Ernesto Quiñonez - San Juan Noir

That night you dream of Samira: you find her in the classroom dressed in the black-and-gold outfit from the talent show; she’s the teacher, you, the only student in a room illuminated by black candles. From a desk you watch her, glowing, self-absorbed, solving equations on the chalkboard. She turns around to begin class; the bells ring in the background. This is what we call the inverse ratio, with the constant Ω. This kind of ratio also appears in natural processes and phenomena, for example ... In the middle of her explanation, a gust of wind slips in through the recently opened door. All the candles go out; the moon provides the only illumination for what comes next. El Gato enters and undresses in front of a silent Samira. She keeps looking at you, as if wishing to continue the math lesson. He’s in front of her, naked, his skin covered with tattoos — skulls, tombstones, feline sex acts, men with pistols in place of their genitals, and women with breasts like curled-up cats. He strikes her and throws her on the floor. She seems to enjoy the beating. You stay motionless, paralyzed. You don’t want to stand; watching her suffer makes you feel good, so you watch her enjoy it, smiling passively, bleeding from the nose. El Gato positions her on the desk to take her. He’s panting, they’re panting, moaning, licking each other. You feel them licking your neck, and then you’re panting, it’s you moving on top of her, you feel your cock inside of her. El Gato is no longer there — you’re El Gato now — your arms spread on the desk, which creaks, and your arms are cat legs. You growl, you meow, and your tail quivers with pleasure. She sticks her claws into your chest. The pain wakes you up.

You don’t turn on the light to shower. You scrub your body vigorously as you try to remove the filth from your skin and your brain. You’ve seen cats clean themselves with their tongues, passively, parsimoniously, with all the time in the world, but yours is not a cat bath — it’s tense, exaggerated. But the water doesn’t eradicate the filth you feel, the dirt you harbor. It runs bloody in the darkness, down the drain that’s darker still.

When morning comes you have no desire to get up, to go back to the school. You decide to stay home with the memory of the dream, the sensation of claws embedded in your chest, and the thought of Samira presenting a report on inverse trigonometric functions. She herself was inverse: she wasn’t a normal adolescent; she acted like an adult, a teacher, erudite. She spoke more than the rest of the kids combined, and her conversation was substantive. Maestro, if so many people live happily off government benefits without needing to study, why do us kids have to study so much? Maestro, if God knows everything, why did He create the devil?

That question goes beyond the scope of mathematics , you would always answer.

You look like a vagrant now. You watch the news again, flip through the channels, peer out the apartment’s front and back windows, and look through the newspaper. You read every page and inspect every photo, but you don’t find Samira. Your hands are dirty, so you clean them with your tongue, passively, parsimoniously, with all the time in the world. Math is good for nothing — nothing in this life — it doesn’t help you live well, or be born, it doesn’t help yield high probabilities of ending up with an good family, and when you die it won’t give you one extra microsecond.

The students give you a surprising reception. Maestro, you don’t look so good. Are you sick? You look like you’re about to die. Maestro, we have news for you, says one of the boys in the classroom. Look at this picture. You see the façade of a notorious bar called Y. Stories of killings that have happened there have been in the papers and on the news before. You think of “Y” as one of the protagonist variables in an equation on the chalkboard. Some of my friends saw her there last night... She’s a total star, a sensation, the little jewel of the business, the most popular whore. Maestro, can you go save her?

You let the night enter you as you board the train at Sagrado Corazón. You no longer care that the map of your trajectory resembles a folded arm, but you do remember the mole in the shape of a cockroach on Samira’s elbow; you enter the underground at that elbow. The urban landscape is unimportant, you think, seeing the long beard of a sick, drunk Zeus. You don’t see Samira. You exit the train and enter the street amid the shadows and decaying odors, where cat-sized rats run by. Deep down you think about the probability of forgetting Samira. A kid offers you cocaine. You tell him that you’re not interested. Fuck yourself, he says without fear. You want to go home. Down a dark street you see two women kissing, and you act like you don’t notice. You arrive at Y. Some men enter with the tranquility of coming home; you long to go to your own home. I’m ridiculous, you can’t stop thinking. The large, red Y outside invites you in, as if you’ll find the answer to the equation you’re trying to solve.

You drink two beers in one hour — the last one already tastes bitter. You listen to the noise; the salsa; the solicitations of older women: you can do everything for this much; the proposals of little girls; none of them is Samira. You feel tricked; it’s impossible that you’d find one of your students here. With her intelligence she’s guaranteed a promising future. Samira would become an upstanding citizen. You think about ordering another beer, but instead decide to pay, leave a tip, and get out of there. You make your way through the patrons who’re there to have a good time.

Back on the train you hear the faraway click of high heels. A shadow approaches with a distinct glow around her hair, like a character with a halo from the calendar of saints. She moves sensually, the sashay of hips possessed by tropical music — you can almost imagine the salsa playing at the Y. As she approaches, you see a black silk scarf. It’s long and it plays with her to the rhythm of inaudible music. You don’t recognize it; you do recognize her.

Maestro, good evening. I never thought I’d see you in these shadowy places.

You don’t answer. You look at her: she’s overly made-up, like a woman already, an adult; she’s not the student you once knew, and you can almost imagine an extensive life history. She traps you with the scarf, tosses it over you, and you feel the band of cloth on your back. She comes closer to you with a slight pull — a grouping of sets, whole numbers, Samira is equal to — standing, she curls up into you.

Maestro, I like this too much... With every man I relive the nights with El Gato, my cat. It’s like this dead man comes back to life every day, like a miracle, and I want to do this for the rest of my life. Don’t give me that face; I’m happy, and my mom knows all about it — she brought me here. She got laid off at work, like they throw out the trash, that’s how they got rid of her. My mom brought me to these dark places and I enjoyed it from the very first time. I couldn’t let my little mother go hungry after all that she’s done for me, so I closed my eyes and felt my cat on top of me, beside me, and behind me. I also want you to know that for as long as I can remember, after working all day, Mom helped me with my homework at night, we played together, and I went to bed early with a prayer to God. Later, I sometimes escaped from my bed, and would find her with other men in the house. At first she told me it was Daddy who came in spirit to visit her, because spirits have needs too, and at first I believed it, but then I saw Daddy as a big man, other times as a small man. Sometimes he was white, sometimes black, and a few times I saw him with Asian eyes; being a spirit gives you such powers, you can change shape. Some nights Daddy could transform himself into a rich or a poor man, and his soul is so powerful that my mom said it can even transform itself into a woman. And I pretended to believe her. Maestro, I don’t want to go back to school. What I wish for now is to be on one of those cheap motel beds, where you can hear people jabbering in the streets, where the red lights change the color of your face, where not even a fan can evaporate my sweat and filth — our filth. Ay, maestro, you don’t know how much I’ve fantasized about you! I’ve imagined it so many ways that sometimes I think it’s real, more real than the men who’ve been fucking me these past few weeks. Maestro, if you say anything or if I find out that people from the government have done anything to my mom, I swear that you’ll never forget me, because I’ll tell everyone the story of how you tried to touch me at school. I’ll tell them that a few days later you took me on your desk and threatened my grades so you could screw me every day. I’ll cry when I tell it, with an expression of shame and pain, and there won’t be a single police officer or judge who won’t be moved. Ah, I want to go to bed—