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  My words hit their mark, because she was quiet, although she recovered immediately. “Why do you always run away?”

  “I didn’t run away,” I told her, “I went for a glass of water and I ended up playing with Aurelia’s daughter. It’s been years since I’ve played with a child.”

  “Aurelia told me she was crying because you kissed her.”

  “That’s not true, she was crying because her mother shouted at her.”

  “You kissed her?” she asked.

  “Yes, we were under the table and I kissed her.”

  “Her mother didn’t like that.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t like it; both of you were under the table and she couldn’t see you.”

  I could feel the blood in my arms starting to heat up, and I remembered that Aurelia had hummed cheerfully while Griselda and I were under the table.

  “Of course she could, all she had to do was bend over to see us!” I shouted. “What’s she insinuating?”

  Celeste, who’d been in the kitchen, looked into the living room when she heard me shout.

  “Why aren’t you saying anything?” I asked Margó, lowering my voice.

  “I’ve never heard you shout,” she said, as if my shouting had revealed God knows what kind of dark twists and turns in my personality to her. I suspected that she was thinking about my accident, or the misfortune, as Celeste called it, asking herself if things had occurred the way I’d told her, and I regretted opening up to her like that.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked, but she’d already hung up.

  * * *

  —

  FATHER CLARK called me in the morning. I imagined him rocking back in his chair, from which he would stand at some point with an abrupt push that would add a new dent to his office wall. I’m glad I caught you, he told me, and he explained that his organization was going to finance a large part of the expenses for the Isabel Fraire tribute. Part of those expenses included wages for an assistant who would help out with a little bit of everything, such as keeping an eye on the sound system so it worked properly and even making sure no one stole books from the shelves, taking advantage of the general bustle in the bookstore during the event, and he told me that I would be this assistant.

  “Me? What do I have to do with any of this?” I snapped.

  He told me they’d count it as part of my community service, and considering the numerous desertions from my reading program, I should be grateful.

  “Numerous? I only know about two, the Jiménez brothers and Colonel Atarriaga.”

  “Now there are three. Margó Benítez called me last night to tell me she’s canceling, too.”

  I felt like I was going to faint.

  “Margó? How come?” I asked.

  “She says you don’t pay attention to what you’re reading. The same thing Carlos Jiménez told me, by the way.”

  I looked at the wall, the infinite living-room wall, and everything Father Clark said after that sounded like a distant buzz. I heard a sharp noise and I knew he’d stood up from his swivel chair. Shortly after that we hung up. I hadn’t followed one word he’d said. I looked at the wall again. Right then, the phone rang. It was my sister. She called to chew me out for my negligent behavior. Her Bible circle friend, tired of waiting in vain for me to call her back, had bought her futon from another furniture store. I chewed her out for not warning me I’d be Abigael Martínez’s assistant during the poetry soiree in El Caracol.

  “I thought you were okay with that,” she said.

  “Father Clark just called to tell me, and he didn’t ask if I was okay with it.”

  “It’s my understanding that it counts as part of your community service.”

  “My community service is reading in people’s homes, not serving as some lackey for cultural soirees.”

  “You’re not going to be anyone’s lackey, Edu. Father Clark even thought you might say a few words about Isabel Fraire.”

  I’m sure that was what the priest had told me while I was watching the wall.

  “I have nothing to say about Isabel Fraire,” I told her, “and don’t call me Edu.”

  I hated it when she called me Edu. She had a boyfriend named Eduardo like me, and she called him Edu, I think so she could differentiate the two of us, but from time to time she’d use the same moniker with me.

  “You could at least say that she was my papi’s favorite poet. He’d like that.”

  “Who would?”

  “My papi would.”

  It annoyed me that she called him “papi,” and especially that she said “my papi” when she was talking to me, her brother, as if we had two different papis.

  “So, you’re thinking of taking Papá to the soiree?” I asked her.

  “Of course. It’s going to make him really happy. He always said that Isabel Fraire deserved greater recognition than she received during her lifetime, and we’re giving it to her.”

  We’re giving it to her. She talked as if she were on the organizing committee.

  “The soiree’s going to be an embarrassment,” I said. “You didn’t stick around to listen to the people who read in the Reséndizes’ house, but I did.”

  “Amalia Reséndiz told me that the readings were stunning…just that…you were the only one who was a little sloppy.”

  “She told you that? That my reading was sloppy?”

  “A little.”

  “Of course I was sloppy,” I exclaimed. “That idiot Tatis took my book and I had to improvise.”

  “Who’s Tatis?”

  “Amalia Reséndiz’s niece, the gangster’s girlfriend.”

  “What gangster?”

  “The idiot’s, I meant to say.”

  “You’re pretty upset,” she said, and I admitted that I was. She asked me why and I told her that Margó Benítez had just dropped out of the home reading program.

  “Who’s she?”

  “My best listener,” I told her.

  “Why’d she drop out?”

