It was a dark, cramped place that smelled of patchouli oil. We sat down. Slobodan ordered two beers. The musicians will arrive soon, according to the waitress, he said after taking a long swig. I nodded and we stayed quiet for a while as I inspected every person who came through the door. Did you know, Eduardo, that gouging your eyes out, I mean, the expression to gouge your eyes out, means to have an orgasm in Gypsy language? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think to ask him how he knew. Lick my foot after I’ve stepped in shit, he said. What? It’s a Gypsy insult. Popušiš mi nogu kad stanem u govno. It means lick my foot after I’ve stepped in shit. Right, I said. Then we reply jedi kurac. But at that moment two Gypsies with trumpets and two Gypsies with violins and another Gypsy with a huge double bass came in and the boy reporter didn’t say anything else.
From one corner of the room, they started to play loud and fast and spiritedly, while a girl who had also arrived with them went from table to table with a black hat, asking for money. A kolo, I thought, and then I thought about Lía mounting me and moaning. Proper blues, I thought, proper mariachi music, but without the sadness, or rather with a different form of the same sadness. Because there was sadness in this too, of course, only instead of an open lament, this one was buried and covered up and dressed in too much joy, like a clown’s smile.
They played for exactly an hour and we drank three more beers in silence, just listening. The place was pretty full now, mostly with very pale, Gothic-looking Serbian teenagers with piercings hanging from everywhere like stalactites. Slobodan, even though he was more relaxed and had lost the black tie, insisted on keeping up a stoic and indifferent attitude as he sat there biting his nails. Watching him, I had the impression he was someone who had yet to understand that the sea is without doubt the perfect cemetery, and that cowboys always win because they have rifles, and that in fact cowboys always lose because they have rifles, and that honey should be eaten on its own and with your finger and preferably alone, and that the shape of the nipple is far more important than the shape of the breast.
The Gypsies started to file out toward the door as soon as they’d finished. I stood up and told Slobodan I needed his help. I went up to one of the trumpeters, a man in a red jacket and felt hat, and started mumbling something to him, partly in English and partly in Spanish, about a young Gypsy named Milan Rakić, a Gypsy pianist, a friend of mine, and maybe he knew him or had seen him or had heard about him. The trumpeter stood looking at me without saying anything. I took out the photo of Milan and showed it to him. Milan, Milan Rakić, I said, pointing at the picture. With a sickened or perhaps nervous face, Slobodan talked to the Gypsy trumpeter in Serbian, translating what I’d said, and the Gypsy took the photo and looked at it from close up and passed it to his friends and they laughed and the little Gypsy girl laughed and the trumpeter in a red jacket grabbed it back, tearing it a little, and he started shouting at me in Serbian as he jabbed at Milan’s face with his index finger and showed me his gold teeth and shouted even louder. He says, Slobodan translated, that the guy in the photo isn’t a Gypsy. And still laughing and gesticulating wildly, they walked out.
I stood there a bit disorientated, examining the face in the photo, and Slobodan had to push me back to the table. I’ll be right back, he said, throwing me a cigarette and heading for the bar. He doesn’t look like a Gypsy because he’s got his mother’s Serbian features, I said out loud, as though to calm myself down a bit, as though to break the spell, as though to banish the doubt that was starting to loom up all around and gnaw at me like any good film would have done, or any bad film. I lit the cigarette, my hand trembling, or perhaps it wasn’t.
Proja, said Slobodan, handing me a plate of something a bit like fried dumplings. And a cold beer, he added. It was warm. We both drank and ate in silence, a private silence amid so much noise and bustle. I had a lot of respect for the way he gave me my space, the way he didn’t ask me anything, and maybe because of that, or maybe because I needed to shed a deadweight, I started talking to him about Milan Rakić and San José el Viejo and every postcard he’d sent me before disappearing into a damn myth of his own, and after I don’t know how many more little dumplings and beers and cigarettes, I’d told him everything. Slobodan, offering no judgment, left some bills on the table and calmly said let’s go, I’m tired.
