Woes of the True Policeman

1

Padilla said tell me, tell me about the dangers you’ve seen, and Amalfitano thought of an adolescent on horseback, himself, achingly beautiful, and then he thought of a black blanket, the blanket he wrapped around himself early in the morning at the detention camp, first he thought of its color, then its smell, and finally its texture, how nice it felt to cover his face with it and let his nose, his lips, his forehead, his bruised cheekbones, come into contact with the rough cloth. It was an electric blanket, he remembered happily, but there was nowhere to plug it in. And Padilla said my love, let my lips be like your black blanket, let me kiss those eyes that have seen so much. And Amalfitano felt happy to be with Padilla. He said: Joan, Joan, Joan, here I am at last emerging from the tunnel, all that time wasted, all those days lost, and he also thought: if only I’d met you sooner, but he didn’t say it, or rather he communicated it telepathically, so that Padilla couldn’t say you idiot, sooner? when? in a time outside of time, thought Amalfitano as Padilla kissed him softly on the back, in an ideal time, when to be awake was to dream, in a country where men love men, isn’t that the title of a novel? asked Padilla, yes, said Amalfitano, but I can’t think of the name of the author. And then, as if he were riding the night in successive waves, he returned to the black electric blanket, with its little tail and its stains, and over the shouting, shouting that announced an impending hurricane, Padilla’s voice rose like the captain of a sinking ship. This will end badly, thought Amalfitano, end badly, end badly, as Padilla’s cock sank smoothly into his old ass.

Then, as always, came the madness. Padilla introduced him to a fat, blue-eyed adolescent, the poet Pere Girau, a wonderful kid, said Padilla, you have to hear him read, he’s got a voice as rich and deep as Auden’s. And Amalfitano listened to Pere Girau read his poems and then they went out for a drive, out for drinks at the Killer Trucker and the Brothers Poyatos, and the three of them ended up in Padilla’s studio and in Padilla’s bed, and Amalfitano, consumed by doubt, thought that this wasn’t what he wanted, even though later he really did want it. But still, he would have liked a different kind of bond, spending evenings with Padilla discussing literature, for example, making time for intimacy and friendship.

And after the poet Pere Girau there were two others, classmates of Padilla, and Amalfitano’s surprise upon meeting them and discovering the purpose of their meeting was huge. This was no longer a matter of attending dramatic readings. He was ashamed, he blushed, he tried to be casual and cold but failed. And Padilla seemed to enjoy his distress, seemed to change and grow, become suddenly old and cynical (he had always been foulmouthed), while Amalfitano grew progressively younger, more dazed, shyer. An adolescent in a foreign land. Don’t worry, Óscar, they understand, they’ve been doing this since long before I popped your cherry, they like you, they say they’ve never had such a good-looking professor, they say it’s incredible, considering how old you are, they wonder what you’d like to do tonight, said Padilla, laughing, thoroughly pleased with himself, master of his actions and his emotions, before the disease, before his encounter with the god of homosexuals.

Tell me, tell me the dangerous things you’ve done in your life, said Padilla. The most dangerous was sleeping with you, thought Amalfitano, but he was careful not to say it.

2

Amalfitano thought, too, about the last time he made love with Padilla. Days before he left for Mexico, Padilla called. Trembling all over, Amalfitano agreed to what he imagined would be their last date. An hour later a taxi dropped him off at the port and Padilla, with his black jacket buttoned up to the neck, strode toward him.

He really should stop smiling, thought Amalfitano as he gazed fixedly, spellbound, at Padilla’s face, finding it haggard, paler, almost translucent, as if lately the sun never shone on it. Then, when he felt Padilla’s lips on his cheek, brushing the corner of his own lips, he experienced a feeling for his former student that-the few times he stopped to think about it-disturbed him. A mixture of desire, paternal affection, and sadness, as if Padilla were the embodiment of an impossible trinity: lover, son, and ideal reflection of Amalfitano himself. He felt sorry for Padilla, for Padilla and his father, for the deaths in his life and his lost loves, which cast him in a lonely light: there, on that sad backdrop, Padilla was too young and too fragile and there was nothing Amalfitano could do about it. And while at the same time he knew with certainty-and most of the time this perplexed him-that there existed an invulnerable Padilla, arrogant as a Mediterranean god and strong as a Cuban boxer, the pity lingered, the sense of loss and impotence.

For a while they strolled aimlessly along narrow sidewalks, skirting terraces, fried-fish stands, and northern European tourists. The few words they spoke to each other made them smile.

“Do you think I look like a gay German?” asked Padilla as they wandered the port in search of a cheap hotel.

“No,” said Amalfitano, “the gay Germans I know-and all my knowledge of them comes from books-are happy brutes like you, but they tend toward self-destruction and you seem to be made of stronger stuff.”

Immediately he regretted his words; it’s talk like that, he thought, that will destroy any kind of love.

3

About the plane trip Rosa remembered that in the middle of the Atlantic her father seemed sick or queasy and all of a sudden a stewardess appeared without being called and offered them a deep golden liquid, bright and sweet smelling. The stewardess was dark-skinned, of average height, with short dark hair, and she was wearing hardly any makeup but her nails were very well kept. She asked them to try the juice and then tell her what it was. She smiled with her whole face, like someone playing a game.

Amalfitano and Rosa, distrustful by nature, each took a sip.

“Peach,” said Rosa.

“Nectarine,” murmured Amalfitano, almost in unison.

No, said the stewardess, and her good-humored smile restored some of Amalfitano’s lost courage, it’s mango.

Father and daughter drank again. This time they took lingering sips, like sommeliers who are back on the right path. Mango: have you tried it before? asked the stewardess. Yes, said Rosa and Amalfitano, but we’d forgotten. The stewardess wanted to know where. In Paris, probably, said Rosa, in a Mexican bar in Paris, a long time ago, when I was small, but I still remember it. The stewardess smiled again. It’s delicious, added Rosa. Mango, mango, thought Amalfitano, and he closed his eyes.

4

Shortly after classes began, Amalfitano met Castillo.

It was one evening, almost night, when the Santa Teresa sky turns from deep blue to an array of vermillions and purples that linger scarcely a few minutes before the sky turns back to deep blue and then black.

Amalfitano left the department library and as he crossed the campus he spotted a shape under a tree. He thought it might be a bum or a sick student and he went over to check. It was Castillo, who was sleeping peacefully and was awakened by Amalfitano’s presence: when he opened his eyes he saw a tall, angular, white-haired figure, looking vaguely like Christopher Walken, with a worried expression on his face, and he knew right away that he would fall in love.

“I thought you were dying,” said Amalfitano.

“No, I was dreaming,” said Castillo.

Amalfitano smiled, satisfied, and made as if to leave but didn’t. This part of the campus was like an oasis, three trees on a mound surrounded by a sea of grass.

“I was dreaming about the paintings of an American artist,” said Castillo, “they were set along a wide street, in the open air, the street was unpaved, lined with houses and stores, all built of wood, and the paintings seemed about to melt away in the sun and dust. It made me feel very sad. I think it was a dream about the end of the world.”

“Ah,” said Amalfitano.

“The strangest thing is that some of the paintings were mine.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, it is a strange dream.”

“No it isn’t,” said Castillo. “I shouldn’t be telling this to a stranger, but somehow I trust you: I really did paint some of them.”

“Some of them?” asked Amalfitano as night fell suddenly over Santa Teresa and from a campus building, a building that seemed empty, came the music of drums and horns and something that might have or might not have been a harp.

“Some paintings,” said Castillo. “I painted them myself, forged them.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, that’s how I make a living.”

“And you tell this to the first person who walks by, or is it common knowledge?”

“You’re the first person I’ve told, no one knows, it’s a secret.”

“I see,” said Amalfitano. “And why are you telling me?”

“I don’t know,” said Castillo, “I really don’t. Who are you?”

“Me?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, that was a rude question, never mind,” said Castillo, in a protective tone that grated on Amalfitano’s nerves. “You aren’t Mexican, that’s plain to see.”

“I’m Chilean,” said Amalfitano.

His reply and the expression on his face when he admitted where he was from were humble in the extreme. So far away, said Castillo. Then both of them were silent, standing there facing each other, Castillo a bit taller because he was up on the mound, Amalfitano like a bird or some hulking raptor sensing in every pore the coming of night, the stars that were beginning swiftly (and also violently, this Amalfitano noticed clearly for the first time) to fill the sky of Santa Teresa, standing there motionless, waiting for some sign under the sturdy trees that rose like an island between the literature department and the administration building.

“Shall we get some coffee?” asked Castillo finally.

“All right,” said Amalfitano, grateful though he couldn’t say why.

They circled around the center of Santa Teresa in Castillo’s car, a yellow 1980 Chevy. Their first stop was at the Dallas, where they chatted politely about painting, forgeries, and literature, and then they left because Castillo decided there were too many students. Without speaking, they drove along streets unfamiliar to Amalfitano until they reached the Just Once, and then, strolling down brightly lit and shuttered streets where it was hard to park a car, they stopped at the Dominium of Tamaulipas and the North Star and later the Toltecatl. Castillo kept laughing and drinking more mescal.

The Toltecatl was a big, rectangular room, the walls painted sky blue. On the back wall, a six-foot-square mural featured Toltecatl, god of pulque and brother of the maguey goddess Mayahuel. Indian drifters, cowboys and herds of cattle, policemen and police cars, ominously abandoned customs stations, amusement parks on either side of the border, children on their way out of a school blazoned with the name-painted in blue on a whitewashed wall-Benito Juárez, distinguished son of the Americas, a fruit market and a pottery market, North American tourists, shoeshine men, singers of rancheras and boleros (the ranchera singers looked like gunmen, the bolero singers suicidal or like pimps, Castillo remarked), women on their way to church, and hookers talking, running, or gesturing mysteriously: this was the backdrop, while in the foreground the god Toltecatl, an Indian with a chubby face covered with welts and scars, laughed uproariously. The owner of the bar, Castillo told him, was a man by the name of Aparicio Montes de Oca, and in 1985, the year he bought the place, he had killed a man at the busiest time of day, in front of everyone. At the trial he got off by pleading self-defense.

