The Look-Alikes

The Look-Alikes Eduardo Mendicutti Translated by David William Foster In order to get to the dunes you had to cross the Prioral Plaza, go down Pagador Street to the end, go by the bull ring, and then you had to walk along the old Fuentebravia highway for a ways before turning right and crossing between the Portuense soccer field and the brick factory and entering the open area that ended in Puntilla Beach. The dunes were to the right and, to the left, the Nautical Club and the moudi of the Guadalete River. Just a little ways before the dunes, in die middle ofsome pine trees that looked like refugees from the stand ofpines on die other side of the wall, was The Anchor. "Let's play look-alikes," Medinilla said as die siren at the brick factory was blowing . The siren sounded at six-o'clock sharp. The days were still long and lazy in September, but everybody removed theirsmall changing tents from the beach, and since classes still hadn't begun, we would be taken to have lunch at die dunes and would spend the afternoon playing until the sun went down and it turned cool. When the siren sounded at six it was as though die air recoiled like the neck ofa salamander when it senses danger, and Medinilla barely had to time to propose the game for us to play without losing sight ofdie jam ofcars that parked in front ofTheAnchor starting at the same time. You could seeThe Anchor perfectly from a rise next to the wall, and that's where we would light ourselves a fire to roast pine cones and eat die pine nuts after letting them cool offon a smooth stone that Medinilla once said looked like a tombstone from the cemetery. Medinilla was always making strange and moving comparisons about everything, but what he was really an unrivaled ace at was finding similarities between people, which is why we would all stop eating pine nuts when a car would park in front of the chalet and a man would get out to go into the house to be with the women. Medinilla would quickly discover that each one of those men looked like someone . "Don Estanislao," he said the first time. "That one's the spitting image ofDon Estanislao." We all quickly agreed with him. SPRING 1998 «ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 53 Eduardo Mendícuttí, Translated by David William Foster Don Estanislao was the director ofthe FishingSchool, and it was anyone's guess as to why it had a name like that, and although Medinilla and I, who were both in prep school, saw little of him and never had anything to do with him, it was enough for Medinilla to say that Don Estanislao and the man who was entering The Anchor looked alike for none of us to disagree with him. The same stature, the same appearance ofhaving just gotten up from a siesta and looking confused with his clothes a bit disarrayed, the same gray hair, the same chubby, disjointed body, the same plodding and distrustful gait, as though he was always expecting to be met with a disagreeable surprise just around the corner. Perhaps Medinilla's ability lay not so much in immediately discerning similarities than his ability to persuade my brother Manolin, my cousin Carlos and me to accept unquestioningly the similarities that would promptly occur to him. "Why is Don Estanislao coming to spend time with the women?" my brother Manolin asked. He still couldn't understand that a man could look so much like someone else without actually being that other person. I explained to Manolin and my cousin Carlos, who were two years younger than Medinilla and me, that it wasn't Don Estanislao, but a man who looked a lot like him, but that Don Estanislao, who, even though he was the director of the Fishing School, was a man just like everyone else, a man offlesh and blood, a real man, and all men like to spend some time with the women now and then atThe Anchor or some other place like The Anchor. Ofcourse, some men didn't go to...