Then two friends appeared as I got out of the car and they took me to see several Mudejar towers, one after the other, and some of the towers were fake and others were real, and they were saying: this one is fake and this one is real, but so fast that I was never sure which were the fake ones and which were the real ones, which is odd anyway, because the name Teruel (Tirwal) means watchtower, and those giant watchtowers were used to sight enemy armies or parties coming from the west or the east, depending: if you climb to the top of an authentic Mudejar tower, you’ll surely spy a dream, and if you climb to the top of a fake Mudejar tower, you’ll surely spy a nightmare. And then there was Ana María Navales, a chain-smoker with a pronounced limp, and she sent me straight to my room in a hotel that has rooms of utter luxury in branches in other provincial capitals, but that in Teruel only has very sad and dignified rooms, as if in the rooms of that hotel — whose name I choose to forget — the din and silence of the battle of Teruel were still something real and terrifying. And it wasn’t only the room that was modest, even timid, but also the receptionist and the men who strolled idly (or so it seemed) along the corridors and looked at you as if to inquire about the course of the battle. A cubist battle, evidently, in which time and space, at least as we understand them, didn’t count for much.
When I came out of my room — still slightly feverish, I think, and feeling as sick as I had during the car trip — Ana María Navales was waiting for me, and we went off with the rest of the jury to decide which story should win the contest. As I expected, the winning story was about the civil war. Then we went out for a walk around the city, upon which night had already fallen. I remember the Mudejar towers, which appeared and disappeared in the most unlikely places. I remember streets with the names of saints. I remember priests rubbing their hands together or clasping them tight as they walked, as if they’d just received news of Buñuel’s death. I remember Aragonese voices coming from the most surprising places (even from beneath the cobblestones). I remember fortress-churches and I remember a girl with short hair, no more than twenty, who passed me without a glance. I remember the Calle de los Amantes and the Plaza del Seminario, which is crammed with ghosts. I remember the faces of two colonels, Rey d’Harcourt, who surrendered, and Colonel Barba, who didn’t. I remember the 20th corps of the Republican army, and the 18th and the 22nd, which launched the offensive in December 1937. And I remember Buñuel’s brother, Alfonso Buñuel — few people rememember him; he made disturbing collages — who was born in 1915 and died in 1961, and whose work was shown to me in Teruel, where they have the custom of remembering precisely those who are remembered by no one, or hardly anyone. I also remember a warm cardoon salad and Ana María Navales talking to me about English women writers until three in the morning, both of us chain-smoking. And I remember that Juan Villoro, in Barcelona, had told me his family came from Teruel, and I remember my vain efforts, as a result, to buy him a bottle of wine to take back to Mexico to drink with Margarita.
But the main thing, the thing I remember best, I had yet to see. I saw it that night. All of a sudden we were in the Plaza del Torico. And there, on a column sturdy enough to hold a Greek hero or Franco’s horse, was the Torico. Here was Teruel, I knew it right away, and here also was the skeptical and indomitable spirit of Aragón. The Torico is tiny, as its name indicates, a toy for an eight-year-old child; but it isn’t a toy, it’s a miniature bull. It possesses a calm elegance not devoid of pride and indifference. It’s one of the most beautiful statues I’ve seen in my life, if not the most beautiful. On the way home I got sick again and then I fell asleep. I dreamed that the Torico was walking along beside me. “Did you like Teruel?” it asked me, though only to be polite, because in reality the Torico couldn’t care less whether I had liked his city or not. “Very much,” I said. “And does it exist or not, do you think?” it asked me. Just as I was about to answer that I thought it did, the Torico turned away and I heard it say: “No, I’d rather not know.” Then I dreamed that someone in a huge dark dance hall put on an album of the pasodoble Suspiros de España, and by the time the music began, the ghost that had set it playing was gone.
Vienna and the Shadow of a Woman
I don’t know what was best about Vienna: whether it was Vienna or Carmen Boullosa. Everyone knows that Vienna is a beautiful, cultured city, the capital of a country that flirts (and its flirting may have reached the feeling-up stage) with neo-fascism. But few in Spain know who Carmen Boullosa is.
The first reports I had of her told of a very beautiful woman who was causing the Mexican lyrical poets to lose their heads. Carmen, who at the time hadn’t yet begun to write novels, was also a Mexican lyrical poet. I didn’t know what to think. All those poets head-over-heels in love with a poet struck me as excessive. On top of it all, the poets who had been dumped by Carmen (or by themselves) got to be friends, or were already friends, and had formed a de facto group or club that met once a week or once a month at bars in the center of Mexico City or in Coyoacán to revile their former beloved.
I also learned, always from third parties, that in response Carmen had started a club or society or commando group of women writers who met in secret, just like their male counterparts.
One day, in a book about contemporary Mexican literature, I saw a picture of her. She was definitely a beautiful woman, dark, tall, with huge eyes and hair down to her waist. I thought she was very attractive, but I also imagined that she must write like one of the many imitators of a magic realism made for the consumption of zombies.
Then I read something she had written and my opinion changed: Boullosa had nothing to do with imitators or imitators of imitators. I read just a few pages, but I liked what I read. And then I received an invitation to come to Vienna, where we would both give readings.
One of the good things about going to Vienna is that you can fly Lauda Air, the airline founded by the mythic Formula 1 driver, with stewardesses who dress like racetrack mechanics. The food is good, too. If you’re lucky (or unlucky) the plane may even be flown by Nikki Lauda himself. And a little while later, in the time it takes to pray three Our Fathers, you’re sitting in a taxi in Vienna, and if you’re lucky you might even be staying at the Hotel Graban, a little place on the Dorotheergasse, next to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, or in other words right in the center of the city. Though the most important thing about the Hotel Graben isn’t its location, but the fact that it’s the place where Max Brod and Franz Kafka stayed when they came to Vienna.
Outside of the hotel there’s a huge bronze plaque that says this, but I arrived at night and didn’t see the plaque, so when the receptionist told me that she was going to give me Brod’s room or Kafka’s room (I wasn’t sure which), I thought she was recommending that I read both Prague writers, which, given the country’s political situation, seemed very timely. Then, gathering my courage, I asked whether she had any information about the arrival of Frau or Fraulein Boullosa, which the receptionist pronounced Bolosa, and which made me think that even though Carmen was Mexican and I was Chilean, we shared the same Galician roots. Her answer disappointed me deeply. Not only was Frau Bolosa not at the hotel, she didn’t have a reservation, and nothing was known about her.
So I went for a walk nearby, along Graben (curious: my hotel was called Graben but it wasn’t on Graben), through the cathedral square, past the Stephansdom, the Figarohaus, the Franziskanerkirche, the Shubertring and the Stadtpark, the places that my friend Mario Santiago had roamed by night, stealthily, and then I returned to the hotel and went
to bed and spent a strange night, as if there really were someone else in my room, Kafka or Brod or one of the thousands of guests who’ve stayed at the Graben and are now dead.
In the morning I met Leopold Federmair, a young Austrian novelist, and together we walked around the city some more, visiting the cafés that Bernhard had frequented when he was in Vienna, one place that was very close to my hotel, on the Lobkowitzplatz or the Augustinerstrasse, I can’t remember which, and then the Café Hawelka, across from my hotel, where the owner, a little old woman out of a medieval folktale, offered us free buns for which she later charged us, and then we walked some more and visited other cafés, until it was time for my reading, and time for me to meet or to not meet Carmen Boullosa, who was nowhere to be found.
When we got to the hall — late, because Federmair got lost twice — she was already there. I recognized her easily, though in person she’s even prettier than in pictures. She seemed shy. Smart and nice. After a party at a restaurant with a Turkish cannonball still embedded in the wall, palpable proof of the Viennese sense of humor, which is somewhere between naïve and twisted, we were left alone. Then she told me that St. Stephen’s Cathedral was secretly consecrated to the devil and then she told me all about her life. We talked about Juan Pascoe, who was her first editor in Mexico, and also mine; about Verónica Volkow, Trotsky’s great-granddaughter; about Mario Santiago, who had been to her house a few times; about our respective children.
After leaving her at her hotel I walked back to the Graben and that night I was visited or dreamed that I was visited by Kafka, or Brod, and I saw both of them, one in my room and the other in the room next door, packing or unpacking suitcases and whistling a catchy tune that the next morning I was whistling too.
Our next excursion was to the Danube, which we reached by metro. Boullosa was even more beautiful than the night before. We set out walking toward Hungary and along the way we saw a couple of skaters, a woman sitting and watching the river, a woman who stood and cried without making a sound, and some very strange ducks, some black and others light brown, and each black duck was paired with a light brown one, which led Boullosa to muse that opposites attract, unless the black ducks were parents and the light brown ones babies.
And then everything went as well as it could have gone. Kafka and Brod abandoned the hotel; Helmut Niederle, a wonderful Viennese man, told me the story of the famous shoemaker of Vienna, which I included in a book; we had dinner at the Mexican embassy, where the ambassador (at Boullosa’s urging, I imagine) kindly treated me as if I were Mexican; I insulted a Nazi without meaning to; I didn’t dare set foot in St. Stephen’s Cathedral; I met Labarca, an excellent Chilean novelist, and two Latin American girls who organize an annual beatnik festival in Vienna; and most of all I walked and talked endlessly with Carmen Boullosa, the best woman writer in Mexico.
The Last Place on the Map
Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, located on the north edge of the Beagle Channel and at the foot of the Martial Mountains, is the dazzling, natural, and untamed heart of the province of Tierra del Fuego.
For a long time, first in the South American imagination and then in Europe and America, in part due to the books by certain meticulous travelers, and most especially English travelers, and most especially Chatwin, Patagonia was something like what the vast and restless territory of the U.S.-Mexican border has been and continues to be. Instead of desert, pampa; instead of sleepy sun-baked towns, farmhouses swept by the wind and southern rain; instead of crowds of strange people singing strange songs, just a few scattered inhabitants and almost uninterrupted silence. And yet both the Mexican border region and the provinces that make up the territory of Patagonia constituted, along with the jungle, the fabled last place, the sacred place of the individual, the space where one goes to die or to watch the time pass, which amounts to essentially the same thing. The jungle, perhaps because of its profusion of mosquitos and the inevitable illnesses they carry, has gone out of fashion: travelers, even terminally ill travelers, want to die in peace, that is cradled and lulled by a specific aesthetic that excludes, one can safely say, dengue fever, irksome insect bites, and even more irksome diarrhea. The Mexican border region and Patagonia, in this sense, have much to offer: tequila, cocaine, and women to the north; maté, good barbecue, and temperatures worthy of any scholastic philosopher in the far south. One travels to Patagonia but one also flees to Patagonia. The literature chronicling this kind of flight isn’t only Anglo-Saxon. At the end of Ernesto Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs, when all the protagonist’s dreams have been dashed and he seems doomed, he decides to get on a bus and set off for the south. Other writers have followed Sábato’s example.
In fact, the voyage to Patagonia has long transcended the bounds of literature. There are paintings in which artists, with more enthusiasm than talent, present their vision of the plain, the glaciers, the barren land. There are musical compositions in which the word Patagonia rhymes with Celedonia. There’s even a movie, the director of which I can’t recall, that tells the story of a dentist, English or maybe Canadian, played by Daniel Day Lewis, who rides a motorcycle across Patagonia on a personal crusade against cavities.
For a while Patagonia replaced the tropics as a source of landscapes suitable for magic realism. And I even seem to remember a proposal — this was some time ago — to cede a big piece of Patagonia’s unoccupied territory to either the League of Nations or the United Nations (the former, I think) for the founding of a Jewish republic, or for the settlement of some wandering Asian nation, probably Chinese refugees fleeing Japanese aggression, a proposal that outraged the Argentines of the day and that, if it had taken effect, would surely have given rise to the most civilized and prosperous country in all of South America.
Where does the name Patagonia come from? From its primitive inhabitants, the Patagon Indians, who were described by the Spanish explorers as giants, and giants with enormous feet too, bigger than any European’s, which was perhaps only logical considering that they were giants. The first to spot them (and also the last, it’s said) were Magellan’s brave sailors, bent on sailing around the globe, which in the end, after many hardships, they succeeded in doing, leaving more than half of the crew in their wake, dead of disease, starvation, and various kinds of exposure. A chronicler of the trip, the Italian Pigafetta, describes these giants as ten feet tall. He was probably exaggerating. In the nineteenth century, less fanciful travelers claimed to have seen Patagons who were six and a half feet tall. Today, the few that remain are well under six feet.
The border of Patagonia isn’t something that everyone can identify with utter certainty, least of all Argentines. According to the novelist Rodrigo Fresán, whom I consulted, Patagonia begins when you cross the Río Negro. Meanwhile, some bus drivers from Buenos Aires who drive the southern routes think that Patagonia begins where the province of Buenos Aires ends. According to an Argentine friend, Patagonia begins when you cross over into the province of Chubut, quite a bit further south than most people believe. According to another Argentine friend, Patagonia doesn’t exist at all. I considered putting the question to Alan Pauls, one of my favorite Argentine writers, but I was afraid to.
Beyond debate is the fact that Patagonia is huge and full of its own particular kind of ghosts. No traveler can see everything, partly because Argentina isn’t cheap and partly because there’s so much land to cover, which means that it takes at least six months to visit what the tour guides call its hidden gems, even in
the most superficial way.
For example, Neuquén. Not only is Neuquén the only Patagonian province with no outlet to the sea, it’s also the the only one to share a border with Chile, which makes it a kind of Bolivia in the geostrategic imagination of the Chilean military, who might just as well be Prussian. Neuquén is like Jurassic Park, South America’s lost world of dinosaurs. In Neuquén, one bumps into tyrannosauruses and pterodactyls on every corner. The ranchers of Neuquén no longer speak of heads of cattle but of velociraptors. Pilgrimages of paleontologists are notable in the spring and summer months.
The tourist generally gets around by plane, which makes sense. But the best way to travel in Patagonia is by hitchhiking. For example, one can take a bus to Choele Choel or fly to Bahía Blanca, and then hitchhike. That, at least, was how the cash-strapped Argentines who couldn’t make it to Europe in the 1960s traveled, and that’s how some Patagon Indians still travel when curiosity or some urgent errand brings them to the capital or to La Plata, that sinister city that Bioy pondered in his old age. Once in Choele Choel the traveler must ask himself a crucial question: Which way? The two routes into Patagonia are very different. Either you head for Bariloche or you head for Puerto Madryn. In Bariloche, the unsuspecting tourist will find the Andes and a legion of skiers, snow fanatics with perfect tans and serious psychological and sexual issues who stay at the Llao-Llao, a 1940s hotel vaguely reminiscent of a thermal spa. In Puerto Madryn, on the other hand, he’ll come upon the Atlantic, which at these latitudes (though it depends on the time of year, of course) is a distinctly horrible shade, like the color of some rotting animal or the skin of a rotting carcass, something from an abandoned tannery, although the sea, as always, smells good. And from here one can visit the Valdés Peninsula, which is the northern edge of the Golfo Nuevo, or, better yet, leave Puerto Madryn and head for Trelew and Rawson, which are nearby, and where, at daybreak, if one climbs up on a certain rock out in the country called the Rock of Yanquetruz, one can hear the cries carried on the wind from both cities, cries that speak vaguely of young recruits, young prisoners, nausea, and herds of pigs.
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 Page 24
