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Auxilio Lacouture, Faculty of Literature, UNAM, Mexico City DF, December 1976. I'm the mother of Mexican poetry. I know all the poets and all the poets know me. I met Arturo Belano when he was sixteen years old and he was a shy boy who didn't know how to drink. I'm Uruguayan, from Montevideo, but one day I came to Mexico without knowing exactly why, or what for, or how, or when. I came to Mexico City, Distrito Federal, in 1967, or maybe it was 1965 or 1962. I can't keep track of the dates or my travels anymore; all I know is that I came to Mexico and I never left again. When I came to Mexico, León Felipe (what a colossus, what a force of nature) was still alive, and León Felipe died in 1968. When I came to Mexico, Pedro Garfias (what a great man, what a melancholy man) was still alive, and Don Pedro died in 1967, which means that I must have gotten here before 1967. So let's say I came to Mexico in 1965. I think it must have been 1965, though I may be wrong, and every day I'd go to see those universal Spaniards. I spent hours with them, as passionately devoted as a poetess and an English nurse and a little sister keeping tireless watch over her older brothers. And they would say to me in that odd Spanish accent of theirs, the way it circles around the z and the c and leaves the s more orphaned and libidinous than ever: Auxilio, stop fussing around the apartment, Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman. Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand. And I would say to them: Don Pedro, León (isn't that funny! I used tú with the older one, the more venerable one, and yet the younger one intimidated me in some way and I couldn't drop the usted!), let me take care of this, you go about your business, keep writing, relax, and pretend I'm the invisible woman. And they would laugh. Or actually, León Felipe would laugh, although to be honest you could never be quite sure if he was laughing or clearing his throat or cursing, and Don Pedro wouldn't laugh (Pedrito Garfias, what a melancholy man), he wouldn't laugh, he would just look at me with his eyes like lakes at sunset, those lakes in the mountains that no one visits, those sad, peaceful lakes, so peaceful they seem otherworldly, and he would say don't trouble yourself, Auxilio, or thank you, Auxilio. And that was all. What a lovely man. So I would go see them, as I was saying, faithfully and without fail, not bothering them with my own poems and trying to be useful, but I did other things too. I worked. I tried to work. Because it's easy to live in Mexico City, as everybody knows or thinks they know or imagines, but it's only easy if you have money or a scholarship or a job, and I didn't have anything. The long trip to
la región más transparente had drained me of many things, among them the energy to work at just any old job. So what I did was make the rounds of the university, specifically the Faculty of Literature, doing what you might call volunteer work: one day I might help to type Professor García Liscano's lectures, another day I'd translate some French texts in the French department, another day I'd cling like a limpet to a group that was putting on a play. I'd spend eight hours, without exaggeration, watching the rehearsals, going to pick up sandwiches, trying my hand at the lights. Sometimes I'd land a paying job: a professor would pay me out of his own salary to act as his assistant, say, or the department heads would arrange for themselves or the faculty to hire me for two weeks or a month to perform some vague task or another, mostly nonexistent, or the secretaries (they were such nice girls) would get their bosses to give me little jobs so I could make a couple of pesos. This was during the day. By night I led a bohemian life with my friends, which was extremely fulfilling and actually convenient because by then money was scarce and sometimes I didn't even have enough to pay for a furnished room. But usually I did. I don't want to exaggerate. I had money to live on. I was happy. During the day I lived at the faculty, like a little ant or actually more like a cicada, running back and forth from one cubicle to another, up on all the gossip, all the cheating and divorces, all the plans and projects, and at night I spread my wings, I turned into a bat, I left the faculty and wandered the DF like an imp (I'd like to say like a fairy, but it wouldn't be true) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew every group) and advised the young poets who were already coming to me, although not as often as later on, and I lived, to make a long story short, in my time, I lived in the time I'd chosen and that surrounded me, aquiver, in flux, brimming over, happy. And then I hit 1968. Or 1968 hit me. Now I can say that I felt it coming, that I smelled it in bars, in February or March of'68 but before '68 really became '68. Oh, it makes me laugh to remember it. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw everything and at the same time I saw nothing. Does that make sense? I was at the faculty when the army violated the university's autonomy and came on campus to arrest or kill everybody. No. There weren't many deaths at the university. That was Tlatelolco. May the name be forever etched on our memory! But I was at the faculty when the army and the riot police came in and carted everybody off. It was the most incredible thing. I was in the bathroom, in the bathroom on one of the floors in the building, I think it was the fourth floor, though I can't say for sure. And I was sitting on the toilet, with my skirt hitched up, as the poem or the song goes, reading the exquisite poetry of Pedro Garfias, who had been dead for a year, Don Pedro, such a melancholy man, grieving for Spain and the rest of the world-who could've imagined that I would be reading in the bathroom at the very moment the filthy riot police entered the university? May I digress for a moment? I think that life is full of marvelous and mysterious things. And in fact, thanks to Pedro Garfias, to Pedro Garfias's poems and my long-standing habit of reading in the bathroom, I was the last to learn that the riot police had come in, that the army had come in, and that they were hauling away everyone they could find. Let's say I heard a noise. A rumble in my soul! And let's say that then the noise got louder and louder and by then I was paying attention to what was going on. I heard someone pull the chain in the next stall, I heard the door slam, heard footsteps in the hall, heard the clamor rising from the lawn, from the neatly cut grass that frames the faculty like a green sea wreathing an island, an island where there's always time for whispered confidences and love. And then the bubble of Pedro Garfias's poetry went pop and I closed the book and got up, pulled the chain, opened the door, said something out loud.