We would arrive at Café Iris around midnight, walking side by side, her hand constantly in my pocket. Our entrance would interrupt the chattering of the drunks there. Stella wore a different form of makeup every day, and it was always spectacular. There was always some impertinent man who would come over, not deigning to acknowledge that I existed, and try to seduce her by means of audacious groping. His mission would be curtailed by a punch to the chin. The waiters would pick up the unconscious fool and return him to his table. When he awoke, cured of his drunkenness, the man would order us a bottle of wine, making discrete apologetic gestures. Once they had learned the lesson of the beast, the men would stop feeling her up with their eyes and dive back into discussions that had nothing to do with reason. There was always someone standing up and reciting a poem, half-singing. Stella stuck cotton wool in my ears, required me to stay still like a model posing for a painter, and with her eyes fixed on mine wrote with dizzying speed, filling page after page without looking down at her notebook.
One night, tired of this immobility, I proposed a game: we would observe strangers and, without saying anything, each write on a sheet of paper what the person did, their characteristics, their social status, their economic status, their degree of intelligence, their sexual capacity, their emotional problems, their family structure, their possible diseases, and the corresponding death that would result. We played this game a great many times. We achieved such a spiritual amalgam that our answers started to be the same. This does not mean we were able to draw a correct portrait of the unknown person, which we would not have been able to verify, but at the very least we knew that there was telepathic communication between the two of us. Eventually, every time we were in someone else’s presence, a mere fleeting glance between us was enough for us to know how we should act.
Anything that is different attracts the attention of ordinary citizens and also attracts their aggression. A couple like us was unsettling, a magnet for destructive people who were envious of the happiness of others. The ambiance of Café Iris was becoming insupportable. The clientele were directing more and more jeers, aggressive praise, sarcastic comments, and stares imbued with crude sexuality toward us.
“Enough of Iris,” Stella said to me. “Let’s find a new place.”
“But where will we go? It’s the only all night café.”
“I’ve heard there’s a bar on San Diego Street, the Dumb Parrot, that stays open until dawn.”
“You’re crazy Stella, that’s an awful place, the worst people go there! They say there’s at least one knife fight there every night.”
I could not dissuade her. “If Orpheus seduced the beasts, we can make that Dumb Parrot sing a mass!”
After midnight, the wine had plunged the sinister patrons of that grisly, dark place into a bovine stupor. My arrival, with the poet on my arm, wearing her most extravagant makeup ever, caused no reaction. Stella was so different from the worn-out whores who beached themselves there, a being from another planet, that they were simply unable to see her. They kept on drinking as if nothing had happened. Offended in her exhibitionism, she decided to drink standing at the bar. I, in normal attire, gradually began to attract some notice. After half an hour, when Stella, having finished her first liter of beer was ordering a second, four men approached me. I did my best to hide the fear that came over me, forcing my face to become an expressionless mask. I tossed a crumpled bill on the counter and said, in a tone that was natural but loud enough for the four men to hear me, “I’ll settle the tab now. This is all I have left.” I left the change, a few small coins, on a saucer. The four curious men, all looking cynical, took the coins and dropped them in their pockets.
“And you, young man, where are you from?”
“I’m Chilean, like you. What happened is that my grandparents were immigrants, they came from Russia.”
“Russian? Comrade?” Sly muttering. “And where do you work?”
“Well, I don’t work. I’m an artist, a poet. ”
“Ah, a poet, like that pot-bellied Neruda! Come on, have a drink with us and read us a poem!”
Stella still seemed to be invisible to them. Their lewd glances were directed at me. They exuded the sexuality of prison inmates. My youthful white skin turned them on. I drank from a glass of sour wine. I started to improvise a poem. The clientele turned their attention toward me.
Where there are ears but there is no song
in this world that dissipates
and in which existence is given to those who do not deserve it
I am much more my footprints than my steps.
In the midst of reciting I saw that all eyes were now on Stella, and no one was listening to me. Determined to steal my audience, my friend was impaling her arm with a large hairpin that she had taken from her sequin-covered purse. Without any sign of pain, she slowly pushed the pin through until it emerged on the other side of her arm. I was fascinated as well. I had not known that the poet had the skills of a fakir. Once she was sure she had captured the patrons’ attention, she began to recite a poem in an insulting tone while lifting up her shirt, millimeter by millimeter.
I am the guardian, you are the punished men
the farmhands with oblique gestures
from whom, as you engender false furrows,
the seed flees in terror!
She now showed her perfect breasts, accusing the offended drunks with her erect nipples, which she moved in a provocative semicircular motion. If I have ever in my life thought that I was going to defecate out of fear, it was on that occasion. Like a volcano beginning a devastating eruption, these dark men were beginning to stand up, reaching into their pockets for the knives they carried at all times. Their hatred was mixed with bestial desire. We were about to be raped and eviscerated. Stella, who had a deep, masculine voice, took in a deep breath and let out a deafening yell that froze them all for an instant: “Stop, macaques, respect the avenging vagina!” I took advantage of their bewilderment to grab her by the arm and make her jump with me through the open window. We ran toward the well-lit streets of the city center like hares being pursued by a pack of raging predators.
We reached the Alameda de las Delicias. At that hour of the night there was not a soul around. We leaned our backs against the trunk of one of the great trees that lined the avenue, catching our breath. Stella, reeling with laughter, pulled the pin out of her arm. Her laughter was contagious, and I started laughing as well, until I shook. Suddenly, our joy vanished. We realized that a strange shadow was covering us. We looked up. Above our heads, a woman was hanging from a branch. The light of a neon sign tinged the suicide’s hair with red. In this I saw a sign. There was nothing we could do for the dead woman, and we left quickly so as not to have to deal with the police. At the door of the boarding house, I said goodbye to Stella.
“I need to be alone for a while. I feel like I’m drowning without a lifejacket in your immense ocean. I do not know who I am. I’ve become a mirror that only reflects your image. I can’t keep living in the chaos you create. The woman hanging from the tree, you invented that. Every night you kill yourself because you know that you will be reborn the same as you were. But maybe someday you will wake up as someone else, in a body that you don’t deserve. I beg you, let me recover; give me a few days of solitude.”