Burnt Water (22 page)

Among Federico Silva's papers was a letter addressed to Doña María de los Angeles Valle, widow of Negrete. The executor delivered it to her, and before reading it the elderly lady reflected a moment about her friend, and her eyes filled with tears. Dead barely a week, and now this letter, written when?

She opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was undated, though it bore a place of origin: Palermo, Sicily. Federico wrote of a series of slight earthquakes that had taken place recently. The experts were forecasting a major earthquake, the worst in the island since the devastating quake of 1964. He, Federico, had a premonition that his life would end here. He had ignored the evacuation orders. His situation was unique: a desire for suicide annulled by a natural catastrophe. He was closed in his hotel room, watching the Sicilian sea, the “foamy” Sicilian sea, Góngora had called it, and how fine, how appropriate, to die in such a beautiful place, so removed from ugliness, lack of respect, and mutilation of the past … everything he most despised in life.

“Dear Friend. Do you remember the blond girl who caused the commotion in the Negresco? You may believe, and with some justification, that I am so simpleminded, that my life has been so monotonous, that I have lived that life under the spell of a beautiful woman who did not wish to be mine. I am aware of the way that you, Perico, the Marqués, and all my other friends avoid that subject. Poor Federico. His one adventure ended in frustration. He grew old alongside a tyrant of a mother. And now he's dead.

“You will be correct insofar as the heart of the matter is concerned, but the outward appearances were not what they seemed. I have never told anyone this. When I begged that girl to stay, to spend the night with me in my room, she refused. She said, ‘No, not if you were the last man on earth.' Those excruciating words—can you believe it?—saved me. I told myself that no one is the last man in love, only in death. Only death can say to us, ‘You are the last.' Nothing, no one else, María de los Angeles.

“That sentence might have humiliated me but it did not intimidate me. I admit that I was afraid to marry. I felt a horror that I might prolong in my children what my mother had imposed upon me. You should know what I mean; our upbringing was very similar. I could not educate badly children I never had. You did. Forgive my frankness. The situation, I believe, authorizes it. Never mind; call my reluctance what you will—religious fear, ordinary avarice, sterile upbringing.

“Naturally, you pay for this cowardice when your parents have died and as is my case, you have no offspring. You have lost forever the opportunity to give your children something better, or at least something different from what your parents gave you. I don't know. What I do know is that you run the risk of dissatisfaction and error, whatever you do. At times, if you're a Catholic, as I am, and you find yourself forced to take a young girl to the doctor for an operation, or, even worse, you send by your servant the money for her abortion, you feel you have sinned. Those children one never had: did you spare them from coming into an ugly, cruel world? Or, quite the opposite, would they throw in your face that you never offered them the risks of life? Would they call you a murderer? A coward? I do not know.

“I fear that this less than forceful image of myself is the one each of you will remember. That is why I'm writing to you now, before I die. I had one love in my life, only one. You. The love I felt for you at fifteen lasted to the time of my death. I can tell you now. In you I centered the excuse for my bachelorhood and the needs of my love. I am not sure that you will understand. You were the only person I could love without betraying all the other aspects of my life and its demands. Being what I was, I had to love you as I did: faithfully, silently, nostalgically. But I was as I was because I loved you: solitary, distant, barely humanized, perhaps, by a certain sense of humor.

“I don't know whether I've made myself clear, or even whether I myself truly understood myself. We all think we know ourselves. Nothing is further from the truth. Think of me, remember me. And tell me whether you can explain to me what I am about to tell you. It may be the only puzzle of my life, and I will die without solving it. Every night before I go to bed I walk out on my bedroom balcony to take the air. I try to breathe the presages of the following morning. I had learned to identify the odors of the lost lake of a city equally lost. With the years it has become increasingly difficult.

