Burnt Water (23 page)

*   *   *

He looked at the Cathedral clock. It was eleven. He walked awhile along Merced and amused himself looking at the crates filled with tomatoes, oranges, squash. He sat down to smoke in the plaza, near some porters who were drinking beer and looking through the sports pages. After a time he was bored and walked toward San Juan de Letrán. A girl was walking ahead of him. A package fell from her arms and Salvador hurried to pick it up, and the girl smiled at him and thanked him.

Salvador pressed her arm and said: “Shall we have a lemonade?”

“Excuse me, señor, I'm not in the habit…”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be fresh.”

The girl continued walking ahead of him with short hurried steps. She waggled her hips beneath a white skirt. She looked in the shop windows out of the corner of her eyes. Salvador followed her at a distance. Then she stopped at an ice-cream cart and asked for a strawberry ice and Salvador stepped forward to pay and she smiled and thanked him. They went into a soft-drink stand and sat on a bench and ordered two apple juices. She asked him what he did and he asked her to guess and began to shadowbox and she said he must be a boxer and he laughed and told her he'd trained as a boy in the City Leagues but that actually he was a teacher. She told him she worked in the box office of a movie theater. She moved her arm and turned over the bottle of juice and they both laughed a lot.

They took a bus together. They did not speak. He took her hand and they got off across from Chapultepec Park. Automobiles were moving slowly through the streets in the park. There were many convertibles filled with young people. Many women passed by, dragging, embracing, or propelling children. The children were licking ice-cream sticks and clouds of cotton candy. They listened to the whistles of the balloon salesman and the music of a band in the bandstand. The girl told him she liked to guess the occupations of the people walking in Chapultepec. She laughed and pointed: black jacket or open-necked shirts, leather shoes or sandals, cotton skirt or sequined blouse, striped jersey, patent-leather heels: she said they were a carpenter, an electrician, a clerk, a tax assessor, a teacher, a servant, a huckster. They arrived at the lake and rented a boat. Salvador took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The girl trailed her fingers in the water and closed her eyes. Salvador quietly whistled a few melodies as he rowed. He stopped and touched the girl's knee. She opened her eyes and rearranged her skirt. They returned to the dock and she said she had to go home to eat. They made a date to see each other the next evening at eleven, when the ticket booth closed.

*   *   *

He went into Kiko's and looked for his friends among the linoleum-topped, tubular-legged tables. He saw from a distance the blind man, Macario, and went to sit with him. Macario asked him to put a coin in the jukebox, and after a while Alfredo arrived and they ordered chicken tacos with guacamole, and beer, and listened to the song that was playing: “Ungrateful woman, she went away and left me, must have been for someone more a man than me.” They did what they always did: recalled their adolescence and talked about Rosa and Remedios, the prettiest girls in the neighborhood. Macario urged them on. Alfredo said that the young kids today were really tough, carrying knives and all that. Not them. When you looked back on everything, they had really been pretty dumb. He remembered when the gang from the Poly challenged them to a game of soccer just to be able to kick them around and the whole thing ended in a scrap there on the empty lot on Mirto Street, and Macario had shown up with a baseball bat and the guys from Poly were knocked for a loop when they saw how the blind man clobbered them with a baseball bat. Macario said that was when everyone had accepted him as a buddy, and Salvador said that more than anything else it had been because of those faces he made, turning his eyes back in his head and pulling his ears back; it was enough to bust you up laughing. Macario said the one dying of laughter was him, because ever since he'd been ten years old his daddy had told him not to worry, that he'd never have to work, that the soap factory was finally going well, so Macario had devoted himself to cultivating his physique to be able to defend himself. He said that the radio had been his school and he'd gotten his jokes and his imitations from it. Then they recalled their buddy Raimundo and fell silent for a while and ordered more beer and Salvador looked toward the street and said that he and Raimundo always walked home together at night during exam time, and on the way back to their houses Raimundo asked him to explain algebra to him and then they stopped for a moment on the corner of Sullivan and Ramón Guzmán before going their own ways, and Raimundo would say: “You know something? I'm scared to go past this block. Here where our neighborhood ends. Farther on, I don't know what's going on. You're my buddy and that's why I'm telling you. I swear, I'm scared to go past this block.”

