No wonder that Buñuel, in The Exterminating Angel, has an adulterous wife ask her lover, a dashing colonel, to meet her secretly in her library. What if the husband arrives? asks the cautious lover. And she answers: We’ll tell him I was showing you my incunabula.
No wonder that Juan Goytisolo, when he invades a Spanish library in his Count Julian, fruitfully employs his time squashing fat green flies between the pages of Lope de Vega and Azorín.
But let me return to that bibliographical Leavenworth which is the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: Buñuel somehow smuggled me in and permitted me to grope in the dark, with fear of imminent discovery, for the ancestry of the Japanese tales of the Togi Boko, which in their turn were the forebears of Akinari’s tales of the moon after the rain, which then inspired the film by Mizoguchi that I saw in Paris in the early days of September 1961, as I searched for the form and intention of Aura.
Is there a fatherless book, an orphan volume in this world? A book that is not the descendant of other books? A single leaf of a book that is not an offshoot of the great genealogical tree of mankind’s literary imagination? Is there creation without tradition? But again, can tradition survive without renewal, a new creation, a new greening of the perennial tale?
I then discovered that the ultimate source of this story was the Chinese tale called the “Biography of Ai’King,” part of the collection called the Tsien teng sin hoa.
Yet, could there conceivably be an “ultimate source” for the story that I saw in a Parisian movie house, thinking I had found in Mizoguchi’s dead bride the sister of my Aura, whose mother, I deceived myself, was an image of youth defeated by a very ancient light in an apartment on the Boulevard Raspail and whose father, deceitful as well, was an act of imagination and desire on crossing the threshold between the lobby and the bar of a house in Mexico City’s Colonia del Valle?
Could I, could anyone, go beyond the “Biography of Ai’King” to the multiple sources, the myriad, bubbling springs in which this final tale lost itself: the traditions of the oldest Chinese literature, that tide of narrative centuries that hardly begins to murmur the vastness of its constant themes: the supernatural virgin, the fatal woman, the spectral bride, the couple reunited?
I then knew that my answer would have to be negative but that, simultaneously, what had happened did but confirm my original intention: Aura came into this world to increase the secular descent of witches.
* * *
FIVE, at least five, were the witches who consciously mothered Aura during those days of my initial draft in a café near the rue de Berri through which passed, more or less hurried and/or worried by the urgent, immediate events of this world, K. S. Karol the skeptical reporter, Jean Daniel the questioning journalist, and Françoise Giroud the vibrant First Lady of the French press, all of them heading toward the pressroom of L’Express, the then great weekly that they had created to fight against bombs and censorship and with the close cooperation — it is hallucinatory to imagine it today — of Sartre and Camus, Mendès-Franee and Mauriac.
These five bearers of consolation and desire, I believe today, were the greedy Miss Bordereau of Henry James’s Aspern Papers, who in her turn descends from the cruelly mad Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, who is herself the English daughter of the ancient countess of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, she who jealously keeps the secret of winning at cards.
The similar structure of all three stories only proves that they belong to the same mythical family. You invariably have three figures: the old woman, the young woman, and the young man. In Pushkin, the old woman is the Countess Anna Fedorovna, the young woman her ward Lisaveta Ivanovna, the young man Hermann, an officer of the engineering corps. In Dickens, the old woman is Miss Havisham, the girl Estella, the hero Pip. In Henry James, the old woman is Miss Juliana Bordereau, the younger woman her niece Miss Tina, the intruding young man the nameless narrator H.J. — “Henry James” in Michael Redgrave’s staging of the story.
In all three works the intruding young man wishes to know the old lady’s secret: the secret of fortune in Pushkin, the secret of love in Dickens, the secret of poetry in James. The young girl is the deceiver — innocent or not — who must wrest the secret from the old woman before she takes it to the grave.
La señora Consuelo, Aura, and Felipe Montero joined this illustrious company, but with a twist: Aura and Consuelo are one, and it is they who tear the secret of desire from Felipe’s breast. The male is now the deceived. This is in itself a twist on machismo.
And do not all three ladies descend from Michelet’s medieval sorceress who reserves for herself, be it at the price of death by fire, the secrets of a knowledge forbidden by modern reason, the damned papers, the letters stained by the wax of candles long since gone dead, the cards wasted by the fingers of avarice and fear, but also the secrets of an antiquity projecting itself with greater strength than the future?
For is there a secret more secret, a scandal more ancient, than that of the sinless woman, the woman who does not incite toward sin — Eve — and does not open the box of disgrace — Pandora? The woman who is not what the Father of the Church, Tertullian, would have her be, “a temple built on top of a sewer,” not the woman who must save herself by banging a door like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, but the woman who, before all of them, is the owner of her time because she is the owner of her will and of her body; because she does not admit any division between time, body, and will, and this mortally wounds the man who would like to divide his mind from his flesh in order to resemble, through his mind, his God, and through his flesh, his Devil?
In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam rebukes the Creator, challenges him, asks him:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould me Man, did I sollicitte thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious Garden?
Adam asks his God, and even worse,
… to reduce me to my dust,
Desirous to resigne, and render back
All I receav’d, unable to performe
The terms too hard, by which I was to hold
The good I sought not.
This man divided between his divine thought and his carnal pain is the author of his own unbearable conflict when he demands, not death, but at least, because she is worse than death, life without Eve — that is, life without Evil, life among men only, a wise creation peopled by exclusively masculine spirits, without this fair defect of nature: woman.
But this life among masculine angels shall be a life alienated, mind and flesh separated. Seen as Eve or Pandora, woman answers from the other shore of this division, saying that she is one, body inseparable from soul, with no complaints against Creation, conceived without sin because the apple of Paradise does not kilclass="underline" it nurtures and it saves us from the schizoid Eden subverted by the difference between what is to be found in my divine head and what is to be found between my human legs.
The secret woman of James, Dickens, Pushkin, and Michelet who finds her young granddaughter in Aura has, I said, a fifth forebear. Her name is Circe. She is the Goddess of Metamorphosis and for her there are no extremes, no divorces between flesh and mind, because everything is transforming itself constantly, everything is becoming other without losing its anteriority and announcing a promise that does not sacrifice anything of what we are because we have been and we shall be: “Ayer se fue, mañana no ha llegado, / Hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto; / Soy un fue, y un seré, y un es cansado” (Yesterday is gone, tomorrow has not come, / Today is endlessly fleeing; / I am an I was, an I shall be, an I am tired).