Woes of the True Policeman

Sometimes Amalfitano saw himself as the Prince of Antioch or the homesick Knight of Tyre, the King of Tarsus or the Lord of Ephesus, adventurers of the Middle Ages once upon a time read or misread — with equal enthusiasm — by a luckless God-fearing lord in the midst of pandemonium and exile and untold confusion, accompanied by a beautiful daughter and an aura intensified by the ravages of time. As in the story by Alfonso Reyes (God rest his soul, thought Amalfitano, who truly loved him), “The Fortunes of Apollonius of Tyre,” from Real and Imaginary Portraits. A dethroned king, he thought, wandering the Mediterranean islands painted by that so-called Michelangelo of comic strips, the creator of Prince Valiant, those divine and infernal islands where Valiant met Aleta, but also where the Knight of Epirus bewailed his unjust persecution, and the giddy vagabond of Mytilene told the story of his misfortunes, these characters who, as Reyes noted, sprang from the Greek or Roman depths of our memory, and this was precisely what was false about it all, what was disturbing and revelatory: the vagabond prince was a stand-in for Ulysses and the Baron of Thebes was a stand-in for Theseus, though both were God-fearing knights who prayed morning and night. In this masquerade, Amalfitano discovered unknown regions of himself. In the Greek king who fled with his daughter from monastery to monastery, from desert island to desert island, as if he were traveling backward from the year 1300 to 500 and from 500 to 20 B.C. and onward, ever deeper in time, he saw the futility of his efforts, the basic naïveté of his struggle, his spurious role as scrivener monk. Now all I need is to go blind, with Rosa as my cherished guide leading me from classroom to classroom, he thought gloomily.

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When Amalfitano learned that his daughter had disappeared with a black man, he thought randomly of a line from Lugones that he had come across years — many years — ago. Lugones’s words were these: “It is well known that youth is the most intellectual stage of an ape’s life, as it is of the Negro’s.” What a brute, that Lugones! And then he remembered the story, Lugones’s plot: a man, a neurotic, the narrator, labors for years to teach a chimpanzee to talk. All his efforts are in vain. One day the narrator senses that the ape can talk, that he has learned to talk but hides it cleverly. Whether he hides it out of fear or atavism, Amalfitano can’t remember. Probably fear. So unrelenting is his master that the ape falls ill. His sufferings are almost human. The man cares for him as devotedly as he might care for his own child. Both feel the pain of their imminent separation. At the final moment, the ape whispers: Water, master, my master, my master. This was where the Lugones story ended (for a second, Amalfitano imagined Lugones shooting himself in the mouth in the darkest and coolest corner of his library, swallowing poison in an attic strung with cobwebs, hanging himself from the highest beam of the bathroom, but could Lugones’s bathroom possibly have had beams? where had he read that or seen it? Amalfitano didn’t know), giving way — one ape leading to another — to the story by Kafka, the Chinese Jew. What different viewpoints, thought Amalfitano. Good old Kafka puts himself without hesitation into the skin of the ape. Lugones sets out to make the ape speak; Kafka gives him voice. Lugones’s story, which Amalfitano thought extraordinary, was a horror story. Kafka’s story, Kafka’s incomprehensible text, also took wing through realms of horror, but it was a religious text, full of black humor, human and melodramatic, unyielding and inconsequential, like everything that is truly unyielding, in other words like everything that is soft. Amalfitano began to weep. His little house, his parched yard, the television set and the video player, the magnificent northern Mexico sunset, struck him as enigmas that carried their own solutions with them, inscribed in chalk on the forehead. It’s all so simple and so terrible, he thought. Then he got up from his faded yellow sofa and closed the curtains.

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