Burnt Water

The Old Morality

“Gloomy buzzards! Damned devouring crows! Get out of here! You want my plants to dry up? Take the other road, around Doña Casilda’s house, let that old fanatic kneel to you as you go by! Show a little respect for the house of a Juarez Republican! Have you even seen me in your temple of darkness, you vultures! I’ve never asked you to visit my house! Get out, get out of here!”

Leaning against the garden fence, my grandfather shakes his cane. He must have been born with that cane. I think he even takes it to bed with him, so as not to lose it. The head of the cane looks just like Grandfather, except it’s a lion with a big mane and wide-stretched eyes that look as if they could see many things at one time, and Grandfather, well, yes, he has a lion’s mane, too, and yellow eyes that stretch toward his ears when he sees the row of priests and seminary students that file past our garden to take the shortcut to the church. The seminary is a little outside of Morelia and my grandfather swears they built it on the road to our ranch just to annoy him. That isn’t the word he uses. My aunts say the words my grandfather uses are very immoral and that I shouldn’t repeat them. It’s strange that the priests always come by here, as if they liked hearing what he shouts, instead of taking the way around Doña Casilda’s ranch. They went that way once and she knelt for their blessing and then invited them in for a cup of chocolate. I don’t know why they’d rather come by here.

“One of these days I’m not going to take any more, you sons of bitches. Someday I’m going to sic the dogs on you!”

The truth is that my grandfather’s dogs bark a lot when they’re closed in, but as soon as they get past the fence they’re as tame as anything. When the file of priests comes down the hill and they begin to cross themselves, the three German shepherds bark and howl as if the devil himself were coming. They must think it strange to see so many men wearing skirts, and clean-shaven too; they’re so used to Grandfather’s wild beard. He never combs it and sometimes I even think he roughs it up, especially when my aunts come to visit. What happens is, the dogs become very tame once they get out on the road, and they lick the priests’ shoes and hands, and the priests get a funny little smile and look out of the corners of their eyes at Grandfather, who beats on the fence with his cane, hopping mad, so mad he gets his words tangled up. Though the truth is, I’m not sure but what it’s something else the priests are looking at. Because Grandfather always waits for the men in skirts to go by with his arm tight around Micaela’s waist, and Micaela, who is a lot younger than he is, squeezes up against Grandfather and unbuttons her blouse and laughs while she eats a big plump banana and then another and still another and her eyes shine as bright as her teeth when the priests go by.

“Doesn’t it make you sick when you see my woman, you bloodsuckers?” Grandfather shouts, and squeezes Micaela tighter. “Do you want me to tell you where the heavenly kingdom is?”

He gives a big belly laugh and lifts up Micaela’s skirts, and the priests begin to trot like scared rabbits, like the kind that sometimes come down from the woods close by the garden and wait for me to throw them some carrots. Grandfather and Micaela laugh and laugh, and I laugh just like them and take my grandfather’s hand, he is laughing so hard he’s crying, and I say: “Look, look, they’re hopping like rabbits. You really scared them this time. Maybe they won’t come back again.”

My grandfather squeezes my hand in his, which is covered with bluish nerve lines and calluses as hard and yellow as the logs stored in the cave at the back of the garden. The dogs come back to the house and start barking again. And Micaela buttons her blouse and strokes Grandfather’s beard.

But, almost always, things are calmer. Here we all like our work. My aunts say it is a sin that a thirteen-year-old boy should be working instead of going to school, but I don’t know what they mean. I like to get up early and run to the big bedroom, where Micaela is looking at herself in the mirror, braiding her hair, mouth filled with hairpins, and Grandfather is still groaning in bed. Sure, what else could he expect, if you go to bed when the owls do and sleep only four hours, after playing cards with your friends till two o’clock in the morning … That’s why at six o’clock, when I come into the bedroom, which is all cluttered with furniture, rocking chairs with little cushions for your head, great big wardrobes with mirrors so huge you can see all of yourself all at once, I crawl into the bed laughing. Grandfather pretends to be asleep for a while and thinks I don’t know. I go along with the game and all of a sudden he growls like a lion, so loud it shakes the crystal candlestick, and then I pretend to be afraid and hide under those sheets that smell like nothing else in the world. Yes, sometimes Micaela says: “You’re not a boy, you’re like one of those dogs, they don’t see anything, they just go where their noses lead them.” She must be serious when she says that, because it’s true that I go in the kitchen with my eyes closed and head straight for the pudding, for the honey pots and the squash-blossom sweets, for the bowl of nata—that thick skin from the milk — and the mangoes in syrup that Micaela is preparing. And without opening my eyes I stick my finger in the pot of stew and press my lips against the wicker tray where she is stacking up the warm tortillas. “Gosh, Grandfather,” I said to him one day, “if I wanted to, I could go anywhere I want just by smelling and never get lost, I swear I could.” Outside it’s easy. As soon as the sun’s up and the men are at the sawmill it’s the odor of fresh resin that leads me to the shed where the workers stack the tree trunks and logs and then saw the planks the width and thickness they want. They all say hello and then, “Hey, Alberto, give us a hand,” because they know that makes me proud, and they know that I know that they know. There are mountains of sawdust everywhere and it smells as if the real forest were here, because the wood never smells the same before or after, not when it’s a tree or when it’s a piece of furniture or a door or a beam in a house. One time there were bad things about Grandfather in the newspaper in Morelia, they called him a “land raper,” and Grandfather went down to Morelia armed with his cane and busted the newspaperman’s head and later he had to pay costs and damages: that’s what the newspaper said. My grandfather is really quite a character, no doubt about it. If you could see him, the way he’s like a wild bull with the priests and the newspapermen, and then so quiet and tame in the hothouse that’s behind the house. No, he doesn’t have plants there, but birds. Yes, he’s a great bird collector, and I think one reason he loves me so much is because I inherited his taste for birds and I spend whole afternoons looking at them and bringing them seed and water and finally putting on their cage covers when they go to sleep after the sun goes down.

Birds are a serious business and Grandfather says you have to study a lot to look after them right. And he’s right. These aren’t just any old pigeons. I’ve spent hours reading the cards on each cage that explain where they’re from and why they’re so rare. There are two pheasants: the male has all the plumage and he’s the vainest, too, while the female is dull and drab. And the Amazon cockatoo, very white with pale-blue circles under its eyes, as if it had been up all night. And an Australian bird, red, green, purple, and yellow. And the bird like flame, black and orange. And the whidah bird with a four-pointed tail that comes out once a year when it’s looking for a mate and then drops out. And the silver pheasant from China, the color of a mirror, with a red face. And especially the magpies, which swoop down on anything shiny and then hide it so well you can’t find it.

I know that I’d like to spend every afternoon looking at the prettiest birds, but then Grandfather comes and says to me: “All the birds know who all the others are, who their friends are, and how to entertain themselves playing. That’s all they need to know.”

Then later the three of us have dinner at the long, worn table that came from a convent, the only thing churchy, according to the old man, he’ll allow in the house.

“And it’s no skin off my nose,” he says as Micaela serves us some peppers stuffed with beans and melted cheese, “that a refectory table should end up in a liberal’s house. Señor Juarez converted the churches into libraries and the best proof that this poor country is going from bad to worse is that they’ve now taken out the books to put in the holy-water fonts again. At least I hope those hypocritical old aunts of yours wash the sleep out of their eyes each time they go to Mass.”

“Well, they get washed pretty often, then.” Micaela laughs as she passes the pulque jug to Grandfather. “They’re so holy they never get out of the sacristy. They stink of old rags and piss.”

Grandfather hugs her around the waist and we all laugh a lot and I make a drawing in my notebook of my dead mother’s three sisters, making them look like the sharpest-nosed and nosiest birds in all Grandfather’s collection. Then we all howl till our sides hurt and tears run down our faces and Grandfather’s face looks like a tomato and then his friends arrive to play cards and I go up to sleep and early the next day I go into the bedroom where Grandfather and Micaela sleep and about the same things happen again and we’re all very happy.

