Homero Aridjis

The Child Poet

Introduction

MY FATHER HAS ALWAYS SAID that he was born twice. The first time was to his mother, Josefina, in April 1940, and the second time was as a poet, in January 1951. His life was distinctly cleaved in two by an accident. Before that fateful Saturday he was carefree and confident, the youngest of five brothers growing up in the small Mexican village of Contepec, Michoacán. After the accident — in which he nearly died on the operating table after shooting himself with a shotgun his brothers had left propped against the bedroom wall — he became a shy, introspective child who spent afternoons reading Homer and writing poems and stories at the dining room table instead of playing soccer with his schoolmates.

There are precious few photographs of my father before his accident. One in particular offers a tender portrait of the boy who was left behind, and the scene of his shaken paradise. Frowning in the sunlight, he kneels beside Tarzan, the first in a line of beloved dogs. On the garden wall behind them hang two of my grandmother’s many birdcages, most likely holding songbirds in midchorus.

It is of course tempting to imbue this pensive face with the intellect of the man to come. His expression is one of a heightened sensibility, his gaze fastened on something beyond the present. One senses shyness and self-assurance, a precocious gravitas but also vulnerability. The truth is, I will never really know who my father was at the time. Nor will he. After the accident his early childhood became like a locked garden.

And then, in 1971, the memories found a way out. As soon as my mother became pregnant with me, visions from this elusive period started returning to my father in astonishingly vivid dreams, giving shape to what would become El poeta niño, a celebration of his life before 1951. Imminent fatherhood helped revive memories that had, for two decades, lain dormant.

This work, narrated in a succession of interconnected vignettes, has provided me with a portrait of my father in his pre-poet years. I have grown to know the child at a time when sights and sensations were still delivered at their purest, when each day brought new perceptions of his mother and his father, when every villager in Contepec formed part of a personal mythology. It was a time when shadows were palpable and light had a sound of its own.

I began work on El poeta niño in a translation class at Harvard in autumn 1993. After translating half the book for my course, I was keenly encouraged by my professor to translate the other half. For mysterious reasons of the psyche — perhaps I needed to write my own book first — it took twenty years for me to complete the task.

Now, as then, translating my father’s text has been an exceptional experience. This has always been one of my favorite works of his, and the fact that its gestation was parallel to my own makes it especially poignant. And its main themes — childhood reverie and artistic solitude and apartness — were ones that would preoccupy me for years to come.

The structure of the book — vignettes — remains faithful to the method of composition, a sequence of loosely related dreams. Many of the passages stand on their own but they also form part of the larger mosaic of childhood reverie. After all, the language of the child, as Gaston Bachelard has described at length, is a language of images that acquire an oneiric quality when returned to later in life. “We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming.”

There is certainly a forward movement to these pages and a distinct rhythm that emerges, but more than anything, it is a celebration of the image and its reverberations. For this is the cadence of reverie, and of a time when one’s perception of the world arrives in fragments. I tried to preserve the poetic simplicity of the child narrator and remain faithful to his rendering of the world around him, opting for words that suited a younger vocabulary.

I also had to accept the strangeness of having Mexican characters converse in English, and of reconstructing such a determinedly Mexican village and landscape in another language. My grandparents, their house, the main square, the village cemetery: coordinates from my own childhood, engraved in my mind long before I’d read the book. I was confronted with the transformation of a place and a people I knew intimately into characters inhabiting a literary landscape. Yet the themes, albeit explored within the frame of a small Mexican village in the 1940s, are universal.

My father never intended to write El poeta niño; it was created out of the necessity to retrieve his childhood. I once asked him about the actual process of writing the book. Because all memory is relative, he replied, it was difficult to avoid modifying his memories. They are vulnerable to subsequent experience and of course to the language in which they are lived and acquired and later recorded. Not to mention that the very act of transforming dreams into text is in itself a form of translation, and at best an approximation of the original. While writing, my father became a reader of his dreams, and while putting them to paper, he could not help but interpret them as well.

So perhaps this is a translation at twice remove; even so, I hope to have captured some of the mystery and wonder of my father’s childhood, the childhood that made him a poet.

CHLOE ARIDJIS

The Child Poet

Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

MARCEL PROUST, Swann’s Way

To my parents

~ ~ ~

Chapter 1

TO SUCKLE. The world was an immense tit, a mountain the size of my mouth. Fingers. Pacifiers. Suction. Female faces with a maternal presence. White instants. Milky light.

The concave hour. The warm crib. And I, center of the room, awaiting the punctual breast, which would transmit to me, like a cornucopia, life itself.

Her breast, like a supple moon or bread, flinched at my bite; between my hands, which lifted it bare to my lips and savored it hungrily.

A brimming cup, it would separate in a soft incarnation from the chest that bore it.

Enveloped in the morning light, from which I suckled brightness. And it was a sun to grasp, my face burying itself in its landscape.

My mother’s footsteps in the corridor. A door opening or closing. Rain on the roof.

My thoughts drifted towards my father in his store. I imagined him entering the room, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and remaining by my side.

But he didn’t. And all of a sudden I would find myself calling out “¡Papá! ¡Papá!” knowing well that as soon as he heard me he’d drop everything and come at once.

And he did. He would sit down by my side and I would watch him, in his fabulous existence, until I fell asleep again.

In darkness I would awaken, not knowing on which side of the bed I was lying. And, feeling the emptiness before me, I would grope around, in search of another comfortable position.

Finding the pillow meant finding the place where my head should have been. But just when I thought I had, I found myself touching the other end of the bed.

I felt battered, full of shadows and confusion, unable to wake up altogether, unable to fall back asleep.

Until the window loomed into view, scarcely lighter than the dark walls. And I would slowly pronounce my own name, as if reassuring myself, adrift in the vast expanse of my bed, that I was still the same person.

I would remember, in the distant, distant past, the moment when my father left the room and I wasn’t able to stop him, filled with a sleepiness more powerful than my desire to bid him to stay. And, clutching the pillow so as not to lose myself, I would finally drift off, in the knowledge that when I woke I would see my father once again.

Awake the next morning, I’d postpone the actual moment of rising from bed. Out in the corridor the goldfinches chirped in their cages and the curtains and walls held a drowsy clarity.

As if inside a luminous sphere, I traveled within the day that brightened my room and, all eyes, would observe from bed the things that surrounded me, feeling an arousal of these things in myself.

In that clarity I could hear my mother’s footsteps, the maids’ voices, the flight of insects … And all of a sudden the house would fall silent, as if everyone had left, except the light.

I did not want to speak. An immense shyness hid the words from me. Moreover, I would think and rethink a sentence so many times that the moment for saying it passed, or it lost its meaning after so much repetition.

I felt fine within myself, and to explain or discuss anything implied a certain decanting of that self and was as tiring as taking a lengthy walk without water. I didn’t need to convince or be admired. I was happy as I was, keeping quiet, watching the sun illuminate the grainy, whitewashed walls and the frayed broom in the backyard.

It was difficult to emerge from myself. To express one wish entailed a long journey, as did the exposition of an idea or having to supply answers to questions put to me. Shyness made me twist inside like a rope, until I reached such extremes of pain that it was impossible to give it one more turn. My face burned scarlet, my features were overpowered by the heat, the ground gave way, my eyes betrayed my helplessness. I did not know where to turn and, ablaze with shame, took refuge in my own interiority like an armadillo in its carapace.

I’d remain within myself, inert, as if walled in, until my mother would say, “Come on, let’s go.”

And if there were others around, I followed her, anxious to disappear, like an actor who has made an entrance on the wrong stage and the audience, noting his bewilderment, discovers his mistake because he panics, and in his haste makes his exit all the more difficult and is unable to find the right door.

Thus was I bewildered by anyone who sensed my shyness, while I hid behind my mother, trying to not be seen, not be there.

From the moment we’d arrive at the home of one of her friends, and the woman or her daughters took notice of me, my main concern was to discourage everyone from addressing me in any way, for my mother was the best person to provide information about my tastes and reply to questions; even those which referred to my age, name, mood, and so forth, were best answered by her. I tried to prevent their curiosity from catching me off guard by feigning interest in a girl’s face or a dog in the room, which would lead inevitably to, “Do you want to play with Anna?” or, “Do you like the dog?”

I was surrounded by a magic circle, which no one should enter. This circle protected my intimacy, with its baggage of thoughts, fears, and desires. What I felt mattered only to me. To reveal my thoughts would mean revealing myself, to exhibit my desires meant exhibiting myself. And if I asked for something and it was denied me, my entire self felt rejected, for I had disclosed one of my soul’s necessities and placed it at someone else’s mercy. For this reason I did things on my own. And if someone went off because I didn’t show my interest, I would let that person go: their being remained within my being, in my thoughts.

I liked going for walks alone and being alone, traveling through the day as through a reality as wondrous as the imagination, where the mountain was beautiful at every instant, shaped like a bird flying over its nest, and where the people I saw transmitted something divine through their very existence.

But when someone spoke to me, I soon felt overwhelmed and listened without listening, tired of having to think about each sentence said; with one word I would run off, or remain there absently, isolated by the curtain of my thoughts.

But when I couldn’t find the words to slip away, or a view to distract me, then, unmoving and subdued, I would summon up my forces to hide my boredom or my secret desire to slap that person in the face and depart.

And if, when with friends, I grew excited by the sight of some sunflowers or an ash tree, or if I discovered the shadow of a cloud cast onto the mountain, or if, gazing at a chestnut tree, I saw a drop of water on a slanted leaf sliding from center to edge, slowly descending as if on a slope, I would realize, thanks to the near deafness with which they listened to me, that I was moved by things that did not interest them, and that my words to them made a pointless journey, as pointless as an elevator in which someone has pressed all the buttons so that it stops at every floor and opens its doors without anyone ever getting on or off.

Whenever my parents left on a trip I’d do nothing but wait for their return. In vain I told myself they would be back in a few days, I felt their absence in my very being, in the house and in the village, and in my brother’s face, as if they were never going to come home. Every act of mine was carried out without them. Every thought missed them. I played knowing they weren’t around. I wandered the streets with a sense of all that was lacking. And if I went with my friends to the orchards to pick fruit or throw stones at lizards, from the hill, amidst the trees, I would hear the midday train and the afternoon train, telling me that today was Wednesday and that my parents would not return until Saturday, that there were still Thursday and Friday to get through.

Like a sleeper who suddenly feels the void surrounding him and instinctively throws himself towards the edge of the bed to hold on and not fall out, I trusted in the movement that from darkness and solitude made its way towards my father, for he circumscribed my body like the black line that outlines a colored-in figure in a drawing, and nothing could happen to me while I was magically surrounded by him. Due to this attachment, I despaired each time he went away and believed I’d never see him again.

The night was full of noises. I could hear the silence of the corridors, the moisture on the walls, the roof’s decrepitude, women’s moans traveling through the air, foxes springing from the rooftops onto the plants below, yelping, and the barking of dogs, which would start far off, then be taken up by dogs nearer by. The darkness weighed down on me as if it were physical. I had to thrust aside the shadows to move. And if I felt oppressed and wanted to turn on the light, I had to push away the night as though heaving a great stone.

I’d pluck leaves from the trees or collect them from the ground; some were still swollen with rain, others perforated by insects; some were like green stars in a puddle and others had withered, their edges ochre like wounds. Somehow, these leaves let me bring the entire tree indoors, as their forms stood for the tree and one leaf was enough to recall it, and all of a sudden a miniature oak was there in the palm of my hand.

Some were the greenish-red of an apple, others the color of lemon. From the branches they would stretch out their rhythmic hands towards me, their weight pushed forwards by the air. During my walks I would visit a certain linden tree, observing it from afar and then from up close; it was my linden, the tree that resembled me in form, in character, in desire.

There were days when, to no matter what, I would answer no. My being would seal up and an indescribable weariness burdened my movements. Walking tired me. Spending time with friends. Hearing them. Seeing them. Eating. Following my parents’ orders. Going. Coming. I would remain in my room, lying in bed, watching the sun come in through the open door or, when a cloud covered it, the wall cast in shadow. I looked at the furniture, knots in the wood, splinters. Out in the corridor I could hear my mother talking to a woman who’d come to see her, or my father passing by.

At night, lights out, I could feel my soul possessed of a flexibility that could either fill space with its expansiveness or else concentrate itself into one small point; able, like some kind of spiritual entity, to go wherever it pleased or visit the person of whom it was thinking, without moving, without making a sound, simply out of desire.

Sometimes, drawn by my parents’ laughter, I would go to them with open arms, but an unexpected ill humor would greet me, and instead of a kind word an order to leave at once would be issued in a harsh voice … And I’d withdraw without understanding why this wrath was concealed within their apparent joy, as confused as someone who attends a celebration in a country whose language he barely understands, and thinks he hears the revelers using words that in reality they’re not using, and sees in their faces a contentment which is not really there, and when he thinks that the spectacle has ended, he goes up to congratulate one of the most enthusiastic-looking participants, only to discover that that beaming face isn’t laughing but is, instead, irate, and, banished with a shout and a shove, he realizes that what he thought was a party was in reality a brawl.

Alone in my room, I would put off turning on the light to follow on the wall the final moments of the day, which for me were like the first rays of night’s dawn.

I followed the falling of dusk on the floor, like the dampness on cardboard that has gotten wet and darkens as it grows wetter. The sun reverberated in some of the windowpanes, lending the air an orange tonality while gilding the roof of a house, and cast the shadow of a pigeon onto a wall.

Within the room, countless eyes were closing and the light’s brightness was becoming more ethereal, depending on the view from the window. White objects were clothed in a darkness that seemed to emanate from within, as they shrank in size like melting ice.

A visual silence dominated the horizon and, in the room, a geometric quietude. The falling dusk welded distances, blended differences, blurred the borders of objects, joined heaven and earth. Remoteness was abolished through the act of erasure.

Ill in bed, I listened to voices on the street, trying to recognize among them the voice of a friend, but in the din the shouts became indistinct and I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child calling or speaking. They all seemed to come from the same place, questioning and answering among themselves, although perhaps the voices were in reality far from one another and did not seek each other out, and it was only due to the silence of my room that my ears united them and gave them a conversation in space; on the wall, meanwhile, the light darkened or brightened depending on the movement of the clouds outside, veiling and unveiling the sun.

And so I would remain, hearing and watching the hours pass by in all their heaviness and penumbra, feeling a loneliness not just in time but in space, and a certain inexistence … Until I’d finally rise from bed, weary of showing misfortune on my face and, crossing the corridor, I would go outside, in defiance of my despondency and unease.

There were days when the day itself was one incessant and varying prohibition, imparted in my mother’s voice that followed me everywhere, like someone maintaining control from afar with the help of a magic leash: “Don’t drink that water.” “Don’t eat from that plate.” “Don’t throw away that peel.” “Don’t cut those flowers.” “Don’t go outside.”

At the market with her, seeing fruits proffer their flavors to the eye — as if through their shapes and hues they could express their singularity in the universe — sensing the fleshy pulp beneath the texture of their peels and, having decided on a plum, my eyes would then wander towards a peach, or discover a tangerine, slipping from one fruit to the next as if on a scale of colors and flavors that attracted me through sight, smell, and touch at the same time, not knowing to which of the three impulses to surrender; no matter which fruit I ultimately chose, it would embody all fruits at once.

Like a child who goes about in the company of old folks, quickening his step at every moment, displaying his impatience through his hurried gait, I would go for walks with my grandmother: imagining monkeys suspended from branches by their tails and parrots that climb around hanging by their beaks, watching sparrows hopping along, pecking at crumbs or digging in the dust for insects.

We would pass beneath the shadow of a great oak, cross a dusty bridge that looked as if it had been abandoned no sooner than it was built. Our dog chased pigeons, who took flight as soon as they felt his breath. A mockingbird perched on a branch conveyed, through his very being, an entire region, climate, and time.

Before long my grandmother would grow tired and we’d sit down on a rock that commanded a view of the village. Immersing herself in its landscape, she would say, “Those houses didn’t used to be there; the highway used to run elsewhere; there didn’t used to be a train; there were only bandits and a few families; I can scarcely remember — I must have been eight or so — your father hadn’t yet arrived at our village; your mother still hadn’t been born; it was the year eighteen hundred and something; before the Revolution, before you were born; that bridge you see down there, those stores didn’t used to be there …”

As her voice dropped it confined her within herself, until the memories carried her so far back that she became inaudible.

