The Savage Detectives (36 page)

As the months went by, I began to leave more time between my visits too. Having gone to see him every day when he was just out of the hospital, I visited less frequently once he started to talk and walk up and down the hall. And yet I called him every night, no matter where I was. We had some crazy conversations. Sometimes I was the one who would talk on and on, telling stories, true stories, although they went barely skin-deep, about the sophisticated Mexico City life (a way of forgetting that we lived in Mexico) that I was getting to know back then, the parties, the drugs I took, the men I slept with, and other times he was the one who would talk, reading stories to me that he'd cut out of the paper that day (a new hobby, probably suggested by the therapists who were treating him, who knows), telling me what he'd had to eat, the people who'd come to visit, something his mother had said that he'd saved up for the end of the conversation. One afternoon I told him that Ismael Humberto Zarco had chosen one of his poems for his anthology, which had just come out. What poem? said that little bird voice of his, that Gillette blade of a voice that tore at my heart. I had the book beside me. I told him. Did I write that poem? he said. It struck me that he was joking, why I'm not sure, maybe because his voice sounded so much deeper than usual. His jokes had been like that before, innocent, almost impossible to distinguish from whatever else he was saying. But he wasn't joking. That week I found time that I didn't have and went to see him. A friend, a new friend, drove me to his house but didn't want to come in. Wait for me here, I said, this neighborhood is dangerous and when we come back we might find ourselves without a car. It seemed strange to him, but he didn't say anything. Around that time, I had developed a well-deserved reputation in the circles I moved in for being eccentric. As it happened, I was right: recently Ernesto's neighborhood had been going downhill. As if the aftereffects of his operation were visible in the streets, in the people without work, the petty thieves who would come out at seven in the evening to sit in the sun, like zombies (or messengers with no message or an untranslatable message) automatically primed to kill another evening in Mexico City.

Ernesto hardly paid any attention to the book, of course. He looked for his poem and said: oh. I don't know if he suddenly recognized it or if he was confused. Then he started to tell me the same kind of things he told me on the phone.

When I came out my friend was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette. I asked whether anything had happened while I was gone. Nothing, he said, it's dead quiet out here. But it couldn't have been so quiet because his hair was disheveled and his hands were shaking.

I never saw Ernesto again.

One night he called me and recited a poem by Richard Belfer. One night I called him, from Los Angeles, and told him that I was sleeping with the theater director Francisco Segura, aka La Vieja Segura, who was at least twenty years older than me. How exciting, said Ernesto. La Vieja must be an intelligent man. He's talented, not intelligent, I said. What's the difference? he said. I sat there thinking how to answer and he waited for me to speak and for a few seconds neither of us said anything. I wish I could be with you, I told him before I said goodbye. Me too, said that voice like a bird from another dimension. A few days later his mother called and told me that he had died. An easy death, she said, while he was sitting at home in a chair in the sun. He fell asleep like a little angel. What time of day did he die? I asked. At about five, after lunch.

Of his old friends, I was the only one who went to his burial, in one of the patchwork cemeteries on the north side of the city. I didn't see any poets, ex-lovers, or editors of literary magazines. Lots of relatives and family friends and possibly every single one of the neighbors. Before I left the cemetery, two teenagers came up to me and tried to lead me somewhere. I thought they were going to rape me. Only then did I feel rage and pain at Ernesto's death. I pulled a switchblade out of my purse and said: I'll kill you, you little creeps. They went running and I chased them for a while down two or three cemetery streets. When I finally stopped, another funeral procession appeared. I put the knife in my bag and watched as they lifted the coffin into its niche, very carefully. I think it was a child. But I couldn't say for sure. Then I left the cemetery and went to have drinks with a friend at a bar downtown.

Norman Bolzman, sitting on a bench in Edith Wolfson Park, Tel Aviv, October 1979
. I've always been sensitive to the pain of others, always tried to feel a part of everyone else's suffering. I'm Jewish, a Mexican Jew, and I know the history of my two peoples. That says it all, I think. I'm not trying to justify myself. I'm just trying to tell a story. Maybe I'm also trying to understand its hidden workings, workings I wasn't aware of at the time but that weigh on me now. Still, my story won't be as coherent as I'd like. And my role in it will flicker like a speck of dust between the light and the dark, between laughter and tears, exactly like a Mexican soap opera or a Yiddish melodrama.

