And then what happened? The usual. We asked for the check. They insisted that I contribute nothing at all, but I refused point-blank. I was young once too, and I know how hard it is to make ends meet at that age, especially if you're a poet, so I put my money on the table, enough to pay for everything we'd had (there were ten of us: young Belano and eight friends of his, among them two lovely girls whose names I've unfortunately forgotten, and me), but they, and now that I think about it, this was the only strange thing that happened all night, they picked up the money and returned it to me, and I put the money back on the table and they returned it to me again, and then I said kids, when I go out for drinks or Coca-Colas (ha ha) with my students I never let them pay, and I delivered my little speech very affectionately (I love my students and I assume they return the sentiment), but then they said: don't even think about it, maestro, and that was all: don't even think about it, maestro, and at that moment, as I decoded that very polysemous (if I may) sentence, I was watching their faces, seven boys and two beautiful girls, and I thought: no, they would never be my students. I don't know why I thought it when really, they'd been so polite, so nice, but I thought it.

I put my money back in my wallet and one of them paid the bill and then we went out. It was a beautiful night, without the daytime crush of cars and crowds, and for a while we walked toward my hotel, almost as if we were drifting along, we might just as easily have been getting farther away, and as we proceeded (but toward where?), some of the kids said goodbye, shaking my hand and heading off (the way they said goodbye to their friends was different, or so it seemed to me), and little by little the group began to dwindle, and meanwhile we kept talking, and we talked and talked, or now that I think about it, maybe we didn't talk much, I would say instead that we thought and thought, but I can't believe it, at that time of night no one thinks much, the body is begging for rest. And a moment came when there were just five of us aimlessly wandering the streets of Mexico City, possibly in the deepest silence, a Poundian silence, although the maestro is the furthest thing from silent, isn't he? His words are the words of a tribe that never stops delving into things, investigating, telling every story. And yet they're words circumscribed by silence, eroded minute by minute by silence, aren't they? And then I decided that it was time to go to bed, and I hailed a taxi and said goodbye.

Lisandro Morales, Calle Comercio, in front of Jardín Morelos, Colonia Escandón, Mexico City DF, March 1977. It was the Ecuadorean novelist Vargas Pardo, a man who always does just as he likes and who was working as a copy editor at my publishing house, who introduced me to this Arturo Belano. A year before, the same Vargas Pardo had convinced me that it would be worth the publishing house's while to finance a magazine that would serve as a forum for the best writers in Mexico and Latin America. I listened to him and launched it. They gave me the title of honorary director and Vargas Pardo and a couple of his cronies appointed themselves to the editorial board.

The plan, at least as they sold it to me, was for the magazine to promote the books of the publishing house. That was the main goal. The secondary goal was to put out a quality literary magazine that would reflect well on the house, as much for its content as for its contributors. They talked to me about Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, the leading lights of Latin American literature. Always prudent, not to say skeptical, I told them that I would be happy to get Ibargüengoitia, Monterroso, José Emilio Pacheco, Monsiváis, Elenita Poniatowska. They said yes, of course, that before long everyone would be begging to be published in our magazine. All right, let them beg, I said, let's do good work, but don't forget the main goal: promoting the house. That would be no problem, they said. It would be a presence on every page, or every other page, and before long the magazine would be turning a profit too. And I said: gentlemen, I leave its fate in your hands. In the first magazine, as anyone can see for themselves, there was no sign of Cortázar, or García Márquez, or even José Emilio Pacheco, but we had an essay by Monsiváis, which rescued the issue, in a sense; otherwise, there was a piece by Vargas Pardo, an essay by an exiled Argentinian novelist and friend of Vargas Pardo, two excerpts from novels that we were about to publish, a story by a forgotten fellow countryman of Vargas Pardo. And poetry, too much poetry. In the review section, at least, I found nothing to object to. Most of the attention was focused on our new releases and was generally favorable.

I remember I talked to Vargas Pardo after reading the magazine and said: I think there's too much poetry, and poetry doesn't sell. I still remember his response: what do you mean it doesn't sell, Don Lisandro, he said, look at Octavio Paz and his magazine. All right, Vargas, I said, but Octavio is Octavio, and there are luxuries the rest of us can't afford ourselves. What I didn't say was that I hadn't read Octavio's magazine for ages, nor did I rectify my use of the word luxuries, which I had meant to describe not poetic endeavors but Octavio's tedious publication, since ultimately I think publishing poetry isn't a luxury but utter foolishness. That was as far as it went, anyway, and Vargas Pardo was able to put out the second and third issues, and then the fourth and fifth. Sometimes I heard talk that our magazine was becoming too aggressive. I think it was all Vargas Pardo's fault, that he was using the magazine as a weapon against those who'd snubbed him when he first came to Mexico, as the perfect vehicle for settling a few scores (some writers are so vain and touchy!), and to tell the truth, that was all right with me. It's good for a magazine to generate controversy, it means it's selling, and it struck me as miraculous that a magazine with so much poetry could be selling. Sometimes I asked myself why that bastard Vargas Pardo was so interested in poetry. He wasn't a poet himself, I knew, but a fiction writer. So how did he come by his interest in verse?

For a while, I admit, I engaged in all kinds of speculation. I came to suspect he was a queer. He might have been. He was married (to a Mexican, incidentally), but you never know. What kind of queer? A platonic, starry-eyed queer who got his kicks, shall we say, on a purely literary level? Or did he have a Mr. Right among the poets he published in the magazine? I don't know. To each his own. I don't have anything against queers. There are more of them every day, though. In the forties, the number of queers in Mexican literature was at an all-time high, and I thought that was as far as things could go. But today there are more of them than ever. I suppose the fault lies with the education system, the increasingly common tendency of Mexicans to make a spectacle of themselves, the movies, music, who knows what. Even Salvador Novo himself once mentioned to me that he was taken aback by the behavior and language of some of the young people who visited him. And Salvador Novo knew what he was talking about.

So that was how I met Arturo Belano. One afternoon Vargas Pardo told me about him, about how he was putting together a fantastic (was that the word he used?) book, the definitive anthology of young Latin American poets, and was looking for a publisher. And who is this Belano? I asked. He writes reviews for our magazine, said Vargas Pardo. These poets, I said, secretly watching him for his reaction, are like hustlers desperately seeking new women to pimp, but Vargas Pardo took it in stride and told me the book was very good, the kind of book another house would pick up if we didn't publish it ourselves (ah, what an interesting use of the plural). Then, watching him surreptitiously again, I said: bring him in, schedule me a meeting with him, and we'll see what can be done.