“The next day I received another note, on letterhead but without seals, in which I was told that the interview was with the Enlightened and Chaste Lady Guinevera Lapis Lazuli.”
“What did you say?” I jumped in. “That was her name?”
“No, of course not.”
Marcos had put down the paper—he had collected at one of the other tables—and now he was coming with the fourth double coffee. He didn’t bring me anything, because this didn’t look like a special occasion.
“Her name,” said Trafalgar, who never puts sugar in his coffee, “was something that sounded like that. In any case, what they told me was that the interview had been postponed until the next day because the enlightened, chaste and so forth, who was a member of the Central Government, had begun her annual proceedings before the Division of Integral Relations of the Secretariat of Private Communication. The year there lasts almost twice as long as here and the days are longer and so are the hours.”
Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about Veroboar’s chronosophy.
“And what does all that mean?” I asked.
“What did I know?”
He fell quiet, watching three guys who came in and sat down at a table at the back. I’m not sure, but it seems to me one of them was Basilio Bender, the one who has a construction firm, you must know him.
“I found out later, bit by bit,” Trafalgar said with the cup of coffee in his hand, “and I don’t know if I understood it completely. So the next day, same story, because the enlightened one continued with her proceedings and the next day too and the next day the same. On the fifth day, I tired of the blonde matriarchs and their secretaries, and of being shut up in the hotel room, of the garbage I had to eat and of pacing twenty square meters thinking that likely they would hold me on Veroboar for an indefinite period. Or they’d shoot me.”
He broke off for a moment, irritated in retrospect, while he drank the coffee, and that made four.
“Then I bribed the waiter who brought me my food. It wasn’t difficult and I had already suspected as much because he was a skinny guy with a hungry face, rotten teeth, and threadbare clothes. Everything is wretched and sad on Veroboar. Everything except for The Thousand. I’ll never go back to that lousy world.” He thought about it. “That is, I don’t know.”
I was getting impatient: “You bribed him. And?”
“That scared the guy half to death but he found me a telephone book and he informed me that to interview a member of the Central Government you had to be formally dressed, damn it.”
“Traf, I don’t understand anything,” I practically shouted. “Marcos, another sherry.”
Marcos looked at me with surprise, but he took out the bottle.
“Ah, I didn’t tell you that in the last of those notes they informed me that since the enlightened one had finished her proceedings, she would remain shut up at home for five to ten days. And since they weren’t summoning me to the office, I wanted her home address so as to go see her there.”
“But they had forbidden you to leave the hotel.”
“Uh-huh.”
Marcos arrived with the sherry: a special occasion.
“I had to do something. Five to ten days more was too much. So that night, since I didn’t know what constituted formal dress on Veroboar and the skinny waiter didn’t either—how would he know?—I dressed as if I were going to be a groomsman: tailcoat, white shirt with pearl buttons, satin bowtie, patent leather shoes, top hat, and cape. And walking stick and gloves.”
“Go on.”
“You can’t imagine the things I carry in my luggage. Remind me to tell you what formalwear on Foulikdan is. And what you have to put on if you want to sell anything on Mesdabaulli IV,” he laughed; I won’t say hard, because Trafalgar isn’t very expressive, but he laughed. “Once dressed, I waited for the signal from the skinny guy and when he informed me over the house phone that there was no one downstairs, I left the hotel and took a taxi that was already waiting for me and that covered some five kilometers at a man’s pace. We arrived. My God, what a house. Of course, you don’t know what houses are like on Veroboar. Scarcely better than a slum. But Guinevera Lapis Lazuli was one of The Thousand and a member of the Central Government. Old man, what a palace. Everything in marble and crystal half a meter thick in a garden filled with flowers and fountains and statues. The night was dark. Veroboar has a rickety little moon that gives almost no light, but there were yellow lamps among the plants in the garden. I crossed it, walking briskly as if I lived there, and the taxi driver watched me open-mouthed. I reached the door and looked for a bell or a knocker. There was none. Nor was there a door handle, but if there was anything I couldn’t do, it was stand there waiting for a miracle. I pushed the door and it opened.”
“You went in?”
“Of course I went in. I was sure they were going to shoot me. If not that night, the next day. But I went in.”
“And?”
“They didn’t shoot me.”
“I had already noticed that.”
“There was no one inside. I coughed, clapped my hands, called. No one. I started walking randomly. The floors were marble. There were huge, round lamps hanging from the ceiling on chains encrusted with stones. The furniture was of gilded wood, very elaborately worked.”
“What do I care about the decoration of Lapis Lazuli’s house? Do me the favor of telling me what happened.”
As you see, I preach but I don’t practice. Sometimes Trafalgar drives me nuts.
“For a while, nothing happened. Until somewhere around there I pushed on a door and I found her.”
The sherry was good and cold, and the guy I think was Bender got up and went to the bathroom.
“Was she blonde, too?” I asked.
“Yes. You’ll excuse me, but I have to talk about the decoration of that room.”
“If there’s no other choice.”
