“Marco is just too good, you see.”
She shook my hand and gave me a slow kiss on the cheek. When I got to the back door it was already dark outside, and I bumped into something on my way out.
“Ah, the axe,” I heard her say. “Lately he’s been leaving it lying around any old place.”
Kolya was hugging my leg. We were alone. Julia had gone out and I’d just given him something bland and mashed to eat. I reached down and stroked his yellow hair, which always reminded me of summer. I looked into his Russian eyes. I felt nothing.
His situation was different to mine; all I knew was flight. But if Marco was planning something, anything, I didn’t see it. He was too tied to his life on the mountain, happily tied down. Where would he possibly have gone to make a new life for himself? He’d leave early in the morning, with or without bridle in hand, and remain silent for days and weeks at a time. Once I worked up the courage to tell Madame Cupin. She didn’t seem to think anything of it. She just smiled her centuries-old condescending smile.
“He’s a mysterious one,” she said, leaning on her walking stick. “He’s probably working on a business deal, or else he’s got some woman on the side. Don’t worry, it never lasts long.”
The names of the implements in the Heidelberg bakery remained unknown to me until my final day of work. The baker always made sure to demand them in his own language, without ever explaining which one he was referring to, without making so much as a gesture, or deigning to show me the slightest bit of goodwill. He’d launch a word into the air like a bright firecracker and watch me run from one end of the kitchen to the other in search of something useful-looking. Then he’d distract me, or somehow procure the dough-cutter or comb in secret, behind my back, and complain about my poor attention span and lack of skill. He’d come over when I was at the cash register and ask me for money, making his numbers rain on my head. The afternoon of the furious customer came about like this: we were about to close up shop. I’d been working in the bakery for four months, and had managed to gather up enough reasons and savings to justify quitting. I figured I’d look for another job, play the role of the well-behaved foreigner in some other neck of the woods. Something had signaled the direction of my next flight. I’d been through the obligatory night of brutal self-honesty (“stop lying to yourself, it’s time to go”) and experienced a vision of the future: a perfectly white, empty page. And yet that afternoon, when the furious customer stormed into the Heidelberg bakery, I didn’t move an inch. The customer was yelling that his delivery had been a disaster: kaput! Later on I learned the details: a series of blunders that extended all the way from the late delivery to the dismal state of the canapés. His party had been a total failure. Kaput! What about the desserts? Same thing. And the cream was rancid. The baker himself had been the one to prepare the delivery. He’d stayed late the night before to work on it. I knew this because he’d spent half the morning complaining that he hadn’t had enough sleep. But when the customer made a dash for the counter and tried to force his way into the back of the bakery, I said there was nobody there (a simple enough sentence in German) and that the failed delivery had been my fault (this last point I made stammeringly, pointing at my own chest to clarify). I’m not sure if he understood my scrappy gibberish. He said he’d be back. The baker was still out the back, hidden away in his sanctuary, when I finished mopping the floors and turned out the lights. I called “see you tomorrow” and he didn’t answer. I left, promising myself that I wouldn’t come back the next day, already regretting the ignoble sacrifice I’d just made. What was the point, I wondered, footsteps and tears falling on the pavement. I had no love for myself. I was good for nothing. But this bad heart of mine, which is neither fair nor kind, trembled happily there beneath my shoulder.
It’s not true that we leave a place when the future is adorned with beautiful visions of faraway travels. We leave one morning, the morning after any given evening, or the afternoon after any given midday, just when we’d decided to stay forever.
“Name?”
I gave it to him.
“Profession?”
In the past, I would have tangled myself up in long explanations trying to answer this question. I told him I worked for the local health-food shop, which he already knew. He noted everything down diligently, with a rather tortuous hand, on a paper form that didn’t look very official. I didn’t glimpse so much as an old typewriter, let alone anything resembling a screen—nothing, in other words, to remind us that we had advanced beyond the analogue age. He sat on one side of the desk and I sat on the other, and we played our respective roles well. The little room we were in had faulty doors and a tiled floor, and three large flies buzzed over our heads like a ceiling fan. How long had I known the deceased? And the second victim, Mrs. Cupin? I explained that I’d arrived at the Del Monje farm one year ago, to work on the harvest, and had decided to stay. Why? It would have taken me half a lifetime to answer that question. I threw him an excuse like small change, knowing it wasn’t enough. The interrogation followed a course I’d rather not have taken, but there was nothing to be done about it. When did you last see them? At the Hotel Amancay, I said. I didn’t tell him I’d seen Marco through the window of the hotel room later that night. He’d pulled up in his pick-up truck, leaned an arm out the window and spat onto the asphalt before driving away. The two officers spent a long time unpicking the Hotel Amancay situation. They didn’t believe I’d gone all the way into town just on account of some bugs falling from the roof onto my lonely bed at the farm. They also asked me if my bed was lonely. At first I said it was; later, I hedged my response with ambiguities. Did I know if Marco had any enemies? they continued. Did he owe anybody money? I said no in all the appropriate places and spoke at length about Madame Cupin’s dresses, about her habit of going out for a walk at sunset, about her walking stick that got stuck in the mud during the rainy season. I cried in all the appropriate places, but they didn’t think much of my tears.
