“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.” These are Joseph Conrad’s words.
THEY NO LONGER KNOW WHO THEY ARE. The totalitarian mind accepts diversity with difficulty; it is by nature monologic; it allows only one voice, which is emitted by the master and slavishly repeated by his subjects. Until recently, this mindset exalted national values as a supreme cult. The cult of the Nation produced a paralysis of ideas and, when prolonged, an impoverishment of language. The cards, in one way or another, were in plain sight, and the game was clear. But the outlook has changed recently. That same mindset suddenly seemed to grow weary of exalting the “national” and its most visible symbols. It claims to have modernized; it discovers the pleasure of being cosmopolitan. Deep down, it is the same, even if the rhetorical adornments look different. It now encourages contempt for the classical tradition and for humanist training. It tolerates only superficial reading. If this trend succeeds, we’ll have entered the world of robots.
DIARY FROM LA PRADERA
12 May 2004, Wednesday: noticed that the nap had
Yesterday at noon I was admitted to the Centro Internacional de Salud La Pradera, a half hour from Havana; in the afternoon tests and a visit with the doctors. They explained to me the treatment that I was to undergo; in the mornings they’ll extract blood, enrich it with ozone in a receptacle at high speed, then reintroduce it into the body through the same vein. The operation will last no more than an hour. I’ll then have the day to rest, read, exercise in an immense garden, and reflect on my maladies and their possible remedies. I’m behind in all my work; I’ll try to write and read in absolute peace and quiet.
13 May
I began to think about the short story, yes, the short story as a genre. An author of stories goes to work from the first paragraph sharpening one or many anecdotes; he then tries to maintain an efficient and frequently elliptical language. In the undersoil of writing, another current wanders imperceptibly: an oblique writing, a magnate. It’s mystery; whether the story is triumphant or disastrous depends on this current. The end of a story may be open or closed. Chekhov’s greatest contribution to literature is his freedom; he closes an era and begins another; his stories and plays ignore the rhetoric of their time. No one, or very few, were accustomed to the beginnings and endings of his works; as they began his stories, readers assumed that the typesetter had forgotten the first pages because they found that the action was well underway, and the ending might be worse, they became lost in a fog, nothing came to an end or if it did, it did so in a wrong way. Critics considered the young man incapable of mastering even the minimum rules of his profession and predicted that he would never be able to; those poor devils had no idea that Chekhov was already Russia’s greatest writer. At forty-four, when he died, he was already a classic. Chekhov exerted, and still does to this day, a noteworthy influence on the great literatures, especially Anglo-Saxon: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Raymond Carver in our time grasped with intelligence and emotion Chekhov’s universe and his stylistic methods. His last story, “Errand,” narrates the Russian’s last hours. Gustavo Londoño always insisted that Borges was a direct heir to Chekhov. I don’t think so. Borges invented his own literature, transformed our language based on classical models, almost all English. He read the Quixote in English, as he did Homer and many other classics. The close of all his best stories is absolute. The majority of his plots are devised to produce a mind-boggling ending. I’m thinking of ones like “Man on Pink Corner,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Emma Zunz,” “Death and the Compass,” or one, the most wonderful of wonderful: “The House of Asterion.”
In a short story the most important thing is the story’s opening and closing, everything else is filling, but literarily it must be at the level of the ends. Even in those stories that have an imprecise beginning and end, those deficiencies confer on the writing a specific physiognomy. Those apparent absences dominate the story with an iron hand.
I do not believe in universal decalogues and prescriptions. The Form that a writer comes to create is the result of his entire life: childhood, every kind of experience, his favorite books, his constant intuition. It would be monstrous that all writers should obey the rules of a common decalogue or that they should follow the path of a single teacher. It would be paralysis, putrefaction.
The modern short story from Chekhov forward, whether it has a precise ending or not, demands the reader’s participation; he becomes not only a translator but also a participant, what’s more, the author’s accomplice. “The great stories of the world are the ones that seem new to their readers on and on, always new because they keep their power of revealing something.” Eudora Welty dixit.
