‘She came to the building because she’s on a mission,’ said the greengrocer.
‘But she’s retired.’
‘A CIA agent never retires!’ she would repeat. ‘Do you think if she was retired she’d need to live in that shabby old place, that stuck-up old thing? If she was retired she’d be living in Tepoztlán or Chapala, somewhere fancy like that. I’m telling you, she’s on a mission, that’s why she’s spying on you and brainwashing everyone in her salon at the same time. Think about it: all she needs is a glass tumbler, she holds it up against the wall and then puts her ear against it.’
‘But I don’t write out loud!’
‘You wouldn’t even need to! These people can decipher your writing by listening to the pen scratching away in your notebook.’
She suggested that when I wrote in the book I should use some kind of device that made a noise to foil Francesca’s attempts to spy on me. So the next time I grew bored of drawing, I switched on the blender, which I never used, and wrote some things down in my notebook that I’d remembered:
Five hundred riot police were sent to capture Alejandro Jodorowsky for crucifying a chicken. José Luis Cuevas painted a temporary mural and invented the Pink Zone. The bones of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Dr Atl and Siqueiros ended up in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men. Juan O’Gorman took cyanide, put a rope around his neck and then put a bullet in his brain. His bones ended up in the same place. La Esmeralda art school was moved to the neighbourhood of Colonia Guerrero. One of Rufino Tamayo’s paintings was auctioned off for seven million dollars, one of Frida’s for five, another of Diego’s for three. The Rotunda’s name was changed: where it had said ‘Men’ they changed it to ‘Persons’. They moved María Izquierdo’s remains to the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons.
The next morning, Francesca was waiting out in the hallway and when I left my apartment she ran over to confront me.
‘That’s the last thing we need! Taco sellers who think they’re art historians.’
‘Do you know what a customer once said to me?’ I replied. ‘That that was precisely what we needed: taco sellers who knew about art, who were interested in art.’
‘Who was your customer? Gorky?’
‘If Gorky were alive he’d be shocked at the price of beer in museum cafés.’
I complained to the greengrocer that her theory had failed.
‘All I managed to do was blow up my blender.’
‘It must be telepathy, then.’
‘I knew it! You’re mad.’
‘That’s precisely what the CIA’s strategy is — don’t you get it? They use crazy techniques so that no one believes it when they are discovered.’
‘So what does she get out of spying on me?’
‘You should know, you’re probably a danger to the system.’
‘Yeah, right!’
‘Well, I’ve always thought you were suspicious, you know? All that clowning around’s got to be a ploy to distract people. Who knows what secrets you’re hiding… Or perhaps the future of the human race depends on your notebook, just imagine!’
With the help of a comrade who was undercover, she’d gone so far as to get hold of a list of names of supposed CIA agents in Mexico. We couldn’t find Francesca’s.
‘But that’s not her real name!’ the greengrocer said.
So we looked for her real name, or at least, the one the salon members called her by, the same one her post was addressed to and with which she signed the minutes of the Residents’ Association meetings. That one wasn’t on the list, either.
‘You see?’ I said.
‘That only proves one thing: that name’s false, too. You really think she’s going to use her real name? I’m telling you, she’s on a mission! Actually, now I think of it, we shouldn’t be using our real names either.’
‘What do you want to be called?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know, can you think of a name? Pick a pretty one.’
‘What about Juliet?’
‘Juliet?’
‘Yeah, but pronounced the French way, Juliette, so it packs more of a punch.’
‘I like it! What about you?’
‘I want to be called Teo.’
‘Mateo?’
‘As if!’
‘Well what, then?’
‘Teodoro, but just call me Teo.’
You had to say her name Juliette to make Francesca jealous. Then Juliet would dare me to force my way into 3-D, Francesca’s apartment, to confirm her theory. This usually happened around the third beer, when I would wisely take my leave. I needed to rest a little in order to get through the rest of the day. On my way back from the greengrocer’s shop, when I crossed the lobby and looked around at the salon members, all hypnotised by their books, perfectly pacified, I’d call out:
‘Still here? How are your piles doing?’
And Francesca would shout:
‘Juliette is the name of a French whore!’
~ ~ ~
One morning the salon was cancelled because a poet had died and everyone rushed off to mourn the dead man. Everyone except Hipólita, whose varicose veins prevented such exertion. I was about to shoot off like a rattletrap rocket to the bar on the corner when I ran into her, putting her hand into the letter boxes to deposit a piece of paper: she was organising an exhibition of little birds modelled out of bread dough down in the lobby. I folded up the invitation to the vernissage and put it in my back pocket, and was almost at the door when Hipólita intercepted me.
‘You’re an ungrateful wretch.’
I turned around to face her. She had come close enough to the entrance that the morning light accentuated the down on her upper lip. Away from the lobby’s deceptive gloom it was a proper moustache.
‘I don’t get a mention in your novel,’ she explained.
‘You know it’s not a novel.’
‘You must think I’m so insignificant.’
‘My dear, you talk like one of Frida Kahlo’s paintings: nothing but moaning. Hey, did you see that?’
I pointed at the right-hand wall of the lobby, covered in damp patches, and then fled as fast as my bunions allowed. That night I wrote in my journal about a childhood memory: my mother’s brother, a bachelor who had been the first taco seller in the family, had a moustache so outrageous he used to get bits of food stuck in it.
‘It’s a northern thing,’ my mother would say, excusing him.
Her family was from San Luis Potosí which, technically speaking, wasn’t even in the north. If anything it was the south of the north. I had seen him spend an entire Sunday afternoon with the tail end of a jalapeño pepper entangled in his whiskers.
The next day there were new chairs in the lobby. Reclining wooden ones, with cushioned backs and seats, super comfortable. They’d nicked them from the poet’s funeral. These were truly dangerous people: they’d lugged them all the way from Bellas Artes, six stops on the metro. The new chairs didn’t fit in the room we used as a dumping ground, where the folded Corona beer chairs were stored. They started leaving the new ones lined up on either side of the lobby, like in a waiting room. The salon members considered them the pinnacle of elegance. The cockroaches rather liked them, too.
Posterity decreed that the dead poet was only mediocre: he failed to merit a statue or even an avenue named after him, never mind a place in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. They named a dirt road after him in Irapuato, where he’d been born. Then another poet died (poets were always dying). The salon members seized the opportunity to steal another chair for Hipólita. This poet had a statue erected to him in a park. The pigeons were over the moon.