The Savage Detectives (52 page)

Still, my life changed very little. I lived with my mother and I never went out, not because I couldn't but because I didn't want to. My mother gave me her old car, a Mercedes, but the only time I drove it I almost had an accident. Any little thing made me cry. A house seen from the distance, traffic jams, people trapped inside their cars, the daily news. One night Abraham called me from Paris, where he had work in a group show of young Mexican painters. He wanted to talk about my health, but I wouldn't let him. He ended up talking about his painting, the progress he'd made, his successes. When we said goodbye I realized that I'd managed not to shed a single tear. Not long afterward, around the same time my mother decided to move to Los Angeles, I began to lose weight. One day, without having sold the factory, we got on a plane and settled in Laguna Beach. I spent the first two weeks at my old hospital in Los Angeles, undergoing exhaustive tests, and then I joined my mother in a little house on Lincoln Street, in Laguna Beach. My mother had been there before, but visiting was one thing and daily life something entirely different. For a while we would take the car out early in the morning and go looking for some other place we might like. We tried Dana Point, San Clemente, San Onofre, finally ending up in a town called Silverado, like in the movie, on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, where we rented a two-story house with a yard and bought a police dog that my mother called Hugo, after the friend she'd just left behind in Mexico.

We lived there two years. During that time my mother sold my grandfather's main factory and I was subjected to regular and increasingly routine doctors' appointments. Once a month my mother traveled to Mexico City. When she came back, she would bring me novels, Mexican novels that she knew I liked, old favorites or new books by José Agustín or Gustavo Sainz or even younger writers. But one day I realized that I couldn't read them anymore and little by little the books in Spanish were set aside. Shortly afterward, without warning, my mother showed up with a friend, an engineer called Cabrera who worked for a construction company in Guadalajara. The engineer was a widower and had two children a little older than me who lived in the United States, on the East Coast. He and my mother got along easily, and it seemed like they'd stay together. One night my mother and I talked about sex. I told her that my sexual life was over and after a long argument my mother started to cry and hugged me and said I was her little girl and she'd never leave me. Otherwise, we hardly ever fought. Our life consisted solely of reading, watching television (we never went to the movies), and weekly trips to Los Angeles, where we saw gallery shows or went to concerts. We had no friends in Silverado, except for a Jewish couple in their eighties whom my mother met at the supermarket, or so she told me, and whom we saw every three or four days, just for a few minutes and always at their house. According to my mother, it was our duty to visit them, because old people could have an accident or one of them might die all of a sudden and the other one might not know what to do, something I doubted since the old people had been in a German concentration camp during World War II and were hardly unacquainted with death. But it made my mother happy to help them and I didn't want to argue with her. The couple were called Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz, and they called us the Mexican Ladies.

One weekend when my mother was in Mexico City I went to see them. It was the first time I'd gone alone, and to my surprise I stayed a long time at their house and I enjoyed talking to them. I had lemonade and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz poured themselves whiskey. At their age it was the best medicine, they claimed. We talked about Europe, which they knew pretty well, and about Mexico, where they'd also been a few times. But the idea they had of Mexico couldn't have been more wrong or superficial. I remember that after we'd been talking for a long time they looked at me and said I was clearly Mexican. Of course I'm Mexican, I said. Still, they were very nice and I started to visit them more often. Sometimes, when they didn't feel well, they would call me and ask me to do their shopping at the supermarket that day or take their clothes to the cleaners or go to the newsstand and buy them a paper. Sometimes they would ask for the
Los Angeles Times
and other times for the local Silverado paper, a four-page flyer devoid of anything of interest. They liked Brahms, whom they thought was both a dreamer and a rationalist, and only very rarely did they watch television. I was the complete opposite. I almost never listened to music and I had the TV on most of the day.

When we'd been living there for over a year, Mr. Schwartz died and my mother and I went with Mrs. Schwartz to the burial at the Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles. We insisted that she come in our car, but Mrs. Schwartz refused, and that morning she drove off behind the hearse in a rented limousine, alone, or at least so my mother and I thought. When we got to the cemetery some guy in his forties, dressed entirely in black and with his head shaved, got out of the car and helped Mrs. Schwartz out as if he was her beau. When they left, the same scene was repeated: Mrs. Schwartz got in the car, then the bald man got in and they left, followed closely by my mother's white Nissan. When we got to Silverado, the limousine stopped in front of the Schwartzes' house and the bald man helped Mrs. Schwartz out, then got back in the limousine, which immediately drove away. Mrs. Schwartz was left alone in the middle of the deserted sidewalk. It's a good thing we followed her, said my mother. We parked the car and went over to her. Mrs. Schwartz seemed lost somehow, gazing down the street after the limousine. We got her inside and my mother made us tea. Until then Mrs. Schwartz had let herself be led, but after the first sip of tea she pushed the cup away and asked for whiskey. My mother looked at me. There was a gleam of triumph in her eyes. Then I asked where the whiskey was and I poured her one. With water or without? Straight up, dear, said Mrs. Schwartz. Ice or no ice? I heard my mother's voice from the kitchen. Straight up! repeated Mrs. Schwartz. After that we grew closer. When my mother went to Mexico I would spend all day at Mrs. Schwartz's house, and sometimes I would even spend the night there. And although Mrs. Schwartz never ate at night, she would prepare a salad and grill a steak and make me eat. She would sit beside me, with her whiskey nearby, and tell me stories about her youth in Europe, when food, she said, was a necessity and a luxury. We listened to records too, and commented on the local news.

During the long and peaceful year of Mrs. Schwartz's widowhood, I met a man in Silverado, a plumber, and slept with him. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The plumber's name was John and he wanted to see me again. I told him no, that once was enough. My refusal didn't convince him and he started to call me every day. Once my mother picked up the phone and they spent a while telling each other off. A week later my mother and I decided to take a vacation in Mexico. We were at the beach and then we went to Mexico City. I don't know why my mother got the idea into her head that I needed to see Abraham. One night he called me and we agreed to meet the next day. By this time, Abraham had left Europe for good and was living in Mexico City, where he had a studio. Things seemed to be going well for him. The studio was in Coyoacán, near his apartment, and after we had dinner he wanted me to see his most recent paintings. I can't say whether I liked them or not. They probably left me cold. They were very large canvases, strongly resembling the work of a Catalan painter Abraham admired, or had admired when he lived in Barcelona, although to be fair, they'd been filtered through his own sensibility: where once there'd been ochers and earth tones, now there were yellows, reds, blues. He also showed me a series of drawings and I liked those a little better. Then we talked about money, or he talked about money, about the instability of the peso, about the possibility of going to live in California, about friends we no longer saw.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he asked me about Arturo Belano. It surprised me because Abraham never asked such direct questions. I told him that I didn't know what had happened to Arturo. I do, he said, do you want me to tell you? First I thought about saying no, but then I told him to go ahead, that I wanted to know. I saw him one night in the Barrio Chino, he said, and at first he didn't recognize me. He was with a blond woman. He looked happy. I said hello to him, since we were in a little dive bar, practically at the same table (here Abraham laughed), and it would have been stupid to pretend I hadn't seen him. It took him a while to recognize me. Then he came closer, almost pushing his face in mine, which made me realize that he was completely drunk (so was I, probably), and asked about you. And what did you say? I told him that you were living in the United States and you were fine. And what did he say? That it was a weight off his shoulders, or something, I guess, that sometimes he thought you were dead. And that was all. He turned back to the blonde and a little later my friends and I left.

