La Desdichada

To the friends of the Sabbath table,

Max Aub, Joaquín Diez-Canedo, Jaime García Terrés,

Bernardo Giner de los Ríos, Jorge González Durán,

Hugo Latorre Cabal, José Luis Martínez, Abel Quezada,

and, above all, to José Alvarado,

who made me understand this story

 

Toño

… In those years we studied at the National Preparatory School, where Orozco and Rivera had painted their frescoes, and we went to a Chinese café on the corner of San Ildefonso and República Argentina, we dipped sweet rolls in café au lait and discussed the books that we bought in the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore when we had the money or in the used bookstores on República de Cuba when we didn’t: we wanted to be writers, they wanted us to be lawyers and politicians; we were just a couple of self-taught guys who had been delivered onto the imagination of a city that, high though it was, gave you the secret sensation of being buried, even though it was then still the color of marble and burnt-out volcano and was filled with the ringing of silver bells and smelled of pineapple and coriander, and the air was so …

Bernardo

Today I saw La Desdichada for the first time. Toño and I have taken a small apartment together, the local equivalent of the garret in Parisian bohemia, in the Calle de Tacuba near the San Ildefonso school. The good thing is, it’s a commercial street. We didn’t like going out to shop, but two single students have to take care of themselves without letting on that they could use a mother figure. So we alternated domestic duties. We were from the provinces and we had no women—mothers, sisters, girlfriends, nurses—to take care of us. Not even a maid.

Tacuba was an elegant street during the viceroyalty. Today the most hideous commercialism has taken hold of it. I come from Guadalajara, a city still unspoiled, so I notice it. Toño is from industrialized Monterrey, and that makes everything here seem romantically beautiful and pure to him, even though there isn’t a ground floor on this street that hasn’t been taken over by a furniture shop, a mortuary, or a tailor’s. You have to look higher up—I say to Toño, his introspective eyes shielded by eyebrows thick as beetles—to visualize the nobility of this street, its serene proportions, its façades of soft red stone, its escutcheons of white stone inscribed with the names of vanished families, its niches acting as a refuge for saints and pigeons. Toño smiled and called me a romantic, for expecting beauty, even goodness, to descend from spiritual heights. I’m a secular Christian who has substituted Art with a capital A for god with a lowercase g. Toño said that poetry is to be found in the shoe-store windows. I looked at him reproachfully. Who in those days hadn’t read Neruda and repeated his credo of the poetry of the immediate, the streets of the city, the specters in the windows? I prefer to look up at the ironwork balconies and their peeling shutters.

The window I was distractedly looking at closed suddenly, and when I lowered my eyes they were reflected in a store window. My eyes, like a body apart from me—my Lazarus, my drudge—dove into the water of the glass and, swimming there, discovered what the window hid: what it displayed. It was a woman in a bridal gown. But whereas other mannequins in this street—which Toño and I walked through every day, hardly noticing it, accustomed by now to the plurally ugly and the singularly lovely of our city—were made forgettable by their struggle to be fashionably up-to-date, this woman caught my eye because her dress was old-fashioned, buttoned clear to the throat.

It was a style from a long time ago, nobody recalls the way women dressed then. They will all be old tomorrow. But not La Desdichada: the sumptuousness of her wedding gown was everlasting, the train of her dress splendidly elegant. The veil that covered her features revealed the perfection of her pale face, softened by gauze. In her flat satin slippers she appeared proud and proper. Elegant and obedient. An incongruous silver lizard ran out from beneath her motionless skirt, scooting away in trembling zigzags. It was looking for a sunny spot in the display window, and there it stopped, like a satisfied tourist.

Toño

I came to see the dummy in the wedding dress because Bernardo insisted. He said it was a rare sight, in the midst of what he called the crowded vulgarity of Tacuba. He was looking for an oasis in the city. I had long since renounced such things. If one wanted rural backwaters in Mexico, there are more than enough in Michoacán or Veracruz. The city must be what it is, cement, gasoline, and artificial light. I didn’t expect to find Bernardo’s bride in a window, and so it turned out: I didn’t find her, and I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Our apartment is very small, just a sitting room where Bernardo sleeps and a loft that I go up to at night. In the sitting room there’s a cot that serves as a sofa by day. In the loft is a bed with metal posts and a canopy, which my mother gave me. The kitchen and the bath are one and the same room, at the back of the flat, behind a bead curtain, like in South Sea movies. (Two or three times a month we went to the Cine Iris: we saw Somerset Maugham’s Rain with Joan Crawford and China Seas with Jean Harlow—the sources of certain images we share.) When Bernardo talked about the dummy in the window on Tacuba, I got an odd feeling that what he wanted was to bring home La Desdichada, as he christened her (and I, letting myself be influenced by him, also started calling her that, before I saw her, before I even had proof of her existence).

He wanted to decorate our poor home a little.

Bernardo was reading and translating Nerval back then. He was busy with a sequence of images in the poem El Desdichado: a widower, a heavenly lute, a dead star, a burnt tower; the black sun of melancholy. As he read and translated during our moments of student freedom (long nights, rare sunrises), he told me that in the same way that a constellation of stars shapes itself into the image of a scorpion or a water carrier, so a cluster of syllables tries to form a word and the word (he says) painstakingly seeks its related words (friendly or enemy words) to form an image. The image travels through the entire world to embrace and make peace with its sister image, so long lost or estranged. This, he says, is the birth of metaphor.

I remember him at nineteen, thin and frail, with the compact body of a noble Mexican, delicate, Creole, the child of centuries of physical slightness, but with a strong, solid head like that of a lion, a mane of black wavy hair, and unforgettable eyes: blue enough to rival the sky, vulnerable as a newborn baby’s, powerful as a Spanish kick in the depths of the most silent ocean. Yes, the head of a lion on the body of a hind: a mythological beast, indeed: the adolescent poet, the artist being born.

I saw him as he couldn’t see himself, so I could read the plea in his eyes. Nerval’s poem is, literally, the air of a statue. Not the air around it, but the statue itself, the air of the voice that recites the poem. When he asked me to go see the mannequin, I knew that actually he was asking me:

—Toño, give me a statue. We can’t buy a real one. Maybe the dress-shop mannequin will strike your fancy. You won’t have any trouble picking out the one: she’s dressed as a bride. You can’t miss her. She has the saddest look in the world. As if something terrible happened to her, a long time ago.

At first I couldn’t find her among all the naked mannequins. None of the dummies in the window was wearing clothes. I said to myself, this is the day that they change their outfits. Like living bodies, a dummy without clothes loses its personality. It is a piece of flesh, I mean, of wood. Women with painted faces and marcelled waves, men with painted mustaches and long sideburns. Fixed eyes, colored eyelashes, cheeks like candy glazes, faces like screens. Below those faces with their eyes forever open are bodies of wood, varnished, uniform, lacking a sex, lacking hair, lacking navels. Though they didn’t drip blood, they were exactly like chunks of meat in a butcher’s shop. Yes, they were pieces of flesh.

Then, looking more closely, I examined the window my friend had indicated. Only one of the women had real hair, not painted on wood, but a black wig, a little matted down but high and old-fashioned, with curls. That, I decided, was she. And besides, her eyes could not have been sadder.

Bernardo

When Toño entered with La Desdichada in his arms, I couldn’t bring myself to thank him. That woman of wood embraced the body of my friend the way they say the Christ of Velázquez hangs from his cross: much too comfortably. Toño, who is a typical man of the north, tall and strong, could easily hold her with one arm. La Desdichada’s backside rested on one of Toño’s hands; his other hand was around her waist. Her legs hung down and her head was on his shoulders, her eyes open, her hair disheveled.

He entered with his trophy and I wanted to show him I wasn’t angry, just vexed. Who had asked him to bring her home? I had asked him only to go look at her in the window.

—Put her wherever you like.

He stood her up, her back to us, as if to demonstrate that she was our statue now, our Venus Callipygia of the shapely ass. Statues rest on their feet, like trees (like horses that sleep on their feet?). She looked indecent. A naked mannequin.

—We have to get her some clothes.

Toño

The store on Tacuba Street had already sold the bride’s gown. Bernardo didn’t want to believe me. What did you expect, I said to him, that the dummy would wait for us forever in that display window, dressed as a bride? The purpose of a mannequin is to display clothes to passersby, so that they buy them—the clothes, mind you, not the mannequins. It was pure chance that she was dressed as a bride when you walked by. She might have been showing off a bathing suit for a month without your noticing. Besides, nobody cares about the dummy. What they’re interested in is the outfit, and it has already been sold. The dummy is wood, nobody wants her, look, it’s what in law classes they call a fungible object, one’s as good as another, it’s all the same … Besides, look, she’s missing a finger, the ring finger of her left hand. If she was married, she isn’t anymore.

He wanted to see her dressed as a bride again, and if he couldn’t, at least he wanted to see her dressed. La Desdichada’s nudity bothered him (it also attracted him). Nonetheless, I set her at the head of our humble table, the sort you’d expect of students of “limited resources,” as one said euphemistically in Mexico City in the year 1936.