Frank O’Connor, in an interview published in the magazine Paris Review, declared in 1958: “The novel can still adhere to the classical concept of a civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community, as in Jane Austen and Trollope, it obviously does; but the short story remains by its very nature remote from community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.”53
Cortázar opines: “A story is bad when it’s written without that tension that should be there from the first words or first scenes. And so we can anticipate that the notions of meaningfulness, intensity and tension will allow us, as we’ll see, to come closer to the very structure of the story.”54
14 May
Day before yesterday, after the first ozone session, I experienced a physical and mental energy that I’ve not known for a long time. My body shed its pain and fatigue, I felt the beginning of a restoration. That night I jotted down some comments about the short story, its structure, its specification as a genre. If there is one writer whom I’ve been most drawn to, it is Chekhov; not only because of his work; his person produces in me enormous respect. Even before I knew of his existence, I was searching for him. Reading him has been my greatest adventure and a permanent lesson. For four decades, I’ve lived in his shadow. When I wrote my first stories I didn’t know his narrative work, only some of his theater, perhaps even more modern than his stories. Before discovering his work, I had already read almost everything by Faulkner, much of James, Borges, Mann’s Doctor Faustus, The Metamorphosis and The Castle, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse, Proust, Sartre. A good part of the wealth of Argentine publishers: Losada, Sudamericana, Emecé, Santiago Rueda and Sur, which filled Mexico’s bookstores with the new European and North American literature at the end of the Second World War. Each title, each author meant a victory: that of not lingering on Giovanni Papini, the biographies of Emil Ludwig, José Rubén Romero, Lin Yutang, and Luis Spota. We young readers decided to immerse ourselves in contemporary literature. Suddenly there appeared among us two unusual narrators: Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola. And a little later another amazing novelist, the young Carlos Fuentes. We read them with the same interest as the new European and American writers. Although Chekhov had died half a century before, I placed him at the top of my preferences, and he is still there. Chekhov maintains a permanent suspense throughout his short stories. Any one of his stories gives us a total impression, but if we frequently reread him, the story becomes different. In a letter to Suvorin, his editor, on April 1, 1890, he remarks, “When I write I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.”55
In my first stories, even before reading Chekhov, and even in my recent one, I have left empty spaces to allow the reader to choose one of several options with which to fill them.
15 May
I began writing in the middle of the last century. In the year 1956 to be exact. I was the first to be surprised at having taken that step. My relationship with literature began during childhood; as soon as I learned the alphabet I wound my way toward books. I can document my childhood
, my adolescence, my whole life through readings. Beginning at twenty-three, writing became intermingled with reading. My inner movements: manias, terrors, discoveries, phobias, hopes, exaltations, follies, passions have made up the raw material of my narrative. I am aware that my writing does not arise solely from my imagination; whatever does come from it, its dimension is miniscule. My imagination is largely derived from my real experiences, but also from the many books I have traveled. I am the son of everything I have seen and dreamt, of what I love and abhor, but more broadly of what I have read, from the most august to the almost atrocious. What I am to language and what language is to me is conveyed by some rather undiscernible communicating vessels. Through intuition and discipline, I have sought and sometimes found the Form that language required. In a nutshell, that is my literature.
After finishing my law degree, I audited some courses in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and went once a week to the Colegio Nacional to listen to Alfonso Reyes lecture on Hellenic subjects. Practicing law held no appeal for me. I chose publishing as a profession; for several years I translated, edited, and acquired books for different publishing houses: Compañía General de Ediciones, Novaro, and two new ones at that time, more ambitious and fully modern: Joaquín Mortiz and Era. On one occasion I spent a couple of weeks in Tepoztlán, where I had rented a house in order to concentrate on my work. There, I intended to finish a translation of a children’s book commissioned by Novaro so I could submit it urgently. Upon arriving at the house, I placed on a table the book to be translated, the typewriter, a dictionary, and some notebooks. I intended to start work that night. But I didn’t open the book that night or any of the following days. I wrote a story and did not leave the table until dawn. I was appalled. In the mornings, I’d wake up groggy and go out to walk through the town like a sleepwalker; without trying, unconsciously, I’d think about the story: what I should omit, change, add; at times I felt guilty about the publishing house, I’d hurry to return in order to begin the task, but continued to add new details, choosing those that might be more effective, seeking a plot development that would follow the first paragraph to the distant end; it was very difficult for me to walk in the marshy sands in-between, and when I arrived home I’d reread the pages that emerged at night, correct countless ineptitudes and recompose the text. In short, when I arrived in Mexico City I brought with me three full stories and not a single translated page.
