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  She came to take my order with one of her favorite comments: “Are you leading the way for everyone else, little boy? Where are the rest of your kindergarten classmates?”

  I told her they were coming, and that I had a craving for some huevos rancheros. She recommended some Gerber baby food, pear, which was quite tasty.

  “I’m tired of that pear mush,” I told her. “Rancheros would be better.”

  She wrote my order down in her pad: rancheros, café Americano, and grapefruit juice. She removed the extra place mats from my table and said, “Mireya told me you were flirting with her the other day.”

  “Damn it! She promised she wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “I killed her. Does that bother you?”

  “You did the right thing; the rolls she served me were flat.”

  “That’s what they told me, that’s why I killed her.” She saw something was wrong, because she added: “Nene’s got something on his mind. A lover’s quarrel?”

  “Maybe,” I told her, giving her the menu and she left to turn in my order. I dialed Ofelia’s number, but she didn’t answer. I assumed that she didn’t want to speak to me. Gladis came back with my huevos rancheros ten minutes later.

  “Talk to your mami,” she said, and it occurred to me that in a city where half the population lived closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls, it was really only possible to open up to a waitress from Sanborns.

  “She’s your age,” I said.

  “Twenty-two?”

  “Give or take a year.”

  Between bites I told her about Margó, leaving for the very end that she was paralyzed.

  “Are you joking?”

  “No, I’m serious. From the waist down. She uses a wheelchair.”

  I didn’t have to guess what she was thinking; her question was enough.

  “Paralyzed all over, Nene?”

  “I think so.”

  She sighed like a mother observing her child take up a profession beneath his capabilities.

  “You’re going to need plenty of endurance.”

  I didn’t say anything and she left to take another customer’s order.

  The strange thing about talking to waitresses at Sanborns is that they walk away and come back, not pausing for a minute, and the conversation moves forward in fits and starts. There’s no need to lose hope, that perpetual movement endows their remarks with overwhelming wisdom, which makes them extremely valuable when one requires guidance of any kind. It took me a while to catch on to that peculiar dialectic, but now I’d mastered it and I couldn’t imagine chatting with Gladis, with Luz Aurora, or with Tristana while seated comfortably in an armchair, where they would have most certainly lost their wisdom.

  My cell phone rang. It was Ofelia. She asked where I was and I told her. “I acted like a real asshole yesterday,” I added.

  “That sounds about right.”

  “I looked for you after, but you weren’t there, and neither was Father Clark.”

  “We left because of the crowd and the heat.”

  “You looked like a couple.”

  “I’ll let you know when we are,” and she asked how my reading had gone. I told her it was shitty and that I’d tell her about it later. We hung up, both pacified.

  Fighting with Ofelia drove me crazy. Gladis came back five minutes later, when I’d finished the rancheros; she took my plate and asked if I wanted anything else. I told her I didn’t, and she asked, “Why do you like women who are older than me, Nene?”

  “It’s just that my mother had enormous breasts, which left me traumatized.”

  “You’re a jackass,” she exclaimed. “What are you talking about, huge breasts! I remember her, her breasts were beautiful. She was the most elegant woman in all the Sanborns.”

  I looked at her fondly. Gladis told you where to sit, and she could tell you things you didn’t know about your mother.

  “She had enviable skin,” she added, and her words made my heart race.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Like a princess,” she said. “Children don’t notice these things.”

  “What does skin like a princess look like?”

  “It’s the kind that’s so thin you can see the little veins. A complexion so pure it would make a king fall in love with her.”

  Gladis hadn’t even finished grade school and she was still so damn articulate.

  “She must’ve smelled good, too,” I said, enthralled.

  She laughed without taking her eyes off me, more cunning than a fox. “Sure, Nene,” she said. “Just like your princess, I’m sure.” She took the bill out of her skirt pocket and placed it on the table. I’d started to blush. “You want more coffee?”

  I said I didn’t. She walked away and I sat there absorbed in the news that my mother had privileged skin, something no one had ever told me and I’d never noticed. Gladis was right, children don’t notice their mother’s skin, which completely covers her, and only when they grow up and fall in love, when they give and receive their first kisses, the skin they love seems like a separate thing to them, and then they learn to say “Your skin,” like Isabel Fraire does in her poem.

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN‘T FEEL like going to the furniture store, so I started walking aimlessly. I was still seized by some abstract rage. Ten minutes later my cell phone rang and an unknown number appeared on the screen. It was Tatis Reséndiz. She was in El Caracol and wanted to know the name of the poet who wrote my book, because she’d forgotten it.

  “Isabel Fraire,” I answered. She thanked me and I asked who’d given her my number.

  “My aunt.”

  I thought that was odd. None of the owners of the houses where I did my readings knew my number. It was a program rule that everything had to be mediated by Father Clark.

  “Congratulations on last night,” I told her.

