San Juan Noir Read online

  I turned on my music at full volume and had a party. You might understand what I mean when I say I had a party. Such was the celebration that I found it necessary to go down to the shop on the first floor an hour later. I entered the elevator and when I pressed the button for the lobby there was a stain on it, something with the opacity and texture of a relief. It seemed strange—not because I tend to focus on that kind of detail, nothing is more foreign to my personality. It made me remember the recent spectacle of the eclipse over the cattleyas. The buttons in elevators are illuminated, right? That circle of light had a half-moon of shadow in its interior, some imperfection that obstructed the glow. It took shape on the left and stole a piece of illumination from the upper part of the G. I stumbled closer and touched it, like a blind person reading Braille. I returned to the back wall of the elevator and reclined my head, humming a Brahms melody. When the doors opened, I bent forward and leaned against the call panel. With the light of the button now off, I could better study the stain. It was a dry streak of grayish or brown paint, nothing more. I scratched it with a fingernail.

  Then I went out into the lobby and saw the commotion.

  Everyone was congregating around something in front of the building. The lights of I don’t know how many police cars and ambulances spun rhythmically in reds and blues, creating a curiously festive air in the twilight. I went inside the shop and asked the clerk at the cash register what had happened. He told me about the painter, shattered on the pavement. I didn’t want go over and see the macabre spectacle that everyone seemed to be enjoying right there and then.

  The return trip in the elevator was strange: I stood looking again at the button for the lobby, clean of paint this time. I must have cocked my head or made one of those gestures we make when something doesn’t fit.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, sitting at ease in my living room armchair, that everything became clear. I carefully read the news in the online papers: the police were investigating the unfortunate incident of a painter who’d accidentally fallen from his scaffold. I vividly remembered the kid and I think I even felt bad about his death; at that hour of the morning it’s easy for me to feel empathy for the human race. But I imagined him just as I’d known him—sniffing around more than was appropriate, his hands forming a visor to look inside and judge the depths of other lives, our lives. What could there be on the floor above that would make him return when his workday was already over? What, in the windows above mine, would’ve awakened his need to look? I fixed my eyes on the ceiling of my apartment, and just so, like an epiphany, I knew. The threads knit themselves together and everything made sense, old things that you don’t even know you remember suddenly link together and create a choir, like the four instruments in the Haydn piece.

  Early as it was (I think it wasn’t even eight yet), and in an outburst of heroism that, given my tendencies, surely wouldn’t last past ten, I decided to meddle. I already knew there was nothing of interest in the penthouse. The spectacle that had captivated the painter was in the apartment just above mine. That boyish voyeur, with his vertical advantage, had served as a periscope between my eyes and the window above. I went up.

  I wasn’t sure what I would do or say once the door opened. I was impelled by the precarious sense of coexistence that’d begun with that brief, repugnant visual contact between me and the painter. Silly as it seems, he was the closest thing to a neighbor I’d had in my condo building. Someone familiar with my habits would understand.

  I knocked one, two, three times. I knew I was being observed through the peephole; I managed to embody a kind of character by concentrating on synchronizing my heartbeats with my blinking. I suppose that this conferred on me the air of a battery-powered doll, innocuous enough that they’d venture to open the door. I had no idea who occupied that apartment: I was there because I needed to scratch the coat of paint with my fingernail. The rest would come later.

  The door opened just a few inches, scarcely enough for me to glimpse a pair of eyes peering through the diagonal along the line of the threshold. This was all that was needed for the other to exist in me, as I suppose you might already understand. And those eyes said everything I needed to hear by revealing their dilated smallness, their suspicious turbidity. We were of the same species.

  “Hello,” I whispered. And I smiled. I remember that I smiled.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m here on behalf of the committee. We’re calling an urgent meeting of all the residents.”

  “Yes?”

  “Because of the incident yesterday.”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you let me come in?” I didn’t want to go in. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go in. I just wanted to corroborate that he wasn’t ready to allow it. Already, for me, it was obvious.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “I understand,” I said. “We’ll be distributing the notice later on today. Have a good day.”

  I turned around and hurried to the elevator. As I was walking with my back to that door, which had yet to close, I began to evaluate the risk I was taking in the deserted hallway of an unfamiliar floor, vulnerable to the paranoia of someone who probably knew that he’d been found out. Because he had been found out, there was no doubt about it. I could feel the heat of his gaze, his terror that was also my own. The elevator took an eternity; I had time to focus on the call button, perfectly clean, as if it had just been polished. Each additional second that passed without hearing that door lock into place threw more fuel on the invisible fire that devoured the distance between us. I never turned around to check, but I know he was about to jump on me and drag me inside his small hell, just like the rest of them.

  I didn’t wait any longer. I headed to the stairs and ran down like I was running for my life. I locked myself in my apartment and called you, inventing an excuse for you to come, latching the bolts on the windows, dragging furniture in front of the door, and arming myself with kitchen knives.

  And what I want to tell you is that the dry thumps were not just from yesterday. They’ve been there for months, I don’t know, maybe years. This morning, as I was reading the newspaper, a simple truth that I never cared to know became clear to me: my habit of playing music at such a high volume began because I preferred not to hear, not to see. I think I’ve already told you that I consent to all the nonsense that others do and say laissez-faire. But it’s not just thumps, you know? Sometimes there are moans, muffled and choked cries, and heavy round blows that reverberate across the pentagram of my bedroom ceiling. Have you heard the sounds a gagged mouth makes? That sound. A lot of that, sometimes. Mostly before, recently not so much. But yesterday . . . yesterday again, so much! As if the eyes of those silenced mouths had been waiting for the miracle of seeing their redeemer ascending, only to witness his useless expiation.

  No doubt the painter saw what he shouldn’t have seen. And he was seen looking. Perhaps what he saw—which he must have seen Monday or Tuesday—ended up unsettling or exciting him so much that he wanted to go back up and enjoy it again yesterday, despite the fact that nothing justified his presence there anymore. I bet the apartment above doesn’t have curtains. I bet the door to the bedroom is open, because at this height, frankly, privacy ceases to be a consideration.

  And now I understand why the scaffolding came down empty at three thirty. Yesterday, I assumed the painter had moved to a segment outside my line of vision, but really he’d already been thrown off. His body must have fallen in the brief lapse when I was distracted by the ceiling and the noises. The killer only had to go out through the window, climb onto the platform, and struggle with him—and in that hand-to-hand struggle, taking into account the paint-covered overalls, it was inevitable that his hands would get dirty. That was the plot point from which I began to deduce everything: the paint stain on the elevator button. He must have gone down right away to pretend to just be part of the crowd that surrounded the body, don’t you think? And we must admit that it was a good idea to take car
e of putting the scaffold in motion. Why call attention to his floor by leaving the platform there, so that later on you would come and examine it? Isn’t it better to make the things of this world fall, according to their own weight, while here above you can order and pay for everything, think of and resolve everything, win and lose everything—even your life—without ever going down?

  FISH FOOD

  by Manolo Núñez Negrón

  Callejón del Gámbaro

  When we were little we were like dirt and fingernail, that’s why it hurt so much. He grew up on Calle Baja Matadero, next to the Placita, and I grew up in one of the houses on the boulevard heading up toward Castillo San Cristóbal. He was fatherless, and in this we were the same. His had been killed at a cockfight, two stab wounds, and mine ran off with a hairdresser, or died in the Gulf War, or got a life sentence in federal prison, it’s all the same in any case. I remember because we were celebrating my birthday in front of Castillo del Morro, and Repollo was standing at the base of the wall feeding out string to his kite, which flew much higher than the one my uncle and aunt had given me. At one point I saw him heading down the hill toward the field, driven by my neighbors’ dogs, who pulled on the leash like horses, and I was jealous of his luck: he could go to the beach without asking permission, and to Recodo, Tite’s Bar, to play pinball. Later on when we were teenagers, he confessed that he would’ve given anything to live where I did; that it made him sad to see me sitting on the balcony, through the ornamental bars, with a coloring book on my knees. He longed to climb up, run through the city, put on tennis shoes, and get to know the stores full of tourists; I wanted to go down, out to the sea, roll around in the sand, and walk through the slums wearing sandals. Maybe that’s why we became such good friends.

  My mom was opposed from the start. “Those people are like cats,” she said, “they bite the hand that feeds them.” She ruled him out from the beginning, and there was no way to convince her that, deep down, he had a good heart. I imagine that she never forgave him for how, after we invited him to the party and gave him a piece of cake, he cut my kite string—which was lost in the sky and traveled on through the air, past the rum factory, searching for El Cañuelo on Isla de Cabras. It didn’t bother me. To the contrary, it made me happy, because flying a kite seemed like a game for little girls.

  * * *

  I ran into him again one morning beside the Capilla del Cristo. It was his favorite spot—not because he loved the doves, he actually loathed them—but because from there he could study the arrival of the cruise ships, the chaos of the docks, the small boats crossing the bay. At first I tried to talk to him, offering him a bag of roasted peanuts, and still he reacted indifferently, picking his nose. It was, I think, the first time I noticed his features. His skin was tanned from the sun, his eyes were damp, his forehead broad. A bruise ran across his cheek, grazing his lower lip, and more bruises were visible on his neck. At first I was curious and then I felt bad. It’s possible that at that moment, inside of me, like a plant left without water, innocence began to die. To earn his trust I bought him a malt and some plantain chips. To tell the truth, I guess that behind his shy character and surly manners there was a spiderweb of insecurity. Childhood is a cruel time. Nothing is worse than a kid alone at recess—I say this with firsthand knowledge. Decades have passed, that environment has receded, and yet, looking at myself in the mirror every morning, holding my razor, my hair graying, I can hear my classmates shouting from the second floor balcony: Faggot, faggot, faggot!

  He didn’t thank me, but he let me sit beside him. He waited awhile in silence, lost in thought, tears of courage rolling down his dirty cheekbones. Both of us, in a way, felt the summer suffocating the flowers, warming the tops of cars, melting caramels in glass jars.

