The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

that false duel of sport serve as mere support to the drama’s carpentry? Might Hamlet be obeying his demiurge while at the same time rebelling against the pen? Might he be compelled to accept a duel prepared by the King, who has bet a large sum on the victory of his stepson, which would imply an affront to everything that Hamlet has hitherto represented, and to Laertes as well, with whom he would play sportingly after having killed his father and caused the suicide of his sister? Or might it be a subtle process by which the author might try to insinuate that, if indeed Claudio is a monster for killing the legitimate king, and Gertrude, upon marrying him, has become his accomplice and is as guilty as he, then Hamlet, in whom from the beginning the author has forced us to place our faith, is not the young hero able to bring order to this senseless world but rather a hopelessly frivolous youth who has inadvertently killed several people, some entirely innocent, and not the culprit designated by the ghost of his father? Or might he simply want to show us that the Prince’s unbearable sorrows have ended up deteriorating his mental faculties? As simple as that? Perhaps so, one must remember that when we met him he was a young philosopher newly arrived from Wittenberg University, beset by infinite doubts; shortly thereafter he is introduced to us as the architect of an exemplary punishment destined for the murderer of his father, and later as a false madman. Why not assume then that in the end the pressures and disorder of this world and the next, which the dead inhabit and from where he receives instructions, have ended up plunging him into madness? Is it possible that from so much pretending he has chosen to take refuge in it, and thus escape all the grief that overwhelms him?

      My friend, the long-time reader, the moribund Gustavo Esguerra, ponders from his sickbed whether perhaps Hamlet’s willingness to take part in that absurd fencing match might be a mere theatrical convention of the time, where so often excess exceeds coherence, and he was counting on the author’s willingness as well as that of a complacent public provided it received a brilliant performance, opulent in its movements, tropes, and characters of all kinds, everything drenched in spilt blood, according to the appetite of the time, at the end of that excessive tragedy. Hamlet will behave as the man who must restore order in the universe that has been brutally distorted. The guilty will be eliminated; Shakespeare conceived the sporting duel knowing that the denouement was within sight. In a single scene both the King and Queen will die, and with them Hamlet and Laertes, divided friends whom only the approach of death will reunite. The valiant Fortinbras would enter; unblemished by guilt he would bid a resounding farewell to the corpse of the Prince and peacefully gird the crown. Would darkness withdraw from Denmark? Would the stench of rottenness evaporate? In this old kingdom, rid of tribulation, would history begin again? As a man of the theater, Shakespeare was obsessed more with staging than by the publication of his works. In a good performance, Hamlet’s willingness to cross swords with Laertes produces no objection, as happens in reading. By contrast, the scene works splendidly and offers a perfect ending. Esguerra relates the scene to another excessively sensationalist one, where the Prince throws himself into the tomb where the body of Ophelia lies; he senses a possible connection between the two situations, but he fails to establish it. In his search, he recalls lines uttered by the trembling, orphaned Ophelia as she wanders aimlessly the halls of Elsinore.

      For Gustavo Esguerra, as for every reader, it was impossible to capture all the mysteries contained in a play by Shakespeare. In his youth, he was dazzled by their intense plots and verbal music. It could not be otherwise! Each reader, according to his abilities, goes about deciphering some of their enigmas over time. Around the middle of the sixties, Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary arrived in his hands. In its pages Kott became convinced of the importance of penetrating, through the Shakespearean text, the contemporary experience, its inquietude and its sensitivity.

       There are many subjects in Hamlet. There is politics, force opposed to morality; there is discussion of the divergence between theory and practice, of the ultimate purpose of life; there is tragedy of love, as well as family drama; political, eschatological and metaphysical problems are considered. There is everything you want, including deep psychological analysis, a bloody story, a duel, and general slaughter. One can select at will. But one must know what one selects, and why.⁹

      Hamlet appears to obey his creator, but he always attempts to evade him. For this reason, it is possible to examine and understand him in different ways. In the last hour of his life, Gustavo Esguerra recalled, as I have said, a few lines of Ophelia, whose existence he seemed never to have noticed. A line from Act IV, precisely the scene where the forlorn maiden stumbles upon the King and Queen, now lost in a delirious verbal maze. Her madness is evident, yet in that dense drama of crimes and punishment the sibylline phrase seems to allude to something very important, very concrete, perhaps an admonition to the heart of the audience: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”¹⁰ The old Esguerra, exhausted, repeats it in an increasingly anguished voice. Beside him are a doctor and a nurse. They have just given him an injection. The doctor shakes his head, implying that all is lost. The patient still has the strength to repeat:

      “‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be,’ a phrase that would fit perfectly in a play by Pirandello, don’t you think, Doctor?”

      These were his dying words.

      I’D LIKE TO TAKE A CHANCE. It pleases me to imagine an author who isn’t intimidated by the thought of being demolished by critics. Surely he would be attacked for the novel’s extravagant execution, characterized as a worshipper of the avant-garde, although the very idea of the avant-garde for him is an anachronism. He would withstand a storm of insults and foolish attacks from anonymous frauds. What would truly terrify him would be that his novel might arouse the interest of some foolish and generous critic who claimed to have deciphered the enigmas buried throughout the text and interpreted them as a shameful acceptance of the world that he detests, someone who said that his novel should be read “as a harsh and painful requiem, a heartrending lament, the melancholy farewell to the set of values that in the past had given meaning to his life.” Something like that would destroy and sadden him, would cause him to toy with the idea of suicide. He would repent of his sins; condemn his vanity, his taste for paradox. He would blame himself for not having clarified, just to achieve certain effects, the mysteries in which his plot delights, for having not known how to renounce the vain pleasure of ambiguities. Over time, he would be able to recover; he would forget his past tribulations, his longing for atonement, such that when he starts writing his next novel he will have already forgotten the moments of contrition as well as his efforts to make amends.

      And he’ll return to his old habits; he’ll leave unexplained gaps between A and B, between G and H, will dig tunnels everywhere, will put into action an ongoing program of misinformation, will emphasize the trivial and ignore those moments that normally require an intense emotional charge. While writing, he dreams with delight that his tale will confuse law-abiding citizens, reasonable people, bureaucrats, politicians, sycophants and bodyguards, social climbers, nationalists and cosmopolitans by decree, pedants and imbeciles, society matrons, flamethrowers, fops, whitewashed tombs, and simpletons. He aspires for the ubiquitous mob to lose its way in the first chapters, to become exasperated, and to fail to grasp the narrator’s intention. He’ll write a novel for strong spirits, whom he’ll allow to invent a personal plot sustained by a few points of support laboriously and joyously formulated. Each reader would find at last the novel he has at some time dreamt of reading. The opulent, the incomparable, the delectable Polydora will be every woman of the world: the protosemantic Polydora, as her refined admirers, as if spellbound, are wont to call her, but also the dandies—what are you going to do!—the distinguished Mrs. Polydora, as she is known to officials, wealthy merchants and professionals, while the masses, who call a spade a spade, refer to her simply as “the best ass in the world.” For some she’ll be a saint, for others the mother of all whores, and to a third group both things and many more. The bewildered reader will discover that not even Padre Burgos, her long-suffering confessor, knows how to react to the abrupt spiritual oscillations of this untamed lady whose conduct he curses one day only to bless her exalted piety with his tears the next. And what about Generoso de Chalma, the famous bullfighter, her lover, her victim? That abominable figure might be a hero and a buffoon, a mystic, a labyrinth, the powerful head of a drug cartel, the innocent