Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

There was a rumor of discontent and a smell of explosives in the French capital. These were the years when de Gaulle was finding a way out from Algeria and the OAS, the Secret Army Organization, was indiscriminately blowing up Jean-Paul Sartre and his concierge: the bombs of the generals were egalitarian.

But Paris is a double city; whatever happens there possesses a mirage which seems to reproduce the space of actuality. We soon learn that this is a form of deceit. The abundant mirrors of Parisian interiors do more than simply reproduce a certain space. Gabriel García Márquez says that with their army of mirrors the Parisians create the illusion that their narrow apartments are double the real size. The true mystery — Gabriel and I know this — is that what we see reflected in those mirrors is always another time: time past, lime yet to be. And that, sometimes, if you are lucky, a person who is another person also floats across these quicksilver lakes.

I believe that the mirrors of Paris contain something more than their own illusion. They are, at the same time, the reflection of something less tangible: the light of the city, a light I have attempted to describe many times, in political chronicles of the events of May 1968 and of May 1981 and in novels such as Distant Relations, where I say that the light of Paris is identical to “the expectation that every afternoon … for one miraculous moment, the phenomena of the day — rain or fog, scorching heat or snow — [will] disperse and reveal, as in a Corot landscape, the luminous essence of the Île de France.”

A second space: a second person — the other person — in the mirror is not born in the mirror: she comes from the light. The girl who wandered in from her living room into her bedroom that hot afternoon in early September more than twenty years ago was another because six years had gone by since I first met her, in the budding grove of her puberty, in Mexico.

But she was also another because the Light that afternoon, as if it had been expecting her, defeated a stubborn reef of clouds. That light — I remember it — first stepped through timidly, as if stealing by the menace of a summer’s storm; then it transformed itself into a luminous pearl encased in a shell of clouds: finally it spilled over for a few seconds with a plenitude that was also an agony.

In this almost instantaneous succession, the girl I remembered when she was fourteen years old and who was now twenty suffered the same changes as the light coming through the windowpanes: that threshold between the parlor and the bedroom became the lintel between all the ages of this girl: the light that had been struggling against the clouds also fought against her flesh, took it, sketched it, granted her a shadow of years, sculpted a death in her eyes, tore the smile from her lips, waned through her hair with the floating melancholy of madness.

She was another, she had been another, not she who was going to be but she who, always, was being.

The light possessed the girl, the light made love to the girl before I could, and I was only, that afternoon, “a strange guest in the kingdom of love” (“en el reino del amor huésped extraño”), and knew that the eyes of love can also see us with — once more I quote Quevedo—“a beautiful Death.”

The next morning I started writing Aura in a café near my hotel on the rue de Berri. I remember the day: Khrushchev had just proclaimed his Twenty-Year Plan in Moscow, where he promised communism and the withering away of the state by the eighties — here we are now — burying the West in the process, and his words were reproduced in all their gray minuteness in the International Herald Tribune, which was being hawked by ghostly girls, young lovers jailed in brief prisons of passion, the authors of Aura: the dead girls.

* * *

TWO, yes, two years before, I was having a few drinks with Luis Buñuel in his house on the Street of Providence, and we talked about Quevedo, a poet the Spanish film director knew better than most academic specialists on baroque poetry of the seventeenth century.

You have already noticed, of course, that the true author of Aura (including the dead girls I have just mentioned) is named Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, born on September 17, 1580, in Madrid and supposedly deceased on September 8, 1645, in Villanueva de los Infantes; the satirical and scatological brother of Swift, but also the unrivaled poet of our death and love, our Shakespeare, our John Donne, the furious enemy of Góngora, the political agent for the Duke of Osuna, the unfortunate, jailed partisan of fallen power, the obscene, the sublime Quevedo dead in his stoical tower, dreaming, laughing, searching, finding some of the truly immortal lines in the Spanish language:

Oh condición mortal Oh dura suerte

Que no puedo querer vivir mañana

Sin la pensión de procurar mi muerte.

(Oh mortal state Oh man’s unyielding fate

To live tomorrow I can have no hope

Without the cost of buying my own death.)

Or maybe these lines, defining love:

Es yelo abrasador, es fuego helado,

es herida que duele y no se siente,

es un soñado bien, un mal presente,

es un breve descanso muy cansado.

(It is a freezing fire, a burning ice,

it is a wound that hurts yet is not felt,

a happiness desired, a present evil,

a short but, oh, so tiring rest.)

Yes, the true author of Aura is Quevedo, and I am pleased to represent him here today.

This is the great advantage of time: the so-called author ceases to be such; he becomes an invisible agent for him who signed the book, published it, and collected (and goes on collecting) the royalties. But the book was written — it always was, it always is — by others. Quevedo and a girl who was almost dust in love, polvo enamorado. Buñuel and an afternoon in Mexico City, so different from an afternoon in Paris but so different also, in 1959, from the afternoons in Mexico City today.

You could see the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl the smoking mountain and Iztaccihuatl the sleeping lady, as you drove down Insurgentes Avenue, and the big department store had not yet been erected at the corner of Buñuel’s house. Buñuel himself, behind a mini-monastery of very high brick walls crowned by crushed glass, had returned to the Mexican cinema with Nazarín and was now playing around in his head with an old idea: a filmic transposition of Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, which hangs in the Louvre and which describes the drama of the survivors of a naval disaster in the eighteenth century.

The survivors of the good ship Medusa at first tried to behave like civilized human beings as they floated around in their raft. But then, as the days went by, followed by weeks, finally by what seemed like an eternity, their imprisonment on the sea cracked the varnish of good manners and they became salt first, then waves, finally sharks: in the end they survived only because they devoured each other. They needed one another to exterminate one another.

Of course, the cinematic translation of the terrible gaze of the Medusa is called The Exterminating Angel, one of Buñuel’s most beautiful films, in which a group of society people who have never truly needed anything find themselves mysteriously incapable of leaving an elegant salon. The threshold of the salon becomes an abyss and necessity becomes extermination: the shipwrecks of Providence Street only need each other to devour each other.

The theme of necessity is profound and persistent in Buñuel, and his films repeatedly reveal the way in which a man and a woman, a child and a madman, a saint and a sinner, a criminal and a dreamer, a solitude and a desire need one another.