Читать книгу Sea Monsters - Chloe Aridjis - Страница 12

AFTER THE FIRST SIGHTING, EACH MORNING I’D EXPECTED the scene to be replayed. There was the organ grinder perched on the edge of the fountain with his rag and instrument, but he sat alone and the red rag announced nothing new, it remained a piece of worn flannel run up and down the sides of the organ. On my way to the school bus I took parallel streets but saw no one, nothing, outside the usual, nothing that hadn’t been absorbed into the daily sights and routines.

And then finally, ten days later, I saw him a second time, near some local ruins. After the big earthquake three years ago I was constantly on the alert for what would emerge from them, and our neighborhood was a living archive of the disaster. We had ruins and we had the people in the ruins, the new inhabitants of La Roma’s twilight zones who had slowly begun to occupy the collapsed buildings and mountains of rubble. They moved in with their menagerie of strays, spectral cats with faint meows and mangy dogs who’d spend hours pawing at imaginary food in the crevices.

As for our modest house, its simple anatomy had saved it. Other houses on our street, ones with more complicated structures, had tumbled within minutes, casualties of the quake that had its epicenter in the Pacific Ocean near the coast of Michoacán. Far away, a tectonic plate had decided to shift and with its shifting that Thursday morning it dispatched a telegram that swayed, toppled, and razed all we’d taken for granted. Yet our house had remained standing. The pictures went crooked, as did several pots in the kitchen, but the only permanent mark was one fissure that appeared along the living room wall like a fallen lightning bolt.

The pile of ruins on Chihuahua was one of the most dramatic expressions of collapse, its massive concrete slabs and shattered glass seeming to multiply and mosaic over time, and it was there that I saw Tomás again. I’d been on my way to the stationery store when I came upon two aging émigrés. Our local enigmas, they had fled a Europe in ruins to live, later, among our slightly more humble ones. I’d often see them at the VIPS diner on Insurgentes bent over their coffee and molletes, the woman with a hand on her purse and the man with a hand on his cane, as if ready to leave at the slightest prompting. That day they were accompanied by their ancient dog, whom they’d take on walks around the neighborhood, the man in his black beret—the street kids called him Manolete—and the woman in gray with her hair swept into an irreverent bun. Yet it seemed that this trio, dignified and decrepit, had run into trouble, for they’d come to a standstill and the dog lay with his hind legs splayed behind him. What was the problem, I asked, to which the woman pointed and said in a thick accent that he was having trouble finding his footing. No worries, I replied, and despite my hesitation I lifted the dog from the rear and held him up so the paws could find traction, not an easy task since even in the fanciest of neighborhoods the pavement was remarkably uneven, the result of our sinking city and the roots of trees battling out their subterranean existence.

As I crouched there assisting the dog, whose fur was short and bristly, a boot stepped down centimeters away, one boot and then the other. Ankle boots, turquoise blue with a black heel. I glanced up and saw with astonishment that this somewhat unconventional footwear was attached to the young man from the fountain. He was looking straight ahead and didn’t pause, nor slow his pace, as he stepped around our little ensemble.

Again, I had a strong urge to follow but the dog was still relying on me to stand—I released him for a second but he immediately began to cave—and as the paws continued to resist traction I saw the figure nearing the corner, but what could I do, I’d embarked on a good deed and couldn’t depart halfway. After several more minutes of struggle the dog finally managed to stand on his own. Once he was back on all fours the émigrés thanked me, though not as profusely as they should have considering what I had just sacrificed in stopping to help them.