To me she looked wrinkled, old, dried up, leaning on her cane, entangled in a thicket of faces and events from which she could not extricate herself. Then abruptly she would stop talking and rise from her spot, and we’d resume our walk while her lips continued to move as if telling herself something, or she’d start adding up a sum in which all the numbers got jumbled; growing paler and dustier, her legs more bent than before as if at any moment she might sit down on the air, but no, she didn’t sit down, she was only very slow.

I’d kick along a stone with my foot, listening to it bounce off the cobbles. But just when my feet found a pace, we’d stop again for another rest, and looking as if each wrinkle stood for a different memory, my grandmother seemed to bid me have patience.

All of a sudden I would catch her watching me, with thoughtful eyes that tried to take me in before aligning me with the image in the photo she held in her hand; but, hesitating, the sparkle in her gaze flitted elsewhere … before quickly returning to fix on my face, finding in my features the ancestral traces of my aunt Hermione in the photo.

I could feel her, my aunt Hermione, and my mother and father and my paternal grandparents, all harmonized within my very being; and I thought about her own parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and of the endless line of the dead that lay behind her and me, and I accepted them all in my face and body, in my thoughts and words, without resistance and with love.

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.

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.

Ricardo el Negro, the illegitimate son of a fishwife, would have been around fifteen. He stole chickens and fruit from the orchards and for a tip would do anyone’s odd chores. Though enrolled in school he played truant, spying on the women bathing at the stream, first from the waist up, then from the waist down. The toughs in town communicated with him by “frogs” (a punch in the arm) and by slapping his back so it burned. Among his nicknames were Son of a Bitch, Sooty, Asshole, and Jerk, and many others that were invented and forgotten the same day. A bastard with no visible father, he would sit by the pots of hominy stew that his mother sold each Sunday and gaze hungrily at the food being ladled into the bowls and then eaten by customers. During the week, he and my brother visited the baths in Tepetongo, a few kilometers from Contepec, losing themselves for hours on the plains and in the hills, or returning late at night, drunk, after spending the day playing poker, or suddenly plunging into the swimming pool where all the women swam naked. With his single pair of shoes, once black and now muddy and gray, and the trousers and the shirt my brother had given him, which he took off only when they had to be washed, spending that day at home naked in the kitchen with his mother, who was cooking the stew for Sunday, he laughed when outside the older kids called him “Ugly”; and when my parents weren’t home he came to the house with my brother and chased the maids, throwing them to the ground amid laughter and threats, until they got up and ran away, panting and disheveled, cursing him because he’d pulled their hair, hurt one of their breasts, or torn a dress.

“Go home,” my mother would say to me at the store, “because Ricardo el Negro is on his way, and I want you to keep an eye on him.” And to my father she’d add, “Lola’s brother came to complain because each time Ricardo el Negro goes to our house he pesters her.”

My father, concerned, would answer, “Let him stay here, I’ll go.”

And he’d go home to find Ricardo in the kitchen, sitting with Lola on his lap, her tits in his hands.

Every now and then at our store a drunkard pulled out a gun, pointed it at my father, and insulted the customers who were buying things.

The sons-of-bitches flew right and left, verbal vomit the drunken man couldn’t keep in, spilling from his insides in a drool of clumsily articulated sounds. His finger on the trigger, he aimed at one person and then another, advertising his presence in an angry voice, his face twisted with hate, dragging himself over to my father, who said, “Go home, you’re drunk.” But the fury of his monologue unabated, the drunkard flung a bottle to the floor, dashing it to pieces, like a sentence exploding in everyone’s face. After a few minutes, however, he tucked his gun under his belt, asked for a pack of cigarettes on credit and a loan of ten pesos, and left.

And when foulmouthed boys at school engaged in a dialogue of obscenities during recess, in the form of off-color puns or insults all round, I could feel the filth from their tongues besmirching every limb, word, or person they mentioned.

It was almost physically impossible for me to say bad words; my tongue refused to pronounce them, and to do so seemed as violent an act as smashing a glass in someone’s face, for it meant breaking an object at the same time as hurting a person, and soiling myself in the process. But the truth was, I had no talent for them, and I’d forget the words as soon as I heard them or, better said, I’d bury them within my very depths as if they were slimy leviathans. As for my father, at the height of his wrath he could barely bring himself to utter a “damn.”

The cemetery lay beside a field belonging to my father. Its whitewashed wall, built from alternating stone and brick, rose around it like a supernatural barrier separating life from death.

Whenever I visited the field, walking among the magueys, I would think about my dead sisters and about the other dead. I wondered how many souls of the deceased, from all ages and all countries, there would be now, and whether there were more dead souls than living people. I thought I could see my sisters, who died before I was born, up in the sky. And so strongly did I feel their existence, spread across the blue like a spiritual ether, that sometimes a word or gesture of mine seemed inspired by them. I never knew them; I’d only seen them in photos, tiny and naked, a few weeks before their deaths, still looking as if they’d just arrived from elsewhere, radiating a strange happiness. My parents kept these photographs alongside their dresses and knitted booties, and when we had guests over they would bring them out, to illustrate the tale of the dead daughters. Alone in my room, I sometimes thought I could sense their presence, without fear and with love, for they were my sisters. And on overcast afternoons, when melancholy led me to sit beneath the fig tree or wander about the poultry yard, something in me began to sense they were nearby. But I couldn’t see them, for if someone sees a dead person he can no longer live in the world of men; he has entered into the other one, the world of ghosts. Yet every man carries his ghost, latent, within him.

The baa of the lamb tied to a pole in the backyard filled me with the queasiness triggered by the sight of animals one knows are awaiting their death. Still very young, with budding horns, he ran around the pole, or stood still, staring at the ground with unseeing eyes; every now and then he emitted a prolonged baa, whose very sound was painful to me. When I heard it I went to hug him, seized by an immense affection brought on by his body and his bleat. But I’d stop and stand by his side, running my hand through his wool and over his hard head. He seemed to be addressing me with his baas, and didn’t appear to eat anything, for the same withered grass rose between his feet.

For a few days, when I visited the backyard I knew he would be there, standing beneath the sun that warmed his wool, amid the sparse shadows of the pear and fig trees.

Until one morning he wasn’t there, and I found out that a butcher had taken him away to turn him into barbacoa for a luncheon we were having the following day.

I went to my father, wanting him to intercede on the lamb’s behalf, but was told he’d been slaughtered at dawn.

And so they served him to us, at a meal my parents hosted for a storekeeper visiting from Mexico City. With a chunk of leg on my plate, I suffered to see the lamb I’d been so fond of changed into steamed meat, hearing deep down inside me his heartbreaking baa as a kind of reproach.

This visual grieving for his death prevented me from taking a single bite, as I sensed his body in its mutilated form and I was filled with a growing desire to piece him together again and return him to the pasture to graze. The general enjoyment and the maids’ sporadic laughter as they served him up, the methodical words of the storekeeper, who referred to him as food and went on about other ways to cook him — all this offended me.

I couldn’t help getting the shivers when I felt tempted to eat the lamb I’d loved alive, my hunger entangled with his smell, and was on the verge of eating him along with the others; then I reminded myself that for me he was not only a piece of meat on a plate but also his eyes, his baas, his existence.

So I said I didn’t feel well and would only have soup, cheese, and a glass of orange juice, overwhelmed by the sadness that the death of animals aroused in me, experiencing the same disquiet as whenever I saw the maid snapping the neck of a rabbit or chicken as if she were simply twisting a rope, then placing it, inert, on the table, almost immediately after the final spasm, to be later skinned or plucked.

The freeloaders would show up while we were eating. After learning from the butcher that there was mole in the house, my uncle Carlos would appear as though drawn by the smell of the food, asking for me since he was on the outs with my parents, with whom he no longer spoke and would greet with a stiff nod of the head. He’d sit down at the table, listening attentively to the conversation, waited on by a maid. Almost immediately afterwards, don Raimundo would arrive. Waddling in like a fat pigeon, he would thrust his plump arms behind him as if they were plucked wings. He was the village tax collector, and diving into the food, he didn’t appear to see any of us watching him, nor hear us talking, so absorbed was he in stuffing himself. Don Raimundo and my uncle Carlos were not on speaking terms either; I think they even pretended not to notice each other’s presence at the table. Yet my uncle, ill-tempered and sarcastic and, at the end of the day, knowing he was my mother’s cousin, would sometimes fling a mocking remark in don Raimundo’s direction, such as, “Slow down, the mole isn’t going to run away,” or else, “Sit down and take a rest,” don Raimundo of course already being seated.

But my uncle spent fifty weeks a year being angry at my parents, and only two, spread out in days over the months, on good terms with them. My parents could never figure out, however, despite all their guessing, why he was angry; they could only assume that the sole and constant reason might be envy, for it profoundly disturbed him that my father was better off than he was. On the other hand, he was accustomed to carrying his envy around as if it were a chronic disease from which deep down he derived a certain pleasure, or using it as a justification for his intolerably bad manners. Nevertheless, each time there was a special occasion at home, he would appear uninvited, like a dog with his tail between his legs, as they say. But even more than my uncle Carlos it was don Raimundo who went after food like a dog regardless of who was providing it, be they friends or enemies, ignoring rebukes and insinuations. He barged in on any meal and sat himself down among the unwelcoming diners, digging his hands into whatever he could, literally grabbing everything within reach. Sometimes he was thrown out of a house with shoves and insults by a host who was either irascible or too poor to seat an undesirable guest among his family members. Short and tubby, he seemed to flaunt in his fleshy face his ravenous stomach and buttocks.

My father was always patient with Raimundo because he’d help him arrange tax matters and documents for the store, in exchange for five free meals a year and clothing he’d ask for on credit but never pay for. Tipped off by the butcher, our maid’s boyfriend, Raimundo would arrive and from the dining room door ask, “Am I disturbing you, sir …? I’ve just come to tell you that your papers are ready,” etc. He then drew up a chair and sat down with us, talking incessantly. Only once he was certain of a chicken breast on his plate would he shut up.

My uncle never talked. He ate in silence, as if angry, repeatedly scratching his arms. He would eat and leave, with never a thank-you or a goodbye. His whole attitude, from the very start, seemed like an insult. He dealt in animals: donkeys, cows, and horses, but just to compete with my father, he opened a clothing store one day and began selling seeds, though he spent more time gossiping than making money. And once he’d turned into a rival, he quickened his step each time he passed our store to avoid saying hello. And he’d walk past several times a day to show how angry he was. Whenever she saw him my mother would say to my father, “There goes Carlos, snorting with rage.”

Sebastián, my mother’s brother, lived in Mexico City. He was married to a woman ten years older than him, which didn’t prevent him from having fun with boys; he would put them to work in his studio as assistants in making dolls, wooden toys, and Sacred Hearts of Jesus; amid the Virgins of Guadalupe he’d hug them and kiss them on the mouth.

His house smelled of varnish, wood and paint; his suit, hands and face were always stained. Once a year he would come to Contepec for a week, at Christmas. And whenever he was with my mother, the main topic was always their father, whom he attacked as if seized by a cyclical rancor each time the conversation turned to certain people or included certain words.

“Why should I call father a man who would only lift his leg to pee?” he would ask with rage. “The only things I ever got from that old fool were blows and disdain.” He would grow more violent at my mother’s protests: “Why should I thank that scoundrel, that jackass? No!”

My mother had a photograph of my uncle at age fifteen, with a head full of curls and lips painted in a heart shape, freshly arrived in Mexico City to work as apprentice to a doll maker. His sweater bore a crest with the initials R.S.Z. On the back of the photo was the name Rosaura Sebastián Z.… Seeing him like that, you would have thought he was a young woman in drag.

Before long, my uncle had set up his business and married Marta, the young lady who had come to buy the painting The Death of Manolete, copied from a calendar. She had fallen in love with Sebastián, finding him both artistic and refined. But the day after the wedding, my uncle vanished from morning to night with nothing more than an “I’ll be right back,” the beginning of a long series of escapades that she forgave on account of his infantile and apathetic nature.

Perhaps as a bulwark against loneliness, my aunt found a little old lady, a friend of her mother’s, to live with them. The woman had been a nun who’d been expelled from her convent for being too obsessive. Old people’s homes wouldn’t have her either and kicked her out after a few months because she spent all day in the bathroom. This virgin was given the nickname “The Handwasher” because of her mania for washing her hands. She saw germs everywhere: in greetings, slight grazes, dust, furniture, in the very air. Over the years she reached the point of washing her clothes while wearing them, and ironing them dry while they were on her, several times an hour. She was more hunched over each time my father brought me to Mexico City, and my uncle would point at her and say, “Here before us is a complete question mark.”

As soon as he woke up my uncle would go out, faithfully telling his wife he’d be back in five minutes, and not come home until nighttime. He had breakfast, lunch, and dinner in eateries and restaurants, always alone and always frugal, pretending to be poor, dressed in secondhand suits his relatives sold to him and he paid for in installments. He’d fish out the money from among torn bits of newspaper and old shopping receipts, the peso bills folded together with the thousand-peso ones. He frequented warehouses and spent hours talking about nonexistent shops so they’d lower the price on fabrics, which he then bought and stored in a closet, forgetting about them, or at least seeming to. If he went to visit someone and took a liking to an object in the house, he persisted, through pleas and promises, in trying to obtain it, and if the lady in question (for he only visited ladies) gave in, he took it home and put it in his closet and never took it out again. He always arrived late to appointments, or not at all. And if he made plans to travel with someone to another city, promising to take the train at a certain hour, he simply didn’t show up, knowing full well, from the moment he made the plan days beforehand, that he had no intention of traveling. And whenever he rode in a crowded bus with my aunt and a seat became free, he seized it and left her standing. And if something happened on the street and a person threatened him with violence, he became hysterical and screamed out, “Marti, Marti, Marti … save me from this lunatic!” If at night he felt cold as they walked around downtown, he asked my aunt for her sweater and scarf, put them on, and then took her arm.

Sick peasants would come to our house, stricken with rheumatism, kidney trouble, old age. The skin stretched over their bones looked tanned by misery. Pain seemed frozen into the wretchedness on their faces. They sat on a bench in the main square, beneath the shade of a tree, and waited for my father to administer medicine. Patiently alert, they watched dusk fall over the streets with wide eyes. They’d sit there for hours, with never a word to anyone that they had come to see him. They might even notice when he arrived and was about to leave without speaking to him … And at times, when I was with my father, we heard a hesitant voice calling out behind us, “Señor Nicias?… Señor Nicias?”

And my father would come to a halt. Knowing well what this was about, he walked towards the man who’d called to him, who was propped up by his wife and in too much pain to move.

“What’s the matter with you?” my father asked.

“The sickness, sir, it won’t leave me alone.”

And during a dialogue of few words and many silences, I observed my father and the man watching each other, as if reading each other’s thoughts on their faces.

Until all of a sudden the man burst into tears, saying that his kidneys were killing him and, pouting like a child, that he was very hungry.

On days my father didn’t show up some of the peasants waited until night, taking short walks around the square or going to the market to buy fruit. The darkness slowly engulfed them, turning them and the trees black. Their children played haunted house with the village children, running between the flower beds, emitting feeble cries, stumbling frequently from weakness.

They ran barefoot, in torn and patched trousers, stepping on the grass, clowning around and bumping into passersby.

Often a dog that had come to town with one of the families was lying nearby, and his paws would tremble as he tried to stand up and stretch, as though his legs were too frail to support him.

When she heard that the peasants were waiting for my father, my mother would go tell them the approximate time he was expected back from his trip. But it made no difference whether she told them three in the afternoon or nine at night, it did not seem to diminish their resolve to wait for him, although one could detect weariness and sorrow in their eyes.

Next to the market, in a dusty lot, a family of circus people had set up a tent for the fair in October. Among the advertised attractions was the man without arms, “fallen to earth one moonless night from a spaceship,” according to the handwritten paper sign hanging over his head. The man without arms, the circus barker cried, could light a cigarette, fry an egg, untie a knot, and play cards with his feet. These were the feats he performed during the show, sitting in the center of the ring, dressed in black like a priest, his cheeks painted like a clown’s. He would go through his act in silence, exasperating the audience with his slowness, spending too long opening a package or uncorking a bottle of wine, investing too many minutes in the eating of an egg with a knife and fork. But just as the audience began to display traces of boredom, murmuring among themselves or shifting in their seats, the man without arms would lift himself abruptly from the floor, thrusting himself upwards like a rag doll and disappear offstage in a dance.

