The first book by Sergio Chejfec that I read was Lenta biografía. As soon as I finished it, I started it again from the beginning. I suppose this second, pleasant, rewarding reading was due to how much I was impressed, intrigued, and moved by the resources that the narrator used to stage the ardent attempts to recover the minute details of the memory of the Argentine Jews, who escaped from Russia before (let’s not forget the pogroms of Tsarist Russia), during, and after the harassment and persecutions of the Second World War and Stalin’s antisemitism. Having lost both the locus of their birth and that of their blood, they lacked reference points, evocative anchors, fathers, mothers, brothers, witnesses to turn to in order to refresh (through speculation as the only solemn option) hopeless, desolate traces of memories, which are quite possibly permanently lost. After the second reading, which was more attentive and careful but no less passionate, for the simple reason that we writers learn from other writers, I had the feeling of having been reading a short story, a chronicle, or a dramatic scene derived from one of those works of Kafka authenticated by the purity, sobriety, and procedural autonomy of its beautiful, melancholy, doubtful, and, at times, cutting prose.

A few days ago, reading El evangelio histriónico (El Taller Blanco Ediciones, Bogotá, 2019, p. 70) by Luis Moreno Villamediana, I confirmed what I had perceived on that occasion and on subsequently reading all of Sergio’s books: that he traced an active path as a continuation of real and ideal pre-existing authors and literary themes. Even in critical essays, which can be considered other stories, like, for example, the surprisingly incisive and original essay—if it can even be classified as an essay—Sobre Giannuzzi, characterised by the subtlety and unemphatic knowledge with which Sergio delves into the biography of the great Argentine poet Joaquín Giannuzzi in relation to the most typical elements of his poetry. 

Like his essays, his short stories and novels transgress the narrow limits of the narrative canon in the opposite direction, through their theoretical-reflexive inclination and orientation, not as an attack, but rather with affability and courtesy. 

Referring to the manner in which Chejfec and Alan Pauls make use of ellipses between square brackets, in El evangelio histriónico, L. M.V. observes, “such use transforms entire sections into addenda, clearly present side comments, the reality of the text, as retrospection: someone has opened a previously-closed manuscript and has set about extending the narration” (my emphasis). L. M.V. calls this manuscript, following Goethe, the Ur-text, the primordial text, the originary text, that which precedes, heralds, and provides the exploratory prototype for all those that appear after… Take El punto vacilante, Baroni: un viaje (which as well as fiction is an aesthetic treatise), Teoría del ascensor (which alternates fiction and poetics), the extraordinary Últimas noticias de la escritura, or the varied collection of essays and writings under the title El visitante, in which Chejfec proposes to question and clarify his poetics.

So, then, reading El evangelio histriónico by Luis Moreno Villamediana corroborated that my initial approach to Sergio’s work, comprised of some twenty books, according to my calculations, was on the right path. From then on, everything that Chejfec would write, as many careful readers would soon note, would advance in the direction of a sort of superimposition and extension of an ideal text as a performative act of writing, dependent, in its turn, on an actualizing speech act. That first challenging read produced in me the feeling of reading something that came from and continued the sober, distant, digressive, slowed down prosody of Kafka in relation with his surroundings, each consubstantiated in the other, like two sides of the same coin.

Sergio Chejfec is one of the few philosopher novelists, Luis Chitarroni affirms. And it is precisely this condition of philosopher novelist that stands out, although I would prefer to call him a philosophical, meditative, inquiring, reasoning writer, rather than a novelist, because in a strict sense I do not believe he is one. Like The Trial or The Castle, for their startling singularity and consubstantiation with the real, despite undoubtedly being fictions, I struggle to call his books novels. 

In Sergio’s case, the blueprint is broken by the quantity of literary genres he encompasses, combines, interlinks, and transgresses—a recognisable rupture in the calm, circumspect mood of the unhurried narrator, in his need to make himself present on the basis of what his own experience has brought to him. Precisely for this reason, his narrative paradigm comes across as partial, unresolved, unsure, fluctuating, conjectural when faced with unknown, ambiguous, confused, enigmatic, almost indiscernible situations or gestures. The attention, the state of alertness demanded by everything that he encounters in the space-time coordinates of his urban paths and itineraries—think of Mis dos mundos—is what gives his writing a character of inquiry, of putting to the test his heart-rending relationship with the strangeness and foreignness of those people who appear in his path, from whom he would like, question by question, to elucidate more of their painful lives.

In addition, in his unwavering need for precision and exactitude, whatever the certainties and demands of the genre in which methodically, substantially, deliberately, and/or randomly he needs to intervene, we commonly find doubtful and never conclusive phrases: I don’t know, maybe, perhaps, who knows?, I’m unaware, probably, could be, it seemed to me, might, I’m not sure…  From book to book, they impose themselves like a languid mark of identity upon his dialogic literary project or, in a wider sense, his goal of an aesthetic lineage. These are all characteristics that, moreover, lend his prose a density and a passionately questioning, enveloping rhythm, never losing sight of the presence of the external reader as the attendant destination of his writing, nor that of the author doubled as a reader of the signs and complexities of his adventures.

The process always goes in the direction mentioned above. While each book passes from one topic to another, the affinities between them are undeniable. But, while many authors write almost the same book over and over again—which is valid—for as many lines of approach to a theme as he may take, Sergio’s innovations, variations, and thematic revisions go hand in hand with his modifications of structure—let’s call it that—established from the beginning until the culmination of his last uninterrupted works in the service of literature.

Translated by Katie Brown

Photo: Argentine author Sergio Chejfec, courtesy of Graciela Montaldo.

“Genres have no other function, for the writer, than giving him something concrete to abandon”
César Aira

“In ordering things, I believe and understand at the same time… To order is to find the best form […] Ordering the form?”
Clarice Lispector

“The terrible glory of being alive is the horror”
Clarice Lispector

The first time that I heard of the writer Clarice Lispector must have been around the mid to late seventies. It was through my friend Elizabeth Burgos, who lived in Paris (from before the age of eighteen, if I am not mistaken ) and came regularly to Venezuela to visit friends and family in Caracas and in her hometown, Valencia. Elizabeth, who was and is a great reader, kept me well informed of books and writers. I trusted her judgement and standards, given that they had never disappointed me. Because of her, I came to the revelation of the great Russian writers and poets, Marina Tsvietáieva, Pasternak, Anna Ajmátova, Ósip Mandelshtam, Nina Berberóva, whom I could begin to read from the early eighties in French or Italian, when they hadn’t quite or had only just started to be published in Spanish. Ah, and I had forgotten, also to the reading of Joseph Brodsky’s essays brought together in Lejos de Bizancio (Fayard, 1986), as well as his poetry, in excellent translations, celebrated by Brodsky himself, from Italian.

During of one of her trips, Elizabeth gave me a brief but evocative biographical review of a peculiar Brazilian writer, born in Ukraine during the turbulent journey made by her family, already fleeing the horror of the ‘Pogroms’ and determined to take every risk necessary to  emigrate to America, with a child who was barely two years old when they landed in Maceió, in the northeast of Brazil, before moving on to Recife. Elizabeth told me everything about La pasión según G.H. (The Passion According to G.H., 1964). Not long after, I listened to Marta Traba (at the Escuela de Arte of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where they both taught) refer to Lispector with the same outpouring of enthusiasm, diligent promoter as she was of the wealth and breadth of the early Brazilian modernist movements (literature, sculpture, music, painting and architecture), initiated at the historic ‘Semana de Arte Moderno’ (Week of Modern Art) in São Paulo or ‘Semana del 22.’

The Passion According to G.H. was published by Monte Ávila in 1969, magnificently translated by Luis García Gayó; respectful of the singularities of her style and of the syntactical construction of her language. I read the translation in the late seventies or early eighties. Not before, simply because I was not aware that it already formed part of the state publisher’s catalogue (besides, in lockdown times, chronological precision has become very difficult for me). I was rather moved by this discovery. I read it as if in a trance, probably three times in the subsequent years, continuing over time with the combination of her previous and later masterpieces to end with her extraordinary and posthumous La hora de la estrella (The Hour of the Star). I should clarify that my generation, to my knowledge (perhaps with a few exceptions), had not paid great attention to Brazilian literature, due to carelessness, ignorance, self-sufficiency, or in other words, to not looking further than our borders until just a few decades ago, or perhaps more truthfully, until even more recently.

In those years, Brazil, despite occupying half the area of the whole of South America, seemed to us in some way as another continent, another linguistic hegemony beyond the dividing line, an almost impassable barrier determined by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which only began to be overcome thanks to the pioneering inter-American project (universal, some classified it) of Biblioteca Ayacucho, led by Ángel Rama and José Ramón Medina, formalised in September 1974, that had by 1982 achieved a corpus of one hundred well curated volumes.

Which masterpieces by Brazilian authors did we read in those years? In my case: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Machado de Assis, the first title from Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas in 1963; the short novel Barren Lives, in an edition by Casa de las Américas in 1964, by  Graciliano Ramos, a northeasterner like our author; some poetry by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, as well as the epic The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Guimarães Roas, full of literary and sometimes mythical ontological references, in the edition by Seix Barral (1975). In the eighties: Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha from Biblioteca Ayacucho, motivated by the recreation of the Canudos War in the novel La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World) by Mario Vargas Llosa, and some poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto associated with the prosaic rigour and the rejection of the musical dimension that ran through lyric poetry. Either way, I would have preferred a much less condensed list.

On the other hand, we were shaken by the hidden and incontestable tensions that invigorated the oral intonation of the written language of Brazil, whose divergences characterised the prevalence of spoken over written expression, in regionally delimited areas in Brazil, contraposed with the grammatical rigidity of the classical tradition. We also must not forget that at that time, there were not many more authors that were accessible to us translated into Spanish either. Bridges did exist, above all in the South with Argentina and Uruguay, but interaction with the editorial industry of the continent and that of Spain is rather recent. It is to be appreciated that at present Ediciones Siruela’s Biblioteca Clarice Lispector, founded in 1982, fulfils this commitment by including twelve titles of her oeuvre: chronicles, stories, novels, correspondence, as well as her complex and superb posthumous novel, The Hour of the Star.

At this point I would like to refer to an article by César Aira, which I read a few days ago, while I tried to redo our itinerary of readings and which corroborates that disinterest of readers not only from Venezuela, but also, estimating that being closer they would have to be more attuned, of the Southern Cone countries. Aira refers to the ignorance not only of the average reader of the richness of Brazilian literature; ductile, pluralistic in the miscegenation and diversity of its origins, ‘so fundamental in the making’ of that nation. He then refers to  Borges, who neither frequented nor enjoyed writers such as Álvares de Azevedo or Machado de Assis, who would have given him ‘a much richer idea of the power of a minor literature’ (my emphasis).

It must also be taken into account that Brazilians speak and make themselves understood in Spanish, whereas we, when it comes to them, are guilty of sinful indifference, in understanding very little or almost nothing of Brazilian Portuguese.

The story of The Passion According to G.H. is tiny; the protagonist and narrator, G.H. (a woman who lives in a vast penthouse in an affluent neighbourhood, an amateur sculptor, associated with Rio de Janeiro’s highest society), enters with fright and horror the room no longer occupied by the mixed-race maid, that unwelcome but indispensable servant-housekeeper, an intruder whose name she cannot even remember, who has vacated the place that she occupied in G.H’s house; such a foreign and strange place, a kind of forbidden territory, one which she had never felt the slightest of curiosity to look into before and which, as was her duty as mistress and owner of the house, she is obliged to clean and order, sanitise and organise.

In her novels, her stories, and even her chronicles, Clarice Lispector breaks from the outright domestic, from the home as a refuge of intimacy in opposition to public space, from the sensitively private, at the same time painful and dark, to launch herself into exploring the twists and turns of the experience of thought; to think with pleasure and imagination, to think suspiciously and speculatively, to think ironically and obliquely through the intermediation of the epiphanic power of emotions and intuitions. Her writing is pure sound; we feel as though we hear a voice whose frequency speaks and reverberates inside our heads, a voice that imposes itself upon us with its linguistic games, with its faltering recital, with its melancholy and languid accents, forcing itself to express what is most difficult to express, twisting grammar to articulate and enunciate the matter of its language from the mystical and illuminated seal of Judaism, in order to enter and leave simultaneously further inside and outside in her perception of her own body, of objects, of living things that make up the world and to make her own the greatest adventure of fatal and threatening solemnity of the genesis narrated in the Old Testament…

G.H. enters the bedroom, opens the wardrobe door, sees a cockroach; terrorised, she slams it shut, squashes the cockroach, watches elated how the matter slips away, the most exclusive part of organic life. With all her repugnance, she ingests it. She engulfs, devours it in her challenge to assume her impure animal condition, which had not yet been shown to her and in which she had not recognised herself until that moment. There is no other less brutal way to say it. Some critics speak of an existential nausea, under the influence of Sartre’s Nausea. I do not believe so; in his journey Sartre did not dare to lose himself so much as to confront himself with the unknown, in order to pursue much-feared and longed-for freedom. Compared with The Passion According to G.H., Nausea, a metaphysical, abstract nausea, is more or less a parable for young ladies. In any case, in an interview Lispector herself assured that she had neither read nor been influenced by existentialism, that hers was an eternal physical nausea, not philosophical.

In those first readings, if someone had asked me what The Passion According to G.H. was about (it is difficult for me to call it a novel, in the same way that it is difficult for me, a profanity almost, to call Kafka’s The Castle or The Trial novels), I would have responded that The Passion According to G.H. concentrates wholly on denying the ontological, and, more prosaically, psychological principle of identity, that principle that builds everything on the first person singular: I. And in return, on the inescapable condemnation of facing our unknown self, in passing through the secure, the stable, the defined and definitive that we felt ourselves to be but weren’t, to the stupor of the unknown, another trajectory of  discovery. Her friends Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Guimarães Rosa (for whose work she felt an undoubted affinity and great admiration, having read it in 1956), Lucio Cardoso, Olga de Sá, opportunely qualified Lispector’s thoughts as ‘ontological questioning.’

In the first and subsequent readings, with some months of intervals, I tried to summarize in a few words what this peculiar and exquisite, in my way of seeing and reading, work consists of: a masterpiece which transgressed, with such naturalness and without a trace of self-consciousness, all the genres and precepts of the canon. It was then that I realised that it was precisely this transgression of genres, through unconscious combination and fluency (at least in the first attempt), which would configure the abundantly elaborate structure of The Passion According to G.H. That every chapter, or fragment—if we are allowed to call them such, since there are no chapters in the usual sense of the term—resumes itself, shutting itself down, reviving itself, identifying itself with the conclusive phrase, sentence almost, of the previous chapter, results in a potent stylistic resource in a constant process of recreating itself. As well as coming close to Quodlibet, that compositional procedure derived from choral music that combines different voices and melodies in counterpoint with popular themes, with variations and repetitions with minor changes of a simple form. Think of its similarity to the effect of the final repetitions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

The variations represent caesura, interruptions of rhythmical transport, of lucid lances, voluptuous phrasing, reflexive pauses between each and every variation, as an incitement to reflect. The chapters, the fragments, are in turn formed by paragraphs and each paragraph has a beginning, a middle, a climax, a coda, like how waves at the beach go to die. Before an outcome, a curl, a final flourish, a conclusive closure, in the style of the incomparably beautiful and sharp final verses of the poems of the mature Baudelaire.

Translated by Amy Watts and Katie Brown

Amy Watts is currently pursuing an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Exeter, UK, working from Spanish into English. She previously attended the University of Sussex, UK, where she earned a BA in English Literature. She has previously lived in Buenos Aires and Barcelona and is now based in the UK.

Recently, I have begun to doubt whether I can rightly say that my mother tongue—the one that I feel is part of my identity—is Italian, and my acquired language is Spanish. I use the term “language” here because that which one gains after arduous hours, days, months, years, is a language more than a second tongue, which would make that person perfectly bilingual. It is a legitimate question, as I am not bilingual. I can read in Italian with pleasure and without any major difficulty, I like Italian literature and poetry very much, but I cannot speak it with ease, much less without a foreign accent. It is not the language in which I express myself fluently and spontaneously, it is not the one that rises straight to my lips in intellectually challenging conversations or moments of particular intimacy. I arrived in Venezuela in 1946, shortly after the war. I was six years old, I had yet to learn how to read and write. When she enrolled me in school, the headmistress told my mother that they would have to catch me up with reading and writing during the holidays, otherwise I would have to repeat the year. That responsibility fell on my sister, Luciana, who was only eight herself: a child teaching another child. Learning to read required a great effort from me, differentiating the sound and the spelling of consonants was a real torture. I agonized, thinking that I would never learn, that I would end up illiterate forever, which, given the way my mother pronounced the term, represented the utmost ignorance and incivility. My sister would sometimes lose patience, but, fortunately, she would regain it and continue to teach me calmly and stoically. And I, with great anxiety and few hopes, fought on. One afternoon, I remember, I went to the cinema with my siblings and, to my joy and surprise, I could read the subtitles on the screen. I returned home beaming with happiness, I felt blessed. I began to read everything I passed, the names of streets, of buildings, of houses, public notices. From that moment, I never let a day go by without reading: at night, in bed, as I had seen my father do, or in the evening, when I would study and do my homework. Around age ten or eleven, I got into the habit of consulting the dictionary and even reading it with gusto. I would always carry a pencil and a notebook, in which I would jot down new words, unknown words, words I had never heard before. I even tried to write verses or what I believed were verses, which together formed stanzas, sequences of phrases that in turn would form stories. In other words, all of my education, from elementary school to university, was in Spanish. If language is the border that confers an identity on the spiritual level, wrote Cioran, then abandoning one’s language entails giving oneself another border, and therefore, another definition; in other words, changing identity.

Many, many years later, after an informal talk with a group of students at the university, one asked me about the difficulties I experienced learning Spanish when I first arrived in Venezuela. I replied offhand that I had not even noticed the moment I switched from Italian to Spanish. From one week to the next I had friends, I chatted, played ball games with them, I had no trouble doing my homework, I made some spelling mistakes, just a few, but those few embarrassed me, they made me feel the shame of not belonging, they pushed me never to repeat them, I made plans for myself. “So there was no trauma?” he asked. “No,” I replied, and then fell silent for a moment, thinking. “Perhaps,” I said, caught by a sudden revelation, almost as if I were talking to myself about something I had never thought before: the trauma lay precisely in my categorical rejection of any trauma.

Now, after mulling it over, I have reached the conclusion that the wound, although veiled and kept back, is still open and will always be there. The native tongue, that of our origin and family environment, remains inside, stuck to our skin, running through our veins. Without a doubt, while I did not experience the great journey as an exile, my parents and probably my slightly older siblings, if to a lesser extent, certainly did. Above all, for my father, a man in his fifties who maintained a nostalgia for the places of his youth, the culture, the music, the literature of his country, the beautiful cities in which he had lived: Naples, Livorno, Milan, Venice, where he met and married by mother, Rome, where we spent the harsh final years of the war.

