by Sergio Pitol
The absence of written references to my day-to-day contact with Prague discouraged me. On the other hand, in one of my notebooks, I found an envelope with notes on a short trip I had made to the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev experiment. As I read these notes, I recalled moments of irritation and moments of pure emotion, constantly interspersed with each other, during the two weeks I spent in the bosom of that empire that had taken centuries to forge and whose impending collapse neither I nor anyone else could foresee. I got the idea to rework those notes, to set aside the texts from my diaries and to mention briefly, by way of background, some situations about my experience in the period in which I worked as a cultural advisor in Moscow.
Upon arriving in Prague, I looked for a Russian teacher, and a Czech woman came highly recommended; I read literary texts, practiced conversation with her in the language, and we did translation exercises. She was retired, which allowed her a freedom of movement that many others lacked. No one could expel her from anywhere for approaching a diplomat, nor could they remove her pension. Like all Czechs, she felt the wound of history in her marrow; she no longer believed in the possibility of a revival of socialism. When news began to circulate that a relatively young Communist leader in Moscow was trying to ease international tensions and introduce in his own country liberal reforms, among others an easing of literary and film censorship, she laughed sarcastically. She had heard it so many times, and everything always stayed the same if not worse, “Surely this is a ploy,” she said, “to fool Americans and to try to take advantage of them.” Some time passed, almost two years, I think, and one day she came to our lesson rather upset with a copy of Ogoniok, a Moscow magazine detested by all of my acquaintances in Moscow. “A friend of mine, who is also a teacher,” she said, “brought me this magazine; I’ve read it from cover to cover, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I still can’t believe it, but the fact is that something serious is happening on the other side of our border. Revolution! Not even in ’68 did they write things like that here.” We began to work that day on a very well written article about Meyerhold’s final days of freedom and the monstrous persecution to which he was subjected at the end. The help of Eisenstein, one of his best friends, to save his archive and a few documents, if the worst were to happen. The article ended with the chronicle of his arrest as well as different versions of his death and the prison camp to which he had been sent.
By this time, I was not only watching the Soviet channel on Saturdays for the theater programs; I was also following the daily newscast. And every week I would stop by the Russian newspaper store, which was no longer the desolate space it once was, to pick up a copy of Ogoniok, which I paid for in advance because it usually sold out within a few hours of arriving. Ogoniok! It seemed inconceivable that Ogoniok had been rehabilitated, had become decent! For many years it was a weekly. During the Khrushchev period, it became a publication of monstrous intolerance, of a repressive police mentality. It was headed at the time by Vsevolod Kochetov, one of the organic writers of Stalinism, a mediocre novelist, primitive to the point of exaggeration. After that leech, even more powerful reactionary forces followed, linked to the repressive apparatus. Kochetov ferociously insulted the intellectuals of the Thaw, the old ones because they dared to say what they had kept silent for so many years, the young ones because they expressed themselves disrespectfully and without fear. The target on which he unleashed most of his animosity was the magazine Novy Mir, and its director Aleksandr Tvardovsky, who dared to publish some of the literature that had been banned for a long time, among other things Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel that caused an unbelievable uproar. Kochetov disappeared shortly thereafter and plunged into personal and literary infamy. His primitivism and vileness did him in. When he spoke of the Jews he did so with the language of the pogrom; the hardliners demanded more cryptic individuals to continue, but more efficiently, what the former barbarian said. The Ogoniok that I read in Prague was a brave, fresh, modern, well-written publication. It had taken on the task of cleaning up the Stalinist as well as recent past, the economic and political paralysis and corruption of the immediate past. When I read an issue, I sensed a breath of oxygen that triggered in me an enormous sympathy for what was happening in the Soviet world. Compared to the Czech Plateau, its lethargy, its passive fatalism, this was an invitation to life and, in my case, a stimulus for creativity.
Later, when what happened and the way it happened passed, I found in Elias Canetti’s autobiographical notes a few lines with which I feel a deep kinship:
Orphans—all of us who wagered on Gorbachev, half the world, the whole world. For decades, I never believed so strongly in anyone, all my hopes were pinned on him; I would have prayed for him—I would have denied myself. But I am not ashamed of it at all.1
At the end of the day, I’m not going to write about Prague, I’ll do that later, but that magical city led me to other excerpts from my diary: to the country of great achievements and horrific turmoil.
