“Maybe you aren’t yet familiar with your sexual self, Marcos,” she told me while we waited in the seats of a theater before a dress rehearsal in Essen. “But you will soon feel it. It will appear at certain moments of your life: when you desire someone, when you have sex or simply in the most unexpected situations.
“Your sexual self is the most important thing in your life because when you go somewhere you’ve never been it will activate you. You will feel how it scours, searching for what it wants, how it falls in love, lights up, fills with passion.
“Maybe you have yet to feel it, but soon, every time you meet people you will end up asking yourself what those people will mean in your life.
“Just getting onto a plane, you’ll know in an instant which people you desire, which people would be able to feel love for you or you to feel love for them and which ones you would want to have sex with.
“It’s innate in people and you must understand that feeling desire is not a bad thing. It forms part of your sexual self. Your homebody self, your formal self, will turn off your sexual self, making it more compliant in society’s eyes, more presentable.
“But Marcos, how are we going to get to know the people around us if we don’t know what they are really like, if we don’t know how they pant, their sexual desires, how they show their most extreme passion...? How can we not know all that? How much happier we’d be if our sexual self controlled our lives and our face showed the happiness of passion.”
The dress rehearsal began in Essen and she forgot all about me from that moment on.
I remember each and every one of her words. I have never dared to apply any of what she told me, but I know she wasn’t talking about orgies or about doing what we desire in every moment.
She was talking about transferring the happiness that we feel in the bedroom to the office, to a sad winter day as we walk the streets or wait for the bus.
When my boss picked up the bow I believe that his sexual self appeared. The sounds he made were like pants of passion in miniature. And he glowed in a way I had never seen him do before. That day I thought that my mother had been right and I understood her a little bit more.
“I’ll do what I can,” I answered my boss as we went into the offices.
Maybe that would have also been a good response to my mother’s speech in Essen.
But I didn’t say anything to her. Many conversations with my mother remained unfinished. She didn’t believe in ending arguments, chats or dance performances.
She said that periods make people’s lives easier. Commas and ellipses increase intelligence.
How I was missing her; her loss hurt me to an extent I never could have imagined. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I had only shed one single tear on the terrace. And that doesn’t count as crying. Crying is at least two or three tears; one is just sorrow.
We headed to the basement. It made sense that they were holding the stranger there. The faces of everyone we came across looked at me expectantly. They all knew about my gift and what I could do.
My gift... it’s hard to explain. How I learned to use it is even weirder. How I ended up working for them, well, I don’t think any of it is easy to explain.
But I want to tell you about it. There are things, little details, that form part of us and make us who we are. And my gift was something that defined me.
Even though I used it very little. I didn’t like to use it in normal life, so I kept it almost always disconnected. That made me feel more alive. If I had had the gift connected when I saw the girl in front of the Teatro Español maybe I wouldn’t have felt the same way about her.
What I felt was primal, it was authentic. Falling in love with her waiting. I thought about her again, she must still be in the theater, enjoying, smiling and savoring that play about the traveling salesman.
How could I miss her without ever having met her? Human beings are magical and indescribable. I felt something special when I thought about her again.
The first time I realized my gift was also in a theater. I was seventeen-years-old. They say that is the age when people’s gifts appear. That day I met a new dancer in the dressing rooms. My mother had a lot of faith that she would give her choreography a new style.
I came across the dancer in those long dressing rooms in Cologne and, suddenly, without knowing why, in barely a couple of seconds, just by looking at her, I knew her entire life.
Her dreams, her desires, her lies came to me. All her emotions and passions were clearly transmitted to me, as if I received them through infrareds.
I perceived her pain over her little brother’s death. Such grief that I realized it came from the guilt of having left him home alone. I also felt the sadness that filled her every time she had sex with strangers. She didn’t like it, she had been raped at fifteen and sex had never been pleasant for her, it was just something that she felt she should do even though it wasn’t pleasurable.
And more than a dozen other feelings, as profound as those first two, came to me. It was like prying into her life without even wanting to. My face filled with her emotions, so much so that I had to leave, get away from her. I didn’t know what had happened, but I had seen her life, her weak points and what made her feel comfortable and proud, too.
Her hatred of my mother came to me as well. It was so strong and so terrible that I even thought she was capable of killing her.
But I didn’t say anything to my mother, because I didn’t think any of that was true.
Two months later, that dancer stabbed my mother in the heart with a pair of scissors. She wasn’t badly hurt, but if it had been just two centimeters to the left and my mother would have died.
In the ICU I told her what I had felt when I met her attacker. She looked at me and took her time and finally said:
“You have a gift, Marcos. Learn to use it and never let it use you.”
We never spoke about my gift again. Her heart recovered. She didn’t mind the whole thing, because of her utmost disdain toward that organ she considered overrated. I think it was her esophagus that controlled her most important emotions.
