‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Juliette.’
‘No it’s not, it’s true.’
‘By the way, did you talk to Dorotea?’
‘She promised me she’d give him the message.’
‘I asked you to get hold of Mao’s phone number!’
‘She wouldn’t give it to me, she said it was for our own safety.’
‘Those kids really like playing games, don’t they!’
‘What, and you don’t?’
A boy entered the shop carrying two paper plates of tacos and a large bottle of beer.
‘Hang on,’ Juliet said, ‘don’t eat them yet, I’m going to give you a Serrano chilli to make you feel better.’
She poured out two glasses of beer and held out the chilli after rubbing it between her hands to make it even more savage. Then we ate in silence. She chewed and chewed and I chewed and sweated, drenched from head to foot. The beer performed the miracle of returning me to a state far more comfortable than that of being hung-over: drunk. Juliet brought me a roll of toilet paper so I could wipe the sweat from my face and blow what was starting to drip out of my potato-nose. As I blew, it occurred to me I’d never asked Juliet – who, when you thought about it, was an expert in such things – if it were true my nose had the form of a tuber.
‘Hey, tell me what my nose looks like.’
‘You really want to know? You’re in such a mood today…’
‘Is it a potato?’
‘Yeah, but a Peruvian potato, you know what I mean, those dark-skinned ones.’
I passed her my glass for more beer and as she took it she looked at me, as if trying to calculate the size and nature of my need.
‘Why don’t you have a lie-down?’ she suggested. ‘A little nap would do you good right now.’
‘Sleeping’s the last thing I want to do,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been having some really weird dreams lately.’
‘Erotic dreams?’
‘I’m being serious, for God’s sake! Why does everything have to be a joke?’
‘Because you and I always joke around and, forgive me for saying so, but if it’s jokes we’re talking about then you’re the king of jokes. Now, if you want to be serious, be serious: go ahead, tell me about your dreams.’
‘I don’t want to tell you my dreams, you might start trying to interpret them.’
‘It’d be your fault if I did.’
‘Oh would it now!’
‘Of course, for giving me that trippy book.’
‘Have you been reading it?’
‘Bits of it, before I go to sleep; it’s like a horror film. Wait a minute.’
I watched her as she walked across the patio and went into her room, returning shortly afterwards leafing through the book as she looked for a particular passage. She stood in front of me, turned a few pages over and eventually said:
‘Here it is. Listen to this.’
And she read:
In us is also a dark angel (Hekate was also called angelos), a consciousness (and she was called phosphoros) that shines in the dark… This part has an a priori connection with the underworld through sniffing dogs and bitchery, dark moons, ghosts, garbage and poisons.
She turned a page and then another one, and another, trying to find another bit to read out to me.
‘Doesn’t it give you nightmares?’ I asked.
‘Not on your nelly: I dream of Coatlicue every single night.’
Mao came into the bar dragging behind him the wheelie suitcase he’d taken the Lost Times away in. It was almost 8 p.m. and I’d lost count of how many drinks I’d had some time ago, out of sheer anxiety: so far from my Aesthetic Theory and so close to the old people’s home. He sat down opposite me and starting flexing his right arm, the one he’d used to pull the delivery with.
‘Damn it Mao,’ I said. ‘It was urgent. Didn’t Dorotea give you the message?’
‘We carried the operation out as soon as we could yesterday,’ he replied. ‘We had to bring it forward because of all the pressure you were putting on me.’
‘And?’
‘Complete success.’
‘I’m talking about the Lost Times, I couldn’t care less about your operations; do you have them?’
‘They’re in the suitcase. Can I have a beer?’
‘Get your own beer, kiddo.’
He called to the barman to bring him a Victoria and stared intently at me; so desperate was he to tell me what had happened it looked as if the words were going to start tumbling out of his mouth like little balls.
‘You really don’t want me to tell you?’ he asked.
‘I thought it was a clandestine operation.’
‘You helped the cause, you deserve to know.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, I don’t have causes, I have problems; since we last saw each other things have got really complicated.’
I must have looked so downcast I imagined he even felt sorry for me, his dreadlocks drooping and depressed.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ he asked.
‘For now,’ I said, ‘ you can just wait here with me until the salon members go to bed so we can take the Lost Times up to my apartment. Then you can help me return them.’
‘Whatever you say, Grandpa.’
We drank two or three more beers while I focused on stemming Mao’s verbal diarrhoea as he stubbornly tried to make me an accomplice to his mischief, and then I sent him to have a look at the lobby. He came back and said:
‘All clear.’
Back in my apartment, I opened the suitcase to check its contents and there were the Lost Times, all battered: the corners of the covers were bent, the pages looked wonky and some were loose and, stamped onto the cover of one, the print of a shoe was clearly visible.
‘My God, Mao, what did you do?’
‘I thought you didn’t want me to tell you?’
‘I don’t want you to tell me a thing, but why are they in such a state?’
‘We used them as weapons in the operation, Grandpa.’
‘What operation? The Battle of the Lost Times?’
