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Amalfitano's first few days in Santa Teresa and at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
were miserable, although
Amalfitano was only half aware of the fact. He felt ill, but he thought it was
jet lag and ignored it. A faculty colleague, a young professor from
Hermosillo
who had only recently finished his degree,
asked what had made him choose the
University
of
Santa Teresa
over the
University
of
Barcelona
. I hope it wasn't the climate,
he said. The climate here seems wonderful, answered Amalfitano. Oh, I agree,
said the young professor, I just meant that the people who come here for the
climate are usually ill and I sincerely hope that's not the case with you. No,
said Amalfitano, it wasn't the climate, my contract had run out in
Barcelona
and Professor
Perez convinced me to take a job here. He had met Professor Silvia Perez in
Buenos Aires
and then they had seen each other twice in
Barcelona
. It was she who
had rented the house and bought some furniture for him. Amalfitano paid her
back even before he collected his first paycheck to prevent any
misunderstandings. The house was in Colonia Lindavista, an upper-middle-class
neighborhood of one- and two-story houses with yards. The sidewalk, cracked by
the roots of two enormous trees, was shady and pleasant, although behind the
gates some of the houses were in advanced states of disrepair, as if the
neighbors had left in a hurry, with no time even to sell, which would suggest that
it hadn't been so hard to rent in the neighborhood, no matter what Professor
Perez claimed. He took a dislike to the dean of the Faculty of Literature, to
whom Professor Perez introduced him on his second day in Santa Teresa. The
dean's name was Augusto Guerra and he had the pale, shiny skin of a fat man,
but he was actually thin and wiry. He didn't seem very sure of himself,
although he tried to disguise it with a combination of folk wisdom and a
military air. He didn't really believe in philosophy either, or, by extension,
in the teaching of philosophy, a discipline frankly on the decline in the face
of the current and future marvels that science has to offer, he said.
Amalfitano asked politely whether he felt the same way about literature. No,
literature does have a future, believe it or not, and so does history, Augusto
Guerra had said, take biographies, there used to be almost no supply or demand
and today all anybody does is read them. Of course, I'm talking about
biographies, not memoirs. People have a thirst to learn about other people's
lives, the lives of their famous contemporaries, the ones who made it big or
came close, and they also have a thirst to know what the old
chincuales
did,
maybe even learn something, although they aren't prepared to jump through the
same hoops themselves. Amalfitano asked politely what
chincuales
meant,
since he had never heard the word. Really? asked Augusto Guerra. I swear, said
Amalfitano. Then the dean asked Professor Perez: Silvita, do you know what
chincuales
means? Professor Perez took Amalfitano's arm, as if they were lovers, and
confessed that really she didn't have the slightest idea, although the word
rang a bell. What a pack of imbeciles, thought Amalfitano. The word
chincuales,
said Augusto Guerra, like all the words in the Mexican tongue, has a number
of senses. First, it means flea or bedbug bites, those little red welts, you
know? The bites itch, and the poor victims can't stop scratching, as you can
readily imagine. Hence the second meaning, which is restless people who squirm
and scratch and can't sit still, to the discomfort of anyone who's forced to
watch them. Like European scabies, say, like all those people with scabies in
Europe
, who pick it up in public restrooms or in those
horrendous French, Italian, and Spanish latrines. Related to this is the final
sense, call it the Guerrist sense, which applies to a certain class of
traveler, to adventurers of the mind, those who can't keep still
mentally.
Ah,
said Amalfitano. Magnificent, said Professor Perez. Also present at this
impromptu gathering in the dean's office, which Amalfitano thought of as a
welcome meeting, were three other professors from the literature department,
and Guerra's secretary, who uncorked a bottle of Californian champagne and passed
out paper cups and crackers. Then Guerra's son came in. He was maybe
twenty-five years old, in sunglasses and a track suit, his skin very tanned. He
spent all his time in a corner talking to his father's secretary and glancing
every so often at Amalfitano with an amused look on his face.

