“My specialty is launching penury in pursuit of wealth,” he would say, the sophisticated Reyes Albarrán with his elbow on the bar and a gin fizz in his hand.
But the clientele—hélas! — began to understand that the owner of the Rendez-Vous was a mocker, a gossip, a cruel and talkative man, even if he tended bar with burlesque religious solemnity, serving each drink with an “ego baptiso te whiskey sour” and closing the establishment at the hour prescribed by law with a no less mocking “Ite Bacchus est.”
He loved, in other words, to humiliate his clients while pretending to protect them. But since the clients eventually saw the light, rancor and suspicion accumulated around Reyes Albarrán. He knew too many secrets, he laughed at his own mother, he could put an end to many reputations by means of gossip columns and whispered slander. They began to abandon him.
And the city was growing, the fashionable places changed like serpents shedding skin, social barriers fell, exclusive groups became reclusive or inclusive, the names of the old families no longer meant anything, those of the new families changed with each presidential term before they retired to enjoy their six-year fortunes, engagements to be married were determined by distances, the new Outer Ring dictated debuts, dates, angers, punctual loves, lost friendships. . Luxury and the places that were frequented moved from the Juárez district to the Zona Rosa to Avenida Masaryk, right here in the Polanco district where the shipwrecked survivor of the postwar period, the pomaded and seductive Reyes Albarrán, had been tossed up one Christmas Eve to knock on the door of his solid old brother, the punctual and industrious Don Luis Albarrán, a recent widower, undoubtedly in need of the fraternal company of the equally needy bartender who had ended as a drunkard, forgetting the golden rule: To be a good saloon keeper, you also have to be a good abstainer.
A drunkard, a pianist in an elegant boîte who ended up pounding the keys in the brothels of the Narvarte district like Hipólito el de Santa, a pomaded seducer of European princesses who ended up living at the expense of rumberas in decline, a waiter in funky holes and, with luck, dives close to the Zócalo, the Plaza Mayor where, more than once, he was found sleeping, wrapped in newspapers, awakened by the clubs of the heartless Technicolor gendarmerie of the increasingly dangerous metropolis. Cops, blue, tamarind, all of them on the take, except what could they put the bite on him for except hunger? Stumbling through the entire republic in search of luck, not finding it, stealing bus tickets and lottery tickets, the first bringing more fortune than the second, carrying him far and sinking him into being broke until the doctor in Ciudad Juárez told him, “You’re no longer the man you were, Señor Albarrán. You’ve lived a long time. It isn’t that you’re sick. You’re just worn out. I mean exhausted. You can’t do any more. The wind’s gone out of you. I see that you’re over seventy. I advise you to retire. For your own good.”
If some buried tenderness remained in Don Luis Albarrán toward his older brother, Reyes Albarrán (the “Don” didn’t come off even as a joke), the implacable Chilean Doña Matilde Cousiño had kept him from bringing it to the surface: “That filthy beggar doesn’t set foot in my house. Don’t let yourself be ruled by affection, Lucho. Your brother had everything, and he threw it all away. Let him live in his shanties. He doesn’t come in here. Not while I’m alive. No, Señor.”
But she wasn’t alive now. Though her will was. That night Don “Lucho” Albarrán felt as never before the absence of his willful wife. She would have thrown the discomfiting brother out on the street with a sonorous, very Chilean:
“Get the hell out of here, you damn ragged beggar!”
3. As tends to happen to most human beings, Don Luis Albarrán woke up in a bad mood. If sleeping is an anticipation of death, then it is a warm, comfortable, welcoming announcement. If dreaming is death, then it is the great open door of hospitality. Everything in that kingdom is possible. Everything we desire lies within reach. Sex. Money. Power. Food and drink. Imaginary landscapes. The most interesting people. Connections to celebrity, authority, mystery. Of course, an oneiric counterpart exists. One dreams of accidents. Dreams are dimensions of our circulation, and as Doña Matilde would say,
“Lucho, don’t be an asshole. We’re nothing but accidents of our circulation.”
Except that accidents in a dream tend to be absurd. Walking naked down the street is the prototype. Or they can be mortal. Falling from the top floor of a skyscraper, like King Kong. Except at that moment the angel sent by Morpheus wakes us, the dream is interrupted, and then we give it an ugly name, pesadilla. Borges, said the very southern and well-read Doña Matilde, detested that terrible word and wondered why we didn’t have a good word in Spanish for a bad dream, for example, nightmare or cauchemar.
Don Luis recalled these ideas of his Chilean dreamer regarding dreams, and he prayed as he was falling precisely into the arms of Morpheus:
“Get away, pesadilla. Welcome, cauchemar, hidden sea, invisible ocean of dreams, welcome, nightmare, nocturnal mare, mount of the darkness. Welcome to you both, drive the ugly Spanish pesadilla away from me.”
Don Luis awoke that morning convinced that his bad mood was the usual one upon opening his eyes and that a good Mexican breakfast of spicy huevos rancheros and steaming coffee from Coatepec would be enough to return him to reality.
The newspaper carefully opened on the table by Truchuela, the butler, noisily displayed news much worse than the worst personal dream. Once again the world was on its head, and the pesadillas, cauchemars, or nightmares of the previous night seemed mere fairy tales compared to ordinary reality. Except that this morning the austere face of Truchuela, as long and sour as that of any actor cast in the role of a butler with a long, sour face,1 was more sour and longer than usual. And in case Don Luis didn’t notice, Truchuela filled the cup to the brim with coffee and even dared to spill it.
“The Señor will please excuse me.”
“What?” said a distracted Don Luis, bewitched by his effort to decipher the tongue twisters of high Mexican officials.
“Excuse me. I spilled the coffee.”
No expression of Don Luis’s justified what Truchuela wanted to say:
“The Señor will forgive me, but the unexpected guest in the blue bedroom—”
“He is not unexpected,” said Don Luis with a certain severity. “He is my brother.”
“So he said,” Truchuela agreed. “It was difficult for us to accept that.”
“Us? How many are you, Truchuela?” Don Luis replied with a growing irritation, directed at himself more than at the perfect servant imported from Spain and accustomed to waiting on the superior clientele of El Bodegón in Madrid.