In late 1988 I returned to Mexico permanently. During my absence I published several books; some were translated into other languages. I received awards, all those things! I returned to the country with the idea of devoting my time and energy exclusively to writing. I felt an almost physical need to live with the language, to listen to Spanish all the time, to know it was around me, even if I did not hear it. The Mexico City I encountered seemed foreign and stubbornly complex. I persevered for four years without being able to assimilate it, nor assimilate myself to it. After I arrived, I began to receive publishing proposals; one was to rework that early autobiography, adding a second part that would bear witness to the previous twenty years. I had never reread it. When I did, I felt disgusted, with myself, and, above all, with my language. I did not recognize myself in the least in the image I sketched in Warsaw in 1965. I was struck immediately by a demure tone and false modesty that were irreconcilable with my relationship to literature, which has always been visceral, excessive, even wild. I sensed a plea for forgiveness emanating from the text for having been written and published. They were pages of immense hypocrisy. The writer’s task seemed like a third-rate activity. In short, it would not have bothered me to declare—because at the time I believed it—that I enjoyed writing less than reading, or that it was an ill-defined and precarious experience compared to other things that life offered me. That would have been fine. What I found strange was the virtuous schoolboy mask I was hiding behind, in halftone, the hypocritical ramblings of the Pharisee.
Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me. I can now distinguish the various stages of my life with sufficient clarity—the autonomy of the parts and their relation to the whole—which I was previously unable to do. I have begun to remember with respect and emotion not only my youth but that of others because of the innocence it represents—its blindness, intransigence, and destiny. That alone allows me to conceive of an infinite, unknown, and promising future.
In 1978 or 1979 I spent a few months in Mexico City. At the time, I was a cultural attaché to our embassy in Moscow. I had saved my vacation days for two years so that my stay in Mexico would make more sense than on previous occasions, when I felt I was and was not in my country. Two months was a more respectable amount of time. During the first days of my stay I received a telephone call from Julieta Campos, then director of the Mexican PEN Club, inviting me to participate in a series of presentations of writers from various generations. In each session an older writer and a younger one, a literary newcomer, would read recent texts and then discuss them with the audience. She told me that she was thinking of pairing me with Villoro; we then talked about other things, some of which, with respect to the literary performance, were unclear to me.
After hanging up the phone it occurred to me that there was something about the proposition that did not make sense, that there was not sufficient distance between his generation and mine. It would have made more sense to be paired with Juan de la Cabada, Fernando Benítez, or Luis Cardoza y Aragón, my seniors. I was more than surprised when I learned a few days later that the Villoro with whom I would be introduced was Juan, Luis’s son; I had been assigned the role of the elder. I was forty-five years old, but until fairly recently I was still being mentioned among Mexico’s young writers. I suppose it was in part because of my absence, which made me difficult to identify, and the paucity of my work.
That was the first sign that things were no longer what they had been. That first public reading I did in Mexico gave me the opportunity to read a story that I had just written after several years of unbearable hibernation. It was also the beginning of a great friendship that binds me to Juan Villoro.
A mature author requires no introduction, or does he? The truth is the majority of my work appeared after that night when I passed the mantle to a very tall, hyperactive adolescent, who read with an impressive display of energy the story “El mariscal de campo” (The Field Marshal).
The act of reading, at that meeting of generations, a text that marked my return to writing made me feel, once the nightmare had ended and the celebratory teasing had begun, that I had reached maturity in a rather equivocal situation, that I had behaved like an adolescent writer and Juan like the master who was returning from all the experiences. I read with almost unbearable tension, without knowing if I would be able to make it to the end of a paragraph or even a sentence. I was afraid of having an embolism or a heart attack before getting to a stopping point, unlike the excruciating ease of the beardless youth who seemed to be conquering not just the audience but the entire world.
But in spite of the confusion, I was able to surmise that the equivocal relationship between age and writing would over the years become something eminently comical. The march toward old age, and, let’s say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience, and in which the scenes are characterized quite often by their parodic quality, like a laughable but also harsh theatrical illusion.
Let us look at an example:
I accompany Carlos Monsiváis to the Bellinghausen to meet Hugo Gutiérrez Vega, who had just arrived in Mexico to celebrate the New Year. Every time he returns to the country, whether from Madrid, Río, Washington, Athens, from whatever city his diplomatic career takes him, Carlos and I meet him at the same place to eat. Without fail, we begin to talk as if only a few weeks had passed since our last meal, which is one of the surest signs of friendship. On this occasion, he was coming from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is Consul General.
Hugo’s magnanimity is known to everyone. I am indebted to him, among other expressions of affection, for having put me in contact with some friends of his from the University of Bristol, where I was lecturer for a year in the Spanish department. We are the same age; I think I am even a couple of years his senior, but this does not prevent me from remembering him as an older brother; in fact, he and Lucy were like a big brother and big sister—and extraordinarily so!—during my stay in England.
In short, we met and were glad to be chatting again at the Bellinghausen. After the obligatory comments—our ailments, our friends, the situation in the country—Hugo manages to turn the conversation to one of his favorite topics: Romania, or rather, Romanian literature. He is elated that the Latin Union of Romance Languages Prize, awarded a few days ago in Rome, was given to the Romanian Alexandru Vona, whom he knows well. He won it for a single novel, he tells us, which Vona finished writing in 1947 and was finally about to have published. The novel, Bricked-up Windows, has shaped his destiny. It continues to be his destiny! The few intimate friends whom the Romanian author had allowed to read the novel claimed that his narrative style revealed such a sublime and rigorous quest for form that, if one were to make comparisons, the only names that might come to mind would be the great writers of our century: Kafka, Joyce, Broch, or Musil. For decades, the novelist lived with the certainty that he would never see his work published. Nevertheless, he continued to care for it, refining it in secret. His first surprise must have been its publication in 1993 in its original language, Romanian; then came the translation to French, and now the prize awarded him unanimously by an exceptionally brilliant jury comprised of, among others, Vincenzo Consolo, Luigi Malerba, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Rubem Fonseca, and our dear friend Álvaro Mutis. And from Vona, Hugo bounces to other writers he knows—some personally, others by their work—because one of his greatest passions, perhaps the most eccentric, is, you may have already guessed by now, Romanian literature.
Hugo speaks with characteristic passion as he moves within his sphere; the names he cited elude me, with the exception of the most obvious: Cioran, Eminescu, Eliade, Gian Luca Caragiale; the same thing, I imagine, happens to Monsiváis. He recounts the exploit of a poet and Hispanist—was it Gialescu?—who, although gravely ill from osseous tuberculosis, devotes