Lisandro Morales, Calle Comercio, in front of Jardín Morelos, Colonia Escandón, Mexico City DF, March 1977. It was the Ecuadorean novelist Vargas Pardo, a man who always does just as he likes and who was working as a copy editor at my publishing house, who introduced me to this Arturo Belano. A year before, the same Vargas Pardo had convinced me that it would be worth the publishing house's while to finance a magazine that would serve as a forum for the best writers in Mexico and Latin America. I listened to him and launched it. They gave me the title of honorary director and Vargas Pardo and a couple of his cronies appointed themselves to the editorial board.
The plan, at least as they sold it to me, was for the magazine to promote the books of the publishing house. That was the main goal. The secondary goal was to put out a quality literary magazine that would reflect well on the house, as much for its content as for its contributors. They talked to me about Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, the leading lights of Latin American literature. Always prudent, not to say skeptical, I told them that I would be happy to get Ibargüengoitia, Monterroso, José Emilio Pacheco, Monsiváis, Elenita Poniatowska. They said yes, of course, that before long everyone would be begging to be published in our magazine. All right, let them beg, I said, let's do good work, but don't forget the main goaclass="underline" promoting the house. That would be no problem, they said. It would be a presence on every page, or every other page, and before long the magazine would be turning a profit too. And I said: gentlemen, I leave its fate in your hands. In the first magazine, as anyone can see for themselves, there was no sign of Cortázar, or García Márquez, or even José Emilio Pacheco, but we had an essay by Monsiváis, which rescued the issue, in a sense; otherwise, there was a piece by Vargas Pardo, an essay by an exiled Argentinian novelist and friend of Vargas Pardo, two excerpts from novels that we were about to publish, a story by a forgotten fellow countryman of Vargas Pardo. And poetry, too much poetry. In the review section, at least, I found nothing to object to. Most of the attention was focused on our new releases and was generally favorable.
I remember I talked to Vargas Pardo after reading the magazine and said: I think there's too much poetry, and poetry doesn't sell. I still remember his response: what do you mean it doesn't sell, Don Lisandro, he said, look at Octavio Paz and his magazine. All right, Vargas, I said, but Octavio is Octavio, and there are luxuries the rest of us can't afford ourselves. What I didn't say was that I hadn't read Octavio's magazine for ages, nor did I rectify my use of the word luxuries, which I had meant to describe not poetic endeavors but Octavio's tedious publication, since ultimately I think publishing poetry isn't a luxury but utter foolishness. That was as far as it went, anyway, and Vargas Pardo was able to put out the second and third issues, and then the fourth and fifth. Sometimes I heard talk that our magazine was becoming too aggressive. I think it was all Vargas Pardo's fault, that he was using the magazine as a weapon against those who'd snubbed him when he first came to Mexico, as the perfect vehicle for settling a few scores (some writers are so vain and touchy!), and to tell the truth, that was all right with me. It's good for a magazine to generate controversy, it means it's selling, and it struck me as miraculous that a magazine with so much poetry could be selling. Sometimes I asked myself why that bastard Vargas Pardo was so interested in poetry. He wasn't a poet himself, I knew, but a fiction writer. So how did he come by his interest in verse?
For a while, I admit, I engaged in all kinds of speculation. I came to suspect he was a queer. He might have been. He was married (to a Mexican, incidentally), but you never know. What kind of queer? A platonic, starry-eyed queer who got his kicks, shall we say, on a purely literary level? Or did he have a Mr. Right among the poets he published in the magazine? I don't know. To each his own. I don't have anything against queers. There are more of them every day, though. In the forties, the number of queers in Mexican literature was at an all-time high, and I thought that was as far as things could go. But today there are more of them than ever. I suppose the fault lies with the education system, the increasingly common tendency of Mexicans to make a spectacle of themselves, the movies, music, who knows what. Even Salvador Novo himself once mentioned to me that he was taken aback by the behavior and language of some of the young people who visited him. And Salvador Novo knew what he was talking about.
So that was how I met Arturo Belano. One afternoon Vargas Pardo told me about him, about how he was putting together a fantastic (was that the word he used?) book, the definitive anthology of young Latin American poets, and was looking for a publisher. And who is this Belano? I asked. He writes reviews for our magazine, said Vargas Pardo. These poets, I said, secretly watching him for his reaction, are like hustlers desperately seeking new women to pimp, but Vargas Pardo took it in stride and told me the book was very good, the kind of book another house would pick up if we didn't publish it ourselves (ah, what an interesting use of the plural). Then, watching him surreptitiously again, I said: bring him in, schedule me a meeting with him, and we'll see what can be done.
Two days later Arturo Belano showed up at the publishing house. He was wearing a denim jacket and jeans. The jacket had unpatched rips on the arms and the left side, as if someone had been shooting him full of arrows for fun or spearing him. The pants, well, if he'd taken them off they would've stood up on their own. The tennis shoes he wore were frightening just to look at. He had hair down to his shoulders, and probably he'd always been skinny but now he was even skinnier. He looked like he hadn't slept for days. Good God, I thought, what a wreck. At least he seemed to have showered that morning. So I said: let's see this anthology you've put together, Mr. Belano. And he said: I already gave it to Vargas Pardo. Off to a bad start, I thought.
I picked up the phone and told my secretary to send Vargas Pardo to my office. For a few seconds neither of us said a word. Damn it, if Vargas Pardo took any longer to get here the young poet was going to fall asleep on me. At least he didn't look like a queer. To kill time I explained to him that poetry collections, as he probably realized, were published by the dozen, but hardly ever sold. Yes, he said, they're published by the dozen. My God, he was like a zombie. For a moment I wondered whether he was on drugs, but who can tell? So, I said, was it hard to put together your anthology of Latin American poetry? No, he said, it's all friends. The arrogance. Well then, I said, there should be no problem with authors' rights, you have the permissions. He laughed. Or rather, let me explain, he twisted his mouth or curled his lip and showed a few yellowish teeth and made a sound. I swear that his laugh made the hair rise on the back of my neck. How to describe it? An otherworldly laugh? The kind of laugh you hear when you're walking down the deserted corridors of a hospital? Something along those lines. And afterward, after the laugh, we seemed about to sink back into silence, into one of those embarrassing silences between people who've just met, or between a publisher and a zombie (which happened, in this case, to be the same thing), but there was no way I wanted to be caught in that silence again, so I kept talking, talking about Chile, where he was from, about my magazine, where he'd published reviews, about how hard it could be to unload a stock of poetry books. And Vargas Pardo was nowhere to be seen (he was probably on the phone gabbing away with another poet!). And then, at that very moment, I had a kind of insight. Or a presentiment. I realized that it would be better not to publish that anthology. I realized that it would be better not to publish anything by this poet. To hell with Vargas Pardo and his brilliant ideas. If other publishing houses were interested, let them take him on, not me. In that second of clarity I realized that publishing a book by this kid would bring me bad luck, that having this kid sitting across from me in my office, looking at me with those vacant eyes, close to sleep, would bring me bad luck, that bad luck was probably already gliding over the roof of my publishing house like a vulture or an Aerolíneas Mexicanas plane fated to crash into my offices.