With the dog dead, the salon returned to the Jardín de Epicuro to opine, in a break from Proust, that one defect of my novel, which didn’t exist, was that I avoided talking about illness in it. Francesca told me so in the lift as we went up to the third floor after returning from our respective activities: I, from drinking the fourth and fifth beer of the day in the greengrocer’s shop, she from the salon. We hadn’t even reached the first floor and I’d had to put up with a speech on decrepitude as a fundamental theme of the twentieth-century European novel.
‘Don’t move,’ I interrupted her.
And I stamped on two cockroaches, one with my right foot, one with my left.
‘You see?’ Francesca said. ‘You don’t listen to me, you’re running away from the topic.’
‘The cockroaches are running away, I’m not running from anything.’
Between the first and second floors she tried to instruct me on something she referred to as ‘the literature of experience’ and which basically turned out to mean that one can only write about what one has experienced, about what one knows first-hand. I thought that this was like saying no one can explain what a dog-meat taco tastes like if they haven’t eaten one. If they don’t believe they’ve eaten one. If they don’t know they’ve eaten one. The fact is that everyone has eaten a dog-meat taco, even if they don’t know it, everyone knows what a dog-meat taco tastes like, even if no one thinks they do. This was the real paradox: not being able to write about something, not because one hadn’t experienced it but rather because one didn’t know one had experienced it. I’d got distracted, just for a change, and when we got to the third floor I clutched at a loose phrase: ‘The experience of illness is as good as any other,’ Francesca was saying.
‘Is it now! As good as romance, adventure, a journey or freedom?’
‘I’m talking about literature.’
‘Oh, right! And how would it improve my supposed novel if I started noting down the symptoms of bunions, gastric reflux, hay fever or fatty liver disease? What would the novel be for, inspiring pity? We can do that on our own, we don’t need books!’
‘Disease is the perfect metaphor for death, decadence, the finite nature of everything human.’
‘You mean instead of asking medical questions we should be asking rhetorical questions?’
‘You’re just like a child. Why do you act the enfant terrible? You’re running away from reality, just look at the state you’re in – do you think I don’t know about all your ailments?’
‘Since when does reality matter? I feel stronger than a horse.’
Her face flushed with colour, even though the zip had just finished its ascent: the lift doors were opening. As we went our separate ways, I took advantage of the bulb that had blown on the landing to give her bum a squeeze. It was firm yet soft, a most agreeable revelation. The slap echoed around the walls of the corridor until the end of time.
One of the daily battles in the building was keeping the main door closed so we didn’t get any old Tom, Dick or Harry coming in. If anyone forgot, Francesca would call an immediate extraordinary general meeting of the Residents’ Association, which no one could get out of until the culprit had been found. She took disciplinary measures that ranged from simple tellings-off to fines that wound up in the jar where cash for unexpected building repairs was kept. The woman would have given both Breton and Stalin a run for their money. Following the famous Mormon incident, the discussion got as far as debating the need for a doorman. Everyone referred to it the same way: the day the Mormons got in. It even became a temporal reference point. People would say: a week before the Mormons got in. Or: two days after the Mormons got in. Things happened before or after the day the Mormons got in.
It had happened one Wednesday afternoon, while I was drinking a beer and doggedly pressing a little button on the TV remote after I’d come across the shock of mad-scientist hair and mischievous face of Sergei Eisenstein. That’s when someone knocked at the door. They knocked, I mean, at my door, not the main door to the building, and that could only mean one thing. Actually, one of many things, which in the end came down to the same thing: Avon ladies, hungry children, drug addicts asking for change, phone company salespeople, talking mutes, seeing blind people, door-to-door kidnappers and shameless scroungers who hadn’t even bothered to come up with a story to inspire pity. The only ones who had disappeared, as a symbol of humanity’s progress, were the encyclopaedia salesmen. Knowing this perfectly well, I had no plans to open the door, so I ignored the knocking and carried on watching my programme. The knocking didn’t stop and I didn’t stop ignoring the knocking, either. The ads came on and the pounding on the door continued. Whoever it was was displaying the determination of a zealot.
I opened the door and saw a tall blond young man, transparent as a grub. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, a pair of black trousers and had a little badge at the height of his heart with his name on it, a name that sounded like a Dutch painter of still lifes: Willem Heda. Very appropriate: as the hall light wasn’t working, he loomed up out of the chiaroscuro. Judging by his appearance I guessed he couldn’t be more than twenty, and was carrying out the mission of having doors slammed in his face in a poor country before going to university. In the unlikely event, that was, that going to university wasn’t a sin.
‘I bring yuh the word of the Lard,’ he said.
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘How much per ounce?’
He raised his blond eyebrows in surprise and they almost reached his hair. Then he looked down at the Bible in his right hand. I reached out my left one and rescued the Aesthetic Theory from the shelf by the door, where I kept it like a shotgun, just in case. He looked at the tome pulsating in my hand and his eyebrows reached the back of his neck.
‘Are yuh a perfessor?’
‘As if.’
‘I ask becuhse of the book.’
We both looked down at my left hand. He looked at the book as though it were a dog that needed a lead, as though it were a sin to have a book loose in the house.
‘This? It’s from the library, but don’t worry, it doesn’t bite.’
‘I bring yuh the word of the Lard,’ he said again. ‘D’yuh have five minutes t’spare?’
I could hear that the ads had finished and my programme was starting again. I held up the Aesthetic Theory, opened it at random and began to read: ‘To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality.’
He held up his Bible, opened it at random and began to read: ‘I have seen all the warks that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity’n vexation of sperit. Ecclesiastes 1:14.’
I started reading again: ‘Advanced art writes the comedy of the tragic: Here the sublime and play converge… Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated.’
And he read: ‘An’ I gave my heart t’know wisdom, and t’know madness and fawlly: I purceived that this also is vexation of sperit. Far in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sarrow.’
I looked from one book to the other: his was bigger. On the TV the programme was still on and I was missing it. I backed up so he could come in.
‘Come in, quickly. What’ll you have to drink, Villem?’
‘It’s pernounced “Will-em”.’
‘Thanks for correcting me! A beer, Villem?’
‘A glass of wahder. Beer is a sin.’
‘No shit! Sit down, there’s a really good programme on.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Scheming and affairs and how to get money for old rope.’
He took off the rucksack he had on his back and sat down on a folding chair, an aluminium one with
the Corona beer logo on it. Thief robbing a thief. I sat down on the little armchair I had in front of the TV.
‘What’s yoah name?’ he asked.
‘Teo.’
‘Mateo?’
‘As if.’
‘Jus’ Teo?’
‘Teodoro.’
‘Like the awthor of the book?’
‘No, the guy who wrote the book’s called Theodor.’
‘It’s the same.’
‘It’s not the same. He’s got an extra “h” and he’s missing an “o”.’
‘Do yuh live alone?’
‘Could you let me watch my programme?’
He resigned himself to staring at the screen, where they were showing, one after another, black-and-white photographs taken in the Casa Azul.
‘Who’s the lady with the moustache?’ Willem asked.
‘What do you mean? That’s Frida Kahlo, the painter. Don’t tell me you don’t know who she is, even the Indians in the Amazon rainforest know who she is. She’s so famous they put up a statue of her in a park in a village of a hundred inhabitants in Uzbekistan, and Bulgaria and Denmark invented their own International Day of Frida Kahlo. See the guy with his trousers pulled up to his armpits? That’s Diego Rivera, the man of the house.’
‘I’d like to talk t’yuh about the word of the Lard. The word of the Lard is a great comfart for older people.’
I shot him a deadly look.
‘Pay attention.’
On the TV they were saying: she wanted to improvise her own freedom, in order elegantly to overcome a life of pain.
‘They really like suffering, Villem; what does elegance have to do with pain?’
‘Pain leads to the Lard.’
‘And elegance to hell. By the way, you look pretty elegant, that’s a neat little outfit you’ve got on.’
He flushed: the pigmentation of embarrassment transformed him from a larva into a shrimp, or from a raw shrimp into a cooked shrimp.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said soothingly, ‘it was a joke.’
On the screen they were showing images of Frida and Diego, Eisenstein, Dolores del Río, Arcady Boytler, Miguel Covarrubias, María Izquierdo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Adolfo Best Maugard, Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Trotsky, Juan O’Gorman and Pita Amor. Willem looked at the television and then stopped looking, inspecting my apartment in search of something that would let him start a conversation, and he thought he’d found it when he saw the painting hanging on the opposite wall.
‘Is that a clown?’ he asked.
‘It’s a portrait of my mother,’ I replied.
‘I’m sarry,’ he said, flushing again.
‘What are you sorry for – for having said my mother is a clown or for not having the sensitivity to appreciate art?’
He thought for a minute, confused.
‘Would yuh rather I came back another day?’
‘Don’t you want to watch the programme?’
‘I wanted to talk about the word of the Lard.’
‘Come back another day, then. If you’re lucky I might even open the door!’
It occurred to him to start coming twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and it occurred to me to let him in, just to pass the time. When he found me in a listless mood or when I’d simply run out of beer, he would start preaching at me.
‘Yuh still have time to repent.’
‘Are you telling me I’m going to die?’ I answered.
‘It’s never too late to repent.’
‘What – for having let you in that first day? I wish!’
Following a catechism manual, I suppose, he spent his time repeating that I was his mission, that he had come to Mexico to bring me the word of the Lord. And I replied: ‘You got here far too late, Villem, we’ve already had a load of those types: Franciscans, Dominicans, Humboldt, Rugendas, Artaud, Breton, Burroughs, Kerouac. The competition’s tough as hell!’
One day he tried to take a photo of me on his phone to send back to his family, who lived in a small town in Utah.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ I stopped him. ‘I’m not a stray dog.’
Dad sent a letter: he’d gone to live by the sea, just like President Ruiz Cortines wanted everyone to do. He was living in Manzanillo, with a job processing paperwork in the port. The letter was to my sister and me, and was written in blue ink in tiny, cramped handwriting, the letters all leaning to the right as if they were falling asleep. It was just one page but it took us a whole afternoon to decipher it. He said that ships arrived in the port from the United States and from China and that last week there had been a north wind and he’d seen thirty-foot-high waves. We had never seen the sea, although we guessed this was meant to impress us. He said that the president of Manzanillo used to be a painter and a taxi driver, and that this proved how far anyone could go in life simply by making up their minds and persevering. He also told us he’d started painting again, and that he would get together after work with a group of artists on the docks to paint seascapes, and had sold an impressionist painting of a fishing boat to a tourist from Guadalajara. Then came the last part, the reason for the letter and the bit that took us the longest to understand, because in addition to the handwriting, we weren’t old enough yet to comprehend other-worldly aspirations. My father was requesting that when he died, we incinerate him and scatter his ashes in an art gallery, ‘where they belonged’. He said he wanted the dust from his bones to float among the artworks and be breathed in by sensitive people, ‘sticking to their clothes and travelling around on the threadbare lapels of new artists’ coats’. Along with the note, my father had sent us three pesos: the cost of four and a half pounds of beans. Mum refused to read it, but when we went to bed we left it on the kitchen table, as if we’d forgotten it. I discovered later that the president of Manzanillo had been a house painter, not a painter of pictures, as I’d thought for some time. And that he’d been the leader of the taxi drivers’ union, which contradicted my father’s motivational theories. Thesis. Antithesis. So life went on.
I went to look for the dog’s body in the Jardín de Epicuro and found it under some bushes, where it had dragged itself to try and puke up the stocking. I couldn’t believe it: it was a Labrador, huge and black. Or rather, yes, I could believe it: I knew I was dealing with literary fundamentalists, people capable of killing a family pet and, on top of that, of abandoning the body for no good reason other than to preserve the sacrosanct peace they needed to concentrate on their reading and dilettantism. I covered the corpse with a pile of twigs and leaves and walked over to the butcher’s on the corner, the same one that had given the salon members the deadly animal skins.
I didn’t know the butcher, having never needed to avail myself of his services until that day. From Monday to Saturday I ate in a budget restaurant and on Sundays I made do with bar snacks from the place on the corner. I sat down to wait on the bench outside the shop until there were no customers around to mess up the operation. I had to wait fifteen, twenty minutes. Eventually I was able to go in and I wasted no time; I couldn’t risk someone coming in and surprising us halfway through the negotiation.
‘I’ll sell you a dog,’ I announced.
‘What?’ replied the butcher.
He was carving a piece of meat that didn’t look like beef, or pork, or anything advertised on the colourful posters pinned to the walls.
‘I’ll sell you a dog,’ I said again.
He let his knife fall, looked up and quivered behind his apron covered in blood as if his ribcage were a barrel full of tacks in an earthquake.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’ve got a dog just around the corner, in the Jardín de Epicuro. It’s just died, it’s perfectly healthy, it choked on a stocking.’
‘A dog?’
‘It’s a Labrador, it must weigh between thirty and forty kilos. The whole thing’s yours to use if you want it.’
The butcher picked up his
knife again, but did not resume his task. I feared the implement would interpret the signals the butcher was sending it and decide to switch roles: from work tool to murder weapon.
‘Is this a joke?’ he said.
‘Don’t play dumb, I was a taco seller my whole life, I had a stand in the Candelaria de los Patos. I know perfectly well how this works.’
‘Are you a health inspector?’
‘At my age? If they raised the retirement age that much even the dead would have to start working.’
‘Empty your pockets, show me your wallet.’
I obeyed, striving to show him I didn’t represent any organisation or institution concerned with the illegal trade in dog meat or the observation of hygiene standards in butchers’ shops. This was easy, because as well as not representing these organisations, I didn’t look like I did either.
‘You see?’ I said. ‘You can trust me.’
‘I’ll give you some advice: go and see your geriatric specialist and tell him you’re losing touch with reality.’
‘Are you going to keep acting dumb? What’s that meat you’re cutting? I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not beef or pork. Who are you trying to kid?’
‘This?’ he said, pointing at the chunks of meat with the tip of his knife. ‘This is horse, Grandpa.’
‘If you don’t want to buy it I’ll pay you to chop it up for me. How much would you charge? I’m sure I can flog it to a taco seller.’
He raised his knife and pointed straight ahead with it, not threateningly, just using it to indicate the shop door. One of the indisputable advantages of being old is that most people end up taking pity on little old men, even if they don’t deserve it. It’s enough to make you become a serial killer.
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