Burnt Water (24 page)

“Your papa's the only one who got out in time, Bernabé.”

T
HE
F
ATHER

Everyone remembered his suspenders. He always wore them, as if his salvation depended on them. They said he hung on to life by his suspenders, and oh, if only he'd been more like them he might have lasted a little longer. They watched his clothes get old and worn, but not his suspenders; they were always new, with shiny gilded clasps. The old people who still used such words said that like his gentility the suspenders were proverbial. No, his Uncle Richi told him, stubborn as an old mule and fooling himself, that was your father. At school Bernabé had to fight a big bully who asked him about his papa, and when Bernabé said he'd died, the bully laughed and said, That's what they all say, everyone knows no papa never dies, no, what happened was that your papa left you or worse never even said you were his, he laid your mama and ran off on her before you were even born. Stubborn but a good man, Uncle Rosendo said, do you remember? when he wasn't smiling he looked old and so he smiled the livelong day though he never had any reason to, oh, what a laugher Amparito's husband, laughing, always laughing, with nothing to laugh about, and all that bitterness inside because they'd sent him, a young agriculture student, a green kid, to be in charge of a co-op in a village in the state of Guerrero, just after he'd married your mama, Bernabé. When he got there he found the place burned out, many of the members of the co-op had been murdered and their crops stolen by the local political boss and the shippers. Your father wanted to file claims, he swore he was going to take it to the authorities in Mexico City and to the Supreme Court, what didn't he say, what didn't he promise, what didn't he intend to do? It was his first job and he went down there breathing fire. Well, what happened was that they no more than caught wind of the fact that outsiders were going to poke in and try to right all the injustices and crimes than they banded together, the victims the same as the criminals, to deny your father's charges and lay it all on him. Meddling outsider, come from Mexico City with his head filled with ideas about justice, the road to hell was paved by men like him, what all they didn't call him. They were bound together by years of quarrels and rivalries and by their dead. After all, time would work things out. Justice was rooted in families, in their honor and pride, and not in some butt-in agronomist. When the federal officials came, even the brothers and widows of the murdered blamed your papa. They laughed: let the government officials fight it out with the government agronomist. He never recovered from that defeat, you know. In the bureaucracy they were suspicious of him because he was an idealist and incompetent to boot, and he never got ahead there. Quite the opposite, he got stuck in a piddling desk job with no promotions and no raises and with his debts piling up, all because something had broken inside, a little flame had gone out in his heart is the way he told it, but he kept on smiling, hooking his thumbs in those suspenders. Who asked him to poke his nose in? Justice doesn't make good bedfellows with love, he used to say, those people loved one another even though they'd been wronged, their love was stronger than my promise of justice. It was as if you offered them a marble statue of a beautiful Greek goddess when they already had their ugly but oh, so warm and loving dark-skinned woman warming their covers. Why come to him? Your father Andrés Aparicio, smiling all the time, never forgot those mountains to the south and a lost village with no highway or telephone, where time was measured by the stars and news was transmitted only through memory and the one sure thing was that everyone would be buried in the same parcel of land guarded over by rose-colored angels and the withered yellow blossoms of the
cempazuchiles,
the flower of the dead, and they knew it. That village banded together and defeated him, you see, because passion unites more than justice, and what about you, Bernabé, who beat you up? where did you get that split lip and black eye? But Bernabé wasn't going to tell his uncles what he'd said to the big bully at school, or how they'd waded into each other because Bernabé hadn't known how to explain to the bully who his father Andrés Aparicio was, the words just wouldn't come and for the first time he knew vaguely, even though he didn't want to think about it too much, that if you weren't able to come up with words then you'd better be able to fight. But, oh, how he wished he could have told that sonofabitching bully that his father had died because it was the only dignified thing left to do, because a dead man has a kind of power over the living, even if he's a godforsaken corpse. Shit, you have to respect a dead man, don't you?

