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  —

  I SPENT THE MORNING in the furniture store, working with Jaime to decide on the monthly sale prices. We hadn’t sold anything in ten days. We discounted each piece of furniture, between ten and twenty percent, depending on the item. It was one of the things I hated most about that business: reducing the price of the merchandise. Even if I wasn’t born to run a business, those moments of price adjustments stressed me out, and I would have gladly left them in the hands of Jaime had I not thought it was something only the owner should do, if he doesn’t want to lose his position of power over his employees.

  We wasted the entire morning affixing tags with a suitable discount for each item, and we had an argument about the Swiss bunk beds. Jaime was of the opinion that twenty percent was appropriate, but I didn’t agree; it was a select piece of furniture and therefore justified a smaller discount.

  “We’ve had them for nearly a year,” he argued.

  He was right, but I didn’t give in, and I told him to hang a ten percent tag on it. I wasn’t blind to his look of disapproval, and for a brief moment I felt like firing him. I never found Jaime very pleasant anyway. Neither did my father. It was impossible to joke around with him. But he was efficient and honest, and he knew the furniture business better than anyone.

  “If they don’t sell this week, we’ll put the twenty percent tag on them,” I said in a conciliatory tone.

  He wouldn’t have said that. He shook his head, an indication of his disapproval, of condemnation.

  “One doesn’t play around with discounts,” he said derisively. “You set the final discount once and for all, no matter what. Successive discounts make you look bad.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew he was right; I grabbed my jacket and hurried off to Sanborns de Piedra. I deserved it, after lowering prices and putting up with Jaime’s sour face. When I arrived, I sat at one of the tables Gladis served and greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.

  “The usual?”

  I asked her about the stew and she made a subtle movement with her index finger to say I’d be better off skipping it.

  “The usual then.”

  “Nene! A whole week and kiddo hasn’t come around!” she scolded and went to the kitchen to turn in my order.

  Luz Aurora, who served in another area, came to greet me with the same reproach: “We haven’t seen you for a week, Nene. A lot of work at the furniture store?”

  “I wish it were that,” I said. “It’s a shitty time right now, no one has any money.”

  She took a five-hundred-peso note out of her pocket and gave it to me. “Thanks, Nene. It took me a while, but here it is.”

  I took the money and asked her about Tristana.

  “She called in sick again. One of these days they’re going to fire that girl.”

  The girl in question, Tristana, another one of the waitresses, was sixty-five years old. Luz Aurora went back to her tables, kissing my cheek as she said goodbye.

  The nickname, Nene, came from my father, who’d been a regular at Sanborns de Piedra, even when Mamá was alive. He’d take us there on Sunday mornings for breakfast and several of these waitresses had watched me grow up.

  I wasn’t the only regular. There was El Conde, the Count, who greeted my father from afar when they happened to see each other in the restaurant, though they never spoke a word to each other. I’d inherited that custom and I greeted him the same way. He was a small, nervous man, married to an elegant woman, also small, who seemed unhappy and sometimes came out for breakfast with him, though neither of them spoke to each other during the entire meal. The peculiar thing about El Conde was that, despite his advanced age and short stature, he rode a Harley-Davidson. He’d leave his helmet and gloves on the table, in view of everyone, and I suppose he went to Sanborns so everyone would know that he owned a powerful motorcycle. One day he asked me, through Gladis, to loan him two thousand pesos. He was sitting on the far side of the café, Gladis informed me of his request, and I got up and went to the ATM, which was at the restaurant’s exit. I withdrew the two thousand pesos and gave them to Gladis, who then walked over and gave them to El Conde. He made a gesture of gratitude from his table, to which I responded with another gesture. A week later, once again through Gladis, he paid his debt, including a box of chocolates with the money. We nodded from our tables and when El Conde left the establishment, I called Gladis over and gave her the chocolates, a gift for her grandchildren.

  Because the Valverde Furniture Store had been in the city for more than twenty years, many assumed we were rich. Maybe we had been at some point, without realizing, but that ended with the huge influx of ready-to-assemble furniture that was sold in the discount stores, which dealt a heavy blow to the traditional furniture stores like ours.

  My sister was right. It was no longer a worthwhile business. Jaime was the problem. Paying off his pension was going to cost us a fortune. We’d have to wait for a good run before we could sell the store, that was my policy, though I was the first to recognize that it wasn’t a policy but a way to postpone a traumatic decision.

  Gladis arrived with my Swiss enchiladas and asked about my father.

  “Still going,” I told her. “I had a ramp installed where the stairs connect the living room with the rest of the house so he can use his wheelchair to go from his room to the porch and get a little sun.”

