The Savage Detectives (63 page)

Felipe Müller, Bar Céntrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona, September 1995
. This is an airport story. Arturo told it to me in the Barcelona airport. It's the story of two writers. Nebulous, in the end. Stories told in airports are soon forgotten, unless they're love stories, and this one isn't. I think we'd met the writers. At least he had. In Barcelona, Paris, Mexico? That I don't know. One of the writers was from Peru, the other was Cuban, although I'm not one hundred percent sure of that either. When he told me the story, Arturo not only knew where they were from, he also told me their names. But I wasn't paying much attention. I think, at least I'd guess, that they were of our generation, which means they were born in the 1950s. Their fates, according to Arturo, and this I do remember clearly, were instructive. The Peruvian was a Marxist, or at least his reading followed those lines: he was acquainted with Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser. But he had also read Hegel, Kant, some of the Greeks. The Cuban was a happy storyteller. That should be capitalized: a Happy Storyteller. Instead of theory, he read novelists, poets, short story writers. Both of them, the Peruvian and the Cuban, were born into poor families, working-class in the one case, peasants in the other. Both grew up happy, with a talent for happiness. Each had the will to be happy. Arturo said that they must both have been beautiful children. Well, I think all children are beautiful. They discovered their literary callings early on, of course: the Peruvian wrote poems and the Cuban wrote stories. Both believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin American writer born in the fifties. Then they grew up and experienced the full flush of success: their books were published, all the critics unanimously praised them, they were hailed as the continent's top young writers, one in poetry and the other in fiction, and although it was never spoken everyone began to await their definitive works. But then the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers or the best of the writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. How did this vision affect their works? At first, in a scarcely perceptible way: as if a sheet of glass lying on top of another sheet of glass were shifted slightly. Only a few friends noticed. Then, inescapably, they headed for catastrophe or the abyss. The Peruvian received a grant and left Lima. For a while he traveled through Latin America, but he soon set off for Barcelona and then Paris. Arturo met him in Mexico, I think, but it was in Barcelona that they became close. In those days everything seemed to point to a meteoric career, and yet with very few exceptions, Spanish editors and writers showed no interest in his work. Who can say why? Then he left for Paris, where he made contact with a student group of Peruvian Maoists. According to Arturo, the Peruvian had always been a Maoist, a playful and irresponsible Maoist, a salon Maoist, but in Paris he let himself be convinced, one way or another, that he was the reincarnation of Mariátegui, the hammer or the anvil, I don't remember which, scourge of the paper tigers roaming in Latin America. Why did Belano think it was all just a game for his Peruvian friend? Well, he had reason enough: one day the Peruvian might write pages of revolting propaganda and the next day an almost illegible essay on Octavio Paz full of flattery and praise of the Mexican poet. For a Maoist, that showed a certain lack of seriousness. It wasn't consistent. Actually, the Peruvian had always been hopeless as an essayist, it didn't matter if he was playing spokesman of the dispossessed or extolling Paz's poetry. And yet he was still a good poet, occasionally very good. Daring, innovative. One day, the Peruvian decided to return to Peru. Maybe he thought the moment had come for the new Mariátegui to return to his native soil, or maybe he just wanted to use what was left of his grant to live somewhere cheaper and set to work on his new projects without interruption. But he was unlucky. He had hardly set foot in the Lima airport when the Shining Path rose up as if it had been waiting for him. Here, suddenly, was a force to be reckoned with, a force that threatened to spread all over Peru. Clearly, the Peruvian couldn't