I’ve just turned thirty-nine and I’m about to die.
Only four days ago, I considered myself a successful man, with a dozen published books and several hundred fans spread across the world. Now I find myself in room twenty-two of a low-rate motel, intoxicated by sedatives, in a remote corner of the province… A Glock .40 in my hands—still smoking—and the dreadful certainty of having lived someone else’s life.
This nightmare began a week ago on Thursday night, when I was on the phone listening to Cristina’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Looking through the junk that mom left, I found a cardboard box with your name on it. I think it contains stuff from when you were little. I wondered if you would be interested in keeping it, so I decided to call you.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was about to start working on an article that a Spanish magazine had tasked me with, and I couldn’t help the enormous annoyance that this interruption caused me. But I pulled myself together. Took a deep breath. In spite of everything, I recognized my sister’s effort in making this call; overcoming the long distance and our uncomfortable relationship as of late.
“Julio, are you there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”
“So?”
“Don’t throw it away. I’ll pick it up this coming weekend.”
“Are you serious? You’re coming to collect it?”
“Yeah, of course. This way I can take the opportunity and stop by the cemetery to bring flowers to Mom’s grave. Would you come with me?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t. I’m going on a trip with my family for the weekend. Vacations, you know? Actually, I was planning to leave the box at Isabella’s. You wouldn’t mind picking it up at hers, would you?”
“As you wish, Cristina.”
“Take care, Julio. Bye.”
She hung up and so did I.
There was no doubt she still hadn’t forgiven me for not attending Mom’s funeral two years earlier. At the time, I had a conference in Guadalajara that was impossible for me to cancel. I was on my way to the airport when she called me with the news. “Mom has passed,” she said. “We’ll bury her tomorrow at two in the afternoon.” But it was too late for me. I asked her to understand that I couldn’t cancel my trip. However, all I got was “I have done my part, Julio, the rest is on you…” and the tone of the dead line.
Ever since that impasse between us, our relationship had become more frugal and tense.
At this point I find it convenient to mention that, when I was a boy (around eleven or twelve, maybe less), I suffered a strange nervous illness that erased part of my memories. Some sort of amnesia. The doctors, because of the scientific limitations back then and my young age, preferred that my family focus on my re-education instead of attempting new therapies for the total rehabilitation of my memory and past. Ultimately, it was only a few years given my young age. Although I was able to readapt and re-insert myself into daily life with relative ease, there were memories that I never got back. Therefore, recovering from oblivion a box of objects from my childhood was of extreme importance to me.
Why had Mother never spoken to me about it?
On Saturday after lunchtime, I set off on my trip. I drove without stopping until I reached my parents’ town. Once there, I checked into the hotel I used to stay at when I came on a visit or for work. Just as I have been doing ever since I moved to the capital twenty years ago. I booked the same room I always did. I had made plans with Isabella to meet in the lobby at eight o’clock, because I didn’t want to revisit some buried memories from my adolescence while wandering down the streets of our neighborhood.
We would eat dinner in the hotel restaurant. She would bring the box.
As soon as I had unpacked the few things I had brought with me and showered, I turned on my laptop and attempted to resume work on the article I was writing about the importance of the subconscious in the creative process.
At ten past eight the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Isabella’s voice.
“I’ve been waiting almost fifteen minutes in the lobby, I thought you’d stood me up,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Isabella.” I said. “I was focused on what I was doing and lost track of time. I’ll be with you in less than five minutes.”
Isabella looked radiant. Just as my eyes remembered her from one of those few occasions when we bumped into each other at a common friend’s house, five or six years ago, during one of my rare visits. She hugged and kissed me with enormous affection, as if no time had passed.
“The years have treated you well,” she praised me after pulling away slightly without letting go of my shoulders, her eyes scouring my body. From top to bottom.
“Same goes for you. Although I would be more daring and say that you look truly divine.”
She blushed slightly, and it surprised me that after all these years she still preserved the ability to do so, after three marriages and a series of lovers much younger than her. I invited her to the restaurant, as I was dying of hunger. Once seated and with some appetizers in hand, the gossip would flow in a spontaneous, natural manner. We would undoubtedly talk better.
“When do you plan to return to Caracas?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Is this town so uncomfortable for you?”
“It’s not that. Next Tuesday’s my birthday and some friends have organized a small gathering. I wouldn’t like to disappoint them.”
I lied. What she said was the truth and she knew it.
“Are you still determined to live alone, no partner?” she asked at one point during our frivolous conversation, with the intention of making it more serious, more intimate. I started to prepare myself for what was to come.
“I don’t see myself in any other situation,” I replied without lifting my gaze from my plate.
“So what was said in that infamous interview, perturbing your family so much, and also some of your friends—me included, of course—wasn’t your agent’s strategy to sell more books?”
“If you’re referring to the one in which the interviewer asked my about my sexuality and I replied that it still wasn’t defined, that in reality I did not know nor did I care to know which of the genders I favored, it’s entirely true: I’m not interested in sex in the least.”
“I suppose you’re aware that for those of us that aren’t like that, it’s very hard to understand, right?”
“Sometimes affection must come before understanding, Isabella, especially if it’s about those closest to you, friends and family.”
“Don’t you think it’s unfair to ask for something you’ve never given?”
“Don’t start, please.”
“Maybe it’s because we have never started that this has never ended, Julio: neither for you, nor for those of us who love you.”
I didn’t reply, only because I imagined what was about to come; the worst part, what I’d always avoided, what made my visits to my parents’ town so uncomfortable and insufferable. In fact, every time I went I had to pass by the shooting range just to relieve the tension it caused me.
“It’s time for you to confront it. For someone to say it straight to your face: you’re incredibly selfish, Julio Rodríguez, and you don’t even know the hurt you’ve caused your loved ones.”
I was going to say something, but I decided to let her finish unburdening herself.
“I don’t understand how you changed so much. How the sweet and kind boy who I fell in love with for the first time, that boy who perhaps made me into the person that I am today, has turned into the disgusting man sitting before me.”
(According to her, she had studied psychiatry due to a promise she had made to herself after my illness. Her aim was to cure me, bring back her soulmate, her first love.)
“There’s no need to be so direct, Isabella. You can deliver your venom in doses.”
“Ha! Look who’s talking,” she spat, almost with anger.
“I am who I am. I cannot be anybody else. Nobody has the right to ask me that. You have to understand it.”
She looked me in the eyes. I held her gaze. Suddenly her pupils started to moisten, and she decided to lower her head, go back to her plate. For a long time we devoted ourselves to finishing our dishes in silence, without looking at each other, as if the one in front wasn’t there, or simply didn’t exist.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered towards the end. We won’t speak of the matter again in what’s left of our meetup.
Upon leaving the restaurant, I accompanied her to her car to say goodbye and pick up the box.
“I hope you find something within that helps you retrieve part of your past.”
Although she spoke without sarcasm and rather with a certain tenderness, I chose to ignore her words. She said goodbye with the same affection she had shown me at the beginning of our date. I tried to hug her as warmly as I could.
“Don’t hesitate to call me if you ever need something: you know I’ll come right away,” she said, already sitting in front of the wheel, inside her Lexus.
“Thank you,” I managed to reply before the tinted car window erased her from my sight.
I returned to the room and could not resist the impulse to open the box. To know what it contained. As if inside, instead of part of my past, would lie my entire future. I sat on the bed and placed the box between my legs. I was extremely nervous. My hands were sweating and every so often, an involuntary thrill of excitement shook my body.
I hesitated for a moment, holding the letter opener in the air… until I finally opened it.
A translucent army of tangled tentacles welcomed me. The strips of plastic wrapping made me think of thousands of bodies of inert, rotting jellyfish. I pushed them aside and objects began to pop up that were totally strange to me: a ball, cap, and baseball glove (did I ever play baseball?); half a dozen plastic toy soldiers and a firefighter truck; a half-used crayon box and a block full of childish drawings; a photo album that I placed to one side to look over later in detail; a diploma with my name and, lastly, a catalog of paintings by the world’s most recognized artists.
That was all.
The emotion, the excitement that I had felt before opening that cardboard box had evaporated, it turned into disenchantment, into a terrible boredom upon finding those things so distant from my true nature. A crushing disappointment. Like when you buy a book or a movie ticket with anticipation and it ends up not living up to your expectations.
With reluctance I grabbed the diploma and studied it carefully, hoping to find something on it, and I did: it wasn’t merely a diploma but a recognition for winning first place in a short story contest. The emotions overwhelmed me again. I couldn’t believe it! Over the twenty years that I had been writing I had never won a contest, never had an accredited institution grant me any recognition. So great was my frustration that I had stopped submitting material to literary competitions, settling for the acceptance of the readers and the favorable opinions of a few critics (very few, indeed). I laughed out loud at the matter. Perhaps in my hands I held the first and last award of my luminous career as a writer. How ironic! Suddenly, I was overtaken by a strange sensation and my laughter turned into horror. Was it truly mine? And if it was, where was the story that had won me the contest? I searched for it in vain among the things I had taken out of the box. Then I turned back to the diploma. I read: Recognition given to Julio Rodríguez for winning first place in the 1st Short-Story Contest of the Autonomous Foundation for State Railways. As hard as I tried, I was unable to extract any sort of image from my memories that could relate to that yellow piece of paper trembling in my hands. Then, I decided to look at the album. However, I found nothing there either. It was like looking at a photo album of a close friend who you recognise in a few photos, but still being unable to decipher the context in which they were taken.
There was only one photo that left me with a strange sensation, an emptiness and a sudden, irrational fear that made me shut the album violently: in it I was hugging another boy, we were waving and smiling at the camera, mounted on the running boards of an old train car.
In the middle of the night I awoke in fear, drenched in sweat. I tried to remember what I had dreamed but the only thing that came to mind was the recurring dream that had been chasing me since adolescence: a boy in a dark room, tied up, terrified, crying without being able to scream.
Around nine I got up with the firm disposition of finishing my article. I would ask for the newspapers and breakfast to be brought to my room and would start to write immediately. I opened the blinds and looked out of the window. The sky appeared taken out of some hyperrealistic movie. Despite the incandescent sun, the morning was fresh. Around the pool, two kids ran around under the watchful gaze of their mothers. The scene motivated me and I changed my mind: I would eat breakfast and read the newspaper at one of the tables surrounding the pool.
When I went up to my room it was almost two in the afternoon. I took a shower and this time enjoyed lunch in my room. After eating I scrolled through channels on the TV. Being unable to find anything that hooked me, I decided to take a nap instead. As soon as I awoke three hours later, I turned on my laptop and continued working. However, time passed and the page remained blank. I couldn’t find it in me to write anything. At the very least, nothing that satisfied me. Furthermore I remained disturbed by the diploma that sat in the box, among the rest of the objects from my unrecovered childhood. I couldn’t go on like this. Tomorrow I would have to rid myself of this doubt once and for all: before returning to Caracas I would go to the railway station and try to find out the authenticity of that piece of paper.
The next day I awoke early. Before nine and with the diploma in hand, I left for the train station. When the building facade began to materialize at the end of the long avenue, something terrible happened. The car cabin, suddenly and inexplicably, began to soften and melt as if it were made of playdough and the sun’s rays had managed to liquify it. I stepped on the breaks with violence and managed to park the car on one side of the avenue. I was sweating buckets. I could barely breathe but at the same time I didn’t dare get out and abandon the car. Suddenly a giant invisible hand pulled my chest sharply inward and the cabin spun like a merry-go-round. At the same time I could feel three fat rats running in terror through my intestines. At this point my urge to pee and defecate was almost uncontrollable. I closed my eyes and broke down on myself, as I experienced multiple violent shakes. I thought I was dying. That at any given moment my heart would stop beating and I would feel how the blood would stop pumping in my veins, unable to reach my brain.
