Amulet

by Roberto Bolaño

  Four

  But my teeth, which still hadn't fallen out, were not all that I thought about. For example, I thought about young Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen when I met him in 1970. I was the mother of the new Mexican poetry and he was just a kid who couldn't hold his liquor, but he was proud that Salvador Allende had been elected president of his faraway Chile.

  I met him. I met him at a rowdy gathering of poets in a bar called the Encrucijada Veracruzana, a squalid hole or dive where a motley bunch of young and not-so-young hopefuls used to get together now and then. He was the youngest hopeful of the lot. And the only one who had written a novel at the age of seventeen. A novel that was later lost or consumed by flames or perhaps it ended up in one of the huge garbage dumps that surround Mexico City; in any case I read it, with reservations at first, but then with pleasure, not because it was good, no, what I liked were the signs of determination on each page, the touching determination of an adolescent: the novel was bad, but he was good. So I made friends with him. It helped that we were the only two South Americans among so many Mexicans. I made friends with him, I went over and talked to him, covering my mouth with my hand, and he looked me in the eye, looked at the back of my hand, and didn't ask why I was covering my mouth, but I think he guessed straight away, unlike the others, I mean he guessed the deeper reason, the ultimate dignity that obliged me to cover my lips, and it didn't matter to him.

  That night I made friends with him, in spite of the difference in our ages, and all the other differences! I was the one who introduced him, some weeks later, to the poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. I took him home once, sick and drunk, holding him up as he clung to my bony shoulder, and I made friends with his mother and his father, and his sister, who was so nice, they were all so nice.

  And the first thing I said to his mother was: I haven't slept with your son, Mrs. Belano. That's just how I am, I like to be frank and forthright with frank and forthright people (although this inveterate habit of mine has caused me no end of grief). I lifted my hands and smiled, then lowered them again and spoke, and she looked at me as if I had just stepped out of her son's notebooks, the notebooks of Arturito Belano, who by then was sleeping it off in his cavelike bedroom. And she said: Of course not, Auxilio, but there's no need to call me Mrs., we must be nearly the same age. And I raised an eyebrow and fixed her with the bluer of my eyes, the right one, thinking: She's right, kid, we must be more or less the same age. I might have been three years younger than her, or two, or one, but basically we belonged to the same generation; the only difference was that she had an apartment and a job and a monthly salary and I didn't; the only difference was that I went out with young people and Arturito's mother went out with people her own age; the only difference was that she had two teenage children and I had none, but that didn't matter either because by then I had children too, in my own way, hundreds of them.

  So I became a friend of the family. A family of traveling Chileans who had emigrated to Mexico in 1968. My year. And sometimes I would say to Arturo's mother: You know, when you were getting ready to move, I was shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the UNAM. I know, Auxilio. Funny, isn't it? Sure is. And we could go on like that for a fair while, at night, listening to music and talking and laughing.

  I became a friend of the family. They invited me to stay at their apartment for long periods, a month, two weeks, or a month and a half, because at the time I had no money for a boarding house or a rooftop room and I had taken to wandering around, blown this way and that by the night winds that sweep the streets and avenues of Mexico City.

  By day I busied myself at the university; by night I led a bohemian life, and slept, and gradually scattered my few belongings, leaving them in the houses and apartments of friends: my clothes, my books, my magazines, my photos. I, Remedios Varo, I, Leonora Carrington, I, Eunice Odio, I, Lilian Serpas (ah, poor Lilian Serpas, I still have to tell you about her). And my friends, of course, would eventually get tired of me and ask me to leave. And I would leave. I would crack a joke and leave. I would try to make light of it and leave. I would hang my head and leave. I would give them a kiss on the cheek and say thanks and leave. Some spiteful people say that I wouldn't go. They're lying. I would leave as soon as I was asked. Maybe, on one occasion, I shut myself in the bathroom and shed a few tears. Some gossipmongers say that I had a weakness for bathrooms. They couldn't be further from the truth. Bathrooms were a nightmare for me, although since September 1968, I had grown accustomed to nightmares. You can get used to anything. I like bathrooms. I like my friends' bathrooms. I like to take a shower and face the day with a clean body, who doesn't? I also like to shower before going to bed. Arturito's mother used to say to me: Use the clean towel I've put out for you, Auxilio, but I never used towels. I preferred to get dressed while my skin was still wet and let my body warmth evaporate the droplets of water. People used to find that funny. I found it funny too. Although I could also have gone crazy.

  Five

  But one thing stopped me from going crazy: I never lost my sense of humor. I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.

  And I was there with them because I had nothing either, except my memories.

  I could remember. I was still shut up in that women's bathroom in the faculty, lodged in the month of September 1968, and that was why I could be a dispassionate observer, although sometimes, thankfully, I did take part in the games of passion and love. Not all of my relationships were platonic. I slept with the poets. Not often, but from time to time I slept with one or the other. Despite appearances to the contrary, I was a woman and not a saint. And I did sleep with a number of them.

  Usually it was a one-night stand: some drunken youth I led off to a bed or an armchair in an unoccupied room, while barbaric music I would rather not recall went on booming next door. When, occasionally, against the odds, it lasted longer than a night or a weekend, I would end up being more a psychotherapist than a lover. But I'm not complaining. Once my teeth went I was timid about kissing and being kissed, and how long can love last without kisses? Even so, I was hungry for sex. A hunger, that's the only word for it. You can't make love without that hunger. You need an opportunity too. But the hunger is the main thing.

  Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. I met a girl at the Faculty. It was during my theater phase. She was a charming girl. She had finished her philosophy degree. She was very cultured and elegant. I was sleeping in a seat at the faculty theater (a precarious institution to say the least) and dreaming of my childhood or of aliens. She sat down beside me. The theater, of course, was empty: on the stage a pitiful troupe was rehearsing a play by Garcia Lorca. At some point I woke up, and she said to me: You're Auxilio Lacouture, aren't you, in such a friendly way that I liked her immediately. She ha
d a slightly hoarse voice, and black, not very long hair, combed back. Then she said something funny or maybe I did, and we started laughing, quietly, so the director wouldn't hear us; he'd been a friend of mine in '68, but had since become a bad director and he knew it, which made him indiscriminately bitter. We left together and went out into the streets of Mexico City.

  Her name was Elena and she bought me a coffee. She said she had a lot of things to tell me. She said she had been wanting to meet me for a long time. As we were leaving the faculty I realized she had a limp. Elena the philosopher. She had a Volkswagen and she took me to a café on Insurgentes Sur. I had never been there before. It was a lovely place, very expensive, but Elena had money and she really wanted to talk to me, although in the end I did all the talking. She listened and laughed and seemed happy, but she didn't say much. When we went our separate ways, I thought: What did she have to tell me, what did she want to talk about?

  From then on we used to meet fairly regularly, in the theater or the corridors of the faculty, usually in the evening, as night was falling over the university, a time when some people don't know where to go or what to do with themselves. I would meet Elena and she would invite me for a drink or a meal in a restaurant on Insurgentes Sur. Once she invited me to her house in Coyoacán, a gorgeous house, tiny but gorgeous, very feminine and very intellectual, full of books about philosophy and theater, because Elena thought that philosophy and theater were closely related. She told me about that once, although I hardly understood a word she said. For me, theater is closer to poetry, but for her it's linked to philosophy—each to her own. And then all of a sudden she wasn't around. I don't know how much time went by. Months, maybe. Naturally I asked the faculty secretaries what had happened to Elena. Was she sick or traveling? Did they have any news of her? But no one could give me a convincing answer. One afternoon I decided to go to her house, but I got lost. I never get lost! Or at least not since September 1968. Before that, I did occasionally, not very often, lose my way in the labyrinth of Mexico City. But not after 1968. So there I was, searching for Elena's house, in vain, and I said to myself, There's something funny going on here, Auxilio, my girl, open your eyes and keep them peeled, or you might overlook the key to this story.

  So I did. I opened my eyes and wandered around Coyoacán until eleven thirty at night, feeling more and more lost, more and more blind, as if poor Elena were dead or had never existed.

  Some time went by. I quit being the theater's official hanger-on. I went back to the poets and my life took a new turn, there's not much point explaining why. All I know for sure is that I gave up helping my director friend from '68, not because I thought his directing was bad, although it was, but because I was bored, I needed a change of air, a change of scene, my spirit was hungry for a different kind of restlessness.

  And one day, when I was least expecting it, I ran into Elena again. In the faculty cafeteria. There I was, conducting an impromptu survey of beauty in the student body, when suddenly I saw her, at a table off in a corner, and she seemed the same as ever at first, but as I approached, taking my time, I don't know why, stopping at each table on the way for a brief and rather awkward chat, I noticed that something had changed in her, although, for the moment, I couldn't identify what it was. When she saw me, and I'm certain of this, she greeted me with the same old warmth and friendliness. She was ... I don't know how to put it. Maybe thinner, but no, she wasn't really any thinner. Maybe drawn, although she wasn't any more drawn than before. Maybe quieter, although after three minutes it was clear to me that she was no less talkative. Perhaps her eyelids were swollen. Perhaps her whole face was swollen, as if she were taking cortisone. But no. The evidence was there before my eyes: she was the same as ever.

