He got to her even before the edge of the table hit the hardwood. The typewriter flew into the air among the fluttering sheets of paper like a lawnmower crashing through a flock of seagulls. His chair raised its front paws high in a mild request and corroborated that request with the muted blow of its tail against the hardwood. Light from the streetlights came through the windows like something sharp and bounced off the floor like something soft. It was midnight in the city that had forgotten why it exists.
And he threw himself onto her. He grabbed her by the hand in which she was holding a glass of water, squeezed the hand tightly and, in spite of his headless rush, managed to keep the water level parallel to the floor even as they were falling, as his weight upset her balance and her toes jutted into the air; as she, with dug-in heels, with shoulder blades thrust into the wall behind her, slid down hard beside it – more screeched than slipped, since a thousand tiny irregularities in the plaster scraped her skin bloody – as her coccyx cracked loudly against the hardwood and the jolt rattled up her spine into her nape, as though somebody had sowed a whole constellation of tiny white dots into her field of vision, and the metal popped when the typewriter jammed its protuberances into the floor, before everything went dark and he sat down on her chest, drawing a silent whistle accompanied by a fine drizzle of saliva from her mouth, and all this time the water level did not approach the edge of the glass until he put it to her mouth, plugged her nose with his fingers, looked deep into her anthracite eyes and calmly ordered her to Drink.
The water drained into her mouth and although her first impulse was to breathe, to fill her lungs with air, and her eyes – still more surprised than frightened – were bulging, his weight on her chest prevented her from inhaling, so, with difficulty, she swallowed – it’s only water, she thought, all I did was bring him some water, did he think that, after all these years, all of the sudden I wanted to poison him? – and when he saw it flowing into her he eased off a bit, shifting his weight onto a knee on the floor and his face turned back into the only facial form she knew. She could breathe again, so she did.
But not without difficulty. Tears filled her corneas and spilt over the rims, streamed down her temples and got caught in her ears, and she had to cough and he had to shield his eyes from the white clouds that were coming out of her mouth. She drew a convulsive breath and again coughed hoarsely, tried to force out a word in-between the gasping and the coughing, but to no avail, and this again unleashed an attack of slobbering and welling up of the eyes, and when the tears slid down the nasal canal, on top of everything came mucus from the nose, lazily oozing from her nostrils and crossing her philtrum to form a translucent, greasy moustache above her lips. Her face had melted and ran like it was made of wax or honey and had been exposed to the hot beams of the sun. He had to resist the urge to lick it. Ice cream danced in his mind. Ice cream under the concentrated ray of a magnifying glass.
He got off her and sat on the floor. She closed her mouth and swallowed the saliva, exhaled deeply through her nose, and a bubble appeared under one nostril, popping as soon as she got on her elbows and raised her head, inched back a bit, towards the wall, leant her head against it, and with tearful red eyes stared at him, her throat still jumping agitatedly up and down, dryly swallowing, almost like a fish that a wave has thrown up at the shore and that’s surprised to discover that it doesn’t in fact know the world at all, that it had been deceived, lied to, that nothing is as it seemed, and that there are places in the world that are hateful to everything.
‘Why did you do this?’ she asked in a voice that had never before been hers.
‘Because I wanted us all to be together again. At least for a brief moment, again. Because I regret. I regret so many things. Because I wanted…’
‘When Father finds out what you did, you will be devoured.’
This she said without emotion, as if she were talking about the facts of nature, not the inclination of the gods. He was grateful that her voice betrayed neither emotion nor compassion. Everything he had written had led to this point, to this outcome. It had begun to have an effect on her. She relaxed her shoulders and gazed dreamily somewhere through him.
‘After all these years, devoured… When you came here I was just a little girl, a tiny little thing, and at night I couldn’t sleep when you prowled the room, howled for whatever it was you wanted us to give you, but reaped only laughter from the ground floor in response. Always laughter. The jeering noise of old men who knew what you wanted and who also knew that you would get nothing. I’m not a little girl any more, I know that, I have learned how things are done around here. And now it’s over. Maybe they will give me a leg. I’ll bite into an ankle and when your crusty skin crackles and your warm blood runs over my chin, I will remember your every look. I have never felt like this was really my life, with you, that this was really happening to me, that it was me standing behind your back with a rod in my hand and making sure that you were writing, but, you know, when so much time passes, and your body insists and insists and insists, it becomes hard to deny that the things you do really are a part of your existence. That you are a part of my existence. That you’re not just a job or some fluke or something that I do in my free time, but that you’ve become a part of me. Like my memory. A part of my body. Like my leg.’
She raised her upper lip and bared a row of sharp, filed teeth, the heritage of an ancient family ritual. Then she frowned as it dawned on her just what she had stated and how she had stated it. That wasn’t like her.
‘What have you done to me?’ she asked, and for the first time there was a touch of fear in her voice.
‘I want you to see what you’re turning us into. To see who I was, once, before I let myself get caught. I want you to know that I wasn’t always alone. That I had people who loved me, people I loved. I don’t want that ever to be forgotten. When you’re rolling me around in your mouth and when I’m slipping, gnawed and chewed, down your throat, I want you to know that there are people in this world who, if they were aware of it, if they ever found out what happened to me, would never forgive you. I wasn’t always alone. I want you to bear the mark of this.’
Her jaw dropped and her eyes rolled backwards.
‘What have you done to me?’ she whispered. Her hands automatically slid along her body, glided over the torso, over the chest, to the neck and started to squeeze.
‘I want you to meet them.’
‘Why didn’t you leave them alone?’ she croaked through her constricted windpipe.
‘Because you didn’t want to. Because I was selfish. Because I thought I was helping them. Because I miss them, I miss them in my very bones, and I would so much like to see them together again.’
‘You won’t make it.’
Her eyes returned to their normal position. Her pupils, so dilated that they banished every last trace of her black irises to the edges and left only two empty holes in the middle of her face, quivered slightly as they watched him. The pressure she felt in her hands subsided and the convulsive breathing in her chest became regular and calm.
‘No one will make it, my dear Lupe. No one yet has. But that never stopped anyone from trying. If that weren’t so, your family would be reigning over a world of grey.’
His face had changed, and that filled her with horror. His jaw jutted and his beard spilt over his cheeks, over his neck, around his mouth, in black tufts. His nose broke off at the root and the tip folded inwards. She closed her eyes and shook her head to ward off the illusion. When she opened them she saw, sitting before her, with his back resting against the overturned desk, a stranger with a broad smile.
‘She’s gone,’ he said in a voice she didn’t recognize. He was wearing a red shirt soaked with sweat, and the soles of his socks – these were protruding strangely out of his faded jeans – were dirty. In the bottom row of his teeth, instead of a left bicuspid, there was a hole.
‘Who?’
‘My sole desire,’ said the stranger and placed his fin
ger over her mouth. ‘Now we quietly wait.’
She unclenched the hands and removed them from around her neck. She couldn’t understand where he’d disappeared to and who this man before her was. She was scared, scared that the prisoner had escaped, although that wasn’t supposed to happen, and although no one else had ever broken the order of things – how did he make it? He should not have been allowed to make it – and left her to the mercy of the wrath of Father, to whom she wouldn’t be able to explain what had gone wrong. The thoughts in her head twisted strangely and flew into each other in patterns that were foreign to her; patterns that, when she resisted them and forced them back into order, left her at a loss, yet at the same time invited her into such a warm and gentle embrace, invited her to surrender to them and forget that the technology of the moment exists, that there really is such a thing, which a few minutes ago – or was it hours? Years? She no longer knew – when she came up the stairs with a glass of water in her hand, she could call her true, real voice, and they lured her into a new world of scattered concepts and loose postulates where it wasn’t really that bad if anyone got away and strayed from her without a clock, fate and judgement, free of her irrevocable demanding, and that this one time she could make an exception and take upon herself the punishment of Father, end something only in half and quietly crawl onwards, onwards, onwards…
The hardwood floor started breathing in concert with her, rising and falling with her thorax, and the yellow of the street lights, which was creeping in sheaves through the window, had taken on the most unusual of qualities, was disintegrating into strands that wove themselves, in a rollicking game and right before her eyes, into lovely lace doilies placed over the edges inside the room, over her legs, over his chest, and a cold-coloured scent arose from their bodies, a scent of noble elements of blue, grey and violet, spiralling through the spinning wheel of light into a chain that fused the various consciousnesses of spirits hidden in the corners, which things and their materiality have denied to eyes… From somewhere far away she heard an echo of some sort of awareness that something was seriously wrong, that she was getting lost in a world that wasn’t hers and that someday she would pay dearly for that, but the blanket of warmth was too attractive, she wrapped herself in it and silenced the voice that was warning her against this illusion, smiled at the stranger, and when he returned a gapped-tooth smile she felt safe.
The air carried a rumbling sound to her ears and at first she thought that Melquiades was outside again, beating a carpet in stout, rhythmic whacks, but when the window panes began to vibrate and the sound increased in volume, conjuring up before her eyes an image of a giant epileptic cloud, she knew it had nothing to do with Melquiades, that something was coming that was too mighty to be hand-wrought, and she was prepared to genuflect before the force if only she could get to her feet – her body wasn’t obeying her, she discerned – so she could only calmly watch the stranger’s face, its smile which, impossible as it seemed, broadened even more, before the stranger raised an index finger and grinned in relief.
‘They’re coming.’
She wanted to ask who when the window panes exploded into crowns of endless little slivers, each of them catching the light and putting on such a stunningly beautiful display that the cry of alarm died out in her throat and she didn’t even fear the black-clad bodies of giants that sailed through the windows on black nylon ropes. The door flew off its hinges with a clap of thunder under the weight of a studded boot, sliced through the air and hit the floor with a bang that reminded her of the summer and the beach and the fat kids cannonballing into the choppy surface of the sea.
