Roberto Bolaño - Amulet

She must have been about sixty. And she certainly looked it. Maybe she was older. And this happened ten years after the death of Remedios Varo, that is, in 1973, not 1963.

Then a chill ran down my spine. And the chill said to me: Hey, Auxilio (with an Uruguayan, not a Mexican, accent), the woman you're following, the woman who slipped out of Remedios Varos house, she's the real mother of Mexican poetry, not you; this woman whose footsteps you are following, she's the mother, not you, not you, not you.

I think my head began to ache and I shut my eyes. I think the teeth I no longer had began to ache and I shut my eyes. And when I opened them she was at the bar, absolutely alone, sitting on a stool, drinking coffee with milk and reading a magazine that she probably kept in the folder, along with the reproductions of her beloved son's drawings.

A couple of yards away, the waitress had her elbows on the bar and her gaze fixed dreamily on an indefinite point outside the windows, somewhere over my head. Some of the tables had been vacated. At others, people were getting back to their own business.

Then I realized that the woman I had been following, whether awake or in a dream, was Lilian Serpas, and I remembered her story, or what little I knew of it.

For a time, in the fifties I guess, Lilian had been a reasonably well-known poet and a woman of extraordinary beauty. The origin of her family name is unclear; it sounds Greek (to me, anyway), or Hungarian, maybe, it could even be an old Castilian name. But Lilian was Mexican and she had lived almost all her life in Mexico City. It was said that in the course of her drawn-out youth she had many fiances and admirers. Lilian, however, was not interested in fiances, she wanted lovers, and she had them too.

I would've liked to say to her: Lilian, you don't need so many lovers, they'll use you up and dump you on a street corner, what else can you expect from men? But what did I know, I was just some crazy virgin, and Lilian led her sex life as she pleased, intensely, guided only by her own bodily pleasure and the pleasure of the sonnets she was writing at the time. And, of course, it didn't turn out well for her. Or maybe it did. Who am I to say? She had lovers. I've had hardly any.

Anyhow, one day, Lilian fell in love with a man and had a child with him. The guy was called Coffeen, he might have been North American, or maybe he was English, or Mexican. In any case she had a child with him and the name of the child was Carlos Coffeen Serpas. The painter Carlos Coffeen Serpas.

At some point (I don't know exactly when), Mr. Coffeen disappeared. Maybe he left Lilian. Maybe Lilian left him. Maybe it was more romantic: Coffeen died and Lilian wanted to die as well, but she survived for the sake of the child. And soon there were new admirers to console her, because Lilian was still beautiful and she still liked going to bed with men and moaning with pleasure till daybreak. Meanwhile young Coffeen Serpas was growing up; at an early age, he was introduced to the circles in which his mother moved, and everyone was amazed by his intelligence and convinced that he would have a brilliant career in the treacherous world of art.

And who else moved in those circles, along with Lilian Serpas and her son? The same old crowd: the old, failed journalists and Spanish exiles who used to gather in the bars and cafés of downtown Mexico City. Very friendly people but not exactly ideal company for a sensitive child, in my opinion.

In those years Lilian held a series of different jobs. She worked as a secretary, and as a sales assistant in various boutiques; for a time she was employed by a couple of newspapers and even by a two-bit radio station. These stints never lasted very long, because, as she told me, not without a certain sadness, when you're a poet and you have to live by night, there's no way you can hold down a steady job.

Of course I understood, and I agreed with her, although even as I expressed my agreement, my voice and my body language automatically and unconsciously betrayed an attitude of sickening superiority, as if I were saying to her, Sure, Lilian, that's fine, but in the end isn't it all a bit childish? Sure, it's enjoyable and amusing, but don't count on me to help carry out your experiment.

As if splitting my time between the deleterious Avenida Bucareli and the university made me any better. As if knowing and associating with young poets as well as old, failed journalists made me any better. The truth is, I'm no better. The truth is, young poets usually end up as old, failed journalists. And the university, my beloved university is lurking in the sewers underneath the Avenida Bucareli, waiting for its day to come.

One night, Lilian told me this herself, she met an exiled South American at the Café Quito and talked with him until closing time. Then they went to Lilians apartment and climbed into bed without making a sound so as not to wake young Carlos Coffeen. The South American was Ernesto Guevara. I don't believe you, Lilian, I said to her. It's true, it was him, said Lilian, in that peculiar voice she had when I met her: brittle, the voice of a broken doll, the sort of voice Cervantes' glass graduate would have had, if he'd been a woman, that is, and taken leave of his senses while remaining perfectly lucid, back in the hapless Golden Age of Spanish Literature. And what was Che Guevara like in bed, was the first thing I wanted to know. Lilian said something I couldn't hear. What? I said. What? What? Normal, said Lilian, staring at the creased surface of her folder.

Maybe it was a lie. When I met Lilian, the only thing she seemed to care about was selling reproductions of her son's drawings. Poetry left her cold. She would turn up at the Café Quito very late and sit down at a table with the young poets, or with the old, failed journalists (all of whom had slept with her) and pass the time listening to the same old conversations. If someone said, for example, Tell us about Che Guevara, she would say, He was normal. That was all. As it happened, a number of those failed journalists had known Che Guevara and Fidel during their stay in Mexico, and no one was surprised to hear Lilian say that the Che was normal, although perhaps they didn't know that Lilian had actually slept with him; they thought she had slept only with them and a few bigwigs who didn't frequent the Avenida Bucareli in the small hours of the morning, no one really special, in other words.

I admit I would have liked to know what Che Guevara was like in bed. So he was normal, OK, but normal how?

One night I challenged Lilian, saying, These kids have a right to know exactly what Che was like in bed. One of my crazier declarations, but I went ahead and made it anyway.

I remember Lilian looking at me with her pained, wrinkled doll's mask, which seemed to be perpetually on the point of dropping to reveal the Queen of the Seas with her cohorts of thunder, yet always remained lifeless. These kids, she said, these kids, and then looked up at the ceiling of the Café Quito, which was being painted by two youths perched on a mobile scaffold.

That's what she was like, the woman I followed from the dream of Remedios Varo, the great Catalan painter, to the dream of Mexico City 's incurable streets, where something was always happening, while seeming to whisper or shout or hiss at you: Nothing ever happens here.

So there I am once again at the Café Quito in 1973 or maybe the first months of '74; it's eleven o'clock and through the smoke, lit as if by tracer fire, I see Lilian arrive enveloped, as always, in smoke, and her smoke and that of the café eye each other like spiders before coalescing into a single coffee-scented cloud (there's a roaster in the Café Quito, and it's one of the few places on the Avenida Bucareli that has an Italian espresso machine).