“I feel it.”
“It’s... is it beating? Can you feel it?”
It was very weird. A sensation similar to the one you might get if you pressed your palm against your chest, over your heart. A little thumping.
Meche frowned. “I don’t feel the beating.”
“This is the one, Meche,” Sebastian said. “The one for our money spell.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Then put it on. Daniela, are you ready?”
“Yes.”
They gathered close to the record player, hands joined. The music began and Sebastian slowly moved his foot. Just a little bit, heel lifting and falling. Lifting and falling. Meche and Daniela’s feet followed his lead, raising and falling and then Billy screamed and he grabbed Daniela and they began to dance.
Daniela was a terrible dancer but she moved quite easily now, and despite her ridiculous pink dress she could have danced in Billy Idol’s music video. Sebastian felt a jolt of electricity when their palms touched and they laughed, jumped back and forward.
He turned around and grabbed Meche’s hand. He spun her, one, two, three times. Her long skirt, reaching beneath the knee, flared up, showing her legs for an instant, her knee-high stockings with the loose elastic pooling down by her ankles.
He spun her again and Meche stepped forward, her palms pressing against his chest for a moment.
Golden tendrils spilled from her fingers, curling up in the air. Sebastian raised his left arm and another golden tendril rose from his hand. He glanced at Daniela and she pointed at them, a gold ribbon extending and touching the two ribbons hovering near the ceiling. They knotted themselves together.
The room glowed golden for a second, as though a small sun had installed itself over their heads. Then little flecks of gold began to fall like snow. Their little sun was chipping away into nothingness.
The needle lifted itself and Sebastian brushed his hair from his face.
“We are going to tear the town up,” he muttered.
“What?” Meche said.
“We’re going to tear the town up, baby!” he yelled, grabbing Meche by the waist and lifting her up.
“Yeah, baby!”
Daniela giggled, jumping up and down. “How much money will we get? How will we get it?”
“Treasure. Hidden in some distant location and we’ll need a shovel to dig it out,” he told them, still holding Meche up. “Aye, aye, Jim Hawkins.”
“Jim, who?”
“Really, Meche?” he said, putting her down. “You don’t even open my birthday presents, do you?”
“Not if I have to read them.”
“You suck.”
“Sticks and stones, Sebastian Soto,” she said, standing on her tiptoes and jamming her finger against the hollow of his throat. “Let’s find that cash and spend it.”
They rushed down the stairs together, trying to see who made it out of the factory first.
Mexico City, 2009
MECHE FOUND THE old boxes where her mom said they would be and pulled them open. There were ancient textbooks there, old toys. A video game she had not played in years and years. Meche scooped them all out and set them on the floor.
She found Sebastian’s books at the bottom. Treasure Island. Shakespeare’s complete works. El Lazarillo de Tormes. Sebastian had definitely been an optimist, thinking one day she might develop a taste for reading.
The smallest of all the books was the last one he had ever given her: Auden.
She opened it to the first page and looked at the inscription, the letters crisp and very straight. Sebastian’s handwriting.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
—Always and always your best friend. Sebos.
“Always and always,” she muttered.
Meche lifted the book and a picture fell out. She thought it might be another snapshot of her with Daniela and Sebastian. But the Polaroid was of her father, holding her as a toddler. He was helping her take an uncertain step.
Her mother had gotten rid of many of the photos of her dad. Meche disposed of the ones she had with indifference. This Polaroid had escaped the culling.
There had been no photos of Vicente in his apartment. Meche had only been able to picture him tenuously, like a jumble of half-remembered features. This picture brought his features into the light, sharpened him, made him real.
And damn it, she looked a lot like her father. She’d forgotten that.
Meche wandered into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. She would have to go to her dad’s apartment again. There were so many things to sort out and another night of food and prayer to look forward to.
“Are you hungry?” her mother asked, wandering into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator.
“I’m fine.”
“You haven’t had breakfast.”
“I never have breakfast.”
“That’s not good for you. I’ll make you some eggs.”
“Ma...”
“Just two eggs.”
Meche knew it was futile to fight back. She sat down at the kitchen table. The kettle whistled and her mother poured the boiling water into a cup, then handed it to her along with a little box full of tea bags.
“Did you ever feel sorry for dad?”
“Sorry about what?”
“In general.”
“Your father made his choices. No, I didn’t feel sorry for him.”
Her mother turned her back on her, her attention on the eggs she was frying. She grabbed a spatula and flipped them over.
“I have no idea what he was up to these last few years,” Meche said.
“The same thing as always. Pretending to write. The bar. Smoking like a train. The last few times he came over...”
“He’d come over?” Meche asked, quite shocked at that.
Her mother turned off the stove and plated the eggs. She set them down before Meche and handed her a fork.
“In the last couple of years. Not a lot. He wanted to know how you were doing. I showed him some of the pictures you sent me, of the Northern Lights. ‘Too cold,’ he told me.”
Natalia sat down across from Meche, holding a glass of orange juice between her hands. Meche really did not want to eat, but she took a tiny bite.
“He wanted to write to you. I gave him your e-mail...”
“Why would you do that?” Meche asked.
She had told Natalia not to give her personal information to her father. He’d had it before and they had few, sparse conversations over the years, generally on Christmas and her birthday. When she lived in London he phoned one night, teary and drunk, talking about music. An incoherent babble of self-pity, of “Let me explain a few things to you about myself,” and all of it mixed with lyrics from songs. A mess. She told her mother not to give her phone number to him again and changed the number.
“He was dying, Meche,” Natalia said, palms up. “What else was I supposed to do? He said he was going to write to you from an internet café. I guess he didn’t.”
“Nope.”
Meche added a couple of spoons of sugar to her tea, stirring it slowly.
“Do you miss him?” her mother asked.
“My father?” Meche asked. “How could I miss someone I hadn’t seen for half my life before he died?”
“Because you look like you miss him.”
MECHE CONTINUED CATALOGUING her father’s albums. Around noon, she realized she should have eaten the eggs instead of just taking a bite. Her father’s cupboards were barren, the kitchen minimally stocked. Above the sink she found a big box of animal crackers. There was also powdered milk.
She thought of eating the crackers, but the memories of her father and a younger Meche enjoying them with a glass of milk made her pause. She grabbed her jacket and walked two blocks away, to a narrow Chinese café. She asked for tea, but this
being a Mexican-Chinese café, there was none. She settled for café-au-lait and fresh bread rolls, watching the woman half-asleep behind the cash register; thinking that this café could be right from the 1980s, so old and worn it looked.
Meche grabbed her earbuds and pressed play, but despite the cheery assurances of Elvis Presley the world seemed dim and grey. She paid, went back to her father’s apartment, and found it dimmer and greyer than the café.
She did not feel like sorting his records. She was tired of looking at album covers and decided to put some of his other things in boxes. The typewriter, to begin with.
It was impossible to believe a man would continue to use a typewriter well into this decade, but he had. It was a heavy beast, many keys worn with the passage of time. Meche set it in the box, then began to gather his manuscript pages. There was, literally, a pile of them and many more scattered all over the house.
While looking for more pages, she found a dozen shoeboxes under the bed. Each box was packed with tiny little notebooks, inscribed with her father’s spidery handwriting. Most of the notebooks contained songs. Songs he’d written. A few things for the book, but it was mostly his songs and his random thoughts.
Meche had never seen any of her father’s songs. She knew he’d written them and she knew he’d stopped. But he hadn’t stopped. There were notebooks from the 70s, but others were labelled from the 80s and 90s, and as recently as a few months before. She pulled out a bunch of yellowed letters and discovered these were the love letters he had written to her mother years before, when he was courting her. He had written lyrics in the margins.
Secretly, under his bed, Vicente Vega had collected decades worth of lyrics and of his life.
Meche grabbed one notebook from 1973 and opened it, turning the pages curiously, looking at the careful, small letters, the tiny script with almost no spaces in between words.
Natalia and I agreed that if we have a boy, she’ll pick the name, and if it’s a girl, I get to pick. I know we are going to have a girl. I know she will have my eyes. I have been thinking of a proper name for her. There are many pretty names from songs which she could have. At first I thought maybe Emily because of the song For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her, but then I changed my mind. I thought about Julia because of The Beatles’ song from The White Album. Then I figured maybe I should name her after a singer instead of a song, and oh boy, anyone who knows me knows my first choice was Janice. But yesterday I was listening to Mercedes Sosa singing Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra and I think I will call her Mercedes Violeta, in honour of two great Latin American writers. Life has not given me many things, but it will give me the most important thing I can ever have: my very own Mercedes.
Meche looked around the house and found the record she was looking for easily. It had been in the stack next to her father’s bed: Mercedes Sosa singing Gracias a la Vida. She put the record on and sat on the floor in her father’s bedroom, looking at the painted palm trees.
Meche took out the picture of her in her father’s arms and she wondered about this man she did not know, this stranger who had passed away and left nothing but papers, records and songs.
Mexico City, 1988
SEBASTIAN AND MECHE were both sitting on the floor and leaning over the book, carefully absorbing every word. Daniela, meanwhile, sulked in a corner. She had videotaped some episodes of El Extraño Retorno de Diana Salazar—the soap opera starring Lucía Méndez about a woman from 16th century colonial Mexico with psychic powers who reincarnates in modern Mexico—and had intended to watch them that afternoon. Meche had invented a mathematics study session, pulled her out of her home and dragged her to the factory. What they were studying was magic and Daniela was not willing to help with their research, preferring to sit on the couch and immerse herself in a bodice ripper with a sexy pirate on the cover.
“But here, what about this part?” Sebastian asked. “An amulet. An object of power.”
“What does it mean?”
“Like witches with wands. Only not that stupid, I guess.”
“Art-ha-me,” Meche said, turning the page of the book. “Dani, aren’t you even going to look at it?”
“Not if it has demons in it.”
Sebastian had found a used book about witchcraft with plenty of extracts from The Key of Solomon. It mentioned a bevy of demons and the garish cover with a bug-eyed woman had scared Daniela away. She insisted she was not going to read it, study it or anything of the sort.
“It’s not Hollywood demons,” Meche said.
Daniela shook her head and Meche rolled her eyes.
“Okay, so objects of power. We can’t be carrying staffs around Mexico City. What can we keep to be our object?”
“I don’t know,” Sebastian said with a shrug. “Couldn’t we keep whatever we want? Whatever matters to us?”
“That’s fine with me. We should keep it a secret. Never tell anyone. Not even each other.”
“Why would we keep secrets from each other?” Sebastian asked, frowning.
“Ugh. Don’t you listen when you speak out loud? Didn’t you just tell us about Merlin and that chick Vivi?”
“Vivien.”
“That one. She figured Merlin’s weakness, tricked him and made him sleep forever.”
“But we wouldn’t trick each other.”
“Yeah, but it feels kind of personal.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll write this thing about objects of power in the grimoire,” Meche said taking her pen and opening the notebook. “Did you hear about objects of power?”
“I heard,” Daniela said.
Meche began writing, neatly labelling the entry with the date and a heading. Sebastian stretched his feet and reached for the large bag of chips Meche had brought. There were also a couple of sodas and some chocolate. He munched the chips loudly and wondered what object he might pick. A book. Would that be too obvious? Where would he put it? He shared his room with Romualdo and that didn’t leave many chances for privacy. There was a loose tile in the kitchen which could be loosened a bit more. Or perhaps he should just tuck it at the back of his closet. Under the bed.
“We still don’t have the money,” Sebastian reminded Meche.
She held the pen between her teeth and nodded.
“Maybe it takes longer to take effect when it’s cash,” Daniela suggested.
“Well, we’re going to need it if we want to buy new clothes and stuff,” Sebastian said. “Are your parents even going to let you go, Dani?”
“Yeah. My mom thinks it’ll be good if I go. As long as I’m back early, by ten. She can pick us up and drop us off.”
“Wanna hitch a ride with Dani?” Sebastian asked.
“I want to stay late,” Meche said. “Can’t we take a cab?”
Sebastian considered his reduced finances. Bagging groceries was not a lucrative operation and a cerillo had no regular wage or contract, just the tips he could gather. On top of that, it was near the end of the month and that meant money was short. He didn’t have cash to splurge on a cab and since their spell hadn’t actually worked yet, he was reluctant to promise a taxi, even if they split it.
“We can take my motorcycle or the bus,” he proposed.
“I don’t want to mess my hair and clothes on the bus,” Meche said.
“We could walk...”
“All the way to Isadora’s house?”
Sebastian did not want to sound like he was cheap. He hated putting his situation into words, so he simply sat on the couch, picking up a couple of records and examining them, hoping Meche might drop the point for now.
Meche went back to her grimoire. After a while she sighed and sat between Daniela and Sebastian.
“Rodriguez is so going to fail me,” she said.
“Why?” Daniela asked.
“Because he’s a freak. Didn’t you see him in class today, ‘Miss Vega, can you tell us one of the important symbols in Anna Karenina and then he kept drilling me and drilling me, like it was
the Spanish Inquisition. I did the reading and he still told me he’s giving me a bad mark.”
“I’m not doing too great either,” Daniela said.
“What are you talking about? You always get an 8.”
“Yeah, but my dad doesn’t like me getting anything but 10s,” Daniela said. “And I’m seriously studying hard.”
“Isadora is passing with flying colours,” Meche said. “Maybe I need to flash my panties at the creep more often.”
Sebastian gave Meche an irritated, sideways glance, his jaw growing tense at the mention of the girl he liked.
“She does not flash her panties at anyone.”
“Oh, hoho. With that short skirt?” Meche said, snorting. “She flashes plenty. And her squeaky little voice. ‘Mr. Rodriguez, I don’t understand why Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train.’ Newsflash: because it’s fucking foreshadowed like pages before. Even I got that.”
“If you’re going to be a bitch why don’t you do it alone?” Sebastian said, grabbing his backpack.
“Where are you going?” Meche asked.
“I’ve got a shift at the supermarket.”
“At six?”
“Yeah, I think I’ll leave early.”
“Ugh, Sebos, don’t be a dick.”
“Bye,” he muttered.
NINE O’CLOCK AND two more hours until he could take off his vest and roll into bed. Sebastian bagged groceries robotically, tossing onions and avocados and potatoes together, stretching out his hand and waiting for the clock to advance another minute.
He felt the headphones pressing against his ears as Meche stood behind him, standing on her tiptoes. He turned around and raised an eyebrow at her.
“What?”
“You said you wanted to borrow my Walkman so you could listen to music at work tonight,” she said.
“You didn’t have to...”
“It’s got The Who on there. Which is probably like giving pearls to a pig, but knock yourself out with it.”
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