But today from the sawmill I hear the dogs barking and decide the priests must be passing by and I don’t want to miss Grandfather’s cuss words plopping like ripe tomatoes, but it seems strange for the priests to be going by so early and then I hear the loud horn and I know the aunts have arrived. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, when they hauled me off to Morelia by force and I was bored as a clam while one of them played the piano and another sang and the other one offered little cups of punch to the bishop. I decide to pretend I don’t know what’s going on, but after a while I get curious to take a look at that automobile that’s older than the hills and I come out of hiding like I’m just strolling around, whistling and kicking at the wood shavings and pieces of cork wood. Everyone has gone inside. But right in front of the gate there’s that old machine with a spotted roof and velvet seats with hand-embroidered cushions. INRI, SJ, ACJM. I will ask Grandfather what those embroidered letters mean. Later. Now I feel sure that the old man is giving them something cool to drink, and so as not to worry him I tiptoe into the house and hide among the big flowerpots and plants where I can see them without their seeing me.

Grandfather is leaning with both hands on the head of his cane; his cigar is between his teeth, and he’s puffing smoke like the express to Juarez. Micaela is standing with her arms crossed, laughing, in the kitchen door. The three aunts are sitting very stiffly all on the wicker sofa. All three are wearing black hats and white gloves and are sitting with their knees pressed tight together. Two of them are married and the one in the middle is an old maid, but there’s no way of telling, because Aunt Milagros Tejeda de Ruiz is different from the others only in that she squints constantly, as if she had a cinder in her eye, and you can tell Aunt Angustias Tejeda de Otero only by the fact she wears a wig that’s always slipping to one side, and Aunt Benedicta Tejeda, the spinster, looks only a little bit younger and she’s the one who constantly touches her black lace handkerchief to the tip of her nose. But, aside from that, all three are thin, very light-skinned — almost yellow — with sharp noses and they all dress alike: in mourning all their lives.

“The mother was a Tejeda, but the father was a Santana like me, and that gives me the right!” Grandfather shouts, and blows smoke through his nose.

“The decent part comes from the Tejeda side, Don Agustín,” says Doña Milagros, that eye gleaming like a beacon. “Don’t you forget it.”

“The decent part comes from my balls!” Grandfather shouts again and pours himself a glass of beer, growling at the aunts, who have covered their ears all at the same time. “Why should I try to explain anything to you cockatoos? I can save my breath for better things.”

“Women!” screeches Doña Angustias, straightening her wig. “That prostitute you’re living in sin with.” “Alcohol,” Señorita Benedicta murmurs, her eyes lowered. “It wouldn’t surprise us to learn that the boy gets drunk every night.” “Exploitation!” Doña Milagros shouts, scratching her cheek. “You make him work like a common laborer.” “Ignorance”—Doña Angustias’s eyes blink. “He’s never set foot in a Christian school.” “Sin”—Señorita Benedicta clasps her hands. “He’s thirteen and he hasn’t received Communion or even been to Mass.” “Irreverence”—Doña Milagros points a finger at Grandfather. “Irreverence for the Holy Church and its priests, whom you attack so vilely every day.” “Blasphemer!” Señorita Benedicta dries her eyes with the black handkerchief. “Heretic!” Doña Angustias shakes her head and the wig falls over her eyebrows. “Whoremonger!” Doña Milagros can no longer control the trembling of her eyelid.

“Adiós, Mama Carlota!” Micaela sings, flourishing her kitchen towel.

“Adiós — goodbye to the papist and the traitor!” Grandfather thunders, with his cane raised high: the three aunts take each other’s hand and close their eye. ‘For a family visit, this has already lasted too long. Go back to that antique you call a car and your rosaries and your incense and tell your husbands not to hide behind your skirts, because the only angelic thing about Agustín Santana is his name, and tell them he’s waiting here for them when they really want to try to take the boy away. Godspeed to you, señoras, because only His grace can grant you that miracle. Giddap!”

But if Grandfather raises his cane, Doña Angustias retaliates by showing him a handful of papers. “You don’t frighten us. Read this order from the juvenile judge. It is a court order, Don Agustín. The boy can no longer live in this atmosphere of shameless immorality. Two policemen will come this afternoon and take him to the home of our sister Benedicta: raising Alberto to be a little Christian gentleman will be a comfort to her in her lonely years. Let us go, sisters.”

