In the subway, Petrarch and I see a strange thing: a trio of blind men, arms linked, lurching along like the cars of an inebriated train, with a subway worker shepherding them down the platform to the exit.
Once they’ve gone, Petrarch tells me one of his stories.
It took place in Mexico City in 1998. That was the year he finally graduated from high school. The twenty-one-year-old high school grad: his problem-child badge of honor. And a nod to the anachronism that had always been part of his fate. Like having a first name straight out of the late Middle Ages, for example. Like his hair turning white when he was still a kid.
The youngest of nine siblings, his birth was both the culmination of ancestral mistakes and the promise of a change. His mother was forty-six, but no amount of medical warnings could overcome her desire to have a poet named Petrarch for a son. And so she offered him the chance to know her in the way that only he ever would, as well as bestowing upon him the gift of losing her (“massive coronary thrombosis”) when he was only eleven.
When he decided to go to Mexico, Petrarch had been rock climbing and mountaineering for five years. Mexico City and its foothills were the ideal place if you wanted to pursue either of these in a serious way. Martín, his older brother, said he really ought to study or get some sort of job as well. Petrarch remembered that Achilles, a friend from high school (one of several he’d passed through in his teenage years), lived there and might be able to help. And that was what happened. No sooner had he arrived than he was taken on as an intern at the TV station where Achilles worked doing the sound design on Mexican soap operas.
“A soap opera is its sound and its voices,” Petrarch says. “Nobody really watches soap operas. They listen to them while they’re doing the dishes, washing their clothes, reading the paper.”
Voices, I think. Petrarch telling me about his mother’s voice when she read him the Canzoniere at age eight. That was also when he told me about his time living in Capaya, a small village in Barlovento where his father had a finca. He came away from there with a liking for poetry, for the connection between philosophy and nature, and with a passion for knives. It was from his father—who was unmistakably a Trujillo State man (he sometimes threatened to slit his son’s “little pot,” meaning slit his throat)—that he got both his recalcitrance and his fondness for settling an argument with recourse to a blade.
“As well as a poet, my mom wanted me to be a shepherd. So she bought me a goat to graze around the village. But Capaya was a wasteland, the only place any grass grew was the cemetery. My mother and I would go there together, wearing our robes with plaited belts, the goat in tow. And at the cemetery she read me Petrarch’s Canzoniere.”
When he came back from Mexico, he ran into Yana, his best friend from childhood, in the Central University Philosophy Department. Petrarch had given up rock climbing and Yana had given up on a marriage. The romance that followed was like Being and Nothingness in a romantic key.
But before the study of philosophy came philosophy in practice.
“Mountaineers and rock climbers are philosophers,” Petrarch says. “They both think about things in abstract terms. Climbing Everest or drinking thirty beers in a night, it’s all the same. The next day they smoke a joint and forget all about the absolute and their hangover.”
Petrarch had initially started climbing rock faces as a literal way of avoiding getting dragged under. He was sixteen. His mother had died five years earlier, his father had gone back to Trujillo in a fugue of alcohol, and now brother Martín and his wife Jimena, who until then had been his de facto parents, were leaving for New York.
He was supposed to stay in Caracas with some of his other siblings, but it felt to him like he was falling behind in the race of life, languishing in that last spot which is solitude at its most absolute.
“Around the time when Martín and Jimena left,” Petrarch says, “everything very nearly went to shit for me.”
To avoid coming last, he decided to completely alter the coordinates. To switch the horizontality of x for the verticality of y. He dropped out of school and started scaling mountains and cliffs.
I know nothing about what he got up to between ages sixteen and twenty-one. Between the decisions to climb and to climb even higher still. Desperation can be a deep pit, but it can also be a mountain peak. Let’s put Petrarch equidistant between the two kinds, weighing them up like cards obscurely encoding his whole future.
Let’s imagine this, and then skip forward a little, to the end of 1998 in Mexico City. In the environs of Zócalo, with Petrarch trying to locate an address.
“La Ópera, you say?” said the taxi driver who had brought him downtown. “Kinda like the theater, isn’t that?”