When Castillo pointed out Aparicio Montes de Oca behind the bar, Amalfitano noticed how much the bar owner looked like the figure of Toltecatl painted on the wall.

“It’s a portrait of him,” said Amalfitano.

“Yes,” said Castillo, “he commissioned it when he got out of jail.”

Then Castillo took Amalfitano home with him to prove that he wasn’t lying, he really was a forger.

He lived on the second floor of a dilapidated three-story building on the edge of town. On the first floor hung the sign for a tool wholesaler; no one lived on the third floor. Close your eyes, said Castillo when he opened the door. Amalfitano smiled but didn’t close his eyes. Go on, close your eyes, insisted Castillo. Amalfitano obeyed and ventured cautiously into the sanctum to which he was being granted access.

“Don’t open them until I turn on the light.”

Amalfitano opened his eyes immediately. In the moonlight coming in through the uncurtained windows, he got a glimpse of the contours of a large room plunged in a gray fog. At the back he could make out a big Larry Rivers painting. What am I doing here? wondered Amalfitano. When he heard the click of the switch he automatically closed his eyes.

“Now you can look,” said Castillo.

The studio was much bigger than he had thought at first, lit by many fluorescent bars. In a corner was Castillo’s spartan-looking bed; in another corner, a kitchen reduced to the bare essentials: hot plate, sink, a few pots, glasses, plates, cutlery. The rest of the furnishings, apart from the canvases stacked everywhere, consisted of two old armchairs, a rocking chair, two sturdy wooden tables, and a bookcase filled mostly with art books. Near the window and on one of the tables were the forgeries. Do you like them? Amalfitano nodded.

“Do you know who the artist is?”

“No,” said Amalfitano.

“He’s American,” said Castillo.

“I can tell that much. But I don’t know who he is. I’d rather not know.”

Castillo shrugged.

“Do you want something to drink? I think I have everything.”

“Whiskey,” said Amalfitano, suddenly feeling very sad.

I’ve come here to make love, he thought, I’ve come here to take my pants off and fuck this naïve kid, this art student, this forger of Larry Rivers, early-or mid-career Larry Rivers, what do I know, a forger who brags when he should cringe, I’ve come to do what Padilla predicted I would do and what he surely hasn’t stopped doing for even a moment, even a second.

“He’s Larry Rivers,” said Castillo, “an artist from New York.”

Amalfitano took a desperate gulp of whiskey.

“I know,” he said. “I know Larry Rivers. I know Frank O’Hara, so I know Larry Rivers.”

“Why did you say you didn’t, then? Are they that bad?” asked Castillo, not offended in the least.

“I can’t imagine who buys them, frankly,” said Amalfitano, feeling worse and worse.

“Oh, they sell, believe me.” Castillo’s voice was smooth and persuasive. “There’s a Texan who buys them-short little guy, a real character, you have to meet him-and then he sells them to other filthy rich Texans.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Amalfitano. “Forgive me. We’re here to go to bed, aren’t we? Or maybe not. Again, forgive me.”

Castillo sighed.

“Yes, if you want. If you don’t, I’ll take you home and we’ll pretend nothing happened. I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

“So do you want to?”

“I want to be with you, in bed or talking, it makes no difference. Or not much, anyway.”

“Forgive me,” murmured Amalfitano and he dropped onto a sofa. “I don’t feel well, I think I’m drunk.”

“No worries,” said Castillo, sitting down beside him, on the floor, on an old Indian rug. “I’ll make you coffee.”

After a while the two of them lit cigarettes. Amalfitano told Castillo that he had a seventeen-year-old daughter. They talked, too, about painting and poetry, about Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara. Then Castillo drove him home.

The next day, when he got out of his last class, Castillo was waiting for him in the hall. That same afternoon they slept together for the first time.

5

One morning a gardener stopped by Amalfitano’s classroom and handed him a note from Horacio Guerra. Guerra wanted to see him in his office at two. Without fail. Guerra’s office turned out to be hard to find. Guerra’s secretary and another woman drew him a map. It was on the first floor of the department building, at the back, next to the little theater-hardly bigger than a classroom-where college actors put on plays once a month for students, family, teachers, and other Santa Teresa intellectuals. Horacio Guerra was the director, and next to the dressing room, in what must once have been the props room, he had set up his office. It was a space with no natural light, the walls papered with posters for old shows, a shelf of university press books, a big oak table stacked with papers, and three chairs in a semicircle, facing a black leather swivel chair.

When Amalfitano came in, the room was dark. He spied Guerra sunk low in the big chair and for an instant he thought the other man was asleep. When he turned on the light he saw that Guerra was wide awake: his eyes were unnaturally alert and bright, as if he were high, and there was a sly smile on his lips. Despite the manner of their meeting, they greeted each other formally. They talked about the school year, about Amalfitano’s predecessors, and about the university’s need for good professors. In the sciences the best people left for Monterrey or Mexico City, or made the leap to some American university. In the arts it’s a different story, said Guerra, nobody pulls a fast one on me, but to make sure of it I have to be everywhere, supervise everything personally, it’s a lot to handle. I can imagine, said Amalfitano, who had decided to tread with care. Then they talked about theater. Horacio Guerra wanted to revamp the department’s drama program and in order to do so he needed the cooperation of everyone. Absolutely everyone. The department had two theater groups, but if he was to speak frankly both were undisciplined. Though the students weren’t bad actors. Amalfitano wanted to know what he meant by undisciplined. Announcing the date of an opening and not opening, losing an actor and having no understudy, starting the show half an hour late, failing to stick to a budget. My task, explained Guerra, is to find the evil and root it out. And I’ve found it, my friend, and I’ve rooted it out. Do you want to know what it was? Yes, of course, said Amalfitano. The directors! That’s right, those ignorant kids, ignorant but most of all undisciplined, who have no idea that a play is like a battlefield, complete with logistics, artillery, infantry, cavalry to cover the flanks (or light armored units, don’t take me for some old fart, even air squadrons if you insist), tanks, engineers, scouts, etc., etc.

“Actually,” said Guerra, “as you may have guessed, this isn’t my office. My office has air and light and I take pride in the furniture, but good generals have to stand with their troops, so I moved here.”

“I know,” said Amalfitano, “your secretary told me.”

“Have you been to my other office?”

“Yes,” said Amalfitano, “that’s where they told me how to get here. I guess it took me a while to find you. At first I got lost.”

“Yes, yes, the same thing always happens. Even our theatergoers get lost on their way to our plays. Maybe I should put up signs pointing the way.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Amalfitano.

They continued their conversation about theater, although Guerra avoided asking Amalfitano what he thought about the repertory he had planned. The only authors Amalfitano had heard of were Salvador Novo and Rodolfo Usigli. The others sounded either like discoveries or yawning pits. All the while Guerra talked about his project as if he were planning a delicate repast that only a few would really attack with relish. Not a word was spoken about Amalfitano’s job. When they parted, an hour later, Guerra asked whether he’d been to the Botanic Garden. Not yet, answered Amalfitano. Later, as he was waiting for a taxi to take him home, he wondered why Guerra had sent a gardener rather than an office boy to summon him. It seems a good sign, he thought.

6

The Texan; the people who bought the fake Larry Rivers paintings from the Texan; Castillo, who sincerely believed he was doing good work; the art market in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas: all of them, thought Amalfitano, were ultimately like characters from an eighteenth-century philosophical novel, exiled on a continent like the moon, the dark side of the moon, the perfect spot for them to grow and be formed, innocent and greedy, singular and brave, dreamers and utterly naïve. How else to explain, he thought, that not only are these paintings commissioned and painted but even sold, that there are people who buy them, and no one exposes them and turns them in? The art spreads across Texas, thought Amalfitano, like a revelation, like a lesson in humility that bypasses the dealers, like a kind of goodness that redeems everything, even bad forgeries, and he immediately pictured those fake Berdies, those fake camels, and those extremely fake Primo Levis (some of the faces undeniably Mexican) in the private salons and galleries, the living rooms and libraries of modestly prosperous citizens, owners of nothing but their well-appointed houses and their cars and maybe a few oil stocks, but not many, just enough, he imagined them strolling through rooms cluttered with trophies and photographs of cowboys, casting sidelong glances at the canvases on the walls at each pass. Certified Larry Rivers. And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo’s nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O’Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover. And superimposed on this image again were the fake Larry Rivers paintings scattered across a flat expanse, with big houses set far from one another, and in the middle, in the geometric and artificial yards, art, shaky and fragile as a forgery; Larry Rivers’s Chinese horsemen riding across a field of roiling white horsemen. Fuck, thought Amalfitano in excitement, this is the center of the world. The place where things really happen.

But then he came back down to earth and cast a skeptical eye over Castillo’s paintings and was assailed by doubt: either he had forgotten how Larry Rivers painted or the Texas art buyers were a bunch of blind raving lunatics. He thought, too, about the loathsome Tom Castro and said to himself that yes, maybe the authenticity of the canvases resided precisely in their failure to exactly replicate the Larry Rivers paintings, allowing them, paradoxically, to pass for originals. Through an act of faith. Because those Texans needed paintings and because faith is comforting.

Then he imagined Castillo painting-with such effort, such dedication-a beautiful boy blithely asleep on the university campus or wherever, dreaming about mixed-race exhibitions in which the authentic and the fake, the serious and the playful, the real work and the shadow, embraced and marched together toward destruction. And he thought about Castillo’s smiling eyes, his laugh, his big white teeth, about his hands showing him the strange city, and despite everything he felt happy, lucky, and he even managed to appreciate the camels.