T
HE
M
OTHER

She struggled to keep her speech refined, her at once sentimental and cold, dreamy and unyielding character might have been molded in her manner of speech, as if to make credible the language that no one spoke any longer in this lost barrio. Only a few old people, the ones who'd spoken of the proverbial gentility of her husband Andrés Aparicio, called on her, and she insisted on setting a proper table with a tablecloth and knives and forks and spoons, demanding that no one begin until everyone was served and that no one leave the table until she the wife, the señora, the lady of the house, rose to leave. She always said “please” when she asked for something and reminded others to do the same. She was always hospitable and made her guests welcome, when there had been guests still, and birthdays and saint's days and Christmas and even a crèche with pilgrims and candles and a piñata. But that was when her husband Andrés Aparicio was living and bringing home a salary from the Department of Agriculture. Now, without a pension, she couldn't manage, now only the old people came and chatted with her, using words like meticulous and punctual, with your permission and allow me, courtesy and thoughtlessness. But the old people were dying out. They'd come in huge enormous groups, three and sometimes four generations strung together like beads on a necklace, but in fewer than ten years all you saw were young people and children and looking for old people who spoke genteelly was like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. What would she have to say if all her old friends kept dying, she thought, gazing at herself in the baroque mirror she'd inherited from her mother when they all still lived on República de Guatemala before the rent freeze had been lifted and their landlord, Don Federico Silva, had mercilessly raised their rent. She hadn't believed his message, that his mother insisted, that Doña Felícitas was tyrannical and greedy, because later their neighbor Doña Lourdes told them that Señor Silva's mother had died and still he didn't lower the rents, what did you expect? When Bernabé was old enough to think for himself, he tried to associate his mother's manners, the delicacy of the way she spoke in public, with tenderness, but he couldn't. The only times she became sentimental was when she spoke about poverty or about his father; but she was never more cold than when she spoke about those same subjects. Bernabé didn't know what his mother's theatrics meant but he did know that what she seemed to be saying had nothing to do with him, as if there were a great chasm between her acts and her words, don't ever forget Bernabé that you're well brought up, try not to mix with those ruffians at school, stay away from them, remember that you have a treasure beyond price, good family and good upbringing. Only twice did he remember his mother Amparo acting differently. Once when for the first time she heard Bernabé shout, You motherfucker, at another child in the street and when her son came into their hovel she collapsed against her dressing table, pressed her hands to her temples, and dropped the mirror to the floor, saying, Bernabé, I haven't given you what I wanted for you, you deserved better, look how you've had to grow up and where you've had to live, it isn't right, Bernabé. But the mirror didn't break. Bernabé never asked her what she meant. He knew that every time she sat before her dressing table with the mirror in her hand and cast sidelong glances at herself, stroking her chin, silently tracing the line of an eyebrow with a finger, erasing the tears of time from her eyes with the palm of her hand, his mother would speak, and this was more important to him than what she said, because for Bernabé speech was something miraculous, it took more courage to speak than to take a beating, because physical combat was merely a substitute for words. The day he came home after his fight with the bully at school he didn't know whether his mother was talking to herself or whether she knew he was creeping around behind one of the coarse cotton curtains the uncles had hung to mark off the rooms of the house that little by little every Sunday they were improving, replacing cardboard with adobe and adobe with brick until the place had a certain air of respectability, like the house they had when their father was the aide-de-camp to General Vicente Vergara, the famous the legendary Old General Iron Balls who often invited them to breakfast on the anniversary of the Revolution, on a cold morning toward the end of November. Not any longer; Amparito was right, the old people were dying off and all the young had sad faces. Not Andrés Aparicio, no, he was always smiling so he wouldn't look old. His proverbial gentility. He stopped smiling only once. A man from the barrio said something nasty to him and your father kicked him to death, Bernabé. We never saw him again. Oh, my child, look what they've done to you, Doña Amparo said finally, my poor child, my son, look how you've had to fight, and she stopped looking at herself in the mirror to look at her son my little sweetheart my dearest oh why do they pick on you my little saint and the mirror fell to the new brick floor and this time it shattered. Bernabé stared at her, unsurprised by the tenderness she so infrequently displayed. She looked at him as if she understood that he understood that he shouldn't be surprised by something he always deserved or that Doña Amparo's tenderness was as temporary as the lost city where they'd lived the last eleven years without anyone coming with an eviction notice, a fact that so encouraged the uncles that they were replacing cardboard with adobe and adobe with brick. The boy asked his mother whether his father was really dead. She told him that she never dreamed about him. She answered with precision, letting him know that the cold and calculating side of her nature had not been overcome by tenderness. As long as she didn't dream about her dead husband, she didn't have to accept his death, she told him. That made all the difference, she let herself go, she wanted to be lucid and emotional at the same time, come give me a hug, Bernabé I love you, my little doll, listen carefully to what I say. Don't ever kill anyone for money. Never kill unless you know what you're doing. But if you do kill someone, do it with reason, with passion. It will make you clean and strong. Never kill anyone, my son, unless you buy a little life for yourself, my precious.

