III. ROSA AMALFITANO
1
For the first week they stayed at the Sinaloa Motel, on the edge of Santa Teresa, off the northbound highway. Each morning Amalfitano called a taxi to take him to the university. An hour or two later Rosa followed suit and spent the rest of the morning wandering the streets of Santa Teresa. When it was time for lunch they met at the university cafeteria or at a cheap restaurant discovered by Rosa called The King and the Queen, which served only Mexican food.
They spent the afternoons looking for a place to live. They hired a taxi and visited apartments and houses downtown or in other neighborhoods, but none of them satisfied Rosa, either because they were awful or too expensive or the neighborhoods weren’t to her liking. As they went back and forth by taxi, Amalfitano read and prepared for his new job and Rosa stared out the window. In their own way, father and daughter were living in another world, a happy, enchanted, provisional world.
Until at last they found a three-bedroom house with a big, sunny living room, a bathroom with a bathtub, and an open kitchen in Colonia Mancera, a middle-class neighborhood in the south of the city.
The house had a small front yard that had once been well tended but was now full of weeds and burrows, as if inhabited by moles. There was a front porch with a tiled floor and wooden railings that promised rocking chairs and peaceful afternoons. There was a smaller backyard, too, about two hundred square feet, and a junk room filled to the rafters with useless objects. It’s the perfect house, Dad, said Rosa, and there they stayed.
Amalfitano took the biggest bedroom. In addition to the bed, the bedside table, and the wardrobe, Rosa found a writing table, moved in a chair from the dining room, and hired a carpenter to build two big bookcases for the books that had been sent by boat from Barcelona and would still be a while in coming. In the room that she chose for herself Rosa put a smaller bookcase and after filling it hastily with the old belongings of her nomadic childhood she painted the walls, taking all the time in the world: two the shade of tobacco and two a very pale green.
When she wanted to give Amalfitano’s walls the same treatment, he refused. He liked white walls and it distressed him to see his daughter dressed in a T-shirt and old pants all day doing work that he should ostensibly be doing himself.
They had never lived in a house with an open kitchen, and the first few nights, dazzled by the novelty, they cooked together, talking and moving constantly from the kitchen to the living room, wiping the counter, watching each other cook, and then eating, one of them perched on a stool while the other served, as if they were at a bar, taking turns being waiter and customer.
2
When life returned to normal, Rosa had time to fall in love with the streets of Santa Teresa, cool streets, streets that in a secret way spoke of a field of transparencies and Indian colors, and she never took a taxi again.
Accustomed as she was to the colorful, perfectly demarcated streets of Barcelona or the perfectly fussy streets of the Casco Antiguo-the streets of a civilization, or in other words real streets-the streets of Santa Teresa seemed somehow newborn, streets with a secret logic and aesthetic, streets with their hair down, where she could walk and feel alive walking, on her own and not a part of.
And also, she discovered in surprise, they were streets shooting outward, urban and at the same time open to the country, a country of great mysterious spaces that crept in during the first hours of dusk down streets shaded by stunted or powerful trees, in a system she couldn’t explain to herself, as if Santa Teresa were interleaved with even the humblest of the nearby hills, viewed from an impossible perspective. As if the streets were the barrels of multiple telescopes trained on the desert, on the planted fields, on the scrubland and pastures, or on the bare hills that on moonlit nights seemed to be made of bread crumbs.
3
Rosa Amalfitano and Jordi Carrera began to write to each other a week after the Amalfitanos arrived in Mexico. The first to write was Jordi. After a strange week in which he could hardly sleep a wink, he decided to do something that in all his seventeen years he had never done before. After much hesitation, he bought what seemed to him the most appropriate postcard, a panel from a comic strip by Tamburini and Liberatore (one of the two of them, he thought he remembered, but everything was so hazy, had died of an overdose), and after writing a couple of sentences that seemed stupid to him, I hope you’re well, we miss you (why the fucking plural?), he put it in the mail and tried in vain to forget her.
Rosa’s typed response was three pages long. It said, more or less, that she was advancing by forced marches into adulthood and that the feeling this gave her was wonderful and exciting at first, though later, as always, one got used to it. She also talked about Santa Teresa and how pretty some of the colonial buildings were: a church, a porticoed market, and the house of the bullfighter Celestino Arraya, now a museum, that she had visited soon after arriving, as if magnetically drawn. Not only was this Celestino handsome, he was a local luminary killed in the flower of his youth (here Rosa went on to make various half-comprehensible and not quite successful jokes about the flower of desire and the flower of sin), and there was an impressive statue of him in the Santa Teresa cemetery that she planned to visit later on. She sounds like a sculptor or an architect, thought Jordi despondently after reading the letter for the tenth time.
It took him twenty days to answer. This time he sent her an extra-large postcard of a Nazario comic. Faced with the impossibility of telling her what he really needed to say, he launched into a garbled but scrupulously truthful account of his latest basketball game. It’s like an absurdist poem, thought Rosa when she read the postcard. The game was described as a series of electrokinetic and electromagnetic instants, bodies moving in a rapid blur, the ball sometimes too big or too small, too bright or too dark, and the shouts of the crowd-which Jordi compared enthusiastically (for once) to the cries at a Roman circus-like a metronome behind his ribs. I hope I’m not overdoing it, he thought. As for himself, he insinuated that he had played badly, inattentively, listlessly, and by this he meant that he was feeling down and he missed her.
This time Rosa’s response was only two pages long. She wrote about her English classes, the exploratory walks she took around the neighborhoods of Santa Teresa, the solitude she deemed a precious gift and that she spent reading and getting to know herself, Mexican food (here in passing she mentioned Catalan white beans with sausage in a way that Jordi found derogatory and unfair), some of which she had already tried to make for her father, chicken with red mole sauce, for example, which was relatively easy, she said, all you had to do was boil a chicken or a couple of chicken breasts and make the mole (an earthen red powder that was bought premixed, from a bin or in jars) in a frying pan with a little oil and then a little water, ideally the broth left over from boiling the chicken, and in a separate pot, of course, you boiled a little rice, which was served with the chicken and plenty of mole sauce. It was a hot, strong-flavored dish (maybe a little too intense for her father-not her-to eat at night), but she had loved it from the start and now she couldn’t do without it. It’s possible, she said, that I’ve become a chicken mole fanatic, which traditionally should really be turkey mole, or mole de guajolote, as they call it here.