The pages were from an old issue of Clarín, or two or three different issues, because there were so many. As he looked for an edge to peel back, a familiar name caught his eye: “Bonorino.” But that wasn’t all; he noticed that the name was preceded by a number that was also familiar: “1800.” He had pronounced that number and name himself just a few minutes earlier; he was so thrown, he couldn’t remember where or why, but those syllables were still ringing in his ears. Was it a coincidence? Or was it magic? Intrigued, he began to read, which was unusual for him; after the last set of exams in July he had thought that he would never read anything again. And in fact, as this little exercise revealed, he was already forgetting how to do it. He made very slow progress, deciphering word by word. But it wasn’t just him: the paper was dirty and faded, and the cocoon’s uneven surface made the lines twist and turn, so Maxi had to keep tilting his head to follow them. Nevertheless, he got the gist. It was a letter of some kind from the father of the girl who got killed in the neighborhood a while back, in summer or autumn. He knew about it because the girl, Cynthia, had been at school with his sister; and for weeks it was all they could talk about at home. Echoes of the incident came back to him one by one, and, by a series of strange coincidences, resonated with the present situation. For a start, he’d forgotten that Cynthia had lived at 1800 Bonorino and died there. But there was something else: Cynthia Cabezas was a poor girl, shanty trash as his sister put it (he’d never met her), the kind of girl who’d normally be working as a servant, not going to high school. Especially not an exclusive, super-expensive school like Misericordia. She had a scholarship; she was the “fly in the pail of milk,” the odd one out. Maxi’s sister and her friends hadn’t excluded Cynthia, but only because discrimination was unfashionable, and they were slaves to fashion, especially Vanessa. All the same, he’d noticed the satisfaction in their voices when they talked about her mediocre grades, and the covertly festive fatalism with which they greeted her sad demise. What the crime had showed was that your origins always catch up with you in the end.
Anyway, that death, which was still unexplained, cast long shadows, and now Maxi remembered an argument that he’d had with Vanessa about it, when she had said that she was being followed by Cynthia’s father. . the Ignacio Cabezas who had written the letter. Cabezas had also led a movement against the evangelical pastors who were recruiting in the shantytowns. In this he had been discreetly supported by the Catholic Church, and that was why the nuns at the Misericordia school had given his daughter a scholarship. But after the crime, a rumor went around that in fact he was working for a rival Protestant group, and then the sects began to accuse each other of being fronts for drug-dealing gangs. What Maxi found most surprising, when he came to the end of the letter, was the timing. Why, he wondered, was Cabezas writing to Clarín now? It didn’t occur to him that the paper could be six months old. He didn’t even know that newspapers had the date printed at the top of each page, so he didn’t think to look. For Maxi, who had never read one in his life, every paper was “today’s.”
He emerged from this cogitation with a doubt. He knew what the letter was about and who had written it, but he was still wasn’t sure to whom it was addressed and why. He thought he must have missed something and was about to reread it, but when he looked down again what he saw, in the place where the letter had been, was a pair of eyes looking up at him.
He got such a fright he almost fell over backward. He didn’t quite lose his balance, but he drew back abruptly and lifted his hand (rather than letting it hover idly, he put it to work scratching an ear) and curved his lips in an apologetic smile, all without taking his eyes off the hobo. With a great scrunching of papers, the white chrysalis came apart all at once.
“Did I frighten you?” asked Maxi. “I was waiting for you to wake up.”
“Sir, good morning.”
Oddly, the light had continued to dwindle instead of getting brighter; the clouds had darkened and descended so far it seemed you could reach out and touch them. Maxi’s eyesight was functioning poorly in that gray dimness, but he was close enough to get a good view of the boy’s face, which, he now realized, he had never actually seen before. He had recognized him by his silhouette, in the context of a particular place and time, and had he seen him somewhere else, in different clothes, he could easily have taken him for a complete stranger. Maxi was shocked by what he saw. The boy had come through the difficult trial of winter, but what a price he’d paid! His face was gaunt, dirty and drawn, his hair all stuck together, and if not for the gleam of hunger and anxiety in his eyes, they might have belonged to a corpse. Luckily he had no facial hair. It occurred to Maxi that, for once, he’d arrived just in time.
That was why he decided not to beat around the bush but to get straight to the point. Anyway, it was better to start with something practical and concrete rather than trying to start a conversation because he wouldn’t have known what to say:
“There’s this place I’m going to tell you about. Be there at nine tonight, and I’ll introduce you to someone.”
The hobo nodded seriously and waited. Maxi’s mind was a blank; he didn’t know how to continue.
“Sir, what place?”
“Oh, yes.” He giggled. “What a dope. I tell you to go there but I don’t say where it is.” He looked around, trying to orient himself, with some difficulty. In the end he pointed in a direction, more or less at random. “180 °Calle Bonorino. It’s a street that widens out. There’s a vacant lot and a big empty space. .”
“Sir, yes, I know.”
“OK, that’s where, at nine. Do you want me to lend you my watch?”
The hobo glanced at Maxi’s Rolex and shook his head energetically.
“Sir, no, I’ll ask.”
“OK then.”
“Sir, is it for a job?”
The question took Maxi by surprise. He dodged it with a prevarication:
“Something like that. But better. You’ll see.”
And off he went. He continued to the gym on autopilot, thinking about what he’d done. And what he hadn’t done: like giving the boy a few pesos for something to eat, or saying something more enticing about the appointment to make sure he’d turn up. . But he didn’t know what he could have said, and maybe it was best to stick to the minimum; for someone who had so little, the minimum was probably enough. And Maxi had only a vague idea of what was going to happen. He would introduce them: the hobo and the mirror-girl, his two best friends. . He felt that they were made for each other, they were complementary; together they could make their way in the world. Each had what the other lacked. She had a job, a home; she could give him shelter. He had the courage and the experience that she needed to emerge from the mirror’s ethereal waters and the dark heart of the shantytown, and take her place in reality. There was no predicting what would happen later on, but they might fall in love, why not? Anything was possible.
Maxi rushed on, blind and deaf to his surroundings, completely absorbed in his thoughts. No one noticed him because all the people who crossed his path were in a hurry too, rushing to beat the storm, which looked as though it was about to break.
He was walking on air. He couldn’t believe it had all worked out so easily; he didn’t stop to think that, in fact, nothing at all had worked out yet. But results were secondary. The masterpiece came first. In the end, after all the time he’d spent thinking about it (or not: it came to the same thing), the operation had performed itself; he’d barely had to intervene. After all that thinking, and promising not to let what he did be governed by impulse or circumstances, it had been an improvisation on the spur of the moment. That’s why it had been easy; that’s why it had seemed to happen all by itself.