The Savage Detectives

I was woken by Pancho Rodríguez hitting me (I think he may have been kicking me too, though I'm not sure). Only good ma

"There's no one home," he said. "I had to hop the wall to get in. What are you doing here?"

I told him that I had spent the night there (I played it down, since I didn't like the way Pancho's nostrils were quivering, by adding that Barrios and Barbara Patterson had spent the night too), then we tried to get into the big house by the back door, the kitchen door, and the front door, but they were all locked tight.

"If a neighbor sees us and calls the police," I said, "how will we explain that we're not breaking in?"

"I don't give a shit. Sometimes I like to nose around my girlfriends' houses," said Pancho.

"And also," I said, ignoring Pancho's remark, "I think I saw a curtain move in the house next door. If the police come…"

"Did you have sex with Angélica, asshole?" asked Pancho suddenly, turning his eyes away from the front windows of the Fonts' house.

"Of course not," I assured him.

I don't know whether he believed me or not. But the two of us hopped the wall again and beat a retreat from Colonia Condesa.

As we walked (in silence, through the Parque España, down Parras, through the Parque San Martín, and along Teotihuacán, where the only people out at that time of day were housewives, maids, and bums), I thought about what María had said about love and about the suffering that love would bring down on Pancho's head. By the time we got to Insurgentes, Pancho was in a better mood, talking about literature and recommending authors to me, trying to forget about Angélica. Then we headed down Manzanillo, turned onto Aguascalientes, and turned south again onto Medellín, walking until we reached Calle Tepeji. We stopped in front of a five-story building and Pancho invited me to have lunch with his family.

We took the elevator up to the top floor.

There, instead of going into one of the apartments, as I had expected, we climbed the stairs to the roof. A gray sky, but bright as if there had been a nuclear attack, welcomed us in the middle of a vibrant profusion of flowerpots and plants spilling into the passageways and laundry space.

Pancho's family lived in two rooms on the roof.

"Temporarily," explained Pancho, "until we save enough for a house around here."

I was formally introduced to his mother, Doña Panchita; his brother Moctezuma, nineteen, Catullian poet and union organizer; and his younger brother Norberto, fifteen, high school student.

One room served as dining and TV room during the day, and as Pancho, Moctezuma, and Norberto's bedroom at night. The other was a kind of giant closet or wardrobe, which held the refrigerator, the kitchen supplies (they brought the portable stove out into the hallway during the day and put it back in the room at night), and the mattress where Doña Panchita slept.

As we were starting to eat, we were joined by a guy called Luscious Skin, twenty-three, rooftop neighbor, who was introduced as a visceral realist poet. A little before I left (many hours later; the time passed in a flash), I asked him again what his name was and he said Luscious Skin so naturally and confidently (much more naturally and confidently than I would've said Juan García Madero) that for a minute I actually believed that somewhere amid the back alley and swamps of our Mexican Republic there was actually a family named Skin.

After lunch, Doña Panchita sat down to watch her favorite soap operas and Norberto began to study, his books spread out on the table. Pancho and Moctezuma washed the dishes in a sink from which there was a view of lots of the Parque de las Américas, and behind it the threatening hulks-looking as if they'd dropped from another planet, and an unlikely planet too-of the Medical Center, the Children's Hospital, the General Hospital.

"The good thing about living here, if you don't mind the close quarters," said Pancho, "is that you're close to everything, right in the heart of Mexico City."

Luscious Skin (called Skin, of course, by Pancho and his brother-and even Doña Panchita!) invited us to his room, where, he said, he had some marijuana left over from the last big party.

"No time like the present," said Moctezuma.

Unlike the two rooms occupied by the Rodríguezes, Luscious Skin's room was a model of bare austerity. I didn't see clothes strewn around, I didn't see household things, I didn't see books (Pancho and Moctezuma were poor, but where they lived I'd seen books in the most unexpected places, by Efraín Huerta, Augusto Monterroso, Julio Torri, Alfonso Reyes, the aforementioned Catullus in a translation by Ernesto Cardenal, Jaime Sabines, Max Aub, Andrés Henestrosa), just a thin mattress and a chair-no table-and a nice leather suitcase where he kept his clothes.

Luscious Skin lived alone, although from remarks that he and the Rodríguez brothers made, I gathered that not long ago a woman (and her son), both pretty tough, had lived there and taken off with most of the furniture when they left.

For a while we smoked marijuana and surveyed the landscape (which, as I've said, basically consisted of the silhouettes of the hospitals, endless rooftops like the one we were on, and a sky of low clouds moving swiftly toward the south), and then Pancho started to tell the story of his adventures that morning at the Fonts' house and his meeting with me.

I was questioned about what had happened, this time by all three of them, but they didn't manage to get anything out of me that I hadn't already told Pancho. At some point they started to talk about María. From what I could gather, it seemed as though Luscious Skin and María had been lovers. And that Luscious Skin was ba

"Really hard slaps," said Luscious Skin. "When they turned on the light I saw her ass and it was all red. I actually got scared."

"But why were you hitting her?" I said angrily, afraid I would blush.

"Isn't he an i

"I find that hard to believe," I said.

"Stranger things have happened," said Luscious Skin.

"It's all because of that French girl Simone Darrieux," said Moctezuma. "I know for a fact that María and Angélica invited her to a feminist meeting and afterward they talked about sex."

"Who is this Simone?" I asked.

"A friend of Arturo Belano's."

"I went up to them. I was like, how's it going, girls, and the little sluts were talking about the Marquis de Sade," said Moctezuma.

The rest of the story was predictable. María's mother tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth. The Spaniard, who, according to Luscious Skin, turned visibly pale at the sight of María's raised and proffered backside, took Mrs. Font's arm with the solicitude reserved for the mentally ill and dragged her back to the party. In the sudden silence that fell over the little house, Luscious Skin could hear them talking in the courtyard, exchanging hurried words, as if the horny Spanish bastard were proposing something unsavory to poor Mrs. Font as she leaned there on the fountain. But then he heard their footsteps fade away in the direction of the big house and María said that they should keep going.