The Same City Read online

  “I don’t have the strength to go and be stuck in a crowd,” she breathed. She rested her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and whispered tenderly,“You go. You like Ginkali so much, and you shouldn’t miss out because of me.”Then she fell asleep.

  It irritated Moy that she hadn’t even remembered the musician’s name correctly, but he didn’t stir from her side. He began thinking that Bob Inkalis would probably give another concert soon. Or that so many years later, his lungs destroyed as a result of fast living, his saxophone would sound like wheezing puffs of air, a crackling rasp, and in that case it was better never to see him again, so as not to cast a shadow over the memories he had of him.

  He didn’t get angry with Adriana over what had happened, but he felt that yet again his life had been drained of its meaningfulness, that prophecies could be made about it that would always be fulfilled. It was a diffuse, acerbic anxiety, like that which one sometimes feels when thinking about one’s own death.

  When Moy got home that night after running into Albert Fergus, Adriana was putting Brent to bed. He chatted with his son for a few minutes and then went to the kitchen to make something for dinner.

  “Do you remember how when you were young, you used to paint your lips blue?” he asked Adriana while rummaging in the fridge.

  The remark made her laugh, and she got up to help him.

  “When I was young, I did a lot of crazy stuff,” she said. Then she stood still, as if pondering something, and gave a mischievous pout. “So, I’m not young anymore?”

  Moy began to chop vegetables.

  “The day I met you, they were painted blue, but the lipstick had stuck to your teeth, so they were blue, too. It was like you had magic teeth. Or some sort of festering gum disease,” he added, smiling. “I never told you, because I didn’t want to embarrass you. But from that day on, my friends and I always called you ‘the girl with the blue teeth.’”

  Adriana embraced Moy from behind as he continued chopping vegetables and placed them in a bowl to season them.

  “What made you think of that just now?” she asked warmly. “Do my teeth look blue?”

  Moy shrugged his shoulders and stood motionless beside her, without saying a word and unsure whether the feeling flooding through him was sadness or resentment. In a vague, inscrutable way, he thought his own failure was Fergus’s fault. Then, turning around, he parted Adriana’s lips with one finger and touched her teeth as though he were trying to turn them blue again.

  That night he ate dinner silently in front of the television and pretended he had to finish a piece of work on the computer, so he wouldn’t have to make conversation with Adriana. When she went to bed, a little before midnight, Moy turned off all the lights in the house and sat in an armchair near the window. He once again recalled the desires he’d had when he was young, the great marvels he had expected from life. Outside he could see the lights of Manhattan, and he began to cry. He had just turned forty-one. He had not yet seen any of the dreams he thought he held dear come to fruition, and he probably never would; at his age, he would no longer have the opportunity to do the kinds of things Fergus had described to him. He wouldn’t be able to sleep in caves anymore, experiment with drugs, or go backpacking to faraway cities. The time when his life had not been a foregone conclusion had now slipped away.

  Before going into the bedroom, he had a whisky and took a sleeping pill, but despite that, it took him a long time to get to sleep. He tried to think about pleasant, calm things. About Adriana, whom he could hear breathing by his side. About his son, Brent, who had already begun acting like a young man. About the Manhattan skyline that could be seen from Brooklyn at night. About the Long Island house. At four in the morning, he finally fell asleep. It was deep and peaceful, as if none of the concerns that had unsettled him during the day were really of any importance.

  Adriana woke him, as she did every day, at six thirty in the morning, after stepping out of the shower. She woke him again at seven, but Moy wasn’t able to rouse himself. At seven twenty, when, as always, she was going to take their son to school on her way to work, she went into the bedroom again and shook him until he sat up in bed and opened his eyes. She informed him that breakfast was ready in the kitchen and that he would be late for work if he didn’t hurry.

