by Sergio Pitol
9 Translated by Mirra Ginsburg.
10 Translated by John Hargraves.
24 MAY
I woke up in a mood from hell. I still don’t know if I’ll go to Georgia, and if so, when and for how many days. I took a long walk through parts of old Leningrad. I realize that I know nothing about the city, or very little. The same happens when I return to Rome, where I lived a few months in my youth, to Venice, where I have been several times, and Prague, where I have resided for three years. I get excited when I arrive, and I am stunned at the splendor of those dazzling cities; I realize that I continue to be in love with them, but I find that I am still a long way away from knowing them, that I have not managed to cross the threshold, that I’m just beginning to scratch their surface, and sometimes not even that. I have an urgent need to reread Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, perhaps the most important Russian novel of the century. Mann read it in his youth and that reading marked him forever. At that time he detested that the novel had not remained in Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Fontane. They were extraordinary, no one could doubt it, but he found in Bely an almost secret parodic form. The culminating scenes, the violent climaxes that abound in the story are bathed in a gentle sarcasm that almost nobody noticed at the time. He did, and he began to study the construction of situations that could combine pathos with caricature. An example can be seen in the tuberculosis spots on the lungs of Mme Chauchat seen in an X-ray by Hans Castorp and the verbal spasm, the exquisite rhetoric with which this young man makes us aware of his romantic passion by way of these spots. I would like to read Bely’s other novels: The Silver Dove, his most experimental, an intrauterine monologue that struggles, through babbling, to reach some meaning, and moreover, to soak in the amazing literature of early twentieth century at the end of teens and twenties: Akhmatova, Rozanov, Kuzmin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Tynyanov, Pasternak, Platonov, and Khlebnikov—for some the latter is the most radical poet of form at the time. Both Ripellino and Shklovsky, who have studied him thoroughly, agree that he is the true transformer of Russian lyrical poetry, who frees it from symbolism and directs it toward the avant-garde, toward futurism in particular. In the afternoon, a pleasant outing to the house-museum of Repin, a painter from the end of the nineteenth century; we are indebted to him for the faces known to us of the great figures of the nineteenth century: Tolstoy, Turgenev, the whole lot. The house is on the Karelian peninsula, not far from the border with Finland. I grew bored during the outing; I continued to rehash my regret for having alienated the Russians. Only one of my books does not cause me to blush, Vals de Mefisto [Mephisto’s Waltz], perhaps because when I wrote it, during the long period I lived in Moscow, I had immersed myself full-time in those waters. And in the evening a perfect Eugene Onegin at the Maly Theater. The only works of Tchaikovsky that really interest me are his operas. Orchestra, voices, musical and stage direction, set design, everything was remarkable in that masterful opera. I left the theater thoroughly refreshed. Happy to discover that my love of opera has not become extinct, as I sometimes feared. What bombs I’ve had to endure in Mexico in recent years! I remember an I puritani by Bellini11 that Luz del Amo took me to see some time ago at Bellas Artes to calm my nerves the night before my standardization exam in the Foreign Service, and I still get shudders remembering that performance. But one can also experience these disappointments in Prague: whether out of apathy, desolation, or laziness, opera has become tedious, except when a major international figure arrives, then the singers and the orchestra give it everything they can, and the improvement is obvious. During intermission, I heard both Russian and Finnish. I have a nagging desire to go out onto the street. But I restrain myself. I think about cities: Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, as everyone knows, and also the most hermetic. But the hopelessness of its inhabitants creates a gloom that permeates everything and penetrates to the marrow. Moscow has wonders: the churches of the Kremlin, St. Basil’s, old neighborhoods—but also large areas of horrendous architecture. The monumental towers constructed during Stalinism are truly frightening, the megalomania of cement and reinforced concrete. An architecture that evinces a complete disregard for dreams, for any sense of play. But the city is alive, its breath can be felt everywhere. At the very moment I write this, there are probably thousands of Muscovites in open conflict, arguing,
showing solidarity for each other, wanting to kill each other. Leningrad, the city of Peter, is also wonderful, and much more, is it not? But during these two days I have not felt its pulse. Sure, I have friends there, or acquaintances, and none here, and that makes a major difference. But there, even if someone brings up a political topic, even strangers say what they think. They are either followers or enemies of something. When I have tried here to cautiously talk about what is happening in the country, I encounter evasion, silence, polite changes of subject…
11 Pitol mistakenly attributes the opera to Donizetti in the Spanish text.—Trans.
25 MAY
I left Prague with a bit of a cold. When I wake up, the first thing I do is take an analgesic and repeat the dose throughout the day, depending on how I feel. Last night and this morning I caught a cold and I realized that rhinitis has gotten the better of me. What spasms! My nostrils are stopped up, making it difficult to breathe, a howl-inducing migraine. I ate breakfast and walked to the Hermitage. I went up to the Picasso and Matisse rooms, to start the tour from there. These works were acquired before the revolution to dress the walls of the palace salons built by industrialists and financiers of the time; the newly fledged, extremely rich, educated and with very broad interests, unprejudiced toward the avant-garde, possibly advised by professors of aesthetics, connoisseurs of contemporary trends. And they accepted them effortlessly, indeed, happily. Dance and Music are housed here, immense in size; each of these great paintings could cover the largest wall of a salon. All of the other paintings, dozens, are also of high quality. They horrified the French, and in general the European, bourgeoisie, produced by wild beasts for the amusement of wild beasts. In the center of an exhibition hall stood a magnificent bronze by Donatello. This space was responsible for housing a sample of the new generation: Matisse, Bonnard, the pointillists. People were crossing the room quickly, their eyes half-closed to keep their gaze from pausing on such monstrosities. A critic who walked through the hall wrote an article for a major newspaper with the headline: “Donatello among the wild beasts,” and the young painters were happy and took the name: Wild Beasts (fauves). The Russian aristocracy loathed these objects viscerally, even more than the French bourgeoisie. It was the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their former serfs, the new wealthy class, who felt comfortable surrounded by the form and color of beasts in their surroundings, which explains why many of the best Picassos and Matisses are still in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were an integral part of the art nouveau villas of Russian magnates. I stayed a good while in these rooms and then meandered slowly past the others, almost without seeing the paintings due to a new migraine attack. I finally found Zurbarán’s Childhood of the Virgin, which I knew only by photograph, but which in my previous visits was always traveling, and there I was revived…At lunchtime, I told a female employee of the Writers’ Union, who accompanied me at meals and to shows, about my previous visit to the museum, framed by privileged conditions: it must have been in 1980 or 1981. A delegation from Mexico had arrived in Leningrad: Juan José Bremer, Rafael Tovar, Carmen Beatriz López Portillo, and Fernando Gamboa, and from Moscow, Ambassador Rogelio Martínez Aguilar, Elzvieta, his wife, and some officials from our diplomatic mission, including myself, to inaugurate a monumental exhibition of Orozco the following day. The director of the Hermitage had prepared a tour of some of the museum’s rooms. It was Monday, the day when museums close their doors to the public. Our entourage, a dozen people, resembled a tiny group of lost caterpillars in its majestic halls. We toured immense corridors, went up and down imperial staircases. Without the public, the building was
once again the Winter Palace, the residence of the Tsars; its dimensions multiplied and escaped to infinity. One could hardly benefit from those conditions to enjoy what awaited: The Venus Tauride, the extensive collection of primitive and Renaissance Italians, the Cranaches, the vast Rembrandt room, the Spaniards, the Impressionists, until finally arriving at Matisse and Picasso on the top floor. What delighted me most, of this superb visual feast, was after having reviewed for several hours the entire history of Western art, upon arriving to the main floor, where Gamboa and his team were putting the final touches to the Mexican exhibition, the works of Orozco did not stand out from the tradition of great painting but rather continued it. The effect was splendid and revealing. Our great artist belonged, just as Matisse and Picasso, although with a distinct poetics, to the great artistic legacy of the twentieth century. In the afternoon, a lightning visit to the home of Alexander Blok, which has just become a museum. Very moving, but I didn’t have anyone to talk about Blok with—about his time, about poetry in general, the Scythians, whom Blok revered, those kinds of things. I don’t know anyone in Leningrad, and despite the city’s undeniable beauty, its more extensive contact with foreign tourists and their customs (in restaurants, at the opera, in museums, in antique shops and bookstores, one hears almost as much Finnish as Russian and, also, a great deal of Swedish and German), its rich cultural traditions, its sumptuous past, its sophistication, it also gives off a sudden aroma of pretentiousness and provincialism