"The Savage Detectives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bolaño Roberto)1Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. My dear boys, I said to them, I'm so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home, and as they filed down the hall, or rather felt their way, because the hall is dark and the bulb had burned out and I hadn't changed it (I haven't changed it yet), I skipped joyfully ahead into the kitchen, where I got out a bottle of Los Suicidas mezcal, a mezcal only made in Chihuahua, limited run, of course, of which I used to receive two bottles each year by parcel post, until 1967. When I returned the boys were in the front room looking at my paintings and examining some books and I couldn't help telling them again how happy their visit made me. Who gave you my address, boys? Germán, Manuel, Arqueles? At which they looked at me as if they hadn't understood and then one of them said List Arzubide. But sit down, I said, have a seat, ah, my good friend Germán List Arzubide, he's not one to forget me, is he still the same big old wonderful man? And the boys shrugged their shoulders and said yes-well of course he'd hardly have shrunk, would he? but all they said was yes-and then I said let's try this mezcalito and I handed them two glasses and they sat there looking at the bottle as if they were afraid a dragon might come shooting out of it, and I laughed, but I wasn't laughing at them, I was laughing for sheer glee, it made me so happy just to be there with them, and then one of them asked if they'd heard right, if that was really what the mezcal was called, and I passed them the bottle, still laughing, I knew the name would impress them, and I stepped back a little to get a better look at them, God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books-the memories they brought back!-and then one of them said are you sure this won't kill us, Señor Salvatierra? and I said what do you mean kill you, this is the essence of health, the water of life, drink it without fear, and to set an example I filled my glass and downed half of it and then I served them, and at first the rascals just wetted their lips, but little by little it grew on them, and they started to drink like men. Well, boys, how is it? I said, and one of them, the Chilean, said that he'd never heard of a mezcal called Los Suicidas, which struck me as a little presumptuous, there must be two hundred brands of mezcal in Mexico at the very least, so it would be hard to know them all, especially if you weren't from here, but of course the boy didn't realize that, and the other one said it's good, and then he said I've never heard of it before either, and I had to tell them that as far as I knew no one made it anymore, the factory went out of business, or burned down, or was sold and turned into a bottling plant for Refrescos Pascual, or the new owners didn't think the name was good for sales. And for a while we were quiet, the two of them standing and me sitting, drinking and savoring each drop of Los Suicidas and thinking who knows what. And then one of them said Señor Salvatierra, we want to talk to you about Cesárea Tinajero. And the other one said: and about the magazine Perla Avilés, Calle Leonardo da Vinci, Colonia Mixcoac, Mexico City DF, January 1976. I'm going to talk about 1970. I met him in 1970, at Porvenir, a high school in Talismán. The two of us were students there for a while. He started in 1968, which was when he came to Mexico, and I started in '69, although we didn't meet until 1970. For reasons that are beside the point we both quit school for a while. Financial reasons in his case, I think, and inner turmoil in mine. But then I went back and he did too, or his parents made him go back, and then we met. This was 1970 and by then I was older than anyone in my class, I was eighteen, and I should have been in college, not high school, but there I was at Porvenir, and one morning, after the school year had already begun, he showed up, I noticed him right away, he wasn't a new student, he had friends, and he was a year younger than me, although he'd repeated a grade. At the time, he lived in Colonia Lindavista, but after a few months he and his parents moved to Colonia Nápoles. I became his friend. In the beginning, as I was getting up the courage to talk to him, I watched him play soccer in the yard. He loved to play. I watched him from the stairs and I thought he was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. Long hair was forbidden in high school, but he had long hair and when he played soccer he took off his shirt and played bare-chested. I thought he looked just like a Greek god from those magazines with tales of the Greek myths and at other times (in class, when he seemed to be asleep), a Catholic saint. I watched him and that was enough for me. He didn't have many friends. He knew lots of people, sure, he kidded around with everybody (he was always laughing), making jokes, but he had very few friends, maybe none at all. He didn't do well at school. In chemistry and physics he was lost. That surprised me because neither one was really hard. All you had to do to pass was pay the tiniest bit of attention, study a little, but obviously he hardly ever studied, or maybe never studied at all, and in class his mind was elsewhere. One day he came up to me, I was on the stairs reading Lautréamont, and asked me whether I knew who owned Porvenir. I was so startled that I didn't know what to