Burnt Water (12 page)

After the siesta, about dusk, she goes out again, all stooped over, her basket filled with dry tortillas, and that's when the dogs begin to gather. It's only natural. As she walks along she throws them the tortillas, and the dogs know it and follow her. When she can get enough together to buy a chicken, she saves the bones and throws them to the dogs as they follow her down La Moneda Street. The butcher says she shouldn't do it, chicken bones are bad for dogs, they can choke on them, chicken bones splinter and pierce the intestines. Then all the bad-mouths say that's proof that Doña Manuelita is an evil woman, look at that, luring the dogs just to kill them.

She returns about seven, soaked to the bone in the rainy season, her shoes gray with dust when it's dry. That's how everyone always thinks of her, bone-white, shrouded in dust between October and April, and between May and September a soppy mess, her shawl plastered to her head, raindrops dripping from her nose and trickling down the furrows of her eyes and cheeks and off the white hairs on her chin. She comes back from her adventures in the black blouse and flapping skirts and black stockings she always hangs out in the night air to dry. She's the only one who dares to dry her clothes at night. What did I tell you, she's mad as a hatter, what if it rains, then what good does it do? There's no sun at night. And there are thieves. Never you mind. She hangs her soaked rags on the communal clotheslines that stretch in all directions across the patio of the building. I'll let them hang in the night air, the gossips imagine Doña Manuelita saying. Because the truth is, no one's ever heard her speak. And no one's ever seen her sleep. Suppositions. Doña Manuela's clothes disappear from the clothesline before anyone's up. She's never been seen at the washtubs, kneeling beside the other women, scrubbing, soaping, gossiping.

“She reminds me of a lonely old queen, forgotten by everyone,” little Luisito used to say before he'd been forbidden to see her, or even speak to her.

“When she's coming up the stone staircase, I can imagine how this was a great palace, Mother, how a long time ago very powerful and wealthy gentlemen lived here.”

“I don't want you to have anything to do with her any more. Remember what happened to her daughter. You, more than anyone, ought to remember.”

“I never knew her daughter.”

“She wants you to take her place. I won't have that, that would be the last straw, the old witch.”

“She's the only one who ever takes me out. Everyone else is always too busy.”

“Your little sister's big enough now. She can take you.”

*   *   *

So, following his directions, Rosa María pushed little Luisito in his wheelchair, wherever he wanted to go. Toward Tacuba Street if what he wanted to see were the old stone and volcanic rock palaces of the Viceregency, wide porticos studded with nail heads as big as coins, balconies of wrought iron, niches sheltering stone Virgins, high gutters and drains of verdigris copper. Toward the squat, faded little houses along Jesús Carranza Street if, on the other hand, it was his whim to think about Doña Manuelita. He was the only one who'd ever been in the old woman's room and kitchen, the only one who could describe them. There wasn't much to describe, that was the interesting thing. Behind the doors that were also windows—the wooden kitchen door hung with sheer curtains, the door to her room covered by a sheet strung on copper rods—there was nothing worthy of comment. Just a cot. Everyone else decorated their rooms with calendars, altars, religious prints, newspaper clippings, flowers, soccer pennants and bullfight posters, paper Mexican flags, snapshots taken at fairs, at the Shrine of the Guadalupe. But not Manuelita. Nothing. A kitchen with clay utensils, a bag of charcoal, food for her daily meal, and the one room with its cot. Nothing more.

“You've been there. What does she have there? What's she hiding?”

“Nothing.”

“What does she do?”

“Nothing. Everything she does she does outside her room. Anyone can see her—the flowerpots, the shopping, the dogs and the canaries. Besides, if you don't trust her, why do you let her water your geraniums and cover your birds for the night? Aren't you afraid your flowers will wither and your little birds will die?”

