Yes; no one will have to pretend any longer. The fist that clutches my arm affirms its strength for only an instant, immediately its grip loosens, then it falls, weak and trembling, before lifting to take the waxen hand touching his shoulder: the señora, perplexed for the first time, looks at me with the eyes of a violated bird and sobs with a dry moan that does not disturb the rigid astonishment of her features. Suddenly the ogres of my imagination are two solitary, abandoned, wounded old people, scarcely able to console themselves in this shuddering clasp of hands that fills me with shame. My fantasy has brought me to this stark dining room to violate the intimacy and the secret of two human beings exiled from life by something I no longer have the right to share. I have never despised myself more. Never have words failed me so clumsily. Any gesture of mine would be in vain: shall I come closer, shall I touch them, shall I caress the woman’s head, shall I ask them to excuse my intrusion? I return the notebook to my jacket pocket. I toss into oblivion all the clues in my detective story: the comic book, the lipstick, the nibbled fruit, the bicycle tracks, the blue-checked apron … I decide to leave the house without saying anything more. The old man, from behind his thick eyelids, must have noticed.
The high breathy voice says: “Did you know her?”
The past, so natural, used by them every day, finally shatters my illusions. There is the answer. Did you know her? How long? How long must the world have lived without Amilamia, assassinated first by my forgetfulness, and then revived, scarcely yesterday, by a sad impotent memory? When did those serious gray eyes cease to be astonished by the delight of an always solitary garden? When did those lips cease to pout or press together thinly in that ceremonious seriousness with which, I now realize, Amilamia must have discovered and consecrated the objects and events of a life that, she perhaps knew intuitively, was fleeting?
“Yes, we played together in the park. A long time ago.”
“How old was she?” says the old man, his voice even more muffled.
“She must have been about seven. No, older than that.”
The woman’s voice rises, as she lifts her arms, seemingly to implore: “What was she like, señor? Tell us what she was like, please.”
I close my eyes. “Amilamia is a memory for me, too. I can only picture her through the things she touched, the things she brought, what she discovered in the park. Yes. Now I see her, coming down the hill. No. It isn’t true that it was a scarcely elevated patch of stubble. It was a hill, with grass, and Amilamia’s comings and goings had traced a path, and she waved to me from the top before she started down, accompanied by the music, yes, the music I saw, the painting I smelled, the tastes I heard, the odors I touched … my hallucination…” Do they hear me? “She came waving, dressed in white, in a blue-checked apron … the one you have hanging on the roof terrace…”
They take my arm and still I do not open my eyes.
“What was she like, señor?”
“Her eyes were gray and the color of her hair changed in the reflection of the sun and the shadow of the trees…”
They lead me gently, the two of them. I hear the man’s labored breathing, the crucifix on the rosary hitting against the woman’s body.
“Tell us, please…”
“The air brought tears to her eyes when she ran; when she reached my bench her cheeks were silvered with happy tears…”
I do not open my eyes. Now we are going upstairs. Two, five, eight, nine, twelve steps. Four hands guide my body.
“What was she like, what was she like?”
