Signal to Noise(11)

Mexico City, 2009





THE APARTMENT HAD shrunk or had been bigger in her memory. She walked in slowly, feeling like an intruder even though she had grown up here. At some point her mother had taken down the old wallpaper and now the interior was painted in soft, institutional beiges.

Meche looked at the photos sitting all around: Natalia as a baby, Natalia as a child, Natalia at the beach. Photos of her mother’s second husband, Lorenzo. Almost like an afterthought, Natalia and Meche, her teenaged face staring at the camera.

“Mercedes,” her mother said as she drifted into the living room and gave her a hug. “Little Meche.”

“Hey, mom,” she muttered.

“How was your flight?”

“Good. Fine.”

“I have had the most awful time getting tamales,” her mother said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“Tamales?”

“For the novena,” Jimena said helpfully.

“I really wished we didn’t have to do a novena,” Meche said.

“There’s no way around it,” her mother said. “God knows your father can use all the prayers he can get.”

“Dad didn’t believe in this stuff.”

“I talked to the baker and we are going to have canapés for the first night,” Jimena said. “He agreed to a discount, seeing as it was us.”

“Good,” Natalia said, patting her niece’s hand. “Meche, you are going to have to go through your father’s things.”

Meche had barely entered the apartment and had just sat down. She looked up at her mother, surprised.

“What?”

“Well, I certainly won’t have the time. I would ask Lorenzo, but it doesn’t seem right to have him going through your father’s clothes. And you know how he was. It’s probably a mess. But some of the records are bound to be valuable.”

Valuable.

“Maybe you can play some at the party,” her mother said. “I have no idea what we are going to do for music.”

“You want me to go to dad’s apartment and see if he had records that are worth any money?”

“Ay, don’t take it like that,” Jimena said. “You want a coffee?”

Norwegians drank a lot of coffee; strong and black. Meche had never taken to this custom, but she had developed a tea addiction after her year in London.

“No.”

“You might as well sort it out and take whatever you want,” her mother said. “Whatever he had, he left it all to you. Nothing for me.”

There was a pointed bitterness to her words. Meche’s father had failed her so many times and Meche got that—because dumping your family one fine day will certainly create a few grudges. And yet... the * was gone. No need to auction off his goods. As far as Meche was concerned, she thought they should stuff all his possessions in cardboard boxes and give them to charity. She wasn’t going to go on eBay and see if someone paid a dollar for a dusty LP. But if her mother insisted, Meche would make an effort.

“I told Meche Sebastian Soto is hanging around the neighbourhood,” Jimena said. “You sure you don’t want a coffee?”

“Nope.”

“Yes, that nice boy.”

“You never liked him,” Meche said.

Meche’s mother chuckled and sat next to her, patting her leg. Her hair was a burnished brown. It matched the furniture. Jimena slipped out, probably to the kitchen for that coffee she yearned for.

“I did like him.”

Sebastian’s new car sure must be something to cause such a tremendous change of opinion in the women in Meche’s family.

“Where’s Lorenzo?” she asked.

“Trying to fix the paperwork and arrange the burial,” her mother said, lifting her hands in the air.

“Maybe I’ll go to father’s apartment tomorrow,” Meche muttered. “Before the funeral.”

At least in her father’s apartment she’d be alone. She didn’t think she could stomach her mother and her cousin at this time.





VICENTE VEGA’S APARTMENT was smack in downtown Mexico City, in an old building which must have been quite something two hundred years before, but which was now nothing more than a tired ruin, perched at the end of an alley, waiting in the shadows. It was cold and damp as Meche walked up the stairs and when she actually opened the door to the apartment and stepped in she realized the apartment itself was even colder.

She locked the door and looked around. The first thing she noticed was a tiny kitchen that had no right to call itself a kitchen, dirty dishes piled high. She started by washing them because it was too depressing to stare at the dregs inside coffee cups and the stains of old spaghetti. Once she was done, she stood in the living room, which also served as the dining room, looking at the piles of old LPs her father had accumulated. They were sitting on shelves, but also spilled onto the floor, peeking from beneath the sofas, drowning the side table, resting upon the battered TV set.

She went to the room which served as an office, but really was nothing more than another space used to pile boxes with records, mountains of sleeves and vinyl. In a corner, forlorn, sat her father’s typewriter. When his music career failed, he had tried—and never succeeded in—writing a compendium of the history of Latin American rock-and-roll. Now that she thought about it, her father had never succeeded at anything, except maybe in finding the bottom of a bottle of tequila.