Burnt Water (25 page)

B
ERNABÉ

When he was twelve he stopped going to school, but didn't tell anyone. He hung around the station where his uncles worked and they let him clean the windshields as a part of the service; no matter if you only earn a few centavos, it's better than nothing. His absence went unnoticed at school, it didn't concern them. The classrooms were jammed with sometimes as many as a hundred children, and one fewer was a relief for everyone, even if no one noticed. They turned down Richi for the band and he told Bernabé flatly, at least come earn a few centavos, don't waste any more time or you're going to end up like your goddamn papa. He gave up playing the flute and signed Bernabé's grade cards so Amparo would think he was still in school and so a pact was sealed between the two that was the first secret relationship in Bernabé's life, because in school he was always too divided between what he saw and heard at home, where his mother always spoke of decency and good family and bad times, as if they'd known times that weren't bad, and when he tried to tell any of this at school he met hard, unseeing gazes. One of his teachers noticed and she told him that here no one offered or asked for pity because pity was a little like contempt. Here no one complained and no one was better than anyone else. Bernabé didn't understand but it made him mad that the teacher acted as if she understood better than anyone what only he could understand. Richi understood, come on Bernabé earn your coppers, just take a good look at what you can have if you're rich, look at that Jaguar coming into the station, jeez usually we get nothing here but rattletraps ah it's our boss the Honorable Tín passing by to see how business is and look at this magazine Bernabé wouldn't you like a babe like that all for yourself and I'll bet lawyer Tín's women look like that, look at those terrific tits Bernabé imagine lifting up her skirt and sliding between those thighs warm as milk Bernabé God I always get the short end of the stick look at this ad of Acapulco we're always shit on Bernabé look at the rich bastards in their Alfa Romeos, Bernabé, think how they must have lived when they were kids, think how they live now and how they'll live when they're old men, everything on a silver platter but you, Bernabé, you and me shit on from the day we're born, old men the day we're born, isn't that right? He envied his Uncle Richi, such a smooth talker, words came so hard for him and he'd already learned that when you don't have the words you get hard knocks, he left school to knock around in the city, which at least was dumb like him, isn't it true, Bernabé, that the big bully's words hurt more than his blows? Even if the city knocks you around, at least it doesn't talk. Why don't you read a book, Bernabé, the teacher who'd made him so mad asked, do you feel inferior to your classmates? He couldn't tell her that he felt uncomfortable when he read because books spoke the way his mother spoke. He didn't understand why but, from wanting it so much, tenderness was painful to him. In contrast, the city let itself be seen and loved and wanted, though in the end racing along Reforma and Insurgentes and Revolutión and Universidad at rush hour, wiping windshields, hurling himself against the cars, playing them like bulls, hanging out with the other jobless kids and playing soccer with balls of wadded newspaper on a flat piece of ground like the one he'd grown up on, sweating the stench of gasoline fumes and pissing streams of sludge and stealing soft drinks on one corner and fried pork rind on another and sneaking into the movies drove him from his uncles and his mother, he became more independent and clever and greedy for all the things he was beginning to see, and everything beginning to speak to him, the damned words again, there was no way to escape them, buy me, take me, you need me, in every shop window, in the hand the woman extended from her car window to give him twenty centavos without a word of thanks for the swift and professional cleaning of her windshield, on the face of the rich young man who didn't even look at him as he said, keep your hands off my windshield, punk, in the wordless television programs he could see from the street through the glass of the show window, mute, intoxicating him with desires, as he stood as tall as he could and thought how he wasn't earning any more at fifteen than he had at twelve, cleaning windshields with an old rag on Reforma, Insurgentes, Universidad, and Revolución at the hour of the heaviest traffic and how he wasn't getting any closer to any of the things the songs and ads offered him and that his helplessness was stretching longer and longer and would never come to anything like his Uncle Richi's desire to play the flute in a dance band and spend the month of September in Acapulco skimming on water skis across a Technicolor bay, swooping from an orange hang glider above the fairy-tale palaces of the Hilton Marriott Holiday Inn Acapulco Princess. His mother, when she found out, was philosophical, she didn't scold him about anything any more, and she resigned herself to growing old. Her few remaining priggish friends, a widower pharmacist, a Carmelite nun, a forgotten cousin of former President Ruiz Cortines, saw in her gaze the tranquillity of a lesson well taught, of words well spoken. She could give no more of herself. She spent hours gazing down the empty road toward the horizon.

