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

9

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Then I heard voices. They were talking to me, saying: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, are you all right? I opened my eyes and there were the two boys, one of them with the bottle of Sauza in his hand. I said: it's nothing, boys, I just drifted off. At my age sleep takes you when you least expect it and never when it should, I mean at midnight, when you're in your bed, which is just when the damn thing disappears or plays hard to get, and leaves old people wide awake. But I don't mind not being able to sleep because then I spend hours reading and sometimes I even have time to go through my papers. The trouble is I end up falling asleep anywhere, even at work, which is bad for my reputation. Don't worry, Amadeo, said the boys, if you want to take a nap, go ahead and take one, we can come back another day. No, boys, I'm all right now, I said, let's see, where's that tequila? And then one of them opened the bottle and poured forth the nectar of the gods into our respective glasses, the same ones we'd been drinking from before, which some consider a sign of slovenliness and others the ultimate refinement, since when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat. Salud, then! I said. Salud, they said. Then I pulled out the magazine I still had under my arm and waved it before their eyes. Oh, those boys: they both grabbed for it, but they were too slow. This is the first and last issue of Caborca, I told them, Cesárea's magazine, the official organ, as they say, of visceral realism. Naturally, most of the contributors weren't members of the group. Here's Manuel, here's Germán, there's nothing by Arqueles, here's Salvador Gallardo, look: here's Salvador Novo, here's Pablito Lezcano, here's Encarnación Guzmán Arredondo, here's yours truly, and next come the foreigners: Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault, eh? what a trio. And then I did let them take the magazine from me and it was with great satisfaction that I watched the two of them bury their heads in those old octavo pages, Cesárea's magazine, though cosmopolites that they were, the first thing they turned to were the translations, the poems by Tzara, Breton, and Soupault, in translations by Pablito Lezcano, Cesárea Tinajero, and yours truly, respectively. If I remember correctly, the poems were "The White Swamp," "The White Night," and "Dawn and the City," which Cesárea wanted to translate as "The White City," but I refused to let her. Why did I refuse? Well, because it was wrong, gentlemen. Dawn and the city is one thing and a white city is another, and that's where I put my foot down, no matter how fond I was of Cesárea back then. Not as fond as I should have been, I grant you, but truly fond of her all the same. Our French certainly left much to be desired, except maybe Pablito's. Believe it or not, I've lost my French completely, but we still translated, Cesárea in a slapdash way, if you don't mind my saying so, reinventing the poem however she happened to see fit, while I stuck slavishly to the ineffable spirit as well as the letter of the original. Naturally, we made mistakes, the poems wound up battered like piñatas, and on top of it all, believe me, we had ideas of our own, opinions of our own. For example, Soupault's poem and me. To put it simply: as far as I was concerned, Soupault was the greatest French poet of the century, the one who would go farthest, you understand, and now it's been years and years since I've heard a word about him, even though as far as I know he's still alive. Meanwhile, I knew nothing about Éluard and look how far he's gotten, every prize but the Nobel, yes? Did Aragon get a Nobel? No, I suppose not. They gave one to Char, I think, but he probably wasn't writing poetry at the time. What about Saint John Perse? I have no opinion on the subject. They couldn't possibly have given one to Tristan Tzara. The strange turns life takes! Then the boys started to read Manuel, List, Salvador Novo (they loved him!), me (no, don't read me, I said, it's too depressing, a waste of time), Encarnación, Pablito. Who was this Encarnación Guzmán? they asked. Who was this Pablito Lezcano, who translated Tzara and wrote like Marinetti and supposedly spoke French like a scholarship student at the Alliance Française? It was as if I'd returned to life, as if night had stopped in its tracks, peeked through the blinds, and said: Señor Salvatierra, Amadeo, you have my permission, get out there and declaim until you're hoarse-I mean, what I'm trying to say is that I didn't feel sleepy at all anymore, it was as if the tequila I'd just swallowed had met up with the Los Suicidas in my guts, in my obsidian liver, and was bowing down to it, as well it should, since certain class distinctions still exist. So