How many lines of poetry did I know by heart? I started reciting, murmuring the lines I could remember, and I would have liked to write them down, but although I had a ball-point pen, I didn't have any paper. Then I thought: Silly, you have all the paper you need. So I ripped off squares of toilet paper and began to write. Then I fell asleep and dreamed, and this is really funny, I dreamed of Juana de Ibarbourou and her book La rosa de los vientos (The Compass Rose), published in 1930, and her first book too, Las lenguas de diamante (Diamond Tongues), such a pretty title, exquisite, it could be the title of an avant-garde book published last year in French, but Juana de America published it in 1919, at the age of twenty-seven. What a fascinating woman she must have been then, with the world at her feet and all those gentlemen gallantly prepared to do her bidding (they are all gone now, although Juana remains), all those modernist poets prepared to give their lives for poetry, so many glances and compliments, so much love.
Then I woke up. I thought: I am the memory.
That's what I thought. Then I went back to sleep. Then I woke up, and for hours, maybe days, I cried for times gone by, for my childhood in Montevideo, for faces that disturb me (even now, more than ever, in fact), faces of which I prefer not to speak.
Then I lost count of the days I'd spent shut up in there. From my little window I saw birds, segments of tree trunks or branches growing from somewhere invisible, shrubs, grass, clouds, walls, but I couldn't see people or hear noises, and I lost track of the time I had been shut up in there. Then, maybe remembering Charlie Chaplin, I ate toilet paper, but only a little, I couldn't stomach more. Then I realized that I was no longer hungry. Then I picked up all the pieces of toilet paper on which I had written, threw them in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water gave me a start, and I thought I was finished.
I thought, In spite of all my cunning and self-sacrifice, I'm finished. I thought, How poetic, to destroy my writings like that. I thought, It would have been better to swallow them, now I'm finished. I thought, The vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because I destroyed what I had written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke up again.
My whole body was stiff. I moved slowly across the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, combed my hair, washed my face. My face looked terrible! Like it does now, to give you some idea.
Then I heard voices. I don't think I'd heard any sound at all for a long time. I felt like Robinson Crusoe when he finds the footprint in the sand. But my footprint was a voice and a door slamming, my footprint was an avalanche of pebbles or marbles suddenly hurtling down the corridor. Then Lupita, Professor Fombona's secretary, opened the door and we stood there staring at each other, gaping, speechless. I think it was the emotional shock that made me pass out.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in Professor Rius's office (what a brave, handsome man he was, and is), among friends and familiar faces, university people, not soldiers, which was so wonderful that I began to cry, and couldn't tell my story coherently, although the professor kept enjoining me to do so, appalled by what I had endured, but equally grateful for it, I think.
And that is all, my friends. The legend was borne on the winds of Mexico City, the winds of 1968; it went among the dead and the survivors, and now everyone knows that when the university was occupied in that beautiful, ill-fated year, a woman remained on the campus. I went on living (although something-what I had seen-was missing), and often I would hear my story told by others, who said that the woman who had gone without food for thirteen days, shut up in the bathroom, was a medical student, or a secretary from the administration building, not an illegal alien from Uruguay, with no job and no place of her own to lay her head. Sometimes it wasn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal problems. And when I heard those stories, those versions of my story, usually (if I wasn't drunk) I held my peace. And if I was drunk, I played the whole thing down. What does it matter, I would say, that's just university folklore, another of Mexico 's City's urban legends, and they would look at me (but who were they?) and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I would say (or shout, if I was drunk), No, I'm nobody's mother, but I did know them all, all the young poets, whether they were natives of Mexico City, or came from the provinces, or other parts of Latin America and washed up here, and I loved them all.
Then they would look at me in silence.
And I would allow a judicious period to elapse before letting my gaze return to them, pretending not to understand and wondering why they weren't saying anything. And although I tried to look elsewhere, at the traffic passing in the street, the leisurely movement of the waitresses, or the smoke emerging from somewhere behind the bar, it was them I really wanted to watch, sitting there steeped in an endless silence, and it struck me as unnatural that they should be quiet for so long.
And at that point the anxiety returned, along with the wild speculation, the sleepiness, and the cold that lacerates your extremities before numbing them. But I didn't stop moving. I moved my arms and legs. I breathed. I oxygenated my blood. If I don't want to die, I'm not going to die, I told myself. So I moved, and at the same time, although there were no eagles to be seen, I had an eagle's eye view of my body moving through snowy passes, drifts and endless white esplanades like the back of a fossilized Moby Dick. Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured.
I endured, and one afternoon I left the immense regions of snow behind and saw a valley before me. I sat down and surveyed it. It was vast. It was like the background of some Renaissance painting, blown up enormously. The air was cold on my face, but not biting. I stopped on the slope above the valley and sat down. I was tired. I wanted to catch my breath. I didn't know what would become of me. Maybe, I speculated, someone would find me a job at the university. I breathed. The air tasted good. The light was fading. The sun was setting far away, over other valleys, each one unique, and smaller perhaps than the vast valley I had discovered. There was still a reasonable ambient brightness. As soon as I've regained some strength, I'll begin the descent, I thought, and before night falls I'll be in the valley.
I stood up. My legs trembled. I sat down again. There was a patch of snow a few yards from where I was. I went over to it and washed my face. I sat down again. A little farther down the slope was a tree. I saw a sparrow on one of its branches. Then there was a green streak in the air. I saw a quetzal. I saw a sparrow and a quetzal. The two birds perched on the same branch. My parted lips whispered, The same branch. I heard my voice. Only then was I aware of the enormous silence hanging over the valley.
I stood up and approached the tree. Carefully, because I didn't want to frighten the birds. From there, the view was better. But I had to walk gingerly, looking down, because there were loose stones and the chances of slipping and falling were high. When I reached the tree, the birds had flown away. Then I saw that at its far end, to the west, the valley opened into a bottomless abyss.