“What do you want to study?”
“I want to be an archaeologist.”
“Heaven help us! You’ve told your grandmother that?”
“I don’t talk to her. I’ve never talked to her. All day long she’s cleaning and cleaning or doing the accounts of the farm. What does she need all those accounts for?”
“That farm of hers is worth a fortune.”
“I’d like to go away with Gus. He’s nothing like the rest of them.”
“Gus couldn’t take you away right now. But in three years’ time it’ll be a different story. He’ll be delighted to do it. Ready to go home now?”
“No way!”
“Do you like music?”
“What? The stuff on the radio?”
He laughed. He asked me no more questions. All he said was “Let’s go to my place.” I put my shoes and socks back on. They were practically dry. We left the park bench and walked off, chattering nonstop, toward his house. The sun was shining as if it had never rained in Agustini.
28 The Teacher’s House
The teacher’s house was very different from mine and from other houses in town. It didn’t look like those I’d seen on my trips with the priest, either, the cool, dark houses of the Indians, rounded off without corners, made of adobe, and with a roof of palm branches, or the enormous homes of overseers and ranch owners, with lofty ceilings, surrounded by verandas, with inside patios and an endless succession of rooms. It had nothing in common with the houses of my cousins in Puebla or Villahermosa, city houses of two or more stories, with balconies, comfy chairs, rugs or carpets on the floors, noisy air-conditioning, staircases with handrails, interior hallways, roofed-over patios, furniture that was either antique or grotesquely trendy, and a host of bathrooms that made sense only if the idea was to trap vampires in the vast number of mirrors.
The door of the teacher’s house opened directly onto a living room with a mosaic floor and two windows, not a balcony, overlooking the street. It was a shadowy room, cool and furnished with armchairs with pointed feet. An unusual silence reigned there because there wasn’t a constant coming and going of people as in other houses, including my own. There it wasn’t uncommon to see the seller of honey sniffing around the door of my bedroom, or the boy who sold lottery tickets, or the lady who brought the bedsheets and the gigantic kitchen linens, all embroidered with the U of my family’s surname. People came and went. They dropped in unannounced and sometimes overstayed their welcome. The only ones who could be guaranteed to leave the house at the first opportunity were the Indians who had come from the farm with their fat overseer, but even these stayed to drink a soda pop offered by old Luz with her smiling face or the wretched Lucifer cursing them under her breath. The Indians crouched on the floor of the kitchen and the overseer sat facing the grinder on the table, without removing his hat. When I was very small, the overseer used to arrive on horseback, mounted on a handsome sorrel he called “the apple of his eye.” Later, it was one of the trucks for transporting coffee that dropped him off at our door, with the wood of the siderails constantly creaking away, since he never bothered to switch off the engine. The trucks had their individual names, of course, written below the tailgate in thick black letters: MY FINAL TRIP or BUTTERFLY OF THE HIGHWAY.
Of all the houses that I’d entered before the teacher’s, the quietest had been Elbia’s. Her grandfather owned a downtown furniture store which supplied the whole area with mattresses, wardrobes, tables of shiny Formica, headboards, bureaus, and such, and his son had opened up branches of the same tasteless business in Villahermosa, Tampico, and finally in Mexico City. But the grandfather had suffered a paralysis, both physical and mental, in some muddy affair in an out-of-the-way corner of Africa. His son, Elbia’s uncle, the rich furniture dealer, and the grandfather, the provincial furniture dealer, had gone on a hunting trip with the idea of both shooting lots of animals and returning with items of interior decor. They were planning to bring back stuff to liven up the look of their stores: stuffed heads of lions, elephant feet to use as umbrella stands, tusks, and the skins from zebras and tigers. And they did return with a pile of stuff, but the grandfather had suffered some unspeakable accident, something to do with a kidnapping attempt, if I’m not mistaken, and now he was reduced to a ghastly piece of furniture himself. But even there, in that house of sickness and quietly longed-for death, people came and went, though without too much hustle and bustle. At my home the birdseller used to come in whistling, after he’d propped up his cages against the housefront, the man selling cheeses came in with a song on his lips, the woman selling threads and embroidery came in reciting her prayers, often mistaking our house for the convent, and not without good cause, as their styles were similar. In Agustini silence was an extinct species. All the houses buzzed like beehives. People fluttered in and out, conducting nonstop conversations, doing their accounts, offering to sell live crabs, prawns, and crayfish from the river and green papayas marinated in black sauce, or wanting to buy our eggnog, to cadge a piece of cake or a mouthful of something, to give somebody a hand beating cream into butter.
What a contrast to the little house where the teacher lived with his aunt! The metal door of his house was kept shut, as it gave directly onto the living room, as in Indians’ houses. It wasn’t as dark as the windowless houses of the Mayans who lived in other parts of Tabasco, but it admitted much less light than ours. Entering that house was like entering another town, entering a mestizo settlement of a type not known in Agustini. All the objects inside it rested on one another. The ashtray leaned on the windowsill; returning the coffee cup to the table produced a sharp and scary puck! sound. Things in that house had a secondary body. Their nature possessed something strange. There were no flower vases, no plastic flowers as in the majority of houses, no natural flowers as in our house and the priest’s. There were no statues on the furniture, no clown like the one that first appeared in the living room of Doña Gertrudis de las Vegas, Grandma’s friend whom we used to visit now and then. “It’s a compassionate visit,” Grandma used to explain. “The poor dear’s lost everything she had, it’s a crying shame, just look at how she lives!” There were no bells there like those in my house, no Lladro figurines like in our house, no statues of the Virgin that the nuns had assiduously collected and foisted on the priest.
Instead, he had an uncountable number of books, scattered here and there throughout the whole house, on bookshelves, on tabletops, on various parts of the floor, but without the accumulations of fluff and dust that gathered like a perverse fungus around neglected books in our house, where I was the only one to bother with them. There were also things that never got inside our house: newspapers and magazines. When Gustavo lived in Agustini, he would go to the café and read the papers and magazines he bought in the arcades, but he invariably left them there for the waiters to read or toss into the garbage.
Among the pile of propped-up things, the teacher also possessed something else forbidden to the rest of us. I can still recall vividly the time Gustavo tried and failed to get the thing working in our house. It was a record player. He’d bought it in Campeche, where he did a fair amount of business, and brought it home, along with a good number of cumbersome 78s, one of which had been damaged on the bumpy journey home. The machine was a handsome, modern portable Panasonic, in a light green case, with two speakers in its lid and the turntable in its base. Gustavo assembled it carefully and positioned the speakers which were connected by dark brown wires to the machine, but for all his efforts, no matter what he connected or disconnected, he couldn’t get a sound out of it. He checked this and that, and was considering taking it back to the dealer who’d brought it in from the States, when he realized that the needle wasn’t making contact with the surface of the record. Hence the absence of sound. He tried to lower the arm by weighting it down with a one-cent coin on its flat top. No go. He used every coin of our national currency. Still the needle floated in midair. He then tried an American quarter, but all he succeeded in doing was producing a few bars of a song and then ruining the record. The teacher had this very same type of record player, but his worked, and on it we listened to songs that are still engraved in my memory. They were by Bob Dylan. The needle worked perfectly and, even though the records themselves were lighter, bigger, and thinner than those brought by Gustavo, the sound was flawless.