The Savage Detectives (47 page)

Back on the open seas, we rounded the Iberian peninsula, and I was still sick, so sick that one night two Italians brought me up on deck so that I could get some air and I saw lights in the distance and I asked what they were, what part of the world those lights belonged to (the world that seemed so unfriendly), and the Italians said Africa-the way you might say
beak
, or the way you might say
apple
-and then I really started to shake, my fever felt like an epileptic seizure, but it was only a fever, and then the Italians left me sitting on the deck and moved to one side, like people leaving a sickroom to smoke a cigarette, and I heard one Italian say to the other: if he dies on us we'd better throw him overboard, and the other Italian answered: all right, all right, but he won't die. And although I didn't speak Italian I understood that clearly, since both of our languages were Romance languages, as a scholar would say. I know you've been in similar situations, Belano, so I won't go on too long. Fear or the will to live, the survival instinct, gave me strength that I didn't know I had, and I said to the Italians I'm all right, I'm not going to die, what's the next port? Then I dragged myself back down into the hold, curled up in my corner, and slept.

By the time we got to Barcelona I was better. On our second night in port I snuck off the ship and went walking out of the harbor like any night-shift worker. I had the clothes on my back, plus ten dollars I'd brought with me from Santiago hidden in one of my socks. Life has many wonderful moments, and they come in all shapes and sizes, but I'll never forget Barcelona's Ramblas or the side streets opening up to me that night like the arms of a girl you've never seen before but who you know is the love of your life. In three hours, I swear, I had a job. If a Chilean has strong arms and isn't lazy, he can make a living anywhere, my father told me when I went to say goodbye. I would have liked to punch the old son of a bitch in the face, but that's another story, so why dwell on it? The point is, on that unforgettable night I was already washing dishes by the time I lost the rocking sensation of the long crossing. This was at a place called La Tía Joaquina, on Calle Escudillers. Around five in the morning, tired but happy, I left the bar and headed for the Pensión Conchi (what a name!), which had been recommended by one of the waiters at La Tía Joaquina, a kid from Murcia who was also staying at that dump.

I spent two days at the Pensión Conchi, then they made me leave in a hurry when I refused to show papers so I could be registered with the police, and I spent a week at La Tía Joaquina, just long enough for the real dishwasher to recover from a bad case of the flu. Over the next few days I made the rounds of other boardinghouses, on Calle Hospital, Calle Pintor Fortuny, Calle Boquería, until I found one on Junta de Comercio, the Pensión Amelia, such a nice, pretty name, where they didn't ask me for papers as long as I shared my room with two others and whenever the police came by I hid myself in a wardrobe with a false back and didn't complain.

