Nunca he leído nada de Celine, pero ahora que he retomado El Danubio, de Magris (preparación espiritual para el viaje del puente) vuelvo a sentir curiosidad por este escritor de los infiernos que inquieta e interesa a partes iguales a los críticos. Como no hay dos referencias sin tres, la reseña de El Cementerio de Praga me lo ha traído también a la memoria. Al parecer Umberto Eco ha escrito un libro heterodoxo en el que la voz narradora es un personaje antisemita decimonónico - pero no se detiene ahí, es bastante democrático en sus desprecios, de los españoles dice que somos vanidosos, por añadir un ejemplo. Supongo que no se refiere a que ser vanidoso sea malo per se, sino que nuestro problema es que nos vanagloriamos de lo que carecemos. Pero divago, mejor esquivar el juego de los estereotipos e ir a las referencias. La primera: esto cuenta George Steiner de Bebert en un ensayo, según explica James Wolcott en su blog de Vanity Fair:
Bébert was a Montparnasse tabby, born probably in 1935. He met his second master in occupied Paris in late 1942. "Magic itself, tact by wavelength," as his master described him, Bébert was to be left behind when the master and his wife, Lucette, decamped for Germany in the dread spring of '44. Bébert refused separation. He was carried in the travelling sack. The voyage led through lunar bomb craters, strafed rail lines, and cities burning like mad torches. Under bombardment, Bebert, almost starving, became lost, but rediscovered his master and Madame. The trio crossed and recrossed the collapsing Reich. In a last, despairing lunch, they reached Copenhagen. When the Danish police came to arrest the unwelcome guests, Bébert slipped out across a roof. Caught, the legendary beast was caged in a pound at a veterinary clinic. When his master was released from jail and was recuperating, Bébert had to be operated on for a cancerous tumor. "But the Montmartre tom had been around the block. He withstood the trauma and made a speedy recovery, with the slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent, and enigmatic." ...Sphinxlike in years, Bébert, the secret sharer, died in a suburb of Paris at the end of 1952. "After many an adventure, jail, bivouac, ashes, all of Europe...he died agile and graceful, impeccably, he had jumped out the window that very morning..."
Y la segunda es un fragmento del análisis de Magris, sugerido por la visita a Sigmaringen (donde Céline, Bébert y Lucette se refugiaron junto con otros colaboracionistas del gobierno de Vichy cuando la derrota alemana se hizo evidente e inminente):
[Claudio MAGRIS (2007) El Danubio. Barcelona: Anagrama. Pg. 46]