retreat to a little town in the mountains to write. That was when everything started to go wrong. The bright hope of Peruvian letters disappeared and was replaced by someone who was increasingly afraid, increasingly unbalanced, someone who couldn't get over having traded Barcelona and Paris for Lima, where the only people who didn't despise his poetry loathed him as a revisionist or a traitorous dog, and where, in the eyes of the police, he had been one of the ideologues of the millenarian guerrilla movement (which, in a certain way, was true). In other words, the Peruvian suddenly found himself stranded in a country where he might just as easily be assassinated by the police as by the Shining Path. Both groups had more than sufficient cause; both felt affronted by what he had written. From that moment on, everything he did to save himself brought him irrevocably closer to destruction. To make a long story short: the Peruvian came unglued. The former admirer of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution was transformed into a believer in the theories of Madame Blavatsky. He returned to the Catholic church. He became a fervent follower of John Paul II and a bitter enemy of liberation theology. And yet the police refused to believe in this metamorphosis and he remained on file as a potential threat. His poet friends, on the other hand, those who expected something of him, did believe him and stopped speaking to him. It wasn't long before his wife left him too. But the Peruvian persisted in his madness and stood his ground, digging in his heels. He wasn't making any money, of course. He went to live with his father, who supported him. When his father died, his mother supported him. And of course, he never stopped writing or turning out huge, uneven books punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant, shaky humor. Years later, he would sometimes boast that he'd been chaste since 1985. Also: he lost any hint of shame, composure, or discretion. He went over the top (notably over the top, that is, since this is Latin American writers we're talking about) in his praise of others and he completely lost his sense of the ridiculous in complimenting himself. And yet, every once in a while he wrote beautiful poems. According to Arturo, the Peruvian believed that the two greatest American poets were Whitman and himself. A strange case. The Cuban was a different story. He was gay and the revolutionary authorities weren't prepared to tolerate homosexuals, so after a brief moment of glory during which he wrote two excellent novels (also brief), it wasn't long before he was dragged through the shit and madness that passes for a revolution. Gradually, they began to take away what little he had. He lost his job, no one would publish him, he was pressured to become a police informer, he was followed, his mail was intercepted, in the end they threw him in jail. It seems the revolutionaries had two aims: to cure the Cuban of his homosexuality and, once he was cured, to persuade him to work for his country. Both were a joke. The Cuban held out. Like all good (or bad) Latin Americans, he wasn't afraid of the police or poverty or not being published. He had countless adventures on the island. He survived it all and kept his wits about him. One day he escaped. He made it to the United States. His books began to be published. He started to work even harder than before, if possible, but he and Miami weren't made for each other. He headed to New York. He had lovers. He got AIDS. In Cuba they went so far as to say: you see, if he'd stayed here, he wouldn't have died. For a while he was in Spain. His last days were hard: he wanted to finish the book he was writing and he could barely type. Still, he finished it. Sometimes he would sit at the window of his New York apartment and think about what he could have done and what, in the end, he did. His last days were days of loneliness, suffering, and rage at what he had lost forever. He didn't want to die in a hospital. That's what Arturo told me as we were waiting for the plane that would carry him away from Spain forever. The dream of Revolution, a hot nightmare. You and I are Chilean, I told him, and none of this is our fault. He looked at me and didn't answer. Then he laughed. He gave me a kiss on each cheek and left. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.

