Woes of the True Policeman

1

According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak (in Spanish, of course; in the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous). Freaks, according to Padilla, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets like Blas de Otero were butches, while poets like Gil de Biedma were — except for Gil de Biedma himself — part nymph and part queer. Recent Spanish poetry, with the tentative exception of the aforementioned Gil de Biedma and probably Carlos Edmundo de Ory, had been lacking in faggot poets until the arrival of the Great Faggot of All Sorrows, Padilla’s favorite poet, Leopoldo María Panero. And yet Panero, it had to be admitted, had fits of bipolar freakishness that made him unstable, inconsistent, and hard to classify. Of Panero’s peers, a curious case was Gimferrer, who was queer by nature but had the imagination of a faggot and the tastes of a nymph. Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to Padilla, were faggot poets by birth who, out of weakness or for comfort’s sake, lived within and accepted — most of the time — the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstrues queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the trio of death. In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of poor Sanguinetti (I won’t pick on Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we’re to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one. Who? you may ask. Mayakovsky? No. Esenin? No. Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova? Hardly. There was just one, and I won’t keep you in suspense. He was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot through and through: Khlebnikov. And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adán. Period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobro, fairies like Alfonso Cortés (although some of his poems are authentically fagotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lacan himself crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Góngora, and along with Lezama all the queers and sissies of the Cuban Revolution except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a nymph with the spirit of a faggot, not to mention, if only in passing, the poets of the Sandinista Revolution: fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are also queers (no, shouted Amalfitano, not Gilberto Owen!); in fact Death Without End is, along with the poetry of Paz, the “Marseillaise” of the highly nervous Mexican poets. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Pellicer, fairy; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy. And back to Spain, back to the beginning: Góngora and Quevedo, queers; San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, to satisfy your curiosity, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pretty boys they love. Faggots, on the other hand, seem to live as if a dick were permanently churning their insides, and when they look at themselves in the mirror (something they love and hate with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and fairies, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness. But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters.

“You missed the category of talking apes,” said Amalfitano when Padilla at last fell silent.

“Ah, those talking apes,” said Padilla, “the faggot apes of Madagascar who refuse to talk so they don’t have to work.”

2

When Padilla was five his mother died, and when he was twelve his older brother died. When he was thirteen he decided that he would be an artist. First he thought he liked theater and film. Then he read Rimbaud and Leopoldo María Panero and he wanted to be a poet as well as an actor. By the time he was sixteen he’d devoured literally all the poetry that fell into his hands and he’d had two (rather unfortunate) experiences at the local community theater, but that wasn’t enough. He learned English and French, took a trip to San Sebastián, to the Mondragón insane asylum, and tried to visit Leopoldo María Panero, but once the doctors had seen him and listened to him talk for five minutes, they turned him away.

At seventeen he was a tough, well-read, sarcastic kid, prone to bursts of anger that could lead to violence. Twice he resorted to physical aggression. The first time, he was walking through Parque de la Ciudadela with a friend, another poet, when two young skinheads insulted them. They might have called them faggots, something like that. Padilla, who was usually the one to taunt others, stopped, went up to the bigger kid, and punched him in the neck, making him gasp and choke; while the kid was trying to keep his balance and get his breath, he was felled by a swift kick to the groin; his friend tried to help but what he saw in Padilla’s eyes was more powerful than the bonds of friendship and he chose to flee the scene. It was all over very quickly. Before Padilla moved on, he had time to aim a few kicks at the bald head of his fallen opponent. Padilla’s young poet friend was horrified. Days later, when he took Padilla to task for his behavior (especially his final outburst, the gratuitous kicking of his enemy when he was down), Padilla answered that when fighting Nazis, everything was permitted. On Padilla’s adolescent lips, the word everything sounded luscious. But how do you know they were Nazis? asked his friend. They had shaved heads, said Padilla tenderly, what kind of world do you live in? Also, he added, it’s your fault, because that afternoon, remember, we were talking about love, Love with a capital L, and the entire time you just kept arguing with me, calling my ideas naïve, telling me to get my head out of the clouds; every word you said, sabotaging my dreams, was like a punch in the gut. Then the skinheads turned up, and added to all my pain and suffering, of which you were well aware, was the pain of ignorance.

Padilla’s friend never knew whether he was serious or not, but from then on, in certain circles, going out late at night with him became a guarantee of safety.

The second time, he hit his lover, a kid of eighteen, good-looking but not too bright, who one night transferred his affections to a rich architect, thirty and not too bright, either, with whom he was indiscreet enough to make the rounds of the places he used to hang out with Padilla, flaunting his happiness plus a weekend jaunt to Thailand and summer in Italy and a duplex complete with Jacuzzi, which was more than Padilla — who was only seventeen at the time and lived with his father in a dark three-bedroom apartment in the Eixample — could take. This time, however, Padilla acted with premeditation: he waited until five in the morning, hiding in a doorway, for his ex-lover to come home. Once the taxi had gone he was on him, and the attack was swift and brutal. He didn’t touch his face. He hit him in the belly and the genitals and, once his ex-lover was on the ground, aimed kicks at his legs and rear. If you turn me in I’ll kill you, baby, he warned before he vanished down the dark streets, gnawing his lip.

His relationship with his father was good, though somewhat distant and perhaps a little sad. The abrupt and enigmatic messages they flung at each other with seeming carelessness tended to be misinterpreted on both sides. Padilla’s father believed that his son was very intelligent, of higher-than-average intelligence, but at the same time deeply unhappy. And he blamed himself and fate. Padilla believed that his father might long ago have been an interesting person or might have had the chance to become one, but the deaths in the family had turned him into a spiritless, resigned man, sometimes mysteriously happy (when a soccer match was on TV), but usually quiet and hardworking, a man who demanded nothing of Padilla beyond perhaps the occasional bit of trivial conversation. Nothing more. They weren’t rich, but since his father owned the apartment and hardly spent a thing, Padilla always had a decent amount of money at his disposal. With it he bought movie and theater tickets; went out to dinner; bought books, jeans, a leather jacket with metal studs, boots, sunglasses, a small weekly supply of hash, very occasionally some cocaine, albums by Satie; paid for his college tuition, his metro passes, his black and purple blazers, the rooms in Distrito V where he brought his lovers. He never went on vacation.

Padilla’s father never went on vacation, either. When summer came, Padilla and his father slept until late, with the blinds down and the apartment plunged into a gentle dusk, redolent of the previous night’s dinner. Then Padilla would go out to roam the streets of Barcelona, and his father, after washing the dishes and giving the kitchen a once-over, would spend the rest of the day watching television.

