Amulet

by Roberto Bolaño

  Of course I understood, and I agreed with her, although even as I expressed my agreement, my voice and my body language automatically and unconsciously betrayed an attitude of sickening superiority, as if I were saying to her, Sure, Lilian, that's fine, but in the end isn't it all a bit childish? Sure, it's enjoyable and amusing, but don't count on me to help carry out your experiment.

  As if splitting my time between the deleterious Avenida Bucareli and the university made me any better. As if knowing and associating with young poets as well as old, failed journalists made me any better. The truth is, I'm no better. The truth is, young poets usually end up as old, failed journalists. And the university, my beloved university is lurking in the sewers underneath the Avenida Bucareli, waiting for its day to come.

  One night, Lilian told me this herself, she met an exiled South American at the Café Quito and talked with him until closing time. Then they went to Lilians apartment and climbed into bed without making a sound so as not to wake young Carlos Coffeen. The South American was Ernesto Guevara. I don't believe you, Lilian, I said to her. It's true, it was him, said Lilian, in that peculiar voice she had when I met her: brittle, the voice of a broken doll, the sort of voice Cervantes' glass graduate would have had, if he'd been a woman, that is, and taken leave of his senses while remaining perfectly lucid, back in the hapless Golden Age of Spanish Literature. And what was Che Guevara like in bed, was the first thing I wanted to know. Lilian said something I couldn't hear. What? I said. What? What? Normal, said Lilian, staring at the creased surface of her folder.

  Maybe it was a lie. When I met Lilian, the only thing she seemed to care about was selling reproductions of her son's drawings. Poetry left her cold. She would turn up at the Café Quito very late and sit down at a table with the young poets, or with the old, failed journalists (all of whom had slept with her) and pass the time listening to the same old conversations. If someone said, for example, Tell us about Che Guevara, she would say, He was normal. That was all. As it happened, a number of those failed journalists had known Che Guevara and Fidel during their stay in Mexico, and no one was surprised to hear Lilian say that the Che was normal, although perhaps they didn't know that Lilian had actually slept with him; they thought she had slept only with them and a few bigwigs who didn't frequent the Avenida Bucareli in the small hours of the morning, no one really special, in other words.

  I admit I would have liked to know what Che Guevara was like in bed. So he was normal, OK, but normal how?

  One night I challenged Lilian, saying, These kids have a right to know exactly what Che was like in bed. One of my crazier declarations, but I went ahead and made it anyway.

  I remember Lilian looking at me with her pained, wrinkled doll's mask, which seemed to be perpetually on the point of dropping to reveal the Queen of the Seas with her cohorts of thunder, yet always remained lifeless. These kids, she said, these kids, and then looked up at the ceiling of the Café Quito, which was being painted by two youths perched on a mobile scaffold.

  That's what she was like, the woman I followed from the dream of Remedios Varo, the great Catalan painter, to the dream of Mexico City's incurable streets, where something was always happening, while seeming to whisper or shout or hiss at you: Nothing ever happens here.

  So there I am once again at the Café Quito in 1973 or maybe the first months of '74; it's eleven o'clock and through the smoke, lit as if by tracer fire, I see Lilian arrive enveloped, as always, in smoke, and her smoke and that of the café eye each other like spiders before coalescing into a single coffee-scented cloud (there's a roaster in the Café Quito, and it's one of the few places on the Avenida Bucareli that has an Italian espresso machine).

  Then the young poets of Mexico, my friends, greet her without getting up from their table. They say, Good evening, Lilian Serpas, or, What's up, Lilian Serpas? Even the most addled pronounce some kind of greeting, as if by so doing they could make a goddess descend from the heights of the Café Quito (where two intrepid young painters are at work, balanced in a fashion I can only describe as precarious) and award them The Order of Poetic Merit, when in reality what they are doing (but this is a thought I keep to myself) by greeting her in that manner is placing their addled young heads on the chopping block.

  And Lilian stops, as if she didn't hear properly, and looks for the table where they are sitting (I am sitting there too) and, having spotted us, conies over to say hello and to see if she can perhaps sell one of her reproductions, and I look the other way.

  Why do I look the other way?

  Because I know her story.

  So I look the other way while Lilian, standing or seated, says hello to each of them in turn, the five or often more motley young poets around that table, and when she gets to me, I look up from the ground, turn my head so slowly it's exasperating (but I really can't turn it any faster) and, compliantly, reply to her greeting.

  And time goes by (in the end Lilian doesn't try to sell us any drawings because she knows we don't have any money and wouldn't buy them anyway, but if anyone wants to take a look, she's happy to show them the reproductions, which are of surprisingly high quality, printed with a proper press on glossy paper, which reveals something about the curious business sense of Carlos Coffeen Serpas or of his mother, mendicant entrepreneurs who, in a moment of inspiration that I would rather not try to imagine, decided to live exclusively from the proceeds of art) and gradually people start to leave or change tables, since, at the Café Quito, after a certain time of night, everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and everyone wants to have a chat or at least exchange a few words with his or her acquaintances. So there I am, stranded in the midst of that ceaseless mingling, staring at my half-empty coffee cup, when suddenly (it's almost like a cut to a new scene) an evasive shadow, so evasive it seems to attract all the other shadows in the café, as if it could exert a gravitational force on absences of light, approaches my table and sits down next to me.

  How are you doing, Auxilio? says the ghost of Lilian Serpas.

  Fine, just hanging out, I say.

  And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let's say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass, or let's say that the full or waxing or obscurely waning moon of Mexico City slides again over the tiles of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, or that the silence of a wake falls over the Café Quito and all I can hear are the murmurs of Lilian Serpas's ghostly court and once again I don't know if I'm in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, or gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.

  Be that as it may, something is happening as time passes. I know that time and not, for example, space, is making something happen. Something that has happened before, although in a sense every time is the first time so experience counts for nothing, which is better in the end, because experience is generally a hoax.

  And then Lilian (the only one who emerges from this story unscathed, since she has already been through it all) asks me, once again, to do her a favor, the first and last favor she will ask of me in her life.

  She says, It's late. She says, You're so pretty, Auxilio. She says, I often think of you, Auxilio. And I look at her and I look at the ceiling of the Café Quito, where the two sleepy young men are still working or pretending to work, perched on the most precarious scaffolding, and then I look back at Lilian: she's talking to me but staring at the large chunky glass containing her coffee with milk. With one ear I'm listening to what she's saying, and with the other to the Café Quito regulars kidding the youths on the scaffolding, yelling remarks that are, I gather, part of some masculine initiation rite, supposedly affectionate but in fact foreshadowing a disaster that w
ill engulf not only the pair of broad-brush painters (or plumbers or electricians, I don't know, I just saw them there, and I can see them still, as the moonlight makes its crazy way over every tile in the women's bathroom, as if its course—and this is a terrifying thought—exhausted all the possibilities of subversion), a disaster that will engulf not just the painters but the jeerers as well, the givers of advice, in other words: us.

  And then Lilian says, You have to go to my place. She says, I can't go home tonight. She says, You have to go and tell Carlos I'll be back early tomorrow morning. And my first impulse is to refuse point blank. But then Lilian looks me in the face and smiles at me (she doesn't cover her mouth when she speaks, like me, or when she smiles, although she should) and I am at a loss for words because I am looking at the mother of Mexican poetry, the worst mother Mexican poetry could possibly have, but its one, true mother none the less. So I say yes, I will go to her apartment if she gives me the address and if it's not too far away, and I will tell Carlos Coffeen, the painter, that his mother will be staying out all night.

  Eleven

  And I see myself that night, my friends, walking toward Lilian Serpas's apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.

  You might be surprised to learn that I didn't know Carlos Coffeen Serpas. No one did, really. Or to be precise, a few people knew him, and they had hatched the legend, the minor legend of a crazy painter who never left his mother's apartment, an apartment that, in some versions, was endowed with massive, dusty furniture that could have been buried in the crypt of one of the Emperor Maximilian's followers, although, according to other accounts, mother and son lived in something more like a tenement building, a faithful reproduction of the Burrón family's apartment (ah, the invincible Burrón family, God bless them, long may their comic strip run; when I arrived in Mexico, the first guy who tried to chat me up said I was the spitting image of Borola Tacuche, which isn't too far from the truth). The reality, as it sadly tends to be, was halfway between these imaginary extremes: neither crumbling palace nor tenement house, but an old four-story building in the Calle República de El Salvador, near the church of San Felipe Neri.

  Carlos Coffeen Serpas was more than forty years old, and no one I knew had seen him for a long time. What did I think of his drawings? I didn't like them much, to be perfectly honest. Figures, almost always very thin, and sickly-looking too: that was what he used to draw. Flying or buried figures, sometimes staring out into the eyes of the viewer, and usually gesturing in some way. For example, holding a finger to their lips to request silence. Or covering their eyes. Or holding up an open, unlined hand. That's all I can say. I don't know much about art.

  Anyway, there I was, in front of the gate of Lilian's building, and while I was thinking about her son's drawings, which probably had the distinction of being the cheapest on the Mexican art market, I was also thinking about what I would say to Coffeen when he opened the door to me.

  Lilian lived on the top floor. I rang the bell a number of times. No one answered and for a moment I thought that Coffeen Serpas must be in some bar nearby, because he was reputed to be an incorrigible alcoholic. I was about to leave when something, I couldn't say exactly what, an intuition possibly, or perhaps just my natural curiosity, exacerbated by the time of night and by having walked all that way, prompted me to cross the street and take up a position on the opposite sidewalk. The lights in the windows on the fourth floor were out, but after a few seconds I thought I saw a curtain move, as if the wind that wasn't blowing through the streets of Mexico City was being channeled through the interior of that darkened apartment. And that was too much for me.

  I crossed the street and rang the bell again. Then, without waiting for the door to open, I went back to the opposite sidewalk, watched the windows, and saw a curtain being drawn back. This time I could see a shadow, the silhouette of a man looking down at me, knowing that I could see him, not seeming to care anymore, and then I knew that the shadow was Carlos Coffeen Serpas, looking at me and wondering who I was, what I was doing there at that hour of night, what I wanted, what abhorrent news I was bearing.

  For a moment I was sure he wouldn't open the door to me. It was common knowledge that Lilian's son was a complete recluse. Not that anyone wanted to visit him. So it was an odd situation, whichever way you looked at it.

  I waved to him.

  Then, lowering my gaze, I crossed the street for the fourth or fifth time, pretending as best I could to be confident. After a few seconds, the door opened with a click that echoed in the entrance hall. I climbed warily up to the fourth floor. The staircase was dimly lit. On the fourth-floor landing, Carlos Coffeen Serpas was waiting for me behind a door left ajar.

  I don't know why I didn't just say what I had to say to him, then turn around and go home. Coffeen was tall, taller than his mother, and you could tell that in his youth he must have been slim and well built, although now he was fat, or, rather, bloated. His forehead was broad, but it didn't have the sort of breadth that suggests intelligence or sound judgment; it had the breadth of a battlefield, and the battle had been lost, to judge from the rest of his face: thin, lank hair falling over his ears, a skull more like a dented bowl than a noble dome, light eyes staring at me with a mixture of suspicion and boredom. In spite of everything, I found him attractive (I'm a born optimist).

  I'm so tired, I said to him. After looking at me for a few seconds without inviting me in, he asked who I was. I'm a friend of Lilian's, I said. My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I work at the university.

  At the time, in fact, I wasn't doing any kind of work at the university. In other words, I was unemployed again. But, faced with Coffeen, I thought it would be more reassuring to say I had a job at the faculty than to confess that I was out of work. Reassuring for whom? Well, for both of us: for me, because it gave me some kind of imaginary status or backing, and for him, because it meant he wasn't being visited late at night by a slightly younger double of his dear, dreadful mother. It's not something to be proud of. I know. But that's what I said, and then I looked him straight in the eye and waited for him to stand aside.

  Coffeen had no choice but to ask me if I would like to come in, like a sullen boy receiving a surprise visit from his girlfriend. Of course I wanted to come in. So in I went and saw what lights remained in Lilian's apartment. A small entrance hall full of packages: reproductions of her son's drawings. And then a short, dark passage leading to a room where there was no hiding the poverty in which the ex-poet and the ex-painter lived. But I don't turn up my nose at poverty. In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor (except perhaps some Chileans). There was, however, something abysmal about this poverty: entering Lilian's apartment was like plunging into the depths of an Atlantic trench. There, in deceptive stillness, the intruder was observed by the charred, mossy or plankton-covered remains of what had once been a life, a family, a mother and son, a real son, not invented or adopted like those prodigal sons of mine; a subtle inventory or anti-inventory of traces, emanating from the walls, speaking in a murmur like the voice of a black hole about Lilian's lovers, Carlitos Coffeen Serpas at primary school, the breakfasts and the dinners, the nightmares and the daylight that came in when Lilian drew the curtains, curtains that looked filthy now, curtains that a housework addict like myself would have taken down immediately and washed by hand in the kitchen sink, if I hadn't been afraid that any sudden movement on my part might have hardened the painter's gaze, which was gradually becoming milder as I let the seconds pass in silence, as if he had provisionally accepted my presence there in his last redoubt. And that's all I can say. I wanted to stay; I kept still and quiet. But my eyes took in everything: the sofa sagging down to the floor, the low table covered with papers, napkins and dirty glasses, Coffeen's dust-covered paintings hanging on the walls, the hallway making its ra
sh, inexorable way toward the mother's room, the son's room and the bathroom, which is where I went, having asked permission, having waited for Coffeen to deliberate with himself or with Coffeen 2 or perhaps even Coffeen 3, the bathroom, which was comparable in every respect to the living room, and which, as I walked down that dark passage (all the passages in Lilian's apartment were dark), I imagined as lacking a mirror, mistakenly, because there was a mirror there, perfectly normal in size and placement, over the small sink, and after having a pee, I took another good look at myself in the mercury of that mirror, at my thin face, blond page-boy hair and toothless smile, because there, my friends, there in Lilian Serpas's bathroom, a room that had probably not been graced for many years by the presence of a visitor, I found myself thinking about happiness, just like that, the happiness possibly hidden under the crusts of filth in that apartment, and when you're happy or sense that happiness may be imminent you're not afraid to look at yourself in mirrors, indeed, when you're happy or feel predestined for happiness, you tend to lower your guard and face up to mirrors, out of curiosity, I guess, or because you're feeling good in your skin, as the Frenchified citizens of Montevideo used to say (may God grant them some remnant of health). So I looked at myself in Lilian and Coffeen's bathroom mirror and I saw Auxilio Lacouture, and what I saw, my friends, moved my soul in contradictory ways, since, on one hand, it could have made me laugh, what I was seeing so clearly there: my skin slightly ruddy from fatigue and alcohol, but my eyes quite wide open (when I go without sleep, my eyes become two cashbox slots collecting not the sadly hoped-for coins of my chimerical savings but coins of fire from a future blaze in which nothing makes any sense), eyes wide open, shining and awake, ideal eyes for appreciating a nocturnal exhibition of Carlos Coffeen's work, but, on the other hand, I also saw my lips, my poor little lips, trembling imperceptibly, as if they were telling me, Don't be crazy, Auxilio, what are you thinking, go straight back to your rooftop room right now, forget Lilian and her infernal offspring, forget the Calle República de El Salvador, and forget this apartment which draws its sustenance from anti-life, from anti-matter, from the black holes of Mexico and Latin America, from all that once tried to find a way out into life but now leads only back to death.