I watched with relief as they all flew on until they were lost in the distance. But as I let the shotgun drop, the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me. Such was the blow I felt from the shots that I thought infinity had entered my belly.
Invaded by ammunition, engulfed in the smell of gunpowder, my blood hot and my right hand bleeding, I wasn’t aware of my state until I tried to take a step and a feeling of being torn apart kept me from moving.
Perhaps I had screamed, for the bricklayer and the peon were now below telling me to hang on, that they were going to bring me down from the bricks. But a maid arrived and opened her arms to me and I jumped, nearly throwing her to the ground with the suddenness of my jump and the weight of my body.
She lifted me and carried me to a bed. My parents came into the room, intense suffering on their faces for what had happened to me and the condition I was in. My brother, who’d been summoned from the bathroom in a hurry, looked wet and sad, wrapped in a large towel, crying and trembling.
After examining me the doctor said the wound was superficial, but that it would still be necessary to take me to the city since he didn’t have the necessary instruments to operate.
Then the maid came to tell my mother that the taxi they’d ordered was waiting outside. My father took me in his arms and laid me down on the backseat.
Before we set off, a Texan rancher named Elías drove by in his jeep, and my father asked him to accompany us on our journey in case the car broke down, and he accepted.
With my head resting in my mother’s lap, I stared at the shabby roof of the car as I listened to a song blasting from a cantina, and I wondered which friends might be watching the car drive off, and thinking of God and my fate, I said yes to my accident, as if it were an adverse gift from God.
The taxi indeed broke down on a steep slope as we drove up a mountain between Contepec and El Oro. They put me in the jeep.
I was extremely thirsty and unable to move when at around four in the afternoon we finally reached El Oro. My father got out of the jeep to hunt for the doctor who knew how to operate; waiting for his return, we parked near the main square, where a few curious onlookers came over to inspect me.
After a while my father returned and said the doctor was out of town and wouldn’t be back till Wednesday.
And so we pressed on to Toluca, not arriving until nine at night because the jeep had to go very slowly; my father took me into the first hospital he saw, at the entrance to the city.
It was the General Hospital.
And there, they operated on me.
Hours later I awoke in a room, in bed. My father and mother were watching me. My father said, “Go to sleep. Rest.”
When I opened my eyes again, night had passed and it was Sunday morning. Seated in a chair next to my mother was a lady from Contepec who lived in Toluca and had come to visit me.
My father was not in the room. My mother and the lady were speaking in hushed voices, and each time they looked over at me they would study my face as if searching for clues to my future.
Listening to them, I learned that my father had witnessed my operation and that there had been a moment when the doctors, giving me up as a lost cause, had no longer wanted to continue, but that my father had insisted they persevere till the end.
According to what I heard them say, which was incongruous with the calm I was feeling, the state of my wound was extremely serious; one doctor had said that if they didn’t operate again within the next twenty-four hours I would die from the complications that might arise. But the main doctor who had operated on me disagreed, and they left me to my fate, to see whether I would live or whether I would die.
My thirst grew until I was near delirium … I burned with an inner parchedness that made me grab the bars of my bed and scream. My father would say he was going to get water and return after a long while, saying there wasn’t any but that he’d been able to moisten a ball of cotton with a few drops left in the sink, and then he’d pat my lips with it.
“Let’s wait and see what happens over the next seventy-two hours,” a doctor told my father, believing I was asleep.
My mother had phoned Father Felipe to come. In a waking moment I heard he was coming, and that he’d been very shaken by the news of my accident.
My mother told the nurses that he was a saint, and could perform the miracle of saving me. They and the nuns awaited his arrival. And the fate of my health remained on hold until then.
I was not doing well at all, the doctors said. But I didn’t feel as bad as I looked to them, and I let them hover around me as if they were working on someone else who wasn’t me. My spirit refused to be bullied by the helplessness of my body.
Injections and dressing changes pricked and pulled at me, and one arm hung for hours in the same position as the serum entered in drops.
Father Felipe arrived on Sunday morning, or at midday. Or on the following Sunday. Or I think he arrived, because I was asleep, and I couldn’t distinguish that well between what was happening around me and what I dreamt, between what I heard and what I thought I was hearing, for often my eyes would close as I lay listening to someone speak. The point is, he arrived. Or perhaps while saying Mass in Temascalcingo he came to Toluca in spirit. And I saw him. Or my parents saw him, and they said he’d been in the hospital chapel, and raising the chalice had asked God to grant me life. And that in the moment of the elevation he had known that I was going to live. And he told my mother, “Your son will live.”
Then he left. He had come to save me. My mother said so. And then he left.
Yet although I don’t remember having seen him in my room, I knew that on that Sunday he had been by my side.
Days later, my mother would tell people he had said I would become a saint, or I was going to do a lot of good for humanity, and that’s why I was going to live.
My mother searched in my eyes and in my actions for signs of saintliness. And I felt like somebody who had been on the brink of death and now received every hour of life as a divine gift.
My parents never left my side. My mother slept in a bed next to mine, and my father would spend the night sitting in a chair or pacing in the corridor when he couldn’t sleep, and most of the time when he heard me crying for water he had to leave the room and pretend to fetch some, for with that hope I could make it to morning.
He didn’t seem to sleep, or eat, day and night by my side, always awake when I opened my eyes. I had only to express a wish and he would immediately try to fulfill it, without protesting, without fuss. Seeing him there, a solitary figure — accompanied by my mother, an equally solitary figure — descending by night, rising by day, behind his love, behind his mortal shadow, I imagined the reality and the mystery of the Father.
Days followed the rhythm of sleep. During my absence I was sometimes on the verge of death, at other times out of danger. Slumber was interrupted by injections and the serum drip and by chance awakenings, which I’m going to talk about now.
Lying in bed with my eyes closed, I would hear the nurse open the door, move around the room, rummage for something in a drawer in the bedside chest, walk over to me, uncover me, give me an injection, cover me, walk away, close the door.
I suddenly woke up and saw my mother as an apparition, sitting on the bed, silently knitting, for I had dreamt that she was dying from a hemorrhage.