“In the Hotel Amancay, then?”
“In the Hotel Amancay. Without fail.”
The baker stopped talking to me. He no longer called me out back to perform our tired comedy of the disappointed boss and the foolish assistant. Nor did he come stomping out to the cash register to dictate his numbers at me. It’s possible the jam-jar customer filed some kind of complaint against him, but I can’t be sure. The owner didn’t even hint at it the day when, after all the cakes had been sold and the food that would otherwise have been thrown out had been divided among the employees, she called me into the private kingdom of her patisserie. The white-bonneted salesgirls were mopping the floors; the bakery was closed. I accepted her offer of a bite to eat, and was even allowed to try a few of the delicacies usually reserved for special occasions. I had already prepared my farewell, which was to be executed frankly and without preamble, but the coffee and sweets confused me. Hadn’t she brought me here to fire me? In a nutshell, and in a totally unforeseen turn of events, the owner told me that by end of the year I’d have the right to legal work status. She’d provide me with papers and benefits, all sealed and approved. The night before, I’d gotten into a fight with the night watchman at my student hostel; I’d forfeited my room and packed and unpacked my suitcase for the third time. I had so few belongings, and still I couldn’t make up my mind. I had the money for Portugal. Why Portugal? I imagined that, in Portugal, I’d be able to get a breather from the stifling sense of European self-sufficiency, and perhaps hear some beautiful lachrymose melodies. The sea would be the Atlantic: that also factored into my decision. Corsica, Greece and Turkey were still ineluctably steeped in the old waters of the Mediterranean, with all its ruins and sunken ships. I ate all the pastries the bonneted salesgirl brought me one by one, before thanking the owner and telling her yes. I had to commit to staying at the bakery for at least two years, she explained. Then she shook my hand, feigning affection. She even prepared me a special takeaway package so that I could celebrate my great victory at home that night. Maybe she didn’t know about the jam-jar incident. Tonight I didn’t have to do the bathrooms or the floors, she said. The bonneted girls looked at me from the corners of their eyes. Walking back to the four walls I called home, I started to knit fantasies out of all the money that awaited me: the change of work status wouldn’t guarantee me a raise straight away, but eventually it would. If I saved for long enough I’d be able to move into my own apartment, or travel somewhere, like other people did when the summer vacation bell sounded—I could go somewhere and then come back. In bed that night, surrounded by canapés, I lay imagining and dismissing my future lives with a Napoleonic hand to my heart.
A man in a red cap opened the elevator door for me and a man in a red cap closed it on the ground floor when I got out. Stefan was waiting for me at the breakfast table, beneath a grand oriental ceiling. We drank tea prepared with water from the Nile River, and discussed the rancid breath of the camels.
We’d eaten, and now the sky turned its back on us. The fair weather held out until we took our last mouthfuls; soon after, the clouds closed in and it was as if the sun had never been there at all. Nevertheless, they tried to continue their celebratory spring picnic. They passed around suspicious-looking cold meats smeared with mysterious sauces, and opened packets of sweets, but nobody wanted to eat any more. One of the party, who apparently hadn’t been informed of my origins (“Aren’t you Turkish?”) was busy disparaging the politics of Latin America. He’d traveled to several countries in the Americas and had confirmed for himself the backwardness of our ideas and the corruption of our institutions. He was one of those ignorant know-it-alls who manage to gatecrash every gathering. Spring billowed up in kilometer-high clouds, and we were soiled slowly by a gathering wind that worried the picnic implements. In the wake of my cultural superior’s comments, a very civilized discussion unfolded on the triumphs of liberty and reason, and although a few of them revealed, like an unstitched hem, the guilt behind their Nazi past and the misdeeds of colonialism, to which Europe still owed a great deal of its wealth and progress, the group as a whole seemed terribly satisfied with themselves and with their cordial, democratic world. One in particular seemed to consider himself some kind of apostle of social progress, and spent a while trying to convince me of the wonders of European transparency and the international market. The others, even the ignorant know-it-all, made sure to partake in the usual game of without-a-doubts and but-of-courses, in an attempt to throw a cheerful veil over their criticism of the rest of the world. Except Alexander. He looked at me every now and again, fixedly, from across the sheet that served as picnic blanket and tablecloth.