As you can imagine, my first weeks in Europe were spent looking for work and working, because I had to pay for my lodging each week. Also because on solid ground my appetite, which had been hibernating during the crossing, was back and much more voracious than I remembered. But as I walked from place to place, say from the boardinghouse to work or from the restaurant to the boardinghouse, something began to happen to me that had never happened before. It didn't take me long to realize. Modesty aside, I've always been alert if nothing else, and I notice what's happening to me. It was a simple thing, anyway, although at first I admit it worried me. It would've worried you too. To give you an idea: I would be walking along the Ramblas, say, happy as can be, thinking the normal thoughts of a normal man and all of a sudden numbers would start to dance in my head. First 1, for example, then 0, then 1, then 1 again, then 0, then another 0, then back to 1, and so on. At first I chalked it up to all the time I'd spent trapped in the belly of the
Napoli
. But the truth is I felt fine, I was eating fine, I had normal bowel movements, I slept my six or seven hours like a baby, and my head didn't hurt at all, so it couldn't be that. Then I wondered whether it might be the change of scenery, which in this case was a change of country, continent, hemisphere, customs, everything. Then, of course, I blamed it on nerves. There have been some cases of insanity in my family, and of delirium tremens too, nobody's perfect. But none of these explanations were convincing, and little by little I adapted. I got used to the numbers. I didn't have much time to dwell on the matter, because the solution wasn't long in coming, and it came all of a sudden. One afternoon, another guy in the kitchen gave me an extra ticket he had for the soccer pools. I don't know why, but I didn't feel like filling it out at work and I took it with me to the boardinghouse. That night, as I was heading home along the half-deserted Ramblas, the numbers started to come, and right off the bat, I connected them with the ticket. I went into a bar on the Rambla Santa Mónica and asked for coffee and a pencil. But then the numbers stopped. My mind was blank! When I went out they started up again. I saw an open newsstand, 0, I saw a tree, 1, I saw two drunks, 2, and so on, until the fourteen scores were filled in. But I didn't have a pen to write them down in the street, so instead of heading to my boardinghouse, I walked down to the end of the Rambla and then back up again, as if I'd just gotten out of bed and I had the whole night ahead of me. A newsstand man near the Mercado de San José sold me a pen. When I paused to buy it the numbers stopped and I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff. Then I walked back up the Rambla and my mind was blank. Moments like that are rough, let me tell you. Suddenly, the numbers returned and I pulled out my ticket and started to write them down. 0 was X, you didn't have to be a genius to figure that out, 1 was 1, and 2, which hardly appeared anyway or flickered in my head, was 2. Easy, right? By the time I got to the Plaza Catalonia metro stop my ticket was complete. Then the devil tempted me and I went slowly back down toward the Rambla Santa Mónica again, like a sleepwalker or a lunatic, with the ticket a fraction of an inch from my face, checking to see whether the numbers that kept appearing matched the ones written on my lucky little piece of paper. Not one bit! The same way you see the night sky, I saw the 0, the 1, and the 2, but the sequence was different, the figures came faster, and when I passed the Liceo, a number appeared that I had never seen before: 3. I stopped agonizing over it and went to bed. That night, as I was undressing in the dark room, listening to the snoring of the two bastards I had for roommates, it occurred to me that I was going crazy, which struck me as so funny that I had to sit down on the bed and cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

The next day I turned in my ticket, and three days later I was one of nine people who had a match for all fourteen. The first thing I thought, and you had to have been through this yourself to know how it felt, was that they wouldn't give me the money because I was in Spain illegally. So that same day I went to see a lawyer and told him everything. The shyster-Mr. Martínez was his name, and he was from Lora del Río-congratulated me on my good luck and then went on to reassure me. In Spain, he said, a child of the Americas is never a foreigner, although it was true that I had entered the country in an irregular fashion, and that would have to be fixed. Then he called a journalist at
La Vanguardia
, who asked me a few questions and took some pictures of me. By the next day I was famous. I was in two or three papers, at least. Stowaway Wins Pool, they said. I kept the clippings and sent them to Santiago. I gave some radio interviews. In a week, we'd straightened out my situation, and in three months I went from being an undocumented alien to being a legal resident with no work permit, while Martínez negotiated a better deal for me. The prize amounted to 950,000 pesetas, which was real money back then, and even after the lawyer bled me for 200,000, the truth is that in those days I felt rich: rich, famous, and free to do as I pleased. The first few days I toyed with the idea of packing my suitcases and returning to Chile. With the money I had, I could've started a business in Santiago, but in the end I decided to exchange 100,000 pesetas for dollars, send my mother the money, and stay in Barcelona, which now seemed to be opening up to me like a flower, if you'll pardon the expression. This was 1975, anyway, and things in Chile were looking ugly, so I got over my doubts and decided to stay the course. At the consulate, after some resistance requiring a certain amount of tact and money on my part, they agreed to give me a passport. I didn't change boardinghouses, but I asked for a bigger, brighter room of my own (which they gave me in a heartbeat, what can I say? fate had made me the darling of Casa Amelia), quit working as a dishwasher, and began nosing around for a job that would be a good match for my interests. I took my own sweet time. I'd sleep until twelve or one. Then I'd go eat at a restaurant on Calle Fernando or another place on Calle Joaquín Costa, waited on by the nicest pair of twins, and after that I would wander around Barcelona, from Plaza Catalonia to Paseo Colón, from Paralelo to Vía Layetana, having coffee at sidewalk cafés and wine and little dishes of squid at bars, reading the sports page and pondering my next step, though in my innermost self I already knew what it would be, even if my education in the Chilean schools (and granted, I never actually spent much time in class) made me reluctant to lay it out on the table. And while I was at it, I'll tell you, I even thought about that bastard Descartes. Just to give you some idea. Descartes, Andrés Bello, Arturo Prat, the men who left their mark on our long, narrow strip of land. But you can't turn your back on the truth and one afternoon I stopped beating around the bush and admitted to myself that what I really wanted was to win another soccer pool, not look for work, win another pool by any means possible, but preferably the way I knew best. Don't look at me like I'm crazy, because of course I realized that my hope, or my dream, as Lucho Gatica would say, was irrational, even highly irrational-look, what mechanism or syndrome was making those figures appear so clearly in my head? who was dictating them to me? did I believe in visions? was I an ignorant person, a superstitious person come to this corner of the Mediterranean from the farthest reaches of the Third World? or was it possible that everything that was happening to me and everything that had happened to me was just a lucky combination of fate and the delirium of a man driven halfway out of his mind by a god-awful crossing that no travel agency would dare to offer?