Once the performance had drawn to a close amid whistles and applause, two sibling trapeze artists would appear, a man and woman in bathing suits, announced by a loudspeaker. Almost immediately afterwards they were joined by a dwarf, whose nose was painted red like a tomato. The dwarf seemed to have normal proportions when seated, but the moment he stood up you noticed his lower limbs were extremely short.

Maize the dwarf, dressed in blue, wearing clown shoes, and always ceremonious, would imitate his companions, falling repeatedly from his trapeze, half a meter high. His charm stole the show and few paid attention to the real trapezists.

The female trapeze artist, whose legs were brown and chunky, reappeared, this time in a sequined suit, and walked the wire. She teetered clumsily to keep her balance while the man without arms, who was her uncle, watched from below.

The teenage boys would follow her legs rather than the act, and when she bent over, in her generous brassiere and her tight panties, there was something almost obscene in her manner.

My brother had fallen in love with her, and wanted to run away with her once the circus left town. In the meantime, he attended every show.

But my father was aware of his intentions, and asked me to keep an eye on him.

I’d follow him down the streets and through the rooms of our house, listening as he spoke to himself, watching him leaning against the fig tree as he stared at his own shadow for hours.

He seemed not to see or hear me. And if he did, it was with the blindness and deafness of someone who is near us but whose thoughts are far away.

After the show I would find him with the trapeze artist in the darkness of a portico on the edge of town, clinging to her as if their bodies were one. I could hear, while I waited, the coyotes howling in the hills.

After a while of being glued to each other, they would part ways and take different streets.

And he would have left the village with her had he not seen her entering the cacique’s house one Saturday night after they’d said goodbye, staying inside with him and not coming out the entire time we waited outside.

The cacique had killed Quedito’s father. He’d taken him by surprise as he climbed the stairs leading up to the school to fetch his son. The cacique had shot him in the back from down below, halting him midway between two steps, the bullets thrusting his body upwards for a moment before he tumbled down, in a matter of seconds, the stairs that had taken him ten minutes to climb.

We were in class at the time and heard the shots. One. Two. Three. While our teacher talked on about the Sierra Madre …

Quedito, seated next to me, barely stirred when he heard the gunshots, unaware they were connected to his life.

Then we heard the voices of the younger pupils, whose classroom windows overlooked the stairs

“The cacique has killed Don Manuel,” someone shouted.

And we saw several people tearing through the yard.

Our teacher forbade us to leave the classroom. She ordered us to remain quietly seated. None of us could resist looking over at Quedito, who sat next to me as if frozen, with his mouth open.

“Come,” the teacher said to him. “Let’s go see what’s happening.”

He didn’t move.

So she took him by the arm and insisted. “Stand up. I’ll take you home.”

And she helped him up from his chair, his legs numb, unable to take a step.

“Can’t you walk?” she asked.

Quedito didn’t answer, as if she were addressing someone else or he couldn’t understand her words.

So I said to him, “Quedito, the teacher says she’ll take you home.”

He looked at me and shrugged, and stood staring at our teacher, his face like a shattered windowpane, about to break into sobs.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Shall we go see what happened?”

At first Quedito wouldn’t budge … He then began to walk on tiptoes towards the door and as soon as he got close to it broke into a run.

The teacher ran after him, losing a shoe on the way. And we ran after her, to see Quedito rushing down the stairs four at a time, always on the verge of tumbling down, his eyes desperately searching for his father, who’d already been picked up and taken home.

One student said:

— They got him in the chest.

Another:

— In the stomach.

Another:

— In the hand.

And they’d point to the stretch of stairs Don Manuel had been mounting the moment he received the gunshots.

And one young pupil, pale with excitement, descended the stairs with his gaze.

The next day, in the square, I encountered the cacique.

Leaning against a lamppost, he straightened himself upon seeing me, staring so intently his eyes seemed to bulge with a wrath he wished to vent on me.

I stood still, not daring to walk any farther.

He had a magnetism like a serpent’s, which fascinated me, his smile contorted into a kind of evil sensuality. He had killed a man: that’s what gave him prestige.

The spilt blood could be read in his eyes like a sign, lending his spirit tension, pleasure, and guilt, somewhere between satisfaction and horror.

Bent over, as if about to pounce, he watched me closely. Maybe he took pleasure in scaring me, as he did the woman who walked past at that moment; he jumped at her with a cry, and she ran away, terrified.

He didn’t laugh. He was like a dog that barks and growls by instinct.

And thus he bared his teeth at me, and began to growl. And he held up his hands as if they were claws. He was attuned to my movements, my glances, my fears. Ready to pounce. Offering me a glimpse of the revolver tucked under his belt, over the white shirt with a black ribbon at his neck. Dressed elegantly, as if for Sunday.

In his crocodile shoes, he stood between two policemen with rifles who also watched me while they checked the side streets as if sifting the air, making sure someone they hadn’t seen wasn’t approaching unawares. Their ponchos smelled of wet wool, their hats nearly covered their foreheads. They wore new shoes, which appeared to be either too tight or not the right size, judging by the fidgety way they were standing.

It looked like the cacique had deliberately placed himself at the center of the square to attract attention, perhaps as a gesture of defiance, or to assert his solitary tyranny.

All of a sudden, as if spitting out his voice, he said to me, “Where are you going, you pip-squeak son of a bitch?”

My breath was cut short.

“Okay, now that you’ve seen me, scram. Otherwise I’ll geld you.”

And I took flight, turning to look at him, his face still contorted and unsmiling, gazing around with a crazed look, still flanked by the two police officers, who laughed, yelling threats and insults at me.

One week later, on a Wednesday afternoon, they killed him.

It was near the railway station, as he was returning to the village on horseback after having paid a visit to one of his lovers.

Riding across the plain, he’d run into a man called El Chimal, with whom he had quarreled, or thought he had quarreled, since the man was an inhabitant of the village, and the village, his enemy.

As was his custom, he started to draw his gun, albeit lazily and with scant conviction, assuming the man, since he came towards him, was going to attack. El Chimal had his gun ready beneath his poncho and was already taking aim. He shot him in the face and kept firing although the rest of the shots were lost in the air.

When the cacique fell to the ground his feet got caught in the stirrups and his horse dragged him along for fifty feet. That was how far El Chimal had to go to rip out the gold teeth and trade his donkey for the other’s chestnut horse. Then he took off.

That night soldiers from another village arrived in Contepec looking for El Chimal. But they didn’t find him. After two days they left, figuring he was gone for good, but before heading out, on orders from the governor, they galloped through the streets shooting at all the houses.

Once they’d left, the villagers threw the cacique’s body into a well and covered it with stones.

The morning they buried the cacique like that, Arturo and I went to see Juan at his house.

At the post office we saw his father hunched over a desk overflowing with papers and seals; he would hold everything close to his face to read it, as if his glasses weren’t strong enough or didn’t have prescription lenses. When we knocked on the door, Juan’s youngest sister, Anita, let us in without saying if he was home or not. We looked for him in the patio, in his room, in the kitchen. With a sleepy expression and without a word, she watched us come and go. When finally we asked her whether Juan was home, she replied in a voice scarcely audible due to shyness that he’d gone out and would be home later.

So we leaned against a column in the porch surrounding the patio and watched Anita in her yellow apron as she laid out little cups and saucers on a small table and sat an old, faded doll in a chair, oblivious to our presence, as if we were no longer there.

All of a sudden Arturo poked me with his elbow to point out that Anita, who was bending over to talk to her doll, didn’t have any panties on.

And he went over to her right away, touching her from behind with his hand. She didn’t move or say anything, only stirred a little spoon in a cup. Arturo murmured something in her ear, making her blush and stop what she was doing. He then grabbed her hand and led her to the bathroom; she followed meekly.

As they passed by he told me to keep an eye open in case someone should come. I remained there, my gaze wandering over the sunny corridor, where a solitary hen was pecking at corn or staring at the wall. They’d left the door open. Anita was on all fours with her backside in the air, while he was behind her, panting.

When he noticed me watching he said it was my turn and stood up with his trousers at his ankles like empty sacks. She looked at me with a bovine expression, waiting patiently on her knees.

I shook my head. Again I was left to keep watch in the corridor, now with two hens strutting about. He sat her on his legs and later pinned her against a wall; she followed instructions.

Finally Arturo grew tired, or bored, and came to me, saying we should go. As we went down the corridor he gave one of the hens a kick. Anita was left sitting on the toilet seat peeing, with a sad, distant look on her face, as if she didn’t realize what she’d just done with Arturo, and that we were now leaving.

Across from the post office, on a bench, an old man was singing in a shrill voice of moans and wailing:

Trees cry for rain

And mountains for wind …

Strumming at his guitar:

And so my eyes cry

For you, darling beloved.

As Arturo walked away I went up to listen to the old man, and noticed that while singing all that moved were his hands and his lips; he was sitting so stiffly, he looked sculpted.

His face red and pockmarked, he resembled an ancient idol, carved out of mud, time, and suffering:

In front of me there is an angel

Looking at me with your eyes

I want to speak but cannot,

My heart sighs.

When I thought he’d finished his song, I asked him where he came from and what he was singing but he didn’t answer or even look at me and continued:

Come see, and come see,

Come see, and we shall see

The love that we two share

Come, let us be united.

Suddenly he fell silent and began to listen alertly.

That’s when I realized he was blind.

An old woman was approaching between the plots of grass, walking so slowly she never finished arriving, so short were her steps and so frequent her stops to rest.

From up close, leaning on her cane she looked weary, poor, and troubled. She turned to me as if to speak, but it seemed her voice would never emerge as her lips fretted over the word about to be uttered.

After a while she sat down and smiled at me, displaying a lone tooth, her face now wearing a happy expression.

She told me, albeit briefly since it distressed her to speak, that they’d come to the village that morning to see a brother who was ill. They felt too tired that afternoon to return on foot to their home, which lay in another village, and would I help them with the bus fare.

So I slid my hand in my pocket, and with a quick, timid movement as if to hide from her what I was doing, I pulled out the five pesos I had. Then off they went, the old man’s shoes so worn he might as well be walking barefoot, for his feet slipped out with every step.

They headed for the market, where some people with scant cash bought a roll or an orange to stave off hunger, staring at the fruit sellers with large, exhausted eyes, or licking a banana peel to the point of transparency.

Beneath the buzzing of flies, skinny dogs lay stretched out in front of closed butcher stalls, and a poor boy had been sitting on a stone for hours.

Occasionally a woman bought tomatoes at a stand, amid the silence of the vendors, who looked half asleep in their vigil over nonexistent customers.

My aunt Inés was going deaf. They operated on her and she ended up completely deaf. When I visited her in her hospital room she read the How are you? on my lips with as much enthusiasm as if I’d brought good news regarding her health. The truth is, she looked like a survivor and reacted to any abrupt movement with alarm, as though it threatened to upset her equilibrium. She’d already acquired that expression some deaf people have, midway between anxiety and disorientation, similar to the expression of sailors who step ashore after months at sea, the isolation they endured written on their faces and patent in their very way of walking.

With her elderly body and virgin heart, she had the face of a sufferer, of a suffering bird. In company she would move her lips in silence, repeating to herself what she’d read on the lips of others.

At meals, people often forgot about her and spoke among themselves without giving her the chance to read their lips, for when she looked at them they would turn their heads away.

When my grandmother died, Aunt Inés inherited the house where she lived. Unmarried, and confined to solitude by her deafness, she spent her days with a few books, reading one after the other in turn. She only interrupted her reading to write letters to suitors in Guadalajara, San Luis Potosí, and Mérida. Yet she never met any of them, for she endlessly postponed their dates in equidistant cities where the encounters were meant to take place. She became the sempiternal “Sentimental Young Woman” or the “Disappointed Blonde,” until the letters she received weekly from the “Gentleman from the North” and the “Lonely Man from Chiapas” grew scarcer by the month until after a year or two they stopped arriving altogether.

In order to garner interest in the personals of Confidencias, she depicted herself as young and beautiful, cultured and virginal, sad and forsaken, swapping photographs from fifteen years earlier with her suitors, along with intimate stories and promises of marriage. And if she hadn’t advertised herself in a certain issue she would go out and buy it at once, anxious to be one of the first to reply to the personals.

Her correspondence was kept in a padlocked drawer so my uncles and cousins wouldn’t find the letters and read them.

She finagled money from her suitors, who were anxious to meet her. Worn down and aroused by so many letters, they pleaded for a rendezvous and sent money orders for her to travel to Tampico, a place to which at the very last minute my aunt would never go, due to fragile health or an ailing brother, postponing the trip to the following year.

Busy with her correspondence and deaf to the world, she went down the street beside noisy trucks. She read by the window, bringing the book closer and closer to her eyes, frowning if anyone she knew walked past, for she had trouble recognizing their features. A smell of dust, animals, and plants had settled in the backyard of her house. From my grandmother she’d inherited pots of geraniums, roses, and pansies, and a donkey, a goat, and a dozen hens, who’d lay their eggs in the kitchen and in the bedrooms on the beds.

The train would stop at the station, a few kilometers from Contepec. Passengers disembarked from two coaches while porters unloaded crates of oranges and sacks of flour from one of the boxcars. A mail pouch, full of letters and newspapers, was dropped between melons and bananas, and women briskly peddled their chicken mole through the railway cars. Yellow in the midday sun, a dog came running over the plain, while other canines fought over scraps of food passengers threw out the windows. A venerable ash tree served as a parasol for two old men, who witnessed in silence the activity on the train; in one of their dark, skinny hands a cigarette seemed to burn endlessly, flaring up every now and then at an occasional puff. All of a sudden, the train’s whistle and its lurching march forward brought all the activity to a halt and voices fell silent. In the landscape once again visible in the train’s wake, those of us who remained behind saw the plain, warm and lazy, surge up once more until only the dust was to be seen, dancing from one side to another like a blond figure, inconsistent and remote, engaged in a drunken dance in which she seemed to dissolve.

THE POEM ABOUT SHADOWS

Chapter 3

MY EYES PRACTICED on the sacred morning’s shadows and I learned to tell them apart by their darkness and their light

they seemed fashioned from penumbra and time and to be perishable or perfectible depending on the sun’s brightness and the location of beings and things

leading a perilous existence where the chance encounters that caused them to shimmer destroyed them

although some lasted beyond the day, for when nightfall came another light was lit next to the object that cast them, causing them to move slightly

some were very limpid and silence encompassed them in a clarity like an expanse of water that seemed to bathe them

my eyes ran over them, whether they were standing, lying down, or bending over as if to drink drops of light from the sun-drenched grass and among them my being composed its song

shadows, I thought, confer reality on objects by serving as their negatives or ghosts and dragging themselves across the floor or sliding down the wall as insubstantial doubles; there’s something servile about them, or inscrutably humble

they are the secret world, the counterweight, and the other landscape of the radiant day

I could tell the age of some and whether they were newly born or old by their condition on the dust and others were so riddled with holes that they were pale remains or ruins of shadows

on them the day narrated its variety, displayed its temperature, and revealed the hour

and suddenly in the afternoon there were unending shadows singing on the ground at the same time

spilled next to unending beings and things in the quiet landscape singing at the foot of a mountain or beside a black dog or a white chair or a little girl

here and there pointy and round in silent music

they intertwined, they intermingled, they piled up or, terribly solitary,

were cast by the root of a lone tree on the hill

or they walked at a man’s feet like an anchor to keep him from flying off the earth

and to remind him at every moment of his ghost

there were shadows of mountains and of clouds on mountains

fleeting shadows of insects

and shadows racing among horses’ feet

green shadows of willows swaying in the water

and shadows of a sparrow that shrink as the bird soars

and once it is in the air open out their wings flying over the ground

trees and beings had their voice on earth and their duration on a wall

and I

made my poem

and I recited it trembling.

Chapter 4

ONLY A HANDFUL of the streets had names, and the letters that arrived bore the words “Domicilio Conocido” (known residence) rather than our address. Our house stood on the main square, the public garden directly in front. From any point in town you could see the steeple of the old church. But what truly provided the landscape to our village were the hills, green or blue depending on the distance from which they were glimpsed.

The taller hill would spread its wings, always on the verge of taking flight.

The streets were few and long.

I had the impression the real village began in the air, above the rooftops of the houses in the blue that emerged from the end of every street as if in a celestial finale, varying in tone depending on the hour.

