The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

The Old Curiosity Shop the most plaintive and deplorable romance novel in the world; he fought the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considered a middling, vulgar, and sensationalist versifier. Today the name Huxley has been eclipsed; he belongs more or less to literary history, but in living literature his place is modest. Dickens and Poe, on the other hand, continue their fascinating march to the stars. I find a beautiful line in a study on Malevich by Luis Cardoza y Aragón: “And I realize that whoever has not reread Reyes has not read him.” Rereading a great author reveals to us everything we lost the moment we discovered him. Who during adolescence has not felt run through while reading The Trial, The Brothers Karamazov, The Aleph, Residence on Earth, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, To the Lighthouse, La Celestina, or Don Quixote? A new world opened before us. We closed the book stunned, transformed within, despising the ordinariness of our daily lives. We were different beings, we longed to be Alyosha, and we feared ending up like the poor Gregor Samsa. And yet, years later, upon revisiting some of those works, it seemed as if we had never read them, we encountered other enigmas, another cadence, other wonders. It was another book.

      UNTIL ARRIVING AT ‘HAMLET.’ A book read in different periods is transformed into many books. No reading resembles the previous ones. Upon discovering, as in the case of Papini or others, that writing had nothing to do with our preoccupations or our dreams, that we find it atrophied and hollow, we conclude that it must have been imposed by mere moral or religious circumstances, the politics of the time, and it was enough that social conditions change to discover that it was devoid of form, destined to become hopelessly lost in the void.

      Even returning to works validated by centuries of indisputable excellence can bring surprises. Like bathing in the river of Heraclitus, subsequent readings of a classic will never be the same, unless the reader is an absolute chump. The Hamlet that a dazed and awestruck student read in adolescence, immediately after seeing the film version by Lawrence Olivier, has little to do with a third rereading done at twenty-six, when a rigorous review of the work made him conceive of human destiny as a relentless pursuit of universal harmony, even if to achieve that purpose one would have to sacrifice his life and the life and the happiness of beings like Hamlet, Ophelia, and Laertes, passionate youths, slain in combat against villainy and rottenness, to make way for the battle-worn Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, who would restore peace and harmony to Denmark. Without suffering and sacrifice, it used to be said, the dawn could never brighten on the horizon. The name of that reader is of no importance, not even his circumstances, although knowing one or others might allow us to trace the chronicle of a long relationship between a man and his favorite books; to speak, as well, of the impulse that exists between reading and rereading. I’ll concede only that he studied a career for which he hadn’t the slightest vocation because his parents chose it for him. While in university he later audits courses in the Faculty of Arts and Letters with greater diligence than those in Law, in which he is enrolled. He doesn’t care much for work; he lives comfortably thanks to an income he received as an inheritance. He recounts and repeats to whomever cares to listen that he doesn’t merely live to read but rather reads to live. His reading list is enormous, ecumenical, and arbitrary, in both genres and styles, languages and periods. He delights maniacally in making lists, of authors, their titles, the number of times he has read each of their books, everything. There is in this, I suppose, a tiny kernel of madness. He reads and rereads at all hours, and records the details in large notebooks. The list of writers he frequents, those with whom he feels at home, is the following, in order of greatest to least: Anton Chekhov, arguably his favorite author, whom he could read every day and at any hour; he knows some of his monologues by heart; this is the author who, of all his favorites, is most impenetrable to him. He surmises that within the work of this exceptional Russian, beneath a veneer of transparency, there hides an impregnable core that transforms him into the darkest, most remote, most mysterious of all the authors he has read. The following are, in order: Shakespeare, Nikolai Gogol, Benito Pérez Galdós, Alfonso Reyes, Henry James, Bertolt Brecht, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlo Goldoni, George Bernard Shaw, Carlos Pellicer, Luigi Pirandello, Witold Gombrowicz, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alexander Pushkin. Of course, there are authors whom he prefers more than those listed: Marcel Schwob, Juan Rulfo, Miguel de Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Choderlos de Laclos, Laurence Sterne, but for one reason or another, he has read the former more. Of course, it would be madness to prefer Agatha Christie, who appears on the list of the most read, to Miguel de Cervantes, who is not. And it is obvious that Gustavo Esguerra—at last I allow his name to slip out!—whom I know well, prefers the plays of Lope, of Calderon, or of his favorite Tirso de Molina to those of Goldoni, and that he also admires Hermann Broch or Carlo Emilio Gadda more than several of the listed. In the same way, he has seen and read Hamlet more than other works of Shakespeare that he prefers, such as The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, King Lear. But fate, who knows why, decreed it so, and led him to rub elbows with some more than with those with whom he should. So, my friend Esguerra, Gustavo Esguerra, discovered Hamlet at twelve and continued to frequent him until just a few hours before he died. Each reading added to and eliminated fresh nuances from the former.

      The eleventh reading occurred in 1968, after the Tlatelolco massacre, after the university was occupied by the army, after the march of tanks through the streets of Mexico. It was a tense and exceptionally political reading in which “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” and “Denmark is a prison” were the key phrases of the tragedy. Elsinore Castle becomes a prison, where the protagonists constantly lay traps and spy ceaselessly and without rest. Polonius sends messengers to Paris to follow the steps of Laertes, his son, and to send reports of his conduct. Polonius also, with the backing of the King and Queen, spies constantly on Hamlet. The King summons Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to the castle to provoke Hamlet and to discover what he is plotting. Hamlet himself asks Horatio to scrutinize the King’s face during the performance recommended to the players. All characters set upon each other; every gesture or word is cautiously examined to discover the mysteries of the souls of others. My friend Esguerra, after his eleventh reading, became convinced that Hamlet was a political tragedy. Shakespeare, in his historical dramas, presents his spectators with an X-ray of the workings of absolute power. No character is exempt from its contamination if he hopes to survive. Many times my friend had believed that the melancholy prince of Denmark was the perfect archetype of indecision, sorrow, and quietism, but in the end it turns out he is not. His rejection of action, his reputation for absenteeism do not prevent him throughout the tragedy from killing Polonius, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, committing regicide, and bearing the utmost responsibility for the suicide of Ophelia.

      When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, terror was gripping London. In 1601, the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex, his Maecenas and friend, was discovered, and he was executed. The wings of the Tower of London filled day after day with the most illustrious youth of England. The Queen did not spare her one-time favorite, and not even his beheading satisfied her. It was necessary to destroy his seed, his family and friends, the philosophers and poets who had once surrounded him. Little is known of Shakespeare during the two years that this nightmare lasted. His was, there is no doubt, the only pen of prestige in the kingdom that did not sing the glories of Elizabeth of England at the time of her death in 1603.

      This rereading influenced those that followed, especially the last, that the now elderly Gustavo Esguerra completed in his hospital bed a few hours before expiring. In this reading he was surprised afresh that in the final act Hamlet would accept the invitation of Claudius, the illegitimate king, the murderer of his father, the corrupter of his mother, his bitter enemy, to engage in a fencing match with Laertes, which caused him to wonder if Shakespeare might have considered at this point in the work that the purpose that had led him to write it had been accomplished, and therefore, that his only interest was to finish it. And what better way to start the laborious denouement than having Hamlet exchange a few blows of the sword with the overwhelmed Laertes, whose father he had murdered, and whose sister, the delicate, fragile, and accursed Ophelia, he had caused to lose her mind and also her life! To achieve this end, it was necessary that one of the foils be envenomed, the same one that would be missing a button on the tip, and if all else failed, a glass of wine would be poisoned, as was the entire atmosphere of Denmark.

      It is the most implausible part of the drama,