Signal to Noise Read online

  Mexico City, 2009

  THE APARTMENT HAD shrunk or had been bigger in her memory. She walked in slowly, feeling like an intruder even though she had grown up here. At some point her mother had taken down the old wallpaper and now the interior was painted in soft, institutional beiges.

  Meche looked at the photos sitting all around: Natalia as a baby, Natalia as a child, Natalia at the beach. Photos of her mother’s second husband, Lorenzo. Almost like an afterthought, Natalia and Meche, her teenaged face staring at the camera.

  “Mercedes,” her mother said as she drifted into the living room and gave her a hug. “Little Meche.”

  “Hey, mom,” she muttered.

  “How was your flight?”

  “Good. Fine.”

  “I have had the most awful time getting tamales,” her mother said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

  “Tamales?”

  “For the novena,” Jimena said helpfully.

  “I really wished we didn’t have to do a novena,” Meche said.

  “There’s no way around it,” her mother said. “God knows your father can use all the prayers he can get.”

  “Dad didn’t believe in this stuff.”

  “I talked to the baker and we are going to have canapés for the first night,” Jimena said. “He agreed to a discount, seeing as it was us.”

  “Good,” Natalia said, patting her niece’s hand. “Meche, you are going to have to go through your father’s things.”

  Meche had barely entered the apartment and had just sat down. She looked up at her mother, surprised.

  “What?”

  “Well, I certainly won’t have the time. I would ask Lorenzo, but it doesn’t seem right to have him going through your father’s clothes. And you know how he was. It’s probably a mess. But some of the records are bound to be valuable.”

  Valuable.

  “Maybe you can play some at the party,” her mother said. “I have no idea what we are going to do for music.”

  “You want me to go to dad’s apartment and see if he had records that are worth any money?”

  “Ay, don’t take it like that,” Jimena said. “You want a coffee?”

  Norwegians drank a lot of coffee; strong and black. Meche had never taken to this custom, but she had developed a tea addiction after her year in London.

  “No.”

  “You might as well sort it out and take whatever you want,” her mother said. “Whatever he had, he left it all to you. Nothing for me.”

  There was a pointed bitterness to her words. Meche’s father had failed her so many times and Meche got that—because dumping your family one fine day will certainly create a few grudges. And yet... the asshole was gone. No need to auction off his goods. As far as Meche was concerned, she thought they should stuff all his possessions in cardboard boxes and give them to charity. She wasn’t going to go on eBay and see if someone paid a dollar for a dusty LP. But if her mother insisted, Meche would make an effort.

  “I told Meche Sebastian Soto is hanging around the neighbourhood,” Jimena said. “You sure you don’t want a coffee?”

  “Nope.”

  “Yes, that nice boy.”

  “You never liked him,” Meche said.

  Meche’s mother chuckled and sat next to her, patting her leg. Her hair was a burnished brown. It matched the furniture. Jimena slipped out, probably to the kitchen for that coffee she yearned for.

  “I did like him.”

  Sebastian’s new car sure must be something to cause such a tremendous change of opinion in the women in Meche’s family.

  “Where’s Lorenzo?” she asked.

  “Trying to fix the paperwork and arrange the burial,” her mother said, lifting her hands in the air.

  “Maybe I’ll go to father’s apartment tomorrow,” Meche muttered. “Before the funeral.”

  At least in her father’s apartment she’d be alone. She didn’t think she could stomach her mother and her cousin at this time.

  VICENTE VEGA’S APARTMENT was smack in downtown Mexico City, in an old building which must have been quite something two hundred years before, but which was now nothing more than a tired ruin, perched at the end of an alley, waiting in the shadows. It was cold and damp as Meche walked up the stairs and when she actually opened the door to the apartment and stepped in she realized the apartment itself was even colder.

