Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Josefina in fact works for my sister, but Mariana got it into her head that I wasn’t eating properly and so decided to finance these weekly visits. At first I resisted, but finally gave way.

  I bought this apartment with the money that came to me two years ago from the sale of the house in Educación. Mariana used her share to make a down payment on a much more spacious apartment near her office, but I decided that I lacked the patience and perseverance needed to repay a mortgage, so bought the first place I could afford, without giving much thought to the condition of the building—in urgent need of renovation—or the neighborhood—frankly dangerous.

  Had he still been alive, my father would have disapproved of the purchase of this apartment. He’d have spent hours telling me about the property bubble, the benefits of having a credit history, the practicality of buying a place where I could raise the children I don’t have, when the time came. If he were still alive now, my father would disapprove of everything I do. Since he died, I’m constantly making those sorts of assumptions, as if I’ve taken on the office he handed down to me at his death in a dingy hospital room and now have to disapprove of myself in his name.

  Something similar had happened after Teresa’s death, which I first heard about on September 23, 1994, the last day of summer. It’s commonly said that denial is the first phase of mourning, but for me, at the age of ten, it wasn’t just the first but, for a long time, the only phase. Through a process of highly complex mental gymnastics, I managed to convince myself that not only was Teresa still alive, but that she was more attentive to what was happening in my life than she’d ever been in the past. During the first two or three years, I used to imagine her reaction to anything I did. I could almost hear her robotic voice explaining why I didn’t need a certain toy, why memorizing dates was not the best way to study for my history class, why my sister’s life would be more difficult than mine because she was a woman.

  Those years of secretly evoking Teresa were followed by overt imitation. Between 1998 and 2001—in the full fury of adolescence—I got into the slightly forced habit of talking like her, in that neutral tone with only minimal variations that was so characteristic of her speech. At the age of fifteen or sixteen I let my hair grow and began to wear it the way she used to. But I never managed to look like Teresa: however reluctantly, I was developing my father’s features, his voice, his brusque, uncouth manner.

  After that imitative phase, my life continued along relatively conventional, uninteresting paths. I went to college and got a job. I had very short-lived relationships and harbored lasting grudges. I made superficial acquaintances and formed one or two friendships that were much closer but then later faded. I lived in either shared apartments or in others—as small as this one—where I was on my own. I adopted a dog that ran away one day, never to be seen again. I developed curable illnesses and chronic addictions.

  Throughout all those years, I continued to see my father from time to time, and less frequently, my sister. And although I still thought about Teresa, eventually days and even weeks would pass when I managed to forget her completely, when I didn’t hear her voice or imagine the way she used to smoke, leaning against the wall of the house in Educación. Days and weeks when I didn’t, even once, think about Friday, September 23, 1994.

  After that summer, Rat continued to be seen on the streets of Educación for some time, but following the night in the Taxqueña terminal, we never exchanged a word. Mariana forgot him almost immediately—programmatically—and began dating other boys and, later, women. Rat’s reputation gradually faded after the summer of ’94, which was apparently the modest peak of his popularity. His escapades were mentioned less frequently, he appeared in the Rec less often, and even his retinue of gorillas dwindled as they found new leaders. Whenever we happened to cross paths in the arcade or Los Orgullosos, I’d try to catch his eye, seeking a trace of complicity, or at least recognition that the night in Taxqueña had existed, that he’d accompanied me from my living room to the bus terminal, had helped me to cross a busy street in my local neighborhood—in my known world. But Rat either avoided me or pretended not to know who I was. He’d look at me without seeing, as if I were transparent or he had the power to see through human bodies.

  For a long time I thought that maybe Rat had forgotten what happened. That, in the end, it had been less important for him than for me. He’d given me the nudge that led to one of the most formative adventures of my childhood, during the summer vacation that shaped my personality, but for Rat it had probably been one night among the many others of his teenage years, its memory blurred by an alcoholic haze. Walking with some local kid to the bus terminal and giving him a little money couldn’t have had any great significance for someone generally thought to be associated with much bolder activities.

