violent insult, but not to humor.
This is what we’re discussing when the friends Monsiváis is meeting arrive: José Luis González de León, Luis Vicens, José de la Colina, Paul Leduc, Tomás Pérez Turrent, Manuel Michel, Emilio García Riera, Juan Manuel Torres, among others. They’re meeting to discuss cinema, and on this specific occasion to plan the publication of some Cuadernos. Juan Manuel Torres tells me that he’s writing about the first divas—the Italians, la Menichelli, la Terribile-González, and la Borelli—and the erotic impulse they represent, which emerged around the birth of the cinema and is still present in it today. They then move to a long table at the back of the café to talk; I stay where I am and read the chapter about Lewis in the book I just purchased at the Británica. When they finish, we’ll go to the cinéclub to see Johnny Guitar, which is part of a season titled something like “The Tribulations of Eros.”
Off we go. It’s a rather idiosyncratic Western, in which the protagonists of the duel, an element that is essential to this genre, are two women. The fight is not between a villain and a hero, that coarse but law-abiding cowboy who is usually John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Randolph Scott. Instead the villain is an insufferable woman. The indispensable leading lady is Joan Crawford. The conflict is between the owner/hostess of a saloon where the cowboys entertain themselves gaily and a raging puritan who devotes every waking moment to combating vice. For Joan Crawford there isn’t a single moment of rest; the other woman harasses and pursues her, and lays the most treacherous traps for her until she is led to the gallows. At the last minute, with the noose around her neck, it looks as if a hero is about to save her, although I mostly imagine this and don’t see it because of the commotion in the theater. We’re sitting, as we have for several years, very close to the screen, in the third row on the right. From the beginning, we find the movie intensely amusing. The villainess’s horrific tantrums and the palavering in which the heroine defends herself create a glorious dialogue. At times they sound like oracles; and others like grocers. Something about it is reminiscent of Ionesco’s world and the humor of the early silent pictures. Our cackles echo throughout the theater, although we’re surprised that ours are the only ones. The audience begins to shush us, insult us, and call for us to be thrown out of the theater. The commotion prevents me from enjoying the ending. When the lights turn on, a few spectators, almost all friends of ours, of course, curse at us. We’re a couple of Pharisees, ignoramuses; our materialist distortion keeps us from detecting and appreciating a new treatment of Myth. Are we not able to see that the true face of hate is love? Has it escaped us that the relationship we saw on screen is governed by the concept of l’amour-fou? We’ve witnessed an extraordinary case of l’amour-fou, and two or three of our friends repeat in unison—I’m not sure whether seriously or in jest—that l’amour-fou means mad love, yes: the mad, mad love proclaimed by the surrealists, with the great Breton in the lead. Did we even know who André Breton was?
We walk to the taquería next door to the Insurgentes movie house. We reflect with increasing pleasure on certain scenes from the movie and the frenzied intolerance of the priggish cinephiles. It’s been a day blessed by laughter. I feel in optimum condition to go home and make some progress for a couple of hours on the gruesome and wanton story of Lewis’s monk.
Suddenly a newsboy comes in with the latest edition of the paper. The headline takes up half the page. Rubén Jaramillo has been executed. We buy the paper. They talk about Jaramillo in the vilest of terms, as if he were a dangerous beast that has finally been hunted down. They’ve also killed his four children and his pregnant wife Epifanía. The tone is celebratory: another victory against the Bolshevist threat. Carlos gives me a brief summary of Jaramillo’s life: he was a Methodist pastor who had fallen out with the Morelos government because of a series of abuses that took place in the countryside. He lived in a village near Cuernavaca, where the price of land has increased enormously. Land speculation had set its sights on them. Jaramillo became a natural leader of the region; he stopped the tenant farmers from being evicted. Holding the paper in my hands is degrading; it expels a foul odor. “Dead dogs don’t bite!” it seems to shout. As we leave the restaurant, Carlos takes a taxi to return to Portales, and I walk few blocks home. My brief walk is enveloped in feelings of unreality, anger, and horror. Everything I’ve seen the last few days becomes a façade, which a harsh Mexico has taken it upon itself to smash to bits.
Not a single intellectual celebrated that crime, nor attempted to mitigate publicly the government’s responsibility. The journalists at the service of the State made sure to do that. They seemed to become intoxicated with fame as they carried out the task; they knew the greater his infamy the higher their reward from the public treasury would be. Writers had yet to lend themselves to that task. That would come later; during the Salinas presidency it would become a succulently “lucrative” profession. Fernando Benítez devoted a supplement in La Cultura en México, which he edited at the time, to Jaramillo’s murder. He visited the region of Morelos himself, with Carlos Fuentes and Víctor Flores Olea, where the events had occurred. The accounts they wrote were splendid and brave.
My desire to stay in Mexico disappeared that night. Soon after, I left the country. Carlos stayed and persisted in his projects, thanks to which he managed to accomplish a large part of the program he confided to me in 1962 at the María Bárbara. Since then, he’s written brilliant books, needless to say; they are a testament to chaos, its rituals, its slime, its greatness, infamy, horrors, excesses, and forms of liberation. They are also an account of a Rocambolesque and ludic world, delirious and macabre. They are our esperpento. Culture and society are his two great domains. Intelligence, humor, and fury have been his greatest advisors. I’m convinced that the current catalyst to create, in spite of everything, a civil society, is due to his efforts.
In his own way, Carlos Monsiváis is a constantly expanding polygraph, a one-man writers’ union, a legion of heteronyms that out of eccentricity sign the same name. If you have a question about a biblical text, all you have to do is call him—he’ll answer it immediately; the same if you need a bit of information about a movie filmed in 1924, 1935, or whatever year you like; you want to know the name of the regent of the city of Mexico or of the governor of Sonora in 1954; or the circumstances under which Diego Rivera painted a mural in San Francisco in 1931, which José Clemente Orozco dubbed “Assitorium”; or the possible transformation of Tamayo’s work during his brief Parisian period, or the fidelity of a line of poetry that may be dancing in your head by Quevedo, Góngora, Sor Juana, Darío, López Velarde, Gorostiza, Pellicer, Vallejo, Neruda, Machado, Paz, Villaurrutia, Novo, Sabines, of any great poet of our language, and the answer will appear immediately: not just the verse but the stanza in which it is located. He is Mr. Memory. He is also an incomparable historian of mentalities: an intensely receptive and sharp essayist—if you don’t believe me, just read the pages he has written on Onetti, Novo, Beckford, Hammett; a remarkable movie critic; a student of Mexican painting who has produced excellent pages on Diego, Tamayo, Gerzso, María Izquierdo, and Toledo; and a lucid political essayist. He is the chronicler of all our misfortunes and our marvels, more of the former, considering that the Mexico in which we’re living has been fertile in misfortunes and, in turn, the marvels appear exceptional as miracles often do; he is the documentarian of the extremely fertile gamut of our national imbecility. His weekly columns capture the statements of the great minds of our minuscule universe; in them speak financiers, bishops, senators, deputies, and governors, the President of the Republic, the “communicators,” the cultured doyens. The result is devastating. Next to him, the discoveries of Bouvard and Pécuchet would look like the apothegms of Plato or Aristotle. To these attributes, others can be added: bibliophile; collector of a thousand heterogeneous things; felinophile, Sinologist—Carlos Monsiváis is all this and more. And, in addition, as readers may have already surmised: he is my closest friend.
Xalapa, January 1996
“On
