JANUARY 27
We didn't find anything in Pitiquito. For a while we were stopped in the car on the road to Caborca that leads to the turnoff for El Cubo, trying to decide whether we should visit the teacher again or not. Belano had the final say and we waited patiently, watching the road, the few cars that passed every so often, the very white clouds blown over on the wind from the Pacific. Until Belano said let's go to Bábaco and Lima started the car without saying a word and turned right and we drove off.
The trip was long and took us places we'd never been, although I, at least, still had the constant feeling of having seen it all before. From Pitiquito we drove to Santa Ana and turned onto the highway. We took the highway to Hermosillo. From Hermosillo we took the road east to Mazatán, and from Mazatán to La Estrella. That was where the paved road ended, and we continued along dirt roads to Bacanora, Sahuaripa, and Bábaco. From the Bábaco school they sent us back to Sahuaripa, which was the municipal seat and supposedly the place where we could find the record books. But it was as if the Bábaco school, the school from the 1930s, had been swept away by a hurricane. We slept in the car again, like in the beginning. Night noises: wolf spiders, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widows, desert toads. All poisonous, all deadly. At moments the presence (or the imminence, I should say) of Alberto is as real as the night noises. Outside of Bábaco, where we've returned for no particular reason, we talk before we go to sleep about anything but Alberto. We keep the headlights on. We talk about Mexico City, about French poetry. Then Lima turns out the lights. Bábaco is dark too.
JANUARY 28
What if we find Alberto in Santa Teresa?
JANUARY 29
This is what we find: a teacher who's still working tells us that she knew Cesárea. They met in 1936, when our interlocutor was twenty. She had just been given the job and Cesárea had only been working at the school for a few months, so it was natural that they became friends. She didn't know the story of the bullfighter, or any other man. When Cesárea quit her job it took the teacher a while to understand it, but she accepted it as one of her friend's peculiarities.
For a while Cesárea disappeared: for months, maybe a year. But one morning the teacher saw her outside the school and they resumed their friendship. Back then Cesárea was thirty-five or thirty-six and the teacher considered her a spinster, although she regrets it now. Cesárea found work at the first canning factory in Santa Teresa. She lived in a room on Calle Rubén Darío, which at the time was in a remote neighborhood, dangerous or at least unsuitable for a woman. Did she know that Cesárea was a poet? She didn't. When both of them were working at the school, she often saw Cesárea write, sitting in her empty classroom, in a thick notebook with black covers that she always carried with her. She imagined it was a diary. During the time Cesárea worked at the canning factory, when they met in the center of Santa Teresa to go to the movies or to go shopping, when she was late she often found Cesárea writing in a notebook with black covers, like the previous one, but smaller, a notebook that looked like a prayer book and in which her friend's tiny handwriting flowed like a stampede of insects. Cesárea never read anything to her. Once she asked her what she was writing about and Cesárea said a Greek woman. The Greek woman's name was Hypatia. Sometime later the teacher looked up the name in the encyclopedia and learned that Hypatia was an Alexandrian philosopher killed by Christians in 415. The thought occured to her, maybe impulsively, that Cesárea identified with Hypatia. She didn't ask Cesárea anything else, or if she did, she had forgotten by now.
We wanted to know whether Cesárea read and whether the teacher remembered the names of any books. In fact, she did read a lot, but the teacher couldn't remember a single one of the books that Cesárea borrowed from the library and carried around with her. She worked at the canning factory from eight in the morning until six at night, so it wasn't as if she had much time to read, but the teacher imagined that she stole hours from sleep to spend reading. Then the canning factory had to close and for a while Cesárea was out of work. This was around 1945. One night, after the movies, the teacher went with her to her room. By then the teacher was married and saw Cesárea less often. She'd only been to her room on Calle Rubén Darío once before. Her husband, although he was a saint, wasn't happy about her friendship with Cesárea. In those days Calle Rubén Darío was like a sewer where all the dregs of Santa Teresa washed up. There were a couple of bars where at least once a week there was a fight that ended in bloodshed; the tenement rooms were occupied by out-of-work laborers or peasants who had just immigrated to the city; few of the children had any schooling. The teacher knew that because Cesárea herself had brought a few of them to the school to be enrolled. Some prostitutes and their pimps lived there too. It wasn't a proper street for a decent woman (maybe it was Cesárea's living there that had prejudiced the teacher's husband against her), and if the teacher hadn't realized it before, it was because the first time she went there was before she was married, when she was, in her own words, innocent and heedless.
But this second visit was different. The poverty and neglect of Calle Rubén Darío tumbled down on her like a death threat. The room where Cesárea lived was clean and neat, as one would expect of the room of a former teacher, but something emanated from it that weighed on her heart. The room was painful proof of the nearly impossible distance between her and her friend. It wasn't that it was untidy or smelled bad (as Belano wondered), or that Cesárea's poverty had surpassed the limits of gentility, or that the filth of Calle Rubén Darío extended into every corner, but something subtler, as if reality were skewed inside that lost room, or even worse, as if over time someone (who but Cesárea?) had imperceptibly turned her back on reality. Or, worst of all, had twisted it on purpose.
What did the teacher see? She saw a wrought-iron bed, a table strewn with papers holding more than twenty notebooks with black covers stacked in two piles, she saw Cesárea's few dresses hanging from a cord that stretched from one side of the room to the other, an Indian rug, a little paraffin burner sitting on a night table, three library books (she couldn't remember their titles), a pair of flat-heeled shoes, black stockings peeking out from under the bed, a leather suitcase in the corner, a black straw hat hanging from a tiny rack nailed behind the door, and food: she saw a chunk of bread, she saw a jar of coffee and another of sugar, she saw a half-eaten chocolate bar that Cesárea offered her and she refused, and she saw the weapon: a switchblade with a horn handle and the word Caborca engraved on the blade. And when she asked Cesárea why she needed a knife, Cesárea answered that she was under threat of death and then she laughed, a laugh, the teacher remembers, that echoed past the walls of the room and the stairs until it reached the street, where it died. At that moment it seemed to the teacher as if a sudden, perfectly orchestrated silence fell over Calle Rubén Darío: radios were turned down, the chatter of the living was suddenly muted, and only Cesárea's voice was left. And then the teacher saw or thought she saw a plan of the canning factory pinned to the wall. And as she was listening to what Cesárea had to tell her, in words that were neither faltering nor rushed, words that the teacher would rather have forgotten, but that she remembers perfectly well and even understands, understands now anyway, her eyes were drawn to the plan of the factory, a plan that Cesárea had drawn with great attention to certain details, leaving other parts shadowy or vague, complete with notations in the margins, although sometimes what was written was illegible and other times it was all in capital letters and even followed by exclamation marks, as if Cesárea were seeing herself in her hand-drawn map, or seeing facets of herself that she had until then overlooked. And then the teacher had to sit down on the edge of the bed, although she didn't want to, and close her eyes and listen to what Cesárea was saying. And even though she was feeling worse and worse, she had the courage to ask Cesárea why she had drawn the plan. And Cesárea said something about days to come, although the teacher imagined that if Cesárea had spent time on that senseless plan it was simply because she lived such a lonely life. But Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn't help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.