Burnt Water

  * * *

  “Today I discovered that the Chac-Mool leaves the house at night. Always, as it grows dark, he sings a shrill and ancient tune, older than song itself. Then everything is quiet. I knocked several times at the door, and when he didn’t answer I dared enter. The bedroom, which I hadn’t seen since the day the statue tried to attack me, is a ruin; the odor of incense and blood that permeates the entire house is particularly concentrated here. And I discovered bones behind the door, dog and rat and cat bones. This is what the Chac-Mool steals in the night for nourishment. This explains the hideous barking every morning.”

  * * *

  “February, dry. Chac-Mool watches every move I make; he made me telephone a restaurant and ask them to deliver chicken and rice every day. But what I took from the office is about to run out. So the inevitable happened: on the first they cut off the water and lights for nonpayment. But Chac has discovered a public fountain two blocks from the house; I make ten or twelve trips a day for water while he watches me from the roof. He says that if I try to run away he will strike me dead in my tracks; he is also the God of Lightning. What he doesn’t realize is that I know about his nighttime forays. Since we don’t have any electricity, I have to go to bed about eight. I should be used to the Chac-Mool by now, but just a moment ago, when I ran into him on the stairway, I touched his icy arms, the scales of his renewed skin, and I wanted to scream.

  “If it doesn’t rain soon, the Chac-Mool will return to stone. I’ve noticed his recent difficulty in moving; sometimes he lies for hours, paralyzed, and almost seems an idol again. But this repose merely gives him new strength to abuse me, to claw at me as if he could extract liquid from my flesh. We don’t have the amiable intervals any more, when he used to tell me old tales; instead, I seem to notice a heightened resentment. There have been other indications that set me thinking: my wine cellar is diminishing; he likes to stroke the silk of my bathrobes; he wants me to bring a servant girl to the house; he has made me teach him how to use soap and lotions. I believe the Chac-Mool is falling into human temptations; now I see in the face that once seemed eternal something that is merely old. This may be my salvation: if the Chac becomes human, it’s possible that all the centuries of his life will accumulate in an instant and he will die in a flash of lightning. But this might also cause my death: the Chac won’t want me to witness his downfall; he may decide to kill me.

  “I plan to take advantage tonight of Chac’s nightly excursion to flee. I will go to Acapulco; I’ll see if I can’t find a job, and await the death of the Chac-Mool. Yes, it will be soon; his hair is gray, his face bloated. I need to get some sun, to swim, to regain my strength. I have four hundred pesos left. I’ll go to the Müllers’ hotel, it’s cheap and comfortable. Let Chac-Mool take over the whole place; we’ll see how long he lasts without my pails of water.”

  * * *

  Filiberto’s diary ends here. I didn’t want to think about what he’d written; I slept as far as Cuernavaca. From there to Mexico City I tried to make some sense out of the account, to attribute it to overwork, or some psychological disturbance. By the time we reached the terminal at nine in the evening, I still hadn’t accepted the fact of my friend’s madness. I hired a truck to carry the coffin to Filiberto’s house, where I would arrange for his burial.

  Before I could insert the key in the lock, the door opened. A yellow-skinned Indian in a smoking jacket and ascot stood in the doorway. He couldn’t have been more repulsive; he smelled of cheap cologne; he’d tried to cover his wrinkles with thick powder, his mouth was clumsily smeared with lipstick, and his hair appeared to be dyed.

  “I’m sorry … I didn’t know that Filiberto had…”

  “No matter. I know all about it. Tell the men to carry the body down to the cellar.”

