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  “Something wrong?” Carlos Jiménez asked.

  “A mistake,” I said, “I brought the wrong book.”

  “Whoa, that’s bad!” the dimwit brother exclaimed.

  Celeste grabbed my arm. The shrill voice of the dimwit, should I say his fake voice, had frightened her. I put my hand on hers to calm her and, addressing the ventriloquist, I said as calmly as possible, “I see the show’s already underway.”

  “What show?”

  It was obvious that he wanted to provoke me, scaring Celeste, and I told myself that I’d made a mistake bringing her along.

  “What show?” the mute brother spit with his mannequin voice, and Celeste flinched again.

  “I’m scared,” she said into my ear and squeezed my hand tightly.

  Then, looking at the dimwit, I noticed that his face was smeared with some whitish cosmetic and he’d outlined his eyebrows with eyeliner to accentuate his dull appearance. They’d carefully made all the necessary preparations, it seemed, knowing I’d come with a woman.

  Carlos Jiménez asked what book I’d brought instead of Capote’s novel, and I told him it was a book of poems. He wanted to know whose, I told him, and he asked if Isabel Fraire was a good poet. I replied that yes, she was, and he ordered me to begin.

  “Well, get started!” the mute shrieked.

  Celeste lowered her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She found something deeply disconcerting about that living cadaver. I opened the Isabel Fraire book and, clearing my throat, began to read: “Your skin, like sheets of sand and sheets of water swirling / your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance / your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home / and lights a silenced lamp—”

  “Wait a minute!” Carlos Jiménez interrupted me. “Aren’t you going to recite it?”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” I said.

  “From memory, I mean.”

  “I don’t have it memorized. What’s the difference?”

  Carlos Jiménez turned to his brother. “Did you hear that, Luis? The young man with the beautiful voice intends to deceive us once again.”

  “He intends to deceive us once again!” his brother shrieked, eliciting another tremor in Celeste.

  “When he reads a novel he has no idea what he’s reading, and when he brings us a poem he doesn’t know it by heart,” Carlos Jiménez said.

  I felt like getting up and smacking him.

  “I’m not going to memorize this poem just to make you happy,” I snapped.

  Carlos Jiménez wore a sardonic smile.

  “Did you hear that, Luis? The young man doesn’t want to make us happy. Has he ever made us happy, Luis, despite his beautiful voice?”

  “Never in a million years!” his brother answered.

  Then something remarkable happened. Celeste, who’d kept her head lowered, began to murmur without looking up: “Your skin, like sheets of sand and sheets of water swirling / your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance / your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home / and lights a silenced lamp.”

  I stared at her, openmouthed.

  “Go on,” Carlos Jiménez told her, seeing that she’d stopped, and Celeste continued.

  “Your skin, that nourishes my eyes / and wears my name like a new dress / your skin a mirror where my skin recognizes me / and my lost hand comes back from my childhood and reaches / this present moment and greets me / your skin, where at last / I am with myself.”

  She moved her head slightly to indicate that the poem had ended, and Carlos Jiménez turned to his brother. “Did you hear that, Luis?” and he applauded enthusiastically, mimicked by his brother.

  “Of course, I heard!” the mute said. “The señora really knows what she’s doing!”

  Celeste bowed slightly to show her gratitude.

  “I wonder if the señora knows another,” Carlos Jiménez said.

  “Yes, yes, recite another!” the moron shouted.

  Celeste looked at me, as if asking for permission, and I nodded. She cleared her throat and began to recite the Isabel Fraire poem that begins “My life is wasted needlessly.” The intensity of her voice was greater, and she delivered the words like my father, with a detachment that accentuated each word. I couldn’t snap out of my astonishment. She’d memorized the poems he recited to her only by listening to them. I realized that she’d been in love with him all these years she’d lived with us. Maybe she still was, and I remembered she’d cried in the kitchen when she heard me reading my father’s favorite poem, the one about skin, out loud. When she finished, the brothers applauded something fierce and the dimwit cried out in delight, this time with his own vocal cords. It was the first time I’d heard him emit one of his own sounds. Celeste, both smiling and afraid, squeezed my hand again.

  Then Carlos Jiménez told his brother, “How clever our friend is, and he set up his little number so well! He brought this señora along and told us, just so he wouldn’t have to read to us, that he brought the wrong book.”

  “Very clever!” the mute exclaimed.

  “We have to acknowledge that he’s not stupid at all, right Luis?”

  “Not at all! There’s nothing stupid about him!”

  “And he accuses us of putting on a show! He set it up so well with this señoraza!”

  “A señoraaaaaza!” the cripple screeched.

  “Do you like the señora, Luis?”

  “I loooove heeeerrrrrr!”

  Celeste blushed beet-red. This time they were going too far. Carlos Jiménez shouted, “Señoraaaaaza!” and the moron repeated, “Señoraaaaaza!”

  “Let’s go, Eduardo!” she said, squeezing my hand.

