The committee drew up a petition to sign, demanding the new delivery boy be dismissed and the old one be immediately reinstated. The discussion about whether the letter should ‘demand’ or ‘request’ took two whole afternoons which I, if I’m honest, spent going back and forth between the lobby and the bar, between the bar and the greengrocer’s, and the greengrocer’s and the lobby, and around again. Juliet said:
‘Typical intellectuals, trying to put the world to rights with letters. If they just kidnapped one of the cashiers, the supermarket would give the old delivery boy his job back within twenty minutes!’
The manager of the supermarket replied, the moment he was handed the letter, that no matter how much he wanted to he was unable to meet our demands because the previous delivery boy had simply stopped showing up for work one day. To demonstrate his goodwill, he gave us the boy’s address and promised us that if we could persuade him to return, as long as he could provide some kind of documentation justifying his absence, then he, the manager, would give the kid his job back.
An expedition was organised to visit him: Francesca, in her role as president of the committee, and me, in my role as customer with an urgent need to ensure a supply of provisions. We crossed the city by metro, taxi, local train, bus, another taxi. A journey of three and a half hours, during which Francesca gave me a lesson in Aristotelian hypokrisis, for having committed the error of asking her where she’d learned to hold forth the way she did. She then classified fifty Mexican novels, dividing them into urban and rural, expounded upon what she called ‘the fallacies of structuralism’, which put me in a dark mood as I recalled buildings collapsing in earthquakes, and finished by explaining (by which point I had, for a change, lost concentration) an approach to narration known as ‘free indirect style’, at which point I no longer knew if we were talking about literature or swimming. Until at last we arrived at the door of an apartment in a complex in Tlalnepantla, which I began desperately pounding on.
The door was opened by the boy’s mother, drying her hands on a checked apron, even though they appeared to be dry. The apartment looked a lot like the one we each had back home, including the cockroaches: a bedroom, a kitchenette, a bathroom and a room that served as living and dining room. Except that four people were living here, not one. Three now: the delivery boy’s father, mother and younger brother. Three now — because the delivery boy had disappeared. His mother told us what she knew, that he had simply not come home from work one day. From the kitchen, a cockroach peeped out, waving its antennae: I could have sworn I’d seen it in my apartment. We asked her if she’d reported the disappearance, what she’d said to the police. The mother turned to look at a calendar on the wall, from 2009, with photos of dogs and the red logo of a dog-food manufacturer where my sister had worked over fifty years ago. She dried her hands on her apron again, even though they were dry, looked at the dog on the calendar and said: ‘They told us he was mixed up in drugs, that he was selling drugs.’
She started to cry as if her son had been accused of stabbing a thousand puppies to death. Francesca tried to console her: she told her that the police always said that when someone disappeared, so they didn’t have to look for them. That the delivery boy was a good kid and the proof was that we had come looking for him. That everyone in our building missed him, we’d grown very fond of him. It sounded as if she was talking about a dog. She paused so I could back her up.
‘Very fond,’ I said.
‘How old was your son?’ Francesca asked.
And immediately corrected herself, making things worse: ‘How old is he, I mean?’
‘Seventeen,’ his mother replied.
‘He looked older,’ Francesca said.
‘Yes, he looks older,’ I said.
‘Life’s not easy round here,’ said his mother.
She was apologising because her son had had to grow up quicker than she would have liked, hinting, as she did so, that she believed the police’s version of events and ultimately justifying the boy’s actions as inevitable. The boy’s younger brother came out of the bedroom where he’d been, behind the closed door, until now. His mother introduced him, said he was fifteen, was at college, a smart kid who would probably go to university. At that moment I saw my chance and I wasn’t going to let it go: I asked the boy’s mother if I could speak to him alone. I winked, hoping the mother and Francesca would realise what my intentions were. The false ones, not the actual ones.
‘Yes, of course,’ the mother said.
I stood up and walked over to the door. The boy followed me, obediently. We left the apartment and moved a few yards away down the hallway.
‘Are you selling?’ I asked him.
‘How much?’ he said.
‘Three litres.’
‘Litres? How many grams, Grandpa?’
‘I want to buy whisky, kid, and don’t call me Grandpa. Can you get hold of it?’
‘Hang on,’ he replied.
He walked to the end of the hall and knocked on the last door. I watched him wait outside. Then he returned, carrying a bag. I gave him a hundred-peso note and he gave me the three bottles.
‘You’re twenty pesos short,’ he said.
‘Your brother used to sell it to me for thirty.’
‘I charge forty.’
I gave him the twenty pesos.
‘Do you know what happened to your brother?’ I asked.
‘They say he got whacked.’
‘Who says?’
‘People here, in the building.’
I put the bottles in the rucksack I’d brought along for the purpose.
‘Hey, don’t tell my mother,’ the boy said.
Don’t tell her what, I thought: that you know your brother’s dead or that you’re headed the same way?
‘Could you deliver to my apartment?’ I asked him.
‘Not likely, I’m not going all that way just to earn ten pesos. My brother was a pushover.’
The manager of the supermarket fired the new delivery boy after accusing him of having stolen the tin of jalapeños and a new new delivery boy was hired. After he got wise to what had happened to his predecessor, the new new delivery boy gave us a wide berth, and when we did get hold of him, we had to beg him to come in with us on the plan. In the end he set a condition: seizing upon some small print in the union’s collective agreement that the other boy hadn’t read, he refused to cross the threshold of the building.
~ ~ ~
Willem had decided to exterminate the cockroaches. One day he had brought along a piece of chalk and traced around the outline of the apartment and all the rooms, as if he were drawing a blueprint on top of reality. The theory was that the cockroaches wouldn’t be able to cross the line and would remain outside.
‘And the ones that are already inside won’t be able to leave?’ I asked him.
He promised he’d bring another solution for the ones inside. Logically, the cockroaches crossed the line as if nothing had changed: since when did borders work? Another day Willem had gone round the whole house with a spray gun. That day, while the poison took effect, we had gone to have a coffee in the Chinese restaurant over the road. Actually, my coffee was a beer. They gave us fortune cookies. Willem’s said: You will be recompensed for your good deeds. Mine said: He who seeks, finds.
‘I knew it!’ Willem said.
All that Bible study just to end up interpreting everything literally. Then it dawned on me that there weren’t any cockroaches in the Chinese restaurant. We tried to talk to the owner, the guy who looked like the owner, and to the waiters. Impossible: they only spoke Chinese. I tried to take one of them over to my building to show him a cockroach, to see if I could get him to understand that way, but when I tugged at his arm they all took fright and locked themselves in the kitchen. Willem said: ‘Perhaps if yuh didn’t drink so much.’