Resultados Etapa 2.

Many o f the dimensions o f Perea’s spiral com e together in two fragments which frame the text. The opening passage describes a route through the old heart o f the city in 1914, from a prison in Tlatelolco to another near the Ciudadela where the prisoners undertaking this ‘excursion’ will be executed (pp. 13-14). The fleeting description o f the cloudy night sky and the bloody streets opens a third dimension; comments on the unreal, ghostly nature of the city under curfew suggest a fourth. The spiral o f the real journey is made complete in the last chapter o f the chronicle where the protagonist is removed from the line of prisoners awaiting their deaths, and returned along the same route to the Santiago Tlatelolco prison (pp. 89-90).

Nevertheless, in the opening passage Perea leaves his protagonist to face the firing squad, brusquely changing to the present, in order to compare and contrast contemporary M exico City with the one that existed in 1914. Slipped in between these two visions o f the city, Perea makes an enigmatic reference to the parallelism between ‘excursiones’ and ‘paseos’ in different times and places. He also contrasts the prisoner’s experience o f the city with that o f a certain Victor Nibelungo travelling from Coyoacan to Las Lomas in 1964. The dimensions o f imaginative time and space travel are apparent.

However, it requires the addition o f an intertextual dimension for the reader to be able to relate the ‘excursiones’ o f Huertista M exico to the ‘paseos’ of Republican Spain, to the ‘recorrido’ o f the protagonist o f Fuentes’s ‘Las dos Elenas’. The key to the identity of the ‘autor revolucionario’ and the relationship between ‘paseos’ and ‘excursiones’ lies in Perea’s La rueda del tiempo. Here, in a discussion of Paz’s experiences in Spain during the Civil War, recorded in his Itinerario, Perea paraphrases Paz’s comments on the term ‘paseos’ to refer to ‘ejecuciones sumarias republicanas’ (p. 467). On the follow ing page, Perea makes an explicit reference to the similarity o f these ‘paseos’ with the ‘excursion’ described by Guillermo Enriquez Simoni in his La libertad de la pren sa en M éxico: una mentira rosa (1967), and paraphrased in the opening paragraphs o f Perea’s Cronica en espiral.'^^ Y et it is only on the last page of his chronicle that Perea identifies his protagonist as ‘el abuelo Guillermo’, making it clear that Enriquez Simom was his own grandfather. Guillermo’s spiral journey is thus an intimate part o f Perea’s own route:

La ciudad de México es la que recorriô el autor revolucionario, desde Santiago Tlatelolco hasta Belem , para ser fusilado. Es la de Fuentes. Y en realidad no es ninguna ni pertenece a nadie, y la guardamos entre las manos o la seguimos con el dedo sobre un piano. Hoy inicio esta “Crônica en espiral” sobre la ruta que fue la del peloton y es la mia. Crônica con final incierto. (p. 15)

For Perea, the city is a living organism ( ‘un cuerpo’), a protagonist in its own right. His ability to capture it in his chronicle, to be illuminated by it, is uncertain:

“Ciudad enigmâtica”, dijo Tablada de esta metrôpoli extrana y luminosa, a veces translucida, pero en absolute transparente. Venecia o Pompeya americana, M éxico se oculta cuando mâs se muestra. Y siempre deja mucho, lo deja todo por decir. (p. 90)

The ‘esfera de espirales’ leaves one speculating: the journey o f illumination continues.3 0 * * * * *

29 A footnote also refers the reader to a passage in Vasconcelos’s Elproconsulado for more information (p. 468).

30 Most recently, Carlos Monsivais has also published his ideas on the ways in which M exico City may be experienced: ‘“Uno - escribiô el gran poeta Wallace Stevens - no vive en una ciudad sino en su descripciôn.” Si esto es cierto poética y sociolôgicamente, uno se domicilia en el trazo cultural y

psicolôgico integrado por las vivencias intimas, el flujo de comentarios y noticias, los recuentos de viajeros y las leyendas nacionales e intemacionales a propôsito de la urbe. También, uno se mueve en el interior de las conversaciones circulares sobre la ciudad, sus virtudes (cuando las hay) y sus defectos (cuando se agota con rapidez la lista de las virtudes)’ ( ‘Apocalipsis y utopias’, U S , 4 April 1999, p. 2). These correspond closely to Perea’s approach.

Imâgenes y lecturas, II

Ruiz Abreu’s epigraph to Los ojos del paisaje is taken from A lfonso R eyes’s introduction to Cartones de Madrid'.

^Necesito explicaros que sôlo he querido réunir, en este cuademo, esos primeros prejuicios de la retina, esos primeros y elementales aspectos que atraen los ojos del viajero? Poco a poco, me fui convenciendo de que el ibis o la flor de loto eran letras y que, juntas, teman un sentido que era menester descifrar. Mientras tanto, me entretuve simplemente en mirarlos.31

Ruiz Abreu’s text cannot seriously claim to be based on the ‘primeros prejuicios de la retina’, and his title deliberately revokes the precedence of ‘los ojos del viajero’, preferring their metaphorical counterpart, ‘los ojos del paisaje’. However, he does accord a high value to images in his chronicle, and to the act of observation. He is not content to simply

‘look at’ these images as Reyes claims he is. Ruiz Abreu, like Perea, aims at producing a synthesised, interpretative vision o f a whole range o f images; that is to say, a reading. Furthermore, this reading may be seen as the ‘real’ journey offered by the chronicle. The conceptual movement between individual images, and the journeys proposed by the act of reading, produce a com plex itinerary similar to that proposed by Perea’s spiral figure: for Ruiz Abreu Villahermosa is a web of images and readings.