we poured another round and then I started to tell them stories about Pablito Lezcano and Encarnación Guzmán. They didn't like Encarnación's two poems, they were very frank with me, the poems didn't hold water, and goodness, as it happened, that was close enough to what I thought and believed, that poor Encarnación was included in Caborca less because she was any good than because Cesárea had a weakness for her, the weakness of one poetess for another, though who knows what Cesárea saw in Encarnación or exactly what kind of compromises she made for Encarnación's sake or for her own sake. It's a normal part of Mexican literary life, publishing one's friends. And Encarnación may not have been a good poet (as I myself wasn't), she may not even have been a poet at all, good or bad (as I myself wasn't, alas), but she was a good friend of Cesárea's. And Cesárea would have taken bread or tortilla from her own mouth to feed her friends! So I talked to them about Encarnación Guzmán. I told them that she was born in Mexico City in 1903, approximately, according to my calculations, and that she met Cesárea outside of a movie theater, don't laugh, it's true, I don't know what the movie was, though it must have been something sad, maybe with Chaplin in it, but anyway, both of them were crying as they came out and they looked at each other and started to laugh, Cesárea probably raucously, she had her own peculiar sense of humor, it would erupt, just a spark or a glance and bam! all of a sudden Cesárea would be rolling on the ground laughing, and Encarnación, well, Encarnación probably laughed more discreetly. At the time, Cesárea was living in a tenement on Calle Las Cruces and Encarnación was living with an aunt (the poor thing had lost her father and mother), on Calle Delicias, I think. The two of them worked long days, Cesárea at the office of mi general Diego Carvajal, a general who had befriended the stridentists, although he didn't know a goddamn thing about literature, that's the truth, and Encarnación as a salesgirl in a dress shop on Niño Perdido. Who knows why they became friends, what they saw in each other. Cesárea didn't have a thing in the world, but one look at her told you that she was a woman who knew what she wanted. Encarnación was the complete opposite, very pretty, certainly, and always well dressed (Cesárea would put on the first thing she could find and sometimes she even wore a peasant's shawl), but insecure and fragile as a porcelain statuette in the middle of a bar fight. Her voice was, how to put it? piping, a slight voice, not forceful at all, though she raised it so that others could hear her, the poor thing being accustomed since she was a child to doubting her powers of speech, a shrill voice, essentially, and an extremely unpleasant one, which I only heard again many years later, in a movie theater, as it happened, watching a cartoon short in which a cat or a dog or maybe a little mouse, you know how clever those gringos are at animated pictures, talked just like Encarnación Guzmán. If she had been dumb, I think more than one of us would have fallen in love with her, but with that voice it was impossible. Besides, she had no talent. It was Cesárea who brought her to one of our meetings one day, when we were all stridentists or stridentist sympathizers. At first people liked her. So long as she was quiet, I mean. Germán probably flirted with her, and I might have too. But she was always distant and shy and stuck close to Cesárea. In time, however, she grew more confident, and one night she began to voice her opinions, offering criticism and making suggestions. And Manuel had no choice but to put her in her place. Encarnación, he said, you don't know the first thing about poetry, so why don't you be quiet? And that caused quite a hullaballoo. Cesárea, who would melt into the background when Encarnación was talking, as if she wasn't there, got up from her seat and told Manuel that that was no way to speak to a woman. But haven't you heard the silly things she's been saying? said Manuel. I heard, said Cesárea, who, remote as she might seem, never missed a single thing her friend and protégée did or said, and I still think an apology is in order. Well, then, I apologize, said Manuel, but from now on she'd better keep her mouth shut. Arqueles and Germán agreed with him. If she can't say anything worth saying, she shouldn't talk, was their argument. That shows a lack of respect, said Cesárea, depriving someone of her right to speak. Encarnación wasn't at the next meeting, and neither was Cesárea. The meetings were informal and no one missed them, or so it seemed. Only when the meeting was over and Pablito Lezcano and I set off along the streets of the city center, reciting the verse of the reactionary Tablada, did I realize that she hadn't been there, and also how little I knew about Cesárea Tinajero.

Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, March 1979. One day a strange man came to visit me. That's what I remember about the year 1978. I didn't get many visitors, just my daughter and a woman and another girl who said she was my daughter too, and who was remarkably pretty. This man had never been to see me before. I received him in the yard, facing north. Even though all the lunatics face south or west, I was facing north and that was how I received him. The stranger said good morning, Quim, how are you today? And I answered that I was the same as I'd been yesterday and the day before and then I asked him whether the architecture studio where I used to work had sent him, since the way he looked or talked was vaguely familiar to me. Then the stranger laughed and said how can you not remember me, man, can you possibly be serious? And I laughed too, to put him at ease, and I said yes, of course, my question was perfectly sincere. And then the stranger said I'm Damián, your friend Álvaro Damián. And then he said: we've known each other for years, man, how can this be? And to relax him, or so he wouldn't be sad, I said yes, now I remember. And he smiled (although his eyes didn't look happy) and he said that's better, Quim, it was as if he'd adopted the voice and concerns of my doctors and nurses. And when he left I guess I forgot him, because a month later he came back and he said I've been here before, I remember this asylum, the urinals are over there, this yard faces north. And the next month he said to me: I've been visiting you for more than two years, man, can't you try just a little harder to remember me? So I made an effort and the next time he came I said how are you, Mr. Álvaro Damián, and he smiled but his eyes were still sad, as if he were seeing everything from the vantage point of a great sorrow.

Jacinto Requena, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, March 1979. It was really strange. I know it's just a coincidence, but sometimes these things make you think. When I told Rafael about it, he said it was all in my head. I said: have you realized, now that Ulises and Arturo don't live in Mexico anymore, there seem to be more poets? What do you mean more poets? said Rafael. Poets our age, I said, poets born in 1954, 1955, 1956. How do you know that? said Rafael. Well, I said, I get around, I read magazines, I go to poetry readings, I read book reviews, sometimes I even listen to reviews on the radio. And how do you make time for so many things now that you have a kid? said Rafael. Franz loves to listen to the radio, I said. I turn on the radio and he falls asleep. Are they reading poetry on the radio? said Rafael. He was surprised. Yes, I said. There's poetry on the radio and in magazines. It's like an explosion. And every day a new publishing house pops up that publishes new poets. And all of this right after Ulises left. Strange, isn't it? It doesn't seem strange to me at all, said Rafael. A sudden blossoming, the flowering of a hundred schools for no good reason, I said, and it just happens to be when Ulises is gone. Doesn't it seem like too much of a coincidence to you? Most of them are terrible poets, said Rafael, suck-ups to Paz, Efraín, Josemilio, and the peasant poets, complete garbage. I'm not saying that they aren't, I said, or that they are. It's the number of them that bothers me, the appearance of so many of them, and so suddenly. There's even some guy who's putting together an anthology of all the poets in Mexico. Yes, said Rafael, I already knew that. (I already knew he knew.) And he isn't going to include any of my poems, said Rafael. How do you know? I asked. A friend told me so, said Rafael, the guy doesn't want anything to do with the visceral realists. Then I said that what he'd said wasn't entirely true, because even if the asshole who was putting together the anthology had excluded Ulises Lima, he hadn't excluded María and Angélica Font or Ernesto San Epifanio or me. He does want poems from us, I said. Rafael didn't answer. We were walking along Misterios, and Rafael gazed toward the horizon, as if he could actually see it, although where it would have been there were houses, clouds of smoke, the afternoon haze of Mexico City. So are all of you going to be in the anthology? said Rafael after a long silence. I don't know about María and Angélica, I said, it's been a long time since I've seen them. Ernesto almost definitely will be. And I definitely won't be. So why won't you…? said Rafael, but I didn't let him finish the question. Because I'm a visceral realist, I said, and if that asshole won't take Ulises, he's not getting me either.

