The Savage Detectives (13 page)

At one in the morning we left the Chinese café and went looking for a hotel. At around two we finally found one on Río de la Loza. Along the way they explained to me what had happened to Lupe. Her pimp had tried to kill her. When I asked why, they told me that it was because Lupe didn't want to work in the afternoons anymore; she wanted to go to school.

"Congratulations, Lupe," I said. "What are you going to study?"

"Contemporary dance," she said.

"At the dance school with María?"

"That's right. With Paco Duarte."

"But can you enroll just like that, without taking some test?"

Quim looked at me as if I were in some other dimension.

"Lupe has influential friends of her own, García Madero, and we're all prepared to help her. She doesn't need to pass any fucking test."

The hotel was called the Media Luna and contrary to my expectations, after Quim took a look at the room and spoke a few words in private to the night clerk, he told Lupe good night and warned her not even to think about leaving without letting him know. Lupe said goodbye to us at the door to her room. Don't see us out, Quim said. Later, as we were walking toward Reforma, he explained that he'd had to give the clerk a small tip to get him to take Lupe without asking too many questions, but especially, if it came down to it, not to give out too many answers.

"What I'm afraid of," he told me, "is that tonight her pimp's going to check every hotel in Mexico City."

I suggested that maybe the police could take care of the problem or at least issue some kind of restraining order.

"Don't be an ass, García Madero. Alberto has friends in the police. How else do you think he runs his rackets? All the whores in Mexico City are controlled by the police."

"Come on. That's hard to believe," I said. "Maybe there are some officers who take bribes to look the other way, but to say that all of them…"

"The prostitution business in Mexico City and all of Mexico is controlled by the police, get that into your head once and for all," said Quim. And after a while, he added: "We're on our own in this."

At Niños Héroes he caught a taxi. Before he got in he made me promise that the next day first thing I'd be at his house.

I didn't go to the Fonts' house. I spent all day having sex with Rosario.

I ran into Jacinto Requena walking along Bucareli.

We went to get two slices of pizza at the gringo's place. As we ate he told me that Arturo had ordered the first purge of visceral realism.

I was stunned. I asked him how many he'd kicked out. Five, said Requena. I assume I wasn't one of them, I said. No, not you, said Requena. The news came as a great relief. Those purged were Pancho Rodríguez, Luscious Skin, and three poets I didn't know.

While I was in bed with Rosario, it occurred to me that Mexican avant-garde poetry was undergoing its first schism.

Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine.

I have to admit that I have more fun in bed with Rosario than with María.

But whom do I love? Yesterday it rained all night. The building's outdoor stairways looked like Niagara Falls. I kept a tally as we made love. Rosario was amazing, but to preserve the integrity of the experiment, I didn't tell her so. She came fifteen times. The first few times she had to cover her mouth so she wouldn't wake the neighbors. The last few times I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. Sometimes she seemed to swoon in my arms and other times she arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells. It's strange: my sweat is hot and Rosario's is cold and reptilian, with a bittersweet taste (mine is definitely salty). In total we spent four hours fucking. Then Rosario dried me, dried herself, tidied up the room in a heartbeat (it's incredible how industrious and practical the woman is), and went to sleep, because the next day she had to work. I sat at the table and wrote a poem that I called "15/3." Then I read William Burroughs until dawn.

Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?

Then there's María. I think about her every day. I'd like to see her, sleep with her, talk to her, call her, but when it comes down to it I'm incapable of taking a single step in her direction. And then, when I make a cool assessment of my sexual encounters with her and with Rosario, I have to admit that I have a better time with Rosario. If nothing else, I learn more!

Today I had sex with Rosario from three to five in the afternoon. She came twice, maybe three times, I don't know, and I'd rather leave the exact figure shrouded in mystery. I came twice. Before she went to work I told her Lupe's story. Contrary to what I expected, she wasn't very sympathetic to Lupe or Quim or me. I told her about Alberto, Lupe's pimp, too, and to my surprise she showed quite a bit of understanding for him, only reproaching him, and then not severely, for working as a pimp. When I told her that this Alberto could be a very dangerous person and that there was a risk that if he found Lupe he would do her real harm, she answered that a woman who abandoned her man deserved all that and more.

"But you don't have to worry, darling," she said, "that's not your problem. You have your true love by your side, thank God."

