“Well, they get washed pretty often, then.” Micaela laughs as she passes the pulque jug to Grandfather. “They’re so holy they never get out of the sacristy. They stink of old rags and piss.”
Grandfather hugs her around the waist and we all laugh a lot and I make a drawing in my notebook of my dead mother’s three sisters, making them look like the sharpest-nosed and nosiest birds in all Grandfather’s collection. Then we all howl till our sides hurt and tears run down our faces and Grandfather’s face looks like a tomato and then his friends arrive to play cards and I go up to sleep and early the next day I go into the bedroom where Grandfather and Micaela sleep and about the same things happen again and we’re all very happy.
But today from the sawmill I hear the dogs barking and decide the priests must be passing by and I don’t want to miss Grandfather’s cuss words plopping like ripe tomatoes, but it seems strange for the priests to be going by so early and then I hear the loud horn and I know the aunts have arrived. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, when they hauled me off to Morelia by force and I was bored as a clam while one of them played the piano and another sang and the other one offered little cups of punch to the bishop. I decide to pretend I don’t know what’s going on, but after a while I get curious to take a look at that automobile that’s older than the hills and I come out of hiding like I’m just strolling around, whistling and kicking at the wood shavings and pieces of cork wood. Everyone has gone inside. But right in front of the gate there’s that old machine with a spotted roof and velvet seats with hand-embroidered cushions. INRI, SJ, ACJM. I will ask Grandfather what those embroidered letters mean. Later. Now I feel sure that the old man is giving them something cool to drink, and so as not to worry him I tiptoe into the house and hide among the big flowerpots and plants where I can see them without their seeing me.
Grandfather is leaning with both hands on the head of his cane; his cigar is between his teeth, and he’s puffing smoke like the express to Juarez. Micaela is standing with her arms crossed, laughing, in the kitchen door. The three aunts are sitting very stiffly all on the wicker sofa. All three are wearing black hats and white gloves and are sitting with their knees pressed tight together. Two of them are married and the one in the middle is an old maid, but there’s no way of telling, because Aunt Milagros Tejeda de Ruiz is different from the others only in that she squints constantly, as if she had a cinder in her eye, and you can tell Aunt Angustias Tejeda de Otero only by the fact she wears a wig that’s always slipping to one side, and Aunt Benedicta Tejeda, the spinster, looks only a little bit younger and she’s the one who constantly touches her black lace handkerchief to the tip of her nose. But, aside from that, all three are thin, very light-skinned—almost yellow—with sharp noses and they all dress alike: in mourning all their lives.
“The mother was a Tejeda, but the father was a Santana like me, and that gives me the right!” Grandfather shouts, and blows smoke through his nose.
“The decent part comes from the Tejeda side, Don Agustín,” says Doña Milagros, that eye gleaming like a beacon. “Don’t you forget it.”
“The decent part comes from my balls!” Grandfather shouts again and pours himself a glass of beer, growling at the aunts, who have covered their ears all at the same time. “Why should I try to explain anything to you cockatoos? I can save my breath for better things.”
“Women!” screeches Doña Angustias, straightening her wig. “That prostitute you’re living in sin with.” “Alcohol,” Señorita Benedicta murmurs, her eyes lowered. “It wouldn’t surprise us to learn that the boy gets drunk every night.” “Exploitation!” Doña Milagros shouts, scratching her cheek. “You make him work like a common laborer.” “Ignorance”—Doña Angustias’s eyes blink. “He’s never set foot in a Christian school.” “Sin”—Señorita Benedicta clasps her hands. “He’s thirteen and he hasn’t received Communion or even been to Mass.” “Irreverence”—Doña Milagros points a finger at Grandfather. “Irreverence for the Holy Church and its priests, whom you attack so vilely every day.” “Blasphemer!” Señorita Benedicta dries her eyes with the black handkerchief. “Heretic!” Doña Angustias shakes her head and the wig falls over her eyebrows. “Whoremonger!” Doña Milagros can no longer control the trembling of her eyelid.
“Adiós, Mama Carlota!” Micaela sings, flourishing her kitchen towel.
“Adiós—goodbye to the papist and the traitor!” Grandfather thunders, with his cane raised high: the three aunts take each other’s hand and close their eye. ‘For a family visit, this has already lasted too long. Go back to that antique you call a car and your rosaries and your incense and tell your husbands not to hide behind your skirts, because the only angelic thing about Agustín Santana is his name, and tell them he’s waiting here for them when they really want to try to take the boy away. Godspeed to you, señoras, because only His grace can grant you that miracle. Giddap!”
But if Grandfather raises his cane, Doña Angustias retaliates by showing him a handful of papers. “You don’t frighten us. Read this order from the juvenile judge. It is a court order, Don Agustín. The boy can no longer live in this atmosphere of shameless immorality. Two policemen will come this afternoon and take him to the home of our sister Benedicta: raising Alberto to be a little Christian gentleman will be a comfort to her in her lonely years. Let us go, sisters.”
Aunt Benedicta’s house is in the center of Morelia and from its balconies you can see a small plaza with iron benches and many yellow flowers. There is a church beside it; it is an old house and looks like all the other big houses in the town. There is an entry hall and a patio and the servants live downstairs: the kitchen is there also, and there two women fan charcoal stoves all day. Upstairs are the living rooms and the bedrooms, all opening onto a bare patio. You can imagine: Aunt Milagros said that I had to burn all my old clothes (my overalls, my boots, my sweatshirts) and that I have to dress the way I dress all the time now, in a blue suit and a stiff white sissy shirt. They put me with a stupid old professor to teach me how to talk fancy before classes begin after vacation, and I’m getting a pig’s snout from so much pronouncing “u” the way the maestro wants it. Naturally, every morning I have to go with Aunt Benedicta to church and sit on the hard benches, but at least that’s something different and sometimes I even enjoy it. Aunt and I eat by ourselves almost all the time, though sometimes the other aunts come with their husbands, who tousle my hair and say, “Poor little guy.” And then I wander around the patio by myself or go to the bedroom they’ve given me. It has an enormous bed with a mosquito net. There’s a crucifix over the head of the bed and a little bathroom right next to it. And I get so bored I can hardly wait for mealtimes, which are the least boring times, and for a half hour before mealtime I hang around the dining-room door, I visit the two women who fan the stoves, I find out what they’re fixing and go back to stand guard by the door until one of the servants comes in to set the plates and silver at the two places and then my Aunt Benedicta comes out of her room, takes me by the hand, and we go into the dining room.
They say that Aunt Benedicta isn’t married because she’s very demanding and no man suits her; also that she’s very old, she’s already thirty-four. While we eat, I look at her to see if it shows that she’s twenty years older than I am, but she goes right on sipping her soup without looking at me or talking to me. She never talks to me, and besides, since we sit so far apart at the table, we couldn’t hear each other even if we shouted. I try to compare her with Micaela, who is the only woman I’ve ever been around, since my mother died when I was born and my father four years later and after that I lived with Grandfather and “that woman,” as my aunts call her.
The thing about Señorita Benedicta is that she never laughs. And the only time she says anything it’s to tell me something I already know or to give me orders when I’m already way ahead of her and doing the things she wanted without her telling me. She really gives me a hard time. I don’t know whether the meals really are long or
if they just seem long, but I try to entertain myself in different ways. One is to put a Micaela mask on my aunt’s face, and this is very funny, I imagine her laughing her loud laugh and her head thrown back and her eyes always asking whether things are serious or a joke—that’s Micaela—all this coming out of that high-buttoned collar and black dress. Another is to talk to her in the language I invented myself, say, to ask her to pass me the coffee: “Hey-yeh, aunt-tant, asspay the offecay.”
My aunt sighs and she must not be so awfully dumb, because she does what I ask, and only adds a lesson in manners: “One says please, Alberto.”
But, as I was explaining, I get her goat in everything else. When she comes all serious to knock at my door to scold me for not being up yet, I answer her from the patio, all bathed and slicked up, so then she covers up her anger and says to me, more serious still, that it’s time to go to church and I smile and show her the prayer book and she doesn’t know what to say.
But she finally caught me one day, about a month after I’d been living with her, and all because of that tattletale priest. They’re preparing me for my First Communion and all the kids in catechism classes laugh that such a big boob doesn’t know the first thing about who the Holy Spirit is. Besides that, they laugh just because it’s me who’s the big boob. Yesterday it was finally my turn to have a little talk alone with the priest to prepare me for confession. He talked a lot about sin and about how it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know anything about religion or had grown up in such an immoral atmosphere. He said not to worry but to tell him everything, because he’d never before had to prepare a boy as full of sin as I was, for whom perversion was an everyday thing, who couldn’t even distinguish between good and evil. I racked my head trying to think what my worst sins could be and how the two of us were there in the empty church staring at each other without knowing what to say, and I started thinking about all the movies I’d seen and then I poured it out: how I had raided a ranch and carried off all the money and a few chickens besides, how I had grabbed and beat up a poor old blind man, how I had stabbed a policeman in the back, how I had forced a girl to strip and then bitten her on the face. The priest threw up his arms and crossed himself and said the worst anybody knew about Grandfather was nothing, and ran out as if I were the devil himself.
Well, my aunt really tore into my bedroom before I woke up. I thought the house was on fire. She slammed the doors open and shouted my name. I woke up and there she was, her arms in the air. Then she came and sat down on the bed next to me and told me that I had made fun of the priest and that that wasn’t the worst. I had told all those lies in order to hide my true sins. I just looked at her as if she were out of her mind.
“Why don’t you admit the truth?” she said, taking my hand.
“What do you mean, Aunt? Honest, I don’t understand.”
Then she ruffled my hair and squeezed my hand. “How you’ve seen your grandfather and that woman in improper postures.”
I guess my dumb look didn’t convince her, but I swear I didn’t understand what she meant and even less when she kept on in a half-strangled voice, halfway between crying and screaming: “Together. In sin. Making love. In bed.”
Oh, that. “Sure. They sleep together. Grandfather says that a man should never sleep alone or he’ll dry up, and the same for a woman.”
My aunt covered my mouth with her hand. She sat that way for a long time and I was on the point of suffocating. She looked at me in a real strange way, and then she got up and walked out very slowly, not saying anything, and I went back to sleep, but she didn’t come back to get me up to go to Mass. She left me alone and I stayed in bed all morning until time for lunch, looking at the ceiling, thinking about nothing.
There are lots of lizards in the patio. I already know that when you look at them they turn the color of the stone or the tree to disguise themselves. But I know their trick and they can’t get away from me. Today I’ve spent an hour following them, laughing at them because they think I don’t know how to find them: you look for their eyes, shiny as painted pins. The whole point is not to lose sight of the eyes, because they can’t disguise them, and since they open and close them all the time, it’s like a signal turning on and off at the crossroads and that’s the way I follow one and then another and when I want to—like now—I catch them and feel them throb in my fist, all smooth underneath and wrinkled on top and tiny, but with life, the same as anyone else. If only they knew I wouldn’t hurt them, their throat wouldn’t throb so, but that’s the way things are. There’s no way to make them understand. What scares them pleases me. I hold this one tight in my hand and my aunt is watching me from the corridor upstairs, not understanding what I’m doing. I run up the stairs and get there out of breath. She asks me what I’ve been doing. I act very serious so she won’t get wind of anything. She’s sitting fanning herself in the shade, since it’s very hot. I stretch out my closed fist and she tries to smile; you can see it’s an effort. She opens her hand to take mine and I put the lizard on her palm and force her fingers closed over it. She doesn’t scream or get scared as I thought she would. She doesn’t scold me or throw the lizard down. She just closes her fingers and her eyes tighter and looks like she wants to say something but can’t and her nose trembles and she looks at me like nobody ever looked at me before, as if she wanted to cry and would feel better if she did. I tell her that the poor lizard is going to suffocate, and Señorita Benedicta leans toward the floor but can’t let it go and finally opens her fingers and lets it run off along the paving stones and climb up the wall and disappear. And then her expression changes and her mouth twists and I see she’s mad, but not really, so I smile and bury my head in my shoulders, try to look real innocent, and run back down to the patio.
I spend all afternoon in my room doing nothing. I feel tired and sort of sleepy like I’m getting a bad cold. It must be the lack of sun and fresh air in this dark old house. I begin to get sore about everything. I miss the sawmill, and Micaela’s desserts, Grandfather’s birds, the fun when the priests go by and the laughing at dinnertime and in the mornings when I go into their bedroom. I figure that up to now life in Morelia has been like a vacation, but I’ve been stuck here for a month and I’m getting tired of it.
I come out of my room a little late for dinner and my aunt is already sitting at the head of the table with her black handkerchief in her hand and when I take my place she doesn’t scold me for coming in late—even though I did it on purpose. Just the opposite. She seems to be trying to smile and be pleasant. All I want is to throw a fit and go back to the ranch.
She hands me a covered plate and I uncover it. It’s my favorite treat, natas.
“The cook told me you like it very much.”
“Thank you, Aunt,” I say, very serious.
We eat in silence and finally, when it’s time to have our coffee and milk, I tell her I’m bored with living in Morelia and that I wish she would let me go back to live with Grandfather, which is where I like to live.
“Ingrate,” my aunt says, and dries her lips with her handkerchief. I do not reply. “Ingrate,” she repeats.
And she gets up and walks toward me, repeating that, and takes my hand and I’m sitting there very serious and she slaps me in the face with that long, bony hand and I swallow my tears and she slaps me again and suddenly she stops and touches my forehead and opens her eyes wide and says I have a fever.
It must be one of the world’s worst, because I’m getting weak and my knees feel wobbly. My aunt takes me to my bedroom and says I must get undressed while she goes for the doctor. But really, all she does is flutter around while I take off the blue suit and white shirt and undershorts and get into bed, shivering.
“Don’t you wear pajamas?”
“No, Aunt. I always sleep in my undershirt.”
“But you have a fever!”
She rushes out like a madwoman and I lie there shaking and try to go to sleep and tell myself the fever’s bad just to say something. The truth is
that I go right to sleep and all Grandfather’s birds come flying out together, stirring up a great commotion because they’re all free at last: the blue sky fills with orange, red, and green lightning flashes, but this lasts only a short time. The birds are frightened, as if they wanted to return to their cages. Now there are real lightning flashes and the birds are stiff and cold in the night. They’re not flying any more, and they’re turning black. They are losing their feathers, no longer singing, and when the storm passes and the dawn comes, they have become the file of seminary students in their habits on their way to church and the doctor is taking my pulse and Aunt Benedicta seems very upset and I see the doctor between dreams and my aunt says: “All right, now. Lie on your back. I have to rub this liniment on you.”
I feel the icy hands on my hot skin. Grandfather shakes his cane and shouts cuss words at the priests. The liniment smells very strong. He sics the dogs on the priests. Of eucalyptus and camphor. The dogs just bark, frightened. She rubs hard and my shoulders begin to burn. Grandfather shouts but his lips move in silence. Now she’s rubbing my chest and the smell is stronger. The dogs bark but they don’t make any sound either. I’m bathed in sweat and liniment and everything burns and I want to go to sleep but I know that I’m asleep at the same time I’m wanting it. The cold hand rubs my shoulders and my ribs and under my arms. And the dogs run loose, furious, to sink their teeth into the seminary students, who turn into birds at night. And my stomach burns as much as my chest and my back and Aunt rubs and rubs to make me better. The seminary students bare their teeth in a snarl and laugh and open out their arms and fly away like buzzards, dying of laughter. And I’m so happy I laugh with them, the sickness fills me with happiness and I don’t want her to stop making me better, I ask her to make me feel better, I take her hands, the fever and the liniment burn my thighs and the dogs run through the fields howling, like coyotes.