The Art of Flight

Sergio Pitol, George Henson

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781941920060
• eBook ISBN: 9781941920077
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The debut work in English by Mexico's greatest and most influential living author and winner of the Cervantes Prize ("the Spanish language Nobel"), The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as a legendary author, translator, scholar, and diplomat.

The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory, " The Art of Flight imaginatively blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do.

Sergio Pitol Demeneghi (b. 1933 in Puebla), one of Mexico's most acclaimed writers and literary translators, studied law and philosophy in Mexico City, and served for over thirty years as a cultural attaché in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe, which is reflected in his diverse and universal writing. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of literary work, Pitol was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language world.

George Henson is currently completing a PhD in humanities (with an emphasis on literary and translation studies) at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his BA from University of Oklahoma, and his MA from Middlebury College. His most recent published translations have included new works by Elena Poniatowska and Andrés Neuman.

READINGS

THE GREAT THEATER OF THE WORLD

The events described in The Court of Carlos IV take place in the year 1807. Galdós, through Gabriel Araceli, the narrator-protagonist of the first series of the National Episodes, allows himself to begin the story with an event that transpired two years before: the premiere of Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s comedy, The Maidens’ Consent. Araceli, in fact, acknowledges his participation in the performance that tarnishes the process of personal dignification in which Galdós has consciously and tenaciously implicated him.

The historical event depicted in the Episode involves a palace plot hatched by the Prince of Asturias against his parents, the King and Queen. Delaying this account in order to recreate the rather droll circumstances of a theater performance might seem disproportionate and even incongruous. And, yet, it is not. The novel’s architecture requires the initial appearance of a dramatic scene that insinuates the interplay between life—as everyday reality or historical fact—and the theater. The novel thus opens with the premiere of a work that endeavored to change Spanish theater, to free it from the extravagances that plagued it and to introduce, at last, dramatic precepts and a didactic and moral zeal. An effort that, from the beginning, was opposed by old playwrights, actors, and in large part by the audience, who considered a theater based on rules to be a foreign imposition—French, for added insult!—an affront not only to their theatrical tastes and preferences but also to national sentiment. The very idea of subjecting the theater to rules, “the dramatic unities” of place, time and action—catchphrases that few were able to understand and, therefore, were interpreted in the most outlandish ways—was an outrage. The French were different, this was well known. Let them keep their Corneille and Racine and their exacting rules! That Lope de Vega had not allowed himself to be inveigled by such nonsense made him far superior to the foreigners. That the unities came from France made the affront even more visceral. To establish a set of symmetries, Galdós closes The Court of Carlos IV with a representation of Othello in a palace theater, a rather free Spanish translation of a French variation of Shakespeare’s play, a piece absolutely foreign to any of those precepts “obsequiously obeyed” by the Frenchified Moratín. The tale opens and closes framed by two theatrical performances. But there’s more. Some of the actors who stage Othello are professionals (including one who existed in real life: the great Isidoro Máiquez) who belonged to the renowned company of the Teatro del Príncipe; others are aristocrats who were acting aficionados. There are love affairs between the nobility and members of the theatrical world, scenes of jealousy, intrigue, and heinous acts of revenge that, from beginning to end, imbue this Episode with an intense theatrical coloring. If the actors are performing all along, the members of the court who have temporarily joined them do so even more.

Gabriel Araceli, whom readers met in Trafalgar, the first Episode of the series, has undergone visible changes in his attitude and lifestyle. He has awakened, sharpened his wit, and is much more aware of himself as an individual. The pretensions of the courtly city and, above all, his daily interaction with actors have given him a presence he could have hardly acquired in Vejer, the small Andalusian town where we left him. Araceli believes that he has had an exceptional run of luck; shortly after arriving in Madrid, dogged by hunger and difficulties of an unspecified nature, he manages to enter the service of Pepa González, an actress widely celebrated in Madrid for her talent, wit, and, above all, her beauty. During discreet soirées at his mistress’s home, Gabriel attends not only to people of the theater but also to more illustrious personages who, it appears, are unable to find either the happiness or informality that reign in the actors’ homes or in other places, to which they sometimes refer, quietly of course, that attract the cream of Madrid’s demimonde, where knives are brandished when least expected and singing and dancing are abruptly interrupted, transforming the tertulia into a raucous free-for-all.

It is not surprising that because of his connection to theater people and their coterie Gabriel Araceli might at times escape the role assigned to him by Galdós: that of the exemplar of virtues of a ruling class that, out of nowhere, was destined to occupy the space that the nobility had begun to lose. From his youth, Gabriel, whom military honors would soon transform into a member of the new redemptive class, was to represent the ideals of the new society that was taking shape and be the champion of unimpeachable morals. That burden, similar to that which weighed on the “positive hero” of the ideological literature of the twentieth century, tends to diminish in some episodes his verisimilitude as the protagonist, and strips him of the essential inner life necessary to become an entirely convincing character. But the boundless energy of the social fabric that surrounds him saves him from becoming a mechanical doll. Galdós endows him with keen powers of observation, a facility for establishing relationships between characters and situations, the qualities necessary for the proper development of a novel, apt for enriching its dramatic moments, ennobling the heroic ones, and heightening the joyous ones. All this at the cost of suppressing in large part his life of instinct.