say, I think I opened my mouth but nothing came out, my face crumpled, and I might even have started to shake. He was shirtless, carrying his shirt in one hand and a backpack, a dusty backpack full of notebooks, in the other, and he looked at me with a smile on his lips and I looked at the sweat on his chest that was drying fast in the wind or the late afternoon air (which aren't the same thing), and most classes were over, I don't know what I was doing at school, maybe waiting for someone, some friend, though that's unlikely since I didn't have many friends either, maybe I'd just stayed to watch him play soccer. I remember that the sky was a bright, damp gray and that it was cold or that I felt cold at the time. I also remember that the only sounds were of distant footsteps, muted laughter, the empty school. He probably thought I hadn't heard him the first time and he repeated the question. I don't know who it belongs to, I said, I don't know whether it has an owner. Of course it has an owner, he said, it's owned by Opus Dei. He must have thought I was a complete idiot, because I told him that I didn't know what Opus Dei was. A Catholic sect in league with the devil, he said, laughing. Then I understood and I told him that I didn't care much about religion and that I already knew that Porvenir was owned by the church. No, he said, what's important is which part of the church it's owned by: Opus Dei. And what kind of people belong to Opus Dei? I asked. Then he sat down beside me on the stairs and we talked for a long time and it bothered me that he wasn't putting his shirt on and it kept getting colder and colder. I remember what he said in that first conversation about his parents: he said they were naïve and that he was naïve too and he probably said they were stupid (he and his parents) and gullible for not having realized until now that the school belonged to Opus Dei. Do your parents know who's in charge here? he asked me. My mother is dead, I said, and my father doesn't know or care. I don't care either, I added, all I want is to finish high school and go to college. What will you study there? he said. Literature, I said. That's when he told me he was a writer too. What a coincidence, I said, I'm a writer. Or something like that. Not making a big deal out of it. I thought he was kidding, of course. That's how we became friends. I was eighteen and he had just turned seventeen. He'd been living in Mexico since he was fifteen. Once I invited him to go riding with me. My father had some land in Tlaxcala and had bought a horse. He said he was a good rider and I said this Sunday I'm going to Tlaxcala with my father, you can come with us if you want. What bleak country that was. My father had built a thatched adobe hut and that was all there was, the rest was scrub and dirt. When we got there he looked around with a smile, as if to say, I knew this wasn't going to be a fancy ranch or a big spread, but this is too much. Even I was a little bit ashamed of my father's land. Among other things, there was no saddle, and some neighbors kept the horse for us. For a while, as my father was off getting the horse, we wandered the flats. I tried to talk about books I'd read that I knew he hadn't read, but he hardly listened to me. He walked and smoked, walked and smoked, and the scenery was always the same. Until we heard the horn of my father's car and then the man who kept the horse came, not riding the horse but leading it by the bridle. By the time we got back to the hut my father and the man had gone off in the car to settle some business and the horse was tied up waiting for us. You go first, I said. No, he said (it was clear his mind was on other things), you go. Not wanting to argue, I mounted the horse and broke straight into a gallop. When I got back he was sitting on the ground, against the wall of the hut, smoking. You ride well, he said. Then he got up and went over to the horse, saying that he wasn't used to riding bareback, but he vaulted up anyway, and I showed him which way to go, telling him that over in that direction there was a river or actually a riverbed that was dry now but that filled up when it rained and was pretty, then he galloped off. He rode well. I'm a good horsewoman, but he was as good as I was or maybe better, I don't know. At the time I thought he was better. Galloping without stirrups is hard and he galloped clinging to the horse's back until he was out of sight. As I waited I counted the cigarette butts that he had stubbed out beside the hut and they made me want to learn to smoke. Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father's car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking. Laura Jáuregui, Tlalpan, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Before I met him I was dating César, César Arriaga, and I was introduced to César in the poetry workshop at the Torre de Rectoría at UNAM. That was where I met María Font and Rafael Barrios. That's also where I met Ulises Lima. His name wasn't Ulises Lima back then, or I don't know, maybe it already was but we called him by his real name, Alfredo something or other, and I met César too and we fell in love or we thought we'd fallen in love and the two of us wrote poems for Ulises Lima's magazine. This was at the end of 1973, I can't say exactly when. It was at a time when it was raining a lot, I remember, because we were always coming in wet to meetings. And then we put together the magazine, But anyway, first I