Return to the Same City

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  He walked down Chapultepec in search of calm and found it in a butcher shop and in a travel agency, his two points of intimate contact with consumer society. By the time he got to his brother’s house, an apartment building with a rusty facade on Sinaloa Street, he wanted a loin sausage and a fourteen-day trip to Manila.

  The door to Apartment C was open. That was unusual and Héctor reacted immediately, putting his hand on the holster of the gun over his heart. Carlos’ voice from the kitchen reassured him.

  “Come in, stupid. The door’s open because Marina went to the store to buy drinks.”

  Carlos was correcting galleys at the kitchen table, disheveled and in a T-shirt. A Vivaldi concerto was ending on the record player. After the crackling of the needle, a Russian chorus started to sing the Internationale.

  “That’s the sign that it’s time for vermouth,” Carlos said, and he got up, brushing the bread crumbs off his jeans. “How is your reencounter with life treating you?”

  “Okay,” Héctor said, disinclined to provide explanations.

  “Take it slowly.”

  “I’m trying.”

  Carlos served himself a vermouth on the rocks, taking the bottle and the ice from the refrigerator. It didn’t even occur to him to offer one to his brother.

  “You don’t look very good. You make me want to put a glass of milk down in front of you.”

  Héctor made his best bewildered face. No worries. No melodrama. No nothing.

  “And my little nephew?”

  “He left with his mom, he doesn’t like Vivaldi,” Carlos answered, sitting down again and looking at Héctor out of the corner of his eye.

  “And you, what are you doing besides correcting books?” Héctor asked.

  “I’ll tell you only if you don’t tell Marina.”

  “I swear.”

  “Swear on the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Jolly Green Giant combined.”

  “Come on, already.”

  “I’m involved in ideological warfare.”

  “Against whom?”

  “Against a gang of juveniles. A bunch of guys from my neighborhood, the guys who spray paint.”

  “What do they paint?”

  “Bullshit,” Carlos said, lighting a new cigarette. “Sex Punks, Wild Border—meaningless phrases like that, numbers, incomprehensible clues to mark their territory. It’s like dog piss. Wherever I piss is my space and nobody can come in.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I paint on top of their paintings. I go out at night with my spray can and paint over theirs. It’s war.”

  “But what do you paint?”

  “Punks are Strawberries, Long Live Enver Hoxha, or Che Guevara Lives, He’s a Living Ghost, Be Careful Assholes, He Lives in the Neighborhood, or Sex Punks Were Born With a Silver Spoon in Their Mouths, or If a Dog Falls in the Water, Kick Him Until He Dies. Some come out too long, they’re not effective, but I hadn’t painted in a long time; my da Vinci profusion is in arrears. I’ve got them screwed. It’s not just ideological warfare; it’s generational warfare, too. Obviously, it’s a professional war and, in that, my painting technique dominates. Those sucklings are going to teach me how to paint walls…? My most successful one was Government=Punks Without Sneakers, and the second most successful, celebrated to the hilt by the dry cleaner guy downstairs, had to do with a discount chain of stores. It was: Paint Me a Blue Egg and Woolworth Will Buy It, but the Woolworth logo didn’t come out that well.” Héctor raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not insanity, it’s just to keep me in shape until I find a new little place in the class war. Besides, sometimes I agree with the punks and we restore universal harmony. The other day I was painting one that said If the PRI wants to govern, why don’t they start by winning the elections, and the gang came along and instead of destroying it, they wrote Yes, that’s true below it, six feet tall.”

  “And where is that painting?”

  “Two blocks away. Want to go look at it?”

  Héctor agreed. The morning was improving.

