19

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República de Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976. What do you mean there's no mystery to it? I said. There's no mystery to it, Amadeo, they said. And then they asked: what does the poem mean to you? Nothing, I said, it doesn't mean a thing. So why do you say it's a poem? Well, because Cesárea said so, I remembered. That's the only reason why, because I had Cesárea's word for it. If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it, I said. How modern, said the Chilean, and then he mentioned someone named Manzoni. Alessandro Manzoni? I asked, remembering a translation of I Promessi Sposi penned by Remigio López Valle, that upstanding gentleman, and published in Mexico in approximately 1930, I'm not sure, Alessandro Manzoni? but they said: Piero Manzoni! the arte povera artist who canned his own shit. Well, what do you know. Art has gone crazy, boys, I said, and they said: it's always been crazy. At that moment I saw something like the shadows of grasshoppers on the walls of the front room, behind the boys and to each side, shadows that slid down from the ceiling and seemed to want to glide across the wallpaper to the kitchen but finally sank into the floor, so I rubbed my eyes and said all right, let's see whether you can explain this poem to me once and for all, because I've been dreaming about it for more than fifty years, give or take a year or two. And the boys rubbed their hands together in sheer excitement, the little angels, and came over to my chair. Let's begin with the title, one of them said. What do you think it means? Zion, Mount Zion in Jerusalem, I said promptly, and also the Swiss city of Sion, Sitten in German, in the canton of Valais. Very good, Amadeo, they said, it's clear you've given it some thought. And which do you choose? Mount Zion, yes? I think so, I said. Obviously, they said. Now let's take the first part of the poem. What do we have? A straight line with a rectangle on it, I said. All right, said the Chilean, forget the rectangle, pretend it doesn't exist. Just look at the straight line. What do you see?

A straight line, I said. What else is there to see, boys? And what does a straight line suggest to you, Amadeo? The horizon, I said. The edge of a table, I said. Peace, said one of them. Yes, peace, calm. All right, then: a horizon and calmness. Now let's look at the second part of the poem:

We went back to Mexico City. This time I was admitted to a clinic in Colonia Buenos Aires. I had a big room with lots of light, a window overlooking a park, and a television with more than one hundred channels. In the morning I would sit in the park and read novels. In the afternoon I would shut myself in my room and sleep. One day Daniel, who had just gotten back from Barcelona, came to visit me. He wasn't going to be in Mexico for long and as soon as he found out that I was in the hospital he came to see me. I asked him how I looked. He said fine, but thin. The two of us laughed. By then it didn't hurt to laugh anymore, which was a good sign. Before he left I asked him about Arturo. Daniel said he didn't live in Barcelona anymore, or at least he didn't think so, but it had been a while since they stopped seeing each other. A month later I weighed one hundred and ten pounds and I was discharged from the hospital.

Still, my life changed very little. I lived with my mother and I never went out, not because I couldn't but because I didn't want to. My mother gave me her old car, a Mercedes, but the only time I drove it I almost had an accident. Any little thing made me cry. A house seen from the distance, traffic jams, people trapped inside their cars, the daily news. One night Abraham called me from Paris, where he had work in a group show of young Mexican painters. He wanted to talk about my health, but I wouldn't let him. He ended up talking about his painting, the progress he'd made, his successes. When we said goodbye I realized that I'd managed not to shed a single tear. Not long afterward, around the same time my mother decided to move to Los Angeles, I began to lose weight. One day, without having sold the factory, we got on a plane and settled in Laguna Beach. I spent the first two weeks at my old hospital in Los Angeles, undergoing exhaustive tests, and then I joined my mother in a little house on Lincoln Street, in Laguna Beach. My mother had been there before, but visiting was one thing and daily life something entirely different. For a while we would take the car out early in the morning and go looking for some other place we might like. We tried Dana Point, San Clemente, San Onofre, finally ending up in a town called Silverado, like in the movie, on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, where we rented a two-story house with a yard and bought a police dog that my mother called Hugo, after the friend she'd just left behind in Mexico.

We lived there two years. During that time my mother sold my grandfather's main factory and I was subjected to regular and increasingly routine doctors' appointments. Once a month my mother traveled to Mexico City. When she came back, she would bring me novels, Mexican novels that she knew I liked, old favorites or new books by José Agustín or Gustavo Sainz or even younger writers. But one day I realized that I couldn't read them anymore and little by little the books in Spanish were set aside. Shortly afterward, without warning, my mother showed up with a friend, an engineer called Cabrera who worked for a construction company in Guadalajara. The engineer was a widower and had two children a little older than me who lived in the United States, on the East Coast. He and my mother got along easily, and it seemed like they'd stay together. One night my mother and I talked about sex. I told her that my sexual life was over and after a long argument my mother started to cry and hugged me and said I was her little girl and she'd never leave me. Otherwise, we hardly ever fought. Our life consisted solely of reading, watching television (we never went to the movies), and weekly trips to Los Angeles, where we saw gallery shows or went to concerts. We had no friends in Silverado, except for a Jewish couple in their eighties whom my mother met at the supermarket, or so she told me, and whom we saw every three or four days, just for a few minutes and always at their house. According to my mother, it was our duty to visit them, because old people could have an accident or one of them might die all of a sudden and the other one might not know what to do, something I doubted since the old people had been in a German concentration camp during World War II and were hardly unacquainted with death. But it made my mother happy to help them and I didn't want to argue with her. The couple were called Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz, and they called us the Mexican Ladies.

One weekend when my mother was in Mexico City I went to see them. It was the first time I'd gone alone, and to my surprise I stayed a long time at their house and I enjoyed talking to them. I had lemonade and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz poured themselves whiskey. At their age it was the best medicine, they claimed. We talked about Europe, which they knew pretty well, and about Mexico, where they'd also been a few times. But the idea they had of Mexico couldn't have been more wrong or superficial. I remember that after we'd been talking for a long time they looked at me and said I was clearly Mexican. Of course I'm Mexican, I said. Still, they were very nice and I started to visit them more often. Sometimes, when they didn't feel well, they would call me and ask me to do their shopping at the supermarket that day or take their clothes to the cleaners or go to the newsstand and buy them a paper. Sometimes they would ask for the Los Angeles Times and other times for the local Silverado paper, a four-page flyer devoid of anything of interest. They liked Brahms, whom they thought was both a dreamer and a rationalist, and only very rarely did they watch television. I was the complete opposite. I almost never listened to music and I had the TV on most of the day.