I gave her a sideways glance, and then I threw over her a Chinese robe that an uncle of mine, an old pederast from Monterrey, had given me when I was fifteen, with these premonitory words: —Some clothes anyone can wear. All of us girls want to look cute.

Covered by a blaze of paralyzed dragons—gold, scarlet, and black—La Desdichada half-closed her eyes, lowering her eyelids a fraction of a centimeter. I looked at Bernardo. He wasn’t looking at her, now that she was dressed again.

Bernardo

What I like best about this poor forsaken place where we live is the patio. Every neighborhood in the capital has a place to wash clothes, but our own house has a fountain. You leave behind the noises of Tacuba Street, go past a tobacco and soft-drink stand, and enter a narrow alleyway, damp and shady, and then the world bursts into sunlight and geraniums, and in the center of the patio is the fountain. The noise remains very far away. A liquid silence imposes itself.

I don’t know why, but the women of our house all choose to wash their clothes somewhere else, in other washing places, in the public fountains perhaps, or in the canals that are the last remnants of the lake city that was Mexico. Now the waters are drying up little by little, condemning us to death by dust. There is a constant come-and-go of laundry baskets, piled high with dirty clothes and clean clothes, which the strongest but least agile women clutch tightly, and the most atavistic carry proudly on their heads.

The large circles of woven straw, the clothes colored indigo, white, and brown: it is easy to bump against a woman holding a basket on her head so she can’t really turn to look, knock over the basket, excuse yourself, extract a blouse, a shirt, whatever, pardon me, pardon me …

I loved the patio of our student home so much, its soothing mediation between the noise of the street and the isolation of the apartment. I loved it as years later I would love the supreme palace: the Alhambra, a palace of water where the water, naturally, has disguised itself as tile. Back then, I hadn’t yet been in the Alhambra, but in my fond memories our poor patio possesses the same charms. Except that in the Alhambra there is not a single fountain that dries up from one day to the next, revealing at its bottom sluggish gray tadpoles looking up for the first time at the people who gaze into the fountain and see them there, doomed, without water.

Toño

He asked me why she was missing a finger. I told him I didn’t know. He wouldn’t let the subject drop, as if I were responsible for La Desdichada’s being maimed, through some carelessness of mine in carrying her home, Christ, he just stopped short of accusing me of mutilating her on purpose.

—Be more careful with her, please.

Bernardo

The toads that have taken over the beautiful fountain in the patio won’t be without water for long. A big storm is approaching. When you go up the stone stairs to our apartment, you look out over the low, flat roofs toward the mountains, which, in the summer light, seem to move closer. The giants of the valley of Mexico—volcanoes of basalt and fire—are accompanied in this season by a watery retinue. It’s as if they had awakened from the long sleep of the highlands, as though from a parched and crystalline dream, demanding a drink. The giants are thirsty and they make their own rain. The clouds that all through the sunlit morning have been accumulating, white and spongy, suddenly stop moving, their grave grayness become turbulent. Each afternoon, the summer sky swells with storm, punctual, abundant, fleeting, and attacks the accumulated light of the dying day and the morning that succeeds it.

It rains the whole afternoon. Falling from the apartment to the patio. Why doesn’t the fountain fill with water? Why do the dry, wrinkled toads, under the stone moldings of the old colonial fountain, look at me with such anguish?

Toño

Today these are ghostly spaces: deserts born of our haste. I resolve not to forget them. Bernardo will know what I mean if I say that the city’s vacant lots were once our pleasure palaces. To forget them is to forget what we had: a little happiness, one time, when we were young and deserved it and didn’t know what to do with it.

He laughs at me; he says that mine is the poetry of the lower depths. Fine: but someone should recall the aroma, poetic or not, of the Waikiki on the Paseo de la Reforma, near the Caballito, the nightclub of our youth. Inside, the Waikiki was the color of smoke, although outside it looked more like a cancerous palm tree, or a sickly stretch of sand turning gray in the rain. Never has a place of entertainment looked gloomier, more forbidding. Even its neon signs were repellent, square, you remember? Everything about them established a precise hierarchy of attractions: the singer (male or female) at the head of the marquee, then the band, then a pair of dancers, finally the magician, the clown, the dogs. It was like a list of political candidates, or a menu for an embassy dinner, or even a death notice: here lies a singer, a band, two ballroom dancers, a magician …

The women were like the place, like the color of smoke inside the cabaret. They were the reason we went there. The closed society denied us love. We believed that, having left our fiancées at home, those maidens whom we couldn’t seduce physically without ruining them for marriage, we could come to the capital to study law and meet—as in the novels of Balzac or Octave Feuillet—an experienced lover, rich, married, who would introduce us to the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, in exchange for our virile services. Hélas, as Rastignac would say, the Mexican Revolution did not extend to sexual liberty. The city was so small then that everybody knew everybody else; groups of friends were exclusive, and if within one of the groups some member made love to another, not even the crumbs of that banquet reached us.

We thought of our provincial fiancées, preserved like apricots, maintained in a state of purity behind the iron grilles on their windows, barely within the range of a serenade, and we wondered if our identity as provincials only put us in an even more sordid position in the capital: either we got ourselves a virginal fiancée or we went to dance with the tarts of the Guay. They were almost all small, powdered, with the blackest eyes and the cheapest perfume, flat-chested, without hips, with skinny legs and shapeless asses. They had thick lips and limp hair, sometimes bullied into place with clips; they wore short skirts, mesh stockings, kiss-me-quicks smeared on their cheeks like question marks, their every other tooth was gold, their every other pore was marked with smallpox; their heels tapped the dance floor, the tapping of their heels resounded as they went out to dance and returned to their tables, and between those heelbeats you heard the sound of their feet dragging, in the slow steps of the danzón.

What were we looking for, if these cheap hetaeras were so ugly? Only sex, which wasn’t so great either?

We were looking for a dance. That’s what they knew: not how to dress, or speak, not even how to make love. Those jokers of the Guay knew how to dance the slow danzón. That was their trick: to do the danzón, that ceremony of slowness. They say the best dancers of the danzón can dance in a space the size of a postage stamp. Second prize goes to the couple who can dance in a space the size of a single tile. Two bodies glued together, their movement almost imperceptible. Clothed bodies, flesh palpitating but almost still, the reflection of a dream as much as of a dance.

Who would have thought that those beaten-down girls possessed the genius of the danzón, responding as they did to the flute and the violin, the piano and the maraca?

Those hot little tamales from the venereal barrios of a city where nobody even used toilet paper or sanitary napkins—a city of dirty handkerchiefs before Kleenex and Kotex, just think, Bernardo, this city where the poor clean themselves with corn husks—what poor, biting poetry would their tragically restrained feelings produce? Because something else came from their world of rural misery, transferred from the destroyed haciendas to the city, the fear of making noise, of bothering the rich and being punished by them.

The nightclub was their answer. The music of the bolero allowed those women, rescued from the fields and exploited again in the city, to express their most intimate feelings, vulgar but concealed; only when dancing were these enslaved bodies given the luxury of immobile movement: these women had the scandalous elegance of the servant who dares to sit down, that is, who asks to be noticed.

Bah, let’s go to the Waikiki, I said to Bernardo, let’s go sleep with a couple of whores, what else is there to do? If you want, you can pretend you spent the night with Marguerite Gauthier or Delphine de Nucingen, but let’s go steal what we need for La Desdichada’s dowry. We can’t have her dressed in a robe all day. It’s indecent. What will our friends say?

Toño and Bernardo

—How would you prefer to die?

Bernardo

My mother was a widow of the revolution. Popular iconography is full of images of the woman warrior who accompanied the fighters into battle. You can see them riding on the trains, or around the campfires. But the widows who didn’t leave their homes were another matter. Like my mother: serious and resigned women, dressed in black ever since they received the fateful message: Your husband, madam, fell with honor on the field of Torreón or La Bufa or Santa Rosa. Perhaps that is what it means to be the widow of a hero. But you might think it would be different to be the widow of the victim of a political murder. Really? Aren’t all fallen soldiers the victims of a political crime? And isn’t every death a murder? It took us a long time to accept the notion that the dead person was not murdered, before we ascribed the death to the will of God.

My father died with Carranza. That is, when the First Chief of the Revolution was murdered in Tlaxcalantongo, my father, who was his friend, was killed in one of the many acts of revenge against the supporters of the president. An undeclared war that took place not on the fields of military honor but in the back rooms of political terror. My mother remained loyal. She laid out my father’s uniform on his bed. His tunic with rows of silver buttons. His kepi with two stars. His riding pants and his heavy belt with its empty holster. His boots at the foot of the bed. This was her perpetual domestic Te Deum.

There she passed the hours, in the orange-colored light of votive lamps, brushing the dust from his uniform, polishing his boots. As if the glory and the requiem of one faded battle would stay with her forever. As if this ceremony of mourning and love guaranteed that her husband (my father) would someday return.

I think of all this because, between us, Toño and I have gotten together a wardrobe for La Desdichada, and we’ve spread it out on display on the four-poster bed. A white linen blouse (from the washerwomen of the patio) and a short black satin skirt (from the tarts of the Waikiki). Black stockings (courtesy of a little trifle named Miss Nothing-at-All, says Toño, laughing). But, for some reason, we couldn’t get shoes. And Toño maintains that La Desdichada doesn’t really need underwear. This made me doubt his Don Juanesque tale. Perhaps he didn’t get as far as I thought with the Waikiki girl. I, on the other hand, only aver that if we intend to treat La Desdichada with respect, we musn’t deprive her of panties and bra, at the least.

