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  “Because you’re the only decent person I can ask for help.”

  “You’re the one who decided to surround himself with a bunch of brutes.”

  The waiter brought his beer and took away our empty bottles. Güero looked at me with determination.

  “Eduardo,” he said, “I won’t call myself a saint because I’ve never been one. Your father knew that when I asked him for work, and still he hired me. He saved my life. I only want to tell you that it upsets me to be taking money from you. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that, and Guiomar still hasn’t forgiven me. If she worships anyone, it’s your father. But if I wasn’t around, things would be a lot worse for you.”

  “I know that tune.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know any other,” he replied. “When I heard they’d set their sights on the furniture store, I stepped forward. I was the one who told them, ‘Let’s go for the Valverdes.’ Do you think you would’ve been spared? Now, instead of dealing with me, you’d be dealing with David, and you don’t know these people, you don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  “So, I should thank you,” I blurted out.

  Had this been a Hollywood movie, I would have stood up at this point and, after throwing a bill on the table, walked out. But instead of Hollywood we were in the City of Eternal Spring, and the thug in front of me wasn’t Robert De Niro but Güero, the first employee to work for us in the furniture store, and he was scared to death.

  I nodded for the waiter to bring me the bill. I had to be at the Colonel’s house in half an hour. While I waited, I did some quick calculations. Only a small portion of Papá’s savings was available, and it was just half the amount Güero needed. The rest was locked in and wouldn’t be available for another three days. I only had a quarter of the total amount he needed. The other quarter was still missing. Asking Ofelia for it was out of the question, because then I’d have to tell her that Güero, Guiomar’s husband, was blackmailing us. I thought of the old Reséndiz couple, but if Father Clark found out that I’d asked them to loan me money, he’d kick me out of the program and I’d end up cleaning toilets in the public hospital or in some prison.

  “So how about it?” Güero asked me.

  “I can’t give you an answer right now. Call Jaime tomorrow morning, early, and he’ll let you know.”

  He stood up, not sure whether to shake my hand or not. He decided not to, and said suddenly, as if he’d rehearsed the phrase in front of a mirror, “If Guiomar hasn’t gone to see your father, it’s because she’s dying of embarrassment.”

  I paid the bill the waiter brought over and waited a few minutes to give Güero time to walk away. I left the bar and headed toward the cash register. I looked for Gladis. When she saw me, she started walking in my direction. I indicated that I was in a hurry, blowing her a kiss as I reached the exit. I stopped there. What if I asked her for the money? I knew she wouldn’t hesitate to give it to me, but I imagined coming to Sanborns carrying that debt, no longer free to order a moderately expensive dish or overpriced beer. It wasn’t just that. She’d seen me loan money to El Conde and Luz Aurora; she knew that if she needed it, she could depend on me and that made me look really good. I was Nene, and if I asked her for money, I’d become an adult, like El Conde. I’d rather confront David. Because it was clear that if Güero didn’t turn the famous invoice over to his bosses, they’d get rid of him without a second thought and from then on I’d have to deal directly with the tall one.

  It was getting dark by the time I got to the Colonel’s house. The weather was starting to change and he’d put on a sweater and a pair of lined house slippers. True to form, he didn’t offer me anything. We sat in our respective places and I pulled The Tartar Steppe out of my briefcase, cleared my throat, and began to read. Every so often I’d look up to see if he’d closed his eyes. He took longer than usual to do so. Maybe he sensed something. When he fell asleep, I didn’t trust myself and kept reading for a while longer. Only when I heard his gentle snoring did I close the book; I got up and walked to the secretaire. My heart was pounding. I opened the first drawer on the left where there were a few pens and an eraser; I opened the one below, which was empty; in the third, which was in the middle and the largest of the three, there was a bundle of black-and-white photographs held together by an elastic band. When I turned it over I saw the wad of bills. My fingers were trembling, and I looked at the Colonel, who continued snoring, and I kept looking at him as I removed the money. I wasn’t sure if I should count it right there or go back to the armchair; I decided to return to the armchair, lifted the briefcase from the floor and opened it on my knees, removed the elastic band to separate the cash from the pictures, and counted the money. It was a little more than what I needed so I took just enough, which I put in one of the compartments; I gathered the rest of the cash with the pictures, closed the briefcase, and went back to the secretaire to put the bundle in the drawer. When I sat back down, it took forever for my heart to recover its normal rhythm.

  That night, when I opened the briefcase in my room to take out the money, I saw a picture of the Colonel among the cash, which must have been separated from the others, and such carelessness on my part put me in a rotten mood. The Colonel was dressed like a civilian, hugging a much younger woman, there was some kind of establishment in the background that could have been a hotel or spa. Judging by the Colonel’s appearance, the picture must have been taken ten years ago. I put it in one of the briefcase compartments thinking that I’d return it when I went back to his house to replace the money.

  The next day, first thing, I went to the bank and withdrew the money that wasn’t tied up in Papá’s fixed-term account, then I went to Rosario’s cubicle to say hello and asked if I could take a picture of her with my phone because my father would love to have a picture of her. She told me that, for security reasons, no one was allowed to take pictures inside the bank, but we could take one outside, and she asked me to wait for a few minutes because she needed to make a call. There was a wooden bench outside the bank, and I waited for her there. After twenty minutes I got up, thinking she’d forgotten about the picture, but I didn’t have the nerve to go in and remind her. She was the branch director and maybe something important had happened. I sat back down. Another twenty minutes passed. After an hour I got up and left. Certainly, something unexpected had come up, but the thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Work came first, but was it such a big deal to step outside for one minute?

  My cell phone rang. It was Jaime. He told me Güero was going to swing by the furniture store in half an hour “to see if I’d come up with what we agreed on.” Since I didn’t want to see him, I took a taxi to get to the furniture store as quickly as possible and leave the money with Jaime. When I arrived, instead of putting the cash in an envelope like I did with the money for the protection fee, I wound the bills into a crude roll and bound it with a rubber band, to make it clear to Güero (and to Jaime, and to myself) that one thing had nothing to do with the other.

  “Something special,” I said to Jaime, giving him the roll of cash.

  “And the other isn’t?” he replied sarcastically, and I was a hairbreadth from telling him to go to hell, but luckily I contained myself, because if I fired him, I knew the store would fall apart.

  I walked out and stopped the first taxi I saw.

  “Sanborns de Piedra,” I ordered the driver, and I repeated it to myself, like a prayer: Sanborns de Piedra, Sanborns de Piedra. It was the only place in that city where I felt comfortable. When I arrived, I looked for Gladis. Then I remembered it was Tuesday morning, the shift she had off. I sat where I always do and an extremely tall young woman who’d been working there a few months came to wait on me. Gladis knew how I liked my rolls: hot, with a little butter and without flattening them out on the griddle. I gave the same instructions to the tall lady and pulled the Isabel Fraire book out of my backpack.

  I hadn’t sle
pt well, thinking about Colonel Atarriaga, who could realize at any moment that the money had gone missing from his secretaire. This whole time I had another prayer in my mouth, that he wouldn’t have to open that little piece of furniture until the next day when I could return the money I’d taken. I bet on my luck: if the tall lady brought me flat rolls, the Colonel was going to discover he’d been robbed; if she brought fluffy ones, I was safe. The tall lady came out of the kitchen carrying the tray on her shoulder and approached my table, walking with what I imagined was a North African cadence. I’ve always liked tall women. They’re more sensitive and loyal than shorter women, and if they’re ugly, they aren’t completely ugly because their height helps dilute their shortcomings. The opposite is also true, and it’s rare to see a really beautiful tall woman, but I think moderate beauty is better than the irresistible kind, if the latter comes accompanied with malice.

  Mireya, that’s what was written on the tall lady’s name tag, opened the tray stand, set the tray down, lifted off the heat cover, and set the plate in front of me. I looked at the rolls, I looked at her, and I didn’t move.

  “Señorita, I told you I didn’t want the rolls flattened out.”

  “You said a little butter, señor.”

  “And without flattening them on the griddle. It was the first thing I told you.”

  “Do you want me to take them back?”

  “Please.”

  She took the rolls, leaving me engulfed in a foreboding fog. If Ofelia hadn’t been so stubborn, I thought. If she’d had a little common sense, she’d have understood that our deal with Güero was the modus vivendi of a large part of the city’s businesses. I’d have asked her for the money, instead of stealing it from Colonel Atarriaga, and I wouldn’t be steps away from ending up in jail. I corrected myself: It wasn’t stealing, because I was going to return his five thousand pesos the next day, immediately after withdrawing the money from the bank. How I was going to do that, I still didn’t know.

  Mireya came back with fresh, fluffy rolls. They weren’t flat, I thanked her and watched her walk away. I’d lost my appetite and I no longer felt like reading Isabel Fraire’s poems. It was a cool, sunny morning, one of those befitting that odious nickname, City of Eternal Spring. I was lost in thought while my rolls and coffee got cold, and Mireya noticed.

  “Something wrong with the rolls, señor?”

  “No, they’re fine. I lost my appetite.”

  “Sometimes that happens,” she said and walked away with a camel-like gait. Then these lines of poetry I’d read a while back came to mind: “There are avenues so wide / that crossing them is another avenue.” I couldn’t remember if I’d read them in one of Papá’s notebooks where he’d copied them out by hand or somewhere else. Maybe they weren’t even part of a poem but a phrase I’d read or heard in some advertisement.

  If we had lived in a better world, I would have asked Mireya, “Hey, Mireya, I just remembered these lines from a poem: ‘There are avenues so wide / that crossing them is another avenue.’ Do you know who wrote them?”

  “Of course: that’s Iván Buruskov, the Ukrainian poet, from his book The Deadly Dahlias, published in 1964; José Emilio Pacheco’s Spanish translation is excellent. How are those rolls?”

  “Everything’s great, thanks Mireya.”

  But this was not a better world, it was the City of Eternal Spring, a city that had no soul, only swimming pools, as my father used to say. I took a sip of coffee, opened the packet of jam so I could spread it on the rolls, and when I looked up I saw Father Clark come in accompanied by a woman. They looked around for a table. So they wouldn’t see me, I crouched down to pick something nonexistent off the floor, spent twenty seconds looking at my shoes, straightened up again, and just then, the priest saw me. He waved, led the woman to a table, and then came over to mine.

  “I am glad to see you, Eduardo, I was hoping to have a word with you,” he told me, using tú with me for the first time and extending his hand. I stood up to shake his hand and he sat down without asking permission, pointing at my chair for me to sit, as if it were his table and not mine, and he told me that the Jiménez brothers would be expecting me the following morning at eleven to finish my reading, as we’d agreed. I told him I was surprised that they’d have scheduled me at that hour, because we always saw each other in the afternoon.

  “They has the higher hands,” he said.

  “Have the upper hand,” I corrected.

  “Are you going to take someone as a witness?” He ignored my correction.

  I told him I was thinking of taking Celeste, my father’s caretaker.

  “That seems reasonable to me.”

  He continued to look at me as if he’d just discovered the resemblance between me and Ofelia. Mireya came over with a menu; he told her he was sitting at another table and asked if they had machaca con huevos, to which Mireya replied yes.

  “I am glad,” he said. “The other Sanborns hardly ever has it,” but he didn’t specify which Sanborns, only said the “other,” though I knew it was the one on Plan de Ayala, because Ofelia had eaten there with him.

  Mireya poured me more coffee and I said, “This is the best Sanborns in the city. They make the best rolls,” and I added, glancing at Mireya, “In the other ones they flatten them on the griddle, and they remove the crunchy bits.”

