The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  I have trouble writing. My hand freezes when I recall the time when living was akin to being a noble savage and realize, without rancor, that society, its offices and its conventions, eventually achieved their mission. But not entirely! Perhaps my opposition to the ways of the world is more radical now, but it manifests itself in sullenness rather than joy—in convictions. It is no longer a mere emanation of nature.

  During my stay in Warsaw I was master of my time, my body, and my pen. And while it is true that freedom in Poland was far from absolute, it is also true that the Poles took advantage as best they could, and with an intensity that bordered on frenzy, of the spaces opened up during de-Stalinization, especially artistic spaces. I owe to that period the pleasure of reading texts that would certainly have been different had I been living in my own country or in any of the cultural metropolises. Free from the burden of trends, from the capillas, Mexico’s literary coteries, and from any pressing need for information, reading became an act of sheer hedonism. I read the Poles, of course, and everything in that world was discovery; I read what my friends sent me from Mexico: Mexican and Latin American literature. Hopscotch was a revelation. Other books that were treasures were Francisco Delicado’s The Portrait of Lozana; a great deal of Tirso de Molina; Canetti’s Auto da Fé; Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless; Tibor Déry’s Mr. G.A. in X; Milan Fust’s The Story of My Wife; and, in particular, the ample collection of the British Council library: Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans; the theater of the Restoration, especially Sheridan and Congreve; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget; and, of course, everything, or almost everything, by Conrad, the reading of whom was different in a Polish milieu; and Henry James and Ford Madox Ford and Firbank and many others. The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power.

  Around the same time as Gombrowicz’s letter, I received another from the publisher Don Rafael Giménez Siles, encouraging me to write an autobiography. He had invited a dozen writers from my generation and from the even younger one. He was interested, he said, in knowing how we young writers perceived the world and, more importantly, how we came to terms with our circumstances within it.

  One aspect of the biographies would be their brevity, consistent with the short journey made by their writers. I began to write the account reluctantly and with very mixed feelings, but convinced of the need to have a presence, however small, in my country. Unlike the other authors included, I had written very little: two small books of short stories. I was certain that my life, and not just my literary one, had just started; nevertheless, I wrote the autobiographical essay out of vanity, or frivolity, or inertia.

  I finished the requested text in a few days. As I wrote it, I felt trapped in an endless continuum. The recent episode was still very close to me, within a stone’s throw, and none of its lines had been brought to a close yet. I could compare my past to one of those extremely destructive hurricanes that strike a particular region with ferocity and, then, for weeks, travel for thousands of miles, but without moving from the spot where they built their greatest strength, to which they return time and time again to unleash their wrath. That was how I viewed my life: my childhood or what I tried to and could remember about it, my days at university, and a few trips, all of it was present in my memory as a single, rather confusing entity. The distance from Mexico, the perspective that it gave me, the strangeness of the new setting, helped to transform the past into a shapeless mixture of elements.

  In late 1988 I returned to Mexico permanently. During my absence I published several books; some were translated into other languages. I received awards, all those things! I returned to the country with the idea of devoting my time and energy exclusively to writing. I felt an almost physical need to live with the language, to listen to Spanish all the time, to know it was around me, even if I did not hear it. The Mexico City I encountered seemed foreign and stubbornly complex. I persevered for four years without being able to assimilate it, nor assimilate myself to it. After I arrived, I began to receive publishing proposals; one was to rework that early autobiography, adding a second part that would bear witness to the previous twenty years. I had never reread it. When I did, I felt disgusted, with myself, and, above all, with my language. I did not recognize myself in the least in the image I sketched in Warsaw in 1965. I was struck immediately by a demure tone and false modesty that were irreconcilable with my relationship to literature, which has always been visceral, excessive, even wild. I sensed a plea for forgiveness emanating from the text for having been written and published. They were pages of immense hypocrisy. The writer’s task seemed like a third-rate activity. In short, it would not have bothered me to declare—because at the time I believed it—that I enjoyed writing less than reading, or that it was an ill-defined and precarious experience compared to other things that life offered me. That would have been fine. What I found strange was the virtuous schoolboy mask I was hiding behind, in halftone, the hypocritical ramblings of the Pharisee.

  Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me. I can now distinguish the various stages of my life with sufficient clarity—the autonomy of the parts and their relation to the whole—which I was previously unable to do. I have begun to remember with respect and emotion not only my youth but that of others because of the innocence it represents—its blindness, intransigence, and destiny. That alone allows me to conceive of an infinite, unknown, and promising future.

  LUNCH AT THE BELLINGHAUSEN

  In 1978 or 1979 I spent a few months in Mexico City. At the time, I was a cultural attaché to our embassy in Moscow. I had saved my vacation days for two years so that my stay in Mexico would make more sense than on previous occasions, when I felt I was and was not in my country. Two months was a more respectable amount of time. During the first days of my stay I received a telephone call from Julieta Campos, then director of the Mexican PEN Club, inviting me to participate in a series of presentations of writers from various generations. In each session an older writer and a younger one, a literary newcomer, would read recent texts and then discuss them with the audience. She told me that she was thinking of pairing me with Villoro; we then talked about other things, some of which, with respect to the literary performance, were unclear to me.

  After hanging up the phone it occurred to me that there was something about the proposition that did not make sense, that there was not sufficient distance between his generation and mine. It would have made more sense to be paired with Juan de la Cabada, Fernando Benítez, or Luis Cardoza y Aragón, my seniors. I was more than surprised when I learned a few days later that the Villoro with whom I would be introduced was Juan, Luis’s son; I had been assigned the role of the elder. I was forty-five years old, but until fairly recently I was still being mentioned among Mexico’s young writers. I suppose it was in part because of my absence, which made me difficult to identify, and the paucity of my work.

  That was the first sign that things were no longer what they had been. That first public reading I did in Mexico gave me the opportunity to read a story that I had just written after several years of unbearable hibernation. It was also the beginning of a great friendship that binds me to Juan Villoro.

  A mature author requires no introduction, or does he? The truth is the majority of my work appeared after that night when I passed the mantle to a very tall, hyperactive adolescent, who read with an impressive display of energy the story “El mariscal de campo” (The Field Marshal).

  The act of reading, at that meeting of generations, a text that marked my return to writing made me feel, once the nightmare had ended and the celebratory teasing had begun, that I had reached maturity in a rather equivocal situation, that I had behaved like an adolescent writer and Juan like
the master who was returning from all the experiences. I read with almost unbearable tension, without knowing if I would be able to make it to the end of a paragraph or even a sentence. I was afraid of having an embolism or a heart attack before getting to a stopping point, unlike the excruciating ease of the beardless youth who seemed to be conquering not just the audience but the entire world.

  But in spite of the confusion, I was able to surmise that the equivocal relationship between age and writing would over the years become something eminently comical. The march toward old age, and, let’s say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience, and in which the scenes are characterized quite often by their parodic quality, like a laughable but also harsh theatrical illusion.

  Let us look at an example:

  I accompany Carlos Monsiváis to the Bellinghausen to meet Hugo Gutiérrez Vega, who had just arrived in Mexico to celebrate the New Year. Every time he returns to the country, whether from Madrid, Río, Washington, Athens, from whatever city his diplomatic career takes him, Carlos and I meet him at the same place to eat. Without fail, we begin to talk as if only a few weeks had passed since our last meal, which is one of the surest signs of friendship. On this occasion, he was coming from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is Consul General.

  Hugo’s magnanimity is known to everyone. I am indebted to him, among other expressions of affection, for having put me in contact with some friends of his from the University of Bristol, where I was lecturer for a year in the Spanish department. We are the same age; I think I am even a couple of years his senior, but this does not prevent me from remembering him as an older brother; in fact, he and Lucy were like a big brother and big sister—and extraordinarily so!—during my stay in England.

  In short, we met and were glad to be chatting again at the Bellinghausen. After the obligatory comments—our ailments, our friends, the situation in the country—Hugo manages to turn the conversation to one of his favorite topics: Romania, or rather, Romanian literature. He is elated that the Latin Union of Romance Languages Prize, awarded a few days ago in Rome, was given to the Romanian Alexandru Vona, whom he knows well. He won it for a single novel, he tells us, which Vona finished writing in 1947 and was finally about to have published. The novel, Bricked-up Windows, has shaped his destiny. It continues to be his destiny! The few intimate friends whom the Romanian author had allowed to read the novel claimed that his narrative style revealed such a sublime and rigorous quest for form that, if one were to make comparisons, the only names that might come to mind would be the great writers of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Broch, or Musil. For decades, the novelist lived with the certainty that he would never see his work published. Nevertheless, he continued to care for it, refining it in secret. His first surprise must have been its publication in 1993 in its original language, Romanian; then came the translation to French, and now the prize awarded him unanimously by an exceptionally brilliant jury comprised of, among others, Vincenzo Consolo, Luigi Malerba, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Rubem Fonseca, and our dear friend Álvaro Mutis. And from Vona, Hugo bounces to other writers he knows—some personally, others by their work—because one of his greatest passions, perhaps the most eccentric, is, you may have already guessed by now, Romanian literature.

  Hugo speaks with characteristic passion as he moves within his sphere; the names he cited elude me, with the exception of the most obvious: Cioran, Eminescu, Eliade, Gian Luca Caragiale; the same thing, I imagine, happens to Monsiváis. He recounts the exploit of a poet and Hispanist—was it Gialescu?—who, although gravely ill from osseous tuberculosis, devotes the rest of his life to translating Góngora’s Soledades which he does so masterfully that today it is considered one of the most remarkable renderings of the Andalusian poet’s work in any foreign language. From there, I begin to get lost, my mind wanders, and not because Hugo’s discussion fails to interest me, rather because I discover that an old man, the doyen of all the world’s old men, the quintessential Nestor, is waving ardently at me from at a faraway table. I watch him stand up suddenly and begin to walk, very slowly, dragging two feet that by all appearances are attempting to rebel against him; he moves his arms as if he were feeling his way or attempting to propel himself. He smiles as though our presence in the restaurant both surprised him and filled him with happiness.

  He is wearing stylish clothes, greenish-gray flannel trousers and a slightly wrinkled checkered jacket, which adds a discreet elegance to his figure. His white mane is full and unruly. His face has a pinkish hue, like that of a baby, but scored in every direction with wrinkles of varying lengths and depths, which seems out of place with his infant-like coloring. He reminds me of the last photos of Auden: “My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain…” The only one among us who could not see him was Carlos, because this radiant specter of happiness was approaching from his rear. The names of classmates came to mind suddenly en masse; at that moment, I tried to imagine the face of a younger man, to return it to adolescence and assign it a name, but it was impossible.

  Waiting on the tip of my tongue were all the platitudes that one says at moments such as this: “It’s great to see you, old man, especially in such good shape! Obviously, life has treated you well, am I right? Now I know why our colleagues call you Dorian Gray. But they’re wrong, you’re in much better shape, much better of course,” and other such nonsense, only to buy time and give the other person the opportunity to say something that will allow me to identify him.

  He opened his arms just a step from our table, as I was about to stand and embrace him. Fortunately, I stopped; I would have made a spectacle of myself. The old timer walked past us without stopping, without even looking at us, his smile growing bigger, and his arms flailing even more. He stopped at the table right behind ours. I was saved from having to repeat such drivel and listen to him do the same. Someone at the table next to us said: “You’re looking good, Flacus! Just look at him! I’m so jealous, Flacus!” And the salvo of hot air that the occasion demanded continued; the gamut of banalities that language has accumulated for such cases. I turned around to watch the show. It was a long table, with some ten people, everyone fawning over Flacus, who, with a content look he attempted to mitigate with words of modesty, responded: “Don’t be so sure, not everything that glimmers is gold; I don’t always feel as good as today; don’t be so sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover…!”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, I realized that we had all stopped talking. What was curious was that the three of us, Hugo and I from the beginning of the old man’s march, and Monsiváis from the time he walked by the table, thought that he was a friend from our youth whom we were not able to place. Perhaps an actor from our generation, a young leading man with a brief but intense career, retired from the profession many years ago. But that possibility turned out to be, without our knowing why, unconvincing.

  We devoured our dessert and downed our coffee, as if trying to escape that character who was so close to us. The suspicion that someone could at that very moment be saying the same thing about us made us a little uneasy to say the least. In short, one must grow accustomed to such discomfort upon reaching a certain age.

  EVERYTHING IS ALL THINGS

  After the first “vision,” I returned to Venice at least a dozen times. I have wandered every corner of it, and read with interest and pleasure many of the texts that have been written about it, its history, its art, and its customs. There also exists a store of fiction set in Venice. In almost every one of these novels it is considered more than just a setting; rather, it becomes a character. Sometimes it is the protagonist itself.

  Puritans, by training, by creed, or by temperament, tend to demonize it; in some, the rejection coincides with an irresistible attraction, and that duality is transformed into delirium. Ruskin passionately described each of its stones, and at the same time was horrified by the customs and traditions of
its inhabitants. Evil dwells in the heart of Venice; it is a sea of abomination; its contaminating power is the work of the devil, they say. Should an innocent person manage to escape from there, he does so with a damaged soul. Some are even denied that privilege. They succumb; such is the case of Aschenbach from Death in Venice. Half of mankind allows itself to berate it, lecture it; they attempt to reform it, redeem it from its sins and vices; they demand it cease to exist in order to purge its sins; they rejoice in its decline; only its sinking—death by water—will succeed in purifying it.

  Its defenders at times employ disconcerting arguments. Berenson becomes rhapsodic over its colors. He marvels at its extraordinary school of painting, the only one in Italy that lacks “primitives,” because it was born with a handful of masterpieces. The celebrated aesthete asserts that Venice was the first modern European nation, but the reasons underlying this assertion seem rather paradoxical: “Since there was little room for personal glory in Venice, the perpetuators of glory, the Humanists, found at first scant encouragement there, and the Venetians were saved from that absorption in archeology and pure science which overwhelmed Florence at an early date. […] As it was, the feeling for beauty was not hindered in its natural development.” Venetian painting is created, and he insists on this point at various times, to be simply an object of pleasure.

  What Berenson highlights—his admiration for beautiful and healthy bodies; his love for colorful and sumptuous decoration; the disposition toward pleasure, carnival; the permanent use of the mask and erotic extravagance—is what scandalizes Puritans. On the other hand, anyone who has the slightest propensity for sensuality will in La Serenissima feel as if he were in the Temple of Venus. It is no wonder Casanova is known world-over as the son of Venice.