Undoubtedly, through a survival instinct, people cling on to the surroundings in which they find themselves, they are nourished at the expense of their environment, they want, they need to occupy it. In this way, convinced that to write in a language you have to know it well, and with the enthusiastic desire of a teenager, I began to lavish on Spanish all the loving care demanded by the spirit, intention, and genius of the language from which, even without knowing it, but already sensing it, I would throw myself into the adventure of expressing myself in novels, essays, and other writing. Did this mean a change of identity for me? In a way, yes. However, Italian had not disappeared, it was rooted in the deepest part of me, it flowed, it moved below. As I grew up, I would switch my reading from Spanish to Italian, from Italian to French and Spanish. Moreover, during my studies of philosophy, I used books from the Italian publishing house Laterza, specialists in philosophy, whose translations were highly regarded. I still have on my bookshelf Metaphysics and On the Soul by Aristotle, some of Plato’s dialogues, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, all in Italian translation.

Spanish is, without doubt, the language of my identity. However, as Canetti called the Judaeo-Spanish of his childhood the saved language, I would call my saved language the fruit of the linguistic and cultural space of my mother tongue.

After this digression, there is a question that I keep asking myself. Did my inclination to write—the word vocation has a hint of romanticism that does not convince me—derive from those exercises I wrote and erased, wrote and crossed out, drafted and redrafted, over and again, to which I was subjected in order to master the jolts and thrusts of the language? Or was it because that inclination was already in me that I put so much effort into appropriating it? It is difficult to determine whether it was the former or the latter, but in the end, this is unimportant.

What is important is the balance over time. If someone writes, perseveres for days, months, years, decades, if that someone does not capitulate, even without greater success or recognition, she can be called a writer. If throughout the duration of her life, the writer becomes convinced that language does not belong to her, but that she belongs to it, to its history, as a tiny and fleeting glint of the stormy current of life, then she can calmly say that even in that tiny and fleeting way her existence will have had a place in it.

Translated by Katie Brown

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At seven, she learns to read and write in Caracas, with many difficulties. She believes that she will never learn to read, Ls and Ms torture her. She goes to school, after her first sobs, she chats to friends, she picks up the local speech, but never too local. She regrets not having learned more than one language fully, but the fusion of both worlds burrowed away on its own accord. At nine, she recites in silence, she does not know in which voice or which language, perhaps in the language of the mind that, like a musical score, virtually expands that which is within, behind, and above languages.

One Sunday in 1950, she reads the headlines in the newspaper that her father had sent her to buy from the Viennese bakery, two blocks from their house. War Breaks Out in Korea. (She does not have the slightest memory, however, of the Hiroshima bomb). Terrified, she runs home to share the news. Her mother calms her down, telling her that this war is very far away, that nothing will happen to them. There is an atlas in the house. She enjoys looking at it. The Pacific Ocean, that is where the war is. She reads the names of cities: Tokyo, Hiroshima, Guadalcanal, Madras, Bombay, Shanghai. From the Pacific to the Atlantic: Dakar, Porto Alegre, Bahía, La Asunción. At 12, she keeps a diary, for a short time. While recovering from mumps, she makes herself comfortable in the bed that she is forbidden from leaving, to write, surrounded by books, a verbose epic poem about Emperor Constantine, six stanzas; it does not matter that they barely rhyme, the joy, the creative spasm of the poem is what counts. She has a weakness for words that sound exotic: incólume (unscathed), aldabas (doorknockers), séquito (retinue), cáliz (goblet), plugo al cielo (please the Lord).

Later she increases her vocabulary through nocturnal reading of the ultimate authority: the dictionary. She fills notebooks with these words. She tries to describe the African tulip that she can see from the window of her classroom, the bucare trees of the Santa Lucía hacienda where she spends the holidays, the damage caused when the River Tuy burst, a runaway mare, the skin left in the bath by a sea sponge as if by a ghost, the abandoned mill, the slaughterhouse, the donkey rides, bathing in the river, the cycling trips to Fila de Mariches, the coffee-drying yards, the fireflies in the pitch black of the countryside as the night stretches on—all in her inadequate, childish language. She still believes in the totality of the linguistic system. She still believes that she only needs to get older to master the required register and the proper meaning of all her references. She still believes that she only needs to become an adult to overcome her insecurities and uncertainties. At 13 years old, for the moment, she still trusts that it is only a matter of growing up and buying time. But time, in turn, will soon cut her and her false, rustic, and naïve beliefs down to size.

So time passes

In the end, there will be nine siblings. If it were not for one lost, they would have been ten. Her friends, whose families do not exceed three or four members, envy her. She grows day by day. At 14, she is over five foot five, in a perfectly childlike body.

From 17, she writes. Sometimes she lets her prey loose. Sometimes she has the pleasure of seeing it return. That is how it will be throughout the years, watching her prey leave and return. At 22, resting her head on her hand, she reflects on prose fiction. As a result of this meditation (translated to today’s reflections), she conceives of prose as a prolonged unfurling of various crossroads and their respective discourses: that of the outcome following a work-in-progress, that of the minimal spatial and descriptive units, as functions of the appropriation of qualitative differences in the world, that of the relationship with the present as a moment of subjective lyrical immersion during which the substance of experience is discovered and concealed in inverse relation to its practical ends. The course of the action, the description, the lyrical descent: narration as a contest between a multiplicity of modalities that, in the interest of objectivity, cannot and should not be left aside. Not to mention the syntactic-prosodic modulation, with its connectives, its disjunctives, its adverbs, its emphases, its pauses, its shocks, its jolts, which accompany the waterline below which run the omissions, entire chunks of silenced, transitory material, the constellations, the counterweights. According to Quintilian, the master of rhetoric, the rhythm of prose is more difficult than that of poetry. That may be so, it may not be. But all that Marcus Fabius Quintilianus says is that the rhythm is more difficult, not prose in itself. All living art, all everlasting and shifting art, is complicated.

The fact that the action progresses does not mean that you are any closer to the finish line. You do not arrive any sooner for going quickly. You only have to arrive—how and in how many steps, through how many cunning diversions, will depend on the way in which the individual elements of the experience are stretched or compressed through the words used and by the connective force of the sentences linking expression to meaning. Only these, on the margin of any canon, if there were one, dictate the intervals into which their sequences will settle: temporal sequences, atemporal sequences, and spatial sequences at their ebbs and flows; as if saying, on earth and in heaven, on flat land and rugged terrain.

Prose is like Ulysses’ voyage back to Ithaca after the fall of Troy, told and sung by the aoidos. Homer selects episodes, abstracts, refines, adds, assembles, and chooses intervals of time to transform them into tensions, surprises, enigmas, and adventures. But Ulysses, the man heading towards his fate—a fate which, before it can be heard, read or sung, can only be lived—is not spared one instance (one deprivation) of the journey for which there is a date of departure and the fact, though not yet resolved or even established, of his arrival.

In between, there are years of irreducible needs, hours, days, weeks of tactical movements, crossings without breaks, crossings that do not slip away as instantly and definitively as water through your fingers. Of all its resources—and prose has made full use of every means available to it—the most typical and unavoidable is the delay born from the need to postpone, to prepare and to intensify the climax, the broad and regular development of its temporal conventions, the alternation, for this same end, between modes of exposition and vehicles of expression. These cannot be counted in page numbers, but in the weight and sum of all those accumulated along the path, whose limits—given that every path followed can lead to the start of another, that is how stories are made—both the narrator and the reader, so close to each other that their gasping voices blend together, still do not know.

Caracas, October 2004

Extract from the essay ‘Su vida’ [Her life], which appears in the book La refiguración del viaje [Reimagining the journey], Mérida, Venezuela: Instituto de Investigaciones Literarias Gonzalo Picón Febres, 2005

Translated by Katie Brown

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Carmen de Eusebio: Victoria, you were born in Italy, at the age of 6 you moved to Venezuela and during long periods of time you had to live in many other countries and cities: Havana, Paris, Barcelona, Algiers, Chile. You know firsthand what exile and wandering mean. Could you tell us what those circumstances have represented for you and in your work?

Victoria de Stefano: I maintain very vividly the memory of the first trip a little more than a year after the war ended, passing from Rome, where I was living with my parents and my four siblings, to Naples, where my grandmother, my great grandmother and my aunt resided facing Mt. Vesuvius with its impressing smoking crater, to take the American Navy warship, precariously equipped for passengers, that would carry us to New York. After a week spent in New York, we flew to the airport of Maiquetía, our final destination, with a layover in Miami. That long trip by sea and by airplane I remember as an event loaded with the most varied and contradictory feelings, anxiety, dread, fear of the unknown, the airplane, the sea, the shipwrecks, but as the little girl that I was what most excited me was the idea of initiating myself in the great adventure of passage through the Atlantic to a new continent and a new life. On the other hand, I wasn’t indifferent to the pain of separation from their own that I perceived in my parents, especially in Papa upon seeing a tear fall when he said good-bye to his mother and his grandmother, whom he adored, without knowing if he would see them again. But the experience of the journey as adventure, that was always present in  me, I later transferred to the readings and fantasies that arose in the novels of Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling: the fervor for reading perhaps began motivated by the journey, as a way to give it form and make sense of the break from the culture of the country torn apart by the war that it came from, and in some way to prepare the way for the encounter with the new. Precisely I read passionately The Mighty Orinoco, because my Papa used to tell us about the rivers, the jungles, the animals of the novel that he had read shortly before we traveled. Later that fundamental taste, basic, for the journey through the tropical jungle persisted with Doña Bárbara: A Novel, The Vortex and Deep Rivers by Arguedas. And when I was older I talked with my Friends that had supposedly had “normal” childhoods (lastly, “normal” childhoods are more infrequent), it seemed to me that I had double the experiences as them, that I had lived much more than them, but obviously, that immodest presumption I kept to myself. I tried to live the other exiles with the same brave attitude, I was still rather young, we know of the strength and vigor of youth, nevertheless, they were hard, with two young children, not poverty, but scarce resources, little help, solitude. I endured them by reading a lot, walking through the park hand in hand with my children, trying to write in the evenings, reading in French while they were sleeping, I got to reading it without the slightest difficulty, although the pronunciation was difficult for me. In that time, I read In Search of Lost Time and almost all The Human Comedy, I even read Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the kiosks in the metro and in the train stations were full of marvelous books at a very low cost. In the diary there are many references to that period in Paris. While I was writing it, the memories, emotional memories of friends and circumstances from that period bombarded me constantly. Paris was not a party, but it was a Discovery, especially of museums, of painting, that fascinated me, of parks, forests.

