The Good Cripple

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Let’s think about it, no?”

  Later, while they were having dinner next to the fire in the little fireplace, she said, “It would be a pity if we left without ever meeting Bowles.”

  He nodded, and went on eating.

  All that week it rained almost without stopping. The roads developed potholes and the countryside around Achakar became a swamp, but the Moroccans seemed very pleased.

  Juan Luis spent his days reading by the fire, with his legs wrapped in a wool blanket, and Ana Lucía never stopped claiming that if the sun didn’t come out soon she was going to get sick. It was clear from her tone of voice that she was referring to her mental health.

  Finally one Saturday the rain stopped and it was a splendid day. A few hours of sunlight were enough to make the flowers come out, and their scent drifted through the air. The earth was almost dry by noon, and in the afternoon light the dark leaves of the palm trees had a metallic gleam.

  The Lunas went out for a stroll. They crossed the highway to walk down to the beach and continue along the sand and rocks to a restaurant called Sol. A hard line separated the sea from the sky. The sea was much bluer than the sky, and the seafoam was white as milk, tinted here and there with violet and rose. At Sol they ate seafood tapas and drank beer.

  Later they drove to the top of Mediuna, from where they could see the Spanish coastline across the sea: the distant bulge of Cape Trafalgar was visible in the west, and still farther off a white glow that had to be Cádiz. In the evening, they drank Moroccan tea at the town café. He was hungry again and invited her to have dinner in the city.

  “Any place in particular?” she asked.

  He thought about it a moment.

  “There’s a new place called the Montecarlo. I’ve heard Bowles sometimes likes to go there.”

  “Then let’s go,” she answered enthusiastically.

  A little while later, therefore, they were not surprised to see Bowles come into the restaurant, accompanied by his chauffeur and followed by a young couple, probably Germans, and a middle-aged woman who looked Semitic, but not Moroccan. A waiter showed them to a reserved table, and the lady, who turned out to be Parisian, knocked over an empty glass as she sat down, causing laughter. The maître d’ went to Bowles’s table to greet him. Juan Luis, who for exceedingly long stretches could not avert his eyes from that table, observed with admiration the contrast between the two men shaking hands. Juan Luis did not believe himself to be racist, classist , or elitist, but he couldn’t help reflecting that those two beings belonged to very different worlds, and though their hands were touching at that moment, they were separated by a distance that couldn’t possibly be overcome in the course of a human lifetime. The Moroccan went back to the kitchen and soon returned to Bowles’s table, followed by a man whose appearance had the effect of a bucket of cold water on Juan Luis’s back. The maître d’ introduced him to Bowles and his companions as Monsieur Pérez, the owner.

  “What’s wrong?” Ana Lucía asked Juan Luis.

  “Nothing, nothing,” he tried to laugh. “I think I’m seeing things.”

  “Está bien. Stop looking over there. No, really, it’s bad manners.”

  He lowered his eyes to a china plate full of black olives. He stared at them fixedly, as if that could stop the vortex that was spinning in his head.

  “What on earth is wrong with you, Juan Luis!”

  He looked at her.

  “Nothing.”

  The owner’s voice reached Juan Luis’s ears as if it were coming from a long way off.

  “I admire your work very much,” he was saying. “I’ve read all your novels.”

  And Bowles’s voice, a little sharply: “Have you really?” He laughed incredulously. “Where are you from?”

  “You’re asking because of my accent, aren’t you? You have a good ear,” the owner looked around the table and Bowles’s companions nodded their agreement. “I’ve lived in several places. In Mexico and Venezuela and also in Guatemala. Something from those places must have stuck to me.”

  “Excuse me,” Juan Luis said to Ana Lucía. Without his cane, he got up from the table and limped toward the sign that said “Toilettes.”