I got back to the apartment drunk and wide-awake. I turned on the TV. All the channels, or almost all the channels, were showing porn films: some very genteel English ones, some of black men and women with perfect bodies and the stamina of horses, and others that were simple and homemade and badly acted. I always preferred the badly acted ones. I ended up watching a slightly ugly young blond girl who, from time to time, looked at the camera and shouted something and made cartoonish grimaces of pleasure, but then she’d forget that they were fucking her and someone behind the camera would remind her and she’d turn around to look at him with surprise and immediately start up with the almighty shrieking again. And I stayed like that for a long time, spiritually reconciling myself to life.
I slept in. I’d unplugged the phone. I drew the curtains and noticed that, for the first time since my arrival, the sun had come out, but that’s really just a figure of speech, because it was still half-overcast. I got dressed quickly. I took the yellow envelope from my suitcase and went out.
Kalemegdan, I said to the taxi driver, showing him the last postcard. I asked him in Spanish and then in English if it was a park. Park, park, he replied, apparently annoyed.
At the gate was a line of hawkers sitting on the ground, each with a blanket covered with figurines and chinaware and antique coins and prints of Tito and little lace tablecloths and lighters and secondhand hats and who knows what else. I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes. I lit one. I started to walk. It was still cold. The trees were gray and bony and looked like something out of a Tim Burton film. Remnants of the already-melting snow shimmered on the grass like little puddles of milky coffee. I arrived at the banks of the Danube or maybe the Sava, I don’t know: I’d been told the two rivers joined right there in Belgrade, in the same way as two great empires had done centuries before. A low stone wall separated the park from the river. I sat down on it and immediately noticed a sour, putrid smell, probably coming from the water. Far off on the other side there was a row of floating houses or something that looked like that. I stubbed my cigarette out on the ground and kept walking. I walked a long way. I reached the fortress. I glanced at a sign in Cyrillic lettering. To go in, you had to cross a hanging bridge strung over a deep ditch, which in some other time had surely been a pit crawling with hungry crocodiles and dragons. There was nothing but damp inside the ruins, and I hurried on to get out the other side, where in an open field there was an exhibit with tanks and machine guns and armored cars and all kinds of war relics. A pathetic sort of museum, dedicated to the detritus of so many wars.
I sat down on a green bench and, lighting another cigarette, started looking back through Milan’s postcards, scrutinizing and rereading them but much less naïvely now, much less passively, looking at them almost as though with a magnifying glass for the slightest detail or fragment or phrase that might shed a bit of light on things, or maybe, given the way things were going, I thought or perhaps even said out loud, throw another handful of darkness over it all. I had read eight or ten or twelve of them when suddenly, as though lost in that sea of postcards, a white card appeared with a drawing of one of Lía’s orgasms. The last time, I supposed, before we’d gone to the airport, with her sky blue doctor’s outfit thrown on the floor and her scratching my back and arms while telling me not to come, that this time I shouldn’t come, and so I hadn’t. Saudade, it said in quick, majestic letters above a solitary, fluid black line, a line that ascended and descended symmetrically, and with an odd and unexpected hook at the end. Simple. Elegant. And underneath, in brackets: E boa sorte em Póvoa, meu Dudú. I looked at the drawing carefully, trying to decipher it, but instead I thought about all the lines of Lía’s orgasms, about the lines of her body, about the lines on my palm, about the lines that join the stars to form constellations, about the five lines of a musical stave that held Milan back so much, about the lines that unite and divide and reunite the Balkan countries only to divide them again, about the ideological and religious lines that fracture the world and are making it more wretched all the time, and about the tangled web of events and people that, like the tiny dots of a single flourishing sketch, had led me to the banks of some river in Belgrade. I didn’t know which river in Belgrade. I understood nothing. I felt superfluous.