Woes of the True Policeman

growing darker and darker. The man is going to smother me with hospitality, thought Amalfitano. Guerra’s voice droned on, listing the gems of the Botanic Garden:
    “The sacred fir. The common fir. Two shrubs, the guayule and the candelilla. Epazote ( Chenopodium ambrosioides ). The grass called zacatón ( Epicampes macroura ). Giant grass ( Guadua amplexifolia ). And here,” said Guerra, stopping at last, “our national tree, or at least that’s how I think of it, our dear, beloved ahuehuete ( Taxodium mucronatum ).”
    Amalfitano gazed at Guerra and the tree and thought wearily but also with emotion that he was back in America. His eyes filled with tears that later he wouldn’t be able to explain to himself. Ten feet from him, his back turned, Professor Guerra trembled.

10
    In his next letter, Padilla talked about Raoul Delorme and the sect known as the barbaric writers, created by Delorme midway through the 1960s. While the future novelists of France were breaking the windows of their high schools or erecting barricades or making love for the first time, Delorme and the nucleus of the soon-to-be barbaric writers were shut up in tiny garrets, concierge quarters, hotel rooms, and the backs of stores and pharmacies, preparing for the coming of a new literature. For them, according to Padilla’s sources, May of ’68 was a period of creative retreat: they kept indoors (eating stockpiled provisions or fasting), talked only among themselves, and—singly and in groups of three—practiced new writing techniques that would astonish the world, attempting to predict the moment when they would burst onto the world scene, a moment that was first erroneously calculated be 1991 but upon further divining adjusted to 2005. The sources Padilla cited were magazines that Amalfitano had never heard of before: Issue 1 of the Evreux Literary Gazette , Issue 0 of the Metz Literary Journal , Issue 2 of the Arras Journal of Night Watchmen , Issue 4 of the Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild of the Poitou . A “foundational elegy” by someone called Xavier Rouberg (“We salute a new literary school”) had been printed twice, in the Literary Gazette and the Literary Journal . The Journal of Night Watchmen included a crime story by Delorme and a poem by Sabrina Martin (“The Inner and Outer Sea”) preceded by an introductory note by Xavier Rouberg that was simply a shorter version of his “foundational elegy.” Featured in the Literary and Trade Journal was the work of six poets (Delorme, Sabrina Martin, Ilse von Kraunitz, M. Poul, Antoine Dubacq, and Antoine Madrid), each represented by a single poem—except Delorme and Dubacq with three and two, respectively—under the collective heading “The Barbaric Poets: When Pastime Becomes Profession.” As if to confirm what amateurs the poets were, their day jobs were indicated in parentheses beneath their names, next to the passport-style photos. Thus the reader learned that Delorme owned a bar, that Von Kraunitz was a nurse’s aide at a Strasbourg hospital, that Sabrina Martin worked cleaning houses in Paris, that M. Poul was a butcher, and that Antoine Madrid and Antoine Dubacq made a living tending newsstands. Regarding Xavier Rouberg, the John the Baptist of the barbarics, Padilla claimed to have done some sleuthing: he was eighty-six, his past was full of lacunae, he had spent time in Indochina, for a while he had been a publisher of pornographic literature, he had communist, fascist, and surrealist sympathies (he was a friend of Dalí, about whom he wrote a trifling little book, Dalí For and Against the World ). Unlike the barbaric writers, Rouberg came from a well-to-do family and had been to university. Everything seemed to indicate that the barbarics were the last project to which Xavier Rouberg attached his hopes. Like almost all Padilla’s letters, this one ended abruptly. No goodbye, no hasta pronto. Amalfitano read it in his faculty cubicle with mounting amusement and trepidation. For a moment he imagined that Padilla was serious, that such a literary group really existed, and—horrors—that Padilla shared or was prepared to embrace its interests. Then he changed his mind, and decided that neither the group nor much less the magazines existed ( Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild of the Poitou !), that it might all be part of The God of Homosexuals . Later, on his way out of class, he gave Padilla’s letter some more thought and