Woes of the True Policeman (24 page)

No one knew where he lived. Some said that it was in Don Pedro Negrete’s basement, while others claimed that he didn’t have a place to call home and that he did sometimes sleep in the cells, empty or not, at the General Sepúlveda police station. Pancho was one of the few who knew from the start (in an extraordinary show of confidence on Gumaro’s part) that in fact he sometimes slept in Don Pedro’s basement, in a little room that had been fixed up especially for him, and sometimes in the cells at the station, but most nights, or days, he slept at a guesthouse in Colonia El Milagro, five blocks from Pancho’s apartment. The owner was a woman in her early fifties with a lawyer son who worked in Monterrey. She treated Gumaro like one of the family. Her husband was a policeman who had been killed in the line of duty. Her name was Felicidad Pérez and she was always asking Gumaro for little favors that he never granted.

Many times Pancho followed him from bar to bar until dawn.

Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying:

“My brain needs air.”

This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start to talk about vampires.

“How many Dracula movies have you seen?” he asked Pancho.

“None, Gumaro.”

“Then you don’t know much about vampires,” said Gumaro.

Other times he talked about desert towns or villages or hamlets that only communicated among themselves, with no regard for borders or language. Towns that were one or two thousand years old and where scarcely fifty or one hundred people lived.

“What towns are those, Gumaro?” Pancho asked.

“Towns of vampires or white worms,” said Gumaro, “which amounts to the same thing. Godforsaken shitholes where the urge to kill runs as strong as the urge to live.”

Pancho imagined two or three cantinas, one grocery store, and courtyards paved in concrete, facing west. Like Villaviciosa.

“So where are these towns?” he asked.

“Here and there,” said Gumaro, “on either side of the border, like a renegade state inside Mexico and also the United States. An invisible state.”

Once, for work, Gumaro had to visit one of these towns. Of course, he didn’t know what it was at the time.

“You never know these things,” he told Pancho.

The road was dirt, but it wasn’t bad, though the last twenty miles were only a track through the rocks and the desert. They arrived at four in the afternoon. The town had thirty inhabitants and half of the houses were empty. With Gumaro were Sebastián Romero and Marco Antonio Guzmán, two veteran Santa Teresa policemen. They were going to arrest a Mexican who had wiped out his two Yankee partners in San Bernabé, Arizona. It was the San Bernabé police chief who had gotten the tip and he called Don Pedro Negrete and came to an arrangement. The Santa Teresa policemen would arrest the killer and then cross the border with him. The men from San Bernabé would be waiting on the other side, and they would receive the prisoner. Afterward, they would say that they had found the killer wandering in the desert, howling at the moon like a coyote, with everything happening on the American side, everything perfectly legal.

Guzmán got sick as soon as they arrived. He was shivering with fever and vomiting, so they left him in the backseat of the car, covered with a blanket and babbling about masked wrestlers. Then Gumaro and Romero went from house to house through the town, guided by an old woman with a limp, but they didn’t find anything. Either the information they had gotten from the San Bernabé police chief was no good or the killer had long since disappeared, because they didn’t find a single scrap of evidence that he had ever been there.

One of the strange things that Gumaro saw as they went back and forth, aware already that the search was useless, were the eyes of some of the animals. They were rubbed-out eyes, he said to Pancho. Eyes from the beyond. Fading into nothing. As if the donkeys and dogs were intelligent and their souls were bigger than human souls.

“If it was up to me,” said Gumaro, “I would have drawn my gun and shot all those animals.”

Before it got dark they left without the man they’d come to find and back in Santa Teresa Don Pedro Negrete was very upset because he owed the police chief of San Bernabé a favor.

Gumaro talked about towns of white worms and towns of buzzards, towns of coyotes and towns of tiny birds. And these were precisely the things, he said, that a true policeman needed to know about. Pancho thought he was crazy. At dawn they went to eat pozole at El Almira, owned by Doña Milagros Reina, who in her day had been one of Santa Teresa’s top whores. By this time Gumaro wasn’t talking about anything: not policemen, not towns of vampires, not white worms. He ate his pozole like a man near death and then he said that he had things to do and he vanished all of a sudden down some random street.