Those were days of deep soul-searching. And yet, at the same time, I have to admit, nothing mattered to me (it's a contradiction, but that's the way it was) and as the days went by I stopped reading and responding to the generous job offerings in
La Vanguardia
, and although the numbers had fled from me ever since the prize (as a result of the shock, I presume), I tried to figure out what to do, and one afternoon, as I was feeding the pigeons in Parque de la Ciudadela, I thought I'd found the solution. If the numbers wouldn't come to me, I'd go after them in their den and drag them out by hook or by crook.

I tried several methods, which for professional reasons I should probably spare you. You say no? All right, then, I won't spare you. I started with street numbers. For example, I would walk along Calle Oleguer and Calle Cadena and note down the numbers on the doors as I went. The ones to my right were 1s, the ones to my left were 2s, and the people who looked me straight in the face as I passed were the Xs. It didn't work. I tried playing dice by myself in a bar on Calle Princesa, a place that doesn't exist anymore called La Cruz del Sur, run in those days by an Argentinian friend. That didn't work either. Other times I would lie in bed, my mind blank, and in desperation I would order the numbers to come back, but I couldn't think, couldn't call up the 1, which in my madness I equated with cash and shelter. Ninety days after I'd won the pool, and after I'd spent more than fifty thousand pesetas on huge, futile multiple bets, I got it. I had to change neighborhoods. It was that simple. The numbers of the Old City were exhausted, at least for me, and it was time to move on. I started to roam the Ensanche, a strange neighborhood that until then I had only eyed from Plaza Catalonia, never daring to cross the boundary of Ronda Universidad, or at least not consciously, thereby exposing my senses to the neighborhood magic and walking unguarded, all eyes, defenseless; in short, the antenna man.

The first few days I just walked up the Paseo de Gracia and down Balmes, but on the days after that I ventured onto side streets, Diputación, Consejo de Ciento, Aragón, Valencia, Mallorca, Provenza, Rosellón, and Córcega. The secret of those streets is the way they can be dazzling and somehow familiar, homey, all at once. When I would get to Diagonal, that was always the end of my walk, which sometimes followed a straight line and other times an endless series of zigzags. As you might imagine, I didn't just look lost. I looked like a crazy person. Lucky for me Barcelona prided itself on its tolerance in those days, as of course it still does. Naturally, I'd bought myself new gear. I was crazy all right, but not crazy enough to think I could pass unnoticed in clothes that reeked of a boardinghouse in Distrito 5. When I went out walking, I sported a white shirt, a tie with the Harvard logo, a sky-blue V-neck sweater, and pleated black pants. The only old things were my moccasins, because when it comes to walking, I've always favored comfort over elegance.

For the first three days, nothing happened. The numbers were conspicuous in their absence, as they say. But something in me resisted giving up the area I had so randomly chosen. On the fourth day, as I walked up Balmes, I raised my eyes skyward and saw the following inscription on a church tower:
Ora et labora
. I couldn't tell you exactly what it was that drew me to that inscription, but I really did feel something. I had a premonition. I knew I was close to the source of what beckoned to me and tormented me, the thing I desired with such unhealthy intensity. As I walked along, on the other side of the tower I read:
Tempus breve est
. Several pictures next to the inscriptions caught my eye, making me think of mathematics and geometry. It was like seeing the face of an angel. From then on that church became the center of my wanderings, although I strictly forbade myself to go inside.