Among Strange Victims (17 page)

Bea isn't sure if she heard the shot. It seems to her that a sharp, painful whistle has occupied her head from the moment she saw the pistol to when the man, kneeling on the platform, all his elegance giving way to desperation and pain, is detained by the local police. The woman does not seem so much dead as to have disappeared, as if by magic, among the many folds of her dress, which spills over the platform like an octopus whose insides have been emptied out.

After the bustle has died down and the curious onlookers have moved on, after the corpse has been removed to the morgue, Bea continues to watch, as if hypnotized, the silent dialogue between the top hat, still lying on the bench, and the bloodstain, ten or fifteen yards away.

A

None of the warnings about the ugliness of Los Girasoles had prepared Marcelo Valente for what he would find there. The town was dull to the core of its streetlights; the members of the academic community, perhaps a little more isolated from the real world than he had noted in other such institutions, were in the habit of generating unfounded rumors at lightning speed, and the reigning endogamy was so deeply entrenched that—as Professor Velásquez informed him—he had hardly even arrived before the aesthetics department was abuzz with speculation about the immediate future of his single status. Velásquez gave him a quick, politically incorrect summary of the physical virtues of each of the female professors, laying particularly irritating emphasis on the size of their respective breasts and the fact that he, Velásquez, had been married to two of them. (“But
the record's held by Porter, a miserable little gringo professor who's been here for six years and has already been married and divorced four times, each to a different member of the female teaching staff,” added Velásquez with an undisguised tinge of jealousy.)

Velásquez, despite the great romantic deeds he boasted of, was not a handsome man: short, potbellied, with graying hair on some areas of his scalp and the round glasses that had gone out of fashion three or four decades before. The prototype of the absentminded academic who manages to shine due to an unjustified confidence in himself and a glibness, not lacking in humor, that had to be—thought Marcelo—one of his most positive attributes.

The flight from Madrid to Mexico City had been easier and less tiring than Marcelo had expected; nothing like the multiple stopovers—Houston and then Lima—that had made his journey to Buenos Aires torture two years before, on a flight the university had gotten for free but that had cost him his mental equilibrium for two weeks, at the end of which he had promptly met Romina.

Descending into Mexico City, just before landing, he had been impressed by the interminable sea of small lights streaming up hillsides and along avenues like an inexhaustible flow of electricity. He had, nevertheless, expected more in the way of architecture; his idea of a metropolis was closer to Manhattan or a movie version of Tokyo: glass skyscrapers stretching to infinity, their façades mirroring the crisscrossing layers of cumulonimbi that darkened the afternoons with their threat of rain. In contrast, he discovered, from the descending plane, a sprawling city with low houses and the lines of the avenues emulating a nonfunctioning, disorganized sanguineous circulatory system.

In the airport, he had felt intimidated by the hardness of the local faces, the gaze—somewhere between humorous and scornful—of the customs officials, the friendliness of the unlicensed cabdrivers that masked a scam. He was to spend the night there in the city, close to the airport, and the next day Velásquez, who was in the capital on some personal business, would pick him up and drive him to Los Girasoles. It was, he was told, a six-hour journey, seven if there was traffic.

In Mexico City, Marcelo breathed air that, while foul and containing large quantities of lead, still held the glow of some ancient past. The dirty yellow line on the edge of the sidewalks, viewed from the cab, seemed to him a metaphor for just about everything, although he couldn't say exactly why. A tone of violated legality hung over things, leaving an ample margin for nameless atrocities, but also, paradoxically, for the construction of an untroubled, dissipated style of life. Everything had two sides. Marcelo thought he would have liked to explore that city for several more days, even months: a blind pilgrimage over the pedestrian bridges, along the boulevards with their sad eucalyptus trees, and through the rich, noisy bustle of the itinerant markets. But he would come back later, he thought, when he would have time to get properly acquainted with the Distrito Federal's sordid quaintness, the “defective” and the pure and simple “defect” of that blackened basin.

