Burnt Water

The Mandarin

I

Once Mexico City had been a city whose nights held the promise of the morning to come. Before going to bed, Federico Silva would walk out on the balcony of his house on Córdoba Street at two o’clock in the morning, when one could still smell the dampness of the earth of the coming day, breathe the perfume of the jacarandas, and feel the nearness of the volcanoes.

Dawn brought everything near, mountains and forests. Federico Silva closed his eyes in order to smell even better that unique odor of dawn in Mexico City: the sapid, green trace of the long-forgotten mud of the lake bed. To smell that odor was to smell the first morning. Only those who can perceive the nocturnal scent of the lost lake really know this city, Federico told himself.

That was a long time ago. Now his house stood only a block away from the huge sunken plaza of the Insurgentes metro station. An architect friend had compared that anarchical intersection of streets and avenues — Insurgentes, Chapultepec, Génova, Amberes, and Jalapa — to the Place de l’Étoile in Paris, and Federico Silva had had a good laugh. Actually, the Insurgentes intersection was more like a giant-sized stack of tortillas: a busy thoroughfare, at times elevated above the flat rooftops of the bordering houses, then streets blocked with cement posts and chains, then the stairways and tunnels communicating with an interior plaza jammed with seafood restaurants and taco stands, itinerant vendors, beggars, vagrant troubadours … and the students, shocking numbers of youths lolling around while shoeshine boys polished their shoes, eating sandwiches, watching the slowly drifting smog, whistling and calling veiled obscenities at passing round-breasted, round-bottomed, skinny-legged girls in miniskirts; the hip world, girls with feathers and blue eyelids and silver-smeared mouths, boys wearing leather vests over bare skin and yards of chains and necklaces. And finally, the entrance to the metro: the mouth of hell.

They had destroyed his morning-scented nights. The air in his neighborhood became unbreathable, the streets impassable. Under Federico Silva’s nose — between the wretched luxury of the Zona Rosa, a gigantic village’s pitiable cosmopolitan stage set, and the desperate, though useless, attempt at residential grace in the Colonia Roma — they had dug an infernal, unsalvageable trench, a river Styx of gasoline vapors circulating above the human whirlpool of the plaza, hundreds of young men whistling and watching the smog drift by, sweating, loafing, sitting in the filthy saucer of the sunken cement plaza. The saucer of a cup of cold, greasy, spilled chocolate.

“Infamous!” he exclaimed impotently. “To think that this was once a pretty, pastel-colored small town; you could walk from the Zócalo to Chapultepec Park and have everything you needed, government and entertainment, friendship and love.”

This was one of the standard tunes of this elderly bachelor clinging to forgotten things that no longer interested anyone but him. His friends Perico and the Marqués told him not to be so pigheaded. It was one thing, as long as his mother had been alive (and God knows she took her time in going), to respect the family tradition and keep the house on Córdoba Street. But what was to be gained now? He’d had stupendous offers to sell; the market would top out; he ought to take advantage of the moment. He should know that better than anyone; he was a landlord himself, that was his living: real estate.

Then they’d tried to force his hand by constructing tall buildings on either side of his property; modern, they called them, although Federico Silva insisted that one can call modern only that which is built to last, not what’s slapped together to begin to disintegrate in two years’ time and fall down in ten. He felt ashamed that a country of churches and pyramids built for eternity should end up contenting itself with a city of shanties, shoddiness, and shit.

They boxed him in, they stifled him, they blocked out his sun and air, his view and his odors. And, in exchange, they gave him a double helping of noise. His house, innocently imprisoned between two cement-and-glass towers, began to tilt and crack under the excessive pressure. One afternoon, while he was getting dressed to go out, he watched a dropped coin roll until it came to rest against a wall. Once in this same bedroom he’d played with his toy soldiers, marshaled historic battles, Austerlitz, Waterloo, even a Trafalgar in his bathtub. Now he couldn’t fill the tub because the water spilled over one edge.

“It’s like living in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but without the prestige. Just yesterday plaster fell on my head as I was shaving, and the whole bathroom wall is cracked. When will they learn that the spongy soil of our ancient lake bed cannot support the insult of skyscrapers!”

It wasn’t a truly old house, but the kind of mansion of supposed French inspiration that was popular at the beginning of the century, and no longer built after the twenties. Actually, it more closely resembled a Spanish or Italian villa, with its flat roof, capricious stone designs on pale stucco, and grand entrance stairway leading to a foyer elevated above the dampness of the subsoil.

