"The Savage Detectives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bolaño Roberto)

7

Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, July 1977. When Ulises Lima got to Paris, the only people he knew were a Peruvian poet who'd been living in exile in Mexico and me. I'd only met him once, at Café Quito, one night when I had a date with Arturo Belano. The three of us talked for a while, the time it took us to drink our coffee, and then Arturo and I left.

I did know Arturo well, though I haven't seen him since then and I'll probably never see him again. What was I doing in Mexico? Studying anthropology, in theory. In practice I was traveling, seeing the country. I went to lots of parties too. It's incredible how much free time Mexicans have. Of course, the money didn't stretch far enough for my purposes (I was on scholarship), so I got a job with a photographer, Jimmy Cetina, whom I met at a party at a hotel, the Vasco de Quiroga on Calle Londres, I think. My finances improved considerably. Jimmy did artistic nudes, as he called them, though they were really soft porn, full frontals and provocative poses, or strip-tease sequences, all in his studio at the top of a building on Bucareli.

I can't remember now how I met Arturo, maybe it was after a photo session in Jimmy Cetina's building, maybe at a bar, maybe it was a party. It might have been at the pizza place run by an American whom everybody called Jerry Lewis. In Mexico people meet in the most unlikely places. Anyway, we met and we hit it off, although it was almost a year before we slept together.

He was interested in all things French. In that sense, he was a little naïve. For example, he thought that I, who was studying anthropology, must necessarily know the work of Max Jacob (the name rang a bell, but that was all), and when I told him no, when I told him French girls read other things (in my case, Agatha Christie), he simply didn't believe me. He thought I was kidding. But he was considerate, I mean, he always seemed to be thinking in terms of literature, but he wasn't a fanatic, he didn't look down on you if you'd never in your life read Jacques Rigaut, he even liked Agatha Christie too, and sometimes we would spend hours talking about one of her novels, going over the puzzles (I have a terrible memory, but his was excellent), reconstructing those impossible murders.

I don't know what it was that attracted me to him. One day I brought him with me to the apartment where I lived with three other anthropology students, an American from Colorado and two French girls, and finally, at four in the morning, we ended up in bed. I'd warned him earlier about one of my quirks. I told him, half serious, half joking (we were laughing in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, where the sculptures are, horrible sculptures): Arturo, never sleep with me, because I'm a masochist. What do you mean by that? he said. That I like to be hit when I'm making love, that's all. Then Arturo stopped laughing. Are you serious? he said. Completely serious, I said. And how do you like to be hit? he said. I like to be slapped, I said, hit in the face, spanked, that kind of thing. Hard? he said. No, not very hard, I said. You must not screw much in Mexico, he said, after thinking awhile. I asked what made him say that. The bruises, Miss Marple, he said, I've never seen a mark on you. Of course I have sex, I replied, I'm a masochist, not an animal. Arturo laughed. I think he thought I was joking. So that night, or that morning, actually, when we ended up in my bed, he was very gentle with me and I couldn't bring myself to stop him, if he wanted to lick me all over and kiss me softly, let him, but soon I noticed that he wasn't getting hard, and I took him in my hand and stroked him for a while, but nothing happened, and then I asked him, whispering in his ear, whether something was bothering him, and he said no, he was fine, and we kept touching each other for a while longer, but it was clear that he wasn't going to get it up, and then I said this is no good, stop trying, that's enough, if you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood, and he lit a cigarette (he smoked a kind called Bali, such a funny name) and then he started to talk about the last movie he'd seen, and then he got up and paced around the room naked, smoking and looking at my things, and then he sat on the floor, beside the bed, and started to look through my pictures, some of Jimmy Cetina's artistic shots that I don't know why I'd kept, because I'm stupid, probably, and I asked him whether they turned him on, and he said no but that they were all right, that I looked all right, you're very beautiful, Simone, he said, and it was then, I don't know why, that it occurred to me to tell him to get in bed, to get on top of me and slap me on the cheeks or the ass a little, and he looked at me and said I can't do that, Simone, and then he corrected himself and said: that's another thing I can't do, Simone, but I said come on, be brave, get in bed, and he got in, and I turned over and raised my buttocks and said: just take it slowly, pretend it's a game, and he gave me the first blow and I buried my face in the pillow, I haven't read Rigaut, I said, or Max Jacob, or boring Banville, Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, or Corbiere, required reading, but I have read the Marquis de Sade. Oh really? he said. Yes, I said, stroking his dick. He had started slapping me on the ass as if he meant it. What have you read by the Marquis de Sade? Philosophy in the Boudoir, I said. And Justine? Naturally, I said. And Juliette? Of course. By then I was wet and moaning and Arturo's dick was as stiff as a rod, so I turned around, spread my legs and told him to put it in, but no more, not to move until I told him to. It was delicious to feel him inside of me. Hit me, I said. On the face, on the cheeks. Put your fingers in my mouth. He hit me. Harder! I said. He hit me harder. Now start to move, I said. For a few seconds the only sounds in the room were my moans and the blows. Then he started to moan too.

