Having already finished off our Bloody Caesars and our Bulls, we were just starting in on our second round of vodka tonics, surrounded by the buzz coming from several other tables behind us that had since become occupied, when Félix started to tell me a story that Aniceto had told him the night before at The College, he said, and he did it without the shouting I mentioned earlier, instead adopting the demeanor of a clandestine militant, which made me feel exceedingly disinclined to listen because I assumed that he’d once again tell me a story he’d already told me several times, this being his trademark pathology, which I had discovered nine years before, the second time I’d ever laid eyes on him, when he told me the same story he had told me at our first encounter the day before, as if he had never told it, needless to say, a pathology that at the time I attributed to the tremendous fear the poor guy must have experienced as a result of having been forced to become an armed urban commando, when quite obviously he was not prepared for it, and also to the guilt he suffered because the military had come to his house to get him and killed his brother-in-law when they didn’t find him, and that was the story he repeated over and over, the story that made him ill, how he had eluded a military raid and how they had gotten even by gunning down his brother-in-law. I flew into a fit of rage, had an urge to shout at him to shut his trap, to stop him from repeating that same idiotic blather, but fortunately it was a fit that remained invisible to those around me, which explains why I suggested instead that we go look for a place to eat, some place other than Sanborns, which was only good for treating our hangovers, a real restaurant, that is, and that he should save the story Aniceto had told him for our new venue.
“Perfect,” Félix said, gulping down his vodka tonic and pressing me to finish mine while stating enthusiastically that the moment he opened his eyes that morning with the hangover hammering at his temples and his guts churning, he’d told himself he’d love to eat some Argentinian beef and chorizo, a strange assertion that I attributed to his bravado, because one thing is a hangover and another hunger, and nobody with churning guts can dream about eating meat. But, in the end, every belly is a world unto itself, and we paid and stepped out onto Insurgentes on the corner of San Antonio then turned toward El Gran Bife, an Argentinian restaurant located a few blocks away, so close you could see it from the terrace of La Veiga. But once we were outside under the midday sun, I discovered that the drinks had made me feel so good that I’d passed from a hangover to a prelude to revelry, and I also discovered that Félix was planning to invite some other friends to join us at the restaurant, thereby turning the meal into an actual party, which is why he stopped to call María Lima, the editor of the magazine’s international page, his boss, and a couple of other reporters; while he was inviting them to El Gran Bife from the telephone booth on the corner of Porfirio Díaz, my eyes were drawn to the windows of Muñecón’s apartment — his building was barely thirty yards away — and then I remembered that I had taken the taxi to escape from Mario Varela at this very same corner in the wee hours of the dawn, a curious spatial coincidence, I told myself, a sign that I moved in a tiny circle in the most populated city on the planet. When Félix finished talking, it was my turn, but nobody picked up on the other end of the line, and I was so worried that I had an urge to go to the building to check and see if my uncle’s car was in its parking space, because ringing the bell without calling first would have been inexcusably reckless. As it turned out, I didn’t have the opportunity to go to Muñecón’s building, for although I had leapt from a hangover to a prelude to revelry, Félix had leapt even higher and more quickly, so high that the demons of urgency were already nipping at his heels, and the whole time we were striding down the four blocks past Parque Hundido, my friend was telling me we had to hurry, his editor was bringing along a new reporter, a woman with an ass straight out of the movies, and he was shouting, flinging his hands around and tracing the shape of her ass in the air, the look on his face like a jackal drooling at the sight of a succulent piece of carrion. “Calm down, you moron, they’re not going to get there before us,” I said, wanting him to slow down, feeling ridiculous at that desperate trot, and the worst part was that I was starting to sweat, a thick sticky sweat, a warning that my kidneys had an urgent need for at least one glass of water. And then I asked myself what was going on with me, what the hell was I doing darting around in a frenzy in the wake created by Félix’s agitation, instead of going to the bank to deposit my check, eating something quickly, then showing up at the travel agency to buy my ticket, which would have been the correct way to proceed, above and beyond whatever had happened to my doctor, above and beyond whatever faces went unseen and hearts (in this case, conspiracies) went unknown, as they say in Mexico, then I stopped, with the sensation that something in my mind had fallen into place. We were about a hundred yards from El Gran Bife, at the corner of Insurgentes and San Lorenzo, when I realized that San Lorenzo was precisely the street Don Chente lived on, just three blocks down.