The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol
are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. Mine relives the enthusiasm I felt as I left Bellas Artes after hearing Arrau, Rubenstein, Callas, and the Teatro Tívoli—no less venerated—where the audience’s pleasure became frenzied before the gyrations of the famous “exotic” dancers of the time—Su Mu-Key, Tongolele, Kalantán; or the Lírico after applauding the legendary Josephine Baker; or the endless walks through the city’s many different neighborhoods where I talked nonstop with Luis Prieto, Lucy Bonilla, Gustavo Londroño, Carlos Monsiváis, Luz del Amo, Ricardo Regazzoni about books, movies, politics, or private matters; we argued, fought, and always reconciled as we made fun of the false (and even genuine) glories of this world…Everything was real, everything was true and, unfortunately, unrepeatable.
Not too long ago, I went through some of my books while preparing them for re-publication, a task that has never been pleasing; I was surprised to discover that a place from my childhood appeared on several occasions, a place it would never have crossed my mind to think about, a setting that entered my writing surreptitiously, which served as an unconscious frame to a mysterious event: a crime that was never completely solved. It surprised me because in real life I had only been there on two or three occasions while I was still very small. Upon recalling those excursions, upon dislodging them from the place where my memory was hiding them, they burst into my conscience as one of the most startling episodes of my childhood. The place is the Ojo de Agua where the river Atoyac is born; a few days ago I discovered that it was one of the sacred places of the Totonacas.
I was living at the Potrero sugar mill. Some families used to organize occasional excursions to the region’s picturesque sites, among them the natural spring at Ojo de Agua. The round-trip—bathing in the river, the picnic—took an entire day. We rode in a Jeep until we arrived at the village of Paraje Nuevo, and, from there, we walked on foot along the paths that the peasants cleared for us with their machetes in the middle of the jungle. One of the high points of the trip was crossing the river on a rope bridge.
It was like crossing a bottomless abyss; it’s possible my childlike eyes magnified it disproportionately, as tends to happen. The bridge lacked the usual board planks common to hanging bridges. Instead there were just three or four ropes braided together. My feet slid slowly along the bottom rope as my hands held the upper one. There were probably twenty or twenty-five of us, including the children. There were some young American couples; the American women were wearing pants and seemed to possess the same sporting ability as their husbands. The Mexican women would not have dared wear pants even if they were threatened with being thrown from the cliff. I remember that they were carried across, tied to the men’s arms, some shouted, terrified, while others laughed hysterically. We children rode astride the adults’ shoulders, or tied to their backs. The operation took a good amount of time, because in addition to our crossing, large straw baskets containing food, drinks, plates, silverware, and other paraphernalia had to be transported across. We then crossed another patch of jungle until we arrived at a spot, the other climatic moment, from where we were able to contemplate paradise: the spring, located beneath a curtain of rocks that my memory reproduces like a great Wagnerian scene. As we neared the place we began to perceive certain mysterious movements in the water and in the brush along the bank. They slowly began to take shape and definition; they were otters, the marvelous water dogs that had inhabited the region from the beginning of creation. If they had stayed there, nothing would have happened to them; there was a tacit agreement not to disturb them. The peasants in the region watched over their pups and occasionally, when the time was right, sacrificed a few males to sell their pelts.
Not long ago I decided to return to that sanctuary, to the magic garden from my childhood. It’s possible to travel to Paraje Nuevo today by car and continue in the same vehicle along dirt roads all the way to the river’s edge. There are scarcely any vestiges of the original jungle left. It has been replaced by sugar cane. There are no longer any difficult passes. The atmosphere of mystery has disappeared. At a certain moment, I decided not to continue; I turned around and retraced my steps. I didn’t dare go as far as the spring. Everything had deteriorated in an unbearable way. The animal life had disappeared, just as the vines from my childhood and the giant ferns, the huge climbing plants with enormous leaves, which back then surrounded the pool and climbed up the mountain, had disappeared. The natural world that existed until a few decades ago and took centuries to be created is now just a memory, just like the Babuino bookstore, the Mondino and Pietro trattorias, the Café Viena, the Tívoli, the Lírico, and so many other things.
Xalapa, May 1994
2 Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni
Happy dreams tend to be scarce and difficult to remember. We awake from them with a smile on our lips; for an instant, we relish the slightest fragment our memory retains, and our smile quite possibly grows into a full laugh. Yet as soon as we get out of bed that happy dream disappears forever. At no time during the day does it occur to us to repeat or build on the happiness that we experienced.
On the contrary, the others, the distressing dreams—the terrifying ones, the monstrous nightmares—are capable of not leaving us alone, even for several days. They demand that we undertake an anxious search that is seldom crowned by complete success. We cling to any loose thread in an attempt to piece together the plot, and, little by little, dark, tangled fragments begin to appear, vague parodies of scenes, scraps we take advantage of to reconstruct the oppressive nighttime experience. We’re fully aware that we’re fabricating a narrative act that corresponds only in part to the ominous atmosphere that upset us at night. Specialists say that the function of these disturbing dreams consists of externally discharging unnecessary energy, of a poisonous kind, created, for some strange reason, by our own organism. Dreaming implies a defense or an omen. Dying means the end of one period and the announcement of a better one. A rebirth! We have undergone an internal cleansing without having willingly participated. Later, as we search consciously through the dream’s residue, we weave it into a story to which we attribute pertinent faces and gestures to give shape to the ghosts that multiply beneath the surface. As we recognize them, but now completely awake, we destroy them, annihilate their evil powers, and we push them out of our psychic space. If this were not so, what sense then would the effort invested in recovering and reuniting the lost fragments make? Only a collective masochism, more widespread than desirable, could sustain that possibility. And I don’t think things are heading in that direction.
I must have been twenty or twenty-one years old (I’m guessing because that was when I began to live by myself in an apartment on Calle de Londres) when an unknown figure, who seemed to encapsulate the infinite spectrum of human evil, began to appear in my dreams. His face displayed nothing but evil. At first glance, he might have looked like an ordinary man, but glancing at him a second time produced fear—being close to him, speaking to him, even more. I awoke terrified. Hours later, when I went down to the street, I recognized the sinister individual about whom I had dreamt. I was dumbfounded. I had read something in Jung about the premonitions contained in certain dreams. The Swiss author related the experience of some patients of his who had dreamt about a catastrophe and had later been the victim of a similar accident. A parapsychological premonition. I thought that the dream was trying to forewarn me of a demonic force that was surrounding my home. I had not dreamt of an imaginary being but rather a real one, whom I had seen with my own eyes a few yards from the building where I lived. That afternoon, I visited a psychologist friend of mine, and I told her about the incident. She believed that I had possibly seen someone who had, perhaps because of a single detail, transformed into the frightening person of my dream. That is, by some mechanism of identification, I had erased the original features of the man I dreamt about and had attributed to him those of the individual who passed by me on the street. Since then I am aware that a large part of what we believe