To put it plainly: the soldier and I remained as still as statues in the women's bathroom on the
fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, and that was all. Then I heard his footsteps receding, I heard the door shutting, and my raised legs resumed their original position as if of their own initiative.
The birth was over.
I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there.
I know that it was starting to get dark when I came out of the stall. My extremities had gone numb. There was a rock in my stomach and my chest hurt. There was gauze or a kind of veil in front of my eyes. There was a buzzing of blowflies or bees or wasps in my ears or in my mind. I felt ticklish and sleepy at the same time. But in fact I was more awake than ever. The situation was, admittedly, unfamiliar, but I knew what to do.
I knew where my duty lay.
I climbed up to the only window in the bathroom and peered out. I saw a lone soldier far off in the distance. I saw the silhouette or the shadow of a tank, although on reflection I suspected that it might have been the shadow of a tree. It was like the portico of portico of Latin or Greek literature. Ah, how I love Greek literature, from Sappho to George Seferis! I saw the wind sweeping through the university as if to savor the last of the daylight.
And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew that I had to resist. So I sat down on the tiles of the women's bathroom and, before the last rays of sunlight faded, read three more of Pedro Garfias's poems, then shut the book and shut my eyes and said: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, resist.
That's all.
Then I began to think about my past as I am doing now. As I went back through the dates, the rhombus shattered in a space of speculative desperation, images rose from the bottom of the lake, no one could stop them emerging from that pitiful body of water, unlit by sun or moon, and time folded and unfolded itself like a dream. The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point. I mean: I started thinking about my past as if I was thinking about my present, future, and past, all mixed together and dormant in the one tepid egg, the enormous egg of some inner bird (an archaeopteryx?) nestled on a bed of smoking rubble. For one thing I started thinking about the teeth I had lost, although at the time, in September 1968, I still had all my teeth, which is odd, to say the least, even on reflection. Nevertheless I thought about them, those four front teeth I lost one by one over the years because I didn't have the money or the inclination or the time to go to the dentist. And it was strange to be thinking about my teeth, because in a sense I didn't care that I had lost the four most important teeth in a woman's mouth, and yet in another sense their loss had left a deep wound in my being, a burning wound that was necessary and unnecessary, absurd. Even now, when I think about it, I still can't understand. Anyway, I lost my teeth in Mexico, where I had lost so many other things, and although from time to time friendly or at least well-meaning voices would say to me, Get some dentures, Auxilio, we'll take up a collection to buy you some, Auxilio, I always knew that the gap would go on gaping to the end like a wound, and I didn't pay them much attention, although I didn't refuse outright.
The loss gave rise to a new habit. From then on, whenever I talked or laughed, I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand, a gesture that, as I soon discovered, was taken up and imitated in certain circles. I lost my teeth but not my discretion, my tact, my sense of propriety. The Empress Josephine, it is said, had enormous black cavities in her back teeth, but that did not diminish her
charm by one iota. She covered her mouth with a handkerchief or a fan. In my lowlier station as a denizen of Mexico DF, that skyward and subterranean city, I placed the palm of my hand before my lips and laughed and spoke freely throughout the long Mexican nights. For those who made my acquaintance at the time, I must have seemed like a conspirator or some strange creature, half Shulamite, half albino bat. But that didn't matter to me. There's Auxilio, said the poets, and there I was, sitting at the table of a novelist with delirium tremens, or of a suicidal journalist, laughing and talking, whispering and gossiping, and no one could say: I have seen the wounded mouth of the woman from Uruguay, I have seen the bare gums of the only person who stayed in the university when it was occupied by the riot police in September 1968. They could say: Auxilio talks like a conspirator, bending close and covering her mouth. They could say: Auxilio looks you in the eyes when she speaks. They could say (with a laugh): How is it that Auxilio, who is constantly fiddling with a book or a glass of tequila, always manages to raise one hand to her mouth, in that spontaneous, natural-seeming way? What's the secret of her prodigious dexterity? Now, since I'm not planning to take that secret to the grave (where there's no point taking anything), I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love. I lost my teeth on the altar of human sacrifice.
Four
But my teeth, which still hadn't fallen out, were not all that I thought about. For example, I thought about young Arturo Belano, who was sixteen or seventeen when I met him in 1970. I was the mother of the new Mexican poetry and he was just a kid who couldn't hold his liquor, but he was proud that Salvador Allende had been elected president of his faraway Chile.
I met him. I met him at a rowdy gathering of poets in a bar called the Encrucijada Veracruzana, a squalid hole or dive where a motley bunch of young and not-so-young hopefuls used to get together now and then. He was the youngest hopeful of the lot. And the only one who had written a novel at the age of seventeen. A novel that was later lost or consumed by flames or perhaps it ended up in one of the huge garbage dumps that surround Mexico City; in any case I read it, with reservations at first, but then with pleasure, not because it was good, no, what I liked were the signs of determination on each page, the touching determination of an adolescent: the novel was bad, but he was good. So I made friends with him. It helped that we were the only two South Americans among so many Mexicans. I made friends with him, I went over and talked to him, covering my mouth with my hand, and he looked me in the eye, looked at the back of my hand, and didn't ask why I was covering my mouth, but I think he guessed straight away, unlike the others, I mean he guessed the deeper reason, the ultimate dignity that obliged me to cover my lips, and it didn't matter to him.
That night I made friends with him, in spite of the difference in our ages, and all the other differences! I was the one who introduced him, some weeks later, to the poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. I took him home once, sick and drunk, holding him up as he clung to my bony shoulder, and I made friends with his mother and his father, and his sister, who was so nice, they were all so nice.