Luis Sebastián Rosado, a dark office, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, March 1979. Yes, it's an odd phenomenon, but its causes are very different from those put forward just a bit naïvely by Jacinto Requena. There really was a demographic explosion of poets in Mexico. This became clear beginning, say, in January 1977. Or January 1976. It's impossible to put an exact date on it. Among the various contributing factors, the most obvious are the country's more or less steady economic growth (from 1960 to the present day), the consolidation of the middle class, and an increasingly well-structured university, especially in the humanities.

Let's take a closer look at this new horde of poets, of which I'm a part, agewise at least. The great majority are students. A large percentage published their first poems in magazines associated with the university or the Ministry of Education, and their first books with university-affiliated publishing houses. A large percentage have also mastered (in a manner of speaking) a second language in addition to Spanish-usually English, or to a lesser extent French-and translate poets writing in those languages, nor is there any shortage of fledgling translators from the Italian, the Portuguese, or the German. Some combine work as amateur editors with their poetic endeavors, which in turn leads to the proliferation of various often valuable projects of an editorial nature. There are probably more young poets in Mexico now than there've ever been. Does this mean that poets under thirty today, say, are better than those who occupied that age bracket in the sixties? May we conceivably discover the equals of Becerra, José Emilio Pacheco, or Homero Aridjis among some of our most rabidly contemporary poets? That remains to be seen.

And yet Ismael Humberto Zarco's project strikes me as perfect. It was about time to bring out an anthology of young Mexican poets with the same high standards as Monsiváis's La poesía mexicana del siglo XX, memorable in so many ways! Or like Poesía en movimiento, the exemplary and paradigmatic work undertaken by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. I must admit that in a certain sense I felt flattered when Ismael Humberto Zarco called me at home and said: Luis Sebastián, I need your advice. Of course, advice or not, I knew for a fact that I was already included in the anthology, as a matter of course, you might say (the only thing I didn't know was how many of my poems would be selected), as were my friends, so my visit chez Zarco was initially only in an advisory capacity, in the event that some detail had escaped Zarco, meaning in this particular case some magazine, some publication from the provinces, a name or two that the totalizing zeal of the Zarconian endeavor couldn't permit itself the luxury of overlooking.

But in the scant three days between Ismael Humberto's call and my visit, I happened to learn the number of poets the anthologist planned to include, an excessive number no matter how you looked at it, democratic but hardly realistic, remarkable as an experiment but mediocre as a crucible of poetry. And the devil tempted me, putting ideas in my head during the days between Zarco's call and our meeting, as if the wait (but what wait, my God?) were the Desert and my visit the instant when one opens one's eyes and sees one's Savior. And for those three days I was tortured by doubts. Or Doubts. But it was a torture, this I saw clearly, that brought satisfaction as well as suffering and doubt (or Doubt), as if the flames were a simultaneous source of pain and pleasure.

My idea, or my temptation, was this: to suggest to Zarco that he include Luscious Skin in the anthology. The numbers were in my favor, but everything else was against me. The rashness of this plan, I admit, at first seemed completely insane. I was literally scaring myself. Then it seemed completely pathetic. And later, when I was finally able to get a little distance from it and judge it more coolly (though only in a manner of speaking, of course), it struck me as noble and sad, and I seriously feared for my mental well-being. I did, at least, have the tact or cunning not to announce my plan to the principal interested party, in other words Luscious Skin, whom I saw three times a month, or twice a month, or sometimes only once or not at all, since his absences tended to be long and his appearances unexpected. Our relationship, from the time of our second and transcendental encounter at Emilito Laguna's studio, had followed an irregular course, occasionally in the ascendant (especially as far as I was concerned), and occasionally nonexistent.

We usually saw each other at an empty apartment that my family owned in Nápoles, although the way we met was much more complicated. Luscious Skin would call me at my parents' house and since I was almost never home he would leave a message, calling himself Estéfano. The name, I swear, was not something I suggested. According to him it was an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, an author he had only heard of (like almost everything, incidentally) but whom he thought of as one of my tutelary spirits, by who knows what kind of strange mental association. Essentially, the name under which he left his messages was a kind of tribute to what he believed I held most dear. In other words, the false name concealed an attraction, a desire, a real need (I don't dare call it love) for me or of me, which, as the months went by and after endless contemplation, I realized filled me with rejoicing.

After he left his messages we would meet at the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at the entrance to a macrobiotic store. Then we would lose ourselves in the city, in coffee shops and bars to the north, near La Villa, where I didn't know anyone and where Luscious Skin had no qualms about introducing me to friends of his, male and female, who would show up in the most unexpected places and whose looks spoke more of a penitentiary Mexico than of otherness, although otherness, as I tried to explain to him, could take many forms. (Like the Holy Spirit, said Luscious Skin, that noble savage.) When night came, we took shelter like two pilgrims in cheap rooms or the lowliest hotels, though there was a certain splendor to them (at the risk of waxing romantic, I'd even say a certain hope), places in La Bondojito or on the edges of Talismán. Our relationship was spectral. I don't want to talk about love, and I'm reluctant to talk about desire. We had only a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them.

Sometimes, inevitably, he would give me one of the magazines published by the visceral realists. I never saw a poem of his in any of them. In fact, when it occurred to me to talk to Zarco about his poetry I had only two poems by Luscious Skin, both of them unpublished. One was a bad imitation of a bad poem by Ginsberg. The other was a prose poem that Torri wouldn't have disapproved of, a strange poem, in which he talked vaguely about hotels and fights. I imagined it was inspired by me.

The night before my meeting with Zarco I could hardly sleep. I felt like a Mexican Juliet, trapped in a sordid struggle between Montagues and Capulets. My relationship with Luscious Skin was secret, at least to the extent that the situation was under my control. By this I don't mean that no one in my circle of friends knew about my homosexuality, which I kept quiet but didn't hide. What they didn't know was that I was involved with a visceral realist (though Luscious Skin was hardly your typical visceral realist). How would Albertito Moore take the news that I was recommending Luscious Skin for the anthology? What would Pepín Morado say? Would Adolfito Olmo think I'd gone crazy? And Ismael Humberto himself, so cold, so sarcastic, so apparently above it all, would he not see my suggestion as a betrayal?

So when I went to visit Ismael Humberto Zarco and showed him those two poems, which I came bearing like two precious objects, I was inwardly prepared to be asked all kinds of difficult questions. And so I was, since Ismael Humberto is no fool and he realized immediately that my protégé was from the wrong side of the fence, as they say. Luckily (Ismael Humberto is no fool, but he isn't God either), he didn't connect him to the visceral realists.

I fought hard for Luscious Skin's prose poem. I argued that since the anthology could hardly be called selective in terms of the number of poets published, it should make no difference to him whether we included something my friend had written. The anthologist was unyielding. He planned to publish more than two hundred young poets, most represented by a single poem, but not Luscious Skin.

At one point in our discussion he asked me the name of my protégé. I don't know his name, I said, exhausted and ashamed.

When I saw Luscious Skin again, in a moment of weakness I told him about my failed efforts to get one of his poems into Zarco's forthcoming book. In the way he looked at me, I saw something like gratitude. Then he asked me whether Pancho and Moctezuma Rodríguez were included in Ismael Humberto's anthology. No, I said, I don't think so. What about Jacinto Requena and Rafael Barrios? They're not either, I said. María and Angélica Font? No. Ernesto San Epifanio? I shook my head, although actually I didn't know, the name didn't sound familiar. And what about Ulises Lima? I looked steadily into his dark eyes and said no. Then it's better if I'm not in it either, he said.

Angélica Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, April 1979. At the end of 1977 Ernesto San Epifanio was admitted to the hospital to have a hole drilled in his skull so that he could be operated on for a brain aneurysm. A week later, they had to go back in because apparently they'd left something inside his head. The doctors had very little hope for this second operation. If they didn't operate he would die, and if they did operate he would die anyway, although his odds were slightly better. That was my understanding of it and I was the only person who was with him the entire time. Me and his mother, although somehow his mother doesn't count because her daily visits to the hospital turned her into the invisible woman: whenever she was there she was so quiet that even though she really did come into the room, even though she sat beside the bed, she never seemed to cross the threshold, or ever quite finish crossing the threshold, this tiny figure framed by the white opening of the doorway.