“There isn’t. It was monstrous. Marble everywhere in various shades of pink on the walls and the floor, and black on the ceiling. Artificial plants and flowers sprouted from the baseboards. Plastic. In every color. Corner cupboards holding censers with incense. Above shone a fluorescent moon like a tortilla hung by transparent threads that swayed when I opened the door. Next to one wall there was a machine the size of a sideboard that buzzed and had little lights that turned on and off. And against another wall, an endless, golden bed, and she was on the bed, naked and watching me.”
I seriously considered drinking a fourth sherry.
“I had prepared a magnificent poem that consisted in not versifying, or in versifying as little as possible, but the scene left me breathless. I took off the top hat, I made a bow, I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. I tried again and I started to stammer. She kept looking at me and when I was about to set in with the whole Enlightened and Chaste Lady, et cetera, she raised a hand and made signs for me to come closer.”
I never noticed when, but he had finished the fourth coffee because Marcos arrived with another cup.
“I went closer, of course. I stopped at the side of the bed, and the machine that buzzed was on my right. I was nervous—do the math—and I reached out a hand and started to feel around to see if I could turn it off without taking my eyes off her. It was worth it.”
“She was just a woman. What’s the big deal?”
“I told you, I think she was. What I’m sure of is that she was really hot. By that point, I was too. With my right hand I found a lever and I lowered it and the machine shut off. Without the buzzing, I started to feel better. I bent down and I kissed her on the mouth, which evidently was the right thing under the circumstances because she grabbed me by the neck and started to pull downward. I tossed the top hat away and used my two free hands for the two little apples, this time without a blouse or anything.”
“Nice night.”
“More or less, you’ll see. I undressed in record time, I threw myself on top of her and I said something like girl, you’re the prettiest thing
I’ve seen in my life, and I assure you I wasn’t lying, because she was pretty and warm and I already felt like a gaucho bard and king of the world all in one, and you know what she said to me?”
“How am I going to know? What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Mandrake, my love, don’t call me girl, call me Narda.’”
“Traf, cut the crap.”
“It’s not crap. I, who was in no state to be thinking in subtleties, charged in with everything, although I felt like I was screwing a nutcase.”
“Was she chaste?”
“What do you think? Maybe she was enlightened, but chaste she was not. She knew them all. And between the little screams and the pirouettes, she kept calling me Mandrake.”
“And you called her Narda.”
“What did I care? She was pretty, believe me, and she was tireless and tempting. Whenever I eased up a bit and dozed, holding her, she ran her fingers and her tongue over me and she laughed at me, poking her nose into my throat, and she nibbled at me and I got back to work and, knotted together, we rolled across the golden bed. Until at some point in one of those somersaults, she wised up to the fact that the machine was shut off. She sat up on the bed and gave a howl and I thought, why such a fuss? It’s as if you start howling because the water heater shut down.”
“But that wasn’t a water heater, I’m just saying, right?”
“No, it wasn’t. I wanted to go on with the party and I tried to grab her so she would lie back down but she yelled louder and shouted questions at me, what was I doing there? I said to her, what a terrible memory you have, my dear, and she kept on yelling who was I and what was I doing in her room and I should leave immediately and she tried to cover herself with something.”
“Nutcase barely says it,” I commented.
“Ah, that’s what I thought, but it turned out that no, the poor thing was partly right.”
He was quiet for a while and then he remembered I was there. “Did I tell you I had undressed in record time? Well, I dressed even more quickly, I don’t know how, because although I didn’t understand what was happening, I had the impression that the matter was becoming uglier than I had supposed. And while I grabbed my shirt and held up my pants and stuffed the bowtie into my pocket all at the same time, I thought it would really have been handy to be Mandrake, so as to, with that magnetic sweep of my hand, appear fully dressed. And right then, I knew I was Mandrake.”
“But, really!”
“Don’t you get it?” he said, a little put out, as if anyone could get anything in all that jumble. “I was dressed like Mandrake and I have, I had, a mustache and black hair, a little slicked down. And The Thousand had confiscated the comic books.”
“And Lapis Lazuli had read them and she had fallen in love with Mandrake, I understand that. But why was she yelling if she thought you were Mandrake?”
“Wait, wait.”
“Because what more did she want, given the way your little evening was going?”
“Wait, I’m telling you, a person can’t tell you anything.”
The ashtray was full of unfiltered cigarette butts. I gave up smoking eighteen years ago, and at that moment, I regretted it.
“I finished getting dressed and ran out of there with the cape and the top hat in my hand and without the walking stick or the gloves while the blonde wrapped up in a silk sheet—a golden silk sheet, believe it or not—and threatened me with torture and death by dismemberment. I don’t know how I didn’t get lost in all that marble. Her screams could be heard all the way to the front door. On the street, not a single taxi. I ran two or three blocks, in the dark, through a silent neighborhood in which surely five or six of The Thousand lived, because each house occupied at least a block. After an avenue wider than that one in Buenos Aires, when the slum began, I found a taxi. The driver was a sallow old man who wanted to talk. Not I. Maybe I would have become sallow, I’m not saying no, but I didn’t want to chat. I climbed the stairs three at a time—there was no elevator in that filthy hotel—I went into the room, I took off the tailcoat, I shaved off my mustache, I put on a blond wig—I already told you that on my trips, my luggage has everything—and glasses and a cap and a checked jacket and brown pants and I started putting things into my suitcase. And right in the midst of that the skinny guy, who had taken a special interest in my affairs not thanks to my overpowering personality, but thanks to the possibilities of my billfold, showed up and found me flinging around underwear.”
