You speak for the silent although smiling breakfasts during which you waited without daring to drink your coffee, driven by God knows what need to preserve the surface of all those actions that concealed the happiness and the desperation of your desire. You would put the slices of bread in the toaster …
“… Adjust the heat, serve marmalade on the little plates. When the toast was ready, I would smear it with butter, and all the time, every morning, I waited for you to speak, to ask something of me, and you went on reading the newspaper in silence — and I shall never forget the names in those black headlines: Rundstedt, Wavell, Gamelin, Timoshenko — reading, sometimes smiling at me as in silence I implored you to tell me what you saw when you walked the city, how your writing was going, begged you to let me read what you wrote as you used to…”
“Do you remember Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Ligeia? I want to find something like that. To give the city its echo in poetry.”
After breakfast he would go out to wander the city in search of the sounds he wanted to echo. And you would go out and walk too.
“Yes, like you, I would go out and walk alone. But we didn’t walk the same parts of the city. I confined myself to our neighborhood, to the streets near Reforma. Reforma between Chapultepec and the Cuauhtémoc circle…”
… was your limited area. The length of the dusty promenade — today it is concrete — beneath the ash trees, past streets that in those days were quiet, past elaborate residences dating back to the turn of the century and boasting relief decorations of urns and vines, some boasting mansard roofs that awaited snow that would never come, carriage gates painted green, white-framed French windows, stone balustrades around the level roofs, up the steep steps to the reception floor. Damp cellars, servants standing in the half-opened doors, elderly inhabitants passing in and out in their elderly expensive cars, a Pierce-Arrow, an Isotta-Fraschini, a Rolls with fringed red-velvet cushions and much luster of gold, passing through wide green gates into the parklike gardens, invisible from the street because of the high walls, of manicured lawn and tall palms. It was a Mexico City you did not know, a disappearing Mexico City, a quarter from the past which had been reserved for you and welcomed you, defended you from the city you feared, that you knew only by fragmentary hurried glimpses caught while you were on your way to a movie downtown or to some restaurant: the shadowed city of hard faces, Dragoness, of criminal eyes, scars, misfortunes, curt and injurious speech, a city always near violence: Mesones, San Juan de Letrán, La Moneda, Corregidora, Argentina, Guerrero, Peralvillo: where the city’s sleeping lions lie, the buyers and sellers of pot and horse, the women of the night who chew our language and spit it back at us transformed, our bat-breed. The bullfights, the cabarets, the cheap movie houses, the vaudeville theaters of that time, all these made you afraid, Dragoness. I know, oh, don’t I know. You always felt that you were followed and spied upon, feared that the muttered compliment of some man who watched you pass might change, without the slightest hesitation, into an act of blood. You doubted your physical integrity: it was as if those glassy eyes, eyes not only of the staring men but of the women and children too, could see more about you than you knew yourself. It was as if they were all diviners and magicians, those dark-skinned millions with their intolerable passivity, their sudden violence, their unhappy smiles, their jeering sadness, their brutality and rancor; it was as if they were the priests of a magic that could turn a simple crossing of glances into some petty death, some destiny as shadowy as that carried in their dark eyes, their callused hands, their thick lips, in their centuries of humiliation and frustrated revenge.
“I think sometimes that all Mexicans just want to get even.”
No, you did not have to go to their haunts and lairs. You could remain far from them, in a neighborhood that at that time was peaceful. Soon the impoverished old families would sell their homes and Niza, Hamburgo, Génova, and Londres would become streets of fashionable restaurants, expensive shops, cabarets, and open-air cafés, a prowling ground for Lancias and Jaguars and vampires in black sweaters and black net stockings and immigrant gringos and the existential heroes of the Café Tirol and the Kinneret, those careful and impatient revolutionaries who make the revolution inside themselves in order to get it over and done with the quicker. And even then these streets would remain for you a barrier against the gangrenous darker city, the hovels of mud and galvanized iron, the bare feet, the scabies, the hands searching through trash and garbage, the black eyes with their criminal or scatological or magical purposes.
“Every Mexican’s look has three possibilities. To kill or to undress or to bless. You had a question to ask of the city, Javier, but you didn’t get an answer. The city had not changed, but you changed. Only a year and a half ago we came home to the apartment late one night and we met a death that didn’t need to happen. That was what I thought. But you thought that it was a necessary death precisely because it was so trivial. I saw the boy’s body lying there against the door of our building. I didn’t know how to respond to it…”
No, Dragoness, for you Yankees have made it a law that in order to show respect for death, one must not know how to react to it. Above all, one must be shocked, believe that death has broken something and that it will break those who contemplate it. Above all, one must have no answer for death.
“I didn’t know what to say. And before I said anything, I was filled with pain.”
Yes, Elizabeth. Pain must be silent at first. Later it may howl, but not immediately. Suffer. Then you have the right to talk about suffering. Be the suffering as little as a chance corpse on your doorstep, or as much as a chance cancer in your guts, don’t speak about it until you know it.
“You felt no pain, Javier. I think you felt nothing at all. He was lying in front of the door of our apartment house in his stocking feet, yes, his shoes were gone, and the knife was still in him and his eyes were wide open. I looked around us as if to make sure I knew where we were. The bookstore that stayed open until midnight, Durrell’s Quartet in the display window along with Hopscotch, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Mind of an Assassin, the mind of the man who murdered Trotsky. What a laugh: the mind of an assassin. And Trotsky had been killed a year or two after we came back from Europe. I remember his picture in the paper, his head bandaged, no glasses, his little white goatee, dead. And the ciné-club of the French Institute, where we had gone together to see An Andalusian Dog and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. A tailor’s shop. On the corner, a bakery, and in front of the door of our building, the body with the knife in it. We had spent the evening dancing the twist in a cabaret on San Juan de Letrán. Some of your students had persuaded you to take me along because they were sure I had to be an expert at the twist, and we had danced all evening while the voice at the microphone repeated endlessly, twist again like we did last summer, twist again like we did last night, until we were sick of it and our arms ached and the muscles of our bellies were sore, the right leg stiff with the foot gyrating about itself, the hips moving in the opposite direction, the arms holding still a third rhythm, twist again like we did last summer. But last summer we were not twisting, goddamn it, last summer we were young, we were in the islands and we loved each other. And the other last summer we weren’t twisting either: we were making love, fucking to kill time and reading Robert Lowell and Octavio Paz and William Styron and the afternoon showers came along and we were tired of reading and you came to me already stiff and I was waiting for you and we made love as if I were a bitch in heat, without really wanting it, just smelling of it and needing it, expecting it of the summer, the long rainy afternoons, the sultry and brown-faced afternoons of Mexico City, fucking because fucking was better than getting drunk or running out for some goddamn pill of yours, last summer we made love and twenty-five years ago in Greece we made love and the day they killed Trotsky too…”