At eighteen Padilla completed his first book of poetry. He sent a copy to Leopoldo María Panero at the Mondragón asylum, put the original in a drawer in his desk — the only one with a lock and key — and forgot all about it. Three years later, when he met Amalfitano, he retrieved the poems from the drawer and begged him to read them. Amalfitano thought they were interesting, maybe too faithful to certain conventions, but elegant and polished. Their subjects were the city of Barcelona, sex, illness, crime. In one of them, for example, the poet described in perfect alexandrines some fifty ways of masturbating, each more painful and terrible than the last, as a nuclear twilight settled slowly over the city’s suburbs. In another he minutely chronicled the death of his father, alone in his room, as the poet cleans the house, cooks, rations out the provisions (ever dwindling) in the pantry, searches for good music on the radio, reads curled up on the sofa in the living room, and tries in vain to reorder his memories. His father takes his time dying, of course, and stretching between his sleep and the poet’s wakefulness, lost in the mist, is a ruined bridge. Vladimir Holan is my model in the art of survival, he told Amalfitano. Wonderful, thought Amalfitano, one of my favorite poets.

Up until this point, Amalfitano had hardly seen Padilla, who only very rarely showed up in class. After the reading and the favorable comments, he was never absent again. Soon they became friends. By then Padilla wasn’t living with his father anymore; he had rented a studio near the university, where he hosted parties and gatherings that Amalfitano soon began to attend. Poems were read and later on in the evening the guests put on little plays in Catalan. Amalfitano found it charming, like the tertulias of South American literary circles in the old days, but with more style and taste, more flair, something like what the tertulias of Mexico’s Contemporáneos might have been if the Contemporáneos had written plays, which Amalfitano doubted. Also: there was a lot of drinking and sometimes one of the guests had a breakdown that usually ended — after much screaming and sobbing — with the sufferer shut in the bathroom and two volunteers trying to calm him down. Every so often a woman made an appearance, but usually it was just men, most of them young, students of literature and art history. A painter also came, a strange man, maybe forty-five, who wore only leather and who sat silently in a corner during the tertulias, not drinking, chain-smoking little hash cigarettes that he selected, pre-rolled, from a gold cigarette case. And the owner of a pastry shop in Gracia, a cheerful, animated fat man who talked to everyone and who was, as Amalfitano soon realized, the one bankrolling Padilla and the other boys.

One night, as they were performing one of the Dialogues with Leucò translated into Catalan by a very tall, fair-skinned boy, Padilla surreptitiously took one of Amalfitano’s hands. Amalfitano didn’t let go.

The first time they made love was one Sunday morning, with the dawn light filtering through the lowered blinds, when everyone else had gone and all that was left in the studio were cigarette butts and a jumble of glasses and scattered cushions. Amalfitano was fifty and it was the first time he had slept with a man. I’m not a man, said Padilla, I’m your angel.

3

At some point, as they were coming out of a movie theater, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla confessed that in the not-too-distant future he planned to make a movie. The movie would be called Leopardi, and according to Padilla it would be a Hollywood-style biopic about the famous and multidisciplinary Italian poet. Like John Huston’s Toulouse-Lautrec movie. But since Padilla’s movie wouldn’t have a big budget (in fact it had no budget), the main roles would be played not by great actors but by fellow writers, who would work for the love of art in general, love of the gobbo in particular, or simply to be included. The role of Leopardi was reserved for a young poet and heroin addict from La Coruña whose name Amalfitano had forgotten. The role of Antonio Ranieri was reserved for Padilla himself. It’s the most interesting of all, he declared. Count Monaldo Leopardi would be played by Vargas Llosa, who, with a brooding look and some talcum powder, would be perfect for the role. Paolina Leopardi would go to Blanca Andreu, and Carlo Leopardi to Enrique Vila-Matas. The role of Countess Adelaida Antici, mother of the poet, was to be offered to Josefina Aldecoa. Adelaida García Morales and Carmen Martín Gaite would play peasants from Recanati. Giordani, faithful friend and epistolary confidant — a bit of a drip, really — would go to Muñoz Molina. Manzoni: Javier Marías. Two Vatican cardinals, tremulous Latinists, loathsome Hellenists: Cela and Juan Goytisolo. Uncle Carlo Antici was reserved for Juan Marsé. Stella, the publisher, would be offered to Herralde. Fanny Targioni, the fickle and too-human Fanny, to Soledad Puértolas. And then there were some of the poems, which — to make them more comprehensible to the audience — would be played by actors. That is, the poems would be given physical presence instead of being ladders of words. Example: Leopardi is writing “The Infinite” and from beneath the table springs Martín de Riquer, in a small but effective role, though Padilla doubted that the eminent academic would accept the ephemeral glory of the cinema. The “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” Padilla’s favorite poem, would be played by Leopoldo María Panero, naked or in a tiny bathing suit. Eduardo Mendicutti would play “To Silvia.” Enrique Vila-Matas: “The Calm After the Storm.” “To Italy,” the poet Pere Girau, Padilla’s best friend. He planned to shoot the interiors in his own Eixample apartment and at the gym of an ex-lover in Gracia. The exteriors: Sitges, Manresa, the Barrio Gótico of Barcelona, Girona, Olot, Palamós. He even had a completely original and revolutionary idea for re-creating Naples in 1839 and the cholera epidemic that ravaged the city, an idea that he could have sold to the big Hollywood studios, but Amalfitano couldn’t remember what it was.

4

On the Ruin of Amalfitano at the University of Barcelona

The rector and the head of the literature department entrusted Professor Carrera with the mission of informing Amalfitano of his situation at the university. Antoni Carrera was forty-eight, a former anti-Franco militant, someone who at first glance led an enviable life. He seemed reasonably content, a happy man. His salary and that of his wife, a high school French teacher, covered the mortgage on an old house that he had renovated to suit himself and the occasional whims of an architect friend. The house was magnificent, with six bedrooms, a huge, bright living room, a garden, and a little sauna that was Professor Carrera’s greatest domestic pride.

His son, seventeen, was a good student, or so his parents thought. He was six foot two, and every Saturday aftenoon the Carreras went to watch him play basketball at a club in Sant Andreu. All three were in good health. Antoni Carrera and Anna Carrera had gone through some hard times and once, long ago, had even come close to divorcing, but that was in the past and their marriage had gradually stabilized; now they were good friends, they shared some things, but in general each led his or her own life. One of the things they shared was their friendship with Amalfitano. When he arrived at the university he didn’t know anyone, and Carrera, taking pity on him and following the unwritten rules of scholarly hospitality, held a dinner at his house — his welcoming, wonderful house — and invited Amalfitano and three other department colleagues. It was a peculiar affair. The professors didn’t know each other, nor did they have any particular interest in getting to know Amalfitano (Latin American literature no longer roused passions); the professors’ wives looked terminally bored; Carrera’s own wife wasn’t in the best of moods. And Amalfitano didn’t appear at the agreed-upon time. In fact, he was very late, and the hungry professors got impatient. One suggested that they begin without him. Most would have seconded the motion, but Anna Carrera had no interest in starting the same dinner twice. So they ate cheese and Serrano ham and reflected on the impunctuality of South Americans. When Amalfitano arrived at last he was accompanied by a strikingly beautiful adolescent. At first the Carreras assumed, stunned, that it was his wife. Humbert Humbert, thought Antoni in terror, seconds before Amalfitano introduced her as his only daughter. I’m a widower, he remarked later, unprompted.

