“And so why didn’t he contact the main barracks?” they asked.
The secretary didn’t give them an answer. Instead, he thought, “What a cuckoo I am! In all the panic and haste it never occurred to me to do the sensible thing.”
They freed us at sunset. Uncle Gustavo, who was in town by this time, was waiting for us at the police department. He put me in his car and drove me out of town. I never saw the house of my grandmother again. I never saw her again. I never saw my mother again. She died six years later. I didn’t go to the funeral, although Gustavo insisted I should. In a letter Grandma explained at length how it was that Mama had fallen sick, with a black patch first appearing on her back at one side of her left shoulder blade, as if somebody had given her a hard punch. But it didn’t hurt or sting, and the doctor said not to worry about it. Then she started to have problems in her left arm, in the area of her armpit. Here an ulcer broke out and it started to get bigger and bigger. It became infected and however many sulfa powders from the doctor she sprinkled on it, and for all the honey and compresses from the herbalist she spread on it, it still continued to grow. Then a wart began to grow right in the center of the black patch on her back, which she still had not been able to get rid of. She lost her appetite and said she felt tired all day long. She said she woke up tired, that she had problems sleeping. She had given up the hammock and now slept on a bed of sugar that Grandma had had built. Instead of a mattress it had several kilos of sugar and was surrounded by a little channel of water to keep the ants away. She slept there because she said that only the sugar gave her any relief from her open wounds.
One morning they found her dead. “Her agonies are over” were Grandma’s words. “I still don’t have white hair, but she’s already gone and died on us. The doctor said it was a massive heart attack. As if her skin condition wasn’t enough to finish her off! Well, in my opinion, she did die of a heart problem, but not in the sense he meant. She rotted from the inside out. That was the rottenness that killed her.” I believed my grandmother’s explanation, perhaps for the first time in my life. Mama was still young, but she hadn’t found herself another boyfriend or an official suitor since she’d separated from my father. Father Lima hadn’t lived in Agustini for the past five years or so. He’d asked that they send him to Tehuantepec, where, according to the gossip my grandmother passed on, he had an Indian woman who “was driving him out of his mind with desire.” Mama could have gotten involved with any other man in town, but she got in over her head with him and there she drowned, longing for her absent love.
My grandmother’s long letters replace her nightly tales, but they lack the old burning imagination. She’s agreed to give me exhaustive accounts of what goes on in Agustini. So I know that the great-grandson of Doña Luz who used to stink of urine hasn’t gotten married, that Dulce still works in the house, that Lucifer still carries on as cook, that the aunt of the schoolteacher fell sick but got better, that the schoolmaster took off, some saying he went to live with the Indians in the jungle, others that he was murdered, and still others that he goes around armed, causing problems for the government. The chief of police, Lucho Aguilar, was assassinated one day in the covered walkway beside the square, nobody knows by whom, though after my disappearance there’s a long list of why’s. The worst thing that’s happened in Agustini I don’t need to tell you: They’ve destroyed the jungle. Between the petroleum, the exploitation of the tropical forests, and the introduction of cattle, they’ve swept it all away. That marvel of nature was converted mainly into telephone poles and railway sleepers. There are no more mahogany trees, no red cedars, no chicozapotes. There are still mangrove swamps and popals and tulars, but only because these trees grow in water.
I passed through Mexico City, barely seeing a thing. I know nothing of it. I never laid eyes on the frescoes of Diego Rivera in the National Palace or the Cathedral or the University Stadium, or the Latin American Tower, or the building of the National Lottery, or the statues of Diana and the Angel of Independence. I never drove along the Avenida Reforma and I’m not sure if we even traveled a few blocks of Avenida Insurgentes, the longest avenue in the world, while we were heading straight to the airport. I never got to see the Zocalo in the heart of Mexico City or the Museum of Anthropology and History or the gigantic statues of Tlaloc or Coatlicue or Coyolxauhqui. I didn’t even sleep in the city.
