Armand obtains permission to exhume the body of Marguerite. The graveyard keeper tells Armand that it will not be difficult to find Marguerite’s tomb. As soon as the relatives of the persons buried in the neighboring graves found out who she was, they protested and said there should be special real estate set apart for women such as she: a whorehouse for the dead. Besides, every day someone sends her a bouquet of camellias. He is unknown. Armand is jealous of his dead lover: he does not know who sends her the flowers. Ah, if only sin saved us from boredom, in life or in death! This is the first thing that Marguerite told Armand when she met him: “The companion of sick souls is called boredom.” Armand is going to save Marguerite from the infinite boredom of being dead.
The gravediggers start working. A pickax strikes the crucifix on the coffin. The casket is slowly pulled out; the loose earth falls away. The boards groan frightfully. The gravediggers open the coffin with difficulty. The earth’s humidity has made the hinges rusty.
At long last, they manage to raise the lid. They all cover their noses. All, save Armand, fall back.
A white shroud covers the body, revealing some sinuosities. One end of the shroud is eaten up and the dead woman’s foot sticks out through a hole. Armand orders that the shroud be ripped apart. One of the gravediggers brusquely uncovers Marguerite’s face.
The eyes are no more than two holes. The lips have vanished. The teeth remain white, bare, clenched. The long black tresses, dry, smeared onto the temples, cover up part of the green cavities on the cheeks.
Armand kneels down, takes the bony hand of Marguerite, and kisses it.
Only then does the novel begin: a novel that, inaugurated by death, can only culminate in death. The novel is the act of Armand Duval’s desire to find the object of desire: Marguerite’s body. But since no desire is innocent — because we not only desire, we also desire to change what we desire once we obtain it — Armand Duval obtains the cadaver of Marguerite Gautier in order to transform it into literature, into book, into that second-person singular, the You that structures desire in Aura.
You: that word which is mine as it moves, ghostlike, in all the dimensions of space and time, even beyond death.
“You shall plunge your face, your open eyes, into Consuelo’s silver-white hair, and she’ll embrace you again when the clouds cover the moon, when you’re both hidden again, when the memory of youth, of youth reembodied, rules the darkness and disappears for some time.
“She’ll come back, Felipe. Well bring her back together. Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back.”
Felipe Montero, of course, is not You. You are You. Felipe Montero is only the author of Terra Nostra.
* * *
Aura was published in Spanish in 1962. The girl I had met as a child in Mexico and seen re-created by the light of Paris in 1961, when she was twenty, died by her own hand, a few years ago, in Mexico, at age forty.
PART TWO. OTHERS
Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading
I
When I was a young student in Latin American schools, we were constantly being asked to define the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. I always remembered a grotesquely famous Spanish play in which a knight in armour unsheaths his sword and exclaims to his astonished family: “I’m off to the Thirty Years’ War!”
Did the modern age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or the publication by Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years’ War. At least since Vico, we know that the past is present in us because we are the bearers of the culture we ourselves have made.
Nevertheless, given a choice in the matter, I have always answered that, for me, the modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it.
Many things are changing in the world; many others are surviving. Don Quixote tells us just this: this is why he is so modern, but also so ancient, eternal. He illustrates the rupture of a world based on analogy and thrust into differentiation. He makes evident a challenge that we consider peculiarly ours: how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world, while retaining the mind’s power for analogy and unity, so that this changing world shall not become meaningless.
Don Quixote tells us that being modern is not a question of sacrificing the past in favor of the new, but of maintaining, comparing, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not to lose the value of the modern.
This is our challenge as contemporary individuals and, indeed, as present-day writers. For if Don Quixote, by its very nature, does not define the modern world but only an aspect of it, it does, I believe, at least define the central problems of the modern novel. I remember discussing the matter over luncheon one cold day in 1975 with André Malraux: he chose Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves as the first modern novel because, he said, it was the first psychological, interior novel, constructed around the reasons of the heart. Anglo-Saxon criticism would perhaps prefer, along with Ian Watt, to establish “the rise of the novel” in connection with the appearance of a middle class of affluent readers in England, politically emancipated and psychologically demanding of novelty in theme and characterization: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett.
Yet I shall not travel the road of Quixote’s modernity alone. After all, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, “All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of Don Quixote: … the problem of appearance and reality.” This all-encompassing fictitiousness in Cervantes is not at odds with Harry Levin’s vision of its modernity: Don Quixote is seen by Levin as “the prototype of all realistic novels” … for it deals with “the literary technique of systematic disillusionment.” And its universality is not in contradiction to Alejo Carpentier’s discovery in Cervantes of the imaginary dimension within the individuaclass="underline" Cervantes invents a new I, says the Cuban novelist, much as Malraux said of Mme de Lafayette.
Wayne Booth’s self-conscious narrator in Don Quixote; Marthe Robert’s conception of Don Quixote as a novel in search of itself; Robert Coover’s vision of Don Quixote in a world divided between reality and illusion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the eschatological; all of these highly articulate and penetrating discussions on the modernity and relevance of Cervantes accompany me in my own search for Don Quixote. But it is, perhaps, Michel Foucault who has best described the displacement that occurs in the dynamic world of Cervantes: Don Quixote, writes Foucault in The Order of Things, is the sign of a modern divorce between words and things. Don Quixote is desperately searching for a new coincidence, for a new similitude in a world where nothing seems to resemble what it once resembled.
This same dynamic displacement, this sense of search and pilgrimage, is what Claudio Guillén calls the “active dialogue” in Don Quixote. A dialogue of genres, in the first place: the picaresque, the pastoral, the chivalric, the byzantine, all the established genres stake their presence and have their say in Don Quixote. But the past and the present are also actively fused and the novel becomes a critical project as it shifts from the spoken tale to the written narrative, from verse to prose and from the tavern to the printing shop.