Xóchitl García, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, January 1984. When Jacinto and I separated, my father told me that if Jacinto gave me any trouble I should let him know and he'd take care of everything. Sometimes my father would look at Franz and say: he's so blond, wondering (I'm sure, though he never said so) how the boy could possibly have ended up with hair that color when everyone in my family is dark and so is Jacinto. My father adored Franz. My little blond boy, he would say, where's my little blond boy? and Franz loved him too. He would come on Saturdays or Sundays and take Franz out for a walk. When they came back I would make him a cup of black coffee and he would sit silently at the table watching Franz or reading the paper, and then he would leave.
I think he thought that Franz wasn't Jacinto's son and sometimes that made me a little bit angry and other times I thought it was funny. As it happened, my breakup with Jacinto wasn't difficult at all, so there was nothing to tell my father. Even if it had been bad I might not have told him anything. Jacinto would come by every two weeks to see Franz. Sometimes he would pick him up and drop him off and then leave, and we would hardly talk, but other times he would stay for a while when he came back to drop him off. He'd ask me about my life, and I'd ask him about his life, and we might talk until two or three in the morning, about things that had happened to us and the books we'd read. I think that Jacinto was afraid of my father and that was why he didn't come more often, for fear of running into him. He didn't know that by that time my father was very sick and would've had a hard time hurting anyone. But my father had quite a reputation and even though nobody knew for sure where he worked, his look was unmistakable and it said I'm with the secret police, so watch yourself, I'm a Mexican cop, so watch yourself. And if his face was haggard because he was sick or if he moved more slowly, that hardly mattered, it only made him that much more threatening. One night he stayed for dinner. I was in an excellent mood and I wanted to eat with my father and see him and see Franz, I wanted to see them together, talk. I can't remember now what I made, a simple meal, I'm sure. As we ate I asked him why he'd become a policeman. I don't know whether it was a serious question, it just occurred to me that I'd never asked him, and that if I waited any longer it might be too late. He answered that he didn't know. Wouldn't you have liked to be something else? I said. He said yes. What would you have liked to be? I said. A peasant, he said, and I laughed, but when he left I couldn't stop thinking about it and my good mood went away.
In those days the person I became very close friends with was María. María was still living upstairs, and although she had boyfriends off and on (some nights I could hear her as if the ceiling was made of paper), since her breakup with the math teacher she'd been living alone, a circumstance (living alone, that is) that had done a lot to change her. I know what I'm talking about because I've been living alone since I was eighteen. Although come to think of it, I've never really lived alone, because first I lived with Jacinto and now I live with Franz. Maybe what I meant was living independently, without family. Anyway, María and I became even closer friends. Or we became real friends, because before that we hadn't been real friends, I guess, and our friendship was based on other people, not ourselves. When Jacinto and I separated, I got into poetry. I started to read and write poetry as if it were the most important thing in the world. Before that, I had written a few little poems and I used to think I read a lot, but when he left I started to read and write for real. I didn't have lots of time, but I made time where I could.
Around then I'd gotten my job as a cashier at a Gigante, thanks to my father, who'd talked to a friend who had a friend who was the manager of the Gigante in Colonia San Rafael. And María was working as a secretary at one of the offices of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. During the day, Franz would go to school and a fifteen-year-old girl who made her spending money that way would go pick him up for me and take him to a park or watch him at home till I got back from work. At night, after dinner, María would come down to my room or I'd go upstairs and read her the poems I'd written that day, at Gigante or while I was heating up Franz's dinner, or the night before, while I watched Franz sleep. The television had been a bad habit of mine when I lived with Jacinto. Now I only turned it on when there was big news and I wanted to find out what was going on, and sometimes not even then. What I did, as I was saying, was sit at the table, which had been moved and was over by the window now, and start to read and write poems until my eyes closed, I was so sleepy. I would rewrite my poems as many as ten or fifteen times. When I saw Jacinto, he would read them and give me his opinion, but my real reader was María. Finally I would type them up and put them in a folder that kept growing day by day, to my satisfaction and delight, since it was like concrete proof that my struggle wasn't in vain.
After Jacinto left it was a long time before I slept with another man, and my only passion, besides Franz, was poetry. The complete opposite of María, who had stopped writing and brought home a new lover each week. I met three or four of them. Sometimes I'd say: what do you see in that guy, mana, he's not right for you, if worse comes to worst, he'll end up hitting you, but María said that she knew how to handle things, and the truth is she did, although more than once I was so scared by the shouting I had to go running up to her room and tell her lover that he'd better leave right away or I'd call my father, who was in the secret police, and then he'd really be sorry. Fucking police sluts, I remember one of them shouted at us from the middle of the street, and María and I both burst out laughing on the other side of the glass. But most of the time she didn't have serious problems. The poetry problem was different. Why don't you write anymore, mana? I asked her once and she answered that she didn't feel like it, that was all, she just didn't feel like it.