He opened his eyes, under the cover of the pages typed over several days, tangled up with an old dog who was in need of a bath again, warmed by the impertinent and resounding light of dawn in the tropics: the same light as always, filtered through the window, that inundated the room and fell like a reflector projecting against the wall from which, as his first action of the day, he would rip and scribble—he ripped and scribbled—the calendar that, with its twelve squares distributed in four rows, had pursued him for nine months, nine days, and nine hours since the interactive calendar: 9-9-9. He was already sixty years old. He had crossed into old age.
In the last three weeks, several times he came to feel he was on the verge of exploding. He managed to fulfill with the prisonlike discipline the medical orders of not drinking for the infinite number of days demanded and, in such terrifying and lucid sobriety, he had had to put down his weapons and also follow the various dispositions, orders, and agreements issued by the Organizing Commission for the Sixtieth Birthday of Compañero Mario Conde, as Aymara denominated the preparation committee, with the unanimous approval of everyone else implied in the process. In the midst of so much obedience and so many rules, he had managed to raise, nonetheless, a miserable demand that he considered nonnegotiable: the night before, the last day before he became old, he wanted to spend at his house, alone with his own company and that of Garbage II, and to sleep in his bed, where he would awaken—and he did awake—on the day of the foreseen celebration.
In too many ways, the final days of his previous age had been the strangest and most impersonal of his life, and, at the same time, the calmest and most productive. The former policeman could not help but see them as a period that was even more confusing than the one he lived through just after having received Elizardo Soler’s gunshot, when he thought he would die and confirmed with his own flesh—such appropriate words—how simple that journey could be, how easily one could cross over the line of to be or not to be, which had always been and would be the question.
When he settled into Tamara’s lair to spend his convalescence and, incidentally, to be under permanent watch, they had considered the problem of Garbage II’s care. Since no other solution was possible, the dog had been rescued by Rabbit and Candito and taken to his owner’s recovery home, where Tamara would welcome him. From the initial negotiations, complex as any peace treaty and agreement based on mutual understanding, the hostess had established one unappealable condition: the dog must be bathed and would not sleep in the bed with her and Conde. The convalescent and the dog accepted both clauses and promised each other to behave as decently as their respective natures allowed, and they swore, besides, to do everything possible not to piss against the side of some armchair.
While two women who were almost identical but so different, Tamara and Aymara, took turns to care for him and cure him, Conde, perhaps unsettled by the lead that had gone through him, or by the impossibility of living his usual bad life, saw himself pressed to fulfill an incisive need that ended up rising up within him. As such, every morning, after he had an abundant dose of Kimbo coffee for breakfast, smoked his first cigarette of the day, and walked a couple of blocks around the neighborhood with Garbage II, he returned to the house and occupied the generous mahogany desk that, many years before, Ambassador Valdemira had acquired from a French antiquarian. Writing became a challenge, born of an unfathomable calling, from an indomitable urge. Relying on the well-populated library, which he himself had continued nourishing with some jewels that fell in his hands as a dealer of old books, Conde had begun to sketch a story—that aimed to be squalid and moving—of the incarnations of a historic figure without a past who, across History, lived some fictious and novelized lives, although in many ways similar to his own life.
The return to writing had been a comforting and simultaneously agonizing exercise, to which he had been able to hand himself over with greater intensity and effort ever since Bobby, pushed by the Pigeon, had shown up at the twins’ house with the purpose of settling an outstanding bill for Conde’s work and the past, and had freed him from an uncomfortable burden.
As soon as he arrived, his former classmate started asking for every manner of forgiveness. In many ways, he said on the verge of tears, he felt responsible for the bad experience his friend had gone through, a situation that had almost cost him his life. Every day that passed, he added, the health of Mario Conde had been in his prayers and supplications, without a doubt heard by their addressees. Old Bobby only regretted that that entire murky journey, which carried along with it three dead, including the infamous and treacherous Elizardo Soler, could also imply the possibility of having lost forever his powerful Virgin of Regla who was not really a Virgin of Regla, but without a doubt powerful and, to him, without any possible discussion, his saving mother Yemayá. But Conde was not in any way responsibile for the outcome in which he himself had landed, Bobby recognized. Because the weaving of the plot had begun long before when, to impress Elizardo and, if possible, take him to bed, he broke the veil of secrecy over the Black Virgin maintained by his near-grandfather, that Josep Maria Bonet, who wasn’t really called Josep Maria Bonet. With his betrayal, Bobby had ended up awakening the maddest and most morose ambitions. That was why he vehemently insisted on paying his friend for his work, as he had agreed with Yoyi the Pigeon. As it should be, he stated.