CdE: Venezuela is the country where you live, from where you feel, and where you have lived many difficult moments. What do you think about the current situation?

VdS: Exiles have always existed; the world has been and is less stable than what one still in that period believed. I would like to remember that in those years we still carried the conviction, Hegelian dialectic, to call it something, but it reality, common to almost all thought in the 19^th century and part of the 20^th, that the absolute spirit, the history, the scientific discoveries, in the last instance, the civilization achieved, went hand in hand with progress and the future. Nevertheless, if we think about the first five, six decades of the past century, as a small measure, with two world wars, genocides, extermination camps, gulags, bloodbaths, purges, famines, upheavals, confinements, expatriations of entire peoples the Great Jump Forward, the cultural revolution, the atomic weapons we didn’t have a way to justify such optimism.

I include myself among them that at the beginning didn’t believe we could get all the way to this disaster, we saw it, we felt it advance, it affected us profoundly, and even so it seemed impossible to us, but we didn’t take long to be contradicted by reality. Forty years of democracy, we said to ourselves, so, like that, wiped out, as if a fiction could be eliminated with a snap of the fingers… it couldn’t be true. The older adults had more conscience, I’m thinking about those that came from the Gómez dictatorship, although they were very young, or that simply had suffered it through the persecutions, the exiles, the imprisonments, the torture of relatives and acquaintances. The history of the country, the old and renewed sorrows that they carried on their shoulders obligated them to be less gullible. Once that story finished, son they faced the dictatorship of General Pérez Jiménez. And at the end of the nineties appeared the fundamentalists and our usual suspects…

CdE: When someone talks to us about the writing of a diary we immediately speculate about the motives that they have to write them, and we hope to find in them the attitude of the author about life. In the reading of your Diarios (1988-1989) [Diaries] La insubordinación de los márgenes [The insubordination of the margins], the authenticity is the first thing that traps us. What difference exists between authenticity and sincerity?

VdS: The diaries I wrote, as I explained in the prologue, to not lose the habit and the desire to write, finally, I liked to write, although it was for a few hours each day while I was going through some exhausting circumstances at work and in some way the emptiness that finalizing a novel had produced in me, a novel that was very difficult to publish and that I had already lost hope that I would be able to achieve. But as I kept writing I felt that the writing of the diary proposed for me, on the one hand, a style a more certain syntax, a sharper timbre, an air, the vibration of a tune, to say it musically, more personal, at the time that a greater challenge in the comprehension of what surrounded me, and I observed privately and silently. Also, the diary-writing was turning out to be enriching in reference to the loose notes here and there about intense reading, if well disciplined, demanded by the preparation of aesthetics classes and about theories and dramatic structures. I read almost all the philosophers and thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D`Alembert, the brothers Grimm, also Germans, of course, Goethe, Schiller, especially on the topic of the aesthetic. I read a lot of drama, that on the contrary perhaps I would not have read with such dedication Shakespeare, Moliére, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Ionesco, Beckett, from whom I learned so much of the craft (more than what I could have imagined at the beginning). Soon I understood that the diary was a path of opening, an awakening of my interest for what was occurring outside of my immediate surroundings, of the country and in other places of the world. For me, seeing it in retrospect, it marked a change in the extent that it drove me to a much wider formal freedom and verbal intonation that I had not known nor enjoyed in the writing of my previous novels. In particular it took me to El lugar del Escritor [The place of the writer], a Historias de la marcha a pie [Stories of the march on foot], Lluvia [Rain] and so on in succession. I felt that with the writing of the diary I was liberating myself of a kind of straightjacket, I was liberating myself of many restrictions and insecurities.

In the diaries, as much as in my novels, I always leaned more towards authenticity than towards sincerity. I don’t believe my diary was confessional, a few fits of sincerity are revealed here and there, but no more. But everything that I write I make sure is genuine, in the sense of something lived. I believe that the excess of sincerity is fought with the empathy and the compassion we should embrace in order to understand our fellowman.

CdE: In the writing of the Diarios, apparently, it doesn’t seem that the author is conditioned by the reading public. Was that so?

VdS: I have never written anything based on the reader. None of my books, I believe not even the essays, has been conditioned by the reading public. Since I began to write, I did that, intuitively, not deliberately, based on myself as a writer and reader, not based on my empirical or psychological self, I believe that is what we could define as authenticity. But if I didn’t write based on the reader, if I found and I assumed that freedom so difficult to achieve, it wasn’t by virtue, but for the simple reason that to publish in those years of youth and even in those years of maturity was almost a miracle and also even if I was publishing I had very few readers. Only a few friends that had faith in me, counted on the fingers of my hands. The faith of my friends was able to move mountains. I believe that’s even why the will, the determination, the desire, whatever you want to call it, rarely abandoned me. In that I was fortunate. Never did something pass through my head even remotely similar to the worldly satisfaction of success. I could fantasize about writing what in the old days they called a great book, a great novel, a fresco, a saga, but not about anything like Rilke in the extraordinary, in the incomparable prose (“prose is the idea of poetry”, Walter Benjamin) of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which not even in dreams did I aspire to approach, I used to designate melancholically…the fame, that public demolition. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge I read it so many times in the refined and elegant and in my opinion unbeatable translation by Francisco Ayala from Alianza Tres, that of the book only pieces remained. The same thing happened with Nightwood by Djuna Barnes in the edition from Monte Ávila.

CdE: Another of the features of the Diarios is the admirable energy and determination with which it was carried out, in spite of the adverse circumstances in which you found yourself. What were you looking for with this writing?

VdS: I believe that in some way I already responded to this. Writers are more than going out to search jump into the encounter of whatever comes their way. We writers without a doubt compose, but we don’t plan, nor do we rationalize too much, at least not in the beginnings of the process of formation. Readings, age, intersubjective relationships, experiences, go imposing changes in us, sometimes profound, even radical, in our vision of the world and, obviously, new paths through which to venture, being as we are inevitably historical beings, social eminently mutable, but as for individuals if we are going towards something it is the inescapable conquest of our own voice. And the diaries, in this sense, are a privileged genre. In addition to the privileged, tempting due to the margin of autonomy that they possess and due to the possibility to have room for, together with the things of the present, to those of the past, is intrinsically memoristic aspect is not one of its lesser virtues. To write helps to remember, to write helps to think, to think helps to clarify. Finally, to read and to write, that always go together, are a great school of learning.

CdE: La Insubordinación de los márgenes comprises a short period from 1988 to 1989, and edited represent 99 pages. Do more written pages of the book exist? Pardon my ignorance, but I haven’t found any publication that continues it, and in the case that it doesn’t exist, why did you not continue your writing? Does it have something to do with the tradition of the diary in Latin America being less important than in Europe?

VdS: The diary has many more pages, but it only covers those years. I hadn’t planned to publish it, it was simply about an exercise of writing. About seven or eight years ago I was invited to take part in an ambitious editorial project, four diaries of by an author that should not surpass one hundred pages, the project that was advanced could not be realized, the crisis, the costs of printing. This year the publishing house El estilete (The Stiletto) proposed to publish it. I had not written it on the computer and to transcribe more than the 97 pages a good part of the 50, 60 or maybe 70 remaining sheets was not in my intentions. At the beginning I had my doubts, I asked myself if it hadn’t aged a lot, I consulted three friends, that knew the diary, and they insisted that I publish it.

Without a doubt the tradition of the diary is less important in Latin America than in Europe, our great diary writer, authentic and sincere with an open heart, was Rufino Blanco Fombona, who spent a great part of his life in Europe, especially Spain. Also Alejandro Oliveros spent years writing, but his are especially literary diaries in the broader sense of the word. He is a poet and a reader of very vast interests, not only of literature, also of painting. Recently Rafael Castillo Zapata has written so many that I almost lose count, although I have read practically all of them, and once in awhile I open them again randomly and I entertain myself reading them. They are some particularly intelligent diaries, diaries of journeys, treaties, a genre that goes beyond everyday life, because also Rafael Castillo is a poet and in some way also a thinker, that is felt in the aftertaste and the pleasure of language, in the aftertaste and the pleasure of reflection, in the aftertaste and the pleasure of teaching and verbalizing. They are a genre in and of themselves.

CdE: In some moment of the diary you tell us, it is not textual, that it did you good to reread the pages that you had written because you could see the line of feelings that went in the same direction, the homogeneity in the style, the themes, etc. From this confession on deduces your commitment to literature. Isn’t that so?

