After a week of this routine, a convertible appeared on the highway. It was a small jewel, a collector’s item — said the man from the service station — even though by then every kind of vehicle had already arrived and none would’ve surprised him. One time the ground even shook when a huge truck pulled up hauling a military tank, and then another one transporting several ATVs that had no wheels, they looked like rubber caterpillars. The man from the service station would’ve quickly forgotten the Porsche Spyder if it hadn’t slowed down and stopped in front of him. Before the smiling and suntanned man driving could finish asking him, ridiculously, where he could find a service station, the Spyder shuddered and died. Merde—exclaimed the Congolese. Just what I need: en panne. Where can I get fuel? Maneuvering around obstacles, they pushed the car two kilometers to the man from the service station’s home. They arrived at nightfall. The foreigner was so tired that he fell asleep sitting up, at a chair in the kitchen while spooning sugar into his coffee. Oddly, though he was snoring, he never let go of the case that contained his musical instrument.
They got acquainted while pushing the Spyder, under the pleasant sun of that early summer evening. Dounn told the man from the service station that he’d driven all the way from Miami, he was in a hurry, and he needed an assistant to organize his performance with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in three days’ time.
60
THE MAN FROM THE service station allowed Patrice Dounn — alias Boris Real, alias Francisco Virditti — to stay in his house, in exchange for a little cash, after finding him asleep at the kitchen table. The Congolese had spilled the sugar. He stood up and began talking, in good Spanish, about money and the long hours he’d spent driving. At no point did he realize that his cheek and the right side of his forehead were coated with grains of sugar, nor that the impression of the plastic tablecloth was stamped on his right hand. He asked which room he should take and then disappeared with his luggage down the hallway. While he was preparing some food, the man from the service station heard his guest talking on a cell phone. It’s not that I like to eavesdrop, he assured me, but my house is made of wood, and I was living alone at the time, so I was used to hearing everything.
After more than an hour, Dounn reappeared in the kitchen. He was more composed: dressed in a very elegant dark suit, his hair gelled, and his instrument case in one hand. He tasted the plate of rice with clams and Swiss chard that the man offered him along with a glass of boxed wine. He found everything “very tasty.” Toward the end of the meal, he asked his host to turn down the volume on the television and inquired who lived in the other rooms. No one, replied the man. Before his mother died, the house had been a hostel. After her passing, he explained, he hadn’t wanted any more kind-faced strangers in his house, so he closed the business. Now he had four guest bedrooms. Two matrimonial suites, one narrow bunk bed, and two twin beds. Dounn asked him if he’d be interested in accommodating some of his friends — a family — who were also coming to the festival that weekend. A couple and their two adolescent children. The man from the service station agreed, he needed the money. The Vivar family would be there in half an hour. Later the owner of the house would discover that the Congolese was very precise with his words: he’d only “accommodate” them, whatever that meant, because the Vivar’s kept their luggage at the Royal Lethargy Grand Hotel and also slept — at least the parents did — in the executive suite they’d reserved there.
After he ate and finished off another glass of boxed wine that the man from the service station had offered him, Patrice Dounn proceeded to clear the kitchen table. Diligently he washed the dirty plates, glasses, and silverware, and cleared away the other things: the cruet, a journal of universal history that his host was reading, his own cell phone. He even removed the plastic tablecloth, which he folded neatly and placed in a corner of the kitchen. On the clean table he set down the black instrument case. He’d begun to open the clasps when suddenly he stopped and looked at the man from the service station, who was watching him from the door, a cigarette between his fingers. For the first time he understood how spiders and insects feel when someone observes them before stepping on them. That’s how don Patrice looked at me, he said. He maintained eye contact for a few seconds until he could no longer stand it. He went into the hallway, asking the foreigner if something was wrong. Nothing, said Dounn, I just want to know if I can trust you. Yes, of course, whatever you need, was the host’s reply. Then the Congolese added: This goes with you to the grave, understand? And he opened the case.
Inside there was no instrument. Just small cans made of a thin material, without label, arranged vertically. Dozens of cans. The host — maybe instinctively, he didn’t know — hurriedly dug through a drawer of knives to find a can opener for the visitor. Then he left the kitchen, heading to the bathroom. He wasn’t feeling well.
When he came back, both Patrice Dounn and his case had disappeared. He didn’t see any sign in the garbage of the can that’d been opened, judging by the can opener — washed and dried meticulously, although still damp — sparkling on the table. The door to the guest’s bedroom was closed. Again the man from the service station felt “fear in my gut and in my eyes and my hair. I’m telling you, my hair was standing on end. But then the urge to vomit passed, and I wanted to run, to head to the beach, to chase after women, or dance to a slow song.”
But he never managed to do anything, because suddenly he heard someone pounding forcefully on the front door. It was the foreigner’s friends. They were upset because they’d spent more than ten minutes calling and no one had come out to greet them. “One lady, one gentlemen, and two teenagers, they seemed to have been arguing among themselves. They were constantly interrupting each other, even the little girl would aggressively grab her father’s shoulder every time she wanted to say something.” They explained to him that they’d already spent two days in Navidad and that they wouldn’t be spending the night at his house, although of course he’d be compensated. They were counting, however, on his discretion, the gentlemen told him in a low voice, while taking his hand for a second. When he withdrew his hand, in his palm, the man from the service station found a twenty-dollar bill. They asked about Dounn. The man said he didn’t know, that he’d disappeared unexpectedly. Then they got back into a luxury Japanese sedan and left. Only Elena, Juan Francisco, and Bruno. When he went back into the house the man from the service station found Alicia sitting on his living room floor, looking through the book he was reading at the time. Always science fiction, really cheap editions that he bought in Pichilemu, he told me. How boring, said Alicia, and she asked what his name was. Then she wanted to know about his job and if he had any children. The girl took a cigarette from the pack that he had in the kitchen and put it in her mouth. The man offered her a light. Alicia made a noise, her tongue against her teeth. She said she didn’t smoke, that he should leave her alone. Please, tell me where the beach is, I can’t find it.
The man from the service station accompanied Alicia to the beach, walking two steps behind her for several kilometers through the night. She asked many questions and he answered them, aware all the time of the cash he’d make housing this strange group of people for a few days. Afterward everything would be calm and normal again. That’s what he believed, he said. But it wasn’t so. Every once in a while the girl would yelclass="underline" Right? Left? And now, which way? It was like she was walking with her eyes closed, like she wanted to be guided in the darkness. Then all of a sudden the sound of the sea was very near. When the sand and docas came into view, Alicia started to run. Rising up from down below he heard a shrill, sharp sound. At first it seemed to him that a woman was screaming. Then he thought someone was doing something bad to the young girl. He quickened his pace across the beach. The night was moonless, and there were no streetlamps in the town, and so he was barely able to make out two distant silhouettes approaching the water. Little by little the shrill sound turned into a birdsong, into the gurgle of an immense stomach, and finally into a strange music. “A female robot, singing with her mouth shut in the shower,” that’s how Patrice Dounn’s theremin sounded to the man from the service station. The foreigner was standing on a dune, an open case beside him — a different case, not the one he’d opened in the kitchen — his left hand suspended above a strange gleaming, blue instrument. The other hand, the right hand, moved slowly toward and away from the object. The music was very beautiful.