Amulet

Eleven

And I see myself that night, my friends, walking toward Lilian Serpas's apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.

You might be surprised to learn that I didn't know Carlos Coffeen Serpas. No one did, really. Or to be precise, a few people knew him, and they had hatched the legend, the minor legend of a crazy painter who never left his mother's apartment, an apartment that, in some versions, was endowed with massive, dusty furniture that could have been buried in the crypt of one of the Emperor Maximilian's followers, although, according to other accounts, mother and son lived in something more like a tenement building, a faithful reproduction of the Burrón family's apartment (ah, the invincible Burrón family, God bless them, long may their comic strip run; when I arrived in Mexico, the first guy who tried to chat me up said I was the spitting image of Borola Tacuche, which isn't too far from the truth). The reality, as it sadly tends to be, was halfway between these imaginary extremes: neither crumbling palace nor tenement house, but an old four-story building in the Calle República de El Salvador, near the church of San Felipe Neri.

Carlos Coffeen Serpas was more than forty years old, and no one I knew had seen him for a long time. What did I think of his drawings? I didn't like them much, to be perfectly honest. Figures, almost always very thin, and sickly-looking too: that was what he used to draw. Flying or buried figures, sometimes staring out into the eyes of the viewer, and usually gesturing in some way. For example, holding a finger to their lips to request silence. Or covering their eyes. Or holding up an open, unlined hand. That's all I can say. I don't know much about art.

Anyway, there I was, in front of the gate of Lilian's building, and while I was thinking about her son's drawings, which probably had the distinction of being the cheapest on the Mexican art market, I was also thinking about what I would say to Coffeen when he opened the door to me.

Lilian lived on the top floor. I rang the bell a number of times. No one answered and for a moment I thought that Coffeen Serpas must be in some bar nearby, because he was reputed to be an incorrigible alcoholic. I was about to leave when something, I couldn't say exactly what, an intuition possibly, or perhaps just my natural curiosity, exacerbated by the time of night and by having walked all that way, prompted me to cross the street and take up a position on the opposite sidewalk. The lights in the windows on the fourth floor were out, but after a few seconds I thought I saw a curtain move, as if the wind that wasn't blowing through the streets of Mexico City was being channeled through the interior of that darkened apartment. And that was too much for me.

I crossed the street and rang the bell again. Then, without waiting for the door to open, I went back to the opposite sidewalk, watched the windows, and saw a curtain being drawn back. This time I could see a shadow, the silhouette of a man looking down at me, knowing that I could see him, not seeming to care anymore, and then I knew that the shadow was Carlos Coffeen Serpas, looking at me and wondering who I was, what I was doing there at that hour of night, what I wanted, what abhorrent news I was bearing.

For a moment I was sure he wouldn't open the door to me. It was common knowledge that Lilian's son was a complete recluse. Not that anyone wanted to visit him. So it was an odd situation, whichever way you looked at it.

I waved to him.

Then, lowering my gaze, I crossed the street for the fourth or fifth time, pretending as best I could to be confident. After a few seconds, the door opened with a click that echoed in the entrance hall. I climbed warily up to the fourth floor. The staircase was dimly lit. On the fourth-floor landing, Carlos Coffeen Serpas was waiting for me behind a door left ajar.

I don't know why I didn't just say what I had to say to him, then turn around and go home. Coffeen was tall, taller than his mother, and you could tell that in his youth he must have been slim and well built, although now he was fat, or, rather, bloated. His forehead was broad, but it didn't have the sort of breadth that suggests intelligence or sound judgment; it had the breadth of a battlefield, and the battle had been lost, to judge from the rest of his face: thin, lank hair falling over his ears, a skull more like a dented bowl than a noble dome, light eyes staring at me with a mixture of suspicion and boredom. In spite of everything, I found him attractive (I'm a born optimist).

I'm so tired, I said to him. After looking at me for a few seconds without inviting me in, he asked who I was. I'm a friend of Lilian's, I said. My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I work at the university.

At the time, in fact, I wasn't doing any kind of work at the university. In other words, I was unemployed again. But, faced with Coffeen, I thought it would be more reassuring to say I had a job at the faculty than to confess that I was out of work. Reassuring for whom? Well, for both of us: for me, because it gave me some kind of imaginary status or backing, and for him, because it meant he wasn't being visited late at night by a slightly younger double of his dear, dreadful mother. It's not something to be proud of. I know. But that's what I said, and then I looked him straight in the eye and waited for him to stand aside.

Coffeen had no choice but to ask me if I would like to come in, like a sullen boy receiving a surprise visit from his girlfriend. Of course I wanted to come in. So in I went and saw what lights remained in Lilian's apartment. A small entrance hall full of packages: reproductions of her son's drawings. And then a short, dark passage leading to a room where there was no hiding the poverty in which the ex-poet and the ex-painter lived. But I don't turn up my nose at poverty. In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor (except perhaps some Chileans). There was, however, something abysmal about this poverty: entering Lilian's apartment was like plunging into the depths of an Atlantic trench. There, in deceptive stillness, the intruder was observed by the charred, mossy or plankton-covered remains of what had once been a life, a family, a mother and son, a real son, not invented or adopted like those prodigal sons of mine; a subtle inventory or anti-inventory of traces, emanating from the walls, speaking in a murmur like the voice of a black hole about Lilian's lovers, Carlitos Coffeen Serpas at primary school, the breakfasts and the dinners, the nightmares and the daylight that came in when Lilian drew the curtains, curtains that looked filthy now, curtains that a house-work addict like myself would have taken down immediately and washed by hand in the kitchen sink, if I hadn't been afraid that any sudden movement on my part might have hardened the painter's gaze, which was gradually becoming milder as I let the seconds pass in silence, as if he had provisionally accepted my presence there in his last redoubt. And that's all I can say. I wanted to stay; I kept still and quiet. But my eyes took in everything: the sofa sagging down to the floor, the low table covered with papers, napkins and dirty glasses, Coffeen's dust-covered paintings hanging on the walls, the hallway making its rash, inexorable way toward the mother's room, the son's room and the bathroom, which is where I went, having asked permission, having waited for Coffeen to deliberate with himself or with Coffeen 2 or perhaps even Coffeen 3, the bathroom, which was comparable in every respect to the living room, and which, as I walked down that dark passage (all the passages in Lilian's apartment were dark), I imagined as lacking a mirror, mistakenly, because there was a mirror there, perfectly normal in size and placement, over the small sink, and after having a pee, I took another good look at myself in the mercury of that mirror, at my thin face, blond page-boy hair and toothless smile, because there, my friends, there in Lilian Serpas's bathroom, a room that had probably not been graced for many years by the presence of a visitor, I found myself thinking about happiness, just like that, the happiness possibly hidden under the crusts of filth in that apartment, and when you're happy or sense that happiness may be imminent you're not afraid to look at yourself in mirrors, indeed, when you're happy or feel predestined for happiness, you tend to lower your guard and face up to mirrors, out of curiosity, I guess, or because you're feeling good in your skin, as the Frenchified citizens of Montevideo used to say (may God grant them some remnant of health). So I looked at myself in Lilian and Coffeen's bathroom mirror and I saw Auxilio Lacouture, and what I saw, my friends, moved my soul in contradictory ways, since, on one hand, it could have made me laugh, what I was seeing so clearly there: my skin slightly ruddy from fatigue and alcohol, but my eyes quite wide open (when I go without sleep, my eyes become two cashbox slots collecting not the sadly hoped-for coins of my chimerical savings but coins of fire from a future blaze in which nothing makes any sense), eyes wide open, shining and awake, ideal eyes for appreciating a nocturnal exhibition of Carlos Coffeen's work, but, on the other hand, I also saw my lips, my poor little lips, trembling imperceptibly, as if they were telling me, Don't be crazy, Auxilio, what are you thinking, go straight back to your rooftop room right now, forget Lilian and her infernal offspring, forget the Calle República de El Salvador, and forget this apartment which draws its sustenance from anti-life, from anti-matter, from the black holes of Mexico and Latin America, from all that once tried to find a way out into life but now leads only back to death.

