The Return

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I met him in a bar on Calle Tallers, in Barcelona, it must be about five years ago now. When he found out I was Chilean, he came over to say hello; he too had been born in that faraway place.

He was more or less the same age as me, thirty-odd, and he drank quite a bit, though I never saw him drunk. His name was Rogelio Estrada. He was thin, shortish, and dark. His smile seemed to be permanently poised between wonder and mischief, but after a while I discovered that he was far more innocent than he made out. One night I went to the bar with a group of Catalan friends. We got talking about books. Rogelio came over to our table and said that the greatest writer of the century was, without a doubt, Mikhail Bulgakov. One of the Catalans had read The Master and Margarita and A Theatrical Novel, but Rogelio mentioned other works by the distinguished novelist, more than ten of them, if I remember correctly, and he gave their titles in Russian. My friends and I thought he was joking, and soon the talk moved on. One night he invited me back to his place and I went, I don’t know why. He lived in a street nearby, a few yards from a very decrepit movie theater known to the local kids as the Ghost Cinema. The apartment was old and full of furniture that wasn’t his. We sat down in the living room, Rogelio put on a record — some awful, emphatic music with an unrelenting crescendo — and then he filled two glasses with vodka. On a shelf, presiding over the room, was a silver-framed photo of a girl. The rest of the decor was nothing special: postcards from various European countries and some very old shabby-looking soccer pennants: Colo-Colo, University of Chile and Santiago Morning. Pretty, isn’t she? said Rogelio, pointing at the girl in the silver frame. Yes, very pretty, I replied.

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