Amulet (2 page)

Once I was in that frame of mind, I even started looking for reasons to justify the continuing presence of the vase, and sure enough various reasons occurred to me, but what's the point of listing them, what purpose could that serve? All I knew for sure was that the vase was there, although it could also have been sitting on the ledge of an open window in Montevideo or on my father's desk, in Doctor Lacouture's old house, my father the doctor, who died so long ago I've almost forgotten him, and even now the pillars of oblivion are collapsing onto that house and desk.

So all I know for sure is that I visited the apartments of León Felipe and Pedro Garfias and helped them in whatever way I could, dusting their books and sweeping the floors, for example, and when they protested, I'd say to them, Don't mind me, you get on with your writing and let me take care of the logistical support, and León Felipe would laugh, but not Don Pedro, Pedro Garfias, what a melancholy man, he didn't laugh, he looked at me with those eyes like a lake at sundown, like one of those lakes high in the mountains that nobody visits, those terribly sad and tranquil lakes, so tranquil they don't seem to belong to this world, and he would say, Don't bother, Auxilio, or Thank you, Auxilio, and that was all. What a divine man. What an honorable man. He would stand there, motionless, and thank me. That was all and that was enough for me. Because I'm not very demanding. It doesn't take long to work that out. León Felipe used to call me
Bonita,
he'd say, You're priceless, Auxilio, and try to help me out with a few pesos, but usually when he offered me money I'd kick up an almighty fuss. I'm doing this because I
want
to, León Felipe, I would say, out of sheer, irresistible admiration. And León Felipe would pause for a moment, pondering my choice of words, while I put the money he had given me on his desk and went on with my work. I used to sing. While I was working I used to sing and it didn't matter to me whether I was paid for my work or not (although it would be hypocritical to say that I wasn't glad to be paid). But with them it was different; I preferred to work for free. I would have paid out of my own pocket simply to be there, among their books and papers, coming and going as I pleased. Although in return I did accept the gifts they offered me. León Felipe used to give me little Mexican clay figurines; where they came from I don't know, because he didn't have many in his apartment. I think he bought them specially for me. Such sad little figurines. They were so pretty. Tiny and pretty. They didn't conceal the gates to Heaven or Hell, they were just figurines made by Indians in Oaxaca, who sold them to traders, who resold them at much higher prices at markets and street stalls in Mexico City. Don Pedro Garfias used to give me philosophy books. I can still remember one by José Gaos, which I tried to read but didn't like. José Gaos was another Spaniard and he died in Mexico too. Poor José Gaos, I should have made more of an effort. When did he die? I think it was in 1968, like León Felipe, no, in 1969, so he might even have died of sadness. Pedrito Garfias died in 1967, in Monterrey. León Felipe died in 1968. One after another I lost all the figurines that León Felipe had given me. Now they're probably sitting on shelves in rooftop rooms or proper apartments in Colonia Ñapóles or Colonia Roma or Colonia Hipódromo-Condesa. The ones that didn't get broken, that is. The broken ones must have nourished the dust of Mexico City. I also lost the books Pedro Garfias gave me. First the philosophy books and then, inevitably, the poetry as well.

From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become part of the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

A
s I was telling you, I was faithful and regular in my visits to León Felipe and Pedro Garfias; I didn't expect them to read my poems or take an interest in my personal problems, I was just trying to be useful, but that didn't take up all my time.

I had my own life to lead. I had a life apart from basking in the glow of those luminaries of Hispanic letters. I had other needs. I worked at various jobs. I looked for work. I went looking and I despaired. Because the living is easy in Mexico City, as everyone knows or presumes or imagines, but only if you have some money or a scholarship or a family or at least some measly casual job, and I had nothing; the long voyage that had brought me to "the most transparent region of the air" had stripped me of many things, including the inclination to take on any old job. So what I did was hang around the university, specifically the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, doing what you might call volunteer work: one day I'd help type out Professor Garcia Liscano's lectures, the next day I'd be translating in the French department, where very few of the staff had really mastered the language of Moliere, not that my French is perfect, but compared to theirs, it was excellent, or I'd latch onto a theater group, and spend eight hours straight, I'm not kidding, watching them rehearse over and over, or going to fetch sandwiches, experimenting with the spotlights, reciting the speeches of all the actors in a whisper that no one else could hear, but which made me happy all the same.

Sometimes, not often, I found paid work; a professor would pay me out of his salary to be a kind of personal assistant, or the department heads or the faculty would put me on a contract for two weeks, a month, or sometimes a month and a half, with vague, ambiguous and mostly nonexistent duties, or the secretaries—who were so nice, I made friends with them all; they confided in me, told me about their heartaches and their hopes— made sure their bosses kept finding me odd jobs so that I could earn a few pesos. That was during the day. At night I led what you might call a bohemian life with the poets of Mexico City, which I found deeply rewarding and convenient too, since money was scarce at the time and I didn't always have enough to pay for lodgings. But most of the time I did. I shouldn't exaggerate. I had enough money to get by and the poets educated me in Mexican literature by lending me books, their own books of poems for a start (you know what poets are like), then the essentials and the classics, so my expenses were minimal.

