The Journey

by Sergio Pitol

  It was—and continues to be—incomprehensible to me. As if one morning I looked in the mirror to shave and could no longer see my face, not because I had lost my sight, but because I didn’t have a face. One night I had a dream. I was arriving at a hotel in Veracruz, the Mocambo, I believe. I had taken a room there in order to finish writing a book I had been working on for quite a while, perhaps years; the only thing left was the conclusion. At the restaurant, around the pool, in the gardens, I ran into friends, or rather past acquaintances—windbags, nitwits—with a big smile always on their face and a sycophantic remark always on their lips. I couldn’t take it anymore; they were monopolizing my time, so I became insufferable: I talked to them constantly about my novel, told them that for the first time I was satisfied with what I was writing, its development had taken me a long time, too long, but in the end I felt I had finally become a writer, a good writer, a great writer, perhaps. So I couldn’t spend time with them, I had to rush to complete the masterpiece on which I was slaving away, I would appreciate it very much if they left me alone while I was there; I went on and on about how wasting my time was worse than stealing my money. Some gave me irate looks, others sarcastic smirks. The day finally arrived when I was able to write the words: The End. What joy! I traveled to meet with my editors, with Neus Espresate in Mexico and Jorge Herralde in Barcelona, or both. I didn’t take the manuscript because I needed to iron out a few things first—the contracts, the advance, the release date, I suppose. When I returned to Veracruz, I would give it a final read, have photocopies made, and send them to the publishers. Afterwards: the glory, the celebrations, the medals, the praise, everything that annoys me in real life, but which my unconscious apparently dreams of. Suddenly a storm appears in the dream, then a bolt of lightning, followed by a blackout: I don’t know if I came back from the airport to retrieve something I had forgotten, the fact is I hadn’t left Veracruz, not entirely, but I was only gone a few hours, and then I returned to the hotel; I rushed into my room and ran—celestial lyre-bearer!—to open my suitcase, to stroke my manuscript, to kiss it. Except there were no notebooks or paper in the suitcase; there were instead huge eggs that suddenly began to crack and from which began to emerge horrible beaks, then bodies, which were even more repulsive, of cartilaginous birds, and I knew, in that strange way that one knows things in dreams, that they were ostriches: a quintuplet hatching of ostriches. I desperately opened another bag and another, out of which sprung ostriches of varying sizes, and the first ones, which I had seen hatch, were now my size, and some were hiding their heads under the bed, behind a door, in the toilet bowl, wherever they could, their droppings all the while falling to the floor and laying eggs wherever they liked. I could have died from despair in that state. I had lost the fruit of many years of work, the work that was going to redeem me professionally, that would lift me out of the mediocrity in which I had always wallowed and catapult me to the summit. I didn’t understand anything, and the only thing I wanted was for someone to remove those grotesque fowl from my room so I could lie down and sleep peacefully.

  The same emptiness I felt at the end of the dream, when by bewildering metamorphosis my supposed masterpiece had turned into a flock of ostriches, was repeated in real life when I discovered the complete absence of Prague, the city, in my notebooks. I had lived captive—happily captive!—aware that a miracle took place each time I ventured out into the street and became lost in the network of labyrinthine streets that make up medieval Prague and the old Jewish quarter—my astonishment before the immense panorama that came suddenly into view as I approached the river or crossed any of its bridges; when I slipped into the shade of its thick walls, built and rebuilt throughout the centuries, like palimpsests made of stone and of different clays that contained messages connected to the cult of Osiris, Mantra, and Beelzebub himself. Of all the sciences that found a home in Prague, the one that enjoyed the greatest prestige was alchemy. There was a reason Ripellino gave his best book the title Magic Prague. For six years, I visited its sanctuaries, those known to the whole world, but also other secret ones; I wandered splendid avenues that are parks that turn into woods, and also squalid alleys, vulgar passageways, without form or direction. Time and time again I walked rhythmically on cobblestone streets that had known the footsteps of the Golem, of Joseph K., and of Gregor Samsa, of Elina Marty-Makropulos, of the soldier Švejk, of the Rabbi Loew, with a chorus of occultists, newts, robots, and other members of Bohemia’s motley literary family. Prague: an observatory and compendium of the universe: an absolute imago mundi: Prague.

  I was fortunate that my arrival in Prague coincided with an exhibition of Matthias Braun, Bohemia’s great Baroque sculptor, who transformed stone, subjected it to unknown tension, extracted from its bosom angels and saints, twisting and arranging them in impossible corporeal positions, and who, in full possession of his liberty, succeeded in making the sacred touch the absurd, the delusional—that which distinguishes the Bohemian Baroque from that of Rome, Bavaria and Vienna. Braun is not a desacralizer, not at all; if anything, he was a man in anguish. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not even know until then the name of that great artist. After seeing the exhibition, I traveled the roads of Bohemia and Moravia to see the rest of his work.

  I’m almost certain that the same day I allowed myself to be dazzled by the Braun exhibit, I was able to find, with the aid of a city map, the Café Arco, one of the holiest sites of interwar literature, where Franz Kafka met with his closest friends: Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Johannes Urzidil, and the adolescent Leo Perutz. All young Jews from more or less affluent families, writers in the German language, who formed the Prague branch of the Vienna School. They considered themselves provincials, disconnected from the living language, unconnected to contemporaneity, to the prestige of the metropolis, and the truth is that their very existence represented, but at the time neither they nor the world knew it, the zone of maximum tension of the German language. From the street and especially inside, the establishment could not be seamier. It looked like all the bleak and filthy fifth-rate establishments that Hašek created for his soldier Švejk. The same neighborhood where it was located seemed to have lost a former prestige that, on the other hand, must have been modest. Imagining those young geniuses talking around a table in that dreary space, devoid of atmosphere, its floor littered with cigarette butts, greasy pieces of paper, and dirt, exchanging ideas and discussing them, or reading their latest texts to each other, had an obscene quality.

  On another occasion, during my first summer in Prague, on an afternoon of stifling heat, I went out, guidebook in hand, to look for a pair of hard to find synagogues and the so-called Faust House. I set out for the latter first, in the heart of the new city. New, in Prague, means anything built after the seventeenth century. The Faust House is a large, solemn, and neutral palace. Not even the blinding light of the summer sun is able to soften its funereal appearance. The house is opposite a square with tall, lush chestnut trees, which, for some reason, fail to enhance the beauty of the surroundings. A tree-covered square, with broad lawns and assorted flowerbeds, devoid of charm. I learned later that once upon a time it was known as the witches’ square. As early as the Middle Ages it was believed that sorcerers, witches, spiritualists, alchemists—the very concubines and spawn of Satan!—held meetings on the surrounding premises. Every thirty or fifty years, tempers in the neighborhood flared. Someone would spread the rumor that the corpses of missing children had been found on the banks of the river with marks on their bodies similar to the various signs used in satanic rituals, and so forth, which no one could prove for the simple reason that they had not existed, but emotions ignited, raged, then the expected happened: the doors of slums and hiding places were battered down; the witches and other visionaries were rounded up in extremely brutal fashion; then came the fire that, during the ensuing days, incinerated, fagot by fagot, that accursed vermin that had lost its way. In 1583, the Emperor Rudolf II transferred the Hapsburg capital from Vienna to
Prague. His credulity was infinite, and none of the many disappointments he suffered could diminish it. He was convinced that he would find the formula for the Philosopher’s Stone, which could extend life as many as three or four hundred years and had already, there was proof, made some humans immortal. He was also convinced that there was an alchemical process whereby a few drops could transform base metals into gold. He claimed to have seen it. During his reign, dozens of alchemists of diverse plumage descended on Prague. The most eminent were granted access to the royal castle, where the monarch enriched them and treated them as equals. However, after a certain amount of time they all met the same fate: ghastly torture, the gallows, the stake, quartering. One of them, Edward Kelley, an Irishman by birth, was the emperor’s favorite for many years. Rudolf worshipped him as a second Faust. And for this he gave him the palace, built centuries before by one Johannes Faust, to whom popular tradition attributed fantastic powers of divination, powers he had received, according to popular lore, from the devil himself for having sold his soul. In short, I arrived that hot August afternoon of 1983 to find that the illustrious house had become a hospital. I did not go in; the uninviting façade failed to inspire a visit, nor did I stop at the lackluster plaza that adjoined it—a gloomy continuation of the building. I walked down a street that led to the river. In August, the residents of Prague go on holiday; if forced to remain in the city, they tend to withdraw into their homes and drink beer until the heat subsides. It was a neighborhood unfrequented by tourists. I turned onto an overly modest and poorly cobbled alley. Suddenly, as I walked, I glimpsed a shapeless bundle in the distance on the opposite sidewalk. As I approached, I saw it move. It was a decrepit old man, with a thick shock of hair, who was obviously drunk. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to stand up or squat down. His pants hovered around his knees, a scene as harsh and grotesque as those of Goya. I think as he dropped his pants to defecate, he collapsed and fell into his own excrement. He was cursing loudly and in a menacing tone. No one was passing through the alley except yours truly. I walked past him, cautiously, on the opposite sidewalk; after walking a few meters I could not resist turning my head to look back. The scene was pathetic: with every attempt to pull himself up, the old man would once again fall onto his back; his pants and underwear at mid-thigh acted as a tether, hindering his movement. Even now, I am haunted by the specter of the repeated falls into his excrement and the squeals that sounded like a pig at slaughter. And today, as I write, I still associate that image with a masquerade directed by someone, hiding in the house that belonged to the man who had sold his soul to the devil. And as I think of Doctor Faust, I recall Thomas Mann’s book on that character, and that for a number of years, while in exile, Mann was a Czech citizen.

