The ensuing years went by in slow motion. They were so similar that they could have been concentrated into a single day. To help me perceive the passing of time, at the beginning of each year I bought a calendar. I hung it on the wall, crossed off the days, and, when the calendars ended, stowed them in a box I kept beneath the bed.
In that box was the photo that E had taken of me, and my sales notepad, too.
What I was safekeeping there was a time machine.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Plus a year when I had no calendar, but that also counted: five years went by.
And I decided enough time had passed, so I sat down to wait for the next call.
The telephone sounded when summer number six was beginning.
“How are you, M?”
“I’m coming to see you.”
(Silence.)
“In one month exactly, wait for me at the train station coffeehouse.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Remember, you owe me money.”
“I remember.”
For the past five years, I’d been walking the neighbor’s dog, too. The neighbor was a confirmed bachelor who, for someone as bitter as he, paid very well. If I added the money D owed me to those savings, I calculated that I had enough to get by for a month in one of the hotels.
I had no trouble obtaining permission to travel. My mother, influenced by my new father, now believed in Buddha, but that didn’t mean she had stopped admiring independence movements. So she lent me her backpack and entrusted me to the primordial emptiness.
MY MOTHER’S BACKPACK
The pieces missing from the puzzle that was my mother were there, inside her backpack. A backpack from the time before I came into existence, before D appeared in her life. Inside it she had placed a bundle of letters, three books, and a blue handkerchief with white spots.
Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada had given her those things.
And, after giving them to her, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada had disappeared.
When she found out, my mother took up a needle and thread and started to embroider a star on her backpack, thinking that when she finished it, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada would appear in the doorway of her house and kiss her. But that never happened.
For years after, she searched for Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada. But all she found were lists of names.
She tucked them into the outer pocket of her backpack.
The backpack was heavy, and my mother, who insisted on wearing it, became more stooped with each passing day.
The world of ghosts is as small as the world of humans.
Years later, the remains of Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada were found by the man who had been his best friend: E, the photographer.
News of the fact appeared in a newspaper that seemed to be from another country, a newspaper that someone had forwarded to my mother inside an envelope that had no sender’s address.
The body of her first love, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada, was peppered with thirteen black holes and had several broken bones.
When my mother finished reading, she shut herself in the bathroom with a needle (the same one she had used to embroider the star on the backpack) and a bottle of black ink.
She made thirteen punctures on her arm because she wanted her body to feel pain on the outside like it was feeling on the inside. She pricked herself thirteen times. Hard, really hard.
Later, when I asked her what those moles were, she said she didn’t know. That she had simply woken that morning with a black constellation on her left arm.
My mother comes out with the weirdest things, I thought.
My mother, who had been crying again.