To conclude his meditation, with his eyes closed, he wrote in ink on the walls of his noggin, “An adventurer requires all sorts of resources to confront the difficult task of survival.”
He would often indulge in this kind of introspective pondering, it was as if he were jotting down letters on an immense board located in the middle of his forehead. This exercise gave him solace in multiple moments of anguish. And there was no doubt this was a transcendental moment of obligatory concern. After his meditatio, having seen straight through its significance, he would occasionally write the thought down in a notebook he always had with him. For example, “Satisfaction has no part in an adventure, rather constant searching, doubt, uncertainty, chaos.” Or, “Life always disappoints.” Or, “Books would make great Presidents.” Or, “We can change our destiny if we keep on plugging away, if we keep on knocking at the door of fate.” Or, “Igártulo Alcazán, Robert Louis Stevenson, Reverend Heart, suitable names for adventurers who desire to cross seas and lands and landscapes, who are eager to install justice where inequality reigns, hope where no future exists, water where thirst has paralyzed glottises and tongues, light in the darkness, life in death.” There was then an arrow indicating a direction across the page; in the background, in capital letters, a name: “LIBARDINO ROMERO”. The notebook was undoubtedly the only intelligent sign of his life in the office, or in apartment 1B, Camellia Square, or in the city, or amidst the noise of the impetuous butcher, or in the monotonous hum of his former existence.
In the short time he had kept company with Mephistopheles’s self-confessed envoy, he had learned to his amazement that man had inhabited the earth for 4,600 years and all discoveries by researchers in the field – age of the planet, theories about sudden explosions, hominids and Neanderthals, gnats, ice ages, Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Pleistocene and Holocene, sapiens, erectus, habilis, antecessor – all these were false clues he had dreamed to keep archaeologists, palynologists, anthropologists, infulous prehistorians and various scientists entertained, such families had to live somehow and early history, needless to say, has much to offer. “This,” Mephistopheles’s son proclaimed in oratory enthusiasm, “is a good way of contributing altruistically to the consolidation of bases for a better future for all, where the encouragement of solidarity and inalienable rights is above individual interests and corrupt practices.” Then, forgetting his earlier emphasis and solemnity, he affirmed in a more natural, relaxed manner, “It is necessary to keep people occupied with trivial matters – for example, a dogfish that lived 700,000 years ago and offers definitive data about the fauna and flora that previously immersed the face of the earth in an aura of purity and virginal fascination.”
This taciturn individual could make the night arrive just by thinking about it, he could turn mountains and prairies into white marble with obscene inscriptions, he could make it rain golden crystals. All he had to do was dream. Convinced that all madmen possess an iota of reason in their judgements, Libardino pressed him to dream for him a life full of adventures and dangers and emotions and sentiments, to dream for him an unforgettable, enduring, constant novel. “I will,” he said, “if you expiate your past woes with vile metal.” “I’m not sure I understand you.” “I need to be paid, I don’t work for nothing, such experiences can prove fatal, even contrary to good intentions, unless they are backed up by hard cash as a sign of commercial interest, there being no affection or lack of affection between the parties.” “What parties?” “The seeker of help and the expert, the client and the professional.” “You sound like a fraud, you just said dreaming up notes struck you as immoral.” “It is immoral, but immorality is necessary for humans not to despair amid the ashes of a monotonous, afflicted world, hence the dilemma: either you pay me, or I won’t dream you as an adventurer, it’s your choice.” In a heartbeat of surrender, Libardino Romero took out of his pocket two 5,000-peseta notes he had stolen from a purse Matilde hid among the sheets of a cheap, chipboard wardrobe. “Here you go, consider yourself paid.” “You shall be the greatest and the best adventurer in history, the Ulysses of the twentieth century, Achilles who feels the foundations of future fields.” “Thank you, Mephistopheles.” “Son of Mephistopheles, don’t forget, Jabato.” When he heard “Jabato”, Libardino recalled his childhood reading, but was reluctant to exploit vile nostalgia, he was an adventurer, there was no point lingering over matters that would delay his Odyssean vocation, he shrugged off such memories, raised his spirits and asked, “Can I call you Mephisto then?” “Of course you can, errant knight, leather shield, racing greyhound, Mephisto is just the sort of nickname my father would want for me, hypocoristic gloricardian, alleluia!”
Without money, Libardino felt a little freer, relieved of baggage, as the poet would say, just the one bag with a cigarette box coated in wax and a change of underwear. Who knows, perhaps those 10,000 pesetas had certified his change of state: from catatonia to movement, from death to life, from aphasia to ductile conversation. But before going back to searching for a direction, before starting to count cars at the crossroads again, he was assailed by urgent curiosity: what did Mephisto have in his suitcase? He returned to the middle of the square, where the man was resting on top of his valise, in silence. “What’s up, Ulysses, fighting Jabato, Arthur Gordon Pym of celestial Anglican bearing, Sandokan of the urbs and sea, improbious man of the race of the chosen, what is it?”
Libardino was taken aback by this ostentatious, bombastic reception, but not too much. As a child, he’d been accustomed to hearing in the mouths of Ébora personages such as Tintoreto and his mother the most unusual linguistic brokerages, unconscious additives or suffixes stretching out words, insistences on a form of rarefied speech, typical of the insanity in which Ébora levitated perpetually and insurmountably. He thought in his new life as an adventurer he would meet folk that talked like this, and others, men and women, who wouldn’t be able to bestow on words the love and honour that Señorita Pura gave them. These would distance Libardino Romero from his road, but the others, those close to him, would sail on his boat, the very one that carried Homer, Virgil, Dante, Meendinho, all those men and women who knew, poor things, that words and harmonies help one to live.
Libardino believed, therefore, in happy affinities, he believed that in the world similar beings tend to come together, to join and merge, to amalgamate and combine in a single life, and he also believed that people who were different flowed together in an infinite, irrevocable distance. He believed when he was an office worker without horizons he necessarily had to be surrounded by office workers without horizons, like him, and now, having decided on his future, he would necessarily bump into beings that were destined for the endless orchard of hope whose horizon licks the happiest, most prosperous hours with its pearly tongue. This belief led him not to hide the enjoyment he felt before Mephisto, the man with the red suitcase who claimed to dream up everything that was, and would be, lived.
“I wanted to know what you keep in your suitcase,” he said, staring straight into his eyes. “I can’t tell you, it’s my great secret, my father confided it to me on the day he sent me to earth, making me solemnly swear only to reveal this mystery to the one who would take my place in the task of dreaming.” “But couldn’t you just do me the favour of showing me what’s inside the suitcase? It would get my new life off to a great start.” “Excuse me, sir, but you are talking to the son of Mephistopheles, in such a matter as this I am unbribable, my criteria are unchangeable, I’m very sorry.” “I wasn’t intending to bribe you, I just wanted you to show me what’s inside the suitcase.”
The man paused, wiped his hand over his face, lingering over his neck, slowly. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Secrets belong to the world of the unconfessable, that’s why they’re secrets, if my father, Mephistopheles, wanted my suitcase to be open to just anybody, I don’t think he would have wasted his time keeping me for exactly 4,600 years alive on the face of this planet, coming up with dreams so you lot could exist together with your hopes and futures and sons and daughters, do you understand, kind sir? Truly important things cannot be known by everybody, it’s necessary to keep them inside the trunk of rites, of liturgies, and the rite stipulates that only he or she may know what is inside the suitcase who relieves me in the terrible task of dreaming, of continuing to dream, because dreams are the sustenance and immovable column on which human beings and their causes are raised, understand, understand, kind sir?”
Libardino, understanding his explanations, lowered his head and headed back to the crossroads to see if vehicle number twenty-seven was capable of showing him the way, so he, being rocked in the Herculean arms of fate, could embark on the fertile path of adventure.
