This was, finally, a way of ceasing to tell what I understood and trying to tell, behind all the things I knew, the really important things: what I did not know. Aura illustrates this stance much too clearly, I suppose. I prefer to find it in a scene set in a cantina in A Change of Skin, or in a taxi drive in The Hydra Head. I never wanted to resolve an enigma, but to point out that there was an enigma.
I always tried to tell my critics: Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre. Do not look for the purity of the novel according to some nostalgic canon, do not ask for generic affiliation but rather for a dialogue, if not for the outright abolition, of genre; not for one language but for many languages at odds with one another; not, as Bakhtin would put it, for unity of style but for heteroglossia, not for monologic but for dialogic imagination. I’m afraid that, by and large, in Mexico at least, I failed in this enterprise. Yet I am not disturbed by this fact, because of what I have just said: language is a shared and sharing part of culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.
I went back to Mexico, but knew that I would forever be a wanderer in search of perspective: this was my real baptism, not the religious or civil ceremonies I have mentioned. But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.
Neruda, Reyes, Paz; Washington, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Geneva; Cervantes, Balzac, Rimbaud, Thomas Mann: only with all the shared languages, those of my places and friends and masters, was I able to approach the fire of literature and ask it for a few sparks.
How I Wrote One of My Books
ONE, yes, one girl, twenty years of age, in the summer of ’61, over twenty-five years ago, crossed the threshold between the small drawing room of an apartment on the Boulevard Raspail and entered the bedroom where I was waiting for her.
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 girclass="underline" 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,