The Savage Detectives (24 page)

Auxilio Lacouture, Faculty of Literature, UNAM, Mexico City DF, December 1976
. I'm the mother of Mexican poetry. I know all the poets and all the poets know me. I met Arturo Belano when he was sixteen years old and he was a shy boy who didn't know how to drink. I'm Uruguayan, from Montevideo, but one day I came to Mexico without knowing exactly why, or what for, or how, or when. I came to Mexico City, Distrito Federal, in 1967, or maybe it was 1965 or 1962. I can't keep track of the dates or my travels anymore; all I know is that I came to Mexico and I never left again. When I came to Mexico, León Felipe (what a colossus, what a force of nature) was still alive, and León Felipe died in 1968. When I came to Mexico, Pedro Garfias (what a great man, what a melancholy man) was still alive, and Don Pedro died in 1967, which means that I must have gotten here before 1967. So let's say I came to Mexico in 1965. I think it must have been 1965, though I may be wrong, and every day I'd go to see those universal Spaniards. I spent hours with them, as passionately devoted as a poetess and an English nurse and a little sister keeping tireless watch over her older brothers. And they would say to me in that odd Spanish accent of theirs, the way it circles around the
z
and the
c
and leaves the
s
more orphaned and libidinous than ever: Auxilio, stop fussing around the apartment, Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman. Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand. And I would say to them: Don Pedro, León (isn't that funny! I used
tú
with the older one, the more venerable one, and yet the younger one intimidated me in some way and I couldn't drop the
usted
!), let me take care of this, you go about your business, keep writing, relax, and pretend I'm the invisible woman. And they would laugh. Or actually, León Felipe would laugh, although to be honest you could never be quite sure if he was laughing or clearing his throat or cursing, and Don Pedro wouldn't laugh (Pedrito Garfias, what a melancholy man), he wouldn't laugh, he would just look at me with his eyes like lakes at sunset, those lakes in the mountains that no one visits, those sad, peaceful lakes, so peaceful they seem otherworldly, and he would say don't trouble yourself, Auxilio, or thank you, Auxilio. And that was all. What a lovely man. So I would go see them, as I was saying, faithfully and without fail, not bothering them with my own poems and trying to be useful, but I did other things too. I worked. I tried to work. Because it's easy to live in Mexico City, as everybody knows or thinks they know or imagines, but it's only easy if you have money or a scholarship or a job, and I didn't have anything. The long trip to
la región más transparente
had drained me of many things, among them the energy to work at just any old job. So what I did was make the rounds of the university, specifically the Faculty of Literature, doing what you might call volunteer work: one day I might help to type Professor García Liscano's lectures, another day I'd translate some French texts in the French department, another day I'd cling like a limpet to a group that was putting on a play. I'd spend eight hours, without exaggeration, watching the rehearsals, going to pick up sandwiches, trying my hand at the lights. Sometimes I'd land a paying job: a professor would pay me out of his own salary to act as his assistant, say, or the department heads would arrange for themselves or the faculty to hire me for two weeks or a month to perform some vague task or another, mostly nonexistent, or the secretaries (they were such nice girls) would get their bosses to give me little jobs so I could make a couple of pesos. This was during the day. By night I led a bohemian life with my friends, which was extremely fulfilling and actually convenient because by then money was scarce and sometimes I didn't even have enough to pay for a furnished room. But usually I did. I don't want to exaggerate. I had money to live on. I was happy. During the day I lived at the faculty, like a little ant or actually more like a cicada, running back and forth from one cubicle to another, up on all the gossip, all the cheating and divorces, all the plans and projects, and at night I spread my wings, I turned into a bat, I left the faculty and wandered the DF like an imp (I'd like to say like a fairy, but it wouldn't be true) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew every group) and advised the young poets who were already coming to me, although not as often as later on, and I lived, to make a long story short, in my time, I lived in the time I'd chosen and that surrounded me, aquiver, in flux, brimming over, happy. And then I hit 1968. Or 1968 hit me. Now I can say that I felt it coming, that I smelled it in bars, in February or March of'68 but before '68 really became '68. Oh, it makes me laugh to remember it. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw everything and at the same time I saw nothing. Does that make sense? I was at the faculty when the army violated the university's autonomy and came on campus to arrest or kill everybody. No. There weren't many deaths at the university. That was Tlatelolco. May the name be forever etched on our memory! But I was at the faculty when the army and the riot police came in and carted everybody off. It was the most incredible thing. I was in the bathroom, in the bathroom on one of the floors in the building, I think it was the fourth floor, though I can't say for sure. And I was sitting on the toilet, with my skirt hitched up, as the poem or the song goes, reading the exquisite poetry of Pedro Garfias, who had been dead for a year, Don Pedro, such a melancholy man, grieving for Spain and the rest of the world-who could've imagined that I would be reading in the bathroom at the very moment the filthy riot police entered the university? May I digress for a moment? I think that life is full of marvelous and mysterious things. And in fact, thanks to Pedro Garfias, to Pedro Garfias's poems and my long-standing habit of reading in the bathroom, I was the last to learn that the riot police had come in, that the army had come in, and that they were hauling away everyone they could find. Let's say I heard a noise. A rumble in my soul! And let's say that then the noise got louder and louder and by then I was paying attention to what was going on. I heard someone pull the chain in the next stall, I heard the door slam, heard footsteps in the hall, heard the clamor rising from the lawn, from the neatly cut grass that frames the faculty like a green sea wreathing an island, an island where there's always time for whispered confidences and love. And then the bubble of Pedro Garfias's poetry went pop and I closed the book and got up, pulled the chain, opened the door, said something out loud.
