Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

"And Efrén Rebolledo?" I asked.

"An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems , 1909. He was a diplomat, of course."

Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word . Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort's sake lived within and accepted-most of the time-the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

"In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of poor Sanguinetti (I won't start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we're to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one."

"Who?" they asked him. "Mayakovsky?"

"No."

"Esenin?"

"No."

"Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?"

"Hardly."

"Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us."

"There was only one," said San Epifanio, "and now I'll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov."

There was an opinion for every taste.

"And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adán. Period. New paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, maybe? The rest are queers like Huidobro, fairies like Alfonso Cortés (although some of his poems are authentically fagotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would've driven Lacan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a misguided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina García) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling and a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…"

"No!" shouted Belano. "Not Gilberto Owen!"

"In fact," San Epifanio continued unruffled, "Gorostiza's Death Without End , along with the poetry of Paz, is the 'Marseillaise' of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican queer poets. More names: Gelman, nymph; Benedetti, queer; Nicanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Westphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak. And back to Spain, back to the beginning"-whistles-"Góngora and Quevedo, queers; San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and when they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters."

"And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or a queer?" someone asked. I didn't recognize the voice.

"Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself," said San Epifanio.

I told María that her father had given me money.

"Do you think I'm a whore?" she said.

"Of course not!"

"Then don't take any money from that old nut-job!" she said.

This afternoon we went to a lecture by Octavio Paz. On the subway, María didn't speak to me. Angélica was with us and we met Ernesto at the lecture, at the Capilla Alfonsina. Afterward we went to a restaurant on Calle Palma where all the waiters were octogenarians. The restaurant was called La Palma de la Vida. Suddenly I felt trapped. The waiters, who were about to die at any minute, María's indifference, as if she'd already had enough of me, San Epifanio's distant, ironic smile, and even Angélica, who was the same as always-it all seemed like a trap, a humorous commentary on my own existence.

On top of everything, they said I hadn't understood Octavio Paz's lecture at all, and they might have been right. All I'd noticed were the poet's hands, which beat out the rhythm of his words as he read, a tic he'd probably picked up in adolescence.

"The kid is a complete ignoramus," said María, "a typical product of the law school."

I preferred not to respond. (Although several replies occurred to me.) What did I think about then? About my shirt, which stank. About Quim Font's money. About Laura Damián, who had died so young. About Octavio Paz's right hand, his index finger and middle finger, his ring finger, thumb and little finger, which cut through the air of the Capilla as if our lives depended on it. I also thought about home and bed.

Later two guys with long hair and leather pants came in. They looked like musicians but they were students at the dance school.

For a long time I stopped existing.

"Why do you hate me, María? What have I done to you?" I whispered in her ear.

She looked at me as if I were speaking to her from another planet. Don't be ridiculous, she said.

Ernesto San Epifanio heard her reply and smiled at me in a disturbing way. In fact everybody heard her, and everybody was smiling at me as if I'd gone crazy! I think I closed my eyes. I tried to join some conversation. I tried to talk about the visceral realists. The pseudomusicians laughed. At some point María kissed one of them and Ernesto San Epifanio patted me on the back. I remember that I caught his hand in the air or grabbed his elbow, and that I looked him in the eye and told him to back off, that I didn't need anybody's pity. I remember that María and Angélica decided to go with the dancers. I remember hearing myself shout at some point during the night:

"I earned your father's money!"

But I don't remember whether María was there to hear me or if by then I was alone.

I'm back at home. I've been back to the university (but not to class). I'd like to sleep with María. I'd like to sleep with Catalina O'Hara. I'd like to sleep with Laura Jáuregui. Sometimes I'd like to sleep with Angélica, but the circles under her eyes keep getting darker, and every day she's paler, thinner, less there.

Today I only saw Barrios and Jacinto Requena at Café Quito, and our conversation was mostly gloomy, as if something irreparably bad was about to happen. Still, we laughed a lot. They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies. Another time, Ulises Lima gave a lecture and no one came. We talked until they kicked us out.