cuilio everyone carries inside him. My taxi driver was the perfect example: he intended to draw from me as much information as he possibly could, asking malicious questions that made me afraid that he was weighing whether it was worth it to assault me or not, said Vega. At the least opportunity, a cop will show his vocation for petty thievery, true petty thieves work as cops, only in this country do they use the word cuilio to denote a petty thief working as a policeman, but in this case a taxi driver snoop was asking me all these questions about my life in order to determine if I were a favorable victim upon whom it would be worth exercising his vocation for petty thievery. All taxi drivers are cuilios, Moya, especially that one who drove me to San Salvador and asked suspicious questions about my life. At the entrance of the city, before the toll booth, the taxi driver told me that now there was this “Monument to Peace,” a grotesquerie that could only have been conceived by someone with a screwed-up imagination, a grotesque “Monument to Peace” showing the absolute lack of imagination of these people, forceful evidence of the total degradation of taste, said Vega. And the one further on is even worse, Moya, it’s the most hair-raising thing I have ever seen; the so-called Monument to the Distant Brother actually seems like a gigantic urinal, this monument with its enormous wall of tiles doesn’t evoke anything other than a urinal, I swear to you, Moya, when I saw it for the first time I didn’t feel anything other than an urge to urinate, and every time I’ve passed by this place they decided to call “Monument to the Distant Brother,” the only thing it has done is excite my kidneys. It’s a masterpiece of the degradation of taste: a gigantic urinal constructed in appreciation of men in sombreros and chubby women who live in the United States loaded down with boxes replete with useless crap, said Vega. Only a party of idiots could be so obsessed to construct this hair-raising monument, Moya, only a bunch of idiots who’ve become the governing party could waste state funds on the construction of these failures, starkly expressing this country’s degraded taste, only a party of idiots enjoying the use of state funds could foment such a degradation of taste by constructing these so-called monuments. They are, truthfully, monuments to the degradation of taste, Moya, they are nothing more than monuments to the lack of imagination, the extreme degradation of taste of the people in this country, said Vega. And what can I say about the enormous heads of the so-called Heroes of the Fatherland, these enormous, deformed heads of marble placed at a distance from what was once called the Southern Highway, these horrendous unwieldy monstrosities of marble supposedly reproducing the so-called heroes of the fatherland’s faces, these horrendous and deformed heads popularly known as “The Flintstones”: only a caveman mentality could have conceived such unwieldy monstrosities, Moya, only a comic-strip, caveman mentality could have conceived of these hulks as sculptures to be exhibited publicly, something that in another place would have been considered with horror, here they exhibit with pride. It’s incredible, Moya. They call it “The Flintstones” because the so-called heroes of the fatherland surely weren’t anything other than cavemen, like the idiots now wasting state funds by ordering the construction of monuments and sculptures that only serve to reveal their total degradation of taste, said Vega; the so-called heroes of the fatherland had to have been cavemen, and from them was passed down the congenital imbecility that’s characterized the people of this country, only the fact that the so-called heroes of the fatherland were cavemen could explain the general monstrousness prevailing in this country. Let me buy you one last whisky, Moya, offered Vega, one more before you leave, while I drink my last mineral water, and I’ll ask Tolín to return my CD of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat Minor, because people have already begun to arrive: the clientele who have surely come to reserve tables for the so-called artistic event tonight. By seven I want to be back at my hotel, to lock myself in to enjoy my room and a frugal dinner, said Vega. Nothing’s more pleasant than lying in bed, calmly reading, without the sound of televisions nearby, without the enervating shouts of my brother’s wife and their pernicious children; there’s nothing more comforting than locking myself in to read, think, and rest. Just the idea of being safe from my brother’s nightly invitations to “go party” I find stimulating, Moya, nothing’s more horrible than being forced to choose between my brother’s invitations to “go party” and the prospect of spending the night flanked by three television sets cranked to top volume on different channels. Only one night did I accept my brother’s invitation to “go party,” said Vega, a unique unrepeatable night that I spent so that it would never again occur to me to accept my brother’s repeated invitation to “go party.” My brother’s primary pleasure is to “go party” at night, Moya, he and his friends’ primary pleasure consists of hanging out in a bar drinking huge quantities of diarrhea-inducing beer until they reach complete imbecility; later they enter a discotheque where they jump around like primates; and, finally, they visit a sordid brothel. These are the three stages of “partying” at night, this ritual they maintain with gusto, it’s their supreme diversion: first they dumb themselves all the way down with beer, then they jump around sweating to savage noise in the thick air of a discotheque, and finally they drool with lust in a