My eyes and Aunt Sofi’s eyes are fixed on Agustina, alert to her reaction, If Bichi’s coming then we have to clean, because this place is turned upside down, she said in excitement, but so naturally that no one could have suspected that only yesterday she was spewing hollow-voiced venom, and in fact the apartment was all topsy-turvy because of the notorious dividing line that she herself had drawn when she was waiting for that other, crazy visitor, her father, Then can we put the furniture back in place?, asked Aunt Sofi, and Agustina said yes, that there was no reason why everything should be piled up on one side, It’s not like we were about to wax the floor or give dance lessons here, she said, as if she herself hadn’t been the engineer of the madness, We have to put all the furniture back and tidy this up completely, she ordered, and I felt a jolt of alarm, What do you mean, tidy it up completely?, I asked, fearing that the pots of water, the purifications, and the whole ungodly commotion would start up again, Tidy it up, tidy it up, I mean put everything back the way it was, she answered, slightly irritated by such silly questions, and she set to it with renewed vigor, excessive vigor, I thought worriedly, It isn’t good for her to get so worked up, I whispered in Aunt Sofi’s ear, Why no, it’s not, but who’s to stop her, we must trust in God, Aguilar, Well, yes, Aunt Sofi, we’ll have to, won’t we.
As Agustina began reorganizing the house for the hundredth time, Aunt Sofi and I sat down to rest after that marathon trip to Sasaima and back, Tell me how you and Bichi ended up in Mexico, Aunt Sofi, I asked her, and just then Agustina interrupted us, saying, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not sure about these green walls, But they’re recommended by feng shui, I ventured to suggest, trying to reassure her, Screw feng shui, she said, I’m thinking that this space would look brighter if we painted the walls burnt orange, Well it was like this, Aunt Sofi told me, ignoring Agustina’s outbursts, after Eugenia delivered the coup de grâce by lying about the photographs, Bichi left the house just as he was, in a sweater and boots over his pajamas and nothing else, but looking so clearly as if he’d made up his mind that we all knew he wasn’t planning to come back, and meanwhile, in a matter of seconds, I had gone from being sure my life was over to suspecting that the only thing that was over was life as I’d understood it up until then, Enough of these passive little moves, Aunt Sofi ordered herself, it’s time for me to play my own ace. The bag she had taken to church with her was still within reach on a chair, next to the hat with a feather in it and the palm branch blessed by the priest. And don’t ask me why, she says, but instead of grabbing just the bag I ran off with all three things, hurrying up to my room to get the money I kept in a dresser drawer, which was $7,500 in traveler’s checks and 250,000 pesos, as well as my coat, my passport, and my little jewelry box, then I swept through Bichi’s room, snatching up the first pair of pants I saw in the closet, and I flew down the stairs, and when I say flew I mean flew, because my feet didn’t even touch the steps, and as I passed the television room where the rest of the family was gathered, I could see that Agustina was still on her knees, with a dumbfounded look on her face, and I felt a twinge in my heart, saying to myself, That girl is the one who’ll end up paying, and I promised myself to come back someday for her; as I went out, I saw that Bichi was already a few blocks away, and when I realized that I was still clutching the palm branch in one hand, I threw it far away from me, Goodbye, palm of martyrdom, and I ran after the boy and caught up with him, Let’s go, I said, and Bichi answered, We’re already gone.
I remember that I arrived at Don Conejo a little after nine, and there was Anita and her amazing breasts, Anita and her brown legs, Anita and her long hair smelling of peach shampoo; uncomplicated Anita, determined to get me into bed with her that night by any means possible, the two of us sitting in Don Conejo with a couple of beers and an order of spicy beef empanadas in front of us. Anita leaned into me with her breasts and her peach smell and said that she’d found out who had paid for the hotel suite my wife was in that weekend, Well, paid isn’t quite the right word, actually, the hotel is looking for him because he never paid, he left a credit card number that the bank reported as canceled the next day, and that isn’t the only bill he hasn’t settled with us, because between one thing and another he owes us a fortune, Anita won’t stop talking and I don’t want to listen, now that she’s about to reveal the name of the man who was with Agustina, I don’t want to know it anymore.