  He looked at himself in the mirror: he was pale. He leaned over the toilet and vomited. Monsieur Pérez not only looked like but had the same voice as the man who had mutilated him, and Bowles’s observation about his Latin American accent had transformed Juan Luis’s stupor into certainty, a certainty that was entirely unacceptable but no less real for that reason. Or else, as he told Ana Lucía, he’d had a hallucination––he thought maybe the kif he’d smoked as they strolled through the forest of Mediuna that afternoon had played a nasty trick on him. A waiter was collecting soup plates from the other table. The owner had withdrawn and Juan Luis drank a little water and breathed deeply in relief.

  “Feeling better?” Ana Lucía wanted to know.

  He smiled.

  “I had to throw up. I’m fine now.”

  She made a face of revulsion.

  “Poor guy. Do you want to leave? What could it be?”

  “Forget about it,” he smiled. “I’ll tell you later.”

  On the way back to Achakar, Juan Luis put on a flamenco tape and they barely spoke. Back home, she said it was a pity he’d felt so ill; otherwise they might have talked to Bowles.

  “But maybe it wasn’t the moment,” she added then.

  In bed, she came over to him under the sheets.

  “Aren’t you going to explain what happened to you?”

  “Ummm. I’m falling asleep. I don’t know if I can explain it,” he thought about it but didn’t say any more and a few minutes later he fell asleep.

  A clamor of sparrows and the faint buzz of bumblebees could be heard from the orchard. Ana Lucía was already in the kitchen, and there was a smell of coffee. Juan Luis got out of bed with memories of a dream that had repelled him but that he couldn’t remember. Leaning on his cane, he stood for a moment looking at the coins he’d left on the bedside table the night before and decided not to explain anything to Ana Lucía about the strange encounter in the Montecarlo.

  He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, then back to the bedroom. He opened the curtains and performed his brief morning calisthenics routine. Then he went to the dining room, kissed his wife on the lips, and sat down across from her to eat breakfast with a slight feeling of guilt. But out of delicacy or defiance, she made no allusion to the previous night. Nevertheless, she expressed once again her desire to leave Tangier. It didn’t matter where they moved, whether to New York, Spain or Guatemala: she was sick, she said, of the Moroccan mentality.

  “Now, now: why are we feeling this way?” he asked, and realized he’d meant for his question to be a little bit cruel.

  “I don’t know. But I do know when a place isn’t right for me anymore. I’ve spent some of the happiest years of my life here, but something is telling me, and has been telling me for days now, that it’s time to go. You don’t feel anything like that? Tell me the truth.”

  “No, in all honesty,” he answered. He was putting a coat on because they were going to go out for a walk. She handed him his cane. “But maybe a change of scene would do us good.”

  A few days later he decided to go to Tangier; he intended to find out one or two things about Monsieur Pérez. On the pretext of going to the market and the shoe repairman–– knowing Ana Lucía wouldn’t be able to go with him because it was the day Aicha came to do the cleaning and they couldn’t leave her alone because she did everything all wrong––he announced he was going in to Tangier. Ana Lucía was sorry that, deliberately or thoughtlessly, he was depriving her of the excursion, but she didn’t protest.

  “It’s just oranges we’re out of, right?” he said before leaving.

  “No. We’re almost out of s
ugar, too. They’ve got all that at the little stand next to the caves, if you want to save yourself the trip. We also need onions. And if you can, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some butane. The cylinder in the bathroom is almost empty. And Aicha needs a broom. All right, it’s probably best that you go, but come back soon. In time for lunch?”

  Juan Luis parked the R-4 about thirty meters away from the front door of the Montecarlo and sat there for while behind the steering wheel with the morning sun on his lap, listening to a tape of short pieces by Stravinsky and keeping watch on the door of the restaurant, through which waiters, busboys, suppliers and a beggar or two came and went. Many things went through Juan Luis’s mind. Vague questions about chance, destiny, and what Muslims call mektoub . Looking back through time, everything seemed to have some meaning, or at least a meaning could be attributed to almost everything. But to believe that what was about to happen was already written down somewhere would be self-deception, he thought. He was sitting there waiting for the owner to appear, in the stance of a man who wants to let himself fall from a high place simply in order to experience an unknown sensation. But there was something else, too: he was hearing a voice which seemed to come from another part of his brain and which told him that he was there because it was his duty to be there. It took him a while to realize, with a familiar wave of anger, that the voice was the voice of his father.

