The night buffalo, p.14
The Night Buffalo, page 14
Later, the mother offered me dinner. I accepted and sat down at the table with her and Laura. For Tania’s family, dinner had to be frugal. They gave me a plate with two helpings of cooked vegetables and a thin fillet of fried fish. I don’t know why none of them were bone-thin.
The parents didn’t consider me an ideal boyfriend for their daughter, even though they obviously preferred me to Gregorio. They tolerated me because they thought Tania was a problem child and that I somehow provided some stability. “That girl needs tough love,” her father once said. He never gave it though, not because he didn’t want to, but because Tania has known how to dominate him since she was a little girl. She was neither upset by his shouting nor affected by his scolding. She just ignored him and went somewhere else. In exchange, Laura would shrink before her father and bear his authoritarian abuses.
TANIA DIDN’T ARRIVE, and at eleven-thirty I decided to leave. We called a few of her friends and none of them had heard anything. As I left, the mother took me by the hand. “Help her,” she said as she squeezed. “Help her, please.”
When I arrived home my father was waiting for me.
“Why did you take your mother’s car without asking?” he demanded.
“Something urgent came up.”
“And that’s why you didn’t tell her?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Your mother had to meet her friends and had no way to get there.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“She’s the one you have to apologize to, and she’s very angry.”
“I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” I said.
My father shook his head and walked toward his bedroom. I went into mine and sat on the floor. Tania’s absence was bothering me again. The speech I’d made, the insults, the jealous scene, they were stuck in my throat. I called Margarita. I was hoping that Tania would be parked outside of her house again.
“Hey,” I said upon answering.
“Who’s this?” she asked sleepily.
“Manuel.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I can’t talk to you,” she said.
“Why?”
“There’s a big fight going on at the house.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know how, but Joaquín found out about us.”
“How?”
“I have no idea.”
“And what did you say?”
“That it was a lie.”
“Your parents know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And?”
“My dad was furious and so was Joaquín. They say it wasn’t enough for you to fuck Gregorio’s girlfriend.”
“Deny it all.”
“I assured them a hundred times that nothing happened between us, but they don’t believe me.”
“I think that…”
She interrupted me.
“Someone’s coming, bye,” she said and hung up.
Nobody could know about us. We were careful and discreet. I suspected that Jacinto Anaya was the snitch. But how could he know? I pulled out the card where I’d written down his phone number. I dialed slowly, making sure I dialed the right numbers. The phone rang four times and after the fifth, an answering machine answered. “I’m not home. Leave a message, name and number after the beep,” ordered a raspy, male voice. I hung up.
Half an hour later I called again. The message started and I hung up. I did this over and over until, exasperated, at two AM, I left a message: “Jacinto Anaya, this is Manuel Aguilera. If you’re so fucking tough, come drop the letters off in person. Give them to me face-to-face, you faggot, or are you afraid? If you’ve got something to say to me, say it to my face. My phone number is 635–00–19.”
Angry, I slammed the phone down.
I was exhausted and fell asleep in my clothes with the light on. At four in the morning, the phone rang. The sound startled me.
“Hello.”
“Tania isn’t back yet,” said Laura, on the other end of the line. “My mom’s been crying all night,” she added.
“You don’t have any idea where she might be?” I asked.
“We know even less than you do.”
She breathed in and went on.
“I don’t know how you can go out with her, she’s a real bitch.”
I was surprised at her coarseness. She didn’t usually talk like this.
“No, she’s not.”
“Don’t defend her. What if she’s fucking some other guy right now, and you don’t even know about it?”
“Or maybe your ex-boyfriend is the one fucking other people?”
“That’s none of your business,” she scolded.
“It could be, don’t you think?”
“Asshole,” she yelled and hung up.
I WAS UNABLE TO SLEEP for the rest of the night. I felt hemmed in, confused, humiliated, jealous. And what if Laura was right? What the hell was Tania doing? Where the fuck had she gone?
My parents were asleep, so I couldn’t look for my mother’s sleeping pills. I wanted those pills like never before; I wanted to swallow the whole jar and be knocked out for a week.
The sun rose. I stayed in bed, wrapped in the covers, listening to the noises of the other life. I heard my father tiptoe out of the house, I heard my brother’s alarm clock, I heard my mother walk downstairs, the maid sweep the patio, the racket made by the blender, the engine of the school bus as it picked up the twins from across the street. The other life.
At ten in the morning I decided to get up. I opened the window, the air was warm, the sky transparent. I went downstairs for breakfast. My mother was dicing some vegetables on the kitchen table. She gave me a sidelong glance.
“Aren’t you going to school?” she asked.
“Later,” I answered.
