SIX
THAT SUNDAY I STAYED IN BED until ten in the morning, for moments dozing off, fantasizing about Pilar, but not managing to concentrate long enough to jack off properly because suddenly the name of Itzel would seep into my mind, a name without a face that awoke my prurience through strange sinuous mental pathways, and soon thereafter so did the name Fátima, the Toledan’s roommate, whom I would meet that afternoon when the three of us would go to eat ceviche and have a few beers, as Pilar and I had agreed on Friday, when I saw her at the end of the day in the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace and mentioned to her my brief meeting with the bishop—still impressed by the fact that the head honcho would focus in that particular way on my hand movements—as well as one testimony that seemed like the plot of a novel I had once read and that on that Sunday morning came back to me along with an urge to take it on and release all restraints on my imagination, for in fact no such novel existed, only the desire to write it, to turn the tragedy on its head, to turn myself into the suffering ghost of the civil registrar in a town called Totonicapán, an idiot whose foolish behavior led to them cutting off with a machete each and every one of his fingers, sliced off he saw his phalanges fall one by one as the soldiers kept him pinned to the ground after they had beaten him so hard they had broken who knows how many bones to teach him not to underestimate them and that dedication to one’s work had a limit and that this limit was the authority of the lieutenant, who now brandished the machete, letting fall one decisive blow that split the head of the civil registrar of Totonicapán longitudinally, as if it had been a coconut and they were at the beach and not in the battered living room of the civil registrar’s house, splattered with the blood and brains of the aforementioned, who had refused again and again the lieutenant’s request to turn over the village’s register of the dead, who knows why he behaved so foolishly, for the lieutenant urgently needed a list of the villagers who had died in the previous ten years so he could bring them back to life so they could vote for the party of General Ríos Montt, the criminal who had taken power through a coup d’êtat and now needed to legitimize himself through the votes of the living as well as the dead, so as to dispel any doubts, something the civil registrar of Totonicapán never understood, not even when the contingent of soldiers broke into his house and he knew his fate was sealed, not even when he felt the sharp blows that sliced off his phalanges did he admit that such a register was in his hands, even as they were being amputated, although the register did exist and he had hidden it under some firewood in his backyard, according to my version, because the testimony didn’t give many details, he had preferred to die rather than turn the register over to the lieutenant from the local garrison, for this is precisely what the novel would be about, the reasons why the civil registrar of Totonicapán had preferred to be tortured and murdered rather than hand over the death register to his executioners, a novel that would begin at the precise instant the lieutenant, with one stroke of the machete, split open the head of the civil registrar as if it had been a coconut from which he would remove the delicious white pulpy flesh, not the bloody palpitating brains, which may also seem appetizing to some palates, I must admit without any bias, the instant that blow fell the restless soul of the civil registrar would start to tell his story, always with the fingerless palms of his hands pressing together the two halves of his head to keep his brains in place, for I am not a total stranger to magical realism. The story would begin with the explanation that the soul of the registrar would remain in purgatory until somebody could enter him into the death register, which was very difficult to do given the fact that he alone knew where he had hidden it, which is why the story would center around the efforts of the civil registrar’s soul in purgatory to communicate to his friends so they could write him into the death register without the military finding out, and through this would be revealed the history and the significance of that register, which had been in the hands of his family for generations, a son and grandson of civil registrars dedicated to their profession, that is, a story of suspense and adventure that I should have begun cobbling together that Sunday morning while I was still lying under the sheets with my thoughts playing some kind of disorganized ping-pong game, if at the time I had been a novelist, needless to say, and not just a copyeditor of barbarous cruelties who dreamed of being what he was not.
