(Background: The Savage Detectives loosely revolves around two poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, from Mexico City who start a literary movement called Visceral Realism. The book is split into two parts. The first part is comprised of journal entries by a third young poet, Juan Garcia Madero, who gets swept up in the Visceral Realist movement, and the second part is a series of anecdotes told by dozens of different narrators that relate to the two protagonists in varying degrees. This passage is from the second part, and the narrator and many of the characters mentioned in the passage are unfamiliar to the reader.)
Laura Jauregui, Tlalpan, Mexico City DF, January 1976. Before I met him I was dating Cesar, Cesar Arriago, and I was introduced to Cesar in the poetry workshop at the Torre De Rectoria at UNAM. That was where I met Maria Font and Rafael Barrios. That's also where I met Ulises Lima. His name wasn't Ulises Lima back then, or I don't know, maybe it already was but we called him by his real name, Alfredo something or other, and I met Cesar too and we fell in love or we thought we'd fallen in love and the two of us wrote poems for Ulises Lima's magazine. This was at the end of 1973, I can't say exactly when. It was at a time when it was raining a lot, I remember, because we were always coming in wet to meetings. And then we put together the magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, what a name, at the architecture studio where Maria's father worked. Those were gorgeous afternoons, we would drink wine and one of us always brought sandwiches, Sofia or Maria or I. The boys never brought anything, although actually they did, at first they did, but then the ones who brought things, the politer ones, quit the magazine, or at least stopped coming to the meetings, and then Pancho Rodriguez showed up and everything was spoiled, at least as far as I was concerned, but I kept working on the magazine, or anyway I still hung around in that crowd, mostly because Cesar was part of it and mostly because I liked Maria and Sofia (I was never friends with Angelica, not real friends), not because I wanted my poems to be published, none were published in the first issue, though there was supposed to be a poem of mine in the second issue, "Lilith" it was called, but in the end I don't know what happened and it wasn't published after all. It was Cesar who had a poem in Lee Harvey Oswald, a poem called "Laura and Cesar," very sweet, but Ulises changed the title (or convinced Cesar to change it) and in the end it was called "Laura & Cesar." That was the kind of thing Ulises Lima did.
but anyway, first I met Cesar, and Laura & Cesar started dating, or something like that. Poor Cesar. He had light brown hair and he was tall. He lived with his grandmother (his parents lived in Michoacan) and I had my first adult sexual experiences with him. Or actually, my last adolescent sexual experiences. Or second to last, now that I think about it. We would go to the movies and a few times we went to the theater. It was around then that I enrolled at the dance school and sometimes Cesar would go there with me. The rest of the time we spent taking long walks, talking about books we were reading, and doing nothing together. And this went on for months, three or four months or even nine months, and one day I broke up with him. That I know for sure, I was the one who told him it was over, although I can't remember exactly why, and I remember that Cesar took it very well, he agreed that I was right, he was in his second year of medical school then and I had just started at the university, studying literature. That afternoon I didn't go to class, went to Maria's house, I had to talk to a friend, I mean in person, not on the phone, and when I got to Colima, to Maria's house, the gate was open and that surprised me a little, because it was always closed, Maria's mother was paranoid about it, and I went in and rang the bell and the door opened and a guy I'd never seen before asked me who I was looking for. It was Arturo Belano. He was twenty-one then, skinny and long-haired, and he wore classes, horrible glasses, although his eyes weren't especially bad, he was just a little bit nearsighted, but the glasses were still horrible. We only exchanged a few words. He was with Maria and a poet called Anibal who was crazy about Maria back then, but they were on their way out when I got there.
