Their swollen bodies trembled with convulsions; muffled cries escaped from the elderly woman’s bleeding mouth. Suddenly, the doorwoman appeared with a large leather sack, kneeled before the old woman and took off her shoes. Lehmann, paralyzed with fear, muttered something, he didn’t even know what, to which one of the youths, pointing to the bodies, replied only: “Juden! Juden!” From the other floors could be heard ferocious voices as well as the cries of the victims.
I was in Vienna this year, after a twelve-year absence. My arrival coincided with a mass rally of three hundred thousand people who protested against the return of Nazism to the country, precisely in Heroes’ Square, the same one where one million Austrians frenziedly cheered Hitler. During the ensuing days I was forced to tolerate the taxi drivers, business employees, hotel staff, who upon seeing that I was a foreigner felt obligated to enlighten me. We were finally liberated, they would say. Haier17 has liberated us from the tyranny of socialists and Jews. I left Vienna days ahead of schedule; I felt as if I were breathing poisoned air.
Paolo Milano’s tale in Rome, in the end almost a gasp, has made me, more than any other spoken or written testimony, viscerally abhor national socialism. As I left the restaurant, someone said, Fellini’s literary assistant I believe, that something like that could happen anywhere in the world, except the repetition of acts like those, to which Ara Zambrano responded that we shouldn’t deceive ourselves and began to recount almost incoherently the circumstances surrounding her years in German-occupied Paris, and the interrogations to which the Gestapo subjected her while her husband rotted in their dungeon, before executing him.
Herman Bosch was arrested at his home the day following Hitler’s arrival in Heroes’ Square. That same day, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, his wife, received a telephone call warning them that a group of Nazi youths had listed them as Jews and Communists. They were saved by a hair’s breadth. The Swiss musician Rolf Liebermann watched from a window at the Opera as the barbarians dragged sculptures from the house of Mahler’s daughter. Broch himself writes to a friend that he could describe his time in prison as “comfortable” in relation to the terror that he experienced later in the streets, where all he heard was the rhythmic cry: “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!” (One people, one State, one leader), chanted all the time by the masses. It was the same demented chorus that Professor Schuster’s widow hears for many years, that drove her to her death in the final scene of the last, extremely intense drama by Thomas Bernhard: Heroes’ Square.
THE JEWS IN MEXICO. “A pause here: I look around and notice that my story has turned into a portrait gallery and that other characters have appeared from what my parents have said,”18 writes Margo Glantz at the beginning of chapter 4119 of that beautiful and extremely original book called The Family Tree, the first to deal with the tribulations and triumphs experienced by a Jewish family during the last fifty years in Mexico. A family whose photo, taken shortly before disembarking at a Mexico port together with their “ship brothers,” shows us a group in which some of its members look like Kafka and all the women like Ottla, Kafka’s favorite sister.20 One of those “brothers” could perfectly be the Karl Rossmann of Amerika.
The figure who at the beginning of that chapter 41 appears on the lips of Jacobo Glantz is that of Bashevis Singer; in other chapters it will be that of Blok, those of Mayakovsky and Einstein, those of Lunacharsky and Alejandra Kollontai, that of Chagall, that of Nabokov, those of a few actors from the Jewish theater of Mexico, those of an infinite number of names of interchangeable relatives disseminated in muddy villages of the Ukrainian steppe, in Mexico, in the United States, in the ports of Odessa and Leningrad.
“The Jews,” says Margo Glantz, quoting Bashevis Singer, “do not record their history, they have no sense of chronology. It would seem that instinctively they know that time and space are mere illusion.”21 And The Family Tree adheres to that postulate. On the lips of Jacobo and Lucía, the author’s parents, and also on her own, history zigzags through past and present, it harks back to a village where Jacobo attends his first primary school to study prayers and the Hebrew alphabet, to the Department of Odessa, where Lucía plays the piano, then skips to the moment when the author is working in Acapulco on the final proofs of her book, to the recounting of her trip to Odessa fifty years after her family’s separation to see and touch the relatives that remained there and, throughout seventy-one brief chapters, allows us to glimpse her biography and to know the fabulous and day-to-day history of her parents. Jacobo seems to be air; Lucía the solid ground that he shakes, from which he extracts its substances to spread around the world. Margo observes them with love, with curiosity, with imprudence. “Oh, Margo, I’ve a lot to do, leave me in peace,” her mother implores her. “Okay, but we’re going to leave it here, I’ll put something together for you, I need to think about it, you can’t talk just like that,”22 Jacobo cuts her short.
Perhaps the couple is prototypical within the Jewish community. If any book reminds me of these genealogies, it is Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops. The figure of her father is that of a demiurge; he creates never-ending, fantastic images within which he lives; day-to-day reality barely brushes against him. Fifty years in Mexico pass between a haberdashery and a bakery, one shoe shop or another, a café, a famous restaurant. Jacobo meanders along Álvaro Obregón with a mule loaded with baskets of bread, while studying a dentistry textbook; at night he pulls the teeth of stallkeepers from La Merced Market. All these events happen to him on an earthly plain. He inhabits another world, that of poetry and color. Jacobo reads poetry incessantly, he translates and writes it. He’ll become one of the most important contemporary poets of the Yiddish language and an original painter. Lucía’s energy keeps him going.
Margo Glantz has succeeded in recreating all the magic of these lives in her story, to which she has added the color and aroma that emanate from the family she describes; she provides a glimpse of a few personal preoccupations, her proximity and distance to the world she recounts, and, above all else, has managed to create a fluid and rigorous form, the only one that the genealogical abyss allows.
FORMS OF GAO XINGJIAN. Suddenly, at random, detached from nothingness, or what one conceives as “nothingness,” memory manages to rescue a solitary, unexpected image, disconnected from the present, but also from its normal surroundings: its time, its place, its minute history, where because of apathy, disinterest, the wear of old age, it is only able to sparkle brightly for a few seconds then return to the primeval chaos from which it emerged.
Sometimes, an image reiterates its presence and demands to be rescued from forgottenness. And if whoever frees it happens to be a writer, he’ll be showered with bliss, he’ll feel as if he were on the verge of conceiving a new story, perhaps the best he has ever written, because the details he has just remembered about his childhood could be what was needed to sketch that long-awaited perfect plot that inexplicably eludes him just as he’s at the point of capturing it. He again feels this time that he’ll be victorious, he has heard the imperious voice of the muses, the message, the announcement, that which crystalizes in “inspiration,” a term scorned by every pedant in the world, and also by his cousins, the pretentious, but one, however, the writer I’m thinking about reveres. Yes, that, inspiration, goddess of the symbolists and of the modernista poets, from Darío to Valle-Inclán. Yes, he says, inspiration, and repeats: inspiration, inspiration and its many mysteries vindicated by Nabokov, the very same that the “scientists” of literature encapsulate in extravagant, profane, and ridiculous terms, increasingly distant from what literature is.
In my personal experience, inspiration is the most delicate fruit of memory.
I return home from an intense session with my massage therapist. I should have visited him weeks before, and as a consequence of the delay the pain in my back, shoulders, neck, and the nape of my neck had grown infinitely worse. The doctor went to work, repeating all the while that it was my fault that my back has turned to stone, that my muscles were in knots, that working them out was going to take him much more time and effort than that required in a normal session, as I, in pain,
