Amulet

Four

But my teeth, which still hadn't fallen out, were not all that I thought about. For example, I thought about young Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen when I met him in 1970. I was the mother of the new Mexican poetry and he was just a kid who couldn't hold his liquor, but he was proud that Salvador Allende had been elected president of his faraway Chile.

I met him. I met him at a rowdy gathering of poets in a bar called the Encrucijada Veracruzana, a squalid hole or dive where a motley bunch of young and not-so-young hopefuls used to get together now and then. He was the youngest hopeful of the lot. And the only one who had written a novel at the age of seventeen. A novel that was later lost or consumed by flames or perhaps it ended up in one of the huge garbage dumps that surround Mexico City; in any case I read it, with reservations at first, but then with pleasure, not because it was good, no, what I liked were the signs of determination on each page, the touching determination of an adolescent: the novel was bad, but he was good. So I made friends with him. It helped that we were the only two South Americans among so many Mexicans. I made friends with him, I went over and talked to him, covering my mouth with my hand, and he looked me in the eye, looked at the back of my hand, and didn't ask why I was covering my mouth, but I think he guessed straight away, unlike the others, I mean he guessed the deeper reason, the ultimate dignity that obliged me to cover my lips, and it didn't matter to him.

That night I made friends with him, in spite of the difference in our ages, and all the other differences! I was the one who introduced him, some weeks later, to the poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. I took him home once, sick and drunk, holding him up as he clung to my bony shoulder, and I made friends with his mother and his father, and his sister, who was so nice, they were all so nice.

And the first thing I said to his mother was: I haven't slept with your son, Mrs. Belano. That's just how I am, I like to be frank and forthright with frank and forthright people (although this inveterate habit of mine has caused me no end of grief). I lifted my hands and smiled, then lowered them again and spoke, and she looked at me as if I had just stepped out of her son's notebooks, the notebooks of Arturito Belano, who by then was sleeping it off in his cavelike bedroom. And she said: Of course not, Auxilio, but there's no need to call me Mrs., we must be nearly the same age. And I raised an eyebrow and fixed her with the bluer of my eyes, the right one, thinking: She's right, kid, we must be more or less the same age. I might have been three years younger than her, or two, or one, but basically we belonged to the same generation; the only difference was that she had an apartment and a job and a monthly salary and I didn't; the only difference was that I went out with young people and Arturito's mother went out with people her own age; the only difference was that she had two teenage children and I had none, but that didn't matter either because by then I had children too, in my own way, hundreds of them.

So I became a friend of the family. A family of traveling Chileans who had emigrated to Mexico in 1968. My year. And sometimes I would say to Arturo's mother: You know, when you were getting ready to move, I was shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the UNAM. I know, Auxilio. Funny, isn't it? Sure is. And we could go on like that for a fair while, at night, listening to music and talking and laughing.

I became a friend of the family. They invited me to stay at their apartment for long periods, a month, two weeks, or a month and a half, because at the time I had no money for a boarding house or a rooftop room and I had taken to wandering around, blown this way and that by the night winds that sweep the streets and avenues of Mexico City.

By day I busied myself at the university; by night I led a bohemian life, and slept, and gradually scattered my few belongings, leaving them in the houses and apartments of friends: my clothes, my books, my magazines, my photos. I, Remedios Varo, I, Leonora Carrington, I, Eunice Odio, I, Lilian Serpas (ah, poor Lilian Serpas, I still have to tell you about her). And my friends, of course, would eventually get tired of me and ask me to leave. And I would leave. I would crack a joke and leave. I would try to make light of it and leave. I would hang my head and leave. I would give them a kiss on the cheek and say thanks and leave. Some spiteful people say that I wouldn't go. They're lying. I would leave as soon as I was asked. Maybe, on one occasion, I shut myself in the bathroom and shed a few tears. Some gossipmongers say that I had a weakness for bathrooms. They couldn't be further from the truth. Bathrooms were a nightmare for me, although since September 1968, I had grown accustomed to nightmares. You can get used to anything. I like bathrooms. I like my friends' bathrooms. I like to take a shower and face the day with a clean body, who doesn't? I also like to shower before going to bed. Arturito's mother used to say to me: Use the clean towel I've put out for you, Auxilio, but I never used towels. I preferred to get dressed while my skin was still wet and let my body warmth evaporate the droplets of water. People used to find that funny. I found it funny too. Although I could also have gone crazy.