The Art of Flight by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

TRAVELING AND WRITING

For Julio Ortega

I amused myself recently rereading some fragments in an autobiographical notebook written some thirty years ago. I was hoping to find in its pages the atmosphere that enveloped the first years of my stay in Europe. A well-known editor of the time, Don Rafael Giménez Siles, invited a dozen young writers to tell their life stories. He seemed to be convinced that such an act would encourage a generation even greener than ours to find its path to literature. I doubt that those allegedly exemplary lives have fulfilled that purpose. The project was in many ways ridiculous; those of us who were chosen were engaged, to varying degrees, in an intense sentimental and literary education that in no way corresponded with a desire to trawl the enigmas of the past and use them to interpret the signs that governed our fate, let alone serve as examples and mentors for the very young writers whom in due time would take our place. I wrote those notes in Warsaw in early 1966. I had left Mexico five years earlier, visited several countries, and prolonged my stay mainly in two cities, Rome and Warsaw.

As I reread the text, I was left suddenly with this question: “Why do I get chills every time I think about returning to my country, which, of course, will have to happen, like it or not, someday?” Then I mentioned the circumstances that had prompted me to undertake this journey and to extend it indefinitely. It began with a sense of professional frustration: I was working at a publishing house where all my projects were systematically thwarted. It infuriated me to see that the practice of literature and the inevitable squabbles that resulted from it often concealed a noticeable intellectual disdain and hinted at aspirations that had little or nothing to do with literature. Some young intellectuals were beginning to seek a more intimate relationship with power than with the muses. My feelings toward political opposition groups, particularly the left, with whose ideals I identified most, were decidedly contradictory; I wanted them to grow stronger, but at the same time their methods seemed confusing to me, limited and far removed from any element of reality. More than anything, the empty rhetoric of official discourse sickened me, as well as the conformity of large swaths of the population to the restrictions of our democratic life and the backwardness of the country. I said all that to myself then, and it was true. But now I am able to see that in large part the state of frustration was related to having published a few years earlier a first book of stories that went unnoticed, and that after that I had stopped writing.

In mid-June 1961, I left Veracruz on the German ship Marburg. One morning, in the middle of the ocean, the bulletin we were given at breakfast announced that the ship, just as all units of the German merchant navy, would have to forego the originally

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