And the garden, a shady, moist garden, solace against the burning mornings of the high plateau; during the night a natural collector of the perfumes of the morning to come. What luxury: two large palm trees, a small gravel path, a sundial, an iron bench painted green, burbling water channeled toward beds of violets. With what animosity he regarded the ridiculous thick green glass with which the new buildings tried to defend themselves against the age-old Mexican sun. How much wiser the Spanish conquistadors, who had understood the importance of convent shadow and cool patios. Of course he would defend all this against the aggression of a city that first had been his friend and now had become his most ferocious enemy! The enemy of Federico Silva, known to his friends as the Mandarin.

His features were so markedly Oriental that they obscured the Indian mask underlying them. It happens with a lot of Mexican faces. The stigmas and accidents of known history recede to reveal the primal face, the face that goes back to Mongolian tundra and mountains. In this way Federico Silva was like the lost perfume of the ancient lake of Mexico: a sensitive memory, practically a ghost.

The hair of the man who wore this immutable mask was still so black it looked dyed. But because of the changes in the national diet he lacked the strong, white, enduring teeth of his ancestors. Black hair, in spite of the changes. But the essential benefits of chili peppers, beans, and tortillas, which contain sufficient calcium and vitamins to make up for a limited diet, were no longer present in the bodies of those generations that had forsaken them. Now in that wretched cup-shaped plaza he watched the young people eating junk — carbonated drinks and synthetic caramels and potato chips in cellophane bags, the garbage food of the North added to the leper food of the South: the trichina, the amoeba, the omnipotent microbe in every slice of pork, tamarind-flavored soft drink, and wilting radish.

In the midst of so much ugliness it was only natural that he maintain his little oasis of beauty, his personal Eden which nobody envied him anyway. Voluntarily, consciously, he had remained on the edge of the mainstream. He’d watched the caravans of fashion pass him by. He preserved a few fashions, it was true. But what he chose and he preserved. When something went out of style he continued to wear it, he cultivated it and saved it from the vagaries of taste. So his style was never out of style, his suits, his hats and canes and Chinese dressing gowns, the elegant ankle-high boots for his tiny Oriental feet, the suave kid gloves for his tiny Mandarin hands.

He had been this way for years, since the forties, all the time he was waiting for his mother to die and leave him her fortune, and now, in turn, he would die, at peace, in any way he wished, alone in his house, freed finally from the burden of his mother, so extravagant and at the same time so stingy, so vain, so painted, powdered, and bewigged till her dying day. The attendants at the funeral parlor had outdone themselves. Feeling an obligation to bestow in death a more colorful and lavish appearance than life, they presented Federico Silva, with great pride, with a raving caricature, an enameled mummy. The moment he saw her he’d ordered the casket sealed.

Family and friends had gathered during the days of the wake for Doña Felícitas Fernández de Silva, and her burial. Discreet, distinguished people everyone else referred to as aristocrats, as if, Federico Silva mused, an aristocracy were possible in a colony settled by fugitives, petty clerks, millers, and swineherds.

“Let us content ourselves,” he used to tell his old friend María de los Angeles Negrete, “with being what we are, an upper middle class that in spite of the whirlwinds of history has managed through time to preserve its very comfortable personal income.”

The oldest name in this assemblage had acquired its fortune in the seventeenth century, the most recent before 1910. An unwritten law excluded from the group the nouveaux riches of the Revolution, but admitted those damaged by the civil strife who’d then used the Revolution to recover their standing. But the customary, the honorable, thing was to have been rich during the colonial period, through the empire and the republican dictatorships. The ancestral home of the Marqués de Casa Cobos dated from the times of the Viceroy O’Donojú, and his grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Carlota; Perico Arauz’s ancestors had been ministers to Santa Anna and Porfirio Díaz; and Federico, on the Fernández side, was descended from an aide-de-camp to Maximilian, and through the Silvas from a magistrate to Lerdo de Tejeda. Proof of breeding, proof of class maintained in spite of the political upheavals of a country known for its surprises, somnolent one day, in tumult the next.

Every Saturday Federico joined his friends to play Mah-Jongg, and the Marqués always told him, “Don’t worry, Federico. No matter how it shocks us, we must admit that the Revolution tamed Mexico forever.”

