The Journey

by Sergio Pitol

  27 MAY

  Yesterday I was on edge because of the dream in which I was dancing maniacally with Señora D’Erzell, whom I’ve never even met. During the day I remembered dancing scenes that made me laugh out loud, but at night as I was writing it down I detected a connection with some very old dreams, an absurd flowering of remorse back in my thirties, when I led a life disposed to revelry, carousing, a so-called wanton’s life, and arrived home at dawn only to fall asleep without fail and dream that I had lost my way, that if I didn’t straighten up I’d be a failure, and in those early-morning dreams I was often demeaned in the eyes of my teachers and especially my comrades of letters, my disciplined and efficient contemporaries, low blows that fortunately disappeared in an instant when I woke up at noon, freeing me to act however I wanted. Once I reviewed the dream, I found that its meaning was just the opposite of those juvenile moralizing dreams; it was instead a way to laugh at myself, to dive head first into the carnival, to live my destiny as the Ugly King and receive that well-deserved beating with which that king’s tale ends. The height of carnival. But I’m furious because I’ve had problems with representatives of the Writers’ Union who apparently do not want to allow me to go to Georgia, and especially because of a terrible incident, a comedy of errors that caused me to feel extreme panic and triggered a nightmare worse than any I can remember. I’ll begin: at breakfast time a very unctuous and talkative employee of the Writers’ Union arrived, asking if everything was going well in the city, that they, the Association and its leaders, were happy about my visit, and they wanted to invite me to participate day-after-tomorrow with other foreign experts in a major symposium in the city of Tula on Turgenev’s work, that they had already talked about it with my embassy and that the cultural attaché had thought it a perfect idea. I told him bluntly that the embassy had no right to decide for me; my visit was not official; I insisted that I had taken this trip in response to an invitation from Georgian writers and therefore did not understand why other activities were being proposed for me. The messenger seemed to agree with everything, but said that an ambassador from one country never ceases to have an official connotation in another country, and that in the USSR all associations of writers, painters, pilots, doctors—of any profession—were autonomous organizations, yes, but official nonetheless. It was a dialogue of the deaf; I kept insisting: why this stubbornness to keep me from traveling to Georgia? He should tell his superiors that I would return to Prague this afternoon, that I would also communicate with my embassy to make them aware of the circumstances in which this visit was unfolding. He said he would, but for the moment, since a tour that morning was planned to a number of Pushkin-related sites in the city and its surroundings, he was sure that I would find a visit to the town of Pushkin fascinating. I refused, I told him that I’d rather rest and get everything ready for the trip and to please advise me when the plane to Prague was leaving. The employee did not bat an eyelid, he drank the last sips of his coffee, looked around, then stared at the book on the table, Jen Sheng, by Mikhail Prishvin, in Italian translation, and next to the book a notecard where I had just made some notes. I had brought the book to study the close relationship that Russian literature maintains with nature that has always impressed me. On the notecard I had written: “Yes, in my hermitage I convinced myself, once and for all, that scented soaps and clothes brushes represent only a small part of civilization, that the essence of civilization resides above all in the creative force of understanding oneself, and of forming a bond between men…” He pointed to the book. He wanted to continue talking, but apparently wasn’t sure how, and I wasn’t going to help him; he was busy eating cheese and bread…Finally, he said that he had studied Italian as a second language in university, that he liked it a lot, but that it was well below his knowledge of Spanish. He looked for ways to convince me to go to the Turgenev celebration but was unable to find one. I got up from the table and told him coldly to call me as soon as he arranged my departure from Leningrad. After returning to my room I was overcome with a terrific flash of rage. I called the embassy in Moscow and Luz del Amo in Mexico. I lay down on the bed. I was exhausted. I tried to sleep a bit longer and forget the insignificant gray man who had visited me to divert me from Georgia. I fell asleep and before doing so completely I felt a sealike calm in anticipation of Catalina D’Erzell’s inviting me to dance with her again, but not The Murder, instead a longer piece, with more dazzling effects that would allow me to really shine in front of the distinguished audience, like The Cherry Orchard, for example. I woke up an hour later, without remembering any dream, but in a much better mood. Absolutely determined to not give in. I left the hotel, went to the used bookstore on Nevsky Prospect, about two or three blocks from the hotel. When I arrived at the bookstore I had second thoughts. What if at that very moment the writers were calling me to tell me that everything was set to leave for the airport and fly to Tbilisi or Prague, which was all the same to me anyway? And later they would tell me that they had looked for me, that they had everything arranged and since they didn’t find me in my room as we had agreed, they had to cancel the flight, I would have to accompany them to Tula and improvise a talk on the author of Fathers and Sons. My concern forced me to make a doctor’s visit, without pausing to rummage through the shelves as long as I had wanted. I found a copy of Karlinsky’s book on Gogol’s dark sexuality that I had been searching for over a period several years; an anthology of stories by Boris Pilnyak, which included an original, splendid, and virulent story that had been on my mind since my arrival in the city: “His Majesty Kneeb Piter Komondor,” a quasi-demented diatribe in its stubbornness against the Westernization imposed by Peter the Great in Russia; and in the English section, Mr. Byculla, a detective novel by Eric Linklater, which I read as a teenager in The Seventh Circle by Borges and Bioy Casares, that fascinated me at the time—a very complicated story of a criminal religious sect whose plots unfolds throughout the centuries. Twice I had bought the original English edition, only to lose it almost immediately both times. Today’s, the third, was the quickest. Upon arriving to the hotel room, I found only the books by Pilnyak and Karlinsky in the bag. I could not have left Mr. Byculla at the bookstore because I was perusing it with delight on the street. I went down to the café, pointed to the table where I was sitting, and they responded that no waiter had picked up a book. “As you can see,” the employee said, “we’ve had a lot of people this morning, someone might have taken it;” I then asked at reception, where I had stopped for a moment to ask if anyone had phoned me, and no, no one had, nor had anyone left anything. I went up to my room, asked for my key from the gruff matryoshka who was guarding the floor—one of those robust and gritty women clad in a horrendous paramilitary uniform responsible for the supervision and control of guests. I asked her if I had left a book there when I asked for the key five minutes earlier. Not a single facial feature changed, only her hard eyes opened until becoming round like those of a sinister doll, she opened the desk drawer without taking her eyes off me and pulled out two Finnish pornographic magazines—one was obviously Tom of Finland, the magnificent line of the figures was unmistakable. On the cover two young policemen are entertaining themselves in horseplay; one is unbuttoning the pants of his partner’s uniform with one hand while removing from his own fly with the other a tool capable of destroying an elephant’s vagina. The two cops’ eyes are shining as they lick their lips with pleasure. The face of that monument to the police force before me turned a shade of purple, like a huge dark tomato, as she looked at the cover, and in a faint but sharp voice that did not at all match the stature and strength of her body—instead of the booming deep bass voice one would expect—she said that the police were to be respected, and anyone who spreads subversive propaganda in the Soviet Union, especially when it intends to degrade the courageous men and women who make up the security of the State, has to pay the appropriate penalty for his criminal effrontery. She concluded: “So were you the one who left them in the room? And you st
ill have the nerve to claim them! Give me your key, give me the key to your room, if you resist you will regret it. Give it to me.” She addressed me with ty, the Russian pronoun that denotes familiarity or, in this case, impertinence, with a delicate but firm voice and soldierly expression. “Either you give it to me willingly, or I’ll break your neck.” She stood up and held out her hand. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. I realized that they had set a cruel trap for me. The next day my picture would be splashed across the newspapers enveloped in a cloud of scandal; I would be expelled from the country amid terrible humiliation. All this for wanting to go to Georgia and not to the celebrations for Turgenev? Or for having behaved rudely the day the president of the Writers’ Union invited me to lunch? I gave her the key. The monster saw the number, showed a look of surprise, changed her tone, and asked my name, which I gave to her. She fell into her chair with an expression of bewilderment. She asked me with extreme courtesy for an identification other than my passport. Thank God she was no longer addressing me with ty. She covered the Tom of Finland magazines with a towel. She carefully studied my diplomatic card, and then said in a voice that had become a fearful trill: “Forgive me, citizen, there has been a mistake. You say that you came to pick up a book; but no one has given me a lost book, this is the time when all the tourists vacate their rooms and leave them