The Savage Detectives (23 page)

It was a relief when he left, and it was a relief to know that we would have a roof over our heads. But soon we discovered that the old man's money was barely enough for us to live on. What I mean is, Xóchitl and I had some extra expenses, extra needs the paternal allowance didn't cover. It wasn't hard for us to get used to wearing the same old clothes, so we didn't spend money on that, but we spent it on movies, plays, buses, and the subway (although the truth is that living downtown we could walk almost everywhere), which we mostly took to get to the poetry workshops at the Casa del Lago or the university. We weren't actually in school, in the formal sense of being in school, but there was no workshop that we didn't check out at least once. We had a kind of obsession with workshops. We would make ourselves a couple of sandwiches and we'd just show up, as happy as could be. We'd listen to poetry, listen to the critiques, sometimes offer critiques of our own, Xóchitl more often than me, and then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking, which was what Xóchitl and I did, talk about the child we were going to have, the poets we'd heard, the books we were reading.

It was actually at a poetry workshop that we met Ulises Lima and Rafael Barrios and Luscious Skin. It was the first or second time we'd been there and the first time Ulises had showed up, and when the workshop was over we made friends and walked out together and then we took the bus together, and while Luscious Skin flirted with Xóchitl I listened to Ulises Lima and he listened to me, and Rafael nodded in agreement at what Ulises was saying and what I was saying, and it was honestly as if I'd found a soul mate, a real poet, a poet through and through, who could explain clearly what I'd only sensed and wished and dreamed, and that was one of the best nights of my life, and when we got home we couldn't sleep, Xóchitl and I, and we talked until four in the morning. Later I met Arturo Belano, Felipe Müller, María Font, Ernesto San Epifanio, and all the others, but none of them impressed me as much as Ulises. Of course, Luscious Skin wasn't the only one who tried to get Xóchitl into bed. Pancho and Moctezuma Rodríguez did their best too, and even Rafael Barrios. Sometimes I would say to Xóchitl: why don't you tell them you're pregnant? Maybe they'll give up and leave you alone. But she laughed and said she didn't mind being wooed. Fine, I said, it's up to you. I'm not the jealous type. But one night, I remember it clearly, it was Arturo Belano who tried to come on to Xóchitl, and that really did make me sad. I knew she wasn't going to sleep with anyone, but their attitude bothered me. It was basically as if they'd written me off because of the way I looked. It was as if they thought: this girl can't like that poor loser with the missing teeth. As if teeth have anything to do with love. But it was different with Arturo Belano. It amused Xóchitl to be courted, but this time it was different, it was much more than a diversion for her. We hadn't met Arturo Belano yet. This was the first time. We'd heard a lot about him before, but for one reason or another we still hadn't been introduced. And that night he was there and the whole group got on an empty bus in the early hours of the morning (a bus full of visceral realists!), heading to a party or a play or somebody's reading, I've forgotten now, and Belano sat next to Xóchitl on the bus and they spent the whole ride talking, and I could tell, I was sitting a few seats back, shaky, with Ulises Lima and the kid Bustamante, I could tell that Xóchitl's face looked different, that this time she really was enjoying herself, how to explain, that she was
delighted
that Belano was sitting there next to her, giving her one hundred percent of his attention, while everybody else, but especially everybody who'd already tried to get her into bed, watched what was going on out of the corners of their eyes, like me, still talking, still watching the semideserted streets and the door of the bus shut tight, like the door of a crematorium oven, still doing the things they'd been doing, I mean, but with every sense alert to what was happening in the seats where my Xóchitl and Arturo Belano were sitting. And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, everything on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don't, something strange is going on here, it isn't normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn't normal that no one's getting on it, it isn't normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened. Then Rafael Barrios, the nerve of him, told me that Belano didn't know that Xóchitl was my partner. I answered that nothing had happened and that if anything had happened it was Xóchitl's business, Xóchitl lives with me, she's not my slave, I said. But now comes the strange part: after that night, the night Belano was all over Xóchitl on that lonely nocturnal journey (the only thing he didn't do was kiss her on the mouth), no one ever bothered her again. Absolutely nobody. As if the bastards had seen themselves reflected in their fucking leader and they didn't like what they saw. And something else I should add: Belano's flirtation only lasted the length of that interminable bus ride, in other words it was an innocent thing, so maybe he really didn't know that the gap-toothed guy a few seats back was the partner of the girl he was coming on to, but Xóchitl did, and the way she accepted the Chilean's flattery was different from the way she endured the flattery of Luscious Skin or Pancho Rodríguez, for example, by which I mean that with them you could see she was enjoying herself, having a good time, laughing, but with Belano her face, the angle of her face that I was able to see that night, betrayed very different emotions. And that night, at the hotel, it seemed to me that Xóchitl looked more pensive and distant than usual. But I didn't say anything. I thought I understood why. So I started to talk about other things: our child, the poems she and I would write; the future, essentially. And I didn't talk about Arturo Belano or any of the real problems in store for us, like me finding work or the two of us having enough money to rent a place and be able to support ourselves and our child. No, I talked about poetry, just as I did every night, about the creative act and about visceral realism, a literary movement that was a perfect match for my inner self and my sense of reality.