met César, and Laura amp; César started dating, or something like that. Poor César. He had light brown hair and he was tall. He lived with his grandmother (his parents lived in Michoacán) and I had my first adult sexual experiences with him. Or actually, my last adolescent sexual experiences. Or second to last, now that I think about it. We would go to the movies and a few times we went to the theater. It was around then that I enrolled at the dance school and sometimes César would go there with me. The rest of the time we spent taking long walks, talking about books we were reading, and doing nothing together. And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him. That I know for sure, I was the one who told him it was over, although I can't remember exactly why, and I remember that César took it very well, he agreed that I was right, he was in his second year of medical school then and I had just started at the university, studying literature. That afternoon I didn't go to class, I went to María's house, I had to talk to a friend, I mean in person, not on the phone, and when I got to Colima, to María's house, the gate was open and that surprised me a little, because it was always closed, María's mother was paranoid about it, and I went in and rang the bell and the door opened and a guy I'd never seen before asked me who I was looking for. It was Arturo Belano. He was twenty-one then, skinny and longhaired, and he wore glasses, horrible glasses, although his eyes weren't especially bad, he was just a little bit nearsighted, but the glasses were still horrible. We only exchanged a few words. He was with María and a poet called Aníbal who was crazy about María back then, but they were on their way out when I got there. That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to María and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about César amp; Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Café Quito, where María was supposed to meet Aníbal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Müller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Aníbal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at I gave him my number and the next day he called me. And we made a date to meet, but not downtown, I told him I couldn't leave Tlalpan, where I lived, that I had to study, and he said perfect, I'll come visit you, that way I'll get to see Tlalpan, and I said that there was nothing to see, you'll have to take the metro and then a bus and then another bus, and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky. And that afternoon he talked to me about Chile, I don't know whether it was because he wanted to or because I asked him about it, although the things he said were mostly incoherent, and he also talked about Guatemala and El Salvador, he'd been all over Latin America, or at least to every country along the Pacific coast, and we kissed for the first time, and then we were together for several months and we moved in together and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up and I went back to living at my mother's house and I began to study biology (I hope to be a good biologist someday, I want to specialize in biogenetics), and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn't. And when we realized it wasn't a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down. At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was María, but even my friendship with María began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I thought: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless. But that wasn't what I meant to say. Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo, editorial offices of the magazine So I was able to come to Mexico and I settled in Mexico City and a little while later I get a call from this kid telling me that he wants to interview me or something, I thought he said interview. And of course I said yes. To tell the truth, I was pretty lonely and lost. I didn't know any young Mexican poets and an interview or whatever seemed like a fantastic idea. So we met that same day and when I got to the place we were supposed to meet it turned out that instead of just one poet, there were four poets waiting for me, and what they wanted wasn't an interview but a discussion, a three-way conversation to be published in one of the top Mexican magazines. The participants would be a Mexican (one of them), a Chilean (also one of them), and an Argentinian, me. The other two tagging along were just there to listen. The topic: the state of new Latin American poetry. An excellent topic. So I said great, I'm ready whenever you are, and we found a more or less quiet coffee shop and started to talk. They'd come with a tape recorder all ready to go, but at the crucial moment the machine conked out. Back to step one. This went on for half an hour, and I had two cups of coffee, paid for by them. It was clear they weren't used to this kind of thing: I mean the tape recorder, I mean talking about poetry in front of a tape recorder, I mean organizing their thoughts and expressing themselves clearly. Anyway, we tried it a few more times, but it didn't work. We decided that it would be better if each of us wrote whatever came to mind and then we put together what we'd written. In the end it was just the Chilean and I who had the discussion. I don't know what happened to the Mexican. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking. And a funny thing happened to me with those kids, or the coffee they bought me, I noticed something strange about them, it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there, I'm not sure how to explain it, they were the first young Mexican poets I'd met and maybe that was why they seemed odd, but in the previous few months I'd met young Peruvian poets, young Colombian poets, young poets from Panama and Costa Rica, and I hadn't felt the same thing. I was an expert in young poets and something was off here, something was missing: the camaraderie, the strong sense of shared ideals, the frankness that always prevails at any gathering of Latin American poets. And at one point during the afternoon, I remember it like a mysterious drunkenness, I started to talk about my book and my own poems, and I don't know why but I told them about the Daniel Cohn-Bendit poem, a poem that was neither better nor worse than any of the others in the collection that had won the Cuban prize, but that ultimately wasn't included in the book, we were probably talking about length, about page count, because those two (the Chilean and the Mexican) wrote extremely long poems, or so they said, I hadn't read them yet, and I think they even had a theory about long poems, they called them poem-novels, I think it was some French poets who came up with the idea, though I can't remember exactly, and so I'm telling them about the Cohn-Bendit poem, why in the world I honestly don't know, and one of them asks me why isn't it in your book and I tell them that what happened was that the Casa de las Américas people decided to take it out and the Mexican says but they asked your permission, didn't they, and I tell him no, they didn't ask my permission, and the Mexican says they took it out of the book without letting you know? and I say yes, the truth is that I couldn't be located, and the Chilean asks why did they take it out? and I tell him what the people at Casa de las Américas told me, which was that Cohn-Bendit had just issued some statements against the Cuban Revolution, and the Chilean says was that the only reason? and like a dickhead I tell him I guess so, but the poem wasn't very good anyway (what had those guys given me to drink to make me talk that way?), definitely long, but not very good, and the Mexican says bastards, but he says it sweetly, he really does, not bitterly at all, as if deep down he understood everything the Cubans had been through before they mutilated my book, as if deep down he couldn't be bothered to despise me or our comrades in Havana. Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. And I remember thinking that then, but I can't remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was. And then the walk (but here I have to clarify that it wasn't five of us anymore but three, the Mexican, the Chilean, and me, the other two Mexicans having vanished at the gates of purgatory) turned into a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell. The three of us were quiet, as if we'd been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought it's one of two things: either I'm going crazy, which is unlikely since I've always had my head on straight, or these guys have doped me. And then I said stop, stop for a minute, I feel sick, I have to rest, and they said something but I couldn't hear them, I could only see them coming closer, and I realized, I became conscious, that I was looking all around trying to find someone, some witness, but there was no one, we were in the middle of a forest, and I remember I said what forest is this, and they said it's Chapultepec and then they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (the word Luis Sebastián Rosado, La Rama Dorada coffee shop, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, April 1976. Monsiváis said it first: disciples of Marinetti and Tzara, their noisy, outrageous, overwrought poems did battle in the realm of simple typographic arrangement, never rising above the level of childish entertainment. Monsi was talking about the stridentists, but the same goes for the visceral realists. No one paid attention to them and they opted for indiscriminate assault. In December of '75, just before Christmas, I was unlucky enough to run into some of them here at La Rama Dorada. The owner, Don Néstor Pesqueira, will back me up: it was extremely unpleasant. One of them, the one in charge, was Ulises Lima; the second was a big fat dark guy called Moctezuma or Cuauhtémoc; the third went by the name Luscious Skin. I was sitting right here, waiting for Alberto Moore and his sister, and all of a sudden these three nuts surround me, sitting down one on each side of me, and they say Luisito, let's talk poetry, let's analyze the future of Mexican poetry, something like that. I'm not a violent person and of course I got nervous. I thought: what are they doing here? how did they find me? what scores have they come to settle? This country is a disgrace, it must be said, and so is Mexican literature, it must also be said. Anyway, we were talking for twenty minutes (I've never been so annoyed by the lateness of Albertito and his snotty sister) and finally we even managed to agree on several points. When it came down to it, ninety percent of the time we hated the same things. Of course I always stood up for what Octavio Paz was doing on the literary scene. And of course all they seemed to like was what they were doing themselves. Thank goodness. That being a lesser evil, I mean, since it would've