“Come sleep it off at my place,” Pancho offered many times, sorry to see him looking so pale and shaky. “Come and stay for a while until you feel better.”

But Gumaro always ignored him, and suddenly, before he had finished talking, he would vanish. Without saying goodbye, as if at that hour everyone was a stranger to him.

Padilla’s next letter seemed to have been written by a different person, someone who had just been operated on and was still under the effects of the anesthesia. It said that he had gone with Raguenau and a kid called Adrià to Tibidabo, the amusement park, and everything, absolutely everything, had been so beautiful that he was unable—on repeated occasions, on repeated and baffling occasions, on repeated and crystal clear occasions—to contain his tears. I cried, he said, like someone who finds true religion and sees it for what it is and knows that his salvation lies in it, but carries on regardless.

On the roller coaster, he said, as the lights of Barcelona and the endless darkness of the Mediterranean swam in and out of view, I had one of the most glorious erections of my life, my cock was rock hard, it swelled so big that my testicles and the shaft hurt, I was afraid to touch it, the bulge under my jeans throbbed, it beat like a racing heart, its length reached almost to my navel (my God, thought Amalfitano), good thing it happened where it did, in a public place, added Padilla, because it would have been more than any ass in the world could handle.

Then he said that Raguenau and the kid, who was apparently his nephew, had brought him to the pastry shop of another baker, an old friend of Raguenau’s, a guy in his seventies who presented them with an assortment of delicious cookies and cakes, nice relaxing conversation, and the music of Mompou. I’d like to live like that always, said Padilla, surrounded by people like that, sharing pleasures like those, though I know that if you scratch the surface you discover that it’s all just polite anguish, genteel anguish, or if you’re lucky, anguish chased by a good shot in the arm of Nolotil, but the friendship they offer me is real, and that should be enough, whatever the circumstances. About
The God of Homosexuals
he said nothing.

Around this time Amalfitano was too busy preparing his classes (combing American libraries and universities for the scattered and forgotten books of Jean-Marie Guyau) and all he could send was a postcard in which he explained clumsily how busy he was and inquired about the progress of the novel.

Padilla’s reply was long and cheerful, but hard to follow. I’m sure you’ve found a new love, he said, and I’m sure you’re enjoying yourself. Carry on! He reminded him of the Byrds song (was it the Byrds?), the one that goes if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, and—strangely, if this was what he really believed—he didn’t ask for any information about Amalfitano’s new lover, I imagine, he said, that it’s probably one of your students. And yet in the next paragraph the tone of the letter changed dramatically and he implored him not to let his guard down. Don’t let anyone play you, he begged, anyone at all, even if he’s the hottest guy around and he does it better than anyone else, under no circumstances should you let yourself be taken advantage of. Then he rambled on about the loneliness that Amalfitano bore and the risks to which that loneliness exposed him. By the end, the letter recovered its cheerful tone (in fact, the lines about loneliness and the danger of being played were like a small anxiety attack enclosed within parentheses) and talked about the winter and the spring, the flower stands on the Ramblas and the rain, about glossy shades of gray and the black stones hidden in the walls of the Old City. In the postcript he sent his regards to Rosa (for the first time, since Padilla usually acted as if Rosa didn’t exist) and said that he had read Arcimboldi’s last novel, 105 pages, about a doctor who upon inheriting the ancestral home finds a collection of masks of human flesh. Each flask—in which the masks float in a viscous liquid that seems to swallow light—is numbered and after a brief search the doctor finds, in a thick book of accounts, a collection of explanatory verses, numbered in turn, which, as in
New Impressions of Africa
, cast spadefuls of clarity or spadefuls of coal dust on the origin and destiny of the masks.

Amalfitano’s response was feeble, to put it mildly. He talked about his daughter, about the vast skies of Sonora, about philosophers Padilla had never heard of, and about Professor Isabel Aguilar, who lived alone in a small apartment in the center of the city and who had been so good to them.

