Woes of the True Policeman (11 page)

Questionnaire

Question
: Why would you want Amado Nervo as a houseguest?

Answer
: Because he was a good man, industrious and resourceful, the kind of person who helps set the table and wash the dishes. I’m sure he wouldn’t even hesitate to sweep the floor, though I wouldn’t let him. He would watch TV shows with me and discuss them afterward, he would listen to my troubles, he would never let things get blown out of proportion: he would always have the right thing to say, the appropriate levelheaded response to any problem. If there were some disaster—an earthquake, a civil war, a nuclear accident—he wouldn’t flee like a rat or collapse in hysterics, he would help me pack the bags, he would keep an eye on the children so that they didn’t run off in fear or for fun or get lost, he would always be calm, his head firmly on his shoulders, but most of all he would always be true to his word, to the decisive gesture expected of him.

Readings

Poems by Amado Nervo (
Los jardines interiores; En voz baja; Elevación; Perlas negras; Serenidad; La amada inmóvil
). Laurence Sterne,
A Sentimental Journey
(Colección Austral, Espasa Calpe). Matsuo Basho,
Narrow Road to the Interior
(Hiperión).

Of all the habits, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla defended smoking. The one thing ever to unite Catalonians and Castilians, Asturians and Andalusians, Basques and Valencians, was the art, the appalling circumstance of communal smoking. According to Padilla, the most beautiful phrase in the Spanish language was the request for a light. Beautiful, soothing phrase, the kind of thing you could say to Prometheus, full of courage and humble complicity. When an inhabitant of the peninsula said “¿tienes fuego?” a wave of lava or saliva gushed anew in the miracle of communication and loneliness. Because for Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that “night of the soul” the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace. It was in the kingdom of Celtas and Bisontes, of Ducados and Rexes, that his fellow countrymen truly lived. The rest: confusion, shouting, the occasional potato tortilla. And as for the repeated warnings of the Department of Health: rubbish. Though every day, it was said, people smoked less and more smokers switched to ultra-light cigarettes. He himself no longer smoked Ducados, as he had in his adolescence, but unfiltered Camels.

There was nothing strange, he said, about a condemned man being offered a cigarette before he was executed. As a popular rite of faith, the cigarette was more important than the prayers and blessing of the priest. And yet those who were executed in the electric chair or the gas chamber weren’t offered anything: it was a Latin custom, a Hispanic custom. And he could go on and on like this, dredging up an endless string of anecdotes. The one that Amalfitano remembered most vividly and that struck him as most significant—and premonitory, in a way, since it was about Mexico and a Mexican and he had ended up in Mexico—was the story of a colonel of the Revolution who had the misfortune to end his days in front of a firing squad. His last wish was for a cigarette. The captain of the firing squad, who must have been a good man, granted his request. The colonel found a cigar and proceeded to smoke it, not saying a thing to anyone, gazing at the barren landscape. When he had finished, the ash still clung to the cigar. His hand hadn’t trembled; the execution could proceed. That man must be one of the patron saints of smokers, said Padilla. So what was the story about, the colonel’s nerves of steel or the calming effects of smoke, the communion with smoke? Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, couldn’t say and didn’t care.

Sometimes Amalfitano meditated on his relatively recent homosexuality and sought literary affirmation and examples as consolation. All that came to mind was Thomas Mann and the kind of languid, innocent fairyhood with which he was afflicted in his old age. But I’m not that old, he thought, and Thomas Mann was probably gaga by then, which isn’t the case for me. Nor did he find consolation in those few Spanish novelists who, once past the age of thirty, suddenly discovered that they were queer: most of them were such jingoistic butches that when he thought about them he became actively depressed. Sometimes he remembered Rimbaud and drew convoluted analogies: in “Le cœur volé,” which some critics read as the detailed account of the rape of Rimbaud by a group of soldiers while the poet was on his way to Paris to join the dream of the Commune, Amalfitano, turning over in his head a text that could be read many different ways, saw the end of his heterosexuality, stifled by the absence of something he couldn’t put his finger on, a woman, a heroine, a superwoman. And sometimes, instead of just thinking about Rimbaud’s poem, he recited it aloud, which was a habit that Amalfitano, like Rosa, had inherited from Edith Lieberman:
Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,

Mon cœur couvert de caporal:

Ils y lancent des jets de soupe,

Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe:

Sous les quolibets de la troupe

Qui pousse un rire général,

Mon triste cœur bave à la poupe,

Mon cœur couvert de caporal!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!

Au gouvernail on voit des fresques

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques.

Ô flots abracadabrantesques,

Prenez mon cœur, qu’il soit lavé!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l’ont dépravé!

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, ô cœur volé?

Ce seront des hoquets bachiques

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques:
J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques,

Moi, si mon cœur est ravalé:

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques

Comment agir, ô cœur volé?

It all made sense, thought Amalfitano, the adolescent poet degraded by brutish soldiers just as he was heading—on foot!—toward an encounter with the Chimera, and how strong Rimbaud was, thought Amalfitano (he had given up any idea of consolation and was filled with excitement and astonishment), to write this poem almost immediately afterward, with a steady hand, the rhymes original, the images oscillating between the comic and the monstrous …

What Amalfitano would never know was that the corporal of “mon cœur couvert de caporal,” the son of a bitch who raped Rimbaud, had been a soldier in Bazaine’s army in the Mexican adventure of Maximilian and Napoleon III.

In March 1865, unable to learn anything about the fate of Colonel Libbrecht’s column, Colonel Eydoux, commander of the plaza of El Tajo, which served as supply depot for all of the troops operating in that part of the Mexican northeast, sent a detail of thirty horsemen toward Santa Teresa. The detail was under the command of Captain Laurent and Lieutenants Rouffanche and González, the latter a Mexican monarchist.