“She sat beneath the eucalyptus and wove garlands from the branches and pretended to cry so I would stop reading and go over to her…”
Hinges creak. The odor overpowers everything else: it routs the other senses, it takes its seat like a yellow Mongol upon the throne of my hallucination; heavy as a coffin, insinuating as the slither of draped silk, ornamented as a Turkish scepter, opaque as a deep, lost vein of ore, brilliant as a dead star. The hands no longer hold me. More than the sobbing, it is the trembling of the old people that envelops me. Slowly, I open my eyes: first through the dizzying liquid of my corneas, then through the web of my eyelashes, the room suffocated in that gigantic battle of perfumes is disclosed, effluvia and frosty, almost fleshlike petals; the presence of the flowers is so strong here they seem to take on the quality of living flesh—the sweetness of the jasmine, the nausea of the lilies, the tomb of the tuberose, the temple of the gardenia. Illuminated through the incandescent wax lips of heavy, sputtering candles, the small windowless bedroom with its aura of wax and humid flowers assaults the very center of my plexus, and from there, only there at the solar center of life, am I able to come to, and perceive beyond the candles, amid the scattered flowers, the plethora of used toys: the colored hoops and wrinkled balloons, cherries dried to transparency, wooden horses with scraggly manes, the scooter, blind hairless dolls, bears spilling their sawdust, punctured oilcloth ducks, moth-eaten dogs, frayed jumping ropes, glass jars of dried candy, worn-out shoes, the tricycle (three wheels? no, two, and not a bicycle’s—two parallel wheels below), little wool and leather shoes; and, facing me, within reach of my hand, the small coffin supported on blue crates decorated with paper flowers, flowers of life this time, carnations and sunflowers, poppies and tulips, but like the others, the ones of death, all part of a compilation created by the atmosphere of this funeral hothouse in which reposes, inside the silvered coffin, between the black silk sheets, on the pillow of white satin, that motionless and serene face framed in lace, highlighted with rose-colored tints, eyebrows traced by the lightest pencil, closed lids, real eyelashes, thick, that cast a tenuous shadow on cheeks as healthy as in the park days. Serious red lips, set almost in the angry pout that Amilamia feigned so I would come to play. Hands joined over her breast. A chaplet, identical to the mother’s, strangling that waxen neck. Small white shroud on the clean, prepubescent, docile body.
The old people, sobbing, are kneeling.
I reach out my hand and run my fingers over the porcelain face of my little friend. I feel the coldness of those painted features, of the doll queen who presides over the pomp of this royal chamber of death. Porcelain, wax, cotton. Amilamia wil not forget her good friend—com see me here wher I draw it.
I withdraw my fingers from the sham cadaver. Traces of my fingerprints remain where I touched the skin of the doll.
And nausea crawls in my stomach where the candle smoke and the sweet stench of the lilies in the enclosed room have settled. I turn my back on Amilamia’s sepulcher. The woman’s hand touches my arm. Her wildly staring eyes bear no relation to the quiet, steady voice.
“Don’t come back, señor. If you truly loved her, don’t come back again.”
I touch the hand of Amilamia’s mother. I see through nauseous eyes the old man’s head buried between his knees, and I go out of the room and to the stairway, to the living room, to the patio, to the street.
V
If not a year, nine or ten months have passed. The memory of that idolatry no longer frightens me. I have forgotten the odor of the flowers and the image of the petrified doll. The real Amilamia has returned to my memory and I have felt, if not content, sane again: the park, the living child, my hours of adolescent reading, have triumphed over the specters of a sick cult. The image of life is the more powerful. I tell myself that I shall live forever with my real Amilamia, the conqueror of the caricature of death. And one day I dare look again at that notebook with graph paper in which I wrote down the data of the spurious assessment. And from its pages, once again, Amilamia’s card falls out, with its terrible childish scrawl and its map for getting from the park to her house. I smile as I pick it up. I bite one of the edges, thinking that, in spite of everything, the poor old people might accept this gift.
Whistling, I put on my jacket and straighten my tie. Why not go see them and offer them this card with the child’s own writing?
I am almost running as I approach the one-story house. Rain is beginning
to fall in large isolated drops, bringing out of the earth with magical immediacy the odor of dewy benediction that stirs the humus and quickens all that lives with its roots in the dust.
I ring the bell. The rain gets heavier and I become insistent. A shrill voice shouts: “I’m coming!” and I wait for the mother with her eternal rosary to open the door for me. I turn up the collar of my jacket. My clothes, my body, too, smell different in the rain. The door opens.
“What do you want? How wonderful you’ve come!”
The misshapen girl sitting in the wheelchair places one hand on the doorknob and smiles at me with an indecipherable, wry grin. The hump on her chest makes the dress into a curtain over her body, a piece of white cloth that nonetheless lends an air of coquetry to the blue-checked apron. The little woman extracts a pack of cigarettes from her apron pocket and quickly lights a cigarette, staining the end with orange-painted lips. The smoke causes the beautiful gray eyes to squint. She fixes her coppery, wheat-colored, permanent-waved hair, all the time staring at me with a desolate, inquisitive, hopeful—but at the same time fearful—expression.
