if I came back from the airport to retrieve something I had forgotten, the fact is I hadn’t left Veracruz, not entirely, but I was only gone a few hours, and then I returned to the hotel; I rushed into my room and ran—celestial lyre-bearer!—to open my suitcase, to stroke my manuscript, to kiss it. Except there were no notebooks or paper in the suitcase; there were instead huge eggs that suddenly began to crack and from which began to emerge horrible beaks, then bodies, which were even more repulsive, of cartilaginous birds, and I knew, in that strange way that one knows things in dreams, that they were ostriches: a quintuplet hatching of ostriches. I desperately opened another bag and another, out of which sprung ostriches of varying sizes, and the first ones, which I had seen hatch, were now my size, and some were hiding their heads under the bed, behind a door, in the toilet bowl, wherever they could, their droppings all the while falling to the floor and laying eggs wherever they liked. I could have died from despair in that state. I had lost the fruit of many years of work, the work that was going to redeem me professionally, that would lift me out of the mediocrity in which I had always wallowed and catapult me to the summit. I didn’t understand anything, and the only thing I wanted was for someone to remove those grotesque fowl from my room so I could lie down and sleep peacefully.
The same emptiness I felt at the end of the dream, when by bewildering metamorphosis my supposed masterpiece had turned into a flock of ostriches, was repeated in real life when I discovered the complete absence of Prague, the city, in my notebooks. I had lived captive—happily captive!—aware that a miracle took place each time I ventured out into the street and became lost in the network of labyrinthine streets that make up medieval Prague and the old Jewish quarter—my astonishment before the immense panorama that came suddenly into view as I approached the river or crossed any of its bridges; when I slipped into the shade of its thick walls, built and rebuilt throughout the centuries, like palimpsests made of stone and of different clays that contained messages connected to the cult of Osiris, Mantra, and Beelzebub himself. Of all the sciences that found a home in Prague, the one that enjoyed the greatest prestige was alchemy. There was a reason Ripellino gave his best book the title Magic Prague. For six years, I visited its sanctuaries, those known to the whole world, but also other secret ones; I wandered splendid avenues that are parks that turn into woods, and also squalid alleys, vulgar passageways, without form or direction. Time and time again I walked rhythmically on cobblestone streets that had known the footsteps of the Golem, of Joseph K., and of Gregor Samsa, of Elina Marty-Makropulos, of the soldier Švejk, of the Rabbi Loew, with a chorus of occultists, newts, robots, and other members of Bohemia’s motley literary family. Prague: an observatory and compendium of the universe: an absolute imago mundi: Prague.
I was fortunate that my arrival in Prague coincided with an exhibition of Matthias Braun, Bohemia’s great Baroque sculptor, who transformed stone, subjected it to unknown tension, extracted from its bosom angels and saints, twisting and arranging them in impossible corporeal positions, and who, in full possession of his liberty, succeeded in making the sacred touch the absurd, the delusional—that which distinguishes the Bohemian Baroque from that of Rome, Bavaria and Vienna. Braun is not a desacralizer, not at all; if anything, he was a man in anguish. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did not even know until then the name of that great artist. After seeing the exhibition, I traveled the roads of Bohemia and Moravia to see the rest of his work.
I’m almost certain that the same day I allowed myself to be dazzled by the Braun exhibit, I was able to find, with the aid of a city map, the Café Arco, one of the holiest sites of interwar literature, where Franz Kafka met with his closest friends: Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Johannes Urzidil, and the adolescent Leo Perutz. All young Jews from more or less affluent families, writers in the German language, who formed the Prague branch of the Vienna School. They considered themselves provincials, disconnected from the living language, unconnected to contemporaneity, to the prestige of the metropolis, and the truth is that their very existence represented, but at the time neither they nor the world knew it, the zone of maximum tension of the German language. From the street and especially inside, the establishment could not be seamier. It looked like all the bleak and filthy fifth-rate establishments that Hašek created for his soldier Švejk. The same neighborhood where it was located seemed to have lost a former prestige that, on the other hand, must have been modest. Imagining those young geniuses talking around a table in that dreary space, devoid of atmosphere, its floor littered with cigarette butts, greasy pieces of paper, and dirt, exchanging ideas and discussing them, or reading their latest texts to each other, had an obscene quality.