Sometimes I'd go for a whole week without spending a peso. I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy. That was when I began to get to know them all and they got to know me. I became a fixture in their group. I spent my days at the faculty, busy as a bee or, to be more precise, a cicada, coming and going in and out of the little offices, keeping up with all the gossip, all the affairs and divorces, keeping up with all the tragedies. Like the tragedy of Professor Miguel López Azcárate, whose wife left him, and who couldn't bear the pain; I knew all about it, the secretaries told me. One day in a corridor I joined a group discussing some aspect of Ovid's poetry; the poet Bonifaz Nuño was there, I think, Monterroso too, perhaps, and two or three young poets. Professor López Azcárate must have been there, though he didn't say a word until the end (when it came to Latin poetry Bonifaz Nuño was the only recognized authority). And what in the name of heaven did we talk about? I can't remember exactly. All I remember is that it had to do with Ovid and that Bonifaz Nuño was holding forth interminably. He was probably making fun of some novice translator of the
Metamorphoses.
And Monterroso was smiling and nodding quietly. And the young poets (or maybe they were only students, poor things) were following suit. Me too. I craned my neck and peered at them fixedly. And from time to time, I threw in an exclamation, over the shoulders of the students, which was like adding a little silence to the silence. And then at some point in that scene, which must have really occurred, I can't have dreamed it, Professor López Azcárate opened his mouth. He opened his mouth as if gasping for air, as if that faculty corridor had been suddenly sucked into an unknown dimension, and said something about the
Art of Love,
by Ovid, something that took Bonifaz Nuño by surprise and seemed to intrigue Monterroso, but the young poets or students didn't understand it, me neither, and then López Azcárate turned red, as if he simply couldn't bear the suffocation any longer, and a few tears, just a few, four or six, rolled down his cheeks and hung from his mustache, a black mustache that was beginning to go white at the tips and in the middle, a look that always struck me as curious in the extreme, like a zebra or something, a black mustache that was, in any case, incongruous, crying out for a razor blade or a pair of scissors, and if you looked López Azcárate in the face for long enough it became blindingly obvious that this mustache was an anomaly (and a voluntary one), and that a man with such an anomaly on his face was bound to come to a bad end.

A week later López Azcárate hanged himself from a tree and the news ran through the university like a terrified, fleet-footed animal. And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

At night, however, I opened out, I began to grow again, I became a bat, I left the university and wandered around Mexico City like a wraith (I can't in all honesty say like a fairy, although I would like to) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew where to find them all) and counseled the young poets who came to see me even back then, though not as much as they would later on, and I had a kind word for each of them. What am I saying: a word! I had a hundred or a thousand words for every one of them; to me they were all grandsons of López Velarde, great-grandsons of Salvador Díaz Mirón, those brave, troubled boys, those downhearted boys adrift in the nights of Mexico City, those brave boys who turned up with their sheets of foolscap folded in two and their dog-eared volumes and their scruffy notebooks and sat in the cafés that never close or in the most depressing bars in the world, where I was the only woman, except, occasionally, for the ghost of Lilian Serpas (but more about Lilian later), and they gave me their poems to read, their verses, their fuddled translations, and I took those sheets of foolscap and read them in silence, with my back to the table where they were raising their glasses desperately trying to be ingenious or ironic or cynical, poor angels, and I plunged into those words (I can't in all honesty say into that river of words, although I would like to, since it wasn't so much a river as an inchoate babble), letting them seep into my very-marrow, I spent a moment alone with those words choked by the brilliance and sadness of youth, with those splinters of a shattered dime-store mirror, and I looked at myself or rather
for
myself in them, and there I was! Auxilio Lacouture, or fragments of Auxilio Lacouture: blue eyes, blond hair going gray, cut in a bob, long, thin face, lined forehead, and the fact of my selfhood sent a shiver down my spine, plunged me into a sea of doubts, made me anxious about the future, the days approaching at the pace of a cruise ship, although the vision also proved that I was living in and with my time, the time I had chosen, the time all around me, tremulous, changeable, teeming, happy.

And so I came to the year 1968. Or 1968 came to me. With the benefit of hindsight I could say I felt it coming. I could say I had a wild hunch and it didn't catch me unawares. I foresaw, intuited or suspected it; I sniffed it on the wind from the very first minute of January; I anticipated and envisaged it even as the first (and last) piñata of that innocently festive January was smashed open. I could even go so far as to say that I smelled its scent in the bars and parks in February and March of that year; I sensed its preternatural quiet in the bookshops and the food stalls, while I stood eating a pork taco in the Calle San Ildefonso, staring at the church of Saint Catherine of Siena and the Mexican dusk swirling deliriously, before the year 1968 was what it would become.

Ah, it makes me laugh to think about it now. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw it all and yet I didn't see a thing. Am I making any sense? I am the mother of all the poets, and I (or my destiny) refused to let the nightmare overcome me. Now the tears are running down my ravaged cheeks. I was at the university on the eighteenth of September when the army occupied the campus and went around arresting and killing indiscriminately. No. Not many people were killed at the university. That was in Tlatelolco. May that name live forever in our memory! But I was at the university when the army and the riot police came in and rounded everyone up. Unbelievable. I was in the bathroom, in the lavatory on one of the floors of the faculty building, the fourth maybe, I'm not exactly sure. And I was sitting in a stall, with my skirt hitched up, as the poem says, or the song, reading the exquisite poetry of Pedro Garfias, who had already been dead for a year (Don Pedro Garfias, such a melancholy man, so sad about Spain and the world in general). Who could have imagined that I would be reading in the bathroom just when the damned riot police came into the university? Now I believe, if you'll excuse a brief digression, that life is full of enigmas, minimal events that, at the slightest touch or glance, set off chains of consequences, which, viewed through the prism of time, invariably inspire astonishment or fear. The fact is that thanks to Pedro Garfias, thanks to the poems of Pedro Garfias and my inveterate habit of reading in the bathroom, I was the last to realize that the riot police were on campus and that the army had occupied the university, and so, while my eyes were scanning verses penned by that Spaniard who had died in exile, the soldiers and riot police were arresting and searching and beating up whoever they could lay their hands on, irrespective of sex or age, marital status or professional credentials acquired one way or another in the intricate, hierarchical world of the academy.