  “Because she doesn’t like how I read. That’s what she told Father Clark, but that’s not the real reason.”

  “So what is?”

  “I did something stupid.”

  “What’d you do?”

  I looked at the wall again. Where to start? I told her bluntly, “I played hide-and-seek with the maid’s daughter.”

  There was a brief silence and then Ofelia exclaimed, “You played hide-and-seek with the maid’s daughter, instead of reading?”

  “No, I went to the kitchen for a glass of water and I hid under the table with the girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I felt like it.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few minutes. Margó was in the living room rehearsing an aria from an opera. She’s the mezzo-soprano who’s going to sing at the poetry soiree honoring Isabel Fraire. I kissed the girl and her mother got upset.”

  “How did you kiss her?”

  “How do you think I kissed a five-year-old girl? On the cheek.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Ofelia acquiesced.

  “Forget about it,” I told her.

  “Father Clark told me that someone else from your group canceled.”

  “Colonel Atarriaga. A nefarious guy, worse than the Jiménez brothers.”

  “Why are all of them canceling your readings?”

  “Now all I need for you to do is psychoanalyze me.”

  “I don’t understand why you hid under a table with a little girl.”

  “Because we were playing, something you don’t do anymore.”

  “You’re going to start attacking me now?”

  “I’m upset. The thing with Margó messed me up.”

  “What do you mean? Why’d it
mess you up?”

  “Because I didn’t deserve it!”

  “It’s okay, you have to calm down.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “I can be there in fifteen minutes, I just need to get dressed.”

  “No, really Ofelia, I’m fine. It took me by surprise, but I’m fine.”

  There was silence.

  “Did you fall in love with that woman, Edu?” she asked.

  “Don’t call me Edu,” I told her.

  She was quiet and I looked at the wall again. Celeste came into the living room to get something from the table and I was struck by the way she moved. Something about her flowed with unprecedented assurance, as if she’d come to terms with that body she’d always kept muted, and I was certain that she’d slept with Colonel Atarriaga.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS IN SANBORNS DE PIEDRA having some rolls for breakfast a little after eleven when Jaime called my cell phone to tell me he’d just been robbed.

  “It was the tall guy who always waits outside when Güero comes by to pick up the money,” he said.

  “David?”

  “I don’t know his name. He took fourteen thousand pesos from the cash register. He had a gun.”

  I asked him if he was okay and he said yes. The guy hadn’t touched him. I left a two-hundred-peso note on the table, enough for three orders of rolls, and I told Gladis that she could give me my change later. Outside I stopped the first taxi I saw. On the way to the furniture store I thought I should have seen this coming. If they were going to cut this guy’s throat, as Güero had warned me, it was really only natural that he’d rob us, because he was going to need money to escape and get as far away as possible.

  It took me ten minutes to get to the furniture store and Jaime was at the door waiting for me. He looked really calm.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, and he said that he was. I went directly to the cash register, opened it and saw that there was only one twenty-peso note and a few coins. I asked if the guy had been alone.

  “No, he was with some other guy I’ve never seen before who kept watch at the door.” He explained that an hour earlier he’d sold the Olympia desk made out of walnut for twelve thousand five hundred pesos, and the customer had paid in cash. That’s why there was so much money in the register.

  “If he’d come an hour earlier, he’d only have taken a thousand pesos,” he said.

  He told me how it all happened, though there wasn’t much to tell. David didn’t even have to pull out his pistol; he only had to show it to Jaime, then order him to open the cash register. Since they were the only ones in the store, everything had happened really fast and without any violence.

  Jaime sat down on one of the tartan sofas. The fact that he sat on an item we wanted to sell showed me how nervous and exhausted he was, and I was afraid his next words would be that he was quitting.

  “Take the rest of the day off,” I told him.

  “What for?”

  “You’ve had a rough morning, go to the movies with your wife.”

  “With my wife? I’m better off here.”

  I sat in front of him on one of the Inoka chairs. For the first time in my life I felt like I was the owner of the furniture store, that I was the boss and Jaime was my employee. Güero was right. Guys like David were capable of anything. We’d been lucky we’d sold the walnut desk an hour before. Maybe those fourteen thousand pesos had saved Jaime’s life or kept them from setting the furniture store on fire. But I didn’t tell Jaime that. I only told him that this guy, David, had crossed a line. He asked me what that meant and I told him that he was shaking people down on the side without giving a cut to his bosses; they’d found out about it and he’d fled with his crony, but not before “reviewing” the businesses under his protection one more time to get as much money as he could.

  “He burned his bridges, you understand? We won’t see his face again, you can be sure of that,” and I added, repeating Güero’s phrase: “They’re gonna fuck him up good.”

  I don’t know if he heard me. He looked into the distance and I imagined that he was thinking about how miserable his life as our employee had been, his job future uncertain, and how he had to put up with criminals. I knew he didn’t have any friends. I could see that from the few conversations we had from time to time, and there was something in his face that rejected friendship, a kind of greedy sneer affixed there resulting from his disregard for anything he found inconvenient. He was a violent pushover, in a manner of speaking, even capable of some act of courage as long as it didn’t interfere with his privacy.

