The Spirit of Science Fiction Read online

  “Do they dream about the Hurricane?”

  “Maybe. The next morning, Lejeune is in constant motion: he has his picture taken with General Gamelin, General Giraud, General de Gaulle, General Weygand, General Blanchard, General Gort’s chief of staff, gazing out over Arras or Ypres, on the streets of Lille, Givet, Sedan, or on the banks of the Meuse and the dunes of Dunkirk. Meanwhile the caretaker follows his usual morning routine in every particular: he has a quick, frugal breakfast and gets straight to work. The girl wakes with a fever. Her dreams were about a nuclear blast, I think, a Yankee battalion wiping out Los Ángeles with a couple of neutron bombs. On the banks of the Bío-Bío is the Hurricane, and when the bombs explode, the Hurricane opens up like a giant cinema, and inside is a factory called Pompeya, where motorcycles are built. Benelli motorcycles. Soon a motorcycle emerges from the factory, and then another and another: a battalion of Komsomols from the south of Chile on its way to destroy or be destroyed by the Yankees. Then it begins to dawn on the caretaker that all the pieces of the course have almost reached Santa Bárbara, or at least they’re on their way. The girl’s mother brings down her daughter’s fever with paper-thin slices of raw potato soaked in vinegar. Boris Lejeune has himself photographed in a French tank on the outskirts of Abbeville.”

  Hmm, said José Arco, a match in his hand, so that’s the guy’s signature, a triangle with a mouth in it. I lit another match. What happened to the fucking light? It’s been out for two days. Look, this is what I was telling you about. I moved a little closer. The smell of shit and urine rose from the sticky floor. This is it? Yes, said José Arco, lighting another match. I can’t see a thing. So that’s supposed to be a cave? Come closer, I’m going to light two matches; you light two and then look. In the glow of the four little tongues of flame, I saw the cross-hatched outline of a cave, some of the lines very bold, others barely visible on the white tile. In fact, it looked less like a cave than like a doughnut hacked with an ax. Inside the doughnut, it was possible to make out the silhouettes or shadows of two human beings, a dog shitting, and a mushroom cloud. Well, can you see it now? I nodded. Plain enough, isn’t it? Terrifying, I replied. The dog has three tails, did you notice? Yes, of course, he’s wagging his tail. And shitting at the same time? Of course. Shitting and wagging his tail. And what are the people doing? I don’t know, the first time I saw it, I thought that they were holding hands, but now I’m not sure. Anyway, look closer, I think they’re shadows, not bodies. The shadows from Plato’s cave? Whoa, I wouldn’t bet on that, but there’s something about the size of the mushroom cloud that makes me want to call them shadows. So they’re looking at us, and we see their shadows reflected on the wall of the cave? No, they have their backs to us, they’re looking out the mouth of the cave because on the horizon, far away, an atomic bomb has exploded. Maybe. And the dog? Why is the dog shitting in the cave? Heh-heh. Touching detail, isn’t it? No, I think he’s shitting because he’s scared, poor Rin-Tin-Tin. When they’re scared, they don’t wag their tails. I had a dog when I was a boy, and I can tell you that for a fact. I’ve never had a dog, you know? Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure you’re the first person I ever knew who had a dog. Give me a break. Shhh, careful, someone’s coming. I closed the door to the stall. A second later, we heard the click of a switch and then the sound of liquid splashing on the urinal outside. An instant later, whoever it was zipped up and left. The matches had gone out, and I realized that I had burned my thumb and index finger. José Arco lit another match. It’s a weird signature, he said, unfazed. A triangle with a fat-lipped mouth in it, in midshout—that’s what it looks like. Probably inspired by the Stones logo, but a savage cubist version of it. Fine, I said. I saw it, now let’s get out of here. Did you examine it carefully? I don’t know, I said, this place makes me dizzy. I wonder whether it was the artist himself who made the bulb burn out, murmured José Arco. When we emerged, the lights of the café dazzled us and seemed to speed up our movements. We couldn’t help it, it was if we were dancing around the tables back to the spot where we had left our coffees.