On another occasion, during my first summer in Prague, on an afternoon of stifling heat, I went out, guidebook in hand, to look for a pair of hard to find synagogues and the so-called Faust House. I set out for the latter first, in the heart of the new city. New, in Prague, means anything built after the seventeenth century. The Faust House is a large, solemn, and neutral palace. Not even the blinding light of the summer sun is able to soften its funereal appearance. The house is opposite a square with tall, lush chestnut trees, which, for some reason, fail to enhance the beauty of the surroundings. A tree-covered square, with broad lawns and assorted flowerbeds, devoid of charm. I learned later that once upon a time it was known as the witches’ square. As early as the Middle Ages it was believed that sorcerers, witches, spiritualists, alchemists—the very concubines and spawn of Satan!—held meetings on the surrounding premises. Every thirty or fifty years, tempers in the neighborhood flared. Someone would spread the rumor that the corpses of missing children had been found on the banks of the river with marks on their bodies similar to the various signs used in satanic rituals, and so forth, which no one could prove for the simple reason that they had not existed, but emotions ignited, raged, then the expected happened: the doors of slums and hiding places were battered down; the witches and other visionaries were rounded up in extremely brutal fashion; then came the fire that, during the ensuing days, incinerated, fagot by fagot, that accursed vermin that had lost its way. In 1583, the Emperor Rudolf II transferred the Hapsburg capital from Vienna to Prague. His credulity was infinite, and none of the many disappointments he suffered could diminish it. He was convinced that he would find the formula for the Philosopher’s Stone, which could extend life as many as three or four hundred years and had already, there was proof, made some humans immortal. He was also convinced that there was an alchemical process whereby a few drops could transform base metals into gold. He claimed to have seen it. During his reign, dozens of alchemists of diverse plumage descended on Prague. The most eminent were granted access to the royal castle, where the monarch enriched them and treated them as equals. However, after a certain amount of time they all met the same fate: ghastly torture, the gallows, the stake, quartering. One of them, Edward Kelley, an Irishman by birth, was the emperor’s favorite for many years. Rudolf worshipped him as a second Faust. And for this he gave him the palace, built centuries before by one Johannes Faust, to whom popular tradition attributed fantastic powers of divination, powers he had received, according to popular lore, from the devil himself for having sold his soul. In short, I arrived that hot August afternoon of 1983 to find that the illustrious house had become a hospital. I did not go in; the uninviting façade failed to inspire a visit, nor did I stop at the lackluster plaza that adjoined it—a gloomy continuation of the building. I walked down a street that led to the river. In August, the residents of Prague go on holiday; if forced to remain in the city, they tend to withdraw into their homes and drink beer until the heat subsides. It was a neighborhood unfrequented by tourists. I turned onto an overly modest and poorly cobbled alley. Suddenly, as I walked, I glimpsed a shapeless bundle in the distance on the opposite sidewalk. As I approached, I saw it move. It was a decrepit old man, with a thick shock of hair, who was obviously drunk. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to stand up or squat down. His pants hovered around his knees, a scene as harsh and grotesque as those of Goya. I think as he dropped his pants to defecate, he collapsed and fell into his own excrement. He was cursing loudly and in a menacing tone. No one was passing through the alley except yours truly. I walked past him, cautiously, on the opposite sidewalk; after walking a few meters I could not resist turning my head to look back. The scene was pathetic: with every attempt to pull himself up, the old man would once again fall onto his back; his pants and underwear at mid-thigh acted as a tether, hindering his movement. Even now, I am haunted by the specter of the repeated falls into his excrement and the squeals that sounded like a pig at slaughter. And today,