It was an unexpected trip. In early 1986, four years after my arrival in Prague, I unexpectedly received an invitation from the Union of Writers of Georgia to visit the republic in May. Georgia had suddenly become famous because of the subversive nature of its films, and was regarded as one of the strongholds of perestroika, the word that denoted the transformation initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR. I was invited to spend a few days in the capital Tbilisi and its surroundings as a writer, not as a member of the Foreign Service, not to participate in a conference, nor to celebrate a centennial of a national hero. I accepted, of course. I began to recall things. A strip of contemporary Georgia was once the famous Colchis, the homeland of Medea, that long-lost place where Jason and the Argonauts arrived in quest for the Golden Fleece. A few days later, the Ministry of Foreign Relations informed me that the Ministry of Culture of the USSR was extending an invitation for me to travel to Moscow from the 20th to the 30th of May of that year. They requested a lecture on some aspect of Mexican literature, which I was free to choose. The invitation came from the Union of Soviet Writers. I assumed it was in response to the letter from Georgia, so that the world would know that it was the metropole that continued to decide when and to whom invitations were extended and that everything else was a vague and wide-ranging peripheral space.
From the moment I arrived in Moscow, I began to inquire about my departure to Tbilisi, but the bureaucrats who welcomed me avoided the question; they would change the subject, or at most they would say that they were in contact with their Georgian colleagues to establish my travel schedule. “You have lived here and know how the Caucasians are, people from the South, friends of the sea, of the sun, but much more of wine and celebration, they lose track of time, we know them very well and so do not worry. In the end, they work everything out,” and they added that in the meantime they would be my hosts, and were pleased to assist me in Moscow and Leningrad, a city they had not mentioned until then. Then, in Leningrad, I was informed that the Georgians were devastated that they were not able to welcome me, because as is always the case in spring, tourism exceeds all possibilities of accommodation. They should know because they had already had embarrassing incidents such as this, but that’s how they were, pleasure-seekers, people of the beach, sun, wine. Nothing rattled them, they were happy people, pagan, yes, good at dance and singing, no one was better, with a wild imagination, an ancient and refined folklore, but definitely careless, chaotic, irresponsible, even dangerous in some ways, one could say…They proposed that I go to Ukraine instead of Georgia. Compared to ancient Kiev, Tbilisi was little more than a picturesque village, they said. I knew that Ukraine and its capital Kiev were extremely beautiful places, but I also knew that in recent decades its cultural institutions were the most resistant to any social, political, or aesthetic change, and that the arts in that republic continued to follow the strictures of socialist realism from 1933, directed by unimaginative, mediocre, and unscrupulous party officials.
> I was about to cancel the trip. Apparently, a game of equivocations had begun, which I no longer wished to play. I had all my luggage ready, so I left for the airport, believing that I would go to Prague, but instead I went to Tbilisi. And, despite the bad omen, the trip was wonderful. I witnessed something unique: the first steps of a dinosaur that had been frozen for a long time. There were beginnings of life everywhere. It was a consecration of their spring, celebrated amid thousands of obstacles, traps, faces marked by hatred. Something of that, I hope, will be translated into the notes that I was able to scribble on airplanes and buses and in cafés and hotel rooms.
1 I have been unable to locate either the English translation or the original quote. The only reference to the quote in Spanish I found was in an article titled “Delayed Effects” in La Jornada Semanal, April 13, 1997, where the quote is attributed to Canetti’s “notes from 1993.” (I have endeavored to cite existing English translations of all quotations. In some cases, I was unable to locate either the original source of the quote or an English translation. In such cases, the translation is mine. —Trans.)
19 MAY
Two hours into the flight and the feeling of having forgotten, as is always the case, things I will need during the trip. Mrs. A., a television official, whom I run into frequently in airports and on airplanes, and also at diplomatic receptions, suddenly changed places and came to sit beside me. From that moment on, she talks non-stop. It’s the same every time I see her, and no matter what we’re talking about, she manages to change the subject, always to the same one, which, apparently, obsesses her. She travels frequently, attending film and television festivals in Spain and Latin America. She loves to talk about her trips and her experiences; she almost always is besieged by brutish and impatient hot-blooded men who give off a smell of sweat and from whom she only manages to free herself with great difficulty. By the end of the episode, she grows demure, contradicts herself, blushes, so her listeners will draw a more unchaste conclusion. I am certain that if given enough rope, she’d lower herself to the bottom of the pit, wallow in the muck with delight, her own intimate confidant, relishing those episodes of a strictly sexual nature. Undoubtedly she has repeated these unpleasant and tiresome confessions many times before, because her speech is mechanical, dispassionate, devoid of even a hint of eroticism. After weeks of perfect health my rhinitis has returned. I didn’t sleep well last night, nor did I did finish packing, so today I had to wake up early in order to finish. I had a dream on the plane: I was at the Posada de San Angel about to leave, saying good-bye to some friends. Suddenly, Mauricio Serrano, a classmate from university, walked by and stopped to talk to me. I said to him, “I read recently that you had died in an accident, is it true?” (And yes, of course it was, I had read that the actual person, whom I call here Mauricio Serrano, had died in an airplane accident. His private plane had crashed in the Chihuahua or Sonora desert, I don’t remember which. We were classmates in law school. He was very thin then and extremely tall. I remember him as one of the first students who attended classes without a tie but in very elegant sportswear, which at that time was almost a provocation. I must have only talked to him four or five times in my life, and about nothing, the weather, even less. We belonged to different worlds. I knew he had made a lot of money, but I don’t remember how.) The dead man, without answering me, walked toward another group. Minutes later, on my way to the bathroom, I saw him again, leaning against a tree, a pine tree I believe. I suggested that we go have a drink somewhere. We made the rounds of several bars, but no place would let us in, as if they sensed something was wrong. In the few places that did let us in, the dead man ordered dozens of limes, which he sucked on desperately. I guess he needed them to maintain his simulacrum of life, so he sucked them furiously, as if he were afraid to enter a state of putrefaction. We arrived in Colonia Juárez, to a building on Calle Londres where I lived for several years in my youth, in such a way that made the trek very long. The inside of my apartment was the same as before, except that the walls were bare, without any of the wonderful paintings from before. The dead man began to bore me, to annoy me, he did everything possible so he wouldn’t have to leave. It seemed as if he had something to tell me, but he didn’t know how, as if he had a message for me, perhaps that I would die soon, a greeting from the other world, something, anything, but everything he said was trivial. His vocabulary was very limited, his topics of little interest. I felt the same irritation that has always produced in me a cloud of termites against which I have fought all my life to protect my time. Finally, when I succeeded in getting him to leave, his color was frightening. “I won’t be able to last without decomposing, no matter how many limes I eat,” he said as he left. I woke up suddenly; I thought that the dream was real. No longer seeing the fireplace in my old studio and to be sitting instead in an airplane seat gave me a terrible shock. But only for a moment. Had Serrano been a messenger from the other world? Had he conveyed his message in such a hermetic way that—because I was distracted or because all I could think of was getting rid of him—I was unable to grasp it? My dream must have lasted an instant, because the functionary hadn’t even noticed. Drunk with conceit, she was telling me how the three Brazilian actors who accompanied her in San Salvador, plus a Cuban boxer, had at the same time pulled out their penises in a garden, in front, behind, and on both sides of her, and begun to urinate without a single drop—she was intent on making this point clear—touching her skirt, like mascarons shooting their streams toward the center statue of a fountain.
Hours later
In Moscow, near the city center. The city imposes its urban design on me, its spectacularness and power. “Moscow is the third Rome, and there will not be a fourth,” is one of the Slavophil slogans from the sixteenth century, which has governed the Russian subconscious ever since. How wonderful to drive along Gorky Street! It was enough just to arrive to perceive the change. There’s discussion about the new political moment, the new plays, the new cinema, and the new problems that everyone faces: the new, the new, the new against the old seems to dominate the present moment. Shortly before landing, Mrs. A. confided in me the repulsion that the changes in the Soviet cinema cause her. “Irresponsibility can cause disasters,” she said, “and these people are not ready for such changes; they need to be educated first, if not they’ll create problems. The Georgians are the worst, the least reliable. They’ve made a one hundred and eighty degree turn, which means turning their back on their rich cultural tradition; they would curse it if they could, erase it. Their social criticism is too strident, ridiculous, crude. Nothing good can come of it, as you will see.” I accept these displays of rancor with absolute bliss. Then, from here, from the hotel, I began to call my friends, I sensed their enthusiasm. My encounter with the city is so strong that I can’t write anything coherent about it. I walked more than three hours without stopping anywhere. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll read my lecture on Lizardi and The Mangy Parrot at the Library of Foreign Languages. I feel overwhelmed. Worse than that: I try to put images from the past in order, but I’m not entirely able. That night, I see the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov on television, speaking openly with the audience. Yes, gentlemen, the world was beginning to move! It’s midnight. The only thing I feel like doing is going out again, to the bars I know well. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll take a very hot bath and go to bed with Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar. I’m returning to his pages after forty years. I know, it’s peculiar to arrive in Moscow with Jules Verne, but I couldn’t help myself.
20 MAY
I woke up with a cold; my head kills me at times. I get by with aspirin, and that has allowed me to do many things today. I recall my first visit to Moscow in late 1962, during a harsh winter, they called it the winter of the century, and I believed them. Later I heard of at least a dozen colder winters of the century in Eastern Europe. Those were the days of Khrushchev. I hear the same kind of hopeful talks again then sense the same fear that the apparatus, the army,
the police agencies, the nomenklatura, and—let’s be honest—the apathy of the people will annihilate what has already been done and close the doors to the future for a long time. The Arbat, the picturesque old quarter, where Pushkin’s house still stands, not far from our embassy, is an active example that winds of change are blowing: cafés, restaurants, young people dressed in brightly colored clothes, with guitars and books under their arm. They tell me that a carnival was held here for the first time in Moscow since the 20s. It was organized by young people who dressed in masks and costumes of their own making; the festival turned out to be so entertaining that the people of neighborhood were speechless, no one imagined that this could be possible. It seems insignificant, but for fifty years young people lacked possibilities as simple as that, except members of the Young Communist League, who at different levels, whether by geography or guild, organized public activities, but always with a civic purpose: day of the teacher, of the woman, of the athlete, fiftieth anniversaries or centennials of the birth or death of a leader of the labor movement, a hero, or a historical event. Young people were left with other possibilities for escape: the cult of friendship, sex for some, religion for others, culture for many, but above all eccentricity. Faced with centuries of cruelty and an unrelenting history, against the robotic nature of contemporary life the only thing they have left is their soul. And in the Russian’s soul, I include his energy, his identification with nature and eccentricity. The achievement of being oneself without relying too much on someone else and sailing along as long as possible, going with the flow. The eccentric’s cares are different from those of others—his gestures tend toward differentiation, toward autonomy insofar as possible from a tediously herdlike setting. His real world lies within. From the times of the incipient Rus’, a millennium ago, the inhabitants of this infinite land have been led by a strong hand and endured punishments of extreme violence, by Asian invaders as well as their own: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas I, Stalin; and from among the glebe, among the suffering flock, arises, I don’t know if by trickle or torrent, the eccentric, the fool, the jester, the seer, the idiot, the good-for-nothing, the one with one foot in the madhouse, the delirious, the one who is the despair of his superiors. There is a secret communicating vessel between the simpleton who rings the church bells and the sublime painter, who in a