meant going to Veracruz, boarding a ship, and crossing the ocean. If someone wanted to take a more luxurious trip, faster and with fewer stops, he had to go to New York, and sail from there on one of the spectacular floating cities of the time: the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, the Leonardo da Vinci, for example. When in 1988 I decided to return to Mexico for good, passenger ships had ceased to exist several years before and were reduced to serving as cruise ships in the summer.
It is hardly surprising that during that long period of absence my memory would occasionally relive unusual episodes that were both fond and forgotten. A letter from Mexico could momentarily recover images I thought lost: a dusty, yellowed, and sometimes implausible hic et nunc managed to emerge from among the deceased, radiant and adorned with every possible prestige. Even an encounter with someone who had traveled through Mexico could cause my immediate surroundings to disappear and transport me back to the infernos or paradises of the past. Every instant recovered from oblivion turned suddenly into a concentration of the universe. Time and space knew extraordinary permutations. As if by alchemy the Café Viena on the Paseo de la Reforma would appear in my memory: its atmosphere, its furniture, and the indisputable aroma of Central European pastries. It was only much later, when I had the opportunity to frequent similar establishments on my march through Europe’s imperial cities—Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Salzburg, Marienbad, Karlsbad—that I realized that Café Viena was a tiny outpost of Habsburg culture. My memory returns me to a long table in the back of the café, beneath an immense rectangular mirror. Don Manuel Pedroso holds court, surrounded by a flock of lads who were probably between eighteen and twenty years old. A genuine interest in what they are hearing and an intense zest for life lessens their slight tendency toward snobbishness. They listen captivated as their mentor talks about Góngora, Balzac, Hobbes, and Dostoyevsky; about his time as a teacher in Seville and Madrid; about episodes and figures from the Spanish Republic; about theories of love in Stendhal and Proust; about studying philosophy and law in Germany; the emergence and height of expressionism, the Bauhaus, Rilke, and the Duino Elegies, of which he’s committed long fragments to memory; about the Italy of Burckhardt, Goethe, Berenson; about the charms of Slavic, French, Andalusian, and Mexican women. He invites his friends to converse with us; one day he brings Américo Castro, who’s passing through Mexico, and talks to us about Cervantes and Tirso de Molina, and declares that he disagrees entirely with the thesis he had espoused on Tirso in his youthful prologue to the comedies published in Espasa’s Clásicos Castellanos, that his ideas about Spain’s Golden Age had changed radically, and not just the Golden Age but also the whole of Spain’s cultural formation. He was the most important visitor our tertulia ever had and, much to the annoyance of Pedroso, we listened to him rather with sarcasm and inattention because of the ridicule to which Borges had subjected him in Other Inquisitions. At Professor Pedroso’s tertulia, the logos and its rigors coexist in total harmony with the trivial; Alicia Osorio, Lupina Mendoza, Ivonne Loyola, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Luis Prieto, and yours truly listen to the maestro intently, we celebrate his wit, we agree, question, dare to raise objections, which the maestro himself encourages. Finally, we say our goodbyes, aware that life is full of wonder, among other reasons, because we know that we will meet again next Saturday in the same café where, unbeknownst to us, our destiny is taking shape.
Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. Mine relives the enthusiasm I felt as I left Bellas Artes after hearing Arrau, Rubenstein, Callas, and the Teatro Tívoli—no less venerated—where the audience’s pleasure became frenzied before the gyrations of the famous “exotic” dancers of the time—Su Mu-Key, Tongolele, Kalantán; or the Lírico after applauding the legendary Josephine Baker; or the endless walks through the city’s many different neighborhoods where I talked nonstop with Luis Prieto, Lucy Bonilla, Gustavo Londroño, Carlos Monsiváis, Luz del Amo, Ricardo Regazzoni about books, movies, politics, or private matters; we argued, fought, and always reconciled as we made fun of the false (and even genuine) glories of this world…Everything was real, everything was true and, unfortunately, unrepeatable.
Not too long ago, I went through some of my books while preparing them for re-publication, a task that has never been pleasing; I was surprised to discover that a place from my childhood appeared on several occasions, a place it would never have crossed my mind to think about, a setting that entered my writing surreptitiously, which served as an unconscious frame to a mysterious event: a crime that was never completely solved. It surprised me because in real life I had only been there on two or three occasions while I was still very small. Upon recalling those excursions, upon dislodging them from the place where my memory was hiding them, they burst into my conscience as one of the most startling episodes of my childhood. The place is the Ojo de Agua where the river Atoyac is born; a few days ago I discovered that it was one of the sacred places of the Totonacas.
I was living at the Potrero sugar mill. Some families used to organize occasional excursions to the region’s picturesque sites, among them the natural spring at Ojo de Agua. The round-trip—bathing in the river, the picnic—took an entire day. We rode in a Jeep until we arrived at the village of Paraje Nuevo, and, from there, we walked on foot along the paths that the peasants cleared for us with their machetes in the middle of the jungle. One of the high points of the trip was crossing the river on a rope bridge.
It was like crossing a bottomless abyss; it’s possible my childlike eyes magnified it disproportionately, as tends to happen. The bridge lacked the usual board planks common to hanging bridges. Instead there were just three or four ropes braided together. My feet slid slowly along the bottom rope as my hands held the upper one. There were probably twenty or twenty-five of us, including the children. There were some young American couples; the American women were wearing pants and seemed to possess the same sporting ability as their husbands. The Mexican women would not have dared wear pants even if they were threatened with being thrown from the cliff. I remember that they were carried across, tied to the men’s arms, some shouted, terrified, while others laughed hysterically. We children rode astride the adults’ shoulders, or tied to their backs. The operation took a good amount of time, because in addition to our crossing, large straw baskets containing food, drinks, plates, silverware, and other paraphernalia had to be transported across. We then crossed another patch of jungle until we arrived at a spot, the other climatic moment, from where we were able to contemplate paradise: the spring, located beneath a curtain of rocks that my memory reproduces like a great Wagnerian scene. As we neared the place we began to perceive certain mysterious movements in the water and in the brush along the bank. They slowly began to take shape and definition; they were otters, the marvelous water dogs that had inhabited the region from the beginning of creation. If they had stayed there, nothing would have happened to them; there was a tacit agreement not to disturb them. The peasants in the region watched over their pups and occasionally, when the time was right, sacrificed a few males to sell their pelts.
Not long ago I decided to return to that sanctuary, to the magic garden from my childhood. It’s possible to travel to Paraje Nuevo today by car and continue in the same vehicle along dirt roads all the way to the river’s edge. There are scarcely any vestiges of the original jungle left. It has been replaced by sugar cane. There are no longer any difficult passes. The atmosphere of mystery has disappeared. At a certain moment, I decided not to continue; I turned around and retraced my steps. I didn’t dare go as far as the spring. Everything had deteriorated in an unbearable way. The animal life had disappeared, just as the vines from my childhood and the giant ferns, the huge climbing plants with enormous leaves, which back then surrounded the pool and climbed up the mountain, had disappeared. The natural world that existed until a few decades ago and took centuries to be created is now just a memory, just like the Babuino bookstore, the Mondino and Pietro trattorias, the Café Viena, the Tívoli, the Lírico, and so many other things.
