Fortune Teller

Creo que es la primera prosa completa que publico. Nacida de un miedo peculiar. A ver que tal.



“I’m not afraid of the future. My future belongs to the past now.”
-Leonardo Nierman



“So, what keeps you here?”
She shrugged again, just as she had done when I had asked her if she liked her job. She just raised her shoulders and shook her head ever so slightly, but never far away from that vehemence, that aggression which I had noticed right after the first question; a movement as if she was trying to scare something away, something which had just found a nest on her shoulder and had to be driven away, even violently. Maybe she didn’t like her job after all.
The waitress came and asked if we already wanted to order. She went first and I followed:
“Un tamal rojo y un tamal verde con café.”
The waitress left and I could see she was smiling. Her, not the waitress.
“Your Spanish has gotten so much better,” she observed. “You don’t speak with an accent now.”
I wanted to say something to her too. I wanted to tell her that she was crazy because she only ordered the simplest breakfast, the one with toast and coffee. Except because she ordered tea. Tea. It was as if she wanted to distance herself from what I ordered, from what she should order, as if her taste buds already belonged to the Island, the one that does not belong to the Continent. But then again, that is not what I wanted to say to her. In fact, I wanted to tell her that that toast and tea she had ordered were not good for her: it wasn’t enough breakfast. That breakfast simply wouldn’t help her: it wouldn’t light up the pallor of her cheeks and her eyes; it would not wake up the drowsiness of her ballerina arms and of her smile, the smile that is suddenly interrupted by discreet coughs that hide choked sobs. Like some person of yore dying from consumption. Or one of those poets she likes.
“Your English is absolutely wonderful too,” was what came out of my lips, finally. “I’m amazed at how much you’ve improved.”
She smiled again, back at me, as if to take the compliment, though I’m sure deep inside she knew I was lying. Not because her English is bad, but because she must have known I had wanted to say something else. She doesn’t need me—or anybody—telling me her English is very good. She knows so.
In fact, it was her English that had called my attention first. In a school where everybody was trying hard to get the right accent, what surrounded me were masks of voices, pretenders and actors, trying hard to hit the right key in a language that stood there, aloof to them. But not to her. She just spoke the way she knew how to speak English, and that did not only showed me what the sound of her voice was, but what her voice itself was.
And man, her voice was. Deep inside I’m sure she knew the variety of identities her voice had: her voice was Greyhound tickets and Mississippi rumble and shotguns and hotel cheap whiskey hangovers and the sun leaving his trail of gold upon dusty roads in the dusk. In fact, for a second, I felt her voice was my parents—but I couldn’t tell her so.
The waitress came and left our orders at the table. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I started digging in. She, in contrast, chose to linger, spreading jam all over her toast and mixing milk with her black tea as if those actions needed the careful steps that a tightrope does. Maybe it was her sleepiness, the fact that she stretched as if she was trying to recover that hour of sleep the sun had taken away from her. Or maybe she just… writes like that. I don’t know.
It was that doubt that led me to the next question.
“You know, there’s going to be another contest. Spanish, of course, but oh well. Are you going to participate?”
The piece of toast stopped right before her mouth and all I could see was her eyes. For a second, I thought she was to hurl it at me. But all the aggressiveness of the action just melted into her response:
“What for? It’s a lost cause.”
I was about to answer Why do you think so? but she must have noticed I was going to say something, for immediately added:
“Really. Think about it. What chances does a short story writer—of short stories in English—has—here?

As she was in her job, as she was fixing herself something for breakfast, as she was folding the warm towels just out from the dryer. She just couldn’t help thinking about it. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do. Perhaps she should have asked her parents for advice before doing so.
Nah. Maybe you shouldn’t, they would have said. That seemed to be all they said lately.
A chill ran through her spine. She wrapped herself up with a warm towel and sat down, and right away a comfortable somnolence swept through her, making her want to sleep into the towel’s warmth. She wondered why she was so tired of lately. Why her stomach lurched at the mention of almost anything. Why she seemed to be down with some illness she could hardly recognize.
Maybe she should go to the doctor. Or maybe you shouldn’t.
She wondered why nobody wanted her for a wife. Was there anything wrong with her? Was there anything wrong in her maidenly figure, her slow but subtle ways, her face that hid nothing? But then again, maybe you shouldn’t. The safety of married life was a myth: married life was another pitfall.
Just as there was a pitfall in everything she thought. Even in her parents’ Maybe you shouldn’t. Her parents thought they were protecting her from the pitfalls, but they were there, in that decision of not doing anything, and even in the questions the rest of her family asked about her liking her job.
She unwrapped herself out of the warm towel, but wrapped her face in her hands. It was absurd—simply ridiculous—that she should have felt more secure of what she was doing after reading the little papers that came out of fortune cookies with her Chinese to-go.

