Still the Same Man

by Jon Bilbao

  “So . . . this is a hotel.”

  The owner looked at him as if he didn’t understand.

  “It’s just it doesn’t say anywhere that it’s a hotel,” Joanes explained.

  “It has a lot of rooms, and I rent them out. It’s a hotel.”

  “I see. Are they guests, too?” asked Joanes, referring to the others. There were close to forty people out on the lawn, sitting on plastic chairs under umbrellas advertising Coca-Cola.

  “Only a few of them,” said the owner with a resigned smile. “Almost all of them are family. They’ve come for shelter.”

  “Your relatives?”

  “And my wife’s. It’s a tradition. When there’s a hurricane, those of them who live on the coast come here to the English Residence.”

  “Do you think the hurricane will reach us here?”

  “It’ll get a bit breezy.”

  “Enough to worry about?”

  “Only if you want to, my friend. Anyway, why don’t you make yourselves comfortable and eat something?” said the owner, pointing to the meat on the barbecue. “It’s cochinita. Like it?”

  Joanes nodded.

  The professor pushed his wife to the room in her wheelchair. Joanes followed them with the luggage. The professor settled his wife in the bed, refusing Joanes’s help. She fell down onto the bed with a moan, whether of pleasure or pain Joanes couldn’t tell.

  “Are you all right like that?”

  If she said anything in reply, only the professor heard her.

  “I’ll bring you more water and something to eat,” he said. “Do you need anything else?”

  “My mask,” she murmured.

  The professor rummaged in the travel bag until he came across her eye mask. Very carefully, he put it on his wife. Then he gestured to Joanes to leave the room and followed him out.

  Once in the hallway, lowering his voice, Joanes asked the professor if his wife was all right.

  “Yes, of course she is. She’s just tired and . . . well, the whole commotion on the bus took its toll on her. But that’s understandable, wouldn’t you say?”

  Once he’d freshened up, having waited a long time in line for the restroom, Joanes went back outside. He kept his backpack on him, reluctant to leave it in the room. The hotel owner waved him over and dished a monumental portion of meat onto his paper plate. The other guests were already eating. Several women were tending a table filled with platters of potatoes, rice, tortillas, beans, chiles rellenos, plantain tamales, and mole chicken.

  Joanes grabbed a chair and took it over to the edge of the lawn, just where the plants and creepers that surrounded the hotel began. On his way, he picked up a beer from a tub of water with cans of drinks floating inside.

  He ought to call his family before eating. He imagined them in their room in the evacuation hotel. His father-in-law would be spouting nonsense and praising his new bride’s latest stroke of genius. His daughter, her hair falling over her face as a kind of barrier against the adults, would be curled up in a corner working on the nihilistic vampire novel she’d been writing for months. And as for his wife, Joanes imagined her checking her watch and asking herself where in the hell he’d gotten to.

  He looked at the battery icon on his cell phone. It would have to be a quick conversation. He needed the rest of the battery to sort out the hotel offer with his client. He dialed the number of the evacuation hotel and asked to be put through to his family’s room. The phone rang three times, four . . .

  “Come on, come on . . . where are you?”

  On the sixth ring, he hung up and dialed the number again. He left a message for his wife, explaining what had happened and that he would get to Valladolid the following day. He added that it was important she didn’t call him, so he could save his battery.

  “Did you get all that?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the employee at the other end of the line. “I’ll be sure to pass it on to your wife.”

  But Joanes wasn’t convinced. He could hear a lot going on in the background, a real racket, and it seemed to him that the hotel employee had more pressing things to attend to than taking down his message. But he couldn’t waste any more time repeating himself. He hung up without saying goodbye and looked again at the battery icon on the screen. He put the phone away in his backpack and nibbled on his cochinita. More than a few of the Mexican folks sat brazenly staring at him. He felt utterly depressed all of a sudden. He wanted to say to hell with it all and talk to his wife until he’d used up every last drop of battery. Hearing her voice always calmed him down. She would almost certainly have some sound piece of advice for him.

  He saw the professor coming out of the hotel. He’d put on a clean shirt. Joanes watched him as he chose from the platters of food and served out small portions of everything on two plates, but so that no one food type touched another. Afterward, the professor made one of the Mexican women attending the table bring him a tray so he could take the plates up to the room. He didn’t notice Joanes, or if he did, he didn’t bother to say hello.

  Joanes polished off his food and grabbed another beer, not caring that it was warm. He felt a bit better with a full stomach. A band of children paraded one after the other in front of him, some stopping to stare at him. He made faces at them, but they weren’t laughing. Little by little, the lawn was emptying; as soon as people finished eating, they looked up at the sky and retreated to their rooms. The women looking after the table had begun taking in the food. One of them came out of the hotel with a palm frond and began to sweep the dirt yard, which made the others laugh. The wind would take care of that.

  He was exhausted but stayed outside. He didn’t want to go back to the room while the professor and his wife were eating. He waited with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin on his fists, not paying any attention to the kids that circled around him, staring as if he were some weirdo.

