Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  A woman passed near me carrying a live, flapping hen by its bound feet. For a moment I watched two children in rags playing a game that involved throwing stones at a bottle.

  Just before we reached the terminal, Rat once again seemed to hesitate momentarily. “I’ve got a hunch Mariana might be here, inside. She knows where your old lady is too.” He stressed the last sentence, as if demonstrating that he’d been aware of just what was going on before I told him.

  Something didn’t quite add up: if my sister was looking for me, why would she go to the bus terminal? I’d never expressed any interest in traveling anywhere by bus. I sometimes used to talk about flying in a jet plane, or even sailing on a ship, which to me seemed exciting and strange, but buses were, in my opinion, ordinary and unattractive. Teresa, Mariana, and I had once gone to Tepoztlán on a bus that had departed from that very terminal, and the stink of vomit seeping from the restroom had made me feel sick ten minutes into the journey. If Mariana knew anything at all, she’d be looking for me at the Rec, or on the slides, or any other place in Educación, but not in the bus terminal by the Taxqueña metro station.

  Rat worked out that something was bothering me. I suppose it was obvious (when I’m worried I frown deeply, even nowadays). He spoke quickly, nervously; for the first time I understood that he didn’t know exactly what we were doing either: “Look, crackbrain, Mariana was a bit canned. Don’t tell anyone. We’d been drinking in her room. When we couldn’t find you anywhere in the house, she started crying, thought something had happened to you. Then she began babbling on about your old lady, said she was in Chiapas and something about going to look for her. I wasn’t really listening. I thought she was afraid of getting a bawling out. She told me to stay and wait for you and ran out of the house. But she’s been gone for around two hours now.” Rat paused, allowing me to take all that in before continuing, “Do you understand that there’s a war in Chiapas? Tanks and soldiers. We have to find Mariana.”

  It wasn’t easy to digest all that information. That Teresa, a woman with a monotone voice and firm convictions, should have gone to Chiapas was one thing, but that my drunken sister should decide to follow her was much more serious.

  Of course, I already knew that there was a war in Chiapas, I’d seen it on TV. For months it had been the only thing anyone anywhere talked about. At school, we’d been assembled in the auditorium, and it was explained that nothing was going to happen in the capital, but Guillermo’s elder brother had told him that the Zapatistas were going to kill the president and take away rich people’s houses. Even though Guillermo’s brother wasn’t generally a reliable source of information, my friend and I had gotten steamed up by just the idea of all that. Teresa was constantly muttering insults about the president (“that bald murderer,” she used to call him), and at the beginning of the year the promise of his overthrow had excited me for a few weeks. Then, in March, someone had shot Colosio, the PRI presidential candidate—in Teresa’s view, he was just as bad as “that bald murderer.” The shooting had taken place in Tijuana, which, as we were told in geography class—geography wasn’t my strongest subject—was more or less on the other side of the country. That was when the war and generalized fraying of nerves took up permanent residence in the house in Educación. The arguments between Teresa and my father about the situation in Chiapas and the forthcoming elections grew in intensity and volume. Only the soccer World Cup had managed to calm things for thirty days, distracting my father from current affairs.

  The clamor of war and politics was amplified at school. During recess, the children in sixth grade sometimes made a game of frightening us, saying that they had seen Zapatistas or—even worse—soldiers behind the co-op, in the vacant lot that the principal had promised to transform into a small soccer field at some point in the future.

  One day, a boy in my class turned up wearing a red balaclava with a pompom on top, and fights were organized between the two most aggressive pupils, one representing the insurgents in balaclavas and the other the forces of law and order—who were booed by the naturally rebellious children, the ones who were always talking in class. Later that afternoon, when I told Teresa about those small-scale reproductions of the political tension in the country, she attempted to explain something about the indigenous peoples. Before she could finish, my father interrupted to drag me off to watch a soccer game in which the Mexican team was playing. On another occasion, he commented over breakfast that Chiapas was a beehive. I didn’t understand the metaphor then, but the idea of a gigantic beehive containing whole cities and enormous bees gave me a nightmare.

