At half eleven, we go out onto the street. At the entrance to the building there’s a long table and by the kerb, a barbecue with steaks and a heap of flaming coals. Bottles of cider pass from hand to hand. A whole host of people I’ve never seen before and never will again come in and out of the door. A broad-shouldered woman with sequins stuck to her body moves off diagonally without showing her face. I could swear she’s the famous Eva, but there’s no one here I know who could confirm it. Firecrackers and gunshots, it’s hard to tell which is which, mingle in the air. On the next block, the Ecuadorians, as they’re known in the neighbourhood, are holding their own party. Tosca is the only one who doesn’t show her face, she stays in her hovel. The rest, in varying degrees of joy and lethargy, parade unceasingly in front of us: Benito, Sonia, Canetti, Mercedes, Herbert, Perico and the hard kids, in a gang. Simón trots after one of the little girls with Asian faces. The layers of reality, all I can see, lead me to a hallucinatory, acid-trip limbo. A firecracker, and I fall to the ground all at once.
Iris, a better drunk than at Christmas, less melancholic and more fun, insists that we go up close to see the Ecuadorians’ dummy being burnt. We stay there a good while in the heat of the bonfire, which I see in duplicate, like a miniature, in Simón’s pupils.
The snake nightmares return. This time just one, a python with a man’s head and luminous eyes that pursues me, fattening the pipes of el Buti. I wake up on the verge of asphyxiation, almost with the dawn. I find the antidote in insomnia. The remedy in obsession. To combat snakes: more snakes. Sitting up in bed, I grope for the big book by Albertus Seba. Making myself comfortable, as I leaf through, I feel something pricking my groin. A pencil with zoo animals on it, I don’t really know how it came to be in my pocket. Everything is linked. I go back through the pages and one of the illustrations is covered by a transparent sheet that triggers an immediate impulse. I start tracing a snake that occupies a whole page, the Corallus hortulanus or garden tree boa. That’s how the year starts for me.
Sixteen
Third of January. Dawn breaks, sticky and oppressive; it couldn’t be more humid. I go to the bank to pick up my first pay cheque. They gave me a card but the cash machine swallowed it. Iris, who’s on a day off, will stay with Simón in the hotel. Before I leave, she gives me instructions: how to get there, where to get off, not to queue twice, and above all to avoid being served by the cashier with the moustache who always manages to find a problem. The ID, the signature, the system, there’s something new every time. Best to arrive half an hour early and queue in the street. It’s worse later, so she said.
I take the subway at Pacífico. Progressively, as I descend underground, first at the ticket window, then crossing the turnstiles, on the escalator leading to the platform, the viscous heat at ground level doubles, triples, until it reaches its peak inside the carriage. Without being quite full, there are a lot of people and as we approach the city centre we are increasingly crushed together. Someone comments: It must be about fifty degrees in here.
There are three people around me with whom I can’t help maintaining physical contact. In front of me, behind me, arms, back, even the head of a boy with endless dreadlocks who will spend the entire journey rearranging his hair and scratching everyone else’s faces with it. There are men in suits, ladies with bags, a down-and-out, a group of percussionists who don’t really know where to put their drums. There’s a girl who’s unbelievably dressed, the seams of her trousers on the verge of bursting, a fat man sleeping, his cheek plastered against the window, and a very pregnant woman who provokes a ripple of sympathy as soon as she gets on. Strong garlic breath wafts through this atmosphere, impossible to identify which mouth it comes from. I breathe as best I can; I hope it’s over soon.
Between Callao and Tribunales, more or less halfway, the train stops dead. Not violently, but still forcing us into a swaying motion that continues until we find our balance as a mass. Two minutes pass and the thing that causes irritation, ill humour, in some cases anxiety, is not knowing what’s happening, or how long we’ll be left stranded. Some accept it with resignation and, as well as sighing, they adopt bored expressions, checking the time on their mobiles with no hint of rebellion. Others, because that’s the way they are, a matter of temperament, start talking loudly, sound off about the subway workers, speculate, swear at no one in particular.
One man, the most agitated, he must be about forty with lots of curly grey hair, overplays his annoyance and, clearly without thinking about it, bangs his fist against the emergency box and pulls the red lever which peals out a shrill alarm, extremely high-pitched, as if to scare off rats. The man is met with synchronised disapproval. His intended heroism, the fact that he assumed his anger on behalf of the rest, makes him the target of all eyes. The hell is almost eternal. Fifteen minutes of enclosure, siren and sweat. Just about at the limit of what we can tolerate, just before someone carries out the threat of fainting, those standing next to the windows notify us of a movement of torches at the edge of the tunnel, they calm us down. Here, here, repeats one man and taps at the glass with his finger, fearing they’ll pass us by, the way it happens in dreams.
When one of the doors is finally opened, the inevitable occurs, an avalanche of which no one seems to be the cause. Some raise their arms in a gesture of innocence. Two men with helmets and grey overalls try to contain the passengers’ anxiety, they ask for order, they don’t say women and children first, as they do during shipwrecks in films: Calm down, everyone will get off. They erect some steps and the carriage slowly drains of people. One at a time, they say, but people still push and shove. Because I’m in a corner opposite the exit, I’m one of the last to leave. As I get out, I look both ways. Our rescue scene is multiplied along the rest of the train, forming the typical image of an exodus of refugees.
The underground peregrination is a mini adventure. The guy who pulled the lever returns to his role from the shadows, he won’t let up carping. Around me, others weave hypotheses about what happened. A blonde woman who is leading two girls, also blonde, by the hand, daughters or granddaughters, the darkness won’t allow me to see, is talking on the phone, relating the events, and she mentions a power failure, I don’t know where she got that from. A third person ventures the theory of a suicide. He says it loudly, with a touch of vindictiveness. I think: a suicide halfway between two stations doesn’t make much sense. One of the percussionists starts humming. His friends encourage him with applause, the boy lets himself go and raises his voice:
I am the miner
The miner am I
I am the miner
And I sing as I pass by
At Tribunales we are informed over the loudspeaker that it wasn’t a suicide or a strike, the blonde woman was right: there was a failure on the medium-tension lines. The man who protested on everyone’s behalf, the guy with grey curls, now I can see him in his entirety, stomach too bulky for the length of his shirt, doesn’t believe the explanations at all and continues with his lecture, now directing it at the loudspeaker as if it were a subway employee.
On the surface at last, the air could be described as fresh, even though it isn’t really. An illusion that doesn’t last long. I buy mint gum at a kiosk. I hardly ever do, but I don’t think twice, I need it like water. As I chew, I feel as though the gum helps me dissolve all those smells that seeped into me during the journey, including the taste of garlic, which I can sense in my own mouth as if it had invaded me by osmosis.