Two weeks later I talked with his sister on the phone and she told me that Arturo was alive. I sighed. What a relief. But I had to keep going. I was the itinerant mother. The wanderer. Life drew me into other stories.
One night, at a party in Colonia Anzures, propped on my elbows in a sea of tequila, watching a group of friends trying to break open a piñata in the garden, it occurred to me that it was an ideal time to call Arturo's place. His sister answered the phone. Merry Christmas, I said. Merry Christmas, she replied sleepily. Then she asked where I was. With some friends. What's with Arturo? He's coming back to Mexico next month. When exactly? We don't know. I'd like to go to the airport, I said. Then for a while we said nothing and listened to the party noises coming from the patio. Are you feeling OK, his sister asked. I'm feeling strange. Well that's normal for you. Not all that normal; most of the time I feel perfectly well. Arturo's sister was quiet for a bit, then she said that actually she was feeling pretty strange herself. Why's that? I asked. It was a purely rhetorical question. To tell the truth, both of us had plenty of reasons to be feeling strange. I can't remember what she said in reply. We wished each other a merry Christmas again and hung up.
A few days later, in January 1974, Arturito arrived from Chile and he was different.
What I mean is that although he was the same Arturo, deep down something had changed or grown, or changed and grown at the same time. What I mean is that people, his friends, began to see him differently, although he was the same as ever. What I mean is that everyone was somehow expecting him to open his mouth and give us the latest news from the Horror Zone, but he said nothing, as if what other people expected had become incomprehensible to him or he simply didn't give a shit.
His best friends were no longer the young poets of Mexico, who were all older than him in any case; he started hanging out with adolescent poets, all younger than he was: sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids, who seemed to have graduated from the great orphanage of Mexico City 's subway rather than from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Sometimes I'd see them peering through the windows of the cafés and bars on Bucareli, and the mere sight made me shudder, as if they weren't creatures of flesh and blood but a generation sprung from the open wound of Tlatelolco, like ants or cicadas or pus, although they couldn't have been there or taken part in the demonstrations of '68; these were kids who, in September '68, when I was shut up in the bathroom, were still in junior high school. And they were Arturito's new friends.
I wasn't immune to their beauty. I'm not immune to any kind of beauty. But, shuddering at the sight of them, I realized that they didn't speak the same language as me or the young poets. What those poor orphaned strays were saying was incomprehensible to José Agustín, the novelist in fashion at the time, and to the young poets who wanted to overthrow José Emilio Pacheco, and to José Emilio himself, who was dreaming of the impossible encounter between Darío and Huidobro. No one could understand those voices, which were saying: We're not from this part of Mexico City, we come from the subway, the underworld, the sewers, we live in the darkest, dirtiest places, where the toughest of the young poets would be reduced to retching.
All things considered, it wasn't really surprising that Arturo started hanging out with them and gradually distanced himself from his old friends. They were the children of the sewers and Arturo had always been a child of the sewers.
He still kept up with one of his old friends, however. Ernesto San Epifanio. I met Arturo first, then I met Ernesto San Epifanio, one radiant night in 1971. Arturo had been the youngest of the group. Then Ernesto came along, and he was a year or a few months younger, so Arturito had to yield his ambivalent place of honor. But there was no tension or jealousy between them, and when Arturo returned from Chile, in January 1974, Ernesto San Epifanio went on being his friend.
What happened between them was very odd. And I'm the only one who can tell the story. At the time, Ernesto San Epifanio seemed to have some kind of illness. He was hardly eating and had become very thin. At night, throughout those Mexico City nights canopied with sheet upon linen sheet, he drank but ate nothing, hardly talked to anyone, and when we went out into the street, he looked around as if he were afraid of something. When his friends asked what was going on, he remained silent or replied with some quote from his beloved Oscar Wilde, but even his characteristic wit had grown sluggish, and those quips, delivered so despondently, provoked only puzzlement and pity. One night I passed on some news about Arturo (which I'd heard from his mother and his sister) and Ernesto listened to me as if he was thinking that going to live in Pinochet's Chile might not actually be such a bad idea.
For the first few days after returning, Arturo stayed at home, hardly setting foot outside, and, for everyone but me, it was as if he still hadn't come back from Chile. But I went to his apartment and talked to him and found out that he'd been imprisoned, for eight days, and although he hadn't been tortured, he'd acquitted himself bravely. And I told his friends. I said, Arturito's back, and I painted his return with colors borrowed from the palette of epic poetry. And when, one night, Arturito finally appeared in the Café Quito on the Avenida Bucareli, his old friends, the young poets, saw him in a different light. Why? Well, because for them, Arturito now belonged to the category of those who have seen death at close range, and the subcategory of hard men, and, that, in the eyes of those desperate Latin American kids, was a qualification that commanded respect, a veritable compendium of medals.
It also has to be said that, deep down, they remained somewhat skeptical. I mean I was the source of the legend; they heard it from my mouth, from my lips hidden by the back of my hand, so although everything I had said about him while he was shut up in his apartment was essentially true, the story wasn't altogether credible, simply because of its source; that is, me. That's how it is on this continent. I was the mother and they believed me, but they didn't believe every word I said. Except for Ernesto San Epifanio. During the days leading up to Arturo's public reappearance, Ernesto made me tell and retell the story of our friend's adventures at the ends of the earth, and with each repetition, he became more enthusiastic. What I mean is that as I talked and invented adventures, Ernesto San Epifanio's lethargy gradually fell away, and his melancholy too, or at least his lethargy and his melancholy stirred, shook themselves and began to breathe again. So when Arturo reappeared and everyone wanted to be with him, Ernesto San Epifanio was present along with the others, and took part, albeit in a self-effacing way, in the welcome that Arturo's old friends organized for him, which consisted, if I remember rightly, of standing him a beer and a serving of chilaquiles at the Café Quito, a modest repast by any standard, but well matched to the economic resources at the group's disposal. And when they all went home, Ernesto San Epifanio remained, leaning against the bar of the Encrucijada Veracruzana, since by then we had moved on from the Quito, while Arturo sat alone at a table, accompanied only by his ghosts, staring at his last tequila as if a shipwreck of Homeric proportions were occurring in the bottom of the glass, which was, you have to admit, strange behavior for a kid his age, not quite twenty-one.