  I took out my cell phone and showed her a series of pictures I’d taken of the ramp, but I forgot that there was one of my father in his wheelchair among them. When Gladis saw him the color drained from her face. She hadn’t seen him in more than a year. Her expression showed me the magnitude of my father’s decline, and though she didn’t tell me that he was unrecognizable, that was the word on the tip of her tongue. I felt awful showing her my father’s physical ruin. It was unfair to him and, because I caught her off guard, to her too.

  “He’s so thin!” she said, returning my cell phone, and for the first time our repertoire of jokes wasn’t enough to maneuver us around that low point.

  “It’s no way to live,” was all I could think to say to her, and she rushed to wait on a customer who was calling her from another table.

  * * *

  —

  THE RESÉNDIZES were my most well-to-do hosts. They had a two-story house with a spacious yard, two maids, and an elegant car, which was strange because the home reading program had been created for the elderly or infirm with limited resources. They were the only ones who clapped when I finished reading. They praised my voice like no one else and Doña Reséndiz asked me once if I sang. Only in the shower, I answered. You have the voice of a tenor, she said, and Señor Reséndiz, who agreed with everything his wife said, nodded his head. They didn’t make any comments about the book we’d read. We’d started off reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but in the third session they asked if we could change to something less depressing. I suggested Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At the end of the reading they gave me a round of applause, and when I asked if they liked the new book, they answered in unison, “It’s interesting.” I realized that they hadn’t liked it and the following week I read them a short story by Agatha Christie. After their applause I asked what they’d thought.

  “It’s an entertaining novel,” Amalia Reséndiz said. “Is it very long?”

  “It isn’t a novel, it’s a story, and we finished it,” I answered.

  “I like it very much,” she said. “What about you, dear?”

  “Me, too,” her husband answered.

  Unlike Margó Benítez and the Jiménez brothers, who criticized me for not paying attention to what I read, the Reséndizes only seemed to notice my voice which, if I didn’t want to disappoint them, forced me to put a lot of effort into my pronunciation. I was more exhausted from these readings than when I left the Vigils’ house. My fear of letting the Reséndizes down and their concentrated atte
ntion on the sound of my voice put me in a situation much like that of a stage actor. I hated the bond that had formed between me and the old married duo, but their applause and the sincere admiration I read in their eyes when I closed the book gave me something like the elation an actor or singer must feel when he is given a standing ovation.

  One afternoon they asked if they could invite a couple of friends to my next reading. They said it like that, “your next reading,” as if it were a performance. I consented, and when I arrived at their house I saw that the couple of friends was not one couple but in fact three and that they were dressed rather formally. By chance, I was too because I’d come from a wake and hadn’t had time to go home to change my clothes. When Doña Amalia opened the door and saw me in a suit, she hugged me enthusiastically, believing I’d dressed up for the occasion deliberately. It didn’t matter that I’d told her I’d come from a wake.

  “No, no, you look amazing!” she said, now using tú instead of addressing me formally, and she introduced me to her friends with these words: “Our artist has arrived.”

  In a way, that was the word that determined the course of subsequent events. Had I known, I would have left their house at that exact moment, giving as a pretext some physical malaise, and on my next visit I would have asked them to never invite anyone again.

  Amalia Reséndiz’s guests shook my hand with a degree of deference, and what was supposed to be a friendly and intimate gathering turned into a small theatrical production. Amalia had found another Agatha Christie story, which I doubt very much she had taken the time to read. When I read it out loud I concentrated on the inflection of the words, hardly understanding the story at all, and after the reading, which was well-applauded, the owners of the house insisted that I join them for a light refreshment of wine and sandwiches.

  The special evening, the soiree as Amalia Reséndiz liked to call it, was repeated the following week. Doña and Señor Reséndiz took for granted that I’d love to repeat the experience and Amalia Reséndiz called me the night before to tell me three other couples were joining them and, in passing, she congratulated me on my cashmere suit, in which I “looked splendid.” The next day, when I was leaving the house in the same suit, Celeste asked where I was going dressed so elegantly and I said to a wake. I made the mistake of wearing the same tie, something that my host didn’t overlook, and after hugging me said in a flirtatious voice while she straightened the knot, “Hmmm, I’ve seen this beautiful tie before,” and, turning to her guests, exclaimed, “Our artist has arrived!”

  There were a dozen guests and the old married duo had a hard time finding seats for everyone. Being by far the youngest person at the event, I had to help Señor Reséndiz bring an armchair down from a second-floor bedroom. In the end I had to carry it myself because the old man gave up halfway down the staircase.

  “Our athlete has arrived!” Amalia Reséndiz exclaimed when she saw me entering the room carrying the armchair, and I loathed her.

