In a nutshell, she wrote at the end of the letter, she was happy and life couldn’t be better. In this sense, she confessed, I’m a little like Candide, and my teacher, Pangloss, is this fascinating part of Mexico. My father, too-though actually no, my father is nothing at all like Pangloss.
Jordi read the letter in the subway. He had no idea who Candide and Pangloss were, but it seemed to him that his friend was at the gates of paradise while he was stuck permanently in purgatory.
4
At night, after they had watched a movie together on TV, he asked his father who Candide and Pangloss were.
“Two characters from Voltaire,” said Antoni Carrera.
“Yes, but who are they,” asked Jordi, to whom Voltaire sounded vaguely like some cabaret or rock band.
“The characters in a philosophical novel,” said Antoni Carrera, “but you should know that by now. Is this for some school project?”
“No. It’s personal,” said Jordi, feeling that his house was suffocating him. The furniture, the TV, the yard with the lights on, everything was suddenly oppressive.
“Candide is the quintessential innocent, and Pangloss is, too, more or less.”
“Pangloss is his teacher?”
“Yes. He’s a philosopher. The classic optimist. Like Candide, except that Candide is an optimist by nature and Pangloss argues rationally for optimism. He’s a moron, basically.”
“And is the novel set in Mexico?”
“No, I don’t think so. Pangloss teaches theology, metaphysics, cosmology, and nigology, and don’t ask me what that is because I don’t know.”
“Nigology. Huh,” said Jordi.
That night he looked up nigology in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. He couldn’t find it. Those fucking professors, he thought angrily. The closest thing was nigola: (Naut.) Lengths of thin line strung between the shrouds of a sailing ship to make a ladder; ratline. To sail amid the rigging and the topsails! There was also nigromancia, or necromancy, the meaning of which Jordi knew thanks to role-playing games, and also nigérrimo, ma. (Del lat. Nigerrimus.) adj. sup. de negro. Negrísimo, very black.
Nor was it in the Ideological Dictionary of the Spanish Language by Julio Casares or in the Pompeu I Fabra.
Much later, while his parents were sleeping, he got out of bed naked, and with measured steps, as if he were on a phantom basketball court, he headed for his father’s library and searched until he found a Spanish translation of Candide.
He read: “It is clear,” said Pangloss, “that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles. Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches. Stones were made to be shaped and to build castles with; thus My Lord has a fine castle, for the greatest Baron in the province should have the finest house; and since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.”
For a while he knelt there on the rug in the library, rocking slightly back and forth with his five senses elsewhere. Have I fallen in love with you? he thought. Am I falling in love? And if I am, what can I do about it? I don’t know how to write letters. I’m doomed. Then, stricken, he whispered: fuck, Rosa, fuck, it’s so unfair, so unfair…
5
Around this time Jordi Carrera dreamed that he was playing for Barcelona at the Palau Sant Jordi alongside the stars of Catalan basketball. The opposing team was Real Madrid, but it wasn’t the usual Real Madrid. The only player he recognized was Sabonis, but this Sabonis was much older and slower and his hands shook when he caught the ball. The rest of the Madrid players were strangers, and not only were they strangers, even their bodies were indistinct. Their legs were legs, but at the same time there was something about them that was uncharacteristic of a pair of limbs, as if they were constantly coming in and out of focus. The same was true of their arms and faces, which never seemed to settle into a fixed expression or firm outline, though this strange phenomenon didn’t seem to bother the other Barcelona players. The Palau was full to bursting and the shouting of the spectators was so loud that for a moment Jordi thought he would pass out. Without much surprise he realized that he was playing point guard, not center. The Madrid players soon began to commit fouls and almost all of them were against him. He didn’t know the score. So focused was he on the game that he never lifted his head to glance at the electronic scoreboard. In fact, he had no idea where the scoreboard was, but he suspected that his team was winning, and this made him incredibly happy. When he noticed that he was bleeding from the nose, the brow, and the upper lip, the scene underwent a radical shift.
Now he wasn’t on the Palau court but in a dark locker room with raw cement walls and long, damp benches and a constant noise of water, as if a river were running above the changing room. He wasn’t alone. A shadowy figure was watching him from a corner. Jordi felt his bloody face and cursed the shadow in Catalan. He said son of a bitch in Catalan, then he said bastard, though the word was the same in Spanish. The shadowy figure quivered like a broken fan. Jordi told himself that he should take a shower, but the ominous presence in the corner made it an ordeal to undress. Feeling cramps in both legs, he sat down and covered his face with his hands. Incomprehensibly, he saw his father, his mother, and Amalfitano drinking whiskey in the yard one fall afternoon, happy, with no problems on the horizon. The afternoon, the sky, and the rooftops of the neighboring buildings were heartrendingly beautiful. Where is Rosa? he asked longingly, careful not to disturb the equilibrium of the scene, which he sensed was precarious. But his parents didn’t seem to hear him. He soon realized that they were in another dimension. Then the dream lifted, drifting away in a balloon or on a cloud, and below, in the streets of Barcelona, Catalan nationalists fought house to house against the Spanish army. Jordi knew the name of the army without being told: it was the King’s Army, the National Army, and it fought with commendable tenacity against him and his compatriots. But this time it wasn’t just the Castilian soldiers whose faces and limbs were blurred. The Catalan militiamen also grew hazy amid the rubble and even the cries of the wounded or the leaders ordering their men to advance or retreat took on the same quality, blurring in the air, fleeing the Catalan and Spanish languages for a kingdom where words were like electrocardiograms, where voices were like Tartar dreams.
In the last image of his dream Jordi saw himself huddled in a corner, hugging his knees as hard as he could and thinking of Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, so far away.
6
Celestino Arraya, whose house Rosa Amalfitano visited on the third day after her arrival in Santa Teresa, was born in Villaviciosa in 1900 and died at a cantina called Los Primos Hermanos in 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power. Little information is available about his childhood: legend has him as a brave young soldier with Pancho Villa when the reality is that he spent the Villa years hiding away on a ranch where his friend Federico Montero-an eminent politician and landowner who managed to navigate the turbulent years of the Revolution with courage and unerring instinct-bred fighting bulls. It was the Piedras Negras bullring that saw his first triumph, in 1920. After that, successful appearances followed in other border cities and towns: Ojinaga, Nogales, Matamoros, Nueva Rosita. These were some of the rings from which he emerged raised aloft, clutching tail and ears in his hands like a shipwrecked sailor frozen stiff with cold. He was extremely adept in the art of killing. His final anointing occurred at the Monterrey bullring and, in 1928, in Mexico City, where he was acclaimed in the ring and feted on public thoroughfares. He was tall and slender-cadaverous, according to some-and always sharply dressed, whether in bullfighting attire or civilian clothes. The elegance with which he moved in the ring, though, became a mannered stride in everyday life, the strut of a preening gangster. Along with Federico Montero and other friends, he belonged to a bachelor’s club, The Cowboys of Death, which was officially gastronomic and harmless, though of terrible memory. Death, the real thing, came to him at the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy who for motives that remain unknown came looking for him at the cantina Los Primos Hermanos and with his old rifle put two bullets in his head before being shot in turn by the bullfighter’s comrades. The statue that stands guard over his mausoleum was erected at the initiative of Montero and other friends, who bore the full cost themselves. The sculptor was Pablo Mesones Sarabia (1891-1942), of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito.