Tomb Song

by Julián Herbert

Only fifteen, but he’s already as tall as me. He’s very slim and handsome and, setting aside his fall from grace with serial killers, has what his family calls “a good heart.” A long time ago, he invited me to his eighth-birthday celebration. It wasn’t a very happy event: his mother had organized a party at a water park, but Arturo had fallen off his bicycle a couple of days before and broken his arm. As he couldn’t play with his friends in the swimming pool, we spent a good part of the afternoon talking. He wanted to know about something the priest was always bringing up: free will. I tried to explain it honestly, convinced if we got through that, talking about sex in the future would be a cinch. I don’t remember how our conversation ended. I only have the image of Arturo saying good-bye from the other side of a chain-link fence, waving, with some difficulty, his cast. That is the most intense bond between my children and me: a plastered wave good-bye.

  Sonia emerged from the ministry.

  “The passport guy wants to talk to you.”

  “Let’s go,” Arturo volunteered.

  “No,” she replied. “You stay here.”

  But we were both already heading for the building.

  The passport guy explained that my identification papers were invalid.

  “If you’d brought them a month ago, there’d have been no problem. But they’ve just changed our delegate, and you know how each official has his own institutional policy.”

  He lowered his voice.

  “What I’d suggest is that you go to the Department of Transportation and take out a driver’s license in your old name. I don’t think they ask for more than 500 pesos on the side.”

  Arturo was standing next to me, his elbows on the counter. I said:

  “First, I can’t drive. And second, that’s corruption.”

  “No, sir. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not asking for anything.”

  “It’s corruption. And you go and blurt it out in front of my son.”

  Without another word, the official turned and disappeared through a door.

  I caught my son’s resentful gaze.

  “It’s always the same with you.”

  “You don’t have to ask for money to be corrupt.”

  He turned his back on me and snarled:

  “And you don’t have to be a genius to get a frigging driver’s license.”

  3

  Mónica wakes at eight in the morning.

  [I should have written woke. In fact I’m writing, hurriedly, from a plane over the Atlantic, trying to ensure that my laptop battery lasts through to the end of this long digression. Mónica keeps distracting me: she wants me to look out the window, down below, at something that could be Greenland, or any old piece of black rock abandoned in the snow. But that was then: now Mónica is looking annoyed and ashamed because I’ve asked her not to interrupt me. But that’s gone too: now I look at her out of the corner of my eye, and she smiles with that pout of absolute availability and her enchanting, illegitimate princess of the House of Bourbon beauty that makes me want to undress her without worrying about her enormous pregnant belly or the fact that the tiny airplane seats are like the plastic chairs in a day nursery. But that’s gone too: now …

  Whenever you write in the present—whether to recount your airport cretinism, or your overdose of carbohydrates from the British Airways menu—you’re generating a fiction, an involuntary suspension of grammatical disbelief. That’s why this book (if this does become a book, if my mother survives or dies in some syntactical fold that restores the meaning of my digressions) will be eventually found in bookstores, standing upright on the dustiest shelf of “novels.” I always narrate in the present in the hope of finding velocity. This time I’m doing it in the hope of finding consolation, while I perceive the progress of the plane through the sky as a free fall into an abyss on pause.]

  Mónica wakes at eight in the morning. In no time at all, we shower, pack our bag, and pay our bill at the front desk of the Mandala. It’s only eleven. Our plane leaves at four. We’re being picked up at two. We decide to spend the few euros and couple of hours we have left on a quick cab ride—obviously, we’re tourists—around our favorite stretch of Berlin: Unter den Linden from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz. We want to re-experience the acrid, distilled smell of the lime trees that give the city its characteristic feel of slow, dense, whitish summer … The ride doesn’t go well. The cab driver tries to explain to us in his guttural, impatient English that the most practical route for getting to our destination is along the side streets that are like the armored back of an intergalactic insect: long blue walls without windows, road surfaces under repair with red-and-white signs and protective meshing, the back door of the comic opera guarded by dark rectangles of glass. To top it all off, the radio is playing Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier.” The idyllic nostalgia we’re hoping to inject into our farewell to Berlin is forever tinged with the scent of the marijuana we used to smoke at seventeen. Annoyed, laughing, we get out of the cab and pay in coins and insults (in Spanish; the cab driver is surely returning them in his native tongue). We stand there, on some stretch of sidewalk, not knowing where to go, deeply embarrassed, confined to the imperfection of memory, the unarticulated eloquence of the sensory layers beneath every enunciation, layers that can only be glimpsed when you stop talking, close your eyes, and float down the river of adversity … The richest experience of the past (it makes no difference if it’s personal or historical) is achieved by abandoning yourself to the physical perception of time: an instant always in the future. That’s why guilt and nostalgia are paltry emotions.

  Once, during Mamá’s stay in the hospital, I spent seventy-two hours at her side. The first thing I did when I got home was to take a long shower. Mónica left me to it, without saying a word. Then we lay down and turned off the light. Mónica was serious, awake, her back to me. There was tension in the air between us, the nature of which was unclear to me at the time, but which I can now describe as a great love with the door latch removed.

  “Can’t you sleep?” I asked idiotically.

  “I want to have a baby. Now,” she said, turning to me.

  Mónica and I met four years ago. We fell into bed, and spent hours there, hardly even bothering to tell each other our names, and long before having a coherent conversation. Sex between us was an intuition of luminosity. Sex—the simplest and most perfect thing to which you can aspire, like drinking pure water without paying for the PET bottle—is what revealed the visceral bond between us, more solid than any other commitment we had to the world. A bond so deep that, in my nightmares, it seemed like incest.

  After a week, we decided to move in together. A couple of months afterward, she left her job at a television station, packed up her home in the capital, started divorce proceedings, and moved to my city. I left my bachelor apartment, sobered up, and got an office job. Later, we bought a house: a petit bourgeois gesture I found repugnant for years, but that, seen in the light of my passion for Mónica, was completely natural.

  Before the night we decided to become parents, our union was based on two reconciliations: she became reconciled with her body, and I with my continued existence. I don’t know how it was for her, but my reconciliation was a matter of survival. A year before I met her, I’d attempted—with more rage and theatricality than conscious intention—to commit suicide. I’d received a hundred thousand pesos as a prize for a book. I bought several bottles of bourbon and three ounces of cocaine, locked the door, and threw away the key for a couple of weeks. I wanted to snort till I dropped. My plan was based on a mixture of frivolity and defeat—I wonder if those words are in fact synonyms—because, after ten minutes of fame, I managed to get a glimpse of the limits of my writing. It wasn’t, naturally, a reflective space. It was this paragraph: experiences that are incommunicable, not for being ecstatic, but for their carcinogenic qualities.

  I don’t know how long we would have been able to go on like that, impermeable to the void. I suppose a few years more. But when leukemia
began to eat away at Mamá’s body, it also contaminated, in a superficial, pestilential way, the invisible organism within which my wife and I floated. If you spend your time caring for a sick person, you risk living in the interior of a corpse.

  Then Mónica said that stuff about the baby.

  My first reaction was panic. My ego was already feeling pretty undermined by the prospect of spending who knows how long on a diet of the meager pleasures involved in protecting the remains of an aged, moribund prostitute. And it was now being suggested that I, once again, advance along the rain-swept highway of paternity. The topic of pregnancy: another way of saying graceless sex, nocturnal discomforts, new hospital experiences. The postnatal stage: the baby, that tyrannical, lovely subspecies, a sacred shark of the mind that, on the route to education and enlightenment, can very well devour you. But, above all, the sense of mourning I’ve been living with since the age of twenty-four: the certainty of having failed as a father on two occasions. The certainty of being, for someone I love and who is alive, simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.