The night before the excursion, Amalfitano heard the voice
for the first time. Maybe he'd heard it before, in the street or while he was
asleep, and thought it was part of someone else's conversation or that he was
having a nightmare. But that night he heard it and he had no doubt whatsoever
that it was addressing him. At first he thought he'd gone crazy. The voice
said: hello, Oscar Amalfitano, please don't be afraid, there's nothing wrong.
Amalfitano was afraid. He got up and rushed to his daughter's room.
Rosa
was sleeping peacefully. Amalfitano turned on the
light and checked the window latch.
Rosa
woke
up and asked what was wrong with him. Not what was wrong, what was wrong with
him. I must look terrible, thought Amalfitano. He sat in a chair and told her
he was ridiculously nervous, he'd thought he heard a noise, he was sorry he'd
brought her to this disgusting city. Don't worry, it's no big deal, said
Rosa
. Amalfitano gave her a kiss on the cheek, stroked
her hair, and went out but didn't turn off the light. After a while, as he was
looking out the living room window at the yard and the street and the still
branches of the trees, he heard
Rosa
turn off
the light. He went out the back door, without making a sound. He wished he had
a flashlight, but he went out anyway. No one was there. Hanging on the
clothesline were the
Testamento geometrico
and some of his socks and a
pair of his daughter's pants. He circled the yard. There was no one on the
porch. He went over to the gate and inspected the street, without going out,
and all he saw was a dog heading calmly toward Avenida Madero, to the bus stop.
A dog on its way to the bus stop, Amalfitano said to himself. From where he was
he thought he could tell that it was a mutt, not a purebreed. A
quiltro,
thought
Amalfitano. He laughed to himself. Those Chilean words. Those cracks in the
psyche. That hockey rink the size of Atacama where the players never saw a
member of the opposing team and only every so often saw a member of their own.
He went back into the house. He locked the door and windows, took a short,
sturdy knife out of a drawer in the kitchen and set it down next to a history
of German and French philosophy from 1900 to 1930, then sat back down at the
table.

The voice said: don't think this is easy for me. If you
think it's easy for me, you're one hundred percent wrong. In fact, it's hard.
Ninety percent hard. Amalfitano closed his eyes and thought he was going crazy.
He didn't have any tranquilizers in the house. He got up. He went into the
kitchen and splashed water on his face with both hands. He dried himself with
the kitchen towel and his sleeves. He tried to remember the psychiatric name
for the auditory phenomenon he was experiencing. He went back into his office
and after closing the door he sat down again, with his head bowed and his hands
on the table. The voice said: I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I
beg you not to consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom?
thought Amalfitano, surprised, as he sprang to the window and opened it and
looked out at the side yard and the wall of the house next door, spiky with
glass, and the reflection of the streetlights in the shards of broken bottles,
very faint green and brown and orange gleams, as if at this time of night the
wall stopped being a barricade and became or played at becoming ornamental, a
tiny element in a choreography the basic features of which even the ostensible
choreographer, the feudal lord next door, couldn't have identified, features
that affected the stability, color, and offensive or defensive nature of his
fortification. Or as if there was a vine growing on the wall, Amalfitano
thought before he closed the window.

That night there were no further manifestations of the
voice and Amalfitano slept very badly, his sleep plagued by jerks and starts,
as if someone was scratching his arms and legs, his body drenched in sweat,
although at five in the morning the torment ceased and Lola appeared in his
sleep, waving to him from a park behind a tall fence (he was on the other
side), along with the faces of two friends he hadn't seen for years (and would
probably never see again), and a room full of philosophy books covered in dust
but still magnificent. At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the
body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the
neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled
itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a
litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the
clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic
in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping
into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the
Testamento
geometrico
to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use,
anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through
which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

