Burnt Water

Mother’s Day

Every morning Grandfather vigorously stirs his cup of instant coffee. He grasps the spoon as in other times my dear-departed grandmother Clotilde had grasped the pestle, or he himself, General Vicente Vergara, had grasped the pommel of the saddle now hanging on his bedroom wall. Then he uncorks the bottle of tequila and tilts it to fill half the cup. He refrains from mixing the tequila and the Nescafé. Let the clear alcohol settle by itself. He looks at the bottle of tequila and it reminds him how red was the spilled blood, how clear the liquor that set the blood boiling, inflaming it before the great encounters, Chihuahua and Torreón, Celaya and Paso de Gavilanes, when men were men and there was no way to distinguish between the exhilaration of drunkenness and the recklessness of combat, sí, señor, how could fear creep in when a man’s pleasure was battle and the battle was his pleasure?

He almost spoke aloud, between sips of the spiked coffee. Nobody knew how to make a café de olla any more, the little jug of coffee tasting of clay and brown sugar, no, nobody, not even the pair of servants he’d brought from the sugar plantation in Morelos. Even they drank Nescafé, invented in Switzerland, the cleanest and most orderly nation in the world. General Vergara had a vision of snowcapped mountains and belled cows, but he said nothing, his false teeth still lay at the bottom of the glass before him. This was his favorite hour: peace, daydreams, memories, fantasies, and no one to gainsay them. Strange, he sighed, that he’d lived such a full life and now memory should come back to him like a sweet lie. He sat and thought about the years of the Revolution and the battles that had forged modern Mexico. Then he spit out the mouthful of liquid he’d been swishing between his lizard tongue and his toughened gums.

* * *

Later that morning I saw my grandfather in the distance, shuffling along in his carpet slippers as he always did, down the marble halls, wiping with a large kerchief the bleariness and involuntary tears from his cactus-colored eyes. Seeing him from that distance, almost motionless, I thought he looked like a desert plant. Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains in its entrails from one summer to the next, fermenting them: moisture seeped from his eyes but never reached the white tufts on his head, wisps of dried corn silk. In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall. As he scuffed along, purposeless and old, through the marble rooms of the huge house in Pedregal, he looked tiny, lean, pure bone, the skin clinging desperately to his skeleton, a taut, creaky little old man. But not bowed, no sir, I’d like to see the man who dared …

Once again I was beset by the same uneasiness I felt every morning, the anguish of a cornered rat, the feeling that seized me every time I saw General Vergara purposelessly wandering the rooms and halls and corridors that Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed on their knees, rooms that at this hour of the morning smelled of soapy scrub brushes. The servants refused to use electric appliances. They said no with great humility and dignity, in the hope that it would be noticed. Grandfather thought they were right; he loved the smell of soapy scrub brushes, and that’s why, every morning, Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed meters and meters of Zacatecan marble, Mexican marble, even if the honorable Agustín Vergara, my father, did say, with his finger to his lips, that it had been imported from Carrara — don’t tell anyone, it’s against the law, they’ll hit me with an ad valorem, you can’t even give a decent party any more, if you do, you end up on the society page and then you pay for it, nowadays a man has to live the austere life, even feel ashamed to have worked hard all his life to give his family the things …

I ran out of the house, shrugging into my Eisenhower jacket. In the garage I climbed into my red Thunderbird and started the motor, the door rising automatically at the sound, and gunned out blindly. Something, a flicker of caution, told me that Nicomedes might be there on the driveway between the garage and the massive door in the wall surrounding our property, moving the garden hose, manicuring the artificial-seeming grass between the flagstones. I imagined the gardener flying skyward, torn apart by the impact of the car, and I accelerated. The cedar entrance door, faded by summer rains, swollen and creaking, also opened automatically as the Thunderbird passed the twin electric eyes embedded in the rock and zoomed out; the tires squealed as I swerved to the right. I thought I saw the snowy peak of Popocatepetl, but it was a mirage. I accelerated. It was a cold morning, and the natural fog of the high plateau was rising to meet the blanket of smog imprisoned by the ring of mountains and the pressure of the high cold air.

I kept accelerating until I reached the access to the ring road around the city. I breathed deeply, and drove calmly now. There was nothing to worry about: I could circle the city once, twice, a hundred times, as many times as I wanted, driving thousands of kilometers with a sensation of never moving, of being simultaneously at the point of departure and the destination, seeing the same cement horizon, the same beer ads, billboards for the electric vacuum cleaners Nicomedes and Engracia detested, for soaps and television sets; the same squat, greenish, miserable buildings, barred windows, protective steel curtains, the same paint shops, repair shops, small refreshment stands with the box at the entrance filled with ice and carbonated drinks, corrugated tin roofs, and, occasionally, the dome of a colonial church lost among a thousand rooftop water-storage tanks, a smiling, stellar cast of prosperous characters, rosy and freshly painted, Santa Claus, the Blond Queen of Beers, Coca-Cola’s little white-haired elf with his bottle-cap crown, Donald Duck, and, below, a cast of millions, extras, vendors of balloons and gum and lottery tickets, young men in T-shirts and short-sleeved shirts gathered around jukeboxes, chewing, smoking, loafing, smart-assing; building-supply trucks, armadas of Volkswagens, a collision at the exit to Fray Servando, motorcycle policemen in cinnamon-colored uniforms, putting on the bite, one-upping, horns, insults. Again I burned rubber, feeling free, the second trip identical, the same run, the water tanks, Plutarco, gas trucks, milk trucks, squealing brakes, milk cans tipping over, rolling, bursting on the asphalt, against the safety barriers, on the red Thunderbird, a sea of milk. Plutarco’s white windshield. Plutarco in the fog. Plutarco blinded by limitless whiteness, the blinding liquid invisible to him, making him invisible, milk bath, sour milk, watered milk, your mother’s milk, Plutarco.

Sure, my name lent itself to jokes, what would you expect from a name that sounded like Prick? In school I’d heard all that — Whaaaa? Did I hear…? Say that again? Two, four, six, eight, there’s a Verga t’appreciate, Verga, Verga, rah, rah, rah! And when they called the roll, there was always some joker waiting to answer, Vergara, Plutarco, present and primed, or present but spent, or Pee-Wee Vergara here. Then there’d be blows at recess. And when I began reading novels, at fifteen, I discovered there was an Italian author named Giovanni Verga, almost like my name, but that would never make any impression on a gang of ruffians like those shits at the National Prep. I hadn’t gone to parochial school — first, because Grandfather had said never, what did we think the Revolution had been about, and then my old man, the lawyer, agreed, there were too damn many people who were fiercely anti-clerical in public but good little Catholics at home, better for the image. But I wished I could have been like my grandfather Don Vicente, when someone’d made a joke about his name he’d had the joker castrated. You’re all smoke and no fire, no lead in your pencil, no powder in your cannon, the prisoner had said, and General Vergara cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday! From that time on, they’d called him General Balls, Old Balls and Guts, when he’s around hang on to your nuts, and similar refrains had circulated all during Pancho Villa’s long campaign against the Federales, when Vicente Vergara, still a young man but already forged in the fire of battle, had fought alongside the Centaur of the North, before going over to the ranks of Obregón when he saw the cause was lost in Celaya.

“I know what they say. Beat the shit out of anyone who tells you your grandfather was a turncoat.”

“But no one’s ever said that to me.”

“Listen to me, boy, it was one thing when Villa came out of nothing, out of the Durango mountains, when he alone banded together all the malcontents and organized the Northern Division, which polished off the dictatorship of that drunk Huerta and his Federales. But when he set himself against Carranza and decent law-abiding folk, that was another thing altogether. He wanted to keep on fighting, anything that came along, because he’d gone past the point where he could stop. After Obregón defeated him at Celaya, Villa’s army evaporated and all his men went back to their corn patches and their woods. Villa went and searched them out, one by one, to convince them they had to keep fighting, and they said no, look, General, they’d come back home, they were back with their women and kids again. Then the poor bastards would hear shots, turn around and see their houses up in flames and their families dead. ‘You don’t have any house or woman or kids now,’ Villa would say. ‘You may as well come along with me.’”

“Maybe he truly loved his men, Grandfather.”

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you I was a turncoat.”

“No one says that. Everyone’s forgotten all that stuff.”

* * *

I thought a lot about what he’d said. Pancho Villa truly loved his men; he couldn’t imagine that the soldiers didn’t feel the same about him. In his bedroom, General Vergara had a lot of yellowed snapshots, some just newspaper clippings. You could see him there with all the leaders of the Revolution, he’d been with them all, served them all, in turn. As the leaders changed, so did Vicente Vergara’s attire — peering through the crowd engulfing Don Panchito Madero the day of his famous entrance into the capital, the small and fragile and ingenuous and miraculous apostle of the Revolution who with a book had overthrown the all-powerful Don Porfirio in a land of illiterates, don’t tell me it wasn’t a miracle, and there was young “Chente” Vergara in his narrow-brimmed, ribbonless felt hat and his old-fashioned shirt without the stiff collar, one more downtrodden wretch, perched on the equestrian statue of Carlos IV, that day when even the earth trembled, as it had the day Our Lord Jesus Christ had died, as if the apotheosis of Madero were already his Calvary.

“After our love for the Virgin and our hatred of the gringos, nothing binds us together more than a treacherous crime, I tell you, and all the people rose up against Victoriano Huerta for murdering Don Panchito Madero.”

And then Vicente Vergara, captain of the Dorados, Pancho Villa’s personal guard, his chest crisscrossed with cartridge belts, in a sombrero and white pants, eating a taco with Pancho Villa alongside a train billowing smoke, and then the constitutionalist Colonel Vergara, very young and proper in his Stetson and his khaki uniform, sheltered by the patriarchal and aloof figure of Venustiano Carranza, the principal leader of the Revolution, inscrutable behind smoked lenses and a beard that came to the buttons of his tunic, this snapshot looked almost like a family photograph, a just but severe father and a respectful and well-motivated son, not the same Vicente Vergara as the Obregonist colonel who in Agua Prieta took part in the pronunciamento against Carranza’s abuse of power, liberated now from the tutelage of the father figure riddled by gunfire as he slept in his bedroll in Tlax-calantongo.

“They all died so young! Madero never reached forty, and Villa was forty-five, Zapata thirty-nine, even Carranza, who seemed like an old man, was barely sixty-one, and General Obregón, forty-eight. What would have happened, tell me, boy, if I hadn’t survived out of sheer luck, what if it’d been my destiny to die young, it’s just chance that I’m not buried somewhere out there in some little town overgrown with buzzards and marigolds, and you, you’d never have been born.”

And this Colonel Vergara sitting between General Alvaro Obregón and the philosopher José Vasconcelos at a dinner, this Colonel Vergara with his Kaiser mustache and dark, high-collared uniform rich with military braid.

“A Catholic fanatic killed our General Obregón, my boy. Ahhhhh. I went to all their funerals, every one of ’em you see here, they all died a violent death, except I didn’t get to Zapata’s funeral, they buried him in secret so they could say he was still alive.”

And a different General Vicente Vergara, now dressed in civilian clothes, about to bid farewell to his youth, very neat, very spit-and-polish, in his light gabardine suit and pearl stickpin, very serious, very solemn, because only such a man could be offering his hand to the man with a granite face and the eyes of a jaguar, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution, Plutarco Elías Calles …

“That was a man, my boy, a humble schoolteacher who rose to be President. There wasn’t a man could look him in the eye, not one, not even men who’d survived the awful test of a fake firing squad, believing their hour had come and not blinking an eye, not even them. Your godfather, Plutarco. Yes, boy, your godfather. Look at him, and look at you there in his arms. There we all are, the day you were baptized, the day of national unity when General Calles returned from exile.”

“But why did he have me baptized? Didn’t he persecute the Church mercilessly?”

“What does one thing have to do with the other? Were we going to leave you nameless?”

“No, Grandfather, but you also say that the Virgin unites all us Mexicans, how can you explain that?”

“The Virgin of Guadalupe is a revolutionary Virgin; she appeared on Hidalgo’s banners during the War of Independence, and on Zapata’s in the Revolution, she’s the best bitchin’ Virgin ever.”

“But, Grandfather, it was because of you I didn’t go to parochial school.”

“The Church is good for only two things, to be born right and to die right, you understand? But between the cradle and the grave they don’t have any business sticking their noses in what doesn’t concern them, let them stick to baptizing brats and praying for souls.”

The three of us who lived in the big house in Pedregal only saw each other at supper, which was still whatever my grandfather the General wished. Soup, rice, fried beans, sugary rolls, and cocoa-flavored gruel. My father, the Honorable Don Agustín Vergara, got his own back for these ranch-style suppers by dining from three to five at the Jena or the Rivoli, where he could order steak Diane and crepes suzette. One revolting thing about the suppers was a peculiar habit of Grandfather’s. After we finished eating, the old man would remove his false teeth and drop them into a half glass of warm water. Then he would add a half glass of cold water. He’d wait a minute and pour half this glass into a third. Then again he’d add a portion of warm water to the first glass, pour half of it into the third, and fill the first with warm water from the second. Then he would remove the teeth from the first of the three turbid mixtures swimming with particles of stew and tortilla, steep them in the second and the third, and, having obtained the desired temperature, place the teeth in his mouth and clamp them shut the way you snap a padlock.

“Nice and warm,” he’d say, “sonofabitch, a set of teeth like a lion’s.”

“It’s disgusting,” my father the lawyer Agustín said one night, wiping his lips with his napkin and tossing it disdainfully on the tablecloth.

I looked at my father in astonishment. He’d never said a word all the years my grandfather had been performing the denture ceremony. The Honorable Agustín had to hold back the nausea the General’s patient alchemy aroused. As for me, my grandfather could do no wrong.

“You ought to be ashamed. That’s disgusting,” the lawyer repeated.

“Hoo, hoo, hoo!” The General looked at him with scorn. “Since when can’t I do what I bloody well please in my own house? My house, I said, not yours, Tín, nor that of any of those fancy-dancy friends of yours.”

“I’ll never be able to invite them here, at least not unless I hide you under lock and key.”

“So my teeth make you vomit, but not my dough? By the way, how’re things going…?”

“Bad, really really bad…” my father said, shaking his head with a melancholy we’d never seen in him before. He wasn’t a grave man, only a little pompous, even in his frivolities. This sadness, however, dissipated almost immediately, and he stared at Grandfather with icy defiance and a hint of mockery we couldn’t understand.

Later Grandfather and I avoided comment on all this when we went to his bedroom, which was so different from the rest of the house. My father, the Honorable Agustín, had entrusted the details of the decor to a professional decorator, who’d filled the big house with Chippendale furniture, giant chandeliers, and fake Rubenses, for which he’d charged us as if they were real. General Vergara said he didn’t give a fig for all that stuff, and he reserved the right to furnish his room with the things he and his dead Doña Clotilde had used when they built their first house in the Roma district back there in the twenties. The bed was brass, and although the room had a modern closet, the General closed it off by installing an ancient, heavy mahogany mirrored wardrobe in front of the closet door.

He gazed at his ancient wardrobe with affection. “When I open it, I still smell the smell of my Clotilde’s clothes, so hard-working, the sheets all ironed, everything stiff with starch.”

In that room, there are all kinds of things that no one ever uses any more, like a marble-topped washstand with a porcelain washbasin, and tall pitchers filled with water. A copper spittoon and a wicker rocking chair. The General has always bathed in the evening, and I guess, because of my father’s mysterious behavior, Grandfather asked me to come with him that night. The two of us went together to the bathroom, the General carrying his gourd dipper with its hand-painted flowers and ducklings and his castile soap, because he despised the perfumed soaps with unpronounceable names that everyone was using then; after all, he wasn’t a film star or a pansy. I helped him with his bathrobe, his pajamas, and his fleece-lined slippers. After lowering himself into the tub of warm water, he soaped up his fiber brush and began to scrub himself vigorously. He told me it was good for the circulation of the blood. I told him I preferred a shower, and he replied that showers were for horses. Then, without his even asking, I rinsed him with his gourd dipper, pouring water over his shoulders.

“I’ve been thinking, Grandfather, about what you told me about Villa and his guard.”

“And I’ve been thinking about your answer, Plutarco. You may be right. God knows, there’re times we miss our friends. Mine have been dying off, all of them. And no one can take their place. When the friends you’ve lived with and fought with die, you’re all alone, flat out alone.”

“You remember times when there were real men, I never get tired of hearing about them.”

“Well, you’re my friend, aren’t you? But it isn’t the same.”

“Why not pretend I was with you in the Revolution, Grandfather? Pretend that I…”

I was overcome with a strange embarrassment, and the old man sitting in the tub, all soaped up a second time, lifted his sudsy eyebrows quizzically. Then he took my hand in his wet one and pressed it hard, before brusquely changing the subject.

“What’s your old man up to, Plutarco?”

“Who knows? He never tells me anything. You know that, Grandfather.”

“He’s never been one to be impudent. I tell you it pleased me how he talked back to me at supper.”

The General laughed and slapped the water. He told me my father had always been a lazy bastard who’d had everything served to him on a silver platter and who’d been lucky to find himself with a decent living when General Cardenas had swept Calles’s supporters out of government. As he washed his hair, Grandfather told how until then he’d lived off his salary as a government official. But Cardenas had forced him to look elsewhere for income, to make his living in business. The haciendas, the old agricultural estates, weren’t producing. The peasants had burned them down before going off to fight. He said that while Cardenas was reapportioning the land, someone had to produce. So Calles’s supporters had got together as small landowners and bought up the bits and pieces of the haciendas not affected by the land distribution.

“We sowed cane in Morelos, tomatoes in Sinaloa, and cotton in Coahuila. The country could eat and clothe itself while Cardenas was setting up communal land holdings, which never caught on because what every man wants is his own little plot of land, registered in his own name, see? I was the one that got things rolling, your father just took over the management as I got older. He’d do well to remember that when he gets feisty with me. But I swear I enjoyed it. He must be growing a little backbone. What’s he got on his mind?”

I shrugged. I’d never been interested in business or politics. Where was the risk and adventure there? Where a risk comparable to what my grandfather had lived through early in his life? Those were the things that interested me.

Compared to the jumble of photographs of revolutionary leaders, the picture of my grandmother Doña Clotilde is something apart. She has a whole wall to herself, and a table with a vase filled with daisies. I think if Grandfather were a believer he’d have put candles there, too. The frame is oval and the photograph is signed by the photographer, Gutierrez, 1915, Guanajuato. This ancient young woman who was my grandmother looks like a little doll. The photographer had tinted the photograph a pale rose, and only the lips and cheeks of Doña Clotilde glow in a mixture of shyness and sensuality. Did she really look like that?

“Like something out of a fairy tale,” the General says to me. “Her mother died when she was a baby, and Villa shot her father because he was a moneylender. Wherever he went, Villa canceled the debts of the poor. But he didn’t stop at that. He ordered the moneylenders shot, to teach them a lesson. I think the only one who learned the lesson was my poor Clotilde. I carried away an orphan who was happy to accept the first man who offered his protection. There were lots of orphan girls in that part of the country who to survive ended up as whores for the soldiers or, if they were lucky, vaudeville entertainers. Later she came to love me very much.”

“And did you always love her?”

Grandfather, deep in his bedcovers, nodded.

“You didn’t take advantage of her, just because she couldn’t protect herself?”

He glared at me and abruptly cut off the light. I felt ridiculous, sitting in the darkness, rocking in the wicker chair. For a while the only sound was the noise of the chair. Then I got up and started to tiptoe out without saying good night. But I was stopped by a single painful vision. I saw my grandfather lying there dead. One morning we’d wake up and he’d be dead, it was bound to happen, and I’d never be able to tell him I loved him, never again. He’d grow cold, and my words, too.

I ran to him in the darkness and said to him: “I love you very much, Grandfather.”

“That’s good, boy. The same goes for me.”

“Listen, I don’t want to have everything served to me on a silver platter like you say.”

“Can’t be helped. Everything’s in my name. Your father just manages it. When I die, I’m leaving everything to you.”

“I don’t want it, Grandfather; Grandfather, I want to begin from the beginning, the way you did…”

“Times are different, what do you think you could do now?”

I half smiled. “I wish I could have castrated someone, like you did.”

“Do they still tell that story? Well, yes, that’s the way it was. Except that I didn’t make that decision by myself, you know.”

“You gave the order, cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday!”

Grandfather patted me on the head and said no one knows how such decisions are made, they’re never made by one man alone. He remembered one night by the light of the bonfires, on the outskirts of Gómez Palacio before the battle of Torreón. The man who’d insulted him was a prisoner, and he was a traitor besides.

“He’d been one of us. He went over to the Federales and told them how many we were and what arms we had. My men would have killed him anyway. I just beat them to it. It was every man’s will. And then it became mine. He gave me the opportunity when he insulted me. Now they tell that colorful story, ah, what a bastard that General Vergara was, Old General Balls himself. Sí, señor. No, oh, no. It wasn’t that simple. They’d have killed him anyway, and rightly so, because he was a traitor. But he was a prisoner of war, too. And that’s a question of military honor as I see it, boy. No matter how bad the fellow was, he was still a prisoner of war. I kept my men from killing him. I think killing him would have dishonored them. But I wouldn’t have been able to stop them. And that would have dishonored me. My decision was theirs and theirs was mine. That’s the way things happen. There’s no way of telling where your will ends and your men’s begins.”

“I came back to tell you I wish I’d been born at the same time as you and could have ridden with you.”

“It wasn’t a pretty spectacle, oh no. That man bleeding to death till the dawn rose over the dust of the desert. Then the sun ate him up and the buzzards held his wake. We left that place knowing secretly that what we’d done we’d done together. But if they’d done it and not me, I wouldn’t be the leader and they wouldn’t feel easy going into battle. There’s nothing worse than looking a poor solitary bastard in the eye and killing him just before you kill a lot of faceless men whose eyes yours will never meet. But that’s the way it is.”

“Oh, Grandfather, how I wish…”

“Don’t get your hopes up. There’ll never be another revolution like that in Mexico! That kind only happens once.”

“And what about me, Grandfather?”

“I feel sorry for you, boy, here, hug me tight, son, I understand, I swear I understand … I’d give a lot to be young again and be with you! What hell we’d stir up, Plutarco, you and me together, ummmm, sonofabitch!”

* * *

I seldom spoke with my father the lawyer. I’ve already said that the three of us only got together for supper and the General had the leading role there. But occasionally my father would call me to his study to ask me how I was getting along in school, what grades I was getting, what career I intended to follow. If I’d told him I didn’t know, that I was spending my time reading novels, that I’d like to go to some far-off world like Michel Strogoff’s Siberia or d’Artagnan’s France, that I would much rather know what I could never be than what I wanted to be, my father wouldn’t have reprimanded me, he wouldn’t even have been disappointed. He simply wouldn’t have understood. I knew all too well his perplexed look when I said something that completely escaped him. That pained me more than it did him.

“I think I’ll study law, Father.”

“That’s good, that’s a good choice. But then you should specialize in business. Would you like to go to Harvard Business School? It’s difficult to get in, but I can pull a few strings.”

I didn’t disabuse him, and stood staring at the volumes in his library, all identically bound in red. There was nothing interesting there except a complete set of the Official Register, which always begins with announcements of foreign decorations, China’s Order of the Celestial Star; the medal of the Liberator, Simon Bolivar; the French Legion of Honor. Only when my father is away do I dare creep like a spy into his carpeted, paneled bedroom. There isn’t a single personal memento, not even a photograph of my mother. She died when I was five, and I don’t remember her. Once a year, on the tenth of May, the three of us go to the French Cemetery, where my grandmother Clotilde and my mother, Evangelina was her name, lie buried side by side. I was thirteen when one of my classmates at the Revolution High School showed me a photograph of a girl in a bathing suit. It was the first time I’d ever felt a twinge of excitement. Like Doña Clotilde in her photograph, I felt pleasure and shame at the same time. I blushed and my classmate, guffawing, said, Be my guest, it’s your mommy. A band of silk crosses the breast of the girl in the snapshot, tying at her hip. The legend reads “Queen of the Mazatlán Carnival.” “My father says your old lady was quite a piece,” my schoolmate said, bellowing with laughter.

“What was my mother like, Grandfather?”

“Beautiful, Plutarco. Too beautiful.”

“Why aren’t there any pictures of her in the house?”

“Too painful.”

“I don’t want to be left out of the pain, Grandfather.”

The General looked at me very strangely when I said that. How could I forget that look and my words that famous night when I was awakened by loud voices in a house where never a sound is heard once my father finishes his dinner and drives off in his Lincoln Continental, to return early the next morning, about six, to bathe and shave and breakfast in his pajamas, as if he’d spent the night in the house. Who was he fooling? Every once in a while I saw his picture in the society section of the paper, always in the company of a rich widow, fiftyish like him, but he could be seen with her. I never got any farther than a whorehouse on Saturday nights, alone, with no friends. I would have liked a relationship with a real lady, mature, like my father’s lover, not the “proper” girls you met at parties given by other families, filthy rich like us. Where was my Clotilde to rescue, to protect, to teach, to love me? What was Evangelina like? I dreamed about her in her white satin Jantzen bathing suit.

I was dreaming about my mother when I was awakened by voices shattering the normal routine of the house. I sat up in bed and instinctively pulled on my socks so I could creep downstairs without making any noise. Of course, in my dream I’d heard Grandfather shuffling along the corridor, it hadn’t been a dream, it was real, no, I was the only one in this house who knew that dreams are real. That’s what I was thinking as I moved noiselessly toward the living room; the voices were coming from there. The Revolution wasn’t real, it was my grandfather’s dream, my mother wasn’t real, she was my dream, and that’s why they were true. Only my father never dreamed, that’s why he lived a lie.

* * *

Lies, lies, my grandfather was shouting. I stopped just outside the living room and hid behind the life-size reproduction of the Victory of Samothrace the decorator had placed there as a guardian goddess of our hearth — the living room that no one ever entered. It was for show; not a footprint, not a cigarette butt, not a single coffee stain. And now it was the scene of this midnight battle between my grandfather and my father, who were shouting at each other, my grandfather the General in a voice you can imagine ordering, Cut off his balls, and I mean yesterday, blast him, shoot him, first we’ll kill him and then we’ll make inquiries, Old General Balls himself; my father the lawyer in a voice I’d never heard before.

I imagined that Grandfather, in spite of his anger, was enjoying the fact that his son was finally talking back to him. He was dressing him down the way he would a drunken corporal: had he had a whip in his hand, he’d have left a crossword puzzle on my father’s face, there’s nothing lower than a sonofabitch like you. And my father to the General: You’re an old bastard. And my grandfather: There’s only one bastard in this family, he’d turned over a solid, honest fortune to him, all he’d asked was for him to manage it with the help of the best lawyers and accountants, all he had to do was sign his name and collect the income, put a little in the bank and reinvest a little, what did he mean there was nothing left? Get off it, you old bastard, get off it, at least I won’t go to prison, I never signed anything, I was cagey as hell, I let the lawyers and the accountants sign everything for me, at least I can say that everything was done behind my back, though I’ll accept the responsibility for the debts, even though I was as much a victim of fraud as the men who lent me the money. Son of a fucking bitch, I handed over a sound, solid fortune to you, wealth that comes from the land is the only secure wealth, money’s not worth the paper it’s printed on unless it’s based on land, you gibbering jackass, diddling around with play money, who asked you to build an empire out of pure air, shadow shareholders, worthless stock, a hundred million pesos with nothing to back them up, who asked you to go around thinking the more debts you accumulated the safer you were? you little bastard. Don’t get in an uproar, General, I can assure you the lawsuit against the lawyers and accountants will proceed, they deceived me, too, I’ll stick to that. You’ll stick to it, your ass, you’ll have to give them the land, the property in Sinaloa, your fields of tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! God, how my father laughed, I’d never heard him laugh like that. What a fool you are, General, tomatoes, do you think we constructed this house and bought our cars and lived the good life on tomatoes? do you think I’m a fishwife from La Merced? what do you think does better in Sinaloa, tomatoes or poppies? it’s all the same, red fields, from the air you can’t tell they’re not tomatoes, why should I keep it quiet any longer? do you want to know everything? if I have to turn over the land to pay the debts it will all come out. Then burn off the fields, fast, you fucker, plow it under and say that you were cleaned out by the blight, what are you waiting for? Do you think they’ll let me get away with that? you stupid old bastard, the gringos who buy the product and commercialize it, my … my associates in California where they sell the heroin, what about them? will they just sit there with their arms crossed? oh, sure, now tell me where I’m going to get a hundred million pesos to pay off my investors, tell me, between the house and the cars I can scratch up about ten million, and there’s a little more in the Swiss account. You poor devil, you couldn’t even milk anything off drugs, and those Yankees made a sucker out of you.

Then the General grew silent and the lawyer made a drowning sound in his throat.

“When you married a whore, you dishonored only yourself,” Grandfather said finally. “But now you’ve dishonored me.”

That I didn’t want to hear. Don’t let them go on, I prayed in the shelter of the wings of the Victory. This was ridiculous, a scene from a bad Mexican film, a soap opera on the idiot box, me hiding behind a curtain listening to the grownups telling truths to each other, a classic scene between Libertad Lamarque and Arturo de Córdova. Grandfather stode from the living room, and I stepped out in front of him and clutched his arm. My father stared at us in stupefaction. I asked Grandfather, “Do you have any money on you?”

General Vergara looked me straight in the eye and caressed his belt. It was his snakeskin belt filled with hundred-peso gold coins. “Right. Let’s go.”

We left, my arm around the old man, as my father screamed at us from the living room: “I’ll not give either of you the pleasure of seeing me defeated!”

The General shoved the enormous cut-glass urn in the vestibule; it fell and shattered. We left behind us a trail of plastic calla lilies, and roared off in the red Thunderbird, I in my pajamas and socks, the General very circumspect in his light gabardine suit, his maroon tie secured below the knot with the pearl stickpin, still caressing the beltful of gold. Oh, it was great to roar along the ring road at one in the morning — no traffic, no scenery, the open road to eternity. That’s what Grandfather said. Hang on tight, General, I’m going to floor her to a hundred and twenty, I’ve ridden rougher broncs than this. Grandfather laughed. Let’s find someone to tell your stories to, let’s find someone who’ll listen, let’s blow all the gold pieces, let’s take her around again, Grandfather. You bet, boy, right from zero, again.

In the Plaza Garibaldi, at one-fifteen in the morning: First things first, boy, we need some mariachis to follow us around all night, you don’t ask how much, just whether they know how to play “La Valentina” and “On the Road to Guanajuato,” okay, boys, strike up the bass guitar. Grandfather let out a yowl like a coyote: “Valentina, Valentina, listen to my plea,” let’s go to Tenampa and have a tequila or two, that’s what I have for breakfast, boys, see who can hold the most, that’s how I worked myself up to a pitch for the encounter in Celaya, when we Villistas sent our cavalry out to swamp Obregón, “One passion fires me, and that’s what I feel for you,” and before us stretched the enormous plain, and in the distance we could see the artillery and the motionless horses of the enemy, and here come banged-up trays loaded with beer, and we surged forward at a gallop, sure of victory, with the courage of wild tigers, and now the mariachis are looking at us with stony eyes, as if my grandfather and I didn’t exist, and then from invisible wolves’ dens on the plain there suddenly emerged a thousand bayonets, boys, Yaqui Indians faithful to Obregón had hidden in those holes, be careful, don’t spill that cold brew, and everyone was staring at us as if we were crazy, a loudmouthed old man and a kid in his pajamas, what’s with them? there they were, ramming their bayonets into the bellies of our horses, holding them firm until they ripped out the guts, those Yaquis with earrings in their ears and their heads tied in red kerchiefs soaked in the blood and guts and balls of our horses, another round? sure, the night is young, we were scared, sure, we were scared, who’d ever have imagined such a magnificent tactic from General Obregón, right then I began to respect him, I swear I did, when do you want us to sing? didn’t you hire us to sing, señor? the mariachis stared at us, thinking, I’ll bet they don’t have a red cent, we fell back, we attacked with cannon, but we’d already been defeated by the maneuver, Celaya was a field of smoke and blood and dying horses, smoke spiraled from Delicados, a bored mariachi poured salt and squeezed lemon on my grandfather’s closed fist, we blew off one of General Obregón’s arms, things were going so bad I said to myself right there, we’ll never make it against this guy, the mariachi shrugged his shoulders and poured salt on the mouthpiece of his trumpet and began to play, teasing out sad sounds, Villa is pure unleashed, undirected force, Obregón is intelligent force, he’s the king bastard of them all, I was ready to crouch down on the battlefield to follow the trail, to look for the arm we’d blasted off Obregón and hand it back to him and say, General, you’re the fucking end, here’s your arm back and I’m sorry, ah, sonofabitch, though I guess you know what happened? you don’t know? don’t you want to know? well, General Obregón flipped a gold coin in the air, like that, and the arm flew off the ground and the bloody fist snatched the coin in midair, like that, ah, sonofabitch, gotcha’, old buddy, now are you interested in my story? I gotcha’, the way Obregón got us and got his arm back at Celaya, “Well, if I’m to die tomorrow, it may as well be today,” I just want you to love me, boys, that’s all, and be faithful, even if it’s just for tonight.

* * *

Two in the morning, in the silver-toned Club of the Aztecs, the sensational Ricky Rola, queen of the cha-cha-cha, cuba libres for everyone, these boys are my buddies, whaddya mean they can’t be seated, you sourass little lemon, just look at those sick green bags under his eyes, crummy little punk, he cleans out the latrines, shut that lemon you call a trap or I’ll squeeze it for you, whaddya mean why is my grandson in his pajamas? why, that’s all the clothes he has, the only time he goes out is at night because he’s sacked out all day with your dear momma and he’s all tired out, whaddya mean, your musicians will protest? my mariachis belong to the union too, sit down, boys, General Vergara’s orders, what did you say, you prick, a waiter says at your service, General, get that, lemon-puss? I’ll bet-you piss vinegar, yellow and rose and blue lights, the Everlasting Lily, Queen of the Sentimental Bolero, they stuffed her into those sequins with a shoehorn, look, General, they lifted those knockers with a derrick after they played soccer with them, that baby could score goals all by herself, she must have a belly button the size of a bullring, they slapped eight layers of paint on her before she came out, General, look at those eyelashes, like black venetian blinds, you’re for sale? you don’t say, how much for those sad eyes, Bubbles? she’s a hypocrite, who’s she singing those pimp songs to, boys, we’ll see about that, charge! troops! a hypocrite, plain and simple, you were making fun of me, let’s have a macho song, get up there on the platform, boys, grab-ass, li’l ole Everlasting Lily, let’s have those cantaloupes, Bubbles, what a screech, respect an artist, go take your bath, Sweatso, go wash off that clown face, stop yelling, it’s for your own good, charge! troops! sing, General, “and on February the sixteenth, Wilson sends to our great nation ten thousand American troops,” let’s hear that sobbing guitar, let’s hear that salty trumpet, “tanks and cannons and airplanes, all looking for Villa, all trying to kill him,” get down you old asshole, after them, my gallant mariachis, and that pansy in the pajamas, giddown, no one plays here but union musicians, musicians, hell, slick-haired greaser gays in little bow ties and shiny tuxedo jackets, shiny? I’ll shine your balls, you old coot, hear that, boys? they’re trying to bully me and I won’t take that, no, by the Holy Virgin, I won’t take that, cut off their balls, Grandfather, right here on the spot, one foot through the bass drum, bass guitar smashing against the snares, rip the guts out of the piano the way they did the horses at Celaya, watch out, Grandpa, for the guy with the saxophone, a right to the belly, butt that bastard’s bass drum, Plutarco, hard at it, troops, I want to see the blood of those low-born bastards running on the dance floor, the guy on the snares has a wig on, Plutarco, grab it, that’s right, egghead, should I crack that before I crack his nuts? kick his ass, Plutarco, and run like hell, all of you, old Lemonade’s called the cops, grab the harp, boys, not a key left in place, here, General, the singer’s eyelashes, and I’m leaving this stack of gold pieces to pay for the damages.

* * *

A little after three in the house of La Bandida, where I was well known, and the Madame herself greeted us, what swanky pajamas, Plutarco, and she felt so honored that the famous General Balls … and what a great idea to bring the mariachis, and could they play “Seven Leagues”? she herself, La Bandida, would sing it because it was her own composition, Seven Leagues was Villa’s favorite horse, serve the rum, come do your stuff, girls, they’ve just arrived from Guadalajara, all very young, you’ll be, at the most, the second person to touch her in her life, General, but if you prefer I can bring you a brand-new virgin, as they say, that was a good idea you had, that’s it, that’s it, right on the General’s knees, Judith, do what I tell you, ayyy, Doña Chela, he looks like something to throw to the lions, my grandpa has a fatter carcass than this, listen, you little bitch, this is my grandfather and I want you to respect him, you don’t have to defend me, Plutarco, now this little flower of the night is going to see that Vicente Vergara’s not something to throw to the lions, he is the lion, come along, little Judith, let’s see if we can find your cot, we’ll see who’s the macho, what I want to see’s the color of your money, there you are, catch it, I like you, a gold piece, Doña Chela, look, the old man’s loaded, “when he heard the train whistle, he reared up on his hind legs and whinnied,” take your pick, boys, my grandfather told the mariachis, remember you’re my troops and don’t haggle.

I sat in the parlor, waiting and listening to records. My grandfather and the mariachis between them had cornered the market on girls. I drank a cuba libre and counted the minutes. After thirty, I began to get worried. I went up to the second floor and asked where Judith worked. The towel girl took me to her door. I knocked and Judith opened it, a tiny little thing without her high heels, stark naked. The General was sitting on the edge of the bed, trouserless, his socks held up by old red garters. He stared at me, his eyes brimming with the moisture that sometimes fell unbidden from his ancient barrel-cactus head. He looked at me sadly.

“I couldn’t do it, Plutarco, I couldn’t do it.”

I grabbed Judith by the nape of her neck, I twisted her arm behind her back, the bitch clawed my shoulder and shrieked, it wasn’t my fault, I did his show for him, everything he asked me to, I did my job, I did my part, I didn’t rob him, don’t look at me like that, I’ll give you your money back if you want, but don’t look at me so sad, please, don’t hurt me, let me go.

I twisted her arm harder, I pulled harder on her frizzy hair, in the mirror I saw the face of a wildcat, screaming, her eyes squeezed shut, high cheekbones, lips painted with silvery pomade, sharp little teeth, sweaty shoulder.

“Was this what my mother was like, Grandfather? A whore like this? Is that what you meant?”

I let her go. She ran from the room, covering herself with a towel. I went to sit beside Grandfather. He didn’t answer me. I helped him get dressed. He muttered: “I hope so, Plutarco, I hope so.”

“Did she put the horns on my father?”

“He looked like a stag when she got through with him.”

“Why did she do it?”

“She didn’t have to, like this girl does.”

“Then she did it because she liked it. What’s bad about that?”

“It was ingratitude.”

