Ah, it makes me laugh to think about it now. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw it all and yet I didn't see a thing. Am I making any sense? I am the mother of all the poets, and I (or my destiny) refused to let the nightmare overcome me. Now the tears are running down my ravaged cheeks. I was at the university on the eighteenth of September when the army occupied the campus and went around arresting and killing indiscriminately. No. Not many people were killed at the university. That was in Tlatelolco. May that name live forever in our memory! But I was at the university when the army and the riot police came in and rounded everyone up. Unbelievable. I was in the bathroom, in the lavatory on one of the floors of the faculty building, the fourth maybe, I'm not exactly sure. And I was sitting in a stall, with my skirt hitched up, as the poem says, or the song, reading the exquisite poetry of Pedro Garfias, who had already been dead for a year (Don Pedro Garfias, such a melancholy man, so sad about Spain and the world in general). Who could have imagined that I would be reading in the bathroom just when the damned riot police came into the university? Now I believe, if you'll excuse a brief digression, that life is full of enigmas, minimal events that, at the slightest touch or glance, set off chains of consequences, which, viewed through the prism of time, invariably inspire astonishment or fear. The fact is that thanks to Pedro Garfias, thanks to the poems of Pedro Garfias and my inveterate habit of reading in the bathroom, I was the last to realize that the riot police were on campus and that the army had occupied the university, and so, while my eyes were scanning verses penned by that Spaniard who had died in exile, the soldiers and riot police were arresting and searching and beating up whoever they could lay their hands on, irrespective of sex or age, marital status or professional credentials acquired one way or another in the intricate, hierarchical world of the academy.
Let's just say I heard a noise.
A noise in my soul!
And let's say the noise grew steadily louder and soon I was alert to what was happening; I heard someone pull the chain in the next stall, I heard a door slamming, footsteps in a corridor, and a roar coming up from the gardens, from that carefully tended lawn that encompasses the faculty like a green sea lapping around an island ever propitious to the sharing of secrets and love. And then the bubble of Pedro Garfias's poetry went pop and I shut the book and stood up; I pulled the chain, opened the door, said something out loud, I said, Hey, is anyone there? But I knew full well that no one was going to answer. Do you know the feeling, as if you were in a horror movie, not the sort that has stupid women characters, but a film in which the women are intelligent and brave, or there is at least one brave, intelligent woman who suddenly finds herself alone, who suddenly walks into an empty building or an abandoned house and calls out (because she doesn't know the place is empty) to check if anyone is there; she raises her voice and asks the question, although her tone leaves no doubt as to the answer, but she asks anyway. Why? Well, basically because she was brought up, like me, to be polite in all circumstances. She stands there quietly or perhaps takes a few steps and asks if anyone is there and of course no one replies. I felt like that woman, although I don't know if I realized it at the time or if I'm only realizing it now, and, like her, I took a few steps as if I were walking on an enormous expanse of ice. Then I washed my hands, looked at myself in the mirror, saw a tall thin figure with a face that was already showing a few wrinkles, too many, a female Don Quixote as Pedro Garfias called me, and then I went out into the corridor, and there I realized right away that something was going on: the corridor was empty, nothing but faded shades of cream, and up the stairwell came a sound of shouting, a petrifying, history-making sound.
What did I do then? What anyone would have done: I went to a window and looked down and saw the soldiers, then I went to another window and saw tanks, and then to another, the one at the end of the corridor (I bounded down that corridor like a woman raised from the dead) and there I saw trucks, and the riot police and some plainclothes cops bundling the students and professors they'd arrested into the trucks, like something from a movie about the Second World War crossed with one about the Mexican Revolution starring Maria Felix and Pedro Armendáriz, a scene fading to black, but with little phosphorescent figures, like the ones some people see when they go crazy or have a sudden panic attack. I saw a group of secretaries, and I thought I could recognize some of my friends among them (in fact I thought I could recognize them all!), coming out in single file, tidying their clothes, with their handbags in their hands or over their shoulders, and then I saw a group of professors also coming out in an orderly fashion, or at least as orderly as the situation allowed, I saw people with books in their hands, people with folders and typed pages spilling onto the ground, bending down to pick them up, and I saw people being dragged out of the faculty building or coming out covering their noses with white handkerchiefs, which were rapidly darkening with blood. And then I said to myself: You stay here, Auxilio. Don't let them take you prisoner, my girl. Stay here, Auxilio, you don't have to be in that movie; if they want to make you play a role, they can damn well come and find you.
And then I went back to the bathroom, and this is the really strange part, not only did I go back to the bathroom, I went back to the stall, the very same stall I was in before, and I sat down on the toilet again, I mean, with my skirt hitched up again and my underpants down, although I felt no pressing physiological need (this is precisely the sort of situation that loosens the bowels, so they say, but that certainly wasn't the case with me), and the book of poems by Pedro Garfias open again on my lap, and although I didn't feel like reading I began to read, slowly at first, word by word and verse by verse, but then my reading started to speed up and soon it sped out of control, the verses flying past so quickly I could hardly take anything in, the words were sticking to one another, or something, in any case the poetry of Pedro Garfias could not withstand that free-fall reading (some poets and poems can withstand any kind of reading, but they are rare exceptions; most can't), and that's how I was occupied when I heard a sound in the corridor. A sound of boots? A sound of hobnailed boots? But, Hey, I said to myself, that would be too much of a coincidence, don't you think? The sound of hobnailed boots! But, Hey, I said to myself, all I need now is for it to be cold and a beret to drop on my head, and then I heard a voice saying something like, All clear, Sir, and five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a bitch who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in.
Three
And I, poor creature that I was, heard something like the sound of the wind when it drops and rustles through paper flowers, I heard a flowering of air and water, and lifted my feet (quietly) like a Renoir ballerina, as if I were about to give birth (and in a sense, in effect, I was preparing to deliver something and to be delivered myself), with my underpants around my skinny ankles like a pair of handcuffs, hooked on my shoes (a pair of very comfortable yellow moccasins I had at the time). While I, a poor Uruguayan poet, but with a love or Mexico as deep as anyone's, waited for the soldier to search the cubicles one by one and prepared myself mentally and physically not to open the door, if it came to that, to defend the autonomy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico even in this last redoubt, a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions. And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spine, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.