After a while she sat down and smiled at me, displaying a lone tooth, her face now wearing a happy expression.
She told me, albeit briefly since it distressed her to speak, that they’d come to the village that morning to see a brother who was ill. They felt too tired that afternoon to return on foot to their home, which lay in another village, and would I help them with the bus fare.
So I slid my hand in my pocket, and with a quick, timid movement as if to hide from her what I was doing, I pulled out the five pesos I had. Then off they went, the old man’s shoes so worn he might as well be walking barefoot, for his feet slipped out with every step.
They headed for the market, where some people with scant cash bought a roll or an orange to stave off hunger, staring at the fruit sellers with large, exhausted eyes, or licking a banana peel to the point of transparency.
Beneath the buzzing of flies, skinny dogs lay stretched out in front of closed butcher stalls, and a poor boy had been sitting on a stone for hours.
Occasionally a woman bought tomatoes at a stand, amid the silence of the vendors, who looked half asleep in their vigil over nonexistent customers.
My aunt Inés was going deaf. They operated on her and she ended up completely deaf. When I visited her in her hospital room she read the How are you? on my lips with as much enthusiasm as if I’d brought good news regarding her health. The truth is, she looked like a survivor and reacted to any abrupt movement with alarm, as though it threatened to upset her equilibrium. She’d already acquired that expression some deaf people have, midway between anxiety and disorientation, similar to the expression of sailors who step ashore after months at sea, the isolation they endured written on their faces and patent in their very way of walking.
With her elderly body and virgin heart, she had the face of a sufferer, of a suffering bird. In company she would move her lips in silence, repeating to herself what she’d read on the lips of others.
At meals, people often forgot about her and spoke among themselves without giving her the chance to read their lips, for when she looked at them they would turn their heads away.
When my grandmother died, Aunt Inés inherited the house where she lived. Unmarried, and confined to solitude by her deafness, she spent her days with a few books, reading one after the other in turn. She only interrupted her reading to write letters to suitors in Guadalajara, San Luis Potosí, and Mérida. Yet she never met any of them, for she endlessly postponed their dates in equidistant cities where the encounters were meant to take place. She became the sempiternal “Sentimental Young Woman” or the “Disappointed Blonde,” until the letters she received weekly from the “Gentleman from the North” and the “Lonely Man from Chiapas” grew scarcer by the month until after a year or two they stopped arriving altogether.
In order to garner interest in the personals of Confidencias, she depicted herself as young and beautiful, cultured and virginal, sad and forsaken, swapping photographs from fifteen years earlier with her suitors, along with intimate stories and promises of marriage. And if she hadn’t advertised herself in a certain issue she would go out and buy it at once, anxious to be one of the first to reply to the personals.
Her correspondence was kept in a padlocked drawer so my uncles and cousins wouldn’t find the letters and read them.
She finagled money from her suitors, who were anxious to meet her. Worn down and aroused by so many letters, they pleaded for a rendezvous and sent money orders for her to travel to Tampico, a place to which at the very last minute my aunt would never go, due to fragile health or an ailing brother, postponing the trip to the following year.
Busy with her correspondence and deaf to the world, she went down the street beside noisy trucks. She read by the window, bringing the book closer and closer to her eyes, frowning if anyone she knew walked past, for she had trouble recognizing their features. A smell of dust, animals, and plants had settled in the backyard of her house. From my grandmother she’d inherited pots of geraniums, roses, and pansies, and a donkey, a goat, and a dozen hens, who’d lay their eggs in the kitchen and in the bedrooms on the beds.
The train would stop at the station, a few kilometers from Contepec. Passengers disembarked from two coaches while porters unloaded crates of oranges and sacks of flour from one of the boxcars. A mail pouch, full of letters and newspapers, was dropped between melons and bananas, and women briskly peddled their chicken mole through the railway cars. Yellow in the midday sun, a dog came running over the plain, while other canines fought over scraps of food passengers threw out the windows. A venerable ash tree served as a parasol for two old men, who witnessed in silence the activity on the train; in one of their dark, skinny hands a cigarette seemed to burn endlessly, flaring up every now and then at an occasional puff. All of a sudden, the train’s whistle and its lurching march forward brought all the activity to a halt and voices fell silent. In the landscape once again visible in the train’s wake, those of us who remained behind saw the plain, warm and lazy, surge up once more until only the dust was to be seen, dancing from one side to another like a blond figure, inconsistent and remote, engaged in a drunken dance in which she seemed to dissolve.
THE POEM ABOUT SHADOWS
Chapter 3
MY EYES PRACTICED on the sacred morning’s shadows and I learned to tell them apart by their darkness and their light
they seemed fashioned from penumbra and time and to be perishable or perfectible depending on the sun’s brightness and the location of beings and things
leading a perilous existence where the chance encounters that caused them to shimmer destroyed them
although some lasted beyond the day, for when nightfall came another light was lit next to the object that cast them, causing them to move slightly
some were very limpid and silence encompassed them in a clarity like an expanse of water that seemed to bathe them
my eyes ran over them, whether they were standing, lying down, or bending over as if to drink drops of light from the sun-drenched grass and among them my being composed its song
shadows, I thought, confer reality on objects by serving as their negatives or ghosts and dragging themselves across the floor or sliding down the wall as insubstantial doubles; there’s something servile about them, or inscrutably humble
they are the secret world, the counterweight, and the other landscape of the radiant day
I could tell the age of some and whether they were newly born or old by their condition on the dust and others were so riddled with holes that they were pale remains or ruins of shadows
on them the day narrated its variety, displayed its temperature, and revealed the hour
and suddenly in the afternoon there were unending shadows singing on the ground at the same time
spilled next to unending beings and things in the quiet landscape singing at the foot of a mountain or beside a black dog or a white chair or a little girl
here and there pointy and round in silent music
they intertwined, they intermingled, they piled up or, terribly solitary,
were cast by the root of a lone tree on the hill
or they walked at a man’s feet like an anchor to keep him from flying off the earth