The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol
that were torturing his legs; ‘So I don’t lose my agility,’ he said, and also removed the scapulars because it seemed disrespectful to drag Our Lady of Pilar and above all the Virgin of Guadalupe into those dances. So they began to dance. Everyone else formed a semicircle and made choreographed movements with their arms and legs to enhance the couple’s artistry. When it was over, they decided unanimously to hire a choreographer to teach them how to stage more complex numbers; upon hearing this, the projectionist took a card from his pocket and handed it to the dean. It read: ‘Párvula Dry: Dance Teacher: Flamenco, Conga, Cuchichí, Mambo, and Other Rhythms.’ ‘We’ve entered a new era,’ the dean said. ‘Our Association has taken an historic step. On the one hand, it will improve our circulation, of which we’re in dire need, but also, and most of all, we’ll surprise our wives at October’s plenary session. Can you imagine, gentlemen, the looks on their faces? They’ll be so proud of us. Neither they nor anyone else will be able to brand us as solemn, do you realize? First thing tomorrow, I’ll contact Doña Párvula Dry.’”
Luis’s story is very famous, and it grows richer with each re-telling; characters we all know filter through it. The name Párvula Dry printed on the card becomes increasingly more important until she becomes the story’s protagonist. Upon discovering the size of her pupils’ fortunes, Párvula Dry will take advantage of them, scam them, promise to take them on a triumphant world tour, when in reality the most she will do is book them in Barcelona’s Bodega Bohemia, a Goyaesque dive where old variety singers are heckled and jeered by a ruthless public. Once there, she’ll escort the group, now called “Friends United of the Voluptuous Terpsichore,” in the front door then vanish out the back, only to reappear in Capri, where she’ll buy a sumptuous residence that once belonged to Gloria Swanson; thus beginning a new chapter in her stormy existence. By the end, the story undergoes so many changes that it ends up making no sense, but we all amuse ourselves to death.
Carlos and I take a bus that drops us in Bucareli, not far from the Paseo de la Reforma, which works out beautifully because we’re able to spend a moment in the Librería Francesa, where they have set aside for him two or three of the last issues of Cahiers du Cinéma; we stroll in the direction of the María Bárbara hotel, where the group Nuevo Cine is holding a meeting. Carlos’s library, from what I’ve seen, has branched out; it continues to be fundamentally a literary library, but now has sections devoted to social sciences, anthropology, history of Mexico, cinema, photography. Mine no longer exists; having sold almost all of my books before leaving for Europe, and the few I bought in Italy—with the exception of a volume of Rivadeneyra’s edition of Tirso de Molina, which I found by chance in a bookstore in Milan and brought with me to Mexico—are still in Rome, at Zamprano’s house, in boxes and suitcases that await my return.
As we walk to the café we also stop at the Británica. Carlos buys a few English magazines and half a dozen books on pop music and photography that, he assures me, are indispensable. I find The Gothic Revival by Clark, a study of that genre known as the Gothic novel that emerged in England in the eighteenth century—replete with horror, eroticism, occultism, orientalism, sadism, and gruesomeness—in which Lewis’s The Monk is set, which I’m translating at the moment. We finally arrive at the María Bárbara, to my surprise, before the meeting is scheduled to start, which gives us time to chat alone for a while, more or less seriously, something we rarely do.
