II. Chance
1. I asked him how old he thought I was. He said sixty, although he knew I wasn’t that old. Do I look that bad? I asked. Worse, he said. And you think you’re in better shape? I said. How come you’re shaking, then? Are you cold? Have you gone crazy? And why are you telling me about Commissioner Damian Valle anyway? Is he still the commissioner? Is he still the same? The old guy said Valle had changed a bit, but he was still a prize son of a bitch. Is he still the commissioner? He might as well be, he said. If he wants to do you harm, he will, even if he’s retired or dying in hospital. I thought for a few minutes and then asked him again why he was shaking. I’m cold, he said (the liar), and my teeth hurt. I don’t want to hear any more about Don Damian, I said. Do you think I’m friends with that pig? Do you think I associate with thugs? No, he said. Well I don’t want to hear any more about him. 2. He reflected for a while. What about, I really don’t know. Then he gave me a crust of bread. It was hard and I said if he ate food like that it wasn’t surprising his teeth hurt. We eat better in the asylum, I said, and that’s saying something. Get out of here, Vicente, said the old guy. Does anyone know you’re here? Well, good for you. Make yourself scarce before they realize. Don’t say hello to anyone. Keep your eyes on the ground and get out of here as fast as you can. 3. But I didn’t leave right away. I squatted down in front of him and tried to remember the good times. My mind was blank. It felt like something was burning in my head. The old guy pulled his blanket tighter around him and moved his jaws as if he was chewing, but there was nothing in his mouth. I remembered the years in the asylum: the injections, the hosing-down, the ropes they used for tying us up at night, many of us anyway. I saw those funny beds again, the ones with a clever system of pulleys that can be used to hoist them into an upright position. It took me five years to work out what they were for. The patients called them American beds. 4. Can a human being who is used to sleeping horizontally fall asleep in an upright position? Yes. It’s difficult at first. But if the person is properly tied, it’s possible. That’s what the American beds were for, sleeping vertically as well as horizontally. Not, as I originally thought, to punish the patients, but to prevent them from choking on their own vomit and dying.
5. Naturally, there were patients who spoke to the American beds. They addressed them politely. They confided in them. Some patients were also afraid of them. Some claimed to have been winked at by a certain bed. One patient said that another bed had raped him. A bed fucked you up the ass? You’ve really lost it, pal! The American beds were said to walk along the corridors at night, straight and tall, and gather to chat in the refectory — they spoke English — and all of them attended those meetings, the beds that were empty and the ones that weren’t, and naturally these stories were told by the patients who for one reason or another happened to be tied to the beds on meeting nights. 6. Otherwise, life in the asylum was very quiet. Shouts could be heard coming from certain restricted areas. But no one approached those areas or opened the door or put their ear to the keyhole. The house was quiet, and the park — tended by gardeners who were crazy too and not allowed to leave, but not as crazy as the others — was quiet as well, and the road you could see through the pines and the poplars was quiet, and even our thoughts, as they occurred to us, were enveloped in a frightening silence. 7. In certain respects, the living was easy. Sometimes we’d look at each other and feel privileged. We’re crazy, we’re innocent. The only thing that spoiled that feeling was anticipation, when there was something to anticipate. But most of the patients had a remedy for that: ass-fucking the weaker ones or getting ass-fucked. Did I do that? we used to say. Did I really do that? And then we’d smile and change the subject. The doctors, the lofty physicians, had no idea, and as long as we didn’t bother the nurses and the aides, they turned a blind eye. We did get carried away a few times. Man is an animal. 8. That’s what I used to think sometimes. The thought formed in the center of my brain. And I concentrated on that thought until my mind went blank. Sometimes, at the beginning, I could hear something like tangling cables. Electrical cables or snakes. But as a rule, especially as those scenes receded into the past, my mind would go blank: no noises, no images, no words, no breakwaters of words. 9. Anyway, I’ve never assumed that I’m smarter than anybody else. I’ve never been an intellectual show-off. If I’d been to school, I’d be a lawyer or a judge now. Or the inventor of a new, improved American bed! I have words, that much I humbly admit. But I don’t make a big deal about it. And just as I have words, I have silence. You’re as silent as a cat, the old guy told me when I was still a kid, though he was old already then. 10. I wasn’t born here. According to the old guy, I was born in Zaragoza and my mother had no choice but to come and live in this city. One city or another, it makes no difference to me. If I hadn’t been poor, I would have been able to study here. It doesn’t matter! I learned to read. That’s enough! Best not to dwell on that subject. I could have got married here too. I met a girl who was called, I forget, she had a typical girl’s name, and at one point I could have married her. Then I met another girl, older than me, a foreigner like me, from somewhere in the south, Andalusia or Murcia, a slut who was always in a bad mood. I could have started a family with her too, made a home, but I was destined for other things, and so was the slut. 11. Sometimes I found the city stifling. Too small. I felt as if I was locked in a crossword puzzle. 12. Around that time I made up my mind to start begging at church doors. I would arrive at ten and take up my position on the cathedral steps or go to the church of San Jeremías, in the Calle José Antonio, or the church of Santa Barbara, which was my favorite, in the Calle Salamanca, and sometimes, before settling down on the steps of Santa Barbara to begin my day’s work, I would go to the ten o’clock mass and pray with all my might — it was like laughing silently, laughing, laughing, happy to be alive, and the more I prayed, the more I laughed — that was my way of opening myself to divine penetration, and my laughter was not a sign of disrespect or the laughter of an unbeliever: on the contrary, it was the clamorous laughter of a lamb trembling before its Creator.