Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

He delves into his left ear with his pinky finger and then observes the extracted wax with great attention. He goes on chewing zealously.

“What do you have to say? I feel like our adversaries are respectable. That’s what I think, and I’ve seen them at their worst, human garbage, the mother giving up her son or the son giving up his mother, all dignity lost. But even so, I consider them respectable. But the feeling is not reciprocated, you know? That hurts. I don’t like to walk around this neighborhood. I come here by bus every day. I don’t have a car. If there’s an emergency they send someone to pick me up. But normally, I come in and leave through these filthy streets that are a boiling cauldron of foul-smelling cars all squeezing in together and thousands of pedestrians who look like beggars. What my mother would say if she saw me go by on my way home from work! This godforsaken lot, the pigeon shit on the ground and on the bodywork of the cars, fucking up the paint on the undercover cars and taxis they use when they follow people. .” The mayonnaise slides down his chin. “And outside, in the honking horns and squealing breaks,” he goes on. “The litter, the leftover food in wet and stinking cardboard containers, the scraps of fruits and vegetables that fall from crates and rot in the streets, the vulgarity, you know? The crushed beer cans that no one picks up, the oil spots on the pavement with its tar patches, the walls with curse words scrawled on them and shredded posters stuck on top of other shredded posters, the kiosk where they sell cigarettes, peanuts, sweets, and chocolates in the middle of the machine racket, the evil whine of the pigeons and the piss left by skinny, sleepy cats, those skin-and-bone cats that are always stretching, and the dirty roofs, the black smoke from the bus engines, their breaks that screech and squeal and hurt your ears, the same tired little shop on the corner, with its television always on full volume, where they sell mote con huesillo and where for safety reasons I never set foot, though that’s where these sandwiches and my Pepsi come from, the worn-out noise of the old trucks, the air heavy and stinging from the nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide and the ozone and the cancerous soot from the diesel engines. .”

“Gato! I have to go. They’re waiting for me. It’s urgent. .”

He falls silent. He takes another bite of the sandwich. I can’t avoid seeing in his open mouth the results of his back molars’ indefatigable chewing. As for him, he seems to be squinting at something far away.

“What would my mother say if she saw me in the middle of the muck of this neighborhood!” And he looks at the ceiling. He wants me to feel sorry for him. At the same time, he’s being sincere. “She, who was such a lady; she made such delicate embroideries that my aunts, who were both older than her, were jealous, and they competed with her but were never able to match the lace on her immaculate tablecloths. If she were alive, could I stand this job? What could I tell her? Listen, Central owes so much to me. I wasn’t here before, you know that, I’ve already told you that; I wasn’t here when the worst things, the most gruesome, were happening, the things that were so horrible that lots of people can’t even believe they happened. And that’s what they expected back then, that no one or almost no one would believe the victims. And the ones closest to them, the ones who actually would believe, well, even better, because they were exactly the ones who had to be taught a lesson. That was before they created Central. I started this shitty job here. And they owe me a lot, hear? Even though I just follow orders same as everyone else on the chain of command, same as Flaco Artaza, who gives orders to me and to Macha, who started working here after I did. He hasn’t been in this for very long, when it comes down to it. And here, no one answers to himself. If they did it would be pure chaos, we’d all be fucked, tearing at each other’s throats. Get it? Chain of command. Sure. The Chain of Command gives us orders that we’d rather not get, right? I wasn’t made for this. I mean: I am not what I do. Because, what the fuck, these are our fellow countrymen, it’s really hard, see?” He drags his little voice, inviting my commiseration; he thinks it’s possible, he wants to be thought of as a victim. “But,” he says with a dignified gesture, “I’ve done my duty, I’ve obeyed. That’s my honor. I’m right where they’ve ordered me to be, down here in this sewer, no judgment. Responsibility lies with the ones who give us orders. I just have to carry them out. Verticality of command. Compartmenting. As it should be. As I was taught. Though of course, I still manage to find out what goes on around here. But I haven’t invented anything new, no new techniques or procedures. It’s not like I enjoy what I do, and I go around thinking up new shit, you get me? You’ve seen it. You have to hold back the nausea sometimes. . But this is what I have to do, and if it wasn’t me it would be someone else. The order is there, it has to be carried out. Even so, when it comes to me, no one wants to see me. No one here inside, I mean.

“Macha is different, you know? He’s the only one who looks me in the eye. I wonder: Is he afraid of me? Macha, who they tell me is so courageous?. . Some afternoons he invites me out for a cold one at a bar around here, close to the market. We talk in a way we can’t talk with people who work directly with us. Because of compartmenting, you understand. I don’t know who Rat is. I know his pseudonym. I don’t know who his wife is or anything about his kids. I’m not supposed to know. Although, don’t ask me why but I get the feeling he’s fuzz. He doesn’t know anything about me either. It’s for good reason our anthem says ‘We are children of solitude.’ No one is more solitary than us, man,” and he looks at me with emptied eyes. “With so much distrust, you end up not trusting yourself. You start to think of the enemy as an equal, almost like a brother. He must be all alone, too, in some miserable room in a boardinghouse out there, living his lousy clandestine life. His presence, which is always alive in your imagination, accompanies you from afar. If it were possible. . You know: hate and love can change places. Later, you tell yourself that no, obviously it’s not like that, he is, truly and completely, your enemy. And still. .

Macha doesn’t know who Iris really is, or Chico Marín. He doesn’t know. . On the other hand, since we’re in different departments, Macha Carrasco and I can talk. Not a lot, but some. Even though we only know each other by our fake names. But I know who his son is, I do know that. We talk about soccer, we talk about his father, who was a truck driver. He drove a Ford with a trailer on it, and Macha hardly ever saw him. He carried cargo to the south, Macha’s dad did, and he was hardly ever home. They didn’t get along well. ‘My old man,’ he told me, ‘put me in military school to straighten me out.’ That way, they’d see each other less. ‘My old man didn’t take me into account,’ he says. His old man wasn’t there for Macha. Maybe that’s why he turned out so macho. That’s what I think.

“We don’t talk about work much. A little, though. He looks down on it. He looks down on our ‘fat-ass bosses,’ he looks down on the decorations, the circular commands; he doesn’t trust anyone. . If there was ever a solitary man, it’s him. I think he can’t even imagine how far his ‘fat-ass bosses’ would be willing to go. The day he least expects it, they’ll get sick of looking the other way when he ignores procedure, they’ll get tired of his habit of going off, out of an excess of ‘professional pride,’ as they say, to arrest the “Prince of Wales,” for example, on his own and with no one’s authorization — not no one’s, as Ronco would say — I don’t think a thing like that even crosses his mind. Or Iris’s, or Great Dane’s, or any of the other people who blindly follow him. Command has hardened feelings, you know. To Command, we’re all disposable, hear? Not just the terrorists. Everyone. And above all, the ones who do this job.”