In The Court of Carlos IV, Gabriel experiences moments of joyful rebellion against the demiurge. It must not be forgotten that he is in the prime of his life, moves in a social circle free of rigor, and carries himself with great ease in settings where aristocrats, actors, and even less reputable characters are accustomed to exchanging partners. If in the first chapters we find Gabriel chastely in love with a sweet neighbor, a young seamstress, we can also imagine him as the possible future lover of a great lady of the Court, a beautiful countess of exceptional powers at Palace with whom he dreams of repeating that infamous story whose protagonists are the Queen María Luisa de Parma and Manuel Godoy, her minister, whom she plucked out of a barracks and transformed into the most powerful man in the kingdom. Gabriel has become so independent of the fate imposed on him by his creator that, now blinded by the beauty of the supreme Amaranta whose “ideal and stately beauty roused a strange emotion akin to sadness,”¹³ as her adolescent lover describes her with happy intuition, he embarks on an adventure that overtakes, disillusions, and humiliates him, but that provides him a unique view of the world from above, of its unprecedented powers and also—alas!—its secret vulnerability.

If Trafalgar constitutes an initiation test under the sign of the Epos, The Court of Carlos IV will place before our hero another, more difficult, kind of test. Gabriel has penetrated the world of fiction with weapons and heroic deeds; he has yet to discover other scenarios where battles are fought in secret and surreptitiously, battles that possess another dimension and are fraught with traps and unknown risks. Araceli enters a minefield, the same one that members of the royal family and their closest retinue tread.

Gabriel will walk away from this Episode more cautious than from other apparently more dangerous ones, like the heroic military sieges and memorable battles. Here, the plot flows through two parallel channels: a public one—the conspiracy of the Prince of Asturias, the future Fernando VII, to murder his mother and dethrone his father; and a private one—a relationship of love and jealousy, whose threads have been cleverly woven to lead to a crime of passion. The two plots continuously intertwine and support each other. The public one is an affair of State; the private one, which gives the story its true body, functions through a mechanism widely used in Renaissance drama; we find it in several of Shakespeare’s comedies, many of Lope’s and Calderon’s, and almost obsessively in Tirso: Pepilla Isidoro loves González Máiquez, who doesn’t even notice her. Máiquez loves the Duchess Lesbia, the Queen’s lady in waiting and secret agent of the Prince of Asturias, who despises him. Lesbia loves Don Juan de Mañara, a handsome officer of the King’s guard and also agent of the Prince of Asturias, who is deceiving her with a wench from the slums of Madrid. Everyone is jealous of everyone. Two of the characters from the romantic entanglement are already embroiled in the Palace plot. The Countess Amaranta, who neither loves nor is loved by anyone, participates in a scheme to punish Lesbia’s disloyalty. The fake knife with which Máiquez, in the role of Othello, will punish the wantonness of Desdemona, played by Lesbia, will be replaced at the last moment by a real one that will be plunged into the heroine’s chest. At that moment, Gabriel will act with great courage and race to prevent the crime.

The tone of the Episode is unmistakably Goyaesque. It could not be otherwise. The very title recalls Goya’s most celebrated painting, The Family of Carlos IV. Goya was the official court painter of the Crown. In that role, he painted a series of portraits of Carlos IV and the Queen María Luisa, of Fernando as Prince of Asturias and as King of Spain, of the rest of the infantes, the royal children, the large canvas on which the entire family appears, as well as a remarkable portrait of Godoy. The actor Isidoro Máiquez was also painted by Goya; his portrait hangs today in the Museo del Prado, near the King and Queen and the infantes. Amaranta, in a fit of capriciousness and defiance, had Goya paint her nude, which leads us immediately to associate her with The Nude Maja. The curtains for the performance of Othello, we are told, were also painted by Goya. The Aragonese painter is present everywhere and at all times.

A powerful and perhaps more troubling referent than the plot itself is represented by the distant, and for the majority of Spaniards, blurry, figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army enters Spain the day a dinner is held at the home of Pepilla González, where comedians and courtiers meet to work out the final details of the performance of Othello. No one in the course of the Episode knows for sure what Napoleon proposes upon entering Spain, and each person attempts to reconcile that enigma in the way that best suits their interests.

“Someone who performs or plays a role in theaters is commonly known as a comediante,” states the first edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. The comediante appears to be someone other than who he in fact is; his function is to portray someone else. One day he pretends to be the king, and the next day he is a laborer, saint, or ship’s captain. That ability to pretend, that ability to create ecstasy out of nothing—shipwrecks, love affairs, dethronements—tends sometimes to filter in a perverse way into the comediante’s personal life. Isidoro Máiquez, for example, during the rehearsals for Othello, becomes delirious; jealousy has overtaken him, fueled, among other reasons, by malicious anonymous letters informing him that he has been nothing but a whim to “his Duchess,” a common plaything of a refined lady who, incidentally, has replaced him with Don Juan de Mañara, a gentleman in his own right. In the drama’s final scene, Máiquez’s personality has vanished; he has been entirely transformed into a crazed Moor, a murderer. The version represented differs in some aspects from the original drama. The proof of Desdemona’s infidelity is found in an impassioned letter that she has supposedly written to her lover. An anonymous hand has forged her handwriting and signature. Faced with this evidence, Othello can no longer doubt her guilt. The letter seals the couple’s fate. Desdemona must inevitably die at the hands of the Moor. A letter in which Lesbia attempts to assuage Mañara’s jealousy has fallen into the hands of someone intent on punishing her. She reprimands him for daring to imagine that a woman of her stature might be interested in a ridiculous little comedian. Someone has removed the paper that Othello must read before the prostrate body of Desdemona, replacing it with the letter in which Lesbia ridicules him to reassure Juan de Mañara, and that same someone has replaced the stage dagger with a real knife. The Marquesa’s die is cast: she will die that night before her lover’s eyes, before those of her ferocious husband, and those of the very distinguished audience made up of the kingdom’s great nobility. Only Araceli’s timely intervention manages to avert the disaster.

Gabriel will discover from personal experience that the same functions of representation and the same to-and-fro between being and seeming that so unsettles comedians is repeated at Court, only there the reality of being gradually atrophies, while the function of seeming, of pretending, grows disproportionately larger. Court life requires a permanent ability to make believe. Its ceremonies become a never-ending performance that demands more complex dramatic talents and more stylized techniques than those required on the stage. One acts there not only in the performance of protocol, but also in the royal chambers, in the visits that the courtiers pay to each other in their respective palaces, in the theater, the bullfights, in walks in the countryside and, above all, in the passageways where they pretend to be who they are not, when they attend de ocultis the dinners of the fashionable comedians and bullfighters of the day, the popular dances and festivals, or even less desirable establishments where it was possible to rub elbows with the picaresque of every stripe that flourished in the slums of Madrid.

Living at the service of comedians or being a page in the palace precincts means participating in a perpetual representation, pretending to perform one activity when, in fact, one performs another. In the first chapter of The Court of Carlos IV, the young Araceli describes a heterogeneous list of duties that he must fulfill that constitutes in itself a delightful passage of local color. Among them, there are two that are mere affectation: “To walk out on the square of Santa Ana, pretending to look into the shops, but in reality listening with covert attention to what was being said in the knots that collected there of actors or dancers, and trying to discover what those of la Cruz theatre had to say against those of el Príncipe”; the other: “To call every day at the house of Isidoro Máiquez under pretext of asking him some question with reference to the dresses in the play; but, in reality, to ascertain whether a certain person happened to be with him—whose name I reserve for the present.” That is, to feign one interest when the real interest is another, a quite despicable one, I might add; to hear what is being said on the street only to repeat it later to a master; to ask something trivial about a garment when in fact the intention is to discover who is visiting whom, how those being observed carry themselves during the visit, what they talk about. They are of course the activities of an informant, a cop, a spy. Another mandatory activity was “to frequent the gallery of the theatre de la Cruz in order to hiss The Maidens’ Consent, a play that my mistress held in at least as much aversion as the others by the same author”—a provocative activity that complemented that of being a spy. The role of a page at court was very similar, exalted not only by the majesty of the settings and the rank of the protagonists but also by the cruelty of the measures the page must employ. The Countess Amaranta casts a spell over the callow Andalusian whom she invites to be her servant. She offers him the acquisition of a bright future as long as he becomes her slave. His astonishment will disappear within a few days, as soon as the Countess gives him his first instructions. To begin with, she will place him in another home from where he must inform her of everything that happens. Even if this arrangement shocks him, he will continue to be her page. Confident of the spell she exerts over the boy who was plucked from González’s home and carried off to the Escorial, Amaranta launches a far-reaching plan that will solve her problems forever. His role would consist of observing from behind tapestries or curtains, listening behind doors, winning the hearts of the handmaids of the ladies-in-waiting and of the ladies themselves, to obtain secrets of all kinds and become a major power in the Palace. By then, the Countess would secure for him letters patent of nobility; once titled, and with her help, he would enter the Royal Guard. Her power would become extraordinary: “A guardsman has indeed an advantage which princes themselves have not, for while these know nothing beyond the palace they live in—which is the reason why hardly any king governs well—the soldier is equally familiar with the palace and the street, the folks outside as well as those within; and this more general knowledge enables him to make himself useful to all parties and to pull the wires of a vast number of springs. A man who knows what he is about here ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas
• I. Memory
• II. Writing
• III. Readings
• IV. Ending
• V. Translator’s Note
• VI. Bibliography of Translated Texts
• Author and Translator Biographies
• Publisher’s Note