Roberto Bolaño - Amulet

And then I kept quiet while they went on bad-mouthing the poets of Mexico, the ones they were going to blow out of the water, and I thought about the dead poets, like Darío and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn't have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Darío instead. We had what we had.

And, at the risk of overstretching every imagination but my own, which is supreme in its elasticity, I will say that some nights my friends even seemed, for a second, to be the incarnations of those who had never come into existence: the Latin American poets who died in childhood, at the age of five or ten, or just a few months after they were born. This exercise in vision was difficult, and futile too, or so it seemed, but, by the purplish light of certain nights, I could see through the features of my friends to the little faces of the babies who never grew up. I saw the little angels they bury in shoeboxes in Latin America, or in little wooden coffins painted white. And sometimes I said to myself: These kids are our hope. But other times I thought: Some hope, a bunch of drunk kids-all they can do is run down José Emilio-a band of young drunkards versed in the art of hospitality but not in the art of verse.

And then the young poets of Mexico began to recite poetry in their deep but irreparably juvenile voices, and the lines they recited went blowing in the wind through the streets of Mexico City, and I began to cry, and they said, Auxilio's drunk (the fools, it takes a lot more than that to get me drunk), or, She's crying because what's-his-name left her, and I let them say whatever they liked. Or I argued with them. Or insulted them. Or got up from my chair and left without paying-I never paid, or hardly ever. I was the one who could see into the past and those who can see into the past never pay. But I could also see into the future and vision of that kind comes at a high price: life, sometimes, or sanity. So I figure I was paying, night after forgotten night, though nobody realized it; I was paying for everyone's round, the kids who would be poets and those who never would.

I left without paying, or so it seemed. I didn't have to pay because I could see the whirlwind of the past that swept like a breath of hot air through the streets of Mexico City, smashing the windows of the buildings. But I could also see the future from my obliterated cave in the fourth-floor women's bathroom, and for that I was paying with my life. So when I left I was paying after all, though nobody knew. I was paying for myself and for the young poets of Mexico and for the anonymous alcoholics of whatever bar we happened to be in that night. Off I went staggering through the streets of Mexico City, pursuing my elusive shadow, alone and tearful, feeling like the last Uruguayan on the planet, which I wasn't, of course, how egotistical, and although I was picking my way through craters illuminated by hundreds of moons, they were not the craters of planet Earth but those of Mexico, a distinction that might appear to be, but is not, quite devoid of sense.

And one night I had the feeling that someone was following me. I don't know where we had been. Maybe in a bar on the outskirts of La Villa, maybe at some dive in Colonia Guerrero. I can't remember. I only know that I kept on walking, making my way through the rubble, without paying much attention to the footsteps that were following in my footsteps, until suddenly the nocturnal sun went out, I stopped crying, came back to reality with a shudder and understood that the person following me, whoever it was, desired my death. Or my life. Or the tears I had shed on that hateful reality, as harsh as our often intractable tongue. And then I stopped and waited, and the steps that were echoing my steps stopped and waited too, and I looked around in the street for someone I knew, or a stranger I could run to, crying for help, who could take my arm and walk me to the nearest subway station or stay with me until I hailed a cab, but I couldn't see anyone. Or maybe I could. I saw something. I shut my eyes, then opened them, and I saw the white tiled walls of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor. Then I shut my eyes again and heard the wind sweeping through the campus around the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature with a diligence worthy of a higher enterprise. And I thought: History is like a horror story. And when I opened my eyes a shadow peeled away from a wall, moved onto the sidewalk about ten yards ahead, and began to come toward me, and I put my hand into my handbag, I mean my satchel from Oaxaca, and felt for my knife, which I always carried with me, as a precaution against urban emergencies, but the burning skin of my fingertips could feel only papers and books and magazines and even clean underwear (washed by hand, without soap, with water and sheer willpower, in one of the sinks of that dreamlike, omnipresent fourth-floor bathroom), but not the knife, ah, my friends, now there's another recurring and terribly Latin American nightmare: being unable to find your weapon; you know where you put it, but it's not there.

That's just our luck.

And it could have been mine. But when the shadow intent on my death, or at least on inflicting suffering and humiliation, approached the doorway where I had hidden, other shadows appeared in that street, which could have become the epitome of all the terrifying streets I had ever walked down, and called out to me: Auxilio, Auxilio, Socorro, Amparo, Caridad, Remedios Lacouture, Where have you gone? And I recognized the voice of the sad and clever Julián Gómez, while the other, brighter-sounding voice belonged to Arturito Belano, ready for a fight, as always. And then the shadow that was bent on my torment stopped, looked back and walked on, went past me: an ordinary-looking Mexican guy fresh out of the underworld, and with him passed a breath of warm and slightly humid air that conjured up unstable geometries, solitudes, schizophrenia, and butchery, and the absolute son of a bitch didn't even glance at me.

After that we went downtown, the three of us, and Julián Gómez and Arturito Belano continued their conversation about poetry, and two or three more poets joined us at the Encrucidada Veracruzana, or maybe they were just journalists or future college professors, and they all went on talking about poetry, new poetry, but I said nothing, I was listening to my heartbeat, still shaken by the encounter with that shadow, although I hadn't said a word about it, so I didn't notice when the discussion turned into an argument or when the shouting and the insults began. They chucked us out of the bar. We walked away through the empty streets of Mexico City at five in the morning and the group diminished as people peeled off, one by one, each heading for home, and at the time I had a place of my own to go to, a rooftop room in Colonia Roma Norte, in the Calle Tabasco, and since Arturito Belano lived in Colonia Juárez, on Versalles, we walked together, although, had he been navigating like a Cub Scout, he really should have turned off to the west, toward the Glorieta de Insurgentes or the Zona Rosa, since he lived right on the corner of Versalles and Berlin, while I had to keep going south. But Arturito Belano decided to go a bit out of his way and keep me company.

To tell the truth, at that hour of the night, neither of us was very talkative, and although now and then we commented on the quarrel at the Encrucijada Veracruzana, mostly we just walked and breathed the air of Mexico City, which seemed to have been purified by the dawn, until Arturito said, in his most nonchalant tone of voice, that he had been worried about me in that dive in La Villa (so it was La Villa), and when I asked him why, he said because he too (the angel) had seen the shadow that was following my shadow. I looked at him calm as you please, raised my hand to my mouth, and said, It was the shadow of death, and although he laughed incredulously, I wasn't offended at all. It was as if he were saying, That was some bad trip back there, Auxilio. I raised my hand to my mouth again and stopped walking and said, If it hadn't been for you and Julián, I'd be dead now. Arturito listened, then walked on. And I caught up with him and we walked side by side. And so, stopping and talking, or walking on in silence, before we knew it, we came to the doorway of the building where I lived. And that was that.