The Savage Detectives (25 page)

glíglico
, like in
Hopscotch
, you could tell they liked me, you could tell they knew who I was, but they spoke in
glíglico
and that made it hard to follow the ins and outs and ups and downs of the conversation, which ultimately drove me off. Let no one think they laughed at me! They listened to me! But I didn't speak their
glíglico
and the poor kids were incapable of giving up their slang. Those poor abandoned kids. Because that was the situation: no one wanted them. Or no one took them seriously. Or sometimes a person got the impression that they took themselves too seriously. And one day someone said to me: Arturito Belano has left Mexico. And then: let's hope this time he doesn't come back. And that made me really angry because I had always loved him and I think I probably scolded the person who said it (mentally, at least), but first I had the presence of mind to ask where he'd gone. And whoever it was couldn't tell me: Australia, Europe, Canada, someplace like that. And then I started to think about him, and I started to think about his mother, who was so generous, and about his sister, about the afternoons we made empanadas at his house, and about the time I made noodles and we hung them all over the place so they would dry, in the kitchen, in the dining room, in the little living room they had on Calle Abraham González. I never forget anything. That's my trouble, they say. I'm the mother of all Mexican poets. I'm the only one who stuck it out at the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed at the faculty all alone, shut up in the bathroom, with nothing to eat for ten days, fifteen days, I don't remember anymore. There I was with a book by Pedro Garfias and my bag, dressed in a white shirt and a pleated blue skirt, and I had all the time in the world to think and think. But I couldn't think about Arturo Belano back then because I didn't know him yet. I said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, stand your ground, if you come out they'll throw you in jail (and probably deport you to Montevideo, because naturally you never got your papers in order, you fool), they'll spit on you, they'll beat you. I prepared myself to resist. To resist against hunger and loneliness. I slept for the first few hours sitting on the toilet, the same toilet I'd been on when everything began, and that, vulnerable as I was, I believed brought me luck, but sleeping sitting on a toilet stool is extremely uncomfortable and I ended up huddled on the tiles. I had dreams. Not nightmares. Musical dreams, dreams of transparent questions, of sleek, safe airplanes crossing Latin America from end to end in a cold, bright blue sky. I woke up frozen stiff and I was starving. I looked out the window, out the little bathroom window, and in pieces of campus like puzzle pieces, I saw the morning of a new day. That first morning I spent crying and thanking God in heaven that no one had shut off the water. Don't get sick, Auxilio, I said to myself, drink all the water you want, but don't get sick. I slid to the floor, my back against the wall, and I opened Pedro Garfias's book again. My eyes closed. I must have fallen asleep. Then I heard footsteps and I hid in my stall (that stall is the cubicle I never had, that stall was my trench and my Duino palace, my epiphany of Mexico). Then I read Pedro Garfias. Then I fell asleep. Then I looked out the little window and I saw very high clouds, and I thought about Dr. Atl's paintings and
la región más transparente
. Then I began to think about pleasant things. How much poetry did I know by heart? I started to recite it, whispering the poems I remembered, and I would've liked to write them down, but although I had a Bic I didn't have paper. Then I thought: you fool, you've got the best paper in the world right here. So I took some toilet paper and I started to write. Then I fell asleep and dreamed, oh, how ridiculous, about Juana de Ibarbourou, I dreamed about her book of poetry
La rosa de los vientos
, from 1930, and also about her first book,
Las lenguas del diamante
, such a pretty title, a gorgeous title, almost as if it were the title of a book of avant-garde poetry, a French book from last year, but it was published in 1919, in other words when Juana de América was twenty-seven. What an interesting woman she must have been back then with the whole world at her feet, all those gentlemen ready to graciously do her bidding (gentlemen who no longer exist, although Juana does), all those modernist poets ready to die for poetry, all those lingering looks, all those pretty words, all that love. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up, and for hours, maybe days, I cried for lost time, for my childhood in Montevideo, for faces that still trouble me (that trouble me now even more than before) and that I'd rather not talk about. Then I lost track of the days I'd been confined. From my window I saw birds, trees, branches extending from invisible places, bushes, grass, clouds, walls, but I didn't see people or hear any noise, and I lost track of how long I'd been inside. Then I ate toilet paper (part of me was maybe remembering Charlot), but just a little piece, I didn't have the stomach to eat more. Then I discovered that my appetite was gone. Then I took the toilet paper that I'd written on and I threw it in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water startled me, and I thought I was lost. I thought: despite my cleverness and all my sacrifices, I'm lost. I thought: what a poetic act to destroy my writings. I thought: I should have swallowed them instead, because now I'm lost. I thought: the vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought: because I wrote, I stood my ground. I thought: because I destroyed what I wrote they're going to find me, beat me, rape me, kill me. I thought: the two acts are related, writing and destruction, hiding and being found. Then I sat on the toilet and closed my eyes. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up. My body was a mass of cramps. I moved slowly around the bathroom, looked in the mirror, combed my hair, washed my face. Oh, how awful my face looked. The way it looks now, to give you some idea. Then I heard voices. I think it had been a long time since I heard anything. I felt like Robinson Crusoe when he discovers the footstep in the sand. But my footstep was a voice and a door slamming shut, an avalanche of stone marbles suddenly tossed down the hall. Then Lupita, Professor Fombona's secretary, opened the door and we stood there staring at each other, both of us with our mouths open and unable to say a word. From the shock of it, I think, I fainted. When I opened my eyes again I was in Professor Rius's office (what a brave, handsome man Rius is and was!), among friends and familiar faces, among university people, not soldiers, and that seemed so wonderful to me that I started to cry, unable to give a coherent account of what had happened, despite the urging of Rius, who seemed at once grateful for and shocked by what I'd done. And that's all, my young friends. The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of '68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year. And I've heard others tell the story many times, and in their telling, the woman who spent fifteen days shut in a bathroom without eating is a medical student or a secretary at the Torre de Rectoría, not a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head. And sometimes it isn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal troubles. And when I hear these stories, these versions of my story, I don't usually say anything (especially if I'm not drunk). And if I am drunk, I try to play it down. That's nothing, I say, that's university folklore, that's urban legend, and then they look at me and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I say (or if I'm drunk, I shout): no, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976
. Then I said to them: all right, boys, what do we do if the mezcal runs out? And they said: we'll go down and buy another bottle, Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, don't worry. And thus assured, or encouraged, at least, I took a good swig, emptying my glass. They used to make some fine mezcal in this country, yes sir, and then I got up and went over to my library, my dusty library-how long had it been since I gave those shelves a cleaning!-not because I didn't care about books anymore, certainly not, but because life makes us so fragile and anesthetizes us too (almost without our noticing it, gentlemen), and some people, though this hasn't happened to me, are even hypnotized or end up with the left hemisphere of their brains split down the middle, which is a figurative way of describing the problem of memory, if you follow me. And the boys got up from their seats too and I felt their breath on the back of my neck, figuratively, of course, and then, without turning around, I asked them whether Germán or Arqueles or Manuel had told them what my job was, what I did for a living. And they said no, Amadeo, none of them said anything to us about that. And then I said, pompously, that I wrote, and I think I laughed or coughed for a few long seconds, I write for a living, boys, I said, Octavio Paz and I are the only ones in this goddamned country who make a living that way. And they, of course, remained touchingly silent, if you'll permit me the expression. Silent in the way people say Gilberto Owen was. And then, with my back still to them and my gaze fixed on the spines of my books, I said: I work nearby, in the Plaza Santo Domingo, I write petitions and prayers and letters, and I laughed again and dust rose from the books with the force of my laugh, and then I could see the titles better, the authors, the files where I kept the unpublished material of my day. And they laughed too, a brief laugh that brushed my neck, such discreet boys, until at last I managed to find the folder I was looking for. Here it is, I said, my life and incidentally all that's left of Cesárea Tinajero's life. And then comes the funny part, gentlemen: instead of pouncing greedily on the file to rifle through the papers, they just stood there and asked me whether I wrote love letters. Everything, boys, I told them, setting the file on the floor and filling my glass with Los Suicidas mezcal again, letters from mothers to their children, letters from children to their fathers, letters from women to their husbands in prison, and letters from lovers, of course, which are the best, either because they're so innocent or so steamy, everything mixed together as it is at the druggist's counter and sometimes the writer adds something of his own devising. Well, what a wonderful job, they said. After thirty years under the arches of Santo Domingo it isn't quite what it used to be, I said as I opened the file and began to rummage through the papers, looking for the only copy I had of
Caborca
, the magazine Cesárea had edited with so much secrecy and excitement.

Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, January 1977
. There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. Let's take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you're calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That's how I see it. I hope I'm not offending anyone. Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading
Werther
. Second: he's a limited reader. Why limited? That's easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who's unable to read all the way through
In Search of Lost Time
, for example, or
The Magic Mountain
(a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter,
Les Misérables
or
War and Peace
. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they're exhausted! Why? It's obvious! One can't live one's whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he's cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly-as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives-he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what's called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damián, and so they didn't listen.

Joaquín Vázquez Amaral, walking on a university campus in the American Midwest, February 1977
. No, no, no, of course not. That boy Belano was an extremely nice person, very polite, not hostile at all. When I was in Mexico in 1975 for the launch, if you can call it that, of my translation of Pound's
Cantos
, a book that in any European country would have attracted much more attention (it was published in a handsome edition, by the way, by Joaquín Mortiz), he and his friends came to the event, and later, and this is important, they stayed to talk to me, to keep me company (when you're a stranger in a city in some way foreign, you appreciate these things), and we went to a bar, I've forgotten which one it was, but it must have been downtown, near Bellas Artes, and we talked about Pound until very late. In other words, I didn't see familiar faces at the launch, I didn't see the famous faces of Mexican poetry (if they were there I didn't recognize them, I'm sorry to say), all I saw were those kids, those eager, idealistic kids, you understand? and that, as a foreigner, I appreciated.

What did we talk about? About the maestro, of course, and his time at Saint Elizabeth's, about that strange man Fenollosa, about the poetry of the Han dynasty and the Sui dynasty, about the poetry of Liu Hsiang, Tung Chung-shu, Wang Pi, Tao Chien (Tao Yuan-ming, 365-427), the Tang dynasty, Han Yu (768-824), Meng Hao-Jan (689-740), Wang Wei (699-759), Li Po (701-762), Tu Fu (712-770), Po Chu-I (772-846), the Ming dynasty, the Ching dynasty, Mao Tse-tung-in other words, about Pound things that none of us knew anything about, not even the maestro, really, because the literature he knew best was European literature, but what a show of strength, what magnificent curiosity Pound had, to root around in that enigmatic language, am I right? What faith in humanity, wouldn't you say? And we also talked about Provençal poets, the usual ones, you know, Arnaut Daniel, Bertrán de Born, Guiraut de Bornelh, Jaufré Rudel, Guillem de Berguedà, Marcabrú, Bernart de Ventadorn, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, the Castellan of Coucy, the towering Chrétien de Troyes, and we also talked about the Italians of the Dolce Stil Novo, Dante's compadres, as they say, Cino da Pistoia, Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Guinizelli, Cecco Angiolieri, Gianni Alfani, Dino Frescobaldi, but most of all we talked about the maestro, about Pound in England, Pound in Paris, Pound in Rapallo, Pound in Saint Elizabeth's, Pound back from Italy, Pound on the verge of death…

And then what happened? The usual. We asked for the check. They insisted that I contribute nothing at all, but I refused point-blank. I was young once too, and I know how hard it is to make ends meet at that age, especially if you're a poet, so I put my money on the table, enough to pay for everything we'd had (there were ten of us: young Belano and eight friends of his, among them two lovely girls whose names I've unfortunately forgotten, and me), but they, and now that I think about it, this was the only strange thing that happened all night, they picked up the money and returned it to me, and I put the money back on the table and they returned it to me again, and then I said kids, when I go out for drinks or Coca-Colas (ha ha) with my students I never let them pay, and I delivered my little speech very affectionately (I love my students and I assume they return the sentiment), but then they said: don't even think about it, maestro, and that was all: don't even think about it, maestro, and at that moment, as I decoded that very polysemous (if I may) sentence, I was watching their faces, seven boys and two beautiful girls, and I thought: no, they would never be my students. I don't know why I thought it when really, they'd been so polite, so nice, but I thought it.