Fifteen days later we went back to Silverado. One afternoon I ran into John on the street and I told him that if he kept calling me and bothering me I would kill him. John apologized and said that he'd fallen in love with me, but that he wasn't in love with me anymore and he wouldn't call me again. Around that time, I weighed one hundred and ten pounds and I wasn't losing or gaining weight and my mother was happy. She had a steady relationship with the engineer and they were even talking about getting married, although my mother never sounded as if she meant it. She opened a shop of Mexican handicrafts with a friend in Laguna Beach, and the business didn't bring in much money but it wasn't losing much either, and the social life it gave her was exactly what she wanted. A year after Mr. Schwartz's death Mrs. Schwartz got sick and had to be admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles. The next day I went to see her and she was asleep. The hospital was downtown, on Wilshire Boulevard, near MacArthur Park. My mother had to leave and I wanted to stay and wait until Mrs. Schwartz woke up. The problem was the car, because if my mother left and I didn't, who would take me back to Silverado? After a long discussion in the hallway, my mother said she would come pick me up between nine and ten that night, and if for some unexpected reason she was held up, she would call me at the hospital. Before she left she made me promise that I wouldn't budge. I don't know how much time I spent in Mrs. Schwartz's hospital room. I ate at the hospital cafeteria and struck up a conversation with a nurse. The nurse's name was Rosario Álvarez and she was born in Mexico City. I asked her what life was like in Los Angeles and she said that it was different every day, that sometimes it could be very good and sometimes very bad, but if you worked hard you could get ahead. I asked her how long it had been since she was in Mexico. Too long, she said, I don't have the money to be nostalgic. Then I bought a paper and went back up to Mrs. Schwartz's room. I sat next to the window and looked up the museum and movie listings in the paper. There was a movie on Alvarado Street that I suddenly felt like seeing. It had been a long time since I'd been to the movies and Alvarado Street wasn't far from the hospital. And yet, when I was outside the ticket window I didn't feel like it anymore and I kept walking. Everyone says that Los Angeles isn't a pedestrian city. I walked along Pico Boulevard to Valencia and then turned left and walked along Valencia back to Wilshire Boulevard, a two-hour walk in all, without hurrying, stopping in front of buildings that might have seemed uninteresting or carefully watching the flow of traffic. At ten my mother came back from Laguna Beach and we left. The second time I went to see Mrs. Schwartz, she didn't recognize me. I asked the nurse whether she'd had any visitors. The nurse said that an older woman had come to see her that morning and had left just before I got there. This time I came in the Nissan, because my mother and the engineer, who had just arrived, had taken his car to Laguna Beach. According to the nurse I talked to, Mrs. Schwartz was fading fast. I ate at the hospital and sat in the room for a while, thinking, until six. Then I got in the Nissan and went for a drive around Los Angeles. In the glove compartment there was a map that I consulted carefully before I turned the key in the ignition. Then I started the car and left the hospital. I know I passed the Civic Center, the Music Center, the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. Then I headed for Echo Park and I merged into traffic on Sunset Boulevard. I don't know how long I was driving. All I know is that I never got out of the Nissan and that in Beverly Hills I got off Highway 101 and meandered along on side roads until I got to Santa Monica. There I got on Interstate 10, or the Santa Monica Freeway, and I headed back downtown, then took Highway 11, passing Wilshire Boulevard, although I couldn't turn off until farther up, at Third Street. When I got back to the hospital it was ten at night and Mrs. Schwartz had died. I was going to ask whether she was alone when she died but then I decided not to ask anything. The body wasn't in the room anymore. I sat next to the window for a while, breathing and recovering from my trip to Santa Monica. A nurse came in and asked me whether I was related to Mrs. Schwartz and what I was doing there. I told her that I was a friend and I was just trying to calm down, that was all. She asked me whether I was calm yet. I said yes. Then I got up and left. I got to Silverado at three in the morning.

A month later my mother married the engineer. The wedding was in Laguna Beach and the engineer's children were there, as well as one of my brothers and the friends my mother had made in California. They lived in Silverado for a while and then my mother sold the shop in Laguna Beach and they went to live in Guadalajara. For a while, I didn't want to leave Silverado. Without my mother, the house seemed much bigger and quieter and cooler than before. Mrs. Schwartz's house was empty for a while. In the afternoons I would get in the Nissan and go to a bar in town and have a coffee or a whiskey and reread some old novels whose plot I'd forgotten. At the bar I met a guy who worked for the Forest Service and we slept together. His name was Perry and he knew a few words of Spanish. One night Perry told me that my vagina had an unusual smell. I didn't answer and he thought he'd offended me. Have I offended you? he said, I'm sorry if I have. But I was thinking about other things, other faces (if it's possible to think about a face), and he hadn't offended me. Most of the time, however, I was alone. Each month there was a check for me from my mother at the bank and I spent my days cleaning the house, sweeping, mopping, going to the supermarket, cooking, washing the dishes, taking care of the yard. I didn't call anyone and the only calls I got were from my mother, and, once a week, from my father or one of my brothers. When I was in the mood, I would go to a bar in the afternoon, and when I wasn't in the mood I would stay home reading beside the window. If I raised my eyes I could see the Schwartzes' empty house from where I sat. One afternoon a car stopped in front of it and a man in a jacket and tie got out. He had keys. He went in and ten minutes later he came out again. He didn't look like a relative of the Schwartzes. A few days later two women and a man came back to visit the house again. When they left, one of the women put a sign out saying that the house was for sale. Then many days went by before anyone came to visit it, but one day at noon, while I was busy in the yard, I heard children shouting and I saw a couple in their thirties going into the house led by one of the women who'd been there before. I knew immediately that they would buy the house and right there in the yard, without taking off my gloves, standing there like a pillar of salt, I decided that the time had come for me to leave too. That night I listened to Debussy and thought about Mexico and then, I don't know why, I thought about my cat Zia and I ended up calling my mother and asking her to get me a job in Mexico City, any job. I told her I'd be leaving soon. A week later my mother and her new husband were in Silverado, and two days later, one Sunday night, I flew to Mexico City. My first job was at a gallery in the Zona Rosa. It didn't pay much, but the work wasn't hard. Then I started to work at a publishing house, the Fondo de Cultura Economica, in the English Philosophy division, and my work life was finally settled.