[...] Imitators of the Boom were (and are) legion, but Bolano and others of his generation tended to see them as selling an exotic stereotype -- dictators, whores, patriarchs, and ghosts -- for export only. The situation in Latin America had changed. The dictators, for the most part, were gone. Capitalism, the World Bank, and the international drug trade replaced caudillos, death squads, and political persecution as the new faces of evil. The phantasms and terrors of the Boom generation had mutated into something more diffuse, unmoored from the local.

Around nine, Felipe Müller showed up; he’s nineteen, so until I came along he was the youngest in the group. Then we all went to eat at a Chinese café, and we walked and talked about literature until three in the morning. We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed. Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda. In other words, between a rock and a hard place.

[...] If he comes back to see me, I thought, I’ll be justified, if he shows up here one day, without calling first, to talk to me, to listen to me tell my old stories, to submit his poems for my consideration, I’ll be justified. All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father. But these poets were meant to be orphans. He never came back.

I remember Ulises liked the young French poets. I can testify to that. We, the Passy Shantytown, thought they were disgusting. Spoiled brats or drug addicts. You have to understand, Ulises, I would say to him, we’re revolutionaries, we’ve seen the insides of the jails of Latin America. So how can we care about poetry like that? And the bastard didn’t say anything, just laughed. Once he took me to meet Michel Bulteau. Ulises spoke terrible French, so I had to do most of the talking. Then I met Mathieu Messagier, Jean-Jacques Faussot, and Adeline, Bulteau’s companion.

I don’t remember whether Ulises had already left or was still around. “Sang de satin.” From the start I had trouble with that shitty poem. How to translate the title? “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin”? I thought about it for more than a week. And it was then that I was suddenly overcome by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language, the poetry scene, our state as unwanted guests, the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world, and then I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to finish translating “Satin Blood” or “Blood of Satin,” I knew that if I did I would end up murdering Bulteau in his study on the Rue de Téhéran and then fleeing Paris like an outlaw. So in the end I decided not to go through with it and when Ulises Lima left (I can’t remember exactly when), that was the end of my dealings with the French poets.

[...] One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn’t know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway the poem was good, it got to you. We were sitting at an outside table, and lights were shining in the windows of the houses in town, but there wasn’t even a cat on the streets and all we could hear was the sound of our own voices and a faraway car on the road to the station, and we were alone, or so we thought, but we hadn’t seen (or at least I hadn’t seen) the guy sitting at the farthest table. And it was after Marguerite read us the poem by Desnos—in that moment of silence after you hear something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last a second or two or your whole life, because there’s something for everyone on this cruel earth—that the guy across the café got up and came over and asked Marguerite to read another poem. Then he asked if he could join us, and when we said sure, why not, he went to get his coffee from his table and then he emerged from the dark (because Raoul is always saving on electricity) and sat down with us and started to drink wine like us and bought us a couple of rounds, although he didn’t look like he had money, but we were all broke so what could we do? we let him pay.

[...] as he listened to me he stroked my body and looked at me and suddenly everything that I was telling him seemed stupid to me and I wanted to sleep, sleep with him, on his mattress on the floor of that tiny apartment, and immediately I was asleep, I slept for a long time, a deep peaceful sleep, and when I woke up, daylight was coming in the only window of the apartment and there was the sound of a radio in the distance, the radio of a worker getting ready to go to work, and Arturo was asleep beside me, curled up a little, the blankets pulled up to his ribs, and for a while I lay there watching him and thinking about what my life would be like if I lived with him, but then I decided that I had to be practical and not let myself be carried away by fantasies and I got up carefully and left.

[...] I think it was then that everything ended between Arturo and me. At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. We would write facing each other and drink lots of cups of tea. We weren’t writing for publication but to understand ourselves better or just to see how far we could go. And when we weren’t writing we talked endlessly about his life and my life, especially mine, although sometimes Arturo told me stories about friends who had died in the guerrilla wars of Latin America, I knew some of them by name, because they’d been on their way through Mexico when I was with the Trotskyites, but most of them I’d never heard of. And we kept making love, although each night I distanced myself a little more, involuntarily, without meaning to, without knowing where I was going. It was the same thing that had already happened to me with Abraham, more or less, except now it was a little worse, now that I didn’t have anything.

[...] Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them. And my firm defended them all, and the giant absolved them and charged them a fair price. That’s democracy, you fools, I told them, it’s time you understood. For better or for worse. And instead of buying a yacht with the money I made, I started a literary magazine. And although I knew that the money troubled the consciences of some of the young poets of Barcelona and Madrid, when I had a free moment I would come up silently behind them and touch their backs with the tips of my fingers, which were perfectly manicured (no longer, since even my nails are ragged now), and I would whisper in their ears: non olet. It doesn’t smell. The coins earned in the urinals of Barcelona and Madrid don’t smell. The coins earned in the toilets of Zaragoza don’t smell. The coins earned in the sewers of Bilbao don’t smell. Or if they smell, they smell of money. They smell of what the giant dreams of doing with his money. Then the young poets would understand and nod, even if they didn’t entirely follow what I was saying, even if they didn’t comprehend every jot and tittle of the terrible, timeless lesson I’d meant to drum into their silly little heads. And if any of them failed to understand, which I doubt, they understood when they saw their pieces published, when they smelled the freshly printed pages, when they saw their names on the cover or in the table of contents. It was then that they got a whiff of what money really smells like: like power, like the gracious gesture of a giant. And then there were no more jokes and they all grew up and followed me.

By then I think I could recite Don Pío’s story by heart, periturae parcere chartae, and still I understood nothing. My life seemed to be progressing through the same realms of mediocrity as usual, but I knew that I was walking in the land of destruction.