Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

Buñuel was inventing his film The Exterminating Angel and crossing back and forth, as he did so, over the threshold between the lobby and the bar of his house, looking for all the world like a pensioned picador from old Cagancho’s cuadrilla. Buñuel’s comings and goings were, somehow, a form of immobility.

A todas partes que me vuelvo veo

Las amenazas de la llama ardiente

Y en cualquier lugar tengo presente

Tormento esquivo y burlador deseo.

(Everywhere I turn I see

The menace of the burning flame

And everywhere I am aware

Of aloof torment and mocking desire.)

Since we had been talking about Quevedo and a portrait of the young Buñuel by Dali in the twenties was staring at us, Eluard’s poetic formula imposed itself on my spirit that faraway Mexican afternoon of transparent air and the smell of burned tortilla and newly sliced chiles and fugitive flowers: “Poetry shall be reciprocal”; and if Buñuel was thinking of Géricault and Quevedo and the film, I was thinking that the raft of the Medusa already contained two eyes of stone that would trap the characters of The Exterminating Angel not only in the fiction of a shadow projected on the screen but within the physical and mechanical reality of the camera that would, from then on, be the true prison of the shipwrecks of Providence: a camera (why not?) on top of Lautréamont’s poetical meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.

Buñuel stopped midway between lobby and bar and asked aloud: “And if on crossing a doorsill we could instantly recover our youth; if we could be old on one side of the door and young as soon as we crossed to the other side, what then…?”

* * *

THREE, yes, three days after that afternoon on the Boulevard Raspail, I went to see a picture that all my friends, but especially Julio Cortázar, were raving about: Ugetsu Monogatari: The Tales of the Pale Moon After the Rain, by the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. I was carrying around with me the first feverish pages of Aura, written in that café near the Champs-Elysées as I let my breakfast of coffee and croissants grow cold and forgot the headlines of the morning Figaro. “You read the advertisement: this kind of offer is not made every day. You read it and then reread it. It seems addressed to you and to nobody else.”

Because “You are Another,” such was the subjacent vision of my meetings with Buñuel in Mexico, with the girl imprisoned by the light in Paris, with Quevedo in the freezing fire, the burning ice, the wound that hurts yet is not felt, the happiness desired, the present evil which proclaims itself as Love but was first of all Desire. Curiously, Mizoguchi’s film was being shown in the Ursulines Cinema, the same place where, more than thirty years before, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou had first been screened to a vastly scandalized audience. You remember that Red Cross nurses had to be posted in the aisles to help the ladies who fainted when Buñuel, on the screen, slashes the eye of a girl with a razor as a cloud bisects the moon.

The evanescent images of Mizoguchi told the beautiful love story adapted by the Japanese director from the tale “The House among the Reeds,” from the collection of the Ugetsu Monogatari, written in the eighteenth century by Ueda Akinari, born in 1734 in the red-light district at Sonezaki, the son of a courtesan and an unknown father. His mother abandoned him when he was four years old; he was adopted and raised by a family of paper and oil merchants, the Ueda, with infinite love and care, but also with a profound sense of nostalgia and doom: the happy merchants were unclassed by commerce from their former military tradition; Akinari contracted the pox and was saved perhaps by his adoptive mother’s contracting of the disease: she died, he was left crippled in both hands until the God of Foxes, Inari, permitted him to hold a brush and become a calligraphist and, thus, a writer.

But first he inherited a prosperous business; it was destroyed by fire. Then he became a doctor: a little girl whom he was treating died, yet her father continued to have faith in him. So he gave up medicine. He could only be a lame writer, somehow a character in his own stories, persecuted by bad luck, poverty, illness, blindness. Abandoned as a child, Akinari spent his late years dependent on the charity of others, living in temples or the houses of friends. He was an erudite. He did not commit suicide, yet died in 1809.

So with his sick hand miraculously aided by the God of Foxes, Ueda Akinari could take a brush and thus write a series of tales that are unique because they are multiple.

“Originality” is the sickness of a modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In so doing, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death.

This is the subject of one of the great dialogues by the magnificent Italian poet and essayist of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi. Read Leopardi: he is in the wind. I was reading him with joy in the winter of ’81, then met Susan Sontag in New York the following spring. She had been surprised by a December dawn in Rome reading Leopardi: like Akinari, infirm; unlike him, a disillusioned romanticist turned pessimistic materialist and maybe, because he knew that in mankind, “outside of vanity, all is pain,” he could write some of the most burning lyrical marvels in the Italian language and tell us that life can be unhappy when “hope has disappeared but desire remains intact.” For the same reason, he could write the biting dialogue of Fashion and Death:

FASHION: Lady Death! Lady Death!

DEATH: I hope that your hour comes, so that you shall have no further need to call me.

FASHION: My Lady Death!

DEATH: Go to the Devil! I’ll come looking for you when you least desire me.

FASHION: But I am your sister, Fashion. Have you forgotten that we are both the daughters of decadence?

Ancient peoples know that there are no words that do not descend from other words and that imagination only resembles power because neither can reign over Nada, Nothing. Niente. To imagine Nothing, or to believe that you rule over Nothing, is but a form — perhaps the surest one — of becoming mad. No one knew this better than Joseph Conrad in the heart of darkness or William Styron in the bed of shadows: the wages of sin are not death, but isolation.

Akinari’s novella is set in 1454 and tells the story of Katsushiro, a young man humiliated by his poverty and his incapacity for work in the fields who abandons his home to make his fortune as a merchant in the city. He leaves his house by the reeds in the care of his young and beautiful wife, Miyagi, promising he will return as the leaves of autumn fall.

Months go by; the husband does not return; the woman resigns herself to “the law of this world: no one should have faith in tomorrow.” The civil wars of the fifteenth century under the Ashikaga shoguns make the reencounter of husband and wife impossible. People worry only about saving their skins, the old hide in the mountains, the young are forcibly drafted by the competing armies; all burn and loot; confusion takes hold of the world and the human heart also becomes ferocious. “Everything,” says the author, reminding us that he is speaking from memory, “everything was in ruins during that miserable century.”

Katsushiro becomes prosperous and manages to travel to Kyoto. Once settled there, seven years after he bid farewell to Miyagi, he tries to return home but finds that the barriers of political conflict have not fallen, nor has the menace of assault by bandits disappeared. He is fearful of returning to find his home in ruins, as in the myths of the past. A fever takes hold of him. The seven years have gone by as in a dream. The man imagines that the woman, like himself, is a prisoner of time and that, like himself, she has not been able to stretch out her hand and touch the fingers of the loved one.