FIVE
WHEN I WOKE UP THAT MORNING I could never have imagined the dirty trick that had been played on me. For a few minutes I remained serenely between the sheets in my apartment in the Engels Building, dozing, receiving in my cupped hands the warmth of my testicles, happy in the knowledge that it was Friday, listening to the cries of the street vendors that rose to my fifth-floor apartment very early in the morning, because my apartment with high ceilings and large windows was located on the corner of Sexta Avenida and Once Calle, in the very heart of the city, as I realized once again that morning upon opening the curtains and contemplating the light on the rooftops and between the buildings, which fortunately were few within my immediate visual perimeters; a furnished apartment with housekeeping services—laundry and fresh sheets and towels like in a hotel—I moved into almost immediately upon my arrival in this city, and whose rent of four hundred dollars a month didn’t seem too excessive given its privileged location, which allowed me to walk the six blocks that separated it from the archbishop’s palace and to have my favorite bars right on hand, and given its very good security situation thanks to a guard being on duty twenty-four hours a day. Once I was dressed and groomed and had eaten my yogurt and cereal—health always comes first—I double-locked the door, walked down the hallway to the elevator, pressed the button to the first floor, got out in the lobby, where I said good morning to the receptionist and the doorman, then went straight out onto the street, keeping my eyes on the passersby, walking down Once Calle on my way to Octava Avenida toward Café León, where I could drink the best coffee in the city and peacefully read the newspapers, as I did from Monday to Friday, before making my way to the office, I sat down at the bar and asked for a café latte and a couple of churros and grabbed whatever newspaper was available, which that Friday morning turned out to be a rag called Siglo XX, which I read without finding anything of much interest until I got to Polo Rosas’s column, where to my surprise I saw myself mentioned in a most ignominious way, that hack whom I’d met only a few times in my life when I lived in Mexico stated in the aforementioned column that I had told him that so-and-so had told me that another so-and-so had been opposed to Polo Rosas being awarded a prize for his novel ten years before, which of course left me flabbergasted not only because of the false nature of the information but also because the entire rigmarole had been drummed up to prove that I was some kind of snitch, which would have been nothing worse than insignificant gossip if I didn’t find myself at that moment carrying out a delicate task whereby the genocide perpetuated by this country’s army against the unarmed indigenous population was being documented and exposed, making me almost choke on my coffee, and I didn’t feel like even tasting my churros when I realized that this was a clear message from the Presidential High Command letting me know in no uncertain terms that they knew I was in that city, involved in what I was involved in, which wasn’t really a surprise to me, considering the high quality of the military intelligence services, the surprising aspect being that they would employ some hack with a reputation as a leftist rebel to communicate this message to me and, I then understood, to the church as well, in order to make them distrust me and my work by having Polo Rosas insinuate that I was a snitch, which of course perturbed me excessively, I almost started screaming and waving my arms around at the bar in the Café León because such libel was a vicious assault on my amour propre and at the same time unleashed my paranoia to such a degree that I no longer wanted more coffee or my churros, but instead I paid and left for the palace, choking on my rage, certain that my friend Erick and the little guy named Mynor had already read the aforementioned column and might know something more about it. But neither of them was in his office when I was so eager to discuss with somebody this dirty trick Polo Rosas had played on me, not only to extract the knife from my wounded amour propre, as mortifying as that was, but also to analyze the significance of this maneuver and discuss what means should be taken to counteract it, to which end I shut myself up in my office and called my buddy Toto, after all a farmer and a poet and therefore acquainted with the local literary fauna, and suggested that we go get a couple of beers around midday, at eleven, to be more precise, at the usual place, as I had a deadly hangover, I lied, without ever mentioning Polo Rosas’s dirty trick, so as not to give the military, which was taping every telephone call that came in and went out of the palace, the pleasure of knowing how deeply their knife had pierced me. I must admit that from eight-thirty in the morning, the moment I passed in fury and poisoned spirits through the enormous wooden door, until ten forty-five, when I passed through it again on my way to El Portalito, I couldn’t concentrate on my perusal of the one thousand one hundred page report, I spent the whole time planning one or another way of responding to the calumnious column written by that hack, whom I’d only seen twice in my life and about whom I remember nothing but his bald spot, and the impertinence and resentment he brandished about once he’d downed his first drink, nothing else, just his bald spot with a few graying tufts around the edges that, due to a highly inexplicable and circumstantial association of ideas, made me repeat again and again like one possessed a sentence written on the piece of paper on my desk, which I immediately copied into my notebook and which said: There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with logs they spilled them, which I repeated with increasing fury until I could see those magnificent logs making pieces of gray hair tufts anointed with brains fly through the air, nor could I make even a modicum of progress because neither my friend Erick nor the little guy with the Mexican mustache would be coming to the palace that morning, according to one of the secretaries, for they were attending an important meeting at the