by Sergio Pitol
30 MAY
Back to yesterday. I arrived at the hotel very tipsy thanks to the barrels of red wine I ingested. The spectacle left me quite disturbed. It was, above all, a blow to modesty. Since childhood I have shuddered at seeing such bodily activities. I have spent my entire life avoiding them. Witnessing such an unexpected excremental jamboree rattled me. More than the stench, what really upset me was the ease with which these functions were performed. I imagine that the writer who had been plagued by the insatiable rut of females from the West offered to accompany me to the toilet to reduce the effect had I entered the place alone. We left the restaurant, walked down the street stairs that led to the river, and before reaching the embankment we entered a small door. It seems that there wasn’t even a sign on the outside, although I’m not sure. The truth is that it was not a secret place, quite the opposite! As soon as I crossed the threshold, I felt a strong blow to my stomach, lightheadedness, a repulsive gust of putrid air. We went down yet another flight of stairs to reach a vast space. By the din that was heard, the locale must have been very crowded. Perhaps the city’s central latrine. The light was very low. At one point I could glimpse through the fetid mist a long row of men of all ages, sitting on a never-ending bench. It was a collective latrine, something I would never have imagined existed, outside correctional facilities, if even there. A few were trying to read the paper, others were talking or debating. My companion said that it was a soccer game day, that’s why there was so much hubbub. He turned to greet someone. On the other side of the giant room a metal canal ran from wall to wall: the urinal, toward which I headed. There was no collective shame. Belly laughs could be heard intermingled with belly noises. The cavernous stench was unbearable. I was afraid that I was going to faint. I looked for that insane pockmarked Virgil that had led me to that fecal circle of hell to ask him to get me out of there immediately, and I saw him happy, as if he had arrived at the agora at the zenithal moment, chatting happily with some boys and greeting others while he unbuttoned his pants and headed to one of the holes to defecate. I left as best I could, I got to the restaurant, I asked the guide to take me in a taxi to the hotel and fell in the bed like a log. I awoke, as I said, I think, queasy, bathed, and changed clothes, as the scenes I had witnessed danced in my head like a vague and distant memory, isolated fragments of a nightmare. I decided not to be dramatic about it. The aspirin had already taken its effect. I drank a couple of espressos in the hotel and started to walk along the Rustaveli, the city’s main avenue. I arrived at the theater of the same name, and remembered the fabulous representation of Richard III by Shakespeare that the company from the theater had performed at the Cervantes Festival about three or four years ago. A production that had a bit of more radical German Expressionism, with popular marionettes, very colorful, with very marked features, gestures, and movements. The theater is surrounded by a wooded park. I walked along a path. Spring was at its best. The trees were beginning to bloom and the aroma was wonderful, the scent of…I was going to say peach, I think, but suddenly to my astonishment, I open my mouth and say aloud: “Sal mojón / de tu rincón / hazme el milagro / niño cagón.”20 I repeated this refrain two or three times, and caught a glimpse of a courtyard, next to a staircase, or in its landing, with big pots of white hydrangea, sitting on a little chamber pot, my pants around my ankles, and a servant girl, still almost a child herself, who was repeating these verses over and over again, teaching me to defecate in that specific place and not in my clothes. It must be the earliest memory, or one of the two most distant I’ve been able to rescue from my memory. How old could I have been? Three, at most four. I recited it again. I was in Puebla, at my aunt and uncle’s house, where we lived for a while. Everything was neat, transparent—I was surrounded by happiness. My mother must have been somewhere upstairs in one of the rooms, and my tía Querubina and my cousins Olga and Lilia, who were almost the same age as my mother, and my father was probably still alive; everything was joy, yes, but mostly it was emptying my bowels at that moment and repeating the words the girl is teaching me and hitting my thighs with my fists to the rhythm of the words, and mamá is surely waiting for me and will hug me as soon as she sees me in the doorway, she will sit me on her lap, kiss me because the girl will tell her that I had already gone on the potty. “Cannot bear very much reality. / Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.”21 A happiness embraced me in that park that surrounded the Rustaveli Theatre, and I emerged from the spell and noticed that such a memory would not have been revealed if not for the shock suffered hours ago. I left the park, I paused in front of the theater to see the programs of the month and the photos of the new productions, and later I arrived at the hotel and had another coffee and toast and went back to my room and remembered the woman who attended my lecture on The Mangy Parrot by Fernandez de Lizardi at the Library of Foreign Languages in Moscow, who told me about the anthropological studies of her husband, of the festivals of spring where they worship a niño cagón, a shitting child, or something like that, and I then established a comparison between that woman and another one I saw many years ago in a restaurant in Istanbul, who suddenly began to sing “Ramona,” the song from the twenties interpreted by Dolores del Río, and their faces overlapped, and I knew then I was about to write a novel that would bring all this together when I arrived in Prague.
Today, during the day, I have seen splendid corners of Tbilisi, I left town, I have seen wonders, I have spoken with interesting people, eaten delicious food, drunk wines as dark as dreams, and dreamt visions of drunkenness. My approach to all these activities is real, but there also lives in me the project of the novel of the lower bodily stratum. I long to get to Prague, to the shelf where Bakhtin’s book on the carnival and functions of the lower bowel in the popular culture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance is located. The woman from the library and the Turkish woman who sang at the café in Istanbul will be the same person, a woman from the Caucasus: a Georgian or an Armenian. Perhaps the narrator comes to Tbilisi, or to the sophisticated Georgian spas on the Black Sea, Sukhumi or Batumi, and visits this woman who cares for her husband’s papers as if they were a treasure. There should be some ambiguity as to the character of the anthropologist; he could be a genius or a charlatan, that ambiguity that always exists when widows speak of their dead husbands: they are capable of exalting impressive nincompoops, because doing so gives them importance, fame, status, they know that the world is convinced that behind every great man is a great woman, and over time they force the process along, by constructing a virtual edifice they speak of how the main idea arose, which made the deceased famous, and they modestly suggest that it came from a marital conversation, or from something she once said, a sudden moment of truth she had in the kitchen or bathroom, or in the park, perhaps it was a triple moment of truth and when she spoke of it with her husband, a light bulb came on in his brain and he began to work in that particular direction, which she pointed to, and at the very end, in old age, after many years of widowhood, she regretted having married a man who was good and generous, but was also limited, mediocre most of all, because what little he did was thanks to her, yes, of course, but if he had had talent, if he had come to understand what she was, by at least attempting to understand her, he would have become an Einstein, a Nietzsche, a Borges. Anyway, it would be interesting to investigate what was really the impression this female character I’m thinking about had of her husband: her name will be Marietta, Marietta Karapetian. And I know she must have a foil, an enemy, perhaps secret, throughout her life. And the central part of the novel will be about her trip to the Mexican jungles with her husband and the celebration of spring with a fecal feast in which an infant participates as the final character. And in the story’s plot, in the language’s substratum will be, of course, a snapshot of the latrine in Tbilisi, but without ever mentioning it in the novel. Someone, her husband, or perhaps her foil or several of their friends, will refer t
o her as the la Divina Garza, the Divine Heron.22
While dining with some Georgian journalists I related the incident at the restaurant at the Writers’ House years before, when Akhmadulina arrived, at a difficult time, on the arm of the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Georgia, and the security that this afforded her. “Ever since then we’ve felt here the need to open windows, to let in fresh air. We knew that the time would come, that we were getting close, and that if we did not act in time we would lose it.” He explains to me that the current Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze was at the time the leader of the Communist Party in Georgia, the strong man, that is. Shevardnadze developed a proto-perestroika on a local level over ten years ago. With few statements and firm action a culture was stimulated closer to that of Poland or Hungary than to the prevailing culture in the USSR. And this was possible thanks to good economic management, to the quotas reached, and to a cautious but at the same time absolute policy, subtle but bold. It seems very difficult, but it has been achieved. Shevardnadze is perhaps the closest politician to Gorbachev, who enjoys his greatest confidence. “And the population supports this political and social transformation?” I ask. “I think so, for several reasons. The Stalinists, who constitute the hardest, most visceral enemy front, have not spoken out against it. I think they envision autonomy, independence as a long-term solution. To leave the Federation and establish an independent Georgian state, a republic or a monarchy, it doesn’t matter to them; they have grown tired of the Russians, they felt deeply betrayed after the Twentieth Party Congress. Georgia was decimated by Stalinism; and, yet, the people did not believe the crimes denounced by Khrushchev. The situation here was extremely delicate. It was a miracle that a revolution did not erupt. Revolts, yes, sometimes bloody, but inconsequential. Now we’ll see. The future is open. What will it bring us?”
20 “Come out turd / from your corner / do me this miracle / little shitting boy.”
21 Pitol is quoting T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” from his Four Quartets.—Trans.
22 Pitol here is referring to a Mexican expression, “creerse la divina garza” [to think oneself the divine heron], which he would subsequently use in the title of his novel, Domar a la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron]. An English equivalent would be “queen bee.” —Trans.
31 MAY
I’ve toured museums, a few churches, Georgia’s artistic treasures. Its medieval and Renaissance painting. The Byzantine painting is of exceptional quality, comparable to the pieces by Rublev in northern Russia. Yesterday afternoon I traveled to the old capital, where there are two magnificent churches: one, the Jvari Monastery, boasts a carved stone frontispiece depicting the Ascension of the Cross, carried by two angels, with a lightness that is rarely achieved in stone. The wind has contributed to the deterioration on the faces; below the hair, only the mouth is distinguishable, while all that remains of the other is an eye, which gives the piece an almost abstract character. The other is from the eleventh century: the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral (Saint George?), on whose façade, interwoven in stone, stands a large tree of life. Once inside, one has the feeling of having entered a wide cavern that exists in the core of a mountain. We are a millennium and a half before our time. The lords and the shepherds, warriors all, gathered for devotion to the true faith, the risen Christ, in prayer asking for victory, but something more: the extermination of the Turks, the Persians, of all infidels. The site stretches upward. At the base, there are four angles, which close as the walls rise; in the second bay there are now eight sides and above sixteen, and finally the dome closes on a beautiful crown of thirty two sides. A replica of the Temple of St. George in Jerusalem, they tell me. On one wall there is a large fresco, which no one has been able to date and which contains obvious repairs. Ships abound in it, gliding between mermaids, mermen, and seven-headed hydras. I see no known saints. Everything seems to belong to a different religious order. The Renaissance and Baroque figures of Catholic hagiography—Saint Christopher crossing a river with the child in his arms, Saint Jerome with a book beside a lion, Saint Sebastian tied to a tree, shot with arrows, Saint Lucia showing on a dish her eyes that have been gouged out, Saint Anthony lost in the melancholy of his temptations—do not exist in these heavens. In Orthodox painting female saints hardly exist, or if they do, I did not see them at these sites, nor do I remember any on display during previous visits to the galleries and museums of Moscow. The closest to female saints are the angels, of epicene appearance and almost nonexistent masculinity. There are fiery archangels, armed and warlike, and many other saints on horseback, with helmets and breastplates that cannot be associated with ours from their appearance, dress, or name. A Saint Francis of Assisi here would be the negation of worship. The martial aspect is marked in painting from all periods, and also in the street, in restaurants, wherever you look around the city. What’s more, they are one of the longest-living peoples in the world. Russian writers have written about the dignity of the diverse peoples, races, and cultures that populate and flourish in the Caucasus. The attraction of this long mountainous strip of land that runs from the Black Sea to the Caspian has been proverbial, uninterrupted since Pushkin and Griboyedov until today. Taking interest in this region, living with its aborigines has been for them, more than learning and enjoying a physical region rich in scenery, a spiritual experience, and a sentimental education. The Caucasus has long been an exceptionally attractive place for young Russians. Pushkin praises it; somehow he finds there a human nature akin to that of the Gypsies, immaculate, unspoiled by a rigid protocol of education rather governed by instinct. From the children to the elderly, both women and men are nature. Nature within nature. Therefore man there does not fear, as in the North, instinct, nor does he repress it; on the contrary, he makes it his guide. Pushkin spent a few years of his youth exiled, for having written an “Ode to Freedom,” in the vicinity of the Caucasus—Bessarabia, in particular—where he wrote one of his first great poems: The Prisoner of the Caucasus; and when he turns thirty he undertakes by choice a pleasure trip to Georgia. From Moscow to Tbilisi, on a trip that was described as whirlwind, in twenty-five days. He recalls those days in his diaries as intensely happy. His arrival in the Georgian capital moves him. Upon entering the city he meets a funeral procession guarded by senior Georgian and Russian officers. He asks who the deceased is and whence are they bringing him. And he is petrified to discover that it his friend and contemporary Alexander Griboyedov, a diplomat in Tehran and the author of a sarcastic comedy of an enlightened bent, Woe from Wit, which was neither performed nor published during his lifetime, but which the entire Russian intelligentsia knew by heart. The embassy in Tehran was stormed by a mob and the entire staff killed. Pushkin, impressed by the mournful note, reduced his stay in Tiflis23 to two weeks, barely half the time it takes him to return to Moscow. Pushkin’s sexual curiosity had been unsparing since puberty, to the point of becoming a venereal compulsion. The day after arriving in Tiflis, he went to the baths, hoping to relax his muscles from the immense journey; while there, he was surprised to see more than fifty women, both young and old, either in undergarments or completely naked, bathing alongside the men, and that there was no visible sexual swell; the only person distressed was he, but no one seemed to perceive his genital arousal. “I felt as if I had walked into that room like an invisible man,” he writes. The young Count Tolstoy, years later, weary from life as a courtesan, throws himself into the Caucasus, and is its captive from the start. The tensions caused by his social life disappear. He has found a land where nature makes the laws and men submit to her and not the other way around. Every human act that is in harmony with nature is no longer a sin. And that natural life is governed by a radiant and vigorous Eros. The Caucasus for him is the land of poetry, truth, and passion. In short, an earthly paradise, a force similar to the first days of creation. The first of Tolstoy’s true novels, The Cossacks, which he wrote when he was thirty-five, and the last Hadji Murad, written at seventy-six, but published
posthumously, are set in the Caucasus. They are books of love of the landscapes that astonish him and a devotion to their characters. For him, space and characters in these novels are the same: truth, human dignity. The pilgrimage to the Caucasus, especially Georgia and Armenia, becomes a literary obligation. Lermontov, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Pasternak, many others. But it was not all happiness in “the Pearl of Caucasus,” as Georgia is ineluctably known in guidebooks. In one of its villages, one of the most feared men who ever lived was born, a demon, Joseph Stalin, the incarnation of evil, who ordered the brutalization, torture, and liquidation of millions of his terrified subjects. If for writers the republics of the Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other autonomous regions such as Chechnya and Dagestan were the land of happiness, the relationship with the Russian homeland was visibly less happy and passionate but equally intense. It is a relationship that the pitiful human being, the long-suffering, humiliated Russian, establishes with the sacred. The Russian homeland is Mother. Nature is diminished for the benefit of the mystery of that area which is impossible to capture with reason, rather only with feelings, with the heart, with pity. Cioran, one of the thinkers who has taken the most interest in Russia, wrote: “A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions: those of Russians, whatever their political complexion, are always, if not identical, at least related. A Chaadaev who found no virtue in his country or a Gogol who mocked it pitilessly was just as attached to it as a Dostoevsky. The most extreme of the Nihilists, Nechayev, was quite as obsessed by it as Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod and a reactionary through and through. Only this obsession counts. The rest is merely attitude…”24 I am always excited and surprised by the association of Russia with the body of God. In Leskov’s The Cathedral Folk, the Russian novelist that Walter Benjamin preferred to other more celebrated writers, a priest is thrilled to learn that a very poor old man, almost a beggar, has taken in an orphan, with whom he shares this scant possessions, and scarcely hearing the news, exclaims: “Oh, you, my beloved Russia, how beautiful you are!” And in the most terrible story one could imagine, In the Ravine, by Chekhov, an old man finds a young woman who is carrying her dead son in her arms. He invites her to get in his carriage and tells her: