‘Son,’ my father said, to exclude my sister from the conversation, ‘I want you to cremate me and give my ashes to Gunther Gerzso.’
He put his right hand into his pocket and took out a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled the painter’s name.
‘That’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘I know him.’
‘You do?’ my father asked, excited for the first time.
‘I mean, I know who he is. I don’t know him personally, but one of my old friends from La Esmeralda might know him. And if not him, I can probably ask José Luis Cuevas.’
‘No, no, no. Cuevas is figurative, it has to be an abstract painter. The Rupture was necessary to break once and for all with muralism, you see? But that was just an intermediary phase; the trend now is towards abstractionism.’
‘What about Vicente Rojo?’
‘Yes, Vicente’s all right. Felguérez would do, too. But try Gerzso first.’
‘You’re a real chip off the old block,’ my sister interrupted us. ‘My mother was right: you’re both as frustrated as each other.’
Back at the bus station, as we said our goodbyes, my father asked if we had a dog. I told him we did.
‘Watch out,’ he warned us, ‘you want to be careful with that.’
~ ~ ~
And then, just when it seemed like nothing else could happen, everything shifted, as if some joker had moved it all around, and suddenly there were stockings in the fridge, broken light bulbs under my pillow, the cockroaches were reading Proust, the dead grew tired of being dead and the past was no longer what it had been.
Notes to Literature
~ ~ ~
The incident was front-page news in all the papers, the radio was repeating it over and over and it was the main item on all the TV bulletins that day: the ground around the esplanade to the Monument to the Revolution was cracking. There were thousands of jokes on the internet about it, photomontages showing a dinosaur bursting up out of the ground. Juliet showed me some of them on her phone. We’d missed our chance to go and desecrate Madero’s tomb — we were about to head over there but the area had been cordoned off. Two days later, the experts appointed to find an explanation delivered their verdict and the dinosaur story suddenly seemed tame. It was the Revolutionaries’ moustaches, which hadn’t stopped growing and had got all tangled up in the sewer system. The experts’ assessment was so exact it set out who was responsible: the fault lay with Villa and Cárdenas. Madero, Calles and Carranza were absolved.
I copied down in my notebook the conversations I had over those days with Juliet, all our speculations, to make Francesca jealous.
‘The Revolution’s really coming this time,’ Juliet announced, beaming. ‘It’s just like in ’85! People here only wake up when the ground opens up under their feet.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Juliette,’ I countered. ‘All that’s going to happen is they’ll change the names of a few streets, take down a few statues. Just look at who they’re blaming! If the Monument falls down completely they’ll say that Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas were terrorists.’
‘The people won’t let themselves be manipulated now, Teo, you’ll see: when the underground’s involved the gods of death and destruction all rise up, the monsters from the subsoil. Think about 1985. It took an earthquake swallowing part of Mexico City, thousands of deaths for people to wake up. Just like now. They’re waking up Coatlicue, our mother of the subsoil! You know who that is?’
‘Of course I do, she’s Huitzilopochtli’s mother.’
‘Our temple-sweeping mother, miraculously impregnated like the Virgin Mary, except by a little ball of feathers instead of a dove, and who forms with her son a duality: darkness and light, waste and fertility, death and life. Do you know what happened when they found the figure of Coatlicue that’s in the Anthropology Museum now? They put her back in the ground! And not just because they were frightened by such a terrible image — this was in 1790 and the Church ordered that it be buried again because they were worried about the influence it might have on young people. If they hadn’t put her back I guarantee Coatlicue would have speeded up the start of Independence by twenty years!’
‘Coatlicue my arse! Young people nowadays don’t know anything about Aztec mythology.’
‘That doesn’t matter, you don’t need to know it, we all carry it inside us. And anyway, who said it’s young people who are going to start the Revolution? What if we’re the ones who have to do it? We’ve got nothing to lose, we’ve barely got any future left.’
‘But we’ve got a lot of past. Don’t kid yourself, Juliette, the only ones who’ve got nothing to lose are the dead.’
‘Or the living dead.’
In the lift, I don’t recall whether going up or going down, Francesca harangued me furiously: ‘This is plagiarism! I think it’s from a novel by García Márquez, except he has a woman’s hair that won’t stop growing, not moustaches.’
‘Really! And do you consider it plagiarism when reality starts imitating a novel? Run and tell the experts who wrote the report: if they sue a Nobel Prize-winner it’s going to cost them an arm and a leg!’
~ ~ ~
Papaya-Head stuck his papaya head into the bar on the corner, where I was on beer number six. It was barely two in the afternoon but as it was a Sunday I was working, earnestly and resolutely, to earn my weekly bread: free bar snacks. He walked over to the table where I was sitting alone, and I could almost see him spitting out the black, gelatinous papaya seeds, except it was only spittle.
‘They said I’d find you here.’
‘They were right. You’ll find me here from nine until two and from four till eight Monday to Friday, and I’m also on duty weekends. You work on Sundays too?’
‘I’m not here on business. Can I sit down?’
‘Can I say no? What are you drinking? Tequila, mezcal? Or would you prefer something stronger?’
‘Stronger?’
‘Caustic soda, chlorine, turps…’
‘I’ll have a beer.’
I shouted at the barman to bring us a large bottle of Corona and concentrated on trying to figure out why Papaya-Head would go around wearing such an extravagant combination of colours: a fluorescent yellow T-shirt with orange Bermuda shorts, a tropical kind of get-up, the opposite to the grey suit he’d been wearing when he’d visited me as a representative of the dog police. Did he know his head looked like a papaya?
‘You should be at the beach in that,’ I said. ‘Nice T-shirt, perfect for hiding from a sniper.’
‘It was a present.’
Which I interpreted as: his wife was the one who, consciously or not, bought his clothes for him in accordance with the shape of his head.
‘Did your wife give it to you?’ I asked.
‘Something like that,’ he replied.
‘Does “something like that” mean a girlfriend, a mistress?’
‘“Something like that” means something like that.’
Our beer arrived and I poured out two glasses; Papaya-Head immediately took a loud gulp. Without the formal protocols of work, which covered up his social awkwardness, what remained was a civilised, twenty-miles-an-hour car crash, not at all fatal, but irritating nonetheless.
‘I want to ask for your help,’ he said.
‘Do you now! Let’s drink a toast first, though.’
I held my glass of beer up towards the centre of the table.
‘To dogs!’ I exclaimed.
‘Hey, that report was archived,’ he said, bristling.