“La Ópera Bar,” said Petrarch.
“No idea. I’m from Toluca.”
Petrarch paid the fare and set out walking. He asked an old man who, after scratching his head, confessed that he was from Querétaro.
“I’ll take you there, young man,” said a voice.
“A very sonorous male voice,” Petrarch says. “A voice like that of an actor out of a soap opera.”
Which made it a surprise to turn around and find what he found. He hesitated, but the blindman’s raised arm, which it clearly took some effort for him to hold aloft, forced Petrarch to decide quickly.
And so, together with his guide the blindman, he headed in the direction of La Ópera.
La Ópera is like a saloon in a Western. Saloon doors, bar constructed from wood, wooden ceilings, wooden floor. A lot of wood.
Once the two of them had taken a table, the blindman sat with his eyes turned to the floor. After a few seconds, he lifted his milky-eyed gaze and scanned about in the soupy air, before calling to the bar owner.
“How’s it going, Miguelito? The young man here wants to see the bullet holes.”
“Of course,” said Miguelito, pointing up towards the darkness of the ceiling. “What can I get you both?”
“I was floored,” Petrarch says.
Apparently, when he’d heard Petrarch on the street, the blindman had recognized his accent and, being Venezuelan himself, decided to help. But when he spoke to the bar owner, his accent sounded Mexican.
“Two Modelo Negras for us, Miguelito.”
“And I have no idea how he knew I’d gone there to see the bullet holes that Pancho Villa was supposed to have left in the ceiling,” Petrarch says.
“What? You’re surprised?” the blindman said. “All the tourists come for the same thing. And they’re all equally disappointed when they get to see it.”
“And what’s your name?”
On the way there, Petrarch had introduced himself, but the blindman was still yet to.
“Tiresias,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“No. I’m messing with you. I’m called Juan.”
Although he wasn’t called Tiresias, the blindman seemed to know everything about him and about Francesco Petrarch. In the course of the magisterial lesson on lyric poetry that followed, with all the skill of a pickpocket, the blindman recounted the story of his life. All without Petrarch even noticing he’d stolen his wallet.
“Forget about Diana,” he said, when the lecture was over.
“Yana, with a y,” said Petrarch, interrupting. He drew a sloped incline in the air with his finger, a mountain in profile, as though the blindman could see it.
“Ah yes, Yana—forget about her. If she’s already married, you should let her be dead to you. You should take the permanent position they’re offering you at the TV station, so you can go on with your rock climbing and all that stuff. And your writing. That’s the only way you’re going to do as your mother wished and become a poet.”
You should, you should, Petrarch repeated to himself.
Was that conversation really happening? Could it be true that his Tiresias went by the name of Juan and lived in Mexico City? Was he also destined to become a Venezuelan lost in Mexico? Wasn’t the very fact of putting these questions to himself like this, in a TV-like voiceover, already a sign?
“The real Petrarch took up mountaineering during his exile in Vaucluse,” said the blindman. “That was where, in 1337, ten years after the April 6 when he had first laid eyes on Laura as she came out of the Church of St. Claire in Avignon, he started work on his eclogues and the Canzoniere. He wrote a good number of the former, and almost the entirety of the latter, while he was there.”
“April 6?” Petrarch asked.
“1327,” the blindman confirmed.
“April 6.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he was a mountaineer.”
“Yes.”
“And who’s this Laura?”
“The love of his life. I won’t say it was an impossible love, because true love is always impossible. The poet’s task is to find love, in order to lose it later on and find it again in poetry.”
Petrarch downed the remaining half of his beer, and tried to bring some clarity to his thoughts. For his part, the blindman had finished his drink and was ordering another round. This time he did so soundlessly, raising his arm instead as though brandishing a pistol and shooting his request up into the rafters.
The beers arrived and they sat and drank in silence.
After a short while, Petrarch succeeded in clarifying his thoughts, but the result of this clarity was that he felt just as confounded as before: April 6 had been the date of his and Yana’s first meeting.
