I suggested that maybe the police could take care of the problem or at least issue some kind of restraining order.
"Don't be an ass, García Madero. Alberto has friends in the police. How else do you think he runs his rackets? All the whores in Mexico City are controlled by the police."
"Come on. That's hard to believe," I said. "Maybe there are some officers who take bribes to look the other way, but to say that all of them…"
"The prostitution business in Mexico City and all of Mexico is controlled by the police, get that into your head once and for all," said Quim. And after a while, he added: "We're on our own in this."
At Niños Héroes he caught a taxi. Before he got in he made me promise that the next day first thing I'd be at his house.
DECEMBER 1
I didn't go to the Fonts' house. I spent all day having sex with Rosario.
DECEMBER 2
I ran into Jacinto Requena walking along Bucareli.
We went to get two slices of pizza at the gringo's place. As we ate he told me that Arturo had ordered the first purge of visceral realism.
I was stunned. I asked him how many he'd kicked out. Five, said Requena. I assume I wasn't one of them, I said. No, not you, said Requena. The news came as a great relief. Those purged were Pancho Rodríguez, Luscious Skin, and three poets I didn't know.
While I was in bed with Rosario, it occurred to me that Mexican avant-garde poetry was undergoing its first schism.
Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine.
DECEMBER 3
I have to admit that I have more fun in bed with Rosario than with María.
DECEMBER 4
But whom do I love? Yesterday it rained all night. The building's outdoor stairways looked like Niagara Falls. I kept a tally as we made love. Rosario was amazing, but to preserve the integrity of the experiment, I didn't tell her so. She came fifteen times. The first few times she had to cover her mouth so she wouldn't wake the neighbors. The last few times I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. Sometimes she seemed to swoon in my arms and other times she arched as if a ghost were tickling her spine. I came three times. Later we went outside and bathed in the rain spilling over the stairwells. It's strange: my sweat is hot and Rosario's is cold and reptilian, with a bittersweet taste (mine is definitely salty). In total we spent four hours fucking. Then Rosario dried me, dried herself, tidied up the room in a heartbeat (it's incredible how industrious and practical the woman is), and went to sleep, because the next day she had to work. I sat at the table and wrote a poem that I called "15/3." Then I read William Burroughs until dawn.
DECEMBER 5
Today Rosario and I had sex from midnight until four-thirty in the morning and I clocked her again. She came ten times, I came twice. And yet the time we spent making love was longer than yesterday. Between poems (as Rosario slept), I made some calculations. If you come fifteen times in four hours, in four and a half hours you should come eighteen times, not ten. The same ratio goes for me. Are we already in a rut?
Then there's María. I think about her every day. I'd like to see her, sleep with her, talk to her, call her, but when it comes down to it I'm incapable of taking a single step in her direction. And then, when I make a cool assessment of my sexual encounters with her and with Rosario, I have to admit that I have a better time with Rosario. If nothing else, I learn more!
DECEMBER 6
Today I had sex with Rosario from three to five in the afternoon. She came twice, maybe three times, I don't know, and I'd rather leave the exact figure shrouded in mystery. I came twice. Before she went to work I told her Lupe's story. Contrary to what I expected, she wasn't very sympathetic to Lupe or Quim or me. I told her about Alberto, Lupe's pimp, too, and to my surprise she showed quite a bit of understanding for him, only reproaching him, and then not severely, for working as a pimp. When I told her that this Alberto could be a very dangerous person and that there was a risk that if he found Lupe he would do her real harm, she answered that a woman who abandoned her man deserved all that and more.
"But you don't have to worry, darling," she said, "that's not your problem. You have your true love by your side, thank God."
Rosario's declaration made me sad. For an instant I imagined the unknown Alberto, his huge cock and his huge knife and a fierce look on his face, and I thought that if Rosario met him on the street she would be attracted to him. Also: that in some way he was coming between María and me. For an instant, that is, I imagined Alberto measuring his cock with his kitchen knife and I imagined the notes of a song, evocative and suggestive, although of what I couldn't say, drifting in the window (a sinister window!) along with the night air, and all of it together made me extremely sad.
"Don't be gloomy, darling," said Rosario.
And I also imagined María making love with Alberto. And Alberto smacking María on the buttocks. And Angélica making love with Pancho Rodríguez (ex-visceral realist, thank God!). And María making love with Luscious Skin. And Alberto making love with Angélica and María. And Alberto making love with Catalina O'Hara. And Alberto making love with Quim Font. And in the final instance, as the poet says, I imagined Alberto advancing over a carpet of bodies splattered with semen (a semen of deceptive consistency and color, because it looked like blood and shit) toward the hill where I stood, still as a statue, although everything in me wanted to flee, go running down the other side and lose myself in the desert.
DECEMBER 7
Today I went to my uncle's office and told him everything.
"Uncle," I said, "I'm living with a woman. That's why I don't come home to sleep. But there's no need for you to worry because I'm still going to class and I plan to finish my degree. Otherwise, I'm fine. I eat a good breakfast. I get two meals a day."
My uncle looked at me without getting up from his desk.
"What money do you plan to live on? Have you found work or is she supporting you?"
I answered that I didn't know yet, and that for now, Rosario was in fact covering my expenses, which were modest anyway.
He wanted to know who this woman was I was living with, and I told him. He wanted to know what she did. I told him, maybe slightly glossing over the coarser aspects of the job of bar girl. He wanted to know how old she was. From then on, despite my initial resolve, everything was a lie. I said that Rosario was eighteen when she's almost definitely older than twenty-two, maybe even twenty-five, although that's only a guess, since I've never asked her; it doesn't seem right to seek out the information unless she volunteers it herself.
"Just so you don't make a fool of yourself," said my uncle, and he wrote me a check for five thousand pesos.
Before I left he urged me to call my aunt that night.
I went to the bank to cash the check and then I stopped by some of the downtown bookstores. I looked in at Café Quito. The first time I didn't see anyone. I ate there and went back to Rosario's room, where I sat reading and writing until late. After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. None of the visceral realists except for him, he said, were showing their faces at the café. Everybody was afraid of running into Arturo Belano, though their fears were unwarranted since the Chilean hadn't been there in days. According to Requena (who is definitely the most laid-back of the visceral realists), Belano had begun to kick more poets out of the group. Ulises Lima was remaining discreetly in the background, but apparently he supported Belano's decisions. I asked who'd gotten purged this time. He named two poets I didn't know and Angélica Font, Laura Jáuregui, and Sofía Gálvez.