Stores were closed on Wednesdays. If there were never many people in Contepec on weekdays, Wednesday the village was virtually uninhabited.

The day would pass with nostalgia and, dazed by its inertia, its interminable hours made me fear that Thursday, when the shops reopened, would never come again.

Nevertheless, in the afternoon after lunch my parents, my brother, and I would set out on a walk to one of our orchards. On the way my father and my brother talked about ways of improving the house and modifications to the orchard that would never get done, amusing themselves each Wednesday with the same conversation, as if it were a ritual of the walk itself to make plans and worry about the state of our properties.

We would pause by the edge of the dam, between the magueys and a ravine. From there we had a view of the horizon, with its solitary paths and dark pines, and, in the background, the hills. And there my brother would point to a spot and say, “That would be a good place to build a house.”

My father would look at him, as if he saw in his face the spot with the house already built.

Later they’d discuss the number of rooms the house would have, what color they would paint them, who would sleep where … And they’d get so lost in their digressions that they never noticed that they’d drifted from the topic. It’d surprise me, the way their faces quickly turned from serious to laughing after any joke at all, or how they got caught up in new plans after the mention of a certain person, place, or merchandise, their boredom showing, however, in periodic absentmindedness or yawns … In the middle of a grand project they would abruptly fall prey to bouts of melancholy, looking as if they were about to cry. And they talked any which way the words came out, not really pursuing a special topic. They drifted away from Contepec, the orchard, or whatever seemed to be exciting them at that particular moment, moving on to the matter of the movie theater or customs in other countries.

Not far from us, amid the magueys, a few buzzards repeatedly swooped down to feed on a dead dog whose stench could be smelled from meters away, as if enclosed within a fetid circle. Black and solitary, like gloomy emissaries or birds from the beyond, they would peck at the dog.

Before, like a silent scream, the stench had summoned them, proclaiming the carcass through the air.

At dusk we started home, resuming our conversation about house building and new business ventures. If fruits were in season, we would return with baskets full of peaches and figs.

Once home, my brother would go off to play pool and we would remain in the garden. My father read the newspaper, my mother watered the plants, and I sat on a step and watched my parents, sensing an indefinable sadness in them that made me sad too, as if it were in the very air, in the hour, in ourselves, in the funereal nightfall.

One morning they attacked the rummage room, a jungle of objects that seemed to defend its clutter. The maids would pull out tricycles with missing pedals, deflated balls in whose rubber a residual red still lingered, a token of bygone days; sparse brooms, chipped mirrors, wobbly tables, chairs without backs; clothes wistful for the shapes of my mother and father in irretrievable years; benches whitened by pigeons.

Dust rose from corners, walls, and things, as if secreted from the hollows, folds, and hours.

Then, once the floor was swept, the shelves dusted, the shared past of the house set here and there, so that a coat belonging to my father when he first arrived in Mexico in 1927 was brought blindly face-to-face in the present with a sweater worn by my mother a few years ago (the two made contemporaries only through finding themselves in the same derelict room), the things went back to the wardrobes, not to be restored to everyday life but to gather dust all over again, cloistered in a future of disuse. Preserved as tangible survivals of our own selves, perhaps to remind us of the unreality of our bodies and our ages, the shifts in our fancies and the ghostliness of our days in a torn shoe or in a record that was like the song to our games. Or to bear witness in the different-sized trousers and the variety of shirts we had worn to the growth of our bodies and the transformation of our faces, forever linked to certain overcast afternoons or to certain desolate days on which we could cry, or did cry, prey to a nostalgia so general or to a solitude so physical, we felt ourselves forgotten by everyone.

Like the time I walked, in a certain pair of trousers, to the railway station to wait for my brother, who was arriving from Mexico City, without asking my father for money to take the bus; and once the train arrived and my brother had alighted, I didn’t dare approach him and headed home without his knowing I had been there. Until on the way, when the bus driver told him I was returning to the village on foot, he made the vehicle stop and got off to help me on, asking why I hadn’t come up to say hello, and I, without knowing what to answer, had remained silent and cried.

There were wandering dogs in the village, scrawny, dirty, and hungry. They would attach themselves to the first person who walked by, and for a while had an owner, until a door closed in their face and they’d go back to being no one’s dog. They’d forage among scraps, prowling around houses or roaming the hot streets, their shadows nearly vaporized.

They barked their way through the night hours, when the sky is full of silences, distances, and stellar solitudes, and every noise reaches us with a din of urgency and abandonment, and voices from the street sound as if something terrible were happening.

I couldn’t imagine where so many dogs had come from, and why they didn’t have an owner. Many of them would gather in front of the butchers’ stalls at the market, monitoring purchases, watching the cutting up of carcasses, staring at the bloody cows hanging from hooks, licking the blood from the floor, and fighting over skins and bones. Sometimes, though, the butchers would subject them to butcher humor, tying strings of empty cans to their tails and lighting firecrackers that’d go off in a blast, and the howling dogs would take flight, the cans clattering against the cobblestones, pursued by the noise of their own making. They’d run past me, terrified, and if they managed to get into a house, they’d seek refuge under a bed or table, trembling violently, as if they were about to explode.

The dogs were the color of the sun, of a yellow that seemed sprouted from the fields. You could see them from the train, running over the plain alongside the cars, until, exhausted, they’d fall behind.

In the dog days some caught rabies and a policeman or a butcher would kill them with a bullet or a blow of the machete.

Around that time my brother used to buy pocketknives at a shop, selling them on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who then sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro, he never paid my brother back either. My brother then embarked on a trade in wallets, which he bought at a shop and sold on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro back, he didn’t pay my brother. My brother then embarked on a trade in pocket diaries …

Around that time someone lent my brother a shotgun and he would go hunting with Ricardo el Negro; although they fired many shells they didn’t kill so much as a hare. They spent more time carrying the shotgun here and there than standing in wait for the animal they were after. We’d see them heading for the hill early in the morning, or in the afternoons sitting and smoking in the shade of an ash tree on the edge of the village, or at the playing field, clutching the shotgun, watching a soccer match. Until one evening my brother, tired of carrying it around, propped it against a wall in his room and left it there, forgotten, for months.

One afternoon as we played soccer, the ball, kicked hard, hit me in the face, and Arturo, who was also playing, began to laugh.

With half my face smarting, the burn of the leather on my cheek and dirt in my mouth, I went for him to wipe off his laughter and avenge my pain, but he merely pointed at my face and made a joke for the others, insulting me.

Then I motioned to indicate that he should prepare to fight. He moved away from the rest of them and rushed at me, his long arms and hard fists pummeling my head.

Hurt and humiliated because he was hitting me on the head, I went at him, pursuing him as he retreated, throwing punches to his face and belly until I knocked him to the ground.

Then, his nose bloody and his head cradled in his arms as if to hide or feign sleep, he cried out, in tears:

“No more.”

My hands were damp with his blood and dirt was stuck to them. My friends laughed and discussed the blows, mentioning a hard elbow in his ribs which I didn’t remember giving. I still had the feel of the fight on my hands, and the taste of his face.

There he lay on the ground, his eyes open, staring at me as if taking me in, while the others tried to help him up but he refused, so they left.

My friends and I then headed back, playing with the ball as we did.

He stayed behind, in the dark field.

I remember him the morning I came to his house when he left me waiting in the dining room while he went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I sat there studying the calendars on the walls, his grandmother arrived, hobbling in on her cane, a very small woman, shrunken by age; and she took me by the arm, pleased to see me, and called me by a name I couldn’t catch … Until she realized I wasn’t the person she thought I was, and she asked whether I wasn’t so-and-so (another name I failed to catch) … but on seeing that I wasn’t that person either, someone she knew, she began reciting in a low, choked voice a list of names among which, she thought, would be mine. Until I told her I was a friend of Arturo’s and this was my first time in the house, repeating the words to her several times, which seemed to amuse her, and she left the room with the expression of someone who has already forgotten what was said to her and the person to whom she was speaking … Later, when Arturo and I came across her standing in the door to her room, she looked at me with curiosity (or rather, ignorance), as if trying to figure out who I was and match my face to some memory or name. But we went away before she relapsed, leaving her sitting in a chair, her gaze fixed on the open door.

Arturo lived with his uncle, who made him work in the pigsties because Arturo’s father had killed a man and fled the village. Arturo liked soccer, and would come to the field to play with us.

But his uncle would come looking for him, spying on him first through the small jagged wall bristling with chunks of glass bottles. And then he would creep up on us, and lunge at Arturo through the doorless entrance.

Once he had him he began shaking and kicking him, giving himself over fully to the wrath his nephew kindled in him.

Bloodied and bawling, Arturo would look over at us. His uncle would throw him to the ground, hold him down with a foot, then remove his belt and start whipping, making him crawl out of the field on all fours. Nearly every time he came to play with us, his uncle would show up.

If one of us spotted him, he’d shout, “Run, here comes your uncle!” But Arturo never ran, he stood there hypnotized, watching him draw near.

And then the show began again, and we heard the uncle’s usual threat:

“You lazy bum, someday I’m going to kill you.”

Yet he never did. One day Arturo drowned. He was walking along the edge of the dam and slipped in and wasn’t able to get out.

Straight away, delighting in the temperature of the day, the placement of cobblestones in the street, the youthfulness of a passing woman, as if they were all topics that interested me, each time I went over to see his son, don Pedro, Juan’s father, would open the door and say he wasn’t home but meanwhile begin telling me about the adventures of the Pardaillan, with each sentence entangling me even more in an episode which, at ten in the morning, and on a Monday, I didn’t want to hear about. Gradually imprisoned by his unrelenting voice, which ignored my excuses to leave and my fidgeting, he made me see the houses as squashed, the hills as flattened, the passersby as misshapen, while my face grew long from boredom.

My sole desire was to flee, while in his sleep-deprived face the features softened, and his expression livened up in the enjoyment of an unintelligible joke. But when my drifting attention signaled that in the first pause I would try to take my leave, he circled around the same anecdote to avoid any silences, telling it over and over in different words. And, scrutinizing my eyes as if to make certain I was following his story, he would suddenly tell me about some harebrained event.

When a boy near us began banging on a post with a stick, don Pedro pretended not to hear so I wouldn’t be distracted from his tale. Without interrupting himself, he searched for the source of the noise with his eyes. Then he stopped, as if the sequence of the episodes had suddenly become scrambled and he didn’t know how to continue, holding up a raised finger that bid me wait.

And then he went on, as if he’d memorized the episode line by line, savoring each word in his mouth before uttering it, taking time to find the next one. And engaged in establishing the relationship between one of the Pardaillan and a lady, he lost himself in the description of her sensual features, but noticing that it bored me, he quickly said, “And then he pushed her away from him and with his dagger pinned a man to the door.”

He called characters in books by their first names, as if he and I knew them personally or were somehow intimate with them; and, as if sharing a secret with me, he announced, “Nevertheless, Pardaillan had conquered the princess.”

Enraptured, he seemed to speak an incomprehensible language, thanks to the saliva in which his words swam and because so many of his sentences were drowned and inaudible.

When one of his friends went by he looked at him suspiciously, as if reading an opinion in his eyes about his being with a boy. But once his distrust of the man had passed, he turned back to the Pardaillan, like a moth circling a lightbulb.

All of a sudden, saying to myself, “That’s it,” I ran off, leaving him in midsentence.

Bedridden with tonsillitis and drawn by the shouting of teenagers and kids, I peered out the window of a room facing the main square and saw Ricardo el Negro playing hide-the-belt.

Six boys, squeezed onto a bench with their hands behind their backs, passed the belt around while my brother, chosen by lot, tried to guess where it was.

When he attempted to grab at the belt from someone on the far left, someone on the far right swatted him with it.

Ricardo el Negro hit him the hardest, laughing out loud whenever he did, and even louder when he saw my brother tightly clamping his lips to hold back the tears.

He and my brother had killed a cat that used to relieve itself in the kitchen. One evening they came home and the stench wafting up from next to the stove had annoyed them.

With nauseated faces and a determined expression, they began looking around. Before long they came upon the cat, fast asleep on a chair; they grabbed him by the fur and carried him to the backyard. There, they set him on a wooden washtub, against a wall, and fired at him with a.22.

They killed him with three shots.

In those days, I hardly spoke to my brother. He went around with Ricardo el Negro and other friends who were older than me. Besides, he liked guns and pocketknives, of which I knew nothing.

One afternoon I followed him around the building site at our house because I was afraid something would happen to him.

I sensed a presence threatening him, entangling him in the snares of death.

I examined the rims of the walls to see if a brick or plank wasn’t about to fall on his head, and the floor, to make sure he wasn’t about to trip on a hole or step on a rusty nail.

I refused to part from him, as my nearness was what saved him from what might kill him.

He went from room to room, stepping on beams and leaning against loosely fitted windows, and jumped onto the mortar, his feet sinking in. With a melancholy air, he looked at me as if from a different space, as distant as people seem in a dream … I felt it was urgent to tell him to take his First Communion; he was already a teenager and still hadn’t taken it.

“To watch someone wash a glass, handling it carefully to feel its shape, and in its shape its fragility and in its fragility the glass of which it is made, and in the glass its transparency … To hold the glass between your hands, feeling its substance, its availability, its fate depending on your wish, which can be to smash it or make it shine … To treat things well, insignificant as they may seem, reveals a spirit in harmony with that which surrounds it, in a relationship of love.”

In a soft voice, Father Felipe shared a secret with me, a secret only I should hear; and although we were alone in the room, which smelled of wood and myrrh, he lowered his voice even more until he was only moving his lips, as if continuing to speak within himself.

After wanting for so long to make the trip, our mother had brought me and my brother to Temascalcingo for our First Communion. She wanted Father Felipe to be our confessor.

He had waited for me in the room, praying, while the nuns prepared me for our meeting, because before receiving anyone, he would pray. When I came in he watched me close the door and draw nearer to him, crossing the floor without feeling it beneath my feet.

Kneeling and wordless, I looked up at him, waiting for the miracle which, they’d told me, could take place. For he was a saint, and had performed miracles for the Indians and peasants in the region; he had soothed the conscience of men who had killed men, whom neither time nor imprisonment could console, the punishment being lesser than the crime.

But he only gazed at me in silence, from the height of his seventy-five years, or were they eighty-seven. And I gazed back, taking in the white beard lying against his chest, which would bleed, people said, if it were ever cut.

Outside the door, my mother talked about me with a nun. In a room off the corridor another nun prepared my brother for his meeting.

Father Felipe seemed to be and not be at my side, and in order to finish coming nearer or going, he would half close his eyes.

I searched for a wish within me, something I could ask for and have come true.

But I couldn’t find any, as I was happy without them.

And then he opened his eyes, smiled, and asked me to fetch my brother.

The following day we took Communion; the burning candles made me dizzy during Mass.

Afterwards we had breakfast in the convent’s dining room with the two nuns who had readied us for our Communion. These women spent the entire time discussing Father Felipe’s physical condition with my mother while consuming multiple helpings of jello and cake and several mugs of hot chocolate.

“His teeth often bother him when he eats,” they said, “if the meat is tough or the bread is stale.”

“Whenever he works too hard he gets tired, and has trouble hearing and mumbles his words.”

“If he doesn’t sleep enough the weather really affects him, his bones ache and he gets the shivers.”

“When he walks he has to go slowly and put his foot down firmly; a false step might cost him his life.”

After breakfast we returned to Contepec. That morning thousands of monarch butterflies were crossing the village. The air, like a river, bore currents of butterflies.

Through the streets, above the houses, between the trees and people, they made their way south.

In a room without a door in the backyard my dog lay dying.

The day before, while we were in Temascalcingo, he had gone out alone into the street and someone had given him yerba.

Lying on the floor, between convulsions and frothing, he was slowly claimed by death.

In vain my parents tried to save him. My mother asked the maids if it hadn’t been the butcher, who for some reason resented my father and had wanted to take revenge.

Rintintin no longer recognized me; futilely, I called out his name. He had been dragged away by death, and his days now seemed unreal and his existence foreign to mine.

Tomorrow, I told myself, he will be dead, and they’ll throw him to the outskirts of the village, where he’ll be fodder for the vultures.

On Sundays the peasants from the farms wandered our village drunk. They crawled on all fours over the cobblestones, or hugged the walls to get around.

After going to Mass and doing their shopping, they headed for the cantinas or drank pulque in the market.

