That was Delgado. At first sight, he was laughable. A clumsy giant, a guy who could stand there all night, not drinking or smoking, just laughing at everybody else’s stories, even when everybody else was pretty sure he didn’t understand a thing.
He was inoffensive.
Inoffensive until silence fell, and then he’d say something to save himself, in a chewed-up Spanish filled with weird echoes that some thought were Bosnian or Moldavian or Danish or Bulgarian gypsy, or maybe some mixed argot from a shipless sailor.
He widened his smile a little more, looked at the ceiling with the blue pinpoints, and said, “Ah, the slender charm of Chinese women.”
That’s why they called him Delgado. Because then he’d lower his eyes and the psycho crouched inside him would look at us from under his fleshy lids until the silence thickened and someone would try, clumsily, to start a conversation or suggest we sing.
That’s what happened the first time I met him. For a few minutes, we passed the joint around and laughed haplessly, as if we were in a hurry.
Over the next hour, Cavalcanti tried to convince me the man was a Vietnam vet, one of the gal pals tried to get close to Delgado, and the other downed four whiskeys without showing it. The women who end their night at that bar are real women. They can be drunk off their asses but you’d never know it. They’re such ladies that if they have to puke, they do it in private.
“This guy you see here is a war hero, my friend.”
Cavalcanti called everybody “my friend,” or used the Argentine pibe, because he couldn’t remember anyone’s name.
“Cavalcanti, that’s impossible. This man wasn’t even born during the Vietnam War, or if he was, he was in diapers.”
“Are you nuts, pibe? That was practically yesterday! I’d left the orchestra; I was hanging out with some Colombians. Miami, Las Vegas, Cali, Medellín... We partied our asses off!”
“Were you dealing drugs?”
“No, pibe, no! What are you thinking? Music! We imported tropical stars, we opened for them. I want to die whenever I remember all the women. Drugs weren’t part of the deal, they were just for pleasure. Here, take a drag...” He casually slipped a diamond-fold of coke in front of me.
“Cavalcanti,” I said before heading to the restroom, “it’s been more than thirty years since Vietnam. If you weren’t so out of your mind, you’d realize that.”
When I came back, pissed at anybody who cuts coke with plaster because it burns your nose, the old singer was looking at three of his fingers as if they belonged to someone else; the drunken gal pal continued in her elegant catatonia, and the other was whispering who-knows-what into Delgado’s ear while he just smiled.
When I tried to give the coke back to Cavalcanti, he showed me his fingers and his generosity. “You can keep it,” he said. “I have more. I’m getting old, my friend. Three decades. Do you realize what that means? It makes me want to die...”
“Not tonight, Cavalcanti. I’m not in the mood for a wake.”
Cavalcanti’s laugh was purely operatic. He dried a tear and, with the effects of his last whiskey in plain view, made his way to the restroom.
It was late. I know this because after a while I started to see everything as if it were underwater, through a submarine porthole. At that hour, exhausted and sleepy, I knew — and that’s why I would never try it — that if I stretched my hand to touch somebody, my fingers would just bump up against the porthole.
Cavalcanti returned rejuvenated, his nostrils smudged with white powder.
“You’re right,” he said emphatically. “It was the Gulf War.”
“What?”
“Delgado was decorated in the Gulf War.”
“I don’t believe you, it doesn’t make sense. El Delgado isn’t even American. What the fuck was he doing in the Gulf?”
He didn’t respond, just drank his shot of whiskey and raised various fingers to order another round for everyone.
“Hey, buddy... big guy... I’m talking to you, deaf dude... show your arms to this piece-of-shit Uruguayan who doesn’t believe me.”
El Delgado hesitated before grasping what he was being asked, then finally rolled up his sleeve and stretched his arms out, both hands on the table. They were full of scars too small to be smallpox.
“They used needles, wooden splinters, and who knows what other shit,” Cavalcanti explained. “The Turks tortured him.”
Delgado stayed in the same position for a long minute, raising his little blue eyes at me as if he was waiting for something — maybe congratulations, or a word of support — until he eventually rolled down his sleeves and took cover again behind his smile.
I didn’t say anything because at that moment I saw Cavalcanti making faces like he was at death’s door and I thought perhaps this was the big one and that it had all come to pass thanks to his dedication to cocaine. But I was wrong. Delgado then widened his smile and took bites at the air as if he were a shark in a Disney cartoon. He had false teeth, and the upper dentures hit the bottom ones like castanets, revealing bright blue gums smeared with spit.
“They kicked his teeth out. What do you think of that?”
I couldn’t tell him what I thought because, just then, the night’s drinks and tobacco turned my stomach and a cold nausea indicated I had to leave unless I wanted to roll around on the ground like a poisoned dog.
I left Clavié with the shakes. The sun was shining outside, promising to cook us all.
A few days later, Paty, my sporadic lover when she’s got nothing better going on, asked me to accompany her somewhere. One of those sources who can’t be revealed had told her they had some ugly info for her, and the place to confirm it was ugly too. Knowing Paty’s nature, I prepared for the worst.
The meeting was set at a “piso patera,” one of those spaces shared by workers on rotating schedules, in Poble Nou, a longtime manufacturing neighborhood whose factories were now only empty shells. As illegal immigrants from all over the world arrived, the old buildings were recycled into housing for eight or ten people per room. It was good business for a few.
Most pisos pateras aren’t mixed, and this one housed black people. It smelled just like Chester Himes would have wanted for one of his Harlem novels: a hot and swampy mix of rotting food, dirty laundry, and life at its most primal. The windows, overlooking an interior courtyard, were covered with cardboard.
It’s tasteless to say it’s hard to see a black person in the dark, but that was the problem. When we arrived, a man greeted us with a nod and a slight gesture, which provoked an African parade to file out the door; he spoke in a low, expressionless voice. It was nearly impossible to tell if he was lying.
“Ma’am,” he said, “they tried to kill one of our sisters. They raped her, they tortured her, and they choked her. They wanted to kill her but she survived. It’s a hate crime and you have to help us.”
“Can I speak with the girl?” asked Paty.
The man took his time to consider this. I lit a cigarette so I could get a look at his face in the light of the flame. He was over thirty and he stared at us with cold, disdainful eyes. Sweat made his skin shiny.
“Maybe you’ll get her to talk. She hasn’t talked to anyone.”
He opened another door inside the apartment. I managed to see a small shadow on one of the mattresses on the floor before my friend went in and closed the door behind her.
“Where did they attack her?” I asked, just to say something.
“Near Parallel, in the plaza with the three chimneys.”
“Those streets are always packed with people.”