Taming the Divine Heron

I

Wherein an aging novelist, haunted by the approach of old age, reveals his craft and reflects on the materials with which he intends to construct a new novel.

AN AGING WRITER IS PREPARING to begin a new novel. He reads, with scant enthusiasm at first, then with frank indifference, bits and pieces of two or three paragraphs from a chapter, beset by a feeling very close to anguish; he closes the volume wishing to never open it again during the remaining days of his life. He recalls a comment made by Carlos Montiel, the literary critic, a friend of his since their college days, who, after reading his first stories, told him that some of the characters too closely resembled certain decidedly ordinary classmates from university: young men capable of everything except living a tragedy, disqualified from embodying the subtleties and a Jamesian sort of chiaroscuro, to whom, however, he strove to provide a byzantine emotional complexity, a realm nourished by intense aesthetic messianisms, behavior that was alien to such a degree that rather than giving them life it deprived them of it. The rarefied atmosphere that enveloped them became their prison; having succumbed, they became incapable of freeing themselves from engaging in conversation and behaving like ventriloquists’ dummies.

If he believed Montiel, and the recent unpleasant reading confirmed his words, everything he’d written until then was intimately and irredeemably condemned. His literature had no future; it had been anachronistic already at the moment of its birth. He was about to turn sixty-five. A cruel age! At times he thinks that what he truly longed for was to rest on the withered laurels he’d earned, to repeat the limited range of already proven techniques until they became completely expended, to keep a more or less plausible language alive until the urge was extinguished by natural causes. His is an age, this he knows, in which one might also run the risk of being trampled by an intricate network of inner movements, projection, a scope and development so vast, so densely obscure, that they exceed the possibilities of creation; to feel shaken by a fury, a violence that exceeds everything; to fall in love with long-awaited emotions and, one day, suddenly, abandon forever that project suddenly revealed to be an immense folly. To finally begin the ambitious work about which one has dreamt all one’s life, for which one has collected over the years an enormous amount of information and details, a book teeming with sound and fury that would redeem one’s own existence and justify it to the world? At his age, such a feat takes on the glint of an immense blunder. Failing to achieve the long-dreamt glory sought in another time doesn’t necessarily have to be a tragedy. The end isn’t far off, and the book in question would require years of research and sustained work. To bring upon oneself such mistreatment when one already has so little energy, looming old age, and its attendant infirmities, and then leave a novel half finished? No, really, thank you very much!

His heroes know only two paths, both mechanical, incidentally, to access fiction, that is to say, their novelistic reality. They’ve returned from a rich life experience, inexplicably fractured, which forces them to hide away either in some town in Morelos, or they’re in a small city in Veracruz, where, dejected, withered, overcome with resentment, they gradually bleed themselves dry: the heroines shed their petals against a sepia background, fondling old letters, yellowed photographs, newspaper clippings from years ago, and remember, remember and remember, those feverish beings they once were, and still others, those who clutched them in their arms, intoxicated them with fiery words, and then, for a reason always unknown, expelled them from their lives. During their boyhood all his male characters longed to be Lord Jim, Alyosha Karamazov, Fabrizio del Dongo. They had all lived through a period of ephemeral brilliance, interrupted by tragedy. If by chance they survived the fall, these protagonists would return, driven by an apparent thirst for identity, to their places of origin, to enjoy, if that could be the verb, a little house in the sun, next to a small garden with a smattering of flowers. Córdoba, Cuernavaca, San Andrés Tuxtla, Huatusco, Tepoztlán, and Cuautla are a few of the places chosen by this human waste as a refuge to end their days. Shortly after returning to the coveted Eden, they will discover they’ve fallen into a pit from which escape is impossible, that they’ve allowed themselves to become trapped, that those who wished them ill have ultimately triumphed by ridding themselves of them, that they’re surrounded by traitors, by disloyal and envious people. And there they’ll grow old, burdened with all matter of ills, debts, and manias, intoxicated with rancor toward a world incapable of appreciating them, bewildered by the nothings they’ve ultimately become. Old, neurotic creatures, at times droll but mostly bitter, resentful, with no way out, no future, no recourse.

But these protagonists could be considered successful compared to those in the latter category, those who weren’t able to return to those sunlit houses and to their tiny orchards, those whom life ensnared in much less generous latitudes. They wander around the world, having been forgotten by everyone and forgetting everything. Did they even try to return? Were they not able? They didn’t quite know. Behold them: night watchmen in a damp cellar, in some wooden storehouse, in a parking lot, doormen in cheap hotels, beneficiaries of some philanthropic institution that finds these fates for them to make them feel useful and to help them recover a modicum of their lost dignity. Forgotten by everyone in their own country, absolute strangers where they live. It’s possible that their circumstances haven’t always been this way. They too must have known a summer or two of initial happiness. With whom had they danced? What step could have been fatal for them? Dirty and toothless, they scarcely notice how quickly their memory is fading. Their revenge consists precisely in that, in shutting down all the channels that connect them with the past. If someone tried to remind them of the shock they lived through thirty years ago, the inner turmoil they experienced when they stood before Giorgione’s The Tempest or the Sleeping Venus, the consecutive visits over four days to the pavilion that housed the Matisse exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where each time they left inebriated with joy and wonder, or the somber days spent in a boarding house while they pieced together the dreadful fate of Adrian Leverkühn and shuddered at the blot that stained the soul of the faithful Serenus as he revealed it, they would sketch an obscene sign, hurl a gob of spit at the feet of the interlocutor, that stranger who feigned familiarity, who approached them suddenly with open arms and that inexplicable language, and they’d immediately run away, slipping through a labyrinth of putrid alleyways until reaching the hovel where they spend the night; they’d lie down on a dirty mattress, covered from head to toe with an equally dirty blanket, trembling, their bodies bathed in thick sweat, longing only for the arrival of sleep that would restore their peace. In reality, the only thing that interests them is to not be expelled from the hole where they spend their days and to remember the time and place where they must stand, bowl in hand, at the hot soup window. The trenchant Montiel, he recalls, was absolutely right. If he wanted to continue, he had to start by getting rid of some bad habits and toss all that useless junk into the fire. But would there still be time to frequent new spaces?

How could he forget that he was on the eve of his sixty-fifth birthday?

Perhaps the most important thing was to decide where to start. He had a series of references, still very confusing, so vague that they seemed to vanish the minute they were born, or transform into something else. It became essential to begin to pinpoint some of those images: an encounter in Istanbul, a learned woman with rather unconventional manners and language, the sordidness of a cheapskate, an indisputably barbaric celebration in a clearing in the jungle of Tabasco.

He finally decided to sketch some notes. Three subjects, for different reasons, had interested him recently, which, in some vague way, connected the encounter in Istanbul with the outrages committed by the cheapskate and the feast in the tropics.

He wrote the following on large notecards:

A) Bakhtin’s book on popular culture in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance! Focus on certain elements: the Feast, for example, as a primary and indestructible category of human civilization. The notion of the feast can become impoverished, even degenerate, but not completely eclipsed. Without the feast, which liberates and redeems, man gestures in a mere simulacrum of life. To study the relationship between the ceremonial, the mystic, and the feast in primitive as well as contemporary industrial societies. Catholicism and, perhaps more still, the Byzantine church, as communicating bridges between us and the pagan roots of the ancient feast, incorporating certain characteristics of popular revelry into ritual forms while allowing others to develop with absolute freedom, outside the cult, etc., etc., etc.

B) Gogol! Bakhtin perceives the carnivalesque breath as a fundamental support of the complex Gogolian verbal organism. An almost exacerbated, one might say, reading of this Russian’s work and that of his exegetes. Few writers in our century have relied on commentators of such exceptional quality: Boris Eikhenbaum, V. V. Gippius, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Sinyavsky, etc. Symbolists, formalists, dissidents of all orthodoxies converge in him. A temptation to attempt a short text on a theme from Dead Souls. To piece together why Chichikov, the protagonist, whom the author presents from the opening paragraph as an absolute nonentity (he was not handsome, but neither was he particularly bad-looking; he was neither too fat, nor too thin; he could not be said to be too old, but he was not too young either), as a character with no personal characteristics of any kind, who manages to make all those he encounters become full, at his sole contact, of life. His existence illuminates that of others and, at the same time, is nourished by the very life that his presence fosters. Even in the second part of Dead Souls, in the tedious fragments that survive, the mere appearance of Chichikov manages to overcome the moralizing tenor that paralyzes many of its pages and returns to them something of the air that every work of fiction needs to breathe. Wherever the scoundrel puts his hand, an illumination is suddenly produced, not light from the sun but the sort that comes from a footlight, stage light that bathes a character and makes him lose his earthliness, deforms him, reduces him, and manages to extract from him his true physiognomy. More than an essay, this could be used in the novel. My protagonist’s rapaciousness provides little, but his sordidness could be useful, like Chichikov’s nonexistent virtues, in illuminating the behavior of other characters and, at the same time, could be enriched in return.

C) Pepe Brozas or the almost religious unction that a certain author can arouse in people lacking the slightest affinity for the arts! Remembering the case of José Rosas, a classmate from law school, whom, shortly after his admission, all the students came to know by the nickname Pepe Brozas, a not-so-subtle reference to his humble origins. Originally from Piedras Negras, he attended preparatory school in Mexico City then went on to study law. He spent two years in Rome, if I remember correctly, on scholarship, trying in vain to obtain a doctorate. He held a position in the International Affairs Directorate of some State Secretariat, which allowed him to take trips abroad. He adopted airs that feigned cosmopolitanism, with which he failed to hide the idiotic way in which he radically and exuberantly invented nuances. It’s impossible to imbue him with subtleties or refined concerns! An unadulterated rube! He never ceased to be the same lout, but he became solemn and pompous and, thus, even more intolerable. In the end he got rich managing his wife’s properties in Cuernavaca. The money, his need to flaunt it, and his passion for keeping it heightened his vulgarity. A single feature set him apart. His passion for Dante. Yes, Dante Alighieri, the Florentine. Yes, yes, the author of The Divine Comedy. He’d studied Italian in preparatory school, which was the origin of this peculiarity. He would read it, reread it, expound on it, although, of course, in a grotesque fashion; in a way, he considered it his own property. Yet he remained the most reluctant sort for any kind of literary excitement. By the way, go through old notes from Berlin. Perhaps I’ll manage to find some notes on that German who resembled Rosas … Matthias … Glaubner? Matthias Glaubner or Glaubener. A young economics graduate from the School of Foreign Trade, where he’d specialized in trade relations with Latin America. He spoke impeccable Spanish. In his spare time he accepted jobs from a number of university institutions as a translator and interpreter. It’s hard to think of anyone more tedious than that German boy. Petty interests, obtuse nationalism! What a pain to be roped into going to exhibitions, concerts, or theatrical performances with him! The inanity of his comments made one lose all interest in conversing with him. Making money, buying on the cheap, saving money were the only visible concerns in his life. One day, in the midst of the usual stream of platitudes, he repeated a quotation from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which led to an almost inconceivable story. Glaubner had learned Italian, which wasn’t a required language in his studies, just to be able to read Italo Calvino in his own language. As unusual as it may seem, he knew his entire oeuvre to perfection. A Spanish teacher had lent him, years ago, an Argentine edition of The Path to the Nest of Spiders. He began to read it with ennui, merely to enrich his vocabulary. Suddenly, something in the reading touched an unexpected place in his being and lit a fire. He discovered that a novel could be something other than a tedious enumeration of social or psychologizing fripperies, capable of transmitting to him something that had nothing to do with what he conceptualized as literature, producing emotions known only in his treaties on foreign trade and statistics, and perhaps even more intense. That day a kind of mystical union took place between the student from Berlin and the Italian author. He continued to read Calvino, no longer in Spanish but in German, while learning Italian. He read the critical notes that accompanied the appearance of his author in Germany. In the letters to the editor section of some newspapers of no importance he refuted, with the most abstruse arguments, several of those reviews. This passion for Calvino did not, however, open the doors to other fields, nor did it enrich his curiosity or broaden the radius of his thinking, nor did it pique his interest in any other author. Those readings didn’t connect him to anything; they didn’t expand or reduce any concept—they exhausted themselves. But they did fulfill a need that was real, that one might consider spiritual for lack of a more appropriate adjective. The same thing happened to Rosas with Dante. He knew everything about him yet understood nothing.

What a treasure, a character like Pepe Brozas! Alongside his vulgarity, coarseness, selfishness, greed, and rapaciousness stood a heroic, disinterested passion for the work of a distant writer. In the novel, he’d cease to be Dante and become Gogol. To contaminate, if possible, the language with some of the Russian’s verbal eccentricity. The passion for Gogol could have been introduced by someone with a certain resemblance to that rather queer Greek ethnologist who recently gave a pair of lectures at the University on the Mesoamerican works of her late husband. Find an exotic name for her in order to lend a certain comicalness. An intensely individual character who embodies the feast and before whom Brozas’s sad rapaciousness is always defeated.

•

The aging novelist who engages our attention, fatigued and insecure, began the second half of the sixth decade of his life writing a new novel: Taming the Divine Heron. In it he would intertwine his three fundamental themes: the feast, that primary and indestructible category of civilization, that magical space where the differences between men become blurred and disappear; he would exorcise the old ghost of his youth, the loathsome Brozas from his school days, and he would renew his passion for Gogol. Led by a foreigner of uncertain nationality, Professor Marietta Karapetiz, the protagonist will penetrate with absolute confidence, without losing his air of perpetual hallucination, the Gogolian labyrinth, from which he will escape only when he learns years later of his mentor’s death. Meeting Marietta Karapetiz, talking to her and her brother Alexander—Sacha to his closest friends—was, although he may not have known it, although he may refuse to believe it, the most important event of his life. Guided by Marietta’s hand, like Alighieri by Virgil, José Rosas, who in the novel will be called Dante de la Estrella, in homage, one could say, to his enthusiasm for the Florentine bard, will sense the fragrance of a tropical feast held at the beginning of our century. The experience will be so intense that even in his old age the main character will strain his memory to explain it. Describing that struggle and some of its circumstances is the mission the aging writer intends to accomplish in this hypothetical next novel.

II

Wherein the author narrates the sundry adventures of Dante C. de la Estrella, Esq., bordering, in the author’s judgment, on the picaresque, which culminated in a trip to Istanbul.

AND SO, BY THE WILL and grace of a novelist, Dante C. de la Estrella, Esq., found himself one rainy afternoon in Tepoztlán, sitting in the middle of a comfortable black leather sofa in Salvador Millares’s den. He leafs through some newspapers, not so much without conviction as with indifference; uncomfortable, it seems, since no one in the house pays him the attention of which he considers himself deserving. The architect is engrossed in reading a novel, by Simenon, to be precise. His father, Don Antonio Millares, is playing an exceedingly complicated game of solitaire