“I hear the wind, and the world creaks.”

“Beautifully stated, Doña Amparito.”

S
UNDAY
A
FTERNOON
R
ODEO

He came to hate his Uncle Richi because leaving school and cleaning windshields along the broad avenues hadn't made him rich or given him what everybody else had, if anything he was worse off than ever. That's why when Bernabé was sixteen his Uncles Rosendo and Romano decided to give him a very special present. Where do you think we've gone for a good time all these years without women of our own? they asked him, licking their mustaches. Where do you think we went after shooting rabbits and eating dinner with your mother and you? Bernabé said he guessed with whores, but his uncles laughed and said that only dumb shits paid for a woman. They took him to an empty factory on the abandoned silent road to Azcapotzalco with its putrid smell of gasoline where for a peso a head the watchman let them enter and his Uncle Rosendo and Uncle Romano pushed him before them into a dark room and closed the door. All Bernabé could see was a flash of dark flesh and then he had to feel. He took the first one he touched, each of them standing, her back against the wall and he leaning against her, desperate Bernabé, trying to understand, not daring to speak because what was happening didn't need words, he was sure that this desperate pleasure was called life and he seized it with open hands, moving from the hard and scratchy wool of a sweater to the softness of shoulders and the creaminess of breasts, from the stiff cotton of a skirt to the wet spider between the legs, from the thick laddered stockings to cotton-candy buttocks. He was distracted by his uncles' bellowings, their hurried and vanquished labors, but he realized that because he was distracted everything lasted longer, and finally he could speak, amazing himself, as he thrust his penis into this soft, melting, creamy girl who clung to him twice with her arms about his neck and her legs locked around his waist. What's your name, mine's Bernabé. Love me, she said, be sweet, be good, she said, be a doll, the same thing his mother said when she felt tender, oh, baby, oh, handsome, what a cock you've got there. Later they sat for a while on the floor but his uncles began whistling the way they did in the station, like a mule driver, hey, come on, kid, let's go, put your sword away, leave a little something for next Sunday, don't let these bulldoggers sap your strength, oooheee they're castrators, they'll eat you alive and spit out the pieces, by-eee by-eee now, who are you anyway, María Felix? Bernabé jerked the medal from the girl's neck and she screamed, but the nephew and the two uncles had already hurried from the Sunday-afternoon rodeo.

M
ARTINCITA

The following Sunday he came early and leaned against the fence by the factory entrance to wait for her. The girls arrived sedately, sometimes exaggerating their charade by wearing veils as if for Mass or carrying shopping baskets, some were more natural, dressed like today's servant girls in turtleneck sweaters and checked slacks. She was wearing the same cotton skirt and woolly sweater, rubbing her eyes, which smarted from the heavy yellow air of the Azcapotzalco refinery. He knew it was she, he'd kept playing with the little medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe, dangling it from his wrist, twirling it so the sun would flash into the eyes of his Lupe and her eyes would glint in return and she would stop and look and look at him and reveal, with a betraying gesture of hand to throat, that she was the one. She was ugly. Really ugly. But Bernabé couldn't turn back now. He kept swinging the medal and she walked over to him and took it without a word. She was repulsive, she had the flattened face of an Otomí Indian, her hair was frizzled by cheap permanents and the gold of her badly capped teeth mirrored the glitter of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Bernabé managed to ask her if she wouldn't like to go for a little walk but he couldn't say, It's true, isn't it, that you don't do it for money? She said her name was Martina but that everyone called her Martincita. Bernabé took her elbow and they walked along the path toward the Spanish Cemetery, which is the only pretty place in the whole area, with its huge funeral wreaths and white marble angels. Cemeteries are so pretty, said Martincita, and Bernabé imagined the two of them making it in one of the chapels where the rich buried their dead. They sat on a tomb slab with gilded letters and she took a lily from a flower holder, smelled it, and covered the tip of her snub nose with orange pollen, she laughed and then teased him with the white bloom, tickling her nose and then Bernabé's, who burst into sneezes. She laughed, flashing teeth like eternal noonday, and said that since he didn't talk much she was going to tell him the whole story, they all went to the factory for fun, there were all kinds, girls from the country like Martina and girls who'd lived a long time in Mexico City, that didn't have anything to do with it, what mattered was that everyone came to the factory because they enjoyed it, it was the only place they could be free for a while from servant-chasing bosses or their sons or the barrio Romeos who took advantage of a girl and then said, Why, I never laid eyes on you, and that's why there were so many fatherless babies, but there in the dark where you never knew each other, where there weren't any complications, it was nice to have their moment of love every week, no? honest, they all thought it was wonderful to make love in the dark, where no one could see their faces or know what happened or with who, but one thing she was sure of was that what interested the men who came there was the feeling that they were getting it from someone weak. In her village that's what always happens to the women of the priests, who were passed off as nieces or servants, any man could lay them saying, If you don't come through I'll tell that bastard priest. They say the same thing used to happen to the nuns when the big estate owners went to the convents and screwed the sisters, because who was going to keep them from it? That night when he was sixteen Bernabé couldn't sleep, he could think of only one thing: how well Martincita spoke, she didn't lack for words, how well she fucked too, she had everything except looks, what a shame she was such a pig. They made a date to meet in the Spanish Cemetery every Sunday and make love in the Gothic mausoleum of a well-known industrial family and she said there was something funny about him, he still seemed like a little boy and she thought there must be something about his home that didn't jibe with his being so poor and so tongue-tied, she didn't understand what it could be, even before she left home she'd known that only rich kids had a right to be little boys and grow up to be big, people like Martincita and Bernabé were born grown up, the cards are stacked against us, Bernabé, from the minute we're born, except you're different, I think you want to be different, I don't know. At first they did the things all poor young couples do. They went to anything free like watching the
charro
cowboys ride and rope in Chapultepec Park on Sundays and they went to all the parades during the first months they were lovers, first the patriotic parade on Independence Day in September, when Uncle Richi had wanted to be in Acapulco with his flute, then the sports parade on Revolution Day, and in December they went to see the Christmas lights and the old Christmas crèches in Bernabé's old house in the tenements on Guatemala Street, where his crippled friend Luisito lived. They barely said hello because it was the first time Bernabé had taken Martincita to meet anyone he knew and who knew his mother, Doña Amparito, and Doña Lourdes, the mother of Luis, and Rosa María didn't even speak to them and the crippled boy stared at them through eyes without a future. Then Martina said she'd like to meet Bernabé's other friends, Luisito frightened her because he was just like an old man in her village but he was never going to grow old. So they looked up the boys who played soccer with Bernabé and cleaned windshields and sold Chiclets and Kleenex and sometimes even American cigarettes on Universidad, Insurgentes, Reforma, and Revolutión but it was one thing to run through the broad avenues joking and insulting one another and fighting over business and then spending their remaining energy on a field with a paper soccer ball and it was something else to go out with girls and talk like regular people, sitting in a cheap café facing a few silent pork rolls and pineapple pop. Bernabé looked at them there in the little café, they were envious of Martina because he was really getting it and not just in wet dreams or jerking off but they didn't envy him because she was such a dog. Either to get back at him or to show off or just to set themselves apart from him the boys told them that some politician who drove down Constituyentes every day on his way to the presidential offices on Los Pinos had wanted to impress a watching presidential guard and had with a great flourish given two of them tickets for the soccer match and the rest of them had scraped together enough money to go on Sunday and they were inviting him, but it would have to be without her because the money wouldn't stretch that far and Bernabé said no, he wasn't going to leave her all by herself on a Sunday. They went with the boys as far as the entrance of the Azteca Stadium and Martincita said why didn't they go to the Spanish Cemetery, but Bernabé just shook his head, he bought Martina a soft drink and began to pace back and forth in front of the stadium like a caged tiger, kicking the lampposts every time he heard the shouting inside and the roar of
Goal!
So there was Bernabé kicking lampposts and muttering, This fucking life is beginning to get to me, when am I going to begin to live, when?