*
Agatha Christie dropped by with her friend, Beto’s daughter, what’s her name? Pina. What a god-awful name: the only thing that makes up for a name like that is that she’s going to be an absolute knockout.
‘Does your wife have a grave?’ they asked me.
I told them she does and they gave me some flowers. Agatha Christie explained she bought them for her sister because today is the 353-day anniversary of Luz’s death, and that this is a palindrome, so they went to buy her flowers from the garden center, but now there’s no one to take them to the cemetery. I asked them if they learned the word palindrome in school and for some reason they burst into hysterics.
‘Ana is my school,’ Pina said.
Something I didn’t tell them, but which comes to mind now that they’ve gone and I’m thinking about the flowers and the yellow sweater, is that perhaps what the Pérez-Walkers need to find solace is a machine like my Nina Simone PC: a direct line to the dead.
Noelia loved Nina Simone.
‘Why did the gods make me big-bootied but not black?’ she’d complain when we listened to her.
If you’d asked Noelia what she would have changed about herself, she would have answered that she’d like to be able to sing. Not that I ever asked her. There was no need. Noelia reminded you of these things, never let you forget her defects, as if to stop you from loving her too much.
‘Come on, it was you who had a thing for the black girls, Alfonso.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Did you put those flowers in water?’
‘Of course, my brown sugar.’
‘And count the days?’
‘No chance. In my mind, you always died yesterday.’
*
‘You know the type?’ was something Noelia would say a lot, above all when she wanted to make sure that whoever she was talking to had understood whatever generalization she’d just come out with. For example, she might say about a nurse, ‘She’s one of those women who thinks she’s really broken the mold, you know the type?’ And about some anesthetist or another, ‘That guy would bite his tongue till it bleeds, you know the type?’ Or, about the owner of the garden center next door: ‘He’s the kind of man that crashes at the first sign of a curve, you know the type?’
I have to confess, I practically never knew the type she was on about, either because Noelia’s definitions belonged to a vernacular I wasn’t familiar with, or, more often than not, because she made them up off the top of her head. But after the first few years of extreme frustration (frustration for Noelia because I simply couldn’t keep up with her), I ended up adopting a habit, one of many. Anything to keep the peace.
The truth is, — and I’m not saying this because I’ve worked out that Noelia, wherever she is, is reading what I write — I was fond of her generalizations. They were always original, or at least they seemed as much to me, someone who spent most of his life with his head in the clouds. Unlike me, my wife was in touch with the world: awake, aware of everything around her, including the mundane things that were lost on me and which it was my genuine pleasure to be made aware of. Like watching a good movie or reading a good book. At first they embarrassed me, but as time went on I came to respect the categories my wife invented. There was something almost Kantian about them: a will to develop a system. You-know-the-type was Noelia’s way of organizing the people who came into our lives, and it has to be said that she was really quite good at it. She had a witch’s intuition. One day an intern started working at the institute, and Noe, having only seen her one lunchtime, said to me, ‘That one will climb the ladder faster than ivy, and good for her.’
Within a year, ‘that one’, with her measly Master’s degree, had a position almost equivalent to mine, even though I, the fool that I am, hold not one but two PhDs.
The point is that I found a way to deal with you-know-the-type so that even in my social ignorance I could follow the conversation, and Noelia could build upon her catalogue of types at her leisure, convinced that I was following her to a T. I’ve always been proud of this excellent little solution, but in fact I ripped it off from Beto’s wife.
Before her sudden disappearance from the mews, I noticed that Chela, when she didn’t understand what we were talking about at the table after dinner — which was basically every time we talked about politics, which was basically every time we stayed up talking at the table after dinner — pulled a very specific face: one that made her seem interested, reflective, ever so slightly dissenting, and which masked her absolute ignorance. The face was simple: she pursed her lips. Obviously, this had a far more satisfactory effect on her, who’s a peach, than on a face like mine, which has more of an overripe-papaya look about it. But I copied her anyway, adding to it from my own cache a simultaneous, slow nod. And unbelievably, it worked. So when, for example, Noelia said to me, ‘Blond but with her roots grown out, you know the type?’, I would purse my lips and nod slowly, and she, satisfied she’d made it perfectly clear what kind of creature we were talking about, would happily babble on without having to stop for another round of frustrating elucidations.
Deep down, I think my Noe wasn’t just blunt. She had a sharper psychological instinct than those women who think they know it all, who think they’re wise owls: the humanitees, Noelia called my colleagues at the institute, with a double ee. The humanitees thought — like almost all the humanities graduates, including me — that they were better than everyone else. ‘Just that little bit more sensitive, that little bit more humane than the rest of humanity,’ is how my wife put it. The humanitees turned their noses up at Noelia because she spoke openly about how much TV she watched in her — rare — free moments. But really they were deeply envious of her career, which was solid as a rock and way — but really way — better remunerated. They pitied her for not having children, but deep down envied her independence; the same independence they’d been so quick to boast about in their youths before trading it in for little Timmy, Tommy and Tammy, and a jealous husband. You can’t ask a humanitee if she likes cooking, because she’ll accuse you of protracting the phallocentric patriarchy. On the other hand, if she finds out that the man in a couple takes care of the cooking — as is, or was, the case in our house — she’ll only ever see him as a hen-pecked husband.
The humanitees have very clear codes when they want to flatter one another, and are the undisputed champions of the backhanded compliment. If she doesn’t think much of someone, a humanitee will say, ‘She’s a real fighter.’ But a woman she admires is ‘the boss of herself’. Noe once whispered in my ear, ‘Of course she is, because a humanitee could boss her way out of a paper bag.’
‘The humanitees wear indigenous Mexican outfits, but designer, you know the type?’ And yes, I knew the type, or I didn’t but Noelia taught me to see them that way. She could smell the male intellectual’s thinly disguised machismo a mile off, while the humanitees were blind to it. I — who was known to be happily married, am ugly, and know how to pretend I’m listening — almost always caught wind of who was all over who from the secretaries, and tried to retain the information, at least until dinner time, so I could pass it on to Noelia, because she loved that kind of thing: it was like steak to her scandalmonger’s soul.
‘Poor thing,’ she’d say of the humanitee-lover in question, ‘this is going to end in tears.’