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  Prefiguration of Lalo Cura

  It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled. The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and man follows that path. A quaking path. Invariably harsh. The path that leads into or out of hell. That’s what it all comes down to. Getting closer to hell or further away. Me, for example, I’ve had people killed. I’ve given the best birthday presents. I’ve backed projects of epic proportions. I’ve opened my eyes in the dark. Once I opened them by slow degrees in total darkness and all I saw or imagined was that name: Los Empalados, shining like the star of destiny. I’ll tell you everything, naturally. My father was a renegade priest. I don’t know if he was Colombian or came from some other country. But he was Latin American. He turned up one night stone broke in Medellín, preaching sermons in bars and whorehouses. Some people thought he was working for the secret police, but my mother kept him from getting killed and took him to her penthouse in the neighborhood. They lived together for four months, I’ve been told, and then my father vanished into the Gospels. Latin America was calling him, and he kept slipping away into the sacrificial words until he vanished, gone without a trace. Whether he was a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister is something I’ll never find out now. I know that he was alone and that he moved among the masses, fevered and loveless, full of passion and empty of hope. I was named Olegario when I was born, but people have always called me Lalo. My father was known as El Cura, the priest, and that’s what my mother wrote down next to surname at the registry office. It’s my official name. Olegario Cura. I was even baptized into the Catholic faith. She sure was a dreamer, my mother. Connie Sánchez was her name, and if you weren’t so young and innocent, it would ring a bell. She was one of the stars of the Olimpo Movie Production Company. The other two stars were Doris Sánchez, my mother’s younger sister, and Monica Farr, née Leticia Medina, from Valparaíso. Three good friends. The Olimpo Movie Production Company specialized in pornography, and although the business was more or less illegal and operating in a distinctly hostile environment, it didn’t go under until the mid-eighties. The guy in charge was a multi-talented German, Helmut Bittrich, who worked as the company’s manager, director, set designer, composer, publicist and, occasionally, thug. Sometimes he even acted, under the name of Abelardo Bello. He was a weird guy, Bittrich. No one had ever seen him with an erection. He liked to do weights at the Health and Friendship Gym, but he wasn’t gay. It’s just that in the movies he never fucked anyone. Male or female. If you can be bothered, you’ll find him playing a Peeping Tom, a schoolteacher, a spy in a seminary—always a modest, minor role. What he liked best was playing a doctor. A German doctor, of course, although most of the time he didn’t even open his mouth: he was Doctor Silence. The blue-eyed doctor hidden behind a conveniently located velvet curtain. Bittrich had a house on the outskirts of town, where the neighborhood of Los Empalados borders the wasteland, El Gran Baldío. The cottage in the movies. The house of solitude, which was later to become the house of crime, out there on its own, among clumps of trees and blackberry bushes. Connie used to take me. I’d stay in the yard playing with the dogs and the geese, which the German reared there as if they were his children. There were flowers growing wild among the weeds and the dogs’ dirt holes. In the course of a regular morning ten to fifteen people would go into that house. Although the windows were shut you could hear the moans coming from inside. Sometimes there was laughter too. At lunchtime Connie and Doris would take a folding table out into the backyard, under a tree, and the employees of the Olimpo Movie Production Company would hoe into the canned food that Bittrich heated up on a gas ring. They ate directly from the cans or off cardboard plates. Once I went into the kitchen, to help, and when I opened the cupboards all I found were enema tubes, hundreds of enema tubes lined up as if for a military parade. Everything in the kitchen was fake. There were no real plates, no real knives and forks, no real pots and pans. That’s what it’s like in the movies, said Bittrich, watching me with those blue eyes of his—they scared me then, but thinking of them now I just feel sad. The kitchen was fake. Everything in the house was fake. Who sleeps here at night? Sometimes Uncle Helmut does, Connie replied. Uncle Helmut stays here to look after the dogs and the geese and get on with his work. Editing his homemade movies. Homemade, but the business was booming: the films went out to Germany, Holland and Switzerland. Some copies stayed in Latin America and others were sold in the United States, but most of them went to Europe, which is