  She thanked me. I waited for her to say something, but she was quiet. I had a hunch she was with David. Maybe he was the one who’d given her my number, not her aunt. If that was the case, she was aware of the fact that we knew each other, and I wondered if she knew that her future husband was engaged in the extortion business.

  “Well, thanks again, I have to go,” Tatis said, and she hung up.

  My good mood had gone to hell. If Tatis knew what her boyfriend did, I didn’t pose any threat to David and my power over him was nonexistent, and maybe not only Tatis but Señor and Doña Reséndiz themselves were aware of everything, and they pretended they didn’t know. What, after all, did I know about them, beyond the fact that they were fatuous and loved to be surrounded by other people?

  I kept walking. I’d distanced myself from all my friends after the misfortune, as Celeste called it, and since my friends were protected inside walled-in gardens, I’d distanced myself from gardens. Now that I couldn’t drive I walked through the city, noticing all the walls in the City of Eternal Spring, which was abundant with streets that were no more than open-air tunnels lined with vertical brick walls made out of cinder block or volcanic stone, piedra. So much wall had infected the people: housekeepers, business owners, and taxi drivers, the beautiful woman from the Vista Hermosa neighborhood, too; everyone walked around stone-faced. There was even a Sanborns made out of stone!

  Half an hour later, tired of rambling aimlessly through so much erected stone, I went to the furniture store to see if grim-faced Jaime needed anything.

  When I entered the store I found a book of poems by Gianni Rodari on one of the tartan sofas. Jaime told me that a woman who’d just bought a desk with a hutch for her son’s room had left it behind. It had probably fallen out of her bag when she sat on the sofa to try it out. I vaguely remembered the name Rodari, knew he was an internationally acclaimed Italian writer of children’s books, and out of curiosity, I opened the book a
t random and read a poem. I liked it so much that I sat on the tartan sofa so I could continue reading, despite Jaime’s reproachful look; he would have never allowed himself to sit on a chair or sofa we wanted to sell. I remembered what my father told me and Ofelia when he came across an anodyne poem: It’s missing the three p‘s: purpose, prowess, and prudence. Rodari’s poem reverberated purpose, prowess, and prudence, as well as an intense melancholy. I read two more poems, and I took the book home with me. That same afternoon I read the poems in the Vigil family house, never imagining the consequences this would have. Rodari’s poems sounded, their ludic and outlandish rhymes could be heard outside the domain of my lips, which had until that moment been the only organ in that house used to decipher the written word.

  One day, on the Soria express train to Monteverde,

  I watched a man come aboard; his ear was green—verde.

  He was no longer young, but seasoned, it seemed,

  everything but his ear, which was completely green.

  The three boys couldn’t resist its music, though at first I didn’t notice it, and perhaps I only noticed that their eyes didn’t possess that hypnotic fixity their parents’ and grandmother’s had, which came from fixating on the mouth of the one speaking.

  So I could see him better, I changed my seat

  to study the marvel, to get a better look at least.

  I asked: Señor, please tell me, you are of a certain age,

  that green ear of yours, does it serve you some advantage?

  You can call me old, he said and winked, I’ve lived my years,

  but from my younger days all I’ve kept is this ear.

  I’d decided to read them Rodari’s poems without any clear intention, other than the pure excitement reading them gave me, but when I saw that the three little boys were listening to me for the first time, I wanted to make sure that they were really listening to me with their ears, not with their eyes, to this end I raised the book just enough so it was in front of my mouth, and I continued reading. The father, the mother, and the grandmother stretched their necks so they wouldn’t lose sight of my lips, but the boys didn’t move at all. I stood up, turned around, turning my back on the whole family, and I continued reading out loud:

  It’s a child’s ear, which helps me heed

  things adults don’t stop to feel

  I hear what trees say, the birds that sing,

  the stones, rivers, and the clouds passing,

  I also hear the children, the ones spinning fables

  that an older ear hears most incomprehensible.

  The father stood up and asked me what I was doing. I didn’t answer him and kept reading:

  The green-eared man spoke just like this

  that day on the Soria to Monteverde express.

  “Turn around, we can’t see you!” he ordered. He was beside himself. “Why are you turning your back on us?”

  “Because I have a booger in my nose,” I replied, still with my back turned, and the boys roared with laughter.

  Their father turned to them, furious. “Why are you laughing? What did he say?”

  The oldest one responded timidly, “That he has a booger in his nose.”

  “Why are you hearing him?”

  “Because he’s funny,” the youngest one replied.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “What he’s reading.”

  “You don’t have to hear him,” the father shouted.

  I closed the book with a sharp thud, opened my bag, and, while I placed the book inside it, I turned toward the three adults, making sure they could see my mouth perfectly.

  “I’m leaving this house and you’ll never see me again,” I said, my voice trembling. “Forcing your children to be deaf! You can’t hear the rhyme, but they can!”

  I closed my briefcase with a quick slap and I took a step toward the door. The mother shot up like a coil spring.

  “Wait, don’t go.”

  Her husband took her by the arm, but she jerked it away and said in a beseeching voice, “Please, sit down and continue reading.”

  “The poems?”

  “Yes.”

  The father looked at the mother but she ignored him. I went back to my chair, opened my briefcase, and took out the book in the middle of a silence even a deaf person could have heard. The mother sat back down. The father, who was still standing, seeing that I was looking at him, waiting to resume the reading, had no other choice but to sit down as well. A revolution had just occurred in that house: The boys had permission to hear.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, back in the furniture store, I received a call from Abigael Martínez. I thought he must have found another copy of Isabel Fraire’s collection of poems and wanted me to return the one that had been inscribed for him, but that wasn’t why he called; instead, he wanted to tell me that a few days ago a young woman had come into his bookstore, accompanied by her boyfriend, asking if he had any book by Isabel Fraire, and he wanted to know if I’d sent them. I told him I had.

  “I suspected as much,” he said. “Turns out that today the boyfriend came back, accompanied by another fellow, and he demanded that I pay eight thousand pesos a month for a protection fee.”

  “Eight thousand?”

  “Yes.”

  I asked him what the man with David looked like and, from the description he gave me, I came to the conclusion that it was Güero.

  “Are they friends of yours?” Abigael Martínez asked me.

  “Are you asking if I’m also in the extortion business?”

  “No, but you sent them.”

  “I sent the girl,” I told him, “because she was looking for a book by Isabel Fraire and she’s the niece of some acquaintances of mine.”

  “Amalia Reséndiz?”

  “Yes.”

  “That lady called me the next day to suggest that I host an evening event of music and poetry in my bookstore, a soiree she called it, in honor of Isabel Fraire. I asked her who would cover the expenses for this soiree, and she told me that I would, if I’d be so kind, and the soiree would give citywide visibility to my bookstore.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “That the business is just getting on its feet and I can’t spend what little money I have on wine, sandwiches, and chair rentals. The lady got upset and almost hung up on me. The guy who blackmailed me a few hours ago demanded that I not only pay the protection fee but that I also organize the poetry soiree within the next eight days, otherwise things will get really ugly.”

  This was how I learned that Amalia Reséndiz was avaricious, and I guessed that David, when he saw that his future aunt-in-law was angry, decided to strong-arm Abigael. I was in part responsible for what had happened, because if I hadn’t mentioned the name of the bookstore to Tatis, Abigael wouldn’t have received a visit from her thug of a boyfriend, nor would he have received a call from Amalia Reséndiz, and now, at least for a little while, he’d still be moving through the labyrinth of his books worry-free.

  “Listen,” I told him, “the guy who’s shaking you down is the fiancé of the girl and he’s doing the same to me.”

  “How much is he charging you?”

  “The same as you.”

  That wasn’t true; they charged me two thousand pesos less. Either the conditions of the situation had gotten worse or Güero had actually managed to obtain preferential treatment for us.

  “I didn’t know things worked like this,” he said. “I’ve never run my own business before.”

  His voice sounded less anxious now that he knew we were in the same boat.

  “I don’t think the girl or her family know how this guy makes his living,” I told him. “If I let them in on his secret, he’s capable of killing me or setting fire to the furnit
ure store. And Amalia Reséndiz is an impetuous woman; once she gets an idea in her head, no one can change her mind. She wants to have this soiree so her niece can swagger around reciting poetry. There was a recital in her house three nights ago; her niece destroyed one of Isabel Fraire’s poems, but all eyes were on her. I’m sure she wants to do the same thing again, but this time with a larger audience.”

  Abigael remained silent and the silence lasted so long that I thought he must have been crying. I had the urge to loan him some money to help meet the costs of the poetry soiree, but I stopped myself. My economic situation wouldn’t allow it: The furniture store was going from bad to worse and the despair I heard in Abigael’s voice forced me to admit that his situation wasn’t any different from mine, just that I was used to it. Keeping a business going in this city, with people’s purchasing power at rock bottom, and the protection fees on top of that, was a little less than miraculous. In the face of such general impoverishment my only hope was that the criminals themselves would eventually go away.

  “Have you been to Sanborns de Piedra?” I asked Abigael.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “I’ll buy you breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  He was quiet, and then he said, “Thanks, but not there. I got mugged there once.”

  “In Sanborns de Piedra?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last year.”

  “In the restaurant?”

  “No, in the tobacco section of the store. They took my money at gunpoint, but they were discreet about it, then they left.”

  My jaw practically hit the floor. Why hadn’t Gladis mentioned anything? There was no way she didn’t know. Maybe they’d been instructed to keep their mouths shut so the establishment wouldn’t look bad? It was my second home, Gladis and Tristana had watched me grow up, Papá would take us there for breakfast religiously every Sunday morning, and I realized I had an unshakable conviction that nothing bad could happen in that place.