The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  Those stories took place three years prior to the day I’m waiting for Carlos at the Kikos on Avenida Juárez. I wait for him as I read ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the intense, truculent, and painful tragedy by John Ford. Of all the works of Elizabethan theatre that I know, including those by Shakespeare, Ford’s tragedy is one of those that most impress me. I began to read it when I arrived at the restaurant, and I’m almost finished when the incestuous brother explodes in anger upon discovering that he’s been betrayed. It’s a literary period that I frequent more and more. I would like to study it in depth, systematize my readings, take notes, and establish the chronology of the period. But the same thing always happens: at the moment of greatest fervor I become sidetracked by other subjects, other periods, and I end up not studying anything in depth. Carlos is always late, but on this occasion he goes too far; it’s possible that he won’t even show. I’m famished; I decide to order the daily special. I eat and continue reading Ford. By the time dessert arrives I reach the end, which leaves me terrified. At that moment Carlos arrives. He’s coming from the Radio Universidad, where he took part, he says, in a taping on science fiction. He orders only a hamburger and a Coke. He places the proofs next to his plate and reads them in a few minutes as he eats. He makes one or two corrections. He then takes out a couple of pages from a book, marks through a few words, adds others, changes the last lines completely. He asks me to go with him to the Excelsior, which is next door, so he can deliver the piece that he just corrected; it will only take a moment. In no time we’ll be at Juan José Arreola’s house to deliver the proofs. Waiting for us there is José Emilio Pacheco, who today will submit his manuscript of La sangre de medusa (The Blood of Medusa), which will also be published in the Cuadernos de Unicornio. La Zaplana, Mexico’s largest bookstore, is located on the ground floor of the building immediately adjacent to the Kikos; we’re unable to resist the temptation to glance at the bookstore’s tables and shelves. Each of us leaves with an immense package under his arm. We’re proud of the rapid growth of our libraries (Monsiváis’s will eventually exceed thirty thousand volumes). We return to the Kikos to ask them to sell us some cardboard boxes because it’s impossible to move through the street or get on a bus with so many books in our hands. While they look for the boxes we drink coffee and examine our finds. During our four-year friendship, our reading lists have expanded and overlapped. We both purchased Conrad by coincidence that day. I pick up Victory and Under Western Eyes, and he picks up Lord Jim, The Outcast of the Islands, and The Secret Agent. We both read an abundance of Anglo-Saxon authors, I prefer English, and he North Americans; but the end result is a mutually beneficial influence. We leaf through our purchases. I talk about Henry James, and he about Melville and Hawthorne; I about Forster, Sterne, and Virginia Woolf, and he about Poe, Twain, and Thoreau. We both admire the intelligent wit of James Thurber, and we declare once more that the language of Borges constitutes the greatest miracle that has happened to our language in this century; he pauses briefly and adds that one of the highest moments in the Castilian language is owed to Casiodoro de Reina and his disciple Cipriano de Valera, and when I ask, confused by the names, “And who are they?” he replies, scandalized, that they are none other than the translators of the Bible. He tells me that he aspires one day to write prose that exhibits the benefit of the countless years he’s devoted to reading biblical texts; I, who am ignorant of them, comment, cowering slightly, that the greatest influence I’ve encountered is that of William Faulkner, and there he checkmates me when he explains that the language of Faulkner, like that of Melville and Hawthorne, is profoundly influenced by the Bible, that they are a non-religious derivation of the Revealed Language. Suddenly, he points out that it’s gotten late, that we have to rush to the Excelsior to deliver his piece. I ask him if it’s “The Idiot Box,” and he immediately changes the subject. “The Idiot Box” is a very acerbic column about television and its effects, which are very disconcerting to Carlos. Television! Who in the hell cares about television! Certainly no one I associate with. We arrive at the editor’s office. The section chief, to whom he must turn in his piece, has gone upstairs to a meeting. He might be back in a half hour. We sit wherever we can. A journalist sitting next to us, talking on the phone, says that things in Mexico are getting worse because of the government’s softness, that it’s giving in more and more to union pressure, that if the authorities do not intervene and eradicate the leprosy, the country will unravel. We continue to talk about books, which implies that literature is the subject to which we constantly return, although frequently interrupted by bursts of commentary of all kinds—cinema, the city, problems that concern us at the moment, the university, our lives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies—until we arrive at that subject which most entertains and amuses us: our novel, to the writing of which we have devoted hundreds of hours of conversation, without ever having written a word. Our novel, we confess, is in some way determined by the parodic humor of the young Waugh. We also know that it is equally determined by the impudence and imagination of La familia Burrón, the comic strip by Gabriel Vargas, and by the daily fireworks of Luis Prieto. Before beginning our work, and to exercise our mind a bit, we make a succinct summary of what is being written in Mexico, the authors worth reading, those it’s better to toss in the trash; those who pass are, of the contemporaries: Gorostiza, Pellicer, Novo, and Villaurrutia; The Labyrinth of Solitude and Freedom under Parole by Octavio Paz, which just came out; Juan José Arreola’s prose and the two superb books by Rulfo. We feel a genuine veneration for Pedro Páramo. We’ve heard very good things about two novels, one recently published, another about to be, but already widely commented on: the first is Balún Canán, by Rosario Castellanos; the other, Where the Air Is Clear, by Carlos Fuentes. And we no longer have time to delve into our parodic novel because an employee approaches to tells Carlos that the section chief is about to leave; to our utter amazement he adds that he’s been in his office for an hour. Carlos jumps up, hastily follows the employee and disappears behind a door. Ten minutes later he returns, calm. He’s almost certain that his piece will appear in tomorrow’s edition.

  Night falls. A bus drops us at the corner of the Chapultepec movie house, just a short walk from where Arreola lives. When we arrive, he complains about our delay. José Emilio is about to leave. We convince him to stay awhile. Arreola is also about to leave. He has committed to attending the premier of Pirandello’s Henry IV at Bellas Artes. He assures us that the next day he’ll take the proofs to press. Our Cuadernos will appear very soon. He shows us a few sheets of stunning Dutch paper and gives us a lesson on watermarks. It’s obvious that he’s in a hurry to leave, but he agrees to sit for a moment to chat. He urges Carlos to submit material for a Cuaderno. José Emilio and I mention that he has a magnificent story. In unison we shout: “Fino acero de niebla!” Carlos bursts out laughing, covers his face with a cushion, and then promises vaguely that he’s revising something he’s about to finish. Arreola begins to talk about Pirandello, recalling the staging of his works when the great Italian companies toured Mexico; the best, according to him, was that of Mimi Agugli. He then turns to Louis Jouvet; he did not miss a single performance when his company was in Mexico, or in Paris, when he lived there. Theater is the genre that combines all literary perfections, he declares; he suddenly stands, marches around the room, and recites entire scenes while imitating all the characters from Farce of the Chaste Susana by Diego Sánchez de Badajoz; later, he retracts, in no way is theater the most important genre, such a claim is an aberration; he then discusses poetry and thereafter takes out a volume of Proust and reads to us, in perfect French, the chapter in which Albertine is surprised while asleep. Suddenly, a young man, visibly irritated, who has been listening to him, and who has remained silent throughout our stay, stands and barks that if he and Arreola do not leave at once they’ll never make curtain time. We all go out into the street. Arreola and his companion get in a taxi, and the three of us—José Emilio, Carlos, an
d I—walk up the Paseo de la Reforma, turn right on Niza, and walk to a taquería next to the Insurgentes movie house, where we would often go at night to eat soup and sample the most delicious selection of tacos imaginable. While we eat, we return to the subject of literature, each of us reiterating our preferences. To the usual names, we add others: Alejo Carpentier and Juan Carlos Onetti, and, thanks to José Emilio, poets are also introduced: Quevedo, Garcilaso, López Velarde, Neruda, Vallejo, Huidobro, the Generation of ’27. José Emilio eats quickly and says goodbye; he has to turn in a translation the next day. Some writers we barely know approach our table to sit and chat. They’re obsessed with defining the topics our generation is obligated to address. They begin to enumerate their projects; they know what they must do for the next five years at least. We eat without paying too much attention to the ambitions of our newly arrived guests. Later, we discuss a fabulous book, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in which both biographer and biographee appear alternately as the remarkable characters they were, but they also prefigure traits belonging to Mr. Pickwick or, closer to home, to the comic strip character Don Reginito Burrón, which makes its reading even more enjoyable. We also discuss detective novels to avoid the formulaic and insipid conversation that dominates the table, and only out of politeness do we answer the questions that our acquaintances occasionally ask, without telling them that the only project that interests us is writing a satirical novel in which we would portray them as a bunch of grotesque and pompous idiots.

  Perhaps we’re aware that we’ll never write a line of that novel, but perhaps we also sense that such a daily game can be one of the sources that will inspire our later work, that is if it is ever written. We cannot foretell the future, nor do we want to; the only thing that matters to us is the present and the immediate future; to think, for example, about what the coming days offer, how the complex situations that each of us confronts in his personal life will unravel, and with the same intensity, what books we will read in the days to come.

  THE RETURN HOME

  I return to Mexico in mid-1962. I’m excited to get back to my old habits and haunts. Nevertheless, I do everything possible to return to Italy. I do not have steady employment; I manage on a hodgepodge of jobs I do at home. After the absolute freedom I enjoyed in Rome, the idea of going back to an office is difficult for me to accept. During this time, I translate The Monk, the gothic novel by M.G. Lewis, which is published in installments in Salvador Elizondo’s magazine Snob. I do readers’ notes for Joaquín Díez-Canedo. Max Aub has given me small jobs at Radio Universidad: snippets to celebrate the anniversaries of famous writers; I also participate in a book review program, also at Radio, with Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis. The Coordination of Cultural Diffusion, which oversees Radio Universidad, is enjoying a golden age under the direction of Jaime García Terrés. To start with, there is no censorship. Rosario Castellanos adds a very informal character to the program; everyone is able to express his or her opinion with no strings attached. We celebrate on the program the release of Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz; we dust off the work of Martín Luis Guzmán, which of late the author himself has not even paid much attention to. We discuss the new postwar Spanish narrative, the existence of which has been difficult to accept in Mexico. The prevailing opinion is that since the fall of the Republic it is impossible for anything worthwhile to emerge; that a new literature can only be born with the disappearance of Franco. Discussing, much less praising, new authors like Sánchez Ferlosio, Goytisolo, Martín-Santos, Aldecoa, bothers a lot of people who believe that to do so legitimizes the Franco regime. It’s a nuisance but it’s impossible to compromise with this kind of intolerance.

  Since that day in 1957 I described before, many things have happened: there have been shockwaves that have provoked reactions against the government apparatus and its institutions; unexpected social movements have arisen; labor leaders have emerged who question the old codgers immobilizing the social organism. Corruption was condemned in many areas. There were protest marches and strikes nationwide; railway workers, teachers, telephone operators, and other union groups filled the streets and took control of them. There were impressive demonstrations. I remember one organized in support of teachers in which the participation of intellectuals was particularly important; there were not only young people but also those we considered our teachers. In a row ahead of Monsiváis and me were Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, both functionaries of the Foreign Service. We marched in front of the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs just as the employees were leaving. Some diplomats applauded when they saw their colleagues in the march; others, horrified, could not believe their eyes.

  The response was immediate: a disproportionate crackdown. From 1958 to 1960 riot police seemed to take control of the city, surprised, perhaps, by the obstinacy of students and workers who, in spite of the beatings, arrests, and torture, continued to express their dissatisfaction, handing out fliers, marching in the streets, singing subversive songs, ridiculing the government. The jails filled with political prisoners. Monsiváis, José Emilio, a dozen other writers, and I went on a hunger strike called by José Revueltas, in solidarity with the strike that Siqueiros and other political prisoners had undertaken in Lecumberri. We were living day to day, with a recklessness that could only be attributed to naïveté. We took for granted that nothing would happen to us, and it was senseless to worry beforehand. We did not possess a desire to be martyrs—on the contrary. Personally, the experience helped me to rid myself of a feeling of over-protection that was beginning to hinder me. Somehow we understood that the country needed changes, that the political institutions were rusty, that it was unhealthy for a nation to be perpetually governed by a single party. But we did not expect the violent reaction from the groups in control. They were only able to respond to dialogue with beatings, arrests, and even murder.

  Every time I reread La segunda casaca (The Second Turncoat), that remarkable national episode by Benito Pérez Galdós, I’m moved by a statement made by the protagonist Salvador Monsalud:

  I have always believed the same thing, and I very much fear, even after victory, that things in my country will continue to seem to me as bad as before. This is such a horrible mixture of ignorance, bad faith, corruption, and weakness that I suspect the evil is too deep for revolutionaries to repair. Among these, one sees everything: there are men of much merit, good heads, and hearts of gold; but there are also unruly ones who seek only noise and chaos; not to mention those filled with good faith yet lacking in intelligence and common sense. I have observed this group they are caught up in, unable to unite the greatness of ideas with the pettiness of their ambitions; I have felt a certain fear for principle; but after pondering it, I have concluded by affirming that the evils that revolution may bring will never be as great as those as absolutism. And if they are—he continued contemptuously—they well deserve it. If all this is to continue to bear the name of nation, everything must be turned upside down, that common sense which has been offended be avenged, drawing and quartering such ridiculous idolatry, such foolishness, and barbarism erected in living institutions; there must be a complete renovation of the patria, no vestiges of the past should remain, and everything must be plowed under with noise, crushing the foolish who insist on carrying an outmoded artifice on their shoulders. And this must be done quickly, violently, because if it is not done this way it will never be done… Here the doors of tyranny must be torn down with ax blows in order to destroy them, because if we open them with their key, they will be left standing and will close again.

  This is what Salvador Monsalud proclaimed, the unblemished hero, the character whom Galdós treated with the greatest sympathy, as if he wanted to share the same exploits with him. But, unlike Monsalud, we did not think it was necessary to change everything, to turn everything upside down, rather simply to ensure that the Constitution be followed, that our legislative practice be real, and not a mere pretext that
gives rise to oratorical pirouettes and flourishes; that the rights of the citizens be respected, that the corrupt leaders and uncivil rulers disappear, those scourges capable of tarnishing any system, and through momentary disharmony reach social harmony. After the repression began we no longer thought the same; we wished, like Monsalud, for everything to be uprooted so that nothing would ever be the same, and one of the options that we envisioned was socialism, whether democratic socialism like Sweden or Finland, or real socialism like that of Eastern Europe, or even a socialism sui generis like that of China. It was the period of the “Hundred Flowers,” not of the Cultural Revolution; I had just read a couple of very suggestive books: The Long March, by Simone de Beauvoir, and Into China, by the magnificent Claude Roy; both writers portrayed that world as a utopia in progress; an ideal vision built with real elements. In other words, the radical Monsalud, at first a purely literary character, ended up being our contemporary. We were tied to him by a common desire for justice, cleanliness, and decency. We also shared with him his doubts about what could happen after the change, if in fact there was one, and at the same time we were captivated by his adventurous life, not at all stifled by his political activity. We were anti-dogmatic by nature. E.M. Forster’s book Two Cheers for Democracy became my spiritual guide; since then, I always have it by my side.