And here you can have another quote, Elizabeth. Catch! Oh, Mexico City, if all your sewers were scents and your modern apartments lost their cracks, would your women cease to look so sad, your men so silly?*
“But when autumn finally came,” you went on, letting yourself fall on the squeaky bed and reflecting that if you turned on the light you would merely see again the smears on the wall left by the dead fleas and the bisexual snails, “when autumn did come, we didn’t remember it. It didn’t matter to us, despite the fact of there being no seasons in this damn country and every hour being exactly like every other hour…”
A plateau that is either dry dust or dust lashed by rain. A place where time curls up, Elizabeth, with its teeth sunk in its tail, like the serpent at Xochicalco.
“This damn country where you brought me, Javier, and made me lose the seasons I loved so. The different clothing. The changing hours for meals. Oh, how I miss it! To wear white dresses through a summer that is really a summer. To put on a tailored wool suit for an autumn that is really an autumn. To buy snow boots for winter. In the spring to go shopping for a straw hat with ribbons … You made me lose my changing weather until I stopped even remembering it. You made me come to believe that summer with its rains is a real season, the season when you used to be horny and I would be forced to respond with an excitement that, that …
* * *
Δ Rain began to fall in the patio of the old house on Calzada del Niño Perdido. Javier closed his book and rested his elbows on the railing. July’s shower redeemed the hot morning that preceded it and the lichens dampened and the geraniums began to droop, humble and grateful, beneath the silent quick rain. He had just finished reading one of Byron’s letters: Passion is the element in which we live; without it, we hardly even vegetate. The only sound was water running toward the drain in the center of the patio. He turned up the lapels of his coat but decided not to go into the house, though he knew that Ofelia was there waiting for him, tonight as every night, that she was seated in the living room and soon, roused by his tardiness, would come to the hall door and wait behind it, this evening as every evening, wait for him to keep his promise and come in and spend half an hour with her before dinner. He opened the book again and sat under the naked light and the buzzing mosquitoes, opened the book so that she, hiding behind the door with an incomprehensible presentiment, with a longing fear, would see him occupied and he, when the meal came that he had forbidden himself to miss, would have a concrete excuse for being late.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said as Ofelia served the tamales and the watered wine. “What are we doing living in this house? We really ought to sell it.”
“When I am dead, sell it. Not before.”
“When we are dead,” Javier said, simply to introduce the prohibited “we,” the “we” of the time before.
“Look,” Raúl said, running his index finger across the wet front page of the newspaper. “It says that the Cristeros are the ones who have been blowing up the railroad tracks. Now, there you are. How is a good Catholic businessman going to make a living when it’s the Cristeros themselves who keep us from working? I’ll be damned if I can understand anything that happens in this country. Why don’t they let decent people work in peace? I don’t understand a damn thing. Why kill priests and blow up trains?”
“Javier, don’t walk with your hands in your pockets. It looks very ugly.”
“Who’s going to buy anything when the country is in such confusion?” said Raúl as he turned the pages of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. “Yesterday I was asked to cancel an order for transformers. Last week, the irons I ordered didn’t come.” He loosened his suspenders. “Figure it yourself. Five hundred pesos less this month, for sure.”
“Enough!”
“Ofelia … What…?”
“Enough, be quiet!” She turned her back to them and retreated into the shadows she herself had created in this house of drawn curtains and padlocked doors. Ofelia, his mother, at that time still slender, her face pale and her features still attractive, even though nagging. Raúl looked at him questioningly.
“Now what the hell have I done? I must have done something … I don’t understand…”
“Javier, go to your room.”
“Damn it, Ofelia, the boy’s thirteen now!”
She ran out of the living room with her closed fist over her lips, and Raúl, shaking his head and plodding heavily, followed her.
That was what he was used to: the whisper of voices which although distant were never alien, voices that were suppressed to make their absence habitual, a different kind of presence in a world that had to give itself order behind its four walls if it was to oppose the chaotic violence and brutality beyond and surrounding it. Ofelia was to tell him this, though not in the same words, shortly before her death: she had wanted to overcome the anarchy of the country in those years by countering it with a shield of domestic calm behind which he could grow up protected and secure, behind which his childhood, a time that sooner or later he would want to return to and would not be able to except in memory, could be prolonged. And he, when he wrote his first book, the book he began that same evening after hearing Raúl talk about blown-up railroad tracks and cancelled orders, he wrote about that closed-off and isolated world, perhaps because it was the only world he wanted to write about or could write about then, the only one he knew. He wrote about the world of his childhood and about the way our energy is spent and wasted by the emotional erosion of daily life. If he had only been able to negate himself in that world, to remain silent himself, to accept without protest the reprimands and punishments he received when he refused to answer the prying questions that drained away his strength, where had he gone, with whom had he gone, what had he done, what was he thinking. But to have been that enduring and perfect he would have had to cease to be what he was. That was what he said in his first book, and in each of its poems he probed the events of day-to-day existence in a dialogue between reason and will from which reason emerged the victor precisely because it could not understand what was happening around it. And thus those poems, new and virginal, fresh and solitary, built of the artificial shadows in his home, built of Sundays beside the lake in the park and walking the lonely streets and listening to the organ-grinder and watching the servant girls, built of Raúl’s smells, tobacco and shaving soap, and of Ofelia’s face of a little girl grown old: thus his poems came to hold the truth, the mistaken certainty, of adolescence, the truth reason speaks when it tells the certain lie that it must supply order to the world if the world is incomprehensible. But only a world that cannot be understood, neither at its irrational edges nor in its core, can be an object to be acted upon by the will, the strength of maturity.
“Did I escape from it, Ligeia? Tell me, please. I ask you today with words, but I have been asking you silently since the first day I met you and told myself that you possessed what I lacked, the will to leave the patio and the shadows of the house and go out into the world and there recover the strength that had been robbed from me by Raúl and Ofelia. That was why I fell in love with you…”
“Your trouble is simple. You want to understand everything, and to do nothing. No, Javier. I’m too tired.”