morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series.”2 As the reader may have already noticed, this is the beginning of “The Aleph,” that great miracle by which Jorge Luis Borges enriched our lives.
From a certain age, every change one discovers in the environment takes on an offensive character, an agonizing personal mutilation. As if with that change, someone were giving us a macabre wink, and the new advertising for American cigarettes, just like Beatriz Viterbo’s death, were turning into an unexpected memento mori, an announcement of our future and inevitable death.
Thirty-five years ago, in Rome, I frequented a small bookstore in the Via del Babuino. It was run by a couple whose age was hard to discern, except that they were more young than old. I enjoyed chatting with them and hearing their recommendations. They were book people through and through. Their shelves reflected a confident and cultivated taste. Later on, each time I passed through Rome I would venture at least once to their store. It was impossible not to as it was on the way to the Piazza del Popolo. I watched them age without ever losing the conviction of their intuition and good literary judgment. The classics fit perfectly there with the new currents of thought and modern narrative forms. They had no patience for light literature, self-help books, or superficial theosophy. These genres fell outside their circle of interests; I imagine it would have disgusted them to welcome into their store readers who were addicted to those kinds of books.
So I saw them from time to time. On one occasion, I found only the woman behind the counter. Her husband, she told me, had died a few months before, from a blood clot, I think. Years later, on a different visit, I saw her sitting in a chair, with the look of someone who was completely detached from reality: she neither moved nor spoke; she didn’t seem interested in anything; her stare was fixed and blank. A slightly younger woman attended to the customers; I think I heard her say she was a cousin. I told her about the relationship that had bound me to the store since I was a young man: my first Ariosto, my first novels by Pavese. She told me that her cousin had succumbed to a deep depression; no treatment had been able to bring her out of it. She was afraid of leaving her in the apartment alone, something might happen to her, she might need help. So every morning she dressed her and took her to the bookstore, and that brought her back to life. “Look how good she feels; she’s spent her entire life here; being here cheers her up, of course it cheers her up.” If the vegetative state I witnessed could be considered a sign of revival, she must have felt awful at home, I thought.
In the spring of 1966, I spent a few days in Italy. When I passed the bookstore it was closed; what’s more, it was nonexistent. The windows on either side of the door that night and day had displayed the latest titles had disappeared. The sign with the bookstore’s name had disappeared. I felt the wound of time, its malignancy, with terrible intensity. That disappearance was a way of punishing the immense happiness of the young man who one day appeared there, rummaged through the bookshelves, and left with copies of Orlando Furioso, Il campagno, and Tra donne sole under his arm.
In every city where I lived I’ve experienced similar circumstances. Running into such changes diminishes not only the pleasure of traveling but also the concrete awareness of the past. Sometimes I have to go out of my way in order to avoid walking by a place where one of these incidents has happened…To not see, for example, in a city in central Italy that where there was once a theater there is now a discotheque whose flashing neon lights take the place of those that more discreetly announced Paolo Stampa and Rina Morelli in a play by Goldoni, or that in place of a middling café where I used to sit and write in Rome there now stands a tacky souvenir store for garden-variety tourists.
Still in Rome, for many years now I’ve stopped walking down that narrow street, which also leads to the Piazza del Popolo, whose eccentricity lies in one side being called Via della Penna and the other Via dell’Oca. It’s the only street that I know like that. On one side of the street lived Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, and on the other there were two trattorias essential on my life’s map: Mondino’s and, a few steps away, Pietro’s. Mondino had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; afterward, for the rest of his life, he was a diehard anti-fascist. He ran his trattoria with his wife and son. Together they cooked and served. Customers ate at long tables around the stove. The clientele was made up of students, young intellectuals, theater students, poor artists, and foreign scholars. They were divided between communists and existentialists. They all had a single common hero: Sartre, who at the time was very close to the Italian Communist Party. His Criticism of Dialectical Reason was the most oft-quoted book among the patrons. Philosophy and, above all, Marxism were constant topics of discussion. At times there were discussions that threatened to erupt into war. Someone would then tell a joke, and laughs would win the day. It smelled like sweat, smoke, onion, and olive oil. When I had no money, I ate for free because it gave Mondino great pleasure to talk about Machado in Spanish and for me to listen to him recite Machado’s poetry, which he knew by heart. At night I would eat at the neighboring trattoria, Pietro’s, a Calabrese who detested bohemian culture, the young crowd, extremist ideas, and, therefore, Mondino, I suppose. There I would meet María and Araceli Zambrano, other literati, important journalists and filmmakers, but seldom famous people, because the establishment was rather modest. The central figure was María, who had in fact transformed the trattoria into a salon. Prominent Hispanists and intellectuals, as well as visitors from Spain and Latin America who were passing through Rome, would sit around her. Whenever a group of young Spaniards came in, María would light up. She’d talk to them about her Republican youth, about her teacher Ortega y Gasset, about the writers of her generation, the Civil War, defeat, and then exile. She became a tragic figure: Hecuba, Cassandra, and, of course, Antigone. Swathed in the smoke of her cigarette, looking up, the words would pour out, as if a higher spirit inhabited her body, had possessed her, and was using her mouth to speak. She did not raise her voice. She spoke as if in a trance, inhaled her cigarette, and paused to exhale the smoke. Just then, before beginning the next sentence, the atmosphere became charged with an almost unbearable intensity; the young Spaniards looked as if a sacred current were running through them, and me along with them, as well as the entire restaurant, whether the dinner guests understood Spanish or not. She did not like to end on a note of pathos. Once attained, she would transition effortlessly to recounting anecdotes about Cernuda, Lezama Lima, or Prados, with whom she maintained intimate correspondence. I imagine that when the young people returned to Spain, what they remembered most of Rome was the moment they had seen and heard María Zambrano. At times, I could not withstand so much intensity, and I would leave there with a fever and spend several days ill in the boarding house where I lived. María and Araceli have died, as have Mondino and Pietro. Their trattorias today have other names and another look. Above all, the atmosphere of elation and generosity, of frenzy, and of anguish and hope that characterized Rome prima del miracolo economico has disappeared. Revisiting the past means, among other heartaches, contemplating a world that is, and at the same time has ceased to be, the same.
Take Mexico, for example. Think about the changes that have occurred in the last half-century—the devastation of the capital, the degradation of the atmosphere, the moral pollution—and you will have a vision that borders on catastrophe. A dystopia staged by an expressionist director. When I entered university, the city was inhabited by four and a half million people; today that number seems to top more than twenty, and I say “seems” because no one can provide an exact figure. Any common memory, every possible collective imagination, tends to be smashed to bits in these circumstances; the social link that replaces their functions is crass TV, the creator of timid mythologies.
I would like to move beyond, to the extent possible, apocalyptic visions; and pause instead on areas of imprecise determination, on small details: writing, reading, dreams, anything that eschews the grandiose, the plaintive, an apostolic zeal, and didactic pontificating.
I