“Tell me, Traf, why were you running away from a handful of women who were stunning and also layable from what I can see, or from what I hear?”
He was midway through the sixth coffee and we were alone in the Burgundy. It was getting late but I didn’t even look at the clock, because I didn’t plan on leaving until I had heard the end. Leticia knows that occasionally, occasionally, I get home very late, and she doesn’t mind, so long as it remains only occasionally.
“You were never on Veroboar,” Trafalgar said, “nor did the Governor holler at you, nor did you meet the hungry, fearful skinny guy or the guy they shot for two dozen comic books, an asthmatic mechanic who had purulent conjunctivitis and was missing two fingers on his left hand and wanted to earn a few extra bucks so as to go two days without working at the port. Nor did you see Lapis Lazuli’s house. Misery, grime, and mud and stench of sickness and rot everywhere. That’s Veroboar. That and a thousand frighteningly rich and powerful women who do whatever they want with everybody else.”
“You can’t trust women,” I said.
I have four daughters: if one of them heard me, she’d strangle me. Especially the third one, who is also a lawyer, God help us. But Trafalgar cut me off at the pass: “From a few things I’ve seen, you can’t trust men, either.”
I had to agree and I haven’t traveled as much as Trafalgar Medrano. Mexico, the United States, Europe and that, and summers in Punta del Este. But I’ve never been on Seskundrea or on Anandaha-A.
“It may seem to you that I was, shall we say, too cautious, but you will see I was right. I realized that if the blonde from the Central Government caught me, she’d dismember me for sure.”
He finished the coffee and opened another packet of unfiltered black cigarettes.
“The skinny guy gave me a few details when I told him I was in a mess, although I didn’t clarify what kind of mess. The position of The Thousand is not hereditary, they aren’t daughters of notable families. They come from the people. Any girl who’s pretty, but really pretty, and manages (which is no easy feat or even close) to pull together a certain sum before she starts to get wrinkly, can aspire to be one of The Thousand. If she manages, she repudiates family, past, and class. The others educate her, they polish her, and afterward they set her loose. And the only thing she has to do from there on out is enjoy herself, become richer all the time, because everyone works for her, and govern Veroboar. They don’t have sons. Or daughters. They’re supposed to be virgins and immortals. People suspect, nevertheless, that they are not immortal. I know they’re not virgins.”
“Yours wasn’t.”
“Nor the others, I’d bet my life. They don’t have children, but they do make love.”
“With who? With The Thousand Males?”
“There are no Thousand Males. I suppose, in secret, among themselves. But officially, once a year, all planned in the Secretariat of Private Communication. They make an application and while they wait for an answer, the rest congratulate them and send them little gifts and have parties. At the Secretariat they always tell them yes, of course, and then they go to their houses, dismiss the servants, set the stage, connect the machine, and lie down. With the machine. The one I turned off. The machine gives them two things: one, hallucinations—visual, tactile, auditory, and everything—which follow the model they’ve selected and which is already programmed into the apparatus. The model may exist or not, it can be the doorman of the ministry or a creature imagined by them or, in my case, a character from a story in one of the damn
ed comic books that I myself sold to the mechanic. And two, all of the sensations of orgasm. That’s why Lapis Lazuli was in seventh heaven with what she believed were the effects of the machine and she thought, I imagine, that the illusion of going to bed with Mandrake was perfect. How could it not be perfect, poor girl, since I had arrived just in time. The electronic romance lasts a few days, the skinny guy didn’t know how many, and afterward they return, smug as can be, to govern and to live like kings. Like queens.”
“The skinny guy told you all that?”
“Yes. Not as I’m telling you but instead full of mythological flourishes and fabulous explanations. While I put my things in the suitcase. He even helped me. I closed it and ran out because I knew the potatoes were about to burn and I knew why, and the skinny guy ran after me. So much courage had already caught my attention. But while we descended the three floors he started telling me, gasping, that he had a daughter prettier and blonder than Ver.”
“Ver?”
“The sun. And that he was saving so that one day she could become one of The Thousand. I stopped short on the second floor and I told him he was crazy, that if he loved her he should marry her to the fried-cakes seller or the cobbler and sit down to wait for her to give him grandchildren. But he was crazy and he didn’t hear me, and if he did hear me, he didn’t pay any attention: he asked if I was rich. Like I tell you, you can’t trust men, either.”
“You gave him the money.”
“I kept on going down the stairs by leaps and the skinny guy found me a taxi.”
“You gave him the money.”
“Let’s not talk about the matter. I got into the taxi and I told the driver, who I don’t know if he was old or if he was sallow or if he was both things or neither, that I would pay him double if he would take me to the port at top speed. He flew and I paid him double. I was looking behind the whole time to see if Lapis Lazuli had set the dogs on me.”
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