My writer friends, those from my generation, Juan García Ponce, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Vicente Melo, and José de la Colina had already published one or two books and were treated by the cultural press as literary promises. Every week, as I left the only cineclub that existed in the city, that belonging to the French Institute for Latin America, I’d meet those friends at the café María Cristina; later the still younger Carlos Monsiváis and Jose Emilio Pacheco joined us. The decade of the fifties was a time of transformation in Mexican culture. The writers of socialist realism, some cultivators of a threadbare and prosy nationalism, and a handful of conservatives, the radical right, opposed the new currents of modern literature, especially the foreign. Alfonso Reyes, our figure most open to the world, was pilloried for writing about the Greeks, Mallarmé, Goethe, and Spanish literature of the Golden Age. Opening doors and windows was a scandal, almost a betrayal of the country.
In my youth, I wasn’t too concerned about the health of the arts and more concretely of Mexican literature. During the gatherings at María Cristina we celebrated literature, painting, cinema, theater, jazz. Those conversations were very stimulating, provocative and, at times, fantastically entertaining. I didn’t feel committed to battle the writers of either side, for that I would have needed to read their works; the newspaper articles of the time, by José Rubén Romero, Gregorio López, Alfonso Junco, and Jesús Guízar Acevedo, all choleric toward contemporaneity, and even those of Vasconcelos, were dead letter to me. I remember a neighbor woman in Córdoba who for three consecutive birthdays gave me the same book by the conservative Alfonso Junco, the title of which was a gem, but not its contents of course: Bendita sotana [Blessed Cassock]; I could never get past the third page. Actually, at that time my knowledge of Mexican literature was paltry: essays by Alfonso Reyes, Ulises criollo [Creole Ulysses] and La tormenta [The Storm] by José Vasconcelos, some novels and stories by José Revueltas, Al filo del agua [The Water’s Edge] by Agustín Yáñez, a collection of stories by Juan de la Cabada, almost all the poetry of the Contemporáneos, The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz and some of his poetry, the most recent books by Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, Sergio Fernández, and a few others. Almost all my readings were English, and I was beginning to delve into the North and South Americans: Borges, Onetti, Carpentier, Monterroso. It was in Europe where I had an inner need to know the history and literature of Mexico, from the chronicles of the Conquest to the latest trends.
What’s more, during those years I didn’t have the slightest inkling of becoming a writer. Instead, I wagered on becoming a publisher, which is why I learned to edit manuscripts, proofs, and galleys, translated articles and books, and wrote reading notes for various publishers. I was convinced that after a period of apprenticeship, I would run my own publishing house, where I intended to publish those who strove to transform Mexican literature.
16 May
When I returned to Mexico City with my first three stories: “Victorio Ferri cuenta un cuento” [Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale], “Amelia Otero,” and “Los Ferri” [The Ferris], another destination awaited me: my life plan began changing imperceptibly. I continued the usual routines, chatting with the same friends, showing up every Thursday at the cineclub, remaining at the María Cristina until one a.m., discussing the same subjects, but I began to reduce my professional activities to a level necessary only to survive. I took advantage of the additional time to write. Almost every day José Emilio and Carlos came to my apartment to discuss our new readings, and to discuss with absolute freedom and camaraderie what we were writing. When I believed I had reached a satisfactory number of stories I published a short book: Tiempo cercado, in a minimum print run of which only twenty-five or thirty copies arrived in bookstores; I felt that I had paid a debt by composing new versions of the stories that my grandmother, my aunts, and an old servant woman, who accompanied my grandmother most of her life, never grew tired of repeating.
