The old man was already rotten and it was strange to me that only I could smell him the bittersweet, faint smell; that neither the daughter nor the son-in-law would comment on it. They were forced to vent and wrinkle their noses because they were their relatives and I was nothing more than a nurse, almost, fake, ex-doctor.
That was the first of the jobs that Frieda had chosen for me when I arrived in Lavanda and discovered her on Avenida Brasil 1597, as beautiful and tough as in the old days, and I tried to get some money out of her — she had plenty - or the essential support for every immigrant who asks, like a worthy cuckold, for a new opportunity.
The jobs and the punishments. Take care of the agony of the old man who was the first in the series of his revenges without proportional reason. She and I preferred to sleep with women and some night without memory we crashed in Santa María and I did not win because I deserved it but because the little woman at stake was more afraid of my commissioner card than greed for what she, Frieda, was offering her in the coastal restaurant, with no intention of complying. It was a game; and late in the morning Frieda lost, splashed saliva into her glass, painted her face and was able to smile at me before getting up to go out and look for her car. It was then a cream Dedion Bouton, small and without a hood. The three of us had been, so cordial, at the same table. The little woman, young, skinny, dirty, stayed with me. I can't discover another cause and this one is confusing.
The best thing about the experience, about the first revenge, was the freshness of the mornings, when excited and virile due to lack of sleep I leaned against the gate of the Argentine Embassy to wait for the 125 bus. The best of all were the mornings of that stormy summer, with mud and brown leaves on the ground, that restless air that had just been made for me, that buzzing joy of the old trees in the villas, the houses that had had names and prestige, the indecisive sky, swirling.
Because neither the air nor I fully believed in what we had done and seen during the night; and we started the day despising the tasks, jokingly reconstructing love, friendship, sympathy, the simulacrum of faith in men, in their short and fierce beliefs.
Despite the heat that reached the nerves, the night had been calm and the rites were repeated with the usual impassive scrupulousness. The son-in-law, the captain, came with his wife at nine o'clock, almost immediately after the maid had left the bedroom with my tray of food, when I was preparing the first injection.
I put out the alcohol flame, put the syringe in the black box, and sat back in the chair with an open book titled Vico's Cyclical Conceptions . He preferred not to give injections without witnesses. Night companion, Frieda said, and the title was repeated by Quinteros. "Two hundred drachmas a night and the work is nothing," he said hurriedly, resting an open hand indifferently on Frieda's knee and reciting apocryphal pieces of the story of the old condemned man and hinting at my possible discoveries in the bedroom, on the furniture, on the mattress, in the gestures and the final babbling.
Quinteros, who had an ancestor who chose to be called Osuna when in the five hundredth the Catholic Monarchs did a small cleaning. But he, outside of business, imposed the Quinteros as an inane and perhaps satisfying challenge.
I do not know, exactly, when I decided to accept irremediably human foolishness, Santa María, Lavanda, the rest of the world that I would always ignore. Refrain from contradicting. I don't know when I learned to silently savor my total disagreement with males and females. But my encounter with Quinteros-Osuna, with his powerful stupidity, with his incredible talent for making money, produced a debauchery in me, forced me to accept with enthusiasm that form of imbecility that he recognized me, with exaggerated, almost envious praise. That's why I said yes to everything and added details, touches, and perfections.
For this reason, when the captain-son-in-law entered the bedroom and I was reading Clausewitz's invented book, I was able to discuss with passion and recklessly the tactical, strategic or logistical points in which to he did not mind hinting at concessions in exchange for my dazzled listening to the speeches that left for military and universal history the conviction that he was never wrong in the fundamental, in the valuable, in what would twist the fate of every war, ancient or future.
But when the daughter of the dying man, Susana, arrived first, I was reading some novel that she called crude and they were hidden like a stolen letter on the shelf, at eye level, from the library. Sometimes he would ask me for my opinion to take one and he always gave them to me with a sigh, a pity, a "disgusting" sick with slowness, thick with compassion. And the books had been hidden, exposed, the dying old man, and she looked at me with a pity, a curiosity similar to that which I went through in the vulnerable hours of dawn, contemplating the restless old man who began to submerge himself timidly and clumsily in the long dream, crashing against the delirious islets, murmuring words that alluded, painstakingly wrong, to memories that were never completely true, to events or lies not known to him, to the man he had been and now, to trick me and have fun, he tried to prolong in those ninety minutes that separate the night from another day, that time when death is on the loose, offering itself, and one, tradition or instinct, performs rites of oblivion in order not to say yes and to abandon oneself. And since she had the habit of planting herself to talk with her feet far apart, I couldn't help but think of dampness, a cordial pad on rigid, indestructible bones.
A book or any printed page, the electric coffee maker, the pretended, long urge to urinate, the nose in the cold of the ajar window, the sudden cry of birds inside the head.
And when Pablo, the next orphan, came in - each one announced by the different voices and noises they drew from the steps of the stairs as they climbed, approached - I could hand the Adler book that I had carried since the first night, lift your eyes with a forgotten finger between the pages. Because Pablo, twenty years old, was studying medicine, but he had already confessed to me one night, walking madly around that room that would be called mortuary at any unforeseeable moment, smoking, lighting one cigarette with another to facilitate stuttering breathing and rest from the thing still his father, he had confessed to me that general medicine was for him nothing more than a stepping stone to reach a repeated childhood dream that he called psychoanalysis. Her face was clean and placid, intelligent, and she liked to brush her messy hair down on her forehead.
At the beginning of the farce I felt that I was the most dangerous of all, the old man, stubborn dying aside. But after a night of confidences, he brought a small bottle of brandy, I knew that the danger was not in him.
For many years I had known that it was necessary to put Catholics, Freudians, Marxists, and patriots in the same bag. I mean: to anyone who had faith, it doesn't matter what; to anyone who thinks, knows or acts by repeating learned or inherited thoughts. A man with faith is more dangerous than a hungry beast. Faith compels them to action, to injustice, to evil; it is good to listen to them nodding, measure in cautious and courteous silence the intensity of their lepers and always agree with them. And faith can be put and stoked in the most despicable and subjective. In the changing beloved woman, in a dog, in a soccer team, in a roulette number, in the vocation of a lifetime.
The leper becomes exalted when he stumbles, sweats phosphoric odors in the face of the smallest or suspected opposition, seeks to assert himself — to affirm the faith — by stepping on tender, sacred heads or intimacies. To conclude — I think of Paul and his age — a man contaminated by any kind of faith quickly comes to mistake it for himself; then it is vanity that attacks and defends itself. With God's help, it is better not to meet them on the road; With your own help, it is better to change paths.
And if one night Pablo asked me with defiance and pity what would have or would have happened to the world, to men, if they did not have enough faith to progress, I moved my head and silently measured the distance that separates the maumau from the concentration camps, genocide and greedy animals that rule the world.
All the nights were the same or during the time it was a single night with hours marked by a storm, a hard and starry sky, a falling pencil, the oscillations of the pulse and the temperature. And on this unique night I deserted bored with the book appropriate to the visit and looked at the landscape with curiosities of a newcomer.
From the moth-eaten plush armchair, with uneven springs, he contemplated the candle on the round table, the brightness of the bars of the brass bed, excessive, the shapes of the medicine bottles, the thick shadow of the ceiling and the large wardrobe. He looked at the time and waited for the first light in the window curtain, wine red in the morning, now black. I was distracted trying to guess, with hideous ease, the furniture and the portraits separated from me by the light, lost in the area where the sick head was resting or moving.
But I needed my hundred coins a night. Sometime remote he would collide with Pablo, lying against falsehood. Every night or almost, the captain drank coffee downstairs and it was impossible to ignore the laughter and jokes.
The memorable time was like this. At a quarter past nine he entered the bedroom with Susana, his wife, Pablo's sister, as much a daughter of the dying man as he. When they arrived, the deceased spaced his gasps and I assumed him a joyous malevolence, a sudden and sudden silence between sighs. He continued living and knew.
At a quarter past nine that night in April the captain and Susana. Far behind Susana, looking for the shadow and stupidity of a cold and fixed smile, her hands joined on her pubis. Far ahead, military man without added rudeness, the poor man, the captain, walked without seeing me, straight to the edge of the bed, and stopped at attention.
If he could think, the captain seemed to be thinking with his jaw resting on his hand, looking at the old man, above the old man. Out of mockery or affection, the half-dead began to move his head and showed, protecting himself, the memory of false teeth to the diffuse din that the world imposed on him.
The captain abandoned the exam and turned to greet me.
But she, Susana, the daughter of my dead, the captain's wife, Pablo's sister, was slow and dark; I regretted having made it up, silly and distracted at first.
"To order, my general," Velez, the captain, almost shouted as he struck one shoe against another and bowed. He was happy and confident as his grandfather might have been in 1904, waving respectfully in a tent, near a fire hidden with eucalyptus branches. Greeting the approach of dawn in front of the barbarian and illiterate leader (color does not matter), his chest widened and his movements hardened because he was the bearer of good or bad news, of pride.
"Nights, my captain," I answered, slightly putting the book away.
As always, I felt that the old dying man was awake and lucid, making fun of Captain Vélez, of all of us; Or maybe the years and the illness had installed him in a super-grown time, which had nothing to do with old age, and from there he looked at us and all our words and movements made him funny, they gave him disdain and tenderness as if he were watching distracted games of children or insects.
Although he had spoken, almost smiling, looking at me, I knew that Captain Vélez's words were not greetings and they only wanted to get to the long, thighless thing on the bed.
Without bending his knees, educated in gymnastics and logistics, Captain Vélez leaned down until he touched the muttering mouth of the patient with one ear. Outlined, he could see the joyous gleam of the little black eyes, the elongated black mustache in the smile.
"Don't worry, my general," he said. We will send the horse. And don't worry about the park. We have bullets and a gang ready to take out all those thugs.
As so often, out of obligation and vice, I was the spectator. And something else, now. I was the means that the captain used to convey the planned message to Susana: her father was going to live ten more years or at least he was not going to die that night. "If it were serious, if there were danger, I, proud of genets, could not behave like that, happy, joke, beat his bones with friendship."
In addition, when speaking of tactics and battles that his grandfather had told him, when speaking of mausers, bridges and horses as if he had lived adventures and was so sad, returning from everything, he partially compensated for a long humiliation from the barracks, rescued something of the frustration of generations that learned in theory to fight to find out that the kind of wars known to them had nothing to do with the future. And, above all, his speeches invited the oblivion of a vocational courage, which bad luck had condemned to die a virgin, without expression or failure. That year, in Lavanda, he could only beat workers and students. It fulfilled and was discharged without true happiness.
Then, more or less, Susana climbed up and put the beginning of a smile between the bronze bars of the bed where her father was dying. Sometimes he would look at me again and I would keep myself in peace, standing up, with one of the books, perhaps mistaking between psychology and war, leaning on my belly. I shook my head as if to say everything is fine and he's dying right now.
But the scent grew, the scent fluttered like a butterfly, black and green, coming and going, while everyone pretended not to feel it.
She was beautiful, Susana, and she was born to marry Vélez because I knew that there is a quality, a type of girls, girls and women who were born to marry honorable soldiers; perhaps it is possible to recognize them by the determination of the hips, and by the distance that separates the smile from the eyes and the gleam of the teeth. They end up knowing more than they do about character and submission.
Then, I repeat, the captain got bored of stroking the old man's yellow forehead and straightened his body firmly. He was dressed in civilian clothes.
"He's an old barbarian, boss," he said; I waited in disbelief until he said, "He was in Masoller." He leaned over to squeeze my shoulder, swaying, jovial, so sure of everything.
—Yes. He's a little nervous tonight. But I'd say it's better.
Because Quinteros, dictated by Frieda, had said of me: «Two years of medicine. It would have been received with a gold medal had it not been for that misfortune that, deep down, was nothing more than the desire to do good ».
The misfortune that Frieda invented to humiliate me for weeks by the old man's bed, once served me to retouch a past. It was more real than my facts, than myself. More easily than the bloody legs, than the crooked jaw of the adolescent I had just killed piercing her uterus, I remembered my serious slowness when I took off my tunic at the midwife's house, in the strange office with canaries and begonias. The maniacal persistence with which I had washed my hands seven times, the astonished discovery of my fingers, the silent prayer next to the stretcher, refusal to ask for help, the insulting hysteria of the fat woman on top of the empty rubber gloves on the floor. A memory, a memory lie.
"Did we give you the injection, boss?" Velez asked, as if he cared.
Somewhere I read or someone told me that days do not pass in vain; much less the nights: poor Velez was unaware, and never knew, that at some point I had demoted him from captain to lieutenant.
—Not yet, I was waiting. The injection is essential, but I don't like that he needs it. Understands? I said.
I didn't understand anything, but the lieutenant did.
"Sure," he explained to Susana. There is no need to create custom.
When they left I was forgotten and they were coming down the stairs talking about Elina, Punta del Este and a sale.
We were already alone in the house when I gave the old man the injection remembering - or another remembered leaning comfortably inside me - the hundreds of injections that I had given to drunk, hysterical and injured people in the Santa María Detachment, while waiting for a nebulous forensic doctor or doctor Díaz Gray, still single, awake at any time and always asking, without smiling or stopping:
- Commissioner. Are you sure it's worth it?
And I repeated the exact words of the worn-out game that could never bore us:
"It is our duty, doctor.
And he did the necessary work and rarely forgot to continue or finish:
—Your paintings are bad. Sometimes I like color, but you never really learned to draw. Yet, nonetheless, why don't you just send this filth to hell and live off alms and walk the coast with an easel and a box of knobs?
I arranged the pillows and clothes for the old man and half opened the window on the cool, windless night. When I sat on the bed, he moved until he was almost awake, until he met my eyes; then he began to shake his head and quickly mutter snatches of words. I thought that millions of damned people had already done that before him.
Almost from the beginning I had lost hope and the desire to understand. So I amused myself - when Frieda or Quinteros woke me up at six in the afternoon - broadcasting fantastic versions, sometimes witty, always disconcerting.
I saw my lies move on Quinteros' face; sometimes the suspicion of the good track, others the discouragement. It was, between yawns, my little daily revenge.
And I added a dirty, rumbling happiness trying to guess what words Quinteros would have preferred the dying man to say and I enthusiastically risked exhibiting false, contradictory textual versions that I had written in the early mornings to defend myself from sleep and boredom.
I think all my literature reiterated the old silly need to have a friend and trust; It also alluded to the imposed distrust, secrecy and cunning.
It was enough to see Quinteros' drunk or tired face at bloody six hours in the afternoon; see his suits and ties; hear him speak of friendship and selflessness; remember how much he paid me, always punctual and without pettiness, to tell him the ups and downs of the old man's head and the, I suppose, raging childhood memories that gurgled his black toothless mouth.
That and the presence of Frieda, almost always in the background, playing indifference and mockery, was enough to understand that it was about money; a lot of money.
Later, I don't know when, in a sunset, time of entry, embedded in the single night of the first punishment, I arrived at the street that inexplicably called Graceful and from the corner I saw the van and I understood that something had ended. The first of the short lives I had at Lavanda. I crossed the street, sat at a table leaning against a glass of acceptable grime and transparency. It was called coffee and I asked for coffee, spying between lazy and curious what was happening, with ex officio precision, in the house opposite, the house where I had read alternately Clausewitz and Freud, where I had given useless injections and I was thinking about my past without being able to order it.
When the van left I started calling Quinteros on the phone, sure he was sleeping off his drunkenness. I thought of the ringtones and confused or mixed them with injection needles. Never again.
I called until he had to wake up and answer dumbfounded. I said:
"It's eighteen thirty-five." This is Medina. You'd better aim. I arrived to mark the card and first saw a van that made me sad and amazed. Later, four guys who didn't want them for me, with gray or blue overalls, the light is bad. They went down and entered a crucifix, a wooden overcoat, six chandeliers, a tempting album to write a novel or the diary of my life. They added mysterious things that must be essential because death is always a mystery. I think the result would be the same. Did you write something down? I'm actually calling you out of a sense of duty. To congratulate you and for you to go to the square root of your little sister.
I hung up to kill his voice and from that night our friendship improved, I had less contempt for him. Of course we never discussed the matter again; And when later I had the obsession of returning, no one was more patient, kind and efficient than Quinteros. But he didn't do it to pay for the involuntary silence.
A long time ago, when we were all twenty years old or a few months older, I gave in to the temptation to be God, absurd, risky, and respecting my limits. It was in Santa María, in a hot and humid March with hardly any threats, storm fuss, as if the weather had accepted the modality of the settlers on the other side, from Lavanda, river in between.
This temptation, when it is genuine, prefers to visit the very poor, the hopeless, those who did not fall into the trap of an orderly destiny.
Everything was as easy and wrong as a first-year arithmetic operation: with what I give up using I can make someone else's happiness.
The result was a seventeen or eighteen year old Seoane, a legitimate emigrant from Santa María, and his mother. Seoane was the last name of the girl, woman, and I never knew if the child, boy, was my son. She had always played the doubt, the misunderstanding, the graceless joke. They were now in Lavender and it seemed right to hold a tray of candy with a decaying finger and visit them monthly, every full moon.
It was to get at will and disgust in the memory of Seoane child, in the room, in the vagrant images of the boy in the dark and smelly apartment, the fat woman with a head full of knots, plastic tubes, hairpins, the irritated sadness that came from us, from the furniture, like a sweat.
It must be, and it is painful to start saying these kinds of things with sweetness: old age, poverty, the past dead, to continue saying them like that.
But it never happened to me with María Seoane. Despite the cheap gifts that I never forgot in any visit and that she was grateful, courteous and almost mocking, to immediately bury them in the filthy disorder of the room, the exclusive possibility was the dialogue that alluded, sentence after sentence, to the mistakes of the unrecoverable past. She, the disgusting fat woman, knew better than I because she was capable of synthesizing everything by placing everything in the conversation, spaced out, sucking on the light bulb and with a sigh:
—He has no return.
And it was true for us, for all the rediscovered lovers, for the whole world. I could only oppose my eagerness to understand, half participating in Maria's intelligent wickedness, evoking the neutral head, almost always absent, of the boy Seoane, who was perhaps my son, who perhaps played to be the real half idiot changed from cradle for the inevitable tribe of gypsies who camped at the right place and time.
After one of my embarrassing pilgrimages, I brought sweets for Maria and Seoane a silk tie and a blue banknote. And there he was, after Maria Seoane's hello, stuck in the imprisoned and immobile heat of the apartment, entangled in pretentious poverty, in the red, semi-bald plush folder, stained with nights and babbling bottles, of dogs, a distant dog and impatient. Locked in a small, unbreathable, dark world, with gauchos and Dutch peasant women, porcelain or plaster, framed magazine covers.
Maria didn't think only of me that she accumulated so much disgust in order to annoy me. She and her friends. Maria trusted other things, more direct and secure.
Nor had she deliberately fostered the smell of the lower middle class, of everyday failures, of base desires chewed by unknown people, twenty years ago, before she came to Lavender, desires that were clinging to the walls and that perhaps I could, today, take off with a nail.
Of course the wallpapers had changed, over and over, one hope and another. But the smell of all this had only grown. The door frames, especially very wide, which were successively painted gray, ivory, cream, gray, smelled resentful and persistent like Italian Sunday lunches, receipts from mutual health workers, retirement procedures.
I didn't know if on that party date any seventeen-year-old Seoane would appear to show her face to my slow scrutiny; he didn't know if he would ever see him; nor, I repeat, did I know if he was my son.
Maria left me alone to look, smell and invent at ease, to take off her worn decent dress and return slowly, with the useless smile of revenge or the short revenge. It did not surprise me because I was full of similar female smiles, which I had thought I imagined, and they showed them, through millions of years, as a new seasonal model, newborn, without antecedents, without danger of memory.
I was not surprised, I repeat. I have known benefits, sacrifices and exceptions. But she came back, as any woman would have done, to reiterate, pounding, with her caliber of subtlety, who María Seoane had been at eighteen, when in each encounter I insisted on looking for her averted eyes and I was sure of smelling her from another recent male. The smile wanted to show me what I had become, an ally unaware of her congenital stupidity.
Now he came back with a dirty and torn robe; He had managed to grow old, put distance.
"By the flies," he said in his brand-new hoarse voice, as he closed the glass above the iron lattice. He lay down slowly on the couch where Seoane, my possible son, slept; with the lazy old movement he left half a leg bare and asked me for cigarettes. I threw him a package, a box of matches.
Too bad, I thought; an old woman a little younger than me, repellent, clumsily handling a twenty-year comeback. For a moment, overwhelmed with heat and sleep, she fumbled for help from stupidity and evil. It was easy to hurt me; the difficulty was in finding news, in keeping hate and filthy courtesy balanced.
She breathed a little, swelling her big tits, she spoke and it was like finding herself again without shelter, in the monotonous rain, even, without wind. But her voice wasn't just the spoiled child of alcohol and tobacco; it was hoarse and deep, sometimes dead of hoarseness, other loud, coming out of nowhere, silence by force of will. She knew or suspected, hiding with hiccups, deliberate amnesias, coughs, and elusive smiles. In my ear his voice sounded foreign and heavy with mystery.
"If you came, I think, to see the boy, I guess you're wasting your time." He always shoots you, it must be instinct, but sometimes, being alone, he calls you and misses you. I knew it from the cartoons. Hide, of course; but I am the mother. He went out with friends, the kind of friends he chooses, to go to the movies or basketball, to whatever bullshit he came up with. He always lies to me, I can prove it, I don't worry, I don't even listen to him when he answers me. Or he doesn't even answer me, sometimes he comes in the early morning or morning and has taken to getting drunk. He does not come, twelve o'clock pass, and in one of those they are going to bring him to me dead; I think one by one of all the misfortunes, and that's how I prepare. You will remember Heyward, who came to the Detachment every Saturday night and told you...
(He told me he was perfectly drunk and I always knew, from his tone, from his smile, that the phrase was stolen. But it was true that almost every Saturday midnight he arrived at the Detachment dirty and with a crooked tie; or also flawless, blond, making a grimace slide that illuminated his suit, the grimy exhaustion that he had dragged along the coast, from one bowling alley to another, looking for, and sometimes with luck, a teenager who would say yes after haggling Heyward. When I found myself, I asked for shelter naturally, as if arriving at a friend's house at an untimely hour.
"I'm on the edge," he said, dirty or correct. One more hour and I'm lost. Not on the streets; Inside of me, for me If it happens, you and I know that there is only one solution, one end. A bed with bugs and I'm leaving tomorrow.
I always said yes and gave him a cell. Later, at noon, he would leave on the counter double the money he would have paid to sleep one night at the Plaza.)
She continued: and her hoarse voice astonished everyone except her: alcohol and tobacco, from breakfast to sleep.
—But don't be nervous, I'm not going to repeat that he's your son. What pride, if you look good? What money is taken from you? Unfortunately I baptized him Julián and years later they told me that his name was Yeta. If you can, look at it and nothing else. Then you tell me. Do you remember when you were younger than him and even painted a portrait of the Pope that I don't remember what his name was then? I wanted to talk to you but I knew right away that I have my secret communications and I hope they tell me that the time has come. It hasn't arrived yet, but it's useless because you were always a twisted person, incapable, I mean, who never believed in anything. It doesn't matter, but if you want to have fun… ”She stroked her gray hair as she smiled comfortably at any absent figure. But first I opened the closet and we are going to have a glass of contraband anise. In one of those you still remember: I preferred anise at La Enramada and you preferred those half-liter glasses of Paraguayan cane.
I served the anise while trying to guess the trap. They were tiny glasses and I was able to have many because the drink was good and barely sweet.
Cigarette smoke changed seamlessly from gray to light blue, almost uniform in the heat of the blinded room.
"Dead," he said, and for minutes his voice didn't want to speak; He lit a cigarette for relief and gargled anise. Dead, any night, any morning, ”he continued. I don't know if I told you that now he gets drunk every day and one night they bring him back to me dead, and when he's not like that the only thing that matters to him, other than eating, is spending the little money I have, almost, I can almost tell you that he does not bring a weight home. Julian. I spend the little money we barely have to eat on fabric or cardboard and paint. And as one of the parents, I swear to you by this and by calculations that cannot fail me that you were the father, and how you painted the portrait of the Pope... He does nothing but paint, get drunk and sometimes brings home money that I don't know where it comes from. Sometimes I go and buy him a bottle, so at least he paints next to his mother. You men.
The anise was good but nauseating. I shook my head in imitation of regret, pain, doubt, bitterness and compassion.
"Since it's not going to show," I said, "could you let me see the pictures.
She smiled happily, as if she had waited for the order.
—It would kill me, you already told me, if I allowed someone to see them. They are in the attic. If you could leave me between fifty and one hundred.
I filled his glass, I brought him the bottle certified by the Spanish government and I walked undecided until I found the iron staircase in the courtyard, slightly crooked.
I turned on a bad light and I could see, with fatigue, that Seoane had crossed all the schools with confidence and without any talent, the ways of painting, from the Altamira bison, painted by Picasso according to a contract with the French government, even the kaleidoscopic games that were already going out of style.
But, sweaty and with aching kidneys, I discovered, as always happens, some paintings, few, that Julián had painted for Seoane. I brought them to the light, mocking and envious. Seoane, like me, did not know how to draw; but the handling of colors was wise, accurate, dazzling. The paintings were not trying to tell anyone anything; They were silent, heavy and elusive, they were made by Seoane, for him and no one else.
When I went back downstairs the woman said:
"I thought you were going to stay in the attic forever.
She was already a bit drunk and kept the dignity of filling the tiny glass without overflowing.
"I like paintings," I said. I want to see it and talk.
—He doesn't want to see you. I told him lies and truths.
I think he hates you. But we don't talk about you anymore. If he does those jerks that are not understood, then it must be that it comes out to you. Dad. But the funny thing is that none of you can be sure, let me tell you.
You were the two of us, all men, a race that Maria Seoane had been careful to hate for at least fifteen years and now had as much in common with her as ants or horses.
The heat increased and I didn't want to accept his invitation to take off my jacket; I continued to defend myself, supporting the tie on my soaked neck, keeping me visiting, smiling at times, looking at her drunk, inventing a purifying suffering.
"Because you guys," the softened voice continued, "men, you better pity me." That way I don't get carried away and do nonsense, justice. The boy is just like you, not physical, I say. Of course I feel pride like any mother. But do not think that I have many illusions. To begin with, he has no character or only has character for evil. Same as you. I had it, I raised it. He raised his plastic-toothed smile to the ceiling and slowly reached out a hand for cigarettes; then she stretched her bare legs and I could guess, almost exactly, the monologue: "Yes, the first time we met and you took me to eat and sleep, I was telling you about Josesito." Yes, the first time, a gesture that seemed good to me while it lasted, I was a little girl, I couldn't go home and I lied. I kept lying. Lying is like a bed because at first it's a shame and then the fun of it begins.
"Poverty," I said to encourage her. No one was at fault at first.
"I'm telling you not to talk about the beginning," she yelled angrily, pulling her head off the pillow; Another cigarette, a drink from the bottle.
I wanted to undo his nose in one fell swoop, almost without moving, barely stretching his arm. But I thought and said:
—Don't yell, dear. I also suffered my part. "I could not laugh." Perhaps the phrase had been prepared a minute earlier. But it might be true that in the unlocatable principle, twenty years earlier, I had suffered my share; it was an appropriate time to believe in so many things.
Actually Maria Seoane could only cause me pain by making Seoane unhappy, my son or not. It no longer mattered. And even from this, with cunning, I had learned to defend myself. Now she described the new sufferings that she wanted to impose on me. Because there were the others, there was the always amazing comparison with the memory; decay, obesity, as a foreigner, that made her a mother to herself. There was the dubious attention of those flat, clear, unchanging eyes, now surrounded by the many little miseries of aging skin. There was the fatigue, the heaviness, the poignant remnants of freshness, the thick varicose leg that twisted to aid the vehemence of the accusations.
But above all there were and moved, almost palpable, the accelerating clumsiness of his brain, the grotesque imitations of his old humor, the incomprehensible echoes of his ways of being. There was, in the stinking room harassed by the summer, the undoubted beginning of Maria Seoane's old age. His teeth too new, the sad provocation of his restless thigh.
"I don't care anymore," he said, "but everything would be different if you had behaved like a male twenty years ago.
She hated males because she couldn't live without having them. I kept talking over my futile waiting for the boy; Twenty years ago I had ceased as a male because I did not marry her, because I was already too expert to move effortlessly through the thick lies that she renewed daily, so furious and tenacious as if it were a vice; twenty years ago for not having publicly and judicially accepted that the ex fetus that she was showing me was my son. For having looked at the purple face of the smelly and weeping worm that they exhibited to me like a trophy; for having doubted and laughed.
In any case, Seoane would no longer come and she could spend the boy's absence to recite:
—Because I accept that in the beginning neither I nor you were to blame. We didn't even know how to blow our noses, that is to say, and they already taught us that you boys had a little pit and we didn't.
(The justice of the peace and the neighbors agreed on the resemblance; but I had a fresh bottle brought to the court and I kept smiling, saying no, suspecting the child of improbable and scandalous appearances. When I said that the child's nose and that of the justice of the peace hinted at a future equality, documentary absence was verified and, later, the possible similarities, the murmurs that dragged names, were irremediable. It should not be forgotten that Brausen put me in Santa María when I was about forty years old and already Commissar, and head of the Detachment. There was a precedent. When I was about ten years old and Prince Orloff as a teacher, I disappeared, I was in limbo until I was forty. I speak of years as they occur in certain places, here, in Lavender, for example. )
—Ah, yes; they had a little pit and we didn't. She was covered by the robe now, mildly drunk, staring at the grimy, fuzzy dampness from the windows, smiling and swaying. It looked like the center of a literary parlor, on a Friday from five to nine. And we had to believe it because it was true. How many twenty years? No mockery. I had congratulations, true loves, as long as they were rare. Men: in front of others so kind and good. With one, always superior, the bed, the silence, the rudeness. And we girls, without being able to live free like them, go to the camps, invent trips, not have hours or even days to return to mother. And if you want to hear it more clearly, we girls cannot take advantage of a lantern without light to feel their bulge and they can handcuff our tits and ass. And we girls who were eagerly waiting for him and quietly said the prayer of San Judas Tadeo to make it happen, we had to say what was believed and who he takes me for. And if you also get married or get married and it happens nine times with one more donkey, in an argument you always have to take a step back and say yes, it hadn't occurred to me. You are right. Now, it is true, we fill them with horns in exchange for the story of a ring, a wallet that we find lost or someone who appeared selling on credit and forgets to collect. It's fair; and for each horn a candle is lit, in the cathedral, under the Blessed Virgin. But the cuckold is still a poor fool and the one with gifts, lies, and secrecy is just as fool as the husband. So we don't have men; only what can be better: the lied gifts, the cheated hour, the taxi on the corner and the timid humidity that reminds us of the real one. Sometimes cute to the point of boredom. Then nothing but repeated pettiness, then nothing. The rabid husband, the diaper shit, the kitchen. And always, Medina, since my breasts appeared, you males, gathered, in a hurry to judge. Because a girl, a woman, is not a person, does not arrive, does not go beyond a body or a thing. Until she gets a husband and the story I was telling you starts back.
He stopped talking to me. We were silent and she took another drink, lit a cigarette and smiled enough at the window.
I remembered other monotonous visits, other mutual phrases with or without Seoane. Our past would have been dirty, perhaps essential. But the present was worse, as usual.
The bed, the food, or the pesos to eat, the room, the attic of an apartment in Gran Punta de las Carretas, a residential and expensive neighborhood. At the very least, Frieda claimed that supermarket prices were almost double those paid by residents of other, unknown places in the city. And besides, she was upset if someone said apartment or apartment or apartment instead of the exact words: pent house .
So I lived in a pent house in the Gran Punta de las Carretas and even today, remembering, thinking, if thinking were possible, I can understand the reason for Frieda's semi-protection. I could only suspect a vague fear of blackmail, of the drunken and distracted word; But I was, I am, sure that Frieda could believe me capable of any greater infamy, never of that.
And he didn't need me in bed, either, even though I was always obedient, always curious. As for me, the abandonment back then was almost inexplicable although, I suppose, easy to understand.
Separated from Santa María by a crisis of pride, I was, more or less, among the inhabitants of Lavanda with a power of separation, criticism, patience and dedication that made me happy or not suffering for many months. He looked at them without stopping seeing me; He spoke almost always saying the correct phrases and they were rarely wrong.
He walked between bodies and voices without losing the course that they had imposed, tenacious and involuntary, forgetting the hour of his death, amen, not knowing that time does not exist, it is not. But I knew, since childhood, and protected my secret like a disease.
He was wandering around aimlessly, playing with a bundle of coincidences that — he was already suspecting — could only occur in Santa María, the lost. Yet it persisted; I leaned, among many other things, on the fearsome force of newly born superstitions that have greater power than inherited ones. I had nothing to do with the Lavandians.
That was when Frieda von Kliestein invented my second job. More or less - it was a time of inaccuracies - this work was called like this:
—I would not bet again on Medina a nurse, nurse or general practitioner. I dont know. I said so many things to help you.
—To help me kill him, to help him kill him.
—That, not even as a joke anymore. I said so many things that perhaps I have spoken of Harley Street and Medina the baronet. It must have been comical, but who remembers? The baronet thing is fun again. I bet, I lost and I never regret it. I told them: this is for sure, Medina was the owner of the night in Santa María. What a macho Medina with his gun in his shoulder holster. But I also told them about the Medina who painted pictures since childhood. So rich and so sweet. Medina, of course, is a man and he knows how to hit when I meow at him and he can hit anyone without asking my permission. But you failed, it cannot be fixed, the corpse died when you were not taking care of it, fulfilling the sacred duty of pushing it to die well. I cried a little; I cried for the great misfortune and for your failure. I remember that I was fair. They too cried, although now, I'm sure, they will have forgiven you. But, anyway, you will have to use another of your talents to make a living. I told you, from the beginning or the other in the Lavender filth, that I could only give you a roof, maybe cigarettes, maybe bottles. But not food. So now...
—I understand, you poor bitch backwards. I'm leaving.
—I'm not kicking you out. I move you, nothing more.
Now there was the new plan, and I wanted to share it with others out of impure generosity and the funny temptation to have witnesses. I pushed her against the couch and she was waiting for him because she gave herself up without a fight, with moans very similar to the truth. He only laughed when he spoke again about art and my paintings.
For her part, Frieda stuffed herself with egg whites, went twice a week to take singing lessons. I used to tease her by citing the Colón and La Scala, calling her María Callas. But she wasn't upset; He did not pretend to sing in operas but to achieve glory singing in theaters, wielding microphones, dominating jazz to the delirium of the crowds. I then said:
"Bye, Bessie. Don't break the piano.
And we were in peace.
Once again, oblivious and without the capacity to hurt, the past, adolescence, an imagined Anton Bergner RP who looked at the disgusting painting of His Holiness that I had painted by imposition and pampering as a spinster with no future of my aunt. Father Bergner looking at the portrait that occupied a third of the height of the wall; it was a gift, it was bad and unpleasant to look at. He had known me since I was a child, I remembered my face altered by the years and clinging without reason to adolescence. And it was my aunt, the principal of the school, who brought the painting to church and offered it with an exciting assurance that she was buying in return a reward that no one on earth could give her. As if the portrait had been done by her, and perhaps it was true. But I, the nephew, existed; that little boy who had decided to run away with the essential clothes, the train ticket, some stolen money and some canisters of paint. Father Bergner also learned that I had returned to invent a workshop in the Old Market of Santa María. He never found out, because time did not want it, that Brausen had arranged something else, that I had exchanged the workshop for the Police Detachment; He could never have sensed me in another Old Market, in Lavanda.
Perhaps Bergner has learned of the arrival of Orloff, a photographic artist, knowledgeable of all the arts, to the city founded by Brausen.
Orloff, also he, prince or grand duke, who was infuriated when called a photographer, convinced my aunt with a scrapbook printed in different languages, with his contempt and the tranquility of a cynicism that seemed legitimate and inherited. I never knew the price; But Orloff got to be my teacher and twice a week I climbed the uneven staircase at his house to learn painting.
I carried my cartons, my box of oil paints and brushes, my portion of cigarettes; He couldn't leave anything in the dirty room, saved by a window facing the river, because the Grand Duke would steal anything, suck on the knobs, shave the bristles, combine turpentine with linseed.
I never had another teacher, I said, and no other conceivable to compare to him. Because Orloff greeted me with a bow, he adjusted the easel near the window, he asked me for cigarettes, he did not patronize me and he never forgot the prologue:
—You don't have any talents. Paint all the trash you can think of. I have to put up with it for an hour, but time passes quickly if we talk.
Then he would bring a bottle of brandy from the dark and the filth of his photographic labyrinth, which was also a bedroom, and he would tell me the most beautiful lie I have ever heard; from the stories of my grandmother, the wretches that I was able to corner in the Department, the clumsiness of Frieda and all the sad mob that I have to endure today.
Thus, slow in his memories, whispering state secrets that would make the Russian revolution go back to zero, Prince Orloff, dragged by a small initial hecatomb of the world, leaned down to pick up from the stained floor the plot that he was reciting to me in the afternoons, sometimes drunk, sometimes delusional and cautious. I knew about the Empress, about Miguel, about teenage Nicolás, about Xenia, about Jorge, about Olga. I learned of Tatiana and Anastasia, of Rasputin and Yusupov, of the invariable fidelity of the Grand Duke or Prince Orloff, anchored today in Santa Maria, sole owner of the secret of Tsarkoe Selo, of Ekaterinburg and of the one that belonged to Admiral Kolchak. That is to say: all dead but, nevertheless, nevertheless, here Orloff laughed protected by his gray whiskers and looked at me with fury and disgust. There was never a useful morning, never looked at my paintings. But there was no doubt that the SECRET with capital letters was in the last words of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, entrusted to Orloff as the only possible key to the Restoration. And the grand duke or prince, hiding in Santa María like a microbe, like a bed bug in a mattress, drunk shut up and waited drunk for the order that he could no longer delay.
I only laughed when I spoke again about art and my paintings.
"A workshop in the market they are going to demolish," Frieda said. Follow the oath of cigarettes and bottles. There is furniture, there is a restaurant downstairs, you have a loan in La Platense to buy fabrics and paintings and whatever you need. I'm going to send you a friend, Olga, who needs an urgent portrait, like you need, I suppose, an abortion or a packet of heroin. I'm going to send you a lot of friends, the ones I have left over.
Now it was as soft, sad and distant as a perfume that had aged on a handkerchief. Sometimes it came, it was never advertised. Generally, in dreams: I saw Teresa's face or the way she walked. The places were capricious and their constructions puzzled me. Never a word, never a direct look that sought my face. In the dreams, silent and in color, I saw her go by, sometimes raising a hand to feel the message that Teresa could not leave me. But at vigil I always remembered her in a cruel way, barely modified or faded, that filled me with fury and blasphemies.
So the magic of Frieda and the Eurodollars that the family, terrified by their threat of return, sent her from Santa María, made the water hit the windows of my workshop at the end of the summer in the market, it ran through the holes that were badly covered with scraps of cardboard. I knew for many months that as a painter I was sick, condemned. I knew I could only care what he made up. However, I spent hours looking at my paintings, my peasants of any race in rebellion, my fishermen, sure of their calling, of the affront of their misery. Because they had not finished being, living, in the easel canvases, in the walls, in the weak refuge that the bed and the floor gave them.
The two ruined pieces of the workshop. There he worked — if happiness deserves the dirtiness of that name — he slept, sometimes cooked. And that's where it began, by chance, out of God's will or Frieda's cunning, what I now try to stumble over because it was impossible for me to paint it.
Stairs and corridors, grease, old age, drafts, bad smells, some short and ominous silence, screaming.
And so, I remember, began the curious little hell that it is not necessary to read but I write. Through the haze of the windows, between eight, ten or noon, the shifting and damp morning came to my face. On the ground, to the right, a dead pipe, a living book that an Andalusian had written. I was left with a despicable innocence, Castilian towns floated, old ladies, foreign dust and respect without cause.
Tuesday, February and 15th, I stretched out on the bed to recognize myself and silently insult the knocks and the almost secret of the door. Already awake, nauseated, placed again on another day. There was the time, the loving stupidity, the tenacious female in the cloth on the separated feet, the farce of work, the hope of company and wine.
The dog was talking. I put on my pants and opened the door for Olga.
Not far above the rot, sour ferment and the restless smell of rats, between stairs and corridors, old age, near-collapse, high-pitched voices.
That's for now, so that everyone can build the market that no longer exists and that Frieda gave me.
I never wanted to know who lent Olga the dented and stuttering Ford that she used to ruthlessly arrive to strip naked in the market, studio, workshop or home; the car that he offered me so many times to take me anywhere that there never was.
The bad, the good, was that in those months worthy of memory I preferred, to any offer from the outside world, to paint the painting urged by Frieda. Olga's portrait.
Now she was there, more solid every day, punctual at noon, a little desperate at times, playing to get drunk with the half bottles that she brought or found. I listened to her saying yes, thinking about the nude, holding her by my side. She was a woman with a large skeleton, with a blond, peasant head, and broad manly hands.
Yes, Olga was married, she no longer had a husband and I managed to ignore the details of the story, despite hearing the noise of her sentences through tears. I made a portrait of his face, shy and unsuccessful. It was lost among so many other things. A bust in profile, imprecise; I remember that the details of the lace blouse, partly invented, mattered more than Olga's face.
We both knew: it was not the head we were looking for but the naked one. And a special nude, dedicated. In my memory the face in the first portrait takes a step back and does not confess. It was barely showing, it was confusing.
We also knew. Like two soggy puppies, looking into our eyes; With no other hope of shelter, we knew that Frieda was unnameable, that from somewhere with laughter she handled the tiny story.
And then the girl disguised as a china came or dreamed, smiling, with learned sweetness, so as not to understand our questions and thanks. I smeared it, of course, with floating crusts of a sweet fruit whose name we could not guess. She, the Chinese woman, was dressed in long black, her braids were rolled up covering her ears and this helped her smile; not to understand, to deny slowly, barely moving his head.
He was there or not and everything is the same. I did not talk about her with Olga because that afternoon, or before, I had lost hope and accepted the modesty - any explanation that was not true - of Olga's rude responses.
During two or three weeks of bad weather, in November, hot and cold, rain and fog, he came to visit me and cry, to lean over the pictures of art books as if he really cared, looking at a secret. We are not talking about the nude, I did not hint, it was forgotten. I painted peasants who would never make a revolution, gilded with crops, geometric hands, open black mouths, arms raised.
Until one afternoon he kept his smile inviting me and said my name. I turned around to be wrong, I thought I understood. I left the enraged woman among the spikes on the easel and walked slowly to the couch.
"What happens now," I said while cleaning a spatula, looking at the various dirt on the cloth, thinking about framing it and it would be the undoubted grand prize of the national hall.
"I thought so now, stupid." I want the nude. I need it and you always knew it. It's something like that, difficult, like asking you for money or a gift. One thing. But the painting is mine and you have little time left.
"Well," I said without joy.
We were looking at the rain on the dirty window and the one that was wetting the floor, we drank from the same glass until it started to get dark.
"We had a white horse that was called tordillo, it ate from our hands without biting us," Olga said. We never rode it and I don't know what happened next. Daddy stuff, which was weird, I always thought.
"It was a filly, Olga. Not today. Tomorrow we start the painting.
I had to think about her naked before I saw her. I was not interested in knowing why I had accepted, what she wanted, needed the painting for. I was thinking about her naked until dawn came and, always indecisive, during the morning. The time when we met, at nap time, was also undecided.
And suddenly, on the second day, as I remember, he managed to abandon himself and loosen the smile that pointed to the ceiling, to my face, to restless memories.
He began to look at the rain and the short moments of cool sun with friendship. She crossed one leg and set about being more beautiful, more gigantic, white and rounded. It was also made on time. She would arrive at nap time, describe the unlikely recent lunch, slowly eat the remains she found. I heard her ramble, tell it on air, in the workshop, gossip about little theater projects that would make Lavanda's culture immortal, gossip from comedians and authors, from unborn children condemned to an early death. I was smoking my pipe lying down to listen to her distracted and wait.
I could never really know what the cause was, the spring that silenced her at around three in the afternoon and made her stand up like a soldier on the target.
"Forgive me" to undress.
Many, many times I wanted to modify my feeling, make it perfect, or closer to the truth. But even today I continue to feel the same; She undressed as if she were removing the cover from someone else's furniture, as if she were peeling potatoes or fruits for a dinner that we were not going to have.
Then he would throw himself on the old bedspread on the couch — overflowing with memories — and light a cigarette. Every few minutes she raised her head to look at her body, her child's chest, her long powerful legs.
The sweet and poor wretch frequently asked:
"Is it okay like this?" Is it a long way?
She wanted, she needed the painting for her, to give it away, like a Trojan pony, to attempt an ineffective way of revenge. But we both ignored the glory of fighting for failure and persisted.
