The Spirit of Science Fiction Read online

  “It’s a strange story,” shouted José Arco. “I won’t insult you by asking if you know who Isou and Altagor are.”

  “Go ahead and insult me, I have no idea.”

  “Really? Fucking Latin America and its fucking young intellectuals!” José Arco laughed.

  “Well, Isou is French,” I yelled. “And he writes visual poetry, I think.”

  “Cold, cold.”

  Then he said something that I didn’t understand—it was in Romanian—and we passed a truck loaded with chickens and then another truck loaded with chickens and another and another. It was a convoy. The chickens poked their beaks through the mesh of their cages and shrieked like teenagers on the way to the slaughterhouse. Where is my mother hen? the chickens seemed to say. Where has my egg gone? My God, I thought, I don’t want to crash. La Salud Poultry Farm. José Arco’s Honda drew up an inch or so from mine.

  “Isou is the Father of Lettrism and Altagor is the Father of Metapoetry!”

  “Wonderful!”

  “And they hate each other bitterly!”

  We stopped at a red light.

  “I don’t know where the hell El Mofles reads these things. He didn’t make it past the first year of high school.”

  Green.

  “Where did you read them?” The Aztec Princess didn’t move right away. It jolted forward.

  “I go to the Librería Francesa! While the jackasses are lining up for Octavio Paz’s lectures, I spend hours digging around in there! I’m basically a nineteenth-century gentleman!”

  “And you never run into Mofles?”

  “Never!”

  A Mustang going sixty miles an hour drowned out José Arco’s last words. Eventually I would learn that El Mofles only visited the Librería El Sótano, and then only occasionally. The story of Isou and Altagor and Georges Perec was very simple. Just after World War II, in a Paris still under rationing, Isou and Altagor met at one of the legendary cafés. Isou sat on the terrace to the far right and Altagor to the left, let’s say. Still, each was aware of the other’s presence. The tables in the middle were occupied by American tourists, famous painters, Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, movie actors, and Johnny Hallyday.

  “Johnny Hallyday, too?”

  “That’s El Mofles for you, the bastard.”

  And so our two phonetic poets sat in perfect anonymity. Only the two of them fully understood what was going on and knew themselves to be the Father of Metapoetry and the Father of Lettrism, greater enemies than the houses of Verona.

  “According to El Mofles, they were both young and ambitious! Vanitas vanitatum!”

  “Fucking Mofles!”

  So after gloomily downing their pastis and munching their sandwiches, the only sustenance either of them would get that night, they called for the check, but one of them asked for it in metalanguage and the other in lettrist caló, and the next minute they refused to pay. Their aim, apart from getting themselves noticed by the tables in the middle, was to get the waiters to speak to them in the languages in which they’d been addressed. Sure enough, insults were soon flying. The waiters swore at them under their breath, trying not to call attention to themselves. Isou treated the waiters like ignorant slaves and mocked Altagor. The Father of Lettrism, on the other side of the terrace, loudly bewailed the narrow-mindedness of the waiters and shook his fist at Isou.

  “What assholes!”

  “Ha-ha-ha.”

  “Hee-hee-hee.”

  “They’re Mofles’s heroes!”

  The appearance of Gaston, the maître d’, a fierce warrior of the Maquis, put an end to the dispute. Gaston was a terror, and everybody knew it. Much to their chagrin, both poets paid up, and to make matters worse, they saw that they’d made fools of themselves in front of the select tables in the middle. Utterly crushed, Isou and Altagor left the café: it was then, out in the street, that they decided to meet in a duel to the death. (In their mutual despair, they believed that Paris wasn’t big enough for both of them.) The time was set for that very morning on the Champs de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower. And that is where Georges Perec comes in.

  “Do you know Georges Perec?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t read anything by him.”

  “He was one of the best,” said José Arco very seriously; our motorcycles were going ten miles an hour along the very edge of the road.

  “We look like two night-shift workers on our way home,” I said.

  “Basically,” said José Arco.

