Tacos came and went, and I waited patiently until, early one morning, I pulled my little trick with the nylon stocking. It was my sister’s, who, when she discovered in the morning that someone had been rummaging around in her chest of drawers, looked at me suspiciously until she saw Turnup lying stiff on the floor. Then she said: ‘You took your time.’
To my surprise, my mother didn’t request an autopsy. She went out for a walk and came back with a mutt she’d found roaming around outside the market. That’s what she called him, Market, even though that wasn’t even a dog’s name. When my sister pointed this out, Mum refused to give him another name, playing dumb. It was something else she pretended to do around that time, as well as stopping work: pretending she didn’t understand and sometimes, pretending to be mad, with no warning. Now that my sister and I were adults she seemed to have discovered that she could change the way she manipulated us, switching from her habitual intransigence, which by now was wearing thin, to an absent-minded attitude with which she gradually and heedlessly transferred to us the weight of her responsibilities.
I promised my mother I would bury Turnup and took his body to an early morning taco stand near our house. They gave me five pesos for it: the price of four beers. The next day I took her out for breakfast to cheer her up. When the taco seller saw me approach and order two tacos with everything, his hair bristled in shock, as if imagining we’d involved him in some kind of black magic ritual.
‘Are they good?’ I asked Mum as she chewed diligently.
With her left hand she made the sign for ‘so-so’ and then, once she’d swallowed her mouthful, whispered in my ear so as not to offend the stallholder: ‘The meat’s a bit tough.’
~ ~ ~
I went to the Chinese restaurant practically every other day to have a beer. I always took a newspaper and occasionally, my notebook. But really what I was doing was analysing the Chinese as they went back and forth, trying to figure out their secret. One day I saw them sprinkling water in the corners of the restaurant. I went back to my apartment and copied them. The cockroaches clapped their antennae together: hydrated. Another time, I wrote down in my notebook the brands of the cleaning products I saw them use, bought the same ones and gave them to the girl who came twice a week to clean the apartment, along with a series of strict instructions: apply this one neat, dilute that one with water… The smells changed, and the shine on the surfaces was different, too. The cockroaches, blithely unaware. I invested in some plastic plants: the cockroaches started using them as a holiday resort. I put paper shades over every light bulb, which I then had to take down again in the middle of the night: the sound of their little feet walking over them kept me awake.
I started collecting fortune cookies in a box I kept under the bed. I thought that receiving a prediction every day was excessive. Dangerous, even. Occasionally, especially when I grew desperate and was about to throw in the towel, I would open one in search of a sign, which did about as much good as a few pats on the back.
Some Wednesdays, or Saturdays, I would bring Willem along with me, and he came up with the most bizarre theories: that it was the smell of the Chinese that scared off the cockroaches. That they fried them and ate them. That the decor in the place was so horrendous that not even roaches would enter the restaurant. There was an element of truth to this last claim: the restaurant was always empty. He even bought me one of those cats with an endlessly waving little paw. A china figurine, I mean. The cat became one more ride in our cockroach theme park.
Juliet took pity on me and claimed she had a comrade who spoke Chinese, a Maoist who had learned Mandarin in Peru.
‘I’ll ask him to help you out,’ she said, ‘but you have to promise you won’t ask him anything or tell anyone about him: he’s undercover.’
She organised the meeting one afternoon in the shop, so she could explain the situation to him. The guy turned out to be a twenty-three-year-old kid who showed up wearing a filthy red Shining Path T-shirt. He had dreadlocks and his fingertips were stained with something that might have been ink, tobacco or gunpowder. Undercover meant that he had been living for four years in a makeshift camp run by the CAH in the faculty of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The CAH: the Alternative Strike Council. I’d come prepared, carrying my Aesthetic Theory, just in case, should things start to get ugly. His eyes went straight to the book.
‘Woah, Grandpa’s into the hard-core stuff,’ he said.
Once we’d given him the low-down on what I needed, we crossed the road and he went into the restaurant alone to talk to the Chinese. I stayed outside to wait for him. He’d said it was better that way: the Chinese love conspiracies. He came back out in less than two minutes, his face doing its best attempt (which was terrible) at imitating a patronising expression.
‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘These Chinese are Koreans.’
He tried to charge me 200 pesos and in the end I gave him twenty. He took another look at the Aesthetic Theory growling in my right hand.
‘If that’s the kind of stuff you’re into I can get more,’ he assured me. ‘There’s a bank around here that I supply, a bank library, you know it?’
‘You do business with a bank?’
‘It’s a postmodern form of extortion: what matters is putting capital to work in favour of the Revolution.’
‘By stealing from the university?’
‘The university’s budget comes from the government. It’s a morally right crime squared. Are you interested or not? Come on, twenty pesos a book, bargain basement!’
‘I get them for free, I nick them from the library.’
‘Woah! A thief stealing from a thief stealing from a thief stealing from a thief. You’ve earned infinite forgiveness. But in the library there is what there is, you can’t choose — I’m offering you a personal delivery service.’
‘Get me Notes to Literature.’
‘Shit, only snuff films are more hard-core than that.’
‘It’s a present.’
‘Man, well, if you put poison on the corners of the pages it’s the perfect gift. I’ll get it for you.’
He shook my hand in a strange fashion and our fingers got entangled. I asked him what his name was.
‘Mao,’ he replied.
‘Your real name.’
‘Mao is my real name. You know what they say, Grandpa, name is destiny.’
‘Don’t call me Grandpa. I’m not anybody’s grandpa, I don’t have grandchildren.’
‘Who said you have to have grandchildren to be a grandpa? You shouldn’t read so much Adorno, you’ll blow a fuse.’
It was that time of the evening when people were rushing to get to the shops before they closed and which in Calle Basilia Franco could be identified by the queue in the bakery and the sound of Hipólita’s pleas as she begged for crumbs among the customers. Mao had walked off nonchalantly, to the rhythm of an imaginary song, taking care to avoid the hurrying crowds. On the corner, Dorotea was waiting for him. I saw them share a long kiss and then, arm in arm, they went into the ice-cream parlour.