I’ve been walking like a lost soul on the lands of your grandfather, may he rest in peace, he said to me once.
We met each morning. Sometimes I tried to pretend I’d forgotten, maybe go back to my solitary walks, my morning movie sessions, but he was always there, sitting on a bench in the Alameda, very still, with the Bali hanging from his lips and his straw hat covering half his forehead (his grub’s forehead). Deep in the shelves of the Librería de Cristal, I couldn’t help seeing him, watching him for a while, and finally going to sit down next to him.
It wasn’t long before I discovered that the Grub was always armed. At first I thought that maybe he was a cop or someone was after him, but it was obvious he wasn’t a cop (or wasn’t a cop anymore) and I’ve never met anyone less concerned about the people around him: he never glanced behind him, never looked to either side, hardly ever looked down. When I asked why he carried a weapon, the Grub replied that it was a habit and I believed him immediately. He wore the pistol on his back, between his spine and his pants. Have you used it many times? I asked him. Yes, many times, he said as if in a dream. For days I was obsessed with the Grub’s gun. It made me uncomfortable to be sitting on a bench in the Alameda talking (or monologizing) to an armed man, not because of what he might do to me, because from the very beginning I knew that the Grub and I would always be friends—but for fear the Mexico City police would spot us, for fear they would frisk us and find the Grub’s gun and the two of us would end up in a cell at the station.
One morning, he got sick and talked to me about Villaviciosa. I spotted him from the Librería de Cristal and he looked the same as usual to me, but when I got close I saw that his shirt was wrinkled as if he’d slept in it, and when I sat down next to him, I noticed that he was shaking uncontrollably. You have a fever, I said, you have to get in bed. Despite his protests, I went with him to the boardinghouse where he lived. Lie down, I said. The Grub took off his shirt, put the pistol under his pillow, and seemed to fall asleep instantly, though with his open eyes fixed on the ceiling. In the room, there was a narrow bed, a night table, a dilapidated wardrobe. In the wardrobe, I saw three perfectly folded white shirts and two pairs of white pants hanging on their respective hangers. Under the bed was a leather briefcase of excellent quality, the kind that has a combination lock like a strongbox. I didn’t see a single newspaper or magazine. The place smelled of disinfectant. Give me money to go to the pharmacy to buy you something, I said. He handed me a roll of bills from his pants pocket and was still again. Every so often a tremor shook him from head to foot as if he was about to die. For a moment, I thought that maybe it would be best to call a doctor, but I realized the Grub wouldn’t like that. When I came back, loaded down with medicine and bottles of Coca-Cola, he had gone to sleep. I gave him a massive dose of antibiotics and some pills to bring his fever down. Then I made him drink half a liter of Coca-Cola. I had also bought him a pancake, which I left on the night table in case he was hungry later. When I was about to go, he opened his eyes and started to talk about Villaviciosa.
In his own peculiar way, he was lavish with detail. He said that the town had sixty houses at most, two bars, a grocery store. He said that the houses were adobe and some yards were paved. He said that the town was two or three thousand years old and its natives made a living as hired killers and bodyguards. He said that a river ran nearby. It was called Río Negro because of the color of its waters, and where it ran past the cemetery, it became a delta that was sucked down into the dry earth. He said that people sometimes spent a long time gazing at the horizon, at the sun setting behind the Lagarto Mountains, and that the horizon was flesh colored, like a dying man’s back. What do they think they’ll see? I asked. I don’t know, he said. Then he said: a cock. And then: wind and dust, maybe. Then he seemed to relax and after a while I decided that he was asleep. I’ll be back tomorrow, I whispered. Take your medicine and stay in bed. The next morning, before stopping by the Grub’s boardinghouse, I spent a while at the Librería de Cristal, as usual. When I was about to go, I saw him through the transparent walls. He was sitting on the same bench, in a clean, loose-fitting white shirt and immaculate white pants, in his straw hat and with a Bali hanging from his lower lip. He was looking straight ahead, as was his habit, and he seemed healthy. That noon, when we parted, he brusquely handed me some bills and said something about the trouble I’d gone to the day before. It was lots of money. I told him he didn’t owe me anything, I would have done the same for any friend. The Grub insisted that I take the money. You can buy some books, he said. I have lots of books, I answered. This way you won’t have to steal books for a few days, he said. At last, I accepted the money. A long time has gone by and I can’t remember how much it was; the Mexican peso has lost value many times. I only remember that it was enough to buy twenty books and two records.
