The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol

then set off for the Galleria. I toured its rooms overflowing with wonders: Giorgione, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio: the immense legacy of form and color that Venice has bequeathed to the world. I cannot remember if I followed a group, as I did in San Marco, or whether I relied on my guidebook, pausing before some of the paintings. Afterward, I become lost. All I know is that I walked aimlessly for several hours, wandered down countless streets, crossed the great Rialto Bridge several times, and other less majestic ones, even some in ruins that crossed the small canals in less affluent neighborhoods. I boarded the vaporetto on several occasions and continued moving; I drank another coffee at the Florian and ate gloriously in a trattoria I happened upon by accident. As I walked, I became lost from time to time in my tiny guidebook. I tried to find Palladio’s buildings, those spaces that Hofmannsthal considered more worthy of being inhabited by gods than by men; I did not know then that outside of two or three churches the rest of his work is located on dry land, in Vicenza specifically. I thought I had found the Palazzo Mocenigo where Byron lived two years of scandalous orgies and prolific creation; the Palazzo Vendramin where Wagner lodged, and that other one where Henry James took an apartment in order to write The Aspern Papers. I began to imagine which one belonged to Juliana Bordereau, the centenarian protagonist who guards the much coveted papers, and the house where Robert Browning died, and the one where Alma Mahler attended to her daughter’s deathbed, and the one where Schnitzler’s daughter committed suicide just days after marrying. The very name of the city links the annals of love with moments of death. It is no wonder that one of the great titles of literature is Death in Venice. I saw towers, battlements, and balconies. I saw pointed arches and columns, bronze horses and marble lions. I heard Italian and German and French spoken all around me, as well as the Venetian dialect, peppered with words from Old Castilian, which once upon a time my ancestors must have spoken in those narrow streets. I paused in front of the Teatro La Fenice, whose splendid interior I had just seen in a movie by Visconti. In the vestibule, a large poster by Picasso announced a recent performance by the Berliner Ensemble: Mutter Courage.

      That night, as I boarded my train, I felt as though I knew Venice like the back of my hand. What a poor naïve devil! Fatigue was getting the best of me; all of the sudden I began to feel the incredible effort I had exerted that day: my eyes, my temples, the back of my neck, my joints all hurt. I struggled to open my suitcase to take out my pajamas. The first thing I pulled out was a jacket; I felt my glasses in one of the pockets. The miracle had been completed: I had crossed the threshold, the steel blue egg of Leda was beginning to hatch, and opposites were uniting at the bottom of tombs. Where was all this esoteric logorrhea coming from? I did not finish putting on my pajamas. I remembered a line from the end of To the Lighthouse: “Yes, I have had my vision,” and I fell asleep. I repeated it again in the morning as I woke up, when the train was about to arrive in Rome.

PAST AND PRESENT

      The year was 1965. I had been living in Warsaw for two years. One day the postman handed me a letter from Vence, a village in the South of France. It was signed by Witold Gombrowicz. Could it be a joke? I could scarcely believe it was real. I showed it to some Polish friends, and they were stunned. A young Mexican who was living in Warsaw had just received a letter from Gombrowicz! It couldn’t be! It was impossible! I nodded, ecstatic. “Like everything in Gombrowicz’s life,” I told myself.

      He explained in the letter that someone had given him the Spanish translation of The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski, which I had done, and that he found it satisfactory. So he invited me to collaborate with him on the translation of his Argentine Diary, which the publishing house Sudamericana was to publish in Buenos Aires. It was the beginning of a significant improvement in my living conditions. Suddenly, I began to receive offers from various places. The sources of my income were Joaquín Mortiz at Ediciones Era and the Universidad Veracruzana Press in Mexico; Seix Barral and Planeta in Barcelona; and Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. Until then, I had only managed to place a few translations here and there. From that moment on, in just three or four hours a day, I managed to earn a regular income that in Poland in those days was a tidy little sum. In addition to Polish literature, I was receiving offers to translate Italian and English authors. For the next six or seven years I worked primarily as a translator; the profession I had begun in Warsaw allowed me to live full-time in Barcelona and part-time in England.

      As I recall that time, I do not think that “I was living another life,” as people usually say, but rather that the person I’m talking about was not entirely me; instead, that person was a young Mexican who shared my name and some of my habits and idiosyncrasies.

      One of the obvious bonds I share with that young man living in Warsaw is his inordinate love for reading. The freedom he enjoyed then is scarcely visible in his writings, but perhaps it was placed into a reservoir for later use, when, paradoxically, his spirit of freedom had withered. Recalling his irresponsibility, his cheek, his taste for adventure, produces in the writer of these lines a kind of vertigo.

      I have trouble writing. My hand freezes when I recall the time when living was akin to being a noble savage and realize, without rancor, that society, its offices and its conventions, eventually achieved their mission. But not entirely! Perhaps my opposition to the ways of the world is more radical now, but it manifests itself in sullenness rather than joy—in convictions. It is no longer a mere emanation of nature.

      During my stay in Warsaw I was master of my time, my body, and my pen. And while it is true that freedom in Poland was far from absolute, it is also true that the Poles took advantage as best they could, and with an intensity that bordered on frenzy, of the spaces opened up during de-Stalinization, especially artistic spaces. I owe to that period the pleasure of reading texts that would certainly have been different had I been living in my own country or in any of the cultural metropolises. Free from the burden of trends, from the capillas, Mexico’s literary coteries, and from any pressing need for information, reading became an act of sheer hedonism. I read the Poles, of course, and everything in that world was discovery; I read what my friends sent me from Mexico: Mexican and Latin American literature. Hopscotch was a revelation. Other books that were treasures were Francisco Delicado’s The Portrait of Lozana; a great deal of Tirso de Molina; Canetti’s Auto da Fé; Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless; Tibor Déry’s Mr. G.A. in X; Milan Fust’s The Story of My Wife; and, in particular, the ample collection of the British Council library: Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans; the theater of the Restoration, especially Sheridan and Congreve; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget; and, of course, everything, or almost everything, by Conrad, the reading of whom was different in a Polish milieu; and Henry James and Ford Madox Ford and Firbank and many others. The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power.

      Around the same time as Gombrowicz’s letter, I received another from the publisher Don Rafael Giménez Siles, encouraging me to write an autobiography. He had invited a dozen writers from my generation and from the even younger one. He was interested, he said, in knowing how we young writers perceived the world and, more importantly, how we came to terms with our circumstances within it.

      One aspect of the biographies would be their brevity, consistent with the short journey made by their writers. I began to write the account reluctantly and with very mixed feelings, but convinced of the need to have a presence, however small, in my country. Unlike the other authors included, I had written very little: two small books of short stories. I was certain that my life, and not just my literary one, had just started; nevertheless, I wrote the autobiographical essay out of vanity, or frivolity, or inertia.

      I finished the requested text in a few days. As I wrote it, I felt trapped in an endless continuum. The recent episode was still very close to me, within a stone’s throw, and none of its lines had been brought to a close yet. I could compare my past to one of those extremely destructive hurricanes that strike a particular region with ferocity and, then, for weeks, travel for thousands of miles, but without moving from the spot where they built their greatest strength, to which they return time and time again to unleash their wrath. That was how