Jimmie attributed the meeting with Rodrigo to some secret force of destiny that was winking an eye and encouraging them to embark on the hypnotism project with even greater verve. He was wary of talking about the project in front of the European girls, wary of their knowledge of occult matters, but took advantage of every lapse of attention on their part to tell Rodrigo, shouting in his ear, some of the details of the affair. He talked about Marcelo’s initial reluctance and his later conversion to the creed of hypnosis, and the interest he now showed in discovering the future form of art by means of that technique. He also spoke of Velásquez and his propensity for slipping into states of altered consciousness. “Prof Velásquez only needs five minutes to get into the asshole of a trance,” explained Jimmie, resorting to technical language. “And once he’s there, his visions are as clear and detailed as if he were right here, now, with his eyes open.” The allusion was inaccurate because the cantina was full of smoke, and the noise of the boleros mingled with the crude comments the waiter directed at the drunks, thickening the atmosphere and fogging everything.
The gringo was a professional snake oil salesman. There was no doubt that he had a certain sensitivity when dealing with people that went beyond the mere power to convince. Jimmie was able to see a person’s inner vulnerabilities and attack them mercilessly; he knew how to overcome resistance and which strings to pluck for each individual. In Rodrigo’s case, the strategy was obvious: on stressing the joint nature of the hypnosis project, he was not only appealing to one of his most longstanding, secret aspirations but also tangentially hinting that it was Micaela who held the group together with the strange Indian-princess magnetism she exuded.
They poured their own drinks, or their glasses were freshened by Jimmie with the skill of a Turkish con man. Rodrigo downed one shot after another, and it became increasingly difficult for him to pretend his attention was on the gringo’s words and not the lock of black hair that had escaped from behind Micaela’s ear, a lock she gracefully replaced, time after time, very slowly, always with the same movement, as if it were a tai chi position taught to her by a Chinese grandmother, the purpose of which was to tame wild animals. Rodrigo began to see double, and two Micaelas were more than his nerves could bear. He felt stabs of guilt for staring so fixedly at a woman who was not his wife, but then he remembered his wife, and the evoked sound of her voice seemed to him so unworthy of brushing Micaela’s ears that he resolved never to introduce them. He had also, naturally, forgotten about the teenagers whose names began with the letter D.
At a given moment, Domitile asked Rodrigo to go with them to find a cab since her friend was drunk, and their absence had probably been noted in the hotel, causing alarm among the other members of the group. Rodrigo briefly explained the situation to Jimmie and promised to return shortly, not because he found the gringo’s conversation particularly entertaining, but because he couldn’t take his eyes off Micaela. Faced with the girl’s extravagant beauty, both Daga and Domitile had seemed suddenly anodyne, Europeans more insipid than celery sticks who didn’t deserve a place in his desire for longer than half a jerk-off. Despite the fact that she was almost the same age as them — as has already been mentioned — Micaela seemed older because her silence was not the mute expectation of someone who is learning, but the grace with which the magnanimous allow chaos to proliferate around them for a time.
Rodrigo left the cantina with a girl on either arm — an achievement that earned him the respect of a number of the most stupid drunks in Los Girasoles — and the three of them headed for the main square, where he remembered having seen cabs waiting for customers when he was walking alone. On the way, Daga threw up noisily into some bushes, and Rodrigo held her forehead like a patient father. Domitile seemed worried but, nevertheless, thanked Rodrigo for having been their escort for the night. They exchanged telephone numbers, and the girls promised to call soon, even though they would be leaving for another city — they couldn’t remember which — the following afternoon, so the possibility of meeting them again seemed fairly low.
When he returned to the cantina, having put the girls into a cab with instructions to take them straight to their hotel, Micaela had disappeared.
It was this fortuitous disappearance that had contributed to fixing in his mind the image of Micaela with the bewitching aura of a blueprint. If he had met her again on his return, still accompanied by her irritating partner, Micaela would have seemed a more terrestrial creature; if not just an ordinary girl, at least one of flesh and blood. But her disappearance placed a wax seal on the meeting and allowed it to rarefy in his memory. To satisfy that feeling of imperfection the evening had produced, Rodrigo was obliged to see Micaela again soon, alone if possible, without the annoying presence of Jimmie, for whom he felt contempt mingled with envy.
7
He had to wait a week for the second meeting to occur. A long week, cooped up in the house, during which Rodrigo experienced a sense of loneliness more profound than the one that, until then, had lulled him to sleep each night. If his life, including his married life, were indeed that of a loner, it suddenly seemed the fact of having met Micaela, of having glimpsed or sketched out in his warped imagination the possibility of an old age at her side, was essentially modifying the density of the loneliness that had never even come close to disturbing him.
Loneliness is always the same, but not the lonely. The discourse we hold back in front of others has a different weight to that which we speak aloud when no one is listening. In a certain sense, one offers inner comfort since it is a form of intimacy. The other, in contrast, makes a hollow in the world, in whose furthest corners the words ricochet to remind us that they have no taste.
Rodrigo called Cecilia one cloudy afternoon. She sounded unusually cheerful, and there was no indication in her voice of the well-known reproach that normally underlay her tremulous vowels, sometimes prolonged into a loving complaint (“They’ll seeee. You’ll be back sooon,” she would say to him). But this time, nothing: a precise description of the atmosphere in the office, a detailed account of her father’s most recent attempts to eliminate the damp in the living room — the old man had taken up the task again, with modest results and an irrational sense of victory. . in fact, a trivial, if not completely comfortable conversation, without the mild, balsamic triviality of couples who tie each other down with the chains of their inexhaustible affection. Or perhaps Rodrigo’s mood — equivalent to the one that invades a sensitive soul when he considers the possibility of having contracted an incurable disease — was tingeing his perception of the world and other people with a violet hue, the violet of his sporadic migraines and his frequent periods of melancholy. Micaela — like a tumor, the nature of which is still unclear — glowed in his memory, threatening to either spread through his hypothalamus or discreetly dwindle under the benign, chemotherapeutic effects of distance. Rodrigo couldn’t decide which was more worrying: that love existed and had, a few days before, wormed its way into him, or that the adulterated tequila in the cantina had played a dirty trick on him. In the former case, he would be obliged to renounce, out of simple coherence, the greater part of his cynicism, something he found worrying since his cynicism was, as far as he knew, his only recourse for externalizing a sharp intelligence; in the latter, the unbearable confirmation of the mediocrity of the world would weigh on him for several decades, until a merciful case of Alzheimer’s would turn his stern, pensive expression into one of drooling innocence. The dice of his life, as someone given to cliché would say, had been cast.