The Savage Detectives Read online

  We talked about poetry. No one has read any of my poems, and yet they all treat me like one of them. The camaraderie is immediate and incredible!

  Around nine, Felipe Müller showed up; he's nineteen, so until I came along he was the youngest in the group. Then we all went to eat at a Chinese café, and we walked and talked about literature until three in the morning. We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed. Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.

  I asked where I could buy the books they'd had with them the other night. The answer came as no surprise: they steal them from the Librería Francesa in the Zona Rosa and from the Librería Baudelaire on Calle General Martínez, near Calle Horacio, in Polanco. I also asked about the authors, and one after another (what one visceral realist reads is soon read by the rest of the group) they filled me in on the life and works of the Electrics, Raymond Queneau, Sophie Podolski, and Alain Jouffroy.

  Felipe Müller asked if I could read French. He sounded a tiny bit annoyed. I told him that with a dictionary I could get along all right. Later I asked him the same question. You read French, don't you, mano? He answered in the negative.

  NOVEMBER 12

  Ran into Jacinto Requena, Rafael Barrios, and Pancho Rodríguez at Café Quito. I saw them come in around nine and motioned them over to my table, where I had just spent three good hours writing and reading. They introduced me to Pancho Rodríguez. He's as short as Barrios, and has the face of a twelve-year-old, even though he's actually twenty-two. It was almost inevitable that we'd like each other. Pancho Rodríguez never stops talking. Thanks to him I found out that before Belano and Müller showed up (they came to Mexico City after the Pinochet coup, so they weren't part of the original group), Ulises Lima had published a magazine with poems by María Font, Angélica Font, Laura Damián, Barrios, San Epifanio, some guy called Marcelo Robles I'd never heard of, and the Rodríguez brothers, Pancho and Moctezuma. According to Pancho, Pancho himself is one of the two best young Mexican poets, and the other one is Ulises Lima, who Pancho says is his best friend. The magazine (two issues, both from 1974) was called Lee Harvey Oswald and was bankrolled entirely by Lima. Requena (who wasn't part of the group back then) and Barrios confirmed everything Pancho Rodríguez said. That was how visceral realism started, said Barrios. Pancho Rodríguez thought otherwise. According to him, Lee Harvey Oswald should have continued. It folded just as it was taking off, he said, just as people were starting to know who we were. What people? Well, other poets, of course, literature students, and the poetry-writing girls who came each week to the hundred workshops blossoming like flowers in Mexico City. Barrios and Requena disagreed about the magazine, even though they both looked back on it with nostalgia.

  "Are there a lot of poetesses?"

  "It's lame to call them poetesses," said Pancho.

  "You're supposed to call them poets," said Barrios.

  "But are there lots of them?"

  "Like never before in the history of Mexico," said Pancho. "Lift a stone and you'll find a girl writing about her little life."

  "So how could Lima finance Lee Harvey Oswald all by himself?" I said.

  I thought it prudent not to insist just then on the subject of poetesses.

  "Oh, poet García Madero, Ulises Lima is the kind of guy who'll do anything for poetry," said Barrios dreamily.

  Then we talked about the name of the magazine, which I thought was brilliant.

  "Let's see if I understand. Poets, according to Ulises Lima, are like Lee Harvey Oswald. Is that it?"

  "More or less," said Pancho Rodríguez. "I suggested that he should call it Los bastardos de Sor Juana, which sounds more Mexican, but our friend is crazy about anything to do with gringos."

  "Actually, Ulises thought there was already a publishing house with the same name, but he was wrong, and when he realized his mistake he decided to use the name for his magazine," said Barrios.

  "What publishing house?"

  "P.-J. Oswald, in Paris, the place that published a book by Matthieu Messagier."

  "And that dumbass Ulises thought that the French publishing house was named for the assassin. But it was P.-J. Oswald, not L. H. Oswald, and one day he realized and decided to take the name."

  "The French guy's name must be Pierre-Jacques," said Requena.

  "Or Paul-Jean Oswald."

  "Does his family have money?" I asked.

  "No, Ulises's family doesn't have money," said Requena. "Actually, the only family he has is his mother, right? Or at least I've never heard of anyone else."

  "I know his whole family," said Pancho. "I knew Ulises Lima long before any of you, long before Belano, and his mother is the only family he has. He's broke, that I can promise you."

  "Then how could he finance two issues of a magazine?"

  "Selling weed," said Pancho. The other two were quiet, but they didn't deny it.

  "I can't believe it," I said.

  "Well, it's true. The money comes from marijuana."

  "Shit."

  "He goes and gets it in Acapulco and then he delivers it to his clients in Mexico City."

  "Shut up, Pancho," said Barrios.

  "Why should I shut up? The kid's a fucking visceral realist, isn't he? So why do I have to shut up?"

  NOVEMBER 13

  I spent all of today following Lima and Belano. We walked, took the subway, buses, a pesero, walked some more, and the whole time we never stopped talking. Sometimes they'd go into houses, and then I had to wait outside for them. When I asked what they were doing they told me that they were taking a survey. But I think they're making deliveries of marijuana. Along the way I read them the latest poems I'd written, eleven or twelve of them. I think they liked them.

