The Spirit of Science Fiction

Chapter 1

“Do you mind if I interview you?”

“Go ahead, but keep it brief.”

“Do you realize that you’re the youngest writer ever to win this prize?”

“Is that so?”

“I’ve just spoken to one of the organizers. I got the sense that they were moved.”

“I don’t know what to tell you…. It’s an honor…. I’m very happy.”

“It seems everyone is happy. What are you drinking?”

“Tequila.”

“Vodka here. Vodka is a strange drink, isn’t it? It’s not what most women would choose. Vodka neat.”

“I don’t know what women drink.”

“Oh, no? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. A woman’s drink is always secret. Her true drink, I mean. Her infinite pour. But never mind. It’s such a clear night, isn’t it? From here we can see the farthest towns and the most distant stars.”

“That’s an optical illusion, miss. If you look carefully, you’ll observe that the windows are oddly fogged. Go out on the terrace. I believe we’re in the middle of the woods. Practically all we can see are tree branches.”

“Then those are paper stars, of course. But what about the town lights?”

“Phosphorescent sand.”

“You’re so clever. Please, tell me about your work. Yourself and your work.”

“I feel a little nervous, you know? All these people singing and dancing nonstop, I’m not…”

“Don’t you like the party?”

“I think everyone is drunk.”

“They’re the winners and runners-up of all the previous prizes.”

“Good God.”

“They’re celebrating the end of another contest. It’s… natural.”

Chapter 2

Ghosts and ghostly days passed through Jan’s mind. I think it was quick, a sigh, and then there was Jan on the floor, sweating and howling in pain. Worth mentioning, too, are the signs he was making, the frozen flurry of gestures, as if to show me that there was something on the ceiling, what? I asked as his index finger rose and fell with exasperating slowness, oh, shit, said Jan, it hurts, rats, mountain-climbing rats, you dumbfuck, and then he said, ah, ah, ah, and I grabbed him by the arms, or I pulled him up, which is when I realized that he wasn’t just sweating rivers but cold rivers. I know I should have run for a doctor, but I got the sense that he didn’t want to be left alone. Or maybe I was afraid to go out. (This was the night I realized that the night is really big.) Actually, from a certain perspective I think Jan didn’t care whether I stayed or left. But he didn’t want a doctor. So I said, don’t die, you’re like the prince from The Idiot. I’d bring you a mirror if we had a mirror, but since we don’t, trust me and try to calm down, don’t die on me. Then, after he had sweated a Norwegian river, he said that the roof of our room was plagued with mutant rats, can’t you hear them? he whispered, my hand was on his forehead, and I said, yes, it was the first time I’d heard rats shrieking on the roof of an eighth-floor room. Ah, said Jan. Poor Posadas, he said. His body was so long and thin that I promised myself that from now on I would do a better job of keeping him fed. Then he seemed to fall asleep, his eyes half closed, his face turned to the wall. I lit a cigarette. Through our only window, the first rays of dawn began to appear. The street below was still dark and deserted, but cars went by with some regularity. Suddenly, behind me, I heard Jan’s snores. I looked at him. He was asleep, naked on his bare mattress, a lock of blond hair drying slowly on his forehead. I slumped against the wall and let myself slide down until I was sitting in a corner. Through the window, I saw an airplane go by: red, green, blue, yellow lights, the kernel of a rainbow. I closed my eyes and thought about the past few days, the big sad scenes, what I could see and touch, and then I got undressed and lay down on my mattress and tried to imagine Jan’s nightmares, and suddenly, before I fell asleep, I was as certain as if it was being dictated to me that Jan had felt many things that night, but not fear.

Letter

Chapter 3

“Then let’s talk about the winning book.”

“There isn’t much to say. Do you want me to tell you what it’s about?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“It begins in Santa Bárbara, a town near the Andes, in the south of Chile. It’s a horrible place, or at least that’s how I see it, nothing like these charming Mexican villages. But there’s one thing that gives it class: the houses are all built of wood. I have to confess that I’ve never been there, but this is how I imagine it: wooden houses in every shade of brown, unpaved streets, nonexistent sidewalks—or, actually, rickety wooden ramps like in westerns, so that when it rains, mud isn’t tracked inside. It’s in this nightmarish, hellish Santa Bárbara that the story begins. To be precise, it begins at the Potato Academy, a kind of three-story grain shed with an iron weather vane on the roof, probably the bleakest building on Calle Galvarino and one of the many secret faculties of the Unknown University that are scattered around the world.”

“Truly fascinating. Tell me more.”

“On the first floor, there are just two rooms. One of them is so huge that tractors used to be kept there; the other is tiny, tucked away in a corner. In the big room, there are tables, chairs, filing cabinets, even sleeping bags and mattresses. Tacked to the walls are posters and drawings of different kinds of tubers. The small room is empty. It’s a room with a floor, a ceiling, wooden walls—not old wood from when the grain shed was built but new wood, neatly cut and polished, nearly jet-black. I’m not boring you, am I?”

“No, go on, go on. This is a nice break for me. You wouldn’t believe all the interviews I had in Mexico City this morning. They work us like slaves at the paper.”

“All right. On the second floor, reached by stairs without a handrail, there are two more rooms, each of the same size. In one of them, there are a few mismatched chairs, a desk, a blackboard, and other items that give the room the vague feel of a classroom. In the other room, there’s nothing but rusty old farm equipment. Finally, on the third floor, which is reached from the tool room, we find a ham radio set and a profusion of maps scattered on the floor, a small FM transmitter, some semiprofessional recording equipment, a set of Japanese amplifiers, et cetera. I say et cetera because anything that I haven’t mentioned either isn’t important or else will be described later in full detail.”

“My dear friend, the suspense is killing me.”

“Spare me the ironic commentary. As I was saying, the third floor, which is actually a huge single attic room, is scattered with all of these modern or quasi-modern communication devices. The ham radio set is the only surviving piece of a collection of equipment that the academy once used for teaching purposes but that had to be sold due to general neglect by the UU and because the caretaker needed to eat. The room is a complete mess; it looks as if no one has bothered to sweep or mop for months. There are a couple of windows with wooden shutters, too few for the size of the room. From the eastward-facing one, you see the mountains. From the other, the view is of an endless forest and the beginning or the end of a path.”

“An idyllic landscape.”

“Idyllic or terrifying, depending how you look at it.”

“Hmm…”

“The academy is surrounded by a yard. In the old days, it was full of carts and trucks. Now the only vehicle in the yard is a BMX bike belonging to the caretaker, a man in his sixties; he’s a health nut, hence the bicycle. Around the yard is a wooden-and-wire fence. There are only two entrances. The main gate is big and heavy, and on the front of it is a yellowish metal sign stamped with black letters reading POTATO ACADEMY—ALIMENTARY RESEARCH 3, and beneath, in tiny print, the street name and number: 800 GALVARINO. The other door is in what a normal visitor would call the backyard. This door is small, and instead of opening onto the street it leads into a vacant lot and beyond to the woods and the path.”

“The same path you can see from the attic?”

“Yes, the tail end of it.”

“It must be nice to live in an attic, even a tiny one.”

“I lived in a rooftop room for centuries. I don’t recommend it.”

“I didn’t say a rooftop room, I said an attic.”

“Same thing. The view is the same. A view of the gallows, but with depth. With sunrises and sunsets.”

Chapter 4

It was the ideal scene on which to pin images or desires, I thought—a young man, five foot eight, in jeans and a blue T-shirt, standing in the sun on the curb of the longest street in the Americas.

This meant that we were in Mexico at last and that the sun shining down on me between buildings was the sun of the Mexico City I’d dreamed of for so long. I lit a cigarette and searched for our window. The building where we lived was greenish gray, like the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Jan had said three days ago, when we found the room. There were flowers on the apartment balconies. Higher up—smaller than some flowerpots—were the windows of the rooftop rooms. I was tempted to call Jan to come to the window and see our future. And then what? Skip out of there, say, Jan, I’m off, I’ll pick up avocados for lunch (and milk, though Jan hated milk), and good news, super queer, perfect poise, eternal faggot in the antechambers of greatness, I’ll be star reporter of the poetry section, every telephone at my disposal.

Then my heart began to hammer strangely. I thought, I’m a statue frozen between the road and the sidewalk. I didn’t scream. I walked on. Seconds later, when I had yet to emerge from the shadow of our building or the weave of shadows that covered this stretch, my reflection appeared in the windows of Sanborns, strange mental duplication—a young man with long hair in a ripped blue T-shirt who bowed, genuflecting strangely before the jewels and the crimes (but what jewels and what crimes I forgot immediately) with rolls and avocados in my arms, and a liter of Lala milk, and the eyes, not my eyes but eyes lost in the black hole of the window, narrowed as if they had suddenly seen the desert.

I turned around slowly. I knew it. Jan was watching me from the window. I waved my arms in the air. Jan shouted something unintelligible and leaned farther out. I jumped. Jan responded by moving his head back to front and then in circles, faster and faster. I was afraid that he would throw himself out the window. I started to laugh. The passersby stared at me, and then they looked up and saw Jan, who was lifting his leg, pretending to kick a cloud. He’s my friend, I said. We just moved here a few days ago. He’s wishing me luck. I’m on my way out to look for work. Oh, well, that’s nice, what a good friend, someone said, and walked on, smiling.

I believed that nothing bad would ever happen to us in that welcoming city. How near and how far from what fate had in store for me! How sad and transparent that first Mexican smile appears now in memory!

Chapter 5

“I dreamed about a Russian guy…. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know…. I dreamed about a blond girl…. It was getting dark…. Like on the outskirts of Los Ángeles, but pretty soon it wasn’t Los Ángeles anymore. It was Mexico City, and the girl was walking in clear plastic tunnels…. She had sad eyes…. But that was yesterday, on the bus.”

“In my dream, the Russian was happy. Somehow I could tell that he was going to go up in a spaceship.”

“Then it was Yuri Gagarin.”

“More tequila?”

“Ándele, pal, simonel.”

“At first I thought it was Yuri Gagarin, too, but you won’t believe what happened next…. In the dream, it made my hair stand on end.”

“You were sleeping soundly, though. I was writing until late, and you looked fine.”

“Well, then the Russian got into his space suit and turned his back on me. He left. I wanted to go after him, but I don’t know what was wrong with me; I couldn’t walk. Then the Russian turned and waved good-bye…. And you know what he looked like, what he was?”

“No…”

“A dolphin… there was a dolphin inside the suit…. My hair bristled, and I wanted to cry…”

“But you weren’t even snoring.”

“It was terrible…. It doesn’t seem like it now, but in the dream it was awful, like a knot in my throat. It wasn’t death, you know? It was more like erasure.”

“The dolphin of Leningrad.”

“I think it was an omen…. You didn’t sleep?”

“No, I wrote all night.”

“Are you cold?”

“Extremely. Fuck, I thought it would never be cold here.”

“The sun is coming up.”

Our heads barely fit in the window frame. Jan said he’d thought about Boris. He said it in an offhand way.

The sunrise said: I’m out of this world. Get used to it. Once every three days, you’ll be seeing me.

“Jesus, what a sunrise,” said Jan, his eyes wide and his hands in fists.

