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 singing 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.