  ***

  Detective Belascoarán Shayne firmly believed that you cannot make friends after age thirty. That the immovable limit to construct and braid emotions within that indestructible thing that is friendship is situated one minute after age thirty; that after thirty there is a certain emotional paralysis that impedes people from risking themselves in the hazardous forming of the passions of friendship. That after thirty, no one pricks his finger and mixes his blood with others. But Héctor had lost his great friends from before thirty and was left with those from after. He had become someone else after thirty and that other person was the one who had made the new friends: his three office neighbors; a radio journalist; a chubby female doctor; her brothers, two fighters; El Mago, his landlord…Héctor also knew—if knowing is that absolute certainty that you acquire by dint of rethinking the same thing over and over again, and that old ladies call idiosyncrasies—that after thirty, a man cannot make friends with a woman. That there’s too much pent-up sex wrapped up in the relationship, too much inopportune romanticism, too much fantasy between skirt and trousers for things to work. However, and to his utter surprise, when the woman opened the door, Héctor sensed that she could have been one of his best friends for the rest of his life had they met during childhood. This absurd certainty, so incongruous with the wisdom he had acquired, left him slightly stupefied.

  The woman looked at him and gave a faint smile. Héctor looked at her with the face of someone studying the salami section in a gourmet deli. She looked behind her, as if expecting there to be someone back there to whom the detective was really directing that look of adoration and astonishment. There was no one. She came in and closed the door behind her, cautiously, not letting the fantasy escape her.

  She was about thirty years old, with very dark, flowing hair, sparkling eyes, full lips, a turned-up nose; a scar about six or seven inches long on her neck, wide hips, and large breasts. She dressed as if the last ten years had passed in vain: a white blouse, a long black Indian skirt, boots, a very loose scarf not intended to cover the scar. She was smiling, always smiling.

  “Héctor?”

  “He went out to get something to drink. But you can tell me everything.”

  “Well, then, who are you?”

  “His secretary.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked and searched for something in the giant knapsack hanging off her shoulder.

  The windows were open. Héctor was cold. It was December and the temperature went down in the afternoons. But it shouldn’t have been that bad. The cold Héctor felt, the detective suspected, was in his blood; it came from his badly mended bones, it was the continuation of the same message of his dreams. Still, he walked, forcing himself to turn his back on the woman and what she had in her bag, and went to the window to close it.

  “Let’s see, is it or isn’t it?” she asked, taking out a photograph and placing it on the desk. Héctor came back from the window, took out a cigarette, lit it. He picked up the photo and studied it.

  The one on the right was Mendiola, the journalist; the one on the left was him, the other him from a couple of years ago. They were in the entrance of the Revolución Arena, after a wrestling match, mixed in among the exiting crowd. Their faces were surly, sullen, as if they had been the ones who had wrestled and failed, as if they’d respectively lost mask and hair in the duel and from the floor had been dished out two flying kicks to the balls. He didn’t remember the moment or the picture, but he did remember the characters. Mendiola and Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the other. The former.

  He put the picture on the desk. The woman drew near, looked at the subject depicted and then compared it to the man in front of her.

  “No, then they’re not the same, are they? The one in the photo looked better. You are more worn out, crippled, skinnier, one-eyed, mustached, the eye you have left lazy and half glazed-over, wiry muscles. But I like you more now despite the scrappiness. You se
em fiercer, more of a bastard…”

  “You’re a pretty keen observer. What I see is I’m more tattered.”

  “Is that right?” She paused to study the room. “May I sit?”

  “Even if I say no…My lady’s name?”

  “Not a lady’s name, my name is Alicia. My sister used to say it was a hairdresser’s name.”

  “And you wear contacts, your middle toe is longer than the others, and one breast looks to the left.”

  “There’s no better description…I need a detective.”

  “They advertise in the Yellow Pages.”

  “I want this one,” she said, pointing to Héctor.

  “This one’s retired, they retired him.”

  “And he doesn’t take anything on? Easy things? Chaperoning sweet sixteen parties, serving as a bodyguard to a stupid singer, finding runaway cats, things like…?”

  “Not even that. This one doesn’t protect pets or sweet sixteen parties, he doesn’t even take much care of himself. That you can see, Alicia.”

  “But can I talk to you or not?”

  Héctor stood up, walked toward the safe, slapped the ass of a poster of Grace Renat and grabbed a Pepsi.

