Luis Sebastián Rosado, La Rama Dorada café, Coyoacán, Mexico City, May 2026.
Monsiváis had already said it: disciples of Marinetti and Tzara, their noisy, nonsensical, sentimental poems waged their battle on the terrain of mere typographical arrangement and never rose above the level of childish entertainment. Monsiváis was speaking of los estridentistas, but I applied that same judgment —in a long essay published by Sexto Piso— to los real visceralistas, and after my latest visit to Madrid I am quite prepared to hang the same old label around the necks of all those who claim to be part of el Movi_Miento, a movement so nebulous that it does not even possess a name for those who profess it.
Last month I had the misfortune of running into a few of them in Madrid, at Café Gijón, together with Tony, owner of a travel agency in Paris and my compadre del alma from those days when one was young, a student, and did not have a peso to his name in the City of Light. Tony, who in his own way was to blame and witnessed the whole thing, will not let me lie: it was highly unpleasant.
I was sitting at my table, at around eight in the evening, waiting for Tony and for Vanesa —or Vane— his elegant friend, or perhaps lover, or I do not know and do not wish to know, because with a character like Tony one never asks questions, when three of them surrounded me. I thought: what are they doing here, what do they want with me, what accounts have they come to settle? The fact is that they too had arranged to meet Tony. In short, we spoke for some twenty minutes —never had I so bitterly hated Tony’s unpunctuality, nor that of flirtatious Vanesa. In fairness, I must say that the plática was cultured and orderly: they asked me about the books I had with me, I passed them across, and we began to talk about them.
José Manuel, a tall, thin man with silvery locks, had read them all; I do not know how, but as the conversation went on I realized how difficult it would be to find a book that man had not read. Luis, shorter, with a Clemenceau-style moustache, focused on one that had to do with Greece: The Colossus of Maroussi, by Henry Miller, which recounts a journey the author made through Athens, Crete, Corfu, and other parts of Greece just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It is considered one of the great travel books of the last century, he said; it captures very well the essence of the Greek people, both the modern Greeks of that time and the classical Greeks. The third, Micky, a little pot-bellied, with the face of a good-natured adventurer, did not speak of books; he merely drank.
Then Tony arrived, and I was still alive. He said he could see we already knew one another; all the better, no introductions were needed. Vane was with him. I wanted to ask her about…, but she sat down on the other side of the table to talk with the people from el Movi_Miento about Bolaño, and it seemed inappropriate to launch the question across the marble.
So I began to drink; I had no reason to, but there it is. I ordered a cognac —there they call it brandy— and went on listening, feeling that, if I let myself slide down that slope, things would begin to go wrong. First it was Luis who went to the lavatory; when he returned, he delivered a terse: “Ignoble.” José Manuel nodded and said: “I had already warned them last Friday.” I wanted to ask whether they were referring to the state of the toilets, if only to say something and rejoin the conversation, but just then another member of el Movi_Miento appeared, a certain Eire.
He came in, mischievous smile and all, carrying a cloth shoulder bag from a bookshop; he greeted everyone and, without even sitting down, was already showing off his acquisitions: the complete Moomin collection, by Tove Jansson, in comic-strip form, published by Salamandra. “I couldn’t resist,” he said. “I read them all as a child and, seeing them there, so beautiful on the shelf, I said to myself: I’ll take one. Then I thought, well, whoever says one may just as well take number two too, so as not to have to come back tomorrow…” I ended up counting six volumes on the tabletop.
I had barely begun to leaf through them, with my second glass in hand, when through the door came Roma, a voluptuous cabaret artist who had always seemed to me the daughter Cleopatra never had. It was for her that I had travelled all those miles from Mexico City, yet I scarcely had the chance even to greet her, for she gave a general salutation to all and then, in her turn, drew from her capacious handbag three black-covered notebooks with elastic bands, Moleskine-style. “The poetry notebooks of Cesárea Tinajero!” she howled, rather than spoke. “Still warm —calientitos— straight from the Sonoran Desert!”
We all applauded, myself first among them. My moment to shine had arrived, or so I thought. As everyone surely knows, there were two real visceralista movements in Mexico: the first, in the nineteen-twenties, led by Cesárea Tinajero, and the second, in the second half of the nineteen-seventies, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Bolaño explains it very well in The Savage Detectives, and I explain it considerably better in my essay, a work I had undertaken in the hope of dazzling Vane and Roma, who had styled themselves ambassadors of real visceralismo in Europe.