chapel of the same church gives life to a majestic Virgin greater than all the icons contained in that holy place. The eccentric lends levity to the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present; in doing so, he breathes new life into it. In some novels, all the characters are eccentrics, and not only they, but the authors themselves. Laurence Sterne, Nikolai Gogol, the Irishmen Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien are exemplars of eccentricity, like each and every one of the characters in their books and thus the stories of those books. There are authors who would be impoverished without the participation of a copious cast of eccentrics: Jane Austen, Dickens, Galdós, Valle-Inclán, Gadda, Landolfi, Cortázar, Pombo, Tomeo, Vila-Matas. They can be tragic or comical, demonic or angelic, geniuses or dunces; the common denominator in them is the triumph of mania over one’s own will, to the extent that between them there is no visible border. Julio Cortázar creates a kind with which he constantly plays: los piantados, the nutcases, those characters outside the constraints of the world, with two registers, one of a genius and the other of a simpleton. There are authors and characters whose eccentricity in this time of yuppies would have led them to a cell in an insane asylum or a retirement home with medical treatment if their finances allow it. The world of the eccentrics and their attendant families frees them from the inconveniences of their surroundings. Vulgarity, ungainliness, the vagaries of fashion, and even the demands of power do not touch them, or at least not too much, and they don’t care. The species is not characterized solely by attitudes of denial, but rather its members have developed remarkable qualities, very broad areas of knowledge organized in an extremely original way. Dealing with friends of this kind can at first be irritating, but little by little it develops into an unavoidable necessity. To the eccentric, other people, from outside his circle, are difficult, pompous, pretentious, and insufferable for a thousand reasons; so he chooses not to notice them. Some fifty years ago, during our first years at university, Luis Prieto and I circulated within a network of cosmopolitan groups dominated, sometimes in excess, by eccentricity; many of them were Europeans who came to Mexico during the war, who found here the promised land and did not return to their countries of origin. We moved among them with remarkable ease. When an unrepentant sane person fell into those spaces, a close relative, for example, who was visiting from abroad, a mother, a brother, whom it was impossible to not host or entertain, that sane person in a sane person’s clothing became unbearable; even to those of us who were not part of that brotherhood, but were merely fellow travelers, his presence in that environment seemed insane, but despite this, one made all the necessary concessions, the same ones that they, the sanest of the sane, would do when they are generous and well-mannered for someone with a mental problem. Of all the places I have lived, only in Warsaw, but especially in Moscow, was I able to become part of those enchanted spaces, those hives of “innocents” where reason and common sense wane and an “odd” temperament or mild dementia may be the best barrier to defend oneself against the brutality of the world. The mere presence of the eccentric creates an uneasiness in those who are not; I have sometimes thought that they detect it and that it pleases them. They are second-rate “oddballs.” My stays in those cities considered difficult by most of the world were for me welcome refuges of unspeakable happiness, always conducive to writing…Everything surprises me here. Is it possible that the time has arrived in which the truth is beginning to break through—or is it another illusion? I think it wouldn’t be bad at all to spend a long while in Moscow, within the next four or five years, if by then this phenomenon takes off and senescence hasn’t gotten the best of me. I have breakfast with my friend Kyrim. He summarizes the Congress of Filmmakers, which took place last week: the Association’s leadership was replaced completely. It has been an explosion of national proportions. None of the dinosaurs of the old guard remained in their posts, including some extremely powerful and prominent figures from a professional point of view like Sergei Bondarchuk, director of War and Peace, a true classic of contemporary Russian cinema. He lost his job due to his sectarianism, his contempt for the trends of young people and contemporary forms, and for trying to keep alive that abhorrent maxim coined by Siqueiros, no less: “Ours is the only path.” I understood better the concerns of my seatmate from the plane; if what happened here occurred in Prague, the film studios would be closed and she would be discharged from her post. No more festivals in San Sebastian or Latin America! The tropical men, the mulattos, their spectacular pricks would disappear from her fantasies, and she would be constrained to local experiences. I should have started this entry with Kyrim Kostakovski, a mathematician, but fundamentally a man of the cinema. He was at the National Film School of Lodz at the same time as Juan Manuel Torres, and was married to a Mexican, one of my best friends. Years