‘I don’t know, Villem, this isn’t a novel, this is real life, it’s not that simple to explain.’
We left the museum when the guards threw us out and we began to walk — I staggered — following the instructions Virgilio had given us, towards the metro station. On the way, both my hands squeezed the exhibition guide, which I’d brought with me to prove, the next day, and the next one and the next, that this had really happened. We walked in silence, broken every now and again by the loud smacking kisses the two lovebirds were bestowing on each other.
The throng was visible two blocks away: the station appeared to be shut. In the crowd we found the salon members debating the best way to get back to our building.
‘What’s going on?’ we asked.
‘The metro’s shut,’ Hipólita informed us.
‘The whole metro,’ Francesca added. ‘They say the city’s in total chaos.’
We started eavesdropping on the conversations going on here and there, until we had a compendium of rumours. People said that the earth had split and the crack in the Monument to the Revolution had spread, criss-crossing the entire length of Avenida Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma. They said that a crowd had gathered around the statue, at first to gossip, but that things then edged closer to an uprising. They said that the Monument to the Revolution had collapsed. That the metro was closed for safety and would not be opening soon.
‘I know how to walk back,’ Virgilio assured us, and we set off, following him.
It took us almost an hour, at the doleful pace imposed upon us by the women’s varicose veins, the men’s bunions, several people’s palpitations and everyone’s shortness of breath. We witnessed a traffic jam, spanning the entire city, that was impossible to avoid save for abandoning one’s car. We saw people pouring out into the street and we heard the subterranean clamour of something waking up.
When we got to our building, around 8 p.m., there were three lorries collecting rotten tomatoes from the greengrocer’s. Juliet came out and called to me:
‘The day has come, Teo, the day has come!’
Willem took me aside and spoke discreetly, his little name badge trembling next to his heart:
‘Can I barrow your aportment?’
I gave him the keys and watched him cross the lobby, holding tight to Dorotea’s hand, and couldn’t help but feel a tingle go through me: history was about to write a glorious chapter. The door closed and I was left standing outside on the pavement.
‘Are you coming?’ Juliet asked, as she got ready to shut the shop.
‘Where to?’ I replied.
‘People are gathering in the Plaza de la Ciudadela.’
‘I’m too old for that sort of thing, Juliette, I’m going to have a beer.’
She gave a happy laugh and for a moment it seemed to me that the Revolution for her was one big carnival where she would be queen, but she was laughing about something else.
‘You really are a pervert, Teo,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean, why?’ she said, looking down at my groin, ‘just look, you’ve got your trousers wet already.’
I walked over to the bar on the corner, went in and headed straight for the toilets to scrub at my clothes with a bit of wet loo roll. Once I’d achieved the effect of making it look like I’d wet myself, I went and asked for a beer and a tequila then sat down in time to see Mao, who was dragging the suitcase the Lost Times had gone away and come back in, swerving madly over towards my table.
‘Where’s Dorotea?’ he shouted.
‘You’re missing the Revolution, kiddo,’ I told him.
‘Tell me where she is!’
‘You know where — she’s with Villem.’
‘I’m gonna smash that little Mormon’s face in!’
‘Relax, Mao, remember what we talked about the other day.’
He collapsed onto the seat opposite me, defeated, but starting to delude himself that this defeat was not, in fact, the one that mattered. It made me want to pat him on the back.
‘Get me a beer, will you?’ he asked.
I yelled to the barman to bring us another beer and a tequila each. The drinks arrived and Mao took a long swig of beer.
‘We let the dog go,’ he said.
‘I told you, I don’t want to know anything about that; the less I know, the better. The salonists are free for the time being, let’s not make matters any more complicated.’
‘I just want you to know we aborted the operation.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
I pointed with my chin at the suitcase we’d used for transporting the Lost Times.
‘Did you get them?’
‘I had to buy them. The first lot I just took out of the library and made them disappear. I would’ve had to trek round all the humanities departments in the country to get this many copies. Next time, let me know in advance.’
‘How much?’
‘One thousand one hundred pesos.’
‘What?’
‘A hundred each. But don’t worry, Grandpa, I took the money out of the operation’s budget.’
‘That’s good, because I wasn’t going to pay you!’
He bent down towards the suitcase and started to unzip it, saying: ‘I brought you something else, too.’
‘The complete works of Adorno?’
‘The elixir of Tlalnepantla,’ he said, placing a bottle of whisky on the table.
‘How much?’
‘Fifty pesos.’
‘Hey, I used to get it for thirty.’
‘There’s a twenty-peso anarchist tax.’
He carried on drinking his beer and tequila in silence, getting ready to turn the page, or to go back, as is still possible when one is young, to a time before Dorotea from where he could nudge history towards a different course. He emerged from his reverie with a dreamy look on his face.
‘Did you hear about the plane?’ he asked.
I told him I hadn’t, and he passed me his phone so I could read the news in the paper: a terrorist cell had hijacked a plane full of stockbrokers travelling from London to New York using five copies of the annotated edition — all one thousand and forty hardbacked pages of it — of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
‘Our methods are spreading.’
He finished his drinks and said goodbye, telling me his comrades were waiting for him in La Plaza de la Ciudadela. I shook his hand and, before he left, I said:
‘How can I reach you to let you know when I’ve finished the whisky?’
He wrote a mobile number on a serviette.
‘When you call,’ he said, ‘ask for Juan.’
‘You’re called Juan?’
‘No, that’s the code.’
I ordered another beer and another tequila, then another, and another, until, just as the bar was about to close, Willem appeared with a smile so wide it made me realise I’d never noticed how huge his teeth were before.
‘Well?’ I enquired.
‘Ah’m in love,’ he replied.
‘Tell me you used a condom.’
‘Condoms are a sin.’
‘Help me take this suitcase up to my apartment. And you’re going to have to wash my sheets.’
~ ~ ~
They had to send the diggers into the rubble of the cardiology ward: they hadn’t rescued my mother, they hadn’t rescued my sister. Nor had they found their bodies, as with the thousands of others across the city. People began organising symbolic funerals, without bodies, without the dead. What was being buried, if anything, and not even this, was memories, nothing more.
A few weeks earlier, in one of her customary outbursts of hypochondria, my mother had given us instructions to bury her in the family tomb, in the Dolores public cemetery, half a mile from the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. With her parents and siblings dead, all I had to do was get a letter of agreement from a few distant cousins whom we never saw and who didn’t even bother coming to see her buried.