For there are people from whom we are so far removed, although they might seem physically near, that we can see them every day and never cross the threshold of their being. Our skins, like walls, and our bodies, like houses, keep us separate every day, like neighbors whose front doors face different directions.
And as in the fable of the wind and the sun where the two compete to strip a traveler of his clothes, and after the wind tries futilely to tear them off with gusts, the sun by shining hot makes him remove them himself, so I understood that it was easier to get along with women who respond with sympathy to our enthusiasm than to triumph in the advances with which we pursue the Silvias of this world, seen over the years looking out of the windows of their homes, each day farther away from us, without our ever entering their eyes, even for a moment.
Chapter 8
MY UNCLE CARLOS brought his wife, Lucinda, and their three sons from Puebla, two boys who walked and one still suckling. The two walkers spent their first days in Contepec yelling, “Daddy, Daddy!” wherever they went.
The older one, Julián, shared so many of his parents’ features that whenever they saw him people remarked, “He’s got his father’s eyes,” “His mother’s eyebrows,” “His father’s chin,” “His mother’s nose,” “His father’s ears.”
The second son, César, went around touching the hen, the wall, the table, a guest’s dress, the dog’s snout, in an insatiable appetite for testing the consistency of things with his hands.
Augusto, the baby, carried about by my uncle in a white blanket, protruded from his arms like the branch of a tree. Patiently, he showed him the world: “Glass,” “Mirror,” “Foot,” “Shoe,” “Boy.” And he opened Lucinda’s boxes on the dresser for him, revealing before his eyes rings and necklaces, buttons and needles.
Lucinda dressed all three in the same fabrics as her dresses, so it seemed they were in uniform, and you had only to look at them to know whose children they were.
A week after arriving, Lucinda told my uncle she would probably never get used to life in such a small village. This prompted my uncle’s immediate exaltation of Contepec’s virtues: “Such pure air!” “Such a clear sky!” “Such clean water!”
If he saw her looking despondent, he tried to convince her, in an imaginary discussion in which only he became impassioned and aggrieved, working himself into anger at her silence. Whenever she was silent he felt she was far away, hungering for men, and to intrude on her daydreaming he badgered her with pronouncements such as, “What decent men there are in Contepec!” “Women in small towns are so faithful!” “What tranquillity!”
But she made no answer and went to wash the dirty dishes, dragging her feet as she did.
Julián would follow her, while César watched from the kitchen door; his only worry was that my uncle might lose sight of him. He was always racing after him, yelling to him in the street to wait, convinced that if his father got a few steps away, he would abandon him.
In the afternoons my uncle stood in his doorway bargaining with the campesinos over the nags he wanted to sell. However, he never set foot outside unless he thought someone was going to buy one.
He carried on him the smell of his cows, his goats, and his mules. His dogs, old and scrawny, small and ugly, toothless and skittish, prowled the streets and stood guard at his door, or pressed their snouts to the window.
Animals were always present in his conversations. When he told the baker about a young man who’d slept with the policeman’s wife, he said, “The bull mounted the cow”; and when he saw the doctor go by with his girlfriend, he remarked, “The nag and his mare.” About his son Julián’s hair, he said, “It’s as soft as lamb’s wool.”
No sooner did he learn that my father had started selling groceries in his store than he stocked them too. When he heard we were including hardware, he ordered hammers, nails, and locks. When he found out that my father had been successful with his movie theater, he proposed to a group of storekeepers from a neighboring village that they open a theater that would rival ours. Chatting with his neighbors, he sought information about my father’s projects and went pale and short of breath when he heard business was good. His wife shouted at him to stick to his mules and oxen and stop competing. But earning money in a transaction in which he didn’t rival my father did not satisfy him. It was better to earn little or even lose than to stop what he was doing. Only rage, resentment, and revenge motivated him. He was seen rising early, going about the village streets, talking to people, traveling to other towns, promoting the sale of animals, all spruced up in his best suit. His eyes shining with rage or narrowed by meanness, he persisted in his attempts to ruin my father with stupid ventures and by bad-mouthing us.
Meanwhile, he complained to the baker that his wife oversalted the soup, and that the desserts she made were tasteless and the cakes always burnt. When they had guests in the living room and she sat with parted legs facing some man, pretending to be cold he would say, “Close the window, Lucinda.” But there was no window in the living room.
In time, she turned violent and reacted to everything he did with fury, even before she knew what the matter was. She called him an idiot for selling an old horse for seven hundred pesos, although it wasn’t worth two hundred. She turned down plans for their sons’ education with disdain, calling them provincial. She took his forgetfulness as a deliberate ploy to annoy her. Nearly every night, Lucinda’s shouting escaped through the windows of the house, and blows were heard.
But what most irritated my uncle was her habit of sitting Julián on her lap and telling him, “Your father is a good-for-nothing,” “Your father is a cretin,” “We can’t depend on him.”
Their arguments, regardless of what triggered them, always ended with a battle between Contepec and Puebla; they attacked each other as a Contepecan and a Poblana, as if the places were responsible for their own defects, or as if it were a defect to have been born in one of them. In their mouths, these two places came to be not two towns in Mexico but two entire countries, whose citizens were so fiercely nationalistic that their differences always ended in a border war. And in each of these confrontations they threatened one another with separation and slaughter, a reminder that they were not twins, Siamese or otherwise.
My aunt often gave him a little kick or scratch. She threw stones, shoes, and spoons at him. With his face clawed, my uncle defined his marriage as a “bitter draft,” and avoided his wife by taking long walks on the mountain, by engaging in endless chats with the baker or in tedious perusal of The Swineherd’s Manual, Horse Illnesses, and The Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison.
Nevertheless, he tried not to tire out his body or his mind and to fill his days with intermissions. He never got fat or thin, his weight never varying. His expression was always the same, like a dirty shirt that’s been worn for a long time.
At night, the masculine odor of angel’s trumpet wafted through the open window into my aunt Inés’s bedroom. All eyes and silence, she let herself be penetrated by its perfume while she lay in bed reading “Abandoned women.” From a photograph on the wall, my grandmother looked towards the bed, her face still young and with my aunt seated on her lap. Between the childish face and my aunt’s present aspect, there had been a fearful gust of wind: time.
A mirror hung alongside Grandma’s photo, and near the mirror was a calendar from 1954, still open at the month of May, with the twenty-first circled in red. Both photograph and mirror had belonged to my grandmother. And the calendar commemorated her death.