The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol
distinct movements. My years in Prague coincided with an intense inner energy. Writing became an obsession; I believe the unbearable social life that I was obliged to lead, for reasons of protocol, in some way nourished the novels I wrote there with anecdotes, episodes, gestures, phrases, and habits.
I live in Xalapa, a provincial capital surrounded by exceptional landscapes. In the morning I go out to the countryside, where I have a cabin, and I spend several hours writing and listening to music. From time to time I take a break to play with my dog in the garden. I return to the city for the midday meal, and in the afternoon I write again, listen to music, read, and sometimes I watch an old movie on videocassette. I talk to friends on the phone. After six p.m., except on rare occasions, nothing can make me leave the house. I am indebted to the architect Bernal Lascuráin, to his imagination, to his taste and his talent, for the pleasure of inhabiting these houses, each one built as a complement to the other. If I had to live under house arrest in them, I would be perfectly happy. I work until two or three in the morning. That rhythm of life which others might find maddening is the only one that appeals to me.
Those things of importance that happen to us in life are due to instinct, Julien Green says. “All sexualities are a part of the same family: instinct. But there is something in it that always escapes us, of which we are conscious. It is what makes our life exciting. Every human being carries a mystery of which he is unaware.” What doesn’t matter, I suppose, what is the same for everyone in the world, what makes an epoch trivial, is created naturally by society. We condition ourselves to it without realizing it; that is one of its great labors and the source of a thousand misfortunes. But then one believes he is behaving like a robot, acting mechanically, marching like a sleepwalker, like an army of tiny little men, and, in the end, it turns out that the force of instinct has worked in the opposite direction. As a child Rosita Gómez dreamt of being a stripper and ended up being an honest bank teller; she never learned to dance, not even waltzes. Marcelino Góngora dreamt of being in the mafia, the head of a criminal gang, the terror of the underworld, yet before the end of adolescence he was a sacristan in his village church. The book that someone intended to write, and for which he took countless notes for years, suddenly came to a standstill, ceased to be a project; something unexpected, beyond his control, began to take shape. That’s how things work. Ask again what we are, where we are going, and a fist in the mouth will rid you of the few teeth you have left.
And from instinct, which is a mystery, I would like to shift to the subject of tolerance, which is an act of will. There is no human virtue more admirable. It implies recognition of others: another way of knowing oneself. An extraordinary virtue, says E.M. Forster, although hardly exciting. There are no hymns to tolerance, as there are, in abundance, to love. It lacks poems and sculptures that extol it. It is a virtue that requires a constant effort and vigilance. It has no popular prestige. If one says of a man that he is tolerant, most people instantly believe that his wife has cheated on him, and the rest make him out to be a fool. One would have to return to the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, to Diderot, to the encyclopédistes, to find the true meaning of the word. In our century, Bakhtin is one of its paladins: his notion of dialogism allows for the possibility of responding to different and opposite meanings equally. “We only harm others when we’re incapable of imagining them,” writes Carlos Fuentes. “Political democracy and civilized coexistence between men demands tolerance and the acceptance of values and ideas different than our own,” says Octavio Paz.
Norberto Bobbio offers a definition of the “civilized” man that embodies the concept of tolerance as daily action, a working moral exercise: The civilized man “lets others be themselves irrespective of whether these individuals may be arrogant, haughty, or domineering. They do not engage with others intending to compete, harass, and ultimately prevail. They refrain from exercising the spirit of contest, competition, or rivalry, and therefore also of winning. In life’s struggle [civilized men] are perpetual losers. […] This is because in this kind of world there are no contests for primacy, no struggles for power, and no competitions for wealth. In short, here the very conditions that enable the division of individuals into winners and losers do not exist.”1 There is something enormous in those words. When I observe the deterioration of Mexican life, I think that only an act of reflection, of critique, and of tolerance could provide an exit from the situation. But conceiving of tolerance as it is imagined in the Bobbio’s text implies a titanic effort. I begin to think about the hubris, arrogance, and corruption of some acquaintances, and I become angry, I begin to list their attitudes that most irritate me, I discover the magnitude of contempt they inspire in me, and eventually I must recognize how far I am from being a civilized man.
In the second entry of Lezama Lima’s diaries, dated October 24, 1939, the Cuban writer writes of the relationship between Voltaire and Frederick II. In the beginning, the rapport between the monarch and the philosopher seemed perfect: “Both constantly lose all sense of measure in their praise.” But a single criticism by Voltaire regarding the spelling mistakes that spoil Louis XIV’s prose is enough to poison the relationship. A king is a king and therefore his greatness cannot be dishonored by a solecism or a spelling mistake; a philosopher, no matter how genius, is only a philosopher and should know his place. Caesar est supra grammaticam, that must never be forgotten. The age-old connection between writer and prince has been undermined by misunderstanding; it is a dangerous friendship. A novelist must learn to carry on a dialogue with others, but especially with himself, he must learn to scrutinize and listen to himself; this will help him know who he is. If he fails, instead of a novel, he will build a verbal artifact that attempts to simulate a narrative form, but whose breathing will be wrong. It will, perhaps, pick up something in the atmosphere. The author knows that he will please either Caesar or the masses, it makes no difference; he has written it for one of those two deities. A few years later, it will end up on the scrapheap. Literature is worse than la belle dame sans merci, that woman beloved and feared by the symbolists. When they play tricks on her, when she senses that she’s being used for spurious reasons, her revenge can be ferocious.
To begin by invoking the annals of Venice and to end bogged down in a literature of lies is a vulgarity. This fact allows me to realize how far I am from the civilized man that Bobbio envisions. Rather than yield to that irritation, I would like to comment on the attitude of two writers who have been decisive as models for my life of retirement: Luis Cernuda and Julien Gracq. It is well known that temperament is destiny, and in temperament I feel that I belong to the same family as those writers. From the outside, and out of slapdashness, one might think that it is a question of authors determined to read life instead of live it. The truth is a little more complex and at the same time much simpler.
One might think that renouncing a large portion of the world’s customs is a way to make arrogance, and occasionally pride, pass for humility. This is not the case. For me it’s a matter of intense relaxation, a pure form of hedonism. Walking through my garden; seeing all my books collected at last, knowing that I have reached the desert island with more options than the ten titles demanded by polls; being far from everything—without refusing to observe the world—scrutinizing it, reading it, trying to decipher its signs, sensing its movements, is overall a pleasure. This does not exclude traveling, dreaming of walking once again the streets of Lisbon, Prague, Marienbad, Venice…
Venice has been a frequent setting in my literature. It is an imagined Venice like Hofmannsthal’s, an ideal Venice, which produces in me the certainty of man’s biological unity with everything that surrounds him and his mythical fusion with the past.
I once wrote:
“All times deep down are a single time. Venice comprises and is comprised of all cities, and the young tourist who, Baedeker in hand and eyes half-closed, stops to contemplate a whimsical façade on the Via degli Schiavoni, the collar of his raincoat raised to protect his weak bronchial tubes from the prevailing dampness, is the same young Levantine with almond eyes and curly hair who contemplates with amazement the riches of the market that runs along the recently erected Rialto Bridge, and also the slave with a coarse mop of dirty-green hair captured in a Kashubian village on the Baltic coast in order to dig the first palafittes of what would later become the most colorful, the most eccentric, the most spectacular of all cities. Each one of us is all men. I have been, the protagonist seems to proclaim, Othello and also Iago and also Desdemona’s lost handkerchief!