The Unknown University (40 page)

¿Qué pasó?, dije.
Vámonos,
dijo Laura.
Volvimos a encontrar a este trío un par de veces, una en aquellos mismos
baños, la otra en unos de Azcapotzalco, los baños del infierno, como los llamaba
Laura, pero las cosas nunca volvieron a ser iguales.
A lo sumo nos fumábamos un
cigarrillo y adiós.
Durante mucho tiempo seguimos frecuentando estos lugares.
Podíamos haber hecho el amor en otros sitios, pero había algo en la ruta de los
baños públicos que nos atraía como un imán.
No faltaron, como era lógico, otro tipo
de incidentes, carreras por los pasillos de tipos poseídos por la desesperación, un
intento de estupro, una redada que supimos sortear con fortuna y astucia; astucia,
la de Laura; fortuna, la solidaridad de bronce de los bañistas.
De la suma de todos
los establecimientos, ahora ya una amalgama que se confunde con el rostro de Laura
sonriendo, extrajimos la certeza de nuestro amor.
El mejor de todos, tal vez porque
allí lo hicimos por primera vez, fue el Gimnasio Moctezuma, al que siempre
volvíamos.
El peor, un local de Casas Alemán llamado convenientemente El Holandés
Errante, que era lo más parecido que he visto a una morgue.
Triple morgue: de la
higiene, del proletariado y de los cuerpos.
No así del deseo.
Dos son los recuerdos
más indelebles que aún conservo de aquellos días.
El primero es una sucesión de
imágenes de Laura desnuda (sentada en la banqueta, en mis brazos, bajo la ducha,
tirada en el diván, pensando) hasta que el vapor que gradualmente va creciendo la
hace desaparecer del todo.
Fin.
Imagen blanca.
El segundo es el mural del Gimnasio
Moctezuma.
Los ojos de Moctezuma, insondables.
El cuello de Moctezuma suspendido
sobre la superficie de la piscina.
Los cortesanos (o tal vez no eran cortesanos) que
ríen y conversan intentando con todas sus fuerzas ignorar aquello que el emperador
ve.
Las bandadas de pájaros y de nubes que se confunden en el fondo.
El color de las
piedras de la piscina, sin duda el color más triste que vi a lo largo de nuestras
expediciones, tan sólo comparable al color de algunas miradas, obreros en los
pasillos, que ya no recuerdo pero que sin duda existieron.

MEXICAN MANIFESTO

Laura and I did not make love that afternoon.
In truth, we gave it a
shot, but it just didn’t happen.
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
Now
I’m not so sure.
We probably did make love.
That’s what Laura said and while we were
at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on and for a
very long time I would associate with pleasure and play.
The first one was, without
a doubt, the best.
It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown
artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool.
Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women
bathe.
Everyone seems carefree except for the king who looks fixedly out of the
mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark wide-open eyes in
which I often thought I glimpsed terror.
The water in the pool was green.
The stones
were gray.
In the background you could see mountains and storm clouds.
The boy who
worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan and that was his primary topic of
conversation.
On the third visit we became friends.
He was only 18, wanted to buy a
car so he was saving everything he could: tips were scant.
According to Laura he was
a little slow.
I thought he was nice.
In every public bath there tends to be a fight
from time to time.
We never saw or heard any there.
The clients, conditioned by some
unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions.
Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be
able to explain since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual
saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas and, above all, cheap.
There in sauna 10 I saw Laura naked for the first time and all I could do was smile
and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which key to turn to make the steam
come out.
The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms,
were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door; in the first there was
usually a divan, an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos, a folding
table and a coat rack; the second chamber was the actual steam bath, with a hot and
cold shower and a bench of azulejo tiles against the wall, beneath which were hidden
the tubes that released the steam.
Moving from one vestibule to the next was
extraordinary, especially if the steam in one was already so thick we couldn’t see
each other.
Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan
where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of
steam slipped by and quickly disappeared.
Lying there, holding hands, we would
listen or try to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the Gym while our bodies
cooled.