Clara Cabeza, Parque Hundido, Mexico City DF, October 1995
. I was Octavio Paz's secretary. You can't imagine how much work it was. Writing letters, finding impossible-to-find manuscripts, calling contributors to the magazine, tracking down books that had ceased to exist outside of one or two North American universities. After two years of working for Don Octavio I had a chronic headache that set in around eleven in the morning and wouldn't go away until six in the evening, no matter how many aspirin I took. In general, I preferred the tasks that were most like housework, making breakfast or helping the maid with lunch. That was work I enjoyed, and it was also a rest for my tortured mind. I usually got to the house around seven in the morning, before the traffic got too bad, or at least before it was as terrible as at rush hour, and I would prepare coffee, tea, orange juice, two pieces of toast, a simple breakfast, and then take the tray into Don Octavio's bedroom and say Don Octavio, wake up, it's a new day. But Señora María José would be the first to open her eyes and she was always cheerful when she woke up, her voice coming out of the darkness and saying: leave breakfast on the bedside table, Clara, and I would say good morning, Señora, it's a new day. Then I would go back to the kitchen and make my own breakfast, something light like the señores' breakfast, coffee, orange juice, a piece of toast or two with jam, and then I would go into the library and get to work.

You don't know the stacks of letters Don Octavio received and how hard it was to file them. As you can imagine, people wrote to him from every corner of the globe, all kinds of people, from other Nobel laureates to young English or Italian or French poets. I'm not saying that Don Octavio answered every letter, he probably only answered fifteen or twenty percent of them, but the rest still had to be classified and filed, don't ask me why, I'd have been happy to throw them away. At least the filing system was simple: we sorted them by nationality, and when a writer's nationality wasn't clear (this was often the case with letters written in Spanish, English, or French), we sorted them by language. Sometimes, while I was going through the mail, I would start to think about the workdays of the secretaries of pop singers or rock stars, and I would wonder whether they had to deal with as many letters as I did. Maybe so, but I'm sure they didn't get letters in as many languages. Sometimes Don Octavio would even receive letters in Chinese, which says it all. When that happened, I had to put the letters aside in a separate little pile that we called
marginalia excentricorum
, which Don Octavio would go through once a week. Then, but this only happened very occasionally, he would say Clarita, take the car and go see my friend Nagahiro. All right, Don Octavio, I would say, but it wasn't as simple as he made it sound. First I would spend all morning calling this Nagahiro and when I reached him at last, I would say Don Nagahiro, I have a few little things for you to translate, and we would make a date for some day that week. Sometimes I would send the papers to him by mail or messenger, but when it was important, which I could tell by the expression on Don Octavio's face, I would go in person and not leave Señor Nagahiro's side until he had at least given me a brief summary of what the papers or letter said, a summary that I would take down in shorthand in my little notebook and then type out later, print, and leave on Don Octavio's desk, on the left side, so that if he wanted he could take a look at it and satisfy his curiosity.

And then there were the letters that Don Octavio sent. That really was exasperating work, because he would write quite a number each week, say sixteen more or less, to the unlikeliest places in the world, which was an astounding thing to see, because one had to ask how the man had made so many friends in so many different places, even mismatched places like Trieste and Sydney, Cordoba and Helsinki, Naples and Bocas del Toro (Panama), Limoges and New Delhi, Glasgow and Monterrey. And he had words of encouragement for everyone, or one of those thoughts that he would mutter to himself and that I suppose gave the recipient something to think about and mull over. It would be wrong to reveal what he said in his letters, so all I'll say is that he talked about more or less the same things he talks about in his essays and poems: pretty things, somber things, and otherness, which is something I've thought about a lot, like many Mexican intellectuals, I suppose, and have never quite been able to figure out. Another thing I did, and willingly, was act as nurse, since I happened to have taken a few first aid courses. By then, Don Octavio wasn't what you might call healthy and he had to take pills every day, and since he always had other things on his mind, he would forget when he had to take them, and then it would all be a muddle, did I take this one at noon, didn't I take that one at eight this morning, anyway, a confusion that I'm proud to say I put an end to, since I even made sure he took what he was supposed to take when I wasn't there, like clockwork. In order to do that, I would call him from my apartment or wherever I happened to be and ask the maid: has Don Octavio taken his eight o'clock pills yet? and the maid would go and see, and if the pills that I'd left ready in a plastic container were still there, then I would tell her: give them to him and make him take them. Sometimes I would speak to the señora instead of the maid, but just the same, I'd say: has Don Octavio taken his medicine? and Señora María José would laugh and say oh Clarisa, she called me Clarisa sometimes, I don't know why, one of these days you'll make me jealous, and when Señora María José said that I would blush a little and somehow be afraid that she would see me blushing, can you imagine? as if she could see anything when we were talking on the phone! but I still kept calling and insisting that he take his pills on time, because otherwise how were they supposed to do him any good?

Another thing I did was keep Don Octavio's calendar, which was full of social engagements, everything from parties and conferences to invitations and art openings to birthday parties and the awarding of honorary doctorates. The truth is that if he'd gone to all of those events the poor man wouldn't have been able to write a single line of poetry, never mind his essays. So when I had prepared his calendar he and Señora María José would go over it with a fine-tooth comb and rule things out, and sometimes I would watch them from my little corner and say to myself: that's right, Don Octavio, punish them with your indifference.

