The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

      When Infierno de todos was published I was living in Warsaw. I had undertaken a trip three years earlier to Europe, which at the beginning I imagined would be very brief. I traveled to all the essential places before settling in Rome for a period of time. Thereafter, for different reasons and motivations, I remained outside Mexico, changing destinations frequently, almost always by random interventions, until the end of 1988, when I returned to the country. During those twenty-eight European years my stories recorded an incessant to-and-fro. They are, in some way, the logbooks of my worldly wanderings, my mutations, and my internal settlements.

      To cut loose the moorings, to confront without fear the vast world and to burn my ships were events that time and again changed my life and, consequently, my literary labor. During those years of wandering, the body of my work was formed. If I received any benefit, it was the chance to contemplate my country from a distance and, therefore, paradoxically, to sense that it was closer. A mixed feeling of approximation and flight allowed me to enjoy an enviable freedom, which surely I would not have known had I stayed at home. My work would have been another. The journey as a continuous activity, the frequent surprises, my coexistence with different languages, customs, imaginations, and mythologies, my diverse reading options, my ignorance of styles, my indifference for metropolises, their demands and pressures, the encounters good and bad; all affirmed my vision.

      The story that appears at the end of Infierno de todos, “Cuerpo presente” [Lying in State], dated in Rome in 1961, represents the closure and farewell to the vicarious world I had written about until then. Thereafter a new narrative period arises in which I use the settings I visited as backdrops for the dramas lived by some characters, mostly Mexicans, who unexpectedly faced the different beings living inside them, whose existence they don’t even suspect. There are inner itineraries whose stops include Mexico City, cities in Veracruz, Cuernavaca, and Tepoztlán, but also Rome, Venice, Berlin, Samarkand, Warsaw, Belgrade, Peking, and Barcelona. My characters are usually students, businessmen, filmmakers, writers, who suddenly and unexpectedly suffer an existential crisis that leads them to doubt momentarily the values that have sustained them by means of an umbilical cord of extraordinary resistance. Breaking that link or remaining attached to it becomes their essential dilemma.

      If it is true that the impulses of childhood will accompany us until the moment of death, it is also true that the writer must keep them at bay, prevent them from turning into a lock so that writing doesn’t become a prison, but rather a reservoir of freedoms. My experience in Rome introduced me to new milieus, to other challenges, and to endless hesitation. It allowed me to close the door on a period and perceive other possibilities.

      A further step. I visited Warsaw in early 1963. I didn’t know anyone in the city. The first night I attended a theater by chance near my hotel. Without understanding a word, I was awe-struck. Upon returning to the hotel I was disturbed by the resemblance to my grandmother that I noticed in one of the employees at reception, an elderly woman. Not only her face, but also her gestures; her way of drawing the cigarette to her lips and exhaling the smoke seemed identical. It was like a hallucination. I forced myself to believe that it was an effect of the theatrical excitement, and I went to my room. The next day I went to Łódź, where Juan Manuel Torres was studying film. He infected me with his enthusiasm for Poland and its culture; he spoke of its classics and its romantics as if in a mystic trance. That evening I returned to Warsaw on a train that was delayed several hours because of a tremendous storm. I had climbed into the car with an aching flu. Numbed by the cold, overcome with fever, almost delirious, I could barely make it to the hotel upon arriving in Warsaw. During the reception the same elderly woman as the night before attended to me again, and again with a cigarette in her mouth. I greeted her with absolute informality, I told her that if she didn’t stop smoking her health would continue to be bad, that at that late hour she should already be sleeping. She answered in Polish, and I was horrified to discover that it wasn’t my grandmother. I spent the next day in bed per physician’s orders. I began to write a story about the feverish confusion between that Polish woman and my grandmother. I tried to reproduce the delirium of the previous day from the moment I boarded the train in Łódź. I noticed that it retrieved from me a new tonality and, more importantly, that it drew me toward a necessary operation: severing the umbilical cord that connected me to my childhood.

      Years later in Barcelona, I managed to finish El tañido de una flauta [The Sound of the Flute],¹¹ my first novel. I was at the time thirty-eight years old and had very little work under my belt. Upon writing it, I established a tacit commitment to writing. I decided, without knowing that I had, that instinct should come before any other mediation. It was instinct that would determine form. Even now, at this moment, I struggle with Reality’s emissary that is form. One doesn’t seek out form, of that I am certain, but rather opens himself to it, waits for it, accepts it, battles it. And, so, form is always the victor. When this doesn’t happen the text is always a bit spoiled.

      El tañido de una flauta was, among other things, a tribute to Germanic literatures, especially Thomas Mann, whose work I have frequented since adolescence, and Hermann Broch, whom I discovered during a stay in Belgrade and whom, awestruck, I read and reread in torrents for almost a year. The central theme of El tañido… is creation. Literature, painting, and film are the central protagonists. The terror of creating a hybrid between the story and the treatise drove me to intensify the narrative elements. In the novel several plots revolve around the central story line, secondary, tertiary plots, some positively minimal, mere larvae of plots, necessary to cloak and mitigate the long disquisitions on art in which the characters become entangled. Little news has pleased me so much as a revelation by Rita Gombrowicz about the literary tastes of her celebrated husband. One of his passions was Dickens. His favorite novel, The Pickwick Papers.

      My apprenticeship continued. For years I continued to write stories and novels, endeavoring not to repeat methods I had already used. My last six years in Europe were spent in Prague, the most secret, the most inconceivably magical of all known cities. There I jumped headlong, as compensation for the dry world of protocol in which I moved, into parody, ridicule, the grotesque, elements that I had greatly enjoyed in oral form my whole life, but which until then I had refused to integrate into my stories.

      As a tacit or explicit homage to some of my tutelary gods: Nikolai Gogol, H. Bustos Domecq, and Witold Gombrowicz, among others, I wrote El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade], Domar la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron],¹² and La vida conyugal [Married Life], a trilogy of novels closer to the carnival than any other rite. I have written elsewhere about the experience:

       As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness, in the grotesque…The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels that make up the Carnival Triptych suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging.¹³

      In Xalapa, where I settled in 1993, my last book was born, The Art of Flight,14 a summa of the enthusiasms and desacralizations that, as it unfolds, become subtraction. Classical manuals of music define the fugue as a composition of many voices, written in counterpoint, whose essential elements are variation and canon, that is, the possibility of establishing a form that sways between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics, the gavotte and the mambo. In a technique of chiaroscuro, the distinct texts contemplate each other, enhance and deconstruct at every moment, as the final purpose is a relativization of all instances. Having abolished the worldly environment that for several decades encircled my life, and having hid from my sight the settings and characters that for years suggested the cast that populates my novels, I was obligated to transform myself into an almost unique character, which was at the same time agreeable and unsettling. What was I doing in those pages? As always the appearance of a form resolved in its own way the contradictions