As the days went by, I began to understand that Rat’s fame was, to say the very least, exaggerated: he was just as bland and apathetic as any other of my sister’s teenage friends (with the exception of Citlali, whose scent of bubblegum held me spellbound, returning to my memory in waves even hours after I’d smelled it). At least when he was in our living room, Rat had no temporary tattoos and didn’t seem particularly threatening. He did smoke, in an unbroken chain I’d only ever seen equaled by the assistant head of Paideia, an obese woman whose sweaters always reeked of cat piss and full ashtrays. For any kid with a minimum of brains, Rat’s ever more frequent appearances in the living room, in my father’s absence, would have had an obvious explanation: he was dating my sister. The erotic subtext of the situation was, however, lost on me, caught up as I was in a symbolic reading of the events and, naturally, concerned by Teresa’s sudden disappearance, the effects of which seemed to be multiplying by the day.
According to my theory, Rat was there, smoking in the living room, because I’d somehow conjured him up when I wrote that note to my father explaining that I’d gone out to play with him. After I’d invited him into my life from the realm of fiction, Rat had answered my call in real life. The fact that he’d become Mariana’s friend was merely a consequence of that invocation.
Entranced by this new variant on my megalomania, I started to spend my time writing false notes on a wide range of topics with the hope that they would have similar consequences in reality. In order to heighten the magical or parapsychological effects of my invocations, I used to pen those notes—expressions of my most secret desires—on pieces of colored origami paper and then fold them into imperfect cranes and abstract pagodas, convinced that this would cause my fantasies to be realized more quickly.
I wrote an alternate ending for the soccer World Cup, wrote about time travel from the comfort of my closet, and, finally, about Teresa’s unexpected, joyful return one morning carrying a Hawaiian pizza. But Brazil continued to be the world champions, my Zero Luminosity Capsule was still just an ordinary closet with the addition of pillows, and Teresa didn’t return to our lives, with or without pizza, on any morning of that summer. Teresa didn’t in fact return on any morning of any season of any year.
8
ONE DAY MY FATHER ANNOUNCED that he’d be later than usual getting back from work. He went into unnecessary detail about the reason for this, speaking of the many implications of the signing of NAFTA. I had no idea then what NAFTA was, but I did know that anything that needed signing was never going to be either fun or interesting. Life had already taught me that lesson. One of the most feared moments of the whole of any year was when Teresa had to sign off on my report card. After her sixteenth birthday, Mariana had spent two weeks practicing what would be her new and definitive signature: her name written in a hand that seemed illegible to me. One day she even practiced that signature on some important document that Teresa had left by the telephone and received a severe reprimand. The previous year, at a school bazaar, I’d had to sign my marriage certificate: my wife—a girl in my class whose name, Karime, seemed mysterious and seductive—teased me about my signature and decided that our marriage was over, only seconds after it had begun. Signatures, in short, belonged to the murkiest areas of the adult world, so I assumed that my father’s late return from work that August evening was attributable to some evil force, and I was a little worried.
Mariana, on the other hand, seemed to cheer up when she heard that my father would be delayed; that gave her more leeway in terms of smoking cigarettes with Rat, drinking beer with Citlali, or breaking the unspoken rules of our home in some other way. For my part, I found that need to transgress incomprehensible; not because I had any particular liking for established authority or the rules Teresa imposed on us, but because I loved repetition, patterns, the way the days always divided along the same axis, like a square piece of paper retaining the memory of its previous folds. Transgression, my sister’s ultimate aim in life and almost obsessive desire, was for me like folding a piece of paper in the opposite direction to the crease, like ignoring all the clues that seemed to be shouting out for you to choose a given adventure. Since then I’ve learned that a piece of paper can be folded down the middle only so many times, and that the adventures that lead you to the most satisfactory ending of a story aren’t the ones you choose by rationally weighing the significance of the clues, but those undertaken in the heat of the moment—that sheet of paper without folds, that eternal square with no memory.
That day, Rat turned up, as was usual, at about three in the afternoon, accompanied by one of his bodyguards and carrying a paper bag containing cans of beer. He looked cleaner than usual, as if he’d showered before leaving home. I wondered if his escort had waited in the street until he’d completed his ablutions. That’s the way it would work. With his friends, Rat behaved like a hardened criminal, although his actual record included, at very most, petty theft from local grocery stores and perhaps the occasional use of soft drugs. His freshly showered appearance humanized him even further in my eyes, as if he’d finally fallen from the Olympian heights
