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  So, to my regret, we went to the Sanborns Father Clark frequented, where they served flat rolls. We met at eight because Abigael opened the bookstore at ten, and we arrived within a minute of each other. I ordered rolls and coffee and put a lot of emphasis on wanting my rolls fluffy, not flattened out. Abigael went for something safer and ordered the Swiss enchiladas and a glass of the seven-fruit juice. They brought me flat rolls, but I didn’t complain; on the contrary, I was pleased to confirm that they didn’t know how to make them any other way in that place.

  Suddenly, while we were eating, Abigael put his fork on his plate, looked around, and confessed that he’d been mistaken; he’d been mugged in this Sanborns, not in the Piedra one. I didn’t say anything, but it infuriated me that he was so wholly unapologetic about it; I was eating these horrible flat rolls because of his awful memory.

  “All the Sanborns are the same,” he said to justify his confusion, and that’s when I pounced.

  “That’s not true at all! This one is nothing like the Piedra one.”

  “I don’t see any difference,” he snapped.

  We looked at each other, a current of mutual disdain crossed what little space there was between us. I placed my fork on my plate to give my words greater emphasis. “Apart from the rolls, on which, modesty aside, I consider myself an expert, the coffee they serve in the other one is much better than this.”

  “It’s the same coffee!”

  “It’s the same coffee, but they reheat it here, there they don’t.”

  That wasn’t true; they reheated it in both places, but I was determined to show Abigael that not all Sanborns are the same. In what other Sanborns would I find waitresses as intelligent and mischievous as Gladis and Tristana?

  Animosities can sprout out of the most trivial discussions, like the one I was having with Abigael about whether one Sanborns could be better than another. I wondered why I’d invited him out for breakfast to begin with, and I found the answer right away: because of my long-running habit of feeling responsible for the misfortune of others. But now, seeing how he was devouring his Swiss enchiladas, accompanied by a large glass of seven-fruit juice, the most expensive drink on the menu, he didn’t seem so wretched, and my compassion toward him was giving way to antipathy. I told myself I couldn’t be blamed for David charging him a fee so he could be left to work in peace. It was like that for all of us, and his bookstore wasn’t going to be an exception. Regarding the poetry soiree they were making him organize, who could be sure it wasn’t going to help out the bookstore? There was some truth in the fact that the event would give some publicity to his little shop.

  He raised his hand to get the attention of the waitress and ordered a double cappuccino. My rancor intensified as I looked at the generous provision of liquids with which he was regaling himself at my expense: café Americano, a double cappuccino, and a glass of seven-fruit juice. Now all he had to do was order a beer at nine in the morning. He looked at my miserable flat rolls and asked, “Aren’t you going to order anything else?”

  “I’m fine with this.”

  At some point, in the middle of our muddy dispute about the best Sanborns in the city, we had started to use tú with each other. Something he’d told me about Isabel Fraire had continued to bother me and I asked him if he knew who the individual was that Isabel Fraire sometimes came to see.

  “Why’s it matter?”

  “I’m curious.”

  He’d finished his enchiladas and juice; he took a sip of his coffee and cleaned his lips with his napkin. His green eyes offset his ugly mouth, thin and wide like the opening in a piggy bank, and I wondered if he was the mysterious person. However, one doesn’t get rid of a book inscribed to you by the woman who was your lover. He cleared his throat and repeated what he’d already told me: He didn’t know the identity of the man Isabel came to see in our city, but he suspected that his wife knew more about it, because the two had been very close. However, his wife had died without telling him anything about it. That’s how I found out that Abigael Martínez had been widowed two years before, but I nodded with a contrite air to prevent the conversation from being diverted to his late wife, and told him, “Maybe the man Isabel saw was a writer like her.”

  “No, he wasn’t a writer or artist.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a hunch. I think he was one of those perfect family men, an average guy, probably even had gray hair. Isabel had a soft spot for that sort of person.”

  My heart beat faster and I tried to remember when my father started to talk so enthusiastically to us about Isabel Fraire’s poems. It was hard to know. I had the impression that her name had always been spoken in our house. Maybe she and my father had met inadvertently, and I asked Abigael if Isabel Fraire had ever given a reading in our city.

  “No, absolutely not. She always said this city has no soul, only swimming pools.”

  “Wait. Say that again, please,” I cried out, sitting forward in my seat.

  “What?”

  “What you just said, what Isabel Fraire used to say about this city.”

  “She said that it has no soul, only swimming pools. Why?”

  “That’s something my father always says. I’ve heard him say it hundreds of times.”

  He noticed my agitation and he paused midmotion as he raised the cup to his lips. “Well, maybe it’s something people say around here.”

  I shook my head. “If he’d heard someone else say it, he would have said, ‘As the saying goes, this city has no soul, only swimming pools.’ I know him.”

  He took a sip of coffee and sat back, hitting the back of his chair. “You mean to say that Isabel and your father knew each other?”

  “I think so.”

  He leaned forward again and added, “You mean to say that your father is the man Isabel Fraire would meet when she came here?”

  PART THREE

  WHEN SHE OPENED the door, Aurelia was talking on the phone with her employer, she had the cordless phone next to her ear, and she told Margó Benítez that I’d just arrived. She was wearing a copiously low-cut linen dress and it was impossible not to look at her dark breasts that contrasted with the garment’s white fabric. She motioned for me to come into the house and close the door behind me, which I did, and I sat in my usual seat while she continued talking. Yes, señora, of course, we’ll talk tomorrow, she said to the phone, and when I thought she was going to hang up, she exclaimed, Are you okay, sweetheart? and I realized she was talking to her daughter. So, we were alone. She exchanged a few more words with her daughter and then hung up. She then explained that Señorita Margó was in Valle de Bravo, where one of her sisters lived, and she’d taken Griselda, her daughter, with her, and she apologized for not telling me beforehand. I was surprised that Margó, knowing that I’d just arrived, hadn’t wanted to speak to me directly to apologize herself. Aurelia offered me a cup of coffee, because that’s what her employer had just instructed her to do, and I sensed that I could have told her to do anything, as if it were her duty to be at my service in recompense for the absence of the owner of the house. I accepted the coffee; she went to the kitchen and shortly after returned and said, “We’ve run out of coffee. Want some tequila?”

  I said I did and I was surprised that instead of taking a bottle from the liquor cart, she disappeared down the hallway, from which she returned almost immediately carrying a bottle of tequila and wearing her usual wide-mouthed smile. I noticed that it was a cheap brand. She took a tequila glass out of the buffet hutch, filled it, and gave it to me.

  “You aren’t going to join me?” I asked her and, without waiting for her to respond, I told her I could drink coffee by myself but not tequila.

  “Okay, but only a little nip, Señor Eduardo.”

  It was the first time she’d pronounced my name.

  She removed another glass from the hutch and served herself.
She swallowed half the contents in one gulp, and I realized that she was used to drinking. I assumed the tequila was her own and that this gave her the freedom to pour us as much as we wanted.

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “No, I’m fine like this,” she said.

  I drank my tequila in two gulps, and she leaned over to fill my glass again.

  “Very tasty,” I told her. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

  “No.”

  It was clear that she didn’t think it was appropriate to sit and have a drink with me, but seeing her there, on her feet, made me uncomfortable, and I wondered if she might not be a little off in the head, the way she was always smiling. I drank my second glass in two gulps, leaned my head against the back of the armchair, and closed my eyes, pretending I was tired. I don’t know what I wanted to show her by doing so. Maybe I was hoping that, if she saw I was relaxed, she’d feel like sitting down, or maybe I was just really tired, and two tequilas in a row had suddenly loosened me up.

  “Would you like to lie down, Señor Eduardo?” she asked me.

  “Where?” I asked her.

  “In my room, or in Señorita Margó’s. Lie down for a bit and you’ll feel better.”

  “I feel fine, I’m just tired. Did you put something in my tequila?”

  “Of course not,” she answered.

  “I’m only joking,” I said.

  “Stand up, I’ll take you to Señorita Margó’s room.”

  The truth was that I did feel tired.

  “Only ten minutes,” I told her.

  “Yes, have a little nap, then I’ll wake you.”

  I stood up and followed her down the hallway. We entered a spacious, well-lit room where a wheelchair sat beside the window. She told me to take off my shoes and lie down and then she closed the curtains to darken the room. I took off my shoes, I lay down, faceup, and it suddenly occurred to me that all of this was some kind of ruse arranged beforehand, I don’t know if by Aurelia or by Margó herself.

  “I’ll wake you in a little bit,” she told me with her unfailing smile.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “It doesn’t matter, rest for a bit.” She left the room and closed the door.

  I closed my eyes and little by little fell asleep. When I woke it was dark outside and the small lamp on the bedside table illuminated the room with its faint light. Aurelia, apparently, had entered at some point to turn it on so I, when I woke, wouldn’t find myself immersed in absolute darkness. I sat up and looked for my shoes, which were right beside my feet. On the bedside table there was a picture frame with a photograph of Margó. It had been taken before the accident. She was standing, wearing a bathing suit, on the seashore and looking away from the camera. She was taller than I’d imagined and her pose, how she turned to the side, highlighted the thickness of her thighs, which were long and enticing. As I’d suspected, hers was not a body made with a single stroke. She gave the impression of a woman pieced together, who was on the verge of decaying into parts. Her dominant thighs, her profile, the seashore, and her disheveled hair gave her a voluptuously inconclusive aura, almost savage, and it occurred to me that this extraordinary photograph had been placed there so I’d see it when I woke.

