Tell me, tell me the dangerous things you’ve done in your life, said Padilla. The most dangerous was sleeping with you, thought Amalfitano, but he was careful not to say it.
2
Amalfitano thought, too, about the last time he made love with Padilla. Days before he left for Mexico, Padilla called. Trembling all over, Amalfitano agreed to what he imagined would be their last date. An hour later a taxi dropped him off at the port and Padilla, with his black jacket buttoned up to the neck, strode toward him.
He really should stop smiling, thought Amalfitano as he gazed fixedly, spellbound, at Padilla’s face, finding it haggard, paler, almost translucent, as if lately the sun never shone on it. Then, when he felt Padilla’s lips on his cheek, brushing the corner of his own lips, he experienced a feeling for his former student that-the few times he stopped to think about it-disturbed him. A mixture of desire, paternal affection, and sadness, as if Padilla were the embodiment of an impossible trinity: lover, son, and ideal reflection of Amalfitano himself. He felt sorry for Padilla, for Padilla and his father, for the deaths in his life and his lost loves, which cast him in a lonely light: there, on that sad backdrop, Padilla was too young and too fragile and there was nothing Amalfitano could do about it. And while at the same time he knew with certainty-and most of the time this perplexed him-that there existed an invulnerable Padilla, arrogant as a Mediterranean god and strong as a Cuban boxer, the pity lingered, the sense of loss and impotence.
For a while they strolled aimlessly along narrow sidewalks, skirting terraces, fried-fish stands, and northern European tourists. The few words they spoke to each other made them smile.
“Do you think I look like a gay German?” asked Padilla as they wandered the port in search of a cheap hotel.
“No,” said Amalfitano, “the gay Germans I know-and all my knowledge of them comes from books-are happy brutes like you, but they tend toward self-destruction and you seem to be made of stronger stuff.”
Immediately he regretted his words; it’s talk like that, he thought, that will destroy any kind of love.
3
About the plane trip Rosa remembered that in the middle of the Atlantic her father seemed sick or queasy and all of a sudden a stewardess appeared without being called and offered them a deep golden liquid, bright and sweet smelling. The stewardess was dark-skinned, of average height, with short dark hair, and she was wearing hardly any makeup but her nails were very well kept. She asked them to try the juice and then tell her what it was. She smiled with her whole face, like someone playing a game.
Amalfitano and Rosa, distrustful by nature, each took a sip.
“Peach,” said Rosa.
“Nectarine,” murmured Amalfitano, almost in unison.
No, said the stewardess, and her good-humored smile restored some of Amalfitano’s lost courage, it’s mango.
Father and daughter drank again. This time they took lingering sips, like sommeliers who are back on the right path. Mango: have you tried it before? asked the stewardess. Yes, said Rosa and Amalfitano, but we’d forgotten. The stewardess wanted to know where. In Paris, probably, said Rosa, in a Mexican bar in Paris, a long time ago, when I was small, but I still remember it. The stewardess smiled again. It’s delicious, added Rosa. Mango, mango, thought Amalfitano, and he closed his eyes.
4
Shortly after classes began, Amalfitano met Castillo.
It was one evening, almost night, when the Santa Teresa sky turns from deep blue to an array of vermillions and purples that linger scarcely a few minutes before the sky turns back to deep blue and then black.
Amalfitano left the department library and as he crossed the campus he spotted a shape under a tree. He thought it might be a bum or a sick student and he went over to check. It was Castillo, who was sleeping peacefully and was awakened by Amalfitano’s presence: when he opened his eyes he saw a tall, angular, white-haired figure, looking vaguely like Christopher Walken, with a worried expression on his face, and he knew right away that he would fall in love.
“I thought you were dying,” said Amalfitano.
“No, I was dreaming,” said Castillo.
Amalfitano smiled, satisfied, and made as if to leave but didn’t. This part of the campus was like an oasis, three trees on a mound surrounded by a sea of grass.
“I was dreaming about the paintings of an American artist,” said Castillo, “they were set along a wide street, in the open air, the street was unpaved, lined with houses and stores, all built of wood, and the paintings seemed about to melt away in the sun and dust. It made me feel very sad. I think it was a dream about the end of the world.”
“Ah,” said Amalfitano.
“The strangest thing is that some of the paintings were mine.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, it is a strange dream.”
“No it isn’t,” said Castillo. “I shouldn’t be telling this to a stranger, but somehow I trust you: I really did paint some of them.”
“Some of them?” asked Amalfitano as night fell suddenly over Santa Teresa and from a campus building, a building that seemed empty, came the music of drums and horns and something that might have or might not have been a harp.
“Some paintings,” said Castillo. “I painted them myself, forged them.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, that’s how I make a living.”
“And you tell this to the first person who walks by, or is it common knowledge?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told, no one knows, it’s a secret.”
“I see,” said Amalfitano. “And why are you telling me?”
“I don’t know,” said Castillo, “I really don’t. Who are you?”
“Me?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, that was a rude question, never mind,” said Castillo, in a protective tone that grated on Amalfitano’s nerves. “You aren’t Mexican, that’s plain to see.”
“I’m Chilean,” said Amalfitano.
His reply and the expression on his face when he admitted where he was from were humble in the extreme. So far away, said Castillo. Then both of them were silent, standing there facing each other, Castillo a bit taller because he was up on the mound, Amalfitano like a bird or some hulking raptor sensing in every pore the coming of night, the stars that were beginning swiftly (and also violently, this Amalfitano noticed clearly for the first time) to fill the sky of Santa Teresa, standing there motionless, waiting for some sign under the sturdy trees that rose like an island between the literature department and the administration building.
“Shall we get some coffee?” asked Castillo finally.
“All right,” said Amalfitano, grateful though he couldn’t say why.
They circled around the center of Santa Teresa in Castillo’s car, a yellow 1980 Chevy. Their first stop was at the Dallas, where they chatted politely about painting, forgeries, and literature, and then they left because Castillo decided there were too many students. Without speaking, they drove along streets unfamiliar to Amalfitano until they reached the Just Once, and then, strolling down brightly lit and shuttered streets where it was hard to park a car, they stopped at the Dominium of Tamaulipas and the North Star and later the Toltecatl. Castillo kept laughing and drinking more mescal.
The Toltecatl was a big, rectangular room, the walls painted sky blue. On the back wall, a six-foot-square mural featured Toltecatl, god of pulque and brother of the maguey goddess Mayahuel. Indian drifters, cowboys and herds of cattle, policemen and police cars, ominously abandoned customs stations, amusement parks on either side of the border, children on their way out of a school blazoned with the name-painted in blue on a whitewashed wall-Benito Juárez, distinguished son of the Americas, a fruit market and a pottery market, North American tourists, shoeshine men, singers of rancheras and boleros (the ranchera singers looked like gunmen, the bolero singers suicidal or like pimps, Castillo remarked), women on their way to church, and hookers talking, running, or gesturing mysteriously: this was the backdrop, while in the foreground the god Toltecatl, an Indian with a chubby face covered with welts and scars, laughed uproariously. The owner of the bar, Castillo told him, was a man by the name of Aparicio Montes de Oca, and in 1985, the year he bought the place, he had killed a man at the busiest time of day, in front of everyone. At the trial he got off by pleading self-defense.