  All of these episodes José Arco dubbed “the Investigation.” Basically, we were just trying to confirm the reports from the Conasupo Cultural Weekly and Dr. Carvajal’s journal, and following any clues that cropped up along the way. Soon we were visiting all kinds of poetry workshops and we had gotten our hands on journals whose sole print runs were often no more than ten xeroxed copies. We also remained on the lookout for the graffiti—invisible art or decadent art?—described in the Weekly. Luck was clearly on our side, since it soon brought several of our working hypotheses together in one place. This place was Café La Habana, where José Arco found the Triangle with a Mouth (or Laughing Triangle) graffiti. It was an establishment already frequented by my friend in the days before the start of the Investigation, if not as assiduously. One random evening at La Habana, as he was talking to a group of friends, Estrellita asked him to buy her a coffee, and then she gave him the Weekly. Gave it to him, nobody else. Days later, after searching for her in vain along Bucareli, he found the drawing of the cave in the toilet stall. And so, over the days that followed, as we searched for Estrellita (halfheartedly, I must add), La Habana became the main headquarters of our meanderings, and then, in the most natural way, it was the place we washed up after eleven each night. We discovered that the block of Bucareli between La Habana and the Reloj Chino wasn’t just a kind of shrine—something we intuited that we should keep in mind—but that it more than satisfied all our alimentary needs: on one corner, there was a sandwich stand run by an ex–Atlante footballer, and on the other corner was La Habana, which served the cheapest and most delicious chilaquiles on the block; in between was an extremely cheap pizza counter owned by an American guy with a Mexican wife, a guy everybody called Jerry Lewis even though he looked nothing at all like the actor; across the street was a taco-and-quesadilla stand run by two dark-skinned sisters who, the minute they saw me, would say, ¿Qué pasó, güero? and I would say, but I’m not a white boy, and they would say, what do you mean you’re not, and me, stubborn, no soy güero, and so on until José Arco arrived and put an end to it: ¿Güero? Of course you are; and working both sides of the street was a gay one-eyed vendor of elotes, tender corncobs spread with butter or mayonnaise or crema and dusted with cheese or chile powder, who sagely recommended the Bucareli movie theater as the ideal place to eat his merchandise. The Bucareli theater was the king of the block, no question about it, a benevolent king, practically a paragon of virtue, host of those with nowhere to sleep, dark Disneyland, the only church that, at times, we seemed destined to belong to.

  And then we found Estrellita.

  José Arco pointed at a table. There she was, sitting up very straight, with two girls. The one on the left is Teresa, said my friend with a hint of bitterness. And the other one? Ah, that’s Angélica Torrente, let’s go somewhere else. What do you mean? I burst out. There’s Estrellita, we’ve been looking for her like crazy, and now we’re going to leave? Forget it! José Arco didn’t answer. As I was shaking him, I watched the three women through the window out of the corner of my eye. Estrellita was very old, and her long face was covered in wrinkles. She hadn’t taken off her coat. She was drinking something, and every so often her face turned toward one or the other of her companions, a permanent smile fixed on it. The two girls were talking and laughing and, maybe by contrast, seemed incredibly young. And smart, shielded by the same yellow light of the café that fell over them like a curtain or a dome—super smart and super pretty, I thought.

  At last we went in, though I almost had to drag José Arco. Estrellita scarcely noticed our presence at the table. Teresa and Angélica Torrente, however, didn’t seem pleased to have to suddenly change the subject. José Arco, embarrassed (my friend, I realized then, was excruciatingly shy around girls he liked), introduced me in a way that was clearly an apology for the intrusion. Hello, I said. José Arco coughed and asked what time it was. Before he could
escape, I pulled up two chairs, and we sat down.

  “So you’re Teresa.” The look on José Arco’s face was more agonized than withering. “The other day, we left the motorcycle outside your place, did you see it?”

  “Yes.” Teresa—another discovery—could be ice-cold, though she was only nineteen or twenty.