—So where are we going to get them from, man? I’ve done my part. You haven’t exactly put yourself out.

She is sitting at the table, wrapped in the Chinese robe from my faggot uncle. She doesn’t move her eyes, of course—she has her gaze fixed, fixed on Toño.

To escape that annoying look, I quickly take her by the arm, pick her up, and say to Toño that we have to put some makeup on her, dress her, make her comfortable, poor Desdichada! to see her always so distant and solitary—I force a laugh—a little attention wouldn’t hurt her, or a little fresh air.

I open the window overlooking the patio, leaving the dummy in Toño’s arms. There is no respite from the sound of the frogs croaking. The storm builds over the mountains. I am oppressed by the small noises of my city, which seem all the more piercing in the lull before the storm. Today the knife sharpeners sound sinister to my ears, the used-clothes venders even worse.

I turn back, and for a moment can’t find La Desdichada: I don’t see her where I left her, where she should be, where I had set her at the table. A cry escapes me: “What have you done with her?” Toño appears alone, parting the beads of the bath curtain. He has a long scratch on his face.

—Nothing. I cut myself. She’s coming right away.

Bernardo and Toño

Why were we afraid?

Why were we afraid to invent a life for her? The least a writer can do is give a person a destiny. It wouldn’t have cost us anything; we wouldn’t have had to account to anyone. Were we incapable of giving La Desdichada her destiny? Why? Did we really feel she was so dispossessed? Was it impossible to imagine her country, her family, her past? What was stopping us?

We can make her a housekeeper. She’ll keep the apartment clean. Run our errands. We would have more time to read and write, to see friends. Or we can make her a prostitute. That would help pay our household expenses. We’d have more time to read and write. To see friends and feel like big shots. We laugh. Do you think anyone would be interested in her as a whore? It would challenge the imagination, Bernardo. Like fucking a Siren: how?

We laughed.

A mother?

What did you say?

She could be a mother. Neither servant nor whore. Mother, give her a child, let her devote herself to taking care of her child.

How?

We laughed even harder.

Toño

Today was La Desdichada’s dinner party. The dummy was still dressed in the Chinese robe from my uncle the fruit. Nothing suited her better, Bernardo and I decided; not only that, but it was her name on the invitations, so, like a high-class courtesan or an eccentric Englishwoman in her castle, she could entertain in her dressing gown: Cast aside convention!

La Desdichada is receiving. From eight to eleven. Punctuality required. She is never late, we inform our friends: British punctuality, eh? And we sat down to wait for them, one on each side of her, I on her left, Bernardo on her right.

It occurred to me that a party would clear away the little cloud in our relations that I noted yesterday, when I cut myself shaving while she was watching me, sitting on the toilet, her legs crossed. Seated there, totally insouciant, one knee over the other. What a flirt! The toilet was just the most convenient place to sit her down to watch me shave. She made me a little nervous, that’s all.

I didn’t explain this to Bernardo. I know him too well, and maybe I shouldn’t have taken the mannequin into the bathroom with me. I’m sorry, really, and would like to ask his pardon without giving any explanation. I can’t; he wouldn’t understand, he likes to verbalize everything, starting with his feelings. The fact is that when he turned his back to the window and looked for us, without finding us, I took a quick look into the living room and saw him looking at nothing. I thought for a moment that we only see what we desire. I had a fleeting sense of terror.

I wanted to clear away the misunderstanding with a little joke, and he was agreeable. That’s another thing we had in common: the taste for a type of humor that, although we didn’t know it at the time, was in vogue in Europe and was associated with the games of Dada. Of course, Mexican Surrealism didn’t need the European imprimatur; we are Surrealists by vocation, by birth, as all the jokes we have inflicted on Christianity prove, confounding the sacrifices of blood and host, disguising whores as virgins, constantly moving between the stable and the brothel, creation and calendar, myth and history, the past and the future, the circle and the line, the mask and the face, the crown of thorns and the crown of feathers, the mother and the virgin, death and laughter: for five centuries, Bernardo and I tell ourselves with stern humor, we’ve been playing charades with the most exquisite corpse of all, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with our vessels of bloodstained glass, why shouldn’t we do the same with the poor cadaver of wood, La Desdichada? Why should we be afraid?

She would be the hostess. La Desdichada is receiving guests, and she will receive them in her robe, like a grand French courtesan, like a geisha, like a great English lady in her castle, taking advantage of her privilege of eccentricity to act freely.

Bernardo

Who sent these dried flowers an hour before dinner?

Who could it be?

Toño

Not many people came to the dinner. Well, fine, not many people would fit in our apartment, but Bernardo and I felt that a huge party with lots of people, the kind that’s usually given in Mexico (there are so many solitudes to overcome: more than in other places), might give the event an orgiastic tone. Secretly, I would have liked to have seen La Desdichada lost in a restless, even a mean crowd: I nourished the fantasy that, surrounded by a mass of indifferent bodies, hers would cease to be so: moved about, handled, passed from hand to hand, a party animal, she would go on being a mannequin but nobody would know: she would be just like everyone else.

Everyone would greet her, ask her name, what she did, wish her well, and quickly move on to chat with the next person, convinced that she had replied to his questions, how spiritual, how clever!

—My name is La Desdichada. I am a professional model. I’m not paid for my work.

The fact is, only three men accepted our invitation. You had to be curious to accept an invitation like ours on Monday night, at the beginning of the school week. It didn’t surprise us that two of our guests were fellows from aristocratic families whose fortunes had been reduced in those years of tumult and confusion. Nothing lasts longer than half a century in Mexico, except the poor and the priests. Bernardo’s family, which was very influential when the Liberals were in power back in the nineteenth century, does not have an ounce of influence today, and the families of Ventura del Castillo and Arturo Ogarrio, who obtained their power under the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, had now lost theirs as well. The violent history of Mexico is a great leveler. The person who’s on top one day shows up the next, not on the heights, but in the flats: the mid-level middle-class plateau composed mainly of the impoverished remnants of short-lived aristocracies. Ventura del Castillo, self-proclaimed “new poor,” was more afraid of being middle-class than he was of being poor. The way he escaped was by being eccentric. He was the school clown, something his appearance helped him in. At twenty, he was fat and prim, with a tuft of hair over his lip, red cheeks, and the eyes of a lovesick sheep behind a ubiquitous monocle. His role-playing allowed him to rise above the humiliating aspects of his social decline; his exaggerated style, instead of making him a laughingstock at school, earned him a startled respect; he rejected the melodrama of the fallen family; with less justification he accepted the idea, still in vogue, of the “fallen woman,” and, no doubt, when he walked into our apartment, that’s what he thought Bernardo and I were exhibiting: a cheap Nana, taken from one of the red-light nightclubs that everyone, aristocrat or not, then frequented. Ventura had his commentary ready and the presence of La Desdichada gave him license to say:

—Melodrama is simply comedy without humor.

Our friend was not disturbed by La Desdichada’s appearance, wrapped in her Chinese dressing gown, her unchanging painted face giving her a rather Orozcoan look (Expressionist, we called it then), but it carried his innate sense of the grotesque to new heights. Wherever he went, Ventura became the festive center of attention, eating his monocle at dinner. Everyone suspected that his eyeglass was made of gelatin; when he swallowed it, he made such an outrageous noise that everyone ended up laughing, repelled and pained, until the wag ended his joke by rinsing his mouth with beer and eating, as a sort of dessert, the flower eternally in his buttonhole—a daisy, no less.

For all that, the encounter between Ventura del Castillo and La Desdichada resulted in a sort of unexpected standoff: we were confronting him with someone who was vastly more eccentric than he was. He looked at her and asked us with his eyes, Is she a dummy, or is she a splendid actress? Is she La Duse with an expressionless face? Bernardo and I looked at each other. We didn’t know if Ventura was going to see us, and not La Desdichada, as the eccentrics of the affair, challenging our fat friend’s supremacy.

—Such rakes you chaps are! laughed the lad, who affected the verbal mannerisms of Madrid.

—She’s a paralytic for sure!

Arturo Ogarrio, by contrast, wasn’t as lighthearted about his family’s decline. Having to study with the masses at San Ildefonso Prep annoyed him; he never resigned himself to losing his chance to enroll at Sandhurst in England, as two preceding generations of his family had done. His bitterness showed in his face. He saw everything that took place in this world of “reality” with a kind of poisonous clarity.

—What we left behind was a fantasy—he told me once, as if I were the cause of the Mexican Revolution and he—noblesse oblige—had to thank me for opening his eyes.

Severely dressed, all in dark gray, with a waistcoat, stiff collar, and black tie, bearing the grief of a lost time, Arturo Ogarrio had no trouble seeing what was going on: it was a gag, a wooden dummy presiding over a dinner of prep students where a pair of friends with literary inclinations were throwing down the gauntlet to the imagination of Arturo Ogarrio, new citizen of the republic of reality.

