The next time he came to the ghost houses, on a hot Sunday afternoon beneath a crescent moon, there was an old woman selling flowers, with long white hair around her face and behind her the cheerful glow of the toy skulls she peddled to children. She reminded him of someone.
Just as some of these abandoned houses’ shutters bore shards of faded paint, so his explorations contained older motive-markings which he could not read. Pulling himself up into another high-floored ruin, one wall of which had been broken open long ago, he encountered rubbish, the stench of excrement, scrap wood and darkness. Of course the city’s homeless fugitives would have grubbed away any jade beads lying here. A succulent, well rooted in the rotten wood, had grown out through the window and rose up higher than he could see. In another house, fig trees had nuzzled their way through the roof. Choking on dust and mildew, he began to feel a special secret warmth upon his forehead, as if a beautiful woman were lovingly urinating on him. It descended the back of his neck and enriched the backs of his hands. For a long time he could not understand what it was. Then his ears began to ring, and he remembered that he was febrile.
Staggering out of there, he next investigated the so-called “castle” on Hidalgo and Callejón California. It was an archway full of sky.
In the morning the bright red shards of brick and the scraps of blue-grey tile gave the castle a mellow appearance in contradistinction to evening when the sky was so yellow and clean over its flat-toothed parapet. The walls were cheerfully graffiti’d in red and yellow, and broken casements leaned up against the partially bricked doorways. Standing on the street, Ricardo, moderately feverish, looked around him, and once again found himself safely alone, aside from the pregnant woman who was dancing to music on the street corner, clutching a small child who lay sleeping across her belly-bulge. Behind the wide curling railing of stone, an open room invited him, so he clambered in, and found lanky dark vines growing down from the high ceiling as at Cortés’s house. The ceiling was ribbed with what seemed to be narrow struts of iron. The wall bore faded patches of blue like the Tang Dynasty tombs. There was a yellow motor oil bottle and a foul smell. It would have felt perfect to close his eyes, but Ricardo proceeded into the next room, which was fresh with pure blue sky in its broken skylight, and floral frescoes on the wall, partially overpainted with graffiti. The deeper in he went, the better he forgot Adela and the more he longed to unite himself with the genius of this place. He entered the third room, and found the burned skeleton of a sofa grinning with all its springs. Beyond this lay a bathroom whose tub was full of ashes. Ricardo sank his arms into this, and immediately found a jade bead carved in the semblance of a grinning woman.
In a niche at the far end of the room stood a toilet like a low altar. The wall behind it had been torn open, and from the wall of the adjacent alley, water trickled down into the toilet bowl, never filling it. He thought to himself: If she came into my arms…
Then the trickling sound became a giggle, and the woman in green appeared, as he had hoped that she would, this perfect woman for him to love, as slender and radiant as when she had stood at Cortés’s right hand. Although she must have been someone from the south, the blue direction, realm of vegetable matter, her lips were cochineal-red like an Aztec prostitute’s teeth. His sudden lust resembled the brass band whose roarings and blarings prevent anyone within two blocks of the zócalo from sleeping before dawn.
She regarded him with much the same unwinking interest as does a lizard the shiny brown beetle which gambols in reach of its jaws; and Ricardo, precisely because he blamed women for his failures, was susceptible under such circumstances as these to even the most impersonal feminine attention. As he approached her, she began to lick her dark lips. Her unwholesome breath played coolly over his face. Unable to control his desire, he thrust the jade bead into her mouth, and at once she became a dead object, with her eyes closed and her mouth an ovoid cave of darkness, her breasts hard and yellow, and a great clay headdress on her forehead, with many vines or serpents rising out of it. Her earrings were the size of cartwheels, and the knurled stone collar around her neck could have moored the largest ship.
Jade beads began to spew from her vulva. He filled up his pockets, then fled.
You’ve grown lucky, said his Aunt Bertha in satisfaction. Which girl gave you those, or is it a secret?
It’s no secret, aunt. I’ve met La Llorona.
Child, that’s very dangerous.
Tell me, aunt. How can I get a woman to love me? — And because he asked her this with desperate sincerity, he felt no embarrassment.
My boy, how could a woman not love you? I see girls turning their eyes on you when you go down the street, and you reject them all; you deny that it happened—
What do they want to do?
To take care of you, my child! To cook for you and comfort you in their arms.
But I’m not just a child! Maybe you see them that way because that’s how you see me. But I’m not, I’m not!
Before she left him absolutely, Adela, who was herself as grave and lovely as Doña Marina, still used to make love with him on unexpected occasions, and whenever this happened Ricardo would whisper: I’m so grateful, in an ever more feeble and passive voice, and Adela, riding on top of him, would stop and raise her eyebrows. Ricardo said: You can do anything you want to me, even cut me into pieces; what I want for you to do is to cut me into pieces! — Then Adela grew angry and disgusted. But this was truly what the young man wished for; that way he escaped the lonely agony of being the one she no longer cared for. Everything was up to her now; that was best; he would accept anything.
After she left him, of course, he rejected everything, despising her; he became as active as a rat.
The next time he pulled himself into the “castle,” early on a cloud-pearled morning, just as the cars began to honk, encouraging the birds to further exertions according to their various aptitudes and interests, while men mopped the café-alleys, and the sweetly sulphurous sea-smell of Veracruz illumined him with fever or happiness, she was absent, so Ricardo returned to the ghost house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and beyond the dark, wooden-gratinged doorway found a heap of broken clay heads, whose thick clay lips the dead potter had rolled on around their oval mouths. Suddenly the impulse to count them overcame him, he could not have said why; but before he had half finished he felt the icy prickle of creepiness between his shoulderblades, and when he turned around, there was La Llorona, paler than he remembered, close enough to touch, with her long hair scarcely darker than her green lips. At once he thrilled into glorious desperation and asked her: Do you love me?
Of course. And after you, the next one and the next.
In his confusion he could not determine whether she was the one who would help him, and cut him into little pieces, or the one who should be weeping with remorse for helping the wicked Cortés. Presently she opened her arms. On fire with fever, he knelt down before her on those shards of clay, and slowly, slowly in the mildewed darkness her cold fingers began to play with his hair. He expected to be devoured like the men before him — all the more so, since he had run away with her jade. But once they had satisfied each other three times she sent him silently away, and when he descended back into the sunlight this very young man who thought to have hardened himself against women longed to worship all the girls in red high-heeled boots whom he passed on the way home to his Aunt Bertha’s house. And that night when he lay down to rest he remembered what until now he had not even perceived seeing on that bus ride from Guadalajara: a young woman, her ripe buttocks practically bursting out of her shorts, walking slowly down the side of the jungle road, half-smiling in the drizzle, gazing for an eyeblink at him. At this recollection he masturbated furiously.