Amulet (3 page)

Let's just say I heard a noise.

A noise in my soul!

And let's say the noise grew steadily louder and soon I was alert to what was happening; I heard someone pull the chain in the next stall, I heard a door slamming, footsteps in a corridor, and a roar coming up from the gardens, from that carefully tended lawn that encompasses the faculty like a green sea lapping around an island ever propitious to the sharing of secrets and love. And then the bubble of Pedro Garfias's poetry went
pop
and I shut the book and stood up; I pulled the chain, opened the door, said something out loud, I said, Hey, is anyone there? But I knew full well that no one was going to answer. Do you know the feeling, as if you were in a horror movie, not the sort that has stupid women characters, but a film in which the women are intelligent and brave, or there is at least one brave, intelligent woman who suddenly finds herself alone, who suddenly walks into an empty building or an abandoned house and calls out (because she doesn't know the place is empty) to check if anyone is there; she raises her voice and asks the question, although her tone leaves no doubt as to the answer, but she asks anyway. Why? Well, basically because she was brought up, like me, to be polite in all circumstances. She stands there quietly or perhaps takes a few steps and asks if anyone is there and of course no one replies. I felt like that woman, although I don't know if I realized it at the time or if I'm only realizing it now, and, like her, I took a few steps as if I were walking on an enormous expanse of ice. Then I washed my hands, looked at myself in the mirror, saw a tall thin figure with a face that was already showing a few wrinkles, too many, a female Don Quixote as Pedro Garfias called me, and then I went out into the corridor, and there I realized right away that something was going on: the corridor was empty, nothing but faded shades of cream, and up the stairwell came a sound of shouting, a petrifying, history-making sound.

What did I do then? What anyone would have done: I went to a window and looked down and saw the soldiers, then I went to another window and saw tanks, and then to another, the one at the end of the corridor (I bounded down that corridor like a woman raised from the dead) and there I saw trucks, and the riot police and some plainclothes cops bundling the students and professors they'd arrested into the trucks, like something from a movie about the Second World War crossed with one about the Mexican Revolution starring Maria Felix and Pedro Armendáriz, a scene fading to black, but with little phosphorescent figures, like the ones some people see when they go crazy or have a sudden panic attack. I saw a group of secretaries, and I thought I could recognize some of my friends among them (in fact I thought I could recognize them all!), coming out in single file, tidying their clothes, with their handbags in their hands or over their shoulders, and then I saw a group of professors also coming out in an orderly fashion, or at least as orderly as the situation allowed, I saw people with books in their hands, people with folders and typed pages spilling onto the ground, bending down to pick them up, and I saw people being dragged out of the faculty building or coming out covering their noses with white handkerchiefs, which were rapidly darkening with blood. And then I said to myself: You stay here, Auxilio. Don't let them take you prisoner, my girl. Stay here, Auxilio, you don't have to be in that movie; if they want to make you play a role, they can damn well come and find you.

And then I went back to the bathroom, and this is the really strange part, not only did I go back to the bathroom, I went back to the stall, the very same stall I was in before, and I sat down on the toilet again, I mean, with my skirt hitched up again and my underpants down, although I felt no pressing physiological need (this is precisely the sort of situation that loosens the bowels, so they say, but that certainly wasn't the case with me), and the book of poems by Pedro Garfias open again on my lap, and although I didn't feel like reading I began to read, slowly at first, word by word and verse by verse, but then my reading started to speed up and soon it sped out of control, the verses flying past so quickly I could hardly take anything in, the words were sticking to one another, or something, in any case the poetry of Pedro Garfias could not withstand that free-fall reading (some poets and poems can withstand any kind of reading, but they are rare exceptions; most can't), and that's how I was occupied when I heard a sound in the corridor. A sound of boots? A sound of hobnailed boots? But, Hey, I said to myself, that would be too much of a coincidence, don't you think? The sound of hobnailed boots! But, Hey, I said to myself, all I need now is for it to be cold and a beret to drop on my head, and then I heard a voice saying something like, All clear, Sir, and five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a bitch who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in.

A
nd I, poor creature that I was, heard something like the sound of the wind when it drops and rustles through paper flowers, I heard a flowering of air and water, and lifted my feet (quietly) like a Renoir ballerina, as if I were about to give birth (and in a sense, in effect, I was preparing to deliver something and to be delivered myself), with my underpants around my skinny ankles like a pair of handcuffs, hooked on my shoes (a pair of very comfortable yellow moccasins I had at the time). While I, a poor Uruguayan poet, but with a love or Mexico as deep as anyone's, waited for the soldier to search the cubicles one by one and prepared myself mentally and physically not to open the door, if it came to that, to defend the autonomy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico even in this last redoubt, a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions. And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spine, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.

To put it plainly: the soldier and I remained as still as statues in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, and that was all. Then I heard his footsteps receding, I heard the door shutting, and my raised legs resumed their original position as if of their own initiative.

The birth was over.

I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there.

I know that it was starting to get dark when I came out of the stall. My extremities had gone numb. There was a rock in my stomach and my chest hurt. There was gauze or a kind of veil in front of my eyes. There was a buzzing of blowflies or bees or wasps in my ears or in my mind. I felt ticklish and sleepy at the same time. But in fact I was more awake than ever. The situation was, admittedly, unfamiliar, but I knew what to do.

I knew where my duty lay.

I climbed up to the only window in the bathroom and peered out. I saw a lone soldier far off in the distance. I saw the silhouette or the shadow of a tank, although on reflection I suspected that it might have been the shadow of a tree. It was like the portico of portico of Latin or Greek literature. Ah, how I love Greek literature, from Sappho to George Seferis! I saw the wind sweeping through the university as if to savor the last of the daylight.