—Are you going to join our game? Yes or no?

His face was extremely pale, thin, without lips, but with the brilliant eyes of the frustrated aesthete, frustrated because he identified art with leisure, and since he didn’t have the one, he couldn’t conceive of having the other. He refused to be a dilettante; perhaps that is all we offered him: a breach of quotidian reality, an unimportant aesthetic diversion. He was almost contemptuous of us. I considered that something I could interpret as his refusal of concessions, like his rejection of dilettantism. He would not take sides—reality or fantasy. He would judge matters on their own merits and respond to the initiatives of the others. He crossed his arms and watched us with a severe smile.

The third guest, Teófilo Sánchez, was the school’s professional bohemian: poet and painter, singer of traditional melodies. He must have seen old engravings or recent films, or simply have heard somewhere that the painter wears a floppy hat and a cape, and the poet long hair and florid neckwear. To be different, Teófilo chose to wear a railroad engineer’s shirt without a tie, and a short jacket, and he went about with his head uncovered (in that age of the obligatory hat, his head appeared offensively naked, it was practically shaved, in a cut that at that time was associated with German schools or the lowest class of army recruits). His careless features, resembling a loaf of rye before it’s put in the oven, his lively raisin eyes, the spontaneous abundance of his poetic language, seemed a commentary on Ventura’s remark, which I had rewarded with a sour smile a moment before: Melodrama is comedy without humor.

Was that remark directed at me, since I was still writing little chronicles of the fait-divers of the capital and the minor poetry, unquestionably vulgar, of the popular dance hall, the tart, and the pimp, the couples of the barrio, jealousy and betrayal, abandoned gardens and sleepless nights? Don’t overlook the classical statues in the gardens and the forgotten idols in the basements, Bernardo commented very seriously. Ventura laughed at Teófilo because Teófilo wanted to provoke laughter. Arturo saw Teófilo as what Teófilo was and would be: a youthful curiosity, but a disappointment as an older man.

What was the bard of bohemia going to do, once we each sat down with our cuba libres, but improvise some awful verses on the subject of our lady, sitting there wordlessly? We saw Arturo’s grimace of disdain and Ventura took advantage of Teófilo’s sigh to laugh good-naturedly and say that this donna immobile would be the best Tancredo at a bullfight. Too bad that woman, inventor of the art of bullfighting in Crete (who continued to delight circus audiences as écuyère), is not able to play the central role in the modern bullring. The man who plays the Tancredo—the fat, rosy-cheeked Ventura began his imitation, first licking his rosebud lips and then anointing a finger with saliva and dramatically running it over his eyebrows—is put in the center of the ring—so—and doesn’t budge for anything—so—because his life depends on it. His future movement depends on his present immobility—he stood stock-still in front of La Desdichada—as the gate opens—so—and the bull—so—is released and seeks movement, the bull is attracted by the movement of the other, and there is Tancredo, unmoving, and the bull doesn’t know what to do, he awaits a movement, an excuse to ape and attack it: Ventura del Castillo motionless before La Desdichada, who is sitting between Bernardo and me, Arturo standing, watching what is going on with the most correct cynicism, Teófilo confused, his words starting to burst out, his inspiration starting to perish: his hands in front of him, his pose and his speech suspended by Ventura’s frozen act, the perfect Tancredo, rigid in the center of the ring, defying the fierce bull of the imagination.

Our friend had been converted into the mirror image of the wooden dummy. Bernardo was sitting on La Desdichada’s right and I on the mannequin’s left. Silence, immobility.

Then we heard a sigh and we all turned to look at her. Her head fell to the side, onto my shoulder. Bernardo stood up trembling, he looked at her huddled there, resting on my shoulder—so—and took her by the shoulders—so—so—and shook her, I didn’t know what to do, Teófilo babbled something, and Ventura was true to his game. The bull was attacking and he, how could he move? It would be suicide, caramba!

I defended La Desdichada, I told Bernardo to calm down.

—You’re hurting her, you prick!

Arturo Ogarrio let his arms drop and said: Let’s go, I think we are intruding on the private lives of these people.

—Good night, madam, he said to La Desdichada, who was being held up with one arm supported by Bernardo, the other by me. —Thank you for your exquisite hospitality. I hope to repay it one of these days.

Toño and Bernardo

How would you prefer to die? Do you see yourself crucified? Tell me if you would like to die like Him. Would you dare? Would you ask for a death like His?

Bernardo

I watched La Desdichada for hours, taking advantage of the heavy sleep Toño fell into after dinner.

She had returned, still in her Chinese dressing gown, to her place at the head of the table; I studied her in silence.

Her sculptor had given her a face of classic features, a straight nose and nicely spaced eyes, not as round as those of most mannequins of the time, who looked like caricatures, especially since they were usually given fan-shaped eyelashes. The black eyes of La Desdichada, on the other hand, were melancholy: the lengthened lids, like a lizard’s, gave her that quality. In contrast, the mannequin’s mouth, tiny, tight, and painted to look like a ribbon, could be that of any store-window dummy. Her chin, again, was different, a little prognathous, like that of a Spanish princess. She also had a long neck, perfect for those old garments that buttoned to the ear, as the poet López Velarde wrote. La Desdichada had, in fact, a neck for all ages: childish nakedness, then silk mufflers, finally pearl chokers.

I say “her sculptor,” knowing that this face is neither artistic nor human because it is a mold, repeated a thousand times and distributed in shops all over the world. They say that store mannequins are the same in Mexico and Japan, in black Africa and the Arab world. The model is Occidental and everyone accepts it. Nobody had seen, in 1936, a Chinese or black mannequin. While they always stay within the classic mold, there are differences: some mannequins laugh and others don’t. La Desdichada does not smile; her wooden face is an enigma. But that is only because I am disposed to see it that way, I admit. I see what I want to see and I want to see it because I am reading and translating a poem by Gérard de Nerval in which grief and joy are like fugitive statues, words whose perfection is in the immobility of the statue and the awareness that such paralysis is ultimately also its imperfection: its undoing. La Desdichada is not perfect: she lacks a finger and I don’t know if it was cut off purposely or if it was an accident. Mannequins do not move, but are moved rather carelessly.

Bernardo and Toño

He throws me a challenge: Do you dare take her out on the street, on your arm? Take her to dine at Sanborns, how about that? Test your social status, let them see you in a theater, a church, a reception, with La Desdichada at your side, mute, her gaze fixed, without even a smile, what would they say of you? Expose yourself to ridicule for her. I wouldn’t count on it, friend: you wouldn’t do anything of the sort. You only want to keep her here at home, for you alone if possible (do you think that I don’t know how to read your glances, your looks of violent impotence?); otherwise, the three of us together. Whereas I will take her out. I’ll take her out for a stroll. You’ll see. As soon as she recovers from your abuse, I’ll show her off everywhere, she is so alive, I mean, she seems alive, just look, our friends were almost fooled, they greeted her, they said goodbye to her. Is it only a game? Then let the game continue, because if enough people play it, it will cease to be one, and then, then maybe everyone will see her as a living woman, and then, then, what if the miracle occurs and she really comes to life? Let me give that chance to this … to our woman, that’s right, our woman. I’m going to give her that chance. I think then she can be mine alone. What if she comes to life and says: I prefer you, because you had faith in me, and not the other, you took me out and he was embarrassed, you took me to a party and he was afraid of being laughed at.

Toño

She whispered in my ear, in a rasping tone: How would you like to die? Do you see yourself with a crown of thorns? Don’t cover your ears. Do you long to possess me and are you unable to think of a death that will make me adore you? Then I will tell you what I will do with you, Toño, tony Toño!

Bernardo

La Desdichada had a very bad night. She groaned dreadfully. I had to watch her closely.

Toño

I see my face in the mirror, on waking. It is scratched. I rush to look at her. We spent the night together, I explored her minutely, like a real lover. I didn’t leave a centimeter of her body unexamined. But when I saw my own wound I went back for another look, to discover what I saw last night and then forgot. La Desdichada has two invisible furrows in her painted cheeks. No tears flow over these hidden wounds, repaired rather carelessly by the mannequin maker. But something flowed down that surface once.

Bernardo

I remembered that I didn’t ask him to buy her or bring her here, I only asked him to look at her, that was all, it wasn’t my idea to bring her here, it was his, but that doesn’t mean you have the right of possession, I saw her first, I don’t know what I’m saying, it doesn’t matter, she must prefer me to my friend, she has to prefer me, I’m better-looking than you, I’m a better writer than you, I’m … Don’t threaten me, you bastard! Don’t raise your hand to me! I know how to defend myself, don’t forget that, you know that perfectly well, asshole! I’m not maimed, I’m not wooden, I’m not …

—You’re a child, Bernardo. But your perversity is part of your poetic charm. Beware of old age! To be puerile and senile at the same time: avoid that! Try to age gracefully—if you can.

—And what about you, asshole?

—Don’t worry. I’ll die before you do.