He hadn’t seen the resentful eyes, the caged tigers lurking in the nervous bodies of the youths sitting watching the smog drift by.

II

The day he buried his mother he really began to remember. Moreover, he realized that it was because of her disappearance that detailed memories were returning which had been buried beneath Doña Felícitas’s formidable weight. That was when he remembered that once mornings could be perceived at midnight, and that he’d gone out on his balcony to breathe them, to collect the anticipated gift of the day.

But that was only one memory among many, the one most closely resembling a revived instinct. The fact is, he told himself, that the memory of old people is stimulated by the deaths of other old people. So he found that he was waiting for the death of some uncle or aunt or friend to be announced, secure in the knowledge that new memories would attend the rendezvous. In the same way, some day, they would remember him.

How would he be remembered? Meticulously grooming himself every morning before the mirror, he knew that he had changed very little over the last twenty years. Like Orientals, who, once they begin to age, never change until the day they die. But also because all that time he’d kept the same style of dress. No denying it, in hot weather he was the only person he knew who still wore a boater like the one made famous by Maurice Chevalier. With delight, savoring the syllables, he enunciated several foreign names for that hat: straw hat, canotier, paglietta. And in winter, a black homburg with the obligatory silk ribbon imposed by Anthony Eden, the most elegant man of his epoch.

Federico Silva always rose late. He had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than a wealthy rent collector. His friends’ sons had fallen prey to a misplaced social consciousness, which meant they must be seen up and in some restaurant by eight o’clock in the morning, eating hotcakes and discussing politics. Happily, Federico Silva had no children to be embarrassed by being wealthy, or to shame him for lying in bed till noon, waiting for his valet and cook, Dondé, to bring him his breakfast so he could drink his coffee and read the newspapers with tranquillity, shave and dress with calm.

Through the years he’d saved the clothes he’d worn as a young man, and when Doña Felícitas died he gathered up her extraordinary wardrobe and arranged it in several closets, one corresponding to the styles that predated the First World War, another for the twenties, and a third for the hodgepodge style she’d dreamed up in the thirties and then affected until her death: colored stockings, silver shoes, boas of shrieking scarlet, long skirts of mauve silk, décolleté blouses, thousands of necklaces, garden-party hats, and pearl chokers.

Every day he walked to the Bellinghausen on Londres Street, where the same corner table had been reserved for him since the era of the hand-tailored suits he wore. There he ate alone, dignified, reserved, nodding to passing acquaintances, picking up the checks of unaccompanied ladies known to him or his mother, none of this backslapping for him, no vulgarity, shouting, What’s new! What-a-sight-for-sore-eyes! or You’ve-made-my-day! He detested familiarity. An almost tangible aura of privacy surrounded his small, dark, scrupulous person. Let no one attempt to penetrate it.

His familiarity was reserved for the contents of his house. Every evening he took delight in looking at, admiring, touching, stroking, sometimes even caressing his possessions, the Tiffany lamps and ashtrays, the Lalique figurines and frames. These things gave him particular satisfaction, but he enjoyed equally a whole room of Art Deco furniture, round mirrors on silvered boudoir tables, tall lamps of tubular aluminum, a bed with a headboard of pale burnished metal, an entirely white bedroom: satin and silk, a white telephone, a polar-bear skin, walls lacquered a pale ivory.

Two events had marked his life as a young man. A trip to Hollywood, when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles had arranged a visit to the set of Dinner at Eight, where he’d been shown Jean Harlow’s white bedroom and even seen the actress from a distance: a platinum dream. And in Eden Roc he’d met Cole Porter, who’d just composed “Just One of Those Things,” and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who was writing Tender Is the Night. He’d had his picture taken with Porter that summer on the Riviera, but not with the Fitzgeralds. A photograph with a box camera that didn’t need a flash. And in his room in the Hotel Negresco he’d had an adventure with a naked woman in the darkness. Neither knew who the other was. Suddenly the woman had been illuminated by moonlight as bright as day, as if the moon were the sun, a prurient, blinding spotlight stripped of the fig-leaf effect of the silver screen.

The visit to the Côte d’Azur was a constant topic of nostalgic reminiscences during the Saturday-afternoon reunions. Federico was a skilled Mah-Jongg player, and three of the habitual players, María de los Angeles, Perico, and the Marqués, had been with him that summer. It had all been memorable but that one event, the incident of the blond girl who resembled Jean Harlow. If one of the friends felt that another was about to venture into that forbidden territory, he warned him with a heavily charged look. Then everybody changed the subject, avoided talking about the past, and turned to their usual discussions of family and money.

