The night buffalo, p.5
The Night Buffalo, page 5
AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING, my brother Luis came into my room. He shook me several times.
“Wake up, wake up…”
I registered his voice as something distant and uncertain.
“What’s the matter?” I managed to mouth heavily.
“You’ve got a phone call.”
“Who?”
He put the mouthpiece next to my pillow and walked out. It was Tania’s mother. Sobbing, she explained that her daughter still hadn’t come home and she suspected another prolonged disappearance. I promised I’d help her look.
I tried to sleep a little more but couldn’t. Tania’s absence wouldn’t let me. I loved her—I loved her very much—but it was hard to decipher her. I decided to go back to room 803. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look.
I showered with my eyes closed, leaning against the wall, dazed by sleep deprivation. Without the energy to pick out new clothes, I put on the ones from the day before. I grabbed whatever money I could get my hands on. I had no car that morning and I planned to take a taxi. I was in no condition to travel around the city in public transport.
I arrived at the motel just before nine-thirty. The sky had cleared a little and a weak sun could be traced through the clouds. Mr. Camariña was already working in his office. Upon seeing me walk by he nodded hello. I responded similarly. In one of the driveways, Pancho was mopping the tiles on the floor. He recognized me from afar and walked over.
“Hey, Manuel.”
“Hey.”
“D’you want me to open or do you have your keys?”
“You open.”
After that twenty-second of February, Tania and I started to go to the motel more and more frequently—three, four, even five times a week—always in Tania’s car, always her paying, because she could. If when we got to the motel, room 803 was occupied, we would leave; we had made love in 803 for the first time and we didn’t plan on doing it in any other room.
One afternoon Mr. Camariña intercepted us. He said he’d seen us there on several occasions and he mentioned our predilection for room 803. We were disconcerted; we thought of ourselves as fleeting clients, almost invisible. Camariña proposed a deal: Instead of the ninety pesos a day, he offered us 803, exclusively, as many times as we wanted to use it, for a two-thousand-peso monthly rent. It was Tania’s decision; there was no way I could afford that kind of money. She accepted. From then on we took over the room and made it our own, not only to make love in, but also to study in, rest in, or just to get away from everyone else.
PANCHO UNLOCKED the door and pushed it open.
“Tania hasn’t been here?” I asked.
“No, I haven’t seen her, at least since I got here.”
The dark-skinned man and the kid with curly hair were nowhere to be seen.
“Did the guys from the other shift leave yet?”
“The new guys? Since seven.”
“They didn’t leave you any messages for me?”
“No.”
The room was in exactly the same mess I’d left it in. They hadn’t made the beds or cleaned the bathroom yet. A single file of ants marched down the side of the wall and gathered around the Cock-Cola bottle I’d left on the carpet. The ants were tiny and they blackened the mouth of the bottle. When I was a boy I used to play God with them. I’d randomly kill some. That way I’d let a few, the minority, crawl away without my finger squashing them. This was my version of divinity.
I took the bottle, set it outside the room next to some potted plants and let them all live.
I LAY ON THE BED. Where could Tania be? I couldn’t tell and, at this point, to consider the zoo or airport as possibilities was absurd. I had no choice but to wait for her to reappear in her usual surreptitious, unexpected way.
I took my clothes off—to do that in 803 was a way of being with her—put my hands behind my head and fell asleep. Real sleep; no panting animals, no earwigs, no phone calls.
I woke up not knowing what time it was. I assumed it was late since the sunlight was filtering through the blinds on my right. I must have been cold while I was asleep, because I woke up wrapped in the comforter.
Some woman, probably a waitress, walked down the hallway humming a song I didn’t recognize. It was an old, sweet tune, strange to the sordid block of motel rooms.
I put on my T-shirt and pants and walked barefoot to the edge of the parking lot. The wind was blowing and in the sky the clouds were gathering rapidly. I spotted Pancho at the entrance to 807. He was tying up a bundle of sheets and dirty towels. I whistled to him.
“Do you want your room cleaned now?” he asked as he approached.
“No, I want you to do me a favor.”
“Name it.”
“Could you go to the front desk and order me a large ham pizza and three sodas?”
“Don Polo’s sandwiches are much better, just round the corner,” he suggested.
“No,” I answered, “I’ve been craving pizza since last night.”
He shook his head in disapproval. I gave him a hundred-peso bill and went back inside. I didn’t plan on leaving for the rest of the evening. I wasn’t going to look for Tania, I wasn’t going to try to call her, and I wasn’t going to worry about her, at least for the next two hours.
I took my clothes off again and started to thumb through the Ruvalcaba book. Tania had underlined a few phrases with a red pen, seemingly at random. There was no connection between them. I was particularly interested in the fact that on page eighty-six she underlined: “The bureaucrats, upon leaving their offices, would stop to buy bread to take home.” And on the top of the page she wrote, with exclamation marks: “look!” “look!” “look!”
What the hell did these phrases mean to her? What did she have to do with bureaucrats and their grayness? I got the feeling the passage held the key to her disappearances. And the jealousy came back, the clumsy jealousy from years before.
Jealousy: I would go to the motel so often, alone or with Tania, that I became a familiar face to the employees. Pancho was the youngest of them—he was my age. He came to work early and left at dusk. He did everything: cleaned the rooms, charged the clients, washed the linen, counted the towels (he had to go into the rooms as soon as the clients left to make sure they hadn’t stolen any), and worked in the reception. He was attentive and hardworking, and I liked him the best.
At first we’d greet each other with tepid, formal gestures. He’d glance at me out of the corner of his eye, following motel rules. His attitude changed a little when I introduced myself to him and asked him his name. Even though the relationship became friendlier, he was still prudent—you never know what to expect with motel clients.
As time went by we started a small friendship. We’d occasionally chat in the five- or ten-minute breaks he had every four hours.
One evening when I showed up alone, I noticed Pancho was more reserved than usual. He avoided me and was terse. He acted like this for several days. He’d answer my questions about his behavior with a curt “Nothing’s wrong.” Until, one evening, he decided to reveal why.
“Manuel, can I tell you something? But you have to promise you won’t get pissed off,” he asked, unsure of himself.
“Sure, man.”
“But really, promise, because if anything happens I’ll get fired for opening my mouth.”
“I swear.”
Pancho breathed in deeply.
“It’s just that…” he said and stopped short.
He breathed in again.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“Come on, man, this is getting boring.”
He shook his head. I gestured for him to go on.
He looked me in the eyes, gulped, and suddenly let it out:
“Okay, here goes: Your girl came by twice last week with the guy she used to come here with.”
“Used to? When?”
“Before she came with you.”
I was stunned, dumfounded. Pancho went on: They had come to the motel eight or ten times and always stayed in room 803. The description of Tania’s companion fit Gregorio feature by feature.
The disclosure overwhelmed me. All of a sudden my relationship with Tania took on a fraudulent aspect. What was Tania’s double game about? What was she plotting? Why had she insisted on feeding me the stupid myth of her virginity?
I left the motel furious. “So that’s why the bitch paid for the room,” I brayed, “that’s why, goddammit.”
I WALKED AROUND THE CITY for hours on a chaotic, furious excursion. What game was that slut playing?
I confronted her the next day, shouting, minutes before class. At first she just listened. Then she timidly tried to defend herself, but every time she tried to explain her motives I’d shut her up with insults.
Tania ended up irate and ended the argument when, abrupt and arrogant, she said that for all intents and purposes Gregorio was her boyfriend, that she was not committed to me and that she could do whatever she goddamn well pleased. We broke up (our romance? our affair? our sexual merry-go-round?) amid shoves and curses.
