Swift as Desire (18 page)

During the war, the radio served as an essential strategic tool. It was used to send orders to the troops on the front lines, but the signals were easily intercepted by the enemy. All they needed was a radio tuned to the same frequency. The German army, in accordance with its rigid routines, sent out orders at the same time each day, and the Allies took advantage of this to intercept the signals and listen to their orders. To foil the Allies, the Germans
invented a cryptographic machine, which changed one letter of the alphabet for another. One could use this modified typewriter to write normally, but as each letter was printed, it was substituted by another letter, with the aid of twenty-six cylinders containing thousands of combinations. The only way to decipher an encrypted message without knowing the relevant code was by guessing the position of the rotors at the beginning of the message, which was practically impossible.

But thanks to the collaboration of a number of notable mathematicians, the Allies soon developed an apparatus similar to the German Enigma, making it possible to decode the German messages. However, it was difficult and demanding work. At first they had to be laboriously guided by the number of repetitions of each particular letter, but then the Fish machine was invented, a teletype that coded and decoded messages much more swiftly. This process, which required so many hours of work, wasn’t wasted. After the war ended, it served to help advance the development of the computer.

Júbilo’s mind too was a sophisticated cryptographic machine, only it was out of order at the moment and was therefore making errors in interpreting signals. His wife’s delight was because she was happy to see him, not because she had received a scarf as a gift. The difference was very significant, but he couldn’t read it correctly. For the third time in his life, this had to do with active sunspots interfering with radio communication systems. Júbilo was suffering the catastrophic consequences of
this phenomenon, in both his personal and his professional life. Luckily, Lucha’s reaction to her husband’s surprise visit was so enthusiastic that it overcame his jealousy. She covered him with kisses and hugged him, and used their closeness to remedy her husband’s faulty memory.

“I knew you hadn’t forgotten my birthday.”

Júbilo realized his oversight immediately. How could he have forgotten something like that?! Since Lucha was thirteen years old they had always celebrated her birthday together, so although he was in no mood for celebration, he made an effort to put aside his jealousy and his problems to fete his wife as she deserved. He took her to dinner at Café Tacuba, and the meal turned out to be a powerful aphrodisiac. Café Tacuba was an integral part of their sentimental history. Among other things, Júbilo had asked Lucha to marry him there, and it was there that she had announced that he was going to be a father for a second time. Sitting at their regular table and being waited on by their usual waiter had a relaxing effect on Júbilo, and this helped him to recover his usual good mood. During dinner he was able to tell Lucha about his terrible experience the previous night, and he received from her all the support and understanding he expected and needed. As he held Lucha’s hand, light flooded his brain and illuminated the darkest corners of his soul. Gradually, the loving energy between them began to build up, and they hurried through the rest of their dinner so they could go home, eager to give themselves up to the pleasures
of love. Júbilo’s birthday present to Lucha was the best night of lovemaking that she’d ever had in her life and that she would ever have. It was a magical night. They made love as they never had before. But from then on, events were fated to overtake them, events that would hurl them from heaven down to hell, with extraordinary speed.

Lucha and Júbilo woke up aching but full of energy, despite having hardly slept all night. Lucha quickly dressed for work. She was careful, as always, to choose the least suggestive dress, in the hope that this would protect her most from her boss’s indiscreet glances. She gave her husband a long kiss on the mouth and hurried off to work. Júbilo took charge of Raúl and Ramiro.

Júbilo had now been awake for two full days and nights, one because of the airplane accident and the other because of their lovemaking. But the previous night had filled him with sufficient energy to overcome his exhaustion. He functioned much better at work than usual. His batteries were so highly charged that he didn’t feel tired again until he opened the door of his home late that night. He expected to find Lucha at home, but, surprisingly, she wasn’t there. Instead, he found his mother-in-law, who tried to explain as best she could that Lucha had called her from the office to tell her that she couldn’t pick up the children: she had asked her mother to take them home, and to explain to her husband that she would be home late, because there was an emergency at the office.

This seemed very strange to Júbilo. As hard as he tried to imagine what kind of “emergency” could occur in a telegraph office, he couldn’t think of any. He thanked his mother-in-law for looking after his children, and he swiftly took charge himself. After putting the children to bed, he lay down and turned on the radio.
La Hora Azul
had already started. Agustín Lara’s voice filled the bedroom.

It didn’t take long for the image of Lucha lying crucified on their bed to appear in his mind’s eye. Júbilo imagined her as she had been the previous night: burning, passionate, madly in love. It excited him to remember Lucha’s look of total ecstatic abandonment. What a woman he had!

Where could she be now? Why hadn’t she called? He was really worried. Soon the telephone rang. It was Júbilo’s mother-in-law. She was worried too. Her daughter had never done anything like this before. To calm her, Júbilo told her that Lucha had already come home and was breast-feeding Ramiro. With those words he was not only sincerely trying to ease his
suegra
’s worry, but also trying to prevent her from calling again, because the
ringing of the telephone made him even more nervous than he already was. He tried to listen to his radio program to clear his mind of negative thoughts and closed his eyes to concentrate even more.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Lucha. The music only served to remind him of the previous night, because these same songs had provided a musical background for their lovemaking. Lucha! Was she thinking of him too? Try as he could not to imagine anything bad, he failed. It seemed very suspicious that she hadn’t been in touch. The only reason he could think of was that she’d been in an accident…or that don Pedro had invited her out with him. His nerves were on edge. To calm them he turned first to cigarettes and then, when they ran out, he moved on to alcohol. It was bad luck that just at that moment Ramiro woke up. It was time for him to eat, but his mother wasn’t there to feed him. Júbilo tried to give him a bottle filled with cow’s milk from the refrigerator. While it was warming up, he held the infant in his arms so that
his crying wouldn’t wake Raúl. But as soon as Ramiro noticed the smell coming from his father’s body, his crying escalated dramatically, and there was no way to quiet him.

Júbilo had to apply cologne, brush his teeth, suck on mints, and coo to his son for hours before he was able to make him fall asleep again. He put Ramiro in his crib and lay back down on the bed. The alcohol and accumulated exhaustion of two full days and nights without sleep took effect and Júbilo slept deeply for a few minutes. It wasn’t long, but it was long enough for Ramiro to wake up again, pull the blanket that his father had covered him with over his face, and suffocate.

Júbilo awoke to Lucha’s screams. She had just arrived home, and before lying down to sleep beside her husband, she had leaned over to kiss her baby, only to find he was dead. Through his confusion and Lucha’s hysterical sobbing, Júbilo managed to ask:

“What happened?”

“Ramiro is dead!”

Júbilo just couldn’t understand what was happening. He approached his wife, who was pounding her fists on the wall, and tried to hold her arms so she wouldn’t injure herself. At first, Lucha let her husband hold her, but when she smelled alcohol on him, poorly disguised by the cologne, she pushed him away brusquely.

“Are you drunk? Is that why you didn’t hear the baby?”

Lucha now aimed her fury at Júbilo and struck him without mercy. At first Júbilo offered no resistance, he
felt he deserved it, and much more. He felt guilty. But then the guilt became so overwhelming that he lashed out at her savagely in return.

“What about you, where were you? Why didn’t you hear your baby? Were you out whoring around?”

Lucha stopped crying. She couldn’t believe what she had just heard. It wasn’t possible that Júbilo had said such a thing to her, much less at a time like this. She moved away from him slowly and walked toward the bathroom. On the way she picked up Raúl who, rubbing his eyes, had come looking for his parents. Lucha closed the bathroom door behind her and locked it. She didn’t want to see Júbilo. She couldn’t bring herself to explain to him that she had come home late because don Pedro had raped Lolita. That she had taken her friend to the doctor and hadn’t left her side until she was able to calm her down a little and take her home. Lucha didn’t have the strength to talk. She decided right then and there that she didn’t have anything more to say to Júbilo.

T
HE DEATH OF HIS
son was devastating for Júbilo. Failing to hear his own child was the worst thing he had ever done. He who considered himself specially gifted at being able to hear anything, from thunder to absolute silence, just couldn’t grasp what had happened. He who had believed that there was no such thing as total silence had simply been deaf to the world for a few minutes. He
who knew that no matter how quiet the air was, there were always hearts beating, planets spinning in the heavens, bodies breathing, plants growing; and all producing sounds, but he hadn’t heard anything! He hadn’t heard anything!

F
ROM A VERY YOUNG
age, Júbilo had realized that not everyone could hear as he did, that there were whispers, buzzes, creaks that were imperceptible for most people, but which to him were penetrating noises. Even the sound of an insect walking was audible to Júbilo. When he was taken to play at the beach, he would say to his grandmother, “Do you hear how the sand sings?” He was referring to the sound that the tiny grains of sand make as they are blown by the wind. To most people, that “song” is only sometimes audible in large sand dunes, but never on a sandy beach. To Júbilo, however, the intonations produced by the sand were quite clear.

Without a doubt, Júbilo had an ear that was adapted for hearing shortwave frequencies that not even modern machines could pick up. That sensitivity had been a problem for him, since over the years the city had become filled with an overpowering noise, like that of a rumbling truck. The sound often bothered him, it filled his ears with whistling sounds that sometimes even gave him a headache. And after all that, what good had it done him? He hadn’t heard his own child dying!