Narrativabreve Stories

Norma yawned, sat up among her jewels, and walked to the staircase that would take her to the rooms. On the plastic table, on a bandana she had used as a tablecloth, there was a card that was one of the 22 Major Arcana of Marseille. At the top, inscribed in red Roman numerals, was the number 18. Below, a violet and red moon emitted thick, pointed rays. Jana caught her breath and focused her mind on the details and symbolism. Under the rays, small drops of white, yellow, red, and green fell on two animals that looked like dogs and could be wolves, sticking their tongues out in thirst. Behind them, in the background, were two modest fortifications. The one on the left was yellow, the one on the right, white. Both had a red strip before the openings where the lookouts rested their weapons. One of the dogs was a timid light blue, and the other a shade that oscillated between the rosy color of piglets and snow white. They stepped on an intense green cord like the drops, and immediately after came a body of water that didn't seem like a river or a sea, but a crustacean appeared. In the center, with claws raised, was a lobster. Jana had gone along with Norma as a game, but she felt that what she was saying was addressing her. She had said that if that card appeared inverted, it meant lies, deception, hidden loves, conflicts with the maternal image, even cancer, and eating disorders like anorexia. If it appeared upright, it referred to ancestors, sea voyages, parties, past lives, reconciliation, and liberation from complex traumas. "Memory, it's the moon, dear, there's a whole world in it." When Jana decoded the message, she left the comfort of the house protected by air conditioning and decided to step into the January inferno.

"Straight, uppercut, and cross! Move, you're an easy target! Straight, uppercut, and cross! Again, come on!" Voices that seem to come from beyond, but this is the present. A silent spectator, at the Caesar Palace Stadium in Las Vegas. A nearby buzzing tells me not to move, but I do. Amilcar looks at me as one looks at something that once held desire but lost it for some reason. I realize I'm scared, and through the clots falling from my nose, I can feel alive. Rubito shoves a swab with acid into my nose that seems to pierce my brain. I can barely open my eyes and mutter. I feel the blood flowing from my nose to my throat, making me want to spit, but the mouthguard is a stone in the shoe of every boxer. It's hard to breathe and spit with the mouthguard, but it's not advisable to lose your teeth. No rule says you can't fight like this. Falucho and Amilcar create a kind of human curtain and help me stand. Someone from behind holds me up by my jockstrap. They pour cold water from canteens, and the water drains through my pants. I see people mopping that opaque liquid out of the ringside.

The tip wasn't reliable enough for me to be there. Not because my presence was out of place among the regulars at Tropezón, as I had frequented the place for years, but because I couldn't believe Pulpo was using that dive as the center of his current operations. But there he was, and I had it out for him. Gutiérrez had warned me, an old dockworker who, after tearing his cruciate ligaments, spent his days driving a garbage truck. He got the tip from someone in the union: "Pulpo is back in the mud and hangs out at Club Unión." The bar in question wasn't a nightclub but the buffet of a civil association that in its heyday had been the cradle of great basketball players and was now about to mark two decades as a haven for drunks and gamblers gathered around a bocce court. I had left at the beginning of that decline, more precisely when the fire happened. That's how it was. I caught the first bus heading to the Valley and took off.

La desesperanza de sentir vació, solo, sin nada, impotente...