Velásquez, despite the great romantic deeds he boasted of, was not a handsome man: short, potbellied, with graying hair on some areas of his scalp and the round glasses that had gone out of fashion three or four decades before. The prototype of the absentminded academic who manages to shine due to an unjustified confidence in himself and a glibness, not lacking in humor, that had to be—thought Marcelo—one of his most positive attributes.
The flight from Madrid to Mexico City had been easier and less tiring than Marcelo had expected; nothing like the multiple stopovers—Houston and then Lima—that had made his journey to Buenos Aires torture two years before, on a flight the university had gotten for free but that had cost him his mental equilibrium for two weeks, at the end of which he had promptly met Romina.
Descending into Mexico City, just before landing, he had been impressed by the interminable sea of small lights streaming up hillsides and along avenues like an inexhaustible flow of electricity. He had, nevertheless, expected more in the way of architecture; his idea of a metropolis was closer to Manhattan or a movie version of Tokyo: glass skyscrapers stretching to infinity, their façades mirroring the crisscrossing layers of cumulonimbi that darkened the afternoons with their threat of rain. In contrast, he discovered, from the descending plane, a sprawling city with low houses and the lines of the avenues emulating a nonfunctioning, disorganized sanguineous circulatory system.
In the airport, he had felt intimidated by the hardness of the local faces, the gaze—somewhere between humorous and scornful—of the customs officials, the friendliness of the unlicensed cabdrivers that masked a scam. He was to spend the night there in the city, close to the airport, and the next day Velásquez, who was in the capital on some personal business, would pick him up and drive him to Los Girasoles. It was, he was told, a six-hour journey, seven if there was traffic.
In Mexico City, Marcelo breathed air that, while foul and containing large quantities of lead, still held the glow of some ancient past. The dirty yellow line on the edge of the sidewalks, viewed from the cab, seemed to him a metaphor for just about everything, although he couldn’t say exactly why. A tone of violated legality hung over things, leaving an ample margin for nameless atrocities, but also, paradoxically, for the construction of an untroubled, dissipated style of life. Everything had two sides. Marcelo thought he would have liked to explore that city for several more days, even months: a blind pilgrimage over the pedestrian bridges, along the boulevards with their sad eucalyptus trees, and through the rich, noisy bustle of the itinerant markets. But he would come back later, he thought, when he would have time to get properly acquainted with the Distrito Federal’s sordid quaintness, the “defective” and the pure and simple “defect” of that blackened basin.
The hotel, a few minutes from the airport, was a mound of reinforced concrete and reflective windows with a neon sign at its apex. The sign alternated, according to the whim of the circuit breaker, between the words hotel and otel. The building overlooked the junction of two immense avenues, a noisy spot that promised to be constantly busy. Marcelo had asked the cabdriver at the airport to take him to any cheap hotel, reasonably nearby, since he had arranged to meet Velásquez for breakfast the next day in a restaurant in the same airport and then leave for the university town of Los Girasoles, where he was to fix his residence for the following year. The driver dropped Marcelo at the main entrance, and the moment he saw the place, the professor thought it showed no sign of adding anything positive to a first night in a city “charged with energy.” That was how he had formulated it to himself. Marcelo reconsidered his phrasing and was ashamed to find himself a doctor of contemporary rationality who was capable of uttering such an ambiguous cliché, an expression that, beyond the high-voltage cables running from pole to pole along the roadside, didn’t relate to anything in particular. But perhaps it wasn’t necessary that it did: the tangle of cables, exposed to the vagaries of the rains and the whims of earthquakes, was enough to leave one feeling no longer just concerned, but even deeply disturbed in one’s innermost being, attacked in that fraction of the soul one reserves for things that cannot be explained. This being the case, Marcelo went into the hotel as if affected by a premonition related to the energy resources of the nation offering him accommodation. None of that, he thought later, made any sense, but one does not select the weapons with which to assault one’s peace of mind.
The bed had a metal frame, and the sheets had circular burn marks. Marcelo feared there would be scorpions or enormous cockroaches on the walls—a friend had told him a dismal story about bugs in Mexico City—but after a cautious inspection, he decided he was safe. He thought that perhaps the cabdriver had misunderstood his instructions and, on hearing he was looking for a cheap hotel, had decided what the Spanish passenger wanted was prostitutes. The hotel certainly did look as if it were normally used on a by-the-hour basis. The decor in his room was rather ugly: two Chinese jars of fake porcelain (they were plastic to the touch) on a painted wood-veneer table. And between the jars, as if standing guard, a small TV.
That night, he dreamed that Richard Foret came into his room dressed as a boxer and, without saying a single word, handed him the notebook in which he had recorded details of the perambulations of his final months. A so-far undiscovered notebook that he, Marcelo, would rescue from oblivion for the benefit of mankind.
The next day everything went as planned: Marcelo handed in his hotel key in the morning, asked at the reception desk for a cab, and returned to the airport. He quickly found Velásquez in the restaurant where they had arranged to meet—he had seen his face on the University of Los Girasoles’ website—and sat down to breakfast with him. Velásquez seemed excited. He spoke rapidly, and some words were lost in the spiel, but what was important was not the detail but the torrent: he passed agilely from recounting the story of his catastrophic relationship with his second wife to glossing—with added insults—a talk he had heard in San Diego on the Surrealists and Mexico, then to recommending a cantina in Los Girasoles that served the only good bourbon to be had in the country—“the owner of the bar is a wetback who drives his truck full of bottles down from L.A. every two weeks,” babbled Velásquez, pausing only to take a sip of coffee.
Marcelo listened patiently, wondering if he would ever manage to understand all those strange turns of phrase the New World was continually spitting out at him. He was particularly fascinated by the diminutive in the phrase ya merito, which he roughly translated as “any second now,” and attempted to describe the spirit of the expression by referring to an essay by Roland Barthes; luckily for him, Velásquez pretended not to hear this display of his prowess and continued with his unstoppable cascade of verbosity.
During the drive to Los Girasoles, Velásquez quieted down a little and Marcelo felt, for the first time, that he might become his friend. The professor was a proficient driver, taking frequent puffs on a cigar that he held in his left hand and communicating with other vehicles through deft use of the horn. They crossed through such a diverse range of climates that when Marcelo surfaced from a torpor of several hours’ duration and took a good look at the surrounding landscape, he thought for a moment they must have been on the road for more than a day and had already crossed over the frontier to the United States. But no, they were not so far north, not by a long way. Outside, the verdant forests and steep cliffs had disappeared, and now a wide plain stretched out around them, replete with shrubs, prickly pears, and yellow earth.
Los Girasoles was a town of some fifty thousand inhabitants in the middle of that plain. Before the university came, there had been nothing to justify a visit from a foreigner. Like all such towns, it had a rectangular main square with its church and government palace and, surrounding this, a not very extensive area of colonial buildings painted brick red. But beyond the center, the town lacked color: everything merged into the dry air of the plain. Houses with corrugated metal roofs, soccer fields dotted with stones, pedestrian bridges from which hung banners sing
ing the praises of the administration of the moment. (“The Government of Los Girasoles is working for you: more pedestrian bridges for pedestrians.”)
Velásquez asked Marcelo if he wanted to be taken to the house he had rented through the internet, near the University of Los Girasoles, or if he would prefer to get something to eat in the center and settle in afterwards. Marcelo had taken a liking to Professor Velásquez, even before meeting him, when he had written from Madrid announcing that, according to his agreement with the Madrid institution he had the opportunity—and, in this case, the desire—to spend a sabbatical year in the sister, albeit third-world, University of Los Girasoles. But however much this liking for the plump, aging Mexican might make him feel like having a meal in his company, in some traditional restaurant with hot, spicy food, the urgent need to find himself finally alone after the car journey was stronger, so he declined the offer to get to know the center of the town and, after summarizing the reasons for his weariness, asked Velásquez to drop him at his new home.
