‘Who was he?’ the fisherman asked me.
‘My father,’ I replied.
The man moved to the rhythm of the rocking boat, man and boat synchronised through the solitary routine of fishing. I closed my eyes to try and recall my father when he was young, but the only thing that came into my head was the image of a glass with a beer logo on that he used to rinse his paintbrushes in, the water forever murky. The fisherman interrupted my musings:
‘Don’t look now.’
Naturally, I opened my eyes and looked down at the surface of the ocean: a shoal of fish was devouring my father’s remains.
‘Do you mind?’ asked the fisherman.
He was unfurling a net.
I told him I didn’t.
And he began to fish.
Standing in front of the paintings in the exhibition, flanked by Willem and Dorotea, who had stayed to keep me company, I started to read the texts accompanying the pictures hanging on the walls: little pinches that were nonetheless failing to wake me up.
Born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, in 1917, Manuel González Serrano belonged to the Other Side of the Mexican School of Painting, also known as La Contracorriente. His most prolific period was during the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s and, after a life characterised by numerous stays in psychiatric hospitals, he died homeless, on the streets in the centre of Mexico City.
The museum was filled with an agitated buzz because it was about to close, and every room overflowed with the usual affluence: haughty old ladies with no discernment who didn’t miss a single show, school children copying the titles of the works into their sketchbooks to prove to their teachers they’d come, groups of retired people ticking off an activity on the weekly agenda, foreign tourists hungry for their dose of exoticism and predisposed to misinterpretation, young couples who would go to eat an ice cream together afterwards. I slipped through the crowds grouped in front of the paintings, more concerned with getting to the next text, as if they were the last chapter in a book where the meaning of history, the meaning of my life, would be explained.
As a result of his near-total exclusion from public museographical archives, curatorial guides to temporary exhibitions and the literature on Mexican painting from the first half of the twentieth century, the Sorceror remains largely unknown.
Dorotea and Willem could see how troubled I was and they followed me, asking over and over: ‘Are you ok?’
‘Do yuh want me to gert you a glass of wahder?’
And I said: ‘Look, Villem, read this.’
And he read: Once he had settled in the capital during the first half of the 1930s, he soon left his sporadic studies as an unregistered student at San Carlos and La Esmeralda.
‘And what does that mean?’ Willem asked.
‘Sporadic means occasional, from time to time,’ I replied.
‘Not that. I mean what does it all mean, the exhibition, everything. Does it mean everyone gerts to be remembered? That histary corrects its mistakes?’
‘I don’t know, Villem, this isn’t a novel, this is real life, it’s not that simple to explain.’
We left the museum when the guards threw us out and we began to walk – I staggered – following the instructions Virgilio had given us, towards the metro station. On the way, both my hands squeezed the exhibition guide, which I’d brought with me to prove, the next day, and the next one and the next, that this had really happened. We walked in silence, broken every now and again by the loud smacking kisses the two lovebirds were bestowing on each other.
The throng was visible two blocks away: the station appeared to be shut. In the crowd we found the salon members debating the best way to get back to our building.
‘What’s going on?’ we asked.
‘The metro’s shut,’ Hipólita informed us.
‘The whole metro,’ Francesca added. ‘They say the city’s in total chaos.’
We started eavesdropping on the conversations going on here and there, until we had a compendium of rumours. People said that the earth had split and the crack in the Monument to the Revolution had spread, criss-crossing the entire length of Avenida Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma. They said that a crowd had gathered around the statue, at first to gossip, but that things then edged closer to an uprising. They said that the Monument to the Revolution had collapsed. That the metro was closed for safety and would not be opening soon.
‘I know how to walk back,’ Virgilio assured us, and we set off, following him.
It took us almost an hour, at the doleful pace imposed upon us by the women’s varicose veins, the men’s bunions, several people’s palpitations and everyone’s shortness of breath. We witnessed a traffic jam, spanning the entire city, that was impossible to avoid save for abandoning one’s car. We saw people pouring out into the street and we heard the subterranean clamour of something waking up.
When we got to our building, around 8 p.m., there were three lorries collecting rotten tomatoes from the greengrocer’s. Juliet came out and called to me:
‘The day has come, Teo, the day has come!’
Willem took me aside and spoke discreetly, his little name badge trembling next to his heart:
‘Can I barrow your aportment?’
I gave him the keys and watched him cross the lobby, holding tight to Dorotea’s hand, and couldn’t help but feel a tingle go through me: history was about to write a glorious chapter. The door closed and I was left standing outside on the pavement.
‘Are you coming?’ Juliet asked, as she got ready to shut the shop.
‘Where to?’ I replied.
‘People are gathering in the Plaza de la Ciudadela.’
‘I’m too old for that sort of thing, Juliette, I’m going to have a beer.’
She gave a happy laugh and for a moment it seemed to me that the Revolution for her was one big carnival where she would be queen, but she was laughing about something else.
