(They’re crazy: they hear music without instruments, the music of time, bands in the night. They feed the woman soup. She drinks it, mute and grateful. How can Bernardo be so sensitive in everything and so brutal to a sick woman who only needs a little care, attention, tenderness?)
Bernardo
I ran into Arturo Ogarrio in the hall at school and he thanked me for the other night’s dinner. He asked if he could go with me, where was I headed? That morning I had gotten a check from my mother, who lives in Guadalajara, at Aunt Fernandita’s house, where I’m staying until the tempest with Toño passes over.
I intend to blow it on books. Ogarrio takes my arm, stopping me; he asks me to take a moment to admire the symmetry of the colonial patio, the arches, the porticoes of the old school of San Ildefonso; he complains about Orozco’s murals, those violent caricatures that disrupt the harmony of the cloister with their parade of oligarchs, their beggars, their Liberty in chains, their deformed prostitutes, and their cross-eyed Pancreator. I ask him if he prefers the hideous stained-glass window in the stairway, a hopeful salute to progress: salvation through Industry and Commerce, in full color. He says that is not the problem, the problem is that the building represents harmony and Orozco’s violent fresco represents discord. That’s what I like, that Orozco doesn’t go along with the consensus, that he tells the priests and politicians and ideologues that things are not going to turn out well — just the opposite of Diego Rivera, who keeps on saying that this time, yes, things will turn out all right for us. No.
We ventured into the Porrúa Brothers Bookstore. The employees, walled in behind glass counters, their arms crossed, block the path of the presumed client and reader. Their brown jackets, their black ties, their false black elbow-length sleeves make a single statement: They shall not pass.
— Surely it was easier to acquire that mannequin in a shop — said Arturo quietly — than it is to acquire a book here.
I placed my check on the counter and on top of the check my student ID. I asked for the Romancero Gitano of Lorca, Andreyev’s Sashka Yegulev, Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, and the review Letras de México, where I had published, hidden toward the back, a little poem.
— Unless, as Ventura says, you ran the risk of stealing her …
— She’s flesh and blood. The other night she wasn’t feeling well. That’s all. Look — I said quickly — I’ll give you this Ortega book; you know it?
— No, you can’t, said the clerk. You have to cash the check in a bank and pay in cash; checks are not accepted here, or money orders, or anything of the sort, said the employee with the black sleeves and coffee-colored jacket, assiduously reclaiming the books one by one:
— Above all, young man, we do not extend credit.
— Toño has been looking for the Andreyev novel for a long time. He wanted to give it to her. It’s the story of a young rebel. And an anarchist, besides. I turned to face him. — She is flesh and blood.
— I know — said Ogarrio with his usual seriousness. — Come with me.
Toño
I think she’s feeling better, thanks to my care. Bernardo has stayed away for several nights and hasn’t helped me. I spend hours watching over her, ministering to her complaints, to her needs. I understand her: in her condition, she needs all sorts of attention. It’s Bernardo’s fault she feels bad: he should have been here helping me, instead of hiding in the tower of his resentment. Thank God, she’s better. I look at her face, so thin and sweet.
… I feel an overwhelming fatigue in the morning, as I’ve never felt before.
I dream that I’m talking with her. But she only talks to herself. When I talk, she doesn’t listen. She talks over my head, or around me, to some other person who is above or behind me, someone I can’t see. It makes me sick with grief. I believe in someone who doesn’t exist. Then she caresses me. She does believe in me.
I wake up with a big scratch on my face. I raise my hand to my wounded cheek, I see the blood on my fingers. I look at her, awake, sitting in bed, motionless, looking at me. Does she smile? I take her left hand, roughly: it lacks the ring finger.
Bernardo
He said that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with virginal fiancées or with whores. Much less with mannequins! He laughed, undressing.
I knew it as soon as I entered the room on the Plaza Miravalle, full of Chinese screens and mirrors in gilded frames, divans heaped with soft cushions and Persian carpets, smelling of lost churches and distant cities; nothing in Mexico City smelled like this apartment where she appeared from behind some curtains, identical to him, but with a woman’s body, pale and slim, almost without breasts but with luxuriant pubic hair, as if the dark profundity of her sex made up for the plainness of her adolescent body: from afar she smelled of almonds and unknown soaps. She walked toward me, her long hair hanging loose, her heavy eyes ringed with dark circles, her lips painted deep red to disguise their thinness: her mouth was two red lines, just like his. Naked except for black stockings that she held up, poor thing, with her hands, with difficulty, practically scratching her thighs.
— Arturo, please …
She could have been his twin. He smiled and said no, they were not brother and sister, they had searched for a long time before finding each other. The penumbra she brought with her. He had asked his father: Don’t throw out the old furniture, what you don’t sell give to me. Without the furniture, perhaps, the room would not be what I see now: an enchanted cave in the middle of Plaza Miravalle, near the Salamanca ice-cream parlor, where we used to go for delicious lemon ices …
— Perhaps all this attracts her: the curtains, the rug, the furniture …
— The penumbra — I said.
— Yes, the penumbra, too. It’s not easy to produce this exact light. It’s not easy to conjure up another person who not only resembles you physically but wants to be like you, even wants to be you. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be like her, but I would like to be her, do you understand? That’s why we’ve been searching until we found each other. By force of attraction, but also by force of repulsion.
— Arturo, please, my garters. You promised.
— Poor thing!
He told me that she made love with someone else only if he was present, if he participated. He was taking off his dark gray jacket, his black tie, his stiff collar. He dropped the collar button into a black lacquer box. She looked at him fascinated, forgetting about her garters. She let her stockings fall to her ankles. Then she looked at me and laughed.
— Arturo, this fellow loves another. She laughed, taking my hand in hers, sweaty, an unexpectedly nervous hand for that woman the color of a waning moon, carrier no doubt of the infirmity of the romantic century: she looked like one of Ruelas’s tubercular sketches, and I thought of La Desdichada and a line from the Romancero of Lorca that I hadn’t been able to buy this morning, which describes the Andalusian dancer as paralyzed by the moon: —Arturo, look at him, he’s afraid, he’s one of those who love only one woman, I know them, I know them! They’re looking for that one woman and that gives them license to sleep with them all, the swine, because they’re looking for just that one. See: he’s a decent boy!