Nietzsche on His Balcony

By Carlos Fuentes

On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit earth once a year for 24 hours based on his theory of eternal return. With tenderness and gallows humor, the novelist and the philosopher unflinchingly tell the story of the beginning of the revolution, its triumph, fanaticism, terror, and retrenchment: a story of love, friendship, family, commitment, passion, corruption, betrayal, violence, and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781628972023

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor. Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

Book preview

Translator’s Preface

History Happening

A NOVEL OF revolution examined through philosophy, story, and critique, Nietzsche on His Balcony demonstrates how history happens. Out of 121 chapters, fifty are interleaved dialogues between Friedrich Nietzsche and an interlocutor, a version of the author Carlos Fuentes. From their neighboring balconies, the two recount a revolution in the streets of the unnamed city below them. As this novel concerns revolution, its techniques are not limited by the conventions of bourgeois realism, and Nietzsche and his interlocutor bleed into one another and into the characters they invent. The narrative’s structure adapts Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, which posits that our lives repeat throughout time, making escapism impossible. Indeed, the book is in part about Nietzsche’s return. Though Nietzsche died in 1900, the novel posits that God grants him twenty-four hours once a year to revisit the world, and so he appears on his balcony in our present day to swap and analyze stories with Fuentes (the writer). Although the revolution the two assess is contemporary, some of the characters they introduce seem to be fighting the French Revolution, and one character—a confidence man—takes the nicknames of all the major players of the first twentieth-century revolution, in Mexico, which galvanized world attention from 1910 until the Russian Revolution in 1917. A decapitated president evokes the seventeenth-century fates of kings Charles I and Philip (Metacom); Louis XVI in the eighteenth; and in the nineteenth, Miguel Hidalgo among other leaders of the Mexican War of Independence.

In this rebellious writing, sentences are parsed in terms of breath and in unpredictable halting or overflowing thoughts. Deliberate run-ons and fragments indicate the harried consciousnesses of the characters animated by fear or enthusiasm, love or greed. An ellipsis (…) can signal and so on, drowned-out speech, or a pause for character or reader. Some dozen characters (and two places) share the responsibilities of narration, giving full and varied voice to the events. This familiar Carlos Fuentes technique is consistent with Nietzschean perspectivism, the idea that there is no singular godlike point of view that observes the whole world. In crowd scenes, many marchers share the same sentences, and it is not apparent when one speaker’s words end and another’s begin. The plot sometimes backtracks, as history seems to, and readers are introduced to characters they already know (though now the characters have undergone incremental changes). Character and narrative technique become porous. I shift shapes and don’t have a name, Nietzsche says, and in the next chapter, he becomes the murderer Rayon Merci. Later Nietzsche brings up a woman named Gala. The interlocutor introduces her. In the following chapter the revolutionary aristocrat Dante Loredano tells her story. When Gala feels desire, she unexpectedly takes over the first person narration. The unpredictable halting and overflowing of plot and character models the fits and starts of the revolution.

In an oft-quoted passage, Walt Whitman writes, Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. Fuentes, his Nietzsche, and the characters at this revolution seem to say, Watch us contradict ourselves. The novel includes what may count among the most lovingly committed murders in literary history. The novel’s revolutionary thinker and inspiration of many of this revolution’s events, Saul Mendes, announces at one point that he had studied for the priesthood but been expelled for revolutionary views (which is odd because he is Jewish and his family background, especially the expulsion of the Jews from Spain after its 1492 Reconquest, is the spark of his revolutionary zeal). His wife, the revolutionary María-Águila, reminds him that he is confusing his story with hers, that she was the nun Sister Consolata who left the church to foment revolution with Saul. During the child Elisa’s murder trial, her age fluctuates. In wartime, and other times too, stories contradict themselves and each other. This might remind readers of the scholarly disagreements of what Nietzsche’s major ideas actually mean: is eternal return a metaphor for living right or a metaphysical reality? At any given time, readers might not understand what’s going on, but they will exit the book enlightened about the making of history and perhaps the possibilities of the novel as a tool for understanding its operations.

Fuentes’s great subject was time, inspired perhaps by pre-Columbian calendars of his country, Mexico. Time is elastic in this book. It includes the clock face or the cycles of planting and harvest: Nietzsche favors cyclical time. Coincidentally, the word revolution implies not just progress but also a turning in place. This novel also (though critically) includes something of linear time, straight as an arrow, as taught by the church:

Eden Christ’s Resurrection Judgment Day; or, as it trickles down, the fourth-grade time line

Norman Conquest Columbus 1776 Civil War pointing ambiguously to a progressive future across the hall,

presumably in a fifth-grade classroom. The novel is concerned with repetition. The circular and linear combine to something elliptical: In the West, the oldest metaphor is time is a river, and as Heraclitus says, a person can’t step into the same river twice. But in the crazy days of Nietzsche on His Balcony, time might run backward. María-Águila (the former Sister Consolata) tosses her vestments into the Rhine, which carries them to the Main, the Rhine debouching into one of its tributaries.

