Dad gave the papaya back to me.
‘You can eat it now,’ he said.
But I still couldn’t eat it: I hid the plate under my bed and only threw it away when the flies tried to lay their eggs in my ears.
~ ~ ~
I escaped from the volley of tomatoes as best I could and headed straight for the greengrocer’s, where I was greeted with a hearty laugh:
‘Good and ripe, were they?’ she’d ask. ‘I saved the best ones for you, they’re from the Hyatt Hotel!’
‘You shouldn’t give that sanctimonious lot ammunition!’ I protested.
‘Everyone has the right to rebel, even them!’
The greengrocer had made rebellion her way of life and her principal source of income: I never saw her sell a single vegetable that was in the least bit edible. Instead, she acted as the official supplier to every riot. Her foul-smelling tomatoes were famous at all the well-known sites of demonstration: on Paseo de la Reforma, down in the Zócalo, on Avenida Bucareli; she even furnished the peasants of San Mateo Atenco with vegetables when they rose up to protest at their land being confiscated to build the airport.
The best thing about the greengrocer was that she was five years younger than Francesca and eleven years younger than me. At this stage in life the effect of age difference has to be multiplied by three, at least. One might say that Francesca was better preserved than the greengrocer, which was logical, considering the wear and tear of an intellectual life as opposed to one of action. But the state of preservation didn’t matter because we weren’t bottles of milk in the refrigerator, or wagons from the 1930s or ’40s. What really mattered were the desires and motives Francesca suspected the greengrocer of having, more intense than her own, and far more so in Francesca’s head than in reality. Since reality was another thing that didn’t matter and what Francesca thought actually did, I calculated that my flirting with the greengrocer could well end up increasing my chances with Francesca. And all this without even taking into account the ostentatious dimensions of the greengrocer’s chest! It was a psychological and sexual battle that would have made even Freud’s beard stand on end.
On the wall of the vegetable shop was a calendar showing special commemorative dates to observe and the vegetables that were in season on each one. March was the time of the renationalisation of oil reserves, the birth of Benito Juárez, courgettes and chayote. May was high season: Labour Day, the Day of the Holy Cross, the Battle of Puebla, Teachers Day, Students Day, chayote, lettuce and tomato. In September, Poblano chillies, the annual presidential speech, Boy Heroes Day and Independence Day. In October and November there were only a few dates, but more tomatoes than ever were sold: the Tlatelolco Massacre, the Day of the Hispanic Peoples and the Mexican Revolution.
The greengrocer would stretch out a chubby arm and hand me a roll of toilet paper with which to wipe the flecks of tomato from my face, hair, neck and arms, and give me a yellow T-shirt from the 2006 electoral campaign to change into. I would return the T-shirt to her later, only for her to lend it to me again after the next barrage of tomatoes. This happened so often that, in time, people in the street came to think I was a supporter of the Party of the Democratic Revolution. Then she would yell out an order for two big bottles of Superior from the shop on the corner, a girl would bring the beer, and the greengrocer would pour us each a glass and begin:
‘So, where did you leave the intellectuals?’
‘Back there — they ran out of tomatoes and went back to their little books.’
‘And to think how much they’re needed out here in—’
Our chats were interrupted by some trucks arriving to unload past-their-best vegetables: from the restaurants and hotels of Polanco, from the branch of Superama on Avenida Horacio, from the Las Américas racetrack; even from a greengrocers up in the fancy neighbourhood of Las Lomas. Instead of throwing the rotting produce away and, above all, to stop the beggars from hanging around their premises to collect it, they had been persuaded to donate it to the greengrocer so she could sell it at ‘community prices’ to those most in need. This was what she had told them and, in a way, she hadn’t lied. In her shop, the price of a pound of tomatoes was one per cent of market price. For the price of one pound of fresh tomatoes, rioters could get a hundred pounds of ammunition. It was a truly community-minded act, although not the one the donors had imagined: they would receive the vegetables that their exquisite palates had rejected smack in the face.
We sipped our beer and by the second glass, without fail, it was Francisco I Madero’s turn. Always Madero: the nation’s fate had gone downhill because of Madero. Things would have been very different, the greengrocer said, if Flores Magón had led the Revolution instead.
‘You know what we should do?’ she asked, not waiting for me to answer. ‘What we should do is put a few bullets into Madero.’
‘They did that already, right there by the Palacio de Lecumberri,’ I reminded her.
‘Well, let’s do it again, then! Do you know where he’s buried?’
We made plans to go and desecrate Madero’s tomb in the Monument to the Revolution. It was close by, three metro stops away. Along with Madero were buried Pancho Villa and José Venustiano Carranza, Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, all of them sworn enemies. The only thing they had in common was that they all had moustaches. The greengrocer shouted:
‘That’s what dialectic’s for: building monuments!’
Madero had been killed exactly one hundred years ago, in February 1913, but in the greengrocer’s head it was as if it had happened yesterday. She lived in a time when all the misfortunes of the nation, from the murder of Zapata to the electoral fraud committed against López Obrador, happened simultaneously, or were placed right up close to each other like a series of rocks encircling the planet and then heading out into space, all the way to Pluto.
The greengrocer had another theory about my novel, or rather about how Francesca knew what was in my notebook. According to this hypothesis, Francesca was a CIA agent. I refused to accept this, because experience had taught me that reality does not bow to ideology.
‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about her? Whether she’s widowed or divorced, whether she’s got kids, whether she’s a spinster, what she used to do?’
‘I know she was a language teacher,’ I replied.
‘You see! English teachers work for the CIA, everybody knows that. It was even in a film. How do you think she ended up in your building?’
‘She entered the draw, like the rest of us.’
‘No one ends up there that way. Did you enter a draw to get a place there? Only influential people get an apartment in that building. Skint, but influential.’
Despite the saying that silence speaks volumes, I kept my mouth shut; I didn’t like to reveal how I’d got the apartment. You were supposed to fill in a load of forms and pray to every saint under the sun, first for one of the current residents to die or be declared incapable of living unassisted, and then for the bureaucrats to awaken from their superannuated torpor and set the process in motion. On top of this you had to be selected by lottery and the probability of success was one in thousands. Barring the part when the dead resident was carried out, leaving the apartment available, this procedure was never adhered to.