“Get a load of this, but don’t let it blow your mind.”
“Knockout, Poca! Where’d you find the feather boas?”
“In the department store in the next room. He’s got three closets stuffed full of old clothes. On my mother’s grave, we hit the jackpot. Necklaces, hats, colored stockings. Anything, my lords, your heart desires!”
“You wouldn’t dare. Keep your filthy hands off my mother’s belongings!”
“Cool it, Fu. I told you, we’re not going to hurt you. What the hell’s it to you? It’s just a lot of junk that doesn’t mean anything to you, your lamps and ashtrays and doodads. Now what the fuck good do they do you?”
“You savages would never understand.”
“Hey, you hear the bad word he called us?”
“Hell, that’s not bad. It’s a compliment. I wear a leather vest with nothing under it and you stick a few feathers in your hair, Poca baby, but tell me, does that make us look like dumb Indians? We’re the Aztecs’ revenge! Well, take a good look, you old turd, because you can kiss your furniture goodbye. And I’m taking your fancy clothes and Poca’s taking your mommy’s. That’s what we came for.”
“To steal my clothes?”
“Shit, yes. All of it, your clothes, your furniture, your silver, every-thing!”
“But why, what value can…?”
“Now you put your finger on it. All this old stuff’s back in style.”
“And you’re going to sell my possessions?”
“Are we! In Lagunilla market this stuff sells better than Acapulco Gold. What we are going to clear on all your pretties, old man!”
“But first, my beauty, you keep what you like best, the best necklace, the hippest feather boa, whatever grabs you, my little sweet-ass bitch.”
“Don’t start messing around with me, Artist. I’ve got my eye on that big white bed and if you get me all hot I might want to keep it for some extra slick dick tricks.”
“How about a little right now?”
“Cut it out. Just take off. You’re always hot.”
“You, Barber, you entertain him.”
“Does he look pretty? With his face all lathered up he looks like Santa Claus.”
“Do not touch me again, sir.”
“Whaaaat? Here, turn this way a little so I can give you a good shave.”
“I told you, don’t touch me.”
“Tip your head a little to the left, be a good boy.”
“Keep your hands off me, you’re messing my hair!”
“Be good now, little fellow.”
“You miserable beggars.”
“What did you call us, fathead?”
“Us, beggars?”
“Beggars beg, old man. We take.”
“You’re a plague. Filth. Running sores.”
“We’re what? Hey, Artist, you think the old man’s stoned?”
“No, it just burns him to be done in while we’re riding so high.”
“I’m the one who’ll do the riding. I’ll ride the whoring mothers of every one of you cockroaches. Pigs! Worms!”
“Whoa, there, Fu Manchu. You shut your mouth when it comes to my mamacita. I don’t stand for that.”
“Cool it, Barber.”
“You, the one they call Barber, you…”
“Yes, you old bastard?”
“You are the most filthy son of a bitch I ever saw in my life. I forbid you to touch me again. If you want to touch something, make it your fucking mother’s cunt!”
“Shit … Yeah, I think we’ve blown it…”
IV
Among Federico Silva’s papers was a letter addressed to Doña María de los Angeles Valle, widow of Negrete. The executor delivered it to her, and before reading it the elderly lady reflected a moment about her friend, and her eyes filled with tears. Dead barely a week, and now this letter, written when?
She opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was undated, though it bore a place of origin: Palermo, Sicily. Federico wrote of a series of slight earthquakes that had taken place recently. The experts were forecasting a major earthquake, the worst in the island since the devastating quake of 1964. He, Federico, had a premonition that his life would end here. He had ignored the evacuation orders. His situation was unique: a desire for suicide annulled by a natural catastrophe. He was closed in his hotel room, watching the Sicilian sea, the “foamy” Sicilian sea, Góngora had called it, and how fine, how appropriate, to die in such a beautiful place, so removed from ugliness, lack of respect, and mutilation of the past … everything he most despised in life.
“Dear Friend. Do you remember the blond girl who caused the commotion in the Negresco? You may believe, and with some justification, that I am so simpleminded, that my life has been so monotonous, that I have lived that life under the spell of a beautiful woman who did not wish to be mine. I am aware of the way that you, Perico, the Marqués, and all my other friends avoid that subject. Poor Federico. His one adventure ended in frustration. He grew old alongside a tyrant of a mother. And now he’s dead.
“You will be correct insofar as the heart of the matter is concerned, but the outward appearances were not what they seemed. I have never told anyone this. When I begged that girl to stay, to spend the night with me in my room, she refused. She said, ‘No, not if you were the last man on earth.’ Those excruciating words — can you believe it? — saved me. I told myself that no one is the last man in love, only in death. Only death can say to us, ‘You are the last.’ Nothing, no one else, María de los Angeles.
“That sentence might have humiliated me but it did not intimidate me. I admit that I was afraid to marry. I felt a horror that I might prolong in my children what my mother had imposed upon me. You should know what I mean; our upbringing was very similar. I could not educate badly children I never had. You did. Forgive my frankness. The situation, I believe, authorizes it. Never mind; call my reluctance what you will — religious fear, ordinary avarice, sterile upbringing.
“Naturally, you pay for this cowardice when your parents have died and as is my case, you have no offspring. You have lost forever the opportunity to give your children something better, or at least something different from what your parents gave you. I don’t know. What I do know is that you run the risk of dissatisfaction and error, whatever you do. At times, if you’re a Catholic, as I am, and you find yourself forced to take a young girl to the doctor for an operation, or, even worse, you send by your servant the money for her abortion, you feel you have sinned. Those children one never had: did you spare them from coming into an ugly, cruel world? Or, quite the opposite, would they throw in your face that you never offered them the risks of life? Would they call you a murderer? A coward? I do not know.
“I fear that this less than forceful image of myself is the one each of you will remember. That is why I’m writing to you now, before I die. I had one love in my life, only one. You. The love I felt for you at fifteen lasted to the time of my death. I can tell you now. In you I centered the excuse for my bachelorhood and the needs of my love. I am not sure that you will understand. You were the only person I could love without betraying all the other aspects of my life and its demands. Being what I was, I had to love you as I did: faithfully, silently, nostalgically. But I was as I was because I loved you: solitary, distant, barely humanized, perhaps, by a certain sense of humor.
“I don’t know whether I’ve made myself clear, or even whether I myself truly understood myself. We all think we know ourselves. Nothing is further from the truth. Think of me, remember me. And tell me whether you can explain to me what I am about to tell you. It may be the only puzzle of my life, and I will die without solving it. Every night before I go to bed I walk out on my bedroom balcony to take the air. I try to breathe the presages of the following morning. I had learned to identify the odors of the lost lake of a city equally lost. With the years it has become increasingly difficult.