Dedicated readers of front matter will find the English title of this book more formal than the Spanish. Mexican Spanish tends to make the names of foreign authors more domestic. In a Mexican bookstore you might buy books by Carlos Marx, Carlos Dickens, and Carlos Fuentes, to pick some potential collaborators who’ve written on revolutions in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Old Gringo. Fuentes calls Nietzsche Federico, and this gives the text a certain ambiguity—the figure is and is not Friedrich Nietzsche—the same ambiguity that is invoked by calling a work fiction. In Fuentes’s A Change of Skin, the philosopher is referred to as Freddy. Because of the English language’s habit of keeping foreign authors foreign, here he is Friedrich. Otherwise, the translated novel could have been called Freddy’s Balcony. As a child, Nietzsche’s family called him Fritz. Now Friedrich is grown up and eternally returned: like King Lear bound / Upon a wheel of fire, but loving his fate. And he would like to point out that the history he has been discussing also recurs eternally.

—Ethan Shaskan Bumas

Part I

The Divine Archangel of Peace

Friedrich

I met him by chance. That night was worse than just hot, sticky, uncomfortable, restless. It was one of those nights that, instead of relieving the daytime’s heat, only increases it. With every passing hour, the day seemed to have accumulated heat before releasing it once the afternoon died, giving up the heat, like a leaden maligned bride, to the long night.

I stepped out of my unventilated room, hoping that the balcony would provide a cool breath of fresher air. But it didn’t. The night outside was darker than the night inside. In spite of everything, I told myself, to be outdoors after midnight was, at the very least, easier on the mind than being confined to a damp bed atop the imprint of my own sweat: better than staying in a room with a pillow tossed on the floor, winter furniture, balding rugs, walls decorated with ludicrous wallpaper dramatizing a Christmas scene with Santa Claus ho-ho-hoing his head off. There was no bathroom, just a chamber pot shaped like a smile, a washbasin beside an empty water pitcher, old towels, and a bar of soap, wrinkled and cracked with age.

And the balcony.

I stepped out, determined to get some air that was, if not quite fresh, at least different from the static air that filled the brick kiln of a room.

I stepped out and something caught my eye.

On the balcony for the room next door, a man leaned against the railing, staring intensely at the wide avenue, unpeopled at this late hour. My own stare lacked the intensity of his nocturnal gaze. He didn’t look back at me. Well, I can’t be sure he didn’t. A pair of thick eyebrows covered his eyelids. Was he talking? A bushy mustache hid his mouth. But in between the eyebrows and mustache, there was a nakedness that struck me as indecent, as if their smoothness meant his cheeks were as naked as exposed buttocks. The smooth stretch of that eyebrow-and-mustache-obscured face led to the perverse idea of hairlessness as something impure, just by virtue of being an exception to the rule, given that, on this man, an abundance of facial hair seemed to be the rule.

But seeing him on the balcony next to mine, staring into the night with a vast sense of absence, I felt that my first impression, like all first impressions, was wrong. Worse, I was slandering this man; I was slandering him because I’d dared to speculate about his character without knowing him. Based on a few external characteristics, I’d drawn conclusions about who the inner man was. My neighbor. What was his name? What did he do for a living? Was he married, single, widowed? Did he have kids? Lovers? What language did he speak? What had he accomplished for the world to remember him by? Or had he resigned himself, like most people, to being forgotten? Had he let himself be carried along by a comfortable anonymity, from the cradle to the grave, without the least aspiration of making his mark? Or was this human being, my neighbor, the bearer of a secret life, valuable because it was secret, unnoticed by the world? A life of his own, cloaked in anonymity but bearing in its bosom something so precious, that if revealed, would, at that moment, vanish?

I was thinking about my neighbor. More likely, I was thinking about myself. If these questions came to mind, did they even refer to my neighbor, deep in his own thought? Or were they questions that I asked myself about myself? And if that’s what they were, why now, of all times, and in the distant presence of the man on the balcony next to mine, was I asking myself questions about him that were really questions about me?