  He wondered what the professor and his wife might be up to. Perhaps they’d fallen asleep. After a little while, he told himself there was no reason to keep waiting; after all, the room was partly his, too. But just as he was about to get to his feet, he saw the professor coming out of the hotel. The don looked around, spotted Joanes, and walked straight over to him.

  “Do you have a telephone? I need to make an urgent call to Egypt.”

  Joanes stood up. He stared at him before answering.

  “I’m sorry, my phone is out of battery. I used it up talking to my wife.”

  The professor tutted.

  “Well! That is very bad news indeed. You can’t imagine how bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” repeated Joanes. “Can I ask why exactly you need to call Egypt?”

  “My son’s been in an accident. He was deep sea diving in the Red Sea, and something went wrong. I don’t know the details.”

  The professor pressed his lips closed, composing himself.

  “It happened yesterday, but we didn’t find out until this morning. They called us at the hotel, just before we got on the bus.”

  “Where were you staying?”

  “In Cancún. We came to Mexico for a conference I had to give in Mexico City. That was last week. My wife insisted that we take a few days’ vacation in the Caribbean after ward.”

  “Is your son very bad?” Joanes asked gingerly.

  The professor shrugged with his palms facing up in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I don’t know. I only had a second to talk to his partner, and the doctors still hadn’t said anything at that point. Later, from the bus, I was able to get through, but they couldn’t tell me anything other than that my son was under observation, no change. By the looks of things, we’ll just have to sit and wait.”

  There was a pause, after which he added, “I have to find out how he is.”

  “Of course,” muttered Joanes. “You say you tried to call from the bu
s; so you have a telephone, then.”

  “I had one. But I lost it. There was . . . how can I put it? There was a ruckus when they threw us off the bus, and I lost my phone. It must have fallen out of my pocket. I only realized after the bus had already driven off.”

  “Seems like it’s been a rough day for you two.”

  The professor agreed wordlessly.

  “And it will continue to be for as long as we don’t know what’s happened to our son.”

  “Perhaps someone could lend you a phone.”

  The professor shook his head.

  “I’ve asked several people. They say the electricity is cut and that if their battery runs out, they’ll have no way of recharging it. And no one knows how long it’ll take for the electricity supply to return, so everyone’s keeping their phones to themselves.”

  “Perhaps with a little financial incentive . . .”

  “I’ve tried, but it’s no use. And the hotel doesn’t have a land line.”

  “You could offer more.”

  “They’ve told me not to ask again.”

  And lowering his voice, the professor added, “Some of them got a bit aggressive. They say that the system’s overloaded and that even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to get through and I’d just be wasting their battery.”

  There was a pause before he added, “I don’t think these people have taken much of a shine to me. It’s a good thing we’re with you. Although it’s a shame your phone is no use.”

  He said all this looking hard at Joanes, who averted his gaze and began staring at the weeds growing beyond the yard. The professor knew that expression well, it was the same one his students pulled when he threatened them with a question—a mixture of fear and shame.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t ask to borrow my phone earlier, when you could have used it.”

  “Yes, a pity. But I prefer to work my own problems out wherever possible.”

  “Maybe the lines will come back later and someone will lend you their phone. My advice to you is to keep asking,” said Joanes.

  “Yes, maybe,” was the professor’s laconic response.

  “And now, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to go up to the room and get a little rest.”

  “Of course. It’s your room, too. Give me a minute or two to see how my wife is. Then come up whenever you like.”

  Joanes needed a minute to go over what had just happened. He unzipped his backpack and checked the phone battery again. It was nighttime in Spain. There was almost no chance he’d receive the call he was waiting for in the next several hours. But it could well come tomorrow. He had to save his battery.

  As for the professor, he could use any old phone so long as it could make international calls. And there had to be a load of them in the hotel. As long as he used a bit of tact, someone would likely end up lending him one. If there was one thing Joanes was sure of, it was the professor’s powers of persuasion.

  What’s more, he wasn’t absolutely convinced that it was an emergency. The professor knew only that his son had been in an accident. Not whether or not he was seriously injured. And in any case, even if he did manage to make contact with the hospital or whatever place his son was in, how would that change anything? It wouldn’t make his son any better. At most, the call might put the professor and his wife’s minds at rest—if the news was good. Joanes preferred not to think about what would happen if the opposite were the case, if the news didn’t bode well or was out and out bad. He couldn’t bring himself to imagine what it would be like to be locked up for hours, days even, with an elderly couple who’d just lost their son.

  But for the time being, he went on reasoning with himself, making the call simply wasn’t an option, so they’d have to put up with the lack of information. He had brought them this far, at least. And arranged them a place to stay for the night. That was all he could do for the time being.

  He defended his decision by telling himself that he truly needed the phone.

  He tried to imagine what his wife and daughter would think if they were there. His wife would question his decision at first, but her practical side would take over and in the end she’d side with Joanes. His daughter would say that he was despicable, making her feelings absolutely clear to him. And yet, for better or for worse, neither of them was there.

