Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

But what if that boy was not really sleeping but being dreamed? I trembled for an instant amid the circular ruins. What if that boy is the child of a man who has dreamed him — a ghost that does not know its name? Wouldn’t it be fearful if the boy woke up, his dream interrupted by my Goody Two-shoes humanitarianism — here, boy, take a few pesos, have some Sacher torte — only to discover that he was not a boy but the projection of another man’s dream? Perhaps the dream of that prisoner in a cellar?

I saw the blind man fall from his wire if the child awakened.

I saw the old philosopher caught forever in the darkness of his cave — his cellar — his Aleph — his book — if the boy woke up, condemning them both to a realization that they too, terrified and humiliated, were not men but the projection of another man’s dream: they, Borges and Erasmus, nothing but dreams of a little Mexican boy being dreamed by them, lying next to a tree on Amsterdam Avenue. I feared what I now knew: a perfect word, a necessary word, is like a dream; once it is said or written, nothing can be added, and what it describes disappears forever — the palace, the desert, the mirror, the library, the compass pass: when they are identical to their word, they disappear forever, they dream forever, they die forever. We must never find the exact identification of word and thing; a mystery, a divorce, a dissonance must remain; then a poem will be written to close the gap, but never achieve the union. A story will be told.

I decided to wake the child up. I shook his shoulder, already dreaming of coffee and cake.

But as he woke up, I wished I hadn’t. As his eyes opened, I wished, truly, that I had left well enough alone.

I swear to you: I never intended to wake myself up and see what I am now seeing.

In December of 1968, three shivering Latin Americans descended from the train at the Prague terminal. Between Paris and Munich, Cortázar, García Márquez, and I had talked a great deal about detective stories and consumed heroic quantities of beer and frankfurters. As we neared Prague, a spectral silence invited us to share it.

There is no city more beautiful in Europe. Between the High Gothic and the Baroque, its opulence and its sadness consume themselves in a wedding of stone and river. Like the character in Proust, Prague won the face it deserved. It is difficult to return to Prague; it is impossible to forget it. It is true: too many ghosts inhabit it.

The windows of Prague send a shiver down your spine; it is the capital of defenestrations. You look toward the windows and see how they fall, killing themselves on the long and glistening stones of the Mala Strana and the Czernin Palace — the Hussite reformers and the Bohemian agitators, also nineteenth-century nationalists and communists who have yet to find their century. Ours was not the time for Dubček, although it was for the two Masaryks. Between the Golem and Gregor Samsa, between the giant and the beetle, Prague’s destiny spans the Vltava River much as the Charles Bridge: heavy with sculptural fatalities, peopled by baroque comendadores who perhaps await the hour of the interrupted enchantment in order to move, speak, curse, remember, escape the malefice of Prague. Mozart’s Don Giovanni opened here, that oratorio of the sacred malediction and the profane joke transcended by grace; from here, Rilke and Werfel fled; here, Kafka remained. Here, Milan Kundera awaited us.

If History has a sense …

I had met Milan Kundera the spring of that same year, a spring that would come to have only one name, that of his city. He went to Paris for the publication of The Joke and was feted by his publisher, Claude Gallimard, and by the poet Aragon, who wrote the prologue for the French edition of this novel which “explains the unexplainable.” The French poet added: “One must read this novel. One must believe in it.”

He was introduced to me by our common editor at Gallimard, Ugné Karvelis, who since the early sixties has insisted that the two most urgent centers of contemporary narrative were to be found in Latin America and Eastern Europe. “No, not Eastern Europe, certainly not.” Kundera jumped when I used this expression, Hadn’t I seen a map of the continent? Prague is in the center, not in the east of Europe; the European east is Russia, Byzantium in Moscovy, Caesaropopism, tsarism, and orthodoxy.

Bohemia and Moravia are the center in more than one sense: lands of the first modern revolts against oppressive hierarchy, elected lands of heresy in its primary sense — to elect freely, to take for one’s own; critical spaces, hurried transitions along the dialectical stages — barons vanquished by princes, princes by merchants, merchants by commissaries, commissaries by citizens; heirs to the triple legacy of the modern age — the intellectual revolt, the industrial revolt, and the national revolt.

This triple heritage had given substance to the communist coup of 1948. Czechoslovakia was ripe for the passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The Kremlin commissars and the local satraps, for all their science, did not seem to understand that in the Czech and Slovak lands social democracy could arise from civil society and never from bureaucratic tyranny. Because they ignored this, because of their servility before the Soviet model — already set at a distance by Gramsci when he spoke of the absence of an autonomous society in Russia — the party bureaucrats bound Czechoslovakia, strapped her to Stalinist terror, informers, trials of degraded comrades, the execution of the communists of tomorrow by the communists of yesterday.

If history has a sense, Dubček and his communist companions did nothing but afford it one. As of January 1968, from inside the political and bureaucratic machinery of Czech communism, these men took the step forward that, ironically, by making effective the substantive promises of Marxist orthodoxy, rendered useless its formal constructions. If it be true (and it was, and it is) that Czech socialism was the product, not of an underdevelopment hungry for accelerated capitalization in exchange for political numbness, but of an economically and politically fulsome capitalist industrial development, then it was true (and it is, and it will be) that the next step was to admit the gradual withering away of the state as the social groups took on their autonomous functions. Socialist society started to occupy the spaces of communist bureaucracy. Central planning gave way to the initiative of workers’ councils; the Prague politburo, to the local political organizations. A fundamental decision was made: at all levels of the party, democracy would express itself through the secret vote.

Undoubtedly, it was this last measure that most irritated the Soviet Union. Nothing was more acrimoniously objected to by the Russian officials against Dubček. In order fully to realize this democratic step, the Czech communists moved forward the date of their congress. The country was politically decentralized but democratically united by one extraordinary fact: the appearance of a free press, a press truly representative of the diverse social groups. The press of the agricultural workers, of the industrial workers, of the students, of the scientific investigators, of the intellectuals and artists, of the small shopkeepers, of the newspapermen themselves, of each and every one of the active components of Czech society. In the socialist democracy of Dubček and his companions, the initiatives of the national state were commented upon, complemented, criticized, and limited by the information of the social groups; conversely, these groups took initiatives that were commented upon and criticized by the official press. This multiplication of powers and opinions within communism was about to be politically translated to the Parliament itself. But first it was necessary to establish democracy within the party. And this is what the U.S.S.R. was not about to accept.