  Brandon Moy later remembered all his movements that morning very precisely. He idled away a few more minutes in bed, then got up feeling stiff and lethargic and had a lazy breakfast. At about eight, he shaved and took a shower, standing under the stream of boiling water until it woke him up. He took his time choosing a suit and then found a tie he hadn’t worn for some time. Finally, when he was fully dressed, he put his laptop into his briefcase and gathered up some papers he had littered on the dining table and might need in one of that day’s meetings. He didn’t look at his watch, but he must have left home between eight thirty and twenty to nine. Nobody saw him. He walked toward the newsstand where he usually bought the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every morning, but before reaching it, he realized he only had hundred dollar bills, so he detoured down 59th Street, where the entrance to the subway he caught every morning was situated. Just before going in, he heard the blast—a muffled, dry, cracking thunderclap, as though metal or glass were being torn apart. He stopped for a moment and looked around, searching for the cause of the noise, but couldn’t see anything. Beside him, an old lady taking a walk came to a standstill on the sidewalk and looked up toward the sky, to the rooftops. A startled woman dropped the cup of coffee she was holding, and it rolled along the sidewalk into a gutter. Everyone was alarmed for a split second, and then continued on their way. Moy went the rest of the way down the subway stairs, passed through a turnstile, and caught the first southbound train, following the route he took everyday. But two stations later, on 42nd Street, the train engines ground to a halt, and a staff member rushed through the carriages forcing all the passengers to get off. “A small airplane’s crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers,” Moy heard a man on the platform saying. “All communications have been cut off in the area.” Moy felt dizzy, his eyes closed. Robertson & Millyander, the financial services agency he’d worked at for over seven years, had its headquarters on the ninety-sixth floor of the North Tower. From his small, badly ventilated office, you could see the labyrinthine streets of the city, the grayish water of the Hudson, and the New Jersey coast. He went up to the man who had just announced the accident, to listen to his explanations, but amid the uproar of all the passengers, he couldn’t hear anything. He passed through the throng on the platform in a matter of seconds, like a sleepwalker, and then came out onto the street with the intention of catching a cab south.

  Every single person can remember what he or she was doing when they learned that the Twin Towers in New York had been attacked. It’s one of those crucial moments that, because of their brutality or consequences, remain branded in our memories. I’d gone to have lunch at my parents’ house and was watching the news with them. The broadcast opened with the images of the first plane—a light aircraft, according to the newscaster, whose explanation on this point coincided with that of the man on the platform—crashing into the tower. My sister was at a swimming class and sensed how everyone swimming around her suddenly began to head toward the sides and climb out of the pool. I heard about a woman, a friend of a friend of mine, who was caught in bed with a lover because her husband, who never went home for lunch, returned that day to watch the excruciating images on television with her. I even met a writer who had shut himself away in a country house in the Sierra de Cazorla to finish writing a novel and heard nothing about the incident until September 13th. Brandon Moy, who worked in the building the first plane crashed into and who should have been in his office at that time, as he was every day, remembered with almost scientific precision everything that happened that morning. His twenty-seven colleagues at Robertson & Millyander died in the attack. He didn’t die, but his
life changed radically over the course of those hours.

  When he got above ground again, the columns of smoke rising toward the sky could be seen from every angle of New York. The traffic had stopped, and the roads were full of people staring up bewilderedly at the skyline, astonished by a spectacle they could not yet comprehend. Moy heard a woman say that the plane had gone through both towers, but shortly afterward, in one of the noisy huddles that was forming on the sidewalks, he found a young man wearing headphones who was repeating out loud what he was hearing on the radio—it wasn’t one plane but two that had crashed into the towers, which were now ablaze. There were thousands of people trapped inside. It was impossible to calculate the number of victims at that point, but all the plane passengers and many of the World Trade Center workers would no doubt have been pulverized in the collision. It was approximately nine thirty in the morning, and none of the plans that later began to obsess Moy had crossed his mind yet, so he tried to call his wife so she wouldn’t worry. But the lines were down, and he couldn’t get through to her. That fact—a technological limitation, a chance occurrence—determined the rest of his life.