Che
, I said, what's going on outside? but no one answered me, everyone using the bathroom had disappeared, I said
che
, isn't anyone there? knowing beforehand that no one would answer. Maybe you know the feeling. And then I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror, and I saw a tall, thin, blond figure, a face with a few wrinkles already, too many wrinkles, the female version of Don Quixote, as Pedro Garfias once said to me, and then I went out into the hallway, and it was there that I suddenly realized something was going on, the hallway was empty and the shouting coming from downstairs was the kind that strikes you dumb and makes history. What did I do then? I did what anyone would do. I went over to a window and looked down, and I saw soldiers, and then I looked out another window and I saw tanks, and then out another one, at the end of the hallway, and I saw vans into which the captive students and professors were being herded, like something from a World War II movie crossed with a María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz movie of the Mexican Revolution, a dark canvas peopled with little phosphorescent figures, the kind of thing they say crazy people see, or people in the throes of fear. And then I said to myself: Auxilio, stay here. Don't let yourself be taken prisoner, baby. Stay here, Auxilio. Baby, don't let them write you into their script. If they want you let them come and find you. And then I went back to the bathroom and it was the strangest thing, not only did I go back to the bathroom but I went back into the stall, the very one I'd been in before, and I sat down on the toilet again, with my skirt up again, I mean, and my underwear pulled down, although I felt no physiological urgency (they say it's precisely in cases like this that the bowels loosen, but it wasn't true for me), and with Pedro Garfias's book open and despite not wanting to read, I started to read slowly, word by word, line by line, and suddenly I heard sounds in the hallway, the sound of boots? the sound of hobnailed boots? but
che
, I said to myself, isn't this a coincidence? and then I heard a voice saying something like everything is in order, though maybe it said something else, and someone, maybe it was the same bastard who'd spoken, opened the bathroom door and came in and I lifted my feet like a Renoir ballerina, my underwear dangling down around my skinny ankles and snagging on a pair of shoes I had back then, the most comfortable yellow moccasins, and as I was waiting for the soldier to check the stalls one by one, preparing myself, if it came down to it, not to open the door, to defend UNAM's last redoubt of autonomy-I, a poor Uruguayan poetess, who loved Mexico as much as anyone-while I waited, as I say, a special silence fell, as if time had fractured and were running in several directions at once, a pure time, not verbal or made up of gestures or actions, and then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced into the mirror, the two of us still as statues in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Literature, and that was all, then I heard his footsteps fading away in the distance, I heard the door close, and my raised legs returned to their former position as if of their own accord. I must've sat there like that for three hours or so, I'd say. I know it was starting to get dark when I came out of the stall. This was a new situation, I admit, but I knew what to do. I knew my duty. So I went over to the only window in the bathroom and looked out. I saw a soldier far off in the distance. I saw the outline of an armored troop carrier or the shadow of an armored troop carrier. Like the portico of Latin literature, the portico of Greek literature. Oh, I adore Greek literature, from Pindar to George Seferis. I saw the wind sweeping the university as if it was delighting in the last light of day. And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew I had to resist. So I sat on the tiled floor of the women's bathroom and in the last rays of light I read three more poems by Pedro Garfias and then I closed the book and closed my eyes and said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, stand your ground. That was all. And then I started to think about my past the same way I'm thinking about my past now. I started to think about things that might not interest you in the same way as what I'm thinking now about Arturo Belano, the young Arturo Belano, whom I met when he was sixteen or seventeen, in 1970, when I was already the mother of the young Mexican poets and he was a kid who couldn't hold his liquor but felt proud that in his faraway Chile Salvador Allende had won the elections. I knew him. I met him in a noisy crowd of poets at the bar La