The dinner, as Anna had feared, proceeded in the usual fashion. The Amalfitanos, father and daughter, weren’t very chatty. The professors discussed seminars, books, university politics, and gossip, though no one could say exactly what the topic was at any given moment: gossip turned into seminars, university politics into books, seminars into university politics, books into gossip, until every permutation was exhausted. In fact they were really only talking about one thing: their work. When they tried to get Amalfitano to tell the same kind of stories about his previous university (it was very small and I taught only one course, on Rodolfo Wilcock, he said, politely and abashedly), the result was disappointing. No one had read Rodolfo Wilcock, no one cared about him. His daughter talked even less. Despite all their efforts, the professors’ wives got monosyllabic replies to their questions: did she like Barcelona, yes, could she speak some Catalan yet, no, had she lived in many countries, yes, did she find it difficult to keep house for her widowed father, the classic absentminded literature professor, no. Though at the coffee hour (after eating, thought Carrera, as if father and daughter were used to eating in silence) the Amalfitanos began to take part in the conversation. Someone, taking pity on them, brought up a subject having to do with Latin American literature, which led to the first lengthy remarks by Amalfitano. They talked about poetry. To everyone’s surprise, and to the disgust of some (feigned surprise and disgust, of course), Amalfitano held Nicanor Parra in higher esteem than Octavio Paz. After that, as far as the Carreras — who hadn’t read Parra and didn’t care much about Octavio Paz — were concerned, everything began to go well. By the time the whiskey was brought out, Amalfitano was frankly winning, witty, brilliant, and Rosa Amalfitano, as her father’s happiness drew everyone into its embrace, grew more talkative, more forthcoming, though she never shed a certain reserve, a watchfulness, that made her even more charming in a way that struck Anna Carrera as most unusual. An intelligent girl, an attractive and responsible girl, she thought, realizing that imperceptibly she had begun to love her.

A week later the Carreras invited the Amalfitanos for dinner again, but this time, instead of the professors and their wives, the fifth person at the table was Jordi Carrera, the pride of his mother, a slender adolescent with a shyness that was in some ways like Rosa’s.

As Anna hoped, they became friends on the spot. And the children’s friendship ran parallel to their parents’ friendship, at least during the time the Amalfitanos lived in Barcelona. Rosa and Jordi began to see each other at least twice a week. Once a week or once every two weeks Amalfitano and the Carreras talked on the phone, dined together, went to the movies, attended exhibitions and concerts, spent hours — the three of them — in the Carreras’ living room, by the fireplace in winter or in the garden in summer, talking and telling stories about when they were twenty, thirty, and possessed of an invincible courage. Concerning the past — their personal pasts — the opinions of the three diverged. Anna looked back on those days with sadness, a fond and rather serene sadness, but sadness nonetheless. Antoni viewed his heroic years with indifference, as something necessary but almost nonexistent; he despised nostalgia and melancholy as pointless, sterile emotions. Amalfitano, on the other hand, was dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering, capable of weeping in front of his friends or bursting into laughter.

They usually talked late into the night, when Carrera would give Amalfitano a ride back to his apartment on the other side of Barcelona, wondering how he had come to confide in him so easily, how he had learned to trust him in a way that he hardly ever trusted anyone. Amalfitano, meanwhile, usually made the trip half-asleep, watching through half-closed eyes the empty streets, the yellow signs, the dark and bright windows, at peace with himself in Carrera’s car, sure of arriving home safe and sound, of coming in the door quietly, jacket on the coatrack, glass of water, and before getting into bed, a last glance into Rosa’s room, out of pure habit.

And now the rector and the department head, always so prudent, so circumspect, had assigned Carrera — because you see him socially, one might call him your friend, he’ll listen to you (was there a threat there? a joke that only the rector and the department head understood?) — this delicate mission which had to be carried out tactfully, with decorum, persuasively, and at the same time firmly. With unshakable firmness. And who better than you, Antoni. Who better than you to find a solution to this problem.

So Amalfitano wasn’t surprised when Carrera told him that he had to leave the university. Jordi, under instructions from his parents, had taken Rosa to his room, and from the end of the hallway came the faint sound of the stereo. For a while Amalfitano was quiet, looking down at the rug and at the feet of the Carreras sitting one next to the other on the sofa. So they want to get rid of me, he said at last.

“They want you to go voluntarily, as quietly as possible,” said Antoni Carrera.

“If you don’t they’ll take you to court,” said Anna Carrera.

“I’ve been talking to some people in the department and it’s the best you can hope for,” said Antoni Carrera. “Otherwise, you risk everything.”

“What’s everything?” Amalfitano wanted to know.

The Carreras gave him looks of pity. Then Anna got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with three glasses. When her husband, the night before, had told her that Amalfitano’s days at the university were numbered, and why they were numbered, she had begun to cry. Where’s the cognac? she asked. After a few seconds in which Amalfitano couldn’t understand what the hell this woman wanted, he answered that he didn’t drink cognac anymore. I gave it up, he said, closing his eyes, his lungs filling with air like someone about to scale a hill. Not a hill, thought Amalfitano as he imagined the whole faculty hearing about his indiscretions, a mountain. The mountain of my guilt. On the sideboard there was a bottle of apple brandy.

“Don’t complain now,” said Antoni Carrera, as if reading his thoughts. “After all, it’s your own fault. You should have been more careful choosing your friends.”

“I didn’t choose them,” said Amalfitano, smiling. “They chose me, or life did.”

“Don’t wax poetic, for God’s sake,” said Anna Carrera, secretly angry that a man who was still handsome — and she really did find him handsome, tall and lean as he was, like a matinee idol, with that shock of white hair — would rather sleep with boys (probably pimply ones) than women. “You fucked up and now you have to suffer the consequences, do what’s best for you, and for your daughter, especially. If you fight it, the literature department will bury you in shit,” she said as she filled three glasses to overflowing with Viuda Canseco.

What a nice, blunt way to put it, thought Antoni Carrera, admiringly and gloomily.

Anna handed them the glasses: “Drink up, we’ll need it. What we should really do is send the kids to the movies and get drunk.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Amalfitano.

“The university is rotten,” said Antoni Carrera without conviction.

“But what does that mean?” asked Amalfitano.

“It means that in the best of cases, you’ll be left with a near-indelible stain on your record. Worst case, you could end up in jail as a corruptor of minors.”

