The night buffalo, p.12
The Night Buffalo, page 12
That morning, the professor told us how Burroughs had killed his wife in a gloomy Mexico City apartment when, totally drunk, he blew her forehead open playing William Tell.
At the end of the class I approached the teacher. Trying to stick with the Burroughs theme, I explained that I’d missed class the previous week because my best friend had blown his head off playing a solitary William Tell.
“You mean he killed himself?”
I nodded. The teacher smiled and patted me on the back indulgently.
“Excellent excuse, Manuel, very literary,” he said. Idiot. “I’ll ignore your absences because you’re original, but make sure you catch up on the work you missed.”
He winked and left the room without letting me say another word. I saw him walk down the corridor. I walked the other way toward the faculty parking lot, found his car, and punctured his four tires with my Swiss Army knife. I waited for them to deflate and left.
I went back home, furious, convinced that I should drop out of college, abandon architecture, and leave this small world of stern and mediocre professors. I decided to go relax at a nearby pool, where for thirty pesos you could stay indefinitely.
Luckily, the pool was empty, and I was able to swim as many laps as I liked, without having to swerve around children in floaties or old women doing aqua-aerobics. When I was almost done, a bland, pudgy blonde appeared, dressed in a garish sapphire swimsuit with yellow stripes. She seemed familiar. She got into the water without looking at me and started to flail her arms around in an awkward, cumbersome way that at times looked something like a breast stroke. After awhile, I managed to place her. She was a famous soap-opera star. “The queen of sensuality” according to cheap tabloids. I took a good look at her and even went underwater with my goggles to stare at her legs. They had cellulite. Pounds of it. Her breasts looked a little more appetizing, but also probably had cellulite (“Tits like sponge cake,” Gregorio called them, “greasy and full of holes”).
When I got out of the pool, I noticed that two bodyguards were intently watching over the woman with the flat sensuality. All in vain, since there was no one left to want her.
I arrived home a little calmer and found my mother. She greeted me with a hug and several kisses. I found it strange that she should be so affectionate. She then recited the messages that had been left for me: at two-fourteen Tania had called, Joaquín at five after three, and a friend from college had called at three twenty-two to remind me about a group project we had to do (we had to design some Barragán-style crap, with water mirrors and thick walls).
My mother offered to make some chicken sandwiches. Her effort to be caring and attentive was apparent. She and I never really understood each other; we were alike in the things we should have differed in, and differed in those we should have shared.
My mother was unable to keep up her jovial mood for very long. She accompanied me while I ate, we spoke trivially about trivia, and then, a little sick of each other, we retired to our own things.
Before I went upstairs, she called out to me.
“I forgot to give you this,” she said, and handed me a letter. “It arrived this morning in the mail.”
I thanked her and kept on my way.
THE LETTER HAD no return address. The writing on the envelope was familiar, but I couldn’t immediately identify it.
I opened it. Inside there was a wrinkled, yellowish paper with a single phrase written on it: “Now the night buffalo will dream of you.”
Nothing else. At first I laughed out loud, thinking it was a stupid joke. Then I sat down on the mattress, rattled. Gregorio had written that, there was no doubt about it. His long, angry script stood out.
I got up without knowing exactly what to do. The blow had been dealt with precision. From his urn and his ashes, Gregorio was stalking me again. I wouldn’t be able to confront him, not even insult him. I also couldn’t tear up the letter and forget it: the threats and secret messages would probably keep coming, one after the other.
I tried to calm down. Gregorio couldn’t beat me, much less with some moronic phrase. I went out into the hallway. My mother was downstairs, in the kitchen. I went to her room and rummaged through her medicine cabinet. I found some sleeping pills and took triple the recommended dosage. I went back to my room and lay down, waiting for the pills to start working. Foggy, I grabbed the letter. The writing on the envelope was different from Gregorio’s. The postage date was February the twenty-fourth, two days after Gregorio’s suicide. Somebody was following the plan.
