holes in his head, on the brink of a breakdown, when a febrile yellowness of an old bone aged yellow placated his astronomically restless face, when even the doctor had declared that our martyr had nothing more than fatigue brought on by an upset stomach, when that excessively peccary uniform was torn to shreds in corrosive agony, even when Palomino had formed his tall ephemeral smile—oh harmony of the Heavens!—with the wrinkles on his forehead, which didn’t manage to jump down to his cheeks or to the human sadness of his shoulders; and when, like today, it was raining and foggy in the unreachable open spaces, and a causeless, labored, surly omen worsened down here, at twilight, he approached me and said, with bloody splinters of voice, ‘Solís … Solís! Now … Now they’ve killed me! … Solís …’ When I saw his two hands holding his stomach, writhing in pain, I felt the blow strike me at the bottom of my heart, the feeling of a roaring fire devouring my innermost recesses. His complaints, barely articulated, as if they didn’t want to be perceived by anyone else but me, were floating toward my inside, like flared-up tongues of a flame long contained between the two of us, in the shape of invisible tablets. So surely and with such lively certainty had we mutually awaited that outcome! Yet after feeling as if the asp had filtered through the veins of my own body, a sudden, mysterious satisfaction came over me. A mysterious satisfaction! Yes, indeed!”
At that moment, Solís made a face of enigmatic obfuscation mixed with such deaf intoxication in his gaze that it sent me wobbling in my chair, as during a furious stoning.
“And Palomino didn’t wake up the following day,” he mysteriously added afterward, hoarse, without provocation, bearing many tons. “So had he been poisoned? And perhaps with the water I gave him to drink? Or had that only been a nervous breakdown? I don’t know. They only say that the next day, while I felt obliged to stay in bed during the early hours, due to the overbearing distress from the night before, one of his sons came to inform his father that his pardon had been handed down, but he was nowhere to be found. The administration had replied to him, ‘Indeed. The pardon of your father, handed down, he’s been released this morning.’”
The narrator had in this a poorly contained expression of torment that drove me to say to him, with thoughtful consternation, “No … No … Don’t start crying!” And, making a subtle parenthesis, Solís again asked me with tenderness as deep as before, “Are you cold?”
“And then?” I interrupt him.
“And then … nothing.”
After that, Solís falls dead silent. Then, as an afterthought, full of love and bitterness at once, he adds, “But Palomino has always been a good man and my best friend, the most loyal, the kindest. I’ve loved him so much, taken such great interest in his situation, helped to examine his endangered future. I even ended up investigating the contents of the pockets and deeds of other people. Palomino hasn’t come back here, doesn’t even remember me. That ungrateful bastard! Can you imagine?”
Again come the sounds of the penitentiary band playing the Peruvian national anthem. Now they are no longer sight-singing. The chorus of the song is played by the entire band in symphony. The notes of that anthem echo, and the prisoner still silent, sunken in deep deliberation, suddenly flicks his eyelids in a lively flutter and cries out with a stunned expression,
“It’s the anthem that they’re playing! Do you hear it! It’s the anthem. But of course! It seems to be making out a phrase: Weee-aaare-frrreee …”
And as he hums these notes, he smiles and finally laughs with gleeful absurdity.
Then to the nearby fence he turns his astonished eyes that glow with burning tears. He jumps from his chair and, stretching out his arms, exclaims with jubilation that sends a shiver down to my spine:
“Hi Palomino! …”
Someone approaches us through the silent, unmoving, locked gate.
[JM]
________________
WAX
That night we couldn’t smoke. All the bodegas in Lima were closed. My friend, who led me through the taciturn mazes of the renowned yellow mansion on Calle Hoyos, where numerous smokers converge, said good-bye to me and, with soul and pituitaries porcelained,60 he jumped the first streetcar he saw and fled through midnight.
I still felt somewhat woozy from our last drinks. Oh, my bohemia of yore, bronzemongery61 ever cornered by uneven scales, withdrawn into the shell of dry palates, the circle of my costly human freedom on two sidewalks of reality that lead to three temples of impossible! But you must excuse this venting that still emits a bellicose odor of buckshot smelted into wrinkles.
As I was saying, once I was all alone I still felt drunk, aimlessly traipsing through Chinatown. So much was clearing up in my spirit. Then I realized what was happening to me. Unrest emerged in my left nipple. A carpenter’s brace made of a strand of black shiny hair from the head of my long-lost girlfriend. The unrest itched, smarted, shot inside and through me in all directions. So I couldn’t sleep. No way around it. I suffered the pain of my stunted joy, its glimmers now engraved on irremediable ironclad sadness were latent in my soul’s deepest brackets, as if to tell me ironically, that tomorrow, sure, you got it, another time, swell.
So I craved a smoke. I needed relief from my nervous breakdown. I walked toward Chale’s bodega, which happened to be nearby.
With the caution warranted by such a situation, I reached the door, put my ear up to it, nothing. After waiting a moment, I got ready to leave, when I heard someone jump out of bed, scampering barefoot inside. I tried to catch a glimpse, to see if anyone was there. Through the keyhole I managed to discern Chale lighting the room, sitting noticeably disturbed in front of the oil lamp, its pathogenic greenness in a mossy halftone welded to El Chino’s layer of face, harangued by visible ire. No one else was there.
Chale’s impenetrable appearance made him seem to have just woken up, perhaps from a terrifying nightmare, and I considered my presence importune, deciding to leave, when the Asian man opened one of the desk drawers, captained by some inexorable voice of authority. With a decisive hand he removed a laconic coffer of polished cedar, opened it, and fondled a couple of white objects with his disgusting fingernails. He put them on the edge of the desk. They were two pieces of marble.
Curiosity got the better of me. Two pieces—were they really marble? They were. I don’t know why those pieces, at the outset and without my having touched them or clearly seen them up close, traveled though the space and barraged my fingertips, instilling in me the most certain sensation of marble.
El Chino picked them up again, angling egregious, flitting observations so that they wouldn’t unscrew certain presumptions about the motive of his watchfulness. He handled and examined them at length in the light. Two pieces of marble.
Then, with his elbows on the table and the pieces still in hand, between his teeth he let out one hell of a monosyllable that barely entered his beady eyes, where El Chino’s soul welled up in tears with a mixture of ambition and impotence. Again he opened the box perhaps out of an old determination that he now relived for the hundredth time, taking out several steel pieces, and with these he began to work on his cabalist marble pieces.
Certain presumptions, I was saying, jumped out in front of me. Indeed. I had met Chale two years prior. The Mongol was a gambler. And as a gambler he was famous in Lima; a loser of millions when he was at the table, a winner of treasures when he speaking with peers. So what was the meaning of that tormenting all-nighter, that furious episode of nocturnal artifice? And those two stone fragments? Why two and not one, three or more? Eureka! Two dice! Two dice in the making.
El
