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, which 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.