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What kind of threat is a shadow on the floor?
he headed straight for my chambre, where I was sitting alone on the bed, staring at the wall, and he came in (he was clean, he smelled good) and stood there next to me, not saying anything, all he said was hello, Sofía, and he stayed there until I stopped crying. And that’s why I remember him fondly.
A little while later I moved to 25 Cowley Road, Oxford, and I wrote the night watchman several letters. I told him all about everything: how I felt, what the doctor had said, how I wore glasses now, how as soon as I had made some money I was planning to come to Barcelona to visit him, that I loved him. I must have sent six or seven letters in a relatively short period of time. Then term started, I met someone else, and I stopped thinking about him.
he smiled but his eyes were still sad, as if he were seeing everything from the vantage point of a great sorrow.
Luscious Skin, that noble savage.)
Sometimes I was the one who would talk on and on, telling stories, true stories, although they went barely skin-deep, about the sophisticated Mexico City life (a way of forgetting that we lived in Mexico) that I was getting to know back then, the parties, the drugs I took, the men I slept with, and other times he was the one who would talk, reading stories to me that he’d cut out of the paper that day (a new hobby, probably suggested by the therapists who were treating him, who knows), telling me what he’d had to eat, the people who’d come to visit, something his mother had said that he’d
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I never saw Ernesto again. One night he called me and recited a poem by Richard Belfer. One night I called him, from Los Angeles, and told him that I was sleeping with the theater director Francisco Segura, aka La Vieja Segura, who was at least twenty years older than me. How exciting, said Ernesto. La Vieja must be an intelligent man. He’s talented, not intelligent, I said. What’s the difference? he said. I sat there thinking how to answer and he waited for me to speak and for a few seconds neither of us said anything. I wish I could be with you, I told him before I said goodbye. Me too, said
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Before I left the cemetery, two teenagers came up to me and tried to lead me somewhere. I thought they were going to rape me. Only then did I feel rage and pain at Ernesto’s death. I pulled a switchblade out of my purse and said: I’ll kill you, you little creeps. They went running and I chased them for a while down two or three cemetery streets.
Ulises told us about his adventures and we all laughed, or rather he told Claudia about his adventures, but in such a charming way, in spite of how sad everything he was telling us really was, that we all laughed, which is the best you can do at times like that.
You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it. A drunk I met the other day on my way out of the bar La Mala Senda told me so. Literature is crap.
And when she left I began to think about Álvaro Damián and the Laura Damián prize, which was finished, and the madmen of El Reposo, where no one has a place to lay his head, and about the month of April, not so much cruel as disastrous, and that’s when I knew beyond a doubt that everything was about to go from bad to worse.
When my friends left, the math teacher called them parasites, saying that they were the kind of element that paralyzes society and keeps a country from ever making any progress. I said that I was just like them and he replied that it wasn’t true, that I studied and worked whereas they didn’t do anything. They’re poets, I argued. The math teacher looked me in the eyes and repeated the word poet several times. Lazy slobs is what they are, he said, and bad parents. Who goes out to eat and leaves their child alone at home? That night, as we were making love, I thought about little Franz sleeping
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No, it’s from outside, said Requena. I went over to the window and looked up toward my room. The light was off. Then I felt Requena’s hands on my waist and I didn’t move. He didn’t move either. After a while he pulled down my pants and I felt his penis between my buttocks. We didn’t say anything to each other. When we were done we sat down at the table again and lit cigarettes. Will you tell Xóchitl? said Requena. Do you want me to tell her? I said. I’d rather you didn’t, he said. I left at two in the morning and Xóchitl still hadn’t come home.
That night Requena and I made love again, for a long time, from the moment the boy fell asleep until three in the morning, approximately, and for a moment I thought that he was the one I loved, not the stupid math teacher.
Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets either. They sold drugs. Marijuana, mostly, although they also had a stock of shrooms in glass jars, little baby-food jars,
I put myself in her shoes, I’m a mother, and if someday some bastard kills Franz (God forbid), then I’m not going to be thinking that the great Mexican (or Latin American) poet is dead, I’m going to be writhing in pain and anguish and I won’t be having the first thought about literature, I can promise you that, because I’m a mother and I know about sleepless nights and the fears and worries that come with having a brat of your own.
Anytime somebody touches a mother’s child she turns into a lioness. At least that’s what Xóchitl says.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have started to laugh right there, but when Luscious Skin told me that the person who’d started the rumor was a madman, a shiver ran up my spine. And I felt pity too, and I knew I was in love.
