Sergio Pitol - The Journey

Later, when what happened and the way it happened passed, I found in Elias Canetti’s autobiographical notes a few lines with which I feel a deep kinship:

Orphans — all of us who wagered on Gorbachev, half the world, the whole world. For decades, I never believed so strongly in anyone, all my hopes were pinned on him; I would have prayed for him — I would have denied myself. But I am not ashamed of it at all. 1

At the end of the day, I’m not going to write about Prague, I’ll do that later, but that magical city led me to other excerpts from my diary: to the country of great achievements and horrific turmoil.

It was an unexpected trip. In early 1986, four years after my arrival in Prague, I unexpectedly received an invitation from the Union of Writers of Georgia to visit the republic in May. Georgia had suddenly become famous because of the subversive nature of its films, and was regarded as one of the strongholds of perestroika, the word that denoted the transformation initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR. I was invited to spend a few days in the capital Tbilisi and its surroundings as a writer, not as a member of the Foreign Service, not to participate in a conference, nor to celebrate a centennial of a national hero. I accepted, of course. I began to recall things. A strip of contemporary Georgia was once the famous Colchis, the homeland of Medea, that long-lost place where Jason and the Argonauts arrived in quest for the Golden Fleece. A few days later, the Ministry of Foreign Relations informed me that the Ministry of Culture of the USSR was extending an invitation for me to travel to Moscow from the 20 thto the 30 thof May of that year. They requested a lecture on some aspect of Mexican literature, which I was free to choose. The invitation came from the Union of Soviet Writers. I assumed it was in response to the letter from Georgia, so that the world would know that it was the metropole that continued to decide when and to whom invitations were extended and that everything else was a vague and wide-ranging peripheral space.

From the moment I arrived in Moscow, I began to inquire about my departure to Tbilisi, but the bureaucrats who welcomed me avoided the question; they would change the subject, or at most they would say that they were in contact with their Georgian colleagues to establish my travel schedule. “You have lived here and know how the Caucasians are, people from the South, friends of the sea, of the sun, but much more of wine and celebration, they lose track of time, we know them very well and so do not worry. In the end, they work everything out,” and they added that in the meantime they would be my hosts, and were pleased to assist me in Moscow and Leningrad, a city they had not mentioned until then. Then, in Leningrad, I was informed that the Georgians were devastated that they were not able to welcome me, because as is always the case in spring, tourism exceeds all possibilities of accommodation. They should know because they had already had embarrassing incidents such as this, but that’s how they were, pleasure-seekers, people of the beach, sun, wine. Nothing rattled them, they were happy people, pagan, yes, good at dance and singing, no one was better, with a wild imagination, an ancient and refined folklore, but definitely careless, chaotic, irresponsible, even dangerous in some ways, one could say…They proposed that I go to Ukraine instead of Georgia. Compared to ancient Kiev, Tbilisi was little more than a picturesque village, they said. I knew that Ukraine and its capital Kiev were extremely beautiful places, but I also knew that in recent decades its cultural institutions were the most resistant to any social, political, or aesthetic change, and that the arts in that republic continued to follow the strictures of socialist realism from 1933, directed by unimaginative, mediocre, and unscrupulous party officials.

I was about to cancel the trip. Apparently, a game of equivocations had begun, which I no longer wished to play. I had all my luggage ready, so I left for the airport, believing that I would go to Prague, but instead I went to Tbilisi. And, despite the bad omen, the trip was wonderful. I witnessed something unique: the first steps of a dinosaur that had been frozen for a long time. There were beginnings of life everywhere. It was a consecration of their spring, celebrated amid thousands of obstacles, traps, faces marked by hatred. Something of that, I hope, will be translated into the notes that I was able to scribble on airplanes and buses and in cafés and hotel rooms.

