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D iego Blanco’s ‘Angelus’ suggests an even more oblique relationship with the genre of the travel-chronicle than the Cronicas sonambulas. U nlike Solana O livares’s text, D iego Blanco’s appears to go out o f its way to avoid any direct references to the ample reserve of chronicles concerning the city: those written by Hernan Cortés and Bernal Diaz del Castillo who travelled through Cholula, prior to the founding o f Puebla; Motolinia and Las Casas; Humboldt, Nebel, Poinsett, Ward, Mayer and Fanny Calderon de la Barca; Payno, Prieto, and Altamirano; Aldous Huxley or even Gutierre Tibon. Admittedly there does seem to be a dearth o f contemporary travel-literature on the city and its environs, by M exicans or by foreigners, but D iego Blanco is hardly short o f material.

But D iego Blanco did not want to write a traditional travel-chronicle full o f facts and references. In the event, the only direct intertextual reference in the text o f ‘A ngelus’ is to

13 Zârate’s response to Hermôgenes’s claims with regard to Lowry and Nietzsche is described as ‘crédulo’ (p. 110). Hermôgenes continues to enjoy Zdrate’s company even after he is publicly ostracised for his affair.

Isak Dinesen’s Out o f A frica, an off-beat aside in an elliptical description o f Puebla’s safari park, A fricam . N evertheless, there are allusions in the text to travel-writing: the imaginative possibilities o f the experience o f travel, veiled references to the resultant texts, and also elaborate descriptions o f the act and art of writing chronicles.

Rather than look at how the world has seen Puebla, D iego Blanco turns the traditional focus o f the travel-chronicle on its head. He explores how Puebla has discovered the rest of the world within itself: the traces o f the Far East in the museums and libraries o f the city; the traces o f Africa in its safari park; the traces o f Alaska in geography classes; and the traces o f Berlin in the work o f a man who preserved the changing names o f the tow n’s streets, and in the cemetery wall. Like Perea, D iego Blanco assumes a dim ension o f imaginative travels in time and space.

This egocentricity - this assumption that the rest o f the world revolves around one’s own restricted field o f action - is essentially a childish Weltanschauung, compatible with D iego Blanco’s personal source o f inspiration for the ‘chronicle’: his childhood memories. He deliberately seeks out ‘un tono infantil’ (interview): the voice of the old angel fuses with that o f the child’s growing perception o f the world around him. Furthermore, the angel’s narration o f his childhood memories takes the form o f travels and adventures. Thus, the ‘angel sepulturero’ adopts the tone of a travel-chronicler as he explores the boundaries o f Puebla. The child/angel ‘navigates’ through the ‘streets’ of Puebla:

He navegado en los rfos de la ciudad. Mi barco partiô del muelle construido trente a la tintoreria Ticaola y bajô a un afluente de la calle Nueve Sur. Las costas del colegio Miguel Hidalgo fueron vistas con catalejos por los miembros de la tripulaciôn, pero el temporal nos impidio anclar. [...] Mi barco hizo travesias que pocos ban logrado y estuvo a punto de llegar a donde empieza el infinito, pero las llantas de un camiôn mayorazgo destruyeron la proa y la popa y todas mis intenciones. (p. 47)

The im possible itinerary - part river/part street - o f these navigations corresponds to an angel’s lack o f corporeality and to the imagination of children; children who return home for lunch ‘fatigados por haber llegado a Alaska en su clase de geografia’ (p. 48). This same voice also narrates the navigations o f a miniature, ivory Nao de China ‘en la humedad disimulada del Museo B ello ’ (p. 33), and from there embroiders on the role o f China in Puebla’s history.

Time and space are flexible, ‘circular’ concepts, where all anachronisms and superpositions can coexist. The angels who built Puebla may w ell have used ‘gruas y tractores’ (p. 11), and Africa and Puebla can be the same place, as they are in the narration o f the ‘discovery’ o f ‘Africam’, a safari park on the shores of Lake Valsequillo, a few miles outside Puebla:

Africam es un desierto con forma de corazôn, escribiô un ângel aventurero que apenas tocô sus frouteras. En la época colonial el silencio sobre aquel territorio creciô con discreta indiferencia. Solo se conocfan algunas poblaciones que eran banadas por el n o Atoyac. Un célébré ângel viajero descubriô gran parte de las costas occidentales de Africam, pero no se atreviô a caminar entre sel vas y desiertos. Es cierto que aunque hubiese descubierto cosas notables nadie se habria enterado de ello pues la crônica que escribiô en un idioma

angelical no fue escuchada per sus contemporaneos. (pp. 27-28)

However, this fragment concerning Africam is also important in its play on the history o f travel-writing. It starts with riddling references to the early chronicles o f the Conquest and Colonial era - the ‘angel aventurero’ and the ‘angel viajero’ are possibly allusions to the chronicles charting the discovery o f the area such as those by M otolinia or D iaz del Castillo. 14 It ends with similar hints at the work o f ‘los naturalistas’ in the area. In all cases the (truth) value o f these works o f travel-writing is undermined. The early Colonial chronicles are written in an inaccessible ‘angelical’ language, hence subject to m is­ translations; later Colonial works are full o f lies: ‘en la narracion de sus tribulaciones unicamente se encuentran mentiras’ (p. 28); in the seventeenth century the inhospitable region still generates more fantastic tales than factual accounts: ‘Estas apreciaciones se convirtieron en un deleite para fabulistas y hombres de letras’ (p. 28); and even the nineteenth-century naturalist travel-writers do not entirely free them selves from these ‘fables’ : ‘La imagen del leon nos aproxima mas a un mito que a una historia’ (p. 29). The whole fragment thus functions as a cautionary tale about the status o f truth in travel- writing.

Time and again, the text o f ‘Angelus’ makes reference to the apocryphal nature o f (travel-) chronicles. The city is seen to invent its history from the multiple histories o f its streets and its inhabitants, recording ‘historias irreales’ in ‘un diario apocrifo’ (p. 11): ‘La ciudad es un conjunto de voces. Un coro que nunca se afina. N o importa la armonla. Interesa la cancion. La ciudad no se causa de hablar’ (p. 39). The city cannot be reduced to one hegem onic history. Instead one must seek out the ‘guion de las conversaciones’ (p. 13) and the inventory o f the ever-mutating street-names.

In the light o f this approach, perhaps the most important oblique bibliographic reference in the book is to Hugo Leicht’s Las calles de Puehla (1934). Leicht was a German scholar who spent many years working in Puebla, and who returned to Germany at the beginning o f the Second World War. Trapped by the war, he was never able to return to M exico, and spent his last years in penury in Berlin, longing for the warmth o f Puebla. His text is an historical encyclopedia o f the streets o f Puebla and their frequently changing names. It is ironic, perhaps, that D iego Blanco wrote ‘A ngelus’ in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin where Leicht would have spent his last years ‘in exile’, physically and intellectually. ‘A ngelus’ is also a text written from the perspective of, if not exile, at least distance,

14 So many other historical figures in the text are introduced in this oblique manner, as angels o f one sort or another, or as the person ‘quien confundid una confesion sacramental con una delacion’ (p. 14) and ‘un amanuense que falsified una cédula real’ (p. 15).

15 In Wim Wenders’s film, D er Himmel Uber Berlin / The Wings o f Desire (1987), the Staatsbibliothek is a favourite ‘hang out’ for the city’s angels. In one scene the two main angels, Damiel (the out-of-work angel) and Cassiel (the archangel), wander through the library listening to the readers’ thoughts, to ‘dem Chor der Stimmen, der die Staatsbibliothek wie eine Katedrale erfiillt’ (Wim Wenders & Peter Handke, Der

Himmel Uber Berlin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 23). This is perhaps another viable source

of inspiration for the angels of ‘Angelus’, although both Diego Blanco and Wenders claim Rainer Maria Rilke’s angels as their source of inspiration (Diego Blanco, interview; Wenders, ''Las alas del d e se o \ Casa

Leicht is only mentioned in one central fragment o f ‘A ngelas’ (pp. 31-33) where his personal story and his love of Puebla are briefly narrated. He is characterised as the city’s translator, and as such he holds the key to the languages o f the city:

Hugo Leicht sabia que el idioma de la ciudad cambia a diario, por eso es dificil entenderla. La ciudad es polfglota y conoce las lenguas vivas y muertas. jLâstima que no sepamos escucharlas! Necesitariamos un ejército de traductores para poder entender lo que nos dice. O tal vez solo seria necesario un hombre paciente que escriba en un libro el lenguaje de la ciudad secreta, un hombre con los ojos de Hugo Leicht, con su oido, con sus manos, con sus palabras, con su corazôn. (p. 32)

Leicht has the power to ‘totalise’ the discourses o f the city, yet, despite the act of translation, he allows for their plurality. He also has the key to D iego B lanco’s ‘Angelus’, written with the ‘secret voices’ o f the city. ‘A ngelus’ reads as an incantation o f the place- names o f Puebla, past and present. In it, old names overlap with new ones. D iego Blanco’s reading o f Leicht, evidenced in his poem o f place-names, pervades the whole text.

Y et Leicht’s influence is even more marked at the beginning and the end o f the text. His construction o f Puebla on the basis o f the language of its streets coincides with the legend o f the angels constructing the town from a map o f its streets and its languages: D iego Blanco’s conception of ‘A ngelus’ was to ‘construir una ciudad a partir de sus calles y a partir de un libro’ (interview), thus fusing the two narratives, making Leicht’s book one with the book o f the angels. In the final fragment o f the text the old angel’s and Leicht’s personal histories coincide: the wall o f the angel’s graveyard is compared to the Berlin W all, an arbitrary division between different narratives, those o f life, and those o f death. The ‘angel sepulturero’ preserves the different voices o f the town in the same way that Leicht did. The figure o f the angel, cold, tired, lonely and waiting patiently for death, coincides with the figure o f Leicht in Berlin. Leicht in Berlin coincides with D iego Blanco in Berlin: they even share the same first name, Hugo. D iego Blanco is, o f course, part- angel, part-child. A ll three are the guardians o f the city’s memory, its faithful archivists who inhabit the graveyards and libraries: the Panteon de la Piedad and the Edificio Carolino; the Panteon Municipal de la Ciudad de Puebla and the Biblioteca Palafoxiana; the Panteon Frances and the Biblioteca Lafragua; the Capilla del Santo Sepulcro and the Biblioteca del C olegio del Estado; the ‘asilo de ancianos Gabriel Pastor’ and the Museo Bello.

Finally, D iego Blanco displays an aesthetic concern for the writing of chronicles: the art of writing and the role o f the scribe. The story of ‘un amanuense que falsified una cédula real’ in the Casa del Alguacil Mayor is told very early in the text (pp. 14-15). In exile he m isses ‘su escritorio, la pluma, el papel y la tinta’. Again, in an elliptical description of what might well be Bartolomé de Las Casas’s chronicle he writes, ‘El angel amanuense que llegd de Sevilla a la ciudad de Puebla sabe que para escribir bien son necesarias tres cosas: una silla cdmoda, una m esa firme y luz adecuada en la habitacidn’ (p. 40). The ideal position in which to ‘desplegar la alas del arte de la caligrafia’ (p. 41) is compared with pictorial representations: ‘la célébré miniatura de Lagarto en donde se représenta a San

Mateo escribiendo el Evangelio y a un pequeno angel que le habla al oido’ (p. 42) and a painting of the French chronicler Jean Froissart in the process o f writing the history o f the Hundred Years War. The scribe, the archivist, is seen in action; the journey is that o f his fingers across the page;

Los dedos ejecutan una danza, subiendo, bajando y sosteniendo la pluma. Son cuerpos que se encuentran y reconocen, hâbitos de monjas y de ninas virgenes, aves migratorias cuya orientaciôn es dirigida por la palabra. Los dedos caminan buscando un altar, como los pasos de la peregrina. (p. 43)

D iego Blanco may w ell have accepted the CNCA com m ission ‘aunque no cumple yo requisitos del viajero en el sentido estricto de la palabra’ (interview), and with no intention o f producing a main stream travel-chronicle, but, despite these factors, he has secretly infiltrated a consciousness o f travel and the travel-chronicle form into his text. Like Solana Olivares, he has also found a way to discredit the ‘truths’ o f centuries’ worth o f travel- writing by intimating the lack o f factual basis for their composition and by diminishing the historical figures o f their authors. All that remains is the art o f writing, and the intellectual journey it supposes. From his seat in the Latin American section of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin or the Edificio Carolino in Puebla, D iego Blanco proves that, ‘Para el escritor el verdadero viaje es la escritura. Para el lector el verdadero viaje es la lectura’

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