We did get letters, long letters in terrible handwriting with lots of spelling mistakes. In them, he talked about “my adopted country,” as he pompously referred to Chile, or “my other country,” “my Chilean self,” “my other self.” Sometimes, though not often, he talked about my grandfather, who was Spanish, from Galicia, and about my Sonoran Indian grandmother, who seemed as remote as aliens to me. He said that he was the youngest of seven children, that my grandfather was ninety and owned land near Santa Teresa, and that my grandmother was sixty, exactly thirty years younger than my grandfather. Sometimes, when I was bored, I made calculations (though I hated math) and the numbers didn’t add up: according to my mother, who knew and liked to report everyone’s age except her own, my father was twenty-five when I was born; therefore, he must have been forty around the time we moved to Mexico. If my grandmother was sixty, that meant she was twenty when she had my father; but if my father was the youngest of seven children, how old could my grandmother have been when she gave birth to her first? Assuming that she’d had them one after another, she might have been thirteen, two years younger than me and one year younger than my sister. My grandmother, thirteen; my grandfather, forty-three. Of course, there was another possibility: my grandmother wasn’t the mother of all my grandfather’s children; just the last two, or just my father. According to my father’s horrible letters, which I sometimes didn’t even finish reading, until recently my grandfather could still get up on a horse. My father also said that when he talked to my grandfather on the phone, telling him how he’d sent money for a horse for me—though here he got his verb tenses mixed up, and nothing about the story quite made sense—the old man said that he hoped to see me ride someday in Sonora, on a real Sonoran horse. All this did was turn me against my grandfather, and anyway I never met him. Once I asked my father (casually, as if we were talking about soccer, when we were stuck in a traffic jam on Insurgentes) about my grandmother’s precocious motherhood and then he confessed that she was my grandfather’s second wife. She’d had her first child at nineteen and the second (and last) at twenty. For some reason, then I asked about his first wife (my father’s, not my grandfather’s), with no transition or preamble, as if everything we’d talked about that afternoon had been leading up to this point. At first my father was cool and quiet, staring forward with his hands on the wheel. Then he said that in Mexico, unlike in Chile, divorce had been possible for a long time, but it cost a lot, which was not the case in Chile. I don’t know why, he said, but it’s expensive to split up. It must be because of the fucking kids, I said, and I threw the cigarette out the window (ever since I’d turned fifteen, from the time I’d set foot in Mexico City, my father had let me smoke). That must be it, he said. I can’t remember anymore whether we were heading toward UNAM or toward La Villa, just that we were crawling along and my father didn’t look at me for a while (he was staring at the motionless crush of cars—carros, as they call them in Mexico—on the avenue, but by his expression he might have been gazing out over the great open spaces of America, the dive bars and factories, the shadowy buildings where men like him lived, men past forty), but when he did look at me, he smiled and started to speak, but in the end he didn’t say anything.
The last time my father was in Chile, a year and a half before we left for Mexico, some friends of my mother’s invited us to their country house for the weekend. One afternoon we went riding. Some days I remember it clearly—the voices; the yellows and dark greens; the birds; the scattered clouds, incredibly high—and other days I remember it wreathed in fog, like some jumpy or distorted movie, or like somebody did something to my brain. There were seven of us Chileans and one Mexican, and the Chileans wanted to see if the Mexican was man enough to ride fast and not fall off the horse (I was one of the Chileans and I wanted to see too). I suspect that one of the Chileans, a doctor—though for all that it matters, he might have been a nurse—had slept with my mother, I remember him over at our house, my mother’s voice ordering Celestina to put us to bed, the music coming from the record player when they were alone, the soundtrack from Black Orpheus. I also remember the doctor’s (or nurse’s) sadness and occasional moodiness, though even at his moodiest he wouldn’t budge from my mother’s side in the hectic days before my father’s arrival. So my mother’s morose friend was there, and I was there, and five other Chileans, and I remember that they were drinking Maule wine and as we got farther from the big house I remember some jokes too, some allusions to the equestrian art in the two sister countries (which is a manner of speaking, since Chile and Mexico have nothing in common, except that one is at the top of Latin America and the other is at the bottom, the head and the tail of the subcontinent, but which is the head and which the tail depends on who’s looking or who’s suffering, and neither position is advantageous). (Actually, no Latin American country is in an advantageous position. We’re all on the slopes of the mountain, all at the bottom of the ravine. What ravine? The Yuro Ravine.) The point is, we were riding. Earlier, at the stables, my father had wanted to saddle his horse himself, then he checked my horse’s cinch, bridle, bit. He made a few remarks about the saddle, which he thought was showy. At first we began walking and the adults were drinking and laughing. I remember that we crossed a stream where my sister and I had swum in past summers. Then we came out into an empty field. On the other side of the fence, cows were grazing. Now two of the group, probably the older children of the country house’s owner, broke into a gallop and jumped the fence. My father followed. My father was just a few years older and I suppose he considered it his duty as a guest to follow them. Or maybe there was an earlier challenge or bet involved, I don’t know. All I know is that he went riding after them and I saw him reach the fence and jump it cleanly. Then I heard a cry, it was a bird, but I don’t know what kind of bird, maybe a southern lapwing, or maybe it was the two brothers galloping toward the next fence, but to me it sounded like the cry of a condor, as if a giant vulture had come out of the woods that we had left and was flying over the fields, invisible and menacing. Just as my father was about to jump the second fence I galloped after him. I felt the horse quiver, felt its power, and I approached the first fence like a drunk man. From here the field began to slope downhill, and though the slope seemed gentle from a distance, with the tall grass swaying a little in the wind, on horseback and galloping it was uneven, rutted, steep. When I looked up, the two brothers had come to a halt and one of the horses was rearing up in fear, maybe there was a snake, I thought, and I was scared, or maybe the rider was angry and was making the horse rear up in punishment. My father, farther away, reached the third fence, and from behind I seemed to hear shouts. Someone, the owner of the house, was calling for him to stop; someone, the nurse, was shrieking like in a Miguel Aceves Mejía movie, a Jorge Negrete movie, a Pedro Infante or Antonio Aguilar movie, a Resortes and Calambres movie, shrieks of pain and joy, shrieks of heartbreak and freedom, I realized all of a sudden as the second fence approached, and I shouted too and clung with my legs as my horse floated over it like a sigh and we kept rushing downhill, my father had already disappeared down the slope and the two brothers were to my left and then behind me, one of them on the ground examining his horse’s front hoof. Next came a steep rise and once I’d breasted it I could see a river walled with trees, and, a little farther off, a small wood, where some araucarias rose above the other trees. I didn’t see my father or his horse anywhere. I jumped the third fence and galloped down toward the wood. Before I got there I slowed the horse to a walk. I found my father sitting on a stump with an unlit cigarette in his hand. The hand holding the cigarette was shaking. He was sweating heavily, his face was flushed, and he had unbuttoned several buttons of his shirt. Until I got off the horse, he didn’t seem to notice my presence. I sat next to him on the ground and asked whether he’d had a good run. I don’t know why I did it, he said, I could have broken my neck. Then he said: it’s been a long time since I rode a horse. Far away, at the top of the hill, the others appeared; maybe somebody saw us and waved a hand; then they gestured, pointing toward a stretch along the river where the hill became less steep, the way they planned to go. I raised an arm to show I’d gotten the message. My father didn’t look up. He’d lit his cigarette and was sweating even more profusely. For a moment I wondered whether he was crying. The other riders waved, signaling to me, and were swallowed up by the earth. I sat back down next to my father. At first the cigarette seemed to choke him. It was a Cabañas and he was used to Mexican Delicados, stronger but smoother (quality tobacco, basically), but then he started to blow distracted smoke rings, as if his lips didn’t belong to him, staring first at the ground covered in twigs, sprigs of grass, clumps of dirt, and then gazing upward, perfect smoke rings of different sizes and even thicknesses. Then, after putting out his cigarette, my father said: do you want to hear how cowboys travel in Mexico? Dad, there are no cowboys in Mexico, I said. Of course there are, said my father, I used to be a cowboy and your grandfather was a cowboy, and even your grandmother was a cowboy. Do you know why I’m here, so far from everywhere? The question didn’t seem fair to me, I lived here, so far from everywhere, and he seemed to be constantly forgetting that, but at the same time I imagined he was about to tell me something that would change my life. Because of my mother, I said. Yes, because of your mother, among other things, he said. Because of you and your sister, he said after a silence. Among other things. Then he was quiet, as if he’d suddenly forgotten what we had been talking about, and at the far edge of the wood the rest of the group appeared. My father got up and said that we should join them. All my life I’ve tried to be a sportsman, he said before getting on his horse, but I’ve never managed it.