Amulet

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

...y cuando una está feliz o presiente que la felicidad está cerca, pues se mira en los espejos sin ninguna reserva, es más, cuando una está feliz o se siente predestinada a la experiencia de la felicidad, tiene a bajar las defensas y a aceptar los espejos

¿Y qué amor puede sostenerse mucho tiempo si a una no la besan en la boca?

... Auxilio, they'd say, that's enough bustling around, Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman, dust and literature have always gone together.

Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured.

...my spirit had become so fragile, I was so devoid of the curiosity that, in former times, had been one of my most salient traits.

El amor es así, amiguitos, lo digo yo, que fui la madre de todos los poetas. El amor es así, el argot es así, las calles son así, los sonetos son así, el cielo de las cinco de la mañana es así. La amistad, en cambio, no es así. En la amistad uno nunca está solo.

And although the song that I heard was about war, about heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet.

I thought, In spite of all my cunning and self-sacrifice, I'm finished. I thought, How poetic, to destroy my writings like that. I thought, It would have been better to swallow them, now I'm finished. I thought, The vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because what I had written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke up again.

Perhaps Arturito is already dead, I thought, perhaps that lonely valley is an emblem of death, because death is the staff of Latin America, and Latin America cannot walk without its staff.

Y lo que los poetas jóvenes o la nueva generación pretendía era mover el piso y llegado el momento destruir esas estatuas, salvo la de Pacheco, el único que parecía escribir de verdad, el único que no parecía un funcionario.