Some would stagger past my father’s store, stopping at the lamppost to regain their balance and avoid falling “snout first,” as they said.

In the square an old man peed in front of his daughters, while the sun set in the distance over his back.

A few steps away a youth was being dragged by a horse that barely moved, and the boy spoke calmly to passersby from the ground.

In the store a woman was trying to say something to my father but couldn’t get the words out because her tongue was thickened from drinking. Faced with her incoherence my father attended to other customers, and the woman stumbled out snorting.

Outside the cantina an old man and a young man threw punches at each other, surrounded by an audience of men, women, children, and other drunks who’d just emerged from other cantinas.

A while after the tongue-tied woman had left the store my brother and Ricardo el Negro found her sprawled near an unwalled well on their way to the playing field. She lay sleeping on her back, her arms and legs splayed wide, her woven dress hiked up above her navel. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, exposing her dust-covered genitals.

My brother and Ricardo el Negro placed withered flowers on her forehead and in her mouth and bottles between the fingers of both hands. Then they shook an empty flour sack over her body and turned her white. Their guffawing woke her up and they broke into a run, pursued by the woman’s loud curses.

In our garden at dusk, amid the plants, my cousin and her friends, in colorful dresses and with their parents’ features pasted on their faces, were pretending to prepare supper.

Coriander, parsley, and watercress lay on the plates; candy and tangerines in the fruit bowl.

With a blue bucket on her head, my cousin, looking like a dunce and brandishing a bunch of spearmint, gave her two friends a lesson on how to brew tea, while they sat by her side with open legs. Catching me watching, they called out for me to join them, so I could play the husband who returns home.

But I didn’t care to.

So my cousin came over to me and stuck her hands in my pockets, feeling around to see whether I had any chocolates or pesos on me, although before long she unzipped my fly. And rolling her eyes towards the bathroom, she led me with murmurs to “you know where, to do what you like to do.”

Leaning against the wall she lifted her dress and made me run my hand across her bare stomach, sliding it down until she clamped it in her fissure.

A few weeks later as I played with soldiers in my room I had the urge to pee. On my way down the corridor I realized I was alone in the house, and sensed a presence around me that froze my steps and kept me from moving.

The sky was darkening, the walls and the floor had a muddy hue, and my parents’ room, seen through the window, had been emptied of its furniture; I felt like someone who returns home after many years and the loved ones he expects to find have already died or gone away, and the house to which he returns has undergone so much change that, although he’s in it, he feels he is elsewhere.

And so, as in one of those dream scenarios in which the participants are dead, the setting is antiquated, the air that envelops us is phantasmal, and the seconds we live through make us feel so unhappy in that space that they seem longer than they really are, I walked without walking, spoke without speaking.

And with my body stilled and my self troubled, I tried to move my tongue in an “Our Father who art in heaven, ha, ha, ha …,” but I couldn’t pronounce “hallowed” until I drew out from within me an enormous, magical

HA

that stood for “HHHHHHHHH​AAAAAAAAA​LLLLLLL​LLOWED.”

And once I said it I could move again, and I ran out of the house in terror.

Upon waking the following day at midnight I saw a ghastly woman at the window of my room.

Disheveled, she cried silently, her half-parted lips fogging up the glass panes. Her features were those of the drunken lady, the one my brother and Ricardo el Negro had made mischief with, and those of a young prostitute who had been raped and killed by a madman. This young woman had gone to Mexico City and lived in a brothel. The madman, who happened to be her cousin, had fallen in love with her when she returned to the village. One afternoon he attacked her in the kitchen, and thinking he was embracing her, hugged pots, brooms, and chairs, sating himself with them. One night, however, he pierced her throat with a knife.

Mute words and thwarted groans seemed to emerge from the hole in her neck. Her breasts were like the heads of pigeons and turtledoves.

“Don’t believe in her,” I told myself, “because you’ll keep seeing her. Look, she doesn’t exist.”

And I dropped my eyelids so as not to see her. And I tried to wake up, though I was already awake.

And when I opened my eyes to see whether she had gone, she was still there, watching me now with the face of my aunt Inés, who would visit me at the clinic after I was born. As a two-months-early baby I was put in a glass box and Inés would press her nose to the glass to gaze at me.

The light in her eyes was beautiful, passing through the window’s dirty panes unmuddied, and an internal brightness made her face radiant.

One morning in the kitchen, as I sat on a chair watching my mother make lunch, I saw three differing scenes through the three windows, each with its own quality of light, as if the present hour also held the hues of hours past and present.

With a deft hand my mother was sifting sugar over a peach cake, or cutting a vegetable, suddenly saying, “Let’s see …,” as she placed a piece of leftover peach in my mouth.

But I’d barely seen her face near mine, her arm extended towards my mouth, when I’d see her lifting the lid off a pot which, hot and uncovered on the stove, gave off warm clouds of steam that I inhaled.

My mother followed an exact rhythm, picking up the frying pan in a certain way and shaking it gently … if I had wanted to replicate her movements I would have mixed up both the chronology and the way they should go, doing a thing after the one it was meant to precede.

But while a willow’s branches filled the entire space of one window’s panes, and in another the sun-drenched morning seemed to mass into a cloudless blue, watching my mother I would tell myself, “Take a good look at her so you’ll be able to remember her later …”

And as I listened to the noise of pots, the wheeze of the small door to the pantry opening, and the sizzling of oil and peas as they came into contact with the frying pan, and as I saw the bright clear bridge of water pouring out of the jug, I repeated to myself: “So you never forget her …”

For I loved her movements, her way of pointing to a plate, her expression as she prepared meat or a sauce, brushing off my caresses without even noticing she did, or as if she were keeping a bothersome creature at bay. And then, abruptly, she would seem upset by a thing she’d suddenly remembered and startle me, as though it were quite serious, but it’d turn out it was only time to remove the flan from the oven.

To follow her gestures was to feel the rhythm of her being; and to feel it was to divine her inwardness; and to divine that was to remember her one day in a particular attitude, with such and such a face. And to remember her was to have her always in my own past, in the memory of my being, united, inseparably, to my self.

THE ROAD TO TOLUCA

ONE SATURDAY towards noon in January 1951, three friends and I made our way home after playing soccer.

The milky rays of a nearly white sun plowed the damp earth, and our shadows moved neatly beneath our soles each time we lifted a foot to take a step.

The mountain in the shape of a bird spreading its wings looked wrinkled. I felt dirty and tired.

When we reached my house I waved goodbye to my friends, taking the ball with me. Without replying they continued on their way.

As I opened the door I thought of going to my room to lie down and then take a bath. My solitary steps echoed along the sunlit corridor; my parents were at the store.

And then I went into my brother’s room, although I hadn’t meant to go in … A shotgun someone had lent him was propped against the wall. As if moving by their own accord, my hands reached for it. I walked to the backyard and climbed onto a pile of bricks that were being used to build the new kitchen. There was no one around; the bricklayer and the peon were having lunch in the old dining room.

Standing on the bricks, I saw some birds alight on the sapodilla tree next door, to be momentarily covered by the branches … Until they returned to the air, over my head, high in the blue above … And without wanting to, I aimed the shotgun at them and fired, not intending to kill a single one.

I watched with relief as they all flew on until they were lost in the distance. But as I let the shotgun drop, the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me. Such was the blow I felt from the shots that I thought infinity had entered my belly.

Invaded by ammunition, engulfed in the smell of gunpowder, my blood hot and my right hand bleeding, I wasn’t aware of my state until I tried to take a step and a feeling of being torn apart kept me from moving.

Perhaps I had screamed, for the bricklayer and the peon were now below telling me to hang on, that they were going to bring me down from the bricks. But a maid arrived and opened her arms to me and I jumped, nearly throwing her to the ground with the suddenness of my jump and the weight of my body.

She lifted me and carried me to a bed. My parents came into the room, intense suffering on their faces for what had happened to me and the condition I was in. My brother, who’d been summoned from the bathroom in a hurry, looked wet and sad, wrapped in a large towel, crying and trembling.

After examining me the doctor said the wound was superficial, but that it would still be necessary to take me to the city since he didn’t have the necessary instruments to operate.

Then the maid came to tell my mother that the taxi they’d ordered was waiting outside. My father took me in his arms and laid me down on the backseat.

Before we set off, a Texan rancher named Elías drove by in his jeep, and my father asked him to accompany us on our journey in case the car broke down, and he accepted.

With my head resting in my mother’s lap, I stared at the shabby roof of the car as I listened to a song blasting from a cantina, and I wondered which friends might be watching the car drive off, and thinking of God and my fate, I said yes to my accident, as if it were an adverse gift from God.

The taxi indeed broke down on a steep slope as we drove up a mountain between Contepec and El Oro. They put me in the jeep.

I was extremely thirsty and unable to move when at around four in the afternoon we finally reached El Oro. My father got out of the jeep to hunt for the doctor who knew how to operate; waiting for his return, we parked near the main square, where a few curious onlookers came over to inspect me.

After a while my father returned and said the doctor was out of town and wouldn’t be back till Wednesday.

And so we pressed on to Toluca, not arriving until nine at night because the jeep had to go very slowly; my father took me into the first hospital he saw, at the entrance to the city.

It was the General Hospital.

And there, they operated on me.

Hours later I awoke in a room, in bed. My father and mother were watching me. My father said, “Go to sleep. Rest.”

When I opened my eyes again, night had passed and it was Sunday morning. Seated in a chair next to my mother was a lady from Contepec who lived in Toluca and had come to visit me.

My father was not in the room. My mother and the lady were speaking in hushed voices, and each time they looked over at me they would study my face as if searching for clues to my future.

Listening to them, I learned that my father had witnessed my operation and that there had been a moment when the doctors, giving me up as a lost cause, had no longer wanted to continue, but that my father had insisted they persevere till the end.

According to what I heard them say, which was incongruous with the calm I was feeling, the state of my wound was extremely serious; one doctor had said that if they didn’t operate again within the next twenty-four hours I would die from the complications that might arise. But the main doctor who had operated on me disagreed, and they left me to my fate, to see whether I would live or whether I would die.

My thirst grew until I was near delirium … I burned with an inner parchedness that made me grab the bars of my bed and scream. My father would say he was going to get water and return after a long while, saying there wasn’t any but that he’d been able to moisten a ball of cotton with a few drops left in the sink, and then he’d pat my lips with it.

“Let’s wait and see what happens over the next seventy-two hours,” a doctor told my father, believing I was asleep.

My mother had phoned Father Felipe to come. In a waking moment I heard he was coming, and that he’d been very shaken by the news of my accident.

My mother told the nurses that he was a saint, and could perform the miracle of saving me. They and the nuns awaited his arrival. And the fate of my health remained on hold until then.

I was not doing well at all, the doctors said. But I didn’t feel as bad as I looked to them, and I let them hover around me as if they were working on someone else who wasn’t me. My spirit refused to be bullied by the helplessness of my body.

Injections and dressing changes pricked and pulled at me, and one arm hung for hours in the same position as the serum entered in drops.

Father Felipe arrived on Sunday morning, or at midday. Or on the following Sunday. Or I think he arrived, because I was asleep, and I couldn’t distinguish that well between what was happening around me and what I dreamt, between what I heard and what I thought I was hearing, for often my eyes would close as I lay listening to someone speak. The point is, he arrived. Or perhaps while saying Mass in Temascalcingo he came to Toluca in spirit. And I saw him. Or my parents saw him, and they said he’d been in the hospital chapel, and raising the chalice had asked God to grant me life. And that in the moment of the elevation he had known that I was going to live. And he told my mother, “Your son will live.”

Then he left. He had come to save me. My mother said so. And then he left.

Yet although I don’t remember having seen him in my room, I knew that on that Sunday he had been by my side.

Days later, my mother would tell people he had said I would become a saint, or I was going to do a lot of good for humanity, and that’s why I was going to live.

My mother searched in my eyes and in my actions for signs of saintliness. And I felt like somebody who had been on the brink of death and now received every hour of life as a divine gift.

My parents never left my side. My mother slept in a bed next to mine, and my father would spend the night sitting in a chair or pacing in the corridor when he couldn’t sleep, and most of the time when he heard me crying for water he had to leave the room and pretend to fetch some, for with that hope I could make it to morning.

He didn’t seem to sleep, or eat, day and night by my side, always awake when I opened my eyes. I had only to express a wish and he would immediately try to fulfill it, without protesting, without fuss. Seeing him there, a solitary figure — accompanied by my mother, an equally solitary figure — descending by night, rising by day, behind his love, behind his mortal shadow, I imagined the reality and the mystery of the Father.

Days followed the rhythm of sleep. During my absence I was sometimes on the verge of death, at other times out of danger. Slumber was interrupted by injections and the serum drip and by chance awakenings, which I’m going to talk about now.

Lying in bed with my eyes closed, I would hear the nurse open the door, move around the room, rummage for something in a drawer in the bedside chest, walk over to me, uncover me, give me an injection, cover me, walk away, close the door.

I suddenly woke up and saw my mother as an apparition, sitting on the bed, silently knitting, for I had dreamt that she was dying from a hemorrhage.

Falling asleep once more, I saw in a new dream two ladies from the village talking about me, about something that had happened to me and affected me greatly. My salvation, according to them, depended on the perfect pronunciation of the word “emeret,” which I couldn’t pronounce correctly. And so they instructed me in how to relax my body, pace my breathing, curve my tongue and articulate clearly, but my brain, overwhelmed by other words, mixed up the sequence of instructions, and the inflections in my voice didn’t harmonize with the inflections of my being, which was essential for the perfect pronunciation of the word. Different parts of my body were pronouncing the syllables incorrectly and with an awkward cadence … Until, suspended at some point in space, with an “e” and a “t” jammed between my lips, I learned that an “a,” which I didn’t know was in the word, was the key to its pronunciation. But as soon as I discovered this, the dream vanished.

My father was peeling an apple with his pocketknife while a grayish twilight filtered in through the closed curtains.

It was 7:10, or 8:25, or 4:00 in the morning. The room was dark, or, through the window, the midday heat shimmered.

Or a golden air would enter the room in diagonal columns that fastened themselves to the floor, as if my day would build itself or my night would lie down to rest on them, depending on whether it was dawn or dusk. Or to know what time it was, I would find my parents with my eyes; if they slept, it was daybreak, if they were standing, reading, or talking in low voices, night was falling.

Beyond my room lived my friends and my brother. Inside it, all that existed were the space of my suffering and the moment of my misfortune.

In bed, waiting, my being lay in doubt.

On the night of the second Sunday, lying awake at eight or so and noting a great weariness in my parents’ faces, I felt uneasy as I remembered that it was the time they usually went to the movies in Contepec and the beginning of their weekly entertainment, knowing that in order to look after me they had to be shut in as well. I also remembered my Sunday night doldrums after laboring my way up the day as if it were an exhausting ladder leading to floors where doors bore signs monotonously proclaiming, “CLOSED. Open tomorrow.” I would reach the height of tedium around eight, at which time, if the films were boring and I didn’t feel like watching them and my family and the maids were at the movies, I would roam the darkened village on my own, stricken by solitude, and, feeling lost outdoors, I would wander the corridors of our house and the streets.

It was the same when I roved anxiously from room to room at home, from the garden to the kitchen, from the store to the movie theater, morning or night, among friends or with my brother, seized by an ineffable melancholy, as if something within me wanted to speak but couldn’t, as if I had the wish but not the words.

I was the wounded one, the boy who’d been shot by a shotgun. The news had come out in the Sol de Toluca, stating that Dr. Alvear had saved my life by operating on me when I had thirty-two perforations in my intestine. Meanwhile, I was aflame with thirst. I slept and woke and I was thirsty. Treatment of my hand made me howl. The adhesive tape would stick to the raw flesh of my fingers, and the nurses had to hold me down to change the dressings. By day ten, I’d received more than eighty injections, and there was scarcely a part of my body that didn’t ache. A new pain was foretold each time the door opened, every three hours, and a nurse entered.

In the room next door they’d put a boy who had sliced off the fingers of his left hand with the guillotine at a print shop. I could hear his screams all night long, and for days his lamentations were the voice of the invisible patients in the hospital. His hand became infected for lack of penicillin; the nuns asked my father if he could buy some, which he did, and then went to visit the boy.

When the boy recovered, he came to thank me.