What was no surprise to Marcelo was that the internet—and, in general, the malicious use of the technology—was an infallible tool for successfully committing fraud. The house he had found on a web page, and for which he had paid six months’ rent up front, was a sad and painful confirmation of this axiom. The online advertisement found on a site for academics described it as “a little tropical paradise just ten minutes from the University of Los Jirasoles” and stressed its “excellent view, magnificent location, and excellent price.” The only thing that was true had to do with the financial side: the place was cheap, although only in comparison to the exorbitant cost of rented accommodations in Madrid, and taking into account the huge advantage that Marcelo was still being paid in euros despite the fact that he was living in a “little tropical paradise.” The small house was almost an orphaned apartment, as if it had been wrested from a parent building, and also an inferno: it was located in a residential estate that stretched like a biblical plague along an immense hill of bare, rocky earth, raising its water tanks to the sun like an army of Cyclopes.
The residential estate known as Puerta del Aire was some fifteen minutes’ drive from Los Girasoles, on a road connecting the town to the university. The plan for the distribution of the small houses seemed to have been made by a blind man. The bathroom fixtures, which didn’t appear in the promotional photos, were of a chromatic spectrum ranging from lilac with silvery glints to bile green. The house came furnished and, on the internet, the furniture had looked brand-new and reasonably tasteful. The reality was different: the armchairs belonged to different living rooms, none of them were handsome, and on the wall was a painting of a Christ figure and various decorated ceramic plates, attached by some irreversible process. Marcelo knew he would not be able to spend very long there.
He dumped his luggage in the bedroom—painted a mind-boggling red—and went out to look around. The environment was not exactly welcoming: the planners of that estate, in alliance with the corrupt local administration that had tendered the contract, had neglected to put in any sidewalks. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic on those cracked concrete streets: the whole neighborhood gave the impression of having been uninhabited for some time. Outside a house identical to his own, about two hundred yards away in a parallel street, he saw a parked car: a gray pickup with Texas license plates from which, due to the heat, seemed to be rising a fine mist, or a mirage in the process of formation. Marcelo felt dizzy: he had not drunk any water during the entire journey from Mexico City, and the implacable sun of that hillside, which would beat down on his house from seven in the morning until the curtain of the fiery night fell, was, in conjunction with the inevitable jetlag and a night in a fifth-rate hotel, beginning to wreak havoc on his feeble, desk-bound anatomy.
When he first heard of Los Girasoles, he had expected the place to be a sort of colonial retreat, a town founded by the conquistadors to guard their maidens in pools of warm water and to return to from time to time to rest from their battles. He had imagined the university would be an old building, a former hacienda or disused monastery with stories of dark virgins and poet-nuns in voluntary reclusion. He had thought there would be an abundance of rivers and waterfalls nearby, and that the old people would trudge along timeworn paths to sell fruit in a neighboring town. Sunk in his autistic imagination, Marcelo Valente had not bothered to do in-depth research into the topic. Violently drawn on by his desire to get away from Madrid for a while, in his plans he merged fantasies about the last months of Richard Foret’s life with the almost nonexistent information he had about Los Girasoles. Now he was paying the high price of disillusion for that blunder.
There was no bottled water in his new home, and Velásquez had warned him all too clearly about the negative effects of the tap water—a unique mixture of fecal material and toxins—on the health of a European, so he decided to walk a little way to the estate’s security booth and ask where he could buy a demijohn of drinking water.
The guard spotted Marcelo in the distance, making his way along the sun-drenched street, and sardonically thought this must be the new foreigner they’d all been making so much noise about. The owner of numbers 34, 35, and 36 had told him a Spanish professor was going to occupy 34 for a whole year, to work at the university. After this announcement, he had heard other members of the teaching staff—number 59 and number 28—commenting that some guy was coming from Europe on an interuniversity exchange to nab the few straight female professors they had. Jacinto, the guard, had seen a lot of gringos like that one file through Puerta del Aire. He had seen them move into number 44, number 60, numbers 70 and 75, and had seen every single one of them throw in the towel before the fight was over: return to their respective countries, go to DF, spend the night in their tiny offices . . . None had survived Puerta del Aire for more than six consecutive months, and this tall little Spaniard with ruffled hair wasn’t going to be any different, you could see that from a mile away. As a zealous, conscientious army officer, Jacinto was proud of the level of desertions Puerta del Aire had achieved among the foreign population. The estate was, in his nameless fantasy, a smaller but worthier version of the country as a whole, a territory impermeable to the evil intentions of gringos, badass and independent from the steel beams of its houses to the dirty white dust of its streets. And in this country, made to the measure of his ambitions, Jacinto ruled the roost.
Marcelo arrived panting at the security booth and, once in the shade, had to take a number of deep breaths before asking the guard where the nearest store was. Jacinto was slowly and silently chewing a segment of a mandarin orange while his hands were employed in peeling the rest of the fruit; a thread of juice trickled down his dark chin.
“You’re the Spanish guy, right?”
“I suppose so. Well, I don’t know if I’m the Spanish guy, but I’m Spanish and I’m a guy. Were you told I was coming?”
The guard insolently ignored that last question and continued to concentrate on his orange. Marcelo Valente was sweaty and found the guard’s attitude slightly maddening.
After a long pause, Jacinto spoke again, returning to the initial, and for Marcelo, more pressing question, “Well, there’s no store around here . . . You’ll have to drive to the outskirts of Los Girasoles . . . or the other way . . .” Between each linguistic outflow, Jacinto appeared to be savoring the anxiety he was provoking.
“The other way? Where?” asked Marcelo, intrigued, seeming to remember Velásquez had said the road came to an abrupt end at the university, five or ten minutes away. Was Jacinto trying to say he could buy bottles of water at the university?
The guard took off his blue cap bearing the logo of the security company and put it on the table, which, together with a portable radio and some sheets of paper with prestamped signatures, was the only object visible in the booth. He appeared to think this over for a while, wiped the trickle of mandarin juice from his chin with his sleeve, and then went on, looking Marcelo in the eyes for the first time. �
�No, the store’s farther off if you go the other way, señor. You’d be better off waiting for Señora Ridruejo to come . . .”
Señora Ridruejo was the owner of numbers 34, 35, and 36. And she was the person responsible for the untruthful internet advertisement that now had Marcelo boiling with indignation. The professor, however, had completely forgotten the owner’s surname, and in the security guard’s mouth it sounded even stranger than before. He oscillated between surprise and exasperation. He was thirsty, he didn’t want to talk to any Señora Ridruejo, and he was beginning to regret not having stayed at the (h)otel a few days longer.
“Are you saying that if you don’t have a car, you can’t buy a bottle of water?” Marcelo asked bluntly, letting his growing anger show.
“No. Well, to get to the store you do need a car, but not to buy water. You asked about the store, not a place where you can buy water.” Jacinto’s response was as mysterious as it was irritating, and his unwillingness to say things plainly made Marcelo think his stay in Mexico was going to feel like a very long one. Openly impassioned, he rebuked the guard, consciously bringing into play that brusque Castilian manner that was to cause him so many mix-ups.
Jacinto went on the defensive: “Keep your temper, eh? I’m not some errand boy here to go looking for stores for you . . . What I do is watch, so that they don’t bump you off in the night,” he said, maintaining his tone of indifference, in spite of the harshness of his message. “If you want water, you can knock on the window of number 9. They sell things there . . .”
Marcelo thought he didn’t know a more exact definition of “store” than “a place where they sell things,” but he kept that semantic reflection to himself to avoid further argument and held out a hand to the guard in farewell. “I’m Professor Marcelo Valente. I’ll be living here for some time. A pleasure to meet you, and thank you for your help.”
Among Strange Victims Page 9