  With joy, with spirit, and with boundless curiosity, in a moment of exuberant optimism, I began to feel like a particle of Prague, a poor relative of the cobbles that paved its streets, its erect baroque estipites, its passion, its lights, its defeats, its mire. Why then—I ask myself—in the hundreds of pages that comprise my diaries of that time was there not a single mention of such walks, or the permanent bewilderment with which I attempted to integrate my person into its surroundings?…Was it out of humility? With what words could I describe that never-ending miracle? What tone would have been necessary to translate into a comprehensible language the murmurs I heard around me and what inclined me to believe that very soon I would succeed in crossing a magical barrier? But what barrier, damn it? In an exemplary essay, Borges reasons that in the Qur’an there are no camels anywhere, for the simple reason that their presence is so mundane that one takes their existence for granted. To mention them would be a pleonasm. The truth is, no answer comforts me. I reread page after page of several notebooks that make up my diary, and I noticed with great consternation that I didn’t describe the city in any of them. I seemed to obey a secret order to avoid it, to omit it, to erase it. The most I managed to do was to mention, without even the slightest importance, a restaurant, a theater, a square: “Today I ate at the Alcron with such and such people. The hors d’oeuvres are delicious there. I dare say they are among the best I’ve tasted in the city;” or “Last night at Smetana Hall I heard Obraztsova as the fortune-teller in Un ballo in maschera. We applauded her to death. Much more than the soprano who sang Amelia, who incidentally was also perfect;” or “I just arrived from the airport. I went to welcome Carmen, who told me that it seemed small relative to this ancient city’s importance.” A restaurant, a theater, the airport. Nothing, in retrospect: twaddle. In contrast, in the same diaries I go on and on about a) the noxious atmosphere I breathed in the foreign ministry; b) the frequent visitors I received from Mexico, Spain, Poland, and elsewhere; what my friends say, what they do, the topics we discuss; c) my physical ailments, medications, doctors, clinics, periods of convalescence in magnificent spas; d) my readings, to which, perhaps, the majority of the space is devoted. During those years, I returned fully to Slavic and Germanic literature, consistent with the history and creation of Czechoslovakia. I reviewed with almost maniacal voraciousness the authors I had admired since adolescence, and those years in Prague strengthened in a strange, elusive but persistent way, my knowledge of the Czechs. I read all of Ripellino—his books on Russian literature, the Czech anthology, his essays could all be included in the title of one of his extraordinary books: Saggi in forma di ballate [Essays in the Form of Ballads]; the Russian formalists, starting with Shklovsky, whose Theory of Prose I studied assiduously; Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which played an extensive role in the novels I wrote in Prague; and massive amounts of Chekhov and Gogol, whom I read and reread at every hour and in every place. During those six years, I also did an extensive review from the Middle Ages to the present of the literature of the German language, the most historically influential in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia, especially its Austrian variant. I found myself closer to Kafka than in any previous reading. As I frequented his daily haunts, I felt closer to his visions. In my youth, my enthusiasm for Kafka transformed, as happened to my entire generation, into a true passion, with all the exclusivity, visceralness, and intransigence that implies; it was equivalent to the first moment in which one feels overpowered by a spirit that he recognizes as undoubtedly superior, the only one capable of explaining in depth a time that will never disappoint us. In Prague, his role grew immensely. It was not merely a matter of providing the scope of an era, but of knowing the whole universe, its rules, its secrets, its ways, its purpose. The signs for knowing the answer are hidden in his writing; they must be sought in earnest. I set my sights on two other fascinating figures: Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann, both Austrians.

