‘They don’t have bittle leaks yet,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m going to make those when my hinjury has eeled.’
I peered at a sticky blue mess by the light in the lobby.
‘That’s a fittle linch,’ she explained. ‘There’s a lot of them in Veracruz.’
The art of modelling with bread dough, which throughout history had been fervently naive and figurative, had just entered, rather abruptly, its abstract period. Hipólita had skipped all previous stages, and thus her contribution would in all likelihood go unacknowledged. Not even art, which is considered a realm of liberty, is open to anomalies: bread-dough modelling would need first to go through impressionism and cubism, at the very least, in order to be able to understand Hipólita’s figures as evolution.
‘What’s that red stuff?’ I asked, because I’d noticed all the figures were covered in red blotches.
‘That?’ she said, pointing at the belly of the supposed finch.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It’s blood.’
‘Are they dead?’ I asked.
‘Cow han they be dead if they’re made of dread bough?’ said Hipólita. ‘Do you thike lem?’
She began placing the figures carefully back into the detergent box, as I searched for the appropriate words for the situation.
‘I think you should keep taking those painkillers you’re on.’
~ ~ ~
I’d signed up in secret for painting classes at La Esmeralda. My sister, who had always been more practical than me and ate papayas instead of looking at them, had gone off to study business. I am able to recognise this only now, almost sixty years later: now my mother was the one who would be punished, in quite a cruel manner. Everything pointed to my sister becoming a secretary. This, along with the length of her legs, horrified my mother. I, meanwhile, was about to repeat the same mistake as my father, who had driven her so mad: confusing passion with vocation. As if it was a matter of genetics, a physical defect or an incurable disease, I was convinced I’d inherited his artistic temperament.
I had gone along to La Esmeralda and discovered very quickly that what really interested me was happening beyond its walls, in the bohemian lives of the students. We used to meet nearby and when the contingent was complete, we’d head for the dingy old bars in the centre. I was enjoying life, I’d found my vocation, until early one morning Turnup stuck his nose into the pocket of the trousers I’d thrown onto the floor by the bed. The next day the dog wouldn’t wake up; his breathing was almost imperceptible and he didn’t respond, no matter how much my mother shook him. In the afternoon she took him to the vet, who diagnosed him with marijuana poisoning. It was a simple diagnosis, you had only to smell his nose, and if my mother hadn’t discovered this earlier it was because she’d never smelled weed. That night, when I got back from ‘taking classes’ at La Esmeralda, Mum was waiting up for me, sitting in the living room, to tell me what the vet had said. It was a clear accusation, but since I had arrived home in a good mood, a little tipsy, and was in no way about to admit my guilt, I tried to play down the drama.
‘Impressive,’ I said. ‘How did the dog manage to light the spliff?’
Mum said only one thing:
‘You do dishearten me.’
I suppose she could have said that I was breaking her heart, but that would have implied a weakness of the muscle in her chest, as if she had a defect that meant she couldn’t deal with disappointments and the disheartening was partly her fault. Instead, she was using the verb with an Aztec sensibility: to dis-hearten, as in to rip out someone’s heart. This way, the fault lay entirely with me. My mother would end up dying from an attack on the heart, which is not the same as dying from a heart attack. She was in the National Medical Centre when part of the cardiology unit collapsed, on 19 September 1985. She was seventy-three years old and, the day before, a heart specialist from another hospital had assured her she was healthy, but she was convinced she was going to die. She kept saying she wasn’t ready yet; the possibility of re-encountering my father terrified her (my father wasn’t dead yet, but she didn’t know this). She insisted on going to the hospital the following day to get a second opinion. As she didn’t have an appointment, she went early so they’d be able to see her: she arrived before 7.19 a.m. She would have survived and lived for a few more years if only she’d paid heed to Schoenberg, whom she had obviously never read: he who doesn’t seek doesn’t find. But does one seek death or is it simply found?
Turnup woke up later and spent the next few hours watching the shadows that things project onto the surfaces of the world. He spent a whole afternoon observing an ant, studying its habits. Meanwhile, I was followed by someone my mother had sent, a colleague from the post office who owed her a favour, because Mum used to cover for him when he missed work. The spy managed to find out that I was going to La Esmeralda and, to jack up the value of the favour and thus clear all his debts, he told her all sorts of scandalous details, specifically that my classmates were a bunch of scruffy, gay, communist stoners. And that we’d learned all this from the finest — the teachers themselves. My mother banned me from ever going near the school again, on pain of being left an orphan, with her still alive. The same reproaches she used to hurl at my father were heard at home once more: Art is useless. You’ll starve to death. It’s a luxury we can’t afford. I thought: the luxury of being an artist, or of starving to death, or the luxury of doing something useless? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the worst dig of alclass="underline" Art is for spoilt little rich kids.
I tried to tell her about my supposed vocation, giving examples to refute what she said, made-up stories of imaginary painters who had overcome poverty and had their names carved into posterity in gilded letters.
‘Don’t you come to me with stories about French artists,’ she interrupted. ‘You’re just like your father and I won’t put up with it. Look at him. All he ever got from having a vocation was frustration, pure and simple. Just look how we ended up.’
Then, when I threatened to leave home, even if it was to live on the streets, to prove to her I was going to be an artist no matter how much she opposed it, she called my sister in and, with the solemnity of categorical lies, the ones there’s no turning back from and which oblige those who’ve told them to be loyal until death, she announced that she was suffering from arthritis and that the doctor had prohibited her from working.
‘I’ve come this far,’ she said, as if her batteries had run out: ‘Now it’s your turn.’
From that day on, Mum devoted all her time to two things: going to the doctor and looking after her dogs. My sister got her first job as a secretary and I never returned to La Esmeralda. My adventure hadn’t even lasted a year, but I had at least taken advantage of the life-drawing classes to see some naked women. Under the pretext of ‘capturing their essences’, I’d stared so hard at them, retaining in my mind each and every one of their folds, and had masturbated so much and so diligently that, at times of visual and carnal exhaustion, I’d reach a gloomy conclusion: the suspicion that perhaps the mystery of women was not quite so wondrous as to make it worth devoting one’s life to them.
My wings clipped, I took the easiest option: I asked my uncle for work on his taco stand. Now that I had to give up my supposedly true vocation, it seemed as good a job as any; better, even, than some of the ones whose systems of slavery were so badly disguised. To be honest, perhaps being a taco seller appealed to me more because I’d developed a grudge against dogs. My uncle’s stand was in the Candelaria de los Patos and he opened at night, which meant we started work at half past five. I chopped the onion and coriander, kept an eye on the tortillas, served the hibiscus tea and cinnamon rice milkshakes and gave the punters their change and a free mint. During the week the stall shut at midnight, and at the weekend, one-thirty in the morning. I gradually grew used to spending hours on my feet, going back and forth, joining in with the regular customers’ banter. The only thing that annoyed me and to which I never resigned myself was the stench on my hands, my artist’s hands, which now smelled of a mixture of onion, coriander, mint, sweaty notes and coins.