27 MAY
Yesterday I was on edge because of the dream in which I was dancing maniacally with Señora D’Erzell, whom I’ve never even met. During the day I remembered dancing scenes that made me laugh out loud, but at night as I was writing it down I detected a connection with some very old dreams, an absurd flowering of remorse back in my thirties, when I led a life disposed to revelry, carousing, a so-called wanton’s life, and arrived home at dawn only to fall asleep without fail and dream that I had lost my way, that if I didn’t straighten up I’d be a failure, and in those early-morning dreams I was often demeaned in the eyes of my teachers and especially my comrades of letters, my disciplined and efficient contemporaries, low blows that fortunately disappeared in an instant when I woke up at noon, freeing me to act however I wanted. Once I reviewed the dream, I found that its meaning was just the opposite of those juvenile moralizing dreams; it was instead a way to laugh at myself, to dive head first into the carnival, to live my destiny as the Ugly King and receive that well-deserved beating with which that king’s tale ends. The height of carnival. But I’m furious because I’ve had problems with representatives of the Writers’ Union who apparently do not want to allow me to go to Georgia, and especially because of a terrible incident, a comedy of errors that caused me to feel extreme panic and triggered a nightmare worse than any I can remember. I’ll begin: at breakfast time a very unctuous and talkative employee of the Writers’ Union arrived, asking if everything was going well in the city, that they, the Association and its leaders, were happy about my visit, and they wanted to invite me to participate day-after-tomorrow with other foreign experts in a major symposium in the city of Tula on Turgenev’s work, that they had already talked about it with my embassy and that the cultural attaché had thought it a perfect idea. I told him bluntly that the embassy had no right to decide for me; my visit was not official; I insisted that I had taken this trip in response to an invitation from Georgian writers and therefore did not understand why other activities were being proposed for me. The messenger seemed to agree with everything, but said that an ambassador from one country never ceases to have an official connotation in another country, and that in the USSR all associations of writers, painters, pilots, doctors — of any profession — were autonomous organizations, yes, but official nonetheless. It was a dialogue of the deaf; I kept insisting: why this stubbornness to keep me from traveling to Georgia? He should tell his superiors that I would return to Prague this afternoon, that I would also communicate with my embassy to make them aware of the circumstances in which this visit was unfolding. He said he would, but for the moment, since a tour that morning was planned to a number of Pushkin-related sites in the city and its surroundings, he was sure that I would find a visit to the town of Pushkin fascinating. I refused, I told him that I’d rather rest and get everything ready for the trip and to please advise me when the plane to Prague was leaving. The employee did not bat an eyelid, he drank the last sips of his coffee, looked around, then stared at the book on the table,
Jen Sheng, by Mikhail Prishvin, in Italian translation, and next to the book a notecard where I had just made some notes. I had brought the book to study the close relationship that Russian literature maintains with nature that has always impressed me. On the notecard I had written: “Yes, in my hermitage I convinced myself, once and for all, that scented soaps and clothes brushes represent only a small part of civilization, that the essence of civilization resides above all in the creative force of understanding oneself, and of forming a bond between men…” He pointed to the book. He wanted to continue talking, but apparently wasn’t sure how, and I wasn’t going to help him; he was busy eating cheese and bread…Finally, he said that he had studied Italian as a second language in university, that he liked it a lot, but that it was well below his knowledge of Spanish. He looked for ways to convince me to go to the Turgenev celebration but was unable to find one. I got up from the table and told him coldly to call me as soon as he arranged my departure from Leningrad. After returning to my room I was overcome with a terrific flash of rage. I called the embassy in Moscow and Luz del Amo in Mexico. I lay down on the bed. I was exhausted. I tried to sleep a bit longer and forget the insignificant gray man who had visited me to divert me from Georgia. I fell asleep and before doing so completely I felt a sealike calm in anticipation of Catalina D’Erzell’s inviting me to dance with her again, but not The Murder, instead a longer piece, with more dazzling effects that would allow me to really shine in front of the distinguished audience, like The Cherry Orchard, for example. I woke up an hour later, without remembering any dream, but in a much better mood. Absolutely determined to not give in. I left the hotel, went to the used bookstore on Nevsky Prospect, about two or three blocks from the hotel. When I arrived at the bookstore I had second thoughts. What if at that very moment the writers were calling me to tell me that everything was set to leave for the airport and fly to Tbilisi or Prague, which was all the same to me anyway? And later they would tell me that they had looked for me, that they had everything arranged and since they didn’t find me in my room as we had agreed, they had to cancel the flight, I would have to accompany them to Tula and improvise a talk on the author of Fathers and Sons. My concern forced me to make a doctor’s visit, without pausing to rummage through the shelves as long as I had wanted. I found a copy of Karlinsky’s book on Gogol’s dark sexuality that I had been searching for over a period several years; an anthology of stories by Boris Pilnyak, which included an original, splendid, and virulent story that had been on my mind since my arrival in the city: “His Majesty Kneeb Piter Komondor,” a quasi-demented diatribe in its stubbornness against the Westernization imposed by Peter the Great in Russia; and in the English section, Mr. Byculla, a detective novel by Eric Linklater, which I read as a teenager in The Seventh Circle by Borges and Bioy Casares, that fascinated me at the time — a very complicated story of a criminal religious sect whose plots unfolds throughout the centuries. Twice I had bought the original English edition, only to lose it almost immediately both times. Today’s, the third, was the quickest. Upon arriving to the hotel room, I found only the books by Pilnyak and Karlinsky in the bag. I could not have left Mr. Byculla at the bookstore because I was perusing it with delight on the street. I went down to the café, pointed to the table where I was sitting, and they responded that no waiter had picked up a book. “As you can see,” the employee said, “we’ve had a lot of people this morning, someone might have taken it;” I then asked at reception, where I had stopped for a moment to ask if anyone had phoned me, and no, no one had, nor had anyone left anything. I went up to my room, asked for my key from the gruff