The Savage Detectives (40 page)

Every day we went to the post office. We took walks that ended at Esterhazy Platz or the Stiftskaserne. Sometimes my friends followed us. Always at a distance! One night we found a man in the Schadekgasse and followed him. He went into the park. He was an old man, well dressed. My good friend Ulises came up beside him and I punched him in the back of the neck. We went through his pockets. That night we ate at a bar close to home. Then I got up from the table and made a phone call. My inheritance, my money, I said, and from the other end of the line someone said: no, no, no. Then the police came and took us to the Bandgasse station. They took off our handcuffs and interrogated us. Questions, questions. I said: I have nothing to say. When they took me to the cell Ulises wasn't there. The next morning my lawyer came. I said: Mr. Lawyer, you look like a statue abandoned in the forest, and he laughed. When he stopped laughing, he said: no more joking from now on, Heimito. Where is my good friend Ulises? I said. Your accomplice is under arrest, Heimito, said my lawyer. Is he alone? I said. Of course, said my lawyer, and then I stopped shaking. If my good friend Ulises was alone, nothing could happen to him.

That night I dreamed about a yellow rock and a black rock. The next day I saw my good friend Ulises in the courtyard. We talked. He asked me how I was. Fine, I said, I exercise, I do push-ups, sit-ups, I shadow-box. Don't shadowbox, he said. How are you, I said. Fine, he said, they treat me well, the food is good. The food is good! I said. Then they interrogated me again. Questions, questions. I don't know anything, I said. Heimito, tell us what you know, they said. Then I told them about the Jews who were working to build an atomic bomb in Beersheba and about the scorpions that only came out at night. And they said that they would show me pictures and when I saw the pictures I said: they're dead, these are pictures of dead people! and I wouldn't talk to them anymore. That night I saw my good friend Ulises in the corridor. My lawyer said: nothing bad will happen to you, Heimito, nothing bad can happen to you, that's the law, you'll go live in the country. And my good friend Ulises? I said. He'll stay here for a while longer. Until his situation is resolved. That night I dreamed about a white rock and the sky of Beersheba, dazzling as a crystal goblet. The next day I saw my good friend Ulises in the courtyard. The courtyard was covered in a green film but neither one of us seemed to care. We were both wearing new clothes. We could have been brothers. He said: everything is working out, Heimito. Your father is going to take charge of you. And what about you? I said. I'm going back to France, said my good friend Ulises. The Austrian police are paying for my ticket to the border. And when will you come back? I said. I can't come back until 1984, he said. The year of Big Brother. But we don't have brothers, I said. So it would seem, he said. Is the devil's spit green? I asked all of a sudden. It might be, Heimito, he answered, but I'd guess it's colorless. Then he sat on the ground and I started to do my exercises. I ran, I did push-ups, I did squats. When I was done my good friend Ulises had gotten up and was talking to another prisoner. For a minute I thought we were in Beersheba and that the cloudy sky was just a trick of the Jewish engineers. But then I slapped my face and said to myself no, we're in Vienna and my good friend Ulises is leaving tomorrow and he won't be able to come back for a long time and maybe soon I'll see my father. When I went back over to him the other prisoner left. We talked for a while. Take care of yourself, he said when they came to get him, stay in shape, Heimito. See you soon, I said, and then I never saw him again.

María Font, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, February 1981
. When Ulises came back to Mexico, I had just moved in here. I was in love with a guy who taught high school math. Things between us had been rocky at first because he was married and I thought he would never leave his wife, but one day he called me at my parents' house and told me to find a place where we could live together. He couldn't stand his wife anymore and they were about to separate. He was married and had two children, and he said his wife used the children to blackmail him. The conversation we had wasn't especially reassuring-in fact quite the contrary-but the next morning I really did start looking for a place where the two of us could live, even if it was only temporary.

Of course, money was a problem. He had his salary but he had to keep paying rent on the house where his children lived and contribute money each month to pay for their keep, tuition, etc. And I didn't have a job and all I could count on was an allowance that one of my mother's sisters was giving me to finish my studies in dance and painting. So I had to dip into my savings, borrow from my mother, and not look for anything too expensive. After three days, Xóchitl told me that there was a vacant room in the hotel where she and Requena lived. I moved in right away.

The room was big, with a bathroom and a kitchen, and it was right above Xóchitl and Requena's room.

