“What?”

  “If you don’t get me out, honestly, it doesn’t matter.”

  He took a step back and looked at me.

  “Sometimes I don’t know who you are anymore, son,” he mumbled and left.

  AN HOUR LATER, the lawyer my parents had hired arrived. He was tall and in his fifties, with blue eyes and freckles on his bald pate. He stank of the same lavender lotion the thin man used. “I’m Attorney Olvera,” he introduced himself. He handed me his card and succinctly expounded his strategy for my defense: a psychiatrist friend of his would evaluate me and between the both of them they would attenuate the report in order to prove that I was suffering from a transitory mental disturbance provoked by my best friend’s suicide. “We’re going to find extenuating circumstances to keep you locked up for as little as possible, even if we have to argue that you’re a little crazy,” he concluded with a smile. He excused himself with a handshake and left. I tore his card up into little pieces and threw them out the window.

  AT THREE I ATE a couple of Cuban sandwiches sent to me by the commander (full of onion, for a change) and they let me go to the bathroom again. When I came back, I could see someone talking with my parents farther off. It was almost certainly the psychiatrist recommended by Olvera. He put on the gestures common to everyone in his profession: he tilted his head when he spoke, he stroked his chin, gazed condescendingly, and didn’t stop moving his head, like a bobblehead doll in a taxi. Worst of all, he looked almost exactly like Doctor Macías, only a little fatter.

  I walked into the cubicle, lay down on the carpet, and fell asleep. I dreamt of Gregorio and Tania. The three of us were dressed in our secondary school uniforms and we were walking down a long, endless street. As we walked the pavement turned into softer matter. Walking became difficult and our shoes were getting stuck in the asphalt mud. Suddenly, the floor gave way under us and we plunged in up to our waists. The three of us were holding out our hands, trying to get out of the enveloping pulp. They were drowning as I slowly sank.

  The thin man woke me up, shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes and for a few seconds I couldn’t figure out where I was. The thin man held out his hand and helped me up. “You sleep heavy,” he said. “I’ve been trying to wake you up for five minutes.” He walked over to the table, grabbed a plastic bag, and held it up.

  Inside was the gun with which I’d shot the jaguar. I was surprised that the thin man’s detectives had found it. They must have gone from sewer to sewer looking for it. He showed it to me.

  “That’s the one you shot the tiger with, right?”

  “Jaguar,” I corrected.

  “It’s the same thing, man.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  The commander opened the door and called one of his subordinates, who came in and put several black ink pads and a few white cards on the table.

  “We’re going to take your fingerprints,” he said.

  He took each and every one of my fingerprints. He even made me use my injured finger. No sooner had I touched it against the piece of card then lacerating pain made me pull it away brusquely. The ink smudged on the card leaving an amorphous stain. The man looked displeased, but the commander ordered him with a look to continue the procedure.

  Once I finished, he handed me a cloth and some alcohol to clean my hands.

  “That’s it,” the man said and left.

  The commander took the cards and arranged them like a poker hand.

  “We’re going to compare these prints with the ones on the gun to see if they match.”

  “They’ll match,” I affirmed.

  “Goddammit, let me do my job, will you?”

  We both smiled. He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and read it to himself. He folded it again and put it away.

  “The gun is registered under the name Arnulfo Camariña Iglesias. Do you know him?”

  “Yeah, he’s the owner of the motel where you arrested me.”

  “What were you doing with his gun?”

  “I stole it.”

  “What for?”

  “To hunt jaguars.”

  He laughed out loud.

  “You’re too much.”

  He told me that later I’d be taken to sleep in an office with its own bathroom. I thanked him.

  “District attorney’s orders,” he clarified, “not mine.”

  My mother’s ties to high-level politicians had started to have an effect. Even if I didn’t avoid jail, at least I’d enjoy some privileges.

  I WASN’T WRONG. The guy I’d seen with my parents had, in fact, been the psychiatrist proposed by Olvera. He turned out to be more pleasant than I’d thought. He joked with me about my cell/cubicle and about my twisted finger: “That’s what you get for making gestures at cops.”

  Without being pedantic, he asked me several questions: “Have you felt depressed lately?” “Did you ever commit another crime?” “Do you have a police record?” “Any trouble with your parents?” “Problems with your girlfriend?” “Fear of death?”

  At first I answered confidently, even occasionally joking, but I don’t know how or why, I started to waver, to contradict myself, to reveal fears not even I had imagined, to lose control. I blurted out confused phrases with a dizzying lack of coherence, until I cracked. At that moment, I understood the full force of Macías’s sentence: Madness can be more terrifying than death.

  The fat man, whose name I didn’t know then, nor do I now, got up from his chair and did what I thought psychiatrists never did: He hugged me. Not an impersonal hug, but a deep, affectionate one. I wanted to tell him about the night buffalo, about its breath on my neck, its gallop on the plains of death, about Gregorio and the earwigs that devoured him, about the evening we cut each other with knives, about how much I hated onions, about Tania’s betrayal, her love, and how my sadness at her absence was killing me, about how much it meant to me to be able to pee on my own, about Rebecca’s torso, Margarita’s imperfect body, about my friend René being decapitated in a car accident, about the time, as a kid, that I cut my brother with a scalpel. Sunk in a paralyzing stupor, I was unable to say a word.

