21 May
The next day he toured the bookstores and purchased some books from the collection El Ciervo Herido, published by Manuel Altolaguirre; he found Pushkin’s short plays, which he read with delight during the leg from Havana to La Guaira. The bookseller told him that next-door to the university he could find the best of Cuban literature. He walked up the avenue that leads to the university’s monumental stairway. As he approached, he saw that the stairs were covered by tens of thousands of people, mostly students, surely in protest, carrying flags and banners of mourning. He had almost reached the last street, but he did not cross; several groups of young people were headed in the same direction, and were shoving those in front in order to cross the street and reach the stairs; suddenly a platoon of armed policemen arrived and began arresting those trying to cross the street and loaded them into military trucks. The young man managed to back up several meters, a female student told him they were holding a vigil over the body of a university leader killed by police the day before. The university was rattled. The crowd that occupied the stairs was moving deliberately and imposingly down a few stairs, the coffin descended in the middle on the shoulders of six students. The mourners burst into revolutionary hymns, the national anthem, perhaps the Internationale. At that moment everything was transformed into the Potemkin Stairs. Gunfire rang out, soldiers burst violently onto the stair and began rounding students up. A spate of bodies moved in all directions, some rolling down the steps. The young man began to retreat; luckily he was not arrested. Numerous columns of armed police moved down the street where he was attempting to escape. Shortly after he learned at a café that the person killed was Rubén Batista, the same last name as Cuba’s tyrant, but there were no family ties between them. It was the first public act that the young man had witnessed. Later he would participate in many more and in different places.
May 22
And the short story? At night I read essays on the short story as genre, I take some notes. As if by miracle, I found in my copy of Cervantes’ Entremeses, which I had not opened for many years, a clipping of an interview I did with my dear friend Margarita García Flores. The note reads: El Día, January 1976, that is, when I lived in Paris. Here is one of the questions:
“How do you construct a story? What problems do you have when writing it?”
That question is very broad and therefore vague. A story doesn’t always respond to the same stimuli, it obeys an internal disquiet perhaps because it is obsessed with a character, or with one or two sentences that one has heard at random in a café, or the tune of a song that you repeat without knowing why; almost all of my stories are closely linked to things I’ve seen and heard that I later transform. Not even the most obsessive realist bests me in my devotion to reality. If I don’t see something, I almost can’t imagine it; I hear a conversation, I see a face with a certain expression that later, sometimes many years later, springs from my memory. Everything begins to outline itself very vaguely; suddenly in the middle of this vagueness I begin to structure a story that is tied to some immediate preoccupations. As I write the draft of a story the plot organizes itself immediately; all its components immediately arise, and they build a structure, which for me is fundamental. In the first draft, the language can be very basic, I write like a child of eleven or twelve. Apparently, in the stories in No hay tal lugar the structure is barely visible; however, I worked intensely on that book to achieve an internal coherence. I think, for example, how a woman from a provincial city, Córdoba or Orizaba, for example, sixty years old, a dentist and wife of a dentist, would deal with any situation, what sorrows and joys has she known in her profession, what books does she read, what movies does she prefer, how does she dress, what newspapers does she read for information, and a thousand other details; this is still the pre-writing process, much of that information doesn’t intervene in the story, it is in my diaries, but for me some details support the story, and they give it a stamp of verisimilitude; it allows an encounter with reality and at the same time establishes a fog that contaminates and transforms that reality. Then the really hard work begins, which is what I like most, transforming into geometry that which came in a flood: adding, mutilating, ordering. At this stage I begin to round out the characters. The stories I like are “Hacia Varsovia” [Toward Warsaw] which is in Los climas, and some stories from No hay tal lugar. I have a weakness for the first one because it reminds me of my arrival in Warsaw and was one of the first in which I dared to mix the real and the oneiric. It’s very special to me, but in general once published the stories cease to interest me; I need to keep writing and confront other problems and different requirements.
23 May
And so, at a table at La Zaragozana, I was allowed to revisit all those old images encapsulated in the attics of the subconscious, some, few, very clear; others fuzzy or incomplete, allowing me only to perceive minimal details, echoes of echoes of something shapeless that is still unable to emerge from the shadows. My biggest surprise was recalling that during those days in Havana and those that followed during the journey to Venezuela I began to write. Several times I have insisted, in writing and verbally, that the beginning of my work took place in Tepoztlán about four years after that first trip to the Caribbean. And I discover that it’s not true. The first time was on the deck of the Francesco Morosini when, attempting to write a letter probably to one of the friends who abandoned the trip, I began a poem. I had been looking at the sea, and suddenly some phrases that aspired to describe the qualities of the ocean, its music, its brightness and opacity and the contrast of its magnitude with the tiny, greyish and unaccented destiny of man emerged. I was ecstatic! That night I read it again, and it seemed passable but a bit bombastic. I had no desire to imitate Valéry, but rather Tristan Tzara, and to be the first Dadaist poet of Mexico, wild and sophisticated; so in the three or four days left before reaching La Guaira, on the deck, in my cabin or the bar, I deformed, deconstructed, and rehabilitated all the poems’ verses several times.
