He’s coming from the Radio Universidad, where he took part, he says, in a taping on science fiction. He orders only a hamburger and a Coke. He places the proofs next to his plate and reads them in a few minutes as he eats. He makes one or two corrections. He then takes out a couple of pages from a book, marks through a few words, adds others, changes the last lines completely. He asks me to go with him to the
Excelsior, which is next door, so he can deliver the piece that he just corrected; it will only take a moment. In no time we’ll be at Juan José Arreola’s house to deliver the proofs. Waiting for us there is José Emilio Pacheco, who today will submit his manuscript of
La sangre de medusa (The Blood of Medusa), which will also be published in the
Cuadernos de Unicornio. La Zaplana, Mexico’s largest bookstore, is located on the ground floor of the building immediately adjacent to the Kikos; we’re unable to resist the temptation to glance at the bookstore’s tables and shelves. Each of us leaves with an immense package under his arm. We’re proud of the rapid growth of our libraries (Monsiváis’s will eventually exceed thirty thousand volumes). We return to the Kikos to ask them to sell us some cardboard boxes because it’s impossible to move through the street or get on a bus with so many books in our hands. While they look for the boxes we drink coffee and examine our finds. During our four-year friendship, our reading lists have expanded and overlapped. We both purchased Conrad by coincidence that day. I pick up
Victory and
Under Western Eyes, and he picks up
Lord Jim, The Outcast of the Islands, and
The Secret Agent. We both read an abundance of Anglo-Saxon authors, I prefer English, and he North Americans; but the end result is a mutually beneficial influence. We leaf through our purchases. I talk about Henry James, and he about Melville and Hawthorne; I about Forster, Sterne, and Virginia Woolf, and he about Poe, Twain, and Thoreau. We both admire the intelligent wit of James Thurber, and we declare once more that the language of Borges constitutes the greatest miracle that has happened to our language in this century; he pauses briefly and adds that one of the highest moments in the Castilian language is owed to Casiodoro de Reina and his disciple Cipriano de Valera, and when I ask, confused by the names, “And who are they?” he replies, scandalized, that they are none other than the translators of the Bible. He tells me that he aspires one day to write prose that exhibits the benefit of the countless years he’s devoted to reading biblical texts; I, who am ignorant of them, comment, cowering slightly, that the greatest influence I’ve encountered is that of William Faulkner, and there he checkmates me when he explains that the language of Faulkner, like that of Melville and Hawthorne, is profoundly influenced by the Bible, that they are a non-religious derivation of the Revealed Language. Suddenly, he points out that it’s gotten late, that we have to rush to the
Excelsior to deliver his piece. I ask him if it’s “The Idiot Box,” and he immediately changes the subject. “The Idiot Box” is a very acerbic column about television and its effects, which are very disconcerting to Carlos. Television! Who in the hell cares about television! Certainly no one I associate with. We arrive at the editor’s office. The section chief, to whom he must turn in his piece, has gone upstairs to a meeting. He might be back in a half hour. We sit wherever we can. A journalist sitting next to us, talking on the phone, says that things in Mexico are getting worse because of the government’s softness, that it’s giving in more and more to union pressure, that if the authorities do not intervene and eradicate the leprosy, the country will unravel. We continue to talk about books, which implies that literature is the subject to which we constantly return, although frequently interrupted by bursts of commentary of all kinds—cinema, the city, problems that concern us at the moment, the university, our lives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies—until we arrive at that subject which most entertains and amuses us: our novel, to the writing of which we have devoted hundreds of hours of conversation, without ever having written a word. Our novel, we confess, is in some way determined by the parodic humor of the young Waugh. We also know that it is equally determined by the impudence and imagination of
La familia Burrón, the comic strip by Gabriel Vargas, and by the daily fireworks of Luis Prieto. Before beginning our work, and to exercise our mind a bit, we make a succinct summary of what is being written in Mexico, the authors worth reading, those it’s better to toss in the trash; those who pass are, of the contemporaries: Gorostiza, Pellicer, Novo, and Villaurrutia;
The Labyrinth of Solitude and
Freedom under Parole by Octavio Paz, which just came out; Juan José Arreola’s prose and the two superb books by Rulfo. We feel a genuine veneration for
Pedro Páramo. We’ve heard very good things about two novels, one recently published, another about to be, but already widely commented on: the first is
Balún Canán, by Rosario Castellanos; the other,
Where the Air Is Clear, by Carlos Fuentes. And we no longer have time to delve into our parodic novel because an employee approaches to tells Carlos that the section chief is about to leave; to our utter amazement he adds that he’s been in his office for an hour. Carlos jumps up, hastily follows the employee and disappears behind a door. Ten minutes later he returns, calm. He’s almost certain that his piece will appear in tomorrow’s edition.
