Amulet Read Online Free Page A

sound of boots? A sound of hobnailed boots? But, Hey, I said to myself, that would be too much of a coincidence, don't you think? The sound of hobnailed boots! But, Hey, I said to myself, all I need now is for it to be cold and a beret to drop on my head, and then I heard a voice saying something like, All clear, Sir, and five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a bitch who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in.
    Three
    A nd I, poor creature that I was, heard something like the sound of the wind when it drops and rustles through paper flowers, I heard a flowering of air and water, and lifted my feet (quietly) like a Renoir ballerina, as if I were about to give birth (and in a sense, in effect, I was preparing to deliver something and to be delivered myself), with my underpants around my skinny ankles like a pair of handcuffs, hooked on my shoes (a pair of very comfortable yellow moccasins I had at the time). While I, a poor Uruguayan poet, but with a love or Mexico as deep as anyone's, waited for the soldier to search the cubicles one by one and prepared myself mentally and physically not to open the door, if it came to that, to defend the autonomy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico even in this last redoubt, a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions. And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spine, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.
    To put it plainly: the soldier and I remained as still as statues in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, and that was all. Then I heard his footsteps receding, I heard the door shutting, and my raised legs resumed their original position as if of their own initiative.
    The birth was over.
    I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there.
    I know that it was starting to get dark when I came out of the stall. My extremities had gone numb. There was a rock in my stomach and my chest hurt. There was gauze or a kind of veil in front of my eyes. There was a buzzing of blowflies or bees or wasps in my ears or in my mind. I felt ticklish and sleepy at the same time. But in fact I was more awake than ever. The situation was, admittedly, unfamiliar, but I knew what to do.
    I knew where my duty lay.
    I climbed up to the only window in the bathroom and peered out. I saw a lone soldier far off in the distance. I saw the silhouette or the shadow of a tank, although on reflection I suspected that it might have been the shadow of a tree. It was like the portico of portico of Latin or Greek literature. Ah, how I love Greek literature, from Sappho to George Seferis! I saw the wind sweeping through the university as if to savor the last of the daylight.
    And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew that I had to resist. So I sat down on the tiles of the women's bathroom and, before the last rays of sunlight faded, read three more of Pedro Garfias's poems, then shut the book and shut my eyes and said: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, resist.
    That's all.
    Then I began to think about my past as I am doing now. As I went back through the dates, the rhombus shattered in a space of speculative