During afternoons of inhuman heat, she preferred to spread out naked in the workshop of the dilapidated market. She spoke of her mornings and her beaches — the short sayings that reconcile in Lavanda — but I knew how not to listen to her, I had her again. I approached the growing white body, ordered capricious, useless positions. The heat mixed Olga with the smells of turpentine and the rotting market.
December started when I thought of a common father and two mothers. Mine was unknown and twenty-nine years old. It was enough for her to invent a soft, candid female with a perpetual smile and no precise direction. Like Olga for the bones of the body and the hunger to believe. Mine was harder and faster.
My young and never seen mother could not have imagined the unimportance of it all. A naked woman in front of a man who was not her husband, a man who handled her body effortlessly on the long, paint-stained couch and so many things. Naked in the market cave, cold or sweating, placid and docile.
She hadn't promised anything that I would impose on her without words: not to look at the painting without permission. The portrait was at first a glorious kitsch in white and pink that climbed independently until it settled on the canvas, eyes, an unconvincing smile, a glimpse of hair that reached to the shoulders. But I knew in ten days that it wasn't that, that I - or the naked body - were wrong. I threw the painting out into the street one drunken drizzle night, and we started over. I started, at least.
Olga didn't ask questions. She let time pass and one afternoon she said, monotonous, almost resigned:
—I already know why that portrait can never be finished. I already know that Frieda asked you and Frieda is not lying to me. But you were, the whole time, putting things between us. The bad thing is that you promised and that I need it soon, sooner than I had thought.
—Sometimes things go well and others go wrong. But now yes, unfortunately. Now I'm going to do what I don't care about, what I didn't want. This is easy and fast and the man will have your body on the wedding night. Otherwise, of course. How the children take revenge on their parents. So ridiculous, so moving, so useless.
He laughed, made the long murmur of a laugh. Sometimes I compared my unlikely memory of the girl with the heavy woman who wanted to abandon herself on the couch.
He was ugly for three days and then returned to his solid beauty, to reproduce almost exactly the lines and color of the portrait, the credible posture.
We also compared - I think - the very brief, almost entirely confessable past of her childhood with the little world of tight, illogical filth - forgetfulness, lies, and confused shame - that she was now forced to endure and increase.
She laughed again as if she was infinitely older than me, as if she revealed that she had discovered my secret. I looked at her for a while, surprised, grateful that the world reserved for me wonder and innocence.
"Because that's why," he bargained.
The bad weather had returned and the afternoon light served me with traps. I looked at her in the painting and on the couch. The left buttock gleamed green and pink; the other suggested a memory of hairs in the shade; his neck rose violently, he leaned confidently in misery.
I approached slowly while the thunder broke, thinking about the dead years that nobody buries, absorbed in the happy and resigned warmth of the couch, in the passing smell of the storm that invaded and exacerbated the rottenness of the market. And very vaguely, as she spread her legs and her mouth, I also assumed the scent of the girl and everything forced me to lie on top. Olga moaned before I touched; his eyes crossed, fixed, and a pleading drool ran down his cheek.
I knew it was the maternal and peasant beast that I had assumed. We don't talk about ourselves afterwards either. Not even the oil nude so that it would arrive at the bride's house exactly on the wedding day.
She asked, dressed, from the door. I was stretched out on the couch, with my reconquered pipe, listening to the rain.
"Are you still seeing Frieda?
—Little. Much less than you.
He came out without hitting. It was still raining and I thought of her again with sweetness and sleep. I didn't think I had made her happy, I remembered her tears on my arm, I saw myself holding a colored cloth to dry her cheek and nose, to take care of her from the rain on the roof, from the screams in the market, from injustice and blindness of life.
The afternoon was repeated, with fears and preferences, while the nude progressed on the easel and Olga advanced, resembling it. He no longer needed to squint to look at her and copy.
I speak now of Olga's inevitable intelligence. Perhaps he had it in the bones of his cheekbones, in the quiet glow of his eyes. I speak of that, at random, because then he never spoke to me about love. Naked, huge and childish, hugging her knees, she only spoke of the idiot who preferred a well-educated and wealthy virgin.
But I knew Roa, the former lover, and he had sold him two paintings and almost got to pay me a third. He was not an idiot; I couldn't confuse him with the man Olga described to me, persistent, repeating himself.
Naked, sulking, big as a mother, Olga insulted and ate, dipped bread in the oil with garlic and thyme, barely moved her glass to demand wine. He only spoke of the painting and - now without naming it - of Roa. But I was watching his secret fury, the way he hit the cigarettes before lighting them. Because she was always knowing and remembering that I had either been with Frieda or had just made my irregular getaway to the house in the dunes to scour the beach looking for wave crests, to collect shells and to tease me. This teases, rests, helps and purifies.
One afternoon I asked him:
"Would you like to call yourself Gurisa?
—That's not a Christian's name.
—Right. Would you like me to call you Gurisa?
—Yes, whatever you want. Anything but an insult.
The nude was ready and packed and it arrived at Roa's girlfriend's house on the wedding day with a card in capital letters that read: IT IS GOOD TO COMPARE THE PAST WITH THE FUTURE .
Quinteros said, or is saying, that the idea of using the five senses in order could lead me to discover a Sanmariano as fugitive as I, so devoid of documents and condemned to fear and hypocrisy.
Quinteros is lying. It is not a reproach because the lie integrates and completes his personality. But I want to affirm and write that the idea and the period of madness were exclusively mine. He did nothing but help me and encourage my various delusions for fun.
I was looking for a brother, an outcast, a stateless person like me; someone who had escaped from Santa Maria without Brausen's permission, to disgust Brausen and everything that flowed from him. And I trusted one of my five senses to help me discover what I was after, to help me as a confidant, a dog's nose, in my espionage task.
I was supported like any Monday, Wednesday or Friday, between seven and eight on an evening in October, warm, supported and with my overcoat detached in a display case of the Palomino pharmacy, on Isla de Flores or Carlos street Gardel, waiting for the water to boil with the syringe in the back room. Bored, immobile, looking at the clients who piled up demanding painkillers, health, beauty and eternal youth, to disappear in concert and then renew themselves. When, in a short gap, between me and the corner of the telephone and the decomposed scale that invariably marked ten kilos and two hundred grams, the girl appeared. I can remember, and I'm only sure not to lie in this, the light of her square white teeth, the submissive, mocking tilt of her head in waiting. The sympathy of the little child's nose, the washed blue pants and the body about to form cannot be exclusively his in memory. But it was his that touch of vulgarity that raised the upper lip a little like a slight swelling, an unchanging pregnancy.
I was stubbornly wrong from the beginning, from the tinkling of the coins with which he struck, calling, accompanying the song he was thinking from his glass case. It was not, I repeat, without anger or frustration, what I had been looking for in Lavender for so long, without data, without help, without even having convincing plans or real tenacity. It happened before I ran into Quinteros or the coach, it was in a time of uprooting, of newcomer clumsiness, of those hours and days so long that they substituted for me the following minutes when I woke up in a foreign bedroom.
It was not that, but it was the girl, quality not born of a small number of years, quality that none of those chosen for the defenseless violation imposed by the presence, step, laughter, short suicide and defiance of the girls, will never try to explain. Those who can understand already know, the others will never understand and, furthermore, they don't matter.
—Oh, Medina, with more than forty years and ruins of old and foreigner. No more, Medina, not one more time, not even this one.
But sense number six told me that yes, that Santa María again, that the lean, sloping and uneven body had the prestige of a lighthouse, it contained the footprint, the transversal path, the shortcut capable of joining the path back.
In the background, between boxes and packages, in the little room without air and low light, the water did not come to boil for my syringe, the liquids and powders ignored did not finish mixing for their recipe. In the precarious solitude, in the sudden fall of silence I recited towards the reflection of the illuminated blue cross on the sidewalk:
—Monday, Wednesday, Friday, between seven and eight.
I spoke as if I was telling a pain so old that it could no longer hurt. And I was sure that the sign of recognition was going to be given to me, undoubtedly and clearly, through smell.
In the spring I was forced to evoke Santa María and its river, so different from this one that they called the sea, my river with the other visible shore, with its island in the middle, with the periodicity of the raft or ferry, with the exact chromatic distribution of launches, barges, yachts, boats, heads of swimmers. There, in that cubicle called the pharmacy, motionless, lying halfway, waiting for the injection and hope, so bored at times that boredom seemed to quickly wither people and things, evoking the friendly spaciousness of Barthé's pharmacy, the vegetal freshness of the basement almost full of bags and boxes, her fat, white and elusive face promising between a blue and a red bottle, comforting with her loving eunuch voice.
Until next Monday, Wednesday or Friday the man with the injections told me, stepping on the ground with a small smile, while I adjusted my belt:
"Looks like he liked the little girl the other day.
—Which one?
—The one that you know, the one with the hand cream and the expectorant, the one you were tapping with the coins on the counter to accompany the little song "Let's go to bed to rest."
"Smart," I told him.
The untitled pharmacist, who had studied medicine, was blond and small, with long drooping mustaches, with a deviation or cloud in his left eye.
"Smart," I said calmly and sweetly. I bet you too. You would also prefer to have her here in my place, look at her underwear down, look at her buttocks and with a little more cunning and give yourself the pleasure, so innocent, of sticking the needle in one blow and feeling her suffer a little. But that little animal shouldn't need injections.
After five minutes of salivating reiterations on the themes of the apostolate in the booths and the asexuality of patients, the weak and the in need, he agreed:
—Of course, that's not why one stops being a man.
And there was the didactic joy of some small revenges:
—Don't think you don't need injections sometimes, not vitamins but hormonal ones. You must have misheard him when they were alone for a little while the other day and I was working in the lab. Because it was yesterday and not even from seven to eight, it would be mid-afternoon. An imported German product that never failed me that I know of. Two ampoules of one cubic centimeter each administered twenty-four hours apart. If she, the friends or the one who banks the corner is up to date with the bribery, she can find it by the Gaucho square or on the side of the Seminary after dark, just after seven, as you said, and that's why I I laughed in the lab. The other day was an exception; You could not know that you gave me the signal and in addition to the cream and the expectorant, an envelope of wipes was carried in the package.
"And I would have sworn...", I began to think. But I persisted, I furiously dug into my foreboding, in the streaky smells of the pharmacy, in the week-old moodiness that grew with my desire for tobacco. Since meeting the girl, I had limited myself to less than five cigarettes a day to strengthen the sense of smell so abused for years. It was not vanity hurt by knowing that the girl in the pants had not dropped that look on me, man and macho, but on a client. That was not why I was angry, for a while, against the injector. It was my old disgust, disgust and sometimes hatred for whores, the sweet little whore in this case, for anyone capable of adulterating the happiness offered by beds. And he remembered me in Santa María signing the yellow cards, with always old photographs and wrong data, authorizing the free exercise of prostitution within the limits of modesty and the region.
The injectionist must have sensed that it was a goodbye, that I would never return to show him gratitude or disappointment, because he added melancholy, looking at the angle of the shelves:
—The bastards froze wages. But for that very reason, perhaps the measure respects the yiras. So I can't tell you. A few months ago she was around three hundred and one piece. They call her Victoria.
I was moved. During our brief relationships I had never tried to be funny. He was there, more blond and fragile, pathetic, with the syringe still between his fingers, stoic, trying to tone down the goodbye with an unconvincing smile.
"I understand," I folded meek and fraternal. Question of kinship. Nepotism, writes the opposition press.
It took me two nights of searching in faces immobilized by habit and paint, in opposite and incredible clothes, under tall and massive hairstyles, constructed by patient master carpenters, of searching without being able to stop, regulating my steps and the temptations of error, in the gloom of the gray wall of the Seminary or in the intermittent light of a luminous advertisement on the horse and the spear rider of the square. The pendulum of dark wallets, long handles, metronome, call, free sample of what it could do to you. Then, to recognize in the confusing moving whore, who entered and left the group of colleagues, who suddenly quieted down in the corner, alone and disdainful, ready to escape, insult or reluctance, to recognize the girl with spent glee of the pharmacy, Victoria, the promise of Santa María, of the past, of a return just to the mystery of simply being in a certain place on earth.
I smelled it as we talked. Still three hundred and the piece, special price for me, full service.
I smelled it without obvious anxiety as we walked down the street, three or four fast blocks, towards the pension. I saw, in the room, that not much had changed; He was still wearing pants, ocher now, and a jacket; It would be enough for me to wash her face and ruffle it to have her again, bent over again, showing me her child's nose, now she activates the mocking mouth, now inflated, growing, spilling, the touch of ordinariness and cynicism that had shaken me for a second, Monday, Wednesday or Friday, at the Isla de Flores pharmacy.
Frantic and concealing, interspersed with the disappointingly neat body due to professional deformation, also passing through the vulgarity of synthetic perfumes that had to be lifted and peeled off as thick translucent crusts, I thought I recognized — in breath, armpit, sex, tiredness— the words, beings and things that the books list and that will return.
«It is easy to draw a map of the place and a plan of Santa María, in addition to giving it a name; But you have to put a special light in each business house, in each hallway and on each corner. The low clouds that drift over the church bell tower and the roofs with cream and pink balustrades must be shaped; you have to distribute disgusting furnishings, you have to accept what you hate, you have to carry people, you don't know where, so that they inhabit, dirty, move, be happy and waste. »
With an effort denying my loneliness, sprawled over the slight disgust, the slight fatigue, I persisted in locating just fading smells suitable for hallways, corners, roofs, furniture, people, entrails, faces. Without forgetting - he did not forget - the scattered smell of the cattle ranch in the countryside, the milky smell of the gringo colony.
"They must all tell you the same thing," I murmured, smashing a hand on the girl's chest, Victoria, preventing her from jumping, washing, and dressing. Quiet, please. There are another three hundred. But I tell you later and not before. I'm not saying that I remember you, or that you look like you. I say that you could look like your mother or your older sister, someone, a woman that I once knew far away, in Santa María.
"Santa Maria," he repeated.
—There, there. Have you never been to Santa María?
I felt, as if instead of renting the woman I had seduced her; I felt, smiling and still, so afraid of a wrong move.
Santa María and the bonfires that make the resin bubble and twist dead leaves in the evenings of April. The dung and that suddenly stopped, barely threatening smell of urine in the dunghill. The swaying of banknotes in furtive businesses, imposing the unmistakable filth of handling. Smoking tobacco and coffee in my Detachment office, acids in the small laboratory, formaldehyde, and death in the Morgue, also small but sufficient. The smell of the hidden maidens that is afraid to denounce itself. A little further afield, like someone who goes to the Colony — that, if you saw it, is so changed, they had told me — honeysuckle, grass at dawn, orange blossoms, the land always favorable, a rack of ribs roasting among invisible trees. The large fruit warehouses along the river, the rusty iron of the shipyard, the hardened superstitious trousers of the immobile fishermen on the jetty. The credulous and persistent repainting, at the glimpse of the good season, houses, boats and launches on the beach of Villa Petrus, heating tar for caulking. Inside some house near the old square, abandoned in what we called a living room, the walnut of a silent piano, a straw sewing box with spools, buttons, a piece of expired elastic, a tortured pincushion, a lavender envelope without strength.
And above the barely broken landscape and our hours of happiness, misfortune or lucidity, the conflict, exactly in the middle of the sky, of the greens that came from the farms and the violent leads of the river, flocks and dead fish.
And, again in my office, the warm, disgusting, unmistakable air, so similar to phosphorus, that surrounded the sweat of those interrogated, son of anguish and fear, after a few hours of cheating and questions, violence and darling. Myself, Medina, the man who never tires, pausing to wash, shave, resuscitate with perfume on my cheeks and cool cautious lies. Or simply the night of Santa María with its moon or its drizzle and the mixed, incomprehensible mist of so many thousands of simultaneous dreams.
I breathed in the air we had formed again and believed again. A short faith, the exact size of its possibilities. Because she had never been to the lost city; Not her, Victoria, not a possible mother or sister, although, it's true, you're right, a friend who is married and they don't want to have children, had abortions, and the husband is an extraordinary guy who brings her breakfast in bed on Sundays and she does the shopping and sauce for the barbecue and takes it home and to work on a scooter, you can't imagine, a friend, that one named Gioconda was a few years ago in Santa María to sign in a succession that in the end she only left her some crazy pesos and, then, from there she sent me some postcards that I still have, but she also never lived in Santa María and the money from the will came to her without thinking about it from an aunt of her husband that I already told you is like none and off the charts.
I got dressed and gave him the money he had earned and also the rest, half the failure. They walked through the patio, knocking on doors and whispering, while all the smells in the room quickly hardened, regained their rogue and hostile air, they rejected me as a steel chair rejects the poor who seeks to rest in it to move and explain their need for comfort. or money.
A while ago I was walking around the Old Market workshop and it suddenly occurred to me that I was seeing it for the first time. There are two cots, chairs spread out and without a seat, sun-tanned newspapers, months old, nailed to the window in the place of the glass.
I used to walk with half my body naked, bored of being lying, since noon, blowing the damn heat that joins the ceiling and that now, always, in the afternoon, spills inside the room. I walked with my hands behind me, hearing the shoes hitting the tiles, alternately smelling each of my armpits. He shook his head from side to side, inhaling, and this made me grow, I felt it, a look of disgust on my face. My unshaven chin brushed my shoulders.
The short adventure, the eleventh or eleventh hope had ended, and not forever, last night, and not forever because memory and oblivion would continue, unhurried, without imaginable regularity, biting, altering the memory, lending, infatuated and surprising, new purities to the old and the old, the poorly lit enclosure where the thick bundles of weeds baptized by Linnaeus before or after hung upside down, named after a laconic Indian and already turned into iguana or stone, by a sly gaucho, by a slow and smoking brown-laundress, witch, midwife, it seems, sooner or later.
For each branch, in addition, a name of organ, bone, confusion, nervous, incapacity or simple bad luck. The set of bad luck — and its infallible patchwork — that make up life and all possible destinies, I thought then or I think it now and who knows with what indescribable difference, with what new amazement I will think about it tomorrow, within an exact solar year or right on the eve of my death, amen. And amen even for the toothless old couple, so sweet and still feeding the mystery of love, looking without apprehension at my ridiculous trial and error, smiling without understanding and — oh, envy — without needing to understand the tricks of my sentences, of my gestures, from my ear.
And also and above all, now or last night at seven o'clock, just above closing time and postponing it, the couple of kind old men in the greenish zaquizamí of weeds and possible diseases, yellowed by the poverty of the asthmatic lantern that the rains imposed on him in Baigorria or Rincón del Bonete, or the droughts, which we must call, and why not the relentless, incessant rains. Or the team of perverse and elusive monsters, filthy with old age and vital stubbornness, determined not to serve me even with a false clue that I could twist to fit my hope. Sons of bitches, so oblivious to my anguish, diverting towards an endless night and jungle the narrow path that could take me alternately towards Brausen, towards Santa María.
In any case, in the little room traversed by diverse smells, the bewilderment, the timid terror of the dilapidated and silent music instruments that almost formed a wall behind the counter, my snooping wisdom that guessed in the darkness of the little drawers from the closet, with handles that were gilded and cards soiled by clumsy spellings, strings for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, harps, banjos, zithers, psalteries, cat guts, of nylon steel bent over themselves with the intention of fetuses, forming true circles and not imitations of circles, forever without beginning or end.
Because the business was not only called La Flora Yuyos but also, with respectful smaller letters, Casa Beethoven.
And the short adventure, the tenth or ninth failure, had begun, as is almost usual, in the art room of the advertising agency, less than a week before, when the boy or the midget who runs errands to me interrupted the sketch for the Trevida fabric ad that I was plagiarizing from an old issue of Burda .
"There is a call," he recited twice.
That afternoon, Quinteros had said on the phone:
—There seems to be a clue for you. Nothing sure. I can't even give you the exact address. A married couple, two old men who have a business there in Palermo, near the cemetery. They sell weeds, fix guitars. The street is called Fulano Petrarca, not just Petrarca. Known? Well, that is an infection of flowers for the dead and bowling alleys for consolation. I repeat that I do not assure you anything; try. Maybe it's both, the old man and the old woman. Maybe just one of them, maybe none. If they are, or some are, they escaped from the Swiss colony. Gringos, without a doubt.
"Well, appreciated," I said. I didn't want to show him my weary and dogged enthusiasm. He didn't want to believe or trust, he didn't want to risk the promise. And at least... Or at the most: is it known, which of the five senses is suspected?
"Not even that, mate," Quinteros dragged sadly. The sixth, most likely. Sure, the sixth from the beginning, from right now and all the time, while rehearsing the other five. Regarding this, I have been thinking and we have to discuss it. Don't forget, when you see me, tell me about concentration. It may be a good technique, but it takes a long time to explain. Anyway, I would say the ear.
Quinteros's voice left and I picked up the brushes. The little man in the ad was crucifying himself false and unfortunate, he wanted to raise an unconvincing head, a playboy smile. I thought about the previous times, when it could be believed that one of the five was the probable one, but never nothing, nothing, only the sixth fluttering indecisively, nervous, until losing strength and not finding rest, a foothold.
That night, not yet another, the night of Quinteros' call, I returned to the agency after lunch, put a bottle, waxed glasses and a pack of cigarettes on the Directory table and looked for the most expensive paper to send me a bug report.
Cartoonist of a circle of hell like all advertising agencies, art department. This life had also been achieved for me by Frieda and Quinteros.
When the whole city knew that midnight had finally arrived, I was in Frieda's apartment, Gran Punta de las Carretas, alone and almost in the dark, watching the river and the light of the lighthouse from the coolness of the window while I smoked and I tried again to look for a memory that would excite me, a reason to feel sorry for the world and reproach the world, to contemplate with some exciting hatred the lights of the city advancing to my left.
He had finished early the drawing of the two children in pajamas who were amazed in the morning at the invasion of horses, dolls, cars and skateboards on their shoes and the fireplace. As agreed, he had copied figures from a notice posted on Companion . The most difficult thing was the slimy expression of the parents spying from a curtain and refraining from using the lipstick to cross the drawing with hairy letters, made of sable brush: «Biba la felisidá».
But instead I was able to spend the forty minutes that separated me from the New Year, my birthday, and Frieda's promised return painting a new little sign for the bathroom in green letters. The old one was faded, splattered, stained with soap and toothpaste. In addition, it had been done with hideous cursive letters, with that calligraphy that is used in the little boards that cretins hang on the walls: small house, big heart, welcome, young ship, old captain.