been worse if they'd declared themselves disciples of the peasant poets or followers of poor Rosario Castellanos or disciples of Jaime Sabines (one Jaime is enough, in my opinion). And then Alberto got here and I was still alive, there'd been a little bit of shouting, some unpleasant language, a certain kind of behavior that was inappropriate in a place like La Rama Dorada, Don Néstor Pesqueira will back me up here, but that was all. And when Alberto arrived I thought I'd handled the situation well. But then Julia Moore comes right out and asks them who they are and what they plan to do that night. And the one called Luscious Skin is quick to say that they're not doing anything, that if she has any ideas she should say so, he's up for anything. And then Julita, oblivious of the looks her brother and I are shooting her, says that we could go dancing at Priapo's, an insanely vulgar place in Colonia 10 de Mayo or Tepito, I've only been there once and I've always done my best to forget it, and since neither Alberto nor I can say no to Julita, off we go in Alberto's car, with Alberto, Ulises Lima, and me in the front seat and Julita, Luscious Skin, and the guy called Cuauhtémoc or Moctezuma in the backseat. Honestly, I feared the worst, these people weren't trustworthy, somebody told me once that they cornered Monsi in Sanborn's, at the Casa Borda, but since Monsi did agree to have coffee with them, granted them an audience, you might say, it was partly his fault, because everybody knows the visceral realists are just like the stridentists and everybody knows what Monsi thinks about the stridentists, so he really couldn't complain about what happened, and anyway nobody or almost nobody knows what did happen, though occasionally I've been tempted to ask him, but I haven't, not wanting to pry or open old wounds, still, It's Rimbaud. Which was a surprise. Relatively speaking, that is. The really surprising thing was that he recited it in French. Anyway, I was a little angry not to have guessed it, since I know Rimbaud's work fairly well, but I didn't let it bother me. Another point in common. Maybe we Alberto Moore, Calle Pitágoras, Colonia Narvarte, Mexico City DF, April 1976. What Luisito says is true, up to a point. My sister is an utter lunatic, yes, but she's charming, only twenty-two, a year older than me, and an extremely intelligent woman. She's about to finish medical school and she wants to specialize in pediatrics. She's no ingenue. Let's get that clear from the start. Second: I didn't speed like lightning along the streets of Mexico City. The blue Dodge I was in that day is my mother's and when that's the case I'm usually a careful driver. The vomiting thing was completely unforgivable. Third: Priapo's is in Tepito, which is like saying a war zone, a noman's-land, or the other side of the Iron Curtain. At the end there was almost a fight on the dance floor, but I didn't see anything because I was sitting at a table talking to Ulises Lima. There is no club in Colonia 10 de Mayo as far as I know; my sister will vouch for that. Fourth and last: I didn't say Baudelaire. It was Luis who said Baudelaire, and Catulle Mendès, and even Victor Hugo, I think. I didn't say anything. It sounded like Rimbaud to me, but I didn't say anything. Make sure you get that straight. The visceral realists weren't as badly behaved as we were afraid they might be, either. I hadn't met them before, only heard of them. Mexico City, as we all know, is a small town of fourteen million. And the impression they made on me was relatively positive. The one called Luscious Skin was trying to flirt with my sister, poor idiot. The other guy, Moctezuma Rodríguez (not Cuauhtémoc), was doing his best too. At some point during the night they even seemed to think they were getting somewhere. It was a sad sight, but there was something sort of sweet about it too. As for Ulises Lima, he gives the impression of always being high and his French is decent. He told an amazing story too, about the poem by Rimbaud. According to him, "Le Coeur Volé" was an autobiographical text describing a trip Rimbaud took from Charleville to Paris to join the Commune. As he was traveling (on foot!), Rimbaud ran into a group of drunken soldiers on the road who first taunted him, then proceeded to rape him. Frankly, it was a pretty crude story. But there was even more: according to Lima, some of the soldiers, or at least their leader, the The detachment was under the command of Captain Laurent and lieutenants Rouffanche and González, the latter a Mexican monarchist. This detachment, according to Lima, reached a town called Villaviciosa, near Santa Teresa, on the second day's march, but never made contact with Libbrecht's column. All the men, except Lieutenant Rouffanche and three soldiers who died in the act, were taken prisoner while they ate at the only inn in town, among them the future At midnight they slit Captain Laurent's throat. Lieutenant González, two sergeants, and seven soldiers were taken to the main street and bayoneted by torchlight by shadowy figures riding the soldiers' own horses. At dawn, the future Carlos Monsiváis, walking along Calle Madero, near Sanborn's, Mexico City DF, May 1976. No ambush, no violent incident, nothing like that. Two young men, who couldn't have been more than twenty-three, both of them with extremely long hair, longer than any other poet's (and I can testify to the length of |
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