I don’t know why, but it no longer mattered, Agustina and I had eaten
obleas
at the place where the old lady was decapitated and everything else was beside the point; she had taken me by the hand to show me the house and gardens in Sasaima, This is the orchid grotto and this is the stable and this was my horse Brandy’s saddle, and this is the little clearing where we played soccer, and these galleries are where we played cops and robbers, this is the tree I hit when I fell off Brandy and I broke my collarbone, come here, Aguilar, and sit with me in the hammock, it was on these stalks of bamboo that my mother stuck pieces of fruit for the birds, there were cardinals, parakeets, bluebirds, and canaries, this is the basket that Aunt Sofi always took with her to gather eggs, and come now, Aguilar, you have to see the Sweet River, listen, you can hear it from here, you don’t know how smooth and black the stones of the Sweet River are, and they heat up in the sun, let’s go and sit on them and dangle our feet in the water. After those black stones, I thought, what did it matter to me anymore what the name of the man at the hotel was, let him be called whatever he wanted now that Agustina had taken me to see the river of her childhood, I don’t know, in some way I’d already gotten past the pain of having been cheated on, the betrayal or the mistake or whatever it was, and hearing a name now would just bring it all back.
So while Anita was talking I let my mind wander, focusing my attention on anything else, on her improbable nails that were no longer striped but now painted with stars, tiny blue stars on a silver background, which meant that they were still flags, though not French flags but some other country’s flags, flags with stars; Anita kept telling me things but I was thinking about the Cuban flag, with its single star, white?, red?, and the gringo flag, on which there were lots of stars but which was the reverse of the flags on Anita’s nails because its stars were white on a blue background; the Algerian flag, if I was remembering correctly, had a moon and a star; the Argentinean flag had a sun, and after all the sun is a star; I imagined that there must be stars on the flags of many Arab countries, like Iraq and Egypt, though those stars would probably be green, and as Anita tickled my forearm with the tips of her starry fingernails, I thought, What an incredible thirst for the heavens, there are stars on almost every flag on earth and yet the earth itself appears on no flag I’ve ever seen, and still I couldn’t help hearing the man’s name when Anita’s mouth finally uttered it, Midas McAlister? Midas McAlister was the one she was with?, Yes, yes I know who Midas McAlister is, he’s an old boyfriend of Agustina’s, and then I felt sick and it occurred to me that it had been a bad idea to have that beer and those empanadas; suddenly there was a burning in my chest and I suspected that the culprit was the hot peppers, or maybe it was Midas McAlister, and I went looking for the restroom to splash water on my face and be alone for a minute.
By the time I returned to the table, Anita was worried, I was just about to come looking for you, she said, Let’s go looking for someone, but let’s make it Midas McAlister, because he owes me an explanation, or rather he owes my wife one, What are you going to do, beat him up?, No, I just want him to explain what happened that weekend, then Anita offered to tell me where we might find him on the condition that things not turn violent, That is if we can find him at all, she warned, because he’s vanished, I tell you, the hotel wants to kill him but they can’t find him, people say he’s disappeared from the face of the earth because he heard that the government was going to issue an extradition order for him.
So we ended up at a gym that belonged to him, a gym with an English name in one of the residential neighborhoods on the north side of the city, but it was already closed because it was almost ten, and the tall, dark man who was pulling down the gates and locking up was him, it was Midas McAlister, I recognized him as soon as I set eyes on him, That’s the man who was with her, I said, Yes, that’s him, Anita confirmed, So this is the moment of truth. And yet it wasn’t the moment of truth but a moment of confusion, because there I was challenging this Midas person and he swears to me by the Holy Virgin that he’s Rorro, not Midas, Rorro my ass, I shouted, although now I admit that although I was standing up to the so-called Rorro, I was doing it cautiously, because the bastard was a real athlete, one of those professional muscle men, and then three or four gym members came out on the way to their cars and confirmed that this actually was Rorro, an employee of the gym, the man in charge of weights and stretching, and that Midas, on the other hand, was the owner, but that he hadn’t been seen for days, He hasn’t been back here, That’s right, he hasn’t been back, No one knows where he is, No, no one knows, and you aren’t the first to come looking for him, No, you’re certainly not the first, This place has already been ransacked several times and it’s likely that they’ll close it any day now and seal it off, Yes, extremely likely, says Rorro, and I’m owed three months’ salary.
But I saw you, I accused him, returning to the offensive, I saw you coming out of that hotel room where my wife was, Then you must be her husband, nice to meet you, I’m Rorro, said the Midas McAlister who claimed his name was Rorro, and he offered me his right hand in a way that seemed friendly and even honest; convincing, you might say. I was the one who called to let you know that you should pick her up at the hotel, he told me, And who gave you my number?, Your wife did, she gave it to me herself and asked me to call you, She asked you to call me?, I demanded, feeling at last that I was myself again, that after so many days and nights of emptiness I had recovered my true self, Are you sure of what you’re saying?, Sure as can be, she gave me the number, and if she hadn’t, how would I have gotten it, think for a second, pal, of course it was your wife who asked me to call you, Thank you so much, Rorro, and please forgive me, I said, but now tell me what all this was about, what happened to my wife, why was she at that hotel with you, what were you doing there with her?
Come on, said Anita, who was the only one who seemed to know how things should be done, let’s all go sit at that bar on the corner and we’ll buy a drink for Mr. Rorro and ask him nicely to do us the favor of explaining everything, because we’re all friends here, Don Rorro, Well there isn’t much I can tell you, but yes, thank you, I will take you up on that drink, because the cold gets into your bones, something to warm me up, and once they were at the bar and had downed a few shots, the man who called himself Rorro kept insisting, I wasn’t doing anything, Señor, I wasn’t doing anything, Señorita, I was just taking care of the lady who was so upset, a very pretty lady, if you don’t mind me saying so, but not right in the head, I was taking care of her because I had received instructions to take care of her, Whose instructions, Rorro, have another shot and maybe then you can tell us, Instructions from my boss, I already told you, from my boss Don Midas, who else, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him and to think he left owing me three months’ salary, And where in hell is Don Midas?, I asked him, You said it yourself, hell’s as likely as anywhere, because the honest truth is no one knows where he’s gone, and if I knew, don’t you think I’d be there claiming my back pay.
When I was convinced the man didn’t know any more than he was telling, I left the bar with the firm resolution that beginning the next day I’d search high and low for Midas McAlister until I found him, determined to dig him out of whatever hole he was in, even if it took me a lifetime, and how could I have known then that the only person in the universe who would have any idea of where to find him was Agustina herself. As I was about to get into the van, I saw Rorro come out of the bar and run toward me, motioning for me to wait, I forgot to give you this, he said, offering me a little card, your wife had it in her hand until she dropped it at the hotel, I picked it up because it struck me as unusual and I put it in my pocket, and here I am still carrying it around, the only reason I haven’t thrown it away is because I was afraid it might be bad luck to mess with it, what if it turned out to have some kind of strange powers, take it, I’m giving it back to you since it belongs to your wife, she was holding it tight.
As soon as I took the card I recognized my own left hand, shrunken down and laminated in plastic, the back on one side and the palm on the other, it was the Hand That Touches, made from the photocopies that I’d sent Agustina at the beginning of our time together, so when I saw it and I heard that Agustina had been clutching it all through the dark episode, I couldn’t help myself and I shouted, This is a miracle, What’s a miracle?, asked Anita, looking at the card and declaring it strange, Very strange, as a girl I spooked myself playing the Hairy Hand game and now I pray to the Miraculous Hand, but I’ve never heard of this Hand That Touches, Come on, Anita, get in the van and I’ll take you to Meissen, I offered, but no sir, Anita expected more, she’d seen me through the hard times and now she was going to demand some good times; Anita hadn’t planned to show off her lovely breasts for nothing, Anita was used to people following through, pretty Anita switched from the casual
tú
to the formal
usted
, her voice turning cold when she spoke to me, and she said, No, Señor, not Meissen, now that I’ve helped you find what you were looking for, you have to take me out dancing for a while, and what could I say but, Of course I’ll take you dancing, Anita, it’s the least I can do to thank you for your sweet company in my times of trial.