My cabinmate was named Johnny Paredes and his parents were sending him to Chile to get him away from bad influences in Caracas. He talked like a Venezuelan and acted like a Venezuelan, but he was a Chilean who had been living there (where his parents had business interests) since he was two or three. He bragged about money. He was going to live with an aunt in Viña del Mar and he planned to hit the books and not make any male friends. The cabin had four berths, but it was just the two of us sharing it, and from the moment we met he made it clear to me that he wasn’t a homosexual and that if I had any weird ideas I should forget them. We were the same age, but I looked older because of my long hair, mustache, and beard. It was the first time that Johnny Paredes had traveled alone and it showed. It was my first time too, but I hid it better because I’d been on the road for two months. Sometimes I remembered my parents saying goodbye to me at a Mexico City bus station and I felt sad and homesick. The neon sign on the station read Gran Estación del Sur, and it was the departure point for all travelers on their way to Puebla, Oaxaca, or Chiapas, and also for those heading to Guatemala. Like Johnny Paredes, I should have been in college, in my case at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, but I had already been expelled from two high schools and my college future was as bleak as a hopeless old bolero. One night, my father told me I had a choice. I had to get a job, either in Mexico City or Sonora. I told him I’d rather go to Sonora. I was there for three months. One night, drunk and high, I visited my grandfather’s grave in Santa Teresa, and the next morning I took the first bus back to Mexico City. I remember I felt terrible and I told the driver I would probably throw up along the way and the driver handed me a plastic bag and said not to worry. I also asked him to let me know when we passed through Villaviciosa, and then the driver looked at me with new eyes, as if he’d just realized that he had a madman on board, and he said the bus didn’t go that way, but he would let me know when we were nearby, though all I’d see would be mountains. I said all right and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. The sun was a blinding whitish yellow. To the left, said the driver. I looked, shading my eyes with my hand: all I saw were mountains, as he had said, and at the top of the mountains some unidentifiable trees, just a few of them, bare and dark with sparse branches. When I got home, I told my father that I had quit my job in Sonora. It wasn’t right for me, I said. What do you want to do, then? asked my father. Join the revolution, I said. What revolution? asked my father. The American revolution, of course, I said. What American revolution? he asked. My mother, who had been silent up until now, said, Oh my God. Then I told them I was going back to Chile. The Chilean revolution? said my father. I nodded. But you’re Mexican, said my father. No, I’m Chilean, I said, but it doesn’t matter, all Latin Americans should be on their way to Chile to support the revolution. Who’s going to pay for your trip? asked my father. You, if you want to, I said, otherwise I’ll hitch rides. That night, according to my sister, my father and mother cried for a long time, she heard them from her room. They must have been fucking, I said (I wish they had been). A week later, they gave me money to take a bus across Central America, and right there in Mexico City they bought me the ticket that would take me by ship from Panama to Valparaiso. Of course, they wanted me to fly, but I managed to convince them that traveling by land was formative, educational, and also cheaper. The idea of setting foot in an airport made my hair stand on end.
One afternoon, as I was writing, Dora Montes sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. She asked whether I was writing to my parents, then she asked if it was a letter to my girlfriend, and finally she wanted to know whether it was a diary. I said it wasn’t a letter, I had no girlfriend, and I didn’t keep a diary either. Surprisingly, once we had gotten to this point, Dora Montes’s curiosity evaporated (I informed her later, unasked, that it was a story I was writing) and she began to tell me what she’d felt when we saw two whales from the deck that morning. She talked about mystical husbands, about life at sea, and finally about money, for some reason. It was that afternoon that she explained to me what she did for a living. She was a cabaret star. A stripper, to be precise. Now she was on her way back to Chile after a tour of sundry Central American nightclubs, all shady except for the Carrusel in Panama, where she had worked for two months. She would rather work in Santiago or Valparaiso, of course, but in Chile, she confessed, times were hard for burlesque artists. After six months, when her contract in Santiago expired, she would have to go back to Central America, and she was already depressed about it. She held out hope that her agent could book her some shows in Buenos Aires, though she humbly admitted that the competition there was strong.
Dora Montes must have been about thirty and she was dark haired, of average height, and fairly respectable. She saw the positive side of everything, though she didn’t get excited about much. Her secretary (who was actually her sister, but I didn’t know that until the second day of the trip) spent most of the day in bed on the poop deck, laid up by migraines that she believed were triggered by the sea air. At first glance, she seemed useless as a secretary or assistant and Johnny Paredes asked me a few times why the hell she was there. She was probably more useful behind the scenes on dry land, as a seamstress, treasurer, or nurse, than on a ship during a quiet sea crossing. As the days went by, I realized that Dora Montes would have killed herself if it hadn’t been for the constant reassurance of her sister’s subtle presence. In some mysterious way, Dora believed that her sister absorbed all of the ills that beset Dora herself (numerous ills, so she believed), meaning that if she drank too much, for example, it was her secretary who felt sick the next day. When I expressed my doubts about this strange link, Dora Montes claimed that it was a family trait and that her mother and her mother’s older sister had the same connection. One night, when I got back from the dance hall, I found Dora and Johnny in bed together in our cabin. The next day, as I was writing, Dora came over and told me not to get the wrong idea about her. I said, Of course not, don’t worry. Then she sat down next to me and, after a prolonged silence in which she gazed out to sea, then at my notebook, then back out to sea again, she proceeded to explain plainly and simply that it was all my fault. I remember that she was wearing light-blue bell-bottoms and her hair was gathered on her neck. It was very black hair, inky black, coarse to the touch. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I felt like hurting her. I told her that if she wanted to confess, we had a Spanish Jesuit on board. That was all. I regretted it almost immediately. But first, I felt Dora Montes fix me with a stare of disgust (I may even have enjoyed it). Then she got up, murmuring an insulting phrase as if to herself. This chilled me (it was the first time I’d heard such words on a woman’s lips: filthy, unerring words, words that couldn’t fail to hit their target), and in no way did I believe it was deserved. When I got back to my cabin that night, Johnny Paredes once again asked me to beat it to the deck for an hour.