  Long before concluding my mental survey of the cons, I made my decision.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Not to please her. I discovered reproduction was the only exercise of will my body retained. I wanted to settle accounts with the mother goddess of biology, shooting a pistol at her, ejaculating in her face. When all is said and done, one is scarcely a tiny creature emerging from prehistoric caverns, and the horror of death can only be alleviated by a statistical cleansing. And so it was that, while Mamá was lying in room 101 of the Saltillo University Hospital, Mónica and I were agreeing to create a substitute for her life by draining out a couple of its warts. A couple of viscous warts we elected to christen Leonardo, a name that, for us, had hints of absolute brilliance, a French art gallery, and missile engineering.

  Three months into the pregnancy, we received an e-mail from Germany inviting us, again, for a reading.

  We landed in Berlin on a Thursday afternoon, accompanied by a majestic belly that threw the cabin crews and customs officials of four countries off track. Due to the transfers, we’d been traveling for twenty-four hours. We turned up briefly for the welcome drinks and by seven were sleeping in the Hotel Mandala. Sleeping in a mandala. The dawn light woke us at exactly four, and we went out onto the balcony. The street was deserted. Across from us—the first time we’d seen it—was the roof of the Sony Center: a sort of aerial labyrinth or gigantic shrouded kite. The banner advertisements and red lettering of the cinema. And lower down, hidden in a nook, the face of Albert Einstein, in gray and white pieces, looking at us from the window of the Lego store.

  [It was perhaps at that moment, or a little afterward, while Mónica was putting a sweater on over her pajamas, and we were going swiftly down in the elevator to see the giraffe and Einstein’s face close up, that the topic and structure of this section occurred to me: paternity as a redemptive strangeness; legacy as a Lego model with pieces always missing.]

  “Shall we go see?” asked Mo.

  She put a sweater on over her pajamas and we rode the elevator down to the street. We crossed the empty road and headed directly for Albert’s dark plastic eyes. Behind the glass of the store window, under the vigilance of the most venerable mustache in the history of physics, lay half-constructed toys: miniature gray fire engines next to yellow cranes, blue airplanes, green zoos, characters from a bizarre Star Wars, Power Miners, Duplos, and, in a place of honor, on a shelf, almost level with Albert’s left eye, an NXT robot, assembled in the classic humanoid form. Scarcely a week before, Mónica and I had bought Leonardo his first book: an introductory manual on robotics with a photograph of this same toy on the cover.

  Outside, on the sidewalk, the designers from the store had constructed a Lego sculpture, an almost ironic version of the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great on Unter den Linden: a giraffe, over fifteen feet high, carefully assembled from yellow and brown cubes. It’s a popular giraffe because, as I later learned, tourists have stolen the prick on a number of occasions, and a squad of operatives has had to reconstruct it.

  “Stand under it,” said Mónica. “This is going to be your first photo of the trip.”

  “Julián Herbert dies, crushed by the giraffe of the ego.”

  The first days of summer slip by so fast. Especially if you’re traveling with an almost-four-pound fetus in your belly.

  Now we’re standing on a stretch of sidewalk, somewhere near Potsdamerplatz, seriously insulting the cab driver who has driven us so badly, singing silently to ourselves, “And he was taken from Africa, brought to America.” Our plane will be leaving soon, there’s no time now to take a carriage ride along Unter den Linden, as the nobility used to. Confused, not knowing who to ask for directions, we walk toward where I think our hotel is, and where Mónica calculates we’ll see the Brandenburg Gate.