7

Once, after discussing the curious nature of art with Castillo, Amalfitano told him a story he had heard in Barcelona. The story was about a recruit in Spain’s Blue Division who had fought on the Russian front in World War II, the northern front, to be precise, in an area near Novgorod. The recruit was a little man from Sevilla, thin and blue-eyed, who by some trick of fate (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo or Tomás Salvador and when he had to give the Roman salute he saluted, but he wasn’t a real fascist, or even a Falangist) had ended up in Russia. In Russia, someone said hey, sorche, hey, recruit, come here, do this, do that, and the word recruit stuck with the Sevillan, but in the dark recesses of his mind and in that vast place, with the passage of time and the daily terrors, it turned into the word chantre, or cantor. So the Andalusian thought of himself in terms of a cantor, with all the duties and obligations of a cantor, though he didn’t have any conscious idea what the word meant, which was choir director at some cathedrals. And yet somehow, by thinking of himself as a cantor he became one: during the terrible Christmas of ’41 he directed the choir that sang carols while the Russians pounded the 250th Regiment. In general, he bore himself with courage, though as time went by he began to lose his sense of humor. Soon enough he was wounded. For two weeks he was at the hospital in Riga under the care of the sturdy, smiling nurses of the Reich and some incredibly ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters, sisters-in-law, and distant cousins of José Antonio. When he was released, something happened that would have serious consequences for the Sevillan: instead of being given a billet with the correct destination, he was given one that sent him to the quarters of an SS battalion stationed some two hundred miles from his regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, all much taller and stronger than he, he tried to explain the mistake but the SS kept delaying their verdict and until the matter was settled they gave him a broom, a bucket of water, and a scouring brush and set him to sweep the barracks and scrub the huge, oblong wooden structure where all kinds of prisoners were interrogated and tortured. Without resigning himself entirely to the situation, but performing his new duties conscientiously, the Sevillan watched the time go by from his new barracks, eating much better than he had before and safe from any fresh threat. Then, in the dark recesses of his mind, the word recruit began to appear again. I’m a recruit, he said, a raw recruit, and I must accept my fate. Little by little, the word cantor vanished, though some evenings, under an endless sky that filled him with Sevillan longing, it still echoed, lost who knows where. And one fine day the inevitable happened. The barracks of the SS battalion were attacked and taken by a regiment of Russian cavalry, according to some, or a group of partisans, according to others. The result was that the Russians found the Sevillan hiding in the oblong building, wearing the uniform of an SS auxiliary and surrounded by the not exactly past-tense horrors perpetrated there. Caught red-handed, as they say. Soon he was tied to one of the chairs that the SS used for interrogations, one of those chairs with straps on the legs and the seat, and every time the Russians asked him a question, the Sevillan replied in Spanish that he didn’t understand, he was just an underling there. He tried to say it in German, too, but he hardly spoke a word of the language, and the Russians didn’t speak it at all. After beating him for a while, they went to get another Russian who spoke German and who was interrogating prisoners in one of the other cells in the oblong building. Before they came back, the Sevillan heard shots and realized that they were killing some of the SS, and he almost gave up hope; but when the shooting ended, he clung to life again with all his might. The German speaker asked him what he did there, what his duties and his rank were. The Sevillan tried to explain in German, but to no avail. Then the Russians opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers that the Germans used for other purposes they seized his tongue and yanked. The pain made tears spring to his eyes and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. With the pliers in his mouth the exclamation was transformed, coming out as the word kunst. The Russian who spoke German stared at him in surprise. The Sevillan shouted Kunst, Kunst, and wept in pain. The word Kunst, in German, means art, and that was how the bilingual soldier heard it and he said that the son of a bitch was an artist or something. The soldiers who were torturing the Sevillan removed the pliers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. Art. The thing that soothes wild beasts. And just like that, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a break and waited for some sign while the recruit bled from the mouth and swallowed his own blood mixed with big doses of saliva and choked and retched. The word coño, however, transformed into the word art, had saved his life. The Russians took him away with the few remaining prisoners, and later another Russian who spoke Spanish came to hear the Sevillan’s story and he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia while his accidental comrades were shot. It was well into the 1950s before he left Siberia. In 1957 he settled in Barcelona. Sometimes he opened his mouth and told the story of his little war in great good humor. Other times, he opened his mouth and showed the piece of tongue he was missing. It was hardly noticeable. When people told him so, the Sevillan explained that over the years it had grown back. Amalfitano didn’t know him personally, but when he heard the story the Sevillan was still living in the concierge quarters of some building in Barcelona.

8

At some point Castillo brought Amalfitano to see Juan Ponce Esquivel, art student and amateur numerologist, who lived in Aquiles Serdán, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Santa Teresa, west of Colonia El Milagro, near the old railroad tracks. The original idea was that Ponce would tell their fortunes, but when they got there they found him absorbed in a forecast of the nation’s future. I think we’re going to see the same heroes all over again, said Ponce as he served them tea. Carranza, for example, has already been born. He’ll die in the year 2020. Villa too: right now he’s a kid mixed up with narcos, hookers, and illegals. He’ll be shot to death in 2023. Obregón was born in 1980 and will be killed in 2028. Elías Calles was born in 1977 and will die in 2045. Huerta was born in the year that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and he’ll die in 2016. Pascual Orozco was born in 1982 and will die in 2016. Madero was born in 1973, the year of Allende’s fall, and he’ll be killed in 2013. Everything will happen all over again. The Mexican people will watch spellbound as new rivers of blood are shed. I get a bad vibe from 2015. Zapata was born already, in 1983; he’s still a kid playing out in the street, memorizing two or three Amado Nervo poems or four poemínimos by Efraín Huerta. He’ll die in a hail of bullets in 2019. The numbers say that everything will repeat itself. Everybody will be born again, the heroes, the soldiers, the innocent victims. The most important ones and the ones who’ll die first have already been born. But some are still missing. The numbers say that Aquiles Serdán will be killed again. Shit for luck, shit for fate.

Viva Mexico, said Castillo.

Amalfitano didn’t say anything, but he had the sense that someone, a fourth person, was saying something from the next room or from a big chest that Juan Ponce Esquivel had at the back of the room: excuse me, is anyone there? excuse me, excuse me?

9

Between the medical school and the plain-a bare open space scarcely interrupted by yellow hills under a high and mobile sky, across which the highway ran east-was the famous Botanic Garden of the city of Santa Teresa, under the stewardship of the university.

“Come and take a good look around,” said Professor Horacio Guerra.

There, tended by four bored gardeners, stood a small forest of no more than three specimens per species. The little dirt paths bordered by alluvial stones wound and unwound like snakes through the garden; in the middle rose a wrought-iron gazebo and every so often, in random spots, the visitor came upon limestone benches where he could sit. Little labels on stakes in the ground announced the name of each tree and plant.

Guerra moved like a fish in the water, his step quick. He didn’t need to check the labels to tell Amalfitano what species a given tree was or what part of Mexico it came from. His sense of direction was unerring. He could walk the labyrinth of dark paths-which looked to Amalfitano like some crazed, baroque version of an English garden maze-with his eyes closed. That’s right, he said when Amalfitano remarked upon this with some admiration, you can blindfold me with a handkerchief and I’ll lead you straight out, never fear.

“There’s no need for that, I believe you, I believe you,” said Amalfitano, alarmed to see that Guerra was about to make good on his words and had pulled a bright green handkerchief emblazoned with the crest of the University of Charleston from his suit pocket.

“Blindfold me,” bellowed Guerra, with a smile that said I can’t help myself, don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind.

Then he wiped the sweat from his brow with the handkerchief.

“Look at the plants and trees,” he said with a sigh, “and you’ll begin to understand this country.”

“They’re impressive,” said Amalfitano as he wondered what kind of person Guerra was.

“Here you have all kinds of agave and mesquite, our native plant,” said Guerra, making a sweeping gesture.

Amalfitano heard the song of a bird: it was a shrill sound, as if the bird were being strangled.

“Various species of cactus, like the giant pitahaya (Cereus pitajaya), the organ pipes, which are a different species of cereus, and the prickly pears, so delicious.”

Guerra filled his lungs with air.

“That’s a Cereus pringlei from Sonora, quite a night-bloomer if you look closely.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Amalfitano.

“There to the left is the yucca, beautiful without being showy, wouldn’t you say? and here is the divine Agave atrovirens, the source of pulque, which is a brew you should try, though make sure you don’t get hooked, sir, heh heh. Life is hard. Just think: if Mexico could export pulque, we’d give the whiskey, cognac, and wine makers of the goddamn world a run for their money. But pulque ferments too fast and can’t be bottled, so there you have it.”

“I’ll try it,” promised Amalfitano.

“That’s the spirit,” said Guerra, “one of these days we’ll go to a pulquería. You’d better come with me. Don’t even think of going alone, eh? No giving in to temptation.”

A gardener went by with a sack of dirt and he waved to them. Professor Guerra began to walk backwards. Over there, he said, more species of agave, the Agave lechuguilla, source of istle, the Agave fourcroydes, source of henequen. The path zigzagged constantly. Bits of sky and small, fast clouds appeared through the branches. Every so often Guerra sought something in the shadows: dark eyes that he scrutinized with his brown eyes without bothering to offer Amalfitano any sort of explanation. Ah, he said, ah, and then he was silent and he gazed around the Botanic Garden with a scowl that flickered between displeasure and the certainty of having found something.

Amalfitano recognized an avocado tree and was reminded of the trees of his childhood. How far away I am, he thought with satisfaction. Also: how near. The sky, over their heads and over the tops of the trees, seemed to be put together like a puzzle. Occasionally, depending on how you looked at it, it sparkled.

“There’s an avocado,” said Guerra, “and a brazilwood and a mahogany tree and two red cedars, no, three, and a Lignum vitae, and there you have the quebracho and the sapodilla and the guava. Along this little path is the cocoyol palm (Cocos butyracea) and in that clearing there’s amaranth, jicama, arborescent begonia, and spiny mimosa (Mimosa comigera, plena and asperata).

Something moved in the branches.

“Do you like botany, Professor Amalfitano?”

