The imaginary line that divided the apartment in two began to firm up and stopped fluctuating so much; Aunt Sofi and I were assigned to a corner that had no access to the door, the telephone, the bathroom, or the kitchen, and everything else, including the second floor, became the exclusive property of Agustina, Don’t sit on the sofa, damn you, that’s for me and my father, or Into your pen, you scum, that side over there is for pigs and this side over here is for us, and of course this Us referred to Agustina and her father, because not a trace was left of the us that she and I had been, In that sense my niece is just like her mother, says Aunt Sofi, always seeking Carlos Vicente’s love, always forgiving him, in life and now in death, too.
I didn’t see it at the time, but every tragedy has its humorous side, and today I can remember what happened with a sort of fondness and even laugh, because Agustina really had us pigs screwed, not even letting us have a glass of water or make a telephone call. Aunt Sofi was getting impatient and she said that she was going to step over the line no matter what because she had to go to the bathroom and she couldn’t hold it any longer, Even if Agustina is furious, I have to pee, she said and she managed to slip away and run up the stairs, heading for the upstairs bathroom since it would have been impossible to make it into the other one without Agustina seeing her, and a few minutes later she came down with a shawl for herself and a poncho for me, because the icy fog that comes down from Monserrate each night was descending on us now.
I watched Aunt Sofi sneak into the kitchen and I thought, Clever woman, she’s going to smuggle us some food, remembering just then that the only thing I’d had in my stomach for hours was those few bites of Anita’s pink doughnut, sweet, pretty Anita, would Anita, the girl from Meissen, be asleep now? and yet it wasn’t food that Aunt Sofi brought from the kitchen, hidden in her pocket, but the little battery-powered radio so that we could listen to the news, What must have happened to all those poor people who were hurt, asked Aunt Sofi, and she hadn’t finished the sentence when Agustina discovered us and snatched away the shawl and the poncho and turned off the radio; still, we managed to hear that Pablo Escobar was claiming responsibility for the attack.
IT WAS A SIMPLE TURN of the screw that catapulted me from glory to ruin, Agustina darling, I swear. It started with the back-and-forth of gossip and secrets in the gyms, dressing rooms, and bathrooms at the center, one of those conspiracies that builds up underground until it explodes and shit flies everywhere, and I suspect that the person who set off the bomb was this woman Alexandra, who is physically a goddess but mentally not all there, though I don’t know, the truth is I can’t be sure it was her, she’s someone who’s been coming to the center for years to work out and at first she was kind of a girlfriend of mine, I told you I sleep with the prettiest ones and she was no exception, so we were more or less together for a while, but I extricated myself from that fast, because as I was saying, she’s a chick with an outstanding body but a fucked-up mind, and on second thought maybe it’s paranoid of me to blame her for something that happened so long afterward.
When it comes down to it, it could have been anyone, because anyone could’ve read El Espacio and started the rumor, although it’s strange, very strange, Agustina sweetheart, that someone from this side of town would pick up that trashy tabloid; in general my clientele thinks there’s no point wasting time on bad news, especially if it involves people they don’t know, and if they ever feel like reading, they read El Tiempo, which lets them know what’s going on the way they like to hear it. But it was my bad luck that a story in El Espacio about the mysterious disappearance of a nurse had to make its way to the Aerobics Center, especially since Dolores’s vanishing was an unremarkable occurrence if ever there was one, the kind of thing that goes completely unnoticed in this country, I mean, if no one complains when a whole hospital is robbed and plundered, who’s going to get worked up about a single missing nurse, but you know how it is when your luck turns.
El Espacio went after the story of the phantom nurse and released a statement by her boyfriend which said that the last time he saw her she was entering a gym on the north side of town. So far not great, though bearable, Agustina doll, but the next day El Espacio runs a longer story and bingo! specifies that the gym in question is Midas McAlister’s Aerobics Center, and publishes a picture of Dolores, alive and smiling, a younger and less worn-down Dolores than the one I met, but definitely Dolores, no doubt about it, although El Espacio doesn’t call her that, they call her Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, and they don’t describe her as a whore specializing in S&M who died fulfilling her true destiny as a professional shit-eater, but as a registered nurse whose colleagues say they’ve heard nothing from her, and there’s also the testimony of the man who claims that he’s her boyfriend and that his name is Otoniel Cocué, who, as you’ll have guessed, Agustina darling, is none other than the pimp, although he doesn’t share that bit of information and instead identifies himself as an accountant because he certainly couldn’t reveal the nature of his miserable illegal profession, and as a result his accusations are only half-truths, the kicking and squirming of a man in over his head; for example, he claims that the nurse Sara Luz, his fiancée, exercised at the Aerobics Center, and that she went in one night and never came out.
But the women in the 7:00 a.m. super-rumba class catch wind of all of this — from Alexandra, if my suspicions are correct — and they tell the women in the noon spinning class, who tell the women in the five o’clock spinning class, who pass it on to the eight o’clock class and the women in the massage rooms and the women in the tanning booths, in other words by evening the story has taken on Hollywood dimensions and when they see me stroll by, some women clam up, others laugh, and the most brazen come up to me to ask what happened; and then of course there’s the flirt who tells me straight out that if I’m Bluebeard she volunteers to be the next victim. Certain games become popular, like getting spooked, hearing moans, spotting the killer, or pointing out suspects, and so it goes, the Aerobics Center brimming with rumors, fears, ghosts, jokes, and teasing, and one thing leads to another according to the inexorable law of consequences until I get a visit from the police, who have a warrant to search the place and question me, but as you might expect, sweetheart, they find nothing and I don’t let anything slip, Women come in and out of here all day, Sergeant, I tell a lieutenant who immediately reminds me of his rank, Of course, Lieutenant, excuse me, I was saying that at least three hundred women come through this door every day, and three hundred leave by the same door, and then the lieutenant performs some routine procedures, like checking the attendance records to verify that in fact there is no Sara Luz recorded, and I very calmly pass him the sign-in book, Go ahead, Lieutenant, take a look if you want.
And now prepare yourself, Agustina doll, because the story is about to take a turn for the surreal, imagine my surprise when I see that on one line, in grandiose handwriting in blue fountain pen, the lieutenant has found the signature of one Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, her name written out in full and with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, I swear I almost fell over backward, it must have been that idiot Dolores the night of her tragic performance, the fool probably saw the book where gym members signed in and thought it would be cool or trendy to sign her name there, too, after all why not, she probably thought of herself as an artist or a model, so I had to smooth things over by explaining to the lieutenant that there was nothing strange about someone attending one of our free promotional sessions, This is a public place, Lieutenant, anyone can come in, maybe the girl did stop by but that means absolutely nothing, I repeated several times, though also and most important I slipped the man enough cash to make him keep his mouth shut and leave me in peace, or relative peace because the whole business was getting me down and it was starting to look like there was no way out.