Home Reading Service

by Fabio Morábito

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  NO ONE COULD give a satisfactory explanation for the third shot fired that evening. Most people attributed it to the failings of an inexperienced assassin who killed two innocent people and only wounded the arm of the principle target, and others thought it was an act of vandalism pure and simple. I immediately ruled out Abigael Martínez, whose Beretta, as the investigation revealed, wasn’t loaded, and I also doubted that he suspected that the old man reduced to skin and bones at the far end of the row of wheelchairs was my father, but I was never convinced by the lost-bullet theory the press espoused.

  When Güero died in a standoff with the police along the US border one month later, I went to see Guiomar, his wife, to pay my respects. I wasn’t sure if I’d find her. In fact, she was moving. There were boxes on the floor in the living room and dining room, and the only furniture remaining was a small table and two chairs where we sat to drink the coffee she offered me. Papá called her la niña, the little girl, but I never knew why. I asked where she was moving to and she said to her parents’ house, in Sinaloa, so Irasema, her daughter, wouldn’t miss out on any of the school year. I nodded and sipped my coffee.

  “Why’d you come, Eduardo?” she asked. “Just to pay your respects?”

  I took another sip, burning my tongue a little.

  “No, I want to ask you something.”

  She invited me to speak with a movement of her hand. She used her gestures sparingly, and I always thought that if she’d been ten or fifteen years older she would have been Papá’s perfect match; they were made for each other, and when they were having a conversation they always lowered their voices and laughed a lot, as if they were making fun of everyone else and judging them from some Olympus exclusively their own. I told her that Güero and I had met one afternoon at Sanborns de Piedra where I’d arranged to see him to ask a favor, and I asked if he’d mentioned anything to her about our meeting.

  “No.”

  “He didn’t even tell you that we saw each other?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’d remember,” she told me.

  I nodded. So Güero hadn’t taken me seriously. He must’ve thought that what I said that afternoon about my father was some knee-jerk reaction, something I’d later regret, and that’s why he hadn’t taken the time to tell his wife about it. Even I, who’d set up the meeting to ask him to scare the shit out of Colonel Atarriaga, couldn’t remember how we’d arrived at the point in our conversation in which I asked him if he’d be capable of helping me put an end to Papá’s opprobrious state. Or maybe he had taken me seriously, so seriously that he hadn’t mentioned a single word of our conversation to his wife.

  “What was it you wanted him to do for you?” Guiomar asked me.

  “I can’t tell you. I only wanted to know if he’d mentioned anything to you.”

  She looked outside, toward the tiny yard in front of the house, and then looked at me again.

  “Your father came to see me about a year ago,” she told me, “after he suffered that bout of pain in his spine.”

  “What pain in his spine?” I asked her.

  “Your father made Celeste promise not to tell you anything.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he was afraid you’d decide to have him hospitalized. You weren’t around when it happened. It was serious, it seems, and he got scared and came to see me.”

  “With Celeste?”

  “No, by himself in a taxi.”

  “Why’d he come here?”

  “That I can tell you. He asked me to speak with José.”

  “With José?”

  “My husband.”

  It was the first time I’d heard Güero’s real name, or maybe I’d heard it at some point and after that I’d forgotten it.

  “He wanted him to take care of…” she continued, but then stopped, as if she couldn’t find the suitable words. She sipped her coffee and she ran a finger over the corner of her mouth. “He wanted José to make sure he didn’t have to go through hell.”

  “Because of his cancer?”

  “Yes. According to your father, in these violent times, it was the safest and most expeditious way to go. He didn’t want to implicate either of you in any way, and he knew he wouldn’t have the nerve to stick a pistol barrel in his mouth.”

  Papá’d beat me to it, I thought, and I remembered the cat in the vacant lot from my childhood, when Ofelia lifted that rock to put an end to the animal’s suffering. I’ve never forgotten the crunch of its skull when the rock crushed it.

  Guiomar took a sip of coffee and I heard the sound of the liquid going down her throat. The house, empty of its furnishings, was perfectly silent.

  “Why’d he come to talk to you and not with Güero directly?” I asked her.

  “Your father and José were no longer on speaking terms, you know why. Also, even though he didn’t tell me, he wanted to know what I thought.”

  “What you thought?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at her. “And what did you think?”

  “I told him he was crazy to ask him to do something like that.”

  “So you didn’t tell Güero anything.” I corrected myself: “Tell José.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not a word.”

  I didn’t feel like smiling, and I said, “Then how’d you figure out that was the same thing I asked Güero to do at Sanborns de Piedra?” This time I didn’t correct myself and she frowned.

  “I didn’t know that’s what you’d asked him to do.”