That night, as we ate dinner, I suggested that he stay with me for a few days. That’s what I was planning to do, said Luscious Skin, but I wanted you to be the one who asked. A little later he brought over a suitcase with all his belongings in it. He had nothing: two shirts, a serape that he’d stolen from a musician, some socks, a portable radio, a notebook he used to keep a kind of diary, and not much else. So I gave him an old pair of pants that were maybe a little tight on him but that he loved, plus three new shirts that my mother had just bought me, and one night, on my way home from
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One night he told me that the first time he had sex he was ten years old. I didn’t want him to tell me anything else. I remember looking away, at a Pérez Camarga print hanging on the wall, and I prayed that his first time had been with a teenager, or a kid, and that he hadn’t been raped.
sometimes I can’t help thinking that poets and politicians, especially in Mexico, are one and the same, or at least I’d say that they drink from the same trough.
And then I started to think again about Stridentopolis, about its museums and bars, its open-air theaters and newspapers, its schools and its dormitories for traveling poets, dormitories where Borges and Tristan Tzara, Huidobro and André Breton would sleep. And I saw mi general talking to us again. I saw him making plans, I saw him drinking, standing at the window, I saw him receiving Cesárea Tinajero, who had come in with a letter of recommendation from Manuel, I saw him reading a little book by Tablada, maybe the one where Don José Juan says: “Under fearful skies / keening for the only star
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psychiatric hospital
Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.
We had no friends in Silverado, except for a Jewish couple in their eighties whom my mother met at the supermarket, or so she told me, and whom we saw every three or four days, just for a few minutes and always at their house. According to my mother, it was our duty to visit them, because old people could have an accident or one of them might die all of a sudden and the other one might not know what to do, something I doubted since the old people had been in a German concentration camp during World War II and were hardly unacquainted with death.
standing there like a pillar of salt,
Then I started to work at a publishing house, the Fondo de Cultura Economica, in the English Philosophy division, and my work life was finally settled.
Then she dies and her lawyers and scientists weep bitterly for her.
realized what Arturo Belano had known from the moment he saw me: I was a terrible poet.
the diagnosis was that I had only a few days left to live. Qui fodit foveam, incidet in eam.
So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What’s more, it’s a Galician joke. Maybe you’ve heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who’re walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly
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And then Norman looked at me and I swear he had the same expression on his face that he used to have when he was sixteen or fifteen, the expression he had when we met in high school, when he was much thinner, with his bird face, his longer hair, his brighter eyes, and he had a smile that made you love him instantly, a smile that said here today, gone tomorrow. And that was when the truck came barreling toward us and Norman swerved to miss it and we went flying. Norman went flying, I went flying, glass went flying. And we all ended up where we ended up.
I realized that Norman seemed to be in Mexican heaven, not Jewish heaven, let alone philosophy heaven or Marxist heaven. But what was goddamned Mexican heaven? A pretense of happiness? or what lay behind it? empty gestures? or what was hidden (for reasons of survival) behind them?
Then she talked about drugs, probably the only subject she thought worth discussing, and I asked her whether Ulises Lima used to get high. At first he didn’t, she said, he only sold, but while he was with me he started. I asked her whether he wrote. She didn’t hear me or maybe she didn’t want to answer. I asked her if she knew where to find Ulises. She had no idea. He might be dead, she said.
Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.
Later, inevitably, I came to my senses and realized that it was all wrong. You can’t love someone who doesn’t love you, you can’t be with someone just for the sex.
conversations in bed do oscillate between the cryptic and the transparent.
I try to hold on to my friends. I try to be pleasant and sociable, I try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. Life does a fine job on its own.
I made him some chamomile tea and didn’t say anything, which is the right thing to do, I think, when there’s a story to be told, sad or happy.
Nothing, I’m just going to be the punching bag, said Arturo. For a while we sat there without saying anything, thinking, as the elevator went up and down and the noise it made was like the sound of all the years we hadn’t seen each other. I’m going to challenge him to a duel, said Arturo at last. Do you want to be my second? That’s what he said. I felt as if someone had given me a shot in the arm. First the pinprick, then the liquid going not into my veins but my muscles, an icy liquid that made me shiver.
life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing. My answer was yes and immediately afterward I thought that maybe in the hereafter Nude Descending a Staircase or The Large Glass really does exist or will exist.
Little by little, various questions began to come to mind, but I decided that it wasn’t the moment to be sensible.
Arturo pulled out a plane ticket and showed it to us. I thought it would be to Chile or Mexico and that Arturo was, in some sense, bidding farewell to Catalonia and Europe. But the ticket was for a flight to Dar es Salaam with stopovers in Rome and Cairo. Then I realized that my friend had gone completely insane and that if the critic Echevarne didn’t kill him with a whack on the head he would be eaten by the black or red ants of Africa.
The passions Baca had unleashed couldn’t be so powerful that authors were taking justice into their own hands now, and in such a melodramatic way.