From where Amalfitano was standing, he could scarcely see Guerra. Guerra’s face was completely obscured by shadows and a tree branch.

“I don’t know, Professor Guerra, it’s a subject on which I plead ignorance.”

“Put it this way, do you appreciate the shapes, the external aspect of plants, their style, their spirit, their beauty?” Guerra’s voice mingled with the song of the strangled bird.

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, then, that’s something at least,” he heard Guerra say as the Mexican stepped off the visitors’ path and into the garden.

After a brief hesitation, Amalfitano followed him. Guerra was standing by a tree, urinating. This time it was Amalfitano who paused, startled, in the shadows under the branches of an oak tree. That oak, said Guerra, still urinating, shouldn’t be there. Amalfitano looked up: he thought he heard noises, little feet pattering in the branches. Follow me, ordered Guerra.

They came out onto a new path. Night was falling and the clouds that had been breaking up to the east were massing again and getting bigger. That’s the sacred fir, said Guerra walking ahead of Amalfitano, and those are pines. That’s a common juniper. When he came around a bend Amalfitano saw three gardeners taking off their overalls and putting away their tools. They’re leaving, he thought as he followed Guerra into the garden, which was growing darker and darker. The man is going to smother me with hospitality, thought Amalfitano. Guerra’s voice droned on, listing the gems of the Botanic Garden:

“The sacred fir. The common fir. Two shrubs, the guayule and the candelilla. Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides). The grass called zacatón (Epicampes macroura). Giant grass (Guadua amplexifolia). And here,” said Guerra, stopping at last, “our national tree, or at least that’s how I think of it, our dear, beloved ahuehuete (Taxodium mucronatum).”

Amalfitano gazed at Guerra and the tree and thought wearily but also with emotion that he was back in America. His eyes filled with tears that later he wouldn’t be able to explain to himself. Ten feet from him, his back turned, Professor Guerra trembled.

10

In his next letter, Padilla talked about Raoul Delorme and the sect known as the barbaric writers, created by Delorme midway through the 1960s. While the future novelists of France were breaking the windows of their high schools or erecting barricades or making love for the first time, Delorme and the nucleus of the soon-to-be barbaric writers were shut up in tiny garrets, concierge quarters, hotel rooms, and the backs of stores and pharmacies, preparing for the coming of a new literature. For them, according to Padilla’s sources, May of ’68 was a period of creative retreat: they kept indoors (eating stockpiled provisions or fasting), talked only among themselves, and-singly and in groups of three-practiced new writing techniques that would astonish the world, attempting to predict the moment when they would burst onto the world scene, a moment that was first erroneously calculated be 1991 but upon further divining adjusted to 2005. The sources Padilla cited were magazines that Amalfitano had never heard of before: Issue 1 of the Evreux Literary Gazette, Issue 0 of the Metz Literary Journal, Issue 2 of the Arras Journal of Night Watchmen, Issue 4 of the Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild of the Poitou. A “foundational elegy” by someone called Xavier Rouberg (“We salute a new literary school”) had been printed twice, in the Literary Gazette and the Literary Journal. The Journal of Night Watchmen included a crime story by Delorme and a poem by Sabrina Martin (“The Inner and Outer Sea”) preceded by an introductory note by Xavier Rouberg that was simply a shorter version of his “foundational elegy.” Featured in the Literary and Trade Journal was the work of six poets (Delorme, Sabrina Martin, Ilse von Kraunitz, M. Poul, Antoine Dubacq, and Antoine Madrid), each represented by a single poem-except Delorme and Dubacq with three and two, respectively-under the collective heading “The Barbaric Poets: When Pastime Becomes Profession.” As if to confirm what amateurs the poets were, their day jobs were indicated in parentheses beneath their names, next to the passport-style photos. Thus the reader learned that Delorme owned a bar, that Von Kraunitz was a nurse’s aide at a Strasbourg hospital, that Sabrina Martin worked cleaning houses in Paris, that M. Poul was a butcher, and that Antoine Madrid and Antoine Dubacq made a living tending newsstands. Regarding Xavier Rouberg, the John the Baptist of the barbarics, Padilla claimed to have done some sleuthing: he was eighty-six, his past was full of lacunae, he had spent time in Indochina, for a while he had been a publisher of pornographic literature, he had communist, fascist, and surrealist sympathies (he was a friend of Dalí, about whom he wrote a trifling little book, Dalí For and Against the World). Unlike the barbaric writers, Rouberg came from a well-to-do family and had been to university. Everything seemed to indicate that the barbarics were the last project to which Xavier Rouberg attached his hopes. Like almost all Padilla’s letters, this one ended abruptly. No goodbye, no hasta pronto. Amalfitano read it in his faculty cubicle with mounting amusement and trepidation. For a moment he imagined that Padilla was serious, that such a literary group really existed, and-horrors-that Padilla shared or was prepared to embrace its interests. Then he changed his mind, and decided that neither the group nor much less the magazines existed (Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild of the Poitou!), that it might all be part of The God of Homosexuals. Later, on his way out of class, he gave Padilla’s letter some more thought and became sure of one thing: if Delorme and the barbaric writers were characters in Padilla’s novel, it must be a very bad novel. That night, as he was walking with Castillo and a friend of Castillo’s along what was both the leafiest and the darkest street in Santa Teresa, he tried to call Padilla from a public phone. Castillo and his friend got change for Amalfitano at a taco cart and chipped in all the coins they had in their pockets. But in Barcelona there was no answer. After a while he stopped trying and attempted to convince himself that everything was all right. He got home later than usual. Rosa was awake in her room, watching a movie. He called good night to her through the closed door and went straight to his desk and wrote a letter to Padilla. Dear Joan, he wrote, dear Joan, dear Joan, dear Joan, how I miss you, how happy and how miserable I am, what an incredible life this is, what a mysterious life, we hear so many voices over the course of a day or a life, and the memory of your voice is so lovely. Etc. He ended by saying that he’d really liked the story about Delorme, the barbaric writers, and all those journals, but that as he’d envisioned it (for no good reason, probably), there was nothing in The God of Homosexuals about any French literary school. You have to tell me more about your novel, he said, but also about your health, your financial situation, your moods. In closing, he begged him to keep writing. He didn’t have long to wait, because the next day another letter arrived from Padilla.

11

As had become customary, Padilla didn’t wait for Amalfitano to answer before he sent another letter. It was as if after putting a letter in the mail, a zeal for accuracy and precision compelled him to immediately send a series of explanations, particulars, and sources intended to shed further light on the missive already dispatched. This time Amalfitano found neatly folded photocopies of the covers of the Literary Gazette, the Literary Journal, the Journal of Night Watchmen, and the Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild. Also: photocopies of the articles cited and of the poems and stories by the barbaric writers, which upon brief perusal struck him as horrible: a blend of Claudel and Maurice Chevalier, crime fiction and first-year creative writing workshop. More interesting were the photographs (appearing in the Literary and Trade Journal, which looked as if it were printed by professionals, unlike the Journal and the Gazette, surely put out by the barbarics themselves, not to mention the Journal of Night Watchmen, mimeographed in the manner of the 1960s and full of crossings-out, smudges, spelling mistakes). There was something magnetic about the faces of Delorme and his gang: first, they were all staring straight at the camera and therefore straight into Amalfitano’s eyes, or the eyes of any reader; second, all of them, without exception, seemed confident and sure of themselves, especially the latter, light-years from self-doubt or a sense of their own absurdity, which-considering that they were French writers-might not have been so surprising, and yet it was, despite everything (let’s not forget that they were amateurs, though maybe it was precisely because they were amateurs, thought Amalfitano, that they were beyond any awkwardness, embarrassment, or whatever, drifting in the limbo of the naïve); third, the age difference wasn’t just striking, it was unsettling: what bond-let alone literary school-could unite Delorme, who was well into his sixties and looked his age, and Antoine Madrid, who surely had yet to turn twenty-two? Confident expressions aside, the faces could be classified either as open (Sabrina Martin, who seemed to be about thirty, and Antoine Madrid, though there was something about him that spoke of the tight player, the man of reserve), or closed (Antoine Dubacq, a bald man with big glasses who must have been in his late forties, and Von Kraunitz, who might just as easily have been forty as sixty), or mysterious (M. Poul, nearly skeletal, spindle-faced, cropped hair, long bony nose, ears flat to the skull, prominent and probably jumpy Adam’s apple, maybe fifty, and Delorme, by all lights the chief, the Breton of this writerly proletariat, as Padilla described him). Without Rouberg’s notes, Amalfitano would have taken them for advanced students-or simply eager students-of a writing workshop in some blue-collar suburban neighborhood. But no: they had been writing for a long time, they met regularly, they had a common writing process, common techniques, a style (undetected by Amalfitano), goals. The information on Rouberg came from Issue 1 of the Literary and Trade Journal of which he seemed to be the editor in chief, though his name didn’t appear on the masthead. It wasn’t hard to imagine old Rouberg-retired, though only spiritually, and under the stigma of who can say what sins-in the Poitou. The journals, of course, were from the collection of Raguenau, who each month received copies from all over the world. And yet, added Padilla, when asked about the four journals in question and the complete collection (Issues 1 through 5) of the grocers’ organ, Raguenau admitted to Padilla and his nephew Adrià, who was digitizing his library with the occasional assistance of Padilla, that he didn’t subscribe to any of them. How, then, had they come into his power? Raguenau couldn’t remember, though he advanced a hypothesis: perhaps he had bought them at an antiquarian bookshop or a bookseller’s stall on his last trip to Paris. Padilla affirmed that he had subjected Raguenau to hours of interrogation before coming to the conclusion that he was innocent. What had attracted him to the magazines was probably their air of kitsch. And yet it was too much of a coincidence that all of them contained information on the barbaric writers and that Raguenau had bought them at random. Padilla ventured another hypothesis: that Raguenau had gotten them from one of the barbaric writers, working among the other stall keepers. But the interesting thing, the truly interesting thing about this business, was that Padilla (astounding memory, thought Amalfitano, more and more intrigued) had previously come across references to Delorme. His name was mentioned by Arcimboldi in an old interview dating back to 1970 published in a Barcelona magazine in 1991, and also by Albert Derville in an essay on Arcimboldi from a book on the contemporary French novel. In the interview Arcimboldi spoke of “a man named Delorme, an amazing autodidact who wrote stories near where I was living.”

