The Good Cripple Read online

  “But we’re leaving soon,” Ana Lucía added.

  “Are you returning to your country?”

  “You’ve been to Guatemala,” Bowles said to the owner, “haven’t you?”

  “Yes, many years ago.”

  “How many years?” Juan Luis asked.

  “Eight or nine. Let’s see. Well, almost ten.” The owner’s pale, shiny face underwent a slight transformation, perhaps because of his memories. “A beautiful country,” he said, “but far too violent.” His small eyes looked past the table to the red velvet-lined corner where Juan Luis’s cane was leaning. A very deep vertical furrow appeared between his eyebrows.

  “Why do you say that?” Juan Luis asked him.

  “What do you mean why?” The owner gave a quick laugh. “Because of everything.” He glanced at Bowles. “Nice cane. Is it yours Monsieur Bowles?”

  “It’s mine,” Juan Luis interrupted with a barely perceptible tremor in his voice.

  “Very nice,” the owner repeated and went on admiring it for a moment. After a moment’s silence, he said, “I’ll leave you to your meal. À plus tard.”

  “Maybe it’s not him.” Juan Luis reflected as he watched him walk away and disappear behind the swinging door to the kitchen. “I hope it’s not him.” He concentrated on cutting up the last pieces of his entrecote.

  When they’d finished eating, Bowles grew taciturn and Ana Lucía realized he was making an effort to stay awake.

  “Shall we ask for the check?” she said.

  “Oui,” Bowles replied. “Or I’m going to fall asleep right here.”

  .

  IV.

  Ana Lucía and Juan Luis went back to Guatemala, full of enthusiasm, each with a dream. She wanted to study anthropology at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín and take private classes in one of the Mayan languages, maybe Mam or Kekchí. He was going to take over a small cinema/theatre that belonged to his father and had just closed down because the former tenant, an entertainment entrepreneur, had declared bankruptcy.

  They moved into an apartment in Zone Ten and once more began a new life. The change of country did them good; everything was simultaneously new and familiar.

  They experienced a sort of rekindling of their sex life, partly because he didn’t come home until after he’d locked up the theatre around midnight, when she, exhausted by her studies, was fast asleep, so they only made love during the siesta.

  But for a while Juan Luis traded in his kif habit for alcohol––obtaining marijuana was sometimes a risky activity here––with results that were soon apparent. Often, before going home, he would visit a seedy cantina or one of the brothels that proliferated throughout Guatemala City despite the supposed fear of AIDS. At first he only went to have a drink and look around, he had some vague idea about using this atmosphere, which was so characteristically Guatemalan, as the setting for a story. Then one night when he had drunk too much he ended up going to bed with a beautiful prostitute from Belize, an experience that was not at all unpleasant.

  After that night, every time he’d had a few too many drinks it took him an effort to resist paying a visit to one of those houses. He didn’t consummate the act every time, but if he happened to meet an especially attractive woman … What’s more he found that his tastes were expanding, and he was now able to find some attractive feature even in women who were clearly ugly. It wasn’t that he loved his wife any less. When he went to bed with her, he invariably told himself that this was the real thing, the only kind of sex he liked, and he knew that the other was just a passing phase, a bad habit he’d have to give up.

  One very rainy night in September, after closing out an empty cash register at the end of the last show, he got into his car and knew the moment he put his hands on the steering wheel that he wasn’t going straight home. Ana Lucía had to get up early the next day to conduct a survey in the Mezquital barrio, and he was going to the Casa de las Flores, near El Trébol.

  He parked behind a short row of cars and taxis. He decided not to take his cane and went limping through the rain to the sheet of tin roofing next to the iron front gate, where a guard checked him over to make sure he wasn’t armed.

  He went into the main room, where about twenty young ladies were sitting on chairs and sofas, and four or five clients stood in the back, next to the bar. He leaned against a column in the middle of the room.

  Three girls were looking at him. One of them, the thinnest of the three, with hair dyed blond and silvery lips, walked over to him, hips swinging.

  “Hola, mi amor,” she said. “Why so lonesome?”

  “Más vale solo …” he said, and smiled.

  “But you won’t be in bad company with me,” replied the artificial blond, wedging one of her legs which was bare all the way up to her panties next to one of his. She smelled like ersatz Chanel No. 5 and wore earrings and a necklace made of fake pearls. Her hand, with its silvery nails, touched his side.

  “Wow, you’re really something, amorcito. What sport do you play?”

  He gave a low laugh.

  “None.”

  “Well, you must not need to if you’re staying in such good shape anyway.” She went on touching him for a while. “Look what’s happening to that thing of yours,” she said in his ear, putting a hand on his cock.

  Before long they began discussing the price. Juan Luis managed to get a small discount and the woman took him upstairs to the rooms. They took their clothes off, looking at each other over the bed. She turned out the light before taking off her bra, and this modesty was odd for her breasts were lovely and erect with well-defined nipples. She lay down with her panties still on and he threw himself down beside her.

  “What happened to your foot, mi amor?”

  “I had an accident, many years ago.”

  At her request, they had sex without further preamble. She must have had other clients that night, he thought, because she was already very wet and smelled of soap.

  When it was over, she got out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. She came back a moment later to tell Juan Luis to get up. Juan Luis obeyed, put his pants and boots on, and threw the towel she’d given him before going out over his back.

  At that same moment, another man emerged from one of the rooms across the hall. He walked ahead of Juan Luis along the strip of carpet in the hall leading to the bathroom, opened the door, displaying his profile, switched on the light, went in, and shut the door. He had a deep scar on his temple, and his nose brought a violent memory back to Juan Luis’s mind. Juan Luis turned around and went back to the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed. His eyes had deceived him, he thought. They’d probably deceived him in Tangier, as well. If they were deceiving him now, then the man taking a shower in the bathroom just then was not his former classmate, the kidnapper he thought had died in the jeep accident, the one they called Bunny.

  “He didn’t see me. He couldn’t see me. Thank God.”

  “What’s wrong?” the prostitute, now dressed, wanted to know.

  “Nothing. Someone else got in there before me.”

  “I’m going downstairs. Pay me?”

  Juan Luis let her go out, closed the door, and put his ear to it, the blood pounding in his head. He could hear faint music from below and the voice of a girl who was calling the cleaning woman: “Pascuaala! No paper in number six!”

  Juan Luis opened the door a crack and saw Pascuala appear at the end of the hall with a roll of toilet paper, which she handed to the girl who stuck her head out the door of the room across the hall.

  He waited in his room until he heard the other client leave the bathroom. He heard him go down the stairs, and then he went out into the hall and down to the bathroom. He let the water run while he was taking his clothes off, but in vain: there was no hot water at Las Flores. Cold, and not without remorse, he soaped up his penis, which had become v
ery small.

  One Saturday afternoon, Don Carlos called the apartment to invite Juan Luis and Ana Lucía to lunch at his country house in San José Pinula, a few kilometers from Guatemala City. He was going out there alone with La Caya, who still looked after him though she was becoming deaf and blind. They would cook cerdo adobado, one of Juan Luis’s favorite dishes. Ana Lucía said she couldn’t go because she was studying for a final exam.

  “If you don’t come back too late, maybe we could go to the movies. I’d like to clear my head a little before going to bed, you know?” she told Juan Luis.

  “I just noticed that Kubrick’s The Killing is playing at the Tikal.”

  “Then I’ll expect you back around six.”

  Don Carlos and Juan Luis had lunch on the terrace, overlooking the pasture where two Andalusian mares were grazing in front of a hill covered with young pine trees. It was a calm, hot Sunday with only a scattered cloud or two, motionless and almost immaterial in the dark blue sky.

  “Know what, I’m glad you came by yourself,” the old man said. “I wanted to talk to you about something I heard a few days ago. Yes. Someone saw you in a whorehouse called Las Flores. Have you been there?”

  Juan Luis raised his eyebrows and looked into his father’s eyes.

  “Yes. Who told you?”

  “Se cuenta el pecado …”

  Juan Luis took a swig from his little bottle of Dorada beer.

  “Está bien,” he said. “By the way, can you guess who I saw there?”

  Don Carlos waited.

  “I saw Bunny, my ex-classmate at the Javier, one of my kidnappers. I thought he’d died in the jeep accident. Wasn’t that what everyone thought?”

  Don Carlos gazed at his son with an expression of incredulity but nevertheless nodded his head.

  “No, that one survived, though he was wounded. Two others died. Barrios and … the one they called El Horrible,” he looked around, to be sure they were alone. “I put one of my men on that individual for a while after they released you. It doesn’t look as if he ever collected a cent. According to the investigator, what happened to the jeep wasn’t an accident, it was another member of the band. They had some internal problems.”

  “What else did you find out about Bunny?”

  “According to the most recent reports, which I received more than five years ago, he was in Quezaltenango. He himself may have been pursuing another member of the band, one of the ones who kept the money.”

  “So they screwed Bunny over.”

  “Yes.”

  They both drank their beers.

  “Who was it that told you they’d seen me in Las Flores?”

  Don Carlos smiled with an air of superiority.

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  A little later, he added, “Don’t be angry. But will you do me a favor and please stop going to that kind of place? You have no reason to expose yourself like that. You know the kind of people you can run into in those places. Or are you having some kind of problem with your wife?”

  “No, no. None.”

  “They why are you going with whores?”

  “Out of curiosity.”

  “Curiosity. Curiosity about dark meat,” said his father sarcastically.

  The following morning Juan Luis made a phone call to Amanda Brera, Bunny’s mother, whose number he got very easily from the operator. The lady had to be over eighty and her voice was soft and sweet. Juan Luis told her he’d been a classmate of her son’s at the Liceo Javier and had lived abroad for many years but was now settling down in Guatemala again and wanted to get back in touch with his old friends. She told him her son had been living in Salcajá, near Quezaltenango, for years, and gave him the phone number and the address.

  That afternoon, Juan Luis phoned Salcajá.

  “This is Luna speaking,” he said to Bunny.

  A moment of silence.

  “Ah, sí.” Another silence. “Juan Luis Luna, no? How did you find me?”

  Juan Luis hesitated for a moment before saying, “I’d like to talk to you. I think you know why.”

  “Why?”

  Juan Luis felt the blood inside his head, the rage, and his voice quivered as he said, “Don’t play dumb. I have nothing in particular against you.” He fell silent, for fear the other man would hang up. “I assure you. But I’d like you to explain one or two things to me, understand?”

  Finally Bunny answered, “Honestly, it was a crazy idea. Forgive me.”

  “Yeah. A crazy idea.”

  “It was El Horrible’s idea. But he got blown up, you know that.”

  “Who killed El Horrible and the Tapir?”

  “The Sephardi.”

  “Why?”

  “For the money.”

  “Just for the money?”

  “Yes. The bastard took it all.”

  “And what happened to the one they called Carlomagno?”

  Bunny smiled audibly. “He disappeared. Did you know he was supposed to finish you off? But he must have been shitting himself with fear, either that or he felt sorry for you. Thank God.”

  “Thank you for being so sincere, you son of a thousand bitches.”

  “Sí, vos. What are you going to do now that you’ve found me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know?” Bunny mocked him, with his usual humor. “Hueco! Don’t you want to bust my ass wide open?”

  “Yes, in fact, I do. But I don’t think it’d be worth the trouble.”

  “Did you have anything else to say to me?”

  “No, not for the moment.”

  They both hung up at the same time.

  Juan Luis rose slowly from the telephone table.

  He could hear the rhythm of his blood in his ears. Two related but contradictory ideas were alternating on his mental horizon: I must kill him … I must not kill him … He shook his head as if trying to rid himself of them. Bunny was a finished man. It wasn’t worth dirtying his hands with the blood of a man like that. But that decision made him feel like a coward. He wondered what he should do, beyond any kind of standard preconception. Full of doubt, he put on a beige cardigan, picked up his keys from the kitchen counter, and left the apartment to go to the theatre.

  Juan Luis was driving in the fast lane on Los Próceres Boulevard, and for a few moments he felt like the Juan Luis of many years before, a peculiar feeling in which happiness and anxiety were mingled in equal measure. He stopped at a light and looked at the columns of clouds in varying tones of red that hung over the leaden volcanoes in the late afternoon sky. This was a landscape that made you think of violent death, which might come from the armed men riding in the car stopped next to him or from the crevasse that an earthquake suddenly opened beneath your feet.

  That night the cinema-theatre was showing a Salvadoran docudrama made in the late eighties. When he read over the program for the month, Don Carlos had objected to this film; its title, Who’s Who in War and in Peace, struck him as overly provocative. “Someone’s going to set off a bomb halfway through the movie,” he said with a worried look. “I know how things are in this country.” But Juan Luis had opted not to discuss it any further and proceed with the program.

  That night only five people arrived for the seven p.m. showing.

  “Six people showed up at four, and I promise you that no one’s going to be here at nine,” said Blanca Nieto, a Spanish friend recently arrived in Guatemala who had started working with Juan Luis. In addition to being the theatre’s publicist and projectionist, she was also sometimes the ticket vendor. “Chico, what a tough country this is. I sent announcements to all the newspapers. Only La Nación published it and that was just because I’m now intimate friends with the editor.”

  Blanca had switched off the projector. She was a tiny woman, and Juan Luis helped her down the high
steps from the booth..

  “Look,” she went on, as they headed down towards the stage, “I think if things keep on like this we should close the theatre and open a strip joint.” She climbed onto the stage, which was very spacious, put her hands on her hips, and said, “People could even dance here, no?”

  “Let’s stick it out until the end of the year, and if business doesn’t pick up we’ll do whatever we have to. A cabaret, a strip joint, anything.”

  “Sí, chico. That’s culture, too.”

  Juan Luis felt like talking. The story about Bunny was off-limits to Ana Lucía because he didn’t dare tell her about his furtive visits to brothels. With Blanca, he thought suddenly at that moment, everything would be easier and more natural.

  “Got anything planned?” he said. “Come with me to the Establo and have something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry. But I’ll come have a drink with you.”

  It was a Tuesday and there weren’t many people in the place. They sat down at the bar and Juan Luis ordered goulash. Blanca drummed her child-sized fingers on the copper-topped bar, playing with the shadows of her hands and the reflected light. Rock music two decades old drowned out the conversations of the people sitting at the tables; if you wanted to hear the person who was with you, you had to lean down and put your ear close to his mouth.

  “I need to talk to someone,” said Juan Luis.

  “And Ana Lucía?” Blanca looked at him. She seemed surprised and flattered but there was also genuine interest and compassion in her eyes.

  “It’s complicated. I imagine I’ll tell her about it some day.”

  “But what’s going on? Can you tell me?”

  Blanca knew part of the story about the kidnapping. Now Juan Luis told her that about a month before he had run into one of his kidnappers in a brothel.

  “Do you often go to those places?” Blanca looked disappointed.

  “No, but bars like this are so boring. Those people …” he looked around. “Sometimes they’re more fun.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I think you get some kind of sick kick out of them, too. Aren’t you afraid of catching a disease?”