“But that was not the real motive for my moments on the balcony. Sometimes, standing there, I begin to tremble, and I fear that once again the hour, the temperature, the eternal threat of storm—if only a dust storm—that hovers over Mexico City have made me react viscerally, like an animal, tamed in this clime, free in another, savage in some distant latitude. I fear, too, that with the darkness or the lightning, the rain or the dust storm, the ghost of the animal I might have been will return—or the son I never had. I carried a beast in my guts, María de los Angeles. Can you believe it?”

The elderly woman wept as she returned the letter to its envelope. She paused for an instant, horrified, remembering the story about the guillotine that Federico liked to tell on Saturdays to frighten her. No. She'd refused to view the body with its neck slit from ear to ear by a straightedge razor. Her morbid friends Perico and the Marqués had not been so fastidious.

The Cost of Living

To Fernando Benitez

Salvador Rentería arose very early. He ran across the roof terrace. He did not light the water heater but simply removed his shorts. The needling drops felt good to him. He rubbed himself with a towel and returned to the room. From the bed Ana asked him whether he wanted any breakfast. Salvador said he'd get a cup of coffee somewhere. The woman had been two weeks in bed and her gingerbread-colored face had grown thin. She asked Salvador whether there was a message from the office, and he placed a cigarette between his lips and said that they wanted her to come in person to sign.

Ana sighed and said: “How do they expect me to do that?”

“I told them you couldn't right now, but you know how they are.”

“What did the doctor tell you?”

He threw the unsmoked cigarette through the broken pane in the window and ran his fingers over his mustache and his temples. Ana smiled and leaned back against the tin bedstead. Salvador sat beside her and took her hand and told her not to worry, that soon she would be able to go back to work. They sat in silence, staring at the wooden wardrobe, the large box that held tools and provisions, the electric oven, the washstand, the piles of old newspapers. Salvador kissed his wife's hand and went out of the room to the terrace. He went down the service stairs and then crossed through the patios on the ground floor, smelling the medley of cooking odors from the other rooms in the rooming house. He picked his way among skates and dogs and went out into the street. He entered a store that occupied what had formerly been the garage to the house, and the elderly shopkeeper told him that
Life en Español
hadn't arrived yet, and he continued to move from stand to stand, unlocking padlocks.

He pointed to a stand filled with comic books and said: “Maybe you should take another magazine for your wife. People get bored stuck in bed.”

Salvador left. In the street a gang of kids were shooting off cap pistols, and behind them a man was driving some goats from pasture. Salvador ordered a liter of milk from him and told him to take it up to number 12. He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked backward, almost trotting, so as not to miss the bus. He jumped onto the moving bus and searched for thirty centavos in his jacket pocket, then sat down to watch the cypresses, houses, iron grilles, and dusty streets of San Francisco Xocotitla pass by. The bus ran alongside the train tracks and across the bridge at Nonoalco. Steam was rising from the rails. From his wooden seat, Salvador saw the provision-laden trucks coming into the city. At Manuel Gonzalez, an inspector got on to tear the tickets in half, and Salvador got off at the next corner.

He walked to his father's house by way of Vallejo. He crossed the small patch of dry grass and opened the door. Clemencia said hello and Salvador asked whether his old man was up and around yet, and Pedro Rentería stuck his head around the curtain that separated the bedroom from the tiny living room and said: “What an early bird! Wait for me. I just got up.”

Salvador ran his hands over the backs of the chairs. Clemencia was dusting the rough pine table and then took a cloth and pottery plates from the glass-front cupboard. She asked how Anita was and adjusted her bosom beneath the flowered robe.

“A little better.”

“She must need someone to look after her. If only she didn't act so uppity…”

They exchanged glances and then Salvador looked at the walls stained by water that had run down from the roof. He pushed aside the curtain and went into the messy bedroom. His father was cleaning the soap from his face. Salvador put an arm around his father's shoulders and kissed him on the forehead. Pedro pinched his stomach. They looked at each other in the mirror. They looked alike, but the father was more bald and curly-haired, and he asked what Salvador was doing out and about at this hour, and Salvador said he couldn't come later, that Ana was very sick and wasn't going to be able to work all month and that they needed money. Pedro shrugged his shoulders and Salvador said he wasn't going to ask for money.

