“Diodorus Pilon.”
“Diodorus of Sicily? Nice name, very original,” said the voice. “Wait a minute, I’m going to write it down.” I heard a kind of laugh and I guessed it was a joke. “All right, Diodorus, you’re young and you’re a poet, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how old you are, if you don’t mind.”
“Seventeen.”
“Do you have a book out yet? Have you published poems in a literary magazine? Newspapers, broadsheets, bulletins, literary supplements, church newsletters?”
“Actually, no. None of my poems have ever been published.”
“Do you have a book in the works? Do you have plans to publish something—anything—soon?”
“No.”
“Okay, okay. Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up…”
I heard a crunch. As if someone had split a slender plank of wood with one blow. I heard static. Muffled curses and grumbling. Then silence. Outside of the booth, in the street, everything seemed normal. I imagined the neighbors and their children sleeping. I imagined kids who lived on that street I had never seen before. I saw them coming out in the morning on their way to school or college, dressed in miniskirts or prestigious uniforms. I thought about my mother, who was waiting for me at the Coves.
“Do you have any idea who I am, Diodorus?” asked the voice all of a sudden.
“No.”
“Not the slightest idea?”
“Maybe this is a joke,” I ventured.
“Not even close. This isn’t a joke. You really don’t have the slightest idea why we’ve called you?”
“You didn’t actually call me. I was just passing by, and I happened to pick up the phone.”
“No, Diodorus. We were calling you. We knew that if you were walking by a phone and it rang, you would answer it. We’ve called lots of public phones, of course. All of the phones on the four or five routes you might have taken tonight.”
“This is the first time I’ve been on this street.”
“It’s called Elm Street. Though I don’t think there are any elms on it.”
“You’re right, there are only pines.”
“But it’s a pretty street. Anyway. Let me ask you the same question again. Do you have any idea who we are?”
“No,” I confessed.
“Would you like to know? Do you want to hear our proposal?”
“I’m dying to hear it,” I said.
“We belong… No, ‘belong’ isn’t the right word, because we don’t belong to anyone or anything… We really only belong to ourselves. And sometimes, Diodorus, even that isn’t certain. Do I sound a trifle moralistic?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.
“Not at all. I agree completely with everything you’ve said. Man belongs only to himself.”
“Well, that’s not quite it, but close. I think we’ve gotten a little off track.”
“You were going to tell me the name of your organization,” I said, helpfully.
“Oh yes. We’re the Clandestine Surrealist Group.”
“The Clandestine Surrealist Group.”
“Or the Surrealist Group in Clandestinity. The CSG, for short.”
“Do you belong to the CSG?” I shouted in excitement.
“Let’s say that I serve in the CSG. Have you ever heard of us?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Not many people have, Diodorus, that’s part of our strategy. I know you’ve heard of surrealism, haven’t you?”
“Of course. My mentor, Roger Bolamba, was a friend of the great south Guianan poet Régis Saint-Clair, about whom Breton said: ‘His horse is the night.’”
“Is that true?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up.”
I heard a voice cursing in a language that definitely wasn’t French. It had to be some Slavic or Balkan language.
“Régis Saint-Clair… Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair… I’ve got it. South Guianan poet, member of the surrealists from 1946 to 1950. Born at Shark Point, lived many years in Africa. Author of some twenty books celebrating negritude, Creole food, the mental landscape of exile… The mental landscape of exile—who wrote that, I’d like to know… At the end of his career he returns to south Guiana, where he’s head of the National Library… Dies of natural causes at his Shark Point home. Is that the man?”
“Yes, sir. Régis Saint-Clair.”
“And you say he was a friend of your mentor, what was his name, Bolamba?”
“Roger Bolamba. They were as close as dirt and fingernail. Pardon the expression.”
“Bury your mentors, Diodorus. Now that you’re seventeen, I’d say that the moment has come.”
“I’ll think about it, sir,” I said, very excited for some reason.
“Now, where were we? You were saying that you’re familiar with surrealism, is that right?”
“The best poets in the world,” I said with conviction.
“Not just poets, Diodorus, painters and filmmakers too.”
“I love Buñuel.”
“But especially revolutionaries, Diodorus. Now listen up. There are prophets, seers, sages, sorcerers, necromancers, mediums. But those are really only disguises. Sometimes good disguises and sometimes clumsy disguises. But disguises all the same, do you follow me?”
“I follow you,” I said, uncertainly.
“And what do these disguises hide? They hide revolutionaries. Because that’s what it’s all about, do you see?”
“Yes,” I said. “Revolutionaries hide to make revolution.”
“No,” said the voice. “The revolution is made without disguises. Revolutionaries hide to prepare for revolution.”
“I understand.”
“And broadly speaking, that’s what the Clandestine Surrealist Group is. A surrealist group that nobody knows anything about. We need publicity,” he said, and he started to laugh. He didn’t laugh like a Frenchman but like a Pole or a Russian who has been living in Paris for a long time. “And that explains this sort-of proselytism, though that’s not quite the right word for it, this sort-of selection process, shall we say, that we conduct through phone calls.”
“So what about surrealism? The… official surrealism? Why doesn’t it take charge of the selection process?” I asked.
“Official surrealism is a whorehouse, Diodorus. The stories I could tell you… Since Breton died, there’s no enduring that crowd. Don’t get me wrong. A few of them are good people, especially some of the widows, the surrealist widows tend to be exceptional people, but the vast majority are absolute twits. If it were up to me I’d hang them all from the lampposts of the Champs-Elysées.”
“I agree,” I said.
“In fact,” said the voice, dreamily, “official surrealism, the usual worthy exceptions aside, is unaware of the existence of the CSG. To give you an idea, imagine a flesh-and-blood person like you or me living in a room, and living in the same room—though I don’t know whether ‘living’ is quite the word—is a ghost. Sharing the same scenery or surroundings. But they don’t see each other. It’s sad. It wasn’t like that at first, I guess. The surrealists and the clandestine surrealists knew one another. Sometimes they were friends. A few played on both teams: surrealists by day and clandestine surrealists by night. They had their in-jokes, the atmosphere was relaxed. Breton himself dropped a hint about the project, in an interview that’s fortunately forgotten today. He said maybe, maybe, maybe the time was coming for surrealism to return to the catacombs. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Luckily no one took him seriously. What were we talking about?”
“About the telephone selection process, I think.”
“It’s our way of recruiting people. We can call anywhere in the world. We have a method for fooling the phone companies and not spending anything on the calls. There are CSG associates who are technology whizzes, Diodorus, and this is only the beginning. Then we mark the phone with certain symbols so it can be used for free by immigrants who want to talk to their families in Senegal or Petit Guiana. We never use that phone again. We’ve got our security measures. Like the urban guerrillas of São Paulo, to give you an idea.”