The Savage Detectives (4 page)

"Take him down?" I wasn't quite sure what he meant. "The two of us? In his own house?"

"His wife would be eternally grateful. The guy's a total headcase. A year or so ago he spent time in the bin. But don't repeat that to the Font sisters. Or if you do, don't say you heard it from me."

"So he's crazy," I said.

"Crazy and broke. Until recently they had two cars and three servants, and they were always throwing these big parties. But somehow he blew a fuse, poor fucker, and just lost it. Now he's ruined."

"But it must cost money to keep up this house."

"They own it. It's all they've got left."

"What did Mr. Font do before he went crazy?" I said.

"He was an architect, but not a very good one. He designed the two issues of
Lee Harvey Oswald
."

"No shit."

When we rang the bell, a bald man with a mustache and a deranged look came to let us in.

"That's Angélica's father," Pancho whispered to me.

"I figured," I said.

The man came striding up to the gate, fixing us with a look of intense hatred. I was happy to be on the other side of the bars. After hesitating for a few seconds, as if he wasn't sure what to do, he opened the gate and charged. I jumped back, but Pablo spread his arms wide and greeted him effusively. The man stopped then and extended an unsteady hand before he let us through. Pancho walked briskly around the house to the back, and I followed him. Mr. Font went back inside, talking to himself. As we headed down a flower-filled outside passageway between the front and back gardens, Pancho explained that another reason for poor Mr. Font's agitation was his daughter Angélica:

"María has already lost her virginity," said Pancho, "but Angélica hasn't yet, although she's about to, and the old man knows it and it drives him crazy."

"How does he know?"

"One of the mysteries of fatherhood, I guess. Anyway, he spends all day wondering which son of a bitch will deflower his daughter, and it's just too much for one man to bear. Deep down, I understand him; if I were in his shoes I'd feel the same."

"But does he have someone in mind or does he suspect everyone?"

"He suspects everyone, of course, although two or three are out of the running: the queers and her sister. The old man isn't stupid."

None of it made any sense.

"Last year Angélica won the Laura Damián poetry prize, you know, when she was only sixteen."

I'd never heard of the prize in my life. According to what Pancho told me later, Laura Damián was a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents had established a prize in her memory. According to Pancho, the prize was very highly regarded "among the true elite." I gave him a look, as if to ask what kind of an idiot he was, but Pancho didn't notice. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then he raised his eyes skyward and I thought I noticed a curtain move in one of the windows on the second floor. Maybe it was just the breeze, but I felt watched until I crossed the threshold of the Font sisters' little house.

Only María was home.

María is tall and dark, with very straight black hair, a straight (absolutely straight) nose, and thin lips. She looks like a nice person, though it's not hard to see that her rages might be long and terrible. We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava. She received us coldly at first, as if Pancho's presence annoyed her and she was only putting up with him for her sister's sake and because, in all fairness, the little house in the courtyard wasn't hers alone but belonged to both of them. She didn't even look at me.

To make matters worse, I managed to make a banal remark about Sor Juana that prejudiced her against me even more (a clumsy allusion to the celebrated lines "Misguided men, who will chastise/a woman when no blame is due,/oblivious that it is you/who prompted what you criticize") and that I made worse when I tried again by reciting, "Stay, shadow of contentment too short-lived,/illusion of enchantment I most prize,/fair image for whom happily I die,/sweet fiction for whom painfully I live."

So suddenly there we were, the three of us, sunk in timid or sullen silence, and María Font wouldn't even look at Pancho and me, although sometimes I looked at her or the watercolor (or to be more precise, stole glances at her and the watercolor), and Pancho Rodríguez, who seemed completely unaffected by María's hostility or her father's, was looking at the books, whistling a song that as far as I could tell had nothing to do with what Billie Holiday was singing, until at last Angélica appeared, and then I understood Pancho (he was one of the men who wanted to deflower Angélica!), and I almost understood Mr. Font, although to be honest, virginity doesn't mean much to me. (I'm a virgin myself, after all, unless Brígida's fellatio
interrupta
is considered a deflowering. But is that making love with a woman? Wouldn't I have had to simultaneously lick her pussy to say that we'd actually made love? To stop being a virgin, does it only count if a man sticks his dick into a woman's vagina, not her mouth, her ass, or her armpit? To say that I've really made love, do I have to have ejaculated? It's all so complicated.)

But as I was saying, Angélica appeared, and to judge by the way she greeted Pancho, it was clear (to me at least) that he had some romantic possibilities with the prize-winning poet. As soon as he introduced me, I was ignored again.

The two of them set up a screen that divided the room in two, and then they sat on the bed and I could hear them whispering to each other.

I went over to María and said a few things about how good her watercolor was. She didn't even look up. I tried another tactic: I talked about visceral realism and Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. I also analyzed (intrepidly: the whispers on the other side of the screen were making me more and more nervous) the watercolor before me as a visceral realist work. María Font looked at me for the first time and smiled:

"I don't give a shit about the visceral realists."

"But I thought you were part of the group. The movement, I mean."

"Are you kidding? Maybe if they'd chosen a less disgusting name… I'm a vegetarian. Anything to do with viscera makes me sick."

"What would you have called it?"

"Oh, I don't know. The Mexican Section of Surrealists, maybe."

"I think there already is a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca. Anyway, what we're trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale."

"On a Latin American scale? Please."

"Well, that's what we want in the long term, if I understand it correctly."

"Who
are
you, anyway?"

"I'm a friend of Lima and Belano."

"So why haven't I ever seen you around here?"

"I only met them a little while ago…"

"You're the kid from Álamo's workshop, aren't you?"

I turned red, although really I don't know why. I admitted that we had met there.

"So there's already a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca," said María thoughtfully. "Maybe I should go live in Cuernavaca."

