“On the way there he never once turned around to look at us or spoke a single word. My grandmother called him ‘the German’ and told us that as a boy he had gone around exposing pyramids in order to photograph them, but that after some contretemps, whose exact nature was never made clear, he’d decided he wanted no more of ‘those absurd piles of stones.’ Instead he lavished on the jungle a love that bordered on the fanatic, the kind of love, I imagined, he’d once lavished on the absurd piles of stones. With the same ease with which he swung the machete to left and right, mastering the most overgrown masses of growth, as if God had created him expressly for this purpose, he would sketch drawings of each one of the jungle plants on huge sheets of papers that he’d had sent especially from Europe. Then, he would color them in with a patient exactitude, writing down their names, and on a second sheet listing their qualities: smell, dimensions, type of blossom and fruit, etc. Then he’d move on to the next one, in what was a labor without end, with so many herbs, so many plants, so many trees, and so many flowers thronging our jungle.
“He was always impeccably dressed, as if on the point of leaving for a party. He had a room next to the house of my aunt’s nurse, and my grandmother said he was the only consolation she had in the world. How did the German console an aunt who was sick both night and day? Well, I never even dared put the question into words.
“One first of September, when we had to sleep over at my aunt’s place because a spectacular storm had broken, the German came into the kitchen in the evening and without saying a word got out an unbelievable number of eggs and beat them with a wild energy. He then put the same energy into frying up for us some inflated fritters, like hollow buns, which we ate with the milky juice you get from fig leaves. They were exquisite.
“I said to him, ‘I really love your fritters, Mr. German. Thanks so much.’
“He replied, ‘I’m not German. I’m Austrian.’
“‘Well, where were you born?’
“‘In the Vatican.’
“‘Then you’re not German or Austrian, either. And that’s why you’ve never married. You were born in the land of priests and altar boys.’
“‘My father was the agent of the Duke of Baden-Baden and managed his affairs in the Vatican. He spent three years there with his family. That’s where I was born, and that’s where we buried my mother, who died very young. I hadn’t reached my second birthday before we were back in Baden-Baden. I don’t have one memory of the Vatican. I was German, but I changed my nationality when I came to Mexico as a volunteer with the army of the emperor Maximilian. And here I stayed, looking after piles of stones and getting only insults for it, till I turned my eyes to the plants, and they’re what occupy me now.’
“‘The German isn’t Austrian either,’ said my grandmother. ‘He’s been here so long he’s more Mexican than tamales and mole.’
“‘What do you mean mole?’ he replied. ‘We don’t eat that stuff around here.’
“‘Did you really come with Maximilian? You must be really ancient,’ I said with the astonishment to be expected of a child.
“My grandmother gave me a clout for being cheeky.
“‘Let her alone,’ he said. ‘She’s right and I’m not offended.’
“‘Well, I am offended,’ said my grandmother. ‘You’re younger than I am. And if I’m up to making these trips, I’m not having anybody calling me aged, just imagine, when we’ve traveled all that way through jungle, with all that heat, and all those ups and downs, any one of my bones could have gone snap, I don’t know how they didn’t …’
“The aunt who was sick both night and day had one key symptom — she couldn’t distinguish dark from light. A strange infirmity made her insensitive to light. She saw everything in a misty light, though she hadn’t cataracts or anything similar in her eyes; it was just something sick inside her that caused it. Since night and day were the same to her, she had trouble sleeping. She’d be wide awake or fast asleep regardless of the time of day. Sometimes she spent days in nightgowns that were embroidered to the point of looking ridiculous, and that night we spent stranded at her house I caught dreamy glimpses of her walking about the house, dressed like she was heading off to a fancy party, but the grandfather clock was striking four in the morning.
“She simply didn’t have the same clock as other people, and there was no pretending she did. She had only one goal in life, and it got in the way of even the most basic forms of politeness — I mean to sleep. She dedicated herself to that goal with admirable tenacity, but, sadly, got very poor results. She was lucky if she got an hour of sleep. Usually it was no more than fifteen minutes at a time. Then she’d wander around for hours trying to nod off or get some sort of rest, stumbling around with her misty vision, or stretched out on her bed, her mind rambling.
“I felt very sorry for her. She suffered far too much with that horrible disease. They say she got it from an insect bite in the jungle. It must have happened when she was strolling there with the German …”
12 The Army
The following Sunday the army marched into town. Minutes before the clock struck eight, while the church bells were summoning the faithful to the second Mass of the day, there arrived in the park four trucks painted green from top to bottom. An uncounted number of uniformed men clambered down from them, armed to the teeth. The vehicles moved away and the men took control of the town center without giving a word of explanation to anyone. First they formed up to block all entrance to the porch of the church. The priest came out to see why he had only two parishioners inside, two old biddies who heard Mass after Mass, stuck like toadstools to the pews, and why the statues of the saints, the images of the Virgin Mary, the candlesticks, and the flower vases had all suddenly fallen out of their places over the altar’s top, down from all its nooks and crannies. Fully dressed to say Mass in his vestments of white and gold, he collided with the army of green men, behind which he assumed his parishioners were waiting. Without changing his dress, he tried to pass through the wall of men, but each soldier was holding his rifle horizontally just below the level of his helmet and they formed an impenetrable barrier. He asked to speak with the general or the colonel or the ranking officer.
But nobody paid him any attention, as if they hadn’t a clue what he meant by “general or colonel or ranking officer.” For their reply they stared at him head-on, though in reality, since they were so focused on standing firm and holding their weapons just right, they barely saw him.
“What a screw-up!” the priest was thinking, he told us later. “Another Sunday without a Mass. What’ll become of my flock?”