The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

dust on the backmost shelves of a bookshop. During those years, readers of Borges in Mexico could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Years later I read the stories written by him and by Adolfo Bioy Casares, signed with the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. Delving into those stories written in lunfardo posed a grueling challenge. One had to sharpen his linguistic intuition and allow himself to be carried away by the sensual cadence of the words, the same as that of fiery tangos, so as not to lose the thread of the story too quickly. They were police mysteries unraveled from an Argentine prison cell by the amateur of crime, Honorio Bustos Domecq, a not-so bright man with a healthy dose of common sense, which linked him to Chesterton’s Father Brown. The plot was of least importance; what was superb about them was their language, a playful, polysemic language, a delight to the ear, like that of the serious Borges, but nonsensical. Bustos Domecq allows himself to establish a euphonious proximity between words, to surrender to a bizarre, rambling, and torrential course that gradually sketches the outlines of the story until arriving in an invertebrate, secretive, parodic, and kitschy fashion to the long-awaited climax. On the other hand, the verbal order of the books by the serious Borges is precise and obedient to the will of the author; his adjectivization suggests an inner sadness, but it is rescued by an amazing verbal imagination and contained irony. I have read and reread the stories, poetry, literary and philosophical essays of this brilliant man, but I never conceived of him as an enduring influence on my work, as was Faulkner, although in a recent rereading of my Divina garza [Divine Heron] I was able to perceive echoes and murmurs close to those of Bustos Domecq.

      To establish a symmetry, it is necessary to mention the language of Faulkner and its influence, which I willingly accepted during my period of initiation. His Biblical sonorousness, his grandeur of tone, his tremendously complex construction, where a sentence may span several pages, branching out voraciously, leaving readers breathless, are unequalled. The darkness that emerges from the dense arborescence, whose meaning will be revealed many pages or chapters later, is not a mere narrative process, but rather, as in Borges, the very flesh of the story. A darkness born of the immoderate crossing of phrases of a different order is a way of enhancing a secret that, as a rule, the characters meticulously conceal.

      ‘THE MAGICIAN OF VIENNA.’ “Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book,” says Borges. “The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of his memory and imagination.”⁵

      The book accomplishes a multitude of tasks, some superb, others deplorable; it dispenses knowledge and misery, illuminates and deceives, liberates and manipulates, exalts and humbles, creates or cancels the options of life. Without it, needless to say, no culture would be possible. History would disappear, and our future would be cloaked in dark, sinister clouds. Those who hate books also hate life. No matter how impressive the writings of hatred may be, the printed word for the most part tips the balance toward light and generosity. Don Quixote will always triumph over Mein Kampf. As for the humanities and the sciences, books will continue to be their ideal space, their pillars of support.

      There are those who read to kill time. Their attitude toward the printed page is passive: they repine, revel, sob, writhe in laughter; the final pages where all mysteries are revealed will ultimately allow them to sleep more soundly. They seek those spaces in which the elementary reader always takes great delight. To satisfy them, the plots must produce the greatest excitement at a minimum cost of complexity. The characters are univocal: ideal or abysmal, there is no third way; the former will be virtuous, magnanimous, industrious, observant of every social norm; they are excessively kind-hearted even if their superficial philanthropy sometimes tarnishes the whole with cloyingly saccharine registers; by contrast, the wickedness, cowardice, and pettiness of the indispensable villains know no bounds, and even if they attempt to turn over a new leaf, an evil instinct will prevail over their will that is sure to haunt them forever; they’ll end up destroying those around them before turning on themselves in their desire for unremitting destruction. In short, readers who are addicted to the struggle between good versus evil turn to the book to amuse themselves and to kill time, never to dialogue with the world, with others, or with themselves.

      In popular novels, beginning with the nineteenth-century feuilletons of Ponson du Terrail, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval, female orphans appear in abundance, defenseless all; to the tragedy of orphanhood the narrator sadistically adds other troubles: blindness, muteness, shrewishness, paralysis, and amnesia, above all amnesia. When these female orphans lose their memory and are rich to boot, they become easy prey for fortune hunters. Clearly the wide array of male fauna who wander through these stories have PhDs in evil. One of their specialties is pretending to be deserted husbands or lovers. When they happen upon one of these fragilely forgetful young women and discover their circumstances, they go about laying claim to nonexistent children whom the aforementioned amnesiacs took out for a stroll years ago, never to return; they almost always convince them of, and threaten to denounce them for, having brutally murdered the children whom they detested; they inform them that during the weeks prior to their disappearance they did nothing but talk about the visceral hatred they displayed for the accursed offspring born of their womb, and that they implored God with the ferociousness of hyenas that He rid them of these detestable children. Thus, seizing on the horror they feel for themselves and the panic they instill in them, these lotharios enslave the damsels carnally, seize control of their assets, force them to sign before a notary a thick stack of papers that consign their real estate, their jewelry deposited in safe deposit boxes, their bank accounts, and investment documents scattered in national and international banks to these insatiable wolves, who were precisely that, counterfeit husbands and lovers who had so suddenly and suspiciously surfaced.

      Some, the most credulous, were convinced that in their previous incarnation—a term they used to allude to their existence prior to their amnesia—they had been nuns, and in that capacity had committed unspeakable blasphemies and countless depravities, such as strangling the portress of the convent, the gardener, or even the Mother Superior, only to wander the world lost for years thereafter, until being found, identified, and reunited with the vast fortune that their deceased parents had deposited into some banking institution.

      A perfect model for this style of light literature is The Magician of Vienna, a novel that sails under triumphant flags in more than a dozen languages and has fascinated all strata of society, with the exception of the contemptuous sector of the illiterate, of course. The author introduces us to an immense, complex, and (if we may disclose a bit of the plot) mysterious firm, Imperium in Imperio, a center of immense power that operates a multitude of branches in Mexico City. Its offices and workrooms are scattered everywhere, in the skyscrapers of Reforma, in the upscale neighborhoods of Polanco and Las Lomas, in the palaces of the colonial sector, in sheds and even huts in the city’s most squalid neighborhoods. Of course, each sector is incommunicado from the other. Save a few members, everyone would be surprised, indeed, they’ll be aghast, to discover the names of their colleagues. People of every social class collaborate in this criminal enterprise. The base is comprised of the foulest ruffians from the capital’s roughest barrios; conversely, the apex, whose role is to serve as the empire’s protective façade, boasts the perfect hostesses, the supreme beauties of the moment, some foreign titles of nobility, the great couturiers and their models, the highest paid soccer players, the worlds of finance and entertainment. And between these poles operates a web of brilliant professionals: detectives, attorneys, notaries, psychiatrists, doctors; that is, a multibrain whose function is to enhance reality. In short, a perfect pyramid, led by an enigmatic character-turned-legend, thanks to the thousands of stories circulating about him. His house is located on Vienna Street, in the borough of Coyoacán, just a few blocks from the house where Trotsky was assassinated. All that is known of him is that he studied psychology in his youth, without graduating, and later supported himself with little success as a seer, magician, or shaman. No one knows how he came into his fortune. Aided by an extraordinarily effective team, this extraordinary man succeeded in ascertaining the whereabouts of hundreds of missing amnesiacs, studying their families and financial backgrounds, not to mention their tragic circumstances; women whom he doesn’t pursue as ruthlessly as in the old dime novels; rather,