Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

The Ides of August

Kundera gave us an appointment in a sauna near the river to tell us what had happened in Prague. It seems this was one of the few places without ears in the walls. Julio Cortázar preferred to stay at the university lodging where we were living; he had found a shower worthy of himself, undoubtedly designed by his namesake Verne and worthy, also, of adorning the submarine quarters of Captain Nemo: a glass cabin, hermetically sealed, with more faucets than the Nautilus and full of oblique and vertical showers aimed straight at the head, the shoulders, the hips, and the knees. This paradise of hydrotherapy became dangerously saturated at a certain height — that of men of regular height such as García Márquez and myself. Only Cortázar, with his more than six and a half feet, could enjoy himself without drowning in the contraption.

Unfortunately, there was no shower in the sauna where Kundera awaited us. After half an hour of intense sweating, we asked for a bath in cold water. We were taken to a door that opened over the frozen river. A hole had been cut in the ice, inviting us to get rid of our discomfort and reactivate our circulation. Milan Kundera softly propelled us toward the inevitable. García Márquez and I sank into these waters, inimical to our tropical essence, and emerged the purple color of certain orchids.

Kundera was bellowing, a Slavic giant with one of those faces you find only east of the Oder River, the cheekbones high and hard, the upturned nose, the close-cropped hair bidding goodbye to the blondness of youth and entering the gray territory of the early forties, a mixture of prizefighter and ascetic, a cross between Max Schmeling and the Polish Pope John Paul II, with the physical frame of a lumberjack, of a mountain climber, the hands of what he is, a writer, the hands of what his father was, a pianist. Eyes like all Slavic eyes: gray, fluid, smiling for an instant as he saw us transformed into Popsicles, the next instant somber — that astonishing transition from one sentiment to another which is the hallmark of the Slavic soul, that crossroads of passions. I saw him laughing; I imagined him as a legendary figure, an ancient huntsman of the Tatra Mountains, bearing on his shoulders the furs he ripped off the bears, so as to look more like them.

Humor and sadness: Kundera, Prague. Anger and tears. The Russians were loved in Prague; they were the liberators of 1945, the vanquishers of Hitlerian satanism. How was one to understand that now they were here entering Prague on their tanks to crush communists in the name of communism, when they should be celebrating the triumph of Czech communism in the name of socialist internationalism? How to understand it? Anger: a girl offers a bouquet of flowers to a Soviet soldier riding atop his tank; the soldier reaches forward to take the bouquet and kiss the girl; the girl spits in the face of the soldier. Astonishment. Where are we? many Soviet soldiers ask themselves. Why are we received this way, with spits, with insults, with flaming barricades, if we came to save communism from an imperialist conspiracy? Where are we? ask the Asian soldiers. They told us we were sent to crush an insurrection in a Soviet republic. Where are we? Where? “We who lived all our lives for the future,” says Aragon.

Where? There is anger, but there is also humor, as in the eyes of Kundera. Closely watched trains: the trains that enter Czechoslovakia carrying troops from the Soviet Union blow their whistles, ride and ride, go around and end by coming back to the frontier from which they originally departed. The resistance to the invasion organizes itself by means of underground radios. The Soviet Army faces a gigantic joke: the switchmen sidetrack the military trains; the military trucks obey the erroneous signs on the highways; the radios of Czech resistance cannot be found.

The good soldier Schweik heads the maneuvers against the invader and the invader starts getting nervous. Marshal Grechko, commander of the forces of the Warsaw Pact, senselessly has the façade of the National Museum in Prague machine-gunned; the citizens of Kafka’s homeland called it El Grechko’s mural. An Asian soldier, who has never seen such a thing before, crashes against the glass partitions of the stores in the underground subway of Wenceslas Square, and Czechs put up a sign on the broken glass: NOTHING STOPS THE SOVIET SOLDIER. The Russian troops enter Marienbad by night, where a cowboy movie is being shown in an outdoor movie house. They hear Gary Cooper shooting and arrive with their machine guns at the ready, firing at the screen. Gary Cooper goes on walking down the empty street of a town in the Far West, forever wounded by the bullets of a bitter joke. The moviegoers of Marienbad pass a sleepless night, and the next day, as in Kundera’s Farewell Party, they return to take the waters.

Aragon switches on his radio the morning of August 21 and listens to the condemnation of “our perpetual illusions.” With him that morning, we all know that, in the name of fraternal assistance, “Czechoslovakia has sunk into servitude.”

My Friend Kundera

We were invited by the Union of Czech Writers during that strange period, from the autumn of 1968 to that final spring of 1969. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had been to Prague, as well as Nathalie Sarraute and other French novelists; also Günter Grass. The whole point was to make believe that nothing had happened, that although Soviet troops were hiding in the woods near Prague, the Dubček government could still save something, not admit defeat — still make a go of it, with the humorous perseverance of the soldier Schweik.

We, as Latin Americans, had reason to talk of imperialisms, invasions, Davids and Goliaths; we could defend, the law in one hand, history in the other, the principle of non-intervention. We gave a collective interview about these matters for the literary review Listy, then directed by our friend Antonin Liehm. It was the last interview to appear in the last issue of the review. We did not talk of Brezhnev in Czechoslovakia, but of Johnson in the Dominican Republic.

It never stopped snowing during the days we were in Prague. We bought ourselves fur hats and boots. Cortázar and García Márquez, who are equally intense music lovers, went out to find recordings of Janáček’s operas; Kundera showed us original scores by the great Czech musician that he had found among the papers of the pianist Kundera senior. With Kundera we ate wild boar and knedliks in dill sauce and we drank slivovitz and we formed a friendship that, for me, has grown with time.

Since then I have shared — and I share more and more with the Czech novelist — a certain vision of the novel as an indispensable element, an element not to be sacrificed, of the civilization a Czech and a Mexican can have in common; a way of saying things that could not be said any other way. We talked a lot then and later, in Paris, in Nice — when he traveled with his beautiful wife, Vera, to France and there found a new home because in his “normalized” homeland his novels cannot be published or read.*

One can laugh bitterly. The great literature of a fragile language, ambushed in the heart of Europe, has to be written and published outside its territory. The novel, supposedly in agony, has so much life that it must be murdered. The “exquisite corpse” must be forbidden because, it seems, it is a dangerous corpse. “The novel is as indispensable to man as bread,” says Aragon in his prologue to the French edition of The Joke. Why? Because in it one will find the key to what the historian, the conquering mythographer, ignores or dissembles.

“The novel is not menaced by exhaustion,” says Kundera, “but by the ideological state of the contemporary world. There is nothing more opposed to the spirit of the novel, which is profoundly linked to the discovery of the relativity of the world, than the totalitarian mentality dedicated to the implantation of an only truth.”