  Rat disappeared from the neighborhood a few years afterward, when I was in high school. His mother spread the word that he’d gone to study abroad (the secret desire of every mother in that middle-class district during those aspirational years), but it very soon became known that he’d gotten one of his girlfriends pregnant and was selling clothes—some said marijuana too—in various street markets in the south of the city. Rat’s function in Educación was speedily taken over by shadier characters who didn’t brag about using temporary tattoos or drinking beer, but about smoking crack and holding up drugstores.

  I next saw Rat around the middle of 2015, not long after my father was diagnosed with the advanced cancer that carried him to the grave—before my life became confined to this stained, unmade bed, to these notebooks in which I attempt to give some shape to the unspeakable, as if making origami figures with shadows. At that time, Mariana and I were alternating overnight stays in the hospital; they were exhausting shifts, as my father made use of his last weeks to reproach us incessantly for our life choices (the setbacks in my love life, my sister’s lack of affection). None of us so much as mentioned Teresa’s name, neither during those days of waiting nor later, at my father’s funeral, or when we met the lawyer who was the executor of his will and would organize the sale of the house in Educación.

  Although the insatiable tumor continued to devour his organs, there were evenings when my father’s condition would seem miraculously improved, and he’d look more like the fifty-nine-year-old man he really was. He’d ask for the TV to be switched on and express unshakable opinions about anything and everything. Age had accentuated his tendency to authoritarianism: he ranted about the obstinacy of the teacher’s union in relation to proposed changes to the education system, demanded that a firm hand be taken with the demonstrators in the Paseo de la Reforma, and complained about the decline of the Mexican soccer team, all in the same furious tone, in the same jaded voice. The less he knew about a topic, the more he felt justified in airing his views. Naturally, both my sister and I were incapable of remaining confined with him in that small hospital room for any length of time. If I was on duty during one of those outbursts, I’d go out for a walk through the neighboring streets and return twenty minutes later, my patience partially restored.

  It was during one of those strolls that I came across Rat. In my mind, I imagined that my father’s illness and the consequent revision of the past that it entailed had in some way called up or attracted Rat. Such occurrences are not unusual: we don’t see a person for many years, and then one day we think about them and then run into them a few hours later in some improbable place. My life, at least, has been full of coincidences of that nature. Even so, Rat was the last person I expected to see that evening.

  I didn’t recognize him straight off. A long time had passed since his disappearance from the neighborhood, and he obviously wasn’t the same little bastard who had dated my sister in the days immediately after Teresa’s departure; he was, by then, just another overweight adult. I remember that he had a bald patch on the crown of his head that he attempted to disguise by tying his long hair back in a ponytail. My first thought was that he was someone who looked very much li
ke a degenerate version of Rat. I guess he must have had much the same idea about me—my unshaven chin, tired eyes, and prematurely graying hair made any other assessment unlikely. He was arguing about something with a teenage girl who resembled him enough to be his daughter. I know he recognized me because, just after our eyes had met, he interrupted the angry monologue he was directing at the girl as if he were embarrassed that I might overhear him. Neither of us said anything, but we looked directly at each other for a prolonged moment, and I’m certain that we both remembered that silent parting in the bus terminal, when he left me, bewildered and tearful, with the crumpled bills in my outstretched hand, and walked hurriedly back to his house in Educación to follow his mother’s orders and diligently shower before heading out again to patrol the Rec.

  I’ve often tried to understand why Rat urged me to take any available bus. To understand why he lacked the maturity to take me home, where we’d probably have found a sober but hungover Mariana repenting her outburst, sitting in front of the TV and wondering, with increasing concern, where the hell I’d gotten to.

