Inside my overcoat that was suffocatingly hot and uncomfortably big, made for a much bigger bear than me, I looked down happily on the clouds beneath, thinking that what was constantly on my heels would have to wait a couple of months or — best case scenario — abandon the chase.
There’s practically nothing to tell you about the journey. I have tried to leave out of my narrative all the anecdotes that didn’t directly lead to this point. I’ve in no way related what was my whole story. This conversation has been a selection, a gentle trawl so you know — as much as I do myself — about who I am, so you can accompany me as you listen and help me understand how if in this darkness there are no external bounds then perhaps they exist within the shadows shaping it. For example, I myself certainly have a form within the formlessness, or that’s what I’m trying to affirm through this narrative. If I left out many years and many facts, I also erased from these words many people I associated with, mentioning only those who helped (all quite unawares) to bring me here, with the exception of dear Uncle Gustavo. If I didn’t talk more about him it was because you’d have then understood mine was a different story, or even that I was a different person, but if I don’t leave him out entirely, if I fleetingly mentioned his name, it was because in any re-telling I could never entirely erase him from my memory.
I will only relate one Quebec anecdote, memorable for two reasons that I’ll combine. One was there at the start and the other arose later. I went to eat in the house of some of Esther’s friends (or acquaintances or colleagues, I never clearly understood what linked them) and, seated at their tables, I really had a clear sense that I was hearing the steps and the noises I know so well, the ones that pursued me at home, but now at midday as we sat down to eat.
I felt so frightened thinking they had tracked me down, that this was the definitive call, that they knew how to ensure I didn’t escape, that I had to stop eating because I couldn’t swallow a mouthful, rather, I couldn’t pass through my gullet the single mouthful I took of the roast meat specially cooked for my visit.
The whole wide world seemed to collapse like the extraordinary waterfall we passed in order to reach their house, the Montmerency falls, that I remember from the mute, single piece of evidence I preserved by mistake from the world I inhabited as a child.
Right here:
I ripped it from my holiday scrapbook to make more space for photos of my hosts and left it loose in no particular place, which is why it sometimes appeared in a notebook, sometimes on top of the desk, sometimes inside a folder. I don’t know why I held it tight the night they came for me and didn’t let it go. Here it is. It’s the only thing I knew I had: nothing at all, a spurt of water in the darkness that by trying to remember so hard I’ve erased completely. I don’t know what colors were there, it’s black and white like the photograph you can see. I don’t know what it smelled of, what its temperature was, if there was noise or silence. Nothing at all. Water, sky, trees, electricity or telephone cables — perhaps carrying voices that I sense and try to recreate — murky constructions, all wrapped in the same senselessness: What was the water like? Was it a violent, extraordinary descent, pure death, or was it lake water, quiet, peaceful, serene, like a tender mother, but gentler, more welcoming, no doubt more faithful, more protective?
And what were the trees like? Gently surrounded by leaves, cruelly protruding, sharp-pointed, rough, bare branches, or dead on their feet?
I had to say I felt sick at the Winograds. I couldn’t swallow anything and my head was spinning. They lay me on a sofa while I listened to them chatting in the quebecoise I’d already got used to listening to and only half grasped. There I realized the steps weren’t pursuing me, that they weren’t after me and realized in the end, by fine-tuning my inner ear in my stillness, that they were following the only daughter of the house. Her name was Miriam. She was much older than me and was quietly humming a pop song as she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I was doubly relieved; because I wasn’t the sought-after prey and because of Miriam’s attitude: the company of the noise didn’t seem to upset her. She asked in relaxed fashion, making me smell cotton wool soaked in alcohol, whether I felt well and would like un chocolat, un caramel, quelque chose…
As soon as I returned to Mexico, I realized the territory I’d lost on my journey was perhaps greater than what would have been snatched from me if I hadn’t gone away, feeling the millimeters of loss night after night as a tragedy. If before I left I thought I’d barely any territory left to defend on my return I just crossed my arms and waited for a rapid denouement. Panicking, naturally. I wasn’t Miriam.
My house was never as big as it was then. I walked around some nights when everyone was asleep, tiptoeing, ducking under tables, looking for the equivalent of the well of eternal youth, El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, and not in broad expanses of uninhabited territory and on horseback, but on a carpet, under furniture, next to the pictures painted by the painters whose names I’ll never be able to forget and who lived on the walls of our house — Fernando García Ponce, Lilia Carrillo, Manuel Felguérez, Juan Soriano — people who at the time were the painters of my city, and who had swapped paintings with Esther so each could have their own collection.
I brushed against furniture, climbed on armchairs, kept my distance from walls, made futile gestures trying to distract them and myself.
There were few parts of the house I didn’t visit by night: the utility room, the patio, the terrace, the garden, and of course, Esther’s studio, which I didn’t visit by day either. I’d never been back there since the serviam competition, since I’d painted that figure that I’d baptized Nails. Why did I return that night? Because when I put my ear to the door I realized I could hear nothing inside, which meant I’d be safe inside. I thought, “They won’t dare go in here.”
I opened the door to the studio; dark, under a starry sky, it was really beautiful. A full moon, as perfect as in her drawings, its round, innocent face smiling down at me, I took another step inside and a shadow jumped (jumped!) out of the dark.
It was Esther. “Oh!” she spluttered. I stood watching her. She seemed younger than by day in a thin cotton nightdress, her face without makeup and her long hair loose.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. I’d liked to have explained, to have told her once and for all about the crazy race I’d become embroiled in, but I didn’t have time.
“What are those noises?” she asked. They flocked into the room. Clung to the walls where I saw them, as if I’d caught glimpses of fragments of them before, I saw them bound to each other, creating the puzzle to that day I’d not understood, the fragments congealed around the Nails that Esther kept framed, hanging on the studio wall.
“But what is it?” she shouted or something similar as she rushed to protect me. All those things on the wall turned on her enraged, feeling disturbed, wounded in their hidden selves, began to separate out, bits of some from bits of others, bits of others from bits of others, till they formed a mass of fragments I knew so well. The pursuers set upon her. I took her hand and said, “Run, Esther, come on…”
“Please say Mom at least now!” she shouted in a panicky voice. “But what is this!?” she kept shouting as I tried to save her, I had been the one who’d drawn the pack to her study, till I heard Dad shout, “But what is this!?” and I saw Esther wasn’t depending on my hand anymore, that I was by myself dodging them in the lounge, and I ran to my bed and cried and cried still hearing them and listening to Dad calling the doctor and then the shrill, deafening, strident, blinding call of the ambulance. I peered out of the door and saw two nurses carrying Esther on a stretcher. Esther (can I say Mom at this point in the story?) turned her head around to see me. I ran after her. The stretcher-bearers stopped. Her head turned around, lips half-open, she said, “Poor little thing,” and burst into tears as well; oh Esther, I loved you so much, so much, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom…