I decided to keep to myself the existence of the red-haired woman who lived beside the Metro.
Telling Jericó about it would have put me at the disadvantage of letting him know my business without the reciprocity of learning almost anything about his. Because the superficial humor with which my friend recounted his European experience did not suit his conflictive, penetrating, bold, and ironic personality. I came to think that Jericó was lying to me, that perhaps he hadn’t spent years in Europe, that someone else had sent the postcards in his name… How strange. All this came to mind because when he returned, as you remember, Jericó said a sentence in English that sounded strange to me,
Let’s hug it out, bitch,
a sentence I didn’t understand and couldn’t translate, but that didn’t fit into either European or Latin American culture. By elimination-I deduced, thinking like Filopáter-it could only be North American.
I didn’t attribute too much importance to this, even though the matter remained suspended in my mind waiting for a clarification that would or would not come, because what Quixote says to Sancho about miracles-they rarely happen-can be transferred to mysteries-when they are revealed, they cease to exist-and I confess here and now that I wanted Jericó to have a truth hidden from me, since I had one hidden from him, and her name was Lucha Zapata.
I’m not ignoring the fact that Zapata’s character put me to the test, at times making me want to leave her or at least share the burden and with whom but Jericó. I’m saying I kept the secret because not only my own dignity before my friend but the very essence of my relationship with her demanded it. This is another way of saying that in recent months, Lucha Zapata had come to depend more and more on me, and that had never happened to me before. Once I had depended on others. Now, a helpless woman, constricted into herself and emerging from that constriction only because of my presence (I thought then), depended on me for salvation.
I urged her to stop using drugs. She continued consuming narcotics until her hidden stash was used up. Then she drank more than usual. Except that alcohol did not completely replace the essential amphetamines. I felt she was approaching a critical point and decided to become strong for her and endure everything-her shouts, insults, depressions, collapses-in the name of her eventual health. In short: I took charge. And if I now summarize the things she said during this time, it is, perhaps, to announce the things she did. Except that these, in the end, refuse to remain under the rug (the mat, in the case of Lucha Zapata) and dominate the words, reducing them to the ashes of mere prattle.
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody,” she would say in her moments of exaltation, as if she were stealing a plane again from a hangar in the international airport and was prepared to drop flyers on the city from the air, condemning all of us to joy.
“I can’t tolerate poverty,” she exclaimed immediately afterward. “It offends me that half my people are destitute, begging, stealing, without hope, exploited by the powerful, deceived by politicians, abandoned to the fatality of having always been and why not, tell me Josué, why not go on being destitute forever, tell me or I’ll die right here…”
It was with this passion that Lucha Zapata evoked a past-that of our people, always oppressed-that she rarely applied to herself. Sometimes I set traps for her so she would talk about her life before our meeting. I never got her past-or almost never, actually-the evocation of our moment in the airport and her aerial view of a collective misfortune that, for her, was eternal, beyond time: Mexico had always been oppressed and would be so forever, inevitably…
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody. I can’t tolerate poverty. What can I do, Savior?”
Sometimes she became violent and banged her head against the walls, as if she wanted to expel from her skull a brain that had been, she said, abducted. Why, by whom? I asked without receiving an answer other than a deep moan that was like hearing the protest of her lungs blackened by tobacco and drugs.
Then she would embrace me without defenses, like an old pillow, like a defeated ghost that knows it is divorced forever from a visible body, and say, “They threw me out because I use drugs, I’m an addict, if I had cancer they wouldn’t throw me out, they’d take care of me, isn’t that right, Savior?” She’d look at me with eyes so forsaken I simply held her even tighter, as if I feared that at those moments of extreme tenderness she’d leave me forever, freeing herself from life with a sigh that at the next moment would turn into a flare-up that burned my neck. I moved her away. She looked at me with intense hatred, accused me of keeping her locked up here, I’d open the door to the courtyard and invite her to go out, she called me horrible, an authoritarian type made in the image of power, a persecutor, an enemy and not a savior as she had believed.
“All of you, let me live my life!” she shouted in despair, tearing at her short hair and scratching her cheeks.
I stopped her by force, grasping her fists, bringing them up to my own face.
“Go on, Lucha, if you want to scratch, scratch me, go on…”
Then she would say Savior, don’t be so bossy, and she would caress my cheeks and sing the usual song, “I’m a poor little deer that lives in the mountains and since I’m not very tame I don’t come down to the water by day, by night little by little and in your arms, my darling.”
I already knew that this song about the “poor little deer” was the code for love. In this way, Lucha would invite me to culminate the day’s action, whatever it may have been, with an erotic moment that could be the quiet after a squall or the announcement of a coming storm, the gentle slope of peace recovered for a moment or a prelude to the tranquillity that, to be honest, she and I wanted to achieve and share without knowing exactly how to do it.
All of this occurred in the middle of her effort to stop using drugs and replace them with alcohol until I realized that tequila didn’t give the same high as amphetamines, then she’d go back to drugs and discover, ay, ay, ay, that her hidden drugs were being consumed and tobacco and alcohol were no substitute and I was to blame for everything.
I knew very well that any person with Lucha Zapata would be “to blame” for a situation for which she was responsible. Asking her to take responsibility was like asking pears of an elm tree, as the unvanquished and sententious María Egipciaca would say. Lucha Zapata needed someone else to blame. Me, someone else, it didn’t matter. But never herself. Herself, never. And I made note of her accusations and acts of violence for the simple reason that I’ve already indicated: I wanted to be responsible for a person.
Until the day she couldn’t take any more.
But first she sang: “I’d like to be a fine pearl in your shiny earrings and nibble at your ear and kiss your cheeks.”
I’LL SAY THAT Jericó never showed curiosity about my prolonged absences from the apartment we shared on Calle de Praga. It didn’t surprise me and I didn’t thank him for it. I didn’t meddle in his life either.
I had my doubts.
How had Jericó traveled? What kind of passport did he have? Where was his passport? What was his name, after all?
Jericó what? I realized that deep-rooted gratitude for the protection the schoolyard champion gave the defenseless big-nosed kid kept me from seeing my friend in any light other than what is called in Roman law amicus curiae.
One of the great temptations when two people live together is rummaging through the affairs of the other. The temptation to open drawers, read personal diaries and correspondence, pry into closets, move like a cockroach under beds to see what the other has hidden under the mattress, in jacket pockets…