Amulet

by Roberto Bolaño

  Later, in 1973, when he decided to go back to his country and take part in the revolution, I was the only one, apart from his family, who went to see him off at the bus station (because Arturito Belano traveled overland). It was a long trip, long and hazardous, an initiation, a Latin American grand tour on a shoestring, wandering the length of our absurd continent, which we keep misunderstanding or simply not understanding at all. And when Arturito waved goodbye from the window of the bus, his mother cried, and so did I, inexplicably, my eyes filled with tears, as if that boy were my son too, and I was afraid I would never see him again.

  That night I slept at Arturo's place, mostly to keep his mother company, and I remember we stayed up late talking about women's things, not exactly my usual topics of conversation. We talked about children growing up and going out to play in the big, wide world; we talked about the lives they lead when they leave their parents and set off into the big, wide world in search of the unknown. Then we talked about the big, wide world itself. A world that was not, in fact, so big or wide for us. And then Arturo's mother read the tarot cards for me and said that my life was about to change, and I said, That's good, you know, a change is just what I need right now. After that I made coffee, I don't know what time it was, but it was very late, and both of us must have been tired, although we didn't let it show, and coming back into the living room I found Arturo's mother laying out the cards on a tiny table they had in the living room, and I stopped and watched her in silence: there she was, sitting on the sofa with a look of concentration on her face (although behind the concentration a degree of anxiety was also perceptible), her small hands turning the cards as if they had been extracted from her body. I realized straight away that she was reading her own future, and what she saw in the cards was terrible, but that didn't matter. What mattered was something a little harder to grasp. What mattered was that as she waited for me, alone, she was not afraid.

  That night I would have liked to be more intelligent than I am. I would have liked to have been able to comfort her. But all I could do was bring her coffee and tell her not to worry, everything would turn out fine.

  The next morning I left, although I had nowhere to go at the time, except the Faculty and the same old bars, cafés, and restaurants, but I went anyway. I don't like to overstay my welcome.

  Seven

  When Arturo returned to Mexico in January 1974, he was different. Allende had been overthrown, and Arturito had done his duty, so his sister told me; he'd obeyed the voice of his conscience, he'd been a brave Latin American boy, and so in theory there was nothing for him to feel guilty about.

  When Arturo returned to Mexico, he was a stranger to all his old friends, except for me. That was because, the whole time he was gone, I stayed in touch with his family. I was a regular visitor at their apartment. But not a nuisance. I didn't stay the night; I would just pop in, chat for a while with his mother or his sister (not his father, who didn't like me), and then I'd leave and not come back for a month or so. That's how I found out about his adventures in Guatemala and El Salvador (where he stayed for quite a while with a friend called Manuel Sorto, who'd also been a friend of mine), and in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. In Panama he got into a fight with a big black guy at a border crossing. We had such a good laugh over that letter, his sister and me! The guy was six foot three and must have weighed sixteen stone, according to Arturo, who was five foot nine, and eleven and half stone at the most. Then he got on a boat in Cristóbal and the boat took him down the Pacific coast to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and finally Chile.

  I ran into his sister and his mother at the first demonstration in Mexico after the coup. They hadn't heard from him and we all feared the worst. I remember that demonstration; it might even have been the first protest against the overthrow of Allende in the whole of Latin America. I saw a few familiar faces from 1968, a few diehards from the faculty, but most of all I saw generous young Mexicans. I also saw something else: I saw a mirror and, peering into it, I could see an enormous, uninhabited valley, and the vision of that valley brought tears to my eyes, partly because, at the time, the most trifling matters were enough to make me burst into tears. The valley I had seen, however, was no trifling matter. I don't know if it was the vale of joy or the vale of tears. But I saw it and then I saw . myself shut up in the women's bathroom, and I remembered that there I had dreamed of the very same valley, and waking from that dream or nightmare I had begun to cry or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the tears had woken me. And the dream of September 1968 reappeared in that September of 1973, which must mean something, surely, it can't have been purely coincidental; no one can elude the combinations or permutations or dispositions of chance. Perhaps Arturito is already dead, I thought, perhaps that lonely valley is an emblem of death, because death is the staff of Latin America and Latin America cannot walk without its staff. But then Arturo's mother took me by the arm (I was in a kind of daze) and we marched on together shouting El pueblo unido jamás será vencido, ah, it makes my cry to think of it now.