Who was the minor, my God? thought Amalfitano, and he remembered the faces of the poet Pere Girau and a friend who sometimes turned up at Padilla’s studio, an economics student he had never slept with but whom he had seen in Padilla’s arms, the memory excited him, the boy surrendering to Padilla in a way that Amalfitano would never be able to, begging him between sobs and entreaties not to pull out, to keep going, as if the poor bastard were a woman, thought Amalfitano, and could have multiple orgasms. I disgust myself, he thought, though the truth is he didn’t disgust himself at all. He remembered other boys, too, whom he’d never seen before and yet who claimed to be students of his, Padilla’s gang, Padilla’s hangers-on, whom he favored upon grading exams (but not overly so) and whom he later saw at parties and on late-night pilgrimages to the James Dean, the Roxy, the Simplicissimus, the Gardel, Chance Encounters, the Doña Rosita, and the Atalante.

“How could you risk so much?” asked Antoni Carrera.

“I always used condoms,” said Amalfitano, remembering Padilla’s body.

The Carreras looked at him in confusion. Anna bit her lower lit. Amalfitano closed his eyes. He thought. About Padilla and his condoms. And suddenly the act appeared to him in a terrifying light. Padilla always used condoms when they slept together! And I never noticed. What horrific thing, what gallantry, lay hidden in that gesture? wondered Amalfitano with a lump in his throat. For a moment he was afraid he would pass out. The music coming from the room where Rosa was persuaded him not to.

“The rector has really behaved in a civilized fashion,” said Antoni Carrera.

“Put yourself in his place,” said Anna Carrera, still thinking about the condoms.

“I have,” answered Amalfitano despondently.

“Then will you do what we suggest? Will you be reasonable?”

“I will. What’s the plan?”

The plan was for him to make an official request for a leave of absence, claiming some physical ailment. A nervous breakdown, for example, said Antoni Carrera, anything. For two months he would continue to receive his full salary, after which he would resign. The university, of course, would furnish all the requisite positive recommendations and draw a veil over the affair. Naturally, he should by no means show his face at the department offices. Not even to get my things? asked Amalfitano. Your things are in the trunk of our car, said the Carreras in unison, downing their drinks together too.

5

I, thought Amalfitano, who was a creative, loving, happy child, the brightest at my elementary school lost on the muddy plain and the bravest at my high school lost in the mountains and the fog, I who was the most cowardly of adolescents and who spent afternoons of slingshot fights reading and dreaming over the maps in my geography book, I who learned to dance rock and roll and the twist, boleros and the tango, but not the cueca, though more than once I bounded under the leafy bower, handkerchief at the ready and driven by something deep inside me because I had no friends in my burst of patriotism, only enemies, purist hicks scandalized by my heel-tapping cueca, my needless and suicidal heterodoxy, I who slept off drinking binges under a tree and who met the imploring eyes of Carmencita Martínez, I who swam one stormy afternoon at Las Ventanas, I who made the best coffee in the apartment I shared with other students in the center of Santiago, and my roommates, southerners like me, would say wonderful coffee, Óscar, you make the most wonderful coffee, though actually it’s a little strong, actually it’s too Italian, I who heard the call of the Absolute Lazy Motherfuckers, time and time again, on buses and in restaurants, as if I had gone mad, as if Nature, sharpening my senses, wanted to warn me of something terrible and invisible, I who joined the Communist Party and the Association of Progressive Students, I who wrote pamphlets and read Das Kapital, I who worshipped and married Edith Lieberman, the most beautiful and loving woman in the Southern Hemisphere, I who didn’t realize that Edith Lieberman deserved it all, the sun and the moon and a thousand kisses and then another thousand and another, I who drank with Jorge Teillier and talked psychoanalysis with Enrique Lihn, I who was expelled from the Party and who kept believing in the class struggle and the fight for the revolution of the Americas, I who taught literature at the University of Chile, I who translated John Donne and bits of Ben Jonson and Spenser and Henry Howard, I who signed proclamations and letters from leftist groups, I who believed in change, in doing my bit to wipe away some of the world’s misery and abjection (without knowing yet — innocent that I was — the real nature of misery and abjection), I who was a romantic and who in my heart of hearts just wanted to stroll bright boulevards with Edith Lieberman, up and down, feeling her warm hand in mine, at peace, in love, while storms and hurricanes and great earthquakes of fate built up behind us, I who predicted the fall of Allende and yet did nothing to prepare for it, I who was arrested and brought in blindfolded to be interrogated, and who withstood torture when stronger men were broken, I who heard the cries of three Conservatory students as they were tortured and raped and killed, I who spent months at the Tejas Verdes concentration camp, I who came out alive and was reunited with my wife in Buenos Aires, I who kept up my ties with leftist groups, that gallery of romantics (or modernists), gunmen, psychopaths, dogmatists, and fools, all brave notwithstanding, but what good is bravery? how long do we have to keep being brave? I who taught at the University of Buenos Aires, I who translated J.M.G. Arcimboldi’s The Endless Rose for a Buenos Aires publishing house, listening as my beloved Edith speculated that our daughter’s name was an homage to the title of Arcimboldi’s novel and not, as I claimed, a tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, I who watched my daughter smile in Argentina and crawl in Colombia and take her first steps in Costa Rica and then in Canada, moving from university to university, leaving countries for political reasons and entering them for academic ones, carting along the remains of my library, as well as the few dresses belonging to my wife, who was in increasingly poor health, and the very few toys belonging to my daughter, and my only pair of shoes, which I called the Invincibles, miraculous leather tooled in the shop of an old Italian shoemaker in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I who spent sweltering evenings talking to the new radicals of Latin America, I who watched smoke drift from a volcano and aquatic mammals that looked like women frolicking in a coffee-colored river, I who joined the Sandinista Revolution, I who left my wife and daughter and entered Nicaragua with a guerrilla column, I who brought my wife and daughter to Managua and when they asked me what battles I had fought in, I answered none, I said that I was always behind the lines, but that I had seen the wounded and the dying and many dead, I had seen the eyes of those on their way back from the fighting, and such beauty mixed with such shit made me retch every day of the campaign, I who was a professor of literature in Managua and who knew no greater privilege than to give seminars on Elizabethan literature and teach the poetry of Huidobro, Neruda, de Rokha, Borges, Girondo, Martín Adán, Macedonio Fernández, Vallejo, Rosamel del Valle, Owen, Pellicer, in exchange for a miserable salary and the indifference of my poor students, who lived desperate, precarious lives, I who ended up leaving for Brazil, where I would make more money and could pay for the medical care that my wife needed, I who swam with my daughter on my shoulders on the most beautiful beaches in the world while Edith Lieberman, who was more beautiful than the beaches, watched us from the shore, barefoot on the sand, as if she knew things that I would never know and that she would never tell me, I who was left a widower one night, one plastic night of shattered windows, one night at a quarter to four as I sat at the bedside of Edith Lieberman, Chilean, Jew, French teacher, and in the next bed a Brazilian woman dreamed of a crocodile, a windup crocodile that chased a girl through mountains of ashes, I who had to carry on, father and mother now to my daughter, but who didn’t know how to do it and who heaped suffering upon suffering, I who hired a servant for the first time in my life, Rosinha, northeasterner, twenty-one, mother of two little girls left behind in the village, my daughter’s good fairy, I who one night after listening to Rosinha’s tales of woe slept with her and probably brought her only misfortune, I who translated Osman Lins and was Osman Lins’s friend though my translations never sold, I who in Rio met the nicest leftists on the planet, I who — for their sake, for my own sake, for the love of art, out of a sense of defiance, out of a fucked-up sense of obligation, out of a sense of conviction, for no reason, for fun — got mixed up in the old trouble and had to leave Brazil with time enough only to pack the little we could take with us, I who in the Rio airport watched my daughter cry and Rosinha cry and Moreira say what’s wrong with these women and Luiz Lima say write us as soon as you arrive and the people coming and going through the airport lounges and the ghost of Edith Lieberman up higher than the Christ of Corcovado, I who at the same time could see nothing, not the people coming and going, not my friends, not Rosinha, not my daughter, not the silent and smiling ghost of Edith Lieberman that we were leaving behind, I who arrived in Paris with no job and scarcely any money, I who worked hanging posters and sweeping offices while my daughter slept in our chambre de bonne on the rue des Eaux, I who strove and strove until I got a job at a high school, I who found work at a German university, I who took my daughter on trips to Greece and Turkey, I who took my daughter on a trip down the Nile, always the two of us, with friends who came close but couldn’t reach the secret heart of our affection, I who found work at a Dutch university and taught a seminar on Felisberto Hernández that got me noticed and even made me a little bit famous, I who wrote for the weekly So Much the Worse, published by French anarchists and Latin American leftists and I who discovered how nice it was to be a dissident in a civilized country, I who discovered the first signs of age (or exhaustion), long present in my body but previously ignored, I who went to live in Italy and work in Italy and travel in Italy, land of my grandparents, I who wrote about Rodolfo Wilcock, beloved son of Marcel Schwob, I who took part in conferences and colloquia all over Europe, flying from place to place like a corporate honcho, sleeping in five-star hotels and dining in Michelin-starred restaurants, all in order to talk about literature, about the people who made literature, I who finally washed up at the University of Barcelona, where I threw myself into my work with earnestness and zeal, I who discovered my homosexuality at the same time that the Russians discovered their passion for capitalism, I who was discovered by Joan Padilla the way a continent is discovered, I who was swept away and rediscovered pleasure and paid the price, I who am the source of mockery, disgrace of the halls of academe, labeled a filthy South American, faggot sudaca, corruptor of minors, queen of the Southern Cone, I who now sit in my flat writing letters, beseeching friends, seeking a job at some university, and time goes by, days, weeks, and no one gets back to me, as if everyone had suddenly stopped existing, as if in these times of crisis literature professors weren’t needed anywhere, I who’ve done so many things and believed in so many things and who is now meant to believe that he’s nothing but a dirty old man and that no one will give me a job, no one cares …