in a mess—the beds, the furniture filled with books of anti-Soviet propaganda, yes, and in every language of the world.” Just then, there appeared in the corridor an elderly couple, very elegant people, the woman wearing an extremely luxurious fur coat, with a carriage and gestures that were indisputably from le grand monde; he, a little weathered, was supporting himself on an orthopedic cane, and at his side a translator, or secretary, also very well dressed. They stopped at the table, with wide smiles, as if they were very satisfied with their stay, and spoke Finnish with their companion. He said something dry and authoritative to the woman, and she handed them the pornographic magazines. The interpreter spoke to her with a tone of implacable authority; when she meekly surrendered the publications, he smirked, patronizingly, almost with contempt, and she, the terrible guardian of order who had so frightened me, acted like a little girl, a reprimanded pupil, and raised her shoulders slightly, as if to apologize. And I didn’t understand anything. Who were these elderly people? Why did they claim those magazines? What powers did they have? Mysteries of the great beyond. I remembered a novel by Highsmith, of whom I am quite fond lately: A Dog’s Ransom, in which a young policeman is terrorized by a thug, a poor sinister devil, who accuses him, the policeman, once his crime is discovered, of demanding from him a percentage of everything he got in his acts of villainy. And I thought how vulnerable someone, anyone, can be when someone else makes an absurd accusation, spreads a slanderous lie, and maintains it without backing down. I lay on the bed again and took a sedative, all I wanted then was to return to Prague as quickly as possible, by train in the event there were no seats available on a plane, and I thought that dancing with Catalina D’Erzell had given me a frightful case of bad luck. Perhaps in life she had been jinxed, and during the course of that seemingly never-ending dance she had infused me with an essence that was pure gettatura—the evil eye. My bags were ready; I only needed to put away the medicines on the bedside table and some books. The interpreter called to tell me not to worry because the passage was booked; no, he did not know exactly what time we should leave the hotel, but I should please stay in the room, someone would go by the agency to collect the tickets and accompany me to the airport. Everything is set. What a relief! A ticket to where, I wondered after hanging up the phone. Would they be such sons-of-bitches as to return me to Prague? And why didn’t they tell me exactly what time they would collect me? I could still see a thousand things in the city! Go to the Russian Museum, which was a step away, or closer, if only to see the façade; or the house where Anna Akhmatova lived and suffered, which to my knowledge is also very close, on the Fontanka. The last thing I read yesterday, for several hours, was the phantasmagoric Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka by Gogol: I read and reread that prodigious story titled “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” written after the author had just arrived to Petersburg from a village in Ukraine, a young man whom everyone mocked, and rightly so, because all he did was make foolish remarks and act a little off in the head, but with that story (and he would never know) he anticipated by at least a century and a half the best avant-garde literature. Every time I read it, I become intoxicated with joy and amazement. It is unique in its genre. He wrote it during adolescence; the other stories that accompany it in the book are entirely foreign to it. It’s a pity that I didn’t read his Evenings until last night when I should have started them on my arrival in Leningrad. Doing so would have opened a parallel and antagonistic track to my travels. Witches, bloodshed everywhere, dementia, ghosts aplenty and of various kinds, the entire wicked lineage of evil. It would have been an effective anaphrodisiac to avoid falling to my knees in love with the city’s extreme perfection. Just to think that these stories were conceived right there is enough. And not just in Leningrad should I have begun with Gogol, but from the very moment I boarded the plane that took me to Moscow…I would love to write a small book, five effigies against the backdrop of the imperial city: Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, Akhmatova, Bely—five personal hells. Or another, on diverse and very free topics, such as Mandelstam’s casual notes on Armenia, which are digressions on a thousand different things that more often than not have nothing to do with Armenia, and remember the monumental figure of Marietta as she enters the auditorium of the International Library of Moscow, where I read my lecture, the corners of her lips, her sneer, the indifference she displayed to the world, and the pursuit of her husband’s work, where, according to her, there were wonders unknown to anyone about feasts in Mexico, archaic rituals, among which the most exciting had to do with a child’s defecation, an authentic rite of spring, a rebirth of the world.