It didn't take me long to realize that Elena was very much in love with Paolo. What will you do when he finally goes to Cuba? I asked her one day. I don't know, she said, looking like a lonely little Mexican girl, and in that face I thought I saw a gleam or a pang that I had seen before, and I knew it wasn't a sign of good things to come. Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better. But better can sometimes mean worse, if you're a woman, if you live on this continent, hit upon unhappily by the Spaniards, inopportunely populated by Asians gone astray.
That's what I thought, shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of Philosophy and Literature in September 1968. I thought about those Asians crossing the Bering Strait, I thought about the solitude of America, I thought about how strange it is to emigrate eastward rather than westward. I may be silly and I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but in these troubled times no one will deny that to migrate eastward is like migrating into the depths of the night. That's what I thought, sitting on the floor, with my back against the wall, gazing absently at the spots on the ceiling. Eastward. To where night comes from. But then I thought: It's also where the sun comes from. It all depends on when the pilgrims set out on their march. And then I struck my forehead (or tapped it, because I didn't have much strength after so many days without food) and I saw Elena walking down an empty street in Colonia Roma, I saw Elena walking eastward, toward the depths of the night, on her own, well dressed, limping; I saw her and I called out, Elena! But no sound at all came out of my mouth.
And Elena turned to me and said she didn't know what she was going to do. Maybe go to Italy. Maybe wait until he comes back to Mexico. I don't know, she said to me with a smile, but I knew that she knew very well what she was going to do and that she was already resigned to it. As for the Italian, he was happy to let her love him and show him around Mexico City. I can't remember all the places we went together: la Villa, Coyoacán, Tlatelolco (that time I didn't go, it was just him and Elena), the slopes of Popocatepetl, Teotihuacán, and everywhere we went the Italian was happy and Elena was happy too, and so was I, because I've always enjoyed sightseeing and the company of happy people.
One day, at the Casa del Lago, we even ran into Arturito Belano. I introduced him to Elena and Paolo. I told them he was an eighteen-year-old Chilean poet. I explained that he wrote plays as well as poems. Paolo said, How interesting. Elena didn't say anything because, by this stage, she was only interested in her relationship with Paolo. We went to have coffee at a place called El Principio de Mexico in the Calle de Tokio (it shut down a while back). I don't know why I remember that afternoon. That afternoon of 1971 or 1972. And the strangest thing is that I remember it prospectively, from 1968. From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are.
And I remember that Arturito and the Italian talked about theater, Latin American theater, and Elena ordered a cappuccino and was rather quiet, and I started looking at the walls and the floor of El Principio de Mexico, and immediately noticed something odd-I always pick up on things like this-a sort of noise, wind or breath, blowing up through the foundations of the café at irregular intervals. And so the minutes went by, with Arturito and Paolo talking about theater, Elena sitting quietly, and me turning my head from time to time, attentive to the receding sounds of what, by then, was undermining not only the Principio de Mexico but the whole city, as if I were being warned a few years in advance or a few centuries too late about the fate of Latin American theater, the double nature of silence, and the collective catastrophe of which improbable sounds are often harbingers.
Improbable sounds and clouds. And then Paolo stopped talking with Arturito and said that the visa for Cuba had arrived that morning. And that was it. The noises stopped. The pensive silence was broken. We forgot about Latin American theater, even Arturito, who wasn't generally quick to let a subject go, although the theater he preferred was not Latin American at all but that of Beckett and Jean Genet. And we started talking about Cuba and the interview that Paolo was going to have with Fidel Castro, and that was that. We said goodbye on Reforma. Arturo was the first to leave. Then Elena and her Italian went off. Which left me standing there, drinking in the breeze on the avenue as I watched them walk away. Elena's limp was more pronounced than usual. I thought about Elena. I breathed. I trembled. I watched her limp away with the Italian at her side. And suddenly I could see only her. The Italian began to disappear, becoming transparent; all the people walking along Reforma became transparent. All my aching eyes could make out was Elena, with her overcoat and her shoes. And then I thought: Resist, Elena. And then I thought: Catch up with her and give her a hug. But she was going off to live her last nights of love and I couldn't disturb her.
After that I went for a long time without news of Elena. No one knew anything. One of her friends said to me: Missing in action. Another said: Apparently she went to Puebla, to her parents' place. But I knew that Elena was in Mexico City. One day I went looking for her house and got lost again. Another day, at the university, I got hold of her address and took a taxi there, but no one came to the door. I went back to the poets, I went back to being a night owl and forgot about Elena. Sometimes I dreamed of her and saw her limping through the boundless campus of the UNAM. Sometimes I peered out of my window in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor and saw her approaching the faculty building amid a whirl of transparent forms. Sometimes I fell asleep on the tiled floor and heard her steps coming up the stairs, as if she were coming to rescue me, coming to say sorry for having taken so long. And I opened my mouth, half dead or half asleep, and said, Chido, Elena, quite uncharacteristically using that awful Mexican slang word for great. Chido, chido, chido. How awful. There's something masochistic about Mexican slang. Or sadomasochistic, sometimes.
Six
That's the way love is, my friends; I speak as the mother of all the poets. That's the way love is, and slang, and the streets, and sonnets. And the sky at five in morning. But friendship is something different. If you have friends you're never alone.
I was friends with León Felipe and Don Pedro Garfias, but also with the youngest poets, the kids who lived in a lonely world of love and slang.
Arturito Belano was one of them.
I met him, I was his friend, and he was my favorite young poet, although he wasn't Mexican, and the expressions "young poets" and "new generation" were generally used to refer to the young Mexicans who were trying to take over from Pacheco or the conspicuous Greek of Guanajuato or the chubby little guy who was working in the Ministry of the Interior while waiting for the Mexican government to appoint him ambassador or consul somewhere, or the Peasant Poets, those four, or three, or five (I forget) horsemen of the Nerudian apocalypse, but Arturo Belano, in spite of being the youngest of them all, for a time at least, wasn't Mexican and therefore didn't fall into the category of "young poets" or "new generation," terms that designated a formless but living mass intent on pulling the rug out from under their elders or undermining the fertile fields on which they were grazing like statues: Pacheco and the Greek of Guanajuato or Aguascalientes or Irapuato, and the chubby little guy who, with the passage of time, had become a greasy, fat, obsequious man (as poets are prone to do), and the Peasant Poets, who were more and more comfortably ensconced in the administrative and literary bureaucracy (but what am I saying: they were lodged there, bolted down, deeply rooted from the very start). And what the young poets or the new generation were trying to do was to make the ground shift, to topple and in due course destroy those statues, except for Pacheco, the only one who seemed to be a real writer, not a public servant. But deep down they were against Pacheco too. Deep down they couldn't allow themselves to make any exceptions. So when I said to them, But José Emilio is charming, he's so kind, so interesting, and he's a real gentleman too, the young poets of Mexico (including Arturito, although he wasn't really one of them) looked at me as if to say, What's she going on about, this crazy woman, this specter escaped from that infernal women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Now most people, faced with that kind of stare, would quail, but not me, I was their mother, after all, and backing down was something I simply didn't do.