Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives

Then a hand, followed by an arm, emerged from the globe of smoke around them. The hand offered me the end of a joint.

"I don't smoke," I said.

"It's weed, poet García Madero. Acapulco Gold."

I shook my head.

"I don't like it," I said.

I was startled by a noise in the room next door. Somebody's voice was raised. A man's. Then someone shouted. A woman. Brígida. I was sure the owner of the bar was hitting her and I wanted to come to her defense, although the truth is I didn't care all that much about Brígida (I didn't care about her at all, really). Just as I was turning back toward the door, the strangers' hands grabbed me. Then I saw their faces emerge from the smoke. It was Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

I sighed with relief, I almost burst into applause; I told them that I had been looking for them for days. Then I made another attempt to come to the aid of the shouting woman, but they wouldn't let me.

"Don't make trouble for yourself, those two are always at it," said Belano.

"Who?"

"The waitress and her boss."

"But he's hitting her," I said. The slaps were clearly audible now. "We can't just let him hit her."

"Ah, García Madero, what a poet," said Ulises Lima.

"You're right, we couldn't let him hit her," said Belano, "but things aren't always the way they sound. Trust me."

Clearly they knew all about the Encrucijada, and I would have liked to ask them some questions, but I didn't want to seem indiscreet.

When I came out of the toilets, the light of the bar hurt my eyes. Everybody was talking at the top of their lungs. Some people were singing along to the blind man's song, a bolero , or what sounded to me like a bolero , about a desperate love, a love that time could never heal, although with the passage of the years it became more humiliating, more pathetic, more terrible. Lima and Belano were carrying three books apiece, and they looked like students, like me. Before we left, we went up to the bar, shoulder to shoulder, and ordered three tequilas which we downed in a single gulp, and then we went out into the street, laughing. As we left the Encrucijada, I looked back for the last time in the vain hope of seeing Brígida appear in the doorway to the storage room, but she wasn't there.

Ulises Lima's books were:

Manifeste électrique aux paupieres de jupes , by Michel Bulteau, Matthieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, Jean-Jacques Nguyen That, and Gyl Bert-Ram-Soutrenom F.M., and other poets of the Electric Movement, our French counterparts (I think).

Sang de satin , by Michel Bulteau.

Nord d'été naître opaque , by Matthieu Messagier.

The books Arturo Belano was carrying were:

Le parfait criminel , by Alain Jouffroy.

Le pays où tout est permis , by Sophie Podolski.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes , by Raymond Queneau. (The Queneau was a photocopy, and the way it had been folded, in addition to the wear and tear of too much handling, had turned it into a kind of startled paper flower, its petals splayed toward the four points of the compass.)

Later we met up with Ernesto San Epifanio, who was also carrying three books. I asked him to let me make a note of them. They were:

Little Johnny's Confession , by Brian Patten.

Tonight at Noon , by Adrian Henri.

The Lost Fire Brigade , by Spike Hawkins.

Ulises Lima lives in a room on a roof on Calle Anáhuac, near Insurgentes. It's a tiny place, ten feet by eight, with books piled up everywhere. Through the only window, as small as a porthole, you can see the neighboring rooftops, where human sacrifices are still performed, according to Ulises Lima, who got it from Monsiváis. In the room there's only a thin mattress on the floor, which Lima rolls up during the day or when he has visitors and uses as a sofa; there's also a tiny table, its entire top taken up by a typewriter, and a single chair. Visitors, obviously, have to sit on the mattress or the floor or just stand. Today there were five of us: Lima, Belano, Rafael Barrios, and Jacinto Requena. Belano took the chair, Barrios and Requena the mattress, Lima stood the whole time (sometimes pacing around the room), and I sat on the floor.

We talked about poetry. No one has read any of my poems, and yet they all treat me like one of them. The camaraderie is immediate and incredible!

Around nine, Felipe Müller showed up; he's nineteen, so until I came along he was the youngest in the group. Then we all went to eat at a Chinese café, and we walked and talked about literature until three in the morning. We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed. Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.

I asked where I could buy the books they'd had with them the other night. The answer came as no surprise: they steal them from the Librería Francesa in the Zona Rosa and from the Librería Baudelaire on Calle General Martínez, near Calle Horacio, in Polanco. I also asked about the authors, and one after another (what one visceral realist reads is soon read by the rest of the group) they filled me in on the life and works of the Electrics, Raymond Queneau, Sophie Podolski, and Alain Jouffroy.

Felipe Müller asked if I could read French. He sounded a tiny bit annoyed. I told him that with a dictionary I could get along all right. Later I asked him the same question. You read French, don't you, mano ? He answered in the negative.

Ran into Jacinto Requena, Rafael Barrios, and Pancho Rodríguez at Café Quito. I saw them come in around nine and motioned them over to my table, where I had just spent three good hours writing and reading. They introduced me to Pancho Rodríguez. He's as short as Barrios, and has the face of a twelve-year-old, even though he's actually twenty-two. It was almost inevitable that we'd like each other. Pancho Rodríguez never stops talking. Thanks to him I found out that before Belano and Müller showed up (they came to Mexico City after the Pinochet coup, so they weren't part of the original group), Ulises Lima had published a magazine with poems by María Font, Angélica Font, Laura Damián, Barrios, San Epifanio, some guy called Marcelo Robles I'd never heard of, and the Rodríguez brothers, Pancho and Moctezuma. According to Pancho, Pancho himself is one of the two best young Mexican poets, and the other one is Ulises Lima, who Pancho says is his best friend. The magazine (two issues, both from 1974) was called Lee Harvey Oswald and was bankrolled entirely by Lima. Requena (who wasn't part of the group back then) and Barrios confirmed everything Pancho Rodríguez said. That was how visceral realism started, said Barrios. Pancho Rodríguez thought otherwise. According to him, Lee Harvey Oswald should have continued. It folded just as it was taking off, he said, just as people were starting to know who we were. What people? Well, other poets, of course, literature students, and the poetry-writing girls who came each week to the hundred workshops blossoming like flowers in Mexico City. Barrios and Requena disagreed about the magazine, even though they both looked back on it with nostalgia.

"Are there a lot of poetesses?"

"It's lame to call them poetesses," said Pancho.

"You're supposed to call them poets," said Barrios.

"But are there lots of them?"

"Like never before in the history of Mexico," said Pancho. "Lift a stone and you'll find a girl writing about her little life."

"So how could Lima finance Lee Harvey Oswald all by himself?" I said.