He shakes his bald head, with its smooth, soft, and shining skin that I like to kiss when we say good-bye. He’s already regretting what he’s going to tell me.
And you, writer who wasn’t there, does my telling you this help you see the situation, the ambiguity of that moment of mine with Flaco?
“Listen to me,” he says, and he lowers his voice until it’s nothing but a thread. “Listen to me well. This is a secret for you and no one else. A couple of weeks ago, Macha got the order to organize an operation to deal with an ugly situation. The order wasn’t to arrest the subject, the terrorist, you understand? They were about to leave. They were in the cafeteria having sodas: Great Dane, Iris, Chico Marín, Pancha Ortiz, Indio. . Macha didn’t know who the victim was, nothing, not the slightest idea. He had a photo, an address, and an order, that’s it. You know how these things are done. And he was listening, surrounded by his people, and he was quiet as always.
“I asked him: ‘And you, Macha, what do you think of having to carry out an order like this?’ There was a silence. ‘Answer me,’ I pressed him. Macha leaned back, balancing calmly on the back legs of the chair. After a long pause he looked me straight in the eyes and said:
“‘Flaco, tell me, old man: What does one more fuck matter to an old whore?’
“Everyone started laughing. But I didn’t laugh at all.
“And he said: ‘Let me be the one to live with this, old man. Other people can’t do it. They have a future to think of. Me, I’ve got nothing.”’
Flaco rolled his eyes upward and he laughed, then, a cold laugh.
Macha is a murderer. That’s what Flaco is telling me. So that’s what it was that drew me to him. He was a killer. I thought: Flaco envies him. Because Macha is an animal with no conscience. He’s more primitive and pure.
And then he came out with it. Just like that, no preamble: “I’m separated,” he told me. “I left my wife.” And I, like an idiot, thought he was pulling my leg, and I laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” he reproached me. “There are two little girls and a woman who are suffering, their hearts are broken. Have some respect for that, at least.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, Flaco, it’s just. .”
“They cry when I come to pick them up, they want to stay at their mother’s house. . She’s brainwashed them,” he goes on telling me. “They used to love me so much. It’s unthinkable that they don’t. . I only see them two hours a week, and sometimes not even that. They don’t feel like it, they say, or they have homework. They can’t forgive me. Should I go to court? She tells me: You’re the one who left home, aren’t you? My lawyer tells me that this gets fixed with money. But, where the fuck do I get the money? From a promotion; it’s the only way.”
He sighed sorrowfully. . Then I embraced him and cradled him in my arms. In that moment, there on the black leather sofa, I truly loved him and I thought I would live with him, and I imagined myself in his Volvo coming back from the beach at El Quisco, and then I saw myself on a mountaintop, and we were laughing and happy in that pure, cold air he loved so much. No more Saturdays and Sundays alone, I thought. We kissed softly, intensely. The tears slid down my cheeks. And the tears that I imagined welling in his eyes, if they existed, never fell.
FORTY-EIGHT
Pancha Ortiz was putting on makeup. She barely greeted me. With the lipstick still in her hand, she pursed her lips in the mirror, spreading out the color until it was even. Her lips were much fuller and more sensuous than I had noticed before. Her black blouse, open, left bare that fissure that men like so much, and part of those insolent breasts of hers. She took a little bottle of perfume from her purse and she sprayed her neck and I watched her, turning her breasts, contemplating herself in the mirror as if she were alone in the bathroom. Alone, or seducing a man. She said good-bye to me, kissing the air by my cheek, and off she went, leaving me confused in a cloud of perfume. Only then did I realize what was causing my confusion: the perfume was Christian Dior and the bottle was the same as the ones Flaco always gave me.
I went out, walking quickly to the darkened lot. I got there in time to see her get into her Nissan. The offices upstairs where Flaco worked were dark. I looked for his silver Volvo, but I didn’t see it. I took a taxi and tried to follow the Nissan, but I lost it after three blocks. When I went into my apartment in the Tajamar Towers I went straight to the bathroom. There was a sharp pain gouging my insides.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?” Flaco says the next day. “Chewing your fingernail is not an answer,” he said, with laughing eyes. A few days later, very early, I saw him kissing Pancha in his silver Volvo. They came in together and he was looking at her. I swore I would break it off with him. And I waited for him. The fucker didn’t even come to my apartment that afternoon.
Then, without thinking about it, the next afternoon I went up to the second floor and presented myself in his office. He ushered me in with that friendly, affectionate manner of his. I sat in the chair facing his desk. As soon as I had him in front of me and felt him looking into my eyes with that faint, shy smile, I despaired. I imagined him looking at Pancha that way and it drove me crazy. Tears came to my eyes, I brought my hands to my face; I fell, tears streaming, from the chair onto the rough carpet that covered the floor of his office. I lay there face down and he came over, murmuring in my ear, telling me the same things, I was sure, that he said to Pancha. He tried to kiss me, to get me to turn my face to him, but I wouldn’t let him, I wouldn’t, not for anything.
Suddenly I felt his strong fingers on my spine; he pressed on it and it cracked, and he pushed on it again, higher up, and it cracked again. They were the same hands, I thought once again, that could kill me with a single, silent blow. It was still a reassuring feeling. I got up and he kissed me on the mouth. I returned the kiss, but when I felt his hand moving up my thigh I pushed him away and left his office.
He didn’t call me. I waited, though. I spent so many afternoons, and entire Saturdays and Sundays, in my apartment in case he showed up. Weeks went by.
Her eyes full of excitement, Anita told me about Leila, her friend from school, whose mother had a room full of doors and those doors were closets where she kept all her clothes. It was one of those languid Saturdays during that time of my life. Anita, if she was with me, could turn those days into something wonderful or disastrous. Because if she had a tantrum for some reason, there was nothing I could do except bring her back to my mother’s house.
Leila’s mother, she told me that day, is the Moroccan ambassador. And Leila, when her mother isn’t home, takes some little keys out from where she hides them among her gloves, and with those little keys she opens the safe. And the safe is in another closet, the shoe closet. Leila’s mother has thousands of shoes, and she keeps them in their boxes and behind the boxes is the safe. Anita helped her move the shoeboxes very carefully. Leila opened the safe and took out mountains of rings, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings that belonged to her mother. “It’s like a princess’s treasure,” she says smiling, her face radiant with happiness.
“Like a chest in Ali Baba’s cave,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “And Leila,” she says, “puts them on and looks at herself in the mirror.” And with her hands she draws pictures in the air of those jewels that shone on her friend’s hands, her neck, her ears. “She looks like a real live princess, Mama!” Sometimes, she let Anita wear a pearl necklace.