Tormented by a sense of foreboding, without being able to concentrate as well as I would have liked, I remained for the rest of the morning shut up in the bishop’s office editing the aforementioned report, from time to time copying unusual sentences into my little notebook, sentences that let my mind wander for a brief spell, but in one way or another all led me back to my urgency to find Fátima, to ask her to forget about the events of the previous night and abstain from recounting them to her Jay Cee, sentences like the one spoken by a man of the Mam ethnic group, whose parents and brothers the military had made disappear after the massacre, and who since then had been living in the deepest depression, the sentence that read, But always so very tired I feel that I can’t do anything!, with all its sadness and desolation, made me realize that I couldn’t do anything to communicate with Fátima, in spite of the insistent and futile calls I made to the apartment she shared with Pilar, the sentence But always so very tired I feel that I can’t do anything! turned in my head into something similar to the anxiety I was feeling at not being able to do anything to prevent Fátima, after the welcoming romp in bed, from whispering as innocently as she could in the ear of Major Jay Cee Medina something like, “I’ve got a little surprise for you, my love,” which he would respond to with the indolence of a warrior exhausted from the recently waged battle of love, without paying too much attention, until the girl with the fetid feet told him with a mixture of enthusiasm and complicity that she had also had a “parallel encounter,” in fact the night before, with a colleague from the archbishop’s palace, who was me, a declaration that would whip up the Uruguayan soldier into a precipitous bout of rage and produce a fear of equal intensity in me, your humble servant, so much so that I stood up and began to pace compulsively around the bishop’s office, imagining the postcoital scene between Fátima and her recently arrived boyfriend, I began to pace and scratch the head of my penis through my pants, I walked back and forth in front of the desk like a caged monkey and rubbed the head of my penis, as if with this gesture I could get rid of the image of that pair of lovebirds and female treason, which perhaps at that very instant was turning that Jay Cee into a fiend ready to crush my bones, when in fact what was happening was that the whole morning I had been feeling a slight itching at the tip of my penis and a kind of tightness around my testicles, sensations which I’d attributed to irritation naturally produced by a sexual encounter after several weeks of abstinence, but that now, under sharper scrutiny, I noticed had gotten worse as the day wore on.
That from suspicion to panic not even a fraction of a second went by I can be absolutely certain by the speed at which I propelled myself out of the office and toward the bathrooms, by the state of mental turmoil I found myself suddenly engulfed in as I ran through the corridors, by the extreme emotional distress I felt as I entered the stall where, after locking the door, I proceeded to examine my member: I didn’t need to squeeze it very hard to make a white drop appear, which left me dumbstruck, my mouth hanging open, as if I had been put under a spell, because never in my life had I had a venereal disease, because I believed I would never in my entire life catch such a disease, because what I had always most feared about carnal relations was the possibility of contracting a venereal disease. And no doubt whatsoever remained: the greatly feared drop of pus was there, looking at me accusatorily, while I had the sensation that the floor was collapsing under my feet, the vertigo of someone who has crossed a forbidden boundary, for until then I had believed that men were divided into two groups, the dirty and the virtuous, and it was precisely the possession of this drop or the lack thereof that constituted the line separating them.
That from panic to indignation I passed in a fury I am certain because before I had even left the stall and gotten to the sink, my fear that Fátima would recount her nocturnal adventures to her soldier lover had been expunged from my soul and instead my entire being became possessed with the idea of revenge, with the search for the best way to repay the dirty trick that little Spanish chick had played on me, for it was impossible that she was unaware that she was a carrier of the infection now eating away at me and that the Uruguayan soldier had undoubtedly infected her with, habitué of who knows what prostitutes, only the worst kind of treachery could lead her to rub her infection off on me the way she had and only my worst treachery could pay her back, I told myself as I splashed water on my face, as if in this way I could rid myself of the plague I had caught, without any desire at all to go back and shut myself up in the bishop’s office unless it was to take immediate action against that diseased scoundrel, which is just what I would do, call my friend Erick and ask him to please recommend a urologist because one of his employees had infected me with a venereal disease, I would even ask Pilarica for a referral to a medical man to treat the disease that her compatriot had given me the night before, which I would explain to her in detail so that she would realize what kind of a friend she had and finally dispel that stupid little giggle. And I would even insinuate to the bishop that I wasn’t making much progress on copyediting the report, nor working with the kind of focus I’d hoped for, and that the fault lay with that Fátima, who had disgraced me with her putrid cunt. But the powerful memory of that pearl of pus between my legs made me understand that this was an issue of first things coming first, that my strategy for repudiating Fátima could wait, and that first I had to stop the infection, so, swiftly, perhaps with the speed of one possessed, I made my way toward the enormous wooden door, crossed the filthy street teeming with beggars and street vendors, and entered the corner drugstore to find a pharmacist who could give me a prescription for the strongest possible penicillin to treat the disease I had caught.
TEN
I ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE at 1-25 Sexta Avenida sharply at eight-thirty, exactly as I had been instructed, for Pilarica had made it clear to me that this was when the birthday party for Johnny Silverman would begin, a New York Jew and a member of the team of forensic anthropologists working with the archdiocese, excavating sites of documented massacres to recover the bones of the victims in order to confirm the testimonies and allow the living to hold funeral services for the dead in keeping with the rituals and traditions of the indigenous cultures, even if it was many years later and nobody was able to distinguish precisely the bones of one from the bones of another, for the army had buried so many in mass graves. I arrived at Johnny Silverman’s house at the appointed hour with no expectations other than to spend a relaxing evening, abstemious as I found myself due to the antibiotics I was taking to counteract the infection already discussed and which had been the cause of an altercation with Fátima that afternoon, for she categorically denied that either she or her boyfriend were infected with any disease and even dared insinuate that I was trying to slander her, so I proposed that she accompany me to the bishop’s office at that very moment and I would show her the sinister drop in private, an invitation she turned down with some excuse or other while she went on sweetening her coffee in the kitchen of the archbishop’s palace, where we were arguing in whispers, because it simply wasn’t possible, I insisted, that the little drop appeared precisely the morning after she had taken advantage of me and that it just so happened that the carrier of this disease exhibited no symptoms whatsoever, a point that made her even more upset and led her to cut short the discussion, this wasn’t the place for that kind of conversation, she said as she left. I entered Johnny Silverman’s house and was surprised that the host himself opened the door, looking rather disheveled with a kitchen knife in his hand, and that the living room was empty as if the party had been cancelled, a suspicion I expressed at that very moment, but Johnny explained that the guests would start to arrive in a few minutes and that I was the first, besides Charlie, who was already in the kitchen helping him prepare some food, that he himself was running late because of something that had come up at work at the last minute, and he still hadn’t even taken a much-needed shower, a point I agreed with him on, based on how dirty he looked. I couldn’t help noticing, all the way from the front door to the kitchen, the large rooms in this beautiful colonial house and the excellent taste of its decor and furnishings, not in the same league as the apartment in the Engels Building where I spent my nights and that could by rights be considered a dump in comparison to this grandeur I still wasn’t seeing to its full extent, an idea that led me to conclude through a series of associations that it was much more profitable to dig up Indians’ bones than edit pages bearing their testimonies, though I must admit that Pilarica had told me that this Johnny Silverman belonged to a wealthy Jewish family from New York that owned a penthouse in Manhattan as well as many other properties, which somehow might explain the difference between his house and my apartment, but not something else I would soon begin to suspect. An olive-skinned beauty with long thick black locks greeted me with the insolence of a woman who knows many desire her and the richest one possesses her after Johnny said that this was Tania, his girlfriend, and the other was Charlie, a guy with a shaved head