“The two cannot be separated,” Federico said as they played. “And as I have no immediate family, when I’m gone my money will be dispersed among distant branches of the family. Amusing, isn’t it?”

He apologized for talking about death. But not about money. Each of them had had the good fortune to appropriate a parcel of the wealth of Mexico at an opportune time — mines, forests, land, cattle, farms — and the luck to convert it quickly, before it had passed out of their hands, into the one secure investment: Mexico City real estate.

Half daydreaming, Federico Silva thought about the houses that so punctually produced his rents, the old colonial palaces on Tacuba, Guatemala, and La Moneda Streets. He’d never visited them. He was totally ignorant about the people who lived there. Perhaps one day he would ask one of his rent collectors to tell him who lived in the old palaces. What were the people like? Did they realize they were living in the noblest mansions of Mexico?

He would never invest in a new building like those that had blocked out his sun and made his house list to one side. That much he’d sworn to himself. Smiling, he repeated his oath as they walked to the dining table that Mah-Jongg Saturday in his home. Everyone knew that to be received by Federico Silva was a very special honor. Only he entertained with such detail, the seating plan in a red leather holder, the places set in accord to the strictest protocol — rank, age, former posts — and the card with the name of each guest at its precise place, the menu written out in the host’s own hand, Dondé’s impeccable service at the table.

That night as he glanced around the table, counting the absent, the friends who had preceded him in death, there was scarcely a flicker of expression on Federico Silva’s Oriental mask. He rubbed his tiny porcelain Mandarin hands together: ah, there was no protocol as implacable as death, no priority more strict than that of the tomb. High overhead, the Lalique chandelier shed a vertical beam, perversely illuminating the Goyaesque faces of his table companions, the flesh of curdled custard, the deep fissures at the corners of the mouths, the hollow eyes of his friends.

Whatever became of the nude blond girl of that night in my room in the Hotel Negresco?

A Mayan profile thrust between Federico Silva and the lady seated at his right, his friend María de los Angeles Negrete, as Dondé began to serve the soup. The bridge of Dondé’s nose began in the middle of his forehead and his tiny eyes were crossed.

“Isn’t it extraordinary,” Federico Silva commented in French. “Do you realize that this type of profile and crossed eyes was a mark of physical beauty among the Mayas? To achieve it they bound the infants’ heads when they were born and forced them to follow the pendulum motion of a marble suspended on a thread. How is it possible that centuries later those artificially imposed characteristics continue to be transmitted?”

“It’s like inheriting a wig and false teeth.” María de los Angeles whinnied like a mare.

Dondé’s profile between the host and his guest, his arm holding the soup tureen, the brimming soup ladle, the unexpected offense of Dondé’s sweat, he’d warned him for the last time, bathe after you finish in the kitchen and before you begin to serve, sometimes it isn’t possible, señor, there isn’t enough time, señor.

“Yours, or my mother’s, María de los Angeles?”

“What, Federico?”

“The wig. The teeth.”

Someone jarred the ladle, Federico Silva, Dondé, or María de los Angeles, who knows, but steaming chickpea soup disappeared into the woman’s bodice, screams, how could that have happened, Dondé, I’m sorry, señor. I swear, I didn’t do it, ay! the curds-and-whey breasts of María de los Angeles, ay! the scalded tits, go take a bath, Dondé, you offend me, Dondé, my mother’s wig and false teeth, the naked blonde, Nice …

He awakened with a fearful start, the anguish of a desperate effort to remember what he’d just dreamed, the certainty he would never recapture it, another dream lost forever. Drunk with sadness, he put on his Chinese dressing gown and walked out on the balcony.

He breathed deeply. He sniffed in vain for odors of the morning to come. The mud of the Aztec lake, the foam of the Indian night. Impossible. Like his dreams, the lost perfumes refused to return.

“Is anything the matter, señor?”

“No, Dondé.”

“I heard the señor call out.”

“It was nothing. Go back to sleep, Dondé.”

“Whatever you say, señor.”

“Good night, Dondé.”

“Good night, señor.”

III

“As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a real stickler about what you wear, Federico.”

