Still the Same Man

by Jon Bilbao

After a pause she said, “All of this is so weird. The hurricane, the monkey on the highway . . .”

  He agreed with her.

  “What’s the place like?”

  She gave a snort. Both the evacuation hotel and the town itself were in absolute chaos. More and more relocated tourists kept showing up, and Mexican people, too. There wasn’t a single bed left in all of Valladolid. In complete contrast to what they’d seen in Cancún, the hotels hadn’t prepared at all for the hurricane. They all trusted that where they were, it wouldn’t do any more harm than a regular storm. The hoteliers were making the most of the situation. Those without a reservation were willing to pay any amount for a room; the hoteliers pocketed the money and put them in the spaces reserved for evacuees. As a result, the tourists coming from the coast wound up sleeping on mats in the common areas.

  Joanes heard his wife yawn.

  “You should go and eat something and rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” she repeated. “Please be careful.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I love you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  The silence in the room was unbearable after they hung up. Joanes looked for the remote control and turned up the volume on the TV.

  A minute later he muted it again.

  He went on working for a few hours. Afterward, he jotted down the changes he’d have to make to his offer in a little notebook. Before going to bed, he put the notebook in the backpack he’d take with him the following day.

  He was up and about before sunrise. He put the suitcase he’d opened back up in the closet and sealed the doors with tape. He made sure he had everything his wife had left out for him, as well as water and food for the journey.

  The moment he stepped out of the room, a maid and two maintenance men hurtled in. It seemed as if they’d spent the night in the hallway, waiting for him to open the door. They began stripping the bed, removing electrical appliances, and transferring as much furniture as they could from the bedroom to the bathroom.

  “Wait a minute, sir.”

  The maid had come after him, carrying the golf clubs.

  “What about these?”

  Joanes shrugged.

  “Do whatever you want with them.”

  The hotel seemed totally different. Everything had been organized for the hurricane’s arrival. The furniture, lamps, and decorative pieces from the hallways and common areas had been removed. The insides of the windows and glass doors were taped from corner to corner with big crosses. In the courtyard, the trees had had their coconuts cut off and their branches strapped down with metal bands so that the wind wouldn’t rip them off.

  Joanes handed in his laptop at reception and took a receipt in exchange.

  “Good luck,” said the receptionist, by way of goodbye.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Nothing in the air suggested that the day would be any less sunny and calm than the previous ones. And yet that impression stood in stark relief to the Cancún hotel strip, which looked like a ghost town. Most of the hotels had already relocated their guests.

  After merging onto the highway for Valladolid, he realized that the local population had also prepared for the hurricane. The repair shops, car dealers, and spare part depots that flanked the highway outside of Cancún for several miles had their doors and windows boarded up and their signs taken down.

  He soon found himself in an increasingly dense flow of vehicles, which, like him, were heading further into the peninsular for shelter. His car joined a motley caravan of passenger cars, buses, motorcycles, and construction and farming vehicles. He spotted pickups carrying various generations of the same family, most of whom were crammed into the back, shielded by awnings made of tube frames covered in plastic sheets or palm leaves. He saw a digger moving along with its bucket raised high and three kids sitting inside it surrounded by backpacks and bundles of clothes. He also saw busses evacuating tourists. He exchanged resigned looks with the passengers inside them.

  The traffic slowed to a desperate crawl, not helped by various fender benders or by the two military checkpoints where soldiers with machine guns were halting vehicles and even ordering a few onto the shoulder. Once there, the passengers were forced to get out while a pair of Rottweilers sniffed the vehicle and rummaged around in the mountains of bags and suitcases that made up their luggage.

  Try as he might not to, Joanes glanced every few minutes at the clock.

  “Are you going to keep us here all day?” he asked aloud to himself after almost an hour spent blocked at the second checkpoint.

  The previous afternoon, he’d gone to a store to buy food for the journey. Panic buying had laid the place to waste. In the canned food aisle, he’d found just a few dented cans. He’d grabbed a couple of the most presentable among them and a loaf of sliced bread. The bottles of water were rationed to two per customer.

  He started in on his scant provisions out of sheer boredom.

  The sky was still clear.

  The highway here cut through thicker and taller vegetation than he’d seen on the coast. He found he was able to put his foot down a little along those stretches of road with more lanes, but even so, the average speed along the way was painfully slow.

  He was driving along a straight stretch when, in the distance, he spied two people on the shoulder. One of the figures was standing watching the traffic. The other was sitting on something he couldn’t make out. It looked like they might be hitchhiking, and yet they weren’t making any effort to catch the attention of the passing vehicles; instead, they just stood there, unmoving. When he drove past them, he saw that it was a man and a woman; she was in a wheelchair. Joanes’s eyes met the man’s for a fraction of a second.

  He continued on some twenty or thirty yards before slamming on the brakes. The car behind had no choice but to swerve violently to avoid crashing into him. The driver showed his irritation with a long honk of his horn. Joanes moved to the shoulder, where he sat stock-still, his hands on the wheel, staring into his rearview mirror at the two figures behind him.

