The Return (13 page)

Diaries and torn-out pages covered with figures:
salaries, bribes, bonuses.
Pocket money.
And the words of the police
commissioner, the air force lieutenant and the colonel from military
intelligence still floating in the air: We don’t want that jinx anywhere near
the Company.
When people see him in our films, their stomachs turn.
It’s bad
taste to have that slug fucking the girls.
And Bittrich let them speak, he
observed them silently, and then he did what he liked.
After all, they were only
porn videos; it’s not like there were serious profits at stake.
And that was how
Pajarito got to stay on with us, although the company’s backers found his
presence disturbing.
Pajarito Gómez.
A quiet and pretty reserved sort of guy,
but for some mysterious reason the girls were especially fond of him.
In the
course of their professional duties, they all got to lay him, and it left them
with a curious feeling, hard to say just what it was, but they were all ready to
do it again.
I guess being with Pajarito was like being nowhere.
Doris even
ended up living with him for a while, but it didn’t work out.
Doris and
Pajarito: for six months they went back and forth between the Hotel Aurora,
which is where he lived, and the apartment on Avenida de los Libertadores.
It
was too good to last, you know how it is: singular spirits can’t bear so much
love, so much perfection stumbled on by chance.
Maybe if Doris hadn’t been such
a bombshell, and if she’d been mute, and if Pajarito had never vibrated .
.
.
Things finally fell apart during the shooting of
Cocaine
, one of Bittrich’s worst
movies.
But they stayed friends until the end.
Many years later, when all the
rest were dead, I tracked down Pajarito.
He was living in a tiny, one-room
apartment, on a street that led down to the sea, in Buenaventura.
He was working
as a waiter in a restaurant owned by a retired policeman: Octopus Ink, the place
was called, ideal for someone who wanted to lie low.
He went from home to work
and back again, with a brief stop each day at a video store, where he’d usually
rent a couple of movies.
Walt Disney and old Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan
films.
Every day, punctual as a clock.
From his walk-up to Octopus Ink, and
then, after dark, back to the apartment, with two videotapes under his arm.
He
never brought food back, only movies.
He rented them on the way there or the way
back, it varied, but always from the same store, a little shack, three yards by
three, open eighteen hours a day.
I went looking for him on a whim, just because
I felt like it.
I went looking and I found him in 1999; it was easy, it took less than a
week.
Pajarito was forty-nine then, but he looked at least ten years older.
He wasn’t surprised to find me sitting on his bed when he got home.
I told him
who I was, reminded him of the movies he’d made with my mother and my aunt.
Pajarito took a chair and as he sat down the videos fell out from under his arm.
You’ve come to kill me, Lalito, he said.
He’d rented films with Ignacio López
Tarso and Matt Dillon, two of his favorite actors.
I reminded him of the old
Pregnant Fantasies days.
We both smiled.
I saw your prick, it was transparent
like a worm; my eyes were open, you know, watching your glass eye.
Pajarito
nodded, then sniffed.
You always were a clever kid, he said, before you were
born too, I guess, with your eyes open already, why not.
I saw you, that’s what
matters, I said.
You were pink for a start in there, then you turned transparent
and you got one hell of a shock, Pajarito.
Back then you weren’t afraid, you
moved so fast only little creatures and fetuses could see you moving.
Only
cockroaches, nits, lice and fetuses.
Pajarito was looking at the floor.
I heard
him whisper: Et cetera, et cetera.
Then he said: I never liked that sort of
movie, one or two is OK, but it’s criminal to make so many.
I’m a fairly normal
person, really.
I was genuinely fond of Doris, I was always a friend to your
mother, when you were little I never did you any harm.
Do you remember?
I didn’t
run the business, I never betrayed anyone, or killed anyone.
I did a bit of
dealing, a few robberies, we all did, but as you can see, it didn’t set me up
for retirement.
Then he picked the videos up off the floor, put the one with
Ignacio López Tarso in the VCR, and as the soundless images succeeded one
another on the screen, he began to cry.
Don’t cry, Pajarito, I said, it’s not
worth it.
His days of vibrating were over.
Or maybe he was still vibrating a
little, and as I sat there on the bed I was scavenging those remnants of energy
with the ravenous hunger of a shipwrecked sailor.
It’s hard to vibrate in such a
small apartment, with the smell of chicken soup permeating every cranny.
It’s
hard to pick up a vibration when your eyes are fixed on a dumbly gesticulating
Ignacio López Tarso.
López Tarso’s eyes in black and white: how could so much
innocence and so much malice be combined?
A good actor, I remarked, just to say
something.
One of our founding fathers, said Pajarito in agreement.
He was
right.
Then he whispered: Et cetera, et cetera.
That lousy fucking Pajarito.
We
sat there in silence for a long time: López Tarso went gliding through the
movie’s plot like a fish inside a whale; the images of Connie, Doris and Monica
lit up for few seconds in my head, and Pajarito’s vibration became
imperceptible.
I haven’t come to rub you out, I said to him in the end.
Back
then, when I was young, I had trouble using the word
kill
.
I never killed: I took people
out, blew them away, put them to sleep, I topped, stiffed or wasted them, sent
them to meet their maker, made them bite the dust, I iced them, snuffed them,
did them in.
I smoked people.
But I didn’t smoke Pajarito, I just wanted to see
him and chat for a while.
To feel his beat and remember my past.
Thanks, Lalito,
he said, and then he got up and filled a washbasin with water from a demijohn.
With exact, artistic, resigned movements, he washed his hands and his face.
When
I was a kid, that’s what they all called me, Connie, Monica, Doris, Bittrich,
Pajarito, Sansón Fernández: they all called me Lalito.
Lalito Cura playing in
the garden with the dogs and the geese at the house of crime, which for me was
the house of boredom and sometimes the house of dismay and happiness.
These days
there’s no time to get bored, happiness vanished somewhere in the world, and all
that’s left is dismay.
Perpetual dismay, composed of corpses and ordinary
people, like Pajarito, who was thanking me.
I was never intending to kill you, I
said, I’ve kept all your movies, I don’t watch them very often, I admit, only on
special occasions, but I’ve looked after them.
I’m a collector of your cinematic
past, I said.
Pajarito sat down again.
He had stopped vibrating: he was watching
the López Tarso movie out of the corner of his eye and his stillness suggested a
mineral patience.
According to the clock radio beside the bed it was two in the
morning.
The night before, I had dreamed of finding Pajarito: I was mounting him
and shouting unintelligible words in his ear, something about a buried treasure.
Or about an underground city.
Or about a dead person wrapped in papers proof
against putrefaction and the passage of time.
But I didn’t even lay my hand on
his shoulder.
I’ll leave you some money, Pajarito, so you can live without
having to work.
I’ll buy you whatever you like.
I’ll take you to a quiet place
where you can spend all your time watching your favorite actors.
There was no
one like you in Los Empalados, I said.
Ignacio López Tarso and Pajarito Gómez
looked at me: stone-like patience.
The pair of them gone crazily dumb.
Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of
memory.
Fetuses and other tiny wide-eyed creatures.
For a moment, my
friends, I felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate.
Then I stood
up very carefully and left.

Murdering Whores

for Teresa Ariño

"I saw you on television, Max, and I thought, That’s my
guy.”

(The guy is stubbornly jerking his head, trying to take a deep breath,
but he can’t.)

“I saw you with your group.
Is that what you call it?
Maybe you
say gang, or crew, but no, I think you say group: it’s a simple word and
you’re a simple man.
You’d taken off your tee shirts and you were
bare-chested, displaying your young bodies: strong pectorals and
biceps, though you’d all like to have more muscle, hairless chests, mostly,
but I didn’t actually pay much attention to the other chests or bodies, just
yours, something about you struck me, your face, your eyes gazing in the
direction of the camera (though you probably didn’t realize you were being
filmed and beamed into our living rooms), the depthless look in your eyes,
different from the way they look now, infinitely different from the way they
will look soon, eyes that were fixed on glory and happiness, satisfied
desire and victory, things that can only exist in the kingdom of the future,
things it’s better not to hope for because they never come.”

(The guy is jerking his head from left to right, still straining for
breath and sweating.)

“In fact, seeing you on television was like an invitation.
Imagine for
a moment that I’m a princess, waiting.
An impatient princess.
One night I see
you, and the reason I see you is that I have, in a sense, been searching, not
for you personally but for the prince you are, and what that prince represents.
You and your friends are dancing with your tee shirts tied around your necks or
your waists.
Tied or perhaps furled, a word that according to cranky old
nitpickers refers to sails when they’re rolled up and bound to a yard or a boom,
but in my own young and cranky way, I use it to refer to garments rolled up
around the neck or chest or waist.
The old and I go our separate ways, as you
will have guessed by now.
But let’s not lose sight of what really interests us.
You and your group are young, and all of you are offering your hymns to the
night; some of you, the leaders, are brandishing flags.
The announcer, poor
bastard, is impressed by the tribal dance in which you’re taking part.
He points
it out to the other newsman.
They’re dancing, he says, in his loutish voice, as
if we, the viewers at home, in front of our televisions, hadn’t realized.
Yes,
they’re having fun, says the other newsman.
Another lout.
They
seem to be enjoying your dance, at
least.
It’s just a conga, really.
In the front line there are eight or nine.
In
the second there are ten.
In the third there are seven or eight.
In the fourth
there are fifteen.
United by the team colors and semi-nakedness (tee shirts
tied or furled around your waists or necks, or turban-style around your
heads) and the dance (if I can call it that) as it moves through the area in
which you have been isolated.
Your dance is like a lightning bolt in the spring
night.
The newsman, the newsmen, weary but still able to muster some enthusiasm,
salute your initiative.
You work your way across the cement steps from the right
to the left, and when you reach the wire fence, you go back the other way.
The
guys at the head of each line are carrying flags, the team flag or the Spanish
flag; the rest of you, including the ones at the ends, are waving much smaller
flags, or scarves, or the tee shirts you took off earlier.
It’s a spring night,
but it’s still cold, and in the end that gives your gesture the force you wanted
it to have, the force it merits, after all.
Then the lines break up, you start
to chant your songs, some of you raise your arms and give the Roman salute.
Do
you know what it means, that salute?
You must, and if you don’t, as you raise
your arm you can guess.
Under my city’s night sky you salute in the direction of
the television cameras, and watching at home I see you and decide to offer you
my salute, in response to yours.”