"I read about it in the
Excelsior
. It's some old men who paint. A group of tourists, I think."

"Leonora Carrington lives in Cuernavaca," said María. "You're not talking about her, are you?"

"Um, no," I said. I have no idea who Leonora Carrington is.

Then we heard a moan. It wasn't a moan of pleasure, I could tell that right away, but a moan of pain. It occurred to me then that it had been a while since we heard anything from behind the screen.

"Are you all right, Angélica?" said María.

"Of course I'm all right. Go take a walk please, and take that guy with you," responded the muffled voice of Angélica Font.

In a gesture of annoyance and boredom, María threw her paintbrushes onto the floor. From the paint marks on the tiles, I could tell that it wasn't the first time her sister had requested a little privacy.

"Come with me."

I followed her to a secluded corner of the courtyard, beside a high wall covered in vines, where there was a table and five metal chairs.

"Do you think they're…?" I said, and immediately I regretted my curiosity, which I'd hoped she'd share. Luckily, María was too angry to pay much attention to me.

"Fucking? No way."

For a while we sat in silence. María drummed her fingers on the table, and I crossed and recrossed my legs a few times and busied myself studying the plants in the courtyard.

"All right, what are you waiting for? Read me your poems," she said.

I read and read until one of my legs fell asleep. When I finished I was afraid to ask whether she'd liked them or not. Then María invited me into the big house for coffee.

In the kitchen, we found her mother and father, cooking. They seemed happy. She introduced me to them. Her father didn't look deranged anymore. He was actually pretty nice to me; he asked me what I was studying, how I planned to balance law and poetry, how good old Álamo was (it seems they know each other, or were childhood friends). Her mother talked about vague things that I can hardly remember: I think she mentioned a séance in Coyoacán that she'd been to recently, and the restless spirit of a 1940s
rancheras
singer. I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not.

In front of the TV we found Jorgito Font. María didn't speak to him or introduce us. He's twelve years old, has long hair, and dresses like a bum. He calls everybody
naco
or
naca
. To his mother he says no way,
naca
, no can do; to his father,
naco
, check it out; to his sister, that's my
naca
or
naca
, you're the best. To me he said hey,
naco
, what's going on?

Nacos
, as far as I know, are urban Indians, city Indians. Jorgito must be using the word in some other sense.

Back at the Fonts' house today.

Things happened exactly as they did yesterday, with minor variations.

Pancho and I met at El Loto de Quintana Roo, a Chinese café near the Glorieta de Insurgentes, and after having several cups of coffee and something a little more substantial (paid for by me), we headed for Colonia Condesa.

Once again Mr. Font came to the door when we rang the bell, in the exact same state as yesterday; if anything, he was a few steps farther down the path to madness. His eyes bulged from their sockets when he accepted the cheerful hand Pancho offered him, unperturbed, and he showed no sign of recognizing me.

María was by herself in the little house in the courtyard; she was painting the same watercolor as before and in her left hand she held the same book, but it was Olga Guillot's voice, not Billie Holiday's, coming out of the record player.

Her greeting was just as cold.

Pancho, for his part, repeated the previous day's routine and took a seat in a little wicker armchair while he waited for Angélica to arrive.

This time I was careful not to make any value judgments about Sor Juana, and I occupied myself first by looking at the books and then the watercolor, standing near María but keeping a prudent distance. The watercolor had undergone significant changes. The two women beside the volcano, whom I remembered in a stern or at least serious pose, were now pinching each other's arms; one of them was laughing or pretending to laugh; the other one was crying or pretending to cry. Floating on the streams of lava (clearly lava, since it was still red or vermillion) were laundry detergent bottles, bald dolls, and wicker baskets full of rats; the women's dresses were torn or patched; in the sky (or at least in the upper part of the watercolor), a storm was brewing; in the lower part María had reproduced this morning's weather report for Mexico City.

The painting was hideous.

Then Angélica came in, glowing, and once again she and Pablo set up the screen. I spent a while thinking, as María painted: there was no longer the slightest doubt in my mind that Pancho had dragged me to the Fonts' house so that I could distract María while he and Angélica went about their business. It didn't seem very fair. Before, at the Chinese café, I'd asked him whether he considered himself a visceral realist. His reply was ambiguous and lengthy. He talked about the working class, drugs, Flores Magón, some key figures of the Mexican Revolution. Then he said that his poems would definitely appear in the magazine that Belano and Lima were putting out soon. And if they don't publish me, they can go fuck themselves, he said. I don't know why, but I get the feeling the only thing Pancho cares about is sleeping with Angélica.

"Are you all right, Angélica?" said María, when the moans of pain, exactly the same as yesterday's, began.

"Yes, yes, I'm fine. Can you go take a walk?"

"Of course," said María.

Once again we resignedly settled ourselves at the metal table under the climbing vine. For no apparent reason, my heart was broken. María started to tell me stories about their childhood, thoroughly boring stories that it was clear she was only telling to pass the time and that I pretended to find interesting. Elementary school, their first parties, high school, their shared love of poetry, dreams of traveling, of seeing other countries,
Lee Harvey Oswald
, in which they'd both been published, the Laura Damián prize that Angélica had won… Once she reached this point (I don't know why; possibly because she stopped talking for a minute), I asked who Laura Damián had been. It was pure intuition. María said:

"A poet who died young."

"I already know that. When she was twenty. But who was she? Why haven't I read anything by her?"

"Have you ever read Lautréamont, García Madero?" said María.

"No."

"Well, then, it's no surprise that you've never heard of Laura Damián."

"I'm sorry. I know I'm ignorant."

"That's not what I said. All I meant was that you're very young. Anyway, Laura's only book,
La fuente de las musas
, was privately published. It was a posthumous book subsidized by her parents, who loved her very much and were her first readers."