that is not perceived in the least in barbaric Moscow, whose vitality has been irresistible, if one accepts the testimony of two centuries of chronicles and novels. Perhaps the Second World War brought an end to the intellectual heyday of this imperial capital. A large number of its writers, artists, scientists, died during the siege or were evacuated to safer places, and when peace came they didn’t return. It was a broken city. Many settled in Moscow, where surely there must have been better conditions: publishing houses, universities and schools, libraries, research centers, a literary press, the movie studios. For this remarkable city to be truly perfect—perfect for me, that is—it would require the existence, inserted in the folds and crevices of its oldest neighborhoods, of a Kitay-gorod, that invisible Asian city that Boris Pilnyak yearned for, which according to him is hidden inside all authentically Russian cities, where countless eyes, mere horizontal slits drawn on an inscrutable facial surface, contemplate everything, study it, interpret it, and where in the darkness of the seedier areas marinates an indescribable mixture of fierce emotions, atavistic terrors, unfathomable mysteries, adventures and exorbitant mountains of dust, layers of innumerable coats of paint embedded on the old walls; in short, to hear the echo of the Scythians invoked by Blok, a Mongolian appetite to stain the European city…In the afternoon, a brief but torrential rain. When the sky cleared, and the lead weight on the atmospheric pressure vanished, my nose began to open up and my migraine vanished immediately. I went to the theater to see Gogol’s The Wedding. A less-than discrete performance, an excessively convoluted stage direction, with all the refined, useless, and unbearable affectations to which Stanislavsky has been reduced in the hands of certain pretentious directors. It is impossible to compare this Wedding with the intelligent production of The Inspector I saw a few days ago in Moscow! We left the theater under a heavy rain. I’ll try to read some of Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia, which I began after lunch. I’ve had too much bread, creams, pastries, blinis, and caviar. My clothes feel tight. Starting tomorrow, I’ll make the necessary adjustments…Later, I lost the desire to read, not even Mandelstam. At midnight, I couldn’t resist the temptation and went out to wander beneath an entirely white sky. I walked the length of Nevsky Prospect from the railway station to the Hermitage; the grand avenue is a recurring scene in Russian literature, from Pushkin to the present. I am and am not in Leningrad. Am I? Of course I am! It’s as if I never left. What a lie! My heart is somewhere else.
GOLDFISH
I was in my second year of secondary school. My grandmother had given me a small rigid leather attaché to hold my books, notebooks, and other school supplies, in the hope that I would stop losing them all the time. We had a subscription to a medical journal with excellent illustrations from which you could detach reproductions of masterpieces of art. I used to cut out these pages and keep them in a box of personal treasures.
One day, when I opened the magazine, I was stunned. I had never seen anything as dazzling as that colorful page. A picture bathed in light, lit from above, but also from inside the canvas. Goldfish were swimming in a fishbowl, their reflection rocking on the surface of the water. It was the absolute triumph of color. The pail containing the fish was part of the vertical axis of the painting and rested on a round table held up by a single foot. It was, of course, in the center. The rest of the canvas was a forest of beautiful leaves and flowers; they were in the foreground, in the background, they could be seen through the glass container, aroused, clustered, together, luminous, perfect. If I had lived in Antarctica, or in the heart of Sonora, or the Sahara, where nobody ever saw flowers or fish or water, I could understand how this flowery precipitation could drive me mad. But I lived in Córdoba, next-door to Fortín de las Flores, in the midst of succulent gardens, and yet it seemed like a miracle to me. I glued the page to the hard inner part of my case, where some classmates placed photos of Lucha Reyes, Toña la Negra—the great voices of the time—or boxers, movie scenes, dogs, Virgins and Saints, or snazzy models of airplanes or automobiles; others, nothing. I lived with my goldfish and their fascinating surroundings for three years. It was my best amulet—a sign, a promise. Later I saw reproductions of other works by its author, but not that one. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York I stopped in amazement in front of his formidable oils.
Years later, as I entered a room in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which houses some of Matisse’s most extraordinary oils, I suddenly came across the original of my goldfish. It was more than an aesthetic experience—it was a mystical trance, an instant reassessment of the world, of the continuity of time.
