I’m sure that my mother never lost a single one of the people who loved her platonically. Because, in her own way, she loved them too. I think that was what made her so powerful.
“Okay, I’ll help you,” said Dani in response to my request.
The boss sighed in relief; I think that without Dani’s help everything seemed more difficult for him. And I knew that he wasn’t helping me just because of his feelings for me, but most of all because he trusted me, trusted my instincts.
“I have to go to the Teatro Español. Call me and tell me where to meet up when you get him out,” I said.
Both the boss and Dani were confused.
“You are going to see a play, now?” asked my boss, surprised.
“I have to pick someone up,” I explained.
“But...” The boss was really incredulous.
“I have to do it, it’s important. Besides, I don’t know anything about escapes or how to get him out of here. You two are better at that and I know you’ll pull it off.”
That is also something my mother taught me: trust in those who have what you lack. That is the foundation of true talent. Although she, who was so good at everything having to do with dance, must never have had to put it into practice.
I got up. They weren’t convinced, but I knew that the boss would get him out of there, even though he knew it would mean the end of his career. Dani, on the other hand, had little at risk and he still wasn’t entirely convinced. I knew that his conscience could play dirty tricks on him. Consciences are too dangerous.
“Go see the head of security on the third floor,” the boss ordered me.
“Why?” I asked.
“I need to have something against him, to convince him if things go awry. Study him with your gift and call me if you find something.”
I didn’t like that; the boss had never asked me for anything so unethical. Using my gift for blackmail was something that didn’t sit well with my conscience, or his.
I knew that I shouldn’t do it, but he shouldn’t have called the press and Dani shouldn’t have agreed to help us either. We were all breaking our moral rules, because we knew that desperate situations require desperate acts.
“I’ll do it,” I said as I left the room.
12
HE IS A STRANGER BECAUSE HE TOLERATES UNIMAGINABLE PAIN
I had never been on the third floor, since my pass didn’t allow me access to that area. Besides, I had never wanted to know what went on up there.
Somehow, I wanted the head of security on that floor to not have any shady things in his life or, if I did find something, I hoped that the boss would find a way to free the boy without using the information I obtained.
I had the utmost respect for my gift.
The elevator arrived at the third floor. The head of security was smoking at the end of the hallway. I almost didn’t recognize him; he was a young man, about thirty and his parents were Brazilian, although for some reason he considered himself French. I think I had heard him mention once that his paternal grandparents were.
I approached him, checking the time, as I walked toward him. I couldn’t waste much time if I wanted to reach the Plaza Santa Ana before the traveling salesman died in that car accident.
The head of security looked at me. I was still thirty paces away from him. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t start a conversation or greet me. He just waited as if he hadn’t seen me. That showed the kind of person he was. He lowered his eyes three times, looked out the window and smoked.
I reached him.
“Hello, I don’t know if you remember me, I’m...”
“I know who you are. The one with the gift,” he added, smiling cynically.
I didn’t like that smile one bit. I returned it with a terse reply.
“Exactly. That’s me.”
“Well it didn’t do you much good today, with the stranger,” he said. “I’d even go so far as to say you were scared out of your mind.”
His gaze was defiant. And I didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t trust me, that was abundantly clear.
“Your mother is that famous dancer, right?” he added as the smile appeared on his face again.
I knew that he had checked me out and that question was just to let me know that he had power. His cockiness made it easier for me to get what I had come for, although it didn’t make it more ethical.
“Yes, she was my mother,” I replied. “She died yesterday.”
He swallowed hard; his investigations of me weren’t up to date. I think I heard “I’m sorry,” although he said it almost imperceptibly. I don’t think he had ever said those two words out loud.
My mother had always taught me that you can’t trust people who don’t say “I’m sorry” and “forgive me.” She believed those expressions should be used on many occasions in life and said without the slightest fear or embarrassment.
The head of security’s phone rang. He looked to see who was calling.
“These fucking journalists are going to fuck everything up,” he said.
“Fuck up what...?” I asked.
He looked at me, enraged.
“Just because that stranger is a teenager and seems friendly, don’t trust him,” he said. “I interrogated him and, while I don’t have your gift, I can tell you that he’s not who he says he is.”
“And how do you know?” I probed.
“Because of the pain. Nobody can tolerate that much pain.”
He pulled out another cigarette and lit it off the other one, which barely existed at that point. Suddenly, I remembered having seen cigarette burns in the interrogation photos that were face-down on the desk. I knew that all those abuses I had seen were the work of the man in front of me, his way of getting information.
I hadn’t yet started using my gift, but what I could see disgusted me.
“And what does it matter if he comes from another planet,” I said, furious and fed up. “Doesn’t he have a right to not want to say where he’s from?”
