Роберто Боланьо - The Spirit of Science Fiction

The motorcycle-repair shop was a single room, six meters long by three wide. At the back, a door hanging half off its hinges led to an inner courtyard where garbage piled up. Margarito Pacheco, a.k.a. El Mofles, had been living there for two years, since the day he turned seventeen and left his mother’s house, which actually was only about three blocks away, also in Peralvillo. He fixed motorcycles and sometimes cars, though he was a pretty bad car mechanic. He knew it, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it: the night that José Arco and I showed up at his shop pushing the Honda, it had been more than a year since he’d touched a car. His specialty was motorcycles, though there wasn’t an abundance of work. Out of thrift or maybe because he liked it, he had set up house in the garage, though this was a detail that the unobservant visitor might miss: the only visible signs were a camp cot behind a heap of tires and a bookcase surrounded by old car calendars, oil calendars, and pinup calendars. The toilet was in the yard. He showered at his mother’s house.

At first glance, he seemed like a shy kid, but he wasn’t. He was missing all his upper teeth. Maybe that explains his initial reserve, his polite, monosyllabic responses to our questions, his enigmatic smiles when we laughed. This would go on until the stranger—in this case, me—said something that he found really interesting or funny. Then he would laugh openly or start to talk very fast, in a Spanish full of slang and words he invented as he went along. His eyes were big—too big—and as you got to know him, his sickly thinness became a strange beauty, gentle and asymmetrical. He had lost his teeth in a fight at fifteen. The mechanic’s trade was something he had learned in that very garage, first watching and then helping a mechanic from Tijuana who, as El Mofles described him, might easily have been Castaneda’s Don Juan. When the mechanic died, which was about two years ago, his wife didn’t want anything to do with the shop, and in less than a week she’d gone back to where she was from. El Mofles had the keys to the shop, and he waited there for someone to come and claim it, or at least to charge rent. At first he slept on the floor; then he brought in the camp cot and his clothes. After a month, the only person who came by, other than a few clients, was a guy trying to sell him a stolen motorcycle. That was how he got started in the business.

When I met him, he had just two motorcycles in the shop, his own and the Aztec Princess, which was the Benelli that José Arco had told me about. I said I liked it. El Mofles said it was a good bike and it was odd that it was still here in the shop. Days later I realized what he’d meant, and it seemed like a sign blinking half hidden among the oil stains and the dirty floorboards of the shop, a sign I could heed or not. In the business of stolen motorcycles, El Mofles worked with two people, one who brought the bikes and one who took them. Always the same two people. And always at set times. At the beginning of the month, a bike would appear, and halfway through the month the guy with the money would come and the bike would leave the shop. With the Aztec Princess, the routine had been interrupted for the first time in two years. The buyer didn’t turn up in fifteen days, or even a month, and the motorcycle was in danger of being orphaned or turned into spare parts and junk.

I bought it that very night.

You could say that the deal worked itself out. I didn’t have money, but El Mofles didn’t have a buyer either. I promised to pay him part when I got paid and the rest in two monthly installments. His counteroffer was better: I would give him whatever I could afford whenever I could afford it, and he would sell me the motorcycle for the price he had paid for it, on the condition that I take it that very night. As José Arco looked on, smiling, I accepted. I didn’t have a driver’s license—hell, I didn’t even know how to drive—but I had blind faith in my luck and in the signs I thought I had glimpsed. If you had a phone, everything would be perfect, I said.

“A phone? Yeah, right, it’s a miracle that we have electricity here.”

I didn’t ask whether he was referring to the neighborhood or the place. José Arco boiled water and made three Nescafés. From a plastic bag hanging on the wall, El Mofles took some cold quesadillas. He warmed them on a hot plate. They were stiff, of course, but they looked good. As he was heating them up, he told me that I should come in one of these days to give the motorcycle a coat of paint.

“I like it the way it is,” I said.

“It’s always a good idea with a stolen motorcycle. That’s the way it’s done.”

“These quesadillas are great,” said José Arco. “Did your mom make them?”

El Mofles nodded. Then he shook his head, and as if he could hardly believe it, he said, “I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t think to get rid of the inscription. I just realized.”

“What inscription?”

“On the Aztec Princess. It’s practically screaming that it’s stolen.”

“It’s a nice inscription. The letters are even metallic.”

“I have no idea why I didn’t scrape it off.”

“I like it this way,” I said. “I’m not going to get rid of it.”

The rain wasn’t letting up outside. Sometimes gusts of wind shook the whole shop, as if it was about to be ripped from its foundations, and the doors groaned with a rasping sound that was like a laugh and then a sudden deep scream. It sounds like someone being beaten to death, muttered José Arco. We were serious all of a sudden, lost in the storm and our own thoughts, as if the space in between—that is, the shop and the words we could have been speaking—didn’t exist. In the yard, the wind whipped the empty cans and papers.

After each sound, El Mofles looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes he paced back and forth with the cup of Nescafé in his hand, trying or pretending to read the grime-covered signs posted on the walls. Still, he didn’t seem nervous. On the contrary. Though you could say it was a deceptive calm, no more than a surface calm: a remoteness neither arctic nor ignorant but like that of a Christian just released from his torments. The remoteness of a body that’s been terribly beaten or utterly satiated.

“The world is beautiful, isn’t it?” said El Mofles.

It was five in the morning when we left. My two friends spent a while teaching me the basic principles of motorcycle riding. According to them, the trick was not to be afraid of cars and to know how to accelerate, brake, and use the clutch. What about changing speeds? That’s important, too. Try to keep your balance. Try to glance at stoplights every once in a while. Don’t worry about the rain.

I went out into the yard to check the weather. The rain wasn’t as intense anymore. I asked José Arco what would happen if we were outside when it started coming down hard again. He didn’t answer. After El Mofles had tuned up the Honda, he asked us if we wanted to hear some poems he’d written. (Making these requests, El Mofles was like a village priest in the presence of the pope: he welcomed all criticism and never defended anything he’d written.) Of the five or six he read that night, there was one that I liked a lot: it was about his girlfriend, Lupita, and his mother watching from the distance as a building went up. The rest were pop-style poems: song lyrics, ballads. José Arco loved them. I didn’t. When we leave, José Arco said, I’m going to tell you the best story El Mofles ever came up with.

“What is it?”

“It’s the story of how Georges Perec, as a boy, prevented a duel to the death between Isidore Isou and Altagor in an old neighborhood of Paris.”