The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol
informer in the pay of the police, depending on how the reader’s whims or emotional needs sketch him. The only thing that the potential addicts of this novel could agree on would be to confirm that the times we live in, just as in the narrative, are abominable, cruel, foolish, and ignoble, disinclined to imagination, to generosity, to greatness, and that none of the characters, neither the best nor the worst, deserve the punishment of living in them. Regrettably, I have never written that novel.
DREAMING REALITY. Returning to one’s first texts demands that the adult writer, and I say this from personal experience, use all of his defenses so as not to succumb to the bad emanations that time goes about saving. It would be better to take a vow never to look back! One runs the risk that the return becomes an act of penance or atonement or, a thousand times worse, that it grows soft in the face of ineptitudes that should embarrass him. What the author can scarcely afford, and only passingly, is to document the circumstances that made possible the birth of those initial writings and to confirm, with rigor but without scandal, the poor respiration that his language manifests, the stiffness and pathos imposed on them beforehand.
My first stories ended irremissibly in an anguish that led to the death of the protagonist or, in the most benign of cases, insanity. To find access to dementia, to seek shelter in it, meant glimpsing an ultima Thule, paradise, the island of Utopia, where all tribulations, anguish, and terrors were abolished forever.
The year was 1957, and I was twenty-four. I moved with delight in a circle of intense eccentricity in which friends of different ages, nationalities, and professions coexisted with absolute naturalness, although, as was to be expected, we, the young, prevailed. Outside the orthodoxly eccentric sector, which already had a foot planted in manias and obsessions, we were characterized by our fervor for dialogue, as long as it was amusing and intelligent, our capacity for parody, our lack of respect for prefabricated values, false glories, petulance and, above all, self-complacency. At the same time, mandatory compliance to a tacit but rigid system of behavior was obligatory, such that even if we entered into the heart of absurdity we should not forget good manners. In essence, but also in form, our best defense lay in a certain snobbishness of which today it is impossible to be certain whether we were or were not aware.
One fine day, I noticed that my time and my space had been saturated and contaminated by the outside world and that the din reduced in a lamentable way two of my greatest pleasures: reading and sleeping. It was, it seems to me, the first announcement of a radical distaste, of a diffuse anxiety; in fact, a real fear. Because I had begun to notice that the absorbent worldliness, in which my friends and I aspired to behave like the young protagonists of the earlyfirst Evelyn Waugh, where any situation could get out of hand and transform into an immense folly, and where laughter was the most effective remedy to purify the pools of conceit and solemnity that one could store inadvertently, was beginning to become something very different from the model we proposed. Among the participants in this joyful lifestyle, an attitude began to appear that shortly before had seemed unimaginable to us. Sometimes, when playing the hackneyed game of truth or dare, where a group of friends sitting in a circle on the floor spins a bottle so that someone might ask the person whom the bottle points to any intimacy, any secret proclivity about which he was suspect, rather than being a fun experience, became repugnantly sordid. Instead of witty phrases, it produced cursing, complaints, screams, and obscenities. An intolerable burden had been imposed on us: we passed from play to massacre, from carnival to howling. A newly-married lad suddenly slapped his wife, a sister crudely insulted her brother and his girlfriend, a pair of friends destroyed in a cruelly scandalous way a close friendship of many years. Day after day, hysteria, suspicions, and animosities grew. Everyone seemed to have fallen in love with everyone and jealousy became a collective passion. Our company seemed to feed only on repellent toxins. We began to lose our style.
It became necessary to escape, to move to pastures new, to leave the magma. I rented a house in Tepoztlán and refurbished it so as to spend extended periods there. Tepoztlán was then a tiny village, isolated from the world, lacking even electric lights. The ideal retreat. I spent splendid days there; I took long walks through the countryside and, above all, I read. I remember on my first stay I buried myself fervently in the prose of Quevedo and the novels of Henry James. At times it seemed that spiritual health was getting closer. It was like living in Tibet without the need to subject oneself to its mystical discipline. The process should not have been so simple, but something happened that from that point on brought me closer to the balance I had longed for. On one occasion, I withdrew there to complete a translation that had been commissioned in a rush. The first day, in the afternoon, I sat down to begin the task, but instead started writing and was unable to stop until dawn. In a few weeks I wrote my first three stories: “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,” “Amelia Otero,” and “The Ferris.” Every line alleviated anxieties from the immediate past (the almost still present) and produced in me a sense of astonishment different from any I had known until then. I wrote, as is usually said, in a kind of fever, in a medium’s trance, but with the irreconcilable difference that, during the exercise, my will consciously ordered the flow of language. I was witnessing, then, the emergence of a form, the application of a mathematics of chaos. That magnificent experience had nothing to do with the insipid writing of a few articles of mine published three or four years earlier.
That was my first active foray into literature, my leap into writing.
It never failed to amaze me that the resulting texts had no connection, at least in appearance, with the historical circumstances of the moment. On the contrary, it harkened me back to times before my own existence. I didn’t write about the capital, where I lived, but rather about the small town where my grandmother lived for many years, where my parents were born, were adolescents, and were married, where my brother was also born. The plots, the characters, the shower of details with which I attempted to create the appropriate atmosphere came from stories that during my childhood and adolescence I heard my grandmother tell again and again. They were stories nestled in an eternally yearned-for Eden: the world that the revolution had turned to ashes. I’ll forever find it strange that of all the reminiscences made by my grandmother and her friends of the same age of that proclaimed paradise, the only thing I retained was an endless string of disasters, evil, and revenge that led me to suspect that in my legendary San Rafael (the name that concealed Huatusco) the presence of the devil far exceeded that of the angels. Perhaps that is the reason for the too frequent mention of the devil in those early stories, which freezes the development of the plot, paralyzes the characters and creates an unnecessary and cumbersome climate of wickedness.
I had managed by way of these stories to unburden myself of some uncomfortable ghosts. They might not be those of the present, but indeed those I lived with during my childhood. As I look back, the time that passed from the moment I traced in Tepoztlán with a sleepwalker’s hand the story of a tragic misunderstanding—the story of the fruitless obedience of Victorio Ferri, a child consumed by madness, who, convinced that his father is the devil, commits, to be kind, all manner of vileness that might seem appropriate for the son and heir of evil, only to discover while dying that none of it had been worthwhile, that the happiness he detected in the face of his father is due to the certainty that he is a step away from freeing himself of him, to discover it at the gates of death—even today, forty years later, as I write these pages, it compels me to repeat what I said on other occasions: what unifies my existence is literature; all that I have lived, thought, longed for, imagined is contained in it. More than a mirror it is an X-ray: it is the dream of the real.
I owe to Infierno de todos [Everyone’s Hell] having extricated myself from a lapsed world that wasn’t mine, that was related only tangentially to me, which allowed me to approach literature with greater fidelity to the real. I noticed this with greater clarity during a period of tenacious reading of Witold Gombrowicz. For him, literature and philosophy must emanate from reality, because only then would they, in turn, have the ability to infer from it. Everything else, the Polish writer insisted, was tantamount to an act of onanism, to the replacement of the language of the inane cult of writing for writing’s sake and the word for word’s sake. When speaking of the real and reality I am referring to a vast space, different from what others understand for those terms when they confuse reality with a deficient and parasitic aspect of existence, fueled by conformity, bad press, political speeches, vested interests, telenovelas, light literature,