THE LESSON OF THE JAGUAR by Alberto Ruy-Sanchez

I write very slowly, my lips tingling with flavors, like someone who eats very deliberately, taking all the time in the world. But I also write as if something were gnawing inside me, filling me with a tension that can escape only in words, in sentences written as if I were singing. On pages scored like musical compositions. But I also write as some Mexican artisans work, patiently seeking the best form for their creation, wanting to take pride in what they have done. Prouder yet if they feel that their piece is imbued with a portion of their souls. I write slowly, but creating a time within time. A replete, and oddly halted, instant. I write giving each phrase space and time. As if I were preparing a fire that will at some moment ignite. To what can I compare this sensation of something that is expanding inside me, something that flows only when little by little I fill a surface with those smudges we call words? I write feeling that I must let some animal emerge inside me.
This morning I was standing before a jaguar in the Chiapas zoo. It was pacing with strangely solemn, and yet at the same time nimble, steps, from one side to the other of the fenced hill that confines it. It was not like the other animals; one could feel in the air the enormous tension that animated that jaguar. Every step, every movement was menacing. It gave the impression of being obsessively driven by welling thoughts or dreams ready to burst through its skin. Suddenly, as I stood watching it from the twenty meters that separated us, it lunged, nearly flying, straight at me. It gave a prodigious leap. Without emitting a sound, and much before I could blink with fright, its charge violently shook the wire mesh fence that separated us. It showed me its long claws and its fangs. Then, very casually, it continued its now placid stroll, in the opposite direction. It had taken my breath for an instant that seemed infinite. My heart was pounding. A shiver ran down my back and now just the sight of it now made my hair stand on end. In an invisible, but not fantasy, world, where more things happen than are seen, my pumping heart was already its prey. I was tuned to the time it had set. It had hunted, and caught, me.
I was aware, in addition, that long before its surprise attack, the leopard had created a surrounding ambit—an area invisible to the eye but sensed on my skin—in which its tension ruled as if beneath a precisely delineated, enclosed cupola. As if beneath a large glass dome. And that ambit was larger than the space of its fenced enclosure. I had stepped inside it, and perceived the uncommon tension of its body. They say that the ambit created by the jaguar’s presence can be felt anywhere in the jungle. That it is not exclusive to this enclosed area.
When I write I am filled with something too large to be contained inside me. As if I were going to explode. Like one of those captive beasts whose movements reveal the volatility of their dreams and the tension of their desires. A writer is sometimes an animal that creates a palpable space around it, one that cannot be seen but that is perceptible to initiates: those readers who allow themselves to be trapped in the kingdom of the unseen. Those who permit poetry to capture their hearts and make it race to the rhythm of words, of the marvels conveyed ritually in a poem, like the lope, and the voracious leap, of a jaguar. I write like a jaguar imprisoned, or enamored, or ready to spring. I have learned why in Maya bas reliefs and stele the hide of the Jaguar symbolizes invisible forces. And, in addition to the powerful and the warriors, the only figures allotted that special classification of spotted skin are those who write. In the world of the Maya, he who writes is part of the secret universe and the invisible strength of the jaguar. And always, those who write are portrayed on a sort of throne enhanced with significant spots.
And like the thousand shadows on the jaguar’s body, I feel that I write and re-write for a thousand logical and illogical reasons. Always seeking that vivid harmonic composition we admire in the combination of dark and light zones on jaguar’s hide. I must admit that I write obsessively, without discipline but without pausing. Obsession helps me fill in what is lacking and inscribe what I do nearer the reign of pleasure than of duty.
I write the way a persistent artisan concentrates on his material. A ceramist who sees born of his hands forms that seem to have been waiting for decades. Forms that, though physically far away and touched by other hands, will lead me to touch those of friends—or enemies—I do not yet know. I also write like those potters who cover walls with amazing geometric paintings in the form of mandalas, with individual pieces that form a puzzle that is at once projected time and invention, plan and rigorous improvisation. Like gold and silversmiths, I forge tools to the measure of my hands. Like weavers, in threads of capricious and meaningful colors, I recount my dreams and my myths, as well as those of the persons who travel with me through this life. And I write like the potter who entrusts to his kiln the soft object of clay that emerged from his fingers, hoping that fire, in the last, uncontrollable, process will improve it, or at least not destroy it.
I write in order to know, to explore dimensions of reality that only literature may penetrate. I write also to remember. But just as important, I write to forget. I write to stretch my body and my senses. To confirm, day after day, the world’s sensuality. I write for pleasure. I write out of desire. I write out of rage. I write to point out the counterfeiting of icons, the abuse of public power. I write to be despised and to be loved; even more, to be desired. I write to propose new ambits in this world. I write to provoke the ritual apparition of Poetry. I write to dance. Dancing is the body’s other magical writing. I write to speak with the dead. Especially, with my dead: living in their literature, in their art, in their works. I write to listen to the living. I write to exercise the enormous pleasure of understanding. I write to draw. I write to erase. I write to smile with lips other than mine. I write to exercise the vitality of the tongue and the sex. I write to seduce my beloved, again and always again, to win her paradise. I write to travel. And my footsteps write with my eyes, and what is outside leaves a trail of capricious letters inside me. Letters of astonishment. I write to capture what flows from me. All that lies ahead, in union with which I will be better. I travel in a thousand ways when I write. And I also write not to move at all. I write to travel inward. I write about myself and my beloved and about the corners of this world that wait to be explored. I write to show myself naked. I write to hide and disguise myself. I write to invent a carnival. I write singing. I write until I no longer write. And even then I search, or, with-out searching, experience the ritual apparition of that sudden existence, that exception that we may or may not call Poetry.
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.