I followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the city's imaginary breath. Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren't stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn't feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
And by that stage we had already crossed the Puente de Alvarado and glimpsed the last human ants making their way across the Plaza San Fernando under cover of darkness, and I began to feel seriously nervous because from that moment on we were venturing into the kingdom of the King of the Rent Boys, who had inspired such fear in the elegant Ernesto (a son of Mexico City's long-suffering working class, incidentally).
Eight
So there she was, my friends, the mother of Mexican poetry with a knife in her pocket, following two poets who still hadn't turned twenty-one down that turbulent river that was and is the Avenida Guerrero, comparable if not to the Amazon, for that would be an exaggeration, at least to the Grijalva, once honored by the song of Efraín Huerta (if I remember rightly), although the nocturnal Grijalva that is and was the Avenida Guerrero had long since lost its condition of original innocence, by which I mean that the urban version of the Grijalva, flowing in the night, was in every respect a damned river, a river of the damned, ferrying corpses and corpses-to-be, black automobiles that appeared, vanished, and then reappeared, the same ones or their silent, demented echoes, as if the river of Hell were circular, which, now I come to think of it, is probably the case.
Be that as it may, I followed them as they proceeded along the Avenida Guerrero and then turned down the Calle Magnolia, and to judge from their gestures they were having an animated conversation, although it was hardly the ideal time or place to engage in an exchange of views. From the bars still open on the Calle Magnolia (of which, admittedly, there were few) a wan tropical music emanated, more conducive to meditation than to festivity or dancing, punctuated from time to time by a resounding shout. I remember thinking that the street seemed to be a thorn or an arrow lodged in the side of the Avenida Guerrero, an image that Ernesto San Epifanio might have appreciated. Then they stopped in front of the Clover Hotel with its neon sign, which was funny, in a way, since it was like finding an establishment by the name of Paris in the Calle Berlin, or so it struck me at least (I was very nervous), and they seemed to be deliberating over what strategy to follow from that point on. I had the impression that, at the last minute,, Ernesto wanted to turn around and get out of there as fast as possible, while Arturito was resolved to continue, having entirely assumed the role of hard man, which was partly my creation, and which, in the course of that helpless, airless night, he had accepted like a wafer of bitter flesh, the host that no one can be qualified to swallow.
Our two heroes went into the Clover Hotel: first Arturo Belano, followed by Ernesto San Epifanio, poets forged in the smithy of Mexico City, and then I, León Felipe's cleaning lady, breaker of Don Pedro Garfias's vases, the only person who remained in the UNAM in September 1968, when the riot police violated the autonomy of the university, I went in after them. And at first glance the interior of the hotel was a disappointment to me. At such moments you feel as if you were shutting your eyes and throwing yourself into a swimming pool of fire. I threw myself in. I opened my eyes. And there was nothing terrible about what I saw. A tiny lobby with two sofas unspeakably scarred by the passage of time, a short, swarthy man at the desk, with an enormous mass of jet-black hair, a fluorescent tube hanging from the ceiling, a green-tiled floor, a staircase covered with a dirty grey plastic runner, in short, a no-star lobby, although, for some of Colonia Guerrero's inhabitants, the Clover would perhaps have seemed a rather luxurious hotel.
After exchanging a few words with the receptionist, Arturo and Ernesto went up the stairs, then I came in and said that I was with them. The swarthy guy blinked. He was going to say something; he was going to play the guard dog, but I was already on the next floor, walking down a corridor bathed in sickly light, redolent of disinfectant and absolutely unadorned, as if its nakedness dated back to the first days of creation. I opened a door that had just been closed and stepped into my role as witness in the royal bed-chamber of the King of the Rent Boys in Colonia Guerrero.
I hardly need tell you, my friends, that the King was not alone.
In the room was a table, and on the table was a green cloth, but the occupants of the room were not playing cards; they were settling the day's or the week's accounts, and spread out on the green cloth were papers with names and numbers written on them, and money.
No one was surprised to see me.
The King was solidly built and he must have been about thirty years old. He had brown hair, that shade of brown that in Mexico they call güero, whether seriously or as a joke I've never been able to tell, and I guess I never will. He was wearing a slightly sweaty white shirt, which revealed, for all to see, a pair of muscular, hairy forearms. Next to him was sitting a chubby guy with a mustache and outsize sideburns, probably the chancellor of the kingdom. At the back of the room, on a bed in the shadows, a third man was watching and listening to us, moving his head. My first thought was that he was ill. At the start, he was the only one who frightened me, but as the minutes went by my fear gave way to pity: I realized that the man on the bed, in that semi-prostrate position (which can't have been easy to maintain), must have been an invalid, or maybe disabled, maybe the King's disabled or sedated nephew, which led me to reflect that however bad one's situation (I was thinking of Ernesto San Epifanio), there's always somebody worse off.
I remember the King's words. I remember his smile when he saw Ernesto and his inquisitive look when he saw Arturo. I remember how the King set a distance between his person and his visitors simply by gathering up the money and putting it into his pocket.
The King mentioned two nights during which Ernesto had willingly given himself and spoke of contracting obligations, the obligations implicit in every act, however gratuitous or accidental. He spoke of the heart, a man's heart, which bleeds like a woman (I think he was referring to menstruation) and obliges a real man to take responsibility for his acts, whatever they might be. And he spoke of debts: there was nothing more despicable than a badly paid debt. That's what he said. Not an unpaid debt but a badly paid debt. Then he stopped talking and waited to hear what his visitors had to say.
The first to speak was Ernesto San Epifanio. He said that he didn't owe any debt to the King. He said that all he had done was to sleep with him two nights in a row (two wild nights, he specified), vaguely aware that he was going to bed with the King of the Rent Boys, but without measuring the dangers and "responsibilities" that such an act entailed, in all innocence (although as he said the word innocence, Ernesto couldn't stifle a giggle, which was rather at odds with his self-exoneration), guided only by desire and a sense of adventure, and not by any secret plan of enslaving himself to the King of the Rent Boys.