He looked at me strangely. I don’t think he liked what I said. I saw that he wanted to interrogate me, he was anxious to find out what I really knew and what I had talked to the stranger about when the cameras and microphones were turned off. But he just took a couple of drags on his cigarette and said:
“No, he doesn’t.”
I never thought that real life could be so similar to a movie. A stranger arrives and we just want him to confess who he is and what his intentions are.
Although it wasn’t so strange; if we treat with cruelty those people who enter our country illegally, what wouldn’t we do to an illegal from another planet?
“Did you want something?” he asked, obviously wanting to end the conversation.
“No. I was looking for the boss, but I can see he’s not here,” I lied.
“No, he’s not. What a crappy gift you have.”
Before leaving I activated the gift. I looked into his eyes for the first time and I felt how he involuntarily transferred all his feelings to me.
The bad was horrible. His life was filled with evil. His most terrible memory was the murder in cold blood of a prisoner in a cell located in a damp basement. But I couldn’t make out the victim’s face or know when or where it had happened. There was humiliation, and a lot of screams and pain. But I wasn’t sure if that was a crime that the boss could use against him. Maybe it was even legal.
On the other extreme, I could see that his great passion was shooting. But it was different than the happiness archery gave my boss. This security guy loved to shoot animals, especially from behind. It gave him great joy. A curious concept of happiness.
On the positive scale I saw two relationships with women that made him vibrate, many years ago. He loved them like crazy until they each left him at different moments of his life.
Suddenly, in the fifth spot, I found the memory that my boss needed. Something that he wouldn’t want people to know about him. And that memory, as always, wasn’t the worst
or the best. The extremes don’t work, the fundamental one is always somewhere in the pile, in the fifth or sixth spot.
I left. For him, only a few seconds had passed before I turned and left him with his cigarettes. Although, really, in those seconds his entire life had flashed before me.
I went into the elevator and down to the garage, checking the time. It was too late to call a taxi, so I asked my Peruvian friend to take me to the Teatro Español. He accepted willingly.
The Cranberries played as soon as I got into the car. His teeth shined brightly and I could tell that many things had happened inside that building and that the person who was leaving was different than the one who had arrived.
It’s incredible how life takes so many turns when you’re least expecting it. My mother used to say that just watching a performance can change your life radically.
“Is he an alien?” the Peruvian asked when we left the complex.
“Yes,” I answered.
It was the first time that I admitted that fact, and the truth was I was convinced of it. Besides, I realized at that moment, for the first time, I was following the advice of someone from another planet. I didn’t know if he was right about the girl, but I knew I had to check it out.
My mother always told me that in love and sex any advice could be valid, although she said it in other words.
“Love and sex are so strange that, surely, strangers have the key to what we should do.”
13
DREAMING WITHOUT CANVASES, PAINTING WITHOUT COLORS
During the drive back to the Plaza Santa Ana I was more restless than on the way there. I kept looking at my watch; I knew I couldn’t be late.
I explained in broad strokes to the Peruvian what I had to do in Santa Ana, what time I had to arrive and I urged him to step on the accelerator. But he didn’t want to; he argued that respecting the speed limits is basic to avoiding serious accidents. I had only ever gone with him inside the complex and at thirty kilometers an hour.
I was surprised by his sense of civic responsibility, but I respected it.
I asked him to put on the radio; I wanted to know how the news had evolved.
I lowered the window. It was a very hot night and I remembered that great film Body Heat by Lawrence Kasdan. It takes place during a summer that is so stifling that there is even a cop who says that it’s so hot that people think the laws don’t exist, that they’ve melted and they can break them.
He took off the Cranberries and the news filled the car. Soon I saw that the panorama had changed radically. Official denials, exaggeration, falsehoods. Everything was deflating. The Peruvian’s expression speaks volumes. Those guys were doing their job well.
The news was dying out for lack of oxygen. Over her life my mother lived through a lot of scandals over lovers, her tyrannical professional character (although that one wasn’t a lie) and over her death.
I think they killed her off four times throughout her life. She always told me that it rejuvenated her, that it allowed her to take stock of her life.
She used to say that it was like being autopsied while you’re still alive. She had a lot of faith in that kind of autopsy.
At sixteen she spoke to me about sexual autopsies.
She told me that it would be good if we practiced one of those autopsies every five years.
That we stayed very still and someone told us what part of our body hadn’t been caressed; how many kisses we’d received; if a cheek or an eyebrow or an ear or our lips had been loved more.
A full autopsy of our sex, but with us alive, although motionless.
She imagined it and she liked to think that someone, just by looking at our fingers, could know if they had been touched passionately or just routinely. If our eyes had been looked at with desire or our tongue had known many others.
