The Good Cripple Read online

  “Before we change the subject, who organized the operation?”

  Bunny swallowed and confessed. “Yours truly.”

  They sat there a while in silence.

  Juan Luis rolled his cane along the arms of the chair under the palms of his hands. With the Sephardi he’d never been sure, but this was different.

  “Don’t you want something to drink?” Bunny asked him.

  “No,” he set the cane again against the floor, rose and looked around him. He walked past the little table and close by the other man, but didn’t raise the cane to strike him.

  He heard him standing up behind him. On a shelf made of dark wood, a photograph in a gilded, baroque frame caught his eye: a naked baby, sitting on the black sand of a Pacific beach. He was skinny with big ears: Bunny’s son, undoubtedly. At that moment Juan Luis was strangely certain that he wanted no descendents; this seemed to him to have something to do with the fact that now, when he had the opportunity to take revenge, he felt no more than a weak desire for it.

  He went on walking toward the door without turning back, went out, and closed it behind him.

  Sunday dawned cloudy.

  Juan Luis called down to ask them to bring his breakfast up to the room, and then sent the waiter for cigarettes. He stayed in bed a couple of hours, thinking about Ana Lucía and reading English essays. After a shower, he went back to bed because it was cold, and read a few lines of poetry. Suddenly he felt like writing. He went to the desk for a notebook and went back to bed. He didn’t know what he was going to write, but his head was not empty. He no longer felt like a coward. Though the sheet of blank paper did inspire a certain fear.

  He wrote two sentences, which he crossed out immediately.

  He started writing again.

  He went slowly down the path. A sick man lay on the ground, his eyes rolled back, his skin colorless, selling agony in his outstretched hand. Before he reached the house he had to get past two lost-looking dogs and a dead rat …

  After that he went down to the gray plaza of Quezaltenango, where a cold, light drizzle had begun to fall. He turned around and went back inside the hotel through the door to the restaurant.

  That afternoon the sky cleared up and Juan Luis walked in no particular direction around the little streets in the city center. Six o’clock found him knocking at the service door of the Colón Theatre. He saw the last few scenes of a film shot in Havana, smoked a cigarette with the projectionist on duty while the reel was rewinding, and then came out with the bag and walked back to the hotel.

  Everything was fine.

  He went down to have dinner in the restaurant at about six thirty.

  How many hours had it been since he’d visited Bunny? He counted them, but the moment seemed in fact to be situated many years away in his memory. Nothing mattered; therefore, everything was fine. Back in his room, he took his clothes off, got into bed, smoked another cigarette, and went to sleep.

  At eleven-thirty the next morning, the little Tikaljets plane landed right on time at Aurora airport and five minutes later Juan Luis and Ana Lucía were hugging each other in the hangar.

  At the last minute, Greg had decided not to fly to Guatemala City but to go on to Mexico instead, through Merida, before returning to New York. He’d taken a plane in Cozumel early that morning.

  “He’s so weird, “ said Ana Lucía once they were in the car, speaking English in a low voice.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance with a roguish expression.

  “He never once stopped coming onto me from the moment we stepped aboard the plane. Can you believe it?”

  Juan Luis suffered an attack of retroactive jealousy.

  “Yes. You’re far too attractive.”

  Ana Lucía gave a merry laugh.

  “I did feel flattered, I can’t deny it.”

  “And?”

  “No, nothing happened.”

  At the Obelisk the traffic had come to a standstill because the light was broken.

  “I’d like to go back to Tangier,” he said.

  Ana Lucía looked at him with a radiant smile.

  “Really? I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  A beggar girl touched Juan Luis’s window with her grimy little hand to offer them a red rosebud.

  “Para la seño, cómpreme una rosita, por favor.”

  Juan Luis gave her a one-quetzal bill but didn’t take the rose.

  In their apartment, he poured out two glasses of beer next to the refrigerator, and the two of them drank standing up in the dining room. He emptied his glass in one long swallow and wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and she kissed him.

  They went on kissing a while longer until their hands began unbuttoning buttons, seeking skin.

  “Look what’s happened to you,” she said. “Come.”

  She led him along the hall to the carpeted room where a vividly-colored Moroccan weaving adorned one wall and there was no other furniture but a mattress and some large cushions.

  “I missed you a lot these last two days,” she said.

  “It was three.”

  “Three days, then.”

  He had a dim, murky thought, but she didn’t want to know anything. Naked, standing up and then lying down, they went on caressing each other, almost without talking.

  At the lovers’ supreme moment, he pulled out to spill his semen on her smooth belly with its fine tracing of hair; it was a risky day and he did not want to have children—he was sure of that. He stroked the white, opaque, viscous substance in a slow circle around her navel.

  ––Tangier – Guatemala City, 1995.