When Bobby went to give him the $2,000 agreed upon for finding the Virgin, Conde had already decided that, if he was trying to be fair, he should reject the money, and he said so to his former classmate. While the Virgin had appeared, Bobby had not recovered Her, perhaps he never would recover Her, and both men regretted it. Purely speaking, he had not fulfilled his job, Conde went on, with an inevitable regret: “Given how much I could use that cash…”
“Conde, I know what you are thinking … Please, take the money. You earned it,” Bobby assured him, holding out the prized envelope toward the hands of his former classmate. “I don’t have my Virgin and you know that pains me … But you found Her and the money is not a problem,” he added, looked around, and lowered his voice before continuing. “Amid the madness that went on and with Eli dead, no one found out that I kept several of his paintings, among them that Portocarrero that you went nuts for the day you saw it … And … I sent it all to Israel and”—Bobby further lowered the volume and leaned forward—“do you know how much the Portocarrero sold for in Miami?”
The eyes of the man who had once been a shy and repressed classmate were shining, the edges of his lips were moving into a smile, and at that moment, Conde felt that Bobby was delivering another gunshot, just like that, point-blank, and he reacted quickly.
“No, I don’t want to know,” he said, as he took the envelope of cash. This type of cultural bloodletting, all the more frequent, pierced him, and the fact of feeling himself close to another one of Bobby’s tricks, in some way spurred by his own actions in search of the lost Virgin, was not pleasant. But, he also thought, he had worked and he had to survive: so, he took out four hundred-dollar bills and returned the rest of the money to Bobby. “Take the envelope. You owed me for three days of work and expenses, nothing else.”
“But, Conde…”
“‘But, Conde’ nothing, man…”
“My brother,” he started to say. “I don’t understand you…”
“Of course you don’t understand me, Bobby … You can’t understand me … When you went to see me and we talked about the past, I wanted to believe the tale that you were seeking me out so I could help you because we were friends. I don’t know if you were always like that or if we all made you like that, but you’ve become a bad person who doesn’t respect even the most sacred things. You tricked me I don’t know how many times. You told me whatever you felt like. You used me, Bobby, because I thought we really were friends … And at this point I don’t know if the Catalan Puigventós was interested in the Virgin because you yourself wanted to sell Her to him and the others beat you to it—”
“How can you think that? I swear to you that I—”
“Don’t swear on anything or anyone … Those are all your problems. What I do know is that I don’t want something that doesn’t belong to me and that, because you are as you are, shouldn’t belong to you, either. That I’m a complete moron? I’ve known that for years … What I don’t know, Bobby, what I can’t understand is how a man like you, who swears he believes in the Virgin, in Yemayá, in God and the angels and archangels, who prays and beseeches the heavens, could be so immoral … Is that what you get out of your faith?”
“Damn, Conde … I didn’t—”
“You did, Bobby. You used me several times and after they shot me and nearly fucked me up, you just told me that you took advantage of what was going on to keep the Portocarrero painting and other things that I don’t know or want to know how you got out of Elizardo’s house. You are a bandit … And what gets me the most is that I believed in you … So go now, Bobby…”
The other man stood up. He looked like he was about to cry, and Conde, despite himself, without being able to avoid it, began to feel compassion for him.
“Are you going to report me?” Bobby asked, with the rest of his money in his hands and fear showing on his face.
“No, although I should … For being a thief and a son of a bitch … I was really mistaken about you. You moved me with your stories of fear and repression, with your cancer and your faith … But this is something else … So go, disappear. I cannot say it was a pleasure to have seen you again. Besides, now I know that it is true that you also took fake paintings out of Cuba to sell them in Miami … Dammit, Bobby … Get the hell out of here already!” he yelled and felt a twinge in the wound in his shoulder and the wound in his soul.
When he was left alone, Conde noticed that his hands were shaking, but he immediately felt tangible relief running through him. He was at peace with himself and with History: whatever happened now with Roberto Roque Rosell, alias Bobby, and the statue of Our Lady of la Vall was not his business.
Later, the wave of those literary, emotional, and pleasant days without alcohol, in reality too pleasant and too little alcohol, so strange, went washing over him like dead weight and had ended up annoying him, as if the confluence of beneficial presences and absences, instead of a prize, were part of a plot against his spirit and personality. He needed to return to his disastrous real life, that, as greater compensation, had the stamp of his ownership: it was his bad life, his. The other one he was inhabiting seemed like an impostor, like Bobby’s lives. Because of that, with Tamara’s understanding consent, and as a part of the signed agreements, the day before his birthday he had returned to his house, with his dog, his disorder, his obsessions, his routine, and some typed pages full of additions and crossings out. On the way, he topped off his load of possessions with a bottle of rum.
After taking down and tearing up the calendar where he had noted the much-feared date that he had just begun to live, Conde brewed the first coffee of his advanced age and, the cup in one hand and cigarettes in the other, went to the rooftop. A pressing and unexplored need pushed him to take advantage of the pleasant October morning, and once on the roof, he settled down on the cement block that served as his watchtower: at his feet was the neighborhood he had known for sixty years of life, of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives, almost certainly that of his great-grandfather and perhaps even that of his great-great-grandfather. Many lives and years in a small and deteriorated physical space that, because of the time that had passed and the maintained permanence, belonged to him and to which he belonged, for the tranquility of his spirit, which was always in tormented conflict. He calmly breathed in the air in which the colorful aroma of a flamboyant tree mixed with the dark car exhaust and the undefinable smell of the recently baked buns made from the dubious flour of the present that didn’t remind one at all of the aroma of the baguettes that, at some point, in a nearly perfect past, had come out from the insides of the same bread-baking oven. A lost and affectionate odor that only remained in his stubborn sentimental memory.
He lit the first cigarette as a sixty-year-old without making any promises of abstaining from nicotine and thought about what awaited him that night: the farewell party to an age and the welcoming (welcoming?) of another. It would be an unequivocal celebration in which, to please his boundless friends, he would have to act as if he were happy, when in reality, he was not. Not even the fact of knowing that, in his house, were the sheets conceived during the days of controlled convalescence, some papers that returned him to one of his most worn aspirations, served to calm down the overwhelming feeling of loss, of fatigue. His now turned out to be an almost bodily void that he never expected to feel, at least not in such a precise and chronologically exact way: because he had never believed in birthdays or closed dates and had lived his existence like an unstoppable flow through which you toss your best belonging over your shoulders. You leave time behind, your time, and you peer out, every day, at the unforeseeable: a future of which you do not know how it will be or how long it will last, if it will get twisted or flow monotonously and pleasantly. And right there, in the unfathomable, arose the most dismal void: in the tomorrow, not in the yesterday.
Then he saw him. He was walking on the sidewalk with his decided step and his usual bad appearance, grimy and dirty: like someone for whom the past and the future were the same thing or, worse still, didn’t mean anything, since its edges had faded in the circularity. Now, instead of bags, he wore on his feet the already-tattered shoes that, three or four weeks before, Mario Conde had given him, and God knew how many miles the wanderer had made them cover.
He smiled when he saw him and was surprised when the man with the bags on his feet, who, for the moment, was no longer walking with bags on his feet, stopped in place, lifted his head, and looked toward the heights where Conde was hunkered down. The poor man moved his hand, in a gesture of greeting that was returned with a similar one, and raised his voice only as much as necessary to be heard by the man posted on the roof.
“I haven’t seen you for days … I’m glad that you’re already well … Oh, and happy birthday!”
When he heard him, Conde shuddered. He had expected to hear anything except a birthday greeting expressed by that man, at times invisible, whom he only knew for having given him the shoes he now wore. He was so confused and dumbstruck, that he asked the poor man, “What did you say?”
“I wished you a happy birthday. Sixty is a good age. To continue living or to die.”
Conde could not shake his surprise. Was this engineered by Carlos and Rabbit? No, it couldn’t be … He had congratulated him on arriving at sixty!
“And how do you know…”
“There are things I know … But many others that I don’t know … Things that no one will ever manage to know … Although one has returned to where he never was … Have a good one,” the man concluded, made a gesture of goodbye with his hand, and continued on his way, marked by God knows what compass, until he got lost among the people, the smoke from the cars, the blinding October light, the absence of the smell of baking bread. The man had disappeared, as he usually did, and Mario Conde again asked himself, despite the evidence of the shoes he was wearing, the same ones that he had worn until the moment in which he donated them, whether that character was real or merely a reflection of his fears, obsessions, and painful meditations. Or a trick of time.