“Go wash your hands while there’s still water.”
An old man was eating chongos zamoranos and offered the boy a bite. Javier was sweating but he had been forbidden to take off his brick-colored wool jacket. He sat beside the old man and the old man smiled and offered him a wooden spoonful of that curdled milk and Javier opened his mouth and tasted the sweetness and the grain of the chipped spoon. The old man smiled again. He had no teeth. The honey ran down his wrinkled chin and the front of his white, buttoned-up, tieless shirt. He was wearing a faded felt hat and a black suit with frayed elbows and lapels and he ate the chongos without saying a word.
“Where is the boy?”
“In the living room.”
“What’s he doing?”
“His homework.”
“Close the door.”
Yes, close the door. The door of their bedroom or the door of the compartment on the train when the train crossed the river and left behind the homes with lawns that had no walls but instead little signs with the name of the family living there, the stores, the movies, the soda fountains. The people who were different. No, that wasn’t right: the people who were different were those who boarded the train in Nuevo Laredo, after it had crossed the wide shallow brown river between the high earthen banks, the river with its little sand bars and islets and its bushes growing surrounded by water. And then he could understand the language again. The allusions, the jokes, that way of speaking without ever referring to things directly, as if the names of things burned the tongue a little, were prohibited and secret and needed to be approached lightly and laughingly from a distance because the direct word was dangerous. The lightening, softening diminutives. The oblique slang. While his father Raúl sat rubbing his head, his suspenders hanging loose, and one by one held out and examined the purchases he had made on the other side this time: the extension cords, the transformers, the electric irons and coffeepots. And Ofelia his mother stood in front of the compartment looking glass and held her new dress against her body until she saw him, her son, reflected in the glass also standing in the open door with a toy boat in his hand, and with a movement of her head she commanded him and he closed the door.
He seldom understood what they said at the table. And they spoke very little. Without his knowing why, he came to believe that their faces and their hands, their expressions and their gestures, so familiar, so habitual, had nothing to do with the words they spoke during their meals.
“Pass the salt, please.”
And Raúl had the habit of breaking up his bread and dropping it small piece by small piece into his soup.
“You look tired.”
While Ofelia always squeezed lemon into her soup. Always, every day.
“Yes. Well, what do you expect?”
Javier brushed away the flies from the metal net that protected the bread. Sometimes the bread became old there and began to turn white.
“Maybe we’ll be able to take a vacation the end of this year.”
Funniest of all were the dining room pictures. Long and narrow, they told the story of a boy who was teasing a sleeping dog (the first picture); the dog awakens (the second picture), bites the boy in the seat of the pants (the third), and the boy cries and climbs a tree.
“Maybe. I don’t know. It depends.”
The bead curtain that served as a door rustled as the single servant came from the distant kitchen, where the cooking was still done on charcoal braziers. Thin filets covered with onions.
“It would be nice to go down to the sea for a few days.”
“Yes, Ofelia, it would be nice.”
They stopped talking while the servant served them. They resumed again, with difficulty, after she had left the room.
“Javier is getting very good grades.”
“Fine. That’s fine.”
“Aren’t you, Javier?”
He nodded without stopping chewing and tried to understand what it was that his mother and father were saying so mechanically and expressionlessly though their lips were smiling. And now and then Ofelia would throw her head back almost happily: a vacation at the end of the year.
“Don’t start eating before your father. It’s bad manners. They’ll say that we don’t know how to…”
He opened the curtain in order to climb …
“Ligeia? Where are you? Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
… to his upper berth and there in the lower, where he had to be, where it was ordained that he be, was the old man of the chongos zamoranos, panting and gray-skinned but with the strength born of pure weariness that belongs to the aged because it has become their habit, on his face the toothless smile Javier did not then understand but which later, if he had tried to write or even to talk about it, he would have described as the transient mask worn when an instant prolongs itself toward fixity; withered, wiry, in his collarless white shirt that hung down to his flaccid buttocks, and beside him the old woman his wife who saw Javier first and pulled long locks of her white hair across her face to conceal it but left her naked heavy breasts exposed, the nipples like brown craters, her wrinkled belly like old linen. She mumbled something and the man turned and observed Javier staring at them. That was how it was. Or no, that was not quite how it was, but really only where and what it was, and Javier never wrote about it because he felt that it had been a meaningless encounter, not one in which anyone had been involved, he told himself this and he put the incident aside, scribbled in one of his notebooks with the comment that sometimes the distance that separates us has not only more value but also more meaning than the closeness that joins us. He was to meet them again, not the same yet the same, years later when he was an adolescent schoolboy and was being punished for some misdemeanor such as forging his father Raúl’s signature and had to stay in the classroom after everyone had left, alone writing on the blackboard I will not forge my father’s signature, I will not forge my father’s signature, I will not forge my father’s signature twenty times until the blackboard was filled and then he erased and began another twenty I will not forge my father’s signature and behind him the room, a makeshift basement classroom in the school of the Marist Fathers, began to change as darkness crept into it, ceased to be the familiar place of slanting light and shadow and familiar smells, ink, paper, crayons, sweat after coming in from exercises in the recreation yard, wood, floor oil, chalk dust, sky dust from the high small open windows and he sat there either not hearing the teacher at all or hearing very indistinctly like the buzz of a distant bee; it ceased to be that room and slowly filled with darkness and coolness that seemed to wipe away the smells of the day while he went on writing I will not forge my father’s signature until he finished, left the last sentence he had written unerased but erased all the others and gathered up his things and took care to turn off the lights and close the door so that it would lock. And tomorrow confession would be given to all students in the first year of law. He had completed his punishment: done it on word of honor, as the teacher had ordered, and in the night the whole school was dark except for those hidden and prohibited patios and rooms of the building next door where the nuns lived, the pale women without makeup who in those years of persecution could not wear their habits, their hair combed starkly back and tied in knots bristling with combs, their spectacles gold-framed, their clothing dark blouses and dark skirts with high-buttoned shoes. He came out to the corner. There they were, crossing the street, an old man in a black suit and a white-haired old woman in a gray and white polka-dot dress, humped, exhausted, patient, hurrying, the same and not the same, he had seen them again.