Choose Heidelberg! Alexander said. Choose Berlin! Julia said.
My heart isn’t even good at being bad.
Later, returning home arm in arm beneath an intermittent rain that had been the cause of much anxiety at the picnic, he told me he was ashamed of those people and swore that next time he’d throw punches at some of them. I’d heard that sentiment before, and told him I didn’t need him to swear anything to me. But Alexander insisted, and despite the cold wind that had picked up he stopped and told me over and over again, his face red with earnestness, that freedom also meant misfortune, that it also meant the freedom to be unfree. He particularly liked this last bit, and repeated it again when we got home. The freedom to be unfree. I took his clothes off and pushed him into the shower. It was colder inside the shower than it was outside, and the water took a century to warm up. Afterward we got into bed and settled our quarrel with the oldest of remedies. And for a moment we felt victorious, and the magic of sex was renewed, and we were better. I looked at the German ceiling and the German windows, the bed where I lay and the table beyond. I thought that I loved all of it tremendously, as if discovering the thought for the first time. I told Alexander that I wouldn’t go back to the student hostel, not even to pack my bags. He could bring my meager possessions over whenever he felt like it. I wanted to stay here, forever. Truly: I never ever wanted to leave.
I glimpsed them as soon as I stepped through the gate. They were sitting underneath the walnut tree: Marco on a tree stump, the other on a green canvas chair that folded up like an umbrella. Later on, I discovered him sitting on the same chair in the middle of a field. It must have been some kind of good-luck charm. From afar the two of them looked similar, but this impression died as I got closer, because the other one greeted me with a warmth Marco never would have shown. He even took his hat off, and folded his mouth into a strange friendly grimace that vanished as soon as he turned his face away. They spent the afternoon together, in silence. They went to look at the crops. They mounted their horses and headed out into the fields. That night they had dinner at Madame Cupin’s house; through the illuminated window I saw them drinking from deep glasses of wine, engrossed in what I imagined was a very serious conversation, judging by their expressions and the shapes made by their shoulders and arms. The next day, as I pulled weeds from the few remaining peony beds, he came over to introduce himself. He shook my hand quite formally, and told me he was very sorry I hadn’t been at dinner the night before.
“I’m just renting the little house next door,” I said, feigning humility.
“That doesn’t matter. My mother would have liked to invite you. She prepared an exquisite rabbit. Do you like rabbit?”
“I don’t think so.”
He left, carrying his little green canvas chair and accompanied by a farmhand and a dog. He was too well dressed for the farm and the heat. He returned covered in mud and full of enthusiasm, despite the rain. He was clutching a notebook and a flower: for me, he said. I asked him how many poems he had in his notebook and he said none, only plans and numbers, like the good architect he was. That night Marco slipped into my house without a sound, and the puerile thought occurred to me that he’d come to visit me in spite of the others, as some kind of act of defiance. But his mother and brother had gone into town, and there was nobody in the other house
s or underneath the walnut tree. A few caresses was all it took to arouse in me that peculiar sadness one often feels when, despite all evidence to the contrary, one suspects that one is loved. Or half-suspects, always with an eye open, to ensure the prey doesn’t escape. His brother the architect lived in Chile, he told me, and for years now he’d wanted to build a big hotel on the third and farthest plot, the eight-hectare one by the hillside. He talked about investors and made big plans, but Marco and his mother still weren’t convinced. Sometimes they argued, yelling and screaming about their ancestry. After pretending to be civil for a while, I told Marco to leave, that I didn’t like being his secret anymore. But he stayed, and I surrendered, until the others came back and Marco slipped out the kitchen door, acting as though he’d just been feeding the pigs.
