Phone’s still broken?
You’re not going to report it, Don Leopoldo?
Of course not, Pascacio. No.
Still busted. I’m heading there again tomorrow to call my cousin Jacinta up in Jacksonville and my sister, you’ve met my little sister? She’s calling our Aunt Rosalia up in Jersey. Both had to flee after the last Paquetazo. You probably have a call or two to make too, eh?
Leopoldo does. And yet admitting it would reveal that his family is also vulnerable to the periodic catchups between downturns and shocks. Therapies of shock everyone calls Los Paquetazos. Thanks for the tip, Leopoldo says, finalizing their exchange as they reach León’s office with the rolltop oak desk they’ve been pushing along the hallway. The one desk remaining on the third floor. Or on any of the five floors. A relic from the times when El Loco and his cohorts emptied the municipal palace of everything but the doorknobs, the wallpaper, the one rolltop oak desk that was too heavy to haul.
After Pascacio picks up his bucket and mop, after he wishes Leopoldo a good night, after the metallic sound of his oscillating bucket fades down the stairs, Leopoldo checks his watch for scratches, though in the dark this isn’t easy to do, the only working light is down the hall, from the lamppost out the window, which he approaches with an industrious trudge and inflated chest, ridiculing himself for the servile diligence he adopts when León’s around, hearing the mottled collision of bugs outside, fireflies and moths and mayflies, those leeches of light, smashing themselves against the incandescence. Pascacio’s trying to rack up favors by helping him. Don Leopoldo, at the registry they’re asking my sister for a bribe she can’t afford. Don Leopoldo, at the social security they’ve pocketed my grandfather’s pension. With one call Leopoldo can fix these. He’s León Martín Cordero’s chief of staff. He has that kind of pull. And yet his pull is at odds with the digital watch he’s been sporting since high school, a gift from when his godfather scored his father a minor post in the prefecture, a clunker with shortlegged blip buttons and a rubber strap, sure, but an advanced machine back then, before his father fled in the wake of an embezzlement scandal. No new scratches from pushing the rolltop. Good.
Though he’s exhausted he will not wait for the bus at the stop nearby, even though at this late hour Pascacio’s the only coworker who might spot him there, but instead he will navigate through Pedro Carbo, Chimborazo, Boyacá, and at the crossing between Sucre and Rumichaca he will catch and ride a different bus along Víctor Manuel Rendón, Junín, Urdaneta, past that gas station that used to dump burnt Pennzoil in the Salado River, past La Atarazana and La Garzota and up the slope on Alcívar, where the bus driver will downshift abruptly and the bus will rattle like a can in a long trail of cans dragged across the asphalt of this canned city by the
(tonight Leopoldo’s dinner will consist of canned chili beans)
and along Alcívar the people already crammed inside the bus will be forced to stomach another round of house painters, domestics, fruit peddlers, hop in, people, lots of room in the back, and at least one of them will fake a panic attack to snatch a decent seat, a panic attack that will further dispirit everyone because those who disbelieve its authenticity will jostle with those who are trying to make room for the poor old woman who’s having the panic attack, and their sweat will not drip on the tin ridged floor but will be absorbed by thousands of pores that will regurgitate the smell of their daylong labors, which will not disgust Leopoldo because this time he shall will these people into a nonexistence that will not deject him then but later, when he will be reminded yet again of how uncharitable he can be toward those less fortunate than he is.
Leopoldo forestalls his bus ride by Tupa & Mera. On the window display silvered arrows point at televisions. On one of them a farmer guides his tractor with a remote control. On another the interim president, a protégé of León, praises the recent coup and announces another Paquetazo. On another the arrival of a helicopter promises yet another triumphant return of El Loco, who has already run for president twice. On another the young and the rich are behaving badly again, this time in Salinas Beach (isn’t that Torbay, his classmate from San Javier?). From the shuttered entrance of Tupa & Mera the watchman steps out onto the sidewalk and tries his most pugnacious glare on Leopoldo.
Good evening.
He does not answer Leopoldo’s greeting. Perhaps it’s too dark for the watchman to notice his tailored suit pants, his embroidered silk tie, his gold cufflinks with the San Javier logo?
Salvador’s not on duty tonight?
The watchman shakes his head.
Tell him Leopoldo Hurtado said hello. I work over at the mayor’s office, by the way. Tupa Mera’s a friend. Not sure if you’ve met him. He’s the owner of this and five other electronics stores across Guayaquil.
Leopoldo hands him his business card. The watchman holds it up with both hands, angling it, trying to lamp it with the TV screens. Now you can see?
I’m so sorry, Economista Hurtado. I’m so new at this job I didn’t even . . .
You’re for El Loco.
Never, Economista Hurtado. Always for León I . . .
On the bus Leopoldo does not yet think of calling his grandmother from the busted phone at the Calderón. He does think of her though. Not as she is now, he wouldn’t know how she is now, three weeks after fleeing to Pensacola because of the last Paquetazo, but as she remains in his memory, on her farm in the outskirts of Manabí, where he’s still ten years old and she’s teaching him how to drive her green John Deere, a one seater, sliding forward on her lap and holding on to the giant steering wheel while her rubber boots ram the pedals and she says that’s my Leo, drive it over those Jesuits if they give you trouble at San Javier, you hear, drive it over your pansy classmates if they heckle you for being smarter than them, which of course he proves to be, seven years later he’s up at the podium of San Javier’s coliseum delivering his valedictorian speech, the one he’d endlessly rehearsed in Antonio’s living room, we are the future of Ecuador, debating with his friend the meditative pauses, the stormy passages, the unrestrained warnings they’d learned from the sermons of Father Villalba, how are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and injustice, although Father Villalba wouldn’t have cared if they’d learned anything from him because while he was still alive he’d spurned them and cursed them and told them he knew they were going to sow misery like their fathers had sown misery, and while Leopoldo delivers his valedictorian speech he sees his grandmother among the crowd of senators and diplomats and of course León Martín Cordero, former president of Ecuador and current mayor of Guayaquil and the greatest oligarch of them all,