Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

These five bearers of consolation and desire, I believe today, were the greedy Miss Bordereau of Henry James’s Aspern Papers, who in her turn descends from the cruelly mad Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, who is herself the English daughter of the ancient countess of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, she who jealously keeps the secret of winning at cards.

The similar structure of all three stories only proves that they belong to the same mythical family. You invariably have three figures: the old woman, the young woman, and the young man. In Pushkin, the old woman is the Countess Anna Fedorovna, the young woman her ward Lisaveta Ivanovna, the young man Hermann, an officer of the engineering corps. In Dickens, the old woman is Miss Havisham, the girl Estella, the hero Pip. In Henry James, the old woman is Miss Juliana Bordereau, the younger woman her niece Miss Tina, the intruding young man the nameless narrator H.J. — “Henry James” in Michael Redgrave’s staging of the story.

In all three works the intruding young man wishes to know the old lady’s secret: the secret of fortune in Pushkin, the secret of love in Dickens, the secret of poetry in James. The young girl is the deceiver — innocent or not — who must wrest the secret from the old woman before she takes it to the grave.

La señora Consuelo, Aura, and Felipe Montero joined this illustrious company, but with a twist: Aura and Consuelo are one, and it is they who tear the secret of desire from Felipe’s breast. The male is now the deceived. This is in itself a twist on machismo.

And do not all three ladies descend from Michelet’s medieval sorceress who reserves for herself, be it at the price of death by fire, the secrets of a knowledge forbidden by modern reason, the damned papers, the letters stained by the wax of candles long since gone dead, the cards wasted by the fingers of avarice and fear, but also the secrets of an antiquity projecting itself with greater strength than the future?

For is there a secret more secret, a scandal more ancient, than that of the sinless woman, the woman who does not incite toward sin — Eve — and does not open the box of disgrace — Pandora? The woman who is not what the Father of the Church, Tertullian, would have her be, “a temple built on top of a sewer,” not the woman who must save herself by banging a door like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, but the woman who, before all of them, is the owner of her time because she is the owner of her will and of her body; because she does not admit any division between time, body, and will, and this mortally wounds the man who would like to divide his mind from his flesh in order to resemble, through his mind, his God, and through his flesh, his Devil?

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam rebukes the Creator, challenges him, asks him:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay

To mould me Man, did I sollicitte thee

From darkness to promote me, or here place

In this delicious Garden?

Adam asks his God, and even worse,

… to reduce me to my dust,

Desirous to resigne, and render back

All I receav’d, unable to performe

The terms too hard, by which I was to hold

The good I sought not.

This man divided between his divine thought and his carnal pain is the author of his own unbearable conflict when he demands, not death, but at least, because she is worse than death, life without Eve — that is, life without Evil, life among men only, a wise creation peopled by exclusively masculine spirits, without this fair defect of nature: woman.

But this life among masculine angels shall be a life alienated, mind and flesh separated. Seen as Eve or Pandora, woman answers from the other shore of this division, saying that she is one, body inseparable from soul, with no complaints against Creation, conceived without sin because the apple of Paradise does not kill: it nurtures and it saves us from the schizoid Eden subverted by the difference between what is to be found in my divine head and what is to be found between my human legs.

The secret woman of James, Dickens, Pushkin, and Michelet who finds her young granddaughter in Aura has, I said, a fifth forebear. Her name is Circe. She is the Goddess of Metamorphosis and for her there are no extremes, no divorces between flesh and mind, because everything is transforming itself constantly, everything is becoming other without losing its anteriority and announcing a promise that does not sacrifice anything of what we are because we have been and we shall be: “Ayer se fue, mañana no ha llegado, / Hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto; / Soy un fue, y un seré, y un es cansado” (Yesterday is gone, tomorrow has not come, / Today is endlessly fleeing; / I am an I was, an I shall be, an I am tired).

Imitating old Quevedo, I asked the Aura papers, feverishly written as the summer of ’61 came to an end: “Listen, life, will no one answer?” And the answer came in the night which accompanied the words written in the midst of the bustle of commerce and journalism and catering on a grand Parisian avenue: Felipe Montero, the false protagonist of Aura, answered me, addressing me familiarly:

You read the advertisement. Only your name is missing. You think you are Felipe Montero. You lie to yourself. You are You: You are Another. You are the Reader. You are what you Read. You shall be Aura. You were Consuelo.

“I’m Felipe Montero. I read your advertisement.”

“Yes, I know … Good. Please let me see your profile … No, I can’t see it well enough. Turn toward the light. That’s right…”

You shall move aside so that the light from the candles and the reflections from the silver and crystal reveal the silk coif that must cover a head of very white hair and frame a face so old it must be almost childlike …

“I told you she’d come back.”

“Who?”

“Aura. My companion. My niece.”

“Good afternoon.”

The girl will nod and at the same instant the old lady will imitate her gesture.

“This is Señor Montero. He’s going to live with us.”

* * *

SIX, only six days before her death, I met La Traviata. My wife, Sylvia, and I had been invited in September of 1976 to have dinner at the house of our old and dear friends Gabriella and Teddy van Zuylen, who have four daughters with the green eyes of Aura who spy on the guests near four paintings by Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, Alberto Gironella, and Pierre Alechinsky, without anyone being able to tell whether the girls are coming in or out of the paintings.

“I have a surprise for you,” said our hostess, and she sat me next to Maria Callas.

This woman made me shake violently, for no reason I could immediately discern. While we dined, I tried to speak to her at the same time that I spoke to myself. From the balcony of the Theater of Fine Arts in Mexico City I had heard her sing La Traviata in 1951, when she was Maria Meneghini Callas and appeared as a robust young woman with the freshest, most glorious voice that I had ever heard: Callas sang an aria the same way that Manolete fought a bull: incomparably. She was already a young myth.

I told her so that night in Paris. She interrupted me with a velocity at once velvet-smooth and razor-sharp in its intention: “What do you think of the myth now that you’ve met her?” she asked me.

“I think she has lost some weight,” I dared to answer.

She laughed with a tone different from that of her speaking voice. I imagined that, for Maria Callas, crying and singing were acts nearer to song than to speech, because I must admit that her everyday voice was that of a girl from the less fashionable neighborhoods of New York City. Maria Callas had the speaking voice of a girl selling Maria Callas records at Sam Goody’s on Sixth Avenue.