  2

  THE WHITE LIGHTS ILLUMINATING THE AISLE were switched off as soon as the bus departed the Taxqueña terminal to the sounds of hooting horns and the cries of street vendors. Almost at the same moment, it began to rain. I leaned against the cold window, watching the bustle of the city. The first raindrops fractured the nightscape as they trickled down the glass in unpredictable paths. What was it that determined whether a drop of water ran vertically to the bottom of the pane or zigzagged and merged with other larger droplets? Who dictated the direction those drops took during their rapid descent, guiding them toward the rivers forming in the street? I tried to follow one of them with my finger but very soon lost track of it. My breath misted the glass, contributing to the blur of everything outside the bus. The reds and greens of traffic signals, distorted by the effect of the water on the glass, were dazzling. Had Teresa boarded a bus like that one to travel to Chiapas?

  A man in the uniform of another bus company, with water streaming from his hair, appeared beside the driver, and in a hoarse voice recited a speech he knew by heart after thousands of repetitions: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Excuse me for bothering you during your journey. I represent the workers of the Grupo de Autotransportes Tres Estrellas union and am here to ask for your invaluable assistance. We have been on strike for three months, demanding better working conditions for our comrades. So now we’re selling a variety of products, including crackers and potato chips, to raise funds for the strikers …” The woman sitting beside me smiled and asked if I’d like some potato chips for the journey. I was surprised; I hadn’t expected any form of interaction, much less that offer. I shook my head and turned to stare again through the misted glass.

  The man selling snacks walked up and down the aisle, repeating his list of products every so often, and then got off the bus with a friendly wave to the driver. The sound of the pneumatic doors of the bus closing startled me out of my reverie. The woman traveling beside me took advantage of that distraction to speak again: “Are your mommy and daddy coming to meet you in Villahermosa?” I looked at her without replying. It was impossible to calculate her age. Her smile seemed a little overdone, almost false, and she had pronounced crow’s-feet around her eyes. No one was coming to meet me in Villahermosa. I’d bought the ticket at the last moment for fear that Rat would return, repenting his generosity and asking for his money back. The young man at the counter had explained that from Villahermosa it would be easy to find a bus going to San Cristóbal de las Casas or any other city in Chiapas. There was no other bus leaving from Taxqueña for Villahermosa, he said. According to him, it was my only chance of starting out for Chiapas at that time of night, unless I crossed the city to the Estación de Autobuses del Oriente.

  My neighbor repeated her question, this time in an extremely familiar tone: “Are your mommy and daddy going to be there to meet you in Villahermosa, sweetie?” Her voice ascended toward the end of the sentence to an almost operatic pitch. Again, I made no reply. I was thinking that it might be a trap. The kindness of strangers had always seemed to me suspicious. Teresa had often warned about the risks of talking to people I didn’t know. To ensure that the message got through, my mother had even enlisted the figure of the Bogeyman, one of whose techniques was precisely that: talking in a kindly way to children until he hypnotized them and put them in his bottomless sack. And if that didn’t do the trick, there was also a TV campaign about such dangers that regularly bombarded our impressionable minds, interrupting the cartoons. Mariana would sometimes tease me by imitating the menacing gestures of the mustachioed man who, in those public service broadcasts, grabbed a child’s shoulders with evil intentions. On such occasions, I’d remove her hand, give her a look of pure hatred, go to my bedroom, and close the door. Could the Bogeyman be a woman of uncertain age traveling after dark to Villahermosa, Tabasco State?

  The woman was staring at me, a little surprised or annoyed that I hadn’t answered her questions. “Cat got your tongue, sweetie?” she asked, trying to get a reaction. That term of affection sounded like an insult, and I decided to break my silence. “My mom will be waiting for me in Chiapas,” I proudly declared. “Oh, so your journey’s longer than mine. Poor little mite. You should have accepted those potato chips. It’s about twelve hours just to Villahermosa.” I attempted to disguise my disappointment on hearing that. Hoping to soften the blow, the woman added, “But not to worry, the bus makes two stops so we can buy food and use the restroom.” I felt the urge to ask her if Villahermosa was farther away than Acapulco, my only point of reference in relation to long road trips, but then thought it would be wiser to make out I was no greenhorn and told her I was used to traveling by bus and never got hungry.

  Ignoring my hostility, after a few minutes’ pause, the woman started to tell me the story of her life. I tried showing my lack of interest by staring straight ahead, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She’d been born in Villahermosa and had two sons living in Mexico City, whom she visited frequently. She always brought them plastic tubs of home-cooked food. Her oldest son had studied engineering and was now selling automobile parts, while the younger one was still at college, doing something related to design. They were sharing an apartment in Colonia Obrera, but the oldest was thinking of getting married and moving with his wife to a small house out in Atizapán.

  As if lulled by the place names and the woman’s voice—high-pitched without being irksome—I was gradually falling asleep. I made an effort to keep my eyes open but at some point that became impossible, and my head kept nodding until it finally came to rest on my neighbor’s arm. She folded her sweater to make a pillow for me. I struggled against this new expression of unjustified tenderness, but sleep got the better of me and I stopped resisting, even when I felt the back of the woman’s hand stroking my hair.

  3

  NOWADAYS, I RARELY REMEMBER MY DREAMS. Although I spend many hours in bed, my waking and sleeping lives have turned their backs on one another. Nothing of what happens while I sleep filters into my waking existence, except for a sense of angst that seems to issue from that dark place to which I escape every so often on an unfixed schedule. Maybe that’s because my sleep, generally induced by narcotics, is a blind sleep. But even before I was in this condition—lying in my bed, sunk in a somnolence without boundaries or defined shape—I rarely remembered my dreams. So I’m surprised that I can recall, with such a wealth of detail, many of the important dreams I had during my childhood, particularly during that summer of 1994. It’s almost as if I used up all my symbolic resources at the age of ten, and since then have had to make do with the crude literalness of the world.

  That night, on the bus heading for Villahermosa, my head resting on the arm of a stranger who was stroking my hair, I dreamed that I was swimming toward an island. A few months before, I’d watched an animated version of Robinson Crusoe—one of those Polish or Czech cartoons Teresa permitted and
that no one else at school had ever heard of—that undoubtedly influenced my dream and determined its point of departure. But my shipwreck wasn’t like Crusoe’s.

  The dream island was surrounded by a wall, its upper part encrusted with fragments of broken bottles. It was a pretty common architectural feature in Educación at that time, and I guess it still is: people add a glass crown to their garden walls to deter possible burglars. In my dream, that glass was of the widest range of colors imaginable, like shards of the stained glass windows of ruined churches rather than broken bottles. I was swimming around the whole island—it was very large—and couldn’t find a single spot to access dry land: the wall formed an impassable barrier between myself and that promised paradise. What I remember most clearly is that, in the dream, I was able to see the island from two different perspectives: on the one hand, I viewed it from my situation as a shipwrecked person hoping to come ashore; on the other, I was simultaneously able to take a bird’s-eye view of it from a point fifteen feet above where I was swimming. That periscopic view displayed the walled island in all its splendor: there were trees with red fruit and a pool of thermal waters.

  The dream of the walled island passed without any perceptible ending or transition into a different one. The second was also a highly visual dream. I’ve reconstructed and told it innumerable times since that day—possibly unconsciously adding details and interpretations, as often occurs in such cases.

  My father is eating something at the dining room table of the house in Educación. I’m standing behind him, so can’t see what he’s eating, although from his movements I can tell that he’s using his hands rather than cutlery. The dining room light flickers two or three times, as happens with all the lights in the house when there’s a storm, just before they cut out completely. I slowly approach my father, hoping not to be discovered. When I’m a couple of feet from him, he turns around abruptly, and I see that he’s eating a pigeon. It might be the plump pigeon in the square that I kicked when I was little, I think, but in fact it could be any pigeon or even any hen: in the dream there’s insufficient detail to clarify that point. What’s important is that the pigeon still has feathers: he’s eating it alive or, at very least, raw and newly sacrificed. Despite the implicit horror, the scene is relatively clinical: there’s no blood, and my father’s expression is completely normal, as if eating a raw pigeon were the most natural thing in the world.