“Doesn’t it make you sick when you see my woman, you bloodsuckers?” Grandfather shouts, and squeezes Micaela tighter. “Do you want me to tell you where the heavenly kingdom is?”
He gives a big belly laugh and lifts up Micaela’s skirts, and the priests begin to trot like scared rabbits, like the kind that sometimes come down from the woods close by the garden and wait for me to throw them some carrots. Grandfather and Micaela laugh and laugh, and I laugh just like them and take my grandfather’s hand, he is laughing so hard he’s crying, and I say: “Look, look, they’re hopping like rabbits. You really scared them this time. Maybe they won’t come back again.”
My grandfather squeezes my hand in his, which is covered with bluish nerve lines and calluses as hard and yellow as the logs stored in the cave at the back of the garden. The dogs come back to the house and start barking again. And Micaela buttons her blouse and strokes Grandfather’s beard.
But, almost always, things are calmer. Here we all like our work. My aunts say it is a sin that a thirteen-year-old boy should be working instead of going to school, but I don’t know what they mean. I like to get up early and run to the big bedroom, where Micaela is looking at herself in the mirror, braiding her hair, mouth filled with hairpins, and Grandfather is still groaning in bed. Sure, what else could he expect, if you go to bed when the owls do and sleep only four hours, after playing cards with your friends till two o’clock in the morning … That’s why at six o’clock, when I come into the bedroom, which is all cluttered with furniture, rocking chairs with little cushions for your head, great big wardrobes with mirrors so huge you can see all of yourself all at once, I crawl into the bed laughing. Grandfather pretends to be asleep for a while and thinks I don’t know. I go along with the game and all of a sudden he growls like a lion, so loud it shakes the crystal candlestick, and then I pretend to be afraid and hide under those sheets that smell like nothing else in the world. Yes, sometimes Micaela says: “You’re not a boy, you’re like one of those dogs, they don’t see anything, they just go where their noses lead them.” She must be serious when she says that, because it’s true that I go in the kitchen with my eyes closed and head straight for the pudding, for the honey pots and the squash-blossom sweets, for the bowl of nata—that thick skin from the milk — and the mangoes in syrup that Micaela is preparing. And without opening my eyes I stick my finger in the pot of stew and press my lips against the wicker tray where she is stacking up the warm tortillas. “Gosh, Grandfather,” I said to him one day, “if I wanted to, I could go anywhere I want just by smelling and never get lost, I swear I could.” Outside it’s easy. As soon as the sun’s up and the men are at the sawmill it’s the odor of fresh resin that leads me to the shed where the workers stack the tree trunks and logs and then saw the planks the width and thickness they want. They all say hello and then, “Hey, Alberto, give us a hand,” because they know that makes me proud, and they know that I know that they know. There are mountains of sawdust everywhere and it smells as if the real forest were here, because the wood never smells the same before or after, not when it’s a tree or when it’s a piece of furniture or a door or a beam in a house. One time there were bad things about Grandfather in the newspaper in Morelia, they called him a “land raper,” and Grandfather went down to Morelia armed with his cane and busted the newspaperman’s head and later he had to pay costs and damages: that’s what the newspaper said. My grandfather is really quite a character, no doubt about it. If you could see him, the way he’s like a wild bull with the priests and the newspapermen, and then so quiet and tame in the hothouse that’s behind the house. No, he doesn’t have plants there, but birds. Yes, he’s a great bird collector, and I think one reason he loves me so much is because I inherited his taste for birds and I spend whole afternoons looking at them and bringing them seed and water and finally putting on their cage covers when they go to sleep after the sun goes down.
Birds are a serious business and Grandfather says you have to study a lot to look after them right. And he’s right. These aren’t just any old pigeons. I’ve spent hours reading the cards on each cage that explain where they’re from and why they’re so rare. There are two pheasants: the male has all the plumage and he’s the vainest, too, while the female is dull and drab. And the Amazon cockatoo, very white with pale-blue circles under its eyes, as if it had been up all night. And an Australian bird, red, green, purple, and yellow. And the bird like flame, black and orange. And the whidah bird with a four-pointed tail that comes out once a year when it’s looking for a mate and then drops out. And the silver pheasant from China, the color of a mirror, with a red face. And especially the magpies, which swoop down on anything shiny and then hide it so well you can’t find it.
I know that I’d like to spend every afternoon looking at the prettiest birds, but then Grandfather comes and says to me: “All the birds know who all the others are, who their friends are, and how to entertain themselves playing. That’s all they need to know.”
Then later the three of us have dinner at the long, worn table that came from a convent, the only thing churchy, according to the old man, he’ll allow in the house.
“And it’s no skin off my nose,” he says as Micaela serves us some peppers stuffed with beans and melted cheese, “that a refectory table should end up in a liberal’s house. Señor Juarez converted the churches into libraries and the best proof that this poor country is going from bad to worse is that they’ve now taken out the books to put in the holy-water fonts again. At least I hope those hypocritical old aunts of yours wash the sleep out of their eyes each time they go to Mass.”
“Well, they get washed pretty often, then.” Micaela laughs as she passes the pulque jug to Grandfather. “They’re so holy they never get out of the sacristy. They stink of old rags and piss.”
Grandfather hugs her around the waist and we all laugh a lot and I make a drawing in my notebook of my dead mother’s three sisters, making them look like the sharpest-nosed and nosiest birds in all Grandfather’s collection. Then we all howl till our sides hurt and tears run down our faces and Grandfather’s face looks like a tomato and then his friends arrive to play cards and I go up to sleep and early the next day I go into the bedroom where Grandfather and Micaela sleep and about the same things happen again and we’re all very happy.
But today from the sawmill I hear the dogs barking and decide the priests must be passing by and I don’t want to miss Grandfather’s cuss words plopping like ripe tomatoes, but it seems strange for the priests to be going by so early and then I hear the loud horn and I know the aunts have arrived. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, when they hauled me off to Morelia by force and I was bored as a clam while one of them played the piano and another sang and the other one offered little cups of punch to the bishop. I decide to pretend I don’t know what’s going on, but after a while I get curious to take a look at that automobile that’s older than the hills and I come out of hiding like I’m just strolling around, whistling and kicking at the wood shavings and pieces of cork wood. Everyone has gone inside. But right in front of the gate there’s that old machine with a spotted roof and velvet seats with hand-embroidered cushions. INRI, SJ, ACJM. I will ask Grandfather what those embroidered letters mean. Later. Now I feel sure that the old man is giving them something cool to drink, and so as not to worry him I tiptoe into the house and hide among the big flowerpots and plants where I can see them without their seeing me.