Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

breath of warm and slightly humid air that conjured up unstable geometries, solitudes, schizophrenia, and butchery, and the absolute son of a bitch didn't even glance at me.
    After that we went downtown, the three of us, and Julián Gómez and Arturito Belano continued their conversation about poetry, and two or three more poets joined us at the Encrucidada Veracruzana, or maybe they were just journalists or future college professors, and they all went on talking about poetry, new poetry, but I said nothing, I was listening to my heartbeat, still shaken by the encounter with that shadow, although I hadn't said a word about it, so I didn't notice when the discussion turned into an argument or when the shouting and the insults began. They chucked us out of the bar. We walked away through the empty streets of Mexico City at five in the morning and the group diminished as people peeled off, one by one, each heading for home, and at the time I had a place of my own to go to, a rooftop room in Colonia Roma Norte, in the Calle Tabasco, and since Arturito Belano lived in Colonia Juárez, on Versalles, we walked together, although, had he been navigating like a Cub Scout, he really should have turned off to the west, toward the Glorieta de Insurgentes or the Zona Rosa, since he lived right on the corner of Versalles and Berlin, while I had to keep going south. But Arturito Belano decided to go a bit out of his way and keep me company.
    To tell the truth, at that hour of the night, neither of us was very talkative, and although now and then we commented on the quarrel at the Encrucijada Veracruzana, mostly we just walked and breathed the air of Mexico City, which seemed to have been purified by the dawn, until Arturito said, in his most nonchalant tone of voice, that he had been worried about me in that dive in La Villa (so it was La Villa), and when I asked him why, he said because he too (the angel) had seen the shadow that was following my shadow. I looked at him calm as you please, raised my hand to my mouth, and said, It was the shadow of death, and although he laughed incredulously, I wasn't offended at all. It was as if he were saying, That was some bad trip back there, Auxilio. I raised my hand to my mouth again and stopped walking and said, If it hadn't been for you and Julián, I'd be dead now. Arturito listened, then walked on. And I caught up with him and we walked side by side. And so, stopping and talking, or walking on in silence, before we knew it, we came to the doorway of the building where I lived. And that was that.
    Later, in 1973, when he decided to go back to his country and take part in the revolution, I was the only one, apart from his family, who went to see him off at the bus station (because Arturito Belano traveled overland). It was a long trip, long and hazardous, an initiation, a Latin American grand tour on a shoestring, wandering the length of our absurd continent, which we keep misunderstanding or simply not understanding at all. And when Arturito waved goodbye from the window of the bus, his mother cried, and so did I, inexplicably, my eyes filled with tears, as if that boy were my son too, and I was afraid I would never see him again.
    That night I slept at Arturo's place, mostly to keep his mother company, and I remember we stayed up late talking about women's things, not exactly my usual topics of conversation. We talked about children growing up and going out to play in the big, wide world; we talked about the lives they lead when they leave their parents and set off into the big, wide world in search of the unknown. Then we talked about the big, wide world itself. A world that was not, in fact, so big or wide for us. And then Arturo's mother read the tarot cards for me and said that my life was about to change, and I said, That's good, you know, a change is just what I need right now. After that I made coffee, I don't know what time it was, but it was very late, and both of us must have been