‘You’re as bad as the Yucatecs, who have the same word for searching and finding.’
And I would reply:
‘If you do not seek, you will not find.’
This was a phrase of Schoenberg’s that reminded me of my mother seventy years earlier, when I had lost a sock. I searched and searched and then it turned out that the dog had eaten the sock. My mother died in 1985, in the earthquake. The dog beat her to it by over forty years and in his haste he never discovered how the Second World War ended: he swallowed a pair of nylon tights, incredibly long ones, as long as my father’s secretary’s legs.
~ ~ ~
I’d come to live in the building one summer afternoon a year and a half ago, carrying a suitcase with some clothes, two boxes of belongings, a painting and an easel. The removal company had brought the furniture and a few appliances that morning. As I crossed the lobby, dodging the bulky forms that made up the salon, I repeated:
‘Don’t trouble yourselves, don’t trouble yourselves.’
Of course, no one did trouble themselves and they all just pretended to carry on reading, although what they were actually doing was looking sidelong at me. When I finally got to the lift doors, I heard the rumour that began on Francesca’s lips and spread from mouth to ear like a party game:
‘He’s a painter!’
‘He’s a waiter!’
‘He’s a baker!
‘He’s a Quaker!’
I took everything I could fit up in the lift and, ten minutes later, as I returned to the lobby to carry the rest up, like an oh-so-slow Sisyphus, I found that the salonists had organised a cocktail party to welcome me with fizz from the state of Zacatecas and savoury crackers spread with fish paste and mayonnaise.
‘Welcome!’ Hipólita shouted, handing me a bottle of DDT spray. ‘It’s just a little something, but you’ll need it.’
‘You must forgive us,’ said Francesca, ‘we didn’t realise you were an artist! We would have put the champagne on ice if we’d known.’
I took the plastic cup she handed me, full to the brim with warm fizzy wine, and held out my arm to make a toast when Francesca exclaimed:
‘To art!’
I’d extended my arm a little too horizontally, so instead of making a toast it looked like I was trying to give them the cup back, which was, in fact, what I wanted to do. They then asked me to speak, to say a few words in the name of art, and what I said, peering sadly at the furious bubbling coming from the disposable cup, was:
‘I’d prefer a beer.’
Francesca took a crumpled twenty-peso note from her purse and ordered one of her minions:
‘Go to the shop on the corner and get the artist a beer.’
Somewhat bewildered, I just managed to head off the jumble of questions trooping towards me in an attempt to dispel my anonymity:
‘Excuse me but how old are you?’
‘Are you a widower?’
‘What’s wrong with your nose?’
‘Where did you live before?’
‘Are you a bachelor?’
‘Why don’t you brush your hair?’
I stood stock-still and smiled, my cup of fizz untouched in my right hand, the DDT spray in my left, until there was a silence when I could reply.
‘So?’ Francesca said.
‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said, unfortunately before the guy who was going to fetch the beers had left the building. ‘I’m not an artist.’
‘I told you! He’s a baker!’ Hipólita shouted triumphantly, and I noticed her mouth was crowned with a fine dark fuzz of hairs.
‘Actually, I’m retired,’ I continued.
‘A retired artist!’ Francesca crowed. ‘No need to apologise, we’re all retired here. All of us except those who never did anything.’
‘I retired, from my family,’ Hipólita chipped in.
‘No, no, I was never an artist,’ I assured them so vehemently even I was suspicious.
One of the salon members who was heading over to offer me a plate of crackers stopped in his tracks and put it down on one of the chairs.
‘Shall I get the beer or not?’ the other minion called from the doorway.
‘Wait,’ Francesca ordered, then asked me: ‘What about the easel and the painting?’
‘They were my father’s,’ I replied. ‘He liked to paint. I used to like painting too, but that was a long time ago.’
‘Just what we need, a frustrated artist!’ Francesca exclaimed. ‘And from a long line of them, too! May I ask what you used to do?’
‘I was a taco seller.’
‘A taco seller?’
‘Yeah, I had a taco stand in the Candelaria de los Patos.’
The salon members started pouring the fizzy wine back into the bottle and, since their hands were shaking, half the liquid spilled onto the floor. Francesca looked over at the man awaiting the denouement in the doorway and commanded him:
‘Give me the twenty pesos.’
I felt the weight of the cup in my right hand disappear, felt Hipólita grab the DDT spray from my left hand, watched Francesca’s minion return the crumpled note to her and the entire salon pull the plug on the cocktail party, handing out the remaining crackers and putting the cork back in the bottle before taking up their books again. Francesca still stood there, looking me up and down, down and up, etching my shabby figure onto her mind’s eye, before declaring:
‘Impostor!’
I looked closely at her too, taking in her figure, her long, svelte, rake-like body, noticing that she had let down her hair and undone the first few buttons at the front of her dress while I’d been going up and down in the lift, felt the rare twinge in my crotch and, realising pretty quickly what she was about, gave the first of many shouts that, from that day forth, would be the catchphrase of our shtick:
‘Well, I beg your pardon for having been a taco seller, Madame!’
~ ~ ~
My mother had demanded an autopsy for the dog and Dad was attempting, fruitlessly, to prevent it.
‘What use is it knowing what the dog died of?’ he asked.
‘We have to know what happened,’ my mother replied. ‘Everything has an explanation.’
The creature had spent the previous night trying to be sick, without success. Mum counted the socks: every pair was complete. This is when she became suspicious, because my father used to take the dog out for a walk every day after dinner. She paid the butcher to slit the animal open. They carried the carcass out to the little patio in the back where we hung out the washing and which my mother had carpeted with newspapers. While the preparations went on, Dad followed my mother around, saying over and over:
‘Is this necessary? Is it really necessary? Poor animal, it’s barbaric.’
I tried to calm him down:
‘Don’t worry, Dad, he can’t feel anything any more.’
I was about to turn eight at the time. The preparations continued and, instead of trying to halt the operation, my father promised to paint a portrait of the dog that they could hang in the living room, so Mum would never forget him.
‘A figurative portrait,’ Dad hastened to add; ‘none of that avant-garde stuff.’
My mother didn’t even reply to such a proposition. There was an outstanding, that is to say, never-ending dispute over a cubist portrait of Mum my father had painted when they were courting and which he had given her as a wedding present. She hated the picture because, depending on the mood she was in, she said it made her look like a clown, a monster or a deformed whale.