  Brandon Moy walked for more than an hour toward Lower Manhattan. The police stopped him from entering the area around the World Trade Center, as they were doing with everyone there on foot, so he stood behind a trench of vehicles and unfamiliar machinery and watched the cloud of fire that was darkening the air, the shadow of burning skyscrapers. He heard the resounding boom when the towers fell. He saw men with bleeding head wounds, or tourniquets on different parts of their bodies, going past him. He spent a while clasping a woman with burns on the skin of her thighs and belly. He observed the shocked or crazed expressions on the faces of the people coming from downtown, all of them covered with ash. The taste of cinders, of scorched air, clung to his palate. And he joined a medical team to help undress victims with open wounds who were waiting to be treated. He spent over five hours in that place, between Canal and Chambers, and although he didn’t speak to anyone for several months about what he had seen there, it all came back to him later with disturbing accuracy.

  The first time it crossed his mind that this disastrous moment could be the last opportunity he would have in his life to do everything he had never dared to do—sleep in caves, take drugs, write poems—was at midday, when he tried to call Adriana again to tell her he was alive. The lines were still down, overwhelmed by the massive overload. More than three hours had passed since the first plane had crashed into the tower in which he worked, so his wife, child, parents, and everyone who knew him would be thinking that he had died. They would be thinking that his body had been destroyed in the explosion from the collision, that he’d flung himself out of the building to escape from the fire, or that while still alive, he had plunged into the ground along with the building’s steel frame and was now lying cut to pieces among the rubble and the waste. Everyone would be sure by this point that Brandon Moy no longer existed. That he was now a piece of detritus or charred clay. “The dust with which God made man in Genesis,” he would say later when talking about it. “The dust that goes back to being only dust when everything is over. Filthy sludge, dregs.”

  Since waking up that morning, Moy had not thought about his encounter with Albert Fergus again, but suddenly, among the crowd, he saw a woman coming toward him staring hard, and she reminded him of Tracy. The woman, just like her, wore a fine, woolen overcoat, with huge, fifties-style lapels. It was jade green but covered in hot, black ash. When she reached him, she collapsed. Moy knelt down beside her, slid his arm around her back, and slapped her in the face to revive her. The woman, however, did not respond. Moy then did something strange that he never managed to fully understand. He bent forward to kiss her on the lips. He separated them with his fingertips and then pressed his tongue to her gums, which tasted of ash. Months later, when he remembered that bizarre, moving event, he came to believe that he was trying, like in children’s stories, to bring her back to life. But in reality it was only an act of emancipation, the first time he had broken the rules in many years. That woman, ugly and disfigured from the damage she had suffered in the catastrophe, had reminded him of Tracy, and Moy, like Fergus, wanted to kiss her, to feel the freedom one feels when one doesn’t owe loyalty to anybody.

  He picked the woman up, putting his other arm under her knees, and carried her to the first-aid station. He left her there lying on the hood of a car. At that moment, he became aware of everything that was happening. He realized that probably nobody thought he was alive any more, and then he suddenly recalled Albert Fergus’s laughter as he draped the coat with the huge lapels on Tracy in the restaurant, his worldly and confident air, and all his adventures, which despite lacking the gloss of detail, because they had been recounted hurriedly in the street, seemed thrilling. When they’d said goodbye on the sidewalk, while he was watching the taxi pull away, he’d thought that if he could be reborn, he would like to live like Fergus, with that scatterbrained impetuosity. And now, only a few hours later, Providence was offering him the chance to be born again. Death is a biological act, a failure of the vital organs of the body, but it can also be, as the poets say, a spiritual state, or an attitude. Brandon Moy thought that morning, as he gazed at the spectral figures around him, that if none of the people who knew him thought at that moment that he was alive, it was in his hands to decide whether he really was. He would never have dared to leave his wife and child under normal circumstances, but that day, while bandaging wounds and moistening the lips of dying men with damp cloths at the firstaid station, he began to feel that for the first time in ages, he had no commitment to them. After almost fifteen years of marriage, he was still in love with Adriana, but with a very different passion from the one he had felt when he was young. He no longer experienced hot flashes or went weak at the knees when he thought about her or imagined himself being deserted or widowed. When he embraced her, he no longer felt fevered excitement but instead calm. He wanted to continue living with her, but for a long time he hadn’t been able to understand why. “It’s possible that we sometimes carry on living with someone for fear of destroying the past and not out of a desire to build a future with them,” Brandon Moy once said to me. “I think that’s what happened to me with Adriana. I never considered leaving her, because that would’ve been like acknowledging that we’d failed and that those dreams we’d had for so many years were no more than smoke or pretense. Adriana wouldn’t have been able to take it if I’d left and met other women. She couldn’t have resigned herself to me living nearby, in another neighborhood in New York, and now and again going to the restaurants we’d gone to together. She would’ve hated me for all that. And I would’ve felt guilt and shame. Leaving someone is a betrayal. Dying, on the other hand, is not.”

