24

Clara Cabeza, Parque Hundido, Mexico City DF, October 1995. I was Octavio Paz's secretary. You can't imagine how much work it was. Writing letters, finding impossible-to-find manuscripts, calling contributors to the magazine, tracking down books that had ceased to exist outside of one or two North American universities. After two years of working for Don Octavio I had a chronic headache that set in around eleven in the morning and wouldn't go away until six in the evening, no matter how many aspirin I took. In general, I preferred the tasks that were most like housework, making breakfast or helping the maid with lunch. That was work I enjoyed, and it was also a rest for my tortured mind. I usually got to the house around seven in the morning, before the traffic got too bad, or at least before it was as terrible as at rush hour, and I would prepare coffee, tea, orange juice, two pieces of toast, a simple breakfast, and then take the tray into Don Octavio's bedroom and say Don Octavio, wake up, it's a new day. But Señora María José would be the first to open her eyes and she was always cheerful when she woke up, her voice coming out of the darkness and saying: leave breakfast on the bedside table, Clara, and I would say good morning, Señora, it's a new day. Then I would go back to the kitchen and make my own breakfast, something light like the señores' breakfast, coffee, orange juice, a piece of toast or two with jam, and then I would go into the library and get to work.

You don't know the stacks of letters Don Octavio received and how hard it was to file them. As you can imagine, people wrote to him from every corner of the globe, all kinds of people, from other Nobel laureates to young English or Italian or French poets. I'm not saying that Don Octavio answered every letter, he probably only answered fifteen or twenty percent of them, but the rest still had to be classified and filed, don't ask me why, I'd have been happy to throw them away. At least the filing system was simple: we sorted them by nationality, and when a writer's nationality wasn't clear (this was often the case with letters written in Spanish, English, or French), we sorted them by language. Sometimes, while I was going through the mail, I would start to think about the workdays of the secretaries of pop singers or rock stars, and I would wonder whether they had to deal with as many letters as I did. Maybe so, but I'm sure they didn't get letters in as many languages. Sometimes Don Octavio would even receive letters in Chinese, which says it all. When that happened, I had to put the letters aside in a separate little pile that we called marginalia excentricorum, which Don Octavio would go through once a week. Then, but this only happened very occasionally, he would say Clarita, take the car and go see my friend Nagahiro. All right, Don Octavio, I would say, but it wasn't as simple as he made it sound. First I would spend all morning calling this Nagahiro and when I reached him at last, I would say Don Nagahiro, I have a few little things for you to translate, and we would make a date for some day that week. Sometimes I would send the papers to him by mail or messenger, but when it was important, which I could tell by the expression on Don Octavio's face, I would go in person and not leave Señor Nagahiro's side until he had at least given me a brief summary of what the papers or letter said, a summary that I would take down in shorthand in my little notebook and then type out later, print, and leave on Don Octavio's desk, on the left side, so that if he wanted he could take a look at it and satisfy his curiosity.

And then there were the letters that Don Octavio sent. That really was exasperating work, because he would write quite a number each week, say sixteen more or less, to the unlikeliest places in the world, which was an astounding thing to see, because one had to ask how the man had made so many friends in so many different places, even mismatched places like Trieste and Sydney, Cordoba and Helsinki, Naples and Bocas del Toro (Panama), Limoges and New Delhi, Glasgow and Monterrey. And he had words of encouragement for everyone, or one of those thoughts that he would mutter to himself and that I suppose gave the recipient something to think about and mull over. It would be wrong to reveal what he said in his letters, so all I'll say is that he talked about more or less the same things he talks about in his essays and poems: pretty things, somber things, and otherness, which is something I've thought about a lot, like many Mexican intellectuals, I suppose, and have never quite been able to figure out. Another thing I did, and willingly, was act as nurse, since I happened to have taken a few first aid courses. By then, Don Octavio wasn't what you might call healthy and he had to take pills every day, and since he always had other things on his mind, he would forget when he had to take them, and then it would all be a muddle, did I take this one at noon, didn't I take that one at eight this morning, anyway, a confusion that I'm proud to say I put an end to, since I even made sure he took what he was supposed to take when I wasn't there, like clockwork. In order to do that, I would call him from my apartment or wherever I happened to be and ask the maid: has Don Octavio taken his eight o'clock pills yet? and the maid would go and see, and if the pills that I'd left ready in a plastic container were still there, then I would tell her: give them to him and make him take them. Sometimes I would speak to the señora instead of the maid, but just the same, I'd say: has Don Octavio taken his medicine? and Señora María José would laugh and say oh Clarisa, she called me Clarisa sometimes, I don't know why, one of these days you'll make me jealous, and when Señora María José said that I would blush a little and somehow be afraid that she would see me blushing, can you imagine? as if she could see anything when we were talking on the phone! but I still kept calling and insisting that he take his pills on time, because otherwise how were they supposed to do him any good?

Another thing I did was keep Don Octavio's calendar, which was full of social engagements, everything from parties and conferences to invitations and art openings to birthday parties and the awarding of honorary doctorates. The truth is that if he'd gone to all of those events the poor man wouldn't have been able to write a single line of poetry, never mind his essays. So when I had prepared his calendar he and Señora María José would go over it with a fine-tooth comb and rule things out, and sometimes I would watch them from my little corner and say to myself: that's right, Don Octavio, punish them with your indifference.

And then came the era of Parque Hundido, a place that isn't one bit interesting, if you want my opinion. Maybe it used to be, but today it's become a jungle swarming with thieves, rapists, drunks, and disreputable women.

It happened like this. One morning, when I'd just gotten to the house and it wasn't even eight yet, I found Don Octavio up already, waiting for me in the kitchen. As soon as he saw me, he said: I'll trouble you to take me for a drive, Clarita, in your car. What do you think of that? As if I'd ever refused to do anything he asked me to do. So I said: just tell me where you'd like to go, Don Octavio. But he motioned to me without saying anything, and we went outside. He settled himself beside me in the car, which incidentally is only a Volkswagen, so it isn't very comfortable. When I saw him sitting there with that absent look of his, I felt a little sorry that I didn't have a better vehicle to offer him, although I didn't say anything because it also occurred to me that if I apologized he might take it as a kind of reproach, since after all he was the one who paid me and if I didn't have enough money for a better car a person could say it was his fault, which is something I'd never even have dreamed of suggesting. So I was quiet, concealing my thoughts as best I could, and I started the car. We took the first streets at random. Then we drove around Coyoacán, and finally turned up Insurgentes. When Parque Hundido appeared, he ordered me to park wherever I could. Then we got out of the car and after Don Octavio took a look around, he walked into the park, which at that time of day wasn't exactly crowded but wasn't empty either. This must bring back some memory for him, I thought. The farther we walked, the lonelier it became. I noticed that through carelessness or laziness or lack of funds or shameless irresponsibility, the park had been left in a shocking state of neglect. Once we were deep in the park we sat on a bench and Don Octavio looked up at the treetops or the sky and then he murmured some words that I didn't understand. Before we left I had grabbed the pills and a little bottle of water and since it was time for him to take them and we were sitting down now, I gave them to him. Don Octavio looked at me as if I'd gone mad but he swallowed the pills without complaint. Then he said: you stay here, Clarita, and he got up and went walking along a little dirt path scattered with pine needles, and I did as he said. It was nice to sit there, I have to admit. Sometimes, along other paths, I would see the figures of maids taking a shortcut or students who had decided not to go to class that morning. The air was breathable, the pollution wouldn't be so bad that day, and from time to time I think I even heard a bird chirp. Meanwhile, Don Octavio was walking. He walked in wider and wider circles and sometimes he would step off the path onto the grass, grass that was sickly from having been trampled so often and that the gardeners probably didn't even tend anymore.