And furthermore the room, which had been inhabited by us for a time, would inhabit our memory from now on, its walls, beds, and chairs commingling with our moods and the color of our days there.
In my eyes a very long time had passed, an interior time not measured by the time on clocks, because of the traces, the waiting, the infinities it leaves in your being.
My parents’ countenances had changed; an expression of alarm would appear on their faces at the slightest injury or the most unthreatening illness; they would be frightened if anyone screamed, assuming something serious had happened, or if a relative began to cry, they would imagine the weeping was over the death of a member of the family; they were convinced that routine mishaps were fated to have terrible consequences.
My eyes also saw my brother and my friends in a different light; and though I felt the same familiarity and affection, something incommunicable now separated me from them. The feeling of having returned from a journey that wasn’t measured by the kilometers between Contepec and Toluca, but rather by the internal distances traveled, made me want to tell them something important about those days, but when I realized that they knew the external facts of my accident, and that my intimate experience was as impossible to convey as an act of love, I kept quiet.
There are moments in your destiny when years are compressed into days, and days into hours, by the intensity with which events transform your life, events almost able to erase a past, and if not to erase it, then at least to shut it off from yourself, erecting a wall that separates the days of your childhood from the days of your adolescence, as if those days had been lived by two separate people, not by one person at two different ages. To build a bridge between the two, to pass from the adolescent to the traumatized child, to know that they are one and the same, to find that only one who was and who is; that has, to a large extent, been the purpose of this narrative.
The return to Contepec was a return to the present. Time was given back to me and, with it, the rhythm of life. I knew if I hadn’t died at the age of ten, every instant, every hour, every day, meant more life. Looking back, drowsing much later on a train, I saw San Juan de la Cruz rescued from a well, and Piero della Francesca blind in Borgo Santo Sepolcro, as unrepeatable and finite existences of my own being, in a timeless projection of myself.
Blood ran through my body, my eyes saw the light, my brain thought, the world’s mysterious movement ceaselessly created itself within me and without; and upon every shadow lay the spirit of God.
THE SOLITARY ENCHANTER
Chapter 6
THE TREASURE buried beside the sapodilla tree glowed at night. But in order to actually find it, you had to catch the phantom that guarded it. And this phantom was visible only to Lola the maid, who’d recently arrived from Ojo de Agua.
The phantom was whitish (Lola would say “softish”), almost transparent (Lola would say “floury”), with black boots just like the ones my cousin wore, and of medium height.
At certain moments during the night, Lola said, she could see it sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her.
But she saw it most often beside the sapodilla tree, where it laid her face down and flickered over her until the break of dawn. As soon as the sun came out, the light erased it.
In our game of tag,* Ricardo el Negro ran the most.
Over the benches and across the fields he’d chase my brother, the only one left to be tagged. Watching them from my window run around the square, I wondered if there wasn’t some way to suspend the instant that was disappearing with its beings and their shadows; and whether the light that was starting to fade from the wall couldn’t be charmed by some magic word; and whether the poet, like some solitary enchanter, when he spoke of what took place in time, wasn’t saving it from oblivion.
The game ended at nightfall, with my brother tagged by Ricardo el Negro. The boys scattered toward their homes. No more rays of light on the window, and Ricardo el Negro, the winner, faded from my eyes, swallowed by the uniform blackness.
One night, in a corner of the archway, hidden from passersby on the street, Luisa and I leaned against the damp wall and embraced. Her restless eyes strained to hear the sounds coming from the house down the alleyway that was only discernible by the white stones of its walls. All of a sudden Juan was standing in front of us, and in a shaky voice that probed the darkness and cross-examined the shadows, he called me by name.
As we went off, he pressed close to me and in a mysterious voice said, “Take this. Your brother sends it. Luisa’s cousin and four of his friends are in a cantina. He says he’s coming to kill you.”
I grabbed the object he held out to me. It was a knife. Slipping it under my belt I felt its cold touch, as if I’d put a frozen fish against my skin.
Juan left.
I didn’t go back to Luisa. She watched me from the archway, not daring to call out for fear of her father.
I spotted her cousin behind a post, with his friends in tow. Their foreheads were covered by hats. You couldn’t see their eyes. And their hands, hidden beneath their ponchos, were surely clasping weapons. They passed in silence, slowly, their steps resounding on the cobblestones. One of them belched drunkenly.
They didn’t turn to look at me. But I felt them measuring up my body out of the corner of their eyes.
Almost on their heels my brother arrived, with a pistol in his jacket pocket. He said we should get out of there.
Luisa’s cousin and his friends soon disappeared among the darkened houses at the end of the street.
Ricardo el Negro and Juan emerged from the murkiness of another archway. They asked us if the others were coming back. They never did.
On the night of Candlemas, seated around the bonfire we could hear the god of fire striding through the flames. Sitting between Juan and my cousin I listened to the ocote pine crackling and watched a newspaper expand and contract, as if eaten up by a golden tooth.
Behind us, Silvia and my cousin gazed at the tongues of fire, streaks of ochre quivering on their faces.
The smoke climbed the wall of a house and, once on the roof, was lost to the night.
My brother and Ricardo el Negro stoked the fire with handfuls of dry leaves that were quickly devoured and threw in pieces of paper that doubled over like bodies with a bellyache.
I pulled a y-shaped branch out of the flames and pointed it in all directions. The branch writhed like a person in pain. The fire consuming it was a flickering flower in the darkness. The air snatched sparks that fizzled out on the stones.
Four hunters, rifles slung over their shoulders, walked by on their way to the lagoon. With somber, silent faces, they looked as if they were about to execute someone.
Don Pedro, the postmaster, brought the mail to my father.
A solitary figure on the sunny street, he walked over slowly after lunch. His pants were too big for his skinny legs and his shirtsleeves, which didn’t reach his wrists, had shrunken in the wash.
After delivering the newspaper and letters at the store, he would buy a kilo of sugar, 50 grams of coffee, 100 grams of alphabet soup noodles, and one can of tuna. On his poor man’s face, at those moments of spending, the Pardaillan and Athos the musketeer, whom he had recently discovered, ceased to exist. He placed his coins on the counter as if he were being robbed, with a senile tremble of the hand and a somewhat hungry, helpless expression. Age had begun to tilt him forward, and fasting gave his face a gaunt, overwrought look.