The Secret Miracle

The night of the fourteenth of March of 1939, in one of the departments of the Zeltnergasse of Prague, Jaromir Hladík, author of the unfinished tragedy Los Enemigos, of a Defense of Eternity, and a study of the subtle Jewish influences on Jakob Boehme, dreamed about a long chess match. It wasn’t disputed between two individuals, but instead between two illustrious families; the match had been tabled many centuries ago; no one was able to name the forgotten prize, but there were murmurs that it was enormous and perhaps infinite; the pieces and the table were in a secret tower; Jaromir (in his dream) was the eldest son of one of the competing families; the clocks proclaimed the hour of the unrelenting game; the dreamer ran along the sands of a rainy desert and was not able to remember the shapes of the pieces or the laws of the game. At this point, he woke up. The roar of the rain and of the terrible clocks ceased. A unanimous, measured sound, cut by some commanding voices, rose from the Zeltnergasse. It was dawn, the armored vanguard of the Third Reich was entering Prague.

On the nineteenth, the authorities received a denouncement; the same day, at dusk, Jaromir Hladík was arrested. He was directed to a white, aseptic prison, on the opposite bank of the Moldau. He couldn’t dispute a single one of the charges of the Gestapo: his mother’s maiden name was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study on Boehme was Judaic, his signature was present on protest against Anschluss. In 1928, he had translated the Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house Herman Barsdorf; their lavish catalogue of this house had exaggerated the commercial renown of the translator; that catalogue was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the officers in whose hands lay Hladík’s fortune. There was no man that would question him; two or three words in Gothic letters would be sufficient for Julius Rothe to establish the importance of Hladík and arrange for him to be condemned to death, pour encourager les autres. The date of the execution was set as the twenty-ninth of March, at nine A.M. The delay (whose importance the reader will later appreciate) owed to the administrative desire of operating impersonally and methodically, like the vegetation and the planets.

The first feeling Hladík experienced was of pure terror. He thought that they could not frighten him off with the gallows, decapitation, or the slitting of his throat, but to be executed by rifle was intolerable. In vain he repeated to himself that the pure, plain act of dying was the most terrifying, not the physical circumstances. But he didn’t tire of imagining those circumstances: absurdly he tried to exhaust all the variations. He anticipated infinitely the process, from the sleepless dawn until the mysterious shooting. Before the day predetermined by Julius Rothe, he had died hundreds of deaths, on patios whose forms and angles consumed the whole of geometry, machine-gunned by various soldiers, of changing amounts, that at times finished him from afar; others, from very near. He confronted with a certain fright (perhaps also with a certain courage) those imagined executions; each simulation lasted only a few seconds; the circle closed, Jaromir perpetually returned to the tremulous meditation of his death. Later he reflected that the reality does not usually coincide with the expectations; with a perverse logic he concluded that to forecast a circumstantial detail is to stop it from happening. Loyal to this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, atrocious flourishes; naturally, he stopped fearing that these flourishes could be prophetic. In the night, he miserably attempted to affirm in some way the fleeting substance of time. He knew that it was rushing onwards towards the dawn of the twenty-ninth; he reasoned out loud: Now I am in the night of the twenty-second; as long as this night lasts (and the seven more) I am invulnerable, I am immortal. He thought that the dreamlike nights were deep, dark fonts of water in which he could submerge himself. At times, he longed with impatience for the definitive execution, which would deliver him, for better or worse, from his vain task of imagining. The twenty-eighth, when the final sunset shimmered through the high bars, he divined from all these abject considerations the image of his drama Los Enemigos.