She had bought for Frieda a gift that was waiting for her, wrapped in blue paper, along with her glass, the bottle of cane, the plate with polished fruits, nougat and nuts, in the place of the table that she used to occupy. He had also bought her a Tuscan and a packet of razor blades to cut her hair. Although we had only lived together for a few months, these gifts were traditional for anniversaries that we respected or invented. She thanked them with insults of astonishing obscenity, sometimes convincing, promised revenge, always ended up accepting my goodwill, my esteem and my careless understanding. His gifts, on the other hand, were jobs, ways to earn little money, gadgets so that I would forget that I was living off his.
On Saturday nights, when there were a lot of people, when she started to get drunk, Frieda would sit on the toilet and for minutes or quarters of an hour, as long as no one was looking for her, she would be almost motionless, with her panties on her knees, greedily cutting herself with a razor blade, the hair that covered her forehead, looking with her alert bird's eyes at the little sign nailed between the medicine cabinet and the sink, the same one that I was renovating to surprise her, the verses of Baudelaire who say: "Thank you, my God, for not having made me a woman, neither black nor Jew nor dog nor petizo. No one using the toilet could walk away without praying.
But on that New Year's Eve we had wanted - or had wrapped ourselves in lies until we committed ourselves - to be alone and to try to feel happy. She had sworn to drop everything, dance students, dress shop clients, unexpected propositions, to be alone with me before midnight. I didn't have many things to leave to reciprocate.
It wasn't happiness but it was the least effort. Frieda would arrive, but she didn't arrive before the new year. We would eat something and we would dedicate ourselves, experts, delaying things so as not to spoil them, to get drunk; I would ask questions of pretended interest to encourage her to repeat the monologue about her childhood and adolescence in Santa María, the story of her expulsion, the capricious, variable evocations of paradise lost.
Maybe, at the end of the night, we would make love on the big bed, the first bedroom rug, or on the balcony. I would not care to do it or not; but he had never met a woman so capable of continuing to surprise, so willing to confess. When it occurred to her to sleep with me and drunkenness forced her to talk, it was like possessing dozens of women and knowing about them. Perhaps, in addition, he agreed to celebrate the new year by laying his back to the floor or mattress.
I was smoking and drinking a lot of water, at the window, when the horns and shots began to sound. It was impossible for me to take care of myself; So I thought of Maria and Seoane, my son, I made an effort to suffer and accuse myself, I remembered anecdotes that could not mean anything.
Everything, simply, had been or was like that, in such a way, although perhaps it was different, although each imaginable person could give a different version. And I, definitely, not only could not be sympathetic but was not even credible. The others existed and I watched them live, and the love I dedicated to them was nothing more than the application of my love for life.
They had already been forgotten in Midnight Lavender. The lights on Ramírez's side were beginning to fade and the dance couples at the Parque Hotel would already be coming and going from the arena, when the new year really began. Some black tambourine sounded again, deep, lonely, not defeated, in the vicinity of the barracks, and made the words confused.
But he recognized Frieda's voice, unsure, surrendering, losing energy. He yelled "Himmel" and I crossed the apartment, quietly down a few steps of the brick staircase, in the dark, that reached the garden and the entrance.
There was no more light there than that which came, diluted, from the Prow. But I could see her, well planted between two dry beds, athletic, balancing her vigor, while an abortion of tubercular parents, blackish and with skirts, with her head fantastically enlarged by a workday of a cheap hairdresser, told her: «Because to me, guacha, because if you thought you were going to take me to the party, because if you go with me you will not go with anyone else ». He hit her face with his hand and Frieda let herself; then he began to beat him with his wallet, methodically and relentlessly.
I sat on a step and lit a cigarette. Frieda can crush her with just one arm swing, I thought. Frieda can get her to the river with just one kick. "
But Frieda had chosen to start the year like this: with her hands on her buttocks, exaggerating the width of the shoulders of the tailored suit, letting herself be beaten and enjoying it, answering the letters with her hoarse "Himmel" that seemed to sound to ask for more blows.
When the filth got tired of hitting, they both cried and went out of the garden to the street. I saw them stop, panting, and walk embracing. So I went upstairs to turn on the lights and offer Frieda a nice New Years reception.
I had her under the luxury of the floor lamp, or was she just there, on the couch, with her blond hair covering her forehead, her mouth twisted in vice and bitterness, her right eyebrow raised as always and now curving over a black eye. With chapped and bleeding lips that did not want to heal, he forced me to enter the new year by talking about Santa María. From the age of fourteen she had dedicated herself to getting drunk and practicing scandal and love with all the sexes foreseen by divine wisdom.
I say this in homage to her, who was more Catholic every Sunday and who filled me every Saturday, every Saturday morning, the department - paid for by her - with increasingly old, amazing and abject women. She spoke of her provincial childhood and of her family of junkers , absolutely guilty that now, in Lavanda, she had no choice but to get drunk and reiterate the scandal and the crapulous love. She spoke until dawn on that first of January of misunderstandings and other people's faults, drunk since before arriving, caressing her almost completely closed eye, enjoying the pain of chapped and swollen lips.
"It seemed to me," he said, smiling, "you won't believe me, it seemed to me that Seoane was on the corner.
"At this hour?" Besides, he would have come up to see me.
—Maybe he didn't come to see you.
"Yes, dear," I said.
—Not to visit you. Maybe to spy on the house, in case you went in or out.
"Could be," I agreed, because I didn't like talking about Seoane with Frieda and maybe with anyone.
She spoke, like all women, of an ideal Frieda, she marveled at the incessant triumph of injustice and misunderstanding, she sought, offered guilty, without hating them.
He didn't say anything about the inexplicable disgust that had been hitting his face with the wallet. I was already used to his need to bring himself dirtier and cheaper lovers. As time does not matter, as simultaneity is a detail that depends on the vagaries of memory, it was easy for me to recall nights when the apartment where Frieda allowed me to live was populated by numerous women that she had brought from the street, of port bars, Victoria Plaza. There were them beautiful and well dressed, with few jewels, with bangles, with dark suits completed by pearls.
But in recent times, insolent and dirty mestizos, bad words, burning cigarettes hanging from their mouths have abounded. Often the festering dialogues prevented me from sleeping, and I would jump out of bed and walk around the apartment biting a cigarette like an olive branch, laboriously moving among the squatting women, seated on the table, spread out on the couch, kneeling in the kitchen, changing in the bathroom, receiving the sun or the moon on the red tiles of the balcony.
"Roa paid," Frieda said. He did well, so he starts the year better and maybe it will bring him luck.
The bills had fallen from my chest onto the table. I picked them up without loosening the rubber around them; they were one hundred pesos.
"Did he pay for everything?" I asked.
Frieda laughed, then licked her split lip.
—Give me a drink and a pucho. That poor beast. But it's so nice to just leave and let them do whatever they want to you, that they don't even suspect who you are. Leave until suddenly someone thinks that it is over and then one stops supporting and taking pleasure in leaving and does the greatest outrage with all the desire and happiness in the world. In revenge; And not out of pride, or out of desire to get even, but because suddenly the pleasure consists in hitting and not in being hit. Yes?
"I understand," I said. I listened to her making the banknote cylinder dance on my hand.
"Are you going to help me?" When the time comes, I say, if it comes.
—Sure. I put the money in my pants pocket, filled a cane glass and gave it to him, put a cigarette in his mouth and handed him a match. Anytime. Did you pay or not? I mean, did he pay for everything and forever?
Frieda sat up with a fit of laughter and flopped onto her side, splashing the slime on the floor.
—He deserved it, for an asshole. On the wedding day, he saw the indecent portrait, the painting of Olga naked, in the gift room. I could show people a strange face, I don't know or care about me. It must have. But at the end of the honeymoon he writes to Olga. The usual, poor animal: "Only love of my life and everything will remain the same." Give me a drink. And add memories and details. Olga comes to see me between doubtful and happy. As he was born stupid, I stole the letter without work and I dedicated myself to photocopies and blackmailing him. Poor Roa.
»He squeezed his ribs and then put on a childish face to listen to what was left of the night. I think that filthy bitch kneed me in the belly. Is nothing. Yes, he paid for everything. I told him it was the last installment. I don't know if it's true, I don't know if in a week, when I'm playing with my children and Reyes' gifts, I won't show up to ask for more money. I don't care about Roa's money anymore. You see, you already saved it. I care to fuck him, that's my relationship with him and he will have to continue like this.
"Frieda," I said very loudly. He shifted in the chair and ended up lifting his head. She was drunk, she had a child's smile, tears were beginning to fall. I put the money on the table, careful not to roll. That's wrong. The Roa affair must be terminated.
She shrugged and looked at me as if she loved me, with such a sad and amazed smile, while lazily moving her tongue to touch her tears.
"As you wish," he said. Give me another drink, let's celebrate the year.
Dying from insomnia, despising fatigue, I sometimes left the first bustle of the market at dawn, took a bus and went to Frieda's house among the dunes, lonely, almost washed by the water. I always let go of a prophetic dream or was pushed by it.
Sometimes, out of cunning, cheating as if walking sideways, he made me bless before the trip, of the attempt to conquer my water spot, receding, sweet and smelly, swollen and rotting among the infinite flock of waves healthy and useless.
I entered the cathedral, cool, excessive, almost deserted. He prayed kneeling, avoiding with effort the distraction of the virile flames, almost motionless on the altar. Somewhere, to my shame, would be the portrait of the Pope that I had painted with childish pride; crushed by time: a XII, a XXIII, a VI. Drawing and color pains, red and black emetics, eyes that wanted to show faith, acceptance of fate, unwanted sacrifices. Now the eyes turned off with each visit like dried plums.
They were always, the old man, his farce and mine, a little more worn than the child he had painted; Than the memory of my fanatical, naive and greedy aunt. The determined and tough old woman who knew how to reach heaven.
I want to remember now the times when I escaped from the city fulfilling the oath not to carry a pencil or a paper. They had promised me: for a second I would see the height and color of the perfect and unrepeatable wave. Such a vision can make up for the rest of a life.
At seven or eight he would arrive at Frieda's pointy house in the dunes, watch her sleep, accept her miserable breakfast, stale ham, hard rice. Lucky mornings, a raw egg. But Frieda is not greedy, neither makes her fat nor lean; Perhaps hunger does not exist for her, perhaps her food is to calm her asthma with the adrenaline syringe.
Some mornings, always unpredictable, he accompanied me on the tenacious journey along the coast. Neither winter nor good weather influenced. It was enough for her to spy on my profile, to hear words very far from us and from the truth, to look distractedly at my steps to find out, without caring, my desire to walk alone or with her.
Here, in those remote months that I want to recall now, another woman, Juanina, appears on a cold and cloudy morning in which Frieda preferred to continue sleeping and I returned to walk the shore looking to the right and hoping to find. I had breakfast at Cristiani's with two gins that increased the bad mood of hunger. At the door of the bowling alley, Cristiani assured me that the weather would continue sad but without rain. I watched him grow old in the gray light: in panties, with a childlike gaze smiling at the sky, barefoot as always to absorb terrestrial radiation.
For a second I felt danger, but I didn't have the strength to escape. And Cristiani said:
—You who paint, sir, why don't you make pictures to show humanity the danger of atomic bombs... I mean that people talk a lot, but they don't even imagine it. Instead of bullets, hydrogen.
I wanted to insult him, but I replied gently, slowly:
—You are right, Cristiani, it would be good, it would be better. But humanity is not going to look at my paintings. Be sure. And it is possible that after the bombs paradise begins. However, you and I are in the same way. Let's thing about it. Now I want a wave, paint a wave. Discover it by surprise. It has to be the first and the last. A white, dirty, rotten wave, made of snow and pus and milk that reaches the coast and swallows the world. That's what I'm on the beach for.
He nodded, intimidated, as if repeating with exactitude a scene acted many times, with the small light eyes moistened, seeking to retain me. He crossed his arms over his chest as he rubbed one foot over the other.
"I read in a book a while ago..." he began. It was the problem of purity, the danger of delicate things, clean things falling into dirty hands.
I didn't know if he was saying it for me or for the owners of the bombs. I was sure, at least, that Cristiani — vegetarian, teetotaler, chaste — didn't believe in my purity.
"Give me another gin," I said, returning to the counter. I have to walk a lot and this is the best time. I have to discover a wave that looks like the last one. I'm not asking too much. That looks just like a two-month-old fetus can look like the woman you want. I have to find out. They are things of the mystery, Cristiani, you understand me.
He served me, he brought me the change, he was looking at me in silence. The counter separated us.
—I also discovered something. For a few months.
I didn't want to hear it. Friendly and tender I picked up the coins, smiled at him as if we were sharing the same secret, and raised a hand in promise. I went out into the veiled light, into the cold of the almost lost morning and walked among rocks and tamarisks, until I stepped on the humidity of the shore. I looked at the churning water, lit my pipe, and resumed my useless walk. I walked a kilometer, I saw a rotten boat, the blows of the foam, flat, I defended the pipe from the wind that was beginning to rise. Then I saw the dog standing too close to the waves.
I sat on the sand about twenty meters from the immobile, huge, yellow animal. The wind increased the cold and suddenly I understood forever, uncomfortable, lucid. I could paint whatever I wanted and do it well. Peasants, portraits, the painting of the Pope that would continue to hang in the church of Santa María. But never the wave promised to Cristiani, the crest of dirty whiteness that would say it all. Never life and its reverse, the strip that shows us to deceive us.
It was finished, peaceful, frozen in the morning, always on the verge of forty.
The night before we had witnessed a third version of the Santa Rosa storm - no one can hardly argue with superstitions - but spring had only shown itself in the stunted shoots of trees, in the pleas of cats, in the personal wishes.
It could be, I remember, ten in the morning; now the beach was sunny, cold and an aggressive wind stirred the sand. I got up, slowed my gait, without taking my eyes off the small, huddled figure.
I walked until the big yellow dog became a person and a woman, another one in this story that because it is true will not be useful to anyone. Thus, I repeat, while looking for an impossible wave or pretending to look for it, Juanina appeared, embedded herself in the world.
I saw her sitting on the wet shore, in the thin pool that the waves renewed. He had an old brown coat, hugged his knees; sometimes he shook and raised his head, his hair short like a boy's, black, drawn with India ink and brush.
She was getting soaked sitting on the shore; moisture, foam, and algae crawled on her clothes, rocking over her short, thick shoes.
I also know that I was doomed to stumble and that this way could be as good, as miserable and dangerous as any other. I walked over and he looked at me; maybe his slow eyes didn't reach my face, my beard at first.
But I could see, from the first moment, the despair turned silent, proud and cynical, the permanent and impersonal hatred. Less than twenty years old, her neck too long and sad, her face bony and cold, her nose curved, small and dyspneic. I saw the portraits that could be born from that head, I did not guess the future.
Motionless, standing open, almost touching her, I tried to light the pipe, I wanted to greet her, find the magic phrase capable of turning her back into a dog, mistake, into nothing. Because I needed to paint that profile, I moved indecisively between old prologues, I wished I had never seen it.
"Bitch," I said, smiling.
She barely moved to look at me again, growling, expressionless. I was or was very skinny. Now he couldn't calculate her age.
"Yellow dog," I corrected.
She continued still, the skin on her face and hands purple from the cold; sometimes, regularly, a grimace made her smile. I sucked on the pipe for a while, I got down until I was squatting, next to him, on top of the moving pool. We were silent, watching the seagulls whirl on the rocks and for a while it was as if each knew the other's life. But this feeling was easy and, as always, wrong.
Another time and I asked insecure, rude:
"What's wrong?" Because everything can be fixed although without guarantee of happiness. Not even that the fix turns out better than misfortune.
She had her head resting on her knees and ended up lifting it to smile lazily into the water, without interest, as if she had heard my phrase many times. Maybe she was drunk or high, or maybe both, or maybe it all started in childhood. Age could not be seen from the small emaciated head. Other things flowed: the dominated grief, the aging antagonism, the refusal to surrender. I needed to draw that profile.
"What," I insisted calmly.
"Everything?" He asked mockingly, without smiling, without looking at me.
—You can't, but it would be for the best.
—You can't, it's long. There are many stories. This story begins with an aunt.
He kept looking at the water. She seemed to me, every minute, skinnier, more purple, sicker.
—Tell me about today, then; if you want. You on the beach and your ass in the water. What happened last night? Then we talk about his aunt.
"Last night? He didn't seem to understand, he hesitated.
—Or this morning, this morning.
—There's nothing for you, it was enough for me to see you. There is nothing but aunt. A gift. Her name is Mercedes.
He was feeling his buttocks with childish fear, without dissimulation.
"What did he come to and what does he care? Only one thing: kill her. Would you help me?
"Sure, it may be, if you say so. Kill Aunt Mercedes. But you have to tell me why. Or we invent it between the two of us. But tell me about now. It is approaching noon and I find her sad, drunk, swinging her ass in a pool of water.
Then, standing up, he was a newborn camel on two legs, cynical, mocking. The misty landscape stretched out motionless and the greens and blues of the water were still at peace. Scrawny trees on the beach were green to the left and right. Above all, beyond, the water, again, impassive. She and the newborn warmth announced the warm storm, the slow summer rain. As always, a motionless white yacht, a quartet of boats playing to win, with different colors, with a fat man in the stern howling his useless horn.
Now he did move his head to look at me and try to figure out who I was. More or less here begins the endless story of Juanina. I stroked his wet forehead and repeated:
—Start from now, from last night or this morning. And you have to take off your clothes. Come with me.
Sad, he seemed to think for a minute. I spoke to him like a child; he had to draw that nose, the eyebrows that hinted to join. I saw her tremble as she laughed.
"Are there flowers?" He asked.
—There isn't.
"I'm not saying here, of course. Near the road, among the privets.
—Not there either.
"It doesn't matter," he reassured me. I already knew, it was a joke, I know the place, maybe I know it too much. My name is Juanina but this is also a lie. Do you really want me to tell you everything? Everything, what an idiot word. And then he takes me to his house to dry my clothes. Because I can't go to the hotel.
I put a wide open hand on his boyish head.
"Move," I told him. Lie later, when you are dry and warm.
He threw his head back, with a gesture of hatred and disgust.
"No," he said, "I'd rather pay earlier. It is always cheaper in the end.
Then she threw herself on the sand again and, leaning on her hands and feet, she recoiled until she was out of the water; She lay stiff on the floor, face up, with her eyes closed. It was neither short nor long, it showed its teeth without smiling.
—If you like me to tell you, and everyone likes it, get down. Always for years, since I was little, I stumble across people who want to help me. There are so many good people on the loose. It's weird isn't it? But I always pay the price. There it goes. Last night I went out with the fishermen again. I like to be with them, at night, in the early morning and on the river. There were four. I paid and I am not complaining. Men are so ridiculous. It is enough not to know.
He teased with thin lips, his nose trembling, he looked at me for a moment, blinking an instant in the sun.
—But there's nothing to discuss. There were four of them, and me, and a little black man who was a cook. It's enough? It was enough for me. I can add fishermen and niggers.
He was laughing for a while about things far away and stretched.
"Come on," I said, and touched his skinny ribs with one foot. The brown coat was old; but the damp shoes, the perfume that was reborn in the sun, the length of her white fingers and nails, made Juanina's first story unconvincing.
He propped himself up on one elbow and was able to sit up. With dark glasses on his forehead he looked at me laughing, maybe now at me.
"My aunt," he said. I like that better. I was at the hotel until yesterday, the one where they rent horses, and my money ran out. I paid the bill and came to live in the sand. I made a story and left the suitcases. But when we returned, with the four fishermen and the little black man, we made a fire, we roasted sea bass and a demijohn of wine came out from somewhere.
Now the sun was stronger; I threw myself in the sand, separated from her, afraid of scaring her and losing her.
"What else?" I said.
- Always today?
—From you. Yesterday or last year.
—Well, listen. If you come to protect me... I can manage without help. You know where to keep your pity. Keep walking along the beach. As soon as I can get up I'm going. To visit my aunt, of course.
"We're leaving," I said quietly, not looking at her. I already had the beginning of a dangerous plan. Walking tell me, if you like.
Now it was she who was standing up and she was skinny and smaller than when she was lying down and sleeping; Sudden anguish erased her cynicism for a moment and stooped her over. Before setting off for the hotel — burdened and struggling, but keeping an implacable straight line — she spoke to me as if she were spitting on my horizontal face.
—And thanks for everything, for your curiosity. I scrub in the knights. I have had diarrhea for more than a week. There is also an abortion that cannot wait. Maybe I'll give the fetus to my aunt. At least it was a comfort, last night on the boat, to think that it had already happened, that I was being reprimanded. There was no danger, not that at least. Now you can go to the… ”She was crying, so skinny and lonely, on the beach, with her back to the river; I could half-open her eyelids to see the tears that came to her lips, to her chin. But that was not crying. I never saw or heard him cry real.
He didn't say where. I listened to her goodbye with my eyes closed, I let some time pass and then I turned to see her swinging in the sand.
I had Frieda, I had almost two thousand Eurodollars in some corner of the market; an abortion and the principle of consolation cost much less if one lives in Santa Maria. But we were in Lavender, an African tribe name.
"Yes," I thought, "I read somewhere that there is nothing better than a good sitz bath in a cold puddle to cure diarrhea and pregnancy."
I met Juanina at the hotel and we had lunch. I found it is a way of saying and everyone chooses what they want. I had told the story to Frieda, nonchalant and unpressured, watching over my tenderness and my purpose.
"She's cute and young. But he looks like a boy.
—You must have liked it. You don't find pregnant boys every day.
I was probably more incredulous than Frieda; I couldn't even fully trust the nonexistent Juanina I'd invented. Perhaps some misfortunes were born from that, some annoying, definitely another.
Juanina had looked at me on the beach and in the hotel, face to face, straight and false. One of the latest communiqués from the Lavanda government had prohibited, with plausible views and considerations, writing "hazel eyes" or "hazel eyes." Just as it is forbidden to surround, exalt a shape with a black or white outline. Smart painters use cobalt blue or fuzzy greens reminiscent of diapers.
But the reader deserves the truth and, furthermore, we all know that the truth is always revolutionary. Juanina was looking at me with hazel eyes, without blinking, not even believing at all in me.
Frieda and I listened to the music on the radio during breaks. He was, I think, a pre-Bach German and the man, his music, they were always right. They told me that only painting mattered. That it was necessary, even for the hygiene of the soul, to dispense with women, friends and money, disinterested in landscapes and oceans, never agree, not take seriously the nonsense of a world, of a life that I did not make, that left me Taxes, which are there, outside and inside, relentless in each awakening, without anyone having had the courtesy to consult me, to ask my opinion, at least, on some tiny detail and, apparently, not important.
I almost immediately forgot my answers, my objections. The music man on the radio went from one phrase to another, from one time to another, always being right and saying it in a miraculous way.
