The Savage Detectives
Page 31
Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, March 1979. One day a strange man came to visit me. That's what I remember about the year 1978. I didn't get many visitors, just my daughter and a woman and another girl who said she was my daughter too, and who was remarkably pretty. This man had never been to see me before. I received him in the yard, facing north. Even though all the lunatics face south or west, I was facing north and that was how I received him. The stranger said good morning, Quim, how are you today? And I answered that I was the same as I'd been yesterday and the day before and then I asked him whether the architecture studio where I used to work had sent him, since the way he looked or talked was vaguely familiar to me. Then the stranger laughed and said how can you not remember me, man, can you possibly be serious? And I laughed too, to put him at ease, and I said yes, of course, my question was perfectly sincere. And then the stranger said I'm Damián, your friend Álvaro Damián. And then he said: we've known each other for years, man, how can this be? And to relax him, or so he wouldn't be sad, I said yes, now I remember. And he smiled (although his eyes didn't look happy) and he said that's better, Quim, it was as if he'd adopted the voice and concerns of my doctors and nurses. And when he left I guess I forgot him, because a month later he came back and he said I've been here before, I remember this asylum, the urinals are over there, this yard faces north. And the next month he said to me: I've been visiting you for more than two years, man, can't you try just a little harder to remember me? So I made an effort and the next time he came I said how are you, Mr. Álvaro Damián, and he smiled but his eyes were still sad, as if he were seeing everything from the vantage point of a great sorrow.
Jacinto Requena, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, March 1979. It was really strange. I know it's just a coincidence, but sometimes these things make you think. When I told Rafael about it, he said it was all in my head. I said: have you realized, now that Ulises and Arturo don't live in Mexico anymore, there seem to be more poets? What do you mean more poets? said Rafael. Poets our age, I said, poets born in 1954, 1955, 1956. How do you know that? said Rafael. Well, I said, I get around, I read magazines, I go to poetry readings, I read book reviews, sometimes I even listen to reviews on the radio. And how do you make time for so many things now that you have a kid? said Rafael. Franz loves to listen to the radio, I said. I turn on the radio and he falls asleep. Are they reading poetry on the radio? said Rafael. He was surprised. Yes, I said. There's poetry on the radio and in magazines. It's like an explosion. And every day a new publishing house pops up that publishes new poets. And all of this right after Ulises left. Strange, isn't it? It doesn't seem strange to me at all, said Rafael. A sudden blossoming, the flowering of a hundred schools for no good reason, I said, and it just happens to be when Ulises is gone. Doesn't it seem like too much of a coincidence to you? Most of them are terrible poets, said Rafael, suck-ups to Paz, Efraín, Josemilio, and the peasant poets, complete garbage. I'm not saying that they aren't, I said, or that they are. It's the number of them that bothers me, the appearance of so many of them, and so suddenly. There's even some guy who's putting together an anthology of all the poets in Mexico. Yes, said Rafael, I already knew that. (I already knew he knew.) And he isn't going to include any of my poems, said Rafael. How do you know? I asked. A friend told me so, said Rafael, the guy doesn't want anything to do with the visceral realists. Then I said that what he'd said wasn't entirely true, because even if the asshole who was putting together the anthology had excluded Ulises Lima, he hadn't excluded María and Angélica Font or Ernesto San Epifanio or me. He does want poems from us, I said. Rafael didn't answer. We were walking along Misterios, and Rafael gazed toward the horizon, as if he could actually see it, although where it would have been there were houses, clouds of smoke, the afternoon haze of Mexico City. So are all of you going to be in the anthology? said Rafael after a long silence. I don't know about María and Angélica, I said, it's been a long time since I've seen them. Ernesto almost definitely will be. And I definitely won't be. So why won't you…? said Rafael, but I didn't let him finish the question. Because I'm a visceral realist, I said, and if that asshole won't take Ulises, he's not getting me either.
Luis Sebastián Rosado, a dark office, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, March 1979. Yes, it's an odd phenomenon, but its causes are very different from those put forward just a bit naïvely by Jacinto Requena. There really was a demographic explosion of poets in Mexico. This became clear beginning, say, in January 1977. Or January 1976. It's impossible to put an exact date on it. Among the various contributing factors, the most obvious are the country's more or less steady economic growth (from 1960 to the present day), the consolidation of the middle class, and an increasingly well-structured university, especially in the humanities.
