BERNABÉ
When he was twelve he stopped going to school, but didn’t tell anyone. He hung around the station where his uncles worked and they let him clean the windshields as a part of the service; no matter if you only earn a few centavos, it’s better than nothing. His absence went unnoticed at school, it didn’t concern them. The classrooms were jammed with sometimes as many as a hundred children, and one fewer was a relief for everyone, even if no one noticed. They turned down Richi for the band and he told Bernabé flatly, at least come earn a few centavos, don’t waste any more time or you’re going to end up like your goddamn papa. He gave up playing the flute and signed Bernabé’s grade cards so Amparo would think he was still in school and so a pact was sealed between the two that was the first secret relationship in Bernabé’s life, because in school he was always too divided between what he saw and heard at home, where his mother always spoke of decency and good family and bad times, as if they’d known times that weren’t bad, and when he tried to tell any of this at school he met hard, unseeing gazes. One of his teachers noticed and she told him that here no one offered or asked for pity because pity was a little like contempt. Here no one complained and no one was better than anyone else. Bernabé didn’t understand but it made him mad that the teacher acted as if she understood better than anyone what only he could understand. Richi understood, come on Bernabé earn your coppers, just take a good look at what you can have if you’re rich, look at that Jaguar coming into the station, jeez usually we get nothing here but rattletraps ah it’s our boss the Honorable Tín passing by to see how business is and look at this magazine Bernabé wouldn’t you like a babe like that all for yourself and I’ll bet lawyer Tín’s women look like that, look at those terrific tits Bernabé imagine lifting up her skirt and sliding between those thighs warm as milk Bernabé God I always get the short end of the stick look at this ad of Acapulco we’re always shit on Bernabé look at the rich bastards in their Alfa Romeos, Bernabé, think how they must have lived when they were kids, think how they live now and how they’ll live when they’re old men, everything on a silver platter but you, Bernabé, you and me shit on from the day we’re born, old men the day we’re born, isn’t that right? He envied his Uncle Richi, such a smooth talker, words came so hard for him and he’d already learned that when you don’t have the words you get hard knocks, he left school to knock around in the city, which at least was dumb like him, isn’t it true, Bernabé, that the big bully’s words hurt more than his blows? Even if the city knocks you around, at least it doesn’t talk. Why don’t you read a book, Bernabé, the teacher who’d made him so mad asked, do you feel inferior to your classmates? He couldn’t tell her that he felt uncomfortable when he read because books spoke the way his mother spoke. He didn’t understand why but, from wanting it so much, tenderness was painful to him. In contrast, the city let itself be seen and loved and wanted, though in the end racing along Reforma and Insurgentes and Revolutión and Universidad at rush hour, wiping windshields, hurling himself against the cars, playing them like bulls, hanging out with the other jobless kids and playing soccer with balls of wadded newspaper on a flat piece of ground like the one he’d grown up on, sweating the stench of gasoline fumes and pissing streams of sludge and stealing soft drinks on one corner and fried pork rind on another and sneaking into the movies drove him from his uncles and his mother, he became more independent and clever and greedy for all the things he was beginning to see, and everything beginning to speak to him, the damned words again, there was no way to escape them, buy me, take me, you need me, in every shop window, in the hand the woman extended from her car window to give him twenty centavos without a word of thanks for the swift and professional cleaning of her windshield, on the face of the rich young man who didn’t even look at him as he said, keep your hands off my windshield, punk, in the wordless television programs he could see from the street through the glass of the show window, mute, intoxicating him with desires, as he stood as tall as he could and thought how he wasn’t earning any more at fifteen than he had at twelve, cleaning windshields with an old rag on Reforma, Insurgentes, Universidad, and Revolución at the hour of the heaviest traffic and how he wasn’t getting any closer to any of the things the songs and ads offered him and that his helplessness was stretching longer and longer and would never come to anything like his Uncle Richi’s desire to play the flute in a dance band and spend the month of September in Acapulco skimming on water skis across a Technicolor bay, swooping from an orange hang glider above the fairy-tale palaces of the Hilton Marriott Holiday Inn Acapulco Princess. His mother, when she found out, was philosophical, she didn’t scold him about anything any more, and she resigned herself to growing old. Her few remaining priggish friends, a widower pharmacist, a Carmelite nun, a forgotten cousin of former President Ruiz Cortines, saw in her gaze the tranquillity of a lesson well taught, of words well spoken. She could give no more of herself. She spent hours gazing down the empty road toward the horizon.
“I hear the wind, and the world creaks.”
“Beautifully stated, Doña Amparito.”
SUNDAY AFTERNOON RODEO
He came to hate his Uncle Richi because leaving school and cleaning windshields along the broad avenues hadn’t made him rich or given him what everybody else had, if anything he was worse off than ever. That’s why when Bernabé was sixteen his Uncles Rosendo and Romano decided to give him a very special present. Where do you think we’ve gone for a good time all these years without women of our own? they asked him, licking their mustaches. Where do you think we went after shooting rabbits and eating dinner with your mother and you? Bernabé said he guessed with whores, but his uncles laughed and said that only dumb shits paid for a woman. They took him to an empty factory on the abandoned silent road to Azcapotzalco with its putrid smell of gasoline where for a peso a head the watchman let them enter and his Uncle Rosendo and Uncle Romano pushed him before them into a dark room and closed the door. All Bernabé could see was a flash of dark flesh and then he had to feel. He took the first one he touched, each of them standing, her back against the wall and he leaning against her, desperate Bernabé, trying to understand, not daring to speak because what was happening didn’t need words, he was sure that this desperate pleasure was called life and he seized it with open hands, moving from the hard and scratchy wool of a sweater to the softness of shoulders and the creaminess of breasts, from the stiff cotton of a skirt to the wet spider between the legs, from the thick laddered stockings to cotton-candy buttocks. He was distracted by his uncles’ bellowings, their hurried and vanquished labors, but he realized that because he was distracted everything lasted longer, and finally he could speak, amazing himself, as he thrust his penis into this soft, melting, creamy girl who clung to him twice with her arms about his neck and her legs locked around his waist. What’s your name, mine’s Bernabé. Love me, she said, be sweet, be good, she said, be a doll, the same thing his mother said when she felt tender, oh, baby, oh, handsome, what a cock you’ve got there. Later they sat for a while on the floor but his uncles began whistling the way they did in the station, like a mule driver, hey, come on, kid, let’s go, put your sword away, leave a little something for next Sunday, don’t let these bulldoggers sap your strength, oooheee they’re castrators, they’ll eat you alive and spit out the pieces, by-eee by-eee now, who are you anyway, María Felix? Bernabé jerked the medal from the girl’s neck and she screamed, but the nephew and the two uncles had already hurried from the Sunday-afternoon rodeo.