it's eleven o'clock and through the smoke, lit as if by tracer fire, I see Lilian arrive enveloped, as always, in smoke, and her smoke and that of the café eye each other like spiders before coalescing into a single coffee-scented cloud (there's a roaster in the Café Quito, and it's one of the few places on the Avenida Bucareli that has an Italian espresso machine).
Then the young poets of Mexico, my friends, greet her without getting up from their table. They say, Good evening, Lilian Serpas, or, What's up, Lilian Serpas? Even the most addled pronounce some kind of greeting, as if by so doing they could make a goddess descend from the heights of the Café Quito (where two intrepid young painters are at work, balanced in a fashion I can only describe as precarious) and award them The Order of Poetic Merit, when in reality what they are doing (but this is a thought I keep to myself) by greeting her in that manner is placing their addled young heads on the chopping block.
And Lilian stops, as if she didn't hear properly, and looks for the table where they are sitting (I am sitting there too) and, having spotted us, conies over to say hello and to see if she can perhaps sell one of her reproductions, and I look the other way.
Why do I look the other way?
Because I know her story.
So I look the other way while Lilian, standing or seated, says hello to each of them in turn, the five or often more motley young poets around that table, and when she gets to me, I look up from the ground, turn my head so slowly it's exasperating (but I really can't turn it any faster) and, compliantly, reply to her greeting.
And time goes by (in the end Lilian doesn't try to sell us any drawings because she knows we don't have any money and wouldn't buy them anyway, but if anyone wants to take a look, she's happy to show them the reproductions, which are of surprisingly high quality, printed with a proper press on glossy paper, which reveals something about the curious business sense of Carlos Coffeen Serpas or of his mother, mendicant entrepreneurs who, in a moment of inspiration that I would rather not try to imagine, decided to live exclusively from the proceeds of art) and gradually people start to leave or change tables, since, at the Café Quito, after a certain time of night, everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and everyone wants to have a chat or at least exchange a few words with his or her acquaintances. So there I am, stranded in the midst of that ceaseless mingling, staring at my half-empty coffee cup, when suddenly (it's almost like a cut to a new scene) an evasive shadow, so evasive it seems to attract all the other shadows in the café, as if it could exert a gravitational force on absences of light, approaches my table and sits down next to me.
How are you doing, Auxilio? says the ghost of Lilian Serpas.
Fine, just hanging out, I say.
And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let's say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass, or let's say that the full or waxing or obscurely waning moon of Mexico City slides again over the tiles of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, or that the silence of a wake falls over the Café Quito and all I can hear are the murmurs of Lilian Serpas's ghostly court and once again I don't know if I'm in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, or gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.
Be that as it may, something is happening as time passes. I know that time and not, for example, space, is making something happen. Something that has happened before, although in a sense every time is the
Then the young poets of Mexico, my friends, greet her without getting up from their table. They say, Good evening, Lilian Serpas, or, What's up, Lilian Serpas? Even the most addled pronounce some kind of greeting, as if by so doing they could make a goddess descend from the heights of the Café Quito (where two intrepid young painters are at work, balanced in a fashion I can only describe as precarious) and award them The Order of Poetic Merit, when in reality what they are doing (but this is a thought I keep to myself) by greeting her in that manner is placing their addled young heads on the chopping block.
And Lilian stops, as if she didn't hear properly, and looks for the table where they are sitting (I am sitting there too) and, having spotted us, conies over to say hello and to see if she can perhaps sell one of her reproductions, and I look the other way.
Why do I look the other way?
Because I know her story.
So I look the other way while Lilian, standing or seated, says hello to each of them in turn, the five or often more motley young poets around that table, and when she gets to me, I look up from the ground, turn my head so slowly it's exasperating (but I really can't turn it any faster) and, compliantly, reply to her greeting.
And time goes by (in the end Lilian doesn't try to sell us any drawings because she knows we don't have any money and wouldn't buy them anyway, but if anyone wants to take a look, she's happy to show them the reproductions, which are of surprisingly high quality, printed with a proper press on glossy paper, which reveals something about the curious business sense of Carlos Coffeen Serpas or of his mother, mendicant entrepreneurs who, in a moment of inspiration that I would rather not try to imagine, decided to live exclusively from the proceeds of art) and gradually people start to leave or change tables, since, at the Café Quito, after a certain time of night, everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and everyone wants to have a chat or at least exchange a few words with his or her acquaintances. So there I am, stranded in the midst of that ceaseless mingling, staring at my half-empty coffee cup, when suddenly (it's almost like a cut to a new scene) an evasive shadow, so evasive it seems to attract all the other shadows in the café, as if it could exert a gravitational force on absences of light, approaches my table and sits down next to me.
How are you doing, Auxilio? says the ghost of Lilian Serpas.
Fine, just hanging out, I say.
And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still; so let's say instead that a tremor disturbs the continuum of time, or that time plants its big feet wide apart, bends down, puts its head between its legs, looking at me upside down, one eye winking crazily just a few inches below its ass, or let's say that the full or waxing or obscurely waning moon of Mexico City slides again over the tiles of the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, or that the silence of a wake falls over the Café Quito and all I can hear are the murmurs of Lilian Serpas's ghostly court and once again I don't know if I'm in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, or gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.
Be that as it may, something is happening as time passes. I know that time and not, for example, space, is making something happen. Something that has happened before, although in a sense every time is the
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