He’d never forgiven his old friend María de los Angeles, who had once made fun of him by addressing him as Monsieur Verdoux. Maybe there was something Chaplinesque in antiquated elegance, but only when it disguised a diminishing fortune. And Federico Silva, as everyone knew, was not down on his luck. It was just that, like every person of true taste, he had the good sense to choose things that lasted. A pair of shoes, or a house.

“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”

He would never, for example, wear spats and carry a cane at the same time. In his daily stroll down Córdoba Street to the Bellinghausen restaurant, he was careful to offset the showy effect of a brick-colored jacket with a Buster Brown belt he’d had made in 1933 by draping a nondescript raincoat over his arm with studied insouciance. And only on the infrequent days when it was really cold did he wear the derby, the black overcoat and white muffler. He was well aware that behind his back his friends whispered that the way he hung on to his clothes was really the most humiliating proof of dependence. With what Doña Felícitas had put him through, he had to make things last twenty or thirty years.

“Save electricity. Go to bed early.”

But why after Doña Felícitas’s death did he continue to wear the same old outfits? That was something they’d never asked him, now that he’d inherited the fortune. You could say that Doña Felícitas had deformed him, and he had turned necessity into a virtue. No, that wasn’t it. His mother only pretended to be stingy. It all began with that sacred sentence — save electricity, go to bed early — said as if it were a sarcastic joke one night when she wanted to conceal her real intent, to save face, to pretend she didn’t know her son was grown up, that he went out at night without asking her permission, that he dared leave her by herself.

“If I support you, the least I can expect is that you won’t leave me here all alone, Feddie. I could die at any moment, Feddie. I know Dondé’s here, but I am not thrilled at the idea of dying in the arms of a servant. Very well, Feddie. I suppose it must be, as you say, a very, very important engagement to cause you to abandon your own mother. Abandon, yes, that’s the word. I pray to God you make up for the hurt you’ve caused me, Feddie. You know how. You promised me this year you’d follow Father Tellez’s spiritual exercises. Please do that little favor for me, Feddie. I’m going to hang up now. I’m feeling very tired.”

She replaced the white receiver. Sitting in the bed with the burnished metal headboard, surrounded with white cushions, covered with white furs, a great ancient doll, a milk-white Punchinella, lavishing powder on a floury face in which her blazing eyes, orange mouth, and red cheeks were obscene scars, flourishing with panache the white puff, enveloping herself in a choking, perfumed cloud of rice powder and aromatic talcum, her bare skull protected by a white silk cap. At night the wig of tight, shiny black curls reposed on a cotton-stuffed head on the silver boudoir table, like the wigs of ancient queens.

Sometimes Federico Silva liked to interject a touch of the fantastic into the Saturday conversations. Nothing more satisfying than an appreciative audience, and inevitably it was easy to frighten María de los Angeles. Federico Silva found this flattering. María de los Angeles was older than he, and he’d been in love with her as a boy; he’d wept when the precious little sixteen-year-old had chosen to go to the Country Club ball with older boys, not with him, the devoted little friend, the humble admirer of her blond perfection, her rose-colored skin, the filmy tulle and silken ribbons that veiled and encircled her desirable flesh. Oh, beautiful María de los Angeles. Now she looked like Goya’s Queen María Luisa. He realized that in frightening her Federico Silva was still paying homage, just as he had at fifteen. But was the only possible homage gooseflesh?

“Supposedly, the guillotine was invented to spare the victim pain, you see. But the result was precisely the opposite. The speed of the execution actually prolongs the victim’s agony. Neither the head nor the body has time to adjust. They feel they are still joined together, and the awareness that they are not takes several seconds to be comprehended. For the victim those seconds are centuries.”

Did she understand? this long-toothed woman with the horse laugh and curds-and-whey breasts; the cruel overhead light from the Lalique chandelier could favor only a Marlene Dietrich, exaggerated shadows, funereal hollows, hallucinatory mystery. Beheaded by light.

“Without a head the body continues to move, the nervous system continues to function, the arms jerk and the hands implore. And the severed head, stimulated by a rush of blood to the brain, experiences extreme lucidity. The bulging eyes stare at the executioner. The accelerated tongue curses, remembers, denies. And the teeth clamp ferociously on the basket. Every basket at the foot of a guillotine looks as if it had been gnawed by an army of rats.”

María de los Angeles exhaled a swooning sigh; the Marqués de Casa Cobos felt her pulse, Perico Arauz offered her a handkerchief dampened in cologne water. At two in the morning, after everyone had left, Federico Silva walked out onto his bedroom balcony wondering whose would be the next corpse, whose the next death, that would allow him to reclaim a bit more of his memories. One could also be a landlord of memory, but the only way to collect that rent was through another’s death. What memories would his own death unleash? Who would remember him? He closed the French windows of his balcony and lay down on the white bed that had been his mother’s. He tried to go to sleep by counting the people who would remember him. They might be the “best” people, but they were very few.

After the death of Doña Felícitas, Federico Silva began to worry about his own death. He instructed Dondé: “When you discover my body, before you notify anybody, put this record on the record player.”

“Yes, señor.”

“Look at it carefully. No mistakes, I’m putting it right on top.”

“Don’t worry, señor.”

“And open this book on the table beside my bed.”

“As you wish, señor.”

He wanted to be found to the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, with Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood open beside him. This was the least elaborate of his fantasies about his death. He decided to write four letters. In one he would describe himself as a suicide; in another, as a man condemned to death; in the third, as incurably ill; and in the fourth, as a victim of a human or natural disaster. This was the letter that presented the greatest difficulties. How could he synchronize the necessary three factors: his death, mailing the letter, and the disaster, an earthquake in Sicily, a hurricane in Key West, a volcanic eruption in Martinique, an air crash in…? He could send the other three letters to people in places scattered around the world asking them please to mail the letters written and signed by him and addressed to his friends as soon as they learned of his death: the suicide letter to María de los Angeles, the condemned-man letter to Perico Arauz, and the incurable-illness missive to the Marqués de Casa Cobos. Confusion. Uncertainty. Eternal doubt. The man about whose body we’ve gathered, the man we are burying, was he actually our friend Federico Silva?

Nevertheless, the predictable confusion and uncertainty of his friends were as nothing compared to his own. As he reread the three letters, Federico realized that he knew whom to send them to, but no one who would do him the favor of mailing them. He had never again traveled abroad following that trip to the Côte d’Azur. Cole Porter had died smiling, the Fitzgeralds and Jean Harlow, weeping. To whom would he send the letters? In his mind’s eye he saw his bathing-suited young friends, Perico, the Marqués, and María de los Angeles, in Eden Roc forty years ago. Where was the girl now who looked like Jean Harlow? She was his only secret ally. In death she could atone for the pain and humiliation she had caused him in life.

“And who the hell are you?”

“I myself don’t know as I look at you.”

“Sorry! I’m in the wrong room.”

“No. Don’t go. I don’t know who you are.”

“Let me go. Let me go or I’ll scream.”

“Please…”

“Let me go. Not even if you were the last man on earth. Filthy Chink!”

The last man. Carefully, he folded the letters before replacing them in their envelopes. A heavy hand fell on his fragile shoulder: a clatter of bracelets and chains, metal striking against metal.

“What’s in the envelopes, old man? Your dough?”

“Is it him?”

“Sure it’s him. He goes by the snack bar every day.”

“I didn’t recognize him in his darling Fu Manchu bathrobe.”

“You’d know him with his cane.”

“Or the cute little bibs over his shoes. Shit!”

“Hey, old man, don’t get nervous. These are my buddies, the Barber, and Pocahontas. They call me Artist, at your service. We won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“What do you people want?”

“Only a lot of stuff you don’t need.”

“How did you get in here?”

“Ask the little fruit when he wakes up.”

“What ‘little fruit’?”

“The one who runs your errands.”

“We put him out for a while. Like a light.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t keep any money in the house.”

“I told you, we didn’t come for your fucking money. Screw the money, old man.”

“Come on, Artist. You’re wasting time. Let’s get going.”

“Right on!”

“Barber, you entertain the walking dead here while Poca and I start collecting stuff.”

“My party, Artie.”

“Are the others downstairs?”

“The others? How many are there of you?”

“Christ, don’t make me laugh, you old shit. Hey, he says how many are there? Christ!”

“Cuddle up to him, Pocahontas, and see how he likes that beautiful puss of yours. Give him a big smile, now; wiggle that cute little nose. That’s the way, baby. Now tell him how many, what the fuck.”

“Haven’t you ever noticed us when you walk by the snack bar, old man?”

