The visceral realists weren't as badly behaved as we were afraid they might be, either. I hadn't met them before, only heard of them. Mexico City, as we all know, is a small town of fourteen million. And the impression they made on me was relatively positive. The one called Luscious Skin was trying to flirt with my sister, poor idiot. The other guy, Moctezuma Rodríguez (not Cuauhtémoc), was doing his best too. At some point during the night they even seemed to think they were getting somewhere. It was a sad sight, but there was something sort of sweet about it too.
As for Ulises Lima, he gives the impression of always being high and his French is decent. He told an amazing story too, about the poem by Rimbaud. According to him, "Le Coeur Volé" was an autobiographical text describing a trip Rimbaud took from Charleville to Paris to join the Commune. As he was traveling (on foot!), Rimbaud ran into a group of drunken soldiers on the road who first taunted him, then proceeded to rape him. Frankly, it was a pretty crude story.
But there was even more: according to Lima, some of the soldiers, or at least their leader, the caporal of mon coeur couvert de caporal, were veterans of the French invasion of Mexico. Of course, neither Luisito nor I asked him what evidence he had for that. But I was interested in the story (unlike Luisito, who was more interested in what was or wasn't going on around us) and I wanted to know more. Then Lima told me that in 1865 a column under Colonel Libbrecht, which was supposed to occupy Santa Teresa, in Sonora, stopped sending back reports, and that Colonel Eydoux, commander of the plaza that served as a supply depot for the troops operating in that part of northeastern Mexico, sent a detachment of thirty troops to Santa Teresa.
The detachment was under the command of Captain Laurent and lieutenants Rouffanche and González, the latter a Mexican monarchist. This detachment, according to Lima, reached a town called Villaviciosa, near Santa Teresa, on the second day's march, but never made contact with Libbrecht's column. All the men, except Lieutenant Rouffanche and three soldiers who died in the act, were taken prisoner while they ate at the only inn in town, among them the future caporal, then a twenty-two-year-old recruit. The prisoners, bound and gagged with hemp rope, were brought before the man acting as military boss of Villaviciosa and a group of town notables. The boss was a mestizo who answered indiscriminately to Inocencio and El Loco. The notables were old peasants, most of them barefoot, who gazed at the Frenchmen and then retired to confer in a corner. After half an hour and some hard bargaining between two clearly opposed groups, the Frenchmen were taken to a covered corral where their clothes and shoes were removed and a little while later a group of their captors spent the rest of the day raping and torturing them.
At midnight they slit Captain Laurent's throat. Lieutenant González, two sergeants, and seven soldiers were taken to the main street and bayoneted by torchlight by shadowy figures riding the soldiers' own horses.
At dawn, the future caporal and two other soldiers managed to break their bonds and flee cross-country. No one came after them, but only the caporal lived to tell the tale. After two weeks of wandering in the desert he reached El Tajo. He was decorated for bravery and remained in Mexico until 1867, when he returned to France with the army under Bazaine (or whoever was in command of the French at the time), which was retreating from Mexico, leaving the emperor to his fate.
Carlos Monsiváis, walking along Calle Madero, near Sanborn's, Mexico City DF, May 1976. No ambush, no violent incident, nothing like that. Two young men, who couldn't have been more than twenty-three, both of them with extremely long hair, longer than any other poet's (and I can testify to the length of everybody's hair), determined not to acknowledge that there could be anything good about Paz, childishly stubborn, I-don't-like-him-because-I-don't, perfectly willing to deny the obvious. In a moment of weakness (mental, I suppose), they reminded me of José Agustín, of Gustavo Sainz, but with nothing like the talent of those two outstanding novelists, in fact with nothing at all, no money to pay for the coffee we drank (I had to pay), no arguments of substance, no original ideas. Two lost souls, two empty vessels. As for myself, I think I was more than generous (coffee aside). At some point I even suggested to Ulises (I don't remember the other one's name, I think he was Argentinian or Chilean) that he should write a review of a book by Paz that we'd been discussing. If it's any good, I said to him, stressing the word good, I'll publish it. And he said yes, that he'd write it, that he'd bring it to my house. Then I said that he shouldn't bring it to my house, that my mother might be frightened if she saw him. It was the only joke I made. But they took me seriously (not a smile) and said they would send it by mail. I'm still waiting.
