It was a lie. He sold fish and birds and maybe a reptile or two. He could not afford extravagant purchases like ostriches.
“I need the money,” Mario confessed. “I want to go to Canada.”
“What for?”
“I want to see the polar bears before they disappear. Before all the ice melts away.”
Gerardo stared at Mario. Who the hell cared about polar bears? Unless Gerardo was importing them, he didn’t give a damn about them or the ice. Canada was far away and there were more pressing problems right now such as how he was going to afford that month’s water bill. Up went the bill, and for a small trader of exotic pets there was always competition, taxes and bribes to pay, food to buy for the animals. If he didn’t sell them quickly, he’d have to keep the beasts for months on end and spend tons of money on their care.
And then Mario came and talked about looking at polar bears? Christ on the cross. They were probably better off without so many of them anyway. He tried to calculate the amount of food one of those things must devour each month and shook his head.
“Look, I can’t give you much,” Gerardo said.
Gerardo put the maquech in the terrarium together with the bits of wood Mario had given him. The maquech fed on the bacteria of decomposing wood, so at least it wouldn’t cost too much to maintain. He recalled the piranhas he’d bought last May. Hungry, ugly little things. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Gerardo looked at the maquech and wondered who might buy this one. He’d seen people wearing a maquech on their lapel or their dress, but usually they had tacky plastic faux-jewels on their backs. This little insect had been painted and decorated with semi-precious stones. It was not a cheap bug and he needed to make a good sale.
He went through his list of regular clients, discarded all of them and kept coming back to a single name: Arturo de la Vega.
He’d never sold anything to Arturo but, if there was a buyer in Mexico City, it was Arturo. He was disgustingly rich. While everyone else worried about getting running water that week, how to purchase a kilo of tortillas, the eternally high levels of pollution and the assholes trying to express-kidnap you, Arturo spent insane amounts of money on exotic pets. Arturo de la Vega had a roof garden with a pool and palm trees in a city where people ran behind the water trucks, filling barrels andtinajas twice a week. Arturo de la Vega drove a car when everyone else had to walk or, at best, be carried on a litter down Reforma.
If you managed to sell an animal to Arturo de la Vega, you were in the big leagues.
But Gerardo had never sold a thing to him. He was too small, too unknown, too much of a provincial newcomer.
He drummed his fingers against the table.
He took out the camera and snapped a few pictures of the maquech.
He normally did not dream. There was no space for dreams in the cramped apartment, filled with the stench of the birds and fish.
That night he dreamt of rivers and quiet, dark places where the sunlight turns green with the colour of the trees.
Three days later, the monthly offering period for Arturo de la Vega opened up. It was only a one-day window and Gerardo had to queue outside the reception office for many hours prior to that. He stood, baking under the furious sun, and watched a man walk by with cages strapped behind his back. Mechanical owls blinked their multi-coloured eyes at Gerardo and shook their metal wings. There was a water-seller across the street yelling the same litany over and over again.
“Water. Fresh, pure water.”
He closed his eyes and he thought of the murmur of a stream.
Somebody shoved him forwards and Gerardo snapped his eyes open and walked forwards, one more step towards the building’s entrance. A long time later, he stepped into the lobby and placed his submission package, nothing more than a few snapshots and an introduction letter, on the narrow cedar table.
Then it was back to his apartment, down three flights of stairs. He couldn’t afford a floor above ground with a glass window; not even a window with metal shutters. Sunlight was costly.
Gerardo fed the fish and the birds first. Then he turned to the maquech.
The insect walked from one end of its terrarium to the other.
“What are you thinking?” he asked the maquech.
The maquech stood very still.
Gerardo stood still, too.
He didn’t talk to the animals. It was not his thing to coo and smile and babble over an animal as if it were a baby. He fed them. He housed them. He sold them. That was it.
Nothing less and nothing more.
It was water day. Four hours of running water. The luxury of a warm shower was something he looked forward to the whole week. He hummed and closed his eyes and thought of blue-green waterfalls.
As he stood in the shower, head bowed under the spray, he heard a loud pounding.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and opened the door.
A courier held out a letter for him.
“From Mr De la Vega,” the man said.
Gerardo tore open the black envelope. Inside was a card with an address and a date. An invitation to Mr De la Vega’s apartment. An invitation to show him the maquech.
He’d done it.
He was going to De la Vega’s home to parade his maquech in front of him like a real trader.
Gerardo froze as he realised the wooden or plastic cages where he normally stuffed his merchandise wouldn’t suffice. He needed something grand and elegant that would display the maquech as an elaborate brooch.
Perhaps a red velvet box lined in silk with appropriate breathing holes. At once he began to panic, considering the price of this custom-made, urgent item.
But then he looked at the maquech with its golden chain, the painted back, the tiny stones in the centre of the composition. A breathing mosaic. A walking jewel. It was beautiful. It needed a beautiful setting.
The room was black and as bright as polished obsidian. The floor and the walls reflected and distorted Gerardo’s image as he opened the box and held it up for De la Vega to inspect.
The young man glanced at the maquech, just a little glance and looked up at him.
“What on earth is that?”
“Zopherus chilensis,” Gerardo said. “In Yucatan they call them maquech and wear them as brooches.”
“It’s alive?”
“Yes. Live-jewellery. It is decorated with …”
“Pablo, did you select this?”
A man in impeccable white, wearing a matching white hat stepped from behind De la Vega’s right, a little silver tablet in his left hand.
“Yes,” said the man.
“What for?”
“It’s a curiosity. I haven’t seen one since I was a child.”
“It’s ugly,” De la Vega said and waved Gerardo away.
He considered tearing off the jewels from the insect’s back. There were bills to pay and the maquech had been an extravagant purchase at a time when he couldn’t afford it. Not that Gerardo could ever afford much.
“Stupid, slow bug,” he told the maquech as it walked on the palm of his hand. Or maybe not stupid, merely indifferent. In Yucatan they said it could live for many decades, even centuries. Maybe after hundreds of years of walking in the jungle, things such as humans and their games were of little importance. Of course, these were just legends. Stories old people told. He didn’t believe them.
But as the maquech began to crawl up his arm, he wondered what time might be like for a quasi-immortal creature, sitting under the jade shade of the trees.
Gerardo was thinking of black eyeless fish and cenotes when the phone rang. The cenotes melted away as he punched a key.