The Same City

by Luisgé Martín

  Moy would have ended up leaving Bogotá sooner or later, since for sometime he hadn’t found anything extraordinary or exciting there, and the love of Angelita, whom he now viewed apprehensively, as if she were a child he had to care for instead of a woman with whom he shared a bed, was no longer sufficient to tie him to the city. But there was another painful disappointment that precipitated events. He discovered that Feliciano Jaramillo was taking individuals to his office who, feigning helplessness and reporting abuses that had never taken place, tried to take advantage of his legal advice and skills to make an unjust gain. Jaramillo had come up with an underhanded scheme for attracting clients that involved offering certain day laborers the chance to obtain substantial compensation from their employers if they reported them with fictitious accusations. They made the accusations, Moy prepared the legal arguments, Jaramillo offered the employers a deal in exchange for halting the process, the employers paid to avoid getting a bad reputation, and the money was finally split behind Moy’s back between the perjured laborers and Jaramillo, who demanded a commission for the swindle. When an employer proudly refused to pay the settlement, the accusation was withdrawn before trial to prevent the setup being discovered in court. That was what had made Moy suspicious—there were too many cases that were unjustifiably discontinued, too much backpedaling, and, moreover, all in cases with a very similar profile. Moy went warily to see a food industry business owner who had been accused by one of his employees of making him work in conditions of slavery. The business owner denied the accusations and showed Moy documents that evidenced his integrity. Moy distrusted him, but one month later, he went to see the owner of a textile factory, who, describing the same circumstances, proclaimed his innocence and explained the intimidation to which he had been subjected. The third interview took place with a hotel director. Then Moy, having learned his lesson, began to investigate, tracing Jaramillo’s steps, and he found out everything.

  His love for the down-and-outs of the world suddenly underwent a radical metamorphosis. It disappeared. The al-Qaeda vigilantes became murdering outlaws. Che Guevara, the Colombian guerillas of the FARC, and the indigenous people of Chiapas, whose causes he had sympathized with, transformed into mere criminals, common bandits who stole from others what they were not capable of earning for themselves. He cursed all the romantic ideals that had captivated him since he left the United States and even some other—less noble—ones that he had stood up for throughout his life. He packed in a few hours and after blowing the whistle on Jaramillo and writing Angelita a sentimental letter of goodbye, he departed Bogotá.

  Brandon Moy’s darkest and most disturbed period followed that moment. He often spoke about it, of the aberrations and excesses in which he indulged, but he always did so in a broad-brush manner, without entering into graphic detail or troubling himself with dates or descriptions. I never found out, for example, what his financial machinations were during those years, where he obtained an income in order to survive, and although he apparently spent a long time living as a hermit without luxuries or conveniences, going from one place to another with a small suitcase in which he kept only the bare essentials, there is no doubt he needed money for his adventures. As well as the costs of food and accommodation, he had to buy the gas for the car he’d bought in Colombia and used to undertake his journey along poorly surfaced roads at reckless speeds.

  In Panama it seems he had a fight, which left him with a scar from a knife wound. In Costa Rica he met a group of young Americans and went deep into the rainforest with them for several days to explore nature. In Nicaragua his car almost got stolen, and in Guatemala the police arrested him for reckless driving. Then he crossed Mexico from south to north and finally settled on the outskirts of Hermosillo, where, overnight, he began to do all those things he had attempted throughout his life to hold in check or had only tried in moderation. He became addicted to peyote and its derivatives, he started to drink rum and absinthe without restraint, and he seduced four women with whom he simultaneously maintained, for almost a year, even more tangled marital relations than he had done in Boston. He learned how to ride a horse, shoot a rifle, and play the marimba, a Mexican percussion instrument similar to a xylophone. He read dozens of books and wrote the visionary poems that were subsequently compiled in one volume and merited the praise of critics around the world. He gave saxophone recitals in one of Hermosillo’s cantinas. He studied Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, although he only ended up speaking the first of them fluently. He took part in scuba diving competitions held in the Gulf of California and became an expert in the region’s marine life. He set up a small company that organized trips in hot air balloons around the area. And he got a tattoo on his back, spanning from his shoulder blades to the base of his spine, in the form of a snake with its wings spread wide.

