I was fortunate that my arrival in Prague coincided with an exhibition of Matthias Braun, Bohemia’s great Baroque sculptor, who transformed stone, subjected it to unknown tension, extracted from its bosom angels and saints, twisting and arranging them in impossible corporeal positions, and who, in full possession of his liberty, succeeded in making the sacred touch the absurd, the delusional—that which distinguishes the Bohemian Baroque from that of Rome, Bavaria and Vienna. Braun is not a desacralizer, not at all; if anything, he was a man in anguish. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not even know until then the name of that great artist. After seeing the exhibition, I traveled the roads of Bohemia and Moravia to see the rest of his work.
I’m almost certain that the same day I allowed myself to be dazzled by the Braun exhibit, I was able to find, with the aid of a city map, the Café Arco, one of the holiest sites of interwar literature, where Franz Kafka met with his closest friends: Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Johannes Urzidil, and the adolescent Leo Perutz. All young Jews from more or less affluent families, writers in the German language, who formed the Prague branch of the Vienna School. They considered themselves provincials, disconnected from the living language, unconnected to contemporaneity, to the prestige of the metropolis, and the truth is that their very existence represented, but at the time neither they nor the world knew it, the zone of maximum tension of the German language. From the street and especially inside, the establishment could not be seamier. It looked like all the bleak and filthy fifth-rate establishments that Hašek created for his soldier Švejk. The same neighborhood where it was located seemed to have lost a former prestige that, on the other hand, must have been modest. Imagining those young geniuses talking around a table in that dreary space, devoid of atmosphere, its floor littered with cigarette butts, greasy pieces of paper, and dirt, exchanging ideas and discussing them, or reading their latest texts to each other, had an obscene quality.
On another occasion, during my first summer in Prague, on an afternoon of stifling heat, I went out, guidebook in hand, to look for a pair of hard to find synagogues and the so-called Faust House. I set out for the latter first, in the heart of the new city. New, in Prague, means anything built after the seventeenth century. The Faust House is a large, solemn, and neutral palace. Not even the blinding light of the summer sun is able to soften its funereal appearance. The house is opposite a square with tall, lush chestnut trees, which, for some reason, fail to enhance the beauty of the surroundings. A tree-covered square, with broad lawns and assorted flowerbeds, devoid of charm. I learned later that once upon a time it was known as the witches’ square. As early as the Middle Ages it was believed that sorcerers, witches, spiritualists, alchemists—the very concubines and spawn of Satan!—held meetings on the surrounding premises. Every thirty or fifty years, tempers in the neighborhood flared. Someone would spread the rumor that the corpses of missing children had been found on the banks of the river with marks on their bodies similar to the various signs used in satanic rituals, and so forth, which no one could prove for the simple reason that they had not existed, but emotions ignited, raged, then the expected happened: the doors of slums and hiding places were battered down; the witches and other visionaries were rounded up in extremely brutal fashion; then came the fire that, during the ensuing days, incinerated, fagot by fagot, that accursed vermin that had lost its way. In 1583, the Emperor Rudolf II transferred the Hapsburg capital from Vienna to Prague. His credulity was infinite, and none of the many disappointments he suffered could diminish it. He was convinced that he would find the formula for the Philosopher’s Stone, which could extend life as many as three or four hundred years and had already, there was proof, made some humans immortal. He was also convinced that there was an alchemical process whereby a few drops could transform base metals into gold. He claimed to have seen it. During his reign, dozens of alchemists of diverse plumage descended on Prague. The most eminent were granted access to the royal castle, where the monarch enriched them and treated them as equals. However, after a certain amount of time they all met the same fate: ghastly torture, the gallows, the stake, quartering. One of them, Edward Kelley, an Irishman by birth, was the emperor’s favorite for many years. Rudolf worshipped him as a second Faust. And for this he gave him the palace, built centuries before by one Johannes Faust, to whom popular tradition attributed fantastic powers of divination, powers he had received, according to popular lore, from the devil himself for having sold his soul. In short, I arrived that hot August afternoon of 1983 to find that the illustrious house had become a hospital. I did not go in; the uninviting façade failed to inspire a visit, nor did I stop at the lackluster plaza that adjoined it—a gloomy continuation of the building. I walked down a street that led to the river. In August, the residents of Prague go on holiday; if forced to remain in the city, they tend to withdraw into their homes and drink beer until the heat subsides. It was a neighborhood unfrequented by tourists. I turned onto an overly modest and poorly cobbled alley. Suddenly, as I walked, I glimpsed a shapeless bundle in the distance on the opposite sidewalk. As I approached, I saw it move. It was a decrepit old man, with a thick shock of hair, who was obviously drunk. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to stand up or squat down. His pants hovered around his knees, a scene as harsh and grotesque as those of Goya. I think as he dropped his pants to defecate, he collapsed and fell into his own excrement. He was cursing loudly and in a menacing tone. No one was passing through the alley except yours truly. I walked past him, cautiously, on the opposite sidewalk; after walking a few meters I could not resist turning my head to look back. The scene was pathetic: with every attempt to pull himself up, the old man would once again fall onto his back; his pants and underwear at mid-thigh acted as a tether, hindering his movement. Even now, I am haunted by the specter of the repeated falls into his excrement and the squeals that sounded like a pig at slaughter. And today, as I write, I still associate that image with a masquerade directed by someone, hiding in the house that belonged to the man who had sold his soul to the devil. And as I think of Doctor Faust, I recall Thomas Mann’s book on that character, and that for a number of years, while in exile, Mann was a Czech citizen.
With joy, with spirit, and with boundless curiosity, in a moment of exuberant optimism, I began to feel like a particle of Prague, a poor relative of the cobbles that paved its streets, its erect baroque estipites, its passion, its lights, its defeats, its mire. Why then—I ask myself—in the hundreds of pages that comprise my diaries of that time was there not a single mention of such walks, or the permanent bewilderment with which I attempted to integrate my person into its surroundings?…Was it out of humility? With what words could I describe that never-ending miracle? What tone would have been necessary to translate into a comprehensible language the murmurs I heard around me and what inclined me to believe that very soon I would succeed in crossing a magical barrier? But what barrier, damn it? In an exemplary essay, Borges reasons that in the Qur’an there are no camels anywhere, for the simple reason that their presence is so mundane that one takes their existence for granted. To mention them would be a pleonasm. The truth is, no answer comforts me. I reread page after page of several notebooks that make up my diary, and I noticed with great consternation that I didn’t describe the city in any of them. I seemed to obey a secret order to avoid it, to omit it, to erase it. The most I managed to do was to mention, without even the slightest importance, a restaurant, a theater, a square: “Today I ate at the Alcron with such and such people. The hors d’oeuvres are delicious there. I dare say they are among the best I’ve tasted in the city;”