I should stop this foolishness, I told myself, throwing back the sheet and jumping energetically out of bed, on my way to the bathroom to take a shower, determined to control once and for all my fantasies, committed to my goal of not jacking off so as not to squander my mental energy, of not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples, and it was the last straw that on the weekend I would carry on in the same vein as I did when I was in the archbishop’s palace as if they were paying me to poison my days off, I scolded myself, while I waited for the water coming out of the shower head to warm up, hoping that Fátima would be as good-looking as Pilar but without those emotional cobwebs left behind by embittered loves, as I’d already gone a month and a half without a fuck, ever since I arrived in this city I had been condemned to chastity as if they were getting me ready to don the habit, I thought once I was under the stream of warm and comforting water, soaping my groin and my balls, pulling on my penis but with my mind set on scrutinizing my wardrobe, for I was determined to look handsome and sporty so the girls would sigh, to which end I chose a polo shirt, salmon-colored, faded blue-denim pants, and brown leather loafers. Putting on my shoes, there I was, when five shots rang out in the street below, five unexpected and piercing shots that I began counting after the first rang out, which I guessed had come from a nine-millimeter-caliber gun, but five, not six as the doorman claimed later, with the inanity so typical of a fool who doesn’t pay attention and just gets scared, because he had to dash into the building to take refuge while I jumped up and looked out my fifth-floor window, trying to catch a glimpse of something, smelling the scent of gunpowder that rose from the street, eager to try to discover the source of such an unexpected event, for after a month and a half in this downtown apartment these were the first gunshots I had heard, my curiosity spurring me on so strongly that one minute later I was in the lobby of the building arguing with the foolish doorman, who insisted that there had been six shots and that it was a car chase, like in the movies when the car doing the chasing shoots at the car being chased, so there were neither victims nor traces of the shootout in the street, he told me already back at the front door, where I could ascertain that apparent normality reigned among the street vendors settled under their plastic shades on the sidewalk. I walked over to the guy who sold pirated CDs, encrusted into the corner of Sexta and Once, about ten steps from the entrance to the building, to ask him what he had seen. “Nothing, I threw myself on the ground,” said the short fat mestizo man without looking me in the eyes, as if I were a policeman who had come to investigate the incident, when all I wanted to know was how many shots he had heard, five like I—who had paid attention—claimed, or six like the doorman—who lost his concentration when he rushed inside—claimed, to which the vendor responded that he also hadn’t paid attention, there could have been five or six, he mumbled, the height of imprecision; so I insisted, explaining to him that there could only have been five shots because after the first one I began counting out loud, an old habit I had acquired during the war in my own country, saying, two, three, four, five, and I remained with the word six in my mouth because there was no sixth shot, and moreover I could be certain that they’d come from a nine-millimeter gun, that my ear wasn’t just any old ear, and if we looked for the bullet casings down the street we would be able to prove the truth of my assertion that the shots had come from a nine-millimeter gun, I told the vendor, who pretended not to know what I was talking about, and, pretending to be busy, he began to dust off the pirated CDs w
ith a flannel rag. I crossed the street, there was very little traffic that day, and in front of McDonald’s I bought two Sunday newspapers—but not that rag that I will never again mention in whose pages I had been maligned—hoping to eat my breakfast while perusing the articles and also so I could ask the newspaper vendor about the shooting that had just occurred, but he turned out to be a worse case than the guy selling pirated CDs, so from there I decided to continue walking down Sexta Avenida under the splendid morning sunshine, not allowing the bad smells and the garbage in the street to soil my soul, content to think that no passerby or street vendor could intuit my thoughts, walking in the direction of the restaurant of the Hotel del Centro, where the buffet of local cuisine would be my Sunday breakfast throughout my stay in that city, at a time of day when the only disturbance came from a marimba that at regular intervals attacked the clientele, but such disturbances were a plague common to all restaurants.