Hladík had passed forty years of age. Outside of a few friendships and a great many daily routines, the problematic exercise of literature is all that constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what they had carried to fruition, and asked that they judge him by the things he had dreamed or planned. All the books he had sent to print now demanded from him a complex repentance. In his examination of the work of Boehme, of Abnesra, and of Flood, he had operated in plain application; in his translation of the Sepher Yezirah, with negligence, fatigue, and conjecture. Judged less deficient, perhaps, was the Vindication of Eternity: the first volume chronicling the various eternities that Man had envisioned, from the immovable Parmenidean One up to the modifiable past of Hinton; the second negates (with Francis Bradley) that all the happenings in the universe come to compose a temporal series. It argues that the permutation of all possible human experiences is not infinite and that one single “repetition” is enough to show that time is a fallacy…Unfortunately, they are no less fallacious the arguments used to demonstrate this fallacy; Hladak used to run through them with a certain disdainful perplexity. He also had redacted a series of expressionist poems; these, to the confusion of the poet, figured in an anthology in 1924 and there would be no later anthology that didn’t inherit them. With his drama in verse Los Enemigos, Hladík wanted to redeem himself from his mistaken and listless past (Hladík had always preferred verse, because it refused to allow its readers to forget unreality, which is a condition of the art).

The drama observed the unities of time, of place, and of action; taking place in Hradcany, in the library of the baron of Römerstadt, in one of the last afternoons of the nineteenth century. In the first scene of the first act, a stranger visits Römerstadt (a clock shows seven in the evening, a flash of the setting sun glorifies the glass windows, the air carries a captive and recognizable tune of Hungarian music). After this visit others follow; Römerstadt does not know the people that impose upon him, but he has the uncomfortable impression of having seen them before, perhaps in a dream. They all praise him exaggeratedly, but it is evident—at first to the audience, and later to the baron—that they are secretly enemies, conspirators in his ruin. Römerstadt manages to deflect or elude their complex intrigues; in the dialogue, they allude to his fiancée, Julia of Weidenau, and to one Jaroslav Kubin, that at one time interfered in their courtship. This Kubin, now, has gone mad and believes himself to be Römerstadt...The dangers intensify. Römerstadt, at the end of the second act, is seen in the course of killing a conspirator. The third act begins, the last. Gradually incoherencies develop: actors return that had seemed to have been already discarded in the plot; returning, for an instant, is the man killed by Römerstadt. Someone makes a note that dusk has not yet fallen: the clock reads seven, in the high windows the westward sun shimmers, the air carries the captive Hungarian music. The first interlocutor appears and repeats the words he uttered in the first scene of the first act. Römerstadt speaks without surprise; the spectator now understands that Römerstadt is the miserable Jaroslave Kubin. The drama has never occurred: it is the circuitous deliriousness that Kubin endlessly lives and relives.

Hladík never asked himself if that tragicomedy of errors was admirable or trivial, sloppily constructed or rigidly structured. In the plot sketched out he saw the most apt invention for playing down his defects and exercising his felicities, the possibility of rescuing (in a symbolic manner) the foundation of his life. He had already finished the first act and one of the scenes of the third; the metered character of the work allowed him to continuously examine it, revising the hexameters, without the manuscript in sight. He felt that two acts were still missing and very soon he was going to die. He spoke to God in the darkness. If by some manner I exist, if I am not one of your repetitions or aberrations, I exist as the author of Los Enemigos. In order to carry to completion this drama, that can justify me and justify you, I need one more year. Grant me those days, You in Whom are all the centuries and all of time. It was the last night, the most terrible, but after ten minutes sleep inundated him like a dark flood of water.

Towards dawn, he dreamed that he was concealed in one of the naves of the library of Clementinum. A librarian in black glasses asked him: What do you seek? Hladík replied: I seek God. The librarian told him: God is in one of the letters of one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand tomes of Clementinum. My forefathers and the forefathers of my forefathers have searched for this letter; seeking it has left me blind. He took off the glasses and Hladík saw his eyes, which were dead. A patron entered to return an atlas. This atlas is useless, he said, and it was given to Hladík. He opened it at random. He saw a map of India, dizzying and hazy. Abruptly confident, he touched one of the tiniest letters. An omnipresent voice said to him: The time for your work has been granted. Then Hladík awoke.

He remembered that the dreams of men belonged to God and that Maimonides had written that the words in a dream were sacred, when they were distinct and clear and it couldn’t be seen who had said them. He dressed; two soldiers entered in the cell and ordered that he follow them.

