The Savage Detectives (37 page)

That night Daniel shut himself in his room earlier than usual and a few minutes later I followed his example, although I didn't go to my room (the room I shared with Claudia) but outside, where I could wander around and breathe freely, far from the harpy I was in love with. When I got back, around twelve, the first thing I heard when I opened the door was music, a song by Cat Stevens that Claudia especially liked, and then voices. Something about the voices made me keep quiet and not walk on into the living room. It was Claudia's voice and then Ulises's voice, but not their normal, everyday voices, or at least not Claudia's everyday voice. It didn't take me long to realize that they were reading poems. They were listening to Cat Stevens and reading short poems, deadpan and sad, luminous and ambiguous, slow and quick as lightning, poems about a cat rubbing itself up against Baudelaire's legs and a cat, maybe the same cat, rubbing itself up against the legs of an insane asylum! (Later I found out that they were poems by Richard Brautigan translated by Ulises.) When I came into the living room, Ulises raised his head and smiled at me. Without saying anything, I sat down next to them, rolled a cigarette, and told them to please continue. When we went to bed I asked Claudia what had happened. Sometimes Ulises makes me crazy, that's all, she said.

A week later, Ulises left Tel Aviv. When she said goodbye to him, Claudia shed a few tears and then she shut herself in the bathroom for a long time. One night, not even three days later, he called us from the Walter Scholem kibbutz. One of Daniel's cousins, Mexican like us, lived there, and the kibbutz members had taken Ulises in. He told us that he was working in an olive oil factory. How are you liking it? asked Claudia. Not much, said Ulises, it's boring work. A little while later Daniel's cousin called and said that Ulises had been kicked out. Why? Because he wouldn't work. We almost had a fire because of him, said Daniel's cousin. And where is he now? asked Daniel, but his cousin had no idea, in fact, that was why he was calling us, to find out where Ulises was so that he could make him pay the hundred-dollar tab he had run up at the kibbutz store. We spent a few nights waiting for him to show up, but Ulises didn't come. What did arrive was a letter from Jerusalem. I swear on my honor or whatever, it was completely unintelligible. The sole fact that it reached us is proof of the excellence of the Israeli postal service, no question about it. It was addressed to Claudia, but the apartment number wasn't right and the street name contained three misspellings, which was a kind of record. That was on the outside. Inside, it was worse. The letter, as I said, was impossible to read, although it was written in Spanish, or at least that was the conclusion Daniel and I came to. But it might just as well have been written in Aramaic. About that, about Aramaic, I remember something strange. That night, as Daniel and I tried to decipher the letter, Claudia, who after glancing at it showed not the slightest interest in knowing what it said, told us a story that Ulises had told her a long time ago, when both of them lived in Mexico City. According to Ulises, said Claudia, that famous parable about Jesus, the one about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle, might have been the result of an error. In Greek, Claudia said that Ulises had said (but since when did Ulises know Greek?) there existed the word
káundos
, camel, in which the
n
(
eta
) read almost just like an
i
, and the word
káuidos
, cable, cord, heavy rope, in which the
i
(
iota
) is read
i
. Which led him to wonder, since Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, whether the possible error or misprint might not have had its origin in Mark or in the work of a scribe immediately posterior to Mark. The only objection to this theory, said Claudia, repeating what Ulises had said, was that Luke, who knew Greek well, would have corrected the error. And yet, Luke knew Greek but not the Jewish world, and he might have supposed that the "camel" passing through or failing to pass through the eye of the needle was a proverb of Hebrew or Aramaic origin. The funny thing, according to Ulises, is that there was another possible source for the error: according to Herr Professor Pinchas Lapide (what a name, said Claudia), of the University of Frankfurt, scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic, there were proverbs in Galilean Aramaic that used the noun
gamta
, ship's cable, and if one of the consonants were carelessly written, as is often the case in Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts, it would be easy to read
gamal
, or camel, especially considering that vowels weren't written in Aramaic and ancient Hebrew and had to be inferred. Which leaves us, Claudia said that Ulises had said, with a less poetic and more realistic parable. It's easier for a ship's cable or a thick rope to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And which parable did he like better? asked Daniel. The two of us knew the answer, but we waited for Claudia to tell us. The one with the error, of course.

