When he wakes, B thinks he knows who the killer is. He has seen his face. That night he goes out with X's brother. They go to various bars and talk about this and that and although they do their best to get drunk, they can't. Walking back to the apartment through the empty streets, B says he once phoned X but didn't speak. What the fuck for? says X's brother. I only did it once, says B, but I realized that X got lots of calls like that. And she thought they were from me, you see? says B. You mean the murderer is the anonymous caller? Exactly, says B, and X thought it was me. X's brother frowns: I think it was one of her exes; there were quite a few of them, you know. B says nothing in reply (it's as if X's brother hadn't understood at all) and they continue in silence until they reach the apartment.
In the elevator B thinks he is going to throw up. He says: I'm going to throw up. Hold on, says X's brother. They walk quickly down the hallway, X's brother unlocks his door and B rushes in looking for the bathroom. But when he gets there, his nausea has subsided. He is sweating and his stomach aches, but he can't throw up. The toilet with the lid up looks like a toothless mouth laughing at him. Or laughing at someone, anyway. After washing his face, he looks at himself in the mirror: his face is as white as a sheet. He spends what is left of the night dozing fitfully, trying to read and listening to X's brother snore. The next day they say good-bye and B returns to Barcelona. I'll never go back to that city again, thinks B, because X doesn't live there any more.
A week later, X's brother calls to tell him that the police have caught the killer. The guy was harassing her with anonymous phone calls, he says. B doesn't answer. An ex, says X's brother. Well, it's good to know, says B. Thanks for calling. Then X's brother hangs up and B is alone.
THE GRUB
He looked like a white grub, with his straw hat and a Bali cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. Each morning when I went to the Librerнa de Cristal to browse I would see him sitting on a bench in the Alameda. The bookshop, as its name suggests, was glass-fronted, and whenever I looked up, there he was, sitting motionless among the trees, staring into nothingness.
I guess we got used to each other's presence. I would arrive at eight thirty in the morning, and he would already be there, sitting on a bench, doing nothing except smoking and keeping his eyes open. I never saw him with a newspaper or a sandwich, a beer or a book. I never saw him speak to anyone. Once, noticing him there as I glanced up from the French literature shelves, I thought he must sleep in the Alameda, on a bench, or in a doorway in one of the neighboring streets, but then I realized he was too clean and tidy to be sleeping in the street and must have a room in some boardinghouse nearby. He was, I noticed, a creature of habit, like myself. My routine consisted of getting up early, having breakfast with my mother, father, and sister, pretending to go to school, then catching a bus to the center of the city, where I would devote the first part of my morning to books and walking around, and the second part to movies and, more surreptitiously, to sex.
I generally bought my books at the Librerнa de Cristal or the Librerнa del Sуtano. If I was short of cash, I'd pick over the specials table at the Cristal, but if I was sufficiently solvent, I'd go to the Sуtano for the new titles. If I had no money at all, which was often the case, I would steal from one or the other, without favoritism. But in any case, I would invariably pay a visit to both the Librerнa de Cristal and the Librerнa del Sуtano (located, as the name suggests, in a basement, across from the Alameda). If I arrived before the shops opened, I'd look for a street vendor, buy myself a ham sandwich and a mango juice and wait. Sometimes I'd sit on a bench in the Alameda, tucked away in the shrubbery, and write. All this lasted until about ten in the morning, which is when the movie theaters began to open up for their first screenings. I preferred European films, though if I was feeling particularly inspired, I wasn't averse to Mexican New Erotic or Mexican New Horror, which were pretty much the same thing, anyway.
The film I saw most often was French, I think. It was about two girls who live alone in a house outside town. One is a blonde and the other's a redhead. The blonde's boyfriend has left her, plus which (to make things worse, I mean) she is going through a personality crisis: she thinks she is falling in love with her housemate. The redhead is younger, more innocent, more irresponsible; in other words, she's happier (although, when I saw this film, I was young, irresponsible, and innocent and believed myself to be deeply wretched). One day a criminal on the run sneaks into their house and holds them hostage. By an odd coincidence this happens on the very night the blonde, after making love with the redhead, has decided to commit suicide. The fugitive climbs in through a window, creeps around the house, knife in hand, goes into the redhead's room, overpowers her, ties her up, interrogates her, asks her how many other people live there, (just her and the blonde, she replies), and then gags her. But the blonde is not in her room and the fugitive goes searching through the house, getting more and more nervous, until finally he finds her lying unconscious on the cellar floor, having obviously swallowed the contents of the medicine cabinet. The fugitive, who is not a killer (he wouldn't kill a woman anyway), saves the blonde: he makes her vomit, brews a gallon of coffee, makes her drink milk, etc.
As the days go by the women and the fugitive start to get to know one another. The fugitive tells them his story: he is a former bank robber, who has escaped from jail, and his former associates have killed his wife. The women are cabaret artists, and one afternoon or one night (it's hard to tell since they keep the curtains closed the whole time) they put on a show for him: the blonde slips into a magnificent bearskin and the redhead pretends to be the trainer. At first the bear is obedient, but then he rebels and claws at the redhead's clothes tearing them off piece by piece. Finally, naked, she collapses in defeat and the bear leaps upon her. No, he doesn't kill her; he makes love to her. And the strangest thing of all is that, having watched this performance, the fugitive falls in love not with the redhead but with the blonde: that is, with the bear.
The ending is predictable but not without a certain poetry: one rainy night, after killing his two former associates, the fugitive flees with the blonde to an unknown destination, leaving the redhead sitting in an armchair, reading, giving them time before she calls the police. The book she is reading — I realized this the third time I saw the film — is The Fall by Camus. I also saw some Mexican films more or less in the same style: women kidnapped by villains who turn out to have hearts of gold; fugitives who take rich young ladies hostage and get themselves shot to pieces after a night of passion; beautiful servants who, starting from nothing, climb the tall ladder of crime to reach the pinnacle of wealth and power. In those days most of the films produced by the Churubusco studios were erotic thrillers, although there were quite a few erotic horror films and erotic comedies too. The horror films basically followed the pattern set by Mexican Horror in the fifties, which is as much a part of the national culture as the mural painting of Rivera, Siqueiros, and company. The innovations were limited to supplementing the stock of timeless icons — Saint, Mad Scientist, Cowboy, Vampire, Ingenue — with contemporary nudes, preferably played by unknown North American, European, or occasionally Argentinean actresses, slipping in scenes of a more or less overtly sexual nature, and treading a line between the laughable and the intolerable in the depiction of violence. I wasn't so keen on the erotic comedies.