The Journey Read online

  Four or five other wretches, all in the buff and, as far as I could see, half drunk, sprawled like pigs over the bench, table, and floor of the pool room.

  Since the room was small, and our companions the sort of people who eat cold, dirty food for supper and who drink pulque and chinguirito, they were producing an ear-shattering salvo whose pestilent echoes, finding no other outlet, came to rest in my poor nostrils, thus giving me in one instant such a migraine that I could not bear it, and my stomach, unable to withstand the fragrant scents, heaved up everything I had eaten just a few hours earlier.

  The noise that my evacuating stomach made woke up one of the léperos there, and as soon as he saw us, he started to spew a blue streak of abuse out of his devilish mouth.

  “You raggedy sons of bitches…!” he said. “Why don’t you go home and vomit on your mamas, if you’re already so drunk, and not come here to rob people of their sleep at this time of night?”

  Januario signaled to me to keep my mouth shut, and we lay down on the billiard table; and between its hard planks, my migraine, the fear instilled in me by these naked men whom I charitably judged to be merely thieves, the countless lice in the blankets, the rats that ambled over me, a rooster that spread its wings from time to time, the snores of the sleepers, the sneezes that their backsides produced, and the aromatic stench that resulted, I spent the most miserable night.3

  The woman on the front row lost her stonelike expression. When I referred to “the snores of the sleepers, the sneezes that their backsides produced, and the aromatic stench that resulted,” she shouted, filled with passion, “That, gentlemen, is the Mexico that I love!” And then when I asked if anyone wanted to ask a question or make a comment, she was the first to speak. “Coincidence of coincidences!” she said. “I came to the library to find some pamphlets written by my husband, Adam Karapetian, the anthropologist, deceased now unfortunately for twenty-five years in Medellín, Colombia, where I live, Armenian by birth, of course, as the surname implies. They are all studies about your country, inspired under the stars, written first in 1908 and again in 1924. On the latter date I accompanied him to the jungle. I was about to leave the library just now when I saw the announcement for a lecture on Mexico, yours, maestro. If my husband were alive he would have stood up to embrace you, because you both work along the same lines I can tell. I’m looking for those opuscules, some very difficult to find, they don’t have them in this library, but I am sure I’ll find them where I least expect it. The most important one concerns a feast in the tropics, a religious feast with a pagan end. Karapetian was only interested in the feast as an anthropological topic, the feast in Mexico, Bahía, Puglia, New Guinea, Anatolia. The one that most interested him was one in the middle of the Mexican jungle in honor of a holy shitting child. (Laughter.) No, one mustn’t be afraid of words, what one must consider is in what circumstances the feast was celebrated. I was there, I saw it all! The blazing sun and the land transformed into shit! It took twenty days for my nose to lose that stench!” And then she got up, put a card in my hand and left the auditorium with an air of extreme dignity. As the door closed we all broke out into laughter. The card read: MARIETTA KARAPETIAN, and below the name the inscription: FINE HAND PAINTED CHINA and, then, another line in tiny, almost illegible print read: I APPLY LEECHES. HYGIENE AND DISCRETION GUARANTEED. Who knows what that could be! I still haven’t met the translator of my novel Juegos florales [Floral Games]. I was hoping to talk to her after the conference, but she didn’t introduce herself. I’d love to walk around for a while, but I’m afraid of the dampness. I wouldn’t want to wake up with another cold tomorrow. Tonight I’ll finish Michael Strogoff, and then go to bed.