2
Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Ah, I said to them, Cesárea Tinajero, where did you hear about her, boys? Then one of them explained that they were writing a piece about the stridentists and that they'd interviewed Germán, Arqueles, and Maples Arce, and read all the magazines and books of the era, and that among all those names, the names of established figures and empty names that mean nothing anymore and aren't even an unpleasant memory, they'd found Cesárea's name. So? I said. They looked at me and smiled, both at the same time, damn them, as if they were interconnected, if that makes any sense. It struck us as odd, they said, she seemed to be the only woman, and there were lots of references to her, all saying that she was a fine poet. A fine poetess? I said, where did you read her work? We haven't read anything she wrote, they said, not anywhere, and that got us interested. Got you interested how, boys? Come now, explain what you mean. Everyone says either wonderful or terrible things about her, but no one published her. We've read González Pedreño's magazine Motor Humano, Maples Arce's directory of the avant garde, and Salvador Salazar's magazine, said the Chilean, and she doesn't show up anywhere except in Maples's directory. And yet Juan Grady, Ernesto Rubio, and Adalberto Escobar all mention her in separate interviews, and in very complimentary terms. At first we thought that she was a stridentist, a fellow traveler, said the Mexican, but Maples Arce told us she never belonged to his movement. Although it's possible that Maples's memory is failing him, added the Chilean. Which we obviously don't believe, said the Mexican. Well, he didn't remember her as a stridentist, but he did remember her as a poet, said the Chilean. Blasted boys. Blasted youth. Interconnected. A shiver ran through me. Although he didn't have a single poem by her in his extensive library to support his claim, said the Mexican. To sum it all up, Mr. Salvatierra, Amadeo, we've been asking around, we've talked to List Arzubide, Arqueles Vela, Hernández Miró, and the result is always more or less the same, everyone remembers her, said the Chilean, to a greater or lesser degree, but no one has anything by her that we can include in our study. And this study, boys, what is it exactly? Then I raised my hand and before they could answer I poured them more Los Suicidas mezcal and then I sat on the edge of the armchair and in my very backside I swear I felt as if I'd perched on the edge of a razor.
Perla Avilés, Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF, May 1976. I didn't have many friends in those days, but when I met him I didn't have a single friend. I'm talking about 1970, when the two of us were in school together at Porvenir. Not for long, really, which goes to show how relative memory is, like a language we think we know but we don't, that can stretch things or shrink them at will. That's what I used to tell him, but he hardly listened to me. Once I went home with him when he still lived near the school, and I met his sister. There was no one else there, just his sister, and we talked for a long time. Soon after that they moved, went to live in Colonia Nápoles, and he quit school for good. I used to say to him: don't you want to go to college? are you going to deny yourself the privilege of higher education? and he would laugh and tell me that in college he was sure he'd learn exactly what he'd learned in high schooclass="underline" nothing. But what are you going to do with your life? I'd say, what kind of work will you do? and he would answer that he had no idea and didn't care. One afternoon when I'd gone to see him at his house I asked him whether he did drugs. No, he said. Never? I said. And he said: I've smoked marijuana, but that was a long time ago. And nothing else? No, nothing else, he said, and then he started to laugh. He was laughing at me, but I didn't mind. In fact, I liked to see him laugh. Around that time he met a famous film and theater director. A fellow Chilean. Sometimes he would talk to me about him, telling me how he'd approached him at the door to the theater where one of the director's plays about Heracleitus or some other pre-Socratic philosopher was being performed, a loose adaptation of the philosopher's writings that caused quite a stir, Mexico being so straitlaced at the time, not because of anything in the play but because almost all the actors came onstage naked at some point. I was still in school at Porvenir, in the stench of Opus Dei, and I spent all my time studying and reading (I don't think I've ever read so much since), and my only entertainment, my greatest pleasure, was going to his house. I would visit him regularly, but not too often because I didn't want to be a bore or get in the way. I would come in the afternoon, or when it was already dark, and we would spend two or three hours talking, usually about literature, although he'd also tell me about his adventures with the director, it was clear he admired him greatly, I don't know whether he liked the theater, but