2.
The Grub
He looked like a grub, with his straw hat and a Bali hanging from his lower lip. Every morning, I’d see him sitting on a bench in the Alameda as I went into the Librería de Cristal to browse, and when I raised my head, looking out through the bookstore wall, which really was made of glass, there he was, stock-still, staring into space.
I guess we ended up getting used to each other. I’d show up at eight-thirty in the morning and he’d be there already, sitting on a bench, just smoking and staring into space. I never saw him with a newspaper, a sandwich, a beer. Once, watching him from the French literature shelves, I imagined he must sleep in the Alameda on a bench, or in some doorway on a nearby street, but then I decided that he was too clean to be sleeping on the street and he must have a room in a boardinghouse. He was a creature of habit, like me, I observed. I got up early, ate breakfast with my mother, father, and sister, pretended that I was going to school, and took a bus to the center of the city, where I devoted the first half of the morning to books and walking around and the second half to movies and sex.
I usually bought books at the Librería de Cristal and the Librería el Sótano. If I was short of money, then it was the former, where there was always a bargain table. If I was flush, then it was the latter. If I had no money, I stole indiscriminately from one or the other, slipping a book or two among my textbooks. Either way, a visit to the Librería de Cristal and the Librería el Sótano (across from the Alameda and located in a basement, as the name indicates) was mandatory. Sometimes I arrived before the stores opened and then I would stop at a sandwich cart, buy a ham sandwich and a cup of mango juice, and wait. Sometimes—after my amazing breakfast—I wrote. All of this went on until ten, which was when some of the movie houses had their first show of the day. I preferred European movies, though some inspired mornings I would take my chances on new Mexican cinema.
It was a French movie I saw the most, I think. Two girls live alone in a house in the middle of nowhere. The blonde has split up with her boyfriend and, on top of that (on top of her suffering, I mean), she has personality problems: she thinks she’s in love with her friend. The redhead is younger, more innocent, more irresponsible; in other words, she’s happier (though I was young, innocent, and irresponsible back then and I was convinced that I was deeply unhappy). One day, a fugitive sneaks into the house and takes them captive. The funny thing is that the break-in happens on the very night that the blonde has decided to make love with the redhead and then commit suicide. The fugitive gets in through a window, creeps around the house with a knife in his hand, comes into the redhead’s bedroom, tackles her, ties her up, interrogates her, asks how many other people live in the house. The redhead says it’s just her and the blonde, and he gags her. But the blonde isn’t in her room and the fugitive looks all over the house, getting more and more nervous, until finally he finds her on the basement floor, out cold, evidently having swallowed a whole medicine cabinet full of pills. The fugitive isn’t a killer, or anyway he doesn’t kill women, and he saves the blonde: he makes her throw up, brews her a pot of coffee, etcetera. Then the days go by and the women and the fugitive begin to grow close. The fugitive tells them his story: he’s an ex-con, an ex–bank thief, his wife has left him. The women are cabaret dancers and one afternoon or night (nobody knows exactly what time it is since they’ve been keeping the curtains drawn), they put on a play: the blonde wraps herself in a magnificent bearskin and the redhead pretends to be an animal tamer. At first the bear obeys, but then it rebels and little by little it tears the clothes off the redhead with its claws. At last she falls in defeat, naked, and the bear is on top of her. No, it doesn’t kill her; it makes love to her. And here comes the strangest part: after watching this act, the fugitive falls in love with the blonde, not the redhead; in other words, the bear. The ending is predictable but poetic: one rainy night, after the fugitive kills two ex-comrades, he and the blonde flee to parts unknown and the redhead is left sitting in an armchair, reading, giving them a head start before she calls the police. The book the redhead is reading, I realized the third time I saw the movie, is Camus’s The Fall. I also saw some Mexican movies of more or less the same type: beautiful women who are kidnapped by criminal types; escaped prisoners who snatch rich girls and at the end of a night of passion are riddled with bullets; beautiful maids who start from zero and reach the zenith of wealth and power. Back then almost all movies made in Mexico were erotic thrillers, though there was some erotic horror and erotic comedy too. The horror movies followed the classic line of Mexican horror established in the fifties, as emblematic of my new country’s culture as the muralist painters. Featuring the Saint, the Mad Scientist, the Vampire Cowboy, or the Innocent Girl, they were seasoned with modern nudes (preferably unknown American or European actresses or the occasional Argentine ingenue), explicit sex scenes, and a cruelty bordering on the risible and the unforgivable. Erotic comedy wasn’t my thing.
One morning, as I was looking for a book in the Librería el Sótano, I saw that a scene from a film was being shot and I went over to investigate. I recognized Jacqueline Andere. It was the first time I’d seen one of my movie legends in person. When I went to the movies alone I would sit in the front row and cross my legs. With my left hand I rubbed my penis through my pants until I came. The only problem was syncing my orgasms with the best scenes in the movie, which wasn’t so hard when I was seeing something for the second or third time, but could be truly agonizing on a first viewing. When I saw Barbarella, for example, I came right away (during the striptease in the spaceship) and when I saw Crimenes pasionales with an actress of Jacqueline Andere’s generation—totally gorgeous, one of my favorites, though I’ve forgotten her name—I put off coming for so long that it finally happened as the credits were rolling. My assiduous moviegoing gave me so much practice that in the end I became an expert in inscrutable masturbation and motionless orgasms (face frozen, maybe just a drop of sweat rolling down my cheek); the movements of my left hand were so precise and economical that today it strikes me as incredible. But anyway, that morning I spotted Jacqueline Andere and I had the dumb idea to go and ask for her autograph. I don’t know why; I’d never been interested in autographs. So when she finished shooting her scene I went up to her (it was a surprise to discover how short she was, even in her stiletto heels) and asked if I could get her autograph. It was one of the simplest things I’ve ever done. Nobody stopped me, nobody came between Jacqueline and me, nobody asked what I was doing there. For a second I thought that I could have kidnapped Jacqueline. Just the prospect of it made my hair stand on end. In the scene, she was walking along a path in the Alameda. When she was done, she stopped for a moment, as if she’d heard something, though none of the crew had said anything to her, and then she walked on toward the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where years later I would give a disastrous poetry reading (disastrous because of what happened at it and after it), and all I had to do was walk toward her. When I reached her, I stopped. She looked me up and down, her blond hair an ashy color that I had never seen before (it might have been dyed), her eyes big, almond shaped, sweet—but no, sweet isn’t the word; calm, incredibly calm, as if she was drugged or had flatlined or was an alien—and she said something that I didn’t understand.