It's hard to believe how slowly the outings with Rosa María go. She's thirteen years old but not half as strong as Doña Manuelita. At every street corner she has to ask for help to get the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. The old woman had been able to do it by herself. With her, if they went down Tacuba, Donceles, and Gonzales Obregón to the Plaza of Santo Domingo, it was little Luisito who did the talking, it was he who imagined the city as it had been in colonial times, it was he who told the old woman how the Spanish city had been constructed, laid out like a chessboard above the ruins of the Aztec capital. As a little boy, he told Doña Manuelita, they'd sent him to school, it had been torture, the cruel jokes, the invalid, the cripple, his wheelchair tipped over, the cowards laughing and running away, he lying there waiting for his teachers to pick him up. That's why he'd asked them not to send him, to let him stay home, kids can be cruel, it was true, it wasn't just a saying, he'd learned that lesson, now they left him alone reading at home, the rest of them went out to work, except his mother, Doña Lourdes, and his sister Rosa María, all he wanted was to be left to read by himself, to educate himself, please, for the love of God. His legs weren't going to get well in any school, he swore he'd study better by himself, honest, couldn't they take up a collection to buy him his books, later he'd go to a vocational school, he promised, but only when it could be among men you could talk to and ask for a little compassion. Children don't know what compassion is.

But Doña Manuelita knew, yes, she knew. When she pushed his wheelchair toward the ugly parts of their neighborhood, toward the empty lots along Canal del Norte, turning right at the traffic circle of Peralvillo, it was she who did the talking, and pointed out the dogs to him, there were more dogs than men in these parts, stray dogs without masters, without collars, dogs born God knows where, born of a fleeting encounter between dogs exactly like each other, a male and a bitch locked together after the humping, strung together like two links of a scabrous chain, while the children of the neighborhood laughed and threw stones at them, and then, separated forever, forever, forever, how was the bitch to remember her mate, when alone, in one of a hundred empty lots, she whelped a litter of pups abandoned the day after they were born? How could the bitch remember her own children?

“Imagine, little Luis, imagine if dogs could remember one another, imagine what would happen…”

A secret shiver filled with cold pleasure ran down little Luisito's spine when he watched the boys of Peralvillo stoning the dogs, chasing them, provoking angry barking, then howls of pain, finally, whimpering, as, heads bloody, tails between their legs, eyes yellow, hides mangy, they fled into the distance until they were lost in the vacant lots beneath the burning sun of all the mornings of Mexico. The dogs, the boys, all lacerated by the sun. Where did they eat? Where did they sleep?

“You see, little Luis, if you're hungry, you can ask for food. A dog can't ask. A dog must take his food anywhere he can find it.”

But it was painful for little Luis to ask, and he did have to ask. They took up the collection and bought his books. He knew that a long time ago in the big house in Orizaba they'd had more books than they could ever read, books his great-grandfather had ordered from Europe and then gone to Veracruz to wait for, a shipment of illustrated magazines and huge books of adventure tales that he'd read to his children during the long nights of the tropical rainy season. As the family grew poor, everything had been sold, and finally they'd ended up in Mexico City because there were more opportunities there than in Orizaba, and because his father'd been given a place as archivist at the Ministry of Finance. The building where they lived was close to the National Palace and his father could walk every day and save the bus fare. Almost everyone who worked in the office wasted two or three hours a day coming to the Zócalo from their houses in remote suburbs and returning after work. Little Luis watched how the memories, the family traditions, faded away with the years. His older brothers hadn't graduated from secondary school, they didn't read, one worked for the Department of the Federal District and the other in the shoe department at the Palacio de Hierro. Of course, among them they made enough money to move to a little house in Lindavista, but that was a long way away, and besides, here in the old building on La Moneda they had the best rooms, a living room and three bedrooms, more than anyone else had. And in a place that had been a palace centuries ago little Luis found it easier to imagine things, and remember.

If only dogs could remember each other, Doña Manuelita said. But we forget, too, we forget other people and forget about our own family, little Luisito replied. At dinnertime he liked to remember the big house in Orizaba, the white façade with wrought-iron work at the windows, the ground behind the house plunging toward a decaying ravine odorous of mangrove and banana trees. In the depths of the ravine you could hear the constant sound of a rushing stream, and beyond, high above, you could see the huge mountains ringing Orizaba, looming so close they frightened you. It was like living beside a giant crowned with fog. And how it rained. It never stopped raining.

