The Savage Detectives (51 page)

I started to feel bad. We were living on what he made because I'd strictly forbidden my mother to send me money. I didn't want that money. I looked for work in Barcelona and finally I ended up giving private Hebrew classes. My students were very strange Catalans who were studying the Kabbalah or the Torah, from which they drew heterodox conclusions that freaked me out. They would explain them to me over coffee at a bar or tea at their houses once the lesson was over. At night I talked to Arturo about my students. Once Arturo told me that Ulises Lima had his own version of one of Jesus' parables, but either he couldn't explain it very well or I've forgotten it, or, most likely, I wasn't paying much attention when he told it to me. By then, I think Arturo and Ulises's friendship was over. I saw Ulises three times in Mexico, and the last time, when I told him I was going back to Barcelona to live with Arturo, he said I shouldn't go, if I went he would really miss me. At first I didn't understand what he was trying to say, but then I realized that he'd fallen in love with me or something, and I laughed in his face. But Arturo is your friend! I said, and then I started to cry, and when I looked up and saw Ulises, I realized that he was crying too. Or no, not crying, I realized that he was making an effort to cry, that he was forcing tears and some had already risen to his eyes. What am I going to do, all alone? he said. The whole scene was unreal somehow. When I told Arturo about it he laughed and said he couldn't believe it, and then he called his friend a son of a bitch. That was the last time we talked about it, but during that second stay in Barcelona I thought about Ulises and his tears sometimes, and about how lonely he'd claimed he was going to be in Mexico.

One night I made chicken with red mole and Arturo and I ate it with the windows open, because it was very hot, it must have been the middle of summer, and suddenly there was an enormous noise from outside, as if the whole city had turned out for a protest, although actually they weren't protesting anything, just celebrating some soccer victory. I had set the table and taken a lot of trouble with the mole, but the noise from outside was so loud that we couldn't even hear ourselves talk, so we had to close the window. It was hot, and the mole was very spicy. Arturo was sweating, I was sweating, and suddenly everything fell apart again and I started to cry. The strange thing is that when Arturo tried to put his arms around me I was struck by a wave of rage and I started to scream at him. I would have liked to hit him, but instead, all of a sudden, I surprised myself by hitting myself. I was saying: me, me, me, and hitting myself in the chest with my thumb until Arturo caught my hand. Later he said that he was afraid I would break my thumb or hurt my chest or both. Finally I calmed down and we went outside. I needed fresh air, but that night there were millions of people in the streets. The Ramblas were overrun. On some corners we saw big trash bins blocking the way and on other corners kids struggling to flip cars. We saw flags. People were laughing loudly and looking at me in surprise because I was walking with a serious expression on my face, elbowing my way through the crowd, trying to find the fresh air I craved, but the air had disappeared as if all of Barcelona had become a giant bonfire, a dark bonfire full of shadows and shouts and soccer chants. Then we heard the wail of police sirens. More shouts. The sound of breaking glass. We started to run. I think it was then that everything ended between Arturo and me. At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. We would write facing each other and drink lots of cups of tea. We weren't writing for publication but to understand ourselves better or just to see how far we could go. And when we weren't writing we talked endlessly about his life and my life, especially mine, although sometimes Arturo told me stories about friends who had died in the guerrilla wars of Latin America, I knew some of them by name, because they'd been on their way through Mexico when I was with the Trotskyites, but most of them I'd never heard of. And we kept making love, although each night I distanced myself a little more, involuntarily, without meaning to, without knowing where I was going. It was the same thing that had already happened to me with Abraham, more or less, except now it was a little worse, now that I didn't have anything.