  “Oh, my favorite drink.”

  Héctor stared at her. Hinting that he should allow her a Pepsi was a transgression he wouldn’t have permitted his clientele even in the olden days, and these days, clientele didn’t exist. The woman smiled at him. He took a second can out of the safe, carried them to the desk, and placed them beside the photo. The Héctor in the photo scowled at him. He moved one Pepsi over the character’s face to avoid the static coming from the past, took his gun out of the holster under his arm, and started to open the can with the gunsight.

  “I don’t think I even have curiosity left,” he said.

  “Christ, they told me you’d tell me to go to hell, but I have a reckless faith, kid, reckless.”

  “Let’s drink our Pepsi, then go.”

  “Where?”

  “Each to her own, okay?”

  “Listen, it’s not okay, I’ve got a story to tell you. It’s terrible, it’s not a joke; I bring you an old picture of yourself, I smile at you until my lips go stiff and my teeth get cold, and nothing. Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Héctor said. The pop top blew through the air. The phone rang.

  “Héctor? It’s Mendiola.”

  “I just saw a picture of you, friend. Why are you going around handing them out?”

  “Is Alicia there?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell her yes, pal. Treat her well. She can be trusted.”

  “I went out to lunch,” Héctor said and hung up. Then he stood up, hesitated. “I’ll leave you to lock up when you finish your drink,” he said to the woman.

  He left, thinking that it wasn’t just the fear of getting back into a character he no longer recognized as himself and who had the bad habit of walking around getting himself killed, it was also the terrible boredom of having to seem ingenious.

  ***

  A gang of neighborhood teenagers was skateboarding in front of the door to his house. El Mago was watching with admiration from the door of the electronics store. It was getting dark. Héctor zipped up his jacket. He was cold. His right elbow and wrist ached. Arthritis? Swelling? Mexico City leprosy? He decided it was something simpler, a sign that he wanted double chicken soup with drumsticks and in a big bowl for dinner.

  “Your girlfriend came by, she left a basket. I put it in your apartment,” El Mago said, not looking away from the skateboarders making figure eights on the asphalt, wearing shabby electric-colored jackets, poor people’s jackets, inherited from brothers who had outgrown them.

  “What do you think, Mago, should I learn to repair televisions?” Héctor asked.

  “Well, you’ve got to know something about electronics, right? That’s what you studied. But I think it’s too late, at your age, you don’t have the grace of a ballerina with your hand on the trigger, which is what the job requires.”

  “That’s what I thought. Looking at you, that’s what I thought.”

  El Mago detached his gaze from the skaters and looked at Héctor.

  “Wipe that look off your face, kid, you’re making me sick,” he said and turned back to the boys, to one in particular, who let a little cardboard box fall on the ground, then distanced himself and rapidly propelled himself toward it, bent over and brushed it with his hair, doubling over, then leaped and got vertical again.

  “Do you think that at my age I could be a good detective?” El Mago asked, hoping to take Héctor by surprise.

  “No,” Héctor answered, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply. “You lack the grace to draw a gun without catching the barrel on your fly and blowing your balls off.”

  “That’s what I said, shithead. Ever since Franco died, life no longer offers any new sensations. The best thing that happens to me is having you as a tenant and that every once in a while a few guys come along and scare the shit out of you by shooting out your windows.”

  Héctor slapped El Mago on the back and went inside the building. There were a couple of letters on the first step of the staircase: one a flyer from American Express that he left there, and the other his bank statement, which he opened as he went up the stairs. Counting everything plus inflation, he had enough cash for one year without having to ask Elisa for any of the money they’d inherited from their father. He knew that, but he looked at the numbers carefully so he could repeat them cent for cent the next time somebody offered him work.

  The basket was in the middle of the living room rug. A bright red rug in a room with no furniture. It was a shopping basket that contained two yellowish ducks no taller than ten inches, and a card. The ducks were ardently saying quack, quack, quack, the envelope was labeled with a simple For you.

