At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was María, but even my friendship with María began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I thought: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.
But that wasn't what I meant to say.
Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo, editorial offices of the magazine La Chispa, Calle Independencia and Luis Moya, Mexico City DF, March 1976. I came to Mexico in November of 1975. This was after I'd been through a few other Latin American countries, living pretty much hand to mouth. I was twenty-four and my luck was starting to change. That's the way things happen in Latin America, which is as far as I'm willing to try to explain it. There I was moldering in Panama when I found out that I'd won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize. I was thrilled. I didn't have a cent, and the prize money got me a ticket to Mexico and food to eat. But the funny thing is, I hadn't entered the Casa de las Américas competition that year. Honest to God. The year before, I'd sent them a book and the book didn't even get so much as an honorable mention. And this year, out of the blue, I hear that I've won the prize and the prize money. When I first got the news I thought I was hallucinating. I hadn't been eating enough, to tell the truth, and when you don't eat enough it can have that effect. Then I thought it might be some other Logiacomo, but that would've been too much of a coincidence: another Argentinian Logiacomo, another twenty-four-year-old Logiacomo, another Logiacomo who'd written a book of poetry with the same title as mine. Well. In Latin America these things happen and there's no point giving yourself a headache trying to come up with a logical answer when sometimes there is none. Fortunately I really had won the prize, and that was that. Later the people at Casa told me that the book from the year before had gotten misplaced, that kind of thing.
So I was able to come to Mexico and I settled in Mexico City and a little while later I get a call from this kid telling me that he wants to interview me or something, I thought he said interview. And of course I said yes. To tell the truth, I was pretty lonely and lost. I didn't know any young Mexican poets and an interview or whatever seemed like a fantastic idea. So we met that same day and when I got to the place we were supposed to meet it turned out that instead of just one poet, there were four poets waiting for me, and what they wanted wasn't an interview but a discussion, a three-way conversation to be published in one of the top Mexican magazines. The participants would be a Mexican (one of them), a Chilean (also one of them), and an Argentinian, me. The other two tagging along were just there to listen. The topic: the state of new Latin American poetry. An excellent topic. So I said great, I'm ready whenever you are, and we found a more or less quiet coffee shop and started to talk.
They'd come with a tape recorder all ready to go, but at the crucial moment the machine conked out. Back to step one. This went on for half an hour, and I had two cups of coffee, paid for by them. It was clear they weren't used to this kind of thing: I mean the tape recorder, I mean talking about poetry in front of a tape recorder, I mean organizing their thoughts and expressing themselves clearly. Anyway, we tried it a few more times, but it didn't work. We decided that it would be better if each of us wrote whatever came to mind and then we put together what we'd written. In the end it was just the Chilean and I who had the discussion. I don't know what happened to the Mexican.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking. And a funny thing happened to me with those kids, or the coffee they bought me, I noticed something strange about them, it was as if they were there but at the same time they weren't there, I'm not sure how to explain it, they were the first young Mexican poets I'd met and maybe that was why they seemed odd, but in the previous few months I'd met young Peruvian poets, young Colombian poets, young poets from Panama and Costa Rica, and I hadn't felt the same thing. I was an expert in young poets and something was off here, something was missing: the camaraderie, the strong sense of shared ideals, the frankness that always prevails at any gathering of Latin American poets. And at one point during the afternoon, I remember it like a mysterious drunkenness, I started to talk about my book and my own poems, and I don't know why but I told them about the Daniel Cohn-Bendit poem, a poem that was neither better nor worse than any of the others in the collection that had won the Cuban prize, but that ultimately wasn't included in the book, we were probably talking about length, about page count, because those two (the Chilean and the Mexican) wrote extremely long poems, or so they said, I hadn't read them yet, and I think they even had a theory about long poems, they called them poem-novels, I think it was some French poets who came up with the idea, though I can't remember exactly, and so I'm telling them about the Cohn-Bendit poem, why in the world I honestly don't know, and one of them asks me why isn't it in your book and I tell them that what happened was that the Casa de las Américas people decided to take it out and the Mexican says but they asked your permission, didn't they, and I tell him no, they didn't ask my permission, and the Mexican says they took it out of the book without letting you know? and I say yes, the truth is that I couldn't be located, and the Chilean asks why did they take it out? and I tell him what the people at Casa de las Américas told me, which was that Cohn-Bendit had just issued some statements against the Cuban Revolution, and the Chilean says was that the only reason? and like a dickhead I tell him I guess so, but the poem wasn't very good anyway (what had those guys given me to drink to make me talk that way?), definitely long, but not very good, and the Mexican says bastards, but he says it sweetly, he really does, not bitterly at all, as if deep down he understood everything the Cubans had been through before they mutilated my book, as if deep down he couldn't be bothered to despise me or our comrades in Havana.
Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. And I remember thinking that then, but I can't remember whether I said it or not, and if I did, what the context was. And then the walk (but here I have to clarify that it wasn't five of us anymore but three, the Mexican, the Chilean, and me, the other two Mexicans having vanished at the gates of purgatory) turned into a kind of stroll on the fringes of hell.
The three of us were quiet, as if we'd been struck dumb, but our bodies moved to a beat, as if something was propelling us through that strange land and making us dance, a silent, syncopated kind of walking, if I can call it that, and then I had a vision, not the first that day, as it happened, or the last: the park we were walking through opened up into a kind of lake and the lake opened up into a kind of waterfall and the waterfall became a river that flowed through a kind of cemetery, and all of it, lake, waterfall, river, cemetery, was deep green and silent. And then I thought it's one of two things: either I'm going crazy, which is unlikely since I've always had my head on straight, or these guys have doped me. And then I said stop, stop for a minute, I feel sick, I have to rest, and they said something but I couldn't hear them, I could only see them coming closer, and I realized, I became conscious, that I was looking all around trying to find someone, some witness, but there was no one, we were in the middle of a forest, and I remember I said what forest is this, and they said it's Chapultepec and then they led me to a bench and we sat there for a while, and one of them asked me what hurt (the word hurt, so right, so fitting) and I should have told them that what hurt was my whole body, my whole being, but instead I told them that the problem was probably that I wasn't used to the altitude yet, that it was the altitude that was getting to me and making me see things.