Ba Jin (whom we always knew as Pa Kin, until the absurd phonetic change took place, the same one that transformed Peking into Beijing), the Nestor of Chinese writers, revered for many decades and also punished in the reeducation campaign, defended his young colleague, publishing courageous articles in the press. Both the dean of literature and Gao Xingjian, as well as other writers, readied to discuss, ventilate, and heal the cultural atmosphere. Speaking in a soft voice among colleagues, cloaking intentions, concealing ideas, meant complying, giving way to the sectarians, to the rudimentary theorists that contributed nothing but disgrace to the Chinese culture.
Gao Xingjian decided not to comply. He wrote with total freedom and defended his cause. One of his great theatrical works, Bus Stop, reached the stage in 1983. Its success was astonishing. Had it been produced in a chamber theater, for an elite audience, nothing would have happened. But the premiere took place in one of the most prestigious theaters of the capital, the audience was immense, made up almost entirely of young people. The Party ideologues became frightened. They labeled the experiment dangerous. His next work, The Other Shore, was banned in 1986. From then on, Gao Xingjian became a dissident writer. To recover from the defeat, he decided to take an expedition though deep China. He traveled for ten months, from the mouth of the Yangtze River to its source, almost entirely on foot. He discovered an unknown China, indispensable to him, he spoke to every class of people, listened to confessions and laments, interacted with marginalized men and fell in love with their wives. He listened to himself. He communicated with his inner being, employing every singular pronoun: “I,” “you,” “he,” he examined himself with different eyes and also with theirs, he looked for and lost himself, he found himself while losing himself, and from that experience, on his return to Peking, he was a different man. In 1988 he traveled to Paris and there he went into exile.
From that trip his most important book is inspired, which earned him the Nobel Prize, a magnificent novel, if the adjective fits: Soul Mountain, a novel that summarizes and cannibalizes many novels, everything fits in it, everything is conjectural, and nothing is conclusive. He worked on it indefatigably for seven years. It recalls the novel written by the ancestor of the protagonist of Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths, where the universe is included with all its attributes, the glory of man and the fall of man. The impure reader attempts to know the plot that appears on the surface and doesn’t find it, doesn’t understand it, and ends up cursing the author. The plot is an intricate web of discourses, a labyrinth that lies beneath an apparently confusing surface. There, diluted, he finds the course of the classic Chinese novel, and also themes from the Peking Opera, but Proust and Genet are also there, the contemporary French novel, and Joyce and Cervantes, whom he had read since childhood. It is an abstract novel, capable of caressing the world of the real and penetrating it. In short, it is one of the most extraordinary literary experiences of our time.
Nevertheless, Gao Xingjian declares in almost all his interviews that his greatest pleasure as a writer has come from the theater. And in effect, the greatest part of his literary production is theatrical. In his pieces, as in his great novel, he intertwines the abstract with the real, with a seamlessness and a play of nuances that seems to conjure the demons that lay siege to it. Tenderness and cruelty, spirituality and slime, are interchangeable terms.
The four theatrical pieces that I have read in this volume are in themselves enigmas: Escape, Weekend Quartets, Nocturnal Wanderer, and The Edge of Reality belong to different periods, some were outlined or written in China and others in France; their poetics are the same. Gao Xingjian notes that language is in essence an instrument to highlight the actor’s craft. In his plays he allows the teachings of Beckett and of Artaud to seep through, and because of the methods of acting one should think of Brecht, who, according to the author, is the only man of European theater that understood the acting methods of the East. The actors are the work; whereas language, gestures, and plot are a mere abstraction, precise and efficient, just as happens in the Peking Opera.
IN A CONTEMPLATIVE MOOD. Some paintings produce immediate pleasure in me, not unlike certain neighborhoods of certain cities, Beethoven’s first and final quartets, the whole of Venice, all of Matisse, Mozart’s operas; and those movies that once and again, no matter how many times I see them, take me back to an inexpressible adolescent joy. I would spend a thousand nights before Lady Windermere’s Fan for the mere pleasure of witnessing the final scene! To enumerate everything capable of arousing pleasure would be overwhelming. But with human relationships, the opposite has always happened to me. Many years ago now, an Italian friend told me that the most intense moments of sexual pleasure cannot divest themselves of a grain of desperation because they already contain a foretaste of death. This is why, deep down, no one will even understand Don Giovanni. Don Juan possesses no past, and he doesn’t sense nor is he interested in the future. Everything in him is present. The same for Cherubino, that Don Juan in the making. The difference between Don Juan and Cherubino and me lies in their capacity to act; whereas if I perhaps sensed the present, I stood idly by.
POMPEII OBLITERATED. An attribute of memory is its inexhaustible ability to bring surprises. Another is its unpredictability. One may be under the illusion that the inner tumult felt in adolescence when he listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for the first time is among the most intense ever known; the same thing will happen years later, upon discovering Venice or the first stirrings of Eros, which were—who can doubt it—initiatory moments that added new elements to his existence and enriched it decisively. Such experiences do not arise entirely by surprise, but rather from something previous that acts as a foundation: a musical work, a city, a life experience, of which an indirect knowledge already existed, through reading, cinema, even daily conversations. That exercise consists only in confirming through our senses something already known and made famous in advance. What is wonderful is that those experiences have shown us that beauty, power, and a capacity for disquiet have exceeded everything we could have imagined.
With the passage of time, our receptiveness goes about gradually transforming. Those first upheavals and surprises were produced by an external agent; the others, those of a mature age, are generated, in turn, in the very breast of the mortal who experiences them, in the unexplored folds of his being. At times I sense that they do not enrich anyone, that their function is the opposite, not adding but subtracting. If they can be compared to anything, it is to a private wound, to an ontological collapse, to orphanhood. But from there arises creation.
So, where is all this going?
To a trivial experience, lacking any greatness, but intensely baffling. I picked up at random a novel from El Séptimo Círculo: The Black Spectacles23 by John Dickson Carr, a detective novel typical of the prewar, belonging to that English current in which analysis, deduction, the resolution of an enigma, the restrained use of learned quotations, and good manners mean everything. During the period when Borges and Bioy Casares ran El Séptimo Círculo, it was thought that highbrow detective literature would best resist the ravages of time, owing to its insertion into a classical narrative tradition; however, few have managed to survive, and when they do it is due to the nostalgia for an era and its habits and customs. Those by Hammett and Chandler, however, have held up perfectly, despite the fact that in their time they passed as mere entertainment whose meager life was built on action and violence and not on narrative mechanism of acclaimed lineage. If I quoted The Black Spectacles, it was for reasons having nothing to do with its generic qualities or its ramifications. The novel begins in a house in Pompeii on the Street of Tombs, where a group of Englishmen have gathered to to deal with delicate matters that have taken place in their country. “The Street of Tombs,” says the author,
lies outside the walls of Pompeii. It leads from the Herculaneum Gate, descending a shallow hill like a broad trough of paving-blocks between a footway on either side. Cypresses stand up
over it, and make this street of the dead seem alive. Here are the burial-vaults of the patricians, the squat altars hardly yet blackened to ruin. When this man heard his own footsteps there, he felt merely that he had got into a neglected suburb. The hot, hard light shone on paving-stones worn to ruts by cartwheels; on grass, sprouting in cracks, and tiny brown lizards that darted before him like an illusion of moving shadow in the grass. Ahead of him Vesuvius rose beyond the mausoleums, dull blue in a heat-haze, but no less large in the mind because it was half a dozen miles away.
Thus begins the Englishmen’s tour through the Pompeiian setting. I paused a moment to set the location and visualize the action with greater clarity. It was impossible. I had seen Pompeii in the movies, in books of art; I had read in magazines about its history and its art. Moreover, I had been there one August afternoon of 1961; nevertheless, it had become invisible to me. During various days I insisted on remembering that visit. Each time I undertook the return to Pompeii, it faded from me into a kind of impenetrable blackness; however, I went about reconstructing a large part of that day until managing to recall that I had arrived at that city in ruins, that I had entered a piazzetta, that it was necessary to wait until a determined group of tourists formed in order for the tour to begin, and that the guide responded to someone’s question that the visit to the special rooms containing the obscene pictures would not be possible that afternoon, and the falsely indignant comments of some of the visitors followed by loud guffaws. From that moment forward, every trace of the city disappeared in my mind. Each time I tried to force my memory, a shower of recollections would fall on me. Everything seen and done that August day of 1961 began to appear: awaking in a hotel in Naples, the visit to the Museo di Capodimonte, where I discovered Caravaggio, the long stroll through the tumultuous city with Nancy Cárdenas and Susana Druker, with whom I had undertaken the trip; we witnessed an imposing burial, with dozens of funeral carriages drawn by horses adorned with magnificent crests of black plumage, rows of priests, children from orphanages, many of them crippled, walking on crutches, luxurious limousines, and behind them a multitude of grief-stricken Neapolitans. We followed the cortege on the sidewalk for a couple of blocks. The body language of the crowds produced a heartrending spectacle, a living piece of neorealist cinema. The inhabitants of the city crowded together on the sidewalks to pay their condolences to the passing cortege. Later, a meal in a trattoria in the city center, where for the first time I ate capitone, a fleshy eel, in a sauce rich in strong flavors and aromas, which made me recall once again the culinary luxury of South Italy, and in the end the trip in a second-class bus, to the South, toward Pompeii, the spontaneous conversation with Italian travelers, who appeared to be interested in our origin and the object of our trip, but who in fact just wanted to talk about themselves and share episodes of their life, of their relatives or acquaintances residing in America, of the region’s beauties, of the picturesqueness of Pompeii, which was interesting, yes, but not as much as the grotta azzurra, which was a veritable sin not to visit. Suddenly we were in Pompeii; they warned us that it would not be possible to see certain rooms; we began to march behind our guide. The next moment I remember takes place suddenly in an automobile. We were hitchhiking, which in those years was safe and normal and was part of the experience of traveling through Europe. A young man from Salerno, the driver, talked like a parrot, although his garrulousness did not diminish the story’s interest. He recalled his childhood during the war, the Allied landing in Salerno; he embodied the spiritual richness of the South, which the Northerners would never possess, a human dimension that they would not even manage to understand. He cursed Milan and Turin, and later showed us the temple of Neptune. That is, we were already in Paestum. He stopped the car on the beach and suggested that we go for a swim in the ocean before seeing the ruins. Plunging my body in the warm water of the Tyrrhenian, that sea plied by Hellenic ships and heroes, was akin to communing with the pagan world. Shortly after, there was a grave misunderstanding between the young man from Salerno and Nancy, who, feeling violently under siege, rejected his propositions. The Italian got out of the ocean, headed for his automobile, threw our bags onto the sand, and shouted something that, by his tone of voice and furious gestures, we surmised were the most terrible of Calabrese insults. Content, we lingered in a sea now bathed by the moon, until suddenly we noticed that it was very late and that we were in a deserted spot. We decided to dress, go in search of the highway, and, with our bags on our back, hitchhike again, or stop a passing bus in order to make it to any city or town where we might find a hotel or guest house. For a long while no one stopped to help us; all of a sudden a group of women dressed in black with bundles on their head appeared, who told us that, high atop the neighboring hill, there was a small village where we could find a pensione. One of them offered to accompany us, but the others all spoke in unison in an impregnable dialect, and so she withdrew her offer. With a certain fear and sorrow we began our march and, once at the top, we found the inn. They told us it was too late for dinner, that we had not entered a railroad station but an honorable pensione. At that moment the fatigue accumulated during the day hit me all at once. I made my way to my room as best I could and collapsed on a rickety old bed. I slept marvelously. The next morning an old peasant woman awoke me to say that my friends were already at the table taking the prima colazione. Breakfast would be comprised of coffee, cheese, and pane con pomodoro, she added. The old woman had brought a pitcher of water, which she emptied into the washbasin, and a wedge of dark soap with an unpleasant odor. She repeated that I was not in a railroad station but in an honorable pensione, that I should hurry, because she had to make the bed and clean the room, and she stood there making urgent gestures for me to wash and dress. Because we had entered into the Hellenic world for this very experience, I ungrudgingly got up, dressed, shaved, and went out to a patio where there were chickens, prickly pears, and heaps of stone. At the back of the patio, beneath an arbor of vines, Nancy and Susana were drinking coffee accompanied by slices of homemade bread, which the tomato spread gave the color of blood. Before moving, at the door of my room, I had asked the old woman the name of the place where we were, and she replied scornfully: “Belvedere!24 Look,” she pointed to the prickly pears, the stones, the sandy loam, “what they call here Beautiful View. It’s enough to make you die of laughter! It should be called Horrible View!”
And in effect nothing could be more horrible. But as soon as I arrived at my friends’ side and looked in the other direction, I saw something supernatural that left me breathless: the majestic temple of Neptune rising from a strip of sand that ran from the base of the hill toward the Tyrrhenian, which at that moment looked like an immense millpond glistening in the sun. I remembered where we were—in a place of privilege among the Hellenes. Paestum was the most precious jewel that Ancient Greece possessed in the Italian peninsula. The name Belvedere fell short in the face of such splendor.
I can recall a large part of the conversation that day when at last we landed, by mere chance, in Paestum. I can recall a thousand details. I seem still to have before my eyes the colored paper glued to the porch of the boardinghouse. They were posters belonging to an extinct monarchist party that still retained some popular reserves in Calabria and Sicily. But what was astonishing about the trip was that I could not recall anything about the guided tour of Pompeii. Could it be possible that Paestum’s impression had weighed so powerfully on the city in ruins as to cause it to fade into oblivion?
I don’t know, but nonetheless it seems like a trivial argument to me. I thought that, as I wrote this travel account, some thread would begin to connect to others until it began to untangle the knot. Writing, quite frequently—and every author knows this without even being told—rescues areas seldom visited, cleans desired places from his conscience, carries air to those areas that are suffocating, revitalizes everything that has begun to wither, triggers reflections that one believed already extinguished. But Pompeii remained for me an
obscure dot buried in my memory. A specialist explained to me the traps that we lay for ourselves in order to defend our personal wholeness. During a hypnotic session I was able to discover a moment that had governed my life completely, a tragic moment that occurred in my childhood, at four years old precisely, buried unbeknownst to me in the quicksand of memory. One convinces himself so that a terrible, grave incident will remain hidden. But the obliteration, the vanishment of Pompeii! And for what, what purpose does that hole serve?
In any event, that day that had begun in Naples and ended in front of the Parthenon of Paestum was one of the most radiant I recall ever having lived. It will forever be, such that if one day by chance I relived an unbearable moment, the agonizing vision I left encapsulated in that city in ruins, nothing will be able to transform that joyous day into an intimate journey into hell. The landscapes I contemplated would protect me from its effect; it would instead be the gift of a plot in order to yet write a spectral story transformed into a carnivalesque and celebratory song.
THE TRIPTYCH. One says, “I don’t know. I didn’t realize how much time has passed.” Truth be told, it’s hard to give credence to that claim. Consider the mirror experiment at shaving time: the senile face that refuses to recognize itself, the efforts to revive certain expressions that thirty or forty years ago he imagined the world found fascinating. What boundless faith of a carbonaro, to suppose that those grimaces the mirror reflects might have some relationship to the photos of youth! There is a genuine resentment in the face of the cosmic injustice for there not being an explicit signal of how closely the disaster looms. Or perhaps there was, and we were unable to detect it. It would seem that the metamorphosis of the vigorous to the withered had happened to us in a state of coma. In short, one has grown old.
The Magician of Vienna Page 8
