Take Mexico, for example. Think about the changes that have occurred in the last half-century — the devastation of the capital, the degradation of the atmosphere, the moral pollution — and you will have a vision that borders on catastrophe. A dystopia staged by an expressionist director. When I entered university, the city was inhabited by four and a half million people; today that number seems to top more than twenty, and I say “seems” because no one can provide an exact figure. Any common memory, every possible collective imagination, tends to be smashed to bits in these circumstances; the social link that replaces their functions is crass TV, the creator of timid mythologies.
I would like to move beyond, to the extent possible, apocalyptic visions; and pause instead on areas of imprecise determination, on small details: writing, reading, dreams, anything that eschews the grandiose, the plaintive, an apostolic zeal, and didactic pontificating.
I spent several years outside the country. Traveling to Europe meant going to Veracruz, boarding a ship, and crossing the ocean. If someone wanted to take a more luxurious trip, faster and with fewer stops, he had to go to New York, and sail from there on one of the spectacular floating cities of the time: the Queen Elizabeth, the Île de France, the Leonardo da Vinci, for example. When in 1988 I decided to return to Mexico for good, passenger ships had ceased to exist several years before and were reduced to serving as cruise ships in the summer.
It is hardly surprising that during that long period of absence my memory would occasionally relive unusual episodes that were both fond and forgotten. A letter from Mexico could momentarily recover images I thought lost: a dusty, yellowed, and sometimes implausible hic et nunc managed to emerge from among the deceased, radiant and adorned with every possible prestige. Even an encounter with someone who had traveled through Mexico could cause my immediate surroundings to disappear and transport me back to the infernos or paradises of the past. Every instant recovered from oblivion turned suddenly into a concentration of the universe. Time and space knew extraordinary permutations. As if by alchemy the Café Viena on the Paseo de la Reforma would appear in my memory: its atmosphere, its furniture, and the indisputable aroma of Central European pastries. It was only much later, when I had the opportunity to frequent similar establishments on my march through Europe’s imperial cities — Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Salzburg, Marienbad, Karlsbad — that I realized that Café Viena was a tiny outpost of Habsburg culture. My memory returns me to a long table in the back of the café, beneath an immense rectangular mirror. Don Manuel Pedroso holds court, surrounded by a flock of lads who were probably between eighteen and twenty years old. A genuine interest in what they are hearing and an intense zest for life lessens their slight tendency toward snobbishness. They listen captivated as their mentor talks about Góngora, Balzac, Hobbes, and Dostoyevsky; about his time as a teacher in Seville and Madrid; about episodes and figures from the Spanish Republic; about theories of love in Stendhal and Proust; about studying philosophy and law in Germany; the emergence and height of expressionism, the Bauhaus, Rilke, and the Duino Elegies, of which he’s committed long fragments to memory; about the Italy of Burckhardt, Goethe, Berenson; about the charms of Slavic, French, Andalusian, and Mexican women. He invites his friends to converse with us; one day he brings Américo Castro, who’s passing through Mexico, and talks to us about Cervantes and Tirso de Molina, and declares that he disagrees entirely with the thesis he had espoused on Tirso in his youthful prologue to the comedies published in Espasa’s Clásicos Castellanos, that his ideas about Spain’s Golden Age had changed radically, and not just the Golden Age but also the whole of Spain’s cultural formation. He was the most important visitor our tertulia ever had and, much to the annoyance of Pedroso, we listened to him rather with sarcasm and inattention because of the ridicule to which Borges had subjected him in Other Inquisitions. At Professor Pedroso’s tertulia, the logos and its rigors coexist in total harmony with the trivial; Alicia Osorio, Lupina Mendoza, Ivonne Loyola, Carlos Fuentes, Víctor Flores Olea, Luis Prieto, and yours truly listen to the maestro intently, we celebrate his wit, we agree, question, dare to raise objections, which the maestro himself encourages. Finally, we say our goodbyes, aware that life is full of wonder, among other reasons, because we know that we will meet again next Saturday in the same café where, unbeknownst to us, our destiny is taking shape.
Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. Mine relives the enthusiasm I felt as I left Bellas Artes after hearing Arrau, Rubenstein, Callas, and the Teatro Tívoli — no less venerated — where the audience’s pleasure became frenzied before the gyrations of the famous “exotic” dancers of the time — Su Mu-Key, Tongolele, Kalantán; or the Lírico after applauding the legendary Josephine Baker; or the endless walks through the city’s many different neighborhoods where I talked nonstop with Luis Prieto, Lucy Bonilla, Gustavo Londroño, Carlos Monsiváis, Luz del Amo, Ricardo Regazzoni about books, movies, politics, or private matters; we argued, fought, and always reconciled as we made fun of the false (and even genuine) glories of this world…Everything was real, everything was true and, unfortunately, unrepeatable.