“I’m not trying to be cruel.”
“Nah. You’re good at hiding your head.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that! If more people minded their own business the world would be a better place.”
“I strongly disagree.”
Maite brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and bit her lip. She quickly switched her record, putting on “Piel Canela” and flipping up the volume, then she sat down on her corner chair and crossed her arms, her foot moving to the music.
“You mind if I have a smoke?”
“Not here,” she said, not so much because she didn’t like cigarettes but because she wanted to punish him. He was irritating. Nice one moment and then annoying the next. No wonder Leonora had dumped him.
“Whatever you say,” he muttered and stepped out of the room.
After a couple of songs Maite also left the atelier and peeked into the living room, to see if he’d taken refuge there, but no. He was leaning in the doorway of her apartment, his head turned toward the hallway.
She thought to tell him that there wouldn’t be cigarettes in the sierra, that he wasn’t nearly as interesting as he thought he was, and his little fantasies about guerillas and guns and revolution weren’t any more solid than her own daydreams. But then she didn’t know if there was a point in bickering, and she suddenly felt very tired.
The way he stood, he also looked tired, and something about the way his shoulders were slumped made Maite guess he was thinking about Leonora.
Maite fed sunflower seeds to the parakeet while watching the young man.
21
IT WAS TOOearly to drop by La Habana and talk to Justo, so Elvis went by Maite’s building and gave the Antelope a chance to rest for a few hours. He had already sent El Güero back to the apartment after they’d stopped to place their ad in the paper. Alone in the car Elvis dismissed one station after another, settled on Stereo Rey as he usually did, and smoked cigarettes, patient, drumming his fingers against his thighs. “Dream a Little Dream of Me” was playing.
A few songs later, Maite stepped out and into a car with the same man he’d seen her with before. The hippie with the unibrow. Elvis followed them, but after a good fifteen minutes he lost track of them when a taxi veered to the right and blocked his path. Fucking drivers! You couldn’t shadow someone properly in this city, not with the multitude of fucking cars and buses and taxis and pedestrians, although the truth of the matter was that maybe Elvis wasn’t cut out for this shit.
Maybe El Güero was right that he was a marshmallow, a softie, and he couldn’t measure up to El Gazpacho.
Damn it! The woman. Where could she have gone? For a minute he panicked, thinking maybe she was meeting with Leonora, but then he calmed himself down. No, Leonora was still in hiding; she wouldn’t read the ad in the newspaper until the next morning. Could be the woman was visiting Emilio Lomelí again. That’s where she’d gone the last time. He remembered his address quite clearly, along with other details in the file.
Or maybe they were driving to the art collective? He doubted it, judging by the direction they’d taken.
Fucking shit. He was too tired and too tense, that was the problem. He still ached from the beating, his muscles screaming about the mistreatment inflicted on them. In particular his back, his spine, they burned like holy hell, and it was getting worse, as if every nerve ending was waking up to the reality of the situation.
He stopped by a pharmacy and bought a bottle of aspirin, then drove back to the apartment. It was one o’clock. Still a while until he could hit La Habana, and he needed a rest. All of them needed a rest if they were going to manage tomorrow and for the next few days. That’s when they must be alert. So he decided to get some shut-eye, just like the others.
The boys were napping, but they’d be up in a couple of hours. He pinned a note to El Güero’s door telling him he had the next shift and it started at five. Then at eleven the Antelope should take his place. He wasn’t sure who he wanted watching Sócrates and who he wanted watching the woman.
The woman. She wasn’t much, and yet there he was, thinking about her again. He supposed it was because he couldn’t have a normal life and therefore almost any woman would catch his interest. Not that he’d ever had much of a normal life, first living with that older American lady and then with that weird cult.
He was in bed, on top of the covers, smoking a cigarette with the lights off and trying to lull himself to sleep. He knew he shouldn’t do this, that chain-smoking was already bad, but doing it in bed was a recipe for waking up with third-degree burns, but he did it anyway when he felt acutely empty.
Cristina, Cristina. Dimples and long brown hair flowing down her back. He remembered her naked, laid out on a narrow bed, humming a song. He liked to remember her like that, naked, next to him.
The woman didn’t look anything like Cristina, who had been exactly his type. Petite, pale, with a pretty, kissable mouth. That’s the way he liked them. But he was still smoking in the dark, wondering whether, under different circumstances, it wouldn’t be possible for him to bump into Maite in the street and meet her that way.
Hundreds of people met every day, after all. It was the easiest thing to chat up a girl on the bus or in line for the movies. And he wasn’t interested in her in a perverted way; it was all very innocent. He was simply curious.
He kept wondering what her voice sounded like. He’d seen her from afar, stared at her photo, read the information El Mago had provided, but he couldn’t imagine her voice. It probably wasn’t anything special, but he wanted to have a full picture of the woman. He wanted to ask her how many records she owned and whether she listened to “Blue Velvet” late at night and swayed to the music, all alone, while the city slept.
He couldn’t imagine her with others, certainly not with that hippie with the bushy eyebrows. She existed in isolation, standing in front of a stark, white background.
Some people are made to be lonely.
He put out his cigarette and slept.