I tell Carlos that I’m thinking more and more about staying in Mexico, and he encourages me to stay. He tells me that the struggle against solemnity that he has undertaken is more than just mere entertainment, or a simple act of amusement, although there is much of that. He’s convinced that the years of the recent past, those in which the riot police were a permanent fixture in the streets, could only have happened by virtue of a fossilization of mindsets and, therefore, of institutions. Everything is frozen: legislation; the cult of heroes, transformed into concrete statues or fountains with meaningless quotations that refer to nothing real; the official rites of the revolution are as vacuous as everything else. The mindset of politicians has become a part of that same fossilized structure. We have to begin to laugh at everything, to the point of chaos if necessary, and create an environment in which the sanctimonious become worried, for a large part of their ills and ours come from their limitations. Laugh at them, ridicule them, make them feel powerless; this is the only way anything can change. A Sisyphus-like effort, no doubt, but one worth undertaking, and one that eases the monotony of life. If it is impossible to humanize the faces of reinforced concrete that politicians hope to acquire from their first measly little position, then at least it will be possible to expose some cracks. Young people are fed up will all the nonsense. They won’t even set foot in the Museum of Anthropology so they don’t have to see the hieratic expressions of their leaders on the massive stone statue of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation. Everyone must learn to laugh at those ridiculous and sinister puppets that address the nation as if history were told through their mouth, not the living one, never that, rather the one they’ve embalmed. Anything new frightens them. When people finally see them for the rats they are, the parrots they are, and not as the magnificent lions and peacocks that they believe themselves to be, when they discover—of course it will take time!—that they are an object of ridicule, not of respect or fear, change will finally arrive; for that to happen they have to lose their base; they’re prepared to respond to even the most violent insult, but not to humor.
This is what we’re discussing when the friends Monsiváis is meeting arrive: José Luis González de León, Luis Vicens, José de la Colina, Paul Leduc, Tomás Pérez Turrent, Manuel Michel, Emilio García Riera, Juan Manuel Torres, among others. They’re meeting to discuss cinema, and on this specific occasion to plan the publication of some Cuadernos. Juan Manuel Torres tells me that he’s writing about the first divas—the Italians, la Menichelli, la Terribile-González, and la Borelli—and the erotic impulse they represent, which emerged around the birth of the cinema and is still present in it today. They then move to a long table at the back of the café to talk; I stay where I am and read the chapter about Lewis in the book I just purchased at the Británica. When they finish, we’ll go to the cinéclub to see Johnny Guitar, which is part of a season titled something like “The Tribulations of Eros.”
Off we go. It’s a rather idiosyncratic Western, in which the protagonists of the duel, an element that is essential to this genre, are two women. The fight is not between a villain and a hero, that coarse but law-abiding cowboy who is usually John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Randolph Scott. Instead the villain is an insufferable woman. The indispensable leading lady is Joan Crawford. The conflict is between the owner/hostess of a saloon where the cowboys entertain themselves gaily and a raging puritan who devotes every waking moment to combating vice. For Joan Crawford there isn’t a single moment of rest; the other woman harasses and pursues her, and lays the most treacherous traps for her until she is led to the gallows. At the last minute, with the noose around her neck, it looks as if a hero is about to save her, although I mostly imagine this and don’t see it because of the commotion in the theater. We’re sitting, as we have for several years, very close to the screen, in the third row on the right. From the beginning, we find the movie intensely amusing. The villainess’s horrific tantrums and the palavering in which the heroine defends herself create a glorious dialogue. At times they sound like oracles; and others like grocers. Something about it is reminiscent of Ionesco’s world and the humor of the early silent pictures. Our cackles echo throughout the theater, although we’re surprised that ours are the only ones. The audience begins to shush us, insult us, and call for us to be thrown out of the theater. The commotion prevents me from enjoying the ending. When the lights turn on, a few spectators, almost all friends of ours, of course, curse at us. We’re a couple of Pharisees, ignoramuses; our materialist distortion keeps us from detecting and appreciating a new treatment of Myth. Are we not able to see that the true face of hate is love? Has it escaped us that the relationship we saw on screen is governed by the concept of l’amour-fou? We’ve witnessed an extraordinary case of l’amour-fou, and two or three of our friends repeat in unison—I’m not sure whether seriously or in jest—that l’amour-fou means mad love, yes: the mad, mad love proclaimed by the surrealists, with the great Breton in the lead. Did we even know who André Breton was?
We walk to the taquería next door to the Insurgentes movie house. We reflect with