José "Zopilote" Colina, Café Quito, Avenida Bucareli, Mexico City DF, March 1981. This was the closest those deadbeats got to politics. Once when I was at El Nacional, in 1975 or thereabouts, Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and Felipe Müller were there waiting for Don Juan Rejano to see them. Suddenly in walks this blonde, not bad looking either (and I'm an expert), and she cuts right in front of all the lousy poets who're sitting there crowded together like flies in the little room where Don Juan Rejano worked. No one complained, of course (they might have been poor but they were gentlemen, the dipshits, and anyway, what the fuck could they say?), so the blonde goes up to Don Juan's desk and gives him a bunch of paper, some translations, I think I heard her say (I have excellent hearing), and Don Juan, God bless him, men like him are few and far between, gives her a big smile and says how are you, Verónica (the oily Spanish son of a bitch, he treated the rest of us like dirt), what good wind brings you here? and this Verónica gives him the translations and they talk for a while, or actually Verónica talks to the old man and Don Juan nods, like he's hypnotized, and then the blond girl takes her check, puts it in her purse, turns on her heel, and vanishes down the filthy rotten hallway, and then, as the rest of us are drooling, Don Giovanni sits there for a minute sort of dazed and lost in thought, and Arturo Belano, who was somebody he always trusted and who was sitting closest to him, says: what is it, Don Juan, what's the matter? and Don Rejas, as if emerging from a fucking dream or a fucking nightmare looks him in the eye and says: do you know who that girl was? speaking with a Spanish-from-Spain accent too, which was a bad sign, since not only did Rejano have a rotten temper, he usually spoke with a Mexican accent, as none of you would have any reason to know, poor old guy, the shitty luck he had at the end, but anyway, he says do you know who that girl was, Arturo? and Belano says no sir, but she looked nice. Who was she? Trotsky's great-granddaughter! says Don Rejas, none other than Lev Davidovich's great-granddaughter Verónica Volkow (or was it granddaughter? no, great-granddaughter, I think), and then, sorry I keep losing my place, Belano said far out and went running after Verónica Volkow, and Lima hurried after Belano, and the kid Müller stayed for a minute to pick up their checks and then he was off like a shot too, and Rejano watched them disappear down the Hall of Filth and he smiled as if to himself, as if to say lousy little fuckers, and I think he must have been thinking about the Spanish Civil War, his dead friends, his long years of exile, maybe he was even thinking of his years as a Communist Party militant, although that was an odd fit with Trotsky's great-granddaughter, but that was Don Rejas, basically a sentimental guy, a good guy, and then he came back down to planet Earth, to the lousy editorial department of the
Revista Mexicana de Cultura, El Nacional's cultural supplement, and everyone who was crowded into the stuffy room and languishing in the dark hallway snapped back to reality with him and we all got our checks.