Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma University of Oklahoma On Reading and Writing Myself: How I Wrote Aura Author(s): Carlos Fuentes Reviewed work(s): Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 4, Carlos Fuentes Issue (Autumn, 1983), pp. 531- 539 Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40139102 . Accessed: 16/05/2012 10:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and University of Oklahoma are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Literature Today. http://www.jstor.org On Reading and Writing Myself: How I Wrote Aura To my immortalfriend, Lillian Hellman By CARLOS FUENTES ONE, yes, ONE GIRL, first stepped through timidly, as if stealing by the twenty years of age, in the menace of a summer's storm; then it transformeditself summer of '61, over into a luminous pearl encased in a shell of clouds; twenty-two years ago, crossed the threshold between finally it spilled over for a few seconds with a plenitude the small drawing room of an apartment on the Boule- that was also an agony. vard Raspail and entered the bedroom where I was In this almost instantaneous succession, the girl I waiting for her. remembered when she was fourteen years old and who There was a rumor of discontent and a smell of was now twenty suffered the same changes as the light explosives in the French capital. These were the years coming through the windowpanes: that threshold be- when De Gaulle was finding a way out from Algeria and tween the parlor and the bedroom became the lintel the OAS, the Secret Army Organization, was in- between all the ages of this girl: the light that had been discriminately blowing up Jean-Paul Sartre and his struggling against the clouds also fought against her concierge: the bombs of the generals were egalitarian. flesh, took it, sketched it, granted her a shadow of But Paris is a double city; whatever happens there years, sculpted a death in her eyes, tore the smile from possesses a mirage which seems to reproduce the space her lips, waned through her hair with the floating of actuality. We soon learn that this is a form of deceit. melancholy of madness. The abundant mirrors of Parisian interiors do more She was another, she had been another, not she who than simply reproduce a certain space. Gabriel Garcia was going to be but she who, always, was being. Marquez says that with their army of mirrors the Pari- The light possessed the girl, the light made love to sians create the illusion that their narrow apartments the girl before I could, and I was only, that afternoon, are double their real size. The true mystery- Gabriel "a strange guest in the kingdom of love" ("en el reino and I know this- is that what we see reflected in those del amor huesped extrario"),and knew that the eyes of mirrors is always another time, time past, time yet to love can also see us with- once more I quote Queve- be. And that, sometimes, if you are lucky, a person do- "a beautiful Death." who is another person also floats across these quicksil- The next morning I started writing Aura in a cafe ver lakes. near my hotel on the rue de Berri. I remember the day: I believe that the mirrorsof Paris contain something Khrushchev had just read his twenty-year plan in Mos- more than their own illusion. They are, at the same cow, where he promised communism and the wither- time, the reflection of something less tangible: the ing away of the state by the '80s- here we are now- light of the city, a light I have attempted to describe burying the West in the process, and his words were many times, in political chronicles of the events of May reproduced in all their gray minuteness in the In- 1968 and of May 1981 and in novels such as Distant ternational Herald Tribune which was being hawked Relations, where I say that the light of Paris is identical by ghostly girls, young lovers jailed in brief prisons of to "the expectation that every afternoon ... for one passion, the authors of Aura: the dead girls. miraculous moment, the phenomena of the day- rain or fog, scorching heat or snow- [will] disperse and reveal, as in a Corot the luminous essence landscape, TWO, yes, TWO YEARS BEFORE I was having a of the lie de France." few drinks with Luis Bunuel in his house on the Street A second A second - the other space: person per- of Providence, and we talked about Quevedo, a son- in the mirroris not born in the mirror:she comes poet the Spanish film director knows better than most aca- from the The who wandered in from her light. girl demic specialists on baroque poetry of the seventeenth room into her bedroom that hot afternoon in living century. more than was an- early September twenty years ago You have already noticed, of course, that the true other because six had since I first met years gone by author of Aura (including the dead I have in the of her in Mexico. girls just her, budding grove puberty, mentioned) is named Francisco de Ville- But she was also another because the that Quevedo y light gas, born on 17 September 1580 in Madrid and as if it had been defeated a sup- afternoon, expecting her, posedly deceased on 8 September 1645 in Villanueva stubborn reef of clouds. That - I remember it- light de los Infantes; the satiricaland scatologicalbrother of Swift, but also the unrivaled poet of our death and love, Copyright © 1983 by Carlos Fuentes our Shakespeare, our John Donne, the furious enemy 532 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY of Gongora, the political agent for the Duke of Osuna, thing find themselves mysteriously incapable of leav- the unfortunate, jailed partisan of fallen power, the ing an elegant salon. The threshold of the salon be- obscene, the sublime Quevedo dead in his stoical tow- comes an abyss and necessity becomes extermination: er, dreaming, laughing, searching, finding some of the the shipwrecks of Providence Street only need each truly immortal lines in the Spanish language: other to devour each other. The theme of is and in Oh conditionmortal Oh durasuerte necessity profound persistent no vivir manana Bunuel, and his films repeatedly reveal the way in Que puedo querer a man and a a child and a a Sin la pensionde procurarmi muerte. which woman, madman, saint and a sinner, a criminal and a dreamer, a solitude (Oh mortalstate Oh man'sunyielding fate and a desire need one another. To live tomorrowI can have no hope Bunuel was inventing his film The Exterminating Withoutthe cost of buyingmy own death. Angel and crossing back and forth, as he did so, over the threshold between the lobby and the bar of his Or these lines, love: maybe defining house, looking for all the world like a pensioned pica- Es yelo abrasador,es fuego helado, dor from old Cagancho's cuadrilla. Bunuel's comings es heridaque duele y no se siente, and goings were, somehow, a form of immobility. es un sonadobien, un mal presente, es un breve descanso cansado. A todaspartes que me vuelvo veo muy Las amenazasde la llamaardiente (It is a freezingfire, a burningice, Y en cualquierlugar tengo presente it is a woundthat hurtsyet is not felt, Tormentoesquivo y burladordeseo. a happinessdesired, a evil, present I I see a shortbut oh so tiringrest.) (Everywhere turn The menaceof the burningflame And I am aware the true author of Aura is and I am everywhere Yes, Quevedo, Of alooftorment and mockingdesire.) pleased to represent him here today. about and a This is the great advantage of time: the so-called Since we had been talking Quevedo por- was "author"ceases to be such; he becomes an invisible trait of the young Bunuel by Dali in the '20s staring itself on agent for him who signed the book, published it and at us, Eluard's poetic formula imposed my afternoonof air collected (and goes on collecting) the royalties. But the spirit that farawayMexican transparent and sliced chiles and book was written- it always was, it always is- by oth- and smell of burnt tortilla newly be and if ers. Quevedo and a girl who was almost dust in love, fugitive flowers: "Poetry shall reciprocal"; and and the polvo enamorado. Bunuel and an afternoon in Mexico Bunuel was thinking of Gericault Quevedo of the Medusa City, so different from an afternoon in Paris but so film, I was thinking that the raft already the charac- different also, in 1959, from the afternoons in Mexico contained two eyes of stone that would trap not in the fiction City today. ters of The ExterminatingAngel only on the but within the You could see the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl the of a shadow projected screen, of the camera that smoking mountain and Iztaccihuatl the sleeping lady physical and mechanical reality be the true of the as you drove down Insurgentes Avenue, and the big would, from then on, prison ship- a camera on of department store had not yet been erected on the wrecks of Providence: (why not?) top an umbrella and a corner of Bunuel's house.