Frieda asked me for a glass of water to take a pill. I was smoking bored and sleepy in the long, undulating chair. She knitted for a while; then he asked me with a smile, low eyelids:
"Does it have to be here?" Wouldn't you rather go back to your aunt to kill her or tell her your memories or a new story? Doesn't Auntie have a lot of money for herself and the next great-nephew?
—Don't be scared. She will go with her aunt or with the devil, more days, fewer days. I see it as a problem of patience, of pity.
—How many days?
—I don't know. I already told you. It depends on your patience, on your pity.
—But she already told you where you could put your pity. I suppose you would advise me the same.
—A week? Fifteen days? Although it may already be gone.
The German continued to insist on the radio.
"Let him come," Frieda said. The downside is that you will have to sleep with me and not be alone with her and not exaggerate this sudden goodness. So exciting, I swear. I never suspected it. We can nap, right? Then you run to save her.
I began to undress while thinking about the girl or woman, about Juanina, about the fishermen's regiment, about life and the cowardice that prevents so many millions on death row from living it.
And after the almost invariable ceremonies that prevented me from fatigued my kidneys, I lit a cigarette; I listened to Frieda sleep, I felt calm and humbled. It was no longer about cowardice but about the chance to live. It's not always about the bed, I thought, although for women it is, despite the fact that they feel love and talk about it, suffer it and talk about it. It was, I think I remember, to flee the cities, to comfort; to respect yourself, to be tough, selfish and mocking, to fulfill a destiny or a whim. And if there is no destiny or whim, there is no inescapable reason for inclement, the protests make sense and the complaints soften into a haggling tone, like a lady at a fair shouting.
Anything that reaches the poor devils, welcome. Let them accept it as a deserved substitution, if they come to understand it, if they learn to enjoy it with the help of their congenital stupidity, their candor, their impotence, and the grace of Brausen. He is my last card and instinct advises me to keep it unmarked.
I dressed slowly and knew the heat had returned; I found the necessary money in Frieda's wallet and started walking through the harsh humidity of the shore to the hotel's huge glass gazebo.
Without saying so, Frieda and I were right. There he was, in the hotel bar, with his suitcase on the table, having a soft drink, calmly digesting his old night, his four fishermen. The coat, still damp, hung on a chair.
I walked forward without saying hello - she recognized my stunted beard expressionlessly - and went to the counter to order a plate of sandwiches. I took it to the table and after a while the waiter brought me the soda, the double beer, the cigarettes that I smoke when I'm excited. I was still and silent while she repeated, looking at me, the dirtiest laughs she had made in the sand that morning. Then she began to eat hungry; then I took a big gulp of cane and sighed, almost at peace.
He had eaten half the sandwiches when he turned his head to the can of huge ferns in a corner of the dining room, very light green, sheltered for years from the cold and coastal winds. The girl seemed healthier, firmer and more authentic, more dangerous than in the first meeting.
- Merde . Good luck, "he said," why did you have to go back?
I stroked my beard so she wouldn't interpret my smile.
—My name is Medina, I don't know if I told you before.
—Thank you. My name is Juanina and I say it to everyone.
—I don't know. I was sure to find you.
—Sometimes it happens like this. I was able to arrange at the hotel. In half an hour I have a bus.
I looked at her, I looked at her again while raising the glass and accepted that I would rather kill her than let her escape without copying her profile. Even just once and she moving, even if it was just a line biting her tail. A profile with his eyes that any police employee would have described, fed up, incredulous or sure and without fear of being wrong, light brown. Now they were green. The eyes on the thinned face were not dominant either, but they revealed more of her than her words and her movements; they threatened to grow thin and they didn't, they looked calm and very open. Friendship, pity, desire, were not caused by youth or the failed simulacrum of sincerity with which he now looked at me.
It all came from the strange shape of the eyes, from their arbitrary placement in the sockets, from an agreement with the cheekbones. They had seen a lot without denouncing each other with lines that surrounded them, without sacrificing their skin. For now, at least, he could look at me like that, with eyes that I thought so easy to paint twenty times, after useless words and closer to the truth. Still and new, flushed with insomnia or the wind off the beach. While the rest of the face had been made up and taught to lie, the flat eyes expressed nothing. They were, simply; watching without apprehension or hope. This is how Juanina appeared for the first time.
I interrupted meekly, almost reluctantly.
—There is no bus, I can explain right away. I'm a little drunk, just feeling for happiness. But it doesn't matter to me and I can order another drink. You already know that I am a gentleman.
"An old man," he said. Must be over forty years old. And old people are easy to handle and it's so nice to make them believe they handle them.
"Yes," I said, "more than forty. It's sad but I have nothing to do with it and for Juanina it will be much sadder.
"Shit," he translated as he ate the last sandwich on the plate. He does not reach forty, nor with that beard and other ways of lying.
—And the fishermen, were they, are they, younger?
—Some. But it is a different thing. There are them, but also the sea and the night.
—I understand.
—No. You can't.
—Who knows. I could tell you a story. When I was teaching drawing at high school. There was a special day, without classes and without a strike. A High School inspector had died. Sure, much older than me. A duel was declared, classes were suspended. Then, amid the shouts of joy, I heard two girls, fourteen years old, talking while painting themselves in the patio. I remember they were under some scaffolding because bricklayers were working to support a ruined wall. One of the girls said: “How lucky. You realize? We chiquichiqui all afternoon and fill ourselves with money ».
—What? He asked without cheating. I did not know that word, but it is enough to hear it to know what it means. And you were scandalized, you gave up teaching and now we have a well-dressed bichicome.
"It's not like that," I said, reaching for the pipe. It was a surprise, it's true. They were fourteen years old, we had them classified as a wealthy middle class. No real need to be prostitutes.
—Well. Maybe you want them.
—Maybe. But I withdraw the story and the discussions. The important thing for me was not to let her disappear. At least this bus has already left.
—Thank you. I've been looking at the clock the whole time. Is it mercy, again?
—No, there was never mercy. Perhaps it is a sleeping illness that you were destined to wake up.
When he stopped teasing, I looked back at his raw bones, his exact and vibrating nose. In the absence of talent and a white, raging wave that would freeze for me, that was what I needed to paint, that bold and rogue head.
"No," I repeated absently, "it's not about mercy. You interest me because my collection of weirdos is very scarce today.
—Thank you. You.
—Okay. It happens like with books. You show them, borrow them, and the library ends up empty or toothless. In addition, there is always an addition that I confess to him and others do not, I want to paint his head. Lighten it, but not too much, and paint it. God tells me there will be a storm, troubled water, fishermen gain. You better come to my house.
He smiled looking at the disgusting blue plastic tablecloth with embossed roses. It was enough for me to touch it to feel a chill.
—He knows you're a good son of a bitch... you know?
"Yes," I said, "but not always. That is why we are brothers. That is why we are here.
—And then at his house. Where there will be a fat woman, who will receive me or not, who will help me watch him smoke a pipe. Tonight?
"She's not fat. It is different from you but they will understand each other. I'm sure. I don't know in what way or on what plane, but they will understand each other. This afternoon, now, in a little while. I do not guess the end. The best thing is that you come and see. She must already be awake.
—But I don't care. I'll go look at his yellow fangs, I'll put up with his patience. Is it many blocks?
I got some of Frieda's money and called the waiter.
"I'm going to have the last one," I told him. Go to the towel or the latrine. It depends on custom, on need. Take what is essential, it will be good if you present it as beautiful as possible.
She looked at me for a while, as if she were the one condemned to paint a profile; then he fumbled with his wallet and left the hotel bar.
She was locked in the lavatory for so long that there was no choice but to imagine her sitting down and immediately I remembered something sad and beautiful that a woman had said to me when I confessed that an angel or Juan María Brausen himself had whispered the order to paint. a painting with an alley that ran through a gray area of an abandoned city until reaching an ambiguous silhouette on the horizon:
—I don't know anything but painting, getting into a painting and suffering it must be like feeling and thinking in a total way, with the whole body and forgotten about the body. I remember, at the beginning of adolescence, just a little girl, sitting in the isolated latrine of a country house, sure of solitude, reading pieces of an old, torn, dirty, yellow newspaper, on a rainy evening. It was like that, nothing and me, everything and me. And if a candle stub flickered threatening to go out, so much the better.
The first afternoon, the first night, they were not difficult. Frieda waited for her in a neat woman's dress, sunk in the sun on a deck chair, in the north of the house that always seemed to advance in the water, weaving, her gaze hidden by her dark glasses. I couldn't guess what she was weaving and she probably didn't know either. He had just taken a bath and had a severe new hairstyle. He smiled at her without hatred, calculating.
"Hi," Juanina yelled, standing in front of the porch, her fists clenched in the damp yellow coat. I am the little whore that your husband brought from the beach.
"He's not my husband," Frieda said sweetly. We are a little crazy, sometimes a lot, but not that much. We are crazy prudent.
"Excuse me," the girl said, and for the first time she seemed puzzled. Frieda continued still and weaving; he had no yellow teeth; he accepted the girl's presence as an ancient and natural event. He spoke of the needles and branches that covered the roof of the house and did not let the rainwater run. He said, vaguely, that someone would have to climb over to clean up.
After having tea we went to the beach. There were no fishermen getting ready to go out; the huge black boats rocked tied up. We talked about the time and the forced places that the three of us had visited alone, at different times. When I saw Juanina turn green, I looked at Frieda and we went back to the house.
Frieda knitted in silence, I arranged logs on the stove even though it was barely cold. We both heard the thunder of a receding storm and the noises of the girl vomiting in the bathroom.
"Is he going to sleep with you?" Frieda asked nonchalantly. He continued weaving. I knew her.
—I thought I would lower the horsehair mattress for her and make her a bed near the fire. But it can be a lot of work. I can sleep with her or with you or in the kennel, if you have a dog. As you like. The house is yours, the little girl is yours, I am yours.
—If you're going to sleep with her, even though she vomits on her wedding night, then it's about true love. I remember you always shot me when I was sick, when I started a cold.
—No, unfortunately. It is not love. I just want to make a portrait of him, a note at least. The rest is yours, if you are interested.
—You always fired from the disease. Of course not for fear of contagion. Simply disgusted. But what will be preferable? Lower the mattress, make her a little virgin's bedroom or smell her all night long —and she continued tirelessly weaving the greenish wool.
—I wouldn't mind smelling her. Everything can be useful. But if you want the right pernada for your nose...
"You can go to hell," and she kept knitting.
"I told you I just wanted to paint that head. The girl has a bus within an hour and I need to sleep.
I rummaged in his pockets and took out the rest of the money I had stolen from him. I put it on the table.
—When you want, give him the money and let him go.
"Aren't you going to lower the mattress?
—No, I'm tired. I want to sleep for a whole month.
"I'm sure," Frieda said, and went to bang on the bathroom door, to whisper with Juanina. Then he came back to the chair and looked at me in silence for a while. The stupidest or the best, ”he said with his old half smile.
We heard the last incredulous thunders of the storm, the spaced strokes of water on the walls.
"Or both," he added. It would be useless to ask you if you remember a time when you wanted to paint my profile. Ah, it was mine and no other. But don't bother, I'm sure you really wanted it.
—I did it more than six times, I'm sure.
—More than ten. I can swear to it. She put down the fabric and leafed through a book. I don't know if they were good or bad. They say yes, they say no and I don't understand. But listen to me calmly, as I hardened myself to pose with a stupid face, the only thing that mattered to me was something else.
—Yes, you know.
—But not what you're thinking. You really only think about that and the painting.
He got up and carefully placed the fabric on the back of the chair, holding the book in one hand, one finger buried in the sheets. He seemed happy and at peace, looking at the fire now, he was younger.
"I'm going to sleep upstairs and alone." Despite the tiredness and the sleep, I am sure that you will take care of everything. Now the little girl is taking a bath and there are deodorant and antiseptic perfumes on the dressing table. After all, I owe you a lot of things, even if I don't worry about paying them or not. Much more than you can guess or guess. Don't worry about the money or the smell. I wake her up early tomorrow.
He went to the closet and brought me a bottle of cane and a siphon. Surrounded by the rain, I heard the noise of the shoes rising and the noise of the water in the bathtub.
But at twelve o'clock the next day, without a watch, insured by the heat and the sunspot on the floor, Juanina was next to me, in the bed that I had improvised, sleeping naked and face down. The curve that your waist makes and the short line of hair between the buttocks that you cannot see. I slipped so as not to wake her, I took off my sleep and the cane with the thick jet of the shower.
Frieda was knitting on the deck chair, now in shorts, although disguised in a women's baroque blouse, with dark glasses, but moved to the southern part of the house, facing the river they called the sea. I carried in my hand a glass of milk, exactly embedded in the middle of the whiteness of the day. He greeted me with a smile and we froze, not looking at each other or speaking.
They threw a folded newspaper over the fence. I read the titles: it seemed that yesterday no student had been murdered, no police officer, no one had been kidnapped. I handed him the journal.
"Were you happy last night? He asked.
—Yes, not much, you don't know, he fell asleep right away. I think she's really sick.
—It will be your old age, Medina. But I listened and I swear you saw God's face.
"I'm not entirely sure. There are so many little gods. Do you need to tile? I don't know what or for whom; but you need to tile. I understand; complete the picture. I also understand why the girl is still sleeping, why you didn't wake her up early, why you didn't give her money to get her out of your life. Forever clear.
He straightened his body and let the fabric slide down to the windblown grass. I wasn't angry.
"Medina," he said, "you can think what you want." You might even think that after all the rest of the money you stole from me is still mine. I thought I felt sorry for her, that it was impossible for me to let her go sick.
Now he was slowly copying her sad and forgiving grin.
—But there is another alternative. There is no use for you to hear it, it is a part of the truth.
"Come on," I said as I made a ball with the journal empty of violence; the heat and hunger were bearable.
—Go. I hope you have bathed. While your smelly babe starts to fidget in bed and doesn't even know where she is. But you must have a habit. The truth, the part I'm going to tell you now, is very short.
—Thank you.
—I woke up at six and went to the beach. I don't know when I decided to let her sleep until she died, lay you out, hide the money and continue knitting a coat for a child with three legs. Knit until something unforeseen happens, unpredictable by me.
He got up laughing and after a while I heard the barbed-wire door to the kitchen knock. I lay down on the grass looking at the white curve of the approaching waves. So I was dripping with happiness in the sun and I wouldn't have a bloody Eurodollar for twenty or thirty days and the pregnant little girl was just hoping to get money out of a hypothetical aunt to give to a fat, bloody, understanding midwife to to remove, in turn, the fetus comecalcium.
He was almost naked on the grass, numb with weakness, doubting the existence of the aunt or imagining her alternately skinny, fat, mourning, stiff, wrapped in fabrics of sour and angry colors, wide sleeves with lace, dry again, the short hands paralyzed by the weight of the rings and a large solid gold cross half lost between the height of the breasts.
And if we were left without aunt, it was not impossible to get the necessary money by painting the portrait of the girl (if she agreed to be bored immobile, if I was able to do it). On the same beach, a couple of kilometers to the east, Carve Blanco lived, alone, drunk, with his collection of Gregorian records - for him the music had stopped and died there, thirteen hundred years before the sunny morning when I I was pondering inconsequentially about the introduction of a little air into Juanina's uterus, about the strange night before, when she said, as if paying a price: "Do whatever you want to me, but do it soon because I'm dying of sleep," and I did it.
Meditating on Frieda's three or four probable reactions and my counterattacks that had to be swift and resolute.
Carve Blanco, I was sure, would pay, robbing me, enough. It was not the first time he had signed me checks for paintings, notes, or what he insisted on calling gouaches . He was very rich, but he only got drunk on a harsh wine that Cristiani sold and that he himself carried on foot, mid-afternoon on Saturdays, in ten-liter demijohns, from the sad bowling alley to his glass-walled house, washed away and crooked, crossing indifferently and wearing sandals. Winter or summer, barely signaling disdain, ensuring their lonely nights and early mornings of unripe wine, of Gregorian chants, of useless and tangled memories, of delirious futures.
He didn't really love anyone and this gave him a respectable impartiality. Apart from the recorded songs and the occasional stray dog, he was interested in painting, the details of a painting that resembled what he had wanted to do, so many years ago, and that now only formed, in moments of lucidity, a paste of failure that rarely hurt.
He did not like women or men who had passed adolescence. But he could recognize a good painting just by looking at it sideways, with contempt, with crossed eyes. And if they coincided with the misty nostalgia of what he had tried to do, it was possible that he would criticize, it was possible that he would haggle with cruelty and mockery to end up buying, signing the check. He never kept money at home.
To bless her, to give her warmth and dexterity, I hid between the shorts and the skin of her belly the right hand, the one that was to paint Juanina's head. The flies and some gadfly woke me up. The hand was capable and softened.
But this other principle was difficult. I found them in the cement cube that Frieda and our friends called living. They had eaten lunch without inviting me; their bodies were abandoned, Frieda in an armchair, Juanina on three orange cushions. They were waiting for the coffee to be made in the stubby glass container and meanwhile they lied to each other with sympathetic smiles, tapping their hands; capable of smuggling across any border, loving lifelong friends, united definitely, without need to say so, against the ingratitude of the world, against the evil race of men.
I accepted the cup that Frieda pushed on the table, lit the pipe on my hunger and lay for a while against the wall, effortlessly enduring the mess, the female cryptology with which they both simulated and perhaps managed to be alone. I felt awake and amused, filled with the peace and restlessness and moodiness and joy that it takes to paint well. I waited for a pause between two old falsehoods:
"I just found out that the three of us need money." Frieda's money order is late than usual and I can't keep stealing the money she doesn't have.
The word money made them discover me; but they looked at me disinterestedly.
—Carve Blanco, our private anchorite, must be sick of seeing Frieda's face, her round little tits, some of her asses. So amazing for its size. Also, as we know, the anchorite should not be overly inspired. Someday he will sell them at a profit and for that he bought them. Nothing great, but there is a trade and he knows it. I almost always failed with landscapes and still lifes. It must be for the best, but he's not interested in them. The walls of his house can no longer support Friedas, front, side, three-quarter. The house is very beautiful but very stupid. We need money, we need a novelty for the guy to buy.
"I see," Frieda said. A girlish nude would be refreshing.
"Money," I repeated. Not less than a thousand Eurodollars, not less than five hundred. You must know how much are the abortions essential for a family budget. And not. No nudity. A sailor's knitwear, a rubber fisherman's hat. That's the best.
"What if I don't want to?" Juanina said. If I don't let myself do the portrait?
So I went to work that very night. Juanina in the wide-brimmed straw hat Cristiani had lent me and a Frieda sweater. The girl endured the oblique light of a floor lamp that almost touched her; Frieda wove the blanket for the Saint Bernard, without speaking, barely muttering the numbers on the fabric, and whispering one of her favorite songs: "Stormy Weather"; I, slow and sure, inventor and owner of chiaroscuro. But the girl kept her head impassive and defiant, her eyes straight, her eyebrows red and united; the immobile head away from us, from the room, isolated in the height of its own and independent solitude, like a newborn, just dead.
And I was surprised - I write it down so as not to forget it, since I never saw it again - that Juanina's face, minutes after I started painting the portrait, began to be covered with a frontal mist that would disappear if I gave it an order, an advice, out loud. His face and his soul softened and elusive, so close and sunk in the mist, softened and almost absent, tenaciously maintaining his silent dialogue with the invisible enemy, with angels who persisted in not appearing, in not being.
And they continued to advance, without knowing, going through the wine of the first mass, the struggle for daily bread, ignorance and folly.
They advanced, happy, distracted, seldom doubting; so innocent, relaxed or stiff, towards the final hole and the last word. So sure, common, quiet, reciters, morons.
The hole had been waiting for them with no real hope or interest. They walked amused; some leaned on others; some were still lonely and smiling, talking to themselves and in low voices. In general, they discussed plans and spoke of the future and the future of their children and the small and great revolutions that they held in books stuck in their armpits. Some waved their arms as they rambled on memories of lovers and withered flowers bearing the same name.
Frieda was not interested in the progress of the painting. It was enough for him to know that the ocher and blue with which I licked the fabric came from my old knobs, that it was not necessary to contribute his money.
Perhaps only once he commented, yawning, a cold morning and with a lot of cheap wine:
"Are you sure Carve is going to buy you that?" It looks like a Modigliani from the times when the Italian learned to clean brushes. Or the times when he was already dead and almost rotten. I always suspected that that was going to turn out, since I saw her, since you brought her to me to feed her and cure her guts with talipectin. It looks a bit like her, it's true. It looks like anything weird and dirty that suddenly occurred to you. But the world is saturated with Modiglianis. Why add one more to it?
—Maybe. I couldn't portray her otherwise.
Actually, we were in no rush. A pregnancy of fifteen or twenty days is very young. Frieda gave us everything, shelter and food, coffee and bad wines in demijohns, organized short walks on the beach. Despite all the boasting of the spring sky, the warmth had not yet arrived or was coming to go.
But I was working furiously in the afternoons on the three nude drawings - it had to be three - and on the portrait, the head with a dislocated neck, the flat hair with the wide yellowish line that divided it.
Frieda was sneaking up on them. I thought that, despite everything, he liked them, and I began to fear the fire and the knife. We both knew that it was not good to talk about the paintings before they were finished and, perhaps, sold. Before I got tired of seeing and painting Juanina, I got Carve's money, cheated them without excess, and invented a random trip to leave the beach. I came to think that they would find a way to live together without bothering each other.
So when the first part of my performance was finished - the head and the spots that three naked women were intended to form - I asked Frieda if she wanted to visit Carve and figure out how much interest she was willing to put in an interview nocturnal. She accepted, submissive and cheerful, anticipating failure.
Upon returning, Frieda enthusiastically reported:
—He said yes, because it is not good to let the grass grow on the path of friendship, "little path," he said. But there were many demijohns and it was barely five in the afternoon and no one can imagine what mood he will have tomorrow at nine, which is the appointed time, which means that he does not intend to feed us, because he was always frugal for others. And there was another thing. Sorting plates, supporting the Gregorian chants without showing fatigue, or pretending that he ordered and supported, Heriberto leaned over the large table. And Heriberto always liked you, and I think that there will be no sale if you do n't show yourself very nice to him. Sacrifice is necessary when it comes to a noble cause. For my part, I am not going to miss the death of a hundred cows that I sense as the end of the night. The sad thing is that this poor innocent, your little spring outfit, has to witness such horrors that she will find hidden kisses from schoolboys compared to her aunt's five o'clock teas. And now I remember that we do not know if the relative is single, widowed, married or matchmaking.