  When at last he saw the owner leaving the restaurant, he gripped the steering wheel and felt his heart start beating harder and faster. He watched him cross the street, get into a recent-model gray Citroën, and drive away. It was him.

  “I have to go to the shoe repairman,” Juan Luis told himself mechanically. The new soles on his Spanish boots must be ready by now.

  He sat still until the Stravinsky tape was over, then got out of the R-4 and walked down the street without his cane, hiding his lameness with a stab of pain at each step, toward the restaurant. A bucket of dirty water held the door open. It was dark inside, and a smell of cigarette smoke mingled with grease and fish floated in the air of the dining room where there was no one to be seen.

  Juan Luis went back outside to ring the bell. Immediately a man in a sky blue track suit came out of the kitchen and walked towards Juan Luis. It was the maître d’.

  “Shni bghiti?” he asked in Moroccan dialect, with a distinctly unfriendly expression.

  “Oh, Pardon. Je ne parle pas l’arabe. Espagnol ou français?”

  “Mais oui,” something sparked in the black eyes beneath the maître’d’s dense brows. “You were here last night, weren’t you? With Monsieur Bowles, no?”

  “That’s right,” Juan Luis heard himself saying. “You have a good memory.”

  “I remember faces,” the other man said. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s …”

  A motorcycle went snarling down the street. From the kitchen came a clatter of plates. A fly settled on the maître d’s glistening forehead.

  “I’d like to ask the owner something.”

  “He’s just gone out.”

  “It’s nothing terribly urgent. Do you have a phone? I wanted to see if he could set up a reception for us.”

  “Of course,” the maître d’ took his wallet out of a pocket in his track suit and extracted a business card. He gave it to Juan Luis with a smile that displayed his enormous, discolored teeth. “There you are.”

  Juan Luis took the card, which was mauve, with blue and red letters. MONTECARLO, he read, Specializing in Mediterranean dishes.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I’ll give him a call. But, excuse me, is this the name?”

  “Yes. Martín Pérez.”

  “Thanks. And your name?”

  “Abdelghani,” he said, showing his enormous yellow teeth.

  “Thanks again,” Juan Luis told him, and turned on his healthy foot to head for the door, almost without limping, forcing himself to take the pain.

  “You’re welcome!” the Moroccan exclaimed to his back.

  Juan Luis drove down Mohammed V Boulevard and turned at Calle Velásquez to park in front of El Faro Fax-Teleboutique, which he entered. The boy behind the counter gave him the file of incoming faxes to look through; there was nothing for Ana Lucía or for him.

  “Pourriez vous me donner une feuille de papier, s’il vous plaît? J’en ai besoin pour envoyer un fax.”

  “Oh oui, monsieur,” the boy opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper, and handed it to Juan Luis.

  Juan Luis went into one of the phone booths, sat down on the little bench, and put the paper on the phone table to write.

  He generally sent his father some trivial message every two months or so, and the old man answered them with short notes that were also trivial. But today’s fax would be different. He had to find out something he had not wanted to know years earlier. Without any preamble other than the customary greeting, he wrote:

  Did you ever find out the names of the members of the band that kidnapped me who didn’t die in the jeep accident? I would like to know them. Not that I’m afraid of running into one of them by chance, but that is a possibility, especially now that the world seems to have become so small. Nor do I imagine we could recover the money that was lost so many years ago at this point …”

  In conclusion, he asked his father please to send the information by mail and not by fax, because the Tangier Muslims often know Spanish, and the employees of the teleboutique looked over the faxes that came in and allowed anyone at all to leaf through them.

  He left the phone booth, took the paper to the employee and stood there supervising while the boy pushed the buttons to transmit the fax: the paper went into the machine’s roller and emerged from it: there were three beeps, and the boy gave the sheet of paper back.

  Juan Luis went out into the street, walked up to Plaza Faro and had his boots polished, leaning against one of the old Portuguese cannons that was aimed toward the other side of the strait. He gave the shoeshine man a tip and then went to buy food in the market on Calle Fez, looking in, along the way, on the shoe repairman who said his boots weren’t ready yet.

  He drove slower than ever on his way home by the high, winding road along Cape Spartel. He thought the only thing for him to do was kill the Sephardi himself, or have him killed.

  That night, after having relations with Ana Lucía and a moment before falling asleep, he thought once more that he had to kill him, and with his eyes closed he saw an image of the Sephardi dead, with his throat slit.

  Two weeks later he received a letter stamped Urgent from his father, who’d had it mailed from the United States rather than Guatemala, where the postal workers had been on strike for a month. In it, he told him the names of the surviving members of the group that kidnapped him; the name Martín Pérez was not among them. Of course it was possible he had changed his name, Juan Luis told himself, but he was already feeling like a bit of a coward because the news lifted all responsibility from his shoulders. He no longer had to think about killing anyone.

  But, though this decision relieved his conscience, he did not lose sight of the fact that he was running a certain risk if indeed the owner of the Montecarlo was the Sephardi. Around that time he had several nightmares that centered on the murder of the Sephardi. He murdered him treacherously several times without feeling the slightest guilt, or he murdered him without giving him any chance to defend himself, and without feeling that this was unjust, either.

  The two of them had agreed they would visit Paul Bowles that day. It was a Sunday in February, in the afternoon.

  Everything went marvelously, right from the start. Bowles’s driver wasn’t there––he had Sundays off––and Bowles, with his well-known kindness, let them in and served them tea, which was delicious. They spoke of places the three of them had visited—in Mexico, Guatemala, and Morocco—and about “things gone and things still here.”

 
Suddenly it was late, and Bowles said they’d have to think about having something to eat. That was when Ana Lucía suggested they go out to a restaurant –– their treat. Bowles didn’t need much persuading. While Ana Lucía and the master waited for the elevator, Juan Luis went down the stairs as quickly as he could, aided by his silver-handled cane, and retrieved the R-4 which was parked around the corner.

  As they were passing through Kuwait Plaza, Bowles said that several restaurants were probably closed because it was Sunday, but Ana Lucía knew the Montecarlo was open because she had made reservations.

  Juan Luis was the first to go into the restaurant with his cane. The maître d’ came to meet him, with his smile and his enormous teeth, holding out his hand. The waiters, standing in a semicircle like soldiers, welcomed Bowles, who came in on Ana Lucía’s arm, and the maître d’ took them to a round table next to a steamed-over window, in an isolated corner of the room.

  Over dinner, Juan Luis talked to Bowles about his stories.

  “In a story you wrote called ‘Allal,’ an exchange of consciousness takes place,” he said.

  “Everything in my stories is a supposition. If something like an exchange of consciousness were possible, without any interference from signs or words, it would happen like that. But we know that it’s not possible.”

  “But, do you believe in telepathy?”

  “Yes, I believe telepathic communication is possible. But that does not imply an exchange of consciousness like the one that occurs in ‘Allal.’”

  Suddenly, the Sephardi was standing next to Juan Luis and greeting Bowles, who held out his hand over the table.

  “How are we this evening?” he said.

  Bowles answered that everything was fine. “The lady and gentleman are from Guatemala,” he added, and looked at the Sephardi with interest.

  “Well, then, welcome to Tangier,” he answered, with a slight bow, and gave Ana Lucía a long look. “How long have you been here?”

  “Quite a while,” she said. “It’s been about three years now.”

  Juan Luis’s hands and legs were trembling very slightly. It was him.