Later he explained that Delorme was the concierge of the building where he lived in the early 1960s. The context in which he referred to him was one of fear. Fears, frights, attacks, surprises, etc. Derville mentions him as part of a list of bizarre writers handed to him by Arcimboldi just before the publication of The Librarian. According to Derville, Arcimboldi confessed that he had grown afraid of Delorme, believing that he cast spells and performed Satanic rituals and black masses in his cramped concierge quarters, by means of which he hoped to improve his written French and the pacing of his stories. And that was all. Padilla promised that he would delve further and report back soon. Was Arcimboldi’s disappearance related to the barbaric writers? He didn’t know but he would keep up the investigation.

12

That night, after rereading the letter for the fourth or fifth time, Amalfitano had to get out of the house. He put on a light jacket and went for a walk. His steps led him to the center of the city, and after wandering around the plaza where the statue of General Sepúlveda stood with its back to the sculpture group commemorating the victory of the city of Santa Teresa over the French, he found himself in a neighborhood that, though only two blocks from the city center, displayed-even flaunted-every stigma, every sign of poverty, squalor, and danger. A no-man’s-land.

The term amused Amalfitano, eliciting feelings of bitterness and tenderness; he too, over the course of his life, had known no-man’s-lands. First the working-class neighborhoods and the industrial belts; then the terrain liberated by the guerrilla. Calling a neighborhood of prostitutes a no-man’s-land, however, struck him as felicitous and he wondered whether those distant danger zones of his youth weren’t simply giant prostitution belts camouflaged in Rhetoric and Dialectic. Our every effort, our long prison revolt: a field of invisible whores, the glare of pimps and policemen.

Suddenly he was sad and also starving. In blatant disregard of gastrointestinal prudence and caution, he stopped at a cart on the corner of Avenida Guerrero and General Mina and bought a ham sandwich and a hibiscus drink that in his fevered imagination was like the jasmine nectar or Chinese peach blossom juice of his childhood. The fucking insane wisdom, the discernment of these Mexicans, he thought as he savored one of the best sandwiches of his life: between two slices of bread, sour cream, black bean paste, avocado, lettuce, tomato, three or four slices of chipotle chile, and a thin slice of ham, which was what gave the sandwich its name and at the same time was the least important part. Like a philosophy lesson. Chinese philosophy, of course! he thought. Which reminded him of the following lines from the Tao Te Ching: “Mystery defines him. And in that mystery lies the gate of all that is most wonderful.” What defines Padilla? he wondered, walking away from the stand toward a big floodlit sign in the middle of Calle Mina. The mystery, the wonder of being young and unafraid and then suddenly afraid. But was Padilla really afraid? or were the signs that Amalfitano interpreted as fear actually indications of something else? In big red letters, the sign announced Coral Vidal, singer of rancheras; a communicative striptease; and a magician, Alexander the Great. Under the marquee, amid a swarm of insomniacs, were vendors of cigarettes, drugs, dried fruit, magazines, and newspapers from Santa Teresa, Mexico City, California, and Texas. As he was paying for a Mexico City paper-any of them, the Excélsior, he told the vendor-a boy tugged at his sleeve.

Amalfitano turned. The boy was dark, thin, about eleven, wearing a yellow University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and running shorts. Come, sir, follow me, he insisted in the face of Amalfitano’s initial resistance. A few people had stopped and were staring at them. Finally he decided to obey. The boy turned down a side street full of tenements that seemed on the verge of collapse. The sidewalks were lined with cars that had been sloppily parked or, to judge by their sorry state, abandoned by their owners. From inside some apartments came a cacophony of angry voices and televisions blaring at full volume. Amalfitano counted at least three signs for cheap hotels. Their names struck him as picturesque, but not as picturesque as the sign on Calle Mina. What did communicative striptease mean? Did the audience undress too or did the stripper announce the items that she was about to take off?

Suddenly the street fell silent, as if drawing in on itself. The boy stopped between two particularly dilapidated cars and met Amalfitano’s eyes. At last, Amalfitano understood and shook his head. Then he forced a smile and said no, no. He took a bill out of his pocket and put it in the boy’s hand. The boy took it and tucked it into one of his sneakers. When he bent down a ray of moonlight seemed to fall on his small, bony back. Amalfitano’s eyes filled with tears. Mystery defines him, he remembered. Now what? asked the boy. Now you go home and go to bed, said Amalfitano, and immediately he realized how stupid his chiding was. As they walked back, this time side by side, he pulled out more money and gave it to him. Wow, thanks, said the boy. Get yourself something to eat this week, said Amalfitano with a sigh.

Before they left the street they heard sobbing. Amalfitano stopped. It’s nothing, said the boy, it comes from over there, it’s La Llorona. The boy pointed to the front door of a house in ruins. Amalfitano approached with hesitant steps. In the darkness behind the door, the sobs could be heard again. They came from above, from one of the upper floors. The boy stood next to him and pointed the way. Amalfitano took a few steps in the darkness but was afraid to follow the sound. When he turned he saw the boy standing there, balancing on a piece of rubble. It’s some guy from around here who’s dying of AIDS, he said glancing absentmindedly toward the upper floors. Amalfitano said nothing. On Calle Mina they parted ways.

13

A week later Amalfitano returned with Castillo to the street where he’d heard the sobs. He found the house without difficulty: by the light of day it didn’t look as terrible as it had that night. In the entryway someone had tried to build a barricade. Inside, however, the building was in slightly better shape, though the windows had no glass and the hallways were a succession of rubble and holes.

Should we go in? asked Castillo, with a squeamish look on his face. Amalfitano didn’t answer and began to poke around. In a room on the second floor he found a mattress and a couple of dirty blankets. This is it, come up, he called. In a corner was a kind of improvised brick hearth, and above it, dug into the wall, a rough niche holding a pot, a griddle, two soup spoons, and a plastic cup. At the foot of the mattress-on the floor but in relatively neat stacks-were movie magazines, everything from trash to art monographs, the latter in English but with lots of photographs. The spacing of the mattress, niche, and magazines conveyed a subtle and desperate sense of order holding at bay the chaos and ruin of the rest of the house.

Amalfitano knelt to get a better look at the objects. This is like reading a letter from a dying man, he said when he was done with his scrutiny. Castillo, leaning in the doorway, shrugged. What does the letter say? he asked grudgingly. I can’t read it, it’s in a foreign language, though sometimes I think I recognize one or two words. Castillo laughed. What words: love, loneliness, desperation, rage, sadness, isolation? No, said Amalfitano, nothing like that. The word I see gives me the shivers because I never would have thought I’d find it here. What is it, then, let’s hear it. Hope, said Amalfitano, but so softly that at first Castillo didn’t hear him. Hope, he repeated. Oh, that, said Castillo, and after a few seconds he added: I have no idea where you see it, there’s more filth here than hope. Amalfitano stared at Castillo (Padilla would have understood) and smiled. Castillo returned the smile. When you’re like this, when you smile like that, he said, you look like Christopher Walken. Amalfitano gave him a grateful look (he knew very well that he looked nothing like Christopher Walken, but it was nice to hear Castillo say he did) and went back to rummaging through the room. Suddenly it occurred to him to lift up the mattress. Underneath, as if put there to iron out the wrinkles, he found a Hawaiian shirt. The shirt was green with swaying palm trees and blue waves tipped with the purest white foam and red convertibles and white hotels and yellow cake and tourists dressed in Hawaiian shirts identical to the Great Hawaiian Shirt with swaying palm trees and blue waves and red convertibles as if infinitely repeated in a pair of facing mirrors. No, not infinitely, thought Amalfitano. In one of the reflections, one of the layers, the tourists would be unsmiling, their shirts black. The images on the shirt sprang from the floor and clung to the back of Amalfitano’s troubled spirit. The rotting smell that suddenly swept over the room made him cover his nose and gag. The shirt was rotten. From the doorway Castillo made a face of disgust. Someone died here, said Amalfitano. Where’s the body, Sherlock? asked Castillo. At the morgue, of course. Oh, you can be so negative, sighed Castillo.

When they emerged, the sun was beginning to drop behind roofs bristling with antennas. The sharp points seemed to puncture the bellies of the low-hanging clouds. On Calle Mina, the Teatro Carlota was advertising the same show. Amalfitano and Castillo stopped under the marquee and spent a long time reading the display while a big cloud passed overhead. Just then the box office opened. My treat, said Amalfitano. Are we going to see the communicative striptease? asked Castillo with a smile. Come on, keep me company, I want to see it, said Amalfitano. He was laughing too. If we don’t like it we’ll leave. All right, Castillo said.

14

The show at the Teatro Carlota began at eight and was repeated continuously until two in the morning, though closing time tended to vary depending on the size of the audience and the mood of the performers. If a spectator arrived at eight, one ticket bought him the right to see the show multiple times or to sleep until the usher kicked him out in the early morning hours. This was the habit of country folk on visits to Santa Teresa when they got tired of their cheap hotels, and, more frequently, the habit of the pimps who worked Calle Mina. Those who were there to see the show usually sat in the orchestra seats. Those who were there to sleep or do business sat in the gallery. The seats there were less tattered and the lighting was lower. In fact, most of the time the gallery was sunk in impenetrable darkness, at least as viewed from the orchestra seats, a darkness broken only when the lighting man flung the spotlights here and there for one of the danceable numbers. Then the beams of red, blue, and green light illuminated the bodies of sleeping men and interlaced couples, as well as the huddles of pimps and pickpockets discussing the events of the afternoon and evening. Below, in the orchestra seats, the atmosphere was radically different. People were there to have fun and they came in search of the best seats, the closest to the stage, bringing beer and assorted sandwiches and ears of corn that they ate-previously slathered with butter or sour cream and dusted with chile powder or cheese-skewered on little sticks. Though the show was in theory restricted to those over sixteen, it wasn’t unusual to see couples with small children in tow. In the view of the box office, these children were so young that the show wouldn’t compromise their moral integrity, and thus their parents, for lack of a babysitter, needn’t be deprived of the miracle of Coral Vida singing rancheras. The only thing requested-of the children and their parents-was that they not run too much in the aisles while the acts were under way.

This season the stars were Coral Vidal and a magician, Alexander the Great. The communicative striptease, which was what had brought Amalfitano to the Teatro Carlota, was in fact something supposedly new, brainchild of a choreographer who happened to be a first cousin of the owner and manager of the Teatro Carlota. But it didn’t work in practice, though its creator refused to admit it. In concept it was fairly simple. The stripper came out fully dressed and carrying an extra set of clothes, which, after much huffing and puffing, she crammed on over the clothes of a generally reluctant volunteer. Then she began to remove her garments while the spectator who had joined the act was invited to do the same. The end came when the performers were naked and the volunteer finally managed to rid himself, clumsily and sometimes violently, of his ridiculous robes and trappings.

And that was all, and if the great Alexander hadn’t suddenly appeared-almost without transition and with no introduction whatsoever-Amalfitano and Castillo would have left disappointed. But Alexander was a different thing entirely, and there was something about the way he came out onstage, the way he moved, and the way he gazed at the spectators in the orchestra seats and the gallery (he had the stare of a sad old man but also the stare of an X-ray-eyed old man who understood and accepted everyone equally: the connoisseurs of sleight of hand, the working couples with children, the pimps plotting their desperate long-range schemes) that kept Amalfitano glued to his seat.

Good day, said Alexander. Good day and good evening, kind members of the audience. From his left hand sprouted a paper moon, some ten inches in diameter, white with gray striations. It began to rise on its own until it was six feet above his head. His accent, Amalfitano realized almost at once, wasn’t Mexican or Latin American or Spanish. Then the balloon burst in the air, releasing a cascade of white flowers, carnations. The audience, which seemed to know Alexander from previous shows and to respect him, applauded generously. Amalfitano wanted to clap, too, but then the flowers froze in the air and-after a brief pause in which they remained still and trembling-re-formed in a five-foot ring around the old man’s waist. The burst of applause was even greater. And now, esteemed and honorable members of the audience, we’re going to play some cards. So the magician was a foreigner, not a native speaker of Spanish, but where is he from, wondered Amalfitano, and how did he end up in this lost city, good as he is? Maybe he’s from Texas, he thought.

The card trick was nothing spectacular, but it managed to interest Amalfitano in a strange way that even he didn’t understand. Part of it was anticipation, but part of it also was fear. At first Alexander spoke from onstage-with a deck of cards in his right hand one moment and in his left the next-on the qualities of the cardsharp and the countless dangers that lie in wait for him. A deck of cards, as anyone can see, he said, can lead a decent working man to ruin, humiliation, or death. It can lead a woman to perdition, if you know what I mean, he said, winking an eye but never losing his air of solemnity. He was like a TV evangelist, thought Amalfitano, but the strangest thing was that the people listened to him intently. Even up above, in the gallery, a few crime-hardened and sleepy faces popped up, the better to follow the magician’s rounds. Alexander moved with increasing decisiveness around the stage and then up and down the aisles of the orchestra level, talking always about cards, cards as nemesis, the great lonely dream of the deck, poker-faced players and players who talk a big game, in an accent that definitely wasn’t Texan, while the eyes of the audience followed him in silence, uncomprehendingly, or so Amalfitano supposed (he didn’t understand, either, and maybe there was nothing to understand). Until suddenly the old man stopped in the middle of an aisle and said all right, here we go, I won’t take up any more of your time.

What happened next left Amalfitano openmouthed in astonishment. Alexander approached a member of the audience and asked him to check his pocket. The man did as he was told, and when he removed his hand there was a card in it. Immediately the magician urged another person in the same row, much farther down, to do the same. Another card. And then a new card appeared in a different row, and one after another the cards-to the cheers of the audience-began to form a royal flush of hearts. When only two cards were left, the magician looked at Amalfitano and asked him to check his wallet. He’s more than ten feet away, thought Amalfitano, if there’s a trick it must be a good one. In his wallet, between a picture of Rosa at ten and a wrinkled, yellowing slip of paper, he found the card. What card is it, sir? asked the magician, fixing his eyes on Amalfitano and speaking in that peculiar accent that Amalfitano couldn’t quite place. The queen of hearts, said Amalfitano. The magician smiled at him the way his father might have. Perfect, sir, thank you, he said, and before he turned he winked an eye. The eye was neither big nor small, brown with green splotches. Then he strode confidently-triumphantly, one might say-to a row where two children were asleep in their parents’ arms. Do me the favor of removing your son’s shoe, he said. The father, a thin, sinewy man with a friendly smile, removed the child’s shoe. In it was the card. Tears rolled down Amalfitano’s face and Castillo’s fingers delicately brushed his cheek. The king of hearts, said the father. The magician nodded. And now the little girl’s shoe, he said. The father removed his daughter’s shoe and held another card up in the air, so that everyone could see it. And what card is that, sir, if you’ll be so kind? The joker, said the father.

15

Amalfitano often had nightmares. His dream (one in which Edith Lieberman and Padilla had Chilean elevenses with tea, buns, avocado, tomato jam made by his mother, rolls and homemade butter nearly the color of a sheet of Ingres-Fabriano paper) opened up and let in the nightmare. There, in those lonely latitudes, Che Guevara strolled up and down a dark corridor and in the background huge diamond-crusted glaciers shifted and creaked and seemed to sigh as at the birth of history. Why did I translate the Elizabethans and not Isaac Babel or Boris Pilniak? Amalfitano asked himself, disconsolate, unable to escape the nightmare but still holding scraps of the dream (beyond the glaciers the whole distant horizon was Edith Lieberman and Padilla having their delicious elevenses) in his empty, frozen, nearly transparent hands. Why didn’t I slip like Mighty Mouse through the bars of the Lenin Prizes and the Stalin Prizes and the Korean Women Collecting Signatures for Peace and discover what was there to be discovered, what only the blind couldn’t see? Why didn’t I stand up at one of those oh-so-serious meetings of leftist intellectuals and say the Russians the Chinese the Cubans are making a fucking mess of things? Why didn’t I stand up for the Marxists? Stand up for the pariahs? March in step with history while history was being born? Offer silent assistance at its birth along the way? Somehow, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of his nightmare, his tone scholarly and his voice unrecognizably hoarse, masochist that I am, I blame myself for crimes that were never committed: by 1967 I had already been expelled from the Chilean Communist Party, my comrades had run me down and turned me out, I was no longer well liked. Why do I blame myself, then? I didn’t kill Isaac Babel. I didn’t destroy Reinaldo Arenas’s life. I wasn’t part of the Cultural Revolution and I didn’t sing the praises of the Gang of Four like other Latin American intellectuals. I was the simple-minded son of Rosa Luxemburg and now I’m an old faggot, in each case the object of mockery and ridicule. So what do I have to blame myself for? My Gramsci, my situationism, my Kropotkin (lauded by Oscar Wilde as one of the greatest men on earth)? For my mental hang-ups, my lack of civic responsibility? For having seen the Korean Women Gathering Signatures for Peace and not stoning them? (I should have buggered them, thought Amalfitano from the whirl of glaciers, I should have fucked those fake Koreans until their true identity was revealed: Ukrainian Women Gathering Wheat for Peace, Cuban Women Gathering Cockles in an Unremitting Latin American Twilight.) What am I guilty of, then? Of having loved and continuing to love-no, not of loving: of longing. Of longing for the conversation of my friends who took to the hills because they never grew up and they believed in a dream and because they were Latin American men, true macho men, and they died? (And what do their mothers, their widows, have to say about it?) Did they die like rats? Did they die like soldiers in the Wars of Independence? Did they die tortured, shot in the back of the head, dumped in the sea, buried in secret cemeteries? Was their dream the dream of Neruda, of the Party bureaucrats, of the opportunists? Mystery, mystery, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of the nightmare. And he said to himself: someday Neruda and Octavio Paz will shake hands. Sooner or later Paz will make room on Olympus for Neruda. But we will always be on the outside. Far from Octavio Paz and Neruda. Over there, Amalfitano said to himself like a madman, look over there, dig over there, over there lie traces of truth. In the Great Wilderness. And he said to himself: it’s with the pariahs, with those who have nothing at all to lose, that you’ll find some justification, if not vindication; and if not justification, then the song, barely a murmur (maybe not voices, maybe only the wind in the branches), but a murmur that cannot be silenced.

16

The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind who almost literally gnaws at himself, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and-the crowning touch-a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I’ve read thousands of books. At least I’ve become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano’s view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the Novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I’ve read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.

17

Amalfitano hardly ever thought about old age. Sometimes he saw himself with a cane, strolling along a bright tree-lined boulevard and cackling to himself. Other times he saw himself trapped, without Rosa, the curtains drawn and the door propped shut with two chairs. We Chileans, he said to himself, don’t know how to grow old and as a general rule we make the most terrific fools of ourselves; ridiculous as we are, though, there’s something courageous about our old age, as if when we grow wrinkled and fall ill we recover the courage of our rugged childhoods in the land of earthquakes and tsunamis. (Though what Amalfitano knew about Chileans was only supposition, considering how long it had been since he’d associated with any of them.)

