“Where? Where do you want us to go?” I exclaimed in alarm, and my fear was obvious, I couldn’t help it, I was suffering from nervous exhaustion, that was what they called that condition then, un agotamiento nervioso.
The fat man grabbed my arm and jerked me violently to my feet. He twisted it around and immobilized it behind my back. He was strong, but it cost him some effort to manage it, you can always tell.
“Out in back there, to have a little chat, you and I, about mariconas and other things before we all go to bed. You need to sleep, too; it has been a very long day while life, on the other hand, is short.”
The start of that day was lost in remote time. That we had shot some scenes in Acapulco that morning, with Paul Lukas and Ursula Andress, seemed impossible. He had no idea how far away that was.
The others didn’t move, not even to watch, it was the fat man’s private business and there are no witnesses to these things. With his left hand he pushed me toward the back door, with the right he kept up the pressure on my arm, a swinging door that kept swinging, we came out into the open air, a storm was on the way that night and a hot wind had already sprung up and was shaking the bushes and, further back, the trees in a grove or thicket, or so it seemed to me when I stepped out onto the grass and felt the wind for an instant against my face, and then dry grass, without missing a beat the fat man had put me on the ground with a fist to the side, he wasn’t going to waste any time fooling around. Then I felt his enormous weight straddling my back and then something around my neck, the belt or the handkerchief, it had to be the green handkerchief that had been forced to interrupt its work a few hours before and now he was knotting it around my throat this time, the package all tied up at last. It wasn’t only his hand, his whole fat body stank of fish and the sweat was pouring off him, and now there was nothing, no music or rumba or trumpet, only the sound of the wind rising or maybe rushing away from the storm, and the squeaking hinge of the door we had come through, out onto the stage of my unforeseen death in a back yard on the outskirts of Mexico City, how could it be true, you wander into some dive and you don’t imagine that here begins the end and that everything finishes obscurely and ridiculously under the pressure of a crumpled, greasy, filthy handkerchief that’s been used a thousand times to mop the forehead, neck and temples of the person who is killing you, killing me, he is killing me, no one could have foreseen it this morning and everything ends in a second, one, two and three and four, no one intervenes and no one is even watching to see how I die this certain death that is befalling me, a fat man is killing me and I don’t know who he is, only that his name is Julio and that he’s Mexican and without knowing it he has been waiting twenty-two years for me, my life is short and is ending against the dry grass of a back yard on the outskirts of Mexico City, how can it be true, it can’t be, and it isn’t because all at once I saw myself with the handkerchief in my hand — the silk floating — and I ripped it in rage, and I had thrown off the fat man with the strength of my dark back and my desperate elbows that dug into his thighs as hard as they could, perhaps the fat man took too long tying up my throat and his strength deserted him, just as he took too long tying up McGraw in order to send him to hell, you need more than the first impulse to strangle someone, it has to be kept up for many more seconds, five and six and seven and eight and even more, still more, because each of those seconds is counted, and counts, and here I am still, and I’m breathing, one, two and three and four, and now I’m the one who grabs a pick and runs with it raised over my head to dig it into the chest of the fat man who has fallen and can’t get up quickly enough, as if he were a beetle, the dark sweat stains tell me where to strike with the pick, there is flesh there and life there and I must finish both of them off. And I dig the pick in, one and two and three times, it makes a kind of squelch, kill him, I kill him, I am killing him, how can it be true, it is happening and it is irreversible and I see him, this fat man got up this morning and didn’t even know who I was, he got up this morning and never imagined that he would never do it again because a pick is killing him that had been waiting, thrown down in a backyard, for a thousand years, a pick to split open the grassy soil and dig an improvised grave, a pick that may never have tasted blood before, the blood that still smells more like fish and is still wet and welling out and staining the wind that is rushing away from the storm.
The exhaustion ends then, as well, there’s no longer fatigue or haze and perhaps not even consciousness, or there is but without mastery or control or order, and as you spring into flight and begin to count and look back you think: “I have killed a man, I have killed a man and it’s irreversible and I don’t know who he was.” That is unquestionably the verb tense you think of it in, you don’t say to yourself “who he is” but inexplicably and already “who he was” and you don’t wonder whether it was right or wrong or justified or if there was some other solution, you think only of the fact: I have killed a man and I don’t know who he was, only that he was named Julio and they called him Julito and he was Mexican, and he was once in my native city staying in the Castellana Hilton and he had a green handkerchief, and that’s all. And he knew nothing about me that morning, and he never learned my real name and I will never know anything more about him. I won’t know about his childhood or what he was like then or if he ever went to high school as part of his scanty education which did not include the study of English, I’ll never know who his mother is or whether she’s alive and they’ll bring her the news of the unexpected death of her fat Julio. And you think about this even though you don’t want to because you have to escape and run now, no one knows what is it to be hunted down without having lived it and unless the pursuit was active and constant, carried out with deliberation and determination and dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but catch up with you and settle the score. No one knows what it is to be hunted down like that for five nights and five days, without having lived it. I was twenty-two years old and I will never go back to Mexico, though Ricardo must be nearing seventy now and the fat man has been dead for centuries, I saw him. Even today I stretch my hand out horizontally and look at it, and say to myself, “Five.”
Yes, it was best not to think and to run, run without stopping for as long as I could hold out now that I no longer felt hazy or fatigued, all my senses wide awake as if I had just risen from a long sleep, and as I went deeper into the thicket and was lost from sight and the first rumblings of thunder began, I could distinctly make out, through the wind, the sound of the venomous footsteps setting off with all the urgency of hatred to destroy me, and Ricardo’s voice shouting through the wind, “I want him now, I want him dead and I will not wait, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, I want his carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end.”
About the author
“One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize.”
— Orhan Pamuk
“Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.”
— San Francisco Bay Guardian
“The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.”
— The Boston Sunday Globe