We made love until dawn. When we were done he lit a Bali and asked me whether I'd read the Marquis de Sade's plays. I said I hadn't, that it was the first I'd heard that de Sade wrote plays. Not only did he write plays, said Arturo, he wrote lots of letters to theater impresarios urging them to stage what he'd written. But of course, no one dared to put on anything by him, since they would have ended up in prison (we laughed), although the incredible thing is that the marquis persisted, making all kinds of calculations in his letters, down to how much should be spent on wardrobe, and the saddest thing of all is that his figures add up, they're good! the plays would have made money. But were they pornographic? I asked. No, said Arturo, they were philosophical, with some sex.

We were lovers for a while. Three months, to be exact, the time I had left before I went back to Paris. We didn't make love every night. We didn't see each other every night. But we did it every way possible. He tied me up, hit me, sodomized me. He never left a mark, except a reddened ass, which says something about how gentle he was. A little bit longer and I would have ended up getting used to him. Needing him, in other words, and he would've ended up getting used to me. But we didn't give ourselves time. We were just friends. We talked about the Marquis de Sade, Agatha Christie, life in general. When I met him he was a Mexican like any other Mexican, but toward the end he felt more and more like a foreigner. Once I said: you Mexicans are like this or that, and he said I'm not Mexican, Simone, I'm Chilean, a little sadly, it's true, but like he meant it.

So when Ulises Lima showed up at my place and said I'm a friend of Arturo Belano's, I felt a rush of happiness, although later, when I found out that Arturo was in Europe too and hadn't even had the courtesy to send me a postcard, I was annoyed. By then I had an essentially boring, bureaucratic job at the anthropology department at the Université Paris-Nord, and with Ulises there at least I could practice my Spanish, which was getting a little rusty.

Ulises Lima lived on the Rue des Eaux. Once, just once, I went to visit him there. I'd never seen a worse chambre de bonne. It had one tiny window, which didn't open and looked out onto a dark, filthy airshaft. There was hardly room for a bed and a kind of ramshackle nursery table. There was no wardrobe or closet, so his clothes were still in suitcases or strewn around the room. When I came in I felt like throwing up. I asked him how much he paid for it. When he told me, I realized that someone was ripping him off. Whoever found you this room cheated you, I told him, this is a dump, the city is full of better rooms. I'm sure it is, he said, but then he argued that he didn't plan to stay long in Paris and he didn't want to waste time looking for anything better.

We didn't see each other often, and when we did it was always his doing. Sometimes he'd call and other times he just showed up at my building and asked if I felt like a walk, or coffee, or a movie. I usually said I was busy, studying or working on something for the department, but sometimes I agreed and we'd take a walk. We always ended up at a bar on the Rue de la Lune, eating pasta and drinking wine and talking about Mexico. He usually paid, which is odd now that I think about it, since as far as I know he wasn't working. He read a lot. He always had several books under his arm, all in French, though truth be told he was far from mastering the language (as I said, we made a point of speaking Spanish). One night he told me his plans. He was going to spend some time in Paris and then head for Israel. I smiled in shock and disbelief when he told me. Why Israel? Because he had a friend there. That's what he said. Is that the only reason? I asked incredulously. The only one.