  2 The story to which Pitol is referring is “Nocturno de Buhara” [Bukhara Nocturne]. —Trans.

  3 Translated by David L. Frye.

  21 MAY

  The night before last, when I arrived at the hotel, a young man was waiting for me to hand deliver a very formal invitation from Georgi Markov, president of the Union of Soviet Writers, to lunch with him and other distinguished members of that institution on May 21, that is to say today. This morning, while eating breakfast, I ran into the same person. The first thing he said was that something terrible had happened. The Mexican ambassador had accepted the invitation days ago, but had suddenly cancelled, and sent word that he had another commitment at the same time. The young man asked me to try to convince him; with his presence, the ceremony would acquire greater importance. I told him, in a very cordial way, that none of that mattered. “In the invitation sent to Mexico, you noted that my visit had no official status; I was not invited as an ambassador nor as an official but as a writer. And I am very grateful for that gesture. What interests me most is literature.” “Allow me to inform you,” he interrupted, “that President Markov is the host. He rarely attends these events. His position, as you know, is of the same rank as Minister of Culture, surely you remember. The ambassador will have to attend. I can take you to the embassy.” “But how can you expect me to make that request? Did you not tell me that he has another engagement at that time?” “That is what he said, but we know he does not have another engagement. He will not tell you…” “No, look, I can’t help you. It would be an unforgivable impertinence. He is a very busy man, extremely busy, one of the busiest I know and I do not want to interrupt him. What interests me is to talk to the writers; rather, for them to tell me what is happening, what is being written now, what their readers think. In Prague there is enormous enthusiasm for this process. The government engages in self-criticism every day and every day there are new results. A Resurrection, thanks to your country.” Of course this was not true, in Prague the authorities were desperate. There was almost no mention of the USSR in the press or on television, but I could not resist the temptation to lie parodically. He wrinkled his face and returned to the charge. “What you are asking me to do is impossible,” I said. “I am an ambassador, but this is not my post, and the ambassador in Moscow could report me to Mexico for interfering in a sphere that is rightfully his. Do Soviet diplomats do things like this? You are the ones who can convince him. Talk to him politely, tactfully, why not ask the cultural attaché to intervene and convince him?” He left, and while I was finishing breakfast, he returned and said: “Your embassy’s minister, as chargé d’affaires, will represent the ambassador. Thank you for the suggestion.” We said goodbye. At noon, someone was coming to pick me up. I went out to walk the Gorky for a while. I read with interest the billboards of several theaters in the area. I bought newspapers at the Intourist, especially those from Italy, which cover this area better than any others, and returned to my room to make some notes. I have never met any of the high-ranking leaders of the Writers’s Union. Never was Markov present, not even when an important delegation arrived, Juan José Bremer as Director of Bellas Artes or Fernando Solana as Secretary of Education. I went several times to the Union’s restaurant, with the ambassador, a friend of many years, Rogelio Martínez Aguilar, who was interested in all aspects of that society, and fortunately in the world of culture in particular. Rogelio, as ambassador, was entitled to reserve a table there and invite writers, musicians, and filmmakers. I remember one occasion when he and his wife invited a married couple who were specialists in Mexican culture: Vera Kuteishchikova, a literature researcher, and her husband, Lev Ospovat, who had just published a biography of Diego Rivera, and me. The dining room was more animated than usual, normally there was no conversation at the tables, but they seemed to be unusually energized because of a literary scandal that had erupted a week or two before. A group of prominent writers, the most important of whom, if I remember correctly, were the poets Andrei Voznesensky and Bella Akhmadulina and the novelists Vasily Aksyonov, perhaps Fazil Iskander and Bulat Okudzhava, had edited a literary almanac. When the volume appeared a storm erupted. The Party ideologues considered it repugnant. Mikhail Suslov, the Torquemada of the Central Committee, expressed his rejection: in no way did that literature reflect the