I figured that once the book was finished, I’d go back to galleys, pages, prints, and translations. But that didn’t happen; I soon shed the dream of running the best publishing house in Mexico; I continued to write stories for twelve years. But that was in other climates, because in 1961 I burned my bridges, and in the summer of that year I set sail for Europe; in order to write I needed a new existence, to establish a significant distance from a rather overwhelming childhood and an adolescence that seemed never-ending. A few months later, once established in Rome, I wrote a story, the first in Europe, “Cuerpo presente,” different from the previous ones. The stories contained in Tiempo cercado had as a general theme the decline of Italian settlers in the region of Huatusco, histories unfulfilled and degraded by the passage of time, the presence of the Revolution, charged with violence, failures, and dreams cut short. In “Cuerpo presente,” I tried to bring history closer to my time and my circumstances, for which I discovered a different language. Beginning with that story, and for many years, my conception of the short story began to change. The subjects, the resources, the literary spaces underwent several metamorphoses. I tried not to copy myself, or to write mechanically; when I sensed that I was approaching a repetition I was prepared to take a leap; on some occasions it was so risky that my writing adopted a form antagonistic to the past. That antagonism was a mere illusion, a façade; upon rereading all my work I have discovered that there exists a clear unity in it, but also various other possibilities of diverging into other formal concerns. I have tried to manage an always visible but increasingly malleable and masked reality; parody has allowed me to knock down the sturdiest of walls.
And if my handling of Form changed, so did the spaces where the plots unfolded: Rome, Venice, Barcelona, Peking, London, Warsaw, Bukhara, Samarkand. What unites and communicates these settings are the characters, almost always Mexicans, with their vicissitudes, extravagances, and regrets thousands of kilometers from the place where they buried their umbilical cord. Language, Form, plot appear simultaneously and from the start; each entity leads to the others, and the pulsations, tensions, fissures, and reconciliations that occur in them allow me to build an oblique, oneiric, delirious vision of the story, and to achieve an open and fortunately conjectural ending.
17 May
I have been here five days. The gardens and palm groves cover an area of several hectares. The patients are foreigners, mostly Venezuelans. There is a very large hotel, several restaurants; some of us Mexicans, Canadians, and a Panamanian woman eat at a very small one, El Rocío. Paz Cervantes has come to be treated for emphysema; we came on the instructions of Dr. Jorge Suárez, our homeopath in Xalapa, to complete an ozone treatment that we began with him; we were told that the ozone clinic La Pradera is one of the few places in the world where this technique is found. Every morning, including Saturday and Sunday, we go to the clinic. The nurse is efficient, but there are days when the treatment becomes difficult and takes a long time. My veins are gradually disappearing, the extraction and above all the reintroduction of the blood to the body sometimes presents difficulties. In addition to going to the clinic, Paz and I go to eat together and then take a walk for half an hour or an hour in the garden. The remaining time I devote to reading, writing these notes, and resting. During the first moments at La Pradera I felt like Hans Castorp, spending a lifetime of medical examination and treatments in a remote part of the world. Shortly after, I take it back; our circumstances are entirely different: his hospital was located in a mountain girded eternally in snow; here, however, in my Caribbean spa I’m surrounded by all kinds of palms, bougainvillea, and tropical plants, and the heat is oppressive. But what radically separates us is a different education, language, culture, roots, opposing myths. Castorp arrived at his magic mountain when he was around twenty years old, and I enrolled at La Pradera at seventy-one. Hans Castorp is interested in everything, he has his life ahead of him, or so he believes; he makes friends easily, he enthusiastically listens to arguments between Naphta and Settembrini, and has for the first time experienced love with a fascinating woman, while I, on the edge of Havana, say hello only occasionally to the other patients, but politely of course, and avoid conversation with those who are trying to kill time, which for them is empty but which I enjoy intensely in my room. This expanse of time allows me to exercise, to rest luxuriously in my room where I read for hours and hours, which I had long since been unable to do. When I travel I take more than a dozen books so as to have several options for reading. I arrived at La Pradera with several Spanish classics: Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and Lope, some novels by young Mexicans whom I don’t know well: Tuscany, Fadanelli, Montiel, and González Suárez, two novels by Sándor Márai, the last book by Tito Monterroso, Literatura y vida [Literature and Life], Gombrowicz’s diaries, a detective novel by the Swiss writer Friedrich Glauser, In Matto’s Realm, the only novel of his I’ve not read, and an excellent and incisive book of essays by Gianni Celati, Finzioni occidentali [Western Fictions].
The Magician of Vienna Page 24
