Woes of the True Policeman

myself for? My Gramsci, my situationism, my Kropotkin (lauded by Oscar Wilde as one of the greatest men on earth)? For my mental hang-ups, my lack of civic responsibility? For having seen the Korean Women Gathering Signatures for Peace and not stoning them? (I should have buggered them, thought Amalfitano from the whirl of glaciers, I should have fucked those fake Koreans until their true identity was revealed: Ukrainian Women Gathering Wheat for Peace, Cuban Women Gathering Cockles in an Unremitting Latin American Twilight.) What am I guilty of, then? Of having loved and continuing to love—no, not of loving: of longing. Of longing for the conversation of my friends who took to the hills because they never grew up and they believed in a dream and because they were Latin American men, true macho men, and they died? (And what do their mothers, their widows, have to say about it?) Did they die like rats? Did they die like soldiers in the Wars of Independence? Did they die tortured, shot in the back of the head, dumped in the sea, buried in secret cemeteries? Was their dream the dream of Neruda, of the Party bureaucrats, of the opportunists? Mystery, mystery, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of the nightmare. And he said to himself: someday Neruda and Octavio Paz will shake hands. Sooner or later Paz will make room on Olympus for Neruda. But we will always be on the outside. Far from Octavio Paz and Neruda. Over there, Amalfitano said to himself like a madman, look over there, dig over there, over there lie traces of truth. In the Great Wilderness. And he said to himself: it’s with the pariahs, with those who have nothing at all to lose, that you’ll find some justification, if not vindication; and if not justification, then the song, barely a murmur (maybe not voices, maybe only the wind in the branches), but a murmur that cannot be silenced.

16
    The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind who almost literally gnaws at himself, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and—the crowning touch—a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I’ve read thousands of books. At least I’ve become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano’s view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the Novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote) . At least I’ve read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.

17
    Amalfitano hardly ever thought about old age. Sometimes he saw himself with a cane, strolling along a bright tree-lined boulevard and cackling to himself. Other times he saw himself trapped, without Rosa, the curtains drawn and the door propped shut with two chairs. We Chileans, he said to himself, don’t know how to grow old and as a general rule we make the most terrific fools of ourselves; ridiculous as we are, though, there’s something courageous about our old age, as if when we grow wrinkled and fall ill we recover the courage of our rugged childhoods in the land of earthquakes and tsunamis. (Though what Amalfitano knew about Chileans was only supposition, considering how long it had been since he’d associated with any of them.)

18
    In one of his classes, Amalfitano said: the birth of modern Latin American poetry is marked by two poems. The first is “The Soliloquy of the Individual,” by Nicanor Parra, published in Poemas y antipoemas , Editorial Nascimento, Chile, 1954. The second is “Trip to New York,” by Ernesto Cardenal, published in a Mexico City magazine in the mid-’70s (1974, I think, but don’t quote me on that),