We gradually calm down, eyes red, tired from so much laughing, just in time for the arrival of our order. For a while, as we eat and drink beer without pause — the anchovies are more than salty, they’re poisonous — we don’t say much. We just smile every time the camp waiter approaches us, somewhere between solicitous and mocking, and gives us one of his contemptuous gestures as he asks if we’d like anything else. We munch away rather animalistically, not worrying about manners, mouths dirty, hands greasy, dripping tomato sauce. We paint the tablecloth with stains of all shapes.
Finally sated, we take a deep breath and Eloísa starts talking again. She says that Axel now wants to make her an actress in the film. What film, I ask. The film they’re going to make with Andy, the one with the Martians. I told you. Oh, yes. I’m fed up of him, I’d move tomorrow but I don’t have the money. I want to get the hell out of there, that’s what she says. Yes, the house is really good, but having him wandering round all day is unbearable. He’s a worm, she says, and the word resonates in me somewhere. She is interrupted by a black man, really black, from Africa or Central America, passing among the tables with a briefcase full of jewellery. Bracelets, earrings, gold chokers, as well as watches, fake and luxurious, blue backgrounds, silver-plated, with moons and suns. Eloísa tries everything. The black guy, who doesn’t utter a single word, partly out of timidity, but mainly because he has earphones in and appears to have no intention of entering into contact with the outside world, is patient. Nor does he protest when Eloísa ends up saying, Thanks, maybe next time. He half closes the briefcase with two fingers and moves on. We take swigs of beer in unison and once more fall into silence. And what if we go and live together? says Eloísa suddenly with a foam moustache on her lip. I raise my eyebrows without stopping drinking but I don’t say anything, nor am I going to. She doesn’t insist either, she must have remembered Simón and rejected the idea quickly. She stands up: Be right back, I’m going to pee. I space out, head resting on my hand, my palate still burning from the anchovies, I look out of the window: a man missing a leg is crossing the street dressed in combat gear. People look at him with a mixture of repulsion and commiseration. He steps onto the pavement, I lose sight of him, I let my eyes zigzag along the pedestrian route disfigured by the heat, the tyres and the million soles treading it. An X-ray of a pair of sick lungs comes into my mind. I think about Tosca and melanomas. The gay waiter rescues me by very deliberately clinking the cutlery to wake me up.
Eloísa returns from the bathroom, both fists clenched near her temples and a wide smile, as if celebrating a goal. She says she’s had a great idea and taps her forehead three times with her knuckles. Guess. I think about Axel’s film. No, no. You want to do a runner. Warm, warm, but bigger, much bigger, she says, eyes clear, suddenly a child. I take a gulp of beer, I give in and she squeezes my wrist, lowering my arm. I put up a weak resistance, for seconds. She leans in to me and finally says very quietly: The jewels, you daft cow, we’ll nick the jewels.
She asks me for a pen. Since I don’t have one, she stands up and gets one at the till. She unfolds a paper napkin and starts drawing the plan of the house. The ground floor, which you already know, she says, living room, kitchen, Axel’s little room and the staircase. What staircase? I ask with a silent gesture, lengthening my neck. The staircase. No, never saw it. She insists: Behind the piano. Well, it doesn’t matter, she continues, you saw it but you don’t remember. That’s how you get to the bedrooms. On another napkin she traces the lines that separate the rooms, Axel’s, his sister’s, which is now a guest room, his parents’. Here’s the bed, the bathroom on one side, it’s enormous, it has a jacuzzi and everything, there’s the dressing room. You have no idea. At the end of the wardrobe she marks an asterisk so hard that it perforates the paper: That’s where the jewels are, in a safe behind a mirror. She waits for my reaction. I can’t tell whether this is a sophisticated joke, so I stay quiet. She continues: I haven’t told you the best part, I know where they keep the key. I must be looking at her with incredulous eyes, more than incredulous, stunned, spellbound. We’ll get rich, understand? She makes the sign of the cross with her index finger over her lips and concludes: I swear in God’s name.
The mix of marijuana, pizza and beer clump together in my guts to form one single, rancid, reverberant mass of taste that rises in my throat in the form of a retch. A false retch that still prevents me from closing my mouth. Walking the few blocks back to the building, I feel like I have a flowerpot on my head. More than that, my whole head has turned into a cube of dry earth. Hard. It’s already night-time when I arrive. Simón and Herbert are sleeping together, back to back. I wonder whether they’ll have eaten anything. Impossible to telclass="underline" there are no traces of anything, no smells, rubbish, dirty plates. I feel like a ghost.
Twenty-six
The dream is so real that I wake up with vertigo and bad heartburn. Mercedes is pursuing us through the building. Herbert, Sonia and Simón manage to slip down the stairs, celebrating their freedom with playful laughs. He catches me with a swipe and drags me to the lift shaft. There, he lets go of me and skewers me with his hard cock, like a bull’s, colossal. He fucks me in the air, right next to the abyss.
Morning in the plaza. Swings, slides, taxi drivers drinking coffee, too much sky for the city. Sitting in the sand, I take off my shoes and entertain myself burying and exposing my feet. My toes are covered in grains of sand that pile up on the skin like minuscule living beings. Thousands of little blond men with the singular mission of sinking and allowing themselves to sink. And at that moment, passing from one state to another, when the toes stop being toes, the instant at which the knuckles have no beginning or end, the deformity is revealed. My deformity. A different kind of decomposition, through concealment, that leads to the same nothing, the same mystery as ever. A horn beeps and it’s goodbye abstraction. Simón is carefully swinging his motorcycling cat back and forth until suddenly he ducks his head and gives it a hard push, launching it like a rocket.
I shake my feet, leave the sandpit and sit on the cement border around the plaza, my back supported by the railings. I start emptying my pockets, between notes and coins I count eighteen pesos. Rolled into a ball, the napkin on which Eloísa drew her plan of Axel’s house, the first floor, the bedrooms, the route to the jewels. She didn’t stop talking for half an hour and I, somewhere else even before she started telling me about her plan, only caught words at random: diamonds, dresses, shoes, Miami, idiot and happiness. At times I woke up and paid her fleeting attention again. That house is a waste of time, no one ever notices a thing, who’s coming in or out, Orfe, the maid, workers who turn up occasionally, the gardener, the pool boy, Axel and his mates, it’s mental. It would be impossible for them to catch us, she was saying, increasingly serious, and it didn’t sound like an idea that had occurred to her in a flash of inspiration, more like something she had been concocting for a while. I went back to daydreaming with my eyes open, the spicy taste of the anchovies still inflaming my palate; her lips moved at top speed while her hands, just as fast, moulded together the crumbs scattered across the table, forming a ball of dirty dough. Now Simón is moving from the swing to the slide, following the cat’s lead. I fold the napkin in four and slip it back in my pocket. A souvenir.