The Spirit of Science Fiction

Chapter 22

“I dreamed of the Russian cosmonaut…. Now I know who it is…”

“Oh, really?”

“Belyaev… Alexander Belyaev…”

“What cosmonaut? What are you talking about?”

“A figure approaches a kind of cell or waiting room, where I am…. A soft, grayish cubicle… Between the two of us, there’s some kind of mesh, so it isn’t hard for me to see what’s outside, to see where Belyaev is coming from.”

“My whole body aches…. What time is it?”

“Six, six P.M.”

“Ugh, disgusting…. What are you doing in bed?”

“I went to bed an hour ago, in solidarity, so that we would be on the same schedule…”

“Sure, ha-ha… When I got back, you were sleeping like a log.”

“I was asleep, but I woke up. I made lunch, showered, did some work, and went back to sleep…. Why don’t you take the black cloth off the window?… Now, listen: behind the mesh, there was an airport…”

“Of course.”

“Beyond the airport, at the edge of a plain, there was a clear view of two mountains silhouetted against the sky…. At the beginning of the dream, we were both looking in that direction, but then he came over to me and introduced himself politely, with a smile…. It was Alexander Belyaev…. Do you know who he is?”

“No idea, Jan.”

“A science-fiction writer.”

“I thought so…. Have you ever read Tolstoy, Bulgakov?”

“Not much…”

“I’m not surprised…. You should read other Russian writers, other writers in general. You can’t spend your life reading stories about spaceships and extraterrestrials.”

“Don’t bait me. And listen, this is fun: The airport actually looked like a tennis court, and the mountains were like two pyramids made out of papier-mâché…. But if you looked carefully, there was something about it, an unreal glow over everything, and Belyaev knew it and wanted me to see it…. Something in his eyes, shadowed by the visor of the space helmet, testified vividly to the incorporeal presence of other people… la troupé, invisible… an energy field…”

“What…?”

“I don’t understand a thing, I said to him. My knowledge of physics is nil, and in high school all I did was write poems. I wanted to cry with impotence…. In dreams, when the tears come, everything gradually goes dark or fades to pure white…. Then he spoke for the first time; I could see his lips move, deliberately, though his voice blared from somewhere else, as if there were hidden speakers in the little room: I’m Alexander Belyaev, he said, Soviet citizen and professor at the Unknown University…”

“What is the Unknown University?”

“A university that no one has ever heard of, obviously. Alfred Bester mentions it in a story. But Belyaev—as I’m sure you don’t know—was born in Smolensk in 1884 and starved to death in January of ’42, in Leningrad.”

“Poor fucker…”

“Then Belyaev turned away from me and vanished. Across the plain came a very strong wind and then some black storm clouds; colors, however, had never been so bright. I thought that this was what death must be like. I felt trapped inside a postcard, while at the same time I was paradoxically watching the landscape slip away. Until the net came loose on the tennis court. It was very strange. It suddenly came unhooked and floated down like a feather. I was sure that no one would ever play there again. And I woke up. You were talking in your sleep.”

“Was I?”

“Yes. How did it go with Laura?”

“Fine. How was it here?”

“A scene. I don’t think I’ll ask them up again. They’re too belligerent when they drink: César got into a fistfight with José Arco. Luckily, he didn’t pick me as scapegoat.”

“Scapegoats have nothing to do with it, Jan. Anyway, I can stand up for myself…. Who won?”

“Our friend, of course, but with a little help.”

“Don’t tell me you ganged up on poor César.”

“It would be more correct to say that we held him down. José Arco was the only one who hit him.”

“What a bunch of cowards. Really, I can’t believe it.”

“Heh-heh-heh.”

“I’m not surprised that you dreamed of Belyaev, then. It must be your guilty conscience gnawing at you.”

“Call it self-defense. Your rival is one tough nut. Anyway, if it were me, I would tread carefully. Before he left, he swore that he would make you pay—multiple times over, naturally—for every punch that José Arco got in. Though there weren’t many, to be honest.”

“What will Laura think?”

“He said something about Laura, too, but I’ll keep it to myself. I don’t know what you were thinking, leaving with Laura just then. César was desperate. He spent a long time looking for the two of you on the roof. Maybe he thought you were hiding in one of the toilets, which is pretty standard practice, I can tell you from experience. When he came back to the room without you, he blew up. By the way, where did you go?”

“We walked to Chapultepec, talking all the way. Then we had breakfast together, and I took her to the Metro.”

“See? César imagined you were at a sleazy hotel.”

“What an ass.”

“Fortunately, our José Arco turns out to be good with his fists, though I can tell you he’s no stylist; he’s more of a slugger. But listen to this: during the fight, your rival did his best to break as many objects as possible in this, your humble abode. Whereas José Arco worried more about the glasses, books, and fingers scattered around on the floor than his own face.”

“One of these days, his gallantry will get him killed.”

“Knock on wood…. In any case, the thing ended well. Between us, Angélica and I kicked out the thwarted suitor. Not a drop of blood was spilled. Estrellita’s sleep was only disturbed when it was time to leave. I turned down Colina and Mendoza’s invitation to come with the group in search of a restaurant that was open for breakfast. Once I had said I wasn’t coming, Mendoza seized the opportunity to make an exit with his arm around Angélica’s waist. A well-intentioned gesture if you consider that it must have been seven in the morning or something. An angelic gesture, even, but that’s really not my main concern right now. Lola and Héctor left before the fight. José Arco stayed for a while, and the two of us cleaned up the mess a little. Mostly what we did was fall around laughing at your César and everybody else. Finally he left, too, and I lay down on the mattress. But I didn’t sleep: I wrote a letter to Ursula Le Guin. Could you mail it for me today?”

“Of course. What do you say in the letter?”

“I talk about dreams and the Revolution.”

“Nothing about the Unknown University?”

“No…”

“Why don’t you ask her if she knows where to find it?”

Chapter 23

The days (or hours) that followed were exceedingly sweet, in many people’s opinions. Up until then, I had been an onlooker in Mexico City, a fairly pretentious recent arrival and a clumsy twenty-one-year-old poet. The city, I mean, took no notice of me, and my dreams never escaped the confines of pedantry and deadly artifice. (Oh, if nothing had happened or at least if Jan and José Arco had kept their mouths shut, instead of being where I am now, I’d be in the Paradise of Latin American Men of Letters—in other words, teaching at an American university or at worst correcting galleys at a second-rate publishing house, peaceful haven, infinite promise.) Still, the days were sweet. Very sweet. Jan and José Arco immersed themselves in calculations and conjectures that we could never have imagined. My status as onlooker persisted, but with a new twist: the seeing eye was able to transmute itself into the streets and objects that it observed, which is what someone (Chateaubriand? the Prophet of the Crossroads?) once called a dry orgasm. At the call of the Aztec Princess, projects, poems, the cult of pocketbook and prudence were abandoned—everything, except for Mexico City (which adopted me overnight) and Lewis Carroll. Our everyday existence was suddenly upset: romantic rendezvous blossomed on one side and the pleasures of the labyrinth and the tangled web on the other. José Arco landed a meeting with Dr. Ireneo Carvajal. Pepe Colina, when we told him about the existence of the Conasupo Weekly, gave us the address of someone by the name of Leonardo Díaz, a poet devoted body and soul to literary paradoxes. Jan’s letters to the United States multiplied. In my dreams, Laura actually said onward! set out in search of the Hurricane, against a backdrop of alpine scenery, her hair bright and electrified. In real life, Laura said I love you, we’re going to be very happy. And very good! I added. We have to be good and generous, Laura! We have to be compassionate and selfless! Laura laughed, but I was serious. One afternoon, I’ll never forget it, as we were going up the escalator in the Metro, I did a tap dance. That was all. I had never tried anything like it, and it came out perfect. Laura said, you do that so well. You’re the spitting image of Fred Astaire. I was surprised. I shrugged, and my eyes filled with tears.

“Why are you sad?”

