{XII}

He looked like a white grub, with his straw hat and a Bali cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. Each morning when I went to the Libreria de Cristal to browse I would see him sitting on a bench in the Alameda. The bookshop, as its name suggests, was glass-fronted, and whenever I looked up, there he was, sitting motionless among the trees, staring into nothingness.

I guess we got used to each other's presence. I would arrive at eight-thirty in the morning, and he would already be there, sitting on a bench, doing nothing except smoking and keeping his eyes open. I never saw him with a newspaper or a sandwich, a beer or a book. I never saw him speak to anyone. Once, noticing him there as I glanced up from the French literature shelves, I thought he must sleep in the Alameda, on a bench, on in a doorway in one of the neighboring streets, but then I realized he was too clean and tidy to be sleeping in the street and must have a room in some boardinghouse nearby. He was, I noticed, a creature of habit, like myself. My routine consisted of getting up early, having breakfast with my mother, father, and sister, pretending to go to school, then catching a bus to the center of the city, where I would devote the first part of my morning to books and walking around, and the second part to movies, and more surreptitiously, to sex.

I generally bought my books at the Libreria de Cristal or the Libreria del Sotano. If I was short on cash, I'd pick over the specials table at the Cristal, but if I was sufficiently solvent, I'd go to the Sotano for new titles. If I had no money at all, which was often the case, I would steal from one or the other, without favoritism. But in any case, I would invariably pay a visit to both the Libreria de Cristal and the Libreria del Sotano (located, as the names suggests, in a basement, across from the Alameda). If I arrived before the shops opened, I'd look for a street vendor, buy myself a ham sandwich and a mango juice and wait. All this lasted until about ten in the morning when the movie theaters began to open up for their first screenings. I preferred European films, though if I was feeling particular inspired, I wasn't averse to Mexican New Erotic or Mexican New Horror, which were pretty much the same thing anyway.

{The Grub, from Last Evenings On Earth, by Roberto Bolano}