“I’m sure my father couldn’t please her.”

“She should have tried to get into the movies, and not come to my house.”

“So did we do her a big favor? It would have been better if my father’d done her a favor in bed.”

“I only know she dishonored your father.”

“Because she had to, Grandfather,”

“When I remember my Clotilde…”

“I tell you she did it because she had to, just like that whore.”

“Well, I couldn’t do it, boy. Must be lack of practice.”

“Let me show you, let me refresh your memory.”

Now that I’m past my thirtieth year, I can remember that night when I was nineteen as if I were living it again, the night of my liberation. Liberation was what I felt as I fucked Judith, with all the mariachis, drunk as hell, in her bedroom, pumping and pumping to the strains of the ballad of Pancho Villa’s horse, “in the station at Irapuato, broad horizons beckoned,” my grandfather sitting in a chair, sad and silent, as if he were watching life being born anew, but not his, not his ever again, Judith red with shame, she’d never done it that way, with music and everything, frozen, ashamed, feigning emotions I knew she didn’t feel, because her body belonged to the dead night, I was the only one who conquered, no one shared the victory with me, that’s why it had no flavor, it wasn’t like those moments the General had told me about, moments shared by all, maybe that’s why my grandfather was so sad, and why so sad forever was the melancholy of the liberation I thought I’d won that night.

It was about six in the morning when we reached the French Cemetery. Grandfather handed over another of the gold coins he carried in his richly ornamented belt to a watchman numb with cold, and he allowed us to enter. Grandfather wanted to play a serenade to Doña Clotilde in her tomb, and the mariachis sang “On the Road to Guanajuato” on the harp they’d stolen from the cabaret: “Life is without meaning, there’s no meaning in life.” The General sang with them, it was his favorite song, it reminded him of so many things from his youth: “On the road to Guanajuato, you pass through many towns.”

We paid the mariachis and said we’d get together again soon, friends to the death, and Grandfather and I went home. Even though there was little traffic at that hour, I had no desire to speed. The two of us, Grandfather and I, on our way home to Pedregal, that unwitting cemetery that rises to the south of Mexico City. Mute witness to cataclysms that went unrecorded, the black, barren land watched over by extinct volcanoes is an invisible Pompeii. Thousands of years ago, lava inundated the night with bubbling flames; no one knows who died here, who fled. Some, like me, think that perfect silence, that calendar of creation, should never have been touched. Many times, when I was a boy, when we lived in the Roma district and my mother was still alive, we passed by Pedregal on the way to visit the pyramid of Copilco, stone crown of stone. I remember how, spontaneously, each of us would fall silent when we saw that dead landscape, lord of its own dusk that would never be dissipated by the (then) luminous mornings of our valley, do you remember, Grandfather? it’s my first memory. We were on our way to the country, because then the country was very close to the city. I always sat on a servant’s lap, was she my nurse? Manuelita was her name.

On the way back to the house in Pedregal with my drunk and humiliated grandfather, I remembered the construction of the university, how they polished the volcanic rock, Pedregal put on spectacles of green glass, a cement toga, painted its lips with acrylic, encrusted its cheeks with mosaic, conquered the blackness of the land with an even blacker shadow of smoke. The silence was broken. On the far side of the vast parking lot at the university they parceled out the Pedregal Gardens. They established a style that would unify the buildings and landscape of the new residential site. High walls, white, indigo blue, vermilion, and yellow. The vivid colors of the Mexican fiesta, Grandfather, combined with the Spanish tradition of the fortress, are you listening? They sowed the rock with dramatic plants, stark, with no adornment but a few aggressive flowers. Door locked tight like chastity belts, Grandfather, and flowers open like wounded genitals, like the cunt of the whore Judith that you couldn’t fuck and I could, and what for, Grandfather?

We were approaching Pedregal Gardens, the mansions that must all have been the same behind their walls, Japan with a touch of Bauhaus, modern, one-floor, low roofs, wide picture windows, swimming pools, rock gardens. Do you remember, Grandfather? The perimeter of the development was encircled by walls, and access was limited to a certain number of orange wrought-iron gates tended by guards. What a pitiful attempt at urban chastity in a capital like ours, wake up, Grandfather, look at it by night, Mexico City, voluntarily a cancerous city, hungry for uncontrolled expansion, a hodgepodge of styles, a city that confuses democracy with possessions, and egalitarianism with vulgarity, look at it now, Grandfather, how we saw it that night we spent with the mariachis and the whores, look at it now that you’re dead and I’m over thirty, bound by its broad belts of poverty, legions of unemployed, immigrants from the countryside, and millions of babies conceived, Grandfather, between a howl and a sigh: our city, Grandfather, it won’t long tolerate oases of exclusiveness. Keeping Pedregal Gardens in good condition was like fixing your fingernails while your body rots of gangrene. The gates collapsed, the guards disappeared, the caprice of construction broke forever the quarantine of our elegant leprosarium, and my grandfather’s face was as gray as the concrete walls of the ring road. He’d fallen asleep, and when we reached the house I had to lift him out of the car like a child. How light he was, emaciated, just skin and bones, and what a strange grimace of forgetfulness on a face laden with memories. I carried him to his bed. My father was waiting for me at the door.

He signaled me to follow him through the marble halls to the library. He opened the cabinet filled with crystal ware and mirrors and bottles. He offered me a cognac and I shook my head no. I prayed he wouldn’t ask me where we’d gone, what we’d done, because I would have had to give him an answer he wouldn’t understand, and that, as I’ve already said, hurt me more than it did him. I rejected the cognac as I would have rejected his questions. It was the night of my liberation and I wasn’t going to lose it by acknowledging that my father had the right to interrogate me. I had my silver platter, hadn’t I, why try once more to find out, for myself alone, what love was, what it was to be courageous, to be free.

“What is it you hold against me, Plutarco?”

“That you left me out of everything, even pain.”

I felt sorry for my father as I said it. He stood there for a moment, then walked to the picture window overlooking an interior patio, glass-enclosed, a marble fountain in the center. He drew back the curtains with a melodramatic gesture at the very moment Nicomedes turned on the fountain; it was as if they’d rehearsed it. I felt sorry for him; these were gestures he’d learned at the movies. Every move he made he’d learned at the movies. Everything he did was learned, and pompous. I compared his actions to the spontaneous hell my grandfather knew how to raise. My father for years had been hobnobbing with gringo millionaires and marquises with invented titles. His own certificate of nobility was his appearance in the society pages, his English mustache carefully brushed upward, graying hair, discreet gray suit, a showy handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket like the dry plants from the Pedregal. Like many vulgar rich Mexicans of his generation, he modeled himself on the Duke of Windsor, a large knot in the necktie, but they never found their Mrs. Simpsons. Pitiful creatures: hobnobbing with some vulgar Texan who’d come to buy a hotel in Acapulco, or a Spanish sardine seller who’d bought his aristocracy from Franco, people like that. He was a very busy man.

