The Savage Detectives (46 page)

My relationship with Fernando López Tapia lasted a while longer. He was married, as I suspected from the start, with two children, the older one twenty, and he wasn't about to separate from his wife (I wouldn't have let him, anyway). I went with him to business dinners now and then. He would introduce me as his most productive writer. I really tried to be that, and there were weeks when, with Gigante on the one hand and the magazine on the other, I barely averaged three hours of sleep a night. But I didn't care because things were going well for me, just the way I wanted them to go, and even though I didn't want to publish any more of my own poems in
Tamal
, what I did was literally take over the arts pages and publish poems by Jacinto and other friends who didn't have a venue for their work. And I learned a lot. I learned everything there is to learn about editing a magazine in Mexico City. I learned to lay out pages, negotiate with advertisers, deal with the printers, talk to people who were theoretically important. Of course, no one knew that I worked at Gigante. Everyone thought I lived on what Fernando López Tapia paid me or that I was a college student, I, who'd never been to college, who'd never even finished high school. And that had its appealing side. It was like living the Cinderella story, and even when I had to return to Gigante and turn back into a salesgirl or cashier, I didn't mind and somehow I found the strength to do both jobs well, the one at
Tamal
because I liked it and I was learning, and the one at Gigante because I had to take care of Franz, I had to buy him clothes and school supplies, and pay for our room on Calle Montes, because my father, poor man, was having a hard time and couldn't give me rent money anymore, and Jacinto didn't even have enough money for himself. The bottom line was, I had to work and bring up Franz all on my own. And that was what I was doing, and I was writing and learning too.

One day Fernando López Tapia told me he had to talk to me. When I went in to see him he said that he wanted us to live together. I thought he was kidding, because sometimes Fernando gets in these moods, wanting to live with everybody in the world, and I assumed we'd probably go to a hotel that night and make love and he would get over wanting to set me up in an apartment. But this time he was serious. Of course, he had no intention of leaving his wife, at least not all of a sudden, but gradually, in a series of done deeds, as he put it. For days we talked about the possibility. Or rather, Fernando talked to me, laying out the pros and cons, and I listened and thought carefully. When I told him no, he seemed crushed, and for a few days he was angry at me. By then I had started to send my pieces to other magazines. Most places turned them down, but a few accepted them. Things got worse with Fernando, I'm not sure why. He criticized everything I did and when we slept together he was even rough with me. Other times he would be sweet, giving me presents and crying at the least little thing, and by the end of the night he'd be dead drunk.

Seeing my name published in other magazines was a great thing. It gave me a feeling of security and I began to distance myself from Fernando López Tapia and
Tamal
. At first it wasn't easy, but I was already used to hardships and they didn't faze me. Then I found work as a copy editor at a newspaper and I quit Gigante. We celebrated my last day with a dinner attended by Jacinto, María, Franz, and me. That night, while we were eating, Fernando López Tapia came to see me but I wouldn't let him in. He was shouting in the street for a while and then he left. Franz and Jacinto watched him from the window and laughed. They're so alike. María and I didn't want to look and we pretended (though maybe we weren't quite pretending) to be in hysterics. What we were really doing was staring into each other's eyes and saying everything we had to say without speaking a word.

I remember that we had the lights off and that Fernando's shouts drifted up muffled from outside, they were desperate shouts, and that then we didn't hear anything, he's leaving, said Franz, they're taking him away, and that then María and I looked at each other, not pretending anymore but serious, tired but ready to go on, and that after a few seconds I got up and turned on the light.

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976
. And then one of the boys asked me: where are Cesárea Tinajero's poems? and I emerged from the swamp of
mi general
Diego Carvajal's death or the boiling soup of his memory, an inedible, mysterious soup that's poised above our fates, it seems to me, like Damocles' sword or an advertisement for tequila, and I said: on the last page, boys. And I looked at their fresh, attentive faces and I watched their hands turn those old pages and then I peered into their faces again and they looked at me too and they said: we aren't losing you, are we, Amadeo? do you feel all right, Amadeo? do you want us to make you some coffee, Amadeo? and I thought oh, hell, I must be drunker than I thought, and I got up and walked unsteadily over to the front room mirror and looked myself in the face. I was still myself. Not the self I'd gotten used to, for better or for worse, but myself. And then I said, boys, what I need isn't coffee but a little more tequila, and when they'd brought me my cup and filled it and I'd drunk, I could separate myself from the confounded quicksilver of the mirror I was leaning against, or what I mean is, I could peel my hands off the glass of that old mirror (noticing, all the same, how my fingerprints lingered like ten tiny faces speaking in unison and so quickly that I couldn't make out their words). And when I had sat back down in my chair I asked them again what they thought, now that they had a real poem by Cesárea Tinajero herself in front of them, with no talk in the way, the poem and nothing else, and they looked at me and then, holding the magazine between them, they plunged back into that puddle from the 1920s, that closed eye full of dust, and they said gee, Amadeo, is this the only thing of hers you have? is this her only published poem? and I said, or maybe I whispered: why yes, boys, that's all there is. And I added, as if to gauge what they really felt: disappointing, isn't it? But I don't think they even heard me, they had their heads close together and they were looking at the poem, and one of them, the Chilean, seemed thoughtful, while his friend, the Mexican, was smiling. It's impossible to discourage those boys, I thought, and then I stopped watching them and I stopped talking and I stretched,
crack, crack
, and one of them lifted his gaze at the sound and looked at me as if to make sure I hadn't fallen to pieces, and then he went back to Cesárea, and I yawned or sighed and for a second, distant images passed before my eyes of Cesárea and her friends walking down a street in the north of Mexico City, and I saw myself among her friends, how curious, and I yawned again, and then one of the boys broke the silence and said in a clear and pleasant voice that it was interesting, and right away the other one agreed. Not only was it interesting, he said, he'd already seen it when he was little. How? I said. In a dream, said the boy, I couldn't have been more than seven, and I had a fever. Cesárea Tina-jero's poem? Had he seen it when he was seven years old? And did he understand it? Did he know what it meant? Because it had to mean something, didn't it? And the boys looked at me and said no, Amadeo, a poem doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, except that it's a poem, although this one, Cesárea's, might not even be that. So I said let me see it and I reached out my hand like someone begging and they put the only issue of
Caborca
left in the world into my cramped fingers. And I saw the poem that I'd seen so many times:

And I asked the boys, I said, boys, what do you make of this poem? I said, boys, I've been looking at it for more than forty years and I've never understood a goddamn thing. Really. I might as well tell you the truth. And they said: it's a joke, Amadeo, the poem is a joke covering up something more serious. But what does it mean? I said. Let us think a little, Amadeo, they said. Of course, please do, I said. Then one of them got up and went to the bathroom and the other one got up and went to the kitchen, and I fell into a doze as, like Pedro Páramo, they wandered the hell of my house, or the hell of memories my house had become, and I let them do as they liked and I fell into a doze, because by then it was very late and we'd had a lot to drink, although from time to time I'd hear them walking, as if they were moving to stretch their legs, and every once in a while I would hear them talking, asking and telling each other who knows what, some serious things, I suppose, since there were long silences between question and answer, and other less serious things, because they would laugh, oh, those boys, I thought, oh, what an interesting evening, it's been so long since I drank so much and talked so much and remembered so much and had such a good time. When I opened my eyes again the boys had turned on the light and there was a cup of steaming coffee in front of me. Drink this, they said. At your orders, I said. I remember that while I was drinking the coffee the boys sat down across from me again and talked about the other pieces in
Caborca
. Well, then, I said, what's the mystery? Then the boys looked at me and said: there is no mystery, Amadeo.

Joaquín Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, August 1987
. Freedom is like a prime number. When I got home everything had changed. My wife didn't live here anymore and my daughter Angélica was sleeping in my bedroom now with her partner, a theater director a few years older than me. My son, meanwhile, had taken over the little house in the garden which he shared with a girl with Indian features. Both he and Angélica worked full-time, although they didn't make much money. My daughter María was living in a hotel near the Monumento a la Revolución and almost never saw her sister and brother. My wife, it seemed, had remarried. The theater director turned out to be quite a considerate person. He had been a friend of La Vieja Segura, or a disciple of his, I couldn't say for sure, and he didn't have much money or luck, but he hoped to direct a play someday that would catapult him to fame and fortune. At night, as we ate dinner, he liked to talk about that. My son's girlfriend, on the other hand, hardly said a word. I liked her.