bishop’s parish church, as far as I could figure out, which further inflamed my paranoia and made me afraid that libelous rag would be the first item on the agenda. I was right to assume that my buddy Toto had not read the aforementioned column, as he confessed to me when I found him installed at the corner table, having arrived ahead of me because he really was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I don’t read that shit,” he said without attributing any importance to the matter and after criticizing me for wasting my time and even worrying about what some slum lord had written, who everybody knew was the eyes and ears of G-2, the so-called military intelligence, as I had correctly inferred, because Polo Rosas was not sensu stricto a novelist but rather the owner of many rental units in various neighborhoods in the city, whose legal representative and rent collector was a lawyer who also worked for the military, my buddy said while still half asleep in the cantina, thank God with no marimba playing and where we were the only customers other than a couple sitting lazily at the bar, which explained why the novels the old guy had published were exclusively about deserters and snitches from the ranks of the guerrillas, and even worse, it was known that said person on two occasions had joined a left-wing guerrilla group and come out of it unharmed while most of his comrades had been murdered, my buddy Toto said, without assigning too much importance to it, as if he were talking about some clerk who filched paper from the copy machine and not a slanderer who, in the light of these new revelations, had acquired a sinister aspect, I asserted with my paranoia firing up yet again after the poet and farmer stated, “Cut the shit, if the sonsabitches want to send you a message, the very least they’ll do is give you a pounding,” which was precisely what I most feared, a vicious attack with a knife in the middle of the street, and then he said that if they wanted to give me a pounding they didn’t need to go through some old bald guy with prostate disease who probably just wanted to use his newspaper column to irritate me, which is precisely what he had achieved. I didn’t have a chance to respond to Toto’s analysis because at precisely that moment we saw walk toward our table Chucky, the Killer Doll, a short stocky guy who looked just like a bulldog with blue eyes, whose subordinates, including my buddy Toto, affectionately dubbed with the name of that movie character, Chucky, the Killer Doll, as much for his appearance as for the fact that in his you
th he was known as playing a leading role in all kinds of dangerous adventures in which he had risked his own life and taken the lives of others, even though he was now the respectable director of an NGO dedicated to promoting the municipal power company, where my buddy Toto worked in public relations, lives like those of the four soldiers who had tried to capture him seventeen years before when he was a daring left-wing urban guerrilla commando, when he and his main comrade-in-arms were taken by surprise by soldiers who believed they’d gotten the upper hand once they had tied their wrists together and loaded them into the back of their jeep, not expecting Chucky and his comrade to strike back so fiercely that the four soldiers in the jeep were killed while Chucky lost only his baby and ring fingers on his right hand, an adventure I had heard about many times from the mouth of my buddy Toto as well as from the hero himself, who now with a few pints under his belt brandished said stumps, which I felt when we had shaken hands, after he greeted us with the typical, “What’s happening, you faggots!?” before he sat down and started clapping loudly as if he owned the place to get the waitress to rush over and take his order. And then Chucky blurted out the morning’s good news: that a few hours ago the main opposition presidential candidate had miraculously escaped an attempt on his life in Zone 9. “You’re kidding,” my buddy Toto exclaimed, who in spite of being the public relations person for the NGO had not read the column against me nor had he heard about the assault, while his boss knew about both events, as I later discovered, when he told me that Polo Rosas was an envious old bastard nobody would ever trust enough to hire for a delicate task like the one I was performing, thanks to which Chucky was immediately transformed from a likable assassin into an intelligent and clever guy, a conclusion further re-enforced when he recounted with a flourish of colorful details an incident that had occurred fifteen years before when urban commandos under his leadership had likewise attacked the presidential candidate of the main opposition party, at that time the Christian Democrats, the difference being that in that instance the whole thing had been a mistake, Chucky said unable to hold back his laughter: all-terrain vehicles with tinted windows had been seen driving out of a fortified mansion surrounded by dozens of bodyguards, making it look like the center of operations of the right-wing death squads, and given the sense of urgency during that period and without doing any research, he had decided to launch an assault—the immediate reprisal for the death squads’ attack on a university press—that consisted of machine gunning and throwing grenades at a car driving out of the compound, after which the commandos retreated without any difficulty, until they were surprised to hear on the radio that they had just attacked the home of Vinicio Cerezo, the Christian Democratic candidate and subsequently president of the republic, who fortunately had come out of it unharmed, he hadn’t been driving in the machine-gunned car, and he was holding the right-wing death squads responsible, Chucky said with a flirtatious chuckle, because at that moment the waitress, whom he constantly called “my love,” had brought him a plate of toast smeared with beans, and that handsome guy, that blue-eyed bulldog, might even manage to score with her, but for that he needed something more than daring and bravery, and he continued recounting anecdotes that distracted me enough to draw me out of the perturbed state the newspaper column written by that treacherous bald and big-eared hack had put me in.