where Bittrich had his main client base. Maybe that’s why he did a voice-over in German, narrating the various scenes. Like a travel journal for sleepwalkers. And the obsession with mother’s milk, another European peculiarity. When Connie was pregnant with me, she went on working. And Bittrich made lacto-porn. Along the lines of Milch and Pregnant Fantasies, aimed at men who believe or make believe that women lactate during pregnancy. With her eight-month bulge, Connie squeezed her breasts and the milk flowed like lava. She leaned over Pajarito Gómez or Sansón Fernández or both of them and gave them a good swig of milk. That was one of the German’s tricks; Connie never had milk. Or only a little bit, for two weeks, maybe three, just enough to give me a taste. But that was all. Actually the movies were like Pregnant Fantasies, not so much like Milch. There’s Connie, big and blonde, with me curled up inside her, laughing as she lubricates Pajarito Gómez’s asshole with Vaseline. She already has the sure, delicate movements of a mother. My moron of a father has left her and there she is, with Doris and Monica Farr, and the three of them are smiling on and off, exchanging looks and subtle signals or secrets among themselves, while Pajarito stares at her belly as if in a hypnotic trance. The mystery of life in Latin America. Like a little bird charmed by the gaze of a snake. The Force is with me, I thought, the first time I saw that movie, at the age of nineteen, crying my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my head, the Force is with me. All dreams are real. I wanted to believe that when those cocks had gone as far into my mother as they could, they came up against my eyes. I often dreamed about that: my sealed, translucent eyes swimming in the black soup of life. Life? No: the dealing that imitates life. My squinting eyes, like the snake hypnotizing the little bird. You get the picture: a kid’s silly celluloid fantasies. All fake, as Bittrich used to say. And he was right, as he almost always was. That’s why the girls adored him. They were glad to have the German around; they could always count on him for friendly advice and comfort. The girls: Connie, Doris and Monica. Three good friends lost in the mists of time. Connie tried to make it on Broadway. Even in the hardest years, I don’t think she ever gave up on the possibility of happiness. There, in New York, she met Monica Farr and they shared their hardships and hopes. They cleaned hotel rooms, sold their blood, turned tricks. Always looking for a break, walking around the city hooked up to the same Walkman, typical dancers, a little bit thinner and closer together with every passing day. Chorus girls. Looking for Bob Fosse. At a party thrown by some Colombians they met Bittrich, who was passing through New York with a batch of his merchandise. They talked until dawn. No sex, just music and words. They cast their dice that night on Seventh Avenue, the Prussian artist and the Latin American whores. It was all decided then and there. In some of my nightmares I see myself resting in limbo again and then I hear, distantly at first, the sound of the dice on the pavement. I open my eyes and I scream. Something changed forever that morning. The bond of friendship took hold, like the plague. Then Connie and Monica Farr got a
n acting job in Panama, where they were thoroughly exploited. The German paid for their tickets to Medellín, which was home to Connie and as good a place as any for Monica. There are photos of them descending the steps from the plane, taken by Doris, the only person who went to meet them at the airport. Connie and Monica are wearing sunglasses and tight pants. They’re not very tall, but they’re well proportioned. The Medellín sun is casting long shadows across an airstrip devoid of planes, except for one in the background, emerging from a hangar. There are no clouds in the sky. Connie and Monica displaying their teeth. Drinking Coca-Cola in the taxi line and striking provocative, turbulent poses. Atmospheric and terrestrial turbulence. Their attitude suggests that they have come straight from New York, surrounded by mystery. Then a very young Doris appears beside them. The three of them hugging each other, photographed by an obliging stranger leaning against the taxi’s bumper, while the driver inside looks on, so old and worn it’s hard to believe he’s real. So begin the most passionate adventures. A month later they are already shooting the first movie: Hecatomb. While the world is in turmoil the German shoots Hecatomb. A film about the turmoil of the spirit. A saint in prison remembers nights of plenitude and fucking. Connie and Monica do it with four guys who look like shadows. Doris walks along the bank of a weakly flowing river accompanied by Bittrich’s largest goose. The night is unusually starry. At dawn, Doris comes across Pajarito Gómez and they start making love in the back part of Bittrich’s house. There is a great fluttering of geese. Connie and