“Do you want to go in alone to see the stranger?” asked my boss.
I nodded.
“How long have you been holding him?” I asked before entering.
“Three months,” he answered.
“You’ve had him locked up for three months?” I asked, indignant.
“We’ve tried every method, but we haven’t been able to figure out if he is a stranger or not. Let’s see what your gift tells you.”
If they had resorted to me it was because I was their last option. Before me, military men, psychologists, doctors and even elite torturers must have entered that room. And they must have all failed because in the upper echelons my gift was not very popular.
“How did the press find out?” I inquired.
The chief was getting increasingly nervous. I think he didn’t want to be asked questions but to be given answers.
“Filtrations, I guess,” he mused indifferently.
“Well, from what I’ve seen on television, in a few hours the media wants to meet him.”
“That’s why you are here,” he declared, anxious for me to enter.
“You have to turn off all cameras, otherwise there will be interference.”
“His face changed dramatically; he wasn’t willing to lose communication with that room.
“Why can’t you try to use your gift with the cameras on, this time?”
“It won’t work,” I reminded him. “Electromagnetic interference won’t allow me to distinguish between what is real and what is false. What has been imagined as opposed to what has actually happened.”
My boss rubbed his face; he didn’t like it one bit. I imagined what it would take for him to transfer my request to his superiors. They were not going to be amused in the slightest to miss that curious moment with the stranger.
“Okay, we’ll turn everything off,” he accepted. “You do what y
ou have to get the information.”
He went off, leaving me alone in front of that door.
8
THE PORTUGUESE GIRL AND THE BAKER WHO LOVED HORSES
Before turning the knob and entering I began to let my gift penetrate me. It wasn’t painful, it was a mix of strangeness and pleasure.
I haven’t told you much about my gift, but when I let it invade me I feel very powerful.
The gift gives me premonitions... Well, I don’t like that word... Let’s just say that it “gives” me the beginning of the most terrible and also the most pleasurable memory of the person whose eyes I am looking into.
I have seen horrible crimes, consummated desires, unbearable pain, psychological terror followed by limitless love, unbridled passion and extreme joy.
In that first moment when I am observing the person I have that duality of feelings. It’s like watching a trailer of both feelings. They come to me, I see the sequence of their two important moments and then I receive twelve extra moments. They are like a succession that goes from the horrible to the pleasurable. As if they were secondary numbers in the lottery.
I don’t see those as two-minute trailers but as fourteen-second teasers.
And, sometimes, in those twelve moments is the key to the person I am examining. Often, the extremes are so far from each other that they don’t allow me to understand the person. We aren’t defined by our extremes.
I remember the first day I worked with the police. The baker in Santa Ana sold me a baguette. I had my gift turned on that day and all of a sudden I saw, in full detail, how he murdered his wife followed immediately by his love for horses.
Horseback riding was his passion. That respect for animals overlapped with the painful death of a human being by his hand.
I went to the police. I still don’t understand why that detective believed me. He was the same one I now call boss. Years have passed and we have both changed physically, but not much in what matters.
I remember when I told him all I had felt about the baker. He hung up the telephone and without hesitating sent a patrol, who found the wife’s body about to be baked and turned into horse feed.
I felt so useless when he told me that, when he showed me the images of the chopped-up corpse... I hadn’t been able to save that woman’s life. She was dead, because that gift only gave me images of things that had already happened.
It never showed me the future, or murders that were planned but not carried out, or dark, horrible dreams that had not been fulfilled.
They were always realities, never just desires. In the case of my mother’s dancer I saw hate, but I never thought that hate would become a murder attempt.
I went to the burial of my baker’s wife.
I felt awful, I thought that I was an accomplice to that murder because, somehow, I had been a witness to that moment.
Although it was after the fact, I had seen her death like a guest statue. It was hard to bear. It was like a video, I had the scene taped but it wasn’t live. A macabre observer of what had been recorded.
My boss was also at the burial. He watched me without saying a thing. At the end he treated me to an iced coffee. And in that horrible cemetery café, he went straight to the point.
“Would you like to work with me?”
“With the police?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Although I’d like you to just be in contact with me in order to avoid...”
“Being made fun of?” I asked.
He chose the word well; I liked it, it was what my mother would have done in that situation.
“Misunderstandings,” he clarified.
I told him that I needed to think about it.
I’d had the gift for more than six years and I had never thought that it could be used for anything more than discovering how strange people are, since I simultaneously saw their evil and their extreme goodness.
“Can I ask you something?” he said when I got up without having taken even a sip of my iced coffee.
I knew what he was going to ask me. When I tell people about my gift they all want me to use it on them. To reveal to them those two extreme states that live together within them and their twelve adjacent feelings.
