Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

swallowed (I saw him swallow his saliva as he leaned across that swamp-like, desert-like bed), and said that the kid was pretty far gone. If this kid dies on us, I'm coming back to kill you, said Arturo. Then I opened my mouth for the first time that night: Are we going to take him with us, I asked. He's coming with us, said Arturo. And Ernesto, who was still at the back of the room, sat down on the bed, as if suddenly overcome by despondency, and said, Come and have a look yourself, Arturo. And I saw Arturo shake his head a number of times. He didn't want to see for himself. Then I looked at Ernesto and for a moment it seemed to me that the back of the room was sailing away from the rest of the building, with the bed as its taut sail, pulling away from the Clover Hotel, gliding off over a lake that was sailing in turn through a clear, clear sky, a sky from one of Dr. Atl's paintings of the valley of Mexico. The vision was so clear, all it needed was for Arturo and me to stand up and wave goodbye. And Ernesto seemed braver than ever to me. And the sick boy seemed brave too, in his way.
    I moved. First mentally. Then physically. The sick boy looked me in the eyes and started to cry. He really was in a terrible state, but I thought it better not to tell Arturo. Where are his pants? Arturo asked. Somewhere around, said the King. I looked under the bed. There was nothing. I looked on both sides. I looked at Arturo as if to say, I can't find them, what should we do? Then Ernesto thought of looking among the blankets and he pulled out a pair of pants that looked damp and a pair of good tennis shoes. Leave it to me, I said. I sat the boy up on the edge of the bed and put on his jeans and his shoes. Then I lifted him up to see if he could walk. He could. Let's go, I said. Arturo didn't move. Wake up, Arturo, I thought. I have one more story to tell His Majesty, he said. You get going and wait for me at the front door.
    Ernesto and I got the boy down the stairs. We hailed a taxi and waited at the entrance to the Clover Hotel. Shortly afterward, Arturo emerged. My recollections of that night when anything could have happened, but nothing did, are fragmentary, as if mauled by an enormous animal. Sometimes, thinking back, I can see a big thunderstorm moving in from the north toward the center of Mexico City, but my memory tells me that there was no thunderstorm that night, although the high Mexican sky did descend a little, and at times it was hard to breathe; the air was dry and it caught in the throat. I remember Ernesto San Epifanio and Arturo Belano laughing in the taxi, laughing their way back to reality or what they liked to think of as reality, and I remember the air as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and then inside the taxi, a cactus air, bristling with every one of Mexico's countless species of cactus, and I remember saying, It's hard to breathe, and, Give me back my knife, and, It's hard to talk, and, Where are we going. I remember that every time I spoke, Ernesto and Arturo burst out laughing, and I ended up laughing too, as much as them or more, we all laughed, all except the taxi driver, who at one point looked at us as if we were just like all the other clients he had picked up that night (which, given that this was Mexico City, would not have been at all unusual), and the sick boy, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.
    And that was how we entered and left the kingdom of the King of the Rent Boys, an enclave in the wasteland of Colonia Guerrero, Ernesto San Epifanio, aged twenty or nineteen, a homosexual poet born in Mexico (and one of the two best poets of his generation, the other being Ulises Lima, who we didn't know at that stage), Arturo Belano, aged twenty, a heterosexual poet born in Chile, Juan de Dios Montes (also known as Juan de Dos Montes and Juan Dedos), aged eighteen, apprenticed to a baker in Colonia Buenavista, apparently bisexual, and myself, Auxilio Lacouture, of definitively