  I hadn’t brought another story by Agatha Christie. At first I thought I’d bring a few humorous texts by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, another one of my father’s favorite authors, but when I started to practice them, I realized that if you’re going to read something funny you need to be immersed in it completely in order to provide the correct situational tone. So, because of my inability to understand what I was reading, I threw that idea out. After a lot of thought I decided on a few poems by Isabel Fraire. I’d never read any poems in that house and Isabel Fraire’s weren’t exactly the “Nocturne for Rosario” type, but I told myself that these people wanted to hear my beautiful voice, not understand what they heard, and it was a wise decision, because the reading was a resounding success. I read with feeling; Margó Benítez, who’d been surprised by how my reading style had changed when I read poems, was right. I felt strangely free to immerse myself in the whimsical typography of Isabel Fraire’s lines, which seemed to be broken, mimicking the irregular breath of a pedestrian in one of our cities. The feeling of disorientation I felt even before I read them seemed familiar because of the way they were scattered across the page. I felt like this was my life since the accident, or the misfortune, as Celeste called it: something whole made up of fragments that were waiting for an opportunity to come together again.

  “You made me cry,” Amalia Reséndiz whispered in my ear when I finished reading, and added, “I’m going to give you a pair of neckties that will enhance your face.”

  * * *

  —

  WE FINALLY SOLD the Swiss bunk beds on Monday. I was in the furniture store when the young couple came in. Because I’m quite a bit younger than Jaime, they thought he was the owner and I the employee; the same thing had happened before. They were straightforward with me and I had no problem closing the deal. I was happy with the sale and that I’d showed Jaime that we could sell the bunk beds at only a ten percent discount.

  Güero came to the furniture store that afternoon, when I wasn’t there, and left word with Jaime that he needed to talk to me. Jaime called to let me know and told me that Güero would be waiting for me at Sanborns de Piedra at five o’clock, near the bar.

  I arrived on time. At that hour the bar’s deserted so I sat at the most secluded table and ordered a beer. I really wanted a gin and tonic but a strong drink encourages certain intimacy, and if there was something I didn’t want it was to cozy up to Güero. Besides, I was going to foot the bill. He arrived ten minutes later, when I’d almost finished my beer. I realized that I hadn’t seen him for some time, because he’d aged; I didn’t tell him this of course, because that’s something friends say to each other.

  “Been a long time!” he said almost without looking at me.

  The waiter approached to take his order, but I beat him to it: “The same for the señor.” I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t there to buy him drinks but to talk business and then leave.

  “You could have at least let me pick the beer. I don’t like Indio,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “A León, if they have it.”

  The waiter came with the Indio.

  “Bring the señor a León and I’ll keep the Indio,” and I swallowed the last of my other beer so the man could take the bottle with him. Then, facing Güero, who was looking around the room, which is what he always did, I asked what this meeting was about.

  “I’ll wait for my beer, give me a break, man.”

  “I don’t have time; I have to be somewhere else in an hour.”

  It was true. I had a reading in Colonel Atarriaga’s house and I had my briefcase with me.

  “They told me about your misfortune,” Güero said, using Celeste’s expression. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “An unfortunate accident.”

  The waiter came with the León, asked if we needed anything else, and I said no. Güero took a long drink from his beer, wiped his lips with a napkin, and told me that he was in trouble. Someone had robbed him, taken the envelope with our money inside. At first he thought he’d dropped it in a taxi, but later he realized he’d been robbed at the seafood restaurant where he met with some childhood buddies, and he could swear that one of them had taken it.

  Here, had we been friends, I would have said, “Those are some great buddies you’ve got!” But we weren’t, and I held my tongue. Then he told me that he had to turn in the invoice the next day, and I was struck by the word “invoice,” a tidy cloak concealing his criminal behavior.

  “And?” I asked him, looking him in the eyes for the first time. Until then, each of us focusing on our beers, we’d avoided looking at each other.

  “I need you to loan me that money, or else…” and he pulled his index finger across his neck, a gesture with a clear meaning.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “You don’t get it, the one whose neck is on the line is me. They
know Jaime gave me the envelope because David was outside the store.”

  “David’s the tall one?”

  “Yes. Forget his name, I shouldn’t have told you and it’s not going to help you any by knowing his name.” He drained what was left of his beer in one gulp and I realized that he was terrified.

  “Want another one?” I asked.

  He said he did. I waved to the waiter, who rushed over, and I ordered another León. Güero thanked me.

  “Even if I wanted to, I don’t have that kind of money,” I told him.

  “Do everything you can to get it. I’ll pay you back, little by little. I promise.”

  The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. The extortioner asking for a loan from the one he was shaking down, and I wondered if he’d noticed the same thing.

  “Why me, exactly?” I asked.