Luis Sebastián Rosado, La Rama Dorada coffee shop, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, April 1976. Monsiváis said it first: disciples of Marinetti and Tzara, their noisy, outrageous, overwrought poems did battle in the realm of simple typographic arrangement, never rising above the level of childish entertainment. Monsi was talking about the stridentists, but the same goes for the visceral realists. No one paid attention to them and they opted for indiscriminate assault. In December of '75, just before Christmas, I was unlucky enough to run into some of them here at La Rama Dorada. The owner, Don Néstor Pesqueira, will back me up: it was extremely unpleasant. One of them, the one in charge, was Ulises Lima; the second was a big fat dark guy called Moctezuma or Cuauhtémoc; the third went by the name Luscious Skin. I was sitting right here, waiting for Alberto Moore and his sister, and all of a sudden these three nuts surround me, sitting down one on each side of me, and they say Luisito, let's talk poetry, let's analyze the future of Mexican poetry, something like that. I'm not a violent person and of course I got nervous. I thought: what are they doing here? how did they find me? what scores have they come to settle? This country is a disgrace, it must be said, and so is Mexican literature, it must also be said. Anyway, we were talking for twenty minutes (I've never been so annoyed by the lateness of Albertito and his snotty sister) and finally we even managed to agree on several points. When it came down to it, ninety percent of the time we hated the same things. Of course I always stood up for what Octavio Paz was doing on the literary scene. And of course all they seemed to like was what they were doing themselves. Thank goodness. That being a lesser evil, I mean, since it would've been worse if they'd declared themselves disciples of the peasant poets or followers of poor Rosario Castellanos or disciples of Jaime Sabines (one Jaime is enough, in my opinion). And then Alberto got here and I was still alive, there'd been a little bit of shouting, some unpleasant language, a certain kind of behavior that was inappropriate in a place like La Rama Dorada, Don Néstor Pesqueira will back me up here, but that was all. And when Alberto arrived I thought I'd handled the situation well. But then Julia Moore comes right out and asks them who they are and what they plan to do that night. And the one called Luscious Skin is quick to say that they're not doing anything, that if she has any ideas she should say so, he's up for anything. And then Julita, oblivious of the looks her brother and I are shooting her, says that we could go dancing at Priapo's, an insanely vulgar place in Colonia 10 de Mayo or Tepito, I've only been there once and I've always done my best to forget it, and since neither Alberto nor I can say no to Julita, off we go in Alberto's car, with Alberto, Ulises Lima, and me in the front seat and Julita, Luscious Skin, and the guy called Cuauhtémoc or Moctezuma in the backseat. Honestly, I feared the worst, these people weren't trustworthy, somebody told me once that they cornered Monsi in Sanborn's, at the Casa Borda, but since Monsi did agree to have coffee with them, granted them an audience, you might say, it was partly his fault, because everybody knows the visceral realists are just like the stridentists and everybody knows what Monsi thinks about the stridentists, so he really couldn't complain about what happened, and anyway nobody or almost nobody knows what did happen, though occasionally I've been tempted to ask him, but I haven't, not wanting to pry or open old wounds, still, something happened to him during his meeting with the visceral realists, and everybody knows it, everybody who secretly loves or hates Monsi, and there were all kinds of hypotheses and theories, but anyway, that's what I was wondering as Alberto's car shot like lightning or crawled like a cockroach, depending on the traffic, toward Priapo's, and in the backseat Julita Moore kept talking and talking and talking to the two visceral realist bums. I'll spare you a description of the club itself. I swear to God I thought we wouldn't get out of there alive. All I'll say is that the furnishings and human specimens adorning its interior seemed arbitrarily plucked from Lizardi's The Mangy Parrot, Mariano Azuela's The Underdogs, del Paso's José Trigo, the worst novels of the Onda, and the worst fifties porn (more than one woman looked like Tongolele, who incidentally I don't think was making movies in the fifties, but should have been). So as I was saying, we went into Priapo's and sat at a table close to the dance floor and as Julita danced the cha-cha or a bolero or a danzón, I'm not exactly up on the annals of popular music, Alberto and I started to talk about something (what it was I swear I can't remember), and a waiter brought us a bottle of tequila or rat poison that we accepted without a murmur, that's how desperate we were. And suddenly, in less time than it takes to say "otherness," we were drunk and Ulises Lima was reciting a poem in French, what in the world for I don't know, but he was reciting it, I didn't realize he spoke French, English, maybe, I think I'd seen a translation of his somewhere of Richard Brautigan, a terrible poet, or John Giorno, whoever he is, maybe a stand-in for Lima himself, but French? that surprised me a little. Good enunciation, passable pronunciation, and the poem, how to put it, sounded familiar, very familiar, but because of my increasing drunkenness or the relentless boleros I couldn't identify it. I thought of Claudel, but none of us can imagine Lima reciting Claudel, can we? I thought of Baudelaire, I thought of Catulle Mendès (some of whose texts I translated for a university journal), I thought of Nerval. Ashamed as I am to admit it, those were the names that came to mind. In my defense I should say that soon, through the haze of alcohol, I asked myself what Nerval could possibly have in common with Mendès, and then I thought of Mallarmé. Alberto, who must have been playing the same game, said: Baudelaire. It wasn't Baudelaire, of course. Here's the poem. Let's see if you can guess:
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,
Mon coeur couvert de caporaclass="underline"
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe,
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe:
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire général,
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,
Mon coeur couvert de caporal!
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé!
Au gouvernail on voit des fresques
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Ô flots abracadabrantesques,
Prenez mon coeur, qu'il soit lavé!
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, Ô coeur volé?
Ce seront des hoquets bachiques