When I was halfway there, though, I had an idea and I turned around, but the Impala was no longer in the street, visible or invisible, now you see it, now you don't. The street had become a jigsaw of shadows with several pieces missing, and one of the pieces missing, oddly enough, was me. My Impala was gone. And in some sense that I couldn't quite understand, I was gone too. My Impala was back inside my head again. I was back inside my head again.
Then, humbled and confused and in a burst of utter Mexicanness, I knew that we were ruled by fate and that we would all drown in the storm, and I knew that only the cleverest, myself certainly not included, would stay afloat much longer.
Andrés Ramírez, Bar El Cuerno de Oro, Calle Avenir, Barcelona, December 1988. I was destined to be a failure, Belano, take my word for it. I left Chile on a long-ago day of 1975, on March 5 at eight p.m., to be precise, hidden in the hold of the cargo ship Napoli. In other words, as a common stowaway, with no idea of my final destination. I'll spare you the variously unpleasant details of the crossing. Put it this way: I was thirteen years younger than I am now and in my neighborhood in Santiago (La Cisterna, that is), my friends knew me as Mighty Mouse, after the funny, crime-fighting little animal that did so much to brighten the afternoons when we were children. In short, the man you see before you was prepared to put up with every hardship of such a voyage. At least physically, as they say. Never mind the hunger, the fear, the seasickness, the uncertainty of what lay ahead, alternately dim or terrifying. There was always some charitable soul who would venture down to the bilge with a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, a little bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Besides, I had all the time in the world to think, something nearly impossible in my previous life, since as we all know, in modern cities it doesn't pay to be idle. And so I was able to examine my childhood (when you're stuck in the bottom of a boat it's best to do these things in an organized way) in more or less the time it took us to reach the Panama Canal. From then on, or in other words as long as it took us to cross the Atlantic (ay, already so far from my beloved country and even my continent, not that I'd seen much of it, but I felt a deep affection for it all the same), I set out to dissect what had become of my youth. And I concluded that everything had to change, even if I wasn't sure just then how to go about it or what path to take. Really, though, I was only killing time, keeping up my strength and my spirits, since I was already near the end of my rope after so many days in that damp, echoing darkness, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Then one morning we docked in Lisbon and my thoughts took a new tack. Naturally, my first impulse was to disembark then and there, but one of the Italian sailors who sometimes fed me explained that a person in my position would have trouble at the Portuguese borders, by sea or by land. So I had to sit tight, and for two days that seemed like two weeks, all I could do was listen to the voices in the ship's hold, which hung open like the jaws of a whale. There, in my barrel, I got sicker and more impatient with each passing moment, shaking with chills that struck at random intervals. Then finally one night we set sail and left behind the industrious Portuguese capital that I envisioned, in my fever dreams, as a black city, with people dressed in black and houses built of mahogany or black marble or stone, maybe because while I was crouched there, burning up and half asleep, I thought of Eusebio, the Black Panther of the team that fought so valiantly in the England World Cup of ' 66, in which we Chileans were treated so unfairly.
Back on the open seas, we rounded the Iberian peninsula, and I was still sick, so sick that one night two Italians brought me up on deck so that I could get some air and I saw lights in the distance and I asked what they were, what part of the world those lights belonged to (the world that seemed so unfriendly), and the Italians said Africa-the way you might say beak, or the way you might say apple-and then I really started to shake, my fever felt like an epileptic seizure, but it was only a fever, and then the Italians left me sitting on the deck and moved to one side, like people leaving a sickroom to smoke a cigarette, and I heard one Italian say to the other: if he dies on us we'd better throw him overboard, and the other Italian answered: all right, all right, but he won't die. And although I didn't speak Italian I understood that clearly, since both of our languages were Romance languages, as a scholar would say. I know you've been in similar situations, Belano, so I won't go on too long. Fear or the will to live, the survival instinct, gave me strength that I didn't know I had, and I said to the Italians I'm all right, I'm not going to die, what's the next port? Then I dragged myself back down into the hold, curled up in my corner, and slept.
By the time we got to Barcelona I was better. On our second night in port I snuck off the ship and went walking out of the harbor like any night-shift worker. I had the clothes on my back, plus ten dollars I'd brought with me from Santiago hidden in one of my socks. Life has many wonderful moments, and they come in all shapes and sizes, but I'll never forget Barcelona's Ramblas or the side streets opening up to me that night like the arms of a girl you've never seen before but who you know is the love of your life. In three hours, I swear, I had a job. If a Chilean has strong arms and isn't lazy, he can make a living anywhere, my father told me when I went to say goodbye. I would have liked to punch the old son of a bitch in the face, but that's another story, so why dwell on it? The point is, on that unforgettable night I was already washing dishes by the time I lost the rocking sensation of the long crossing. This was at a place called La Tía Joaquina, on Calle Escudillers. Around five in the morning, tired but happy, I left the bar and headed for the Pensión Conchi (what a name!), which had been recommended by one of the waiters at La Tía Joaquina, a kid from Murcia who was also staying at that dump.