Then she stood up, trembling on her cane as if about to lose her balance, and walking as fast as her legs allowed sought the shadows cast by trees and the shady side of the street.
On Sundays the campesinos would descend into the village with their wives and children, with wheat and corn to sell. Wild cherries and prickly pears, sapodillas and peaches, were paraded through the streets in baskets and boxes. Sitting amidst the hats in my father’s store, I would observe the people who came in to buy clothes.
During the rainy season clouds often appeared out of nowhere and rapidly darkened the sky and a sudden downpour would drive the crowd from the street into our store. Lightning bolts blanched the day, thunder drummed on the mountain. In hurried threads the rain dispersed a delicious-smelling fog. Then, a few minutes later, the sun came out again, the village floating on the fragrances of earth and wet plants.
Some of the campesinos who’d congregated in our store bore the essence of the region in their faces; gathered there, watching the rain fall, they seemed possessed by a pluvial individuality that lent them an intimate weightlessness, as they observed the sacred falling of water with millenary resignation.
Among them were girls whose complexions looked scraped from the earth, watching furtively as if they were their own shadows.
My mother believed our house was full of treasures, buried by the bootleggers who once lived there or by their predecessors, who inhabited it during the Revolution. The house was altered when my father remodeled it; what was once the kitchen was now a corridor, and there was a bedroom where parapets had stood in case the house came under attack. After weighing rumors against her own fantasies, my mother would undertake the excavation of a room or the corridor, sending a workman down several meters below ground.
Souls in torment would appear to the maids and disclose the location of the treasure, or else snatch them from bed in the middle of the night and drag them along the ground before depositing them at the exact site. Treasure seekers arrived from Mexico City with their instruments for detecting hidden objects, and for several days many large holes were dug in all the rooms.
Only once did my mother own a house with a treasure, but that treasure was discovered by others. My father had rented this house to three poor, spinsterly sisters; each night, the eldest, the ugliest and skinniest of the three, was pulled out of bed by the hair and pinned to a dead sapodilla tree. This gave them the idea — the only one they ever had in their lives — of digging up the ground around the sapodilla, and there they found three coffins brimming with coins, which my mother later assumed were of gold. But since the house belonged to us, the three sisters left the village at the crack of dawn with two donkeys loaded down with sacks, heading for an unknown destination … My father discovered the excavation from the holes in the ground where the coffins had been, and realized there’d been coffins from the bits of old wood mingled with the earth heaped next to the tree. My mother continued to buy houses, which she would then demolish, digging beneath walls and tearing up foundations, but all her hunches came to naught.
There were days when the table was being eaten away by woodworm, our clothes by moths, our bread by mold.
Plates were chipped, the door unhinged, the chicken plucked and quartered.
A neckless bottle and a broken chair would appear in the poultry yard, and the fins of a recently eaten fish emerged from the garbage can like a sign.
The entire house was like a window without panes, and man in time, like sugar dissolving in water.
The days extracted shadows, scraps, and splinters from things, exposing their hollows and their chaff; they wrinkled faces and devoured animals.
Bloodied butchers would walk past the store leading cows to the slaughterhouse, where in one blow they’d be killed.
Drawn by the blood and warm flesh, dogs ran after them barking.
The bellowing of cows filled the streets as they refused to move along.
But after a while, all that remained where they’d been was the quiet of the afternoon.
The next day the executioners would pass by again, this time in the direction of the butcher shops, accompanied by assistants carrying large slabs of meat on their backs and donkeys laden with chines and legs.
Whenever my father brought me to Mexico City I was afraid of getting lost. The crowds seemed to press forward to trample me, and the whirlpool of people created a confusion into which I strayed.
Worst of all, there might be a very wicked person who would kidnap me and keep me from ever seeing my parents again, forcing me to beg on the streets.
That’s why my father carried me on his shoulders, from the warehouse to the toy store, from the hotel to the movie theater.
Within me there existed another, a boy who would enjoy getting lost, who yearned to live in a dark place with no outdoors or suffering, who was drawn to the crowd, desiring to lose himself among the faces and feet, in order to no longer be me.
But I loved my father, and nothing would’ve consoled me had I stopped seeing him; and so it was he carried me on his shoulders.
Upon hearing the sound of my cousin roller-skating down the corridor, I’d run to see her.
She skated clumsily, opening and closing her legs too much and in danger of falling each time she picked up speed; and in an effort to keep her balance she’d stop short, or one foot would go in the wrong direction. Yet the movement of her hands, which she raised as if fending off a danger from above, and her closed eyes as if to avoid witnessing the disastrous end of her sprint — she seemed always on the verge of something happening to her, though nothing ever would — revealed an inner rhythm expressed in movements and gestures in which I divined a certain placidity that calmed me, just by watching her. It was a placidity undercut only by a fine line of impudence in blossom, which lay upon her lips like a crooked grin, betraying on her face a habit of spending too much time in the bathroom touching herself in private.
It was hard to escape when my brother chased me. He could run twice as fast as I could, and hit harder as well.
In the house, down the corridor, through the garden, from room to room, he ran after me and I could never find a place to hide.
I would search for my father (who wasn’t there), and my mother (who had gone out), and the maid (who never defended me), until I’d find myself pinned against the wall, forced to confront him, and the tussle would make me cry.
Eventually my father would arrive (always after my brother had hit me) and scold us both, and I never understood how I was guilty, since all I had done was receive the blows. But I was guilty, he said, of provoking them, or of putting myself in the way of being hit.
On the first Sunday of October the mummers would appear in the streets, begging for money at shops and houses; masked and dressed as women, they danced in worn sandals around the villagers and made grotesque movements with their bodies. Even before they reached our house we heard their drumming, their laughter, their flutes. They circled around my father, who’d give them coins and cigarettes, and made fun of me, waving their hands around their masks, which I believed were the actual faces of pigs, hags, and devils.
Children ran away at the sight of the mummers stomping their feet and groaning. My father would reassure me, pointing out that those hideous crones were really men in disguise.