Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

"I can imagine," I said.

"It was like seeing the devil," said Quim.

"The guy could talk fine," I said.

"Perfectly fine! He looked up and said hello to me. He even had a nice voice, for God's sake."

"It wasn't the devil," said Lupe, "although maybe it was, you never know. But in this case I don't think it was the devil."

"Please, you know I don't believe in the devil, Lupe," said Quim. "It's a manner of speaking."

"Who do you think it was?" I asked.

"A narc. An informer," said Lupe, grinning from ear to ear.

"Well, of course, you must be right," I said.

"And why would he be friendly to us, pretending he was mute?" said Quim.

"Deaf-mute," I said.

"Because you were students," said Lupe.

Quim looked at Lupe as if he were about to kiss her.

"You're so smart, Lupita."

"Don't make fun of me," she said.

"I'm serious, damn it."

At one in the morning we left the Chinese café and went looking for a hotel. At around two we finally found one on Río de la Loza. Along the way they explained to me what had happened to Lupe. Her pimp had tried to kill her. When I asked why, they told me that it was because Lupe didn't want to work in the afternoons anymore; she wanted to go to school.

"Congratulations, Lupe," I said. "What are you going to study?"

"Contemporary dance," she said.

"At the dance school with María?"

"That's right. With Paco Duarte."

"But can you enroll just like that, without taking some test?"

Quim looked at me as if I were in some other dimension.

"Lupe has influential friends of her own, García Madero, and we're all prepared to help her. She doesn't need to pass any fucking test."

The hotel was called the Media Luna and contrary to my expectations, after Quim took a look at the room and spoke a few words in private to the night clerk, he told Lupe good night and warned her not even to think about leaving without letting him know. Lupe said goodbye to us at the door to her room. Don't see us out, Quim said. Later, as we were walking toward Reforma, he explained that he'd had to give the clerk a small tip to get him to take Lupe without asking too many questions, but especially, if it came down to it, not to give out too many answers.

"What I'm afraid of," he told me, "is that tonight her pimp's going to check every hotel in Mexico City."

I suggested that maybe the police could take care of the problem or at least issue some kind of restraining order.

"Don't be an ass, García Madero. Alberto has friends in the police. How else do you think he runs his rackets? All the whores in Mexico City are controlled by the police."

"Come on. That's hard to believe," I said. "Maybe there are some officers who take bribes to look the other way, but to say that all of them…"

"The prostitution business in Mexico City and all of Mexico is controlled by the police, get that into your head once and for all," said Quim. And after a while, he added: "We're on our own in this."

At Niños Héroes he caught a taxi. Before he got in he made me promise that the next day first thing I'd be at his house.

I didn't go to the Fonts' house. I spent all day having sex with Rosario.

I ran into Jacinto Requena walking along Bucareli.

We went to get two slices of pizza at the gringo's place. As we ate he told me that Arturo had ordered the first purge of visceral realism.

I was stunned. I asked him how many he'd kicked out. Five, said Requena. I assume I wasn't one of them, I said. No, not you, said Requena. The news came as a great relief. Those purged were Pancho Rodríguez, Luscious Skin, and three poets I didn't know.

While I was in bed with Rosario, it occurred to me that Mexican avant-garde poetry was undergoing its first schism.

Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine.

I have to admit that I have more fun in bed with Rosario than with María.

But whom do I love? Yesterday it rained all night. The building's outdoor stairways looked like Niagara Falls. I kept a tally as we made love. Rosario was amazing, but to preserve the integrity of the experiment, I didn't tell her so. She came fifteen times. The first few times she had to cover her mouth so she wouldn't wake the neighbors. The last few times I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. Sometimes she seemed to swoon in my arms and other times she arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells. It's strange: my sweat is hot and Rosario's is cold and reptilian, with a bittersweet taste (mine is definitely salty). In total we spent four hours fucking. Then Rosario dried me, dried herself, tidied up the room in a heartbeat (it's incredible how industrious and practical the woman is), and went to sleep, because the next day she had to work. I sat at the table and wrote a poem that I called "15/3." Then I read William Burroughs until dawn.

Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?

Then there's María. I think about her every day. I'd like to see her, sleep with her, talk to her, call her, but when it comes down to it I'm incapable of taking a single step in her direction. And then, when I make a cool assessment of my sexual encounters with her and with Rosario, I have to admit that I have a better time with Rosario. If nothing else, I learn more!

Today I had sex with Rosario from three to five in the afternoon. She came twice, maybe three times, I don't know, and I'd rather leave the exact figure shrouded in mystery. I came twice. Before she went to work I told her Lupe's story. Contrary to what I expected, she wasn't very sympathetic to Lupe or Quim or me. I told her about Alberto, Lupe's pimp, too, and to my surprise she showed quite a bit of understanding for him, only reproaching him, and then not severely, for working as a pimp. When I told her that this Alberto could be a very dangerous person and that there was a risk that if he found Lupe he would do her real harm, she answered that a woman who abandoned her man deserved all that and more.

"But you don't have to worry, darling," she said, "that's not your problem. You have your true love by your side, thank God."

Rosario's declaration made me sad. For an instant I imagined the unknown Alberto, his huge cock and his huge knife and a fierce look on his face, and I thought that if Rosario met him on the street she would be attracted to him. Also: that in some way he was coming between María and me. For an instant, that is, I imagined Alberto measuring his cock with his kitchen knife and I imagined the notes of a song, evocative and suggestive, although of what I couldn't say, drifting in the window (a sinister window!) along with the night air, and all of it together made me extremely sad.

"Don't be gloomy, darling," said Rosario.

And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O'Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.