The town fair would take place a few days later. The merry-go-round, the hoopla, the Caterpillar. Men set up games, heavily made-up women arrived. People played cards and threw dice. Outside the tents, the eagle woman and the snake woman were advertised.
Love songs drifted out of speakers everywhere, and at night a firework bull, carried on a mummer’s back, would be set alight, launching blue balls into the air, until the bull, in a burst of pure light, burned away entirely, leaving a gunpowdery-smelling frame on the mummer’s back.
I detested my cousin who visited us from Morelia and danced La Bamba. From the very first night, his father would make him dance in the corridor.
But I’d never play with him. He went around with my friends during his stay in Contepec. What’s more, he had a reputation as a crybaby, after once getting into a fight and having his nose punched, which resulted in blood and tears. He was always with his father, or with my cousin, my aunt from El Oro’s daughter, whose too-short dress showed off her growing thighs; my brother used to seat her on his lap and stroke her breasts.
I had a great urge to set off firecrackers in my cousin’s ears. But my parents laughed each time he danced, and the adults claimed he was very intelligent.
I preferred my female cousin, who would share the bedroom with my brother, my cousin, and me, and though I felt jealous at night when she and my brother kissed when I wanted to kiss her myself, I went to sleep without being able to prevent it.
With her we climbed to the school to view the village from above. Or when my brother wasn’t around we played married couples in the garden, because when he was home he would take her to his room to play alone. And if my male cousin ever tried to interfere, my brother punched him in the stomach and made him cry.
Like one who dreams the air around him has turned to stone and wakes up to find that it’s only his hard pillow, sometimes the oppressive darkness would produce a feeling of death in my body, which would then vanish with the magical act of turning on the light.
Perhaps because of this fear of dying I never liked nights that were too dark, nor did I like it when my room was too white, for the painted door reminded me of the coffins in which children were buried.
The funeral processions passed by our house, and all of a sudden in the morning the bells would start tolling and a devastating cry, an exaggerated shriek, would cross the sunlit streets making the silence resound, as when a pistol is shot into the clearest blue sky. Shortly afterwards a woman in black would appear on the corner, weeping. Behind her several men carried the coffin, dressed as if they’d been asked to help on the spur of the moment while working in the fields. And alongside them other women, peasants as well, accompanied the grieving woman in clothing, gait, and lamentations.
In the rear, lagging behind as though headed elsewhere, to judge from the distance between them and the procession, came the children, whose expressions suggested they were more interested in playing than in this march, bearing their imposed mourning like people who have recently been wounded in the face and whose features have yet to adjust to the scar, presenting two expressions at once.
The poverty of their clothes and the archaic quality of their features lent these campesinos an aura of solitude and abandon, as if they were participating in a rite taking place in some remote setting and were only present in time through their suffering.
Chapter 2
BY MY SIDE, sitting at our desk, was Quedito, who smelled bad and whose face looked swollen.
Since he was right next to me I couldn’t resist calling him Quedito, but he hit my arm in annoyance whenever I did.
Using his nickname meant touching a sore that others touched with impunity, even for fun. But whenever I said it, he turned on me as though I stood for everybody.
I had no idea why they called him that, if it was on account of some personality trait or because of something that had happened to him, or simply because the nickname already existed and someone had to use it. But maybe they called him Quedito because he was always silent in class, scarcely moving, elbows on notebook, pencil in hand, eyes open yet absent.
He was two years older than me, taller, and stronger. He lived near the mountain, and brought peaches to school that he ate without sharing during recess, moving away from us to do so. He came to class before the other pupils and sat at the top of the long flight of stairs, his gaze meandering down the steps, ignoring the kids who climbed them, as if lost in thought. Meanwhile the students passed by repeating, “Quedito” … “Quedito” … “Quedito” …
Two by two we sat on the benches, in a classroom adorned with nothing but a blackboard and a long outdated calendar forgotten on the wall. From the center of the ceiling dangled wires with bulbs on which flies had dried.
Our gazes were fixed on our teacher, seated at her desk, though mine nearly always strayed out the window or else down below, towards the village.
The school stood atop a hill that resembled a wrinkled breast. To reach it you had to climb a lengthy stairway, or else walk up a street bordering ravines. It was said that our school had been built during the Revolution, and it commanded a view of the village, its clusters of houses, and, farther in the distance, the railway station, the cemetery, and the highway.
During recess we played among the rocks that had been in the playground since before the school was built. We would sit on top of them while Quedito, dull and colorless, went on and on, like a lie machine: “My uncle has a hook for catching whales …; he owns a ranch with five thousand hens …; he has a horse as large as a house …; he owns a lion that once ate a crocodile …” He stared at my clothes, while he himself swam in his brother’s enormous trousers and a shirt whose sleeves flopped over his hands each time he tried to gesticulate. A nocturnal anguish had settled into his features, into his sagging eyelids, so that even when his voice showed enthusiasm, his expression made him seem about to cry. Every now and then a sparrow stirred up some dust with its wings a few steps away; Quedito would fling a stone at it with all his might, but always miss.
Recess would be ending on an unhappy note. To shake off the suffocating feeling brought on by Quedito, I would run towards Juan and Arturo the moment I saw them.
One Monday Juan and Arturo came across our teacher’s panties on a rock and drops of blood on the ground. Juan told me that on Sunday afternoon she had come to the school with three of the older boys and that in one of the classrooms, amid the desks, they had beaten and raped her, tearing her stockings and dress, and that Ricardo el Negro had been one of them. But when I searched for traces of the rape and beating in my teacher’s face, I found her no different from before, apart from a bandage on her chin and a blemish on her neck. She spoke in the same manner, walked and moved in the same way, and her face bore no traces of the blows she had supposedly received. That said, when I looked at her it was as if her whole being were sullied, and on her painted lips, half open and moist with saliva, I sensed an absence of shame that troubled me. And when I’d hear her described as very thin, I’d translate the word into tubercular. And when I’d bump into her brothers on the street, I’d wonder what it must be like to have a prostitute for a sister.
Driven by these thoughts, Juan and I went one night at around eight to spy on her in the dark portico near her house, where she would rendezvous with her boyfriend. We approached stealthily, hugging the wall without casting shadows, and when we peeked in we saw a couple embraced in a kiss. And then we ran away.