The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

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СКАЧАТЬ of Reforma, in the upscale neighborhoods of Polanco and Las Lomas, in the palaces of the colonial sector, in sheds and even huts in the city’s most squalid neighborhoods. Of course, each sector is incommunicado from the other. Save a few members, everyone would be surprised, indeed, they’ll be aghast, to discover the names of their colleagues. People of every social class collaborate in this criminal enterprise. The base is comprised of the foulest ruffians from the capital’s roughest barrios; conversely, the apex, whose role is to serve as the empire’s protective façade, boasts the perfect hostesses, the supreme beauties of the moment, some foreign titles of nobility, the great couturiers and their models, the highest paid soccer players, the worlds of finance and entertainment. And between these poles operates a web of brilliant professionals: detectives, attorneys, notaries, psychiatrists, doctors; that is, a multibrain whose function is to enhance reality. In short, a perfect pyramid, led by an enigmatic character-turned-legend, thanks to the thousands of stories circulating about him. His house is located on Vienna Street, in the borough of Coyoacán, just a few blocks from the house where Trotsky was assassinated. All that is known of him is that he studied psychology in his youth, without graduating, and later supported himself with little success as a seer, magician, or shaman. No one knows how he came into his fortune. Aided by an extraordinarily effective team, this extraordinary man succeeded in ascertaining the whereabouts of hundreds of missing amnesiacs, studying their families and financial backgrounds, not to mention their tragic circumstances; women whom he doesn’t pursue as ruthlessly as in the old dime novels; rather, he manages to coax them with considerable ease by introducing them to a gang of super-hunks: Brazilians, Italians, Cubans, and Montenegrins, and why not? He later reveals that they are their former husbands or fiancés whom they had married or were about to marry just days before succumbing to the amnesia that left them in a void for several years.

      What is surprising is that none of these women becomes startled or expresses the slightest doubt as to the identity of these men; each claimed to have recognized the man of her life by the scent of his cologne, deodorant, or by the loins of these young men, corroborating the shaman’s oft-held thesis on the mnemonic power of perfumes.

      Maruja La noche-Harris, the highly controversial literary critic, to put it mildly, wrote a solemn defense of the book. She proffered the thesis that amnesia was a parable of the virginity of memory, of course, that scourge imposed on our time by computers. Memory, as we know, is today artificial; it is deposited into a device to be retrieved at our pleasure with the mere push of a button or a few codes, such that if a young woman, romantic and starry-eyed like so many others, goes out onto the street and asks herself something to dispel her ennui, which as a rule is the motivation for her outing, she is unable to orient herself because her responses have been stored in the computer. There lie the birthdates of her children, their names, their zodiac signs, the dates on which the Aztecs arrived at the site where the great Tenochtitlán was erected, the names and characteristics of the most magnificent hotels in Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo in Mexico and Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, of the caravels of Columbus and of his captains, Don Vladimiro Rosado Ojeda’s lectures, which she attended as a young girl, on the laggard transfiguration that architecture has undergone from the Romanesque to Bauhaus, the vices of each of the Roman emperors, the list of films in which Tyrone Power appeared, the most picturesque streets of London… Everything! Absolutely everything! And at the moment she discovers that she’s unable to answer because she doesn’t have the artificial memory on-hand, she inevitably succumbs to panic. She makes a near fatal effort to contemplate those questions the answers to which no one can evade: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?, then falls to the ground. When she comes to, she’s in a clinic; she doesn’t remember who she is, much less her home address, or where she was going. To make matters worse, a curious young man who allegedly rendered first-aid has stolen her purse with her identification. At that moment, a nameless woman is born, devoid of family, home, memories, newly unemployed, and, even worse, educated for nothing.

      Señora La noche-Harris infers from her reading of The Magician of Vienna an urgent call to return to the old days of rote memorization, since a brain with frequent relapses into nothingness remains under the absolute control of institutions, dogmas, all types of power, public and private, ecclesiastical, familial, and above all, the worst of all, that of the senses, an elegant allusion, if ever there was one, to the abundance of procuresses, panderers, and pimps who populate the novel.

      A rigorous defamiliarization, as called for by Shklovsky, an intelligent dissolution of pathos, and a method generously parodic of the romance novel’s devices contribute to the architecture of its remarkable ending: from the bunker inhabited by the shaman on Vienna Street, a convoy of buses, trucks, and motorcycles departs every three or four months for clandestine airstrips and ports. In addition to contraband, they carry shipments of extremely beautiful women who will travel to to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf emirates. At each port of destination, a well-organized squadron belonging to the network and at the service of the Magician of Vienna will deliver them, like door-to-door service, to palatial homes or brothels so lavish they recall those from the pages of Arabian Nights. There is no need to add that, in addition to the young orphaned women from well-to-do families, those opulent dolls who, after regaining their memory, recovered their fortunes only to hand them over a few months later to the stallions the shaman has chosen for them, other libidinous beauties were sent, obviously born to families of more modest means. It is impolite, La noche-Harris points out, to reveal all the details of the plot; suffice it to say that in the last chapters we learn of the triumph of those multinational hunks who were hired and trained to serve as sex objects, or worse: as fornicating robots, feigning for a brief time to be the husbands or lovers of a string of extremely loving women whom every so often they were required to misplace. A sense of revolt arose out of the awareness of their degradation. Their hearts proved not to be bulletproof and made room for feelings they had never known before. Slowly but surely, these men moved into the light: their pagan instinct, their romantic nature, and a congenital chivalry led them into battle, and one night they lynched the shaman and his henchmen, set fire to the immense house on Vienna Street, freed the women they loved from their cells, as well as hundreds of unknown young women, made public their deed in a press conference, and revealed the shady international businesses that were concocted on Vienna Street, borough Coyoacán. The trial was not complicated; just weeks later these brave men were acquitted by an exceptionally decent judge, a humanist, who understood that it was not merely a matter of a sordid and mechanical coup d’état against a company but a healthy release of energy born of a love of justice and love itself. Indeed, shortly thereafter, the same judge who acquitted the gallant young men performs their nuptials to the saintly young women they idolized.

      Maruja La noche-Harris declared at the book launch that to classify The Magician of Vienna as a light novel was to diminish the work. It could only be light if one were thinking of its absolute and captivating charm, but owing to its subject it belonged to the most noble literary caste of our century: Kafka, Svevo, Broch, and the contemporary Spanish writer Vila-Matas. Names that someone surely must have whispered in her ear. The press published some of the concepts of this literary criticism the following day:

       As with all great books, we can read The Magician of Vienna for what it seems to tell us. The surface enchants; we follow the destinies of innumerable characters, entering a drawing room, suffering the passion of love, visiting military headquarters, experiencing the disasters and senselessness of the war of the sexes, relishing the joys of the ironic happy ending, through a horizontal, infinitely meticulous reading. We can, on the other hand, consider the novelistic surface a veil, behind which a secret truth is hidden: in that case, we concentrate our attention on a number of points that seem to us to hide a more intense thickness.⁶

      Reading that paragraph confused those who had on other occasions stumbled upon Señora La noche-Harris’ abrupt and at times rather salty prose, but to learn that someone has managed to improve herself in her craft never fails to produce joy. Two days later, a reporter found that this paragraph came from a biography of Tolstoy written by Pietro Citati. La noche-Harris had applied to The Magician of Vienna words that the Italian biographer had dedicated to no less than War СКАЧАТЬ