‘Do yuh live alone?’
‘Could you let me watch my programme?’
He resigned himself to staring at the screen, where they were showing, one after another, black-and-white photographs taken in the Casa Azul.
‘Who’s the lady with the moustache?’ Willem asked.
‘What do you mean? That’s Frida Kahlo, the painter. Don’t tell me you don’t know who she is, even the Indians in the Amazon rainforest know who she is. She’s so famous they put up a statue of her in a park in a village of a hundred inhabitants in Uzbekistan, and Bulgaria and Denmark invented their own International Day of Frida Kahlo. See the guy with his trousers pulled up to his armpits? That’s Diego Rivera, the man of the house.’
‘I’d like to talk t’yuh about the word of the Lard. The word of the Lard is a great comfart for older people.’
I shot him a deadly look.
‘Pay attention.’
On the TV they were saying: she wanted to improvise her own freedom, in order elegantly to overcome a life of pain.
‘They really like suffering, Villem; what does elegance have to do with pain?’
‘Pain leads to the Lard.’
‘And elegance to hell. By the way, you look pretty elegant, that’s a neat little outfit you’ve got on.’
He flushed: the pigmentation of embarrassment transformed him from a larva into a shrimp, or from a raw shrimp into a cooked shrimp.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said soothingly, ‘it was a joke.’
On the screen they were showing images of Frida and Diego, Eisenstein, Dolores del Río, Arcady Boytler, Miguel Covarrubias, María Izquierdo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Adolfo Best Maugard, Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Trotsky, Juan O’Gorman and Pita Amor. Willem looked at the television and then stopped looking, inspecting my apartment in search of something that would let him start a conversation, and he thought he’d found it when he saw the painting hanging on the opposite wall.
‘Is that a clown?’ he asked.
‘It’s a portrait of my mother,’ I replied.
‘I’m sarry,’ he said, flushing again.
‘What are you sorry for — for having said my mother is a clown or for not having the sensitivity to appreciate art?’
He thought for a minute, confused.
‘Would yuh rather I came back another day?’
‘Don’t you want to watch the programme?’
‘I wanted to talk about the word of the Lard.’
‘Come back another day, then. If you’re lucky I might even open the door!’
It occurred to him to start coming twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and it occurred to me to let him in, just to pass the time. When he found me in a listless mood or when I’d simply run out of beer, he would start preaching at me.
‘Yuh still have time to repent.’
‘Are you telling me I’m going to die?’ I answered.
‘It’s never too late to repent.’
‘What — for having let you in that first day? I wish!’
Following a catechism manual, I suppose, he spent his time repeating that I was his mission, that he had come to Mexico to bring me the word of the Lord. And I replied: ‘You got here far too late, Villem, we’ve already had a load of those types: Franciscans, Dominicans, Humboldt, Rugendas, Artaud, Breton, Burroughs, Kerouac. The competition’s tough as hell!’
One day he tried to take a photo of me on his phone to send back to his family, who lived in a small town in Utah.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ I stopped him. ‘I’m not a stray dog.’
~ ~ ~
Dad sent a letter: he’d gone to live by the sea, just like President Ruiz Cortines wanted everyone to do. He was living in Manzanillo, with a job processing paperwork in the port. The letter was to my sister and me, and was written in blue ink in tiny, cramped handwriting, the letters all leaning to the right as if they were falling asleep. It was just one page but it took us a whole afternoon to decipher it. He said that ships arrived in the port from the United States and from China and that last week there had been a north wind and he’d seen thirty-foot-high waves. We had never seen the sea, although we guessed this was meant to impress us. He said that the president of Manzanillo used to be a painter and a taxi driver, and that this proved how far anyone could go in life simply by making up their minds and persevering. He also told us he’d started painting again, and that he would get together after work with a group of artists on the docks to paint seascapes, and had sold an impressionist painting of a fishing boat to a tourist from Guadalajara. Then came the last part, the reason for the letter and the bit that took us the longest to understand, because in addition to the handwriting, we weren’t old enough yet to comprehend other-worldly aspirations. My father was requesting that when he died, we incinerate him and scatter his ashes in an art gallery, ‘where they belonged’. He said he wanted the dust from his bones to float among the artworks and be breathed in by sensitive people, ‘sticking to their clothes and travelling around on the threadbare lapels of new artists’ coats’. Along with the note, my father had sent us three pesos: the cost of four and a half pounds of beans. Mum refused to read it, but when we went to bed we left it on the kitchen table, as if we’d forgotten it. I discovered later that the president of Manzanillo had been a house painter, not a painter of pictures, as I’d thought for some time. And that he’d been the leader of the taxi drivers’ union, which contradicted my father’s motivational theories. Thesis. Antithesis. So life went on.
~ ~ ~
I went to look for the dog’s body in the Jardín de Epicuro and found it under some bushes, where it had dragged itself to try and puke up the stocking. I couldn’t believe it: it was a Labrador, huge and black. Or rather, yes, I could believe it: I knew I was dealing with literary fundamentalists, people capable of killing a family pet and, on top of that, of abandoning the body for no good reason other than to preserve the sacrosanct peace they needed to concentrate on their reading and dilettantism. I covered the corpse with a pile of twigs and leaves and walked over to the butcher’s on the corner, the same one that had given the salon members the deadly animal skins.
I didn’t know the butcher, having never needed to avail myself of his services until that day. From Monday to Saturday I ate in a budget restaurant and on Sundays I made do with bar snacks from the place on the corner. I sat down to wait on the bench outside the shop until there were no customers around to mess up the operation. I had to wait fifteen, twenty minutes. Eventually I was able to go in and I wasted no time; I couldn’t risk someone coming in and surprising us halfway through the negotiation.
‘I’ll sell you a dog,’ I announced.
‘What?’ replied the butcher.
He was carving a piece of meat that didn’t look like beef, or pork, or anything advertised on the colourful posters pinned to the walls.
‘I’ll sell you a dog,’ I said again.
He let his knife fall, looked up and quivered behind his apron covered in blood as if his ribcage were a barrel full of tacks in an earthquake.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’ve got a dog just around the corner, in the Jardín de Epicuro. It’s just died, it’s perfectly healthy, it choked on a stocking.’
‘A dog?’
‘It’s a Labrador, it must weigh between thirty and forty kilos. The whole thing’s yours to use if you want it.’
The butcher picked up his knife again, but did not resume his task. I feared the implement would interpret the signals the butcher was sending it and decide to switch roles: from work tool to murder weapon.