Life is marvelous, I exclaimed to myself, about three hours later, marveling at the sight of the girl with Pilar, that very same Fátima about whom I knew so little until that moment and who was about to become the object not only of my attentions but also those of half a dozen indolent beasts drinking beer in the Modelo Cevichería, a kind of food kiosk with a few plastic chairs squeezed onto one side of the small plaza in front of the Conservatory, half a dozen beasts among whom I ought to include myself a bit shamefacedly and who were stupefied and drooling as they stared at the two girls crossing the street in front of the Conservatory and approaching down the plaza’s sidewalk toward the cevichería, I, possessed of the knowledge that they were Pilar and Fátima, while the others were simply aroused by the prospect of such gorgeous girls, apparently foreigners, coming to perfume that cevichería, where the main attraction was the Sunday soccer match between Mexico and Argentina on the television. Approach, dear ladies, your appearance serves the singular purpose of delighting these ridiculous potbellied men in their stupid shorts, I would have liked to say to them as a greeting, if those same potbellied man hadn’t had on their faces a certain threatening look and if their ears weren’t just a little too close to my words, attentive as they were to that pair of sweet things, who both gave me kisses on both of my cheeks, lighting up my day and darkening the lives of the potbellied men, who soon began to secrete a poisonous envy because the girls ignored them and sat down—so deliciously—very nearly one on each of my legs, an envy mitigated only by the soccer match between Mexico and Argentina though they could no longer concentrate on the game with the same intensity, every once in a while looking libidinously at the girls as they ordered their fish ceviches and beers in a pleasant exchange with the waiter. The first thing I knew about Fátima was that I wanted to lick her all over due to the appetizingly creamy texture and light rosy hue of her skin and her perfect curves pressed into a pair of red-denim jeans and an organdy blouse under which could be descried her seductive belly button as well as a little path of fuzz my eyes began to follow, descending, while she talked about her recent trip to a village in the highlands, where years ago half the population had been slaughtered—initiated by the army but with an enthusiasm that left no room for doubt—by the other half, their fellow citizens, one of the 422 massacres contained in the one thousand one hundred pages that awaited me on the bishop’s desk the following day, when I would continue my task of copyediting and correcting and about which I refused to think, wanting only to descend the peach-fuzz path that would carry me from Fátima’s belly button to her fleshy cave, where I wanted to take refuge from those potbellied spies, from the television sportscasters with diarrhea of the mouth, and from the sudden and unexpected memory of the hundreds of Indians I had strolled among a few hours earlier in Parque Central while I peacefully digested my breakfast and passed the time, enjoying the brilliant morning among these hundreds of Indians decked out in their Sunday dress of so many festive colors, among the most salient being that joyous cheerful red, as if red had nothing to do with blood and sorrow but was rather the emblem of happiness for these hundreds of domestic servants enjoying their day off in the large square surrounded by the cathedral, the presidential palace, and the old commercial arcades, a splendid and telling promenade because as I wandered around under that brilliant sky I realized that not one of those women with slanted eyes and toasted brown skin awoke my sexual appetite or my prurient interests, thanks to which I continued walking lightly and mincingly, my fantasies remaining dormant, attentive rather to the patterns on the textiles and the cut of those ethnic costumes whose colorful skirts prevented the exposure of even the tiniest patch of skin, the opposite of what was transpiring with Fátima’s flirtatious belly button, which was winking at me, luckily without the potbellied men realizing it, for they were fascinated by the battle of the Titans, as the sportscaster defined it with a howl that caught the attention of even the two girls, for whom soccer was, of course, boring, but who couldn’t detach themselves wholly from the reigning emotions, to the extent that Fátima even asked me who I was rooting for, Mexico or Argentina, and as my third eye had already detected some antipathy toward the Aztecs oozing out of said potbellied men, I immediately told her that all of Central America was rooting for Argentina against their giant criminal neighbor, spoken with enough emphasis to guarantee me safe conduct out of there flanked by two such girls as these.
SEVEN
SUCH A NOVELTY IT WAS WHEN I finally met the Spaniard who had planned and executed half of the one thousand one hundred pages I so intrepidly continued to correct, the Basque named Joseba so loved and admired by everybody in the archbishop’s palace, according to what my friend Erick and the little guy named Mynor told me when they introduced him to me, a Basque and by profession a psychiatrist, for that was the only way to comprehend how he would have gotten involved with such enthusiasm and attention to detail in that morass of suffering that anybody in his right mind would have run away from without the slightest hesitation, as I gave him to understand once we were alone in my office going over the corrections I’d made to his text, which was already so clean and clear, only a psychiatrist from the Basque countries could have immersed himself for months in studying with such dedication the testimonies of hundreds of victims traumatized by the orgy of blood and dust, which they had come out of alive only by chance, I told Joseba with outright admiration, and then I read out loud and as if in passing a few sentences I had copied down in my notebook and that were highlighted on the pages I was leafing through on my desk, sentences like, Then he got frightened and went crazy completely or That is my brother, he’s gone crazy from all the fear he has had; his wife died from fear also, or, It’s not just hearsay because I saw how his murder was, or this that impressed me so much, Because I don’t want for them to kill the people in front of me, sentences that proved the extent of mental perturbation of the survivors and the danger that such a state of mind posed for people working with them, which wasn’t Joseba’s case, who to all appearances exuded not only health but also a striking spirit, was tall and strong, with an upright bearing, just as I imagined those knights-errant who came to conquer the indigenous peoples of this land, an amusing idea I couldn’t help but mention, as an aside, when he asked me my impressions of his work, and I repeated that he had done a superb job, impeccable, after which the history of this country would never be the same, not a chance, and taking advantage of an interstice I said to him: what a paradox, that someone so fitting the archetype of the Spanish conquistador should dedicate himself with such devotion to recovering the indigenous peoples’ massacred memories, no offense intended, I clarified, because Joseba shifted uneasily in his chair in front of my desk, so modest, discomfited by my adulation, rubbing his stubbly chin. I am very impressed by the combination of objectivity and courageous humanitarianism in your text, I exclaimed with an almost feminine flair, as if I had been Fátima, which wasn’t all that gratuitous since the previous afternoon she had not stopped praising Joseba as we walked toward her house in Zone 2, and so much praise could only
infuse my fantasy with the most tenacious suspicions, for although this Joseba fellow was married, I would not have been surprised if he had shed the pellucid armor of a loyal knight-errant in order to enjoy the favors of said compatriot and admirer, thus it was not so very unusual that while discussing his work behind the closed doors of my office I began to fantasize that Fátima had gone up to the door and locked it, then started getting it on with him, Dulcinea herself, passionately making out with the much-admired knight as she unbuttoned his fly and extracted his lance, which she then caressed in her hands and then in her mouth and soon thereafter frenetically inserted into herself, mounting the knight who would in his alarm lose all sense of decorum, still sitting in that chair with that tasty panting morsel pounding herself against him, his gaze lost in the tall bare walls, trying not to notice the crucifix, alone and contemplative from its great height, worried that Mynor or Erick would knock on the door and discover him in such a trance or that I would suddenly appear and not only catch him with his hands in the pot but berate him for using my office to fornicate with the girl of my dreams, a betrayal capable of unleashing in me a rage that began at that very moment to inflame me against not so much the Spaniard, who was meticulously describing the methodology he used for his psychosocial research, but my own fantasies, so foolishly bent on imagining Fátima galloping on top of Joseba, instead of imagining me galloping on top of her, which would have been preferable from any and all points of view. It was the sudden irruption—after a quick perfunctory knock—into my office, which really was his office, of the Sicilian, the head capo, that shook me out of my rapture and brought me back to the scene where we were greeting each other, and he asked Joseba to accompany him to Mynor’s office, where the three of them would meet to hatch a conspiracy I was fortunately not included in, I told myself, thank God, for I already had quite enough with the one thousand one hundred pages without also getting involved in Vatican intrigues, though I cannot fail to admit that merely seeing that I was unexpectedly excluded from the circle of power, in which my friend Erick would undoubtedly be included, made me feel a certain amount of