“No, Carlos. Go away. Don’t come back.”
And from the house, at the same moment, I hear the high labored breathing of the old man, coming closer.
“Where are you? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to answer the door? Get back! Devil’s spawn! Do I have to beat you again?”
And the rain trickles down my forehead, over my cheeks, and into my mouth, and the little frightened hands drop the comic book onto the wet paving stones.
The Old Morality
“Gloomy buzzards! Damned devouring crows! Get out of here! You want my plants to dry up? Take the other road, around Doña Casilda’s house, let that old fanatic kneel to you as you go by! Show a little respect for the house of a Juarez Republican! Have you even seen me in your temple of darkness, you vultures! I’ve never asked you to visit my house! Get out, get out of here!”
Leaning against the garden fence, my grandfather shakes his cane. He must have been born with that cane. I think he even takes it to bed with him, so as not to lose it. The head of the cane looks just like Grandfather, except it’s a lion with a big mane and wide-stretched eyes that look as if they could see many things at one time, and Grandfather, well, yes, he has a lion’s mane, too, and yellow eyes that stretch toward his ears when he sees the row of priests and seminary students that file past our garden to take the shortcut to the church. The seminary is a little outside of Morelia and my grandfather swears they built it on the road to our ranch just to annoy him. That isn’t the word he uses. My aunts say the words my grandfather uses are very immoral and that I shouldn’t repeat them. It’s strange that the priests always come by here, as if they liked hearing what he shouts, instead of taking the way around Doña Casilda’s ranch. They went that way once and she knelt for their blessing and then invited them in for a cup of chocolate. I don’t know why they’d rather come by here.
“One of these days I’m not going to take any more, you sons of bitches. Someday I’m going to sic the dogs on you!”
The truth is that my grandfather’s dogs bark a lot when they’re closed in, but as soon as they get past the fence they’re as tame as anything. When the file of priests comes down the hill and they begin to cross themselves, the three German shepherds bark and howl as if the devil himself were coming. They must think it strange to see so many men wearing skirts, and clean-shaven too; they’re so used to Grandfather’s wild beard. He never combs it and sometimes I even think he roughs it up, especially when my aunts come to visit. What happens is, the dogs become very tame once they get out on the road, and they lick the priests’ shoes and hands, and the priests get a funny little smile and look out of the corners of their eyes at Grandfather, who beats on the fence with his cane, hopping mad, so mad he gets his words tangled up. Though the truth is, I’m not sure but what it’s something else the priests are looking at. Because Grandfather always waits for the men in skirts to go by with his arm tight around Micaela’s waist, and Micaela, who is a lot younger than he is, squeezes up against Grandfather and unbuttons her blouse and laughs while she eats a big plump banana and then another and still another and her eyes shine as bright as her teeth when the priests go by.
“Doesn’t it make you sick when you see my woman, you bloodsuckers?” Grandfather shouts, and squeezes Micaela tighter. “Do you want me to tell you where the heavenly kingdom is?”
He gives a big belly laugh and lifts up Micaela’s skirts, and the priests begin to trot like scared rabbits, like the kind that sometimes come down from the woods close by the garden and wait for me to throw them some carrots. Grandfather and Micaela laugh and laugh, and I laugh just like them and take my grandfather’s hand, he is laughing so hard he’s crying, and I say: “Look, look, they’re hopping like rabbits. You really scared them this time. Maybe they won’t come back again.”
My grandfather squeezes my hand in his, which is covered with bluish nerve lines and calluses as hard and yellow as the logs stored in the cave at the back of the garden. The dogs come back to the house and start barking again. And Micaela buttons her blouse and strokes Grandfather’s beard.