  I finished my coffee. It was really good, and I remembered that Papá always praised Guiomar’s coffee.

  “The truth is that I didn’t actually ask him to do it, what you’d call asking. Do you have a napkin?”

  She got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a napkin holder, apologizing. She saw my empty cup and asked if I wanted more coffee.

  “No, thanks. Where was I?”

  “You didn’t ask him to do it, actually.” She sat down again.

  “I set up a meeting to ask him for a favor and he told me he couldn’t do it. Then, during the conversation, the thing about my father came up. I didn’t ask him to do anything, I only wanted to know if I could count on him, if it were necessary.”

  “Of course, because of everything he owed you and your father.” I noticed the bitterness in her voice and looked away, observing the cardboard boxes piled in a corner of the room. “And what did he tell you?” she asked looking straight into my eyes.

  I raised the cup to my mouth, knowing it was empty, and she, seeing me do it, didn’t ask if I wanted more coffee.

  “That I should mind my own business,” I answered. “That I should leave it up to my father. I thought they’d come to an agreement. And now you tell me my father came to see you to ask Güero to—”

  “José never knew your father came to see me!” she interrupted. “I already told you that. And I doubt your father spoke with him afterward.”

  “Why?”

  “I already told you they weren’t on speaking terms,” she answered at once, lowering her voice. “Your father was really frightened about his spine and he wanted to know if he could cut his losses when the time came, that’s why he came to see me, and he called beforehand to make sure they wouldn’t run into each other.”

  “So he left here knowing you weren’t going to—”

  “I told him I’d think about it. I know how impulsive your father was. A moment of impulse brought him here, and I thought it would pass.”

  “And couldn’t it be that José listened to me when I asked him to do the same thing at Sanborns de Piedra?”

  “No, he wouldn’t have listened to you, only your father.”

  The h
ouse fell back into that oppressive silence that precedes a move and I could hear Guiomar’s breathing. I didn’t know if I should believe her. If she was lying, if she’d conveyed the message to Güero, and he’d acted accordingly, paying off in one fell swoop all the debt he owed us, I’d never find out, now that he was dead.

  I looked at the pile of cardboard boxes again and asked if she needed help.

  “Thanks, it’s okay.” She got up and took the two cups to the kitchen. I also got up and went to the window that looked onto the little yard. It was starting to get dark outside.

  When she came back to the living room, I told her, “Don’t mention a word of this to Ofelia, it would give her a heart attack if she knew why my father came to see you.”

  “Your sister knows.”

  I turned around. “What’d you say?”

  She was standing next to the table.

  “Your father told her. When he spoke with me, he’d already talked to your sister, he needed her approval and she gave it to him.”

  I must have made a face of complete disbelief, because Guiomar softened her voice so she wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

  “They didn’t want to tell you anything, Eduardo, because you live in your own little world.”

  I noticed the plural, which included my father.

  “My father told you that? That I’m living in my own little world?”

  “More or less.”

  She took the napkin holder back to the kitchen. I had a feeling she did it to give me time to recover from the effect her words had on me. Even though my sister had only been around to hear a fraction of his agony from the pain in his bones and his shrieking when he couldn’t move his bowels, my father had confided in her instead of me. Ofelia had hidden that she was prepared to aid and abet my father in his desire to decide at what moment, with Güero’s help, he was going to cut his losses, to use Guiomar’s terminology, and then it all made sense. She was also aware of the protection fee. If not, how else would my father have explained that Güero owed him a debt and was willing to pay it any way he could? My sister was aware of the fee and of, most likely, Papá’s bout of spinal pain. I came close to asking Guiomar about it, but I decided to spare her the discomfort I was going to put her in, because it was clear that the only person no one told anything to was me, the kid who lived in his own little world, or in his bubble, as Margó had said.

  I went out to the yard while I waited for Guiomar to come back from the kitchen, and I looked at the trees along the street, submerging myself in their majestic foliage. Maybe that was my problem, not looking at what was directly in front of me but sinking into it instead, whether with objects or people. In doing so, I betrayed the nature of what put itself in front of me. In me, perceptiveness was not a virtue but a form of evasion. I used to lose sight of the simple and plain prose of the world. Maybe only when I was waiting for an hour outside the bank to take a picture of Rosario that I knew would make my father happy was I truly part of it.

  Either way, the death of my father threw me into a series of hasty acts of which I was an extremely efficient executor, although passive, or efficient because I was passive, as if the bookcase that fell and triggered the tragedy continued pushing me from behind with its enormous weight, which was perhaps my only way to feel reality’s heartbeat or, in other words, of not losing sight of the skin of everything, the skin that is so close at hand and so elusive, so explicit and unobtainable, like Margó’s, which I was never able to touch.