Dawn came as a surprise, interrupting my questions. From the night that I’d eluded in my room, I stepped out into a daybreak that lasted longer in my memory than in my imagination. Was the dawn shorter than I remembered? Was it longer than I imagined? I would have liked to put these questions, which I could not answer on my own, to my neighbor. Brightness increased. It preceded sunrise but didn’t guarantee it. For a moment I felt as though I was in an endless twilight from which neither day nor night would ever appear again. And those uncertain hours, which I knew were fleeting, were transformed into eternity.

The day approached, renewed and indifferent to us: whether we lived or died, whether we were here or not, whether the Earth had been emptied of its people. The day was self-sufficient in its eternal return; there need be nothing in the world but the world itself. I don’t know whether the Earth, left to its own rotations and revolutions, would be conscious of itself, would know that it was the Earth, would understand that it was part of a solar system, and if the universe itself would question whether or not it was infinite, an inconceivable idea, without beginning or end. That would be another reality. Reality.

But at this moment, reality consisted of me and my neighbor with the bushy mustache staring at the dawn.

An eternal dawn. The concept filled me with dread. If the day didn’t arrive even though the night had ended, then in what temporal limbo would we be left suspended forever? We’d be left alright. My neighbor and I. I tried to make out the gaze of his indiscernible eyes, hooded under those thick brows. Were his eyes closed? Was he perhaps sleeping, oblivious to my inquisitive presence? Or was he watching, like I was, this slow and merciless twilight? Without mercy: indifferent to our lives. Uninterested in our need of night and day to sort out—to sort out what? Do we truly need day and night to know when to wake up and bathe, eat breakfast, go to work, get together with friends or colleagues, eat lunch, read, see the world, make love, eat dinner, and sleep? The unrepentant—imperturbable—turning of our lives was dictated by a cycle in every way foreign to our goals, in every way indifferent to our activities (or lack of activities).

Would I have the courage to free myself of schedules, duties, desires, and to subject myself to an endless dawn that would free me from the distraction of any activity? Perhaps that’s what heaven is like: an eternal dawn that releases us from all our obligations. But I imagined, staring at the silent man on the next balcony over, that hell would also be like that: a never-ending dawn. Freedom. Or slavery. To live forever in the daybreak of the world. Captivity. Or freedom. To be a bird who lives for just one day. Or an eternal eagle that flies without ever landing, seeking that which no longer exists: the day to fly in, the night to disappear into. Not even a shooting star, at this early hour, to reassure us that everything, soon enough, will continue …

He looked at me from his balcony, a foot and a half from mine.

He looked at me the way one might look at a stranger. Discovering, all of a sudden, someone familiar. What I mean is that this man, my neighbor, first looked at me as though I was a stranger. Then, at once, he discovered some kind of resemblance. Even though he’d never met me before, his eyes told me that he at least recognized in me a forgotten figure. I made something of an effort.

Where had I seen this man before?

Why did this stranger look so familiar? As recognizable, apparently, as I was to him?

All of a sudden, he asked me, Did you read the newspaper?

No, I answered, more surprised by the sense that he spoke as though we’d already been having this conversation.

Aaron Azar, he said, as if he recalled the foreseeable.

What, I said or asked, I’m not sure which.

My neighbor’s questions flew at me like bullets: Did they kill him? Did he escape? Is he hiding? Are they hiding him?

My weak excuse was: I don’t know.

Do you at least know if God is dead? Before retiring from the balcony he concluded, What do you know?

Nothing much. What’s your name?

Friedrich, he said. Friedrich Nietzsche.

Aaron

Aaron Azar lives in a room that was rented to him, with pleasure, by a family who’d known his. Their house isn’t elegant, but comfortable. It’s in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, so Aaron has an almost hour-long commute to (and back from) the courts.

He walks to work: can’t afford a taxi. He’s imposed on himself the discipline of forgoing public transportation. That’s easy: he’d be miserable traveling while crushed by sweaty bodies. He’d rather walk and take the time to think. He spends lots of time thinking. In the room given to him by his friends, the Mirabal family, he sits for hours on end. To keep his hands busy and his mind free, he knits. He knits socks and sweaters, but try as he may, he just can’t get woolen ties to turn out the way he wants.

He has only one good suit: dark black and double breasted. No one sees it when he’s working because it’s covered by the black judicial robes he wears. He hasn’t given up on his dark black suit. Everyone sees him arrive and leave well dressed. Who knows if people say: Does he own another suit? Maybe he has a lot of suits that look like that one. In any case, he’s a frugal man.

What does he contemplate during the long and solitary hours he spends seated and knitting? He thinks obsessively about punishment.

He knows that his performance at the courts tomorrow will determine whether a human being is freed or punished. And because his client might be punished, many questions cross Aaron Azar’s mind while he knits:

Why do we punish people?

To protect society.

Is that reason enough?

No, because punishment is not just a legal judgment, but a sentimental one as well.

What would that mean?

Every judgment affects the moral order.

What about the responsibilities of individuals to themselves?

That’s what can’t be judged: a person’s responsibilities to himself. For example, suicide, for obvious reasons, is not punishable. But, can someone be punished for assisting with another’s suicide? Not according to the law. Then who is responsible for that death or self-murder? Nobody? Why do we punish someone who kills another person but not someone who kills himself? What is the moral threshold that, when crossed, makes an action a crime?

Counselor Azar had two jury trials on his docket for the coming days. The first was the case against a certain Rayon Merci, who was accused of sexually abusing underage girls and murdering them.

Gentlemen of the jury, my client stands accused firstly of sexual misconduct with minors. A grave accusation. What does the accused, Rayon Merci, have to say about this?

I didn’t mean to. All I wanted was to touch their underwear. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. It’s not my fault the girls showed up too early. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen them. I never wanted to kill them. I only wanted to touch their underwear, to feel it, to kiss it. To imagine.

The fact is that Rayon brutally murdered the young girls who found him naked, wearing nothing but their underwear, lying in one of their beds.

I didn’t ask them to come and find me. I just wanted pleasure, all by myself. Nosey parkers, why did they have to—?

You forced them to strip naked. And you took pictures of them.

I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.

You taped over their mouths and noses.

I didn’t mean to. That’s not what I wanted.

Then you beat them to death.

But they would have turned me in—

Quiet, Rayon.

Aaron Azar presented Rayon Merci’s defense to the jury. Rayon is no repeat offender. Keep in mind that this is the first time he’s been charged with any crime at all. He was obsessed with teenage girls’ underwear. That’s no crime. To break into a stranger’s bedroom to try on and to steal clothes, that is a crime, the crime of appropriating someone else’s property, in this case, a crime against the dignity of people, against life and bodily integrity, homicide and kidnapping with prurient intent, kidnapping of minors, physical abuse and rape.

Rayon Merci stared at the jury with an idiotic pride. He offered the courtroom observers a presumptuous look that said: I bet none of you would dare. But when he looked at Aaron Azar, he seemed confused: Was his lawyer defending or accusing him? Taking the side of his accusers? Betraying him? Rayon’s face revealed a growing fear of the lawyer who was supposed to be defending him.

All this is true, Azar continued, "but it is atypical. And I’m not referring to the severity of the crimes, but to the defendant’s character. Rayon Merci is a sane, hard-working, and sensible man. With one exception. He has a fetish for women’s underwear. If that were his only problem, he couldn’t be tried."

He looked at Rayon who didn’t know where to look.

He can’t be tried for a fetish—but he can be tried because he killed.

Azar bowed his head.

This is the first time you’ve killed someone, isn’t it Rayon?

Yes, the first. I didn’t mean. If they hadn’t—

You didn’t mean to kill anyone, did you?

Oh no, no, only that—

Gentlemen of the jury, it wasn’t the defendant’s will to murder. Nor was it his intention. It’s not his habit.

Rayon lifted his shame-faced head. He didn’t dare shake out his short, curly, copper hair, the hair that gave a certain charm to his contorted face, as if the defendant was afraid that his natural-born facial features, if revealed, would only betray him: betray him as a liar, if he told the truth; as trustworthy, if he lied. All he could do was press one fist against the other and separate them immediately, as if he realized that his hands were to blame for everything, not him, no, not him.

He didn’t want to do what he did. Neither his intelligence nor his will drove him toward the deed. Normally, this man is lucid and easygoing. For what will he be judged? For the way he usually is? Or for what happened by accident?

Aaron Azar knew how to pause for effect. Not a whisper could be heard in the courtroom.

"I will not be so vulgar as to try to convince you that the defendant is crazy. No, not according to the meaning in the dictionary: incapable of judgment. The defendant knew what he was doing. But a murderer repeats his crimes again and again. Rayon is not a habitual murderer. That’s clear. Rayon was driven to act by a force beyond his control. Not by his own intelligence. Not by his own will. Only by an unwanted outcome of an occasional fixation."

Everyone in the courtroom stared at the attorney.

"Rayon Merci suffers from recurring bouts of madness. He doesn’t deserve the death penalty. He deserves a compromise between the death that he doesn’t deserve and the