Rosario's declaration made me sad. For an instant I imagined the unknown Alberto, his huge cock and his huge knife and a fierce look on his face, and I thought that if Rosario met him on the street she would be attracted to him. Also: that in some way he was coming between María and me. For an instant, that is, I imagined Alberto measuring his cock with his kitchen knife and I imagined the notes of a song, evocative and suggestive, although of what I couldn't say, drifting in the window (a sinister window!) along with the night air, and all of it together made me extremely sad.

"Don't be gloomy, darling," said Rosario.

And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O'Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.

Today I went to my uncle's office and told him everything.

"Uncle," I said, "I'm living with a woman. That's why I don't come home to sleep. But there's no need for you to worry because I'm still going to class and I plan to finish my degree. Otherwise, I'm fine. I eat a good breakfast. I get two meals a day."

My uncle looked at me without getting up from his desk.

"What money do you plan to live on? Have you found work or is she supporting you?"

I answered that I didn't know yet, and that for now, Rosario was in fact covering my expenses, which were modest anyway.

He wanted to know who this woman was I was living with, and I told him. He wanted to know what she did. I told him, maybe slightly glossing over the coarser aspects of the job of bar girl. He wanted to know how old she was. From then on, despite my initial resolve, everything was a lie. I said that Rosario was eighteen when she's almost definitely older than twenty-two, maybe even twenty-five, although that's only a guess, since I've never asked her; it doesn't seem right to seek out the information unless she volunteers it herself.

"Just so you don't make a fool of yourself," said my uncle, and he wrote me a check for five thousand pesos.

Before I left he urged me to call my aunt that night.

I went to the bank to cash the check and then I stopped by some of the downtown bookstores. I looked in at Café Quito. The first time I didn't see anyone. I ate there and went back to Rosario's room, where I sat reading and writing until late. After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chilean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena (who is definitely the most laid-back of the visceral realists), Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group. Ulises Lima was remaining discreetly in the background, but apparently he supported Belano's decisions. I asked who'd gotten purged this time. He named two poets I didn't know and Angélica Font, Laura Jáuregui, and Sofía Gálvez.

"He's expelled three women!" I exclaimed, unable to help myself.

Moctezuma Rodríguez, Catalina O'Hara, and Jacinto himself were hanging in the balance. You, Jacinto? Belano hasn't been wasting any time, said Requena, resigned. And me? No, no one's said anything about you yet, said Requena, sounding unsure. I asked him the reason for the expulsions. He didn't know. He repeated his original opinion: temporary madness on the part of Arturo Belano. Then he explained to me (although this
I already knew
) that Breton recklessly indulged in the same sport. Belano thinks he's Breton, said Requena. Actually, all the
capi di famiglia
of Mexican poetry think they're Breton, he sighed. And the people who were expelled, what are they saying? Why don't they form a new group? Requena laughed. Most of the people who were expelled, he said, don't even know they've been expelled! And those who do know couldn't care less about visceral realism. You might say Arturo has done them a favor.

"Pancho couldn't care less? Luscious Skin couldn't care less?"

"Those two might care. The others have just been relieved of a burden. Now they're free to join the ranks of the peasant poets or go kiss up to Paz."

"What Belano is doing doesn't seem very democratic to me," I said.

"True enough. It isn't exactly what you might call democratic."

"We should go see him and tell him," I said.

"No one knows where he is. He and Ulises have disappeared."

For a while we sat watching the Mexico City night through the window.

Outside people were walking fast, hunched over, not as if they were expecting a storm, but as if the storm were already here. Still, no one seemed to be afraid.

Later Requena started to talk about Xóchitl and the baby they were going to have. I asked what they would call it.

"Franz," said Requena.