  He was snapped out of his thoughts by a sudden gust of wind, so strong it nearly knocked him to the ground. The trees rustled. and even the metal rods sticking out of the roof of the English Residence made a gentle clinking sound. The gust barely lasted a few seconds and was followed by a cool, blustery breeze that also disappeared a moment later. Joanes and the few Mexican guests that remained outside looked up to the clouds, clearly anxious; that had been no more than a taste of what was to come. Calm was restored to the yard, but this did little to reassure the people still out there, who began edging towards the hotel.

  On the east coast of Yucatán, the wind had already begun to blow with some force. A salty rain would follow it—ocean water, picked up and dragged along by the hurricane, accompanied by gulfweed and corral and fish, some of which would still be alive, flapping around on roads and backyard patios, on the roofs of houses and in the jungle, among the dark roots of trees many miles inland.

  Three months after his visit to the professor’s house, Joanes started working in a modestly sized company that made telephone cables. A year later, he and his girlfriend got married, and almost immediately after that, she became pregnant.

  Joanes tried to do his best at work, but things didn’t go as well as he or his superiors hoped they would. He felt out of place there, and pined for the post that never was at Robot Systems. He realized that he’d wanted it much more than he’d previously realized. He ended up convincing himself he’d been destined for that job and that now that it was out of his grasp, no other job would ever be right for him. Time and again, his initiatives at the company came to nothing.

  After a couple of years, he was transferred to a secondary department whose main role was replacing the polyethylene covers on cables. His performance there also stood out for all the wrong reasons.

  One evening, on his way home, he heard someone calling his name as he sat in a line of cars all waiting to reach the tollbooth. In the adjacent line, a driver was waving his arm, trying to catch Joanes’s attention, half his body hanging out of the car window. It turned out to be an old friend from the School of Engineering. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Yelling from car to car, they agreed to meet up in town for a few beers.

  Things weren’t going so bad for his friend. He headed up a small air conditioning firm, where he acted as an intermediary between manufacturers and clients, and at the moment he found himself with more work than he could manage alone. He dropped into the conversation that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to have a partner with some technical know-how. Joanes didn’t take the hint, but that night he told his wife about it. It was true that he’d never seen himself at the helm of an air conditioning company, but the opportunity had come up at just the right moment, and it was pretty tempting—just two partners, no one above him, the chance to make decisions . . .

  As part of joining the company, he was required to invest some capital, capital he didn’t have. He spoke to his father, who gave him the money he’d been saving for his yacht. Joanes promised to repay him the moment he could.

  For a while things went swimmingly, exactly as Joanes had hoped, and better. The business grew. He repaid his father the money he’d borrowed—although his father still didn’t buy himself the boat. And Joanes, his wife, and his daughter left the apartment they’d moved into after the wedding and rented a bigger one. Even then they didn’t imagine staying there forever. They began saving up to buy a house—one with a sea view.

  But as the years went by, his friend became more and more distrustful and distant. He avoided Joanes outsid
e work hours. He assigned himself all the business trips, as if he wanted to spend as little time as possible in the office. Things went on like this until, one day, he revealed his plan to up sticks and move to a bigger city. He offered his part of the business to Joanes, who could either take it over entirely or risk someone else buying it, someone he might not get along with as well. He talked it through with his wife, and the two of them together opted for the former. They dipped into their house savings, and Joanes, once again, asked his dad for help.

  Suddenly he owned one hundred percent of the business.

  And then things took a turn for the worse. The jobs began to dry up, as if his ex-partner had been the only one the clients trusted. The formerly profitable business was being run into the ground, and in a matter of months it was on the cusp of insolvency. Joanes began to think that perhaps he’d had nothing to do with its previous success, that it had all been thanks to his ex-partner. Now that he, and he alone, was at the helm, the whole thing was falling apart. None of his efforts came to anything, just as had happened at the telephone cable company.

  Over all those years, he’d never forgotten his visit to see the professor, but when the company began to go from bad to worse, the memory came back on a daily basis to haunt him. He no longer wondered what the professor had seen in him to discourage his hiring at Robot Systems; the problem was perfectly clear from the way everything had gone for him since. Now he asked himself how the professor had managed to see it, how he’d come by his power of prescience. And he asked himself, too, if during the little time that they’d spent there on that balcony, from the few words that they’d exchanged, the professor had perceived anything more than a bleak professional future.

  The nights he couldn’t sleep, when all those thoughts came into his head, spinning in an endless spiral, his self-respect kicked in as a kind of defense mechanism.

  Accurate as the professor’s intuition might have been, it didn’t allow him to see into the future. If he hadn’t recommended Joanes for Robot Systems, perhaps it was because he wanted the post for some family member or friend, or perhaps for an even more banal reason, like, for instance, him not liking some physical feature of Joanes’s or because of the geographical implications of his last name.