The first night I slept in the living room. I put a blanket on the sofa, lay down, and closed my eyes. The noises were the same as ever. But no, I was wrong. There was something that made them different and prevented me from sleeping, so I spent my nights sitting on the sofa with the television on and my eyes half shut. Then I moved into my son's old room and that cheered me up. I suppose it was because the room still retained a certain air of happy, carefree adolescence. I don't know. In any case, after three days the room only smelled like me, in other words, like old age and madness, and everything went back to the way it was before. I got depressed and didn't know what to do. Silently, I waited in that empty house for the hours to go by until one of my children would come back from work and we could exchange a few words. Sometimes someone would call and I would answer. Hello? Who is this? No one knew me and I didn't know anyone.

A week after I came home I started to take walks around the neighborhood. At first they were short walks: once around the block and that was it. Little by little, though, I grew more daring, and my outings, at first tentative, took me farther and farther afield. The neighborhood had changed. I was mugged two different times. The first time, it was kids with kitchen knives, and the second time, some older guys who beat me up when they didn't find any money in my pockets. But I don't feel pain anymore and I didn't care. That's one of the things I learned at La Fortaleza. That night, Lola, my son's girlfriend, put iodine on my cuts and scrapes and warned me that there were certain places I shouldn't go. I told her that I didn't care whether I got beaten up every so often. Do you like it? she said. I don't, I said. If I were beaten up every day I wouldn't like it.

One night the theater director said that the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was going to give him a grant. We celebrated. My son and his girlfriend went out to buy a bottle of tequila and my daughter and the director made a gala dinner, although the truth is neither of them knew how to cook. I don't remember what they made. Food. I ate everything. But it wasn't very good. The person who did that kind of thing well was my wife, but she was living somewhere else now and she wasn't interested in impromptu dinners like this. I sat at the table and started to shake. I remember that my daughter looked at me and asked whether I felt sick. I'm just cold, I said, and it was true. With the years I've become the kind of person who's always cold. A little glass of tequila would have helped, but I can't drink tequila or any kind of alcohol. So I shivered and ate and listened to what they were saying. They were talking about a better future. They were talking about silly things, but what they were really talking about was a better future, and although that future didn't include my son and his girlfriend or me, we smiled too and talked and made our plans.

A week later the department that was supposed to award the grant was closed because of budget cuts and the theater director ended up with nothing.

I realized that it was time for me to take action. I took action. I called a few old friends. At first no one remembered me. Where have you been? they said. Where have you come from? What kind of life have you been leading? I told them that I'd just returned from abroad. I've been traveling around the Mediterranean, I've lived in Italy and in Istanbul. I've been looking at buildings in Cairo, so suggestive architecturally. Suggestive? Yes, of hell. Like the Tlatelolco towers, but with less green space. Like Ciudad Satélite, but without running water. Like Netzahualcóyotl. All of us architects deserve to be shot. I've been in Tunis and Marrakech. In Marseille. In Venice. In Florence. In Naples. Lucky you, Quim, but why did you come back? Mexico is going straight to hell. You've probably been following the news. Yes, I've been keeping up, I told them. There's been no shortage of reports. My daughters sent Mexican newspapers to the hotels where I was living. But Mexico is my country, and I missed it. There's no place like this. Don't fuck with me, Quim, you can't be serious. I'm completely serious. Completely serious? I swear, completely serious. Some mornings, as I ate my breakfast watching the Mediterranean and those little sailboats that Europeans like to sail, I'd get tears in my eyes thinking of Mexico City, thinking about breakfast in Mexico City, and I knew that sooner or later I'd have to return. And one of my friends might say: but wait, weren't you in a mental hospital? And I would say yes, but that was years ago. In fact, it was when I left the mental hospital that I went abroad. Doctor's orders. And my friends would laugh at this or at other quips, since I told the story differently each time and they would say oh, Quim, and then I would seize my chance and ask them whether they knew of any work for me, a little job at some architecture firm, anything at all, a part-time job, to help me get used to the idea that I had to find something full-time, and then they would answer that the employment situation was terrible, that firms were closing one after another, that Andrés del Toro had left town for Miami and that Refugio Ortiz de Montesinos had set up shop in Houston, just to give me some idea, they said, and I got the idea, but I kept calling and abusing their patience and telling the story of my adventures in happier parts of the world.

