Read Amulet for Free Online Page A

the opposite. And faced with that dilemma I decided that the best thing to do was to keep quiet and listen. Which is what I did.
    The Italian's name was Paolo. That says it all, I think. He was born in a little village near Turin. He was at least six feet tall, had long brown hair and an enormous beard; Elena, or any other woman for that matter, could have disappeared into his embrace. Modern theater was his field but he hadn't come to Mexico to see theatrical performances. In fact the only thing he was doing in Mexico was waiting for a visa to Cuba, where he was planning to interview Fidel Castro. He had already been waiting for a long time. Once I asked him why they were taking so long. He told me that the Cubans wanted to check him out first. Only the right sort of people were granted an audience with Fidel Castro.
    He had already been to Cuba twice, which, so he said, and Elena backed him up on this, was enough to make him suspicious in the eyes of the Mexican police, although I never noticed anyone who might have been a plainclothes cop watching him. They'd have to be doing a bad job for you to notice them, said Elena. Anyway Paolo's being watched by secret police agents. Which only proved my point, since it's common knowledge that secret police agents are the easiest to identify. A traffic cop, for example, take away his uniform and he could pass for a factory worker, some even look like union leaders, but a secret policeman will always look like a secret policeman.
    We were friends from that night on. On Saturdays and Sundays the three of us would go see the free plays at the Casa del Lago. Paolo liked to watch the amateur groups that used the open-air theater. Elena sat between us, leaned her head on Paolo's arm and soon fell asleep. She didn't like the amateur actors. I sat on Elena's right, and to tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to what was happening on stage, since I was always keeping an eye out to see if I could spot a secret police agent. And I did actually spot not one but several. When I told Elena, she burst out laughing. You couldn't have, Auxilio, she said, but I knew I wasn't mistaken. Then I realized what was going on. On Saturdays and Sundays the Casa del Lago was literally swarming with spooks, but they weren't all on Paolo's trail; most of them were there to watch other people. We knew some of the people under observation from the university or the world of independent theater and we used to say hello to them. Others were strangers to us, and we could only feel for them, imagining the paths they would trace with their pursuers in tow.
    It didn't take me long to realize that Elena was very much in love with Paolo. What will you do when he finally goes to Cuba? I asked her one day. I don't know, she said, looking like a lonely little Mexican girl, and in that face I thought I saw a gleam or a pang that I had seen before, and I knew it wasn't a sign of good things to come. Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better. But better can sometimes mean worse, if you're a woman, if you live on this continent, hit upon unhappily by the Spaniards, inopportunely populated by Asians gone astray.
    That's what I thought, shut up in the women's bathroom on the fourth floor of the faculty of Philosophy and Literature in September 1968. I thought about those Asians crossing the Bering Strait, I thought about the solitude of America, I thought about how strange it is to emigrate eastward rather than westward. I may be silly and I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but in these troubled times no one will deny that to migrate eastward is like migrating into the depths of the night. That's what I thought, sitting on the floor, with my back against the wall, gazing absently at the spots on the ceiling. Eastward. To where night comes from. But then I thought: It's also where the sun comes from. It all depends on when the pilgrims set out on their march. And then I struck my