Since I don't have anything to do, I've decided to go looking for Belano and Ulises Lima in the bookstores of Mexico City. I've discovered the antiquarian bookstore Plinio el Joven, on Venustiano Carranza. The Lizardi bookstore, on Donceles. The antiquarian bookstore Rebeca Nodier, at Mesones and Pino Suárez. At Plinio el Joven the only clerk is a little old man who, after waiting obsequiously on a "scholar from the Colegio de México," soon fell asleep in a chair next to a stack of books, supremely ignoring me. I stole an anthology of Marco Manilio's
Astronómica
, with a prologue by Alfonso Reyes, and
Diary of an Unknown Writer
by a Japanese writer from the Second World War. At Lizardi I thought I saw Monsiváis. I tried to sidle up next to him to see what book he was looking at, but when I reached him, Monsiváis turned around and stared straight at me, with a hint of a smile, I think, and keeping a firm grip on his book and hiding the title, he went to talk to one of the clerks. Provoked, I filched a little book by an Arab poet called Omar Ibn al-Farid, published by the university, and an anthology of young American poets put out by City Lights. By the time I left, Monsiváis was gone. The Rebeca Nodier bookstore is tended by Rebeca Nodier herself, an old woman in her eighties who is completely blind and wears unruly white dresses that match her dentures; armed with a cane and alerted by the creaky wooden floor, she hops up and introduces herself to everyone who walks into her store, I'm Rebeca Nodier, etc., finally asking in turn the name of the "lover of literature" she has the "pleasure of meeting" and inquires what kind of literature he or she is looking for. I told her that I was interested in poetry, and to my surprise, Mrs. Nodier said all poets were bums but they weren't bad in bed. Especially if they don't have any money, she went on. Then she asked me how old I was. Seventeen, I said. Oh, you're still a pipsqueak, she exclaimed. And then: you're not planning to steal any of my books, are you? I promised her that I would rather die. We chatted for a while, and then I left.

The Mexican literary mafia has nothing on the Mexican bookseller mafia. Bookstores visited: the Librería del Sótano, in a basement on Avenida Juárez where the clerks (numerous and neatly uniformed) kept me under strict surveillance and from which I managed to leave with volumes by Roque Dalton, Lezama Lima, and Enrique Lihn. The Librería Mexicana, staffed by three samurais, on Calle Aranda, near the Plaza de San Juan, where I stole a book by Othón, a book by Amado Nervo (wonderful!), and a chapbook by Efraín Huerta. The Librería Pacífico, at Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre, where I stole an anthology of American poets translated by Alberto Girri and a book by Ernesto Cardenal. And in the evening, after reading, writing, and a little fucking: the Viejo Horacio, on Correo Mayor, staffed by twins, from which I left with Gamboa's
Santa
, a novel to give to Rosario; an anthology of poems by Kenneth Fearing, translated and with a prologue by someone called Doctor Julio Antonio Vila, in which Doctor Vila talks in a vague, question mark-filled way about a trip that Fearing took to Mexico in the 1950s, "an ominous and fruitful trip," writes Doctor Vila; and a book on Buddhism written by the Televisa adventurer Alberto Montes. Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex-featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books-especially for a novice like myself-is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Librería Orozco, on Reforma, between Oxford and Praga:
Nueve novísimos
, the Spanish anthology;
Corps et biens
, by Robert Desnos; and
Dr
.
Brodie's Report
, by Borges. Librería Milton, at Milton and Darwin: Vladimir Holan's
A Night with Hamlet and Other Poems
, a Max Jacob anthology, and a Gunnar Ekelöf anthology. Librería El Mundo, on Río Nazas: selected poems by Byron, Shelley, and Keats; Stendhal's
The Red and the Black
(which I've already read); and Lichtenberg's
Aphorisms
, translated by Alfonso Reyes. This afternoon, as I arranged my books in the room, I thought about Reyes. Reyes could be my little refuge. A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

Before, I didn't have time for anything, and now I have time for everything. I used to spend my life on the bus and subway, having to cross the city from north to south at least twice a day. Now I walk everywhere, read a lot, write a lot. Every day I make love. In our tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores. Last on the list, the Batalla del Ebro: its owner is a little old Spaniard named Crispín Zamora. I think we've gotten to be friends. Naturally, the store is almost always deserted and Don Crispín likes to read but he doesn't mind spending hours at a time talking about any old thing. Sometimes I need to talk too. I confessed that I was making the rounds of Mexico City bookstores looking for two friends who had disappeared, that I'd been stealing books because I didn't have any money (Don Crispín immediately gave me a Porrúa edition of Euripides translated by Father Garibay), that I admired Alfonso Reyes because in addition to Greek and Latin he knew French, English, and German, and that I had stopped going to the university. Everything I tell him makes him laugh, except my not going to class anymore, because it's important to have a degree. He distrusts poetry. When I explained that I was a poet, he said that distrust wasn't exactly the right word and that he'd known some poets. He wanted to read my poems. When I brought them to him I could see he found them a little confusing, but when he was done reading he didn't say anything. All he asked me was why I used so many ugly-sounding words. What do you mean, Don Crispín? I asked. Blasphemy, swear words, curses, insults. Oh, that, I said, well, it must just be the way I am. When I left that afternoon, Don Crispín gave me
Ocnos
, by Cernuda, and urged me to study it, because Cernuda was also a poet with a difficult disposition.