  “My mom hit me with a belt,” he said.

  “Moms are like that,” I responded.

  After a couple hours we got soaked by a downpour. We made little boats out of paper and launched them into the inlet ditches until it stopped. The rain had a virtue: it imposed a sense of cleanliness, of pulchritude, a new world springing up from the asphalt. We separated in front of Iglesia San Francisco. From that day on he was my accomplice. We went to different schools, it’s true, but we saw each other frequently. As we grew up and began to have more freedom, we became closer. We had, of course, some disagreements typical of that age. Standard stuff: trivial fights over a baseball card, a toy pistol, a couple of marbles. He cheated at everything—marked playing cards, hid dominoes, altered dice—but, to my surprise, he avoided these little tricks with me. As an adult, I understood that they were survival tactics: he moved in a universe governed by different rules.

  Honestly, in terms of tastes, we were polar opposites. He declared himself cocolo, a fan of the Cowboys, and a lover of McDonald’s hamburgers. I, on the other hand, was into rock music, burritos from Taco Bell, and Raymond Dalmau’s jump shots. If I said Menudo, he answered Los Chicos; if he suggested Lourdes Chacón, I said Iris, and on and on. I guess we really loved the same things and the rivalry was nothing more than a front. Harmless entertainment that reinforced the ties that bound us together. He never mentioned the incidents with his mother again even though it was clearly a common practice. In the end, he let her hit him and didn’t talk back. Human beings adapt to everything. And yet I know he was unable to abolish the beatings from his memory. There are events that remain recorded under the skin, stuck to the bones, and nothing can be done to erase them. It doesn’t even do any good to talk about them, because little by little they dissolve, mixing into everything we do. At the smallest provocation, the slightest gesture, it’s like a puppet master pulls these events out of a trunk and they come back from the emptiness, and on our faces is an expression of incomprehension, absorbed and disbelieving. Something similar happened to us with the death of Vigoreaux and the DuPont Plaza fire: those events continued to live on in our imaginations, feeding on fear and foreboding.

  He gave me my first porn magazine, wrapped in a B&B case. On the cover was a blonde dressed as a nurse. I stashed it away, like a relic, and it probably is. The process, before, had its charm: nudity transmitted an aura of mystery, and it was a marvel hiding away in my room, flipping through the pages, delving into the intimacy of a stranger, feeling the texture of the glossy pages between damp fingers, looking at bodies opening the doors to eroticism and pleasure. Now everyone bends over and shows it all. “We macho machos buy Hustler,” he warned me. “Pendejos settle for Playboy.” That observation made such an impression on me that, even today, flipping through such magazines on a shelf in a 7-Eleven, his comment still seems valid. In effect, he was more precocious than I was. At fifteen, his relatives took him to Black Angus, to pop his cherry, and a few months later he passed this kindness to me. “Just stay calm, big guy, she knows what she’s doing.” It was the best advice I could’ve gotten, and I repeated it to myself out loud, walking down the long, dark hallway, trembling with excitement and terror.

  I rolled him his first joint one Palm Sunday, when we were about to finish high school. He got hooked on weed and almost failed the semester. Well, to be honest, he didn’t pass: the teachers came to an agreement and inflated his grades to get him out of there. And that’s what he did—he hitched up his gown, walked at graduation, and the next week he joined the National Guard Reserve. He came back from Fort Jackson off his rocker, jacked, his biceps bursting out of his T-shirt, hell-bent on banging all the girls. As soon as he could, he got himself a motorbike, a brand-new Yamaha RX, which he crashed into a wall at Parada 26 coming out of a Palma Party rally. Even in this respect we were different. His family was blue, true blue, and mine was red to the core. We barely ever talked politics, preferring to avoid unnecessary disputes. Things like that sow discord where there is none. I knew that a flag of the ex-governor hung from his window, and that was more than enough.

  * * *

  We grew apart while I was at university, but we still saw each other every now and then. We bum
ped into each other at Boricua or Ocho de Blanco, dives we went to on the hunt: hair slicked back à la John Travolta, starched and unbuttoned guayaberas, faded blue jeans, riding boots shined to perfection. That was when he started getting into cocaine. He came out of the bathrooms with dilated pupils and a numb jaw, euphoric. He avoided me under these circumstances, ashamed, even though he knew drugs weren’t foreign to me and that I’d tried everything—even LSD and hashish, of which I was an aficionado for a time. I found out from other friends, randomly, that he was getting heavily into smack. “He’s turning into a junkie,” they said. Alone, I cried, I admit it. Nobody returns from that trip intact: they want to come back, get back to the shore, save themselves from the tide that’s sucking them out. They fail. A dense jungle, darkness, live ash, snake-bitten shadows, hunting, inexorable. Only the grave frees them from that prison. When I graduated, just scraping by, with a degree in accounting, and with the strike calming down at the university, I lost sight of him. What I mean to say is I stopped seeing him, although not so much his doubles, that multitude of creatures wandering along the avenues and sidewalks: the plastic cup in their ulcerated hands, their breath broken with thirst, happiness fading from their expressions, slow and without rhythm.