  I remembered that I’d brought Isabel Fraire’s book about twentieth-century North American thinkers with me, the one with her photograph, and I went to pull it out of my briefcase to show her picture to Jaime. I asked him if he’d ever seen that woman in the furniture store; he looked at the picture and asked me who she was.

  “A friend of my father’s.”

  “Does she have something to do with the robbery?” he asked.

  “Of course not. She’s a poet. You don’t remember ever seeing her here?”

  He looked at the picture again and said no. I put the book back in my briefcase, and I thought I should ask Güero about it. Isabel had fallen off the ladder six or seven years ago, during the time Güero worked with my father. If she’d come to the furniture store, he’d have to remember her, because the book photo was from around that time and Isabel’s face wasn’t easy to forget.

  I told Jaime that we weren’t going to report anything to the police, because then it would come out that David had been blackmailing us for more than a year and it was absolutely necessary that my sister not find out about any of this.

  “You should have never made that deal,” he said.

  “Who said I made any deal?” I asked him, wanting to kick his ass.

  * * *

  —

  OFELIA WENT TO THE HOUSE to go over some bills with Celeste and have Papá try on the pants and jacket she wanted him to wear that Friday night to El Caracol. It seemed like an excessively formal outfit for a poetry recital, but I didn’t say anything. Between the two of them, they dressed and undressed him several times; because my father had lost so much weight during the previous year he didn’t have one suit that fit him well, all of them were baggy and made him look like a scarecrow. First, he tried on a light gray combination, then a darker gray one, and, finally, a suit that was almost black. I wondered if that trajectory from light to dark didn’t somehow reflect my sister’s unconscious desire to see him dead.

  I spent the first part of Friday morning in the bookstore, working with Abigael to move stacks of books against the walls in order to clear an area where we could set up the chairs and a podium. I remembered two decent-sized pine bookcases I’d had in storage in the furniture store warehouse for quite a while, because they’d turned out to be defective, and I asked him if he wanted them. He said he did, and when I offered to bring them over so the bookstore would look a little more pleasant for the recital, without those stacks of books piled against the walls that gave the place an unkempt appearance, he accepted enthusiastically and asked how we’d get them to the store.

  “With the delivery truck we have at the furniture store,” I answered, “but you’ll have to drive because my license was taken away.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” he said, and he wanted to know why it had been taken away.

  “It’s a long story.”

  I called Father Clark and explained that we needed a driver who could help us load a few bookcases I was keeping in the furniture store warehouse and transport them in my truck so the bookstore would look a little more inviting for the evening’s event. He asked me if it wasn’t a little late to be doing all that work, and I replied that
there were so many books stacked against the walls that it made the place look sloppy.

  “That seems reasonable to me,” he said. “Let me see if I can enlist Efrén, our driver.”

  Ten minutes later Efrén called me. I arranged to meet him at the furniture store, and I took a taxi to save time. He arrived almost immediately after I did. He was a young and portly man; we went to the warehouse, which is in the basement of the store, and between us we carried the two pine bookcases up the stairs, loaded them into the truck, and tied them down.

  The whole day was like that: go up, get down, load, and move. I discovered how much I missed being engrossed in a purely physical task. When we arrived at the bookstore Abigael was moving the piles of books away from the wall, where we’d placed them an hour earlier. Efrén and I helped him, and the walls were finally empty enough to hold the bookcases. They fascinated Abigael and he asked me what was wrong with them. We looked them over, we didn’t find any abnormalities, and I wondered if I’d brought the wrong ones. Efrén and I understood each other immediately. He grasped the urgency of the situation and offered to help us with whatever we needed. I asked him if he knew how to drill holes and sink wall anchors so we could attach the bookcases to the walls, and he said yes. While he got to work, Abigael and I tested the sound system Father Clark had provided: two microphones and a speaker. The truth is that I was the one who tested it, because Abigael had to attend to a couple of customers. The delivery truck with the rented chairs arrived at midday and I told the guys to stack them in a corner. By that time it was clear that I was the one coordinating operations, because Abigael had to deal with the occasional customer who came into the store and Efrén was grappling with the drill, his use of which, incidentally, appeared to be less than competent. I almost called Filiberto, the carpenter I always use, so he could attach the bookcases to the walls, but we were running short on time so I let Efrén manage as best he could. Because there was a faulty connection in the microphones, I went to a lamp store two blocks away to see if someone could help me out. I knew the owner, he was a friend of Papá’s, and he promised to send his assistant when he returned from a delivery. I went back to the bookstore and Abigael told me that Father Clark had just called and he wanted to speak with me. I called him back. He only wanted to know how everything was going and I listed all the tasks that still remained to be done. He asked if I thought we’d finish in time and I said, “I think so, but with so many things left to do, I’d rather not read tonight.”