Many times Pancho followed him from bar to bar until dawn.
Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying:
“My brain needs air.”
This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start to talk about vampires.
“How many Dracula movies have you seen?” he asked Pancho.
“None, Gumaro.”
“Then you don’t know much about vampires,” said Gumaro.
Other times he talked about desert towns or villages or hamlets that only communicated among themselves, with no regard for borders or language. Towns that were one or two thousand years old and where scarcely fifty or one hundred people lived.
“What towns are those, Gumaro?” Pancho asked.
“Towns of vampires or white worms,” said Gumaro, “which amounts to the same thing. Godforsaken shitholes where the urge to kill runs as strong as the urge to live.”
Pancho imagined two or three cantinas, one grocery store, and courtyards paved in concrete, facing west. Like Villaviciosa.
“So where are these towns?” he asked.
“Here and there,” said Gumaro, “on either side of the border, like a renegade state inside Mexico and also the United States. An invisible state.”
Once, for work, Gumaro had to visit one of these towns. Of course, he didn’t know what it was at the time.
“You never know these things,” he told Pancho.
The road was dirt, but it wasn’t bad, though the last twenty miles were only a track through the rocks and the desert. They arrived at four in the afternoon. The town had thirty inhabitants and half of the houses were empty. With Gumaro were Sebastián Romero and Marco Antonio Guzmán, two veteran Santa Teresa policemen. They were going to arrest a Mexican who had wiped out his two Yankee partners in San Bernabé, Arizona. It was the San Bernabé police chief who had gotten the tip and he called Don Pedro Negrete and came to an arrangement. The Santa Teresa policemen would arrest the killer and then cross the border with him. The men from San Bernabé would be waiting on the other side, and they would receive the prisoner. Afterward, they would say that they had found the killer wandering in the desert, howling at the moon like a coyote, with everything happening on the American side, everything perfectly legal.
Guzmán got sick as soon as they arrived. He was shivering with fever and vomiting, so they left him in the backseat of the car, covered with a blanket and babbling about masked wrestlers. Then Gumaro and Romero went from house to house through the town, guided by an old woman with a limp, but they didn’t find anything. Either the information they had gotten from the San Bernabé police chief was no good or the killer had long since disappeared, because they didn’t find a single scrap of evidence that he had ever been there.
One of the strange things that Gumaro saw as they went back and forth, aware already that the search was useless, were the eyes of some of the animals. They were rubbed-out eyes, he said to Pancho. Eyes from the beyond. Fading into nothing. As if the donkeys and dogs were intelligent and their souls were bigger than human souls.
“If it was up to me,” said Gumaro, “I would have drawn my gun and shot all those animals.”
Before it got dark they left without the man they’d come to find and back in Santa Teresa Don Pedro Negrete was very upset because he owed the police chief of San Bernabé a favor.
Gumaro talked about towns of white worms and towns of buzzards, towns of coyotes and towns of tiny birds. And these were precisely the things, he said, that a true policeman needed to know about. Pancho thought he was crazy. At dawn they went to eat pozole at El Almira, owned by Doña Milagros Reina, who in her day had been one of Santa Teresa’s top whores. By this time Gumaro wasn’t talking about anything: not policemen, not towns of vampires, not white worms. He ate his pozole like a man near death and then he said that he had things to do and he vanished all of a sudden down some random street.
“Come sleep it off at my place,” Pancho offered many times, sorry to see him looking so pale and shaky. “Come and stay for a while until you feel better.”
But Gumaro always ignored him, and suddenly, before he had finished talking, he would vanish. Without saying goodbye, as if at that hour everyone was a stranger to him.
14
Padilla’s next letter seemed to have been written by a different person, someone who had just been operated on and was still under the effects of the anesthesia. It said that he had gone with Raguenau and a kid called Adrià to Tibidabo, the amusement park, and everything, absolutely everything, had been so beautiful that he was unable-on repeated occasions, on repeated and baffling occasions, on repeated and crystal clear occasions-to contain his tears. I cried, he said, like someone who finds true religion and sees it for what it is and knows that his salvation lies in it, but carries on regardless.
On the roller coaster, he said, as the lights of Barcelona and the endless darkness of the Mediterranean swam in and out of view, I had one of the most glorious erections of my life, my cock was rock hard, it swelled so big that my testicles and the shaft hurt, I was afraid to touch it, the bulge under my jeans throbbed, it beat like a racing heart, its length reached almost to my navel (my God, thought Amalfitano), good thing it happened where it did, in a public place, added Padilla, because it would have been more than any ass in the world could handle.
Then he said that Raguenau and the kid, who was apparently his nephew, had brought him to the pastry shop of another baker, an old friend of Raguenau’s, a guy in his seventies who presented them with an assortment of delicious cookies and cakes, nice relaxing conversation, and the music of Mompou. I’d like to live like that always, said Padilla, surrounded by people like that, sharing pleasures like those, though I know that if you scratch the surface you discover that it’s all just polite anguish, genteel anguish, or if you’re lucky, anguish chased by a good shot in the arm of Nolotil, but the friendship they offer me is real, and that should be enough, whatever the circumstances. About The God of Homosexuals he said nothing.
Around this time Amalfitano was too busy preparing his classes (combing American libraries and universities for the scattered and forgotten books of Jean-Marie Guyau) and all he could send was a postcard in which he explained clumsily how busy he was and inquired about the progress of the novel.
Padilla’s reply was long and cheerful, but hard to follow. I’m sure you’ve found a new love, he said, and I’m sure you’re enjoying yourself. Carry on! He reminded him of the Byrds song (was it the Byrds?), the one that goes if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, and-strangely, if this was what he really believed-he didn’t ask for any information about Amalfitano’s new lover, I imagine, he said, that it’s probably one of your students. And yet in the next paragraph the tone of the letter changed dramatically and he implored him not to let his guard down. Don’t let anyone play you, he begged, anyone at all, even if he’s the hottest guy around and he does it better than anyone else, under no circumstances should you let yourself be taken advantage of. Then he rambled on about the loneliness that Amalfitano bore and the risks to which that loneliness exposed him. By the end, the letter recovered its cheerful tone (in fact, the lines about loneliness and the danger of being played were like a small anxiety attack enclosed within parentheses) and talked about the winter and the spring, the flower stands on the Ramblas and the rain, about glossy shades of gray and the black stones hidden in the walls of the Old City. In the postcript he sent his regards to Rosa (for the first time, since Padilla usually acted as if Rosa didn’t exist) and said that he had read Arcimboldi’s last novel, 105 pages, about a doctor who upon inheriting the ancestral home finds a collection of masks of human flesh. Each flask-in which the masks float in a viscous liquid that seems to swallow light-is numbered and after a brief search the doctor finds, in a thick book of accounts, a collection of explanatory verses, numbered in turn, which, as in New Impressions of Africa, cast spadefuls of clarity or spadefuls of coal dust on the origin and destiny of the masks.