Into what world have I stumbled? Last night I couldn’t write anything about my visit to the Writers’ House, my walks, the supra on the riverbank, and something else that I find hard to describe. In the morning, I continued to enjoy the splendid view that the balcony affords me. I had already spent a while there before bathing. The climate is perfect, like Cuernavaca’s. Around the hotel, brick houses of two or three stories with red roofs abound, which contrast with the architecture of cement or reinforced concrete that is now fashionable in the world and is abused in socialist countries. In the distance, all around, towers with conical metal roofs dot the landscape. Some buildings with Moorish elements, possibly from the last century, with a more or less artificial appearance, stand out. The towers of the Orthodox churches and monasteries have the air of minarets trimmed mid-growth. Yesterday, an interpreter, who will be my guide to take me to the Writers’ House, came to pick me up. I walked into a room where there were a dozen Georgians; a few more arrived later. On the tables there are big ceramic bowls overflowing with fruit. During our conversation we are invited to eat giant pears and apples; they peel them with knives in slow, precise gestures, cut them elegantly, and ceremoniously offer each other pieces of fruit as if fulfilling an ancient rite, then offer them to me and my guide. I learn that the first book of literature written in Georgian dates to the fifth century, an extremely remote date, and their ecclesiastical literature is even older. I ask them to repeat the date for me, because it seems all but impossible that the Georgians already had books in their language in the final days of the Roman Empire, five centuries before the Romance languages had produced a literary text. Could it have been the fifteenth century? I ask again, and they answer no. They also explain to me that the golden age of Georgian literature was the twelfth century, in which the great classic of the nation, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, was composed by Shota Rustaveli. I gather from the conversation that Georgian literature as well as cinema and theater are based on three elements: a strict sense of form, an effort of imagination that in no way dismisses the mythological, an attachment to reality, and at the same time the criticism of that very reality. They repeatedly complain that for a long time Georgians have not been considered as thinking beings, but rather as a national group that expresses its happiness vacuously by singing, dancing, and drinking wine all the time. “For many it has been very eye-opening to know that we Georgian writers and filmmakers are tremendously self-critical. We are not only a hedonistic nation, it must be stressed, but also a tragic one,” says the writer who chairs the meeting. Another man, in his sixties, short, plump, with a sensual mouth and skin that has been cruelly punished by smallpox, or by juvenile acne so pernicious that it destroyed his face, protests in a muffled voice, because the fair sex, the blessed ladies, above all the Nordic and German ones, consider Georgians as mere sex objects and not as subjects capable of making poetry, and this had ruined the prestige of the nation. “Pasternak was a great enthusiast of our poets, he wrote about them and translated the best. The French translations have been based on his translations, they have been published in France and Switzerland, and it has been very difficult to get out of their head that their splendor is owed to Pasternak alone and not to the authors themselves, whom they regard as mere raw material. But what can we do, their wives, their daughters come to Georgia and when they return to their countries what they want to talk about is the muscular strength of our boys, what they have between their legs, and not that they read poems here or there. They come in the summer, not like lobsters—not at all!—they come like packs of cougars, and they pounce hungry and ferocious on our defenseless bodies; not even the old men are safe. We endure them for three months during summer, and they leave us looking like skeletons. Our brains dry up and it takes us a long time to recover our vitality and remember our language properly. There is a lack of respect in such a crude way of behaving, don’t you think? One of my cousins who is older than I, his legs amputated in the war…” And there they all stop him mid-gallop. He acts a little stunned, apologizes, everyone then laughs, they talk among each other, discuss something that the interpreter doesn’t want to translate for me, peel more apples and pears, cut them into pieces and share them again. “Perhaps,” says a playwright, Shadiman Schamanadze, the youngest of the group, “no country in the world feels dissatisfaction for its achievements like Georgia. They label what amazes them about us as experiments in the avant-garde, we’re either the children of Beckett, or the surrealists or the minimalists; okay, yes, some may be, but I think we are instead the result of a different tradition, which goes far back in time.” Someone explains that the new generation feeds on ancient Georgian literature, and that’s why it seems so new. “What is being written today,” the playwright insists, “is a tragic literature, characterized by its acceptance of pain. The recognition of a moral code that comes from antiquity. What differentiates us from the West,” he concludes, “is our wish to build.” Before leaving the Writers’ House they showed me a list of Mexican books translated into Georgian in the last ten years: Rafael Muñoz’s Let’s Go with Pancho Villa; The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela; and The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes, along with some ghosts of socialist realism, which nobody in Mexico reads—least of all the left: Lorenzo Turrent Rozas, José Mancisidor and others…I then had a few hours to begin my city tour and my rudimentary apprenticeship about things in Georgia. In the year 337 (the source comes from museum brochures), Christianity was officially accepted in Iberia (Eastern Georgia), that is, surprisingly long before Rome. Its great religious art flourished from the eighth to the eleventh century. They showed me wonderful icons, in one of them St. George slays the Emperor Constantine with a spear, evidently before his conversion to Christianity. A linguistic relationship has been found between Georgian and the Basque language. One of the oldest names of the region was Iberia. This first day in Georgia was equivalent in intensity to a quarter of my usual life. What a radiant representation of life! What faces, what eyes, what movements while walking, what voices! No praise is enough to describe them. It would certainly be sparing. What is most striking is their naturalness. These are people who have made great strides. The street shows it. The women and the men, the old and the young, all seem to own the space in which they were destined to live, perhaps the entire world. The group that met at the restaurant at noon was made up of the writers I met in the morning plus a few others, as well as visual artists. There were several very beautiful young women whom no one was able to identify for me, whether wives or daughters of the attendees, or writers or actresses; the