Woes of the True Policeman

He talked about the novel in general (randomly citing Emilia Pardo Bazán, Clarín, and a Spanish Romantic novelist who had drowned himself in a river in one of the Baltic states) and about The God of Homosexuals in particular. He mentioned an Argentinean bishop or archbishop who had proposed moving the entire non-heterosexual population of Argentina to the pampa, where, lacking the power or opportunity to pervert the rest of the citizens, they would set about building their own nation, with its own laws and traditions. The wise archbishop had even given his project a name. It was called Argentina 2, but it might just as well have been called Faggotlandia.

He talked about his ambitions: to be the Aimé Césaire of homosexuals (his handwriting in this paragraph was shaky, as if he were writing with his left hand), he said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn’t know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it’s just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.

The God of Homosexuals, he said, would take shape first in dreams and then along deserted streets, the kind visited only by those who dream waking dreams. Its body, its face: a hybrid of the Hulk and the Terminator, a terrible and repulsive colossus. From this monster they (the homosexuals) expected endless bounty, not the republic on the pampa or in the Patagonia of the Argentinean archbishop, but a republic on another planet, a thousand light-years from earth.

The letter ended abruptly, as if his pen had run out of ink, but he sent kisses to Amalfitano and his daughter.

18

Padilla’s next letter talked about Elisa. It said that one night when he got home he found the girl outside his building waiting for him. She was sick, with bruises on her neck, a slight fever, and not much interest in sleeping. We got in bed together, he said, it was very late and we tried to make love, but her general lowness was matched by my own despondency, my fever, my shivers. At first they just masturbated on opposite sides of the bed, gazing into each other’s eyes, saying nothing for a long time. The result was that neither of them could come and sleep fled them both for good. Wide-awake, said Padilla, we talked until dawn, and only then were we finally able to fall asleep.

So Padilla began to talk about the first thing that came into his head, and all of a sudden he found himself telling the story of Leopoldo María Panero, his poems, his madness, what he imagined his life must be like at the Mondragón asylum. The next thing he realized, the girl was kneeling over him or curled around his legs or tying him to the bedposts or asking him to tie her up, said Padilla, or the two of them were sitting on the rug, naked, or they were talking for the first time about death in an innocent, idiotic, desperate, brave way, making plans and promising each other that they would carry them out. Of course, we didn’t end up making love, said Padilla, at least technically we didn’t.

The problem, said Padilla further on, is that the next day I was sober again (if you could say that what had happened the night before took place in a state of drunkenness), but not Elisa, who all through breakfast couldn’t stop going over the things they’d talked about, remembering bits of everything that Padilla had told her, sometimes priding herself on her incredible memory, since their late-night conversation hadn’t exactly been a model of coherence, and also, when he got like that, admitted Padilla, he talked in bursts, too fast, confusedly, it was a coprolalic kind of thing, so that whoever he was talking to (and Padilla himself) tended to miss more than half of what he was saying, but Elisa, apparently, remembered everything: names, book titles, the petty intrigues and small excesses of a (literary) life long gone.

So the breakfast in question had been very strange.

Suddenly I had a vision of myself. But as a woman. Which (as you know) is something I’ve never wished for. But there I was, on the other side of the table, a woman with very thin lips, sick, young, poor, unkempt. A woman with the look of someone near death. I’m surprised I didn’t kick her out of the house on the spot, said Padilla, clearly not quite persuaded, clearly a little scared. About his novel he said nothing.

Amalfitano’s response was brief and epigrammatically ambiguous: he began by saying that Padilla’s friendship with Elisa must have some meaning that they had yet to understand, and he ended with an ominous list of the daily problems he faced, both in the philosophy department and at home, in his father-daughter dealings with Rosa, who was distancing herself from him more and more.

As had become habitual, Padilla didn’t wait for Amalfitano’s response to send him another letter.

He talked again about Elisa.