Everything began last February. It was a gray afternoon, fine as a shroud, the kind that brings a shudder to the skies of Tel Aviv. Someone rang the bell of our apartment on Hashomer Street. When I opened the door, the poet Ulises Lima, leader of the self-proclaimed visceral realists, was standing there before me. I can't say I knew him, in fact I'd only met him once, but Claudia used to tell me stories about him, and Daniel read me one of his poems once. Literature isn't my specialty. It may be that I was never able to appreciate the quality of his work. In any case, the man in front of me looked less like a poet than a bum.

We didn't get off to a good start, I admit. Claudia and Daniel were at the university and I had to study, so I let him in, made him a cup of tea, and then went into my room and shut the door. For a minute everything seemed back to normal. I immersed myself in the philosophers of the Marburg School (Natorp, Cohen, Cassirer, Lange) and in some commentaries on Solomon Maimon, indirectly devastating to the Marburg philosophers. But after a while, it might have been twenty minutes or two hours, my mind went blank and in the middle of that whiteness the face of Ulises Lima, the recent arrival, began to take shape, and even though in my mind everything was white it took me a long time, I don't know how long, to make out his features precisely, as if Ulises's face were getting darker instead of brightening in the light.

When I came out he was sprawled in an armchair, asleep. I stood there watching him for a while. Then I went back into my room and tried to concentrate on my work. I couldn't. I should have gone out, but it seemed wrong to leave him alone. I thought about waking him up. I thought that maybe I should follow his example and go to sleep too, but I was too afraid or too embarassed, I can't say which. At last I took a book from the shelf, Natorp's
Religion at the Limits of Humanity
, and sat facing him on the sofa.

It was around ten when Claudia and Daniel came in. I had cramps in both legs and my whole body ached. Worse, nothing I'd read had made any sense, but when I saw them come in the door I somehow managed to raise my finger to my lips, why I don't know, maybe because I didn't want Ulises to wake up before Claudia and I could talk, maybe because I'd grown used to hearing the steady rhythm of his breath while he was sleeping. But when Claudia, after a few seconds of hesitation, saw Ulises in the armchair, it was all for nothing. The first thing she said was
carajo
or
bolas
or
cámara
or
chale
, because even though Claudia was born in Argentina and came to Mexico when she was sixteen, deep down she's always felt Mexican. Or so she says, who knows. And Ulises woke up with a start and the first thing he saw was Claudia smiling at him from less than a foot away, and then he saw Daniel, and Daniel was smiling too. What a surprise.

That night we went out to dinner in his honor. At first I said that I really couldn't go, that I had to finish with my Marburg School, but Claudia wouldn't let me get out of it. Don't even think about it, Norman, let's not start. Dinner was fun, despite my fears. Ulises told us about his adventures and we all laughed, or rather he told Claudia about his adventures, but in such a charming way, in spite of how sad everything he was telling us really was, that we all laughed, which is the best you can do at times like that. Then we went walking home along Arlozorov, taking deep breaths of fresh air. Daniel and I were ahead, quite a long way ahead, and Claudia and Ulises were behind, talking as if they were in Mexico City again and they had all the time in the world. And when Daniel told me not to walk so fast, asking why I was in such a hurry, I quickly changed the subject, asking him what he'd been doing, telling him the first thing that came to mind about crazy old Solomon Maimon, anything to put off what was coming next, the moment I was afraid of. I would happily have run away that night. I wish I had.

When we got to the apartment we still had time for a cup of tea. Then Daniel looked at the three of us and said he was going to bed. When I heard his door close I said the same thing and went into my room. Lying on my bed with the light off, I heard Claudia talking to Ulises for a while. Then the door opened and Claudia turned on the light, asked me whether I had class the next day, and started to undress. I asked her where Ulises Lima was. Sleeping on the sofa, she said. I asked her what she'd told him. I didn't tell him anything, she answered. Then I undressed too, got in bed, and squeezed my eyes shut.

For two weeks a new order reigned in our house. Or at least that was how it seemed to me, deeply disturbed as I was by small details that perhaps I hadn't noticed before.

Claudia, who for the first few days tried to ignore the new situation, finally came to terms with reality too, and said that she was beginning to feel suffocated. On the morning of the second day he was with us, while Claudia was brushing her teeth, Ulises told her that he loved her. Claudia's answer was that she already knew. I came here because of you, Ulises said, I came because I love you. Claudia's answer was that he could have written her a letter. Ulises found that highly encouraging, and he wrote a poem that he read to Claudia at lunch. When I got up discreetly from the table, not wanting to hear it, Claudia asked me to stay and Daniel seconded the request. The poem was essentially a collection of fragments about a Mediterranean city, Tel Aviv, I guess, and a bum or a mendicant poet. I thought it was beautiful and I told him so. Daniel agreed. Claudia was quiet for a few minutes, with a thoughtful expression on her face, and then she said that we were right, she wished she could write such beautiful poems. For a minute I thought everything would work out, that we were all going to be able to get along, and I volunteered to go buy a bottle of wine. But Claudia said that the next day she had to be at the university first thing, and ten minutes later she had shut herself in our room. Ulises, Daniel, and I talked for a while and had another cup of tea, then each of us went to his room. Around three I got up to go to the bathroom and as I tiptoed through the living room I heard Ulises crying. I don't think he realized I was there. He was lying facedown, I guess. From where I was, he was just a shape on the sofa, a shape covered with a blanket and an old coat, a heap, a lump of flesh, a shadowy figure, heaving and pathetic.

I didn't tell Claudia. In fact, it was around then that I first began to hide things from her, keep parts of the story from her, lie to her. As far as our daily lives as students were concerned, things didn't change at all for her, or if they did she did her best not to let it show. When Ulises first came to Tel Aviv, Daniel was his constant companion, but after two or three weeks Daniel had to buckle down again too, or risk jeopardizing his exams. Little by little, I became the only one still available to Ulises. But I was busy with neo-Kantianism, the Marburg School, Solomon Maimon, and my head was a mess because each night, when I got up to pee, I'd find Ulises crying in the dark, and that wasn't the worst of it, the worst was that some nights I thought: today I'll
see
him cry-see his face, I mean, because until then I'd only heard him, and who could be sure that what I was hearing was crying, and not, for example, the heavy breathing of someone in the middle of jerking off? And when I thought about seeing his face, I imagined it raised in the dark, a face bathed in tears, a face touched by the light of the moon filtering through the living room windows. And that face was so desolate that from the very moment I sat up in bed in the dark, listening to Claudia's raspy breathing beside me, a weight like a rock settled on my heart and I felt like crying too. And sometimes I spent a long time sitting there in bed, repressing my urge to go to the bathroom, repressing my urge to cry, all for fear that it would happen that night, that he would lift his face in the dark and I would see it.

Not to mention sex, my sex life, which was shot from the day he came through the door of our apartment. I just couldn't do it. Or I mean I could, but I didn't want to. The first time we tried, on the third night, I think, Claudia asked what was wrong with me. Nothing's wrong, I said, why do you ask? Because you're as silent as the dead, she said. And that was how I felt, not like the dead but like a reluctant guest in the world of the dead. I had to stay quiet. Not moan, not cry out, not pant, come with extreme circumspection. And even Claudia's moans, which used to arouse me so much, became unbearable. They made me frantic (although I was always careful not to let her know), they grated in my ears, and I tried to muffle them by covering her mouth with my hand or my lips. In a word, making love became torture, something that by the third or fourth time I would do anything to avoid or postpone. I was always the last to go to bed. I would stay up with Ulises (who never seemed to get tired anyway) and we would talk about anything. I would ask him to read me what he'd written that day, not caring whether it was poems in which his love for Claudia was painfully obvious. I liked them anyway. Of course, I preferred the other ones, the ones in which he talked about the new things he saw each day when he was left alone and went out to wander Tel Aviv, Giv'at Rokach, Har Shalom, the alleyways of the old port city of Jaffa, the university campus, or Yarkon Park, or the ones in which he remembered Mexico, Mexico City, so far away, or the ones that were formal experiments, or seemed to me like formal experiments. Any of them, except the ones about Claudia. But not for my sake, not because they might hurt me, or her, but because I was trying to avoid the proximity of
his
pain,
his
mulish stubbornness,
his
profound stupidity. One night I told him. I said: Ulises, why are you doing this to yourself? He pretended not to hear me, giving me a sidelong look (which made me remember, as at least a hundred other thoughts flashed through my mind, the look of a dog I'd had when I was a boy in Colonia Polanco, the dog my parents put to sleep when suddenly it started to bite), and then he kept on talking as if I hadn't said a word.

That night, when I went to bed, I made love to Claudia as she slept, and when I was at last able to reach the proper state of arousal, which wasn't easy, I moaned or cried out.

Then there was the question of money. Claudia, Daniel, and I were in school and we each received a monthly allowance from our parents. In Daniel's case this allowance was barely enough to live on. In Claudia's case it was more generous. Mine fell somewhere in between. If we pooled our money, we could pay for the apartment, our classes, and our food and have enough for the movies or the theater or to buy books in Spanish at the Cervantes Bookstore, on Zamenhof. But having Ulises there upset everything, because after a week he had hardly any money left and all of a sudden we had another mouth to feed, as the sociologists say. Still, as far as I was concerned, it was no big deal. I was prepared to give up certain luxuries. Daniel didn't care either, although he continued to live his life exactly as he had before. It was Claudia-who would've thought?-who chafed at the new situation. At first she tackled the problem coolly and practically. One night she told Ulises that he needed to look for work or ask to have money sent from Mexico. I remember that Ulises sat there looking at her with a lopsided smile and then said he would look for work. The next night, during dinner, Claudia asked if he'd found work. Not yet, said Ulises. But did you go out and look? asked Claudia. Ulises was washing the dishes and he didn't turn around when he said yes, he'd gone out and looked but had no luck. I was sitting at the head of the table and I could see his face in profile, and it looked to me like he was smiling. Fuck, I thought, he's smiling, smiling out of sheer happiness. As if Claudia were his wife, a nagging wife, a wife who worried about her husband finding work, and he liked that. That night I told Claudia to leave him alone, that he was already having a hard enough time without her getting on his case about work. Anyway, I said, what kind of job do you expect him to find in Tel Aviv? as a construction worker? a porter at the market? a dishwasher? What do you know, Claudia said to me.

It was the same story the next night, of course, and the next, and each time Claudia was more tyrannical, hounding him, goading him, backing him into a corner, and Ulises always responded in the same way, calmly, resignedly, and, yes, happily. Whenever we were at the university he would go out and look for work, asking here or there but never finding anything, although the next day he would try again. And it got to the point that after dinner Claudia would spread the paper on the table and look for job listings, writing them down on a piece of paper and telling Ulises where he had to go, which bus to take or which was the shortest way to walk, because Ulises didn't always have money for the bus and Claudia said it wasn't necessary to give him money because he liked to walk, and when Daniel or I would say but how can he walk to Ha'Argazim, for example, or Yoreh Street, or Petah Tikva or Rosh Ha'ayin, where they needed construction workers, she would tell us (in front of him, as he watched her and smiled like a whipped husband, but a husband, still) about his wanderings around Mexico City, how he would walk from UNAM to Ciudad Satélite, and at night too, which was almost like from one end of Israel to the other. And things kept getting worse. Ulises had no money left now and no job either, and one night Claudia came home in a rage, saying that her friend Isabel Gorkin had seen Ulises sleeping in Tel Aviv North, the train station, or begging on Avenue Hamelech George or along the Gan Meir, then saying that this was unacceptable, emphasizing the word
unacceptable
in a particular way, as if begging in Mexico City were permissible, but not in Tel Aviv, and worst of all was that she said this to Daniel and me, but with Ulises right there, sitting in his place at the table, listening as if he were the invisible man, and then Claudia said that Ulises was lying to us, that he wasn't looking for work at all, and that we had to decide what we were going to do about it.