And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew that I had to resist. So I sat down on the tiles of the women's bathroom and, before the last rays of sunlight faded, read three more of Pedro Garfias's poems, then shut the book and shut my eyes and said: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, resist.

That's all.

Then I began to think about my past as I am doing now. As I went back through the dates, the rhombus shattered in a space of speculative desperation, images rose from the bottom of the lake, no one could stop them emerging from that pitiful body of water, unlit by sun or moon, and time folded and unfolded itself like a dream. The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point. I mean: I started thinking about my past as if I was thinking about my present, future, and past, all mixed together and dormant in the one tepid egg, the enormous egg of some inner bird (an archaeopteryx?) nestled on a bed of smoking rubble. For one thing I started thinking about the teeth I had lost, although at the time, in September 1968, I still had all my teeth, which is odd, to say the least, even on reflection. Nevertheless I thought about them, those four front teeth I lost one by one over the years because I didn't have the money or the inclination or the time to go to the dentist. And it was strange to be thinking about my teeth, because in a sense I didn't care that I had lost the four most important teeth in a woman's mouth, and yet in another sense their loss had left a deep wound in my being, a burning wound that was necessary and unnecessary, absurd. Even now, when I think about it, I still can't understand. Anyway, I lost my teeth in Mexico, where I had lost so many other things, and although from time to time friendly or at least well-meaning voices would say to me, Get some dentures, Auxilio, we'll take up a collection to buy you some, Auxilio, I always knew that the gap would go on gaping to the end like a wound, and I didn't pay them much attention, although I didn't refuse outright.

The loss gave rise to a new habit. From then on, whenever I talked or laughed, I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand, a gesture that, as I soon discovered, was taken up and imitated in certain circles. I lost my teeth but not my discretion, my tact, my sense of propriety. The Empress Josephine, it is said, had enormous black cavities in her back teeth, but that did not diminish her charm by one iota. She covered her mouth with a handkerchief or a fan. In my lowlier station as a denizen of Mexico DF, that skyward and subterranean city, I placed the palm of my hand before my lips and laughed and spoke freely throughout the long Mexican nights. For those who made my acquaintance at the time, I must have seemed like a conspirator or some strange creature, half Shulamite, half albino bat. But that didn't matter to me. There's Auxilio, said the poets, and there I was, sitting at the table of a novelist with delirium tremens, or of a suicidal journalist, laughing and talking, whispering and gossiping, and no one could say: I have seen the wounded mouth of the woman from Uruguay, I have seen the bare gums of the only person who stayed in the university when it was occupied by the riot police in September 1968. They could say: Auxilio talks like a conspirator, bending close and covering her mouth. They could say: Auxilio looks you in the eyes when she speaks. They could say (with a laugh): How is it that Auxilio, who is constantly fiddling with a book or a glass of tequila, always manages to raise one hand to her mouth, in that spontaneous, natural-seeming way? What's the secret of her prodigious dexterity? Now, since I'm not planning to take that secret to the grave (where there's no point taking anything), I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love. I lost my teeth on the altar of human sacrifice.

B
ut my teeth, which still hadn't fallen out, were not all that I thought about. For example, I thought about young Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen when I met him in 1970. I was the mother of the new Mexican poetry and he was just a kid who couldn't hold his liquor, but he was proud that Salvador Allende had been elected president of his faraway Chile.

I met him. I met him at a rowdy gathering of poets in a bar called the Encrucijada Veracruzana, a squalid hole or dive where a motley bunch of young and not-so-young hopefuls used to get together now and then. He was the youngest hopeful of the lot. And the only one who had written a novel at the age of seventeen. A novel that was later lost or consumed by flames or perhaps it ended up in one of the huge garbage dumps that surround Mexico City; in any case I read it, with reservations at first, but then with pleasure, not because it was good, no, what I liked were the signs of determination on each page, the touching determination of an adolescent: the novel was bad, but he was good. So I made friends with him. It helped that we were the only two South Americans among so many Mexicans. I made friends with him, I went over and talked to him, covering my mouth with my hand, and he looked me in the eye, looked at the back of my hand, and didn't ask why I was covering my mouth, but I think he guessed straight away, unlike the others, I mean he guessed the deeper reason, the ultimate dignity that obliged me to cover my lips, and it didn't matter to him.

That night I made friends with him, in spite of the difference in our ages, and all the other differences! I was the one who introduced him, some weeks later, to the poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. I took him home once, sick and drunk, holding him up as he clung to my bony shoulder, and I made friends with his mother and his father, and his sister, who was so nice, they were all so nice.

And the first thing I said to his mother was: I haven't slept with your son, Mrs. Belano. That's just how I am, I like to be frank and forthright with frank and forthright people (although this inveterate habit of mine has caused me no end of grief). I lifted my hands and smiled, then lowered them again and spoke, and she looked at me as if I had just stepped out of her son's notebooks, the notebooks of Arturito Belano, who by then was sleeping it off in his cavelike bedroom. And she said: Of course not, Auxilio, but there's no need to call me Mrs., we must be nearly the same age. And I raised an eyebrow and fixed her with the bluer of my eyes, the right one, thinking: She's right, kid, we must be more or less the same age. I might have been three years younger than her, or two, or one, but basically we belonged to the same generation; the only difference was that she had an apartment and a job and a monthly salary and I didn't; the only difference was that I went out with young people and Arturito's mother went out with people her own age; the only difference was that she had two teenage children and I had none, but that didn't matter either because by then I had children too, in my own way, hundreds of them.