The detail arrived in Villaviciosa on the second day of March. It never made it to Santa Teresa. All the men—except for Lieutenant Rouffanche and three soldiers who were killed when the French were ambushed as they ate at the only inn in town—were taken prisoner, among them the future corporal, then a twenty-two-year-old recruit. The prisoners, gagged and with their hands bound with hemp rope, were brought before the man acting as military boss of Villaviciosa and a group of town notables. The boss was a mestizo addressed alternately as Inocencio and El Loco. The notables were country folk, most of them barefoot, who stared at the Frenchmen and then withdrew to a corner to confer. Half an hour later, after a bit of hard bargaining between two evidently opposed groups, the Frenchmen were taken to a covered corral where, after being stripped of their clothes and shoes, they were raped and tortured by a group of captors for the rest of the day.

At midnight Captain Laurent’s throat was cut. Lieutenant González, two sergeants, and seven soldiers were taken to the main street and forced to play chasing games by torchlight. They all died, either run through or with their throats slit by pursuers on the backs of the soldiers’ own horses.

At dawn, the future corporal and two other soldiers managed to break their bonds and flee cross-country. Only the corporal survived. Two weeks later he reached El Tajo. He was decorated and remained in Mexico until 1867, when he returned to France with Bazaine, who retreated with his army, abandoning the emperor to his fate.

Sometimes Amalfitano saw himself as the Prince of Antioch or the homesick Knight of Tyre, the King of Tarsus or the Lord of Ephesus, adventurers of the Middle Ages once upon a time read or misread—with equal enthusiasm—by a luckless God-fearing lord in the midst of pandemonium and exile and untold confusion, accompanied by a beautiful daughter and an aura intensified by the ravages of time. As in the story by Alfonso Reyes (God rest his soul, thought Amalfitano, who truly loved him), “The Fortunes of Apollonius of Tyre,” from
Real and Imaginary Portraits
. A dethroned king, he thought, wandering the Mediterranean islands painted by that so-called Michelangelo of comic strips, the creator of
Prince Valiant
, those divine and infernal islands where Valiant met Aleta, but also where the Knight of Epirus bewailed his unjust persecution, and the giddy vagabond of Mytilene told the story of his misfortunes, these characters who, as Reyes noted, sprang from the Greek or Roman depths of our memory, and this was precisely what was false about it all, what was disturbing and revelatory: the vagabond prince was a stand-in for Ulysses and the Baron of Thebes was a stand-in for Theseus, though both were God-fearing knights who prayed morning and night. In this masquerade, Amalfitano discovered unknown regions of himself. In the Greek king who fled with his daughter from monastery to monastery, from desert island to desert island, as if he were traveling backward from the year 1300 to 500 and from 500 to 20
B.C.
and onward, ever deeper in time, he saw the futility of his efforts, the basic naïveté of his struggle, his spurious role as scrivener monk. Now all I need is to go blind, with Rosa as my cherished guide leading me from classroom to classroom, he thought gloomily.

When Amalfitano learned that his daughter had disappeared with a black man, he thought randomly of a line from Lugones that he had come across years—many years—ago. Lugones’s words were these: “It is well known that youth is the most intellectual stage of an ape’s life, as it is of the Negro’s.” What a brute, that Lugones! And then he remembered the story, Lugones’s plot: a man, a neurotic, the narrator, labors for years to teach a chimpanzee to talk. All his efforts are in vain. One day the narrator senses that the ape can talk, that he has learned to talk but hides it cleverly. Whether he hides it out of fear or atavism, Amalfitano can’t remember. Probably fear. So unrelenting is his master that the ape falls ill. His sufferings are almost human. The man cares for him as devotedly as he might care for his own child. Both feel the pain of their imminent separation. At the final moment, the ape whispers: Water, master, my master, my master. This was where the Lugones story ended (for a second, Amalfitano imagined Lugones shooting himself in the mouth in the darkest and coolest corner of his library, swallowing poison in an attic strung with cobwebs, hanging himself from the highest beam of the bathroom, but could Lugones’s bathroom possibly have had beams? where had he read that or seen it? Amalfitano didn’t know), giving way—one ape leading to another—to the story by Kafka, the Chinese Jew. What different viewpoints, thought Amalfitano. Good old Kafka puts himself without hesitation into the skin of the ape. Lugones sets out to make the ape speak; Kafka gives him voice. Lugones’s story, which Amalfitano thought extraordinary, was a horror story. Kafka’s story, Kafka’s incomprehensible text, also took wing through realms of horror, but it was a religious text, full of black humor, human and melodramatic, unyielding and inconsequential, like everything that is truly unyielding, in other words like everything that is soft. Amalfitano began to weep. His little house, his parched yard, the television set and the video player, the magnificent northern Mexico sunset, struck him as enigmas that carried their own solutions with them, inscribed in chalk on the forehead. It’s all so simple and so terrible, he thought. Then he got up from his faded yellow sofa and closed the curtains.

So what did Amalfitano’s students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorized the two or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of Marcabrú, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn’t more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.

Amalfitano’s sense of humor tended to go hand and hand with his sense of history and both were as fine as wire: a skein in which horror mingled with a gaze of wonderment, the kind of gaze that knows everything is a game, which might explain why after these rare outpourings Amalfitano’s inner self, forged in the rigors of dialectical materialism, was left stricken, somehow ashamed of itself. But this was his sense of humor and there was nothing he could do about it.