26 MAY
Nowhere have I dreamt so much as in Russia. My notes from my time as cultural attaché are proof of it. I would wake up at night and write down the outline of a dream, I would climb into a car and although the ride would last only ten minutes, I would dream something. I dreamt during the siesta, in a boring meeting, at a movie, anywhere. Dreams appeared in bulk. The height of extravagance. Mephisto’s Waltz, née Bukhara Nocturne, emerged from those dreams. And on this trip, the same is happening. On the plane, coming from Prague I dreamt I ran into a classmate from the Faculty of Law, a dead man pretending to be alive, which I didn’t find the least bit amusing, and last night I had another dream that was interrupted when I went to the bathroom, and which I summarized as I went back to bed in four or five lines. When I woke the next morning I read what I had written and thought it was very funny. I don’t know why. It could have been, I think, if in the dream I’d been a mere witness to what happened and not a protagonist. I’ll try to describe it sparingly, removing the frills that have come to plague my work in recent years. I’m in Moscow, eating breakfast in the restaurant of the National. I recognize three or four famous international figures in the middle of a large group of writers. Suddenly I see the writer Catalina D’Erzell, a Mexican playwright, and I turn to greet her. I never met her when she was alive, I had perhaps seen a photo of her in a newspaper, but I don’t remember what she looks like at all. She had a modicum of fame in the forties and perhaps early fifties. I never saw her plays, nor have I read them. They were lachrymose and prim melodramas, of which the titles are proof: What Only a Man Can Suffer; The Sin of Women; Those Men! In the dream, I went to say hello and she told me that a conference on Slavic literature was beginning that day, that we, the only Mexicans—what an honor, what a tribute!—would open the first session, and she was a little nervous because she had not seen me in a few days. She would not have been able to translate alone into body language the Chekhov sto
ry we had chosen. Not even if they gave her an award, not even if they threatened to lock her up for life in a Siberian dungeon would she do it alone. Whom would she have as a partner? Who would know how to express all the registers of The Murder? She doubted that other than us anyone was competent enough. On the bus, Señora D’Erzell explained to me that she had for months prepared ways to interpret in extremely tense forms of body language the genius of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. The Murder is one of the most difficult novellas to interpret. “There is a lot of philosophy, I can tell you, in this battle between two relatives who believe in God, one of them is convinced that Our Lord was born and died to teach men to live with dignity and happiness, while the other, who spends all his time in religious ceremonies, all the while stealing from his fellow parishioners using all kinds of tricks, believes that Christ is the equivalent of a punishment. That is my reading, full of philosophy as you can see. It’s a pity that you didn’t go to the university auditorium yesterday. I did the finale alone, they asked me, I couldn’t escape the commitment and, since you were not there, what was I to do. I expressed with my whole body the Christian revelation, the true epiphany, the stern brother who resorts to crime finds himself in a sinister prison, where he is stripped of everything, they beat him, insult him, and there, at last, he has begun to love God, to understand that He wishes us to love each other, to help each other, which also coincides with my philosophy. I don’t know what yours is, but whatever it is, I beg you, during the largo desolato at the end, which is so difficult, please hold me firmly, one long step, three tiny ones, one long and three short, do you understand?” I didn’t understand anything, not a word. What incredibly silly stunt were we about to pull in front of the public?…What a bunch of nonsense?…Suddenly we were on center stage. The music began to play, it was “Falling in Love Again,” Marlene Dietrich’s signature song. My compatriot, dressed entirely in black, with a corset that gave her the body of a dolphin in vertical jump, but a body nonetheless, rolled several times across the stage, at times with the slow ferociousness of a jaguar, others with the tenderness that the spectator always associates with the cooing of doves. I was almost hidden on one side of the stage, at times she approached me, bowed, extended her arm, pointed at me and then turned to the audience with a sweeping gesture that enveloped me and the audience. Suddenly, from the loudspeakers came a velvety but firm voice, serious, even severe one might think, that introduced us as the two greatest experts of Russian literature, especially Chekhov, not only in Mexico but throughout the Americas. The praise showered on the lady was excessive, a little extravagant, I would say, for example, they announced her as “the internationally-recognized supreme empress of Chekhov, heroic woman who has danced on Parnassus, but also splashed pitifully through the mud, a firefly and tarantula, a wholly dialectical being, from head to toe.” I then discovered that we were not in a university auditorium, but in a circus, and that the audience was not made up of academics or intellectuals but rather what one finds in circuses: families, children, noise, happiness, and among the throng of everyday people one could see the faces of the international dignitaries attending the Conference. A woman in a military uniform hugged my partner’s waist, took