Aunt Benedicta’s house is in the center of Morelia and from its balconies you can see a small plaza with iron benches and many yellow flowers. There is a church beside it; it is an old house and looks like all the other big houses in the town. There is an entry hall and a patio and the servants live downstairs: the kitchen is there also, and there two women fan charcoal stoves all day. Upstairs are the living rooms and the bedrooms, all opening onto a bare patio. You can imagine: Aunt Milagros said that I had to burn all my old clothes (my overalls, my boots, my sweatshirts) and that I have to dress the way I dress all the time now, in a blue suit and a stiff white sissy shirt. They put me with a stupid old professor to teach me how to talk fancy before classes begin after vacation, and I’m getting a pig’s snout from so much pronouncing “u” the way the maestro wants it. Naturally, every morning I have to go with Aunt Benedicta to church and sit on the hard benches, but at least that’s something different and sometimes I even enjoy it. Aunt and I eat by ourselves almost all the time, though sometimes the other aunts come with their husbands, who tousle my hair and say, “Poor little guy.” And then I wander around the patio by myself or go to the bedroom they’ve given me. It has an enormous bed with a mosquito net. There’s a crucifix over the head of the bed and a little bathroom right next to it. And I get so bored I can hardly wait for mealtimes, which are the least boring times, and for a half hour before mealtime I hang around the dining-room door, I visit the two women who fan the stoves, I find out what they’re fixing and go back to stand guard by the door until one of the servants comes in to set the plates and silver at the two places and then my Aunt Benedicta comes out of her room, takes me by the hand, and we go into the dining room.

They say that Aunt Benedicta isn’t married because she’s very demanding and no man suits her; also that she’s very old, she’s already thirty-four. While we eat, I look at her to see if it shows that she’s twenty years older than I am, but she goes right on sipping her soup without looking at me or talking to me. She never talks to me, and besides, since we sit so far apart at the table, we couldn’t hear each other even if we shouted. I try to compare her with Micaela, who is the only woman I’ve ever been around, since my mother died when I was born and my father four years later and after that I lived with Grandfather and “that woman,” as my aunts call her.

The thing about Señorita Benedicta is that she never laughs. And the only time she says anything it’s to tell me something I already know or to give me orders when I’m already way ahead of her and doing the things she wanted without her telling me. She really gives me a hard time. I don’t know whether the meals really are long or if they just seem long, but I try to entertain myself in different ways. One is to put a Micaela mask on my aunt’s face, and this is very funny, I imagine her laughing her loud laugh and her head thrown back and her eyes always asking whether things are serious or a joke — that’s Micaela — all this coming out of that high-buttoned collar and black dress. Another is to talk to her in the language I invented myself, say, to ask her to pass me the coffee: “Hey-yeh, aunt-tant, asspay the offecay.”

My aunt sighs and she must not be so awfully dumb, because she does what I ask, and only adds a lesson in manners: “One says please, Alberto.”

But, as I was explaining, I get her goat in everything else. When she comes all serious to knock at my door to scold me for not being up yet, I answer her from the patio, all bathed and slicked up, so then she covers up her anger and says to me, more serious still, that it’s time to go to church and I smile and show her the prayer book and she doesn’t know what to say.

But she finally caught me one day, about a month after I’d been living with her, and all because of that tattletale priest. They’re preparing me for my First Communion and all the kids in catechism classes laugh that such a big boob doesn’t know the first thing about who the Holy Spirit is. Besides that, they laugh just because it’s me who’s the big boob. Yesterday it was finally my turn to have a little talk alone with the priest to prepare me for confession. He talked a lot about sin and about how it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know anything about religion or had grown up in such an immoral atmosphere. He said not to worry but to tell him everything, because he’d never before had to prepare a boy as full of sin as I was, for whom perversion was an everyday thing, who couldn’t even distinguish between good and evil. I racked my head trying to think what my worst sins could be and how the two of us were there in the empty church staring at each other without knowing what to say, and I started thinking about all the movies I’d seen and then I poured it out: how I had raided a ranch and carried off all the money and a few chickens besides, how I had grabbed and beat up a poor old blind man, how I had stabbed a policeman in the back, how I had forced a girl to strip and then bitten her on the face. The priest threw up his arms and crossed himself and said the worst anybody knew about Grandfather was nothing, and ran out as if I were the devil himself.

