And here I am, without the strength to return to Barcelona, or the courage to leave the hospital for good, although each night I get dressed and go out for a walk under the Roman moon, the moon I first came to know and admire long ago, in a distant past that I naïvely thought was happy and would never be lost and that today I can only call up with a spasm of incredulity. And my steps lead me, unfailingly, along Via Claudia to the Colosseum and then along Viale Domus Aurea to Via Mece-nate and then I turn left, past Via Botta, along Via Terme di Traiano, at which point I'm in hell. Etiam periere ruinae. And then I listen to the howls that issue like gusts of wind from the mouth of the chasm and by God I make an effort to understand their language but I can't, no matter how I try. The other day I told Claudio about it. Doctor, I said, every night I go out for a walk and I have hallucinations. What do you see? said the poet-physician. I don't see anything, they're auditory hallucinations. So what do you hear? asked the noble Sicilian scion, visibly relieved. Howls, I said. Well, considering your health and sensitivity, it's nothing serious; one could even say it's normal. Cold comfort.

In any case, I don't tell the ineffable Claudio everything that happens to me. Imperitia confidentiam, eruditio timorem creat. For example: I haven't told him that my family is unaware of the state of my health. For example: I haven't told him that I've strictly forbidden them to come and visit me. For example: I haven't told him that I know with absolute certainty that I won't die in his Ospedale Britannico but one night in the middle of the Parco di Traiano, hidden in the shrubs. Will I drag myself, will I be brought by my own powers to my last leafy hiding place or will it be others, Roman hoods, Roman hustlers, Roman psychopaths, who hide my body, their corpus delicti, under the burning bush? In any case, I know I'll die in the baths or the park. I know that the giant or the shadow of the giant will shrink as the howls are unbottled from the Domus Aurea and spread all over Rome, a black and ominous cloud, and I know that the giant will say or whisper: save the boy, and I know that no one will hear his plea.

So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What's more, it's a Galician joke. Maybe you've heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who're walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they're crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we're all alone and we're lost.

21

Daniel Grossman, sitting on a bench in the Alameda, Mexico City DF, February 1993. It had been years since I'd seen him and when I got back to Mexico the first thing I did was ask about him, about Norman Bolzman, where he was, what he was doing. His parents told me that he was teaching at UNAM and that he spent long stretches at a place he'd rented near Puerto Ángel, a place without a telephone where he holed up to write and think. Then I called other friends. I asked questions. I went out to dinner. That was how I learned that things had ended with Claudia, and Norman was living alone now. One day I saw Claudia at the house of a painter whom the three of us, Claudia, Norman, and I, had known in our teens. In those days, by my calculations, the painter must have been sixteen, at the oldest, and we'd all talked about how great he was going to be. The dinner was delicious, a very Mexican meal, in honor of me, I guess, and my return to Mexico after what had been a pretty long time away, and then Claudia and I went out on the terrace and we were bitching about our host, making fun of him. Claudia was adorable. Remember, she said, how the dipstick used to swear he'd be better than Paalen? Well, he turned out worse than Cuevas! I don't know whether she was serious or not, Claudia never liked Cuevas, but she saw a lot of the painter, Abraham Manzur, Abraham had made a name for himself in the Mexican art world and his paintings sold in the United States, but he certainly wasn't the promising kid he used to be, the kid Claudia and Norman and I had known in Mexico City in the seventies and whom we thought of, a little condescendingly, since he was two or three years younger than us at the age when a few years make a difference, as the incarnation of the artist or the artist's drive. Anyway, Claudia didn't see him that way anymore. And neither did I. What I mean is, we didn't expect anything of him. He was just a short little Mexican Jew, on the chubby side, with lots of friends and lots of money. Like me, in fact, a tall, thin, unemployed Mexican Jew, and like Claudia, a gorgeous Argentinian-Mexican Jew handling PR for the one of the biggest galleries in Mexico City. All of us with our eyes open, all of us locked in a dark passageway, motionless, waiting. But maybe that overstates it.

That night, at least, I didn't overstate or criticize or make fun of the painter, who'd been kind enough to invite me to dinner, even if he had me over only to show off and talk about shows he'd had in Dallas or San Diego, cities that, to hear people tell it, are almost part of Mexico by now. And then I left with Claudia and Claudia's date, a lawyer maybe ten or even fifteen years older than her, a divorced guy with kids in college, the head of the Mexican affiliate of a German company, worried about everything. At this point I can't even remember Claudia's pet name for him, they broke up a little later. Claudia was like that, she still is, none of her boyfriends lasted longer than a year. We didn't really get to talk. We didn't say anything serious, we didn't ask each other the questions we should have asked. All I remember about that night is the meal, which I ate with relish, the works by the painter and some of the painter's friends that were scattered around the painter's cavernous living room, Claudia's smiling face, the dark streets of Mexico City, and the trip, not as short as I thought it would be, back to my parents' house, where I was staying until I started to get things straightened out.

Not long afterward, I left for Puerto Ángel. I made the trip by bus, from Mexico City to Oaxaca and from Oaxaca, on another bus line, to Puerto Ángel, and when I finally got there I was tired, my body ached, and all I wanted was to fall into bed and go to sleep. Norman's place was on the edge of town, in a neighborhood called La Loma. It was a two-story house, the bottom built of cement blocks and the top of wood, with a tiled roof and a small, overgrown yard full of bougainvillea. Norman wasn't expecting me, of course, but when we saw each other I got the feeling that he was the only person who was happy I was back. The feeling of alienation that I'd been trying to shake since I set foot in the Mexico City airport began to fade imperceptibly as the bus headed deeper into Oaxaca, and I relaxed into the certainty that I was in Mexico again and that things could change. Not that I knew whether these changes, if they did come, would be for better or worse, but that's almost always the way with changes, almost always the way it is in Mexico. And Norman's welcome was magnificent, and for five days we swam at the beach, read in the shade on the porch in hammocks that hung from nails and gave way little by little until our backsides touched the floor, drank beer, and took long walks around a part of La Loma where there were lots of cliffs, and also locked fishermen's huts, there on the edge of the woods by the beach, which a thief could have broken into with an expedient kick to one of the walls, a kick that we were sure would knock a hole or make the whole thing collapse.