‘You really are a pervert, Teo,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, why?’ she said, looking down at my groin, ‘just look, you’ve got your trousers wet already.’
I walked over to the bar on the corner, went in and headed straight for the toilets to scrub at my clothes with a bit of wet loo roll. Once I’d achieved the effect of making it look like I’d wet myself, I went and asked for a beer and a tequila then sat down in time to see Mao, who was dragging the suitcase the Lost Times had gone away and come back in, swerving madly over towards my table.
‘Where’s Dorotea?’ he shouted.
‘You’re missing the Revolution, kiddo,’ I told him.
‘Tell me where she is!’
‘You know where – she’s with Villem.’
‘I’m gonna smash that little Mormon’s face in!’
‘Relax, Mao, remember what we talked about the other day.’
He collapsed onto the seat opposite me, defeated, but starting to delude himself that this defeat was not, in fact, the one that mattered. It made me want to pat him on the back.
‘Get me a beer, will you?’ he asked.
I yelled to the barman to bring us another beer and a tequila each. The drinks arrived and Mao took a long swig of beer.
‘We let the dog go,’ he said.
‘I told you, I don’t want to know anything about that; the less I know, the better. The salonists are free for the time being, let’s not make matters any more complicated.’
‘I just want you to know we aborted the operation.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
I pointed with my chin at the suitcase we’d used for transporting the Lost Times.
‘Did you get them?’
‘I had to buy them. The first lot I just took out of the library and made them disappear. I would’ve had to trek round all the humanities departments in the country to get this many copies. Next time, let me know in advance.’
‘How much?’
‘One thousand one hundred pesos.’
‘What?’
‘A hundred each. But don’t worry, Grandpa, I took the money out of the operation’s budget.’
‘That’s good, because I wasn’t going to pay you!’
He bent down towards the suitcase and started to unzip it, saying: ‘I brought you something else, too.’
‘The complete works of Adorno?’
‘The elixir of Tlalnepantla,’ he said, placing a bottle of whisky on the table.
‘How much?’
‘Fifty pesos.’
‘Hey, I used to get it for thirty.’
‘There’s a twenty-peso anarchist tax.’
He carried on drinking his beer and tequila in silence, getting ready to turn the page, or to go back, as is still possible when one is young, to a time before Dorotea from where he could nudge history towards a different course. He emerged from his reverie with a dreamy look on his face.
‘Did you hear about the plane?’ he asked.
I told him I hadn’t, and he passed me his phone so I could read the news in the paper: a terrorist cell had hijacked a plane full of stockbrokers travelling from London to New York using five copies of the annotated edition – all one thousand and forty hardbacked pages of it – of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
‘Our methods are spreading.’
He finished his drinks and said goodbye, telling me his comrades were waiting for him in La Plaza de la Ciudadela. I shook his hand and, before he left, I said:
‘How can I reach you to let you know when I’ve finished the whisky?’
He wrote a mobile number on a serviette.
‘When you call,’ he said, ‘ask for Juan.’
‘You’re called Juan?’
‘No, that’s the code.’
I ordered another beer and another tequila, then another, and another, until, just as the bar was about to close, Willem appeared with a smile so wide it made me realise I’d never noticed how huge his teeth were before.
‘Well?’ I enquired.
‘Ah’m in love,’ he replied.
‘Tell me you used a condom.’
‘Condoms are a sin.’
‘Help me take this suitcase up to my apartment. And you’re going to have to wash my sheets.’
They had to send the diggers into the rubble of the cardiology ward: they hadn’t rescued my mother, they hadn’t rescued my sister. Nor had they found their bodies, as with the thousands of others across the city. People began organising symbolic funerals, without bodies, without the dead. What was being buried, if anything, and not even this, was memories, nothing more.
A few weeks earlier, in one of her customary outbursts of hypochondria, my mother had given us instructions to bury her in the family tomb, in the Dolores public cemetery, half a mile from the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. With her parents and siblings dead, all I had to do was get a letter of agreement from a few distant cousins whom we never saw and who didn’t even bother coming to see her buried.
In preparation for the ceremony, I gave a nylon stocking to Eighty-Three, an incredibly long stocking, as long as my sister’s legs, a stocking she would never wear again, and the dog’s bones – inside a pine coffin with a little gold plaque with the names of my mother and my sister carved onto it – ended up on top of my Grandfather’s, who had died in the Revolution, killed by a stray bullet.
The salon finished reading the first volume of In Search of Lost Time and to celebrate, they organised a cocktail party with champagne from Zacatecas and savoury crackers spread with tuna mayonnaise.
When I crossed the lobby on my way to the bar and they invited me to stay, I called out:
‘All this sophistication plays havoc with my digestion!’
And just when it seemed that nothing else could happen, what with all the things that had happened, it turned out that the new delivery boy had been telling the truth. We only found out the night Hipólita tripped over the lost tin of jalapeño peppers on the first-floor landing. The management committee declared the boy innocent of theft and guilty of murder in multiple degrees: Hipólita didn’t survive the fall. The salonists said: ‘It’s the supermarket’s fault for having hired that negligent delivery boy.’