Monica at a window, clapping. The lobster-red cock of the saint shines with semen. The End. The credits appear over the image of a sleeping policeman. Bittrich’s sense of humor. His movies amused drug lords and businessmen. The ordinary guys, the gunmen and the messengers, didn’t understand them; they’d have been quite happy to blow the German away. Another movie: Kundalini. A rancher’s wake. While the mourners weep and drink coffee with aguardiente, Connie enters a dark room full of farming implements. Two guys—one disguised as a bull and one as a condor—jump out of an enormous wardrobe. They proceed to force Connie’s front and rear entries. Connie’s lips curve into the shape of a letter. Monica and Doris touching each other up in the kitchen. Then stables full of cattle and a man approaching with difficulty, pushing his way through the cows. It’s Pajarito Gómez. He never arrives: the following scene shows him stretched out in the mud, among cowpats and hooves. Monica and Doris rimming each other on a big white bed. The dead rancher opens his eyes. He sits up and climbs out of the coffin to the horror and amazement of his family and friends. Covered by the bull and the condor, Connie pronounces the word Kundalini. The cows escape from the stables and the credits appear over the abandoned, gradually darkening body of Pajarito Gómez. Another movie: Impluvium. Two genuine beggars dragging sacks along a dirt road. They reach the backyard of Bittrich’s house. There they find Monica Farr, completely naked and chained in an upright position. The beggars empty the sacks: an abundant collection of sexual instruments made of steel and leather. The beggars put on masks with phallic protuberances, and, kneeling down, one in front of Monica, one behind, they penetrate her, moving their heads in a way that is, to say the least, ambiguous: it’s hard to tell whether they’re excited or the masks are suffocating them. Lying on an army camp bed, Pajarito Gómez smokes a cigarette. On another camp bed the conscript Sansón Fernandez is jerking off. The camera pans slowly over Monica’s face: she is crying. The beggars depart, dragging their sacks down a miserable, unpaved street. Still chained, Monica shuts her eyes and seems to fall asleep. She dreams of the masks, the latex noses, the pair of old carcasses who could barely hold a breath of air and yet were so enthusiastic in the performance of their task. Supernatural carcasses emptied of all the essentials. Then Monica gets dressed, walks through the centre of Medellín, and is invited to an orgy, where she meets Connie and Doris; they kiss and smile at each other, and talk about what they’ve been doing. Pajarito Gómez, half dressed in fatigues, has fallen asleep. When the orgy is over, before it gets dark, the owner of the house wants to show them his most prized possession. The girls follow their host to a garden covered with a metal and glass canopy. The man’s bejeweled finger indicates something at the far end. The girls examine a cement swimming pool in the shape of a coffin. When they lean over the edge, they see their faces reflected in the water. Then dusk falls and the beggars come to an area where big cargo ships are docked. The music, performed by a band of kettledrummers, gets louder, more sinister and ominous, until the storm finally breaks. Bittrich adored sound effects like that. Thunder in the mountains, the sizzle of lightning, splintering trees, rain against window panes. He collected them on high quality tapes. He said it was to make his movies atmospheric, but in fact it was just because he liked the effects. The full range of sounds that rain makes in a forest. The rhythmic or random sibilance of the wind and the sea. Sounds to make you feel alone, sounds to make your hair stand on end. His great treasure was the roar of a hurricane. I heard it as a kid. The actors were drinking coffee under a tree and Bittrich was playing with an enormous German tape player, away from the others, looking pasty, the way he did when he’d been working too hard. Now you’re going to hear the hurricane from inside, he said. At first I couldn’t hear anything. I think I was expecting a god-almighty, ear-splitting racket, so I was disappointed when all I could hear was a kind of intermittent whirling. An intermittent ripping. Like a propeller made of meat. Then I heard voices; it wasn’t the hurricane, of course, but the pilots of the plane flying in its eye. Hard voices talking in Spanish and English. Bittrich was smiling as he listened. Then I heard the hurricane again and this time I really heard it. Emptiness. A vertical bridge and emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. I’ll never forget the smile on Bittrich’s face. It was as if he was weeping. Is that all? I asked, not wanting to admit that I’d already had enough. That’s all, said Bittrich, fascinated by the silently turning reels. Then he stopped the tape player, closed it up very carefully, went inside with the others and got back