Locked away in the peace of these deserts,
With a small, learned gathering of books
I live conversing with those expired
My eyes listening to the resting dead.
Guzmán’s periods of exile, like those of Quevedo, were authentic and obligatory. Both of them were men of action who were condemned, from time to time, to quiescence — a curse for which we, their readers, should be selfishly grateful. Sometimes I feel a bit like an exile, but for the most part I have to admit that I’m really nothing more than a high-class wetback.
My wife and son should have returned by now. If they get home any later we’re going to have to go out for dinner.
8:35 P.M. I got back to the house a while ago. I went to the pool but no one else was there and it was terribly boring. I can’t read either, I’m too worried that they’re not back yet. I turn on the TV to catch the baseball game without anybody suggesting we change the channel and watch cartoons instead. I open the giant-size bag of Tostitos and pour a Diet Coke. The silence has become unbearable so I turn up the volume. The poet Julio Trujillo is right when he says that baseball is an Odyssean sport: the batter has to circle round the archipelago of the bases to get back home.
Between innings I step out onto the balcony. I see that all the neighbors who hate the ocean without realizing it have returned home. Now they’re out taking walks to make their vacations tolerable. I wonder if my family’s ship might have had engine troubles and sunk.
11:15 P.M. The game’s finished. They still haven’t gotten home or called.
1:00 A.M. I can’t get to sleep. I take out the trash and check to make sure all the outside lights are on: maybe in the dark they couldn’t recognize the house and just drove past. Coming back inside I see a sign above the door I hadn’t noticed before: Ithaca.
HEAVY WEATHER
1. AIR
Things out of order are restless; restored to order, they are at rest.
The first things that went flying by the window were newspapers and plastic bags. This wouldn’t have been unusual for autumn, but we were sitting in a third-floor classroom at the time. We were talking about how Rubén Darío had been abandoned as a baby, and I interrupted the discussion to comment on the disgusting weather found on the East Coast of the United States. My students just sat there, staring back at me with hostility — for my own sanity I’ve decided that they always look that way — so I simply continued with my lecture. By now we were talking about Darío’s arrival at Valparaíso, when something else went flying by the window; it might have been a tarp from a construction site, the hood of a car, or a calf. Instantly, the Wizard of Oz file in my mind clicked open and I proposed that we head downstairs to the basement and finish class in one of the lecture halls there. They followed my instructions — for the first time — with military discipline.
The Foreign Languages building where I teach usually empties out around three o’clock each afternoon. The hallways end up littered with garbage, like in the aftermath of a summary execution: open notebooks, disposable cups rimmed with lipstick traces, a sweatshirt or cap flung into the corner. The hastily abandoned classrooms exude the same feeling one must get while staring at the charred, smoking remains of a massacre. The whole place smells like a bombed-out city. To avoid further distractions, I chose a windowless classroom, and managed to get as far as Darío’s move to Buenos Aires. I told them that as soon as the Nicaraguan poet stepped off the boat, the Spanish language was never the same, that the known world ended right then and there, and that another one — possibly better, but certainly different — began. Darío, I declared, in a rapture of lyricism that earned me a variety of odd looks, from hostile to confused, was the writer who’d flushed all the old crap down the toilet.
After that, we managed a fairly decent review of several of Darío’s poems, with time still left for me to discuss the details of an assignment they had to turn in for the next class. As always, I thanked them for their patience. Nobody said you’re welcome, so I figured they’d had enough of me.
After class, I took my time gathering up my papers and books to avoid running into one of my students at the bus stop or, later, on the Metro. I never really know what to say when I do. I feel as though I’m going to end up sounding like a pervert, no matter what I say. Adjusting my glasses on the bridge of my nose every few moments, I pretended to be absorbed with my roster. I briefly looked over my notes again and then, with exaggerated care, packed everything into my briefcase. I left the building only when I was sure they’d all melted away into the sprawling campus.
Outside it was odd to see no one sitting on the patio. Thanks to its comfortable tables in the shade right outside a building frequented by foreign exchange students, it’s usually populated by packs of smokers. A heavy, humid breeze, more appropriate to August than the end of September, was stirring the astonishing amount of sodden trash left by the storm in the corners of the patio and all around the legs of the chairs. Then I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, and realized how uneasy I was already feeling.
Ever since the mournful days of the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the sound of ambulances fills me with an anxiety that I’m always slow to identify. For the better part of two weeks, sirens provided the only soundtrack to our paralyzed lives. I’ll never forget the mornings I spent as part of a team of senior high school students hauling and delivering food in Tepito, a neighborhood that had been completely destroyed. This is what Mexico City will look like when the gringos declare war on us again, El Pollo said to me. He was hard at work playing the role of emergency driver in the improvised ambulance we’d made out of his truck, sticking giant crosses of red tape to its sides. Afterward — as with Darío and tradition — nothing in Mexico was ever the same: we flushed the toilet on sixty years of half-assed tyranny. Although the older generations have a hard time accepting it, we had ourselves a real revolution, a la Hemingway: by carrying stretchers.
To get to the street that runs through the center of campus you have to traverse a long meadow bordered by oak trees. Normally this walk cheers me up when I’ve had enough of being an insignificant foreigner: teaching classes in Latin American literature at a gringo university is like cutting trees in a deserted forest with no one around to hear them fall. As I walked, I felt increasingly sure that something ominous was afoot: not a soul in sight on the paths, and the whining sirens were growing more intense as I approached the university’s main road. At that point I was still sufficiently unaware of events to be annoyed by the idea that, whatever had happened, the road would be clogged with terrible traffic and I’d end up taking forever to reach the Metro. I checked my pocket and made sure I had enough change to call my wife from a pay phone. I wanted to let her know that she should go ahead and give the kids dinner. I’d be home as soon as possible.
Which turned out to be the last ordinary worry I’d have, that evening: I got to the main drag only to find it closed off and deserted. The bus stop was encircled by yellow police tape. The ambulances sounded farther away now. Seized by a ferocious dread, I walked toward the student commons where the cafeterias, bookstores, and post office were located. All deserted. I walked the hallways, climbing and descending staircases. Everything was closed and lonely. In the main dining room the tables were covered with dozens of abandoned meals: half-eaten hamburgers, full cups of soda, plastic spoons navigating melted sundaes. At the reception desk, I rang the visitors’ bell over and over in a sort of hysteria.