All of this persistence finally landed me a job as a draftsman in the studio of an architect I didn't know. He was a kid who was just starting out, and when he discovered that I was an architect, not a draftsman, he took a liking to me. At night, when we closed the little office, we would go to a bar in Ampliación Popocatépetl, near Calle Cabrera. The bar was called El Destino and we would sit there talking about architecture and politics (the kid was a Trotskyite) and travel and women. His name was Juan Arenas. He had a partner I hardly ever saw, a fat guy in his forties who was an architect too but he looked more like he belonged to the secret police and hardly ever showed up at the studio. So the firm essentially consisted of Juan Arenas and me, and since we had hardly anything to do and we liked to talk, we spent most of the day talking. At night he would give me a ride home and as we crossed a Mexico City like a fading nightmare, I would sometimes think that Juan Arenas was my happier reincarnation.

One day I invited him to the house for lunch. It was a Sunday. No one was home and I made him soup and an omelet. We ate in the kitchen. It was nice to be there, listening to the birds that came to peck in the garden and watching Juan Arenas, a simple, unpretentious boy who ate with a hearty appetite. He lived alone. He wasn't from Mexico City but Ciudad Madero, and sometimes he felt lost in the capital. Later my daughter and her partner came home and found us watching TV and playing cards. I think that Juan Arenas liked my daughter from the start, and after that he visited often. Sometimes I would dream that we were all living together in the house on Calle Colima, my two daughters, my son, the theater director, Lola, and Juan Arenas. Not my wife. I didn't see her living with us. But things never turn out the way you see them in dreams, and one day Juan Arenas and his partner closed the office and vanished without saying where they were going.

Once again I had to call my old friends and ask for favors. I'd learned from experience that it was better to look for a job as a draftsman than as an architect, and so I soon found myself working hard again. This time it was at a firm in Coyoacán. One night, my bosses invited me to a party. The alternative was to head for the nearest metro stop and return to what would surely be an empty house, so I accepted and went. The party was at a house not far from mine. For a few minutes it seemed familiar to me and I thought I'd been there before, but then I realized I hadn't, that it was just that all houses of a certain period in a certain neighborhood were as alike as two peas in a pod, and then I relaxed and went straight into the kitchen to find something to eat because I hadn't had a bite since breakfast. I don't know what came over me, but all of a sudden I felt very hungry, which was unusual for me. Very hungry and very much like crying and very happy.

And then I rushed into the kitchen and in the kitchen were two men and a woman, who were talking animatedly about someone who had died. And I took a ham sandwich and ate it and then I had two gulps of Coca-Cola to wash it down. The bread was somehow dry. But the sandwich was delicious, so I took another one, this time a cheese sandwich, and I ate it little by little, not all at once, chewing carefully and smiling the way I used to smile so many years ago. And the trio who were talking, the two men and the woman, looked at me and saw my smile and smiled at me, and then I moved a little closer to them and I heard what they were saying: they were talking about a corpse and a burial, about a friend of mine, an architect, who had died, and at that moment it seemed appropriate for me to say that I'd known him. That was all. They were talking about a dead man whom I'd known, and then they started to talk about other things, I guess, because I didn't stay but went out into the garden, a garden of rosebushes and fir trees, and I went over to the wrought-iron gate and began to watch the traffic. And then I saw my old '74 Impala go by, looking worse for the wear, its paint peeling and with dents on the fender and doors, moving very slowly, at a crawl, as if it were looking for me along the night streets of Mexico City, and it had such an effect on me that then I did start to shake, grabbing the rails of the gate so I wouldn't fall, and sure enough, I didn't fall, but my glasses fell off, my glasses slipped off my nose and dropped onto a shrub or a plant or a rosebush, I don't know, I just heard the noise and I knew they hadn't broken, and then I thought that if I bent down to get them, by the time I got up the Impala would be gone, but if I didn't I wouldn't be able to see who was driving that ghost car, the car I'd lost in the final hours of 1975, the early hours of 1976. And if I couldn't see who was driving it, what good would it do to have seen it? And then something even more surprising occurred to me. I thought: my glasses have fallen off. I thought: until a moment ago I didn't know I wore glasses. I thought: now I can perceive change. And knowing that now I knew I needed glasses to see, I was afraid, and I bent down and found my glasses (what a difference between having them on and not having them on!) and I stood up and the Impala was still there, which makes me think that I must have moved as fast as only certain madmen can, and I saw the Impala, and with my glasses, the glasses that until just then I hadn't known I possessed, I peered into the darkness, searching for the driver's face, half eager and half afraid, because I thought that I would see Cesárea Tinajero, the lost poet, at the wheel of my lost Impala, I thought that Cesárea Tinajero was emerging from the past to bring me back the car I'd loved most in my life, the car that had meant the most to me and that I'd had the least time to enjoy. But it wasn't Cesárea who was driving it. In fact, no one was driving my ghost Impala! Or so I thought. But then I realized that cars don't drive themselves and that some poor, short, severely depressed little man was probably driving that beat-up Impala, and I returned to the party bowed down by an enormous weight.

When I was halfway there, though, I had an idea and I turned around, but the Impala was no longer in the street, visible or invisible, now you see it, now you don't. The street had become a jigsaw of shadows with several pieces missing, and one of the pieces missing, oddly enough, was me. My Impala was gone. And in some sense that I couldn't quite understand, I was gone too. My Impala was back inside my head again. I was back inside my head again.

Then, humbled and confused and in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer.

Andrés Ramírez, Bar El Cuerno de Oro, Calle Avenir, Barcelona, December 1988
. I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it. I left Chile on a long-ago day of 1975, on March 5 at eight p.m., to be precise, hidden in the hold of the cargo ship
Napoli
. In other words, as a common stowaway, with no idea of my final destination. I'll spare you the variously unpleasant details of the crossing. Put it this way: I was thirteen years younger than I am now and in my neighborhood in Santiago (La Cisterna, that is), my friends knew me as Mighty Mouse, after the funny, crime-fighting little animal that did so much to brighten the afternoons when we were children. In short, the man you see before you was prepared to put up with every hardship of such a voyage. At least physically, as they say. Never mind the hunger, the fear, the seasickness, the uncertainty of what lay ahead, alternately dim or terrifying. There was always some charitable soul who would venture down to the bilge with a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, a little bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Besides, I had all the time in the world to think, something nearly impossible in my previous life, since as we all know, in modern cities it doesn't pay to be idle. And so I was able to examine my childhood (when you're stuck in the bottom of a boat it's best to do these things in an organized way) in more or less the time it took us to reach the Panama Canal. From then on, or in other words as long as it took us to cross the Atlantic (
ay
, already so far from my beloved country and even my continent, not that I'd seen much of it, but I felt a deep affection for it all the same), I set out to dissect what had become of my youth. And I concluded that everything had to change, even if I wasn't sure just then how to go about it or what path to take. Really, though, I was only killing time, keeping up my strength and my spirits, since I was already near the end of my rope after so many days in that damp, echoing darkness, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Then one morning we docked in Lisbon and my thoughts took a new tack. Naturally, my first impulse was to disembark then and there, but one of the Italian sailors who sometimes fed me explained that a person in my position would have trouble at the Portuguese borders, by sea or by land. So I had to sit tight, and for two days that seemed like two weeks, all I could do was listen to the voices in the ship's hold, which hung open like the jaws of a whale. There, in my barrel, I got sicker and more impatient with each passing moment, shaking with chills that struck at random intervals. Then finally one night we set sail and left behind the industrious Portuguese capital that I envisioned, in my fever dreams, as a black city, with people dressed in black and houses built of mahogany or black marble or stone, maybe because while I was crouched there, burning up and half asleep, I thought of Eusebio, the Black Panther of the team that fought so valiantly in the England World Cup of ' 66, in which we Chileans were treated so unfairly.