  According to El Mofles, Perec was a kid who rose with the sun. First thing in the morning, he snuck on tiptoe out of his grandparents’ house, got on his bike, and hightailed it around the city, no matter the weather. The morning in question, he went pedaling around the Champs de Mars. And wouldn’t you know it, the first person he runs into is Altagor, sitting on a bench and reciting one of his own poems for courage. Little Perec stops near him and listens. It goes like this: Sunx itogmire ésinorsinx ibagtour onéor galire a ékateralosné. Which to the boy’s ears sounds the same as if ten years ago you and I and El Mofles had met Mary Poppins in person singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” According to El Mofles, little Perec—who despite his youth is painfully polite and pedantic—begins to applaud with barely contained enthusiasm, which attracts the attention of Altagor, who looks at him and asks Veriaka e tomé?

  “Oh, my God, Mofles is too much.”

  Tumissé Arimx, answers the boy, and Altagor’s resolve crumbles. He sees the boy as a portent, a sign telling him to keep working come hell or high water. So he gets up, dusts himself off, bows down to the boy as if before fate itself, and goes off to his room to sleep. Shortly after this, the boy runs into Isidore Isou, and the same kind of thing happens. Maybe Isou doesn’t say a word to the boy. Maybe he just sees him riding his bike around the Champs de Mars and singing Echoum mortine flas echoum mortine zam, and that’s all it takes. Years later, when Georges Perec wrote the account I Remember, for reasons unknown he forgot to include this story.

  “Perec hasn’t been translated into Spanish, and El Mofles doesn’t speak French. I leave you with that mystery for breakfast.”

  All of Mexico City was bathed in a deep yellow light. We had arrived. I felt less like eating breakfast than like sleeping; with Laura, if possible. I pointed out to José Arco that I had seen worse in the last few days.

  “El Mofles’s universe is full of stories like that. I wonder if he might be responsible for one of those little magazines.”

  “We’ll ask him,” I said.

  Then I left the motorcycle on the first-floor landing, maybe with the secret hope that it would be stolen, and I went up the stairs two at a time.

  When I woke up, the first thing I saw was Jan’s flushed face and Angélica Torrente’s Greek profile smoking a Delicado and then Laura’s serene, expectant smile, all connected by a kind of arc of energy, very fine and very black, an effect that I attributed to the sleep in my eyes, and finally, as I pulled the sheet up to my nose, I saw the open door and the plants in the corridor shuddering and the daughter of one of the tenants walking away with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a transistor radio blaring in the other. Angélica Torrente had been here for an hour. The entire time, she’d been arguing with Jan. Of course, that wasn’t why she’d come: the purpose of her visit was love and confessions. But things got off track, and the two of them found themselves arguing, sorrowfully and stubbornly, and though most of the time it was at the top of their lungs, they didn’t manage to wake me. The problem was the table made of science fiction books. Jan had shown it to her with the beaming pride of a Chippendale collector, and Angélica, after studying it in astonishment and disgust, had decreed that it was nothing less than a slap in the face to literature in general and science fiction in particular. “Books should be on bookshelves, neatly organized, ready to be read or consulted. You can’t treat them this wa
y, like Meccano pieces or vulgar bricks!” Jan argued that many city dwellers under siege had relieved their hunger by masticating the pages of books: in Sevastopol in 1942, a young writer had ingested a good chunk of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in the original French. Science fiction, Jan believed, was especially well suited to serendipitous bookcases, like the bookcase-table, for example, without being any less valued for the content of its pages or its tales of adventure. According to Angélica, this was idiotic and impractical in the extreme. Tables were for eating on, for spilling sauces on, for stabbing with knives in fits of rage. My God! was Jan’s response, accompanied by a dismissive wave. That has nothing to do with anything! You don’t get it! There are tablecloths!

  After which there was an instant when they tried to move from words to deeds. For a fraction of a second, they met in an attempt at lucha libre, masks versus manes, that might have ended or climaxed with the two of them tangled on Jan’s mattress, legs pressed to legs, arms wrapped around backs and shoulders, hands clawing, and jeans pulled down to knees. But it didn’t happen. They just lunged at each other a few times, getting in a few jabs on the forearms, their breathing faster and the gleam in their eyes more intense. Then Laura arrived, and the argument lost steam and finally fizzled out. Laura hardly noticed the table at all. “I saw a motorcycle on the landing,” she said in a sibylline voice. “I bet it’s Remo’s.”