And then I stopped looking at myself in the mirror and two or perhaps three tears welled from my eyes. Tears, how many nights have I spent pondering them, to come to such meager conclusions.

Then I went back to the living room and Coffeen was still there, standing, staring at a point in vacant space, and although when he heard me emerge from the passage (as one might emerge from a spaceship) he turned his head and looked at me, I knew immediately that he wasn't looking so much at me, his unexpected visitor, as at the life of the world outside, the life he had spurned, which, nevertheless, was eating him alive, even though he feigned a regal indifference. And then, more out of stubbornness than desire, I burned the last of my boats, sat down, uninvited, on the battered sofa, and repeated Lilian's words, telling him that she wouldn't be coming home that night, that he shouldn't worry, first thing next morning she'd be back, and I added a few words of my own, which weren't strictly relevant, banal remarks on the home of the poet and the painter, such a nice location, close to the center but in a calm, quiet street, and since I was there, I thought it wouldn't do any harm to inform him of the interest a number of people had expressed in his work; I said that I found his drawings, which his mother had shown me, interesting, an adjective that hardly seems adjectival at all, so varied are its functions, from describing a film that you don't want to admit you found boring to remarking on a woman's pregnancy. But interesting is also or can also be a synonym of mysterious. And I was talking about mystery. That was what I was really talking about. I think Coffeen understood, because after looking at me again with those exile s eyes of his, he took a chair (for a moment I thought he was going to hurl it at my head), and straddled it backward, gripping the bars of the backrest like a minimalist prisoner.

Then, as if I had heard the shot that signals the beginning of the hunting season, I remember I began to spout whatever came into my head. Until I ran out of words. Sometimes it seemed that Coffeen was about to fall asleep, and sometimes his knuckles clenched as if he was about to burst or as if the backrest of the chair that stood between him and me was about to fly apart, explode, disintegrate. But there came a point, as I said, when I ran out of words.

I don't think it was long before sunrise.

Then Coffeen spoke. He asked me if I knew the story of Erigone. No, I don't, but the name's familiar, I said (lying), afraid I was putting my foot in it. For a moment, with a sinking heart, I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-lover. We all have an old love affair to talk about when there's nothing left to say and day is breaking. But it turned out that Erigone was not one of Coffeen's ex-lovers but a figure from Greek mythology, the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. That's a story I do know. A story I did know. Agamemnon goes off to Troy and Clytemnestra becomes Aegisthus's mistress. When Agamemnon comes back from Troy, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra kill him, and then get married. Electra and Orestes, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, decide to avenge their father and regain control of the kingdom. This involves killing Aegisthus and their own mother. Horror. I could get that far on my own. But Coffeen Serpas went further. He spoke of the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Erigone, Orestes's half-sister, and said that she was the most beautiful woman in all Greece; her mother's sister, after all, was none other than Helen of Troy. He spoke of Orestes's vengeance. A spiritual hecatomb, he said. Do you know what a hecatomb is? I associated that word with nuclear warfare, so I thought it better not to reply. But Coffeen kept asking. A disaster, I said, a catastrophe? No, said Coffeen, a hecatomb is the sacrifice of a hundred oxen all at once. It comes from the Greek hekaton, which means one hundred, and bous, which means ox. There are even records from classical times of five hundred oxen being slain. Can you imagine that, he asked. Yes, I can imagine anything, I replied. The sacrifice of a hundred or five hundred oxen: you would have been able to smell the stench of blood for miles around. Imagine so much death, all around you; it must have been stupefying. Yes, I imagine it was, I said. Well, the vengeance of Orestes was something like that, said Coffeen. The terror and the irreparability of parricide, the shame and the panic, he said. And in the midst of that terror: Erigone, exquisite, immaculate, observing the intellectual Electra and the eponymous hero Orestes.

The intellectual Electra and the eponymous hero Orestes? For a moment I thought that Coffeen was pulling my leg.

But no, not at all. In fact Coffeen was talking as if he were alone: with every word that came out of his mouth I was farther and farther away from that apartment on the Calle República de El Salvador. Although at the same time, however paradoxical it might seem, I was also more present, as an absence, as if the features of the immaculate Erigone were supplanting my invisible or reality-faded features, so that although, in a sense, I was disappearing, in another sense, as I disappeared my shadow took on the features of Erigone, and Erigone was present there, in the decrepit living room of Lilian's apartment, summoned by the words that Coffeen was reeling off, like a gossip or a busybody (as Julio Torri, who liked this sort of story, would have said), oblivious to my worried look, since although I was reluctant to leave him that night, I also realized that the path on which he had set out was perhaps the preamble to a nervous breakdown brought on by the absence of his mother, or by my unexpected presence, which was no compensation.

But Coffeen went on with his story.

And so I discovered that after the murder of Aegisthus, Orestes proclaimed himself king, and the followers of Aegisthus had to go into exile. Erigone, however, remained in the kingdom. The still Erigone, said Coffeen. Still under the vacant gaze of Orestes. Nothing but her extraordinary beauty can momentarily placate his homicidal fury. One night Orestes loses control, gets into her bed, and rapes her.

He wakes up at first light the next day and goes to the window: the lunar landscape of Argos confirms his suspicion. He has fallen in love with Erigone. But someone who has killed his mother is incapable of love, said Coffeen looking me in the eye with a charred smile, and Orestes knows that Erigone is poison to him, as well as being a blood relative of Aegisthus, which is sufficient justification for leading her to slaughter. Over the following days, Orestes's followers persecute and eliminate the followers of Aegisthus. At night, like a drug addict or a wino (Coffeen's similes), Orestes visits Erigone's bedchamber and they make love. In the end, Erigone gets pregnant. Having found out, Electra confronts her brother and explains why this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Erigone, says Electra, will give birth to a grandchild of Aegisthus. There is no longer a single man in Argos who is a blood relative of the usurper. Having taken it upon himself to fell that tree, how can Orestes weaken now and allow a new shoot to spring up? But it's my child too, says Orestes. It's the grandchild of Aegisthus, Electra insists. So Orestes accepts his sister's advice and decides to kill Erigone.

Nevertheless he wants to sleep with her one last time, so he does. She suspects nothing and gives herself to Orestes without fear. Although young, she has quickly learned how to handle the new king's madness. She calls him brother, my brother, she implores him, sometimes she pretends to see him and sometimes she pretends to see only a dark and solitary silhouette taking refuge in a corner of her bedchamber. (Was that Coffeen's idea of erotic ecstasy?) Before dawn, a besotted Orestes reveals his plan. He proposes an alternative. Erigone must leave Argos that very night. Orestes will provide a guide, who will take her out of the city and far away. Horrified, Erigone looks at him in the darkness (they are sitting at opposite ends of the bed), suspecting that Orestes's words conceal her death sentence: the guide that her brother says he is prepared to provide will turn out to be her executioner.

Seized by fear, she says that she would prefer to stay in the city, close to him.

Orestes loses his patience. If you stay here, I will kill you, he says. The gods have driven me crazy. Once again, he speaks of his crime; he speaks of the Erinnyes and the life he wants to lead when he can sort things out in his head or even before he gets them sorted out: wandering through Greece with his friend Pylades, becoming a legend. Hippies, with no ties to hold us, turning our lives into art. But Erigone doesn't understand Orestes's words, and fears that all this is part of a plan hatched by the cerebral Electra, a kind of euthanasia, an exit into darkness that will not stain the young king's hands with blood.