Armando sips a little water and avoids my gaze. He doesn’t like to be criticized, but I’m not criticizing, I’m just explaining something he clearly can’t see. Over dinner, between mouthfuls, he told me a Party official had asked him to replace a bartender and a cashier at the hotel with two people from the reserve staff. He told me he’d refused. I said the Party official was obviously trying to promote two men he was colluding with to steal from the hotel. He said that this was precisely why he’d refused. I told him everyone would assume that he was conspiring with the two employees he refused to replace, that common theft, rather than any other motive, would be seen as the reason he refused.
Principle, he told me, I refused on principle. I cannot allow people to steal, he said. María stares down at her food. All right then, on principle, I said to him, and Armando launched into the story of Che Guevara, how once he refused a bicycle that a factory foreman had given him for his daughter. These bicycles, Armando said Che said, belong to the State, not to you.
I’ve heard the story too many times. I don’t know whether Armando made it up or whether it’s true. It’s a story that makes my head ache. I heard it a year and a half ago when he was transferred. At the time, Armando was working in the provincial delegation of the Ministry of Tourism and they appointed him manager of the hotel. He wanted to fire María in case he was accused of nepotism, but María had been working at the hotel long before Armando was appointed, so there wasn’t much he could do. In fact, some of his colleagues—Armando’s colleagues—arranged to give María a job as restaurant manager. Behind his back. Armando was furious. I hadn’t wanted María to give up university either, but she was happier this way. All things considered, we didn’t really have much choice. For me, it was a relief.
Then María met René and they became friends. I thought they might get together—wanted them to, even—but it never happened. Even so, for some reason, René started to help out the family. Then Armando took up the hotel job and, since he already knew René, picked him from all the men in the driving pool to be his driver. René told me he didn’t want to do it. With the greatest respect, I don’t want to be the manager’s personal driver, he said. But he wasn’t referring to the manager. He was referring to Armando. I understand, hijo, I said, as I handed him a cup of coffee. I remember it clearly. A steaming cup of coffee that René grasped between two fingers on which there were still traces of oil, and engine grease under his nails, as the afternoon light streamed in from my balcony and pooled in the hollow of his hand.
We finish eating. María goes to her room, claiming she is tired. Armando washes the dishes and I go watch TV. The telephone rings and Armando rushes to answer. It’s for me. I signal to say I’m not here. It’s a former pupil wanting to know, worrying about me. To be honest, I don’t want to talk to any of them. I spent twenty-five years educating children that life went on to destroy. I’d rather have devoted myself to my own children. But they’re all in the past. Those I taught and those I didn’t.
Around midnight, Armando closes the windows, throws the bolt on the door, and we go to bed. In the early hours, the telephone rings and I jolt awake. Armando stops me answering. Sparks are flashing inside my head. I clench my jaws and shuffle closer to him. It’s cold and I’m alone and dawn is breaking. Although I slept, I don’t feel as though I rested.
Armando and María are heading to work. I don’t feel like doing anything. I rummage through the drawers, change the bedsheets, and lie down again. My body is like a country I sometimes visit. I’ve spent months waiting on the wrought iron benches bolted around the beltways of my ears and no one has come, no car, no horse and cart, no messenger.
I have traversed the arch of my brow, thinking it was the main street of the city, expecting that there would be rumbling buses, traffic lights, and paperboys on every corner, until an ancient red dust settled over my eyes. Rocks rolled and tumbled with a crash. I swam long miles out to sea, through dark waters. I dived as many fathoms as my lungs would allow. It seemed to me that here, in these depths, something was lurking, burrowing into the seabed, small blind lobsters, delicate, timid creatures, terrified and misshapen in their panic. But I could not make them out.
What exactly am I, if I already know I am not this flesh? Where is my house, my home? What part of me can they kill that does not ache? What part would hurt like a distant relative? What part would hurt like a family member and what part would hurt as though it were me? I am not a corpuscle moving through my own body from crown to toe. I lie quite still, curled up behind some specific zone, trying to make sure that death does not find me. I look at my hand, move it, and it seems independent of me. I understand that I am not this hand, that I am located somewhere outside it.
I get up, go into the kitchen, and drink some water. Someone’s talking on TV, though I don’t remember turning it on. But I don’t turn it off. A teacher is giving a lecture in English. I stare at the ceiling. I see shapes, but I can’t quite make them out. I see blotches. I close my eyes. Still I see shapes, still I see blotches, and still I can’t make them out. The teacher’s words are music to my ears. He has a gentle voice and, within that voice, that last inevitable deadlock of those languages that are not one’s own. This is what I am inside my body. I am its language. Nothing more.
What is the study of chemistry? I hear the teacher ask. There is silence. Chemicals, one of the pupils seems to say. Chemicals? says the teacher. And then he says no, and then, I think, he says that the study of chemistry is not chemicals. Technically, chemistry is the study of matter, he says, but I prefer to think of it as the study of changes.
I am so calm that I cannot feel my heartbeat. I go into the sitting room—my English isn’t good enough, so I have to read the subtitles. Pay attention, he says, electrons change their levels of energy. My heart is still beating. I know this because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to think it wasn’t beating. Molecules change their bonds, he says. His voice is serious; I sense that this man enjoys teaching. Elements combine and are transformed into compounds. This is life itself, isn’t it? he asks. I nod. This is life itself. It is the constant, he says, the cycle. Solution, dissolution, again and again. It is growth, decomposition, and then transformation, he says. Then he adds something that I don’t have time to read.
I’d like to have sex with this teacher, hear his foreign voice trickling into my ears.