The Good Cripple

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  “You’re imagining too much. All I do is drink and look!”

  “Appetite begins in the eyes, my friend.”

  “Anyway, I ran into this guy. They call him Bunny. He has a scar here”––he put his finger on his temple––“which identifies him, so I wasn’t seeing visions as you might imagine. Anyway, I knew him when we were kids. The other day I called his mother to ask for his phone number. I didn’t tell her who I was, of course. She gave it to me, and I called him.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes. You’re not going to believe me, but he asked me if I didn’t feel like busting his ass wide open, as they say here.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t.”

  “That was very noble of you,” she said without sarcasm. She lowered her eyes to Juan Luis’s prosthetic foot for a moment and added, “Or maybe you lost your nerve.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about everything. I don’t know what I should do.”

  “What a story,” said Blanca. “And now you feel like it’s you who’s being pursued, instead of them.”

  “Who knows what they’re feeling. They can’t possibly know that I found them by accident.”

  “And the police?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t need any more problems than I already have.”

  “You’re right.”

  Juan Luis began eating his goulash.

  A few weeks later, he had a pretext for visiting Quezaltenango. The theatre had brought a collection of Caribbean movies to Guatemala from Cuba, and Blanca had arranged with the manager of the Colón theatre in Xela to exchange that collection for one of Chiapan movies that the Colón was about to receive from San Cristóbal de las Casas. The only problem was that the movies had to go back to Cuba in a diplomatic pouch three days after they were shown in Guatemala City, and under the terms of the contract the reels could not be transported by ordinary mail or the bus lines’ courier services. Therefore Juan Luis offered to take them.

  He would spend a long weekend in Quezaltenango. Ana Lucía wasn’t going with him because a friend was visiting them from New York and she’d promised to go with him to Tikal that weekend.

  They both woke up early on Friday. It was still dark and they could hear dogs barking and roosters crowing. Juan Luis loaded up the car and they stopped by the Hotel Conquistador to pick up Gregory Hill, the friend from New York, then continued on to the airport. They said goodbye in front of the Tikaljets counter, after agreeing that Juan Luis would pick them up at the airport on his way back from Quezaltenango Monday at noon.

  Gregory––whom Ana Lucía had become friends with almost ten years earlier in New York––was gay, so Juan Luis wasn’t worried. But he knew Ana Lucía was worried about him; she was imagining that Juan Luis was going to see someone in Quezaltenango, and she guessed that it was a lover. Nevertheless, she didn’t ask any questions. All she said, while they hugged goodbye, was, “Be good, won’t you?”

  “Yes, yes. You, too.”

  It would have been more satisfying to drive a car with a stick shift across the highlands on the way to Xelajú, but it had been more than a year since Juan Luis’s artificial foot began hurting quite a bit when he shifted gears, and now he was driving a car with automatic transmission. He drove fast, as if a lover really were waiting for him in the provincial city. He felt a curious happiness, a physical happiness, though the automatic was very slow to pass other vehicles going uphill. It was the best time for driving, when there wasn’t much traffic on the highway. The trucks still had their fog lights on, and the milky vapor that rose from the black asphalt made you feel as if you were driving on cotton. With the window down and the air ruffling his hair, Juan Luis was in high spirits, seized by a joy that was slightly mad. He knew he wasn’t just going to Quezaltenango to drop off a few acetate reels that contained innumerable images––the famous danzones, Fidel’s face, patients wasting away in the AIDS camps, blacks offering sacrifices to African gods–– he was going to meet Bunny Brera.

  The volcanoes––Agua, Fuego, Acatenango, and Atitlán––were all visible from a curve in the road where Juan Luis stopped the car a moment to get out and pee. At that hour, the sky was pale blue and the clouds still bore a faint tinge of pink and looked like the scales of a gigantic fish.

  An Israeli company had resurfaced the strip of the Panamerican Highway that Juan Luis was driving down at 120 kilometers per hour towards a lover who existed only in Ana Lucía’s mind. The Israelis had done excellent work: the road flowed along smoothly beneath the car’s tires and was banked to allow the curves to be taken at high speed; it gave a sense of security that was like traveling inside a tunnel. A flock of vultures took flight when the car veered around a tight curve, and from the corner of his eye Juan Luis glimpsed the disemboweled body of a horse. There was a bloodstain on the asphalt which the tire tracks had transformed into a long streak like a brushstroke.

  He was going towards another human being. One mirror would be placed in front of another. A ritual reiteration that was both superficial and profound would begin, the reiteration of increasingly remote reflections that would sink into the distance, to the point of despair.

  As happens sometimes when a person becomes aware of these things, Juan Luis believed himself to be the protagonist of a unique and original story, a story that could happen only to him. This feeling relieved him of a vague anxiety: it was as if the plotline in itself justified his insignificant existence.

  Past Katok––“the burnt place”––where the wind was shaking the pine trees’ branches and lifting plastic bags off the ground, he lit up a joint and put on some rap music. The light was different now; the sun was beginning to heat up, tingeing the mountaintops with yellow and hurting Juan Luis’s eyes. He put his dark glasses on.

