Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

“Now, now, Georgie boy, all this darkness can drive a man crazy, I know. But would you prefer a sudden night and a blade seeking your throat?”

“No, no,” he said. “Although I dream of that, sometimes, yes.”

“I don’t know what you dream, little boy George. But it all takes place in this cellar, don’t forget that. You just dream things.”

“Can I…?” the man said, stretching out his hand.

“No,” she said. “No, no longer. You are a coward, you know,” she said with a cruel smile. “I don’t keep you here. You are not a prisoner. You are afraid, remember that, you are afraid to come out.”

“Afraid?” he said. “No, I cannot see you. It is so dark. I can’t see you anymore.”

We did see her as she walked, stooping, up the stairs: singing “Karma Chameleon.” We saw her, forgetful, distracted, contemptuous, beautiful, with that streak of cruelty mixed with clairvoyance … and an up-to-date spiked hairdo.

“Beatriz,” the blind man managed to say as the cellar door closed on him and plunged him once more into the dream of darkness, from which he was now unable to escape: yes, whatever he dreamed would now take place in that cellar. At first he may have been a hunted man, a man in danger; later, when we saw him, he was more like an animal at peace in its burrow, or perhaps even a sort of dim god, yes …

Erasmus and I walked up from that cellar back into his cozy Dutch parlor, where the fire was slowly dying. He rubbed his hands and then went to his shelf of thirty-two books. He chose one and caressed it and opened it, nodding to me all the time: “Yes. You know, my friend, that garden of forking paths was mentioned in this book. But the name of the book — look here — or the name of the garden is never mentioned. Do you know why?”

“Yes,” I ventured. “Both were somewhere else.”

“No, not somewhere else. They were something else. What?”

I resented his questioning and decided not to reply. His eternal snooping attitude, his curiosity disguised as some sort of superior calling: this academic gossipmonger, Erasmus of Rotterdam, indeed!

“I don’t know and frankly I don’t give an Amster…”

He raised a fine, long-boned hand, a Holbein, transparent hand, a veined hand of wax and ink: the hand of Erasmus, bidding me to wait and listen: “Tell me, where were we truly lost? In the maze or in the pampa?” This question stunned me.

“Why, come to think of it, in the pampa. In the labyrinth.” I hesitated. “In the maze, I expected to be lost, but it was — you are right — so symmetrical; its sharp turns, its willful design: we were meant to be lost…”

“So we weren’t: the maze is foreseeable,” said the Dutchman. “But the pampa isn’t. But that is the real labyrinth: the straight line, you see.”

“Then you mean, Erasmus, that everything we have seen stands for something else: the maze is simple; the straight line is the true labyrinth, the true mystery…”

“And the true name of the garden of Eden, El Dorado, is Time. Do not go away impatiently without understanding this, you above all, you of the New World: you do have something more than an epic fatality; you do have a mythic chance. Come, look at this book, another of my little treasures.

The book he gave me was bound in rough cowhide, like an edition of Don Segundo Sombra my father had when I was very young. But this was not the celebrated novel by Güiraldes. It was, of all things, Don Quixote. Only, instead of the author’s name I expected, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, or even as a joke one of its multiple sub-authors or plagiarists — Cide Hamete Benengeli, Avellaneda — I read a name unknown to me: Pierre Ménard.

The book was opened by the bony hands of the Dutchman. “In a certain place of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived not long ago a gentleman of…”

“But this is Cervantes’s book!” I exclaimed.

“No,” Erasmus said. “The text is the same, but the intention is different.”

“What is the intention?” I asked impatiently.

“To confront the mysterious duty of literally reconstructing a spontaneous work,” Erasmus said.

“I don’t understand,” I responded socratically.

Erasmus did not sigh. As a matter of fact, he was quite serious and probing. “We shall never know if all that we have seen is true. But if it is, then this man from Buenos Aires, this Jorge Luis Baroquess, or Borghese or whatever, whom the woman Beatriz Viterbo (if it is indeed she) refused the name Pedro Salvadores, and then this reader of his he was able to mention simply because he knew he was read by him, could also be conceived, you understand, as the writer of everything that has ever been written.

“His name — Burgos — Ménard — Cervantes — Salvadores — Borges — is merely an accident.” The Dutchman vigorously nodded. “The sum of all spaces can only be read by one man who is many men, but it could only be written by one writer who was all writers, and his work, in consonance with this principle, could only be one work: one vast narrative in which space has been seen and defeated in and by the Aleph of Literature, an endless, multifarious, multi-cultural time taking over its space: space is only memorable when time occurs in it.”

He gasped, and urged me to profit from my chance, our chance: a second chance for our terrible history, an opportunity to refashion time by admitting its polycultural sources. Oh, what a chance that this Borgia or Borja, or George Burke, or Boy George or whatever, was not content with our modernity or with our past or with the promise of our future, unless it included all the wealth of our cultural present, including the present of all our pasts: our modernity is all that we have been, all of it. This is our second history, and Burgos, or Borja, or Berkeley, has written its introduction. We must rewrite our Koran, our Cabala; we must also rewrite the Bill of Rights and the Code Napoléon. We must live them, and in order to do so we need, before, at the same time, later, it does not matter, to reassimilate our ancient myths, our Renaissance epics and utopias; our colonial hunger for the baroque, and our desolate — I looked at him, sinking back into the cave of his time — our desolate Erasmian irony.

Yes: he was now dead to me, he was now back in the cave, having escaped from it: this house, I suddenly realized, was but a cave to which he came back, telling everyone — I saw him, thin and querulous now, a veritable busybody of truths — telling those who remained here that the world outside consisted of realities, not of shadows.

I did not want to see what they did to him; I heard them, the shadows, as I slowly left, shouting back at him that he lied, that their shadows were the only things that existed. And he whispered to me from afar: “They are mad and caught forever in error.”

I looked back only once. Erasmus was shrouded in the darkness of the cave. But Borges was balancing himself above the cave on a tight wire, dressed in rags and with a colorful umbrella in his upraised arm.

I left the sudden darkness of the Dutch house and stepped out, back onto Amsterdam Avenue and the glaring sun, the resolana, the smells, tortillas burning, gasoline burning, wafts of dead bone borne by the smog, the sound, old clothes, ropa vieja, dulces, pirulíes, knife sharpeners, insulting claxons, a shave and a haircut, tantararata, the sights, the dying trees of Mexico City, and the boy still sleeping, still dreaming, at the foot of the tree.

My compassion was aroused at the sight. Should I awaken him, give him a few hundred pesos, perhaps invite him to have some cake in the nice Viennese coffee shop on the corner?