  The fat man waited for me to calm down and I gradually recovered control of myself. I felt exhausted—my muscles flaccid, out of breath, as if I’d just made an extraordinary physical effort. The fat man squatted next to me.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  I nodded and the fat man went to sit on the other chair.

  “What’s your favorite food?” he asked.

  His question seemed absurd, out of place.

  “Grilled ham and cheese sandwiches,” I answered.

  “That’s it?”

  “Also sweet and sour chicken, garlic shrimp, and pepper steak.”

  “You’ve got gourmet tastes, and expensive gourmet tastes at that!”

  He thought about my answers for a moment and lightly hit his chin with his fist.

  “Do you know what they feed you in jail?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered annoyed.

  “Beans, a piece of bread, fried eggs drenched in oil, coffee, sometimes meatballs or pork and greens. Do you know how I know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because I was in jail for three years, eight months, fourteen days, and nine hours.”

  It didn’t look like he was lying, trying to console me, or even trying to win my sympathy.

  “It was fucking awful, and when I got out of there I promised I’d never let what happened to me happen to others.”

  He looked at my hand and pointed at my hurt finger.

  “For example: I don’t want another fucking cop to bend your finger backward, and you know what I’m talking about, right?”

  He raised his left hand and showed me two crooked fingers.

  WE TALKED FOR A LONG TIME. I never trusted anyone as much as I did him. He asked me to listen to his instructions, to fake it if I had to, and not to sign another document without talking to him first. He hugged me good-bye.

  Like many people I crossed paths with in my life, I never saw him again.

  AT NIGHTFALL, “Tuercas” Manrique arrived. I didn’t want to see anyone else. The session with the psychiatrist had left me exhausted. He found me splayed out on the carpet, sleeping. I got up lethargically and said hello. Manrique was a restless, witty man, but this time I noticed he was reserved.

  “I appreciate you thinking of me for your case,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ll be of much use to you.”

  He seemed worried: I’d admitted my guilt and he would have trouble arguing that I had been coerced. He explained that the list of charges was long and the serious accusations not only centered on the jaguar, but on my having attacked Tania with a loaded weapon.

  “But I didn’t try to attack her,” I clarified, indignant, “that’s ridiculous.”

  “I know, but Tania went all out against you.”

  He was considering four ways of defending me: The first was to force Tania to ratify her declaration. The second was to set up a face-to-face meeting between us. The third was to deny the charges and claim that psychological pressure and threats were used to get my confession. And the fourth was to claim that I was emotionally disturbed. The last one seemed the most viable. He had already consulted with Olvera and the psychiatrist, and between the three of them they had agreed to prepare a joint defense.

  I was opposed to all of the alternatives. The first two meant confronting Tania, and I didn’t have the courage to do so. Besides, I couldn’t forget that “Tuercas,” as Tania’s father’s partner, would not get involved in the process. The other two meant lying, and I wanted to find my ground again.

  “Have it your way,” said “Tuercas,” disappointed.

  He pointed out that luckily my name was no longer in the headlines, though it wouldn’t be long before Commander Ramírez leaked it to some reporter in order to secure his raise. Also, Manrique had already talked to the district attorney about my case (“With my bestest buddy,” he joked) and he had assured him that he would under no circumstances bargain for my freedom, neither would he bend to the desires of retired public officials, clearly referring to the ex–minister of finance—my mother’s old boss. “He’s a man I respect,” he’d said, “but now he’s spent ammunition, and he doesn’t have the slightest political power to pressure me.” He did, however, promise that I’d be given the best possible treatment while I was under his jurisdiction.

  “And since you don’t want to help us or yourself,” Manrique concluded, “you’re going to have no choice but to give up and go to the slammer.”

  I wasn’t giving up. I just considered all my ways out to be cut off. The cost of avoiding prison seemed higher than the cost of accepting it.

  Manrique must have left that cubicle convinced that I really did suffer from some sort of emotional infirmity.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, two cops arrived to transfer me. We walked down dozens of hallways through forgotten desks and boxes of files piled on top of one another. We arrived at a spacious and comfortable office with a large window that looked out onto an avenue. A dark wood table and a black leather couch took up half the space. There were several phone jacks, but no phones. They had put a sleeping bag and my pillow in a corner—the same pillow I had used since I was a boy. It was a pillow thick with its feather stuffing, and a rayon pillowcase. Also, my blue flannel pajamas. Instead of comforting me, the familiar objects made me feel attacked. They were home intruding in the chaos of my collapse, the painful reminder of a world to which I neither could nor wanted to return. I put my pajamas in the pillow and threw them into a filing cabinet.

  AS THE THIN MAN had promised, the room had its own bathroom. I sat on the toilet lid with the lights off. A constant murmur indicated that one of the pipes had cracked and the water was spilling into the drainage. The walls smelled like humidity. Who invented bathrooms and when did he do it? Who invented toilets, showers, and washbasins? Whose idea was it to mix hot and cold water, who thought of toothbrushes, soap, razor blades, combs? I considered bathrooms to be the saddest places in the world, and I, in the bathroom of that office, felt sadder than ever.

  ONE AFTERNOON in the motel, after making love, Tania told me the story of an eighty-seven-year-old man who was in an intensive care unit due to a stroke. He was a Frenchman who had settled down in Mexico at the age of twenty, recently married to a woman named Marie. He was a man dedicated to his work and family. He was meticulous. Two days after he had been checked into the hospital, he began to speak in the patois of his native region, which he hadn’t spoken in over sixty years, not even with his wife, since she was from another province.

  At his most critical moments, the old man would incessantly say the name Valerie, and ask anyone who visited him about her. His wife, when she heard this, refused to ever see him again and muttered between her teeth, “Let him rot.” The sons and grandchildren wondered what was behind this name to cause such marital stress. Two months later, Marie died and the old man went on with his senile delusions. He gradually stopped recognizing those around him: his sons, their wives, his friends. He only repeated the monotonous “Valerie.” No one in the family could unravel the mystery until one of the old man’s cousins arrived from France. Valerie was the name of the girlfriend his parents had forced him to break up with in order to marry Marie. The old man had to abandon Valerie with a sense of defeat that lasted sixty-seven years. He never saw or heard anything about her again. He only once went back to France—to Paris—to deal with some legal matters regarding an inheritance.

  I imagined the man in the hospital room groping the breasts of a fifteen-year-old girl in empty space, kissing her neck, whispering how much he loved her in his patois, yearning for her until his final breath.

  Tania finished telling me the story and fell asleep on my chest. At the time I thought she had told me this story to let me know I was the man of her life. Now, it pains me to admit it, I think she meant Gregorio.

  THE SILENCE INSIDE the office was total. They say one of the worst things about prison is the lack of silence. There is always a shout, a voice, a drop of water, steps, snoring. I had to make the most of it; this was probably my last night of silence.

  I SLEPT DEEPLY. My exhaustion was such that I hadn’t realized I’d rested my face on a thumbtack. In the middle of the early morning, the thin man walked in with three cops. He turned on the light and woke me by pushing me with the sole of his shoe. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I was suddenly invaded by the fear of being tortured. I asked what was going on.

  “You’re outta here,” the commander answered.

  I supposed I was going to be transferred to isolation or maybe even to jail.

  “Where to?” I asked nervously.

  The commander smiled with a harsh, tight expression.

  “Home, buddy.”

  “Why?”

  The commander squatted before me.

  “I don’t have the slightest fucking idea who you are, but you’ve got some pretty powerful friends backing you, that’s for sure.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The minister of the interior asked the D.A., or should I say ordered him, to let you go. How d’you like that?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “The boss is pretty fucking pissed off,” he continued, “but he has no choice but to comply, so get the hell up and get the hell out before somebody upstairs regrets it.”

  I got out of the sleeping bag and sat down to put my shoes on. The commander handed me two folders.

  “They’re yours,” he said.

  They were the original copies of Tania’s and my declaration.

  “Keep them as a souvenir, tear ’em up, or stick ’em up your ass,” he joked.

  He looked bothered. He didn’t seem to find my release funny at all. I got up. The thin man brushed off some carpet fuzz from my shirt and pointed at my cheek.

  “You’re bleeding,” he warned.

  The thumbtack had punctured me, but I felt no pain.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered.

  We walked down the hallways in the darkness. We arrived at a desk near the cubicle I had been kept in before. The commander opened a drawer and he took out the gun Camariña had given me, wrapped in a plastic bag.

  “I’m giving it back to you,” he said.

  He took out some sheets and started to tear them into pieces.

  “They’re copies of your confession and your girlfriend’s accusation.”

  He also tore up the cards with my fingerprints.

  “These are the orders from the D.A.,” he clarified. “You were never here, you understand? Never…”

  He grew quiet and looked at my injured finger.

  “And of course, I didn’t do that to you, did I?”

  I shook my head. We walked to the elevators escorted by the cops, who looked underslept and grumpy. We got into the elevator and one of them pushed the button for the lobby.

  The doors opened. There were several other cops on guard in the lobby. Some of them looked mistrustfully at the bagged weapon I was carrying in my hand. The thin man signaled one of his subordinates to open the main door. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me toward the street.

  “Leave now,” he said.

  I walked down the steps. A patrol car with its turret lit screeched past and drove down to the underground parking lots. I asked one of the judicial policemen walking around there what time it was. “Four-twenty,” he answered.

  I sat on the sidewalk without knowing what to do. I didn’t have a single peso and I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go.

  I went back to the building to look for the commander. A judicial cop stopped me at the entrance. “Where are you going?” he asked brusquely. I pointed at the commander, who was still in the lobby. “To talk to him,” I answered.

  The judicial cop let him know and the thin man came to see me.

 

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