los piantados, the nutcases, those characters outside the constraints of the world, with two registers, one of a genius and the other of a simpleton. There are authors and characters whose eccentricity in this time of yuppies would have led them to a cell in an insane asylum or a retirement home with medical treatment if their finances allow it. The world of the eccentrics and their attendant families frees them from the inconveniences of their surroundings. Vulgarity, ungainliness, the vagaries of fashion, and even the demands of power do not touch them, or at least not too much, and they don’t care. The species is not characterized solely by attitudes of denial, but rather its members have developed remarkable qualities, very broad areas of knowledge organized in an extremely original way. Dealing with friends of this kind can at first be irritating, but little by little it develops into an unavoidable necessity. To the eccentric, other people, from outside his circle, are difficult, pompous, pretentious, and insufferable for a thousand reasons; so he chooses not to notice them. Some fifty years ago, during our first years at university, Luis Prieto and I circulated within a network of cosmopolitan groups dominated, sometimes in excess, by eccentricity; many of them were Europeans who came to Mexico during the war, who found here the promised land and did not return to their countries of origin. We moved among them with remarkable ease. When an unrepentant sane person fell into those spaces, a close relative, for example, who was visiting from abroad, a mother, a brother, whom it was impossible to not host or entertain, that sane person in a sane person’s clothing became unbearable; even to those of us who were not part of that brotherhood, but were merely fellow travelers, his presence in that environment seemed insane, but despite this, one made all the necessary concessions, the same ones that they, the sanest of the sane, would do when they are generous and well-mannered for someone with a mental problem. Of all the places I have lived, only in Warsaw, but especially in Moscow, was I able to become part of those enchanted spaces, those hives of “innocents” where reason and common sense wane and an “odd” temperament or mild dementia may be the best barrier to defend oneself against the brutality of the world. The mere presence of the eccentric creates an uneasiness in those who are not; I have sometimes thought that they detect it and that it pleases them. They are second-rate “oddballs.” My stays in those cities considered difficult by most of the world were for me welcome refuges of unspeakable happiness, always conducive to writing…Everything surprises me here. Is it possible that the time has arrived in which the truth is beginning to break through — or is it another illusion? I think it wouldn’t be bad at all to spend a long while in Moscow, within the next four or five years, if by then this phenomenon takes off and senescence hasn’t gotten the best of me. I have breakfast with my friend Kyrim. He summarizes the Congress of Filmmakers, which took place last week: the Association’s leadership was replaced completely. It has been an explosion of national proportions. None of the dinosaurs of the old guard remained in their posts, including some extremely powerful and prominent figures from a professional point of view like Sergei Bondarchuk, director of War and Peace, a true classic of contemporary Russian cinema. He lost his job due to his sectarianism, his contempt for the trends of young people and contemporary forms, and for trying to keep alive that abhorrent maxim coined by Siqueiros, no less: “Ours is the only path.” I understood better the concerns of my seatmate from the plane; if what happened here occurred in Prague, the film studios would be closed and she would be discharged from her post. No more festivals in San Sebastian or Latin America! The tropical men, the mulattos, their spectacular pricks would disappear from her fantasies, and she would be constrained to local experiences. I should have started this entry with Kyrim Kostakovski, a mathematician, but fundamentally a man of the cinema. He was at the National Film School of Lodz at the same time as Juan Manuel Torres, and was married to a Mexican, one of my best friends. Years ago, I traveled with them to Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand; I wrote one of the few stories of mine I like about that trip.2 We had not seen each other for five or six years, but from the first moment, we began to talk like always, as if no time had passed. As with all my Russian friends, I would discuss with Kyrim film, literature, opera, people, and, of course, politics, until the wee hours of the morning. I often decided that I was no longer going to tolerate his irascible outbursts. Our dialogues resembled those of Naphta and Settembrini: each of us began to defend a play, a literary movement, a type of cinema — Bergman’s, Fellini’s, Clair’s, or Pabst’s — and the other would insult it until late into the night and with wracked nerves each of us would end up defending the position that he had previously attacked and refuting what he had originally defended. In other words, arguing, whether for hours or days, is a Russian sport. Kyrim’s passion for Gogol, vast and unfailing, is perhaps what most unites us. Over the years and distance our dialogue has become much less strident. After recounting to me the circumstances of the film conference, he told me that he had accompanied Viktor Shklovsky to England. The University of Essex had awarded him an honorary doctorate. After the ceremony they returned to London, where they had been booked in a rather mediocre hotel. No expense had been spared on the public events, banquets, social activities, etc., but when it came to lodging the British really cut corners. They had planned a to visit to the British Museum in the afternoon. The writer was about to leave his miniscule cubicle when, after making a sudden movement to open a door, an armoire fell on him. He rolled to the floor under the cabinet; the blow caused him to lose consciousness. A doctor arrived, applied iodine and arnica, gave him an injection and, with considerable trouble, managed to get him into bed. Shklovsky is a man of eighty-five, if not older. Kyrim thought that because of his age he might not survive the blow. Devastated, he returned to his room to rest a moment, waiting for another doctor to arrive, a specialist who had been called. Half an hour later, he heard the phone; he feared that it was the hotel manager or the new doctor with bad news. But no, it was Shklovsky himself, ready to head to the museum. They spent the rest of the day there, touring its many rooms, seeing everything, collecting data, taking notes, theorizing. Only on the plane back to Moscow did he begin to complain of discomfort, and he showed Kyrim his purple-blue swollen ankles. Kyrim’s grandfather met Shklovsky in his youth, back in the twenties. He was a mathematician and supporter of the October Revolution. In 1937, uniformed men came to their house and took him away; shortly thereafter, three of his sons were kidnapped. They were Jews and Trotskyists — therefore, enemies of the revolution, agents at the service of foreign espionage. Kyrim’s father was the only survivor, having been at the time barely a child. In 1957 the honor of the entire family was vindicated, but none of them returned from Siberia alive. He and his family have been rather skeptical. But this time Kyrim is excited about what is happening in the country, especially in film, and tells me that wonderful films have been made and about what is on the horizon: Abuladze and Paradzhanov in Georgia, he says, are fabulous, and he tells me about a Russian film by Gelman, in his opinion the best in the history of Soviet cinema: My Friend Ivan Lapshin, “A very sad film, the farewell to an epic, a sentimental story about all the wretched generations who have lived in Russia in this century.” Try to see it here, he says, because in Prague you will for sure never be able to. The public, of course, is divided; the intelligentsia, students, scientists are all in favor of this kind of cinema, but we are a country of masses, immense masses manipulated from above, guided by emotion, and they will undoubtedly think it’s an insult to our history. In the afternoon I gave my lecture at the Library of Foreign Languages: “Fernández de Lizardi and The Mangy Parrot, the First Mexican Novel.” A small audience, a handful of Hispano-Americanists, mostly friends or acquaintances from my previous stay; one of them, in a very fraught Spanish, paid me very nice compliments in his introduction, but said he was glad to see me again in a Moscow freed from the defects that caused me so much pain in the past. Who knows what he meant! After the reading had begun, the door opened noisily, and a woman of an advanced but difficult to discern age, tall, stout, dressed elegantly in black, marched in and sat on the front row, directly in front of me. She listened to me with indifference, like a Roman matron who for some unknown reason had to endure a reading by one of her slaves. And so she remained throughout the whole lecture: haughty, histrionic, commanding attention, except at the end, when I read a scatological fragment that I introduced as an example of a language that broke ties with the legal and ecclesiastical language used until then in books. An effort to find the language appropriate to the circumstances of the new nation. This episode takes place in a disreputable gambling house where the protagonist seeks shelter for the night: