Last Date in El Zapotal

LAST Date IN EL ZAPOTAL

First published by Charco Press 2024

Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh

EH10 4BF

Copyright © Mateo García Elizondo, 2019

c/o Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells

First published in Spanish as Una cita con la Lady

(Barcelona: Anagrama)

English translation copyright © Robin Myers, 2024

The rights of Mateo García Elizondo to be identified as the author of this work and of Robin Myers to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781913867843

e-book: 9781913867850

www.charcopress.com

Edited by Fionn Petch

Cover designed by Pablo Font

Typeset by Laura Jones-Rivera

Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh

Mateo García Elizondo

LAST DATE IN EL ZAPOTAL

Translated by

Robin Myers

For Cuau

1

I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all. I emptied my pockets as soon as I set foot in the town, tossing the keys to the house I left behind in the city, my credit cards, anything with my name or photograph. All I’ve got left are three thousand pesos, twenty grams of opium, and a quarter-ounce of heroin, which had better be enough to kill me. If not, I’ll be too broke to even buy a pack of cigarettes, much less pay for a roof over my head or score some more lady, and then I’ll freeze and starve to death out there instead of making slow, sweet love to my skinny bride, just as I’ve planned. That should get me through for sure. But I’ve missed the mark before and I always wake up again. I must have some unfinished business to take care of.

I’ve been wanting to take this trip for ages. It’s my last wish in a life stripped of all other ambitions or desires. I’ve been letting go of everything that once tethered me to this earth. My wife died and then my dog died, too. I burned bridges with family and friends, sold the TV, the dishes, the furniture. It was like a race against myself to see if I could scrape up enough smack and enough dough to clear the hell out before I ended up completely paralyzed. I needed to lose everything first – it was something I had to do. Where I’m going, I won’t even need my body any more. But this sack of bones has been following me the whole way, and I had no choice but to drag it along with me.

Other than that, all I’ve brought is the can with the kit. That’s where I keep my pipe, my spoon, my syringes, the whole toolbox. That’s where I store the cash, too. I bought this notebook in the bus station, because I know there won’t be much in the way of entertainment before I die, and I don’t want to go crazy. I think I need to spell it all out. Not for anyone else, though. Just for myself, so I can understand what’s been happening to me this whole time. I need to describe what dying feels like, because no one sticks around to tell the tale. Except for me. I’m still here, and I’m getting closer. I know what it feels like to live in limbo, to start slipping over to the other side. I’m a kind of living corpse now. That’s how people see me. I can’t just blurt it out to anyone, not out loud, because the living can no longer hear what I have to say. I hope no one reads this, just to avoid any misunderstandings. I hope they don’t even find it. Better if they burn it or throw it in the trash or dump it in the grave along with whatever’s left of me.

I’ve come all the way out here because when I die I don’t want anyone to wake me up again. I don’t want anyone to find me and haul me out of bed or dress me up or put the colour back into my face. I don’t want the rigmarole: the rites, the tears, the pretty words. I want people to say I renounced everything, like a saint. That I abandoned all earthly ties and matters of the flesh and travelled alone into the jungle to face my death head-on. I want them to think of me and say ‘How brave’ and ‘Not just anyone can pull that off’. People think you do this sort of thing out of cowardice, but no. It’s just what happens when you realise what we’re all bound for, where we’re all going. Everything becomes meaningless, except for this. This does make sense. At least to me. This is all I want to figure out.

I’d never heard of El Zapotal and I don’t really know why I came here. All I wanted was to reach the end of the line, the ends of the earth. But this isn’t what I’d imagined. Here, the human world peters out, and then there’s just jungle and hills. It’s said that people get lost in the bush, outside of town, and they lose their minds; that they see monsters and catch a fever that makes them bleed from their pores. All day long, you can hear the cicada-drone muddling with the blare of the chainsaws that the village men use to cut down trees in a frantic struggle against nature, fighting to invade its territory. Every felled tree is a triumph that leaves a wake of sterile vacant lots behind, enveloped in a hot, foul, stifling fog, desolate plots that can no longer be used for anything at all, ravaged of any remaining life. Meanwhile, the weeds rise faster than they can be cut, and they overrun the town, devouring streets and houses as they grow. During the day, the men grapple with these weeds in the oppressive heat, and at night, trying to distract themselves and forget, they drink and fight until they pass out.

From what I’ve heard, the village was founded as an encampment for the lumber trade, because that’s all this place has to offer, the only thing of interest. To encourage the expansion of the settlement, the government brought in prostitutes from all over the state, and the outpost started by lumberjacks and whores became El Zapotal. Besides the mostly humble houses, there’s a scattering of farms, a couple of sawmills, a chapel, two abandoned haciendas, a convenience store, and a cantina. The dirt road into town exists only for the lumber lorries, laden with amputated trunks, plus the occasional bus, like the one that brought me here. These are the only means of transport into this wasteland, supplying enough beer, cigarettes and Coca-Cola to give the village an illusory air of civilisation.

