And Lilian stops, as if she didn't hear properly, and looks for the table where they are sitting (I am sitting there too) and, having spotted us, conies over to say hello and to see if she can perhaps sell one of her reproductions, and I look the other way.
Why do I look the other way?
Because I know her story.
So I look the other way while Lilian, standing or seated, says hello to each of them in turn, the five or often more motley young poets around that table, and when she gets to me, I look up from the ground, turn my head so slowly it's exasperating (but I really can't turn it any faster) and, compliantly, reply to her greeting.
And time goes by (in the end Lilian doesn't try to sell us any drawings because she knows we don't have any money and wouldn't buy them anyway, but if anyone wants to take a look, she's happy to show them the reproductions, which are of surprisingly high quality, printed with a proper press on glossy paper, which reveals something about the curious business sense of Carlos Coffeen Serpas or of his mother, mendicant entrepreneurs who, in a moment of inspiration that I would rather not try to imagine, decided to live exclusively from the proceeds of art) and gradually people start to leave or change tables, since, at the Café Quito, after a certain time of night, everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and everyone wants to have a chat or at least exchange a few words with his or her acquaintances. So there I am, stranded in the midst of that ceaseless mingling, staring at my half-empty coffee cup, when suddenly (it's almost like a cut to a new scene) an evasive shadow, so evasive it seems to attract all the other shadows in the café, as if it could exert a gravitational force on absences of light, approaches my table and sits down next to me.
How are you doing, Auxilio? says the ghost of Lilian Serpas.
Fine, just hanging out, I say.
And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let's say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass, or let's say that the full or waxing or obscurely waning moon of Mexico City slides again over the tiles of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, or that the silence of a wake falls over the Café Quito and all I can hear are the murmurs of Lilian Serpas's ghostly court and once again I don't know if I'm in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, or gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.
Be that as it may, something is happening as time passes. I know that time and not, for example, space, is making something happen. Something that has happened before, although in a sense every time is the first time so experience counts for nothing, which is better in the end, because experience is generally a hoax.
And then Lilian (the only one who emerges from this story unscathed, since she has already been through it all) asks me, once again, to do her a favor, the first and last favor she will ask of me in her life.
She says, It's late. She says, You're so pretty, Auxilio. She says, I often think of you, Auxilio. And I look at her and I look at the ceiling of the Café Quito, where the two sleepy young men are still working or pretending to work, perched on the most precarious scaffolding, and then I look back at Lilian: she's talking to me but staring at the large chunky glass containing her coffee with milk. With one ear I'm listening to what she's saying, and with the other to the Café Quito regulars kidding the youths on the scaffolding, yelling remarks that are, I gather, part of some masculine initiation rite, supposedly affectionate but in fact foreshadowing a disaster that will engulf not only the pair of broad-brush painters (or plumbers or electricians, I don't know, I just saw them there, and I can see them still, as the moonlight makes its crazy way over every tile in the women's bathroom, as if its course-and this is a terrifying thought-exhausted all the possibilities of subversion), a disaster that will engulf not just the painters but the jeerers as well, the givers of advice, in other words: us.
And then Lilian says, You have to go to my place. She says, I can't go home tonight. She says, You have to go and tell Carlos I'll be back early tomorrow morning. And my first impulse is to refuse point blank. But then Lilian looks me in the face and smiles at me (she doesn't cover her mouth when she speaks, like me, or when she smiles, although she should) and I am at a loss for words because I am looking at the mother of Mexican poetry, the worst mother Mexican poetry could possibly have, but its one, true mother none the less. So I say yes, I will go to her apartment if she gives me the address and if it's not too far away, and I will tell Carlos Coffeen, the painter, that his mother will be staying out all night.
Eleven
And I see myself that night, my friends, walking toward Lilian Serpas's apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.
You might be surprised to learn that I didn't know Carlos Coffeen Serpas. No one did, really. Or to be precise, a few people knew him, and they had hatched the legend, the minor legend of a crazy painter who never left his mother's apartment, an apartment that, in some versions, was endowed with massive, dusty furniture that could have been buried in the crypt of one of the Emperor Maximilian's followers, although, according to other accounts, mother and son lived in something more like a tenement building, a faithful reproduction of the Burrón family's apartment (ah, the invincible Burrón family, God bless them, long may their comic strip run; when I arrived in Mexico, the first guy who tried to chat me up said I was the spitting image of Borola Tacuche, which isn't too far from the truth). The reality, as it sadly tends to be, was halfway between these imaginary extremes: neither crumbling palace nor tenement house, but an old four-story building in the Calle República de El Salvador, near the church of San Felipe Neri.
Carlos Coffeen Serpas was more than forty years old, and no one I knew had seen him for a long time. What did I think of his drawings? I didn't like them much, to be perfectly honest. Figures, almost always very thin, and sickly-looking too: that was what he used to draw. Flying or buried figures, sometimes staring out into the eyes of the viewer, and usually gesturing in some way. For example, holding a finger to their lips to request silence. Or covering their eyes. Or holding up an open, unlined hand. That's all I can say. I don't know much about art.
Anyway, there I was, in front of the gate of Lilian's building, and while I was thinking about her son's drawings, which probably had the distinction of being the cheapest on the Mexican art market, I was also thinking about what I would say to Coffeen when he opened the door to me.
Lilian lived on the top floor. I rang the bell a number of times. No one answered and for a moment I thought that Coffeen Serpas must be in some bar nearby, because he was reputed to be an incorrigible alcoholic. I was about to leave when something, I couldn't say exactly what, an intuition possibly, or perhaps just my natural curiosity, exacerbated by the time of night and by having walked all that way, prompted me to cross the street and take up a position on the opposite sidewalk. The lights in the windows on the fourth floor were out, but after a few seconds I thought I saw a curtain move, as if the wind that wasn't blowing through the streets of Mexico City was being channeled through the interior of that darkened apartment. And that was too much for me.