As a matter of fact, nothing he did ever seemed to be planned out.

What was he like as a person? He was laid-back, calm, somewhat distant but not cold. Actually, he could be very warm, unlike Arturo, who was intense and sometimes seemed to hate everybody. Not Ulises. He was respectful. Ironic but respectful. He accepted people for what they were and never seemed to be trying to invade your privacy, which was often not the case with Latin Americans, in my experience.

Hipólito Garcés, Avenue Marcel Proust, Paris, August 1977. When my buddy Ulises Lima showed up in Paris I was thrilled, honest to God. I found him a nice little chambre on the Rue des Eaux, close to where I was living. From Marcel Proust to his place it was hardly any distance at all. You went left, toward Avenue René Boylesve, then turned onto Charles Dickens, and you were on the Rue des Eaux. So we were practically next door, as they say. I had a hot plate in my room and I cooked every day, and Ulises would come eat at my place. But I said: you've got to let me have a little something for it, pues. And he said: Polito, I'll give you money, don't worry, that seems fair, since you buy the food and you cook it too. How much do you want? And I said give me one hundred dollars, pues, Ulises, and that'll be the end of it. And he said that he didn't have any dollars left, all he had were francs, so that was what he gave me. He had the cash and he was a trusting guy.

One day, though, he said: Polito, I'm eating worse every day, how can a goddamn plate of rice cost so much? I explained to him that rice in France was expensive, not like in Mexico or Peru, here a kilo of rice costs an arm and a leg, pues, Ulises, I told him. He gave me this look, in the brooding kind of way Mexicans do, and he said all right, but at least buy a can of tomato sauce because I'm sick of eating white rice. Of course, I said, and I'll buy wine too, which I forgot because I was in a hurry, but you have to give me a little more money. He gave it to me and the next day I made him his plate of rice with tomato sauce and poured him a glass of red wine. But the next day the wine was gone (I drank it, I admit) and two days later the tomato sauce ran out and he was back to eating plain white rice. And then I made macaroni. Let's see, I'm trying to remember. Then I made lentils, which have lots of iron and are nutritious. And when the lentils were gone I made chickpeas. And then I made white rice again. And one day Ulises stood up and half jokingly let me have it. Polito, he said, I get the feeling you're pulling a fast one. You make the plainest and most expensive food in Paris. No, man, I told him, no, mi causita, you have no idea how expensive things are, but the next day he didn't come to eat. Three days went by and there was no sign of him. After that I stopped by his room on the Rue des Eaux. He wasn't there. But I had to see him, so I sat in the hall waiting for him to get home.

He showed up around three in the morning. And when he saw me in the hall, in the dark of that long, nasty-smelling hall, he stopped and stood where he was, about twenty feet from me, with his legs braced, like he was expecting me to attack him. But the funny thing was that he was quiet too, he didn't say a word. Holy shit, I thought, old Ulises is pissed and he's going to disemfuckingbowel me right here in this hallway. So I thought it over and stayed where I was. What kind of threat is a shadow on the floor? And I called him by name, Ulises, causita, it's me, Polito, and he says Polito! what the hell are you doing here this time of night, Polito, and then I realized that he hadn't known who I was before and I thought who is this motherfucker expecting? Who did he think I was? And I swear on my mother's grave that right then I was more afraid than before, I don't know why, it must have been how late it was, or that gloomy hall, or my poet's imagination running away with me. Shit, I actually started to shake. I thought I saw another shadow behind Ulises Lima's shadow in the hall. By then, frankly, I was afraid to go down the eight flights of stairs to get out of that spooky place. And yet all I wanted was to run away. But at that moment my fear of being left alone was even stronger. When I got up, one of my legs had a cramp, and I asked Ulises if I could come in. Then he seemed to wake up, and he said of course, Polito, and he opened the door. When we were inside, with the light on, I felt the blood start to circulate in my veins again, and like a heartless bastard, I showed him the books I'd brought. Ulises looked at them one by one and said they were all right, though I know he was dying to have them. I brought them to sell to you, I said. How much do you want for them? he said. I named some crazy sum, to see what would happen.

