My Documents (18 page)

The stores are starting to close. It’s hard to know if it’s day or night: 5:15 p.m. and the lights of apartments and cars are already on. He starts to walk away from downtown, but instinctively he goes into a Laundromat and decides to spend some time there—he doesn’t really decide this, actually, but this is where he ends up, along with two guys who are reading while they wait for their clothes. It isn’t exactly warm there, but at least it isn’t cold. It’s absurd—he knows that he’s short on money, that he’s going to need every coin—but still he decides he is going to wash one of the pairs of pants, the second shirt, and the extra pair of socks. It
takes him a while to figure out how the washing machines work—they’re old and look sort of dangerous—but when he finally gets the apparatus going the victory gives him a stupid and absolute feeling of satisfaction. He sits there looking at the tumbling clothes, entranced or paralyzed, focused like someone watching the end of a championship game on TV, and maybe for him this is even more interesting than the end of a championship game, because while he’s watching the tumbling clothes pushed up against the glass, soaked in soapy water, he thinks, as if discovering something important, how these clothes are his, how they belong to him, how he has worn those pants a hundred times, those socks too, and how once upon a time that shirt, a little faded now, was his best, the one he picked out on special occasions; he remembers his own body wearing that shirt with pride, and it’s a strange vision, vain, awkward. It’s perhaps his kitsch idea of purification.

Then he goes into a pizzeria called Bella Vita, which looks cheap. His waiter is a man named Bülent, a very friendly and cheerful Turk who speaks some French and a little Flemish but no English, so they have to communicate exclusively through gestures and a reciprocal murmur that perhaps serves only to demonstrate that neither of them is mute. He eats a Napolitano pizza that tastes out of this world to him, and then he sits there, drinking a coffee. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t want to go on wandering, but he can’t make up his mind to look for a cheap hotel or a hostel. He tries to ask Bülent if the place has Wi-Fi, but it is truly difficult to mime the idea of Wi-Fi, and at this point, he is already so helpless that he doesn’t think of the simplest option, which would have
been to say “Wi-Fi” and pronounce it in all possible ways until Bülent understood. Luckily Piet arrives just then; he’s a very tall guy who wears glasses with thick red rims and has an unspecifiable number of piercings in his right eyebrow. Piet knows English and a little Spanish—he has even been to Chile, for a month, years ago. Rodrigo finally has someone to talk to.

A couple of hours later they are in the living room of Piet’s beautiful apartment, across from the pizzeria. While his host makes coffee, Rodrigo watches from the window as Bülent, with the help of the waitress and another man, closes the place up for the night. Rodrigo feels something like the pulse or the pain or the aura of daily life. He turns on his laptop and connects to the Internet; there are no messages from Elisa, but he wasn’t really expecting any. He tries to find a friend from high school who, as he remembers, has lived in Brussels for several years. He finds him easily on Facebook, and the friend responds right away but says that he’s in Chile now, taking care of his sick mother, and although he plans to come back to university, for now he’s going to stay in Santiago, he doesn’t know for how long. Ten minutes later he gets another message in which the friend recommends that he not be afraid to drink
peket
(“It’s a good buzz, but a bad hangover”), that he avoid the grilled endive (“No to the grilled endive, yes to the
boulettes de viande
and to the
moules-frites
”), that he try the hot dogs with warm sauerkraut and mustard, that he buy chocolates at Galler, near the Grand Place, that he go to the Tropismes bookstore, and that he shouldn’t miss the Musical Instrument or the Magritte Museums—to Rodrigo, all of these details seem remote,
almost impossible, because this isn’t a vacation, it never was. He feels desperate. He doesn’t have much credit left on his card, and he has only a hundred euros left in his wallet.

That’s when Bart arrives, Piet’s editor, who lives in Utrecht. Only then does Rodrigo find out that Piet is a writer, that he has published several books of short stories and a novel. He likes that Piet showed this kind of discretion, that he was so reserved. He thinks that if he were a writer, he wouldn’t go around proclaiming it to all the world either.

Bart is even taller than Piet, he’s a giant of almost two meters. Along with a friend, who is also named Bart, he runs a small press that publishes emerging writers, almost all of them fiction writers, almost all of them Dutch, but there are a few Belgians, also. The other Bart, oddly, lives in Colombia (because he fell in love with a woman from Popayán, Rodrigo learns), but he handles everything online from there: his job is to manage distribution—to a series of small bookstores, none of them commercial—and to organize small events and readings where he sells the books himself.

