Among Strange Victims (39 page)

And so Rodrigo had in the end, if rather vaguely, agreed to join the hypnotists at least once, just to hear Jimmie's explanation of the project firsthand. That was the most Marcelo could get from him, and he was satisfied.

A few days after that conversation with Marcelo, Rodrigo decided to make a foray beyond the walls of Puerta del Aire and go out for a drink one evening, on his own, in the center of Los Girasoles. Marcelo had lent him a little money to cover his expenses, and so that he could pretend he was receiving payment from Velásquez for the phantom proofreading he was phantasmagorically undertaking.

He asked Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, the security guard, for the number of a cab service, and was set down in a street flanking the main square. He walked around the colonial part of town without much idea of what he was looking for, and even went a little farther on to the market, where, despite the fact that the stalls had closed, things were quite lively.

The cantina he entered didn't look too much like the typical local joint: it was, rather, a touristy spot serving regional brews. Only a couple of tables were occupied, and a jukebox was pumping out deafening boleros.

At one of the tables, the darkest and farthest from the bar, Rodrigo made out two foreign girls, looking half-lost and too naive for a country like Mexico. After a couple of shots of tequila at the bar, he plucked up his courage and went over to their table. They, the foreign girls, were very young, and Rodrigo was surprised to see them alone in a bar, without a man or responsible adult to chaperone them. One was good-looking, in a gamin kind of way, with a pretty nose and outlandishly long black eyelashes. Her hair was short, and she seemed, from her smile, more willing than the other to strike up a conversation.

Rodrigo asked if he could sit down, and the girl with the long lashes answered with a smile while taking a cigarette from a packet and rummaging in her bag for a lighter. Rodrigo decided that what could have been indifference was assent and took the seat beside her. The other girl seemed more concerned with the ambiance of the cantina and only gave him a distracted, aloof glance, the way you look at someone who comes up to offer goods for sale at an inopportune moment.

The girl with the lashes was called Domitile and was French. She spoke faltering Spanish but incorporated into it Norteño expressions, as if she had learned to speak by deciphering narco-corridos. They were both nineteen and had been living in Mexicali for eight
months on a cultural exchange—as they explained—which allowed them to spend a year in Mexico learning the language before returning to begin their university studies in their respective countries—the more standoffish one was from Poland. Rodrigo was surprised by the unlikely fate that had befallen them, and jokingly apologized, in the name of all Mexicans, for the ugliness of Mexicali. Domitile agreed, smiling widely again, and explained that they were now on a group trip around the whole country, with the aim of experiencing something besides the unbearable heat of their adoptive city. In comparison with Mexicali, Los Girasoles seemed—according to the French girl—like paradise. The rest of the group was in a hotel on the outskirts of town, and they were the only ones who had dared to leave the comfort of their accommodations to seek a little local color and sample something of the way of life in the town. They had ended up in this cantina thanks to a guidebook—a particularly bad one—that only suggested anodyne places that were, therefore, characteristic of every town and settlement mentioned.

The Polish girl, with obvious annoyance, moved her seat away from her companion's cigarette smoke, and Rodrigo took advantage of this distance to strike up a more intimate conversation with Domitile. She was from Nantes, had never before been outside France, and had chosen Mexico in the hope of finding a more humid climate and the constant sound of danceable music, only to be confronted with the fact that neither of these things existed in Mexicali. The Norteña music was, for her, little less than dodecaphonic, and she invariably suffered a nosebleed every afternoon due to the exquisite sun of the city and the desert dust. Her journey around Mexico, though brief and organized by people unacquainted with the local terrain, was in some way redeeming the previous months of suffering. She even thought Los Girasoles was pretty, compared with the neighborhood in which she had lived in Mexicali, in the house of a middle-class couple who had given the two girls room and board in exchange for sending their son to France the following year.

Domitile didn't know much about Mexico, and what she did know was information that Rodrigo, a resident of the capital and more used to the southern cities, didn't share. She told stories about
quinceañeras where the people fired into the air after a quarter of an hour spent swigging from a bottle with no label.

