When Amalfitano called and said that he wanted to see her, Isabel thought they would make a date for the following Saturday, so her astonishment was great when he said he wanted to see her that very night.
“I’m in my pajamas,” said Isabel, accustomed to being the one who always visited Amalfitano.
“I’m coming to your house,” said Amalfitano. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I need to talk to someone and I can’t do it over the phone.”
Isabel downed the whiskey in a single gulp and then began to tidy up. She picked up some things in the living room, made the bed and straightened the bedroom, opened a few windows and aired out the house, closed the windows and sprayed a bit of Holiday Forever air freshener in the corners, then she splashed water on her face, put on a little makeup, and poured another whiskey.
10
By Thursday Pancho could have delivered a full report on Amalfitano, but he didn’t.
That morning he followed Rosa: he followed her along Avenida Sonora, followed her into a covered market where she did the shopping, and then followed her back to the house. It was noon before she appeared again. At twelve fifteen, one of the windows in the living room opened and he presumed that she was cleaning. Then he watched her go out into the yard, walk to the fence, bend down, and look for something. Then he watched her get up and head back to the house with surer steps. Muted pop music drifted on the breeze to the windows of his car. Then Rosa closed the window and all he could hear was the whisper of the sun falling on the pavement and the trees.
At four in the afternoon Rosa went out again.
He followed her on foot. Rosa walked at a good clip, in the same direction as always, toward Calle Sonora and then Avenida Revolución. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She had on low boots, with no heel.
11
Padilla’s next letter was torrential. He began by saying that one night, drunk and high on pills, he had somehow ended up at a used-book store on Calle Aribau and suddenly, as if the book had leaped into his hands, he found himself with an old copy of J.M.G. Arcimboldi’s The Endless Rose, translated by Amalfitano. Your name in that tattered and precious volume!
Arcimboldi, he said, had overnight become a fashionable author in Spain, where they were publishing or about to publish everything he’d written. Not a week went by without an article on the great French writer, or a profile of him. Even The Endless Rose (his third or fourth novel?)-a difficult and deceptive work despite its apparent simplicity, to the point that sometimes it seemed like a book for morons-was already in a second printing, when it had scarcely been out for a month. The new Spanish translation was by a writer from Navarra, suddenly revealed to be an expert-which he was, though he’d certainly kept it under wraps-on the Arcimboldean oeuvre. I prefer your translation, said Padilla, and every page that I reread makes me imagine you in that storm-tossed Buenos Aires, freighted with omens, where your innocence triumphed. Here Padilla gets it wrong again, thought Amalfitano, because even though the translation was for a Buenos Aires publishing house, he had done it while he was living in Mexico City. If I had translated Arcimboldi in Buenos Aires, he thought, I would be dead now.
Of course, continued Padilla, he, too, had succumbed to the fashion for Arcimboldi and in a week he’d devoured the three novels in Spanish translation, plus another three in the original French that he’d found at the Librería Apollinaire on Calle Córcega, plus the controversial novella or long short story Riquer, which he’d read in Juli Montaner’s Catalan translation and which seemed to him a kind of long-winded Borges. In Barcelona there are those who say, said Padilla, that Arcimboldi is the perfect blend of Thomas Bernhard and Stevenson (old R.L., you heard me right), but he placed him somewhere nearer the unlikely intersection of Aloysius Bertrand and Perec and (brace yourself) Gide and the Robbe-Grillet of Project for a Revolution in New York. In any case, French to the hilt. Finally, he said that he was starting to get sick of the flocks of Arcimboldi exegetes, whom he equated with donkeys, animals he had always pitied though he hadn’t seen one in the flesh until he was nineteen, in Gracia, the property of some Gypsies who moved like metropolitan shepherds from the grazing lands of one Barcelona neighborhood to another with the donkey, a monkey, and a barrel organ. Despite Buñuel and Dalí, I always loved Platero, it must be because we faggots get a kick out of all that Andalusian shit, he wrote, and these lines wounded Amalfitano deeply.
As he saw it, Padilla was a poet, an intellectual, a fighter, a gay free spirit who dispensed his favors liberally, an engaging companion, but never a faggot, a term he associated with cowardice and enforced loneliness. But it was true, he thought then, he and Padilla were faggots, and that was all there was to it, period.
With sadness, Amalfitano realized that he in fact wasn’t an authority on the work of Arcimboldi, though he had been the first to translate him into Spanish, more than seventeen years ago, when almost no one had heard of him. I should have kept translating him, he said to himself, and not wasted my time on Osman Lins, the concrete poets, and my atrocious Portuguese, but I struck out there too. And yet Padilla, Amalfitano realized, had overlooked something in his long letter (as had probably all the other Arcimboldians of Barcelona), a crucial feature of the French writer’s work: even if all his stories, no matter their style (and in this regard Arcimboldi was eclectic and seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is a fraud), were mysteries, they were only solved through flight, or sometimes through bloodshed (real or imaginary) followed by endless flight, as if Arcimboldi’s characters, once the book had come to an end, literally leapt from the last page and kept fleeing.
Padilla’s letter ended with two pieces of news: his breakup with his SEAT boyfriend, and the imminent-though why it was so imminent he didn’t say-end to his job as a proofreader. If I keep proofreading, he said, I won’t enjoy reading anymore, and that’s the end, isn’t it? About The God of Homosexuals he had little or a lot to say, depending: it’s a waltz.
In his reply, which was as long as Padilla’s letter, Amalfitano entangled himself in a series of disquisitions on Arcimboldi that had little to do with what he really wanted to get across: the state of his soul. Don’t leave your proofreading job, he said in the postcript, I imagine you with no money in Barcelona and it scares me. Keep proofreading and keep writing.
Padilla’s reply was slow in coming and it seemed to have been written in a state of trance. Right off the bat he confessed that he had AIDS. I got the package, he said between jokes. Immediately after that he told Amalfitano to get tested. You might have it, he said, but if you do I promise that you didn’t get it from me. For a year now he had known that he was HIV-positive. Now he had developed the disease. That was all. Soon he would be dead. As far as everything else was concerned, he was no longer working and he had moved back in with his father, who had guessed or gotten some inkling of his son’s illness. Poor old man, said Padilla, he’s had to watch all the people he loves die. Here he rambled on about people like jinxes or dark clouds. The good news was that he had run into the baker from Gracia who used to come to the soirées at the studio near the university. Without asking for anything in return, the baker, having heard that Padilla was sick, had given him a bimonthly allowance, which was what he called it. It wasn’t enough for Padilla to rent an apartment and live alone, but it did cover most of his costs: books, drugs, rooms by the night, dinners at neighborhood restaurants. His prescriptions were paid for by social security. Paradise, as you can see, he said.