Well, my aunt really tore into my bedroom before I woke up. I thought the house was on fire. She slammed the doors open and shouted my name. I woke up and there she was, her arms in the air. Then she came and sat down on the bed next to me and told me that I had made fun of the priest and that that wasn’t the worst. I had told all those lies in order to hide my true sins. I just looked at her as if she were out of her mind.
“Why don’t you admit the truth?” she said, taking my hand.
“What do you mean, Aunt? Honest, I don’t understand.”
Then she ruffled my hair and squeezed my hand. “How you’ve seen your grandfather and that woman in improper postures.”
I guess my dumb look didn’t convince her, but I swear I didn’t understand what she meant and even less when she kept on in a half-strangled voice, halfway between crying and screaming: “Together. In sin. Making love. In bed.”
Oh, that. “Sure. They sleep together. Grandfather says that a man should never sleep alone or he’ll dry up, and the same for a woman.”
My aunt covered my mouth with her hand. She sat that way for a long time and I was on the point of suffocating. She looked at me in a real strange way, and then she got up and walked out very slowly, not saying anything, and I went back to sleep, but she didn’t come back to get me up to go to Mass. She left me alone and I stayed in bed all morning until time for lunch, looking at the ceiling, thinking about nothing.
There are lots of lizards in the patio. I already know that when you look at them they turn the color of the stone or the tree to disguise themselves. But I know their trick and they can’t get away from me. Today I’ve spent an hour following them, laughing at them because they think I don’t know how to find them: you look for their eyes, shiny as painted pins. The whole point is not to lose sight of the eyes, because they can’t disguise them, and since they open and close them all the time, it’s like a signal turning on and off at the crossroads and that’s the way I follow one and then another and when I want to — like now — I catch them and feel them throb in my fist, all smooth underneath and wrinkled on top and tiny, but with life, the same as anyone else. If only they knew I wouldn’t hurt them, their throat wouldn’t throb so, but that’s the way things are. There’s no way to make them understand. What scares them pleases me. I hold this one tight in my hand and my aunt is watching me from the corridor upstairs, not understanding what I’m doing. I run up the stairs and get there out of breath. She asks me what I’ve been doing. I act very serious so she won’t get wind of anything. She’s sitting fanning herself in the shade, since it’s very hot. I stretch out my closed fist and she tries to smile; you can see it’s an effort. She opens her hand to take mine and I put the lizard on her palm and force her fingers closed over it. She doesn’t scream or get scared as I thought she would. She doesn’t scold me or throw the lizard down. She just closes her fingers and her eyes tighter and looks like she wants to say something but can’t and her nose trembles and she looks at me like nobody ever looked at me before, as if she wanted to cry and would feel better if she did. I tell her that the poor lizard is going to suffocate, and Señorita Benedicta leans toward the floor but can’t let it go and finally opens her fingers and lets it run off along the paving stones and climb up the wall and disappear. And then her expression changes and her mouth twists and I see she’s mad, but not really, so I smile and bury my head in my shoulders, try to look real innocent, and run back down to the patio.
I spend all afternoon in my room doing nothing. I feel tired and sort of sleepy like I’m getting a bad cold. It must be the lack of sun and fresh air in this dark old house. I begin to get sore about everything. I miss the sawmill, and Micaela’s desserts, Grandfather’s birds, the fun when the priests go by and the laughing at dinnertime and in the mornings when I go into their bedroom. I figure that up to now life in Morelia has been like a vacation, but I’ve been stuck here for a month and I’m getting tired of it.
I come out of my room a little late for dinner and my aunt is already sitting at the head of the table with her black handkerchief in her hand and when I take my place she doesn’t scold me for coming in late — even though I did it on purpose. Just the opposite. She seems to be trying to smile and be pleasant. All I want is to throw a fit and go back to the ranch.
She hands me a covered plate and I uncover it. It’s my favorite treat, natas.
“The cook told me you like it very much.”
“Thank you, Aunt,” I say, very serious.
We eat in silence and finally, when it’s time to have our coffee and milk, I tell her I’m bored with living in Morelia and that I wish she would let me go back to live with Grandfather, which is where I like to live.
“Ingrate,” my aunt says, and dries her lips with her handkerchief. I do not reply. “Ingrate,” she repeats.
And she gets up and walks toward me, repeating that, and takes my hand and I’m sitting there very serious and she slaps me in the face with that long, bony hand and I swallow my tears and she slaps me again and suddenly she stops and touches my forehead and opens her eyes wide and says I have a fever.
It must be one of the world’s worst, because I’m getting weak and my knees feel wobbly. My aunt takes me to my bedroom and says I must get undressed while she goes for the doctor. But really, all she does is flutter around while I take off the blue suit and white shirt and undershorts and get into bed, shivering.
“Don’t you wear pajamas?”
“No, Aunt. I always sleep in my undershirt.”
“But you have a fever!”
She rushes out like a madwoman and I lie there shaking and try to go to sleep and tell myself the fever’s bad just to say something. The truth is that I go right to sleep and all Grandfather’s birds come flying out together, stirring up a great commotion because they’re all free at last: the blue sky fills with orange, red, and green lightning flashes, but this lasts only a short time. The birds are frightened, as if they wanted to return to their cages. Now there are real lightning flashes and the birds are stiff and cold in the night. They’re not flying any more, and they’re turning black. They are losing their feathers, no longer singing, and when the storm passes and the dawn comes, they have become the file of seminary students in their habits on their way to church and the doctor is taking my pulse and Aunt Benedicta seems very upset and I see the doctor between dreams and my aunt says: “All right, now. Lie on your back. I have to rub this liniment on you.”