The Savage Detectives

Luis Sebastián Rosado, La Rama Dorada coffee shop, Colonia Coyoacán, Mexico City DF, April 1976. Monsiváis said it first: disciples of Marinetti and Tzara, their noisy, outrageous, overwrought poems did battle in the realm of simple typographic arrangement, never rising above the level of childish entertainment. Monsi was talking about the stridentists, but the same goes for the visceral realists. No one paid attention to them and they opted for indiscriminate assault. In December of '75, just before Christmas, I was unlucky enough to run into some of them here at La Rama Dorada. The owner, Don Néstor Pesqueira, will back me up: it was extremely unpleasant. One of them, the one in charge, was Ulises Lima; the second was a big fat dark guy called Moctezuma or Cuauhtémoc; the third went by the name Luscious Skin. I was sitting right here, waiting for Alberto Moore and his sister, and all of a sudden these three nuts surround me, sitting down one on each side of me, and they say Luisito, let's talk poetry, let's analyze the future of Mexican poetry, something like that. I'm not a violent person and of course I got nervous. I thought: what are they doing here? how did they find me? what scores have they come to settle? This country is a disgrace, it must be said, and so is Mexican literature, it must also be said. Anyway, we were talking for twenty minutes (I've never been so a

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,

Mon coeur couvert de caporal:

Ils y lancent des jets de soupe,

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe:

Sous les quolibets de la troupe

Qui pousse un rire général,

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,

Mon coeur couvert de caporal!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé!

Au gouvernail on voit des fresques

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Ô flots abracadabrantesques,

Prenez mon coeur, qu'il soit lavé!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques

Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,

Comment agir, Ô coeur volé?

Ce seront des hoquets bachiques

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques:

J'aurai des sursauts stomachiques,

Moi, si mon coeur est ravalé:

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques

Comment agir, Ô coeur volé?

It's Rimbaud. Which was a surprise. Relatively speaking, that is. The really surprising thing was that he recited it in French. Anyway, I was a little angry not to have guessed it, since I know Rimbaud's work fairly well, but I didn't let it bother me. Another point in common. Maybe we would make it out of that hellhole alive. And after reciting Rimbaud, Ulises Lima told a story about Rimbaud and some war, which war I don't know, war not being a subject that interests me, but there was something, a common theme linking Rimbaud, the poem, and the war, a sordid story, I'm sure, although at the time my ears and then my eyes were registering other sordid little stories (I swear I'll kill Julita Moore if she drags me to another dive like Priapo's), disjointed scenes in which brooding young delinquents danced with desperate young cleaning girls or desperate young whores in a whirl of contrasts that, I confess, heightened my drunke