Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- (XIX) -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XIX
ONLY TO the attentive reader of the Book is the nature of that spring clear and legible. All the morning preparations of the day, its early-hours ablutions, hesitations, doubts and scruples of choice lay bare their essence only to one initiated into postage stamps. Postage stamps are an initiation into that intricate game of morning diplomacy, those protracted negotiations, the atmospheric revisions which precede the conclusive draft of the day. From the ruddy mists of that ninth hour — clear to see — a variegated and spotted Mexico would like to erupt, a snake writhing in the beak of a condor, a glaring splash, hot and desiccated, and in an azure interval, in the lofty green of the trees, a parrot continually repeats: ‘Guatemala’ — stubbornly, at regular intervals, with that unmistakeable intonation. And slowly, at the uttering of that green word, everything turns cherry red, fresh and leafy. And so, amid all the difficulties and conflicts, an election is unhurriedly held — the schedule of the ceremony is established, the list of the parades and the diplomatic protocol of the day.
In May the days were pink, like the Egyptian stamp. In the market square, brilliance ran out from every side and undulated. An accumulation of summer clouds kneeling down in the sky, swirling under fissures of brilliance, volcanic and brilliantly drawn in outline, and everything emerged in red as if seen through ruby spectacles — Barbados, Labrador, Trinidad. And through those two or three pulses, through the darkness and that red eclipse of blood pounding in my head, the great corvette of Guiana sailed over the entire sky, all of its sails exploding. It glided, heftily dragged along amid thrown out lines and shouts from the tugboats, its sails blown out and rumbling, through a tumult of seagulls and the red splendour of the sea. Then the enormous entangled rigging of ropes, ladders and poles sprouted upon the whole sky and spread wide, and the multifarious, many storeyed spectacle of lofty sails, spars and braces blustered, its unbolted canvas rumbling in the heights, and for a moment tiny nimble Negro boys could be seen in the gaps, being swamped by that linen labyrinth, lost amid the signs and figures of a fantastic tropical sky.
Then the scenery changed; in the sky, in its massifs of clouds, pink eclipses culminated three at a time, and glistening lava smoked, drawing the menacing contours of the clouds in a luminous outline, and the core of the world sank into the depths — a Cuba, a Haiti, a Jamaica. It grew riper and riper and reached its quintessence, and suddenly the pure essence of those days flowed out: their roaring tropical oceanicness, their archipelago sky-blues, their happy currents and whirlpools, their equatorial and briny monsoons.
I read that spring with the stamp album in my hand. For was it not a great commentary on the times, a grammar of their days and nights? The Colombias, the Costa Ricas and the Venezuelas were that spring’s declensions — for what is the essence of Mexico, Ecuador or Sierra Leone if not some concocted specific, some sharpening of the taste of world, some conclusive and elaborate extreme — a blind alley of aroma where the world presses on with its experiments, rehearsing scales and practice pieces, leaving no key unplayed?
The most important thing not to forget, like Alexander the Great, is that no Mexico is final, that it is a point of passage that the world crosses over, and that beyond each Mexico a new Mexico will open up, ever more vivid, super-coloured and super-fragrant...
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