“You want to know your extremes?” I asked directly, making it easier for him.
He nodded, finishing his iced coffee eagerly. I installed the gift inside myself and looked at him.
“You killed a man under arrest, but it wasn’t premeditated or on purpose,” I said as I saw that scene clearly in my mind. “You weren’t the one who caused the tragedy, it was a policeman with a beard, about fifty years old, but you feel guilty over that murder. You’ve never forgotten it.”
His face grew pale, I guess it must not be pleasant to find yourself in a cemetery cafe with someone you’ve just met and have him reveal your biggest secret.
“You have a lover,” I continued. “A Portuguese woman. She is your greatest joy, the other extreme. You meet up on Fridays in a house she has beside a river. You feel very young when you are with her. Those hours you spend together are your extreme happiness.”
He didn’t say a word. I realized that it was Friday and that the elegant clothes and cologne he wore probably weren’t out of respect toward the baker’s wife but toward the Portuguese woman who was about forty.”
He said nothing, and I left the café.
Once I was out on the street I wondered if I should accept his offer. As I looked out at hundreds of graves I decided that it wasn’t for me.
It took two more years before I accepted his offer. Although we became friends during that time. I met the Portuguese woman and I visited the grave of the man who killed that man in custody. That policeman with the beard was his father. He never had the courage to denounce what he did but talking to me about it made him feel better.
Why did I agree to work with him? Well I think it was to give some meaning to my gift. I needed that. We all need our actions to have meaning.
In front of that door, about to turn the knob and meet the most famous stranger in the world, I felt that my gift was taking on real meaning.
If the stranger was who the television claimed, the image I got from him would allow us to know his history, where he comes from and even his intentions on this planet.
Good and evil are like one’s cardinal points. Like that game where you have to join fourteen points to get an image.
The fourteen points were in my hands.
I took a deep breath, dialed my gift up to the max, and opened the door.
9
RED RAIN IN CHILDHOOD
When I opened the door, I was expecting to find a viscous being. Maybe because that was the idea I had of strangers from other worlds.
Viscosity, yes, that was the characteristic that I was imagining. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get that image out of my head.
I opened the door, afraid. And there he was, sitting in the middle of the interrogation room. He was looking at the floor and not at me, but he wasn’t viscous at all.
Physically he looked a lot like Alain Delon in the film Purple Noon. He exuded vitality and was surprisingly handsome. Even though he kept his gaze on the floor, I sensed that he had large eyes and his hair seemed like it would feel very soft.
He didn’t say anything, he didn’t even look up at any point.
I sat in front of him. We were separated by a small, square white desk covered with scribbles written by prisoners when they were left alone. I read a few phrases like: “I’m innocent... I shouldn’t be here... they violated my rights...”
He kept his gaze focused on the floor. He seemed like a shy teenager.
The clothing he wore had been lent to him by the institution that was holding him and it was reminiscent of blue hospital pajamas. The neck was very stretched out and showed part of his skin, normal skin. Not viscous at all.
I greeted him: “Hello.” He didn’t answer; I think he hadn’t even noticed my presence or he wasn’t the
least bit interested.
He really didn’t seem strange at all, he was just a kid.
I searched for his gaze to find out what I had come to discover, but right away I noticed that my gift wasn’t working. They hadn’t listened to me and the electronic and listening devices were connected.
I gestured with my hands at the mirror that presided over the room and pointed to all the cameras that were interfering with my gift.
I waited a few seconds, the stranger crossed his legs. His indifference began to make me nervous.
I sensed as each of the electronic devices were shut off and I could feel my gift growing in strength and intensity. A strange pleasure overtook me. It was like feeling a pleasant, warm color.
When they turned off the last electronic surveillance device I felt that I was alone. Although they were watching us through the mirror they couldn’t know what we were talking about or even zoom into a part of our faces.
The stranger and I were alone. I felt powerful.
“Yesterday your mother died, right?” asked the stranger without even looking up.
My heart and my esophagus both leapt. I didn’t know how to react.
It was as if you had missiles pointing in one direction and when you were about to launch them you were hit with an atomic bomb. How could he know...?
I took some time, I didn’t want to seem nervous. I searched for his gaze again, but he continued with his head down, as if he had asked me the time of day or what the weather would be tomorrow.
I decided to stay calm and not show fear.
“You are afraid,” he continued. “You feel that your life has no meaning now that your mother is gone. You miss her, you spent a lot of time together in many different countries. You and her, always you and her. And that must hurt a lot... It’s the worst moment of your life, right?”
And just then he lifted his gaze. Suddenly I understood; that stranger had my gift. For the first time I knew what people felt when I fearlessly x-rayed them.
My face must have been one of total fear, because my boss’ voice echoed in the room.
Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I Page 5