The key was in the handwriting. Almost asleep, I tried to look over the types of handwriting that I knew: Margarita, Tania, Rebecca, Joaquín, my father, my mother, Luis, Margarita, Rebecca…
I GOT UP AT MIDNIGHT, afraid. Again, I had felt a stifling, humid breath on the back of my neck. I tried to run away, to jump out of bed, but I was unable to move. The sleeping pills had me in a state of semi-consciousness. I noticed lights, noise, voices. My legs, my arms didn’t respond.
After about an hour, I managed to turn on the light. My head was throbbing and my tongue felt swollen. I walked into the bathroom and gargled some water. I looked at my face in the mirror: It still looked like a stranger’s.
Under the door, I found a note from my mother with phone messages. At 5:08 PM, my friend from college had called, annoyed, because I hadn’t shown up to work on the project with the group. At 6:02 PM, Tania called, and at 6:25 PM, Doctor Macías’s secretary called to ask why I hadn’t gone to my appointment. I had completely forgotten and was happy to have stood him up.
The handwriting on the envelope started to worry me. Why the fuck had anyone volunteered for Gregorio’s sick machinations? I thought it might be Doctor Macías himself, and I found the idea amusing: the prestigious psychiatrist, slave to his most tormented patient. I imagined both of them making a blood pact and Macías swearing eternal loyalty. He probably also had a buffalo tattooed on his left biceps.
This helped distract me a bit. I put my pajamas on and got back into bed. I was about to turn off the light when I suddenly remembered where I had seen the script on the envelope. I went to the closet and took out Gregorio’s box. I looked through the pieces of paper in the package with the black ribbon. I grabbed one of them and compared the traces. Yes: Jacinto Anaya had written the song lyrics as well as the address on the envelope.
I tried to contact Macías. Maybe he knew about Gregorio’s plan and had been trying to warn me. I called his office. No one answered. I called his beeper and sent him a message to get in touch with me. He didn’t.
I called Tania’s house. She had probably received a similar letter. Her sister answered sleepily. I asked her to put Tania on the phone. She said that it was no time to be calling in the first place and hung up. They didn’t get along. She was jealous of Tania. She said that Tania was given too many privileges, that her parents let her do whatever she wanted, while she, because she was older, was always kept in check. She was wrong. They were both headstrong and capricious, only Tania was more decisive.
I tried calling Margarita, but her father answered and I hung up. I came to think that she was also involved in Gregorio’s game. Then I hesitated; she was probably another victim.
I resolved to be patient and not pay attention to Gregorio’s cheap confabulations. I threw the box into a corner and turned on the TV.
I SPENT THE NIGHT with insomnia, staring at newscasts. I jolted at dawn, certain that an earwig had come out of my mouth. I lifted the sheets and found nothing.
I left the room. The doors to the other rooms were closed. I imagined my parents sleeping in their bedroom, next to each other, dreaming their respective dreams, keeping their own worlds intact. I imagined my father getting up in the half-dark, drinking water from the glass on the nightstand, rubbing his eyes, so close and still so far away from my sleeping mother. I imagined her dreaming about all the different job opportunities she’d lost and which she considered fundamental to her life. I imagined my brother dreaming of his insipid girlfriends, his friends, his trips, his preoccupations, and his bland desires.
I went downstairs into the living room and headed over to the wooden bar my father had built. He had built it so it would be “his” place, where he could get together with his friends to chat and drink rum and Cokes, and they’d sit on the benches while he served them from the other side of the bar. Only twice in thirteen years did I see him get together like that with his friends. The other times he was alone, in the early morning, drinking rum and Coke with lime and ice (served like only he knew how), solving crossword puzzles from the pages of the Excelsior.
I never drank, not a drop. I had never known what it was like to be drunk. Neither had Gregorio. Drinking seemed like something faggots did. Nevertheless, that morning, I craved drinking my father’s treasured Cuban rum down to the last drop. Maybe that way the earwigs, the breathing on my neck, life itself, would have some meaning. But no, drinking was for sissies.
