FOUR
BINGO: I FINALLY FOUND A good-looking girl. Allow me to clarify: she was no Demi Moore, but she had all her parts in all the right places, was well-proportioned, had fine features and a healthy expression, without that resentment so typical of those ugly doyens of messianic causes who thronged the archbishop's palace, a girl born in Toledo, Spain, who had spent most of her life in Madrid, in the Salamanca neighborhood, which is no slum, and whose father was a well-known military physician, an admirer of Generalísimo Franco, whom he served under, she told me, but not when we first started talking, obviously nobody introduces themselves like that, much less so in the courtyard of the archbishop's palace, full of so many so-called guardians of human rights, where she was reading and soaking up a little mountain sunshine, sitting on the rim of the stone fountain. An apparition! I said to myself, Lord in Heaven! as I walked down the corridor toward the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, but there and then changed my direction toward that apparition, next to which I sat down, introduced myself without any preambles, and immediately asked her where had she been hiding all week, how was it possible that I hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even known of her existence until that very moment. She told me her name was Pilar, otherwise known as Pilarica, a graduate in psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid, for the past five months working under the supervision of my friend Erick in the archbishop’s palace but also in indigenous communities in the province of Alta Verapaz, where she had been the previous week, that’s why we hadn’t met. A few hours later, at noon, we walked together through the large wooden door on our way to a vegetarian restaurant located in front of the bandstand in Parque Central, conversing in a relaxed fashion, the first time I had left the archbishop’s palace with someone else and without the devil nipping at my heels, a pleasure no matter how you looked at it, walking along and chatting calmly with an attractive girl, a foreigner and apparently intelligent, who moreover worked most of the time just a few feet from my office and with whom I could easily establish a closer relationship, too good to be true, as I soon discovered, for we hadn’t even reached the vegetarian restaurant when I began to detect certain expressions that made me suspect that my delightful companion might be a fanatic of that nonsense called political correctness, which put me slightly on my guard and thereafter made me think that the very fact that we were about to enter a vegetarian restaurant already constituted one alarming symptom, for only a mind accustomed to absurd abstractions and fashionable activism could prefer that insipid food to a good cut of tender juicy meat, which is why so far I hadn’t dared ask her why she had chosen that restaurant for our first meal together, hoping she would allege some digestive ailment resulting from her sojourn in inhospitable regions, but no, just as I feared, once we were seated in that environment infused with a certain sect-like air, which I immediately perceived, Pilar began her diatribe against meat, which was not only repulsive to her but also very unhealthy, enumerating the various harmful, even deadly, effects of ingesting meat, with a lexicon and an emphasis appropriate for the daughter of a military physician and Franco supporter turned savior of indigenous peoples, which is what she did on her trips to the countryside, she met with indigenous communities, victims of the atrocities committed by the armed forces, to help them overcome the trauma they were suffering as a result of not being able to go through the traditional mourning rites, she explained to me, for the worst thing was the absence of cadavers for sinister reasons, which prevented people from carrying out any mourning rituals, as a result of which they suffered all sorts of disorders, something I was already familiar with, as I told her, that’s what the report’s all about, so familiar that I proceeded to take my notebook out of the pocket of my corduroy blazer to read her a few remarkable sentences related to the subject she had just brought up, and I placed it on the table, open, next to my plate of soup: My children say: Mama, my poor Papa where might he be, maybe the sun passes over his bones, maybe the rain and the air, where might he be? As if my poor Papa he was an animal. This is sorrow. ., I read between spoonfuls, and then I looked for a sentence that had electrified me that very morning: The pigs they are eating him, they are picking over his bones. ., I enunciated as I reached for my glass of myrtle juice, because they didn’t serve beer at that restaurant, a sip of something to soothe my throat so I could continue reading the sentence, I want to see at least his bones, but at that moment I perceived that Pilar was not enjoying my sentences, the astonished expression on her face indicated as much, as did her stillness, so I decided to close my notebook but not before reading, only to myself, the last of the sentences that I would have liked to share with her, which said, While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat. .