Encrucijada Vera-cruzana, a ferret hole of a place where various promising young people and not-so-young people used to get together. I became friends with him. I think it was because we were the only two South Americans among all those Mexicans. I became friends with him despite the age difference, despite every conceivable difference! I taught him who T. S. Eliot was, who William Carlos Williams was, who Pound was. I took him home once, sick, drunk, his arms around my neck, his weight hanging from my narrow shoulders, and I became friends with his mother and his father and his very nice sister, all of them so nice. The first thing I said to his mother was: señora, I haven't slept with your son. And she said: of course not, Auxilio, but don't call me señora; we're practically the same age! I became friends with the family. A family of nomadic Chileans who had immigrated to Mexico in 1968. My year. I stayed as a guest at Arturo's mother's house for long stretches, once for a month, another time for two weeks, another time for a month and a half. This was because at the time I didn't have money to pay for a furnished room or a place on a roof. During the day I lived at the university doing this, that, and the other and at night I lived the bohemian life and I slept at friends' houses, leaving my meager belongings scattered everywhere, my clothes, my books, my magazines, my pictures, I was Remedios Varo, I was Leonora Carrington, I was Eunice Odio, I was Lilian Serpas (oh, poor Lilian Serpas), and if I didn't lose my mind it was because I always kept a sense of humor, I laughed at my skirts, my stovepipe pants, my tights with runs in them, my Prince Valiant haircut rapidly growing whiter than blonde, my blue eyes peering into the Mexico City night, my pink ears listening to the university stories, the rises and falls, the put-downs, the slights, the fawning, the flattery, the false praise, shivering beds that were disassembled and reassembled against the night sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that churning, unreachable sky like an Aztec cauldron under which I moved in perfect bliss, with all the poets of Mexico and Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen and who began to grow up as I watched and who in 1973 decided to return to his homeland to join the revolution. And I was the only one, besides his family, who went to see him off at the bus station, since he was traveling overland, a long journey, extremely long, plagued with dangers, the journey of initiation of all poor Latin American boys, crossing this absurd continent, and when Arturito Belano looked out the window of the bus to wave goodbye to us, it wasn't just his mother who cried, I cried too, and that night I slept at his family's house, more to keep his mother company than anything else, but the next morning I left, though I had nowhere to go except the same old bars and coffee shops, but still I went. I don't like to overstay my welcome. And when Arturo returned, in 1974, he was a different person. Allende had fallen and he had done his duty, or so his sister told me. Arturito had done his duty, and his conscience, the terrible conscience of a young Latin American male, had nothing with which to reproach itself. He had presented himself as a volunteer on September 11. He had mounted absurd guard in a deserted street. He had gone out at night; he had seen things. Then, days later, he had been arrested at a police checkpoint. They didn't torture him, but he was held captive for a few days and during that time he behaved like a man. Waiting for him in Mexico were his friends, the Mexico City night, the poets' life. But when he got back he wasn't the same. He started to go out with other, younger people, snot-nosed kids of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, he met Ulises Lima (a bad influence, I thought so from the first time I saw him), he started to make fun of all his old friends, look down on them, see everything as if he were Dante and he'd just returned from hell, or not Dante, I mean, but Virgil himself, such a sensitive boy, and he started to smoke marijuana, that vulgar weed, and deal substances I'd rather not even think about. But deep down he was still as nice as ever, I know he was. And so when we met (purely by chance, because we didn't see the same people anymore), he would say how are you Auxilio, or he'd shout help, help! help!! from the sidewalk on Avenida Bucareli, jumping around like a monkey with a taco or a piece of pizza in his hand, always with that Laura Jáuregui, who was gorgeous, though her heart was blacker than a black widow's heart, and Ulises Lima, and that other little Chilean, Felipe Müller, and sometimes I would even bring myself to join his group, but they spoke in