Well, my aunt really tore into my bedroom before I woke up. I thought the house was on fire. She slammed the doors open and shouted my name. I woke up and there she was, her arms in the air. Then she came and sat down on the bed next to me and told me that I had made fun of the priest and that that wasn’t the worst. I had told all those lies in order to hide my true sins. I just looked at her as if she were out of her mind.

“Why don’t you admit the truth?” she said, taking my hand.

“What do you mean, Aunt? Honest, I don’t understand.”

Then she ruffled my hair and squeezed my hand. “How you’ve seen your grandfather and that woman in improper postures.”

I guess my dumb look didn’t convince her, but I swear I didn’t understand what she meant and even less when she kept on in a half-strangled voice, halfway between crying and screaming: “Together. In sin. Making love. In bed.”

Oh, that. “Sure. They sleep together. Grandfather says that a man should never sleep alone or he’ll dry up, and the same for a woman.”

My aunt covered my mouth with her hand. She sat that way for a long time and I was on the point of suffocating. She looked at me in a real strange way, and then she got up and walked out very slowly, not saying anything, and I went back to sleep, but she didn’t come back to get me up to go to Mass. She left me alone and I stayed in bed all morning until time for lunch, looking at the ceiling, thinking about nothing.

There are lots of lizards in the patio. I already know that when you look at them they turn the color of the stone or the tree to disguise themselves. But I know their trick and they can’t get away from me. Today I’ve spent an hour following them, laughing at them because they think I don’t know how to find them: you look for their eyes, shiny as painted pins. The whole point is not to lose sight of the eyes, because they can’t disguise them, and since they open and close them all the time, it’s like a signal turning on and off at the crossroads and that’s the way I follow one and then another and when I want to — like now — I catch them and feel them throb in my fist, all smooth underneath and wrinkled on top and tiny, but with life, the same as anyone else. If only they knew I wouldn’t hurt them, their throat wouldn’t throb so, but that’s the way things are. There’s no way to make them understand. What scares them pleases me. I hold this one tight in my hand and my aunt is watching me from the corridor upstairs, not understanding what I’m doing. I run up the stairs and get there out of breath. She asks me what I’ve been doing. I act very serious so she won’t get wind of anything. She’s sitting fanning herself in the shade, since it’s very hot. I stretch out my closed fist and she tries to smile; you can see it’s an effort. She opens her hand to take mine and I put the lizard on her palm and force her fingers closed over it. She doesn’t scream or get scared as I thought she would. She doesn’t scold me or throw the lizard down. She just closes her fingers and her eyes tighter and looks like she wants to say something but can’t and her nose trembles and she looks at me like nobody ever looked at me before, as if she wanted to cry and would feel better if she did. I tell her that the poor lizard is going to suffocate, and Señorita Benedicta leans toward the floor but can’t let it go and finally opens her fingers and lets it run off along the paving stones and climb up the wall and disappear. And then her expression changes and her mouth twists and I see she’s mad, but not really, so I smile and bury my head in my shoulders, try to look real innocent, and run back down to the patio.

I spend all afternoon in my room doing nothing. I feel tired and sort of sleepy like I’m getting a bad cold. It must be the lack of sun and fresh air in this dark old house. I begin to get sore about everything. I miss the sawmill, and Micaela’s desserts, Grandfather’s birds, the fun when the priests go by and the laughing at dinnertime and in the mornings when I go into their bedroom. I figure that up to now life in Morelia has been like a vacation, but I’ve been stuck here for a month and I’m getting tired of it.

I come out of my room a little late for dinner and my aunt is already sitting at the head of the table with her black handkerchief in her hand and when I take my place she doesn’t scold me for coming in late — even though I did it on purpose. Just the opposite. She seems to be trying to smile and be pleasant. All I want is to throw a fit and go back to the ranch.

