I’m waiting for Monsiváis in the Kilos on Avenida Juárez, opposite the El Caballito statue. We agreed to meet at two, have lunch, and go over the final pages of the text I was to publish in the Cuadernos del Unicornio (The Unicorn’s Notebooks). I don’t know how many times I’ve reread the proofs, but I’ll feel more secure if he takes a look at them. Carlos was the first person to read the two stories that will make up the notebook; the first, “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,” is dedicated to him. I see him almost daily, even if just in passing. We met three years ago — yes, in 1954—during the days preceding the “Glorious Victory.” At that time we were participating in the University Committee for Solidarity with Guatemala; we collected protest signatures, distributed fliers, attended a rally together that began in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. We saw Frida Kahlo there, surrounded by Diego Rivera, Carlos Pellicer, Juan O’Gorman, and some other “greats.” She was already living entirely against the grain; it was her last public appearance: she died shortly thereafter. From then on I began to see Carlos regularly: in the café at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters; at a cineclub; in the editorial office of Estaciones; or in the home of mutual friends. More than anywhere else, I ran into him at bookstores.
Not long after we met, he came to my apartment, on Calle de Londres, when the Juárez neighborhood had not yet become the Zona Rosa, to read a story that he had just finished: “Fino acero de niebla” (Fine Steel of Mist), about which the only thing I remember is that it had nothing to do with the Mexican literature of our generation. The language was popular, but highly stylized; and the structure was very elusive. It demanded that the reader more or less find his own way. The fiction written by our contemporaries, even the most innovative, seemed closer to the canons of the nineteenth century next to his fine steel. Monsiváis brought together in his story two elements that would later define his personality: an interest in popular culture — in this case the language of the working-class neighborhoods — and a passion for form, two facets that do not usually coincide. When I expressed my enthusiasm after the reading, he immediately snapped shut, like an oyster trying to dodge lemon drops.
He had just finished reading when Luis Prieto arrived. He greeted Carlos warmly, and Carlos immediately shoved the pages into a folder, as if they were compromising documents. Luis told us that he had just come from Las Lomas, from a very entertaining gathering with a group of English philosophers, followers of Ouspensky; one of them, who was very rich, Mr. Tur-Four, or Sir Cecil Tur-Four, as the group’s members referred to him, had proposed building a place for meditation — a temple, to be exact — The Eye of God, on the outskirts of Cuautla, where the community would be able to perform the necessary rites. Some thirty people had attended to express their gratitude. Luis said he didn’t understand why they had invited him. It didn’t surprise me; I had accompanied him on many of his adventures through the impenetrable labyrinth of eccentricity that lay hidden within the city at the time, a world that included locals and foreigners, teachers, notaries, archeologists, old Balkan countesses, Chinese restaurateurs, Italian mediums, famous actresses, anonymous students, choreographers, rural school teachers, and opulent collectors of African, Oceanic, and pre-Hispanic art that had traveled the world, exhibited in the most famous museums, but also others, much more modest, who collected cigarette boxes, beer bottles, and shoes. Luis was also a friend of two nuns who had been cloistered during the time of religious persecution; one of them, congenitally ill-natured, a Mexican, and daughter of an Englishman, Párvula Dry, who at the slightest provocation would recount to whomever was standing in front of her, even a perfect stranger, her thorny post-convent odyssey, her arduous journey toward the Truth. The other never spoke; instead she just agreed solemnly with whatever her spokeswoman said. Every time I saw them with Luis, Párvula Dry would repeat, in almost the exact same words, that if both she and the other, the former Mother Superior, had managed to find themselves, it was due not to psychoanalysis, to which they had both turned, nor to tantric Buddhism, which is a mere fallacy, nor to the teachings of Krishnamurti, from which they learned nothing, but to their discovery of Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Luis was like a fish in water with these over-the-top characters. He eventually described the meeting in detail, the characters in attendance, the events that transpired; he told us that, in the middle of Mr. Tur-Four’s report on the progress of the construction of The Eye of God, a very large man, monster-like in his obesity, fell suddenly into a trance and from his lips the Maestro, Ouspensky of course, violently insulted the patron and the two dissolute nuns who were manipulating him, whose mere presence, he said, sullied their Work. He described the uproar that occurred in the room at these words and his astonishment when several of the participants, instead of attempting to silence the giant who continued his trance-induced tirade, began to savagely insult each other. Some fell into a trance and produced conflicting messages. A skeleton-like woman, who in her normal state sounded like a bird chirping when she spoke, emitted a thunderous voice with which she threatened the snake, the worm who claimed to be the Maestro’s messenger, with expulsion from the sect, and added that the former nuns, slaves of papism in the past, had already been redeemed and that, like the magnanimous Sir Cecil Tur-Four, they were absolutely necessary to the revelation of the Truth. Some fell into convulsions only to hurl increasingly inappropriate insults at each other; Luis Prieto deepened his voice and in a cavernous tone announced: “The session has been suspended!” At that moment they all came out of their trance, stood up and, like good Englishmen, said their goodbyes with the greatest propriety imaginable, except for a single elderly woman who became flabbergasted and kept repeating in English, “Two-four, stop! Two-four, stop!” and who had to be carried out on a stretcher. Luis reproduced the session in so many different voices and so many details that it looked as if a demiurge were recreating that amazing theosophical pandemonium before our eyes. Until then, for as long as I had known Carlos, I had never seen him laugh so much, nor could I imagine that a person so introspective and ensconced in books would be so receptive to such madcap humor. It was the first time I heard his inimitable guffaw. Luis and I began to tell variations of the story, adding characters, exaggerating some scenes for effect, and, to my surprise, the neophyte not only laughed like Rabelais but also contributed very skillfully to the construction and deconstruction of that verbal puzzle, the great game, of which Luis’s verbal synopsis had been only a starting point.
