Burnt Water

The Son of Andrés Aparicio

THE PLACE

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.

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

THE FATHER

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?

THE MOTHER

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.

THE UNCLES

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.

BERNABÉ

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.”

SUNDAY AFTERNOON RODEO

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.

MARTINCITA

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?

WORDS

Martina asked him what they were going to do, she was very truthful and told him she could deceive him and let herself get pregnant but what good would that do if they didn’t come to an agreement first about their future. She hinted around a lot like the time he suggested they hook a ride to Puebla to the Fifth of May parade and managed to get a supply truck to take them as far as the Church of San Francisco Acatepec glittering like a thimble and from there they walked toward the city of shining tiles and caramel candies, still blissful from their adventure together and the clear landscape of pines and cool breezes from the volcanoes that was something new for Bernabé. She had come from the Indian plains of the state of Hidalgo and she knew what poor country looked like, but clean, too, not like the city filth, and watching the parade of the Zouaves and the Zacapoaxtlas, the troops of Napoleon and those of the Honorable Don Benito Juarez, she told him that she’d like to see him marching in a uniform, with a band and everything. His turn might come up in the lottery for the draft and everyone knew, said Martina with an air of being very much in the know, that they gave the draftees whatever education they needed and a career in the army wasn’t a bad deal for someone who didn’t even have a pot to pee in. Bernabé’s words stuck in his throat because he felt he was different from Martincita but she didn’t realize it, and looking at a display of sweets in a shop window he compared himself to her in the reflection and he thought he was handsomer, slimmer, even lighter of complexion, and his eyes had a kind of green spark, they weren’t impenetrable like his sweetheart’s black eyes, in which no white was visible. But since he didn’t know how to tell her this, he took her to meet his mother. Martincita took it all to heart, she was thrilled and thought it was almost as good as a formal proposal. But all Bernabé wanted was to show her how different they were. Doña Amparito must have been waiting a long time for a day like this, an occasion that would make her feel young again. She took out her best clothes, a wide-shouldered tailored suit, her precious nylons and sharp-toed patent-leather shoes, she hung up some old photographs that proved the existence of ancestors, they hadn’t sprung from nowhere, johnny-come-latelys, why certainly not, señorita, you see what kind of family you’re hoping to get into and a photograph with President Calles in the center and to the left General Vergara and in the background the General’s head groom, the father of Amparito, Romano, Rosendo, and Richi. But one look at Martincita, and Doña Amparo was speechless. Bernabé’s mother could handle women like herself, women insecure of their place in the world, but Martincita showed no sign of insecurity. She was a country girl and had never pretended to be anything different. Doña Amparo glanced desolately at the table set for tea and the mocha tea cakes she’d asked Richi to bring from a distant bakery. But she didn’t know how to offer tea to this servant girl, not only a servant but ugly ugly ugly, God help her but she was ugly, she could even contend with a girl of that class if she were pretty, but a servant and a scarecrow besides, what words could deal with that? how could she say, Have a seat, señorita, please forgive the circumstances but decency is something one carries inside, something seen in one’s manners, the next time you come we can compare our family albums if you would like, now wouldn’t you like a drop of tea? lemon or cream? a mocha tea cake, señorita? Bernabé loves French pastry more than anything, he is a young man with refined tastes, you know. She didn’t offer her hand. She didn’t rise. She didn’t speak. Bernabé pleaded in silence, Speak, Mama, you know what words to say, you’re like Martincita that way, you both know how to talk, I just plain can’t get the words out. Let’s go, Bernabé, Martina said pridefully after five minutes of strained silence. Stay and have your tea with me, I know how much you like it, Doña Amparo said, good afternoon, young lady. Martina waited a couple of seconds, then wrapped herself in her woolly sweater and hurried from the house. They saw each other again, they spent one of their Sundays together all close and cuddling, and Martincita’s words, pretty and teasing but now with a hard and cutting edge.

“Ever since I was a little girl I knew I couldn’t be a little girl. But not you, Bernabé, not you, I see that now.”

PARTINGS

Bernabé tried once again, this time with the uncles, so many r-r-r’s Martina laughed, showing her gold teeth, Rosendo and Romano and Richi sitting with their pistols between their legs after a Sunday morning shooting rabbits and toads and then cutting pigweed leaves on the plain where the squat green greasewood grew. Richi said that the leaves of the pigweed were good for stomach cramps and frights and he elbowed his brother Rosendo and looked at Martincita, who was smiling, holding his nephew Bernabé’s hand, and Romano told Bernabé that he was going to need some pigweed tea to get over his fright. The three uncles laughed maliciously and this time Martincita covered her face with her hands and ran from the house with Bernabé behind her, Wait for me, Martina, what’s the matter? The uncles yelped like coyotes, licked their mustaches, hugged one another and clapped each other’s shoulders weak with laughter: Listen, Bernabé, where’d you pick up the little stray? she looks like something you’d throw to the lions, our nephew with a reject like that? you shouldn’t be screwing with her, let us get you something better, where’d you scare her up, kid? don’t tell us from the Sunday-afternoon rodeo? Oh, what a blockhead you are, nephew, no wonder your mother’s been so upset. But Bernabé didn’t know how to tell them how well she spoke and that she was loving besides, that she had everything except beauty, he wanted to tell them that but he couldn’t, I’ll miss her, he watched her run across the flat ground, stop, look back, wait for the last time, decide, Bernabé, I don’t give you a bellyache or haunt your dreams, I cuddle you, I fondle you, I give you all my sweetness, decide, Bernabé, Bernabé my love. A real asshole, nephew; it’s one thing to get a free lay from some servant girl on Sundays just to get your hard off but it’s something else again who you show to the world and that’s the very reason you’re going to need money, Bernabé, stay here, don’t be stupid, let her go, you don’t marry the first little bitch you go to bed with, certainly not a pig with a dish face like your Martincita, my God, what an ass you are, Bernabé, it’s about time for you to grow up and be a man and earn yourself a wad so you can take girls out, we’ve never had any children, we’ve given everything to you, we’re counting on you, Bernabé, what do you need? a car, money, clothes? how are you going to buy clothes? what are you going to say to the hot mommas, nephew? how are you going to attract them? be bold as a bullfighter, Bernabé, remember they’re the heifers, you’re the torero and you have to make them charge, you need style, Bernabé, class like the song says, come on, Bernabé, learn how to fire the pistol, it’s time now, come along with your old uncles, we’ve sacrificed ourselves for you and your mother, don’t fight it, forget her, Bernabé, do it for us, it’s time for you to get ahead, kid, you were spinning your wheels with that dog, boy, don’t tell us we sacrificed ourselves for nothing, look at my hands peeling like a scabby old mutt, look at your Uncle Romano’s big belly and he’s got a matching spare tire of grease and fumes in his head, what does he have to look forward to? and look at your Uncle Richi’s glazed eyes who never got to go to Acapulco he’s bleary-eyed from dreaming, you want to be like that, kid? You need to go your own way, claw your way up, Bernabé, I’m an old man now and I’m telling you whether you like it or not we’re growing apart, the way you just parted from your sweetheart you’re going to have to part from your mother and us, with some pain a little more a little less but you get used to everything, after a while partings will seem normal, that’s life, life is just one parting after another, it’s not what you keep but what you leave behind that’s life, you’ll see, Bernabé. He spent that afternoon alone without Martina for the first time in ten months, wandering through the streets of the Zona Rosa, staring at the cars, the suits, the restaurant entrances, the shoes of the people going in, the neckties of the people coming out, his gaze flashing from one thing to another without really focusing on anything or anyone, fearing the bitterness the bile in his guts and balls that would make him kick out at the well-dressed young men and hip-swinging girls going in and out of the bars and restaurants on Hamburgo and Genova and Niza the way he’d kicked the lampposts outside the stadium. He tramped up and down Insurgentes that Sunday, a street jammed with automobiles returning from Cuernavaca, bumpers crashing, balloon vendors, sandwich shops jammed too, he fantasized he could kick the whole city until there was nothing left but pieces of neon light and then grind up the pieces and swallow them and I’ll be seeing you, Bernabé. That was when his Uncle Richi, with whom he’d been angry even before he made fun of Martincita, waved excitedly from an open-air oyster stand near the bridge on Insurgentes.

“I’ve got it made, nephew. They’ve hired me as flute player and I’m off to Acapulco with the band. To prove I keep my word I want you to go with me. To tell you the truth, I think I owe it all to you. My boss wants to meet you.”

EL GÜERO

He didn’t have to go to Acapulco with his Uncle Richi because the Chief gave him a job on the spot. Bernabé didn’t meet him immediately, he only heard a deep and unctuous voice, like on the radio, from behind the glass office doors. Tell the boys to take care of him. In the dressing rooms they looked him up and down, some thumbed their noses at him, some gestured up yours and continued dressing, carefully arranging their testicles in close-fitting undershorts. A tall dark-skinned youth with a long face and stiff eyelashes brayed at him and Bernabé was about to take a swing at him but another man they called El Güero because of his light hair came over and asked him what he would like to wear, the Chief offered a new wardrobe to new arrivals and he told him too that he shouldn’t pay any attention to the Burro, the poor thing only brayed to say his name, not to insult anyone. Bernabé remembered what Martina had said in Puebla, Join the army, Bernabé, they’ll give you an education, you’ll learn to take orders, then they’ll promote you and if they discharge you, you buy a gun and go into business for yourself, she joked. He told El Güero that a uniform would be fine, he didn’t know how to dress, a uniform was fine. El Güero said it looked as if he was going to have to look after him and he picked out a leather jacket, some jeans still stiff from the factory, and a couple of checked shirts. He promised that as soon as he got a girl he’d get him a dress suit, but this would do for now and for the workouts a white T-shirt and watch out for your balls, eggs in a basket because sometimes the blows fell hot and heavy. They took him to a kind of military camp that didn’t look like a camp from the outside, with a lot of gray trucks always waiting in front and sometimes men dressed in civilian clothes who tied a white handkerchief on their arm as they entered and removed it when they came out. They slept on campaign cots and from the crack of dawn went through training exercises in a gym that smelled of eucalyptus drifting through the broken windowpanes. First were the rings and parallel bars, the horizontal bar and box horse, the weights and the horse. Then came poles, rope climbing, tree trunks across barrancas and sharpshooting, and only at the end of the training, bludgeons, rubber hoses, and brass knuckles. He looked at himself naked in the full-length mirror in the dressing room, as if sketched with an iron nib, hair that curled naturally not with curling irons like poor straight-haired Martincita’s, fine bony mestizo features with a real profile, not like Martincita’s pushed-in face, a profile to his face and his belly and a profile between his legs and a green pride in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. The Burro went by braying and laughing at the same time, with a lasso longer than his, and both things angered Bernabé. Again El Güero held him back and reminded him that the Burro didn’t know any other way to laugh, that he announced himself with his braying the way that he, El Güero, announced his presence with his transistor, with the music that always preceded him, when you hear music, that’s where your Güero is. One day Bernabé felt the earth change beneath his sneakers. It was no longer the soft earth of Las Lomas de Chapultepec, sandy and sprinkled with pine needles. Now all the training exercises were held in a huge hand-ball court, where they learned to run hard, fight hard, move on hard pavement. Bernabé concentrated on the Burro to work up his anger, to turn nimbly and land a karate chop on the nape of the enemy’s neck. He jammed a knee into the tall lanky youth with stiff eyelashes, which put him down for the count, but after ten minutes the Burro came to, brayed, and continued as if nothing had happened. Bernabé felt as if the moment for action was near. El Güero said no, he’d done well in training, worked like all get-out and he deserved a vacation. He sat him in a coppery Thunderbird and said have a good time with the cassettes, you can choose the music and if you get bored turn on this small TV, we’re off to Acapulco, Bernabé, I’m going to give you a taste of what life’s all about, I was born to dance the rumba, down in Veracruz, I was born in silv’ry moonlight, I play it fast and loose, choose anything you want. Not really, he said to himself later, I didn’t choose anything, they chose for me, the blond American girl was waiting for me in that big bed with the glittery bedspread, the bellboy dressed like an organ grinder’s monkey was waiting to carry my suitcases, and another just like him to bring my breakfast to my room and fill my refrigerator, the only thing they didn’t give me were the sun and the sea, because they were already there. He looked at himself in the hotel mirrors but he didn’t know whether they looked back. Other than Martincita, he didn’t know whether or not women liked him. El Güero told him if he wanted to pay he’d have to make a lot of money so it wouldn’t feel like he was receiving a tip; look at this Thunderbird, Bernabé, it may be secondhand but it’s mine, I bought it with my own dough, he laughed and told him that they wouldn’t be seeing so much of each other now, it was time to turn him over to Ureñita, old Dr. Ureñita himself, what a drag he was with a face like a sour old maid and ugly as a constipated monkey, he wasn’t like El Güero, who knew how to enjoy life, hey, baby, ciao, he said, spitting on each hand and then slapping the saliva on the hood bright as a new coin before he roared off in his Thunderbird.

UREÑITA

“What rank did you reach young man?”

“I don’t seem to remember.”

“Don’t be asinine. Second? Third?”

“Whatever you say, Señor Ureña.”

“Oh yes, Bernabé, I’ll be having plenty to say. That’s why I’m here. We get knuckleheads like you by the ton here. Well, never mind. That’s our raw material. We’ll see what we can do to refine it, to make an exportable product.”

“Whatever you say, Señor Ureña.”

“Presentable, I mean. Dialectics. Our friends think we have no history and no ideas because they see dolts like you and they laugh at us. So much the better. Let them believe what they will. That way we will occupy all the history they vacate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No, maestro.”

“They’ve filled our country’s history with lies in order to weaken it, in order to make it putty, then they tear off a little piece and then another and at first no one notices. But one day you wake up and you no longer have the great, free, unified nation you dreamed of, Bernabé.”

“I dreamed of?”

“Yes, even you, though you don’t know it. Why do you think you’re here with me?”

“El Güero told me to come. I don’t know anything.”

“Well, I’m going to make you understand, you simpleton. You are here to assist at the birth of a new world. And a new world can only be born of tumultuous, hate-filled beginnings. Do you understand? Violence is the midwife of history.”

“If you say so, Señor Ureñita.”

“Don’t use the diminutive. Diminutives diminish. Who told you to call me Ureñita?”

“No one, I swear.”

“Poor muddlehead. If I wanted I could analyze you blindfolded. This is what they send us. We owe that to John Dewey and Moisés Sáenz. Tell me, Bernabé, do you have a fear of getting buried in poverty?”

“I’m already there, Señor Ureña.”

“You are mistaken. There are worse things. Imagine your poor old mother scrubbing floors, still worse, imagine her streetwalking.”

“You imagine yours, prof.”

“You do not offend me. I know who I am and what my worth is. And I know who you are, shitty lumpen. Do you think I don’t know your kind? When I was a student I went to the factories, to try to organize the workers, to awaken their radical consciousness. Do you think they paid me any heed?”

“All the way, maestro.”

“They turned their backs on me. They refused to hear my message. They didn’t want to face reality. And there you have it. Reality punished them, it avenged itself on them, on all of you, poor devils. You haven’t wanted to face reality, that’s the problem, you’ve tried to punish reality with dreams and you’ve failed as a revolutionary class. And yet here I am trying to form you, Bernabé. I warn you; I don’t give up easily. Well, I’ve said what I had to say. They’ve vilified me.”

“They?”

“Our enemies. But I want to be your friend. Tell me everything about yourself. Where do you come from?”

“Oh, around.”

“Do you have a family?”

“That depends.”

“Don’t be so reticent. I want to help you.”

“Right, prof.”

“Do you have a sweetheart?”

“Could be.”

“What are your ambitions, Bernabé? Trust me. I trust you, don’t I?”

“That depends.”

“It may be that the atmosphere here in the camp is too cold. Would you prefer to continue this conversation elsewhere?”

“It’s all the same to me.”

“We could go to a movie together, would you like that?”

“Maybe.”

“Remember one thing. I can help you humiliate those who humiliate you.”

“I like that fine.”

“I have books in my home. No, not just books on theory, I have less arid books, all kinds of books for young men.”

“Swell.”

“Are you coming then, you doll?”

“Let’s shake on it, Señor Ureñita.”

LICENCIADO MARIANO

They took him to meet him after he bit Ureña’s hand, they said the Chief fell out of his chair laughing and wanted to meet Bernabé. He received him in a leather-and-oak office with matched sets of red leather-bound books and statues and paintings of erupting volcanoes. He told him to call him Licenciado, the Honorable Mariano Carreón, it sounded a little pretentious to call him Chief the way they did in the camp, didn’t he agree? Yes, Chief, Bernabé said, and thought to himself that the Licenciado looked exactly like the janitor at his school, a janitor who wore spectacles, and had a head like an olive with carefully combed hair and lenses thick as bottle glass and a mousy little mustache. He told him he liked how he’d reacted to that obnoxious Ureña, he was an old pinko who was working for them now because the other leaders in the movement said a varnishing of theory was important. He hadn’t thought so and now he was going to see. He summoned Ureña and the theorist entered with bowed head, his hand bandaged where Bernabé had sunk his teeth. The Chief ordered him to take a book from the shelf, any book at all, the one he liked most, and to read it aloud. Yes, sir, at your pleasure, sir, said Ureña, and read with a trembling voice I could not love within each man a tree/with its remaindered autumns on its back, do you understand any of that, Bernabé? No, said Bernabé, keep reading, Ureñita, as you wish, sir, till in the last of hovels, lacking all light and fire,/bread, stone and silence, I paced at last alone,/dying of my own death, keep going, Ureñita, don’t swoon, I want the boy to understand what the fuck this culture thing is all about, Stone within stone, and man, where was he?/Air within air, and man, where was he?/ Time within time … Ureña coughed, oh, I’m so sorry, Were you also the shattered fragment/ of indecision…? That’s enough Ureñita, did you understand anything, boy? Bernabé shook his head. The Chief ordered Ureña to place the book in a huge blown-glass ashtray from Tlaquepaque as thick as his spectacles, put it right there and set fire to it, right now, double time, Licenciado Carreón said with a dry severe laugh, and while the pages blazed he said I didn’t have to read any of that stuff to get where I am, who needs it, it would have got in my way, Ureñita, so why would this kid need it? He said the boy had been right to bite him, and if you ask me why I have this library, I’ll tell you that it’s to remember every minute that there are many books still to be burned. Look here, son, he said to Bernabé staring at him with all the intensity he was capable of behind his eight layers of congealed glass, any dumb shit can put a bullet through the most intelligent head in the world, don’t forget that. He told him he was all right, that he liked him, that he reminded him of himself when he was young, that he perked up his spirits and oh, how he wished, he said as he invited him to accompany him in a Galaxy black as a hearse with all the windows darkened so you could look out without being seen, someone years ago had taken an interest in him, someone like himself, they stole the election from General Almazán, synarchism would have taken care of people like them, as they were doing now, don’t you worry, if you had had us your life and your parents’ lives would have been different. Better. But you have us now, Bernabé my friend. He told the chauffeur to come back about five and told Bernabé to come eat with him, they went into one of the restaurants in the Zona Rosa that a furious Bernabé had seen only from the outside one Sunday, all the majordomos and waiters bowed to them like acolytes during Mass, Señor Licenciado, your private table is ready, this way, what can we do for you, señor, anything at all, I’m putting the Señor Licenciado in your hands, Jesús Florencio. Bernabé realized that the Chief liked talking about his life, how he’d come from the very asshole of the city and with persistence and without books but with an idea of the greatness of the nation, yes that, had got where he was. They ate seafood au gratin and drank beer until El Güero came in with a message and the Chief listened and said bring that sonofabitch here and told Bernabé to keep calm and go on eating. A very cool Chief went on recounting anecdotes and when El Güero returned with a well-dressed paper-skinned man, the Chief simply said good afternoon, Señor Secretary, El Güerito is going to tell you what you need to know. The Chief went on circumspectly eating his lobster thermidor as El Güero seized the Secretary by his tie and mouthed a string of curses, he’d better learn how to treat Licenciado Carreón, he shouldn’t get independent and go see the president on his own, everything went through Licenciado Carreón first, didn’t the Secretary owe him his job, see? The Chief simply ignored El Güero and the Secretary, he looked instead at Bernabé, and in his eyes at that moment Bernabé read what he was supposed to read, what the Chief intended him to read, you can be like me, you can treat the big shots this way and have no fear, Bernabé. The Chief ordered the remains of the lobster removed and the waiter Jesús Florencio bowed with alacrity when he saw the Secretary but when he saw Licenciado Carreón’s face he decided not to speak to the Secretary but instead busied himself with removing the dishes. As they couldn’t look at anyone else, Bernabé and Jesús Florencio exchanged glances. Bernabé liked the waiter. He felt as if this was someone he could talk to because they shared a secret. Though he had to ass-kiss the same as anyone, he earned his living and his life was his own. He found out all this because they decided to meet, Jesús Florencio took a liking to Bernabé and warned him, watch out, if you want to come to work as a waiter I’ll help you, politics has its ups and downs and the Secretary’s not going to forget that you saw him humiliated by the Licenciado and the Licenciado’s not going to forget that you saw him humiliate someone the day they humiliate him.

“But congratulations just the same. I think you’ve bought yourself a winning ticket, buddy.”

“You think so?”

“Just don’t forget me.” Jesús Florencio smiled.

PEDREGAL

Bernabé felt that this was really a place with a name. The Chief took him to his house in Pedregal and said, Make yourself at home, as if I’ve adopted you, go wherever you want and get to know the boys in the kitchen and in administration. He wandered in and out of the house, which started at the service area on the ground level but then instead of rising descended along scarlet-colored cement ramps through a kind of crater toward the bedrooms and finally to the open rooms surrounding a swimming pool sunk into the very center of the house and illuminated from below by underwater lights and from above by a roof of celestial-blue lead tiles that capped the mansion. Licenciado Carreón’s wife was a small fat woman with tight black curls and religious medals jangling beneath her double chin, on her breasts, and on her wrists, who when she saw him asked if he was a terrorist or a bodyguard, if he’d come to kidnap them or protect them — they all look alike, the brown scum. The señora was highly amused by her own joke. You could hear her coming a long way off, like El Güero and his transistor and the Burro and his braying. Bernabé heard her often the first two or three days he wandered around the house feeling like a fool, expecting the Chief to call him and give him some job to do, fingering the porcelain knickknacks, the glass display cabinets and large vases and at every turn bumping into a señora who smiled as endlessly as his father, Andrés Aparicio. One afternoon he heard music, sentimental boleros playing during the siesta hour and he felt languorous and handsome as he had when he looked at himself in the hotel mirrors in Acapulco, he was drawn by the soft sad music but when he reached the second floor he lost his way and walked through one of the bathrooms into a dressing room with dozens of kimonos and rubber-soled beach sandals and a half-open door. He saw a bed as large as the one in the Acapulco hotel covered with tiger skins and on the headboard he saw a shelf with votive candles and religious images, and beneath that a tape deck like the one El Güero had in his secondhand Thunderbird and lying on the skins Señora Carreón stark naked except for her religious medals, especially one in the shape of a seashell with a superimposed gold image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that the señora held over her sex while Chief Mariano tried to lift it with his tongue and the señora laughed a high coquettish schoolgirl laugh and said, Oh no my Lord, no my King, respect your little virgin, and he naked on all fours his balls purple with cold trying to reach the medal in the shape of a seashell, oh my sexy plump beauty, oh my saintly little bitch, my perfumed whore, my mother-of-pearl ringleted goddess, let your own little Pope bless your Guadalupe, oh my love, and all the time the bolero on the tape, I know I shall never kiss your lips, your lips of burning crimson, I know I shall never sip from your wild and passionate fountain … Later the boys in the office and the kitchen told him, you can see the Chief’s taken a liking to you, friend, don’t do anything to blow it because he’ll protect you against whatever comes. Get out of the brigade if you can, that’s dangerous work, you’ll see. On the other hand here in the kitchen and the office we’ve got the world by the tail. El Güero walked through the office to answer the telephone and invited Bernabé to go for a ride in the Jaguar that belonged to the Carreóns’ daughter, she was in a Canadian finishing school with the nuns and the car had to be driven from time to time to keep it in good shape. He said the boys in the office were right, the Chief sees something in you to adopt you this way. Don’t muff the chance, Bernabé. If you get to be one of his personal guard you’re set up for life, said El Güero, driving the girl’s Jaguar the way a jockey exercises a horse for a race, I give you my word, you’ll be set up. The deal is to learn every little thing that’s going on and then whatever shit they try to pull you’ve got a stranglehold on them, you can take any shit they try to pull, unless they shut you up forever. But if you play your cards right, just look, you’ve got it all, money, girls, cars, you even eat the same food they eat. But the Chief had to study, Bernabé replied, he had to get his degree before he made it big. El Güero hooted at that and said the Chief hadn’t gone past grade school, they’d stuck on the Licenciado because that’s what you call anyone important in Mexico even though he wouldn’t recognize a law book if it fell on him, don’t be a jerk, Bernabé. All you need to know is that every day a millionaire is born who someday is going to want you to protect his life, his kids, his cash, his ass. And you know why, Bernabé? Because every day a thousand bastards like you are born ready to tear the guts out of the rich man born the same day. One against a thousand, Bernabé. Don’t tell me it isn’t easy to choose. If we don’t get away from where we were born we go right down the goddamn tubes. We have to get on the side of the ones who’re born to screw us, as sure as seven and seven make heaven, right? The Chief called Bernabé to the bar beside the pool and told him to come with him, he wanted him to see the tinted photograph of his daughter Mirabella, wasn’t she pretty? You bet she was and that’s because she was made with love and feeling and passion and if you don’t have those there’s nothing, right, Bernabé? He said in Bernabé he saw himself when he didn’t have a centavo or a roof over his head, but with the whole world to conquer. He envied him that, he said, his eyeglasses fogged with steam, because the first thing you know you have everything and you begin to hate yourself, you hate yourself because you can’t stand the boredom and the exhaustion that comes of having reached the top, you see? On the one hand you’re afraid of falling back where you came from but on the other hand you miss the struggle to reach the top. He asked him, wouldn’t he like to marry a girl like Mirabella someday, didn’t he have a sweetheart? and Bernabé compared the photograph of the girl surrounded by rose-colored clouds with Martincita, who was plain born for misfortune, but he didn’t know what to say to Licenciado Mariano, because either way whether he said yes he did or no he didn’t, it was an insult and besides the Chief wasn’t listening to Bernabé, he was listening to himself thinking he was listening to Bernabé.