That very night the math teacher came to see me and we made love until dawn. The next day, however, he didn't show up, and even when I tried calling him a few times at school, I couldn't reach him. Two days later I saw him again and I accepted all the explanations he was willing to give me. That was more or less how things went during the first and then the second week of my new life on Calle Montes. The math teacher would show up every four days, more or less, and we would be together until dawn and the start of a new workday. Then he would disappear.

Naturally, we didn't only make love. We talked too. He would tell me things about his children. Once, talking to me about the littlest girl, he started to cry, and finally he said that he didn't understand any of it. What's to understand? I said. He looked at me as if I'd said something idiotic, as if I were too young to know what he meant, and didn't answer. Otherwise, my life was more or less the same as it had always been. I went to class, found a (miserably paid) job as a proofreader at a publishing house, saw my friends, and took long walks around the city. Xóchitl and I grew closer, in large part because we were now neighbors. In the evenings, when the math teacher wasn't around, I would go down to her room and we would talk or play with the little boy. Requena was almost never there (although he, at least, came home every night) and Xóchitl and I would talk about the things that mattered to us, women's things, unconstrained by the presence of men. As was only natural, the subject of our first conversations was the math teacher and his strange ideas about how a new relationship should work. According to Xóchitl, the guy was ultimately a gutless jerk who was afraid to leave his wife. In my opinion, it had much more to do with his sensitivity, his desire not to hurt anyone unnecessarily, than with real fear. Privately, I was surprised how firmly Xóchitl took my side, and not the side of the math teacher's wife.

Sometimes we would go to the park with little Franz. One night when the math teacher was there, I invited them to dinner. The math teacher wanted us to be alone, but Xóchitl had asked to be introduced to him, and I thought this was the perfect occasion. It was the first dinner I had given in what I now thought of as my new home, and although the meal itself was simple, a big salad, cheeses, and wine, Requena and Xóchitl showed up punctually and Xóchitl was wearing her best dress. The math teacher was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, but I don't know whether it was the meagerness of the food (in those days I was into low-calorie eating) or the abundance of wine, but the dinner was a disaster. When my friends left, the math teacher called them parasites, saying that they were the kind of element that paralyzes society and keeps a country from ever making any progress. I said that I was just like them and he replied that it wasn't true, that I studied and worked whereas they didn't do anything. They're poets, I argued. The math teacher looked me in the eyes and repeated the word
poet
several times. Lazy slobs is what they are, he said, and bad parents. Who goes out to eat and leaves their child alone at home? That night, as we were making love, I thought about little Franz sleeping in the room downstairs as his parents drank wine and ate cheese in my room, and I felt empty and irresponsible. Not much later, maybe a day or two afterward, Requena told me that Ulises Lima had come back to Mexico.

One afternoon, as I was reading, I heard Xóchitl calling me, banging on her ceiling with a broomstick. I leaned out the window. Ulises is here, said Xóchitl, do you want to come down? I went downstairs. There was Ulises. I wasn't especially thrilled to see him. Everything he and Belano had meant to me was too remote now. He talked about his travels. I thought there was too much literature in his telling of them. As he was talking I started to play with little Franz. Then Ulises said he had to go see the Rodríguez brothers and asked whether we wanted to go with him. Xóchitl and I looked at each other. If you want to go, I'll watch the kid, I said. Before I left, Ulises asked me about Angélica. She's home, I said, call her. I can't say why, but my attitude was generally hostile. When they left, Xóchitl winked at me. That night the math teacher didn't come. I fed little Franz in my room and then I took him downstairs, got him into his pajamas, and put him to bed, where he soon fell asleep. I chose a book from the shelf and sat reading beside the window, watching the headlights of the cars going by on Calle Montes. I read and thought.

At midnight, Requena came home. He asked me what I was doing there and where Xóchitl was. I told him she had gone to a meeting of visceral realists at the Rodríguez brothers' house. After he checked on his son, Requena asked me whether I'd eaten. I told him I hadn't. I'd forgotten to eat. But I gave the boy his supper, I said.

