‘Traitor!’ I shouted as soon as he answered the phone.
‘Saboteur!’
‘How you could stoop so low?’
‘I could say exactly the same: all you ever wanted was to stop me writing my novel. You know that after just one session with Francesca I’ve already got the first chapter?’
‘You betrayed me for a novel!’
‘Go and find someone else to buy your drinks!’
‘You big fat papaya-head!’
I heard him hang up and the mere prospect of ending up in an old people’s home made me drink that day until I lost consciousness.
~ ~ ~
‘Will you let me draw you?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Can I hold your hand?’
‘Tomorrow. Weren’t you going to look for another job?’
‘Tomorrow. Can I kiss you?’
‘Tomorrow. Didn’t you say the taco stand was temporary? When are you going to stop selling tacos?’
‘Tomorrow. Will you marry me?’
‘Tomorrow. Why don’t you enrol at university to study something useful?’
‘Tomorrow. Will you let me come in and watch while you pose?’
‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’
Wanks came and went, and thus, life went on.
~ ~ ~
Our bodies floated in a desert-like wilderness studded here and there with dead trees that looked as if they would come to life at any minute thanks to some wizardry; dead trees that, instead of growing green again, and covering themselves with leaves, threatened to pull their roots from the earth and start walking; dead trees with branches like arms, monsters from a child’s nightmare; trees like the living dead. On the horizon a few rocky hills were visible and, up in the sky, some strange clouds, clouds whose shapes not even a meteorologist or an art critic would be able to decipher.
I squeezed my hands to calm Marilín down, because I sensed she was with me, but I wasn’t squeezing anything at all, Marilín wasn’t there. Instead, I could see the back of the Sorcerer, delicately moving his right arm, from which poured, in anguished brush strokes, the surrounding landscape. He finished painting a tree and floated over towards me holding his palette and his paintbrush. He started looking at the landscape as if looking at the landscape were an order: look at the landscape! he ordered me with his gaze, look at the landscape! I looked at the landscape and wished I wasn’t there, in this prehuman apocalypse, as if life on Earth had ended before it had begun, as if evolution had gone wrong and life were slowly dying out without having managed to produce even a tadpole, as if the world were going to end and the only vestiges would be these sorrowful trees.
The Sorcerer breathed deeply, and I breathed deeply, and in that world there were no smells other than the greasy smell of oil paint.
‘Where’s Marilín?’ I asked.
‘Marilín, Marilín… ’ he replied.
He stretched out his neck, his head passing through the physical bounds of the canvas, and when I imitated him I could see his bedroom. On the bed, tangled up in sweaty sheets, lay Marilín, her hands and feet tied, condemned by the tape over her mouth to an oppressed silence. On the walls were framed still lifes with fruit: peaches that were buttocks, watermelons and dragon fruit that were vaginas, and on the bedside table, a papaya cut in half obscenely displaying its gelatinous belly.
I put my head back inside the painting, propelled by a dizzying rage my hoary old body couldn’t match. My fist waved slowly around in the static atmosphere of the apocalyptic landscape.
‘Calm down, compadre, don’t be like that,’ the Sorcerer said.
‘Let her go!’ I shouted.
‘That depends on you. If you fulfil your side of the bargain nothing will happen to her, I promise. I didn’t want to go to such extremes, but you don’t seem to understand.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘You still don’t get it?’
‘How can I if you haven’t asked me to do anything?’
‘Do I have to tell you? Are you going to waste the symbolic power of a dream and settle for literalism?’
‘Or we could play a guessing game.’
‘You’re a bit slow, aren’t you. Very slow, in fact.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘What is it that you want?’
‘Do you really not understand? I want you to write a novel about me!’
‘I don’t write novels!’
‘There you go again!’
‘I wanted to be a painter, an artist; I was never interested in literature.’
‘You wanted to be a painter, you wanted to be an artist, but you weren’t.’
‘And I’m not a writer, either!’
‘But you’ve got an artistic temperament, which is what matters. When you have an artistic temperament you can use it equally for music or for painting or for literature. Let me show you something.’
Then the Sorcerer left his palette and paintbrush on the branch of a tree, which took them as if it had fingers, and put his hands in his trouser pocket, from where he was going to take out a fortune cookie. Curiously, I knew that it was a fortune cookie without having seen it, as if it were in my own pocket, and I could feel the Sorcerer’s cadaverous fingers rummaging about near my groin, not his, and the shock and the tickly feeling made me wake up.
I was so drunk, still, that I decided I’d better not get up, although this was what my head was demanding: that I go to the toilet, wash my face, fetch a glass of water. Instead I stayed lying down with my eyes open, watching the darkness spinning around, and at a certain point, before I fell asleep again, I clearly heard the door to my apartment opening stealthily, and closing again a moment later. I stuck my arm out from under the sheets and reached out to turn on the main light. I held my breath to try and detect any sound coming from the lounge: nothing, just the cockroaches bustling about as usual. In my dozy state, I bent down and picked up the box of fortune cookies, to complete the dream. I tore off a wrapper, broke the cookie in two and unrolled the little piece of paper: The future’s not what it used to be. I switched off the light and returned to my fitful sleep, the discomfort heightened by the cookie crumbs that had spread themselves all over the sheets.
In the morning when I remembered the sound of the door opening I began to investigate, as much as my headache allowed me, to see if anything was missing from the apartment. I found nothing. I took my daily pills and left the apartment intending to sort out my thoughts — and my hangover — at the greengrocer’s.
In the lobby there was a dismal atmosphere: the salon members were staring at their hands and discussing, between sighs, a few chapters from Lost Time that they’d particularly enjoyed.
‘So who died this time?’ I inquired.
‘Don’t forget,’ Francesca replied, ‘you’ve got twenty-four hours.’
I went over to the greengrocer’s without managing to dodge the sun, which sent twinges of pain through my forehead that nearly made me vomit. I had never been so thankful for the gloom and the cool air of the shop’s back room. When she heard me stumbling in, Juliet looked up from her newspaper.
‘Did you see?’ she said, referring to what she’d been reading in the paper. ‘They’ve evacuated over a mile of land around the Monument; they’re saying the crack is spreading.’
‘Can you give me something to drink?’ I begged.
‘You look a right mess, Teo. I can smell you from here.’