18

In one of his classes, Amalfitano said: the birth of modern Latin American poetry is marked by two poems. The first is “The Soliloquy of the Individual,” by Nicanor Parra, published in Poemas y antipoemas, Editorial Nascimento, Chile, 1954. The second is “Trip to New York,” by Ernesto Cardenal, published in a Mexico City magazine in the mid-’70s (1974, I think, but don’t quote me on that), which I have in Ernesto Cardenal’s Antología, Editorial Laia, Barcelona, 1978. Of course, Cardenal had already written “Zero Hour,” “Psalms,” “Homage to the American Indians,” and “Coplas on the Death of Merton,” but it’s “Trip to New York” that to me marks the turning point, the definitive fork in the road. “Trip” and “Soliloquy” are the two faces of modern poetry, the devil and the angel, respectively (and let us not forget the curious fact-though it may be rather more than that-that in “Trip” Ernesto Cardenal mentions Nicanor Parra). This is perhaps the most lucid and terrible moment, after which the sky grows dark and the storm is unleashed.

Those who disagree can sit here and wait for Don Horacio Tregua, those who agree can follow me.

19

Notes from a Class in Contemporary Literature: The Role of the Poet Happiest: García Lorca.

Most tormented: Celan. Or Trakl, according to others, though there are some who claim that the honors go to the Latin American poets killed in the insurrections of the ’60s and ’70s. And there are those who say: Hart Crane.

Most handsome: Crevel and Félix de Azúa.

Fattest: Neruda and Lezama Lima (though I remembered-and with grateful resolve chose not to mention-the whale-like bulk of a Panamanian poet by the name of Roberto Fernández, keen reader and best of friends).

Banker of the soul: T. S. Eliot.

Whitest, the alabaster banker: Wallace Stevens.

Rich kid in hell: Cernuda and Gilberto Owen.

Strangest wrinkles: Auden.

Worst temper: Salvador Díaz Mirón. Or Gabriela Mistral, according to others.

Biggest cock: Frank O’Hara.

Secretary to the alabaster banker: Francis Ponge.

Best houseguest: Amado Nervo.

Worst houseguest: various and conflicting opinions: Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, e. e. cummings, Adrian Henri, Seamus Heaney, Gregory Corso, Michel Bulteau, the Hermanitos Campos, Alejandra Pizarnik, Leopoldo María Panero and his older brother, Jaime Sabines, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Mario Benedetti.

Best deathbed companion: Ernesto Cardenal.

Best movie companion: Elizabeth Bishop, Berrigan, Ted Hughes, José Emilio Pacheco.

Best in the kitchen: Coronel Urtecho (but Amalfitano reminded them of Pablo de Rokha and read him and there was no argument).

Most fun: Borges and Nicanor Parra. Others: Richard Brautigan, Gary Snyder.

Most clearsighted: Martín Adán.

Least desirable as a literature professor: Charles Olson.

Most desirable as a literature professor, though only in short bursts: Ezra Pound.

Most desirable as a literature professor for all eternity: Borges.

Greatest sufferer: Vallejo, Pavese.

Best deathbed companion after Ernesto Cardenal: William Carlos Williams.

Most full of life: Violeta Parra, Alfonsina Storni (though Amalfitano pointed out that both had killed themselves), Dario Bellezza.

Most rational way of life: Emily Dickinson and Cavafy (though Amalfitano pointed out that-according to conventional wisdom-both were failures).

Most elegant: Tablada.

Best Hollywood gangster: Antonin Artaud.

Best New York gangster: Kenneth Patchen.

Best Medellín gangster: Álvaro Mutis.

Best Hong Kong gangster: Robert Lowell (applause), Pere Gimferrer.

Best Miami gangster: Vicente Huidobro.

Best Mexican gangster: Renato Leduc.

Laziest: Daniel Biga. Or, according to some, Oquendo de Amat.

Best masked man: Salvador Novo.

Biggest nervous wreck: Roque Dalton. Also: Diane Di Prima, Pasolini, Enrique Lihn.

Best drinking buddy: several names were mentioned, among them Cintio Vitier, Oliverio Girondo, Nicolas Born, Jacques Prévert, and Mark Strand, who was said to be an expert in martial arts.

Worst drinking buddy: Mayakovsky and Orlando Guillén.

Most fearless dancer with American death: Macedonio Fernández.

Most homegrown, most Mexican: Ramón López Velarde and Efraín Huerta. Other opinions: Maples Arce, Enrique González Martínez, Alfonso Reyes, Carlos Pellicer, fair-haired Villaurrutia, Octavio Paz, of course, and the female author of Rincones románticos (1992), whose name no one could remember.

Questionnaire

Question: Why would you want Amado Nervo as a houseguest?

Answer: Because he was a good man, industrious and resourceful, the kind of person who helps set the table and wash the dishes. I’m sure he wouldn’t even hesitate to sweep the floor, though I wouldn’t let him. He would watch TV shows with me and discuss them afterward, he would listen to my troubles, he would never let things get blown out of proportion: he would always have the right thing to say, the appropriate levelheaded response to any problem. If there were some disaster-an earthquake, a civil war, a nuclear accident-he wouldn’t flee like a rat or collapse in hysterics, he would help me pack the bags, he would keep an eye on the children so that they didn’t run off in fear or for fun or get lost, he would always be calm, his head firmly on his shoulders, but most of all he would always be true to his word, to the decisive gesture expected of him.

Readings

Poems by Amado Nervo (Los jardines interiores; En voz baja; Elevación; Perlas negras; Serenidad; La amada inmóvil). Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Colección Austral, Espasa Calpe). Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior (Hiperión).

20

Of all the habits, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla defended smoking. The one thing ever to unite Catalonians and Castilians, Asturians and Andalusians, Basques and Valencians, was the art, the appalling circumstance of communal smoking. According to Padilla, the most beautiful phrase in the Spanish language was the request for a light. Beautiful, soothing phrase, the kind of thing you could say to Prometheus, full of courage and humble complicity. When an inhabitant of the peninsula said “¿tienes fuego?” a wave of lava or saliva gushed anew in the miracle of communication and loneliness. Because for Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that “night of the soul” the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace. It was in the kingdom of Celtas and Bisontes, of Ducados and Rexes, that his fellow countrymen truly lived. The rest: confusion, shouting, the occasional potato tortilla. And as for the repeated warnings of the Department of Health: rubbish. Though every day, it was said, people smoked less and more smokers switched to ultra-light cigarettes. He himself no longer smoked Ducados, as he had in his adolescence, but unfiltered Camels.

There was nothing strange, he said, about a condemned man being offered a cigarette before he was executed. As a popular rite of faith, the cigarette was more important than the prayers and blessing of the priest. And yet those who were executed in the electric chair or the gas chamber weren’t offered anything: it was a Latin custom, a Hispanic custom. And he could go on and on like this, dredging up an endless string of anecdotes. The one that Amalfitano remembered most vividly and that struck him as most significant-and premonitory, in a way, since it was about Mexico and a Mexican and he had ended up in Mexico-was the story of a colonel of the Revolution who had the misfortune to end his days in front of a firing squad. His last wish was for a cigarette. The captain of the firing squad, who must have been a good man, granted his request. The colonel found a cigar and proceeded to smoke it, not saying a thing to anyone, gazing at the barren landscape. When he had finished, the ash still clung to the cigar. His hand hadn’t trembled; the execution could proceed. That man must be one of the patron saints of smokers, said Padilla. So what was the story about, the colonel’s nerves of steel or the calming effects of smoke, the communion with smoke? Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, couldn’t say and didn’t care.

21

Sometimes Amalfitano meditated on his relatively recent homosexuality and sought literary affirmation and examples as consolation. All that came to mind was Thomas Mann and the kind of languid, innocent fairyhood with which he was afflicted in his old age. But I’m not that old, he thought, and Thomas Mann was probably gaga by then, which isn’t the case for me. Nor did he find consolation in those few Spanish novelists who, once past the age of thirty, suddenly discovered that they were queer: most of them were such jingoistic butches that when he thought about them he became actively depressed. Sometimes he remembered Rimbaud and drew convoluted analogies: in “Le cœur volé,” which some critics read as the detailed account of the rape of Rimbaud by a group of soldiers while the poet was on his way to Paris to join the dream of the Commune, Amalfitano, turning over in his head a text that could be read many different ways, saw the end of his heterosexuality, stifled by the absence of something he couldn’t put his finger on, a woman, a heroine, a superwoman. And sometimes, instead of just thinking about Rimbaud’s poem, he recited it aloud, which was a habit that Amalfitano, like Rosa, had inherited from Edith Lieberman: Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,

Mon cœur couvert de caporal:

Ils y lancent des jets de soupe,

Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe:

Sous les quolibets de la troupe

Qui pousse un rire général,

Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,

Mon cœur couvert de caporal!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!

Au gouvernail on voit des fresques

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques.

Ô flots abracadabrantesques,

Prenez mon cœur, qu’il soit lavé!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques, Comment agir, ô cœur volé?

Ce seront des hoquets bachiques

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques: J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques,

Moi, si mon cœur est ravalé:

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques

Comment agir, ô cœur volé?

It all made sense, thought Amalfitano, the adolescent poet degraded by brutish soldiers just as he was heading-on foot!-toward an encounter with the Chimera, and how strong Rimbaud was, thought Amalfitano (he had given up any idea of consolation and was filled with excitement and astonishment), to write this poem almost immediately afterward, with a steady hand, the rhymes original, the images oscillating between the comic and the monstrous…

22

What Amalfitano would never know was that the corporal of “mon cœur couvert de caporal,” the son of a bitch who raped Rimbaud, had been a soldier in Bazaine’s army in the Mexican adventure of Maximilian and Napoleon III.

In March 1865, unable to learn anything about the fate of Colonel Libbrecht’s column, Colonel Eydoux, commander of the plaza of El Tajo, which served as supply depot for all of the troops operating in that part of the Mexican northeast, sent a detail of thirty horsemen toward Santa Teresa. The detail was under the command of Captain Laurent and Lieutenants Rouffanche and González, the latter a Mexican monarchist.

