Adam in Eden

Chapter 39

I am led away from the zoo by Abelardo Holguín and the veiled lady who had identified herself: “Sagrario Guadalupe, at your service.”

“Where are we going?”

“To my house,” says the woman in mourning from head to toe. “Is it far?” I ask, afraid of showing myself in public given the threats I’ve described.

“No, it’s right over there,” murmurs the mysterious lady.

Where they are taking me — and not the identity of the veiled lady — is the mystery.

“Don’t worry, Señor Gorozpe, we won’t leave the forest or the park.”

That seemed true. The couple led me toward a thick grove to a place I recognized as the “forest of the blind.”

“Close your eyes,” Sagrario Guadalupe all but ordered, blindfolding me.

“Rather, breathe in the scents,” Abelardo said more softly.

And yes, with my eyes closed I smelled grass, roses, and Montezuma Cypress, which suddenly became moss and shadow, humidity and age. A metallic-sounding door closed behind us. I moved ahead blindly until Sagrario ordered Abelardo to take off my blindfold.

I opened my eyes in a stone chamber. Everything there was hard, impenetrable, a great secret dungeon in the midst of the center of Mexico City and my emblematic forest. We’d hardly walked at all. We couldn’t have been far from the zoo, or from Chapultepec Castle. Yet here the sensation of “forest” and “castle” disappeared as if flattened by some great metal mass. We could only be — this adventurer ventures — inside a secret cave in the middle of the city’s busiest park.

Sagrario and even Abelardo supported me by holding my arms, as though I were in danger of falling from some high precipice. . I shook them off, angered by this excessive precaution. I wasn’t the kind of guy who would need their support. I may not have known where I was, but I knew I was somewhere. Wherever the couple led me, I knew how to remain standing, firm, armored against any surprise. Such a macho guy.

And what a surprise awaited me.

The empty space before me became light, and in its center, elevated on some kind of little altar, appeared the Boy already described to me by L, the ten- or eleven-year-old Boy, with his white robe and his halo of blond curls. A very polite Boy, he said, “Welcome, sir.” A frightening Boy. Not just because of his sudden appearance right here, in the bowels of Chapultepec Castle, but because of his perfect symmetry with his public image as photographed by the press and as described by L. In other words, any semblance of “normality” beyond the public pulpit was forbidden in this secret space. Just as L had said, the Boy was luminous, and he was staring at me with authority and with love, as L had also reported, “a powerful love mixed with a great authority.” And with a touch, as L had explained, of menace.

I got my bearings and dared to ask him, remembering L, but imposing myself on Sagrario: “Your wings? What happened to your wings?” The Boy laughed and turned his back to me: he didn’t have any wings. Sagrario groaned, then attached the wings to the Boy’s back before returning to her place beside Abelardo.

The Boy said, “I don’t need them, mom. I’m just a schoolboy, not a god.”

“What do you want from me?” I said, jumping ahead of my guards, again imposing myself.

“I don’t give orders, sir. I’m just a kid. I go to school. Ask my mom. She knows.”

“But publicly you say that you obey an inner order, an order from your heart,” I said, remembering L’s description.

The Boy removed the wig of blond curls, revealing a thick black head of hair.

“I’m just a schoolboy,” he repeated in the darkness below the castle, a space only he illuminated. “I’m not pulling anybody’s leg, sir.”

“In public you deceive, you pretend to be someone else, a messenger,” I blurted out, urgently trying to retain the young messenger. “Whose messenger? Someone’s. . God’s?”

“I am both people,” he said with great simplicity. “I am a schoolboy. I am also God’s messenger to warn. .”

“What are you warning us about?” I said, trying to control the impatience in my voice. “What?”

“The time is nigh,” he said with great sweetness.

“The time for what, kid?”

“The time of the soul.”

“What time is that?”

“Now.”

“What is the soul?”

“Don’t tell him, don’t tell him anything!” Sagrario shouted with a fearful voice — afraid of what? Of the Boy telling the truth, telling a lie, or worse, saying something stupid? “Don’t say anything!”

The Boy continued unperturbed.

“I do what I have to do.”

“Who sent you?” I asked insistently.

“Nobody.”

“Why do you do what you do?”

“It’s the only thing. .” the Boy all but sighed, and he disappeared in silence, like wine.