Home Reading Service Page 9
Father Clark saw me, said something to Ofelia, and the three turned to look in my direction. We greeted each other from a distance, then Father Clark broke away from the two women and came inside to meet me.
“I am glad to see you, Eduardo,” he said. “I was hoping to have a word with you.” And pulling me aside, he added in a more confidential tone, “It is a good thing that you took matters into your own hands!”
“What matters?”
“This one,” and he waved his arm in front of him, indicating the gathering we were part of.
“I have nothing to do with this, it was Amalia Reséndiz’s idea.”
“She told me you started these poetry soirees.”
Ofelia came over, kissed me on the cheek, and introduced me to the woman who was with her, Deputy Director Ordóñez from the State Cultural Outreach Program.
“Congratulations are in order, Eduardo,” the deputy director said. “Initiatives like this make all the difference.”
I was going to ask her what difference she was referring to, and to what, when a woman who was behind her shouted her name; the deputy director turned around, in turn shouted her friend’s name, and the two kissed each other with tremendous glee.
“I want to introduce you to Father Clark, something of an institution in our city,” the deputy director said to the other woman, and Ofelia and I were momentarily forgotten.
“Let’s move into the yard,” I told her, “it’s really hot in here.”
She followed me, and circumventing the throng, we reached the coolest part of the property, where she asked me if it was true that I’d organized the gathering.
“Of course not, all of this was that crazy Amalia Reséndiz’s idea. Had I known there were going to be so many people, I wouldn’t have come.”
I told her that the Reséndiz couple were the only ones who applauded when I finished each reading, and I was to blame for giving in to them, and now there’s this artsy soiree.
“What’s going on with these dress pants you’re wearing?” she asked.
“Amalia took away my coat and tie at the door.”
“You were wearing a coat and tie?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you,” and she started to laugh, discreetly at first and then harder, until she spilled a little wine from her glass. Two nearby couples looked at us. I forced myself to laugh so they’d think we were laughing at the same joke, and I realized how Amalia Reséndiz had manipulated me, first dressing me like a waiter and now undressing me so I wouldn’t look like a waiter. Ofelia, continuing to laugh, shook her head and said, breathlessly, “My little brother in a coat and tie!”
“You made your point!” I rejoined, sulking.
“Settle down!” she said and the two couples turned to look at us again. Ofelia, annoyed, went into the house, leaving me alone, so I drank what was left in my glass to avoid their glances. I took out my cell phone, pretending I’d just received a message, fumbled with the little device, then put it away again. I missed Margó. The sensation of her soft skin on mine was still vivid, and I imagined that if she’d been beside me, we’d have laughed at that charade. I don’t know what I’d have given to listen to her make fun of this pseudo-avant-garde evening in her surly, bedraggled voice. I kept reliving, over and over, the way she pulled me close so she could kiss my cheek and, mixed in with that amorous gesture, Aurelia’s giant breasts appeared, which she took every opportunity to push in front of my face. Maybe I was falling in love with the older woman, stuck in her wheelchair, thanks to her maid’s breasts, which were intended to compensate for her employer’s disability, and I wondered again if Margó had instructed her to show them to me, subtly or not, any time she could, since Margó’s condition prevented her from showing me her own body. I was suddenly overcome with an exuberance that made me look at the two couples and I bellowed, “Ladies and gentlemen,” raising my empty glass in their direction. Margó loved me, even though I lived in a bubble, and Aurelia was the means to keep me at her side. Both couples raised their glasses, smiled at me, and once again ignored me, most likely thinking I was drunk. And I was, not from the alcohol but from feminine plenitude, from the possibility of being able to love in perfect carnal and spiritual harmony, not just one but two women.
“Here we’ve found the hermit!” a woman’s voice called out behind me. It was Amalia Reséndiz, arm in arm with a beautiful young woman. She introduced me to Tatiana, her niece, who was holding my Isabel Fraire book in her hand.
“I took the liberty of opening your briefcase to take out your book, Eduardo, because I’d like to ask you a favor,” the lady of the house said.
The favor consisted of me showing Tatiana a poem in the book so she could read it that evening. A love poem, preferably. I chose the one about skin because I’d memorized the page number.
“It’s an extraordinary poem, Tatis, you’ll be great,” Amalia Reséndiz exclaimed. Tatis read it right there and, when she finished reading it, said that it was marvelous. “She’s a poet who hasn’t received the recognition she deserves,” her aunt explained, repeating the exact words she’d heard me use on another occasion. Tatis asked where I’d bought the book. I told her, “In El Caracol,” and I gave her the business card Abigael Martínez had given me, which I’d been using as a bookmark. I warned her that it was the last copy he had.
“Maybe they have another book of hers, other than this one,” she said, and I thought maybe she wasn’t as dumb as she looked. She took the card and asked if she could borrow my book for twenty minutes so she could memorize the poem. I told her she didn’t have to memorize it, that she could just read it.
“No, poetry shouldn’t be read, it must be felt,” she declared with aplomb, and I thought she was as dumb as she looked.
She and her aunt went into the house, taking my book with them. I went into the house to look for Ofelia because I wanted to make amends, but I couldn’t find her. Father Clark had also left.
Then Amalia Reséndiz beckoned everyone to be silent and asked those of us who were going to read to approach her. There were six of us, four men and two women, who closed ranks around our host. Tatis was missing; she was upstairs memorizing the skin poem.
The reading began, but it wasn’t really that at all, because no one had anything in their hands, a definite sign that they were going to recite their poems from memory. I should’ve known, because for some people poetry and declamation are one and the same. What was I doing there?
A short, friendly-looking bald gentleman began, reciting from Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: “I can write the saddest lines tonight,” et cetera. With a somewhat nasally voice, he dutifully disaggregated the poem and received a warm round of applause. In his wake was Señora Lucy, “who is going to delight us with three sonnets by the great poet Amado Nervo,” Amalia Reséndiz announced, and while Señora Lucy delighted us I didn’t take my eyes off the stairs, waiting for Tatis to come down with my book. I was the last one in line to read, so I was counting on having a little time before it was my turn, but I was already sweating nervously. Señora Lucy received a warm round of applause. Then it was the turn of the señor who looked like a notary, whose name Amalia Reséndiz called out but I’ve now forgotten, and he delighted us with “Nocturne for Rosario” by Manuel Acuña, and I remembered how my father made fun of that poem when I was nearly a teenager. I was still drawn to his unrestrained tackiness, especially the line that says “Slice of my life.” It seemed like a trap Acuña had set for those reciting his poem, a kind of puddle in the path that would trip them up, one from which the notary was also unable to emerge unsoiled; until that moment he handled it with a firm voice and a tone of heightened dignity but, arriving at this point, he lost his bearings, took a deep breath, and blurted out, as if in an act of protest, “Slice of my life!” which sounded more like, “The house is on fire.” I lowered my eyes in embarrassme
nt, though no one else but me seemed to notice the mess, and the man received the loudest applause to that point.
It was Señora Armendáriz’s turn, who I literally did not hear, because I was losing all hope that Tatis would come down in time to hand over my book. I wasn’t certain she would in fact bring it down, because she might have assumed that I, like everyone else, was going to recite from deep inside my heaving chest. That said, the only poem I could have recited without reading it, because I’d already read it several times, was precisely the one she was memorizing. I didn’t know any other poem and I started to go through it in my head while my neighbor, another bald gentleman, recited a fragment from the Iliad, in Greek, where Priam implores Achilles to return the dead body of his son Hector. His sobbing recitation earned him another warm round of applause, even though no one understood Greek.
It was my turn and Amalia Reséndiz called out my name. At that moment, I saw Tatis descending the stairs beside a young man whose arm encircled her waist, and I recognized him immediately. It was David, the guy who was always with Güero when he came to collect the monthly protection fee, the one who waited outside the furniture store. Both of them were laughing, but when his gaze met mine, he stopped smiling. As for me, I lost my concentration and made a mistake in the third line, which I repeated twice, and from there on I literally ran out of voice: I skipped lines six and seven and ended the poem with a murmur. I received an applause that was almost equally inaudible. Tatis Reséndiz took advantage of her place as the last to arrive and instead of standing beside us, she placed herself decidedly in front, directly in front of me, which I appreciated because she hid me from everyone’s view. Although it was the same poem, I’m certain no one was able to connect my pitiful babble to her portentous declamation. Lifting both her arms, she uttered with a bellicose flourish: Your skin, like sheets of sand and sheets of water swirling. She paused and stood looking at those present. You could have heard a pin drop and then she returned to the charge to exclaim, Your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance, pronouncing the word “louring” almost ferociously. She held us in her power, then abruptly lowered her voice in the following line and murmured, your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home, to then shout like a banshee, and lights a silenced lamp, which again made us shudder. So that was her trick: move without rhyme or reason from a soft modulation to an irate one, without any connection to the meaning of the lines. It was clear that the poor woman hadn’t understood a thing. Her voice, starving for effect, had made each line a separate thing, without any connection to the others. Like a lion tearing apart its prey.
The thunderous ovation she received made Amalia Reséndiz burst into tears.
* * *
—
TAKING ADVANTAGE of the commotion over Tatis’s recital I went upstairs to look for my things, which I found on a chair in the foyer. I put the book, my tie, and my coat in my briefcase and I snuck out of the Reséndizes’ house.
In the taxi that took me home my poor performance transformed before my eyes into a confrontational exploit. Destroying Isabel Fraire’s poem had saved it from the declamatory success personified by Tatis. Lowering my voice until it was nearly inaudible had been an act of sabotage on my part.
But that reasoning fell apart when I went to bed. Beneath the sheets, alone, I once again experienced that sensation of failure. My performance had been pathetic. Fault of my arrogance, my vanity, I told myself, because from the beginning I’d felt superior to my recital colleagues, who now, as in the dark I reassessed their effort-filled performances, seemed almost admirable. They hadn’t tried to do anything but delight the audience, with which they were in perfect harmony and the audience, like them, had a grandiloquent notion of what poetry is. Yes, they venerated the pompous verb, but their capacity to listen and their astonishment when they encountered the vibrancy of verse and rhyme were genuine. What right did I have to despise them?