resentment, as if the priest had been suspicious of me ever since he watched how my hands moved, as if my work weren’t important enough and my opinions about the report didn’t count. “Hey, let’s have lunch together,” the hidalgo said, with a wink, before leaving with the bishop, conscious perhaps of the marginalization I had been subjected to, probably afraid of the possibility that I would express my resentment by marking up the text, something that of course never even crossed my mind, as I let him know a few hours later when we were in the Imery Restaurant, located on the other side of Parque Central, a rather dark place where the menu du jour was consumed by dozens of office workers, low-level politicians, one or another academic from the institutes of higher learning in the vicinity, as well as the staff of the archbishop’s palace, among whom Joseba and I could be counted, sitting at a corner table, where I readied myself to hear delicious secrets straight from the mouth of the gallant knight about the palace intrigues he had participated in that morning and about all the other intrigues related to the report that my friend Erick had failed to reveal to me, but as the minutes went by and we turned our attention to the main course, I ascertained that the Basque psychiatrist responded with monosyllables and evasions to my enthusiastic questions, as if prudence and caution were essential components of his nature, I thought at first, as if the heads of that religious institution had taken vows of silence that required absolute discretion even toward a trusted employee like myself, or, I then thought, as if they had discussed at that morning’s meeting to which I had not been invited how much they could trust me and their conclusions were reflected in the Spaniard’s polite negatives in response to my questioning, then I frankly grew concerned, on the verge of descending along a paranoid spiral that would in no way help my digestion and that I instantly tried to avoid by shifting the gist of the conversation, insisting instead on digging into my table companion’s private life, knowing for a fact that prudence and caution were fundamental components of his character and that he would never reveal anything about his political activities in Bilbao, would never mention anything about his past and present as an ETA sympathizer, which could be smelled from a mile away, and talked only in generalities about how well one drank and ate in that city full of always crowded and welcoming bars, of shipyards, and of the shells of abandoned factories along the length of the river. But to my surprise, perhaps once he saw that the table next to ours had remained empty, Joseba suddenly changed the vague and nonchalant tone of his discourse and began to tell me, with a conspiratorial air copied from my friend Erick, that the missing text of the second volume of said report was extremely sensitive, a detailed analysis of how the army’s intelligence services operated, he said, almost in a whisper, uncertain if any of the other diners could hear us, that at the meeting I had not been invited to that morning they had talked precisely about that analysis of the military intelligence services and had agreed that this text would not be incorporated into the report until the very last minute when it was about to be sent to the printers, not only for reasons of security but also because my friend Erick needed the maximum amount of time to finalize it, considering the fact that he was the lead investigator into the activities of the military intelligence organizations as well as the coordinator of all the other parts of the report, Joseba made clear, as if I were not already fully aware of the responsibilities of the person who had hired me, and the only new thing I now learned from his conspiratorial whisperings was that those people really didn’t trust me, and that neither my friend Erick nor the little guy with the Mexican mustache had had the courage to tell me so but instead had sent the gallant Spanish knight to me to break the news that I probably wouldn’t see or correct the report’s chapter about the military intelligence services because of a problem with the deadline. I was just about to react to such a dirty trick with the stentorian indignation it deserved without caring at that moment about the waitress who had arrived with our next course, when that cunning fox, perhaps intuiting the imminent arrival of a squall, asked me as if in passing if I knew what The Archive was, with as much candor as if he were mentioning a child’s bookshelf or the drawer he keeps his puzzles in, a question that couldn’t fail to cause me the greatest astonishment, so much so that it took me a few seconds to react, stunned by my interlocutor’s imprudence, for nobody talked about The Archive in public, much less in a restaurant just a few blocks from the presidential palace in whose chambers The Archive had its headquarters, a restaurant where more than a few officials and specialists from that sinister office undoubtedly ate on a daily basis, an office Joseba had named so light-heartedly and that I never would have named in the same way, or in any way, because suddenly I was in the grips of a panic attack, stoked by a furtive glance from the waitress before