And the first thing I said to his mother was: I haven't slept with your son, Mrs. Belano. That's just how I am, I like to be frank and forthright with frank and forthright people (although this inveterate habit of mine has caused me no end of grief). I lifted my hands and smiled, then lowered them again and spoke, and she looked at me as if I had just stepped out of her son's notebooks, the notebooks of Arturito Belano, who by then was sleeping it off in his cavelike bedroom. And she said: Of course not, Auxilio, but there's no need to call me Mrs., we must be nearly the same age. And I raised an eyebrow and fixed her with the bluer of my eyes, the right one, thinking: She's right, kid, we must be more or less the same age. I might have been three years younger than her, or two, or one, but basically we belonged to the same generation; the only difference was that she had an apartment and a job and a monthly salary and I didn't; the only difference was that I went out with young people and Arturito's mother went out with people her own age; the only difference was that she had two teenage children and I had none, but that didn't matter either because by then I had children too, in my own way, hundreds of them.
So I became a friend of the family. A family of traveling Chileans who had emigrated to Mexico in 1968. My year. And sometimes I would say to Arturo's mother: You know, when you were getting ready to move, I was shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the UNAM. I know, Auxilio. Funny, isn't it? Sure is. And we could go on like that for a fair while, at night, listening to music and talking and laughing.
I became a friend of the family. They invited me to stay at their apartment for long periods, a month, two weeks, or a month and a half, because at the time I had no money for a boarding house or a rooftop room and I had taken to wandering around, blown this way and that by the night winds that sweep the streets and avenues of Mexico City.
By day I busied myself at the university; by night I led a bohemian life, and slept, and gradually scattered my few belongings, leaving them in the houses and apartments of friends: my clothes, my books, my magazines, my photos. I, Remedios Varo, I, Leonora Carrington, I, Eunice Odio, I, Lilian Serpas (ah, poor Lilian Serpas, I still have to tell you about her). And my friends, of course, would eventually get tired of me and ask me to leave. And I would leave. I would crack a joke and leave. I would try to make light of it and leave. I would hang my head and leave. I would give them a kiss on the cheek and say thanks and leave. Some spiteful people say that I wouldn't go. They're lying. I would leave as soon as I was asked. Maybe, on one occasion, I shut myself in the bathroom and shed a few tears. Some gossipmongers say that I had a weakness for bathrooms. They couldn't be further from the truth. Bathrooms were a nightmare for me, although since September 1968, I had grown accustomed to nightmares. You can get used to anything. I like bathrooms. I like my friends' bathrooms. I like to take a shower and face the day with a clean body, who doesn't? I also like to shower before going to bed. Arturito's mother used to say to me: Use the clean towel I've put out for you, Auxilio, but I never used towels. I preferred to get dressed while my skin was still wet and let my body warmth evaporate the droplets of water. People used to find that funny. I found it funny too. Although I could also have gone crazy.
Five
But one thing stopped me from going crazy: I never lost my sense of humor. I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.
And I was there with them because I had nothing either, except my memories.
I could remember. I was still shut up in that women's bathroom in the faculty, lodged in the month of September 1968, and that was why I could be a dispassionate observer, although sometimes, thankfully, I did take part in the games of passion and love. Not all of my relationships were platonic. I slept with the poets. Not often, but from time to time I slept with one or the other. Despite appearances to the contrary, I was a woman and not a saint. And I did sleep with a number of them.
Usually it was a one-night stand: some drunken youth I led off to a bed or an armchair in an unoccupied room, while barbaric music I would rather not recall went on booming next door. When, occasionally, against the odds, it lasted longer than a night or a weekend, I would end up being more a psychotherapist than a lover. But I'm not complaining. Once my teeth went I was timid about kissing and being kissed, and how long can love last without kisses? Even so, I was hungry for sex. A hunger, that's the only word for it. You can't make love without that hunger. You need an opportunity too. But the hunger is the main thing.
Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. I met a girl at the Faculty. It was during my theater phase. She was a charming girl. She had finished her philosophy degree. She was very cultured and elegant. I was sleeping in a seat at the faculty theater (a precarious institution to say the least) and dreaming of my childhood or of aliens. She sat down beside me. The theater, of course, was empty: on the stage a pitiful troupe was rehearsing a play by Garcia Lorca. At some point I woke up, and she said to me: You're Auxilio Lacouture, aren't you, in such a friendly way that I liked her immediately. She had a slightly hoarse voice, and black, not very long hair, combed back. Then she said something funny or maybe I did, and we started laughing, quietly, so the director wouldn't hear us; he'd been a friend of mine in '68, but had since become a bad director and he knew it, which made him indiscriminately bitter. We left together and went out into the streets of Mexico City.
Her name was Elena and she bought me a coffee. She said she had a lot of things to tell me. She said she had been wanting to meet me for a long time. As we were leaving the faculty I realized she had a limp. Elena the philosopher. She had a Volkswagen and she took me to a café on Insurgentes Sur. I had never been there before. It was a lovely place, very expensive, but Elena had money and she really wanted to talk to me, although in the end I did all the talking. She listened and laughed and seemed happy, but she didn't say much. When we went our separate ways, I thought: What did she have to tell me, what did she want to talk about?
From then on we used to meet fairly regularly, in the theater or the corridors of the faculty, usually in the evening, as night was falling over the university, a time when some people don't know where to go or what to do with themselves. I would meet Elena and she would invite me for a drink or a meal in a restaurant on Insurgentes Sur. Once she invited me to her house in Coyoacán, a gorgeous house, tiny but gorgeous, very feminine and very intellec-tual, full of books about philosophy and theater, because Elena thought that philosophy and theater were closely related. She told me about that once, although I hardly understood a word she said. For me, theater is closer to poetry, but for her it's linked to philosophy-each to her own. And then all of a sudden she wasn't around. I don't know how much time went by. Months, maybe. Naturally I asked the faculty secretaries what had happened to Elena. Was she sick or traveling? Did they have any news of her? But no one could give me a convincing answer. One afternoon I decided to go to her house, but I got lost. I never get lost! Or at least not since September 1968. Before that, I did occasionally, not very often, lose my way in the labyrinth of Mexico City. But not after 1968. So there I was, searching for Elena's house, in vain, and I said to myself, There's something funny going on here, Auxilio, my girl, open your eyes and keep them peeled, or you might overlook the key to this story.