  All those scenes (the scraps at school, the noisy domestic arguments, the red balaclava with a pompom, the mutant bees) came back to flood my mind when I heard Rat mention the war, the tanks, the possibility that Mariana had followed in Teresa’s footsteps and run away to Chiapas.

  I felt betrayed. It hurt me that, knowing where Teresa was, my sister hadn’t sat down and talked to me, explained what was going on in our family. In fact, she’d left me to investigate on my own, to steal letters and spend whole days inside a dark closet when we could have been coming up with a plan—a sibling plan to get our mother back—or running away together. It felt unfair that Mariana had gone, leaving me alone with my father, abandoning me to a life of boredom while she was having an adventure.

  Now Rat was trying to drag me into the bus terminal, or the war, to save my sister and maybe even my mother. It wasn’t particularly clear why he needed me as his shield carrier, but at that moment I had no intention of asking questions. It was that, or go back home to watch reruns of the soccer World Cup with my father, eat Hawaiian pizza, and make non-figurative origami figures until the end of the summer vacation.

  Although I was eager to start, I was also sorry not to have come better prepared. If I’d known that we were setting out on an expedition of that caliber, I’d have brought my jacket with secret pockets, and my Choose Your Own Adventure book to act as a sort of guide. But I understood that at certain critical moments life offers the opportunity to really choose our own adventures and decided that following Rat to war would make me the envy of every boy in my class; if, that is, I managed to stay alive until the new school year.

  By the time Rat and I had passed through the doors of the Autobuses del Sur terminal, the only outcome to that adventure my imagination was capable of coming up with was personal triumph. I heard a bubblegum-scented Citlali laughing and saw Ximena doling out over-the-top gestures of affection while I told them how I’d found their best friend, my sister, who by then was allowing me to choose whatever pizza I wanted, and was asking—as if she really cared—how the Zero Luminosity Capsule worked. I saw my grateful father comparing me to Bebeto or Romário. I saw, more clearly than anything else, Teresa smoking in silence by the door, secretly proud of her son.

  10

  RAT INQUIRED ABOUT MARIANA at a number of counters in the terminal. He inquired timidly, as if defeated in advance. Not having a photograph, he attempted on each occasion to describe my sister, but his linguistic tools were, to say the least, limited: he’d simply say that she was a girl with black hair, wearing a checked shirt knotted at the waist. One of the assistants from the line that serviced Ixtapa said a girl of that description had bought a ticket for a bus leaving at 8 p.m., but we checked the waiting room and didn’t see Mariana there. What’s more, Ixtapa seemed an unlikely destination. No bus to Chiapas had departed in the previous two hours and none was scheduled to leave around that time, but the logical thing would have been to take a bus to Puebla, Veracruz, or Oaxaca and then another to San Cristóbal de las Casas. At least those were Rat’s muttered conjectures as we walked from one end of the bus terminal to the other—with me a few steps behind him, trying to look calm. All those names of states and cities sounded vaguely familiar from my textbooks, but I was incapable of visualizing them in any way. They were just that: empty, interchangeable names. Magical names that invoked unknown lands where my mother and my sister wer
e fighting for a fairer world.

  Finally, Rat tired of making inquiries, and we sat in waiting room No. 2, next to a stand selling backpacks that also had plush toys and ham and cheese sandwiches. The seat Rat took was falling apart; mine had a basic penis design drawn in indelible ink. The whole terminal smelled strange, a mixture of burnt food and gas.

  Rat seemed undecided, as if his vaguely ambitious plan to rescue Mariana from who knows what danger had balked at the first hurdle (what’s more, a predictable hurdle, since it was unlikely that we would have found my sister just sitting waiting for us in the Taxqueña terminal). Perhaps he’d expected the first person he asked to tell him which bus she’d boarded so we could get on the next one going to the same place, or intercept it in a cab before it left the city. The idea of the two of us taking a bus somewhere, without any clear indication of my sister’s whereabouts, must have suddenly seemed less enticing. Like a fly, his eyes rested on one object after another. I asked if he’d given up on going to Chiapas, if he’d given up on searching for Mariana, given up on helping me. I asked a torrent of questions, but Rat responded with only an evasive gesture that seemed to say, “stop bugging me.”

  That indecisiveness was another disappointment. Not only did Rat take a shower before leaving home, meekly obeying his mother, but he also shrank before the slightest danger. His fame as a rebellious teenager once again appeared unjustified. I thought about snitching on him to the gorillas who were normally to be seen hanging around him at the Rec, explaining that their idol was nothing but a scared kid with a breaking voice who pretended to possess levels of maturity, and even evil, he’d never attain.

  I spotted a terrifying trend: according to all the available evidence, my mother and sister had been capable of pitching themselves into the battle without giving it a second thought, guided by their convictions or by passions that raised them onto the untamed flanks of History. On the other hand, my father and Rat, different but complementary models of masculinity—the omniscient provider, the hardline rebel—remained on the margins of events, watching reruns of soccer games or applying temporary tattoos like self-obsessed loudmouths. What that pattern held in store for my own life was frightening: the world was a place infested with cowardly men who spilled beer down their clean shirts, and the women who put up with them for a time. At that instant, it occurred to me that if I wanted to do something worthwhile with my time on earth, I should, at least symbolically, become the woman whom destiny or genetics had prevented me from being at the moment of conception. If not, I’d be condemned to repeating the mistakes of my father and Rat, to crying over games lost in overtime or hanging around on the neighborhood streets, my hair freshly washed, accompanied by my minions, without the courage to do anything by myself.

  Head bent, sitting in waiting room No. 2 of the Taxqueña bus terminal, Rat was inspecting the laces of his sneakers, the dirt under his fingernails, the wide legs of his grubby, torn jeans. His mouth seemed larger, as if gravity were dragging his lips downward, giving him an expression of childlike concentration.

  I don’t know where I found the confidence and willpower to do it, but I was suddenly on my feet, facing Rat, telling him that we had to take a bus to Chiapas, that we had to follow Mariana and my mother to the war itself if necessary. The words issued from my mouth of their own volition, my voice was charged with emotion. Rat looked at me uncertainly and mumbled something I didn’t catch. Then he said that he wanted to see my sister, too, but that it was a bad idea, that she probably hadn’t gone to Chiapas, that she’d return home on her own when the drink had worn off and she realized that she was in trouble. I glared at him. The scorn I felt took the form of a tangled knot of emotions that threatened to become tears. I thought that if I went on looking him in the eyes, I’d end up hitting him, even while I was aware he could easily overpower me.

  When he understood that I was willing to do whatever it took to find my sister, Rat went back on the attack with new arguments and a tougher tone. He told me that we had no damned idea where Mariana was; she could have taken a bus to Chiapas or a pesero to Ciudad Satélite, there was no way of knowing. I’d never been to Ciudad Satélite, but it sounded like somewhere in another part of the galaxy, and I was surprised you could take a pesero there. I sat down again on the rickety seat, next to Rat. Our options were running out. The clock at the far end of the waiting room showed 8:40 in the evening. I thought that if my father hadn’t already arrived back from work, he soon would. A homeless man stopped in front of us and asked for money; Rat ignored him, and I made a gesture indicating we had nothing to give. When he left, I burst into tears.

  There’s another very early memory I return to every so often. It must have been after the time Teresa fainted by the piñata and costume stand in the market. The three of us were walking across a cobbled square. With hindsight, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been the main square of Coyoacán, but there’s really no way of knowing. My mother had bought us each an ice cream, but I’d thrown half of mine to the ground, and Mariana was teasing me by licking hers with exaggerated pleasure. By the pavilion in the square, fifteen or twenty gray pigeons were moving about, pecking at crumbs of bread and fluffing out their breast feathers. Partly as a distraction from Mariana’s vexatious behavior, I let go of Teresa’s hand and ran toward the pigeons.

  It’s a game as old as the concept of the city, one played by every child who has ever crossed a public square anywhere: attempting to kick the pigeons and then watching them fly away. One of the attractions of that game for a miniature human is, I guess, the sense of being dangerous: the power wielded over those who are weaker than us—which at that age is only birds. I used to like feeling the fluttering of wings around me, the frenetic flight that left me excited and triumphal in the middle of a cloud of dirty, flea-infested feathers.

  On this occasion, however, something was different. One particular pigeon, plumper and less agile than the rest, was my chosen target. Before starting my dash, I contemplated it for a moment. It looked as stupid as any other pigeon but moved more slowly than its companions, as if its instincts were atrophied or dormant. I ran toward it as fast as my short legs would carry me. The other pigeons rose up in flight as I passed; I heard the beating of their wings and sensed the movement of their shadows on the ground. But the plump pigeon stayed exactly where it was, indifferent to its fate.

  When I was halfway there, the pigeon showed signs of taking off, but didn’t quite make it. There was, in that aborted attempt, a yearning for the sky, common to so many bipeds, but also a real-life inability to fulfill it.

  The impact of my foot fell on one of its sides, just below the wing. If I hadn’t been a rather scrawny five-year-old, I’d probably have killed the pigeon, but it just rolled over like a rag doll, making two or three turns on its unstable axis. Then it got to its feet again.

  I’d done it. I’d kicked the fattest pigeon in the square, thus fulfilling the secret ambition of every child my age who was in the habit of chasing dumb birds. The desire to exercise cruelty had been unexpectedly satisfied. I’d managed to kick the pigeon but, paradoxically, something had broken inside me. That kick had hurt me too.

  When I turned to my mother and sister, some fifteen or twenty yards behind me, looking on in stunned amazement, I understood just what I’d done, the gravity of my transgression. And I began to cry.

  What I remember most clearly about that whole episode is Teresa’s coldness: she refused to comfort me when I reached her, my face smeared with tears and snot. “Let’s go,” she said, and the three of us walked back to the car without saying another word.

  Sitting next to Rat in waiting room No. 2 of the Terminal Central de Autobuses del Sur, crying, I remembered the sensation of that kick to the pigeon’s soft flank, near the pavilion in the cobbled square. And although the memory made my tears even more bitter, they also became more adult, tears that—for the first time—weren’t the result of a specific, immediate situation, but of the vague consciou
sness of having lost something I could never again recover.

  Rat got to his feet. It was as if my sobs were the last straw, as if he had no idea how to deal with a public expression of emotion. There was fear in his eyes: fear of being judged by others, but also the fear that my tears would trigger something inside him he’d held in check throughout his whole life: fear of crying with me, for me, beside me, like two lost children in a bus terminal.

  Rat hurriedly took a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket and held them out to me unceremoniously. “You go,” he mumbled, and walked quickly away toward the noise of the traffic on Avenida Taxqueña without looking back.

  TWO

  1

  THE BED IN WHICH I’M WRITING IS DISGUSTING. The sheets are stained with layer upon layer of dried sweat—the geological strata of my sedentary life. It’s a double bed. I can usually be found on the same side, so the left half of the mattress looks a little more worn, sags a little more deeply than the right. Symmetry is an impossibility, even here.

  It’s the only bedroom in the apartment—also the only room besides the bathroom to have a door. The rest of the place is a continuity: a single space that crams in a small kitchen, a living room, and a table with two chairs.

  I rarely venture beyond the bedroom, unless it’s to use the bathroom, warm up food in the microwave, or, in exceptional circumstances, buy something in the grocery store on the first floor of the building.

  On Fridays, Josefina, a woman in her sixties, comes to give the apartment a desultory dusting and to cook a few meals: tinga de pollo, meatballs in chipotle, arroz a la mexicana, rajas con crema. Most of these dishes give me indigestion, but I look upon the discomfort as a well-deserved punishment: I’ve never complained to her.