Certainly —as they had already heard me say at the beginning— I am highly critical of the literary quality of that group, and I had to state as much, for the piece was going to be read by more people, and people of a certain level at that, besides Vane and Roma. But it must be admitted that I had taken an interest in that minority in order to impress those two she-devils, and that for that reason I carried in my briefcase a couple of copies I wished to offer and inscribe to them.
Our table was full; at a nearby one, Vane, Roma, and Eire had sat down to examine the manuscript, and it was there that I too needed to sit. I was undone by good manners and by the ceremonial obligations due to my table companions at the moment of rising and gathering my belongings. By the time I tried to reach Parnassus, the table had just filled up with two more members of el Movi_Miento who had recently arrived: a certain Chufa, who must have had a Christian name, I suppose, though everyone called him Chufa, and another who answered to the name of Jesús.
And “Jesus!” was precisely what I said to myself when I found myself planted there, standing between two tables, having already taken leave of the people with whom I had been sitting, and with no place at the second, while no one seemed to care about my ridiculous situation or to offer me a chair. In the end I went to the lavatory to disguise my embarrassment. And there was nothing wrong with the lavatory. Nothing at all. The establishment had recently undergone a handsome renovation; the bar and the furniture gleamed as if new, and the lavatories had been done up as well. Indeed, I found them most coquettish, with the period portraits they had hung on the walls.
On my way out, I stopped by the bar. There was Micky, standing, ordering himself a drink, and I said to myself: well then, another, since we are already spending money. And so the downward slope continued. By the time we renewed our glasses, another writer was making his entrance into the café, a certain Tomás García Yebra. He was received with resounding applause; everyone got up and went to the door to shake his hand, clap him on the back, and offer all the other congratulations required by the occasion. From what I soon gathered, this Tomás had presented his latest play, Un padre transgresor, in a bookshop in Malasaña a few days earlier, through a dramatized reading. The room had filled to such a degree that some of those arriving had to be asked not to enter. The event had been a complete success, and now it had to be celebrated.
I seized that moment, while the champagne was flowing, to approach Roma and suggest that we vanish together in the direction of the best restaurant in Madrid, whichever she might choose. She turned her back on me. Two bottles later, it was Tomás’s turn to return from the lavatories with his engine blazing. “An affront to this establishment, to everything it has represented, and to literature in general!” he pronounced. And I, truth be told, still understood nothing.
Then Eire approached their table without saying a word and, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, on his return handed Tomás the empty satchel in which he had brought his Moomin books. They said nothing to each other, and I observed the scene closely, because since no one was addressing me I was attentive to everything, and Tomás merely nodded —nomás— and went back to the lavatories. Later he returned to the group; Eire had a glass ready for him. “Calvados for the champion!” was all he said as he passed it to him. Tomás drained it in one gulp and departed.
And up to that moment I had understood nothing. I hated Spain, I hated that café, I hated those writers, and, especially, I hated Roma for paying me no attention whatsoever. Chufa must have perceived my desolation, because he threw an arm around my shoulder and said something like: “Hey, weren’t you the one who had written about los real visceralistas?” I asked his permission to go over to the tables and show him my book. By the time I returned, a hell of a thousand devils had broken loose.
A waiter had realized that two portraits had disappeared from the gentlemen’s lavatories. That was how I understood everything. The manager had taken it out on Eire. “This is your doing. A few days ago you were asking us to remove the very portraits that are now missing. Tell us what you have done with them!” Eire himself, calm —or rather amused— replied that he knew nothing about those portraits; that, out of respect, he had imposed upon himself the rule that whenever he came to Café Gijón he would use only the ladies’ lavatory and not the gentlemen’s, and that therefore he had at no point passed through there.
The customers began to gather round and shout, supporting either one side or the management, though rather few supported the latter. It was then that I understood that the two portraits they had taken were those of Fernando Fernán Gómez and Umbral, two writers much loved by the café, whom the new management and the renovation had banished to the urinals. Since the portraits were not going to appear and the tumult was growing worse, the Policía Nacional had to make their entrance. When they asked me for my papers, I began to vomit.
Tony. La Taverne de Montmartre. Paris. May 2026.
What Luis Sebastián says is true. The portraits appeared a few days later in an anonymous package addressed to the Local Police. Since by then the matter had already reached the media, the management of Café Gijón decided not to hang them again, neither in the lavatories nor anywhere else. On its Instagram page it stated that it had sent them to a restorer, a diplomatic way of saying that today they are gathering dust in God knows what storage room.
As for my friend’s vomiting, I must apologize on his behalf. It is, under no circumstances, acceptable.
Eire.
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