Soviet image; quite the opposite, it portrayed a decadent and perverted world. For neglecting the ideological aspect, the hammer fell on the Writers’ Union, whose leadership redirected it fiercely against the implicated writers. They threatened the youngest ones with branding them as pornographers. In every newspaper and magazine, articles appeared with the usual cowardice, letters to the editor, all written following the same model, expressing astonishment, horror, anger, disgust, at the poisonous fruit of that nest of stateless degenerates who published their malignant writings at the expense of the money of the working people. The differences (if any) were minimal between a pensioner from Arkhangelsk, a retired military official from Leningrad, an engineer in Baku, a group of construction workers in northern Moscow, a photography club made up of widows on the island of Sakhalin, a few teachers from Odessa, a club of hunters from Omsk, a cell of pioneers from an island in the Arctic: all demanded the authorities take action on the matter and impose the appropriate punishment on the group of outcasts. There were of course punishments, two of the youngest, those labeled pornographers, if I remember correctly, were expelled from the Writers’ Union. Vasily Aksyonov resigned his membership in the Union and went into exile. The aforementioned evening when the Martínez Aguilars invited us to dinner, a couple entered suddenly: a still attractive woman of a certain age, with a beautiful smile, on the arm of a young man who looked more like a Hollywood heart-throb or famous athlete than a writer; we were all susceptible to the surprise caused by the appearance of the couple there. There was a moment of silence, followed by a brouhaha and frenetic movement. Vera Kuteshikova told us that the woman was Bella Akhmadulina, the former wife of Yevtushenko. The poet paused to greet a few friends, while attendees at several tables rose to pay tribute to the couple. I imagine there must have been faces full of hate, but I don’t remember seeing any, it certainly wasn’t the rule. “Was she not one of those implicated in this recent literary scandal?” Rogelio asked: “She seems not to be worried, does she?” And Vera responded, “What does she have to be worried about when she’s holding hands with Georgia’s Minister of Culture?” Then she and her husband explained that Georgia was becoming a sanctuary for Russians from Moscow or Leningrad. “Painters, scriptwriters, playwrights, anyone worthwhile can find protection in Georgia. But that the Minister of Culture himself would come to the Writers’ House to support a woman who has fallen out of favor is unheard of. I think Akhmadulina has roots in the Caucasus, in Georgia certainly; it is a way of protecting her.” “But why in Georgia?” I asked. “Because the Georgians are the most formidable people in the world,” she replied, “even though they can also be worse than the devil, we Russians know that very well.” I enjoyed the venue immensely. It was the former Palace of the Rostovs, yes, the same Rostovs of War and Peace. One of the best scenes in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also takes place there, precisely in that restaurant; Walter Benjamin dined there frequently during his stay in Moscow. On subsequent occasions, I was invited by writers and translators, or by employees whom I befriended, like Yuri Greyding, from the Spanish-American section, who on numerous occasions took me to little known neighborhoods of old Moscow or to visit writers he thought would interest me. On one occasion, we spent the morning, which I recall as one of the most remarkable of my life, in the house of Viktor Shklovsky, where he, with his more than eighty years, spoke passionately about the book he was writing at the time, Energy of Delusion, “The one I have most wanted to write, and has given me the most pleasure,” he told us, and then he talked to us at length about the morning Tolstoy died, when he was a student in Petersburg. The press has been ordered not to publish anything, not a single line about his death in the papers. Shklovsky walked out his front door and suddenly saw people vanish, businesses were closed in a matter of seconds, the carriages stopped. There was a majestic, sacred silence, as if the world had died, as if the earthly globe had stopped in its orbit, and then, suddenly, everywhere there appeared an inconsolable weeping multitude, ill with mourning, orphaned because their father had abandoned them. The churches had closed their doors so no one could enter; Tolstoy had been excommunicated many years before. But the crowd surrounded them, drowned them, rendered them trivial before the mighty oak that had fallen, the earth had died and Russia was in mourning. My visit with Shklovsky is one of the most intense, most lyrical, most exciting moments I can remember. Much later, on two occasions, when speaking of Tolstoy to my students, I began to repeat Shklovsky’s words, but I could not finish them. My eyes welled with tears, my voice cracked, and I had to take out my handkerchief and pretend to blow my nose, clear my throat, blaming it on a cold, allergies, because it seemed grotesque to announce the death of a Russian writer and start to cry. They arrived for me at one-thirty. For years the Union has been run by a handful of Stalinists, cynical, obtuse, and rapacious. They serve as the armed wing of the Party leadership. Having said that, almost every writer and translator is listed as members of the Union: the good, the bad, the terrible, the noble, and the vile. I was received by the capo, an elegant man, very European, some sixty-odd years old, along with five “writers” whose names I did not know. We waited for over half an hour for the minister from the embassy, killing time, talking about the weather, my experiences in Moscow as a cultural advisor, my travels at the