The old people, sobbing, are kneeling.
I reach out my hand and run my fingers over the porcelain face of my little friend. I feel the coldness of those painted features, of the doll queen who presides over the pomp of this royal chamber of death. Porcelain, wax, cotton. Amilamia wil not forget her good friend — com see me here wher I draw it.
I withdraw my fingers from the sham cadaver. Traces of my fingerprints remain where I touched the skin of the doll.
And nausea crawls in my stomach where the candle smoke and the sweet stench of the lilies in the enclosed room have settled. I turn my back on Amilamia’s sepulcher. The woman’s hand touches my arm. Her wildly staring eyes bear no relation to the quiet, steady voice.
“Don’t come back, señor. If you truly loved her, don’t come back again.”
I touch the hand of Amilamia’s mother. I see through nauseous eyes the old man’s head buried between his knees, and I go out of the room and to the stairway, to the living room, to the patio, to the street.
V
If not a year, nine or ten months have passed. The memory of that idolatry no longer frightens me. I have forgotten the odor of the flowers and the image of the petrified doll. The real Amilamia has returned to my memory and I have felt, if not content, sane again: the park, the living child, my hours of adolescent reading, have triumphed over the specters of a sick cult. The image of life is the more powerful. I tell myself that I shall live forever with my real Amilamia, the conqueror of the caricature of death. And one day I dare look again at that notebook with graph paper in which I wrote down the data of the spurious assessment. And from its pages, once again, Amilamia’s card falls out, with its terrible childish scrawl and its map for getting from the park to her house. I smile as I pick it up. I bite one of the edges, thinking that, in spite of everything, the poor old people might accept this gift.
Whistling, I put on my jacket and straighten my tie. Why not go see them and offer them this card with the child’s own writing?
I am almost running as I approach the one-story house. Rain is beginning to fall in large isolated drops, bringing out of the earth with magical immediacy the odor of dewy benediction that stirs the humus and quickens all that lives with its roots in the dust.
I ring the bell. The rain gets heavier and I become insistent. A shrill voice shouts: “I’m coming!” and I wait for the mother with her eternal rosary to open the door for me. I turn up the collar of my jacket. My clothes, my body, too, smell different in the rain. The door opens.
“What do you want? How wonderful you’ve come!”
The misshapen girl sitting in the wheelchair places one hand on the doorknob and smiles at me with an indecipherable, wry grin. The hump on her chest makes the dress into a curtain over her body, a piece of white cloth that nonetheless lends an air of coquetry to the blue-checked apron. The little woman extracts a pack of cigarettes from her apron pocket and quickly lights a cigarette, staining the end with orange-painted lips. The smoke causes the beautiful gray eyes to squint. She fixes her coppery, wheat-colored, permanent-waved hair, all the time staring at me with a desolate, inquisitive, hopeful — but at the same time fearful — expression.
“No, Carlos. Go away. Don’t come back.”
And from the house, at the same moment, I hear the high labored breathing of the old man, coming closer.
“Where are you? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to answer the door? Get back! Devil’s spawn! Do I have to beat you again?”
And the rain trickles down my forehead, over my cheeks, and into my mouth, and the little frightened hands drop the comic book onto the wet paving stones.
The Old Morality
“Gloomy buzzards! Damned devouring crows! Get out of here! You want my plants to dry up? Take the other road, around Doña Casilda’s house, let that old fanatic kneel to you as you go by! Show a little respect for the house of a Juarez Republican! Have you even seen me in your temple of darkness, you vultures! I’ve never asked you to visit my house! Get out, get out of here!”
Leaning against the garden fence, my grandfather shakes his cane. He must have been born with that cane. I think he even takes it to bed with him, so as not to lose it. The head of the cane looks just like Grandfather, except it’s a lion with a big mane and wide-stretched eyes that look as if they could see many things at one time, and Grandfather, well, yes, he has a lion’s mane, too, and yellow eyes that stretch toward his ears when he sees the row of priests and seminary students that file past our garden to take the shortcut to the church. The seminary is a little outside of Morelia and my grandfather swears they built it on the road to our ranch just to annoy him. That isn’t the word he uses. My aunts say the words my grandfather uses are very immoral and that I shouldn’t repeat them. It’s strange that the priests always come by here, as if they liked hearing what he shouts, instead of taking the way around Doña Casilda’s ranch. They went that way once and she knelt for their blessing and then invited them in for a cup of chocolate. I don’t know why they’d rather come by here.
“One of these days I’m not going to take any more, you sons of bitches. Someday I’m going to sic the dogs on you!”
The truth is that my grandfather’s dogs bark a lot when they’re closed in, but as soon as they get past the fence they’re as tame as anything. When the file of priests comes down the hill and they begin to cross themselves, the three German shepherds bark and howl as if the devil himself were coming. They must think it strange to see so many men wearing skirts, and clean-shaven too; they’re so used to Grandfather’s wild beard. He never combs it and sometimes I even think he roughs it up, especially when my aunts come to visit. What happens is, the dogs become very tame once they get out on the road, and they lick the priests’ shoes and hands, and the priests get a funny little smile and look out of the corners of their eyes at Grandfather, who beats on the fence with his cane, hopping mad, so mad he gets his words tangled up. Though the truth is, I’m not sure but what it’s something else the priests are looking at. Because Grandfather always waits for the men in skirts to go by with his arm tight around Micaela’s waist, and Micaela, who is a lot younger than he is, squeezes up against Grandfather and unbuttons her blouse and laughs while she eats a big plump banana and then another and still another and her eyes shine as bright as her teeth when the priests go by.