This is all I can tell you now, because my story starts and ends in Agustini. When I began this book, I’d planned to write only three brief pages about my town, and after that I’d describe the plane I took to escape from it, my journey beside a lady who took compassion on me for the story I told her and who left me in New York, where she offered me the book she’d been reading:
“One Hundred Years of Solitude—it’s fantastic, you gotta read it, Del, everybody’s reading it!”
Imagine my disappointment on flipping through its pages, telling myself that I didn’t leave Agustini just to find other towns that resembled it. Then would come my arrival in London, the awful malaise of jet lag that nobody had warned me about, my meeting with my father, the experience of ’68 at his side, my trip to Berlin, my job as an editor. Here I’d pause in my narrative to tell you about my sin, the one that ruined my life in Germany. Then, in the final chapter, I’d return to Agustini, only to find that it no longer existed — and that’s all I’d have breath for. Those are really the pages I intended to write. That way Delmira Ulloa would have freed herself from her idiotic errors, signing her work with the name of a prodigious and inimitable writer, before dying maybe in a fit of passion. My book would have freed me from the tangle of events that had surrounded me. After all, I fled here to write. But it didn’t turn out that way. I avoided my encounter with the truth to meet up once again with my past, my infancy. That, after all, was my real life, the only one I could ever truly be faithful to.
Time has moved on while I’ve been telling the story of my town. A chilly spring with its fragile miracle has come and gone. Summer arrived, a spurious summer with gusts of wind and rain. The sun had hardly decided to take up residence in the sky and it was August already! Suddenly Berlin has burst out into greenery and light. People are coming back from their summer vacations with their skin brown, faces aglow, throbbing with energy. The city is full of visitors from other parts of Germany, some with kids, some without. Holiday times are staggered here so that the favorite places to relax don’t get swamped with millions of visitors.
But I’ve prolonged the winter in my apartment. I go out little. I work at home, I write at home. It looks as if I’ve left my life in the lurch in order to prolong it, like some paradoxical form of gymnastics. Today I crossed the Tiergarten in all its renewed greenery — it’s the central park where I walk and intended to replace the bandstand in Agustini, though that was never my conscious decision. Couples were lying naked on the grass, exchanging caresses; on the beach men were wooing other men without a stitch on; mothers were getting grouchy with their kids, and from his van the ice-cream seller was dispensing his ephemeral merchandise, stuff the heat makes popular but which the sun melts into trickles.
Life continues on. But not for me. Here ends the life I lived as a girl, the way the other lives I’ve invented have ended. Now it’s my turn to invent myself over again. But concluding this account of my doings has left me exhausted. So I’ll take off to the beach, to Cumaná or Costa Rica, or to Djerba or New Zealand. I’ll try not to think about anything while I sunbathe, pretending I’m German. Then I’ll invent another character for myself and, if I’m lucky, I’ll decide to be a writer, with stories to tell on the written page, but stories unlike this one, stories that aren’t autobiographical and actually happened, but stories where the fantasy makes a certain kind of sense, where metaphor and meaning underwrite each other’s mechanisms, and where imagination marries a sense of reality in a radiant ceremony. Stories set far from Agustini, belonging only to the page on which the fantasy is written. That’s the limit of my ambition. I’m no longer the dreamy adolescent who was bent on threading together a book over the uncertain territory where the impossible meets the unique. My new goal is no longer a project founded on repetition of the past, however lofty and self-satisfied. Now I want to tell stories, to fill my readers the way my grandmother filled those nights when she failed to slide her hand over my head and failed to stroke my back and never uttered a single word of tenderness or planted a kiss on my cheek. Filling life out that way, with dreaming, with writing, leaping from one story to the next. But if I’m out of breath after disclosing merely the ups and downs of my childhood, if I haven’t managed to tell you how I got fired from my job in Berlin, how I modified passages in the work of Lope out of rebelliousness or plain boredom, how I tried to imitate those passages in real life, how I walked through the valley of the shadow of the lie, poisoning my everyday life and my daily acquaintances, I know I won’t be able to get