The Savage Detectives

I thought about taking a shower but decided to save it for when he got there. I spent a while straightening things up, and then I changed my shirt and went outside to wait. It was more than half an hour, and all I did the entire time was try to remember the first time we made love.

When he got out of the taxi he looked much thi

At three in the morning we got up and I made us a second supper, this time a cold one, and I poured us some whiskey. We were both hungry and thirsty. Then, as we were eating, Luscious Skin started to talk more about Ulises Lima's disappearance. He had a wild theory that didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. According to him, Ulises was fleeing from an organization (or that's the way it sounded at first) that wanted to kill him, so when he ended up in Managua he decided not to come back. No matter how you looked at it, it was an unlikely story. Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the begi

That night we talked until dawn. At eight in the morning I had to go to the university. I left Luscious Skin copies of the keys to the house and I asked him to wait till I came back. From the university I called Albertito Moore and asked him whether he remembered Ulises Lima. His reply was vague. He did and he didn't. Who was Ulises Lima? A lost lover? I said goodbye and hung up. Next I called Zarco and asked him the same question. This time the reply was much more emphatic: a lunatic, said Ismael Humberto. He's a poet, I said. More or less, said Zarco. He traveled to Managua with a delegation of Mexican writers and got lost, I said. It must have been the delegation of peasant poets, said Zarco. And he didn't come back with them, he disappeared, I said. That's the kind of thing that happens to these people, said Zarco. That's it? I said. Sure, said Zarco, there's nothing else to it. When I got home, Luscious Skin was sleeping. My latest book of poetry was open next to him. That night, as we ate di

Our life together was brief but happy. For thirty-five days we lived together and each night we made love and talked until late and ate meals that he cooked. Usually they were complicated or sometimes they were simple but they were always tasty. One night he told me that the first time he had sex he was ten years old. I didn't want him to tell me anything else. I remember looking away, at a Pérez Camarga print hanging on the wall, and I prayed that his first time had been with a teenager, or a kid, and that he hadn't been raped. Another night, or maybe the same night, he told me that he'd come to Mexico City when he was eighteen, with no money, no clothes, no friends to turn to, and that he'd had a rough time of it, until a journalist friend he'd had sex with let him sleep in El Nacional's paper warehouse. Since I was there, he said, I thought I was fated be a journalist, and for a while he tried to write articles that no one would publish. Then he lived with a woman and had a child and a long string of jobs, none of them permanent. He even worked as a street hawker around Azcapotzalco, but he ended up in a knife fight with his supplier and he quit. One night, when he was inside of me, I asked him whether he had ever killed anyone. I didn't mean to ask the question, I didn't want to hear his answer, whether it was true or a lie, and I bit my lips. He said that he had and thrust even harder, and I cried when I came.

During that time no one came to see me and I stopped visiting anyone, I told some people I didn't feel well, and others that I was working on something that required utter solitude and unbroken concentration. The truth is, I did write a little while Luscious Skin was living with me, five or six short poems. They aren't bad. I'll probably never publish them, but you never know. The visceral realists always appeared in the stories he told me and although at first it bothered me when he talked about them, little by little I got used to it and when he didn't happen to mention them, I was the one to ask: where were the Rodríguez brothers when you were in the house on Calzada Camarones? where did Rafael Barrios live when you lived in the Niño Perdido hotel? and then he would reshuffle the pieces of his story and talk to me about those shadowy figures, his occasional brothers-in-arms, the ghosts populating his vast freedom, his vast desolation.

One night he talked to me about Cesárea Tinajero again. I told him that Lima and Belano had probably made her up to justify their trip to Sonora. I remember that we were lying naked in bed, the window open to the skies of Coyoacán, and that Luscious Skin turned on his side and pulled me to him, my erect cock seeking his testicles, his scrotum, his still flaccid cock, and then Luscious Skin said ñero (he had never addressed me in that vulgar way before), he said ñero and grabbed me by the shoulders, and he said it wasn't like that, Cesárea Tinajero existed, she might still exist, and then he was quiet, but watching me, his eyes open in the dark as my erect penis lightly tapped his testicles. And then I asked him how Belano and Lima had heard of Cesárea Tinajero, a purely perfunctory question, and he said that it was in an interview, that in those days Belano and Lima didn't have any money and they started to do interviews for a magazine, a corrupt magazine under the sway of the peasant poets or soon to be under the sway of the peasant poets, but then as now, said Luscious Skin, there was no way not to be part of one of the two camps, what camps are you talking about? I whispered, my penis rising up his scrotum and its tip touching the base of his penis, which was begi