‘What it’s saying is that there’s a connection between mythology and the psychology of the masses. When the earth cracks open, the mythological gods wake up in people’s minds and they rebel. It’s exactly what you said the other day!’
‘Are you accusing me of being intellectual?’
‘I’m accusing you of being intelligent.’
In return, softened more by the gesture than the gift itself or the compliment, Juliet announced she was going to show me her treasures. She invited me to come into her room, at the back of the shop. I said I’d swing by the pharmacy first and that we’d have to wait a little while for the magic to take effect.
‘You really are a clown, Teo,’ she said.
Out the back of the shop there was a little patio and then a little further on, her bedroom, with no windows or ventilation, like a cave. Inside, the bed and all the junk you could possibly imagine and possibly fit into thirty square feet. Juliet turned on a lamp with a white light that dazzled all the cockroaches, who ran to hide behind or beneath the knick-knacks. From inside a trunk she took out two delicate little glass boxes. The first one she handed to me contained a transparent flake, of an orangey colour, stuck to what I supposed was the lower part. I stood and observed all four sides of the thing. All six: from above and below, too. I had no idea what it might be, if it still was something. Or what it had been, if it had ceased to be it. Or even what it might come to be, in the event it was growing, evolving, changing. And I had even less of an idea why it was in a little glass box and Juliet considered it a treasure. I told her I was going to step out onto the patio to look at it in daylight.
‘Relax,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve got no idea what it is. It’s not a riddle. It’s a tomato, a tomato from 1988. This tomato touched our engineer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano on the sixteenth of July. Remember that day? The earthquake of ’85 had a deadly aftershock: a tremor in society. That was the day the Revolution was going to start. It was going to, but the Engineer stopped it. People were itching to take the National Palace and he calmed us all down. He said no, no, no. Was he prudent, as history records, or had he made a pact with the government? What do you think?’
She held the other box out to me, and here it was easier to make out that the contents had once been a tomato, not just by comparing it to the previous one, but because it hadn’t yet been reduced to a flake: it had been a tomato in more recent times.
‘This one’s from 2006,’ the greengrocer said. ‘Do you know how many people there were in the Zócalo on that day? Over a million, they say. Can you imagine what would have happened if López Obrador had said the right words? He forgot to finish off that phrase about “to hell with institutions”. Crowds can’t start interpreting things — crowds, like armies, need orders. Another lost opportunity.’
I gave her back the little glass boxes. Juliet returned them to the trunk, where they would continue their progress towards total volatilisation. For a second I thought she was now going to show me her real treasure: an arsenal.
‘Do you know why I’ve kept these tomatoes?’
‘To remember,’ I replied.
‘Not to forget,’ she corrected me.
Hanging from the wall I discovered a photo in a little wooden frame, old yet polished. It was a newspaper clipping showing the faces of four young men: one was talking into a slender microphone held in his right hand, the two flanking him were staring off into the distance and, behind them, a dark-skinned guy with a moustache, his chin in his hand, stared intently at the one who was speaking. Judging by their hairstyles, the frame on the glasses worn by the one holding the mike, their shirt collars and their jacket lapels, I calculated it must be a photo from the sixties.
‘Now you must think I’m bonkers,’ Juliet said.
I said that I was actually thinking she was a soppy old thing. I went over to the wall to read what was written beneath the photo: ‘Press conference called last night in the faculty of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, by the National Strike Council.’
‘The guy with the moustache is my brother,’ Juliet said. ‘Do you know where he is now?’
I guessed he was undercover. Or I tried to guess, but I didn’t say anything out loud, naturally. Instead, I raised my eyebrows, forming a question.
‘If only I knew,’ she explained. ‘He went missing thirty-five years ago.’
I looked at the photo again, carefully this time. Juliet’s brother was the only one who looked convinced he wanted to be there; the other three were already fleeing, at least in spirit.
‘Do you have siblings?’ she asked me.
‘I had a sister, but she died.’
‘Was she older than you?’
‘A year older.’
‘How did she die?’
‘In the earthquake of ’85. And my mother, too.’
‘Seriously? Why didn’t you ever tell me?’
‘I don’t like thinking about it. You’ve never told me about your brother, either.’
‘Where did the tremor hit?’
‘The cardiology ward.’
‘You’re not making this up, are you?’
‘As if.’
‘I don’t know, we’re so close to the bed.’
‘Pity’s a terrible seduction technique.’
‘You’d be surprised, it can work.’
‘Seriously?’
‘But not with me. Shall we have a mezcal?’
‘Or a couple, even.’
We left her bedroom and went back through the shop as I mused that this was what being undercover really meant: two unburied bodies, the living dead, the ones who are alive only through a trick, or a crack that suddenly appears in one’s memory.
~ ~ ~
One afternoon, on a day that could have been any of those days that followed mercilessly on from each other (except Wednesday or Saturday as Willem hadn’t come earlier and would not come later), the crunching of metal outside announced that two cars had had a crash. I went out onto the balcony and, among the gossiping crowds, saw the entire literary salon striding over to the site of the accident. I downed what was left of my beer and, carrying my copy of Aesthetic Theory to create yet more confusion, headed downstairs with a view to joining the fray.
In the lobby, the copies of In Search of Lost Time lay face down, abandoned on the chairs with their legs spread open. I opened the Aesthetic Theory’s legs and placed it on top of one of the Lost Times, face down. It was things like this that at times made me wonder whether it might not be a bad idea to stop drinking, or at least to cut back a little. I went over to Francesca’s throne, the chair that presided over the circle, positioned at an angle from which she could observe both the lift and the main door. I hefted the brick up to within sight of my failing eyes, turned on the little light, used the magnifying glass to focus, and read:
However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned be — or be thought to be — so difficult as to oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them…
The salon members were a bunch of wanton hypocrites. I looked around and found a red pen, which I used to underline the passage. In the left-hand margin of the page, and along the top, because the message wouldn’t fit, I wrote: Exactly! Are you going to let me give you one or just carry on being a prim old prick-tease?