In Caracas, a letter of introduction from Alfonso Reyes to Mariano Picón Salas, one of Venezuela’s most eminent intellectuals, opened every door to me. Don Mariano invited me on two occasions to eat at his home, where I met some writers, historians, and painters. One of them, the poet Ida Gramcko, invited me to participate in the salons she held every Saturday at her home. I made friends there with young people whom time transformed into great figures of Venezuelan literature. Shortly thereafter, a very conservative, elegant, and generously hospitable Mexican family, that of Don Ángel Altamira, whose daughter Malú I had met in Mexico, invited me to spend a few days in a spacious country home in Los Chorros, an Edenic world of residences and splendid gardens on the outskirts of Caracas, where I spent over a month reading poetry, detective novels of the Séptimo Círculo, the collection directed by Borges and Bioy Casares, and other books of which I only recall with enthusiasm Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, which had just been published in Mexico.
I took frequent strolls with Malú through Caracas; we paid visits, almost always to foreign diplomats who were friends of the Altamiras; we saw exhibitions; I talked to her about literature, painting, mutual friends in Mexico, but above all, wantonly and with incontinence, my poems; on Saturday afternoon we never failed to attend Ida Gramcko’s salons, to chat with her and with Antonia Palacios, Oswaldo Trejo, Salvador Garmendia and with Picón Salas, who frequently made an appearance. When asked if I wrote, I answered yes; I was beginning, I told them, to write poetry, Dadaist poetry. Never have I known such a spoiled-rich-kid existence like that at Los Chorros. My attitude, my mere presence were antagonistic to the orgiastic rhythms of Havana. I didn’t recognize myself. I was so comfortable with the family’s ceremonial acts that I abandoned the idea of traveling to the other Andean republics. On the return boat, I recovered my old personality; I regretted not having made the trip planned in Mexico, and the only explanation I found was that it was my love for poetry that kept me anchored there for so
long. After breakfast I’d sit on one of the Altamiras’ lavish terraces alone with my notebooks. In the meantime, I was Rilke in Duino Castle, an intense poet who at all times maintains intercourse with the muses, in the shadow of a family of patrons. I wrote and unwrote verses. I was convinced that my poetry was absolutely extraordinary; I conceived of it as a sum of stridentism, elegance, and distance, in that I differed from Tzara and his pupils. Truth be told, my poems were an insipid and overly sentimental mess, which I discovered much later.
For fifty years I kept my days in Havana cloistered; I knew, of course, that I had passed through this fascinating city but could not remember what I had done or seen in it, not even where I slept; instead I remembered my stay in Venezuela with crystalline clarity, except with regard to the creative work. Poetry did not appear anywhere in my memory. It’s strange, now it seems that the main objective of my staying so long in Los Chorros was to perfect my poetry. I lived for that. Even during my return to Mexico on the Andrea Gritti I insisted on adding the finishing touches, which meant for me writing my poems with more savagery and even greater refinement. They were not many, perhaps not even fifteen. Few episodes have troubled me more than the resurrection of those poems and their very quick elimination thirty years later. So, upon returning to Mexico I gave copies to my closest friends, at least those who read poetry, and I didn’t receive the slightest praise from anyone; some made comments so absurd that I was at the point of ending the friendship. I had dreamt in Caracas of making a sober and elegant plaquette like those of the poems by Villaurrutia and Novo. One day Luis Prieto advised me: “I would recommend keeping your poems in a safe place, as proposed by Horace, and after about seven months or maybe seven years, I don’t remember whether he mentioned months or years, read them again with a caustic self-criticism. If a line doesn’t fit in a poem, remove it or eliminate the whole poem plain and simple, and if none of them seems superb, throw them all away and begin to write others that might possibly come out not as bad, and don’t be daunted, Sergio, you’re still a kid at all this.” I put my papers away and a few months later I didn’t even know where I had put them. In 1982, after finishing a tour as cultural attaché in Moscow, I returned to Mexico to join the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. One of my first visits after arriving in the country was to the publishing house Siglo XXI, where I was to collect copies of a recent book, Nocturno de Bujara, and to deliver to Don Arnaldo Orfila the manuscript of a novel, Juegos florales, which the press would also publish. I ran into Eugenia Huerta, who had an important position there. She told me that her mother Mireya had died, and that while she was putting her papers in order she found an envelope that would surely interest me. I insisted that she tell me what it was, and she would only say, “You’ll see soon enough.” Don Arnaldo was away and would not arrive until a week later; I may have confused the date. “Come next week and I’ll give you the envelope,” Eugenia said. I thought they might be letters from my youth to Mireya, a very dear friend, sent from far-away places, perhaps from China, a country that she adored.
