Everything happens in the year 1942, when Mexico declared war on the Axis countries, and the capital became a tower of Babel to which thousands of war refugees arrived. The language veers every moment, every statement by a witness, whatever it may be, is immediately refuted by the others; the discourse marches on, come hell or high water, interrupted at every turn by paralyzing bawdiness. The flow of the words as well as the silences are examples of the same neurosis. El desfile del amor received the Herralde Novel Prize in its second edition. Thereafter, Mexico began to discover me. The minute handful of enthusiasts gradually began to expand.
In the mid-1980s I spent a period of convalescence in Carlsbad and Marienbad. There I read the magnificent book by Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World. Every page brought me relief. His theory of the festival seemed genius to me. For weeks I could do nothing but reread Bakhtin; from there I went on to the theater and prose of Gogol, which under a Bakhtinean lens acquired surprising brilliance. I had carried with me to the sanatoriums the beginning notes to my next novel, Domar a la divina garza. The role of Gogol is extremely important in the life of the story’s central character. Although in my novel Bakhtin’s name is mentioned and even the title of his book, I am convinced that the ghost of another famous Slav, the Pole Witold Gombrowicz, is even more present, as well a few other ingredients: the Spanish theater of the género chico, the comedic sketch, but also the picaresque novel of the Golden Age, the anthropological theories of Malinowski, the comedies of Noel Coward; Quevedo, Rabelais, Jarry: in short, a nice parody of the Faustian cauldron.
If El desfile del amor was a comedy of equivocations, where each character was a bagful of secrets, some serious, others trivial, in Domar a la divina garza it is even more difficult to untangle the characters’ very identity. They tend to appear and disappear as if they were obeying a spell. The reader doesn’t know if they are real characters in a novel, or marionettes, mere visions, effigies. A loutish central character, one of those insufferable boors who, when encountered on the street, turns to avoid saying hello, shows up at the home of a family where he long ago ceased to be welcome and imposes himself as visitor and as old friend (which he never was), and recounts an absurd, vulgar, and grotesque tale for hours and hours that leads to disgusting stories of excrement, and he himself ends up transformed into fecal matter. As the character progresses through the story, he changes, becomes entangled, loses depth and gains in vulgarity. In Domar a la divina garza even the most obvious reality, the most tangible, becomes doubtful and conjectural. The only visible truth in the novel is humor, this time, rather barracks.
With La vida conyugal the triptych comes to an end. A metaphorical tale about one of society’s most well-worn institutions: marriage. The aim, if one can be clearly delineated, would be to demonstrate the obsolete structure of our institutions, the immense layer of colored stucco with which the so-called lifeblood, the powers that be, and the institutions masked reality until transforming it into a trap. If anything approaches a moral, it is the Gombrowiczian indication that the role of the writer and of the artist is to destroy those façades in order to allow what has been hidden for centuries to live. Between these three novels there exists a wide network of connections, of corridors, of vessels that strengthen their carnivalesque, farcical, hilarious, and grotesque character. I keep a diary. I began it thirty-five years ago, in Belgrade. It is my source, my storehouse, my collection box. From its pages my novels feed voraciously; for a year now I have neglected it too much; the entries have been minimal: a few lines that signal the death of a dear friend, of course my brother, also Sacho, my dog, and a few other friends. Keeping a diary is to establish a dialogue with oneself and an adequate means for eliminating dangerous toxins. Perhaps the abandonment to which I am alluding is due to the fact that this indispensable dialogue has been translated to my last books, almost all with a strong autobiographical foundation; it has always been present in my novels, first secretively; it then brazenly has begun to permeate even my literary essays. In short, I manage to insert my presence into whatever subject I write about, I intrude in the subject, I relate anecdotes that at times are irrelevant, I transcribe pieces of old conversations held not only with dazzling figures but also with wretched people, those who spend nights in railroad stations to doze or talk into the wee hours.
I suspect that because I always moved in a motley environment—excessively gregarious, first in university, then in the bustling publishing houses where I worked, and still later in the diplomatic service, where the social life could be rather taxing—later, upon taking refuge in the tranquility of Xalapa, my literature went about changing. That sophisticated past provided a multiplicity of characters, expressions, and gestures, habits and customs, clothing, and conversation topics, despite giving the impression of everything being exact. But whoever says that all diplomats are cut from the same cloth, that they only differ in the color of their skin and the contour of their eyes or the national costume for the celebration of patriotic holidays, is mistaken. Whoever has lived an extended time with that body and scrutinized with care and suspicion that interesting circle will arrive at the conclusion that the notion of uniformity there is absurd or, at the very least, an exaggeration. Those people who deal all day long with one ceremony after another, elegantly dressed and heeled, with the same expressionless face, could encompass all the variations that Balzac presents in his Human Comedy, and still more. In a way, that fistful of ladies and gentlemen could be a confederacy of manias, obsessions, extravagances, and complexes, subjected, of course, to a perfect iron education. Being a member of that body enriched me fully: some aspects of my protagonists, above all the most eccentric, the most outrageous, the truly odd, emerged from that sphere. So, after abandoning the vast world, I lost a source of inexhaustible information and I began, alone, to rummage through my own feelings, to look for some meaning to my acts, to regret or to enjoy my mistakes, to establish the story of my dealings with the world, what it means to touch reality, or fragments of it, in a kind of semi-wakefulness close to the tormented incoherence that some dreams possess.
In that effort to impose my presence in my writing I felt close to Witold Gombrowicz, especially to his Argentine period, to his magnificent diaries and his last novels, where he appeared as a clown-like character, anchored in an immense freedom, happy to parody others and also himself. Absolute freedom! No one knows what that exactly is. I conceive of it as a possibility of not flattering the powerful, nor kneeling to receive awards, tributes, grants, or any other sinecure.
Alea jacta est: and so things pass. One doesn’t notice the process that leads to old age. And one day, all of a sudden, he discovers, with astonishment, that the leap has been made. I measure the future by decades and the result is chilling: if things go well for me, I still have two to go. I look back, and I perceive the corpus of my work. For good or bad, it is whole. I recognize its unity and its transformations. It unsettles me to know that it has not reached the end. I feel that in the future I may, without realizing it, become complacent with it, become blind to the point of concealing with “effects” its weakness, its clumsiness, just as I do before the bathroom mirror when I try to conceal my wrinkles with funny faces.
SUITE COLOMBIANA FOR DARÍO JARAMILLO. Back in the fifties of the last century I had the pleasure of meeting a good number of Colombians in Mexico, temporarily residing in the Mexican capital to escape the asphyxia, or the abuses, of an absolutist military government, that of Rojas Pinilla.
At the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, I met two students from Cali, Doña Rosario Gamboa and her daughter, Lucy Bonilla. The mother was attending a seminar on Heidegger, with José Gaos, who had just translated Being and Time; and the daughter was enrolled in first year, also in philosophy. I was taking some classes in the Faculty of Letters and was in the same elective art history course as Lucy. I’m almost certain that it was in the faculty café where I established a friendship with both of them. As they had just arrived to Mexico I offer
ed to show them a few sites of interest in the capital. My friend Luis Prieto, a specialist in various styles of Novo-Hispanic architecture, almost always accompanied us. We devoted Saturday mornings to those tours, and later we visited them for afternoon tea. I had never met a Colombian, except in novels, admittedly a rather reduced cast: Fermina Márquez by Valery Larbaud and the protagonists swallowed by the jungle in The Vortex.
Five o’clock tea was an extremely important part of the sentimental education for many young Mexicans of my generation. Doña Rosario had five daughters; the youngest was Lucy, two others, Esperanza, who lived in Bogotá, and Marta, in New York, spend long periods of time with their mother; the remaining two are of no interest to this story. Esperanza was also a philosopher, and had done an advanced degree in a North American university. During tea, they spoke constantly of phenomenology and existentialism, of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre, but also of the sordid news they received from Colombia, although, poetry, omnipotent, was always in the air, a mere allusion to which was enough to illuminate the gathering. Poetry was the kingdom, the garden, the veritable paradise of those studious gentlewomen. Verses even became intertwined with the most rudimentary daily conversation, at times expanding into stanzas or even into complete poems. Esperanza Bonilla, the doctor from the United States, recited long fragments of Ash Wednesday, The Wasteland, and very frequently The Hollow Men, in English or in Spanish, in the resounding translation by León Felipe; when reciting that version, Doña Rosario and her other daughters recited it with her in a low voice like a chorus in a religious celebration, their eyes veiled; one did not know if they were fixed on the horizon or on their own essence. When the final stanzas were scarcely ended they would raise their voice:
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
And then, without pause, the conversation would continue; the cups tinkling merrily, the hostess would cut fresh slices of an exquisite rosca; Lucy would inquire as to who preferred toast with butter, and Marta refilled our cups. Luis Prieto would do riotous parodies about situations and Mexican characters that made us cry with laughter, because, it must be said, these women were also extraordinarily receptive to his sense of humor.
In short, between the metaphysical discussions, the concern for family and friends in a bloody Colombia, and the carnivalesque climate that we, the young Mexican university students, created on that campus, poetry would appear at every moment. The repertoire was that of the time: Neruda, Vallejo, Mistral, Juan Ramón, Alberti, and García Lorca, whose Poet in New York Marta Bonilla knew almost by heart, and the Colombian poets: Silva, Barba Jacob, about whom we knew only his black legend, and León de Greiff, totally unknown, with whose poems I became enamored immediately.
Next door to Doña Rosario lived the Londoños, whose youngest son, Gustavo, a timid adolescent, began with morbid timidity to join us on Saturdays, and enriched the repertoire with Cernuda and Aleixandre, and also with René Char and Louis Aragon’s Cantique à Elsa, recited in French, and some fragments of Anabasis by Saint-John Perse, in the translation of Jorge Zalamea. He also read Quevedo and Manrique. As soon as a verse left his lips, that awkward and frightened boy became a titan. Poetry transformed him, it gave him an almost superhuman strength that disappeared when the silence returned.
Those were my first impressions of the relationship between the Colombians and poetry. Later there were others that strengthened it. Every time I chat with Álvaro Mutis, no matter what he is talking about, the weather, a recent or future trip, an episode from his youth, a magnificent restaurant, whatever, literature is never far away; he focuses on it with a joy that I can’t recall ever having seen in anyone, and literature, whether Dickens, Proust, or Tolstoy, is transmuted immediately into poetry.
I have witnessed at the Book Fair in Bogotá that religious union, which I had known only in Russia or in Ireland, created by a large public profoundly receptive to listening to poets, not just to their national poets, but to all those from our language. And I have heard from poet friends who have participated in the Poetry Festival of Medellín testimonies about the drunkenness produced by the Word, which one can hardly believe.
Two exceptional Mexicans have celebrated the lyrical energy that moves within Colombian society. In 1931, politically defeated, vexed, obligated to leave Mexico in exile, José Vasconcelos toured Latin America. He was received warmly in every country, above all in Colombia, where he was named Maestro de América. On that occasion, the Maestro stated that he sensed poetry was the factor that unified Colombia, the only thing that could save it. A decade earlier the young poet Carlos Pellicer was living in Bogotá. He arrived there in December of 1918, at the age of twenty; he toured a good part of the country and bid it farewell in March of 1920. He had until then only published a few poems in Mexican magazines, and in Bogotá he wrote his first book of poems, Colors in the Sea. Each time Pellicer mentioned that youthful stay, he did so with fervor: “My beloved city, Bogotá,” “In Bogotá my language was spontaneous everywhere and in every place,” “My bride, the unforgettable city of Bogotá.” In that beloved city he discovers his own voice, and he departs forever from the modernista aesthetic. “It was in Colombia and in the city of Curaçao,” he says, “where I wrote the first lines with my own accent.” From the Colombians’ inclination for poetry he discovered a wellspring of figures, even though the national poets, he would say, were more or less asleep, “boxed in a stale nineteenth-century rhetoric that they refuse to leave.” Valencia might have been a good modernista poet, but poetry cannot nor should it be only Valencia.
Time more than corrected that paradox in a country with a decided lyrical vocation and poets frightened by the rupture. Moreover, even during the period when Pellicer was in Colombia, a postmodernista, León de Greiff, had begun to thaw Colombian lyric with magnificent and strange poems published in newspapers and magazines of limited distribution. Pellicer never met him, just as the celebrated poets of his country did not know him. Poetry never stops, it never does. It awakened slowly, shedding the layers of dust that cast a pall over it, until managing to reach a speed and an appetite that was not only satiated by verses but that permeated the novel, the essay, every literary genre.
ENCOUNTERS WITH DARÍO JARAMILLO. And here, without fanfare, Darío Jaramillo Agudelo begins to appear in these pages. In his Historia de una pasión [History of a Passion], a beautiful declaration of his love for poetry, his marriage, his long, devout, and happy coexistence with it, he says:
I must confess that I rather don’t understand the difference between literary genres. Virginia Woolf declared that the only literary genre was poetry. Poetry transforms the novel into literature, a text for television, the bibliographical note, or the chronicle. The potential of the written word to take our breath away, to cause us to light up with surprise, to exorcize demons, to make us smile inside: that word in a poem, a story, a commercial, or in the movies.
My friendship with Darío Jaramillo began ten years ago. I met him at the University of Colorado in Boulder in September of 1992. The eminent Latin Americanist, Professor Raymond Williams, organized a monumental conference on diverse themes: literature, history, the social and economic questions of our continent. Hundreds of guests were present for the occasion, renowned scholars from North American universities, writers, teachers, economists, and political scientists from many parts. It was a marathon that concluded with an exceptionally spectacular finale. Each participant remained only two or three days in Boulder. The invitees gave a talk or delivered a lecture and had to leave. Everyday there were six, seven, or ten lectures at the same time. The afternoon I arrived at the Denver airport, a professor was waiting for me to drive me in his automobile to the conference hotel. He assisted me in registering, and I left my bag in my room. I had time only to change m
y shirt and put on a tie because Dr. Williams was hosting a reception for the Latin American writers, and we were to be punctual. Upon arrival, the house was teeming with guests. I greeted Williams and his wife, and one of the professors took me to a small terrace that faced the magnificent campus, where I found the Colombian group, one of whom approached me and greeted me by name. It was Darío Jaramillo, by whom I had read a handful of poems published in an anthology by Monte Ávila. The next morning, they took us to Denver, the largest city in Colorado, to show us “one of the largest bookstores in the country.” On the bus, I sat next to Darío, and we chatted about literature, of course, and about possible mutual friends in Colombia and Mexico. Beside us was seated a former president of Colombia with one of his assistants. Darío introduced himself and began to expound politely but very animatedly his ideas for defeating drug trafficking in his country. The former leader refuted the writer’s positions with official and solemn language, but Darío handled himself with such intelligence and expounded such irrefutable arguments that the man of state began to retract and ultimately concurred with Jaramillo on everything. Except, he told him, “no Latin American country could accept them until the president of the United States put them into practice. These people,” he said, “would do away with whatever country that proposed measures that to them seemed heterodox.” The Empire is the Empire, as we already know.
The Magician of Vienna Page 10