After her voice, then came that short story about the fortune teller.
She handed it in as an assignment. And it was good—damn good it was. And yet, I could not give it the appreciation it deserved. I mean, of course I liked it, but my comments were more focused in knowing if she had a third eye that could see beyond physical things, rather than criticizing the story.
And she must have known about my deficiency, for she started showing the story around, and that was when it happened. All those congratulations and pats in the back and yeah, you got it, if only there was a contest of English-speaking writers you would win. It was her winning streak. I had been turning the possibility over in my mind of telling her what was the hidden relationship between me and her story, and that was when I decided not to. She didn’t need any extra information to stain what was already so successful.
Though, of course, my life isn’t (or I hope it isn’t) as drastic as her story. The story about a man who is told by a fortune teller that he shall be the luckiest man of town. Emboldened by this premonition he sets out to do everything he has dreamed of, only to find setbacks and heartbreak. So, he goes back to his town, wondering if the fortune teller was wrong, only to find all the people he knew have died and, in that sense, he’s indeed the luckiest man in town.
Neat, isn’t it? That’s her story. It isn’t hard to see why it was considered so good. But, even though it looks like my story, they’re not the same.
My story starts out with me being very little, running into our golden yard ornamented with dry grass and my grandmother watching me. At some moment I interrupted my play, went and hugged Grandma, and told her I wanted to stay there, with her, forever. And Grandma answered, in that tone which foreshadows mystic, supernatural things that only grandmothers know, that my wish would be granted, that I would stay there, at my sunlit home, with my past and my family, forever.
But just a year after, my parents took me away to New York. My whole childhood, until my early adulthood, was spent there. I was educated there. My parents’ voices never lost the flavor of my old sundry town. But mine did.
Yet, I never really noticed it. Not until I came back to my town, in order to achieve that tinsel music dream everybody has there. I was pretty good with a guitar; people told me I was talented. It was the other guys that would pick on me because of my voice. They would say that it was such a shame that a guy born at the town could have the technique, but not the feeling. That it plainly sucked I just wouldn’t have the feeling.
I don’t know why that affected me so badly, but it did, and like my parallel life in a story I hadn’t read just yet, I visited a fortune teller.
She didn’t tell me I would be the luckiest man in town. I’m not that literary-interesting. What she told me was that I should first go, find the feeling, and then come back. As if the feeling was something you could find.
Or, perhaps it is.
Whatever the case, I did what that fortune teller told me, which was just the thing a music teacher or some old bluesman could have told me to do. I did so, and I traveled all around the world. All around the world so I could get just where I am now. In a restaurant, having breakfast with a girl who has her own version of my life, written down in the words my parents gave me for living. And who’s looking at me with big eyes. We have finished eating now, both of us, though with her is no surprise, with that little breakfast she had, and I can’t remember if we talked or not. Then, she lowers her eyes to her empty plate, as if she was surprised it was empty already, and asks for the bill, in such a way that if looks as if she was going to write a story about this moment.
“Hey,” I say, impressed by how she doesn’t leave her writer’s role no matter where she goes. She must have sensed my admiration, for she looks up and asks: “Yes?” with that quality of haughty boredom that I sometimes noticed in her, in some classes. Answering “Yes?” like that when it was time to take the roll only proved she was the best.

She sits down and writes the words in the notebook where she writes the stories. And she writes them down with the same care, the same attention, as if she was trying to write a story with them. The story of her life.
In English, of course. Three words, irregularly divided, look at her from the blankness of the page. Hard work. Success.
She speaks to them in the same language, even though the fortune teller who told her so spoke in Spanish and called her señorita as often as she could.
“Nothing more?”
The voice of the fortune teller, the same one she met, answers to her, in spite of her suspicion the woman couldn’t speak English:
“Nothing more.”
What is next, then. What is what should follow. No clue of a place, no clue of a time, no clue of anything.
Slowly, carefully, she writes down the words, this time in Spanish. And she’s more shocked by the result. Now the words don’t say anything to her. They have alienated her. Or perhaps this is because lately her head can’t seem to think straight. It seems to be forever swimming in a puddle of steaming water, enclosed together by the four walls of the city.
And, when she finally manages to extract meaning from them, she can’t help but feeling they mean something she had managed to shrug off her shoulders a long time ago.

Once, two girls with similar playful strides and mocking smiles came over to me and told me that she loved me.
They didn’t use those same words. They giggled and spoke, one on top of the other, mixing the words as if they were baking a cake. And they baked a story that said something about her secret. About her reasons for being the way she was around me, though I hadn’t noticed anything peculiar in her behavior towards me. How she had a whole box under the bed filled with poems and stories about me. At least that would explain her third eye. But the girls just couldn’t get rid of their mocking smiles and their mocking manners, so everything I got was the fact that she loved me.
Maybe that was why I did what I did next. I paid the bill for both of us, paid for her cheap, small breakfast and led her out of the restaurant with her arm in mine. Some minutes later I pulled her close to me and saw her looking at me with big eyes again. Big eyes that suddenly drifted in the direction of the sun, and over the trees of the park, to the horizon.
She may love me. She may not. Yet, she does love something that I love. Something that has to do with long lost towns wrapped up in dirty roads that she has never known and that I, unlike her, remember too well. With the words that come together with them.
Is there a place in her heart for me, when so many words fill it?
A pigeon flies and stops right in front of us, and I wonder if she loves the word too. Paloma. And suddenly I know that if say that word to her, she will tell me a story of her childhood in Coyoacán, chasing palomas at the quiosco, then going with her father to have a nieve, which will never taste like those American multi-flavored ice-creams. And I realize she loves those words as well, with the family-bond, the bloodline love one owes to parents, to brothers or sisters; the kind of love that cannot be blotted out even with the use of other language or an acquired accent.
It’s the other words she needs to nurture her bond with, as if it was a thing between a man and a woman. Those other words that hold a special meaning for her: a meaning of trips and adventure. Greyhound, six-string, a penny for your thoughts. She loved that expression; she used it many times while talking.
I decided to recreate those beloved words in the language that was rightfully her inheritance, to no avail. An autobús does not belong in dusty golden streets, but rather in the cold streets of the city. A guitarra, not matter how cool it is, will never strike the hard rock note a six-string can. Not to mention the pennies. Hard to think somebody would offer her money for her thoughts in Spanish, and, if they did, she would surely miss the small copper shine of the pennies that would not be in her purse.
I would give her a penny is she would just answer me if there’s a bond between me and her. An alternate version of the mocking story of the mocking girls to match the alternate version of my life. But, instead, I ask again:
“So, what keeps you here?”

When she finally gets home, she has the memory of his arms around her still fresh on her mind and on her body. Yet, they fade away when she lays her eyes on the blank page.
She lied to him when she said she was not trying. Of course she was. She always is.
Or perhaps she’s not. Though she thinks it’s him who has stopped trying and that that is the reason’s he’s going back. The real reason; not fulfilling some prophecy a fortune teller told him, so many years ago.
“Are you not afraid?” she had asked him. “It’s been so long, since you were there.”
“I’m not afraid of tomorrows,” he had answered. “I’ve seen many, enough to know their uncertainties are always the same. I’m not that young anymore.” So he had smiled that pretty smile of his and she had wished to tell him he was not old, not even middle-aged, that at least he wasn’t sick out of nothing as she was; but she had stopped and wondered about how many tomorrows she still had to face.
It was a great phrase. The one he had said, about the tomorrows and the uncertainties and not being young. It would make a great beginning for a story. Too bad it was in English.
But, who cares. There goes. She tried to write the phrase down, but couldn’t. There was another sentence, popping over and over again in her mind, erasing the events of the day:
“So, what keeps you here?”
She had written it down before she could stop her hand. There was it, the question that had been staring at her in the face throughout these days, throughout breakfast, staring at her from the page that was now stained with it.
“So, what keeps you here?”
What did? What prevented her from taking a Greyhound and his six-string and joining him into his past, into a town where words meant something else, to an uncertainty that didn’t belong to her, but to him?
They can be dead, she had told him. They can be dead or maybe they won’t remember you and you will drink your way into the grave. Or get married to a nice sundusty girl and forget all about the dream you had. Or maybe what the fortune teller said will become true. Have you thought about it? Have you thought all about those stories? But he had just smiled again and insisted on not being afraid, on his lack of fear, on his lack of youth.
“So, what keeps you here?”
Maybe she should write the answer down. Or, maybe you shouldn’t.
But, as she did, she could see it all before her; the uncertainty of tomorrow was a fake. She could see their smiles, feel the pats on her back, hear them saying this was just better than the previous one, the previous story; maybe even taste the beer on her lips when her friends decided to go out and toast her: ahora sí, ésta es la buena, ahora sí, con ésta ganamos y nos vamos pa donde quieras. She could even feel her drunken tongue slurring out the words when the party was over and her friends would ask her to read it out loud.
If that wasn’t what the fortune teller meant, then she didn’t know.
Yes; that was it, there was not another way. Not another story; just the new ones she would bring, the next day and many days, to her friends at the job, who would read her and smile at her and cheer at her and prognosticate her success. And she would smile, that same old smile of defiant satisfaction, and shrug off, with her deliberate, but lying, vehemence, the feeling of being watched by a smiling, yet scornful Muse.