The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol

donne sole under his arm.

      In every city where I lived I’ve experienced similar circumstances. Running into such changes diminishes not only the pleasure of traveling but also the concrete awareness of the past. Sometimes I have to go out of my way in order to avoid walking by a place where one of these incidents has happened…To not see, for example, in a city in central Italy that where there was once a theater there is now a discotheque whose flashing neon lights take the place of those that more discreetly announced Paolo Stampa and Rina Morelli in a play by Goldoni, or that in place of a middling café where I used to sit and write in Rome there now stands a tacky souvenir store for garden-variety tourists.

      Still in Rome, for many years now I’ve stopped walking down that narrow street, which also leads to the Piazza del Popolo, whose eccentricity lies in one side being called Via della Penna and the other Via dell’Oca. It’s the only street that I know like that. On one side of the street lived Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, and on the other there were two trattorias essential on my life’s map: Mondino’s and, a few steps away, Pietro’s. Mondino had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; afterward, for the rest of his life, he was a diehard anti-fascist. He ran his trattoria with his wife and son. Together they cooked and served. Customers ate at long tables around the stove. The clientele was made up of students, young intellectuals, theater students, poor artists, and foreign scholars. They were divided between communists and existentialists. They all had a single common hero: Sartre, who at the time was very close to the Italian Communist Party. His Criticism of Dialectical Reason was the most oft-quoted book among the patrons. Philosophy and, above all, Marxism were constant topics of discussion. At times there were discussions that threatened to erupt into war. Someone would then tell a joke, and laughs would win the day. It smelled like sweat, smoke, onion, and olive oil. When I had no money, I ate for free because it gave Mondino great pleasure to talk about Machado in Spanish and for me to listen to him recite Machado’s poetry, which he knew by heart. At night I would eat at the neighboring trattoria, Pietro’s, a Calabrese who detested bohemian culture, the young crowd, extremist ideas, and, therefore, Mondino, I suppose. There I would meet María and Araceli Zambrano, other literati, important journalists and filmmakers, but seldom famous people, because the establishment was rather modest. The central figure was María, who had in fact transformed the trattoria into a salon. Prominent Hispanists and intellectuals, as well as visitors from Spain and Latin America who were passing through Rome, would sit around her. Whenever a group of young Spaniards came in, María would light up. She’d talk to them about her Republican youth, about her teacher Ortega y Gasset, about the writers of her generation, the Civil War, defeat, and then exile. She became a tragic figure: Hecuba, Cassandra, and, of course, Antigone. Swathed in the smoke of her cigarette, looking up, the words would pour out, as if a higher spirit inhabited her body, had possessed her, and was using her mouth to speak. She did not raise her voice. She spoke as if in a trance, inhaled her cigarette, and paused to exhale the smoke. Just then, before beginning the next sentence, the atmosphere became charged with an almost unbearable intensity; the young Spaniards looked as if a sacred current were running through them, and me along with them, as well as the entire restaurant, whether the dinner guests understood Spanish or not. She did not like to end on a note of pathos. Once attained, she would transition effortlessly to recounting anecdotes about Cernuda, Lezama Lima, or Prados, with whom she maintained intimate correspondence. I imagine that when the young people returned to Spain, what they remembered most of Rome was the moment they had seen and heard María Zambrano. At times, I could not withstand so much intensity, and I would leave there with a fever and spend several days ill in the boarding house where I lived. María and Araceli have died, as have Mondino and Pietro. Their trattorias today have other names and another look. Above all, the atmosphere of elation and generosity, of frenzy, and of anguish and hope that characterized Rome prima del miracolo economico has disappeared. Revisiting the past means, among other heartaches, contemplating a world that is, and at the same time has ceased to be, the same.

      Take Mexico, for example. Think about the changes that have occurred in the last half-century—the devastation of the capital, the degradation of the atmosphere, the moral pollution—and you will have a vision that borders on catastrophe. A dystopia staged by an expressionist director. When I entered university, the city was inhabited by four and a half million people; today that number seems to top more than twenty, and I say “seems” because no one can provide an exact figure. Any common memory, every possible collective imagination, tends to be smashed to bits in these circumstances; the social link that replaces their functions is crass TV, the creator of timid mythologies.

      I would like to move beyond, to the extent possible, apocalyptic visions; and pause instead on areas of imprecise determination, on small details: writing, reading, dreams, anything that eschews the grandiose, the plaintive, an apostolic zeal, and didactic pontificating.

      I spent several years outside the country. Traveling to Europe meant going to Veracruz, boarding a ship, and crossing the ocean. If someone wanted to take a more luxurious trip, faster and with fewer stops, he had to go to New York, and sail from there on one of the spectacular floating cities of the time: the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, the Leonardo da Vinci, for example. When in 1988 I decided to return to Mexico for good, passenger ships had ceased to exist several years before and were reduced to serving as cruise ships in the summer.

      It is hardly surprising that during that long period of absence my memory would occasionally relive unusual episodes that were both fond and forgotten. A letter from Mexico could momentarily recover images I thought lost: a dusty, yellowed, and sometimes implausible hic et nunc managed to emerge from among the deceased, radiant and adorned with every possible prestige. Even an encounter with someone who had traveled through Mexico could cause my immediate surroundings to disappear and transport me back to the infernos or paradises of the past. Every instant recovered from oblivion turned suddenly into a concentration of the universe. Time and space knew extraordinary permutations. As if by alchemy the Café Viena on the Paseo de la Reforma would appear in my memory: its atmosphere, its furniture, and the indisputable aroma of Central European pastries. It was only much later, when I had the opportunity to frequent similar establishments on my march through Europe’s imperial cities—Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Salzburg, Marienbad, Karlsbad—that I realized that Café Viena was a tiny outpost of Habsburg culture. My memory returns me to a long table in the back of the café, beneath an immense rectangular mirror. Don Manuel Pedroso holds court, surrounded by a flock of lads who were probably between eighteen and twenty years old. A genuine interest in what they are hearing and an intense zest for life lessens their slight tendency toward snobbishness. They listen captivated as their mentor talks about Góngora, Balzac, Hobbes, and Dostoyevsky; about his time as a teacher in Seville and Madrid; about episodes and figures from the Spanish Republic; about theories of love in Stendhal and Proust; about studying philosophy and law in Germany; the emergence and height of expressionism, the Bauhaus, Rilke, and the Duino Elegies, of which he’s committed long fragments to memory; about the Italy of Burckhardt, Goethe, Berenson; about the charms of Slavic, French, Andalusian, and Mexican women. He invites his friends to converse with us; one day he brings Américo Castro, who’s passing through Mexico, and talks to us about Cervantes and Tirso de Molina, and declares that he disagrees entirely with the thesis he had espoused on Tirso in his youthful prologue to the comedies published in Espasa’s Clásicos Castellanos, that his ideas about Spain’s Golden Age had changed radically, and not just the Golden Age but also the whole of Spain’s cultural formation. He was the most important visitor our tertulia ever had and, much to the annoyance of Pedroso, we listened to him rather with sarcasm and inattention because of the ridicule to which Borges had subjected him in Other Inquisitions. At Professor Pedroso’s tertulia, the logos and its rigors coexist in total harmony with the trivial; Alicia Osorio, Lupina Mendoza, Ivonne Loyola, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Luis Prieto, and yours truly listen to the maestro intently, we celebrate his wit, we agree, question, dare to raise objections, which the maestro himself encourages. Finally, we say our goodbyes, aware that life is full of wonder, among other reasons, because we know that we will meet again next Saturday in the same café where, unbeknownst to us, our destiny is taking shape.

      Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark