When I told Marta Elena, the mother of my children, from whom I was already separated, that I had fallen for a pretty girl because she’d bent down to tie my shoelace, she surprised me by responding, You’re so Christian. Anyone else would have pegged me as a chauvinist, but Marta Elena knows me well and realizes it’s not that; she’s well aware of the subliminal and devastating effect on me of bishops washing the feet of the elderly, saints offering their coats to beggars, nuns devoting their lives to the sick, all those who give their lives for something or someone: the kind of excessive or exalted gesture that today seems so anachronistic. So it was that, and her astonishing beauty, that were enough to make me think, What a pretty, crazy girl, and to fall hopelessly in love with Agustina, without even suspecting that madness, not the way it was then but the way it is now, isn’t beautiful at all but petrifying and horrendous.
HOW TO PUT THIS, Agustina doll, I’m not good at explanations, but do you believe in that silly thing the gringos call a winner? well it does exist, and that’s what I am, a born winner, a natural at coming out on top, which is something you should know better than anyone else, since each time we’ve been up against each other you’ve lost, and yet look at me now, down here biting the dust of defeat.
What happened was that Mystery’s visit left me with a bad taste in my mouth, don’t ask me why, when he’d come to offer me the deal of the century, after all, and I’ve never been superstitious because for that I have you, my pretty little witch-girl, but as soon as I opened the door and saw that sinister bird standing there, burning with crack fever and polluting the air with his corpse-sucking breath, I, King Midas, golden boy, superstar of the highlands, felt an uncomfortable prickle run through me. And I don’t have to tell you, Agustina kitten, that Spider didn’t get it up that night, it was the first failed attempt, as was to be expected, chronicle of a failure foretold, and the truth is, I was ready to quit the game right then, settle my ill-fated bet, and tell Spider, We had our fun, Spider old man, let’s not fuck around with this anymore, you might as well settle for making money because lovemaking isn’t in the cards now.
At this stage in the game I had hit rock bottom, and even though I’d just landed the deal of the century, I felt miserable, like I’d had enough, and what I desperately wanted was to go to bed all alone and sink into a quiet, bottomless sleep with the lights out and the blinds hermetically sealed, total blackout against the onslaught of the sun in the morning, but good old Spider, who couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly so down, was whimpering, convinced it was his fault, asking me over and over again to forgive him for failing, It’s not over yet, Midas my boy, he tried to console me with pathetic and groundless enthusiasm, his insistence only sending me deeper into my funk, I failed you in the end, but I swear we were millimeters from success, we would’ve won the bet if those two girls you brought me hadn’t been so limp and lifeless, next time I want some real women, some hot pussy, no more little china dolls.
But Spider, old man, I replied, I brought you exactly the kind of girls you asked for, bilingual and ladylike and sushi-fed, Not quite, Midas my boy, I think there’s some kind of generation gap here, you missed the fact that men my age like women with a little meat on their bones and you set me up with a pair of anorexics, the kind that have to be kept in the freezer, men like me want ripe, juicy flesh, and you, Midas my boy, present me with a pair of forlorn, malnourished little girls who might be nice to adopt but not to fuck. Don’t worry, Spider old man, things will be looking up soon, that’s what I told him, because I can be the biggest ass-kissing bastard when I have to be, and at the same time I was pretending not to be in a foul mood so I wouldn’t screw up the serious business that had to be done, Don’t leave yet, Spider, old man, let me send Joaco and Ayerbe home, and you stay in my office with Silver for just fifteen more minutes, because I have word from Escobar.
When I told Spider and Silver the big news, leaving out unflattering details like the fact that the Boss calls them the Cripple and the Informer, both of them sat silent, as if at first they weren’t sure they liked the sound of the thing, then they started asking questions and getting caught up in doubts, like why was Pablo asking us for cash now when he’d always taken checks before, and why had he come looking for us again when so little time had passed since our last encounter, and they were right to worry, Agustina baby, because Escobar always lets at least six months go by before he comes to you again, he’s not the Boss for nothing and he knows how to rotate his paid beneficiaries, I knew that perfectly well and I don’t know how I could have forgotten it, I guess greed and Alzheimer’s go hand in hand, what’s worse is that the deal smelled bad to me from the start, but the payoff was so juicy that I decided to ignore the stench.
Something didn’t smell quite right to Spider and Silver either, so they vacillated between scratching their heads and squirming at the slightest excuse, complaining, for example, about the difficulty of getting so much cash together overnight; they were acting like people who find out they’ve won the lottery and then gripe because they don’t know what they’ll do with all the money, but after a while they’d shrugged off any concerns or misgivings and were taking their Montblancs and little Hermès notepads out of their pockets to do the math, calculating deposits here and investments there, and that was when we all started to get carried away by excitement, because after all, making eight hundred million in one fell swoop is something that doesn’t happen every day. But don’t be late, boys, remember Pablo’s condition, the hard stuff has to be here in my hand by the day after tomorrow at the latest, I warned them as we said our goodbyes out there on the pavement in front of the center, by then it was almost two in the morning, and before taking off, we were hugging and slapping one another on the back like schoolboys on graduation day, the three of us bonded in the sweetness of the coming windfall.
The next day, as I’d predicted, I woke with no desire to get up and with the feeling that I’d had a bad dream, I dreamed that somebody was chasing me, it was a paranoid kind of thing, I can’t be more specific because it was hazy in my mind, Agustina princess, hazy but so terrible that I felt weak when I woke up that morning, if you can call it morning when you open your eyes and the sun is already halfway across the sky; the covers felt heavy on me, as if I’d be trapped under them forever, and I couldn’t tell whether I was coming down with some kind of Asian flu, whether it was shock at the massive amount of money that was about to fall into my lap, or whether I was just shitting myself at the possibility of things turning out badly, or probably a combination of all three; the truth is that the only thing I wanted was to hibernate, I mean I didn’t even have the strength to pee, because I knew that out of bed I would be slobbering and ridiculous like a helpless snail without its shell.
And when that happens to me you won’t believe it but I think of you, Agustina darling, and you should take that as a fucking earth-shattering declaration of love, because I’ve never been the kind of person to dwell on memories, the past is always erased from my hard drive, and anything outside the present moment is the land of the forgotten, as far as I’m concerned; of course you may ask what good my declarations of love have done you when in practice I act like a pig, but it’s true that I think of you when I’m alone in my bedroom, which is essentially my place of worship, and it’s also true that for a scum like me, the only prayer that counts is the memory of you. That’s why sometimes I think about what your life and mine might have been like if they weren’t what they are, and the thought makes me tired and I sink deeper and deeper into lethargy and that’s when I’m least interested in the world outside my bedroom, which in the end has become my only kingdom; you visited it on your night of horrors, Agustina doll, after you made the fuss that wrecked everything, but you were so out of it that you probably don’t even remember, and don’t think I blame you, Agustina my love, that family of yours has always been a collection of crazies, but the funny thing is, while it’s only too plain in your case, your mother and your brother Joaco hide it beautifully, it’s amazing how coolly Joaco rides his madness without being thrown, like it’s one of his polo ponies, and meanwhile you, Agustina baby, are tossed back and forth and jolted up and down like in a Texas rodeo.