I gave her back the little glass boxes. Juliet returned them to the trunk, where they would continue their progress towards total volatilisation. For a second I thought she was now going to show me her real treasure: an arsenal.
‘Do you know why I’ve kept these tomatoes?’
‘To remember,’ I replied.
‘Not to forget,’ she corrected me.
Hanging from the wall I discovered a photo in a little wooden frame, old yet polished. It was a newspaper clipping showing the faces of four young men: one was talking into a slender microphone held in his right hand, the two flanking him were staring off into the distance and, behind them, a dark-skinned guy with a moustache, his chin in his hand, stared intently at the one who was speaking. Judging by their hairstyles, the frame on the glasses worn by the one holding the mike, their shirt collars and their jacket lapels, I calculated it must be a photo from the sixties.
‘Now you must think I’m bonkers,’ Juliet said.
I said that I was actually thinking she was a soppy old thing. I went over to the wall to read what was written beneath the photo: ‘Press conference called last night in the faculty of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, by the National Strike Council.’
‘The guy with the moustache is my brother,’ Juliet said. ‘Do you know where he is now?’
I guessed he was undercover. Or I tried to guess, but I didn’t say anything out loud, naturally. Instead, I raised my eyebrows, forming a question.
‘If only I knew,’ she explained. ‘He went missing thirty-five years ago.’
I looked at the photo again, carefully this time. Juliet’s brother was the only one who looked convinced he wanted to be there; the other three were already fleeing, at least in spirit.
‘Do you have siblings?’ she asked me.
‘I had a sister, but she died.’
‘Was she older than you?’
‘A year older.’
‘How did she die?’
‘In the earthquake of ’85. And my mother, too.’
‘Seriously? Why didn’t you ever tell me?’
‘I don’t like thinking about it. You’ve never told me about your brother, either.’
‘Where did the tremor hit?’
‘The cardiology ward.’
‘You’re not making this up, are you?’
‘As if.’
‘I don’t know, we’re so close to the bed.’
‘Pity’s a terrible seduction technique.’
‘You’d be surprised, it can work.’
‘Seriously?’
‘But not with me. Shall we have a mezcal?’
‘Or a couple, even.’
We left her bedroom and went back through the shop as I mused that this was what being undercover really meant: two unburied bodies, the living dead, the ones who are alive only through a trick, or a crack that suddenly appears in one’s memory.
One afternoon, on a day that could have been any of those days that followed mercilessly on from each other (except Wednesday or Saturday as Willem hadn’t come earlier and would not come later), the crunching of metal outside announced that two cars had had a crash. I went out onto the balcony and, among the gossiping crowds, saw the entire literary salon striding over to the site of the accident. I downed what was left of my beer and, carrying my copy of Aesthetic Theory to create yet more confusion, headed downstairs with a view to joining the fray.
In the lobby, the copies of In Search of Lost Time lay face down, abandoned on the chairs with their legs spread open. I opened the Aesthetic Theory’s legs and placed it on top of one of the Lost Times, face down. It was things like this that at times made me wonder whether it might not be a bad idea to stop drinking, or at least to cut back a little. I went over to Francesca’s throne, the chair that presided over the circle, positioned at an angle from which she could observe both the lift and the main door. I hefted the brick up to within sight of my failing eyes, turned on the little light, used the magnifying glass to focus, and read:
However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned be – or be thought to be – so difficult as to oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them…
The salon members were a bunch of wanton hypocrites. I looked around and found a red pen, which I used to underline the passage. In the left-hand margin of the page, and along the top, because the message wouldn’t fit, I wrote: Exactly! Are you going to let me give you one or just carry on being a prim old prick-tease?
This done, my plans changed. I went back up to my apartment, poured myself a glass of beer and settled myself into the Corona chair on the balcony to wait for the moment when the salon returned. It took them about twenty minutes, which was the time it took for an ambulance to arrive and take away one of the drivers, who’d broken a leg (I only learned this later, when Juliet told me). Just as they walked under my balcony, I shouted:
‘Went out to give your piles an airing, did you?’
Once they’d disappeared from view and were back in the lobby, I counted the seconds and didn’t even get to thirty. Francesca appeared out on the pavement again and, lifting her flushed and furious face up at the balcony, screamed: ‘You brute!’
‘You forgot the mariachi band!’
‘Pervert!’
‘Me? I’m not the one reading smutty books!’
‘It’s literature!’
‘Oh, well you should have said so!’
‘Come down and read it if you’re so brave!’
‘Why don’t you come up here? Forget about literature, let’s try experience for a change!’
She stuck her tongue out, blew a raspberry and went back into the building. I went to the fridge to get another beer, smug and content as you like, whistling ‘Ode to Joy’, when the disaster dawned on me: I’d left my Aesthetic Theory in the lobby. I ricocheted downstairs like a frantic firework, trapped in the elevator’s exasperating slowness, and burst into the lobby shouting:
‘Hands up! Nobody move!’
