glíglico, like in Hopscotch, you could tell they liked me, you could tell they knew who I was, but they spoke in glíglico and that made it hard to follow the ins and outs and ups and downs of the conversation, which ultimately drove me off. Let no one think they laughed at me! They listened to me! But I didn't speak their glíglico and the poor kids were incapable of giving up their slang. Those poor abandoned kids. Because that was the situation: no one wanted them. Or no one took them seriously. Or sometimes a person got the impression that they took themselves too seriously. And one day someone said to me: Arturito Belano has left Mexico. And then: let's hope this time he doesn't come back. And that made me really angry because I had always loved him and I think I probably scolded the person who said it (mentally, at least), but first I had the presence of mind to ask where he'd gone. And whoever it was couldn't tell me: Australia, Europe, Canada, someplace like that. And then I started to think about him, and I started to think about his mother, who was so generous, and about his sister, about the afternoons we made empanadas at his house, and about the time I made noodles and we hung them all over the place so they would dry, in the kitchen, in the dining room, in the little living room they had on Calle Abraham González. I never forget anything. That's my trouble, they say. I'm the mother of all Mexican poets. I'm the only one who stuck it out at the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed at the faculty all alone, shut up in the bathroom, with nothing to eat for ten days, fifteen days, I don't remember anymore. There I was with a book by Pedro Garfias and my bag, dressed in a white shirt and a pleated blue skirt, and I had all the time in the world to think and think. But I couldn't think about Arturo Belano back then because I didn't know him yet. I said to myself: Auxilio Lacouture, stand your ground, if you come out they'll throw you in jail (and probably deport you to Montevideo, because naturally you never got your papers in order, you fool), they'll spit on you, they'll beat you. I prepared myself to resist. To resist against hunger and loneliness. I slept for the first few hours sitting on the toilet, the same toilet I'd been on when everything began, and that, vulnerable as I was, I believed brought me luck, but sleeping sitting on a toilet stool is extremely uncomfortable and I ended up huddled on the tiles. I had dreams. Not nightmares. Musical dreams, dreams of transparent questions, of sleek, safe airplanes crossing Latin America from end to end in a cold, bright blue sky. I woke up frozen stiff and I was starving. I looked out the window, out the little bathroom window, and in pieces of campus like puzzle pieces, I saw the morning of a new day. That first morning I spent crying and thanking God in heaven that no one had shut off the water. Don't get sick, Auxilio, I said to myself, drink all the water you want, but don't get sick. I slid to the floor, my back against the wall, and I opened Pedro Garfias's book again. My eyes closed. I must have fallen asleep. Then I heard footsteps and I hid in my stall (that stall is the cubicle I never had, that stall was my trench and my Duino palace, my epiphany of Mexico). Then I read Pedro Garfias. Then I fell asleep. Then I looked out the little window and I saw very high clouds, and I thought about Dr. Atl's paintings and la región más transparente. Then I began to think about pleasant things. How much poetry did I know by heart? I started to recite it, whispering the poems I remembered, and I would've liked to write them down, but although I had a Bic I didn't have paper. Then I thought: you fool, you've got the best paper in the world right here. So I took some toilet paper and I started to write. Then I fell asleep and dreamed, oh, how ridiculous, about Juana de Ibarbourou, I dreamed about her book of poetry La rosa de los vientos, from 1930, and also about her first book, Las lenguas del diamante, such a pretty title, a gorgeous title, almost as if it were the title of a book of avant-garde poetry, a French book from last year, but it was published in 1919, in other words when Juana de América was twenty-seven. What an interesting woman she must have been back then with the whole world at her feet, all those gentlemen ready to graciously do her bidding (gentlemen who no longer exist, although Juana does), all those modernist poets ready to die for poetry, all those lingering looks, all those pretty words, all that love. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up, and for hours, maybe days, I cried for lost time, for my childhood in Montevideo, for faces that still trouble me (that trouble me now even more than before) and that I'd rather not talk about. Then I lost track of the days I'd been confined. From my window I saw birds, trees, branches extending from invisible places, bushes, grass, clouds, walls, but I didn't see people or hear any noise, and I lost track of how long I'd been inside. Then I ate toilet paper (part of me was maybe remembering Charlot), but just a little piece, I didn't have the stomach to eat more. Then I discovered that my appetite was gone. Then I took the toilet paper that I'd written on and I threw it in the toilet and pulled the chain. The sound of the water startled me, and I thought I was lost. I thought: despite my cleverness and all my sacrifices, I'm lost. I thought: what a poetic act to destroy my writings. I thought: I should have swallowed them instead, because now I'm lost. I thought: the vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought: because I wrote, I stood my ground. I thought: because I destroyed what I wrote they're going to find me, beat me, rape me, kill me. I thought: the two acts are related, writing and destruction, hiding and being found. Then I sat on the toilet and closed my eyes. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up. My body was a mass of cramps. I moved slowly around the bathroom, looked in the mirror, combed my hair, washed my face. Oh, how awful my face looked. The way it looks now, to give you some idea. Then I heard voices. I think it had been a long time since I heard anything. I felt like Robinson Crusoe when he discovers the footstep in the sand. But my footstep was a voice and a door slamming shut, an avalanche of stone marbles suddenly tossed down the hall. Then Lupita, Professor Fombona's secretary, opened the door and we stood there staring at each other, both of us with our mouths open and unable to say a word. From the shock of it, I think, I fainted. When I opened my eyes again I was in Professor Rius's office (what a brave, handsome man Rius is and was!), among friends and familiar faces, among university people, not soldiers, and that seemed so wonderful to me that I started to cry, unable to give a coherent account of what had happened, despite the urging of Rius, who seemed at once grateful for and shocked by what I'd done. And that's all, my young friends. The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of '68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year. And I've heard others tell the story many times, and in their telling, the woman who spent fifteen days shut in a bathroom without eating is a medical student or a secretary at the Torre de Rectoría, not a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head. And sometimes it isn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal troubles. And when I hear these stories, these versions of my story, I don't usually say anything (especially if I'm not drunk). And if I am drunk, I try to play it down. That's nothing, I say, that's university folklore, that's urban legend, and then they look at me and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I say (or if I'm drunk, I shout): no, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.