time through some Soviet republics. They were all very convivial, but were annoyed by the delay of the Mexican diplomat. The time came when we went into an elegant private dining room in which I had never entered, we drank various kinds of vodka, all excellent, and like birds of prey we swooped on the delicacies—the zakuski—that the Russians devour as a prelude to the actual meal. A waiter removed the plate of the absent guest. Several details indicated that my prestige had fallen through the floor as a result of not being accompanied by any embassy official. Markov did not even hide his contempt; he barely spoke, and only indirectly, to his people, on matters related to the Union. I think when I said something he yawned. The others asked me about my favorite writers: I mentioned Gogol and Chekhov above all, then Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Bely. They made the obligatory comments—expendable and interchangeable—and fired off the appropriate quotes. Then, suddenly, there was movement, a young woman came in—it was the Mexican cultural attaché, apologizing for arriving late and bearing greetings from the ambassador, from the minister, from the entire staff of the mission of Mexico. The capo forced a cold smile, greeted her soberly, and gave her the cold shoulder throughout the meal. Little by little we inched toward the elephant in the room. I feigned absolute innocence, I treated them as if they were key agents of change and they shared my enthusiasm with equal zeal. I congratulated them. “It’s a big change, the whole world applauds it. The Soviets’ decision to take such a decisive step toward openness is being celebrated on Czechoslovakia and all over Europe. The Czechs informed me that your Union has played a significant role in the transition.” I continued talking, as if sure that perestroika and glasnost were their doing; as if they felt that the changes that had taken place would make their lives fuller, their work more productive, and their literature, their beloved literature, their true raison d’être. Not a single muscle twitched in their faces. I added that yesterday in Moscow I had heard that they were on the eve of a conference of the utmost importance, which would undoubtedly be as important as the one the filmmakers had held recently. The director was evidently furious, the others looked at each other, puzzled, not knowing what to say. Markov finally responded to my provocations, saying that in the USSR cinema and literature inhabit different spheres, their infrastructure is not the same, nor is their space of reception. Russian literature did not require transformations, it was very rich in form and in content. Foreigners had managed to introduce germs of debauchery, distortions, a cloud of dangerous anarchy to the country; but fallacies like these would not prosper at any time. “Of course,” he underscored with emphasis, “we do not defend the anachronistic, society would not allow it; we are current, we know we must be, but in our own way and not tha
t of others who think they know better than we what we need.” Now truly furious, he added, addressing the writers present, as if reprimanding them, that fortunately the Ukrainian delegation would be the largest at the Conference, so he was sure that Soviet literature would never be defeated, that it would maintain its dignity, its noble mission, its commitment to the nation, as in its best moments. And with that we stopped drinking our coffee, he stood up, said goodbye with distant civility and left, accompanied by three of his retinue, who were so outraged that they did not even extend their hand as they said goodbye. The other two escorted us to the door. One of them told me that he had written a book on Gogol and that he found it interesting that a Mexican was so enthusiastic about him, the most Russian narrator of all. “About Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov one could understand: they are so very Russian, of course, but their problems are universal. Gogol is also, but less obviously so; he’s like a snail stuck to the most recondite wall of the Slavic labyrinth. The best book on Gogol is Bely’s,” he added. “He published it in 1933, it was a miracle that it appeared even then, the year in which socialist realism became indispensable, and the book by Bely, fortunately, was completely the opposite, an explosion of imagery, discoveries. Hopefully,” he added, “now that taboos are beginning to fall the book will reappear.” We parted on friendly terms. I imagine that these two members of the leadership will not join the Ukrainians. I took a nap. I woke up depressed; perhaps I was too rude. If someone is invited to eat and accepts, he should be polite. If someone participates in a conference, a symposium, a roundtable, then he is entitled to say what he thinks, even if it proves to be annoying to others. But then I remembered Markov, those career inquisitors, profiteers, petty tyrants, the heirs of those who tortured and killed Babel, Pilnyak, Mirsky, Mandelstam, the great man of the theater who was Vsevolod Meyerhold, and persecuted Pasternak horribly, and Akhmatova and Platonov and so many others, and I felt a sense of satisfaction for having said what I said, and I thought it was not enough. Perestroika is beginning to work on me.