Against her nature, Francesca kept her mouth shut, and the obedient, passive stance did not bode well. By now it was almost night and, in the darkness, the salon with its little lights looked like a group of miners exploring a cave. I located the chair where I remembered, or thought I remembered, having left the Aesthetic Theory with its legs open: Hipólita’s seat. As I went over to her she shyly removed her glasses, the cast on her right hand accentuating her usual clumsiness, and placed them in her lap with exaggerated care, as if they were a tiny bird whose bones she was trying not to crush.
‘Good evening, Hipólita,’ I said.
‘Night,’ she replied. ‘Wood night.’
The painkillers were now causing linguistic disorders of the most creative sort.
‘Would you be so kind as to give me back the book I left on top of your Lost Time?’
She looked over at Francesca, asking for help, and with her left hand nervously squeezed her glasses, almost crushing the tiny bird. Francesca was undaunted and ordered Hipólita to resist with an imperceptible movement of her eyebrows; imperceptible, that is, to those who are not experts in the semiotics of the supercilium.
‘I don’t know what you’re squawking about,’ she replied.
The dictator was wielding admirable control over the salon, capable even of imposing her will over that of a highly powerful drug. I looked around me, at the other salon flunkies, who were pretending this was nothing to do with them, and they were right: it was never to do with them. Idly, I looked underneath the chairs, on top of the letter boxes, in every corner of the lobby, knowing even as I did so that I wasn’t going to find anything.
‘So this is what it’s come to, is it?’ I exclaimed. ‘If you want war
you’d better be ready for it.’
Francesca, who’d been holding back so as to carry out her satanic plan, replied: ‘Hipólita’s already told you we don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not our problem you’ve lost your book. Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’
‘If I didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t be such a bunch of thieves?’
‘If you didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t have lost your book. Look for it, but see that you look hard. He who doesn’t seek does not find.’
Since I didn’t know what love was, I confused it with an elevator that went up and down between my legs, powered, complete with a remote control, by Marilín’s voice during our chats. On the long tram journey back home from Coyoacán I was doomed to suffer one of two calamities, both equally humiliating: testicular pain, or getting my trousers all wet.
‘What did you do?’ I asked her.
‘I posed,’ she replied.
‘Nude?’
‘What do you think? You men are all the same.’
‘Nothing else? You didn’t do anything else?’
‘What else would I do? What have you been imagining?’
‘And what’s he doing, a painting?’
‘Sketches, he says they’re studies for a mural.’
I was barred from whatever was going on inside the house, in the studio, despite the fact that Marilín’s mother had given her permission only on the condition that I accompany her daughter at all times. When we got there, the door to the house would open and, without fail, Diego Rivera’s brilliant hand, the same hand with which he commanded the history of art in Mexico, would hand me a peso and order me to come back in two hours. I would leave and walk around the block, but I came back immediately and stationed myself across the road trying to get a glimpse of something through a half-open window, watching people coming and going from the house, a stream of characters that made one imagine all sorts of conspiracies. More than once, my suspect presence attracted the attention of the police, who assumed I must be planning some kind of atrocity. Until at last, two and a half, three hours later, never the promised two, the door would open and Marilín would cross the threshold that returned her to the street, to the tram and to my questions:
‘What did you do?’
‘You know what – I posed.’
‘Naked?’
‘What do you think? Does it turn you on, Teo?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t go.’
‘Oh really! You’re far too pushy, if Frida heard you she’d castrate you for sure.’
‘Frida? Who’s Frida?’
‘What do you mean, who’s Frida? She’s Diego’s wife.’
The tram continued on its way, and when finally we reached our neighbourhood, I’d ask her: ‘Are you going to let me draw you?’
‘Tomorrow.’
I began carrying my sketchbook with me, hoping to show it to Diego one day to ask his advice, and also to keep myself occupied as I waited for Marilín. When the door opened, I’d hold out my pad to Diego and the door would slam in my face, in my ridiculous potato-nose, I mean. As the days came and went, one of the regular visitors to the house, a man who wore a pair of very sad spectacles, came over one afternoon to where I was standing.
‘It’s not the first time I’ve seen you loitering here,’ he said. ‘Mind telling me what you’re up to?’
‘I’m drawing,’ I replied.
‘Out on the street?’
‘I’m waiting for a friend of mine who’s in there.’
‘Marilín’s a friend of yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘A friend or a girlfriend?’
‘A friend. Are you a painter too?’
His face twisted into an expression that meant neither yes nor no, rather that the question was impertinent.
‘I’m the architect of the house,’ he said.
‘But you’re a painter too, aren’t you?’ I insisted.
He agreed that he was with an affirmative movement of his sad glasses.
‘Could you take a look at my drawings and give me some advice?’ I begged him.
