Burnt Water (19 page)

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.

When I woke up, one night had passed and a morning and the sun was just going down. The first thing I saw was the shadows of the patio through the curtains on the door. And then I realized that she was still sitting next to the head of the bed and she asked me to eat a little and put the spoon to my lips. I tasted the stewed oats and then looked at my aunt, with her hair falling over her shoulders and smiling as if she were grateful to me for something. I let her feed me the cereal as if I were a child, spoonful by spoonful, and I told her I was better and thanked her for making me feel better. She blushed and said that at last I was finding out that they loved me in this house, too.

I was in bed about ten days. First I read a mountain of novels by Alexandre Dumas, and ever since then I've thought that novels go with bronchitis like rain goes with planting time. But the curious thing is that my aunt went out to buy them as if setting out to commit a robbery and then hid them when she brought them to me, and I just shrugged my shoulders and as fast as I could began reading that wonderful story of the man who gets out of prison by pretending to be dead and they throw him in the sea and he washes ashore on the island of Monte Cristo. But I had never read so much before and I got tired and bored and lay thinking and counting the hours by watching the lights and shadows that came and went on the walls of my room. And anyone looking at me would have thought I was very calm, but inside me things were happening that I didn't understand. The thing was that I wasn't as sure as I had been before. If earlier they'd given me the chance to choose between going back to the ranch and staying here, I would have been way ahead of them, I would have hightailed it right back to be with Grandfather. And now I didn't know. I couldn't decide. And the question kept coming back no matter how I tried to avoid it and distract myself by thinking about other things. Of course, if anyone had asked me, I know what I would have answered: I'd be on my way back to the ranch. But inside me, no. I realized that, and also that it was the first time something like that had happened to me: that what I was thinking outside was different from what I was thinking inside.

I don't know what all that had to do with my aunt. I told myself, nothing. She looked the same, but she was different. She only came in to bring me my tray herself, or to take my temperature, or to see that I took my medicines. But I watched her out of the corner of my eye and I realized that the sadder she looked, the happier she was, and the happier she looked, the closer she was to crying, or you could see something was bothering her, and when she was sitting in the rocking chair fanning herself—when it seemed she was resting, quite free from care—the more I felt there was something she wanted, and the more she busied about and talked, the more I felt she didn't want anything, that she would have liked to leave my room and close herself up in her own.

Ten days passed and I couldn't stand the sweat and dirt and the grimy hair any more. Then my aunt said I was well and I could take a bath. I jumped out of bed very happy but, oh, boy, I almost fell from the dizziness that came over me. My aunt ran to take me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. I sat down, very dizzy, while she mixed the cold water with the hot, stirred it with her fingers, and let the tub fill up. Then she asked me to get into the water and I told her to leave and she asked me why. I said I was embarrassed.

“You're just a child. Pretend I'm your mother. Or Micaela. Didn't she ever give you a bath?”

I told her yes, when I was just a kid. She said it was the same thing. She said she was almost my mother, since she had taken care of me like a son while I was sick. She came to me and began to unbutton my pajamas and to cry and say how I had filled her life, how someday she would tell me about her life. I covered myself as best I could and got into the tub and almost slipped. She soaped me. She began to rub me the way she had that night and she knew how I liked that and I let her do it while she told me I didn't know what loneliness was and repeated it over and over and then said just last Christmas I had still been a child and the water was very warm and my body felt good, soapy, and she was cleansing me of the exhaustion of my illness with caressing hands. She knew before I did when I couldn't take any more and she herself lifted me from the tub and looked at me and put her arm around my waist.

*   *   *

I've been living here for four months now. Benedicta asks me to call her “Aunt” in front of everyone else. I get a kick out of slipping down the hallway mornings and nights and yesterday the cook almost caught me. Sometimes I get very tired of it, especially when Benedicta cries and yells and kneels before her crucifix with her arms spread out wide. We never go to Mass or take Communion now. And nobody's said anything again about sending me to school. But just the same, I still miss my life with Grandfather and I have written a letter in which I ask him to come after me, that I miss the sawmill and the birds and the happy mealtimes. The only thing is, I never send it. But I do keep adding things every day, and I drop sly hints to see if he catches on. But I don't send the letter. What I don't know how to describe very well is how pretty Benedicta has become, how that stiff woman in mourning who came to the ranch has changed. I'd like to tell Micaela and Grandfather that they should see, that Bendicta knows how to be affectionate, too, and she has very smooth skin and, well, different eyes—bright and very wide—and that she's very white. The only bad part is that sometimes she moans and cries and twists so. We'll have to see whether I ever send the letter. I got scared today and even signed it, but I still haven't sealed it. Just a while ago Benedicta and my Aunt Milagros were whispering in the living room behind the bead curtain that rattles when you go in and out. And then Aunt Milagros, with her trembling eyelid, came to my room and began to stroke my hair and ask me if I wouldn't like to come stay a while in her house. I just sat there, very serious. Then I thought about everything. I don't know what to think. I added one more paragraph to the letter I'm writing to Grandfather: “Come get me, please. It seems to me there's a lot more morality at the ranch. I'll tell you about it.” And I put the letter in the envelope again. But I still can't decide whether to send it.

The Mandarin

To Graciela, Lorenza, and Patricia

I

Once Mexico City had been a city whose nights held the promise of the morning to come. Before going to bed, Federico Silva would walk out on the balcony of his house on Córdoba Street at two o'clock in the morning, when one could still smell the dampness of the earth of the coming day, breathe the perfume of the jacarandas, and feel the nearness of the volcanoes.