  In a Flemish Garden

  Sept. 19. That attorney Brambila gets the most harebrained ideas! Now he’s bought that old mansion on Puente de Alvarado, sumptuous, but totally impractical, built at the time of the French Intervention. Naturally, I thought it was just another of his many deals, and that he intended, as he had on other occasions, to demolish the house and sell the land at a profit, or at least to build an office and commercial property there. That is, that’s what I thought at first. I was astounded when he told me his plan: he meant to use the house, with its marvelous parquet floors and glittering chandeliers, for entertaining and lodging his North American business associates—history, folklore, and elegance all in one package. And he wanted me to live for a while in his mansion, because this Brambila, who was so impressed with everything about the place, had noticed a certain lack of human warmth in these rooms, which had been empty since 1910, when the family fled to France. A caretaker couple who lived in the rooftop apartment had kept everything clean and polished—though for forty years there hadn’t been a stick of furniture except a magnificent Pleyel in the salon. You felt a penetrating cold (my attorney friend had said) in the house, particularly noticeable in contrast to the temperature outside.

  “Look, my handsome blond friend. You can invite anyone you want for drinks and conversation. You’ll have all the basic necessities. Read, write, do whatever it is you do.”

  And Brambila took off for Washington, leaving me stunned by his great faith in my power to create warmth.

  * * *

  Sept. 19. That very afternoon, with one suitcase, I moved into the mansion on Puente de Alvarado. It is truly beautiful, however much the exterior with its Second Empire Ionic capitals and caryatids seems to refute it. The salon, overlooking the street, has gleaming, fragrant floors, and the walls, faintly stained by spectral rectangles where paintings once hung, are a pale blue somehow not merely old but antique. The murals on the vaulted ceiling (Zobenigo, the quay of Giovanni e Paolo, Santa Maria della Salute) were painted by disciples of Francesco Guardi. The bedroom walls are covered in blue velvet, and the hallways are tunnels of plain and carved wood, elm, ebony, and box, some in the Flemish style of Viet Stoss, others more reminiscent of Berruguete and the quiet grandeur of the masters of Pisa. I particularly like the library. It’s at the rear of the house, and its French doors offer the only view of a small, square garden with a bed of everlasting flowers, its three walls cushioned with climbing vines. I haven’t yet found the keys to these doors, the only access to the garden. But it will be in the garden, reading and smoking, that I begin my humanizing labors in this island of antiquity. Red and white, the everlastings glistened beneath the rain; an old-style bench of greenish wrought iron twisted in the form of leaves; and soft wet grass, partly the result of love, partly perseverance. Now that I’m writing about it, I realize that the garden suggests the cadences of Rodenbach … Dans l’horizon du soir où le soleil recule … la fumée éphémère et pacifique ondule … comme une gaze où des prunelles sont cachées; et l’on sent, rien qu’à voir ces brumes détachées, un douloureux regret de ciel et de voyage …

  * * *

  Sept. 20. In this house I feel very far removed from the “parasitical ills” of Mexico City. For less than twenty-four hours I’ve been inside these walls that emanate a sensitivity, a flow, suggestive of other shores. I’ve been invaded by a kind of lucid languor, a sense of imminence; with every moment I become increasingly aware of certain perfumes peculiar to my surroundings, certain silhouettes from a memory that formerly was revealed in brief flashes but today swells and flows with the measured vitality of a river. Amid the rivets and bolts of the city, when have I noticed the change of season? We don’t notice the season in Mexico City: one fades into another with no change of pace, “the immortal springtime, and its tokens.” Here the seasons lose their characteristic reiterated novelty of parameters with rhythms, rites, and pleasures of their own, of boundaries about which we entwine our nostalgia and our projects, of signs that nurture and solidify consciousness. Tomorrow is the equinox. Today, in this place, I have with a kind of Nordic indolence noted, not for the first time, the approach of autumn. A gray veil is descending over the garden, which
I am observing as I write; overnight, a few leaves have fallen from the arbor, carpeting the lawn; a few leaves are beginning to turn golden, and an incessant rain is fading the greenness, washing it into the soil. The smoke of autumn hovers over the garden, as far as the walls, and one could almost believe one heard, heavy as deep breathing, the sound of slow footsteps among the fallen leaves.

  * * *

  Sept. 21. I finally succeeded in opening the French doors in the library. I went out into the garden. The fine rain continues, imperceptible and tenacious. If in the house I seemed to caress the skin of a different world, in the garden I touched its nerves. In the garden those silhouettes of memory, of imminence, that I noticed yesterday make my nerves tingle. The everlastings are not the flowers I know: these are permeated with a mournful perfume, as if they had been gathered from a crypt after years among dust and marble. The very rain stirs colorings in the grass I want to identify with other cities, other windows; standing in the center of the garden, I closed my eyes … Javanese tobacco and wet sidewalks … herring … beer fumes, the haze of forests, the trunks of great oaks … Turning in a circle, I tried to absorb the totality of this quadrangle of vague light that even in the rain seems to filter through yellow stained glass, to glimmer in braziers, made melancholy before it became light … and the verdant growth of the vines was not that of the burnt earth of the plateau; this was a different, soft, green shading into blue in the distant treetops, covering rocks with grotesque slime … Memling! Between the eyes of a Virgin and reflections of copper, I had seen this same landscape from one of your windows! I was looking at a fictitious, an invented landscape. This garden was not in Mexico! This misty rain … I ran into the house, raced down the hallway, burst into the salon, and pressed my nose to the window: on the Avenida Puente de Alvarado, a blast of jukeboxes, streetcars, and sun, the monotonous sun. A Sun God without shading or effigies in its rays, a stationary Sun Stone, a sun of shortened centuries. I returned to the library: the rain still fell on the old, hooded garden.

  * * *

  Sept. 21. I’ve been standing here, my breath misting the door panes, gazing out at the garden and the reflection of my blue eyes. Hours perhaps, staring at the small, enclosed space, fingering my beard absentmindedly. Staring at a lawn that minute by minute is buried beneath new leaves. Then I heard a muted sound, a buzzing that might have come from within me, and I looked up. In the garden, almost opposite mine, another head, slightly tilted, its eyes staring into mine. Instinctively, I leaped back. The face in the garden never varied its gaze, impenetrable in the deep shadows beneath its brows. The figure turned away; I saw only a small body, black and hunched, and I covered my eyes with my hands.

  * * *

  Sept. 22. There’s no telephone in the house, but I could go out on the Avenida, call up some friends, go to the Roxy … After all, this is my city; these are my people! Why can’t I leave this house; more accurately, my post at the doors looking onto the garden?

  * * *

  Sept. 22. I am not going to be frightened because someone leaped over the wall into the garden. I’m going to wait all evening—it continues to rain, day and night!—and capture the intruder … I was dozing in the armchair facing the window when I was awakened by the intense scent of the everlastings. Unhesitatingly, I stared into the garden—yes, there. Picking the flowers, the small yellow hands forming a nosegay. It was a little old woman, she must have been at least eighty. But how had she dared intrude? And how had she got in? I watched as she picked the flowers: wizened, slim, clad all in black. Her skirts brushed the ground, collecting dew and clover; the cloth sagged with the weight, an airy weight, a Caravaggio texture. Her black jacket was buttoned to the chin, her torso was bent over, hunched against the cold. Her face was shadowed by a black lace coif which covered tangled white hair.

  I could see nothing but her bloodless lips, the paleness of her flesh repeated in the firm line of a mouth arched slightly in the faintest, saddest, eternal smile devoid of any motivation. She looked up; her eyes were not eyes … what seemed to emerge from beneath the wrinkled lids was a pathway, a nocturnal landscape, leading toward an infinite inward journey. This ancient woman bent down to pluck a red bud; in profile, her hawk-like features, her sunken cheeks, reflected like the vibrating planes of the reaper’s scythe. Then she walked away toward…? No, I won’t say she walked through the vines and the wall, that she evaporated, that she sank into the ground or ascended into the sky; a path seemed to open in the garden, so natural that at first I didn’t notice it, and along it as if—I knew it, I’d heard it before—as if treading a course long-forgotten, heavy as deep breathing, my visitor disappeared beneath the rain.

  * * *

  Sept. 23. I locked myself in the bedroom and barricaded the door with everything I could lay my hands on. I was sure it would do no good, but I thought I could at least give myself the illusion of being able to sleep with tranquillity. Those measured footsteps, always as if on dry leaves; I thought I heard them every moment. I knew they weren’t real, that is, until I heard the faintest rustle outside the door, and then the whisper of something passed beneath the door. I turned on the light; the corner of an envelope was outlined against the velvety floor. For a moment I held its contents in my hand: old paper, elegant, rosewood.