Night falls. A bus drops us at the corner of the Chapultepec movie house, just a short walk from where Arreola lives. When we arrive, he complains about our delay. José Emilio is about to leave. We convince him to stay awhile. Arreola is also about to leave. He has committed to attending the premier of Pirandello’s Henry IV at Bellas Artes. He assures us that the next day he’ll take the proofs to press. Our Cuadernos will appear very soon. He shows us a few sheets of stunning Dutch paper and gives us a lesson on watermarks. It’s obvious that he’s in a hurry to leave, but he agrees to sit for a moment to chat. He urges Carlos to submit material for a Cuaderno. José Emilio and I mention that he has a magnificent story. In unison we shout: “Fino acero de niebla!” Carlos bursts out laughing, covers his face with a cushion, and then promises vaguely that he’s revising something he’s about to finish. Arreola begins to talk about Pirandello, recalling the staging of his works when the great Italian companies toured Mexico; the best, according to him, was that of Mimi Agugli. He then turns to Louis Jouvet; he did not miss a single performance when his company was in Mexico, or in Paris, when he lived there. Theater is the genre that combines all literary perfections, he declares; he suddenly stands, marches around the room, and recites entire scenes while imitating all the characters from Farce of the Chaste Susana by Diego Sánchez de Badajoz; later, he retracts, in no way is theater the most important genre, such a claim is an aberration; he then discusses poetry and thereafter takes out a volume of Proust and reads to us, in perfect French, the chapter in which Albertine is surprised while asleep. Suddenly, a young man, visibly irritated, who has been listening to him, and who has remained silent throughout our stay, stands and barks that if he and Arreola do not leave at once they’ll never make curtain time. We all go out into the street. Arreola and his companion get in a taxi, and the three of us—José Emilio, Carlos, and I—walk up the Paseo de la Reforma, turn right on Niza, and walk to a taquería next to the Insurgentes movie house, where we would often go at night to eat soup and sample the most delicious selection of tacos imaginable. While we eat, we return to the subject of literature, each of us reiterating our preferences. To the usual names, we add others: Alejo Carpentier and Juan Carlos Onetti, and, thanks to José Emilio, poets are also introduced: Quevedo, Garcilaso, López Velarde, Neruda, Vallejo, Huidobro, the Generation of ’27. José Emilio eats quickly and says goodbye; he has to turn in a translation the next day. Some writers we barely know approach our table to sit and chat. They’re obsessed with defining the topics our generation is obligated to address. They begin to enumerate their projects; they know what they must do for the next five years at least. We eat without paying too much attention to the ambitions of our newly arrived guests. Later, we discuss a fabulous book, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in which both biographer and biographee appear alternately as the remarkable characters they were, but they also prefigure traits belonging to Mr. Pickwick or, closer to home, to the comic strip character Don Reginito Burrón, which makes its reading even more enjoyable. We also discuss detective novels to avoid the formulaic and insipid conversation that dominates the table, and only out of politeness do we answer the questions that our acquaintances occasionally ask, without telling them that the only project that interests us is writing a satirical novel in which we would portray them as a bunch of grotesque and pompous idiots.
Perhaps we’re aware that we’ll never write a line of that novel, but perhaps we also sense that such a daily game can be one of the sources that will inspire our later work,
