When I opened them the circle of madmen who roved the courtyards of La Fortaleza had closed around me. Anyone else would have shouted in terror, begun wailing prayers, torn off all his clothes, and started to run like an American football player gone mad, withering under the gaze of the myriad eyes spinning like unmoored planets. But not me. The madmen circled around me and I kept as quiet as Rodin's thinker and watched them, and then I looked at the ground and I saw red ants and black ants locked in combat and I didn't say or do anything. The sky was very blue. The earth was light brown, with little stones and clumps of dirt. The clouds were white and drifting westward. Then I looked at the madmen who were stumbling here and there like pawns of an even madder fate, and I closed my eyes again.
Xóchitl García, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, January 1986. The funny thing was when I tried to publish. For a long time I wrote and revised and rewrote and threw lots of poems away, but there came a day when I was ready to publish and I started to send my poems to magazines and cultural supplements. María warned me. They aren't going to answer, she said, they aren't even going to read your work. You should go in person and ask for a response face-to-face. So that's what I did. At some places they wouldn't see me. But at other places they would, and I got to talk to the deputy editor or the head of the books section. They would ask me things about my life, what I read, what I'd published so far, what workshops I'd been in, what college classes I'd taken. I was naïve: I told them about my dealings with the visceral realists. Most of the people I talked to didn't have any idea who the visceral realists were, but the mention of the group piqued their interest. The visceral realists? Who were they? Then I would explain, more or less, the brief history of visceral realism and they would smile. A few of them scrawled down a name or some other note. A few asked for further explanations, and then they'd thank me and say they'd call or that I should come by in two weeks and they would let me know. Others, the minority, remembered Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but only vaguely. For example, they didn't know that Ulises was alive and that Belano didn't live in Mexico City anymore, but they had known them, they remembered the scenes Ulises and Arturo used to make, hassling the poets at readings, they remembered the way they were against everything, they remembered their friendship with Efraín Huerta, and they looked at me as if I were an alien, and they said, so you were a visceral realist, were you? and then they would say they were sorry, but they couldn't publish a single one of my poems. According to María, when I turned to her in growing disappointment, this was normal. Mexican literature, probably more than any other Latin American literature, was like that, a strict sect. Forgiveness was hard to come by. But I'm not asking to be forgiven for anything, I'd say. I know, she'd say, but if you want to publish you'd better never mention the visceral realists again.
Still, I didn't give up. I was tired of working at Gigante and I thought my poetry deserved a little attention at least, if not respect. As time went by I discovered other magazines, not the ones I'd have wanted to publish in, but different ones, the inevitable magazines that spring up in a city of sixteen million. The publishers or editors were terrible men and women, people who had crept out of the sewers, you could tell just by looking, a mix of ousted officials and repentant killers. But they had never heard of visceral realism and had no interest at all in being told the story. Their notion of literature ended (and probably began) with Vasconcelos, although it was easy to guess the admiration they felt for Mariano Azuela, Yáñez, Martín Luis Guzmán, authors they probably knew only by reputation. One of these magazines was called Tamal, and its editor was a man named Fernando López Tapia. It was there that I published my first poem, in the two-page arts section, and López Tapia personally handed me the check for the amount I'd made. That night, after I cashed it, María, Franz, and I celebrated by going to the movies and then eating at a restaurant downtown. I was tired of cheap meals and I wanted to give myself a treat. From then on I stopped writing poems, at least I stopped writing as many as before, and I started to write articles, stories about Mexico City, pieces about gardens that very few people knew existed anymore, items about colonial houses, reports on specific subway lines, and everything or almost everything I wrote was published. Fernando López Tapia fit me into the magazine wherever he could, and on Saturdays, instead of going with Franz to Chapultepec, I would take him to the magazine's offices and while he banged on a typewriter I would help Tamal's few staff members put together the next issue, which was always a problem, since we had a hard time getting the magazine out on schedule.