‘Shall I tell you or not?’
‘Tell me the minimum, I’m in enough trouble as it is.’
‘The minimum is that we kidnapped a dog.’
‘A dog?’
‘Not just any dog: it belongs to the son of the richest man in the world.’
‘Didn’t that dog die?’
‘They had another one: the Labrador’s little lady-friend. We’re going to demand the ransom in a few days.’
‘I told you I don’t want to know anything. Now, let’s go to the Jardín de Epicuro.’
The next day, Juliet communicated the conditions of the handover to Francesca. The paper I found in my letterbox informed me that the Aesthetic Theory was in my apartment, under the bed. I found it stuffed into the box where I kept the Chinese fortune cookies. Meanwhile, the salonists rescued their Lost Times from the bushes in the Jardín de Epicuro. As their withdrawal symptoms had reached crisis point, they sat down immediately to read on the park benches. And that was where the police arrested them: using the battered books as evidence, they accused them of possession of weapons used in an attempted murder and unlawful deprivation of canine liberty.
The dog had been scratching non-stop at the door to my room, which meant that Mum had left the house without taking him with her. I hated this dog more than any other, even more than the dog that had made my father leave home, more, even, than Turnup, and before he became the definitive symbol of calamity. This dog was a nervous hound, who looked like he was about to have a heart attack even when he was asleep: he’d kick out his legs, tremble, bark and whine at oneiric enemies. My mother had named him Eighty-Three, the year she’d adopted him, because when she’d brought him home a couple of weeks after the demise of the previous animal, my sister had said that the different periods in our lives were marked by Mum’s various mutts. It was true: when
we recalled episodes from our past, we didn’t say, that was in the sixties or in the forties, never mind ‘before or after Dad left’, which was the real watershed in the family history. Instead, perhaps to evade the issue, we said: that was when we had Turnup. Or when we had Market, that silky-haired dog who – in my defence, I would like to clarify – had ended up dying of a urinary infection that spread through his entire body and left him swollen like a balloon (and culinarily useless).
Eighty-Three had become an anachronism a year later, in ’84, and by the time he was scratching at the door to my room, well into ’85, he was a dead weight that tested my patience and made me doubt seriously whether the dog would live to see ’86.
Around that time I used to sleep, or try to sleep, until midday, because I went to bed at 3 a.m. at the earliest, after closing the stall at midnight or at one on weekends, after cleaning and getting rid of the rubbish, pushing the cart over to a carport where I paid a guy to keep it safe for me, and having one or two drinks, which sometimes ended up being three or four, or five, in one of the nearby bars. My sister left for work early, and Mum came and went, running errands to fill the day like anyone with time on their hands does. Dogs had come and gone, and life had gone by: I was fifty years old and my sister fifty-one. After my father left, no one had been brave enough to leave home.
I got out of bed when my hangover let me remember that that morning, my mother was going to go to one of the few places she couldn’t take the dog: the doctor’s. The mutt wasn’t going to leave me in peace until I took him out to have a wee. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and on the table I found the results of the tests my mother had been given the day before, a diagnosis that said, contrary to her belief, Mum was not suffering from any kind of heart condition. She’d left the results in the house on purpose, so the second opinion she was going to ask for today wouldn’t be influenced by them. That is, so they wouldn’t tell her she was a hypochondriac and send her home without doing more tests.
It was almost eleven o’clock, so I put on yesterday’s clothes and, with Eighty-Three at my heels, went out into the communal passageway, where I discovered all my neighbours, every single one of them, gathered in groups that formed and then dispersed again, their radios playing at full blast, the doors to their houses open, the TVs on. My bewilderment lasted a second and then turned to astonishment when I saw Marilín walking towards me. As grudges had come and gone, we hadn’t said a word to each other for twenty-five years.
Considering her legendary talent for flirting, something very serious must have happened: her face was bare and she wore a blouse and trouser get-up that could easily have been pyjamas. Without make-up, the wrinkles on her face were the proof of everything I hadn’t wanted to see until then and which, as a matter of fact, I still didn’t want to see.
‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked me.
‘At the doctor’s,’ I replied. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Didn’t you hear? There was an earthquake!’
‘I was asleep.’
‘I’ve been knocking at your door all morning.’
‘I didn’t hear. I’m a heavy sleeper.’
‘Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’
‘If I didn’t drink so much there wouldn’t have been an earthquake? Really?’
‘Where did your mum go?’
‘To the doctor’s.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know, cardiology, I think.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I think so.’
‘They’re saying the hospital collapsed.’
‘Who is?’
‘I don’t know, on the radio, or the TV.’
‘I’m going to talk to my sister.’
‘Where is she?’
‘At work.’
‘The phones aren’t working.’
I left Marilín and went back into the house without worrying about Eighty-Three, who came after me anyway, panicking now and with good reason, infected by the collective hysteria. I switched on the TV and then I saw the piece of paper on top with a message.
