Amulet

Lilian lived on the top floor. I rang the bell a number of times. No one answered and for a moment I thought that Coffeen Serpas must be in some bar nearby, because he was reputed to be an incorrigible alcoholic. I was about to leave when something, I couldn't say exactly what, an intuition possibly, or perhaps just my natural curiosity, exacerbated by the time of night and by having walked all that way, prompted me to cross the street and take up a position on the opposite sidewalk. The lights in the windows on the fourth floor were out, but after a few seconds I thought I saw a curtain move, as if the wind that wasn't blowing through the streets of Mexico City was being cha

I crossed the street and rang the bell again. Then, without waiting for the door to open, I went back to the opposite sidewalk, watched the windows, and saw a curtain being drawn back. This time I could see a shadow, the silhouette of a man looking down at me, knowing that I could see him, not seeming to care anymore, and then I knew that the shadow was Carlos Coffeen Serpas, looking at me and wondering who I was, what I was doing there at that hour of night, what I wanted, what abhorrent news I was bearing.

For a moment I was sure he wouldn't open the door to me. It was common knowledge that Lilian's son was a complete recluse. Not that anyone wanted to visit him. So it was an odd situation, whichever way you looked at it.

I waved to him.

Then, lowering my gaze, I crossed the street for the fourth or fifth time, pretending as best I could to be confident. After a few seconds, the door opened with a click that echoed in the entrance hall. I climbed warily up to the fourth floor. The staircase was dimly lit. On the fourth-floor landing, Carlos Coffeen Serpas was waiting for me behind a door left ajar.

I don't know why I didn't just say what I had to say to him, then turn around and go home. Coffeen was tall, taller than his mother, and you could tell that in his youth he must have been slim and well built, although now he was fat, or, rather, bloated. His forehead was broad, but it didn't have the sort of breadth that suggests intelligence or sound judgment; it had the breadth of a battlefield, and the battle had been lost, to judge from the rest of his face: thin, lank hair falling over his ears, a skull more like a dented bowl than a noble dome, light eyes staring at me with a mixture of suspicion and boredom. In spite of everything, I found him attractive (I'm a born optimist).

I'm so tired, I said to him. After looking at me for a few seconds without inviting me in, he asked who I was. I'm a friend of Lilian's, I said. My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I work at the university.

At the time, in fact, I wasn't doing any kind of work at the university. In other words, I was unemployed again. But, faced with Coffeen, I thought it would be more reassuring to say I had a job at the faculty than to confess that I was out of work. Reassuring for whom? Well, for both of us: for me, because it gave me some kind of imaginary status or backing, and for him, because it meant he wasn't being visited late at night by a slightly younger double of his dear, dreadful mother. It's not something to be proud of. I know. But that's what I said, and then I looked him straight in the eye and waited for him to stand aside.

Coffeen had no choice but to ask me if I would like to come in, like a sullen boy receiving a surprise visit from his girlfriend. Of course I wanted to come in. So in I went and saw what lights remained in Lilian's apartment. A small entrance hall full of packages: reproductions of her son's drawings. And then a short, dark passage leading to a room where there was no hiding the poverty in which the ex-poet and the ex-painter lived. But I don't turn up my nose at poverty. In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor (except perhaps some Chileans). There was, however, something abysmal about this poverty: entering Lilian's apartment was like plunging into the depths of an Atlantic trench. There, in deceptive stillness, the intruder was observed by the charred, mossy or plankton-covered remains of what had once been a life, a family, a mother and son, a real son, not invented or adopted like those prodigal sons of mine; a subtle inventory or anti-inventory of traces, emanating from the walls, speaking in a murmur like the voice of a black hole about Lilian's lovers, Carlitos Coffeen Serpas at primary school, the breakfasts and the di

And then I stopped looking at myself in the mirror and two or perhaps three tears welled from my eyes. Tears, how many nights have I spent pondering them, to come to such meager conclusions.