seedy brothel, said Vega. At least these were the three rigorous stages of partying on the night my brother took me with them. Only the disturbance produced in me by the noise of the television sets, by the chitchat of my brother’s wife, and by the shouts of the pair of stupid, pernicious boys could explain why I accepted my brother’s invitation to “go party” that night, knowing all along that no invitation coming from my brother would lack a disturbing vulgarity. I will repent for the rest of my life having accepted this invitation to “go party” that night, Moya, I suffered the worst anxiety imaginable, I wasted practically all my emotional capital, said Vega. It was my brother, a friend of his called Juancho, and me. First we were at a bar called The Barbed-Wire Fence, a lurid place, enough to make your hair stand on end, it’s a shack plagued with gigantic screens in every corner, truly an aberration: a place where you can only drink diarrhea-inducing beer surrounded by screens on which different singers are projected, each singer more abominable than the last, interpreting those foolish and strident melodies. And my brother’s friend, Moya, this Juancho, a guy with negroid features, talked up a storm; he’s a negroid who owns a hardware store, he swears to have downed all the alcohol in the world and gone to bed with every woman who ever crossed his path, said Vega. El Negroid exaggerated more and was more mythomaniacal than you could imagine, Moya, a machine of talking and telling stories about himself, a talking doll who drinks beer after beer while narrating about his delirious sexual prowess. I wasn’t prepared for this: stuck with my glass of mineral water, I was forced to listen with one ear to the verbosity of El Negroid and with the other to the strident voice of some disheveled girl gyrating on the screens. But El Negroid imposed himself against their wailing and as he drank more beer, his stories about his drinking binges and sexual adventures became more and more obscene. A really repulsive negroid, Moya. And foolish like few are: time and again he insisted that I should drink a beer, that it wasn’t possible to spend the whole night drinking mineral water. I don’t know how many times I explained that I don’t drink beer, Moya, much less this revolting, diarrhea-inducing Pilsener they drink, my colitis only permitted me to have a couple of drinks, preferably whisky, but in this bar called The Barbed-Wire Fence they didn’t sell anything other than this revolting, diarrhea-inducing beer. In El Negroid’s peanut brain, in the center of his little head, there wasn’t room for the idea that someone might not drink that filth, said Vega. It was repulsive, Moya, once again he told me his delirious sexual adventures with all the prostitutes in all the brothels in San Salvador. But what truly preoccupied me, Moya, were the four guys at the next table, they were the most sinister people I’ve ever seen in my life, Moya, four psychopaths with crime and torture stamped on their faces drinking beer at the next table, these were guys you really need to be careful of, so bloodthirsty it seemed that to turn to look at them for just a second constitutes a tremendous risk, said Vega. I warned El Negroid to lower his voice, that these lovely guys to the side were already watching him with creepy grins. I feared a tragedy, Moya, these psychopaths evidently carried fragmentation grenades they anxiously hoped to throw under the table of a trio of guys like us, I was sure at this instant that these criminals stroked fragmentation grenades that at any moment they would throw under our table, because for these psychopath ex-soldiers, ex-guerillas, fragmentation grenades have become their favorite toys, not a day passes in which one of these so-called demobilized guys doesn’t throw a frag grenade at a group of people bothering him, truthfully these criminal ex-soldiers and ex-guerrillas really carry fragmentation grenades hoping for the least opportunity to throw them at guys like El Negroid who wouldn’t stop shouting about his most unusual sexual adventures, said Vega. I warned him time and time again to lower his voice, Moya, and he calmed down for a second, whirling to look at these psychopaths about to throw fragmentation grenades at us the way they do every day in bars and dance halls, and in the streets, where they settle their differences with grenades, like kids, where these so-called demobilized guys have fun with their fragmentation grenades, throwing them while laughing at imbeciles like El Negroid, said Vega. Luckily we rushed out of the bar for a discotheque called Rococó, in the second stage of what my brother and his friends denoted “partying.” It was a dark hall, with blinding lights pulsing vividly from the ceiling and where the air hardly circulated, a hall that thumped with infernal noise and in the center of which there was a dance floor surrounded by seats and tables practically encrusted to the floor. An overwhelming place, Moya, especially made for the deranged and deaf who enjoy darkness and dense air. I immediately began to sweat, to feel my temples palpitate as if my blood pressure had increased out of control and my head were about to burst, said Vega. And after we made it to the bar to order the drink that came with the cover charge, in the middle of a desperate scramble, while we looked for a table, I realized that El Negroid hadn’t stopped talking for a single minute, that his voice strenuously fought to be heard over the shocking noise threatening to demolish the hall. I drank my shot of whisky, hoping it might help ease my palpating head, but it only served to make me sweat more profusely, accentuating my sensation of claustroph