‘Is this a joke?’ he said.
‘Don’t play dumb, I was a taco seller my whole life, I had a stand in the Candelaria de los Patos. I know perfectly well how this works.’
‘Are you a health inspector?’
‘At my age? If they raised the retirement age that much even the dead would have to start working.’
‘Empty your pockets, show me your wallet.’
I obeyed, striving to show him I didn’t represent any organisation or institution concerned with the illegal trade in dog meat or the observation of hygiene standards in butchers’ shops. This was easy, because as well as not representing these organisations, I didn’t look like I did either.
‘You see?’ I said. ‘You can trust me.’
‘I’ll give you some advice: go and see your geriatric specialist and tell him you’re losing touch with reality.’
‘Are you going to keep acting dumb? What’s that meat you’re cutting? I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not beef or pork. Who are you trying to kid?’
‘This?’ he said, pointing at the chunks of meat with the tip of his knife. ‘This is horse, Grandpa.’
‘If you don’t want to buy it I’ll pay you to chop it up for me. How much would you charge? I’m sure I can flog it to a taco seller.’
He raised his knife and pointed straight ahead with it, not threateningly, just using it to indicate the shop door. One of the indisputable advantages of being old is that most people end up taking pity on little old men, even if they don’t deserve it. It’s enough to make you become a serial killer.
‘You’re even more cracked than you look,’ he said. ‘If you don’t beat it now I’m going to call the police.’
I walked out and mentally ran through my daily stroll to see if I could recall another butcher. Nothing. I sat down to think on a bench in the Jardín de Epicuro; it seemed to me some sort of conclusion had to be drawn from what had just happened. How was it possible that a specimen weighing at least thirty kilos, strong, healthy and well-fed, could end up on the rubbish heap or, even worse, buried? All of a sudden I felt infinitely old, as old as the world. The country had changed, it wasn’t the same any more, it was a place I no longer recognised: this was why the tacos were so bad.
I was about to get up from the bench to plod slowly back home when I heard the shout: ‘Here he is, ma’am!’
A maid in uniform was crouching near the bush where the dog’s corpse lay. Behind me, a 4 x 4 pulled up with a squeal of tyres, one of those cars made by gringos for one of their endless wars. There were potholes the size of trenches in the road, but even so this was over the top: Iraq was a long way off. A young couple got out and ran towards the park, with three children following them. The maid shouted again: ‘No! Not the children!’
The mother, or the woman I guessed was the mother, turned and encircled them in an embrace to stop them coming any further. The man came over to the dog’s corpse.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
And then he shouted:
‘Take the kids, take them away!’
I suddenly became sixty years younger. I stood up and, with an energetic, almost military gait, marched over to the greengrocer’s. I could almost hear the strains of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in my head and I easily broke the world record for urban hiking for the over-sixties.
I found Juliet spraying tomatoes with water and covering them with plastic so as to speed up and complete the rotting process. I called out from the door:
‘I’ve got news! A great victory for the Revolution!’
‘Calm down, Bakunin. Want a beer?’
‘A tequila’d be more appropriate.’
Three tequilas later and, thanks to the story of my feat, I was about to convince her to come up to my apartment. I failed at the last moment: ‘I’ll nip to the chemist and pick you up on the way back.’
I stared hard at her mouth, at her full upper lip which, when she smiled, formed a little pout beneath her nose: a second smile.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.
‘Why do you think?’ I replied.
She pursed her lips and the double smile disappeared.
‘Let’s leave it there,’ Juliet said, with all the gentleness sincere rejections tend to have. ‘You and I have more important deeds awaiting us. Let’s not jeopardise the Revolution for a shag.’
‘Isn’t it the other way round, Juliette?’
‘What do you mean, the other way round?’
‘That it’s not worth jeopardising a shag for the Revolution?’
‘You’re such a clown.’
I went back home and had to make do with the company of Willem, who was waiting for me in the lobby, sitting on the floor in front of the lift doors, behind the circle of the salon.
‘What are you doing here? Who let you in?’
‘They did.’
We got into the lift and I waited for the doors to close and the contraption to start moving before asking: ‘What did they say to you?’
‘They assed me lats of questions.’
‘Who, Francesca?’
‘Yeah, she talked to me in English.’
‘What did she want to know?’
‘Why I come to see yuh.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I said I come to talk. To talk about the word of the Lard. And sometimes we watch TV.’
‘Good. Hey, how does she speak?’
‘What?’
‘How well does she speak English?’
‘She speaks as if she wus teaching a child.’
‘Just like in Spanish!’
‘Why are they so innersted in me coming?’
‘They probably think you’re a poof.’
His eyebrows reached his shoulder blades.
‘They read a lot of novels,’ I explained.
~ ~ ~
Everyone attended the meeting, as was customary: meetings took place in the lobby and all the residents, except me, spent their lives down there. Depending on the topic, sometimes I showed up and sometimes I didn’t. I went just enough so as not to fall foul of an administrative rule that meant Francesca would report me to the management committee. On this occasion I had decided to go because the matter affected me directly: the local supermarket had replaced our delivery boy, who had been helping us carry our shopping for over a year, and the entire building considered it an outrage. They said that the new boy refused to do anything other than leave the shopping bags at the entrance to the apartments. The previous one had always been happy to change a light bulb, kill a particularly insidious cockroach, move a piece of furniture, stand on a chair and get something down from the top of a wardrobe…
The new boy was cocky and, instead of helping, he delivered speeches from the Mexico City Union of Deliverymen and alleged that what we asked him to do was not included in the job description drawn up by the union. He kept a folded copy in his trouser pocket, and was always quoting huffily at us from it. Then he would take offence because he didn’t get a tip, or the tip wasn’t big enough. As if that wasn’t enough, the previous delivery boy had been a first-rate spiv. I’d bought a microwave oven off him, a DVD recorder, a little radio with headphones and a cordless phone. And most importantly: he used to supply me with a whisky distilled in Tlalnepantla that cost thirty pesos a litre. When I asked the new boy if he could get it for me, he replied indignantly that he was from Iztapalapa.
In response to the residents’ furious complaints comparing the new delivery boy to the old, the manager of the supermarket had said that we would soon become accustomed to the change, as if the prevailing economic model had transformed capacity for adaptation into a corporate form of resignation. Then someone on the ground floor accused the new delivery boy of stealing a tin of jalapeños, and the cup of patience spilled over.