The lobby was all but deserted. I went into the bar and asked the waiter if they sold cigarettes. There’s a machine over there, sir, he replied and he took me over to show me. Nice people, southerners. I was just about to ask for a beer at the bar when I heard my name. It was Harold Lewis, the Mormon, sitting alone in a corner, and I suppose he saw the confusion on my face because he raised his glass straight away. Don’t worry, it’s apple juice. He explained that sometimes he found it very difficult to sleep, especially in hotels, and told me to join him for a while. I mumbled some poor excuse about being tired or having reading to do or whatever it was. And see you tomorrow.
I needed a bit of fresh air and went out to the golf course. I walked a few holes, smoking, shivering from the cold but happy to be outside. The full moon cast a gray light on everything. It was a bland, tasteless gray that for some reason reminded me of old neorealist Italian films. A little way off, a strange shape caught my eye. I thought some golfer must have left his bag of clubs on the grass, but when I got closer I realized that the large mass was moving, just slightly. A deer, I thought, and carried on walking toward it. I was perhaps ten or fifteen yards away when I heard a squeal and ran to hide behind the nearest tree. She had her shirt open. She was on top of him, thrusting rhythmically and moaning as if she were alone in the universe. Without being able to make out what he was saying, I could hear him whispering, his voice getting louder while his hands grabbed desperately at her stomach and breasts. I stayed where I was, in spite of the cold, watching them copulate on the fairway like two wild animals, until after a while I decided to withdraw in silence. I don’t know why. Maybe out of embarrassment, or maybe because I’m an average man and my three minutes were up. Who knows.
I didn’t sleep much. For breakfast, I had a roll with cream cheese, and arrived late and dozy to the last session.
I poured myself a coffee while everyone discussed Life on the Mississippi, a fairly fragmented, semiautobiographical work, which recounts the vicissitudes of Twain’s life on the steamboats of the Mississippi. For nearly three hours they debated the author’s economic ideas, his conception of identity, his criticism of the fake southern aristocracy, and his notion of liberty. At one inopportune moment, I pointed out that here again Twain mentioned his admiration for Don Quixote. What an idiot, I thought, and I’m sure everyone else thought the same. But while I talked about Tom and Huck and Sancho and that Sad-Faced Knight, I thought I sensed some kind of stylistic correlation between the two authors, or no, rather than stylistic it was philosophical, cosmological, but it vanished again just as quickly as I’d found it, and right in the middle of my argument, as though I’d simply run out of gas, I stopped talking.
Smiling strangely again, for the first time in two days Joe Krupp asked to speak, said that humor is everything, that humor is our salvation, that humor is mankind’s greatest blessing — which sounded to me like a quote, but I didn’t want to interrupt him — and then, with his languid Mark Twain voice, he started telling jokes. All kinds of jokes. For nearly half an hour. I think I might have been the only person who understood straight away where he was heading, or maybe I didn’t understand at all.
And as we’re in a golf club, said Joe Krupp to the group of confused intellectuals, well, that’s where I’ll finish. All right. One day a man walks into the women’s bathroom at a private golf club, accidentally, of course, and when he gets out of the shower he realizes that all his clothes are gone. Quite a fix, Joe Krupp said slowly, as though he himself were trying to remember or invent the punch line. Then, he continued after a pause, the man hears some women’s voices and puts a towel round his head to hide his face, but remaining otherwise completely naked. I could have sworn that while he was talking, the sky blue gaze of the old man settled on me, as though there were no one else in that huge cold conference room. And so when the man tries to run out of the bathroom, he bumps into the three women, who are shocked at first but then start looking him over closely, examining him, as it were. Joe Krupp laughed a devilish little laugh, with that mischievousness that only old age can absolve. That man isn’t my husband, says the first. That man isn’t my husband either, says the second. That man, says the third, isn’t even a member of this club.
Epistrophy
The first time I heard Milan Rakić play was a few years ago in the ruins of San José el Viejo. A pigeon had landed in its nest way up in the vaulted roof, directly above the Serbian pianist, who played on as though the rejoicing of the hungry chicks and the courageous flapping of the pigeon’s wings were notes that had been set down in the score by Rachmaninoff himself.
I’d arrived in Antigua a little late, and there was Lía, waiting for me in the Café del Conde, ripping the cellophane off of a pack of cigarettes with her teeth, and an ice-cold beer on the table. As if afraid to sit down, I stood there explaining that a truckload of chickens had overturned on the highway, holding up traffic in both directions for hours, and she just kept looking at me with as much incredulity as she could muster, which was a lot. Well, we’ve missed the talk on neo-baroque Italian architecture, she said in a silky voice, looking at her watch. I know. And the Irish children’s choir, she added. I thought about telling her I wasn’t in the mood to listen to some pretentious guy talk about neo-baroque Italian architecture, or to witness the alleluias of a chorus of pale Irish kids, or to watch the spasmodic strutting of some Far Eastern dance company, or to submit myself to the cheap melodramas of Salvadorean theater, or to partake — begging the pardon of any hooligans in the stands — in any of the activities at the biannual festival of culture in Antigua, Guatemala. I just let out a sigh. Oh well, Lía said suddenly, maybe it’s for the best. And she half smiled. Come on, give me a kiss, she said, yanking down on my shirt. Her mouth tasted like a desert island.
It was dark already and we drank our beer in silence. There was a strange stone fish next to us, spitting water vertically, halfheartedly, as if gargling. Every now and then Lía would lift up her hand so I could take a drag on her cigarette. Oxygen administered by the loveliest of nurses. She said she’d already checked us into our room. The same one? I asked, and she smiled uneasily. The same one, Dudú. She’d been calling me Dudú ever since she’d spent some time in Salvador de Bahía, doing Capoeira, sunbathing naked or half-naked, and of course learning Portuguese. She came back with a nickname for me like I was some midfielder on the Brazilian soccer team, as well as with her pubis shaved smooth. It seems impossible to me, inconceivable even, to resist falling in love with someone whose name was Lía and who had come back from vacation with her pubis shaved smooth.