Eventually we left that restaurant. My friend paid and led the march toward the exit. He wasn't as drunk as I thought and there was no need to suggest that he let me drive. I vaguely remember some other places, where we didn't stay very long, and finally an enormous vacant lot on a dirt road running out into the country, where Josй Ramнrez got out of the car and said good night without shaking hands.
I said it seemed funny to drop him off there, with no houses in sight, only darkness and the silhouette of a hill in the background, dimly lit by the moon. I said we should go with him part of the way. Without turning to look at me, my friend (his hands on the wheel, tired but calm) replied that we couldn't go with him, there was no need to worry, the kid knew the way perfectly well. Then he started the car again, switching on the high beams and, before the car started to reverse, I glimpsed an unreal landscape, in black-and-white, made up of stunted trees, weeds, a cart trail — a cross between a garbage dump and an idyllic picture postcard of the Mexican countryside.
The boy had disappeared without a trace.
Back at the dentist's house, I had trouble getting to sleep. In the guest room there was a painting by a local artist: an impressionistic landscape in which there seemed to be a city and a valley, rendered almost exclusively in a range of yellow tones. I believe there was something evil in that picture. I remember tossing and turning, exhausted but unable to sleep, while a feeble light from the window spread a rippling fire through the landscape. It was not a good picture. It wasn't the picture that was troubling me, stopping me from getting to sleep, filling me with a vague and irreparable sadness, although I was tempted to get up, take it down, and turn it to the wall. I was tempted to go back to Mexico City that night.
The next day I got up late and didn't see my friend until lunchtime. I was alone in the house with the woman who came every day to clean, so I thought it would be best to go out for a walk. Irapuato is not a beautiful city, but there is, undeniably, a charm to its streets and the calm central district, where the locals busy themselves conspicuously with what in Mexico City would be considered mere distractions. Since I had nothing to do, after breakfast in a cafй (orange juice) I sat down on a bench to read the newspaper, while high school students and public servants strolled past, exercising their talents for leisure and idle chat.
For the first time since I had set out for Irapuato, my troubled love life back in Mexico City seemed remote. There were even birds in the square where I was sitting. Later on I visited a bookshop (it took a while to find one), where I bought a book with illustrations by Emilio Carranza, a landscape painter born in El Hospital, a village or farming cooperative near Irapuato. I was planning to give it to my friend the dentist; I thought he would like it.
We were to meet at two in the afternoon. I went to his clinic. The secretary politely asked me to wait: at the last minute someone had turned up unannounced, but my friend would be free shortly. I sat down in the waiting room and started reading a magazine. I was alone in the room. The silence in my friend's clinic, indeed in the whole building, was almost absolute. For a moment I thought the secretary had lied to me: my friend wasn't there, something bad had happened and he had rushed off, leaving explicit instructions not to give me any cause for alarm. I stood up, and started to walk back and forth in the waiting room; naturally I felt ridiculous.
The secretary had left the reception desk. I felt like picking up the phone and making a call, but it was an absurd reflex, since I didn't know anyone to call in that city. I bitterly regretted having come to Irapuato, cursed my emotional susceptibility, swore that as soon as I got back to Mexico City I would find an intelligent, beautiful, and above all sensible woman, whom I would marry after a brief and drama-free engagement. I sat in the secretary's chair and tried to calm down. For a while I stared at the typewriter, the appointment book, a wooden container full of pencils, paperclips, and erasers, arranged in what seemed to be perfect order, which was incomprehensible to me, since no one in their right mind arranges paperclips (pencils and erasers, yes, but not paperclips), until I noticed my hands trembling over the typewriter keys, which made me stand up with a start and set off resolutely in search of my friend with my heart thumping in my chest.
Even in the grip of a sudden panic attack, manners can sometimes prevail. While opening doors and barging through the clinic, calling out to my friend, I was, I remember, trying to think of a way to explain my behavior when I found him, if I did. I still don't know what came over me that afternoon. It was probably the last outward manifestation of the anxiety or sadness I had brought with me from Mexico City and was to leave behind in Irapuato.
My friend, of course, was in his consulting room, and I found him with a patient, a distinguished-looking woman of about thirty, and his nurse, a short girl with mestizo features, whom I hadn't seen before. None of them seemed surprised by my sudden appearance. My friend smiled at me and said, I'll be finished in a minute.
Later, when I was trying to explain what I had felt in the waiting room (apprehension, anxiety, fear mounting uncontrollably), my friend declared that something similar often happened to him in buildings that seemed to be empty. Basically, I knew, he meant well. I tried to put it out of my mind. But once my friend got talking there was no stopping him, and during the meal, which lasted from three till six in the evening, he kept coming back to the subject of seemingly empty buildings, that is, buildings that you think are empty because you can't hear a sound, but in fact they aren't empty, and somehow you can tell, although your senses, your ears, your eyes, are telling you they are. So it's not that you feel anxious or afraid because you're in an empty building, or even because you might be trapped or locked inside an empty building, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, no, the reason you're anxious or afraid is that you know, deep down, that there is no such thing as an empty building, in every so-called empty building someone is hiding, keeping quiet, and that's the terrifying thing: the fact that you are not alone, said my dentist friend, even when everything indicates that you are.
And then he said: You know when you really are alone? In a crowd, I said, thinking I was following his train of thought, but no, it wasn't in a crowd. I should have been able to guess the answer: When you die. Death: the only real solitude there is in Mexico; the only solitude in Irapuato.
That night we got drunk. I gave him my present. He said he didn't know Carranzas work. We went out to dinner and got drunk.
We started in the bars of the central district and then we returned to the outskirts, where we had been the night before, where we had met young Josй Ramнrez. I remember that at one point in our erratic journey I had the impression that my friend was looking for Ramirez. I said so. He said I was mistaken. I told him he could speak freely to me, anything he said would remain between us. He said he always had spoken freely to me and after a while he looked me in the eye and added that he had nothing to hide. I believed him. But I still had the impression that he was looking for the boy. That night we didn't go to bed until around six in the morning. At one point the dentist started reminiscing about the old days, when we were both students at the UNAM and fervent, blind admirers of Elizondo. I was enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and he was studying dentistry. We met at a discussion organized by the university's film society, after the screening of a movie by a Bolivian director, who I guess must have been Sanjinйs.