After that somehow disastrous night we started to see them almost every day. Wherever they went, we went. It was only a week later, I think, that they invited me to participate in one of the group's poetry readings. We didn't miss a single meeting. And the relationship between Belano and Xóchitl was frozen in polite ritual, not devoid of a certain mystery (a mystery that nevertheless cast no shadow over the steady growth of my partner's belly), but not going any farther. The truth is, Arturo never really saw Xóchitl. What happened that night, in the bus carrying only us along the vacant streets, the howling streets, of Mexico City? I don't know. Probably a girl whose pregnancy wasn't visible yet fell in love for a few hours with a sleepwalker. And that was all.

The rest of the story is fairly ordinary. Sometimes Ulises and Belano disappeared from Mexico City. Some people didn't like it. Others didn't care. I thought it was a good thing. Sometimes Ulises loaned me money. They had piles of money, more than enough, and I always needed it. I don't know where they got it from and I don't care. Belano never loaned me money. When they left for Sonora I had the sense that the group was about to fall apart. Kind of as if the joke had stopped being funny. It didn't seem like such a terrible thing to me. My son was about to be born and I'd finally found a job. One night Rafael called me and told me they were back, but that they were leaving again. Fine, I said, the money's theirs, let them do what they want with it. This time they're going to Europe, Rafael told me. Perfect, I said, that's what we should all do. But what about the movement? said Rafael. What movement? I said, watching Xóchitl as she slept. The room was dark and the hotel sign flickered through the window like something in a gangster movie. It was in these shadows that my son's grandfather had done his dirty business. What do you mean "what movement"? Visceral realism, said Rafael. What about visceral realism? I said. That's what I mean, said Rafael, what will happen to visceral realism? What will happen to the magazine we were going to publish, to all our projects? He sounded so pitiful that if Xóchitl hadn't been asleep I would've burst out laughing. We'll publish the magazine ourselves, I said, and we'll do the projects with them or without them. For a while, Rafael didn't say anything. We can't get off track, he murmured. Then he was quiet again. Thinking, I guess. I was quiet too. But I wasn't thinking. I knew perfectly well where I stood and what I wanted to do. And just as I knew what I wanted to do, what I planned to do from then on, I also knew that Rafael would end up finding his way. There's no point getting all upset, I told him when I got tired of standing there in the dark with the phone to my ear. I'm not upset, said Rafael. I think we should go too. I'm not leaving Mexico, I said.

María Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, December 1976
. We had to put my father in an asylum (my mother corrects me and says psychiatric clinic, but there are words you can't gloss over: an asylum is an asylum) a little before Ulises and Arturo came back from Sonora. I don't know whether I've told you, but they left in my father's car. According to my mother, it was that act, which she describes as underhanded and even criminal, that triggered my father's collapse. I disagree. My father's relationship to his possessions, his house, his car, his art books, his bank account, was always distant and ambiguous, to say the least. It was as if my father were always unburdening himself, willingly or reluctantly, always getting rid of things, but with such bad luck (or so slowly) that he could never achieve the nakedness he longed for. And that, as you might imagine, ended up driving him crazy. But to get back to the matter of the car. When Ulises and Arturo came back and I saw them again, at Café Quito and almost by chance-although if I was at that horrible place, in the end it meant I was looking for them-when I saw them again, as I was saying, I almost didn't recognize them. They were with some guy I didn't know, a man dressed completely in white, with a straw hat on his sticklike head, and at first I thought they'd seen me but were pretending they hadn't. They were sitting in the corner by the window that looks onto Bucareli, next to the mirror and the sign that says "Roast Goat," but they weren't eating anything. They had two tall glasses of coffee in front of them and every once in a while they would take a few feeble sips, as if they were sick or exhausted, although the man in white was eating, not roast goat (every time I repeat the words
roast
goat
I feel sick) but enchiladas, Café Quito's famous cheap enchiladas, and there was a bottle of beer in front of him. And I thought: they're pretending they haven't seen me, there's no way they couldn't have seen me, they've changed a lot, but I haven't changed at all. They don't want to talk to me. Then I started to think about my father's Impala and I thought about what my mother said, that it was completely shameless the way they'd stolen that car from him, really incredible, and that the best thing would be to report it and try to get the car back, and I thought about my father, who would mumble incoherently whenever anyone said anything to him about the car. For God's sake, Quim, my mother would say, stop babbling, I'm tired of going back and forth by bus or taxi, because in the end all those trips are going to cost an arm and a leg. And when my mother said that, my poor father laughed and said be careful, you'll end up crippled. And my mother didn't see the humor in it, but I did. Told the way I'm telling it, it probably isn't funny at all, but the way my father came out with it all of a sudden, more confidently than usual, or at least in a more confident voice, it really was clever and witty. In any case what my mother wanted was to report the theft of the Impala so we could get the car back and what I wanted was not to report it, since it would come back on its own (that's funny too, isn't it?). We just had to wait and give Arturo and Ulises time to come back, to return it. And now there they were, talking to the man in white, back in Mexico City, and they didn't see me or were avoiding me, so I had plenty of time to watch them and think about what I should say to them, that my father was in an asylum and that they should give the car back, although as time went by, I don't know how long I was there, the tables around me emptied and were filled again, the man in white never took off his hat and his plate of enchiladas seemed eternal, everything began to tangle in my head, as if the words I had to say were plants and all of a sudden they'd begun to wither, fade, and die. And it did me no good to think of my father shut up in the asylum, suicidally depressed, or my mother brandishing the threat or refrain of the police like a UNAM cheerleader (which she actually had been in her student days, poor Mom), because suddenly I began to wither too, to fall apart, to think (or rather repeat to myself, like a tomtom) that nothing had any meaning, that I could sit at that table at Café Quito until the end of the world (when I was in high school we had a teacher who claimed to know exactly what he would do if World War III broke out: go back to his hometown, because nothing ever happened there, probably a joke, I don't know, but in a way he was right, when the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico) or until Ulises, Arturo, and the stranger in white got up and left. But none of that happened. Arturo saw me and got up, came over to my table, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then he asked whether I wanted to come and sit with them, or, better yet, wait for them where I was. I told him I would wait. All right, he said, and he went back to the man in white's table. I tried not to watch them and for a while I managed it, but finally I looked up. Ulises had his head bowed, his hair covering half his face, and he seemed about to fall asleep. Arturo had his eyes on the stranger and every once in a while he glanced at me, and both looks, the ones he gave the man in white and the ones directed at my table, were absent, or distant, as if he'd left Café Quito a long time ago and only his ghost was still there, restless. Later (how much later was it?) they got up and came to sit with me. The man in white was gone. The café had emptied. I didn't ask them about my father's car. Arturo told me that they were leaving. Going back to Sonora? I asked. Arturo laughed. His laugh was like a gob of spit. As if he were spitting on his own pants. No, he said, much farther. Ulises is off to Paris this week. How nice, I said, he'll be able to meet Michel Bulteau. And see the most famous river in the world, said Ulises. Very nice, I said. Yeah, not bad, said Ulises. And what about you? I said to Arturo. I'm leaving a little later, for Spain. And when do you plan to come back? I said. They shrugged their shoulders. Who knows, María, they said. I'd never seen them look so beautiful. I know it sounds silly to say, but they'd never seemed so beautiful, so seductive. Although they weren't trying to be. In fact, they were dirty, who knows how long it'd been since they'd showered, how long since they'd slept, they had circles under their eyes, and they needed to shave (not Ulises, because he never had to shave), but I would've kissed them both, I don't know why I didn't, I would've gone to bed with them both, fucked them until we passed out, then watched them sleep and afterward kept fucking. I thought: if we find a hotel, if we're in a dark room, if we have all the time in the world, if I undress them and they undress me, everything will be all right, my father's madness, the lost car, the sadness and energy I felt and that at moments seemed about to choke me. But I didn't say a word.