she pushed the swinging doors that led into the kitchen, a glance that in other circumstances I would have interpreted as natural feminine interest in the good looks of the hidalgo caballero, but which at that moment brought on instead a panic attack that paralyzed me, bathed me in sweat, surely made my blood pressure shoot sky high, because The Archive was in fact the office of military intelligence where the political crimes mentioned in the report had been planned and ordered, the report that lay on my desk and was written by none other than the Spanish gentleman who sat there with his mouth hanging open, at that moment waiting with such composure for me to begin to blab on about the unmentionable office, something that was not about to happen, because when I managed to overcome my stupefaction, when finally I was able to get over my panic attack, it was thanks to another shot of adrenaline produced by the fact that the waitress had brought dessert and coffee when we had just begun to eat our entrees, a common practice in restaurants serving office workers always waiting for a free table at the lunch hour, I would have thought at any other time, but not then, when such haste seemed like proof that the woman was an informer for the military, a woman who alre
ady had us in her sights and wanted only to confirm the subject of our conversation before denouncing us, at which point and without rhyme or reason I launched into a feverish long-winded speech this Joseba person didn’t expect: What I admire most about Spain is the struggle of the Basque people, I told him, stumbling over my words, and within that struggle I am most fascinated by the ETA tactic of executing its victims with one bullet to the back of the neck, their audacity to take them by surprise, to take advantage of them being unarmed civilians and having their backs turned to dispatch them without them even noticing, I told him with an intensity I achieve at moments, the idea of executing your victim under such circumstances can only be the brilliant result of a daring strategy that does not allow for the most minimal chance of defeat, the idea of training Basque youth in the practice of and admiration for such perfect crimes wherein the defenseless victim lacks any capacity to react seems to me capable of inspiring in those youth only the most distilled form of nationalism, I added almost breathlessly, while the waitress placed both cups on the table with the expression on her face of someone who is not hearing what she is definitely hearing, and Joseba was astonished, as if he didn’t know whether he was facing an insolent provocation or a delirious rant, when the only reason for my tongue’s incoherencies was to sidestep the subject that struck me with terror and to overcome my panic attack, which ceded only under the spell of my harangue, which, given my interlocutor’s discomfort and without my knowing why, led me to immediately speak about the virtues of Spanish democratic tolerance, the constitutional monarchy’s broad-mindedness, which allowed it to unflinchingly open the pages of its leading magazine to an indigenous woman who had survived the massacres thanks to which Joseba and I were earning a few dollars—he more than I, I assumed with good reason, given the dimensions and erudition of his work—as well as the Spanish royal family’s humanitarianism and that of all the other European monarchs, who not only welcomed the aforementioned indigenous woman with their most exalted protocols but also had their pictures taken with her and allowed those pictures to be published in nothing less than the magazine Hola!; a short round chubby indigenous woman surrounded by kings, princes, marquises, and counts, just like in a fairy tale, I said in the same stumbling tone of voice; an indigenous woman whom none of the white, and so-called respectable, families in this country where we were now drinking coffee would have welcomed through the kitchen door unless she were delivering tortillas, that same indigenous woman who had won the most prestigious international prizes was the only citizen of this country to have appeared in Hola! surrounded by European royalty, a truly impressive occurrence, I told Joseba, my voice almost out of control, to have appeared in Hola! was the highest honor a famous person could aspire to and something this country’s arrogant white masters would never forgive the chubby lady for because there was not then and never would be any chance of them ever appearing in those prestigious pages, though to tell the truth what had most impressed me about my most recent perusal of Hola! had been the feminine attributes of that Norwegian woman Prince Felipe was going out with, my goodness gracious, I could practically taste that Nordic flesh, I told Joseba, sucking on my teeth with relish, now a bit more relaxed, there wasn’t one princess among all of those who appeared in the pages of Hola! capable of outshining that female Viking Don Felipe took his pleasure with, I managed to say with my last breath at the same time as Joseba stood up with an indecipherable expression on his face, indicating that we should go to the cashier to pay for our food, while the prying waitress pushed on the swinging doors and entered the kitchen.
Senselessness Page 5