And then came the era of Parque Hundido, a place that isn't one bit interesting, if you want my opinion. Maybe it used to be, but today it's become a jungle swarming with thieves, rapists, drunks, and disreputable women.

It happened like this. One morning, when I'd just gotten to the house and it wasn't even eight yet, I found Don Octavio up already, waiting for me in the kitchen. As soon as he saw me, he said: I'll trouble you to take me for a drive, Clarita, in your car. What do you think of that? As if I'd ever refused to do anything he asked me to do. So I said: just tell me where you'd like to go, Don Octavio. But he motioned to me without saying anything, and we went outside. He settled himself beside me in the car, which incidentally is only a Volkswagen, so it isn't very comfortable. When I saw him sitting there with that absent look of his, I felt a little sorry that I didn't have a better vehicle to offer him, although I didn't say anything because it also occurred to me that if I apologized he might take it as a kind of reproach, since after all he was the one who paid me and if I didn't have enough money for a better car a person could say it was his fault, which is something I'd never even have dreamed of suggesting. So I was quiet, concealing my thoughts as best I could, and I started the car. We took the first streets at random. Then we drove around Coyoacán, and finally turned up Insurgentes. When Parque Hundido appeared, he ordered me to park wherever I could. Then we got out of the car and after Don Octavio took a look around, he walked into the park, which at that time of day wasn't exactly crowded but wasn't empty either. This must bring back some memory for him, I thought. The farther we walked, the lonelier it became. I noticed that through carelessness or laziness or lack of funds or shameless irresponsibility, the park had been left in a shocking state of neglect. Once we were deep in the park we sat on a bench and Don Octavio looked up at the treetops or the sky and then he murmured some words that I didn't understand. Before we left I had grabbed the pills and a little bottle of water and since it was time for him to take them and we were sitting down now, I gave them to him. Don Octavio looked at me as if I'd gone mad but he swallowed the pills without complaint. Then he said: you stay here, Clarita, and he got up and went walking along a little dirt path scattered with pine needles, and I did as he said. It was nice to sit there, I have to admit. Sometimes, along other paths, I would see the figures of maids taking a shortcut or students who had decided not to go to class that morning. The air was breathable, the pollution wouldn't be so bad that day, and from time to time I think I even heard a bird chirp. Meanwhile, Don Octavio was walking. He walked in wider and wider circles and sometimes he would step off the path onto the grass, grass that was sickly from having been trampled so often and that the gardeners probably didn't even tend anymore.

It was then that I saw the man. He was walking in circles too and his steps took him along the same path, but in the opposite direction, so that he would have to pass Don Octavio. For me, it was as if an alarm had gone off in my chest. I got up and tensed all my muscles in case it would be necessary for me to intervene, since I happened to have taken a course in karate and judo a few years before with Doctor Ken Takeshi, whose real name was Jesús García Pedraza and who had been a member of the federal police. But it wasn't necessary: when the man passed Don Octavio he didn't even raise his head. So I stayed where I was and this is what I saw: Don Octavio, when he passed the man, stopped and stood still as if he were thinking, then he started to walk again, but this time he wasn't moving as aimlessly or as nonchalantly as he had been a few minutes before but rather seemed to be calculating the moment that the two trajectories, his and the stranger's, would cross again. And when the stranger passed Don Octavio once more, Don Octavio turned and stood there staring at him with real curiosity. The stranger looked at Don Octavio too, and I would say that he recognized him, which is hardly surprising, since everybody, and when I say everybody, I mean literally everybody, knows who he is. On our way home Don Octavio's mood had altered notably. His eyes were brighter and he was more energetic, as if the long morning walk had given him new strength. I remember that at some point during the trip he recited some very pretty lines of poetry in English and I asked him who the poet was and he said a name, it must have been the name of an English poet, I forget what it was, and then, as if to change the subject, he asked me why I'd been so nervous, and I remember that at first I didn't answer, maybe I just exclaimed oh, Don Octavio, and then I explained that Parque Hundido was hardly a peaceful spot, a place where one could walk and think without fear of being attacked by ruffians. And then Don Octavio looked at me and said in a voice that seemed to come straight from the heart of a wolf: no one attacks me, not even the president of the Republic. And he said it with such certainty that I believed him and thought it best not to say anything else.

