Woes of the True Policeman

His relationship with his father was good, though somewhat distant and perhaps a little sad. The abrupt and enigmatic messages they flung at each other with seeming carelessness tended to be misinterpreted on both sides. Padilla’s father believed that his son was very intelligent, of higher-than-average intelligence, but at the same time deeply unhappy. And he blamed himself and fate. Padilla believed that his father might long ago have been an interesting person or might have had the chance to become one, but the deaths in the family had turned him into a spiritless, resigned man, sometimes mysteriously happy (when a soccer match was on TV), but usually quiet and hardworking, a man who demanded nothing of Padilla beyond perhaps the occasional bit of trivial conversation. Nothing more. They weren’t rich, but since his father owned the apartment and hardly spent a thing, Padilla always had a decent amount of money at his disposal. With it he bought movie and theater tickets; went out to dinner; bought books, jeans, a leather jacket with metal studs, boots, sunglasses, a small weekly supply of hash, very occasionally some cocaine, albums by Satie; paid for his college tuition, his metro passes, his black and purple blazers, the rooms in Distrito V where he brought his lovers. He never went on vacation.

Padilla’s father never went on vacation, either. When summer came, Padilla and his father slept until late, with the blinds down and the apartment plunged into a gentle dusk, redolent of the previous night’s dinner. Then Padilla would go out to roam the streets of Barcelona, and his father, after washing the dishes and giving the kitchen a once-over, would spend the rest of the day watching television.

At eighteen Padilla completed his first book of poetry. He sent a copy to Leopoldo María Panero at the Mondragón asylum, put the original in a drawer in his desk-the only one with a lock and key-and forgot all about it. Three years later, when he met Amalfitano, he retrieved the poems from the drawer and begged him to read them. Amalfitano thought they were interesting, maybe too faithful to certain conventions, but elegant and polished. Their subjects were the city of Barcelona, sex, illness, crime. In one of them, for example, the poet described in perfect alexandrines some fifty ways of masturbating, each more painful and terrible than the last, as a nuclear twilight settled slowly over the city’s suburbs. In another he minutely chronicled the death of his father, alone in his room, as the poet cleans the house, cooks, rations out the provisions (ever dwindling) in the pantry, searches for good music on the radio, reads curled up on the sofa in the living room, and tries in vain to reorder his memories. His father takes his time dying, of course, and stretching between his sleep and the poet’s wakefulness, lost in the mist, is a ruined bridge. Vladimir Holan is my model in the art of survival, he told Amalfitano. Wonderful, thought Amalfitano, one of my favorite poets.

Up until this point, Amalfitano had hardly seen Padilla, who only very rarely showed up in class. After the reading and the favorable comments, he was never absent again. Soon they became friends. By then Padilla wasn’t living with his father anymore; he had rented a studio near the university, where he hosted parties and gatherings that Amalfitano soon began to attend. Poems were read and later on in the evening the guests put on little plays in Catalan. Amalfitano found it charming, like the tertulias of South American literary circles in the old days, but with more style and taste, more flair, something like what the tertulias of Mexico’s Contemporáneos might have been if the Contemporáneos had written plays, which Amalfitano doubted. Also: there was a lot of drinking and sometimes one of the guests had a breakdown that usually ended-after much screaming and sobbing-with the sufferer shut in the bathroom and two volunteers trying to calm him down. Every so often a woman made an appearance, but usually it was just men, most of them young, students of literature and art history. A painter also came, a strange man, maybe forty-five, who wore only leather and who sat silently in a corner during the tertulias, not drinking, chain-smoking little hash cigarettes that he selected, pre-rolled, from a gold cigarette case. And the owner of a pastry shop in Gracia, a cheerful, animated fat man who talked to everyone and who was, as Amalfitano soon realized, the one bankrolling Padilla and the other boys.

One night, as they were performing one of the Dialogues with Leucò translated into Catalan by a very tall, fair-skinned boy, Padilla surreptitiously took one of Amalfitano’s hands. Amalfitano didn’t let go.