“No. Never. I don’t lower myself to…”

“That’s just it, baby. You should pay more attention to us. We pay attention to you. We’ve been paying attention to you for months. Right, Barber?”

“You said it. Day after fun-filled day. But let me tell you, Pocahontas, if I was you I’d feel pretty bad that the old shit didn’t pick up on me, all decked out like that, all that pretty skin showing. Tongolele, you are with it!”

“Yeah, Fu Manchu, you sure put me down. You never once noticed me. But I bet you don’t forget me now.”

“All right, stop fooling around. Go see what you find in the closets, Poca. Then get the boys up here to carry out the furniture and lamps.”

“On my way, Artist.”

“And you, Barber, I want you to entertain his lordship here.”

“Well, now, look here. I never had the pleasure of shaving such a distinguished gentleman, like they say.”

“Artist! Would you look at all the old asshole’s hats and shoes. He couldn’t wear all these if he had a thousand legs.”

“He’s loaded, all right.”

“What is it you want from me?”

“I want you to shut up so I can lather you nice and pretty.”

“Keep your hands off my face.”

“My, my. First you never noticed us, and now it’s Keep your hands off my face. You sure are touchy, Fu.”

“Get a load of this, but don’t let it blow your mind.”

“Knockout, Poca! Where’d you find the feather boas?”

“In the department store in the next room. He’s got three closets stuffed full of old clothes. On my mother’s grave, we hit the jackpot. Necklaces, hats, colored stockings. Anything, my lords, your heart desires!”

“You wouldn’t dare. Keep your filthy hands off my mother’s belongings!”

“Cool it, Fu. I told you, we’re not going to hurt you. What the hell’s it to you? It’s just a lot of junk that doesn’t mean anything to you, your lamps and ashtrays and doodads. Now what the fuck good do they do you?”

“You savages would never understand.”

“Hey, you hear the bad word he called us?”

“Hell, that’s not bad. It’s a compliment. I wear a leather vest with nothing under it and you stick a few feathers in your hair, Poca baby, but tell me, does that make us look like dumb Indians? We’re the Aztecs’ revenge! Well, take a good look, you old turd, because you can kiss your furniture goodbye. And I’m taking your fancy clothes and Poca’s taking your mommy’s. That’s what we came for.”

“To steal my clothes?”

“Shit, yes. All of it, your clothes, your furniture, your silver, every-thing!”

“But why, what value can…?”

“Now you put your finger on it. All this old stuff’s back in style.”

“And you’re going to sell my possessions?”

“Are we! In Lagunilla market this stuff sells better than Acapulco Gold. What we are going to clear on all your pretties, old man!”

“But first, my beauty, you keep what you like best, the best necklace, the hippest feather boa, whatever grabs you, my little sweet-ass bitch.”

“Don’t start messing around with me, Artist. I’ve got my eye on that big white bed and if you get me all hot I might want to keep it for some extra slick dick tricks.”

“How about a little right now?”

“Cut it out. Just take off. You’re always hot.”

“You, Barber, you entertain him.”

“Does he look pretty? With his face all lathered up he looks like Santa Claus.”

“Do not touch me again, sir.”

“Whaaaat? Here, turn this way a little so I can give you a good shave.”

“I told you, don’t touch me.”

“Tip your head a little to the left, be a good boy.”

“Keep your hands off me, you’re messing my hair!”

“Be good now, little fellow.”

“You miserable beggars.”

“What did you call us, fathead?”

“Us, beggars?”

“Beggars beg, old man. We take.”

“You’re a plague. Filth. Running sores.”

“We’re what? Hey, Artist, you think the old man’s stoned?”

“No, it just burns him to be done in while we’re riding so high.”

“I’m the one who’ll do the riding. I’ll ride the whoring mothers of every one of you cockroaches. Pigs! Worms!”

“Whoa, there, Fu Manchu. You shut your mouth when it comes to my mamacita. I don’t stand for that.”

“Cool it, Barber.”

“You, the one they call Barber, you…”

“Yes, you old bastard?”

“You are the most filthy son of a bitch I ever saw in my life. I forbid you to touch me again. If you want to touch something, make it your fucking mother’s cunt!”

“Shit … Yeah, I think we’ve blown it…”

IV

Among Federico Silva’s papers was a letter addressed to Doña María de los Angeles Valle, widow of Negrete. The executor delivered it to her, and before reading it the elderly lady reflected a moment about her friend, and her eyes filled with tears. Dead barely a week, and now this letter, written when?

She opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was undated, though it bore a place of origin: Palermo, Sicily. Federico wrote of a series of slight earthquakes that had taken place recently. The experts were forecasting a major earthquake, the worst in the island since the devastating quake of 1964. He, Federico, had a premonition that his life would end here. He had ignored the evacuation orders. His situation was unique: a desire for suicide annulled by a natural catastrophe. He was closed in his hotel room, watching the Sicilian sea, the “foamy” Sicilian sea, Góngora had called it, and how fine, how appropriate, to die in such a beautiful place, so removed from ugliness, lack of respect, and mutilation of the past … everything he most despised in life.

“Dear Friend. Do you remember the blond girl who caused the commotion in the Negresco? You may believe, and with some justification, that I am so simpleminded, that my life has been so monotonous, that I have lived that life under the spell of a beautiful woman who did not wish to be mine. I am aware of the way that you, Perico, the Marqués, and all my other friends avoid that subject. Poor Federico. His one adventure ended in frustration. He grew old alongside a tyrant of a mother. And now he’s dead.

“You will be correct insofar as the heart of the matter is concerned, but the outward appearances were not what they seemed. I have never told anyone this. When I begged that girl to stay, to spend the night with me in my room, she refused. She said, ‘No, not if you were the last man on earth.’ Those excruciating words — can you believe it? — saved me. I told myself that no one is the last man in love, only in death. Only death can say to us, ‘You are the last.’ Nothing, no one else, María de los Angeles.

“That sentence might have humiliated me but it did not intimidate me. I admit that I was afraid to marry. I felt a horror that I might prolong in my children what my mother had imposed upon me. You should know what I mean; our upbringing was very similar. I could not educate badly children I never had. You did. Forgive my frankness. The situation, I believe, authorizes it. Never mind; call my reluctance what you will — religious fear, ordinary avarice, sterile upbringing.

“Naturally, you pay for this cowardice when your parents have died and as is my case, you have no offspring. You have lost forever the opportunity to give your children something better, or at least something different from what your parents gave you. I don’t know. What I do know is that you run the risk of dissatisfaction and error, whatever you do. At times, if you’re a Catholic, as I am, and you find yourself forced to take a young girl to the doctor for an operation, or, even worse, you send by your servant the money for her abortion, you feel you have sinned. Those children one never had: did you spare them from coming into an ugly, cruel world? Or, quite the opposite, would they throw in your face that you never offered them the risks of life? Would they call you a murderer? A coward? I do not know.

“I fear that this less than forceful image of myself is the one each of you will remember. That is why I’m writing to you now, before I die. I had one love in my life, only one. You. The love I felt for you at fifteen lasted to the time of my death. I can tell you now. In you I centered the excuse for my bachelorhood and the needs of my love. I am not sure that you will understand. You were the only person I could love without betraying all the other aspects of my life and its demands. Being what I was, I had to love you as I did: faithfully, silently, nostalgically. But I was as I was because I loved you: solitary, distant, barely humanized, perhaps, by a certain sense of humor.

“I don’t know whether I’ve made myself clear, or even whether I myself truly understood myself. We all think we know ourselves. Nothing is further from the truth. Think of me, remember me. And tell me whether you can explain to me what I am about to tell you. It may be the only puzzle of my life, and I will die without solving it. Every night before I go to bed I walk out on my bedroom balcony to take the air. I try to breathe the presages of the following morning. I had learned to identify the odors of the lost lake of a city equally lost. With the years it has become increasingly difficult.

“But that was not the real motive for my moments on the balcony. Sometimes, standing there, I begin to tremble, and I fear that once again the hour, the temperature, the eternal threat of storm — if only a dust storm — that hovers over Mexico City have made me react viscerally, like an animal, tamed in this clime, free in another, savage in some distant latitude. I fear, too, that with the darkness or the lightning, the rain or the dust storm, the ghost of the animal I might have been will return — or the son I never had. I carried a beast in my guts, María de los Angeles. Can you believe it?”

The elderly woman wept as she returned the letter to its envelope. She paused for an instant, horrified, remembering the story about the guillotine that Federico liked to tell on Saturdays to frighten her. No. She’d refused to view the body with its neck slit from ear to ear by a straightedge razor. Her morbid friends Perico and the Marqués had not been so fastidious.