  She locked the door and looked around. The first thing she noticed was a tiny kitchen that had no right to call itself a kitchen, dirty dishes piled high. She started by washing them because it was too depressing to stare at the dregs inside coffee cups and the stains of old spaghetti. Once she was done, she stood in the living room, which also served as the dining room, looking at the piles of old LPs her father had accumulated. They were sitting on shelves, but also spilled onto the floor, peeking from beneath the sofas, drowning the side table, resting upon the battered TV set.

  She went to the room which served as an office, but really was nothing more than another space used to pile boxes with records, mountains of sleeves and vinyl. In a corner, forlorn, sat her father’s typewriter. When his music career failed, he had tried—and never succeeded in—writing a compendium of the history of Latin American rock-and-roll. Now that she thought about it, her father had never succeeded at anything, except maybe in finding the bottom of a bottle of tequila.

  She stepped into his bedroom and discovered the same chaotic mass of records, though her father, perhaps in an effort to escape the clutter that reigned in the other parts of the apartment, had cleared a section of the wall and pinned up a large poster depicting palm trees and a sunset. The thick curtains also had a lively pattern of palm trees, this time with flamingos, so kitsch it made her wonder if it was really her father who had rented this apartment.

  She remembered when she had been younger and her dad had told her he planned to spend the end of his days on a beach, watching the waves come in.

  He never made it to the seaside, though he did spend several years in Guadalajara before returning to Mexico City.

  His kidneys had failed him. That’s what had done him in. Not the booze. The liver put up a good fight. It was the kidneys which gave up. Her mother had told her he was on dialysis, but Meche hadn’t phoned him.

  Meche took a look in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was cluttered with pills and expired medications. His glasses sat on the water tank of the toilet.

  She walked back to the bedroom, sat on the sagging bed and wondered what it would be like to wake every morning to the old picture of the beach, feet shuffling upon the cold floor. Dying and knowing you were dying.

  On the floor, by the bed, half-hidden under a sweater, was the portable turntable. Meche moved the sweater away and looked at it, hesitantly.

  Was it the same one? It seemed to be the same walnut case. The one Meche used to have in her room could play full-size LPs, so chances were it was the same one.

  Meche grabbed it, put it on her knees and found the sticker on the side. The little heart which Daniela had left there.

  That was it. But it just looked so... ordinary and worn now. No magic to it.

  Would it still work?

  She reached towards a stack of records on the bedside table and picked the first one off the top. The Beach Boys.

  The needle went down. Good Vibrations began to play. She flipped the record sleeve around, looking at the image of the five young men. It had been released in 1966. That would have made her father... what... sixteen when it came out?

  Meche opened the bedside drawer and found a stack of unpaid bills. There were some loose pages, stained with coffee smudges: notes for his glorious book. A matchbook. Tucked beneath the matchbook, like a postscript, a postcard from Puerto Vallarta. Meche looked at the remittance address but it had never been sent. It was an old Puerto Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta from the seventies, just left there to moulder in the drawer.

  She closed the drawer and The Beach Boys finished their song, the needle
lifted from the record and the apartment was silent.

  Meche sighed and started going through the records, making three piles: throw away, sell and keep. She placed each record in the right pile, trying to maintain the keep pile as low as she could.

  The silence was depressing. She could see why her father had kept the turntable by the bed, to liven his nights and mornings. She looked for another Beach Boys record, maybe Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), but it was not to be found. She settled on Hotel California by The Eagles—which was not quite the same thing at all—and pulled apart the curtains to see what the view was like.

  But there was no view. The windows showed the grey façade of another building. She dropped the curtains and the flamingos returned, masking the greyness, cheerfully frolicking in a land of palm trees.

  She remembered that she was now almost the same age her father had been when he had left them.

  Mexico City, 1988

  IT’S NOT THAT Meche hated school, because she didn’t. She just hated the people at school, all them crawling around with their petty thoughts and their annoying habits. A few were outright assholes, like Teofilo. Others merely bumped into you on the stairs, giggled when you walked by, talked under their breath.

  There were some—few and far between—who made it worth attending. Daniela and Sebastian, of course. But also Constantino. Especially Constantino Dominguez. She looked at him across the courtyard as she sat with her friends, eating her sandwich.