Chapter 6

I started to do work for the arts supplement of the newspaper La Nación. The supplement’s editor, Rodríguez, an old Andalusian poet who had been a friend of Miguel Hernández, let me write something for each issue. Once a week, in other words. With what I made on four pieces a month, we could get by for eight or nine days. The other twenty-one days, we lived off the articles I wrote for a magazine of pseudohistory run by an Argentinean just as old as Rodríguez, though he had the smoothest, most flawless skin I’d ever seen. People called him “the Doll,” for obvious reasons. The rest was put up by my parents or Jan’s parents. It worked out more or less like this: 30 percent of the money came from La Nación, another 30 percent from our parents, and 40 percent from History and Society, which was the name of the Doll’s misbegotten creation. I could turn out the four assignments for La Nación in a couple of days; they were reviews of poetry books, a few novels, and the occasional essay collection. Rodríguez gave me the books on Saturday mornings, which was when everyone, or almost everyone, who wrote for the supplement gathered in the tiny cubicle that served as the old man’s office, handing in assignments, picking up checks, and proposing ideas that must have been really bad, or if not, maybe Rodríguez had rejected them, because the supplement was always the worst rag. The real reason people came on Saturdays was to talk to their friends and bad-mouth their enemies. They were all poets, they all drank, they were all older than me. It wasn’t much fun, but I never missed a Saturday. When Rodríguez wrapped things up, we went to the cafés and talked until, one by one, the poets went back to their jobs and I was left alone at the table, legs crossed, watching the view through the window: the boys and girls of Mexico City, ecstatic policemen, and a sun that seemed to keep watch over the planet from the rooftops. With the Doll, things were different. First of all, pride—it makes me blush now—led me to refuse to publish any pieces under my own name. When I told the Doll this, he blinked, hurt, but agreed. What do you want to call yourself, kid? He grunted. Without hesitation, I said, Antonio Pérez. I see, said the Doll. You have literary ambitions. No, I swear I don’t, I said, lying. Whether you do or not, I’m going to demand quality work from you, he said. And then, more sadly, to think of all the pretty stories you can write on these topics. My first piece was on Dillinger. The second was on the Naples Camorra. (Antonio Pérez went so far as to quote entire paragraphs from a Conrad story!) Then came the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the life of a poisoner from Walla Walla, the Lindbergh kidnapping, et cetera. The offices of History and Society were in an old building in Colonia Lindavista, and the entire time I was bringing in work, I never saw anyone but the Doll. Our meetings were short: I turned in the pieces, and he gave me new assignments and loaned me reference material, photocopies of magazines that he had published in his native Buenos Aires and photocopies of sister magazines from Spain and Venezuela that I used as sources but also sometimes shamelessly plagiarized. Occasionally the Doll asked about Jan’s parents—they were old friends—and then he sighed. How is the Schrellas’ son? Fine. What’s he doing? Nothing, he’s in school. Ah. And that was all. Jan, it goes without saying, wasn’t in school, though we fed the lie to his parents to keep them quiet. Actually, Jan never left the room. He spent all day there doing God knows what. He did go out to the toilet or the shower that we shared with the other roof tenants, and sometimes he went down to take a walk along Insurgentes, two blocks at most, moving slowly and seeming to sniff around for something, and very soon he was back. Meanwhile I was lonely; I needed to meet other people. The solution came from a poet at La Nación who worked on the sports section. He said: go to the poetry workshop at the Faculty of Literature. He said: you’ll find young people there, people your own age, not shitty drunks and has-beens who just want to be on a payroll somewhere. I smiled. Now the old bastard is going to cry, I thought. He said: poetesses, there are poetesses there, kid, get in on the action. Ah.

Letter

Chapter 7

The workshop was led by Jeremías Moreno, prizewinning poet, and it was held in a small room on the third floor of the Faculty of Literature. On one wall, someone had written ALCIRA SOUST SCAFFO WAS HERE in red spray paint, ten inches from the floor, clear but unobtrusive, impossible to see if the visitor didn’t look down. Though at first glance the graffiti seemed completely innocent, after a few minutes of repeated reading it began to feel like a shout, an agonizing display. Judging by the paint, it wasn’t recent, and I wondered who could have written it, what good fairy had rescued it from the vigilantes of good manners, who this Alcira was who had set up camp a few inches from the floor.

To make things even more confusing, Jeremías asked me in a whisper what I wanted. I explained, maybe too eagerly, that Colin, the baseball expert at La Nación, had recommended his workshop to me. I used the words “advice” and “suggestion”; I was about to precede them with the adjectives “brilliant” and “happy,” but I was halted by his expression of complete bafflement. It had been only a few seconds, and everyone hated me already.

“Never heard of the man.”

“Short, dark… big nose,” I stammered.

“No clue.”

We were silent for a moment. I think it was the graffiti, the magnetic attraction of those red letters—which for some reason I immediately associated with poverty and kindness—that kept me from fleeing. I can’t remember when exactly Jeremías Moreno asked me to sit down or when he made the obligatory remarks about the country I was from. The members of the workshop had arranged their chairs in a circle, broken only by the door. There were no girls among the apprentice poets, I noted with a surge of discouragement, heightened, if possible, upon scanning their faces and discovering that not a single one of them looked like someone I’d want to get to know.

Who’s reading first? A skinny kid passed out three copies of a poem. I didn’t get one, but by craning my neck I could read the title on my neighbor’s copy. “The Willow,” said the kid. Heh-heh, it’s metaphysical, kind of. Go on, then. Threatened by a creeping mental fog, I counted twenty lines the way an insomniac counts sheep. Or maybe thirty. Or maybe fifteen kicks planted on the writer’s backside, followed by a silence, and some “hmm”s, some coughs, some faint smiles, some “uh-huh”s. I get the sense, said a fat kid, that you’re trying to con us. The rhythm, I think. No, it’s the gerunds—there should never be two in a row. And why all the “and”s? To make it more powerful. Make the willow more powerful. Fucking college kids, I thought. I learned everything I know from Mariano Pérez, said the author, trapped. (Mariano Pérez, as I later learned, was Jeremías’s buddy and the coordinator of the other workshop, the official Faculty of Literature workshop.) Is that so? said Jeremías resentfully. Well, I still think it sounds bad, said the fat kid. I know for a fact that you’ve done better work. Actually, to me it sounds like Frost, broke in a kid with glasses. Jeremías almost erupted. The only Frost you’ve read is in anthologies, you bonehead. Let me see, read that line again, the one about the willow weeping. T. S. Eliot? Bonifaz Nuño? Mariano? Let’s not implicate Mariano in this crime, please. Interesting the way the lines are arranged, said the kid with glasses. Jeremías grabbed a copy from the poet next to him. If you turn it upside down and look hard at it, it could be a willow. Spatial arrangement, I suppose—Jean-Clarence Lambert? I swear it’s a coincidence. Maybe you’re just a bad reader, said Jeremías, conciliatory and weary of the discussion. Who wants to read it again? You do it, Jeremías, you’re the best reader. All right, then. Ahem, let’s give it a try. Does the willow remember its horizon? Why, yes—crocodile smile—there’s a hint of Mariano here, no doubt about it. That’s because Mariano is my model. I can see that. Look, cut the first twenty lines and keep the ending, it’s really powerful. Who wants to read next?

The kids shuffled through their papers, reluctant. Jeremías consulted his watch with the professional flourish of a psychoanalyst. I heard shouts from the hall, voices, kids calling good-bye, doors slamming, until another poet, one who had so far opened his mouth only to exhale cigarette smoke, passed out three copies, like the first kid.

When the reading was over, everyone nodded in the same blissful state. Man, you’re really improving, Márquez, said Jeremías. But try not to bring up love so much—it makes you sound like Horace. I think our friend Márquez is in love. Ha-ha-ha. Nods of agreement were followed by gripes about Márquez’s luck. Nice poem, yes sir. In gratitude, the object of this praise passed around a pack of Camels previously kept under lock and key in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Carefully, I lit a cigarette, and I smiled because everyone was smiling. This kind of workshop, I thought, was like a tiny dance club for shy, boring people, though as I would soon have occasion to learn, I was gravely mistaken. Didn’t you bring in anything else, Márquez? No, that’s all I typed up. Did you really like it? It’s a good poem: unpretentious, epigrammatic, forceful, declared Jeremías. Márquez’s face changed colors, a strange soup of mingled pride and vulnerability.

What did I think about then? I thought about food, about Jan on the roof, about the Mexican buses that ply their routes through the night, about Boris, about me sitting sadly in this creepy little room. But I didn’t budge, and it was a good thing I didn’t. Because suddenly the door opened and a stranger in grease-stained jeans and black leather boots joined the group, saying hello and standing there, his back to me, as the poets shifted uneasily in their chairs and Jeremías said good evening, José, outwardly deferential, though wishing terrible misfortune on him with eyes and eyebrows. His very black hair fell past his shoulders, and he had a book crammed in the back pocket of his pants like the reactor on a ship. I knew he was a kamikaze. But I also knew that he could be many other things, among them a voyager through the writing workshops springing up around the city, though in them he would clearly be out of place. He was oblivious of the mocking looks that the poets exchanged, possibly amused when everyone hurried to make room for him (between a pensive literature student and me), unruffled when asked whether something had happened to him, whether he’d brought poems, whether he’d been out of town, whether he’d read the latest book by.

He smiled and said no, he hadn’t been away, hadn’t been in an accident, hadn’t brought in anything written—much less in triplicate—but not to worry, he had a good memory.

“I’m going to recite something for you. It’s a poem I’m calling ‘Eros and Thanatos.’”

Then he lay back in his chair, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and began to speak.

Chapter 8

The caretaker of the academy is an energetic man. He sleeps on the second floor of the academy, and he takes his lunch at a house in town. Whenever he leaves the grain shed, it’s on the BMX. At night, he makes something to eat on the camp stove while broadcasting folk music over the radio. When he’s done eating, he makes a cup of tea and smokes a cigarette. Only then does he sit down in front of the microphone. His live broadcast isn’t very interesting. Lectures on how to double or triple potato crops, how to cook potatoes one hundred ways, how to make potato soup or potato jam, how to store potatoes for five years or even ten, et cetera. His voice is calm, relaxed: he speaks coolly but in the confidence-inspiring tone of a man of reason. I don’t know how many people listen to him. It can’t be more than a few. There are no listener surveys in the region. But anyone who listens carefully will realize, sooner or later, that his voice isn’t just detached or lazy but unmistakably icy. When the program is over, he smokes another cigarette and records his observations of the day in a kind of log. Then he starts the tape recorder. The tape spins silently, and the man falls asleep in his chair or pretends to be asleep.”

“Are the tapes playing or recording?”

“I don’t know. The man, I should say, pretends to sleep, but he’s actually listening to sounds. The grain shed creaks endlessly all night long, each gust of wind is answered by a particular faint moan of timbers, and the man’s ear is tuned to the wind and the sounds of the grain shed. Until he gets bored. Sometimes he dreams about Boris.”

“So he doesn’t listen all night long?”

“No. He gets bored and goes to sleep. The tape rolls on, of course. When the caretaker wakes up around eight, he turns it off and rewinds. Really, there’s nothing fun about life at the Academy. The scenery is nice and the air is healthy, but it’s not a fun life, no matter how the caretaker tries to fill his hours with petty pursuits. Among these occupations, let’s single out three: the nightly didactic potato lectures, the silent tape recorder, and the ham radio set. This last activity is even more fruitless than the rest, if possible. Basically, the caretaker searches the airwaves for a message that never comes. But, oh, his patience is infinite, and every day, once every eight hours, he issues his call: ‘HWK, do you receive me? HWK, do you receive me? Academy here, HWK, academy here, academy here…’”

“And no one answers.”

“No. The man searches, but no one answers. Very occasionally, he picks up distant voices, maybe other ham radio operators, stray words, but mostly all he hears is the buzz of static. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”

“Well…”

“It’s a riot. The poor caretaker has a heavy Chilean accent. Imagine him talking to himself in his high voice: ‘HWK, do you receive me? HWK, do you receive me?’ Ha-ha-ha… Straight-faced…”

Letter

Chapter 9

Before we move on to more important matters, I should talk to you about Dr. Huachofeo. He isn’t an important figure, but he is indispensable. And ornamental. He’s like the coat of paint on a crossbeam. I don’t know if you follow me. A ray of light, a pocket-size Joselito for our pains…”

“Is that a tear in your eye? Young as you are, you remember Joselito, too?”

“Yes, but never mind that. Instead you should ask me what was in the academy file cabinets.”

“Go on, then, tell me.”

“The cabinets were full of the potato lectures that the caretaker broadcast over the radio or delivered personally when there were still students who came to the grain shed. None of the papers had dates. There were no names. Just the courses taught, filed by trimester, several three-year cycles’ worth of them. To judge by the papers, the old caretaker was responsible for the education of several classes of experts on the potato as staple.”

“I hate potatoes. They’re fattening.”

“Ask me what books were in the grain shed.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“If we exclude the manuals and textbooks, all relating to the world of the potato, we are left with just one: The Paradoxical History of Latin America, by Pedro Huachofeo, B.A. in economics and M.D. in veterinary science, both degrees obtained at the University of Los Ángeles in the province of Bío-Bío. A five-hundred-page tome, lavishly illustrated by the author himself and full of stories, half of which don’t take place in Latin America.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“Huachofeo, I should say, was the pseudonym of a scion of one of the richest landowning families, which disinherited him, of course. He was killed in a raid at a brothel down south.”

“Ah, always the violence. And the machismo. Why do our intellectuals have to be such creeps when it comes to sex?”

“You’re wrong. Huachofeo was there to receive a message. His contact didn’t show up, and the poor guy sat for a while talking to a pimp and sipping some tasty house red. Pure bad luck.”

“Uh-huh. The caretaker was a friend of Huachofeo’s, I suppose.”

“No—an admirer. Or a student of his work, if you prefer. The caretaker believed that the meanderings and ponderings of The Paradoxical History of Latin America were really signals in code. But let’s leave Dr. Huachofeo in his grave. As you’ll see, there are many coded messages. I’m telling you all this because the soul of the dead author, present in this book—the only nonacademic book read by the caretaker—roamed the academy, along with other ghosts. It was one of the guardian spirits of the academy. And that’s all. That’s the Potato Academy. Where Boris studied.”

“I’m going to get myself another vodka.”

“Bring me a tequila or whatever while you’re up.”

“Wonderful. Now you look happier.”