Ulises looked at me and said all right, then he put his hand in his pocket and paid me, and stood there looking at me without saying anything. All right, man, I said, well, I'm going now. Should I have a delicious meal waiting for you tomorrow? No, he said, don't expect me. But you will come one of these days, won't you? Remember that if you don't eat you'll starve to death, I said. I'm not coming again, Polito, he said. I don't know what was wrong with me. Inside I was scared shitless (the idea of heading out, walking down the hall, going down the stairs, was killing me), but on the outside I started to talk. Fuck, suddenly I was talking, hearing myself talk, like my voice wasn't mine and the bitch had taken off rambling on its own. I said you have no right, Ulises, with the money I've spent on provisions, if you could see all the good things I've bought, and what do I do with them now? do they rot? do I shove everything down my own throat, Ulises? Is that what you want me to do? What if I get indigestion or stomach cramps from stuffing my face? Answer me, pues, Ulises, don't pretend you can't hear me. That kind of thing. No matter that inside of me I was saying to myself shut up, pues, Polito, you're going too far, this could get ugly, don't push it, shithead-on the outside, in the kind of half-asleep state I was in, my face and lips numb, my tongue flapping loose, the words (words that for once I didn't want to speak!) kept coming out and I heard myself say: what kind of friend are you, Ulises? when I spoiled you like you were more than my buddy, like you were my own brother, causita, my little brother, goddamn it, Ulises, and now you turn your back on me like this. Etc., etc. Why go on? All I can say is that I talked and talked, and Ulises, who stood facing me in that room, so small it seemed more like a coffin, never once took his eyes off me, perfectly still, never doing what I assumed he'd do, what I was afraid he'd do, just standing there like he was letting me dig myself into a hole, like he was saying to himself Polito has two minutes left, a minute and a half, one minute, Polito's got fifty seconds left, poor guy, ten seconds. And I swear it was like I was seeing each and every hair on my body, as if while my eyes were open, another pair of eyes, closed eyes, were scanning every inch of my skin and counting up each hair, eyes that could see more when they were closed than my open eyes could see. I know that doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I couldn't take it anymore and I collapsed on the bed like a slut and I said: Ulises, I feel like shit, Ulises, man, my life is a disaster, I don't know what's wrong with me, I try to do things right but everything turns out wrong, I should go back to Peru, this city is fucking killing me, I'm not the same person I used to be, and on and on I went, letting out everything that was torturing me inside, with my face in the blankets, in Ulises's blankets, I have no idea where they came from but they smelled bad, not just the typical unwashed smell of a chambre de bonne, and not like Ulises, but like something else, like death, an ominous smell that suddenly wormed its way into my brain and made me sit up, holy shit, Ulises, where did you get these blankets, causita, from the morgue? And Ulises was still standing there, not moving, listening to me, and then I thought this is my chance to go and I got up and reached out my hand and touched his shoulder. It was like touching a statue.

Roberto Rosas, Rue de Passy, Paris, September 1977. There were twelve rooms in our attic apartment. Eight of them were occupied by Latin Americans: one Chilean, Ricardito Barrientos; one Argentinian couple, Sofía Pellegrini and Miguelito Sabotinski; and the rest of us Peruvians, all poets, all at war with one another.

We liked to call our attic the Passy Commune or Passy Shanty-town.

We were always arguing and our favorite topics, or pretty much our only topics, were politics and literature. Ricardito Barrientos's room had been rented before by Polito Garcés, who was Peruvian and a poet too, but one day, after an emergency meeting, we decided to give him an ultimatum: Either you leave here this very week motherfucker or we'll kick you down the stairs, take a shit in your bed, put rat poison in your wine, or come up with something worse. Luckily Polito listened to us. If he hadn't I don't know what would've happened.