  Angélica Torrente seemed friendlier and nicer.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” she asked.

  “Me? . . . From Chile . . .”

  The two of them laughed. Estrellita’s beatific smile deepened slightly. I smiled. Ha-ha. Yes, I’m from Chile. Angélica Torrente was seventeen, and she had won the Eloísa Ramírez Prize for young poets. (Eloísa Ramírez had died fifteen years ago, before she turned eighteen, leaving behind a giant stack of papers and a pair of inconsolable parents who, in her memory, awarded a not-insignificant annual cash prize for the best collection of poetry by a writer under twenty or twenty-one or something like that.) Angélica Torrente’s charms were electric, mainly, and a touch acidic. She talked like a person on the crest of a wave; she could see everything from up there, though she didn’t pay much attention to the sights because of the speed and the falling. She was definitely very beautiful, sometimes even painfully so. She had a laugh—unusual for her age—that was the thing you remembered most about her when she dumped you in the end; it was her signature, her trademark, her weapon. She laughed easily, an open, happy laugh, and the combination of the sound and the way she moved hinted at dark dreams, paranoia, the urge to live life to the hilt whether or not you ended up battered and bruised. Teresa was different: not only did she seem more serious, sometimes she actually was. She was a poetess, too, though unlike Angélica and the others I would soon meet, Teresa worked. She was a typist, and she was studying medicine, in her second semester. She didn’t live with her parents. She was beginning to make a name for herself in some journals—not many of them, but good ones—as someone not to be overlooked when anthologies of young Mexican poets were assembled. Her relationship with José Arco, despite appearances, was completely atypical. I never knew, and never asked, whether they had slept together. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. I don’t think it matters. It’s common knowledge that Teresa came to hate José Arco, which I presume means that at some point she loved him. There’s one thing that tells you all you need to know about Teresa: she would never lend you a book, and if you made the mistake of loaning her one—as José Arco did a thousand times at least—you could bet anything that you would never see it again, or if you did, it would be in her bookcase, blond wood with mahogany streaks and knots, very pretty, very elegant. Between the two girls, Estrellita was like a grain of sand in a saucer of coffee.

  “We’ve been looking for you, Estrellita,” said José Arco.

  Estrellita sighed. Then she said “hmm,” gazing past my friend’s forehead, and she sighed again, putting everything into her smile.

  “We’ve been looking for you because of the Weekly you gave me the other day.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you remember? The Conasupo Cultural Weekly, about the poetry workshops . . .”

  “Ah? Hmm . . .” Estrellita studied a point in the distance and huddled into her coat.

  “Do you remember it? A long list of poetry workshops, Mexico City poetry workshops.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Angélica.

  “A really weird magazine, maybe a conspiracy,” I said.

  “Oh, yes . . .” said Estrellita. “Did you like it?”

  “Very much.”

  “Oh, I’m glad . . .”

  “I’d like to know where you got it. . . . Who gave it to you?”

  Estrellita smiled. There wasn’t a single tooth in her mouth.

  “Hmm, it’s a strange story, a lovely one . . .”

  “Tell us,” said José Arco and Teresa.

  But the old woman sat there unmoving, her pale green eyes fixed on the tabletop. We waited. The sounds of La Habana, dwindling at this time of night, wrapped around us like Estrellita’s threadbare coat. It was nice. Now Angélica Torrente showed herself to be the most practical of us all.