One night, while we were making love, I told him. I told him that I thought I was going crazy, that I kept having the same symptoms. I talked for a long time. His response surprised me (it was the last time he surprised me). He said that if I was going crazy then he would go crazy too, that he didn't mind going crazy with me. Do you like to tempt fate? I said. It's not fate I'm tempting, he said. I searched for his eyes in the dark and asked whether he was serious. Of course I'm serious, he said, and he pressed his body close to mine. That night I slept peacefully. The next morning I knew I had to leave him, the sooner the better, and at noon I called my mother from Telefónica. In those days, Arturo and his friends didn't pay for the international calls they made. I never knew how they did it. All I knew was that they had more than one method and they had to be swindling Telefónica out of thousands of millions of pesetas. They would find some telephone and hook up a few wires and that was it, they had a connection. The Argentinians were the best at it, hands down, and then the Chileans. I never met a Mexican who knew how to rig a phone, maybe because we weren't ready for the modern world, or maybe because the few Mexicans who lived in Barcelona at the time had enough money so that they didn't need to break the law. The rigged telephones were easy to tell by the lines that formed around them, especially at night. The best and the worst of Latin America came together in those lines, the old revolutionaries and the rapists, the former political prisoners and the hawkers of junk jewelry. When I saw those lines, on my way back from the movies, around the phone booth in Plaza Ramalleras, for example, I would freeze and start to shake, a metallic cold like a security wand running from the back of my neck down to my heels. Adolescents, young women with nursing children, old men and women: what did they think about out there, at midnight or one in the morning, while they waited for a stranger to finish talking, able not to hear but to guess at what was being said, since the person on the phone would gesture or cry or stand there without speaking for a long time, just nodding or shaking his head? What were those people in line waiting for? Were they only hoping that their turn would come soon, that the police wouldn't show up? Was that all? In any case, I distanced myself from that too. I called my mother and asked for money.

One afternoon I told Arturo that I was leaving, that we had to stop living together. He asked me why. I told him I couldn't stand him anymore. What have I done to you? he said. Nothing, I'm the one doing terrible things to myself, I said. I need to be alone. We ended up shouting at each other. I moved to Daniel's apartment. Sometimes Arturo would come by and we'd talk, but each day it was more painful for me to see him. When my mother sent me money I left for good and flew to Rome. At this point I should probably mention my kitten. Before we were living together, a friend or ex-lover of Arturo's had been forced to move unexpectedly and she left him six kittens that her cat had just had. She left him the kittens and took her cat. Arturo kept the kittens for a while, when they were still little. Later, when he realized that his friend or ex-lover was never coming back, he began to look for owners for them. His friends took most of them, except for one gray kitten that no one wanted and I took, which annoyed Abraham, because he was afraid the kitten would claw his canvases. I called her Zia, in memory of another kitten I'd seen one afternoon in Rome. When I left for Mexico, Zia came with me. When I went back to Barcelona to Arturo's apartment, Zia came with me. I think she loved to fly. When I went to stay with Daniel Grossman, naturally I brought Zia with me. And when I caught the flight to Rome, the cat was in a straw bag on my lap. She was going to see Rome at last, the city she was from, namewise at least.

My life in Rome was a disaster. Everything went badly, and worst of all, or at least so I was told later, was that I refused to ask for help. All I had was Zia and all I cared about was taking care of Zia and feeding her. I did read a lot, but when I try to remember what I read a kind of hot, quivery wall gets in the way. Maybe I read Dante in Italian. Maybe Gadda. I don't know. I'd already read them both in Spanish. The only person who had more than a vague indication of my whereabouts was Daniel. I got some letters from him. In one of them he told me that Arturo was shattered by my leaving and each time he saw Daniel he asked about me. Don't give him my address, I said, because he's capable of following me to Rome. I won't give it to him, said Daniel in his next letter. I also heard from him that my mother and father were worried and that they kept calling Barcelona. Don't give them my address, I said, and Daniel promised he wouldn't. His letters were long. My letters were short, almost always postcards. My life in Rome was short and simple. I worked in a shoe store and lived in a boardinghouse on Via della Luce, in Trastevere. At night, when I got home, I would take Zia out for a walk. We usually went to a park behind the church of Sant'Egidio, and as the cat wandered among the plants I would open a book and try to read. I must have read Dante, I guess, or Guido Cavalcanti or Cecco Angiolieri or Cino da Pistoia, but all I remember of what I read is a hot curtain or maybe just a warm curtain fluttering in the slight breeze of Rome at dusk, and plants and trees and the sound of footsteps. One night I met the devil. That's all I remember. I met the devil and I knew I was going to die. The owner of the shoe store saw me come to work with bruises on my neck and watched me for a week. Then he wanted to sleep with me and I refused. One day Zia got lost in the park, not the one behind Sant'Egidio, but another one, on Via Garibaldi, with no trees or lights. Zia just strayed too far and the darkness swallowed her up.