Requena opened the refrigerator and took out a small pot that he put on the stove. It was rice soup. He asked me whether I wanted any. What I really wanted was not to go back to my lonely room, so I said I'd have a little. We spoke in lowered voices so as not to wake up little Franz. How are your dance classes going? he said. How are your painting classes going? Requena had only been in my room once, the night of the dinner, and he'd liked my paintings. Everything's fine, I said. And your poetry? I haven't written for a long time, I said. Me neither, he said. The rice soup was very spicy. I asked him whether Xóchitl always cooked like that. Always, he said, it must be a family tradition.

For a while we looked at each other without saying anything, and we looked out the window too, and at Franz's bed and the unevenly painted walls. Then Requena started to talk about Ulises and his return to Mexico. My mouth and my stomach were burning, and then I realized that my face was burning too. I thought he would stay in Europe forever, I heard Requena saying. I don't know why I started to think about Xóchitl's father just then, whom I had only seen once, as he was leaving the room. When I saw him I took a step backward, because I thought he was a frightening-looking man. He's my father, said Xóchitl when she saw the expression of alarm on my face. He nodded to me, and left. Visceral realism is dead, said Requena, we should forget about it and make something new. A Mexican section of surrealism, I murmured. I need something to drink, I said. I watched Requena get up and open the refrigerator, the yellow light streaking across the floor to the legs of little Franz's bed. I saw a ball and some tiny slippers, though they were too big to belong to the boy, and I thought about Xóchitl's feet, much smaller than mine. Did you notice anything new about Ulises? said Requena. I drank some cold water. I didn't notice anything, I said. Requena got up and opened the window to clear the cigarette smoke. He acts crazy, said Requena, like he's out of his head. I heard a noise from little Franz's bed. Does he talk in his sleep? I asked. No, it's from outside, said Requena. I went over to the window and looked up toward my room. The light was off. Then I felt Requena's hands on my waist and I didn't move. He didn't move either. After a while he pulled down my pants and I felt his penis between my buttocks. We didn't say anything to each other. When we were done we sat down at the table again and lit cigarettes. Will you tell Xóchitl? said Requena. Do you want me to tell her? I said. I'd rather you didn't, he said.

I left at two in the morning and Xóchitl still hadn't come home. The next day, when I got back from my painting classes, Xóchitl came to my room to get me. I went with her to the supermarket. As we were shopping she told me that Ulises Lima and Pancho Rodríguez had fought. Visceral realism is dead, said Xóchitl, if only you'd been there… I told her that I didn't write poetry anymore, and I didn't want to have anything to do with poets either. When we got back, Xóchitl asked me in. She hadn't made the bed, and the dishes from the night before, the dishes Requena and I had used, were piled unwashed in the sink along with Xóchitl and Franz's lunch dishes.

That night the math teacher didn't come either. I called my sister from a public phone. I didn't have anything to say but I needed to talk to someone and I didn't feel like being in Xóchitl's room again. I caught her on her way out. She was going to the theater. What do you want? she said. Do you need money? We made conversation for a while, then before we hung up I asked her whether she knew that Ulises Lima was back in Mexico. She hadn't heard. She didn't care. We said goodbye and hung up. Then I called the math teacher's house. His wife answered the phone. Hello? she said. I was silent. Answer, you goddamn fucking bitch, she said. I hung up gently and went home. Two days later Xóchitl told me that Catalina O'Hara was having a party where all the visceral realists might get together and see whether it was possible to start the group up again, put out a magazine, plan new activities. She asked me whether I planned to go. I said no, but that if she wanted to go I would watch Franz. That night Requena and I made love again, for a long time, from the moment the boy fell asleep until three in the morning, approximately, and for a moment I thought that he was the one I loved, not the stupid math teacher.

The next day Xóchitl told me how the meeting had gone. Like a zombie movie. In her opinion, visceral realism was finished, which was too bad because the poems she was writing now, she said, were really visceral realist poems. I listened to her without saying anything. Then I asked about Ulises. He's the boss, said Xóchitl, but he's on his own. After that, there were no more visceral realist meetings, and Xóchitl didn't ask me to watch her son at night again. My relationship with the math teacher was over, but we still slept together every once in a while and I still kept calling his house, out of masochism, I guess, or worse, because I was bored. One day, though, we talked about everything that was or wasn't happening between us, and after that we stopped seeing each other. When he left he seemed relieved. I thought about moving out of the room on Calle Montes and going back to live at my mother's house. In the end I decided not to leave, to stay there for good.