  Neither of us is right: we reach the entrance to the Tiergarten through a small esplanade covered with gray tumuli. Years ago, someone had told me about this place. A square with what resembles concrete tombs to commemorate the millions of Jews who had had to confront Hitler’s insanity. It hadn’t even occurred to me to look for it on the map. And here it was, barely three blocks from the hotel. A mandala of irregular rectangles. My first impression as we wander into the symbolic labyrinth is solemn. I feel it isn’t death that walks here, but something moribund: spirituality (but I don’t fuckin’ care). Over that emotion, another more precise one grows. I remember someone—maybe Timo Berger—telling me on my first visit to Berlin that the monument was a piece of nerve: it was constructed using a special type of anti-graffiti coating produced by a German company whose capital had been amassed by nothing less than the dispossession of Jews during the Third Reich. Then another layer of perception, lighter and sharper: walking hand in hand with my pregnant lady through a labyrinth related to a graveyard. We three—always three—are now a metaphor of the Mystery, a set of Lego pieces around a belly, a spherical sacrophage en route to being expelled toward life while the height of the concrete blocks rises like a tide and is already level with my shoulders, and now above my head, and is like an ocean of residential tower blocks completed by that great whore death who has lately been hanging around at all hours, and is an existential Lego model whose historical significance is exceeded by the naked horror of form. Berlin isn’t a wall. Berlin is a civic graveyard project into which has been drained the best of its sacred art: dead bodies.

  But beneath it all, beneath the final urban hallucination, while the height of the blocks ebbs and we can gradually make out, beyond the gray swell, the greenery of the Tiergarten, I have an epiphany: this was the first dream I’d had in Europe. The first time around, before passing through Tegel airport: walking without landscape through a cemetery of Führers, each one interred in his bunker of choice.

  “Do you want a photo?” Mónica asks.

  I don’t reply.

  So we don’t take one last tourist shot among the dark stone rectangles. Beyond the landscape. Beyond the present. A few yards before we enter the Animal Forest.

  FEVER (1)

  As a kid I was a pilot but now I’m a nurse.

  Charly García

  The Saltillo University Hospital (formerly the Civilian Hospital) was opened in 1951. It was designed in 1943 by the Mexican architect and urbanist Mario Pani, famous for his predilection for the ideas of Le Corbusier and for having planned both the Juárez apartment complex and another block in Nonoalco Tlatelolco: projects that now symbolize the destruction caused by the 1985 earthquake.

  The history of the U.H. is (as the old people say, wagging an arthritic finger before your face) “inextricably bound up with the history of Mexico.” Not for its architectural merit, much less its role in the field of medicine, but because its surprising origin is a good example of Mexicans’ great talent for making themselves look foolish.

  It all began with the Nazis.

  As is well known, the Nazis conspired for yea
rs across the length and breadth of our Sweet Nation, seducing, intriguing, longing to set up what would be, given our proximity to the United States, strategic military bases. It’s also well known that the Nazis needed our oil (our, what a mannerist word, now it’s all going down the drain, now the real gold doesn’t come from underground, but from the jungles of Colombia, and the teeth of Kalashnikovs rattle all afternoon against the wall while Felipe Calderón drools on his tie). But that’s not all: it’s also known that Hilde Krüger (ex-actress, Goebbels’s former lover, and Abwehr agent) thumped thighs, first with the influential politician Ramón Beteta, and then with the future president, Miguel Alemán, both of whom served in Manuel Ávila Camacho’s government between 1940 and 1946. It’s said that Hilde did it for the sole purpose of promoting and fomenting Hitler’s cause within our ideological spectrum. I’ve no doubt this is true. But neither does it seem to me an extraordinary triumph for a pair of thighs: using fascist arguments to indoctrinate Mexican politicians in positions of power is preaching to the converted. On the other hand, it’s not irrelevant to mention the fortunes generated by nationalism within the nation’s business community. In Saltillo, no less, one present-day working-class neighborhood is called Guayulera. It owes this name to an old rubber factory whose owners got rich providing the German army with tires.

  At the beginning of the Second World War, the Ávila Camacho regime maintained—more from sloth and simple-mindedness than for ideological reasons—neutrality, although with evident sympathy for the Allies. Then, during the summer of ’42 (when my grandmother Juana discovered, to her horror, that she was pregnant with my mother), German submarines sank six Mexican oil tankers that were supplying a number of their U.S. counterparts in the Gulf of Mexico. In thunderous retaliation, the Mexican government declared war on the Axis powers. The relevant ministry pulled from its sleeve its highest-caliber weapon: the 201st Mexican Fighter Squadron, also known as the Aztec Eagles.