VdS: Yes, my commitment to literature comes from much further back, but it is there from the first to the last page, day by day. When I finished reading the diary in its final stages, I thought that I had read it as if it dealt with the diary of another person, another writer and that pleased me. I could see the line of feelings that went in the same direction, the homogeneity in the style, the themes. I could see in that writer, in that I recognized myself without identifying myself, the lines of my life.

CdE: Your formation is philosophical, and your books have a reflective tone not only philosophical but also subjective reflections. What does that charge contribute to the characters?

VdS: Yes, my formation is philosophical, but literature has always been my vocation. So much so that the philosophers that I have read most were always masters of prose. In the first place, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck, the theologist friend from Nietzsche’s youth, Schopenhauer, the great French essayists Paul Valéry, Albert Camus, Deleuze, Barthes, among the Germans Benjamin, Adorno, even Kant when he was a student seemed to me quite arid and terse. Those who teach have the obligation to study, I like to write, but also to study. I didn’t have what they call “a philosophical mind”, but if I had a temperament given to pondering and to thought, I believe that that was there and it was good that I didn’t push it aside, that I kept cultivating it.

CdE: You are the author of some books of essays, but especially you have written novels and some short stories. Is that reflective tone of your books an obstacle?

VdS: For me it is not, for some readers it might be, or has been in some moment. But for the younger readers it doesn’t seem to be. Many decades ago the short story and novels were closed off as canonical genres, with specific rules, plots, actions, types of characters, that shouldn’t and were not able to be transgressed. But writers are transgressors by nature. Nowadays, after so many works (novels?) that broke the greater part of the conventions in which the traditional narrative is sustained, like, for example, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Malone Dies or The Unnamable, by Beckett, the works by Thomas Bernhard, the prose by Sebald, the takes by Kafka, I don’t believe that that reflexive intonation can be considered an obstacle.

CdE: That examining yourself and the attention that it pays to the everyday, has it paved the way for the themes that are dealt with in your books to be ones that encompass the human condition?

VdS: More than examining myself, I believe that I inquire about relationships with others based on my inner self. I hope to separately preserve interiority from exteriority, art and life.

CdE: To think, to bear witness and to imagine, those are, in synthesis, the pivots that sustain your work and in some way seem to transcend in your narrative. How does the tension live among the genres?

VdS: From a very early age I lived them, but I also quickly began to avoid the tensions and not the genres. That avoidance was arduous work, but few times did I stray from the “philosophical” vein of my novels, that I could express myself in a way organically with more freedom on a formal level, it helped me to explore other methods, to introduce stories, to string them together, to tangle them up, to diverge them and most importantly to intercept them, as I did, especially, in Historias de la marcha a pie and later in Paleografías [Paleographies]. Not even in the seventies and eighties when the departmentalization of genres was very imperative did I separate from my path. Later reading my friends writes, poets, essayists of a somewhat older generation, I realized that they marked their own way and they galloped straight ahead without hesitating, that they weren’t afraid to write what they desired and needed to write. From them I learned not to contradict what belonged to me by nature.

Interview published with permission of Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos

Translated by Christina Miller

Venezuelan writer Victoria de Stefano. Photo: Martha Viaña.

Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza: Today we have the privilege of speaking with Victoria de Stefano, who’ll tell us about her work and the experience of creative writing, both fiction and essay. Victoria sent us a few texts that could serve as a starting point for this conversation: an excerpt from her novel Lluvia [Rain] and an essay from the book La refiguración del viaje [The refiguration of the journey] called “Su vida” [Her life], which is obviously an autobiographical essay. Perhaps we could start our conversation with those two texts. Victoria, thank you so much for accepting our invitation.

Victoria de Stefano: Thanks to all of you for coming to listen to me.

***

VS: Well, perhaps based on the reading of these texts and your comments you all could ask some questions.

AGP: Curiously, I think we all agreed on identifying Vargas Llosa when you were talking and thinking about the novelist who can really plan out a novel, I think there’s general agreement about that. But I’m interested to hear you mention Proust. Before this conversation, I was thinking, “What could Victoria’s novels look like?” A digression from digression to digression to digression; the writer who thinks about art, about the artistic, cultural, literary reference; it’s expansive and static all at once, no? It can be so morose that it fascinates you or it can bore you terribly, depending on the type of reader as well. Your novel easily demands a type of reader attracted to books that are not bestsellers, no? For that reason, I’m interested to hear you mention Proust, because I see something else there. Proust has absolutely no qualms, obviously, in appealing to biographical date. His novel is constructed from “his life.”

VS: From his experience.

AGP: From his own experience, no? And the same thing is notable and interesting in your case. For example, in your essay “Su vida,” it becomes obvious…

VS: That’s what I was talking about, when we traveled by boat, when we came to New York.

AGP: Exactly, but in the novel, the text you sent, the chapter that corresponds to the fourth of July—and this is really a novel, not a book of essays—you start by saying “my father was born in 1905,” and this is evidently the same father as the father of the narrator of “Su vida.”

VS: Yes, yes.

AGP: Today, we could say that it’s common that, in the contemporary novel, the issue of autobiography has assumed a greater status, a greater presence, but perhaps there was a certain aversion to it in “Boom” literature, no? A bias against the biographical. What do you think about that? You’ve spoken of memory, that memory that acts through layers, through story after story after story as they accumulate. But what can you tell us about this narrative subject, which has no qualms about letting the reader see that it is openly in dialogue with the author herself? What do you think of that?

VS: Two things. When I finished La noche [The night], I was waiting for them to edit it, because it’s hard to start another project before they edit your book. Then I wrote the Diarios 1988-1989. A much longer diary, but one from which I selected ninety-five pages. So, for me, the work of this diary was the work of showing myself to myself, of opening up (there we have psychoanalysis and the therapist’s couch), but also my need to take on (although La noche includes a lot of personal experience), to take on a more intimate and personal way of writing, with fewer models (although literary models are always there). That is, with fewer imposed models, such that the choice of literary models is a choice of fondness, of feeling, of affinity. So, this diary played a very important role in my passage to what you call… they are biographical, not confessional. I think. So much so that when I wrote La refiguración del viaje as a biographical outline, I called it “Su vida” and wrote it in the third person. Writing in the first person is very strong. If someone writes in first person, based solely on their experience, it can become somewhat banal. The first person is useful to create a first-person character, but that’s not easy. Consider that all the “Boom” novels you mentioned are narrative novels. Even from the point of view of the model of the novel employed by the German romantics and later Benjamin, the novel is the novel of subjectivity. The novel is where we see inner beings. And these novels, which we think of as coming from the “Boom,” barring a few exceptions, are all written as descriptions of a universe, which is our social, geographic, political universe, that we must absorb. That is, they fulfill another function. They fulfilled this function as did other previous generations, like Ciro Alegría, or Arguedas, or perhaps Rómulo Gallegos, or Pocaterrra, no? And if, like some people, you have the words, “I want success,” “victory,” “success,” written on your forehead, haha! Since that’s almost impossible in our part of the world, it becomes just another torture. And the writer can’t torture himself too much, because life itself involves enough torture already.

***

AGP: Another thing that interests me is the subject of menace… That is, the confrontation between the space of intimacy, which is the writer’s place (and it’s strange that a novel should be called “the place of the writer,” which sounds like a book of essays).

VS: Miguel Arroyo, who was one of the editors, demanded that they call it a “novel.” I didn’t want to. But he said, “No, people will think it’s an essay.” It seemed rather absurd to me that they called it a “novel.”

AGP: I think that’s where you synthesize, in some way, your literary project. That is, as a narrator you’re thinking from the writer’s place, and making a novel, from the writer’s place, that constantly reinforces the space of that writer who is reflecting on how to create stories. But that presupposes a space of intimacy where the characters you create act in defense of that space, right? And that space is menaced by the various forms in which nature expresses itself. These forms could be the rain, they could be what, in your latest novel (Paleografías), could be read as the landslide (of the tragedy of Vargas). So characters appear who remain isolated from inclemency, like those of La montaña mágica [The magic mountain], or the boat itself when you describe that journey in which you talk about the shipwreck and the menace of the sea, and the terrible sensation of facing down the avatars of the environment, no? In this case, it’s the ocean.

VS: Those were all stories my father told.

AGP: But isn’t it true that the subject is always constructed, that there’s something outside that menaces it, that the subject is taking refuge through writing, making its own story?

VS: Yes, of course. One way or another, seclusion is a privileged literary space. Seclusion as a space of encounter, as a dramatic space. And having created that space, in Paliografía, in the end, in which no one can get out, everyone’s locked up in that inn-hotel, I allow myself a novelesque outing, I allow myself something like the night in The Decameron, the nighttime meetings where everyone speaks. The social differences have disappeared to some extent, so everybody’s there, the hotel workers, the maid, the cook, all together. Each one, in these circumstances, suggests things that are important or that bear spiritual weight: the relationship with the divine and the subject of love, the subject of happiness, which also appears in the novel Cabo de vida [Tail end of life], which is, as I said, a little-read novel. It was published by Planeta, then the crisis came, and well, it disappeared. Even I only have three copies. Think of all the things Bakhtin said about chronotopes, which are—whether the entrance to the stairway, the hallway (or the “bargueño,” as the Spanish translators say, which I never understand, it must be some sort of porch?)—where the great conflicts are produced. But I also had that in mind, because it’s obvious that the novel, from its beginnings until today, has had its little tricks. Just like theatre, with the misplaced letter or the poisoned cup that’s passed to the wrong person. I like these literary resources, these novelesque resources, I like to use them, they give me a certain freedom, they place me in the world of fiction. And, to be sincere, when I hear the word “fiction,” I get a little… because, for me, it’s reality.