“I don’t know, but I feel like I’ve been torn apart,” I said.

“All because you did a tap dance? Poor thing, come here and let me give you a hug.”

“Let’s stay like this with our arms around each other, okay?”

“But then we’ll be in the way of people getting off.”

“Well, then we’ll get off, too, but slowly.”

And the echo: we have to be good and generous, Laura! We have to be compassionate and selfless, because otherwise terror will turn its gaze on us! And Laura laughed, of course, and I did, too, but my laughter wasn’t as confident.

As for Jan, his letters multiplied, as I’ve said. In fact, he spent most of the day writing letters and reading science fiction books that José Arco and I brought him by the cartload. The books were almost all stolen, which was easy enough with the assistance of José Arco, who was untiring in such pursuits. It was no simple thing to deliver the list of titles and authors that Jan required. Many of them hadn’t been translated into Spanish yet and needed to be lifted from specialty English bookstores, which were few and far between in Mexico City and, what’s worse, equipped with private security more suited to the library at Alcatraz. Still, after some near misses, Jan had all the books he wanted at his disposal. These books, underlined, scribbled on, and underlined again, piled up so chaotically in every corner of the room that it could be hard to get around; going out to pee in the middle of the night when you weren’t quite awake, without turning on the light, could be dangerous: pests like E. E. Smith—the little rat—or Olaf Stapledon, or the near-complete works of Philip K. Dick posing as a boulder could trip you when you least expected it. It wasn’t unusual to wake up from a nightmare with a book by Brian Aldiss or the brothers Strugatsky wrapping itself around your feet, and it was useless, of course, to conjecture how the book in question had ended up in that precise spot, though I have to admit that we didn’t make our beds too frequently. (I don’t think I can be accused of being dramatic when I say that I was once woken by my own cries: not only was I kicking at a book, but I had gripped its pages between my toes like a monkey, and to make matters worse, one of my feet had fallen asleep and my toes, against all logic, curled around the pages and refused to let go.) Until finally Jan decided to tidy up that galactic trash heap. One early afternoon, all the books turned up stacked against the wall, but in such a way that instead of a pile of books it looked like a bench in the town square. The only things missing were the trees and pigeons, but the feel of a bench in a plaza, the aura of it, radiated from the pile of stolen volumes. Almost immediately I realized that this was precisely the intent.

“How did you do it?” I exclaimed in surprise.

“With patience.” Jan looked strange, overexcited, his skin almost transparent.

“It reminds me of… the benches in the Plaza de Armas in Los Ángeles.”

“Moral of the story: never underestimate the paperback.”

The next day the bench disappeared, or rather it metamorphosed into a modernist table about fifteen inches tall, a solid mass of books with a couple of tunnels that opened on two of its five sides, then met at the center and came out together on the far side, the side full of edges. To drive home the joke, Jan had set a glass of water with a flower in it in the middle of the table, on the cover of a book by John Varley.

“Señora Estela’s daughter gave me the carnation.”

“Very pretty, Jan, very pretty…”

“Hmm, yeah, not bad… We can even eat on it, if you want; it’s sturdy, but we’ll have to find something to use as a tablecloth, okay? I don’t want you getting food on any of the books.”

“No, man, you’ve got to be kidding. Let’s eat at the real table.”

“Why? Look, touch it, it’s strong, well made.”

We had lunch there, on the books covered by a light blanket, and dinner, too—José Arco was with us, and at first he didn’t believe it, so we had to lift the blanket so he could see that the table was made of books. That night, before he went to sleep, Jan actually suggested that I could write at the table if I wanted to. I flatly refused.

After a while, I asked him, “Did you sit?”

Jan’s eyes were closed, and he looked asleep, but he answered in a clear voice.

“No.”

“Did you think the bench wouldn’t hold you?”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“Why didn’t you sit, then? Or why didn’t you ask me to sit?”

“I was… afraid…. No, not afraid… It made me feel sad. Sad deep inside. Shit, that sounds like a corrido.”

“No, like a bolero… Heh-heh-heh… Good night, Jan, sweet dreams.”

“Good night, Remo, write good things.”

Then I was the one who was scared. It wasn’t sadness or uneasiness. It was fear. There, with a cigarette hanging from my lips, the room lit only by the glow of the lamp, my friend about to start snoring and fall asleep for real (God willing), and the city spinning outside.

But sunrise came, and the fear went away. It was a sunrise that said hello, hello, little cowards, hello, hello. Do you know who I am? as it pushed on the windowpane and pressed our shadows against the wall. Of course, I said. Five minutes later, half asleep and pulling the sheet over his head, Jan said: of course, you’re the incredible sunrise that promised to show up every three days. Exactly, exactly, said the sunrise, and we yawned, made tea—kind of a pain in the ass, this sunrise, don’t you think?—we smoked, we told each other our dreams. Hello, hello, yippee! I’m the Mexican sunrise that always beats death.

“Of course,” Jan said mockingly.

“Sure, why not,” I murmured.

Chapter 24

The earthly abode of Dr. Ireneo Carvajal was on the fourth floor of a 1950s apartment building in a working-class neighborhood with lots of kids—there was a day care on the fifth floor, to judge by the noise—and a notable lack of the silence and mystery in which José Arco and I had wreathed the director of the Poetry Bulletin of Mexico City. The doctor received us in a tobacco-colored robe that fell to his shins and seemed excessive considering the heat of the day; he was a thin man of indeterminate age, between forty and sixty, his angular face scored by precise and symmetrical wrinkles. His bearing was that of someone sad and well bred. In contrast to the living-room furnishings, which were tidy and petit bourgeois, the collar of his shirt showed signs of neglect or poverty. He avoided our eyes, listening to us in silence with his gaze fixed on the floor or the foot of an armchair, and as José Arco explained why we had come, he began to bite his lips more and more furiously, as if our presence was suddenly a strain. When at last he spoke, I thought it would be to show us out. I was wrong.

“Boys,” he said, “I fail to understand why you’re so interested in a perfectly ordinary phenomenon.”

“Don’t you think it’s odd, to say the least, that there are more than six hundred literary magazines in Mexico City?”

Dr. Carvajal smiled benevolently.

“Let’s not exaggerate. My esteemed friend Ubaldo, always so seismic, has gotten himself all worked up about nothing. Six hundred literary magazines? It depends on what you call a magazine and how you define literature. More than a quarter of these magazines are really a few sheets of paper, photocopied and stapled in runs of twenty at best, sometimes fewer. Literature? According to me, yes; according to Octavio Paz, for example, no; scribbles, shadows, diary entries, sentences as mysterious as a telephone directory; from a professor’s perspective, they’re a distant jet trail, the faint echo of a nameless failure; from a policeman’s perspective, they’re not even anything subversive. No matter who you ask, they’re essentially texts outside the realm of literary history. Of course, heh-heh, I’m not talking about government publications.”

“It still seems incredible to me—excuse me, I mean disturbing. Don Ubaldo told us that he didn’t think there were more than two hundred magazines published in Mexico City last year.”

“In My Enchanted Garden,” I added, “you say that by the end of the year there may be more than a thousand, enough to make The Guinness Book of World Records.”

“Maybe,” said Dr. Carvajal, shrugging his shoulders. “But even so, I fail to see why it matters to you…. Do you want to prove that a record was set? Compile an anthology of rare texts? Let me disabuse you of that notion: There are no rare texts. Wretched ones, to be sure, and luminous ones, but none of them rare.”

“They interest us as a symptom.”

“A symptom of what?”

José Arco didn’t answer. I guessed that my friend was thinking about the Hurricane. Dr. Carvajal got up with an enigmatic smile and left the room. He came back with a few of the magazines.

“Photocopied sheets, mimeographed sheets, even handwritten sheets, the output of poetry workshops for self-proclaimed orphans, modern-music fanzines, song lyrics, a drama in verse on the death of Cuauhtémoc, all with the occasional spelling mistake, all humbly situated in the very center of the world… Ay, Mexico…”

The magazines, scattered on the table that separated our armchairs from our host’s wooden chair, seemed as skeletal as the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Like those emaciated figures, or like the photographs we see of them, I mean, they were black and white and had big, hollow eyes. I thought: they have eyes, they’re looking at us. Then, feigning a calm that I suddenly didn’t feel, I said, “They do look pretty pathetic,” and right away I felt like an idiot.

“A symptom of the Revolution.” José Arco’s voice, unlike mine, sounded firm and confident, though I could tell that he was bluffing.

“Such arrogance!” exclaimed the doctor. “Though the producers of these sheets would be thrilled to hear you say so. To me, the magazines are the symptom of a certain kind of unhappiness. Let me tell you another story that will surely be a lesson to us; it comes from the book Ten Years in Africa by the Chiapas priest Sabino Gutiérrez. The events narrated by Father Gutiérrez take place in a village near Kindu, in what was then the Belgian Congo. This was at some point in the 1920s, though Father Gutiérrez was in the village only twice, the first time to visit his friend Pierre Leclerc, a French missionary, and the second time to lay flowers on Leclerc’s grave. Both visits were brief. In between, Gutiérrez traveled across southeast Congo to Lake Mweru, reaping no great evangelical rewards but finding delight as an incorrigible tourist, finally settling in Angola for eight months at least. This is when the events that I’m about to describe took place, and I believe that they are in some way related to what I fear you glimpse behind the small-magazine phenomenon, though they have little to do with the phenomenon itself. Before I continue, I must warn you that after years spent in Africa, mostly on trips and expeditions that for some reason are never fully explained, Father Gutiérrez wasn’t easily surprised. And yet something about this village near Kindu awakened his curiosity: the natives displayed unusual manual dexterity, a talent for woodworking that he had never seen before. Or possibly it wasn’t their skill that impressed him but their enthusiasm, the atmosphere. In a moving passage, he recalls his one stroll through the village with Leclerc, whom he had met in Rome and to whom he seems bound by true and deep friendship, though they have little in common. (Sabino Gutiérrez was worldly, learned, brilliant, the kind of man who would spend his time in Katanga revising his own translation of Pindar; Leclerc is described as kindhearted, cheerful, a stranger to pomp and vanity.) As they walk, Gutiérrez peers into the huts and marvels at the wooden objects created by the collective exercise of the art of carpentry. Leclerc, peppered with questions by Gutiérrez, doesn’t share his friend’s astonishment: it was he who introduced many of the tools that the natives are using; he believes that what they’re doing is good and healthy; he can’t see what’s so strange about it. Gutiérrez lets it go, but that night, the only night he spends in the town, he dreams of chairs, stools, cupboards, dressers, tables of all sizes (mostly small), benches, doghouses or dollhouses, and an infinite number of objects that can be separated into three categories: furniture in the strict sense; toys or imitations of European progress, like trains, cars, guns, et cetera; and unidentifiable or artistic objects, like irons with holes in them, toothed disks, enormous cylinders. The next day, before he leaves, Leclerc presents him with one of the wooden objects that he finds so discomfiting: a crucifix, three inches tall, carved from a soft, almost juicy wood, black with yellow streaks. Our traveler is delighted to accept it; it is certainly an excellent piece. The visit ends with effusive displays of affection on both sides and promises to meet up again before too long. Months later, once he’s settled in Luanda, Sabino Gutiérrez receives a letter from his friend, who returns to the topic of woodworking in a lengthy postscript. It has become even more widespread now, says Leclerc, to the point that it occupies the whole town, with few exceptions. The villagers work their fields in a daze; the shepherds have lost interest in their flocks. Leclerc and the two nuns who work as nurses are beginning to worry. But the matter hardly merits grave concern; in fact, the Frenchman treats it as a joke. He even makes inquiries—ultimately fruitless—about selling the pieces in Léopoldville. After this, every time that Sabino Gutiérrez writes to his friend, he asks about the village woodworkers. The situation remains stable for six months. Then a new letter from Leclerc sounds the alarm. Woodworking fever has taken over the village and seems contagious: in some neighboring villages, men, women, and children are sawing with the only communal saw, hammering with the two communal hammers, sanding, assembling, gluing. The villagers make up for the lack of tools with imagination and indigenous craft. The finished objects pile up in huts and yards, overflowing the frenzied village. Leclerc speaks to the elders. The only reply he gets is the witch doctors’ diagnosis: a virus of sadness and exaltation has seized the town. Despite himself, he is surprised to recognize a little sadness and exaltation in his own soul, like a tiny, twisted reflection of the emotions that have taken root in his village. The next and final letter is brief; according to Sabino, it is written with the simplicity of a de Vigny and the desperation and religiosity of a Verlaine. (Ha-ha, as you can see, his critical methods aren’t far removed from those of our contemporary reviewers.) One imagines that all this mattered not a whit to Leclerc by now. The narrow streets of the village are littered with wooden tools that no one has used or will use. The woodworkers gather in secret with delegations of woodworkers from elsewhere. Almost no one attends Mass. As a precaution, the priest has ordered the nuns to retreat to Kindu. He spends the tense, idle days whittling a crucifix—at this point, he asks Gutiérrez to throw away the crucifix that he gave him on his previous visit ‘because compulsion perverts the figure of Christ’ and promises that he will replace it with the ‘carving that I’m working on now’ or an ‘Andalusian Christ worked in silver.’ He laments the situation in the village. He wonders about the future of the children. He mourns his lost efforts. But he doesn’t specify what he fears or where the threat lies. He does speak of the dead: white colonists killed, a strike attempt at a tin mine, but nothing else. You could say that all he cares about is his village and that nothing that happens outside its boundaries is real to him. On some level, he feels responsible; let us not forget that he was the woodworker-in-chief, in a sense. Now he can’t even muster horror at the sight of the strange wooden tub that a group of teenagers has left in his vegetable patch. The end comes quickly. The nuns flee, presumably carrying the letter with them. Leclerc is left alone. Months later Gutiérrez learns of his death. Once the shock subsides, and after attempting in vain to make inquiries from Luanda, our priest pulls every string he can in order to return to the Congo, to the place where his friend was laid to rest. At last he succeeds. The problem now is the Belgian authorities who are reluctant to consent to the visit. The events at Village X are considered classified. Upon persisting, Gutiérrez discovers that Leclerc’s death wasn’t accidental. His friend was killed during a native uprising. Beyond that the official explanation is vague: perhaps there was a battle between two neighboring tribes, or maybe the witch doctors incited the slaughter. Based in Kindu, Gutiérrez leads an absolutely unorthodox life. Finally he obtains authorization to visit the village with a colonial official and a doctor. When they arrive, there is something ominous about the few huts left standing, the new dispensary, the living souls glimpsed through dark doorways, and the very air they breathe. The cemetery, exquisitely laid out, boasts an enormous number of new crosses. When Gutiérrez asks, he is informed that the nuns who worked here have returned to Europe. Of course everyone is reluctant to recall the woodworking that once went on in the village; there is no trace of the former craftspeople. Exasperated, our priest decides to visit his friend’s grave on his own. Then he realizes that the crucifix that Leclerc asked him to get rid of is in his pocket. He takes it out and gives it one last look. The Jesus figure is strange, strong, serene; it even seems to smile when looked at from a certain angle. He hurls it into the underbrush. Instantly he realizes that he isn’t alone; he first hears and then sees an old man creep out from behind a tree and feel around in the spot where the crucifix fell. Gutiérrez, frozen in fear, doesn’t move. After searching for a moment, the old man gets up, and, without coming toward him—in fact, keeping his distance—he speaks. His name is Matala Mukadi, and he is going to tell Gutiérrez the truth. Leclerc was killed by the white men. Three hundred natives suffered the same fate, and bullets from the white men’s guns surely rest in the bones of those who weren’t burned to death. But why? asks Gutiérrez. Because of the revolt. The whole village rebelled. The miners rebelled. Everything happened all at once, like a miracle. And the whites crushed the rebellion thoroughly and completely: Women, children, and old people died. Those who sought refuge with the French priest were killed in the mission house itself, then half of the village was burned to the ground and the area was cordoned off. The whites had firearms; the natives had only wooden rifles, wooden pistols. Why did they kill Leclerc? asks Gutiérrez, and he expects that the black man will say that it was because he took up the cause of the woodworkers, but the old man is unequivocal: it was by chance. The slaughter was quick, of course. The black man holds up the little wooden figure. Magic? asks Gutiérrez before the other turns and leaves. No, says the black man: the clothes it wears, village clothes. Our priest understands that when he says ‘village,’ he means rage or sleep. They part without another word. From the moment that Gutiérrez gives more credence to the black man’s account than to the white man’s, there’s little to be done. Two years later, he leaves Africa—and then Europe—forever. He returns to Chiapas, where he devotes himself to writing his memoirs and religious essays until the day he dies. His final years, if his editor (another priest) is to be believed, are placid and anonymous. And that’s all…”

