The story left her silent for quite a while and me up in the air, because when Vicky isn’t swearing, she’s plotting something or is about to break your heart. They have to go for the kill because of their anger, I say, and who’s always there? That’s right. She grabbed the newspaper, read it, left it on the table, speechless and self-absorbed for about half an hour, then read it once more and threw it on the floor, as usual. By now you’ll have noticed my ability to remain forever in dreamland, not bothering anyone, right? That’s how I was brought up, it’s from my childhood. This chameleon-like quality saved me from more than fifty spankings. When the storm of insults would erupt, I became a rocking chair, or a living room corner; yeah, I could become a fucking living room corner, limestone, and nobody is stupid enough to smash a wall, right? Well, that’s what I did the better part of that morning while sweat began to create blacker black spots on her T-shirt, her forehead shone, and she boiled in her own foul juices.
“Right now that hand is in formaldehyde. Motherfuckers. That hand... Magic’s divine hand, the hand from my favorite memories; it was mine, ours. We don’t matter one fuck now. Motherfuckers. It’s not enough to destroy everything, to torture us with stupid music, to ban breathing, eating, fucking, living; no, they had to tear it out by the roots. Motherfuckers. They have it in formaldehyde, wanna bet?”
And thus began the story of the precious scar, I tell you, which is a waste of time.
Back then, it was called the Bronx. But the splendorous mall had now turned the area into something else. Into what? Basically, into the Bronx with a splendorous mall. The junkies from those days, most of them anyway, were dead now, and shovels of cocaine, mall-brand cocaine with slummy neon lights, had replaced heroin. I staked out a place between the few remaining gypsies who hadn’t been absorbed by the Cult yet and the large colony of Colombians, Dominicans, Moroccans, and so on.
I was going through a bad time, with no clients, in the red, pregnant, and with good ol’ Jesús waiting for me every morning at the office, right on time, so that I would appear and come up with some solution to his life. To his fucking life as a former deadbeat, former drunk, former pusher. Rootless and dirty — the poor wretch was really dirty.
“Looking for something?”
Junkie, I thought. A junkie with money problems and hunting for saps. I looked at her and touched my belly. The gesture didn’t mean anything. Not in that place, and we both knew it. I looked the woman straight in the eye, pitiless. Thirty, I thought, and not looking good for your age at all, girl, with those gloomy rings under your eyes and two teeth fewer than what’s needed for a smile to smile.
I waited, I knew silence was a language.
“I’ve got coke, hashish, and pastis, what do you want? It’s all very legal, sister, I’m very legal. Everything’s okay, sister, you hear me?”
She still had an Andalusian lilt, probably from her parents, and they got theirs from before, from the grandparents, a lilt that came from hauling bags and long train rides. In her family’s case, of course, exodus had not ended in generational success.
“Coke, one gram,” I answered without thinking, and handed her a fifty-dollar bill while I changed my tourist-in-Apache-territory look for an obvious murderous warning. It’s habit. Your gestures, your habits, they stick to you. I had put one foot in Nou Barris and gone right to the Renfe-Meridiana area, to the junkie blocks from days gone by. Well, to one of the many clusters of dwellings scattered in those neighborhoods, where life went on between sale and consumption, yesterday’s heroin, today’s coke and pastis. Habit, my habit: Nou Barris, dealers, blow. Precisely because of that habit, I followed her and was treated to the dazzling mall that had not changed the feel of those blocks, though there was a certain something missing that had nothing to do with the surrounding innovations. The throbbing bundles I remembered huddled in the corners had been swept away by death. I thought, damnitshit, there’s nothing left. I didn’t feel sorry for them — they were already cadavers back then — what hurt me was the shadow of the shopping mastodon next to this desert of city blocks, albeit with its big public swimming pool. And Magic Hand’s hand was part of my memory, the time gone by, the scooter and the delirium; I had been a stupid and feverish youngster back then, keeping time with that hand that seemed like an essential soundtrack. I felt the silence. I felt old.
Just a second before the woman rang the bell for the eighth floor, I whispered into her neck: “Give me my stuff and take me to the dealer. And shut up!”
That’s how it was. Everything was okay, as it always is. There was something left over from the old times. I figured the junkie would get a good beating, because she was gullible and dumb, and the creep who would beat her would know she had it coming, and I wondered why I’d done that. Nostalgia? Probably. Partly, I had a nauseous feeling and the ephemeral happiness that comes from shady deals sewn in the memories of a risky and delicious youth. That’s what they called it: risky. And I also had anger.
It was obvious that, with my belly, I wasn’t going to put that gram in my body, that poison that was actually less expensive now than twenty years ago, the only consumer item whose price hadn’t gone up in that time. It was cheaper now. But who knows what that white powder I had put in my back pocket was actually made of: paracetamol, laxative, amphetamine, lime from the bathroom wall... I didn’t want poison, I had no real need to meet that fucking dealer, what a face, what pain; I had no intention of getting that poor toothless girl into any more trouble. Let her fuck herself. I only wanted to test the strings, to prove something to myself. There was no soundtrack. Fucking thieves, old-time rats. I’d had a rough time in Nou Barris but I still knew how to get around. It was just that I was checking things out... for nostalgia’s sake.
“I can’t believe it! The queen visiting my humble abode...”
It was Santo, still in his flat. Río de Janeiro Avenue, next to the sign reading Goodbye, Barcelona right on the outskirts, next to Meridiana Avenue, waving goodbye to the city with the stink of an immigrant buried in poverty and oilcloth. Nou Barris was the sad fringe of the city. It had been the workers’ bastion, solidarity with Cuba, oh Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, until victory forever and lunch for the poor, but now nobody remembers any of that. Shovelfuls, millions of bags later, and he was still there, skinny, with his dark hide covered in thick gold chains, stooped like an awning over a passerby, a visitor, the one footing the bill, the solicitor.
“Hi, Go-Getter.”
That was him now, the Go-Getter. I noticed my tone of voice. A bit more seductive than required. A bit nicer. I could admit to being nice, but not seductive, damnit, not with that belly.
“Come on in, my queen. Enter my humble abode. You will find something to your liking... I’m sure.”
But I didn’t go in. It took me a few minutes to recognize the smell, the same smell from those other times, of disinfectant and rancid smoke. The smell of a closed bar seems rather sinister in a house. I remembered the nights, so many visits at such a wrong time, without clocks, Santo’s bed — he was still Santo — and Magic Hand’s solo marking the beat of everything that was going on in that house, with fifty-hour days full of insomnia and crappy poker. He was looking at me from the arch his head formed at the top of the marquise, at the end of his too-long neck; a bird’s neck. He smiled, because he knew, and he looked at my belly. His fingernails were yellowed by cigars. His eyes were yellowed by vice. His brown skin was smooth and brilliant on his bones. Short straight hair, brown, soft, a girl’s hair.