Padilla’s next letter, four pages typewritten on both sides, struck Amalfitano as melancholy in the extreme. He talked about his father and his father’s health, about the way he, as a boy, had noticed the fluctuations in his father’s health, about his clinical eye for his father’s aches and pains, spells of flu, attacks of weariness, bronchial infections, fits of depression. Then, of course, he didn’t do anything to help, didn’t even care that much. If my father had died when I was twelve I wouldn’t have shed a single tear. He talked about his house, about his father’s comings and goings, about his father’s ear (like a broken-down satellite dish) when it was he who was coming and going, about the dining room table, sturdy, made of solid wood, but soulless, as if its spirit had fled long ago, about the three chairs, one always unoccupied, off to one side, or perhaps stacked with books or clothing, about the sealed packages that his father opened in the kitchen, never the dining room, about the dirty lamp that hung too high, about the corners of the apartment or the ceiling that sometimes, on euphoric or drug-fueled nights, looked like eyes, but closed or dead eyes, as he always realized a second later despite the euphoria or the drugs, and as he realized now despite how much he would have liked to be wrong, eyes that didn’t open, eyes that didn’t blink, eyes that didn’t see. He also talked about the streets of his neighborhood, the little shops where he went to buy things when he was eight, the newsstands, the street that used to be called Avenida José Antonio, a street that was like the river of life and that he now remembered fondly, even the name José Antonio, which was so reviled but which in memory retained a trace of beauty and sadness, like the name of a bullfighter or a composer of boleros who dies young. A homosexual youth killed by the forces of Nature and Progress.

He also talked about his current situation. He had become friends with Adrià, Raguenau’s nephew, though no sex figured into the friendship: it was a kind of monastic love, he said, they held hands and talked about any old thing, sports or politics (Adrià’s boyfriend was an athlete and an active member of the Gay Coordinating Committee of Catalonia), art or literature. Sometimes, when Adrià begged him to, he read bits from
The God of Homosexuals
, and sometimes they wept together on the balcony, in each other’s arms, watching the sun set over Plaza Molina.

Raguenau, meanwhile, he had slept with. He gave a step-by-step account of the proceedings. Raguenau’s bedroom, awash in Caribbean blue and ebony, African masks and porcelain dolls (what a combination! thought Amalfitano). The timid nakedness of Raguenau, a touch ashamed, his belly too big, his legs too skinny, his chest hairless and flabby. His own nakedness reflected in a mirror, still acceptable, less muscle mass, maybe, but acceptable, more Greco than Caravaggio. The shyness of Raguenau curled up in his arms, the room dark. Raguenau’s voice saying that this was enough, he didn’t need to do anything else, this was wonderful, perfect, feeling himself being held and then falling asleep. Raguenau’s smile, sensed in the darkness. The phosphorescent red condoms. Raguenau’s trembling upon being penetrated with no need for Vaseline, ointment, saliva, or any other kind of lubricant. Raguenau’s legs: now tensed, now seeking his legs, toes seeking his toes. His penis in Raguenau’s ass and Raguenau’s half-erect penis caught in his left hand and Raguenau moaning, begging him to let go of his cock or at least not to squeeze too hard. His laugh of joy, unexpected, pure, like a flare in the dark room, and Raguenau’s lips issuing a faint protest. The speed of his hips, their thrust unimpaired, his hands caressing Raguenau’s body and at the same time dangling him over the abyss. The baker’s fear. His hands grabbing Raguenau’s body and rescuing it from the abyss. Raguenau’s moans, his panting growing louder and louder, like a man being hacked to pieces. Raguenau’s voice, barely a thread, saying slower, slower. His crippled soul. But don’t misinterpret me, said Padilla. That was what he said: don’t misinterpret me, the way you’ve always done, don’t misinterpret me. Raguenau’s innocent sleep and his own insomnia. His steps echoing through the whole house, from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the living room. Rageunau’s books. The Aldo Ferri armchair and the vaguely Brancusi lamp. The dawn that finds him naked and reading.

The clinic in Tijuana where Amalfitano took the AIDS test had a window that looked out onto a vacant lot. There, amid the rubble and the trash, under a blazing sun, was a stocky little man with a giant mustache who seemed to be the enterprising type and who was carefully assembling a kind of tent from a collection of sheets of cardboard. He looked like the red-bearded pirate from the Donald Duck cartoons, except that his skin and hair were very dark.