  We spent the evening and that whole night together. Starting in the cafeteria as it gradually emptied of students and professors, leaving only us in the end, and the cleaning lady, and the very nice, very sad middle-aged man behind the bar. Then we stood up to go (Isn't it dingy at this time of day, the cafeteria, she said; I didn't say what I thought at the time, but I can't see why I shouldn't now: to me, the cafeteria at that time of day was magnificent: shabby and majestic, indigent and absolutely free, shot through with the last rays of sunlight in the valley—that cafeteria was whispering to me, begging me to stay until the end and read a poem by Rimbaud, it was a cafeteria to weep for) and we got into her car and when we had already driven a fair way she said she was going to introduce me to an extraordinary guy, that's what she said, He's extraordinary, Auxilio, I want to you meet him and give me your opinion, although I realized straight away that my opinion wouldn't matter to her in the least. She also said, After I introduce him to you, you have to leave, I need to talk to him in private. And I said, Of course, Elena, naturally. You introduce him to me and then I'll go. A word to the wise is enough. Anyway I have things to do tonight. Like what, she asked. I have an appointment with some poets on the Avenida Bucareli, I said. And then we laughed like crazy and almost crashed the car, but all the while I was thinking, and the more I thought the clearer it became that Elena was not well, though I couldn't give any specific, objective reason for my assessment.

  Meanwhile we had come to a place in the Zona Rosa, a kind of bar, I've forgotten its name, but it was in the Calle Varsovia and it specialized in wine and cheese. It was the first time I'd been to a place like that, such an expensive place, I mean, and I must admit a ravenous hunger possessed me all of a sudden, because although I'm as thin as a rake, put food in front of me and I'm liable to fall upon it like the Unrepentant Glutton of the Southern Cone, or the Emily Dickinson of Bulimia, especially if it's an assortment of cheeses to beggar belief and a variety of wines to set your head spinning. I don't know what showed on my face, but Elena took pity on me and said, Stay and eat with us, although she also elbowed me discreetly as if to say: Sure, stay and eat with us, but then make yourself scarce. I stayed to eat and drink with them and tried about fifteen different cheeses and drank a bottle of Rioja and met the extraordinary man, an Italian who was passing through Mexico and who, back in Italy, was friends, so he said, with Giorgio Strehler, and he liked me, at least thinking back now I realize he must have, because the first time I said I had to go, he said, Stay, Auxilio, what's the hurry, and the second time he said, Don't go, woman of wonderful conversation (his exact words), the night is young, and the third time I said I had to go, he said, That's enough, what are you fussing about, have Elena and I offended you or something? And then Elena elbowed me again, under the table, and in a perfectly calm and steady voice said, Stay, Auxilio, I'll give you a lift to wherever you need to go later on, and I looked at them and nodded, radiant with wine and cheese, not knowing what to do, whether to go or to stay, whether Elena's offer was genuine or really an invitation to do the opposite. And faced with that dilemma I decided that the best thing to do was to keep quiet and listen. Which is what I did.

  The Italian's name was Paolo. That says it all, I think. He was born in a little village near Turin. He was at least six feet tall, had long brown hair and an enormous beard; Elena, or any other woman for that matter, could have disappeared into his embrace. Modern theater was his field but he hadn't come to Mexico to see theatrical performances. In fact the only thing he was doing in Mexico was waiting for a visa to Cuba, where he was planning to interview Fidel Castro. He had already been waiting for a long time. Once I asked him why they were taking so long. He told me that the Cubans wanted to check him out first. Only the right sort of people were granted an audience with Fidel Castro.

  He had already been to Cuba twice, which, so he said, and Elena backed him up on this, was enough to make him suspicious in the eyes of the Mexican police, although I never noticed anyone who might have been a plainclothes cop watching him. They'd have to be doing a bad job for you to notice them, said Elena. Anyway Paolo's being watched by secret police agents. Which only proved my point, since it's common knowledge that secret police agents are the easiest to identify. A traffic
cop, for example, take away his uniform and he could pass for a factory worker, some even look like union leaders, but a secret policeman will always look like a secret policeman.

  We were friends from that night on. On Saturdays and Sundays the three of us would go see the free plays at the Casa del Lago. Paolo liked to watch the amateur groups that used the open-air theater. Elena sat between us, leaned her head on Paolo's arm and soon fell asleep. She didn't like the amateur actors. I sat on Elena's right, and to tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to what was happening on stage, since I was always keeping an eye out to see if I could spot a secret police agent. And I did actually spot not one but several. When I told Elena, she burst out laughing. You couldn't have, Auxilio, she said, but I knew I wasn't mistaken. Then I realized what was going on. On Saturdays and Sundays the Casa del Lago was literally swarming with spooks, but they weren't all on Paolo's trail; most of them were there to watch other people. We knew some of the people under observation from the university or the world of independent theater and we used to say hello to them. Others were strangers to us, and we could only feel for them, imagining the paths they would trace with their pursuers in tow.