“I don’t want to make trouble for you, but someone went into my room.”
“Well, yes, they had to clean the room.”
“What I meant was, someone went in and took my books.”
“Books?”
“Listen.” I looked at him as calmly as I could. “Strange as it may seem, this young lady is my friend. That’s right, even though I don’t know her surname. I haven’t known her for long, but we have become friends.”
The guy looked at me mischievously. “It’s not what you think. I’m not saying the young lady stole those books from me. But I’m sure she took them. It’s a kind of game we’ve been playing since we met.”
“I understand, I think,” he said. “But will you be staying or leaving, sir?”
“I’m leaving. But first, I have a question. Were you here when she left? Do you know where she was going?”
“No, sir.”
“Was she on her own?”
His annoyed frown indicated that I was harassing him with my questions.
I put a hundred quetzal note on the counter. He shook his head in disapproval but reached out, took the note, and slipped it into his pocket.
“She was with a gentleman.”
I felt an unpleasant dizziness, accompanied by strong palpitations.
“Her father?”
He smiled condescendingly.
“He was an older man, yes. But to judge from the names, he wasn’t her father. He was traveling with a lot of books, though. Two suitcases full, plus his personal effects.”
“Do you mean she was with him last night?”
“No, sir. Last night the young lady was alone. The old man came to get her and her luggage this morning.”
The register was on the counter, open at a blank page. I read the date, upside down. I reached out, spun the book around and turned to the previous page. The second-to-last line read: Ana Severina Bruguera. Occupation: unemployed. Nationality: Honduran. And underneath: Otto Blanco. Traveler. Spanish.
“Did he go with her?”
The man looked at me with renewed contempt, and replied with a slight shake of his head. He took hold of the book, closed it, and put it away under the counter.
“As I said, I can’t be giving this kind of information out to all and sundry. But if you’re interested, I think they were going to the airport.”
I thanked him and took my suitcase out into the street, where I hailed a cab.
“You’re lucky,” said the driver. “I’ve just come from the airport, and there’s not much traffic. It can be hell at this time of day.”
If what the receptionist had told me was true, I thought, if she really had left the pensión just an hour ago and was heading for the airport, I had a chance of catching her there. I felt that if I let her escape this time I’d lose her forever. “One cannot lose what one does not possess,” I said to myself, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Maybe she was called Ana Severina Bruguera. Maybe not.
Near the statue of Tecún Umán (the hero of our national history, in spite of the fact that he didn’t exist) with his rusted iron spear and his colossal comic-book chest, I realized that it was lucky I had a suitcase with me, because for some time access to the airport had been restricted to passengers. The fact that our international airport is located in the middle of the city says a lot, but on this occasion I was glad of it. Thanks to the suitcase, I got in without any trouble. I went from queue to queue, scanning the passengers lined up to check in at the counters of the foreign and local airlines.
Nothing.
Finally I saw her at the cashier’s desk where the airport taxes are collected. Her boarding pass had just been stamped and she had turned to walk toward the automatic glass doors beyond which, without a passport, I wouldn’t have been able to follow her. Behind her were two men of different ages. They were engaged in a heated discussion. The older man, who was tall and corpulent, with sparse white hair and pale skin, was loftily looking down at his interlocutor from a height of about six feet. At first I didn’t recognize the other, much younger man, who was thin, with jet black hair and a beard, and who turned out to be a colleague, Ahmed al Fahsi, a Moroccan who had a bookstore in La Antigua. Ahmed was a self-declared atheist, but with his Muslim father, Jewish ancestors on his mother’s side, and a thorough knowledge of Christian (and Lacanian) doctrine, he came closer than anyone I knew to the model of the “Godfearing man.”
Even if I’d broken into a run, I don’t think I would have been able to reach her before she went on through the security gate. I could have called out, but I wasn’t sure of her name. I stopped.
The man I took to be Otto Blanco showed his papers to the officers and went through the gate, while Ahmed said something to him in a loud voice. A farewell in Hebrew? His brow still furrowed with anger, Ahmed turned, and our eyes met, but I don’t think he recognized me and I looked down. We passed each other, coming quite close, as he headed for the exit and I walked toward the cashier’s desk, where I turned around, pretending to have forgotten something. A few moments later, I left the airport and, with a tightness in the chest (or was it a gaping hole?), with “death in my soul” as Latouche would have said, I took a cab back home.
“It is impossible to be wise and to love at the same time,” someone has rightly said.
At first I thought that knowing she was far away would help me forget her. It took me some time to realize that I was mistaken.
That night I had dinner with Latouche, who was flying back to France the next day. I talked about her again, but without mentioning the books I’d let her steal — I didn’t want to seem a fool. I remembered that Latouche also knew Ahmed, who at some point had invited him to read at his bookstore. I said that I’d seen Ahmed at the airport, arguing with the putative father of Ana Severina Bruguera.
“And you didn’t talk with him? Why not? Though I guess it would have been embarrassing. If I were you, I’d go and see him,” said Latouche.
After dinner he asked me to take him to a striptease show that one of my partners had recommended. I said I’d take him there but that I wasn’t in the mood for watching the show. He gave up on the idea.
“Let’s go to a bar and have a drink, then,” he said.
We drank a fair bit, though not as much as the previous night.
“You need to talk to Ahmed,” he insisted when we were saying goodbye in front of his hotel.
“There’s no money for the famine in Africa, but there’s money to send satellites into space,” Ahmed was saying on the telephone when I walked into his bookstore at the end of Sucia Street in La Antigua. He didn’t see me straight away. “Do you know how long it is since it rained in Zagora? Zagora’s the town I come from. Yes, in the desert. Fifteen years. That’s right, fifteen years!”
He hung up and stared at the old telephone for a while before lifting his gaze to find out who had come into his store and made the bell ring.
“Ah.” He smiled when he saw me. “What’s up with the competition?”
“Right, the competition.” I looked around. Alfarabi, as his bookstore was called, had many things in common with La Entretenida. “Lucky you’re here and we’re in the capital.”
We shook hands, although, like many Moroccans, Ahmed simply held his hand out and let me do all the shaking. Then he touched his chest, as is customary in his country. I did the same as a reflex or a courtesy or. . I don’t really know why.