Woes of the True Policeman

For three days he had lost sight of her. On the fourth, when he was finally beginning to forget that strange mnemotechnical epiphany, he found her outside his building at a similar time of night and in similar circumstances. Again they slept together. Again they masturbated (this time they both came). Again they talked.

The girl, said Padilla, had come up with a plan to cure herself. The plan was to hitchhike from Barcelona to the Mondragón asylum. When she told him this, Padilla burst out laughing. But she kept talking. This time it was dark and the only light filtered in the window from the skylight in the inner courtyard. She spoke, said Padilla, in a monotone, but it wasn’t a monotone, it was full of inflection, but it lacked inflection, it was contaminated by the slang of Barcelona’s blue-collar neighborhoods, but at the same time it was the voice of a young lady from Sarriá. You, thought Amalfitano, have read too much Gombrowicz.

The rest of the letter continued at great length on the same subject. The dark room. Elisa’s voice describing an impossible trip. Padilla’s questions: why did she think she would be cured by traveling? what did she expect from Leopoldo María Panero and the Mondragón asylum? The urge to laugh, and Padilla’s laughter and teasing. Sleeping with a faggot is messing with your head. Elisa’s laughter, which for a fraction of a second seemed to light up the room and then shoot like backwards lightning through the window joints, upward, toward the courtyard skylight and the stars.

But the letter ended on a less than festive note. Elisa is here with me, said the last paragraph, when I went out this afternoon she stayed here, in bed, my father and I talked about taking her to the hospital but she refused, we made her some chicken broth, she drank it, and then she fell asleep.

19

Padilla’s next letter, the first that Amalfitano didn’t answer right away, talked about the pilgrimage to San Sebastián and the terms on which it would be conducted, terms dictated by the wavering voice of Elisa, who, he reported, was in the hospital now and with whom it was best not to argue, at least until she recovered. At the hospital, he said, I’ve gotten to see her family again, the junkie brother I tried to strangle, her mother, who’s a saint, assorted aunts and cousins. Once Raguenau had come with him, and another time Adrià, both of them worried about the interest Padilla had taken in the girl. His friends, he said, advised him to stop visiting her, stop taking care of her, start taking care of himself. But Padilla ignored them and spent a night or two at the foot of Elisa’s bed. She asked him to talk to her about Panero. When Raguenau and Adrià heard this they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But Padilla took it seriously and told Elisa everything he knew about Panero, which wasn’t much, actually; the rest he made up. And when he couldn’t think what else to make up he brought volumes of Panero’s poetry to the hospital and read them to Elisa.

At first she didn’t understand them.

I think, said Padilla, that she understands even less about these things than I realized at first.

But he was undaunted and he devised a method (or something resembling a method) of reading. It was simple. He decided to read Panero’s poems aloud in chronological order. He began with the first book and ended with the last and after each poem he offered a brief commentary that didn’t pretend to explain the whole poem, which was impossible, according to Padilla, but rather a single line, an image, a metaphor. This way, Elisa understood and retained at least a fragment of each poem. Soon, wrote Padilla, Elisa was reading Panero’s books on her own and her comprehension of them (but the word comprehension conveys none of the desperation and communion of her reading) was luminous.

When she was discharged, Padilla-in a rather crepuscular gesture, thought Amalfitano-presented her with all the books he had loaned her and left. He didn’t expect to see her again and for a few days he was happy about it. Raguenau and Adrià took him out to the movies and the theater. He went out on his own again. He got back to work, though unenthusiastically, on The God of Homosexuals. Very late one night, coming home drunk and high, he found her sitting outside his building, waiting for him.

According to Padilla, Elisa was death.

Amalfitano’s response was a five-page letter, hastily written between classes, in which he begged him to listen to the baker and his nephew, and in which, with perhaps exaggerated optimism, he related the giant steps that science was taking in its fight against AIDS. According to some doctors in California, he claimed, the disease was steps away from becoming simply another chronic ailment, something that didn’t necessarily mean a death sentence.

About the latest developments in Santa Teresa he chose to remain silent.