Each day the curtains were left open a bit longer. The room was lit by natural light. I began sleeping almost only by night. I was able to have chicken broth and drink noncarbonated water; I nearly finished off the bottle the first time my mother put one to my lips, trying to quench weeks of thirst.

My father brought fruit and magazines. One morning he arrived with books, King Thrushbeard and The Four Skillful Brothers. Within hours I’d read them both.

Next he brought me Emilio Salgari’s Sandokan novels and Michel Zevaco’s Bridge of Sighs.

But as I read them so quickly they were running out of books at the small bookstore in Toluca.

Once I could take small steps they brought me out to the corridor, where they sat me down, accompanied by my mother, to take some sun alongside the other convalescing patients, nearly all women.

Saturday evening they took me to the hospital movie theater, where they were showing a film with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

The entrance to the theater was also the entrance to another spectacle, one of misfortunes portrayed almost allegorically by such pitiful cases that seeing them in succession depressed me. There were old men without legs, armless men, crippled children, women with bandaged chests, and patients who had recently had surgery on many parts of the body, a sampling of the great variety of ills that afflict mankind.

Most of the audience that filled the hall looked so unhealthy you wouldn’t have thought they were there for a screening but rather for a meeting of candidates for the beyond. Some wore awful smiles on their cadaverous faces; one man who was deathly pale, with a greenish cast and trembling hands, stared at me, looking as wretchedly unhappy as if he were being broken apart; and when the show started he kept on staring fixedly at me, seeming unaware the film had begun.

Otherwise, although the movie was funny no one laughed, or they couldn’t laugh because of their injuries, responding to the occasional comic moments with a groan or a sigh. In the silvery light the projection of the film lent the hall, you could see their mournful faces, as if the everyday world where the film was taking place made them deeply long for their own homes, or made them feel they would never return to them.

On their feet and leaning against the walls, the nurses looked from patients to screen and screen to patients. Sitting next to me, my parents didn’t laugh at what was happening on the screen but they didn’t seem unhappy either. The only people who enjoyed the film somewhat were the patients’ relatives, who, obliged to remain in seclusion, found some relief from the continual strain of life at the hospital.

The following day in the corridor when my parents asked a passing nurse why they’d opened the side door that was always shut and she replied that a corpse had been removed and this was the door they always used to remove corpses so the sick patients wouldn’t notice and get scared, I was horrified by the possibility that just a few days ago the door could have been opening for me. Other than that, when I saw my body and studied my face in the mirror, I trembled with joy to realize it was me.

On the way back to my room I passed the dining room and on the table saw some bananas spreading their scent. Some had softened so much they almost came apart in the nurse’s hand, others were barely speckled to a tasty yellow, fully ripe.

Handing me one, the nurse told me to save it for after dinner.

One Saturday we returned to Contepec. I had many books and my parents were glad to get back to our village and our home.

The nurses said they would miss us, as if during our stay at the hospital we’d established a friendly bond. Upon leaving I felt that something of ours would remain forever in the room, and I looked with melancholy at the door about to close on the other person I once was, as if I were abandoning inside the room the body that had carried me from the day of my birth till the day of my accident, to convalesce in this other body that carries me still, whose novelty I felt at the time.

And furthermore the room, which had been inhabited by us for a time, would inhabit our memory from now on, its walls, beds, and chairs commingling with our moods and the color of our days there.

In my eyes a very long time had passed, an interior time not measured by the time on clocks, because of the traces, the waiting, the infinities it leaves in your being.

My parents’ countenances had changed; an expression of alarm would appear on their faces at the slightest injury or the most unthreatening illness; they would be frightened if anyone screamed, assuming something serious had happened, or if a relative began to cry, they would imagine the weeping was over the death of a member of the family; they were convinced that routine mishaps were fated to have terrible consequences.

My eyes also saw my brother and my friends in a different light; and though I felt the same familiarity and affection, something incommunicable now separated me from them. The feeling of having returned from a journey that wasn’t measured by the kilometers between Contepec and Toluca, but rather by the internal distances traveled, made me want to tell them something important about those days, but when I realized that they knew the external facts of my accident, and that my intimate experience was as impossible to convey as an act of love, I kept quiet.

There are moments in your destiny when years are compressed into days, and days into hours, by the intensity with which events transform your life, events almost able to erase a past, and if not to erase it, then at least to shut it off from yourself, erecting a wall that separates the days of your childhood from the days of your adolescence, as if those days had been lived by two separate people, not by one person at two different ages. To build a bridge between the two, to pass from the adolescent to the traumatized child, to know that they are one and the same, to find that only one who was and who is; that has, to a large extent, been the purpose of this narrative.

The return to Contepec was a return to the present. Time was given back to me and, with it, the rhythm of life. I knew if I hadn’t died at the age of ten, every instant, every hour, every day, meant more life. Looking back, drowsing much later on a train, I saw San Juan de la Cruz rescued from a well, and Piero della Francesca blind in Borgo Santo Sepolcro, as unrepeatable and finite existences of my own being, in a timeless projection of myself.

Blood ran through my body, my eyes saw the light, my brain thought, the world’s mysterious movement ceaselessly created itself within me and without; and upon every shadow lay the spirit of God.

THE SOLITARY ENCHANTER

Chapter 6

THE TREASURE buried beside the sapodilla tree glowed at night. But in order to actually find it, you had to catch the phantom that guarded it. And this phantom was visible only to Lola the maid, who’d recently arrived from Ojo de Agua.

The phantom was whitish (Lola would say “softish”), almost transparent (Lola would say “floury”), with black boots just like the ones my cousin wore, and of medium height.

At certain moments during the night, Lola said, she could see it sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her.

But she saw it most often beside the sapodilla tree, where it laid her face down and flickered over her until the break of dawn. As soon as the sun came out, the light erased it.

In our game of tag,^* Ricardo el Negro ran the most.

Over the benches and across the fields he’d chase my brother, the only one left to be tagged. Watching them from my window run around the square, I wondered if there wasn’t some way to suspend the instant that was disappearing with its beings and their shadows; and whether the light that was starting to fade from the wall couldn’t be charmed by some magic word; and whether the poet, like some solitary enchanter, when he spoke of what took place in time, wasn’t saving it from oblivion.

The game ended at nightfall, with my brother tagged by Ricardo el Negro. The boys scattered toward their homes. No more rays of light on the window, and Ricardo el Negro, the winner, faded from my eyes, swallowed by the uniform blackness.

One night, in a corner of the archway, hidden from passersby on the street, Luisa and I leaned against the damp wall and embraced. Her restless eyes strained to hear the sounds coming from the house down the alleyway that was only discernible by the white stones of its walls. All of a sudden Juan was standing in front of us, and in a shaky voice that probed the darkness and cross-examined the shadows, he called me by name.

As we went off, he pressed close to me and in a mysterious voice said, “Take this. Your brother sends it. Luisa’s cousin and four of his friends are in a cantina. He says he’s coming to kill you.”

I grabbed the object he held out to me. It was a knife. Slipping it under my belt I felt its cold touch, as if I’d put a frozen fish against my skin.

Juan left.

I didn’t go back to Luisa. She watched me from the archway, not daring to call out for fear of her father.

I spotted her cousin behind a post, with his friends in tow. Their foreheads were covered by hats. You couldn’t see their eyes. And their hands, hidden beneath their ponchos, were surely clasping weapons. They passed in silence, slowly, their steps resounding on the cobblestones. One of them belched drunkenly.

They didn’t turn to look at me. But I felt them measuring up my body out of the corner of their eyes.

Almost on their heels my brother arrived, with a pistol in his jacket pocket. He said we should get out of there.

Luisa’s cousin and his friends soon disappeared among the darkened houses at the end of the street.

Ricardo el Negro and Juan emerged from the murkiness of another archway. They asked us if the others were coming back. They never did.

On the night of Candlemas, seated around the bonfire we could hear the god of fire striding through the flames. Sitting between Juan and my cousin I listened to the ocote pine crackling and watched a newspaper expand and contract, as if eaten up by a golden tooth.

Behind us, Silvia and my cousin gazed at the tongues of fire, streaks of ochre quivering on their faces.

The smoke climbed the wall of a house and, once on the roof, was lost to the night.

My brother and Ricardo el Negro stoked the fire with handfuls of dry leaves that were quickly devoured and threw in pieces of paper that doubled over like bodies with a bellyache.

I pulled a y-shaped branch out of the flames and pointed it in all directions. The branch writhed like a person in pain. The fire consuming it was a flickering flower in the darkness. The air snatched sparks that fizzled out on the stones.

Four hunters, rifles slung over their shoulders, walked by on their way to the lagoon. With somber, silent faces, they looked as if they were about to execute someone.

Don Pedro, the postmaster, brought the mail to my father.

A solitary figure on the sunny street, he walked over slowly after lunch. His pants were too big for his skinny legs and his shirtsleeves, which didn’t reach his wrists, had shrunken in the wash.

After delivering the newspaper and letters at the store, he would buy a kilo of sugar, 50 grams of coffee, 100 grams of alphabet soup noodles, and one can of tuna. On his poor man’s face, at those moments of spending, the Pardaillan and Athos the musketeer, whom he had recently discovered, ceased to exist. He placed his coins on the counter as if he were being robbed, with a senile tremble of the hand and a somewhat hungry, helpless expression. Age had begun to tilt him forward, and fasting gave his face a gaunt, overwrought look.

The musketeer, as my mother called him, seemed too old and tired and breathless to tell any stories.

When he conversed with my father, he interrupted himself to ask whether he properly understood such and such a word, since it came from the dictionary. And he spoke so softly that you could only make out “llán ban, le, la, nos, bas” between the coughs and pauses. Usually he left off whatever he was saying in the middle, promising to finish tomorrow, or think overnight about what he’d forgotten from the story.

Sometimes, when he encountered the doctor in our store he told him about ailments with such enthusiasm that he appeared to have every one he mentioned, and the more he had, the more delicate his health. And if an old woman, emboldened by the conversation, announced that her son had gotten pneumonia from going outside at night, the postmaster felt threatened and touched wood, grimacing as if he had a headache.

My grandmother used to say that her eyesight had grown sharper from peering in the dark and that she could tell a needle from a pin at night; that in the silence of her room she could hear the branches of trees in the orchard rustling in the wind; and that her body, kept alive from moment to moment for eighty years, would die in an instant.

Sitting at the window of her room, with an air of someone witnessing the light being extinguished from one thing after another around her — though in reality nothing was extinguished anywhere except in her eyes or in her appetite for things — as if everywhere dusk were about to fall, though the sun warmed the stones and sent shiverers to the shade — she looked at each person as though death were knitting funereal threads around him or her, as if the cobbler might stumble and die walking down the street, and the watchman could stop breathing and die in his sleep in bed, and the dog, scrawny with hunger, might bite my aunt Inés and give her rabies. Besieged from all sides by death, and lacking the energy to dodge the fatal organisms making their way towards her to strike, and without the strength to resist the germs floating in the air, swimming in the water, and poisoning the food, she detected signs of illness in the faces of others, and the onset of old age and omens of death. Her room creaked and the world threatened to collapse — although it was her body that trembled and her days that were numbered. For according to her, everything advanced towards its destruction and contributed to its own defeat.

And so it was that she died, not from the expected illness but from another, none of the four that had plagued her. She died before her neighbor, who’d been at death’s door for three months and had seemed on the point of departure, like a car that’s running and always about to pull off but at the last minute is delayed and leaves a few seconds late. She didn’t die in the morning, as she’d wished, but at night, in the presence of nobody.

Yet before dying she had already disappeared. That is, she had withdrawn from the window into the gloom of her bedroom. And her death only physically registered an absence, for during the last few days she did not speak, and sitting in the dark in the silence of her room, she was like an aged baby waiting for its father.

Otherwise, her name aroused no interest in conversation and the memories that involved her were as old as shriveled peaches. For this reason, when my aunt Inés found her dead, the news affected my parents but not their friends, who with crude sincerity observed, “Well, she’d already lived a long time,” or, “I’d be happy to reach eighty myself.”

Enveloped in darkness, the lone truck drove past Puerto de Medina, following paths of shadow into the heart of night.

Holding on to the stakes, we players in the back let ourselves be taken towards a house where we were supposed to sleep.

We went up and down hills. The house seemed to be hiding, or constantly moving farther away, and we felt we’d never get there. Not a single light shone along the way and all was black behind the silhouettes of trees.

We thought we were lost, and that the truck was skirting the rim of ravines. Yet the priest, who sat in the cab beside the driver, surely knew the way, since it was on his account that we were now looking for the house, after playing a soccer match in El Oro.

Occasionally a hare or an armadillo was caught in the headlights. But in the back, with no light, we couldn’t even see one another, and the loneliness of the night burrowed into our souls.

Weariness, hunger, and dust had taken command of our bodies, and made me long for my well-lit room.

Finally, at midnight, a few dogs began barking in the distance; shortly afterwards, we arrived at a house.

A peasant around forty years old appeared with a flashlight to receive the priest, who was captain of our team, bidding us all to enter.

In the kitchen he served us each hot soup and a slice of brown bread, which the priest ordered us to eat quickly because we had to rise early for the Mass he was going to say at the chapel next door.

While we ate our soup, Ricardo el Negro clutched his spoon in his hand and spoke incessantly, until our time at the table ran out and the priest, picking up his plate, left him still hungry.

Before he went to bed, Ricardo el Negro, his face lit by a candle, told Juan how I had cried because the priest had kept me as a reserve during both halves of the game.

Lying on a plank resting on two pillars of bricks, with a blanket that covered only half my body, I spent the night shivering and afraid that any movement I made would topple the bed.

The priest, lying on a plank like mine, blessed me to the howling of the dogs and blew out the candle flame.

^* In Spanish “juego de los encantados,” game of the enchanted. When tagged, one is “encantado,” or under a spell.

Chapter 7

ONE MIDDAY IN JUNE, three tall, broad, mustached men with no suitcases alit from the van that came from the train station.

From the stop they headed towards the Town Hall and disappeared behind a door that closed after them.

They reappeared on Rayón Street and followed each other into the La Barca de Oro cantina. One minute later we heard gunshots.

Later on, don Pedro came to the store, followed by Juan.

“The Norteño,” he said, “killed a secret agent and tried to run away. But another agent, with a.45 in each hand, shot him in the legs.”

“Yeah,” Juan added. “When the Norteño lay wounded on the ground the agent came closer to finish him off, but he spotted doña Blanca looking at him from her window and he didn’t go through with it. He only aimed at his mouth, to scare him. Doña Blanca heard him say, “I won’t kill you yet, just wait.” Then the other agent came over and asked his buddy, “What should we do with him?” “Leave him to me for a while,” the first one replied, sealing the Norteño’s fate with a look as he almost bled to death on the stones.

“He made a mistake,” said don Pedro. “He thought the agents were coming to get him, but they were only going around disarming people. And the dead man showed him his police badge when he came into the cantina. And the Norteño, who had a couple of murders to his name in Sonora, thought they were going to arrest him; so he leaned over as if to let them frisk him and shot the agent in the heart from beneath his jacket. As the shots hit him the deceased emptied his gun into the floor, but the Norteño had already broken into a run. It was then that the other two agents outside fired at him.”

That night, they treated the Norteño in a room in the jail, grudgingly and without anesthesia, so he would die. And they hung him by his arms and beat him with sticks so he would die. But he refused to die.

The next day soldiers arrived from Morelia. The villagers were curious about the agents, who were scared the local people might kill them.

But when the soldiers moved in, it was the people of Contepec who were afraid, since they pointed their rifles at every man, woman, old person, or child who went near them. And from the window of a troop truck a mocking sergeant brandished his machine gun.

So when the soldiers carried off the Norteño and the dead agent, people calmed down. Yet they never paid the carpenter who made the coffin. “Let the village pay,” a corporal who’d stayed on to keep an eye on things told him.

The Norteño didn’t hail from Contepec. In Mexico City he’d become the boyfriend of the baker’s daughter and one day he came to town with her. He opened a cantina, which he would only leave to go home to sleep, and spent customerless afternoons throwing dice. He had a particular dislike for Tequilitas, who used to come in drunk to talk to him.

“Get out,” he’d say. “I prefer to be alone, like a vulture. All alone in my business.”

The new cacique followed the corporal around, anxious to please. The corporal treated him like a subordinate. And not just a subordinate, but one he scorned. Whenever he mentioned him his mouth twisted, as if he were throwing the words at his listeners or spitting out the cacique.