6

Horacio Guerra, professor of literature and official historian of Santa Teresa, distinguished polymath according to some friends from Mexico City, where he went every four months to soak up ideas, was, like Amalfitano, fifty years old, though unlike the latter he was beginning to enjoy a certain reputation — earned, God only knew, by the sweat of his own brow.

Born of humble stock, he had worked stubbornly his whole life to get ahead. He was awarded a scholarship by the government of Sonora, and finished his university studies at twenty-eight; he wasn’t a great student, but he was curious and, in his own way, diligent. At twenty-one he published a book of sonnets and cataphoras (Spell of the Dawn, Tijuana, 1964) that won him the respect of some influential reviewers at northern Mexico newspapers and inclusion, six years later, in an anthology of young Mexican poets edited by a young lady from Monterrey which managed to briefly engage Octavio Paz and Efraín Huerta in a dialectical battle (both despised the anthology, though for reasons that were contradictory and mutually opposed).

In 1971 he moved to Santa Teresa and began to work at the university there. At first the contract was for only one year, during which time Horacio Guerra finished a study and anthology of the work of Orestes Gullón (The Temple and the Wood: The Poetry of O. Gullón, with prologue and notes by J. Guerra, University of Santa Teresa, 1973), an underappreciated Oaxacan poet and old friend of the university rector. His contract was extended for another year and then for five and then indefinitely. Now his interests multiplied. It was as if he had suddenly become a Renaissance man. From the sculpture and architecture of the school of Maestro Garabito to the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Ramón López Velarde, pillars of Mexicanness, he dabbled in everything, sought to learn about everything, studied everything. He wrote a treatise on the flora and fauna of the Mexican northeast, and it wasn’t long before he was named honorary president of the Santa Teresa Botanic Garden. He wrote a brief history of the city’s old town, kept up a regular column called “Memories of Our City Streets,” and finally was named official historian, a distinction that filled him with satisfaction and pride. All his life he would remember the ceremony, which was only an informal gathering but was attended by the bishop of Sonora and the state governor.

In academic circles his presence was inevitable: he might have been slow on the uptake and not particularly charming, but he made sure he was seen where he needed to be seen. The other professors were divided between those who admired him and those who feared him; it was easy to take issue with his ideas, his projects, or his teaching methods, but not advisable if one didn’t want to be excluded from university activities and social life. Though a serious man, he was up on all the gossip and secrets.

In 1977 he published a book on the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito, who left his mark on the public buildings and plazas of the north of Mexico (Statues and Houses of the Border, University of Santa Teresa, thirty photographs and illustrations). Shortly after he was named professor, the book he considered his masterwork appeared: Ramonian Studies, on the life and work of Ramón López Velarde (University of Santa Teresa, 1979). The following year saw his book on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (The Birth of Mexico, University of Santa Teresa, 1980), a work that was dedicated to the rector and that sparked a kind of polemic: accusations of plagiarism appeared in two Mexico City newspapers but the slander didn’t stick. By this point something had developed between Guerra and the rector, Pablo Negrete, that could superficially have been called friendship. They saw each other, yes, and sometimes they had a drink together, but they weren’t friends. Guerra knew he was a glorified courtier—courtier, the term wounded and pleased him, filled him with pride and gloom, but it was the only one that fit the facts — and yet he believed that he, too, when the moment came, would be university president and that he would take under his wing another professor in circumstances similar to his own. For years now, too, he suspected that Pablo Negrete had been delegating to him only practical matters, resolving worldly matters without his counsel.

He lived in a permanent state of agitation.

At the time when Amalfitano met him, Horacio Guerra was a well-dressed man (this was a quality — like so many others — that he shared with the president, who over the years had become a dandy) among poorly or sloppily dressed professors and students. His manner was cordial, though he sometimes raised his voice excessively. His gestures for years now had tended to be peremptory. It was said that he was ill, but no one knew what was wrong with him. It was probably something do to with his nerves. He never missed a class. He lived in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment in the center of Santa Teresa. He was still a bachelor. For a while now his students had been calling him by the nicer-sounding and more peaceable name of Horacio Tregua, Truce replacing War.

