She had been in Bangkok for three years, she was a career diplomat. The problems of her compatriots mostly revolved around robberies and the usual tricks played on tourists. Only once had there been a minor case involving possession of a small quantity of drugs, and it had resulted merely in provisional detention. That was how she knew the lawyer, who helped them with everything.
I told her Manuel’s story and she listened to me with a surprised expression.
“A young philosopher?” she said. “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard! There have been cases of people accused of things in order to keep the police or even the press quiet and give breathing space to those who are really involved. It’s a delicate matter. You’ll have to handle it with kid gloves.”
We kept ordering gin and Cuba Libres until we felt pleasantly drunk and a tad hungry. She suggested we have dinner in a place typical of her neighborhood, Sukhumvit, which turned out to be a very lively area full of restaurants and bars, with tables out on the street and neon signs.
“Do you like fish?” she said as we sat down on the terrace of a place called Bo Lan. “Because if you do, you can try this, look.”
She pointed to the menu: red snapper in turmeric curry with coconut milk, a Renaissance dish that’s called geng guwa pla dtaeng in Thai. We ordered it, and as we drank our aperitifs I thought of the great Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who died in the airport of this city as he was changing planes and who actually wrote a novel called The Birds of Bangkok. I mentioned it to Teresa.
“I know the book,” she said. “There’s an episode where Pepe Carvalho has dinner in a Chinese restaurant called the Shangri La, eats duck, and then goes to the Atami massage parlor, which if I’m not mistaken still exists. You can go there later, if you like. The women are supposed to be stunning.”
“It isn’t Vázquez Montalbán’s best novel,” I said. “There’s something very eighties Spain about it, the way it depicts Asia as a ridiculously exotic place. The characters talk like in Tintin: ‘Velly nice city, we visit?’”
The food was delicious, and we drank more alcohol, including the Mekong, a cocktail mentioned by Vázquez Montalbán (it was through reading him that I’d discovered the Singapore Sling and Lagavulin whisky). After the check, Teresa invited me to have one last drink on the terrace of her apartment.
“I’ll offer you a tour of Bangkok in one minute,” she said.
She lived on the top floor of a huge building, from which, sure enough, there was a 360-degree view of the city: the metallic purple lights of the skyscrapers, the black silhouette of the river, the congested roads in the distance, the luminous profile of a never-ending metropolis.
Her apartment was a pleasant deux pièces with antiques, designer objects, and an original José Luis Cuevas on the wall, Portrait of a Woman. We continued talking.
“My husband and I separated rather abruptly,” she said, “but there are people who get married at the point at which we parted. I loved him a lot. I still do.”
Her elder daughter was completing a doctorate in human rights and lived in Aguascalientes. The younger one was about to graduate in political science from the Sorbonne. She was a career civil servant but she liked literature and, of course, kept under lock and key a few poems of her own that she wouldn’t have shown anybody for anything in the world. She talked to me about Bonifaz Nuño, Octavio Paz, Gerardo Deniz. I told her I had read Gatuperio and she could hardly believe her eyes. “You know Deniz? You’re kidding! He’s hardly known outside Mexico!”
When a conversation turns to literature, there’s no end to it, so we refilled our glasses. I tried to sum up for her what I admired about Mexico. A sea of letters that comes and goes in the Gulf, that rocks and sways through the jungles of Chiapas and the deserts of Sonora, Ciudad Juárez and the north. Mexico was the country of Colombian writers. That struck her as amusing. Others say the opposite, that people go to Mexico to die.
“It’s the same thing,” I said, quite merry by now. “Where we live, we die, don’t we?”
She asked about Octavio Paz in Delhi. I told her that from a literary point of view India was Pazian or Octavian, I’m not sure of the word, Paztec? Octavian? Octopazian? We laughed.
The residence of the Mexican embassy is a tourist attraction, I told her, I was shown it by your colleague Conrado Tostado, the cultural attaché, the same person who gave me your telephone number, of course. It’s on Prithviraj Road. The nim tree is still there, where Paz married Marie José in 1964, a year before I was born, and she cried out, ’64? then we’re the same age, that’s something to be celebrated, before you go you have to try a tequila, and she took out a colored bottle, pulled the cork, and said, wait and see, this is really fantastic stuff from Mexico, and she showed me the label, José Cuervo, Special Family Reserve, it’s like brandy, better even, and I added: if we talk about the development of the human spirit, the most influential personalities of the twentieth century are Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, the Bacardis, and José Cuervo, don’t you think it’s strange that there are no women? and she said, there is a Japanese woman, Banana Split! she cried, laughing drunkenly, letting drops fall from her mouth, but I said, that doesn’t count because it doesn’t have alcohol, and she said, then you just have to pour a little in, right? and what about Bloody Mary? and I said, we’re forgetting the most obvious, Margarita! and a very important lady, Veuve Clicquot! then she stood up and said, look, listen to this, but only one, I swear, and she put on José Alfredo Jiménez.
I remembered Fernando Vallejo’s words: “If Mexico were the center of the world, José Alfredo would be classical music.” That’s quite a salute, he was an intelligent man, Vallejo, all honor to him, and she put on “Ella” and raised the volume, and seeing that I was worried about the neighbors said, don’t worry, the Thais are even-tempered people, and anyway I don’t have people above me or on either side, just offices.
We listened to two more songs until I looked at my watch and saw, to my horror, that it was two in the morning. I’m sorry, Teresa, I have to go, what a wonderful evening, could you call me a taxi? And she said, you just have to ask the doorman, there’s a taxi stand opposite.
When I got to my hotel I found another message from Gustavo:
Hello, old man, I found out that Manuel lost touch with the philosophy people when he left university, but that a few weeks ago he was asking questions. His sister disappeared a few years ago and apparently he was investigating. I’m going to get hold of the telephone numbers of these people and ask them what he wanted, what they talked about. Would that help you? Not that such things are easy here. Keep me up-to-date.
I answered immediately:
Thanks, Tavo, and if you can find out who his sister was, what kind of people she had dealings with, and when she disappeared, all the better. Thanks, brother. Have a hug from me.
10. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES
I divide myself and I am many, contradictory, wild, clandestine. Today I’m dedicating this space to a friend of mine so that he can tell his story, so that he can talk to you directly, dear bloggers, who is he? is he a projection of me? is he you?
Guess, read, invent.
I have a thousand nicknames, but the one I like most is Tongolele. That’s the one they gave me in the Splendor, a karaoke bar in Culiacán in the north of Mexico, where I went to sing once with a boyfriend I had. Or let’s say a friend with benefits, since he was married, not that that kind of thing bothers me. I sang “Ella,” by José Alfredo, and my friend whispered in my ear: you sing like Tongolele, and so that’s how I stayed. I hope you like it. I love it. I’ve seen that part of the public is like me and that’s why I’m going to talk to you quite openly: the name I was born with is horrible, decadent, demeaning: Wilson Amézquita. I had to put up with that horror, God forgive me, until I came of age, when they finally operated on me, as if it were a deformity or a tumor. I feel a knot in my stomach just saying it. Amézquita, that’s gross! I changed it to Jennifer Mor, which is so much more elegant and romantic, suggesting a woman sitting in a drawing room reading the classics, something like Racine’s Phaedra, while outside, in New York, it’s pouring rain and you hear the muffled sound of taxis hooting their horns. I mean, Wilson! I wouldn’t call a tennis ball Wilson! The name suggests a urinal with sawdust and flies in a chichi bar in Choachí. I’m a lady, I have delicate and beautiful things in my mind.