directed by someone, hiding in the house that belonged to the man who had sold his soul to the devil. And as I think of Doctor Faust, I recall Thomas Mann’s book on that character, and that for a number of years, while in exile, Mann was a Czech citizen.
With joy, with spirit, and with boundless curiosity, in a moment of exuberant optimism, I began to feel like a particle of Prague, a poor relative of the cobbles that paved its streets, its erect baroque estipites, its passion, its lights, its defeats, its mire. Why then—I ask myself—in the hundreds of pages that comprise my diaries of that time was there not a single mention of such walks, or the permanent bewilderment with which I attempted to integrate my person into its surroundings?…Was it out of humility? With what words could I describe that never-ending miracle? What tone would have been necessary to translate into a comprehensible language the murmurs I heard around me and what inclined me to believe that very soon I would succeed in crossing a magical barrier? But what barrier, damn it? In an exemplary essay, Borges reasons that in the Qur’an there are no camels anywhere, for the simple reason that their presence is so mundane that one takes their existence for granted. To mention them would be a pleonasm. The truth is, no answer comforts me. I reread page after page of several notebooks that make up my diary, and I noticed with great consternation that I didn’t describe the city in any of them. I seemed to obey a secret order to avoid it, to omit it, to erase it. The most I managed to do was to mention, without even the slightest importance, a restaurant, a theater, a square: “Today I ate at the Alcron with such and such people. The hors d’oeuvres are delicious there. I dare say they are among the best I’ve tasted in the city;” or “Last night at Smetana Hall I heard Obraztsova as the fortune-teller in Un ballo in maschera. We applauded her to death. Much more than the soprano who sang Amelia, who incidentally was also perfect;” or “I just arrived from the airport. I went to welcome Carmen, who told me that it seemed small relative to this ancient city’s importance.” A restaurant, a theater, the airport. Nothing, in retrospect: twaddle. In contrast, in the same diaries I go on and on about a) the noxious atmosphere I breathed in the foreign ministry; b) the frequent visitors I received from Mexico, Spain, Poland, and elsewhere; what my friends say, what they do, the topics we discuss; c) my physical ailments, medications, doctors, clinics, periods of convalescence in magnificent spas; d) my readings, to which, perhaps, the majority of the space is devoted. During those years, I returned fully to Slavic and Germanic literature, consistent with the history and creation of Czechoslovakia. I reviewed with almost maniacal voraciousness the authors I had admired since adolescence, and those years in Prague strengthened in a strange, elusive but persistent way, my knowledge of the Czechs. I read all of Ripellino—his books on Russian literature, the Czech anthology, his essays could all be included in the title of one of his extraordinary books: Saggi in forma di ballate [Essays in the Form of Ballads]; the Russian formalists, starting with Shklovsky, whose Theory of Prose I studied assiduously; Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which played an extensive role in the novels I wrote in Prague; and massive amounts of Chekhov and Gogol, whom I read and reread at every hour and in every place. During those six years, I also did an extensive review from the Middle Ages to the present of the literature of the German language, the most historically influential in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia, especially its Austrian variant. I found myself closer to Kafka than in any previous reading. As I frequented his daily haunts, I felt closer to his visions. In my youth, my enthusiasm for Kafka transformed, as happened to my entire generation, into a true passion, with all the exclusivity, visceralness, and intransigence that implies; it was equivalent to the first moment in which one feels overpowered by a spirit that he recognizes as undoubtedly superior, the only one capable of explaining in depth a time that will never disappoint us. In Prague, his role grew immensely. It was not merely a matter of providing the scope of an era, but of knowing the whole universe, its rules, its secrets, its ways, its purpose. The signs for knowing the answer are hidden in his writing; they must be sought in earnest. I set my sights on two other fascinating figures: Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann, both Austrians.
The hatred of the Russians was intense, monolithic, visceral; and no fissure, not even the slightest nuance, was allowed. It extended, albeit with less intensity, to the other socialist countries for having collaborated in the military occupation that cut short the experiment known as “socialism with a human face” in Prague in 1968. When I arrived to assume my post at the embassy, fifteen years had passed since this despicable event, but the memory of the tanks in the streets, the days of humiliation and powerlessness, the absurd argument that the Czechs and Slovaks had requested assistance to put an end to the enemies of socialism redoubled the population’s anger rather than assuage it. In the city center, there were two spacious Soviet bookstores always teeming with people. But no Czech or Slovak would set foot in them. The feverish horde that crowded inside to reach the shelves before others emptied them with exorbitant purchases consisted of Russian tourists or travelers from the other Soviet republics, who as soon as they arrived in the city, rushed to bookstores to acquire art books and literary editions that in their country sold out immediately, due to reduced printings of works that differed from the official canon, or those that touched on “dangerous” topics, which in Moscow could only be purchased with hard currency from the West, which when purchased in Prague with Czech korunas were a steal. Appearing in these collections were Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksey Remizov, Andrei Platonov, Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Bely, and other writers persecuted by Stalinism—enemies of the people, cosmopolitans who had turned their back on the nation, the recalcitrant bourgeois, those who were executed, those who spent long years in the Gulag; others, who were treated better, who lost the right to publish their work during long periods of their life, those who began to reemerge after the death of Stalin, were vindicated and over time became the greatest artists of their century, literary classics, and notable examples of human dignity. Russians came to Prague in the morning and returned to Moscow at night, just to purchase dozens of books they would then sell in Moscow or Leningrad at prices so exorbitant that they could make a profit even after traveling by plane. Near my embassy offices there was an exclusively Soviet press office, which no one ever entered. From time to time I would pause in front of its windows and not once saw anyone buy a newspaper or magazine. On television, one could easily watch a Soviet channel with less banal programs than the national ones, and I would even venture to say less ideologically rigid. As always happens, of course, to win the trust of superiors, these programs had to brim with ideological zeal, be more Catholic than the Pope. Once a week, on Saturdays, I occasionally watched masterfully directed and acted plays on this channel, to which I had grown accustomed from when I lived in Moscow. But if I mentioned it in the presence of my Czech friends, they grew silent, pretending not to have heard my comments, as if they suddenly suspected a trap.
The absence of written references to my day-to-day contact with Prague discouraged me. On the other hand, in one of my notebooks, I found an envelope with notes on a short trip I had made to the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev experiment. As I read these notes, I recalled moments of irritation and moments of pure emotion, constantly interspersed with each other, during the two weeks I spent in the bosom of that empire that had taken centuries to forge and whose impending collapse neither I nor anyone else could foresee. I got the idea to rework those notes, to set aside the texts from my diaries and to mention briefly, by way of background, some situations about my experience in the period in which I worked as a cultural advisor in Moscow.
Upon arriving in Prague, I looked for a Russian teacher, and a Czech woman came highly recommended; I read literary texts, practiced conversation with her in the language, and we did translation exercises. She was retired, which allowed her a freedom of movement that many others lacked. No one could expel her from anywhere for approaching a diplomat, nor could they remove her pension. Like all Czechs, she felt the wound of history in her marrow; she no longer believed in the possibility of a revival of socialism. When news began to circulate that a relatively young Communist leader in Moscow was trying to ease international tensions and introduce in his own country liberal reforms, among others an easing of literary and film censorship, she laughed sarcastically. She had heard it so many times, and everything always stayed the same if not worse, “Surely this is a ploy,” she said, “to fool Americans and to try to take advantage of them.” Some time passed, almost two
