Signal to Noise(10)

“There’s magic everywhere, if you look carefully,” her grandmother said. “The trouble is wanting it enough, and holding on to it.”

Meche slanted the peeler, slowly stripping the potato.

“What if magic...”

“Magic will break your heart, Meche,” Mama Dolores said very seriously.

Meche frowned.





MECHE’S MOTHER, NATALIA, was good looking. When angered, however, she resembled the Medusa in one of Meche’s story books. Except she still had to grow some snakes on her head. Any day now, Meche thought those would begin to sprout.

“Okay, Meche,” Natalia said, from behind the pharmacy counter. “How come I got a call from school today to ask if you were sick?”

“I don’t know,” Meche said. “I’m just here because I need money for the tortillas and grandma doesn’t have any.”

“I left money on top of the refrigerator.”

“It’s not there.”

“Your goddamn father,” her mother muttered. “Did he take it?”

“I don’t know.”

Meche rested her chin against the glass counter and shrugged. If she had known it was going to be such a big deal to get the pesos she needed, she would have borrowed them from someone. This was Spanish Inquisition stuff.

“Wait three minutes,” her mother said as she headed to the back of the pharmacy.

Meche eyed the arcade machine sitting in a corner, right by the little children’s coin-operated horse and the scale that would tell you your weight and fortune. She could play a game. Or just get the hell out of the pharmacy before her mother started asking too many questions.

“Here,” her mother said, coming out from behind the counter and opening her change purse, handing her two bills. “Buy the tortillas and give the rest of the money to your grandmother.”

“Alright.”

“Meche, if I find out that you and Sebastian Soto are skipping classes, I’m going to beat you black and blue.”

“I wasn’t skipping nothing,” Meche said, though she was impressed by her mother’s psychic skills.





VICENTE VEGA STILL had most of his hair, only a small—though increasing—gut, and a great quantity of his charm. He had, however, misplaced his common sense and his optimism as he stumbled through the streets of Mexico City. Thirty-eight—not too old, not really young—he went through life like a zombie navigating a closed course, from home to the radio cabin and from the cabin to the cantina.

On Mondays he had the seafood soup. Tuesdays the stuffed chilli. Wednesdays he fought with his wife. The weekends were for playing pool and dominoes. He drank every day.

He remembered being young once, being happy. He remembered marrying a pretty young woman he had adored and somehow stumbling into a cold, distant stranger in bed one morning. He had been his parents’ pride and joy, now a sore disappointment, their eyes turned to his younger brother who had done as he was told and—his mother reminded him every time he spoke to her—had made something of himself. His brother was a licenciado and he had a big house and two nice cars, wearing good suits which threatened to explode as he moved his corpulent form around the office. At heart, his brother was still the same tricky, devious bastard he’d always been, but he played in bigger leagues now. He had set his sights squarely on the Mexican dream: lots of money and lots of women.

Vicente, always unable to understand these simplistic desires, never one to lust after lots of money or numerous broads, had looked for that elusive something else in life. Meaning. Answers that were not printed in triplicate or faxed to the office. Beauty. But life, being the bitch that she was, had denied Vicente what he asked for, had rewarded him only with ugliness and pessimism, had sunk his dreams low.

Music. He loved music. Playing it, writing songs. He’d quit veterinary school and gone to work at the record shop and then he had got the part-time stint as a DJ because—and here he could quote more than a few people—he had the most amazing voice. But that golden voice was false gold and when the demands of parenthood, of making money and getting by intruded on the band, he quit the musician bit and went full-on onto radio.

He thought this would make Natalia happy. Natalia, however, was never happy, accumulating little hates and grudges, cataloguing them by date and carefully filing them so she could pull them out later and toss them in his face.

Only Meche loved him.

She’d been born like him, Meche. Not just the looks—the shape of the eyes, the firm mouth—but his temper and his proclivities.

If he hadn’t had Meche, Vicente might have gone to live at the bar forever, installed himself in a corner and drunk himself under the table. If he shuffled his feet home every night and stumbled out of bed in the mornings, it was because of his daughter.

Vicente went up the steps, trudging back into the apartment. After hanging his jacket he went towards the stereo, running his hands over the turntable. He carefully selected a record, plugged in his headphones and sat on the floor, listening to The Beatles playing in the dark as he smoked a cigarette.

He was almost done with one side of the recording when the door opened and the clatter of heels announced the presence of his wife. She turned on the lights and glanced at him.

She didn’t say anything. Her heels just moved away, towards the bedroom, with a soft sort of indifference which mirrored his own.