to work. Another movie: Ferryman. From the ruins you might think it’s about life in Latin America after the Third World War. The girls wander through garbage dumps, along deserted paths. Then there’s a broad, gently flowing river. Pajarito Gómez and two other guys play cards by the light of a candle. The girls come to an inn where the men are carrying guns. They make love with them all, one after another. They look out from the bushes at the river and a few pieces of wood tied clumsily together. Pajarito Gómez is the ferryman, at least that’s what everyone calls him, but he doesn’t budge from the table. He holds the best cards. The villains remark on how well he’s playing. What a good player the ferryman is. What good luck the ferryman has. Gradually the supplies begin to run short. The cook and the kitchen hand torture Doris, penetrating her with the handles of enormous butcher’s knives. Hunger reigns over the inn: some stay in bed, others wander through the bushes looking for food. While the men fall ill one by one, the girls scribble in their diaries as if possessed. Desperate pictograms. Images of the river superimposed on images of a never-ending orgy. The end is predictable. The men dress the women up as chickens, make them do their tricks, and then proceed to eat them at a feather-strewn banquet. The bones of Connie, Monica and Doris lie on the diner’s patio. Pajarito Gómez plays another hand of poker. He wears his luck like a close-fitting glove. The camera is behind him and the viewer can see the cards he’s holding. They are blank. The credits appear over the corpses of all the actors. Three seconds before the end of the film, the river changes col
or, turning jet black. That one was especially deep, Doris used to say, it illustrates the sad fate of artists in the porn industry: first we’re ruthlessly exploited, then we’re devoured by thoughtless strangers. Bittrich seems to have made that movie to compete with the cannibal porn videos that were starting to cause a stir at the time. But it isn’t hard to see that the film’s real center is Pajarito Gómez sitting in the gambling den. Pajarito Gómez, who could generate an inner vibration that planted his image in the viewer’s eyes. A great actor wasted by life, our life, yours and mine, my friends. But the movies Bittrich made live on, unsullied. And so does Pajarito Gómez, holding those cards covered with dust, with his dirty hands and his dirty neck, his eternally half-closed eyelids, vibrating on and on. Pajarito Gómez, an emblematic figure in the pornography of the 1980s. He wasn’t specially well endowed or muscular, he didn’t appeal to the target audience for that kind of movie. He looked like Walter Abel. He had no experience when Bittrich dragged him from the gutter and put him in front of a camera: the rest came so naturally it’s hard to believe. Pajarito had this continuous vibration, and watching him, sooner or later, depending on your powers of resistance, you’d be suddenly transfixed by the energy emanating from that scrap of a man, who looked so feeble. So unprepossessing, so undernourished. So strangely triumphant. The pre-eminent porn actor in Bittrich’s Colombian cycle. The best when it came to playing dead and the best when it came to playing vacant. He was also the only member of the German’s cast who survived: in 1999, the only one still alive was Pajarito Gómez, the rest had been killed or succumbed to disease. Sansón Fernández died of AIDS. Praxíteles Barrionuevo died in the Hole of Bogotá. Ernesto San Román was stabbed to death in the Areanea sauna in Medellín. Alvarito Fuentes died of AIDS in the Cartago jail. All of them young guys with supersize cocks. Frank Moreno, shot to death in Panama. Oscar Guillermo Montes, shot to death in Puerto Berrío. David Salazar, known as the Anteater, shot to death in Palmira. Victims of vendettas or fortuitous brawls. Evelio Latapia, hung in a hotel room in Popayán. Carlos José Santelices, stabbed by strangers in an alley in Maracaibo. Reinaldo Hermosilla, last seen in El Progreso, Honduras. Dionisio Aurelio Pérez, shot to death in a bar in Mexico City. Maximiliano Moret, drowned in the Marañon River. Ten- to twelve-inch cocks, sometimes so long they couldn’t get them up. Young mestizos, blacks, whites, Indians, sons of Latin America, whose only assets were a pair of balls and a member tanned by exposure to the elements or miraculously pink by some weird freak of nature. The sadness of the phallus was something Bittrich understood better than anyone. I mean the sadness of those monumental members against the backdrop of this vast and desolate continent. For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes in a scene from a movie I’ve forgotten the rest of ; he’s naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. It’s dark and wrinkled and the drops have a milky sheen. Behind the actor a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, ranges, towering clouds, a city perhaps, a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perched