Читать книгу Sea Monsters - Chloe Aridjis - Страница 15

AT NIGHT THE WAVES OF THE PACIFIC WOULD GROW tremendous, swelling in height and in volume, a maritime thunder outdinning every other gesture of nature, and I’d watch as surfers materialized on the horizon like rare mammals from the sea. Dogs would bark at them from the shore with their hackles raised, and I’d wonder whether we all fell prey to some form of coastal delirium, a delirium born from the potent alignment of air, sand, and sea; after all, a mere drop of water can interact with light in an infinite number of ways.

The first three sightings of Tomás were followed by none, so one afternoon when I was feeling fortified—three A’s at school that day—I dropped by A Través del Espejo. As much as I liked the idea of it, I didn’t go there often. The place was topsy-turvy, with erratically packed shelves and signs in different languages and piles of books rising from the floor to the height of children. Positioned at the till as if to contradict its chaos was the owner, a stern woman with a pageboy haircut; she never smiled, never helped, and expressed annoyance whenever someone inquired into the availability or location of this or that book.

I crossed paths with Tomás, nearly brushed sleeves, as I walked in. He was on his way out, accompanied by a couple around his age whom he introduced as the Americans. He was taking them to see an apartment, he said. Which apartment? I asked, wondering whether he was now working in real estate, too. The apartment where William Burroughs shot his wife, he said. These Americans had come into the shop asking whether someone would show them, could pay fifty pesos, and since Tomás had been there once before he volunteered, and got permission for a short break. Do you even know who Burroughs is? he asked me. Yes, I do, I said, though I’ve never read him. My mother had two books of his and every now and then, sensing they held something illicit, I’d peer inside, searching for incendiary words and scenes, but was always left feeling short-changed.

Moments later I was walking down the street with Tomás and the two Americans, the girl chubby and snub-nosed and exuding an impressive confidence, the boy somewhat timid and half her girth. Tomás led us to the corner where Chihuahua meets Monterrey, paused, then turned right on Monterrey and stopped in front of number 122, a gray building with a black door. It opened with a push. We entered the tiled hallway and climbed a chilly flight of stairs but at the first floor our steps were cut short by a floor-to-ceiling grate that blocked access to a whole section of the corridor. A woman in a tracksuit and flip-flops emerged from one of the apartments and asked what we wanted. We’d like to see— No, no, no, the woman interrupted, aware of where the sentence was heading. Number 8 was a private residence. After moving in she and her husband had put up this barrier because people kept coming by, Americans wanting to make a television series, Americans wanting to make a documentary, Americans wanting to do a photo shoot. The young couple pleaded. They said they were students from San Francisco who loved William Burroughs and wanted to see the place where it all happened, the place that made him a writer, the place that made him a different person from when he entered. The woman seemed moved. I could see her studying the eager couple, their Converse high-tops and woven bracelets from the market, and after biting her lip and glancing over at me and Tomás to make sure we weren’t renegades, she finally said, Okay, five minutes, and unlocked the gate.

As far as I could tell, her home contained nothing foreboding apart from the walls being decked in Christmas decorations, with pots of poinsettia on the sills; it was unclear whether these were left over from the previous year or put out a few months early. The windows of the apartment looked onto an interior courtyard whose upper tiers were crisscrossed with laundry. The woman’s husband surfaced from a side room. His jeans were fastened with a string and he spoke and moved in stutters as if he’d suffered a stroke. His wife told him why we were there, upon which he sighed, especially when the young Americans asked whether they knew where in the flat it had all happened, there seemed to be many spaces and they wanted to know which held meaning. The woman pointed to a piano in the living room, an old piano covered in doilies, nearly eighty years old, she said, no one ever played it but in its spot the lady was shot. With forensic hunger the American boy began to circle the piano as if the instrument had absorbed some of the drama from thirty-seven years before, and started taking photos from different angles, his camera clicking loudly each time he pressed down on the button and wound the film.

As he took pictures the woman positioned herself in front of the piano and her husband stuttered over to the arch dividing living room from dining room, and solemnly announced that here was where Burroughs himself had stood, under the arch, and taken aim. Husband at one end, wife at the other. Face-to-face. All movement halted as they set up the scene. Despite their earlier protestations I had the sense they had done this before, inviting friends over to pantomime the famous incident that had taken place under their roof. The seconds passed, taut and bizarre, as each of them stood in their places. I sensed I was being watched. Tomás was staring over at me. Lips curled, eyes slightly narrowed. I wasn’t certain how to meet the expression so I smiled, but since his lips were already curled I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling back. Well, he must be, I decided; perhaps he was thinking what I’d begun to think, that this was a space of couples, first Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, then the married pair who lived here, and the young Californians. And now, Tomás and Luisa. Three couples, albeit one deceased, and us. Different portraits of modern coupledom. Story of an Afternoon with Piano and Couples. Tomás returned his attention to the husband and wife, who continued with their pantomiming as the rest of us stood quietly in our places.

After a minute or so the American girl, now powdered-milk pale, brought the session to an end. Well, thank you, I think we’ve seen enough, she said softly, her hand tightening around her bag strap. It’d been too much, I sensed, she’d gotten more than she’d expected. Thank you, we echoed. The man waved from under the arch but his legs stayed rooted, unfreed from the spell. His wife accompanied us to the gate.

On our way out I noticed it was the rest of the building, rather than the apartment itself, which seemed to hold something of that unfortunate past. The hollowed steps, the cold, blue shadows of the stairwell. I was eager to return to the street but Tomás insisted we have a quick look at the patio at the back, an outdoor space enclosed by four high walls, home to a Cal-o-Rex boiler and a black door lying horizontal. It wasn’t the original from 1951 but one of many reincarnations, Tomás explained; the past ten doors had been documented over the years by a fan. Up above I glimpsed a patch of blue beyond the hanging laundry and walls of blistered plaster, beyond the pleated curtains flapping in the windows like women’s nightgowns pressed against the sills, restless and billowing and ready to leap out into this domestic void of the inner courtyard. In silence we headed back toward the street, through the corridor where light bled around the rim of the front door and pooled into long white bars on the floor tiles, and it was there, in these communal spaces, that one felt captive to the building.

Once back on the street the Americans handed Tomás a fifty-peso bill and disappeared into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle taxi. The last time he’d gone to the apartment, he told me with a note of disappointment, there’d been three sisters living there with their five parrots, as you can imagine it was a bit noisier … Well, anyway, thanks for coming, he added, he had to get back to work but I knew where to find him, and off he went, hands in pockets, reverting to a black streak.

Yes, he was intriguing, but he wasn’t the only one. Later in my room I ran through my list. From nights out there’d been Tiburcio Pérez, an artist from La Quiñonera with long hair and amber jewelry who attached reddish brown scorpions, our city’s native Vaejovis mexicanus Koch, to thickly painted canvases. La Quiñonera was an artist’s colony in La Candelaria, through the rusted gate you’d step into a vast unruly garden and there, at the end, beckoned a large stone house with four entrances. It was always cold at night and many of the artists wore ponchos, ponchos and some manner of pendant, often a silver cross or an animal tooth. And of course there was pulque, a lot of pulque, buckets brought fresh from a faraway town, and we’d gather round and dip in our cups, the air pungent with the heady scent of copal, and the copal would merge with the smell of unfiltered Alas and Faros and Delicados, those were the cigarettes of choice at La Quiñonera. Someone would always be painting while someone else would be playing the guitar, others would be arguing over politics or philosophy in the kitchen, and there were dogs, dogs everywhere. After Tiburcio came Alfonso, an anesthetist by day and drummer by night. My father’s greatest fear was that I would end up with a rockero, so this one time I stepped out with a musician set his hair on end, especially when I accompanied Alfonso to concerts to see howling monkeys, that’s what my father called them, howling monkeys, although my drummer would never howl, he’d sit serious and tight-lipped, sweating profusely as he banged out his rhythms. I’d also liked one of the Swedes on the bus, by the name of Lars Karlsson. There were probably 100,000 Lars Karlssons in Sweden but only one, or a few, in Mexico. Lars appeared gentler and more approachable than the other Swedes yet I found it impossible to speak to him, and on the few occasions he ended up sitting beside me I’d spent the entire ride trying to think of something to say. And then there was Andrés, who liked kicking boxes, he’d kick any box he found lying on the street; because of his deranged expression my mother had him drive her around the block a few times before allowing him to take me to the movies. There would also be the random boy from school I would dream about and the next day in class feel a connection to; after all, if he had gatecrashed my dream there must be a reason, especially when I’d hardly noticed him before. It would always be an individual from whom I would never have expected interest in either direction, usually preppy, with brown loafers and light pink button-up shirts; whereas I dressed almost entirely in black and would pin up my hair in extravagant ways. Yes, it would’ve been a shock if one of them had turned around and asked me out, indeed shattered all preconceptions, and yet my dream, so vivid, had introduced a thin crack in an otherwise impenetrable surface, and at first I’d wait for some sign of acknowledgment. But no, there’d be none, not even a glance, and over time I would have to accept that the dream bore no message, there was no connection, and once more the random boy would fade into the background, to become simply another face in the classroom.

As for Tomás, yes, he had been a snag in the composition, somehow inserting himself in the picture in a way the others had not.