Roberto Bolaño: Amulet

Sometimes, not often, I found paid work; a professor would pay me out of his salary to be a kind of personal assistant, or the department heads or the faculty would put me on a contract for two weeks, a month, or sometimes a month and a half, with vague, ambiguous and mostly nonexistent duties, or the secretaries-who were so nice, I made friends with them all; they confided in me, told me about their heartaches and their hopes- made sure their bosses kept finding me odd jobs so that I could earn a few pesos. That was during the day. At night I led what you might call a bohemian life with the poets of Mexico City, which I found deeply rewarding and convenient too, since money was scarce at the time and I didn't always have enough to pay for lodgings. But most of the time I did. I shouldn't exaggerate. I had enough money to get by and the poets educated me in Mexican literature by lending me books, their own books of poems for a start (you know what poets are like), then the essentials and the classics, so my expenses were minimal.

Sometimes I'd go for a whole week without spending a peso. I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy. That was when I began to get to know them all and they got to know me. I became a fixture in their group. I spent my days at the faculty, busy as a bee or, to be more precise, a cicada, coming and going in and out of the little offices, keeping up with all the gossip, all the affairs and divorces, keeping up with all the tragedies. Like the tragedy of Professor Miguel López Azcárate, whose wife left him, and who couldn't bear the pain; I knew all about it, the secretaries told me. One day in a corridor I joined a group discussing some aspect of Ovid's poetry; the poet Bonifaz Nuño was there, I think, Monterroso too, perhaps, and two or three young poets. Professor López Azcárate must have been there, though he didn't say a word until the end (when it came to Latin poetry Bonifaz Nuño was the only recognized authority). And what in the name of heaven did we talk about? I can't remember exactly. All I remember is that it had to do with Ovid and that Bonifaz Nuño was holding forth interminably. He was probably making fun of some novice translator of the Metamorphoses. And Monterroso was smiling and nodding quietly. And the young poets (or maybe they were only students, poor things) were following suit. Me too. I craned my neck and peered at them fixedly. And from time to time, I threw in an exclamation, over the shoulders of the students, which was like adding a little silence to the silence. And then at some point in that scene, which must have really occurred, I can't have dreamed it, Professor López Azcárate opened his mouth. He opened his mouth as if gasping for air, as if that faculty corridor had been suddenly sucked into an unknown dimension, and said something about the Art of Love, by Ovid, something that took Bonifaz Nuño by surprise and seemed to intrigue Monterroso, but the young poets or students didn't understand it, me neither, and then López Azcárate turned red, as if he simply couldn't bear the suffocation any longer, and a few tears, just a few, four or six, rolled down his cheeks and hung from his mustache, a black mustache that was beginning to go white at the tips and in the middle, a look that always struck me as curious in the extreme, like a zebra or something, a black mustache that was, in any case, incongruous, crying out for a razor blade or a pair of scissors, and if you looked López Azcárate in the face for long enough it became blindingly obvious that this mustache was an anomaly (and a voluntary one), and that a man with such an anomaly on his face was bound to come to a bad end.

A week later López Azcárate hanged himself from a tree and the news ran through the university like a terrified, fleet-footed animal. And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

At night, however, I opened out, I began to grow again, I became a bat, I left the university and wandered around Mexico City like a wraith (I can't in all honesty say like a fairy, although I would like to) and drank and talked and attended literary gatherings (I knew where to find them all) and counseled the young poets who came to see me even back then, though not as much as they would later on, and I had a kind word for each of them. What am I saying: a word! I had a hundred or a thousand words for every one of them; to me they were all grandsons of López Velarde, great-grandsons of Salvador Díaz Mirón, those brave, troubled boys, those downhearted boys adrift in the nights of Mexico City, those brave boys who turned up with their sheets of foolscap folded in two and their dog-eared volumes and their scruffy notebooks and sat in the cafés that never close or in the most depressing bars in the world, where I was the only woman, except, occasionally, for the ghost of Lilian Serpas (but more about Lilian later), and they gave me their poems to read, their verses, their fuddled translations, and I took those sheets of foolscap and read them in silence, with my back to the table where they were raising their glasses desperately trying to be ingenious or ironic or cynical, poor angels, and I plunged into those words (I can't in all honesty say into that river of words, although I would like to, since it wasn't so much a river as an inchoate babble), letting them seep into my very-marrow, I spent a moment alone with those words choked by the brilliance and sadness of youth, with those splinters of a shattered dime-store mirror, and I looked at myself or rather for myself in them, and there I was! Auxilio Lacouture, or fragments of Auxilio Lacouture: blue eyes, blond hair going gray, cut in a bob, long, thin face, lined forehead, and the fact of my selfhood sent a shiver down my spine, plunged me into a sea of doubts, made me anxious about the future, the days approaching at the pace of a cruise ship, although the vision also proved that I was living in and with my time, the time I had chosen, the time all around me, tremulous, changeable, teeming, happy.

And so I came to the year 1968. Or 1968 came to me. With the benefit of hindsight I could say I felt it coming. I could say I had a wild hunch and it didn't catch me unawares. I foresaw, intuited or suspected it; I sniffed it on the wind from the very first minute of January; I anticipated and envisaged it even as the first (and last) piñata of that innocently festive January was smashed open. I could even go so far as to say that I smelled its scent in the bars and parks in February and March of that year; I sensed its preternatural quiet in the bookshops and the food stalls, while I stood eating a pork taco in the Calle San Ildefonso, staring at the church of Saint Catherine of Siena and the Mexican dusk swirling deliriously, before the year 1968 was what it would become.

Ah, it makes me laugh to think about it now. It makes me want to cry! Am I crying? I saw it all and yet I didn't see a thing. Am I making any sense? I am the mother of all the poets, and I (or my destiny) refused to let the nightmare overcome me. Now the tears are running down my ravaged cheeks. I was at the university on the eighteenth of September when the army occupied the campus and went around arresting and killing indiscriminately. No. Not many people were killed at the university. That was in Tlatelolco. May that name live forever in our memory! But I was at the university when the army and the riot police came in and rounded everyone up. Unbelievable. I was in the bathroom, in the lavatory on one of the floors of the faculty building, the fourth maybe, I'm not exactly sure. And I was sitting in a stall, with my skirt hitched up, as the poem says, or the song, reading the exquisite poetry of Pedro Garfias, who had already been dead for a year (Don Pedro Garfias, such a melancholy man, so sad about Spain and the world in general). Who could have imagined that I would be reading in the bathroom just when the damned riot police came into the university? Now I believe, if you'll excuse a brief digression, that life is full of enigmas, minimal events that, at the slightest touch or glance, set off chains of consequences, which, viewed through the prism of time, invariably inspire astonishment or fear. The fact is that thanks to Pedro Garfias, thanks to the poems of Pedro Garfias and my inveterate habit of reading in the bathroom, I was the last to realize that the riot police were on campus and that the army had occupied the university, and so, while my eyes were scanning verses penned by that Spaniard who had died in exile, the soldiers and riot police were arresting and searching and beating up whoever they could lay their hands on, irrespective of sex or age, marital status or professional credentials acquired one way or another in the intricate, hierarchical world of the academy.