When we got back to the house I poured us out a whiskey each, as a nightcap, and my friend lapsed into silent contemplation of the engravings by Cavernas hanging on the wall. I put his glass on the table and stretched out in an armchair without saying a word. The dentist scrutinized his engravings, first with his hands on his hips, then resting his chin on one hand and finally ruffling his hair. I laughed. So did he. For a moment I thought he was going to take one of the pictures down and proceed to destroy it methodically. But instead he sat down next to me and drank his whiskey. Then we turned in.
We didn't get much sleep. About five hours. I dreamed of young Ramirez's house. I saw it standing in the middle of Mexico's wastelands, plains, and garbage dumps, exactly as it was, bare of all ornamentation. Just as I had seen it, a few hours before, at the end of that supremely literary night. And for barely a second I understood the mystery of art and its secret nature. But then somehow the corpse of the old Indian woman who had died of gum cancer came into the dream, and that's the last thing I can remember. I think her wake was being held in Ramirez's house.
When I woke up I told the dentist about my dream, or what I could remember of it. You're not looking too good, he said. He wasn't looking too good himself, although I chose not to point this out. I soon realized that he needed some time on his own. When I announced that I was going for a walk around the city, I saw a look of relief on his face. That afternoon I went to the movies and fell asleep halfway through the film. I dreamed that we were committing suicide or forcing others to commit suicide. When I got back to my friend's house, he was waiting for me. We went out to dinner and tried to talk about what had happened the night before. It was useless. We ended up talking about some friends from Mexico City, people we had thought we knew but who had in fact turned out to be perfect strangers. Surprisingly, it was a pleasant evening.
The next day, Saturday, I went with him to his clinic, where he had a couple of hours' work to do for the cooperative. Community service, he said in a resigned sort of way as we got into his car. I was thinking of returning to Mexico City on Sunday and my conscience was telling me I should spend as much time as possible with my friend because I didn't know how long it would be before I would see him again.
For a long time (I couldn't even hazard a guess at how long now) we waited for a patient to turn up, my friend the dentist, a dentistry student, and I, but no one came.
DANCE CARD
1. My mother read Neruda to us in Quilpuй, Cauquenes, and Los Angeles. 2. A single book: Veinte poemas de amor y una canciуn desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1961. On the title page, a drawing of Neruda and a note explaining that this edition commemorated the printing of the millionth copy. Had a million copies of Veinte poemas already been printed in 1961? Or did the note refer to all of Neruda's published works? The first, I fear, although both possibilities are disturbing, and unimaginable now. 3. My mother's name is written on the second page of the book: Maria Victoria Avalos Flores. A somewhat hasty examination of the handwriting leads me to the improbable conclusion that someone else wrote her name there. It is not my father's handwriting, nor that of anyone I know. Whose is it then? After closely scrutinizing the signature blurred by the years, I am obliged to admit, albeit skeptically, that it is my mother's. 4. In 1961 and 1962, my mother was not as old as I am now; she hadn't turned 35, and was working in a hospital. She was young and full of life. 5. This copy of Veinte poemas, my copy, has traveled a long way. From town to town in southern Chile, from house to house in Mexico City, and then to three cities in Spain. 6. The book didn't always belong to me, of course.
First it was my mother's. She gave it to my sister, and when my sister left Girona and went to Mexico, she passed it on to me. Of the books my sister left me, my favorites were the science fiction and the complete works (up to that point) of Manuel Puig, which I had given her, and re-read after she went away. 7. By that stage I didn't like Neruda anymore. Especially not Veinte poemas de amor! 8. In 1968, my family moved to Mexico City. Two years later, in 1970, I met Alejandro Jodorowski, who, for me, was the Archetype of the Artist. I waited for him outside a theater (he was directing a production of Zarathustra, with Isela Varga) and said I wanted him to teach me how to make films. I then became a frequent visitor at his house. I don't think I was a good student. Jodorowski asked me how much I spent a week on cigarettes. Quite a bit, I said (I've always smoked like a chimney). He told me to stop smoking and spend the money on Zen meditation classes with Ejo Takata. All right, I said. I went along for a few days, but during the third session I decided it wasn't for me. 9. I parted company with Ejo Takata in the middle of a Zen meditation session. When I tried to slip away he came at me brandishing a wooden stick, the one he used on the students who asked to be hit. What he would do was hold out the stick; the students would say yes or no, and if the response was affirmative, he'd let them have a couple of whacks, and the sound would echo in the dim room hazy with incense. 10. On this occasion, however, he didn't ask me first. His attack was precipitate and stentorian. I was sitting next to a girl, near the door, and Ejo was at the back of the room. I thought he had his eyes shut and wouldn't hear me leaving. But the bastard heard and threw himself at me shouting the Zen equivalent of banzai. 11. My father was a heavyweight amateur boxing champion. His unchallenged reign was restricted to southern Chile. I never liked boxing, but had been taught since I was a kid; there was always a pair of boxing gloves in the house, whether in Chile or in Mexico. 12. When Master Ejo Takata threw himself at me shouting, he probably didn't mean to do me any harm, or expect me to defend myself automatically. Normally when he whacked his followers with that stick it was to dissipate their nervous tension. But I wasn't suffering from nervous tension; I just wanted to get out of there once and for all. 13. If you think you're being attacked, you defend yourself; it's only natural, especially when you're seventeen, especially in Mexico City. Ejo Takata was Nerudian in his ingenuity. 14. Jodorowski was to thank for Ejo Takata's presence in Mexico, so he said. At one stage Takata used to go looking for drug addicts in the jungles of Oaxaca, mostly North Americans who hadn't been able to find their way back from a hallucinogenic trip. 15. My experience with Takata, however, didn't make me give up smoking. 16. One of the things I liked about Jodorowski was the way, whenever he talked about Chilean intellectuals (usually in critical terms), he would include me among them. That was a big boost to my confidence, although naturally I had no intention whatsoever of resembling the said intellectuals. 17. One afternoon, I can't remember how, we got onto the topic of Chilean poetry. He said that the greatest Chilean poet was Nicanor Parra. He recited one of Nicanor's poems straightaway, and another, and then one more. Jodorowski recited well but I wasn't impressed by the poems. At that stage I was a highly sensitive young man, as well as being ridiculous and full of myself, and I declared that Chile's finest poet was, without any doubt, Pablo Neruda. All the rest, I added, are midgets. The discussion must have lasted about half an hour. Jodorowski brandished arguments from Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, and Madame Blavatski, went on to talk about Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, then Topor, Arrabal, and himself. I remember him saying that Nicanor, on his way somewhere, had stayed at his house. In this statement I glimpsed a childlike pride which since then I have noticed again and again in the majority of writers. 18. In one of his books Bataille says that tears are the ultimate form of communication. I started crying, not in a normal, ordinary way, letting the tears roll smoothly down my cheeks, but wildly, in spurts, more or less like Alice in Wonderland, shedding gallons of tears. 19. As I left Jodorowski's house I realized I would never return, and that hurt as much as what he had said, and I went on crying in the street. More dimly, I also realized that never again would I have a master as charming as that gentleman thief and consummate con man. 20. But what dismayed me most of all was my poorly argued, rather pathetic defense (a defense it was, nevertheless) of Pablo Neruda, when all I had read of his were the