And Alfredo recalled how when he graduated his family had given him an old car and they had all gone on a great celebration, making the rounds of the cheap nightclubs in the city. They had been very drunk and Raimundo said that Alfredo didn't know how to drive and began to struggle to take the wheel from Alfredo and the car had almost turned over at a traffic island on the Reforma and Raimundo said he was going to throw up, and the door flew open and Raimundo fell to the street and broke his neck.

They paid their bill and said goodbye.

He taught his three afternoon classes, and when he finished his fingers were stained with chalk from drawing the map of the republic on the blackboard. When the session was over and the children had left, he walked among the desks and sat down at the last bench. The single light bulb hung from a long cord. He sat and looked at the areas of color indicating mountains, tropical watersheds, deserts, and the plateau. He never had been a good draftsman: Yucatán was too big, Baja California too short. The classroom smelled of sawdust and leather bookbags. Cristobal, the fifth-grade teacher, looked in the door and said: “What's new?”

Salvador walked toward the blackboard and erased the map with a damp rag. Cristobal took out a package of cigarettes and they smoked, and the floor creaked as they fitted the pieces of chalk in their box. They sat down to wait, and after a while the other teachers came in and then the director, Durán.

The director sat on the lecture platform chair and the rest of them sat at the desks and the director looked at them with his black eyes and they all looked at him, the dark face and the blue shirt and maroon tie. The director said that no one was dying of hunger and that everyone was having a hard time and the teachers became angry and one said that he punched tickets on a bus after teaching two sessions and another said that he worked every night in a sandwich shop on Santa María la Redonda and another that he had set up a little shop with his savings and he had only come for reasons of solidarity. Durán told them they were going to lose their seniority, their pensions, and, if it came to that, their jobs, and asked them not to leave themselves unprotected. Everyone rose and they all left, and Salvador saw that it was already six-thirty and he ran out to the street, cut across through the traffic, and hopped on a bus.

He got off in the Zócalo and walked to Olmedo's office. Toribio told him that the car he was going to drive would be turned in at seven, and to wait awhile. Salvador closed himself in the dispatch booth and opened a map of the city. He studied it, then folded it and corrected his arithmetic notebooks.

“Which is better? To cruise around the center of the city or a little farther out?” he asked Toribio.

“Well, away from the center you can go faster, but you also burn more gasoline. Remember,
you
pay for the gas.”

Salvador laughed. “Maybe I'll pick up a gringo at one of the hotels, a big tipper.”

“Here comes your car,” Toribio said to him from the booth.

“Are you the new guy?” yelled the flabby driver manning the cab. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a rag and got out of the car. “Here she is. Ease her into first or sometimes she jams. Close the doors yourself or they'll knock the shit out of 'em. Here she is, she's all yours.”

Salvador sat facing the office and placed the notebooks in the door pocket. He passed the rag over the greasy steering wheel. The seat was still warm. He got out and ran the rag over the windshield. He got in again and arranged the mirror to his eye level. He drove off. He raised the flag. His hands were sweating. He took 20 de Noviembre Street. A man immediately stopped him and ordered him to take him to the Cosmos Theater.

The man got out in front of the theater and his friend Cristobal looked into the side window and said: “What a surprise.” Salvador asked him what he was doing and Cristobal said he was going to Flores Carranza's printing shop on Ribera de San Cosme and Salvador offered to take him; Cristobal got into the taxi but said that it wasn't to be a free ride for a buddy: he would pay. Salvador laughed and said that's all he needed. They talked about boxing and made a date to go to the Arena Mexico on Friday. Salvador told him about the girl he'd met that morning. Cristobal began talking about the fifth-grade students and they arrived at the printing plant, and Salvador parked and they got out. They entered through a narrow door and continued along a dark corridor. The printing office was in the rear and Señor Flores Carranza greeted them and Cristobal asked whether the broadsides were ready. The printer removed his visor and nodded and showed him the broadsides with red-and-black letters calling for a strike. The employees handed over the four packages. Salvador took two bundles and started ahead while Cristobal was paying the bill.

He walked down the long, dark corridor. In the distance, he heard the noise of automobiles along Ribera de San Cosme. Halfway along the corridor he felt a hand on his shoulder and someone said: “Take it easy, take it easy.”

“Sorry,” Salvador said. “It's very dark here.”

“Dark? It's going to get black.”

