“Petrilli never liked me. My Amneris was much better than her Aida. It’s not unusual. From the beginning of rehearsals, the relationship between the sopranos, mezzos, and contraltos turns into a fierce battle.”
They begin to serve the consommé. My dinner guests talk about opera, singers, conductors, and performances that are memorable for their splendor or for their disaster, about Turandot, Der Rosenkavalier, Tosca, and Così Fan Tutte. I too take part, after all I’m pretending to be a good host, but little by little the lynching of the student, the faces contorted by hatred, the blood-soaked hands, begin to hang over the guests like an unbearable weight. The conversation that began with so much exuberance becomes subdued. The guests stare and scrutinize each other, ask trick questions. The suspicion that the boy’s murderer can be found at the table takes over. I’m terrified that someone might suspect me. I could offer irrefutable proof of my innocence. But what would it matter? The student also had proof, which did nothing to help him escape execution. My anxiety intensifies. I can’t wake up.
Xalapa, March 1995
Imagine an eighteen-year-old youth who suddenly decides to become a writer and consumes the better part of his nights scribbling literary articles. His tastes, you must understand, are unintentionally ecumenical. He writes about Eugene O’Neill and his theater, about a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World, which he had just read, about a trip to Mexico told by Paul Morand. His interests are as varied as his ignorance is vast. Needless to say, the judgments he makes are not conspicuous for their originality, and his prose is only slightly less than flat. Undoubtedly, none of his pages exceed the level of a school assignment. Someone, perhaps a friend from law school, surprised by his talent, suggests that he send his articles to the cultural supplement (rather shoddy, in fact) of an important daily where a friend of his father works, and he embraces the suggestion with enthusiasm. Once the articles are submitted, his friend naturally assumes the role of advocate and spokesman, making an exaggerated defense of his writings, of his love for reading, and of other personal qualities that are unrelated. If they accept his writings, the author thinks, he will have taken the first step on a path toward the stars.
Several months went by without a single article appearing in the supplement. Having recovered from such a chilly reception, the budding literato gives up his night job. He’s still too green for literature: a sound conclusion. But one Sunday he goes out to buy newspapers in the provincial city where his family lives, and where he usually spends all his holidays. On the way home he decides to stop at a café and leaf through one of the newspapers he’s carrying under his arm. From the front page of the cultural supplement, the title of one of his articles leaps out at him, the one in which he commented on O’Neill’s theater. The sense of excitement that some authors claim to experience when they see their first published text and their name printed below the title eludes him. The exact opposite happens. He’s momentarily paralyzed; then, slowly, a feeling of shame that ends in nausea pours over him. The mere thought of returning home with the newspaper seems impossible. He suddenly realizes that he’s become an unclean animal, and at that moment he has the evidence that proves it. He’s afraid to go home. He feels incapable of enduring a single comment; the most discreet praise, any sign of surprise or celebration of his talent, unknown to his family, would drive him hopelessly mad, at least that’s what he believes as he stares blankly at the newspaper. Finally, he decides to tear out the page, fold it up, and hide it in his jacket pocket. He leaves the rest of the supplement on the table. When he reaches the dreaded place, he deposits the papers in the living room, and slips off to his room where he stays locked up the rest of the afternoon. He rereads the article without grasping its meaning. “Without understanding a lick,” was all he could think of to say. But this time, unlike in the past, the expression fails to reassure him. Only in a handful of old translations of foreign novels has he run across these words. To read that Nastasya Filipovna, desperate and exhausted, implores her prince to speak with greater clarity, otherwise to leave her in peace lest she not understand “a lick” of the lofty and passionate sermons with which he overwhelms her, or for Emma Bovary to repeat in one of her final heart-rending meditations, that she has not understood “a lick” about life, not only destroyed the desired pathos but also rendered laughable the situations written to move the reader. He is only able to discern the titles scattered throughout the article because they’re written in a different font and in bold: The Great God Brown, Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire under the Elms, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, and a few others. Those dramas that have so impressed him seem as hollow and ridiculous as his own prose. He wants nothing more than to disappear from the world, to invent a chilling story to persuade his brother that he desperately needs to borrow money so he can travel to Veracruz, where he will board the first boat weighing anchor and become lost in the world without leaving the slightest trace. Or just plain die. He doesn’t even dare pour his heart out to his grandmother, his usual confidant.
The afternoon dragged on, like a nightmare. But, to his surprise, no one discovered the crime. No one came by the house or called to congratulate him. The apathy toward literature from those around him left him perplexed and disappointed. The remaining articles he submitted appeared the following Sundays. He had returned to Mexico City; his friends’ comments left him undaunted. He did not care whether anyone read them or not, whether anyone liked them or not, even if it wasn’t entirely true. In any case, he did not succumb to the vice of writing again for some time.
Over the years he has come to believe that he would have preferred to be discovered that Sunday when his guilt was made public. Not only that, but also to be mocked and condemned; everything would have been easier, cleaner. His relationship with the world could have been cleared of many cobwebs. Now, more than forty years after that incident, he’s content with merely acknowledging the event. He tries to examine the circumstances, to elaborate a few hypotheses. Why was that rite of initiation bathed in horror? Did it have something to do with a late detachment of his umbilical cord, a bloody separation of his body from those around him? He arrives at the conclusion that the exercise is becoming a pointless guessing game, that to continue it would send him into a labyrinth of astonishment. He would become lost in marshes without ever touching solid ground.
Perhaps he owes to that experience his inability to write at home, as if it were an activity to be avoided at all costs. Writing in the same space where he lives was for much of his life equivalent to committing an obscene act in a holy place. But that’s anecdotal. What is certain is that his fall into uncleanness that characterized, at the end of his adolescence, his confrontation with the word, his printed word, has conditioned his most personal, most secret, most unwitting manner of writing, and has transformed the exercise into a joyful game of concealment, an approach to the art of flight.
Xalapa, December 1994
(At the end of 1968, I left the Mexican embassy in Belgrade, where I was carrying out my first diplomatic mission. I refused to continue to collaborate with the Mexican government after Tlatelolco. I returned to Mexico and found the atmosphere to be unbreathable. A female friend promised to help me find a job in London as a translator at The Economist, which was about to begin publishing in Spanish. It was almost certain that I would begin working in October. I would be able to spend the summer in Poland as a guest of Zofia Szleyen. My attendance at a conference on Conrad, I thought, would allow me to obtain a visa. I stopped in Barcelona to deliver the translation of Cosmos, by Gombrowicz, to Seix Barral, which I had almost finished, thinking it would only be a matter of a couple more weeks’ work. I arrived in Barcelona on June 20, 1969, at midnight, at the Francia station. I did not know the city. I asked the taxi driver to recommend a pleasant and moderately priced