The next day, Don Octavio was waiting for me when I got to the house. We left without speaking a word and I drove, silly me, toward Coyoacán, but when Don Octavio noticed he told me to head for Parque Hundido without further delay. The story repeated itself. Don Octavio left me sitting on a bench and started to walk in circles in the same place he had the day before. Before that, I gave him his pills and he took them without a fuss. A little while later the other man showed up. When Don Octavio saw him he couldn't help looking at me from the distance as if to say: you see, Clarita, everything I do is for a reason. The stranger looked at me too and then he looked at Don Octavio and for a second it seemed to me that he wavered, his steps faltering and becoming more hesitant. But he didn't turn around, as I began to fear he might, and he and Don Octavio set off again and passed each other again and each time they passed each other they would raise their eyes from the ground and look each other in the face and I realized that at first both of them were wary of each other, but by the third time around they were immersed in their own thoughts and didn't even look at each other when they crossed paths. And I think it was then that it occurred to me that neither of the two was speaking, I mean, neither one was muttering
words
, but numbers, that the two of them were counting something, maybe not their steps, which is the only thing I can think of now that makes sense, but something like that, random numbers, possibly, adding or subtracting, multiplying or dividing. When we left, Don Octavio was tired. His eyes were shining, those beautiful eyes of his, but otherwise he looked as if he had just run a race. I confess that for a moment I was worried and I thought that if something happened to him it would be my fault. I imagined Don Octavio having a heart attack, I imagined him dead, and then I imagined all the Mexican writers who love him so much (especially the poets) surrounding me in the visitors' lounge at the hospital where Don Octavio has his checkups and asking me with frankly hostile stares what in the world I'd done to the only Mexican Nobel laureate, how Don Octavio could possibly have been expiring in Parque Hundido, such an unpoetic spot, and so far from my boss's urban haunts. And in my imagination I didn't know what answer to give them, except to tell them the truth, which at the same time I knew wasn't going to convince them, so why bother, better to say nothing, and that's what I was thinking, driving along the increasingly unbearable streets of Mexico City and imagining myself plunged into situations full of blame and recrimination, when I heard Don Octavio say let's go to the university, Clarita, there's something I need to ask a friend. And although at that moment Don Octavio looked the same as he always had, as in command of himself as ever, the truth is that I could no longer rid myself of a nagging worry, the weight of dark foreboding. Especially when at five that afternoon Don Octavio called me into his library and asked me to make a list of Mexican poets born since 1950, a request no stranger than many others, it's true, but highly disturbing given the matter we were involved in. I think Don Octavio realized how nervous I was, which wouldn't have been particularly difficult since my hands were shaking. I felt like a little bird in the middle of a storm. Half an hour later he called for me again and when I came he looked me in the eyes and asked me whether I trusted him. What a question, Don Octavio, I said, the things that occur to you. And he repeated the question, as if he hadn't heard me. Of course I do, I said, I trust you more than anyone. Then he said: not a word to a single person about anything I tell you here or what you've seen or what you'll see tomorrow. Agreed? I swear on my mother's grave, may she rest in peace, I said. And then he made a gesture as if he were shooing away flies and he said I know that boy. Really? I said. And he said: many years ago, Clarita, a group of radical leftist lunatics planned to kidnap me. I can't believe it, Don Octavio, I said and I started trembling all over again. Well, they did, he said, such are the vicissitudes of life as a public figure, Clarita, stop shaking, pour yourself a whiskey or whatever you like, but calm down. And that man is one of the terrorists? I said. I think so, he said. And what in the world did they want to kidnap you for, Don Octavio? I said. It's a mystery to me, he said, maybe they were offended because I didn't pay them any attention. It's possible, I said, people bear grudges for all kinds of silly reasons. But maybe that wasn't what it was about, maybe it was just a joke. A fine joke, I said. In any case, they never actually tried to kidnap me, he said, but they announced it with great fanfare, and so I got wind of it. And when you found out, what did you do? I said. Nothing, Clarita, I laughed a little and then I forgot about them forever, he said.