With both arms I brought my legs up to my chest and curled myself up like a snail shell. I remained that way for almost half an hour. After some time, I gradually regained my composure. When I returned to my senses, I turned around and went back to the hotel.
I rang Isabella from the room.
Just as she had promised, she took no time in coming to my rescue. I told her what I had experienced just moments before, without sparing the details, saying how terrified I was that a similar situation could happen to me again. She tried to calm me down and asked me to repeat once more what I had done since the night we had seen each other. I told her everything, from my lack of concentration when trying to write to the irrational fear that the photo in the album had caused me two nights ago.
She grabbed the album and looked for the photo. She asked if I knew the other boy in the picture. I told her no, that I didn’t recognise him.
“It’s Alberto Vargas,” she said. “Or Beto, which is what we called him. Your best friend from primary school.”
She added that she remembered him as a strange, sad kid, who had a hard time forming friendships. That maybe I was his only friend. I asked her what happened to him, since I couldn’t recall him from my adolescence.
“That’s because he never reached adolescence,” she said. “He disappeared before turning thirteen and no one ever heard from him again. Among the neighbors there was a rumor that his father, an alcoholic who frequently abused him, had killed him and hidden his body during one of his drunken stupors. He was detained for a few days, but after the investigation was completed with no proof of guilt, he was released. A few days later they found him hanging from a rope in his house. People said that was enough to ratify the rumors that were going around. That he couldn’t stand to be alive with the guilt of having murdered his son and ended up taking his own life. Some time after, you fell ill. Some said it was due to Beto’s disappearance. That he had come for you and taken you away forever, because after such a trauma you were never the same.”
I had never heard of any of that. I suppose my parents tried to hide the truth to protect me from a relapse, they even chose to move house and it wasn’t until father’s death years later that we returned to that neighborhood. At that point I was around fifteen or sixteen years old and felt a profound urge to leave home. Cristina was only a seven-year-old girl. Three more years would pass before I left the city, with a handful of cash robbed from my mother’s jewelry box and the romantic illusions of turning into a writer.
Isabella tried to pass me the album with Beto’s picture and I felt the sickness that had overtaken me just moments before returning, although not with the same intensity. She observed for a minute how my body shook and began to sweat. She closed the album and told me she would prescribe me some sedatives and tomorrow we would go together to the railway station.
That night I once again dreamed of the terrified, tied-up boy in a dark room. I awoke and found myself in one of the hotel’s hallways, dazed, and quite disoriented. However, this was not as unpleasant as realizing that I was in my birthday suit, completely naked. Terrified, I ran around looking for my room, trying to guide myself using the room numbers on the doors. It wasn’t long before I was stopped by a pair of security agents who asked me to identify myself. Burning from shame, I explained that I was staying there and this was all a mixup. An unfortunate misunderstanding. One of them called the front desk with his radio, and they confirmed what I had just said. They escorted me to my room and, upon opening the door, they told me to please not do that again, or they would have to ask me to leave the hotel. Drowning in embarrassment, I entered my room without saying a word. I didn’t even say thank you.
It was impossible for me to sleep the rest of the night.
Later on I would leave the hotel. I was sure that I would never step foot there again, nor in that city that had caused me so much disgust and discomfort. I left a note for Isabella at reception, thanking her for her interest and help. However, only a few hours later I was calling her cell phone, desperate, on the verge of insanity:
“The first thing you need to do is calm down, Julio,” she said. “Have you followed my instructions? Have you used the sedatives?”
“That doesn’t work anymore, Isabella. I only want you to come and get me.”
“Where are you?”
“In a motel on the outskirts of the city.”
“Give me the name and address. I’ll try to be there as soon as possible.”
I did as she asked and took a couple more sedatives. I tried to think of less unpleasant things, although it was impossible to stop being afraid, impossible to stop imagining that, at any moment, I would lose control and turn myself into a wild and unbridled pack. And then, nobody would be able to do anything for me.
After half an hour, which for me felt like eternity, Isabella arrived. When I saw her I threw myself into her arms. She was my salvation, my only hope. Almost sobbing, I explained to her that I was leaving this town forever; that I had planned on never returning, but the feeling of another imminent panic attack had made me run off the highway and hide out in this motel. That there was something deep inside me telling me that I should not leave, that I would face a grave danger if I left the room.
She noted from the empty packets littered on the floor that I had taken more pills than I should have. She told me that everything I was experiencing, all I was feeling was only happening inside my head. That with pharmacological treatment and good therapy I could overcome my fears. She would help me. She wouldn’t leave me alone. I began to calm down. I don’t know why I felt so secure in her arms. Isabella stroked my hair, and was extremely sweet with her words and touches. There was a moment when she took my head with both hands and forced me to look her in the eyes. Suddenly she kissed me. I could feel her humid and slightly rough tongue slide itself into my mouth. Touching my palate and gums. I reacted by pushing her away violently.
What came after paralyzed me: before me I see a boy, the same from the photo… It’s raining and perhaps that’s why I can’t tell if he’s crying while he says he loves me. That he wants to live with me for the rest of his life, together with my family, so beautiful and noble… I feel anger. Anger and disgust from the kiss he has just given me (like Isabella’s) and I push him away, repulsed. Meanwhile he keeps talking without defending himself, repeating that he loves my family dearly, that he loves me dearly, that he’d do anything to be with us. He begs me to understand that he wanted to tell me for a long time but had never dared to until now. I keep pushing him with renowned strength and hatred because now I’m thinking of Isabella, young Isabella, and the ring she had gifted me only a few days back.
A scream makes me stop in my tracks. I wipe the rainwater from my face to see better and less than a yard away I see a deep pit with water at the bottom. Beto has fallen within, disappearing without a trace.
I run to the place where we had left our backpacks. I open his and look within his notebooks, searching for the story about trains he had read to me only minutes before. He planned on submitting it to the contest organized by the Autonomous Foundation of State Railways. It was part of the reinauguration ceremony of the station we’re in (and where we usually played in the afternoons after school). I rip the pages out of his notebook and shove them in my backpack. I return his notebook to his bag and run with it again to the edge of the pit. I throw it in and after a disgusting gurgle I see it disappear under the water, dragged by the current, just like Beto.
The rain keeps falling. I lift my gaze up to the sky and see the huge droplets falling. I close my eyes and feel them splash on my face. I extend my arms like a cross and hope that the rain will turn me into mud, like the dirt under my feet.
I open my eyes and find myself in front of a mirror. I can see my face on it. A distraught face, soaked now by tears instead of rain; it was no longer a boy’s face but rather a man’s, the man I am now, or thought myself to be. I don’t know. Further behind I observe Isabella’s silhouette, pale as a ghost, devastated by horror. I understood then that not only had I found my lost past, but that she had also been witness to the brutality that the old cardboard box held. A photo, a seemingly harmless, yellowing diploma. Without knowing why, I open a drawer of the dresser in front of me. I’m unsurprised by what I find inside. I grab the gun. I turn back to Isabella and shoot her straight in the forehead without saying a word. She collapses in silence, without a shout, without even uttering so much as a whimper. Perhaps without even knowing that she was falling and would never get up again.
However, my greatest fear is not knowing whether the next shot will be fired by me, or Beto.
Translated by Argelia Calzadilla Pérez & Ilú Suárez
This story is part of the book of short stories Mensajes en la pared, published by Monte Ávila Editors in 2006, within the collection Continents. The year after its publication, the book received the Municipal Prize in Literatur of the city of Caracas.