Translated by Arthur Dixon

July 8: In the evening I have dinner at P’s house. It’s a longstanding invitation. P. has been a widower for around three years: the period that, according to the Chinese, bereavement should last. Without the least warning, his wife had been left paralyzed by an embolism. She died a week later without it ever having occurred to P. that someone eighteen years his junior might precede him along that path. Until the mechanism of illness was set in motion, he had never considered the eventuality that she might die first. P. finds it difficult to adapt to his constantly unappeased nostalgia for the intimacy in which he lived with his deceased wife, but copes with it better, and with more humility than any of us would have suspected, given his sensitive and rather unpractical nature.

After the unhappy event, aggravated by the wretched circumstance that, only a few weeks later his first wife—a fragile, unbalanced woman he had divorced decades before, but who continued to depend on him in a number of ways—had taken her own life through a massive overdose of barbiturates, bets were laid about how long he would last. The people who put their money on his collapse felt defrauded, as if his failure to do so sprang from an ominous lack of moral integrity. By contrast, those of us who were closer to him were happily surprised by his sober attitude in the face of those two calamities. Even more so when we saw how meticulously he attended to each and every one of the requirements in his first wife’s will: to be dressed in her best clothes and jewelry, a string quartet to play certain pieces of music, specific flowers (no chrysanthemums) bought; that during the rites, a particular person was to read the funeral prayer she had transcribed and signed, with youthful passion, Dido Forsaken, or the eternal fate of a woman in love; afterwards her oldest and most faithful friends (the list of whom, with a few final alterations, was attached to her last will and testament with the menu for the meal) were to hold a wake, and each say a few words in her honor as a form of farewell. In spite of the effort he put in to locating all these friends, P. was barely able to come up with a dozen. Of the twenty listed in the document, three were dead, some had left the country, others hadn’t been heard of for some time, and yet others had quickly invented excuses for not attending. The latter were no doubt people who had belonged to her circle of friends during the time she and P.  were still married, but no longer so at the moment of her death.

P. often seems irritated, discontented, as if life has played him a dirty trick, and yet he is resolute: he doesn’t give in. Lately he has developed an admirable inclination for order, he gets by quite well in his domestic life and is even more rigorous than before about his work schedule. His desire to reintegrate into life has encouraged him to renew former attachments, to telephone his friends rather than waiting for them to call him. He seeks company when he needs it, but never begs or pleads. If he hasn’t quite learned the art of cookery, he can at least prepare a hot meal, something that gives him pleasure and of which he is quite proud, particularly when you remember that his wife used to dress and undress him, put on and take off his shoes, feed him, act as his secretary and, when the need arose, his nurse. In spite of his iron constitution, he has a tendency towards hypochondria

When I arrived I found him seasoning two enormous steaks. The watercress and avocado salad sprinkled with walnuts and toasted almonds was already beautifully presented in a green dish in the shape of a cabbage leaf, beside it stood the pureed potatoes, which only needed to be warmed up, and a small tray of tomatoes, parsley and slices of soft cheese. The kitchen was filled with the splendorous harmonies in E flat of the final section of The Magic Flute. There was a Saturday night feel about it all. P. has lived on the first floor of the same old house for a little over forty-five years. The ceilings are high with exposed beams, the is kitchen large in comparison with the other rooms (as often happens with building cut up and patched back together to form a number of residences) with a door leading onto the patio, and so the greater part of his time is spent in that kitchen, or on the patio itself, where he has installed some pleasant, comfortable garden furniture beneath a rustic awning of slatted planks. Although the night is clear, we don’t eat outside, as has we have done in the past, but in the kitchen. To the left is a living room that had originally been a porch, in which there are just two armchairs facing each other and an old pianola, the only superfluous ornament being his diploma in chemical engineering—a profession he never exercised—in an elaborate silver frame.

P. has just gotten over a severe cold and fears a relapse. There’s nothing worse than nodular bronchitis, he tells me while moving an antiquated typewriter he never uses (he can’t concentrate without a Parker 51 in his hand) and spreading a delicate cambric cloth, hand-embroidered with heraldic butterflies, over the table. His father had enjoyed a good social position before the large toy store that had been the source of the family fortune went bankrupt, and he still possesses remnants of that former wealth, such as the pianola, the glassware, the linen, the paintings (gradually sold off, the last being a small seascape by Boggio dated 1909), and the boon of an income on which he has so far managed to survive, and pay the fees of the rest home where his old nanny now lives.

During the dessert course—fruit, yoghurt, ice cream and almond biscuits—our conversation was suddenly interrupted by a series of strange, querulous grunts, like those of a sick animal. What’s that? I asked. Oh nothing, just problems upstairs, he said cautiously raising his eyes to mine.  The grunts began to die down. P. folded his serviette and carefully smoothed it out. We continued our conversation. A few minutes later, the grunts changed into a single grating note stuck in a human—clearly not animal—throat. A door slammed. Then silence. P. rapped his fingers furiously on the tabletop, stood up, and began to clear the plates. The muscles of his face were tense, his eyes glazed, absent, his shoulders blades quivered, his lips were white. The sounds, which seemed to have required the full force of the lungs to finally burst forth, culminated in a long, long dirge that entered through the window and circled the room, rising and falling, turning on itself, pressing on the air.

Avoiding my terrified gaze, P. offers me a little more ice cream. I shake my head. He pats my shoulder and puts a finger to his lips. Who is he attempting to silence with that gesture, given that I can’t even think of a single word to say? I recall the upstairs tenant, a Russian, Polish, Lithuanian or all-of-the-above woman who has lived in the house for over thirty years. All I know of her is that she’s eccentric, and has an uncaring daughter who lives in the hope that, on one of her occasional visits to take her mother out in in her wheelchair, she will find her dead in the bed.

I remember the morning I went to the roof terrace with P., who was carrying a load of laundry to hang out in the sun. The windows were wide open, an opportune breeze was blowing the curtains aside, P. had his back turned to me, so I was able to spy right into the apartment at my leisure. I remember the gold-striped wallpaper, the thick-pile carpet, chairs with carved backrests, large, heavy paintings of mythological scenes, glass display cabinets containing medals, peacocks, miniature shepherds, and candy boxes adorned with tiny mirrors. On a corner table, under a lamp with a plaster base in the form of a lily was a dirty plate on which sat a peeled orange and a peach with a bite taken out of it. Moving towards the second window, I made out a brass bed in which, propped up on two pillows, one hand under her cheek, a woman was, apparently, sleeping, her eyes half open, staring, as the eyes of the dead sometimes are; she was wearing a see-through nightgown rolled up around her waist. I looked in horror at the almost bald scalp with tufts of red hair at the crown, her sagging breasts, the wide apart legs, the veined thighs, and between them the dark bulge with its halo of gray hair surrounding what must have been the forgotten, exposed lips of her sex. Clothes were scattered on the floor, a pair of silk stockings hung from a chair, the atmosphere inside seemed acrid, dense, suffocating. The last thing I saw before P. turned to tell me he had finished was a large male tabby cat curling up on the bed

P. grabbed a knife by its bone handle, as if ready to use it as a weapon, then immediately let it fall. He picked up his wine glass and twirled it between his fingers. It was a beautiful crystal vessel in a strange shade of turquoise. Contemplating the pattern of the cut glass, he pursed his lips, clenched his jaws, and threw back his head. A heavy sigh hollowed the outline of his chest above the incipient belly whose sudden appearance he has lately been grumbling about. At the instant the howls—that is what they had become—reached their highest pitch, P. flung the glass at a cupboard. I closed my eyes, expecting it to shatter, but it did nothing more than break into three beautiful, resplendent pieces. A sweet-natured, restrained, circumspect man whose company generally left one calmer, P. has completely lost control.

He runs outside and, in the light of the crescent moon, makes a lap of the patio. He bows his head and begins to strike it repeatedly with the flat of his hand. Then he stretches up his arms and implores: For God’s sake! For God’s sake! Are you trying to kill me, Wanda? Or frighten away my guests? Send them running for the door? I had never seen him like that before. I was terrified, didn’t know what to do, what to think.

The cries faltered, faded away like the sound of a train rounding a curve and then disappearing from sight. P. came back inside. Looking directly at me, and indicating the chair from which I had sprung, he said, Don’t worry. Sit down. We both sat. Regarding our reflections in the window, we stayed there, motionless, so silent that it took no effort of attention to hear the still unmitigated pounding of our two hearts. Then, as if from another world, diffusing into the silence, the subtle creaks of the furniture and shrill croaking of tree frogs became audible in the disturbing still of the night.

I catch sight of something snaking downwards between the corner of the house and the branches of a spindly tree, and eventually realize it is a basket tied to a length of cord. His eyes fixed on the receptacle, P. stands and, with a resigned sigh, carefully walks along the passage leading to the living room. It seems as if his knees are dancing. He bends down and inspects the contents of a cabinet, his stiffness and the effort to remain calm making him clumsy. A pile of newspapers and cardboard come tumbling down. I hear a tinkling of bottles and glassware. From the very back of the cabinet he extracts a small bottle of mint liqueur. Quick as a flash, he runs to place it in the basket, and tugs on the cord. The basket rocks gently and is hauled up. It disappears.

She doesn’t raise a hell often, P. said hoarsely—he had to cough and clear his throat to get his voice out—but when she does, it’s unbearable… She’s turned into a decrepit old woman, who lives surrounded by filth and trash. And to think that only a few years back she was a beauty, coming and going in a stunning lilac convertible, perfectly made-up, perfumed, dazzling, full of fantastic ideas and excesses, taking gambles on sex, love affairs, business deals, insatiable in all three, until she lost her wits. He leaned forward with a confidential air. She claims she’s my singing bird, a bird that sings lullabies to soften my heart. Only hard liquor, any hard liquor, calms her down.