Dr. Carvajal was silent; his face, lit by the last rays of sun filtering in through the blinds, resembled a skull haphazardly covered by a film of skin. And yet there was something strong and healthy about his head.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” he said at last, “is that six hundred little magazines give or take make no difference…”

“Whatever happens happens, you mean?” José Arco interrupted him.

“Precisely, young man, and the only thing an intellectual can do is watch things blow up, from a safe distance, of course.”

“In my opinion,” I said, leafing through the four pages of a publication ambiguously titled Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, “the creators of these magazines are intellectuals, too.”

“Yes,” said José Arco, “motorcycle thieves.”

Dr. Carvajal smiled in satisfaction; deep down he was a cinema-club neorealist.

“Victims,” he said, and though he was smiling, his voice was terrible. “Oblivious players in a drama that in all likelihood I’ll never witness. Or maybe not even that: a meaningless accident of fate. In the United States, they’re getting into video, I have it on good authority. In London, teenagers play for a few months at being pop stars. And nothing comes of it, of course. Here, as you might expect, we seek out the cheapest and most pathetic drug or hobby: poetry, poetry magazines; that’s just the way it is. There’s no getting around the fact that this is the land of Cantinflas and Agustín Lara.”

I was about to say that I thought he was wrong: back then I believed—and even now I may still believe—that Latin America’s greatest literary successes came in verse form. To bad-mouth Vallejo, to lack an in-depth knowledge of the work of Gabriela Mistral, to confuse Huidobro with Reverdy: these were things that made me sick, and then angry. The poetry of our poor countries was a motive—maybe the main motive—of pride for the young Turk who took possession of my body once a week. But I didn’t say any of this. Instead I remembered something that I’d read in Jan’s collection of papers, and I connected it immediately to the subject of our conversation.

“I don’t think that video is the Americans’ drug, though actually I don’t know whether you’re talking about video games or making movies. But I can tell you that a new hobby is gaining ground: war-gaming. The range is pretty broad, though basically there are two main approaches: board games, played on a hexagonal grid with cardboard markers called counters, and weekend war games, like the ones we played when we were kids, except that the gringos who play them now pay serious money to support their habit. The first kind of game, with a hexagonal grid for a battlefield, assigns the player the role of company commander or strategist (though there are also tacticians), like the Squad Leader series, in which each counter (there are over a thousand of them) represents ten men, more or less. These games mostly take more than five hours to play, and some even go on for twenty or thirty hours. Their origins are in German Kriegsspiel, I think, those big nineteenth-century strategy boards that made it possible to play out wars before they began, or chess, which is an abstract war game. In the other kind of game, the player steps into the skin of a soldier, like in a play. The game consists of a day or a weekend spent in military exercises. There are lessons in handling all types of weapons, conferences of Vietnam veterans, mock battles, and even parachute jumps arranged by some organizations for their members. Whatever variant you choose, the simulations claim to be models of historical accuracy: the battles never happen in limbo but in concrete places, either in the past or in some predictable or fantasy future: Vietnam, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, even Mexico are among the scenes of the skirmishes. Important to note: some battles take place in the United States itself, where the enemy is a hypothetical black or Chicano guerrilla force. The hex-board campaigns mostly feature World War II, though you can also find near-future wars, from the Sixth Fleet shooting up every living thing in the Mediterranean to a European-theater-only version of World War III, atomic bombs included. But most are of them are World War II games, with obvious Nazi iconography and perspectives. In their ads, for example, they promise the prospective player that if he plays well and is lucky, Operation Barbarossa will succeed, Rommel’s tanks will reach Cairo, and the Ardennes Offensive will end in an honorable armistice. Both hobbies, the board games and the weekend games, have more than one dedicated journal and are supported by an infrastructure only conceivable in the United States. Incidentally, the publisher of the board games is now putting out computer war games. As far as I can tell, business is booming.”

“But who plays?” asked Dr. Carvajal.

“That’s the strangest thing. You’d think that only murderers and Ku Klux Klanners would show up for the live war games, but it turns out that it’s popular among college graduates, housewives, yuppies, and people who are sick of jogging. Whereas the board games attract lazy fascists, military-history buffs, shy teenage boys, and even former chess players: I hear that Bobby Fischer has been playing Battle of Gettysburg for more than two years. Not against anyone, just by himself.”

Dr. Carvajal nodded with a cold angelic smile.

“The world has taken a strange turn,” he murmured. “Miniaturists always struck me as minions of the devil. All my life, I’ve believed that Evil practices her pirouettes on a small stage before making her debut. Frankly, compared to these gringo fetishes, our magazines seem like what they are: lame beasts.”

“But they’re alive,” said José Arco. Then he asked me under his breath, “Where did you get all that?”

I said it was from the papers that Jan had been collecting.

“According to him, the John Birch Society is a sweet old folks’ home compared to the gang at Soldier of Fortune magazine, who aren’t just mercenaries by trade but the true creators of imperialist performance art, also known as happenings. The same can be said about all the businesses supporting board games. Avalon Hill, for example, publishes a magazine that you should take a look at someday: it’s called The General, and it’s the bible of armchair Mansteins, Guderians, and Kleists.”

“Jan talked to me about Guderian once.”

Dr. Carvajal was staring at us like a suicide rock.

“Jan is a friend of ours,” I explained. “He says that… Guderian’s tanks have to be stopped over and over—across a whole century, I guess, though I don’t know whether that has to do with what we’re talking about.”

“Bloodbath lyricism,” grumbled the doctor, and he waved his hand as if to say that none of it mattered a fig to him but that we could talk as long as we wanted.

José Arco, who liked to be contrary, kept his mouth shut after that. I spouted some nonsense about the first thing that came into my head, and our host told stories about highly respected doctor poets and government-official poets we’d never heard of. How sad, I thought in a flash of clarity or fear, someday I’ll be telling stories about lumpen poets, and the people around me will wonder who those poor bastards were. Finally, when my friend’s stubborn silence was beginning to get on my nerves, I asked to borrow a few magazines, ten at most, and Dr. Carvajal made no objection. “Do you plan to write an article for the paper?” I don’t know why, but I lied: yes. “Then try to exaggerate only as much as you absolutely have to.” The two of us smiled. José Arco began to pick out magazines.

Once we were outside, my friend said, “The poor bastard doesn’t have a clue.”

It was a clear night, and the moon in Dr. Carvajal’s neighborhood looked like a sheet hung out to dry in the windy sky. The motorcycle had broken down, as usual, and we pushed it along, trading places every two blocks.

“Explain what you mean, please, because I have no clue either.”

“I feel like killing somebody.”

After a long time, he added, “I feel like getting a tattoo on my arm.”

Now I was the one pushing the motorcycle.

“What kind of tattoo?”

“The hammer and sickle.” His voice sounded dreamy and carefree. Good, I thought: it was just the night for dreams, and we had a long walk ahead of us. I laughed.

“No, man, how about this: I’LL LIVE IN MEMORY FOREVER. Don’t you like that?”

