Belano is momentarily hypnotized by the design. Those pathetic-looking guys on the sweatshirt seem familiar. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the street that seems familiar. I’ve been there, years ago, he thinks, years ago I walked down that street, with time on my hands, just looking around.
The guy in the sweatshirt, who’s almost as fat as the other one, asks Belano something in a voice that sounds like water boiling. Belano doesn’t understand. But it wasn’t an aggressive question, he’s sure of that. What? he asks. Are you a fan of Los Amos del Barrio? repeats the fat guy in the sweatshirt.
Belano smiles. No, I’m not from here, he says.
Then the second fat guy is pushed aside and a third fat guy appears; he’s very dark, an Aztec kind of fat guy with a little moustache, and he asks his roommates what’s going on. Three against one, thinks Belano, time to go. The fat guy with the little moustache looks at him and asks what he wants. This jerk was ringing the bell at Ulises Lima’s place, says the first fat guy. Did you know Ulises Lima? asks the fat guy with the little moustache. Yes, says Belano, I was a friend of his. And what’s your name, jerk? asks the fat guy in the sweatshirt. Arturo Belano says his name and then adds that he’ll be on his way, he’s sorry to have bothered them, but now the three fat guys are looking at him with real interest, as if they were seeing him from a different point of view, and the fat guy in the sweatshirt smiles and says, Cut the bullshit, your name can’t be Arturo Belano, though from the way he says it, Belano can tell that although he’s unconvinced, he’d like to believe it’s true.
Then he sees himself — and it’s as if he’s watching a movie, a movie so sad he’d never go to see it — in the fat guys’ apartment, and they’re offering their guest a beer. No thanks, I don’t drink any more, he says, sitting in a rickety armchair, its cloth cover printed with wilting flowers, holding a glass of water he can’t bring himself to drink from, because the water in Mexico City, so he’s been warned, though in fact he’s always known this, can give you gastroenteritis, while the fat guys settle down in the surrounding armchairs, except for the one without a shirt, who sits on the floor, as if he’s afraid the other chair might break under his weight or afraid of how his friends might react if it did.
The fat guy without a shirt is behaving a bit like a slave, Belano thinks.
What happens next is chaotic and sentimentaclass="underline" the fat guys inform him that they were the last disciples of Ulises Lima (that’s the word they use: disciples). They tell Belano about his death, how he was run down by a mysterious car, a black Impala, and they talk about his life, a succession of legendary drinking bouts, as if the bars and rooms where Ulises Lima got sick and threw up were the successive volumes of his complete works. But mainly they talk about themselves: they have a rock group called El Ojete de Morelos and they perform in discos in the suburbs of Mexico City. They’ve made a record, which the official radio stations won’t touch because of the lyrics. But the little stations play their songs all day long. We’re getting famous, they say, but we’re still rebels. The way of Ulises Lima, they say, Ulises Lima’s tracer fire, the poetry of Mexico’s greatest poet.
As good as their word, they put on a CD of their songs, and Belano sits there motionless, listening, with his hand clamped around the glass of water he still hasn’t sipped from, looking at the dirty floor and the walls covered with posters for Los Amos del Barrio and El Ojete de Morelos and other bands he’s never heard of, maybe they’re earlier groups, whose members went on to form Los Amos and El Ojete: Mexican kids staring out at him from photos or from hell, holding their electric guitars as if they were brandishing weapons or freezing to death.