Bernardo and Toño

When I was carrying her, she whispered to me secretly: Look at me. Think of me, naked. Think of all the clothes I have left behind, every place I’ve lived. A shawl here, a skirt there, combs and pins, brooches and crinolines, gorgets and gloves, satin slippers, evening dresses of taffeta and lamé, daytime clothes of silk and linen, riding boots, straw hats and felt hats, fur stoles and lizard-skin belts, pearl and emerald teardrops, diamonds strung on white gold, perfumes of sandalwood and lavender, eyebrow pencils, lipstick, baptismal clothes, wedding gowns, mourning clothes: be capable of dressing me, my love, cover my naked body, chipped, broken: I want nine rings of moonstone, Bernardo (you said to me in your most secret voice); will you bring them to me? you won’t let me die of cold, will you be able to steal these things?, she laughed suddenly, because you don’t have a dime, right, you’re just a poor poet without a pot to piss in, she laughed like crazy and I dropped her, Toño ran over to us furious, you’re hopeless, he said, you’re an ass, even though she’s only a mannequin, why did you have me get her if you’re going to mistreat her this way? You’re a hopeless bastard, a shithead forever, how could anyone put up with you, much less make any sense of you!

—She wants to dress luxuriously.

—Find her a millionaire to keep her and take her on his yacht.

Toño

We haven’t spoken for several days. We have allowed the tension of the other night to solidify, turn bitter, because we don’t want to say the word: jealousy. I am a coward. There is something more important than our ridiculous passions. I should have had the courage to tell you, Bernardo, she is a very delicate woman and she can’t be treated that way. I have had to put her down in my bed and the shaking of her hands is awful. She can’t live and sleep standing up, like a horse. Quick. I’ve fixed her some chicken soup and rice. She thanks me with her ancient look. How ashamed you must be of your reaction the day of the party. Your tantrums are pretty ridiculous. Now you leave us alone all the time and sometimes don’t come home to sleep. Then she and I hear the music of a mariachi in the distance, coming through the open window. We can’t tell where the sounds are coming from. But perhaps the most mysterious activity of Mexico City is playing the guitar alone the whole night long. La Desdichada sleeps, sleeps by my side.

Bernardo

My mother told me that if I ever needed the warmth of a home, I could visit my Spanish cousin Fernandita, who had a nice little house in Colonia del Valle. I would have to be discreet, Mother said. Cousin Fernandita is small and sweet, but her husband is a terror who takes revenge at home for his twelve hours a day behind a counter of imported wines, olive oil, and La Mancha cheeses. The house smells of it, though cleaner: when you walk in, you feel as if someone just ran water, soap, and a broom over every corner of that pastel-colored stucco Mediterranean villa set in a grove of pines in the Valley of Anáhuac.

There is a game of croquet set up on the lawn and my second cousin Sonsoles can be found there any hour of the afternoon, bent over, with a mallet in her hand, and looking out of the corner of her eye, between the arm and the axilla, which form a sort of arch for her thoughtful gaze, at the unwary masculine visitor who appears in the harsh afternoon light. I’m sure my cousin Sonsoles is going to end up with sciatica: she must keep up that bent-over croquet pose for hours at a time. It lets her turn her ass toward the entrance of the garden and wiggle it provocatively: it shows off her figure and makes it stand out better, stuffed into a tight dress of rose-colored satin. That was the style in the thirties; cousin Sonsoles had also seen it on Jean Harlow in China Seas.

I need a space between Toño and me and our wooden guest. Wooden, I repeat to myself walking along the new Avenida Nuevo León almost to the pasture that separates the Colonia Hipódromo from Insurgentes, walking across that field of prickly heather until I reach the leafy avenue and from there cross over to the Colonia del Valle: La Desdichada is wooden. I’m not going to compensate for that fact with a Waikiki whore, as Toño would, or would like to, cynically. But if I go on believing that Sonsoles is going to compensate me for anything, I know that I am making a mistake. The tiresome girl stops playing croquet and invites me into the living room. She asks me if I would care for some tea and I answer yes, amused by the British afternoon invented by my cousin. She skips off coquettishly and in a little while comes back with a tray, teapot, and teacups. Such speed. She hardly gave me time to sneer at the Romero de Torres-style kitsch of this pseudo-gypsy room, full of silk shawls on black pianos, glass cases, with open fans, wooden statues of Don Quixote, and furniture carved with scenes from the fall of Granada. It is hard to sit and take tea with your head leaning against a carving of the tearful Moorish king Boabdil and his stern mother, while my cousin Sonsoles sits under a column portraying Isabel la Católica in the encampment of Santa Fe, about to have a last swing at the infidel. —Will the gentleman take a little tea? the silly little thing asks.

I say yes with my most, well, gentlemanly smile. She serves me the tea. It doesn’t steam. I take a sip and spit it out involuntarily. It’s cider, a lukewarm apple drink, unexpected, repugnant. She looks at me with her hazel eyes very round, not sure whether to smile or take offense. I didn’t know what to say. I saw her there with the teapot in her hand, spilling out of her Hollywood vamp costume, bending over to expose her breasts while she pours the tea: the freckled, deceitful, heavily powdered breasts of my cousin Sonsoles, who looks at me with a question on her face, asking if I don’t want to play with her. But I only see a pale face, long and narrow, without artifice, almost unpainted, nunlike, protected from the sun and air for five hundred years—since the fall of Granada!—and now showing up, like a pale conventual ghost, in the century of the swimsuit, tennis, and suntan lotion.

—A little tea, sir?

She probably has a dollhouse in her bedroom. Then Aunt Fernandita arrives, what a surprise, stay for dinner, spend the night, Bernardito, Feliciano had to go to Veracruz to fill out the papers on some imported goods, he won’t be back until Thursday, stay with us, boy, come on, why not, it’s what your mother would want.

Toño

Bernardo hasn’t come back. I think of him; I hadn’t imagined that his absence would bother me so much. I miss him. I ask myself why, what is it that binds us? I look at her sleeping, her eyes always open but languid. There is no other mannequin like her; who can have given her this singular expression?

Since childhood, our literary vocation has earned us nothing but scorn. Or disapproval. Or pity. I don’t know what he is going to write. Nor what I am going to write. But our friendship derives from others’ saying: They’re crazy, they want to be writers. How can it be? Here, in this country that’s now wide open, anything you want, easy money, easy power, anyone can make it to the top … What binds us is that Lázaro Cárdenas is president and he brings a moment of moral seriousness to politics. We feel that Cárdenas values power and money less than justice and work. He wants to get things done, and when I see his Indian face in the newspaper, I sense that’s his one great anxiety: so little time! Then the crooks, the bullies, the murderers will be back. It’s inevitable. It’s wonderful, Bernardo, that we grew up under the power of a serious man, a decent man. If power can be ethical, then why can’t two young men be writers, if that’s what they want?

(They’re crazy: they hear music without instruments, the music of time, bands in the night. They feed the woman soup. She drinks it, mute and grateful. How can Bernardo be so sensitive in everything and so brutal to a sick woman who only needs a little care, attention, tenderness?)

Bernardo

I ran into Arturo Ogarrio in the hall at school and he thanked me for the other night’s dinner. He asked if he could go with me, where was I headed? That morning I had gotten a check from my mother, who lives in Guadalajara, at Aunt Fernandita’s house, where I’m staying until the tempest with Toño passes over.

I intend to blow it on books. Ogarrio takes my arm, stopping me; he asks me to take a moment to admire the symmetry of the colonial patio, the arches, the porticoes of the old school of San Ildefonso; he complains about Orozco’s murals, those violent caricatures that disrupt the harmony of the cloister with their parade of oligarchs, their beggars, their Liberty in chains, their deformed prostitutes, and their cross-eyed Pancreator. I ask him if he prefers the hideous stained-glass window in the stairway, a hopeful salute to progress: salvation through Industry and Commerce, in full color. He says that is not the problem, the problem is that the building represents harmony and Orozco’s violent fresco represents discord. That’s what I like, that Orozco doesn’t go along with the consensus, that he tells the priests and politicians and ideologues that things are not going to turn out well—just the opposite of Diego Rivera, who keeps on saying that this time, yes, things will turn out all right for us. No.

We ventured into the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore. The employees, walled in behind glass counters, their arms crossed, block the path of the presumed client and reader. Their brown jackets, their black ties, their false black elbow-length sleeves make a single statement: They shall not pass.

—Surely it was easier to acquire that mannequin in a shop—said Arturo quietly—than it is to acquire a book here.

I placed my check on the counter and on top of the check my student ID. I asked for the Romancero Gitano of Lorca, Andreyev’s Sashka Yegulev, Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, and the review Letras de México, where I had published, hidden toward the back, a little poem.

—Unless, as Ventura says, you ran the risk of stealing her …

—She’s flesh and blood. The other night she wasn’t feeling well. That’s all. Look—I said quickly—I’ll give you this Ortega book; you know it?

—No, you can’t, said the clerk. You have to cash the check in a bank and pay in cash; checks are not accepted here, or money orders, or anything of the sort, said the employee with the black sleeves and coffee-colored jacket, assiduously reclaiming the books one by one:

—Above all, young man, we do not extend credit.

—Toño has been looking for the Andreyev novel for a long time. He wanted to give it to her. It’s the story of a young rebel. And an anarchist, besides. I turned to face him. —She is flesh and blood.

—I know—said Ogarrio with his usual seriousness. —Come with me.

