We transferred from the bus to the U-Bahn and hummed along to Friedrichstraße station. From there we continued on foot to our hotel, the Baxpax, scarcely a block from Oranienburger Straße.
Quite suddenly, as if with a single gulp I’d melted all the ice of my hallucinations, I felt completely relaxed. The Mitte turned out to be not only more habitable than Tegel, or the west of the city, but even welcoming. There was a whiff of the Condesa neighborhood in the air, with added hints of curry and Pakistan. But also, sheltering in certain venerable doorways, were beautiful Hungarian and Russian prostitutes with long, high-heeled boots and ultratight corsets gracefully tied, not over their skin, but over goose-down jackets. This trick allowed them to preserve, and even exaggerate, the desirability of their figures without succumbing to the thirty-five-degree wind. I could still sense the heavy lethargy of an inhuman architecture, as if the mental aroma of the Famous Wall was enveloping each new brick in its mixture of blackmail and bridal veil. But I found myself suddenly fond of the narrow, cramped streets of the old Jewish quarter. I don’t know: perhaps the ghosts of prudish, pre-Nazi, socialist whoring have a family resemblance to my own tutelary phantoms.
Mónica and I did practically nothing the whole time we were in Germany. In Munich, we ate Italian olives and took hundreds of photos of a set of miniature gargoyles, specially designed to relieve the boredom of disoriented tourists. In Bonn, we went to look at the Rhine: a bit of an anticlimax with its Rhenish joggers of varying degrees of obesity grumbling about our slow pace. We occasionally had breakfast with other Latin American poets, who seemed deeply self-satisfied with their own genius. Or we chatted with Timo and Rike, our hosts. We always spoke in Spanish, utilizing a secret formula of idiomatic phrases and accents that, as soon as it emerged from Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan sea, fell headlong in a long-winded, hip-hop flood. It was a language that had been fleetingly imperial, before dragging itself along through the proud sewers and junkyards of junkie-filled, overpopulated cities, violent national anthems intoned by squat, swaggering countries that lose almost every one of their wars; nations and subnations and regurgitations whose only Bolivarian dream is called Nike, is called Brangelina, is called for-the-love-of-god-will-someone-pull-the-four-hairs-from-Chavez’s-nose … The best poets were, naturally, from Cuba and Chile. But when it came to conversation, nothing doing: they would have had to send them over with built-in subtitles.
What Mónica and I preferred (I’m not sure we enjoyed it: rather, we suffered it with incoherent lyrical depth) was walking along the empty, autumnal Berlin streets. We made a point of veering off between three-story apartment buildings whose central courtyards, dedicated to trade, seemed like the Odradek or golem of a mall by the sea. Or we would shelter from the evening’s howling gale in exquisite Turkish cafés, in the doorways of which a boy would be selling hashish and sprigs of lavender. Or we went deep into the area around the Volkspark Friedrichshain, walking along streets that unfailingly led to small squares, each with its inevitable gray church with green and gold ornamentation, and a crush barrier around a public work of art and—right here, or over there—an unfortunate equestrian statue, romantically impeccable in its isolation. None of those images were either flattering or sad. It was, instead, like entering an interior landscape on tiptoe.
There’s a Ray Bradbury story in which two hobos earn a living by taking over a lookout point by the highway: they charge anyone who pulls over two dollars to get an advance view of the city. The success of the ragged entrepreneurs is due to the fact that, by some miraculous ruse, each driver views from the hillside the city that is the object of his most burning desire: some see New York; others Paris; a young student describes what he sees by reciting from memory Coleridge’s Kubla Khan … If I could pay two dollars to stand on that lookout point, Berlin below zero would be my bombed Xanadu.
In an effort to compensate for our cultural ineptitude, each morning we set out to visit a museum. We almost never followed through with this plan: there was always a shop selling knickknacks or some street stall to divert us from our mission. In Hackescher Markt, along Hackescherhöfe, going up Rosenthalerplatz and beyond, Invalidenstraße and Kastanienallee and the Prenzlauerberg neighborhood, our route was not dictated by historical prestige, but by the omnipotent junk: Chinese plastic beads, vintage pinups with inscriptions in Swedish, a polymer ring in the form of a stylized panther, an absinthe boutique, fake relics of the GDR, hundreds of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tapestries, reproduced without copyright on wrapping paper, lighters and pens and small bottles of oil and CDs of eighties Italian ballads and tin dolls with moving pieces and aluminum necklaces coated with powdered dye and little books with pictures of the Fernsehturm highlighted with silver ink: mass-produced trash, identical in spirit to the plastic frogs sold on the stalls opposite the Zócalo in Mexico City. Serve us another round of Taiwan.
But when we happened to detach ourselves from the sidewalk treasures and enter some distinguished locale housing the Germanic patrimony (the Bode, the Pergamon, Friedrich Wilhelm III’s apartments), the experience turned out to be heartrendingly unremarkable: tall Roman jars for serving wine, Greek vessels decorated with images of gigantic pricks, marble heads battered to a greater or lesser extent by sticks and swords, Phoenician coins, tiny Cretan dolls whose size and orifices seemed perfect for making key chains … Hardware, no less tacky for being ancient. The difference isn’t in the object itself but in the story behind it. A solid gold fish encrusted with precious stones that a fisherman’s net trawled from the bottom of the Spree: the piece is so sumptuous it seems akin to Mexican narco jewelry. The bust of an Egyptian lady with unplucked eyebrows. A Hellenic frontispiece that, after being thrown in the garbage, became a marble Lego model with pieces gone, never to return …
When the night drew in, we’d return to the hotel and, freezing cold, make love. We’d talk for a while in the dark, looking out through the mist at the illuminated cupola of the Oranienburger Straße. Then Mónica would slowly fall asleep. I’d cover her up, get dressed, grab my Walkman, and go out in search of a drink on the icy streets of Spandau. Sometimes I’d stop to talk—in mutually incomprehensible English—with transvestites and prostitutes. Sometimes I’d buy a bottle of 136-proof Moulin Vert absinthe and, stashing it under my overcoat, go up into the S-Bahn. All alone, with no destination in mind. I’d drink until the shadow of the bare lime trees and the velocity of the street-lit public became blots: black and white ink transecting the print of Berlin like a cup of tea spilled on the plans of a sacred city.
2
As a child I was called Favio Julián Herbert Chávez. Now, in the civil registry in Chilpancingo, they say that was not in fact the case. The copy of the birth certificate differs from the original in one letter: it says “Flavio.” I don’t know if this was out of spite on the part of my parents or a mistake made by the previous or present bureaucracy. Under the name of “Flavio,” I had to renew my passport and my electoral ID. So all my childhood memories come, inevitably, with an error. The name I use for the simplest of acts (holding a spoon, reading this line) is different from the one I use to cross borders or vote for the president of my country. My memory is a notice written by hand on cardboard, posted outside an airport equipped with Prodigy Mobile, a brokerage house, and a Sanborns department store: “Welcome to Mexico.”
I was born on January 20, 1971, in the port city of Acapulco de Juárez, Guerrero State. At the age of three, I saw my first dead body: a drowned man. And also my first guerrilla: Kito, the younger brother of my godmother, Jesu: he was doing time for a bank heist. I spent my childhood traveling from city to city, whorehouse to whorehouse, following the itinerancy imposed on the family by my mother’s profession. Year after year, I journeyed from the far south, armed with fierce patience, to the splendid cities of the north.
I thought I’d never leave the country. I thought I’d never get out of poverty. I’ve worked—I say this without meaning to offend, paraphrasing an i
llustrious statesman, an exemplar of the sublime national idiosyncrasy—doing things not even the blacks are prepared to do. I’ve had seven long-term relationships—Aída, Sonia, Patricia, Ana, Sol, Anabel, Lauréline, and Mónica—and very few casual lovers. I have fathered two sons: Jorge, who is now seventeen, and Arturo, fifteen. I was a cocaine addict during some of the happiest and most dreadful periods of my life. I once helped remove a dead body from the highway. I smoked crystal meth off a lightbulb. I went on a fifteen-day triumphal tour as the lead singer in a rock band. I went to university and studied literature. I lost an academic progress competition whose prize was to meet the president. I’m left-handed. None of those things prepared me for my mother’s leukemia. None of those things made the forty days and nights I spent sitting sleepless at her bedside less squalid. Noah plowing his way through a flood of blood chemicals, caring for and hating her, watching her fever rise to the point of asphyxiation, noting her encroaching baldness. I’m a brute who, with my head spinning, travels north from the southern ruins of an ancient civilization toward a Second Coming of the Barbarians: bon voyage; Free Market; USA; the death of your fucking mother.
A few weeks before coming to Berlin, I had to spend hours in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It wasn’t for myself: Sonia, the mother of my son Arturo, is moving to Texas. Arturo still hasn’t decided whether to go with her or stay on a year with his grandparents before enrolling in a gringo high school. In either case, he needs to renew his passport. He can’t: he’s a minor, I’m his father, and he needs my authorization. And I can’t give it: according to the Mexican civil registry, I no longer exist. My name is no longer my name. Je est un autre, and unlike Rimbaud, I have documents to prove it.
Arturo, Sonia, and I had arranged to meet very early outside the ministry. It took us until midday to complete all the red tape. Then, when they were about to add the much-prized stamp with the national coat of arms, the young woman noticed a minute typographical discrepancy between my passport and my son’s birth certificate. She became very serious.
“But just look at us,” I tried joking. “We’re like two peas in a pod.”
The young woman didn’t deign to reply. Turning to my wife, she said:
“There’s a discrepancy. I’ll have to consult my superiors.”
Making a face, Sonia ordered me (as if I too were her child, a strange idea I’ve been unable to rid myself of since the day we married) to go out into the street with Arturo and let her sort things out.
Sitting on a bench opposite the ministry, Arturo picked up the thread of our conversation.
“Then he sent a letter saying he’d killed another woman, one nobody thought he’d murdered. But a long time had gone by. And that’s how they knew he wasn’t in fact dead, and if it hadn’t been for the DNA, and a computer file, and a security camera in a Home Depot, he’d never have been caught.”
He was talking about the BTK strangler. Lately, Arturo has been giving me detailed accounts of the lives of famous murderers whenever we see each other. An Argentinian boy with big ears who committed five or six homicides before reaching puberty. A vindictive guru who threw poison gas into the Japanese metro. The famous Goyo Cárdenas, honored by Congress … Not long ago he discovered a web page dedicated to the subject. Since then, he’s learned so much he sometimes surprises me with forensic terminology I’ve heard only on TV series. I have to confess it’s a shared interest: extreme, gratuitous, unpunished, cruel, perversely poetic violence is one of my recurring themes. In my adolescence, I too compulsively read the stories and legends related to serial killers. From experience, I know that below the morbid patina coating these stories, there’s a constant test of empathy and the moral limits of the imagination, a compassionate gaze. One is moved by the story of a logical sequence (the planning of a murder, the psychoanalytic inferences, and the forensic elements that allow the case to be solved), while being alternately repulsed and seduced by the concrete details of the execution, voids of meaning beyond their pornographic surface. I’ve experienced that ambiguous instinct. I’m terrified by the possibility of having passed on a disturbing tendency to my son. In some dark corner of my consciousness is the weariness of having battled for the past thirty years with the sociopathic streak left by my childhood.
One of the reasons I haven’t been a good father is the puritanical self-obsession with which I perceive the bonds between my children and myself. A while ago, when Jorge was still in elementary school, Aída phoned me in alarm:
“The boy completely lost it at school. He pushed one of his classmates around, and even bashed his head against the wall.”
The whole way there, I told myself that it was my fault. I’d done something very bad to my baby. I remembered how I used to cradle him crooning “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” remixed with “By the Rivers of Babylon.” I’d always liked the similarity of argument and tone between the two pieces. At that moment, however, they seemed more like lullabies fit for a monster: the biblical psalm on which they are both based ends with this verse: “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
In the end, it turned out to be something less spectacular and obvious: other kids were bullying Jorge because he didn’t live with his father. They branded him an orphan. His anger finally boiled over into violence.
Until I met Mónica, I viewed reproduction as a megalomaniacal theodicy. My birth seemed to me an act of pure personal evil that could only be atoned for by engendering another life. It’s an idea I acquired from my mother, who considered her own life to be condemned and wretched (as decreed by my grandmother) except for the fact of having given birth to my siblings and me. Continuing this criminal lucubration, I began wanting to be a father at the age of seventeen. It was a fairly unfocused desire that started with an impossible sense of responsibility: unhealthy levels of output, burning the midnight oil. Throughout my last semester of high school, I stayed up until early morning listening to the radio, monitoring and analyzing information for the PRI and the government, a shameful task for which I earned decent money. Shortly after graduating, I enrolled in two college courses, and accepted—prematurely—the task of teaching writing in an unregistered high school that offered its illegal teachers a pittance. I decided to become a paterfamilias: for almost two years, I prohibited my mother from going to brothels; I was going to be the breadwinner. I organized the household responsibilities, apportioning them equally between her and my two brothers. The result was that, before the age of twenty, I’d had several bust-ups with Saíd, and Mamá and my sister were undernourished.
In addition to putting these bizarre keys to social success into practice, I decided to fall in love with only older single women willing to have unprotected sex. The lover who fit these requirements was Aída Guadalupe, an amateur actress, five years my senior. I suggested we live together. Mamá was furious:
“If you want to move in with that frigging bitch, fine: do it. But she’ll make your life hell. And you’re abandoning me, the person who’s taken so much shit to get you this far. If you’ve already made up your mind, go ahead. But you’re not my son anymore, you bastard, you’re nothing but a mad dog.”
I conquered paternity at the age of twenty-one. Then, when I was twenty-two, we separated.
The story could have ended there: a kid saved from the iniquity of the whorehouses of his childhood by a plump little baby. But then I met Sonia. Nineteen. A secretary. Putting herself through high school at night. She’d once had a boyfriend—I never met him—who, according to her, looked just like Luis Miguel. In soap-opera jargon, this boyfriend disappeared off the scene after taking her virginity. Sonia began coming to my rented room every day just after noon. Our meetings consisted of long fucks while talking about her boyfriend. We had a brilliant year.
Before I met her, I’d slept with five or six other women. Sex, for me, had been a transaction: something not so different from prostitution or paternity. In contrast, with Sonia, I discovered the civic
depth of eroticism, that thing Mamá was unconsciously referring to one afternoon when, as we were walking together beside the long, long brick wall of La Huerta, she said:
“Lobo y Melón used to play here.”
We did it with agility, but without any grand pirouettes. It’s not that we were magnificent lovers: it just took us a long time to grow out of adolescence, and we were still graduating in the sport of slowness. There was a therapeutic subtlety in those first cleansing orgasms, the limpid gust of health imposing its un-rhetorical aroma on my arrogant, poor-boy’s solemnity, and the whiff of Catholic prudery my lover exuded each time, raising and turning her neck, she murmured:
“Don’t think badly of me.”
One day in December ’93, she showed up later than usual. She’d brought the test kit with her: she was pregnant. I’ve no idea what I said in response. I do remember that the minute she left, I locked myself in the communal bathroom and stayed there for hours, looking in the mirror, grimacing and trying to count the pores on my face. I heard the bangs coming from outside as if from a specter I had no access to. After a while, someone kicked in the door, punched me a few times, and dragged me to my room.
So (or so I now feel: the past is made up of broken pulleys), at the age of twenty-three, I found myself sexually enthralled, earning a miserable wage, and the father of two children. I was sad to note I’d failed in my attempt to escape from home: I was a specimen worthy of inclusion in the diary of a sociology student evaluating the lives of young men descended from prostitutes.
“I don’t know why you always have to do this,” said Arturo.
“Do what?”
“Go off thinking your own things.”
Tomb Song Page 6
