The Magician of Vienna

by Pitol, Sergio; Henson, George; Bellatin, Mario

  We entered the university amphitheater. One of the professors accompanied me, gave a short introduction to the audience about my work and about Fernández de Lizardi, and as I began my lecture I heard a savage cry: Vlamata! Vlamata!, which turned instantly into a roar. The teacher attempted to silence the crowd. He was unsuccessful. For ten minutes it was a revolution, they threw chairs, hurled inkwells at the walls, pelted me in the face with a ripe fruit the size of a papaya that tasted like pulque. Soon the police arrived. Only fourteen people stayed to hear me speak, I skipped almost half the pages, when I arrived at the end no one applauded, or asked a question, or said a word. I left for the hotel alone. Fortunately, I left early the next morning for the airport, and at midday I was in my apartment. Two weeks later I received a letter from Enrique. He described the trip as a mirage, he only knew part of it to be true when he put on the garments given to him by the mother of mothers from the Ashgabat looms. “The trip was horrible, they sat me beside those monsters, the aforementioned baritone and his horrendous Frau. From Ashgabat to Kiev they spoke the whole while in German, which I don’t understand. From Kiev to Frankfurt she muttered in an atrocious Papiamento mixed with Italian and French; the little I understood was that the great baritone sung a handful of times in a restaurant in a village whose name I did not understand close to Frankfurt. The worst part was that when I changed planes, the wonderful rugs that they gave me in the desert bazaar stayed in the Frankfurt airport because the excess weight cost a fortune, which I didn’t have.”

  I also remember it as a mirage. I don’t know what reports they sent from Ashgabat to the Institute of Soviet-Latin American Cultural Collaboration, but they never invited me to appear at another Soviet university.

  THE ALCHEMIC LEAP. When I write anything akin to autobiography, be it travel chronicles, texts on events to which, by my own will or sheer chance, I was a witness, or portraits of friends, teachers, writers whom I have known, and, above all, my frequent incursions into the unforeseeable magma of my childhood, I’m left with the suspicion that my angle of view has never been adequate, that the environment is abnormal, sometimes because of a loss of reality, others due to an overwhelming weight of details, almost always trivial. I am then aware that upon treating myself as a subject or as an object, my writing becomes infected by a plague of imprecisions, equivocations, excesses, or omissions. I persistently transform into someone else. Those pages emit a willingness to see, a corpuscle of reality achieved by plastic effects, but enveloped in a fog. I suppose it has something to do with a defense mechanism. I guess that I produce that evasion in order to assuage a fantasy that comes from my childhood: an abiding desire to be invisible. That dream of invisibility has accompanied me as long as I can remember and persists until now; I long to be invisible and to move among other invisible beings.

  In 1956 I wrote my first stories, and in 1959 I published my first book: Tiempo cercado [Corralled Time], edited by the journal Estaciones. It was the first and last in a collection of young writers conceived by José de la Colina. Those early stories had as their source the tales that I had heard from my grandmother in my childhood, in long and minute monologues. They revolved around a trip to Italy in her childhood, accompanied by her father and her sisters, a stay of several years to be educated; but, above all, they were circumscribed to the infinite vicissitudes that she suffered upon her return, the Revolution, widowhood in the fullness of youth, the plundered ranches, difficulties of every kind, sorrows that I imagine must have been somehow soothed by an incessant consumption of novels. My grandmother was until her death a full-time reader of novels from the nineteenth century, especially those of Tolstoy. Whenever I recall her she appears seated, oblivious to everything going on around her, leaning over a book with a magnifying glass, almost always Anna Karenina, which she must have reread more than a dozen times.

  With the publication of Tiempo cercado I believed I was fulfilling a duty, paying tribute to my grandmother, but also marking a distance from her world. I noticed immediately that I was leaving behind an adolescence that had stubbornly refused to fade. I took for granted that the only reason to write my book was for the liberating effect I needed at the time. During the next three years I didn’t write a single line. And as far as I recall I didn’t feel the slightest compunction. Nor did I regret it. My energy and imagination were occupied in other more vital things, but I did not distance myself completely from literature, rather simply from writing.

  In 1961 I traveled to Europe. In Rome, one evening, as I passed time in a café, waiting for the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, I began to draft a story about a well-to-do Mexican functionary, on vacation in Italy, who suddenly discovered that the machinations he had employed to ascend socially, politically, and economically were being wasted, that the steps with which he believed he was assuring success in his career had been a trap, a ruse only to end up in the hole where he found himself, and during a night of reminiscences he discovers to his surprise, and with infinite horror, that he was little more than a poor bastard. London was the first city I settled in after beginning my European odyssey. On one occasion I was invited to dine at the home of the embassy’s cultural attaché. I think it was Mexican cultural week in London. A group of Mexican journalists were there, two or three functionaries from the National Autonomous University, some English Hispano-Americanists, a very prestigious historian, whose classes I attended many times as an auditor, members of the embassy, some ladies who belonged to a British-Mexican cultural association, and a politician who had had a sinisterly dark and powerful career, who had abandoned politics to become a businessman, where, it was said, had made an enormous fortune, and who greeted everyone as if he were the host. During one of his tours through the drawing room he paused before the group who had surrounded the history professor. He greeted my former teacher, who at that moment was commenting on José Vasconcelos’ titanic contribution to Mexican culture, with exaggerated politesse. The professor introduced us, adding that this person could speak on the subject much more knowledgeably considering he had in his youth worked with Vasconcelos, only to become later one of his closest assistants during his presidential campaign, and following his defeat one of the most hounded and punished. The man sat and recounted some banal anecdotes that we all knew, then proceeded to talk about himself. He talked about his years in poverty while in exile in San Francisco and then in Spain and France, and about his repatriation during the Second World War, when President Ávila Camacho called on all Mexicans to form a united front against the enemy, a true national unity. “Can you imagine, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what it meant to embrace Calles, my former enemy, the very devil, who ordered me to kill our comrades, but he also embraced us and warmly, because after us he also came to know exile, like the Vasconcelistas, and because we were united in a new cause, yes, national unity. All this is easily said, but carrying it out was very difficult, nothing short of a miracle”; later he bemoaned that some imbeciles considered him a traitor for it, “traitors, bollocks, we were the architects of a new México,” and his features grew hard as if made of stone. He rose as if he had completed the act that was expected of him and then approached another group. The history professor allowed himself a single commentary about the character: “His entire life he was a traitor, not for having embraced Calles, which would be the least important thing; he was a traitor to everyone,” and he went on to remark on some aspects of Vasconcelos’ extraordinary cultural achievement. The politician remained until late; when he said good-bye to the few of us who remained, he blurted out rudely that we did not know Mexico nor could we ever understand it, and he said it as if he were cursing someone’s mother.