7

After Amalfitano had sent out fifty job applications and pestered the few friends he had left, the only school to show an interest in his services was the University of Santa Teresa. For a full week Amalfitano debated whether to accept the job or to wait by the mailbox for a better offer. In terms of quality, the only worse options were a Guatemalan university and a Honduran one, though neither had even bothered to send him a written rejection. In fact, the only universities that had gotten back to him to say no were the European ones with which Amalfitano had had previous dealings. All that was left was the University of Santa Teresa, and after a week of thinking it over, sunk in a deepening depression, Amalfitano sent word that he would accept the position. He soon received a copy of the contract, all the papers and forms he would need to fill out for his work permit, and the date when he was expected in Santa Teresa.

He lied to Rosa. He told her that his job was ending and that they had to leave. Rosa thought they would return to Italy, but she wasn’t unhappy to hear that they were going to Mexico.

At night Amalfitano and his daughter talked about the trip. They made plans, studied maps of northern Mexico and the southern United States, decided which places they would visit on their first vacations, what kind of car they would buy (a used one, like in the movies, at one of those lots with a salesman in a blue suit, red tie, and snakeskin boots), the house they would rent, no more apartments, a little house with two or three bedrooms, a front yard, and a backyard where they could barbecue, though neither Amalfitano nor his daughter was entirely sure what barbecuing was: Rosa claimed it involved a grill set up in the backyard (next to the pool, if possible) where meat and even fish were grilled; Amalfitano thought that in Mexico it actually involved a pit — a pit out in the country, ideally — into which one shoveled hot coals, then a layer of earth, then slabs of goat, then another layer of earth, and finally more hot coals; the pieces of meat, according to Amalfitano, were wrapped in the leaves of some ancient tree, the name of which escaped him. Or in aluminum foil.

Those last days in Barcelona, Amalfitano sat at his desk for hours, supposedly working but really doing nothing. He thought about Padilla, his daughter, his dead wife, random scenes from his youth and childhood. Rosa, meanwhile, was never at home, as if the moment she had to leave Barcelona she was seized by an irresistible urge to walk its streets, to see and commit to memory every inch of it. Usually she went out alone, although occasionally she was accompanied by Jordi Carrera, silent and distant. Amalfitano would hear him arrive, and after a brief interval in which nothing seemed to happen, he would hear them go and it was then that he most regretted having to leave Barcelona. Then he would stay up, though with the lights off, until one or two or three in the morning, which was when Rosa generally came home.

To Amalfitano, Jordi seemed a shy and formal boy. Rosa liked his silence, which she mistook for thoughtfulness when it was really just a symptom of the confusion raging in his head. For both young people, each day that went by was like a sign, the announcement of an impending future full of significant events; Rosa suspected that the trip to Mexico would mark the end of her adolescence; Jordi sensed that their time together would torment him someday and he didn’t know what to do about it.

One night they went to a concert. Another night they went to a club where they danced for a long time like two strangers.

8

Who came to the airport? The Carreras — and, thirty minutes before boarding, Padilla and the poet Pere Girau. Jordi and Rosa’s farewell was silent. The Carreras and Amalfitano’s was traditional, a hug and good luck, write to us. Antoni Carrera knew the poet Pere Girau by reputation, but he greeted him politely. Anna Carrera, however, asked him whether his work had been published and if so where she could buy it. Jordi gave his mother an incredulous look. But you don’t read poetry, he said. Rosa — who, standing next to Jordi, looked much smaller than she was — said: it’s never too late to start, though I would choose something more classic, more solid. Like what, for example? asked the poet Pere Girau, who next to Jordi looked smaller, too (even smaller than Rosa), and who was hurt by the word solid. Padilla cast his gaze skyward. Amalfitano seemed to develop an interest in the fine print on his boarding passes. Catullus, said Rosa, he’s quick and fun. Oh, Catullus, said Anna, I read him ages ago, in college, I think, wasn’t it? Yes, said Antoni Carrera, we read him, of course. Jordi shrugged, but that was a long time ago, I’m sure you don’t remember any of it now. I haven’t been published yet, said the poet Pere Girau with a smile, though this year a collection of mine is coming out with Cavall amb Barretina, the new Catalan publishing house. And do you write poetry too? Anna asked Padilla. Yes, ma’am, but in Spanish, which means there’s no chance I’ll be published by Cavall amb Barretina. But there are other places where you could be published, aren’t there? Or so I imagine. What do you think, Toni? Of course there are other places, said Antoni Carrera, trying to give her a look that explained who Padilla was. Are all of your students poets? asked Rosa. Amalfitano smiled without looking at her. Not all of them, he said. Jordi thought: I should ask Rosa to come with me to the café for a drink, I should get her alone, I should bring her with me to the newsstand and say something, anything. Oh, these are students of yours, said Anna Carrera, at last understanding who they were. Yes, said Amalfitano, and then he smiled: former students. Shall we go get something to drink? Jordi asked. Rosa, after hesitating for a few seconds, said no, there wasn’t time. No, there isn’t time, said the Carreras and Amalfitano. Amalfitano was the only one to notice the boy’s dejected slump and he smiled, youth is the pits. Well, well, well, said Anna Carrera. Yes, the hour approaches, said Amalfitano. I’m so envious, said the poet Pere Girau, I’d love to be on my way to Mexico tonight, wouldn’t you all? I’m starting to feel that way, admitted Antoni Carrera. Padilla gave them a smile that was intended to be ironic but was only tender. It must be the moon, said Anna Carrera. The moon? asked Amalfitano. The moon, the moon, said Anna Carrera, the moon is huge, the kind that makes people go wild or take long trips to exotic countries. There are no exotic countries left in Latin America, said Rosa. Oh, no? asked Anna, who had always liked Rosa’s wit. No, Anna, there are no exotic countries left anywhere in the world, said Jordi. Don’t you believe it, said Amalfitano, there are still exotic countries and there must be one or two of them left in Latin America. Catalonia is an exotic country, said Padilla. Catalonia? asked the poet Pere Girau. The moon is certainly exotic, said Antoni Carrera sadly. Not even the moon, said Jordi, the moon is just a satellite. I love the full moon when I’m at the beach, I love to listen to the tide — is it coming in or going out? I’m never sure — while I’m moon gazing, said the poet Pere Girau. It’s coming in, said Antoni Carrera, and it’s called high tide. I thought high tide was when the water stopped rising, said Padilla. Actually, it’s the time it takes it to rise, said Antoni Carrera. I adore the ebb and flow, said the poet Pere Girau, rolling his eyes back in his head, though low tide is more practical because you can find treasures. He rolled his eyes back in his head, thought Rosa, disgusting! Do you remember our honeymoon in Peniche, Toni? asked Anna Carrera. Yes, said Antoni Carrera. The tide was very low, hundreds of yards out, and in the early morning light the beach looked like some extraterrestrial landscape, said Anna. In Brittany you see things like that every day, said the poet Pere Girau. But what you’re talking about has nothing to do with the moon, said Antoni Carrera. Of course it does, said Amalfitano. I don’t think so, said Antoni Carrera. It certainly does, said Amalfitano. Peniche is an exotic place, too, said Padilla, in its own way and with its government workers. Have you ever been to Peniche? asked Anna Carrera. No, but a third of Barcelona has camped there, said Padilla. Funny, it’s true, now everyone has been to Portugal, but when we went it was unusual to see another Catalonian, said Anna Carrera. It was political tourism, admitted Antoni Carrera quietly. My father took me to the Alentejo on vacation, said Rosa. Amalfitano smiled, in fact they had made only a brief stop in Lisbon, but he loved his daughter’s finely honed malice, she might be Brazilian, he thought happily. What is an exotic country, essentially? asked Jordi. A poor but happy place, said Amalfitano. Somalia isn’t exotic, of course, said Anna Carrera. And neither is Morocco, said Jordi. It can also be a country that’s poor in spirit but deeply joyful, said Padilla. Like Germany, which at least to me seems very exotic, said Rosa. What’s exotic about Germany? asked Jordi. The beer halls, the street food, and the ruins of the concentration camps, said Padilla. No, no, said Rosa, not that, the wealth. Mexico is a truly exotic country, said the poet Pere Girau, Breton’s favorite country, the promised land of Artaud and the Mayas, home of Alfonso Reyes and Atahualpa. Atahualpa was an Inca, a Peruvian Inca, said Rosa. True, true, said the poet Pere Girau. Then he was quiet until the moment came for hugs and farewells. Take care of your father, Anna Carrera said to Rosa. Take care of yourself and think of us every now and then, Padilla said to Amalfitano. The plural, like a flower flung in his face, dealt Amalfitano a soft blow. So low, he thought sadly. Good luck and bon voyage, said the poet Pere Girau. Jordi looked at Rosa, made a gesture of resignation, and couldn’t think what to say. Rosa turned to him and said let me give you a kiss, silly. Of course, said Jordi, and he bent down clumsily and they kissed on both cheeks. Jordi’s cheeks burned as if he had a fever, Rosa’s were warm and smelled like lavender. Anna kissed Rosa, too, and Amalfitano. Finally, they all hugged and kissed, even the poet Pere Girau and Anna Carrera, who weren’t going anywhere. When they were in line to board, Amalfitano raised his hand and waved a last time. Rosa didn’t turn around. Then the Carreras, the poet Pere Girau, and Padilla hurried up to the viewing area but they couldn’t see the Amalfitanos’ plane, though they did see a huge moon, and after a while, not knowing what to say to each other, each group went its own way.