  Sebastian had once dubbed Constantino the King of the Clones because his friends were always intent on copying his mannerisms and clothes. Sebastian also called him Floro Tinoco on account of the comic book character from La Familia Burron, swearing that Constantino was equally stupid and also built like a tractor. Meche only knew what all the other fifteen-year-old girls knew: Constantino had dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes, and when he smiled, he showed off perfectly straight, white teeth.

  Today Constantino was standing next to Isadora Galván, a very common occurrence. They were not an item anymore, but hung out together in the way that the beautiful and popular will gravitate to each other. You could regularly find them in the Pit—which was an empty lot two blocks from school where the smokers liked to gather—and at other high school landmarks.

  Isadora was certainly pretty, in a way which Meche could never expect to achieve. She had reddish-brown hair and it curled just the right amount around her shoulders. Her skin was very pale and this alone had earned her the lead in more than one school play while Meche and Daniela had to carry heavy props and scenery backstage.

  Meche would have given anything to be like Isadora for a single day.

  Maybe she could. If the magic worked.

  “I think we should do the spell tonight,” she told Daniela and Sebastian.

  They didn’t answer. Sebastian was also looking at Isadora, his eyes fixed on her long legs and her very short skirt. That kind of skirt looked sloppy and unflattering when Meche wore it, but on Isadora it was positively lovely. She supposed Isadora could wear a garbage bag and look amazing.

  Daniela, for her part, was busy writing in her diary. Well, writing was an exaggeration. She just drew lots of little hearts with arrows going through them.

  Meche snatched the diary away and hit Sebastian on the back of the head with it.

  The boy looked at her, irritated.

  “What?”

  “I said we should do the spell tonight.”

  “I can’t go out tonight,” Daniela said.

  “Who are you kidding, you can never go out,” Meche muttered.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Then we’ll go to your place.”

  “Okay,” Daniel said demurely. “Can I have my notebook back, please?”

  Meche looked at the diary and tapped her finger against the page.

  “This is what we need,” she told Sebastian.

  “My diary?” Daniela asked.

  “No, dummy. A place where we write down what we do. A grimoire.”

  “What’s a gri-moy-re?” Daniela asked.

  “You should pay more attention when we watch horror movies,” Meche admonished her. “It’s like a recipe book for witches. We’ve got to have one. If we’re going to do this right.”

  “There’s really no point in explaining it to her right now when she’s so distracted,” Sebastian said. “We’ll do it later.”

  Daniela pouted, but Sebastian was right. Daniela was always going off on a tangent, dreaming away, getting distracted. The only thing Daniela’s brain was able to retain was the cheesy dialogue from those romance novels she borrowed from her sister.

  Sebastian extended a hand towards Meche’s juice box. She frowned, but gave it to him in the end. Sebastian was constantly broke, this despite his attempts to earn a few extra pesos by bagging groceries at the supermarket, a job, which, by the way, he was getting too old for: everyone preferred very young baggers and he was reaching the end of his career as a bag boy.

  Sebastian sipped the juice, his eyes fixed on Isadora again. Isadora, probably feeling the weight of his gaze, turned her head and looked in their direction.

  Sebastian immediately dropped his head, staring at the juice box between his hands. Meche smirked and jabbed him on the ribs.

  LITERATURE WAS LIKE having needles pushed under her eyelids. Meche could not understand or even remotely pay attention to what was happening on the blackboard; she rested her head against the desk and tried to add numbers in her head, repeat lyrics of songs. She wondered what she would eat that afternoon.

  Daniela, however, was in love with the teacher and she sat all perky and straight next to Meche, with a docile smile on her face, nodding periodically while Rodriguez—the youngest of the faculty, but no prize pie in the looks department—strolled by, babbling on about Cervantes. Windmills. Some Spanish asshole who was nuts and a fat guy on a donkey.

  “What are we going to wish for?” Sebastian asked.

