The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol
cinephiles. It’s been a day blessed by laughter. I feel in optimum condition to go home and make some progress for a couple of hours on the gruesome and wanton story of Lewis’s monk.
Suddenly a newsboy comes in with the latest edition of the paper. The headline takes up half the page. Rubén Jaramillo has been executed. We buy the paper. They talk about Jaramillo in the vilest of terms, as if he were a dangerous beast that has finally been hunted down. They’ve also killed his four children and his pregnant wife Epifanía. The tone is celebratory: another victory against the Bolshevist threat. Carlos gives me a brief summary of Jaramillo’s life: he was a Methodist pastor who had fallen out with the Morelos government because of a series of abuses that took place in the countryside. He lived in a village near Cuernavaca, where the price of land has increased enormously. Land speculation had set its sights on them. Jaramillo became a natural leader of the region; he stopped the tenant farmers from being evicted. Holding the paper in my hands is degrading; it expels a foul odor. “Dead dogs don’t bite!” it seems to shout. As we leave the restaurant, Carlos takes a taxi to return to Portales, and I walk few blocks home. My brief walk is enveloped in feelings of unreality, anger, and horror. Everything I’ve seen the last few days becomes a façade, which a harsh Mexico has taken it upon itself to smash to bits.
Not a single intellectual celebrated that crime, nor attempted to mitigate publicly the government’s responsibility. The journalists at the service of the State made sure to do that. They seemed to become intoxicated with fame as they carried out the task; they knew the greater his infamy the higher their reward from the public treasury would be. Writers had yet to lend themselves to that task. That would come later; during the Salinas presidency it would become a succulently “lucrative” profession. Fernando Benítez devoted a supplement in La Cultura en México, which he edited at the time, to Jaramillo’s murder. He visited the region of Morelos himself, with Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea, where the events had occurred. The accounts they wrote were splendid and brave.
My desire to stay in Mexico disappeared that night. Soon after, I left the country. Carlos stayed and persisted in his projects, thanks to which he managed to accomplish a large part of the program he confided to me in 1962 at the María Bárbara. Since then, he’s written brilliant books, needless to say; they are a testament to chaos, its rituals, its slime, its greatness, infamy, horrors, excesses, and forms of liberation. They are also an account of a Rocambolesque and ludic world, delirious and macabre. They are our esperpento. Culture and society are his two great domains. Intelligence, humor, and fury have been his greatest advisors. I’m convinced that the current catalyst to create, in spite of everything, a civil society, is due to his efforts.
In his own way, Carlos Monsiváis is a constantly expanding polygraph, a one-man writers’ union, a legion of heteronyms that out of eccentricity sign the same name. If you have a question about a biblical text, all you have to do is call him—he’ll answer it immediately; the same if you need a bit of information about a movie filmed in 1924, 1935, or whatever year you like; you want to know the name of the regent of the city of Mexico or of the governor of Sonora in 1954; or the circumstances under which Diego Rivera painted a mural in San Francisco in 1931, which José Clemente Orozco dubbed “Assitorium”; or the possible transformation of Tamayo’s work during his brief Parisian period, or the fidelity of a line of poetry that may be dancing in your head by Quevedo, Góngora, Sor Juana, Darío, López Velarde, Gorostiza, Pellicer, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Paz, Villaurrutia, Novo, Sabines, of any great poet of our language, and the answer will appear immediately: not just the verse but the stanza in which it is located. He is Mr. Memory. He is also an incomparable historian of mentalities: an intensely receptive and sharp essayist—if you don’t believe me, just read the pages he has written on Onetti, Novo, Beckford, Hammett; a remarkable movie critic; a student of Mexican painting who has produced excellent pages on Diego, Tamayo, Gerzso, María Izquierdo, and Toledo; and a lucid political essayist. He is the chronicler of all our misfortunes and our marvels, more of the former, considering that the Mexico in which we’re living has been fertile in misfortunes and, in turn, the marvels appear exceptional as miracles often do; he is the documentarian of the extremely fertile gamut of our national imbecility. His weekly columns capture the statements of the great minds of our minuscule universe; in them speak financiers, bishops, senators, deputies, and governors, the President of the Republic, the “communicators,” the cultured doyens. The result is devastating. Next to him, the discoveries of Bouvard and Pécuchet would look like the apothegms of Plato or Aristotle. To these attributes, others can be added: bibliophile; collector of a thousand heterogeneous things; felinophile, Sinologist—Carlos Monsiváis is all this and more. And, in addition, as readers may have already surmised: he is my closest friend.
Xalapa, January 1996
“On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series.”2 As the reader may have already noticed, this is the beginning of “The Aleph,” that great miracle by which Jorge Luis Borges enriched our lives.
From a certain age, every change one discovers in the environment takes on an offensive character, an agonizing personal mutilation. As if with that change, someone were giving us a macabre wink, and the new advertising for American cigarettes, just like Beatriz Viterbo’s death, were turning into an unexpected memento mori, an announcement of our future and inevitable death.
Thirty-five years ago, in Rome, I frequented a small bookstore in the Via del Babuino. It was run by a couple whose age was hard to discern, except that they were more young than old. I enjoyed chatting with them and hearing their recommendations. They were book people through and through. Their shelves reflected a confident and cultivated taste. Later on, each time I passed through Rome I would venture at least once to their store. It was impossible not to as it was on the way to the Piazza del Popolo. I watched them age without ever losing the conviction of their intuition and good literary judgment. The classics fit perfectly there with the new currents of thought and modern narrative forms. They had no patience for light literature, self-help books, or superficial theosophy. These genres fell outside their circle of interests; I imagine it would have disgusted them to welcome into their store readers who were addicted to those kinds of books.
So I saw them from time to time. On one occasion, I found only the woman behind the counter. Her husband, she told me, had died a few months before, from a blood clot, I think. Years later, on a different visit, I saw her sitting in a chair, with the look of someone who was completely detached from reality: she neither moved nor spoke; she didn’t seem interested in anything; her stare was fixed and blank. A slightly younger woman attended to the customers; I think I heard her say she was a cousin. I told her about the relationship that had bound me to the store since I was a young man: my first Ariosto, my first novels by Pavese. She told me that her cousin had succumbed to a deep depression; no treatment had been able to bring her out of it. She was afraid of leaving her in the apartment alone, something might happen to her, she might need help. So every morning she dressed her and took her to the bookstore, and that brought her back to life. “Look how good she feels; she’s spent her entire life here; being here cheers her up, of course it cheers her up.” If the vegetative state I witnessed could be considered a sign of revival, she must have felt awful at home, I thought.
In the spring of 1966, I spent a few days in Italy. When I passed the bookstore it was closed; what’s more, it was nonexistent. The windows on either side of the door that night and day had displayed the latest titles had disappeared. The sign with the bookstore’s name had disappeared. I felt the wound of time, its malignancy, with terrible intensity. That disappearance was a way of punishing the immense happiness of the young man who one day appeared there, rummaged through the bookshelves, and left