Signal to Noise(22)

“You could stop doing your nails,” he countered. “They’re more expensive than my half pack a day.”

“I do my nails because of my job.”

“What job? You work at the pharmacy.”

“It’s customer service.”

“It’s bullshit. You do your nails because you want to, so don’t come telling me it’s because of some demanding job.”

“I could get an audition.”

“But you won’t,” he said.

She slapped him. He left afterwards, didn’t even try the chicken soup that was supposed to be his dinner, and went to eat at the cantina instead.

There he nursed his glass and his feelings, hunched over a table. Eventually some of the regulars arrived and he joined a game of dominoes, trying to find meaning in the black-and-white pieces, like a man trying to read the Tarot cards.

Where had he gone wrong? Where had his road forked towards defeat? Somehow, at some point, he had become a loser. Maybe he’d always been one but had been unable to recognize it in his youth.

Vicente smoked his cheap cigarettes. Cigarettes which were staining his once pristine teeth, turning them an ugly yellow. But did it matter? He had been a decent looking chap but that was gone. He had the same face, but it was lined with discomfort and misery. It was not the face of a music idol.

As for Natalia... Natalia had changed. Each year her eyes narrowed more, fixed more sternly on his shoulders. Each year, he knew she found the leather jackets shabbier, the long hair more off-putting, the little tricks he did to charm people—like recite the year when any song had come on the air—more stale. Each year she measured him and found him more and more wanting.

How different from when they had first met at the record store, when Natalia had wandered in looking for a present for the boyfriend she had at the time. Her taste in music did not run very deep and Vicente had spent a good hour chatting to her about this and that band, the benefits of a certain record over another, finally settling on Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) as his recommendation for a birthday present. When he gave Natalia her change he wrote his number on the back of a bill.

“Let’s go out sometime,” he said.

“I told you I have a boyfriend,” she said.

“It’s not going to last.”

It didn’t and one month later she was back at the store, trying to exchange the record for another one, although, truth be told, she just wanted to see him.

He had charm aplenty in those days. He wrote letters to Natalia every day and quickly won her heart. Maybe he still had charm, but Natalia had ceased to be impressed by it. She didn’t want him to compose songs for her and she certainly didn’t want to read his eternal compendium on Latin American music.

Vicente smoked and drank. Around midnight Meche popped in. She’d been sent to get him from the cantina since she was ten years old. Vicente knew the routine, he said goodbye to his friends, put out his cigarette and nodded to his daughter, following her outside.

She was stuffed into her oversized green jacket, carrying her Walkman.

“What are you listening to?” he asked. He always asked her. It made her happy when he asked.

“Dylan. All Along the Watchtower.”

“Depressing.”

“Well, you know,” Meche muttered, kicking a can of soda down the sidewalk. “Happiness is in short supply.”

She passed it to him and Vicente kicked it for a little bit, then passed it to her and paused to light a cigarette. Meche looked at him with eyes that were his own. Large and sad and painted with the same seeds of misery he carried in his own gut.

“Then you steal it.”

Meche frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”

“If happiness doesn’t come to you, then you take it. Any way you can,” he said.

He thought of the ocean. He had wanted to live by the beach but Natalia had been opposed to that. What would they do there? His fantasies of building a hut, of combing the sand for treasure, of running barefoot with nothing but a single change of clothes and a guitar, pounding on the typewriter by candlelight, did not impress her.

Maybe he could still do it. Maybe he could have his ocean and the sound of the waves heavy in his ears as he went to sleep.

Steal it if you can’t get it...

“Yeah,” Meche said, nodding.





MECHE NEVER LIKED dragging her father back home. She thought her mother sent her to punish him, to humiliate him. It seemed petty to her. Especially that night. She had told her mother she did not feel like going out, too busy nursing her disappointment, but her mother had shoved Meche into her jacket and pushed her out the door.

Her father had to go to work the next day, her mother said. She’d better bring him before it got too late.

Later, as Meche and her dad sat in the kitchen, dipping animal crackers in a glass of milk, she thought about what he’d said about happiness.

Steal it if you must.

Meche was willing. But that bitch, happiness, wasn’t being very cooperative.

Why had the spell failed?

She looked at the box of crackers with its colourful picture of a lion tamer and a lion jumping through a hoop.

She sighed, wishing magic was more like something she could understand. More like math.

Equations, she could get. Computer languages, she could get.