The Art of Flight. Sergio Pitol

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СКАЧАТЬ “Modern music, ma non troppo!” he said. The projectionist chose films by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. When the title appeared on screen: The Gay Divorcee, the uproar was overwhelming. A divorcee! And gay! A gay divorcee? Never! Could it be that they were members of an association called “Friends United for a Culture of Debauchery?!” Fortunately, the man from the theater had another film: Pies de seda.

      “Shall We Dance?” Monsiváis said immediately in English.

      “As the projection progressed,” Luis continued, “something began to move inside the hearts of those watching. When it was over, they asked the projectionist to replay some musical numbers, and in one of them, Don Arturo María stood up and to everyone’s surprise began to do a few discreet tap steps, then spun like a top, waving a lace tablecloth that he had removed from the table, tossing it into the air, and running rhythmically to catch it before it fell. He moved about with remarkable ease, as if during his entire life he had done nothing but dance. A musical number was replayed, and on that occasion four or five others began to tap with him, and although the difference between Don Arturo María and the new enthusiasts was astronomical, the audience’s joy was absolute.”

      “But how can you be sure, Luis, that whatshisname had not danced before?” Someone added: “I assure you he’s probably a smooth operator who’s fooled his entire fraternity.”

      “He insisted he wasn’t, and I have no reason to disbelieve him,” Luis responds. “Even he seemed to be surprised by his exploits. He was ecstatic. This month I had to go back to the Bankers’ Club because old man De la Cadena overdid it on his birthday and is being insufferable, and this time the meeting was entirely different. Most showed up in shoes appropriate for dancing with disheveled hair, which some had dyed, or so it seemed, and print ties that they would never have dared to wear before voting for modernization. And, you guessed it, to top it all off, they themselves demanded that The Gay Divorcee be shown. ‘Modesty be damned!’ they shouted. At the end, just as before, there was a replay of musical scenes and dancing. Don Arturo María was out of control and unrecognizable. At one point, he turned to his brother-in-law, Rafael de Aguirre, stuck out his hand and said to him: ‘Hey, Fallo, now it’s your turn to be Ginger for a while and I’ll be Fred.’ Don Rafael was horrified. ‘What, you’re going to be Fred?’ he stuttered. ‘That’s right, and you’re Ginger; you understood me perfectly.’ I thought Don Rafael was going to collapse from an embolism, but his brother-in-law calmed him down: ‘Remember, Fallo, in this kind of dance one barely touches the tips of the fingers; or didn’t you notice? Did you watch the movie or did you fall asleep? In these numbers, each person twirls however he wants.’ ‘But what about my beard, Fatso? Won’t it look bad if Ginger has a beard?’ ‘We’ll all pretend that you don’t have one, or that we don’t see it, Fallo,’ his cousin Don Graciano de Aguirre, the dean of the Association, said forcefully. That said, the poor devil began to remove the cilices that were torturing his legs; ‘So I don’t lose my agility,’ he said, and also removed the scapulars because it seemed disrespectful to drag Our Lady of Pilar and above all the Virgin of Guadalupe into those dances. So they began to dance. Everyone else formed a semicircle and made choreographed movements with their arms and legs to enhance the couple’s artistry. When it was over, they decided unanimously to hire a choreographer to teach them how to stage more complex numbers; upon hearing this, the projectionist took a card from his pocket and handed it to the dean. It read: ‘Párvula Dry: Dance Teacher: Flamenco, Conga, Cuchichí, Mambo, and Other Rhythms.’ ‘We’ve entered a new era,’ the dean said. ‘Our Association has taken an historic step. On the one hand, it will improve our circulation, of which we’re in dire need, but also, and most of all, we’ll surprise our wives at October’s plenary session. Can you imagine, gentlemen, the looks on their faces? They’ll be so proud of us. Neither they nor anyone else will be able to brand us as solemn, do you realize? First thing tomorrow, I’ll contact Doña Párvula Dry.’”