on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That’s all. It’s like a poem by Tablada, isn’t it? But you’ve never heard of Tablada. Neither had Bittrich, and it doesn’t matter, really, it’s all there in that image—I must have the tape around somewhere—the loneliness I was talking about. Impossible geography, impossible anatomy. What was Bittrich aiming for with that sequence? Was he trying to justify amnesia, our amnesia? Or portray Oscar Guillermo’s weary eyes? Or did he just want to show us an uncircumcised penis dripping in the continent’s immensity? Or give an impression of useless grandeur: handsome young men without shame, marked out for sacrifice, fated to disappear in the immensity of chaos? Who knows? The only one who always got away was the amateur Pajarito Gómez, whose endowment extended, after plenty of work, to a maximum length of seven inches. The German flirted with death—what the hell did he care about death?—he flirted with solitude and black holes, but he never tried anything with Pajarito. Elusive and uncontrollable, Pajarito came into the camera’s scope as if he just happened to be passing by and had stopped for a look. Then he began to vibrate, full on, and the viewers, whether they were solitary jerk-off artists or businessmen who used the videos to liven up the decor, barely intending to glance at them, were transfixed by that scrawny creature’s moods. Pajarito Gómez gave off prostatic fluid! And that was something different, far exceeding the German’s lucubrations. And Bittrich knew it, so when Pajarito appeared in a scene there were usually no additional effects, no music or sounds of any kind, nothing to distract the viewer from what really mattered: the hieratic Pajarito Gómez, sucked or sucking, fucking or fucked, but always vibrating, as if unawares. The German’s protectors were deeply suspicious of that talent; they’d have preferred to see Pajarito working in the central market unloading trucks, ruthlessly exploited until the day he disappeared. They wouldn’t have been able to explain what it was they didn’t like about him; they just had a vague sense that he was a guy who could attract bad luck and make people feel ill at ease. Sometimes, when I remember my childhood, I wonder how Bittrich must have felt about his protectors. He respected the drug lords; after all they put up the money, and like all good Europeans, he respected money, a point of reference in the midst of chaos. But the corrupt police and army officers, what would he have thought of them, Bittrich, a German, who read history books in his spare time? They must have seemed so ludicrous, he must have had such a good laugh at them, at night, after those unruly meetings. Monkeys in SS uniforms, that’s what they were. Alone in his house, surrounded by his videos and his amazing sounds, he must have laughed and laughed. And they were the ones who wanted to get rid of Pajarito, those monkeys, with their sixth sense. Those pathetic, odious monkeys thought they could tell him, a German director in permanent exile, who he should and shouldn’t be hiring. Imagine Bittrich after one of those meetings, in the dark house in Los Empalados, after everyone else has gone, drinking rum and smoking Mexican Delicados in the biggest room, the one he uses as his study and bedroom. On the table there are paper cups with dregs of whiskey in them. Two or three videotapes sitting on top of the TV, the latest from the Olimpo Movie Production Company. Diaries and torn-out pages covered with figures: salaries, bribes, bonuses. Pocket money. And the words of the police commissioner, the air force lieutenant and the colonel from military intelligence still floating in the air: We don’t want that jinx anywhere near the Company. When people see him in our films, their stomachs turn. It’s bad taste to have that slug fucking the girls. And Bittrich let them speak, he observed them silently, and then he did what he liked. After all, they were only porn videos; it’s not like there were serious profits at stake. And that was how Pajarito got to stay on with us, although the company’s backers found his presence disturbing. Pajarito Gómez. A quiet and pretty reserved sort of guy, but for some mysterious reason the girls were especially fond of him. In the course of their professional duties, they all got to lay him, and it left them with a curious feeling, hard to say just what it was, but they were all ready to do it again. I guess being with Pajarito was like being nowhere. Doris even ended up living with him for a while, but it didn’t work out. Doris and Pajarito: for six months they went back and forth between the Hotel Aurora, which is where he lived, and the apartment on Avenida de los Libertadores. It was too good to last, you know how it is: singular spirits can’t bear so much love, so much perfection stumbled on by chance. Maybe if Doris hadn’t been such a bombshell, and if she’d been mute, and if Pajarito had never vibrated . . .