A week later we got a postcard from Hebron. And then another from the shores of the Dead Sea. And then a third from Eilat, in which he told us that he had found work as a waiter at a hotel. After that, and for a long time, we didn't hear anything. Deep down, I knew the waiter job wouldn't last long and I knew that traveling indefinitely around Israel without a cent in your pocket could be dangerous, but I didn't say anything to the others, although I suppose Daniel and Claudia knew it too. Sometimes we would talk about him during dinner. How do you think he's doing in Eilat? Claudia would ask. He's so lucky to be in Eilat! Daniel would say. We could go visit him next weekend, I would say. And immediately we would tacitly change the subject. At the time I was reading Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
, and everything I saw or did only heightened my sense of vulnerability. I remember that I got sick and spent a few days in bed and Claudia, always so perceptive, took the
Tractatus
away and hid it in Daniel's room, giving me instead one of the novels that she liked to read,
The Endless Rose
, by a Frenchman called J.M.G. Arcimboldi.

One night, as we were having dinner, I started to think about Ulises, and almost without my realizing it a few tears slid down my cheeks. What's wrong? said Claudia. I answered that if Ulises got sick he wouldn't have anyone to take care of him, the way she and Daniel were taking care of me. Then I thanked them and broke down. Ulises is as strong as a… as a warthog, said Claudia, and Daniel laughed. Claudia's remark, her simile, hurt me, and I asked her whether she'd become insensitive to everything. Claudia didn't answer and started to make me tea with lemon. We've condemned Ulises to the Desert! I exclaimed. As Daniel was telling me not to exaggerate, I heard the spoon, which Claudia's fingers were holding, clicking and stirring in the glass, mixing the liquid and the layer of honey, and then I couldn't take it anymore and I asked her, I begged her to look at me when I was talking, because I was talking to her, not to Daniel, because I wanted her to be the one to give me an explanation or console me, not Daniel. And then Claudia turned around, put the tea in front of me, sat in her usual chair, and said what do you want me to say? I think this is crazy talk, all that philosophy is affecting your brain. And then Daniel said something like my God, yes, in the last two weeks you've been wallowing in Wittgenstein, Bergson, Key-serling (who frankly I don't know how you can stand), Pico della Mirandola, that Louis Claude guy (he meant Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, author of
The Man of Aspiration
), crazy racist Otto Weininger, and I don't want to know how many others. And you haven't even touched my novel, added Claudia. At that moment I made a mistake and asked her how she could be so insensitive. When Claudia looked at me I realized that I had fucked up, but by then it was too late. The whole room shook when Claudia began to speak. She said that I should never say that again. She said that the next time I said it our relationship would be over. She said that it wasn't a sign of insensitivity not to worry excessively about Ulises Lima's escapades. She said her older brother had died in Argentina, possibly tortured by the police or the army, and that really was serious. She said that her older brother had fought in the ranks of the ERP and had believed in a continentwide American Revolution, and that was serious. She said that if she or her family had been in Argentina during the crackdown they might be dead now. She said all of that and then she started to cry. That's two of us now, I said. We didn't hug, as I would have liked, but we squeezed hands under the table and then Daniel suggested that we all go out and take a walk, but Claudia told him not to be silly, I was still sick, and that it would be best if we all had more tea and then went to bed.

A month later, Ulises Lima showed up. With him was a huge guy, almost six and a half feet tall, dressed in all kinds of rags, an Austrian Ulises had met in Beersheba. We put the two of them up in the living room for three days. The Austrian slept on the floor, Ulises on the sofa. The guy's name was Heimito. We never knew his last name, and he hardly ever said a word. He spoke English with Ulises, but only enough to get by. We had never met anyone with a name like that, although Claudia said there was a writer called Heimito von Doderer, Austrian too, although she wasn't sure. At first glance Ulises's Heimito seemed retarded, or borderline retarded. But they really did get along well.

When they left we went to the airport to see them off. Until then Ulises had seemed calm, in control of himself, indifferent. Now he suddenly turned sad, although
sad
isn't the right word. Glum, maybe. The night before he left we were talking and I told him I was happy I'd gotten to know him. Me too, said Ulises. The day he left, when Ulises and Heimito had already gone through security and we couldn't see them anymore, Claudia started to cry and for a minute I thought that she loved him-in her way, of course-but I soon gave up that idea.

