GOLDFISH
I was in my second year of secondary school. My grandmother had given me a small rigid leather attaché to hold my books, notebooks, and other school supplies, in the hope that I would stop losing them all the time. We had a subscription to a medical journal with excellent illustrations from which you could detach reproductions of masterpieces of art. I used to cut out these pages and keep them in a box of personal treasures.
One day, when I opened the magazine, I was stunned. I had never seen anything as dazzling as that colorful page. A picture bathed in light, lit from above, but also from inside the canvas. Goldfish were swimming in a fishbowl, their reflection rocking on the surface of the water. It was the absolute triumph of color. The pail containing the fish was part of the vertical axis of the painting and rested on a round table held up by a single foot. It was, of course, in the center. The rest of the canvas was a forest of beautiful leaves and flowers; they were in the foreground, in the background, they could be seen through the glass container, aroused, clustered, together, luminous, perfect. If I had lived in Antarctica, or in the heart of Sonora, or the Sahara, where nobody ever saw flowers or fish or water, I could understand how this flowery precipitation could drive me mad. But I lived in Córdoba, next-door to Fortín de las Flores, in the midst of succulent gardens, and yet it seemed like a miracle to me. I glued the page to the hard inner part of my case, where some classmates placed photos of Lucha Reyes, Toña la Negra — the great voices of the time — or boxers, movie scenes, dogs, Virgins and Saints, or snazzy models of airplanes or automobiles; others, nothing. I lived with my goldfish and their fascinating surroundings for three years. It was my best amulet — a sign, a promise. Later I saw reproductions of other works by its author, but not that one. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York I stopped in amazement in front of his formidable oils.
Years later, as I entered a room in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which houses some of Matisse’s most extraordinary oils, I suddenly came across the original of my goldfish. It was more than an aesthetic experience — it was a mystical trance, an instant reassessment of the world, of the continuity of time.
26 MAY
Nowhere have I dreamt so much as in Russia. My notes from my time as cultural attaché are proof of it. I would wake up at night and write down the outline of a dream, I would climb into a car and although the ride would last only ten minutes, I would dream something. I dreamt during the siesta, in a boring meeting, at a movie, anywhere. Dreams appeared in bulk. The height of extravagance. Mephisto’s Waltz, née Bukhara Nocturne, emerged from those dreams. And on this trip, the same is happening. On the plane, coming from Prague I dreamt I ran into a classmate from the Faculty of Law, a dead man pretending to be alive, which I didn’t find the least bit amusing, and last night I had another dream that was interrupted when I went to the bathroom, and which I summarized as I went back to bed in four or five lines. When I woke the next morning I read what I had written and thought it was very funny. I don’t know why. It could have been, I think, if in the dream I’d been a mere witness to what happened and not a protagonist. I’ll try to describe it sparingly, removing the frills that have come to plague my work in recent years. I’m in Moscow, eating breakfast in the restaurant of the National. I recognize three or four famous international figures in the middle of a large group of writers. Suddenly I see the writer Catalina D’Erzell, a Mexican playwright, and I turn to greet her. I never met her when she was alive, I had perhaps seen a photo of her in a newspaper, but I don’t remember what she looks like at all. She had a modicum of fame in the forties and perhaps early fifties. I never saw her plays, nor have I read them. They were lachrymose and prim melodramas, of which the titles are proof: What Only a Man Can Suffer; The Sin of Women; Those Men! In the dream, I went to say hello and she told me that a conference on Slavic literature was beginning that day, that we, the only Mexicans — what an honor, what a tribute! — would open the first session, and she was a little nervous because she had not seen me in a few days. She would not have been able to translate alone into body language the Chekhov story we had chosen. Not even if they gave her an award, not even if they threatened to lock her up for life in a Siberian dungeon would she do it alone. Whom would she have as a partner? Who would know how to express all the registers of