THE TROUBLEMAKER
Some of his works were shown in 2003, during the European protests against the war in Iraq, at an exhibition organized by the poet Ponç Altés: mere sketches, as the artist pointed out himself, trials, private exercises done in some anonymous and dingy room. About Vallirana, there is little to be said: he was young, just twenty-one, unemployed, and he came from a family that was relatively poor (but loving: they supported him). His literary tastes were still developing, although he had, by then, read the complete works of Alfred Jarry, his favorite writer, whose radiance the passing days could do nothing to dim. As to Vallirana’s personality at that time, the accounts diverge. Generally speaking, it could be said that he was a somewhat (though not excessively) reserved young man and somewhat shy (although his shyness was not excessive either). He believed only in art and science. For him, the union of art and science was a matter of work. In that sense it could be said that he was deeply Catalonian. God and chance belonged to art, eternity and labyrinths to science. When the protests against the war in Iraq began, he spent three days shut up in his room, like those young men in Japan who retreat to a tiny bedroom in the family home and refuse to come out again to look for work or go shopping or see a movie or take a walk in the park. Being an only child and living in El Masnou, not Tokyo, Vallirana had a larger bedroom, and he spent only three days in there, watching television almost nonstop (there was a set at the foot of his bed), barely sleeping, following the protests, and thinking. When the three days were over, he went up onto the roof and made a little sign. The sign said: “NO WAR — LONG LIVE SADDAM HUSSEIN.” He wrote it in Roman square capitals — the result was rather stylish — on a modest-sized sheet of white cardboard, which he stapled onto a wooden stick about four feet long. In a moment of malicious inspiration, he illustrated both sides of the sign with little flowers that looked more like four-leafed clovers. The next day he took the train to Barcelona and participated in an anti-war demonstration in Hospitalet, which was poorly attended, but that night he joined the crowd banging pots and pans in Plaza San Jaume, and held his sign up high. No one said anything to him in Hospitalet. Or in Plaza San Jaume, where Vallirana contributed powerfully to the racket with an umpire’s whistle. He missed the last train back to El Masnou and slept on a bench in the subway along with the homeless. The next day he took part in a march with students from the Universidad Autónoma, who chanted antiwar and anti-US slogans as they walked from the campus to Sarrià, stopping the traffic on numerous occasions. A girl who was studying journalism came up to him as they crossed one of the ring roads and said that she was against the war but that didn’t mean she supported Saddam Hussein. The girl was called Dolors, and Vallirana told her that his name was Enric de Montherlant. When the demonstration was over, they went to have coffee on Plaza de Sarrià, and agreed to meet the following day and join the big march from the Rambla de Catalunya to Plaza Catalunya. Then Vallirana went back to El Masnou, where he took a shower and changed his clothes, vaguely suspecting that he had picked up fleas the previous night. His whole body was, as it turned out, covered with tiny, bright red bites. Before going to sleep, Vallirana made a great many notes. He asked himself questions. And he didn’t choose the lazy solution of leaving them all unanswered. When he’d finished writing, he went up to the rooftop terrace and made another sign. This one said: “NO WAR — LONG LIVE THE IRAQI PEOPLE — DEATH TO THE JEWS.” The first phrase, NO WAR, was written in big letters, the second in smaller ones, and the third in letters that were smaller again. The characters had curves and twists that were vaguely reminiscent of Arabic script. Comic-book Arabic script. On both sides of the sign he drew peace symbols. When he had finished he said to himself: Now let’s see what happens. Then he dined on a ham sandwich and tomato bread, and shut himself in his room and masturbated, thinking about Dolors, until he fell asleep, the TV on with the volume turned down so as not to bother his parents. First thing the next morning he caught a train. In his carriage there were laborers and students, but mainly commuters on the way to the office, men wearing ties and women in respectable, ugly suits, although, here and there, he could see a few people dressed with a little more taste, who didn’t seem completely resigned to leading failed lives. These individuals seemed to have staked everything on sex and seduction, on attracting and being attracted, which wasn’t much, thought Vallirana, but at least it was something. The others made a pitiful showing: women with glasses and too much fat on their hips and thighs, men who could only inspire disgust if they stripped off in a bedroom. As for the laborers, who were easily identifiable by their blue or yellow overalls and their lunch boxes or foil-wrapped sandwiches, they seemed to be in another world; and to a large extent they were, since most of them were immigrants from Africa or South America, who didn’t care what the Spanish were doing. The students were dozing or going over their notes. When the train went into the tunnel in Barcelona, before reaching the Arco del Triunfo station, Vallirana shouted, “No war!” Some of the passengers, it seemed, were woken by the shout, and others were scared, but after the initial moment of surprise, almost everyone in the carriage responded by taking up the cry: “No war!”