  Carlos Jiménez looked like he was about to stand up from his armchair: he braced himself on the armrests and began to tremble. His face was pierced by a look of disgust, as if someone had squeezed an entire lemon into his mouth, and then, to my astonishment, Luis, the mute, the moron, the sideshow puppet, put both his hands on the wheels of his chair, turned it in one fulminating motion, and told me, “Quick! Hold his head, he’s having an attack!” and he wheeled himself forward toward the kitchen.

  That sudden metamorphosis stunned me, and he, seeing that I hadn’t moved, shouted, “For fuck’s sake, my brother’s having a seizure, do what I tell you!”

  Carlos Jiménez had collapsed on the floor and shook from head to toe. Celeste, faster than me, knelt down next to him.

  “Stick your hand in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue off!” Luis shouted from the kitchen. “Adela, quick!”

  The servant appeared from the far end of the hallway and went into the kitchen without looking at us. Celeste opened Carlos’s mouth with both hands and at that moment, a white foam gurgled out of it. Carlos Jiménez kept arching at a right angle and I thought he was going to snap in two. I’d knelt beside Celeste and asked her what I needed to do.

  “Don’t do anything,” she told me.

  Luis came out of the kitchen and reached us with three quick pushes on the wheels of his chair. I noticed how robust he was, despite his age. He had a tea towel on his lap, and on the tea towel a syringe. He picked up the syringe and ordered me to raise his brother’s arm. I lifted Carlos Jiménez’s arm and Luis pressed the needle in just below the shoulder. The liquid seeped in and when Luis removed the needle, his brother stopped heaving and relaxed on the rug.

  “You can take your hand out of his mouth,” Luis told Celeste, who did as she was told. Carlos Jiménez, when she removed her hand, looked at her with his mouth open and produced a whimper that sounded like a call for help.

  “He’s trying to tell me something,” Celeste said.

  “I doubt that he’s going to tell you anything,” Luis said. “He’s mute.”

  PART TWO

  I NEVER ASKED Margó Benítez about her accident and I don’t know if she ever forg
ave me for that blunder. I should have, but even though we used tú with each other, I still felt like I was a home reader, who has no business nosing around in the life of his hosts. When I arrived at her house there was a short bald man with a sheaf of papers under his arm; he was saying goodbye. The owner of the house introduced him to me as her voice coach, and I noticed that the papers were actually musical scores. Margó introduced me simply as “the young Eduardo” and Rómulo Esparza regarded me with curiosity, albeit with some aversion, like a man usually looks at a romantic rival.

  “Margó has spoken about you at length,” he said obsequiously and, flagrantly contradicting that phrase, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I was a home reader.

  “How interesting. We are in the presence of an artist, then.”

  “No, not an artist at all, just a reader,” I said, and Margó Benítez smiled, crowning me the victor in this sudden amorous duel that had just played out between me and the bald guy. Rómulo Esparza said goodbye to her and kissed her on the cheek, we gave each other an appropriate handshake, and Aurelia accompanied him to the door.

  “He’s an extraordinary pianist, and he also plays the guitar,” the owner of the house told me, pointing to the armchair for me to sit, and she instructed Aurelia to bring the coffee. About the same time, I noticed the Daphne du Maurier novel on the side table and told her that I’d just finished reading it.

  “Why?” she asked, surprised.

  “I bought it in a used bookstore, and I read it from cover to cover that same night.” And I added, seeing the disappointment on her face, “I wanted to know what the story was about; when I read here, I don’t understand anything.”

  “So there’s no point in reading any more of it since we’ve both already read the book.”

  She called Aurelia and told her to take the book away, which Aurelia did immediately. Her reaction left me speechless, because I thought she’d be happy that I’d read that book, which I told her.

  “Happy? I was really hoping that the book would end up drawing you in,” she said, “and now that’s not possible, because you’ve already read it.”

  “It drew me in,” I replied.

  “Yes, but in your house, not here.”

  “I can’t here, when I read out loud—”

  “I know!” She interrupted me, wincing with annoyance. “It’s my fault,” she added somberly.

  “What’s your fault?”

  “I was getting my hopes up that you were coming out of that bubble you live in, Eduardo, and that you’d start to read differently, like when you read me the poem the other day, but I was wrong. You’d rather read this book on your own, by yourself, and now I have nothing else to offer you.”

  “I read it because it’s one of your favorite books and now it’s also become one of my favorite books,” I protested.

  She shook her head, her eyes fixed on the rug, and said, “We were reading this book together and you just turned your back on me. It was simply a way to take a weight off your shoulders. Now that you’ve read it you’ve been exonerated from learning how to enjoy it with me. I didn’t care that you didn’t understand what you were reading; in the end you’re a home reader and you can’t be obliged to become engrossed by all the books you read.”

  “None of them engross me,” I clarified so she wouldn’t think it only happened with her.

  “I was waiting for the moment,” she continued, “when you were able to leave behind your home reader voice and you really began to experience what you were reading because it’s my favorite book. I haven’t stopped looking at you, waiting for that moment, and I’ve hardly paid any attention to the novel.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention?”

  “Not to one word, just like you. All I’ve done is watch you and listen to you.”