My sister María came a few times too. And Juanito Dávila, alias El Johnny, Ernesto's last love. The rest were brothers and sisters, aunts, people I didn't know, connected to my friend only by the most unlikely family ties.

No writers came, or poets, or ex-lovers.

The second operation lasted more than five hours. I fell asleep in the waiting room and dreamed of Laura Damián. Laura had come looking for Ernesto and then the two of us went for a walk in a eucalyptus forest. I don't know whether there really is such a thing, because I've never been in a eucalyptus forest, but the one in my dream was horrible. The leaves were silver and when they brushed my arm they left a dark, sticky mark. The ground was soft, like the needle-carpeted ground in pine forests, although the forest in my dream was a eucalyptus forest. The trunks of all the trees, without exception, were rotten and their stink was unbearable.

When I woke up in the waiting room there was no one there and I started to cry. How could it be that Ernesto San Epifanio was dying alone in a hospital in Mexico City? How could it be that I was the only person there, waiting for someone to tell me whether he had died or survived a terrible operation? When I was done crying I think I fell asleep again. When I woke up Ernesto's mother was beside me murmuring something I couldn't understand. It took me a while to realize that she was just praying. Then a nurse came in and said that everything had gone well. The operation was a success, she explained.

A few days later Ernesto was discharged and went home. I had never been to his house before. We always saw each other at my house or at other friends' houses. But from then on I began to visit him at home.

The first few days he didn't even talk. He looked around and blinked but didn't talk. He didn't seem to hear anything either. And yet the doctor had recommended that we talk to him, that we treat him as if nothing had happened. So I did. The first day I looked in his bookcase for a book I knew for sure that he liked and I started to read it out loud. It was Valéry's Cemetery by the Sea, and he didn't show the slightest sign that he recognized it. I read it and he looked at the ceiling or the walls or my face, and his real self wasn't there. Then I read him a collection of poems by Salvador Novo and the same thing happened. His mother came into the room and touched my shoulder. Don't wear yourself out, miss, she said.

Little by little, however, he began to distinguish sounds, bodies. One afternoon he recognized me. Angélica, he said, and he smiled. I had never seen such a horrible, pathetic, crooked smile. I started to cry. But he didn't seem to notice that I was crying and kept smiling. He looked like a corpse. The trephination scars weren't hidden by his hair yet, which was maddeningly slow to grow back.

A little later he started to talk. He had a very high-pitched, thin little voice, like a flute. Gradually it grew stronger, but no less shrill. In any case, it wasn't Ernesto's voice, that I was sure of. It was like the voice of a feebleminded adolescent, an ignorant adolescent on his deathbed. His vocabulary was limited. He had a hard time coming up with the words for some things.

One afternoon I got to his house and his mother let me in and then led me to her room, in such a state of agitation that at first I thought my friend must have taken a turn for the worse. But it was a motherly flurry of happiness. He's cured, she told me. I didn't understand what she meant. I thought she was talking about Ernesto's voice or saying that Ernesto's mind had gotten sharper. How is he cured? I said, trying to get her to let go of my arms. It took her a while to say what she meant, but in the end she had to come out with it. Ernesto isn't a fairy anymore, miss, she said. Ernesto isn't what? I said. At that moment his father came into the room, and after asking us what we were doing in there, he declared that his son had finally been cured of his homosexuality. He didn't say it in those exact words, and I didn't want to answer or ask any more questions, so I got out of that horrible room as quickly as I could. Still, before I went into Ernesto's room, I heard his mother say: every cloud has a silver lining.

