, which were published under the title Nocturno de Bujara, in subsequent editions as Vals de Mefisto. Upon finishing the book, I took advantage of a few d
ays of rest to go to Rome. In the Fiumicino airport I ran into a classmate from university whom I had not seen in a long time, whom I’ll call Raúl, and he introduced me to his wife, whom I’ll call Billie, Billie Upward, a tall English woman, educated since childhood in Spain, with a face of disconcerting paleness, as if painted white, in the style of clowns; they were arriving from a trip to Spain, where she had grown up. It was ten in the morning on one of those days of Roman autumn radiant with light. Raúl Salmones suggested that we dine that night at a restaurant in the Trastevere so as to enjoy the warm night and later take a stroll through the city. During dinner, I talked to Raúl about mutual friends, he talked about what Rome offered him, about some people at the embassy whom he saw, about interesting Mexicans who had passed through Italy recently, about his studies, his work as an architect, and I about my adventures in Moscow; I recounted some anecdotes of what happened there, and the good and bad relationships I had made in the city. At one moment I noticed that Billie was exasperated, she looked as white as that morning, as if her blood were not circulating; surely her exasperation was due to having remained on the margin, so I tried to incorporate her into the conversation, which took a radical turn; her voice, her expressions, her gestures seemed plummy and solemn, her discourse ranting, a screed that at moments became a sermon; she began without preamble with the statement that in Venice she always moved in a very refined circle of friends, one of whom was Luigi Nono, the son-in-law of Schoenberg; she had traveled with him and his wife recently to Salzburg to hear Lulu by Alban Berg. She described the opera’s scenery, the execution, and the voices, and without any transition she moved on to the cante jondo and its supposed roots in India and the Islamic world; to Palladio, on whom Raúl had written an excellent essay, to Bauhaus, to the autobiography of Alma Mahler, whom she detested, to Cioran, to Brancusi, to the German romantics, to the tomcat Murr and the beautiful books that she and Raúl were publishing in Rome, and to many other subjects, without taking a breath, or without allowing us the chance to speak. When we got up, Raúl suggested that we see each other before leaving Rome. I proposed Saturday at noon, it would be my last day in the city, we would eat at noon at D’Alfredo, in Piazza del Popolo. Later we took a very long stroll until arriving at the building where they lived, situated on a narrow street that opens onto the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. Upon arriving at the gate, Raúl invited me to one last drink, which in fact was too many. It was a large apartment of elegant sobriety. Seldom have I enjoyed such visual perfection. All at once I noticed that Billie had had too much to drink, she was drunk, and in that state, honestly, she was rather tiresome. She stood up and began to dance alone, and hurled small objects at us that she took from the furniture. She sang and spoke nonsensically, then began to insult Raúl with a coarseness that was not to believed and ended in a frightful wail. She raised her face to the sky like coyotes do, and her wail turned into a howl and then a guffaw. My friend approached her, embraced her, and led her to the bedroom, from where she immediately exited. He accompanied me to the street, apologizing, especially for his wife’s behavior. He asked me to forgive Billie, she had had to resolve difficult problems with her family in Spain recently, she was very distressed, he took responsibility for allowing her to drink too much. He assured me that the next morning she would wake up calm, without remembering the grotesque scene to which she had exposed me. And in his goodbye he repeated that we would see each other at the restaurant.
I left a bit distraught. I took a taxi back to the hotel. I was extremely exhausted. That morning in Moscow I had awakened early in the morning in order to make it to the airport, and I had not had a moment’s rest all day. It had been an immense day, a day as long as a month, which at the same time had transpired as if in a second. The following days were magnificent, I visited my favorite places; I entered the church of San Luigi dei Francesi to see some paintings by Caravaggio that I did not know; I saw museums, bought shirts and ties, made an exhaustive round of bookshops, and, above all, I moved as always at random in order to lose myself and discover the many Romes that Rome shelters. On Friday I called Raúl at home to ascertain if there had been a change for the following day. A young Peruvian girl who claimed to work at the home answered brusquely, as if frightened. The lady and gentleman were not at home, and she did not know when they might return. I left my regards and asked that she remind them that the next day we were to eat at the Piazza del Popolo; I added that I was leaving from there for the airport, so that they would be punctual.