‘It’s the delivery boy’s fault for not realising he’d dropped the tin in the corridor.’
‘It’s the management committee’s fault for not properly maintaining the building.’
‘It’s the doctor’s fault for giving her such a strong painkiller: it made her dizzy.’
‘It’s the plaster cast’s fault: if she’d been able to put her hands down she wouldn’t have hit her head.’
‘It’s her husband’s fault: if he hadn’t cheated on her she wouldn’t have had to leave Veracruz and end up in this building.’
‘It’s the champagne’s fault: it was too strong.’
‘It’s Hipólita’s fault for having drunk three glasses of it.’
I tried to join in: ‘It’s Proust’s fault, for not making Lost Time shorter!’
At A&E they told us she was stuffed full of painkillers. At least she hadn’t felt anything. There was no funeral and no burial, because her children had the body cremated and took the ashes to Veracruz. They said they were going to spread them at the foot of the Pico de Orizaba volcano. Instead of a funeral procession, the whole salon organised a protest march to the supermarket. Juliet, who was a soppy old thing, presented them with a hundred pounds of tomatoes. When I saw them all troop by from my balcony I called out: ‘There’s a bookshop in the Alliance Française on Calle Sócrates!’
In an attempt to understand everything that had happened, I wrote in my notebook: How can everything that’s happened be understood? What’s the meaning of it taking place? Was it a vindication of the forgotten, the disappeared, the damned, the marginal, the stray dogs? Was it a complicated way of saying art historians are revisionists? Was it a laboured joke that life played to rid itself of Hipólita? Or did Fate orchestrate it all to bring Willem and Dorotea together? What if they have a baby? What if the child ends up being the result of this whole story? Was it perhaps life that finds a way at any price? Or, worse, was there some sort of moral lesson that meant I’d have to give up drinking and channel my compulsions towards some other activity, such as writing a novel, for instance?
The need to understand everything, to try and sum it up like a lesson, gave me uneasy dreams. Towards dawn, at the end of a corridor in a large exhibition space, I recognised the unmistakeable silhouette of the Sorcerer. I walked over and saw the Sorcerer do the same, surrounded by the usual pack of melancholy mutts.
‘Now you really are ready to write my novel,’ he said.
‘Congratulations,’ I replied.
‘What for?’
‘For the exhibition.’
‘Do you think I’m interested in being recognised by posterity?’
‘You’re not?’
‘I’ve suffered more than Christ; nothing can remedy that.’
‘Nor can a novel.’
‘You’re right, but the novel you’re going to write is about me, not for me.’
‘So who’s it for, then?’
‘Who do you think? Look.’
And then he lifted up his shirt and, from down his trousers, where he had stuffed it, took a copy of Aesthetic Theory. He opened it up without hesitation at page 30, and ordered: ‘Read this.’
And I read a phrase that stood out in golden letters: The new is akin to death.
‘Am I going to die?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘First you’re going to write a novel. Now wake up.’
‘What?’
‘WAKE UP, DAMN IT!’
I woke in a cold sweat, with a stabbing pain in my liver, and got up to get a glass of water and find a pill that would calm me. As I crossed the darkness of the lounge I saw a little light burning. I felt for the light switch and the bulb illuminated Francesca, clad in a long robe of red silk and sitting in my little chair
, using the Chinese reading light to read my notebook.
‘Give me the keys,’ I demanded.
She waved a heavy bunch.
‘My keys,’ I insisted.
‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘It’s my responsibility, the responsibility of the chair of the management committee. Who do you think opens the door when someone here dies?’
‘Have you been coming into my apartment this whole time?’
She fell silent, conceding that this was indeed what she’d been doing.
‘But how is it possible I’ve only realised just now?’ I asked aloud, although it sounded more like an expression of surprise bouncing around in my own head.
‘You’re a deep sleeper. Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’
‘If I didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t sneak into my room to spy on my notebook?’
She stood up and put the notebook down where her soft, firm, long-yearned-for posterior had been.
‘Now you really are ready to write the novel,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I said now you can start writing the novel.’
‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Why so insistent? What for, what do you get out of it?’
‘You don’t know? I work for literature.’
‘You’re kidding! Does it pay you a grant?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Something like that? What does something like that mean? You can’t just come into my apartment and start playing guessing games!’
‘What I get out of it is a novel.’
‘You’re not going to tell me you’re a muse.’
She was silent again so as to confirm my suspicion and I raised my eyebrows just enough to demand an explanation.
‘What did you expect?’ she answered. ‘A nymph flitting about by a river? A translucent young girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes sitting in a café in Paris? A dark-skinned beauty with huge breasts suckling the children of the earth?’
‘For a muse you’re certainly pretty twisted.’
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