The posing sessions with Juanina almost always ended in bed. On a mattress, at least new, almost soft, that Frieda had thrown for us on the ground floor. Both in the lies and in the roars and in the silences a numerous and strange past could be perceived. In any case, it seemed that no one had enjoyed the time educating her. Or she didn't enjoy her time when she was with me.
Once a week I would climb in the shade to Frieda's room. There the old ways were recovered, the round forms of love were recovered and I slept in peace.
I remember having calculated fifteen days of work and discipline to finish the three proposed fabrics. The head had to be as close as possible to Juanina. The two nudes, the stains on a pure white, obsessive to a mirage, had to be ambiguous.
He was staring at the scrawny body, forcing her to open or close. She obeyed with her childish smile, distracted, so unconcerned about me, about the probable existence of the world. The next day it was necessary to ask him to hide the revenge, the mockery, the smile again. I found her skinnier and more vulnerable every day. Sometimes he would straighten up to light a cigarette, without warning.
—Good pair of bastards are you. How did you get together?
What he gave, offered, lent, was just the thrilling leanness of the body; and it could be clothed, separated from me and forever.
So, when she smoked sitting on any uncomfortable kitchen bench, she preferred them, she dragged them by hooking them with one foot, she talked about her aunt with so many variations, so many hatreds and tenderness, so many contradictory descriptions that I was almost certain that she had none and that this absence was sad for her.
I could guess that of the triplet, the least unhappy was Frieda. I knew nothing credible about the girl and for me life was not a happiness or a misfortune; it was the everyday thing, what came or not. But it seems necessary that the word happiness has meaning and that numerous idiots, without premonitions or terrifying pauses, threw themselves upside down, abandoned to it.
Frieda, for example and without dedication, seemed sure of her life and her victory. Years problem. Every night, when I was in bed with Juanina, she would bring us hot water bottles, when it snaked the heat would arrive shortly after dawn - she never knocked on the door, she was never worried about what might surprise her - and she would tell us about the weather, in a short future, of fishing incidents. I would spy on her smile and always see that she did not care what she was saying and that she was patiently amused at each maternal movement. I was looking at the ceiling, Juanina was chasing her in silence, with hatred and respect.
Did Frieda ever ask:
"Did you work a lot on the squares today?
We didn't answer him. But also once, perhaps the last time, Juanina was right with her most childish and sleepy voice to answer:
—It made me spin naked, cold, and both of us reluctantly. Smoking the stinky pipe. He's a pig, pardon the word. Then he painted with hatred for a while and insulted himself at every brush. Then we did chiquichiqui until morning, ma'am. With forgiveness of the word.
The head, the profile, the line of the nose, began to get as abundant as when you sit on a bench in a plaza and surround yourself with grains to attract pigeons.
As for the ambivalent nudes - two - the story was different. With my head I could recover and celebrate my old, eternal, newly arrived wisdom. With the hints of nudes, I once again felt a repeated lie: that I was someone else, that I painted differently and better. But here we are not dealing with pictures; just a book, a story. The delivery and explanation are not worth it.
I looked at the first nude for many hours, I knew it was made for me, by a miracle, for lack of understanding and that I would not sell it to anyone. Or almost.
I slept until noon, I wrapped the painting, the notes and the nudes that could be exposed without great danger, without it mattering, to the stupidity of men. In the afternoon I lay in the sun and slept with a bottle of wine. He didn't want to talk to women. Then I walked along the shoreline, like a superstitious roulette player, playing the game called "the ideal wave may appear at any moment and perhaps I will understand it." It was essential to look at the water without interest, to walk distracted.
The hunger for lunch started when I came back from my failure and found Carve sitting in front of his house on one of those pieces of sand that Cristiani called a terrace. He was drinking wine and with him it was difficult to tell if he was drunk or not; or if he could fluctuate between lucidity and clumsiness. I asked him for a glass of wine while he told me:
—You never show yourself.
—I walk all day on the beach. You can see me whenever you want from any of the ten windows in your house.
—They are always closed. The records and me. Nothing else. I don't need more.
I thought about the liters of wine and the Heriberto on duty. I did not comment.
—I think Frieda arranged a meeting here tomorrow night.
He put a pack of cigarettes on the table.
—It's true; I didn't know you were around here, ”he said after handing me the lighter. Although one never guesses where you are. You can't even guess it. ”He took another drink. with other people it happens to me. You can have lunch with me, you can stay here, no matter how long. But of what he has under his arm, nothing; I don't have money, I don't think and I can't buy.
I lit the pipe and watched the compass of the dolphin pairs.
"I have no money," he repeated.
"You really never had money," I said. Some thousand pesos sometime. I just brought this for you to see, before one of us dies. It would be a shame. Besides, I only paint waves and don't sell them.
Sitting on the steps I smelled him frying ham and eggs. I was looking at the sea, waiting for the impossible wave, the folder under my feet. Every once in a while, Carve would come sweaty to take a drink from the demijohn and offer me another.
"No," I said, looking at the dolphins, in an indifferent voice. I never drink before nightfall.
"On occasion, though," he said. Or is it a new procedure for selling paintings?
—It is possible; occasionally. But, I remember, there were women, this world was different. I didn't come to sell you anything; I came to show. After lunch; There's time. —I raised the demijohn to wet my lips, out of courtesy, to prevent him from being, on that beach, a poor lonely drunkard at noon; I sank the cork and muttered sadly: "I only sell waves and the wave that I would like, or not, to sell you has not been painted yet." I couldn't even see her, not even a false wave broke on the shore that could represent her, tell me gossip, anticipate the truth.
"So early and already drunk," he said happily; went back into the house. But there were no waves like that and I couldn't believe in their absence enough to start painting them. It was not a Pacific wave, it was not a Japanese wave; let this be clarified. It may not even deserve my signature at the bottom. It was a blurry wave, topped with a dirty white (add, for modesty, as another put it) opal: filthy mixture of urine, busted eyes. Elements: bandages with blood and pus, but already faded; corks with erased marks; gargajos that could be mistaken for clams; epileptic saliva, blunt pieces of plaster, remnants of vomit, edges of old and annoying furniture, semi-undone sanitary napkins — but, any beach of ours: all absorbed by the wave and forming its foam, its height, its respectable doubtful whiteness.
I watched, far away, the rise and fall of the dolphins. I had many things to complete my ideal wave; but he would die without seeing her. I wet my tongue with the demijohn again and left it in the sun.
We ate ham with eggs while we talked about many things and people.
"You're afraid of Gregorian chant," Carve said. And yet it is the beginning and the end. Maybe he is afraid of that. As the Goncourts say, people get subtle, smart, when shit starts to form in their guts. That is why I speak of the Gregorian chant.
"It may be true," I said, "I often thought the same thing. And after that? But I have a mania for painting. Let it burst, be reservoir, all the music in Gregorian chant. I paint.
"I wage war," he said, laughing, lighting a cigarette. Well, you walked blocks to show me the folder.
—Yes, but the food still hasn't had the same effect on me. I am not spiritual. Pass me, please, the demijohn.
It must have been close to five when I pretended to be drunk, I pulled the folder from the bottom of the table and flew it to the couch.
—You can rub your nose as long as you like. Nothing begins or ends there. It is not Gregorian chant.
I went outside, to the steps, to the beach; I didn't want many things, but I just thought that an abortion cost five hundred piastres.
After half an hour he came to sit next to me, on the steps, looking like me at the water. Everything was green and silver fish leaped into the air and sank again. Almost desperate I thought of wreck for my wave. Perhaps we have spent in the sun, in the air that was beginning to cool, about an hour in silence. When it began to get dark, he touched his mustache and said, without enthusiasm:
—How much?
—All?
—I would put some things aside.
I started laughing heartily and quietly.
"Stand aside?" Nerd; all or nothing. All for a thousand maravedíes.
"You're crazy," he commented sadly.
—A long time ago. If he weren't crazy, I wouldn't offer, I wouldn't give him the folder for a thousand. I need the money. Did you look at the heads and the noses of the heads?
—Very good. I looked at that and other things.
—I didn't do other things. Neither for you nor for me. There are only cardboard and cardboard.
He let a whole cigarette go by for a while.
"Is he living at Frieda's?" He asked.
—Yes, just for a while.
Then I discovered the pairs of dolphins, sinking and rising, rhythmic, without altering their gait.
I went in ignoring them and knelt in front of the stove. Frieda continued to knit an endless brown-green pullover for an unborn giant; Juanina was biting her nails and had nothing of happiness or hope. I let the silence last and then said:
—We have the money. Or we will have it.
"They have," Frieda replied; she corrected the fabric before asking in a sweet voice, her eyes downcast, "When are they leaving?" Did you get what you wanted?
—Nothing more than that. "I was sure they were talking about me until they heard me arrive." I think I'll get it tomorrow. Let's go. Juanina to live with her aunt, I to the workshop. I have to invent something useless.
Frieda didn't speak and kept knitting the monstrous pullover that wasn't for me.
Juanina said:
—I was there this afternoon, I had no choice but to stay on the beach. The fishermen were there. We leave tomorrow at five.
Frieda sipped the cane and showed the mystery smile again as she knitted the endless pullover, the coat that no man could wear.
Juanina took half a glass in one gulp; I waited for the cough to go away, the burning in his chest.
"What? He asked later, aloud.
We did not reply. Frieda kept weaving with her sweet and wise smile; I was looking at the rest of a wood taken from the fire. Juanina swallowed the half that was left in her glass and leaned back to laugh. We ignored him. He finally said:
"I'm cold. Who brings me the bag to bed?
We are not taking it. Dawn was beginning and I had obtained from her everything I had wanted and I knew that she had a habit and allowed herself to be done out of hope, out of indifference.
"Does it bother you that I go out with the fishermen?" -I ask-. Just say no, shake your head.
—But I don't think you really want to. "I lit a cigarette and thought I was up for the whole morning.
—If there's no aunt, I'll kill you. Today you can do whatever you want because it is a desperate love, even if you have not realized it. But last night we were happy, I went.
He straightened up suddenly and kissed my forehead. He was searching for the warm clothes in the dirty light. He left without making a sound. I lit another cigarette and went back to sleep after a while.
(He was laughing without mockery; he simply did not believe. But since I was maddened with love for her and besides, I did not care about her, I could dream of her in the gray morning, advancing to the water's edge, small, shrunken and cold, looking for the fishermen, seeking to hurt the world and, perhaps, incidentally also me, asleep, absent, clothed, unable to love her as she had imagined love.)
At nine o'clock at night the moon stretched out our three shadows that wavered, stumbling, going up and down the tricky dunes. To the east the hardened beat of the stars. I carried the roll of Juanina's epicene nude and Frieda carried the drawings, the more or less happy notes on her neckline. The girl ran, rolled in the sand, preceded us or let us pass. We enter the light of Carve's veranda: a petroleum lantern hanging from a long iron, an ancient octagonal lantern.
The first to come out and say hello was Heriberto; seemed to tease gently, seemed to know and anticipate us the rest of the night:
—We were waiting for you.
"It's nine o'clock," I said, as the women shook his hand; I pushed them in, diverted them to the big chair where Carve moved a pencil over large sheets of rough paper. The demijohn beside him, on the floor. Five glasses on the table, two flushed to the brim.
"Punctuality is the courtesy of idiots," Carve said. Those who have nothing in their minds other than the memory of the appointment. I can't, I'm always late. Wait for me.
He wasn't drunk yet; just the voice with cuddly highs, just the slow movements of the hands, now drawing in the air, the pencil touching the lips like a cigarette.
"Heriberto," Carve said. Fill the glasses.
The boy lifted the nearly full demijohn with one arm and served, first Carve, then the women. When he handed me my glass he winked.
"Ah," he said. You drink it watered down.
I followed him into the kitchen, full of empty bottles. He reached down at the sink and came up with a bottle of Haig, mediated.
—Have yourself a quick drink. That wine is for the poor and drunk.
I took a long, slow drink and handed the bottle back, which quickly disappeared and noisily, colliding with other glasses.
The women had spread the nude and the drawings on the table; I saw Carve hurriedly put on his glasses and lift his head to look at the ceiling. Then he said:
—The painting. Hold it upright.
It was done; an angle for each woman's hand; he stepped back and put his glasses back on.
"Same old merchandise," he said, smiling.
"Almost," I said. But keep looking. I never did something like that. Maybe it's not good or you don't like it. But it's different from all of the above and I couldn't explain why.
"Music," Carve said, always looking at the painting, and Heriberto crossed the room to put ten records of Gregorian chants in the set. It's okay. "He took off his glasses.
The two women rested and the painting rolled back onto the table.
I then had a glass full of the disgusting wine which was immediately mixed with the whiskey.
"You had time to look and review them yesterday," I said. Nothing begins or ends there. It is not Gregorian chant.
I went out to the veranda, walked down the steps to the sand, took off my shoes and went back and forth. He had to sell paintings and drawings, he had to think of five hundred florins for an aseptic abortion. There was phosphorescence in the sea and I came up with wrecks for my wave. With espadrilles in hand, I went back to the house.
The characters were the same, but the scene had changed. Heriberto was sitting in front of a kitchen knife stuck in the table. He drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Carve, pale and nervous, shook his head to look at me, as if seeing me for the first time, and said:
—Ah, it's you.
Frieda and Juanina were on a long unpolished bench, hugging, cheek to cheek. The four glasses on the table glowed their translucent red, filled with wine.
Carve looked at the table again and I saw a drop of blood on his ear; Frieda said, monotonous, bored:
—Enough. I'm leaving.
Immediately the scene quieted down again and for a few seconds it seemed to me that I was looking at a museum of wax figures.
"Give him the money," Heriberto ordered.
Carve, without turning around, extended his hand to me with the check for a thousand lei that he had already prepared.
"This for everything," he stated.
Heriberto made a repellent drunken laugh last. I picked up the check as Frieda and Juanina got up from the bank. Then I moved to look one last time at the painting of the naked girl.
Outside the moon had climbed and our shadows were small and trembling as we walked silently through the dunes.
When we were coming back from the beach, a windy and sandy afternoon woke up; we had our heads down and my breathing was somewhat stronger, anxious, than Juanina's. We arrived at the house and saw it closed, mute and blind; We saw our bags at the top of the entrance stairs; we saw, nailed to the door, the sign that said: SUMMER IS OVER , written in all the colors of my knobs; we saw, for the first time, a sitting reddish cat meowing its abandonment.
We open our suitcases to get dressed on the porch, behind the house, alone, invisible in front of the river. Juanina said a dirty word for every clothes she wore. I was watching a black cloud when the first drops fell.
"I'm sure that big whore knew it was going to rain," Juanina almost shouted as she resigned herself to looking for her yellow dog uniform and putting it on. And now?
—Now we go to the corner of the buses. But your money. They won't cash my check here. Did Frieda give you the address of the apartment?
Juanina put a smile on the rain.
—Sure. The address and a lodging offer.
—There are only two beds. He will think of kicking me out.
—I don't know. Or combine, ”he said.
—He must have fallen in love. It is possible.
—Women make me sick. And so much. The smell of a woman is enough to make me nauseous. "I knew I was lying.
"Did you tell him?
—There was no why.
Now we were at the corner of the buses, cut off from the world and its memories by a raging and cunning rain. Water was pouring into my eyes, into my mouth. The yellow dog defended himself with a shower cap.
—He offered it to me to rest after the abortion. If my aunt didn't agree to have me with her. Give me a peso.
I rummaged through the moisture in my pockets and separated a bill. She hid it in the water channel of the cleavage, her breasts hard and almost newborn, she laughed again.
"You already paid," she too spat water; I sold you my aunt.
—Thank you. I don't need, I don't buy.
—There isn't, never was an aunt. This is crap, this is the flood.
"That's how it started," I told him as I retired, motionless, to another area of cold and disenchantment.
He knew and asked:
"Does that lie bother you?" Okay. I was already a pure lie when you found me on the beach. And now you're going to give me two pesos. One for the bus.
I looked around and gave him a five bill.
"Does it reach you?" Enough?
"Leftover," he said, and now he was clearly laughing at me.
There was thunder, lightning, and lightning zigzag; the rain, proud, increased his strength, his rage. It hit my head in an imitation of a serene drop, it entered my nose.
I said, "It doesn't matter. It already happens. Summer storm, "and she corrected," Summer is over. " Without bitterness or mockery.
She pushed the suitcases with one foot and tried to wedge herself into the wall of a house where lights were being turned on. From his no man's land - we were alone on the corner - he told me:
—I already sold and you already bought, paying too much. You bought another lie, another truth. Calm and patience. There is no abortion, I was never pregnant. Or in condition, as the poor people say. The laundry job I had to do so Frieda wouldn't notice. Now a favor, maybe the last one. The first bus is mine. You go in the other. I want to be alone and think about so many things.
The first bus, his, had been showing yellow and red headlights in the rain.
I let her go and waited while I felt cheated and dying of love.
I can lie, but I don't want to do it here; Because it is a memory and any idiot can twist the wires of a memory, give it nice shapes, suitable colors, plant it on top of a piece of furniture or a chat.
I say I guessed the scene from the elevator, between the fourth and sixth floors, with the jacket on one shoulder, loosening my tie, back to the apartment that would be hotter than the street. Frieda would be, was, half naked on the couch in the living room, with a pile of German magazines lying on the floor and a bottle of gin, a glass, a bowl of ice stones on the small circular table. I had guessed it and it was as if Frieda passed the sentences neatly, the attitude that I thought confused in the elevator, it was as if that special form of the woman's bad mood could spread not only to surround her but to slide through the slots of the doors, digging victoriously into the nail holes that held pictures in the wood-covered walls.
I opened my shirt and let it fall; I filled the glass and plunged another misshapen cube of ice into it. As he drank, she began, slow and guttural, unaware that tonight, at least, she was doomed. From the open window entered meek, growing, the burning of dusk, still bright; opposite the ruined shed of the disappeared trams, the yellow grass of the soccer field, the still river crossed by a huge silver stain, a rhomboid boat of paralyzed fish. Sometimes, according to luck, the spot announced more heat for tomorrow; others, storm at dawn.
"One Sunday," he began. And I haven't seen you since Friday. What suffering since Friday. There are guys who have weird ideas about how to spend a Sunday afternoon. Today, for example, since lunch, locked up with that old husky who wants to convince you that the kid's moron is your son. Or has it already convinced you? They say that by doing blood tests you can tell. But the bad thing about the bulletin is that it is not even known if he is her son or if someone forgot to sweep it or if he borrowed it to get a salary and a birthday and Christmas Eve gift. Also, live with the boy in one room. Do they send him to the movies to lie down or roll around in front of him? The facts of life . It is your duty as a father, after all; someday he has to know how to do those things that he sees when he looks in the mirror.
He rested for a bit to drink from the bottle, bit into a piece of ice.
—But maybe not. Maybe you trotted along the shady sidewalks, your tongue out, looking like a dog for a broken wall, a door ajar, any crack to take the big leap and return to that Santa Maria that you invented with the help of the other vagrants.. Why don't you tell me the truth? Was he with the grubby or looking for the city?
It was repeated, I was already a little drunk; perhaps, when it got dark, she would be forced to go out and look for women. I finished my glass and went to the kitchen to get another one, some more ice. Then I sat in an armchair near the window; the gin and hate swirled in the balcony heat, increasing it.
"Nothing," I said. Sometimes I am afraid of loving you. Not tonight, of course. They are moments, like a chill, like a remorse; they pass right away. But it's terror, I swear. I don't know if I love you a little more or in a different way and mix that love with pity, believing that you are guilty of my misfortune. Terror because I'm sure I can kill you.
He made a noise with his nose and raised a magazine to cover his face. He continued drinking, smoking; sweat was dripping slowly and insolently. I heard the silence of the fat neighbors listening on the next balcony.
"If you thought I'm one of those who..." Frieda finally said. Did you charge at the agency?
—It's Sunday.
—Yesterday or the day before yesterday, asshole. Because there is no food and I don't have a weight.
Since Friday night I had been stumbling, as always, blinded and correct in the world of twins. But it was not one of those things that can be told to people, it was something that required living with a dog and smoking and thinking and shifting watched by the friendship without questions of the eyes of a dog. And maybe not even like this. And immediately, the heat persisted and it was, I forgot Frieda and the thirty-two version of her his litany and imagined telling a man a little more shameless, cynical and foolish, than myself, that my childhood had been the classic and in definitive frustrating childhood of the deprived child, deprived of dogs. And if the cretin insisted behind my back, I would say, I would have told the truth, I would have described the impossible dog - and that in the evening of gin, twins and Frieda seemed so necessary and capable of bringing me closer to the round happiness -, I would have talked with detail and conviction of a beast similar to me, condemned to be classified by laymen as a policeman, Belgian or German, it doesn't matter, with a bit of shepherd dog's blood and a suspicion, for the most intelligent or contemptuous, of a doberman, an animal ungrateful and of a single, exclusive happiness.
But I didn't have, we didn't have a dog, and Frieda increased:
—Did you get paid or not, guacho and breeder of guachos? The immortal cartoons for health services.
As he remembered, back in the Detachment, a midday confrontation between a gigantic scoundrel and his rickety colleague who twice advised the other: "And if you're scared, why don't you buy a dog?"
—Every day younger. I looked at him enviously. The toilets correspond to the day before. I collected them and the money ended up at the Morini, because you were sentimental and wanted to visit the ruins of the market, guess the window of the room, of the workshop where it can be said that I lived before you resolved to support me, almost, before we founded this society, association for small-scale criminal purposes. What I had to charge on Friday and I did not charge - I lied - was the drawing for the lactal bread, opus five hundred and thirteen. But I have some money. To eat enough, not to get you drunk, sorry. And it is not enough for you to telegraph to Santa María demanding the money order.
"Every day more scrubbed," she murmured almost appeased, thoughtful, giving me a smile.
I wiped my chest with the shirt again and sniffed it before tossing it lightly against his face. I lingered under the warm and mean shower, I was looking for clean clothes in Frieda's bedroom and I discovered on the carpet, almost hidden by the bed, a clock, the Girard-Perregaux that I had given Seoane a year ago, on some birthday his in that I decided to accept forever that he was my son or that he was not my son and that neither possibility mattered.
Already dressed and fresher, I returned to the living room and I was smoking and looking at her, determined not to talk to her about the clock, thinking about the unions with fixed time of the lovers, when one resorts to frequently spying the clock to slow down the time, to measure the minutes that passed during the plunge into one stroke and know that another can still be attempted. Perhaps Seoane was my son and had inherited that superstitious occurrence from me, perhaps the occurrence was universal, a rite practiced by all lovers that time cornered.