he loved film, in fact now that I think about it, he didn't read very much back then, I was the one who talked about books, and I really did read a lot, literature, philosophy, political essays, but he didn't, he went to the movies and then every day or every third day, extremely often, really, he would go to the director's house, and once when I told him he had to read more, he said he'd already read everything that mattered to him. Such arrogance! Sometimes he would say things like that, I mean sometimes he was like a spoiled child, but I forgave him everything, whatever he did seemed fine to me. One day he told me that he'd fought with the director. I asked him why and he didn't want to tell me. Or rather, he said that it had to do with a difference in literary opinion and that was all. What I managed to get out of him was that the director had said that Neruda was shit and that Nicanor Parra was the greatest poet of the Spanish language. Something like that. Of course I could hardly believe that two people would fight about something so unimportant. Where I come from, he said, people fight about things like that all the time. Well, I said, in Mexico people kill each other for no good reason at all, but certainly not educated people. Oh, the ideas I had then about culture. A while later, I went to visit the director, armed with a little book by Empedocles. His wife ushered me in and shortly afterward the director in person came into the living room and we started to talk. The first thing he asked me was how I'd gotten his address. I said that my friend had given it to me. Oh, him, said the director, and right away he wanted to know how he was, what he was doing, why he never came to visit. I gave him the first answer that popped into my head, then we started to talk about other things. After that, I had two people to visit, the director and my friend, and suddenly I realized that my horizons were expanding imperceptibly and my life was being gradually enriched. Those were happy days. One afternoon, however, after the director asked about my friend again, he told me about their fight. The story he told me wasn't much different from what my friend had told me. The fight had been about Neruda and Parra, about the validity of their respective poetic visions, and yet there was a new element to the story that the director told (and I knew he was telling me the truth): when he fought with my friend and my friend couldn't come up with anything else to say in his desperate defense of Neruda, he started to cry. Right there in the director's living room, like a ten-year-old, without trying to hide it, although he was seventeen and had been for a while. According to the director, it was the tears that had come between them, that were keeping my friend away, since he must be ashamed (according to the director) of his reaction to what was otherwise a completely trivial and circumstantial disagreement. Tell him to come visit me, the director said that afternoon when I left his house. I spent the next two days thinking about what he'd said and about the kind of person my friend was and the reasons he might have had for not telling me the full story. When I went to see him I found him in bed. He had a fever and he was reading a book on the Templars, the mystery of the Gothic cathedrals, that kind of thing, I really don't know how he could read such trash, although to be honest it wasn't the first time I'd surprised him with books like that, sometimes it was thrillers, other times junk science, anyway, the only good thing about the books he read was that he never tried to get me to read them too, whereas whenever I read a good book, I immediately passed it on to him and sometimes I waited whole weeks for him to finish reading it so we could discuss it. He was in bed, he was reading the Templars book, and the minute I stepped into his room I started to shake. For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. I could've sat there like that for the rest of the day, for the rest of my life. But I spoke. I told him about my latest visit to the director's house, I relayed the director's message, that he should go see him, that he was expected, and he said: then he'd better wait sitting down because I'm not going back. Then he started to pick up his Templars book again. I argued that just because Neruda's poetry was good it didn't mean that Parra's couldn't be. I was stunned by his reply. He said: I don't give a shit about Neruda's poetry or Parra's poetry. So why the big argument, then, why the fight? I managed to ask, and he didn't answer. Then I made a mistake. I came a little closer, sitting down beside him on the bed, and I took a book out of my pocket, a book of poetry, and I read him a few lines. He listened in silence. It was a poem about Narcissus and a nearly endless forest inhabited by hermaphrodites. When I finished he didn't say anything. What do you think? I asked. I don't know, he said, what do you think? Then I told him that I thought poets were hermaphrodites and that they could only be understood by each other.