my second wind and tell you a true story about something that never happened or happened only in the world of the imagination, surging to the surface full of fiery force, exposing life’s meanings. Here I’ve just managed to tell you who I once was, the only thing I have ever really been. Shall I now become a writer and desert my old self? For the present I don’t dare venture an answer to that. I simply don’t know what I’m going to be. I don’t know if I dare go back home, leaving behind all the other places I’ve known, or if there’ll be a square centimeter of Agustini that I’d recognize after the petroleum industry and modernity have overrun it. I don’t know what the sky will be like, now that they’ve buried the jungle and replaced it with cattle ranches and oil wells. I don’t know what’ll become of me, where I’ll be living when I come back from the beach, or if I’ll have the nerve to return to Agustini and look again at the house where I was a girl, my grandmother now an old crone for sure, my uncle the governor, the nuns all wrinkled, Young Baldy the rector of the University of Villahermosa, Dulce probably as ageless as ever, Lucifer raving mad, Dr. Camargo without a scrap of hair, the streets choked with vehicles, Agustini grown out of shape, the home of a hundred times more inhabitants, the apartment blocks built by Gustavo lining the whole coastline. I don’t know if I dare climb the church belfry and view the endless expanse of ranches, the paved highways, the mobs of people coming in and out of the market which my uncle also built. Worse still, I don’t know if, while evening shadows fall, I’ll have the courage to see, from up there, the frozen light of the TV screens flickering out from every window, instead of young and old strolling through the streets, eating corn on the cob, circling and circling the bandstand, looking for the young woman who makes those exquisite chunky tortillas from fresh dough, crammed with pork sausage and cottage cheese. I don’t know if my eyes might yet be capable of taking in the birds tumbling down from the sky, the oranges flying in clouds, the women suckling insects. Shall I go to the market? Will I bump into the seller of shawls, scarves, and rebozos? Will he raise above us in the air his tent of fabrics, will he be able to keep it aloft when he wishes to speak to me in private? Will I recognize his accent, will I know where he comes from, whether it’s from Mexico, and, if so, whether it’s from the north or south? Will the man who hauls merchandise still be anchoring around his waist the stuff the woman gives him to carry, so that he can keep his hands free? Will he trot along after her, the cans clattering, the plastic bags squeaking, stepping along among the gleaming price tags, boots, packages? Or will the market in Agustini still be selling cooking ingredients unprocessed the way Nature bestows them? The mountains of kidney beans, garbanzos, and rice — do they still await their purchasers, glistening on the ground? How old, I wonder, is the porter now? Does a child still make paper the way a child back then did? Does he still go without shoes? Does my grandmother remain asleep on the patio, stretched out on her shawl and floating? How fat has Dulce gotten by now after decades of guzzling the cakes that Lucifer makes? Do old women continue to pull out their rocking chairs to the street fronts to watch the death of the day? Are those same men still shut in the bakery? Is there even a bakery nowadays or one that actually bakes its own bread? Will the milkman come down the street, hawking his milk, banging on an empty can to alert housewives? Who still comes and goes from my house? The honey seller, the man who offers crabs, smoked lizard, and lottery tickets, along with fresh nuts and persimmon? Who is Lucifer grinding coffee for these days? Is the house still the same? Or have they shifted something out of my mother’s room? Does her water jug still look out from her balcony? Old Luz’s room that Dulce and Lucifer have now, does it still stink of pee? Won’t Dulce be sleeping in my room now? I wonder who plays with my dolls? Or do they still await my return, on the shelf where I left them, carefully organized, well dressed, sighing for the little girl I ceased to be before I deserted them? Does Grandma still hang a bunch of bananas at the door of the kitchen so they can ripen in the shade? Do they still dry coffee and cocoa pods on the terrace that overlooks the river? Or lock the door of the living room? Does anyone ever go in there? Do the bells still shift lazily back and forth, without their clappers ever sounding? Who are the nuns getting breakfast for on Sundays? Is Grandma still invited? Will they invite me to share their delicacies if I return? Do I have the courage to return? There’s no place to return to now, Delmira, you’ve returned to the only place you can: to memory.