Hello,
Please do read the story I filched from Joseph Conrad.Second half to follow in a few weeks. Warm regards,
John Paul G.
He didn’t notice that day that the city of Abaixado seemed to be plotting its own demise. Near dusk, a mist rose in the wake of a vengeful rainstorm, catching the weird blue-gray light of the gas lamps. In the avenues now like the pulsing arteries of an exposed heart, things began to seem like a Joseph Conrad novel and Bocanegra had no idea at all.
The evening had fallen like a hangman when Bocanegra stood abruptly, half delirious, with a need to leave the cafe. On the small black metal table in front of him were an open copy of Capitalism and Freedom, a coagulant plate of juevos flacos, an un-warm mug of coffee. The coffee had branded two pieces of chicken-scratched paper roughly equal halves of a blurred, brown-black “O,” and these he clutched, along with the keys to his apartment, in his right hand. With his left he jerkily dug in his pockets and set down a few coins — maybe it was enough, maybe it wasn’t — and thrust his notes and book into the black satchel he carried with him everywhere. On shaky legs he left by a breach in the wrought iron gate that segregated the cafe’s patio from the ministerial plaza.
He crossed the plaza with a restless look in his eye, his mouth drawn and firmly shut to, his gunpowder hair like an oil painting on his skull. He was walking a kind of walk that wasn’t totally human or even, really, animal. Like a red-eyed ghost, he passed through the plaza and onto Avenida Bolivar, where the pearly face of the clock above the entryway of the mayor’s mansion read ten past six. He smiled grimly to himself, his head throbbing.
The mist rose like the notes of a violin in the blue of the lamps, and, still some six blocks away from his apartment, he began to fumble for his keys. He patted his breast pocket, then each of the pockets of his withering pants. But the keys had already made their way to his hand.
Avenida Ninos Heroes gave way to Avenida Victor Hugo, and then came the house — his house — with its Kool-Aid blue siding, burnt orange trim, and its air of an enormous, stale pastry. The Indian maid stood aquiline at the landing, sweeping without expression. He grunted a hello before lurching up the stairs to his apartment, twisting the key in its lock, and cramming himself inside the darkness.
When he’d slammed the door shut, he stood with one hand propped against it and the other gripping the handle. The room, which was in that moment a moist kind of dark, seemed to draw him further and further into itself.
“Thank God,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?” asked in a small way the man who was waiting in his room. Bocanegra turned around: a pair of eyes, so wide that they were like two black apples, were staring back at him from the gloom. The eyes belonged to a thin but muscular figure with the suggestion of a shrug in its shoulders and a set of buck teeth that teepeed out from under lazy, loose, strangely red lips. It was easy to see, even in the poorly lit room, that he — whoever he was — was ugly.
Bocanegra’s jaw dropped just a little—
“Don’t yell, please, Bocanegra,” the weak, brackish voice came again, this time with urgency, and Bocanegra thought of the bottom falling out of a bucket. He wondered illogically whether he had somehow let himself into the wrong room.
“Who is there?” asked Bocanegra, not impolitely. A half minute or more passed, the two people in the room breathing together.
“It’s just me, Carondele,” said the man finally. “From school.” It was a name said as though belonging to an acquaintance, but to Bocanegra it was only vaguely familiar. His gaze still fixed on his uninvited guest, he started toward the door, his hand out to grasp the handle.
“Would you like some water?” asked Bocanegra, for obscure reasons. Time had ceased to exist (everything had ceased to exist, actually), and there was something like a very civilized carnival going on inside the room.
He had failed to escape.
Without another word, Carondele’s black-apple-eyes lifted (he had stood). And now, breathing very loudly through the triangular space between his teeth and his lower lip, the man removed something that looked like a silver snake from where it had been tucked into his pants. Slowly, he put it beside the lamp on Bocanegra’s desk.
“What would you do with this?” asked Carondele, pointing at his gun.
The room began to stink like something — like sulfur, or fermentation, or like danger, or a threat, or something — and it began to spin a little. In that instant, Bocanegra ceased to plan how to get rid of his unwanted guest and decided instead to plan his own escape from his tiny room on the second floor of the house that looked like an enormous and stale pastry.
All that was no use anymore.
* * *
He’d met the mayor once. It had been almost a year now, during Bocanegra’s third year at school. It was before the strike (and then, of course, the riots), and it was before things in the city started feeling vaguely toxic and on days in late summer when it rained the rain didn’t suggest anything of the end of days.
He was summoned to the office of the president of the college on this day, which wasn’t exactly expected and wasn’t exactly abnormal. The president of the college, a nakedly ambitious, stupid man, had always seemed fond of him, as a gardener might prefer his orchids or succulents. And even though the president of the college wheezed a lot and he sipped his tea too loudly, Bocanegra could stand him all right. His name was Sanjurju, an uncommon name. Sanjurju would call Bocanegra up to his office often enough, especially after Bocanegra won the prize for his essay on the price of bread in Zimbabwe.
When he’d made his way to the mansion that housed the offices of administration, he was ushered by the fat little secretary more quickly than was normal into Sanjurju’s office, a bright room with a fireplace wreathed in golden plaques and certificates of distinction. The president stood rigidly behind his desk, his well-kempt and unfashionable moustache dangling stupidly below his nose. When Bocanegra came in, the man’s chuckle (nothing good-natured about this chuckle) sounded in the room like startled birds taking to the air and Sanjurju said higher than normal that he was pleased to see him.
He thought: I’m being studied.
And then Bocanegra, the air thinner than normal, noticed the man seated opposite Sanjurju in a plain leather chair. He had very black eyes, pale skin, and he was dressed in a well-fitting linen suit. He was probably handsome at some point, Bocanegra figured. And there was something violent about him.
“And may I present,” continued Sanjurju idiotically, “The mayor of Ciudade Abaixado, Ulíses Dias.” The head of the man nodded once or twice, the eyes bulged almost imperceptibly, and the nose twitched.
“Your name is one that I hear often enough these days,” Dias said as he almost stood, extending his hand. The three men stood there, all trying to figure out what they wanted to say while they were standing there. Until Bocanegra asked in very simple terms if he was a suspected dissident.
The men laughed in this order: first the mayor, then Sanjurju, and then Bocanegra, a little and to himself.
A halting, awkward conversation ensued about Bocanegra’s favorite subjects, his favorite sports, the weather at this time of year, and the progress of the machines making the superhighway across the isthmus. And then the mayor turned to Sanjurju: thank you, Mauricio, and Bocanegra was told that he could leave. Everything they had spoken about had turned on the strange circumstances of the conversation itself—it was only later that he let a thrill passed through himself. Even when things began to go badly for the mayor, it was a comfort to know that such a man had heard his name “often enough.”
Since that day, there was the strike and then the strikers and then the movement and the farmers down from the campos; there was Gilson Cabral shot dead in the street; there was the police disbanded, but there were still the white trucks with no plates coming in the night to Eglisa Santo Domingo where the 5,000 of them slept. And they killed in the night.
People had begun to demand the mayor’s resignation, calmly, like the sea gnaws at a cliff, and Bocanegra hadn’t seen him since that day, except on TV.
* * *
“It was me who shot the mayor this afternoon,” said Carondele after a while. “Just a little while ago. At the Hotel Zará.”
When he understood the words, even Bocanegra’s eyeballs sweat. He may have gaped, and in fact that would have made sense. A groan, like wind through the rafters of an old house, left him and turned the room the arsenic green of panic. He shook suddenly and, pulling out his sad little chair from behind his even sadder little desk, Bocanegra took a seat. Vomit stung the back of his throat.
He looked at Carondele again, and this time he recognized him as one of the idiots who liked to stand on the steps of the library, giving the clenched-fist salute. He thought with disdain of their brand new clothes and their clenched fists: Bocanegra stood and walked very slowly to Carondele, who wouldn’t meet his gaze and who looked older now, somehow.
He had learned a dirty trick in his youth, and tonight he used it on Carondele: his shoulders, firm and thick, betrayed no movement as he pulled back his right fist and plunged it deep into the guts of his comrade. He punched as though aiming for the man’s spine. The other clutched his stomach and collapsed onto the small bed, a gasp coming and going, before he began to weep. His crying was not only for a physical pain, but for something deeper; the weeping was more existential than that, and it belonged to the first murderer Bocanegra had ever met.
Bocanegra was now thinking very quickly because the sound of the crying had kicked some lever in his brain. He walked briskly and quietly to the window and looked outside: no one. But, he thought, who knows if the idiot has been followed?
With a sneer, he said, “Thanks for dropping by.”
He walked to the cabinet above his sink, removed some instant coffee and a mug, and filled it with tap water. He noticed that his hands were now shaking a little. He understood that it wasn’t that there weren’t any police in the city, exactly, but rather that they had taken off their uniforms.
It was all very bad and very unlucky.
In this way, slowly, by degrees, he understood three simple facts. The first was that he had no real desire to help Carondele. He certainly felt no great political sympathies, since, a ward of the State, Bocanegra had watched developments with the neutral eyes of someone who witnesses their parents fighting. Second, Carondele was in danger of being caught and he was in Bocanegra’s room and so long as he was in danger Bocanegra was in danger himself. Third, Carondele needed to leave his room very quickly and quietly and needed not to be seen by anyone, not even the Indian maid sweeping wordless and aquiline in the foyer.
His heart felt full of panic and fear, still. But there was also his mind. And so anger gave way to curiosity and he began to think differently about things, generally.
“Your comrade,” he said, not mockingly, exactly. He’d accepted that he was guilty by association, really. He could almost hear the television station reporting in a scandalized way the single word that would be his end: a co-conspirator. As in: The assassin fled the scene of the crime and went to the house of a co-conspirator. And he pitied Carondele. He pitied him.
All of which meant: Fuck!
So he said that, again and again. In his mind he saw a black hand with fingers as thick as cudgels, coming for his throat. His stomach tilted upward into his head.
Carondele stopped crying: “I’m sorry,” he said imploringly. “I wasn’t sure where else to go.” His hands were pressed to his sides and his black eyes stared straight upward, studying the lines of the ceiling, maybe. Thinking of family, friends and enemies.
Bocanegra thought about how pathetic it was.
The knock could come at any minute. It wouldn’t be a hard knock. It would be quick, confident, entirely impersonal. It would ring like church bells. Two men would enter, inconspicuous except for their aviator glasses and the toothpicks jammed between scarred lips. They’d be at the door, they would enter quietly; they wouldn’t take out their guns, nor would they show their badges (no doubt they would have badges somewhere). Placed there by the force of human drama, they would ask, almost politely, “Come with us.” Somewhere, in a smoke-filled room behind an unremarkable door at the bottom of an unremarkable staircase, Bocanegra and Carondele would be beaten. Gleefully they’d beat them. Burning with cigarettes, electrocution, the removal of the fingernail from the finger with a pair of pliers!
What, exactly, is your connection to the assassination of Mayor Ulises Dias?
They’d be there soon—any minute now—to remove his fingernails! He asked Carondele, without feeling, “But why did you come here?”
And Carondele, shifting only his eyes, replied, “I thought I recognized you from the assemblies at the Eglisa Santo Domingo.”
This was a ridiculous notion—Bocanegra wouldn’t have been caught dead at one of those. They were noisy and crowded, and the idea that anyone should be free to speak and share their idiotic revolutionary ideas revolted him. The idea of preaching to the choir was anathema to Bocanegra, who distrusted all agreement.
“You didn’t see me there,” said Bocanegra, with finality.
“I wondered.”
“Well, you didn’t,” said Bocanegra, lip curling even as he spoke.
