My outrage made her laugh out loud, satisfied that her future self had had the gall to turn me down just as she was already doing back then.
‘And what happened in ’85?’ she wanted to know. ‘Did it take you more than thirty years to lose hope?’
‘My mother and my sister died and the council used the fact that the rental contract was in Mum’s name to get me out of the house. I had to find somewhere else to live.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know they’d died.’
‘Yes you did, I spoke to you the day it happened.’
‘So it was just mental masturbation.’
‘What was?’
‘Marrying me; being an artist.’
‘What’s wrong with masturbation?’
‘You’re right, I’d forgotten what a pervert you were. Just look at your trousers, they’re wet already.’
At that moment, as if reality was produced by her words, I felt a dampness spread across my groin and, when I looked down to confirm the evidence of ejaculation, a shadow rose up between us suddenly, a gigantic shadow that covered everything. I looked up and saw the Sorcerer, looming menacingly — how tall was he? Sixty feet? 250? He opened his mouth to speak, or rather to shout, and it was as if he was getting ready to spit fire.
‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU? WHAT DID I TELL YOU? JUST LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENING TO YOUR NOVEL. I HAVE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST. I HAVE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST. I HAVE SUFFERED…’
I woke up amid the shouting and left the warmth of my bed immediately, taking care not to fall onto the floor again. I was so shaken I even thought I heard noises in the living room. I left my bedroom and switched on the lights: there were the cockroaches, focused on their activities. I poured myself a whisky to calm myself and, as if it was an exorcism, opened my notebook and started writing furiously:
They said that María Izquierdo was afraid of him. That Juan O’Gorman liked his paintings. That Diego looked down on him from on high, scaling the arrogance of ladders and the scaffolds of his murals. That Lola Álvarez Bravo took some photographs of him that mysteriously came out blurred. That Frida didn’t remember him. Or did a good job of pretending she didn’t. That José Luis Cuevas didn’t know if he was for him or against him. They said he came from a town where families with money diligently practised inbreeding until they overcame deformity, imbecility and madness. That he had been married twice. That he was like a seminarian who had the Devil inside him. They said he’d had smallpox, syphilis, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, measles, parvovirus. That he used to repeat over and over again: I have suffered more than Christ, I have suffered more than Christ. That he pretended to be from a family with money who had lost their wealth in the Cristero War. They said that Agustín Lazo told him that history’s quota of tormented artists had already been filled. That he never took classes at La Esmeralda after that. They said he had schizophrenia, that he’d been committed to every single one of Mexico City’s lunatic asylums, that he’d been given electroshock therapy, that he’d had a lobotomy. That he used to go to the openings of shows to scare the stuck-up old women, like someone scaring children in a park. They said his paintings looked like Giorgio de Chirico’s. That he painted the landscape of the Apocalypse and that in his still lifes, the fruits made you think of necrophilia. They said he had never travelled, that he was a hick. That he’d been born in Lagos de Moreno.
The next morning, as I left my apartment more sleep-deprived and hung-over than usual, Francesca was standing guard over the landing from her own half-open door and she yelled out:
‘At last, the protagonist appears!’
~ ~ ~
A telegram had come: a wave from the Pacific Ocean had swallowed up my father. Mum didn’t want to know anything and shut herself up in her room with Market. Along with a thousand other things, closed doors drove Market mad. He wouldn’t stop whining; it was almost as if my mother had hired him as a professional mourner. My sister and I took a bus and, sixteen hours later, we got to Manzanillo. My father was waiting for us at the bus station. For a dead man, he looked pretty good. For a living one, abysmal.
He took us out for seafood at a little palm-covered shack by the beach. The sea smelled putrid. My father apologised, as if this, too, was his fault. We started eating our prawns and ceviche, pretending he’d never been dead. Not in reality or in our minds. Meanwhile, Dad interrogated us. Were we at university, did we have jobs. Our answers disappointed him.
‘I thought you were going to be a painter,’ he said to me.
‘I did too,’ I replied. ‘I was taking classes at La Esmeralda.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Mum’s got arthritis, I had to get a job.’
‘Do you make good tacos?’
‘Really good, I’m famous all over town.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said, with the fragile resolve of the white liar.
Then he asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I told him I was going to get married in a few months. It was the time of my supposed marriage. He asked to see a picture of my fiancée. I didn’t have one on me. He asked what she was called. I told him she was called Marilín, but my sister cut in and said she was actually called Hilaria. My father tried to interrogate my sister, too, but she kept quiet, pretending to be very busy enjoying the view: she was seeing a married man on the sly. When it was time for dessert he recommended we try the mango in syrup and eventually asked us how our mother was. I enumerated her ailments for him.
We finished our dessert and it began to grow dark, and all our blood went to our stomachs to work. Then we really did have the impression we’d been eating with a ghost, that our father had died and we were in a dream. The only thing we didn’t know was who was having the dream: my mother, me or my sister.
‘Are you ill?’ I asked him.
‘I’ve got cancer,’ he replied. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’
‘That you’re alive and you’ve got cancer, or that you’re not dead?’ my sister asked.
My father sighed, as if having cancer gave him permission to respond to reproaches by sighing and changing the subject.
‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘That’s why I called you here. Can I count on you two?’
‘No,’ my sister said.
‘It depends,’ I said.
He looked at my sister one last time, before focusing on me: I knew perfectly well he’d only asked both of us so his request for help would seem like a shared burden and wouldn’t weigh me down with responsibility.
‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I want you to cremate me, mix my ashes with paint, and give them to an artist.’
It most definitely wasn’t a dream, and my father wasn’t dead: this kind of thing, so utterly nonsensical, only happened in real life.
‘Have you gone mad?’ my sister said. ‘Didn’t you tell us you wanted us to throw your ashes into a museum? Do you not think that’s eccentric enough? Has your last screw finally come loose?’
‘He’s not mad,’ I interrupted her. ‘He’s just changed his mind.’
My father looked down at the leftover mango on his plate, pre-emptively tired of having to give an explanation that at the same time was a confession of his failure.
‘All I wanted to do in life,’ he began, ‘was to make a piece of transcendental art and I couldn’t do it. I lacked talent; I lacked imagination, technique, even money. Money means time to paint, peace of mind, you can’t be an artist if you have to work. But while I didn’t manage to create a truly great work of art, what I can do is become one myself, become ashes stuck to a canvas, become powder paint, artistic texture.’
‘I’m calling the loony bin,’ my sister said.