My uncle Gustavo’s secretary was waiting for us at the British Airways counter with a passport he’d gotten for me through the help of an influential friend. I had a seven-hour flight to New York, but on this occasion I didn’t get to know that place, either. I’ve gone back there since, but never back to Mexico City. I blew through Mexico City like a stray breeze and hardly had time to realize I was there. So there’s no point in talking to me about “Mexico, beautiful and beloved” and other such tags from songs. I do know the curtain that hangs on the stage of the Palace of Fine Arts because I’ve seen it in some book or other. But the volcanoes can’t stir me the way they do other Mexicans, nor can the view of the Valley of Mexico, because I never saw either Popo or Itza. I get nothing out of the nopal cactus or the maguey plant or the Indian with his serape whom I’ve seen in sketches here and there. I never visited Xochimilco or climbed the Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon at Teotihuacán. I never caught sight of mariachis, but I suspect they sound different from the ones they sometimes have here in Germany. I never saw charro horsemen. In my town nobody celebrated the Day of the Dead. I never knew the great mountain ranges of Mexico, nor its deserts, nor its other cities. I tried tequila maybe a couple of years ago. I know something about the rest of Tabasco only because I’ve read about it, but I’ve no idea what the magisterial sky over Zacatecas looks like or the Hill of the Chair overlooking Monterrey. I never visited the Cabañas Hospice in Guadalajara with those glorious frescoes by Orozco. I never went back to Mexico. Thirty years, Delmira, thirty years. And before them, Agustini, with your eyes fixed on a place that turns its back on the rest of the country.
1997
45 Thirty Years
I will finish my story in the style that Lope de Vega used in the novels dedicated to Marcia Leonarda. So here you won’t get a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened; all I’m going to give you is a rapid sketch of the key events.
Ten years ago I was working on Lope de Vega, editing him in Spanish for German students taking Spanish courses, and I’m going to use that as my pretext for choosing this break-neck narrative style, instead of showing my readers the incidents as they happened. I’m going to follow the example of Lope, who polished off the end of his Diana in a mere ten lines. I can’t dawdle over the thirty years I spent in Europe, because there was nothing in those thirty years to make me pause. I was alien to them, a complete Other. For three decades I didn’t sleep in a hammock, I saw no strange objects floating in water. No albino crocodile popped into my room, no army of Indians came by sucking voluptuously on juicy insects, no legion of toads exploded against my balcony, there were no imposing witches hawking fake merchandise, no rainstorms purchased for cash. I’ve spent six times five years here without hearing once the nightly tale of my grandmother. I came here in search of a world that obeyed the laws of physics; it is now all around me, but I can’t say I’ve come to terms with it. The first years here I was fascinated by the down-to-earthness of Europe, while the Europeans of my generation, I saw, were in turn being massively seduced by our apparent lack of logic. I found my father and then I lost him. Inspired by Lope, I forged various personalities, I believed myself first this person, then that, I showed distinct preferences for things and then I went and changed them, I opted for pronounced tastes and styles and then I dropped them. Once or twice I fell in love. I pretended I was working-class, I passed as an aristocrat, people thought I was the daughter of a king, I wore gauze and tulle at the same time as I dyed my hair and curled it coquettishly. I dressed like a man out of love for a woman. I found my father again, only to lose him again. I ended up beating him at his own game. These days they’ve opened The Globe, Shakespeare’s old theater, and I ought to take advantage of the chance to go visit it, to see a show there with him. We’ll make a date to drink a pint or two in his favorite pub. Maybe I’ll get there fifteen minutes late because of a delay on the Tube, while they check out if the bomb scare is genuine, but he won’t be aware of that. He’ll just sit there watching the froth move down his glass. The minute he sets eyes on me, we’ll launch into our chatter, as if we’d seen each other only yesterday. I’ll listen to his latest calamity in love and we’ll go off together in silence to sniff out the bookstores in Charing Cross Road. Without realizing it, we’ll approach the banks of the Thames, arm in arm, and we’ll look at the originals of scenes we’ve so often seen reproduced in photos. We’ll sit down where the nobility once sat, like them and now like everybody, with the rain on our backs. After the show, we’ll go dine where we have a view of the Thames, from one of the new restaurants that they’ve built some way from the City, where in times past stood a factory which had employed child labor, which was then replaced by a warehouse, and which is now the last word in chic.