The same girl came out through the bead curtain carrying a tray. She walked over to me. I noticed that she was barefoot. I noticed that she now had a baby tied to her back (or did she before and I hadn’t seen it?) with a long blue sash. The baby was sleeping. Here you are, she said, and placed on the table an ashtray, a bottle of Gallo beer, a small glass. I thanked her. You’re welcome, she said. You don’t want to eat anything? she asked me, almost embarrassed, and I said not now, but thanks, maybe later. A stray dog tried to come into the diner, but she scared it away with a clap. Then she just stood where she was, holding the tray flat against her ample breasts, perhaps waiting for something. I asked her why it was called the Fallabón Diner. That’s what they call this neighborhood, she said. Years ago, she told me, Fallabón used to be its own village, right here, but now it’s a part of Melchor de Mencos. (I learned later that the name of the village, Fallabón, comes from a fire and explosion that had taken place near there, in a timber warehouse, in 1950; it’s an Anglicism, from the English words fire and boom.) The baby whined and the girl reached back and stroked its cheek with a finger. So is that your car, in Don Nica’s workshop? It is, I said, reluctant to explain to her that it wasn’t really my car, but a friend’s. She clicked her tongue, as if to say good luck, or as if to say what a shame. I asked her if she could recommend a hotel, since maybe I’d have to spend the night, and she thought a moment and then told me that La Cabaña Hotel was good, that it was close by, on the main road. There’s even a pool, she said. La Cabaña Hotel, I repeated, so as not to forget, and wiping the sweat from my forehead with a paper napkin, I thought I saw something small and dark climbing the back wall. Perhaps a spider. Perhaps a horsefly. Perhaps a scorpion. And is that yours, the macaw? I asked the girl. She smiled. It’s just part of this place, she said, but I didn’t understand whether that meant the restaurant or the neighborhood or the whole town. Does it have a name? Sure, she said. Gómez, she said. The macaw screamed something, maybe because it had heard its name and wanted to join in the conversation. I stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray. So he’s male? I asked the girl and she just gave a laugh and shrugged and said probably, nobody really knows. I saw that the floor tiles under the macaw were covered in gray-and-white droppings. Excuse me, whispered the girl, and went back into the kitchen.
I poured myself a swig of beer with plenty of foam. The beer was warm but it went down well. I poured myself another swig. I lit a cigarette and took a deep breath. I moved the bottle of water closer, just in case the macaw decided to flap down off the broomstick. I opened my backpack and was about to take out a book to read for a bit, when I felt the presence of somebody standing behind me.
You, kid, bring us two beers, yelled the immigration officer.
THEY EACH ACKNOWLEDGED ME STERNLY, with just a glance, and positioned themselves at a table in front of me. The girl came out through the bead curtain. She carried a bottle of beer in each hand. The baby was still sleeping, tied to her back. Here you are, Don Francisco, she said. The officer muttered something, perhaps thanking her. He had taken a red handkerchief out of the pocket of his green khaki uniform. He finished wiping the sweat from his neck and his face. Then he took a long sip of beer and wiped his lips and his grayish mustache with the red handkerchief. The other man reached out and grabbed the girl’s forearm hard and pulled her over toward him until she was sitting on his lap. Do you have pork carnitas? he asked her in a lecherous whisper, his long-nailed hand holding her neck, like a hook. His voice sounded too feminine to me. We do, she said, never looking up from the floor. The baby on her back stirred, whined. And do you have cracklings? Them too, she said, her voice muted, her gaze still fixed on the floor. Well then, go bring us one portion of carnitas and another of cracklings, he said, and gave her a shove toward the kitchen. She tottered a little. Right away, she said, recovering her balance. The man took off his shades and his cowboy hat and took out the black pistol and put them all down on the table. Still chewing on the toothpick, he raised his right hand as though swearing an oath before a judge. And if that fucking bird comes anywhere near me, he said, I swear to God I’ll put a couple of bullets in him.
Both men laughed loudly, almost cackling, perhaps looking at me. The girl slipped away quickly, head down, the baby swaying on her back.
