and to remind him at every moment of his ghost
there were shadows of mountains and of clouds on mountains
fleeting shadows of insects
and shadows racing among horses’ feet
green shadows of willows swaying in the water
and shadows of a sparrow that shrink as the bird soars
and once it is in the air open out their wings flying over the ground
trees and beings had their voice on earth and their duration on a wall
and I
made my poem
and I recited it trembling.
Chapter 4
ONLY A HANDFUL of the streets had names, and the letters that arrived bore the words “Domicilio Conocido” (known residence) rather than our address. Our house stood on the main square, the public garden directly in front. From any point in town you could see the steeple of the old church. But what truly provided the landscape to our village were the hills, green or blue depending on the distance from which they were glimpsed.
The taller hill would spread its wings, always on the verge of taking flight.
The streets were few and long.
I had the impression the real village began in the air, above the rooftops of the houses in the blue that emerged from the end of every street as if in a celestial finale, varying in tone depending on the hour.
Stores were closed on Wednesdays. If there were never many people in Contepec on weekdays, Wednesday the village was virtually uninhabited.
The day would pass with nostalgia and, dazed by its inertia, its interminable hours made me fear that Thursday, when the shops reopened, would never come again.
Nevertheless, in the afternoon after lunch my parents, my brother, and I would set out on a walk to one of our orchards. On the way my father and my brother talked about ways of improving the house and modifications to the orchard that would never get done, amusing themselves each Wednesday with the same conversation, as if it were a ritual of the walk itself to make plans and worry about the state of our properties.
We would pause by the edge of the dam, between the magueys and a ravine. From there we had a view of the horizon, with its solitary paths and dark pines, and, in the background, the hills. And there my brother would point to a spot and say, “That would be a good place to build a house.”
My father would look at him, as if he saw in his face the spot with the house already built.
Later they’d discuss the number of rooms the house would have, what color they would paint them, who would sleep where … And they’d get so lost in their digressions that they never noticed that they’d drifted from the topic. It’d surprise me, the way their faces quickly turned from serious to laughing after any joke at all, or how they got caught up in new plans after the mention of a certain person, place, or merchandise, their boredom showing, however, in periodic absentmindedness or yawns … In the middle of a grand project they would abruptly fall prey to bouts of melancholy, looking as if they were about to cry. And they talked any which way the words came out, not really pursuing a special topic. They drifted away from Contepec, the orchard, or whatever seemed to be exciting them at that particular moment, moving on to the matter of the movie theater or customs in other countries.
Not far from us, amid the magueys, a few buzzards repeatedly swooped down to feed on a dead dog whose stench could be smelled from meters away, as if enclosed within a fetid circle. Black and solitary, like gloomy emissaries or birds from the beyond, they would peck at the dog.
Before, like a silent scream, the stench had summoned them, proclaiming the carcass through the air.
At dusk we started home, resuming our conversation about house building and new business ventures. If fruits were in season, we would return with baskets full of peaches and figs.
Once home, my brother would go off to play pool and we would remain in the garden. My father read the newspaper, my mother watered the plants, and I sat on a step and watched my parents, sensing an indefinable sadness in them that made me sad too, as if it were in the very air, in the hour, in ourselves, in the funereal nightfall.
One morning they attacked the rummage room, a jungle of objects that seemed to defend its clutter. The maids would pull out tricycles with missing pedals, deflated balls in whose rubber a residual red still lingered, a token of bygone days; sparse brooms, chipped mirrors, wobbly tables, chairs without backs; clothes wistful for the shapes of my mother and father in irretrievable years; benches whitened by pigeons.
Dust rose from corners, walls, and things, as if secreted from the hollows, folds, and hours.
Then, once the floor was swept, the shelves dusted, the shared past of the house set here and there, so that a coat belonging to my father when he first arrived in Mexico in 1927 was brought blindly face-to-face in the present with a sweater worn by my mother a few years ago (the two made contemporaries only through finding themselves in the same derelict room), the things went back to the wardrobes, not to be restored to everyday life but to gather dust all over again, cloistered in a future of disuse. Preserved as tangible survivals of our own selves, perhaps to remind us of the unreality of our bodies and our ages, the shifts in our fancies and the ghostliness of our days in a torn shoe or in a record that was like the song to our games. Or to bear witness in the different-sized trousers and the variety of shirts we had worn to the growth of our bodies and the transformation of our faces, forever linked to certain overcast afternoons or to certain desolate days on which we could cry, or did cry, prey to a nostalgia so general or to a solitude so physical, we felt ourselves forgotten by everyone.
Like the time I walked, in a certain pair of trousers, to the railway station to wait for my brother, who was arriving from Mexico City, without asking my father for money to take the bus; and once the train arrived and my brother had alighted, I didn’t dare approach him and headed home without his knowing I had been there. Until on the way, when the bus driver told him I was returning to the village on foot, he made the vehicle stop and got off to help me on, asking why I hadn’t come up to say hello, and I, without knowing what to answer, had remained silent and cried.
There were wandering dogs in the village, scrawny, dirty, and hungry. They would attach themselves to the first person who walked by, and for a while had an owner, until a door closed in their face and they’d go back to being no one’s dog. They’d forage among scraps, prowling around houses or roaming the hot streets, their shadows nearly vaporized.
They barked their way through the night hours, when the sky is full of silences, distances, and stellar solitudes, and every noise reaches us with a din of urgency and abandonment, and voices from the street sound as if something terrible were happening.
I couldn’t imagine where so many dogs had come from, and why they didn’t have an owner. Many of them would gather in front of the butchers’ stalls at the market, monitoring purchases, watching the cutting up of carcasses, staring at the bloody cows hanging from hooks, licking the blood from the floor, and fighting over skins and bones. Sometimes, though, the butchers would subject them to butcher humor, tying strings of empty cans to their tails and lighting firecrackers that’d go off in a blast, and the howling dogs would take flight, the cans clattering against the cobblestones, pursued by the noise of their own making. They’d run past me, terrified, and if they managed to get into a house, they’d seek refuge under a bed or table, trembling violently, as if they were about to explode.