She made a gesture of disgust and continued with her task. When I started college, I took a psychological exam—a written questionnaire where you could only answer yes, no, or don’t know. One of the questions was “Do you get along well with your mother?” It took me fifteen minutes to choose. I marked “yes” without much conviction when I should’ve answered “don’t know.”
I made myself some scrambled eggs with ham and ate them sitting across from her, without talking, both of us focused on our own things. And I didn’t apologize for having taken her car.
I WENT BACK TO MY ROOM to try to sleep. It was hot. I got naked, unplugged the phone, lay facedown, and closed my eyes. I was beginning to dream when I felt an earwig running up my back. I rolled over on the mattress, trying to crush it, and I sat up to try to shake it off. I pulled the sheets off the bed and scrutinized it carefully. Again, nothing.
Despite the heat, I put on the blue flannel pajamas and covered myself with the blankets. That way, I thought, I’d be better protected. I managed to sleep for two, three hours, until I was awoken by someone knocking on the door.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Someone on the phone,” said my mother angrily and walked away.
I picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Manuel?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“No.”
“Jacinto Anaya.”
Stunned, I was quiet for a few moments.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stop fucking with me.”
“I don’t even know you,” he said.
We remained silent. His voice was deeper, more masculine than it was on his answering machine. It matched neither his pudgy figure nor his bland calligraphy.
“If you don’t know me, then stop sending me letters and stupid fucking little notes,” I shot back furiously.
“We need to talk, don’t you think?” he said.
“If you’re not afraid,” I said.
“I’ll be waiting for you at five, at the zoo, by the jaguar pit. I guess you know where it is, right?” he said ironically.
“Yes.”
He didn’t say anything else and hung up. To meet me specifically at the jaguar pit seemed like a declaration of war. He knew more about me than I’d imagined. I tried to call him back to curse at him, but first the line was busy, and then the answering machine picked up.
AT THREE IN THE AFTERNOON I showered, got dressed, and took the gun Camariña had given me out of the drawer. I didn’t really know who Jacinto Anaya was, whether he was a dangerous psychotic or just an idiot playing the wrong game.
I put on a wool sweater—an absurd item of clothing for such a hot day, but baggy enough to hide the bulk of the revolver in my waist.
With a gun, I couldn’t use a taxi or public transport. I needed my mom’s car. I looked for the keys, but she’d hidden them. There was no choice but to ask her. Of course, she refused. I claimed it was urgent. She refused again.
“I really need it.”
“So do I.”
“Not as much as I do.”
“How do you know?” she said, annoyed. She got up and closed the door to her room.
I remembered my father kept duplicates in a corner of the laundry room. I looked in every nook and cranny but couldn’t find them. I never paid attention when he explained that that was where he kept them for emergencies.
Resigned, I went outside to wait for a taxi. I finally found one after half an hour. It was hot as hell inside the car, but I didn’t dare take off the sweater. I opened the window and reclined on the seatback. The taxi was driving too slowly between the other vehicles. The heat made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and the image of Rebecca’s white torso came to mind—just her torso, naked, without a face, moist, stretching out after making love. I opened my eyes. The cars were moving slowly. The exasperated drivers were staring dead ahead, a woman was scolding some kid, a truck driver was dabbing at his sweat with a handkerchief, and a white body was being unveiled in my memory, a body I’d never again caress, kiss, smell. I missed Rebecca, her white torso, her silent orgasms. I missed her peace, her serenity. Her serenity.
I made sure the revolver was safe at my hip, closed my eyes again, and fell asleep.
WE MADE IT TO THE ZOO after almost an hour. The driver woke me up with a “Here we are.” I sat up. The meter read forty-two pesos. I paid with a fifty-peso bill—the only one I had in my wallet. The taxi driver gave me my change in fifty-cent coins.
I asked the guy what time it was. Ten to five. Time had passed quickly. I stood before the zoo gates. The people strolled aimlessly, a few salesmen were hawking their wares, a couple was kissing. I gulped and went in.
I walked decisively toward the jaguar pit. Halfway there I felt something missing on my left. I stopped and turned around: the cage with the ochre coyote was empty. I walked up to it. There was just a fistful of dry shit stacked in a corner and a gnawed horse bone. I asked one of the employees what had happened.
“It died,” he answered.
“What of?”
“Who knows? Kids throw all sorts of crap in there. One day a hippopotamus died and when they opened its belly they found a baseball glove, and a javelina had a baby bottle…”
I looked back at the cage. I remembered the coyote trotting in circles, intense, alive.
“You should be more careful…”
“We try, we try,” he said with the verbiage of a bureaucrat.
“Bullshit ‘you try,’” I said and left.
I REACHED THE FELINE AREA and slowed down. I stealthily approached, trying to spot Jacinto Anaya before he spotted me. I arrived at the pit and there was nobody there. As usual, the two jaguars were lying there, inert, twirling their tails every now and again.
