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Joaquín Font, Calle Colima, Colonia Condesa, Mexico City DF, August 1987. Freedom is like a prime number. When I got home everything had changed. My wife didn't live here anymore and my daughter Angélica was sleeping in my bedroom now with her partner, a theater director a few years older than me. My son, meanwhile, had taken over the little house in the garden which he shared with a girl with Indian features. Both he and Angélica worked full-time, although they didn't make much money. My daughter María was living in a hotel near the Monumento a la Revolución and almost never saw her sister and brother. My wife, it seemed, had remarried. The theater director turned out to be quite a considerate person. He had been a friend of La Vieja Segura, or a disciple of his, I couldn't say for sure, and he didn't have much money or luck, but he hoped to direct a play someday that would catapult him to fame and fortune. At night, as we ate di
The first night I slept in the living room. I put a blanket on the sofa, lay down, and closed my eyes. The noises were the same as ever. But no, I was wrong. There was something that made them different and prevented me from sleeping, so I spent my nights sitting on the sofa with the television on and my eyes half shut. Then I moved into my son's old room and that cheered me up. I suppose it was because the room still retained a certain air of happy, carefree adolescence. I don't know. In any case, after three days the room only smelled like me, in other words, like old age and madness, and everything went back to the way it was before. I got depressed and didn't know what to do. Silently, I waited in that empty house for the hours to go by until one of my children would come back from work and we could exchange a few words. Sometimes someone would call and I would answer. Hello? Who is this? No one knew me and I didn't know anyone.
A week after I came home I started to take walks around the neighborhood. At first they were short walks: once around the block and that was it. Little by little, though, I grew more daring, and my outings, at first tentative, took me farther and farther afield. The neighborhood had changed. I was mugged two different times. The first time, it was kids with kitchen knives, and the second time, some older guys who beat me up when they didn't find any money in my pockets. But I don't feel pain anymore and I didn't care. That's one of the things I learned at La Fortaleza. That night, Lola, my son's girlfriend, put iodine on my cuts and scrapes and warned me that there were certain places I shouldn't go. I told her that I didn't care whether I got beaten up every so often. Do you like it? she said. I don't, I said. If I were beaten up every day I wouldn't like it.
One night the theater director said that the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was going to give him a grant. We celebrated. My son and his girlfriend went out to buy a bottle of tequila and my daughter and the director made a gala di
A week later the department that was supposed to award the grant was closed because of budget cuts and the theater director ended up with nothing.
I realized that it was time for me to take action. I took action. I called a few old friends. At first no one remembered me. Where have you been? they said. Where have you come from? What kind of life have you been leading? I told them that I'd just returned from abroad. I've been traveling around the Mediterranean, I've lived in Italy and in Istanbul. I've been looking at buildings in Cairo, so suggestive architecturally. Suggestive? Yes, of hell. Like the Tlatelolco towers, but with less green space. Like Ciudad Satélite, but without ru
All of this persistence finally landed me a job as a draftsman in the studio of an architect I didn't know. He was a kid who was just starting out, and when he discovered that I was an architect, not a draftsman, he took a liking to me. At night, when we closed the little office, we would go to a bar in Ampliación Popocatépetl, near Calle Cabrera. The bar was called El Destino and we would sit there talking about architecture and politics (the kid was a Trotskyite) and travel and women. His name was Juan Arenas. He had a partner I hardly ever saw, a fat guy in his forties who was an architect too but he looked more like he belonged to the secret police and hardly ever showed up at the studio. So the firm essentially consisted of Juan Arenas and me, and since we had hardly anything to do and we liked to talk, we spent most of the day talking. At night he would give me a ride home and as we crossed a Mexico City like a fading nightmare, I would sometimes think that Juan Arenas was my happier reincarnation.
One day I invited him to the house for lunch. It was a Sunday. No one was home and I made him soup and an omelet. We ate in the kitchen. It was nice to be there, listening to the birds that came to peck in the garden and watching Juan Arenas, a simple, unpretentious boy who ate with a hearty appetite. He lived alone. He wasn't from Mexico City but Ciudad Madero, and sometimes he felt lost in the capital. Later my daughter and her partner came home and found us watching TV and playing cards. I think that Juan Arenas liked my daughter from the start, and after that he visited often. Sometimes I would dream that we were all living together in the house on Calle Colima, my two daughters, my son, the theater director, Lola, and Juan Arenas. Not my wife. I didn't see her living with us. But things never turn out the way you see them in dreams, and one day Juan Arenas and his partner closed the office and vanished without saying where they were going.