The only current items in the room were a copy of Confidencias magazine, turned to the letters page, and the light of the moon, which entered white through the window.
To save Inés money on food, my mother sent her a bite to eat every day. Her only income was the rent from a cantina next door to her house.
Every day when our maid returned from there she brought with her the previous day’s plates and the invariable message that I should visit.
On the way to her house I liked to feel the afternoon sun on my face, its luminosity seeming to lift the village into the air. As I leaned against a parapet of the stone bridge, the only sound I heard was of things opening to the heat. People, houses, and hills appeared to ascend in a golden sphere. At this hour, one was most conscious of Contepec’s altitude.
When I reached my aunt’s house, if it was August, she offered me figs; if it was October, pears. She wanted me to cut them myself from the trees in her orchard so I could choose the ones that appealed to me.
Beside a crumbling adobe wall a climbing plant, its stake broken, grew by spilling over the ground, like a desperate hand that blindly searches for some means of support to cling to. But not finding anywhere to climb amid the worm-eaten beams and clumps of earth, it was nearly always dry.
Seated in the living room, my aunt would show me postcards with moving parts and the front cover of El Mundo, and tell my fortune with a deck of cards. Card in hand to predict my future, she foretold travels and weddings, betrothals and separations, paying little attention to chronological order or to contradictions in the events. She said I would have my first girlfriend after my wedding and told me I was going to spend my entire life in the village right after saying that I was destined to travel for twenty years. She also brought out photos of her female friends when they were girls around my age, remarking, “She’s very pretty and has a birthmark on her thigh,” “She’s passionate but still doesn’t know about men,” “She has big breasts and just came here from Uruapan.”
One day at dusk, as we drank hot chocolate in the garden, she told me that a general from Nogales wanted to come see her. The letters he’d been sending her over the past two years, with pages ripped out of the Cancionero Picot, arrived in blue and pink envelopes. Photos of himself at different ages were enclosed in many of them, as if he took pleasure in alternating his recent faces with others from when he was eight, fifteen, twenty-four, or forty years old; or perhaps by showing my aunt his previous faces he wanted her to know his whole life and meant to suggest there was nothing from his past he needed to hide.
While she spoke, she tore a roll in two from the bag of bread on her lap and dipped a piece in the hot chocolate. The jug was leaking onto the bare table, forming a dark puddle.
As I listened to her, the hole in the jug stoked my anxiety, as if my very being, ostensibly stationary, were escaping through a gap in the day, my life shrinking with every passing second.
One midday in January, a skinny little man got off the bus that came from the station with passengers from the Mexico City train. The blond toupee, shiny boots, and navy blue jacket made him look as if he’d just come out of a shop. The wrinkled seat of his trousers revealed that he’d been sitting for a long time.
After a few moments of indecision, doubtful about which way to walk, he came into the store and asked for Rayón Street.
He smiled at my father’s reply, as if the information obtained brought him closer to something he wanted, and set off in the direction of my aunt’s house.
He was going to propose matrimony to her.
He had with him two one-way tickets to Nogales.
There he would give her a wardrobe and put a house in her name.
His friend the judge had everything ready for the ceremony.
Another friend, the owner of a restaurant in Nogales, had all this for the banquet:
a dozen turkeys
50 kilos of rice
a sack of chiles
twelve pigs
six ducks
100 kilos of corn
twenty cartons of beer
fifteen bottles of tequila
seventeen crates of soft drinks
bananas, pears, apples, peanuts, tangerines.
His honorable mother, his honorable father, his worthy sisters, and his honorable son had made arrangements with the priest at the church.
But not only did my aunt not want to marry him, she didn’t even want to see him. The most she agreed to after their first encounter was a meeting in the store the following day at nine in the morning.
Consequently, the Generalito, as we already called him in the village, sat for many hours that night on a bench in the square holding an umbrella, though the sky was clear. He looked towards Rayón Street, and behind the shawl of every passing woman he saw my aunt’s face. Ricardo el Negro, my brother, and I went over to talk to him. Laughing heartily, my brother and Ricardo el Negro listened to him tell how he’d become a general during the Revolution. And, once he discovered that my brother and I were Inés’s nephews, he interrupted his stories to praise her: “There’s no woman like her!” “She’s definitely one of a kind.” And when he happened to mention a romance with someone else, he excused himself with, “I was very young,” or, “One’s only human.” Unforgettable women weren’t lacking in his conversation, women glimpsed once on some village street as he galloped past with his fellow troops.
The following day he showed up at the store with the face of someone who’s had a bad night and stood outside, the sun fracturing his shadow on the stones, while sparrows at his feet pecked at the earth, sending up dust.
He was wearing white trousers and the navy blue jacket. He’d powdered his cheeks to cover up his wrinkles and seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open in the blinding light.
My aunt arrived at nine. Quickening her step she entered the store and went to the back without turning around, until she was nearly hidden behind the counter. Nothing was farther from her offended face, so like that of a neglected patient, than a smile.
Resembling an unpenned bull ready to charge, she ignored me and my father, mindful only of the door.
Her face half covered by a black shawl, she leaned on her elbows next to the cookie cabinet, where two yellow cats were watching her.
The Generalito came inside looking for her but turned pale when he saw her glaring at him.
Nevertheless, he drew near. He leaned on the counter and spoke to her in a rush, like someone who wants to say everything he’s been thinking about for months during the first meeting:
“You must know that I can’t live without you any longer … And that I spend sleepless nights in Nogales … And that I receive every letter of yours with a trembling hand,” etc.
My aunt, her intent reader’s eyes fastened on the opening and closing of his lips, not missing a word, interrupted him in the loud voice of the deaf:
“This is just what I want to talk to you about. It’s embarrassing me how ridiculous you are. Remove yourself from my presence, because I don’t love you.”
She pulled the shawl over her mouth angrily, indicating she had nothing further to say. And strode out of the store, her eyes throwing sparks.
The Generalito continued to lean on the counter, his hair unkempt, his jacket wrinkled, his shirttails hanging out, and his face pasty, the confusion of the moment having completely disheveled him.