Sitting between two soldiers on a bench in the square, the corporal would pull out his pistol and with his slanty eyes gleaming maliciously take aim at the cross atop the church tower.

“Let’s see if I can hit it,” he’d say.

He limped when he walked, and his right shoe looked flattened, as if it were hollow with no foot inside.

There was a yellow dog, very fierce, who followed him everywhere as if he were his master.

This dog, who growled at everybody, attacked me and Juan one July night, chasing us up a tree, where we remained on a branch for more than half an hour. Finally I slid down and when I saw the dog coming at me I picked up a stone and threw it at him, hitting his head.

The dog began to run in circles, biting the air, as if he’d gone mad.

That morning the corporal went to the market with his soldiers. He sauntered past the stands as though he owned them. He probed and picked up the fruit, and everything from oranges to melons, peanuts to pineapples, mameys to watermelons, dropped into his bag, unpaid for, while the fruit sellers totted up with their eyes what he took from them.

Afterwards he came to the shop and from the threshold asked, “Who does the selling here?”

My father replied, “I do. What do you need?”

“Everything.”

“Everything of what?”

“What’s in the store.”

“If you buy it.”

He looked at the shelves. He looked at my father. His slanted eyes shone with that gleam that precedes laughter. And then he saw me.

“I know this kid,” he said. “He threw a stone at my dog’s head. He left him an idiot … Let’s see …” He turned towards my father. “Give me a shirt, one of the fancy ones. I’m going to give it to my brother when I leave.”

He chose one. And paid only five pesos for it. He asked that it be gift- wrapped. And he walked out of the store, followed by his soldiers.

The corporal’s dog died.

The next day I saw him lying by the bandstand in the square.

At first, from the distance, I thought he was sleeping, but when I walked past later on I realized he was dead.

A policeman dragged him over the cobblestones to throw him to the vultures.

The corporal didn’t seem to feel sorry or even remember that the dog used to always follow him. When he ran into the policeman and saw the dog on the cobblestones his expression didn’t change, and he only seemed annoyed that the policeman wasn’t dragging him fast enough to the outskirts of the village.

Standing in the street, he screwed up his mouth pensively as if about to make a decision, but looked towards the mountain — its blues, its shadows, the sunlit peak, the rocky ravine — as if that moment in time were tearing him out of time, taking him far from the village, from the policeman, from the dog. Yet suddenly his expression lost its calm, and serenity vanished from his face like a fleeting cloud. He turned back to the soldiers and yelled, “Get moving, you lazy bums.”

In the streets a loudspeaker was announcing the movie Bugambilia, which my father was showing at his theater that Sunday.

The soldiers went to the afternoon screening and mingled with the girls, old people, and children.

The corporal arrived once the movie had already begun and insisted the lights be turned back on so he could find a seat. But once the movie started up again he didn’t look at the screen but at the women sitting next to him or in the aisle behind. And, bored by the darkness, he soon left.

Afternoons, from the windows of the Town Hall, the corporal spied on the comings and goings of women on their way to market.

The soldiers on guard made excuses to the campesinos who came to see him, saying he was busy in a meeting, although he was watching them from a side window, like a ghost or a recluse.

Two campesinos, father and son, came looking for him over many days without being able to see him. In his stead they met with the corporal’s secretary, who sent them to his uncle, the judge; who sent them to his cousin, the notary; who sent them to his brother-in-law, the police officer; who told them that the matter depended on the mayor, who was away on a trip … but if it was urgent they should go see the secretary, his nephew … Each one charged them five pesos, for time lost listening to their problem.

The corporal brought Ricardo el Negro’s mother to live with him. She followed him everywhere, like a shadow. He told people he was going to take her to Morelia because she was a good laundress, a good pozole maker, and a good lover.

Ricardo el Negro was very unhappy. Neglected by his mother, he sat outside the Town Hall waiting to see her go in and out, and he followed her from a distance down the street. Fearfully. Because the soldiers threw stones and threatened to castrate him.

Ricardo el Negro’s frightened face amused the corporal, who would happily have had the soldiers capture him to toy with.

Nevertheless, what pained Ricardo el Negro the most was not that his mother was living with the corporal but that whenever they happened to cross paths in the street she pretended not to know him.

She had padlocked the house so he stayed in a doorless room in my father’s orchard and slept on a mattress my brother put out for him. At mealtimes, we brought him something to eat.

One night when my mother was ill, my brother and I went for the doctor. In the square we saw someone sitting on a bench, hiding his head under a poncho as if he didn’t want us to see him. As we drew nearer, the figure compressed itself so firmly against the stone backing that we thought it wanted to disappear into the bench. My brother recognized him.

“Ricardo,” he said.

No one moved beneath the poncho.

“Ricardo,” my brother repeated.

This time, still motionless, a voice that seemed to be the poncho’s said, “I’m not Ricardo … I’m someone else.”

“What do you mean you’re not Ricardo … You’re nobody but him.”

“I’m someone else.”

Until finally my brother pulled down the poncho, revealing a pair of frightened eyes.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” my brother said. “We’re going to get the doctor.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

But after we said goodbye, that same night, he returned to the bench in the square and the snow-cone seller and the policeman threw a fishing net over him, dragged him off to a field, and thrashed him.

The next morning found him sprawled on a pruned rosebush, his face black and blue and his hair muddied. His shoes were missing, his shirt and pants torn. Solitary as a captive fox, he was surrounded by curious onlookers, and when the corporal saw him lying there he thought he was drunk and ordered a soldier to throw cold water in his face, remarking pityingly, “Poor asshole.”

Two days later, the corporal left the village with his soldiers, Ricardo el Negro’s mother, baskets of fruit, packages of filet, liver and chorizo, live chickens, and bags of cheese.

At midday he took the train to Morelia, seen off by the cacique, the secretary, the judge, the notary, the policemen, the priest, and four leading citizens.

“In your compositions on winter,” our teacher said, “don’t forget about snow.”

Quedito, asleep with his eyes open, suddenly dropped his pencil on his notebook. This prompted the teacher to ask him the “how many” questions: “How many meters in a liter? How many humerus bones in a hand? How many seas flow into a river?”

Questions that made Quedito, awakened by the nudge of another student’s elbow, begin to cry.

At the back of the classroom, amid the rolled-up maps and broken desks, he would doze off.

Or during recess, leaning against a wall, he intently studied a ray of light fracturing on some stones, seemingly oblivious to the voices of his schoolmates playing nearby.

“A plane loaded with …”

“Apples.”

“A plane loaded with …”

“Melons.”

Engrossed in his instant, like an animal or a god.

In the boy’s bathroom, someone had written:

Slutty

Susi

I know

your pink

pussy.

and

Eeny, meeny,

miny, moe

Catch your mother

by the toe

amid muddy handprints that seemed to have crawled towards the window as they wrote, slipped through the empty frame, and slithered into the girls’ bathroom.

The waning light shone drearily on these scrawls, and the names of female schoolmates, illustrated with male and female genitals done in colored pencils, were entangled, with tenderness and violence, in a coitus of shapes and letters.

One afternoon after school Juan and I stayed behind to play soccer. Our teacher was correcting exams in the classroom and had asked us to wait so she wasn’t on her own.

But after playing for a while, my stomach started to hurt, and feeling stiff and weary, I sat down on a rock to look at a yellow flower next to a smaller rock that seemed to sing with color.

Juan went to the bathroom to pee, about when our teacher was locking the classroom door. The corridors were already dark and on the roof a bat began to squeak.

All of a sudden, our teacher peered through the bathroom window to watch Juan peeing and, calling over to me in a hollow voice, told me she was going to go in to see how much he had peed.

Through a crack in the bathroom door, which didn’t close completely, I saw her take his member in her hand. Juan covered his face with his arms. And for a few seconds, or perhaps minutes, I heard him moan.

Then he ran out with his fly unzipped.

She lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke, and approached me, smiling. Under her arm she carried the book Little by Little, which Juan had left behind. She asked me to bring it to him.

One week later, I was standing outside my house when Ricardo el Negro passed by carrying a football.

When I followed him he began running down the cobblestoned street ever more quickly, bouncing the ball off walls and doors.

Once on the field, he threw the ball far from the entrance and then ran to catch up with it, passing it from one foot to the other until it escaped him.

“Go fetch the ball,” he yelled at me.

“No.”

“If you don’t go, you won’t play.”

“I won’t play.”

We then sat down on the grass, looking at the ground. He was pensive, with a lock of hair on his forehead.

Finally, he stood up to get the ball. And he threw it hard at my face, without hitting me.

I threw it at him too, but missed. And he at me. And we started to play.

Before long he tired. He stopped the ball with his foot.

“I’m not playing anymore.”

He stared hard at me.

“Let’s go to the stream,” he said.

Shortly before we reached the stream he held a finger to his lips, hissing shhh, and crept to the edge of the ravine. His pants and shirt dusty amid the grass and nettles, he stuck out his head under the branches of a tree.

A few minutes later, gaping and intoxicated by what he saw, he whispered throatily, “Now it’s your turn.”

I looked.

A woman was bathing. She was naked underneath the green slip that clung to her body, outlining her curves. Standing in the middle of the stream with water up to her knees and rosy legs like a waterbird’s, her drooping neckline revealed two large milky breasts. Her expression was childlike, and the hair on her bosom resembled plumage.

With both hands she splashed water on her face and soaped her head. She squinted in our direction, seeming not to see us. The foam whitened her hair, like a hat drying in the sun.

Suddenly she raised her slip and with a clay vessel threw water between her thighs. Facing us now, her movements were slow, even lackadaisical.

She was unembarrassed, although I sensed that she saw us when she reached for a bar of soap among the pebbles. Her skin became covered in goose bumps, as if despite the voluptuousness of her body it too was vulnerable to cold and death.

But since she didn’t cover herself though she looked right at us, I thought she hadn’t seen us after all.

Then she took off her slip and was completely naked. As she bent over to pick up the clay vessel her breasts hung down.

All of a sudden Ricardo el Negro made noise shifting his feet. And the woman, who had surely known all along that we were there, yelled, “That’s how the pill is sweetened!” and made an obscene gesture.

We broke into a run.

Sometimes I thought that if Silvia were to spend the night with me in a room, both of us lying in bed, naked, getting closer and closer, perhaps we’d make love. But in order to be together in a room, in a bed, lying naked, the occasion had to arise. And that occasion would only arise if she were in danger at the moment of lying down.

Moreover, for that to happen, Martians had to land in Contepec. And the villagers would have to flee, leaving the two of us on our own, for inexplicable reasons, in a house, in a room, in a bed.

Nevertheless, as the days passed and the occasion never arose, I realized that it was easier to talk to Silvia about what I wanted than for the Martians to land.

All I had to do to let her know what I wanted was to tell her. However, given the indifferent way she looked at me, or rather, didn’t look at me, it was difficult to tell her. And because the subject didn’t have anything to do with our conversation, no opportune moments arose for such a serious announcement.

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.

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.

My aunt Marta was withering away, like those fruits people leave out to age for later use in preserves, or store behind glass once they’ve dried.

Everything around her was ancient, frayed and faded, like wallpaper peeling off the walls. The living room and dining room furniture creaked if you merely looked at it, and the chairs seemed to mutely cry fragile! The dresses and wardrobes exhaled a humid breath when opened and whatever items were taken out of them smelled of confinement. If you pulled open a door or a drawer, the wardrobe groaned or the handle came off. Even the fancy stationery lying on the little desk had seen better days and ninety years earlier a youthful hand must have used it to write letters. The little bottles of perfume and jars of cream on the dresser seemed to be saving themselves for a special night outside of time, a night that would never arrive, or to be kept as mementos of a wedding that never took place. The tablecloths, the bedspreads, so much larger than the table and the bed, were like the ghosts of objects lost, and in their dimensions appeared to mourn for another bed, another table. The uninhabited dresses gathered dust, turned brittle, were nibbled on, eaten away by implacable silent hours. Jewelry, gifts, purses remained in their cases and original boxes. Blue coats smelling of camphor hung from the hangers on which they had been bought by my mother or grandmother.

My aunt, in her taffeta dress and bows, looked as if she’d come out of a box or been gift wrapped. The coat she wore had belonged to my great-grandmother, in the days of Maximilian’s court. Her finery returned to the creaking wardrobe after visits to doña Cuca, her friend from the Colonia Roma.

Like a magnet that attracts random iron bits, my aunt now drew two old ladies to her home.

Stray old ladies, who smelled like a room where cats live and who had often traveled from boardinghouse to old people’s home and old people’s home to boardinghouse.

One afternoon, after reading the “Room for Rent” sign outside, they had knocked on my aunt’s door. The price was right.

These ancient ladies had lost the fortunes their parents left them by eating up their inheritance without earning a cent. Time had inflicted hardships without altering their status as virgins. First it took away their piano, then the mirror, next the mantilla, the painting by Velasco, the table, the chest of drawers, the bed, the carpet, the jardiniere: a plundering that would end not with their shoes, but with their death.

And so in their twilight, and in this state, the sisters Nacha and Natasha came to the room at the back of my uncle Sebastián’s house. With their faces like wizened mannequins, they listened from behind the door to their room, suspecting my uncle had plans to throw them out, although he wasn’t talking about the boarders but about how wonderful it was to have the soul of an artist … Sensing they were spying, he would open the door abruptly, and the gust of air and the surprise made them lose their balance.

Seeing them caught unawares, too weak to raise their heads, so waxen and flabby, made the peach I held in my hand feel mushy and rotten.

But minutes later trying to enliven their existence, they tiptoed to the bathroom and came into the living room with powdered cheeks, lipsticked mouths, false lashes in place, and penciled brows, as if on their way to the theater.

“A lady can skimp on bread but never on her quality,” Nacha would say, even willing to sell her underwear so she could buy powder, while Natasha, plumped in a chair like one more dusty cushion, stared at my uncle.

On their birthdays, they donned dresses from their youth and perfumed themselves heavily for the luncheon my aunt prepared for them.

Seated at the table, the three spoke of old times as though the people they mentioned were still alive. They alluded to Ricardo, Francisco, and Porfirio as if they’d seen them yesterday; they named Plateros, San Francisco, and Santa Teresa Streets as if they’d walked down them that morning and their names and physiognomy hadn’t changed at all. They talked about promenades down Reforma on horseback and the recent construction of houses now razed, and the dance and singing classes their father had enrolled them in, as though they’d just come from class with their teacher. They recited verses by Juan de Dios Peza and the young Amado Nervo, never forgetting so much as a period or comma.

As they spoke their cheeks quivered, their eyes sank deeper into their sockets; everything about them seemed to converge in a longing to be, to cry out for an irretrievable life.

After lunch they showed each other things that looked as though they were under threat from light, air, human contact. They themselves were like garments taken out of a decrepit wardrobe that might break into flakes, pill, come apart at the seams. I don’t know what was so decayed, disillusioned, dissimilar, or deficient in their faces, their arms, their legs, that made it seem that their very bodies were about to weep. Meanwhile they complained about the mailman who hadn’t brought them a single letter and the plumber who hadn’t fixed their bathtub and the rude taxi driver who’d dropped them off two doors down from their home, and about the price of sardines and about the girls in the apartment next door who made fun of them. A litany of offenses that grew at the pace of their contacts with other people.

In every old man they ran into on the street, they saw not only a survivor and a contemporary but also an affirmation of the reality of their own existence and their past. As soon as they saw one their eyes screamed, “Look at Francisco, he was born in the nineties.” “Look, the times we talk about did indeed exist.”

But what astonished me most during my visits to my uncle’s house was not only that I didn’t hear their tread but that I hardly saw them be. They sat so imperceptibly on the couch at the far end of the living room that you forgot they existed and you went in and out without noticing them. Furthermore, my uncle contributed to their invisibility by never addressing them or turning to look at them. What made their situation worse was, just as there are beings so pleasing to the eye that the mere sight of them affords visual satisfaction to whoever looks at them, these women when looked at seemed to emanate a kind of rancid perfume, which was simply the expression on their faces.

Whenever my father went to Mexico City on business he deposited me at my uncle’s house. As I sat reading Góngora they observed me from the end of the living room like cats with lackluster eyes perched on the sofa. Absorbed in my reading, I’d forget about them at times, only to find them watching from between a display case and a painting of The Death of Manolete whenever I raised my eyes. And when I walked past them to the bathroom or kitchen their eyes followed me.