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976
. For a while after that we didn't see Cesárea Tinajero at any of our meetings. It sounds odd, it sounded odd to admit it, but we missed her. Each time Maples Arce visited General Diego Carvajal he would ask Cesárea when she thought she'd stop being angry. But Cesárea turned a deaf ear. Once I went with Manuel and I spent a while talking to her. Rather than literature, we talked about politics and dancing, which Cesárea loved. In those days, boys, I said to them, there were dance halls all over Mexico City, the grandest in the center, but plenty in the outlying neighborhoods too, in Tacubaya, Colonia Observatorio! Colonia Coyoacán! Tlalpan to the south and Colonia Lindavista to the north! And Cesárea was one of those fanatics who would travel the city from one end to the other to get to a dance, although as I remember she liked the ones in the center best. She went alone. That is, before she met Encarnación Guzmán. That's something no one thinks twice about today, but in those days it led to all kinds of misunderstandings. Once, for reasons I can't recall, possibly because she asked me to, I took her to a dance. It was in a tent erected in a vacant lot near La Lagunilla. Before we went in I said: I'm your date, Cesárea, but don't make me dance, because I don't know how, and I don't want to learn. Cesárea laughed and said nothing. What a feeling, boys, what a rush of sensations. I remember the little round tables made of some light metal, like aluminum, although it can't have been aluminum. The dance floor was a crooked square, a raised platform of planks, and the orchestra was a quintet or sextet that would just as soon launch into a
ranchera
as a polka or a
danzón
. I ordered two sodas, and when I got back to our table Cesárea wasn't there anymore. Where have you got to? I wondered. And then I saw her. Where do you think she was? That's right, on the dance floor, dancing alone, something I'm sure is normal in this day and age, nothing out of the ordinary, times change, but back then it was the next best thing to an open provocation. So there I was with a serious dilemma on my hands, boys, I said to them. And they said: what did you do, Amadeo? And I said,
ay
, boys, what would you have done in my place? I got out on the dance floor and started to dance. And did you learn to dance on the spot, Amadeo? they said. Well, the truth is, I did, it was as if the music had been waiting for me all my life, waiting twenty-six years, like Penelope waiting for Ulysses, yes? and suddenly all the obstacles and all my qualms were a thing of the past and I was moving and smiling and watching Cesárea, what a pretty woman, and the way she danced! you could tell it was something she did all the time, if you closed your eyes out there on the floor you could imagine her dancing at home, or on her way out of work, or as she made herself her
cafecito de olla
, or as she read, but I didn't close my eyes, boys, I looked at Cesárea with my eyes wide open and I smiled at her and she was looking at me and smiling too, the two of us as happy as can be, so happy that for a moment I thought of giving her a kiss, but in the end I didn't dare, since things were good between us the way they were, after all, and I never had a one-track mind. It's all in the first step, as they say, and that's how it was for me with dancing, boys, all in the first step, and then I couldn't find a way to put an end to it. There was a time, but this was many years later, after Cesárea had disappeared and the fervor of youth had faded, when all my ambitions in life were centered on my biweekly visits to the dance halls. I'm talking about my thirties, boys, then my forties, and even a good slice of my fifties. At first I went with my wife. She didn't understand why I liked to dance so much, but she went with me. We had a good time. Later, after she died, I went alone. And I had a good time then too, although the flavor or the aftertaste of the places was different, and the music was different. I certainly didn't go there to drink or seek companionship, as my sons believed, Francisco Salvatierra and Carlos Manuel Salvatierra, a professor and a lawyer, two good boys whom I love dearly although I don't see them much, they have their own families now and too many problems, I suppose, but anyway I've already done all I can for them, given them a good education, which is more than my parents did for me, so now they're on their own. What was I saying? That my sons thought I went to the dance halls in search of a friendly face? Ultimately, they may have been right. But to my way of thinking, that wasn't what got me out the door each Saturday night. I went for the dancing and in some sense I went for Cesárea, or rather for Cesárea's ghost, which was still dancing around those places that always seemed to be on their last legs. Do you like to dance, boys? I said. And they said, it depends, Amadeo, it depends who we're dancing with, not alone, that's for sure. Oh, those boys. And then I asked them whether there were still dance halls in Mexico and they said that there were, though not many, or at least they didn't know of many, but that they existed. Some, according to them, were called
funk joints
, such a strange name, and the music that got them moving was modern music. Gringo music, you mean, I said, and they said: no, Amadeo, modern music made by Mexican musicians, Mexican bands, and then they started to name names, each one stranger than the next. Yes, I remember some of them. Las Vísceras de los Cristeros, that one I remember for obvious reasons. Los Caifanes de Marte, Los Asesinos de Angélica María, Involución Proletaria, strange names that made us laugh and argue. Why Los Asesinos de Angélica María, when Angélica María seems like such a nice girl? I said. And they: Angélica María is extremely nice, Amadeo, it must be an homage, not a threat, and I: isn't
Los Caifanes
a film starring Anel? And they: Anel and María Félix's son, Amadeo, you're so up to date. And I: I may be old, but I'm no fool. Enriquito Álvarez Félix, yes sir, an upstanding young man. And they: you have a fucking amazing memory, Amadeo, let's toast to that. And I: Involución Proletaria? who are they when they're at home? And they: they're the bastard offspring of Fidel Velásquez, Amadeo, they're new workers hailing back to a preindustrial age. And I: I don't give a rat's ass about Fidel Velásquez, boys, the one who always inspired us was Flores Magón. And they:
salud
, Amadeo. And I:
salud
. And they:
viva
Flores Magón, Amadeo. And I:
viva
, feeling a sharp pain in my stomach as I thought about the old days and how late it was, that time when night sinks into night, though never all of a sudden, the white-footed Mexico City night, a night that endlessly announces her arrival, I'm coming, I'm coming, but is a long time coming, as if she too, the devil, had stayed behind to watch the sunset, the incomparable sunsets of Mexico, the peacock sunsets, as Cesárea would say when Cesárea lived here and was our friend. And then it was as if I could see Cesárea in General Diego Carvajal's office, sitting at her desk with her shiny typewriter in front of her, talking to the general's bodyguards, who usually spent their off-hours there too, lounging in the armchairs or leaning in the doorways as the general raised his voice in his office, and Cesárea, to keep them busy or because she really needed their help, sent them to run errands or to look for a certain book at Don Julio Nodier's bookstore, some book she needed to consult for an idea or two, or a quote or two, for the general's speeches, which according to Manuel she usually wrote herself. Incredible speeches, boys, I said, speeches that circulated all over Mexico and were printed in the papers all over the country, Monterrey and Guadalajara, Veracruz and Tampico. Sometimes we read them aloud at our meetings at the café. And Cesárea wrote them at the general's office, and in the most peculiar fashion: as she smoked and talked to the general's bodyguards or to Manuel or me, talking and typing the speeches all at once. The talent of that woman, boys. Have you ever tried such a thing? I have, and it's impossible, something only a few natural writers or journalists can do, be talking about politics, for example, and at the same time writing a little article on gardening or spondaic hexameters (which I can tell you, boys, are a rare phenomenon). And that was how she spent her days at the general's office, and when she had finished her work, sometimes quite late at night, she would say goodbye to everyone, gather up her things, and leave on her own, although often someone would offer to accompany her, sometimes the general himself, Diego Carvajal, the big man, the grand pooh-bah, but Cesárea wouldn't hear of it: certainly not, here are the papers from the attorney general's office, General (she called him General, not
mi general
, as the rest of us did), and here are the ones from the government of Veracruz and here are the Jalapa letters and here is tomorrow's speech, and then she would leave and no one would see her until the next day. Haven't I told you anything about
mi general
Diego Carvajal, boys? In my day he was
the
patron of the arts. What a man. You had to have seen him. He was on the short side, and thin, and even then he must already have been close to fifty, but more than once I saw him stand up all alone to some of Congressman Martínez Zamora's gunmen, saw how he looked them straight in the eye, never reaching for the Colt in his underarm holster, though it's true his jacket was unbuttoned, and I saw how the gunmen shriveled under his gaze and then I saw them back away, murmuring excuse me,
mi general
, the congressman must have made a mistake,
mi general
. An honest-to-God man if ever there was one, General Diego Carvajal, and a lover of literature and the arts, although as he said himself, he didn't learn to read until he was eighteen years old. The life he led, boys! I said. If I started to tell you about him I could keep going all night and we would need more tequila, it would take a whole carton of Los Suicidas mezcal for me to be able to give you some idea of that black hole in the Mexican firmament. That blazing black hole! Jet-black, they said. Jet-black, that's right, boys, I said, jet-black. And one of them said I'll go right now and buy another bottle of tequila. And I said off you go, and drawing energy from the past I got up and hauled myself (like lightning, or the idea of lightning) along the dark hallways of my apartment to the kitchen, and I opened all the cupboards in search of an unlikely bottle of Los Suicidas, although I knew very well there weren't any left, muttering and cursing, rummaging among the cans of soup that my sons bring me every so often, among the useless junk, finally accepting the bitter truth, up to my ears in ghosts, and I chose some little things to stave off hunger: a few packages of peanuts, a can of chipotle chilies, a package of crackers, and I brought them back at the speed of a World War I cruiser, a cruiser lost in the mists of some river or delta, I don't know, lost, anyway, since the truth is that my steps didn't lead to the living room but to my bedroom. For goodness's sake, Amadeo, I said to myself, you must be drunker than you thought, lost in the fog, with only a little paper lantern hanging from my forward guns, but I didn't panic and I found the way, step by step, tinkling my little bell, ship on the river, warship lost at the mouth of the river of history, and the honest truth is that by then I was walking as if I were doing that heel-toe dance step, whether it's still something anyone does I don't know, I hope not, touching the heel of the left foot to the toe of the right and then the heel of the right foot to the toe of the left, a ridiculous step but one that had its day, don't ask me when, probably while Miguel Alemán was president, I danced it at some point, we've all done foolish things, and then I heard the door slam and then voices and I said to myself Amadeo stop being an ass and make your way toward the voices, part the mists of this river with your rust-eaten prow and return to your friends, and that's what I did, and I made it to the front room, my arms overflowing with snacks, and the boys were in the front room, sitting there waiting for me, and one of them had bought two bottles of tequila. Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it's a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it's clear.

