Could we become so great and strong as to survive the malodorous embrace of those who love us beyond death, we would not need their ghostly services. And the man who scarcely fears at all when his dead brother, instead of answering him, draws rotted hands about his throat, is nearly insusceptible to blackmail. Agustín had already learned how to be despised as poor, dark and criminal. The day they cut off his brother’s head something sickened in him. The night he became a catamite he felt as blindly bewildered as the corpse which wonders whether it has been buried alive or is truly dead. But the foul breaths of his new friends, the fungus on their skin, never mind the stink of algae and sewage from that hole in the floor; the grand and lonely hatreds he already wore; and the sunrises glowing in the latrine hole where the sea lightened into turquoise and small fry swam mindlessly round and round; all these improved him into a befitting instrument; then came the pestilences which could not kill him, although they carried off seven others in that cell. Now, for a fact, he grew “realistic.” The second time was not so bad as the first; by the fifth he knew better than to struggle; the best way was to give them satisfaction so that it would be quickly over. Juan and Rafael generally hurt him the most; Leopoldo was the kindest. Agustín would never come into his growth, it seemed; he had no more power to defend himself than a little girl. Salvador would have protected him, even with his life; indeed, in a sense he had — the very reason he was gone forever. That fatal quarrel with Fray de Castro had been occasioned by the victim’s refusal either to accept Agustín as an apprentice or to allow Salvador a half day’s leave in hopes of finding some master for the boy; the priest remarked, not without reason, that Herlinda had already siphoned off enough of Salvador’s labor; it was when he called her a succubus that the shovel struck him. So the boy drew himself ever more apart, not only from the other inmates of that crowded sweltering vault, but even from himself; and his appointed stripes no longer prevented him from meditating on the idea that the remains of some relative — her skeleton hand, for instance — might retain some virtue which could aid the living. Furthermore, he thought on the grand mountain of silver, and the regal Amazon of Ziñogava who wept silver tears. Once he more completely forgot the stepped Indian walls assembled from round river stones, the Spanish flag over the Baluarte, the smoke rising from the old Indian pyramid, the cruelty of canon law and the chittering and thudding of birds and lizards in the tree of yellow berries, the fishing nets on the wall by Boca del Río and the way Herlinda used to smile when she brushed her long hair away from her face, reality bled out of the world; and he dreamed about silver, which might for all its silverness keep a bluish or golden-brown tint, and which although it seems to reflect pinkness remains white in its deepest grooves.
His neighbors were gambling with lousy rag-scraps. The winner got to strike the loser. Agustín dreamed out his impossible escape: The iron door would screech open, the guards would fall dead, and somehow he would ascend the wall, which resembled the skin of a piebald albino.
In that cell lay a certain Indian whose ears had been lopped off for some offense against the Holy Sacraments; since he never in all those years broke silence, his cellmates jested that the executioner must also have cut out his tongue, as could easily have been the case. He was the only one who had not incurred Agustín’s hatred, not that he had ever defended the boy — who took him as a model. Staring at the wall, those two said no word. Agustín heard his cellmates reckoning up the days as well as they were able; they decided that this might be the first of May, at which he closed his eyes, remembering the Ribbon Dance which is performed on that date; once when he was small his brother sat him on his shoulders so that he could see across the thousand-headed crowd in the zócalo, and enjoy the dancers; there were certain nuns who could sing and play the guitar, and although he was too young to understand the words, the melodies tickled him; and afterward his brother gave him a slice of cake. Closing his eyes, he saw the arches of San Juan de Ulúa receding and receding; he had seen them only that once, and it seemed that if he could but count them accurately he might save himself; therefore as he lay in the sticky whitestained cell, his bitterness growing upward like one of the stalagmites around him, he tabulated arch-shadows on the grey-pebbled pavement which he had so briefly trodden: one, two, three, and then the fourth shadow-bar was darker and wider, after which came the fifth, beyond which he could not certainly see any shadows, but noted two more sharp-edged archways, although it might have been three, and the blotched pallor after those might or might not have been a wall.