I couldn’t sleep and at times the idea that I’d acted like a guerrilla combatant reemerged and that my failure was honorable, but I immediately fell prey to another bout of bitterness. The most deplorable part was that I didn’t care that I’d messed up in front of Amalia Reséndiz, who’d held me in such high esteem until now, or in front of her dunderhead niece, or in front of the official in charge of the State Cultural Outreach Program, just as I wouldn’t have cared if Father Clark and Ofelia had been present for that meltdown; the only person before whose eyes it pained me to make a fool of myself was David the mobster, the one who stayed outside smoking when Güero paid us a visit to collect the envelope with our payment. I had the feeling that in his eyes my failure expanded until it reached the totality of my life and that this would give him the right from now on to blackmail me without regard.
The next day I felt seized by abstract rage. It had rained during the night, so I blamed it on that, and the sight of the wet yard brought back the objectivity I’d lost when I went to bed. The world looked fresh, and the recital from the night before seemed like a distant episode. I remembered the yard Isabel Fraire wrote about in one of her poems, a yard that intimidates its owners a little when they discover that it hardly needs their attention. I went to my room for the book, looked for the poem, and reread it. It ends with:
Every three or four days
we say
we have to buy seeds
fertilize the ground
irrigate
snip the dry flowers
maybe we will
meanwhile
the yard
continues its own life and we ours
That bittersweet ending, with that “maybe we will,” left me submerged in a gentle gloom. That’s how I’d been feeling lately, as if nothing in the world needed me, not my father, not the furniture store, not Ofelia, not my home reading program listeners. The world was a yard that was going to take care of itself, surviving without my attention, ignoring me like an attentive but superfluous spectator. I went back to the window to see if my yard was living its own life, and there, looking at the wet lawn and plants, I was overcome with a desire to do things, crucial and unequivocal things. In the meantime, remembering how the smile left David’s face when he recognized me in the row of orators, I told myself that if I’d lost my concentration, he must have felt panic, knowing that I could tell his girlfriend’s aunt the kind of activities the future husband of her niece was engaged in. I was, in short, a danger to him, and that was motive enough for him to decide to remove me from his extortion list.
Celeste had prepared the three little bottles of curative ointment her cousin Ramiro had delivered the previous afternoon, and I went to the bank to deliver Mario his and leave one for the taxi driver. I’d hoped to see Rosario and take her picture for my father. I arrived a few minutes after they opened, knowing I’d find her less busy then. I peeked into Mario’s cubicle. He was alone, we shook hands, he asked me to sit down, and I gave him the ointment, explaining who the other bottle was for. He wrote the name Regino García on a little piece of paper.
“He might not even come by,” I said.
“I’m always here. If he comes, he’ll find me.”
I heard Rosario’s voice in the next cubicle; a one-and-a-half-meter-high wall separated us, and I thought she must have been with a client, or with one of the branch executives. She probably also heard my voice and thought I’d peek into her cubicle before long to say hello, which is what I usually did, but suddenly I didn’t feel like seeing her, and I realized that what had happened a few days ago, when she made me wait for an hour outside the branch office without deigning to leave for one minute to have her picture taken for my father, enraged me. What would it have taken to send one of her underlings out to tell me she was unable to leave the bank? I raised the volume of my voice a little so that, knowing I was in Mario’s cubicle, she’d come and apologize, but after five minutes nothing happened. Then, to prolong my visit, I asked
about his tendonitis. He said that he didn’t remember he had it most mornings but by the afternoon the pain started up again.
“How strong?”
“Strong enough, it climbs up to my elbow.”
“Hmmm…that’s not so good.”
“No, not good at all.”
“When you run out of the ointment let me know and I’ll tell Celeste to get you some more.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Not at all. And that elbow thing doesn’t sound good either.”
“No.”
He looked at me with a sliver of impatience; he obviously had things to do and I wondered if he had a meeting with Rosario. I said no and stood up, he did the same, and we shook hands. To delay my departure from the bank and give Rosario yet another chance to come out and meet me, I searched for a large-peso banknote in my pants pocket and went to one of the cashiers to break it. I only had small bills. I had no other choice but to go to one of the open cashier windows and ask the bank teller to exchange a fifty-peso note for two-peso coins. I abhor having coins in my pockets, but I told myself that it’s always a good idea to have a little change. Rosario didn’t come out to greet me and I left the bank with twenty-five two-peso coins making a bothersome clamor in my right pocket, as well as having an ugly-looking bulge in my pants. In order to rid myself of that burden I decided to go to Sanborns de Piedra, where I arrived twenty minutes later. Gladis was taking a customer’s order and, when she saw me, pointed to a table where she wanted me to sit. There was only one time that I disapproved of the table Gladis sent me to, because it was right in the middle of a draft of cold air. Sweetheart, she’d said when I complained, my whole area is full, look around, suck it up for a few minutes and once that little green onion who just asked for his check leaves, you can move to his table. I looked in the direction of the man she’d pointed out, a thin guy with a lumpy head that did actually look like a green onion, I sucked it up until he left and then I moved to his table.