“The pain you go through, you have the right to make others suffer, my boy. That’s the honest truth, I swear by all that’s holy.”

THE BRIGADE

They’re planning to meet on Puente de Alvarado and march down Rosales toward the statue of Carlos IV. We’re going to be in the gray trucks farther north at the corner of Héroes and Mina, and to the south at Ponciano Arriaga and Basilio Badillo, so we can cut them off from any direction. All of you are to wear your white armbands and white cotton neck bands and have vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs ready to protect yourselves against the tear gas when the police arrive. When the demonstration is a block and a half from the Carlos IV statue you who’re on Heroes come down Rosales and attack from the rear. Shout, Viva Che Guevara! over and over, yell so loud that no one can doubt where your sentiments lie. Yell Fascists at the demonstrators. I repeat, Fash-ists. Get that straight, you must create total confusion, real pandemonium, and then lay into them, don’t hold anything back, use your clubs and brass knuckles and yell anything you want, let yourselves go, boys, have a ball, those coming from the south will be yelling Viva Mao! but you send them flying, they won’t give you any trouble, the whole thing’s a breeze, let ’er rip, you’re members of the Hawk Brigade and the moment’s come to prove yourselves in the field, my boys, in the street, on the hard pavement, against posts and steel shutters, break as many windows as you can, that stirs up a lot of resentment against the students, but the main thing is that when you overtake them you go at it heart and soul, have no mercy for the bastards, kick and punch and knee and you, just you two, ice picks for you and see what happens and if you put out the eye of some Red bastard so what, it will be a lesson to them and we’ll protect you here, you know that, get that in your thick heads, you bastards, we’ll protect you here, so do God’s will and do it well and the street is yours, you, where were you born? and you, where are you from? Azcapotzalco? Balbuena? Xochimilco? Canal del Norte? Atlampa? the Tránsito district? Mártires de Tacubaya? Panteones? Well today, my Hawks, you get your own back, just think about that, today the street where you’ve been fucked good is yours and you’ll have your chance to fuck them back and go scot-free, it’s like the conquest of Mexico, the man who wins wins, today you’re going out in the street, my Hawks, and get your revenge for every sonofabitch who made you feel like a dog, for the abuse you’ve taken all your miserable lives, for every insult you couldn’t return, for all the meals you didn’t eat and all the women you didn’t screw, you’re going out to get even against the landlord who raised your rent and the shyster who ran you out of your rooms and the sawbones who wouldn’t operate on your mother unless he had his five thousand in advance, you’re going to beat up on the sons of the men who’ve exploited you, right? the students are spoiled young shits who one day will be landlords and pen-pushers and quacks like their papas but you’re going to get even, you’re going to give blow for blow, my Hawk Brigade, you know that, so go quietly in the gray trucks, then stalk like wild animals, then the fun, lash out, have the time of your lives, think about your little sister had against her will, your poor old mother on her knees washing and scrubbing, your father screwed all his life, his hands misshapen from grubbing in shit, today’s the day to get your revenge, Hawks, today won’t come again, don’t miss it, don’t worry, the police will recognize you by your white neck bands and armbands, they’ll act like they’re attacking you, play along with them, they’ll pretend to shove a few of you in the Black Maria, but it’s all a fake to put off the press because it’s all-important that tomorrow’s papers report a clash among leftist students, subversive disturbance in the heart of the city, the Communist conspiracy rears its ugly head, off with its head! save the republic from anarchy, and you, my hawks, just remember that others may be repressed but not you, no way, I promise you, and now, can’t you hear the running feet on the pavement? the street is yours, conquer the street, step hard, go out into the smoke, don’t be afraid of the smoke, the city is lost in smoke. No escape from it.

