The figure who at the beginning of that chapter 41 appears on the lips of Jacobo Glantz is that of Bashevis Singer; in other chapters it will be that of Blok, those of Mayakovsky and Einstein, those of Lunacharsky and Alejandra Kollontai, that of Chagall, that of Nabokov, those of a few actors from the Jewish theater of Mexico, those of an infinite number of names of interchangeable relatives disseminated in muddy villages of the Ukrainian steppe, in Mexico, in the United States, in the ports of Odessa and Leningrad.
“The Jews,” says Margo Glantz, quoting Bashevis Singer, “do not record their history, they have no sense of chronology. It would seem that instinctively they know that time and space are mere illusion.”21 And The Family Tree adheres to that postulate. On the lips of Jacobo and Lucía, the author’s parents, and also on her own, history zigzags through past and present, it harks back to a village where Jacobo attends his first primary school to study prayers and the Hebrew alphabet, to the Department of Odessa, where Lucía plays the piano, then skips to the moment when the author is working in Acapulco on the final proofs of her book, to the recounting of her trip to Odessa fifty years after her family’s separation to see and touch the relatives that remained there and, throughout seventy-one brief chapters, allows us to glimpse her biography and to know the fabulous and day-to-day history of her parents. Jacobo seems to be air; Lucía the solid ground that he shakes, from which he extracts its substances to spread around the world. Margo observes them with love, with curiosity, with imprudence. “Oh, Margo, I’ve a lot to do, leave me in peace,” her mother implores her. “Okay, but we’re going to leave it here, I’ll put something together for you, I need to think about it, you can’t talk just like that,”22 Jacobo cuts her short.
Perhaps the couple is prototypical within the Jewish community. If any book reminds me of these genealogies, it is Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops. The figure of her father is that of a demiurge; he creates never-ending, fantastic images within which he lives; day-to-day reality barely brushes against him. Fifty years in Mexico pass between a haberdashery and a bakery, one shoe shop or another, a café, a famous restaurant. Jacobo meanders along Álvaro Obregón with a mule loaded with baskets of bread, while studying a dentistry textbook; at night he pulls the teeth of stallkeepers from La Merced Market. All these events happen to him on an earthly plain. He inhabits another world, that of poetry and color. Jacobo reads poetry incessantly, he translates and writes it. He’ll become one of the most important contemporary poets of the Yiddish language and an original painter. Lucía’s energy keeps him going.
Margo Glantz has succeeded in recreating all the magic of these lives in her story, to which she has added the color and aroma that emanate from the family she describes; she provides a glimpse of a few personal preoccupations, her proximity and distance to the world she recounts, and, above all else, has managed to create a fluid and rigorous form, the only one that the genealogical abyss allows.
FORMS OF GAO XINGJIAN. Suddenly, at random, detached from nothingness, or what one conceives as “nothingness,” memory manages to rescue a solitary, unexpected image, disconnected from the present, but also from its normal surroundings: its time, its place, its minute history, where because of apathy, disinterest, the wear of old age, it is only able to sparkle brightly for a few seconds then return to the primeval chaos from which it emerged.
Sometimes, an image reiterates its presence and demands to be rescued from forgottenness. And if whoever frees it happens to be a writer, he’ll be showered with bliss, he’ll feel as if he were on the verge of conceiving a new story, perhaps the best he has ever written, because the details he has just remembered about his childhood could be what was needed to sketch that long-awaited perfect plot that inexplicably eludes him just as he’s at the point of capturing it. He again feels this time that he’ll be victorious, he has heard the imperious voice of the muses, the message, the announcement, that which crystalizes in “inspiration,” a term scorned by every pedant in the world, and also by his cousins, the pretentious, but one, however, the writer I’m thinking about reveres. Yes, that, inspiration, goddess of the symbolists and of the modernista poets, from Darío to Valle-Inclán. Yes, he says, inspiration, and repeats: inspiration, inspiration and its many mysteries vindicated by Nabokov, the very same that the “scientists” of literature encapsulate in extravagant, profane, and ridiculous terms, increasingly distant from what literature is.
In my personal experience, inspiration is the most delicate fruit of memory.
I return home from an intense session with my massage therapist. I should have visited him weeks before, and as a consequence of the delay the pain in my back, shoulders, neck, and the nape of my neck had grown infinitely worse. The doctor went to work, repeating all the while that it was my fault that my back has turned to stone, that my muscles were in knots, that working them out was going to take him much more time and effort than that required in a normal session, as I, in pain, moaned in desperation. Shortly after, as I feel my physical fortune renew, the relaxation of my muscles, the harmony of the organism, my memory blesses me with a glimpse of the Temple of Heaven, the most elegant, powerful and at the same time light edifice that I know. In my memory the temple appears in the distance, a circular building, built with dazzling white marble, surrounded by walls of the same material. I see large curved surfaces; they are walls that rise to heaven, and something like a foaming marble lace around the grand structure. I want to applaud upon seeing that landscape from where I am situated. It is the absolute victory of form over chaos. On various occasions, when I have to explain the concept of form, I mention the Temple of Heaven to illustrate precisely what I want to express, a resource I always keep behind the scenes, the subconscious, that space where fog reigns, yes, the Temple of Heaven, and also, why not!, the Peking Opera. A perfect and precise form governs all elements in both creations, converts them into ancillary details, into mere bases to celebrate a rite and to perceive one of the world’s majestic celebrations.
For some time now, as the result of a hypnotic experience, I have tried to explain my relationship with those visions, to halt to the extent possible their occurrence, to recuperate what is still alive in them, to detail every trait of their surroundings.
If I think about my past I discover that I’ve occupied myself in detestable jobs, but at the time I didn’t notice; or in other formidable ones, which I despised at the time and only later was able to adequately appreciate. But there were also others, very few, that are now the source of as much joy as in times past, when I held them. One of them was my collaboration with a program on Radio Universidad de México, coordinated by a dear friend, the Colombian Milena Esguerra. It was called: Ventana abierta al mundo [Open Window to the World], and was made up of interviews, chronicles, and reviews of activities that were supposedly the most important in the great cities of the world. Participating in that Ventana, being a part, if only minimally, of its creation, fascinated me. I felt as if I were in a dream: an apostle of culture, of the opening to the world of my country, and at the same time I lived formidable experiences, dealt with interesting characters, broadened my knowledge, all that. I sent reports from London, Rome, Warsaw, and, even though at times it’s hard for me to believe, from the mysterious and ancient city of Peking.
So upon returning home, after a grueling massage session, I went about reconstructing my first visit to the Temple of Heaven. I recall that my hosts and I stopped to rest during the trek toward the building, midway from the long marble streamer that encircles it, from where we had a marvelous all-encompassing view. To one side, with an arm stretched out toward the immense conical roof covered in glazed tiles of many vivid colors, was Professor Chen, a philologist from the University of Peking, a specialist in French literature. In fact, the greater part of his life had been spent in France. I imagine that, at that moment and with that gesture, he’s providing a description of the building that surely must have gone well beyond my possibilities of reception. I’m in ecstasy. It