es un soñado bien, un mal presente,
es un breve descanso muy cansado.
(It is a freezing fire, a burning ice,
it is a wound that hurts yet is not felt,
a happiness desired, a present evil,
a short but, oh, so tiring rest.)
Yes, the true author of Aura is Quevedo, and I am pleased to represent him here today.
This is the great advantage of time: the so-called author ceases to be such; he becomes an invisible agent for him who signed the book, published it, and collected (and goes on collecting) the royalties. But the book was written — it always was, it always is — by others. Quevedo and a girl who was almost dust in love, polvo enamorado. Buñuel and an afternoon in Mexico City, so different from an afternoon in Paris but so different also, in 1959, from the afternoons in Mexico City today.
You could see the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl the smoking mountain and Iztaccihuatl the sleeping lady, as you drove down Insurgentes Avenue, and the big department store had not yet been erected at the corner of Buñuel’s house. Buñuel himself, behind a mini-monastery of very high brick walls crowned by crushed glass, had returned to the Mexican cinema with Nazarín and was now playing around in his head with an old idea: a filmic transposition of Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, which hangs in the Louvre and which describes the drama of the survivors of a naval disaster in the eighteenth century.
The survivors of the good ship Medusa at first tried to behave like civilized human beings as they floated around in their raft. But then, as the days went by, followed by weeks, finally by what seemed like an eternity, their imprisonment on the sea cracked the varnish of good manners and they became salt first, then waves, finally sharks: in the end they survived only because they devoured each other. They needed one another to exterminate one another.
Of course, the cinematic translation of the terrible gaze of the Medusa is called The Exterminating Angel, one of Buñuel’s most beautiful films, in which a group of society people who have never truly needed anything find themselves mysteriously incapable of leaving an elegant salon. The threshold of the salon becomes an abyss and necessity becomes extermination: the shipwrecks of Providence Street only need each other to devour each other.
The theme of necessity is profound and persistent in Buñuel, and his films repeatedly reveal the way in which a man and a woman, a child and a madman, a saint and a sinner, a criminal and a dreamer, a solitude and a desire need one another.
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: