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  International Praise for Sergio Pitol

  “Pitol’s prose is one of the most complex in the Spanish language; it is at the same time rich, fluid, full of meanings and references, and elegantly balanced in humor and erudite gravity. This certainly provided numerous challenges to Henson, who does an outstanding job in conveying the richness and subtleties of Pitol’s prose to English readers. Henson’s translation is the result of a rigorous and loving approach to Pitol’s work and a fitting tribute to a man who was a major translator throughout his life.”

  —Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Pitol is probably one of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable and eccentric…. It isn’t easy to explain the reason why Pitol’s imagination takes hold of his readers. Perhaps it is the way he’s able to delicately tap into the most disturbing layers of reality and turn our conception of what is normal inside out. Perhaps it’s because he’s always telling a deeper, sadder, more disquieting story while pretending to narrate another. Or perhaps it is merely that strange gift which very few possess: a voice that reverberates beyond the margins of his books.”

  —Valeria Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd

  “Pitol is a writer of another kind: his importance lies on the page, in the creation of his own world, in his ability to shed light on the world.”

  —Daniel Saldaña Paris, author of Among Strange Victims

  “Sergio Pitol is one of Mexico’s greatest authors.”

  —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

  “Pitol’s fiction tours his own complex personal landscape, and his idealizations and the ‘voices through the voices’ are all shared with discreet brilliance.”

  —Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

  “Pitol simply writes as he must. He travels in time as he sorts his memories, travels in time as he sorts history, travels in space as he physically travels, travels in space as he follows the history of foreign authors or their characters. It’s not limited to books however—music, theater, movies, visual art, all of it is invoked, all part of this existence. The breadth is remarkable, and Pitol’s control of it even more so.”

  —P.T. Smith, Three Percent

  “Pitol, winner of both the Juan Rulfo and the Cervantes prizes—the two most important in the Spanish-speaking world—is a writer to whom one should quite simply surrender.”

  —Anne Posten, Words Without Borders

  “Reading Sergio Pitol will make any serious writer want to write—and write better…. In Pitol’s life and his writing, neither images nor thoughts flow naturally and automatically to their logical associations.”

  —3:AM Magazine

  “[The Trilogy of Memory] is a rarity: each can stand on its own, but they also form a fulfilling tale together, the capstone of a long and celebrated career of writing and translating. Pitol has memorialized the fullness of his life and passion for literature in lasting fashion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Pitol is a tactful writer who masterfully handles hundreds of different subjects in a compact, novel-like form…. One of his great strengths is to turn from comic sentences to those of poetic resonance with a seamless and subtle finesse.”

  —Matt Pincus, Bookslut

  MEPHISTO’S WALTZ

  — STORIES —

  Sergio Pitol

  Translated by George Henson

  DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3

  nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  Copyright © 2005 Sergio Pitol.

  Originally published as Los Cuentos Mejores in 2005 by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain

  English translation copyright © 2018 by George Henson

  First edition, first printing 2018

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-83-1 (paperback) · 978-1-941920-81-7 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938737

  Cover design by Tanya Wardell

  Typesetting by Kirby Gann · kirbygann.net

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution · (800) 283-3572 · cbsd.com

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction by Elena Poniatowska

  Victorio Ferri Tales a Tale

  Like the Gods

  The Panther

  Body Present

  Warsaw Bound

  Westward Bound

  The Return

  Icarus

  The Wedding Encounter

  Tía Clara’s Devices

  Cemetery of Thrushes

  Mephisto’s Waltz

  Bukhara Nocturne

  The Dark Twin

  THE ORIGIN OF SERGIO PITOL’S WORK

  Here was a grandmother with her grandson; they lived on a hacienda of hot earth, of vanilla and spices, of reed beds and black vultures and roosters, all unbearable because of their insistence. The grandmother read books to the little boy who was ill from every kind of fever, tropical and literary, and, meanwhile, the little boy grew beneath the sheets, lanky, secret, malarial, complex, wide-eyed, curious, unhappy because he believed he had been denied happiness. This Renaissance child, ungraspable, charming, somnambulistic, apart, descendant of the Capulets and the Montagues but above all of the Deméneghi, the Buganzas, the Sampieri, and the Pitols.

  While the grandmother read, Sergio Pitol began to live his own life of fantasy, and he never left it. Sergio never inhabited a reality that was not a part of literature. His journeys were a continuation of that never-ending tale spun by Catalina Deméneghi, his grandmother, whose thread began to unravel, taking him to the ends of the planet. Pitol arrived in Poland, beneath the earth’s crust and emerged in Kanal, the film by Andrzej Wajda, wrapped in the great black cloak, which he wore deep inside and brought back from hell.

  Sergio danced the “Mephisto Waltz” at the Hotel Bristol before writing it, or at the Pera Palace in Istanbul. At the Ritz in Madrid he melted like a candle in the arms of La Pasionaria and in Barcelona he embraced Marietta Karapetiz and whisked her across the dance floor in wicked and liberating waltzes, thousands of waltzes on the bank of the Rhine, the same ones that caused the venerable and magical Giuseppe di Lampedusa to twirl in Garibaldi’s Italy. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia offered him the same snows, the same somnambulism. Central Asia did not take him out of himself, immersed in his illnesses and convalescences, in his long dialogues with another disappearing apparition, the writer Juan Manuel Torres, in improbable settings that latched on to his suit like misery latched on to the world.

  All Sergio Pitol’s characters, or almost all, wake up in the hospital, and when they don’t, they lose interest in what they set out to do, which is also a kind of hospitalization. His stories are always a story within another story, memories within other memories, nothing is ever direct, one has to turn with him, or when it suits him, unravel the story, a Russian doll, a box full of surprises, a jack-in-the-box propelled by a spring, a prank that pops out, a spurt of water that soaks you, a pie in the face, a viper that bites just when the author is about to tame it.

  An odd character, Sergio, the more he wrote, the more elusive and remote he became; the narrower the boundaries between the fantastic and the real, the more indispensable. Pitol felt less uprooted the farther away he was and able to be found as Margarita García Flores found him in Paris, in his apartment in the Trocadéro, a stone’s throw from the Bois de Boulogne.

  Later, with the Cervantes Prize painted on his smile, he walked through the streets of Xalapa where everyone greeted him, embraced him, congratulated him, recognized him in “recognition,” grateful for his having rewarded them and for remaining within reach of their Mexican—or rather Xalapeño—embrace.

  His mother, Cristina Deméneghi, drowned in the Atoyac River, during an outing in the countryside. Unwittingly, his mother bequeathed to her son his status as a castaway, which never left him. Sergio Pitol was always part sea and part sailor. He always returned but only later did he remain in Mexico. To stay must have been for him a kind of death, and Mexico City a port of catastrophe, to settle down, something akin to mummification, because Pitol burned all his ships.

  Ever since Sergio published his first story, his heroes and heroines always seemed eccentric because if Sergio parodies, he never provides us the key, it could be the Mock Turtle and not the novelist María Luisa Mendoza; it could be Marietta Karapetiz and not the latinist Mathilde Lemberger. Sergio Pitol is not interested in revealing anything, much less providing explanations. He throws out his book, and that’s it. The rest is a matter of typography. Oh, and of Sacha, which was his dog’s name and also one of the characters in his novel Taming the Divine Heron! Pitol was never interested in anyone who didn’t write or at least love books, and Sacha, like Jan Kott, was an expert on Shakespeare.

  Sergio Pitol, an aristocrat to the tip of his toes, a maker of illusions, a bon vivant, the owner of stables full of unicorns, a great connoisseur of painting, a lover of antique furniture, and discoverer of works of art in Poland and Istanbul; he would walk with his cane (which he didn’t need but accentuated h
is elegance) through his properties in his native Xalapa, in the state of Veracruz, like the Marquis de Carabas, gesturing: “Those cornfields are mine!”

  The author of the extraordinary The Magician of Vienna, he quickly became a native of Poland out of the great love he had for its people and its literature, and he found time to write books of short stories and novels that earned him the Cervantes Prize in 2005.

  I remember his anger when he told me that “the Mexican leftists go to Moscow to find formulas that fit within their intractable creeds.” It irritated him to be given classes in socialism with pre-established and punitive manuals. He told me that when he arrived in Poland—where he worked as a cultural attaché—the reality was totally different “because life is much stronger, national circumstances are different than those that appear in the socialist books we read in Mexico.”

  There are things that Sergio simply does not want to do, and one must accept it or throw in with him, join him secretly or underground, accept his mysterious, his special literary vibration, despite the work it demands. Even then, one becomes trapped by his language, in his writing that links reflections, and enter that gloomy bar in Warsaw, look for the horizon facing the Sopot Sea, and realize that men and women are also settings where comedies or tragedies play out. There is never dialogue in Pitol, only relationships, and it is only possible to “enjoy the beauty of certain phrases.”

  Sergio once gave Margarita García Flores a phrase key to understanding his work: “Usually, when I write a story, there is an area of emptiness, a kind of psychological cave that I’m not interested in filling.” The characters of Mephisto’s Waltz inhabit this space, which can be as insalubrious as the Córdoba of his childhood.

  These are stories that bewitch, stories with open arms, stories that sing like a river. Flowing. Different streams converge in them in perfect harmony and Pitol, that great magician, orchestrates their waters, traces their path along the earth, deepens their bed, polishes their reflections, and sometimes plays and plunges us into laughter because it’s always healthy to drown, if only for a moment, anyone who believes they can swim upstream.

  ELENA PONIATOWSKA AMOR

  VICTORIO FERRI TELLS A TALE

  for Carlos Monsiváis

  I know my name is Victorio. I know people think I’m mad (a fiction that at times infuriates me and at others merely amuses me). I know I’m different from the others, but my father, my sister, my cousin José, and even Jesusa, are different too, and no one thinks they’re mad; worse things are said about them. I know we’re nothing like other people, but even among us there isn’t a hint of similarity. I’ve heard it said that my father is the devil, and though I’ve never seen any external mark that identifies him as such, my conviction that he is who he is remains incorruptible. Even so, at times it’s a source of pride; in general, it neither pleases nor frightens me to be one of the evil one’s offspring.