(The guy shakes his head, his eyes seem to fill with tears, his
shoulders tremble.
Is there love in his gaze?
Has his body sensed what will
certainly happen, while his mind is still lagging behind?
Both phenomena, the
tears and the trembling, could result from the effort he is making at this
moment, in vain, or from a sincere regret tearing at all his nerves.)

“So, I take off my clothes, I take off my pants, I take off my bra, I
take a shower, I put on perfume, I put on clean pants, I put on a clean bra, I
put on a black silk top, I put on my best pair of jeans, I put on white socks, I
put on my boots, I put on a jacket, the best one I own, and I go into the
garden, because to get out into the street, first I have to cross that dark
garden, which you especially liked.
All in less than ten minutes; normally I’m
not so quick.
Let’s say it’s your dance that is speeding up my movements.
While
I get dressed you’re dancing.
In some other dimension.
Another dimension and
another time, like a prince and a princess, like the eruptive call of animals
coupling in springtime, I get dressed while, inside the television, you dance
wildly with your eyes fixed on something that might be eternity or the key to
eternity, except that your eyes as you dance are flat and empty and
inexpressive.”

(The guy nods repeatedly.
What were gestures of denial or desperation
are transformed into gestures of affirmation, as if he’d been suddenly seized by
an idea, or a
new
idea had just
occurred to him.)

“Finally, even though I haven’t got time to look at myself in the
mirror and check that my clothes are exactly right, and in fact I probably
wouldn’t want to see my reflection even if I did have time (because what you and
I are doing is secret), I go out, leaving just the porch light on, get onto my
motorbike and drive through streets where people stranger than you or me are
setting out to enjoy their Saturday night, a Saturday to match their
expectations, a sad Saturday, in other words, one that will never give life to
what they have dreamed and meticulously planned, a Saturday like any other,
aggressive and grateful, stocky and affable, perverse and sad.
Awful adjectives
that aren’t my style at all, they make me baulk, but, as always, in the end, I
let them stand, as a farewell gesture.
My motorbike and I roll on among those
lights, those Christian preparations, those baseless expectations, and we come
out in front of the stadium, on the Gran Avenida, which is still empty, and we
stop beneath the arches of the bridges that lead to the entrance gates, and this
is the really strange part: when we stop, I can feel in my legs that the world
is still moving, as I suppose you know it does, the earth is moving under my
feet, under the wheels of my motorbike, and for a moment, for a fraction of a
second, whether or not I find you doesn’t matter, you can leave with your
friends, you can go and get drunk or take a bus back to the city you come from.
But the feeling of abandon, as if I were being fucked by an angel, without
penetration—or actually no, penetrated to the core—is brief, and just
as I begin to doubt or analyze it in amazement, the gates swing open and the
people start coming out of the stadium: a flock of vultures, a flock of
crows.”

(The guy hangs his head.
Lifts it up.
His eyes try to smile.
His
facial muscles are seized by a spasm or a series of spasms that could mean many
different things: We’re meant for each other, Think of the future, Life is
wonderful, Don’t do anything stupid, I’m innocent, Spain rules.)