9

How Were the Carreras Affected by Amalfitano’s Departure?

At first both of them were busy at their respective jobs, and in a way, especially for Antoni, Amalfitano’s departure was simply a relief, but after a few months, in the middle of an especially boring after-dinner hour, the two of them began to miss him. Gradually they realized that Amalfitano and his crazy stories were like the image of their own lost youth. They saw him as they saw themselves: young, poor, determined, brave, generous, invested in a perhaps ridiculous and feeble way with pride and nobility. By so often associating Amalfitano with defunct images of themselves, they ultimately stopped thinking about him. Only every so often, when a letter came from Rosa, were they reminded of the wandering queer, and then they would laugh, happy all of a sudden, remembering him with fleeting but sincere affection.

How Was Jordi Carrera Affected by the Departure of Rosa Amalfitano?

It was much harder for him than for his parents. Until Rosa left, it was as if Jordi lived at the North Pole. He and his friends and a few people who weren’t his friends and others he didn’t even know but saw in teen magazines, all lived in harmony — if not happily, since happiness was a sham — at the North Pole. They played basketball there, learned English, developed computer skills, bought lumberjack clothes, and assiduously attended movies and concerts. His parents often remarked to each other how inexpressive Jordi was, but this lack of expressiveness was his true self. Rosa’s absence changed everything. From one day to the next, Jordi found himself sailing at full speed over a vast sheet of ice to warmer seas. The North Pole receded in the distance and faded in significance and his ice sheet kept shrinking. He soon began to suffer from insomnia and nightmares.

How Was Padilla Affected by Amalfitano’s Departure?

Hardly at all. Padilla lived in a constant state of amorous self-expression and his feelings were extravagant but didn’t last for more than a day. In his own way, Padilla was a scientist who left no room for God in his laboratory. He agreed with Burroughs that love is nothing but a mixture of sentimentalism and sex and he found it everywhere, which meant that he was unable to mourn a lost love for more than twenty-four hours. Inside, he was strong and he accepted the shifts and fluctuations of the romantic object with a stoicism that, unlikely as it seemed, he shared with his father. Once, the poet Pere Girau asked how in the world, after a person had loved and fucked a Greek god, he could love and fuck people of inferior looks — ugly queers, if you can believe it, and the usual horrible rent boys. Padilla’s answer was that we loved beautiful people for the sake of convenience, that it was like a preference for known quantities, that the inner self was all that mattered, and that he could find beauty even in the shuffle of a donkey. And he wasn’t the only one. For example, he said, take the Apollonian poets of nineteenth-century France who sated themselves with stub-dicked boys from the Maghreb, youths who in no way fit the strict definition of classical beauty. Stub-dicked boys? said the poet Pere Girau incredulously, but I’m Apollonian, too, aren’t I, and I’d like to find someone to love who’s at least as good-looking as the son of a bitch who left me. Girau, said Padilla, I love people and my insides are bursting, and all you love is poetry.

And Finally, How Was the Poet Pere Girau Affected by the Departure of Amalfitano?

Not at all, though occasionally he remembered how much Amalfitano knew about Elizabethan verse, how well acquainted he was with the work of Marcel Schwob, how pleasant and agreeable he was when they talked about contemporary Italian poetry (Girau had translated twenty-five poems by Dino Campana into Catalan), what a good listener he was, and how sharp his opinions usually were. In bed it was a different story, he was a late-blooming queer and he neglected the practical, neglected it badly. Though in the end, thought the poet Pere Girau bitterly, he’s more practical than we are, because he’ll always be a literature professor, which means he’ll be protected financially at least, while we’re plunged into the vulgar and savage fin de siècle.

