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  “That’s me.”

  I looked at him, felt stupid, and closed the book.

  “I’m asking because Isabel Fraire is my father’s favorite poet and I thought that by chance he and the person she inscribed it to knew each other.”

  He asked me what my father’s name was. I told him, and I handed him my card from the furniture store. He looked at it and said that he didn’t have the pleasure of knowing my father, though he knew about the furniture store because he walked by it sometimes. I told him I didn’t want to keep the copy the author had inscribed for him and that I’d give it back if he could get me another copy of the same book.

  “It doesn’t matter, you can keep it,” he replied, and I thought he must have been in serious financial trouble if he’d sold a book signed by the author, who also happened to be a friend of his.

  I put the book in my backpack and told him, “In any case, if you get another copy, let me know; you can keep my card.”

  He took the card and asked me where my father had met Isabel Fraire.

  “He hasn’t met her,” I told him, and added: “My father doesn’t know anyone.” He looked at me, as if waiting for me to add something after such a lapidary statement, and then I said, “He’s sick and I run the furniture store now. The worst thing for him is that he can’t read anymore.”

  “Why don’t you read to him?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. I was a reader in seven different homes, and I’d never read even one page to my father.

  “I’m not very good at reading out loud,” I said to justify myself. “I can’t seem to get interested in what I read.”

  “The same thing happened to me. It happened to me with Isabel, in fact.”

  “You read to her?”

  “She came to spend the weekend with us, fell off a ladder, and broke a leg. She was in the hospital for two weeks, unable to move. My wife visited her in the mornings and I went in the afternoons, and since I’m not very talkative, I read her a novel. But I read poorly, I got bored and I bored her, so one afternoon she said we should forget about the novel and I should read recipes from a cookbook one of the nurses had loaned her. I enjoyed them and so did she. And after the recipes we moved on to poems, which are similar.”

  “How are they similar?” I asked him.

  “They’re recipes for life, let’s say, and even though we might not like the dish they describe, we admire how well they describe it. All the pleasure in poetry is in that.”

  I nodded, though not very convinced, and I asked if Isabel Fraire came to the City of Eternal Spring often.

  “She’d show up suddenly,” he answered. “She’d come to see someone, we never asked who it was, and she never told us. Do you want to look at the poetry section?”

  I told him I didn’t have time right then, but that I’d be back on another occasion. We shook hands and I was about to ask what city the words “this city of ours” referred to but I lost my nerve. Who was I to stick my nose into other people’s dedications?

  When I got home, Papá was asleep, as usual. He slept in his room, he slept in front of the TV, and he slept on the porch when Celeste took him out for a little sun after breakfast. The cancer was gnawing away at him, was consuming more and more of his substance every day, but it respected his sleep. Maybe everything had become a dream for him, as a way to protect himself from the disease.

  I went to my room, opened the notebook I use to record the furniture store deposits and expenses, and wrote on the last page: “My father doesn’t know anyone.” It was the second time that phrase had materialized on my lips, and I thought it was a line of poetry, that’s why I wrote it down. I’d never written a poem and I didn’t intend to start now, but I thought that, being a line of poetry, I should write it down. I had no idea what line could follow, one similarly categorical or one that spelled things out. Poetry is so difficult; the world must be full of first lines like mine, which launched a poetic career while at the same time bringing it to a close.

  I asked Celeste where she kept the two or three cookbooks she’d look through, to savor their pictures mostly and sometimes to make a recipe with my help, and Ofelia’s. She went to the credenza in the living room and brought them to me. There was a little book of recipes for Italian pasta dishes and one for Mexican Christmas cuisine. I sat on the porch and carefully read three ravioli recipes: al pesto, alla puttanesca, and with marinara sauce. I didn’t find them at all enjoyable. It wasn’t any better with the Mexican Christmas cuisine, where I got lost in the process of making romeritos a la jaliciense. I closed both books and left them on the folding table, thinking that Abigael Martínez was mistaken. Poems are not like recipes, because recipes only make sense taken as a whole, unlike poems which can be read in fragments, without the obligation of finishing them; one could stop halfway through, fascinated by four or five lines and reread them countless times, forgetting about the poem as a whole. At least that’s how a lot of people read poetry. But with a recipe you have to read the whole thing, because the dish won’t turn out or it won’t be any good if you stop in the middle.

  I called Celeste and told her she should talk to her niece about filling in for her the following day, because I needed her to help me with several errands, among them visiting Señor Ventriloquist. Again she asked me if she had to dress up and I said no.

  That night Papá couldn’t sleep and wanted to get up. I was afraid that the metastasis in his bones had started its difficult demolition work and that this waking in the middle of the night was the prologue to his suffering, which Celeste and I were expecting, dreading, from one day to the next. Fortunately, in this instance, it only seemed to be a nightmare. Celeste made him some jasmine tea and then she went back to bed and I stayed with him. I made another cup of tea for myself, pushed his wheelchair up to the dining-room table, and sat beside him. For a long time neither of us spoke. When I told him I’d bought a book by Isabel Fraire, he nodded his head; I asked if he wanted to see it and he said yes.

  I went to my room and returned with the book, he opened it, looked at the inscription, and said, “It’s dedicated.”

  “Yes.”

  “How kind. Thank her for me. How is she?”

  I took off my glasses and cleaned them with a napkin.

  “Good, she sends her regards. It’s a collection of her poems.”

  He nodded and started to flip through the pages. I was watching him to see if he recognized the poems he’d read so many times before. Suddenly his face lit up and, smiling, he read out loud: “Your skin, like sheets of sand and sheets of water swirling.” He put the book on the table and, without looking, he continued: “Your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance. / Your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home / and lights a silenced lamp. / Your skin, that…that…”

  He searched his memory for the next words. I picked up the book to help him, looked for the line, and said, “Your skin that nourishes…” and he remembered: “Your skin that nourishes my eyes.” But he hesitated again, looked at me impatiently, and I told him the beginning of the next line: “and wears my name…”

  “Ah, yes, ‘and wears my name like a new dress.’ ”

  He looked at me again. His eyes, like those of a castaway on the verge of sinking, looking at the one next to him, waiting for him to help. I told him: “Your skin a mirror…where my skin…”

  “Where my skin,” he repeated, and repeated again, “Where my skin…”

  “Recognizes me,” I finished the line.

  Something inside him pulled away sharply, I saw it in his gaze. He refused to continue remembering and fixed his eyes on his cup of tea. That poem, which he’d squirreled away in his memory for years, had now become unfamiliar. “Take me to bed,” he said brusquely.

  I obeyed and helped him lie down; I went back to the dining room to turn out the lights and then went to my room. Abigael Martínez was righ
t, poems are a whole, like recipes; you can’t read them halfway through or recite a few lines, you have to take them as seriously as the poet who wrote them and who fought all the way to the last line before stopping. The fact that he remembered a few lines of a poem didn’t attenuate my father’s frustration; it would have been better to remember none of them at all. He knew that he’d just lost something that had always been part of him, in its complete and living entirety, and he must have felt like a useless old man.

  * * *

  —

  CELESTE AND I ARRIVED at the bank five minutes before it opened. Rosario hadn’t arrived yet. Mario, the manager in the adjoining cubicle, stood up obsequiously and asked how he could help me. I explained what I needed to do, and I introduced him to Celeste. She, even though I’d told her otherwise, had dressed up as formally as she could, donning a silk shawl from India that Ofelia had given her for Christmas, which made her look like a cross between a Tehuana and a palm reader. We sat down, and Mario had the money order ready in less than ten minutes. I went to the bank teller and when I came back to the cubicle, Celeste was holding Mario’s left hand between both of hers and she was rubbing his wrist.

  “When you wake up and when you go to bed,” she was explaining to him.

  “Where can I find the ointment you mentioned?” Mario asked her.

  “You won’t find it in the pharmacies. I have it sent from my hometown. Señor Eduardo can bring you a bottle when he comes back.”