  Thanks to my alleged heroic act that night in El Caracol, the parole board pardoned me from the community service hours I still had to complete, and they even returned my driver’s license, which I burned as soon as I had it in my hands. We put Papá’s house up for sale and settled up with Celeste, who’d been with us for close to four years, and when I asked her if she wanted me to write a letter of recommendation for some future employment, she assured me that it wasn’t necessary and I didn’t need to ask her where she was going to live from then on. I saw Aurelia for the last time at Margó’s wake, which was attended by a multitude. Everyone wanted to pay their last respects to the most famous mezzo-soprano in the City of Eternal Spring, despite the fact that no one, except Rómulo Esparza, had heard her sing. Her world debut was cut short by bad luck and her voice would forever remain shrouded in mystery. Aurelia looked unhinged. Someone had made her understand that her employer was gone forever. When I hugged her, her ear-to-ear grin rematerialized but it disappeared again when we parted. Two days later I went back to the house to ask her for the picture of Margó wearing a bathing suit over that oblong cubist body of hers. She wasn’t there. The next-door neighbor told me she’d gone back to her hometown with her daughter, without leaving any contact information. I went back a few months later, hoping to find Margó’s sister and ask her for the nightstand photograph, and the same neighbor informed me that the house had been sold. I don’t have any other picture of Margó than the two or three faded ones that came out in the paper after her death, and in those I have a hard time recognizing the woman whose skin I fell in love with, and from whom the only thing I received was a kiss on the cheek.

  Father Clark left the home reading program, which remained entirely under the city council’s management from then on. We sold my father’s house, and with my share of the sale I bought a small apartment where I live now. The Valverde Furniture Store grew in popularity, and for the next three months we had exceptional sales, after which I sold it and settled up with Jaime, and I’ve heard nothing from him since. During that time of abundance no one came to take over for David and people of that ilk for their punctual monthly collections. I suppose my public notoriety, which earned me the nickname “Hero of the Golden-Agers,” was enough prompting for the mobsters to stay away from the furniture store, at least for a while, and so, after I sold it, I decided to open an orthotics shop for the elderly and handicapped, which revealed itself to be a lucrative business, because our city, due to the unchecked danger it suffers from, is expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any other godforsaken town of emigrants. The restaurants, except Sanborns, are going extinct; half of the mansions are up for sale; the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting; and I guess pretty soon we’ll hold the world record for the city with the most empty swimming pools.

  Abigael Martínez closed El Caracol and opened a new bookstore in Querétaro. Obviously he didn’t want to take the bookcases that had belonged to my father with him and he called me three months later to tell me that he’d found a copy of Isabel Fraire’s collected poems and that he’d like to exchange it for my copy, so he could keep the one Isabel had inscribed for him. We sent our respective copies through the mail and that was our last contact.

  Even though I was released from the home reading program, I haven’t stopped going to the Vigils’ house. Of all my former hosts, theirs is the only house I continue to visit. Thanks to Gianni Rodari, of whom we’ve read all the poems we could find, the father was convinced that his children are not deaf. Now they go to a regular school and only live deaf lives in their house. Undeafening them, so to speak, has been the greatest achievement of my short career as a home reader. After Rodari, we read other poets, among them Isabel Fraire. The whole family learned to listen to poetry, the three children with their ears, and the father, the mother, and the grandmother by reading my lips, because even with the mere movement of my lips, poetry allows itself to be heard, something I didn’t know but learned in that house. I also learned to shake off my inherent deafness in their home, to emerge a little, amid so many deaf people, from my bubble, and to know what I’m saying when I hear myself say it. And that’s how I turned thirty-five. It was my birthday the other day and the Vigils invited me to their house to celebrate it with them. They turned out the lights, it was quiet, and I sat back and watched the whole family emerge from the kitchen carrying a cake with thirty-five flaming candles and start to sing “Las Mañanita
s,” but in the penumbra created by the candles it wasn’t “The Morning Song” that I heard but the words my father loved and those that touched Margó so deeply, which she couldn’t sing the night of her world debut and the Vigils sang in chorus, standing and carefully situated, while I listened to them with an adolescent shiver, and I was thankful for the darkness that hid me from their gaze: “Your skin, like sheets of sand and sheets of water swirling. Your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance. Your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home and lights a silenced lamp. Your skin, that nourishes my eyes and wears my name like a new dress. Your skin, a mirror where my skin recognizes me and my lost hand comes back from my childhood and reaches this present moment and greets me. Your skin, where at last I am with myself.”