  When a peon dares to speak about my family, he says that our house is hell itself. Before hearing that assertion the first time, I imagined the devil’s abode to be different (I thought, of course, of the traditional flames), but I changed my mind and gave credence to the words when after a painful and arduous meditation it occurred to me that none of the houses I know looks like ours. Evil does not dwell in them, but it dwells in ours.

  My father’s wickedness is so prodigious that it exhausts me; I’ve seen the pleasure in his eyes when he orders a peon locked in the rooms at the back of the house. When he orders them flogged and contemplates the blood that flows from their shredded backs, he bares his teeth in delight. He’s the only one on the hacienda who’s able to laugh this way, although I’m learning to do it too. My laugh is becoming so terrifying that women cross themselves upon hearing it. We both bare our teeth and emit a sort of gleeful bray when we’re overcome with satisfaction. None of the peons dares laugh like us, not even when they’re weary from drink. Joy, if they can remember it, confers on their faces a grimace that doesn’t quite form a smile.

  Fear has been exalted on our properties. My father has assumed his father’s position, and when he in turn disappears I shall become the lord of the comarca; I shall become the devil: I’ll be the Lash, the Fire, and the Punishment. I shall oblige my cousin José to accept money in exchange for his share of the hacienda, and, because he prefers life in the city, he’ll be able to go to that part of Mexico he’s always talking about, which only God knows whether it exists or whether he merely imagines it in order to make us jealous; and I shall keep for myself the lands, the houses, and the men, and the river where my father drowned his brother Jacobo, and, much to my woe, the sky that blankets us every day, in a different color, with clouds that change from one moment to the next, only to change again. I endeavor to look up as little as possible, such does it terrify me when things are not the same, when they escape dizzyingly from my sight. Whereas Carolina, to annoy me, despite the fact I’m her elder and she should show me respect, spends long periods of time gazing at the sky, and at night, during dinner, adorned with a silly expression that dares not come from ecstasy, remarks that the evening clouds were golden on a lilac background, or that at dusk the water’s color succumbed to that of fire, and other such nonsense. If anyone in our house is truly possessed with madness, it would be she. My father, indulgent, feigns excessive attention and encourages her to continue, as if the foolishness he’s hearing made any sense to him! He never speaks to me during meals, but it would be silly for me to resent it, as I am the only one he favors with his intimacy each morning, at sunrise, when I’m just getting home and he, with coffee in hand that he sips hurriedly, sets out to the fields to become drunk on the sun and violently stupefy himself with the harshest of tasks. Because the devil (I have yet to understand why, but he does) is compelled by necessity to forget his crime. If I drowned Carolina in the river, I’m certain that I wouldn’t feel the slightest remorse. Perhaps one day, when I rid myself of these filthy sheets that no one has bothered to change since I fell ill, I shall do it. Then I’ll be able to feel myself in my father’s skin, to know firsthand what I intuit in him, even though, regrettably, incomprehensibly, a difference will forever stand between us: he loved his brother more than the palm tree he planted in front of the colonnade, and his chestnut mare and the filly she foaled; whereas to me Carolina is nothing more than an inconvenient weight and nauseating presence.

  These days, illness has led me to rip away more than one veil that until now had remained untouched. Despite having always slept in this room, I can say it is only now betraying its secrets. I had never noticed, for example, that there are ten beams that span the ceiling, or that on the wall opposite where I now lie there are two large spots caused by the humidity, or that, and I find this oversight unbearable, beneath the heavy mahogany dresser dozens of mice have built nests. The desire to catch them and feel their beating death on my lips torments me. But such pleasure is, for now, forbidden me.

  Do not think that the many discoveries I make day after day reconcile me to my illness, nothing of the sort! The yearning, more intense with each passing moment, for my nightly escapades is constant. Sometimes I wonder if someone is taking my place, if someone whose name I do not know is usurping my duties. That sudden concern disappears at the very moment it is born; it overjoys me to think that no one on the hacienda is able to fulfill the requirements that such a laborious and delicate occupation demands. Only I, who am known to the dogs, the horses, the domestic animals, am able to get close enough to the shanties to hear what the laborers are whispering without causing the barking, clucking, or braying that such animals would make to betray someone else.

  I provided my first service without realizing it. I discovered that behind Lupe’s house a mole had dug a hole. Lying there, lost in the contemplation of the hole, I spent many an hour waiting for the odd-looking creature to appear. Instead, I watched, to my regret, the sun defeated once again, and with its annihilation I was overwhelmed by a deep sleep that was impossible to resist. When I awoke, night had fallen. Inside the shanty, you could hear the soft murmur of hasty and trusting voices. I pressed my ear to a crevice, and for the first time I discovered the tales that were circulating about my house. When I repeated the conversation, my service was rewarded. It seems that my father was flattered when it was revealed to him that I, against all expectation, might be useful to him. I was happy because, from that moment, I occupied an undeniably superior position to Carolina.