  NOVEMBER 14

  Today I went with Pancho Rodríguez to the Font sisters' house.

  I'd been at Café Quito for four hours, I'd already had three cups of coffee, and I was losing my appetite for reading and writing when Pancho showed up and invited me to come with him. I leaped at the invitation.

  The Fonts live in Colonia Condesa, in a beautiful two-story house on Calle Colima, with a front yard and a courtyard in back. The front is nothing special, just a few stunted trees and some ragged grass, but the courtyard is another story: the trees are big, and there are enormous plants with leaves so intensely green they look black, a small tiled pool that can't quite be called a fountain (there are no fish in it, but there is a battery-powered submarine, property of Jorgito Font, the youngest brother), and a little outbuilding completely separate from the big house. At one time it was probably a carriage house or stables and now it's where the Font sisters live. Before we got there, Pancho gave me a heads-up:

  "Angélica's father is kind of nuts. If you see something strange, don't be scared, just do whatever I do and act like nothing's happening. If he starts to make trouble, don't worry. We'll take him down."

  "Take him down?" I wasn't quite sure what he meant. "The two of us? In his own house?"

  "His wife would be eternally grateful. The guy's a total headcase. A year or so ago he spent time in the bin. But don't repeat that to the Font sisters. Or if you do, don't say you heard it from me."

  "So he's crazy," I said.

  "Crazy and broke. Until recently they had two cars and three servants, and they were always throwing these big parties. But somehow he blew a fuse, poor fucker, and just lost it. Now he's ruined."

  "But it must cost money to keep up this house."

  "They own it. It's all they've got left."

  "What did Mr. Font do before he went crazy?" I said.

  "He was an architect, but not a very good one. He designed the two issues of Lee Harvey Oswald."

  "No shit."

  When we rang the bell, a bald man with a mustache and a deranged look came to let us in.

  "That's Angélica's father," Pancho w
hispered to me.

  "I figured," I said.

  The man came striding up to the gate, fixing us with a look of intense hatred. I was happy to be on the other side of the bars. After hesitating for a few seconds, as if he wasn't sure what to do, he opened the gate and charged. I jumped back, but Pablo spread his arms wide and greeted him effusively. The man stopped then and extended an unsteady hand before he let us through. Pancho walked briskly around the house to the back, and I followed him. Mr. Font went back inside, talking to himself. As we headed down a flower-filled outside passageway between the front and back gardens, Pancho explained that another reason for poor Mr. Font's agitation was his daughter Angélica:

  "María has already lost her virginity," said Pancho, "but Angélica hasn't yet, although she's about to, and the old man knows it and it drives him crazy."

  "How does he know?"

  "One of the mysteries of fatherhood, I guess. Anyway, he spends all day wondering which son of a bitch will deflower his daughter, and it's just too much for one man to bear. Deep down, I understand him; if I were in his shoes I'd feel the same."

  "But does he have someone in mind or does he suspect everyone?"

  "He suspects everyone, of course, although two or three are out of the running: the queers and her sister. The old man isn't stupid."

  None of it made any sense.

  "Last year Angélica won the Laura Damián poetry prize, you know, when she was only sixteen."

  I'd never heard of the prize in my life. According to what Pancho told me later, Laura Damián was a poetess who died before she turned twenty, in 1972, and her parents had established a prize in her memory. According to Pancho, the prize was very highly regarded "among the true elite." I gave him a look, as if to ask what kind of an idiot he was, but Pancho didn't notice. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then he raised his eyes skyward and I thought I noticed a curtain move in one of the windows on the second floor. Maybe it was just the breeze, but I felt watched until I crossed the threshold of the Font sisters' little house.

  Only María was home.

  María is tall and dark, with very straight black hair, a straight (absolutely straight) nose, and thin lips. She looks like a nice person, though it's not hard to see that her rages might be long and terrible. We found her standing in the middle of the room, practicing dance steps, reading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a Billie Holiday record, and absentmindedly painting a watercolor of two women holding hands at the foot of a volcano, surrounded by streams of lava. She received us coldly at first, as if Pancho's presence annoyed her and she was only putting up with him for her sister's sake and because, in all fairness, the little house in the courtyard wasn't hers alone but belonged to both of them. She didn't even look at me.

  To make matters worse, I managed to make a banal remark about Sor Juana that prejudiced her against me even more (a clumsy allusion to the celebrated lines "Misguided men, who will chastise/a woman when no blame is due,/oblivious that it is you/who prompted what you criticize") and that I made worse when I tried again by reciting, "Stay, shadow of contentment too short-lived,/illusion of enchantment I most prize,/fair image for whom happily I die,/sweet fiction for whom painfully I live."