The others looked at him strangely; his father, Don Raúl, lowered his head, his mother sighed and shook hers, one brother laughed aloud, the other made a circling motion at his brow with his index finger. Little Luisito was “touched,” where did he get such ideas, why he'd never been in Orizaba, he was born and bred in Mexico City, after all, the family'd come to the city forty years ago. Rosa María hadn't even heard him, she just kept eating, her shoe-button eyes were as hard as stone, and held no memories. How it pained little Luisito to beg for everything, for books and for memories. I don't forget, I collect postcards, there's the trunk filled with old snapshots, it's used as a chest, I know everything that's inside.

Doña Manuela knew all this, too, because little Luisito had told her, before they'd forbidden her to take him out for a walk. When she was alone in her room, lying on her cot, she tried to communicate silently with the boy, remembering the same things he remembered.

“Just imagine, Manuelita, how this building must have looked before.”

That was little Luisito's other memory, as if the past of that big house now shared by twelve families complemented the memory of the one and only house, the house in Orizaba, the house that belonged to only one family, his family, when they'd had an important name.

“Just imagine, these were palaces.”

The old woman made a great effort to remember everything the boy told her and then imagine, as he did and when he did, a majestic palace: the entryway before there was a lottery stand, the carved marble facade stripped of cheap clothing stores, the bridal shop, the photographer's shop, and the soft-drinks stand, free of the advertisements that disfigured the ancient nobility of the building. A clean, austere, noble palace, a murmuring fountain in the center of the patio instead of the clotheslines and washtubs, the great stone stairway, the ground floor reserved for the servants, the horses, the kitchens, the grain storerooms, and the smell of straw and jelly.

And on the main floor, what did the boy remember? Oh, great salons smelling of wax and varnish, harpsichords, he said, balls and banquets, bedchambers with cool brick floors, beds draped with mosquito netting, mirrored wardrobes, oil lamps. This is the way that Doña Manuelita, alone in her room, spoke with little Luis, after they'd been separated. This is the way she communicated with him, by remembering the things he remembered and forgetting about her own past, the house where she'd worked all her life until she was an old woman, General Vergara's house in the Roma district, twenty-five years of service, until they'd moved out to Pedregal. There hadn't been time to win the friendship of young Plutarco; the new mistress, Señora Evangelina, had died only a few years after marrying the General's son, and her mistress Clotilde before that; Manuela had been only fifty when she was fired, she reminded the General of too many things, that's why he fired her. But he was generous. He continued to pay her rent in the tenement on La Moneda.

“Live your last years in peace, Manuela,” General Vergara had said to her. “Every time I see you I think of my Clotilde. Goodbye.”

Doña Manuelita chewed on a yellowed, knotted finger as she remembered her employer's words, those memories kept intruding into the memories she shared with little Luisito, they had nothing to do with them, Doña Clotilde was dead, she was a saint, the General had been influential in Calles's government, so in the midst of the religious persecution Mass was celebrated in the cellar of the house; every day Doña Clotilde, the servant Manuelita, and Manuelita's daughter, Lupe Lupita, went to confession and received Communion. The priest would arrive at the house in lay clothes, carrying a kit like a doctor's bag containing his vestments, the ciborium, the wine and the hosts, a Father Téllez, a young priest, a saint, whom the sainted Doña Clotilde had saved from death, giving him refuge when all his friends had gone before the firing wall, shot in the early morning with their arms opened out in a cross; she'd seen the photographs in
El Universal.

That's why she'd felt so bad when the General fired her, it was as if he'd wanted to kill her. She'd survived Doña Clotilde, she remembered too many things, the General wanted to be left alone with his past. Maybe he was right, maybe it was better for both of them, the employer and the servant, to go their own ways with their secret memories, without serving as the other's witness, better that way. She again gnawed at her finger. The General still had his son and grandson, but Manuelita had lost her daughter, she would never see her again, all because she'd brought her to this accursed tenement, she'd had to break her little Lupita's solitude, in her employer's home she'd never seen anyone, she had no reason ever to leave the ground floor, she could get around quite easily in her wheelchair. But in this building there was no escape, all the overhelpful people, all the nosy people, everyone carrying her up and down stairs, let her get some sun, let her get some air, let her get out on the street, they took her from me, they stole her from me, they'll pay for it. Doña Manuela's few remaining teeth drew blood. She must think about little Luisito. She was never going to see Lupe Lupita again.