‘Why are you so worried? It’s almost as if Villem was your son.’
‘I like the boy, he just needs a bit of experience.’
‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t play dumb with me. It turns you on to think of your little Mormon boy screwing my Dorotea. You’re a pervert.’
~ ~ ~
It was three in the afternoon already and all we’d been given to eat was peanuts, crisps and two miserable little fried tacos with beans. Papaya-Head was resolutely reading the opening to his novel and drinking oh-so-slowly, hindering the steady flow of bar snacks. I was starving, so the next time he took a breath to signal the full stop, new line and space between one paragraph and the next, I interrupted him.
‘Hurry up, the bar snacks are running out,’ I ordered him.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Finish your beer and order another one so they’ll bring us some more food.’
He downed what was left in his glass in one gulp and I ordered another large bottle, which came accompanied by two bowls of soup each the size of a ten-peso piece.
‘Is that all?’ I asked the waiter.
‘Do you want more?’ he replied. ‘You’re taking your time today.’
Twenty minutes later, we were in the same place: I, starving; Papaya-Head, absorbed in the meanderings of his novel.
‘Hey, what did you have for breakfast?’ I interrupted him.
‘Sausages,’ said Papaya-Head.
‘Stands to reason.’
‘What does?’
‘You’re trying to destroy me. Come on, drink up!’
‘Oh, I’m destroying you, am I? You’re not listening to me.’
‘Of course I am, I don’t have a choice.’
‘Well you’re not telling me how I can improve my novel.’
‘Because it’s all bad!’
‘All of it? Tell me one thing that’s bad, just one!’
‘Just look at the protagonist, look at the things you say about him to justify his dog-killing. You say he’s solitary, he’s an alcoholic and a drug addict, a womaniser, that he’s got a scar on his face and a toothpick in his mouth, like a ruffian from the movies. You paint such a bad picture of him it’s as if you’re trying to say that evil is a physical attribute.’
‘It’s based on a true story,’ he said, defensively. ‘It’s a portrait of the owner of the butcher’s shop who we caught selling dog meat. I’ve got the photos they took when they arrested him.’
‘And you think that explains his behaviour?’
‘His behaviour’s explained by the fact that he’s a frustrated guy who doesn’t even want to be a butcher.’
‘No shit! I’m going to let you in on a secret: no one wants to be a butcher, not even if they love it, except someone has to be a butcher, right? Otherwise the world would be full of poets, artists, actors and intrepid explorers, and the parks would be full of statues honouring them, but there’d be no one to make things work. Someone has to hunt the bison, sow the fields, turn the screws of the world. And in any case, you’re judging your character without considering one fundamental detail.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘First finish your beer,’ I ordered him, and I leaned back so he’d understand I wasn’t going to continue until he did so.
He obeyed, I shouted at the waiters to bring us another large bottle and finally they sent over two plates of pozole.
‘You’ve forgotten where your protagonist lives,’ I told him, ‘where he was born and grew up. Are you from Mexico City?’
‘No, I’m from a little town in the provinces’, he replied.
‘I knew it! You don’t understand this city. In your town they call a guy who kills a dog a dog-killer; here, they’d call him a survivor.’
‘Actually, in my village they’d call him a cynic.’
‘And here we call people like you provincial. Don’t you get it? Dogs don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that they’re dogs. They’re dogs just because they are, but they could be anything else that worked as a symbol of life’s cruelty. If they weren’t dogs they’d be rats, or rabbits.’
‘The dogs are dogs because this is what happened. The dogs matter because that’s reality.’
‘Reality doesn’t matter.’
‘Do you mind telling me what does matter, in that case?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure doesn’t: the fact that you’re writing a novel.’
‘All you want to do is ruin me.’
‘All I want to do is eat pozole and it’s getting cold — do you mind?’
He stood up, making a great show of pushing his chair back noisily.
‘On your own head be it,’ he warned me.
And then something happened that really did matter: Papaya-Head walked across the bar, angry as a bullet, and left without paying.
~ ~ ~
The voice on the telephone, a female voice all fuzzy with static that had asked to speak to me, identified itself by saying it was calling from the public health clinic in Manzanillo. My father had just died of cancer and someone had to deal with the body. I bluffed as best I could and Mum didn’t ask any questions, even smiling at me, fancying that this mysterious phone call meant I was finally going to stop bumbling through life and start putting the story of my failed marriage to Marilín behind me, after all these years. When she went out to walk the dog, I told my sister what had happened.
‘I’m not going,’ she said.
‘We promised him,’ I replied.
‘You promised him — I’ve already buried him, in a graveyard in Manzanillo, just like we told Mum we did, like normal people do. Or had you forgotten?’
I told my mother I was going away for a few days and she didn’t ask where or with whom, only smiled again, even more broadly this time. My sister and I had become adults, but Mum hadn’t stopped being Mum and she would only cease to be so if we made her a grandmother, something that would never happen.
I got on a bus and, fourteen hours later, arrived in Manzanillo. My father was waiting for me at the station. For a dead man, he looked dreadful (they might have put some make-up on him). For a living one, he looked like a ghost. I hugged his puny bones to me and gave him a loud telling-off, right into his ear to make sure he would hear me: ‘You’ve got to stop doing this. What happens when you really die one day and I don’t believe you and you end up in an unmarked grave or in the university’s medical department?’
‘That’s what happens in children’s stories and you’re an adult now,’ he replied. ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘She wouldn’t come, she says she’s already buried you.’
‘She promised!’
‘I promised, and here I am. Don’t tell me you want me to cremate you alive!’
He suggested we go and have lunch at a seafood shack by the sea, but I refused; I didn’t want this to become a family tradition. We ate in a restaurant in town, which was unbearably hot in spite of the ceiling fans spinning round as quickly and as noisily as they could. When my father saw me fanning myself with the menu, he said:
‘I told you: there’s not a breath of air in here. We didn’t have to suffer for nothing. You’re just like your mother.’
‘Didn’t you have cancer?’
‘I did, but I got better.’
‘You don’t say! So why did you make me come here, then?’
‘Not so fast, all in good time. How’s your wife? You got any kids?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Weren’t you going to get married?’
‘Weren’t you going to die?’
‘So we’ve both been jilted. I hope your bride was prettier than mine — mine was frightful.’