  So suddenly there we were, the three of us, sunk in timid or sullen silence, and María Font wouldn't even look at Pancho and me, although sometimes I looked at her or the watercolor (or to be more precise, stole glances at her and the watercolor), and Pancho Rodríguez, who seemed completely unaffected by María's hostility or her father's, was looking at the books, whistling a song that as far as I could tell had nothing to do with what Billie Holiday was singing, until at last Angélica appeared, and then I understood Pancho (he was one of the men who wanted to deflower Angélica!), and I almost understood Mr. Font, although to be honest, virginity doesn't mean much to me. (I'm a virgin myself, after all, unless Brígida's fellatio interrupta is considered a deflowering. But is that making love with a woman? Wouldn't I have had to simultaneously lick her pussy to say that we'd actually made love? To stop being a virgin, does it only count if a man sticks his dick into a woman's vagina, not her mouth, her ass, or her armpit? To say that I've really made love, do I have to have ejaculated? It's all so complicated.)

  But as I was saying, Angélica appeared, and to judge by the way she greeted Pancho, it was clear (to me at least) that he had some romantic possibilities with the prize-winning poet. As soon as he introduced me, I was ignored again.

  The two of them set up a screen that divided the room in two, and then they sat on the bed and I could hear them whispering to each other.

  I went over to María and said a few things about how good her watercolor was. She didn't even look up. I tried another tactic: I talked about visceral realism and Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. I also analyzed (intrepidly: the whispers on the other side of the screen were making me more and more nervous) the watercolor before me as a visceral realist work. María Font looked at me for the first time and smiled:

  "I don't give a shit about the visceral realists."

  "But I thought you were part of the group. The movement, I mean."

  "Are you kidding? Maybe if they'd chosen a less disgusting name… I'm a vegetarian. Anything to do with viscera makes me sick."

  "What would you have called it?"

  "Oh, I don't know. The Mexican Section of Surrealists, maybe."

  "I think there already is a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca. Anyway, what we're trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale."

  "On a Latin American scale? Please."

  "Well, that's what we want in the long term, if I understand it correctly."

  "Who are you, anyway?"

  "I'm a friend of Lima and Belano."

  "So why haven't I ever seen you around here?"

  "I only met them a little while ago…"

  "You're the kid from Álamo's workshop, aren't you?"

  I turned red, although really I don't know why. I admitted that we had met there.

  "So there's already a Mexican Section of Surrealists in Cuernavaca," said María thoughtfully. "Maybe I should go live in Cuernavaca."

  "I read about it in the Excelsior. It's some old men who paint. A group of tourists, I think."

  "Leonora Carrington lives in Cuernavaca," said María. "You're not talking about her, are you?"

  "Um, no," I said. I have no idea who Leonora Carrington is.

  Then we heard a moan. It wasn't a moan of pleasure, I could tell that right away, but a moan of pain. It occurred to me then that it had been a while since we heard anything from behind the screen.

  "Are you all right, Angélica?" said María.

  "Of course I'm all right. Go take a walk please, and take that guy with you," responded the muffled voice of Angélica Font.

  In a gesture of annoyance and boredom, María threw her paintbrushes onto the floor. From the paint marks on the tiles, I could tell that it wasn't the first time her sister had requested a little privacy.

  "Come with me."

  I followed her to a secluded corner of the courtyard, beside a high wall covered in vines, where there was a table and five metal chairs.

  "Do you think they're…?" I said, and immediately I regretted my curiosity, which I'd hoped she'd share. Luckily, María was too angry to pay much attention to me.

  "Fucking? No way."

  For a while we sat in silence. María drummed her fingers on the table, and I crossed and recrossed my legs a few times and busied myself studying the plants in the courtyard.

  "All right, what are you waiting for? Read me your poems," she said.

  I read and read until one of my legs fell asleep. When I finished I was afraid to ask whether she'd liked them or not. Then María invited me into the big house for coffee.

  In the kitchen, we found her mother and father, cooking. They seemed happy. She introduced me to them. Her father didn't look deranged anymore. He was actually pretty nice to me; he asked me what I was stu
dying, how I planned to balance law and poetry, how good old Álamo was (it seems they know each other, or were childhood friends). Her mother talked about vague things that I can hardly remember: I think she mentioned a séance in Coyoacán that she'd been to recently, and the restless spirit of a 1940s rancheras singer. I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not.

  In front of the TV we found Jorgito Font. María didn't speak to him or introduce us. He's twelve years old, has long hair, and dresses like a bum. He calls everybody naco or naca. To his mother he says no way, naca, no can do; to his father, naco, check it out; to his sister, that's my naca or naca, you're the best. To me he said hey, naco, what's going on?

  Nacos, as far as I know, are urban Indians, city Indians. Jorgito must be using the word in some other sense.

  NOVEMBER 15

  Back at the Fonts' house today.

  Things happened exactly as they did yesterday, with minor variations.

  Pancho and I met at El Loto de Quintana Roo, a Chinese café near the Glorieta de Insurgentes, and after having several cups of coffee and something a little more substantial (paid for by me), we headed for Colonia Condesa.

  Once again Mr. Font came to the door when we rang the bell, in the exact same state as yesterday; if anything, he was a few steps farther down the path to madness. His eyes bulged from their sockets when he accepted the cheerful hand Pancho offered him, unperturbed, and he showed no sign of recognizing me.

  María was by herself in the little house in the courtyard; she was painting the same watercolor as before and in her left hand she held the same book, but it was Olga Guillot's voice, not Billie Holiday's, coming out of the record player.