  Two weeks later I talked with his sister on the phone and she told me that Arturo was alive. I sighed. What a relief. But I had to keep going. I was the itinerant mother. The wanderer. Life drew me into other stories.

  One night, at a party in Colonia Anzures, propped on my elbows in a sea of tequila, watching a group of friends trying to break open a piñata in the garden, it occurred to me that it was an ideal time to call Arturo's place. His sister answered the phone. Merry Christmas, I said. Merry Christmas, she replied sleepily. Then she asked where I was. With some friends. What's with Arturo? He's coming back to Mexico next month. When exactly? We don't know. I'd like to go to the airport, I said. Then for a while we said nothing and listened to the party noises coming from the patio. Are you feeling OK, his sister asked. I'm feeling strange. Well that's normal for you. Not all that normal; most of the time I feel perfectly well. Arturo's sister was quiet for a bit, then she said that actually she was feeling pretty strange herself. Why's that? I asked. It was a purely rhetorical question. To tell the truth, both of us had plenty of reasons to be feeling strange. I can't remember what she said in reply. We wished each other a merry Christmas again and hung up.

  A few days later, in January 1974, Arturito arrived from Chile and he was different.

  What I mean is that although he was the same Arturo, deep down something had changed or grown, or changed and grown at the same time. What I mean is that people, his friends, began to see him differently, although he was the same as ever. What I mean is that everyone was somehow expecting him to open his mouth and give us the latest news from the Horror Zone, but he said nothing, as if what other people expected had become incomprehensible to him or he simply didn't give a shit.

  His best friends were no longer the young poets of Mexico, who were all older than him in any case; he started hanging out with adolescent poets, all younger than he was: sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids, who seemed to have graduated from the great orphanage of Mexico City's subway rather than from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Sometimes I'd see them peering through the windows of the cafés and bars on Bucareli, and the mere sight made me shudder, as if they weren't creatures of flesh and blood but a generation sprung from the open wound of Tlatelolco, like ants or cicadas or pus, although they couldn't have been there or taken part in the demonstrations of '68; these were kids who, in September '68, when I was shut up in the bathroom, were still in junior high school. And they were Arturito's new friends.

  I wasn't immune to their beauty. I'm not immune to any kind of beauty. But, shuddering at the sight of them, I realized that they didn't speak the same language as me or the young poets. What those poor orphaned strays were saying was incomprehensible to José Agustín, the novelist in fashion at the time, and to the young poets who wanted to overthrow José Emilio Pacheco, and to José Emilio himself, who was dreaming of the impossible encounter between Darío and Huidobro. No one could understand those voices, whi
ch were saying: We're not from this part of Mexico City, we come from the subway, the underworld, the sewers, we live in the darkest, dirtiest places, where the toughest of the young poets would be reduced to retching.

  All things considered, it wasn't really surprising that Arturo started hanging out with them and gradually distanced himself from his old friends. They were the children of the sewers and Arturo had always been a child of the sewers.

  He still kept up with one of his old friends, however. Ernesto San Epifanio. I met Arturo first, then I met Ernesto San Epifanio, one radiant night in 1971. Arturo had been the youngest of the group. Then Ernesto came along, and he was a year or a few months younger, so Arturito had to yield his ambivalent place of honor. But there was no tension or jealousy between them, and when Arturo returned from Chile, in January 1974, Ernesto San Epifanio went on being his friend.

  What happened between them was very odd. And I'm the only one who can tell the story. At the time, Ernesto San Epifanio seemed to have some kind of illness. He was hardly eating and had become very thin. At night, throughout those Mexico City nights canopied with sheet upon linen sheet, he drank but ate nothing, hardly talked to anyone, and when we went out into the street, he looked around as if he were afraid of something. When his friends asked what was going on, he remained silent or replied with some quote from his beloved Oscar Wilde, but even his characteristic wit had grown sluggish, and those quips, delivered so despondently, provoked only puzzlement and pity. One night I passed on some news about Arturo (which I'd heard from his mother and his sister) and Ernesto listened to me as if he was thinking that going to live in Pinochet's Chile might not actually be such a bad idea.

  For the first few days after returning, Arturo stayed at home, hardly setting foot outside, and, for everyone but me, it was as if he still hadn't come back from Chile. But I went to his apartment and talked to him and found out that he'd been imprisoned, for eight days, and although he hadn't been tortured, he'd acquitted himself bravely. And I told his friends. I said, Arturito's back, and I painted his return with colors borrowed from the palette of epic poetry. And when, one night, Arturito finally appeared in the Café Quito on the Avenida Bucareli, his old friends, the young poets, saw him in a different light. Why? Well, because for them, Arturito now belonged to the category of those who have seen death at close range, and the subcategory of hard men, and, that, in the eyes of those desperate Latin American kids, was a qualification that commanded respect, a veritable compendium of medals.

  It also has to be said that, deep down, they remained somewhat skeptical. I mean I was the source of the legend; they heard it from my mouth, from my lips hidden by the back of my hand, so although everything I had said about him while he was shut up in his apartment was essentially true, the story wasn't altogether credible, simply because of its source; that is, me. That's how it is on this continent. I was the mother and they believed me, but they didn't believe every word I said. Except for Ernesto San Epifanio. During the days leading up to Arturo's public reappearance, Ernesto made me tell and retell the story of our friend's adventures at the ends of the earth, and with each repetition, he became more enthusiastic. What I mean is that as I talked and invented adventures, Ernesto San Epifanio's lethargy gradually fell away, and his melancholy too, or at least his lethargy and his melancholy stirred, shook themselves and began to breathe again. So when Arturo reappeared and everyone wanted to be with him, Ernesto San Epifanio was present along with the others, and took part, albeit in a self-effacing way, in the welcome that Arturo's old friends organized for him, which consisted, if I remember rightly, of standing him a beer and a serving of chilaquiles at the Café Quito, a modest repast by any standard, but well matched to the economic resources at the group's disposal. And when they all went home, Ernesto San Epifanio remained, leaning against the bar of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, since by then we had moved on from the Quito, while Arturo sat alone at a table, accompanied only by his ghosts, staring at his last tequila as if a shipwreck of Homeric proportions were occurring in the bottom of the glass, which was, you have to admit, strange behavior for a kid his age, not quite twenty-one.

  Then the adventure began.

  I saw it. I can testify. I was sitting at another table, talking to a rookie journalist who wrote for the culture pages of a Mexico City newspaper, and I had just bought a drawing from Lilian Serpas, who, after making the sale, had smiled her most enigmatic smile (though the word enigmatic cannot even adumbrate that abyss of darkness) and disappeared into the night, and I was telling the journalist who Lilian Serpas was; I was telling him that the drawing was the work of her son; I was telling him the little I knew about that woman who used to make fleeting appearances in the bars and cafés along the Avenida Bucareli. And then, as I was talking, as Arturo contemplated putative whirpools in his tequila at the next table, Ernesto San Epifanio walked across from the bar and sat down next to him, and for a moment I could see only their heads, their mops of shoulder-length hair (Arturo's was curly while Ernesto's was straight and much darker), and they talked for a while as the last night owls gradually vacated the Encrucidada Veracruzana, some suddenly in a hurry to be gone, shouting, Viva Mexico! from the doorway, and some so drunk they could hardly get up out of their seats.

