Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

series of different jobs. She worked as a secretary, and as a sales assistant in various boutiques; for a time she was employed by a couple of newspapers and even by a two-bit radio station. These stints never lasted very long, because, as she told me, not without a certain sadness, when you're a poet and you have to live by night, there's no way you can hold down a steady job.
    Of course I understood, and I agreed with her, although even as I expressed my agreement, my voice and my body language automatically and unconsciously betrayed an attitude of sickening superiority, as if I were saying to her, Sure, Lilian, that's fine, but in the end isn't it all a bit childish? Sure, it's enjoyable and amusing, but don't count on me to help carry out your experiment.
    As if splitting my time between the deleterious Avenida Bucareli and the university made me any better. As if knowing and associating with young poets as well as old, failed journalists made me any better. The truth is, I'm no better. The truth is, young poets usually end up as old, failed journalists. And the university, my beloved university is lurking in the sewers underneath the Avenida Bucareli, waiting for its day to come.
    One night, Lilian told me this herself, she met an exiled South American at the Café Quito and talked with him until closing time. Then they went to Lilians apartment and climbed into bed without making a sound so as not to wake young Carlos Coffeen. The South American was Ernesto Guevara. I don't believe you, Lilian, I said to her. It's true, it was him, said Lilian, in that peculiar voice she had when I met her: brittle, the voice of a broken doll, the sort of voice Cervantes' glass graduate would have had, if he'd been a woman, that is, and taken leave of his senses while remaining perfectly lucid, back in the hapless Golden Age of Spanish Literature. And what was Che Guevara like in bed, was the first thing I wanted to know. Lilian said something I couldn't hear. What? I said. What? What? Normal, said Lilian, staring at the creased surface of her folder.
    Maybe it was a lie. When I met Lilian, the only thing she seemed to care about was selling reproductions of her son's drawings. Poetry left her cold. She would turn up at the Café Quito very late and sit down at a table with the young poets, or with the old, failed journalists (all of whom had slept with her) and pass the time listening to the same old conversations. If someone said, for example, Tell us about Che Guevara, she would say, He was normal. That was all. As it happened, a number of those failed journalists had known Che Guevara and Fidel during their stay in Mexico, and no one was surprised to hear Lilian say that the Che was normal, although perhaps they didn't know that Lilian had actually slept with him; they thought she had slept only with them and a few bigwigs who didn't frequent the Avenida Bucareli in the small hours of the morning, no one really special, in other words.
    I admit I would have liked to know what Che Guevara was like in bed. So he was normal, OK, but normal how?
    One night I challenged Lilian, saying, These kids have a right to know exactly what Che was like in bed. One of my crazier declarations, but I went ahead and made it anyway.
    I remember Lilian looking at me with her pained, wrinkled doll's mask, which seemed to be perpetually on the point of dropping to reveal the Queen of the Seas with her cohorts of thunder, yet always remained lifeless. These kids, she said, these kids, and then looked up at the ceiling of the Café Quito, which was being painted by two youths perched on a mobile scaffold.
    That's what she was like, the woman I followed from the dream of Remedios Varo, the great Catalan painter, to the dream of Mexico City's incurable streets, where something was always happening, while seeming to whisper or shout or hiss at you: Nothing ever happens here.
    So there I am once again at the Café Quito in 1973 or maybe the first months of '74;