Toño

I think she’s feeling better, thanks to my care. Bernardo has stayed away for several nights and hasn’t helped me. I spend hours watching over her, ministering to her complaints, to her needs. I understand her: in her condition, she needs all sorts of attention. It’s Bernardo’s fault she feels bad: he should have been here helping me, instead of hiding in the tower of his resentment. Thank God, she’s better. I look at her face, so thin and sweet.

… I feel an overwhelming fatigue in the morning, as I’ve never felt before.

I dream that I’m talking with her. But she only talks to herself. When I talk, she doesn’t listen. She talks over my head, or around me, to some other person who is above or behind me, someone I can’t see. It makes me sick with grief. I believe in someone who doesn’t exist. Then she caresses me. She does believe in me.

I wake up with a big scratch on my face. I raise my hand to my wounded cheek, I see the blood on my fingers. I look at her, awake, sitting in bed, motionless, looking at me. Does she smile? I take her left hand, roughly: it lacks the ring finger.

Bernardo

He said that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with virginal fiancées or with whores. Much less with mannequins! He laughed, undressing.

I knew it as soon as I entered the room on the Plaza Miravalle, full of Chinese screens and mirrors in gilded frames, divans heaped with soft cushions and Persian carpets, smelling of lost churches and distant cities; nothing in Mexico City smelled like this apartment where she appeared from behind some curtains, identical to him, but with a woman’s body, pale and slim, almost without breasts but with luxuriant pubic hair, as if the dark profundity of her sex made up for the plainness of her adolescent body: from afar she smelled of almonds and unknown soaps. She walked toward me, her long hair hanging loose, her heavy eyes ringed with dark circles, her lips painted deep red to disguise their thinness: her mouth was two red lines, just like his. Naked except for black stockings that she held up, poor thing, with her hands, with difficulty, practically scratching her thighs.

—Arturo, please …

She could have been his twin. He smiled and said no, they were not brother and sister, they had searched for a long time before finding each other. The penumbra she brought with her. He had asked his father: Don’t throw out the old furniture, what you don’t sell give to me. Without the furniture, perhaps, the room would not be what I see now: an enchanted cave in the middle of Plaza Miravalle, near the Salamanca ice-cream parlor, where we used to go for delicious lemon ices …

—Perhaps all this attracts her: the curtains, the rug, the furniture …

—The penumbra—I said.

—Yes, the penumbra, too. It’s not easy to produce this exact light. It’s not easy to conjure up another person who not only resembles you physically but wants to be like you, even wants to be you. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be like her, but I would like to be her, do you understand? That’s why we’ve been searching until we found each other. By force of attraction, but also by force of repulsion.

—Arturo, please, my garters. You promised.

—Poor thing!

He told me that she made love with someone else only if he was present, if he participated. He was taking off his dark gray jacket, his black tie, his stiff collar. He dropped the collar button into a black lacquer box. She looked at him fascinated, forgetting about her garters. She let her stockings fall to her ankles. Then she looked at me and laughed.

—Arturo, this fellow loves another. She laughed, taking my hand in hers, sweaty, an unexpectedly nervous hand for that woman the color of a waning moon, carrier no doubt of the infirmity of the romantic century: she looked like one of Ruelas’s tubercular sketches, and I thought of La Desdichada and a line from the Romancero of Lorca that I hadn’t been able to buy this morning, which describes the Andalusian dancer as paralyzed by the moon: —Arturo, look at him, he’s afraid, he’s one of those who love only one woman, I know them, I know them! They’re looking for that one woman and that gives them license to sleep with them all, the swine, because they’re looking for just that one. See: he’s a decent boy!

She laughed. The piercing wail of a baby interrupted her. She cursed and rushed off, with her stockings slipping, to hide behind a screen. I heard her soothing the infant. “Poor little one, poor little one, my baby, go to sleep now, it’s all right…” while Arturo Ogarrio threw himself, naked, mouth open, onto the divan piled with cushions covered in arabesques and pillows patterned in cashmere.

—I shouldn’t kid myself. She always preferred him to me, from the beginning, that head leaned against his shoulder, those little glances, those escapades in the bathroom, the whore!

Toño

When Bernardo mistreated her, I didn’t say anything. But at night she reproached me.—Are you going to defend me or not? Are you going to defend me…? she asked several times.

Bernardo

My mother writes from Guadalajara just to tell me: she has taken the tunic, the pants, the belt off the bed. She has taken the boots off the floor. She’s put them all away, shined his boots and put everything in a trunk. They’re not needed anymore. She has seen my father. An engineer who had taken pictures of the political events and public ceremonies of recent years invited her and other members of families that had supported Don Venustiano Carranza to see a film in his house. A silent film, of course. From the dances of the turn of the century to the murder of Don Venustiano and the ascent to power of those horrible characters from Sonora and Sinaloa. No, that was not important. That didn’t interest her. But there, in a congressional ceremony in Donceles Street, behind President Carranza, was your father, Bernardo my son, your father was standing there, very serious, very handsome, very formal, protecting the president, in the very uniform that I have taken such zealous care of, your father, my son, moving, dressed up for me, my son, for me, Bernardo, he looked at me. I have seen him. You can come home.

How can I explain to my mother that I cannot compensate for the death of my father with the mobile simulacrum of the film; rather, my way of keeping him alive is to imagine him at my side always, invisible, a voice more than a presence, answering my questions, but silent in the face of those actions of mine that do not conform to his counsel, that kill him over again, with as much violence as the bullets themselves? I need a father close by me to authorize my words. The voice of my father is a secret endorsement of my own voice. But I know that with my words, even though he inspires them, I deny my father’s authority, I instill rebellion, at the same time that I try to impose obedience on my own children.

Does La Desdichada save me from family obligations? The immobile dummy could free me from the responsibilities of sex, parenthood, matrimony, releasing me to literature. Could literature be my sex, my body, my posterity? Could literature provide friendship itself? Is that why I hate Toño, who gives himself purely to life?

Toño

I hear Bernardo’s step on the stairs. He is returning; I recognize him. How can I tell him what has happened? It is my duty. Is it also my duty to tell him that she’s dangerous, at least at times, that we must be on guard? The bed is wet with urine. She doesn’t recognize me. She cowers in the corners, rejecting me. What does this woman want of me? How can I know, if she keeps so stubborn a silence? I have to tell Bernardo: I’ve tried everything. The bed is wet. She doesn’t recognize me, doesn’t recognize her Toño, her tony Toño, she called me like a child. She has wet the bed, she doesn’t recognize me. I have to prepare her pabulum, dress her, undress her, clean her, tuck her in at night, sing her lullabies … I held her, I soothed her, now you belong to me, child, now you’re mine, I said, little baby, the boogeyman … Desperately I push her away, far from me. She falls to the floor with a horrible crash of wood against wood. I rush to pick her up, to embrace her. For God’s sake, what do you want, Desdichada, unhappy one, why don’t you tell me what you want, why don’t you hold me, why don’t you let me loosen your dressing gown a little, lift up your skirts, see if what I feel, what you want is true, why not let me kiss your nipples, doll, embrace me, you can hurt me, but not him, he has to do things, you understand, Desdichada? He has to write, you mustn’t hurt him, you can’t scratch him, infect him, destroy his confidence, or wound him with your polymorphous perversity, I know your secret, doll, you’re in love with all shapes, doll, that’s your perversion, but he is pure, he is the young poet, and you and I have had the privilege of witnessing his youth, the birth of his genius, the nativity of the poet.

My brother, my friend.

Since I have known you I have realized the importance of forming an image of oneself at the moment when youth and talent meet: the sign of that meeting can manifest itself as a spark of ingenuity—and sometimes as a flash of genius. That is something you find out later (do you understand me, Desdichada, wretched one?). What the image of the young artist (you, Bernardo, coming up the stairs) tells the rest of us is that we can recapture that moment: the image reveals a vocation; if we falter, it can return to reawaken us. You remember, Bernardo? I cut out a print of the self-portrait of the young Dürer and stuck it into a corner of the mirror: to my friend, the young poet, who is going to write what I will never be able to write. Perhaps you understood. You didn’t say anything. Like you, I write, but I am afraid of my potential to call forth darkness. If creation is absolute, it will reveal good, but also evil. That must be the price of creation: if we are free, we are free both to create and to destroy. If we don’t want to be responsible to God for what we are and do, we must make ourselves responsible, don’t you agree, Bernardo? Don’t you agree, unhappy woman, Desdichada?

You believe that she has the right to impose herself between us, to destroy our friendship, bewitch you, turn you from your vocation, deliver you unto evil, frustrate your monogamous romanticism, initiate you in her voracious, perverse love of all shapes? I don’t know what you think. I have seen her up close. I have observed her changes of mood, of time, of taste, of age; she is tender one minute and violent the next; she comes to life at certain hours, she seems near death at others; she is enamored of metamorphosis, not of the inalterable form of a statue or a poem. Bernardo, my friend, my poet: let her go, your fascination with her is unhealthy for you, you must fix your words in a form to transmit them to others: they must return them to flux, instability, uncertainty; you can’t be expected to give form to loose and common words and then reanimate them as well: that is my responsibility as your reader, not yours, my creator.