  The man, in fact an elderly gentleman, was now looking in the direction of the car. The woman, wearing a straw hat, hadn’t changed her stance at all, her body was hunched and her head bent.

  But all of Joanes’s attention was fixed on him. On the elderly gentleman.

  He was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt. He’d put on a good number of pounds. What had once been a stout stomach was now a serious belly hanging over his belt. The man’s double chin was now a triple. And the large, square-framed, black-rimmed glasses reminiscent of old TV sets had now been replaced by a more modern pair. But his imperious air was the same as ever.

  The elderly man moved guardedly toward the car. Joanes got out.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “A compatriot!” responded the man with great satisfaction, holding out his hand.

  As he took it, Joanes scrutinized his face, but there was nothing in it to suggest that the other man recognized him.

  “Hello, professor.”

  The old man’s smile immediately vanished.

  “I don’t think you remember me. I was your student. At the School of Engineering.

  He added his name and the year it had been.

  The professor looked at him, creasing his forehead, and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember you. But in any case, I’m incredibly pleased to see you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  The professor pursed his lips.

  “We’ve been the victims of a mutiny,” he said, containing his rage. “We were on the bus, on our way to one of those shelters, when the other passengers ganged up against me and my wife, forcing us to get off. They
threw us out. Kicked us to the curb and then just went on their way. We should be thankful they didn’t hurt us.”

  Joanes shook his head, confused.

  “But, why?”

  “Intolerance, my friend. Because they gave in to the irritation produced by a minor inconvenience and let their nerves get the better of them. Because of her condition, my wife requires a little more space than other people. A hard, narrow, straight-backed seat is terribly tiring for her. This fact, in a bus with more passengers than seats and a faulty air-conditioning system, was enough to incite the uprising.”

  “And there was no one to defend you? A hotel rep, the driver . . . ?”

  The professor gave an emphatic shake of the head.

  “Only the driver, but the last thing he wanted was to get involved. He obeyed those savages without so much as a word when they ordered him to stop. Just imagine the scene. They lifted my wife up in midair and set her on the curb! As if she were a piece of luggage!”

  “Is that your wife over there?” Joanes asked, pointing to the woman in the wheelchair.

  “Forgive me. I should have introduced you. My manners are melting in this heat.”

  Joanes followed him to where his wife was sitting.

  “Darling, you won’t believe the stroke of luck we’ve had!”

  When her husband introduced her to Joanes, she simply looked at him meekly. She barely shifted the pained look on her face, as if smiling took an unbearable effort. Her eyebrows were plucked bald, and her dress—white, no belt or frills—looked like a hospital gown. When the professor added that Joanes had been a student of his, her response was, “In that case, I’m not sure we are so lucky.”

  A trailer whizzed past, and she shut her eyes tight to protect them from the dust.

  “Where was the bus supposed to be taking you?” asked Joanes.

  “I don’t know,” answered the professor. “I heard someone say the name of the city, but . . .”

  “I’m going to Valladolid.”

  “That could be the place. I think it might have been, yes.”

  “Would you like me to take you?”

  The professor replied with an enormous smile and shook his hand again, now more firmly than before.

  “You can’t imagine how grateful we’d be if you would. I didn’t dare ask you myself.”

  “It’s not a problem. But we ought to get going. It’s already a little late.”

  Joanes watched as the professor threw his travel bag over his shoulder and pushed his wife toward the car. The chair was motorized, but she needed help there along the rubbly shoulder.

  The whole story about the mutiny on the bus seemed strange to Joanes. He found it hard to believe that the other passengers would have thrown them off the bus simply because of a space issue. Something else had gone on, surely. The professor must have provoked the others somehow, which, knowing him, wasn’t hard to imagine.

  They settled the woman into the back seat and put the wheelchair in the trunk.

  Joanes sat down at the wheel but didn’t turn on the engine right away. He wanted to fix that place firmly in his memory—that nasty stretch of Mexican highway, the roadside hawk perched and watching them from a signpost . . .

  He had imagined this moment countless times since leaving college. In his fantasies, the professor always appeared in some desperate situation where he had no choice but to ask Joanes for help, recognizing, implicitly, that he’d made a terrible mistake in underestimating him as he had. And Joanes always helped him out, making a point of being sober and efficient. He’d make it clear that things were going great, that he ran a prosperous business, that he had an enviable family, and, ultimately, that the professor’s harmful influence hadn’t had the least effect on him.

  “Is something wrong?” asked the professor.

  “No, nothing,” answered Joanes, starting up the engine. “Everything’s in order.”

  The professor belonged to a family of dentists. His grandfather, father, and two of his uncles had all practiced dentistry. Out of all of them all, the professor’s father had enjoyed the most prolific career, having made a small fortune from the patents of various professional instruments—two endodontic clamps, a drill burr, a barbed broach, and, most significantly, a dental milling cutter universally praised by his colleagues in the field.

  The professor’s students liked to point out the appropriateness of him being part of a family who’d made their money inflicting pain on others, and they considered the professor’s move from dentistry to teaching math as a sign of his loyalty to the family tradition, and his personal refinement of it.

  He specialized in algorithm theory and recursive mathematical functions and was not exactly up there among the most popular professors in the School of Engineering. He owed his less than favorable reputation to the excessive demands he placed on his students, along with his penchant for upsetting and intimidating them, inciting such levels of insecurity that, for a few, the problem became congenital.

  In one of the first of the professor’s classes Joanes attended, the former took the whole lecture hall by surprise with an inflammatory speech defending the duodecimal system. According to him, various strong cases could be made for replacing the modern decimal system with a duodecimal one. Calculations would become far easier, he assured them. Multiplication and division would be far more practicable, owing to the duodecimal system having four factors—two, three, four, and six—while the decimal system, to its detriment, only had two—two and five. Another of the arguments he put forward was the widespread acceptance—both historical and geographical—of a base 12 numeral system, as demonstrated by the existence of the twelve signs of the zodiac, the division of the year into twelve months, and of the foot into twelve inches. He concluded by pointing out—in case more or clearer explications were necessary—that human anatomy lends itself to counting in divisions of twelve—four of their fingers have three phalanges, and four times three is twelve. The thumb serves as a pointer when counting the phalanges on the other fingers.

  “Think about it,” he told them.

  A few days later, the professor asked them if they’d thought about what he’d said. The first voices in favor piped up timidly. But many others soon jumped on the bandwagon, expressing their approval for the duodecimal system and chipping in with new reasons to support it. The professor listened with a satisfied smirk on his face. After a while, the room fell silent. All eyes were on him as the students waited to hear what he would say about the lively response his speech had inspired. But rather than adding anything, he burst out laughing, and his laugh reverberated through the room like the sound of stone scratching stone.

  “You are bunch of idiots,” he told the students. “How could you possibly think that I consider the signs of the zodiac or the twelve moons of the year to be just reasons for changing our elegant numeral system?”

  And he repeated.

  “Idiots.”

  Then he added, “And ignoramuses.”

  By that point, he’d stopped laughing, and his face was puce.

  “I fed you that load of nonsense merely to test your critical faculties. And I regret to confirm that you do not possess any such faculties. From this moment on,” he cautioned, pointing at them with a threatening finger, “it is your duty to question everything I say from this podium or write on this blackboard. Absolutely everything.”

  Joanes didn’t miss a single day of the professor’s Numerical Analysis course. When he was with his friends, he joined in their harsh digs of him. But in his case, it was all an act. What he really felt for the professor was admiration.

  This feeling was only amplified by the professor’s encyclopedic knowledge (encyclopedic from a student’s point of view), his assured, precise manner of teaching, his aristocratic indifference toward his students, and the frequent and prolonged silences into which he fell, sometime
s mid-sentence, during which he would stare blankly into the distance, as if the students and everything in the room had vanished into thin air. Often, after one of these silences, he would scribble a few lines in the notebook that he kept in his breast pocket. Then he’d continue the class where he’d left off.

  Joanes’s admiration of the professor was also fueled by the fame and recognition the man enjoyed in his field, and the impressive row of dog-eared books with his name on the spine that sat in the college library.

  On numerous occasions, Joanes tried to get close to the professor, to gain his confidence, but the man’s distant character and the school’s educational model, which did not allow for contact between faculty and students, rendered any efforts useless. He took out a few of his books from the library and flicked through them fervently, but their contents were too advanced for him. He had to resign himself to simply admiring the beautiful, castle-like configurations of his equations.

  All this changed when, in the middle of the course, the professor published a biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing had been one of the pioneers of computing and was greatly admired by the professor, who often cited him in class. His previous articles had been published in renowned journals in the field. However, his book about Turing, whose title was a pun—Turing: Pragmatic Mathematics—was published by a little-known house specialized in texts on chess.

  During the professor’s routine digressions on Alan Turing, Joanes sensed a level of admiration similar to that which he felt for his don, and on this basis, he thought that the book might hold clues to certain facets of the professor’s personality that he kept hidden from his students, information on his tastes and interests. The moment that Turing: Pragmatic Mathematics was published, he rushed straight out to buy it.

  The book included absolutely no mention of Turing’s private life, focusing solely on his professional career. He ran through the most celebrated episodes of that career: the publication of his famous article, “On Computable Numbers,” in which Turing postulated the existence of a hypothetical machine—the “a-machine”—which, by applying a finite series of steps, would be capable of determining the veracity or falseness of any affirmation; the mathematician’s crucial role in World War II, helping to decipher the Germans’ cryptographic codes using the Enigma machine; and his subsequent, failed attempts to bring the a-machine to life.