The Savage Detectives (16 page)

I must be getting old, because her verbal excesses gave me goose bumps.

Half an hour later we went walking to El Amanuense Azteca, a public bathhouse on Calle Lorenzo Boturini.

That was the surprise.

"We have to be nice and clean now that the new year is coming," said Rosario, winking at me.

I would've liked to slap her right there, then walk away and never see her again. (My nerves are shot.)

And yet, when we had passed through the frosted glass doors of the bathhouse, the mural or fresco that arched over the front desk seized my attention with mysterious force.

The anonymous artist had painted an Indian scribe writing on paper or parchment, lost in thought. Clearly, he was the Amanuense Azteca. Behind the scribe stretched hot springs, where Indians and conquistadors, bathing in pools set three in a row, were joined by Mexicans from colonial times, El Cura Hidalgo and Morelos, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota, Benito Juárez surrounded by friends and enemies, President Madero, Carranza, Zapata, Obregón, soldiers in different uniforms or out of uniform, peasants, Mexico City workers, and movie actors: Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Javier Solís, Aceves Mejía, María Félix, Tin Tan, Resortes, Calambres, Irma Serrano, and others I didn't recognize because they were in the farthest pools, and those really were tiny.

"Cool, huh?"

I stood there with my arms at my sides. Ecstatic.

Rosario's voice made me jump.

Before we turned down the hallway with our little towels and soap, I discovered that at each end of the mural there was a stone wall surrounding the springs. And on the other side of the wall, on a kind of plain or frozen sea, I saw shadowy animals, maybe the ghosts of animals (or the ghosts of plants) lying in wait, multiplying in a seething but silent siege.

We've been back to El Amanuense Azteca. A success. The private rooms are carpeted, with a table, coat rack, and sofa, and a cement stall where the shower and steam taps are. The steam jet is at floor level, like in a Nazi movie. The door between the room and the stall is heavy, and there's a creepy, perpetually fogged-up peephole at eye level (although I have to stoop since I'm taller than the average person it was designed for). There's restaurant service. We shut ourselves in and order cuba libres. We shower, take steam baths, rest and dry ourselves on the sofa, then shower again. We make love in the stall, in a cloud of steam that hides our bodies. We fuck, shower, let the steam smother us. All we can see are our hands, our knees, sometimes the back of a neck or the tip of a breast.

How many poems have I written?

Since it all began: 55 poems.

Total pages: 76.

Total lines: 2,453

I could put together a book by now. My complete works.

Tonight, while I was waiting for Rosario at the bar of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, Brígida came by and said something about time passing.

"Pour me another tequila," I said, "and tell me what you mean."

In her look I caught something that I can only call victory, although it was a sad, resigned victory, more attuned to small signs of death than signs of life.

"What I meant was that time goes by," said Brígida as she filled my glass, "and once you were a stranger, but now you're like part of the family."

"I don't give a shit about the family," I said as I wondered where the fuck Rosario had gone.

"I didn't mean to insult you," said Brígida. "Or pick a fight. These days I don't feel like fighting with anyone."

I sat looking at her for a while, not knowing what to say. I would've liked to say you're being an idiot, Brígida, but I wasn't in the mood to fight with anyone either.

"What I meant was," said Brígida, looking behind her as if to make sure Rosario wasn't coming, "that I would've liked to fall in love with you too, believe me, I would've liked to live with you, give you spending money, make your meals, take care of you when you were sick, but it wasn't meant to be. We have to accept things the way they are, don't we? But it would've been nice."

"I'm impossible to live with," I said.

"You are who you are and you have a cock that's worth its weight in gold," said Brígida.

"Thank you," I said.

"I know what I'm talking about," said Brígida.

"So what else do you know?"

"About you?" Now Brígida was smiling, and this, I guessed, was her victory.

"About me, of course," I said as I swallowed the last of the tequila.

"That you're going to die young, Juan, and that you're going to do Rosario wrong."

Today I went back to the Fonts' house. Today I did Rosario wrong.

I got up early, around seven, and went out to roam the streets downtown. Before I left I heard Rosario's voice saying: wait a second and I'll make you breakfast. I didn't answer. I closed the door quietly and left the tenement.

For a long time I walked as if I were in a foreign country, feeling choked and sick. When I got to the Zócalo my pores opened at last. I started to sweat freely, and my nausea vanished.

Then suddenly I was starving and I went into the first cafeteria I found open, a little place on Madero called Nueva Síbaris, where I ordered coffee and a ham sandwich.

To my great surprise, there was Pancho Rodríguez, sitting at the bar. His hair was freshly combed (it was still wet) and his eyes were red. He didn't look surprised to see me. I asked him what he was doing there, so far from home and so early in the morning.

"I was out whoring all night," he said, "to see whether I was finally ready to get the fuck over you-know-who."

I guessed that he meant Angélica, and as I took the first sips of coffee I thought about Angélica, María, my first visits to the Fonts' house. I felt happy. I felt hungry. Pancho, on the other hand, seemed listless. To distract him I told him that I'd left my aunt and uncle's place and that I was living with a woman in a tenement straight out of a 1940s movie, but Pancho wasn't in the right frame of mind to listen to me or anybody else.

After he'd smoked a few cigarettes, he said he felt like stretching his legs.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked, although deep down I already knew the answer, and if he didn't say what I expected to hear, I was ready to get it out of him by any means necessary.

"To Angélica's," said Pancho.

"That's the spirit," I said and I hurried to finish my breakfast.

Pancho went ahead and paid my bill (which was a first) and we left. A feeling of lightness settled in our legs. Suddenly Pancho didn't seem quite so trashed and I didn't feel so clueless about what to do with my life. Instead, the morning light returned us to ourselves, refreshed. Pancho was cheery and quick again, gliding along on words, and the window of a shoe store on Madero reflected back a mirror image of my inner vision of myself: someone tall, with pleasant features, neither gawky nor sickeningly shy, striding along followed by a smaller, stockier person in pursuit of his true love-or whatever else came his way!

Of course I had no idea then what the day had in store for us.

For the first half of the trip, Pancho was enthusiastic, friendly, and extroverted, but after that, as we got closer to Colonia Condesa, his mood changed and he seemed to succumb again to the old fears that his strange (or rather histrionic and enigmatic) relationship with Angélica awakened in him. The whole problem, he confided, gloomy again, had to do with the social divide between his family, who were lowly and working-class, and Angélica's, firmly ensconced as they were in Mexico City's petit bourgeoisie. To cheer him up, I argued that although this would surely make it harder to
start
a relationship, the chasm of class struggle narrowed considerably once the relationship was already under way. To which Pancho replied by asking what I meant by saying the relationship was already under way, a stupid question I didn't bother to answer. Instead I responded with another question: were he and Angélica really two average people, two typical, rigid representatives of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

"No, I guess not," said Pancho pensively as the taxi we'd caught at Reforma and Juárez headed at breakneck speed toward Calle Colima.

That's what I was trying to say, I told him, that since he and Angélica were poets, what difference did it make if one belonged to one social class and the other to another?

"Plenty, I'm telling you," said Pancho.

"Don't be mechanistic, man," I said, more and more irrationally happy.

Unexpectedly, the taxi driver backed me up: "If you've already gotten what you came for, there's no such thing as barriers. When love is good, nothing else matters."

"See?" I said.

"No, actually," said Pancho, "not really."

"You go at it with your girl and forget that communist crap," said the taxi driver.

"What do you mean communist crap?" said Pancho.

"You know, all that social class business."

"So according to you social classes don't exist," said Pancho.

The taxi driver, who had been watching us in the rearview mirror as he talked, turned around now, his right hand resting on the back of the passenger seat, his left firmly grasping the wheel. We're going to crash, I thought.

"For all intents and purposes, no. When it comes to love all Mexicans are equal. In the eyes of God too," said the taxi driver.

"What a load of bullshit!" said Pancho.

"If that's what you want to call it," replied the taxi driver.

With that, Pancho and the taxi driver started to argue about religion and politics, and meanwhile I stared out the window, watching the scenery (the storefronts of Juárez and Roma Norte) rolling monotonously past, and I also started to think about María and what separated me from her, which wasn't class but experience, and about Rosario and our tenement room and the wonderful nights I'd spent there with her, though I was prepared to give them up for a few seconds with María, a word from María, a smile from María. And I also started to think about my aunt and uncle and I even thought I saw them, walking arm in arm down one of the streets that we were passing, never turning to look at the taxi as it zigzagged perilously away down other streets, the two of them immersed in their solitude just as Pancho, the taxi driver, and I were immersed in ours. And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn't frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear. And then, with my face glued to the window, we turned onto Calle Colima, and Pancho and the taxi driver stopped talking, or maybe only Pancho stopped, as if he'd given up trying to win his argument, and my silence and Pancho's silence clutched at my heart.