  Mario glanced at me appreciatively and I smiled back at him, despite myself. Celeste stood up, the two kissed goodbye on the cheek, and we left the bank. On the street, Celeste told me that the young man had a tendinitis problem resulting from his excessive use of the computer mouse. I was annoyed by the way she was drawing on my time without consulting me first, but I didn’t complain to her about it, because now I had the perfect excuse to come back to the bank and take Rosario’s picture for my father.

  I hailed a cab as soon as we got to the Avenida. It was one of the few virtues of the City of Eternal Spring: There were more taxis than flies. If you raised your hand to sneeze, a taxi stopped in front of you. I gave the driver the name of the street where Colonel Atarriaga lived, and during the trip Celeste extolled, for the taxi driver, the benefits of the ointment she’d just prescribed to Mario. I don’t remember how she managed to introduce the topic. I noticed that she became more loquacious on the street. Perhaps the temporary separation from my father infused her with energy. The taxi driver had a problem like Mario’s, not in the wrist but in his neck, and when he asked Celeste where he could procure the ointment, she told him that she has it sent from her hometown.

  “I’m taking a small bottle to Señor Mario this week; he works at the Banorte branch where you, señor, picked us up, and I can leave a small bottle for you there,” she told the taxi driver. He asked her how much it cost and Celeste told him she’d be happy to give it to him, all she needed was his name, so she could tell Señor Mario.

  “Regino García, at your service. You’re most kind, señora.”

  When we arrived, I had to insist on paying the full fare, because the man didn’t want to charge us. Celeste asked me which house was the Colonel’s and I pointed at the ocher-colored construction halfway down the street.

  “Well, let’s go,” the hyperactive character she’d suddenly become said. During the taxi ride I’d decided to tell her the full details of everything that had happened, because it was the only way she could help me put the five thousand pesos back in the Colonel’s secretaire.

  “I did something stupid,” I said, and I told her about the loan I gave Güero, and I made her swear she wouldn’t mention that name in front of my sister, because she knew him from when he was one of our employees in the furniture store. She placed her hand over her heart solemnly, and when I finished telling her everything about the situation, she asked me what she had to do. I let her in on my plan. I’d tell the Colonel that I came for my umbrella. Because I knew how cagey he was, he’d most likely tell us to wait. Then she’d ask permission to use his bathroom and the man wouldn’t have any choice but to invite us in. Once we were inside his house, while she went to the bathroom, I’d manage to distract the Colonel and take him out to the patio with the excuse of asking him about his plants. She’d come out of the bathroom and put the money in the middle drawer of the secretaire, which was located near the entrance.

  I gave her the five thousand pesos, which she put in her bag, and we walked over to ring the Colonel’s bell. As I’d imagined, he didn’t open the door with his pulley system, since he didn’t know we were coming, and he shuffled down the passageway to open the door in person. We heard his steps approaching, and when he opened the door, even before he greeted me, he grabbed my umbrella, which he’d left beside the door, and handed it to me.

  “I left it here knowing you’d come back for it,” he said, and I stood there with the umbrella in my hand, looking stupid. But Celeste reacted expeditiously.

  “I’m Celeste Hermenegildo, the nurse for Señor Eduardo’s father. I wanted to ask you, please, if I might use your bathroom.”

  “Of course, I’ll take you,” the Colonel exclaimed, and, turning to me, added in his military manner: “Stay here and watch the entrance, don’t let anyone in.”

  I stood there stiffly. The Colonel’s order toppled our plan and I gave Celeste a panicked look, but she didn’t flinch.

  “Hold this, Eduardo, I won’t be long,” she said, handing me her bag where she’d just placed the five thousand pesos.

  This is how things transpired. While the Colonel was leading the way, Celeste told him that she noticed that his neck looked somewhat stiff.

  “You have a good eye,” he said.

  “Do you mind?” and she placed her hands on his upper back. They’d stopped in the middle of the passageway. “You have knots in this part, it’s a shame I didn’t bring my ointment with me.”