Of course, Ernesto was still a homosexual even though sometimes he didn't remember very well what that meant. Sexuality, for him, had become something remote, something he knew was pleasurable and exciting, but remote. One day Juanito Dávila called me to say that he was going north, to work, and that I should tell Ernesto goodbye for him because he didn't have the heart. From then on there were no more lovers in Ernesto's life. His voice changed a little, but not enough: he didn't speak, he wailed or moaned, and when he did, everyone except for his mother and me-his father and the neighbors paying their endless obligatory visits-would flee, which was ultimately a relief, so much so that once I thought Ernesto was wailing on purpose to drive away all that terrible politeness.

As the months went by, I began to leave more time between my visits too. Having gone to see him every day when he was just out of the hospital, I visited less frequently once he started to talk and walk up and down the hall. And yet I called him every night, no matter where I was. We had some crazy conversations. Sometimes I was the one who would talk on and on, telling stories, true stories, although they went barely skin-deep, about the sophisticated Mexico City life (a way of forgetting that we lived in Mexico) that I was getting to know back then, the parties, the drugs I took, the men I slept with, and other times he was the one who would talk, reading stories to me that he'd cut out of the paper that day (a new hobby, probably suggested by the therapists who were treating him, who knows), telling me what he'd had to eat, the people who'd come to visit, something his mother had said that he'd saved up for the end of the conversation. One afternoon I told him that Ismael Humberto Zarco had chosen one of his poems for his anthology, which had just come out. What poem? said that little bird voice of his, that Gillette blade of a voice that tore at my heart. I had the book beside me. I told him. Did I write that poem? he said. It struck me that he was joking, why I'm not sure, maybe because his voice sounded so much deeper than usual. His jokes had been like that before, innocent, almost impossible to distinguish from whatever else he was saying. But he wasn't joking. That week I found time that I didn't have and went to see him. A friend, a new friend, drove me to his house but didn't want to come in. Wait for me here, I said, this neighborhood is dangerous and when we come back we might find ourselves without a car. It seemed strange to him, but he didn't say anything. Around that time, I had developed a well-deserved reputation in the circles I moved in for being eccentric. As it happened, I was right: recently Ernesto's neighborhood had been going downhill. As if the aftereffects of his operation were visible in the streets, in the people without work, the petty thieves who would come out at seven in the evening to sit in the sun, like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message) automatically primed to kill another evening in Mexico City.

Ernesto hardly paid any attention to the book, of course. He looked for his poem and said: oh. I don't know if he suddenly recognized it or if he was confused. Then he started to tell me the same kind of things he told me on the phone.

When I came out my friend was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette. I asked whether anything had happened while I was gone. Nothing, he said, it's dead quiet out here. But it couldn't have been so quiet because his hair was disheveled and his hands were shaking.

I never saw Ernesto again.

One night he called me and recited a poem by Richard Belfer. One night I called him, from Los Angeles, and told him that I was sleeping with the theater director Francisco Segura, aka La Vieja Segura, who was at least twenty years older than me. How exciting, said Ernesto. La Vieja must be an intelligent man. He's talented, not intelligent, I said. What's the difference? he said. I sat there thinking how to answer and he waited for me to speak and for a few seconds neither of us said anything. I wish I could be with you, I told him before I said goodbye. Me too, said that voice like a bird from another dimension. A few days later his mother called and told me that he had died. An easy death, she said, while he was sitting at home in a chair in the sun. He fell asleep like a little angel. What time of day did he die? I asked. At about five, after lunch.

Of his old friends, I was the only one who went to his burial, in one of the patchwork cemeteries on the north side of the city. I didn't see any poets, ex-lovers, or editors of literary magazines. Lots of relatives and family friends and possibly every single one of the neighbors. Before I left the cemetery, two teenagers came up to me and tried to lead me somewhere. I thought they were going to rape me. Only then did I feel rage and pain at Ernesto's death. I pulled a switchblade out of my purse and said: I'll kill you, you little creeps. They went running and I chased them for a while down two or three cemetery streets. When I finally stopped, another funeral procession appeared. I put the knife in my bag and watched as they lifted the coffin into its niche, very carefully. I think it was a child. But I couldn't say for sure. Then I left the cemetery and went to have drinks with a friend at a bar downtown.