Once I told them a story I had heard José Emilio telclass="underline" if Rubén Darío hadn't died so young, before reaching the age of fifty, Huidobro would certainly have got to know him, much as Ezra Pound got to know W. B. Yeats. Imagine it: Huidobro working as Dario's secretary. But the young poets were too young to be able to grasp how important the encounter between the old Yeats and the young Pound had been for poetry in English (and, in fact, for poetry all around the world), so they didn't realize how important the hypothetical encounter and the potential friendship between Darío and Huidobro might have been; they had no sense of the range of missed opportunities for poetry in our language. Because Darío, I dare say, would have taught Huidobro a great deal, but Huidobro would also have taught Darío a thing or two. That's how the relationship between master and disciple works: it is not only the disciple who learns. And since we're speculating, I believe, and so did Pacheco (with an innocent enthusiasm that is one of his great qualities), that, of the two, Darío would have learned more; he would have been able to bring Hispanic modernism to a close and begin something new, not the avant-garde as such, but an island, say, between modernism and the avant-garde, what we might now call the non-existent island, an island of words that never were, and could only have come into being (granted that this were even possible) after the imaginary encounter between Darío and Huidobro; and Huidobro himself, after his fruitful encounter with Darío, would have been able to found an even more vigorous avant-garde, what we might name the non-existent avant-garde, which, had it existed, would have transformed us and changed our lives. That's what I said to the young poets of Mexico (and Arturito Belano) when they were bad-mouthing José Emilio, but they didn't listen to me, or only to the anecdotes about the travels of Darío and Huidobro, their illnesses, their hospitals, but also the other kind of health they had, not condemned to fail prematurely, as so many things in Latin America fail.
And then I kept quiet while they went on bad-mouthing the poets of Mexico, the ones they were going to blow out of the water, and I thought about the dead poets, like Darío and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn't have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Darío instead. We had what we had.
And, at the risk of overstretching every imagination but my own, which is supreme in its elasticity, I will say that some nights my friends even seemed, for a second, to be the incarnations of those who had never come into existence: the Latin American poets who died in childhood, at the age of five or ten, or just a few months after they were born. This exercise in vision was difficult, and futile too, or so it seemed, but, by the purplish light of certain nights, I could see through the features of my friends to the little faces of the babies who never grew up. I saw the little angels they bury in shoeboxes in Latin America, or in little wooden coffins painted white. And sometimes I said to myself: These kids are our hope. But other times I thought: Some hope, a bunch of drunk kids-all they can do is run down José Emilio-a band of young drunkards versed in the art of hospitality but not in the art of verse.
And then the young poets of Mexico began to recite poetry in their deep but irreparably juvenile voices, and the lines they recited went blowing in the wind through the streets of Mexico City, and I began to cry, and they said, Auxilio's drunk (the fools, it takes a lot more than that to get me drunk), or, She's crying because what's-his-name left her, and I let them say whatever they liked. Or I argued with them. Or insulted them. Or got up from my chair and left without paying-I never paid, or hardly ever. I was the one who could see into the past and those who can see into the past never pay. But I could also see into the future and vision of that kind comes at a high price: life, sometimes, or sanity. So I figure I was paying, night after forgotten night, though nobody realized it; I was paying for everyone's round, the kids who would be poets and those who never would.
I left without paying, or so it seemed. I didn't have to pay because I could see the whirlwind of the past that swept like a breath of hot air through the streets of Mexico City, smashing the windows of the buildings. But I could also see the future from my obliterated cave in the fourth-floor women's bathroom, and for that I was paying with my life. So when I left I was paying after all, though nobody knew. I was paying for myself and for the young poets of Mexico and for the anonymous alcoholics of whatever bar we happened to be in that night. Off I went staggering through the streets of Mexico City, pursuing my elusive shadow, alone and tearful, feeling like the last Uruguayan on the planet, which I wasn't, of course, how egotistical, and although I was picking my way through craters illuminated by hundreds of moons, they were not the craters of planet Earth but those of Mexico, a distinction that might appear to be, but is not, quite devoid of sense.
And one night I had the feeling that someone was following me. I don't know where we had been. Maybe in a bar on the outskirts of La Villa, maybe at some dive in Colonia Guerrero. I can't remember. I only know that I kept on walking, making my way through the rubble, without paying much attention to the footsteps that were following in my footsteps, until suddenly the nocturnal sun went out, I stopped crying, came back to reality with a shudder and understood that the person following me, whoever it was, desired my death. Or my life. Or the tears I had shed on that hateful reality, as harsh as our often intractable tongue. And then I stopped and waited, and the steps that were echoing my steps stopped and waited too, and I looked around in the street for someone I knew, or a stranger I could run to, crying for help, who could take my arm and walk me to the nearest subway station or stay with me until I hailed a cab, but I couldn't see anyone. Or maybe I could. I saw something. I shut my eyes, then opened them, and I saw the white tiled walls of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor. Then I shut my eyes again and heard the wind sweeping through the campus around the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature with a diligence worthy of a higher enterprise. And I thought: History is like a horror story. And when I opened my eyes a shadow peeled away from a wall, moved onto the sidewalk about ten yards ahead, and began to come toward me, and I put my hand into my handbag, I mean my satchel from Oaxaca, and felt for my knife, which I always carried with me, as a precaution against urban emergencies, but the burning skin of my fingertips could feel only papers and books and magazines and even clean underwear (washed by hand, without soap, with water and sheer willpower, in one of the sinks of that dreamlike, omnipresent fourth-floor bathroom), but not the knife, ah, my friends, now there's another recurring and terribly Latin American nightmare: being unable to find your weapon; you know where you put it, but it's not there.