Chapter 10

The name of the author of “Eros and Thanatos” was José Arco. Before the night was over, we were friends. The kids from the workshop asked me out for coffee, and José Arco came, too. I rode in one of the poets’ cars; he rode behind us—but also beside and sometimes ahead of us—on a black Honda. I was surprised: in those days, more and more motorcycles were turning up in poems, but there weren’t many poets on real motorcycles on real streets; also, as I could see from the car window, he rode in a particular way. Hardly the inscrutable biker, he made his presence known with hand signals and waves and cries, attuned not just to the nocturnal landscape but also, I could have sworn, to the ghosts—half vision and half apparition—that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City. Later, when everyone had gone and he and I were still eating and drinking, he confessed that his motorcycle had broken down and that he was actually happy about it, since he was a walker by nature. I asked no questions until we left the bar. The motorcycle, in fact, wouldn’t start, and we decided to leave it parked in front of the house we liked best. Actually, it was he who asked me if I liked the looks of some houses that he pointed out not entirely at random as we pushed the motorcycle along, while at the same time begging me to be honest and not weasel out and choose any old house. The fourth received my nod of approval. This is where Teresa lives, he said with a smile. The street, José Arco, the motorcycle, me—together we formed a strange unit. Our shadows, too dark, stretched to a wizened and nearly leafless oak; from the distance came snatches of a song. I whispered, happy: Who is Teresa?

“A friend.”

“Let’s go see her and tell her we’ve left the motorcycle here.”

“No,” said José Arco, “she’ll realize in the morning, when she wakes up.”

“Call her on the phone, then.”

“No, it’s too late, let’s go.”

It didn’t take a genius to realize that he was in love and that the motorcycle parked in front of the house was some kind of offering. I didn’t say anything, and we walked away. Deep down I was incredibly happy to have chosen the house of the only person he knew in the neighborhood. From where we were in Colonia Coyoacán, it was blocks and blocks to my rooftop room, and there would be plenty of time to talk. At first José Arco wasn’t very communicative, or rather he was semicommunicative: he muttered incomprehensible things, assumed that you knew what he was talking about, had trouble explaining his stories, talked as if desperation and happiness were the same thing, a single territory, the site of his Language Academy and his homeland. And so, little by little, on this walk and later ones, he gave me a summary of his life. We were the same age, twenty-one. He had studied sociology and philosophy and hadn’t gotten a degree in either. An illness, which he didn’t like to talk about, had caused him to drop out of school. He had spent four months in the hospital. One morning a doctor told him that he should have been dead two weeks ago. José Arco said that then he leaned on one elbow and struck the doctor with a right cross, the first time he’d punched anybody. When he went back to school, his friends, who by now were in their second year, explained in some disappointment that all this time they’d thought he was in the mountains with the guerrilla troops of the Party of the Poor. He stuck it out for two days, and then he decided he’d had enough. At the time, he was living in a house in Satélite with his mother and his little brother, Gustavito, a six-foot-tall giant of a kid. I’ll have more to say about his mother later. There’s not much to tell about Gustavito: I think he wanted to study law, and maybe he’s a lawyer by now, though José tried more than once to convince him that he was the great hope of Mexican heavyweights, the avenger of Pulgarcito Ramos, just what Satélite needed to come out swinging and shut down the competition from Tepito and La Bondojito. His brother, benevolent and patient as only a two-hundred-pound adolescent can be, laughed and let him talk. I think José Arco loved his family much more than he let on. (His father is the invisible man in this story.) Then he enrolled in the philosophy department and began to go to class again almost every day. Like so many others, he hung out at film clubs and went to parties thrown by the heroes of the day. He found work as a proofreader at a publishing house and stopped going to class; this time he and the university parted ways permanently. He left home at nineteen, almost twenty, and spent his time rolling around Mexico City dreaming up weird projects, planning swift and meticulous scenes that left him suddenly exhausted, racked, straddling the motorcycle pulled to a halt wherever he happened to be, gripping the handlebars so as not to fall off. Thanks to him, I got to know the dens of San Juan de Letrán, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood, which looked just as cheerful and unsavory to us as we did to the women who served us pozole. Back then he was king of the frogs and I was ambassador of the rats, and our friendship and our schemes were in full swing. Many were the nights we spent in the rooftop room with Jan, whom he loved from the start. Sometimes he came by late, at three or four in the morning, waking us up with a long cry, like a wolf, and then Jan leaped up from his mattress, went over to the window, and said: it’s José Arco. Other times we were awake, reading or writing, and he came up with a bottle of tequila and three ham sandwiches, with Posada and Remedios Varo postcards for Jan’s correspondence, with poetry books and little magazines, with reports on the cloud, the eye that was advancing on Mexico City. Don’t scare me, I said. Jan laughed. He loved José Arco’s visits. José Arco sat down on the floor and asked me what article I was perpetrating for the Doll, and then he talked science fiction with Jan. The sandwiches, wrapped in brown paper, were enormous and full of everything: beans, tomato, lettuce, sour cream, avocado, chile pepper, and two slices of ham. The little bottle of tequila was finished before the sandwiches, and we would end the evening drinking tea, playing some radio show with the volume turned way down, reading poetry, Jan translating poems by Daniel Biga or Marc Cholodenko, whom José Arco would meet many years later, but that’s another story; at six thirty or seven, he said good-bye, took the stairs one by one, got on his Honda, and disappeared down Insurgentes. We went back to our mattresses and fell asleep, and sometimes I dreamed that José Arco was gliding on his black motorcycle along a frozen avenue, without a glance at the icicles that hung from the windows, shivering with cold, until suddenly, from a sky that was also white and frozen, came a blazing red lightning bolt, and houses and streets split apart, and my friend disappeared in a kind of hurricane of mud. When I woke up, it was usually with a sharp headache.

Chapter 11

Yesterday I dreamed about Thea von Harbou…. It woke me right up…. But then, thinking about it, I realized that I dreamed about her because of a novel I read recently…. It’s not that it was such a strange book, but I got the idea that the author was hiding something…. And after the dream, I figured it out…”

“What novel?”

“Silhouette, by Gene Wolfe.”

“…”

“Want me to tell you what it’s about?”

“All right, while I’m making breakfast.”

“I had some tea before, when you were asleep.”

“I’ve got a headache. Are you going to want another cup of tea?”

“Yes.”

“Go on. I’m listening, even if my back is turned.”

“It’s the story of a spaceship that for a long time has been looking for a planet habitable by the human race. At last they find one, but it’s been many years since they set off on the voyage, and the crew has changed; they’ve all gotten older, but you have to realize that they were very young when they set off…. What’s changed are their beliefs: sects, secret societies, covens have sprung up…. The ship has also fallen into disrepair—there are computers that don’t work, blown-out lights that no one bothers to fix, wrecked sleeping compartments…. Then, when they find the new planet, the mission is completed and they’re supposed to return to Earth with the news, but no one wants to go back…. The voyage will consume the rest of their youth, and they’ll return to an unknown world, because meanwhile several centuries have gone by on Earth, since they’ve been traveling at close to light speed…. It’s just a starving, overpopulated planet…. And there are even those who believe that there is no life left on Earth…. Among them is Johann, the protagonist…. Johann is a quiet man, one of the few who love the ship…. He’s of average height…. There’s a hierarchy of height; the woman who’s captain of the ship, for example, is the tallest, and the privates are the shortest…. Johann is a lieutenant; he goes about his duties without making too many friends. Like nearly everyone, he’s set in his ways; he’s bored… until they reach the strange planet…. Then Johann discovers that his shadow has grown darker…. Black as outer space and dense… As you probably guessed, it’s not his shadow but a separate being that’s taken cover there, mimicking the movements of his shadow…. Where has it come from? The planet? Space? We’ll never know, and it doesn’t really matter…. The Shadow is powerful, as we’ll see, but as silent as Johann…. Meanwhile the sects are preparing to mutiny…. A group tries to convince Johann to join them; they tell him that he’s one of the chosen, that their common fate is to create something new on this planet…. Some seem pretty loony, others dangerous…. Johann commits to nothing…. Then the Shadow transports him to the planet…. It’s a vast jungle, a vast desert, a vast beach…. Johann, dressed only in shorts and sandals, almost like a Tyrolean, walks through the undergrowth…. He moves his right leg when he feels the Shadow push against his right leg, then the left, slowly, waiting…. The darkness is total…. But the Shadow looks after him as if he’s a child…. When he returns, rebellion breaks out…. It’s total chaos…. Johann, as a precaution, takes off his officer’s stripes…. Suddenly he runs into Helmuth, the captain’s favorite and one of the heads of the rebellion, who tries to kill him, but the Shadow overpowers him, choking him to death…. Johann realizes what’s happening and makes his way to the bridge; the captain and some of the other officers are there, and on the screens of the central computer they see Helmuth and the mutineers readying a laser cannon…. Johann convinces them that all is lost, that they must flee to the planet…. But at the last minute, he stays behind…. He returns to the bridge, disconnects the fake video feed that the computer operators have manipulated, and sends an ultimatum to the rebels…. Whoever lays down arms this very instant will be pardoned; the rest will die…. Johann is well acquainted with the tools of falsehood and propaganda…. Then, too, he has the police and the marines on his side, who’ve spent the voyage in hibernation, and he knows that no one can snatch victory from him…. He finishes his communiqué with the announcement that he is the new captain…. Then he plots another route and abandons the planet…. And that’s all…. But then I dreamed about Thea von Harbou, and I realized that it was a Millennial Reich ship…. They were all Germans… all trapped in entropy…. Though there are a few weird things, strange things…. Under the effects of some drug, one of the girls—the one who sleeps most often with Johann—remembers something painful, and, weeping, she says that her name is Joan…. The girl’s real name is Grit, and Johann thinks that maybe her mother called her Joan when she was a baby…. Old-fangled and unfashionable names, banned by the psychologists, too…”

“Maybe the girl was trying to say that her name was Johann.”

“Possibly. The truth is, Johann is a serious fucking opportunist.”

“So why doesn’t he stay on the planet?”

“I don’t know. Leaving the planet, and not going back to Earth, is like choosing death, isn’t it? Or maybe the Shadow convinced him that he shouldn’t colonize the planet. Either way, the captain and a bunch of people are stuck there. Listen, read the novel, it’s really good…. And now I think the swastika came from the dream, not Gene Wolfe…. Though who knows…?”

“So you dreamed about Thea von Harbou…”

“Yes, it was a blond girl.”

“But have you ever seen a picture of her?”

“No.”

“How did you know it was Thea von Harbou?”

“I don’t know, I guessed it. She was like Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ the Dylan song, you know? Weird stuff, spooky, but very up-close and personal—it’s hard to explain, but personal.”

“So the Nazis take over the Earth and send ships in search of new worlds.”

“Yes. In Thea von Harbou’s version.”

“And they find the Shadow. Isn’t that a German story?”

“The story of the Shadow or the man who loses his shadow? I don’t know.”

“And it was Thea von Harbou who told you all this?”

“Johann believes that inhabited planets, or habitable planets, are the exception in the universe…. As he tells it, Guderian’s tanks lay waste to Moscow…”

Chapter 12

“Boris Lejeune?”

“Yes.”

The voice interrupts breakfast like a bomb, long anticipated but still capable of triggering surprise and terror. The caretaker jumps, drops his cup of tea, turns pale. Then he tries to stand, his feet tangling in the stool where he’s sitting. On all fours, his gaze pleading, he crawls to where the tapes spin silently. He waits. He wonders, biting his lip, whether the voice that upset him just a moment ago was an auditory illusion. Finally, as if it were a prize for perseverance, though it isn’t that at all, he hears a distant voice repeating a name from the speakers, which he has connected as quickly as he can. Cavalry Lieutenant Boris Lejeune. Then a laugh. Then static, magnified by the speakers, spills across the third floor of the academy, the second floor, the first floor, until it disappears into the yard, through which a girl is creeping. She’s about seven years old, and her name is Carmen. Under her arm, she’s carrying some tubes that she’s “stolen” from the piles of junk in the grain shed. The noise stops her in midstride…

“And that’s it?”

“What else did you expect?”

“The voice just says, I’m Lieutenant Boris Lejeune?”

“Cavalry Lieutenant.”

“That’s all?”

“There’s a laugh. It’s a boy’s mocking, insolent laugh. ‘Let me laugh for a second,’ he says. ‘As of now, I am Cavalry Lieutenant Boris Lejeune. The course will begin in a few minutes. This is new to me. Forgive me in advance for any errors. The uniform is nice-looking, true, but it’s fucking cold out here. The course begins now. My regiment has set up camp next to a potato field.’”

“This voice from the dead comes as a complete surprise to the caretaker, I guess.”

“Not exactly.”

“And the girl is still standing there in the yard?”

“The girl, overcome by curiosity, opens the door a crack and looks in. There’s no one on the first floor, of course, so she starts up the stairs, not bothering to be too careful.”

“Meanwhile Boris Lejeune gazes out over a potato field.”

“That’s right. And as Lejeune is contemplating the field, the caretaker bustles around plugging and unplugging cables, starting tape recorders, jotting things down in a little notebook, testing the volume, et cetera. Vain and pointless tasks, nothing but testament to the fear that fills the old man now that the course, as the lieutenant said, has begun. Meanwhile the girl has reached the third floor, and, hidden in the stairwell, she watches the whole scene with astonished eyes. The sky begins to brighten. Soon it exhibits a curious mix of whites and grays, an abundance of whimsical geometric figures. The only one who gazes pensively up at it is the cavalry lieutenant, as he’s about to cross the potato field. The girl is too absorbed in the machines she’s never seen before. The caretaker has eyes only for his connections. Lejeune sighs, then plants his officer’s boots in the black soil and heads toward the tents erected on the far side of the potato field. In the camp, everything is a mess. When he passes the infirmary, Lejeune spies the first dead and stops whistling. A corporal points toward the staff officers’ tents. As he moves that way, Lejeune realizes that they’re breaking camp. But everything is being done so slowly that it’s hard to tell whether the troops are setting up or tearing down. When at last he finds his superiors, Lejeune asks what he should do. Who are you? thunders the general. The girl, all at once, curls into a ball in the stairwell. The caretaker swallows. Lejeune answers: Lieutenant Boris Lejeune, I’m on the other side of the potato field, sir, I’ve just arrived. About time, says the general, and immediately forgets him. The conversation soon turns into an incomprehensible shouting match. Lejeune catches the words ‘honor,’ ‘nation,’ ‘shame,’ ‘glory,’ ‘command,’ et cetera, before sidling out of the tent. Now the girl smiles. The caretaker shakes his head as if to say, of course, I knew it. As the hours go by, a sense of defeat and panic grows in the encampment. Lejeune crosses back to the other side of the field and waits. Before night falls, a nervous hum rises from the camp. Some soldiers walking past yell: we’re in a giant pocket! The Germans are going to fuck us good! Lejeune smiles and says: we’ve begun the course behind schedule, but here we go. Glory be, hip-hip hoorayayay! exclaims the caretaker. The girl backs away, suddenly realizing that it’s night. An hour later, the gunfire begins.”

Chapter 13

Back then, for reasons unknown (though I could come up with a few), writing workshops were blossoming in Mexico City as never before. José Arco had some thoughts on the subject. It might be a scheme hatched from the beyond by the founding fathers, or an excess of zeal in some branch of the Education Department, or the visible manifestation of something else entirely, the sign of the Hurricane, as my friend explained, half serious and half joking. Whatever the case, the numbers told the story: according to the magazine My Enchanted Garden, whose publisher, editor in chief, and backer was the old poet and Michoacán politico Ubaldo Sánchez, in Mexico City alone the number of poetry journals of any size published in the year… was 125, by no means an inconsiderable sum, setting a record believed at the time to be unbreakable. Since then this torrent of magazines had been on the wane, until suddenly it began to wax again, from 32 in the previous year to 661 in the current year, and this proliferation, added Don Ubaldo, was by no means finished, since we were only in the month of… By the end of the year, he predicted a hair-raising total of one thousand poetry magazines, 90 percent of which would almost certainly cease to exist or undergo name changes and shifts in aesthetic tendencies in the year to come. How can it be, Don Ubaldo wondered, that in a city where illiteracy is growing by 0.5 percent annually, the production of poetry journals is on the rise? Likewise writing workshops, of which there were fifty-four in the previous year, according to the Conasupo Cultural Weekly, while in the current year the tally stands at two thousand. These figures, of course, have never been published in the bigger newspapers. And the fact that the Conasupo Weekly (which, as its name indicates, is a tabloid-size paper distributed to Conasupo employees along with three liters of milk) should attempt to document the number of workshops in Mexico City was suspicious in itself. José Arco and I tried to investigate further; or rather, he tried and I accompanied him, perched on the precarious rear seat of his Honda and getting to know the city along the way. The poet-editor of My Enchanted Garden lived in Colonia Mixcoac, in a big, ramshackle house on Calle Leonardo da Vinci. He welcomed us warmly, asked me what the hell I thought about what had just happened back where I was from, declared that the military was never to be trusted, then gave us some back issues of My Enchanted Garden. (It had been around for twenty-five years, if I remember correctly, and there were eighteen issues, some more polished than others and none more than fifteen pages long, from which Don Ubaldo launched attacks on nearly every writer in Mexico.) As he went to get gin and a family-size bottle of Coca-Cola from the kitchen, he roared at us to be ready with our poems. With a little smile, José Arco chose one and put it on the table. What about you? asked Don Ubaldo. I’ll send you something later, I lied. (When we left, I scolded my friend for his willingness to publish anywhere.) On our third drink, we asked him where he had come up with the figure of 661. We’d really like it if you could give us the names and addresses of all the magazines, said José Arco. Don Ubaldo looked at him with narrowed eyes. It was getting dark, and no light had been turned on. The question is offensive, boy, said the old man. After all these years of struggle, the name, at least, is familiar to them. Familiar to them? I asked. The publishers of these new journals, their distributors, they recognize the name of my journal, which was a pioneer in so many ways, as you have no way of knowing, of course, being new to the Republic. Sure, man, of course, said José Arco, but in your article you talk about a huge jump, and it’s hard to believe that all those people have heard of My Enchanted Garden, isn’t it? Don Ubaldo nodded slowly. Then he opened one of the drawers of his desk and took out a magazine printed on flimsy green paper, with type that seemed to leap from the page. There’s something to what you say, son. Then he went on to explain that he had been sent 180 poetry journals this year, of which 25 dated to the previous year. Among the 155 new journals was the one we held in our hands. From it he had taken the information about the other 480 journals, which, together with My Enchanted Garden, accounted for the sum of 661. I can vouch for the truth of it; I’ve known Dr. Carvajal for a long time. Dr. Carvajal? The publisher of the journal you’re holding in your hands, boys. The journal we were holding in our hands was called Mexico and Its Arts, and it was scarcely five pages long. The cover, a green sheet identical to the inner pages, featured the title, typewritten in capital letters (on an Olivetti Lettera 25, as Jan would later point out) and underlined twice; farther down, in parentheses and underlined just once, was Poetry Bulletin of Mexico City; at the bottom, not underlined, was the name of the publisher: Dr. Ireneo Carvajal. When we looked up, Don Ubaldo was smiling in satisfaction. The light that came in through the room’s only window made him look like a stone gargoyle. The doctor is a poet? For the first time, José Arco began to show signs of hesitation, his voice barely audible in the darkness that was rapidly gaining ground. The creator of My Enchanted Garden chortled: no one had ever dared to call Dr. Carvajal a poet. Son of a bitch? Sure. Also: a nasty piece of work, a snake, a backstabbing recluse. Though he’s read more than the three of us put together. Not without alarm, I noticed that as the evening went on, Ubaldo Sánchez had begun to look more and more like the Big Bad Wolf. The two of us must be turning into twin Little Red Riding Hoods, I thought. I turned the page: inside, there was a brief introductory note, followed by the names of the magazines and, sometimes, their addresses. On the back cover, the innocent phrase “Registration Pending” had a vague lapidary air. All at once, I felt that the little journal was burning my fingertips. Can I turn on the light, maestro? José Arco’s voice was brusque. Don Ubaldo seemed to jump. Then he said something unintelligible and lumbered to his feet. The light, though weak, revealed a room where scattered papers and books seemed locked in combat. On a small table, I made out the cheap bust of an Indian warrior; on the walls, magazine pictures in black and white and color blended in with the wallpaper. Could you give us Dr. Carvajal’s address? The old man nodded. All right, said José Arco, and I suppose we can keep this copy of the magazine? You suppose right, grumbled Don Ubaldo. As we were leaving, my eyes fell on a wrinkled sepia photograph on the desk: a group of soldiers on horseback, all but one gazing into the camera, and in the background a couple of 1920s Fords emerging from a great static dust cloud.

When he opened the door for us, it was starting to rain. I suppose you’ve noticed that this godforsaken city is hopping lately, hey, boys? Yes, said José Arco, we’ve noticed. Why is that? the old man whispered to himself.

In the next few days, I couldn’t tag along with José Arco on his adventures, so when he turned up on our roof, Jan and I begged him to tell us what he’d discovered so far. Our friend’s story was disappointing, but not without a hint of mystery. It went like this: A poet, promoter of the journal The Flying North (included, as it happens, in Dr. Ireneo Carvajal’s report), and employee of Conasupo, where he occupied some obscure post—doorman, office boy, or typist, I can’t remember—had so far been his only source of information. From this poet, he learned that the Weekly was hardly ever distributed among the administrative staff but that it could be found on any counter of the chain of cheap Conasupo supermarkets around Mexico City. Though “any counter” was an exaggeration, as my friend soon realized: there were supermarkets where the Weekly had never been seen and others where the employees, after digging through piles of papers, managed to retrieve five- or six-month-old issues. In total, José Arco collected four Cultural Weeklys, counting the one he already had when he began the search. The poet from The Flying North thought that the publisher and editor of the Weekly was someone from the cultural department, and, unfortunately for us, he didn’t know anyone there. Given the quality of the print job and the paper, it seemed evident that the Weekly was well funded. There was no point discussing why it was distributed in supermarkets; the way things were done at the hypothetical cultural department must be the same way things were done at offices everywhere. Here José Arco’s friend insisted on the possible nonexistence of the department in question. So it was fruitless to seek explanations. The conversation ended with an invitation for us to send unpublished work to The Flying North. Then José Arco, on his Honda, made the rounds of ten or fifteen cheap supermarkets, and, in the end, not sure exactly why he was wasting his time, he found himself in possession of four Weeklys. Leaving aside the one we’d read already, the remaining three were devoted to (1) urban corridos; (2) poetesses (Mexican or foreign) in Mexico City (including an incredible number of women whose names, not to mention whose work, we had never heard of); and (3) graffiti in Mexico City—invisible art or decadent art? And that was all, for now. José Arco believed that somehow—he would come up with a way soon—he would meet the author or authors of the Weekly, whose articles, it goes without saying, were always published anonymously. What kind of person could it be? A true avant-gardist, a CIA agent—whatever, stranger things had been seen at Conasupo. And naturally he was still trying to land an interview with Dr. Carvajal.

“Maybe they’re the same person,” I suggested.

“Possibly, but I doubt it.”

“What I’d like to know is how you got the first Weekly, the one about the poetry workshops, though actually the issues with the poetesses and the graffiti are the best,” said Jan.

“It’s a funny thing,” said José Arco. “I got it from Estrellita. You’ll have to meet her soon.”

“Estrellita?”

“The spirit of La Habana,” said José Arco.

Letter

Chapter 14

Amid the gunfire and confusion, Lejeune makes his escape with a colonel and a Parisian recruit. What’s your opinion of all this, Colonel? Lejeune asks as he runs. The colonel won’t or can’t answer, so our lieutenant addresses the same question to the Paris recruit. A fucking mess. It’s all the officers’ fault—they screwed us, says the recruit. Shut up and run, orders the colonel. At last the three of them stop on a ridge, watching as the tanks go by and a column of prisoners forms in the German rear guard. The colonel, exhausted, gets out a cigarette, lights it, inhales a few times, and finally points the smoldering tip at the recruit: you should be ashamed of what you just said. I swear I’ll have you court-martialed for insubordination and disrespect. The recruit shrugs. I swear it, says the colonel, I’ll have our own soldiers shoot you, or the Germans, I don’t care. What’s your opinion of all this, and what are you going to do? Lejeune asks the recruit. The latter considers for a few seconds, then turns, points his gun at the colonel’s chest, and fires. Lejeune poses the first part of the question again. The recruit says he has no idea, that this won’t be over anytime soon. The colonel’s body twitches on the dark grass. Lejeune leans over and asks what he believes is the best defense against the enemy. Order, says the colonel, ashen-faced. Then he says, my God, my God, and dies. The column of prisoners begins to move. The recruit empties the colonel’s pockets, taking his cigarettes, his money, and his watch, and heads down the ridge to join the prisoners. Lejeune sits on the ground. Next to the dead man’s body is a photograph of a woman, with ‘Monique and the breeze. St. Cyr’ written on the back. He stares at the woman for a long time. She’s young and pretty. When he has looked for long enough, he lies down on his back and stares up at the stars that swell in the vault of the heavens. At this point the academy caretaker remembers that Huachofeo describes a similar scene in his Paradoxical History of Latin America.”

“What about the girl?”

“The girl has gone down the stairs without a sound, exited the grain shed, gone home, eaten a plate of beans left for her on the table, taken off her shoes, and gotten into bed with her mother. The caretaker has eaten a hard-boiled egg, drank a cup of tea, and lain down on a mat, covering himself with a couple of vicuña blankets. Lieutenant Boris Lejeune has fallen asleep gazing up at the stars.”

“Do they dream about the Hurricane?”

