Cocaine, one of Bittrich’s worst movies. But they stayed friends until the end. Many years later, when all the rest were dead, I tracked down Pajarito. He was living in a tiny, one-room apartment, on a street that led down to the sea, in Buenaventura. He was working as a waiter in a restaurant owned by a retired policeman: Octopus Ink, the place was called, ideal for someone who wanted to lie low. He went from home to work and back again, with a brief stop each day at a video store, where he’d usually rent a couple of movies. Walt Disney and old Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan films. Every day, punctual as a clock. From his walk-up to Octopus Ink, and then, after dark, back to the apartment, with two videotapes under his arm. He never brought food back, only movies. He rented them on the way there or the way back, it varied, but always from the same store, a little shack, three yards by three, open eighteen hours a day. I went looking for him on a whim, just because I felt like it. I went looking and I found him in 1999; it was easy, it took less than a week. Pajarito was forty-nine then, but he looked at least ten years older. He wasn’t surprised to find me sitting on his bed when he got home. I told him who I was, reminded him of the movies he’d made with my mother and my aunt. Pajarito took a chair and as he sat down the videos fell out from under his arm. You’ve come to kill me, Lalito, he said. He’d rented films with Ignacio López Tarso and Matt Dillon, two of his favorite actors. I reminded him of the old Pregnant Fantasies days. We both smiled. I saw your prick, it was transparent like a worm; my eyes were open, you know, watching your glass eye. Pajarito nodded, then sniffed. You always were a clever kid, he said, before you were born too, I guess, with your eyes open already, why not. I saw you, that’s what matters, I said. You were pink for a start in there, then you turned transparent and you got one hell of a shock, Pajarito. Back then you weren’t afraid, you moved so fast only little creatures and fetuses could see you moving. Only cockroaches, nits, lice and fetuses. Pajarito was looking at the floor. I heard him whisper: Et cetera, et cetera. Then he said: I never liked that sort of movie, one or two is OK, but it’s criminal to make so many. I’m a fairly normal person, really. I was genuinely fond of Doris, I was always a friend to your mother, when you were little I never did you any harm. Do you remember? I didn’t run the business, I never betrayed anyone, or killed anyone. I did a bit of dealing, a few robberies, we all did, but as you can see, it didn’t set me up for retirement. Then he picked the videos up off the floor, put the one with Ignacio López Tarso in the VCR, and as the soundless images succeeded one another on the screen, he began to cry. Don’t cry, Pajarito, I said, it’s not worth it. His days of vibrating were over. Or maybe he was still vibrating a little, and as I sat there on the bed I was scavenging those remnants of energy with the ravenous hunger of a shipwrecked sailor. It’s hard to vibrate in such a small apartment, with the smell of chicken soup permeating every cranny. It’s hard to pick up a vibration when your eyes are fixed on a dumbly gesticulating Ignacio López Tarso. López Tarso’s eyes in black and white: how could so much innocence and so much malice be combined? A good actor, I remarked, just to say something. One of our founding fathers, said Pajarito in agreement. He was right. Then he whispered: Et cetera, et cetera. That lousy fucking Pajarito. We sat there in silence for a long time: López Tarso went gliding through the movie’s plot like a fish inside a whale; the images of Connie, Doris and Monica lit up for few seconds in my head, and Pajarito’s vibration became imperceptible. I haven’t come to rub you out, I said to him in the end. Back then, when I was young, I had trouble using the word kill. I never killed: I took people out, blew them away, put them to sleep, I topped, stiffed or wasted them, sent them to meet their maker, made them bite the dust, I iced them, snuffed them, did them in. I smoked people. But I didn’t smoke Pajarito, I just wanted to see him and chat for a while. To feel his beat and remember my past. Thanks, Lalito, he said, and then he got up and filled a washbasin with water from a demijohn. With exact, artistic, resigned movements, he washed his hands and his face. When I was a kid, that’s what they all called me, Connie, Monica, Doris, Bittrich, Pajarito, Sansón Fernández: they all called me Lalito. Lalito Cura playing in the garden with the dogs and the geese at the house of crime, which for me was the house of boredom and sometimes the house of dismay and happiness. These days there’s no time to get bored, happiness vanished somewhere in the world, and all that’s left is dismay. Perpetual dismay, composed of corpses and ordinary people, like Pajarito, who was thanking me. I was never intending to kill you, I said, I’ve kept all your movies, I don’t watch them very often, I admit, only on special occasions, but I’ve looked after them. I’m a collector of your cinematic past, I said. Pajarito sat down again. He had stopped vibrating: he was watching the López Tarso movie out of the corner of his eye and his stillness suggested a mineral patience. According to the clock radio beside the bed it was two in the morning. The night before, I had dreamed of finding Pajarito: I was mounting him and shouting unintelligible words in his ear, something about a buried treasure. Or about an underground city. Or about a dead person wrapped in papers proof against putrefaction and the passage of time. But I didn’t even lay my hand on his shoulder. I’ll leave you some money, Pajarito, so you can live without having to work. I’ll buy you whatever you like. I’ll take you to a quiet place where you can spend all your time watching your favorite actors. There was no one like you in Los Empalados, I said. Ignacio López Tarso and Pajarito Gómez looked at me: stone-like patience. The pair of them gone crazily dumb. Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of memory. Fetuses and other tiny wide-eyed creatures. For a moment, my friends, I felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate. Then I stood up very carefully and left.