At eight o'clock Amalfitano dragged himself into the
kitchen. His daughter asked how he'd slept. A rhetorical question that
Amalfitano answered with a shrug. When
Rosa
went out to buy provisions for their day in the country, he made himself a cup
of tea with milk and went into the living room to drink it. Then he opened the
curtains and asked himself whether he was up to the trip planned by Professor
Perez. He decided that he was, that what had happened to him the night before
might have been his body's response to the attack of a local virus or the onset
of the flu. Before he got in the shower he took his temperature. He didn't have
a fever. For ten minutes he stood under the spray, thinking about his behavior
the night before, which embarrassed him and even made him blush. Every so often
he lifted his head so that the water streamed directly onto his face. The water
tasted different from the water in
Barcelona
.
The water in Santa Teresa seemed much denser, as if it weren't filtered at all
but came loaded with minerals, tasting of earth. In the first few days he had
acquired the habit, which he shared with Rosa, of brushing his teeth twice as
often as he had in
Barcelona
, because it seemed
to him that his teeth were turning brown, as if they were being covered in a
thin film of some substance from the underground rivers of
Sonora
. As time passed, though, he went back
to brushing them three or four times a day.
Rosa
,
more concerned about her appearance, kept brushing six or seven times. In his
class he noticed some students with ocher-colored teeth. Professor Perez had
white teeth. Once he asked her: was it true that the water in that part of
Sonora
stained the
teeth? Professor Perez didn't know. It's the first I've heard of it, she said,
and she promised to find out. It's not important, said Amalfitano, alarmed,
it's not important, forget I asked. In the expression on Professor Perez's face
he had detected a hint of unease, as if the question concealed some other
question, this one highly offensive and wounding. You have to watch what you
say, sang Amalfitano in the shower, feeling completely recovered, sure proof of
his frequent irresponsibility.

Rosa came back with two newspapers that she left on the
table, then she started to make ham or tuna sandwiches with lettuce and slices
of tomato and mayonnaise or
salsa rosa.
She wrapped the sandwiches in
paper towels and aluminum foil and put them all in a plastic bag that she
stowed in a small brown knapsack with the words
University of Phoenix
printed
on it in an arc, and she also put in two bottles of water and a : dozen paper
cups. At nine-thirty they heard Professor Perez's horn. Professor Perez's son
was sixteen and short, with a square face and broad shoulders, as if he played
some sport. His face and part of his neck were covered in pimples. Professor
Perez was wearing jeans and a white shirt and a white bandanna. Sunglasses,
possibly too big, hid her eyes. From a distance, thought Amalfitano, she looked
like a Mexican actress from the seventies. When he got in the car the illusion
vanished. Professor : Perez drove and he sat next to her. They headed east. For
the first few miles the highway ran through a little valley dotted with rocks
that seemed to have fallen from the sky. Chunks of granite with no origin or
context. There were some fields, plots where invisible peasants grew crops that
neither Professor Perez nor Amalfitano could make out. Then they were in the
desert and the mountains. There were the parents of the orphan rocks they'd
just passed. Granitic formations, volcanic formations, peaks silhouetted
against the sky in the shape and fashion of birds, but birds of sorrow, thought
Amalfitano, as Professor Perez talked to her son and Rosa about the place where
they were going, painting it in colors that shaded from fun (a pool carved out
of living rock) to mystery, exemplified for her by the voices to be heard from
the lookout point, sounds clearly made by the wind. When Amalfitano turned his
head to see the expression on
Rosa
's face and
on the face of Professor Perez's son, he saw four cars trailing them, waiting
to pass. Inside each car he imagined a happy family, a mother, a picnic basket
full of food, two children, and a father driving with the window rolled down.
He smiled at his daughter and turned back to watch the road. Half an hour later
they went up a hill, from the top of which he could see a wide expanse of
desert behind them. They saw more cars. He supposed that the roadside bar or
cafe or restaurant or by-the-hour motel was a fashionable destination for the
inhabitants of Santa Teresa. He regretted having accepted the invitation. At
some point he fell asleep. By the time he woke up, they were there. Professor
Perez's hand was on his face, a gesture that might have been a caress or not.
Her hand was like a blind woman's hand. Rosa and Rafael were no longer in the
car. He saw a parking lot, almost full, the sun glittering on the chrome-plated
surfaces, an open terrace on a slightly higher level, a couple with their arms
around each other's shoulders looking at something he couldn't see, the
blinding sky full of small, low, white clouds, distant music and a voice that
sang or muttered at great speed, so that it was impossible to understand the
words. An inch away he saw Professor Perez's face. He took her hand and kissed
it. His shirt was damp with sweat, but what surprised him most was that the
professor was sweating too.