She hands me a covered plate and I uncover it. It’s my favorite treat, natas.

“The cook told me you like it very much.”

“Thank you, Aunt,” I say, very serious.

We eat in silence and finally, when it’s time to have our coffee and milk, I tell her I’m bored with living in Morelia and that I wish she would let me go back to live with Grandfather, which is where I like to live.

“Ingrate,” my aunt says, and dries her lips with her handkerchief. I do not reply. “Ingrate,” she repeats.

And she gets up and walks toward me, repeating that, and takes my hand and I’m sitting there very serious and she slaps me in the face with that long, bony hand and I swallow my tears and she slaps me again and suddenly she stops and touches my forehead and opens her eyes wide and says I have a fever.

It must be one of the world’s worst, because I’m getting weak and my knees feel wobbly. My aunt takes me to my bedroom and says I must get undressed while she goes for the doctor. But really, all she does is flutter around while I take off the blue suit and white shirt and undershorts and get into bed, shivering.

“Don’t you wear pajamas?”

“No, Aunt. I always sleep in my undershirt.”

“But you have a fever!”

She rushes out like a madwoman and I lie there shaking and try to go to sleep and tell myself the fever’s bad just to say something. The truth is that I go right to sleep and all Grandfather’s birds come flying out together, stirring up a great commotion because they’re all free at last: the blue sky fills with orange, red, and green lightning flashes, but this lasts only a short time. The birds are frightened, as if they wanted to return to their cages. Now there are real lightning flashes and the birds are stiff and cold in the night. They’re not flying any more, and they’re turning black. They are losing their feathers, no longer singing, and when the storm passes and the dawn comes, they have become the file of seminary students in their habits on their way to church and the doctor is taking my pulse and Aunt Benedicta seems very upset and I see the doctor between dreams and my aunt says: “All right, now. Lie on your back. I have to rub this liniment on you.”

I feel the icy hands on my hot skin. Grandfather shakes his cane and shouts cuss words at the priests. The liniment smells very strong. He sics the dogs on the priests. Of eucalyptus and camphor. The dogs just bark, frightened. She rubs hard and my shoulders begin to burn. Grandfather shouts but his lips move in silence. Now she’s rubbing my chest and the smell is stronger. The dogs bark but they don’t make any sound either. I’m bathed in sweat and liniment and everything burns and I want to go to sleep but I know that I’m asleep at the same time I’m wanting it. The cold hand rubs my shoulders and my ribs and under my arms. And the dogs run loose, furious, to sink their teeth into the seminary students, who turn into birds at night. And my stomach burns as much as my chest and my back and Aunt rubs and rubs to make me better. The seminary students bare their teeth in a snarl and laugh and open out their arms and fly away like buzzards, dying of laughter. And I’m so happy I laugh with them, the sickness fills me with happiness and I don’t want her to stop making me better, I ask her to make me feel better, I take her hands, the fever and the liniment burn my thighs and the dogs run through the fields howling, like coyotes.

When I woke up, one night had passed and a morning and the sun was just going down. The first thing I saw was the shadows of the patio through the curtains on the door. And then I realized that she was still sitting next to the head of the bed and she asked me to eat a little and put the spoon to my lips. I tasted the stewed oats and then looked at my aunt, with her hair falling over her shoulders and smiling as if she were grateful to me for something. I let her feed me the cereal as if I were a child, spoonful by spoonful, and I told her I was better and thanked her for making me feel better. She blushed and said that at last I was finding out that they loved me in this house, too.