Gradually the evening becomes as pleasant, as convivial as before. P. lights a cigar, makes jokes in a tone somewhere between ironic and jolly. He holds my interest telling me about the time in his youth when, due to a difference of opinion with his tyrannical father (nowadays, when he looks at things calmly, without rebellion, he knows his poor father had not been a tyrant), the urge to feel himself really experiencing life, plus the desire to have an exotic job on his CV, he had left behind the comfort of the paternal home to work in a horseracing stable. At night he would drop completely exhausted onto his bed in the bunkhouse without even eating at the communal table or taking off his boots. For years afterwards, he could still feel that tension in his muscles, even though they no longer experienced such wear and tear. Once the job had come to an end, he had returned, bored rather than glorious, to the protection of the family home and his classes. For years he had been unable to expunge the stench of stable that oozed from every pore in his body. So, why am I telling you all this? Ah yes, that’s it. I remember now. The rumor went around that Jacinto, one of the jockeys, was a medium. Since his workmates never tired of taunting and making fun of him, he decided to gather them together in the tack room one night to give a demonstration. After a few jerks and a little incoherent babbling, his breathing became very irregular. He gulped for air, wiped his hand across his brow or pressed it to his chest as if suffering intense pain. His pupils were dilated, cataleptic, he stared fixedly like a bird of prey. One moment, he was prancing, his toes pointing outwards; the next, he was rocking back and forth, as if praying. We’d just about had our fill of all this when, emerging from his bleak silence, he began to recite entire passages of Leviticus on the prohibitions against eating dead animal flesh and blood-letting with a knife, followed, in a strangulated voice, by a list of the atrocious punishments meted out to those found guilty of gluttony and perverse sexual acts. No surprise there; he was very prudish and, terrified of gaining weight, ate only vegetables and fruit. He had brought along a piece of chalk and hurriedly sketched a skull and something that looked like a cauldron on the wall. When he came out of his trance, he was most definite that he was not the author of those marks, they had been made by the spirit who had inhabited him; he had no responsibility for anything he might have said or done, but what was drawn there could only be the fifth circle of hell in which all unbelievers and sinners would burn. I was impressed, moved said P. Whenever I recall it all, he went on, it’s as if I’m still there! As for the others, they realized that in future they had to watch their step, take him seriously.

Of all the people who worked there, he said, crossing his knees, Jacinto was the only one he had managed to become friendly with. He was a very imaginative man, he used to draw horses on any scrap of paper that came to hand, was particular about whom he associated with. Since he had been lucky in his early days as a jockey—this good fortune hadn’t lasted long—he had a wealth of anecdotes about the time he’d spent touring American and Canadian racetracks, carrying off prizes. His two brothers exercised a great deal of power over him. Every time they came to visit, they would empty his pockets to pay their debts and continue their carousals. Some time later, he flew to Colón to marry a Panamanian girl he’d met one weekend, and who had mailed him letters and photos over the subsequent days. The first photograph was very small, then, when he begged for something larger, she speedily sent him another with an effusive dedication. More photos, more letters followed, and these, added to the feeling that the time was ripe to put the Canal between himself and his brothers, had encouraged him to take the leap.

Not long after Jacinto’s departure, P. had received a letter saying that the wedding had gone off in great style, his wife was loving, hard-working, and that they were as happy as could be; they planned to move to Bilbao, where he had been contracted as a riding master in a military academy. In the postscript, he related that a spiritualist society based in Cartagena had invited him to the annual meeting of their most select members from all over the world. He hadn’t received any more letters from Jacinto for a long time, but a few years ago had heard, via a former vet at the stables, that he had two daughters, various grandchildren, and was living in Springfield, Illinois, where he had a lovely home and enjoyed a reputation for distance healing. P. had loved him the way you love simple people who, when you get to know them better, are not simple at all. In the vision of the rebel he had been in at that time, that man encapsulated a certain moral substance. A moral substance he had then—he blushed to think of it now—associated with limited intellect, I want you to understand that phrase in the most positive light, free from narrow-minded prejudice. As a way of seeing things, it was ingenuous, if not completely ridiculous. But anyway, he added, the most admirable thing about Jacinto wasn’t so much his simplicity as his obstinacy and stoicism, the sibylline patience he’d employed in avoiding, almost without trying, life’s great and not so great deceits. Despite having a mother who was almost, but not quite an alcoholic, a villainous father who had disappeared off the scene at the first opportunity, despicable brothers; despite living in a poverty-stricken shantytown, in an unpromising environment; despite certain dire circumstances, the many humiliations, nothing, absolutely nothing, had managed to shake his faith. His faith in what? In himself, in his powers, in his destiny, his luck… Yes, his faith, his guileless, unshakable faith that he would escape all that, and, as in fact was the case, remain more or less pure and light of heart. And that, said P., for the voracious investigator of the enigmas of characterology I was at that time, was inevitably interesting, even seductive.

At that time? And now? I asked with a smile. He closed one eye, took a deep drag on his cigar. Now? Well, to tell the truth, it’s the same now as it ever was. He puffed out his cheeks, enjoying the smoke, and then expelled it from his mouth with a cough. Today is ever always, he muttered. It was a phrase frequently to be found on his lips.

Translated by Christina MacSweeney

Venezuelan writer Victoria de Stefano. Photo: Martha Viaña.

Sergio Pitol es uno de esos escritores que vive la literatura en pensamiento, palabra y obra. Leer, pensar y escribir, o sea, querer crear, saber crear y poder crear. Una vida en la que tanto se lee, se piensa y se escribe que, como para disipar cualquier duda sobre la generosidad con que se lleva la vida, también se traduce. La traducción es, sin duda, la mejor escuela para aprender a interiorizar la estructura de los géneros literarios y de la propia lengua.

Todo esto para decir que mi primer encuentro con Pitol fue a través de sus traducciones. Lo conocí a través de Kusniewicz, Pilniak, Gombrowicz, Andreievski y Chéjov antes de conocerlo a través del paso firme con el que caminaba, en posesión de sí mismo y de sus medios, a través de novelas, cuentos y textos críticos, textos por los que yo Aprovecho la feliz oportunidad para expresarle la tremenda gratitud que le debemos aquellos de nosotros que no somos tan entusiastas en el aprendizaje de idiomas, y especialmente aquellos de nosotros que también somos escritores.

El hecho de que muchos lo desconocieran hasta bien entrada la década de los ochenta, como en el caso de muchos otros escritores de este continente, se debe sin duda al aislamiento y la dispersión que han caracterizado a nuestra literatura. Leer a nuestros contemporáneos colombianos, argentinos y centroamericanos ha sido y es una hazaña de bibliófilos y ratones de biblioteca. Para llegar a nosotros, deben pasar por los grandes centros culturales o recibir la palmadita en la espalda del éxito.

Pero, como todos sabemos, cuando uno está interesado en algo, ese algo comienza a aparecer por todos lados. Primero fue La casa de la tribu[La casa de la tribu], luego los cuentos que aparecieron como algo prestado, como un regalo de un amigo, y luego el encuentro personal y la amistad con la que me honra. Desde el principio me intrigaron los matices y la elaboración de su lenguaje, ciertas huellas de pudor apasionado que brillaban en su prosa; por su transparencia y precisión idiomática, así como por su entonación paródica, todo ello junto. De inmediato me hizo imaginar la inauguración sutil y no declarada de una literatura diferenciada del lenguaje retórico de los discursos ideologizados y de la buena o mala fe de sus reflexiones y cosificaciones en el campo literario.

Por otro lado, vi cómo su escritura se resolvía en la estructuración de situaciones existenciales, empujada entre la elusividad y la luz de las apariencias, entre el sueño y la relativización de la vigilia, a veces más borrosa que el sueño mismo, que es como el mundo y su las peculiaridades se entregan al hombre, por poco que sueñe.

Este entusiasmo inicial me llevó a El desfile del amor , con su reconstrucción moral de los atrasos de la guerra mundial en México, con sus enigmas y faltas de conclusiones, con su contar-mucho sin contarlo todo, con sus encuentros y separaciones, con sus historias como reversiones de las mismas historias que siempre están al acecho para penetrar el espacio de experiencia de una era, incluido el espacio físico de la ciudad en el curso de convertirse en otra. Y una vez más, la tensión con la que nos acercamos y nos distanciamos de los entresijos de un asunto complejo de ficción, metaficción e historia. Era natural saltar de allí a la explosión deslumbrante y ardiente de Domar a la divina garza.[Domar a la garza divina] y sus cuentos. “El relato veneciano de Billie Upward”, “La pareja”, “El regreso hacia Varsovia”, “Nocturno de Bujara”.

Pero fue en mi reciente y más detallada lectura de Todos los cuentos[Todos los cuentos], o casi todos, recogidos por Alfaguara, donde pude confirmar con mayor certeza lo que, en la antología de Monte Ávila, que carece de una serie de elementos con los que sustentar mi juicio, sólo me había permitido presumir. En esta segunda lectura, me formé una impresión más clara de que, así como sus novelas formaban naturalmente el tríptico del “carnaval”, sus cuentos, con su forma abierta y sin marco, con su capacidad de crecer juntos, anticiparse e interconectarse temática y alegóricamente , con sus narradores ocultos, expectantes, retenidos a cierta distancia, con sus personajes entrando y saliendo de la camisa de fuerza de las restricciones y débiles placeres de la ficción y el delirio,

Para poder explicar, debo referirme a un tiempo anterior.

