“Who comes to a cocktail party to be ‘deducted’?” I insisted, interested in not having my sentimental education cut short.
“Everybody,” Errol said with a laugh. “But only my father is so clever that he bans publicity and closes the deal.”
His laughter sounded hollow and sad.
“I’ve got the old man by the balls! The old fucker!”
I managed to squeeze in a question: “Do you think you’re going to negate your father’s offenses?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I only want to push my differences with him to the limit. Understand? I’m rich, you’re poor, but I have more misery to overcome.”
He emptied his glass in one swallow.
“You should know you’re born with privilege. You don’t make it.”
And he looked at us with an intensity we had never seen in him before.
“Everything else is robbery.”
I TOLD YOU, my dear survivors, I went to the Esparza house that night to avoid my own home, if it can be called that. Dysfunctional and all the rest of it, Errol’s family was in the have column, if Cervantes was right-and he is-when he quoted his grandmother: There are only two families in the world, the one you have and the one you don’t have. Now, how do you quantify familial possession or dispossession? People’s opinion of the fair is based on whether they had a good time. I ought to explain-I owe it to those who are still alive and gather in cities, neighborhoods, families-that I grew up in a gloomy house on Calle de Berlín in Mexico City. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the country seemed to settle down after decades of upheaval (though it traded anarchy for dictatorship, perhaps without realizing it), the capital city began to spread beyond the original perimeter of Zócalo-Plateros-Alameda. The “colonias,” as the new neighborhoods were called, chose to display mansions in various European styles, especially the Parisian and another, more northern one whose origins lay somewhere between London and Berlin and its destiny in a district patriotically called Juárez, though devoted to baptizing streets with the names of European cities.
My first memory is of Calle de Berlín and a three-story house with parapets and towers proclaiming its lineage, a meager stone courtyard, no plants, and only two residents: the woman who took care of me from my infancy, and myself. My name is Josué Nadal, something that readers have known since my decapitated head began to ramble, resting like a coconut and lapped at by the waves on a beach in Guerrero. The name of the woman who cared for me from infancy was María Egipciaca del Río, a name with Coptic resonances that should not be surprising in a country where baptisms are a fertile part of the popular imagination: In Mexico there is an abundance of Hermengildos, Eulalios, Pancracios, Pánfilos, Natividades, and Pastoras, Hilarias, and Orfelinas.
Her name being María Egipciaca and mine Josué should not attract any particular attention if we recall the biblical names that North Americans had from the very beginning: Nathaniel, Ezra, Hepzibah, Jedediah, Zabadiel, not to mention Lancelot, Marmaduke, and Increase.
Attribute this nomenclature, if you like, to the naming vocation of the New World, baptized once at the dawn of time with indigenous names and rebaptized with Christian and African ones throughout its history.
I’m saying all this to situate María Egipciaca in a sovereign territory of proper names that go beyond the designations “mother,” “stepmother,” “grandma,” “aunt,” “guardian,” or “godmother,” which I didn’t dare use for the woman at whose side I grew up, but whose identity she always hid from me, tacitly forbidding me to call her “mother,” “godmother,” or “stepmother” because the mixture of attention and distance in María Egipciaca was like an alternating current: When I displayed mistrust indulgence overflowed from her, and when I showed affection it provoked a hostile response. I’m explaining this game since there is something ludic in every close, solitary relationship that constantly has to choose between amity and enmity; it became clearly established only as I grew and situated in my surroundings this small, severe woman, always dressed in black with a belt and a wide, starched white collar, though her hair was styled coquettishly with short reddish curls in what used to be called a “permanent” (and was repeated like a temporal oracle on the head of Errol’s mother). The severe dress did not go well with the high-heeled shoes María Egipciaca wore to disguise her short stature, though this was more than compensated for by the energy she displayed in the huge house on Calle de Berlín, which was like an elephant’s cage occupied by two mice, for it had three floors but she and I lived only in a space bounded by the vestibule at the entrance, the living room, the kitchen, then two bedrooms on the second floor and a kind of mysterious ban on the third floor, where neither one of us went, as if the madwoman in the attic lived there and not the odds and ends left by previous residents in the course of a century.
Furthermore, the house on Berlín had suffered a great deal in the 1985 earthquake and no one had bothered to repair the cracked walls or restore the airy garret that served as the mirador and crown of the residence. So that when I came to live there, while I was still an infant, forgotten, forgetful, and forgettable (I suppose), its condition was not so much abandoned or forgotten as adrift, as if a house were a stream lost in the great tide of a city that had always been ravaged by military destruction, poverty, inequality, hunger, and revolt, and in spite of, or because of, so much catastrophe, determined to come back more chaotic, energetic, and brazen than ever: Mexico City would give a gigantic finger to the rest of the country, which was attracted to it like the proverbial fly to the spider’s web where it will be trapped forever.
Were there two María Egipciacas? I don’t remember the moment my life began in the light green mansion on Calle de Berlín, because no one remembers the moment of my birth, and lacking other references, we situate ourselves in the environment where we grew up. Unless in a fit of sincerity or imaginary health, the person who shelters us says:
“You know something? I’m not your mother, I adopted you right after you were born…”
María Egipciaca never did me a favor like that. And yet I recall her with the passing affection that gratitude imposes. It’s one thing to be grateful for something and another to be grateful forever. The first is virtue, the second stupidity; favors can be renewed but gratitude is lost if it doesn’t turn into something else: love that is a highflying bird or friendship that is not (Byron) a bird “without his wings” but a fowl less fleeting than love, with its high passionate flight and its low carnal passion. María Egipciaca was part of my childhood landscape. She fed me and had the peculiarity of offering me the spoon accompanied by incomplete proverbs, as if she were waiting for the Holy Spirit of Homilies to descend and illuminate my childish brain:
“No matter how early you wake up…”
“If you eat and sing…”
“Let it rain, let it rain…”
“A closed mouth…”
“An old woman died…”
I believe that whatever the real identity of María Egipciaca, for her, mine was that of perpetual infancy. As a little boy I didn’t dare ask her Who are you? since I had adjusted, in the gloomy solitude of this greenish house, to where I was though I didn’t know who I was. The fact is she never called me “son,” and if she said it by accident, it was in the way someone says “listen,” “boy,” or “kid.” I was an asterisk in the daily vocabulary of the woman who took care of me without ever explaining or clarifying her relationship to me. I didn’t feel worried, I was used to it, I nullified any question about María Egipciaca’s status and was sent to the public school on Calzada de la Piedad, where I made some friends-not many-whom I never invited to my house, and I was never invited to theirs. I suppose I had a forbidding aura, I was “strange,” what others intuitively know about-a family, a home-did not stand behind me. I was, in fact, the orphan who, like the mailman, comes and goes punctually, without provoking a response to what would later, in secondary school, be my watchword: my large nose, or as Jericó, the friend who came to fill all the loneliness of my childhood, would say, “You don’t have a big nose. Your nose is long and thin, not big. Don’t let that bunch of bastards get to you.”