  I put on my shoes, and when I stood up, I felt vaguely dizzy. I walked to the door and opened it. The house was quiet and dark. I went back down the hallway to the kitchen. Aurelia wasn’t there, and she wasn’t in the living room. I went back to the hallway, knocked on the first door; there was no answer, so I opened it. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Aurelia was lying on a bed, facedown and naked, and one of her legs, bent at an angle, made her ass bulge. I moved closer and said her name, but she only snored in response. It occurred to me that knowing she was ugly, she’d decided to get drunk so I’d surprise her like this, asleep and naked, trusting that this would be the best way to enflame my desire. In fact, it was, because seeing her in that posture within hand’s reach, snoring softly, turned me on, and I shook her so she’d wake up and we could make love. But she didn’t respond. If this had been her strategy to seduce me, the fool had gone too far.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to come to, and I wondered if perhaps she’d lied to me about the telephone, making me believe that her employer and daughter were in Valle de Bravo so I’d feel emboldened to seduce her. If the phone call had been a ruse, Margó might show up at any moment, and finding me in her house at this hour with Aurelia stripped naked in her bedroom, she might think that I got her drunk so I could take advantage of her, so I left the room without making a sound, searched in the dark living room for my briefcase, and fled like a thief in the night.

  When I got home, I went straight to my room. Celeste and my father had already gone to bed. I undressed, got into bed, and turned out the light. But I wasn’t tired, and while I thought about Margó’s voluptuous thighs, about her body, mysteriously made of parts more assembled than pieced together, and her formidable legs that, because they lacked sensitivity and movement, were now somehow more imposing, I asked myself again whether that photograph had been placed there so I’d fall in love with that body, obviating her present misery with the knowledge of her past splendor.

  * * *

  —

  I WENT TO COLONEL ATARRIAGA‘S house in the afternoon to give him Celeste’s ointment. When I knocked, he pulled the cord to let me in; I traversed the long passageway and pushed open the door to his house, which he’d left ajar. That part surprised me, because he always met me at the door wearing that grim expression of his. He was in the living room, sitting in his armchair, and I noticed he was wearing a different robe and other house slippers, which seemed to be new. His appearance also seemed different: He’d combed his hair and I noticed a scent of lavender.

  “Should I close it?” I asked him.

  He winced and asked where Celeste was. I told him she was at my house and added that I brought him the ointment for his sore muscles. I opened my briefcase, took out the little bottle, and gave it to him, but he didn’t take it.

  “She told me she’d be coming,” he said brusquely. He kept me standing, the little bottle still in my hand, and I couldn’t bring myself to sit down.

  “I don’t remember her saying that, Colonel,” I said as gently as I could.

  “You were in the bathroom, Señor…Señor…! What’s your name?”

  “Eduardo.”

  “You were in the bathroom! She told me she’d come back today to massage my neck.”

  He was outraged, his hands grasping the arms of his chair. I assumed that while I put the money back into the drawer of his secretaire, Celeste, to keep him calm, told him that she’d return next time to give him a massage and, now that the danger had passed, she’d forgotten her promise.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “Easy for you to say!” he exclaimed. “Here I am waiting for her, and you’re sorry. Call her and tell her to get over here, that I’m waiting for her!”

  “I can’t do that; she can’t leave my father alone.”

  “Go take care of your father yourself!”

  It might have been the first time that I really looked at him. It might also have been the first time that he really looked at me.

  “You have no right to tell me what I have to do,” I told him.

  It took a while for my sentence to sink in, or maybe it’s a military technique to not respond at once to a subordinate’s disobedient act, so the latter perceives, through the silence of his superior, the enormity of his action and punishes himself before the other does so. Finally, he said, “You are expiating a crime. I shouldn’t have allowed you into my house. How dare you talk to me like that? Get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m leaving, but you’ll have to sign the visitation form first,” and I opened my briefcase to take out the paperwork. I was
standing in an uncomfortable position, and when I opened it the Rodari book, The Tartar Steppe, and a few invoices from the furniture store fell to the floor, among them the picture of the Colonel in the arms of a younger woman, which I’d forgotten to return to his secretaire.

  The invoices and picture landed at his feet, the latter caught the Colonel’s eye and he placed his house-slippered foot on top of it, leaned over to pick it up, looked at it, looked up, and asked me, “What’s this photograph doing in your briefcase?”

  I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t wait for me to respond; he stood up and went to the secretaire while I knelt down to pick up what had fallen on the floor. I put everything away and closed my briefcase. The Colonel was counting the money that was in the drawer. When he finished, he put the stack of bills in the pocket of his robe, turned around, looked at me, and said in a voice breaking with emotion, “I didn’t have so many five-hundred-peso bills. You got into my money the day Celeste came with you.”

  “I didn’t steal anything from you,” I said, “you just saw that, and I can explain what happened.”

  “I don’t know what you did, but you got into my money. I don’t want to hear any explanation.”

  “I’m not a thief,” I told him.

  “Get out,” he said, opening the door.

  “I’m not a thief,” I repeated.

  “I said get out.”

  I left his house and walked down the long passageway leading to the street, opened the door, and the Colonel pulled hard on the cord, whipping the door closed with a bang behind me.

  At home, when Papá dozed off in front of the TV, I told Celeste what had happened. She remained unperturbed as she listened to me and then said, softly so she wouldn’t wake my father, “I don’t think he’ll call the police.”