Shorts by Alberto Fuguet

Author:Alberto Fuguet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061762734
Publisher: HarperCollins

LOST

In a country full of missing people, disappearing is easy. All the efforts are concentrated on the dead, so those of us who are among the living can fade quickly away. They won’t come looking; they won’t even realize you’re gone. If I’ve seen you before, I don’t remember. You see, everyone down there has bad memories. Either they don’t remember, or they simply don’t want to.

A professor once told me that I was lost. I replied that in order to lose yourself, first you’d have to know where you are.

Then I thought: What if it’s the reverse?

I was erased for fifteen years. I abandoned everything, including myself. There was a quiz I never took. My girlfriend was having a birthday party and I never showed up. I got on a bus bound for Los Vilos. I didn’t have a plan; it just happened. It was what had to happen, and there was no turning back.

At first I felt guilty. Then pursued. Would they be after me? Would they find me? What if I run into someone?

But I didn’t run into anybody.

They say that the world is a handkerchief. It’s not. People who say that don’t know what the world is like. It’s huge and—above all—strange and foreign. You can roam far and wide and nobody will care.

Now I’m an adult. In some ways. I’ve got hair on my back, and sometimes the zipper doesn’t zip. I’ve been to a lot of places and done things I never thought I’d do. But you survive. You get used to things. Nothing is so bad. Nothing.

I’ve been to a lot of places. Have you been to Tumbes? To the port of Buenaventura? Or San Pedro Sula? What about Memphis?

Like a puppy, I followed a Kmart checkout girl as far as El Centro, California, a town that smelled of fertilizer. The relationship started off better than it ended. Then I went to work in the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada, that lined the Colorado River. I lived in a house across the way in Bullhead City with a woman named Frances and a guy named Frank, but we never saw each other. We left each other notes. Both of them were bad spellers.

Once, in a diner in Tulsa, a woman told me that I reminded her of her son who’d never come home. “Why do you think he left?” she asked. I said I didn’t know, but maybe I did.

Or maybe not.

Without wanting to, I ended up teaching English to Hispanic children in Galveston. The Texas flag looks a lot like Chile’s. One of the girls died in my arms. She fell off the swing set: I’d pushed too hard and she flew out of her seat. It seemed like she flew for two minutes through the hazy Gulf sky. I didn’t want to hurt her, but nevertheless I did. So…what?

What can you do?

Have you been to Mérida, on the Yucatán? In the summer there it hits 108 degrees, and they close off the downtown area on Sundays so the people can dance.

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