The following week I returned to Siglo XXI to say hello to Don Arnaldo. Eugenia gave me the envelope; I opened it; it was pages of typewritten poems. I did not read them them there, I figured they were poems by Efraín Huerta, her father, or David, her brother. In the taxi on the way to the hotel, I read them one by one. They were some of the vilest moments of my life. I got to my room, I reread them, and it was difficult to conceive that I’d been able to write such garbage. I was holding in my hands the horrendous “Dadaist” poems that I had perpetrated in Venezuela and distributed to my best friends after returning from my trip. I immediately tore up the envelope and its contents so as to leave no trace of that fruit of authentic imbecility. There’s something amazing in that, shortly thereafter, that new “poetic” episode would again plunge into my memory. Around that time, when Eugenia Huerta presented me with the envelope with the poems, I had written all my books of short stories and two novels. I look in fear at the first copies of Nocturno de Bujara that I had collected at the publisher; I had written those stories in Moscow with immense pleasure; I was convinced it was the best I had written and that I would write again, and I wondered with the same sense of panic if I would read these stories twenty years later with the same disgust produced by the poems I had just destroyed.
Such is how a visit to a restaurant in Havana brought me close to my true origins as a writer. Had I published these monstrosities, every door surely would have closed to me; little by little I would have discovered my total incompetence. Those poems would have been, at best, material for taunts, and I would have never ventured to write again; I may have also ceased to read; I would have been dogged by a sad, cruel, and frustrated life, and when it came time, I would die of an acute attack of melancholy in some desolate rooftop apartment.
27 May
During a conversation in 1976 with Margarita García Flores we made a specific reference to No hay tal lugar, published that same year. And since that time I’ve written only five more stories. Nocturno de Bujara, in 1981, which in later editions became known as Vals de Mefisto, contained four stories: “El relato veneciano de Billie Upward” [The Venetian Tale of Billie Upward,” “Mephisto-Walzer,” “Asimetría” and “Nocturno de Bujara”; the fifth story, “El oscuro hermano gemelo” [The Dark Twin] is included in The Art of Flight (1996). These are the five stories that have given me the greatest happiness to write. Sometimes I think I haven’t attempted to write others because they would be inferior to my favorites, and that’s why I have drifted toward the novel and essay.
I understand Margarita García Flores’ insistence in the interview on No hay tal lugar because with that book I experienced a shift in my work. I wrote these stories in Warsaw. Polish literature opened many paths for me. I read Jerzy Andrzejewski, whose The Gates of Paradise I translated, one of the most perfect novels I know, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Andrzej Kuśniewicz, Kazimierz Brandys and Bruno Schulz, the most brilliant of all. The forms these novelists used could be complex and sophisticated, yet one sensed beneath the subsoil of language a dark, unforgiving and, at the same time, profoundly lyrical reality. Through contagion I began to practice and do exercises with the various shades of language and diverse structures; my plots remained more or less the same, but everything else was different, I was moving from one metamorphosis to another. But I still and forever consider reality to be the mother of imagination. For many years I have been guided by the words of Henry James, the great master of at times impenetrable stories, whose processes have transformed the universal novel: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life.”
Finally, in the four stories contained in Vals de Mefisto, I perceive a reality and imagination that have soothed their grievances, both of which have yielded their arrogance, opposites have been dissolved. Presence, flight, dreams, reality, solitude, distance, solidarity, textuality, and autobiographic chronicle have managed to fit together rather conveniently. Sometimes I imagine I am near the Threshold, that mythical garden where I’ll discover that everything is in all things.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, I find talking about myself and what I do awkward and boring. So I’ll allow myself to close this long sermon with a few words from my friend Carlos Monsiváis: “Sergio Pitol has written illuminating books, everyone knows this; they are a testament to chaos, to his rituals, his sludge, his greatness, abjections, horrors, excesses, and forms of liberation. They are also the chronicle of a rocambolesque and playful world, delirious and macabre. They are our esperpento. Culture and Society are his two great dominions. Intelligence, humor, and fury have been his great advisers.” What else can be said?
28 May, on the plane
The cure has had surprising results. Last week I spent every afternoon in the neurological clinic, specifically in the department of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, where I underwent a logophoniatric evaluation. I read in my file that I was given the Luria-Nebrask
a Neuropsychological Battery and the Boston Naming Test, about which I knew nothing; they also studied carefully the results of an MRI and concurred that my brain was okay, just as the specialists from Mexico had told me; the language problem, they say, may be the result of fatigue or a fear of the vicissitudes of old age. They have recommended several prosody and vocal articulation exercises to do when I arrive in Xalapa.
Today is my last day in Cuba; early tomorrow morning we fly to Mexico. Tonight we bid farewell to Havana. It had been several months since I was able to write, since January, I think. The words escaped me, they came out halfway, I was confused about conjugations, about the use of prepositions, my tongue became paralyzed. As I tried to read what I was inflicting on my notebooks in recent months I found fragments of something like a Finnegan’s Wake from the Paleolithic Era carved in stone by some bewildered Neanderthal.
Antonio Tabucchi once said that Carlo Emilio Gadda invited people to be suspicious of those writers who were not suspicious of their own books.
1 Pitol may be referring to the essay “The Sedulous Ape,” in which Stevenson writes, “I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.”—Trans.
2 Translated by Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig. (Where possible, I will use existing English translations for the majority of quotations from other works. These translations will be indicated by a footnote. Otherwise, the translation will be mine.—Trans.)
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