Pretty soon I was sick of Guatemala. I got myself far away from Graciela and from the scene of the crime. I left the neighborhood, I left the city itself, I traveled the country, coast to coast and up and down. And although the newness was exciting at first, in the end it just seemed like going around the block a million times. New landscapes and different faces hide the fact that, no matter where you are, laws apply to everybody, prison bars all look the same, and cop bullets are cop bullets.
I wandered for four years. Now and then I returned to the city, I visited Clodomira on the sly and found out how things were going in the neighborhood. That’s how I learned that Graciela was now with a heavyweight from Morelos. According to the rumors, some dude tied to the Gulf cartel. And since gossip and perversion go hand in hand-they’re certainly kin-I also found out the street had me pegged. Guatemala invented what it didn’t know. Something had happened between Graciela and the Squirrel, something grave, mysterious, and truculent-everybody’s lack of imagination was so depressing that they all thought the same thing: “That cabrón Squirrel must have raped her.” The third nugget of info claimed that, to gain points with his lady, the Morelos heavyweight had put a price on my head. I couldn’t believe it. In the neighborhood, people talk because the air is free. Anybody with a mouth can join the cotorreo and if they don’t have a good story to tell, they just make stuff up. But as the love of my life, Graciela would have never accepted such savagery. I didn’t worry then and I’m even less worried now, when the winds seem to have shifted in the neighborhood. This month’s news is that the Morelos heavyweight was put on a boat and is resting comfortably in La Palma, the high-security prison. So much for him and the stories concocted in Guatemala. I don’t know why I bother with somebody I don’t even know. Must be the loneliness, which grows like pestilence at dawn.
“Your thing is melancholia,” some guy in La Cotorra dared to say to me once. “You hurt everywhere and you don’t know why. Love gone bad, fucked up.” I showed him the sevillana and the guy shut up. But tonight, dizzy and confused, trembling, I remember what he said.
Three-thirty in the morning, three more blocks to my house on this deserted street, and I’m thinking about black coffee, a roll, and a pastry. My aunt goes back and forth from the table to the stove. In the patio there’s a little girl playing with a storybook. I like to read to her and make up stories in which the bird with enormous wings flies us all over the world. Graciela and me in the clouds, looking at houses and fields from above. The little girl’s a big burden but she’ll be pretty when she grows up. The sweet, hot coffee does me good for a moment, but then there’s that ice plunging through my chest, the helicopter above me, that room in the neighborhood and the promise made, my list of creditors, and that man who got put away. As soon as I get up off the ground and this cold leaves my back and the taste of blood disappears from my mouth, I’m going to go tell Graciela I’m sorry, that I’ve always wanted her, for real, like a man, like it must be, but then I fall.
GOD IS FANATICAL, HIJA BY EDUARDO MONTEVERDE
San Fernando
Father… I accuse myself of having changed my sex.” “Is that so, hija? Me too.” The incense in San Fernando Church veiled the confessional in mist. To the side of the Epistle, an altar boy with the crusty face of a seraph, dressed in a red habit, rocked a small brazier. He was just a kid, with scrawny limbs like those street urchins who surrounded the temple.
“What do you do for a living, hija? I’m entranced by your perfume.”
“At night I’m a dancer and by day I search for lost children, though I haven’t found any yet.”
“You’re a crook,” said the priest.
“It’s not what you think. In fact, I used to work for the state police.”
“I used to be a nun. Shall we go outside for a stroll?”
“You’re not going to absolve me?”
“I’ll take care of that later. Let’s save ourselves the confiteor. I’ll confess that it’s you who came to me-I consider the admission that you’re an ex-police officer a humble act of solidarity.”
In another confession booth, incense threaded like steam in a bog around the feet of a different priest wearing torn Nikes; it snaked in under his habit and wafted toward his crotch. It was the breath of Fernando III, medieval king and canonized flagellator, whose weightless sword was displayed at the altar and hovered above his spare crown, above the devout women in their prayer shawls. The warrior wore a metal belt that cut into his flesh despite many layers of mesh. His spirit traveled from the incorrupt body in Seville to watch over his dominion in New Spain.
The penitent and the confessor strolled out together. They walked from the portico to a tainted lawn, careful not to disturb the sickly, glue-addicted children huddled about.
“Check out their stomachs, hija. Those strange cavities are ulcers, and look at that one’s sunken skull. Very few of them are worth eating. Not even a cannibal would be tempted.”
“What about the man who came over here a few days ago?”
“The guy who ate his lover? He didn’t dress his victim very well, according to Próspero, my neighbor in the confessionals, a baldhead who walks around in torn sneakers. Would you like to catch the cannibal?”
“If Madre-Excuse me. I caught one-well, I didn’t, but I was there when they caught him, Madre-Excuse me again.”
“I’m not offended by the gender confusion. We are surgical angels.” The priest covered his head a bit more with his hood, allowing only the slightest glimpse of his waxen scalp. “This church is Mexican baroque, which is kind of poignant, don’t you think? Scary, isn’t it? Look how the sky has turned purplish. It’s because of the smog; in a little while it’ll turn blue. This city always manages to get drenched in liturgical colors. If you want to find lost kids, go down to the sewers and poke around in the drains with a wire… Let’s go down to the pantheon.”
He shook his brown habit, waving away the stains of urban shame. They were greeted by an immense pink marble funerary urn in the center of a modest garden which contained the petrified remains of a fierce military man, a conservative Indian shot next to Archduke Maximilian of the Mexican Empire. They walked among the graves in the San Fernando pantheon under the city’s lecherous gray sky.
“Did you use torture when you were a cop?”
“On men, but it wasn’t what you think.”
“Torture. Don’t be afraid of the word. You were no doubt turned on by their erections when you used the cattle prod on them. Electricity is miraculous-like the tolling of San Fernando’s testicle.”
“Are you still listening to my confession?”
“I confess once again that I was waiting for you. You remind me of an old lover. Let’s see… San Fernando whipped the flesh of his soldiers with barbs. Times are changing; you have to adapt to technology. Did you get aroused?”
“I was a bit soft. My peers harassed me and I had to show I had balls, so yes, yes, I got aroused. I’d caress them after they passed out.”
“Who did you sleep with?” asked the priest.
“With Commander Pérez…” The girl practically fainted after saying this, her back to the cross, her face like a Mediterranean spring. The city’s dense air shrouded her white Gap pants and aquamarine Zara T-shirt-flea market bootlegs-in a gray aura. If she’d been naked, an infantile San Juan de Dios would have covered her breasts with his hair like sea foam, Renaissance style.