  “No, no, no,” sighed Jan. “Absolutely not. My esteemed friend only knows how to ride a bicycle.”

  “How much do you want to bet?” Laura was like that; when she was sure about something, she would rather die than let her arm be twisted. Luckily for her, her convictions were few, though they were as sharp as a falcon’s beak.

  “But, my dear,” said Jan, “up until yesterday he didn’t have a motorcycle, so there’s no way he could have one now.”

  “I’m sure it’s his motorcycle.”

  “Unless”—Jan seemed doubtful—“he stole it, but even so, how can you steal a motorcycle when you don’t know how to ride it?”

  A vision of me buying the motorcycle and signing letters and contracts flashed through Jan’s mind like a shout. It was a chilling prospect, as he would later confess to me, because he was forced to accept something that he’d never wanted to admit: our disastrous economic situation. If the motorcycle was mine, which was beginning to seem more and more likely, we would surely be up to our ears in debt for at least five years, and to make matters worse, I would need financial help, which meant that he would have to look for work.

  “My God, I hope it isn’t true,” he said.

  “It’s a very nice motorcycle,” said Laura.

  “When I came up, I guess there was a motorcycle on the landing,” said Angélica, “but it didn’t look nice to me. It was an ugly old motorcycle.”

  “Why do you call it ugly?” asked Laura.

  “Because I thought it was. An old motorcycle all covered in stickers.”

  “You must not have gotten a good look at it. It has character. And there aren’t that many stickers on it. In fact, there’s just an inscription, a really original one in metallic letters: ‘Aztec Princess’ . . . that must be its name.”

  “The name of the motorcycle.”

  “Such observant girls,” said Jan.

  “Listen, it’s cheesy enough to give a motorcycle a name. But to call it Aztec Princess, ugghh,” said Angélica.

  “No, it can’t be Remo’s,” said Jan. “But, Laura, you spent hours studying that motorcycle!”

  Laura laughed and said yes, the hulking rusty thing out there on the landing had spoken to her: there was something about it that made her feel sad, like crying. Angélica said, “bullshit.” Then I woke up.

  Cautiously, I began to perform the delicate maneuver of getting dressed. The two girls had already seen Jan naked, and I guess they thought it would be bad manners to close their eyes or turn to face the wall while I was getting up. I didn’t say anything. I put my pants on under the sheet and did the best I could.

  “The motorcycle is mine.”

  “See?” said Laura.

  “I bought it from a savage poet in Peralvillo. I’ll pay for it when I have money.”

  “In other words, never,” said Jan.

  “I’ll work more. I’ll enter all the literary contests. I give myself a year to get famous and make the same money as somebody with a desk job at the bottom of the ladder. All this, of course, if I don’t end up in jail first for riding without a license on a motorcycle that turned up out of nowhere.”

  “Stolen,” said Jan.

  “Exactly. What do you expect? But I didn’t steal it! It fell into my hands by chance. Come on, can you imagine the Lone Ranger buying Silver at an auction? No, the Lone Ranger found Silver on the prairie. They found each other, and they hit it off. Same for Red Ryder. Only that ass Hopalong Cassidy would buy a new horse every year.”

  “But you don’t know how to ride a motorcycle.”

  “I learned last night. It’s not so hard. It’s all in the head, really. License, police, stoplights, fear of cars—those are the hard parts. If you forget about all that, you can learn to ride a motorcycle in half an hour.”

  “Sure,” said Angélica, “it’s like the luck of the drunk. If you aren’t afraid that something will happen to you, it won’t.”

  “Most accidents are the fault of drunk drivers,” whispered Jan.

  “No, half-drunk, which is totally different. Half-drunk drivers are terrified of screwing up, so of course they do. If you’re completely drunk, you’re thinking of other things. Well, actually, total drunks hardly ever get into a car. They just fall into bed.”

  We kept talking for a while about my motorcycle and the dangers that could befall me riding it around a place like Mexico City. Some of the advantages, according to everyone except for me, were speeding past motorcades and traffic jams and being on time to all my appointments and future jobs. But he isn’t going to get a job, said Laura, with an enigmatic smile, he’s going to write poems and win all the contests. That’s right, I said, I won’t need the motorcycle for that. Maybe when I’ve got writer’s block, I’ll go out and ride around. Contests? What contests? Jan asked hopefully. All of them, said Angélica. You’ll ride to the post office on the motorcycle, and you’ll sit on the manuscripts so they don’t blow away. True, and it’s only fitting, too, I said. One of the disadvantages was the price of gasoline, which none of us knew, even approximately.

  And so on and so on, until Jan and Angélica left and I realized that something had to happen between Laura and me. Where are you going? I asked. I had always been in favor of Jan leaving the room, even if only once a day, but this time I would have preferred it if he’d stayed. The two of them looked happy. Jan had his arm around Angélica’s waist, and she was petting his hair. The scene terrified me.

  “To the landing,” said Jan. “We’re going to take a look at your motorcycle, and if we really feel like it, we’ll head over to La Flor de Irapuato.”

  “Don’t be long,” I said.

  When we were left alone, there was a silence as sudden and heavy as a concrete ball. Laura sat on Jan’s mattress, and I stared out the window. Laura got up and came over to the window. I sat on my mattress. I stuttered something about the motorcycle and going to get a coffee at La Flor de Irapuato. Laura smiled and said nothing. There was no doubt in my mind: she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. And the most direct.

  “Last night you said you wanted to make love with me. That you were dying to do it. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m out of practice,” I stuttered. “I want to do it, I want it more than anything, but I’m out of practice. Also, it’s hard to explain, but I’m kind of wounded in action.”

  Laura laughed and asked me to tell her about it. Little by little, I started to feel better. I put on water for tea, I made a few banal rema
rks about the weather, and then I confessed that not long ago I’d been ruthlessly and repeatedly kicked in the testicles, a kind of Chilean memento, and that since then I’d been convinced that I would never get it up again, a predictable reaction from an admirer of the Goncourt brothers. Actually, I can get it up, I admitted, but only when I’m alone.

  “Why did they kick you there?”

  “Who knows? Jan and I were wandering around desperately looking for our friend Boris, and not only did we not find him, we got caught ourselves.”

  “What about Jan, did he . . . ?”

  “That’s right, we both got thrashed. He was yelling as loud as me.”

  “But Jan has normal erections,” said Laura. “I know that for a fact.”

  Laura had never seemed so pretty and so terrible. For a second, I felt a wave of jealousy and fear. At what point had the hypocritical little satyr stolen my girlfriend?

  “Really?” I said, with an icy smile.

  Laura told me then that the night of the party in our room Jan and Angélica had made love. I must have been very drunk or high or depressed or immersed in López Velarde, because I didn’t notice. Angélica felt sick, and her sister and Jan took her to the bathroom. Really, it was very stuffy in our room. In one of the chicken coops where clothes were hung up to dry, Laura bumped into Lola Torrente, José Arco, and Pepe Colina. Angélica and Jan had vanished. César was pretty drunk, and he wanted to leave. He begged, pleaded, claimed he was about to vomit—poor César, but too bad for him. Laura absolutely refused. In a corner full of pails, buckets of water, and empty boxes of detergent, César tried to make love to her as she looked over the railing. He was out of luck. Laura kept wandering sleepily around the roof (like the princess, candle in hand, who roams the castle of the prince she is to marry!) until on one of her rounds she came to what Jan cheerfully called the latrines. There she hesitated, and soon she heard a muffled noise coming from one of them. She thought that Angélica might be sicker than she’d seemed and went to investigate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jan was sitting on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, and in the fingers of his left hand he held a match. Kneeling over him, Angélica was mounted on his erect cock. Every so often, when the match burned the tips of his fingers, Jan dropped it and lit another one. Discreetly, Laura returned to the others. The next day, Angélica told her what she already knew, plus some additional details.