Lisandro Morales, pulquería La Saeta Mexicana, near La Villa, Mexico City DF, January 1980
. When Arturo Belano's book finally came out, Belano was already a phantom author and I was about to become a phantom publisher. I knew it would happen. There are writers who are jinxes, bad luck, and you'd better steer clear of them whether you believe in bad luck or not. Even if you're a positivist or a Marxist, you have to avoid those people like the plague. And I say this from the bottom of my heart: you have to trust your instincts. I knew I was playing with fire by publishing that boy's book. I got burned and I'm not complaining, but it's never a bad idea to reflect a little on what went wrong, since other people's stories can always be of service to somebody else. Now I drink a lot, I spend the day at the bar, I park my car far from where I live, and when I get home I take a look around just so no collection agent can take me by surprise.

At night I can't sleep and I drink more. I have well-founded suspicions that a hired killer is after me. Maybe two. I was already a widower before the disaster, thank God, so at least I have the consolation of having spared my poor wife this ordeal, this journey through the shadows that awaits all editors in the end. And even if some nights I can't help asking why this had to happen to me, to me of all people, deep down I've accepted my fate. Being alone makes us stronger. So said Nietzsche (I published a paperback edition of his selected quotes in 1969, when the terrible crime of Tlatelolco was still smoldering, and incidentally, it was a huge success) or maybe Flores Magón. We published a small militant biography of him by a law student that didn't do too badly.

Being alone makes us stronger. That's the honest truth. But it's cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore. Not that bastard Vargas Pardo, who works for another house now, though with a lesser title than when he worked for me, and not a single one of all those literary types who basked in my reflected glory back in the day. No one wants to walk alongside a moving target. No one wants to walk alongside a man who already bears the stink of carrion. At least now I know what I only intuited before: there's a hired killer after every publisher. This killer may be distinguished, he may be illiterate, but he's in the pay of the darkest interests. And sometimes-oh, the cosmic irony-those interests, so vain and foolish, are our own.