made by my grandmother and her friends of the same age of that proclaimed paradise, the only thing I retained was an endless string of disasters, evil, and revenge that led me to suspect that in my legendary San Rafael (the name that concealed Huatusco) the presence of the devil far exceeded that of the angels. Perhaps that is the reason for the too frequent mention of the devil in those early stories, which freezes the development of the plot, paralyzes the characters and creates an unnecessary and cumbersome climate of wickedness.
I had managed by way of these stories to unburden myself of some uncomfortable ghosts. They might not be those of the present, but indeed those I lived with during my childhood. As I look back, the time that passed from the moment I traced in Tepoztlán with a sleepwalker’s hand the story of a tragic misunderstanding—the story of the fruitless obedience of Victorio Ferri, a child consumed by madness, who, convinced that his father is the devil, commits, to be kind, all manner of vileness that might seem appropriate for the son and heir of evil, only to discover while dying that none of it had been worthwhile, that the happiness he detected in the face of his father is due to the certainty that he is a step away from freeing himself of him, to discover it at the gates of death—even today, forty years later, as I write these pages, it compels me to repeat what I said on other occasions: what unifies my existence is literature; all that I have lived, thought, longed for, imagined is contained in it. More than a mirror it is an X-ray: it is the dream of the real.
I owe to Infierno de todos [Everyone’s Hell] having extricated myself from a lapsed world that wasn’t mine, that was related only tangentially to me, which allowed me to approach literature with greater fidelity to the real. I noticed this with greater clarity during a period of tenacious reading of Witold Gombrowicz. For him, literature and philosophy must emanate from reality, because only then would they, in turn, have the ability to infer from it. Everything else, the Polish writer insisted, was tantamount to an act of onanism, to the replacement of the language of the inane cult of writing for writing’s sake and the word for word’s sake. When speaking of the real and reality I am referring to a vast space, different from what others understand for those terms when they confuse reality with a deficient and parasitic aspect of existence, fueled by conformity, bad press, political speeches, vested interests, telenovelas, light literature, romance as well as self-help.
When Infierno de todos was published I was living in Warsaw. I had undertaken a trip three years earlier to Europe, which at the beginning I imagined would be very brief. I traveled to all the essential places before settling in Rome for a period of time. Thereafter, for different reasons and motivations, I remained outside Mexico, changing destinations frequently, almost always by random interventions, until the end of 1988, when I returned to the country. During those twenty-eight European years my stories recorded an incessant to-and-fro. They are, in some way, the logbooks of my worldly wanderings, my mutations, and my internal settlements.
To cut loose the moorings, to confront without fear the vast world and to burn my ships were events that time and again changed my life and, consequently, my literary labor. During those years of wandering, the body of my work was formed. If I received any benefit, it was the chance to contemplate my country from a distance and, therefore, paradoxically, to sense that it was closer. A mixed feeling of approximation and flight allowed me to enjoy an enviable freedom, which surely I would not have known had I stayed at home. My work would have been another. The journey as a continuous activity, the frequent surprises, my coexistence with different languages, customs, imaginations, and mythologies, my diverse reading options, my ignorance of styles, my indifference for metropolises, their demands and pressures, the encounters good and bad; all affirmed my vision.
The story that appears at the end of Infierno de todos, “Cuerpo presente” [Lying in State], dated in Rome in 1961, represents the closure and farewell to the vicarious world I had written about until then. Thereafter a new narrative period arises in which I use the settings I visited as backdrops for the dramas lived by some characters, mostly Mexicans, who unexpectedly faced the different beings living inside them, whose existence they don’t even suspect. There are inner itineraries whose stops include Mexico City, cities in Veracruz, Cuernavaca, and Tepoztlán, but also Rome, Venice, Berlin, Samarkand, Warsaw, Belgrade, Peking, and Barcelona. My characters are usually students, businessmen, filmmakers, writers, who suddenly and unexpectedly suffer an existential crisis that leads them to doubt momentarily the values that have sustained them by means of an umbilical cord of extraordinary resistance. Breaking that link or remaining attached to it becomes their essential dilemma.
If it is true that the impulses of childhood will accompany us until the moment of death, it is also true that the writer must keep them at bay, prevent them from turning into a lock so that writing doesn’t become a prison, but rather a reservoir of freedoms. My experience in Rome introduced me to new milieus, to other challenges, and to endless hesitation. It allowed me to close the door on a period and perceive other possibilities.
A further step. I visited Warsaw in early 1963. I didn’t know anyone in the city. The first night I attended a theater by chance near my hotel. Without understanding a word, I was awe-struck. Upon returning to the hotel I was disturbed by the resemblance to my grandmother that I noticed in one of the employees at reception, an elderly woman. Not only her face, but also her gestures; her way of drawing the cigarette to her lips and exhaling the smoke seemed identical. It was like a hallucination. I forced myself to believe that it was an effect of the theatrical excitement, and I went to my room. The next day I went to Łódź, where Juan Manuel Torres was studying film. He infected me with his enthusiasm for Poland and its culture; he spoke of its classics and its romantics as if in a mystic trance. That evening I returned to Warsaw on a train that was delayed several hours because of a tremendous storm. I had climbed into the car with an aching flu. Numbed by the cold, overcome with fever, almost delirious, I could barely make it to the hotel upon arriving in Warsaw. During the reception the same elderly woman as the night before attended to me again, and again with a cigarette in her mouth. I greeted her with absolute informality, I told her that if she didn’t stop smoking her health would continue to be bad, that at that late hour she should already be sleeping. She answered in Polish, and I was horrified to discover that it wasn’t my grandmother. I spent the next day in bed per physician’s orders. I began to write a story about the feverish confusion between that Polish woman and my grandmother. I tried to reproduce the delirium of the previous day from the moment I boarded the train in Łódź. I noticed that it retrieved from me a new tonality and, more importantly, that it drew me toward a necessary operation: severing the umbilical cord that connected me to my childhood.
Years later in Barcelona, I managed to finish El tañido de una flauta [The Sound of the Flute],11 my first novel. I was at the time thirty-eight years old and had very little work under my belt. Upon writing it, I established a tacit commitment to writing. I decided, without knowing that I had, that instinct should come before any other mediation. It was instinct that would determine form. Even now, at this moment, I struggle with Reality’s emissary that is form. One doesn’t seek out form, of that I am certain, but rather opens himself to it, waits for it, accepts it, battles it. And, so, form is always the victor. When this doesn’t happen the text is always a bit spoiled.
El tañido de una flauta was, among other things, a tribute to Germanic literatures, especially Thomas Mann, whose work I have frequented since adolescence, and Hermann Broch, whom I discovered during a stay in Belgrade and whom, awestruck, I read and reread in torrents for almost a year. The central theme of El tañido… is creation. Literature, painting, and film are the central protagonists. The terror of creating a hybrid between the story and the treatise drove me to intensify the narrative elements. In the novel several plots revolve around the central story line, secondary, tertiary plots, some positively minimal, mere larvae of plots, necessary to cloak and mitigate the long disquisitions on art in which the characters become entangled. Little news has pleased me so much as a revelation by Rita Gombrowicz about the literary tastes of her celebrated husband. One of his passions was Dickens. His favorite novel, The Pickwick Papers.
My apprenticeship continued. For