Bart is friendly and he tells his story in pretty fluent English, though he is also helped by his emphatic gestures and a certain talent for mimicry when words fail him. It’s almost ten; they walk for a few blocks. Rodrigo feels better, he leans on the umbrella-cane, but it’s more of a precaution than a necessity. They reach La Vesa, a somewhat gloomy bar that has poetry readings on Thursdays, but today isn’t Thursday, it’s Tuesday, and the patrons are scarce, which is better, thinks Rodrigo, who enjoys this feeling of intimacy, of routine camaraderie, this sensible chatting with new
friends, and the comments—short but laden with slight ironies—that come every once in a while from Laura, an Italian waitress who isn’t beautiful at first sight, but who becomes beautiful as the minutes pass, and not from the effect of the alcohol, but because you have to look at her really closely to discover her beauty. His friends are drinking Orval and Rodrigo orders wine by the glass; Piet asks him if he dislikes beer, and he replies that he likes it, but he’s still too cold and he prefers the warmth of wine. They start talking about Belgian beer, which is the best in the world. Piet tells him it’s not so cold out, that there have been many worse winters. Then Rodrigo wants to tell them the joke about the coldest man in the world, but he doesn’t know how to say
friolento
, “cold-blooded,” in English, so he says “I am” and makes the gesture of shivering, and Bart tells him, “You’re chilly,” and it all gets tangled up because Rodrigo thinks they’re talking about Chile, about whether he’s from Chile, which supposedly they already knew, until, after several misunderstandings that they celebrate thunderously, they understand that the joke is about the chilliest man on earth, and Rodrigo adds that the most cold-blooded man on earth is definitely Chilean, he’s the chilliest man on earth, and he laughs heartily, for the first time he laughs on Belgian soil the way he would laugh on Chilean soil.

Rodrigo starts the joke uncertainly, because as he strings the story together, he thinks that maybe in Belgium and Holland they have the same joke, that maybe there are as many versions of the joke as there are countries in the world. His listeners react well, however, giving themselves over to the story: they enjoy the
enumeration of the cities, whose names sound so strange to them (“‘Arica’ sounds like ‘Osaka,’” says Bart), and when the chilliest man in the world, who is Chilean, dies of cold under the burning sun of Bangkok, his friends let out an anxious giggle and grab their heads in a mournful gesture.

The chilliest man in the world had been a good son, a good father, a good Christian, so Saint Peter accepts him into Heaven without delay, but the problems start immediately: incredibly, even though in heaven hot and cold don’t exist—at least not in the way we understand them down here—and even though all the rooms in that formidable hotel that is Heaven automatically adjust to the needs of their guests, the Chilean still feels cold, and in his friendly but also effusive manner he goes on complaining, until the blessed patience that reigns in Heaven runs out, everyone gets fed up, and they all agree that the chilliest man in the world should go find a truly beneficial climate. It is God himself who decides to send him to Hell, where it’s unthinkable that he could go on feeling cold. But in spite of the unquenchable fires, the burning waters, the scorching coals, and the human heat, which in such an overcrowded place is intense, the chilliest man in the world still feels cold, and the case becomes so famous that it reaches the ears of Satan, who sees it as an amusing challenge and decides to take matters into his own hands.

One morning, Satan himself leads the Chilean to nothing less than the hottest place imaginable: the center of the sun. It’s so hot there that Satan has to put on a special suit or else he’ll get burned. Once inside the center of the sun, they come to a small two-by-two-meter
cubicle, and Satan opens the door. The Chilean enters and he stays there, hopeful and deeply grateful. Weeks pass, months, years, until one day, moved by curiosity, the Devil decides to pay the Chilean a visit. He puts on his special suit again—even reinforces it with two additional layers, because he thinks he may have singed himself on the previous trip—and he heads off to the sun. He has scarcely opened the door to the cubicle when he hears the Chilean shout from inside: “Please close the door, it’s chilly in here!”

“Please close the door, it’s chilly in here!” says Rodrigo, and his performance is a success.