Things finally fell apart during the shooting of Cocaine, one of Bittrich’s worst movies. But they stayed friends until the end. Many years later, when all the rest were dead, I tracked down Pajarito. He was living in a tiny, one-room apartment, on a street that led down to the sea, in Buenaventura. He was working as a waiter in a restaurant owned by a retired policeman: Octopus Ink, the place was called, ideal for someone who wanted to lie low. He went from home to work and back again, with a brief stop each day at a video store, where he’d usually rent a couple of movies. Walt Disney and old Colombian, Mexican or Venezuelan films. Every day, punctual as a clock. From his walk-up to Octopus Ink, and then, after dark, back to the apartment, with two videotapes under his arm. He never brought food back, only movies. He rented them on the way there or the way back, it varied, but always from the same store, a little shack, three yards by three, open eighteen hours a day. I went looking for him on a whim, just because I felt like it. I went looking and I found him in 1999; it was easy, it took less than a week. Pajarito was forty-nine then, but he looked at least ten years older. He wasn’t surprised to find me sitting on his bed when he got home. I told him who I was, reminded him of the movies he’d made with my mother and my aunt. Pajarito took a chair and as he sat down the videos fell out from under his arm. You’ve come to kill me, Lalito, he said. He’d rented films with Ignacio López Tarso and Matt Dillon, two of his favorite actors. I reminded him of the old Pregnant Fantasies days. We both smiled. I saw your prick, it was transparent like a worm; my eyes were open, you know, watching your glass eye. Pajarito nodded, then sniffed. You always were a clever kid, he said, before you were born too, I guess, with your eyes open already, why not. I saw you, that’s what matters, I said. You were pink for a start in there, then you turned transparent and you got one hell of a shock, Pajarito. Back then you weren’t afraid, you moved so fast only little creatures and fetuses could see you moving. Only cockroaches, nits, lice and fetuses. Pajarito was looking at the floor. I heard him whisper: Et cetera, et cetera. Then he said: I never liked that sort of movie, one or two is OK, but it’s criminal to make so many. I’m a fairly normal person, really. I was genuinely fond of Doris, I was always a friend to your mother, when you were little I never did you any harm. Do you remember? I didn’t run the business, I never betrayed anyone, or killed anyone. I did a bit of dealing, a few robberies, we all did, but as you can see, it didn’t set me up for retirement. Then he picked the videos up off the floor, put the one with Ignacio López Tarso in the VCR, and as the soundless images succeeded one another on the screen, he began to cry. Don’t cry, Pajarito, I said, it’s not worth it. His days of vibrating were over. Or maybe he was still vibrating a little, and as I sat there on the bed I was scavenging those remnants of energy with the ravenous hunger of a shipwrecked sailor. It’s hard to vibrate in such a small apartment, with the smell of chicken soup permeating every cranny. It’s hard to pick up a vibration when your eyes are fixed on a dumbly gesticulating Ignacio López Tarso. López Tarso’s eyes in black and white: how could so much innocence and so much malice be combined? A good actor, I remarked, just to say something. One of our founding fathers, said Pajarito in agreement. He was right. Then he whispered: Et cetera, et cetera. That lousy fucking Pajarito. We sat there in silence for a long time: López Tarso went gliding through the movie’s plot like a fish inside a whale; the images of Connie, Doris and Monica lit up for few seconds in my head, and Pajarito’s vibration became imperceptible. I haven’t come to rub you out, I said to him in the end. Back then, when I was young, I had trouble using the word kill. I never killed: I took people out, blew them away, put them to sleep, I topped, stiffed or wasted them, sent them to meet their maker, made them bite the dust, I iced them, snuffed them, did them in. I smoked people. But I didn’t smoke Pajarito, I just wanted to see him and chat for a while. To feel his beat and remember my past. Thanks, Lalito, he said, and then he got up and filled a washbasin with water from a demijohn. With exact, artistic, resigned movements, he washed his hands and his face. When I was a kid, that’s what they all called me, Connie, Monica, Doris, Bittrich, Pajarito, Sansón Fernández: they all called me Lalito. Lalito Cura playing in the garden with the dogs and the geese at the house of crime, which for me was the house of boredom and sometimes the house of dismay and happiness. These days there’s no time to get bored, happiness vanished somewhere in the world, and all that’s left is dismay. Perpetual dismay, composed of corpses and ordinary people, like Pajarito, who was thanking me. I was never intending to kill you, I said, I’ve kept all your movies, I don’t watch them very often, I admit, only on special occasions, but I’ve looked after them. I’m a collector of your cinematic past, I said. Pajarito sat down again. He had stopped vibrating: he was watching the López Tarso movie out of the corner of his eye and his stillness suggested a mineral patience. According to the clock radio beside the bed it was two in the morning. The night before, I had dreamed of finding Pajarito: I was mounting him and shouting unintelligible words in his ear, something about a buried treasure. Or about an underground city. Or about a dead person wrapped in papers proof against putrefaction and the passage of time. But I didn’t even lay my hand on his shoulder. I’ll leave you some money, Pajarito, so you can live without having to work. I’ll buy you whatever you like. I’ll take you to a quiet place where you can spend all your time watching your favorite actors. There was no one like you in Los Empalados, I said. Ignacio López Tarso and Pajarito Gómez looked at me: stone-like patience. The pair of them gone crazily dumb. Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of memory. Fetuses and other tiny wide-eyed creatures. For a moment, my friends, I felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate. Then I stood up very carefully and left.