We got out a few feet past the Fonts' house.

"Something strange is going on here," said Pancho, as the taxi driver drove happily away, with a few choice words about our mothers.

At first glance the street looked normal, but I too noticed something different about the place I remembered so vividly. Across the street I saw two guys sitting in a yellow Camaro. They were staring at us.

Pancho rang the bell. For a few long seconds there wasn't any movement inside the house.

One of the occupants of the Camaro, the one sitting in the passenger seat, got out and propped his elbows on the roof of the car. Pancho watched him for a few seconds and then repeated, in a low voice, that something very strange was going on. The Camaro guy was scary. I remembered my first few times at the Fonts' house, standing at the door, gazing at the garden, which to my eyes seemed to spread before us full of secrets. That hadn't been long ago, and yet it felt like years.

It was Jorgito who came out to let us in.

When he got to the gate he made a sign to us that we didn't understand and he looked over toward where the Camaro was parked. He didn't return our greeting and when we were through the gate he shut and locked it again. The garden looked neglected. The house seemed different. Jorgito led us straight to the front door. I remember that Pancho looked at me inquiringly and as we walked he turned around and scanned the street.

"Move it, man," Jorgito told him.

Inside the house Quim Font and his wife were waiting for us.

"It was about time you showed up, García Madero," said Quim, giving me a big hug. I hadn't been expecting such a warm welcome. Mrs. Font was dressed in a dark green robe and slippers and it looked as if she'd just gotten up, although later I learned that she'd hardly slept the night before.

"What's going on here?" asked Pancho, looking at me.

"You mean what
isn't
going on," said Mrs. Font as she stroked Jorgito's hair.

After he hugged me, Quim went to the window and looked out surreptitiously.

"Nothing new to report, Dad," said Jorgito.

Immediately I thought about the men in the yellow Camaro and I began to form a vague idea of what was going on at the Fonts'.

"We're having breakfast, boys, would you like some coffee?" said Quim.

We followed him into the kitchen. There, sitting at the table, were Angélica, María-and Lupe! Pancho didn't even blink when he saw her, but I almost jumped out of my skin.

It's hard to remember what happened next, especially because María greeted me as if we'd never fought, as if we could pick things up again from where we'd left off. All I know is that I said hello to Angélica and Lupe in a friendly way and that María gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then we had coffee and Pancho asked what was going on. The explanations were various and heated and in the middle of it all Mrs. Font and Quim started to fight. According to Mrs. Font, this was the worst New Year's holiday she'd ever had. Think about the poor, Cristina, replied Quim. Mrs. Font started to cry and left the kitchen. Angélica went out after her, which prompted Pancho to make a move, though it came to nothing: he got up from his chair, followed Angélica to the door, and then sat down again. Meanwhile Quim and María, between the two of them, brought me up to date. Lupe's pimp had found her at the Media Luna. After a scuffle, the particulars of which I didn't understand, she and Quim had managed to escape from the hotel and make it to Calle Colima. This had been a few days ago. When Mrs. Font found out what was going on, she called the police, and it wasn't long before a couple of officers showed up in a patrol car. They said that if the Fonts wanted to make a formal complaint they would have to go to the station. When Quim told them that Alberto and the other guy were there, in front of the house, the officers went to talk to the pimp, and from the gate Jorgito could tell that they seemed more like old friends than anything else. Either the guy with Alberto was also a policeman, according to Lupe, or the police had been given a handout big enough to make them look the other way. That was when the siege of the Fonts' house formally began. The officers left. Mrs. Font called the police again. Different officers came, with the same result. A friend of Quim's, who talked to Quim on the phone, recommended that they wait out the siege as best they could until the holidays were over. Sometimes, according to Jorgito, who was the only one with the guts to spy on the intruders, another car would come, an Oldsmobile that parked behind the Camaro, and Alberto and his companion, after talking to the new besiegers for a while, would drive off noisily, even threateningly, making the car tires squeal and honking the horn. Six hours later they were back and the car that had replaced them would leave. There was no question that these comings and goings were wearing down the house's inhabitants. Mrs. Font refused to go out for fear that she'd be kidnapped. Quim, faced with these new developments, wouldn't go out either. He said it was out of responsibility to his family, although I think it was really out of fear that he would be beaten up. Only Angélica and María had crossed the threshold, once and separately, and the outcome was ugly. Angélica was heckled and María, who walked boldly right past the Camaro, was groped and knocked around. By the time we got there, the only person who dared to answer the door was Jorgito.