The sight of them made me want to open the windows to dispel the mood they provoked in me, but when they were in the living room I couldn’t open them on account of the drafts, drafts they immediately felt even from another room or the bathroom.

Then, when they saw I was nervous, in compensation for the unopened windows they offered me a candy they’d slowly select from a little box labeled Lágrimas Poblanas, which I’d never tried and which tasted as if it had been stored for fifty years.

Only one afternoon did I see them lose their composure, seized by an ire so complete it made them stumble, spit, tremble, and shed the powder on their cheeks all at once. This was when my uncle addressed them as “madams” rather than “mademoiselles.” An omission of syllables that transformed them from virgins into whores, an assault on the chaste motive for their solitude.

Despite the fact my aunt enjoyed a much better financial situation than her guests, she followed a hunger diet in a state of euphoria. She was so used to it that had anyone told her she ate poorly she would have been surprised, insisting that, on the contrary, she ate in the most refined way possible in Mexico, basing her cuisine on forgotten recipes that had been preserved thanks to the pedigree of her parents.

Nevertheless, she appeared to be hungry all the time, and would tear off bits from a roll or nibble on an apple, making them last all day.

A way of eating without eating, which gave others the impression that she had the appetite of a bird. And one didn’t know which was the greater punishment: my uncle’s neglect or the tyranny of her own diet. At the store she was the little old lady of 50 grams of sugar, 25 grams of coffee, 50 grams of noodles, and a quarter liter of milk; at the butchers’ she was the scraps-for-the-cat-and-bones-to-boil-for-broth lady. Yet her hungry condition stood in contrast with her happy face and pride at being married to my uncle.

For his part, he tended to eat in those restaurants where you don’t know which is worse, ordering a particular dish or having to eat it since you ordered it and will have to pay. The diner wonders whether it might not be better for his health to lose the money spent on the dish rather than add to the loss the unpalatability of the meal and the chance of getting sick. He’s seated at a shared table, next to one of those elderly couples where the wife talks about food while she eats and the husband eats in silence without listening, a habit that apparently followed them out of the house and into the street.

Ruedas was the painter who helped my uncle. Or rather, he carried out the commissions my uncle received. His arrival was announced by a loud ringing of the bell at around eleven every morning.

My uncle ran out immediately, with canvases under his arms, clutching brushes and tubes of paint to leave in the studio for Ruedas.

Once he had explained the job, my uncle locked him up in the room so Ruedas wouldn’t disappear with the canvases, paint, or brushes, for he was a heavy drinker, and when he had money at his disposal or something to sell he would slip away to get drunk, leaving behind the feet of the Juan Diegos or the Virgins of Guadalupe, for he had learned to paint from the bottom up, as if saying a prayer on his knees.

Ruedas had a red nose and swollen eyelids, and the paintbrushes trembled in his hands; sleep-deprived, or still tipsy, he occasionally took blue for pink or painted a virgin’s face green.

At two o’clock sharp, he started pounding on the studio door with his fists, although my uncle often went out and he had to stay until five to be released. Forced to wait, he intermittently kicked, punched, and butted the door, without managing to open it.

His enraged banging terrified my aunt, who from time to time went to the door to calm him down, as my uncle had phoned to say he was on his way, but all she got were insults, which she feared would translate into blows to her husband.

Finally, my uncle went to open the door, money in one hand and the other brandishing a stick, as if he were letting a wild animal out of its cage. From her half-open door, my aunt monitored the situation ready to hurry over to defend her husband should Ruedas attack him with a palette knife.

Chapter 9

DURING THE DAYS leading up to the Feast of San José — the saint who, according to my mother, had saved me when I’d been on the verge of dying from the gunshots — the ladies in charge of his worship at church would come to the house.

And so one morning in March three elderly campesinas, in clothes so ragged they resembled patchwork, knocked on the door. Grizzled, lame, and pockmarked, they smiled at me toothlessly when I opened the door, and my impulse was to shut it.

The skinniest one had a hanging lip; the prettiest was cross-eyed; the least old had large hands like baseball mitts. Trying to be likeable, all three produced forced smiles so grim I wished they’d remained solemn.

The squint-eyed one asked me if my mother was home, in a voice so soft it seemed to come from some other person or be thrown by a ventriloquist. When I answered yes, she said they wanted to see her, so I went to the garden and called my mother. She took fright at the sight of them, asking right away what they wanted. To which the skinny one replied, as if a young woman were speaking with her tongue and blushing in her ears, that they wanted to sing at the Feast of San José, a proposal that made my mother think that if their voices were as off key as their bodies were bent over and their faces grotesque, they would scare everyone off. Nonetheless, she asked them to sing her a devout song. And they did so with such enthusiasm that the stiffness of their features began, as they sang, to relax, the roughness of their faces to soften, and their eyes to shine so brightly that they seemed to become young again before us. As if the joy that burst from their mouths lightened their bodies and poured out their souls with their voices.

Amid the flowerpots and the plants, the three women, sunlit in the corridor and singing in unison, personified ugliness transformed into song. As if by optical illusion, or a reversal of reality occasioned by solar flares, they were now the Furies, now the Graces.

That March afternoon, my mother, her hands floured, was about to put some cookies into the oven when my father came into the kitchen and asked me to take a walk with him. It was a Wednesday, meaning the store was closed. A cage hung on the wall; inside shivered a goldfinch with wet wings. Beside the cage dangled a string bag of eggs. The sun coming through the window was like a brilliant yolk and its rays whitened the table legs and the brick floor.

Before we headed out, my mother slipped a piece of Ojo de Agua cheese into my mouth with a hand smelling of vanilla.

But as I watched her hand withdraw to pour milk into a copper pot, I noticed wrinkles on the back. I quickly sought my father’s hands for comparison, and studying them, I perceived the passage of time … And perhaps to drive away that image of their old age and death, I shook the goldfinch’s cage. The bird, its wings stiff, clung to a wire and did not move.

Outside the kitchen, swallows that had built nests on top of the hanging lamps in the corridor swooped overhead. Their wheeling seemed to celebrate the sun-filled instant; perched on the roof tiles they throbbed on their little feet, like tremulous hearts about to leap into the air.

Around the square, similar to a sleeping fence, the houses and the stores were closed eyes; and, confronted by the dearth of activity they manifested, I felt that my body was a covered pot with water boiling inside.

Seated on a bench two old campesinos, boozy and bewhiskered, wrapped in ponchos with their foreheads hidden by hats, sang with more rage than rhythm:

Get out of here, my father, more than a lion I am fierce,

We wouldn’t want my dagger your only heart to pierce.

— Son of my heart, for what you’ve just spoken,

ere the sun rises, your life will be taken.

Strolling along the empty road that led to the fields, my father and I seemed very close, though we didn’t speak; our faces were illuminated by the sunlight, our bodies cast long shadows.

My father’s kindly rhythm kept in step with my silence so well that seeing his eyes beam with happiness, I felt that neither time nor death could destroy him.

Although I wanted to say, “Father, don’t go.”

But I didn’t, realizing it would mean nothing to him, because he was physically present and had no intention of going, so the words merely sprouted from my thoughts.

A vulture glided over the ash tree, descending lower with each gyre, until it turned into a black claw and plunged into the magueys like a shadow. Right afterward it rose again, dead flesh clutched in its crooked talons, and circled above as if watching us, until it flew off towards the village and over the houses.

The sun was setting and a bluish light, as if spiritualized, conferred on the present an aura of absence and time past, as though my father and I were trudging yesteryear among the fig trees.

Many figs had fallen to the ground when the branches were shaken by rain and wind.

Apples and peaches were rotting in the mud. Quinces and sapodillas exposed their flesh, pits, and skins. As we stepped on them, leaves released water like sponges or tore soundlessly like damp paper.

A quantity of ripe fruits had blended into a single burst of fruit. The sun drank their juices and warmed them in the mud.

Voices traveled alone over the telephone, orphans in the night, detached from their faces.

At this end of the line, in Contepec, my father tried to find words to describe forty years of separation in a few minutes.

At the other end, in Brussels, his younger brother was heard, his voice altered.

And the two voices, made of time, asked and answered, intertwined and fell apart in the air.

When the telephone had rung my brother had said to my father, “It’s for you.”

And my father heard the voice of his brother, unseen for decades, who addressed him in Greek from the disembodied past:

“Nicias?”

And he, with a tired, older voice, and in Spanish, replied from the present, “Yes.”

His brother had begun to speak to him in Greek, but unable to articulate a single word, my father remained mute thanks to four decades of distance and a life elsewhere; and because Spanish had smothered the language of his childhood.

For the voice at the other end of the line was emerging from somewhere lost, from something irretrievable. It was like the voice of a photograph speaking, an old photograph; the voice of a phantom speaking from long ago. Without present, without future, only causing pain.

Perhaps this was why my father repeated in Spanish, “Yes, it’s me.”

As if he needed to emphasize that he wasn’t another, that he wasn’t the ghost of the one who was born and raised in a town east of Smyrna.

And so, like two transfigured people who no longer speak their common family language, they began with some effort to converse in French. And their voices suffered not only from crossing the ocean but also from the impossibility of being the people they were when they were separated.

It didn’t matter whether they updated each other on their current lives. Whether they were gray-haired, wrinkled, or bald; how many children they had; whether they were poor or rich; happy or sick. During the conversation their parents’ faces, their own childhood faces, the room where they used to play passed before their eyes like specters.

But despite my father’s ignorance of the language through which they recognized each other, they painfully found a single voice, calm, weathered, fraternal, like the voice of those who accept their death, knowing that no matter what they do they will die: be they together or apart, be they rich or poor. A voice without a face, orphaned in time, condemned to suffering, a voice that accepted its human destiny.

One Sunday afternoon, during a screening of the Cantinflas movie “Seven Machos” in my father’s theater, I was feeling forlorn in the midst of the audience, which was mainly composed of campesinos, young couples, and children. What set me apart from them was the knowledge that my father would travel to Mexico City late that night without me, for I had a bad cold and it wasn’t advisable to be outside in the early hours.

All of a sudden in the darkened hall, amid heads turned towards the screen, I remembered the things I’d been planning to do in the capital when my father promised to take me. But while I was remembering, the symptoms of my cold made those earlier days seem unreal, and erased the image of me walking along the city streets.

The darkness became overwhelming and I felt all alone in the audience, like a creature that belonged to another species. Not laughing when they laughed, not getting excited when they did, on the verge of crying, I stood up and left the movie theater.

I shut myself up in the dining room to write. So much silence of empty rooms surrounded me that I imagined I heard footsteps and doors creaking open, although no one was there.

Alone with my notebook, struggling to put what was happening to me into words, after several forced attempts where the atmosphere of my father’s trip was more intense than my concentration to write, I laid down my pencil.

The cold I longed to banish made me cry; it was worse than before, keeping me somewhere between nothingness and lucidity, so that I saw the colors in the room more sharply but they were opaque.

Finally I went to bed, hoping sleep would make me better, perhaps even well enough to travel in the early hours.

And so it was that I took up the solitary battle against the cold. I resented every moment of malaise, of weakening in my body, of headache, as if it were a defeat of my very self, and a humiliation.

When he left the movie theater my father came to see me. Without turning on the light he asked how I was. And he knew that, although I answered “fine,” my voice said the opposite, for I heard him tell my mother, “Make him some tea, he’s very sick.”

From that moment onwards, my struggle against the cold resumed in a desperate but doomed fashion. I had to drive it out of me before one in the morning.

The darkness of the room, my wish to travel, and the knowledge that my father was leaving got mixed up with the sweat, sneezes, and tears. Each time I awoke I felt worse than before.

So when the church clock struck one and my father turned on the light in his room, I realized I had to give up the fight to go with him. Passing by my window, and knowing I wasn’t asleep and could hear him, he said, “I’ll take you next time. I’m going again in two weeks. Go to sleep.”

His steps then faded in the corridor and I heard him close the street door.

Then the sound of an engine filled my room. When I heard it I felt like getting up, dressing, and running after him, yelling that I was fine and could go to Mexico City.

But between the tears from my cold and my frustration, soon all I heard was dogs barking.

Chapter 10

I SAT DOWN TO WRITE but it started to rain. This immediately prompted a battle within me between what I imagined and what was taking place, for on paper the pensive trees in the forest of my story were darkened by shadows; and the imaginary poet who wandered among them was obliterated by the actual fact of the downpour, which fell in torrents on the roof and lopped off branches from the rosebushes in the garden.

Even afterwards, once it had stopped raining, my dusky-voiced trees were flooded and I didn’t feel like writing. In a different mood, I understood that the rain had prevailed not only over what was imagined but also over the person imagining.

I had made the dining room my study. Mornings I would sit down to write. My parents didn’t ask what I was doing shut up in there; they didn’t seem to notice.

One afternoon my brother, searching for a camera, opened a drawer and discovered my writings.

When I returned from a walk in the fields I found him sitting on a step, reading. When he saw me he waved the notebooks in the air and came towards me. He asked why I’d never told him before that I wrote. And he went to tell my parents I was a poet and that he was going to publish my books.

At the pool hall, words piled up inside me like rain clouds. But even when I wrote them down they didn’t stop bubbling up, and when I leaned over the green cloth I took crooked aim at the cue ball. A story was hatching before my eyes, one in which the friends around me at that moment became both more real and more remote; they now existed in sentences in my mental village.

Then, feeling the urgency to be alone to write, I told Juan, who was playing pool with me, that I had to do something right away at home, and I left.

On the street the poem churned in my head faster than the speed of my steps; each new verse made me want to walk more quickly, although I was already hurrying.

And so, while Juan talked, I became aware of the separation that exists between people at certain moments. For though we walked side by side down the street, as I sensed within me the imminence of a poem we began to go down different paths; his along the words he spoke and I through a silence that immersed me in myself, and then I would speak.

Confronted with the flash of lightning of every poem, I felt I could make a book be like a spiritual home within a landscape of the ephemeral. The objects in the book shimmered before my mind’s eye, similar to the apparitions a saint receives, which only he, even if surrounded by other people, can see.

And so it was that the hill, the church, the square, the playing field, the ash tree, and my parents were woven into a verbal embroidery with its own movements and colors.

The village looked different and yet the same when seen from the Plain of the Mules, from the school, and from the mill, its landscape varying according to the place from where it was beheld, as though through a multiple perspective that offers one’s eyes a different village each time.

At home, through the living room window, I watched the maid water the plants, close a door, put canary seed in the goldfinch’s cage, look at herself in the mirror, as if in a continuous flow of fiction into life.

Because all of a sudden, human beings had become poetizable. And through poetry, things revealed their infinitude. And the first line of a text was not only the beginning of an action towards a being, but also the first movement towards another form of my own existence. Joys and misfortunes, desires and memories converging into the moment of the poem.

During the days leading up to my move to Mexico City, I felt sad for my parents, who, whenever they saw me, said: “Don’t go, we’ll be all alone.” “Stay here, you can write in Contepec.” “I have to go,” I’d reply, feeling discouraged.

My brother was leaving too and was depressed. He spent a lot of time sitting alone in the living room, so quiet that if you didn’t see him you wouldn’t know he was there. When we met he stared at me with melancholy eyes.

Thus, not wanting to constantly think about leaving, I became upset each time I remembered. The atmosphere of the trip descended on me on the playing field, in the pool hall, and at home, as if I felt uncomfortable in my own body and the projects in mind had their expiry date the day we were to leave, with no possible future thereafter.

And so it was that on the day of our departure, sitting down to a final breakfast with my parents, I felt imprisoned by my body like the goldfinch in the cage by its bones. And I longed to fly out of myself, towards the free space of poetry, towards a life without fear or suffering. But, painfully watched by my parents, I realized that we cannot escape time, living as we do among the mortals from whom we have issued and alongside those with whom we will exist and next to whom we will be laid to rest.

And so, when I said goodbye to them I felt like a figure on a Greek stele, a son bidding his defunct parents farewell, the parting, which took place in time, revealing its spatial dimension, a kind of petrified desolation: the mute stone broadcasting the solitude of ghosts in bas-relief.

Then, with my books and my manuscripts in a box, my suitcase packed with clothes, and my brother dressed in the suit he always wore on the fifteenth of September for the Independence Day dance, we left my parents, feeling we were relinquishing the village the moment we departed but finding nothing before us. We were heading towards a city neither of us felt like heading towards. Yet we had to abandon the village because at our age it had grown too small, like a pair of trousers that no longer fits.