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Chapter 10

Abelardo moved out of his father’s house, and when I saw him, he told me the following:

My cousin Sonsoles, sucking on her Mimi lollipop and prancing around, told me that someone had telephoned on behalf of the poet Maximino Sol. He wanted to meet me and would be expecting me at his house in the Condesa neighborhood at five. I went to the audience feeling ill at ease: Maximino Sol was a great writer; he also exerted a fascinating sort of tyranny over Mexican literature, monopolizing the publication of magazines and, through his disciples and close friends, the book reviews in newspapers. I went there, I admit, fascinated, resisting an impulse to rebel by admitting that pride, while a virtue, was also an extravagance for an unknown poet. Maximino Sol received me in his wood-paneled office, where he introduced me to a thirty-year-old man with blood-shot eyes and a mustache in the style of the writer Valle Arizpe or some colonial Kaiser. I identified him as the poet’s notorious enforcer, who in proud cynicism, signed his attacks against Sol’s enemies as “Luna,” the moon, while Sol, the sun, atop the lyrical Olympus, beatifically feigned ignorance of his satellites tumbling around madly in the lower depths. A sidekick to his boss, a parasite on others, he would forever be someone’s servant; as a servant to money and power, he would never exist on his own account. I pictured this assistant, slightly overweight at the hips, sporting a ruff and holding a quill pen at the ready, waiting to take dictation of every word pronounced by the poet who, with old-fashioned Mexican courtesy, received me in a three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a thick silk necktie fastened with a tiepin. The poet’s body, tiny and chubby, looked constrained in the gray pinstriped vest, and his double chin hung a bit over the knot of his tie. The vest, instead of tightening the body, was tightened by the body, so that Maximino Sol seemed put together from two perfect circles, the double-chin giving rise to the belly that seemed to emerge from the neck, and vice versa. But the leonine head concentrated all the energy that was absent in the flabby body, and his carefully ruffled mane gave him a fierce air, emphasized by the mixture of impatience and disdain in his gaze. Nevertheless, an angelic veil magically covered all of Maximino Sol’s manners and movements.

He sat down and told me that my little poem published in K____ magazine had come to his attention. There was perhaps too much influence from Neruda and Lorca—he said while smiling cherubically—and he suggested, in any case, that I choose instead models like Jorge Guillén and Emilio Prados, whom one could paraphrase without being too obvious. In any case, he went on, mimicry is inevitable in literature and, after all, to choose one’s mentors well is a sign of talent.

The amanuensis passed an open copy of the magazine to the poet.

“You have talent,” the poet said, leafing kindly through the pages where I had imprinted my literary baby steps. “And besides, you are young . . .”

Sitting uncomfortably before the great man, I felt even less comfortable in my soul than in my body. Before acknowledging the compliment, I examined the rich mahogany of the office, I admired the perfect order of the bookshelves, and I tried to amuse myself by speculating about the way the poet organized his books: by genre, alphabetical or chronological order, or a combination of all these? I let my mind wander to distract myself from the obvious: I was being recruited so that my youth and talent would join, as he would soon inform me, the writers of K____ magazine, directed by Maximino Sol. The poet’s discourse had been directed to a conscript. His affable smile and his alert eyes told me, without words, that a great honor was being done to me, and that is how I understood it.

“Thank you,” I said.

But the association of my youth (verifiable) and my talent (still questionable) in one equation, made me uncomfortable, especially when Sol went off on a long disquisition about the lack of real minds in our literature.

He recalled everybody: the poets—Alfonso Reyes, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jaime Torres Bodet, Jorge Cuesta, Gilberto Owen, José Gorostiza, Carlos Pellicer, and even Tablada, Urbina, González Martínez—and a few novelists—Azuela, Guzmán, Muñoz, Ferretis, Magdaleno. Sol began by dispatching, one by one, the writers of his generation, of previous generations, and then of generations younger than his own. In Olympian style he conferred prizes and punishments, granting this poet a second place, those two a third, the one over there an honorable mention, the vast majority a failing grade, and one, his mortal enemy, was flat-out sent to stand in the corner with donkey ears and the impenitent heretic’s dunce cap. In any case the mediocre or bad poets sat in the front rows and the novelists, considered more or less the mentally disabled of literature, in the last.

I wondered, as I listened to Sol talk, what place he would grant me, especially when I ceased to be young and had my own body of work. I understood as well what place Maximino Sol awarded himself in this perpetual classroom without recess or vacation, in which, or so it seemed, the teacher was also the prized student.

“What is being written today is not especially interesting. But we must have confidence in the young. In reality, the places are vacant: the first rows, unoccupied. Only the young, in time, can fill them.”

He paused magisterially and cordially invited me to join his magazine. He did not have to say what we both knew: this was the only path by which I could become a recognized poet.

I pictured myself back in school with the teacher. Since my schooldays were not far behind, I was able to ask myself with enough spontaneity: was I going to spend my life waiting for Maximino Sol to pass or fail me, waiting for an A, a C, an F, or an exemplary punishment after class; write on the blackboard a hundred times, There is nothing in Mexican literature except the work of Maximino Sol?

I told him that perhaps he was right, I was too young, and at my age I could do without any kind of mentorship until . . .

He brusquely interrupted me. He said that youth was not eternal and that lyrical energy was lost if it was not channeled.

“I am disciplined, maestro,” I said, without gauging the ambiguity of the appeal.