Dawn brought everything near, mountains and forests. Federico Silva closed his eyes in order to smell even better that unique odor of dawn in Mexico City: the sapid, green trace of the long-forgotten mud of the lake bed. To smell that odor was to smell the first morning. Only those who can perceive the nocturnal scent of the lost lake really know this city, Federico told himself.

That was a long time ago. Now his house stood only a block away from the huge sunken plaza of the Insurgentes metro station. An architect friend had compared that anarchical intersection of streets and avenues—Insurgentes, Chapultepec, Génova, Amberes, and Jalapa—to the Place de l'Étoile in Paris, and Federico Silva had had a good laugh. Actually, the Insurgentes intersection was more like a giant-sized stack of tortillas: a busy thoroughfare, at times elevated above the flat rooftops of the bordering houses, then streets blocked with cement posts and chains, then the stairways and tunnels communicating with an interior plaza jammed with seafood restaurants and taco stands, itinerant vendors, beggars, vagrant troubadours … and the students, shocking numbers of youths lolling around while shoeshine boys polished their shoes, eating sandwiches, watching the slowly drifting smog, whistling and calling veiled obscenities at passing round-breasted, round-bottomed, skinny-legged girls in miniskirts; the hip world, girls with feathers and blue eyelids and silver-smeared mouths, boys wearing leather vests over bare skin and yards of chains and necklaces. And finally, the entrance to the metro: the mouth of hell.

They had destroyed his morning-scented nights. The air in his neighborhood became unbreathable, the streets impassable. Under Federico Silva's nose—between the wretched luxury of the Zona Rosa, a gigantic village's pitiable cosmopolitan stage set, and the desperate, though useless, attempt at residential grace in the Colonia Roma—they had dug an infernal, unsalvageable trench, a river Styx of gasoline vapors circulating above the human whirlpool of the plaza, hundreds of young men whistling and watching the smog drift by, sweating, loafing, sitting in the filthy saucer of the sunken cement plaza. The saucer of a cup of cold, greasy, spilled chocolate.

“Infamous!” he exclaimed impotently. “To think that this was once a pretty, pastel-colored small town; you could walk from the Zócalo to Chapultepec Park and have everything you needed, government and entertainment, friendship and love.”

This was one of the standard tunes of this elderly bachelor clinging to forgotten things that no longer interested anyone but him. His friends Perico and the Marqués told him not to be so pigheaded. It was one thing, as long as his mother had been alive (and God knows she took her time in going), to respect the family tradition and keep the house on Córdoba Street. But what was to be gained now? He'd had stupendous offers to sell; the market would top out; he ought to take advantage of the moment. He should know that better than anyone; he was a landlord himself, that was his living: real estate.

Then they'd tried to force his hand by constructing tall buildings on either side of his property; modern, they called them, although Federico Silva insisted that one can call modern only that which is built to last, not what's slapped together to begin to disintegrate in two years' time and fall down in ten. He felt ashamed that a country of churches and pyramids built for eternity should end up contenting itself with a city of shanties, shoddiness, and shit.

They boxed him in, they stifled him, they blocked out his sun and air, his view and his odors. And, in exchange, they gave him a double helping of noise. His house, innocently imprisoned between two cement-and-glass towers, began to tilt and crack under the excessive pressure. One afternoon, while he was getting dressed to go out, he watched a dropped coin roll until it came to rest against a wall. Once in this same bedroom he'd played with his toy soldiers, marshaled historic battles, Austerlitz, Waterloo, even a Trafalgar in his bathtub. Now he couldn't fill the tub because the water spilled over one edge.

“It's like living in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but without the prestige. Just yesterday plaster fell on my head as I was shaving, and the whole bathroom wall is cracked. When will they learn that the spongy soil of our ancient lake bed cannot support the insult of skyscrapers!”

It wasn't a truly old house, but the kind of mansion of supposed French inspiration that was popular at the beginning of the century, and no longer built after the twenties. Actually, it more closely resembled a Spanish or Italian villa, with its flat roof, capricious stone designs on pale stucco, and grand entrance stairway leading to a foyer elevated above the dampness of the subsoil.

And the garden, a shady, moist garden, solace against the burning mornings of the high plateau; during the night a natural collector of the perfumes of the morning to come. What luxury: two large palm trees, a small gravel path, a sundial, an iron bench painted green, burbling water channeled toward beds of violets. With what animosity he regarded the ridiculous thick green glass with which the new buildings tried to defend themselves against the age-old Mexican sun. How much wiser the Spanish conquistadors, who had understood the importance of convent shadow and cool patios. Of course he would defend all this against the aggression of a city that first had been his friend and now had become his most ferocious enemy! The enemy of Federico Silva, known to his friends as the Mandarin.

His features were so markedly Oriental that they obscured the Indian mask underlying them. It happens with a lot of Mexican faces. The stigmas and accidents of known history recede to reveal the primal face, the face that goes back to Mongolian tundra and mountains. In this way Federico Silva was like the lost perfume of the ancient lake of Mexico: a sensitive memory, practically a ghost.

The hair of the man who wore this immutable mask was still so black it looked dyed. But because of the changes in the national diet he lacked the strong, white, enduring teeth of his ancestors. Black hair, in spite of the changes. But the essential benefits of chili peppers, beans, and tortillas, which contain sufficient calcium and vitamins to make up for a limited diet, were no longer present in the bodies of those generations that had forsaken them. Now in that wretched cup-shaped plaza he watched the young people eating junk—carbonated drinks and synthetic caramels and potato chips in cellophane bags, the garbage food of the North added to the leper food of the South: the trichina, the amoeba, the omnipotent microbe in every slice of pork, tamarind-flavored soft drink, and wilting radish.