  “What ointment?”

  They continued walking toward his apartment while Celeste explained that her ointment was excellent for rubbing out knots and back contractures.

  “Do you think I have a contracture?”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  They went into the apartment and closed the door, leaving me on the street with my umbrella and Celeste’s bag, and without any hope of returning his money.

  But I hadn’t counted on Celeste’s presence of mind; she came out of the apartment and called, “Eduardo, please bring me my bag, I need my glasses. Señor Colonel says you should close the door, so no one sneaks in off the street.”

  I obeyed, closed the door, walked down the passageway, and went into the Colonel’s house. Celeste took her glasses out of her bag and gave it back to me. She’d seated the Colonel on one of the chairs at the dining-room table, at an angle from which he could not see the secretaire.

  “Let’s see,” she said to the Colonel, and moved closer to feel his neck.

  “Didn’t you have to go to the bathroom?” the master of the house asked.

  “There’s no rush, this won’t take long.”

  “The one who needs to go is me, if you don’t mind,” I said to the Colonel, who granted me permission with a nod of his head.

  Instead of going into the bathroom I went to the secretaire, removed the money from Celeste’s bag, and opened the middle drawer. There was the bundle of photographs and under it the money bound with an elastic band. I grabbed the five thousand pesos and added them to the small bundle, then I closed the drawer and went into the bathroom, which was off to the side. I peed, flushed twice, and left. Celeste, still massaging the base of the Colonel’s neck, turned to me and said, “I told Señor Colonel you can bring him a little bottle of ointment on Monday.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” I said.

  Including that one, there were now three little bottles I had to deliver: Mario’s, the tax
i driver’s, and the Colonel’s.

  Celeste went to the bathroom, and when she came out, the Colonel, grateful for the massage, wanted to walk us to the door.

  On the street, I waived a taxi down. Celeste’s resourcefulness and poise astounded me. The slightly dull and introverted woman I knew at home had shown herself to be chatty and fearless on the street. Had it not been for her presence of mind, I’d have never returned Colonel Atarriaga’s money. In the taxi I told her, “You saved me, Celeste,” and I watched her without her noticing, trying to see her through my father’s eyes, searching for something attractive. I didn’t find anything, but my eyes were judging her, not my skin. She’d touched him countless times; her hands must have been the only thing he looked forward to when he woke up every day, and I wondered if she was aware of the immense power she held over him. Yes, she was; being outside the house with her showed me how profoundly aware of people she was; she knew Papá depended on her completely, to the degree that she could have killed him, in the event that his suffering got out of hand. With her experience, it would have been easy enough. Leave it to me, Señor Eduardo, I’ll take care of it. It was as if I were listening to her say it, and I felt a sudden aversion to her limitless power.

  I came out of my brooding when she touched my arm. We’d arrived. I paid the taxi driver and noticed that she was anxious. She rearranged her shawl and touched up her hair, as if she were going on a date. I pointed out the house where the Jiménez brothers lived. We knocked and the door was opened by the maid who, as usual, disappeared down the long hallway after we entered. For the first time both brothers were already in the living room, waiting for us, and I introduced them to Celeste.

  “Celeste Hermenegildo, the nurse who takes care of my father.”

  She wasn’t a nurse, but I felt obliged to conserve the status with which she’d presented herself to Colonel Atarriaga. I thought that Father Clark must have let them know that I wouldn’t be alone, because the presence of Celeste didn’t surprise them in the least. Well, the remark only applies to Carlos Jiménez, because the dimwit, as usual, hardly looked at us from his wheelchair. His inexpressive face, illuminated by the sun’s morning glare, seemed like a cadaver’s, and Celeste clung to my side when we sat down on the sofa. Before I opened my briefcase I looked at my watch to make it clear that I came only to make up the twenty minutes that I owed them from my previous reading session. Carlos Jiménez also looked at his. Then, opening my briefcase, I realized that I’d brought the wrong book; instead of Capote’s In Cold Blood, I’d brought my Isabel Fraire book.