From the other side of the door, Hladík had envisioned a labyrinth of galleries, staircases, and pavilions. The reality was less luxurious: they descended to a rear patio by one single steel staircase. Various soldiers—some with their uniforms unbuttoned—were examined a motorcycle and discussing it. The sargent looked at his watch: it was 8:44. He had to wait until it was nine. Hladík, feeling more insignificant than damned, sat himself on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the eyes of the soldiers avoided his. As a way to pass the time, the sargent handed him a cigarette. Hladík had never smoked; he accepted it out of courtesy or humility. Lighting it, he saw that his hands were trembling. The day had become cloudy; the soldiers spoke in a low voice as if he was already dead. Vainly, he tried to remember the woman whose he had pictured as Julia of Weidenau...

The firing squad was formed, was told to stand to attention. Hladík, standing against the wall of the prison, waited for the shots. Someone voiced a concern that the wall would be mackled by the blood, so it was ordered that the accused would advance a few paces. Absurdly, Hladík thought of the preliminary flashbulb pops of photographers. A heavy drop of rain brushed one of Hladík‘s temples and rolled slowly down his cheek; the sargent shouted the final order.

The physical universe was stopped.

The rifles were trained on Hladík, but the men that were going to kill him were motionless. The arm of the sargent sustained an unfinished gesture. Over a tile of the patio, a bee cast a fixed shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a painting. Hladík tested a shout, a single syllable, the turn of a hand. He understood that he was paralyzed. Not even the faintest sound of the impeded world could reach him. He thought I am in hell, I am dead. He thought I am crazy. He thought time has been stopped. Later he reflected that in such a case, his thoughts would have also stopped. He wanted to test this: he recited (without moving his lips) the mysterious fourth eclogue of Virgil. He imaged that the now remote soldiers were sharing his anguish: he longed to communicate with them. It surprised him to not feel any fatigue or the vertigo of his long motionlessness.

After an indeterminate amount of time, he slept. He awoke to the world that continued deaf and immovable. On his cheek remained the drop of water; on the patio, the shadow of the bee; the smoke of the cigarette that he had tossed away had not finished dispersing. Another “day“ passed before Hladík understood.

A whole year is what he had petitioned God in order to finish his work: one year is what His omnipotence had granted. God had engineered a secret miracle: German lead could have killed him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would transpire between the order and the execution of the order. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

No other document was available to him other than his memory; the shaping of each hexameter he added imposed a rigorousness that would not have been expected by those who had ventured into and forgotten his evanescent and vague paragraphs. He didn’t work for posterity nor even for God, about whose literary preference little is known. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he forged, in time, his great invisible labyrinth. Three times he remade the third act. He erased any symbol that was too obvious: the repeated peals of the bell, the music. No detail was too small to be ignored. He omitted, abridged, amplified, in some cases, he opted for the rudimentary choice. He began to love the patio, the prison; out of one of the faces opposite his he shaped his conception of Römerstadt’s character. He discovered that the arduous cacophonies that had so disturbed Flaubert were mere visual superstitions: troubles and weaknesses of the written word, not the aural word...He had come to finish his drama: he had not failed to resolve even one single epithet. Then he felt it; the drop of water slid down his cheek. He began to scream in sheer madness, he moved his head, the four-fold shot cut him down.

Jaromir Hladík died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02 in the morning.

Objective of Para Llevar

For those of you who haven't heard, a short introduction for this blog and its goals. Currently, the state of publishing in the United States is such that only about three to five percent of all published literature is translated foreign literature. Obviously, the Garcia Marquez and the Roberto Bolano get exposed to American audiences, but for the most part, great masses of good literary fiction and non-fiction go without notice. Part of that is because of the gargantuan size of American authorship, which eclipses the body of translated work. Part of it is the popularity of English works abroad, meaning more translators focus on English to Spanish than Spanish to English.

But as a way to discover more Spanish writers and expose them to the United States, I started Para Llevar (which is the equivalent of "take-out" in Spanish) as a place to publish translated short stories, poetry, and essays.

Thanks.