She wants you to believe the opposite: nothing should ever be fixed, everything must always be in flux, that is pleasure, liberty, diversion, art, life. Have you heard her moaning at night? Have you felt her nails on your face? Have you seen her sitting on the toilet? Have you had to clean her filth from the bed? Have you ever soothed her to sleep? Have you ever prepared her pap? Do you know what it’s like to live every day with a woman with no voice, no language? Pardon me, Bernardo: do you know what it’s like to open your hand and find there that …

Sometimes I see myself behind him in the glass, when we are in a hurry and must both shave at once. The mirror is like an abyss. It doesn’t matter that I fall in it. Not everything happens only in the mind, as you seem to think, Bernardo.

Bernardo and Toño

She whispered in my ear, with a breath of dust: How would you like to die? Can you picture yourself crucified? Can you imagine yourself with a crown of thorns? Tell me if you would like to die like Him. Would you dare, you wretch? Would you ask for a death like His? Don’t cover your ears, poor devil! You want to possess me and you aren’t capable of thinking of a death that would make me adore you? Then I will tell you what I’ll do with you, Toño, my little tony Toño, I’ll make you die of sickness, young or old, murdered like your friend Bernardo’s father, in a street accident, in a nightclub quarrel, fighting over a whore, gunned down, die however you die, tony Toño, I’ll dig up your body, gnaw your skeleton until you are sand, and I’ll put you in an hourglass, to mark the passing time: I’ll turn you into the sand in an hourglass, my little one, and I’ll turn you over every half hour, that will keep me busy until I die, turning you on your head every thirty minutes, how do you like my idea, how do you like it?

Bernardo

I know: I am coming back to take care of her. I enter our apartment without a sound. I open the door carefully. I’m sure that even before I’m inside I can hear her voice, very low, very far off, saying: I believe in you, I’m not sick, I do believe in you. I slam the door and the voice stops. I hate hearing words not meant for me. Can one be a poet in that case? I believe so, deeply: the words that I must hear are not necessarily directed toward me, they are not words only for me, but they are never words I shouldn’t be hearing. I’ve thought that love is an abyss; language too, and the words of another’s confidences, intrigues, and secrets—words of friends, politicians, insincere lovers—they are not mine.

The poet is not a Peeping Tom—that may be the novelist’s role, I don’t know. The poet doesn’t seek, he receives; the poet doesn’t look through keyholes, he closes his eyes in order to see.

She stopped talking. I went in and found Toño lying in my bed, his arms crossed over his face. I heard the clear glug-glug of the enchanted water. Slowly I entered the bath, parting the beaded curtain with its Malaysian sound.

There she was, at the bottom of a tub full of steaming-hot water, her paint peeling, with barely a trace of eyebrows, of lips, of her languid eyes, already peeling away, blistering from the hot water, submerged in a glassy death, her final display window, her long black hair free at last, floating like algae, clean at last, no longer matted down, my woman was sleeping, in the window where no one would ever see her or admire her or desire her: never again imagine her, unhappy one, Desdichada …

And yet I had to take her out and hold her one more time, comfort her, now cling to me, only me, go to sleep, my soul … How would it have been—I say to Toño—if one afternoon I had listened to you and taken La Desdichada to have tea at Aunt Fernandita’s house, and cousin Sonsoles had served us an insipid tea that was really an apple drink, and then the silly girl had invited us up to her dollhouse, to stay there, the three of us? Then what—I asked Toño—then what? Take this handkerchief, these panties, these stockings. They’re just things I’ve been gathering for her, here and there.

Toño

Throughout the wake, Bernardo didn’t look at her. He only looked at me. It doesn’t matter; I accept his reproaches. He doesn’t say a word to me. I don’t respond to his silent question. I could tell him—though it isn’t true: “You know why: because she refused to love me.”

I went to buy her casket from the funeral home on the corner.

Teófilo Sánchez and Ventura del Castillo came over. Ventura brought a sprig of fragrant spikenard. Arturo Ogarrio arrived with two tall tapers, he placed them at the head of the coffin and lit them.

I went out to eat a sandwich nearby, watchful and sad. Bernardo left after me. He paused in the patio. He looked at the bottom of the dry fountain. It began to rain: the warm round drops of the month of July in the Mexican plateau. The sky-high tropics. The cats of the neighborhood slunk across the roofs and eaves of the house.

When I came running back, protecting myself from the torrential rain with a copy of the Ultimas Notícias de Excélsior, with my lapels turned up, brushing the water off my shoulders and stomping hard, the coffin was empty and none of the four—Ventura, Teófilo, Arturo, Bernardo—was there.

I laid out the wet paper on the sofa. I hadn’t read it. Besides, we saved the papers to light the water heater. I read the news of July 17, 1936: four generals had taken up arms in the Grand Canary Island against the Spanish Republic. Francisco Franco flew from Las Palmas to Tetuán in a plane called the Rapid Dragon.

Bernardo
(i)

Some months later my loneliness led me back to the Waikiki. My Aunt Fernanda had let me stay at her house. All right, I will be frank: my poverty was great, but not as great as my wretchedness. I will go further. I needed the warmth of a home, I admit it, and the evocations of the Andalusian sun of my ancestors gave it to me, notwithstanding even the flirtations of that fake maja, cousin Sonsoles. On the other hand, I found it more difficult every day to put up with Uncle Feliciano, a Franco supporter to the bone; his trips to Veracruz provided the only relief, before I realized that he went to the port to organize the Spanish merchants against the red republic of Madrid, as he liked to call it.

I began to spend a lot of time at the nightclub, stupidly blowing my mother’s check on dolls and drink. This was Toño’s world not mine; perhaps my secret desire was that I’d run into him there, we’d make up, forget La Desdichada, and resume our comfortable life together, which permitted us to share expenses that we really couldn’t afford if we each lived alone.

There is something else (I must add): the visits to the nightclub reconciled me to the mystery of my city. The Waikiki was a public hiding place, as well as a private agora. In it, one felt oneself surrounded by the vast enigma of the oldest city of the New World, a city that one can travel to by train, plane, and highway, stay in a hotel, eat in restaurants, visit museums, and still never see.

The unwary visitor doesn’t understand that the true Mexico City is not there. It must be imagined, it can’t be seen directly. It demands words to bring it to life, like the Baroque statue that can be fully seen only if one moves around it; like the poem that makes one condition to be ours: Speak me. Syllables, words, images, metaphors: a lyrical sentence is completed only when it goes beyond metaphor and becomes epiphany. The intangible crown on this web of encounters is, finally, amazement: the epiphany is wonderful because the poem now is written but cannot be seen; it is said (it said-duces).

There must be a place for the final encounter of the poet and his reader: a port of sail.

I see my city like this poem of invisible architecture, successfully concluded only to begin again, perpetually. The conclusion is the condition of the new beginning. And to start anew is to be led to the epiphany to come: I evoke names and places, Argentina and Donceles Streets, Reforma and Madero Avenues, the Churches of Santa Veracruz and San Hipólito, the pirul and the ahuehuete trees, calla lilies, a skeleton on a bicycle and a wasp stinging my forehead, Orozco and Tolsá, Porrúa Brothers Bookstore and Tacuba Café, the Cine Iris, sunstone and stone sun, zarzuelas at the Arbeu Theater, ahuautles and huitlacoche, pineapple and coriander, jicama and cactus with white cheese; Los Leones desert, Ajusco Mountain and Colonia Roma, gooey popcorn and morning sweet rolls, the Salamanca ice-cream shop, the Waikiki and Rio Rosa cabarets, wet season and dry season: Mexico, D.F. In the renewed mystery of the city, starting from any of its streets, eating a taco, entering a movie house, I could meet my dear friend Toño again and tell him it’s all right, it’s all over, shake hands, man, buddies again, brothers forever, come on, Toñito …

I released myself from the woman who was rubbing my knee, and set my glass on the table. The comic uproar in the middle of the nightclub’s raised runway, the unexpected Spanish dancing, the mood of a bullfight victory celebration, the play of warm red and blue lights, and the unmistakable figure of Teófilo Sánchez, his short jacket, his miner’s boots, his hair like a new recruit’s (shaved with the aid of a bowl), dancing to the exuberant music with a woman dressed in a wedding gown, moving back and forth, lifting her in the air, the arms of the popular poet showing her, on high, to all, clasping her tightly to his chest like a prize he’d been coveting, head to toe, that light, stiff, unpainted creature; again they crossed the stage, now spinning, her rigid arms raised as for a chant of hallucinated snakes, turning in circles, the music swelling double-time, and now Teófilo Sánchez threw his companion dressed as a bride into the air, her collar buttoned to her ears, her face covered by a wedding veil, hiding the signs of age, destruction, water, fire, pockmarks … the intensely sad eyes of the mannequin.

I went to jump up on the runway to put an end to the horrible spectacle. It wasn’t necessary. Other small disturbances succeeded the first, like an earthquake followed by an aftershock, a new shaking that makes us forget the first, which seems remote, though it’s only a few seconds old. A commotion on the runway an angry scream, confused movement, injured bodies, shouted curses.