“I think that you are the chilliest man in the world,” Bart tells him, “and I want the chilliest man in the world to try the best beer in the world.” Piet proposes they go to a bar where they sell hundreds of beers, but in the end they decide to go somewhere closer, where they clandestinely sell Westvleteren, the so-called best beer in the world, and on the way Rodrigo leans on the umbrella, but he doesn’t know if it’s necessary, he feels like he doesn’t need it anymore and could throw it away, but he goes on using it anyway while he listens to the story of the Trappist monks who make the beer and sell it in modest quantities, a story he finds amazing. He hopes he likes the beer a lot and he does, although they buy only one for the three of them, because the bottle costs ten euros.

They go back to the apartment at two in the morning with their arms around each other, so Rodrigo doesn’t have to use the umbrella: they look drunker than they are. Later, in the living room, they go on drinking for a while, they half listen to each other, they laugh. “You can stay, but only for tonight,” says Piet,
and Rodrigo thanks him. They drag in a mattress while Bart stretches out on an old chaise lounge and covers himself with a blanket. Rodrigo thinks about what he will do if Bart tries something in the middle of the night. He considers whether he will reject him or not, but he falls asleep, and Bart does too.

He wakes up early; he’s alone in the living room. He’s a little hungover, and the coffee he finds in the kitchen does him good. He looks at the street, he looks at the buildings, the silent facade of the pizzeria. He wants to say good-bye to Piet, and he cracks open the door to his room: he sees him sleeping next to Bart in a half embrace. He leaves them a note of thanks and goes down the four flights of stairs. He has absolutely no plan, but he’s encouraged by the idea of walking without a cane, and once in the street he tries it, like in a happy ending. But he can’t do it, and he falls. It’s a nasty fall, a hard fall, his double pants rip, his knee bleeds. He stays on the corner, thinking, paralyzed by pain, and it starts to rain, as if he were a character in a cartoon with a cloud hanging above him—but this rain is for everyone, not just him.

It’s a cold and copious rain and he should look for a place to take shelter. He has very little money left, but he has no choice but to buy another umbrella. This is the moment to think of Elisa and curse her, but he doesn’t do it. Now he has two umbrellas, the blue one for balance and the black one for the rain; he says it out loud, in the same calm tone in which he would say his name, first and last, his birthplace. “Now I have two umbrellas, blue for balance and black for rain,” he repeats, as he starts to walk, with no other purpose than that, simply: to walk.

FAMILY LIFE

For Paula Canal

I
t’s not hot out, it’s not cold. A shy, sharp sun overcomes the clouds, and the sky looks, at times, truly clean, like the sky blue of a child’s drawing. Martín is in the last seat of the bus, listening to music, bobbing his head like the young folks do, but he’s not young anymore, not by a long shot: he’s forty years old, his hair fairly long, black, and a little curly, his face extremely white—well, there ’ll be time later to describe him. For now he’s just gotten off the bus, carrying a backpack and a suitcase, and he is walking a few blocks in search of an address.

The job consists of taking care of the cat, running the vacuum cleaner every once in a while, and watering some indoor plants that seem destined to dry out. I’m not going to go out much, hardly at
all, he thinks, with a trace of happiness. Only to buy food for the cat, to buy food for myself. There is also a silver Fiat that he has to drive every so often (“So it can breathe,” they’ve told him). For now, he’s spending time with the family: it’s seven in the evening, and they’ll be leaving very early, at five thirty a.m. Here is the family, in alphabetical order:

Bruno: sparse beard, blondish, tall, smoker of black tobacco, literature professor.

Consuelo: Bruno’s partner, not his wife, because they never married, although they act like a married couple, perhaps worse than a married couple.

Sofía: the daughter.

She’s just run past, the little girl, chasing after the cat toward the stairs. She doesn’t greet Martín, doesn’t look at him; these days kids don’t say hi, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because adults say hi too much. Bruno explains to Martín some of the details of the job while, at the same time, arguing with Consuelo about how to organize a suitcase. Then Consuelo approaches Martín with a friendliness that unsettles him—he isn’t used to friendliness—and shows him the cat’s bed, the litter box, and a piece of pressed cloth where the cat can sharpen its claws, although none of these things get much use, according to Consuelo, because the cat sleeps wherever he feels like it, does his business in the yard, and scratches on all the chairs. Consuelo also shows him how the little door works, the mechanism that allows the cat to go out but not come in, or
come in but not go out, or come in or out as it likes. “We always leave it open,” says Consuelo, “so she can be free—it’s like when our parents finally gave us the keys to the house.”