Let's take a closer look at this new horde of poets, of which I'm a part, agewise at least. The great majority are students. A large percentage published their first poems in magazines associated with the university or the Ministry of Education, and their first books with university-affiliated publishing houses. A large percentage have also mastered (in a manner of speaking) a second language in addition to Spanish-usually English, or to a lesser extent French-and translate poets writing in those languages, nor is there any shortage of fledgling translators from the Italian, the Portuguese, or the German. Some combine work as amateur editors with their poetic endeavors, which in turn leads to the proliferation of various often valuable projects of an editorial nature. There are probably more young poets in Mexico now than there've ever been. Does this mean that poets under thirty today, say, are better than those who occupied that age bracket in the sixties? May we conceivably discover the equals of Becerra, José Emilio Pacheco, or Homero Aridjis among some of our most rabidly contemporary poets? That remains to be seen.
And yet Ismael Humberto Zarco's project strikes me as perfect. It was about time to bring out an anthology of young Mexican poets with the same high standards as Monsiváis's La poesía mexicana del siglo XX, memorable in so many ways! Or like Poesía en movimiento, the exemplary and paradigmatic work undertaken by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. I must admit that in a certain sense I felt flattered when Ismael Humberto Zarco called me at home and said: Luis Sebastián, I need your advice. Of course, advice or not, I knew for a fact that I was already included in the anthology, as a matter of course, you might say (the only thing I didn't know was how many of my poems would be selected), as were my friends, so my visit chez Zarco was initially only in an advisory capacity, in the event that some detail had escaped Zarco, meaning in this particular case some magazine, some publication from the provinces, a name or two that the totalizing zeal of the Zarconian endeavor couldn't permit itself the luxury of overlooking.
But in the scant three days between Ismael Humberto's call and my visit, I happened to learn the number of poets the anthologist planned to include, an excessive number no matter how you looked at it, democratic but hardly realistic, remarkable as an experiment but mediocre as a crucible of poetry. And the devil tempted me, putting ideas in my head during the days between Zarco's call and our meeting, as if the wait (but what wait, my God?) were the Desert and my visit the instant when one opens one's eyes and sees one's Savior. And for those three days I was tortured by doubts. Or Doubts. But it was a torture, this I saw clearly, that brought satisfaction as well as suffering and doubt (or Doubt), as if the flames were a simultaneous source of pain and pleasure.
My idea, or my temptation, was this: to suggest to Zarco that he include Luscious Skin in the anthology. The numbers were in my favor, but everything else was against me. The rashness of this plan, I admit, at first seemed completely insane. I was literally scaring myself. Then it seemed completely pathetic. And later, when I was finally able to get a little distance from it and judge it more coolly (though only in a manner of speaking, of course), it struck me as noble and sad, and I serio
usly feared for my mental well-being. I did, at least, have the tact or cunning not to announce my plan to the principal interested party, in other words Luscious Skin, whom I saw three times a month, or twice a month, or sometimes only once or not at all, since his absences tended to be long and his appearances unexpected. Our relationship, from the time of our second and transcendental encounter at Emilito Laguna's studio, had followed an irregular course, occasionally in the ascendant (especially as far as I was concerned), and occasionally nonexistent.
We usually saw each other at an empty apartment that my family owned in Nápoles, although the way we met was much more complicated. Luscious Skin would call me at my parents' house and since I was almost never home he would leave a message, calling himself Estéfano. The name, I swear, was not something I suggested. According to him it was an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, an author he had only heard of (like almost everything, incidentally) but whom he thought of as one of my tutelary spirits, by who knows what kind of strange mental association. Essentially, the name under which he left his messages was a kind of tribute to what he believed I held most dear. In other words, the false name concealed an attraction, a desire, a real need (I don't dare call it love) for me or of me, which, as the months went by and after endless contemplation, I realized filled me with rejoicing.
After he left his messages we would meet at the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at the entrance to a macrobiotic store. Then we would lose ourselves in the city, in coffee shops and bars to the north, near La Villa, where I didn't know anyone and where Luscious Skin had no qualms about introducing me to friends of his, male and female, who would show up in the most unexpected places and whose looks spoke more of a penitentiary Mexico than of otherness, although otherness, as I tried to explain to him, could take many forms. (Like the Holy Spirit, said Luscious Skin, that noble savage.) When night came, we took shelter like two pilgrims in cheap rooms or the lowliest hotels, though there was a certain splendor to them (at the risk of waxing romantic, I'd even say a certain hope), places in La Bondojito or on the edges of Talismán. Our relationship was spectral. I don't want to talk about love, and I'm reluctant to talk about desire. We had only a few things in common: some films, some folkloric figurines, the way he liked to tell tales of desperation, the way I liked to listen to them.