One day he came by, though, shuffling along as always, going into one room after another asking to borrow money (money he would never return), getting somebody to offer him a little coffee here, a drop of maté there (Sofía Pellegrini hated him like the plague), asking to borrow books, saying that he'd seen Bryce Echenique that week, or Julio Ramón Ribeyro, or that he'd had tea with Hinostroza. The first time you might believe him, the second time you might laugh, but after you'd heard the same lies over and over all you felt was disgust, pity, and alarm because it was clear that Polito wasn't right in the head. Who is, when you get right down to it? Still, none of us is as crazy as Polito.

Anyway, one day he came by, some evening when almost all of us happened to be around (I know because I heard him knock on other doors, I heard that voice of his, that unmistakable "how's it, causita"), and after a while his shadow fell across the threshold of my room, like he was afraid to come in without being asked, and then I said-and maybe I said it too abruptly-what do you want, motherfucker? and he laughed his little jackass laugh and said ay, Robertito, it's been a long time, man, I'm glad to see you haven't changed, look, I've got a poet here with me who I want you to meet, a buddy from Mexico.

Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor's smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.

It was Ulises Lima. That's how I met him. We became friends. Paris friends. He was nothing like Polito, of course. If he had been, we couldn't have been friends.

I don't remember how long he lived in Paris. I know we saw a lot of each other, even though we had very different personalities. But one day he told me he was leaving. How come, man? I asked, because as far as I knew he loved the city. I think I'm not well, he said, smiling. But is it anything serious? No, nothing serious, he said, just a nuisance. Well, I said, then that's all right, let's have a drink to celebrate. To Mexico! I said, raising my glass. I'm not going back to Mexico, he said, I'm going to Barcelona. What do you mean, man? I said. I have a friend there, and I'll stay at his place for a while. That was all he said and I didn't ask any more questions. Then we went out for more wine and sat drinking near the Porte de Bir Hakeim while I told him about my latest romantic adventures. But his mind was elsewhere, so we started to talk about poetry for a change, a subject I enjoy less and less these days.

I remember Ulises liked the young French poets. I can testify to that. We, the Passy Shantytown, thought they were disgusting. Spoiled brats or drug addicts. You have to understand, Ulises, I would say to him, we're revolutionaries, we've seen the insides of the jails of Latin America. So how can we care about poetry like that? And the bastard didn't say anything, just laughed. Once he took me to meet Michel Bulteau. Ulises spoke terrible French, so I had to do most of the talking. Then I met Mathieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, and Adeline, Bulteau's companion.

I didn't hit it off with any of them. I asked Faussot whether he could get one of my articles published in the magazine where he worked, this shitty little pop magazine, and he said he'd have to read the article first. A few days later I brought it to him and he didn't like it. I asked Messagier for the address of a French poet, a "grand old man of French letters" who had supposedly met Martín Adán on a trip he took to Lima in the forties, but Messagier wouldn't give it to me. He tried to tell me that the poet was wary of visitors. I'm not going to borrow money from him, I said, I just want to interview him, but it made no difference, it was out of the question. Finally I told Bulteau that I was going to translate him. He liked that and made no objection. I was joking, of course. But then I thought maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. And in fact, I set to work a few nights later. The poem I chose was "Sang de satin." It had never occurred to me before to translate poetry, although I'm a poet and poets are supposed to translate other poets. But no one had translated me, so why should I translate anyone else? Well, so it goes. This time it didn't seem like such a bad idea. Maybe it was because of Ulises, whose influence was making me question old assumptions. Maybe it just seemed like time to do something I'd never done before. I don't know. All I know is that I told Bulteau that I planned to translate him and I planned to publish my translation (publish is the key word) in a nonexistent Peruvian magazine (I made up the name), a magazine that counted Westphalen among its contributors, that's what I told him, and he was happy to agree, although I think he had no idea who Westphalen was, I might as well have said that the magazine published Huamán Poma, or Salazar Bondy. Anyway, I set to work.