“Fuck, it’s weird, leaving that asshole’s house I was super depressed but also super happy.”

I said I didn’t understand, and we were silent until it was his turn to take the motorcycle.

“Make that tattoo a Mexican flag with the hammer and sickle on it,” he said.

I lit a cigarette. It was nice to walk without having to push the motorcycle. We were in a neighborhood of narrow streets, stunted trees, and three-story buildings.

“I’d like to get the fuck out of here once and for all,” said José Arco. “With the motorcycle and my Mexican flag.”

“Tell me what you didn’t like about Dr. Carvajal.”

“His skull face.” He spoke each word with blind conviction. “He looked like a Posada skeleton taking the pulse of all the poor young poets.”

“Yes,” I said, “now that you mention it…”

“Fuck, he was the skeleton of Posada, dancing while he took the pulse of the whole country.”

Suddenly I felt that there was an edge of truth to José Arco’s words. I tried to piece together Dr. Carvajal’s face, the living room of his apartment, the ordinary things in it, the way he greeted us and got up to look for the magazines, his eyes that might have been scrutinizing something else, somewhere else, as we were talking.

“I realized it when you were telling us all about the Yankee games. He didn’t realize that I realized it.”

“Realized what?”

“The way he was looking at us, looking at you, like everything you were saying was old news to him… For a second, I thought it was true, the old bastard knew everything…”

Without being aware of it, we had stopped walking. There was a change in the sky all of a sudden: somewhere in Mexico City, it was raining, and to judge by the thunder and lightning, we would soon be getting drenched. My friend smiled. He was perched on the seat of the motorcycle, and he seemed to be waiting for the downpour.

“Just thinking about it scares me,” I said.

“It’s not such a big deal. Looks like it’s going to rain.”

“He did have a skull face, you’re right,” I said.

“Yeah, afterward I thought it wasn’t that he knew everything but that nothing mattered to him.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“There are lots of guys like that. They call themselves ‘sons of the Mexican Revolution.’ They’re interesting, but they’re actually fucking sons of bitches, not sons of the revolution.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said as I looked up at the dark, dark, pitch-black sky. “We’re going to get caught in the storm.”

“I don’t hate them. In fact, it’s amazing to see how they deal with loneliness.” José Arco held out his hands with the palms upraised. “In a very, very twisted way, they’ve gotten what they wanted: they’re the absentee fathers of this country. A drop just fell on me.” He raised the palm of his hand to his nose and sniffed it as if rain had more than one smell (it does).

“I don’t know what to tell you…. This fucking piece-of-shit bike, we’re going to get soaked…”

“I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t what?” The raindrops began to patter on the dark body of a fifties Ford parked in front of us. We hadn’t noticed it until now; it was the only car on the empty street.

“I could never be so alone, so silent, so disciplined about myself and my fate, pardon the expression.”

“Fuck…”

A broad, bright smile appeared on José Arco’s face.

“Come on, my friend’s garage is around here. Let’s see if he’ll fix the bike and give us coffee.”

Letter

Chapter 25

The motorcycle-repair shop was a single room, six meters long by three wide. At the back, a door hanging half off its hinges led to an inner courtyard where garbage piled up. Margarito Pacheco, a.k.a. El Mofles, had been living there for two years, since the day he turned seventeen and left his mother’s house, which actually was only about three blocks away, also in Peralvillo. He fixed motorcycles and sometimes cars, though he was a pretty bad car mechanic. He knew it, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it: the night that José Arco and I showed up at his shop pushing the Honda, it had been more than a year since he’d touched a car. His specialty was motorcycles, though there wasn’t an abundance of work. Out of thrift or maybe because he liked it, he had set up house in the garage, though this was a detail that the unobservant visitor might miss: the only visible signs were a camp cot behind a heap of tires and a bookcase surrounded by old car calendars, oil calendars, and pinup calendars. The toilet was in the yard. He showered at his mother’s house.

At first glance, he seemed like a shy kid, but he wasn’t. He was missing all his upper teeth. Maybe that explains his initial reserve, his polite, monosyllabic responses to our questions, his enigmatic smiles when we laughed. This would go on until the stranger—in this case, me—said something that he found really interesting or funny. Then he would laugh openly or start to talk very fast, in a Spanish full of slang and words he invented as he went along. His eyes were big—too big—and as you got to know him, his sickly thinness became a strange beauty, gentle and asymmetrical. He had lost his teeth in a fight at fifteen. The mechanic’s trade was something he had learned in that very garage, first watching and then helping a mechanic from Tijuana who, as El Mofles described him, might easily have been Castaneda’s Don Juan. When the mechanic died, which was about two years ago, his wife didn’t want anything to do with the shop, and in less than a week she’d gone back to where she was from. El Mofles had the keys to the shop, and he waited there for someone to come and claim it, or at least to charge rent. At first he slept on the floor; then he brought in the camp cot and his clothes. After a month, the only person who came by, other than a few clients, was a guy trying to sell him a stolen motorcycle. That was how he got started in the business.

When I met him, he had just two motorcycles in the shop, his own and the Aztec Princess, which was the Benelli that José Arco had told me about. I said I liked it. El Mofles said it was a good bike and it was odd that it was still here in the shop. Days later I realized what he’d meant, and it seemed like a sign blinking half hidden among the oil stains and the dirty floorboards of the shop, a sign I could heed or not. In the business of stolen motorcycles, El Mofles worked with two people, one who brought the bikes and one who took them. Always the same two people. And always at set times. At the beginning of the month, a bike would appear, and halfway through the month the guy with the money would come and the bike would leave the shop. With the Aztec Princess, the routine had been interrupted for the first time in two years. The buyer didn’t turn up in fifteen days, or even a month, and the motorcycle was in danger of being orphaned or turned into spare parts and junk.

I bought it that very night.

You could say that the deal worked itself out. I didn’t have money, but El Mofles didn’t have a buyer either. I promised to pay him part when I got paid and the rest in two monthly installments. His counteroffer was better: I would give him whatever I could afford whenever I could afford it, and he would sell me the motorcycle for the price he had paid for it, on the condition that I take it that very night. As José Arco looked on, smiling, I accepted. I didn’t have a driver’s license—hell, I didn’t even know how to drive—but I had blind faith in my luck and in the signs I thought I had glimpsed. If you had a phone, everything would be perfect, I said.

“A phone? Yeah, right, it’s a miracle that we have electricity here.”

I didn’t ask whether he was referring to the neighborhood or the place. José Arco boiled water and made three Nescafés. From a plastic bag hanging on the wall, El Mofles took some cold quesadillas. He warmed them on a hot plate. They were stiff, of course, but they looked good. As he was heating them up, he told me that I should come in one of these days to give the motorcycle a coat of paint.

“I like it the way it is,” I said.

“It’s always a good idea with a stolen motorcycle. That’s the way it’s done.”

“These quesadillas are great,” said José Arco. “Did your mom make them?”

El Mofles nodded. Then he shook his head, and as if he could hardly believe it, he said, “I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t think to get rid of the inscription. I just realized.”

“What inscription?”

“On the Aztec Princess. It’s practically screaming that it’s stolen.”

“It’s a nice inscription. The letters are even metallic.”

“I have no idea why I didn’t scrape it off.”

“I like it this way,” I said. “I’m not going to get rid of it.”

The rain wasn’t letting up outside. Sometimes gusts of wind shook the whole shop, as if it was about to be ripped from its foundations, and the doors groaned with a rasping sound that was like a laugh and then a sudden deep scream. It sounds like someone being beaten to death, muttered José Arco. We were serious all of a sudden, lost in the storm and our own thoughts, as if the space in between—that is, the shop and the words we could have been speaking—didn’t exist. In the yard, the wind whipped the empty cans and papers.

After each sound, El Mofles looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes he paced back and forth with the cup of Nescafé in his hand, trying or pretending to read the grime-covered signs posted on the walls. Still, he didn’t seem nervous. On the contrary. Though you could say it was a deceptive calm, no more than a surface calm: a remoteness neither arctic nor ignorant but like that of a Christian just released from his torments. The remoteness of a body that’s been terribly beaten or utterly satiated.