Don’t forget I’m going to cardiology today. I don’t know how long I’ll be, so take Eighty-Three out to do his business. If I’ve got something serious and they have to keep me in, don’t forget to feed him this evening. Your sister’s coming with me.
I showed up at the police station, accompanied by Dorotea and Willem, and we made a statement that the Lost Times had been lost the day the crime was committed and that the literary salon had only just recovered them when they were arrested. I brought along the money to cover the bail, an amount equivalent to two years of life. It didn’t pain me to do so, not at that moment: five or six years more, instead of seven or eight, or three or four, seemed the same. And in any case, there was always the possibility of getting the bail money back if the salon members were acquitted. Less likely was that they’d be given back the Lost Times, which had become evidence in a criminal case.
We waited for the salonists to be released and when they came out there were no embraces or scenes of relief, only an exchange of glances halfway between hatred and gratitude, if a sentiment exists that can link the two. We’d come in a taxi and, since there was quite a gaggle of us now, I suggested we take the metro back. One of the salon members, one who throughout this whole story hadn’t said or done anything to distinguish himself, said that he used to work around here and would be able to show us the way to the metro station. We set off in silence, Dorotea and Willem holding hands, me calculating how soon I could bust out a joke so it wouldn’t feel so much like a funeral procession. I waited for two blocks, then I said: ‘We really missed you guys.’
‘Why did you do it?’ Francesca asked.
Why did I do what, I thought? Loan out the Lost Times to commit a crime and then return them covered in evidence that would incriminate them, or pretend I knew nothing and say it had all been a mix-up?
‘Why did I do what?’ I asked out loud.
‘Pay our bail,’ she replied. ‘You didn’t have to, we were getting a collection together already. I’ll pay you what I owe…’
‘Don’t get the wrong idea, Francesca, I didn’t do it for the reason you think I did.’
‘And what reason is that?’
‘That I’ve gone soft, that I feel guilty, that I think I owe you all something.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well then?’
‘It’s a negotiation. The real negotiation. You make that medical certificate disappear and I won’t inform the management committee that their president is being investigated for a crime.’
‘A crime of which I’m innocent.’
‘That’s why I paid the bail.’
‘Because you feel guilty.’
‘Because if the Lost Times hadn’t disappeared none of this would have happened.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sense of justice.’
‘Come and have a glass of whisky with me tonight and I’ll explain everything I know about justice and executions, starting with the catacombs of the Roman Empire.’
‘You pervert.’
‘That’s how I like it.’
We carried on walking in silence. It was that time in the afternoon when all that remained of the sun was the heat rising from the tarmac. I looked towards the horizon, through the buildings, and then I saw the self-portrait printed on a plastic sheet hanging from the wall of an old colonial building.
‘STOP!’ I yelled.
Everyone stopped dead, envisaging some imminent danger: a runaway car, a rabid dog.
‘What is it?’ Willem asked.
‘What is it?’ Francesca asked.
‘What is it?’ Dorotea asked.
‘What is it?’ the chorus of salon members asked.
I read out the advert for the exhibition: Wounded Life: Manuel González Serrano (1917–1960).
‘
It’s him,’ I replied.
‘Who?’ Willem asked.
‘The Sorcerer.’
I dragged the anonymous salonist who’d showed us the way over by the arm and, pinching him to prove I wasn’t dreaming, I asked:
‘What’s your name?’
‘Virgilio.’
And then one day, as was to be expected, as was normal, Dad really did die. A woman from the Manzanillo Forensic Medical Service explained it to me over the phone and, though it seemed more than likely to be true upon calculating my father’s age, I wasn’t prepared to fall into the same old trap again. I assured her I needed the death certificate so I could fill in some forms before I headed up there, and they faxed it over, to the stationer’s outside the building I’d moved to and now lived in, alone. The ironies of life: before Dad’s real death, I’d lived through the disappearance of my mother and my sister. The fax had come through all blurry, the image smudged and out of focus, but I made out the emblem of the local government of Colima and half my father’s name. A half-truth, for the moment, that obliged me to confirm it.
I got on a bus and twelve hours later arrived in Manzanillo. At the station no one was waiting for me. I headed for the morgue to discover that my father really was dead and that he’d killed himself. He had taken cyanide, as well as a preserving formula that supposedly delayed the onset of decay in the body. He explained this in a note he’d left for me, the suicide note. In red ink and cramped, shaky letters leaning so far to the right that the words looked like they’d beaten him to dying, my father’s message took me hours to decipher, sitting in the waiting room of the morgue as I waited for the body to be released.
The time has come. It’s perfect. Take me with you to Mexico City and give me to SEMEFO. The art collective, mind you, not the actual forensic medical service. I saw a fantastic exhibition they put on in Colima last week: there were jars of human blood and drawings of corpses. Talk to Teresa Margolles, she’ll think of something.
That same night I managed to cremate his body, and the next day I paid a fisherman to take me out to sea. When we were far enough away from the coast, I delivered my father’s ashes to the Pacific Ocean.
I'll Sell You a Dog Page 16