  She walked away with her pot of coffee.

  “I do not like rolls,” Father Clark said.

  I looked at his eyes. They were the most impenetrable eyes I’d ever seen, and I thought they could hide as much from a saint as from a murderer. He looked at me as if he were still assessing how I resembled my sister, which made me think that maybe he was in love with her, too.

  To pull him out of that trance, I said, “Ofelia really admires you.”

  “We are good friends.”

  “I know, and you’re also her confessor.”

  “Yes.”

  Since I didn’t say anything, he asked me, “Do you think one cannot be friend and confessor at the same time?”

  I thought, because of a certain tremble in his voice, that yes, he was in love with her.

  “No,” I answered.

  “If we accept that a confessor is as weak as those who confess to him, friendship is perfectly possible, no?”

  It sounded like a prepared response.

  “Say it like that and it certainly sounds very lovely,” I said, “but in practice, the one who listens to the sins of others acquires an unquestionable authority over them.”

  “Do you think I am in a position of authority over your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  I was about to ask if he was in love with Ofelia. He’d have said no, and he’d have thought I was stupid for asking. But he must have read that question in my eyes, because he lost his poise and looked over my shoulder, probably looking for the woman he’d come in with.

  “It is a matter of debate, but they are waiting for me,” he said, standing up and making the chair wobble, almost tipping it over. Apparently, he had problems getting up.

  “Ah, I forgot,” he exclaimed. “Colonel Atarriaga called me earlier today. Do not get up.” I had stood up abruptly when I heard the Colonel’s name. “He told me that you forgot your umbrella at his house last night.”

  I’d forgotten it on purpose, to have an excuse to return the following day.

  “Good, I thought I’d lost it,” I said uncertainly.

  “He said to tell you to pick it up anytime you want.”

  I thanked him, we shook hands, and while I watched him walk away, I felt my pulse pounding in my temples. The Colonel, apparently, had not yet noticed that he was missing five thousand pesos.

  The news brought back my appetite and I sat down to eat my rolls. When I finished, I asked for the check. While I waited my turn to pay at the cash register, I looked in the direction where F
ather Clark was seated. The woman with him was blond, good-looking, older, about Ofelia’s age. He was gesticulating, and the woman was looking at him, visibly impressed. I thought that, like her and Ofelia, there must be other women who invited him out for breakfast, and that he charmed them all with his flashy manners. Perhaps in some cases the breakfast or lunch was a preamble to something else. I never would have condemned him for that. It was likely that he, with his bearlike vigor, could provide these women more pleasure and affection than their conventional husbands. Suddenly I had the feeling that we were alike and that deep down he abhorred his celestial eyes, which had opened so many doors for him, of course, but none of the ones he wished had opened. Perhaps he’d scrutinized me a few minutes earlier because he saw in me someone who’d drifted off course, and that reminded him of the deeper meaning of his vocation, which he’d lost in the slightly frivolous circle in which he now moved, surrounded by ladies who held him in such high esteem.

  I decided to walk home, and after a few blocks I stopped, opened my backpack, took out Isabel Fraire’s book, and reread the words she’d written in her inscription: “In this city of ours.” Was it possible Isabel Fraire had felt like the City of Eternal Spring was hers? I wasn’t far from El Caracol bookstore, so I decided to go there. I was sweating when I arrived because the last stretch of street was on an incline. There was only one customer, flipping through a book at the back of the store. The owner, as usual, was flitting from one side of the store to the other, and when he saw me, he came up to ask what I was looking for. He’d recognized me.

  I took out Fraire’s book and opened it to the first page: “I found this dedication in the book I bought from you the other day.”

  He looked at the dedication, nodded, and told me that he couldn’t exchange the book because it was the only copy he had.

  “I don’t want to exchange it,” I told him, “I was just curious if by chance you know the person she’d inscribed it for.”

  “Abigael Martínez?”

  “Yes.”