Practically freezing, submerged in silence, we could finally hear the purr
welling through the floor and walls, the catlike whir of hot pipes and boilers that
stoked the business from some secret place in the building.
One day I’ll wander
around in here, said Laura.
Her experience raiding public baths was greater than
mine, which was pretty easy considering I’d never before crossed the threshold of
such an establishment.
Nevertheless she said she knew nothing of baths.
Not enough.
She’d gone a couple times with X and before X with a guy who was twice her age and
who she always referred to with mysterious phrases.
In total she hadn’t been more
than ten times, always to the same place, Montezuma’s Gym.
Together, riding the
Benelli, which were everywhere then, we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico
City, guided by an absolute eagerness which was a combination of love and play.
We
never succeeded.
On the contrary, as we advanced the abyss opened up around us, the
great black scenography of public baths.
Just as the hidden face of other cities is
in theatres, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap
cinemas, old buildings, even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City could be
found in the enormous web of public baths, legal, semilegal and clandestine.
Setting
our course was simple at first: I asked the boy at Montezuma’s Gym to point me in
the direction of some cheap baths.
I got five cards and wrote the addresses of a
dozen establishments on a piece of paper.
These were the first.
From each of them
our search branched off countless times.
The schedules varied as much as the
buildings.
We arrived to some at 10 a.m.
and left at lunchtime.
These, as a general
rule, were bright places with flaking walls, where we could sometimes hear the
laughter of teenagers and the coughing of lost and lonely men, the same men who, in
just a little while, having collected themselves, would get up and sing boleros.
The
essence of those places seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes.
They weren’t
very clean or maybe they did the cleaning later in the day.
At others we’d make our
appearance at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and wouldn’t leave until dark.
That was our
most common schedule.
The baths at that hour seemed to enjoy, or suffer from, a
permanent shadow.
That is, a trick shadow, a dome or palm tree, the closest thing to
a marsupial’s pouch: at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more
than a gravestone.
The baths were most crowded at 7 in the evening, 7:30, 8 at
night.
On the sidewalk next to the door, teenagers stood guard talking about
baseball and pop songs.
The hallways echoed with the sinister jokes of workers who’d
just come from factories and workshops.
In the foyer, old fags, birds of passage,
would greet the receptionists and those killing time in the armchairs by first name
or nom de guerre.
Getting lost in the hallways, nourishing a kind of indiscretion in
small doses, like pinches, never ceased to be highly informative.
Open or half open
doors, like landslides, like cracks in the earth, usually offered live paintings to
the happy observer: groups of naked men who left all movement and action entirely to
the steam; teenagers lost like jaguars in a labyrinth of showers; small but
terrifying gestures of athletes, bodybuilders and loners; a leper’s clothes hanging;
little old men drinking Lulú and smiling as they lean against the wooden door of the
Turkish bath.
It was easy to make friends and we did make some.
Couples, after
passing each other a few times in the hallways, felt obliged to greet one another.
This was due to a kind of heterosexual solidarity; women, in many public baths, were
an absolute minority and it wasn’t uncommon to hear extravagant stories of attacks
and harassment even though, truth is, those tales weren’t very credible.
These kinds
of friendships never went beyond a beer or drink in the bar.
We’d say hi to each
other in the baths and at most we’d take neighboring saunas.
After a while the first
to finish would knock on their couple friends’ door and, without waiting for an
answer, would holler they’d be in such and such restaurant, waiting.
Then the others
would leave, they’d go to the restaurant, have a drink or two and say goodbye until
next time.
Sometimes the couple would take you into their confidence, the woman or
the man, especially when they were married but not to each other, they’d tell about
their lives and you’d have to nod, say that’s love, that’s a shame, that’s destiny,
that’s children.
Tender but bored.
The other friendships, which were a bit more
turbulent, were the ones where they’d visit your private room.
These could get to be
just as boring as the former, but were much more dangerous.
They’d show up without
prelude, just knock on the door, a strange quick knock, and say let me in.
They were
rarely alone, almost always in threes, two men and a woman or three men; the motives
they put forth for such visits tended to be stupid or not too believable: to smoke a
little weed, which they couldn’t do in the group showers, or to sell us something or
other.
Laura always let them in.
The first few times it made me tense, ready to
fight and fall blood-soaked on the tiles of the private room.
I figured the most
logical thing was they were coming to rob us or to rape Laura, or even to rape me,
and my nerves had me on edge.
The visitors knew this somehow and they only addressed
me when necessity or good manners made it impossible to avoid.
All the propositions,
deals and whispers were addressed to Laura.
She was the one who let them in, she was
the one who asked what the fuck she could offer them, she was the one who let them
pass through to the room with the divan (I would listen, from the steam, to how they
sat down, first one, then another, then the next, and Laura’s back, unmoving, could
be seen through the frosted glass door separating the steam from that antechamber
which had suddenly been transformed into a mystery).
Finally, I’d get up, put a
towel around my waist, and go in.
The visitors were usually two men and a woman.
Or
a man, a boy and a girl, who would wave hesitantly when they saw me as if all along,
against all reason, they’d come for Laura and not for the two of us; as if they’d
only expected to find her.
Seated on the divan, their dark eyes never missed a
single one of her gestures, while their hands independently rolled the weed.
The
conversations seemed coded in a language I didn’t know, certainly not in the teenage
slang prevalent at that time of which I now barely remember a couple of expressions,
but in a much more ominous slang where each verb and each sentence had a touch of
funeral and of holes.
Maybe the Air Hole.
Maybe one of the deformed faces of the
Immaculate Grave.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
In any case I too joined the conversation or
tried to.
It wasn’t easy, but I tried.
Sometimes, along with the pot, they’d pull
out bottles of alcohol.
The bottles weren’t free, but we still never paid.
The
visitors’ business was selling marijuana, whiskey, turtle eggs in the saunas, rarely
with the approval of the receptionist or janitorial staff, who relentlessly pursued
them; that’s why it was of utmost importance that somebody shelter them; they also
sold theatre, which is really where they made their dough, or arranged private
performances in the bachelor pads of contracting parties.
The repertoire of these
traveling companies could be paltry or multifarious, but the dramatic crux of their
mise en scène was always the same: the older man stayed on the divan (thinking, I
suppose) while the boy and girl, or the two boys, followed the spectators into the
steam chamber.
The performance, as a general rule, didn’t last more than half an
hour or three quarters of an hour, with or without the participation of the
spectators.
When time was up, the man on the divan would open the door and announce
to the respected public, between coughs brought on by the steam which immediately
tried to slip into the other room, the end of the show.
The encores were very
expensive, though they only lasted ten minutes.
The boys would shower quickly, then
take their clothes from the man’s hands.
I remember they’d get dressed while they
were still wet.
The downcast but enterprising artistic director would take advantage
of the last few minutes to offer the satisfied viewers the delicacies in his basket
or suitcase: whiskey served in paper cups, joints rolled by expert hands, and turtle
eggs he’d open with his enormous thumbnail and which he’d sprinkle with lemon and
chili when they were in the glass.
In our private room things were different.
They’d
talk softly.
They’d smoke marijuana.
They’d let time pass, checking their watches
now and again while their faces became covered with beads of sweat.
Sometimes they’d
touch each other, touch us, something that was inevitable, regardless, if we were
all sitting on the divan, and the brushing of legs, or arms, could get to be
painful.
Not the pain of sex but of the unpardonably lost or of the last shred of
hope roaming the Impossible country.
If they were acquaintances, Laura would invite
them to undress and join us in the steam.
They rarely accepted.
They preferred to
smoke and drink and listen to stories.
To relax.
After a while they’d close the
suitcase and take off.
Then, two or three times in the same afternoon, they’d come
back and the routine was the same.
If she was in a good mood, Laura would let them
in, if not she wouldn’t even bother to tell them through the door to quit bugging
us.
The relationships, with the exception of one or two isolated quarrels, were
always harmonious.
Sometimes I think they treasured Laura long before they’d even
met her.