I sat on one of the benches and opened a bag of Japanese peanuts that my father always kept at hand, part of his obsession to be a good host. I chewed, crushing them between my molars. That noise always bothered my brother. He thought I was doing it to annoy him. The truth is, I liked to hear them crunch.
I could hear the water running in my parents’ bathroom. My dad was probably having a shower, getting ready for another day of work as a bank manager. He wasn’t always like this, even though I can’t visualize him without his banker’s suit and wine-colored briefcase (an image that filled me with pride as a boy: the image of a confident, important man).
I remembered when he confessed he’d smoked marijuana, some ten, twelve times, hidden in the college bathrooms, at parties, inside a beat-up Volkswagen. He showed me a photograph from back then. He and his friends were in it, with their hair falling over their eyebrows, thick sideburns, flowery shirts and ridiculous bell-bottoms. The same friends who, twenty-five, thirty years later, would no longer share his bar, his conversation, his heavenly rum and Cokes prepared with lime and ice.
My father finished showering. I imagined him quietly getting dressed so as not to disturb my mother, knotting his tie, splashing his face with expensive, outdated aftershave. Then I saw him descending the staircase. His expression was different from most days, more relaxed, free of the usual gestures of a father or a husband. He looked like a man getting ready to go to work. Just a man. Plain, simple, maybe a little clumsy. A man.
He left, closing the door carefully so as not to make any noise. I imagined all the times he left early in the morning for a business meeting when he could’ve gone to meet a beautiful woman at a motel. All those times he missed smoking pot, fighting in bars, eating tacos and running away without paying, watching midnight porn. All the times he was tempted to leave us, to get in the car next to the beautiful woman and drive down a straight and endless highway. All the times he could have and didn’t.
Maybe this was the right time to run, so that twenty, thirty years later, one of my sons didn’t see me walking quietly down the stairs so as not to wake the rest of the family.
I didn’t run and went back to my room.
THE REST OF THE MORNING I remained locked in my room, distraught. It was clear that Gregorio wanted me to know that Jacinto Anaya was his scribe and accomplice. He’d left enough clues. But for what? For me to seek him out and confront him? Or would finding him lead to the next part of the plan? I couldn’t ignore the trap. I couldn’t avoid it either. I had to keep going.
Impulsively, I grabbed the box and opened the packet with the blue ribbon—the one whose content I was most afraid of. I had barely untied the knot when I encountered a photograph that was a message in itself. In it were Tania, Gregorio, and myself. It was taken the last day of high school. Each one of us had a copy signed by the other two. In this copy, my face and Tania’s had been run through with a cigarette.
Then came a recent portrait of Tania. She was wearing a white blouse I’d given her at Christmas, and a silver necklace Gregorio had given her for their first anniversary. Then I found several newspaper cutouts from the movie section of El Universal. Some of the advertised movies were marked in blue ink with the showtimes underlined in red. There were also some pictures of Gregorio in the garden of the psychiatric ward. He was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. You could see the buffalo tattooed on his left biceps. He was smiling and in one photograph blowing kisses at the photographer.
Next I found a box of matches with the name and address of a motel printed on it. It was a motel near the Villalba, probably the same one in which the lieutenant killed his lover. On the back of the matchbox, Gregorio had written a date, January fifth, and a phrase: “today, very close to the fire.” The date coincided with one of the underlined showtimes for a movie in the newspaper cuttings.
I also found a poem from a book by Agustín García Delgado that Tania liked very much and frequently quoted. It was transcribed on a typewriter. The poem was called “Room.”
ROOM
Better to stay,
Outside a deathless burial awaits us,
Outside is a cemetery where a scarecrow
Armed in vigil
Frightens the blue crows of silence away.
In the vast early morning of the soul,
The pitiless rooster will not stop.
The sun that would silence him will never rise.
Never will our hands touch
The luminous edge of day.
