“Actually, Borges never said anything about his spine freezing…”
“Let me finish. We can argue about the details later. Great, I told the old woman, killing time and trying to figure a way out. The old man pulled some wrinkled sheets out of the pocket in his robe pocket and read: ‘There is, among your many memories, one that has been irremediably lost / neither the white sun nor the yellow moon / will see you descend to the core.’ ‘You’re an impostor! Those verses are by Borges, not Carlos Argentino Daneri,’ I screamed. ‘I recognize them!’ The old man jumped back and tried to speak. ‘You’re wrong, young man, my name is Carlos Andrés Danielli.’ I leapt from the couch as if someone had stuck a needle in my ass. ‘Identify yourself!’ I screamed. The old man was so scared, his eyes popping out as he looked to the old woman for help. ‘Your passport,’ I demanded. ‘Good lord! This man has gone crazy,’ said the old woman as she aimed her.22 at me. Chema stood up, unholstered his weapon, pointed it at the old woman’s head, and shouted, ‘Ma’am, put your gun down!’ I started laughing so hard, I nearly fell over. I couldn’t stop.”
“Motherfucker! You’ve lost your mind, Ponce. If your bosses find out, you’ll get demoted, you’ll end up working as a janitor.”
“Tell me about it, Cohen. Fear-fear is a terrible thing. It plays dirty, gets in your way, and confuses you if you’re not careful. The laughing attack was a response to fear. That’s the subconscious at work.”
“But that old couple’s crazy too. The guy reads verses that aren’t his… How did you know they were Borges’ if you’ve only ever read ‘The Aleph’?”
“Easy-memories, white sun, yellow moon-they sounded just like the blind guy. The old woman threw the.22 at Chema’s feet and got silly too, she was laughing and crying, she shook her arms, doubled over, she looked like a puppet. When we calmed down a little, she said, ‘I haven’t had that much fun in a long time. We must have a party, I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge.’ Then Chema and the old man started laughing too. We made a toast to life, to the three Beatriz Viterbos, and to many other things.”
“I envy you, and it pisses me off that you didn’t let me go with you. How did it occur to you that the old man might be named Carlos Argentino, like in the story?”
“Coincidence, accident, who knows? With all that was going down, logic suggested his name was Daneri. But logic doesn’t do fiction any justice.”
“Got it. So you hung out with the old couple, just having fun…?”
“With them and with Beatriz Viterbo, the one who was the opposite of Borges’. We toasted to the three Beatrizes: the imaginary one, the one buried in the Dolores crypt, and the housekeeper’s young daughter, the one with the unknown father.”
“The young Beatriz, she’s also Viterbo?…So Mikel told the truth and the old woman got her confused with the aunt who died in 1929? We must investigate. This is a bit much, it doesn’t seem right.”
“I already investigated. The old woman gave her last name to the housekeeper’s daughter, made her her heir, sent her to school, where she’s earning a master’s degree, and, to cap her good work, wants to marry her off to a good man, like Mikel, ‘that poor innocent,’ she said sweetly. You realize she wants to marry her off to your friend, the faggot from Puebla? I tried to object, to explain we hadn’t determined who the killer was yet, blah blah blah. Those three stooges defended the faggot better than the best defense attorney in the country.”
“Look at that. Despite a few coincidences, look how different the stories of Beatriz and Violeta turned out to be. And that luckless Mikel left thinking Beatriz didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was marked for life.”
“I told you he was a faggot. Instead of facing the girl and the old woman and explaining what had happened, he ran away to his mother. He’s a coward, that guy.”
“Ponce, it’d be better if you just shut up, because you had a lot to do with his running away. Although I confess that right now I could give three shits about that crazy guy. All this smells rotten to me-the three Viterbos, your sudden fearlessness, acting like nothing happened and drinking to madness. Didn’t you think for even an instant that they could have drugged your champagne?”
“Well, then I would have gone down to the basement and seen the aleph. What more can you ask from life?”
[With my head floating from the beer, the tequila, and the interminable literary chat with Ponce, I walked home. As I crossed Mexico Park, I thought of Violeta. I’d met with Ponce to write an article about her, but another story-this one written 1,500 kilometers away-had distracted us from the impact of her death. I remembered that the evening Violeta was killed, she and I had talked for a bit-if exchanging twenty, thirty, forty words can be called that. She had smiled tenderly. I didn’t know anything about Violeta, only that she was nice and asked about people’s health and their work. In ten years as her neighbor, I never once asked her if she needed anything. Nobody else did either. They erased the smile off that lonely woman’s face and killed her for no reason. No one claimed her body, and she won’t have a gravestone to remind us she was born, lived, and died. Pretty soon, those few of us who did know her will forget her as well.]
OUTSIDE THE DOOR BY ÓSCAR DE LA BORBOLLA
Barrio Unknown
The screams for help crashed through the second-story window with the broken glass. Everybody from the building across the street claimed to have seen the shards hurled like bloody projectiles. The window had turned into a woman’s cry, into the sounds of a torn brassiere and broken matrix. She’s being raped, some of us thought-killed, imagined others-and we all rushed up the stairs. The metal apartment door was jammed. There was no way to open it; the strongest among us slammed against it unsuccessfully. The next-door neighbor called the police but the line was continuously busy. Let’s go get a patrol car, somebody proposed, and two of the other neighbors dashed down to the street. I stayed behind, striking the flat metal of the door with my palms. There was no response from inside and we wouldn’t hear anything again. I was soon informed that the condo was vacant and that the owner had put bars on the bathroom windows.
After a while, the neighbors who had gone in search of a patrol car returned with a promise from a couple of officers to come right away; we elicited the same hope from the phone when a bureaucratic voice finally responded and asked us to spell out the address and summarize the facts. Yes, said the neighbor, it happened about an hour ago, around 2 p.m.
But another hour went by and still the authorities didn’t show. We called again; we even tried the Red Cross, the Green Cross, the fire department-but the phones were dead, busy, or rang endlessly without an answer. It was horrible not being able to do anything, feeling so impotent next to that door blocking our way; we were sure the woman who’d screamed was still alive. We couldn’t hear a thing but we desperately wanted to help her. Plus, the rapist, the killer, was still in there, because no one had left the place after the screams.
I ran down to the street to look for another patrol car, but there wasn’t a single cop, nor an ambulance-nobody. I walked around for a long time and finally, exhausted, I returned to the building, hoping somebody had shown up. But when I saw the others taking action, now with tools, trying to break the locks, I began to curse the irresponsibility of the cops. After all, it was almost 6 p.m. and growing dark and still no help had arrived.
We tried everything with the tools we had: a chisel to loosen the frame, a pickax for leverage to pop the door. But we only managed to chip the point of the chisel and the wall showed barely a scratch. It was even worse with the pickax, because it slipped and cut the leg of the guy from apartment 7, who, accompanied by his wife and a few other neighbors, had to be taken to the hospital, he was bleeding so much.