A week later we got a postcard from Hebron. And then another from the shores of the Dead Sea. And then a third from Eilat, in which he told us that he had found work as a waiter at a hotel. After that, and for a long time, we didn't hear anything. Deep down, I knew the waiter job wouldn't last long and I knew that traveling indefinitely around Israel without a cent in your pocket could be dangerous, but I didn't say anything to the others, although I suppose Daniel and Claudia knew it too. Sometimes we would talk about him during dinner. How do you think he's doing in Eilat? Claudia would ask. He's so lucky to be in Eilat! Daniel would say. We could go visit him next weekend, I would say. And immediately we would tacitly change the subject. At the time I was reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and everything I saw or did only heightened my sense of vulnerability. I remember that I got sick and spent a few days in bed and Claudia, always so perceptive, took the Tractatus away and hid it in Daniel's room, giving me instead one of the novels that she liked to read, The Endless Rose, by a Frenchman called J.M.G. Arcimboldi.
One night, as we were having dinner, I started to think about Ulises, and almost without my realizing it a few tears slid down my cheeks. What's wrong? said Claudia. I answered that if Ulises got sick he wouldn't have anyone to take care of him, the way she and Daniel were taking care of me. Then I thanked them and broke down. Ulises is as strong as a… as a warthog, said Claudia, and Daniel laughed. Claudia's remark, her simile, hurt me, and I asked her whether she'd become insensitive to everything. Claudia didn't answer and started to make me tea with lemon. We've condemned Ulises to the Desert! I exclaimed. As Daniel was telling me not to exaggerate, I heard the spoon, which Claudia's fingers were holding, clicking and stirring in the glass, mixing the liquid and the layer of honey, and then I couldn't take it anymore and I asked her, I begged her to look at me when I was talking, because I was talking to her, not to Daniel, because I wanted her to be the one to give me an explanation or console me, not Daniel. And then Claudia turned around, put the tea in front of me, sat in her usual chair, and said what do you want me to say? I think this is crazy talk, all that philosophy is affecting your brain. And then Daniel said something like my God, yes, in the last two weeks you've been wallowing in Wittgenstein, Bergson, Key-serling (who frankly I don't know how you can stand), Pico della Mirandola, that Louis Claude guy (he meant Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, author of The Man of Aspiration), crazy racist Otto Weininger, and I don't want to know how many others. And you haven't even touched my novel, added Claudia. At that moment I made a mistake and asked her how she could be so insensitive. When Claudia looked at me I realized that I had fucked up, but by then it was too late. The whole room shook when Claudia began to speak. She said that I should never say that again. She said that the next time I said it our relationship would be over. She said that it wasn't a sign of insensitivity not to worry excessively about Ulises Lima's escapades. She said her older brother had died in Argentina, possibly tortured by the police or the army, and that really was serious. She said that her older brother had fought in the ranks of the ERP and had believed in a continentwide American Revolution, and that was serious. She said that if she or her family had been in Argentina during the crackdown they might be dead now. She said all of that and then she started to cry. That's two of us now, I said. We didn't hug, as I would have liked, but we squeezed hands under the table and then Daniel suggested that we all go out and take a walk, but Claudia told him not to be silly, I was still sick, and that it would be best if we all had more tea and then went to bed.
A month later, Ulises Lima showed up. With him was a huge guy, almost six and a half feet tall, dressed in all kinds of rags, an Austrian Ulises had met in Beersheba. We put the two of them up in the living room for three days. The Austrian slept on the floor, Ulises on the sofa. The guy's name was Heimito. We never knew his last name, and he hardly ever said a word. He spoke English with Ulises, but only enough to get by. We had never met anyone with a name like that, although Claudia said there was a writer called Heimito von Doderer, Austrian too, although she wasn't sure. At first glance Ulises's Heimito seemed retarded, or borderline retarded. But they really did get along well.
When they left we went to the airport to see them off. Until then Ulises had seemed calm, in control of himself, indifferent. Now he suddenly turned sad, although sad isn't the right word. Glum, maybe. The night before he left we were talking and I told him I was happy I'd gotten to know him. Me too, said Ulises. The day he left, when Ulises and Heimito had already gone through security and we couldn't see them anymore, Claudia started to cry and for a minute I thought that she loved him-in her way, of course-but I soon gave up that idea.
11
Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. For a while after that we didn't see Cesárea Tinajero at any of our meetings. It sounds odd, it sounded odd to admit it, but we missed her. Each time Maples Arce visited General Diego Carvajal he would ask Cesárea when she thought she'd stop being angry. But Cesárea turned a deaf ear. Once I went with Manuel and I spent a while talking to her. Rather than literature, we talked about politics and dancing, which Cesárea loved. In those days, boys, I said to them, there were dance halls all over Mexico City, the grandest in the center, but plenty in the outlying neighborhoods too, in Tacubaya, Colonia Observatorio! Colonia Coyoacán! Tlalpan to the south and Colonia Lindavista to the north! And Cesárea was one of those fanatics who would travel the city from one end to the other to get to a dance, although as I remember she liked the ones in the center best. She went alone. That is, before she met Encarnación Guzmán. That's something no one thinks twice about today, but in those days it led to all kinds of misunderstandings. Once, for reasons I can't recall, possibly because she asked me to, I took her to a dance. It was in a tent erected in a vacant lot near La Lagunilla. Before we went in I said: I'm your date, Cesárea, but don't make me dance, because I don't know how, and I don't want to learn. Cesárea laughed and said nothing. What a feeling, boys, what a rush of sensations. I remember the little round tables made of some light metal, like aluminum, although it can't have been aluminum. The dance floor was a crooked square, a raised platform of planks, and the orchestra was a quintet or sextet that would just as soon launch into a