My brother and Ricardo el Negro placed withered flowers on her forehead and in her mouth and bottles between the fingers of both hands. Then they shook an empty flour sack over her body and turned her white. Their guffawing woke her up and they broke into a run, pursued by the woman’s loud curses.
In our garden at dusk, amid the plants, my cousin and her friends, in colorful dresses and with their parents’ features pasted on their faces, were pretending to prepare supper.
Coriander, parsley, and watercress lay on the plates; candy and tangerines in the fruit bowl.
With a blue bucket on her head, my cousin, looking like a dunce and brandishing a bunch of spearmint, gave her two friends a lesson on how to brew tea, while they sat by her side with open legs. Catching me watching, they called out for me to join them, so I could play the husband who returns home.
But I didn’t care to.
So my cousin came over to me and stuck her hands in my pockets, feeling around to see whether I had any chocolates or pesos on me, although before long she unzipped my fly. And rolling her eyes towards the bathroom, she led me with murmurs to “you know where, to do what you like to do.”
Leaning against the wall she lifted her dress and made me run my hand across her bare stomach, sliding it down until she clamped it in her fissure.
A few weeks later as I played with soldiers in my room I had the urge to pee. On my way down the corridor I realized I was alone in the house, and sensed a presence around me that froze my steps and kept me from moving.
The sky was darkening, the walls and the floor had a muddy hue, and my parents’ room, seen through the window, had been emptied of its furniture; I felt like someone who returns home after many years and the loved ones he expects to find have already died or gone away, and the house to which he returns has undergone so much change that, although he’s in it, he feels he is elsewhere.
And so, as in one of those dream scenarios in which the participants are dead, the setting is antiquated, the air that envelops us is phantasmal, and the seconds we live through make us feel so unhappy in that space that they seem longer than they really are, I walked without walking, spoke without speaking.
And with my body stilled and my self troubled, I tried to move my tongue in an “Our Father who art in heaven, ha, ha, ha …,” but I couldn’t pronounce “hallowed” until I drew out from within me an enormous, magical
HA
that stood for “HHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLOWED.”
And once I said it I could move again, and I ran out of the house in terror.
Upon waking the following day at midnight I saw a ghastly woman at the window of my room.
Disheveled, she cried silently, her half-parted lips fogging up the glass panes. Her features were those of the drunken lady, the one my brother and Ricardo el Negro had made mischief with, and those of a young prostitute who had been raped and killed by a madman. This young woman had gone to Mexico City and lived in a brothel. The madman, who happened to be her cousin, had fallen in love with her when she returned to the village. One afternoon he attacked her in the kitchen, and thinking he was embracing her, hugged pots, brooms, and chairs, sating himself with them. One night, however, he pierced her throat with a knife.
Mute words and thwarted groans seemed to emerge from the hole in her neck. Her breasts were like the heads of pigeons and turtledoves.
“Don’t believe in her,” I told myself, “because you’ll keep seeing her. Look, she doesn’t exist.”
And I dropped my eyelids so as not to see her. And I tried to wake up, though I was already awake.
And when I opened my eyes to see whether she had gone, she was still there, watching me now with the face of my aunt Inés, who would visit me at the clinic after I was born. As a two-months-early baby I was put in a glass box and Inés would press her nose to the glass to gaze at me.
The light in her eyes was beautiful, passing through the window’s dirty panes unmuddied, and an internal brightness made her face radiant.
One morning in the kitchen, as I sat on a chair watching my mother make lunch, I saw three differing scenes through the three windows, each with its own quality of light, as if the present hour also held the hues of hours past and present.
With a deft hand my mother was sifting sugar over a peach cake, or cutting a vegetable, suddenly saying, “Let’s see …,” as she placed a piece of leftover peach in my mouth.
But I’d barely seen her face near mine, her arm extended towards my mouth, when I’d see her lifting the lid off a pot which, hot and uncovered on the stove, gave off warm clouds of steam that I inhaled.
My mother followed an exact rhythm, picking up the frying pan in a certain way and shaking it gently … if I had wanted to replicate her movements I would have mixed up both the chronology and the way they should go, doing a thing after the one it was meant to precede.
But while a willow’s branches filled the entire space of one window’s panes, and in another the sun-drenched morning seemed to mass into a cloudless blue, watching my mother I would tell myself, “Take a good look at her so you’ll be able to remember her later …”
And as I listened to the noise of pots, the wheeze of the small door to the pantry opening, and the sizzling of oil and peas as they came into contact with the frying pan, and as I saw the bright clear bridge of water pouring out of the jug, I repeated to myself: “So you never forget her …”
For I loved her movements, her way of pointing to a plate, her expression as she prepared meat or a sauce, brushing off my caresses without even noticing she did, or as if she were keeping a bothersome creature at bay. And then, abruptly, she would seem upset by a thing she’d suddenly remembered and startle me, as though it were quite serious, but it’d turn out it was only time to remove the flan from the oven.
To follow her gestures was to feel the rhythm of her being; and to feel it was to divine her inwardness; and to divine that was to remember her one day in a particular attitude, with such and such a face. And to remember her was to have her always in my own past, in the memory of my being, united, inseparably, to my self.
THE ROAD TO TOLUCA
ONE SATURDAY towards noon in January 1951, three friends and I made our way home after playing soccer.
The milky rays of a nearly white sun plowed the damp earth, and our shadows moved neatly beneath our soles each time we lifted a foot to take a step.
The mountain in the shape of a bird spreading its wings looked wrinkled. I felt dirty and tired.
When we reached my house I waved goodbye to my friends, taking the ball with me. Without replying they continued on their way.
As I opened the door I thought of going to my room to lie down and then take a bath. My solitary steps echoed along the sunlit corridor; my parents were at the store.
And then I went into my brother’s room, although I hadn’t meant to go in … A shotgun someone had lent him was propped against the wall. As if moving by their own accord, my hands reached for it. I walked to the backyard and climbed onto a pile of bricks that were being used to build the new kitchen. There was no one around; the bricklayer and the peon were having lunch in the old dining room.
Standing on the bricks, I saw some birds alight on the sapodilla tree next door, to be momentarily covered by the branches … Until they returned to the air, over my head, high in the blue above … And without wanting to, I aimed the shotgun at them and fired, not intending to kill a single one.