Senselessness Read online

  THREE

  I BLEW UP AS I HADN'T BLOWN UP for a long time, in the administrative offices of the archdiocese one afternoon soon thereafter, when the accountant told me there wasn’t any money for me, that he didn’t even know that he was supposed to pay me, heedless of the fact that my friend Erick had assured me that same morning that I could go by the accounting office in the afternoon to get my two-thousand-five-hundred-dollar advance, per our agreement that they would pay me half of the five thousand dollars upon commencement of the work and the other half upon termination of the same, which is why I walked from my office down the long, wide corridors to the other side of the archbishop’s palace to collect the money without which it would be impossible for me to continue my work, as I explained to the accountant, so insignificant and dim-witted sitting behind his desk, and I so unwilling to believe that my friend Erick would have deceived me so blatantly. Or are you saying, sir, that my friend Erick lied to me shamelessly? I said, skewering the accountant, who kept his eyes down without responding, like an altar boy who’d been scolded, until from the back of the office a tall blond man with a Caribbean accent appeared and in a commanding voice asked what was going on, as if he hadn’t already figured it out, and he stood in front of me, a situation too good to be true, here was a Crusader in the land of the Indians whose face I could rub in the Catholic bureaucracy’s inefficiency, which I proceeded to do without further delay by spitting out that it was inconceivable to me that my money wasn’t forthcoming, for my friend Erick had given me his word—and I pronounced “his word” with adequate emphasis—that this afternoon I could pick up my advance, and as far as I knew the word of my friend Erick was worth something in this institution, which meant that somebody wasn’t doing his job and was putting the entire project at risk, because I was not willing to correct even one more line of those one thousand one hundred pages if they didn’t pay me my advance right now per our agreement. No great observational ability was needed to appreciate that the blond man was busting his balls trying to control himself, incensed by my tirade, which I hadn’t even finished, as he soon realized when I nailed him by saying that not only did they expect me to do twice the work for the same amount of money, which was already a pittance by any measure, but they now had the gall to flagrantly disregard the very essence of the contract, the payment of my advance, this said in a louder voice and with a touch of hysteria, I must admit, as often happens when I find out that somebody is trying to cheat me, clearly the intention of the blond man, who was now muttering between clenched teeth that I would be paid at the latest the following day, that he as the office manager guaranteed this, it was simply a matter of a short delay because he hadn’t been there in the morning when Erick probably came to process the payment. Imagine how lucky I was when at that moment the little guy who had had his picture taken with Clinton and the pope appeared at the door, for if it hadn’t been for his timely appearance who knows how the dispute would have ended between the blond man, who must have thought I was some kind of moron who wouldn’t fight for his advance, and me, who thought that getting paid as promised had a value above and beyond everything else, as I told the little guy once he assured me—resting his supposedly calming hand on my back, a gesture that awoke in me the worst possible suspicions—that on his word as director I would be pai my two thousand five hundred dollars early in the morning of the following day, asking me moreover if I preferred to have it in U.S. dollars or in the form of a check drawn on local currency, a stupid question any way you look at it for in all my discussions with my friend Erick we had always talked about five thousand dollars, never mentioning his local currency, those putrid, old bills that wouldn’t motivate anybody even minimally in their right mind, as in my case, as I said to the little guy as he escorted me, without removing his suspicious hand from my back, to the wing of the palace where we had our offices, with a slow and cadenced step, as if we were elderly priests taking our evening stroll, and he took the opportunity to suggest I not get angry at Jorge, the office manager, that the delay in my payment was not his fault, and moreover he was a good fellow, from Panama, very dedicated to the project, I would soon get to know him better. Then he asked me, wanting to change the subject and thereby help me calm down, about the quality of the text of the report I had read so far, by my third day of work, to which I responded that so far the quality was not the problem but rather the quantity, double what had been agreed upon while the time given to complete it had remained the same, as had the money, an assertion that automatically got me all riled up again at the delay in my payment, a state that persisted after I took leave of the little guy, entered my office, and closed the door behind me, then sat down in front of that hefty stack of paper without even the ghost of a chance that I could pick up where I had left off, especially because the first sentence my eyes lit upon was, With only sticks and knives they killed those twelve men they talk about there, followed by a short statement that struck me as lethal—it said, They grabbed Diego Nap López and they grabbed a knife each officer giving him a stab or cutting off a small slice . . . —because suddenly my fury grew into a paroxysm of rage, even though nobody could have imagined anything of the sort if they had seen me sitting there leaning my elbows on the desk, my gaze lost in the high bare wall, a rage focused on that despicable Panamanian who was to blame for my not getting paid my advance, who did that shit-face think he was? Didn’t he realize I wasn’t just another miserable Indian like he was used to dealing with? Then I stood up and began to pace around the room, by now I was utterly possessed, my imagination whipped up into a whirlwind that in a split second carried me into the office of the aforementioned, at that hour of the night when nobody remained in the archbishop’s palace except that Jorge fellow there in his office, supposedly poring over his accounts but really savoring the knowledge that he had shit on me, my humanity, so focused on that thought that he didn’t hear me arrive and thus couldn’t react when I stabbed him in the liver, a blow that made him fall to his knees, surprise and terror in his eyes, mouth gaping, his two hands trying to staunch the flow of blood from his liver, making him even more incapable of defending himself when I stabbed him a second time under his sternum, with even greater fury this time, such was my spite, my zealous arm plunging the knife again and again into the body of that arrogant Panamanian who had refused to pay me my advance, until I suddenly found myself in the middle of my office imitating the furious movements of someone stabbing his worst enemy, of course without a knife in my hand, like a lunatic, as anyone suddenly and without warning who opened the door to my office, which I realized in dismay was unlocked, would have thought. I must admit, however, that once I sat back down in my chair, taking deep breaths in an attempt to lessen my agitation, I felt as serene as someone who has been relieved of a great burden, as if the Panamanian had in reality received his retribution and I was therefore free to leave, for there was no way I could work until those two thousand five hundred dollars were in my pocket, which is what I did, without giving any explanations to anybody, I grabbed my jacket, walked through the vestibule between the two secretaries, reached the enormous wooden door, and stepped out into the street.