Also, we could know which were our best sexual acts, just like how we can see in a cut-down tree trunk when it lived through floods or droughts. Maybe at seventeen, thirty and forty-seven. Maybe always in springtime or almost always by the sea.
How many nibbles, how many whispers, how many love bites had we felt? A calculation of statistics about our sex, our lust, our solitary pleasures.
And according to her, the best part was that when that autopsy ended we would know that we were alive, that we could improve and achieve caresses, desire, to love and be loved in return.
You have to be very brave to listen to that from someone else’s lips, even though I don’t know if such a person, with those abilities, even exists.
But that’s how my mother was. I thought again about the sex painting; I still owed it to her, to her and my incomplete trilogy.
When I painted diligently I always went to a little store on Valverde and Gran Vía. It was run by an old Canadian man who was about ninety and always gave me a good price.
I hadn’t painted in two years. I thought about passing by the store. I was short on time, but maybe I wouldn’t be able to later. If my boss and Dani managed to get the stranger out, everything would get more complicated.
“Can you stop by Valverde and Gran Vía first?” I asked the Peruvian. “It’ll just be a sec.”
The Peruvian accepted willingly; I barely noticed the shift in his route.
I thought about the girl at the Teatro Español, what would I say to her, how to focus that strange encounter without her thinking that I was crazy or out for sex.
The telephone brought me back to reality. It was the boss.
“What do you have on him?” he asked me directly.
I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary; I didn’t like even saying it out loud. I asked the driver to raise the opaque separating window even though I knew he could still hear what I was saying.
“Do you really need to know it?” I asked once the window had gone up.
“The original plan failed and they are going to move him to another complex. I need something to make the head of security help us. Do you have anything?”
I did, but I didn’t like it; I was slow to respond.
“Marcos, we are going to lose him,” insisted the boss. “If you don’t tell me what you have they’ll kill him. The press isn’t going to stop until they find him, so they will destroy him before they let that happen.”
I didn’t want to do it but there was no other solution.
“He has photos of naked little girls, between two and five years old,” I said. “He looks at them pretty often and he hides them in a folder called “attached2,” which is inside another folder on the desktop called “attached.””
I didn’t feel good about it at all. The boss didn’t say anything, just absorbed it in silence.
He hung up just as the car stopped on Valverde at Gran Vía.
I got out and saw that the sign for the store as I remembered it was no longer there. In place of the charming little frame shop there was now a dream store. I had heard that it was a growing business.
People who had quit sleeping missed them. A friend from the plaza who I played poker with every Thursday told me he had tried them several times. He said you could ask for whatever subject you wanted; then, they told you a dream using a hypnotic technique, so it was similar to actual dreaming.
How strange that people end up missing dreaming. We always end up appreciating the things we lose.
I went in, maybe because I wanted to see how the space had been transformed on the inside.
As soon as I went through the door I heard the faint tinkle of a bell. It was the same as before; I was happy that that hadn’t changed. A familiar sound welcomed me.
A few seconds later the old Canadian appeared. I was surprised that he recognized me.
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “Did you lose your inspiration or lose yourself?”
Then he gave me a hug. I loved that he didn’t shake my hand and he broke code with a stranger, although we had once been close.
“We don’t sell canvases anymore,” he said after the hug. “Now...”
He laughed thunderously; his laugh was still the same. There are things that the passing years can’t take from us.
“Do you want to paint again?” he asked.
“Yes,” I admitted, surprised by my response. “An old idea came back into my head and I need some materials.”
“It’s important to have the elements you need for when the ideas come to you. Are you sleeping?”
I smiled. I showed him the injections. It took me a little while to find them.
“I’m about to quit,” I pointed out.
He offered me a seat.
I didn’t look at the time, since I knew I didn’t have time, but I could never refuse his kind offer. He served me a little wine in a glass that was on the table, as if it was waiting for me. I noticed that the chair reclined and I imagined that the customers sat there for a quick rest.
I remember that many people thought that everybody who quit sleeping would sell their beds. It didn’t happen; beds still have many functions in those people’s lives: loving, having sex, resting with their eyes open, lying down, living... They were selling more beds than ever.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “I’ve seen the harm it can do to people. They miss dreaming so much... They miss having something to break up their day... You don’t know how frustrating it is after a horrible day, filled with the worst you could imagine, to know that that day is never going to end, like the one after it and the one after that. There is no difference between day and night. Their characters grow bitter, they end up changing and needing to disconnect, even just for a few hours. The ones that come here aren’t looking for dreams, they are just looking to disappear for a few moments from those never-ending days and months. Don’t do it...”
Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I Page 7