  The hatred of the Russians was intense, monolithic, visceral; and no fissure, not even the slightest nuance, was allowed. It extended, albeit with less intensity, to the other socialist countries for having collaborated in the military occupation that cut short the experiment known as “socialism with a human face” in Prague in 1968. When I arrived to assume my post at the embassy, fifteen years had passed since this despicable event, but the memory of the tanks in the streets, the days of humiliation and powerlessness, the absurd argument that the Czechs and Slovaks had requested assistance to put an end to the enemies of socialism redoubled the population’s anger rather than assuage it. In the city center, there were two spacious Soviet bookstores always teeming with people. But no Czech or Slovak would set foot in them. The feverish horde that crowded inside to reach the shelves before others emptied them with exorbitant purchases consisted of Russian tourists or travelers from the other Soviet republics, who as soon as they arrived in the city, rushed to bookstores to acquire art books and literary editions that in their country sold out immediately, due to reduced printings of works that differed from the official canon, or those that touched on “dangerous” topics, which in Moscow could only be purchased with hard currency from the West, which when purchased in Prague with Czech korunas were a steal. Appearing in these collections were
Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksey Remizov, Andrei Platonov, Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Bely, and other writers persecuted by Stalinism—enemies of the people, cosmopolitans who had turned their back on the nation, the recalcitrant bourgeois, those who were executed, those who spent long years in the Gulag; others, who were treated better, who lost the right to publish their work during long periods of their life, those who began to reemerge after the death of Stalin, were vindicated and over time became the greatest artists of their century, literary classics, and notable examples of human dignity. Russians came to Prague in the morning and returned to Moscow at night, just to purchase dozens of books they would then sell in Moscow or Leningrad at prices so exorbitant that they could make a profit even after traveling by plane. Near my embassy offices there was an exclusively Soviet press office, which no one ever entered. From time to time I would pause in front of its windows and not once saw anyone buy a newspaper or magazine. On television, one could easily watch a Soviet channel with less banal programs than the national ones, and I would even venture to say less ideologically rigid. As always happens, of course, to win the trust of superiors, these programs had to brim with ideological zeal, be more Catholic than the Pope. Once a week, on Saturdays, I occasionally watched masterfully directed and acted plays on this channel, to which I had grown accustomed from when I lived in Moscow. But if I mentioned it in the presence of my Czech friends, they grew silent, pretending not to have heard my comments, as if they suddenly suspected a trap.