most present of present times when a group of boys grabbed me from behind, stripped off my jacket, and put me in one of the red shirts of the team, school, sect, league, union, alliance, federation, band, clan, tribe, order, brotherhood, guild, club, squad, firm, division, branch, chapter, and common market of the strongest and fastest of nations: Club Youth, which is a kick in the ass and a delirium of the soul, believing you are immortal and knowing you are a badass, in possession of everything and owner of nothing, irrelevance of the passing, celebration of the moment, seminal potency, lost opportunities, rivers in the sand, ocean of the future, sirens that weep: I saw them and I saw myself, all the days of a youth that was dying, harassed, came back to me surrounded by a mariachi band, a melancholy torero, some young girls on vacation, some adolescents in soccer shirts, and a lost woman whose residence, however, I knew. It was enough to go to the house on Pedregal with an arrest warrant arranged by the lawyer Sangines to have the shameless Nazario Esparza and his consecrated concubine shit volcanic rock.
On the other hand, I was captive to the huge crowds coming in and going out of an airport with only two runways for twenty million locals and who knows how many foreigners. I stopped counting. The useless anarchy defeated me. The secret tremor of self-destruction. The chaos that appeared with no exit, drowning me in its mere existence.
I wanted to urinate.
I went into the strategic bathroom, asking myself How did I get here?
I produced my usual kidney beer.
I washed my hands.
I looked in the mirror.
Was it me?
Behind me, someone was sitting on the toilet.
He hadn’t closed the door.
His trousers eddied around his ankles.
His shirt covered his noble parts.
I looked at his face reflected in the mirror.
He looked at me with great melancholy.
It was the face of a sad clown.
He looked at me asking me without speaking: How do we respond to a senseless world?
It was the voice of a sick clown.
An undulating light fell on his head.
I felt ill.
I wanted to throw up.
I made a mistake.
I opened the door of a closet instead of the door to a stall.
I was stunned.
In the closet, a dark, good-looking young man, his pants around his ankles as if he were going to take a shit, was fucking a woman with her skirt bunched around her waist and her panties entangled in the high heels of her shoes.
She looked at me with a strange start, as if she were expecting to be caught and liked the idea of a third person seeing her fornicate.
She was a modern woman, young, with the attitude of an animal of prey, but she no longer had the elegance I had once attributed to her.
I looked at her buttock. She had a bee tattooed on it.
I took off the soccer club’s red shirt.
WHEN WE ENTERED the house on Pedregal de San Angel together-Errol, Jerico, and I-we didn’t know what awaited us.
Sara was detained there. I had the advantage over Jerico of having seen the bee on her buttock. I said nothing to him because at that moment there was a certain tension between us. And besides, “circumstances” push us to keep some secrets without really distrusting each other. I abandoned the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, uninhabitable without the life I had shared with Lucha Zapata. I took the liberty of going and leaving the door open, as if chance would be the next inhabitant of the modest little house of the woman who had filled me with so much passion. Passion becomes diseased if it counts only on an empty house for commemoration, as if past love were a phantom. I decided that the intensity of my relationship with Lucha required a final act that would not be like a stage curtain. She had left. I was going. The house would remain open, as if summoning a new couple. As if the destiny of our “nest” was to call to future birds.
I don’t know. Only when she left did I realize how much I needed her, how much I loved her. There was a certain cynical disloyalty in this feeling, since, with admitted ingenuousness, I had already decided to fall in love with the svelte, elegant Asunta Jordan. What I couldn’t foresee is that the trio of women who concerned me would eventually join another ghost from a past in some sense remote, for between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a galaxy intervenes.
“Operation Sara”-for it was an entire operation-implied deciding first between returning to the prison to speak with Miguel Aparecido so he could enlighten me, or consulting with the lawyer Sangines so he could orient me, or looking for Errol in some cabaret in the center of the city, or consulting with Jerico since in our erotic life we had shared the whore with the bee on her buttock.
This last proposition was the most difficult. I’ve already recounted how my life with Lucha Zapata had moved me away from Jerico and the apartment on Calle de Praga. The situation seemed to suit both of us on the basis of this premise: Jerico didn’t ask me about my constant absences and I didn’t inquire into his activities when he returned to Mexico. Except now my absences had become presences. Without the house on the Cerrada (without Lucha), I returned to my normal life (in the apartment on Praga). Except now I was living again with a Jerico who had taken advantage of my absence to envelop his presence in a mystery that daily life threatened to dispel.
To the preceding I should add that I multiplied my activities as an employee of Max Monroy’s company in Santa Fe and as a law clerk obliged to write a thesis on Machiavelli, while Jerico had entered the presidential residence of Los Pinos, where the president himself, in an act that could appear to me as unusual or irrelevant, had given my friend-he told me about it without moving a muscle in his face-the responsibility of organizing something like festivals, commemorations, and national entertainments for a “depoliticized” youth. Was it important? Was it trivial? As Jerico didn’t ask about my activities, I didn’t look into his. The fact is that the arrest of Nazario Esparza’s second wife obliged us to locate our old comrade the formerly bald Errol who, according to the presumptive criminal, played drums in a dive in the oldest section of the city.
His having told me that he had gone into the president’s office and received the assignment placed me in a circumstance of disloyalty. Jerico trusted me. And what was I going to tell him? My relationship with Lucha was mine alone, it was something almost sacred, it couldn’t be talked about by me or pawed over by other people, not even my fraternal friend Jerico. Was I betraying him with my secret? Should I open up to him? Was I inviting him to betray me as well? In fact, Jerico had told me he was collaborating at Los Pinos, something I already knew because Sangines had told us so, and he already knew I was working for Max Monroy. Jerico didn’t know about Lucha Zapata. Now he didn’t know about Asunta Jordan. I had two advantages over him in the persons of two women. Was I the disloyal partner in our old friendship? Or was he not telling me more than I knew about or more than I was hiding from him?
With this kind of suspicion I realized, thanks to small signs (attitudes, greetings, goodbyes, calculations that raised their heads then disappeared like small snakes in our shared domestic life), that our friendship was being muddied and I sincerely lamented it: Jerico was half of my life and his companionship was a way of expunging myself from my own past…
The incident in the airport and my decision to report the woman and the porter fornicating so happily in the men’s bathroom in reality created the opportunity for me to reconcile with Jerico and avoid a break, and for the two of us together to reinitiate a search that meant, in the long run, reknotting a lasso, tying up a thread before it broke, and coming together at the point where we had left the story: the burial of Senora Esparza and Errol’s truncated destiny.
“Where is Nazario Esparza?” was Don Antonio Sangines’s first and logical question when we told him about a case whose precedents he knew better than we did and possibly its consequences as well.
