The Journey. Sergio Pitol

any of the wonderful paintings from before. The dead man began to bore me, to annoy me, he did everything possible so he wouldn’t have to leave. It seemed as if he had something to tell me, but he didn’t know how, as if he had a message for me, perhaps that I would die soon, a greeting from the other world, something, anything, but everything he said was trivial. His vocabulary was very limited, his topics of little interest. I felt the same irritation that has always produced in me a cloud of termites against which I have fought all my life to protect my time. Finally, when I succeeded in getting him to leave, his color was frightening. “I won’t be able to last without decomposing, no matter how many limes I eat,” he said as he left. I woke up suddenly; I thought that the dream was real. No longer seeing the fireplace in my old studio and to be sitting instead in an airplane seat gave me a terrible shock. But only for a moment. Had Serrano been a messenger from the other world? Had he conveyed his message in such a hermetic way that—because I was distracted or because all I could think of was getting rid of him—I was unable to grasp it? My dream must have lasted an instant, because the functionary hadn’t even noticed. Drunk with conceit, she was telling me how the three Brazilian actors who accompanied her in San Salvador, plus a Cuban boxer, had at the same time pulled out their penises in a garden, in front, behind, and on both sides of her, and begun to urinate without a single drop—she was intent on making this point clear—touching her skirt, like mascarons shooting their streams toward the center statue of a fountain.

       Hours later

      In Moscow, near the city center. The city imposes its urban design on me, its spectacularness and power. “Moscow is the third Rome, and there will not be a fourth,” is one of the Slavophil slogans from the sixteenth century, which has governed the Russian subconscious ever since. How wonderful to drive along Gorky Street! It was enough just to arrive to perceive the change. There’s discussion about the new political moment, the new plays, the new cinema, and the new problems that everyone faces: the new, the new, the new against the old seems to dominate the present moment. Shortly before landing, Mrs. A. confided in me the repulsion that the changes in the Soviet cinema cause her. “Irresponsibility can cause disasters,” she said, “and these people are not ready for such changes; they need to be educated first, if not they’ll create problems. The Georgians are the worst, the least reliable. They’ve made a one hundred and eighty degree turn, which means turning their back on their rich cultural tradition; they would curse it if they could, erase it. Their social criticism is too strident, ridiculous, crude. Nothing good can come of it, as you will see.” I accept these displays of rancor with absolute bliss. Then, from here, from the hotel, I began to call my friends, I sensed their enthusiasm. My encounter with the city is so strong that I can’t write anything coherent about it. I walked more than three hours without stopping anywhere. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll read my lecture on Lizardi and The Mangy Parrot at the Library of Foreign Languages. I feel overwhelmed. Worse than that: I try to put images from the past in order, but I’m not entirely able. That night, I see the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov on television, speaking openly with the audience. Yes, gentlemen, the world was beginning to move! It’s midnight. The only thing I feel like doing is going out again, to the bars I know well. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll take a very hot bath and go to bed with Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, or The Courier of the Czar. I’m returning to his pages after forty years. I know, it’s peculiar to arrive in Moscow with Jules Verne, but I couldn’t help myself.

20 MAY