Then the lights dimmed. The scene cooled down. The darkness surrounded us. A single ray of icy light, a silver light in a world of black velvet, shone like a lunar spotlight on the runway and the band began the slowest danzón. A young man dressed all in dark gray, pale and sunken-eyed, with his lips pressed tight and his black hair slicked back, took the woman dressed as a bride in his arms and held her in the slowest danzón, moving, yes, over the space of a single tile, practically a postage stamp, almost without moving his feet, without moving his hips or his arms, the two held each other in aquarian silence. Arturo Ogarrio and the rescued woman, slow, ceremonious as a Spanish Infanta, her face hidden behind a cascade of veils, but finally free, I realized with sudden relief, finally her own mistress in the arms of this young man who did the danzón so slowly, tenderly, respectfully, passionately, while I watched the figures of the dancers moving farther and farther away in the silver light, leaving more and more space, for me, for my life and my poetry, giving up a meeting with Toño, writing a farewell to Mexico in this night the color of smoke, in exchange for a meeting with literature …

(ii)

The words of a poem only return to life, imperfect or not, when they flow anew; that is, when they are said. Better said (read) than dead! The poem I’m translating is called El Desdichado—Nerval’s French did not offer the verbal phantasm of the Spanish words, in which what is said (dicho) defeats what is sad (des-dicha), and what is unsaid (des-dicho), and what’s unsound(ed) (des-dicho) is rent by the sword of words. Silence is the unsaid; it is sadness, whereas a word is award. The wordless are worldless, for silence is shapeless, hapless. It’s voice versus vice—so voice verses!

But she, La Desdichada, does not speak, she does not speak …

I think this and surprise myself. Emotion floods over me, I translate it as she who doesn’t speak: Love, be who you may, named as you’re named (name, flame: benighted, be lighted—to name is to bring to life, to flame is to inflame), speak through me, Desdichada, unhappy, unsaid one, trust in the poet, let me be your voice, your word/world. I will make you sound. Speak to me, through me, for me, and in exchange for your voice I swear I will always be true, always true to you. That is my desire, Desdichada, the world is slow to give me what I want, one woman who is mine alone, and I only hers.

Let me draw near your wooden ear, while I’m still under twenty, and tell you: I don’t know if the world will ever bring me that one woman, or if so, when. Perhaps to find her I would have to change my ways (my virtue), perhaps I would have to love many women before discovering this is it, the one and only, the here and now. And even if I find her, what will become of me then, having loved so many to find that one, telling her that it was all for her and her alone—will she believe me when I tell her that I am a man meant for only one woman?

How can I be believed? How can I prove my sincerity? And if she doesn’t believe me, how can I believe in her? It’s okay for a nineteen-year-old writer to say these things; perhaps confidence is, after all, the most important thing. But my fear is something known best in adolescence, though never completely forgotten, even if concealed: love is an abyss.

I choose henceforth to put my trust in one woman: will La Desdichada be my abyss, the first, best, and most faithful lover of my life? Toño would laugh. It’s easy to count on the fidelity of a wooden doll. No, it’s hard, I tell him, for a wooden doll to rely on the fidelity of a man of flesh and blood.

(iii)

Twenty-five years later, I returned from all the cities of the world. I wrote. I loved. I did things that pleased me. I tried to turn them into literature. But the things that pleased me were sufficient unto themselves. They didn’t want to be words. Likes and dislikes, tastes and distastes fought among themselves. With luck they became poetry. The poetry of the changing city reflected my own tensions.

I knew the old Waikiki was closing, so I went there one night. The last night it was open. I saw Toño sitting a little ways from me. He had gotten fatter and had an impressive mustache. There was no need to greet each other. What would he think of me, after a quarter of a century? We walked between the tables, the dancing couples, to shake hands and sit down together. All this without speaking a word, while the band played the anthem of all slow dances, Nereidas. Then we laughed. We had forgotten the ceremony, the rite that affirmed our public friendship. We stood up. We embraced. We slapped each other on the back, on the waist, Toño, Bernardo, how are you?

We didn’t want to reminisce. We didn’t want to slip into an easy nostalgia. The Waikiki was taking care of that. We started talking as if no time had gone by. But the end of an era was being celebrated all around us; the city would never be the same, the Expressionist carnival was ending, from now on everything would be much too vast, distant, ground down; tonight marked the end of the theatrics that everyone could share, the witticisms that everyone could repeat, the celebrities that we could celebrate without risk of foreign comparisons: our village, rose-colored, blue, vivid, was going away, it was whirling around us, inviting us to a carnival that was a funeral, the footlights pointed toward the edges of the nightclub full of smoke and sadness so that we were all mixed together: show, audience, whores, Johns, band, masters, servants, slaves: out of this crowd that moved like a sick serpent, two extraordinary figures emerged: a Pierrot and a Columbine in perfect costume: they both wore whiteface, his forehead was black, her tragic smile was painted on with lipstick; he had the black gorget, the shiny white suit of a clown, the black buttons, the satin slippers; Columbine had the white wig, the tiny fairy cap, the white gorget, the white mesh stockings, the ballet slippers; their moonlike faces were both masked.

They came over to us, said our names. Bernardo, welcome to Mexico! Toño, we knew you’d be here! Come on! Today marks the end of the Mexico City we knew, today one city dies and another is born, come with us!

Laughing, we asked their names.

—Ambar.

—Estrella.

—Come with us.

We took taxi after taxi, the four of us squeezed in together, breathing the intense perfume of those strange creatures. It was the last night of the city we had known. The ball at San Carlos, where they took us that night (the perfumed couple, Pierrot and Columbine), was the annual saturnalia of the university students, who cast aside the medieval prohibitions of the Royal, Holy University of Mexico amid the Neoclassicism of the eighteenth-century palace’s stone staircases and columns: disguises, drinks, abandon, the always threatening movement of the crowd carried away by the dance, the drunkenness, the sensuality on display, the lights like waves; who was going to dance with Ambar, who with Estrella: which was the man, which was the woman, what would our hands tell us when we danced first with Columbine, then with Pierrot? And how easily the two were able to avoid our touch so that we were left without sex, with only perfume and movement. We were drunk. But we justified intoxication with a thousand excuses: seeing each other after so many years, the night, the dance, the company of this couple, the city celebrating its death, the suspicion I formed in the taxi, when we all climbed in and Estrella ordered: “Let’s have one for the road at Las Veladoras”—an outdoor bar lit by votive lamps: could it be Arturo Ogarrio and his girlfriend, his double? I asked Toño No, he answered, they’re too young, the best thing would be to pull off their masks, find out for sure. So we tried, and they both shrieked in androgynous voices, screamed horribly, squealed as pigs would if we took their hind legs and castrated them, and they cried for the taxi driver to stop, they’re killing us, and the flustered driver came to a stop, they got out, we were in front of the cathedral, Ambar and Estrella ran past the iron gate into the churchyard and on into the splendid cave of carved stone.

We followed them inside, but our search was futile. Pierrot and Columbine had disappeared into the bowels of the cathedral. Something told me that Toño and I had not come here to find them. Sacred, profane, cathedral, cabaret, school, Orozco’s mural, the carnival of San Carlos, the agony of Mexico; I felt dizzy, I grasped a gilded screen in front of a dark side altar. I tried to catch Toño’s eye. He didn’t look at me. Toño was holding on to the screen with both hands and gazing intently at the altar behind it. It was dawn and some religious women who had been there for four centuries knelt down one more time, wrapped in black shawls as always, with skins like yellow onions. Toño didn’t look at them. The incense made me nauseated, the smell of rotting spikenard. Toño stared fixedly at the altar.

The Virgin, with her cowl, her gown of ivory and gold, and her velvet cape, was weeping as she gazed at her dead Son lying cradled in her arms. The Christ of Mexico, wounded like a bullfighter, cut to pieces in a great, never-ending corrida, bathed in blood, gored: His wounds would never heal, that’s why His Mother cried; although He came back to life, He was wounded, caught by the bull. She rested her feet on the horns of a bull, and she wept. Down her cheeks rolled huge black tears, like the ones on the Pierrot who wouldn’t let me take off his mask. He never stopped bleeding, she never stopped crying.

Now I joined in the contemplation of the Virgin. Her sculptor had given her a face of classic features, a straight nose and nicely spaced eyes, languid, half open, and a tiny, tight mouth painted to look like a ribbon. Her chin was a little prognathous, like the Infantas of Velázquez. She also had a long neck, perfect for her gorget, which was like Columbine’s. At last she had found her niche. At last the cause, the background of her misery, her des-dicha, became clear. She opens her arms to ask mercy for her Son, and her praying hands, open, don’t quite touch the object of her passion. The ring finger of her left hand is missing. Her long eyelids, like a lizard’s, look at us half-closed, look at Toño and me as if we are lifeless wooden dolls. Her eyes are infinitely sad. As if they had witnessed a great unhappiness in another time.

Toño

… The air became so filthy, the city so sprawling and remote, our destinies were fulfilled, accomplished—we were what we were, writers, journalists, bureaucrats, editors, politicians, businessmen, no longer “will be,” but “were,” back in those years, when the air was so …

Vineyard Haven,

Massachusetts

Summer 1986