So I went for a walk nearby, along Graben (curious: my hotel was called Graben but it wasn’t on Graben), through the cathedral square, past the Stephansdom, the Figarohaus, the Franziskanerkirche, the Shubertring and the Stadtpark, the places that my friend Mario Santiago had roamed by night, stealthily, and then I returned to the hotel and went to bed and spent a strange night, as if there really were someone else in my room, Kafka or Brod or one of the thousands of guests who’ve stayed at the Graben and are now dead.
In the morning I met Leopold Federmair, a young Austrian novelist, and together we walked around the city some more, visiting the cafés that Bernhard had frequented when he was in Vienna, one place that was very close to my hotel, on the Lobkowitzplatz or the Augustinerstrasse, I can’t remember which, and then the Café Hawelka, across from my hotel, where the owner, a little old woman out of a medieval folktale, offered us free buns for which she later charged us, and then we walked some more and visited other cafés, until it was time for my reading, and time for me to meet or to not meet Carmen Boullosa, who was nowhere to be found.
When we got to the hall — late, because Federmair got lost twice — she was already there. I recognized her easily, though in person she’s even prettier than in pictures. She seemed shy. Smart and nice. After a party at a restaurant with a Turkish cannonball still embedded in the wall, palpable proof of the Viennese sense of humor, which is somewhere between naïve and twisted, we were left alone. Then she told me that St. Stephen’s Cathedral was secretly consecrated to the devil and then she told me all about her life. We talked about Juan Pascoe, who was her first editor in Mexico, and also mine; about Verónica Volkow, Trotsky’s great-granddaughter; about Mario Santiago, who had been to her house a few times; about our respective children.
After leaving her at her hotel I walked back to the Graben and that night I was visited or dreamed that I was visited by Kafka, or Brod, and I saw both of them, one in my room and the other in the room next door, packing or unpacking suitcases and whistling a catchy tune that the next morning I was whistling too.
Our next excursion was to the Danube, which we reached by metro. Boullosa was even more beautiful than the night before. We set out walking toward Hungary and along the way we saw a couple of skaters, a woman sitting and watching the river, a woman who stood and cried without making a sound, and some very strange ducks, some black and others light brown, and each black duck was paired with a light brown one, which led Boullosa to muse that opposites attract, unless the black ducks were parents and the light brown ones babies.
And then everything went as well as it could have gone. Kafka and Brod abandoned the hotel; Helmut Niederle, a wonderful Viennese man, told me the story of the famous shoemaker of Vienna, which I included in a book; we had dinner at the Mexican embassy, where the ambassador (at Boullosa’s urging, I imagine) kindly treated me as if I were Mexican; I insulted a Nazi without meaning to; I didn’t dare set foot in St. Stephen’s Cathedral; I met Labarca, an excellent Chilean novelist, and two Latin American girls who organize an annual beatnik festival in Vienna; and most of all I walked and talked endlessly with Carmen Boullosa, the best woman writer in Mexico.
The Last Place on the Map
Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, located on the north edge of the Beagle Channel and at the foot of the Martial Mountains, is the dazzling, natural, and untamed heart of the province of Tierra del Fuego.
For a long time, first in the South American imagination and then in Europe and America, in part due to the books by certain meticulous travelers, and most especially English travelers, and most especially Chatwin, Patagonia was something like what the vast and restless territory of the U.S.-Mexican border has been and continues to be. Instead of desert, pampa; instead of sleepy sun-baked towns, farmhouses swept by the wind and southern rain; instead of crowds of strange people singing strange songs, just a few scattered inhabitants and almost uninterrupted silence. And yet both the Mexican border region and the provinces that make up the territory of Patagonia constituted, along with the jungle, the fabled last place, the sacred place of the individual, the space where one goes to die or to watch the time pass, which amounts to essentially the same thing. The jungle, perhaps because of its profusion of mosquitos and the inevitable illnesses they carry, has gone out of fashion: travelers, even terminally ill travelers, want to die in peace, that is cradled and lulled by a specific aesthetic that excludes, one can safely say, dengue fever, irksome insect bites, and even more irksome diarrhea. The Mexican border region and Patagonia, in this sense, have much to offer: tequila, cocaine, and women to the north; maté, good barbecue, and temperatures worthy of any scholastic philosopher in the far south. One travels to Patagonia but one also flees to Patagonia. The literature chronicling this kind of flight isn’t only Anglo-Saxon. At the end of Ernesto Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs, when all the protagonist’s dreams have been dashed and he seems doomed, he decides to get on a bus and set off for the south. Other writers have followed Sábato’s example.
In fact, the voyage to Patagonia has long transcended the bounds of literature. There are paintings in which artists, with more enthusiasm than talent, present their vision of the plain, the glaciers, the barren land. There are musical compositions in which the word Patagonia rhymes with Celedonia. There’s even a movie, the director of which I can’t recall, that tells the story of a dentist, English or maybe Canadian, played by Daniel Day Lewis, who rides a motorcycle across Patagonia on a personal crusade against cavities.
For a while Patagonia replaced the tropics as a source of landscapes suitable for magic realism. And I even seem to remember a proposal — this was some time ago — to cede a big piece of Patagonia’s unoccupied territory to either the League of Nations or the United Nations (the former, I think) for the founding of a Jewish republic, or for the settlement of some wandering Asian nation, probably Chinese refugees fleeing Japanese aggression, a proposal that outraged the Argentines of the day and that, if it had taken effect, would surely have given rise to the most civilized and prosperous country in all of South America.
Where does the name Patagonia come from? From its primitive inhabitants, the Patagon Indians, who were described by the Spanish explorers as giants, and giants with enormous feet too, bigger than any European’s, which was perhaps only logical considering that they were giants. The first to spot them (and also the last, it’s said) were Magellan’s brave sailors, bent on sailing around the globe, which in the end, after many hardships, they succeeded in doing, leaving more than half of the crew in their wake, dead of disease, starvation, and various kinds of exposure. A chronicler of the trip, the Italian Pigafetta, describes these giants as ten feet tall. He was probably exaggerating. In the nineteenth century, less fanciful travelers claimed to have seen Patagons who were six and a half feet tall. Today, the few that remain are well under six feet.
The border of Patagonia isn’t something that everyone can identify with utter certainty, least of all Argentines. According to the novelist Rodrigo Fresán, whom I consulted, Patagonia begins when you cross the Río Negro. Meanwhile, some bus drivers from Buenos Aires who drive the southern routes think that Patagonia begins where the province of Buenos Aires ends. According to an Argentine friend, Patagonia begins when you cross over into the province of Chubut, quite a bit further south than most people believe. According to another Argentine friend, Patagonia doesn’t exist at all. I considered putting the question to Alan Pauls, one of my favorite Argentine writers, but I was afraid to.