“Maybe. The next morning, Lejeune is in constant motion: he has his picture taken with General Gamelin, General Giraud, General de Gaulle, General Weygand, General Blanchard, General Gort’s chief of staff, gazing out over Arras or Ypres, on the streets of Lille, Givet, Sedan, or on the banks of the Meuse and the dunes of Dunkirk. Meanwhile the caretaker follows his usual morning routine in every particular: he has a quick, frugal breakfast and gets straight to work. The girl wakes with a fever. Her dreams were about a nuclear blast, I think, a Yankee battalion wiping out Los Ángeles with a couple of neutron bombs. On the banks of the Bío-Bío is the Hurricane, and when the bombs explode, the Hurricane opens up like a giant cinema, and inside is a factory called Pompeya, where motorcycles are built. Benelli motorcycles. Soon a motorcycle emerges from the factory, and then another and another: a battalion of Komsomols from the south of Chile on its way to destroy or be destroyed by the Yankees. Then it begins to dawn on the caretaker that all the pieces of the course have almost reached Santa Bárbara, or at least they’re on their way. The girl’s mother brings down her daughter’s fever with paper-thin slices of raw potato soaked in vinegar. Boris Lejeune has himself photographed in a French tank on the outskirts of Abbeville.”

Chapter 15

Hmm, said José Arco, a match in his hand, so that’s the guy’s signature, a triangle with a mouth in it. I lit another match. What happened to the fucking light? It’s been out for two days. Look, this is what I was telling you about. I moved a little closer. The smell of shit and urine rose from the sticky floor. This is it? Yes, said José Arco, lighting another match. I can’t see a thing. So that’s supposed to be a cave? Come closer, I’m going to light two matches; you light two and then look. In the glow of the four little tongues of flame, I saw the cross-hatched outline of a cave, some of the lines very bold, others barely visible on the white tile. In fact, it looked less like a cave than like a doughnut hacked with an ax. Inside the doughnut, it was possible to make out the silhouettes or shadows of two human beings, a dog shitting, and a mushroom cloud. Well, can you see it now? I nodded. Plain enough, isn’t it? Terrifying, I replied. The dog has three tails, did you notice? Yes, of course, he’s wagging his tail. And shitting at the same time? Of course. Shitting and wagging his tail. And what are the people doing? I don’t know, the first time I saw it, I thought that they were holding hands, but now I’m not sure. Anyway, look closer, I think they’re shadows, not bodies. The shadows from Plato’s cave? Whoa, I wouldn’t bet on that, but there’s something about the size of the mushroom cloud that makes me want to call them shadows. So they’re looking at us, and we see their shadows reflected on the wall of the cave? No, they have their backs to us, they’re looking out the mouth of the cave because on the horizon, far away, an atomic bomb has exploded. Maybe. And the dog? Why is the dog shitting in the cave? Heh-heh. Touching detail, isn’t it? No, I think he’s shitting because he’s scared, poor Rin-Tin-Tin. When they’re scared, they don’t wag their tails. I had a dog when I was a boy, and I can tell you that for a fact. I’ve never had a dog, you know? Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure you’re the first person I ever knew who had a dog. Give me a break. Shhh, careful, someone’s coming. I closed the door to the stall. A second later, we heard the click of a switch and then the sound of liquid splashing on the urinal outside. An instant later, whoever it was zipped up and left. The matches had gone out, and I realized that I had burned my thumb and index finger. José Arco lit another match. It’s a weird signature, he said, unfazed. A triangle with a fat-lipped mouth in it, in midshout—that’s what it looks like. Probably inspired by the Stones logo, but a savage cubist version of it. Fine, I said. I saw it, now let’s get out of here. Did you examine it carefully? I don’t know, I said, this place makes me dizzy. I wonder whether it was the artist himself who made the bulb burn out, murmured José Arco. When we emerged, the lights of the café dazzled us and seemed to speed up our movements. We couldn’t help it, it was if we were dancing around the tables back to the spot where we had left our coffees.

All of these episodes José Arco dubbed “the Investigation.” Basically, we were just trying to confirm the reports from the Conasupo Cultural Weekly and Dr. Carvajal’s journal, and following any clues that cropped up along the way. Soon we were visiting all kinds of poetry workshops and we had gotten our hands on journals whose sole print runs were often no more than ten xeroxed copies. We also remained on the lookout for the graffiti—invisible art or decadent art?—described in the Weekly. Luck was clearly on our side, since it soon brought several of our working hypotheses together in one place. This place was Café La Habana, where José Arco found the Triangle with a Mouth (or Laughing Triangle) graffiti. It was an establishment already frequented by my friend in the days before the start of the Investigation, if not as assiduously. One random evening at La Habana, as he was talking to a group of friends, Estrellita asked him to buy her a coffee, and then she gave him the Weekly. Gave it to him, nobody else. Days later, after searching for her in vain along Bucareli, he found the drawing of the cave in the toilet stall. And so, over the days that followed, as we searched for Estrellita (halfheartedly, I must add), La Habana became the main headquarters of our meanderings, and then, in the most natural way, it was the place we washed up after eleven each night. We discovered that the block of Bucareli between La Habana and the Reloj Chino wasn’t just a kind of shrine—something we intuited that we should keep in mind—but that it more than satisfied all our alimentary needs: on one corner, there was a sandwich stand run by an ex–Atlante footballer, and on the other corner was La Habana, which served the cheapest and most delicious chilaquiles on the block; in between was an extremely cheap pizza counter owned by an American guy with a Mexican wife, a guy everybody called Jerry Lewis even though he looked nothing at all like the actor; across the street was a taco-and-quesadilla stand run by two dark-skinned sisters who, the minute they saw me, would say, ¿Qué pasó, güero? and I would say, but I’m not a white boy, and they would say, what do you mean you’re not, and me, stubborn, no soy güero, and so on until José Arco arrived and put an end to it: ¿Güero? Of course you are; and working both sides of the street was a gay one-eyed vendor of elotes, tender corncobs spread with butter or mayonnaise or crema and dusted with cheese or chile powder, who sagely recommended the Bucareli movie theater as the ideal place to eat his merchandise. The Bucareli theater was the king of the block, no question about it, a benevolent king, practically a paragon of virtue, host of those with nowhere to sleep, dark Disneyland, the only church that, at times, we seemed destined to belong to.

And then we found Estrellita.

José Arco pointed at a table. There she was, sitting up very straight, with two girls. The one on the left is Teresa, said my friend with a hint of bitterness. And the other one? Ah, that’s Angélica Torrente, let’s go somewhere else. What do you mean? I burst out. There’s Estrellita, we’ve been looking for her like crazy, and now we’re going to leave? Forget it! José Arco didn’t answer. As I was shaking him, I watched the three women through the window out of the corner of my eye. Estrellita was very old, and her long face was covered in wrinkles. She hadn’t taken off her coat. She was drinking something, and every so often her face turned toward one or the other of her companions, a permanent smile fixed on it. The two girls were talking and laughing and, maybe by contrast, seemed incredibly young. And smart, shielded by the same yellow light of the café that fell over them like a curtain or a dome—super smart and super pretty, I thought.

At last we went in, though I almost had to drag José Arco. Estrellita scarcely noticed our presence at the table. Teresa and Angélica Torrente, however, didn’t seem pleased to have to suddenly change the subject. José Arco, embarrassed (my friend, I realized then, was excruciatingly shy around girls he liked), introduced me in a way that was clearly an apology for the intrusion. Hello, I said. José Arco coughed and asked what time it was. Before he could escape, I pulled up two chairs, and we sat down.

“So you’re Teresa.” The look on José Arco’s face was more agonized than withering. “The other day, we left the motorcycle outside your place, did you see it?”

“Yes.” Teresa—another discovery—could be ice-cold, though she was only nineteen or twenty.

Angélica Torrente seemed friendlier and nicer.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she asked.

“Me?… From Chile…”

The two of them laughed. Estrellita’s beatific smile deepened slightly. I smiled. Ha-ha. Yes, I’m from Chile. Angélica Torrente was seventeen, and she had won the Eloísa Ramírez Prize for young poets. (Eloísa Ramírez had died fifteen years ago, before she turned eighteen, leaving behind a giant stack of papers and a pair of inconsolable parents who, in her memory, awarded a not-insignificant annual cash prize for the best collection of poetry by a writer under twenty or twenty-one or something like that.) Angélica Torrente’s charms were electric, mainly, and a touch acidic. She talked like a person on the crest of a wave; she could see everything from up there, though she didn’t pay much attention to the sights because of the speed and the falling. She was definitely very beautiful, sometimes even painfully so. She had a laugh—unusual for her age—that was the thing you remembered most about her when she dumped you in the end; it was her signature, her trademark, her weapon. She laughed easily, an open, happy laugh, and the combination of the sound and the way she moved hinted at dark dreams, paranoia, the urge to live life to the hilt whether or not you ended up battered and bruised. Teresa was different: not only did she seem more serious, sometimes she actually was. She was a poetess, too, though unlike Angélica and the others I would soon meet, Teresa worked. She was a typist, and she was studying medicine, in her second semester. She didn’t live with her parents. She was beginning to make a name for herself in some journals—not many of them, but good ones—as someone not to be overlooked when anthologies of young Mexican poets were assembled. Her relationship with José Arco, despite appearances, was completely atypical. I never knew, and never asked, whether they had slept together. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. I don’t think it matters. It’s common knowledge that Teresa came to hate José Arco, which I presume means that at some point she loved him. There’s one thing that tells you all you need to know about Teresa: she would never lend you a book, and if you made the mistake of loaning her one—as José Arco did a thousand times at least—you could bet anything that you would never see it again, or if you did, it would be in her bookcase, blond wood with mahogany streaks and knots, very pretty, very elegant. Between the two girls, Estrellita was like a grain of sand in a saucer of coffee.

“We’ve been looking for you, Estrellita,” said José Arco.

Estrellita sighed. Then she said “hmm,” gazing past my friend’s forehead, and she sighed again, putting everything into her smile.

“We’ve been looking for you because of the Weekly you gave me the other day.”

“Hmm?”

“Do you remember? The Conasupo Cultural Weekly, about the poetry workshops…”

“Ah? Hmm…” Estrellita studied a point in the distance and huddled into her coat.

“Do you remember it? A long list of poetry workshops, Mexico City poetry workshops.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Angélica.

“A really weird magazine, maybe a conspiracy,” I said.

“Oh, yes…” said Estrellita. “Did you like it?”

“Very much.”

“Oh, I’m glad…”

“I’d like to know where you got it…. Who gave it to you?”

Estrellita smiled. There wasn’t a single tooth in her mouth.

“Hmm, it’s a strange story, a lovely one…”

“Tell us,” said José Arco and Teresa.

But the old woman sat there unmoving, her pale green eyes fixed on the tabletop. We waited. The sounds of La Habana, dwindling at this time of night, wrapped around us like Estrellita’s threadbare coat. It was nice. Now Angélica Torrente showed herself to be the most practical of us all.

“Do you want another coffee?”

“Yes.”

Not many knew exactly who Estrellita was. She turned up in the most unexpected places, like a battered reproduction of the Angel of Independence or Liberty Leading the People. No one knew where she lived—though theories were ventured—or even if Estrellita was really her name. When asked, she would sometimes say that it was Carmen, or Adela, or Evita, but she also claimed that Estrella was her real name and not, as was commonly believed, the pet name given to her by some old man from Spain who had killed himself. At La Habana, it was assumed that she was a poet, though as far as I know, no one, or hardly anyone, had read anything she wrote. According to her, rivers and rivers of ink—seas of ink—had flowed since she published her last sonnet. She had a son. The old reporters who hung around La Habana didn’t know much about art, but they swore that he had been a good painter. In fact, Estrellita’s only visible source of income was a set of prints made from her son’s drawings, which she sold from table to table. It was said that heroin had ended his career but that he was still alive, and here came the saddest part: he was living with his mother. The drawings were wild, reminiscent of Leonora Carrington: spiderwebs, moons, bearded women, dwarfs—bad, essentially. There must have been about twenty of them, maybe fewer, copied a thousand times over, because Estrellita really did sell them and she never ran out. Who had ordered so many prints? The son himself? Judging from the paper, they had been printed at least fifteen years ago. Estrellita considered them a blessing, and maybe they were: she supported herself and her son—who was in his forties now—on the proceeds, tucking sweet rolls for him into the deep pockets of her coat and nourishing herself on milky coffee in tall glasses with a long spoon so that she could reach the bottom without wetting her fingers, font of energy.

“Don’t burn yourself,” said Angélica.

Estrellita sipped, tasting, then put in enough sugar for three glasses.

“Hmm, delicious,” she said.

“Do you like it very sweet?” asked Angélica.

“Yes.”

“Estrellita, are you going to tell us where you got the Weekly?”

“Yes, yes…”

“Where?”

“At a supermarket…”

José Arco opened his eyes and smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m an idiot.”

“I went in to buy a princess dress…”

“…”

“And a yogurt…”

“…”

“And they gave me this paper, for free…”

“Thank you, Estrellita,” said my friend.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” asked Angélica Torrente half an hour later, informed of all the dumb things—according to her—that we’d been doing.

“No,” I said.

“There’s a kind of party at my place. Do you want to come?”

“I’d love to,” I said.

Letter

Chapter 16

“Seriously, now, let’s talk about your book—your monumental work.”

“My work, as you call it, begins on the third floor of the Potato Academy, in old Santa Bárbara, in the foothills of the Andes. It’s the story of Boris, son of Juan Gonzales and student aide at the Unknown University. An ordinary kid.”

“Wait. There’s some interruption. Do you hear a strange noise?”

“It must be those alcoholics yelling. Who would’ve thought renowned intellectuals and men of letters (God shit on them) could make such a racket? Even the ones who’ve fallen asleep are snoring like bears.”

“They’re celebrating your triumph, my young friend.”

“Look at that old man: he’s got his face in his wife’s crotch.”

“That’s not his wife. Never mind. All his life he’s fought for the perfect word and silence. Otherness. Now he’s scared but happy. The reason for his happiness is you. You and your magnificent poems.”

“I get the sense that the only sober person in this Republic of Letters bacchanal is me. You, dear reporter, have had a touch too much vodka. It’s clear that I’m not here for my ‘magnificent’ poems.”

“Anyway, back to your work. How is the girl? Is she still sick?”

“No. Now there’s a fiesta in town, and the girl walks the streets with a crown of flowers in her hair. The people gather in the Plaza de Armas, and then they stream along the streets of town. They’re singing as they go. There aren’t many of them, as I’ve said. The town isn’t big, and the song that they sing has no words: it’s a string of aa-ohh, aa-ohh, ee-ahh, ee-ahh sounds, a little like an Indian lament.”

“At a certain point, they pass in front of the Potato Academy.”

“Yes. The caretaker is watching from the window. The procession continues to the end of Calle Galvarino, turns onto Valdivia, and is gone. Only the girl is left standing in the middle of the street, and this time the caretaker notices her. The sky, of course, suddenly grows dark.”

“Does the girl think it’s a haunted house?”

“No. She’s still too little for that. In fact, she hesitates for a second and goes into the academy. From the window, the caretaker sees her shadow flit across the yard, and then he hears her light step on the stairs. The old man softens. Ah, he thinks, ah. The bride. The betrothed. The eyes that could look upon Boris with love. The immaculate child on her way up the stairs, believing herself unseen. Then, of course, he goes back to his cables and reels. He has time; the broadcast isn’t for a while yet. The electric bill for the grain shed at 800 Galvarino is the highest in Santa Bárbara. If he gets raided someday, that might be why. I think it was Dan Mitrione who, back in the day, taught the cops how to hunt leftists by reading the electric meter. Any house that uses too much or too little electricity is suspicious. The crowd, meanwhile, returns to the plaza after making a loop around town, and now they begin to disperse. Silence descends on the streets once again. A silence for which the caretaker is grateful: he can handle interruptions and curious girls, but not this revelry and celebration, painful because they remind him of his sad life devoted to his work. But let’s not exaggerate. The caretaker gets intoxicated and dances, too, in his own way. His holidays are pure potential. He doesn’t know what boredom is. The recipe for spicy potato cake is his exclusive property. Nothing to sniff at, wouldn’t you agree?”

“It must be a sad life—yours, I mean, my young friend.”

“Sure: I’ve squandered my adolescence in seedy movie theaters and pestilent libraries. To make matters worse, my girlfriends always leave me.”

“Now everything might change. A bright future lies ahead of you.”

“Do you say that because of the prize?”

“Because of everything that the prize entails.”

“You poor, naïve reporter. First you mistake this room in the middle of some random forest for a crystal palace on a hill. Then you actually predict a bright future for art. You don’t realize yet that this is a trap. Who the hell do you think I am, Sid Vicious?”

Chapter 17

Everything that happened at Angélica Torrente’s house, as I remember it, fades into the background, as a prelude to the loud ring of the bell. Someone’s at the door, and everyone’s in Lola Torrente’s room, and I go to answer it, the door: coming!

But there are things that I remember vividly—books, records (the shiny black objects themselves, I mean, not the music), and, especially, Lola Torrente, two years older than Angélica, much darker, bigger-boned, not thin at all. To me, her smile is still the terminal smile of that other Mexico, a place sometimes revealed between the folds of a random dawn: part rabid will to live, part sacrifice stone. It’s not too much to say that for an hour I had been in love with Angélica. Or that around midnight, more or less, my love gradually faded until it perished entirely, amid glasses of alcohol and cigarettes and don’t touch Mallarmé, assholes, you’ll fuck it up. It’s possible that the rapid rise and fall of this great platonic love had something to do with Lola Torrente. I don’t mean—this would be the height of fickleness—that during the course of the party I transferred my affections from one sister to the other, but rather that first (let’s be honest), Angélica wouldn’t give me the time of day, and second, as the only person there who didn’t know everyone, I was limited to the role of observer (though unfortunately I did open my mouth, too), and at some point that was how I discovered that there was a structure of mirrors between the two sisters, mirrors in which each of them was distorted and reflected back at the other like a message, so that one sister might receive a still and harmless figure and the other a little glass ball under the bed, though most of the time they were firing deadly laser beams back and forth. The star of the party and of everything was Angélica. The powerful shadow was Lola. And it was this and the certainty with which Angélica handled the situation (but especially, as I’ve said, her manifest indifference to me) that left me on the sidelines, relegated to the joys of the observer. Anyway, Angélica wasn’t lacking in suitors; neither, I must admit, was Lola, though her suitors (actually just one suitor, but a nice one) were nothing like the promises made flesh who courted her sister. The issue, according to Pepe Colina, a Nicaraguan versed in Horace and Virgil, was that Angélica was a virgin and Lola wasn’t, and at least one or two hundred people knew it. I glared at him—some things are simply in bad taste—and then I asked him how two hundred people could be aware of such an intimate detail. From people like me, of course, he replied. I guessed, not without blushing, that Pepe Colina had slept with Lola Torrente. An odd couple, I thought, in the tradition of the short, glasses-wearing guy and the strong, independent woman. I lit a Delicado, feigning indifference. I felt myself getting an erection. I retreated to the bathroom and finished smoking the cigarette. At a certain point, I looked at myself in the mirror and started to laugh very softly. On my way out, I almost ran into Lola Torrente. She was a little bit drunk. Her eyes were dark and bright. She whispered something unintelligible, smiling, and closed the door. I knew that our friendship had been sealed.

I went back to the living room, literally bouncing with joy. What was José Arco doing meanwhile? Surrounded by the shyest, least graceful, and worst dancers, my friend was telling stories: the new Peruvian poetry, the Hora Zero group, Martín Adán’s silver knife, Oquendo de Amat, and other stories, too, new to young Mexican poets back then, stories as true and horrifying as life itself, in which his Honda scaled the highways and trails of western Mexico until it reached an eagle’s crag of toughness, what Baldomero Lillo called the very center of the hot potato, whereupon he launched himself at 120 or 130 kilometers an hour along the twisting path of the story.

That night’s tale was inspired by a prolonged absence from Mexico City, or something like that, not that it matters. It begins with José Arco arriving at a solitary beach where he finds nothing but a single dog. No fishermen, no houses, nothing—just the motorcycle, José Arco, and the dog. The rest is paradise, and in the sand my friend writes mi mamá me mima and all the other first words. He lives on cans of condensed milk and tuna. The dog is always with him. One afternoon, a ship appears. José Arco rides up the cliff on his motorcycle (in his telling, the black Honda will go wherever you want it to go if your heart is pure); the dog comes along, too. The people on the ship see him and wave. José Arco waves back. We’re from Greenpeace! they shout. Ay, whispers José Arco. What are you doing there, where are you from, who are you, how did you get that motorcycle up there, is there a road? Their questions are left unanswered. The captain announces that he’s coming over. José Arco and the captain meet on the beach. As they’re about to shake hands, the dog attacks the eco-skipper. The crew members who came over with the captain rush to his defense, kicking the dog and then roughing up José Arco. Five against one and a dog. Then they patch him up, put Merthiolate on him and the dog, apologize, advise him to keep the mutt tied up. Before it gets dark, they return to the ship and sail off. José Arco, bruised and battered, watches them go from under a palm tree, his dog at his feet and his motorcycle nearby. The captain and the young men and women of the crew wave to him from the horizon. The dog whimpers, and so does my friend, but then, as the ship is about to vanish from sight, he leaps on the motorcycle and roars up to the top of the cliff. Behind him comes the dog, limping a little, and they watch the ship as it sails away.

Teresa: I’ll die before you get me to believe that.

Angélica: What did you do next?

Pepe Colina (lighting a joint and passing it to Angélica): Man, the only decent eco-skipper there ever was or ever will be was Captain Ahab, a truly misunderstood man.

Regina Castro (poetess, thirty, as yet unpublished, purveyor of birth-control pills to her younger peers, decent writer but nothing special): Tell me—what happened to the dog?

Lola: And what is Greenpeace?

Héctor Gómez (in love with Lola Torrente, twenty-seven, La Habana regular, elementary-school teacher): A pacifist movement, Lola… To be honest, Pepe, I find it hard to believe what you’re telling us.

José Arco: Don’t call me Pepe.

Teresa (smiling at Héctor Gómez, who pours more vodka): Well, of course it’s a complete lie. José doesn’t like the beach, and there’s no way he could spend three days in a row in a place where there weren’t any people.

José Arco: Well, I was there.

Two Lit. Dept. students: We believe you, poet.

Regina Castro: What about the dog? Did you bring it back with you?

José Arco: No, it got left there.

Pepe Colina: Or Jonah, if we can call him a sailor. An eco-friendly guy, for sure, like everybody back then, but it might be a stretch to call him a skipper…

Angélica: He didn’t follow you? Strange.

Antonio Mendoza (bard of the proletariat, twenty, proofreader at a government agency): The thing is, José doesn’t have room for another dog.

Angélica (giving Antonio a tender look): What?

Antonio Mendoza: There’s no room at home for another dog.

Lola: I didn’t know you had one already.

Angélica: Who’s the dog, Antonio?

Antonio Mendoza: Me. Sometimes.

José Arco: What the fuck are you talking about?

Antonio Mendoza: And him sometimes.

Pepe Colina: Uh-huh, totally wasted. (He laughs.) They’re children. Unless it’s some kind of joke, man, but a fucked-up joke like that is bad news.

Héctor Gómez (to Lola): How about we get some fresh air?

Pepe Colina (when Héctor and Lola are gone): We should all get some fresh air…

Antonio Mendoza (relaxed all of a sudden): They went to fuck in the yard…

Teresa: Could you shut up for once, idiot?

Antonio Mendoza: Are you jealous?

Teresa: Me? You’re drunk…

Two Lit. Dept. students: Bottles that haven’t been opened yet… Joy, joy…

Angélica: No more drinking here!

Antonio Mendoza (putting a hand on her waist): Hey, Angélica…

Angélica: And don’t touch my sister!

Antonio Mendoza: But I never—

Regina Castro (commandingly and without raising her voice): Shut up for a change and sit down. I was going to read a poem, but the way you’re all acting…

Teresa: Oh, please, read it.

Pepe Colina: Madame Poetess, I’m all ears.

Two Lit. Dept. students (pouring drinks for those present): Wait until we’re all ready.

Estrellita (her head popping around the kitchen door): Oh, a reading, lovely…

I couldn’t stand it, and I fled onto the balcony. The poem threatened to be uncommonly long: Regina Castro’s childhood and adolescence in San Luis Potosí, her family, her dolls, her Catholic school, recess, her Carrancista grandfather, the rocking chair, the dresses, the trunks, the cellar, Regina’s lips, her older sister’s lips, high heels, the poetry of López Velarde. Meanwhile it was a clear night, and the lights in the other apartments hinted at parties five meters above our heads, leisurely conversations five meters below our feet, maybe a couple of old men listening to classical music fifteen meters in a straight line from our ribs. I was happy. It didn’t seem very late, but even if every light went out and all that was left was me and the glow of my cigarette suspended on the wonderful balcony, this particular beauty or terrible fleeting calm wouldn’t melt away. The moon seemed to creak over reality. Behind me, through the bulk of the building, I heard the whisper of traffic. Sometimes, if I was quiet, holding my cigarette motionless in the air, I could hear the click of the lights changing and then another click or, more precisely, a rhrrr, and the long cars moved on down Avenida Universidad. Three floors below, the gravel yard and the building’s garden were connected by narrow paths of black dirt bordering big trees and planters. From the balcony, the garden looked like a capital B on its side, like this . Inside one of the semicircles, there was an open space, slanted like a Chinese eye, with three benches, two swing sets, and a seesaw, presided over by a good-size stone, probably a sculpture. Winding around behind this space was a sinuous black line, maybe a ditch, and two feet beyond it rose the wall separating the building from its neighbor. There, against the wall, in a space behind the bushes hidden to passersby but visible from the exact spot on the balcony where I was standing, Lola Torrente brought Héctor Gómez’s cock to her mouth and began to suck it, as if she had been waiting for me.

