From what delirious alchemy did the most perfect books I know arise: Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade; Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Borges’s The Aleph; Monterroso’s Perpetual Motion?
Half-jokingly, I managed to convince myself that the debt I owed to Prague was in some way scandalous. I spent six years there in a diplomatic post, from May 1983 to September 1988: a decisive period in world history. I planned to write some reflections on my time there. Not the essay of a political scientist, which for me would be grotesque, but a literary chronicle in a minor key. My conversations with professors of literature, my outings to the imperial spas — Marienbad, Carlsbad — where for centuries during the summer the region’s three august courts could be found at the service of their respective majesties — the Emperor of Austria, the Tsar of Russia, and the King of Prussia — along the beautiful avenues where later, from the end of the First World War, time stood still. They are the two largest spas in the region. To stroll through the streets, among the luxurious sanatoriums, the old hotels built in an era when tourism was not yet accessible to the masses, the elegant villas of the nobility and of the financial magnates, continues even today to be a delight. Plaques abound: on the lavish mansion next to my hotel, where Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde; at the Inn of the Three Moors where Goethe summered for several years; on the small theater where Mozart attended performances of Don Giovanni; on the hotel where Liszt lodged; at the hall where Chopin played; the apartment where Brahms, and oftentimes Franz Kafka, convalesced from their maladies. There are plaques that indicate where Nikolai Gogol, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Mann, the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson, among others, once promenaded. Or to trace Kafka’s steps through Prague, from his birthplace to his grave; or to describe the specific characteristics of Prague’s Baroque; or the city’s vast art collections; or the cultural and social energy typical of the first Czechoslovak republic in literature, in theater, in painting, in society, or on the architecture of the time: the cubic houses of Adolf Loos, the Bauhaus houses built by Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius — in Prague, in Brno, in Karlovy Vary; the bleakness and frustration of the present; the efforts of intellectuals to not grow stale, to not stop thinking, to prevent students from becoming robots; in short, to write a long essay that did not specialize in anything, but that approximated a history of ways of thinking. I needed to review my journals from that time, as I always do before starting any work, to relive the initial experience, the primal footprint, the reaction of instinct, the first day of creation. I read several notebooks, hundreds of pages, and to my surprise I found nothing about Prague. Nothing. That is, nothing that might serve as a basis for writing an article, much less a literary text.
It was — and continues to be — incomprehensible to me. As if one morning I looked in the mirror to shave and could no longer see my face, not because I had lost my sight, but because I didn’t have a face. One night I had a dream. I was arriving at a hotel in Veracruz, the Mocambo, I believe. I had taken a room there in order to finish writing a book I had been working on for quite a while, perhaps years; the only thing left was the conclusion. At the restaurant, around the pool, in the gardens, I ran into friends, or rather past acquaintances — windbags, nitwits — with a big smile always on their face and a sycophantic remark always on their lips. I couldn’t take it anymore; they were monopolizing my time, so I became insufferable: I talked to them constantly about my novel, told them that for the first time I was satisfied with what I was writing, its development had taken me a long time, too long, but in the end I felt I had finally become a writer, a good writer, a great writer, perhaps. So I couldn’t spend time with them, I had to rush to complete the masterpiece on which I was slaving away, I would appreciate it very much if they left me alone while I was there; I went on and on about how wasting my time was worse than stealing my money. Some gave me irate looks, others sarcastic smirks. The day finally arrived when I was able to write the words: The End. What joy! I traveled to meet with my editors, with Neus Espresate in Mexico and Jorge Herralde in Barcelona, or both. I didn’t take the manuscript because I needed to iron out a few things first — the contracts, the advance, the release date, I suppose. When I returned to Veracruz, I would give it a final read, have photocopies made, and send them to the publishers. Afterwards: the glory, the celebrations, the medals, the praise, everything that annoys me in real life, but which my unconscious apparently dreams of. Suddenly a storm appears in the dream, then a bolt of lightning, followed by a blackout: I don’t know if I came back from the airport to retrieve something I had forgotten, the fact is I hadn’t left Veracruz, not entirely, but I was only gone a few hours, and then I returned to the hotel; I rushed into my room and ran — celestial lyre-bearer! — to open my suitcase, to stroke my manuscript, to kiss it. Except there were no notebooks or paper in the suitcase; there were instead huge eggs that suddenly began to crack and from which began to emerge horrible beaks, then bodies, which were even more repulsive, of cartilaginous birds, and I knew, in that strange way that one knows things in dreams, that they were ostriches: a quintuplet hatching of ostriches. I desperately opened another bag and another, out of which sprung ostriches of varying sizes, and the first ones, which I had seen hatch, were now my size, and some were hiding their heads under the bed, behind a door, in the toilet bowl, wherever they could, their droppings all the while falling to the floor and laying eggs wherever they liked. I could have died from despair in that state. I had lost the fruit of many years of work, the work that was going to redeem me professionally, that would lift me out of the mediocrity in which I had always wallowed and catapult me to the summit. I didn’t understand anything, and the only thing I wanted was for someone to remove those grotesque fowl from my room so I could lie down and sleep peacefully.
The same emptiness I felt at the end of the dream, when by bewildering metamorphosis my supposed masterpiece had turned into a flock of ostriches, was repeated in real life when I discovered the complete absence of Prague, the city, in my notebooks. I had lived captive — happily captive! — aware that a miracle took place each time I ventured out into the street and became lost in the network of labyrinthine streets that make up medieval Prague and the old Jewish quarter — my astonishment before the immense panorama that came suddenly into view as I approached the river or crossed any of its bridges; when I slipped into the shade of its thick walls, built and rebuilt throughout the centuries, like palimpsests made of stone and of different clays that contained messages connected to the cult of Osiris, Mantra, and Beelzebub himself. Of all the sciences that found a home in Prague, the one that enjoyed the greatest prestige was alchemy. There was a reason Ripellino gave his best book the title Magic Prague. For six years, I visited its sanctuaries, those known to the whole world, but also other secret ones; I wandered splendid avenues that are parks that turn into woods, and also squalid alleys, vulgar passageways, without form or direction. Time and time again I walked rhythmically on cobblestone streets that had known the footsteps of the Golem, of Joseph K., and of Gregor Samsa, of Elina Marty-Makropulos, of the soldier Švejk, of the Rabbi Loew, with a chorus of occultists, newts, robots, and other members of Bohemia’s motley literary family. Prague: an observatory and compendium of the universe: an absolute imago mundi: Prague.