~ ~ ~
The building was fumigated and we had to stay out for a whole day. The council started cutting the water off regularly because there was a drought. The canapés from the private view for the exhibition of bread-dough birds went off, and there was an outbreak of diarrhoea. The supermarket delivery boy was replaced; the new one was accused of stealing a tin of jalapeño peppers. The bulb on the third floor went. Someone left the main entrance open and let in the Mormons, who started going from door to door. The salon read In Search of Lost Time in a commemorative edition which included all seven volumes of Proust’s novel. Four thousand, two hundred and thirty pages long, hardback, with leaves thin as tracing paper and weighing in at almost three and a half kilos (those with arthritis were excused). Signatures were collected to bring back the previous supermarket delivery boy. The bulb on the first floor went. The cockroaches, cool as cucumbers.
~ ~ ~
My mother had taken less than a week to find a substitute for the dog: an insufferable mutt she had christened Turnup, because it just turned up one day at the front door and started to scratch it. Turnup would eat anything within reach of his muzzle, not just stockings, but my mother imagined it was the reincarnation of that other dog she had loved so much. She didn’t say this, of course, but she didn’t need to: she would regularly forget herself and call Turnup by the deceased dog’s name. Over the ten years he was alive, that dog managed to eat every object in the house that wasn’t nailed down, including clothes pegs, refrigerator seals and tons of tubes of toothpaste, which were his weakness: if someone left the bathroom door open, he would jump up and knock over the glass where we kept them. Despite this he never got fat, and remained skeletal until the end of his days. My mother forgave him everything while punishing me and my sister for the slightest offence. We really had it in for that dog. Mum would ground us for a week for any misdemeanour, as this was how she solved everything in life, by locking us up. This meant being condemned to evenings of tedium, spent begging my mother to lift the punishment. In retrospect, the faith placed by that generation in punishment as a way of building character seems astonishing.
Mum worked in the post office in the mornings and in the afternoons she took washing in at home. When we were grounded, we set to following her around, like two little street hawkers, asking: ‘What are we supposed to do shut up at home all day? What are we supposed to do shut up at home all day?’
Everything was said in duplicate, like the paperwork for some sort of official procedure, and in a way it was: an official procedure doomed to failure because the bureaucrat on duty, my mother, had an endless supply of patience.
‘Go and do your homework,’ she ordered us.
We scribbled down our homework and went back to the other work, trying to wear my mother down so she’d let us go and play in the street.
‘What are we supposed to do now? What are we supposed to do now?’
‘Study.’
‘We’ve studied already,’ we lied.
‘Go and play.’
‘Play what?’
‘I don’t know, whatever you like.’
We walked around the house, fiddling with things; I started kicking a ball about and it went whizzing past the china cabinet, my sister pulled her doll’s head off and said she needed to go to the shop to buy some glue. We returned to the attack.
‘What are we supposed to do now? What are we supposed to do now?’
Then my mother would fetch some blank sheets of the paper she used to bring home from the post office, a pack of colouring pencils that had been Dad’s and which she kept on top of a wardrobe, and pronounced the final sentence:
‘Go and do some drawing.’
Drawing was an activity that never ran out, you could do it for hours and hours, and my mother was very careful to ensure there were always adequate supplies of paper. She grounded us so often that it became a habit, and the day came when Mum had to replace the colouring pencils and then we started drawing even when we weren’t being punished. We went out into the streets and began drawing outside, which was something we remembered having seen Dad do.
Punishments came and went, and in the end I asked my mother at least to buy me a sketch pad to give some focus to my endless drawing. I began walking about, up and down, carrying that damn sketchbook, which gave me a reputation for being an artist — and a drifter — in the neighbourhood. For a time it even turned into a lucrative activity: people would pay me to paint portraits of their girlfriends and I would swap the drawings for marbles, initially, and then later on, for my first cigarettes. Then the neighbours grew bored of the artist and my sketchbook lost its cachet, and finally turned into a dreadful burden.
~ ~ ~
It hadn’t rained for almost two months, the Río Lerma was not much more than a stream and the lack of water in our building was making the pipes grumble. In the lobby they were saying that the pipes were squealing and, claiming that they couldn’t concentrate, the members of the salon decided to go and read in the Jardín de Epicuro. They paid a boy to bring their copies of In Search of Lost Time back and forth in a wheelbarrow. From the balcony of my apartment I saw the procession that spanned two blocks of Calle Basilia Franco, each person carrying a foldable Corona chair and turning left at Avenida Teodoro Flores, where they still had three blocks to go, and the little boy sweating and stopping to catch his breath after five steps. I yelled out to them: ‘The weight of literature! You’re going to kill the poor little squirt!’
The entire salon then had to leave the Jardín de Epicuro because there was a dog that kept hurling itself at them. The mutt was running between the salon members’ legs, scratching their ankles with its claws and trying to sharpen its teeth on the covers of the Lost Times. The final straw was when the animal tried to mount Francesca, clinging on and rubbing its genitals against her leg: it took the intervention of a passing kid to free her from the canine embrace. In an attempt to keep the salonists away from our block, I suggested they give the dog a stocking. The stocking came back; the dog had refused to eat it. I asked them to show me the hosiery: it was one of Hipólita’s, who wore special varicose-vein stockings. I told them to give the dog a normal stocking, made of nylon, and they went off to buy a pair in the haberdashery store. They returned, and the dog still wouldn’t go for it. I suggested they stuff one stocking with meat and roll it into a ball, without knotting it, so it would unroll in the mutt’s intestines. The butcher gave them a load of skins for free. Problem solved.
With the dog dead, the salon returned to the Jardín de Epicuro to opine, in a break from Proust, that one defect of my novel, which didn’t exist, was that I avoided talking about illness in it. Francesca told me so in the lift as we went up to the third floor after returning from our respective activities: I, from drinking the fourth and fifth beer of the day in the greengrocer’s shop, she from the salon. We hadn’t even reached the first floor and I’d had to put up with a speech on decrepitude as a fundamental theme of the twentieth-century European novel.
‘Don’t move,’ I interrupted her.
And I stamped on two cockroaches, one with my right foot, one with my left.
‘You see?’ Francesca said. ‘You don’t listen to me, you’re running away from the topic.’
‘The cockroaches are running away, I’m not running from anything.’
Between the first and second floors she tried to instruct me on something she referred to as ‘the literature of experience’ and which basically turned out to mean that one can only write about what one has experienced, about what one knows first-hand. I thought that this was like saying no one can explain what a dog-meat taco tastes like if they haven’t eaten one. If they don’t believe they’ve eaten one. If they don’t know they’ve eaten one. The fact is that everyone has eaten a dog-meat taco, even if they don’t know it, everyone knows what a dog-meat taco tastes like, even if no one thinks they do. This was the real paradox: not being able to write about something, not because one hadn’t experienced it but rather because one didn’t know one had experienced it. I’d got distracted, just for a change, and when we got to the third floor I clutched at a loose phrase: ‘The experience of illness is as good as any other,’ Francesca was saying.