‘We were at a dance.’
‘We were, now we’re here.’
‘Where’s Marilín?’
‘Marilín, Marilín… I’VE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST! YOU HEAR? I’VE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST! IF YOU THINK I’M GOING TO LET YOU STICK ME IN A ROMANTIC NOVEL OR A SELF-HELP BOOK THEN YOU’RE VERY, VERY WRONG!’
At that moment I woke up, because, as well as the Sorcerer shouting in the dream, outside, in real life, I got a stabbing pain in my liver. It took me so long to get back to sleep that I memorised the whole dream.
In the morning, a tense silence in the lift as it descended. The minute the apparatus juddered to a halt in the lobby, Francesca started correcting me.
‘Marilyn doesn’t have an accent on the last syllable. And you spell it with a “y”.’
~ ~ ~
An inspector from the Federal District department and the head of the street sellers’ association came to the taco stand. It was six in the evening and my uncle hadn’t arrived yet. I was standing on the corner, waiting for him. The inspector showed me his ID, making it clear that this authorised him to commit superior abuses. The other guy took out a little plastic case containing a filthy card from the National Confederation of Popular Organisations, which apparently was a passport to anywhere he could think of. I had seen this man before: he was the guy we paid our rates to. That’s what my uncle called him: the rates guy. They both carried folders stuffed with papers, pens behind their ears, paper clips stuck in the buttons of their shirts; they were dressed as itinerant jobsworths.
‘You’re the kid who helps old Bigotes out, aren’t you?’ the rates guy said, inserting the card back into its plastic holder as delicately as an antiques dealer.
Bigotes was my uncle’s taco-selling nickname, on account of his large moustache, and also the name of his stand: Tacos Don Bigotes. I said that I was and that he was running late, that by now the stand should have been set up and I should be slicing the onions and the coriander.
‘Didn’t you hear what happened?’ the inspector asked.
I shook my head from right to left and from left to right.
‘Old Bigotes kicked the bucket,’ the rates guy said.
‘What?’ I said, from shock, but they took it to mean that I wanted to know how it had happened.
‘They found him in La Alameda, he’d been stabbed five times, twice fatally,’ the inspector explained.
‘What?’ I said again, from shock once more, and this time they thought I wanted to know why.
‘Seems it was “girl trouble”,’ said the inspector, the tone of bureaucratic sarcasm in his voice adding scare quotes.
‘Gay trouble, more like,’ the rates guy said, laughing.
I raised my eyebrows as close to my hairline as I could: instinct told me it was better to pretend I knew nothing about this.
‘You didn’t know Bigotes was a faggot?’ the inspector said.
I said that I didn’t. What I actually said was: ‘What?’
‘What about you?’ the rates guy asked.
‘What about me?’
‘Are you a faggot too?’
I said I wasn’t, that I had a girlfriend.
‘Well everyone thinks you’re a faggot,’ he went on. ‘All Bigotes’ assistants were. He brought them all from a place on Calle Luis Moya. Do you know what I’m talking about? You’re not lying to us, are you?’
I explained that Bigotes had given me a job because he was my uncle. They looked at each other, as if checking whether it was appropriate to offer condolences in this kind of situation, dealing with this sort of people. They concluded that it wasn’t.
‘But are you a faggot or not?’ the rates guy insisted.
‘No, I’ve told you, Bigotes was my uncle.’
‘Well, let’s just hope it’s not genetic,’ the inspector said.
‘Are you or aren’t you?’ the rates guy asked again.
I said that I wasn’t, again.
‘Good,’ the inspector said. ‘You’ll be of more use to us that way.’
‘Are you interested in business, kid?’ the rates guy asked.
‘Business?’ I said, because I didn’t understand, but they thought I wanted to know how it worked.
‘We’ll let you have this corner and you give us ten per cent of what you make,’ the rates guy said. ‘Ten for me and ten for my associate here.’
‘Ten for the Confederation and ten for the Department,’ the inspector corrected him.
‘But I don’t have a stand,’ I said.
They explained that they’d lease it to me, that it was part of the agreement and was already included in the ten per cent.
‘Twenty per cent,’ the rates guy said.
‘Are you in?’ the inspector asked.
‘I don’t know, I’ll have to talk to my mother.’
They looked at each other as if suspecting for a moment they’d got the wrong person and it was all a misunderstanding. They asked me how old I was. I told them I was twenty-one.
‘And you have to ask your mum, kid?’ the inspector said. ‘What you need to do is help your mother. The stand’s a really good business, you’ll see.’
‘Bigotes was her brother, and she doesn’t know about any of this yet,’ I explained.
‘Even more reason not to ask her, then,’ the inspector said. ‘Just tell her you inherited it, she’ll be happy.’
‘You have to decide now,’ the rates guy said. ‘We’re giving you an opportunity. There’s a waiting list to get a spot on this corner.’
I knew it really was a good opportunity; one of the ways I used to help my uncle was by counting the money when we closed up the stand. I said yes, thinking that if I said no I’d end up with nothing, and if I accepted and I didn’t like it, I could always give it up. The inspector handed me a card: on the back he’d written a code in numbers and letters.
‘If one of our colleagues from the Department comes, show him this card. Keep it in your wallet. Don’t lose it. Without this card you’re no one, got it?’
I said yes.
‘Tonight I’ll come round to settle up.’ The rates guy said. ‘Everything had better add up, don’t you try and be smart. We wouldn’t want you to end up a faggot, now.’
‘Another thing,’ the inspector said.
He turned and looked across the road stretching out his arm to signal to a guy leaning against the wall there. The individual crossed the road without looking and a car had to screech to a halt to avoid running him down. When the driver stuck his head out of the window to curse at him, the man showed him a pistol he had hidden under his shirt, tucked into his trousers. He tucked his shirt in again and came over to where we were. He had a scar criss-crossing his face and a toothpick between his teeth. He was spectacularly ugly, like the caricature of a despot drawn by an artist troubled by the atrocities of war, so ugly it was depressing, because it implied that beauty was a moral attribute.
‘Evening,’ he said.
‘Evening,’ I repeated.
The rates guy put his right hand on the man’s shoulder and informed me:
‘My pal here’s the one who’ll sell you the meat.’
~ ~ ~
The doorbell rang and it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday. On the intercom, Mao’s lilting voice announced:
‘I have your order.’
‘Pizza? You’ve got the wrong apartment.’
‘I’m from the UPD: Unintelligible Philosopher Deliveries.’
I told him to come up, pressed the button that opened the main door and, in the obligatory five minutes it took him get upstairs (almost ten, as it turned out), began to imagine the commotion going on down in the lobby caused by the combination of his dreadlocks, his gently swaying walk and the pong he gave off. Finally, Mao rapped at the door to my apartment as if typing out a telegram: first one rap on its own, then several little raps spaced out and finished off with a kind of samba flourish. When I opened the door, my eyebrows expressing bewilderment, he apologised.