Those stories took place three years prior to the day I’m waiting for Carlos at the Kikos on Avenida Juárez. I wait for him as I read ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the intense, truculent, and painful tragedy by John Ford. Of all the works of Elizabethan theatre that I know, including those by Shakespeare, Ford’s tragedy is one of those that most impress me. I began to read it when I arrived at the restaurant, and I’m almost finished when the incestuous brother explodes in anger upon discovering that he’s been betrayed. It’s a literary period that I frequent more and more. I would like to study it in depth, systematize my readings, take notes, and establish the chronology of the period. But the same thing always happens: at the moment of greatest fervor I become sidetracked by other subjects, other periods, and I end up not studying anything in depth. Carlos is always late, but on this occasion he goes too far; it’s possible that he won’t even show. I’m famished; I decide to order the daily special. I eat and continue reading Ford. By the time dessert arrives I reach the end, which leaves me terrified. At that moment Carlos arrives. He’s coming from the Radio Universidad, where he took part, he says, in a taping on science fiction. He orders only a hamburger and a Coke. He places the proofs next to his plate and reads them in a few minutes as he eats. He makes one or two corrections. He then takes out a couple of pages from a book, marks through a few words, adds others, changes the last lines completely. He asks me to go with him to the Excelsior, which is next door, so he can deliver the piece that he just corrected; it will only take a moment. In no time we’ll be at Juan José Arreola’s house to deliver the proofs. Waiting for us there is José Emilio Pacheco, who today will submit his manuscript of La sangre de medusa (The Blood of Medusa), which will also be published in the Cuadernos de Unicornio. La Zaplana, Mexico’s largest bookstore, is located on the ground floor of the building immediately adjacent to the Kikos; we’re unable to resist the temptation to glance at the bookstore’s tables and shelves. Each of us leaves with an immense package under his arm. We’re proud of the rapid growth of our libraries (Monsiváis’s will eventually exceed thirty thousand volumes). We return to the Kikos to ask them to sell us some cardboard boxes because it’s impossible to move through the street or get on a bus with so many books in our hands. While they look for the boxes we drink coffee and examine our finds. During our four-year friendship, our reading lists have expanded and overlapped. We both purchased Conrad by coincidence that day. I pick up Victory and Under Western Eyes, and he picks up Lord Jim, The Outcast of the Islands, and The Secret Agent. We both read an abundance of Anglo-Saxon authors, I prefer English, and he North Americans; but the end result is a mutually beneficial influence. We leaf through our purchases. I talk about Henry James, and he about Melville and Hawthorne; I about Forster, Sterne, and Virginia Woolf, and he about Poe, Twain, and Thoreau. We both admire the intelligent wit of James Thurber, and we declare once more that the language of Borges constitutes the greatest miracle that has happened to our language in this century; he pauses briefly and adds that one of the highest moments in the Castilian language is owed to Casiodoro de Reina and his disciple Cipriano de Valera, and when I ask, confused by the names, “And who are they?” he replies, scandalized, that they are none other than the translators of the Bible. He tells me that he aspires one day to write prose that exhibits the benefit of the countless years he’s devoted to reading biblical texts; I, who am ignorant of them, comment, cowering slightly, that the greatest influence I’ve encountered is that of William Faulkner, and there he checkmates me when he explains that the language of Faulkner, like that of Melville and Hawthorne, is profoundly influenced by the Bible, that they are a non-religious derivation of the Revealed Language. Suddenly, he points out that it’s gotten late, that we have to rush to the Excelsior to deliver his piece. I ask him if it’s “The Idiot Box,” and he immediately changes the subject. “The Idiot Box” is a very acerbic column about television and its effects, which are very disconcerting to Carlos. Television! Who in the hell cares about television! Certainly no one I associate with. We arrive at the editor’s office. The section chief, to whom he must turn in his piece, has gone upstairs to a meeting. He might be back in a half hour. We sit wherever we can. A journalist sitting next to us, talking on the phone, says that things in Mexico are getting worse because of the government’s softness, that it’s giving in more and more to union pressure, that if the authorities do not intervene and eradicate the leprosy, the country will unravel. We continue to talk about books, which implies that literature is the subject to which we constantly return, although frequently interrupted by bursts of commentary of all kinds — cinema, the city, problems that concern us at the moment, the university, our lives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies — until we arrive at that subject which most entertains and amuses us: our novel, to the writing of which we have devoted hundreds of hours of conversation, without ever having written a word. Our novel, we confess, is in some way determined by the parodic humor of the young Waugh. We also know that it is equally determined by the impudence and imagination of La familia Burrón, the comic strip by Gabriel Vargas, and by the daily fireworks of Luis Prieto. Before beginning our work, and to exercise our mind a bit, we make a succinct summary of what is being written in Mexico, the authors worth reading, those it’s better to toss in the trash; those who pass are, of the contemporaries: Gorostiza, Pellicer, Novo, and Villaurrutia; The Labyrinth of Solitude and Freedom under Parole by Octavio Paz, which just came out; Juan José Arreola’s prose and the two superb books by Rulfo. We feel a genuine veneration for Pedro Páramo. We’ve heard very good things about two novels, one recently published, another about to be, but already widely commented on: the first is Balún Canán, by Rosario Castellanos; the other, Where the Air Is Clear, by Carlos Fuentes. And we no longer have time to delve into our parodic novel because an employee approaches to tells Carlos that the section chief is about to leave; to our utter amazement he adds that he’s been in his office for an hour. Carlos jumps up, hastily follows the employee and disappears behind a door. Ten minutes later he returns, calm. He’s almost certain that his piece will appear in tomorrow’s edition.