Xóchitl García, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, January 1986. The funny thing was when I tried to publish. For a long time I wrote and revised and rewrote and threw lots of poems away, but there came a day when I was ready to publish and I started to send my poems to magazines and cultural supplements. María warned me. They aren't going to answer, she said, they aren't even going to read your work. You should go in person and ask for a response face-to-face. So that's what I did. At some places they wouldn't see me. But at other places they would, and I got to talk to the deputy editor or the head of the books section. They would ask me things about my life, what I read, what I'd published so far, what workshops I'd been in, what college classes I'd taken. I was naïve: I told them about my dealings with the visceral realists. Most of the people I talked to didn't have any idea who the visceral realists were, but the mention of the group piqued their interest. The visceral realists? Who were they? Then I would explain, more or less, the brief history of visceral realism and they would smile. A few of them scrawled down a name or some other note. A few asked for further explanations, and then they'd thank me and say they'd call or that I should come by in two weeks and they would let me know. Others, the minority, remembered Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but only vaguely. For example, they didn't know that Ulises was alive and that Belano didn't live in Mexico City anymore, but they had known them, they remembered the scenes Ulises and Arturo used to make, hassling the poets at readings, they remembered the way they were against everything, they remembered their friendship with Efraín Huerta, and they looked at me as if I were an alien, and they said, so you were a visceral realist, were you? and then they would say they were sorry, but they couldn't publish a single one of my poems. According to María, when I turned to her in growing disappointment, this was normal. Mexican literature, probably more than any other Latin American literature, was like that, a strict sect. Forgiveness was hard to come by. But I'm not asking to be forgiven for anything, I'd say. I know, she'd say, but if you want to publish you'd better never mention the visceral realists again.

Still, I didn't give up. I was tired of working at Gigante and I thought my poetry deserved a little attention at least, if not respect. As time went by I discovered other magazines, not the ones I'd have wanted to publish in, but different ones, the inevitable magazines that spring up in a city of sixteen million. The publishers or editors were terrible men and women, people who had crept out of the sewers, you could tell just by looking, a mix of ousted officials and repentant killers. But they had never heard of visceral realism and had no interest at all in being told the story. Their notion of literature ended (and probably began) with Vasconcelos, although it was easy to guess the admiration they felt for Mariano Azuela, Yáñez, Martín Luis Guzmán, authors they probably knew only by reputation. One of these magazines was called Tamal, and its editor was a man named Fernando López Tapia. It was there that I published my first poem, in the two-page arts section, and López Tapia personally handed me the check for the amount I'd made. That night, after I cashed it, María, Franz, and I celebrated by going to the movies and then eating at a restaurant downtown. I was tired of cheap meals and I wanted to give myself a treat. From then on I stopped writing poems, at least I stopped writing as many as before, and I started to write articles, stories about Mexico City, pieces about gardens that very few people knew existed anymore, items about colonial houses, reports on specific subway lines, and everything or almost everything I wrote was published. Fernando López Tapia fit me into the magazine wherever he could, and on Saturdays, instead of going with Franz to Chapultepec, I would take him to the magazine's offices and while he banged on a typewriter I would help Tamal's few staff members put together the next issue, which was always a problem, since we had a hard time getting the magazine out on schedule.

I learned to do layouts and edit, and sometimes I even chose the photographs. And everybody loved Franz too. Of course, I didn't make enough at the magazine to quit my job at Gigante, but even so it was nice for me, since while I was working at the supermarket, especially when the work was particularly annoying (Friday afternoons, for example, or Monday mornings), I would think about my next article, about the story I was planning to write on the peddlers of Coyoacán, or the fire-eaters of La Villa, or whatever it might be, and the time would fly. One day Fernando López Tapia asked me to write profiles of some low-level politicians, friends of his, I guess, or friends of friends, but I refused. I can only write about things I feel connected to, I said, and he replied: what's so interesting about the houses of the Colonia 10 de Mayo? I didn't know what to say, but I stood firm. One night Fernando López Tapia invited me out to dinner. I asked María to keep an eye on Franz and we went to a restaurant in Roma Sur. To be honest, I was expecting something better, more sophisticated, but I had lots of fun during dinner, although I hardly ate a thing. That night I slept with the publisher of Tamal. It'd been a long time since I'd had sex with anyone, and it wasn't exactly a pleasurable experience. We did it again a week later. And then the following week. Sometimes, to be honest, it was excruciating to stay up all night and then go to work early in the morning and spend hours stickering products like a sleepwalker. But I wanted to live my life. Deep down I knew that I had to live my life.

One night Fernando López Tapia showed up on Calle Montes. He said he wanted to see where I lived. I introduced him to María, who treated him coldly at first, as if she were a princess and poor Fernando were an illiterate peasant. Luckily, I don't think he even noticed how rude she was. He was always a perfect gentleman. I liked that. After a while María went up to her room and I was left alone with Franz and Fernando. Then Fernando told me that he'd come because he wanted to see me, and then he said now he had seen me but he wanted to keep on seeing me. It was silly, but I liked that he said it. Later I went up to get María and the four of us went out to dinner. We laughed a lot that night. A week later I took some of María's poems to Tamal, and they published them. If your friend writes, said Fernando López Tapia, tell her that the pages of our magazine are at her disposal. The problem, as I soon discovered, was that for all her college studies, María hardly knew how to write prose: properly punctuated, grammatically correct prose without poetic pretensions, I mean. So for several days she tried to write an article on dance, but no matter how hard she tried and how much I helped her, she couldn't do it. What she came up with in the end was a very good poem that she called "Dance in Mexico." After she gave it to me to read, she filed it away with her other poems and forgot all about it. María was a powerful poet, definitely better than me, for example, but she had no idea how to write prose. It was too bad, but that put an end to her chances of being a regular contributor to Tamal. I don't think it made much difference to her, in any case, since she turned up her nose at the magazine, as if it were beneath her. But that's María for you, and I love her the way she is.

My relationship with Fernando López Tapia lasted a while longer. He was married, as I suspected from the start, with two children, the older one twenty, and he wasn't about to separate from his wife (I wouldn't have let him, anyway). I went with him to business dinners now and then. He would introduce me as his most productive writer. I really tried to be that, and there were weeks when, with Gigante on the one hand and the magazine on the other, I barely averaged three hours of sleep a night. But I didn't care because things were going well for me, just the way I wanted them to go, and even though I didn't want to publish any more of my own poems in Tamal, what I did was literally take over the arts pages and publish poems by Jacinto and other friends who didn't have a venue for their work. And I learned a lot. I learned everything there is to learn about editing a magazine in Mexico City. I learned to lay out pages, negotiate with advertisers, deal with the printers, talk to people who were theoretically important. Of course, no one knew that I worked at Gigante. Everyone thought I lived on what Fernando López Tapia paid me or that I was a college student, I, who'd never been to college, who'd never even finished high school. And that had its appealing side. It was like living the Cinderella story, and even when I had to return to Gigante and turn back into a salesgirl or cashier, I didn't mind and somehow I found the strength to do both jobs well, the one at Tamal because I liked it and I was learning, and the one at Gigante because I had to take care of Franz, I had to buy him clothes and school supplies, and pay for our room on Calle Montes, because my father, poor man, was having a hard time and couldn't give me rent money anymore, and Jacinto didn't even have enough money for himself. The bottom line was, I had to work and bring up Franz all on my own. And that was what I was doing, and I was writing and learning too.