The Savage Detectives

Xóchitl García, Calle Montes, near the Monumento a la Revolución, Mexico City DF, January 1986. The fu

Still, I didn't give up. I was tired of working at Gigante and I thought my poetry deserved a little attention at least, if not respect. As time went by I discovered other magazines, not the ones I'd have wanted to publish in, but different ones, the inevitable magazines that spring up in a city of sixteen million. The publishers or editors were terrible men and women, people who had crept out of the sewers, you could tell just by looking, a mix of ousted officials and repentant killers. But they had never heard of visceral realism and had no interest at all in being told the story. Their notion of literature ended (and probably began) with Vasconcelos, although it was easy to guess the admiration they felt for Mariano Azuela, Yáñez, Martín Luis Guzmán, authors they probably knew only by reputation. One of these magazines was called Tamal, and its editor was a man named Fernando López Tapia. It was there that I published my first poem, in the two-page arts section, and López Tapia personally handed me the check for the amount I'd made. That night, after I cashed it, María, Franz, and I celebrated by going to the movies and then eating at a restaurant downtown. I was tired of cheap meals and I wanted to give myself a treat. From then on I stopped writing poems, at least I stopped writing as many as before, and I started to write articles, stories about Mexico City, pieces about gardens that very few people knew existed anymore, items about colonial houses, reports on specific subway lines, and everything or almost everything I wrote was published. Fernando López Tapia fit me into the magazine wherever he could, and on Saturdays, instead of going with Franz to Chapultepec, I would take him to the magazine's offices and while he banged on a typewriter I would help Tamal's few staff members put together the next issue, which was always a problem, since we had a hard time getting the magazine out on schedule.

I learned to do layouts and edit, and sometimes I even chose the photographs. And everybody loved Franz too. Of course, I didn't make enough at the magazine to quit my job at Gigante, but even so it was nice for me, since while I was working at the supermarket, especially when the work was particularly a

One night Fernando López Tapia showed up on Calle Montes. He said he wanted to see where I lived. I introduced him to María, who treated him coldly at first, as if she were a princess and poor Fernando were an illiterate peasant. Luckily, I don't think he even noticed how rude she was. He was always a perfect gentleman. I liked that. After a while María went up to her room and I was left alone with Franz and Fernando. Then Fernando told me that he'd come because he wanted to see me, and then he said now he had seen me but he wanted to keep on seeing me. It was silly, but I liked that he said it. Later I went up to get María and the four of us went out to di

My relationship with Fernando López Tapia lasted a while longer. He was married, as I suspected from the start, with two children, the older one twenty, and he wasn't about to separate from his wife (I wouldn't have let him, anyway). I went with him to business di