  He was thinking randomly about various things: the animal smell of the car’s upholstery, heroine in the stories of Ana Kavan, the way his eyes perceived the white and yellow lines on the road at this velocity …

  On a deserted peak, the cool wind made the telegraph lines whistle. An Indian with a mecapal stretched around his head to support a pinewood table on his back was trotting along the side of the road, followed by a child and a black dog, and the zacate leaves gleamed like little swords in the sunlight.

  Finally he glimpsed the valley of Xelajú, vast and blue, almost convex, where the volcanoes didn’t tower against the sky but appeared discreetly in the distance; Santa María with its white crown of moisture and Santiaguito, small and shapeless.

  The city of Quezaltenango had spread out a little more, but the old part of town was the same as it had been when Juan Luis first saw it thirty years earlier. Everything in the Pensión Bonifaz was, too, as if time didn’t matter. An Indian servant girl took Juan Luis to his room, which looked out on one of the back patios. She showed him the bathroom and the closet where the towels were, and Juan Luis gave her a tip.

  He put the suitcase with the reels in it down on the desk, on the other side of the bed. He walked into the bathroom to wash his hands and face. He looked at himself in the mirror, imagining Bunny’s face. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, took a little book out of his breast pocket, and picked up the phone to call Salcajá.

  “Bunny? Juan Luis here.”

  “Ah, vos. How are you?”

  His voice was that of a tired, depressed man and unexpectedly Juan Luis felt something akin to pity.

  “Fine. And you?”

  “More or less.” He laughed. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m in Xela. I’d like to see you.”

  Bunny coughed.

  “See me? Why?”

  He answered immediately: “I want to talk, no more than that. There are things I’ve been wondering about all these years and I think you may have the answers to some of my questions.”

  “You became a writer, righ
t? Are you writing a book?”

  Juan Luis laughed.

  “No,” he said. “I’m staying at the Bonifaz. Can you come see me?”

  “Ay, vos. I don’t have a car and to tell the truth it’s too much trouble for me to take the bus. You come here, if you want. That way you’ll meet my wife.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Yes. I’ve got two little boys. Five and three.”

  “I didn’t know. What’s your address?” Juan Luis stared at his own artificial foot.

  “You know the road to Cantel? My house is the last one before the crossroads—a colonial house, green with a black door. You can’t miss it. What do you say? Tomorrow afternoon?

  It had been too easy, Juan Luis told himself as he walked across the plaza towards the Colón Theatre with the heavy bag full of reels. His talk with Bunny had been like a chat between two old acquaintances who happened to run into each other by chance in an unfamiliar city. He didn’t feel anything more than curiosity and an entirely natural distrust. It was possible that Bunny had invited him to his house in order to kill him, but he was going there anyway.

  The manager of the Colón wasn’t in, so Juan Luis had to deliver the reels to the projectionist, who signed a receipt.

  “I’ll stop by to pick them up on Sunday after the afternoon show.”

  The projectionist said he wouldn’t be there on Sunday, but the Sunday projectionist would return them.

  “I’m entrusting them to your care,” Juan Luis told him as he was leaving. “The prints are almost new.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  That afternoon, after lunch, Juan Luis went to his room to read. He closed the curtains to keep the sun from shining into his face, switched on the lamp on the night table, placed two pillows upright against the headboard for him to lean back on and got under the covers.

  He read a dozen pages of poetry and fell asleep.

  He dreamed he was on the land his father had owned in the Petén years before, with a stream that was infested with caimans; he dreamed of a city that was a mixture of New York and Guatemala City, and a dank, sordid room where he and Ana Lucía were copulating in the presence of his father and a beautiful, unknown woman. He woke up with an erection, got out of bed, and went to the bathroom. His forehead was wet. He washed his face again, sat down on the toilet, and readjusted his prosthetic foot to the stump. With a metallic click, muffled by the sock, he stood up and put his pants on. He lifted the hem on the left side to take another look at the prosthetic foot, which even after so many years was not completely familiar to him.

  It was four o’clock when he went out for a stroll in the park. It was odd to note how the cane, unlike the foot, had become part of him. He owned three canes, but that didn’t matter. All three were his cane.

  He felt comfortable with his discreet limp; he knew it gave him a certain air of dignity. More than one of the girls who strolled by him in the park turned her head to watch him go past and he turned his head, too, more than once, to smile, with a friendly, almost paternal air about him. He felt like certain mental patients, as if he were seeing everything from a great distance, but that didn’t keep him from observing the faces of the passers-by with interest. From time to time the wind lifted dead leaves and pieces of paper, spun them in the air, and let them drop.

  With some violence, Juan Luis jabbed a sheet of newspaper floating along the sidewalk like a stingray with the tip of his cane. Putting his good foot down on it, he pulled the cane away from the paper, and the wind carried it off down the street, playing with it. Juan Luis crossed the street and turned back toward the hotel.

  He didn’t go in through the lobby, but down along the lateral passage that led to the parking garage in back of the hotel. He went to his car, opened the door, put the cane down on the floor below the seat, and got behind the wheel. He drove slowly down the street, circled the plaza, and left the center of the city.

  He went slowly along the road to Salcajá. The last rays of sunlight were falling on Quezaltenango’s outermost houses. An old man was lying face down at the edge of the road, and further along some children were running behind a small cow.

  In Salcajá he stopped at a corner to ask a man about the road to Cantel but when the man turned to face him Juan Luis saw that he was very drunk. A few blocks farther along he saw a rustic sign bearing the word Cantel, with a black arrow pointing to the right. He stopped the car in front of the respectable-looking green house Bunny had told him about and turned off the engine

  He rolled the window down and sat there listening. There was nothing to hear. Juan Luis felt no fear, but he was nervous. Like an employee about to have an interview with his new boss, he thought. This was absurd. He honked the horn three times.

  Bunny appeared at the front door and crossed the small yard to open the gate for him.

  “Do you want to park in here?” he asked. He stared at Juan Luis fixedly, with an expression of sincerity that was not very natural. The scar was deep, but Bunny’s face was not really deformed; the mark, a colorless line, was lost among the other lines on his face.

  Juan Luis had to back up and do some maneuvering to get the car through the gate; he parked it in front of the house and got out. Bunny went back to close the gate, and then approached him with his hand held out, wearing a conciliatory smile. Juan Luis switched his cane to the other hand, and inclined his head slightly by way of greeting.

  “Let’s talk first,” he said gravely.

  Bunny was insulted by this gesture and didn’t hide it. His thin, pink upper lip trembled very slightly. But his voice was soft when he said, “Will you come in, or shall we talk here?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Juan Luis answered.

  Bunny led him to the door. Walking along behind him, Juan Luis felt a slight cramp in his arm and repressed a desire to strike him on the nape of the neck with the cane.

  They walked through a small entryway full of potted flowers and plants with carefully waxed leaves, that gave the room––Juan Luis observed, as he had before in other places––an air of respectability. In the living room, they sat down across from each other on two matching armchairs, with a low table between them. The sound of running water reached them from the kitchen; someone was washing dishes in a sink.

  “It’s the servant girl,” said Bunny. “She barely speaks Spanish.”

  “Your wife isn’t here?”

  “No, she went with the kids to see their grandparents, who came to spend the weekend in the guest house at the Georginas hot springs. An unexpected visit.” He smiled.

  Juan Luis laid his cane across the arms of his chair, which was upholstered in leather.

  “I want you to tell me how it all happened,” he said. “Whose idea was it? Why did you choose me?”

  Bunny looked at him with eyes that were understanding and almost compassionate. He shook his head slightly and said, “It was a crazy idea.”

  “Yes. But whose?”

  “Everyone’s!”

  “Someone must have said my name.”

  “Several names were mentioned. I can hardly remember what they were any more.”

  “Who said my name?”

  “I’m not sure. But what does it matter, at this point? It wasn’t me.”

  “And were you going to release me if you got the money?”

  Bunny joined his hands, like someone preparing to pray, and staring hard at Juan Luis shook his head no.

  “Sons of bitches,” said Juan Luis.

  Bunny, who remained immobile, seemed to have resolved to allow himself to be killed. It was as if nothing mattered to him, as if he were beyond everything, even life itself, and that infuriated Juan Luis.

  “Who thought of mutilating me?” he asked.

  “El Horrible.”

  “Who cut my foot off?”

  “The Sephardi.” J
uan Luis settled back in the chair. Bunny went on: “I will say on behalf of that fucking bastard that he was against almost all of it: against kidnapping you, who knew us; against severing anything, against not keeping our end of the bargain. The thing is, you were the easiest one, and since we didn’t have much professional experience … except for the Sephardi, of course. What’s more, the Tapir had it in for you bad, you know, ever since that time you beat the shit out of him in school,” he smiled. “He was crazy, really hard-core crazy, el hijo de cien mil. All right: what more do you want to know. The Sephardi did practically all of it. Maybe in his place I’d have done the same thing he did to us.”

  Juan Luis thought about the Montecarlo. His foot, two lives. It wasn’t worth it.

  “Have you ever heard anything more about him?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Bunny shook his head.

  “How did you manage to survive.”

  “Luck, and maybe a quick eye. The other two didn’t even make it to the hospital. The Tapir was riding in the front seat and his head was hanging off from one side. El Horrible lasted a little longer, and suffered more, too. Some of the shards had pierced his brain.”

  “Your parents know any of this?”

  Bunny’s face fell; clearly even the thought horrified him.

  “No. They didn’t find out about anything, thank God. They think I had an accident, nothing more. I got out of the hospital three months later. I swear, vos, I came out a new man. I don’t know what happened to me. As if the explosion hit me in a part of my brain where I was thinking wrong. Incredible, no? Por Dios, that’s how it was. I became the most peaceable man in the world.”

  He was a coward and a hypocrite, like the song said, Juan Luis thought.

  “And the other one, the one they called Carlomagno?”

  Bunny lowered his eyelids a moment.

  “I lost track of him. I’m glad he didn’t finish you off. Maybe he was in on the plot with the Sephardi. But I doubt it. I never think about this any more. Since I met my wife I’ve been forgetting all of it, little by little.”