The man stuck a cigarette between his lips and smiled, but Salvador only said: “Excuse me.” But the hand fell again on his shoulder and the fellow said he must be the only teacher who didn't know who
he
was, and Salvador began to get angry and said he was in a hurry and the fellow said: “The S.O.B., you know? That's me!”

Salvador saw that four cigarettes had been lighted at the mouth of the corridor, at the entrance to the building, and he hugged the bundles to his chest and looked behind him and another cigarette glowed before the entrance to the print shop.

“King S.O.B., the biggest fucking sonofabitch of 'em all, that's me. Don't tell me you never heard of
me!
” Salvador's eyes were becoming adjusted to the darkness and he could now see the man's hat and the hand taking one of the bundles.

“That's enough introduction, now. Give me the posters, teacher.”

Salvador dislodged the hand and stepped back a few paces. The cigarette from the rear advanced. A humid current filtered down the corridor at the height of his calves. Salvador looked around.

“Let me by.”

“Let's have those flyers.”

“Those flyers are going with me, buddy.”

He felt the burning tip of the cigarette behind him close to his neck. Then he heard Cristobal's cry. He threw one package, and with his free arm smashed at the man's face. He felt the squashed cigarette and its burning point on his fist. And then he saw the red saliva-stained face coming closer. Salvador whirled with his fists closed and he saw the knife and then felt it in his stomach.

The man slowly withdrew the knife and snapped his fingers, and Salvador fell with his mouth open.

The Son of Andrés Aparicio

To the memory of Pablo Neruda

T
HE
P
LACE

It had no name and so it didn't exist as a place. Other districts on the outskirts of Mexico City had names. Not this one. As if by oversight. As if a child had grown up without being baptized. Or worse: without even being given a name. It was as if by general agreement. Why name such a barrio? Perhaps someone had said, not really thinking, that no one would stay here very long. It was a temporary place, like the cardboard and corrugated tin shacks. Wind sifted through the badly fitting fiber walls; the sun camped on the tin roofs. Those were the true residents of the place. People came here confused, half dazed, not knowing why, maybe because this was better than nothing, because this flat landscape of scrub and pigweed and greasewood was the next frontier, one that came after the most recent place, a place that had a name. Here no name, no sewers, and the only light was an occasional light bulb where someone had tapped into the city power lines. No one had named the place because everyone pretended they were there temporarily. No one built on his own land. They were squatters, and though no one ever said it, they'd agreed among themselves that they wouldn't offer resistance to whoever came to run them off. They'd simply move on to the next frontier of the city. At least the time they spent here without paying rent would be time gained, time to catch their breath. Many of them had come from more comfortable districts with names like San Rafael, Balbuena, Canal del Norte, even Netzahualcóytl, where already two million people were living, want to or not, with its cement church and a supermarket or two. They came because not even in those lost cities could they make ends meet, but they refused to give up the last vestiges of decency, refused to go the way of the scavengers who picked over the dump or the paupers who sold stolen sand from Las Lomas. Bernabé had an idea. That this place had no name because it was like the huge sprawling city itself, that here they had everything that was bad about the city but maybe the best too, he wanted to say, and that's why it couldn't have a name of its own. But he couldn't say it, because words always came so hard to him. His mother still had a treasured old mirror and often gazed at herself in it. Ask her, Bernabé, whether she sees the place, the lost city with its scabrous winter crust, its spring dust devils, and in the summer the quagmires inevitably blending with the streams of excrement that run the entire year seeking an exit they never find. Where does the water come from, Mama? Where does all the shit go, Papa? Bernabé learned to breathe more slowly so he could swallow the black air trapped beneath the cold clouds, imprisoned within the encircling mountains. A defeated air that barely managed to drag itself to its feet and stagger across the plain, seeking mouths to enter. He never told anyone his idea because he couldn't get the words out. Every single one was locked inside him. Words were hard for him because nothing his mother said ever had any relation to reality, because his uncles laughed and whooped it up as if they felt an obligation to enjoy themselves once a week before returning to the bank and the gasoline station, but especially because he couldn't remember his father's voice. They'd been living here eleven years. No one had bothered them, no one had run them off. They hadn't had to offer resistance to anyone. Even the old blind man who'd serenaded the power lines had died, he'd strummed his guitar and sung the old ballad,
Oh, splendid, luminous electricity
 … Why, Bernabé? Uncle Rosendo said it was a bad joke. They'd come temporarily and stayed eleven years. And if they'd been there eleven years they'd be there forever.