Mephisto's Waltz: Selected Short Stories by Sergio Pitol

Author:Sergio Pitol [Pitol, Sergio]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Short Stories, Hispanic & Latino, Fiction
ISBN: 9781941920817
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 1981-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CEMETERY OF THRUSHES

for Luis Deméneghi

The story he began writing on the ship and finished in Italy was not well received. Billie discouraged him immediately. It had no roots, she pontificated, everything in it was too abstract. It was impossible to locate where the action took place. Orión had other demands. Revealing to aspects of the world that the world did not know a cultivated audience. A few days earlier, he added, they had brought him the translation of an Icelandic story. Cleared of localisms and folklore and without the need for special glossaries, the author had elaborated a modern drama in which any of those present could be the protagonist, but at the same time it left a taste of the sea different from any other taste of the sea. It was possible to imagine a light that only the Norse were capable of savoring, a herring with a taste different from usual, without his (that boy with the straw-colored hair who regularly attended meetings and barely spoke and drank immoderately and silently) mentioning at all that light and those flavors; everything was implicit in an intimate narrative that happened in an apartment possibly like the one where the conversation was taking place.

She ended up agreeing with him, because in his story the protagonist should live abroad, in New York to be more precise, host a party to celebrate the exhibition of an old Mexican friend who’s become a famous painter, and at the same time welcome his son whom he had not seen in a long time. In order to introduce the conflict that he was interested in developing, it was necessary that they live in different countries and that mother and son had barely spoken in the previous years. He barely knew New York, he had a mere tourist’s vision of the city, he had never spent more than ten days in a row there, and so it was difficult for him to succeed in having the mother, son, and other incidental characters move about with ease. Following Billie’s advice would have meant redoing the text altogether, which he was not at all anxious to do. If he had too much of anything during that enviable time it was stories. He had notebooks full of notes, sketches, projects more or less developed. Perhaps the ups and downs of travel always have that effect on him. During those days in Rome, he’s unable to think of new topics, but he does manage to find attractive solutions to those stories he’s left half-finished.

A dream was crucial for getting the mechanisms of creation going. He must have had it one night not long after his father’s death, when he tried to forget that he had not accompanied his mother at that decisive moment, and dreams afflicted them unrelentingly.

He remembers that he wrote the story as if in a fever, inside a café devoid of any charm where he listened to the showers of autumn fall; it was very close to his apartment, a rather seedy café where in the evenings a young clientele met to listen to a jukebox.

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