Three Messages and a Warning (4 page)

It was fortunate that there weren’t many people: a couple in their forties, pale and about one and a half meters tall, though maybe the woman was a little bit taller; a man of about thirty, olive-skinned, with an enormous gold bracelet on his wrist; an older woman, and, on the same bench as her but at its opposite end, a handsome young man wearing a cheap and badly cut suit. Strangely, they were all asleep. It was because of the heat, I assumed. Without realizing it, I also fell asleep.

I was in a good mood the rest of the afternoon and, trying to come up with an explanation, I told myself it had been many years since I’d slept so peacefully as I had for that spell in Murillo Park. It shouldn’t be surprising that I returned the next day. Yes, I returned the next day and the next and then every day, from Monday to Friday. The siesta under the trees became my daily and obligatory portion of earthly pleasure. In time I came to have my own bench, almost my own, one that everyone recognized was for me, and they respected that; a bench that waited for me every afternoon at the same hour, like a faithful girlfriend. Of course, on occasions I had to share it with strangers to me and my fellow sleepers. Once I even had to listen to a lovers’ quarrel barely thirty centimeters from my right ear.

We came to know each other. We didn’t converse much, as we went there to nap, but we managed to learn a few things: each others’ names, where we worked. For example, Martínez, the guy with the gold bracelet, preferred to sleep in the park rather than his office because he snored and farted at the same time. And nobody gave him a hard time; nobody felt the need to wear a mask. The couple of near-dwarves had lost hope of having a child after who knows how many tests and treatments. They worked in the same building, though not in the same office, and they liked to watch the kids coming out of the high school. They went there, sat on their bench and closed their eyes to engender in their minds their impossible offspring. Martínez was fed up with his wife: he did everything he could to avoid her, but he wouldn’t think of divorce. On Fridays, instead of taking his siesta, he would visit a young and attractive woman who accepted money from him. As for the young man, Ramiro, he had fallen in love with one of his co-workers in the ministry. He asked our advice about how to dress, which cologne to use, where to take her, and what gifts to give her.

This is how I met Jorge, the older lady I had seen that first afternoon. Jorge was her last name, not her first, but that is what she liked to be called. She was a widow, still comely, with a voice that betrayed her vice of smoking while possessing velvety nuances enhancing its femininity. She dressed elegantly and had a large bosom, with stretch marks, which glistened in the sun thanks to her décolletage.

“I’m much obliged,” she said distantly, as if with nostalgia, the first time we spoke, when, nodding on the bench, she had dropped her magazine and I had bent down to retrieve it. It was printed in sepia. I couldn’t help but see the title, Mexico Today. I had never seen that one in the kiosks.

“It’s nothing,” I said modestly, and before she had a chance to nod off, I took my chance to start a conversation:

“I’ve seen you around here. Do you work nearby?”

She fanned herself a little with the magazine and smiled.

“I work in the Montecarlo. Do you know it?”

“The Montecarlo?” It seemed to me I’d heard that name somewhere, but I couldn’t place it.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it!”

“Well . . .”

“I’m in charge of the coat check and other small things. I start at six in the afternoon.”

“Ah,” was the only thing I could think of to say. I was quiet for a moment, looking ahead, where two high school girls were teasing each other with a kind of slang that, in my time, only men would use. I was embarrassed that Jorge, so ladylike, should hear this. But Jorge wasn’t hearing anything now: she was snoring. She slept with her mouth open and nearly falling over onto my shoulder. Her magazine had once again fallen from her hands and was coming apart in the puddle under the bench.

All that afternoon and even into the night, once in bed, I thought about this woman and asked myself, where did she work? Why was she dressed and made up like that? What were the magazines she was reading about? What was her life like? There was something about her that intrigued and attracted me very much. It seemed to me that I had dreamt about her once, when I was a boy or a teenager: a dream with the scent of orange trees in blossom.

The next day we met again. I couldn’t wait to ask her the questions on the tip of my tongue:

“Tell me about yourself, Jorge. Tell me about your life.”

“I have made many mistakes,” she answered in a conclusive tone, and she closed her eyes without saying more. I didn’t know when exactly she fell asleep, there on the bench, breathing deeply through her red-painted lips.

The next day I did not see her. But I sat next to Martínez and I asked him about her.

“I haven’t noticed her,” he said. “What does she look like?”

I described her for him, but it was useless.

“No, well, the truth is, I don’t remember her.”

After that came a long Saturday without news of Jorge nor any way to talk with her. “Had I made her mad?” I asked myself several times. My sister noticed and she asked me what was wrong. I told her the whole story.

“What kind of crazy person have you found? The Montecarlo was a nightclub back in the forties.”

“It must be a different one,” I said, mentally erasing the possibility that there was something strange about Jorge, “a new one with the same name.”

“And then her name, Jorge . . . don’t you suspect she might be a lesbian, Ducky?”

“I already told you, that’s her last name.” In the first place, I was annoyed by her manner of talking to me. In the second, I hated being called that ridiculous nickname, which my mother had given me when I was a kid.

“All right, then . . . no need to get upset.”

We were quiet for a long time. We’d just eaten, and, though it was turned on in front of us, the television had lost our attention.

Like every Saturday, my sister and I rested for a while after lunch and then we got ready to go to the neighborhood movie theater. There I relaxed, I stopped thinking about silly things, and I enjoyed the picture. Then we went for donuts and hot chocolate, another thing we did every Saturday. Finally we went home in peace, and there, in peace, I would fall asleep but never dream. Sunday went by quickly: that was the day we cleaned the house.