“What I thought was that you might be able to talk to your boss; he might have something for me. Some kind of work.”

“Well, yes, maybe so. Help me with these suspenders.”

“It's just … well, look, I'm not going to be able to make it this month.”

“Don't worry. Something will come along. Let me see if I can think of something.”

Pedro belted his pants and picked up the chauffeur's cap from the night table. He embraced Salvador and led him to the table. He sniffed the aroma of the eggs Clemencia set before them in the center of the table.

“Help yourself, Chava, son. I'd sure like to help you. But, you know, Clemencia and I live pretty close to the bone, even if I do get my lunch and supper at the boss's house. If it wasn't for that … I was born poor and I'll die poor. Now, you've got to realize that if I begin asking personal favors, Don José being as tough as he is, then I'll have to pay them back somehow, and so long raise. Believe me, Chava, I need to get that two hundred and fifty out of him every payday.”

He prepared a mouthful of tortilla and hot sauce and lowered his voice.

“I know how much you respect your mother, and I, well, it goes without saying … But this business of keeping two houses going when we could all live together and save one rent … Okay, I didn't say a word. But now, tell me, why aren't you living with your in-laws?”

“You know what Doña Concha's like. At me all day about how Ana was born for this and Ana was born for that. You know that's why we moved out.”

“So, if you want your independence, you'll have to work your way. Don't worry. I'll think of something.”

Clemencia wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron and sat down between father and son.

“Where are the kids?” she asked.

“With Ana's parents,” Salvador replied. “They're going to stay there awhile, while she's getting better.”

Pedro said he had to take his boss to Acapulco. “If you need anything, come to Clemencia. I've got it! Go see Juan Olmedo. He's an old buddy of mine and he has a fleet of taxis. I'll call him and tell him you're coming.”

Salvador kissed his father's hand and left.

*   *   *

Salvador opened the frosted-glass door and entered a reception room in which a secretary and an accountant were sitting in a room with steel furniture, a typewriter, and an adding machine. He told the secretary who he was and she went into Señor Olmedo's private office and then asked him to come in. Olmedo was a very small, thin man; they sat down in leather chairs facing a low, glass-topped table with photographs of banquets and ceremonies beneath the glass. Salvador told Olmedo he needed work to augment his teacher's salary and Olmedo began to leaf through some large black notebooks.

“You're in luck,” he said, scratching his sharp-pointed, hair-filled ear. “There's a very good shift here from seven to twelve at night. There are lots of guys after this job, because I protect my men.” He slammed the big book shut. “But since you're the son of my old friend Pedrito, well, I'm going to give it to you. You can begin today. If you work hard, you can get up to twenty pesos a day.”

For a few seconds, Salvador heard only the
tac-tac-tac
of the adding machine and the rumble of cars along 20 de Noviembre Avenue. Olmedo said he had to go out and asked Salvador to come with him. They descended in the elevator without speaking, and when they reached the street, Olmedo warned him that he must start the meter every time a passenger stopped to do an errand, because there was always some knothead who would carry his passenger all over Mexico City on one fare. He took him by the elbow and they went into the Department of the Federal District and up the stairs and Olmedo continued, telling him not to let just anyone get in.

“A stop here, a stop there, and the first thing you know you've gone clear from the Villa to Pedregal on a fare of one-fifty. Make them pay each time!”

Olmedo offered some gumdrops to a secretary and asked her to show him into the boss's office. The secretary thanked him for the candy and went into the boss's private office and Olmedo joked with the other employees and invited them to have a few beers on Saturday and a game of dominoes.

Salvador shook hands with Olmedo and thanked him, and Olmedo said: “Is your license in order? I don't want any trouble with Transit. You show up this evening, before seven. Ask for Toribio, he's in charge of dispatch. He'll tell you which car is yours. Remember! None of those one-peso stops; they chew up your doors. And none of that business of several stops on one fare. The minute the passenger steps out of the car, even to spit, you ring it up again. Say hello to your old man.”