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It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment.
lately I’ve been noticing that time can expand or contract at will),
But poetry (real poetry) is like that: you can sense it, you can feel it in the air, the way they say certain highly attuned animals (snakes, worms, rats, and some birds) can detect an earthquake.
The first time I read it (a few hours ago), I couldn’t help locking myself in my room and masturbating as I recited it once, twice, three times, as many as ten or fifteen times, imagining Rosario, the waitress, on all fours above me, asking me to write a poem for her long-lost beloved relative or begging me to pound her on the bed with my throbbing cock.
“Misguided men, who will chastise / a woman when no blame is due, / oblivious that it is you / who prompted what you criticize”)
“Stay, shadow of contentment too short-lived, / illusion of enchantment I most prize, / fair image for whom happily I die, / sweet fiction for whom painfully I live.”
at some point more or less separated ourselves from the group, physically and spiritually, but even from a distance (maybe because of the pot) I could still hear what they were saying.
Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.
the servant (whose name I don’t know or can’t remember, which is inexcusable). Barrios and I washed the dishes.
As we were starting to eat, we were joined by a guy called Luscious Skin, twenty-three, rooftop neighbor, who was introduced as a visceral realist poet. A little before I left (many hours later; the time passed in a flash), I asked him again what his name was and he said Luscious Skin so naturally and confidently (much more naturally and confidently than I would’ve said Juan García Madero) that for a minute I actually believed that somewhere amid the back alley and swamps of our Mexican Republic there was actually a family named Skin.
She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good.
Then I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
Horrible things keep happening, dreams, nightmares, impulses I indulge that are completely out of my control. It’s like when I was fifteen and always masturbating. Three times a day, five times a day, nothing was enough!
“Is it your first time, papacito?” Rosario asked me. I said yes, I don’t know why.
In total we spent four hours fucking. Then Rosario dried me, dried herself, tidied up the room in a heartbeat (it’s incredible how industrious and practical the woman is), and went to sleep, because the next day she had to work.
At a certain moment, however, he turned around and asked how much it would cost him to sleep with me. I’ve noticed you’re short on cash, which is the only reason I’d venture to propose such a thing. I was stunned.
When he had calmed down, still apologizing profusely, he asked me to understand that he was a timid homosexual (never mind my age, Juanito!) and that he was out of practice in the art of hooking up, always difficult even when it wasn’t downright mysterious. You must think I’m an ass, and rightly so, he said. Then he confessed that it had been at least five years since he’d slept with anyone. Before I left, he insisted on giving me the Porrúa edition of the complete works of Sophocles and Aeschylus to make up for bothering me. I told him that I hadn’t been bothered at all, but it
would have seemed rude not to accept his gift. Life is shit.
How much did you spend? I said. That doesn’t matter, papacito. You’re the only thing that matters.
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
“I’m impossible to live with,” I said. “You are who you are and you have a cock that’s worth its weight in gold,” said Brígida.
“That you’re going to die young, Juan, and that you’re going to do Rosario wrong.”
the window of a shoe store on Madero reflected back a mirror image of my inner vision of myself: someone tall, with pleasant features, neither gawky nor sickeningly shy, striding along followed by a smaller, stockier person in pursuit of his true love—or whatever else came his way!
It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear.
as if I were beyond jealousy now (which if true would be amazing, since jealousy does no one any good).
That afternoon I showered. My body was covered in bruises but I didn’t know who’d given them to me, whether it was Rosario or Lupe. In any case it hadn’t been María, and strangely enough that hurt, although the pain was far from unbearable, as it had been when I first met her. On my chest, just under my left nipple, I have a bruise the size of a plum. On my collarbone there are scratches like tiny comet trails. I discovered some marks on my shoulders too.
I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I’d always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. They’re shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala’s window. It’s firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the
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strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn’t. And when we realized it wasn’t a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.
The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.
I was an expert in young poets and something was off here, something was missing: the camaraderie, the strong sense of shared ideals, the frankness that always prevails at any gathering of Latin American poets.
Mexico City, as we all know, is a small town of fourteen million.
He told an amazing story too, about the poem by Rimbaud. According to him, “Le Coeur Volé” was an autobiographical text describing a trip Rimbaud took from Charleville to Paris to join the Commune. As he was traveling (on foot!), Rimbaud ran into a group of drunken soldiers on the road who first taunted him, then proceeded to rape him. Frankly, it was a pretty crude story.
with nothing like the talent of those two outstanding novelists, in fact with nothing at all, no money to pay for the coffee we drank (I had to pay), no arguments of substance, no original ideas. Two lost souls, two empty vessels.