The following Monday, at last, I saw Jorge. Trying to act disinterested, I asked her what she’d done on Saturday.

“I went to the movies with my sister,” she said with satisfaction.

Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought: she has a sister and she likes the movies. Just like me.

“What a coincidence: I also went to the movies with my sister. Maybe we were in the same room, at the same time, without realizing it.”

“I went to the opening night of A Different Dawn. And you?”

“Um . . . we went to see The Terminator. That’s what they were showing at the theater near my house.”

“Ah,” Jorge answered, distractedly. “I haven’t heard of that one.”

“And the one you went to see, did it have anyone famous in it?”

“Of course! It had Julio Bracho. And it starred Andrea Palma and Pedro Armendáriz.”

It sounded to me like one of the pictures from the forties they showed on Channel 4, but I didn’t say anything. Jorge didn’t seem to want to talk. She fell asleep right away.

That night, my sister asked what had happened with her. I didn’t tell her everything; I left out the part about the movie. I didn’t want her to annoy me again, and she didn’t.

Jorge and I continued to see each other on that bench. Days went by, weeks. There was a moment when I tried to get more out of her. She preferred to hide, to turn my questions around on me. I answered, recounting my life without secrets. What did I have that was worth hiding? We became friends, more than friends. That is, we grew very close, very much alike in some sense—we both liked peanut candies with caramel and the candied figs the street vendor would take from bench to bench—but we never managed to have what one would call a romance. We never even saw each other away from those benches. On the verge of suspecting Jorge might be crazy, I repressed the thought. It was that every month she brought a new issue of Mexico Today. And every time I asked if I could see it, I saw that it was fifty years old and advertised things that were no longer available: Ipana toothpaste, The Business and Banking School on Palma 27, Printemps de Paris perfume, Boujois red lipstick that purportedly “avoided the painted look,” Quina Laroche tonic wine, Eno fruit salt, and who knows how many other equally strange things.

Maybe there could have been something more between us, but I didn’t want it. I was afraid. I was afraid because I had dreamt about her when I was little and I didn’t want to ruin this dream. One afternoon, taking advantage of the fact that everyone in the park was asleep and there was no one to see us, I took Jorge’s hands in mine. She looked at me intensely, her eyes very bright under the painted blue shadow of her eyelids, and she said to me:

“Next week maestro Lara will play at the Montecarlo. Why don’t you go? I can get you one of the best seats, and look, if you’re not too sleepy to stay up late and you want to wait for me, afterward we could go out somewhere. The Smyrna closes later.”

“Maestro Lara . . .” Was she talking about Agustín Lara? That was too much. And nonetheless, it didn’t matter. Truly, it didn’t matter. I was able to keep holding her gaze, but not her hands. I was about to tell her, “I’m afraid our friendship is doomed not to last,” but I sensed that she wouldn’t understand me. Her hands now free, she put one on my thigh and winked at me.

“Come on, you’ll see, you won’t regret it.”

Although my heart started to beat fast, there was something in this gesture that seemed repulsive to me. I repressed it, relegating it to the depths of my consciousness. It didn’t fit with the woman I had dreamed about as a boy: a woman still young, subtle, and beautiful, despite the dream being now very old.

“Instead, Jorge, why don’t you come have tea with us? My sister makes fritters.”

“I’ll telephone you soon,” she said dryly. But she didn’t call. She didn’t call, and, furthermore, she stopped coming to the park. “What if I upset her?” I asked myself. Maybe I said something I shouldn’t have. Or maybe she thought me very silly. Why didn’t I take advantage of the opportunity she was giving me? Anyone else in my place would have known what to do, I reproached myself continually. Every afternoon in Murillo Park I hoped to see her, and at night I had elaborate fantasies of scenes in which Jorge and I found each other again in her world, not this so imperfect world. I saw her dressed in a vaporous organdy dress with very high heels, seated on a black velvet cushion, smoking. We enjoyed ourselves until midnight in exciting places, after which we would begin to kiss in the streets, leaning against antique automobiles slick with the night’s dew; drunk and happy, we would lurch out into the fog to walk down a street with no end.

I asked Martínez about her again. I asked all the others. They not only had not seen her, they said they didn’t know her. They’re making fun of me, I thought. How could it be possible that not one of them had noticed her? She with whom I had shared my siesta on so many afternoons! No, they insisted, they didn’t know her, they hadn’t seen me talking to anyone on that bench; they didn’t remember any woman of that description.

I began to spend the period of my siesta looking for Jorge. I found the Yellow Pages for recent years, and there I looked for the Montecarlo. There were four motels that rented rooms by the hour and some public baths under that name, all in different parts of the city. The time I had for my siesta wasn’t enough; I had to invest more and more hours into investigating her whereabouts. I, who always took refuge at home at twilight, got to know the city at night. I got to know horrible places, none with an employee named Jorge handling the coat check: they didn’t even have a coat check. Finally, I confirmed the address of the old Montecarlo. There wasn’t anything there anymore. Nothing! I regretted being so stupid. Out of nothing but shyness I had never asked Jorge for her telephone number, though she had mine. She never called me, however, and I never found her: and after some months, I returned to my routine of siestas in Murillo Park and quit fantasizing. I went back to my friends: Martínez, the couple, young Ramiro.