“The world is beautiful, isn’t it?” said El Mofles.

It was five in the morning when we left. My two friends spent a while teaching me the basic principles of motorcycle riding. According to them, the trick was not to be afraid of cars and to know how to accelerate, brake, and use the clutch. What about changing speeds? That’s important, too. Try to keep your balance. Try to glance at stoplights every once in a while. Don’t worry about the rain.

I went out into the yard to check the weather. The rain wasn’t as intense anymore. I asked José Arco what would happen if we were outside when it started coming down hard again. He didn’t answer. After El Mofles had tuned up the Honda, he asked us if we wanted to hear some poems he’d written. (Making these requests, El Mofles was like a village priest in the presence of the pope: he welcomed all criticism and never defended anything he’d written.) Of the five or six he read that night, there was one that I liked a lot: it was about his girlfriend, Lupita, and his mother watching from the distance as a building went up. The rest were pop-style poems: song lyrics, ballads. José Arco loved them. I didn’t. When we leave, José Arco said, I’m going to tell you the best story El Mofles ever came up with.

“What is it?”

“It’s the story of how Georges Perec, as a boy, prevented a duel to the death between Isidore Isou and Altagor in an old neighborhood of Paris.”

“I’d rather read it.”

“It isn’t written, it’s an oral story.”

El Mofles smiled, blushing, wiped his hands on a rag, and put on water for the last round of Nescafé. Suddenly I realized that I was scared, panicked; I thought of a thousand different ways that things could end badly, seeing myself first at the police station and then at the hospital, every bone in my body broken. We drank our coffee. In silence I listened to the final instructions. When we went outside, the street looked dark and deserted. Without a word, José Arco got on my motorcycle and started it. The roar of the tailpipe made me shudder. Then he got on his bike, and we rolled down the street to the end of the block, testing the engines. We turned, with me always close behind, and returned to where El Mofles was waiting for us.

“You’ve made it like new,” said José Arco. I was silent, all my senses focused on keeping the engine from stalling. Take care and come back soon, said El Mofles. Of course, said José Arco. How do you feel, Remo? Scared shitless, I said. It was strange—the sound of our voices was muted, even the sound of the bikes seemed to come from far away; meanwhile the sounds of the sleeping street were magnified in my ears: cats, the first morning birds, water running in the pipes, some distant door, the snores of a man in a house down the block.

“All right, you’ll get over it; we’ll go slow, stay right next to each other.”

“Okay,” I said.

“See you around, Mofles.”

“Good-bye.”

We coasted out of the neighborhood as if we were on bicycles. Every so often, José Arco asked me how I was doing. Soon we left the empty streets of El Mofles’s neighborhood and turned onto a wide avenue.

“Stick close to me,” said José Arco.

The two motorcycles lurched forward. I felt as if somebody had given me a kick somewhere in my insides. My hands were sweating, and I was afraid they would slip off the handlebars. Several times I thought about braking, but I was prevented by the certainty that if I did, the Aztec Princess would be left lying abandoned in the street while I went home on the Metro. At first all I could see was the asphalt lane, interminable and full of silences suddenly broken, and the hazy outline of my friend and his Honda, sometimes moving ahead of me and other times letting me move ahead. Then, as if a curtain was drawn back in the middle of the desert, a hulking mass appeared on the horizon, gigantic but far in the distance, seeming to flicker or cycle through every shade of gray in the world through the fine mist of rain. What the hell is that? I screamed in my head. The Turtle of Death? The Great Beetle? The thing was as big as a hill, I calculated, and it was coming straight at us, propelled by pseudopods or perhaps on a cushion of steam. Its progress, from where I sat, was unrelenting. I didn’t need to ask José Arco which way we were going.

“La Villa!” he called, pointing his finger at Godzilla.

“La Villa, La Villa!” I shouted happily.

Only then did I notice the cars passing us; the half-hidden stoplights, corroded by smog, flashing on and off at the corners; the shadowy figures moving along the sidewalk, even smoking cigarettes; the buses, lit up like riverboats, carrying workers to their jobs. In the middle of the street, a kid, drunk or high, called out to death and then fell to his knees, impassively watching the cars go by. From inside a coffee shop that had just opened its doors came the strains of a ranchera.

We stopped near the plaza in front of the basilica to stretch our legs and to see how I was doing so far on my first motorcycle ride. I told José Arco that a minute ago I’d been convinced that the basilica was a monster. Or a petrified atomic blast striding toward us. If that’s what it was, wouldn’t it be heading toward the center of the city? Maybe, I said, but still, we were in the way. Good thing you’re all right. How is the Aztec Princess behaving? Isn’t she a nice bike?

I don’t know why, but the air seemed to be coming at us from a hole in the clouds. I lit a cigarette and said yes.

“Well, it wasn’t an atomic bomb,” said José Arco as he cast an eye over my motorcycle. “It was the castle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, mother of all, the great babe.”

“Yes,” I said watching the sunrise, which was only the faintest glow so far. “She’s the one who saved me from getting into an accident.”

“No, man, that was me and Mofles, we’re pedagogues of the wheel.”

I felt in my pockets for coins.

“Wait for me a minute, I’m going to make a phone call.”

“All right.”

Nearby I found a public phone and called Laura. After a long time, her mother picked up. I apologized for calling so early and asked if she would be so kind as to get Laura. It’s urgent, I think; I don’t know, I said, playing dumb. I wasn’t tired, but I would have been happy to flop down on my mattress. The streets were bright, and next to me a couple of taxi drivers were talking about soccer—one liked Club América and the other preferred Guadalajara. When Laura came on the line, I apologized again, exactly as if I was back on the line with her mother, and then I told her that I loved her.

“It’s hard to explain. I’m in love with you.”

Laura said, “It’s nice that you called.”

“That’s all I wanted to tell you, that I love you.”

“Great,” said Laura. “That’s great.”

We hung up, and I went back over to the motorcycles.

“Everything okay? Ready to go?”

“Yes,” I said, “let’s go.”

“Do you think you can make it home?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ll come with you anyway.”

“There’s no need. You must be tired.”

“Tired? Me? No, man, and anyway, I still haven’t told you the story of Isidore Isou and Altagor.”

“What shit is that?”

“El Mofles’s story, man, wake up.”

We headed toward the center of the city, taking our time. The air finally cleared my head. It was nice to ride along on the bike and watch the streets and windows begin to wake up. People who’d been out all night drove their cars home or wherever, and workers drove their cars to work or piled into the vans or waited for the buses that would take them to work. The geometric landscape of the neighborhoods, even the colors, had a provisional look, filigreed and full of energy, and if you sharpened your gaze and a certain latent madness, you could feel sadness in the form of flying sparks, Speedy Gonzales slipping along the great arteries of Mexico City for no reason at all or for some secret reason. Not a melancholy sadness but a devastating, paradoxical sadness that cried out for life, radiant life, wherever it might be.

“It’s a strange story,” shouted José Arco. “I won’t insult you by asking if you know who Isou and Altagor are.”

“Go ahead and insult me, I have no idea.”

“Really? Fucking Latin America and its fucking young intellectuals!” José Arco laughed.

“Well, Isou is French,” I yelled. “And he writes visual poetry, I think.”

“Cold, cold.”

Then he said something that I didn’t understand—it was in Romanian—and we passed a truck loaded with chickens and then another truck loaded with chickens and another and another. It was a convoy. The chickens poked their beaks through the mesh of their cages and shrieked like teenagers on the way to the slaughterhouse. Where is my mother hen? the chickens seemed to say. Where has my egg gone? My God, I thought, I don’t want to crash. La Salud Poultry Farm. José Arco’s Honda drew up an inch or so from mine.

“Isou is the Father of Lettrism and Altagor is the Father of Metapoetry!”

“Wonderful!”