Halfway between flattered and annoyed, he added that Mexico was a country of sacrifices, and that those who showed talent were quickly attacked until they were dead.

“If you stick your head out, they will cut it off.”

Talent—no matter how much you have—is not enough, he went on, without a shield to protect it. That is what a magazine is, and that is what a group and a teacher are: the protection of the seed constantly threatened by envy and overwhelming controversies; threatened by chauvinists if the young poet demonstrates his inevitable universal learning; threatened by cosmopolitans if, on the contrary, he shows, as it were, his folkloric garments; threatened by the political commitment demanded by the left and by the artistic purity demanded by the right . . . How was I going to survive alone, so young, so talented, so . . . ?

I feared, listening to him, watching him say all of this with an almost evangelical concern for my poor person, that he would see in me and in my probable work only a youthful poetry that, extolling early experience and vitality, would serve the old man of letters to moralize before his contemporaries, making them feel guilty that they had lost what Maximino Sol, vicariously protecting a young author, still had: precisely this initial vitality, the experience of wonder. I felt exposed by a manipulation that offered me immediate protection and eventual glory in exchange for my adherence to a hierarchy presided over by the Sol; a hierarchy of values, texts, interests . . . I felt chosen to justify the demands of the pope of a literary chapel before his rival pontiffs. I pictured a court in which our youth was the indispensable support for the continued demands of an old writer before the adult world: “Look, I have more young writers around me than anybody else, and these young poets exalt me and denigrate you, my rivals . . .”

“I would like to hear my own voice,” I said naïvely.

Maximino Sol abstained from laughing. He said seriously:

“The ‘I’ is an ‘us’ or it is not.”

In my turn, I abstained from laughing at the sophism, but the poet continued: “Our group, our magazine, we constitute a chorus. Outside of it, Abelardo, all is cacophony.”

“Abelardo,” he repeated, tilting his head as though to excuse himself, “may I call you that?” There was only one step left: he would address me in the familiar tú. For some reason, I felt repugnance toward any familiarity with him, and especially toward the assistant who, standing, exchanged glances of infinite patience with his boss. I never saw a less desperate person than that man. In him, waiting was everything, but what was he waiting for? I thought of him, in spite of his appearance, as The Desperate One. But even that—desperation—was taken away from him, with the quick and fractured imagination that accompanied this interview, by the literary pope who was taking shape, this time slowly and seamlessly, before my very eyes. However, the relationship between the two—Maximino Sol and his secretary—seemed perfectly normal to me in the hierarchy of subordination, until the man slightly wider at the waist dared to say to me:

“Don’t be a total idiot, tú. Maximino Sol, no less, offers you glory, and you reject it. Do you imagine that you’ll get anywhere in Mexico without him?”

“Are you saying that you depend on him completely?” I answered. “Well, I don’t.”

“Shut up,” Sol said to him as a prelude to a tantrum and a symphony of facial tics that momentarily paralyzed the secretary.

“No, maestro, it’s just that this guy in no way deserves to be here, nor is he worthy of your even looking at him. I don’t know why you insist on casting pearls before—”

“I said shut up!” repeated the poet, this time with a full show of furious authority.

“Okay, maestro, just don’t yell at me.”

“I will yell at you as much as I wish,” said the poet, now very cool and calm with his angelic smile, this time directed at me.

I understood that this charade consisted in showing me what my future would be if I did not accept the offer of protection in exchange for submission that I was being offered.

I stood up and was about to turn my back on them and walk out, but in Maximino Sol’s light-colored eyes, aged rivals of my own, I read such hatred and confusion that I knew, as Sol spoke to me, I would need to speak up for myself.

“Young man, I have a voice. You are right, at least about that. I will survive those whom you consider my flatterers. I have a voice,” he repeated, whether to convince me or to convince himself, I don’t know.

I was able to say what I wanted to say: “Because you hear other voices.”

“Well, you know, there are a lot of deaf people in this world.”

“Maybe you’re one of them, if you’re unaware that the voice you hear is also heard by, I don’t know, a driver, a baker, a housewife.”

“Your populism moves me. Offer it to the late Mr. Neruda. A baker or a driver doesn’t create poetry.”

“But at least they create something.”

I was going to say, they lulled a child to sleep, they insulted an arrogant person, they loved a woman, but I recalled the more intimate, and therefore more public tones, of Maximino Sol’s poetry, the tenderness of his violence, the strangeness of the unfinished symbols that he pitted against all the finished religious, political, and economic signs in the world, and I pleaded, dear God, let me be like that man’s poetry, but not like the man himself; dear father, don’t let me sacrifice everything to literary opportunism and glory; give me a corner, dear mother, where I can value a son, a wife, and a friend more than all the laurels of the earth; save me from the bootlickers, Lord, and help me acquire my youth with age, instead of losing it with time.

When I left the office, closing the door and entering a vestibule with purplish leaded windows, I heard Maximino Sol’s prickly, temperamental, exalted voice, without low tones, scolding his secretary. I couldn’t make out the words, but I thought it would be funny to come back with a blank book and offer it to the shrewdness of this man condemned to the treachery of his flatterers and blind to the independence of his friends. Please, I prayed again, don’t let me grow old like that. Let me depend on a woman, a son, and a friend, not on literary ties and vanity. Glory is the mask of death. It has no progeny.

Abelardo fell silent.

I only remarked: “Read the writers, but don’t get to know them in person.”