But, almost always, things are calmer. Here we all like our work. My aunts say it is a sin that a thirteen-year-old boy should be working instead of going to school, but I don’t know what they mean. I like to get up early and run to the big bedroom, where Micaela is looking at herself in the mirror, braiding her hair, mouth filled with hairpins, and Grandfather is still groaning in bed. Sure, what else could he expect, if you go to bed when the owls do and sleep only four hours, after playing cards with your friends till two o’clock in the morning … That’s why at six o’clock, when I come into the bedroom, which is all cluttered with furniture, rocking chairs with little cushions for your head, great big wardrobes with mirrors so huge you can see all of yourself all at once, I crawl into the bed laughing. Grandfather pretends to be asleep for a while and thinks I don’t know. I go along with the game and all of a sudden he growls like a lion, so loud it shakes the crystal candlestick, and then I pretend to be afraid and hide under those sheets that smell like nothing else in the world. Yes, sometimes Micaela says: “You’re not a boy, you’re like one of those dogs, they don’t see anything, they just go where their noses lead them.” She must be serious when she says that, because it’s true that I go in the kitchen with my eyes closed and head straight for the pudding, for the honey pots and the squash-blossom sweets, for the bowl of nata—that thick skin from the milk—and the mangoes in syrup that Micaela is preparing. And without opening my eyes I stick my finger in the pot of stew and press my lips against the wicker tray where she is stacking up the warm tortillas. “Gosh, Grandfather,” I said to him one day, “if I wanted to, I could go anywhere I want just by smelling and never get lost, I swear I could.” Outside it’s easy. As soon as the sun’s up and the men are at the sawmill it’s the odor of fresh resin that leads me to the shed where the workers stack the tree trunks and logs and then saw the planks the width and thickness they want. They all say hello and then, “Hey, Alberto, give us a hand,” because they know that makes me proud, and they know that I know that they know. There are mountains of sawdust everywhere and it smells as if the real forest were here, because the wood never smells the same before or after, not when it’s a tree or when it’s a piece of furniture or a door or a beam in a house. One time there were bad things about Grandfather in the newspaper in Morelia, they called him a “land raper,” and Grandfather went down to Morelia armed with his cane and busted the newspaperman’s head and later he had to pay costs and damages: that’s what the newspaper said. My grandfather is really quite a character, no doubt about it. If you could see him, the way he’s like a wild bull with the priests and the newspapermen, and then so quiet and tame in the hothouse that’s behind the house. No, he doesn’t have plants there, but birds. Yes, he’s a great bird collector, and I think one reason he loves me so much is because
I inherited his taste for birds and I spend whole afternoons looking at them and bringing them seed and water and finally putting on their cage covers when they go to sleep after the sun goes down.
Birds are a serious business and Grandfather says you have to study a lot to look after them right. And he’s right. These aren’t just any old pigeons. I’ve spent hours reading the cards on each cage that explain where they’re from and why they’re so rare. There are two pheasants: the male has all the plumage and he’s the vainest, too, while the female is dull and drab. And the Amazon cockatoo, very white with pale-blue circles under its eyes, as if it had been up all night. And an Australian bird, red, green, purple, and yellow. And the bird like flame, black and orange. And the whidah bird with a four-pointed tail that comes out once a year when it’s looking for a mate and then drops out. And the silver pheasant from China, the color of a mirror, with a red face. And especially the magpies, which swoop down on anything shiny and then hide it so well you can’t find it.
I know that I’d like to spend every afternoon looking at the prettiest birds, but then Grandfather comes and says to me: “All the birds know who all the others are, who their friends are, and how to entertain themselves playing. That’s all they need to know.”
Then later the three of us have dinner at the long, worn table that came from a convent, the only thing churchy, according to the old man, he’ll allow in the house.
“And it’s no skin off my nose,” he says as Micaela serves us some peppers stuffed with beans and melted cheese, “that a refectory table should end up in a liberal’s house. Señor Juarez converted the churches into libraries and the best proof that this poor country is going from bad to worse is that they’ve now taken out the books to put in the holy-water fonts again. At least I hope those hypocritical old aunts of yours wash the sleep out of their eyes each time they go to Mass.”