ago, I traveled with them to Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand; I wrote one of the few stories of mine I like about that trip.2 We had not seen each other for five or six years, but from the first moment, we began to talk like always, as if no time had passed. As with all my Russian friends, I would discuss with Kyrim film, literature, opera, people, and, of course, politics, until the wee hours of the morning. I often decided that I was no longer going to tolerate his irascible outbursts. Our dialogues resembled those of Naphta and Settembrini: each of us began to defend a play, a literary movement, a type of cinema—Bergman’s, Fellini’s, Clair’s, or Pabst’s—and the other would insult it until late into the night and with wracked nerves each of us would end up defending the position that he had previously attacked and refuting what he had originally defended. In other words, arguing, whether for hours or days, is a Russian sport. Kyrim’s passion fo
r Gogol, vast and unfailing, is perhaps what most unites us. Over the years and distance our dialogue has become much less strident. After recounting to me the circumstances of the film conference, he told me that he had accompanied Viktor Shklovsky to England. The University of Essex had awarded him an honorary doctorate. After the ceremony they returned to London, where they had been booked in a rather mediocre hotel. No expense had been spared on the public events, banquets, social activities, etc., but when it came to lodging the British really cut corners. They had planned a to visit to the British Museum in the afternoon. The writer was about to leave his miniscule cubicle when, after making a sudden movement to open a door, an armoire fell on him. He rolled to the floor under the cabinet; the blow caused him to lose consciousness. A doctor arrived, applied iodine and arnica, gave him an injection and, with considerable trouble, managed to get him into bed. Shklovsky is a man of eighty-five, if not older. Kyrim thought that because of his age he might not survive the blow. Devastated, he returned to his room to rest a moment, waiting for another doctor to arrive, a specialist who had been called. Half an hour later, he heard the phone; he feared that it was the hotel manager or the new doctor with bad news. But no, it was Shklovsky himself, ready to head to the museum. They spent the rest of the day there, touring its many rooms, seeing everything, collecting data, taking notes, theorizing. Only on the plane back to Moscow did he begin to complain of discomfort, and he showed Kyrim his purple-blue swollen ankles. Kyrim’s grandfather met Shklovsky in his youth, back in the twenties. He was a mathematician and supporter of the October Revolution. In 1937, uniformed men came to their house and took him away; shortly thereafter, three of his sons were kidnapped. They were Jews and Trotskyists—therefore, enemies of the revolution, agents at the service of foreign espionage. Kyrim’s father was the only survivor, having been at the time barely a child. In 1957 the honor of the entire family was vindicated, but none of them returned from Siberia alive. He and his family have been rather skeptical. But this time Kyrim is excited about what is happening in the country, especially in film, and tells me that wonderful films have been made and about what is on the horizon: Abuladze and Paradzhanov in Georgia, he says, are fabulous, and he tells me about a Russian film by Gelman, in his opinion the best in the history of Soviet cinema: My Friend Ivan Lapshin, “A very sad film, the farewell to an epic, a sentimental story about all the wretched generations who have lived in Russia in this century.” Try to see it here, he says, because in Prague you will for sure never be able to. The public, of course, is divided; the intelligentsia, students, scientists are all in favor of this kind of cinema, but we are a country of masses, immense masses manipulated from above, guided by emotion, and they will undoubtedly think it’s an insult to our history. In the afternoon I gave my lecture at the Library of Foreign Languages: “Fernández de Lizardi and The Mangy Parrot, the First Mexican Novel.” A small audience, a handful of Hispano-Americanists, mostly friends or acquaintances from my previous stay; one of them, in a very fraught Spanish, paid me very nice compliments in his introduction, but said he was glad to see me again in a Moscow freed from the defects that caused me so much pain in the past. Who knows what he meant! After the reading had begun, the door opened noisily, and a woman of an advanced but difficult to discern age, tall, stout, dressed elegantly in black, marched in and sat on the front row, directly in front of me. She listened to me with indifference, like a Roman matron who for some unknown reason had to endure a reading by one of her slaves. And so she remained throughout the whole lecture: haughty, histrionic, commanding attention, except at the end, when I read a scatological fragment that I introduced as an example of a language that broke ties with the legal and ecclesiastical language used until then in books. An effort to find the language appropriate to the circumstances of the new nation. This episode takes place in a disreputable gambling house where the protagonist seeks shelter for the night: