The Uncomfortable Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

take a walk, strolling along the promenade on Alfonso Reyes Avenue, which was better when it was Juanacatlán and lined with unionized whores or those hoping to join. He stopped at one of the taco joints to have a couple of cheese arracheras with lots of green salsa, then went on his way, smiling to strangers, every once in a while saying good evening just to see how the well-mannered Mexicans of the capital would recover their basic manners and reply.
    The character seemed to live alone. Alone except for the dog with the splint, which, just as Belascoarán passed through the doorway, came over and licked his hand, either to identify him or simply to express solidarity between two cripples. There was no sign of children in the house, no pictures, but the walls were covered with reproductions of paintings of mountains and volcanoes, from a Velasco to Alt’s Paricutin, and rather attractive photographs of Everest in the style of National Geographic.
    Monteverde was wearing the same chocolate-stained shirt from a few hours earlier. Héctor asked to use the bathroom, which was pristine, spotless. In his free time, Monteverde must be a detergent and Windex freak. A touch of incongruent humor among such hygienic fundamentalism moved him: On one of the walls there was a poster that read, Constipation Promotes Reading. Héctor decided he had to get one of those for his own home. The idea wasn’t new and he wasn’t constipated, but it was another good excuse to read in the john.
    The floor in the hallway was filled with books for lack of bookshelves. Monteverde had arranged them on their sides so that all you had to do was bend over slightly to pick one up. Héctor recognized many of his own favorites: Remarque, Fast, Haefs, Ross Thomas, Neruda, Hemingway, Cortázar. They were all there.
    “So tell me it ain’t strange, man.”
    He didn’t answer, but he figured he would have to give the Alec Guinness method a rest. It was time for questions. He dropped into a rat-gray rocker, and before Monteverde could do likewise, he blurted out, “Did you recognize the voice?”
    “No, but you can’t tell. It’s been so many years.”
    “Were you guys friends? Friends enough that if he were alive he would—”
    “I went to his funeral. He’s dead. I saw him lying there dead in his coffin, with a patch that you could see sticking out from the back of his head where they had shot him,” Monteverde interrupted.
    “Were you good friends?”
    “Just friends. He was always raring to go about everything. I was more timid. But there we were, in the movement, teaching literature in the preps, and we had a sort of a girlfriend, him first, then me, and we only ate street food, the cheapest we could find.”
    The bit about teaching literature in the preps reminded Belascoarán of the poem, which he began to recite:
    Where I will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.
    “Where forgetfulness may dwell/in the vast dawnless gardens/ where I will be …” Monteverde added.
    “Of course, the Cernuda poem, I thought it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t…” Belascoarán paused, slapping his hands together to applaud his own memory.
    “A marvelous poem,” Monteverde said, and resumed:
    Where sorrow and fortune will be only words,
a native sky and land enveloping a memory;
where I will finally be free without even knowing it,
dissolved in a mist, an absence,
an absence soft as the flesh of a child.
    “There, far away; where forgetfulness may dwell,” they finished in unison.
    Now that was a real poem, one of those that grabs you by the nuts and squeezes softly until the pain becomes an idea. That was one hell of a poet, the old Spaniard exiled in Mexico. Héctor lit a cigarette; he used the moment to organize his ideas, while the dog, who must have been nervous about secondhand smoke, limped to a safe distance.
    “That one scared me more than the other messages; it was Jesús María’s