  The note was laconic, like everything about her:

  I took a photo shoot in Puerto Vallarta. Two weeks. I hope your mood has passed by the time I get home. The gentlemen are called Octavio Paz and Juan José Arreola. A hug. They eat birdseed and hard bread twice a day, they drink water all the time. If they shit on your shirt, you can start praying for Francesca Dry Cleaning to reopen.

  Me.

  Héctor contemplated the tiny little ducks with their yellowish, silly faces. They reminded him of a rabbit called Rataplán that once roamed the apartment. The woman with the ponytail believed that Héctor became dangerous in solitude and every time she left, she tried to leave something for company: a portrait, two ducks, a long tape with just one song on it, a rabbit, a stuffed roasted turkey and an electric knife to slice it, the complete works of Dashiell Hammett in twelve volumes.

  That was the way it was.

  He contemplated the ducks’ maneuvers on the rug, he walked over to the record player and put on Silvio Rodríguez’s latest. Side A, track three. He peered out the window, the skateboarders had gone. The sound of the chains that made the metal gate go down told him that El Mago was closing the store.

  You have to love the hour that never shines. And don’t, don’t pretend to pass the time, only love engenders wonder. Only love can wake the dead.

  He’d been playing the same song for a month. Curiously, he wasn’t learning the words, though he enjoyed all of them in bits each time. But love wasn’t waking anything. It didn’t light up more than a few hours, a few minutes and always in the solitude of two. It didn’t shed more than ten square feet of occasional light. He went back to the window trying not to step on the ducks erratically circling around the rug. The streetlights turned on as if desire had created a magical order.

  After all, it wasn’t that bad, the story didn’t make for a tragedy. It was just a guy covered with scars who was scared. And the fear wasn’t that bad, it was good company, as rational as love or ducks or the cold. He walked to his room and came back with a black wool vest, stopped in the kitchen and filled a little plate with water for the ducks. He watched them drink. Such pigs, they walked in and out o
f the plate, spat in it, drank and splashed; the water was clouding over and the rug around the plate getting soaked. It was a good rug. Red. Here and there there were a few stains—wine stains, swallow’s nest soup, acid from a Volks-wagen battery, other people’s blood. He walked over to the record player again and put the needle back in the groove of track three. One of the ducks had discovered the joys of diving and he leaned against the edge of the plate to fling himself onto the rug and then staggered a little. That had to be JJ. He tried to differentiate him from the other one. He had a coffee stain on his wing. OP had a sly look and a circle of white down on his head. Now the phone is going to ring, Héctor said to himself. Out of the speakers came: You should love yourself to insanity. Only love lights what lasts. Now, he thought, the phone is going to ring, counting one, two…and…three. But nothing rang and Héctor went back to the kitchen to make a tortilla with potatoes and Michoacán sausages according to old man Belascoarán’s recipe. OP and JJ would adore the tortilla. Either that or they would face starvation.

  ***

  The city that one possesses is not the one that others have. The one one has, one’s own, has the lampposts in the wrong place, it fills with shadows where there shouldn’t be any. In the one one has, the newspaper seller displays Ovaciones folded over so that one has to perform miracles in order to read the ninety-point headline, and even then just barely. In one’s own city, the corner store invariably closes at 7:15 even though when one asks them in the morning what time they’ll be closing that night, they say 8:00; in one’s city, Channel 9 has static when they run the Bogart movies. The personal city may have a kinship with the other cities: misery, unemployment, the unreliability of the electrical power, the price of gas, the black cloud of smog that travels northwest to southwest, the ill humor of the fifth-floor neighbors, the standard taste of the hamburgers in fast-food joints, the cleaning lady’s instantaneous reaction when a lamp suddenly shudders, announcing an earthquake. But that’s decoration. We experience different cities, linked by the abuses of power and fear, corruption, and the eternal threat of descent into the jungle, that hides in the system; it pops up regularly to remind us that we are fragile, that we are alone, that one day we will be fodder for the buzzards. Or that one day, all will have to be risked at once, Western style, Main Street shoot-out style: them or us.