“But congratulations just the same. I think you’ve bought yourself a winning ticket, buddy.”
“You think so?”
“Just don’t forget me.” Jesús Florencio smiled.
PEDREGAL
Bernabé felt that this was really a place with a name. The Chief took him to his house in Pedregal and said, Make yourself at home, as if I’ve adopted you, go wherever you want and get to know the boys in the kitchen and in administration. He wandered in and out of the house, which started at the service area on the ground level but then instead of rising descended along scarlet-colored cement ramps through a kind of crater toward the bedrooms and finally to the open rooms surrounding a swimming pool sunk into the very center of the house and illuminated from below by underwater lights and from above by a roof of celestial-blue lead tiles that capped the mansion. Licenciado Carreón’s wife was a small fat woman with tight black curls and religious medals jangling beneath her double chin, on her breasts, and on her wrists, who when she saw him asked if he was a terrorist or a bodyguard, if he’d come to kidnap them or protect them — they all look alike, the brown scum. The señora was highly amused by her own joke. You could hear her coming a long way off, like El Güero and his transistor and the Burro and his braying. Bernabé heard her often the first two or three days he wandered around the house feeling like a fool, expecting the Chief to call him and give him some job to do, fingering the porcelain knickknacks, the glass display cabinets and large vases and at every turn bumping into a señora who smiled as endlessly as his father, Andrés Aparicio. One afternoon he heard music, sentimental boleros playing during the siesta hour and he felt languorous and handsome as he had when he looked at himself in the hotel mirrors in Acapulco, he was drawn by the soft sad music but when he reached the second floor he lost his way and walked through one of the bathrooms into a dressing room with dozens of kimonos and rubber-soled beach sandals and a half-open door. He saw a bed as large as the one in the Acapulco hotel covered with tiger skins and on the headboard he saw a shelf with votive candles and religious images, and beneath that a tape deck like the one El Güero had in his secondhand Thunderbird and lying on the skins Señora Carreón stark naked except for her religious medals, especially one in the shape of a seashell with a superimposed gold image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that the señora held over her sex while Chief Mariano tried to lift it with his tongue and the señora laughed a high coquettish schoolgirl laugh and said, Oh no my Lord, no my King, respect your little virgin, and he naked on all fours his balls purple with cold trying to reach the medal in the shape of a seashell, oh my sexy plump beauty, oh my saintly little bitch, my perfumed whore, my mother-of-pearl ringleted goddess, let your own little Pope bless your Guadalupe, oh my love, and all the time the bolero on the tape, I know I shall never kiss your lips, your lips of burning crimson, I know I shall never sip from your wild and passionate fountain … Later the boys in the office and the kitchen told him, you can see the Chief’s taken a liking to you, friend, don’t do anything to blow it because he’ll protect you against whatever comes. Get out of the brigade if you can, that’s dangerous work, you’ll see. On the other hand here in the kitchen and the office we’ve got the world by the tail. El Güero walked through the office to answer the telephone and invited Bernabé to go for a ride in the Jaguar that belonged to the Carreóns’ daughter, she was in a Canadian finishing school with the nuns and the car had to be driven from time to time to keep it in good shape. He said the boys in the office were right, the Chief sees something in you to adopt you this way. Don’t muff the chance, Bernabé. If you get to be one of his personal guard you’re set up for life, said El Güero, driving the girl’s Jaguar the way a jockey exercises a horse for a race, I give you my word, you’ll be set up. The deal is to learn every little thing that’s going on and then whatever shit they try to pull you’ve got a stranglehold on them, you can take any shit they try to pull, unless they shut you up forever. But if you play your cards right, just look, you’ve got it all, money, girls, cars, you even eat the same food they eat. But the Chief had to study, Bernabé replied, he had to get his degree before he made it big. El Güero hooted at that and said the Chief hadn’t gone past grade school, they’d stuck on the Licenciado because that’s what you call anyone important in Mexico even though he wouldn’t recognize a law book if it fell on him, don’t be a jerk, Bernabé. All you need to know is that every day a millionaire is born who someday is going to want you to protect his life, his kids, his cash, his ass. And you know why, Bernabé? Because every day a thousand bastards like you are born ready to tear the guts out of the rich man born the same day. One against a thousand, Bernabé. Don’t tell me it isn’t easy to choose. If we don’t get away from where we were born we go right down the goddamn tubes. We have to get on the side of the ones who’re born to screw us, as sure as seven and seven make heaven, right? The Chief called Bernabé to the bar beside the pool and told him to come with him, he wanted him to see the tinted photograph of his daughter Mirabella, wasn’t she pretty? You bet she was and that’s because she was made with love and feeling and passion and if you don’t have those there’s nothing, right, Bernabé? He said in Bernabé he saw himself when he didn’t have a centavo or a roof over his head, but with the whole world to conquer. He envied him that, he said, his eyeglasses fogged with steam, because the first thing you know you have everything and you begin to hate yourself, you hate yourself because you can’t stand the boredom and the exhaustion that comes of having reached the top, you see? On the one hand you’re afraid of falling back where you came from but on the other hand you miss the struggle to reach the top. He asked him, wouldn’t he like to marry a girl like Mirabella someday, didn’t he have a sweetheart? and Bernabé compared the photograph of the girl surrounded by rose-colored clouds with Martincita, who was plain born for misfortune, but he didn’t know what to say to Licenciado Mariano, because either way whether he said yes he did or no he didn’t, it was an insult and besides the Chief wasn’t listening to Bernabé, he was listening to himself thinking he was listening to Bernabé.