The afternoon of that same day I met briefly with the bishop for the first time, in my very own office, which was in fact his office, the head honcho came with the little guy with the big Mexican mustache to meet me and find out how the report was coming along, a tall robust man with a bearing that commanded respect, like the godfathers of La Cosa Nostra as well as the high ecclesiastical dignitaries of the Vatican, I understood at that moment that this bishop, of Italian descent, could very well play Marlon Brando’s role in The Godfather, perhaps with even more conviction, which gave me a positive impression, considering that my image of priests after years in a Salesian school was that they were a bunch of faggots, crows in cassocks, their eyes full of perversion, which didn’t correspond in the least to this stately silent man who asked few questions, preferring to stare inquisitorially at how my hands were moving, something that had never happened to me, to feel exposed through my hand movements—damn!—as if I were suddenly confessing all my sins through my hand movements. I explained to him that the report could be divided into four volumes, the first two containing the bulk of the aftermath of the massacres of villagers, the third containing the historical context, and the fourth consisting of a list of the massacres and their victims, and that in this way the one thousand one hundred pages would be more manageable for the reader, I specified, and although I, at that point, had only read carefully through half of the second volume, I could assure him that we were dealing with a text of the highest quality, I said, as if the purple-robed man had not long before reviewed everything that had landed on my desk—and at that moment I was especially discomfited by the attention he was paying to how my hands were moving, so I crossed my arms over my chest—a text that was precise in its analysis and with some very moving testimonies, fascinating, especially that richly expressive language, on a par with the best literature, I proclaimed, and I was about to pull out my notebook to regale the bishop’s ears and those of the little guy named Mynor with the sonorous sentences that had so excited me, but just as I was about to do so I realized that they might think that without authorization I was removing in my notebook information we had clearly agreed I would not take out of that office, so instead I returned to the pages of the report that were on my desk and read the first underlined sentence I found that said: Even at times I don’t know how resentment arises or who to take it out on at times . . . The bishop stared at me, an indecipherable look in his eyes behind his glasses with tinted lenses and tortoise-shell frames, a look that made me afraid he might see me as a deluded literati seeking poetry where there were only brutal denunciations of crimes against humanity carried out by the army against the indigenous communities of his country, that he would think that I was a simple stylist who wasn’t paying any attention to the content of the report, so I abstained from reading any further sentences and instead began to talk about the structure and the table of contents, the psycho-social focus and the classification of the mental afflictions of the victims, but without the godfather shifting the object of his indecipherable gaze or saying a word, all of which made me extremely nervous, understandably so, for nobody likes to face an inquisitorial priest listening as if expecting a shameful confession, that’s how I felt, and I definitely would have revealed to him my frustration that the only good-looking chick I had met in the archbishop’s palace had refused to lend me her splendid ass if the little guy named Mynor had not mentioned that in a few moments they both had to welcome an important delegation from an international organization, and so, as if with the pealing of a bell, I was rescued from succumbing to the inevitable confession and also prevented me from talking to the little guy about the implications of the dirty trick that had been done to me and published that morning in that rag Siglo XX.
Senselessness Page 4