  Written in a spidery hand, large, erect letters, the message consisted of one word:

  TLACTOCATZINE

  Sept. 23. She will come, as she did yesterday and the day before, at sunset. I will speak to her today; she can’t escape me, I will follow her through the hidden entry among the vines …

  * * *

  Sept. 23. As the clock was striking six, I heard music in the salon; it was the magnificent old Pleyel, playing waltzes. As I approached, the sound ceased. I turned back to the library. She was in the garden. Now she was skipping about, pantomiming … a little girl playing with her hoop. I opened the door, went out, I don’t know exactly what happened; I felt as if the sky, as if the very air descended one level to press down on the garden; the air became motionless, fathomless, and all sound was suspended. The old woman stared at me, always with the same smile, her eyes lost in the depths of the world; her mouth opened, her lips moved; no sound emanated from that pale slit, the garden was squeezed like a sponge, the cold buried its fingers in my flesh …

  * * *

  Sept. 24. After the apparition at dusk, I came to my senses sitting in the armchair in the library; the French doors were locked, the garden solitary. The odor of the everlastings has permeated the house; it is particularly intense in my bedroom. There I awaited a new missive, a new sign from the aged woman. Her words, the flesh of silence, were struggling to tell me something … At eleven that evening I could sense beside me the dull light of the garden. Again the whisper of the long, starched skirts outside my door; and the letter:

  My beloved

  The moon has risen and I hear it singing; everything is indescribably beautiful.

  I dressed and went downstairs to the library; a veil-become-light enveloped the old woman, who was sitting on the garden bench. I walked toward her, again amid the buzzing of bumblebees. The same air, void of any sound, enveloped her. Her white light ruffled my hair, and the aged woman took my hands and kissed them; her skin pressed against mine. I saw this; my eyes told me what touch would not corroborate: her hands in mine were nothing but wind—heavy, cold wind; I intuited the opaque ice in the skeleton of this kneeling figure whose lips moved in a litany of forbidden rhythms. The everlastings trembled, solitary, independent of the wind. They smelled of the grave. Yes, they grew there, in the tomb: there they germinated, there they were carried every evening in the spectral hands of an ancient woman … and sound returned, amplified by the rain, and a coagulated voice, an echo of spilled blood copulating still with the earth, screamed:

  “Kapuzinergruft! Kapuzinergruft!”

  I jerked free from her hands and ran to the front door of the mansion—even there I heard the mad sound of her voice, the drowned dea
d echoing in the cavernous throat—and I sank to the floor trembling, clutching the doorknob, drained of the strength to turn it.

  I couldn’t; it was impossible to open.

  It is sealed with a thick red lacquer. In the center, a coat of arms glimmers in the night, a crowned double eagle, the old woman’s profile, signaling the icy intensity of permanent confinement.

  And that night I heard behind me—I did not know I was to hear it for all time—the whisper of skirts brushing the floor; she walks with a new, ecstatic joy; her gestures are repetitious, betraying her satisfaction. The satisfaction of a jailer, of a companion, of eternal prison. The satisfaction of solitude shared. I heard her voice again, drawing near, her lips touching my ear, the breath fabricated of spume and buried earth:

  “… and they didn’t let us play with our hoops, Max; they forbade us; we had to carry them in our hands during our walks through the gardens in Brussels … but I told you that in a letter, the letter I wrote from Bouchot, do you remember? Oh, but from now on, no more letters, we’ll be together forever, the two of us in this castle … We will never leave; we will never allow anyone to enter … Oh, Max, answer me, the everlastings, the ones I bring in the evenings to the Capuchin crypt, to the Kapuzinergruft, don’t they smell fresh? They’re the same flowers the Indians brought you when we arrived here: you, the Tlactocatzine … Nis tiquimopielia inin maxochtzintl … Remember? Lord, we offer you these flowers…”