I walked a few meters away and sat on a bench under the shade of a large tree. From there I could watch people approach the pit from the two paths that led to it.
Minutes went by. A woman in a gray uniform started to sweep behind me. I moved so she wouldn’t cover me in dust, and looked for somewhere else to sit. I suddenly saw Tania walking down one of the paths. I hid behind a tree trunk. She stopped in front of the pit, looked around, took a cigarette out of her purse, lit it and watched the jaguars.
I watched her for a while. She was smoking worriedly. I saw her make gestures that I’d never seen before: how she blew out the smoke, how she bit her nails, how she lifted her chin toward the sun. She seemed like a stranger, a woman unknown and distant. I felt a sense of uneasiness, a clawing at my stomach. I couldn’t wait any longer and I walked up to her.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
She turned around, looked at me surprised and immediately flicked the cigarette away (she had promised she would never smoke in front of me after she found out that my grandmother had died of pulmonary emphysema).
“What are you doing here?” she asked, disturbed.
“I came looking for you.”
“How did you know I was coming?”
“Every time you get lost, I come here to look for you.”
“You know me well,” she said with a half-smile, nervous.
She moistened her lips and sighed lengthily.
“I missed you a lot,” she said.
I shook my head. “That’s not true.”
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because if you’d missed me you would have come give me a kiss.”
“You scared me,” she said. She hugged me and kissed me on the mouth.
“Were you expecting anyone else?” I asked.
“No, why?”
“Because I was.”
“A new girlfriend?” she joked.
“No, a friend. Maybe you know him: Jacinto Anaya.”
Upon hearing Jacinto’s name, Tania looked away, at where the male jaguar was sleeping.
“They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
“They bore me.”
“Why?”
“They don’t move; they don’t do any tricks.”
Tania brushed the hair away from her face and smiled. That was the expression she made that I liked the most, and she knew it. It was her way of seducing me, of alleviating the tension.
“That’s what I admire about them the most: that they lie there for most of the day, but they just need a second to kill.”
Tania looked back at the pit and pointed at the male.
“Look at them. They’re the most beautiful animals on the planet.”
I looked around to make sure Jacinto Anaya wasn’t there. I grabbed Tania by the arm and pulled her. She thought I was doing it to kiss her. She prepared her lips, but I avoided her.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“How do you know Jacinto Anaya?” I asked her, squeezing her arm.
“I don’t know who he is,” she answered and tried to break free.
“Don’t bullshit me,” I shouted and squeezed even harder.
The woman who was sweeping stopped and watched us.
“Don’t make one of your scenes,” warned Tania.
I let go of her and she rubbed her arm. She rummaged through her purse, took out another cigarette and lit it.
“They’re the most beautiful animals,” she repeated, staring at the pit.
“How do you know him,” I insisted.
Tania gave the cigarette another long drag and exhaled as she tilted her head. Another unknown gesture.
“I told you I don’t know who he is,” she answered, irritated.
We remained silent. She leaned her forehead on the chain-link fence. Her hair shone in the sun.
“Where were you last night?”
She turned to look at me with an annoyed expression on her face.
“At Claudine Longega’s.”
“No you weren’t,” I refuted.
“Of course I was.”
“Laura called her and Claudine said she didn’t know where you were.”
Tania smiled sarcastically.
“Don’t believe everything my retarded sister says.”
“I was next to her when she called.”
Tania looked annoyed again.
“Enough, come on, get off my back,” she said and brought her cigarette up to her mouth.
I slapped the cigarette out of her lips. It flew off and landed in the gutter that separated the pit from the fence.
“It pisses me off when you smoke,” I bellowed.
Tania looked at me indignantly, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Why?” she asked and lowered her head. “Why do you have to know everything?”
She brought her left hand to her face and tears started to roll down her cheeks. I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her toward me.
“Just answer this question. I’m not asking anything else. In these last months, how many times did you sleep with Gregorio?”
“None,” she whispered.
“Stop lying, goddammit!”
Tania raised her hands, put them against my chest, and pushed me backward.
“None,” she repeated.
She wiped away her tears, clenched her teeth, and turned around to leave. I jumped in her way.
“Look in my fucking eyes, look at me and for once in your life tell me the truth, I’m asking you, please.”
Tania clicked her tongue and shook her head.
“Gregorio doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Tell me the truth.”
She looked me in the eyes and lifted her face defiantly.
“You don’t deserve it.”
“Oh, no?”
“No.”
She made another attempt to leave, but I blocked her way. She wasn’t crying anymore.
“Tell me.”
“I slept with him about five times less than you slept with Margarita,” she confessed.
Her revelation incensed me.
“I never slept with Margarita,” I affirmed, “and you did sleep with Gregorio, you fucking slut.”
“So now it’s your turn to lie?” she asked sardonically.