I put my money back in my wallet and one of them paid the bill and then we went out. It was a beautiful night, without the daytime crush of cars and crowds, and for a while we walked toward my hotel, almost as if we were drifting along, we might just as easily have been getting farther away, and as we proceeded (but toward where?), some of the kids said goodbye, shaking my hand and heading off (the way they said goodbye to their friends was different, or so it seemed to me), and little by little the group began to dwindle, and meanwhile we kept talking, and we talked and talked, or now that I think about it, maybe we didn't talk much, I would say instead that we thought and thought, but I can't believe it, at that time of night no one thinks much, the body is begging for rest. And a moment came when there were just five of us aimlessly wandering the streets of Mexico City, possibly in the deepest silence, a Poundian silence, although the maestro is the furthest thing from silent, isn't he? His words are the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And yet they're words circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence, aren't they? And then I decided that it was time to go to bed, and I hailed a taxi and said goodbye.

Lisandro Morales, Calle Comercio, in front of Jardín Morelos, Colonia Escandón, Mexico City DF, March 1977
. It was the Ecuadorean novelist Vargas Pardo, a man who always does just as he likes and who was working as a copy editor at my publishing house, who introduced me to this Arturo Belano. A year before, the same Vargas Pardo had convinced me that it would be worth the publishing house's while to finance a magazine that would serve as a forum for the best writers in Mexico and Latin America. I listened to him and launched it. They gave me the title of honorary director and Vargas Pardo and a couple of his cronies appointed themselves to the editorial board.

The plan, at least as they sold it to me, was for the magazine to promote the books of the publishing house. That was the main goal. The secondary goal was to put out a quality literary magazine that would reflect well on the house, as much for its content as for its contributors. They talked to me about Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, the leading lights of Latin American literature. Always prudent, not to say skeptical, I told them that I would be happy to get Ibargüengoitia, Monterroso, José Emilio Pacheco, Monsiváis, Elenita Poniatowska. They said yes, of course, that before long everyone would be begging to be published in our magazine. All right, let them beg, I said, let's do good work, but don't forget the main goal: promoting the house. That would be no problem, they said. It would be a presence on every page, or every other page, and before long the magazine would be turning a profit too. And I said: gentlemen, I leave its fate in your hands. In the first magazine, as anyone can see for themselves, there was no sign of Cortázar, or García Márquez, or even José Emilio Pacheco, but we had an essay by Monsiváis, which rescued the issue, in a sense; otherwise, there was a piece by Vargas Pardo, an essay by an exiled Argentinian novelist and friend of Vargas Pardo, two excerpts from novels that we were about to publish, a story by a forgotten fellow countryman of Vargas Pardo. And poetry, too much poetry. In the review section, at least, I found nothing to object to. Most of the attention was focused on our new releases and was generally favorable.

I remember I talked to Vargas Pardo after reading the magazine and said: I think there's too much poetry, and poetry doesn't sell. I still remember his response: what do you mean it doesn't sell, Don Lisandro, he said, look at Octavio Paz and his magazine. All right, Vargas, I said, but Octavio is Octavio, and there are luxuries the rest of us can't afford ourselves. What I didn't say was that I hadn't read Octavio's magazine for ages, nor did I rectify my use of the word
luxuries
, which I had meant to describe not poetic endeavors but Octavio's tedious publication, since ultimately I think publishing poetry isn't a luxury but utter foolishness. That was as far as it went, anyway, and Vargas Pardo was able to put out the second and third issues, and then the fourth and fifth. Sometimes I heard talk that our magazine was becoming too aggressive. I think it was all Vargas Pardo's fault, that he was using the magazine as a weapon against those who'd snubbed him when he first came to Mexico, as the perfect vehicle for settling a few scores (some writers are so vain and touchy!), and to tell the truth, that was all right with me. It's good for a magazine to generate controversy, it means it's selling, and it struck me as miraculous that a magazine with so much poetry could be selling. Sometimes I asked myself why that bastard Vargas Pardo was so interested in poetry. He wasn't a poet himself, I knew, but a fiction writer. So how did he come by his interest in verse?