The beginning of The Journey could not be more classic. The author, tired and a bit sick, locks himself away to write in a sort of tropical Montaigne’s tower: a modest, cultured, and provincial city on the Gulf of Mexico. He recalls his years as ambassador in Prague and notices that his favorite city of the many in which he has lived is the only one about which he has never written anything. Surprised, he checks his diaries from the time and discovers a hole: they contain only notes about meetings, readings, and petty office problems — not a word about his outings through the never-ending city, its splendid museums, its powerful cultural life. What he does find in his notebooks, however, is a travel diary to Russia that, over time, grew in significance: it records the moment of the Soviet Thaw.
It is here that Pitol’s process of writing becomes extreme. His diary is rewritten and edited so that it reads like footage from a documentary filmed at the very moment Perestroika was received by the people of the Soviet Union amid feelings of hope and skepticism. Brought into play by a series of essays on Russian literature, with pages dedicated to the mysteries of the craft of writing and the projection of memories whose connections are not clear until the reader reaches the last line of the volume, the diary produces reverberations that resignify it as it goes along. One must not forget here that the Soviet opening occurred shortly before the transition to democracy in Mexico, which is the precise time Pitol wrote The Journey. The year 2000, when it was published, was the same year in which Mexico’s long transition toward a system that ultimately guaranteed basic civil liberties ended. His stark mockery of Soviet commissars and his dithyramb on citizens intoxicated by the idea of freedom represent an oblique look at the fiesta that was Mexico in those years full of hope.
But The Journey is not a political book — or, rather, it is much more than that. It is framed by three scenes that by reflecting on each other reveal the personal vision of the writing of an author who is at his creative peak. In the introduction on Prague, there is a scene, part terrible and part comic, in which Pitol, wandering the alleys of the city’s old quarters, notices an old man sprawled on the ground, unable to get up, who is cursing at pedestrians. When the novelist approaches, he discovers that the man is not drunk, but rather has slipped in his own shit, and every time he attempts to get up slips on it. Later on, when Pitol finally reaches Tbilisi, Georgia, he attends a supra given in his honor by an association of writers and filmmakers. He has been, since arriving to the city, in ecstasy: he finds it awake, vibrant, critical, and infinitely freer and more cheerful than Moscow or Leningrad. In that state of excitement, he gets up from the banquet to go urinate and, because the bathroom is closed, one of the guests suggests that they go down to the river to relieve themselves, which is normal. Having had a little too much wine, he accepts the invitation and discovers a disturbing scene: in Tbilisi shitting in public is not only a socially acceptable act, but also an opportunity to socialize. In the last episode of the book, Pitol returns to his childhood in the tiny town of Potrero, Veracruz, where the entire community earns a living from a sugar mill. Because he was a sickly child, he was prone to loneliness and isolation. One of his favorite outings consisted of getting lost in the mill’s naves on Sundays — when it was closed — to reach the place where accumulated huge mountains of bagasse, the unusable crap left behind from the production of sugarcane. There, buried among the vegetable waste, he fantasizes about an illustration from a children’s book in which there appears a Slavic child named “Iván, the Russian boy,” and imagines himself as his twin. He later confesses that of all the images he has had of himself, that one — the most delirious — is still the one that seems to him “to be the real truth.”
The odyssey that The Journey relates is not, as it seems at first glance, the one Ambassador Pitol made to the Soviet Union of the Thaw, but that of the solitary child who accumulated faces, names, memories, and turned them into a book. Among the many things included are the notes that the author made to write Domar a la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron] — perhaps his best novel and a truly wild book — which recounts the discovery of a rite of spring in which an entire community in the state of Tabasco is inundated with shit by its inhabitants in an emancipatory paroxysm.
The Journey is at once a lesson in subtlety and in destruction. It is a book that, in order to rescue one tradition, dynamites another. It is a volume about how a writer constructs. About freedom and its lack; that final, indomitable freedom which is letting go, allowing things to come out: narrating. This is why the book does not function, like almost all the others, as a progressive sequence of stories, ideas, and images, but rather like a hall of mirrors, in which a series of narratives reflect on each other: eschatological tales; a body of essays on the humiliations suffered by Russian writers who chose to pay the price for speaking their mind; a collection of documentary vignettes in which the reader watches live the Soviet generation that was becoming emancipated, fertilized by the sacrifice of those authors and the autobiographical framework of the writer who chose not to comply with any parameters to become who he wanted to be: a Russian boy.
There is a memorable story in the Havana diary with which The Magician of Vienna, the final book in Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” ends: as a young man, while traveling to Europe by boat, Pitol passed through Cuba. One night in Havana he got drunk as a sailor and passed out. The next morning he woke up in his room wearing someone else’s shoes, which worried him until he discovered they were Italian, new, superbly cut, and fit him perfectly. For Sergio Pitol everything is in everything and writing is the only way to reveal the secret connections that give meaning to reality. Writing exists so that our shoes fit us.
New York, February 2015
INTRODUCTION
And suddenly, one day, I asked myself: Why have you never mentioned Prague in your writings? Don’t you get tired of constantly returning to the same stale topics: your childhood at the Potrero sugar mill, your astonishment upon arriving in Rome, your blindness in Venice? Do you perhaps enjoy feeling trapped inside that narrow circle? Out of sheer habit or loss of vision, of language? Is it possible that you’ve turned into a mummy or a corpse, without even realizing it?
Shock treatment can yield amazing results. It stimulates weakened fibers and rescues energy on the verge of being lost. Sometimes it’s fun to provoke yourself. Without going overboard, of course; I never ridicule myself in my self-criticism; I’m careful to alternate severity with panegyric. Instead of dwelling on my limitations, I’ve learned to accept them graciously and even with a degree of complicity. From this game, my writing is born; at least that’s how it seems to me.
A chronicler of reality, a novelist, preferably talented, Dickens, for example, conceives of the human comedy not only as a mere vanity fair, but rather, he uses it to show us a complex timing mechanism where extreme generosity coexists and colludes in sordid crimes, where the best ideals man has ever conceived and achieved fail to separate him from his infinite blunders, pettiness, and his perennial demonstrations of indifference to life, the world, himself; he will create with his pen admirable characters and situations. With the vast sum of human imperfections and the least — the bleakest, it must be said — of their virtues, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Faulkner, Rulfo and Guimarães Rosa, have all obtained results of supreme perfection. Evil is the great protagonist, and even if it is usually defeated in the end, it never completely is. Extreme perfection in the novel is the fruit of the imperfection of our species.