All of a sudden, saying to myself, “That’s it,” I ran off, leaving him in midsentence.
Bedridden with tonsillitis and drawn by the shouting of teenagers and kids, I peered out the window of a room facing the main square and saw Ricardo el Negro playing hide-the-belt.
Six boys, squeezed onto a bench with their hands behind their backs, passed the belt around while my brother, chosen by lot, tried to guess where it was.
When he attempted to grab at the belt from someone on the far left, someone on the far right swatted him with it.
Ricardo el Negro hit him the hardest, laughing out loud whenever he did, and even louder when he saw my brother tightly clamping his lips to hold back the tears.
He and my brother had killed a cat that used to relieve itself in the kitchen. One evening they came home and the stench wafting up from next to the stove had annoyed them.
With nauseated faces and a determined expression, they began looking around. Before long they came upon the cat, fast asleep on a chair; they grabbed him by the fur and carried him to the backyard. There, they set him on a wooden washtub, against a wall, and fired at him with a.22.
They killed him with three shots.
In those days, I hardly spoke to my brother. He went around with Ricardo el Negro and other friends who were older than me. Besides, he liked guns and pocketknives, of which I knew nothing.
One afternoon I followed him around the building site at our house because I was afraid something would happen to him.
I sensed a presence threatening him, entangling him in the snares of death.
I examined the rims of the walls to see if a brick or plank wasn’t about to fall on his head, and the floor, to make sure he wasn’t about to trip on a hole or step on a rusty nail.
I refused to part from him, as my nearness was what saved him from what might kill him.
He went from room to room, stepping on beams and leaning against loosely fitted windows, and jumped onto the mortar, his feet sinking in. With a melancholy air, he looked at me as if from a different space, as distant as people seem in a dream … I felt it was urgent to tell him to take his First Communion; he was already a teenager and still hadn’t taken it.
“To watch someone wash a glass, handling it carefully to feel its shape, and in its shape its fragility and in its fragility the glass of which it is made, and in the glass its transparency … To hold the glass between your hands, feeling its substance, its availability, its fate depending on your wish, which can be to smash it or make it shine … To treat things well, insignificant as they may seem, reveals a spirit in harmony with that which surrounds it, in a relationship of love.”
In a soft voice, Father Felipe shared a secret with me, a secret only I should hear; and although we were alone in the room, which smelled of wood and myrrh, he lowered his voice even more until he was only moving his lips, as if continuing to speak within himself.
After wanting for so long to make the trip, our mother had brought me and my brother to Temascalcingo for our First Communion. She wanted Father Felipe to be our confessor.
He had waited for me in the room, praying, while the nuns prepared me for our meeting, because before receiving anyone, he would pray. When I came in he watched me close the door and draw nearer to him, crossing the floor without feeling it beneath my feet.
Kneeling and wordless, I looked up at him, waiting for the miracle which, they’d told me, could take place. For he was a saint, and had performed miracles for the Indians and peasants in the region; he had soothed the conscience of men who had killed men, whom neither time nor imprisonment could console, the punishment being lesser than the crime.
But he only gazed at me in silence, from the height of his seventy-five years, or were they eighty-seven. And I gazed back, taking in the white beard lying against his chest, which would bleed, people said, if it were ever cut.
Outside the door, my mother talked about me with a nun. In a room off the corridor another nun prepared my brother for his meeting.
Father Felipe seemed to be and not be at my side, and in order to finish coming nearer or going, he would half close his eyes.
I searched for a wish within me, something I could ask for and have come true.
But I couldn’t find any, as I was happy without them.
And then he opened his eyes, smiled, and asked me to fetch my brother.
The following day we took Communion; the burning candles made me dizzy during Mass.
Afterwards we had breakfast in the convent’s dining room with the two nuns who had readied us for our Communion. These women spent the entire time discussing Father Felipe’s physical condition with my mother while consuming multiple helpings of jello and cake and several mugs of hot chocolate.
“His teeth often bother him when he eats,” they said, “if the meat is tough or the bread is stale.”
“Whenever he works too hard he gets tired, and has trouble hearing and mumbles his words.”
“If he doesn’t sleep enough the weather really affects him, his bones ache and he gets the shivers.”
“When he walks he has to go slowly and put his foot down firmly; a false step might cost him his life.”
After breakfast we returned to Contepec. That morning thousands of monarch butterflies were crossing the village. The air, like a river, bore currents of butterflies.
Through the streets, above the houses, between the trees and people, they made their way south.
In a room without a door in the backyard my dog lay dying.
The day before, while we were in Temascalcingo, he had gone out alone into the street and someone had given him yerba.
Lying on the floor, between convulsions and frothing, he was slowly claimed by death.
In vain my parents tried to save him. My mother asked the maids if it hadn’t been the butcher, who for some reason resented my father and had wanted to take revenge.
Rintintin no longer recognized me; futilely, I called out his name. He had been dragged away by death, and his days now seemed unreal and his existence foreign to mine.
Tomorrow, I told myself, he will be dead, and they’ll throw him to the outskirts of the village, where he’ll be fodder for the vultures.
On Sundays the peasants from the farms wandered our village drunk. They crawled on all fours over the cobblestones, or hugged the walls to get around.
After going to Mass and doing their shopping, they headed for the cantinas or drank pulque in the market.
Some would stagger past my father’s store, stopping at the lamppost to regain their balance and avoid falling “snout first,” as they said.
In the square an old man peed in front of his daughters, while the sun set in the distance over his back.
A few steps away a youth was being dragged by a horse that barely moved, and the boy spoke calmly to passersby from the ground.
In the store a woman was trying to say something to my father but couldn’t get the words out because her tongue was thickened from drinking. Faced with her incoherence my father attended to other customers, and the woman stumbled out snorting.
Outside the cantina an old man and a young man threw punches at each other, surrounded by an audience of men, women, children, and other drunks who’d just emerged from other cantinas.
A while after the tongue-tied woman had left the store my brother and Ricardo el Negro found her sprawled near an unwalled well on their way to the playing field. She lay sleeping on her back, her arms and legs splayed wide, her woven dress hiked up above her navel. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, exposing her dust-covered genitals.