Back in Buenos Aires, fatherless, after ten years of dragging my bones through the Old World, having acquainted myself with the Antilles and the white stone façades of Tunisia, I find myself in my brother’s house, walled in by suburbia. It’s a double-story house with a lot of bedrooms, and a morning silence punctured by the barking of dogs and the whirring of vacuum cleaners. The kids are at school. A woman a few years younger than my mother would be, if she were alive, is wiping the dining room furniture with an orange cloth. The lady of the house must be at the hairdresser. I have a room to myself, which is more than enough for me, but still. They said I could paint it any color I like, which is to say that my brother would pay someone to paint it for me. I could easily spend several months in that bedroom without spending a cent, without subjecting myself to the yoke of any job. It’s afternoon, and one of my brother’s daughters comes home. She makes several cunning attempts at winning me over, without success. Head to head at the dining table, we complete her biology homework together. The wife comes home too, and offers me a snack. Better not, I say. I go up to my room and sit at the desk where, stacked into tall deliberate piles, my brother has left a number of science books rescued from my father’s house, on the assumption that they once belonged to me. I look down at them and open the window. The next-door neighbor’s garden appears; I see a cat hunting something invisible to me. I decide to stay in Buenos Aires. I’m tired of this haste, this incomprehensible urgency. I probably think about Julia, about how she was always right about everything. I decide I’m tired of the life I know. I decide to change my dust jacket, change my hair. On a piece of paper I will later misplace, I scribble down some equations with several unknowns: a, b, c.
Julia was a woman with such good intentions. She claimed the only thing that mattered to her was love. If you saw her laughing, or holding Kolya, you believed every word.
That night in Berlin, at the party, I recognized Stefan among the hundreds of unfamiliar faces. I even remembered his name. He had to dig deep into his past to recall my face, and the rest of me.
“Málaga,” I reminded him.
This password from the past didn’t seem to work, and I had to try a thousand different memories before he understood. Finally he did, or at least he managed plausibly to pretend that he did, and we spent a long time side by side studying each other’s drinks. I’d lost sight of Julia, who had disappeared with the “gentleman” and had no intention of returning. I used her as an excuse to stay in the club another hour, even though I hated it there. I didn’t know what to do with Stefan. He asked me several times if we’d really met in Málaga. He was convinced he’d never been there, although apparently he’d traveled Spain extensively, as he had the rest of Europe and the entire planet. I said it had definitely been Málaga, and that he’d been traveling with a four-year-old who hunted lizards in the shrubs. He admitted that he did, in fact, have a son somewhere. Where? He was in London some of the time, Singapore the rest. A pale woman like an ear of wheat appeared behind us and stroked his back. We continued talking with difficulty under the barrage of music, growing slowly and modestly drunk. The pale woman leaned over, revealing her cleavage, to whisper something in his ear. Nevertheless, Stefan said he hadn’t come with anyone, and we walked out together into the Berlin night, which is unlike any other night. He glanced at his watch, made a calculation, then extracted the latest piece of technology from his pocket and spoke to it in English, then wrote something in Chinese, greeting and farewelling people in every corner of the globe, as we walked together along this street and that street, aimlessly at first, then along the banks of the canal. Suddenly he put his device away and asked me what I was doing in Germany. To begin with I lied to him, taking thousands of pointless precautions, but then I said something true: that I’d come to Germany to look for him, first in Heilbronn and then in Heidelberg, because those were the two cities I thought I remembered him mentioning that night in Málaga, when we’d met and his son had hunted imaginary lizards in the shrubs. That, he replied, couldn’t possibly be true. He’d never been to Heidelberg, except as a child, and he’d certainly never been to Heilbronn. I must have gotten confused, I said. But he was enthralled, he asked me questions as if he cared about my story. He was killing time; it must have been too early to call some other corner of the world. One by one I gave him the lies he requested of me. Why come to Germany to look for him if we’d only spent a single night together? I didn’t tell him the truth: “So I wouldn’t have to go home.”
I wander, I wander, I wander. I dream of Bedouins and tides.