1 I have been unable to locate either the English translation or the original quote. The only reference to the quote in Spanish I found was in an article titled “Delayed Effects” in La Jornada Semanal , April 13, 1997, where the quote is attributed to Canetti’s “notes from 1993.” (I have endeavored to cite existing English translations of all quotations. In some cases, I was unable to locate either the original source of the quote or an English translation. In such cases, the translation is mine. —Trans. )

Two hours into the flight and the feeling of having forgotten, as is always the case, things I will need during the trip. Mrs. A., a television official, whom I run into frequently in airports and on airplanes, and also at diplomatic receptions, suddenly changed places and came to sit beside me. From that moment on, she talks non-stop. It’s the same every time I see her, and no matter what we’re talking about, she manages to change the subject, always to the same one, which, apparently, obsesses her. She travels frequently, attending film and television festivals in Spain and Latin America. She loves to talk about her trips and her experiences; she almost always is besieged by brutish and impatient hot-blooded men who give off a smell of sweat and from whom she only manages to free herself with great difficulty. By the end of the episode, she grows demure, contradicts herself, blushes, so her listeners will draw a more unchaste conclusion. I am certain that if given enough rope, she’d lower herself to the bottom of the pit, wallow in the muck with delight, her own intimate confidant, relishing those episodes of a strictly sexual nature. Undoubtedly she has repeated these unpleasant and tiresome confessions many times before, because her speech is mechanical, dispassionate, devoid of even a hint of eroticism. After weeks of perfect health my rhinitis has returned. I didn’t sleep well last night, nor did I did finish packing, so today I had to wake up early in order to finish. I had a dream on the plane: I was at the Posada de San Angel about to leave, saying good-bye to some friends. Suddenly, Mauricio Serrano, a classmate from university, walked by and stopped to talk to me. I said to him, “I read recently that you had died in an accident, is it true?” (And yes, of course it was, I had read that the actual person, whom I call here Mauricio Serrano, had died in an airplane accident. His private plane had crashed in the Chihuahua or Sonora desert, I don’t remember which. We were classmates in law school. He was very thin then and extremely tall. I remember him as one of the first students who attended classes without a tie but in very elegant sportswear, which at that time was almost a provocation. I must have only talked to him four or five times in my life, and about nothing, the weather, even less. We belonged to different worlds. I knew he had made a lot of money, but I don’t remember how.) The dead man, without answering me, walked toward another group. Minutes later, on my way to the bathroom, I saw him again, leaning against a tree, a pine tree I believe. I suggested that we go have a drink somewhere. We made the rounds of several bars, but no place would let us in, as if they sensed something was wrong. In the few places that did let us in, the dead man ordered dozens of limes, which he sucked on desperately. I guess he needed them to maintain his simulacrum of life, so he sucked them furiously, as if he were afraid to enter a state of putrefaction. We arrived in Colonia Juárez, to a building on Calle Londres where I lived for several years in my youth, in such a way that made the trek very long. The inside of my apartment was the same as before, except that the walls were bare, without any of the wonderful paintings from before. The dead man began to bore me, to annoy me, he did everything possible so he wouldn’t have to leave. It seemed as if he had something to tell me, but he didn’t know how, as if he had a message for me, perhaps that I would die soon, a greeting from the other world, something, anything, but everything he said was trivial. His vocabulary was very limited, his topics of little interest. I felt the same irritation that has always produced in me a cloud of termites against which I have fought all my life to protect my time. Finally, when I succeeded in getting him to leave, his color was frightening. “I won’t be able to last without decomposing, no matter how many limes I eat,” he said as he left. I woke up suddenly; I thought that the dream was real. No longer seeing the fireplace in my old studio and to be sitting instead in an airplane seat gave me a terrible shock. But only for a moment. Had Serrano been a messenger from the other world? Had he conveyed his message in such a hermetic way that — because I was distracted or because all I could think of was getting rid of him — I was unable to grasp it? My dream must have lasted an instant, because the functionary hadn’t even noticed. Drunk with conceit, she was telling me how the three Brazilian actors who accompanied her in San Salvador, plus a Cuban boxer, had at the same time pulled out their penises in a garden, in front, behind, and on both sides of her, and begun to urinate without a single drop — she was intent on making this point clear — touching her skirt, like mascarons shooting their streams toward the center statue of a fountain.