first time so experience counts for nothing, which is better in the end, because experience is generally a hoax.
And then Lilian (the only one who emerges from this story unscathed, since she has already been through it all) asks me, once again, to do her a favor, the first and last favor she will ask of me in her life.
She says, It's late. She says, You're so pretty, Auxilio. She says, I often think of you, Auxilio. And I look at her and I look at the ceiling of the Café Quito, where the two sleepy young men are still working or pretending to work, perched on the most precarious scaffolding, and then I look back at Lilian: she's talking to me but staring at the large chunky glass containing her coffee with milk. With one ear I'm listening to what she's saying, and with the other to the Café Quito regulars kidding the youths on the scaffolding, yelling remarks that are, I gather, part of some masculine initiation rite, supposedly affectionate but in fact foreshadowing a disaster that will engulf not only the pair of broad-brush painters (or plumbers or electricians, I don't know, I just saw them there, and I can see them still, as the moonlight makes its crazy way over every tile in the women's bathroom, as if its course—and this is a terrifying thought—exhausted all the possibilities of subversion), a disaster that will engulf not just the painters but the jeerers as well, the givers of advice, in other words: us.
And then Lilian says, You have to go to my place. She says, I can't go home tonight. She says, You have to go and tell Carlos I'll be back early tomorrow morning. And my first impulse is to refuse point blank. But then Lilian looks me in the face and smiles at me (she doesn't cover her mouth when she speaks, like me, or when she smiles, although she should) and I am at a loss for words because I am looking at the mother of Mexican poetry, the worst mother Mexican poetry could possibly have, but its one, true mother none the less. So I say yes, I will go to her apartment if she gives me the address and if it's not too far away, and I will tell Carlos Coffeen, the painter, that his mother will be staying out all night.
Eleven
A nd I see myself that night, my friends, walking toward Lilian Serpas's apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.
You might be surprised to learn that I didn't know Carlos Coffeen Serpas. No one did, really. Or to be precise, a few people knew him, and they had hatched the legend, the minor legend of a crazy painter who never left his mother's apartment, an apartment that, in some versions, was endowed with massive, dusty furniture that could have been buried in the crypt of one of the Emperor Maximilian's followers, although, according to other accounts, mother and son lived in something more like a tenement building, a faithful reproduction of the Burrón family's apartment (ah, the invincible Burrón family, God bless them, long may their comic strip run; when I arrived in Mexico, the first guy who tried to chat me up said I was the spitting image of Borola Tacuche, which isn't too far from the truth). The reality, as it sadly tends to be, was halfway between these imaginary extremes: neither crumbling palace nor tenement house, but an old four-story building in the Calle República de El Salvador, near the church of San Felipe Neri.
Carlos Coffeen Serpas was more than forty years old, and no one I knew had seen him for a long time. What did I think of his drawings? I didn't like them much, to be perfectly honest. Figures, almost always very thin, and sickly-looking too: that was what he used to draw. Flying or buried figures, sometimes staring out into the eyes of the viewer, and usually gesturing in some way. For example, holding a finger to their lips to request silence. Or
And then Lilian (the only one who emerges from this story unscathed, since she has already been through it all) asks me, once again, to do her a favor, the first and last favor she will ask of me in her life.
She says, It's late. She says, You're so pretty, Auxilio. She says, I often think of you, Auxilio. And I look at her and I look at the ceiling of the Café Quito, where the two sleepy young men are still working or pretending to work, perched on the most precarious scaffolding, and then I look back at Lilian: she's talking to me but staring at the large chunky glass containing her coffee with milk. With one ear I'm listening to what she's saying, and with the other to the Café Quito regulars kidding the youths on the scaffolding, yelling remarks that are, I gather, part of some masculine initiation rite, supposedly affectionate but in fact foreshadowing a disaster that will engulf not only the pair of broad-brush painters (or plumbers or electricians, I don't know, I just saw them there, and I can see them still, as the moonlight makes its crazy way over every tile in the women's bathroom, as if its course—and this is a terrifying thought—exhausted all the possibilities of subversion), a disaster that will engulf not just the painters but the jeerers as well, the givers of advice, in other words: us.
And then Lilian says, You have to go to my place. She says, I can't go home tonight. She says, You have to go and tell Carlos I'll be back early tomorrow morning. And my first impulse is to refuse point blank. But then Lilian looks me in the face and smiles at me (she doesn't cover her mouth when she speaks, like me, or when she smiles, although she should) and I am at a loss for words because I am looking at the mother of Mexican poetry, the worst mother Mexican poetry could possibly have, but its one, true mother none the less. So I say yes, I will go to her apartment if she gives me the address and if it's not too far away, and I will tell Carlos Coffeen, the painter, that his mother will be staying out all night.
Eleven
A nd I see myself that night, my friends, walking toward Lilian Serpas's apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city's calm, an obeisant calm whose sole property is that of being a mirage.
You might be surprised to learn that I didn't know Carlos Coffeen Serpas. No one did, really. Or to be precise, a few people knew him, and they had hatched the legend, the minor legend of a crazy painter who never left his mother's apartment, an apartment that, in some versions, was endowed with massive, dusty furniture that could have been buried in the crypt of one of the Emperor Maximilian's followers, although, according to other accounts, mother and son lived in something more like a tenement building, a faithful reproduction of the Burrón family's apartment (ah, the invincible Burrón family, God bless them, long may their comic strip run; when I arrived in Mexico, the first guy who tried to chat me up said I was the spitting image of Borola Tacuche, which isn't too far from the truth). The reality, as it sadly tends to be, was halfway between these imaginary extremes: neither crumbling palace nor tenement house, but an old four-story building in the Calle República de El Salvador, near the church of San Felipe Neri.
Carlos Coffeen Serpas was more than forty years old, and no one I knew had seen him for a long time. What did I think of his drawings? I didn't like them much, to be perfectly honest. Figures, almost always very thin, and sickly-looking too: that was what he used to draw. Flying or buried figures, sometimes staring out into the eyes of the viewer, and usually gesturing in some way. For example, holding a finger to their lips to request silence. Or
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