I don't remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. "Sang de satin." From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin"? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to finish translating "Satin Blood" or "Blood of Satin," I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can't remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, September 1977. He never found anything remotely resembling a job. Honestly, I don't know what he lived on. He had money when he got here, that I know for a fact. The first few times we met he was always the one to pay, for coffee, calvados, a few glasses of wine, but he ran out of money fast and as far as I know he had no source of income.

Once he told me that he'd found a five-thousand-franc note in the street. After that, he said, he walked with his eyes on the ground.

After a while he found another bill.

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn't ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of the Latin Americans I know. I'm not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians. They had a kind of cleaning cooperative. They waxed office floors, washed windows, that kind of thing, and Ulises helped them out when one of the cooperative was sick or away from the city. Mostly he filled in when someone was sick, since the Peruvians didn't travel much, although in the summer some of them went off to harvest grapes in the Roussillon. They would leave in groups of two or three, sometimes they traveled alone, and before they left they would say they were off to the Costa Brava for a vacation. I saw them three times. They were miserable human beings. More than one of them tried to get me into bed.

With what you make, I said to Ulises once, you hardly manage to keep from starving. How do you expect to ever get to Israel? There's time, he answered, and that was the last we talked about money. Actually, now that I think about it, it's hard to say what kind of conversations we had. Just as with Arturo it was always clear (we talked about literature and sex, basically), with Ulises the boundaries were vague. Maybe this was because we saw each other so infrequently (although in his own way he was loyal to our friendship, loyal to my phone number). Maybe it was because he seemed to be, or was, someone who made no demands.

Sofía Pellegrini, sitting in the Jardins du Trocadero, Paris, September 1977. They called him the Christ of the Rue des Eaux and they all made fun of him, even Roberto Rosas, who claimed to be his best friend in Paris. They laughed at him because he was dumb, basically, or so they said. They used to say only a complete moron could let himself be fooled more than three times by Polito Garcés, but they were forgetting that Polito had fooled them too. The Christ of the Rue des Eaux. No, I never went to see his place. I know people said horrible things about it, that it was a filthy hole, that the worst junk in Paris piled up there: trash, magazines, newspapers, books he stole from bookstores, and that all of it soon began to smell like the place and then rotted, blossomed, turned all kinds of crazy colors. They said he could spend whole days without eating a thing, months without a visit to the public baths, but I doubt it because I never saw him looking especially dirty. Anyway, I didn't know him well, I wasn't his friend, but one day he came to our attic in Passy and there was no one home, just me, and I was in bad shape, I was depressed, I had been fighting with my boyfriend, things weren't going well for me, when he showed up I was crying in my chambre, the others had gone to the film society or one of their political meetings (they were all activists and revolutionaries), and Ulises Lima walked down the hallway and didn't knock on any of the doors, as if he knew beforehand that no one would be there, and he headed straight for my chambre, where I was sitting alone on the bed, staring at the wall, and he came in (he was clean, he smelled good) and stood there next to me, not saying anything, all he said was hello, Sofía, and he stayed there until I stopped crying. And that's why I remember him fondly.

Simone Darrieux, Rue des Petites Écuries, Paris, September 1977. Ulises Lima showered at my house. I was never thrilled about it. I don't like to use a towel after somebody else, especially if we aren't intimate in some way, physically and even emotionally, but still I let him use my shower, then I would gather up the towels and put them in the machine. It helped that he tried to be neat in my apartment. In his own way, but he tried and that's what counts. After I shower I scrub the bathtub and pick the hair out of the drain. It may seem trivial but it drives me up the wall. I hate to find clumps of hair clogging the drain, especially if it isn't mine. Then I pick up the towels I've used and fold them and leave them on the bidet until I have time to put them in the machine. The first few times he came he even brought his own soap, but I told him he didn't have to, that he should feel free to use my soap and shampoo but that he shouldn't even think about touching my sponge.