“You could come up with a pretty interesting chapter in a universal history using that date alone,” said the blindman, reading his mind. “Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Garcilaso de la Vega and Isabel Freyre: all three first saw their beloveds on that date, all three went through the sorrow of being far away from them, and they were the three greatest poets.”
666, Petrarch thought. To take his mind off things, he peered closely at the blindman’s Adam’s apple, that part of the body his father always called “the devil’s little pot.” Was he really hearing all this? April 6, 4-6; Dante, Petrarch, Garcilaso de la Vega, and then back round to Petrarch again. Was this what it was all about? Was the blindman telling the truth? Wasn’t nine Dante’s number?
They finished their beers and the blindman told Petrarch to ask for the check.
The blindman showed no intention of splitting it. Petrarch took some bills out of his pocket and paid.
“Let’s go,” said the blindman.
Petrarch obediently got up and they left the bar.
“The fresh air outside woke me up a little bit,” Petrarch says. “It was getting late. I asked him where we were going.”
“To the Torre Latinoamericana,” the blindman said.
This is one of Mexico City’s landmarks. There was a period when its forty-plus stories made it the tallest building in Latin America, and among the tallest in the world. But that wasn’t the most important thing.
“The most important thing,” Petrarch says, “was that the Torre withstood the 1985 earthquake. Like a real macho man. The problem was that I’d already been up to its observation decks. I said as much to the blindman.”
“We aren’t going to look at the city,” said the blindman. “We’re going to go and make ourselves so dizzy that it pervades our every atom.”
When they got to the top observation deck, Petrarch stood looking at the elevator, the gray streaks on the very old metal.
“What is it?” the blindman asked him.
“The elevator,” Petrarch said.
“What about it?”
“It looks like a mountaineer.”
They went out to the edge of the observation deck.
“Go right up to the window,” the blindman told him.
Petrarch took a step forward and looked out.
After a few seconds, Mexico City began to expand, to spread outwards from where they were, like an infinitely receding tide. Petrarch became lost trying to locate the exact point where that misty evening panorama ended.
“And that was all I saw,” Petrarch says to me.
“As in?” I say.
“I don’t know. It was like a white blindness, like I’d traveled too far and had crept up on the world from behind. If I’d managed to hold on a little longer, maybe I’d have found the world at last. Maybe I’d have come full circle with myself and, having left myself behind, gone back to the beginning. I could have, but I didn’t. And I didn’t because the thought of the elevator suddenly came to me. I thought about the elevator and I saw myself in the form of an elevator, going up to the tops of mountains and coming back down again. Smoking a joint on the summit and doing the sound for Mexican soap operas when I reached the bottom. No Yana in my life, no poetry writing, just going up and coming back down over and over again like that moron Sisyphus until the very end of time, until the cables holding me up decided to snap.”
Thus spake our Zarathustra, before he felt a hand grabbing his behind.
Coming back from the outer limits of Mexico City, that horizontal Everest and the promise of some terra incognita at which he had recoiled, he looked down to find the blindman clumsily manhandling his butt.
In that moment Petrarch, quite unexpectedly and only for a matter of seconds, reconciled with his father.
“I’m going to slit your little pot,” he said.
“Oh? Mm, go on, slit it,” said the blindman, his excitement growing. Then, feeling the tip of a blade against his Adam’s apple, he took his hands off Petrarch and started to tremble.
As they rode the elevator down, walked along the street together, and went into the subway station, the blindman apologized over and over. Petrarch simply gave him his arm to lean on, saying nothing. It was the evening rush hour. The platform was crowded. People stumbling and pushing, the crush and anonymous fondling of blind bodies.
The train pulled into the station and everyone began gathering by the doors.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Petrarch says to me. “I did what I could.”
He had managed to get into one of the cars, while the blindman was still struggling for a spot on the platform. The blindman struggled and ricocheted off people, in the way that one ricochets off those enormous curtains that will occasionally drop out of nowhere in dreams.
Petrarch watched as the blindman was forced to the back by the swirling mass of bodies, eventually languishing in last spot as that agglomeration of people pushed past and ahead of him.
“Then the train doors closed,” says Petrarch, “and I couldn’t see him anymore.”