I was with Alexander, opposite the main square in Heidelberg. We were saying goodbye. The sky was limpid, unusually so, the weather barely cool. A few others had also ventured outside to refresh their lungs; inside the café, the stale smell of the long winter was still oppressive. We talked (they talked) about the weather and about how maybe tomorrow it would be properly warm. In their world this meant thirteen, perhaps fourteen degrees, should Fortune be so kind as to cast a glance at their side of the globe. The city continued on its placid course of richness and wellbeing, with its population of students and foreign servants and the well-to-do. Heartened by the prospect of pleasant weather, those gathered were making plans for a picnic. They agreed on a time and place, delegated tasks. The looks on their faces were priceless as they anticipated perspiration, feeling the sun’s rays warming their necks and shoulders. I wasn’t sold on the picnic idea, partly out of elegance and partly out of a longstanding inability to feel joy. But Alexander managed to convince me, and even suggested I make something to eat—not because he wanted to show me off like some kind of exotic bird but because he was genuinely and naively interested in me as a person. “Something Latin American,” he specified, employing a term that, while it works in some contexts, definitely shouldn’t be applied to food. The next morning, on my way to the tram stop to meet Alexander, I passed by the bakery on Hauptstraße and decided to buy something, even though I’d told myself I’d never set foot in there again. It was unusual enough that I’d stayed in the same city after quitting my job. From the street I could see the new salesgirl. She was taller than me, and able to reach the top shelves without difficulty. She sold poppy seed, she sold rye. She smiled as she handed them over, just like I had. Going inside would have meant betraying myself and sympathizing with her. I’d already been through the IKEA job, the auto-parts factory job. Going inside would have been some kind of consolation, though I’m not sure what for. The crumbs of comfort. I went inside. The salesgirl was running to and fro behind the counter. The customers besid
e me grumbled about the wait, about her incompetence in cutting the bread. I waited for my turn. I tried to look her in the eye, told her I sympathized with her, then left without buying anything. As I walked down the street I realized my sentence had been meaningless, something like “sympathize you” or “my sympathy.” I was well accustomed to the strange animal that was my language, so this wasn’t surprising to me. I met up with Alexander in Bismarck Square. He asked me for my Latin Americanisms and I told him I hadn’t brought anything. He dedicated the tram trip to reeling off the extremely valid reasons (valid because they were his) why I should continue living in that den of European traditionalism, with its 500-year-old houses and its balconies dripping with flowers. He mentioned books, the peace and quiet, the university. If you found it hard to think, you could just head to the forest, or to Italy, which served as something of a last resort for all melancholy Germans. The age of traveling the world and marveling at other people’s poverty was over. And yet he still felt the weight of an entire continent on his shoulder, you could see it when he walked. We got off the tram at the last stop, and he persisted with his argument as we crossed the university campus in the direction of the highway. I wondered what drove him to justify himself to me in that way. To me of all people, such a poor witness. He spoke about freedom of thought and its alleged beauty, he even spoke about social security, using words that crawled out of his mouth like tiny insects, and it was almost as though he were aware of it, because every so often he’d rub his lips to prevent them from stinging him.
My father used to sing to me at night: sleep now, little buttercup, or the dust will come and eat you up. Then he made me learn the periodic table and the chemical composition of ether. That last bit is a lie. Nobody talks about ether anymore.
