Grandfather is leaning with both hands on the head of his cane; his cigar is between his teeth, and he’s puffing smoke like the express to Juarez. Micaela is standing with her arms crossed, laughing, in the kitchen door. The three aunts are sitting very stiffly all on the wicker sofa. All three are wearing black hats and white gloves and are sitting with their knees pressed tight together. Two of them are married and the one in the middle is an old maid, but there’s no way of telling, because Aunt Milagros Tejeda de Ruiz is different from the others only in that she squints constantly, as if she had a cinder in her eye, and you can tell Aunt Angustias Tejeda de Otero only by the fact she wears a wig that’s always slipping to one side, and Aunt Benedicta Tejeda, the spinster, looks only a little bit younger and she’s the one who constantly touches her black lace handkerchief to the tip of her nose. But, aside from that, all three are thin, very light-skinned — almost yellow — with sharp noses and they all dress alike: in mourning all their lives.
“The mother was a Tejeda, but the father was a Santana like me, and that gives me the right!” Grandfather shouts, and blows smoke through his nose.
“The decent part comes from the Tejeda side, Don Agustín,” says Doña Milagros, that eye gleaming like a beacon. “Don’t you forget it.”
“The decent part comes from my balls!” Grandfather shouts again and pours himself a glass of beer, growling at the aunts, who have covered their ears all at the same time. “Why should I try to explain anything to you cockatoos? I can save my breath for better things.”
“Women!” screeches Doña Angustias, straightening her wig. “That prostitute you’re living in sin with.” “Alcohol,” Señorita Benedicta murmurs, her eyes lowered. “It wouldn’t surprise us to learn that the boy gets drunk every night.” “Exploitation!” Doña Milagros shouts, scratching her cheek. “You make him work like a common laborer.” “Ignorance”—Doña Angustias’s eyes blink. “He’s never set foot in a Christian school.” “Sin”—Señorita Benedicta clasps her hands. “He’s thirteen and he hasn’t received Communion or even been to Mass.” “Irreverence”—Doña Milagros points a finger at Grandfather. “Irreverence for the Holy Church and its priests, whom you attack so vilely every day.” “Blasphemer!” Señorita Benedicta dries her eyes with the black handkerchief. “Heretic!” Doña Angustias shakes her head and the wig falls over her eyebrows. “Whoremonger!” Doña Milagros can no longer control the trembling of her eyelid.
“Adiós, Mama Carlota!” Micaela sings, flourishing her kitchen towel.
“Adiós — goodbye to the papist and the traitor!” Grandfather thunders, with his cane raised high: the three aunts take each other’s hand and close their eye. ‘For a family visit, this has already lasted too long. Go back to that antique you call a car and your rosaries and your incense and tell your husbands not to hide behind your skirts, because the only angelic thing about Agustín Santana is his name, and tell them he’s waiting here for them when they really want to try to take the boy away. Godspeed to you, señoras, because only His grace can grant you that miracle. Giddap!”
But if Grandfather raises his cane, Doña Angustias retaliates by showing him a handful of papers. “You don’t frighten us. Read this order from the juvenile judge. It is a court order, Don Agustín. The boy can no longer live in this atmosphere of shameless immorality. Two policemen will come this afternoon and take him to the home of our sister Benedicta: raising Alberto to be a little Christian gentleman will be a comfort to her in her lonely years. Let us go, sisters.”
Aunt Benedicta’s house is in the center of Morelia and from its balconies you can see a small plaza with iron benches and many yellow flowers. There is a church beside it; it is an old house and looks like all the other big houses in the town. There is an entry hall and a patio and the servants live downstairs: the kitchen is there also, and there two women fan charcoal stoves all day. Upstairs are the living rooms and the bedrooms, all opening onto a bare patio. You can imagine: Aunt Milagros said that I had to burn all my old clothes (my overalls, my boots, my sweatshirts) and that I have to dress the way I dress all the time now, in a blue suit and a stiff white sissy shirt. They put me with a stupid old professor to teach me how to talk fancy before classes begin after vacation, and I’m getting a pig’s snout from so much pronouncing “u” the way the maestro wants it. Naturally, every morning I have to go with Aunt Benedicta to church and sit on the hard benches, but at least that’s something different and sometimes I even enjoy it. Aunt and I eat by ourselves almost all the time, though sometimes the other aunts come with their husbands, who tousle my hair and say, “Poor little guy.” And then I wander around the patio by myself or go to the bedroom they’ve given me. It has an enormous bed with a mosquito net. There’s a crucifix over the head of the bed and a little bathroom right next to it. And I get so bored I can hardly wait for mealtimes, which are the least boring times, and for a half hour before mealtime I hang around the dining-room door, I visit the two women who fan the stoves, I find out what they’re fixing and go back to stand guard by the door until one of the servants comes in to set the plates and silver at the two places and then my Aunt Benedicta comes out of her room, takes me by the hand, and we go into the dining room.
They say that Aunt Benedicta isn’t married because she’s very demanding and no man suits her; also that she’s very old, she’s already thirty-four. While we eat, I look at her to see if it shows that she’s twenty years older than I am, but she goes right on sipping her soup without looking at me or talking to me. She never talks to me, and besides, since we sit so far apart at the table, we couldn’t hear each other even if we shouted. I try to compare her with Micaela, who is the only woman I’ve ever been around, since my mother died when I was born and my father four years later and after that I lived with Grandfather and “that woman,” as my aunts call her.
The thing about Señorita Benedicta is that she never laughs. And the only time she says anything it’s to tell me something I already know or to give me orders when I’m already way ahead of her and doing the things she wanted without her telling me. She really gives me a hard time. I don’t know whether the meals really are long or if they just seem long, but I try to entertain myself in different ways. One is to put a Micaela mask on my aunt’s face, and this is very funny, I imagine her laughing her loud laugh and her head thrown back and her eyes always asking whether things are serious or a joke — that’s Micaela — all this coming out of that high-buttoned collar and black dress. Another is to talk to her in the language I invented myself, say, to ask her to pass me the coffee: “Hey-yeh, aunt-tant, asspay the offecay.”
My aunt sighs and she must not be so awfully dumb, because she does what I ask, and only adds a lesson in manners: “One says please, Alberto.”
But, as I was explaining, I get her goat in everything else. When she comes all serious to knock at my door to scold me for not being up yet, I answer her from the patio, all bathed and slicked up, so then she covers up her anger and says to me, more serious still, that it’s time to go to church and I smile and show her the prayer book and she doesn’t know what to say.
But she finally caught me one day, about a month after I’d been living with her, and all because of that tattletale priest. They’re preparing me for my First Communion and all the kids in catechism classes laugh that such a big boob doesn’t know the first thing about who the Holy Spirit is. Besides that, they laugh just because it’s me who’s the big boob. Yesterday it was finally my turn to have a little talk alone with the priest to prepare me for confession. He talked a lot about sin and about how it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know anything about religion or had grown up in such an immoral atmosphere. He said not to worry but to tell him everything, because he’d never before had to prepare a boy as full of sin as I was, for whom perversion was an everyday thing, who couldn’t even distinguish between good and evil. I racked my head trying to think what my worst sins could be and how the two of us were there in the empty church staring at each other without knowing what to say, and I started thinking about all the movies I’d seen and then I poured it out: how I had raided a ranch and carried off all the money and a few chickens besides, how I had grabbed and beat up a poor old blind man, how I had stabbed a policeman in the back, how I had forced a girl to strip and then bitten her on the face. The priest threw up his arms and crossed himself and said the worst anybody knew about Grandfather was nothing, and ran out as if I were the devil himself.