truth is, they all looked like actresses of a single role, that of Carmen la de Triana. I compare this encounter to the lunch with the Muscovite “writers,” who seemed like somber mummies, pompous caricatures compared to the flesh and blood people with whom I am meeting now. Before eating I made a short speech of gratitude. I spoke of the happiness I had noticed in the city, and concluded by saying only that a State that succeeded in bringing happiness to its people, that had at hand the resources to meet the physical and spiritual needs of society, justified a political and social system. The same young playwright from that morning replied that I shouldn’t let the solar aspect of this Southern country fool me, that Georgians were far from being the swarm of voluptuous heathens that the world reveled in seeing, but rather thinking people, serious and critical of their own shortcomings. I liked his answer, but by then I rejoiced in everything that was being said at the table. It was a Pantagruelian banquet that lasted five hours. Solemn at moments but always entertaining. The villain of every story was socialist realism—its mere mention provoked uproarious laughter. Both malicious and humorous anecdotes were recounted of some literary figures from Soviet Central Asia, local heroes who in their youth had written poems or novels, and who in recent decades did nothing but write speeches at conferences like the one that was being prepared. Bottles of an almost black wine were circulated endlessly. There was a moment when everyone was talking without knowing to whom. My interpreter translated into French loose phrases here and there, words that did not connect with anything, or instead of translating things that interested me, he described instead the gestures and movements of the characters, which made me feel on stage acting in a piece by Ionesco: “What did the young lady who made everyone laugh say?” I asked, and he replied: “That woman is not as young as you might think, she ended up sitting down, look, she finally took the spoon to her mouth,” or, in response to the question about what the director of the Union said during his toast, he said: “The tamada raises the horn of plenty with his right hand; his neighbor was served caviar and now he’s running his hand along his jacket sleeve to remove the crumbs.” “But what is the tamada saying at this moment?” I insisted. “He is saying that nature is taking revenge on us, and with each passing day the revenge will be greater. Look at the woman there, across from us, she’s an architect, although she doesn’t look like one. They are serving grape leaves stuffed with ground beef again. He’s talking about a confusion of the sexes, because an American woman who was here recently combed her hair like a cowboy and didn’t allow anyone to call her girl but rather boy, and used the masculine gender; she said, for example, ‘We Oklahoma boys…’” I began to speak in very bad Russian with another table companion. I think I understood that Bob Dylan and some friends, one of which was the woman who insisted she was a boy, had eaten with them very recently at the same restaurant, as guests of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and are probably at his villa right now, on one of the famous beaches: Batumi and Sukhumi, places I’d like to visit one day as a tourist. I glanced across the table and saw that the supra had taken on an air of bedlam. They’ve added tables and chairs and the group was becoming immense, we had taken over the entire terrace, at times the musicians approached us, played their instruments beside us, and everyone sang beautifully and endlessly. The laughter was explosive and contagious. Against all warnings from Dr. Rody, my physician in Prague, I drank like a fish without feeling the slightest discomfort. At times, I was annoyed by the excessive nationalism of some of the dinner guests; it seemed like as the liquor took over the sense of race grew, which caused me to make scenes, to quote Thomas Mann and mention his concept of citizen of the world. And when they squawked about the purity of their blood, I sang the praises of mestizaje, I reminded them that Pushkin was a mulatto and toasted to him. The protocol, the very conception of the Georgian supra, does not favor two-way communication. Only the tamada, the toastmaster, can concede the floor, and on this occasion it was the director of the Writers’ Union, a man of great stage presence and whose authority was accepted by the others. Every time I tried to participate, he allowed me to say four or five words, six at the most, then cheerfully interrupted me to allow someone else to tell a story in which everyone participated alternately with a comment. Of course, one could always talk privately with those at the table, but not for long. The unfolding of a Georgian meal can be both thrilling and fatiguing. The table must always be served, glasses filled, and the environment must remain lively and cordial. The hosts are princes…I started to feel fatigued, I desperately needed to urinate and wash my face, bathe it, soak my head, so I looked for the men’s room. A female employee made it known that on that day it was closed, she showed me a sign and told me in Russian that I should go down beside the river, where I’d find the great toilette. The pockmarked writer changed seats and sat next to me. Using macaronic Italian he continued to tell me about the persecutions in which he had been an object during the summers; soon he would retire to the mountains, to a village that is difficult to access, where it would be calmer, he would go with other old men to rest, or rather to hide, because last year he had to live locked in a barn where his grandchildren smuggled him food, “Because the German and Finnish women climb like goats, I swear, I’m convinced they would climb the Himalayas if they knew they would find a lost Georgian man there, and even if he were dying, they’d bang him, just imagine what they’d do in places that aren’t as inaccessible; they’re guided by smell, they say that the semen of the Georgians is gold; bah, nonsense, but that’s what they say, and that it’s also the most aromatic in the world, so they go around like little animals sniffing the ground, rooting for truffles, by the aroma alone, that’s how they are.” He offered to go with me to the restroom and bring me back to the restaurant. It is impossible for me to write more. The experience was almost traumatic, it was too disturbing, the smell of excrement makes me physically ill, and I had had tons to drink. I left the toilet alone and arrived back at the restaurant as best I could to find my guide to take me to the hotel, I think I didn’t even say goodbye to anyone. I’ll have to apologize. A very beautiful young woman stopped me to tell me that the man who went outside with me was her father, and that he had not returned. She asked me if he had said whether he was going straight home. I said I didn’t know, but that he had left, that I saw him leave. “To the right or left?” she wanted to know. I replied that I hadn’t noticed, that it seemed instead that he had gone to the river. If I had been honest, I would have had to tell her that the last place I left him was at the latrine, and that he was lowering his pants while talking to some boys who welcomed him with obvious delight.