Rodrigo learned that the other girl was called Daga, or rather that she had an unpronounceable name that she had exchanged for this simpler nickname while in Mexico. Daga muttered a beautifully enunciated “Mucho gusto” when she felt herself being referred to, and then asked, in a Spanish her companion must have envied, if he liked the music in the cantina. At that moment, a deeply emotional song was playing that Rodrigo had heard one too many times the year before, at the exit of every metro station and in the streets crammed with ambulant vendors around the museum. He said no, he didn't like Mexican music, or at least not this kind, and that the only Mexican music he did like was the
son jarocho
and some rock 'n' roll numbers from the sixties that were extremely free translations of songs from the States: “Angélica María, for instance, or the incunable Rockin Devil's,” added Rodrigo, making erroneous use of an adjective that, to him, always sounded like it meant famous. Daga looked as if she had no idea what he was talking about, and Domitile explained that Mexicali only had rancheras and narco-corridos, and that they still hadn't worked out the difference between these two genres despite having spent various months being forced to listen to them, in the same way that prisoners in Guantánamo had to listen to Barney the dinosaur. To Rodrigo, this political allusion sounded, quite rightly, frivolous, and he thought his relationship with these outsiders was, from that moment, condemned to unmitigated failure.

Rodrigo ordered a round of beers and two tequilas (Daga didn't want one), and they clinked glasses in a not especially cordial toast while he returned to his private conversation with Domitile. She had not yet been to
DF
but would be going there in five or six days, she couldn't remember exactly when, and Rodrigo recommended a couple of neighborhoods not to be missed during her nocturnal excursions, when she again left her boring group of students in the boring hotel restaurant to go out and sample the local nightlife of that monstrous city. Domitile wrote down the names in a notebook she carried in her bag and thanked him for the information with disarming innocence. She said
DF
was what she was most looking
forward to because she'd read the French translation of Bolaño's
The Savage Detectives
as soon as she'd learned that she had been awarded the annual exchange grant (in fact, what she said was “anal exchange grant,” but Rodrigo turned a deaf ear to the imbecilic pun and inwardly pardoned Domitile's poor command of the language). Rodrigo told her he hadn't read
The Savage Detectives,
even though he had in fact done so and hadn't liked it, and preferred to sound ignorant rather than question the adolescent's tastes. Domitile attempted, without much luck, to summarize the plot of the novel but stopped short to include Daga in the conversation, referring to one of their traveling companions whom they had secretly nicknamed Ulises Lima (Daga had also read Bolaño, apparently).

They continued drinking and tried to agree on which one of them would go to the jukebox to choose the next record. Rodrigo gave way under pressure from the others, alleging his knowledge of the field, and walked to the jukebox, taking a five-peso coin from the pocket of his pants. As he began to flick through the sheets of the cantina's musical menu, a drunk who was sinking into sentimentality in a nearby chair shouted, “Don't put on anything stupid, you fucking sod,” and Rodrigo felt too intimidated to choose a song based on his very personal criteria, so he returned to the table and said, “We'd better be going.” Domitile understood the situation and looked serious. Daga was already serious and simply took her bag from the back of her chair and sprang up, as if she had been wanting to do so for several hours.

They left the cantina, and Rodrigo realized that Domitile was having difficulty walking, as if she were very drunk or some bug had bitten the sole of her left foot. He inquired and discovered that the girl's unsteady gait was a mixture of drunkenness and accident: she'd twisted her ankle a few days earlier, at a waterfall they had visited in another state; besides which, she was sloshed, and when she was sloshed she always walked a bit oddly. From her explanation, Rodrigo understood that Domitile had only ever been sloshed in Mexico, and he thought of her parents' concern when they learned that Mexicali was Mexicali and that laws in Mexico were mere suggestions.

Domitile started saying her elder sister was still calculating the price of things in francs, but that she, born seven years later, didn't
remember ever having seen a franc and that euros seemed to have been there forever. She laughed inappropriately, unconcerned whether either of her companions shared the joke, if that's what it was. They walked around the market in search of another open bar and during that search passed along a street lined with prostitutes.

The only open cantina they came across had a more dubious air than the one they had left, although to an inexperienced eye, it might have been the very same cantina, which is exactly what Daga said when they looked inside: “It's the same cantina.” In any case, they decided to try their luck and went in. It was much more crowded than the other and was so noisy that all three of them, without saying so, felt sheltered in some form of anonymity. They found an empty table, and when they sat down, after borrowing another chair, Rodrigo thought he had no clue what he was doing there. This cantina also had a jukebox, and the music it was pumping out seemed like an exact copy of the other: boleros about the stoical endurance of the nostalgia for a lost joy. It was obvious he wasn't going to get either of these girls into bed, much less the two of them together, nor did it seem probable that their conversation would be particularly enlightening. He considered beating a retreat but was beset by a vague sense of guilt and decided to stay with them for at least a while longer, so as not to leave them at the mercy of the drunks.

But his guess that the drunks would keep their distance on seeing him sitting with the foreign girls was completely mistaken. They hadn't finished their first beer before a short guy, his head almost shaven, wafted beery breath in his face, shouting into his ear a request to be introduced to his friends. Rodrigo didn't know how to react and chose what was, perhaps, the worst possible option: he said they weren't his friends, that he'd only just met them, and didn't think they were interested in doing anything or getting to know anyone. Seeking complicity with the drunk, he said he'd already tried it on one of them and been told to fuck off, and they'd also told him they had big gringo boyfriends who were coming to pick them up a little later in another bar.

The drunk with the almost shaven head and the obstinacy of someone used to getting his way continued to insist, even though he
appeared to have swallowed Rodrigo's explanation and taken the bait of the sham friendship. Forgetting about his prey for a moment, he pulled up his chair until he was practically on Rodrigo's lap and began telling him about isolated episodes from his life. He had a fat wife, and a daughter he was proud of, whose picture he had as the background image on his malfunctioning cell phone. He was a state policeman, and if Rodrigo had any problems during his stay in Los Girasoles, he just had to mention his name, Oliver Rodríguez, to free himself from the injustice his colleagues shamelessly doled out. “You gotta grease the wheels if you wanna move,” the policeman pronounced, making it clear he also took advantage of outsiders to make it comfortably through to payday.

It needed a few more wiles to convince Oliver Rodríguez that the two gringas didn't want to fuck him, and that he should leave the table of the impromptu trio and return to his solitary corner, where he knocked back a couple more drinks before departing—all the while talking to himself—through the wooden swinging doors leading to the street.

And it was while Rodrigo was watching, with relief, the departure of Oliver Rodríguez, the drunken policeman, that he saw Micaela cross the threshold in the opposite direction. The girl's solitary presence in the doorway only lasted a second before Jimmie came in behind her and swept the room with the expert gaze of a person prepared for any eventuality. A second or two that, for Rodrigo, seemed to extend in time like a wet shirt thrown up by its extremities, two elastic seconds, or maybe three that seemed to last five or six of the seconds we normally experience, sometimes with greater shame than glory but always without the power to stop the passage of time, as he would have liked to have stopped it at that instant, because Rodrigo had forgotten about Domitile and Daga and thought the alcohol must have been adulterated, since there was no other way to explain the intense heat rising from his stomach and manifesting itself at the back of his throat as an extreme dryness, as if all the dust of Los Girasoles had been summoned to appear in his throat, as if someone had ordered a cemetery to be constructed in his mouth and people were throwing handfuls of earth onto the simple coffins of their most recent dead.

There are coincidences in real life that appear to be dictated by the cliché that rules songs of love and vengeance with an iron fist, and there are coincidences that appear to be neither forced nor gratuitous but essentially necessary, inevitable, and evident, and that no one, having experienced them, would dare say were the creations of an affectedly falsetto voice or an eccentric personality, but are, rather, events with undeniable religious echoes, even if these coincidences involve, as in this case, a song of love and vengeance issuing from a jukebox. Because as soon as the door of the cantina allowed the policeman to leave and set up the arrival of Micaela, suddenly, in the middle of a line, the song playing was interrupted and another began, as equally new to Rodrigo as its predecessor, but in some way related or foreseen, like those songs we hear one single time in our childhood and never again until the day they are played on the most unlikely radio program, and then we remember we have already lived that moment. The words of the song were clear, and the voice was not nasal, unlike all the others that had pulsed through the cantina. It was a female voice and a sad song, like the sad, female figure who entered at that moment through the wooden door and let her eyes wander in the semidarkness until they met with, at the darkest, most distant table, Rodrigo's, in an elastic, unreal moment of more or less two seconds that both of them would remember as the clearest they had ever experienced. Because there are clear moments when the air really does seem to be a docile material that allows us to understand the world, and there are dirty, noisy moments when any degree of lucidity will be immediately held in check by the insipid material of things that impose themselves like symptoms of a very serious disease we all agree to call “world,” or “cruel world” if we are tragedians.