  For a few seconds, before I took off like a shot, I enjoyed that hour in the afternoon when the sun had not yet set, the transparent light, a warm breeze blowing through the streets at the same pace as my own steps, and that’s no joke, because I was walking as fast as my legs could carry me, first on one side of the street, then on the other, crossing impetuously in the middle of the block, not so much to prevent somebody from following me, how deluded could I be on such a crowded street, but rather to avoid the ambush I always feared, the one in which two pseudo-muggers—really army intelligence operatives—would corner me and stab me to steal something I didn’t have on me so the priests would finally get the message, I was a foreigner whose murder in the course of a street crime would have no repercussions. At all costs avoid the always-feared ambush: I had this goal in mind every time I went out,
obsessed, electrified, just like that afternoon they didn’t pay me my advance and I threaded my way down Octava Avenida, a street stinking of piss and garbage that led from the archbishop’s palace to the central market, a dunghill behind the cathedral I walked through with long strides, constantly scanning the field—behind, in front, to the sides—as if by descrying the murderer’s face I could guarantee my escape, down a stretch of sidewalk crowded with people and street vendors, another stretch on the asphalt the old buses clambered down noisily, overusing their horns, not slowing my pace until I reached Novena Calle and turned up toward Pasaje Aycinena, my improvised destination, because before going to my apartment I wanted to have a few drinks, I wanted some distraction, and the place I picked was a shabby bar-café named Las Mil Puertas, which, despite the name, had only two doors, not a thousand, territory of recycled communists but above all frequented by young men and women with artistic inclinations, bohemians, rebels perhaps, in any case an ambience as different from the archbishop’s palace as could be, tender slabs of young flesh to lift my spirits, I told myself once I was inside and sitting at the corner table, ready to order a soda to catch my breath, because in that joint they served flat water, which I prefer, from the tap, a dangerous circumstance I’d learned about during my previous visits, when I had also sat at the corner table where the walls were marked up with those horrible verses written by mediocre left-wing poets, hawkers of hope, verses written without humility, in big prison-style lettering, but even so, a table that was preferable to those outside, along the Pasaje Aycinena, a deserted walkway that led from Novena Calle to the entrance of Parque Central. So I ordered a whisky with soda and set about clearing my head of all mental associations related to my work at the palace, just as my buddy Toto had advised me to do, taking note instead of every single one of the girls in this bar-café, the good-looking ones, of course, who were few in number but enough to distract me, one of them in particular, a thin girl with lively eyes, oriental eyebrows, and a laugh that was flirtatious for being somewhat timid, whose features sparked my imagination so powerfully that I could picture, within seconds, as I rubbed the palms of my hands against my eyes, that girl’s face as she was being possessed, penetrated, shaken by my rhythmic assault, and I could also see her expression of total abandon at the moment of orgasm and almost hear her plaintive moans, like a satisfied cat, an exercise in fantasy that managed to stabilize my mood and even generated a weak current through my groin, nothing to worry about, even less so now that they had brought me my whisky and soda and after relishing the delightful tickle of that first sip, I finally recovered my equilibrium and relaxed, capable now of observing the flow of my thoughts while remaining separate from them, not identifying with them, as if they were somebody else’s mental movie I was watching with a certain amount of indifference, a mood propitious for achieving spiritual peace but which I couldn’t hold on to for as long as I wanted due to the arrival of a group of persons whom I identified at first glance as belonging to the office I had recently fled and which at that moment I didn’t want to remember anything about, a truly impertinent interruption, for their appearance not only shook me abruptly out of my mood but also forced me to ask myself what the hell I was doing with my life, committing myself to such a project and having to dash madly around a foreign city, which is what I had just done by taking the longest route so as to throw off any possible pursuers, according to my thinking, as if in the end I wasn’t going to find my way to this joint where any wretch could nab me if he wanted to. But I wasn’t going to allow that group of so-called defenders of human rights to ruin my whisky for me, I told myself as I took another sip, and I proceeded to take my notebook out of the inner pocket of my jacket intent on calmly relishing those sentences that seemed so astonishing from a literary point of view, an observation I would never again share with insensitive poets like my buddy Toto, sentences I could, with luck, later use in some kind of literary collage, but which surprised me above all for their use of repetition and of adverbs, such as this one that said, What I think is that I think . . . . Wow. And this one, So much suffering we have suffered so much with them . . . : its musicality perplexed me when I first read it, its poetic quality too high not to suspect that it came from some great poet rather than from a very old indigenous woman who with this verse had brought to an end her wrenching testimony, which wasn’t the point at the moment. Both sentences should have been written on the walls of this bar-café instead of those horrible verses by leftist poetasters, I thought as I put away my notebook, asked the waitress for the check, and took one last look at the girl with oriental eyebrows whose face had fired up my imagination. Upon leaving I walked right by the table where my colleagues were sitting, though I refrained from greeting them, still irritated by their inopportuned appearance, and they didn't greet me either though there passed between us one or another look of recognition.