The hotel, a few minutes from the airport, was a mound of reinforced concrete and reflective windows with a neon sign at its apex. The sign alternated, according to the whim of the circuit breaker, between the words
hotel
and
otel.
The building overlooked the junction of two immense avenues, a noisy spot that promised to be constantly busy. Marcelo had asked the cabdriver at the airport to take him to any cheap hotel, reasonably nearby, since he had arranged to meet Velásquez for breakfast the next day in a restaurant in the same airport and then leave for the university town of Los Girasoles, where he was to fix his residence for the following year. The driver dropped Marcelo at the main entrance, and the moment he saw the place, the professor thought it showed no sign of adding anything positive to a first night in a city “charged with energy.” That was how he had formulated it to himself. Marcelo reconsidered his phrasing and was ashamed to find himself a doctor of contemporary rationality who was capable of uttering such an ambiguous cliché, an expression that, beyond the high-voltage cables running from pole to pole along the roadside, didn't relate to anything in particular. But perhaps it wasn't necessary that it did: the tangle of cables, exposed to the vagaries of the rains and the whims of earthquakes, was enough to leave one feeling no longer just concerned, but even deeply disturbed in one's innermost being,
attacked in that fraction of the soul one reserves for things that cannot be explained. This being the case, Marcelo went into the hotel as if affected by a premonition related to the energy resources of the nation offering him accommodation. None of that, he thought later, made any sense, but one does not select the weapons with which to assault one's peace of mind.

The bed had a metal frame, and the sheets had circular burn marks. Marcelo feared there would be scorpions or enormous cockroaches on the walls—a friend had told him a dismal story about bugs in Mexico City—but after a cautious inspection, he decided he was safe. He thought that perhaps the cabdriver had misunderstood his instructions and, on hearing he was looking for a cheap hotel, had decided what the Spanish passenger wanted was prostitutes. The hotel certainly did look as if it were normally used on a by-the-hour basis. The decor in his room was rather ugly: two Chinese jars of fake porcelain (they were plastic to the touch) on a painted wood-veneer table. And between the jars, as if standing guard, a small
TV
.

That night, he dreamed that Richard Foret came into his room dressed as a boxer and, without saying a single word, handed him the notebook in which he had recorded details of the perambulations of his final months. A so-far undiscovered notebook that he, Marcelo, would rescue from oblivion for the benefit of mankind.

The next day everything went as planned: Marcelo handed in his hotel key in the morning, asked at the reception desk for a cab, and returned to the airport. He quickly found Velásquez in the restaurant where they had arranged to meet—he had seen his face on the University of Los Girasoles' website—and sat down to breakfast with him. Velásquez seemed excited. He spoke rapidly, and some words were lost in the spiel, but what was important was not the detail but the torrent: he passed agilely from recounting the story of his catastrophic relationship with his second wife to glossing—with added insults—a talk he had heard in San Diego on the Surrealists and Mexico, then to recommending a cantina in Los Girasoles that served the only good bourbon to be had in the country—“the owner of the bar is a wetback who drives his truck full of bottles down from L.A. every two weeks,” babbled Velásquez, pausing only to take a sip of coffee.

Marcelo listened patiently, wondering if he would ever manage to understand all those strange turns of phrase the New World was continually spitting out at him. He was particularly fascinated by the diminutive in the phrase
ya merito,
which he roughly translated as “any second now,” and attempted to describe the spirit of the expression by referring to an essay by Roland Barthes; luckily for him, Velásquez pretended not to hear this display of his prowess and continued with his unstoppable cascade of verbosity.

During the drive to Los Girasoles, Velásquez quieted down a little and Marcelo felt, for the first time, that he might become his friend. The professor was a proficient driver, taking frequent puffs on a cigar that he held in his left hand and communicating with other vehicles through deft use of the horn. They crossed through such a diverse range of climates that when Marcelo surfaced from a torpor of several hours' duration and took a good look at the surrounding landscape, he thought for a moment they must have been on the road for more than a day and had already crossed over the frontier to the United States. But no, they were not so far north, not by a long way. Outside, the verdant forests and steep cliffs had disappeared, and now a wide plain stretched out around them, replete with shrubs, prickly pears, and yellow earth.

Los Girasoles was a town of some fifty thousand inhabitants in the middle of that plain. Before the university came, there had been nothing to justify a visit from a foreigner. Like all such towns, it had a rectangular main square with its church and government palace and, surrounding this, a not very extensive area of colonial buildings painted brick red. But beyond the center, the town lacked color: everything merged into the dry air of the plain. Houses with corrugated metal roofs, soccer fields dotted with stones, pedestrian bridges from which hung banners singing the praises of the administration of the moment. (“The Government of Los Girasoles is working for you: more pedestrian bridges for pedestrians.”)