I looked for her until seven in the morning. Until the sun came up and people started slowly heading to work. That day I didn't go to the shoe store. I went to bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, and slept. When I woke up I went out to look for my cat again. I couldn't find her. One night I dreamed of Arturo. The two of us were at the top of an office building, the kind built out of glass and steel, and we opened a window and looked down. It was nighttime. I wasn't planning to jump, but Arturo looked at me and said if you jump, I will too. I wanted to call him an idiot, but I didn't have the strength to insult him.

One day the door of my room opened and I saw my mother and younger brother come in, my brother who'd been a soldier in the Tsahal and who lived most of the year in Israel. They moved me to a hospital in Rome right away, and two days later I was flying back to Mexico. As I found out later, my mother had flown to Barcelona and between her and my brother they had managed to get my address in Rome out of Daniel, after he refused to give it to them at first.

In Mexico I was admitted to a private clinic in Cuernavaca, and the first thing the doctors told my mother was that there was nothing they could do if I didn't make an effort. By then I weighed ninety pounds and I could hardly walk. Then I got on a plane again and was admitted to a clinic in Los Angeles. There I met a Doctor Kalb and gradually we became friends. I weighed seventy-five pounds and in the afternoon I watched television and that was pretty much it. My mother moved into a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, on Sixth Street, and every day she would come to see me. After a month I had gained weight and I was back up to ninety pounds. My mother was very happy and decided to return to Mexico City, to take care of business. With my mother gone, Dr. Kalb and I established a friendship. We talked about food and tranquilizers and other kinds of drugs. We didn't talk much about books because Dr. Kalb only read bestsellers. We talked about film. He'd seen many more movies than I had and he loved movies from the fifties. In the afternoons I'd turn on the television and find some movie so I could discuss it with him later, but the medicine I was taking made me fall asleep halfway through. When I talked to Dr. Kalb he would tell me what had happened in the part I hadn't seen, although by then I'd usually forgotten the part I had seen. My memory of those movies is strange, images and scenes filtered through the lens of my doctor's simple enthusiasm. My mother came most weekends. She would arrive Friday night and return to Mexico City on Sunday night. Once she told me that she was thinking about moving permanently to Los Angeles. Not to the city itself, but to some nice place nearby, like Corona del Mar or Laguna Beach. Then what will happen to the factory? I said. Grandfather wouldn't have wanted you to sell it. Mexico is going to hell, said my mother, sooner or later it'll have to be sold. Sometimes she would show up with some friend of mine whom she'd invited along because, according to the doctors, including Dr. Kalb, it was good for my health to see my "old gang." One Saturday she showed up with Greta, a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn't seen since then. Another Saturday she showed up with a guy I didn't even recognize. You're the one who should be bringing friends and trying to have a good time, I told her one night. When I said things like that my mother would laugh, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing, or start to cry. Aren't you dating anyone? Don't you have a boyfriend? I asked her. She admitted that she was seeing someone in Mexico City, a man who was divorced like she was, or a widower. I didn't try very hard to get it straight. I guess I didn't really care. After four months I weighed one hundred and five pounds and my mother started to prepare for my transfer to a Mexican clinic. The day before I left, Dr. Kalb came to say goodbye. I gave him my phone number and begged him to call me sometime. When I asked for his number, he claimed something about a move so he wouldn't have to give it to me. I didn't believe him, but I didn't call his bluff either.

We went back to Mexico City. This time I was admitted to a clinic in Colonia Buenos Aires. I had a big room with lots of light, a window overlooking a park, and a television with more than one hundred channels. In the morning I would sit in the park and read novels. In the afternoon I would shut myself in my room and sleep. One day Daniel, who had just gotten back from Barcelona, came to visit me. He wasn't going to be in Mexico for long and as soon as he found out that I was in the hospital he came to see me. I asked him how I looked. He said fine, but thin. The two of us laughed. By then it didn't hurt to laugh anymore, which was a good sign. Before he left I asked him about Arturo. Daniel said he didn't live in Barcelona anymore, or at least he didn't think so, but it had been a while since they stopped seeing each other. A month later I weighed one hundred and ten pounds and I was discharged from the hospital.