He was always very formal. He usually called the day before to ask whether it was a good time for him to come, checking to make sure I wouldn't have guests or plans, then we would set a time, and the next day he would arrive right when he said he would, then we'd talk a little and he would head into the bathroom. Then any number of days might go by before I heard from him again, sometimes a week, sometimes two or even three. In the meantime he must have showered at the public baths.

Once, at the bar on the Rue de la Lune, he told me that he liked the public baths where foreigners went to bathe, black people from Francophone Africa or the Maghreb. I pointed out that poor students went there too. That's true, he said, but especially foreigners. And once, I remember, he asked me whether I had ever been to the public baths in Mexico. Of course I hadn't. They're the real thing, he said. They have saunas, Turkish baths, steam baths. Some of the ones here do too, I told him, but they're more expensive. Not in Mexico, he said. In Mexico they're cheap. I'd never thought twice about Mexican public baths, to be honest. Don't tell me you went to those baths, I said. No, not really, he said. Only once or twice.

He was a strange person. He wrote in the margins of books. I'm glad I never lent him any of mine. Why? Because I don't like people to write in my books. You won't believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet. At first I thought it was the rain. Ulises was a big walker. He hardly ever took the metro. He walked back and forth across Paris and when it rained he got soaked because he never stopped to wait for it to clear up. So his books, at least the ones he read most often, were always a little warped, sort of stiff, and I thought it was from the rain. But one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. That day my curiosity got the better of me. I went up to him and pulled the book away from him. Not only was the cover wet, some of the pages were too, and so were the notes in the margins, some maybe even written under the spray, the water making the ink run, and then I said, for God's sake, I can't believe it, you read in the shower! have you gone crazy? and he said he couldn't help it but at least he only read poetry (and I didn't understand why he said he only read poetry, not at the time, but now I do: he meant that he only read two or three pages, not a whole book), and then I started to laugh, I threw myself on the sofa, writhing in laughter, and he started to laugh too, both of us laughed for I don't know how long.

