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He
climbed the stairs trying not to make a sound. In the living room Charly Cruz
and the man with the mustache were talking in Spanish. Charly Cruz's voice was
soothing. The voice of the man with the mustache was squeaky, as if his vocal
cords were atrophied. The noise he'd heard in the hallway repeated itself. The
stairs ended in a room with a big window behind the dark brown plastic slats of
a Venetian blind. Fate went down another hallway. He opened a door. Rosa Mendez
was lying facedown on a military-looking bed. She was dressed and had high
heels on, but she seemed to be asleep or to have passed out. The room was
furnished with only a bed and chair. The floor, unlike the floor downstairs,
was carpeted, so his steps made almost no sound. He went over to the girl and
turned her head. Rosa Mendez smiled without opening her eyes. This hallway led
to another. Fate could see light coming from under one of the doors. He heard
Chucho Flores and
Corona
arguing, but he didn't know what they were arguing about. He thought they both
wanted to fuck Rosa Amalfitano. Then he thought maybe they were arguing about
him.
Corona
sounded truly angry. He opened the door without knocking and the two men turned
around at once, their faces stamped with a mixture of surprise and sleepiness.
Now I have to try to be what I am, thought Fate, a black guy from Harlem, a
terrifying
Harlem
motherfucker. Almost
immediately he realized that neither of the Mexicans was impressed.
"Where's
Rosa
?" he asked.

Chucho
Flores managed to point to a corner of the room that Fate hadn't seen. I've
lived this scene before, thought Fate.
Rosa
was sitting in an armchair, with her legs crossed, snorting cocaine.
"Let's go," he said.

He
didn't order her or plead with her. He just asked her to come with him, but he
put all his soul into the words.
Rosa
smiled
at him sympathetically, but she didn't seem to understand. He heard Chucho
Flores say in English: get out of here, amigo, wait for us downstairs. Fate
held out his hand to the girl.
Rosa
got up and
took it. Her hand felt warm, its temperature evoking other scenarios but also
evoking or encompassing their current sordid circumstances. When he took it he
became conscious of the coldness of his own hand. I've been dying all this
time, he thought. I'm as cold as ice. If she hadn't taken my hand I would've
died right here and they would've had to send my body back to
New York
.

As
they left the room he felt
Corona
grab his arm and saw him lift his free hand, which seemed to be holding a blunt
instrument. He turned around and dealt
Corona
an uppercut to the chin, in the style of Count Pickett. Like Merolino Fernandez
earlier,
Corona
dropped to the floor without a sound. Only then did Fate realize
Corona
was holding a gun.
He took it away from him and asked Chucho Flores what he planned to do.

"I'm not jealous, amigo," said Chucho Flores with his
hands raised at chest height so that Fate could see he wasn't carrying a
weapon.

Rosa Amalfitano looked at
Corona
's
gun as if it were a sex-shop contraption.

"Let's go," he heard her say. "Who's the guy
downstairs?" asked Fate.

"Charly, your friend Charly Cruz," said Chucho Flores,
smiling. "No, you son of a bitch, the other one, the one with the
mustache." "A friend of Charly s," said Chucho Flores. "Is
there another way out of this goddamn house?" Chucho Flores shrugged.

"Listen, man, aren't you taking this too far?" he
asked. "Yes, there's a back door," said Rosa Amalfitano. Fate looked
at
Corona
's
fallen body and seemed to reflect for a few seconds.

"The car is in the garage," he said, "we can't
leave without it." "Then you'll have to go out the front door,"
said Chucho Flores. "What about him?" asked Rosa Amalfitano, pointing
to
Corona
,
"is he dead?"

Fate looked again at the limp body on the floor. He could have
stared for hours.

"Let's go," he said in a decisive voice.

They went down the stairs, passed through an enormous kitchen that
smelled of neglect, as if it had been a long time since anyone cooked there,
crossed a hallway with a view of a courtyard where there was a pickup truck
covered by a black tarp, and then walked entirely in the dark until they
reached the door that led down to the garage. When Fate turned on the lights,
two big fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling, he took another look at the
mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe. When he moved to open the garage door he
realized that the Virgin's single open eye seemed to follow him wherever he
went. He put Chucho Flores in the front passenger seat and
Rosa
got in the back. As they drove out of the garage he caught a glimpse of the man
with the mustache. He had appeared at the top of the stairs and was looking
around for them with the expression of a startled adolescent.

They
left Charly Cruz's house behind and turned down unpaved streets. Without
realizing it, they crossed an empty stretch that gave off a strong smell of
weeds and rotting food. Fate stopped the car, cleaned the gun with a handkerchief,
and threw it into the lot.

"What
a pretty night," murmured Chucho
Flores
.

Neither
Rosa
nor Fate said anything.

They left Chucho Flores at a bus stop on a deserted and
brightly lit street.
Rosa
got in the front
seat, giving Chucho Flores a parting slap in the face. Then they headed down a
labyrinth of streets that neither
Rosa
nor
Fate recognized, until they came out onto another street that led straight to
the center of the city.

"I
think I've been an idiot," said Fate.

"I was the idiot," said
Rosa
.

"No,
I was," said Fate.

They
started to laugh, and after circling the city center a few times, they let
themselves be caught up in the stream of cars with Mexican and American license
plates heading out of the city.

"Where
are we going?" asked Fate. "Where do you live?"

She
said she didn't want to go home yet. They passed Fate's motel, and for a few
seconds he didn't know whether to keep going to the border or stay there. Half
a mile farther down the road he turned around and headed south again, toward
the motel. The clerk recognized him. He asked how the fight had gone.

"Merolino
lost," said Fate.

"Of
course," said the clerk.

Fate
asked whether his room was still vacant. The clerk said it was. Fate stuck his
hand in his pocket and pulled out the key to the room, which he had kept.

"That's
right," he said.

He
paid for another night and then he went out.
Rosa
was waiting for him in the car.

"You
can stay here for a while," said Fate, "and whenever you say I'll
take you home."

Rosa
nodded and they went in. The bed was made
and the sheets were clean. The two windows were open a crack. Maybe the
cleaning person had noticed a trace of vomit smell, thought Fate. But the room
smelled fine.
Rosa
turned on the TV and sat in
a chair.

"I've
been watching you," she said.

"I'm
flattered," said Fate.

"Why did you clean the gun before you got rid of it?"
asked
Rosa
.

"You never know," said Fate, "but I'd rather
not go around leaving fingerprints on firearms."

Then
Rosa
focused her
attention on the TV show, a Mexican talk show that was essentially just an old
woman talking. She had long white hair. Sometimes she smiled and you could tell
she was a nice, harmless little old lady, but most of the time she had a grave
expression on her face, as if she were addressing matters of great importance.
Of course, he didn't understand a thing she said. Then
Rosa
got up from the chair, turned off the TV, and asked whether she could take a
shower. Fate nodded. When
Rosa
went into the
bathroom and closed the door he began to think about everything that had
happened that night and his stomach hurt. He felt a wave of heat rise to his
face. He sat on the bed, covered his face with his hands, and thought of what
an idiot he'd been.

•

When she came out of the bathroom,
Rosa
told him that she had been Chucho Flores's girlfriend, or something like that.
She was lonely in Santa Teresa and one day she met Rosa Mendez at Charly Cruz's
video store, where she went to rent movies. She couldn't say why, but she liked
Rosa Mendez from the moment she met her. During the day, according to Rosa
Mendez, she worked at a supermarket and at night she worked as a waitress at a
restaurant. She liked movies and she loved thrillers. Maybe what Rosa
Amalfitano liked about Rosa Mendez was her perpetual cheerfulness and also her
bleached-blond hair, which contrasted strongly with her dark skin.

One day Rosa Mendez introduced her to Charly Cruz, the owner of
the video store, whom she'd seen only a few times, and Charly Cruz struck her
as a relaxed person, someone who took things easy, and sometimes he loaned her
movies or didn't charge her for the movies she rented. Often she would spend
whole afternoons at the video store, talking to them or helping Charly Cruz
unpack new shipments of movies.

One night, when the store was about to close, she met
Chucho Flores. That same night Chucho Flores took them all out to dinner and
later he gave her a ride home, although when she invited him in he said he'd
rather pass, because he didn't want to bother her father. But she gave him her
phone number and Chucho Flores called the next day and asked her out to the
movies. When
Rosa
got to the theater, Chucho
Flores was there with Rosa Mendez and her date, an older man around fifty who
said he was in the real estate business and who treated Chucho like a nephew.
After the movie they had dinner at a fancy restaurant and later Chucho Flores
dropped her off at home, claiming that the next day he had to get up early
because he was going to
Hermosillo
to interview someone for the radio.

Around
that time, Rosa Amalfitano saw Rosa Mendez not just at Charly Cruz's video
store but also at her place in Colonia Madero, in an apartment on the fourth
floor of an old five-story building with no elevator, for which Rosa Mendez
paid lots of money. At first, Rosa Mendez had shared the apartment with two
friends, so the rent wasn't too bad. But one friend left to try her luck in
Mexico City
and she had a
fight with the other friend, and after that she lived alone. Rosa Mendez liked
to live alone, even though she had to work a second job to afford it. Sometimes
Rosa Amalfitano would spend hours at Rosa Mendez's apartment, not talking,
lying on the couch drinking
agua fresca
and listening to her friend's
stories. Sometimes they talked about men. Here, as elsewhere, Rosa Mendez's
experience was richer and more varied than Rosa Amalfitano's. She was
twenty-four and she'd had, in her own words, four lovers who'd changed her in
some way. The first was when she was fifteen, a guy who worked at a maquiladora
and left her to go to the
United
States
. She remembered him fondly, but of
all her lovers he was the one who'd left the least mark on her. When she said
this Rosa Amalfitano laughed and Rosa Mendez laughed too without knowing
exactly why.

"You
sound like a
bolero,"
Rosa Amalfitano told her.

"Oh,
so that's it," answered Rosa Mendez, "well,
boleros
are true,
mana,
the words of the songs come from deep inside all of us and they're always
right."

"No,"
said Rosa Amalfitano, "they
seem
right, they
seem
authentic,
but they're actually full of shit."

At
this point, Rosa Mendez would give up arguing. Tacitly she acknowledged that
her friend, who was in college, after all, knew more
a
bout these things than she did. The boyfriend who'd left for the
United States
,
she explained again, was the one who'd left the least mark on her but also the
one she missed the most. How was that possible? She didn't know. The other
ones, the ones who came later, were different. And that was all. One day Rosa
Mendez told Rosa Amalfitano what it felt like to make love with a policeman.
"It's the best," she said.

"Why, what difference does it make?" her friend wanted
to know. "It's hard to explain,
mana,"
said Rosa Mendez,
"but it's like fucking a man who isn't exactly a man. It's like becoming a
little girl again, if that makes sense. It's like being fucked by a rock. A
mountain. You know you'll be there, on your knees, until the mountain says it's
over. And that in the end you'll be full."