Tania had dated the poem January eighth. In the margin, Gregorio had written: “today, inside the fire, deep inside.”
After looking through a bunch of papers with cryptic messages on them, I found the key to understanding everything else. On the back of a receipt from a gas station near the psychiatric hospital, Tania had scrawled:
“My love, they won’t let me in to see you. I’m desperate. This is the third time. I don’t know what to do. The watchman who used to let me in is gone. But I’m here, waiting for you. Always, don’t forget. I hope this note reaches you.”
Below Tania had written two of the song lyrics that Jacinto Anaya had copied:
“Near you everything is new / it’s being in the fire’s center.”
The receipt was from just six months ago. They’d both kept their relationship hidden from me. I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t been capable of figuring out what was going on around me, and that was the most painful thing of all.
Gregorio’s plan was working too well. Only the rage of a dead man could be so effective. I looked at the box and the mess of papers impregnated with vengeance. I piled them into a corner of the shower and set them on fire. The photographs started to curl and so did the newspaper cuttings, the hidden messages, the unopened packets.
Once the fire went out, I turned on the water so that it would wash the ashes into the drain. The room was left full of a cloud of smoke that made me cough. I sat on the floor, exhausted, short of breath, as if the fire had consumed all the oxygen in the room. I remained motionless for a few minutes, my eyes fixed on the drain as the ashes disappeared.
I felt incredibly tired.
I HAD NO CHOICE but to forget. Only by erasing the past could I face the pain. Now, more than ever, I had to love and trust Tania. I wouldn’t reproach her at all.
No matter how much it hurt, I had to deal with the blow, I had to humbly assume that she possessed mysteries to which I had no access, in the same way that she had no access to mine.
I had to forget. Or at least try. Forgive. Forget.
Forget.
IT WASN’T POSSIBLE. In the evening I received another letter from Gregorio. Like the last one, the envelope bore Jacinto’s handwriting. I tried to get rid of it, to burn it before I opened it. My curiosity won.
The letter had two pages. On the first, Gregorio warned: “You won’t be able to run from the night buffalo.”
The second page was a note that apparently Tania had sent to Gregorio at the hospital on January fifteenth of that year: “As soon as you get out of there, we’ll go as far away as we can. I promise, my love. This time I mean it.”
January fifteenth was the last time Gregorio checked into a psychiatric hospital. He left two weeks later, when Macías and his team decreed that he was ready to readapt. Twenty-two days later, he killed himself.
I dropped the letter. And no, there was no way out. Gregorio wouldn’t let me forget. He’d rub the past and his secrets with Tania in my face until he beat me, if he hadn’t beaten me already.
Tania had insisted, over and over, that her breakup with Gregorio was definitive, and that it was me she loved. Why, then, that late need to run away with him?
I put on the first thing that appeared in the closet: a pair of jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. I grabbed a jacket and headed out toward Macías’s office. I needed to find Jacinto Anaya. I could think of no other way to stop Gregorio’s attacks, at least momentarily.
I LEFT THE BEDROOM. My mother was watching TV in her room. Without telling her, I took her car keys. As I was pulling out of the garage, she looked out the window. She watched me impassively. I waved good-bye. Expressionless, she closed the curtain.
THE CARS WERE MOVING slowly down the avenue. A broken water main was flooding the central lanes, complicating the traffic flow. A Volkswagen tried to avoid the gridlock by climbing up onto the divider. As he did, he lightly hit my car. Instead of stopping, he tried to escape, but I caught up to him several blocks ahead. I cut him off. I got out, bent on beating the shit out of him. When he saw me coming he locked the doors. That he should stay inside pissed me off even more. I knocked on his window and shouted at him that he should pay for the damages. He looked at me timorously and slid over to the passenger seat. I picked up a large rock and smashed his windshield to pieces. Not even that would get him out of his car. With the same rock, I tried to shatter the window. Suddenly I realized that I was surrounded by dozens of curious onlookers. None of them seemed willing to intervene. They were just watching, expectant.