That same day I saw him again. I spent all afternoon talking to Maria and then we went downtown to buy a scarf, I think, and we kept talking (first about Cesar & Laura, then about everything in existence) and we ended up having cappuccinos at Cafe Quito, where Maria was supposed to meet Anibal. And Arturo showed up around nine. This time he was with a seventeen-year-old Chilean called Felipe Muller, his best friend, a tall blond kid who almost never spoke and followed Arturo everywhere. And they sat down with us, of course. And then other poets turned up, poets a little older than Arturo, none of them visceral realists, among other reasons because visceral realism didn't exist yet, poets like Anibal who had been friends with Arturo before he left for Chile and so had known him since he was seventeen. They were actually journalists and government officials, the kind of sad people who never leave downtown, or certain downtown neighborhoods, sovereigns of sadness in the area bounded by Avenida Chapultepec, to the south, and Reforma, to the north, staffers at El Nacional, proofreaders at the Excelsior, pencil pushers at the Secretaria de Gobernacion who headed to Bucareli when they left work and sent out their tentacles or their little green slips. And even though, as I say, they were sad, that night we laughed a lot. In fact we never stopped laughing. And then we went walking to the bus stop, Maria, Anibal, Felipe Muller, Gonzalo Muller (Felipe's brother who was leaving Mexico soon), Arturo, and I. And somehow all of us fel incredibly happy, I had forgotten all about Cesar, Maria was looking up at the stars that had miraculously appeared in the sky of Mexico City like holographic projections, and even the way we were walking was graceful, our progress incredibly slow, as if we were advancing and retreating to put off the moment at which we would inevitably have to reach the bus stop, all of us walking and looking up at the sky (Maria was naming the stars). Much later Arturo told me that he hadn't been looking at the stars but at the lights in some apartments, tiny rooftop apartments on Calle Versalles or Lucerna or Calle Londres, and that was the moment he realized that nothing would make him happier than being with me in one of those apartents, eating a few sandwiches with sour cream from a certain street stall on Bucareli. But he didn't tell me that at the time (I would've thought he was crazy). He told me that he'd like to read some of my poems, he told me that he loved the stars of both hemispheres, north and south, and he asked for my number.
I gave him my number and the next day he called me. And we made a date to meet, but not downtown, I told him I couldn't leave Tlalpan, where I lived, that I had to study and, he said perfect, I'll come visit you, that way I'll get to see Tlalpan, and I said that there was nothing to see, you'll have to take the metro and then a bus and then another bus, and then I don't know why but I was sure he'd get lost and I said wait for me at the metro stop and when I went to meet him I found him sitting on some crates of fruit, leaning against a tree, really, the best place possible. You're lucky, I said. Yes, he said, I'm extremely lucky. And that afernoon he talked to me about Chile, I don't know whether it was because he wanted to or because I asked him about it, although the things he said were mostly incoherent, and he also talked about Guatemala and El Salvador, he'd been all over Latin America, or at least to every country along the Pacific coast, and we kissed for the first time, and then we were together for several months and we moved in together and then what happened happened, or in other words we broke up and I went back to living at my mother's house and I began to study biology (I hope to be a good biologist someday, I want to specialize in biogenetics), and strange things started to happen to Arturo. That was when visceral realism was born. At first we all thought it was a joke, but then we realized it wasn't. And when we realized it wasn't a joke, some of us went along with him and became visceral realists, out of inertia, I think, or because it was so crazy that it seemed plausible, or for the sake of friendship, so as not to lose a whole circle of friends, but deep down no one took it seriously. Not deep down.
At the time I was beginning to make new friends at the university and I saw Arturo and his friends less and less. I think the only one I called or went out with occasionally was Maria, but even my friendship with Maria began to cool. Still, I always more or less kept track of what Arturo was doing, and I though: of all the stupid things to come up with, how can he believe this junk, and suddenly, one night when I couldn't sleep, it occurred to me that it was all a message for me. It was a way of saying don't leave me, see what I'm capable of, stay with me. And then I realized that deep down the guy was a creep. Because it's one thing to fool yourself and another thing entirely to fool everybody else. The whole visceral realism thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless.
But that wasn't what I meant to say.
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