I sat looking at her for a while, not knowing what to say. I would've liked to say you're being an idiot, Brígida, but I wasn't in the mood to fight with anyone either.
"What I meant was," said Brígida, looking behind her as if to make sure Rosario wasn't coming, "that I would've liked to fall in love with you too, believe me, I would've liked to live with you, give you spending money, make your meals, take care of you when you were sick, but it wasn't meant to be. We have to accept things the way they are, don't we? But it would've been nice."
"I'm impossible to live with," I said.
"You are who you are and you have a cock that's worth its weight in gold," said Brígida.
"Thank you," I said.
"I know what I'm talking about," said Brígida.
"So what else do you know?"
"About you?" Now Brígida was smiling, and this, I guessed, was her victory.
"About me, of course," I said as I swallowed the last of the tequila.
"That you're going to die young, Juan, and that you're going to do Rosario wrong."
DECEMBER 30
Today I went back to the Fonts' house. Today I did Rosario wrong.
I got up early, around seven, and went out to roam the streets downtown. Before I left I heard Rosario's voice saying: wait a second and I'll make you breakfast. I didn't answer. I closed the door quietly and left the tenement.
For a long time I walked as if I were in a foreign country, feeling choked and sick. When I got to the Zócalo my pores opened at last. I started to sweat freely, and my nausea vanished.
Then suddenly I was starving and I went into the first cafeteria I found open, a little place on Madero called Nueva Síbaris, where I ordered coffee and a ham sandwich.
To my great surprise, there was Pancho Rodríguez, sitting at the bar. His hair was freshly combed (it was still wet) and his eyes were red. He didn't look surprised to see me. I asked him what he was doing there, so far from home and so early in the morning.
"I was out whoring all night," he said, "to see whether I was finally ready to get the fuck over you-know-who."
I guessed that he meant Angélica, and as I took the first sips of coffee I thought about Angélica, María, my first visits to the Fonts' house. I felt happy. I felt hungry. Pancho, on the other hand, seemed listless. To distract him I told him that I'd left my aunt and uncle's place and that I was living with a woman in a tenement straight out of a 1940s movie, but Pancho wasn't in the right frame of mind to listen to me or anybody else.
After he'd smoked a few cigarettes, he said he felt like stretching his legs.
"Where do you want to go?" I asked, although deep down I already knew the answer, and if he didn't say what I expected to hear, I was ready to get it out of him by any means necessary.
"To Angélica's," said Pancho.
"That's the spirit," I said and I hurried to finish my breakfast.
Pancho went ahead and paid my bill (which was a first) and we left. A feeling of lightness settled in our legs. Suddenly Pancho didn't seem quite so trashed and I didn't feel so clueless about what to do with my life. Instead, the morning light returned us to ourselves, refreshed. Pancho was cheery and quick again, gliding along on words, and the window of a shoe store on Madero reflected back a mirror image of my inner vision of myself: someone tall, with pleasant features, neither gawky nor sickeningly shy, striding along followed by a smaller, stockier person in pursuit of his true love-or whatever else came his way!
Of course I had no idea then what the day had in store for us.
For the first half of the trip, Pancho was enthusiastic, friendly, and extroverted, but after that, as we got closer to Colonia Condesa, his mood changed and he seemed to succumb again to the old fears that his strange (or rather histrionic and enigmatic) relationship with Angélica awakened in him. The whole problem, he confided, gloomy again, had to do with the social divide between his family, who were lowly and working-class, and Angélica's, firmly ensconced as they were in Mexico City's petit bourgeoisie. To cheer him up, I argued that although this would surely make it harder to start a relationship, the chasm of class struggle narrowed considerably once the relationship was already under way. To which Pancho replied by asking what I meant by saying the relationship was already under way, a stupid question I didn't bother to answer. Instead I responded with another question: were he and Angélica really two average people, two typical, rigid representatives of the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat?
"No, I guess not," said Pancho pensively as the taxi we'd caught at Reforma and Juárez headed at breakneck speed toward Calle Colima.
That's what I was trying to say, I told him, that since he and Angélica were poets, what difference did it make if one belonged to one social class and the other to another?
"Plenty, I'm telling you," said Pancho.
"Don't be mechanistic, man," I said, more and more irrationally happy.
Unexpectedly, the taxi driver backed me up: "If you've already gotten what you came for, there's no such thing as barriers. When love is good, nothing else matters."
"See?" I said.
"No, actually," said Pancho, "not really."
"You go at it with your girl and forget that communist crap," said the taxi driver.
"What do you mean communist crap?" said Pancho.
"You know, all that social class business."
"So according to you social classes don't exist," said Pancho.
The taxi driver, who had been watching us in the rearview mirror as he talked, turned around now, his right hand resting on the back of the passenger seat, his left firmly grasping the wheel. We're going to crash, I thought.
"For all intents and purposes, no. When it comes to love all Mexicans are equal. In the eyes of God too," said the taxi driver.
"What a load of bullshit!" said Pancho.
"If that's what you want to call it," replied the taxi driver.
With that, Pancho and the taxi driver started to argue about religion and politics, and meanwhile I stared out the window, watching the scenery (the storefronts of Juárez and Roma Norte) rolling monotonously past, and I also started to think about María and what separated me from her, which wasn't class but experience, and about Rosario and our tenement room and the wonderful nights I'd spent there with her, though I was prepared to give them up for a few seconds with María, a word from María, a smile from María. And I also started to think about my aunt and uncle and I even thought I saw them, walking arm in arm down one of the streets that we were passing, never turning to look at the taxi as it zigzagged perilously away down other streets, the two of them immersed in their solitude just as Pancho, the taxi driver, and I were immersed in ours. And then I realized that something had gone wrong in the last few days, something had gone wrong in my relationship with the new Mexican poets or with the new women in my life, but no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't figure out what the problem was, the abyss that opened up behind me if I looked over my shoulder. All the same, it didn't frighten me. It was an abyss without monsters, holding only darkness, silence, and emptiness, three extremes that caused me pain, a lesser pain, true, a flutter in the stomach, but a pain that sometimes felt like fear. And then, with my face glued to the window, we turned onto Calle Colima, and Pancho and the taxi driver stopped talking, or maybe only Pancho stopped, as if he'd given up trying to win his argument, and my silence and Pancho's silence clutched at my heart.
We got out a few feet past the Fonts' house.
"Something strange is going on here," said Pancho, as the taxi driver drove happily away, with a few choice words about our mothers.
At first glance the street looked normal, but I too noticed something different about the place I remembered so vividly. Across the street I saw two guys sitting in a yellow Camaro. They were staring at us.