      Luis’s story is very famous, and it grows richer with each re-telling; characters we all know filter through it. The name Párvula Dry printed on the card becomes increasingly more important until she becomes the story’s protagonist. Upon discovering the size of her pupils’ fortunes, Párvula Dry will take advantage of them, scam them, promise to take them on a triumphant world tour, when in reality the most she will do is book them in Barcelona’s Bodega Bohemia, a Goyaesque dive where old variety singers are heckled and jeered by a ruthless public. Once there, she’ll escort the group, now called “Friends United of the Voluptuous Terpsichore,” in the front door then vanish out the back, only to reappear in Capri, where she’ll buy a sumptuous residence that once belonged to Gloria Swanson; thus beginning a new chapter in her stormy existence. By the end, the story undergoes so many changes that it ends up making no sense, but we all amuse ourselves to death.

      Carlos and I take a bus that drops us in Bucareli, not far from the Paseo de la Reforma, which works out beautifully because we’re able to spend a moment in the Librería Francesa, where they have set aside for him two or three of the last issues of Cahiers du Cinéma; we stroll in the direction of the María Bárbara hotel, where the group Nuevo Cine is holding a meeting. Carlos’s library, from what I’ve seen, has branched out; it continues to be fundamentally a literary library, but now has sections devoted to social sciences, anthropology, history of Mexico, cinema, photography. Mine no longer exists; having sold almost all of my books before leaving for Europe, and the few I bought in Italy—with the exception of a volume of Rivadeneyra’s edition of Tirso de Molina, which I found by chance in a bookstore in Milan and brought with me to Mexico—are still in Rome, at Zamprano’s house, in boxes and suitcases that await my return.

      As we walk to the café we also stop at the Británica. Carlos buys a few English magazines and half a dozen books on pop music and photography that, he assures me, are indispensable. I find The Gothic Revival by Clark, a study of that genre known as the Gothic novel that emerged in England in the eighteenth century—replete with horror, eroticism, occultism, orientalism, sadism, and gruesomeness—in which Lewis’s The Monk is set, which I’m translating at the moment. We finally arrive at the María Bárbara, to my surprise, before the meeting is scheduled to start, which gives us time to chat alone for a while, more or less seriously, something we rarely do.

      I tell Carlos that I’m thinking more and more about staying in Mexico, and he encourages me to stay. He tells me that the struggle against solemnity that he has undertaken is more than just mere entertainment, or a simple act of amusement, although there is much of that. He’s convinced that the years of the recent past, those in which the riot police were a permanent fixture in the streets, could only have happened by virtue of a fossilization of mindsets and, therefore, of institutions. Everything is frozen: legislation; the cult of heroes, transformed into concrete statues or fountains with meaningless quotations that refer to nothing real; the official rites of the revolution are as vacuous as everything else. The mindset of politicians has become a part of that same fossilized structure. We have to begin to laugh at everything, to the point of chaos if necessary, and create an environment in which the sanctimonious become worried, for a large part of their ills and ours come from their limitations. Laugh at them, ridicule them, make them feel powerless; this is the only way anything can change. A Sisyphus-like effort, no doubt, but one worth undertaking, and one that eases the monotony of life. If it is impossible to humanize the faces of reinforced concrete that politicians hope to acquire from their first measly little position, then at least it will be possible to expose some cracks. Young people are fed up will all the nonsense. They won’t even set foot in the Museum of Anthropology so they don’t have to see the hieratic expressions of their leaders on the massive stone statue of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation. Everyone must learn to laugh at those ridiculous and sinister puppets that address the nation as if history were told through their mouth, not the living one, never that, rather the one they’ve embalmed. Anything new frightens them. When people finally see them for the rats they are, the parrots they are, and not as the magnificent lions and peacocks that they believe themselves to be, when they discover—of course it will take time!—that they are an object of ridicule, not of respect СКАЧАТЬ