10

During the flight each of them realized that the other was afraid, though not very, and each of them understood with a sense of fatalism that all they had was each other: Planet Amalfitano began with Óscar and ended with Rosa and there was nothing in between. Or maybe there was: a succession of countries, a whirl of cities and streets that brightened and darkened arbitrarily in memory, the ghost of Edith Lieberman in Brazil, an imaginary country called Chile that drove Amalfitano mad — although every so often he tried to find out what was going on there — and that Rosa, born in Argentina, couldn’t care less about. If their plane went down in flames over the Atlantic, if their plane exploded, if their plane disappeared in the boundless space of the Amalfitanos, no memory of them would be left in the world, thought Amalfitano sadly. And he thought: we are two gypsies without a tribe, reviled, used, exploited, with no real friends, a clown and his poor defenseless daughter. Which led him to think: if instead of both of us dying in a plane accident only I die, of a heart attack or stomach cancer or in some gay brawl (the possibilities made Amalfitano sweat), what will happen to my angel, my darling, my wonderful, clever girl? and the carpet of clouds he could see if he craned his neck a little (he was in an aisle seat) opened up like the door to a nightmare, like an immaculate wound, Israel, he thought, Israel, let her head to the first Israeli embassy she can find and request citizenship, her mother was Jewish, so it’s her right, let her live in Tel Aviv and study at Tel Aviv University, where she’ll probably run into Skinny Bolzman (how many years has it been since I saw him? twenty?), let her marry an Israeli and live happily ever after, ah, he thought, if only it could be Sweden I would breathe easier, but Israel isn’t bad, Israel is acceptable. And he thought: if neither of us dies but things go badly in Santa Teresa, if I lose my job and can’t find another one, if I can only give private French lessons and we have to live in a seedy boardinghouse, if we start to shrivel up and succumb to our basest instincts in the middle of nowhere with no money to leave and no place to go, if we’re smothered and numbed in a time that moves with endless slowness, without hope or prospects, if I end up like that Spanish widow I met in a café in Colón, the perfect victim, that mental Justine who worried every day that the Panamanians (the black ones, those big, athletic black men) would rape her delectable fifteen-year-old daughter, and she would be helpless, a woman with no husband and no money running a tiny café that made no profit, with no hope of returning to Spain, trapped in a Buñuel film from the ’50s, what will I do then? thought Amalfitano, bewildered, trying to block stray images of Padilla and desolate, schematic New World landscapes in which he was the only cat among packs of hounds, a hoopoe among eagles and peacocks.

11

A month after they were settled in Santa Teresa one of the secretaries from the rector’s office gave Amalfitano a letter from Padilla that was addressed to the university. In the letter Padilla talked about the weather in Barcelona, about how much he was drinking, about his new lover — another one — a twenty-eight-year-old SEAT auto worker, married with three children. He said that he had left the university (it wasn’t the same without you) and that at last he had work, he was a proofreader at a publishing house, a friend got him the job, it was a little boring but secure and the pay wasn’t bad, though a few lines later he said that in fact the pay was bad but he could get by. He also said that he had left the studio and that the painter who was sometimes there, the one with the gold cigarette case full of little hash cigarettes, had recently killed himself in New York. Life, according to Padilla, despite the crushing boredom of proofreading novels faker than a three-thousand-peseta note, continued to be strange and full of mysterious offerings. Finally, he reported that he had begun to write his first novel. About the plot, however, he divulged nothing.

Amalfitano answered the letter that same night, in his room, lying on his unmade bed, as his daughter devoured another video in the living room. In broad strokes he described his life in Santa Teresa, his work, how receptive his students were, I don’t know whether I’ve ever seen kids so interested in literature, interested, in fact, in everything that was happening in the world, all continents and all races. He didn’t say anything about his new lover, whose name was Castillo, or about how badly he was getting along with his daughter lately. He ended the letter by telling Padilla that he missed him. Though it may seem strange to you (or maybe not), I miss you. In a postcript he said that of course he remembered the man with the gold cigarette case, the one who always wore leather, and he asked why he had killed himself. In a second postcript he said that it was wonderful that Padilla was writing a novel, keep it up, keep it up.

Padilla’s response was quick to arrive. It was concise and monothematic. My novel, he said, will be like an emission of stroboscopic light, with lots of characters (though rudimentary or sketched arbitrarily and at random) and lots of violence and lots of wolf moons and dog moons and lots of erect and well-greased cocks, lots of hard cocks and lots of howling.

Amalfitano’s response, on university letterhead and written between classes on the electric typewriter in his cubicle, tried to be judicious. Too many characters could turn any novel into a collection of stories. Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary. Howls were literary, but the place for them, their natural medium, was generally poetry, not prose. That way lies danger, he warned, and a few lines later he insisted on hearing the circumstances surrounding the painter’s suicide. Otherwise, he assured Padilla once again that he missed him and wished him the best. About his new life in Santa Teresa he said practically nothing.

The next news he had from Padilla was a postcard of the port of Barcelona. This is where we saw each other for the last time, he said. The last time ever, I think sometimes. And he disclosed the title of his novel: The God of Homosexuals.

Amalfitano returned the ball. On a postcard of Santa Teresa depicting the statue of General Sepúlveda, hero of the Revolution, he allowed that the title struck him as the right choice. It was a sad title, certainly, but the right choice. And who was this god of homosexuals? Not the goddess of love or the god of beauty, but some other god — which one? As to whether they would see each other again, he left that in the hands of the god of travelers.

Padilla’s response was swift and lengthy: the leather-wearing painter had had seemingly no reason to kill himself. He was in New York for a solo show of his work at the prestigious Gina Randall Gallery, you’ve probably never heard of her, but she’s known to the cognoscenti as one of the most powerful art dealers in Babylon. So, ruling out any financial or artistic motives (in that order, insisted Padilla), what remained were sentimental or carnal ones, but the painter was famous for his indifference to a nice pair of hips and to spoken or unspoken romantic sentiments, which meant that this possibility also had to be discarded. And if the explanation wasn’t money, art, or romance, what else could drive a man to suicide? Clearly: boredom or illness, the culprit must have been one or the other, you choose. Regarding the identity of the god of homosexuals, Padilla was categorical: he’s the god of beggars, the god who sleeps on the ground, in subway entrances, the god of insomniacs, the god of those who have always lost. Here he talked (confusedly) about Belisarius and Narses, two Byzantine generals, the former young and beautiful, the latter old and a eunuch, but both of them perfectly suited to the Emperor’s military needs, and he talked about the wages of Byzantium. He’s a helpless god, ugly and resplendent, a god who loves but whose love is terrible and always, but always, turns against him.

The wages of Chile, remembered Amalfitano, and he also thought: fuck, he’s describing the god of poets, the god of the poor, the god of the Comte de Lautréamont and Rimbaud.

The novel is moving along, said Padilla in the postcript, but the proofreading work was killing him. Too many hours comparing originals and proofs, soon he would probably need glasses. This last bit of news saddened Amalfitano. The only glasses that suited Padilla’s face were sunglasses, and then only because of the unsettling effect produced when Padilla removed them with a flourish at once provocative and endearing.

In response, he listed all the reasons why Padilla should persist at all costs with The God of Homosexuals. When you finish, he suggested with false casualness, you can come visit us. They say that the north of Mexico is delightful. This letter received no response. For a while Padilla remained silent.

13

Soon after this, Amalfitano began to feel watched. There were other times in his life when he’d had the same feeling: that of the prey in the woods who scents the hunter. But it was so long ago that he’d forgotten the instructions and advice received in his youth, the proper way to behave in a situation like the one that now, rather than presenting itself, was gradually creeping up on him.