  I blushed intensely and tried to conceal it by raising the coffee cup to my lips without realizing that it was empty, which made her burst out laughing. At that moment Aurelia came in with the coffeepot, and maybe because of the relaxed atmosphere my awkwardness had facilitated, she leaned over more spectacularly than usual to fill our cups, producing an unexpected overflowing of boobs greater than all my expectations. Even Margó, in light of her maid’s phenomenal glandular display, had a kind of retreat, as if ceding her the available space, and I wondered if it was something they’d rehearsed; as if Margó, unable to give me her body, was willing to offer me Aurelia’s as a substitute. Aurelia returned to the kitchen and I raised the cup to my mouth, blowing on it to cool the coffee, a symbolic gesture to assuage the erection her spectacularly abundant bust had given me.

  “You look so handsome in a sports coat,” Margó told me.

  She asked why I was dressed so elegantly and I told her I was going to the Reséndizes’ house, that they liked me to dress a little more formally, because the last few times they’d taken it upon themselves to invite a few friends to my readings.

  “Wow, look at you! What do you read them?”

  “Poetry.”

  “And they understand it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care about anything.”

  She was smiling when she said it, but her words cut into me. I’d bought her favorite novel so I could read it and make up for my lack of emotional commitment in our reading sessions, and she, instead of being grateful, accused me of living in a bubble.

  “Had I known you were going to get upset, I wouldn’t have looked for your book and read it,” I told her.

  “Forgive me,” she said quickly. “I’m not the easiest person to deal with.”

  There was a long silence, during which she continued to look at me. I took refuge behind my cup, and when I took a sip I burned my tongue. She noticed, laughed, and asked if I wanted a glass of water.

  “No.”

  I looked in the direction of the kitchen, where I could hear Aurelia’s voice, and her daughter’s.

  “You’re doing everything you can to avoid looking at me,” she said. “Do you feel sorry for an old paralyzed woman who’s fallen in love with you?”

  She said it in a way that was both gentle and mocking which, far from attenuating the bitterness of her words, accentuated it.

  “You aren’t old,” I exclaimed, and I was about to add, And you’re not paralyzed, either. It would have been stupid to say that, but somehow I realized that she was paralyzed only now that I heard it from her mouth, as if until that moment I would have believed that, simply by wanting to, she could get out of her wheelchair and start to walk.

  In the sweetest voice I’d ever heard her use, she said, “How I’ve longed to tell you that!”

  “That you’re paralyzed?”

  “No, that I love you!”

  I looked in the direction of the kitchen, afraid that Aurelia had heard her.

  “You keep criticizing me,” I told her, lowering my voice, and I noticed that, speaking in such a way, I sounded like I was also in love.

  “Because I love your remorseful expression,” she said, still smiling. “Drink your coffee and go to the Reséndizes’ house; today’s rehearsal with Rómulo took a lot out of me. Give me the paperwork so I can sign it.”

  I took the visitation form out of my briefcase, she signed it, and when I shook her hand, she pulled me toward her and kissed me on the cheek. I felt her soft skin on mine and asked her, “Do you really think I don’t care about anything?”

  She looked at me soberly. “If you only knew how much I love you, Eduardo! Forgive me if I upset you,” and she studied me with her dark eyes. We were about to kiss, hidden from Aurelia’s view by the wall between us.

  “Your skin is like cousin Raquel’s,” I told her.

  “Don’t tell me that. Raquel dies.”

  The thought struck me that such was the price of having skin like hers.

 
; * * *

  —

  I DOUBT THE RESÉNDIZ COUPLE had been eagerly awaiting my arrival. The more or less small gathering the previous time had turned into an ultra-crowded soiree, and there were half a dozen of us reading poems tonight.

  “Eduardo, how nice of you to come,” Amalia Reséndiz exclaimed as she opened the door, and from those words I understood that I was just one more invited guest. Right there, at the door, she made me take off my tie. “Take off this boring outfit, they’re going to mistake you for one of the waiters. You’re an artist.”

  I had to give her my sports coat and she insisted that I untuck my shirt, emphasizing that it was really hot inside.

  “I’ve invited a few other artists tonight, Eduardo. Come, I want to introduce you to my niece.”

  The house was packed with people, so the doors to the yard had been opened in order to gain additional space. There were in fact two waiters, although the guests were dressed informally, beginning with Amalia Reséndiz herself, who wore plaid slacks and a low-cut cotton blouse that gave the unpleasant impression that she was trying to look younger. Jeans and guayaberas were in abundance among the men. Many had gone into the yard because it was a warm evening, and as soon as I walked inside I saw Father Clark, who stood out because of his height, and he was the only guest who wore dark clothes. He was out in the yard accompanied by Ofelia; they each held a glass of wine and they chatted with a woman who had her back to me. Amalia Reséndiz had gone to look for her niece so she could introduce her to me; one of the waiters walked by with a tray of drinks and I stopped him to take a glass of white wine. I could still feel Margó’s soft skin on my face where she’d kissed my cheek. Her reproaches, which in her house had seemed unfair, now, in the midst of that hubbub, accompanied me like a pleasant pronouncement of love, and I withdrew to a corner of the room with my glass of wine to savor them in plenitude, while pretending to observe the people around me.