He never talked to me about Villaviciosa again. For a month and a half, maybe two months, we met each morning and parted at noon, when it was time for lunch and I went home on a city bus or a pesero. A few times, I invited him to the movies, but the Grub never wanted to go. He liked to talk to me as we sat in the Alameda or strolled the neighborhood, and sometimes he would deign to enter a bar, where he always sought out a turtle-egg vendor. I never saw him touch alcohol. A few days before he disappeared forever, he got it into his head to make me talk about Jacqueline Andere. I realized it was his way of remembering her. I talked about her ash-blond hair and compared it favorably or unfavorably to her honey-blond hair in the movies and the Grub nodded slightly, staring straight ahead, as if seeing her for the first time. Once I asked him what kind of women he liked. It was a stupid question from a kid just trying to pass the time. But the Grub took it literally and for a long time he pondered his response. At last he said: quiet women. And then he added: but only the dead are quiet. And after a while: not even the dead, when you think about it.
One morning he gave me a knife. The word Caborca was traced in silver on the bone handle. I remember that I thanked him effusively, and that morning, as we were talking in the Alameda or walking the crowded streets, I opened and shut it, admiring the grip, testing its weight in my hand, marveling at its perfect proportions, and frightening some passersby, who stepped away when they saw the knife, assuming an intent to harm that I by no means harbored. Otherwise, it was the same as any other day. The next morning, the Grub was gone.
Two days later, I went looking for him at his boardinghouse and I was told that he had gone north. I never saw him again.
3.
The Trip
Dora Montes boarded the Donizetti with approximately twenty other passengers, myself among them. The name of the port where we embarked sounded like a joke or gibberish. And maybe it really was gibberish, but it wasn’t a joke in the Spanish sense of the term.
Then came the passage through the locks, with the passengers getting up early so as not to miss a thing (I slept in). And then, during breakfast, I saw her. She was sharing the table next to mine with her secretary, a brusque woman with very long straight hair who always wore black; a Peruvian businessman; and my cabinmate. I, in turn, was sitting with a Spanish Jesuit on his way to Bolivia, who would leave us in El Callao; a Chilean student returning from Europe; and the student’s German wife, who was learning Spanish. I don’t know whose idea it was to put us together. It had nothing to do with where we were from, or where our names fell in the alphabet, or whether our cabins were in the same section. It was just chance, and by lunchtime we discovered that the four of us at my table and the four at the neighboring table got along tolerably well, separately and even together, and any arguments would be civilized and easily settled.
My cabinmate was named Johnny Paredes and his parents were sending him to Chile to get him away from bad influences in Caracas. He talked like a Venezuelan and acted like a Venezuelan, but he was a Chilean who had been living there (where his parents had business interests) since he was two or three. He bragged about money. He w
as going to live with an aunt in Viña del Mar and he planned to hit the books and not make any male friends. The cabin had four berths, but it was just the two of us sharing it, and from the moment we met he made it clear to me that he wasn’t a homosexual and that if I had any weird ideas I should forget them. We were the same age, but I looked older because of my long hair, mustache, and beard. It was the first time that Johnny Paredes had traveled alone and it showed. It was my first time too, but I hid it better because I’d been on the road for two months. Sometimes I remembered my parents saying goodbye to me at a Mexico City bus station and I felt sad and homesick. The neon sign on the station read Gran Estación del Sur, and it was the departure point for all travelers on their way to Puebla, Oaxaca, or Chiapas, and also for those heading to Guatemala. Like Johnny Paredes, I should have been in college, in my case at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, but I had already been expelled from two high schools and my college future was as bleak as a hopeless old bolero. One night, my father told me I had a choice. I had to get a job, either in Mexico City or Sonora. I told him I’d rather go to Sonora. I was there for three months. One night, drunk and high, I visited my grandfather’s grave in Santa Teresa, and the next morning I took the first bus back to Mexico City. I remember I felt terrible and I told the driver I would probably throw up along the way and the driver handed me a plastic bag and said not to worry. I also asked him to let me know when we passed through Villaviciosa, and then the driver looked at me with new eyes, as if he’d just realized that he had a madman on board, and he said the bus didn’t go that way, but he would let me know when we were nearby, though all I’d see would be mountains. I said all right and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. The sun was a blinding whitish yellow. To the left, said the driver. I looked, shading my eyes with my hand: all I saw were mountains, as he had said, and at the top of the mountains some unidentifiable trees, just a few of them, bare and dark with sparse branches. When I got home, I told my father that I had quit my job in Sonora. It wasn’t right for me, I said. What do you want to do, then? asked my father. Join the revolution, I said. What revolution? asked my father. The American revolution, of course, I said. What American revolution? he asked. My mother, who had been silent up until now, said, Oh my God. Then I told them I was going back to Chile. The Chilean revolution? said my father. I nodded. But you’re Mexican, said my father. No, I’m Chilean, I said, but it doesn’t matter, all Latin Americans should be on their way to Chile to support the revolution. Who’s going to pay for your trip? asked my father. You, if you want to, I said, otherwise I’ll hitch rides. That night, according to my sister, my father and mother cried for a long time, she heard them from her room. They must have been fucking, I said (I wish they had been). A week later, they gave me money to take a bus across Central America, and right there in Mexico City they bought me the ticket that would take me by ship from Panama to Valparaiso. Of course, they wanted me to fly, but I managed to convince them that traveling by land was formative, educational, and also cheaper. The idea of setting foot in an airport made my hair stand on end.
One afternoon, as I was writing, Dora Montes sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. She asked whether I was writing to my parents, then she asked if it was a letter to my girlfriend, and finally she wanted to know whether it was a diary. I said it wasn’t a letter, I had no girlfriend, and I didn’t keep a diary either. Surprisingly, once we had gotten to this point, Dora Montes’s curiosity evaporated (I informed her later, unasked, that it was a story I was writing) and she began to tell me what she’d felt when we saw two whales from the deck that morning. She talked about mystical husbands, about life at sea, and finally about money, for some reason. It was that afternoon that she explained to me what she did for a living. She was a cabaret star. A stripper, to be precise. Now she was on her way back to Chile after a tour of sundry Central American nightclubs, all shady except for the Carrusel in Panama, where she had worked for two months. She would rather work in Santiago or Valparaiso, of course, but in Chile, she confessed, times were hard for burlesque artists. After six months, when her contract in Santiago expired, she would have to go back to Central America, and she was already depressed about it. She held out hope that her agent could book her some shows in Buenos Aires, though she humbly admitted that the competition there was strong.
Dora Montes must have been about thirty and she was dark haired, of average height, and fairly respectable. She saw the positive side of everything, though she didn’t get excited about much. Her secretary (who was actually her sister, but I didn’t know that until the second day of the trip) spent most of the day in bed on the poop deck, laid up by migraines that she believed were triggered by the sea air. At first glance, she seemed useless as a secretary or assistant and Johnny Paredes asked me a few times why the hell she was there. She was probably more useful behind the scenes on dry land, as a seamstress, treasurer, or nurse, than on a ship during a quiet sea crossing. As the days went by, I realized that Dora Montes would have killed herself if it hadn’t been for the constant reassurance of her sister’s subtle presence. In some mysterious way, Dora believed that her sister absorbed all of the ills that beset Dora herself (numerous ills, so she believed), meaning that if she drank too much, for example, it was her secretary who felt sick the next day. When I expressed my doubts about this strange link, Dora Montes claimed that it was a family trait and that her mother and her mother’s older sister had the same connection. One night, when I got back from the dance hall, I found Dora and Johnny in bed together in our cabin. The next day, as I was writing, Dora came over and told me not to get the wrong idea about her. I said, Of course not, don’t worry. Then she sat down next to me and, after a prolonged silence in which she gazed out to sea, then at my notebook, then back out to sea again, she proceeded to explain plainly and simply that it was all my fault. I remember that she was wearing light-blue bell-bottoms and her hair was gathered on her neck. It was very black hair, inky black, coarse to the touch. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I felt like hurting her. I told her that if she wanted to confess, we had a Spanish Jesuit on board. That was all. I regretted it almost immediately. But first, I felt Dora Montes fix me with a stare of disgust (I may even have enjoyed it). Then she got up, murmuring an insulting phrase as if to herself. This chilled me (it was the first time I’d heard such words on a woman’s lips: filthy, unerring words, words that couldn’t fail to hit their target), and in no way did I believe it was deserved. When I got back to my cabin that night, Johnny Paredes once again asked me to beat it to the deck for an hour.
Every night, the second-class passengers partied. There was a group that washed dishes in the kitchen by day and played for our dances by night. They were all Italians, and many of them were Communists who sympathized with the Chilean turn toward socialism. Sometimes they asked for a volunteer from the audience to come up onstage to sing or do magic tricks or tell jokes. When we came into port, they disappeared en masse and spent every minute they could at some brothel. Back on board the first night after we set out to sea again, they were so exhausted that they couldn’t perform and we had to settle for music from a record player. The rest of the crew were calmer about shore calls and many didn’t even disembark in port. The passengers bade farewell to those leaving the ship for good by waving handkerchiefs from the gangway, though moments later many of them also went ashore for a brief touristic visit. When I asked a Peruvian woman returning from Italy why the departing passengers’ friends didn’t say their goodbyes on dry land, her reply was that it was more romantic this way.
Cowboy Graves Page 4