But they’re surrounded by an imaginary circle of silence, enigma, and risk. They share in the true mysteries of Central. Every one of them is a trunk full of secrets in the shape of a body. A brotherhood of blood. The others in the cafeteria treat them carefully, look at them with admiration: they’ve been chosen for this. They are the workers of death. And death inspires respect, even here. Macha has told Flaco: “In my team, a person who has killed no one is no one. Around here, Flaco, it’s a corpse that baptizes you.”
But Macha hardly speaks. He’s shy, he’s stony. But, you know, the others talk to him. His difference. His distance. His contained sadness. Once in a great while, the surprise of a smile under his bushy moustache. Then the row of large, even teeth. His conspicuous cheekbones, his cleft chin, the sharp lines of his face, and his dangerous eyes, his eyelashes long like a foal’s: all this intrigues me. I’d like to sit at his table, look at him from close up, smell him. And at the same time there is this, my hate: he killed Canelo. The gang he commands loves him with a doglike loyalty. Is it jealousy, damned jealousy, this bitterness I feel when I see the way Pancha looks at him? And what of it?
THIRTY-THREE
One Friday, I don’t know why but I remember it was a Friday, Flaco took me out to lunch. He brought me to the Giratorio, the rotating restaurant on the top floor of a building on Avenida Lyon. From up there you could see a good portion of Santiago. San Cristóbal Hill was in front of us as we started lunch and we turned, we turned without noticing it while we ate an exquisite sole and drank a Santa Rita white wine. I felt happy up there. Everything was left behind, down below. The snow-covered mountains paraded in front of us and Flaco showed me the Plomo, the Provincia, the Punta de Damas, the San Ramón, mountain names I’d never heard and that seemed to me mysterious, poetic, evocative. He described the way to climb up the sheer cliff of El Altar — anchors, ice ax — or the La Paloma glacier, the hanging glacier of San Francisco wedged into the Morales canyon. Two days it had taken them to go up, bivouacking only once. They’d slept hanging from the rock. During the night a sudden jerking and a collision woke Flaco up. A bolt had come loose, and he was left hanging by only the other one.
“You never feel as free as in the mountains,” he told me, and it seemed incredibly profound and true to me. Then he asked if I would dare go climbing with him up a peak that wasn’t very difficult. I loved the idea. “The air,” he said, “what I like most is to feel on my face that cold air, biting and pure, which at that height has touched nothing but the ice.” At that moment, the only thing I wanted was to feel the freedom of that cold air, biting and pure; I wanted to leave with Flaco right away and go there. When the check came we were in front of San Cristóbal Hill again. I leaned over the table and kissed him. Flaco gave me another kiss as we got into his silver Volvo, then he got onto the Costanera highway. We drove fast.
I was picturing myself standing in the wind of a glacier. Then I thought of the house in Malloco. I saw myself in my mind’s eye disfigured in the little mirror, anxiously inhaling what was left of a line he’d shaped with his MasterCard Gold, the same one that just paid for lunch, and I felt my body swept up by the loud guitars and the powerful, tireless motor of the electric bass. I told him we should go that very night. He smiled. We shared that powerful secret. The complicity was exquisite. I believe in that: the attraction you feel when you share a dangerous secret. Don’t you? I always loved that exclusion that separates those who are in on the secret from those who aren’t. It’s the drug of co-conspirators, and without it there wouldn’t be secret societies or networks in clandestine life, or loyalties among secret agents like the one who was beside me in the driver’s seat then. He turned suddenly and parked in front of the Tajamar Towers. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see, my dear,” he smiled mischievously.
We went into an eleventh-floor apartment, with big windows looking out over the river and San Cristóbal Hill. It had a light beige carpet, almost white, wall-to-wall. A bedroom and a living-dining room. The walls were white. There wasn’t a stick of furniture. “Do you like it?” he asked me. Everything was luminous. “Would you like to live here?” And in a voice that was too serious to be serious: “For security purposes, the time has come for you to change your residence, don’t you think?”
In that moment I loved him with a furious, urgent passion. That silent, empty apartment, those windows high over the San Cristóbal Hill, I don’t know, I was flooded by an acute sense of helplessness just at the moment when Flaco was protecting me. I pulled off my clothes and we made love frantically, standing up, and then again on that recently carpeted floor. I’m seeing him lying there on his back with me astride him, his clear eyes and his bald, youthful head, the dark hair on his chest, the almost white beige of the rug. Me? Could this be happening to me?
To rest my head on his chest brings me a perfect peace. The cedar scent of Flaco’s soap brings me back to my father’s workshop. He’s a big man, Flaco. The muscles of his chest are my pillow. I’m protected there, almost merging into him. I press closer. I’m happy like that.
When he left, I was still naked. I kissed his bald head. I always did that when I said good-bye to him. He left a ring of keys in my hand and a folded paper between my breasts. When I straightened up it slid to the floor: it was a fat check. Enough to pay my move from the little apartment with thin walls I rented on Carlos Antúnez and to furnish the new one. I installed a little safe in the closet, built into the wall. I hid my documents and the CZ in there when Anita or my mother or the cleaning lady came.
And it was that apartment where he would drop in without warning, where I waited for him always just in case, in case he could get away from his wife, from his two small daughters whom he adored, I knew, and we could lose ourselves for the night in the disco music and among the rooms of the house in Malloco. I’d been holding back for such a long time. One of those nights, I let myself be carried away by the voluptuousness of the forbidden. I shouldn’t have. But the secret was burning my lips. I shouldn’t have. But I loved Flaco, I wanted to keep him with me, I wanted his complete intimacy; I longed for that communion, to open the door for him to a secret he didn’t know. It was vertiginous. So I told him something I shouldn’t have.
I told him tremblingly that the “Prince of Wales” smoked Havana cigars. He looked at me with widened eyes, surprised. “I want to punish,” I told him, “the irresponsible people who’ve gotten us into this imaginary fight that has very real deaths.” I said it firmly, and I believed it; I needed to believe it, just as Rodrigo, when he left me, had needed to convince me that I was the one to blame. The Spartan shouldn’t have smoked. It was forbidden. And yet, he did. The perfect combatant had that one defect, that trace of rebellion against an absolute and unequivocal order of the organization. He let the ashes fall onto a saucer using the utmost caution, and then he flushed them down the toilet. I knew it was a valuable clue. Some of the ashes must fly off and be left behind.