  That was the enigma, or sophism, that Brandon Moy came up with that morning to justify his actions; if he had announced to his wife one day that he was leaving her to travel around America or the south of India, as they had planned to do together many years before, she would resent him for the rest of her life, but if he left New York right now without saying anything, silently walking away through that devastated landscape, Adriana would mourn him and feel eternal gratitude toward him. If he vanished into the flames, his son would not grow up thinking that his father was a flake and a deserter but rather a hero. Everyone would remember him with affection instead of resentment. This bizarre conjecture is what roused Moy to make the decision to leave the city and go somewhere far away. Perhaps if he had thought it over for a few more hours, he would have lost the courage to do it, but the urgency with which he had to make up his mind forced his hand. He realized that if the telephone lines came back into operation, sooner or later his cell phone would ring, and Adriana would then know that he had not been fatally injured and was still alive. He took it out of his pocket very deliberately and placed it gently on the ground, on the cement surface of the road. Then he stamped on it repeatedly until it lay in bits. At th
at moment, he knew that Brandon Moy had died.

  A few years later, when I was doing some research on Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile for my novel Las manos cortadas, I found out about a man who, like Moy, had taken advantage of particular circumstances in order to escape. In his case the story had been much more sinister. Pablo Gajardo, a metalworker who lived in Antofagasta, had for several months been trying to find some way of paying off a debt he owed to a loan shark. Neither his parents nor his pregnant wife knew anything about the situation, and he, filled with anxiety over the payment that would soon fall due and the wretchedness of his life, went every afternoon after leaving the factory to spend what little money he had on alcohol to drown his sorrows. He shoplifted and then gambled his ill-gotten gains at cards but ended up losing everything again. Then came the uprising against the Salvador Allende government, which also happened to take place on a September 11. Soldiers arrested hundreds of Chileans in just a few days and killed them. The bodies of a large number of them never reappeared. They were buried in mass graves or thrown into the ocean, they vanished without trace. Pablo Gajardo was not a union member, nor did he have any political ties, but taking advantage of the brutal repression being meted out by the army and the fact that the country had been plunged into chaos, he decided to pass himself off as one of those who had been arrested. He trashed the hellhole in which they lived, emptied the contents of the drawers onto the floor, broke a few worthless objects, and sneaked away. He walked for days until he reached the Peruvian border, and then he settled in Lima. He changed his identity, opened a workshop, and made a fortune. In Chile, everyone thought he was dead. His name appeared among the lists of political exiles, and he was honored as a martyr. In the mid-nineties, when he really did die, one of his Peruvian friends found a cardboard box full of mementos in his house. In it, he had kept a photo of his wife with an inscription on the back, several letters of confession he had never dared to send, and his Chilean identity card. The Peruvian friend wrote to the address on it, and a month later Gajardo’s son, who had never gotten to meet his father, replied. Bit by bit, the plot unraveled. The body was not repatriated.