Luck would have it that the following evening after work I went out with Pilar to have a few beers — thank God she wasn’t abstemious — to a bar called La Bodeguita de Enfrente, a rather odd name, for across the street from this bar, per the name, there was nothing besides a barbershop, and in spite of the diminutive ending in the name it was a large bodega whose walls were plastered with hundreds of posters with revolutionary slogans and at night they had live music, either the keening imitators of the so-called New Cuban Song, or danceable tunes in the style of the Gipsy Kings, but when Pilar and I arrived it was still early, only a few tables were occupied, and we found the best possible conditions for conversation under the congenial influence of the beer, I even revealed to her certain aspects of my life, a vice I am not addicted to, like the fact that a month before I had been forced to leave my country because I had written an article that stated that El Salvador was the first Latin American country to have an African president, a statement that was characterized as “racist” and that won me the enmity of half the country, especially those with power and my employers, despite my subsequent clarification that I was not referring to the fact, anyway verifiable, that the president looked like a black African, for the color of his skin didn’t matter at all, but rather to his dictatorial attitude and his refusal to hear the opinions of those whose opinions differed from his, I explained to Pilar, therefore a month ago I was forced to immigrate to this country, my neighboring country, and accept my friend Erick’s offer to edit the report she already knew about and was also working on. “How did you meet Erick?” she asked, as if I were confessing rather than carrying on a lighthearted conversation under the congenial influence of the beer, and after making vague reference to us having coincided in Mexico during my exile and his graduate studies there, I went on the offensive, now she was the one who had to loosen her tongue, come on, and I asked her with full impunity if her boyfriend also worked at the offices of the archbishop, my only intention being to jar her ever so slightly, never dreaming that I had touched her gangrened wound, as I was soon to find out, for what at first was simply a suddenly altered facial expression quickly became an outburst of tears, an inferno, abject discomfort, a human specimen crying because — I was certain — of so-called love, who would proceed to find in me a captive audience she could spill her guts to — still sucking in her snot — about her tragedy: the guy was named Humberto, he had also been working for the archdiocese when they met—how did you know? — but three weeks ago he left for the Basque Country to study for his Master’s in Political Science, none of which justified her tears, I told her rather sharply; nobody in their right mind would cry because their lover had gone away to study, unless he had gone with somebody else and was sleeping with that person, I said, irritated, because the most irritating thing is a crying woman and her nose started dripping even more freely and she demanded I tell her who had told me about it, as if one needed a gossipmonger’s loose tongue to discover what I had figured out using common sense, I explained, already decidedly uncomfortable, with the waiter eavesdropping from behind the bar—we don’t want another beer, you gimp! I would have loved to shout at him, but at that moment Pilar began wailing uncontrollably about how he had betrayed her since the very beginning of their relationship, but she had only realized it when Itzel, her victorious rival and, needless to say, colleague had also traveled to the Basque Country, just one week after Humberto, for no reason and without any explanation, she said still sniffling loudly, to which I responded that the reason resided in Humberto’s crotch, speaking as an expert on couple relationships, and then I offered her my best homily: it’s a sign of an intelligent person to be grateful when they manage, without the slightest effort, to rid themselves of a treasonous and slimy partner, in view of the fact that this immediately and without further ado renders them free to initiate a new relationship that will allow them to open themselves up in a way they never could with the traitor who didn’t deserve them anyway. And I smiled at her, so she would fully understand my words. But Pilarica returned to her old ways, sobbing in a frankly grotesque manner, with no respect for me, who just wanted to drink a few beers and explore the possibility of seducing a girl who appeared to be good-looking and intelligent, what a crass mistake, mucus doesn’t exactly enhance beauty nor tears intelligence, so I gestured to the gimp to bring a couple more beers, getting ready to stand up in deference to my bladder, but at that moment and in a quick broadside she muttered that what hurt her most was that she had lovingly loaned her darling Humberto one thousand dollars and he had turned right around and used it to pay for an airplane ticket for that very same Itzel. Damn! I blurted out at the gimp, who nervously placed the beers on the table. Did you hear that? This girl pays for her boyfriend’s lover’s trip, how many of us have got a girlfriend like that. .! The victim of her own stupidity suddenly stopped crying, sat rigidly up in her chair, as if she had just woken up from a dream, dumbfounded, perhaps tempted to become indignant, it seemed, and in response I raised my mug of beer and said, Cheers, not thinking precisely of her but rather of Humberto, a clever fellow from the looks of it and with a great future ahead of him, not to mention Itzel, whose total lack of scruples had fired up my imagination, which led me to ask Pilar what kind of creature was that girl who had taken her, Pilar’s, money to run off with her, Pilar’s, boyfriend, such a perfect scheme that it could only have been conjured up by a woman, but my serious and indignant companion didn’t utter a word. For the moment I found myself in an uncomfortable situation, for there is nothing more repulsive to me than a woman who cries as a result of her own stupidity and who in addition asks for my commiseration, but at the same time nothing so stimulates my fantasies as the possibility of fornicating with a good-looking girl recently abandoned because of her own stupidity whom I could delightfully take advantage of during the act of love, so I didn’t know whether to tell Pilar that we should call an end to our tearful date and proceed to pay for the beers we had drunk, or, on the contrary, activate my strategies of seduction so as to move things forward. My razor-sharp intuition told me that she was undergoing a similar conflict, on the one hand very upset that I had made fun of her stupidity, especially in front of the gimp, but on the other needing company and perhaps not wanting to go home right away only to sink into the murky mire of mortification. Fortunately, at that instant, two enthusiastic guys who worked at the archbishop’s palace appeared at our table, very good friends of Pilar’s, apparently, whom I knew only by sight, and without further ado they sat down, ordered beers, and managed to unravel the knot that had tangled up our date, which I interpreted as a sign from the heavens that I should persevere with Pilar because a good romp in the hay, if it were possible, would calm my nerves and gratify my senses after a week of being shut in a room reading about cadavers and torture.