I handed him my sketchbook, where there was an outline of the house and a whole load of sketches of Marilín’s face in profile, which I drew on the tram, as she posed, involuntarily, and whispered into my ear: ‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’
And I did get wet. Perhaps the man with the sorry glasses would be able to see what was behind these portraits, my sorry pursuit without end or hope. After carefully leafing through the book, he raised the sadness that was his glasses, closed the pad and gave it back to me.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
I told him I was nearly eighteen, although in reality I had just turned sixteen.
‘Have you ever taken drawing classes?’
I said I hadn’t.
‘So you like the girl, eh?’ he said.
‘Can you tell from the drawings?’ I asked.
‘You can, from the number of times you’ve drawn her.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you lack technique, but that can be learned. Go to La Esmeralda.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an art school.’
He grabbed the sketchbook from me, selected a blank page at random and, leaning against the wall, started writing with a pen he took from the pocket of his overcoat, an overcoat too heavy for the warm weather at the time.
‘Where is the school?’
‘On Callejón de la Esmeralda.’
He gave me back the notebook and took his leave, saying: ‘Don’t hang around here; the police will think you’re a thief, and some of Diego and Frida’s friends will get nervous. Go and take a walk, or else you’ll end up a model too with that nose of yours, only for a still life.’
I watched his melancholy walk as he left and, when he had gone far enough so he couldn’t see my reaction to his note, I read what he’d written in my sketch pad:
To the Directors of the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, La Esmeralda: I hereby request that the boy bearing this letter be enrolled in life-drawing classes. He might well learn how to hold a pencil, or at the very least get to see a naked woman.
Yours faithfully, Juan O’Gorman.
I had stayed in my apartment, monitoring things from the balcony, until at last I had seen the procession of salon members, led by Francesca, leave the building and head for the Jardín de Epicuro. Then I initiated the operation to recover my Aesthetic Theory. I crossed the twelve feet separating my door from Francesca’s and, into the crack, inserted my ID card from the National Institute of Senescence, which last year had changed its name to the National Institute of Mature Adults but I hadn’t got a new card yet. It took me two seconds to hear the click that announced the opening of the door; it was something I’d had to do more than once, after locking myself out. On these occasions, when she came across me fiddling with my door, Francesca would accuse me: ‘Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’
‘If I didn’t drink so much the locks on doors would be impossible to pick?’
I pushed the door and at that moment the shrill noise of the alarm rang out, which, as well as giving me palpitations for a couple of hours, meant I was obliged to put a few drops of painkiller into my ears. I shut the door and went back to my apartment as fast as I could. The alarm shut itself off two minutes later. All I managed to see, through the half-open door, was a poster of Octavio Paz hanging from the living-room wall.
I was debating with Willem about what dead people would look like when they came back to life, on Judgement Day: would they really rise up from under the ground, covered in soil, half-rotten, or would they materialise immaculate, translucent, incorporeal, like a spiritual presence?
‘Just imagine, Villem,’ I said. ‘Everyone who’s ever died in the history of humanity – how many do you reckon there are – thousands of millions, surely? Think of t
hem all suddenly above ground, some just skeletons, others with bits of rotting flesh hanging off them, all covered in maggots, and as if that wasn’t enough, the huge great cloud of ashes from the ones who were cremated; the Bible’s such a gruesome book!’
‘It won’t happen like that,’ Willem replied. ‘The Bible isn’t meant to be interperted that closely.’
‘Look who’s talking! Of course it’ll be like that, that’s what it’s like in films and when it comes to the living dead the cinema has always used the Bible as a guide.’
‘Felms are very often sinful.’
‘Oh really!’
Just then the intercom buzzed and interrupted our disquisitions. I picked up the receiver and heard Mao’s voice.
‘I’ve come from the TCF.’
‘The Twisted Consumerist Federation?’
‘The Trotskyist Cockroach Fumigators.’
‘You can start in the lobby, it’s crawling with literary pests.’
‘You got it.’
‘Come on up.’
Willem put his Bible (in which he’d been consulting passages on the Apocalypse) back in his rucksack, and asked:
‘Wouldyuh like me to go?’
‘No, stay,’ I replied. ‘It’s a friend of mine, you’ll like him.’
We positioned ourselves to wait for Mao to appear but since, as usual, he took ages to arrive, Willem took his Bible out again and started going after cockroaches. Ever since the Aesthetic Theory had been kidnapped, the cockroaches were proliferating merrily; I had tried to reduce their numbers with Notes to Literature, but the book was very slight and no matter how hard I thwacked the creatures I only left them stunned. Finally Mao rapped out the entry code on the door with his knuckles. I opened it and saw that Dorotea was with him. I raised my eyebrows mischievously.
‘If you want to use my apartment,’ I informed him, ‘you need to let me know in advance, and you’ve got to bring your own sheets. Besides, I’ve got company. But come on in, I think your girlfriend wanted to meet my pal here.’
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