Michel Bulteau, Rue de Téhéran, Paris, January 1978. I don't know how he got my phone number, but one night, it must have been after midnight, he called me at home. He asked for Michel Bulteau. I said: this is Michel Bulteau. He said: this is Ulises Lima. Silence. I said: yes? He said: I'm glad I caught you at home, I hope you weren't asleep. I said: no, no I wasn't asleep. Silence. He said: I'd like to see you. I said: now? He said: all right, yes, now, I can come to your place if you want. I said: where are you? but he misunderstood me, and said: I'm Mexican. Then I remembered, very vaguely, that I had received a magazine from Mexico. Still, the name Ulises Lima didn't ring any bells. I said: have you ever heard of the Question Marks? He said: no, I've never heard them. I said: I think they're Mexican. He said: the Question Marks? Who are the Question Marks? I said: a rock group, of course. He said: do they wear masks when they play? At first I didn't understand what he'd said. Masks? No, of course they don't wear masks. Why would they? Are there rock groups in Mexico that perform in masks? He said: sometimes. I said: it sounds ridiculous, but it might be interesting. Where are you calling me from? Your hotel? He said: no, from the street. I said: do you know how to get to the metro station Miromesnil? He said: sure, no problem. I said: twenty minutes. He said: I'm on my way, and hung up. As I was putting on my jacket I thought: but I don't know what he looks like! What do Mexican poets look like? I don't know a single one! All I've seen is a picture of Octavio Paz! But this poet, I sensed, would definitely not look like Octavio Paz. Then I thought about the Question Marks, and Elliot Murphie, and something Elliot had told me when I was in New York, about the Mexican Death's-Head, a guy they called the Mexican Death's-Head, who I only saw from a distance at a bar on Franklin Street and Broadway. The Mexican Death's-Head was a musician but all I saw was a shadow, and I asked Elliot what it was about the guy he wanted to show me, and Elliot said: he's a kind of worm, he has worm eyes and he talks like a worm. How do worms talk? In doublespeak, said Elliot. All right. Clear enough. And why is he called the Mexican Death's-Head? I asked. But Elliot wasn't listening to me anymore or he was talking to someone else, so I just assumed this guy must be Mexican or have spent time in Mexico at some point in his life, in addition to being as thin as a rail. But I didn't see his face, just his shadow as it crossed the bar. A shadow empty of metaphor, evoking nothing, a shadow that was only a shadow with no wish to be anything else. So I put on my black jacket, combed my hair, and went out thinking about the stranger who had called me and the Mexican Death's-Head I'd seen in New York. It's only a few minutes from Rue Téhéran to the Miromesnil metro station, walking fairly quickly, but you have to cross Boulevard Haussmann and then head along Avenue Percier and part of Rue la Boétie, streets that at that time of night are mostly lifeless, as if starting at ten they were bombarded with X-rays, and then I thought that it might have been better to meet the stranger at the Monceau metro station, so that I would've had to walk in the opposite direction, from Rue Téhéran to Rue de Monceau, on to Avenue Ruysdaël and then Avenue Ferdousi, which crosses the Parc de Monceau, because at that time of night it's full of junkies and dealers and sad policemen beamed in from other worlds, the languid gloom of the park leading up to the Place de la République Dominicaine, an auspicious place for a meeting with the Mexican Death's-Head. But I'd chosen my path and I followed it to the steps of the Rue de Miromesnil station, which was deserted and immaculate. I confess that the metro steps had never seemed so suggestive, and at the same time so inscrutable. And yet they looked the same as ever. I realized immediately that this was an aura I'd conjured up myself by agreeing to meet a stranger at such an ungodly hour, which isn't something I'd normally do. And yet I'm not in the habit of ignoring the call of fate. There I was and that was all that mattered. But except for a clerk who was reading a book and must have been waiting for someone, there was no one on the stairs. So I started down. I'd made up my mind to wait five minutes, then leave and forget the whole thing. At the first turn I came upon an old woman wrapped in rags and cardboard, sleeping or pretending to sleep. A few feet farther on, watching the old woman as if she were a snake, I saw a man with long black hair whose features may have been what you'd call Mexican, though I really wouldn't know. I stopped and took a good look at him. He was shorter than me and he was wearing a worn leather jacket, carrying four or five books under his arm. All at once he seemed to awake and he fixed me with his gaze. It was him, beyond a doubt. He came up and offered me his hand. His grip was peculiar. As if, as we shook, he threw in Masonic code and signals from the Mexican underworld. A tickling and morphologically peculiar handshake, in any case, as if the hand shaking mine had no skin or were only a sheath, a tattooed sheath. But never mind his hand. I said that it was a beautiful night and we should go outside and walk. It's as if it were still summer, I said. He followed me in silence. For a moment I was afraid he wouldn't say a word the entire time we were together. I looked at his books. One of them was my Ether-Mouth, another was by Claude Pelieu, and the rest might have been by Mexican authors I'd never heard of. I asked him how long he'd been in Paris. A long time, he said. His French was terrible. I suggested that we speak in English and he agreed. We walked along the Rue de Miromesnil to the Faubourg St. Honoré. Our strides were long and rapid, as if we were late to an important meeting. I'm not the kind of person who likes to walk. And yet that night we walked nonstop, at top speed, along the Faubourg St. Honoré to the Rue Boissy d'Anglas and on to the Champs-Élyseés, where we turned right again, continuing on to the Avenue Churchill and turning left, the vague shadow of the Grand Palais behind us, making straight for the Pont Alexandre III, our pace never slackening, while in occasionally unintelligible English the Mexican reeled off a story that I had trouble following, a story of lost poets and lost magazines and works no one had ever heard of, in the middle of a landscape that might have been California or Arizona or some Mexican region bordering those states, a real or imaginary place, bleached by the sun and lost in the past, forgotten, or at least no longer of the slightest importance here, in Paris, in the 1970s. A story from the edge of civilization, I said. And he said yes, yes, I guess so, yes. And then I said to him: so you've never heard the Question Marks? And he said no, he'd never heard them. And then I said that he had to hear them someday, because they were very good, but really I only said that because I didn't know what else to say.