Back in Mexico, he thinks.
The taxi driver looks at him as if he were an old acquaintance. Belano has heard stories about the taxi drivers of Mexico City and muggings in the vicinity of the airport. But all those stories vanish now. Where are we going, young man? asks the driver, who is younger than Belano. Belano gives him the most recent address that he has for Ulises Lima. OK, says the driver, and the taxi pulls away and plunges into the city. Belano shuts his eyes, the way he used to when he lived there, but now he’s so tired that he opens them almost immediately, and his old city, the city of his adolescence, displays itself to him for free. Nothing has changed, he thinks, although he knows that everything has changed.
It’s a cemetery morning. The sky’s a dirty yellow. The clouds, moving slowly from south to north, look like graveyards adrift; sometimes they part to reveal scraps of gray sky, sometimes they come together with a dry, earthy grinding that no one, not even Belano, can hear, but it gives him a headache, the way it did when he was an adolescent and lived in Colonia Lindavista or Colonia Guadalupe-Tepeyac.
The people walking on the sidewalks, however, are the same; they’re younger, they probably hadn’t even been born when he left, but basically these are the faces he saw in 1968, in 1974, in 1976. The taxi driver tries to engage him in conversation, but Belano doesn’t feel like talking. When he can finally close his eyes again, he sees his taxi driving at full speed down a busy avenue, while robbers hold up other taxis and the passengers die with terrified expressions on their faces. Vaguely familiar gestures and words. Fear. Then he sees nothing and falls asleep the way a stone falls down a well.
Here we are, says the taxi driver.
Belano looks out of the window. They’re in the street where Ulises Lima used to live. He pays and gets out. Is this your first time in Mexico? asks the driver. No, I used to live here. Are you Mexican? the driver asks as he gives him the change. More or less, says Belano.
Then he’s standing alone on the sidewalk, looking at the façade of the building.
Belano’s hair is short. A bald patch like a tonsure reveals the top of his scalp. He’s no longer the long-haired youth who once roamed these streets. Now he’s wearing a black leather jacket and gray trousers and a white shirt and a pair of Martinelli shoes. He’s been invited to Mexico to participate in a conference that will gather a group of Latin American writers. At least two of his friends have also been invited. His books are read (a bit) in Spain and Latin America, and all of them have been translated into various languages. What am I doing here? he wonders.
He walks toward the entrance of the building. He takes out his address book. He presses the buzzer of the apartment where Ulises Lima used to live. Three long buzzes. No one answers. He buzzes another apartment. A woman’s voice asks who it is. I’m a friend of Ulises Lima, says Belano. She hangs up abruptly. He buzzes another apartment. A man’s voice shouts, Who is it? A friend of Ulises Lima, says Belano, feeling more and more ridiculous. The door opens with an electric click, and Belano starts climbing the stairs to the third floor. By the time he reaches the landing, the effort is making him sweat. There are three doors and a long, dimly lit corridor. This is where Ulises Lima spent the last days of his life, he thinks, but when he rings the doorbell he finds himself irrationally hoping to hear his friend’s approaching steps and then to see his smiling face appear at the crack in the door.
Nobody answers.
Belano goes back down the stairs. He finds a hotel nearby, without having to leave Colonia Cuauhtémoc. He sits on the bed for a long time, watching Mexican television and letting his mind go blank. Not a single show is familiar, but somehow the old shows infiltrate the new ones, and Belano has the impression that he can see the face of El Loco Valdés on the screen or hear his voice. Later, channel surfing, he comes across a Tin-Tan movie and watches to the end. Tin-Tan was El Loco’s elder brother. He was already dead when Belano came to live in Mexico. El Loco Valdés might be dead now too.
When the movie’s over, Belano takes a shower and then, without even drying himself, he calls a friend. No one’s home. Just the answering machine, but Belano doesn’t want to leave a message.
He hangs up. He gets dressed. He goes to the window and looks out at Calle Río Panuco. He doesn’t see people or cars or trees, only the gray pavement and a calm that has something timeless about it. Then a boy appears, walking down the opposite sidewalk with a young woman who might be his big sister or his mother. Belano shuts his eyes.
He isn’t hungry, he isn’t sleepy, he doesn’t feel like going out. So he sits down on the bed again and goes on watching television, smoking one cigarette after another, until he finishes the pack. Then he puts on his black leather jacket and goes out into the street.
Irresistibly, the way a hit song keeps playing in your head, he finds himself returning to Ulises Lima’s apartment.
The sun is beginning to set over Mexico City when, after a series of fruitless attempts, Belano succeeds in getting someone in the building to buzz him through the street door. I must be going crazy, he thinks, as he climbs the stairs two by two. Nothing’s affecting me: the altitude, not having eaten, being alone in Mexico City. For a few interminable and, in their way, happy seconds, he stands in front of Ulises’s door without ringing. Then he presses the button three times. As he is turning to go, about to leave the building (though not for the last time, he knows that), the door of the adjacent apartment opens and an enormous, hairless, coppery head, on which slashes of red can be dimly made out (as if the possessor of the head had been painting a wall or a ceiling), emerges and asks him who he’s looking for.
At first, Belano doesn’t know what to say. There’s no point saying he’s looking for Ulises Lima, and he can’t be bothered making something up, so he keeps quiet and looks at his interlocutor: the head belongs to a young man, he wouldn’t be more than twenty-five, and from his expression Belano guesses that he’s annoyed or lives in a permanent state of annoyance. It’s empty, that place, says the young man. I know, says Belano. So what are you ringing for, idiot? says the young man. Belano looks him in the eye and says nothing. The door opens and the hairless young man comes out into the corridor. He’s fat, and all he’s wearing is a pair of baggy jeans held up by an old belt. The buckle, partly hidden by the young man’s belly, is large and made of metal. Is he coming out to hit me? wonders Belano. For a moment they examine each other. Our hero Arturo Belano, dear readers, is forty-six by this stage, and as you all know, or should know, his liver, his pancreas and even his colon are in a bad way, but he still knows how to box, and he’s sizing up the voluminous figure in front of him. When he lived in Mexico he got into plenty of fights and never lost, though it’s hard to credit now. Schoolyard scraps and barroom brawls. Belano looks at the fat guy, trying to figure out when to attack, when to hit him and where. But the fat guy just stares at Belano and looks back into his apartment, and then another young man appears, wearing a brown sweatshirt with a transfer on it that shows three men striking defiant poses in the middle of a street full of trash, and “Los Amos del Barrio” written in red letters at the top.