Then I said that he shouldn’t bring it to my house, that my mother might be frightened if she saw him. It was the only joke I made. But they took me seriously (not a smile) and said they would send it by mail. I’m still waiting.
I really don’t know what I was doing wrong. When Belano heard what had happened at Priapo’s, he said that we weren’t thugs or pimps, but all I’d done was express my sensuality. In my defense I could only stutter (sarcastically, and not even looking him in the eye) that I was a freak of nature.
Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding, least cultured, most desperate ones? It’s a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven’t found an answer.
The rest of the details I’d rather not disclose; I’m still a romantic. A few hours later, as we were lying in the dark, I asked him who had given him the name Luscious Skin, so suggestive, so fitting. It’s my name, he said. Well yes, I said, all right, it’s your name, but who gave it to you? I want to know everything about you. It was the tyrannical, slightly stupid kind of thing you say after you’ve made love.
The question burst from me as if of its own accord: have you slept with María? His reply (my God, what a sad, beautiful profile Luscious Skin had) was devastating. He said: I’ve slept with every poet in Mexico. What I should have done then was either be quiet or hold him, and yet I did neither, but kept asking him questions, and each question was worse than the one before and I lost a little ground with each one. At five in the morning we went our separate ways. I caught a cab on Insurgentes, and he walked off north.
I knew all her lovers. I heard them moan at night less than fifteen feet from my bed, and I could tell them apart by the sounds they made, by the way they came, quietly or noisily, by the things they said to my sister.
Anyway, they didn’t hang around our house anymore. I heard that Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima had disappeared up north; my father and mother discussed it once. My mother laughed. I remember she said: they’ll show up someday. My father seemed worried. María was worried too. Not me. By then the only friend I had left from the group was Ernesto San Epifanio.
All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.
Even Belano and Ulises Lima, who were obviously asexual and secretly got it on together (you know, I’ll suck you, you suck me, just for a minute and then we’ll stop),
what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.
But one night, I remember it clearly, it was Arturo Belano who tried to come on to Xóchitl, and that really did make me sad. I knew she wasn’t going to sleep with anyone, but their attitude bothered me. It was basically as if they’d written me off because of the way I looked. It was as if they thought: this girl can’t like that poor loser with the missing teeth. As if teeth have anything to do with love. But it was different with Arturo Belano. It amused Xóchitl to be courted, but this time it was different, it was much more than a diversion for her.
But now comes the strange part: after that night, the night Belano was all over Xóchitl on that lonely nocturnal journey (the only thing he didn’t do was kiss her on the mouth), no one ever bothered her again. Absolutely nobody. As if the bastards had seen themselves reflected in their fucking leader and they didn’t like what they saw.
when the whole civilized world disappears Mexico will keep existing, when the planet vaporizes or disintegrates, Mexico will still be Mexico)
Auxilio Lacouture, Faculty of Literature, UNAM, Mexico City DF, December 1976.
And so when we met (purely by chance, because we didn’t see the same people anymore), he would say how are you Auxilio, or he’d shout help, help! help!! from the sidewalk on Avenida Bucareli, jumping around like a monkey with a taco or a piece of pizza in his hand, always with that Laura Jáuregui, who was gorgeous, though her heart was blacker than a black widow’s heart, and Ulises Lima, and that other little Chilean, Felipe Müller, and sometimes I would even bring myself to join his group, but they spoke in glíglico, like in Hopscotch, you could tell they liked me, you could tell they knew
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I came to suspect he was a queer. He might have been. He was married (to a Mexican, incidentally), but you never know. What kind of queer? A platonic, starry-eyed queer who got his kicks, shall we say, on a purely literary level? Or did he have a Mr. Right among the poets he published in the magazine? I don’t know. To each his own. I don’t have anything against queers. There are more of them every day, though. In the forties, the number of queers in Mexican literature was at an all-time high, and I thought that was as far as things could go. But today there are more of them than ever. I
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What was he like as a person? He was laid-back, calm, somewhat distant but not cold. Actually, he could be very warm, unlike Arturo, who was intense and sometimes seemed to hate everybody. Not Ulises. He was respectful. Ironic but respectful. He accepted people for what they were and never seemed to be trying to invade your privacy, which was often not the case with Latin Americans, in my experience.