“And they hate each other bitterly!”

We stopped at a red light.

“I don’t know where the hell El Mofles reads these things. He didn’t make it past the first year of high school.”

Green.

“Where did you read them?” The Aztec Princess didn’t move right away. It jolted forward.

“I go to the Librería Francesa! While the jackasses are lining up for Octavio Paz’s lectures, I spend hours digging around in there! I’m basically a nineteenth-century gentleman!”

“And you never run into Mofles?”

“Never!”

A Mustang going sixty miles an hour drowned out José Arco’s last words. Eventually I would learn that El Mofles only visited the Librería El Sótano, and then only occasionally. The story of Isou and Altagor and Georges Perec was very simple. Just after World War II, in a Paris still under rationing, Isou and Altagor met at one of the legendary cafés. Isou sat on the terrace to the far right and Altagor to the left, let’s say. Still, each was aware of the other’s presence. The tables in the middle were occupied by American tourists, famous painters, Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, movie actors, and Johnny Hallyday.

“Johnny Hallyday, too?”

“That’s El Mofles for you, the bastard.”

And so our two phonetic poets sat in perfect anonymity. Only the two of them fully understood what was going on and knew themselves to be the Father of Metapoetry and the Father of Lettrism, greater enemies than the houses of Verona.

“According to El Mofles, they were both young and ambitious! Vanitas vanitatum!”

“Fucking Mofles!”

So after gloomily downing their pastis and munching their sandwiches, the only sustenance either of them would get that night, they called for the check, but one of them asked for it in metalanguage and the other in lettrist caló, and the next minute they refused to pay. Their aim, apart from getting themselves noticed by the tables in the middle, was to get the waiters to speak to them in the languages in which they’d been addressed. Sure enough, insults were soon flying. The waiters swore at them under their breath, trying not to call attention to themselves. Isou treated the waiters like ignorant slaves and mocked Altagor. The Father of Lettrism, on the other side of the terrace, loudly bewailed the narrow-mindedness of the waiters and shook his fist at Isou.

“What assholes!”

“Ha-ha-ha.”

“Hee-hee-hee.”

“They’re Mofles’s heroes!”

The appearance of Gaston, the maître d’, a fierce warrior of the Maquis, put an end to the dispute. Gaston was a terror, and everybody knew it. Much to their chagrin, both poets paid up, and to make matters worse, they saw that they’d made fools of themselves in front of the select tables in the middle. Utterly crushed, Isou and Altagor left the café: it was then, out in the street, that they decided to meet in a duel to the death. (In their mutual despair, they believed that Paris wasn’t big enough for both of them.) The time was set for that very morning on the Champs de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower. And that is where Georges Perec comes in.

“Do you know Georges Perec?”

“Yes, but I haven’t read anything by him.”

“He was one of the best,” said José Arco very seriously; our motorcycles were going ten miles an hour along the very edge of the road.

“We look like two night-shift workers on our way home,” I said.

“Basically,” said José Arco.

According to El Mofles, Perec was a kid who rose with the sun. First thing in the morning, he snuck on tiptoe out of his grandparents’ house, got on his bike, and hightailed it around the city, no matter the weather. The morning in question, he went pedaling around the Champs de Mars. And wouldn’t you know it, the first person he runs into is Altagor, sitting on a bench and reciting one of his own poems for courage. Little Perec stops near him and listens. It goes like this: Sunx itogmire ésinorsinx ibagtour onéor galire a ékateralosné. Which to the boy’s ears sounds the same as if ten years ago you and I and El Mofles had met Mary Poppins in person singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” According to El Mofles, little Perec—who despite his youth is painfully polite and pedantic—begins to applaud with barely contained enthusiasm, which attracts the attention of Altagor, who looks at him and asks Veriaka e tomé?

“Oh, my God, Mofles is too much.”

Tumissé Arimx, answers the boy, and Altagor’s resolve crumbles. He sees the boy as a portent, a sign telling him to keep working come hell or high water. So he gets up, dusts himself off, bows down to the boy as if before fate itself, and goes off to his room to sleep. Shortly after this, the boy runs into Isidore Isou, and the same kind of thing happens. Maybe Isou doesn’t say a word to the boy. Maybe he just sees him riding his bike around the Champs de Mars and singing Echoum mortine flas echoum mortine zam, and that’s all it takes. Years later, when Georges Perec wrote the account I Remember, for reasons unknown he forgot to include this story.

“Perec hasn’t been translated into Spanish, and El Mofles doesn’t speak French. I leave you with that mystery for breakfast.”

All of Mexico City was bathed in a deep yellow light. We had arrived. I felt less like eating breakfast than like sleeping; with Laura, if possible. I pointed out to José Arco that I had seen worse in the last few days.

“El Mofles’s universe is full of stories like that. I wonder if he might be responsible for one of those little magazines.”

“We’ll ask him,” I said.

Then I left the motorcycle on the first-floor landing, maybe with the secret hope that it would be stolen, and I went up the stairs two at a time.

Chapter 26

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was Jan’s flushed face and Angélica Torrente’s Greek profile smoking a Delicado and then Laura’s serene, expectant smile, all connected by a kind of arc of energy, very fine and very black, an effect that I attributed to the sleep in my eyes, and finally, as I pulled the sheet up to my nose, I saw the open door and the plants in the corridor shuddering and the daughter of one of the tenants walking away with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a transistor radio blaring in the other. Angélica Torrente had been here for an hour. The entire time, she’d been arguing with Jan. Of course, that wasn’t why she’d come: the purpose of her visit was love and confessions. But things got off track, and the two of them found themselves arguing, sorrowfully and stubbornly, and though most of the time it was at the top of their lungs, they didn’t manage to wake me. The problem was the table made of science fiction books. Jan had shown it to her with the beaming pride of a Chippendale collector, and Angélica, after studying it in astonishment and disgust, had decreed that it was nothing less than a slap in the face to literature in general and science fiction in particular. “Books should be on bookshelves, neatly organized, ready to be read or consulted. You can’t treat them this way, like Meccano pieces or vulgar bricks!” Jan argued that many city dwellers under siege had relieved their hunger by masticating the pages of books: in Sevastopol in 1942, a young writer had ingested a good chunk of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in the original French. Science fiction, Jan believed, was especially well suited to serendipitous bookcases, like the bookcase-table, for example, without being any less valued for the content of its pages or its tales of adventure. According to Angélica, this was idiotic and impractical in the extreme. Tables were for eating on, for spilling sauces on, for stabbing with knives in fits of rage. My God! was Jan’s response, accompanied by a dismissive wave. That has nothing to do with anything! You don’t get it! There are tablecloths!

After which there was an instant when they tried to move from words to deeds. For a fraction of a second, they met in an attempt at lucha libre, masks versus manes, that might have ended or climaxed with the two of them tangled on Jan’s mattress, legs pressed to legs, arms wrapped around backs and shoulders, hands clawing, and jeans pulled down to knees. But it didn’t happen. They just lunged at each other a few times, getting in a few jabs on the forearms, their breathing faster and the gleam in their eyes more intense. Then Laura arrived, and the argument lost steam and finally fizzled out. Laura hardly noticed the table at all. “I saw a motorcycle on the landing,” she said in a sibylline voice. “I bet it’s Remo’s.”

“No, no, no,” sighed Jan. “Absolutely not. My esteemed friend only knows how to ride a bicycle.”

“How much do you want to bet?” Laura was like that; when she was sure about something, she would rather die than let her arm be twisted. Luckily for her, her convictions were few, though they were as sharp as a falcon’s beak.

“But, my dear,” said Jan, “up until yesterday he didn’t have a motorcycle, so there’s no way he could have one now.”

“I’m sure it’s his motorcycle.”

“Unless”—Jan seemed doubtful—“he stole it, but even so, how can you steal a motorcycle when you don’t know how to ride it?”

A vision of me buying the motorcycle and signing letters and contracts flashed through Jan’s mind like a shout. It was a chilling prospect, as he would later confess to me, because he was forced to accept something that he’d never wanted to admit: our disastrous economic situation. If the motorcycle was mine, which was beginning to seem more and more likely, we would surely be up to our ears in debt for at least five years, and to make matters worse, I would need financial help, which meant that he would have to look for work.

“My God, I hope it isn’t true,” he said.

“It’s a very nice motorcycle,” said Laura.

“When I came up, I guess there was a motorcycle on the landing,” said Angélica, “but it didn’t look nice to me. It was an ugly old motorcycle.”

“Why do you call it ugly?” asked Laura.

“Because I thought it was. An old motorcycle all covered in stickers.”

“You must not have gotten a good look at it. It has character. And there aren’t that many stickers on it. In fact, there’s just an inscription, a really original one in metallic letters: ‘Aztec Princess’… that must be its name.”

“The name of the motorcycle.”

“Such observant girls,” said Jan.

“Listen, it’s cheesy enough to give a motorcycle a name. But to call it Aztec Princess, ugghh,” said Angélica.

“No, it can’t be Remo’s,” said Jan. “But, Laura, you spent hours studying that motorcycle!”

Laura laughed and said yes, the hulking rusty thing out there on the landing had spoken to her: there was something about it that made her feel sad, like crying. Angélica said, “bullshit.” Then I woke up.

Cautiously, I began to perform the delicate maneuver of getting dressed. The two girls had already seen Jan naked, and I guess they thought it would be bad manners to close their eyes or turn to face the wall while I was getting up. I didn’t say anything. I put my pants on under the sheet and did the best I could.

“The motorcycle is mine.”

“See?” said Laura.

“I bought it from a savage poet in Peralvillo. I’ll pay for it when I have money.”

“In other words, never,” said Jan.

“I’ll work more. I’ll enter all the literary contests. I give myself a year to get famous and make the same money as somebody with a desk job at the bottom of the ladder. All this, of course, if I don’t end up in jail first for riding without a license on a motorcycle that turned up out of nowhere.”

“Stolen,” said Jan.

“Exactly. What do you expect? But I didn’t steal it! It fell into my hands by chance. Come on, can you imagine the Lone Ranger buying Silver at an auction? No, the Lone Ranger found Silver on the prairie. They found each other, and they hit it off. Same for Red Ryder. Only that ass Hopalong Cassidy would buy a new horse every year.”

“But you don’t know how to ride a motorcycle.”

“I learned last night. It’s not so hard. It’s all in the head, really. License, police, stoplights, fear of cars—those are the hard parts. If you forget about all that, you can learn to ride a motorcycle in half an hour.”

“Sure,” said Angélica, “it’s like the luck of the drunk. If you aren’t afraid that something will happen to you, it won’t.”

“Most accidents are the fault of drunk drivers,” whispered Jan.

“No, half-drunk, which is totally different. Half-drunk drivers are terrified of screwing up, so of course they do. If you’re completely drunk, you’re thinking of other things. Well, actually, total drunks hardly ever get into a car. They just fall into bed.”

We kept talking for a while about my motorcycle and the dangers that could befall me riding it around a place like Mexico City. Some of the advantages, according to everyone except for me, were speeding past motorcades and traffic jams and being on time to all my appointments and future jobs. But he isn’t going to get a job, said Laura, with an enigmatic smile, he’s going to write poems and win all the contests. That’s right, I said, I won’t need the motorcycle for that. Maybe when I’ve got writer’s block, I’ll go out and ride around. Contests? What contests? Jan asked hopefully. All of them, said Angélica. You’ll ride to the post office on the motorcycle, and you’ll sit on the manuscripts so they don’t blow away. True, and it’s only fitting, too, I said. One of the disadvantages was the price of gasoline, which none of us knew, even approximately.

And so on and so on, until Jan and Angélica left and I realized that something had to happen between Laura and me. Where are you going? I asked. I had always been in favor of Jan leaving the room, even if only once a day, but this time I would have preferred it if he’d stayed. The two of them looked happy. Jan had his arm around Angélica’s waist, and she was petting his hair. The scene terrified me.

“To the landing,” said Jan. “We’re going to take a look at your motorcycle, and if we really feel like it, we’ll head over to La Flor de Irapuato.”

“Don’t be long,” I said.

When we were left alone, there was a silence as sudden and heavy as a concrete ball. Laura sat on Jan’s mattress, and I stared out the window. Laura got up and came over to the window. I sat on my mattress. I stuttered something about the motorcycle and going to get a coffee at La Flor de Irapuato. Laura smiled and said nothing. There was no doubt in my mind: she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. And the most direct.

“Last night you said you wanted to make love with me. That you were dying to do it. What’s wrong?”

“I’m out of practice,” I stuttered. “I want to do it, I want it more than anything, but I’m out of practice. Also, it’s hard to explain, but I’m kind of wounded in action.”

Laura laughed and asked me to tell her about it. Little by little, I started to feel better. I put on water for tea, I made a few banal remarks about the weather, and then I confessed that not long ago I’d been ruthlessly and repeatedly kicked in the testicles, a kind of Chilean memento, and that since then I’d been convinced that I would never get it up again, a predictable reaction from an admirer of the Goncourt brothers. Actually, I can get it up, I admitted, but only when I’m alone.

“Why did they kick you there?”

“Who knows? Jan and I were wandering around desperately looking for our friend Boris, and not only did we not find him, we got caught ourselves.”

“What about Jan, did he…?”

“That’s right, we both got thrashed. He was yelling as loud as me.”

“But Jan has normal erections,” said Laura. “I know that for a fact.”

Laura had never seemed so pretty and so terrible. For a second, I felt a wave of jealousy and fear. At what point had the hypocritical little satyr stolen my girlfriend?

“Really?” I said, with an icy smile.

Laura told me then that the night of the party in our room Jan and Angélica had made love. I must have been very drunk or high or depressed or immersed in López Velarde, because I didn’t notice. Angélica felt sick, and her sister and Jan took her to the bathroom. Really, it was very stuffy in our room. In one of the chicken coops where clothes were hung up to dry, Laura bumped into Lola Torrente, José Arco, and Pepe Colina. Angélica and Jan had vanished. César was pretty drunk, and he wanted to leave. He begged, pleaded, claimed he was about to vomit—poor César, but too bad for him. Laura absolutely refused. In a corner full of pails, buckets of water, and empty boxes of detergent, César tried to make love to her as she looked over the railing. He was out of luck. Laura kept wandering sleepily around the roof (like the princess, candle in hand, who roams the castle of the prince she is to marry!) until on one of her rounds she came to what Jan cheerfully called the latrines. There she hesitated, and soon she heard a muffled noise coming from one of them. She thought that Angélica might be sicker than she’d seemed and went to investigate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jan was sitting on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, and in the fingers of his left hand he held a match. Kneeling over him, Angélica was mounted on his erect cock. Every so often, when the match burned the tips of his fingers, Jan dropped it and lit another one. Discreetly, Laura returned to the others. The next day, Angélica told her what she already knew, plus some additional details.

“Phew! That’s a relief.”

“What’s a relief? That your best buddy is still in working order, despite the beating?”

“Don’t be vulgar. I thought you had slept with Jan.”

“No, I went back with César to the place with the soap. A cozy spot—you’ll have to show it to me by daylight. There I forced him to penetrate me. We almost fell over the parapet. It was quick, really quick. César was drunk and depressed. I was thinking of you, I felt really good. It was like I couldn’t stop laughing inside, I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? That morning we talked for hours…”

“It was none of your business. Also, I was tired and I was having a good time with you, so why start an argument?”

“I wouldn’t have argued. I would have cried. Shit.”

“Silly, it was a kind of good-bye. I think I had already decided that we were done. Poor César.” She sighed wickedly. “I wasn’t even saying good-bye to him, but to his penis. Ten inches. I measured it myself with my mother’s measuring tape.”

“Shitshitshit. I’ll never let you come near me with a measuring tape.”

“I won’t, I swear.”

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