T
HE
U
NCLES

They were his mother's brothers and she called them the boys, though they were between thirty-eight and fifty years old. Uncle Rosendo was the oldest and he worked in a bank counting the old bank notes that were returned to the government to be burned. Romano and Richi, the youngest, worked in a gasoline station, but they looked older than Rosendo, because he spent most of the day on his feet and although they moved around a lot waiting on customers, lubricating cars, and cleaning windshields, they passed their time swilling soft drinks that swelled up their bellies. During all the spare time in the station located in a cloud of dust in the barrio of Ixtapalpa where you couldn't see anything clearly, not people not houses nothing but grimy cars and the hands of people paying, Romano drank Pepsis and read the sports pages while Richi played the flute, coaxing beautiful warm sounds from it and sipping from time to time on his Pepsi. They drank beer only on Sundays, before and after they went out to the barren field with their pistols to shoot rabbits and toads behind the shacks. They spent every Sunday this way, and Bernabé sitting on a pile of broken roof tiles watched from the back of the house. They laughed with a kind of slobbering glee, wiping their mustaches on their sleeves after every draught of beer, elbowing one another, howling like coyotes if they got a rabbit bigger than the rest. Then he watched them hug each other, clap each other on the back, and return dragging the bloody rabbits by the ears and Richi with a dead toad in each hand. While Amparo fanned the charcoal brazier and served them ears of corn sprinkled with chili pepper and rice cooked with tomatoes the brothers argued because Richi said that he was getting on toward forty and didn't want to die a big-bellied bastard, Amparito should forgive him, in some gas station even if it did belong to Licenciado Tín Vergara who did them the favor because the old General had ordered it and in a cabaret on San Juan de Letrán they were going to audition him to play flute in their dance band. Rosendo angrily picked up an ear of corn and Bernabé looked at his fingers leprous from counting all those filthy bank notes. He said that playing the flute was a queer's job, Amparito should forgive him, and Richi replied if he was so macho why hadn't he ever married and Romano rapped Richi's head half affectionately and half angrily because he wanted to get away from the station where Richi was his only company and Rosendo said it was because among the three of them they kept this household going, their sister Amparo and the boy Bernabé, that's why they never got married, they couldn't afford to feed any more than five mouths with what the three brothers earned and now only two if Richi went off with some dance band. They kept arguing and Richi said he'd earn more in the band and Romano said he'd blow it all on women just to prove something to the marimba players, and Rosendo said that no matter how small it was, with Amparo's permission, Andrés Aparicio's pension would help a little, all they had to do was declare him dead and Amparo wept and said it was her fault of course and would they forgive her. They all consoled her except Richi, who walked to the door and stood silently staring into the darkening dusk over the plain, ignoring Rosendo, who was again speaking as the head of the family. It isn't your fault Amparito but your husband could at least let us know whether or not he's dead. We've all worked at whatever we could, look at my hands, Amparito, do you think I enjoy it? but it was your husband who wanted to be something better (that was my fault, said Bernabé's mother) because a street sweeper or an elevator operator earns more than an office worker but your husband wanted to have a career so he could earn a pension (that was my fault, said Bernabé's mother), but to earn a pension you have to be dead and your husband just went up in smoke, Amparito. Outside it's all dark and gray said Richi from the door and Amparito said her husband had struggled to be a gentleman so we wouldn't sink so low. What's low about work, Richi asked with irritation, and Bernabé followed him out onto the quiet and sleeping plain into a dusk smelling of dried shit and smoking tortillas and a hint of the green, squat greasewood. Uncle Richi hummed Agustín Lara's bolero,
caballera de plata: hair of silver, hair of snow, skein of tenderness with one tress daring
 … as airplanes descended in their approach to the international airport, the only lights those on a distant runway. God, I wish they'd hire me for the band, Richi said to Bernabé, staring at the yellowish fog, in September they're going to Acapulco to play for the national fiesta and you can come with me, Bernabé. We're not going to die without seeing the sea, Bernabé.