I sank into a state of paranoid jealousy, weathering our love’s decay, the insecurity, the doubt. Now, three years later, was it worth getting jealous over half a paragraph that spoke of bureaucrats buying bread? No, it wasn’t worth it, especially after all the effort it took to piece the relationship back together.
I PUT RUVALCABA’S book down and fell asleep. A while later, what seemed a short while, someone knocked on the door. Groggy, I wrapped myself in a towel and looked through the peephole. Pancho was balancing the items in his hands, trying to keep them from falling. I opened and he handed over the food, together with the bill and change. Since he refused to accept a tip I gave him one of the sods and a slice of pizza.
I devoured the pizza and could have eaten three more. Parched, I drank down both sods, one after the other, and then drank tap water till I was ready to burst.
I had dreams in the short nap Pancho interrupted. I was unable to remember any of them, but I was left with a residue of sadness. Besides Gregorio and Tania’s absence, I was heavy with something like an absence of myself. I had turned into someone different from whom I thought I would become.
Naked, I walked to the window that looked out onto the parking lot. I discreetly pushed the curtain aside. The evening had turned brown. Gusts of wind blew pieces of paper over the houses and the rain threatened to come down any minute.
A black luxury car crossed the parking lot and stopped in the driveway to room 810. That made eleven occupied rooms. Almost full. This happened Friday afternoons, especially fortnightly, on payday. Couples would come in and hole up for the weekend. There were students, workers, bodyguards, maids, stuck-up ladies, bank clerks, bureaucrats (would they have gone to the motel before, or after buying bread for their homes?), nervous teenagers, taxi drivers, cops. Despite its diverse clientele, the Motel Villalba took pride in being a moral motel: Access was denied to prostitutes, gay couples, anyone under fifteen, and threesomes. “One guy and two dresses make messes” was one of Mr. Camariña’s mottos.
Even though it was a cheap, shoddy motel, the rooms were clean and the furniture in good condition. The mattresses were old, but still firm; the headboards were fastened solidly and didn’t creak with the typical rocking; the dresser benches and chairs didn’t wobble and the mirrors weren’t peeling; the carpets were constantly washed and vacuumed; the sheets were immediately changed after use and there was no need to fear lying down on viscous stains; the comforters had no cigarette burns. It was a different motel from the ones I’d been to with Margarita or other women. “All love, no matter how dirty,” claimed Mr. Camariña, “deserves a clean place.”
Nor was it a motel with a dark past or bad reputation. Other than an incident in which a woman in her fifties sliced her lover’s legs with a knife (a young waiter who was cheating on her with someone else), there had been no bloody acts of violence. No murder, suicide, or gunfight.
Gregorio took Tania to the Motel Villalba for the first time by mistake. He thought it was one where an army lieutenant and his lover (the wife of one of his friends) had committed suicide together. It had been a story widely covered on the front pages of the tabloids Gregorio liked so much.
He had read that the motel was in the Portales neighborhood, and that the room number ended in 3. He searched for it in order to consummate his love with Tania in the same place where the lieutenant and his lover had sealed theirs in blood. He was way off: The Villalba motel was twenty blocks away.
So, there were no suicide rooms for Gregorio. Neither was there consummation. He had Tania as naked as I did. He caressed her, kissed her, drank her. He lay on the same bed as I did. He slept with her, bathed with her, but was unable to enter her. Not the first, not the second, not the fifth time around. He, the first of us who fucked, he who had penetrated so many, couldn’t, back then, make love to the woman he loved the most.
And I imagine them both: he, in a corner of the room, naked, sweaty, defeated, with her beside him, also naked, trying to console him, kissing his forehead, with him collapsed and certain that thousands of earwigs are devouring him day after day, hour after hour, and that these same earwigs are piling up at the tip of his penis ready to emerge with his semen into her, to invade and devour her, as they do him, and she trying to convince him that it won’t happen. And I imagine them both, crying, naked, in a corner of room 803.
I LEFT THE MOTEL exactly at nightfall, at “zero hour.” “It’s the most dangerous hour to drive on the highway,” my father used to say when we traveled by car. “It’s the hour when you can still see, but you don’t know what you’re looking at.”
I counted my leftover change. It wasn’t enough for a taxi. I walked to the corner, where a group of poor women, workers, builders, and night-school students waited for the bus. It was a compact, silent group, whose faces were now barely discernible.
It started to drizzle and we all stuck to the wall trying to avoid getting wet. Pointless. A sudden downpour started and the wind carried it into us.
Most of them ran to take refuge in a nearby taco joint on the other side of the street. I stayed on the corner, next to a short, bony old woman who, clothed only in a worn blue sweater, weathered the rain, awaiting the bus.
No matter how much I tried to stop it with my hands, the rain filtered down my neck, into my back. Why was it raining so much in February? The meteorologists on television attributed it to global warming. This did not seem to concern the old woman beside me, who stared imperturbably in the direction from which the bus would be coming.
A blue car pulled over next to us. The driver honked the horn. I squinted through the windows, but couldn’t tell who it was. I stopped paying attention to him. The driver insisted. I walked over and recognized Camariña’s completely bald head as he gestured for me to get in.
I jumped into the car. As soon as I sat down, the car seat got wet. Embarrassed, I apologized.
“Don’t worry about it,” answered Camariña, “it’ll dry off later.”
He pulled away. Through the window I watched the old woman who, dripping wet, remained impassively waiting for her bus.
“Where are you going?” asked Camariña.
“Villa Verdún.”
“Where’s that?”
“Far away, all the way up Calzada de las Águilas. Which way are you headed?”
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
I tried to protest. Camariña stopped me: “You’re one of my two best clients, kid. What’re you gonna do?”
HE DROVE SILENTLY for a while. The slow, anarchic traffic didn’t seem to bother him. Every now and then he’d drum his fingers on the steering wheel to the rhythm of a song on the radio. His forearms were thick and strong. His hands were meaty, with thick, jutting veins. His stubby fingers seemed more like a mechanic’s than a motel owner’s.
Camariña skipped the line of cars by turning the wrong way into a one-way avenue, and then zigzagged through narrow, nameless streets. He cut through several blocks and joined the traffic farther ahead. He looked at me with childish pride.
“At this point I know this city better than my hometown.”
His hometown was Villalba, in Galicia, near the sea. He’d come to Mexico thirty-five years ago, when he was eighteen. He set up the motel under the premise that there are four basic human needs: “housing, clothing, feeding, and fucking.” Camariña laughed his horselike laugh every time he mentioned this. On several occasions he had invited me into his office for a chat. Despite his wryness he truly enjoyed conversation.
Upon reaching Insurgentes Avenue I realized that a bus was driving past us heading to my house. I tried to get ready to board it.
“No, kid, I’ll take you.”
“You’ve got me close enough. I don’t want to make you go out of your way.”
Camariña leaned over and shut the door I’d half opened.
We went on. Camariña turned off the radio and started to talk about football, his greatest passion. In Mexico he was a Necaxa fan, in Spain a Sporting fan. He knew statistics for each team and player, tactical formations, the starting lineups for every first division team. He told lively stories of games he never saw. His football world was completely separate from the world of furtive love affairs that unfolded in the rooms of his motel.
We stopped at a light and, out of the blue, he asked if I’d had a fight with Tania. I said no.
“It’s just that in the evening your girlfriend drove into the business.” Camariña always called it the business, never the motel. “She stopped in front of the room, stood there for a while, then turned around and left. And since you’ve been in there alone, I just thought…”
I felt a sudden uneasiness, a ventral oppression. Tania was avoiding me. She was avoiding me again.
Camariña noticed the state I was in and squeezed my leg with his great hand.
“Don’t worry, women are like that. That’s why the only woman I’ve ever dealt with is my wife and she’s more than enough.”