He parted the curtains and said he knew his arguments wouldn’t sway me, that my mother had not taken proper care of me, she’d been dazzled by the social scene, it was the time when the European emigres were arriving, King Carol and Madame Lupescu with valets and Pekingese, and for the first time Mexico City felt itself to be an exciting cosmopolitan capital, not a petty town of Indians and military coups. It was inevitable that it would impress Evangelina, a beautiful girl from the provinces who’d had a gold tooth when he first met her, one of those girls from the coast of Sinaloa who become women while still very young, tall and fair, with eyes like silk, and long black hair, whose bodies hold both night and day, Plutarco, night and day glowing in the same body, all the promises, all of them, Plutarco.

He’d gone to the carnival in Mazatlán with some friends, young lawyers like himself, and Evangelina was the Queen. She was paraded along the seawall called Olas Altas in an open car adorned with gladiolas, everyone was courting her, the orchestras were playing “Little sweetheart mine, pure as a newborn child,” she’d preferred him, she’d chosen him, chosen happiness with him, life with him, he hadn’t forced her, he hadn’t offered any more than the others, the way the General had with your grandmother Clotilde, who had no recourse but to accept the protection of a powerful and courageous man. Not Evangelina. Evangelina had kissed him for the first time one night on the beach, and said, I like you, you’re the tenderest, you have handsome hands. And I was the most tender, I was, Plutarco, that’s the truth, I wanted to love. The sea was as young as she, they’d been born together that very minute, Evangelina your mother and the sea, owing nothing to anyone, no obligations, unlike your grandmother Clotilde. I didn’t have to force her, I didn’t have to teach her to love me, as your grandfather had to teach his Clotilde.

In his heart the General knew that, and his veneration for my mother Clotilde pained him, Plutarco, he was like the old saying, he never lost, but if he lost, he took it with him, my mother was part of his war booty, no matter how hard he tried to hide it, she hadn’t loved him, she had had to learn to love him, but Evangelina chose me, I wanted to love, your grandfather wants people to love him, and that’s why he determined that Evangelina should stop loving me, the reverse of what happened to him, do you understand? all day long he compared her to his sainted Clotilde, everything was my dear dead Clotilde wouldn’t have done it that way, when my Clotilde was alive — my Clotilde, may she rest in peace — she knew how to run a household, she was modest, she never raised her voice to me, my Clotilde was so well-mannered, she’d never had her picture taken showing her legs, and the same, even more, when you were born, Plutarco, take my Clotilde, now there was a real Mexican mother, there was a woman who knew how to care for a baby.

“Why don’t you nurse Plutarco? Are you afraid it’ll ruin those beautiful boobs? Well, what do you want them for? To show the men? Carnival’s over, miss, it’s time to be a decent mother.”

If my father succeeded in making me hate the memory of my mother Clotilde, imagine how it exasperated Evangelina, it’s no wonder your mother felt isolated, and then driven out of the house, going to the dentist, looking for parties to go to, looking for another man, my Evangelina was so simple, leave your father, Agustín, let’s go live by ourselves, let’s love each other the way we did at first, and the General, don’t let that woman get on your back, you let her get her own way just once and she’ll dominate you forever, but in his heart he was hoping she would stop loving me so I would have to force her to love me, the way it had been with him, so I wouldn’t have any advantage he hadn’t had. So no one would have the freedom he’d missed. If he’d had to work hard for everything, then we’d have to, too — first me and then you, that’s how he sees things, his own way, he gave us everything on a silver platter as he always says, and there wasn’t going to be another Revolution where a man could win at a stroke both love and valor, not any more, now we have to prove ourselves in other ways, why should he pay for everything and us for nothing? he’s our eternal dictator, don’t you see? see if we dare show we don’t need him, that we can live without his memories, his heritage, his tyranny of sentiment. He wants people to love him, General Vicente Vergara is our father, by God, and we’re obliged to love him and emulate him, to see if we can do what he did, now that it’s more difficult.

You and I, Plutarco, what battles are we going to win? what women are we going to tame? what soldiers are we going to castrate? you tell me. That’s your grandfather’s terrible challenge, realize that quickly or you’ll find yourself broken the way he broke me, he laughs and says, let’s see whether you can do what I did, now that it can’t be done any longer, let’s see whether you can find a way to inherit something more difficult than my money.

“Violence with impunity.”

Evangelina was so innocent, so without defenses, that’s what galled me more than anything, that I couldn’t blame her, but I couldn’t forgive her either. Now that’s something your grandfather never lived through. Only with such a feeling could I triumph over him forever, inside myself, though he supported me and went on mocking me. I’d done something more than he’d done, or something different. I still don’t know which. Your mother didn’t know either. She must have felt guilty of everything, except the one thing I blamed her for.

“Her irritating innocence.”

My father had been drinking all night. Even more than Grandfather and me. He walked to the hi-fi and turned it on. Avelina Landín was singing something about silver threads among the gold. My father dropped into a chair, like Fernando Soler in the old Mexican film Soulless Woman. I no longer cared whether this, too, was something he’d learned.

“The medical report said your mother had died by choking on a piece of meat. As simple as that. Those things are easily arranged. Your grandfather and I tied a beautiful scarf around her neck for the funeral.”

He gulped down the rest of his cognac, put the glass on a shelf, and stood for a long while staring at the palms of his hands, as Avelina sang about the silvery moon reflected on a lake of blue.

Of course, the business matters were resolved. My father’s friends in Los Angeles covered the hundred-million-peso debt so the fields in Sinaloa would remain untouched. Grandfather took to his bed for a month after the binge we’d had together, but he was back in good form for the tenth of May, Mother’s Day, when the three of us men who lived in the huge house in Pedregal went together, as we did every year, to the French Cemetery to leave flowers in the crypt where my grandmother Clotilde and my mother Evangelina are buried.

The marble crypt is like our mansion in miniature. They are both sleeping here, said the General in a broken voice, head bowed, sobbing, his face hidden in a handkerchief. I stand between my father and my grandfather, clasping their hands. My grandfather’s hand is cold, sweatless, like a lizard’s skin. My father’s hand blazes like fire. My grandfather sobbed again, and uncovered his face. If I’d looked at him closely, I’m sure I would have asked myself for whom he wept so bitterly, and for whom he wept more, his wife or his daughter-in-law. But at that moment I was simply trying to guess what my future would be. We’d gone to the cemetery without mariachis this time. I would have liked a little music.