Saturday was a sad and dark day, with intermittent showers. I awoke late, prepared my bags, and stayed in bed reading. At the appropriate time, I took a taxi and was at the restaurant by two. My friends had not arrived; I waited a half hour and began to eat; I thought I had confused the establishment. A little after three Billie appeared, soaked and disheveled, wearing the same dress as when I left her at her home, only dirty and wrinkled, a shawl badly placed on her shoulders, and instead of her shoes an old pair of men’s ankle boots. She hurried toward my table and asked in a sharp voice: “Where did you leave your dear old chum?” I stood and invited her to sit with me. She did so clumsily. “Where is he, I ask you?” I answered that I had arrived at two sharp and had been waiting for them since, had begun to eat because I had to leave soon for the airport. “Where is Raúl coming from?” I asked, and her response was a river of excrement: she cursed Mexicans, South Americans, mestizos, and above all her clown of a husband; she said he was a good-for-nothing, and that when she met him she was embarrassed to be seen with him on the street, anywhere, that he was unpresentable, what little he knew he owed to her, his ignorance continued to be oceanic, his essay on Palladio, regrettable; she spoke as she ate her soup, and some liquid fell from the spoon onto the tablecloth; she allowed the waiter to serve her several glasses of wine; Raúl was a pig like all mestizos, a chimpanzee; each time she raised her voice and was more offensive, she wanted to know where I had hidden Raúl. Had I convinced him to return to Mexico? She took a break to eat some bread, at times as she chewed she spat the bites to the floor; when she spoke again she did so about herself and in superlative terms: “You don’t deserve to be at this table, you don’t know with whom you’re eating, nor what your place is. Go back to the kennel with your partner; go ahead, go see him, did you sleep there the night you left my house? Did you gnaw on the bones together? Why don’t you answer?” The waiters and the guests at the neighboring tables looked at us with visible disgust. She didn’t stop: “Your friend respects me less than the whores he frequents,” and she began to say vile, filthy things again, about Raúl, veritable atrocities. I asked for the bill and put down my credit card, she stood up. She burst into insults again, and, worse, began to cry between guffaws and howls, as she had done the previous night. She leant over the table suddenly and in a single motion of her arm threw everything to the floor, plates, silverware, a pitcher, the fruit dish, the glassware. Two husky waiters rushed over immediately, but she slipped through them like an eel. She ran to the door, dodging everyone, and disappeared into the downpour. Nothing so unpleasant had ever happened to me. The restaurant captain reprimanded me in front of everyone with a thundering voice. He reproached me for having invited to a place of that category an adventuress of the worst sort, a madwoman, and when they returned my card I saw that the total was exorbitant, almost the same price as a roundtrip ticket to Moscow. I arrived at the hotel shaking with rage to pick up my bags. The malaise continued there, in the airport, on the plane, in the taxi in Moscow, in my apartment. I slept poorly. The next day, in the afternoon, I sat down to my worktable. A few hours later I had finished writing the first chapter of Juegos florales. It was the same story as before, the trip to Papantla, an award ceremony for a poet, a woman member of the jury who comes down from the dais and moves like a sleepwalker down the aisle to embrace and old servant woman who’s rumored to be a witch. But at the same time it was another novel. The woman was English, her name was Billie, Billy Upward, an insufferable woman.
In the first manuscript the story is linear; in the second, on the contrary, it turns into a sum of intermixed stories, none of which results in a real ending. And if there were, it would be found only in confusion. The reader would have to decipher it at will. In the first outline, the novel begins with the couple situated in Xalapa, and when the past is mentioned there is an occasional mention of Rome, only in passing; in the second version, the final one, Rome and Venice manifest their splendor and their immense attributes. For the portrait of Billie, the frustrated writer, the story’s narrator compiles testimonies from different people, some think her crazy for literature, others crazy in love, others crazy because she’s bewitched, others, simply, a crazy piece of shit; the reader will have to put the puzzle together and is allowed to play, cheat, and make shady deals.
Juegos florales has a complex structure, the most difficult that I have constructed. Despite the challenges I imposed on myself I finished it in very few months, which surprised me because at that time I wrote at a frustratingly slow pace.
The Magician of Vienna Page 23