It’s been raining for ten days, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, according to meteorological laws that transcend the little patio where I sit watching the falling water, at different times and from different angles. The rain isn’t threatening; we even welcomed it at first. But now the water opens channels in the earth (where the soil allows it, or fails to prevent it) to form new streams and lakes. It’s a simple process, one that invites contemplation and melancholy: first the land was dry, then it was green, now it is flooded. Before there was no lake there, no pond or puddle, and now there is. It takes every ounce of my feeble willpower to avoid succumbing to the hypnotic traps of mountain life. I fetch strawberries, I feed cats, I eat raw peas off the vine, all without lapsing into a state of reverie. A man approaches; I recognize him from afar, but only barely. I know a little about his past. He wears a black beret that adorns his head like a bow. He’s carrying a few extra kilos, and an awful smile that he misuses to ask me the whereabouts of Marco as I sit shelling peas into a bag. I offer him some peas. He tries one, then another, and another, spitting them out one by one. I tell him they’re delicious; he disagrees. Then I tell him his animals are stranded, that if he likes I can help him move them. He studies the axe that Marco has left too blatantly in the middle of the porch. It’s a good axe, he tells me, without enthusiasm or secrecy, a very good axe, I’d know, I used to work as a lumberer in El Hoyo, I’m telling you it’s a good axe. Ask him if he’ll sell it to me. He even leaves me his telephone number. He doesn’t move the sheep, doesn’t say goodbye, but before turning back he removes the beret and smooths his glorious head of hair, which doesn’t look like the hair of a murderer.
“How many dead?” I ask Marco when he returns to the farm that night. “The lumberjack from El Hoyo was here.”
“I don’t remember,” he says. “Maybe none.” He directs a kick at a cat sneaking under the eaves to avoid the rain.
Our boss, or what was left of her, was removed from the store on a stretcher. Her face and uniform were still decorated with red and white porcelain shards. We didn’t see her again. Rumor had it she died before she even got to the hospital. This seemed like an exaggeration, and I tried my best to deny it. I was worried the Turk would be accused of something, and by denying the facts I felt that I was somehow contributing to his salvation. But neither he nor the Lithuanian seemed worried at all. They feigned normality for a few weeks; only one or two broken plates, no mysteriously stained sheets. Through their shared conspiracy they had come to love one another. But I never saw them leaving work together, never heard them discussing a film they’d seen or a night they’d spent together. They co
mmunicated in taunts, like teenage boys or sailors. As she passed him in the store she’d say: “Working hard, huh?” or give him a little shove, or pull his hair, or swipe one of his aromatic black cigarettes. Our replacement boss turned out to be much friendlier than her predecessor. Now and then, if she was feeling particularly inspired, she even managed to call some of us by our names. The odd innocuous accident still occurred, and occasionally we’d catch wind of some complaint from the sales staff regarding our arrangement of the merchandise. Many mornings, on my way to work, I resolved to join forces with the Turk and the Lithuanian, to praise their sabotage with my primordial tongue and convince them of my potential worth. I tried, and I could not. For some time now the Turk had stopped offering me his cigarettes, and he no longer invited me to sit at the conspirators’ table. The two of them seemed to be approaching the apex of some secret project when the Lithuanian stopped turning up regularly to work. Sometimes she’d arrive with a black eye, poorly masked with makeup. He found a way to comfort her during the breaks, in the bathroom or the women’s change rooms. They stopped joking around, stopped taunting one another. The Turk’s happiness faded slowly, like a dying light. One day, we simply didn’t see her anymore. She disappeared suddenly, just as the boss had, only this time there was no ambulance, no stretcher, no procession. And the Turk mourned her in secret; this I know, although he never spoke her name again.
“Are you sure I have to go?”
“Yes.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“I’m always sure.”
“Please,” I begged. I wasn’t used to begging. I’d survived my first winter on the mountain. I’d been living in the little house for over half a year, and was now working for the health-food shop in town, selling flour and almonds. I had a wad of savings rolled up inside a tin can: money I’d received from my brothers, mostly, money that rained down from the black sky of their distant compassion. But as far as Marco knew, I had no money. Where will I go? I asked him. I said I’d do anything if he’d just let me stay.
All My Goodbyes Page 8