The infenestrated men in black helmets and black uniforms and, with black rifles in hand, filled the room, full of strength and purpose, firmly determined to get what they had come for. They tossed a black bag over the stranger’s head and thrust him out of the window, while another grabbed her by the waist, slung her over his shoulder and marched her down the stairs – it seemed odd to her that there was nobody else around and she could only mutely form their names with her lips, which was of course so futile a gesture that she nearly broke into hysterics – past the empty dining hall, through the salon door and out, where they flung her headfirst through the gaping door of a black limousine, which drove off before its door had even managed to close. Guadalupe had no idea what was going on. Hands she couldn’t see planted her on the seat next to the door, beside a man with a black bag over his head, who was sitting between her and somebody on the other side. When her head jerked to the side as they went around a corner, she was able to observe him. He was a handsome man of rough appearance, with thinly sown grey hair high above his forehead, carved features and a sullen look, thin lips crowned with a bushy moustache and a nose that resembled a fox’s or wolf’s snout.
He seemed to have one of those faces that look best when they’re saying no. He was bent over, with his forehead leaning against the driver’s seat, and, incredibly slowly, untying his shoes. He was dressed in a dark suit and his every move gave off the sound of treetops rustling in the breeze. Silk, she thought. He was dressed in silk, and it was entirely obvious that he hated it. If it were up to him, he’d be wearing something rougher, but something had happened to him, something that had softened him. After untying his shoes and slipping them off, he straightened up and disappeared from her sight.
Short, feverish bursts of laughter were coming from the bag. Guadalupe fixed her eyes on the driver and screamed somewhere deep inside. No doubt it was him, hidden beneath a grey hat and taller than he seemed to her when he was seated in his chair, with rolled-up sleeves and forearms that – she had never noticed this before – were covered with long, black hair. A thick, gaudy gold bracelet that didn’t quite fit hung from his wrist and swung freely every time he turned the wheel. Every now and then she could catch his reflection in the rear-view mirror.
He was laughing. Laughing from the bottom of his heart, youthfully, almost impishly, exploding with the life and happiness that were taking turns lighting up his face. His eyebrows, even darker and even thicker, almost like a pair a chimney sweep’s brushes, showed off on his face and were no longer lowered, as they had been all those years when he was with her, but turned upwards, towards the hat, and if he were to raise them they would knock the hat off his head. Did he make it? she thought. How could he think he had? What had he done?
And immediately her attention was caught by the roadside lights, which, like in overexposed photographs, dragged long, shyly inconstant coloured lines across her gaze, and the empty spaces of night between the light – spaces that her mind filled with everything that would be possible, not only probable, there – so forcefully bursting with darkness and surrounded by light, as if it were protecting them from the invasion of anything with form, and they absorbed her, took her eyes and put them on, so that she could, from high up in the sky, trace the path of the racing limousine that, completely alone on the four lanes of this orange motorway, was blazing a smoky trail into the asphalt. Her thoughts were tearing themselves apart, the feeling was too strong to keep in touch with, too strong for her head to know how to articulate what was going on, and so she hid from the thoughts, hid herself into the night and the silver edge of the horizon, the jagged sea-level somewhere far, far to the west.
Not until she saw what was going to happen – and she knew what was going to happen, it was inevitable, necessary, even though the two points were still far apart – and although she was convinced that she couldn’t prevent it, did she marshall all her strength so that at least a single word might escape her mouth, at least one essential word with which she would, even if she couldn’t change anything, at least assume an ounce of responsibility, so that in the end she could tell – whom? She didn’t know – that at least she had tried. No one will make it, he had said to her, nobody has ever made it, and those words appeared before her, denuded of all weight, and she recognized that he was right – this world is not grey, not at all, it never was – so she coul
d then unseal her lips and seduce the man sitting on the other side into speech.
‘Watch out,’ said the man in silk.
An animal had stepped in front of the headlights, the pair of green reflections came to terms with doom, erasing itself from the world with a blunt thud. Guadalupe didn’t have time to make out its specific shape in that swarming of forms, she only knew that the animal had stepped of its own volition onto the sacrificial altar, and this awareness shook her so deeply that she couldn’t feel the profound silence that lay over the male passengers, she instead sank into herself and followed the flight of her consciousness into the sky.
Up there the clouds were crowding each other out and growing damp. She hung on to the first drop that emerged from the slimy mist and let it pull her into the depths. The world was rapidly approaching her; its chequered visage reminded her of Father’s chessboard, but that was always full of figures, always full of dead pawns and rooks and kings, whereas stretching out under her view now was a field without any game, without figures, with just a bit of grass and ears of wheat that whispered their shades to the grey night. Nobody around for miles.
The drop evaporated on the silken shoulder of the man who had got out of the car, taken a few barefoot, hesitant steps and stood before the bloody carcass. A strange shadow lay across his face and she saw a thin tongue of dark smoke slipping out of his ear. Something had left him and the relief in his eyes was such that Guadalupe’s body, still safely stowed in the seat of the car, trembled tangibly. The palm of the man with the bag over his head tried to soothe her with gentle caresses of her thigh, and the driver, him, demurely stared ahead, now without a smile on his face, only with the hard look of someone who doesn’t want to stand beside a friend in anguish, because that anguish is his own, but would like at the same time to use his body to relate to his friend that he understands that anguish, its entire extent.
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