  “Do you want another coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  Not many knew exactly who Estrellita was. She turned up in the most unexpected places, like a battered reproduction of the Angel of Independence or Liberty Leading the People. No one knew where she lived—though theories were ventured—or even if Estrellita was really her name. When asked, she would sometimes say that it was Carmen, or Adela, or Evita, but she also claimed that Estrella was her real name and not, as was commonly believed, the pet name given to her by some old man from Spain who had killed himself. At La Habana, it was assumed that she was a poet, though as far as I know, no one, or hardly anyone, had read anything she wrote. According to her, rivers and rivers of ink—seas of ink—had flowed since she published her last sonnet. She had a son. The old reporters who hung around La Habana didn’t know much about art, but they swore that he had been a good painter. In fact, Estrellita’s only visible source of income was a set of prints made from her son’s drawings, which she sold from table to table. It was said that heroin had ended his career but that he was still alive, and here came the saddest part: he was living with his mother. The drawings were wild, reminiscent of Leonora Carrington: spiderwebs, moons, bearded women, dwarfs—bad, essentially. There must have been about twenty of them, maybe fewer, copied a thousand times over, because Estrellita really did sell them and she never ran out. Who had ordered so many prints? The son himself? Judging from the paper, they had been printed at least fifteen years ago. Estrellita considered them a blessing, and maybe they were: she supported herself and her son—who was in his forties now—on the proceeds, tucking sweet rolls for him into the deep pockets of her coat and nourishing herself on milky coffee in tall glasses with a long spoon so that she could reach the bottom without wetting her fingers, font of energy.

  “Don’t burn yourself,” said Angélica.

  Estrellita sipped, tasting, then put in enough sugar for three glasses.

  “Hmm, delicious,” she said.

  “Do you like it very sweet?” asked Angélica.

  “Yes.”

  “Estrellita, are you going to tell us where you got the Weekly?”

  “Yes, yes . . .”

  “Where?”

  “At a supermarket . . .”

  José Arco opened his eyes and smiled.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m an idiot.”

  “I went in to buy a princess dress . . .”

  “. . .”

  “And a yogurt . . .”

  “. . .”

  “And they gave me this paper, for free . . .”

  “Thank you, Estrellita,” said my friend.

  “Are you doing anything tonight?” asked Angélica Torrente half an hour later, informed of all the dumb things—according to her—that we’d been doing.

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s a kind of party at my place. Do you want to come?”

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  Dear Fritz Leiber:

  I think you must know this story. Like love at first sight, without the love, comes the True Encounter; every organ in the body transmitting and receiving; organic radar units shuffling along the last streets of a Latin American city, drinking and taking peso buses, winking at the void. At the other end of the bar, the anthropoid suddenly discovers that the stranger, too, is interested in the figures sketched on the wall. After that, everything moves even more slowly, if possible; a montage of aquatic scenes of two characters who meet in unexpected places; washrooms in fleabag movie theaters, cantinas frozen in 1940, underground clubs, the Chapultepec roller coaster, dark and deserted parks. And then there is the only repeated scene: the first and last meeting of the terrestrial explorer and the alien take
s place in the inner courtyard of a pulquería. Upon exiting through the wrong door, the earth dweller comes across the alien vomiting in a corner. Calmly, he raises his video camera and records the scene. What the alien registers is not the barely perceptible hum of the camera but the presence of something that he has been obscurely pursuing for centuries. When he turns, the moon disappears behind the rooftops. The owner of the establishment says she heard shouts, splashing, curses, singing. Real nice guys, a couple of sympathetic empaths, was how she put it. That night, she found bloodstains on the dirt floor of the courtyard. This is the source of the legend that once a year, in mid-February, the tourist and the local still do battle in the sky. The truth, I think, is that they both died that night. Is there any American university that might put up money for a team to search for clues to this Mystery? Some private foundation, maybe? It’s a true story, and I’m afraid that it’s prophetic. It’s in our mutual interest, etc., etc., for our mutual survival, etc., etc.

  Much love and thanks,

  Jan Schrella

  Seriously, now, let’s talk about your book—your monumental work.”

  “My work, as you call it, begins on the third floor of the Potato Academy, in old Santa Bárbara, in the foothills of the Andes. It’s the story of Boris, son of Juan Gonzales and student aide at the Unknown University. An ordinary kid.”

  “Wait. There’s some interruption. Do you hear a strange noise?”

  “It must be those alcoholics yelling. Who would’ve thought renowned intellectuals and men of letters (God shit on them) could make such a racket? Even the ones who’ve fallen asleep are snoring like bears.”