  Then I got up and went and stood beside them like the crystal statue I wanted to be when I was a girl, and I listened as Ernesto San Epifanio told a terrible story about the King of the Rent Boys in Colonia Guerrero, a guy known as the King, who had a monopoly on male prostitution in that picturesque and indeed charming neighborhood of the capital. The King had bought Ernesto's body, which meant, so our friend told us, that he now belonged to that monarch body and soul (which is what happens if you're reckless enough to let yourself be bought), and if he did not accede to his new owner's demands, the judgment and the wrath of the King would fall upon him and upon his family. Arturito listened to what Ernesto was telling him, and from time to time he lifted his head from the maelstrom of his tequila and looked into his friend's eyes as if wondering how Ernesto could have made such a dumb mistake, how he could have got himself into that mess. And as if Ernesto had read his mind, he said there comes a time in the life of every gay man in Mexico when he goes and makes an irredeemably dumb-ass mistake, and then he said that he had no one to help him, and that if things went on the way they were going he'd end up being a slave to the King of the Rent Boys in Colonia Guerrero. Then Arturito, the kid I had met when he was seventeen, said, And you want me to help you get out of this fucking mess? And Ernesto San Epifanio said, There's no fucking way out of it, but I wouldn't say no to some help. And Arturo said, What do you want me to do? Kill the King of the Rent Boys? And Ernesto San Epifanio said, I don't want you to kill anyone, I just want you to come with me and tell him to leave me alone, for good. And Arturo said, Why the fuck don't you tell him yourself? And Ernesto said, If I go on my own and tell him, all the King's heavies will beat me to a pulp and throw my body to the dogs. And Arturo said, What a fuck-up. And Ernesto San Epifanio said, But nobody fucks with you. And Arturo said, Don't fucking push it. And Ernesto said, Well I'm fucked already, my poems will go down in the martyrology of Mexican poetry. If you don't want to come with me, fine. In the end, you're right. Right about what? said Arturo, stretching as if he'd been asleep until that moment. Then they started talking about the power wielded by the King of the Rent Boys in Colonia Guerrero and Arturo asked what that power was based on. Fear, said Ernesto San Epifanio. The King ruled by fear. And what am I supposed to do? asked Arturo. You're not afraid, said Ernesto. You've just come back from Chile. Whatever the King can do to me, you've seen it multiplied a hundred times or a hundred thousand. I couldn't see Arturo's reaction but I guessed that the slightly vacant expression on his face until then was subtly unsettled by a small, almost imperceptible wrinkle, in which all the world's fear was concentrated. Then Arturito laughed and Ernesto laughed and in the ashen space of the Encrucijada Veracruzana at that late hour their crystalline pea
ls of laughter were like polymorphic birds. Then Arturo got up and said, Let's go to Colonia Guerrero, and Ernesto got up and went out with him, and thirty seconds later I too deserted that moribund bar and followed them at a careful distance, because I knew that if they saw me, they wouldn't let me come along, because I was a woman and they were on men's business, because I was older and didn't have the vigor of a twenty-year-old, and because at that uncertain hour before dawn Arturito Belano was assuming his destiny as a child of the sewers and setting out to confront his ghosts.

  But I didn't want to let him go on his own. Him or Ernesto San Epifanio. So I followed at a careful distance, and as I walked I felt in my bag or my old satchel from Oaxaca, looking for my lucky knife, and this time I found it straight away, and put it in a pocket of my pleated skirt, a grey pleated skirt it was, with pockets on both sides, a gift from Elena, which I rarely wore. And right then I didn't think about what I was doing and the consequences it could have for me or for the others who would no doubt be affected. I thought of Ernesto, who was wearing a lilac-colored jacket and a dark green shirt with stiff collar and cuffs, and I thought about the consequences of desire. And then I thought of Arturo, who had suddenly been promoted to the rank of revolutionary veteran and had, for some obscure reason best known to himself, accepted the responsibilities entailed by that error.