Now Frieda was naked, her face invisible by the magazine, her legs just barely apart. So, I thought, she knows, or believes much more than I do, that Seoane is my son; then he would like to seek me out to make love to him after the boy, perhaps almost immediately. Why, then, did the temptation not start as soon as I arrived, why did it give me time, with the stupid argument and the lying reproaches, to bathe and get dressed again. I thought that she was looking now, after the attack, which had been nothing more than a form of defense, that I did not lie down with her in the position imposed from the beginning, to move smiling with her eyes closed, to compare remembering, to increase her pleasure.
Then - I stopped looking at the tiny shudder that started her thighs - it was also possible that they had deliberately left the clock under the bed, that she had suggested it, that the false forgetting was invented by Seoane so that I would find out, to leave his defiant mark, his emblem of spite and revenge. Now the watch was in my pocket and I fingered the short, sweaty black viper with the gold head in the middle of the spine, as he pulled out cigars and the phone rang.
"Are we for this one?" I asked.
"Find out," he said without lowering the magazine. Maybe he's got dollars, maybe he's laden with a plate of food.
It was Quinteros's voice.
"I'm with Mr. Wright. Oh gloomy Sunday We are hungry, not a peso and the coach carries a bottle. Looking at his expression, I see as if the child were the fruit of sin and the parents, the alleged parents of the child, had thrown him out of the home and everything indicates that there will be storm, rain and cold. A matter of minutes and poor Wright, here by my arm, with his sex-stricken face and breasts overflowing with milk...
—Pathetic. Very good news. Frieda will be mad with joy and will start knitting. No thanks. She is like that, weaves and unweaves. One moment, please, I don't know if he's home.
Frieda had dropped the magazine and picked up the glass.
"Don't tell me anything," he said. The comedy duo Exiliados de Santa María. Another night of memories and boredom and I, so late, without having returned home and who knows where I am.
"As you wish. But I just had a bath and I'm dressed and I'm hungry. It's true: Quinteros and English. They have just gotten rich at the racecourse and they invite us to eat at that Diving restaurant that you like so much and I don't remember its name.
Frieda moved to sit on the couch, one hand raised to drink, the other to ask me to wait. He calculated the possibilities of the night, he measured the heat and the fatigue that Seoane had made him; postponing revenge and convoluted enjoyment did not mean a true postponement. She understood it by smiling sweetly at me, so powerful and confident, almost maternal, my dear.
—If you swear not to talk about the lost city...
—Quinteros? Still there? Yes, I found Frieda and she doesn't know how to thank them. So, as we said, on the Diving Yacht, in half an hour.
"In the Dive," Quinteros laughed; He wasn't drunk, he never was. No. The young lady can't ride a bus and you know what it's like to get a taxi in Lavanda on a holiday night. As difficult as getting money to pay for the trip.
Frieda had already gone to the bathroom and then I thought, it occurred to me, I was sure.
"Where are you?
—Alhambra. But actually we are not. We hardly use the phone. And it is better that you say soon where you invite us to eat because there are people who have the desire or physiological desire to talk on this same phone. They did not queue yet, perhaps out of respect for the moving social and sentimental situation in which circumstances placed Lady Wright. As I said, just look at her expression and the bottle wrapped in discreet paper pressed against her breast. The way not to move, to lean on and stand. There is something that sells it. Sorry. It says yes. No questions asked, tonight he says yes to everything. Well, it is the consequence of having said yes before, nine months and a week ago. Now with the girl in her arms. Sorry for the second time: he spent half an hour looking at a vernissage of Colt revolvers in Ferrando's windows. But I am not concerned and I beg you to do the same. He just watched with envy and pure artistic admiration. Steel blue gray and ascetic functional forms. Later I explain, you may know, you were born a painter. Last forgiveness: I think I remember that on such a different night Frieda was happy in a restaurant near this phone (no, there is no queue yet, but as you can see), a restaurant called Blue Grotto or any similar misfortune.
"Yes, Quinteros," I replied lazily. Of course I beg you to fuck off, for the memory. But it's okay. Blue Grotto and nostalgia for various homelands. Within half an hour. The same thing will happen again, I prophesy and you already knew it.
"No interest, believe me, see you later," Quinteros uttered, almost syllable, I imagined him shrugging as he hung up the phone.
Frieda had gotten out of the shower and now I could hear her clicking in the bedroom, moving hangers in the closet, pushing the smell of cleaning and perfume into the living room. I sat down again in front of the balcony and the storm, the first silent lightning bolts. I was drinking the cold and watery gin, sunk in the tender joy of waiting for her, of guessing her dress, her necklace, her bracelets. And again, amused, I thought, it occurred to me, I was sure that Frieda had hesitated to accept the false treat so as not to destroy with soap and water the physical traces produced by her meeting with Seoane and that she had resolved to offer and impose on me. The idea was not mine but Frieda's; it was almost unbelievable, almost grotesque, almost unpleasant. I was only appeased when I could find a word equivalent to almost all three: the word moisturizing .
In Lavanda or Santa María a Quinteros can be known by anyone, at any time, and I don't care because it is no more than sympathy and it will never change. But the case of Mr. Wright is different, I care, and a confused loyalty forces me to say what it was like for me years before a stormy Sunday night in a ubiquitous restaurant. I don't want him fat, graceless drunk, cunning, and filled with selfish mysteries. I learned to obey for so long that now, without knowing it, I can command the details.
It can be said two or three years ago, including and accepting the time lived in Lavanda, that it is nothing, today without yesterday or tomorrow, but whose passage I must accept out of obscure courtesy to others. I imagine Mr. Wright in a dark little street, twisted between fifths, miraculously respected or faithfully appreciated by the mayor on duty, a winding alley in the wealthy neighborhoods of Santa María; small and straight, dressed in string and with a panama hat, holding with the same hand the cane and the thin nickel chain that tied the restlessness of his dog Dick . On the left the stinking pipe. It had to have been in Santa Maria and in a sticky summer. Mr. Wright in his Indian attire, the smell of strong alcohol on his breath. Incoherently telling me a succession of mysterious robberies that had occurred in that same dusty street where we were sweating and standing, me in my greenish uniform, boots and cap with a visor.
"Mysterious, I tell you, because they never steal anything." Nothing worthwhile. They enter houses at night. I go out with my dog and look, Dick looks for clues. Not yet, not found.
Perhaps I had more friendship and trust with Quinteros than with Mr. Wright, perhaps I despised him more or loved him less. But between the well-dressed Quinteros, almost dapper, with flat brown hair and the transparent purity of his glasses, and the other fat man, dressed in dirty white and shrunken, sweaty and not disgusted by the drops that ran down his brow, by the short purplish nose, I chose the English. So as soon as we sat down and ordered the first courses and finished discussing, helped by the waiter, about wine brands, I chose Mr. Wright to invite him to come to the counter and offer him whiskey, knowing that he was going to say:
—You know. No. The smell. Cane.
—There is no Ombú cane.
—I know. We are not there. Anyway, forgive me, cane.
I raised my glass to touch my mouth. Why so precisely the word smell , this gringo. Quinteros is an artist of situations, a bit sadistic, suitably discreet and perverse, incapable of risking his dominance. How could English know the history of smell.
—Speaking of whiskey, talking of cane, what does smell do?
The round, sweaty and innocent face; the wet blue eyes weren't lying. An indecisive nostalgia, confusion, almost nothing more.
—What sweet pussy gets the nose between whiskey and cane. Even if it's not Ombú, ”I insisted softly, looking at him friendly.
" Cold , flu," he said slowly, hardly annoyed. A bad story, a barn on fire. The whiskey has no smell or taste to me anymore. Montreal history, very old, mounted police, redcoat. Oh, it can be called chief . In another story later sahib .
Now at peace and so grateful. Because he had always supposed for his mythical or just lying saga a title as beautiful as "Colonel Wright's red coat".
I chose it to fulfill what an invincible superstition forbade me to do in a direct, personal way, imposed on me a messenger, a separation between myself and the little infamy.
—Afterwards we can bring a bottle of cane to the table, if you want. Or wrap it up so you can take it away, or move at night from one cafeteria to another, a vice that you like so much, Frieda's mania. Pablito does not close all night. Two blocks, behind the Solís. I told Frieda that you were inviting, that you had made a lot of money at the racetrack. It's a favor, I can't go to Pablito's for a tie-pin story. What was the horse's name?
I put my old watch in his jacket pocket, warped, open as if waiting for him.
- Tie . He called for another rod and rolled his teary eyes. It's the name. In my life I had many, many dogs, and they were all the same dog and there was one called Tie .
"Don't sell it, Mr. Wright; just pawn it. When you see the brand you will understand that you can order several thousand. Pablito will understand too.
The coach left without staggering.
Later, when the Englishman and Frieda had their desserts, Quinteros coffee and I continued slowly with the wine, my chair on two legs leaning against the wall, I felt smiling and sad, filled with something that was not called remorse, so close to a feeling of complicity for having accepted the game and my move.
"So," Quinteros lied, already aware, "we decided to gamble on what little we had left. We knew he was not winning, it was impossible, an old man was not hard-legged. But if luck... You understand, Frieda, you have to understand us because we play as women.
"Always so repetitively a jerk," Frieda agreed patiently. The restaurant was beginning to fill up, theater or film ends, couples or quartets, some large family horror led by fat women, bald men a step back, children moving forward and backward.
—Exactly, Frieda; you understand us, ”Quinteros continued. He was fed a glass of wine; Relentless, I thought with amusement. All was lost when the revenge came, everything except the dirty bills that John Bull and I dug into our pockets. To put it in words that only a woman can truly understand, all but hope lost. Better yet: the battered will to hope against hope. Necktie couldn't win, you know, and so we decided to bet on Necktie , all on a winner. And see, my dear, how things are. Lancaster's pupil delivered, through thick and thin, an excellent demonstration. Note: a handicap over 1,400.
"Right, a mile or so," Mr. Glaeson interrupted, away from the edge of the table, between Quinteros and Frieda, almost out of us.
"A thousand four hundred and I don't move away," Quinteros insisted. As soon as the unbreakable ones were raised, the rider Lein came to the front with the son of Resplandor and it was useless for Negrito to put the knife. The stud Alequí always kept running firm and on the straight he took off from Black Pansy . From behind, because from the front it was not possible, the favorite Distant appeared as a refreshment with action to steal. But, Frieda, Marino's pupil had no luck because Corbata toughened up and kept a small advantage until the disc, but an advantage in the end.
"If they were a bit of a whore," Frieda pleaded, searching for cigarettes. How much did they earn? We could go anywhere else, this is filling up with Judas. I looked for his eyes, bright, they did not want to look at me; but the sudden voice that was approaching asthma couldn't lie to me. I looked for faces and bodies in the nearby tables without finding reasons.
No longer racing, they kept talking about anything and the sentences went and fell, mixing like distracted and ephemeral fingers. My loin at the angle, almost exactly one shoulder on each wall. I looked at my sadness, still healthy and friend. The first touches of sadness, new failure, and different loneliness had come to me, coming with the noise of a moth, a fire in the drizzle, a puppy scratching at a door. I presume. Because when I knew that the holiday party was over, those things were already in me and were building a secret disease that was mine and my owner, painless but sensitive, prologue, working the bones with patience. No trace: invisible dust.
He had concluded, who knows at what exact moment, the absurd adolescent of animal bliss and rebellion. He no to Santa Maria, to Brausen, to the masochism of imposed responsibilities.
I scratched now, useless and aged from an age that cannot be known, or returned without warning to my true age, here in Lavanda, the hostile limits of the city that I had left and lost; almost every night, in the variable hour of lucidity and cynicism, he stroked my cheeks with the dampness of the saliva that I had spat out so many months before and was now returned to me, without cheating or haggling.
Leaning on two legs of the chair and in the corner of the wall, he looked at the gestures, heard the interlocking drawings of the words on the table that eluded, by origin, all respectable meaning.
I smoked, smiling, I drank the rosé wine slowly, out of habit I told them yes, I affirmed the reason of the most needy. I was on the sidelines, mocking and melancholy, at peace, but I had to go in because Frieda looked at her wrist and said:
"Not a word, Medi?" As always, as sometimes, above the nonsense and the world.
"Of the nonsense that makes up the world," Quinteros corrected.
White and wrinkled, Mr. Wright brought his body closer to the table and leaned on his elbows. His face was more childish and round, sweating his greasy sweat resigned.
—There was a promise of cane, a bottle. Here or in a slightly more civilized place of heat. I pay, naturally, ”he said.
"It's midnight," Frieda continued. It is the hour that the boberío arrives. We go anywhere.
—Come on; choose, ”I agreed. But the voice hadn't fooled me, and the dull tone of asthma now sounded like a hardened patch.
And now it was undoubted because the new symptom hit the edge of the table with small persistent jumps: Frieda's long hand, always as white as dead, protected from all bad weather and the simple passage of time, dancing her Cossack red-clad, seemingly indefatigable, untamed and free.
I looked again and knew. He was two tables away to my left, huge, fat, young, in profile, sipping his wine amid short laughs that were cut off by unpredictable hysterical violence. He was in shirtsleeves, without a tie to the happiness of his double chin, his belly almost asleep on his thighs, listening to stories and unable to speak, his anxious breathing increasing the insolence and ordinariness of life.
That was normal, it had happened to us more than twice. I waited resolutely for Frieda's eyes, which invented reasons not to look at me: the blue tablecloth, the chianti bottles hanging and far away, the glitter of the papier mache that lined the walls of the blue grotto, the forced agility of the young men, the rigid hairstyles of the women. I waited motionless, as if waiting with my hand raised for the return of a fly until Frieda's eyes were forced to return and look at me saying yes with anguish, exaggerating despair and intelligence.
"Okay, everything is perfect and inevitable," I nodded. Now, while Fraulein goes to the dresser, we pay and discuss a likely rest of the night for her to consider.
Frieda picked up the wallet and walked slowly towards the little door adorned with a white A , invariably crossing the area of rudeness that surrounded the back of the young and fattened beast, the laughter and the smell unlikely of small degradation.
"The reed," Mr. Wright said.
"The best thing, I propose, it occurs to me, would be to go to the yot clab of Diving and wait for dawn on the jetty," Quinteros suggested.
—Anything, whatever she chooses and says, until she peels off us like wrapping paper without the need to throw it out.
"If there was cane," Mr. Wright began, correcting himself, "when there is cane I would tell you.
- Afghanistan or the strange case of the barren village, ”Quinteros agreed, making the ironed brown hair and glasses shine. But you, Medina, are a gentleman. You're right, we can offer Frieda the Dive. And if she doesn't want to, something else.
"Thank you," I told them. The money.
—Yes, of course. Always smiling, Mr. Wright reached into his pants and put the money from the watch on the table. I covered it with one hand and asked for the bill.
I was thinking, haunted, missing the pleasure of the slow and detailed memories, of Frieda involved in the mystery that protects the letter A in bars, restaurants, hospitals, train stations and mixed schools. He was thinking of Frieda, so immediately after Seoane. He thought weakly about disagreements and postponements, he thought enviously of a supposed Medina in love with Frieda and a Frieda in love with Medina. I thought that for them Frieda's caresses on the ladies' dressing table, sitting or standing, made in homage to the sexuality that had awakened the unusual filth of the fat young man, could have been for them, the hypothetical lovers, an act of union, a secret, inexplicable, powerful enrichment of love.
When Frieda came back swinging her wallet, she had brief appeasement in her face; the bill was paid with an excessive tip and the hot night rejuvenated with the usual insistence of the girls.
Anyone, in Lavender, on a summer night, can mislead a woman without using anything but distraction. It is enough to drive a car taking care of the dangers, looking with simulated fury and attentions towards the front, towards the sides of the intersections.
I don't know where we lost her. Lavender only offers a few kilometers of surface and on it, but not everywhere, they shine softly, until dawn, few businesses with alcohol and corners that lie inviting until dawn, the implacable clarity of the day.
Quinteros drove the Impala with such recklessness and joy that the car looked like hers or was definitely someone else's, in transit, smuggled from Brazil or Paraguay and with a dubious destination. Along with 61, Mr. Wright sucked on his nearly empty snoring pipe, proposing morgues and cemeteries.
In the back seat Frieda and I hugged each other like in the taxi that took us for the first time to a whorehouse called furnished in Lavanda. Slow and deliberate, embracing failures with poignant surprises, Mr. Wright increased his accent and offered impassively:
—Nice night. I would say nice night to watch, us, a little.
When we had to accept the loss of Frieda, we got out of the car and reproached ourselves warmly, with voices deepening the low notes until they became sweet soprano descents. Fed up with the farce, we mourned Frieda's disappearance; we agreed that we were not guilty and we entered a desperate bowling alley, there by La Mondiola, lit with green neon on the faces and hands, lying sympathetically from the sign: "Three Trees - Day and night".
We sat down and ordered the old buseca already reheated, with every hint of rottenness hidden with vinegar or special house sauce. Some of us were more drunk than the others, but it was unlikely and, besides, it doesn't matter. Mr. Wright finally had half a bottle of cane to gulp down and pop. Quinteros, flattened bright yellow hair, had asked for wine with faith, had insisted on vintage 1952 and it was difficult for me to accept him so stupid, to believe that he believed in Lavender wines. Getting to the tourist stupidity of insisting on dates for the poison label that he took with caution. I asked for mineral water and the bubbles fooled me effortlessly because they were stupid or tricky, clever even to sell me an impossible, non-existent territory without work.
Then, sometime then, I looked at the violet light in a small, tall window and hated Quinteros's flat yellow head just for the sake of it and leaned an elbow to annoy the Englishman.
—I speak to you, Quinteros, but it is the gringo who is really listening. Don't interrupt me, I ask. He knows and is silent; you think you know and just hint. Maybe I'm wrong and everything is the other way around. I do not care for now, for this dead night that they are taking to nothing, clarity, the shit of the day. You called me by phone, since prehistoric times by phone you called me by phone and gave me an approximate address, you suggested, without obligation, that the voice could be the clue.
—I didn't promise anything, I assumed and wanted to help. Without faith, of course, of course, naturally.
"The ear and the sixth," I said twice slowly, thinking I was the most drunk of the three, convincing myself that they were forced to believe it. The Englishman increased the brightness of his face and the wrinkling of his white, yellow, exaggerated, colonial suit, while he drank with joy and resignation the cane, which was not called Ombú. The almost motionless beast, sweaty and self-absorbed, he knew. Quinteros, modest and public relations, he knew, the same or something else. They were not going to say or denounce it, at least that night. So, bringing impossible chips to a folder scammed by thirty-seven zeros, I continued, grading the lie and the importance of failure:
—The ear and the sixth. It was, faithfully, as you had told me: a couple of old men, weeds, guitars that will never sound, other things, impossible objects hanging in the gloom. The synthesis is easy: I went, I was listening to them and I failed. Innocent or smarter than you. And I believing out of superstition, because of the proximity of the cemetery. It would give me a lot of work to explain, then we talk or I speak. Now I am, with permission, the little inquisitor and it seems clean, in a sense that you understand, that we discuss a while to define.
"I hear," Quinteros promised.
"Speaking," said the Englishman. You speak and I don't know why. I mean about the mysteries. Sometimes I like them, sometimes I don't, depending on how my liver is, I think.
I didn't even look at their faces; the bodies, so different, coincided in immobility and an old invulnerable reluctance. I filled my glass with wine with soda and smiled at the ceiling as I moved a flameless cigarette across the table.
—Perfect. "Always on the roof and without hope." There is a place, a thing, a thought called Santa Maria for all of us.
"Sorry," Quinteros said; she was looking at her polished nails, the silver-white lighter between her fingers. I'm not in a rush until eight in the morning. But the prologue seems long, repetitive, and may be unnecessary. You went, listened and you are sure you have failed.
—It's not that, you know perfectly, damn well that the little inquisitor doesn't want, for the moment, to talk about the little things. I walked tripping over traps or stepping on detours. I think there is a trap, I do not know where or armed by whom.
"I tried to help him," Quinteros said; English helped with the noise of the pipe.
—It's possible. It is true that I asked him to help me. But perhaps neither of us can tell what kind of help it was.
—You wanted to search. I don't.
—The cards face up. Frieda is missing, but we all have a place for her. Me first. Fled from Santa María in Manfredo's boat, fugitive without passport or permit. Kid Manfredo, just the man I had to stop or kill. Superior orders, smuggling crime. Me, Medina. And just when I find him in the lump ranch that had the opening covered by trees or shrubs that never grew on the edge of that river, at the moment when I am a hero, I advance alone and put my hand with the gun on the table first. that he can wield the revolver (jealous guardian of order stops dangerous smuggler), just then. Let's thing about it; But no comprehensible explanation for the morons, you and I, the longed-for Frieda, the people I know or can imagine never approached me that afternoon and never after. The memory I was spinning until it wasted, but I still want it. Just then, just when. You know the coast, you who are in no rush before eight in the morning. The part of the coast in the corner, where the sand falls at a peak and the depth of the water is fifteen meters at three steps and on summer nights it is filled with couples, naked boys, and the men play at skimming suicide so that they beg and get excited. But it was not a summer night, it was an autumn afternoon and the boy Manfredo was waiting for the end of the sun with his revolver and one of the bottles smuggled on the table. I recognized him as skinny, brown eyes, age forty, tanned white complexion, large receding black hair. The selfish and quiet look, the black sailor's sweater, the cap with an admiral's anchor.
"You screwed me, Commissioner," he said without acquainting me, without asking or accepting.
It was then, just when I could have it after months, red herrings, early mornings as cold as lost. I sat opposite him, always watching his malice, and covered his revolver with my hat. Think: he had three behind my back and I had ten with long guns on the hill with instructions to wait for the whistles or the first shot. If they can, Quinteros or Mr. Wright help me or try their luck with any nonsense. Maybe they do better than me; I still don't understand.
"Of course," Quinteros contributed patiently, "there were no shots. Not even whistles.
—No. There was nothing. No facts , Mr. Wright.
I repeated, knowing it was useless, old for months that exceeded a year, the little laugh, the glass of wine, the new cigarette, the slow caress in the tangled hair. The pause that I effortlessly defended.
"Nothing, you idiot brothers." Kid Manfredo raised a finger and a clean glass came from behind. He put a hand to his mouth and filled the two glasses now on the table with the contraband Martell, perhaps a counterfeit. When one collides with a mystery, sorry, with an act that he committed without understanding and time passes and understanding does not come, he seeks consolation or support in large and foreign events. Some time later, I came to repeat from memory the words of Saint Paul on the way. He filled the glasses without rudeness and we lifted them without sound or the suspicion of a touch, me with the three capangas on my back and the black Colt in my right hand paralyzed, the kid Manfredo with his body loosened in the chair by a sudden languor, her eyes half open simulating comfort and boredom. We drank and then it was just the moment, it was when. If I had in the world someone to swear to sincerely, I would swear, because you and everyone else and maybe I myself are people who need oaths. The kid, no. He didn't need to say or hear words; I expected — and perhaps not even that — movements and events.
"That's when," Quinteros recalled, without hurrying, taking a cigarette.
"That's when," I agreed. The only thing I can swear is that I was not afraid, that I knew that a wink from the kid could make my neck fly; but that this was not (the sun was going down in the fall) the most important thing.
"Yes," Quinteros said, with a smile so close to friendship. I don't want to interrupt, understand. For me, I would make him blind and payador, I would listen to him go through the sheds of the peonada through the rooms or estates of Lavanda reciting what happened with a guitar without a snare. But the kid Manfredo was a millionaire and continues to grow. The kid Manfredo works for the patriots who rule Santa María and Lavanda. If you came, excuse me, to give him the catch that autumn afternoon, it must have been because the thing was delivered.
—But the boat started.
—But there were no shots or whistles. And do not think that I forgot the declining sandy area, the division camouflaged in the little hill, the autumn influx of windless dusk. We added still lights in the water and, if I don't bother you, a feeling I'd be somewhere else. Playing, I would say, without correcting myself, that the old man was delivered for you. All this of yours, generously given and without objection. You can use it as you like. Mr. Wright, I suppose, agrees.
"Oh, all yours," said the Englishman, and sucked on the rekindled pipe until the cough cut off his laughter.
—All you want. But you do not understand Commissioner Medina and I do not understand the deceased. There were no more millions than the bottle of brandy and some pack of cigarettes. Accepting money would have been the same as staying in Santa María or continuing to be me. And I add, in case you care, and it doesn't matter whether you know it or not, whether you care or not, whether you get a salary at one or both information services, that kid Manfredo continues to browse. If we ever stumble, it's just a raised hand salute, a smile, and a look away. As you understand, that afternoon we knew we were friends; not much but forever.
—And you here, Frieda, all the rest. And he has stays here and there and bought, or almost, Latorre island to work more comfortably.
"I heard you say. And he doesn't take on trips, not counting the planes, only gringo cigarettes or gringo whiskey or gringo spare parts for anything. He also carries men and the men carry machine guns and grenades, and they go back and forth. You can tell everyone; the kid and I will continue to smile, counting the dead and the millions published by the military, sometimes reducing, exaggerating others. I know, there are lonely and starving. But none of the four. I include Frieda. All with money to earn, all with an ambition that, placed in the corresponding position, would smell bad; all with a love or his disgusting caricature, all with a future towards the worm. All with a reason, in short and if they understand. And it was just then and when, dear animals, without the possibility of ever knowing the cause, that I kept the idiocy of the pistol, I uncapped the revolver because it was beginning to feel cold and I wanted to warm my head. I felt suddenly, without relief or sadness, that I had lost my motive. I poured myself another glass and asked the kid Manfredo: "What time do we cross?".
By tacit commitment and a man's word, never formulated but coming upon me, I was obliged to tell the late Quinteros — who is now called Osuna or any kind of Jew threatened by the kings and a convert—, I was obliged to tell him about my second escape attempt.
Apart from the sixth, the possibility came, could come, from the ears, the voices, the words, the little truths and the big ignored lies.
I was never a gentleman with the late Quinteros, Osuna, great-grandson of a cartoonist friar who wandered around the city of Santiago de Chile. I never told him the story that begins and ends in a Lavender business, next to the Central Cemetery, where an ash and rose couple, an elderly couple entertained me with dominated and smiling hostility. Any. It was true, old house, marble stairs, he or she in a so-called writing room with windows to the river and one asks for violin strings, viola, cello, guitar, and on a whim, if one wanted, double bass. They and the huge, disconcerting photographs on the walls: oval, cuttlefish, three or four generations and some slip, fresher, grayish, with two tiny figures to the left of the unmistakable Cathedral of Santa María.
And them: mutual white hair, mare's legs for the almost dwarf old woman and secreting honey when her hand touches yours. He, tall, heavy, round and good, put in the background of his own free will, barely mocking, speaking to you with his voice of chosen bass do of the viola. It is evident that he trusts and she does not. That they started playing sex when they were fourteen years old and now they still love each other, and I almost say adoration, through the only permissible way at eighty years of age, sixty-five or sixty of life together, through irony, joke, the mockery, the inescapable tenderness.
Yes, Quinteros Osuna; They had been to Santa Maria, they had not left the Colony since the day their tiny, impossible and respectful Mayflower brought them in from Europe. They did not leave the Colony (if that means leaving) apart from the Sundays in which the first rented wheel and then their own took them to mass in the city. Which worried me for the first time: why, Catholics, had they fled their German and Protestant Switzerland?
But, anyway, there they were surrounded by dead and fresh branches, there they were, they were, despising me with meek joy, buzzing people, accepting to have lived in the Colony and denying the mystery of their second emigration any explanation that would overcome greed. They had nothing to do with me, with the supposed us, cursed, rebellious, eager to return.
—You couldn't live anymore.
Without needing to touch, happy in the assurance that no, no longer, they needed to unite the bodies to defend the sacred from any attempt of interference, sure that time, faith and the God to whom they prayed had erected - and not gratuitously — a fence that separated the secret from the filth. Almost immovable, inscrutable and seemingly forever.
Together and smiling, poor cheater Osuna, leaning without deliberation - or it was a deliberation as old as oblivion - so as not to let one of them, she or he, could slip, fall, into the always suicidal trap of death. She or he who loved each other from the age of fourteen, above and below all known words and all the words that a genius or a stuttering idiot could compose to express the unspeakable, to belittle and stain that purity of sixty-five years.
In the prologue to an unbelievable time, I almost uttered the ineffable name - Gurisa - in front of Frieda who was painting all twenty nails. One of his hobbies.
"What became of Olga," I asked in a distracted voice, "what became of Juanina.
Frieda looked at me, almost smiling, blew her fingers.
—Juanina comes sometimes. Always so rude and mysterious. I don't know anything about Olga. He called once or twice and you weren't there. Or he called and neither was I.
I appreciated the mystery of Juanina because I had cashed Carve's check. Nobody knew, nobody asked. I remembered that they had begun to demolish the Old Market and I decided to go and look at the state of my workshop, see what things deserved and could be rescued.
First I saw the letter on the ground and immediately I was stunned, buried in the noise of the collapse. Peaks stinging above my head, distant peaks —in the south of the market—, the blows of the enormous ball of steel and lead flipping stubborn façade, cornices, partitions. But the dust had not reached my room and the letter said:
I don't know how long I've been looking for you by calling the fagot's house and nothing. I don't know if you are here or if you are alive. Who knows if she hides you from me, she is very capable although she was different. Before everything falls apart, call me at the office after five and say that you are my brother because now they have taken control of everything. I have many brothers. Bye handsome. Olgurisa .
Half a month or twenty days we lived in bed and the sky was falling pulverized in the room; We would go out to eat and when Gurisa tried to sleep I tried to paint, with less faith every day, indifferent to the noises of the destruction of the market, but attentive to my inner apathy, to the disobedience of my hands, to the errors of my eyes. There was no electricity anymore, we bought a stinking kerosene lantern and the fearsome blows of the huge metal ball were coming every day.
Until one morning three of us went to the workshop room and the intruder said:
—So they didn't find out. This falls apart and we would have to pay for them as if they were new. If you like, I'll call the fire department.
For better luck we were asleep, separated but naked. Behind the usual coarseness of the guy was the clear day framed by the complicated geometry of the broken wall. The great killing ball of the Lord was spinning slowly on a blue background already tinged with autumn.
Indifferent to the man's greasy presence and his phrases of mockery and dominance, I dressed slowly, made the shoulder holster dance in the air with the pistol stolen from Brausen, took out a large bill and held it up by one end.
—Shut up and go. Or I swear to you that tomorrow you don't work here anymore.
He hesitated and stopped smiling; He no longer spoke, he searched my eyes. I had met many such rabble in the Santa Maria Detachment. My new clothes or the gun or my bluff made him calmly hand his money and he walked away into the incomprehensible drawing of the broken wall.
Gurisa was totally hidden by a patch of sheet and blanket. I told him to get dressed to go to the restaurant. I rummaged through the paint rags and turpentine until I found the money ball.
"But see if she's cursed," Gurisa insisted in the tired taxi. I don't care if he likes women. But do not be envious and do not believe that it is your owner. But you consent to it. Every time I was looking for you, in the apartment, on the beach, in the market, every time I got confused, I said I didn't know anything about you. That I haven't seen you in months. And now you tell me that it was all a lie.
We had entered the silence of a dark street. The driver saw, as I did, that a diagonal wooden bar showed us a negative. But with a faith not shared with anyone, he sounded three honks, waited a useless moment and said again:
—Let's go to Nostra's or we'll get out.
"To Nostra," I replied. As if he had said Kuwait or the Falklands.
The failures had turned on Gurisa, they filled me with resentment. I said:
—I have a pet and it's the only hope. If you put it on a skinny finger. "It was a lead ring.
I had already said no. But it was being in limbo, with heaven suspended in heaven and hell with closed intercourse. And time and coats passed. Finally, at some imprecise moment, after rejecting with disgust, with a profile of mortal and unforgivable offense, intermittently cut out by the sad light of the lanterns, he accepted the ring and said:
—Shit. Another whore.
The magical pet that he had offered her, loaded with a Judas Tadeo and a San Pancracio, the medals joined by a red thread, was a gift from Juanina.
"It never failed me," I said.
And while she, anxious and resigned, rubbed the ring against her visible cheek, we passed three complete houses, three furnished, three places of fornication and short happiness.
Until she, gaping and sick, confessed:
—Tell the driver we're going to Carreño's. Tell him that you are a friend of Carreño. Larsen, ”she added, almost crying.
I hesitated and was afraid. I thought I was crazy, a little, but that was enough.
"Decile," he insisted in a hoarse, shaky voice, as if we were already in bed.
I said it and the man grumbled:
—I would have spoken before.
The car nailed an evil U in the night and we turned back, we entered a different darkness, a plausible mall.
"Carreño," the chauffeur rejoiced, reminiscent, almost a friend.
But Gurisa with the silver or lead ring strung on the tip of her finger, so absorbed in the mist from the window. And the only thing that matters, I thought, is her naked body, her scent and wisdom.
Carreño's friend of the chauffeur spoke to a waiter and said, "Fourteen." I paid and searched the monotonous row of metal curtains. Gurisa had already come downstairs and spoke with another waiter in an inverted voice; then I lost it at night.
Carreño was generous and spent heating in October in room fourteen, with an anteroom and the necessary rest. But Gurisa wasn't there.
I threw myself on the bed, on my back, lit a cigarette; hands on the back of my neck, the ash barely burning my chin. Gurisa lost forever or never was Gurisa. Until I picked up the phone and explained my loneliness.
Someone said:
—It's a moment. Excuse me Confusion. Everything will be fixed.
—Yes, everything works out. But sometimes too late. Send me a bottle of whiskey. The least poisonous.
It is true that my curiosity, my nostalgia, was mixed with a confused resentment. Carreño, whoever he was, was innocent that his employees had mistaken fourteen for sixteen. But I had said "friend of Carreño." And since childhood. So I had to give our friendship time. So I distracted myself by investigating a faint old motive for hatred, the memory of some dirty trick he had made on me in a credible and remote past, when we cautiously got lost in the evening from the farms surrounding a city to steal green fruit..
He also remembered that the maid, with a foreign accent and almost certainly inverted, had told Gurisa, without deceit, piece sixteen. There is no choice but to tell it and sometimes I like the details and also the spring of the unexpected.
The minutes passed, the bottle and the servile smile came, and it occurred to me —when I had to get up to throw my cigarette in the toilet because there are no ashtrays, because customers take them away as kleptomaniacs or out of fidelity to what they call it an unforgettable night — that my little hatred for Carreño, the only true and unknown friend who gave me life, could be based on what a certain Marx Brothers tried to explain to me in Santa María. He was a kept man with a commander's beard, he said that everything is a question of money.
So, if the aforementioned was right instead of a more economically bearded one, also a Sanmariano, who was looking for support but did not rest in the tribulations inherent to the relationships one had with his grandmother, my mild hatred against Carreñito did not come from the errors of his men or computers, but of the simple envy that he had never felt before, the healthy and ambitious envy of a poor man for a rich man, a poor man - and now wandering and humble - without friendship with the satrapy of Lavender, a poor man no grandmother.
I sat in the half-light of the bed and accepted that my rejection of Carreñito, never manifested in childhood, was born from the simple fact that he had gotten five million to pay the bribe that authorized him to exploit the generous house of Iglesias street. On the other hand, I did not have, among other deficiencies, not even a woman in the suite with a living room, bedroom and bathroom.
I forgave, I thought I had forgotten Carreño forever, when the wrong one entered, poorly dressed and writhing, more stupid than ugly.
Standing, I showed him the palm of my hand, as a greeting from the Nganska tribe, and put a finger to my lips.
"If she keeps quiet, if she stays still..." I said. Don't worry, everything works out.
She agreed to stay in the room and wait for her particular destiny, separated from me by the transparent curtains. But I had to endure through tears, watery mucus tissue, the story of his life.
Not even you will be able to feel or lean on the edge of the fury, the bittersweet happiness or misfortune of the little woman —with a hat— lost forever in department fourteen or sixteen of my compadre Carreño.
The beast cried turning her back to me; the curtain between the living room and the bed was respected. Bored, sure of a happy ending, I smoked, barely gnawed whiskey, rested in an armchair in the shade:
«The best husband a woman ever had, kinder, more macho. And we have three kids, all three of them so blond that they don't look like his or mine. Two, four, five and a half. May God forgive me and also you and everyone who wants to throw stones at me. I don't know what to call it, viaraza or fever, because all four are wrong and I don't know if one day, hopefully never, I will meet that one again. With you who have seen my face and my face is never forgotten in life. I don't care that he has a belly or that he is a skinny blonde who is losing hair. But the other one who got lost like an idiot and is entirely to blame and here I am waiting, knowing that I can't get home later than ten, there's no lie of mine that stays fresh until ten at night. And everything, the three children, my husband, everything because that idiot who maybe lost me for pleasure tonight, look at the almanac, tonight that was going to be the first and one imagines before and he can't know for sure if it works or not. Seeing him come from the office next door includes so much, smiles and attention, roses, a confectionery barely but already getting wet to say yes, more curiosity than you win, even if you don't believe me. Seven years of marriage and never again, but there comes a time and one closes her eyes and I was touched by this moment, which is the last and it is to laugh ".
I kept crying or making noises; when I stubbed the second cigarette against the wall, the phone rang. They explained the equation fourteen sixteen to me again, excuse me, please, we'll fix it right away. But when I went to break the good news to the wrong lady, there was no longer an adulteress to talk to. Not even the scent or perfume of a female looking for an unforeseeable new direction.
I went back to bed, went back to smoking. My duty, I understood, was to be restless, to grieve over Gurisa's unknown fate, to ask the photo in the almanac for March - imported and hanging lianas, sheep darkened on top of a doubtful whiteness, of snow or sand - where she would be, in what furnished room, among what people, keeping what words.
Gurisa, God gave and God took away. It was possible that she would go through the maze of rooms, clumsiness and telephone wires and come back to me. I could be covered with syphilitic sores from the sole of my foot to the crown of my head, or it might be enough to stir on the hardened coolness of the sheets.
But Gurisa did not come and when I was sure, when I forgot her variable faces and the curves of her fingers, I undressed to rub myself in the sheets, continue smoking and attending in the peace where other thoughts more important than her, older that I. Why, he thought, do they allow those born tired to be born and back; Why is the one born with a lukewarm spirit born, the one who awaits death and Gurisa does not arrive?
Maybe there was an answer and it was getting to me, I thought; But a second before the phone rang and came the voice of the young exotic and pedophile maid.
I said yes, of course, I understand, there was no more, thank you, thinking about her buttocks being pressed by black bullfighting pants; his embellished shirt, his virile determination not to wiggle unless movement was essential.
"Everything is fine, Manolete," I repeated my thanks.
"El Cordobés, if you don't mind," he said with anger and tenderness, and hung up the phone.
He didn't have too much money in his pockets, but the bills were already crushed between the sheet and the mattress; I had cigarettes, a member that grew fat and then fell purple, I had the hope of a woman who could be called Gurisa.
Perhaps we were separated forever, I would never hear her moans on the sheet or the web of her naive lies again. He was lonely and sad, the half bottle. Without knowing why I decided to write her a shipwrecked letter that she, now, would never read. On the desk, mimicking a secretaire, I found creased paper with a delicate letterhead tucked away discreetly on the upper left: "Carreño House."
I had a drink and worked:
«No, Gurisa, there was no need for anything other than bed and oblivion. The fear born in childhood or adolescence of never being in debt to a woman. But you went crazy and your madness leaned on me, on mine that you were creating and increased your own sweetly, little by little, until you and I accepted, with error, that being crazy was equivalent to falling in love with normal people. Without thinking, Gurisa, that our fury was a little beyond love, without thinking that all the sufferings and happiness of true lovers barely touched our anguish, the desperate and novel desire to know our soul and intestines, to build a hermaphrodite unit that would naturally and joyfully support four arms, four legs, a single brain, a single sex locked in ecstasy and communion.
»If I swear, we swear, we promised, Gurisa, to tell the truth about them, the story lasted seventy-two hours, a suitable time for the protests of the poor and the hunger strikes. But a male and a female dislodged by impossible ambitions, by the illusion of believing the sin of lust achievable —the only way to the absolute, the eternal and the small belief in true communication—, Gurisa and I, were never within time.. We went in and out without anyone having any suspicions. "
He was about to sign the letter when there was another knock on the door. It was not Gurisa, it was a man with a hat, with a pleasant wild smell of damp earth, of remote spaces, a stranger. But he said:
"Hello, Commissioner," and he entered slowly and swaying, skinny, short, confusing, and apparently tame.
I began to recognize him when he walked to the mirror to gently tug on the wings of the black butterfly that he used as a tie.
I was a little drunk and that man had died years ago. He went to sit in the chair that I had used to write my letter; he spun it around to give me the profile.
"Larsen...? Larsen, ”I murmured in a funeral voice.
"Why don't you call me Corpse Board?" Meeting. Carreño. Coming from you does not offend me. He spoke with a soft, distant mockery. He barely removed the silence with a snort.
I saw him groping at the worms that slipped from nose to mouth, distracted and resigned. When there were several vibrating on the parquet he would put a shoe forward and make them die with a short and repeated sighing noise.
"Excuse me," he said, "it's the disease. He spoke with a still, milky face. I didn't want to disturb him. The room confusion helped me a little and the rest bad luck. Deep down I'm in debt and I like to pay by telling them.
—In debt to me? So many years passed... I don't understand.
—If you don't remember, you didn't even notice. And so the debt gets bigger and I have to pay more. Think: you were a commissioner and I was a poor loser, which is the worst failure a man can suffer in this world. Santa Maria. And in all the encounters we had, you never even tweeted me.
—It must be true, I didn't have that habit.
—Yes, you were different. We almost treat each other as equals. Like now.
The night was getting old and Gurisa was still lost. And what could this risen man want from me... Now he wore a handkerchief for worms and shook his head as if saying yes to a memory. Then he looked me in the face and said in a changed voice, almost hoarse:
—Don't worry, the girl is coming right away. As soon as I call on the phone. I heard you were here another night. With other woman. So I didn't want to bother him because I didn't have what I'm going to show him now. Why did you shoot Santa Maria?
—Because I was fed up, because I was suffocating, because I hated Brausen.
—And go to Lavanda, they told me, crazy with the desire to return.
—Yes, now weird. I was born there.
—And Brausen kicked me out in a bad way. So they say. But I am the same anywhere on the planet. Now I live here and have my home. And with false mirrors in every room. Also with microphones. But I already got bored. Notice that they all do the same, even though they think they are inventing. And they say the same nonsense or lies. Disgusting, but they pay. Well, I didn't come to talk about myself. But wait.
He got up and went to pick up the phone. He muttered rudely and I understood to say:
—Make it up.
He returned to his chair; I was sitting on the bed with the glass of whiskey in hand. Car doors rattled below. He smiled forgiving my life.
—You can go to Santa María whenever you want. And at no cost to you, without even a trip. Listen: I never spend gunpowder on chimneys, so I never bought one of those that the cold dead over there call sacred books, nor did I read them. I can't do it, but you can. I mean, the test that I propose. Because I was educated in the university of the street and you are a man of reading. Notice: a friend told me about those books in the Resident Center. And, arguing, he showed me a piece. Please wait.
He leaned over to reach into his back pocket and pulled out a black monogrammed wallet or metal trim. He dug through the money until he found a battered and folded piece of paper.
"Read it yourself," he said.
Besides the doctor, Díaz Gray, and the woman, he already had the city where they both lived. He now had the provincial city on whose main square the two windows of Diaz Grey's office opened. I was smiling, amazed and grateful that it was so easy to spot a new Santa Maria on the spring night. The city with its decline and its river, the brand new hotel and, in the streets, the brown-faced men who change, without spontaneity, jokes and smiles.
I held out the paper to Larsen, but he held up a hand.
"No," he said, "it's for you.
Another knock on the door, timid, almost clandestine. I left the bed and went to make way for Gurisa to enter. She had a new smile that I had seen on another woman's face, who knows when or where. He walked straight in and passed the owner without looking at him. He barely raised his hat, but I had time to see his sparse gray hair combed toward his forehead, like a thin silver cap trying to reduce baldness.
I sat down again, Gurisa lay down on the bed, behind me, and I heard him open his wallet and light a cigarette. From then on it was as if she did not see or hear Larsen, as if he felt alone with me.
—Brausen. He stretched out as if to take a nap and was making up Santa Maria and all the stories. It's clear.
—But I was there. You too.
—It's written, nothing more. There is no evidence. So I repeat: do the same. Get on the bed, invent yourself too. Make yourself the Santa María that you like the most, lie, dream people and things, happened.
"Until now you haven't asked me what the hell happened to me," Gurisa said from behind me.
Larsen stood up and pressed the last worm against his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
"Think about it," he said. It's easy for you. You can stay here as long as you like. Free of charge. There is a restaurant service, minutes I say.
I got up to accompany him and despite the worms I did not feel disgusted by squeezing the cold in his hand.
I went back to bed; Gurisa had made an ashtray with an envelope that she kept between her breasts.
"This is going to be a honeymoon," I told him. We're going to stay here for a few days until we get bored.
Gurisa smiled happily.
—Really? All the time together?
I nodded and she added:
"Then I'm going to find a way to change those curtains." They are horrible.