One afternoon I got to his house and his mother let me in and then led me to her room, in such a state of agitation that at first I thought my friend must have taken a turn for the worse. But it was a motherly flurry of happiness. He's cured, she told me. I didn't understand what she meant. I thought she was talking about Ernesto's voice or saying that Ernesto's mind had gotten sharper. How is he cured? I said, trying to get her to let go of my arms. It took her a while to say what she meant, but in the end she had to come out with it. Ernesto isn't a fairy anymore, miss, she said. Ernesto isn't what? I said. At that moment his father came into the room, and after asking us what we were doing in there, he declared that his son had finally been cured of his homosexuality. He didn't say it in those exact words, and I didn't want to answer or ask any more questions, so I got out of that horrible room as quickly as I could. Still, before I went into Ernesto's room, I heard his mother say: every cloud has a silver lining.
Of course, Ernesto was still a homosexual even though sometimes he didn't remember very well what that meant. Sexuality, for him, had become something remote, something he knew was pleasurable and exciting, but remote. One day Juanito Dávila called me to say that he was going north, to work, and that I should tell Ernesto goodbye for him because he didn't have the heart. From then on there were no more lovers in Ernesto's life. His voice changed a little, but not enough: he didn't speak, he wailed or moaned, and when he did, everyone except for his mother and me-his father and the neighbors paying their endless obligatory visits-would flee, which was ultimately a relief, so much so that once I thought Ernesto was wailing on purpose to drive away all that terrible politeness.
As the months went by, I began to leave more time between my visits too. Having gone to see him every day when he was just out of the hospital, I visited less frequently once he started to talk and walk up and down the hall. And yet I called him every night, no matter where I was. We had some crazy conversations. Sometimes I was the one who would talk on and on, telling stories, true stories, although they went barely skin-deep, about the sophisticated Mexico City life (a way of forgetting that we lived in Mexico) that I was getting to know back then, the parties, the drugs I took, the men I slept with, and other times he was the one who would talk, reading stories to me that he'd cut out of the paper that day (a new hobby, probably suggested by the therapists who were treating him, who knows), telling me what he'd had to eat, the people who'd come to visit, something his mother had said that he'd saved up for the end of the conversation. One afternoon I told him that Ismael Humberto Zarco had chosen one of his poems for his anthology, which had just come out. What poem? said that little bird voice of his, that Gillette blade of a voice that tore at my heart. I had the book beside me. I told him. Did I write that poem? he said. It struck me that he was joking, why I'm not sure, maybe because his voice sounded so much deeper than usual. His jokes had been like that before, innocent, almost impossible to distinguish from whatever else he was saying. But he wasn't joking. That week I found time that I didn't have and went to see him. A friend, a new friend, drove me to his house but didn't want to come in. Wait for me here, I said, this neighborhood is dangerous and when we come back we might find ourselves without a car. It seemed strange to him, but he didn't say anything. Around that time, I had developed a well-deserved reputation in the circles I moved in for being eccentric. As it happened, I was right: recently Ernesto's neighborhood had been going downhill. As if the aftereffects of his operation were visible in the streets, in the people without work, the petty thieves who would come out at seven in the evening to sit in the sun, like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message) automatically primed to kill another evening in Mexico City.
Ernesto hardly paid any attention to the book, of course. He looked for his poem and said: oh. I don't know if he suddenly recognized it or if he was confused. Then he started to tell me the same kind of things he told me on the phone.
When I came out my friend was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette. I asked whether anything had happened while I was gone. Nothing, he said, it's dead quiet out here. But it couldn't have been so quiet because his hair was disheveled and his hands were shaking.
I never saw Ernesto again.
One night he called me and recited a poem by Richard Belfer. One night I called him, from Los Angeles, and told him that I was sleeping with the theater director Francisco Segura, aka La Vieja Segura, who was at least twenty years older than me. How exciting, said Ernesto. La Vieja must be an intelligent man. He's talented, not intelligent, I said. What's the difference? he said. I sat there thinking how to answer and he waited for me to speak and for a few seconds neither of us said anything. I wish I could be with you, I told him before I said goodbye. Me too, said that voice like a bird from another dimension. A few days later his mother called and told me that he had died. An easy death, she said, while he was sitting at home in a chair in the sun. He fell asleep like a little angel. What time of day did he die? I asked. At about five, after lunch.
Of his old friends, I was the only one who went to his burial, in one of the patchwork cemeteries on the north side of the city. I didn't see any poets, ex-lovers, or editors of literary magazines. Lots of relatives and family friends and possibly every single one of the neighbors. Before I left the cemetery, two teenagers came up to me and tried to lead me somewhere. I thought they were going to rape me. Only then did I feel rage and pain at Ernesto's death. I pulled a switchblade out of my purse and said: I'll kill you, you little creeps. They went running and I chased them for a while down two or three cemetery streets. When I finally stopped, another funeral procession appeared. I put the knife in my bag and watched as they lifted the coffin into its niche, very carefully. I think it was a child. But I couldn't say for sure. Then I left the cemetery and went to have drinks with a friend at a bar downtown.
10
Norman Bolzman, sitting on a bench in Edith Wolfson Park, Tel Aviv, October 1979. I've always been sensitive to the pain of others, always tried to feel a part of everyone else's suffering. I'm Jewish, a Mexican Jew, and I know the history of my two peoples. That says it all, I think. I'm not trying to justify myself. I'm just trying to tell a story. Maybe I'm also trying to understand its hidden workings, workings I wasn't aware of at the time but that weigh on me now. Still, my story won't be as coherent as I'd like. And my role in it will flicker like a speck of dust between the light and the dark, between laughter and tears, exactly like a Mexican soap opera or a Yiddish melodrama.
Everything began last February. It was a gray afternoon, fine as a shroud, the kind that brings a shudder to the skies of Tel Aviv. Someone rang the bell of our apartment on Hashomer Street. When I opened the door, the poet Ulises Lima, leader of the self-proclaimed visceral realists, was standing there before me. I can't say I knew him, in fact I'd only met him once, but Claudia used to tell me stories about him, and Daniel read me one of his poems once. Literature isn't my specialty. It may be that I was never able to appreciate the quality of his work. In any case, the man in front of me looked less like a poet than a bum.
We didn't get off to a good start, I admit. Claudia and Daniel were at the university and I had to study, so I let him in, made him a cup of tea, and then went into my room and shut the door. For a minute everything seemed back to normal. I immersed myself in the philosophers of the Marburg School (Natorp, Cohen, Cassirer, Lange) and in some commentaries on Solomon Maimon, indirectly devastating to the Marburg philosophers. But after a while, it might have been twenty minutes or two hours, my mind went blank and in the middle of that whiteness the face of Ulises Lima, the recent arrival, began to take shape, and even though in my mind everything was white it took me a long time, I don't know how long, to make out his features precisely, as if Ulises's face were getting darker instead of brightening in the light.