“Finding you is a problem.
Will you look the same five yards away as
you did on TV?
Your height is a problem: I don’t know if you’re tall or of
medium height (you’re not short, I know that).
Your clothes are a problem: by
now it’s starting to get cold, and your torso and the torsos of your companions
are once again draped in tee shirts or even jackets; some are coming out of the
stadium with scarves furled (like sails) around their necks and some are even
using their scarves to cover their mouths and cheeks.
My footsteps on the cement
are lit by vertical moonlight.
I search for you patiently, and yet at the same
time I am anxious like the princess contemplating the empty frame in which the
prince’s smile should be shining.
Your friends are a problem compounded: they’re
a temptation.
I see them and am seen by them, I am desired, I know they’d pull
my jeans off without a second thought; some no doubt deserve my attentions at
least as much as you do, but in the end I resist, I remain faithful.
Finally you
appear, surrounded by conga dancers, chanting the words of a hymn that
prefigures our meeting, with a serious look on your face, charged with an
importance that no one but you can measure and appreciate precisely; you’re
tall, quite a lot taller than me, and your arms are long, just as I imagined
after seeing you on TV, and when I smile at you, when I say, Hi, Max, you don’t
know what to say, at first you don’t know what to say, you just laugh, not quite
as stridently as your friends, but you laugh, my prince of the time machine, you
laugh and you stop walking.”

(The guy looks at her, narrows his eyes, tries to calm his breathing,
and as it becomes more regular, he seems to be thinking: breathe in, breathe
out, think, breathe in, breathe out, think .
.
.)

“Then, instead of saying, I’m not Max, you try to catch up with your
group, and for a moment I’m seized by panic, a panic that in retrospect seems
closer to laughter than to fear.
I follow you without a clear idea of what I am
going to do next.
But you and three others stop and turn and size me up with
cold eyes, and I say, Max, we have to talk, and then you say, I’m not Max,
that’s not my name, what is this, are you joking, are you getting me mixed up
with someone or what, and then I say, Sorry, you really look like Max, and I
say, I want to talk with you, What about, Well, about Max, and then you smile,
and you finally decide to stay behind and let your friends go off; they shout
the name of the bar where you’ll meet to set off home, No problem, you say, see
you there, and your friends shrink away like the stadium behind us as I drive my
bike at full throttle, confidently, and the Gran Avenida is almost empty at this
time of night, there are only the people leaving the stadium, and you sit behind
me with your arms around my waist, I feel your body against my back like a
mollusk clinging to a rock, and it’s true that the air on the avenue is cold and
dense like the waves that push and pull at the mollusk; you cling to me so
naturally, Max, like someone who senses that the sea is not only an inhospitable
element but a time tunnel, you furl yourself around my waist the way your tee
shirt was furled around your neck, but now the conga is danced by the air that
pours like a torrent into the streaky tube that is the Gran Avenida, and you
laugh or shout something, maybe you saw some friends among the people sliding
past beneath the canopy of trees, maybe you’re just yelling insults at
strangers, oh Max, you’re not shouting Good-bye or Hi or See you, you’re
shouting slogans that are older than blood, but surely not older than the rock
to which you’re clinging, happy to feel the waves, the submarine currents of the
night, sure that you will not be swept away.”

(The guy murmurs something unintelligible.
It looks like saliva
dripping from his chin, although perhaps it’s only sweat.
His breathing, in any
case, has settled down.)

“And so we arrive at my house on the outskirts of town, safe and
sound.
You take off your helmet, you touch your balls, you put your arm around
my shoulders.
The gesture betrays a surprising degree of tenderness and
timidity.
But your eyes are still not tender and timid enough.
You like my
house.
You like my pictures.
You ask me about the figures that appear in them.
The Prince and the Princess, I reply.
They look like the Catholic Monarchs, you
say.
Yes, the thought has sometimes occurred to me too, Catholic Monarchs in the
confines of their kingdom, Catholic Monarchs spying on each other in a perpetual
panic, a perpetual solemnity, but for me, for the person I am at least fifteen
hours a day, they are a prince and a princess, a bride and groom who journey
through the years, and are wounded, pierced by arrows, who lose their horses on
the hunt, or never even had horses and must flee on foot, with only their eyes
to guide them, and an idiotic will, which some call kindness and others good
nature, as if nature could be qualified, good or bad, wild or tame, nature is
nature, Max, that’s a fact you have to face, and it will always be there, like
an irresolvable mystery, and I’m not talking about forests catching fire but
neurons and the left or the right hemisphere of the brain catching fire and
blazing for centuries and centuries.
But, blessed soul that you are, you think
my house is pretty, and you even ask if I’m alone and then you’re surprised when
I laugh.
Do you think I would have invited you here if I hadn’t been alone?
Do
you think I would have ridden right across the city on my motorbike, with you
pressed against my back, like a mollusk clinging to a rock, while my head (or my
figurehead) plunged through time, with the sole aim of bringing you back safe
and sound to this refuge, the real rock, the rock that rears magically from its
foundations and breaks the surface, do you think I would have done all that if I
hadn’t been alone?
And just on a practical level, do you think I would have
taken an extra helmet, a helmet to protect your face from prying eyes, if my
intention hadn’t been to bring you back here, into my purest solitude?”