But this was no ordinary blow job: shrine suddenly alight, soon all that existed were Lola’s hands, one around Hector’s penis, the other between his legs, and Héctor’s fingers buried in her hair—her beautiful, strong head of black hair—and Lola’s mouth and shoulders and knees on the black grass or black earth or shadow, and the smiles that weren’t smiles, every so often discreetly directed at each other.

This, without a doubt, was secret Balinese theater.

Only when I went back into the living room did a single shudder run through me.

There was no one in the room.

I think I drank something and sat down. I picked up a book from the table. From one of the rooms came voices, maybe the start of an argument. Then I heard laughter, nothing serious. I closed my eyes: sounds barely audible on the ghost channel. I remembered what Jan said about Boris. I had never believed him. It’s true, said Jan. You’ll go crazy, I said. No, no, no, no. Jungle, I thought, out there is the jungle. Boris was what, fifteen? No, no, no. I got up and went into the kitchen.

I’m always amazed by refrigerators full of food.

I went back to the living room with a glass of milk and sat down, sipping it slowly. I must have looked ridiculous there with my legs crossed and tears in my eyes. But why? Jan’s voice droned on in the background of the Balinese theater. I’ve told you a thousand times, Remo, and you still don’t get it. Fateful figures in an incomprehensible game of chess. All I can see, I said, is the silhouette of a boy… dancing in a room. He must be happy. A boy of thirteen dancing in his bedroom. Now he’s turning, and I can see his face, Boris’s face? And then the room is plunged into darkness, the power is out all over the neighborhood, and all I hear is the sound of his breathing, the sound of his body dancing in silence. I set the glass on a night table. The leg that was crossed over my knee began to jerk as if the Invisible Doctor was checking my reflexes with his little steel hammer. Stop, I said, quiet, come on, Rinti, stop, hee-hee, good boy.

Then came that famous ring at the door, dingdong, ringgg, ttlililinggg, I swear I can’t remember the tones, screeekkkkk, brrrrringggg, lingalingaling, and I jumped up because I sensed or guessed, ronngggdronnggg, that from here to total happiness, ping ping-ping, hhhwhishh, there were just one or two or three million steps, and I set out on the path by making my way to the door, deet-deet-deet, which I opened. It was a girl with brown hair. Behind her: a very disagreeable—and very ugly—boy with hair the same color.

Letter

Chapter 18

“Ah, nights are for dreaming, don’t you think? Young people everywhere with the windows open… It would be so nice not to be working, not to have a job to do…”

“If you want, we can go out on the terrace. A little fresh air won’t do us any harm.”

“No. Let’s continue. But try to be serious. I’m telling you this for your own good, for your artistic future. Everything you say is being recorded.”

“Where were we?”

“No idea.”

“Then let’s go back to the night when Boris Lejeune is watching the enemy movements from the potato field.”

“A nice boy… and a dreamer.”

“Yes, he’s in the habit of talking to himself.”

“Like so many of us. I have a friend on the gossip pages who’s always talking to herself. People think she’s crazy; she’ll probably lose her job. She spends the whole day muttering. Sometimes she rattles off the names of famous fashion designers. To herself or an invisible friend…”

“Boris Lejeune says, attention, attention…”

“Can he hear his own voice, or is he not even aware that his lips are moving, that random words are coming out?”

“Boris Lejeune here, attention, attention, failure of tanks R35, H35, H39, FCM36, D2, B1, FT17, S35, AMR, AMC… Where I’m from, it’s normal to talk to yourself…. The Civil War is unstoppable…. It’s like reciting from memory…. Special message for my lost friends: Vaché and Nizan can finally join ranks with Daudet and Maurras…. God doesn’t exist…. The human race is scum…. Shit fuck cunt… Et cetera… Across the potato field, the lights blink like beings from another planet.”

“I’m cold. This corner is freezing. What happens next?”

“Next, everything speeds up. The girl walks along the outskirts of Santa Bárbara. The caretaker goes for a ride on his bicycle. The machines at the academy work imperturbably, day and night, picking up curses and tantrums. The images begin to fall into place, each ready to be assigned its numbered spot on the map drawn with a firm hand and winged imagination by Dr. Huachofeo in his Paradoxical History of Latin America. Scene number one: A prisoner leaves a Paris jail, destined for a German concentration camp. In a station outbuilding, before he is put on the train, he’s asked his name, for form’s sake. I shit on your dead, the prisoner replies. In Spanish. What? asks the German soldier or the French gendarme. Boris Gutiérrez, says the prisoner. Scene number two: A Spitfire plummets outside Southampton. The staff at the base watch from the ground. Why doesn’t he jump? Who’s flying that plane? They try to make radio contact, but no one replies. Collision is imminent; the plane is in a nosedive. The radio operator keeps trying: Jump, jump, jump, is there anyone in that plane? Suddenly a distant voice answers: Boris McManus here, I’m crashing…. Scene number three: A party of guerrilla soldiers retreat to an area near Užice. In the early-morning hours, they find a comrade wounded in both legs lying next to a dead youth. The wounded soldier explains that the youth brought him here. The guerrillas examine the body. There are multiple wounds to the chest and head. He can’t possibly have brought you here, says the leader. He’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours. I swear, last night he dragged me away from the front line and brought me here! I passed out a couple of times. I was in a lot of pain. We talked. He told me stories to distract me. He told me that he liked horses. And… The guerrillas have to acknowledge that the wounded man could never have made it this far on his own. In the dead youth’s pocket, they find his identification papers: Boris Voilinovic, student at the Sarajevo School of Mechanical Arts and Flight. Employee of the Unknown University.”

Chapter 19

Jan’s eyes widened in alarm, as if to ask what the hell was going on. Smiling and trying to keep my voice calm, I explained that it was some friends. That’s obvious, he said as the others began to file into the room one by one, giving him no time to get dressed or gather up the scattered papers, newspaper clippings, science fiction books, maps, and dictionaries that were piled around his mattress like a kind of library dump. This is my friend Jan, I muttered. Only Angélica and Estrellita heard me. When the last person had come in, Jan jumped up, his skinny ass exposed and his balls dangling golden, and in two or three swift movements, his back to the group, he jammed his papers under the mattress and got back into bed; then he smoothed his hair and cast a cold eye over the recent arrivals. I don’t think we’d ever had so many people in our room.

“Jan,” I said, “this is Angélica; this is her sister, Lola; this is Colina; this is Antonio; this is the Señora Estrellita we’ve talked about…”

“Just Estrellita,” said Estrellita.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jan.

“This is Héctor, this is César and… Laura.”

“Well, well, well,” said Jan.

I turned red.

“This is Jan, my friend and comrade.”

“Hello.” Smiles all around.

“Good evening,” said Jan, his voice not the least bit friendly.

“What a lovely young man,” said Estrellita. “And his darling balls are the color of gold.”

Jan laughed.

“It’s true,” I said.

“That means that he’s destined for greatness. Golden balls are the mark of a young man capable of… great deeds.”

“They’re not exactly golden,” said Jan.

“Shut up. She thinks they look golden, and so do I. That’s all that matters.”

“And I do, too,” said Angélica.

“What’s the mark of greatness for women, Estrellita?” asked Lola.

“Is there any wine?”

“Where are the glasses?”

“That’s more complicated, sweetheart.” Estrellita sat on the floor by the window, without taking off her coat. “A smile, a laugh. Though Eunice said it was in the gaze… but I believe it’s the laugh that’s the mark.”

“Wait a minute. Then nobody with brown skin, nobody from the Bronze Race would be destined for greatness, not to mention black people.”

“There are only five glasses and two chairs. We’ll have to share glasses.”

“What do you know about testicles? How many balls have you seen in your life?”

“Not a lot, true,” admitted Colina. “Maybe fifteen.”

“There are many marks of identity, Colinita,” said Estrellita. “For black people, it’s the wake they leave, memory and a sense of vertigo…”

“Estrellita is so talkative tonight.”

“It must be from the climb up five flights of stairs.”

“Sit on the floor.”

“She’s used to climbing stairs and staying up late.”

“So this is the only room in the place?” asked César.

“That’s right, it’s small.”

“What were you hiding under the mattress?”

“Nothing!”

“You and I will have to share this glass.”

Angélica sat down next to Jan, on the edge of the mattress.

“Yes,” said Jan.

“Is it true that you never go out?”

“Who told you that?”

“Your friend Remo and José Arco.”

“They lied to you. I go out every day. I love to walk along Insurgentes. Up and down, up and down, like a soldier in the Wehrmacht.”

“Like what?”

“A soldier in the Wehrmacht,” said Jan. “Did you notice the color of this building?”

“No, it’s dark out,” said Angélica. She smiled. She looked much more attractive here than at La Habana or her house.

“It’s greenish gray. Like the Nazi field uniform.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen it in books. Pictures of the uniform. Exactly the same color as the front of this building.”

“That’s creepy,” said Angélica.

“You won a poetry prize, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Who told you that? Remo or José Arco?”

“Nobody. I read it somewhere.”

They looked at each other for an instant without smiling, like two piranhas swimming in a vacuum chamber. Then Jan said, “I’d like to read something you’ve written.”

Meanwhile I was looking at Laura, who was sitting at the other end of the room next to Lola Torrente, talking in a low voice. Every so often, our eyes met and we smiled, though not at first but centuries later, when we were eating the sandwiches that José Arco had gone out to buy at some place only he knew about, and even then we might not have been smiling because we liked each other, at least not openly, but because the energy radiated by Jan and Angélica, sitting still as statues or a blushing bride and bridegroom, was growing little by little in the tight confines of that room, and the rest of us—whether by photosynthesis or because that’s how we were back then or because in that place and on that night there was no other way to be, I swear I don’t know—began to smile at each other, more and more like brides and bridegrooms, eating and drinking deliberately and relentlessly, waiting for someone to plug in the dawn at the window under which Estrellita was sleeping.

Sunk in a cup of oil and lost was the arrival of the Torrente sisters’ parents, the breakup of the party half an hour later, my suggestion that we continue the fun—what was left of it—on the rooftop, the ride through nighttime Mexico City in taxis, rancheras on the radio, the precision of the Mexican dawn! and the faces, imagined or glimpsed through the windows of other cars, plunging into the tunnel with the determination of actors or commandos and coming out the other end ready for love, exquisitely made-up. The only thing that was real (I mean supremely real) was Laura’s smile from across the room, her meteorite smile, fading half smile, barely there smile, friend smile, smoke smile, knife-in-an-arsenal smile, pensive smile, and smile—finally—meeting mine without pretense: smiles sought, smiles seeking each other.

Still, the patient reader mustn’t imagine that this was some kind of mime show. God save me from a girl able to smile so many different ways in a matter of minutes. No. All the smiles fit into one smile. And the eye of the lover is like the eye of the fly, which means that other smiles might have been projected onto Laura’s lips, her teeth.

But even so, did it matter? After all, wasn’t Laura gradually turning into everyone and everything? Like the immaculate and ill-starred mother of legend, like the immaculate and ill-starred Aztec princess, like the immaculate and ill-starred wanderer of Tepeyac, like the immaculate and ill-starred Llorona, like the ghost of María Félix…

I leaped to my feet. I felt a little dizzy.

I announced that I was going down to the coffee shop two blocks away to buy sweet rolls. I asked for a volunteer to accompany me. Almost at the same instant, it occurred to me that José Arco might offer, and I was about to take back the request when Laura said, I’ll go, I won’t be long.

Who was she talking to when she said she wouldn’t be long? César?

As I was counting the money that people gave me, I couldn’t stop shaking and singing inside.

“This is a doll’s house. I wish I had a place like this,” she said as we went out.

The clouds, seen from the roof, seemed to suck up the electricity of the city; one even reached out a little arm that almost brushed the tallest buildings.

“It’s going to rain,” said Laura.

Her face, lit by the bulb hanging over the door to our room, seemed to turn transparent for an instant, silver for a fraction of a second, her brown eyes its only living, earthly feature.

“Do you know what name I’d give you?” I said as we were going down the stairs.

“Me?” she said, laughing as she passed Señor Ruvalcava’s door.

“That’s right.”

“Why would you want to give me another name? Don’t you like the one I have?” she asked in the lobby as I opened the door.

“I like your name a lot. It’s just something that occurred to me up there, all of a sudden. But never mind. I’m erasing it.”

“Now you have to tell me what it was.”

“No, it’s erased.”

“What’s the name?”

“Swear you won’t get mad.”

“That depends. Tell me what it is.”

“Listen, really, don’t ever get mad at me. I’d be a wreck.” I laughed stupidly, but I meant it.

“What’s the name? I can’t promise.”

“Aztec Princess.”

Laura burst out laughing. It really was dumb, and I laughed, too. God, what an ass I am, I said. You really are, said Laura. We turned off Insurgentes. Just as I expected, the coffee shop was still open.

(A few days later, I described this conversation to José Arco. Funny, he said, there’s a motorcycle called Aztec Princess. It’s a brown motorcycle, a Benelli, big, not too banged up, and the name is painted on the tank in silver letters. If you want, we can go and see it. Why? I asked. It’s a stolen bike, you could get it for cheap. No, I said, forget about it. I don’t know how to ride, I’m not interested. The guy who has it is a poet, said José Arco. His name is Mofles. You’d like him. But I hardly have enough money for food, I said. I don’t even have a driver’s license, and anyway I don’t like that shit. I hate those piece-of-crap bikes. Fine, fine, said José Arco.)

“Sometimes,” I said to Laura, “it’s open all night, other times it closes at six with no warning. It has no regular schedule.”

“Nice place. Just a little run-down.”

“It’s called La Flor de Irapuato. I guess the owner doesn’t care about appearances.”

“Why not Flower of Peking or Flower of Shanghai?”

“Because the owner was born in Irapuato. Only his honorable grandparents were born in China. Canton, probably, but I could be wrong.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“Emilio Wong, owner, cook, and sole waiter. If you want, we can have coffee before we go back. You can ask him why his schedule is so out of whack.”

“Why is your schedule so strange? Remo told me about it; it’s the first time I’ve been here.”

“It’s not really so strange,” said Emilio Wong. “It’s flexible and sometimes unexpected, but not strange.”

“He makes great biscuits,” I said.

“Remo told me that sometimes you don’t close until dawn.”

“Heh, it must be the nights I have insomnia.”

“What I didn’t tell you is that when Emilio has insomnia, he writes poems. Please, don’t ask him to read us one. He’s thinking of selling his business in a few years and moving to Brazil.”

“By van,” said Emilio.

“Why don’t you want him to read us a poem?”

“Can’t you guess? He’s a follower of the brothers Campos.”

“Who are they?”

Laura’s face shone in the dim sand-colored lights that hung over the counter. Across the counter, Emilio Wong furrowed his brow in sympathy. It seemed to me then that I had found the love of my life. I wanted to tell Laura, but she and Emilio were laughing. The coffee-shop owner said something about keeping a travel diary, a concrete or visual one, or maybe it was Laura who asked about it before turning to me and confessing that she would like that, too. Brazil? Traveling by van? Owning a coffee shop? I’d like to have a place like this, I said. Laura’s face lit up and went dark. It wasn’t the lights: sometimes her hair was blond, and sometimes it was brown, and sometimes she looked at me sort of very calmly, although in the mirror her eyes were like slow-motion arrows—sad, distant arrows—and I wondered why her pretty, dark eyes looked like that as family trees sprang to life and vanished over the counter: the Wongs of Canton, the Wongs of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Wongs of Tijuana, and the Wongs who headed south across the border, not the usual thing for a Chinese couple settled in California, leaving behind a string of failed businesses before they arrived in Irapuato and died there. And Laura in the middle, nodding sympathetically, exclaiming in wonder, agreeing when Emilio said that his grandparents must have had good reason to leave San Francisco, that the mafia of cooks and laundrymen is merciless, and what could be more horrible than dying in a steamy kitchen or laundry, worse than Jack the Ripper’s London fog. She expressed delight at the recipes for pig and fried snake and grilled strawberries, assuring him that he had a nice coffee shop, very original, and that she would be back another day for sure, begging him not to sell it, he should rent it to her when he was finally ready to leave for Brazil.

“The brothers Campos thing… it was a dumb joke. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said Laura. “You’re forgiven.”

We finished our coffee.

Emilio had wrapped the sweet rolls in brown paper.

“Well, we’re going.”

“It makes me feel bad to leave Emilio here alone,” I said.

“Why doesn’t he come with us?”

“Oh, no, I’m used to it, don’t be silly,” said Emilio.

Once we were outside, Laura seemed different. All her enthusiasm had vanished. We walked back without saying a word. We were going up the stairs when she said, “I have to warn you, Remo, I’m a bad person.”

She said it in a low voice, almost inaudible. In the darkness on the stairs, I got the sense that she was smiling.

“I don’t believe it.”

Laura stopped.

“It’s true, I’m terrible, little things upset me, and I take it out on other people. Sometimes I think I’ll end up murdering someone or that I’m going crazy.”

“You’re kidding,” I said as I brought my face to hers and kissed her lips.

I had never wanted to kiss anyone as much as I wanted to kiss Laura.

“You see? I wanted you to kiss me, though when I tell César, I know it will hurt him.”

“When will you tell him?”

“Not tonight, obviously.”

“That’s a relief.”

Laura’s eyes shone as they had in La Flor de Irapuato. I felt lost and happy there on the stairs. The stairs themselves, which had never had any special meaning, were transformed into something extraordinary, part snake and part precipice.

“I’ve never fallen in love before,” I almost shouted.

“Are you in love with me?”

“I think so, but don’t worry. It’s the way I was brought up; I’m deeply and truly in love.”

A sad smile appeared on Laura’s face. For an instant, instead of flesh-and-blood people we were two cartoon characters. I said: “I feel like we’re two cartoon characters pasted onto the real world. Or maybe the world isn’t so real after all.”

“Hansel and Gretel? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?” asked Laura.

“I don’t know. I’m going to touch your breast to check.”

“All right. Touch it.”

I stroked her right breast, then the left, then I sighed and laughed a dumb laugh, hee-hee. “Yeah, this is the stepmother, and the other one is her mirror.”

“You sound like Br’er Rabbit,” said Laura as she kissed me.

The stairs seemed to writhe. Above us, though far enough away that we were still in the dark, a light shone. Laura asked me what I was looking at. I pointed out the brightness, which was swelling and growing nearer.

“It’s like the stairs are tilting,” I said.

It was true. The light was almost directly over our heads.

“Your lips are delicious,” I said.

“Yours, too. Salty.”

I licked our lips. Hers tasted like herbs and goat’s milk (what kind of milk did Emilio Wong put in his coffee?), but I didn’t tell her that.

“Are you really in love?”

“Of course.”

“But why? Today I was feeling so bad. I went to see Lola because I was depressed; it was obvious, wasn’t it?”

“When I saw you at the door, I fell in love with you. You looked serious.”

“Poor César didn’t want to come. I’ve been dragging him around all day. And only for his car, I think.”

“Such a practical, honest girl,” I said admiringly.

Laura smiled in satisfaction and kissed me once more. We clung together as if we would never see each other again.

“We could make love right here, and no one would know. This is such a strange building,” she said.

“Jan says it’s a totem of the Wehrmacht,” I said. “I don’t think I could.”

“What do you mean, you don’t think you could? You mean you couldn’t fuck?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get it up. I couldn’t get an erection. It’s the way I am.”

“You don’t get erections?”

“No. I mean, I do, but it wouldn’t work right now. This is a special moment for me, if that makes sense, and it’s erotic, too, but there’s no erection. Look, feel.” I took her hand and put it to my crotch.

“You’re right, it’s not erect,” said Laura with a barely audible laugh. “That’s unusual for a guy. Maybe it’s the stairs.”

“The stairs have nothing to do with it.”

Laura didn’t move her hand from my penis.

“Maybe you’re scared.”

“The tiniest bit.”

“You aren’t a virgin, are you?”

I could barely hear her; her words came out amid muffled laughter, more luminous than the light spilling down from the landing.

“More or less. Anyway, it’s a long story. But I swear I don’t plan to die a virgin,” I said.

“Oh.”

She took her hand away, thoughtful for a second, and then added, “I liked your Chinese friend. Tell me, seriously now, is he a poet, too?”

“Yes. My God, I hope it doesn’t bother you that I can’t get it up.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Oh, no, I think it does.”

“No, silly, it really doesn’t. I don’t like it when you say that you’re in love with me. That’s all. Let’s go up. They must think something happened to us.”

From the roof, the sky looked charged with the same intensity as when we had left. Fat black clouds were crowded aside or shot through by filaments of purple clouds. From far off came the sound of the rain, though in this part of the city not a drop was falling. Before we went into the room, Laura turned and kissed me on the cheek. As she was moving away, I grabbed her by the shoulders. Through the door, we could hear our friends’ voices. “I’d like to keep talking to you,” I said. It definitely didn’t come out right. We smiled at each other, utterly remote. I hope it pours, I thought.

“Aztec Princess, huh. Funny,” she murmured. “What made you think of that?”

“I told you. I don’t know.”

We went in. Jan was talking at the top of his lungs. He waved to us, raising a glass. He was completely drunk. I sat down on the floor, and soon there was a glass in my hand, too.

Chapter 20

“Do you really think this is normal? I mean, are these artsy parties normal for Mexico? I can’t help feeling that there’s something unhealthy about all this. Something sad and dark.”

“It’s true. People drink. They aren’t careful. The celebrating gets out of hand. That’s the way it always is.”

“Good thing I have someone to talk to. If I were alone, I would’ve left by now.”

“That might’ve been a little difficult. The winner isn’t allowed to just walk out of a party thrown in his honor…”

“I was afraid of that.”

“My poor friend, don’t look so gloomy. Let’s talk more about your work. Why are your stories always set in Europe? Don’t you know that true universality lies in the particular, the local?”

“Please don’t talk that way. You sound like the long-lost sister of the Taviani brothers. The truth is, and I’m not saying this to get off the hook, no part of my humble first work is set in Europe. There are references to books read in childhood, part nostalgia, part desperation. Magazines I can barely remember: U-2, Commando, Spitfire, maybe, though they probably had other names…. It can also be seen as an interpretation of the teachings of Huachofeo: extrapolation leads us to open doors that were once bricked up…. A very southern turn of phrase, straight out of Concepción…. But ask me questions. I don’t want to bore you.”

“You aren’t boring me. I’ve got the shivers. Did you say we’re in a clearing in the woods?”

“Let’s go out on the terrace, and you can see for yourself. Or let’s open this window. I don’t think anyone will notice.”

“No, don’t do it. Soon enough the two of us will stroll out arm in arm for a breath of fresh air. Right now I think it would make me sick. Talk to me about something, anything. About new Mexican poetry.”

“For God’s sake. I insist: you aren’t well. Let’s get out of this hole or at least have a cup of coffee. It smells like semen and vaginal juices in here!”

“You’re right. Old people’s semen and vaginal juices.”

“Old intellectuals’, I might add.”

“Talk to me about your work; if we keep this up, I’ll probably lose my job.”

“You’d get plenty of offers. You’re a very nice reporter.”

“Thank you.”

“And incredibly hardworking.”

“Thank you. If you don’t mind, let’s stay on the subject.”

Letter

Chapter 21

I tried to drink. I tried to laugh at words caught in passing that weren’t meant to be funny. I woke Estrellita up from peaceful sleep, from a place far away from the rooftop and everyone’s prophecies of triumph, with a cup of tea that the old woman drank with a smile before falling back to sleep. (I felt terrible.) I tried to seem lost in thought, oblivious, invisible, leafing through a book of literary criticism amid the din; I really just wanted everyone to leave so I could turn out the lights and drop onto my mattress. At a certain point, people began to vanish. Jan got dressed and went out into the corridor with José Arco and the Torrente sisters. Then Pepe Colina vanished. I wasn’t alarmed until Laura and César left, the latter apparently drunker than I was. I felt depressed. It seemed best not to move, to sit still and wait. My depression morphed smoothly into despair. Héctor, Estrellita, and I were the only ones left in the room, which was suddenly huge. Then someone said that Angélica had felt sick and they’d taken her out for a walk on the roof. Like in a horror movie, the walkers hadn’t kept together for long: Jan and Angélica went into one of the toilet stalls, and José Arco and Lola smoked a cigarette under the clotheslines, where they were joined by Pepe Colina. I can’t remember how long it was before the door opened again and everybody reappeared one by one. Before the last person came in, I jumped up, unable to bear the possibility that Laura wasn’t among them. But there she was, and when our eyes met, I realized that whatever there was between us wouldn’t end that night. The night itself did end at some point, though it seemed interminable.

I should ask someone or check in an almanac, because sometimes I’m sure it was the longest night of the year. What’s more, sometimes I could swear that it didn’t end the way nights always end, swallowed up all of a sudden or chewed over by a slow dawn. The night I’m talking about—cat night, nine-lives night in twenty-league boots—vanished or ebbed in odd moments, and as it was going, part of it (and therefore all of it) was coming or lingering, like in some game of mirrors. The nicest kind of hydra: 6:30 A.M. transforming itself unexpectedly into 3:15 for five minutes, a phenomenon that might strike some as annoying but that for others was a blessing, a genuine reprieve and a rewinding.