  He wasn’t taking notes either, but he didn’t have to take notes. Sebastian knew all this stuff. He liked it. Hell, he had read Moby Dick which was as thick as a damned brick. You could maim someone with that book.

  “I’m not sure,” Meche said. “Something big. What do you want to wish for?”

  “I’m making a list.”

  “God, won’t he shut up,” Meche whispered.

  “Then he couldn’t listen to himself.”

  Meche smirked.

  “What is amusing you today, Mercedes?”

  She hated it when people called her by her full name. She’d told Rodriguez this, but he refused to ever use her nickname. Meche did not reply, staring down at her book and pretending she was reading.

  “No, really. I’m interested. Because you two lovebirds have been whispering for about half an hour.”

  The class erupted into laughter at the word ‘lovebirds,’ making Meche blush with mortification.

  “Maybe Sebastian Soto is not such a fag,” someone yelled from the back of the room.

  Rodriguez let them chuckle, then gave her a twisted smile. “Extra homework for you. Stay at the end of class.”

  “Can hardly wait,” she whispered.

  MECHE GRABBED HER backpack and shuffled to the front of the class, stopping before Rodriguez’s desk. She could see Daniela standing outside the door, waiting for her.

  The teacher raised his eyes and nodded at her.

  “You were disruptive today. Again.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “You know, I can’t really tell if you do it on purpose, Mercedes,” he said, lacing his hands together, trying to look stern although his incipient moustache made him more comical than scary. “Is it just the sugar from all those cereals coursing through your body?”

  “My brain is stuck from shooting glue,” she said.

  Rodriguez did not get the Ramones reference. He just raised an eyebrow at her.

  “It’s a song,” she explained, fearing he’d take it seriously and call t
he principal.

  “That’s your problem, Mercedes. Your head is filled with songs. If you spent less time watching music videos and more time doing your readings, you wouldn’t be failing my class.”

  He shuffled a stack of papers and put them in a folder.

  “You need to do some extra work.”

  “Professor...”

  “No, you do,” he said. “I can help you if you need it. I tutor after school.”

  “I’ve got a tutor,” she said, thinking of Sebastian. He knew books. He could help her.

  “I think you could benefit from my...”

  “Yeah, where’s the assignment?” she asked, pissed off and just wanting to get out of the classroom.

  He handed her a piece of paper. Meche stuffed it in her sweater pocket and walked out. Daniela peeked her head inside and saw her heading towards the door. She smiled at the teacher then looked at Meche.

  “What did he say?”

  THE NEIGHBOURHOOD WHERE they lived was cut by a large avenue, dividing it into two starkly different halves. To the west, the buildings and houses became progressively nicer, the cars newer, the people better dressed. To the east there were no houses. Just numerous apartment buildings sandwiched together. These turned uglier, rattier and more dangerous the more you moved in that direction. In the east side people built tin-houses in the alleys and streets. Gang members could dismantle a car in five minutes flat and beat you for your lunch money.

  Sebastian was the one who lived closest to the east, just a mere two blocks from the large avenue and the division between lower middle-class and outright poverty. Meche was situated three blocks further to the west. Although three blocks might not seem like much, it gave her a surer social footing at school.

  Daniela lived closest to the west, not in an apartment, but in a house with a high wall covered with a purple bougainvillea. Her father was an accountant for a furniture chain and his wealth manifested conspicuously—without taste—all through this house in the form of Tiffany lamps, shiny tables and a plaster replica of the Venus de Milo greeting you when you entered the home. Daniela’s house, like her father, was big and ostentatious. The jolly, obese man had a wife as round as he was and three daughters, all quiet and polite, educated in archaic manners and ways right out of the 1940s. Daniela’s father believed in the sanctity of virginity and the role of the woman as wife and mother. He thought men who wore earrings were fags and those with long hair hippies or anarchists. He was, however, unable to manifest any ill-will towards them, or towards almost anyone, convinced that God would sort them out in his due time.