  “That was me,” he explained the day he showed it to me, “a snake with plumage, or a huge eagle with the body of a reptile. A mythological animal, a crossbreed of ill-matched creatures. A being with two natures that doesn’t know which one to choose. That was me,” he repeated.“Or maybe it still is.”

  Brandon Moy experienced a feeling of sinister elation throughout those years. Life, which right up until then had always appeared to him as a serene trance and somewhat tedious, now seemed like a process of falling to pieces, or a stampede. The streets of New York were now only a faded, tepid memory, one of those hazy landscapes in which everything seems unreal. Brent’s face, in the photo he still possessed, left him cold, indifferent, just like the feeling that certain literary characters leave us with; although we come to love them, we know perfectly well they do not exist. On many nights, he would sit staring at the sky from the back patio of the large, ramshackle house where he lived, trying to understand what exactly happiness was. He never managed to find out, but his investigation enabled him to write some poems, almost theological in nature, of great beauty.

  Although it took him time to understand it, the disappointment he had suffered in Bogotá signified the end of his escape. Everything that happened afterward, including his life in Madrid, was an exuberant culmination of what he had imagined he had to do, not of what he really desired. His overindulgence never completely satiated him. Every time he took a step off the straight and narrow, he wanted to take another that would lead him even further astray, so that satisfaction was forever yet another step away. Speed became his great passion. Almost everyday, he would go out on the road and drive for hours, straining the engine to its limits. Sometimes he took part in illegal races held on busy freeways, and even if he didn’t win, the physical risk and the nearness of death evoked in him a feeling of vivacious excitement. In those moments, just as when he ejaculated inside a woman, he felt a sensation of immortality and bliss that soothed him. He forgot about all the failures. He forgot about all the things he had never done.

  In one of those car races, he had an accident that almost cost him his life. His car swerved off the road, hurtled uncontrollably across a field, and then overturned several times. He ended up face down in the middle of the meadow. He didn’t have any spectacular or bloody injuries, but he remained in a coma for eleven days, and the doctors began to think he wouldn’t regain consciousness. Two of his female companions took turns sitting up with him in the hospital and caring for him. When he awoke, something surprising happened—he could not remember anything about his new life. He insisted his name was Brandon Moy and didn’t understand why everyone was calling him Albert Tracy. He was able to talk to the nurses in Spanish, but he had no memory of Hermosillo, nor did he recognize the women at the foot of his bed.

  Little by little he began to recover his memories and reconstruct the years he had spent away from New York. This experience of rebirth or restitution generates a feeling of relief in those who, like him, have suffered amnesia following a head injury, but in Moy it caused a terrible depression. It was like going back to Manhattan and seeing the towers in flames again. He once more remembere
d the injured woman he’d carried in his arms to a first-aid station. He remembered the futile attempts he had made to speak to Adriana to tell her he was alive. He remembered the moment when he’d placed his cell phone on the pavement and stamped on it wildly to break it to pieces. Finally, he remembered everything that had happened afterward—the journey in the truck to Boston, stealing the purse, working at the coffee shop, Daisy’s love and the love of the wealthy lady, Angelita’s body, the views from Mount Monserrate, the beaches of Nicaragua, and at the end of the road, the barren terrain on which the car had spun out of control before beginning to flip over in the air. He remembered all of it as if it had happened to someone else, as though it were a fable or a parable he wasn’t quite able to interpret. He even recalled all the dreams he’d had the night of September 10, when he’d bumped into Albert Fergus and thought about his youth. He knew, therefore, what his reasoning had been at that moment and the logical process he had followed to make his decisions. But despite that, he was not capable of understanding why he had walked away from his old life. It seemed strange to him, inexplicable, like those behaviors that are alien to our nature and when we see them in others, we can never fully comprehend.

  When he finished his convalescence, he locked himself away to write poems and letters he almost always tore up before mailing. He sent one, though, to Laureen, the wife of the Italian diplomat whom he’d met in Boston, and she replied. They kept up a romantic (or, more precisely, erotic) correspondence for some months, and when Moy completed his book, he sent it to her; she was the only person in whose artistic sensibility he trusted. Laureen was impressed and immediately sent it to Richard Palfrey, who got in touch with Moy straightaway to offer to publish it. Moy had his doubts. He didn’t know if the book should be signed by Albert Tracy, he didn’t know which one of the two had created it. In the end, perhaps goaded by the vanity of becoming a writer, which was something he had wanted to do for so many years, he accepted. He moved to Saltillo, near Monterrey, and subsequently to Mexico City, where he undertook a variety of menial jobs. When “The City” with Albert Tracy’s signature was finally published and highly favorable reviews began to appear in the most reputable literary circles, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma invited him to join them as a visiting lecturer and give a seminar on American poetry. It was during that time that I met him.

  Due to the labyrinth that his memory and his life had become, Moy transformed into an almost mystical figure. He grew a beard, which was peppered with gray hair even though he wasn’t that old, and he developed the habit of speaking in a very quiet tone of voice, like missionaries or spiritual advisors. He once again became interested in the dispossessed, and he worked on several educational support projects that operated in the slums and small towns on the outskirts of the city. He responded to his literary success with elusiveness, since he was afraid someone seeing his face in photos might recognize him. He stopped writing and rejected many offers to attend congresses and literary fairs. He also declined most of the interviews the newspapers and television channels requested, although in so doing he only managed to boost his fame, since people began to compare his mysterious secrecy with that of Thomas Pynchon, Bruno Traven, or J. D. Salinger.

  Moy turned into a somber, distracted man. He no longer tried to fulfill those impetuous, extravagant desires he had listed in a notebook years earlier. He didn’t even remember them. He lived an orderly, monotonous life. He read a lot, prepared his university classes, visited the neighborhood educational missions, gave legal advice to a nongovernmental organization, went for walks through the city, and watched films on television. He had begun to sense, as though he were converting to Buddhism, that happiness did not lie in fulfilling desires but rather in not having any. That’s why for several months he even abstained from women and underwent a period of chastity. But willpower is not enough to steer the course of life, as he himself wrote, with greater refinement, in one of his poems—“The facts are never enough for life,”—and after a time, he fell in love again.

  Alicia hailed from Madrid and was in Mexico collaborating with an indigenous political action group. She was twenty-seven and still believed in the revolution that would change the world. She lived with other young people in a grubby, shared apartment that didn’t even have a bathroom. She was passionate and angry. The first time Moy saw her, she was trying to hit a school security guard who was almost twelve inches taller than her and who would have been able to flatten her with a single blow. That innocuous, untamable rage touched him. He went to protect her and ended up confronting the security guard himself. He then realized that Alicia was very attractive and that it was impossible to live without ever taking risks. Sensing the same gleeful disappointment with which someone who’s on the wagon succumbs to the temptation of drinking once again, Moy got slowly back into the swing of things. He felt outrage and affection again. He felt pain, sorrow, and sensuality. Without forethought, without knowing exactly what was happening, he started to make plans with Alicia and commit himself to her.

  Although we hadn’t spoken again since the writers’ congress in Cuernavaca at which we met, Moy wrote me a lengthy letter and then called to break the news that he was coming to live in Madrid with Alicia. She was the daughter of a multimillionaire construction company owner, and although she displayed that violent rebellion against authority and conventions to which Moy had been witness, she always had the financial support of her family. This unseemly contradiction made Alicia more attractive in Moy’s eyes, since in a warped way, he found in her the same need to break away from everything that had urged him to leave New York. Weary of the discomforts of Mexico and her philanthropic work, she decided to return to Madrid, where her father offered her a small apartment in a working class area so that she could hold onto her pride. There was nothing to keep Moy in Mexico, and having often dreamed of seeing Europe, he followed her.

  In his letter he explained that he didn’t know anyone in Madrid and that he would like to see me. I offered to help him with whatever he needed and invited him to a party I throw every summer on the rooftop terrace of my house, so that he could meet some of my writer friends and enter the city’s literary circles. At the party, I introduced him to, amongst others, Marta Sanz, Javier Montes, and Marcos Giralt, all of whom he saw frequently during the following months. Nonetheless, the closest relationship he formed was with Fernando Royuela, since both had a certain propensity for abstract conversation, ambiguous speculation, and political spiritualism. Royuela read Moy’s book of poetry with admiration, and Moy, who found it difficult to understand Royuela’s polished, cosmogonical prose in Spanish, ended up being fascinated by his novels.

  Straightaway, I became the person he trusted in Madrid. I went with him to sort out some red tape, I took him to visit Toledo and the Prado Museum, and although Alicia’s father also provided him with money, I got him several translation jobs for informational books that a publishing house I worked with at that time was going to release. Perhaps because he, like me, had a wistful and somewhat disconsolate nature, we became friends instantly. He would drop by the office some afternoons to pick me up, and we would go out for beers in the bars around Argüelles. We always started off talking about literature, politics, or impersonal matters, but little by little, as the effects of the alcohol began to relax us, we would give free rein to our confessions and tell each other all the indiscretions that crossed our minds.

  On one of those days, during a drunken conversation, he disclosed to me that he was not called Albert Tracy but rather Brandon Moy and that he had previously had another life. We were in a small bar on the Calle Gaztambide, seated at a table. There were a lot of people at the bar drinking and celebrating. Suddenly, Moy began to sob and started talking about his wife and son without giving me any prior explanations. His speech slurring due to the alcohol, he then told me everything that had taken place on September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers had been razed to the ground. Going back and forth in ti
me, as if he were telling one of those experimental tales in which the chronology is jumbled, he described his life in New York before the disaster, the dreams he’d had as a young man, the promises he’d made to Adriana when they had married, the professional disappointments, and the plans he’d had for his son. He also remembered in great detail the conversation with Albert Fergus outside the Continental restaurant,Tracy’s laughter, and the motion picture image of the taxi driving away through the streets of Manhattan. He was speaking for over an hour. He only stopped to go up to the bar and collect the beers he had ordered by signaling at the waiter. On a few occasions, he lost the thread of the story and sat staring into space as though he were miles away. But then, after a few seconds, his eyes began to gleam again, and finding some link in his memory, he continued relating his story pitifully.

  “There are things that should only be achievable when we want them for the first time,” he said to me in a hoarse, cracking voice. “Continuing to desire them afterward is a tragedy. Above all, it’s a mirage.”

  We sat in silence for a while, rolling our empty glasses on the table. Then I suddenly remembered a story about a couple in love who, a century before Moy, had tried to stray from their destiny. In a rather ill-judged way, I started to recount it, as if in so doing, I were trying to offer him some consolation.

  “I once heard about some young people from Barcelona who went through the opposite of what happened to you,” I began. “They were rich, part of the Catalonian bourgeoisie that built empires at the beginning of this past century. They decided to get married and insisted on spending their honeymoon in New York. At their age, they thought the city was paradise. They dreamed of jazz clubs, lavish hotels, enormous skyscrapers, and a world of high society that didn’t exist in Europe. But their families must have held all the archaic convictions of their ancestry, and they refused to agree to the extravagant trip. Why did they have to go to New York when Vienna or Paris were more elegant and decent than that faraway American city known only for its lewd, modern lifestyle and the depraved acts that went on there?”