A NEW BERNABÉ

His mother, Doña Amparo, didn’t want to come because she was ashamed, his Uncles Rosendo and Romano told him, she didn’t want to admit that a son of hers was in the clink; Richi now had a more or less permanent job with the Acapulco dance band, and from time to time he sent a hundred pesos to Bernabé’s mother; she was dying of shame and didn’t know this new Bernabé and Romano said that after all her husband, Andrés Aparicio, had kicked a man to death. Yes, she replied, but he never ended up behind bars, that’s the difference, Bernabé is the first jailbird in the family. As far as you know, woman. But the uncles looked at Bernabé differently too, hardly recognizing him; he wasn’t any longer the dumb little kid who’d sat on the roof tiles while they shot rabbits and toads on the plain where the greasewood grew. Bernabé had killed a man, he went at him with an ice pick during the fracas on Puente de Alvarado, he buried the pick deep in his chest and he felt how the wounded boy’s guts were mightier than the cold iron of his weapon but in spite of it all the ice pick vanquished the viscera, the viscera sucked in the ice pick the way a lover sucks a beloved. The boy stopped laughing and braying and lay staring at the arches of neon light through stiff eyelashes. El Güero came to the prison to tell Bernabé not to worry, they had to put on an act, he understood, after a few days they’d let him go, meanwhile they were working things out and giving the appearance of law and order. But El Güero didn’t recognize this new Bernabé either and for the first time he stammered and his eyes even filled with tears, if you had to stab someone, Bernabé, why did it have to be one of us? You should have been more careful. You knew the Burro, poor old Burro, he was a stupid fart but not a bad guy underneath, why, Bernabé? On the other hand the waiter Jesús Florencio came as a friend and told him that when he got out he should work in the restaurant, he could arrange everything with the owner, and he wanted to tell him why. Licenciado Mariano Carreón had got drunk in the restaurant the day of the row in the city, he was very excited and spilled the beans to his friends about how there was this one kid that reminded him of a lot of things, first what Don Mariano himself had been like as a boy and then of a man he’d known twenty years ago in a co-op in the state of Guerrero, a crazy agricultural student who wouldn’t give in, who brought what he called justice to the state and wanted to impose it without so much as a fuck-you. Licenciado Mariano told how he’d organized the resistance against this agronomist Aparicio, playing on the unity of the village families, rich and poor, against a meddlesome outsider. It’s so easy to exploit provincial ways for your own good. You have to keep the local bosses strong because where there’s no law the boss will enforce order and without order you can’t have property and wealth and how else can a man get rich fast, he asked his friends. That agronomist had the fanaticism of a saint, a crusading zeal that got under Licenciado Carreón’s skin. For the next ten years he tried to corrupt him, offering him one thing after another, promotions, houses, money, voyages and virgins, protection. No dice. Aparicio the agronomist became an obsession with him and since he couldn’t buy him he tried to ruin him, to make problems for him, to prevent his promotions, even evict him from the tenement on Guatemala Street and force him into the lost cities in Mexico City’s poverty belt. Licenciado Mariano’s obsession was so total that he bought all the land in the area where Andrés Aparicio and his family and other squatter families had gone to live, so no one could run them off, no, he said, let them stay here, the old people will die, no one can live on honor alone and dignity doesn’t come with marrow-bone broth, it’s good to have a breeding ground for angry kids so I can set them on the right track when they grow up, a nest for my Hawks. He told how every day he savored the fact that the agronomist who wouldn’t be corrupted lived with his wife and son and bastard brothers-in-law on land that belonged to Licenciado Mariano, and because he allowed it. But the richest part of the joke was to tell the agronomist. So the Licenciado sent one of his musclemen to tell your father, Bernabé, you’ve been living on the Chief’s bounty, you dirty beggar, ten years of charity, you think you’re so pure, and your father, who never stopped smiling so he wouldn’t look old, attacked Licenciado Carreón’s bodyguard and kicked him to death and then disappeared forever because all he had left was the dignity of death, he didn’t want to be buried in jail like you, even for a few days, Bernabé. It’s better for you to know, said Jesús Florencio, you see what they offer you isn’t as great as they make out. One day you’ll run into a man, a real man, who’ll knock your protection into a cocked hat. It’s not much of a life to live under someone’s protection, telling yourself, without the Chief I’m not worth a shit. Bernabé fell asleep on his cot, protecting even the crown of his head with the thin wool cover, talking in his sleep to the fucking Chief, you didn’t dare look my father in the face, you had to send a hired killer after him and he killed your killer, you asshole. But then he had a dream in which he was tumbling in silence, dying, tumbling like a shattered fragment of indecision, what? what man? He dreamed, unable to separate his dream from a vague but driving desire that everything that exists be for all the earth, for everyone, water, air, gardens, stone, time. “And man, where was he?”

THE CHIEF

He came out of jail hating him for everything, what he’d done to his father, what he’d done to him. El Güero picked him up at the exit of the Black Palace and he climbed into the red Thunderbird, so give your heart in sweet surrender, hey baby, where there’s music and fun there’s your Güerito. He told Bernabé that the Chief would be waiting in his house in Pedregal anytime the kid wanted to stop by and see him. The Chief was sorry Bernabé had been locked up ten days in Lecumberri. But a lot worse had happened to the Chief. Bernabé hadn’t known, he hadn’t read the newspapers or anything. Well, a real storm broke loose against the Chief, they said he was an agent provocateur and they threatened to send him as governor to Yucatan, which was roughly like being a ditchdigger on the moon, but he says he’ll get even with his political enemies and he needs you. He said you were the best man in the brigade. You may have stiffed poor old Burro but the Chief says he understands that you’re hotheaded and it’s okay with him. Bernabé started sobbing like a baby, it all seemed so lousy, and El Güero didn’t know what to do except stop the cassette music out of respect and Bernabé asked him to drop him on the road to Azcapotzalco near the Spanish Panteon but El Güero was worried about him and followed in the car as Bernabé walked along the dusty sidewalks where flower vendors were fashioning huge funeral wreaths of gardenias and stonecutters were chiseling tombstones, names, dates, the beginning and end of every man and woman, and where had they been, Bernabé kept asking himself, remembering the book burned by orders of Licenciado Carreón. El Güero decided to be patient and was waiting for him when an hour later he walked through the wrought-iron cemetery gate, that’s the second time you’ve come through an iron gate today, kid, he joked, better watch your step. Bernabé, still hating the Chief, entered the house in Pedregal, but the minute he saw that nearsighted janitor’s face he felt sorry for the man clinging to an oversized tumbler of whiskey as though it were a life belt. It made him sad to remember him on all fours stark naked his balls freezing trying to win his wife’s cruel teasing game. Hell, didn’t Mirabella have the right, after all, to go to finishing school rather than live in a tin-and-cardboard shack in some lost city? He walked into the house in Pedregal, he saw the Chief cut down to size and felt sorry for him, but now felt sure of himself, nothing bad could happen to him here, no one would abandon him here, the Chief wouldn’t make him bust his ass cleaning windshields because the Chief had no intention of taking justice to the state of Guerrero, he wasn’t about to die of hunger just to feel pure as the Host, the Chief wasn’t a fuckup like his Chief, his Chief Mariano Carreón his Chief Andrés Aparicio, oh Father, do not forsake me. The Licenciado told El Güero to serve the kid his whiskey, he’d been brave and never mind, politics is nothing more than a lot of patience, it’s like religion that way, and before you knew it the moment would arrive to get even with the men who were plotting against him and trying to exile him to Yucatan. He wanted Bernabé, who’d been with him in the hour of combat, to be with him in the hour of revenge. They’d change the name of the brigade, it had become too notorious, one day it would reappear bleached clean, bleached by the sun of revenge against the crypto-Communists who’d infiltrated the government, only six years, thank God for the one-term presidency, then those Reds would be out in the street and they’d see, they’d swing back in like a pendulum because they knew how to wait a long long long time like the stone idols in the museum, right? there’s no one can stop us. He said to Bernabé, his arm around his neck, that there was no destiny that couldn’t be overturned by contempt and he told El Güero that he didn’t want to see any of them, not him, not the kid Bernabé, not any of the young toughs in the house while his daughter Mirabella was there, she’d be returning the next day from Canada. They went to the training camp and El Güero gave Bernabé a pistol so he could defend himself and told him not to worry, the Chief was right, there was no way to stop them once they got rolling, look at that rock, how it keeps rolling, shit, said El Güero with a shrewd and malicious expression Bernabé hadn’t seen before, they could even slip out of the Chief’s hands if they wanted, didn’t he know everything there was to know? how to set things up, how to go to a barrio and round up the young kids, begin with slingshots if they had to, then chains, then ice picks like the one you killed the Burro with, Bernabé. It was so easy it was a laugh, all you had to do was create a kind of unseen but shared terror, we’re terrified of always living under someone’s protection, they’re terrified of living without it. Choose, kid. But Bernabé didn’t answer, he’d stopped listening. He was remembering his visit to the cemetery that morning, the Sundays he’d spent making love with Martincita in the crypt of a wealthy family, remembering a ragged old man urinating behind a cypress, bald, smiling like an idiot, smiling ceaselessly, who with his fly open walked away beneath that Azcapotzalco noonday sun hot as a great yellow chili pepper. Bernabé felt a surge of shame. But don’t let it return. A vague memory, a kind of unknowing would be enough for this new Bernabé. He went to see his mother when he had a new suit and a Mustang, secondhand but all his, and he told her that next year he’d have a sunny clean house for her in a respectable neighborhood. She tried to talk to him as she had when he was a boy, My little sweetheart, you’re such a good boy, my little doll, you’re not a ruffian like the others, she tried to say what she’d once said about his father, I never dreamed you were dead, but to Bernabé his mother’s words now were neither tender nor demanding, they merely meant the opposite of what they said. On the other hand, he was grateful that she gave him his father’s most handsome suspenders, the red ones with the gilded clasps that had been the pride of Andrés Aparicio.