I wanted to smoke. I noticed the cigarette I was holding in my fingers was shaking slightly. I couldn’t stop looking at that dirty hand in the air, and as I looked at it, I suddenly thought of the heart attack my Polish grandfather had suffered at the end of the seventies. I was very young at the time, but I can still remember my mother’s uncontrollable weeping when she got the call from the hospital. My grandfather had been lucky. It was only a minor attack. He recovered quickly. And as a result, following the three instructions he received from his doctor, he quit smoking, started drinking a couple of ounces of whiskey daily (for his nerves, he used to say), and got into the habit of walking. He walked a lot, every morning, for exercise. He would leave the house very early and walk around his neighborhood. Sometimes for up to two hours. Sometimes I’d go with him. And during one of those walks, while he was alone at the end of the Avenue of the Americas, right by the statue of Pope John Paul II, a motorcycle with two guys on it stopped beside him. They knocked him to the ground, he told us later, outraged. They gave him a blow to the head, he said, showing us where. They wanted to kidnap him, he said, perhaps now exaggerating what had been a simple robbery. They took everything he had on him, he said, now indignant, or almost everything, now proud. He managed to keep the ring with the black stone that he wore on his right pinkie finger. Sometimes he told us he had pleaded with them till they let him keep his ring. Sometimes he told us he had struggled with them to keep his ring. Sometimes he told us he had fought with them to keep his ring. Which version he told depended on the passing of the years, or on his nostalgia, or on his mood, or on the character of the person who was asking him (my grandfather understood, maybe at an intuitive level, that a story grows, changes its skin, does acrobatics on the tightrope of time; he understood that a story is really many stories). He had bought that ring in 1945, he liked to tell us, in New York, the first stop on his journey to Guatemala after being freed from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In New York, at a Jewish jeweler’s in Harlem, he had paid forty dollars for it. And he had worn it for the rest of his life, for the next sixty years, on his right pinkie finger, as a way of mourning for his parents and siblings and friends and all the others exterminated by the Nazis in the ghettos and concentration camps. A few years back, when my grandfather died, that ring was left to one of my mother’s brothers, who wept when he inherited it and decided to keep it in the safe in his office. It was just an old black stone in an old gold setting. But one night, someone broke into that office and managed to open the safe and stole everything inside, including my grandfather’s ring with the black stone.
And there before me, on the pinkie finger of that dirty hand now holding a tortilla filled with pork and cracklings, was a ring very much like my grandfather’s ring. Or perhaps it was exactly the same as my grandfather’s ring. Perhaps it was exactly the same black stone, and exactly the same setting in gold metal, and it was exactly the same shape and size. Or at least it was all exactly like the ring in my memory, the ring as I recalled it or as I wanted to recall it, on my grandfather’s pale and slightly crooked right pinkie finger. And although I knew it was impossible, even preposterous, even absurd, I couldn’t help imagining that this ring, on this greasy hand, was indeed my grandfather’s ring with the black stone. Not a similar one. Not an exact replica. But the same one. The one my grandfather had bought in New York, in Harlem, in 1945. The one he had worn for the rest of his life on his right pinkie finger. The one he had managed to save after convincing or compelling — at the end of the Avenue of the Americas, at the end of the seventies — some muggers or maybe kidnappers. The one that, when he died, was inherited by one of my mother’s brothers. The one that had been stolen from a safe one night by a thief who never knew what he was stealing; by a thief who never knew that in that insignificant and somber black stone, one could still see the perfect reflections of my grandfather’s exterminated parents (Samuel and Masha), and the faces of my grandfather’s exterminated sisters (Ula and Rushka), and the face of my grandfather’s exterminated brother (Zalman), and the faces of so many exterminated men and women and boys and girls and babies who were killed as they slept in the arms of their mothers, as they dreamed in the gas chambers; by a thief who never knew that in that small black stone it was still possible to hear the murmur of all these voices, of so many voices, intoning in chorus the prayer for the dead.