her by the arm to greet the public while at the same time demanding a warm applause, a cosmic applause to comfort the heart of the Mexican woman who had suffered so much and had stumbled so many times in life. She said it just like that. I, on the other hand, was nobody—a shadow, a zero to the left. Anyone who has suffered a spectacular automobile accident will be able to understand me: everything happens at once, everything is simultaneous, a bit like in The Aleph, one loses the ability to know for sure what came first and what next. The visions in the dream changed constantly, became interwoven with others, they transformed into a permanent metamorphosis. I will try to make a semblance of their order, a story in a more or less successive form, in spite of the endless fits and starts, the vocation for chaos privileged by dreams. A master of ceremonies announced in a divine voice the first act of the Conference: the body reading of Anton Chekhov’s amazing and enigmatic gem: The Murder, performed by a famous Russian actress (not only famous but the most famous, my compatriot told me in a whisper), whose name was not mentioned, which I found strange, interpreted by the equally eminent bodybuilder Catalina D’Erzell and her assistant, also Mexican. D’Erzell in the meantime ordered me to “take a deep breath, relax, believe in God above all things, nimble feet, cool head, everything in its place,” while two long rows of men on the right, and women on the left, climbed to the stage. “A chorus of basses and altos, baritones and mezzos, tenors and sopranos!” the speaker announced. “Voices of cannon and crinoline, as it should be!” my compatriot whispered in the voice of a little bird. A stately woman, dignified and beautiful, ascended to the rostrum and sat on a throne. Ray beams bathed us in light. The ceremony began. The actress began reading Chekhov’s tale in an absolutely wonderful, lilting, superhuman voice; minutes later, the chorus began to repeat her words melodiously. The prose became music; the actress stopped talking, she sang the text and the choir sang with her, with spirit and splendor. At times the noise was deafening, enough to drive anyone mad, except, apparently, the attendees of the Conference of Slavic Literatures, who were fascinated. Who knows where the other smaller orchestra of balalaikas came from, that surrounded us during the body interpretation and followed our every step, faithful to the end! My compatriot commanded: “It’s your turn, cannon,” so I went: she made me do jumps of every caliber, squat on the floor, lift one leg, then the other, fall dead and rise again, run with my partner around the stage, lift her, throw her it into the air above my head, then stop her fall mere inches from the floor, then force her to maintain an upright position with her head down and feet up. Our greatest triumph was a series of turns we did on stage at a hair-raising speed, but also with absolute precision because had I released her, she would have crashed into the audience, and perhaps she and some spectators would have gone on to a better world, but our ability was extraordinary and there was not even the slightest incident. There were moments of dancing on point and others in which we jumped gaily and closed like accordions as we fell on the floor, only to propel ourselves immediately into the air by way of springs. We achieved ecstasy, delirium, another sky whose existence we never suspected, like in African ritual dances, at least I did. I was Nijinsky for a few moments, I was Nureyev, I swear, and she, no less than Terpsichore. The end of Chekhov’s story was one of the most beautiful that one could ever imagine. The austere Christian, the repressor, has murdered his cousin, and is sentenced to life in prison in Siberia. There, amid terrible punishments, he rejects what he has been and finds true faith in God, a simple faith like that of his cousin whom he had so hated, and that gives him hope to truly live, to save someone from perdition, to redeem himself. Then the great climax: she could be heard moaning suddenly, as if she no could no longer continue, as if she were about to surrender, only to demand tremulously greater speed from me, more rhythm, more muscle. Suddenly everything stopped, the musicians disappeared with their balalaikas, silent and downcast they descended the stairs, and the choruses of basses and altos, baritones and mezzos, tenors and sopranos, light and absolute, and even the masterful actress whose name we never knew, who had read Chekhov’s story. Without saying a word we fell like whipped dogs. We passed around towels soaked in vinegar for our faces; fans began to approach us. The crowd, crazed with enthusiasm, surrounded D’Erzell, but nobody noticed me. I managed to sneak off the stage and wander through a mysterious maze of corridors and stairways, a scene similar to Piranesi’s prisons, which slowly became a rickety passageway, and then an anodyne, ugly, gray street. An instant later, I was walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. Some young people stopped next to me, looked at me, and one of them shouted rudely: “Wash your face, you clown son-of-a-bitch, or I’ll wash it with bleach.” A girl with beautiful eyes, the rest of her face covered by the collar of her coat, put a mirror in front of my face, and I almost th
rew up. The face I saw, rotten, decomposed, was telling me that I only had a few hours to live. What I can’t understand is why, then, I woke up so happy and wrote so happily during the early morning hours the first draft of the dream. Why then hours later, wide-awake, did I think that I had a funny dream, which now, as I transcribe it, causes me unbearable anguish?