  While in Rome I began to outline the story as I waited for the Zambrano sisters; I felt that my muses had been very generous, the character they sent me was a formidable gift; as I constructed it I distanced myself from my region, and it was easy to build the story from the characters of my previous stories, create the secondary figures th
at surrounded him, among whom the character had lived and whom he went about sacrificing as he ascended that dangerous ladder that leads to success, but where one can also come to know the abyss; by the end of the story I was able to discern that I had sketched the politician whom I’d met in London. It would seem that upon remembering that gathering in London, the millionaire politician had made an excessive impression on me, to the point of transforming him into the protagonist of my story. But it wasn’t like that at all, the monologue he unleashed on us at the party must have lasted at most fifteen or twenty minutes. The victor’s rhetoric was hollow; the oratorical tone and the theatrical gestures, ridiculous. I did spend, however, a great deal of time conversing with my teacher, with the professors of Hispano-American literature, with some very amusing young women who were economists studying in London, and with my friend, the cultural attaché from the embassy. By the next week, he had completely slipped my mind, and only three or four months later he had appeared in my notebooks. He was not the fruit of mere imagination, but rather of reality, an eroded, stylized reality, which in one way or another could be a secondary form of imagination. None of the real character’s words had made their way into my story, neither his physical description nor his gestures were the same; what made him coincide with my protagonist was a whiff of arrogance and vileness. From these metamorphoses springs my work. When a point of reality explodes everything goes into motion. That story, “Cuerpo presente,” had an intensity unlike the earlier ones, a temperature different to those tales that evoked my ancestors, which I attempted to revive with modern registers and echoes of Faulkner, of Borges, and of Onetti. It was a new beginning. From that moment on I began to imagine plots that were unfolding wherever I was. The narrative scenarios were the same as those I was inhabiting: Poland, Germany, France, Austria and, above all, Italy. They were not travel chronicles; I only borrowed a few of the real spaces, and I highlighted a handful of significant details to strengthen the architecture of a plot, mere settings in which I imposed a strict requirement on myself not to succumb to picturesqueness. My protagonists, with one or two exceptions, were always Mexicans passing through somewhere in Europe: students, writers and artists, businessmen, filmmakers who were attending some festival, or simply tourists. Men and women of any age who at an unforeseeable moment would suffer a moral, romantic, intellectual, religious, ideological, or existential crisis. Had they been in Mexico at the moment, they would have surely withstood that moment of anguish easily, and perhaps even considered it a minute detail. Their surroundings, the familial and professional customs, their dealings with friends, colleagues, or their teachers and, in the extreme case, with their psychologist or competent psychotherapist would free them from the malaise. In the solitude of the Orient-Express or, even more so, that of the Trans-Siberian, in the small hours of Rome’s or Palermo’s city center at night, surrounded by fools and tormented faces, the unease was growing, the struggle against oneself took on new dimensions, the internal enigmas that no one wishes to uncover were growing sinister. I lingered almost fifteen years in these complicated webs and their multiple variations. Six years after having published Tiempo cercado, that almost secret first book, in 1965, Infierno de todos appeared, which included some of the stories of the earlier collection, and added some new ones; straight away, Los climas (1966), No hay tal lugar (1967), even Del encuentro nupcial [The Wedding Gathering] (1970).

  I wrote all those books abroad. I sent the manuscripts to the publishers in Mexico, and a year or more later I’d receive the first copies. A final story collection followed the same path: Nocturno de Bujara [Bukhara Nocturne], 1981, rechristened later by the publishers with the title of Vals de Mefisto [Mephisto’s Waltz], as well as my first two novels: El tañido de una flauta, 1972, and Juegos florales, 1982. Not having a personal relationship with the editors, readers, or critics was to my advantage. Far from Mexico, I received no news about intellectual fads, I belonged to no group, and I read only my friends’ books. It was like writing in the desert, and in that near absolute solitude I went about slowly discovering my processes and measuring my strengths. My stories went in search of a Form through which each story would be a sibling to the others, but without being the same, and would capture my own language and style.

  I began the year 1961 under extreme fatigue, I was fed up with everything. My work consisted only of Tiempo cercado, a secret little book. I sensed that I needed a change of environment; all at once I decided to sell some paintings and a few valuable books to bibliophiles with which to cover the costs of a trip of several months in Europe. I bought passage on a German boat that would leave Veracruz the summer of that year. As the date of my departure neared, my fever became more compulsive. I ended up selling almost all my books and even some pieces of furniture. Deep down, without being completely aware, I was burning my bridges. Those few months turned into twenty-eight years, during which I spent holidays in Mexico on various occasions, although in reality not frequently, and on two occasions I stayed for extended periods, one year in Xalapa in 1967, and another year in Mexico City between 1982 and the beginning of 1983, but with a clear understanding that they were temporary, that I would again travel abroad. My life outside the country was comprised of two markedly distinct and initially antagonistic stages. I spent the first year in Rome, then in Peking, I taught classes at the University of Bristol, I worked for two publishing houses in Barcelona, one very presitigious, Seix Barral, the other fledgling and very audacious for the time, Tusquets, but above all I did translations for various publishers in Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. I also lived three years in Warsaw. That stage, when I did not have schedules, or bosses, or offices, allowed me to move through other countries freely, despite my modest resources. I must have translated during those years some forty books, perhaps more. I had the good fortune, with the exception of two or three titles, to choose personally all the books that I translated, and outside of two all were novels. That work allowed me later to embark on writing my own. I know no greater training for structuring a novel than translation. Rummaging in the innermost parts of The Aspern Papers by Henry James, Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Heart of Darkness by Conrad, Cities of the World by Vittorini, Boris Pilniak’s Mahogany, among others, stimulated the temptation to try my luck at a genre that until then I had not been able to write.

  The second part of my stay in Europe begins in 1972 and ends in 1988, and unfolds in spaces that as a rule one might assume to be entirely antagonistic to those in which I had previously moved. The Secretariate of Foreign Relations invited me to be a cultural attaché in the Mexico embassy in Poland for a period of two years. I accepted, with the conviction that by abandoning translations I would have more time to devote to creation, and also because I had lived years before in Warsaw, during a time when its artistic life enjoyed moments of radiance, which had made me an addict of its culture and people. I was convinced that after completing those two years I would return to Mexico where I would remain permanently. But the same thing occured that always happened during my youth: I allowed chance to govern my destiny, in such a way that I remained in the Foreign Service for sixteen years. The embassies and the countries where I found myself were abundant in experiences. My books, even now, are nourished by them. If I can be sure of one thing, it is that literature and only literature has been the thread that has given unity to my life. I think now of the seventy years I have lived to read; I became a writer as a result of that permanent exercise.

  In the space that divides those two stages, my first two novels were conceived: El tañido de una flauta, 1972, and Juegos florales, 1982. The latter should have been the first; however, I had to wait fifteen years to complete it.

  In early 1968, shortly before ending a stay in Xalapa, I attended a party in Papantla. A Xalapeño poet had won first prize in the floral games that are celebrated annually as part of a major regional festival. I stayed with a group of teachers and students from the Universidad Vera
cruzana during the three days of the festivities. When I returned home I traced that very night the outline of a novel. The story seemed easy; its realization was infernal. The plot was closely tied to a true story. A teacher who accompanied us disappeared in Papantla. She was from a city on the northern border, Nuevo Laredo or Matamoros, I don’t remember which, who had met a Mexican student of architecture years before in Rome. When their scholarships ended, they settled into Xalapa and joined the university. The marriage was a disaster. They had a child who died at a very young age. The architect left one morning to take care of some business at customs in Veracruz and never returned. No one, neither she, nor his family, nor his most intimate friends heard from him. He was lost forever. The woman stayed in Xalapa, doing translations, writing articles on music, teaching English classes; her disposition was very harsh, and she was permanently unbalanced. At the awards ceremony, seated on a dais with the other members of the jury and in the middle of the opening remarks, she stood up, descended the steps, and walked very slowly the entire length of the theater, embraced a woman, a former servant whom she had dismissed on rumor of being a witch; both exited the theater. The next day she did not show up at the hotel, they searched for her at the home where the witch lived, and they found it in ruins, as if it had burned several days before. Like her husband, she disappeared. It’s ghastly, I know, to use this as a basis of a novel. What interested me was describing the breakdown of a marital relationship, retold by a friend of the disappeared architect, a frustrated and resentful writer, who went from having promise to being a don nadie, a no one, yes, a mediocre and scheming teacher, an incompetent and entirely unreliable narrator who constantly contradicted himself during the story. I couldn’t write the novel at the time; I was about to travel to Belgrade as an envoy of the Secretariate of Foreign Relations in order to arrange the participation of Yugoslavia in the cultural activities attached to the Olympic Games of 1968 that was to take place in Mexico. I arrived in Belgrade in March of that year. Everything there was organized. All I had to do was show up from time to time at meetings in the Ministry of Culture and attend certain acts of protocol. I traveled through that amazingly beautiful country, made friends, reread the Serbian writer Ivo Andrić, and I discovered the Croatian Miroslav Krleža, the greatest literary figures of their languages. Finally, after many years, I had ample time to write. I began to write Juegos florales, the novella that I outlined after my return from Papantla, confident that I would finish it in a couple of months. The truth is it took me fifteen years. It was a calamity; it was as if I were paying for a grave offense of which I was unaware.