Friday night in Berlin. The city seemed to promise something of a truce, as far as the weather was concerned. Julia, Kolya and I were all on our feet. Mother and son had been crying. She was in her usual stance, half-resting against the kitchen bench, and I mirrored her beside the dining table. Kolya had fallen asleep then woken up again, all tear-streaked, and his rather inauthentic weeping had provoked his mother’s much more convincing version. Now the three of us were looking at one another, sizing each other up, and the kitchen seemed narrower than usual. I had a weak card up my sleeve and planned on playing it at some point. Despite Julia’s insistence, Kolya refused to return to solitary confinement. He made faces and rolled his eyes, beseeching our pity. The mark on Julia’s face was still visible, and the bruise had colored to a thick circle that, at a certain angle, made her look like a clown. There we were. I said to Julia that maybe we should go to the party after all, and she replied that the party had been a week ago. I wasn’t intimidated by that, and soon found another party that was at least as uninteresting as the one we’d missed. Naturally Kolya didn’t want to sleep, or try to sleep, in the sick neighbor’s apartment across the hall. But the force of the circumstances, and the force of our arms, along with the promise that he could watch a movie even though it was already midnight, eventually convinced him. We painted our faces and changed our clothes before leaving him with the asthmatic. We took a taxi, a decision that broke several of our rules of austerity. The party I’d chosen turned out to be not very Berlin. The music was a mix of electronica and sporadic cumbia, and there wasn’t a single interesting person there: no cheerful and solitary drag queens, no naked people, no bearded women. But Julia seemed pleased with the two decorative palm trees, fake or otherwise. We had a few drinks, winking at each other under the lights; it was impossible to speak. After a while she left with a guy who seemed like a “gentleman,” she told me later, but it didn’t work out. “It didn’t work out,” she told me afterward. “He wasn’t good for much.” And what good would he have been to me? My suitcases were still packed and stowed in the wardrobe. I saw Julia, and she made a sign at me as she walked past. I thought about going home, but I stayed; this happened several times. I thought I should wait for Julia to come past again. I stayed standing in my corner, when suddenly something caught my attention—finally, after two, three hours of sipping my drink without a single interesting thing to look at. It was surprisingly easy to recognize him, considering the number of years that had passed since I’d met him, the number of years he hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I didn’t want to admit that the thing befalling us was only the return of summer. I was still living in the little house, and every morning I’d walk down to the town, put on a checkered apron and a pair of gloves, and rummage for almonds or walnuts in the barrels where we kept the dried fruit and nuts. I took the customers’ money and handed them change, I ate, I breathed suspiciously the unavoidable fragrance of thyme and aniseed. I’d leave in the afternoon and sometimes I’d go for a walk down the main street, looking at the dust-covered novelties in the shop windows. On that particular afternoon I walked all the way to the payphone center. I had a vague desire to call Julia, as I’d done that one time last winter, only this time I’d actually follow through with it. Another dead name, Alexander’s, somehow found its way into my head. Confused, I opened the door and bumped into somebody. It was Marco. We looked at one another with a suspicion that neither of us could fathom, but refrained from asking what each of us was doing using a telephone that wasn’t the farm telephone. A mutual “good afternoon” and a nod, that was all. Inside, I hesitated over whether or not to buy a packet of colorful sweets; but I wasn’t there to buy sweets, I was there to swallow the bitter pill of my love for those distant people I’d left for dead, so many years ago. The kid at the front desk offered me a booth, which I declined.
The enraged customer returns to the Heidelberg bakery and I manage to hurl a jar of jam which hits him in the shoulder, but doesn’t break. The jar rolls along the floor and still doesn’t break. At that moment, more than ever, I despise the Germans’ world-famous quality-assurance standards.
It was five-thirty in the morning, according to the Turk’s watch. He was nervous for the first time in his life, biting his moustache, exposing the stained enamel of his teeth. With considerable difficulty, I asked him what was wrong. He didn’t answer me. He finished his coffee with an air of theatrical solemnity, shaking the last drops into his mouth, then dropped his empty cup onto the table that served as a barrier between us. Moments later I heard a scream, followed by a howl. Everybody in the cafeteria stood up, except the Turk. Then, with what seemed to be a great deal of effort, he rose from his seat and half-heartedly joined in the general commentary: “How strange?” “What on earth?” “What could have happened?” We walked out in single file, just like in the evacuations we’d practiced, though fire was the last thing on our minds. An accident had occurred in the store. It had been the boss’s idea to construct a tower of five thousand red and white plates, in the shape of a skyward-pointing arrow. We’d all been reticent that morning when she recruited builders for her monstrosity. Only the Lithuanian had shown any interest. She was entrusted with the task, which she undertook with seeming diligence over the course of several days. On one side, a red arrow pointing toward the sky—toward the future, the boss had said—and on the other side the IKEA logo. It was a work of art. And now it had been reduced to a great monolith of rubble. The Lithuanian scrambled to uncover some item of clothing that would reveal the identity of the person buried underneath it. But she knew full well who it was. First a hand appeared, then its corresponding wrist. Someone recognized the boss’s gold watch. They dug her out. They called an ambulance. One of the cult members even let out a hypocritical sob, whimpering “poor little boss” or “my poor boss” or something like that.
All My Goodbyes Page 7