Near the bus station, I found a guesthouse, or the closest thing to it. The landlord, Don Tomás, rented me a room on the second floor of an unfinished concrete structure with a tin roof. It overlooks the street on one side, and the backyard with the Don’s water tank on the other. I pay a hundred pesos a night for this pigsty. There’s nothing but a cot, a table, a dresser, and a shoddy, doorless latrine out back with a seatless toilet and a little sink. The cement walls are already cracked and a reddish light filters through the flowered curtains in the afternoons. It’s a perfect room to die in.

The Don asked what brought me to El Zapotal, and since I didn’t expect him to understand, I told him I was on holiday. He said not to smoke in the room because people like me always burn the mattresses, he’d had a bunch of fires already. I told him not to worry and gave him six hundred pesos to buy myself a few days’ peace. Then I stretched out in bed to smoke some opium. I’d just arrived, after all, and there was no need to rush.

I remember that I started getting drowsy, and I felt as if I had a mouthful of cotton moulding itself to my teeth. Little by little, my nostrils went numb, my eyeballs, my earlobes. I was engulfed in a pleasurable feeling that travelled my entire body, from my toes to the tips of my hair.

That’s how it begins.

2

Smoking opium clears the fog in your head. Your thoughts take on the presence and materiality of physical objects, like you could touch them. People say it makes you sleepy, but I never feel as awake as when I smoke. Under the soft plumes of vapour, your visions hidden in the basements of the mind, impossible to capture when you’re really conscious, they unfurl in harmonious permutations, appearing and fusing together with the clarity of an open vista. You even feel good. You feel smart and refined, and strong in your limbs, and if anyone knocked on your door you’d welcome them in with tea and cookies. When I smoke opium, it’s like I’m lying in a room filled with works of art, marble tables, velvet armchairs. A castle, a millionaire’s mansion. I feel like I’m the millionaire, and that this exuberant, voluptuous kingdom is mine, all mine.

You start drifting off and your dreams creep in like a bass line, a song in the background that you stop hearing after a while, even though it’s still there. The first thing I see whenever I begin to fade out are flocks of birds in the sky, winging in unison, not touching each other, like a cloak that flutters and palpitates in the wind. I know it’s a distant memory, something I saw from a car when I was little, as my dad drove along a highway, crossing an infinite plain of monotonous golden grasses. I can’t come up with any other context for it; I don’t know where we were going or where we’d been, but from the back seat I looked out at that huge, ominous presence with a mix of fright and fascination.

Confronted with this singular living entity that contracts and expands in the sky, I always feel like I can see a presence, sometimes more human, sometimes almost animal, as if the sky itself were a parted veil, offering a glimpse of a face that peers out and watches me, looks after me. It greets me for a moment, then vanishes again. It’s a familiar presence, but I struggle to recognise it, and just as it starts to make sense to me, the cloud of birds contracts again. The presence hides itself away and won’t come back if I wait. It only returns when I forget, letting it catch me by surprise once more.

This vision soothes me, lulls me. I fight against the exhaustion that wells up overwhelmingly as soon as the image flashes into my mind. I stay awake just so I can keep watching, and when I can’t nod off, I picture it and always plummet right into sleep, like a corpse. In that haphazard movement, I see panoramas sharpening into focus before they disappear again, and I look for some thread I can follow through their hatches, passageways, and dark alleys, into chambers connected by vaults and stairs. I make my way among their vertices and edges, through their undersoil and the hollows beyond their walls, losing myself in the texture of each vision until, as in all dreams, I forget I’m dreaming and let myself be swept along by these improbable storylines that lead into the farthest reaches of that world, both intimate and foreign to me.

In one, I suddenly found myself walking through a lush garden filled with marble statues like Greek gods, but bony ones, covered in wounds and bruises, and when I got closer I realised that I knew them. They were my friends from the trap house. I hadn’t seen some of them for ages. Mike was there, and he’d been dead for a long time, although maybe he wasn’t entirely dead after all. He was very still, but his lips were moving. ‘Are you seriously joining us already, man? Come on, get out of here, this is no place for you…’

I understood from his words that they’d all ended up here, that El Zapotal was one giant trap house, and that instead of escaping I’d just found my way back to the start. Mike told me to go back to the city, that this was an exclusive club – which was odd, because he was never like that, he’d always welcome you in and share whatever he had on hand.

‘What bug crawled up your ass, dude?’ is all I said. ‘Since when have you been such a snob? You got the shakes or what?’

Drifting through dreams, I felt a dog licking my hand, as if trying to wake me, and I opened my eyes and looked around the room. There was a very skinny old woman bustling about. She acted like my mother, but she couldn’t have been, because my mother died giving birth to me. Maybe she’d ended up here, too. She looked worried, and for a while I thought she must also want me to leave, retreat to the city. Then I realised she was unsettled by the mess. ‘What mess, lady?’ I said. ‘There’s nothing here.’ And she pointed at the colourful junk lying all over the place,