The detail arrived in Villaviciosa on the second day of March. It never made it to Santa Teresa. All the men-except for Lieutenant Rouffanche and three soldiers who were killed when the French were ambushed as they ate at the only inn in town-were taken prisoner, among them the future corporal, then a twenty-two-year-old recruit. The prisoners, gagged and with their hands bound with hemp rope, were brought before the man acting as military boss of Villaviciosa and a group of town notables. The boss was a mestizo addressed alternately as Inocencio and El Loco. The notables were country folk, most of them barefoot, who stared at the Frenchmen and then withdrew to a corner to confer. Half an hour later, after a bit of hard bargaining between two evidently opposed groups, the Frenchmen were taken to a covered corral where, after being stripped of their clothes and shoes, they were raped and tortured by a group of captors for the rest of the day.

At midnight Captain Laurent’s throat was cut. Lieutenant González, two sergeants, and seven soldiers were taken to the main street and forced to play chasing games by torchlight. They all died, either run through or with their throats slit by pursuers on the backs of the soldiers’ own horses.

At dawn, the future corporal and two other soldiers managed to break their bonds and flee cross-country. Only the corporal survived. Two weeks later he reached El Tajo. He was decorated and remained in Mexico until 1867, when he returned to France with Bazaine, who retreated with his army, abandoning the emperor to his fate.

23

Sometimes Amalfitano saw himself as the Prince of Antioch or the homesick Knight of Tyre, the King of Tarsus or the Lord of Ephesus, adventurers of the Middle Ages once upon a time read or misread-with equal enthusiasm-by a luckless God-fearing lord in the midst of pandemonium and exile and untold confusion, accompanied by a beautiful daughter and an aura intensified by the ravages of time. As in the story by Alfonso Reyes (God rest his soul, thought Amalfitano, who truly loved him), “The Fortunes of Apollonius of Tyre,” from Real and Imaginary Portraits. A dethroned king, he thought, wandering the Mediterranean islands painted by that so-called Michelangelo of comic strips, the creator of Prince Valiant, those divine and infernal islands where Valiant met Aleta, but also where the Knight of Epirus bewailed his unjust persecution, and the giddy vagabond of Mytilene told the story of his misfortunes, these characters who, as Reyes noted, sprang from the Greek or Roman depths of our memory, and this was precisely what was false about it all, what was disturbing and revelatory: the vagabond prince was a stand-in for Ulysses and the Baron of Thebes was a stand-in for Theseus, though both were God-fearing knights who prayed morning and night. In this masquerade, Amalfitano discovered unknown regions of himself. In the Greek king who fled with his daughter from monastery to monastery, from desert island to desert island, as if he were traveling backward from the year 1300 to 500 and from 500 to 20 B.C. and onward, ever deeper in time, he saw the futility of his efforts, the basic naïveté of his struggle, his spurious role as scrivener monk. Now all I need is to go blind, with Rosa as my cherished guide leading me from classroom to classroom, he thought gloomily.

24

When Amalfitano learned that his daughter had disappeared with a black man, he thought randomly of a line from Lugones that he had come across years-many years-ago. Lugones’s words were these: “It is well known that youth is the most intellectual stage of an ape’s life, as it is of the Negro’s.” What a brute, that Lugones! And then he remembered the story, Lugones’s plot: a man, a neurotic, the narrator, labors for years to teach a chimpanzee to talk. All his efforts are in vain. One day the narrator senses that the ape can talk, that he has learned to talk but hides it cleverly. Whether he hides it out of fear or atavism, Amalfitano can’t remember. Probably fear. So unrelenting is his master that the ape falls ill. His sufferings are almost human. The man cares for him as devotedly as he might care for his own child. Both feel the pain of their imminent separation. At the final moment, the ape whispers: Water, master, my master, my master. This was where the Lugones story ended (for a second, Amalfitano imagined Lugones shooting himself in the mouth in the darkest and coolest corner of his library, swallowing poison in an attic strung with cobwebs, hanging himself from the highest beam of the bathroom, but could Lugones’s bathroom possibly have had beams? where had he read that or seen it? Amalfitano didn’t know), giving way-one ape leading to another-to the story by Kafka, the Chinese Jew. What different viewpoints, thought Amalfitano. Good old Kafka puts himself without hesitation into the skin of the ape. Lugones sets out to make the ape speak; Kafka gives him voice. Lugones’s story, which Amalfitano thought extraordinary, was a horror story. Kafka’s story, Kafka’s incomprehensible text, also took wing through realms of horror, but it was a religious text, full of black humor, human and melodramatic, unyielding and inconsequential, like everything that is truly unyielding, in other words like everything that is soft. Amalfitano began to weep. His little house, his parched yard, the television set and the video player, the magnificent northern Mexico sunset, struck him as enigmas that carried their own solutions with them, inscribed in chalk on the forehead. It’s all so simple and so terrible, he thought. Then he got up from his faded yellow sofa and closed the curtains.

25

So what did Amalfitano’s students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorized the two or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of Marcabrú, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn’t more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.

26

Amalfitano’s sense of humor tended to go hand and hand with his sense of history and both were as fine as wire: a skein in which horror mingled with a gaze of wonderment, the kind of gaze that knows everything is a game, which might explain why after these rare outpourings Amalfitano’s inner self, forged in the rigors of dialectical materialism, was left stricken, somehow ashamed of itself. But this was his sense of humor and there was nothing he could do about it.

Once, when he was teaching in Italy, he somehow found himself in the middle of an informal dinner attended by new-fledged Italian patriots, the same people who years later would form the New Right.

The dinner was held at a celebrated Bologna hotel and between the dessert course and the after-dinner drinks there were speeches. At a certain point, clearly as the result of a misunderstanding, it was Amalfitano’s turn to speak. To sum it up in a few words, his short speech-delivered in a passable Italian flavored by what more than a few listeners thought was a real or faked central European accent-was about the mystery of so-called great civilizations. In two lines he dispatched the Romans and the princes of the Renaissance (with a tossed-off mention of the tragic fate of the Orsini, probably referring to Mujica Láinez’s Orsini), arriving rapidly at the subject of his toast: World War II and the role of Italy. A role that was distorted by history and obscured by Theory: the ersatz exploits, forged in mystery, of the brave Alpini and the gallant Bersaglieri. Immediately, and without putting too fine a point on it, he asked what the French of the Charlemagne Brigade had achieved, what the Croats or the Austrians or the Scandinavians of the Viking Division, the Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division or the 1st Armored Division, the Germans of the 7th Panzer Division or the Russians of the 3rd Guards Tank Army had really accomplished. Shreds of glory, he mused aloud, deeds that pale alongside the countless hardships of old Badoglio’s Greek Campaign or the Libyan campaign of bold Graziani, the anvil on which Italian identity was forged and the well from which the strategists of the future will drink when the mystery is uncovered at last. The desert raids, he said, and he raised a finger skyward, the bitter fight to hold the forts, the fixed-bayonet charges of the brave men of the Littorio (a tank division) still rouse the ardor of this patient and peaceful nation. Next he spoke in commemoration of the generals, old and young, the most skilled and steadfast that the palm groves and huts of Africa (he said the word huts, or bohíos, in Spanish, to the bafflement of his audience, except for a professor of Latin American literature who understood the term but was left even more in the dark) had ever seen. Then he argued that the glory of the Germans obscured the memory of Gariboldi, for one, who, to make matters worse, was dogged by a nagging error: in nearly every country’s history books, except those of Italy, France, and Germany-meticulous in this regard-he was referred to as Garibaldi, but history, Amalfitano confided, was rewritten daily, and, like a humble and virtuous seamstress, constantly stitched up any holes. He warned that Africa should strive to be worthy of Sicily’s stubborn resistance or the hard fighting on the steppes that had earned Italy the admiration of the Slavs. At this point, those who weren’t whispering to each other or staring off into space with cigars in their mouths realized that he was pulling their leg and the uproar and shouting began. But Amalfitano refused to be cowed and he continued to hold forth on the matchless courage of those who fought to the last on the peninsula, the San Marco Regiment, the Monte Rosa, the Italia, the Grenadiers of Sardinia, the Cremona, the Centauro, the Pasubio, the Piacenza, the Mantua, the Sassari, the Rovigo, the Lupi de Toscana, the Nembo. The betrayed Army, fighting at a disadvantage, and yet still, at some point, like a miracle or an annunciation, laughing in the faces of the arrogant pups from Chicago and the City.

The end was quick. Blood, Amalfitano asked himself, to what end? What justifies it, what redeems it? And he answered himself: the awakening of the Italian colossus. The colossus that everyone since Napoleon has tried to anesthetize. The Italian nation, which has yet to speak its final word, its brilliant final word. Its radiant final word, in Europe and the world. (Punches, shoves, shouts of foreigner go home, the applause of two vaguely anarchist professors.)

27

Sitting on the porch of his Mexican house at dusk, Amalfitano thought that it was strange that he hadn’t read Arcimboldi in Paris, when the books were closer at hand. As if the writer’s name had been suddenly erased from his mind when the logical thing would have been to go in search of all his novels and read them. He had translated The Endless Rose at a moment when no one outside of France, except for a few Argentinean readers and publishers, had shown any interest in Arcimboldi. And he had liked it so much, it had been so thrilling. Those days, he remembered, the months before the birth of his daughter, were perhaps the happiest of his life. Edith Lieberman was so beautiful that sometimes she seemed to glow with a dense light: lying in bed, on her side, naked and smooth, her knees drawn up a little, the serenity of her closed lips disarming, as if she passed straight through every nightmare. Forever unscathed. He would stand there watching her for a long time. Exile, with her, was an endless adventure. His head swarmed with projects. Buenos Aires was a city on the edge of the abyss, but everyone seemed happy, everyone was content to live and talk and plan. The Endless Rose and Arcimboldi were-he realized then, though later he forgot-a gift. A final gift before he and his wife and daughter entered the tunnel. What could have made him fail to seek out those words? What could have lulled him like that? Life, of course, which puts the essential books under our noses only when they are strictly essential, or on some cosmic whim. Now that it was too late, he was going to read the rest of Arcimboldi’s novels.