On Packing My Library

Figures

There is only one cardinal sin: impatience.Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise,because of impatience we cannot return.

—Franz Kafka

I am packing my library. One by one the books lose configuration. I take them down from the shelf, dust off the jackets, and browse calmly through their pages. I stack everything in empty cartons. The books will follow a different order when they come out again; I wonder if they will resent the change. As I proceed, I realize how much my library and I have changed in the last decade. We hardly recognize each other. Are all these volumes really mine? How did they grow to be so many? What do they say about me? What can I say about them?

Suddenly—I don’t know why—my mind stops on an item from childhood. A small, antiquated .22-caliber pistol. La pistola. Books? No, they played little part in my youth. I was an outdoor kid, hiking, swimming, collecting butterflies. Books signified passivity, a reluctance to act, to be part of the universe. Every volume my parents bought for me was relegated to a shelf I could hardly reach in my bedroom. But the pistol, la pistola . . . Throughout my childhood I was obsessed with it. Why did my father keep it hidden in a strongbox inside his closet? He would open the box only on rare occasions—to fetch a pair of earrings, to deposit the gold necklace my mother inherited from Bobe Miriam, to make sure his stash of American dollars was intact. While the door was open, I would contemplate the pistol furtively, fearfully, from the corner of my eye. Why on earth was it in my house? Who gave it to my father? Whenever I asked him, he would shrug, “I just like to keep it around.” So I concocted my own stories: maybe young Zeyde Srulek, my grandfather, had used it to defend himself during a pogrom in Eastern Europe; perhaps it was the remnant of an obscure and violent period in my father’s life.

When I was ten, I dreamed that my father and I were on an anthropological expedition to Chiapas. After crossing the Lacandonian jungle, we came upon a system of caves in the mountains where an Indian tribe had survived from time immemorial. My father talked to a [End Page 52] [End Page 53] priest, who led us into an immense grotto with a vaulted Gothic roof. Fixed on the wall was a wooden bust in the shape of an immense godhead, its mouth opening and closing, hungry for human flesh. The priest told my father the head wanted me for a sacrifice, and so my father serenely withdrew the pistol from his backpack. But instead of firing it, he put it on the ground and smiled at me. “Don’t worry, mi amor,” he said. “The pistol will satisfy the god’s appetite.” I screamed in terror, unconvinced. The dream ended.

To me, Mexico is an arsenal of deadly firearms, a massive munition depot that could explode at any moment. There’s always an implicit threat—a premonition of violence deferred. You can sense it in the specter of pistols, in the images of Mexico’s greatest photographers, even when no guns are on display. Outrage, injustice, suffering: is the country anything else?

In 1967, when I was six years old, my father acted in Viet Rock, an incendiary play directed by Rafael López Miarnau. In addition to denouncing U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, Viet Rock skewered Mexican patriotism. During one Sunday matinee, a gang of thugs affiliated with the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei leapt onstage to attack the actors with sticks and chains. The ruffians seemed to come out of nowhere, and they vanished into the afternoon before the police could get there. (Would the police have stopped them, I wonder?) The wounded had to be rushed to the hospital with concussions and head fractures.

You can see this Mexico in the free-flowing blood of Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s films; in the tacit violence...