En nuestro acercamiento a un escritor, el escritor se nos revela más a través de lo que tiene en común con sus pares que a través de sus divergencias. Para decirlo más clara y brevemente en el lenguaje de la tradición, su revelación tiene lugar tanto por nuestras afinidades dentro del universo de la literatura como por la mediación de referencias preestablecidas. Pero este reconocimiento, como parte de un corpus literario, sólo bastaría para hacerlo identificable y localizable para nosotros en las supuestas normas sancionadas. Sus particularidades son las que lo hacen sobresalir de todas las determinaciones comunitarias, geográficas, históricas y culturales, que lo hacen querido para nosotros.

En cuanto a este bien común, Pitol establece conexiones a lo largo de las letras latinoamericanas e hispánicas, por limitadora que sea esta afirmación en referencia a un escritor que ha pisado “con la soltura de un gato”, según la expresión utilizada por Steiner para referirse a al narrador que ha fusionado los dos prototipos del narrador viajero y el narrador sedentario —el artesano serio de la intertextualidad posmoderna, del que Pitol es un vivo ejemplo— a través del gran espectro de las literaturas nacionales y extranjeras. Digo esto porque las literaturas son siempre nacionales o extranjeras, nos pertenecen o son ajenas a la perspectiva de un individuo, y “universales” sólo en cuanto a su recepción y público.

Pitol es más de este Sur, un Sur siempre de cara al Norte, y de este frente atlántico, de lo que se cree a simple vista y lectura aislada. En él está el legado íntimo de los muertos de Rulfo, el gusto ecuménico y la curiosidad insaciable de su maestro Reyes, las premeditaciones de los mundos conjeturales de Borges; el humor demente, el catastrofismo, el determinismo opresor de los Quiroga; Carpentier está en la partitura musical, si no en la exuberancia del léxico; la irremediable cualidad de orfandad y soledad antirromántica de Onetti, la memoria domesticada y redirigida, pero no voluntarista, del Ulisis criollo [Ulysses criollo] de Vasconcelos, el perspectivismo de la novela de los sertões , la moneda espiritual de Suave patria[Patria blanda] de López Velarde; las capas residuales de la picaresca americana, del esperpento, de la farsa medieval, transmitida por Quevedo, cimentada por Pérez Galdós, Valle-Inclán y los que le siguieron en su siglo. Y encima o debajo de este lecho de muchas sábanas están todos los exilios y autoexilios descarados, culpables o nostálgicos, todas las circulaciones, las insularidades, las vueltas a la patria, a los paraísos perdidos, bien o mal recuperados; todos los fundamentos y refundaciones del ser propio y del ser ajeno, todos los encantos y desencantos que forman una herida común del intelectual letrado desde la pampa hasta el río Grande.

Su ideal, expresado en “Droctulf y demás” —y en muchos otros textos, algunos ficticios— es establecer ciertas fronteras reales: las de dominio de la tribu, las de carácter nacional, las de definición de un tono en un lenguaje de pertenencia, todo para luego confrontar y conquistar la inmensidad oceánica que atraviesa y permea estas fronteras: “Tomar todo lo que hay”, como decía Goethe. Si esta es su misión, Pitol debe darse por satisfecho, porque ha realizado este sueño civilizatorio, o mejor dicho, cívico, en la medida en que pueden realizarse aquellos ideales que buscan trascender nuestras aspiraciones. Como escritor —en formación y educación, y desde su propio relato de mayoría de edad, del Tríptico a los relatos, de los relatos al texto crítico, de todo ello a la fuga deEl arte de volar —es mexicano. No tiene necesidad, cuando se sienta a escribir, de recordar las señas de su identidad y origen. Puede continuar, sobre todo ahora que ha pasado el aguacero más fuerte del debate identitario, como un felino inquieto, escalando, en cuerpo y espíritu, todas las coordenadas del espacio para activar la virtud de la tolerancia y la reconciliación de las disputas de donde nace la idea de el futuro tomará forma.

Pitol es un escritor de este lado del mundo y de este hemisferio. Pero, como autor definido por la expresión y elaboración de su obra, posee ciertas moralidades que le son muy propias: moralidades que, en los últimos veinte años más o menos, parecen haberse eclipsado en nuestra literatura, más allá de los tecnicismos y experimentalismos que dieron origen a la abrumadora riqueza de los años sesenta, y que ya no parecen continuar sino en sus reiteraciones emulatorias y en la perdida eficacia de sus aristas. Moralidades reflejadas por su pasión “por la trama”, por “el rigor de la trama”, como decía Borges. Por la juventud de la forma contra el caos, según Gombrowicz, o por la “fuerza contra la apatía”, como ha declarado el propio Pitol en su defensa de la forma narrativa y de la novela.

Un debate sobre el retorno de la narración ha agitado el mundo literario en las últimas décadas. Este retorno a menudo corre el riesgo de caer en posiciones más bien conservadoras, incluso en propuestas y códigos que solo sirven para aplacar las necesidades de la industria, para determinar qué obras están “bien formadas” y regularizar el público al que están destinadas.

Pero la pasión de Pitol por la trama no forma parte de este tipo de recuperación. Para saberlo, sólo hay que observar la composición, la articulación de la forma y el lenguaje, su qué y su cómo, así como las estrategias narrativas, ejemplificadas en uno de sus mejores y más despiadados relatos, que es más un relato que un relato. ensayo: “El oscuro hermano gemelo”. En esta historia, siguiendo un prólogo de Justo Navarro a un libro de Paul Auster, salta a Tonio Kröger para retomar la frase dogmática de Navarro: “Te alejas de ti mismo cuando te acercas a ti mismo… Escribir es hacerse pasar por otro”. —para presentarnos al escritor como parte de una animada velada entre funcionarios diplomáticos en la embajada portuguesa en Praga. En este escenario monta la escena que tiene lugar en Madeira, narrado y revisitado por la esposa del embajador de un país escandinavo, en medio de un delineamiento de monosílabos e interrupciones, con las respectivas sorderas chejovianas que se abrirán sobre Conrad y los posteriores comentarios irritados de su esposo, que revelan la oscuridad y lado contradictorio tanto de la historia como del escritor que busca trabajarla en su laboratorio. De esta caja de sorpresas saldrán la costurera, la teósofa, un ranchero veracruzano, una segunda explosión de dinamita, y no una casa en Funchal, sino las vívidas arcadas del Hotel Zevallos en Córdova, Veracruz, Chiquitita, un tío, el disparates de una herencia, y así, la última novela de Donoso, que lleva un epígrafe de Faulkner que nos devuelve al punto donde todas las historias deben ir para morir, si no para concluir,

Para confirmarlo bastaría citar un texto dentro de un texto que revierte y se multiplica en otro texto, como el paso de “El relato veneciano de Billie Upward” a Juegos florales . Bastaría recordar la dura observación a la que somete a sus personajes, todos los cuales juegan a la nostalgia ya la burlona repetición de gestos para destruir cualquier rastro de triunfalismo; bastaría con señalar la ligereza, la extrañeza, la disolución del lenguaje en el desarrollo del relato, la misma disolución que asombró a Pitol de joven cuando leyó a Borges y que, siendo él mismo escritor, hizo suya. Y por si todo esto fuera poco, podríamos referirnos al título de El arte de volary al itinerario artístico e intelectual que marca la sutura de “An Ars Poetica” en el libro.

Todo lo incluido en El arte de volar es la instalación y exhibición de estas poéticas. Y, por si necesitáramos más, podríamos recordar a los autores a los que ama ya los que siempre vuelve: Sterne, James, Conrad, Woolf, Gogol, Chekhov, Mann, Faulkner, Reyes, Carpentier, Cortázar. Porque cuando un autor habla de alguna obra ajena está hablando de la suya propia. Está pasando los dedos por los eslabones de la cadena que forman su propia línea de producción de significado. Está recordando sus deudas y sus acreedores.

Y, ahora que menciono El arte de volar, ataré mis cabos sueltos.

Este libro es como la conclusión de aquel proyecto al que me refería al principio. ¿Es una autobiografía? Parece que Pitol, al igual que en sus cuentos y novelas, cuando usa la primera persona, ese sujeto pronominal, es sólo un yo en el sentido del verbo que sostiene, organiza y aísla la escena. Un yo secundario, un yo posible y deliberado, casi como Seremis Zeitblom documentándose en relación con lo que es y lo que ha sido. Un yo, al final, como memoria novelizable de una vida hecha de viajes, libros, páginas de diario que algún día se convertirán en libros. Esta memoria, que se despliega y repliega del presente al pasado, es un doble juego, presente y pasado, ahora y ayer, antes y hoy, que establece, en términos progresivos, la simultaneidad y la alternancia temporal y espacial de las divisiones y subdivisiones de un registro de vida. De estos movimientos surge la afirmación de una conciencia que da cuenta de los valores y propósitos que la han regido y llenado de sentido. Todos los vuelos y desvíos están ahí para intentar reconstituir el cuerpo fragmentado de la historia, que, sin este esfuerzo, terminará a la deriva sin prospectar un mero acontecimiento de vida.El arte de la huida reúne, como ritos de paso, todas las obras anteriores, todos los géneros practicados por Pitol como momentos de la totalidad mayor que los contiene.

Caracas, noviembre de 1999

Traducido por Arthur Dixon

Una foto de la infancia del escritor mexicano Sergio Pitol (izquierda) con su hermana Cristina y su hermano Ángel.