I was in bed about ten days. First I read a mountain of novels by Alexandre Dumas, and ever since then I’ve thought that novels go with bronchitis like rain goes with planting time. But the curious thing is that my aunt went out to buy them as if setting out to commit a robbery and then hid them when she brought them to me, and I just shrugged my shoulders and as fast as I could began reading that wonderful story of the man who gets out of prison by pretending to be dead and they throw him in the sea and he washes ashore on the island of Monte Cristo. But I had never read so much before and I got tired and bored and lay thinking and counting the hours by watching the lights and shadows that came and went on the walls of my room. And anyone looking at me would have thought I was very calm, but inside me things were happening that I didn’t understand. The thing was that I wasn’t as sure as I had been before. If earlier they’d given me the chance to choose between going back to the ranch and staying here, I would have been way ahead of them, I would have hightailed it right back to be with Grandfather. And now I didn’t know. I couldn’t decide. And the question kept coming back no matter how I tried to avoid it and distract myself by thinking about other things. Of course, if anyone had asked me, I know what I would have answered: I’d be on my way back to the ranch. But inside me, no. I realized that, and also that it was the first time something like that had happened to me: that what I was thinking outside was different from what I was thinking inside.

I don’t know what all that had to do with my aunt. I told myself, nothing. She looked the same, but she was different. She only came in to bring me my tray herself, or to take my temperature, or to see that I took my medicines. But I watched her out of the corner of my eye and I realized that the sadder she looked, the happier she was, and the happier she looked, the closer she was to crying, or you could see something was bothering her, and when she was sitting in the rocking chair fanning herself — when it seemed she was resting, quite free from care — the more I felt there was something she wanted, and the more she busied about and talked, the more I felt she didn’t want anything, that she would have liked to leave my room and close herself up in her own.

Ten days passed and I couldn’t stand the sweat and dirt and the grimy hair any more. Then my aunt said I was well and I could take a bath. I jumped out of bed very happy but, oh, boy, I almost fell from the dizziness that came over me. My aunt ran to take me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. I sat down, very dizzy, while she mixed the cold water with the hot, stirred it with her fingers, and let the tub fill up. Then she asked me to get into the water and I told her to leave and she asked me why. I said I was embarrassed.

“You’re just a child. Pretend I’m your mother. Or Micaela. Didn’t she ever give you a bath?”

I told her yes, when I was just a kid. She said it was the same thing. She said she was almost my mother, since she had taken care of me like a son while I was sick. She came to me and began to unbutton my pajamas and to cry and say how I had filled her life, how someday she would tell me about her life. I covered myself as best I could and got into the tub and almost slipped. She soaped me. She began to rub me the way she had that night and she knew how I liked that and I let her do it while she told me I didn’t know what loneliness was and repeated it over and over and then said just last Christmas I had still been a child and the water was very warm and my body felt good, soapy, and she was cleansing me of the exhaustion of my illness with caressing hands. She knew before I did when I couldn’t take any more and she herself lifted me from the tub and looked at me and put her arm around my waist.

* * *

I’ve been living here for four months now. Benedicta asks me to call her “Aunt” in front of everyone else. I get a kick out of slipping down the hallway mornings and nights and yesterday the cook almost caught me. Sometimes I get very tired of it, especially when Benedicta cries and yells and kneels before her crucifix with her arms spread out wide. We never go to Mass or take Communion now. And nobody’s said anything again about sending me to school. But just the same, I still miss my life with Grandfather and I have written a letter in which I ask him to come after me, that I miss the sawmill and the birds and the happy mealtimes. The only thing is, I never send it. But I do keep adding things every day, and I drop sly hints to see if he catches on. But I don’t send the letter. What I don’t know how to describe very well is how pretty Benedicta has become, how that stiff woman in mourning who came to the ranch has changed. I’d like to tell Micaela and Grandfather that they should see, that Bendicta knows how to be affectionate, too, and she has very smooth skin and, well, different eyes — bright and very wide — and that she’s very white. The only bad part is that sometimes she moans and cries and twists so. We’ll have to see whether I ever send the letter. I got scared today and even signed it, but I still haven’t sealed it. Just a while ago Benedicta and my Aunt Milagros were whispering in the living room behind the bead curtain that rattles when you go in and out. And then Aunt Milagros, with her trembling eyelid, came to my room and began to stroke my hair and ask me if I wouldn’t like to come stay a while in her house. I just sat there, very serious. Then I thought about everything. I don’t know what to think. I added one more paragraph to the letter I’m writing to Grandfather: “Come get me, please. It seems to me there’s a lot more morality at the ranch. I’ll tell you about it.” And I put the letter in the envelope again. But I still can’t decide whether to send it.