I woke with the sensation that we were stopping, the same sound of the pneumatic system as the doors opened, the cold night air entering the bus. With a mix of embarrassment and surprise, I lifted my head from my neighbor’s lap and moved as far away from her as I could, pressing my face to the cold window.
I had a strange feeling in my guts, a sort of wooziness that I’ve experienced several times since then, but which, that night, on that bus, I was unable to identify. The woman traveling in the seat next to mine had also fallen asleep. I gazed in horror at the parted lips with a glint of saliva in the corners, the eyes closed in what seemed a grimace of pain. When the lights came on in the aisle, the woman slowly opened her eyes, like someone emerging from a deep trance. She looked at me, uncertain of where she was, and in her pupils I could see the passage from sleep to consciousness—as if consciousness were also a light, a light that could be switched on.
In addition to the generalized discomfort in my stomach, I noted a metallic reflux in my mouth, something like the taste of one of those old thousand-peso coins with the face of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I considered asking the woman beside me for a sip of water, as she seemed to have made preparations for every eventuality, but I felt uneasy about having fallen asleep against her, about having become a vulnerable being—an injured pigeon, a failed origami figure—lying in her lap, so I said nothing and silently hoped that we were making a scheduled stop to buy food (I still had a little of the money Rat had given me).
I looked out the window, expecting to see a gas station, maybe even a bus terminal. I thought that perhaps we were in Villahermosa, that we’d reached our destination hours before we were due, very late at night, and that I’d now have to wait until dawn to board another bus that would take me to Chiapas, where I’d find Mariana and Teresa as soon as I left the terminal. Perhaps my sister and mother were aware that I was on my way and were waiting for me, holding an enormous cake with my name in sugar frosting, eager to see me, glad that the three of us had escaped the tedium of Educación. Glad, most of all, to have escaped from my father: we’d celebrate finally being free of his monstrous ordinariness, his slipper-shod evil intentions.
But outside the window, all I could see was a dusty landscape. Nopals, stones, and spindly bushes suddenly lit—as if discovered in flagrante to be bushes—by passing headlights.
The driver got out of the bus and, through the window, I watched him arguing with three men in military uniforms holding flashlights and opening the luggage compartment. I was relieved to think that I hadn’t brought any bags, as I’d have been worrying about the soldiers stealing them.
From an early age, Teresa had alerted me to the inherent iniquity of anyone in uniform. On one occasion we were stopped by a patrol when she was driving Mariana and me to school. A police officer walked up to our car and, putting his head through the open window, said, “What lovely children you have, señora. You should drive more carefully. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.” She looked him straight in the face, refusing to give in to his attempt to intimidate her, and replied unsmilingly, “I haven’t committed any traffic violation, but if you insist that I did, write me out a damn ticket and let me take my children to school, because I’ve got no intention of giving you a single peso.” The officer was so surprised that he let us continue on our way without even imposing a fine, and Teresa explained that the sole aim of the local police, the judicials, and soldiers was to humiliate people and take their money, a bit like those school bullies who terrorize younger kids.
That early lesson on the role of the forces of law and order in public life was later reinforced by numerous comments and arguments about the behavior of the military in Chiapas when the uprising broke out at the beginning of ’94. Teresa’s “simplistic views” exasperated my father, and she used to complain that he “played down things as obvious as State repression.” While those quarrels were incomprehensible to me and, it must be said, boring, belonging to a world whose codes I didn’t know, the message that the military were all sons of bitches had been branded on my subconscious in the same way the primeval fear of the Bogeyman and temporary tattoos had been instilled in me as a defense mechanism by the myths circulating among children in the schoolyard.
So, as I watched the soldiers searching the luggage in the middle of the dark highway, I was certain that something bad was going to happen and turned my head to my neighbor as if seeking confirmation of this ill omen in her adult concern. I guess she realized that I was worried and tried to hide, as far as was possible, her own fears. She asked me my name (I muttered a reply) and told me that hers was María Concepción, but that everyone called her Mariconchi. That must have brought an involuntary smile to my face, because Mariconchi then asked me what was so funny. She said this in a jokey tone, as if she herself knew that her nickname was a bit ridiculous.
This exchange lightened our moods. The fact of being stopped halfway to our destination couldn’t, after all, be too serious. It was probably something that happened all the time and that I wasn’t aware of. Just when I was consoling myself with those thoughts, Mariconchi grabbed my hand, put her face close to mine, and whispered, “If they ask you anything, sweetie, say I’m your auntie and that your mommy and daddy have asked me to take you to Villahermosa. Got it?”
Far from calming me, this plan of action rekindled my forebodings. Who was going to ask me if I was traveling alone, if Mariconchi was my aunt, if my “mommy and daddy” were waiting for me in Villahermosa? Would the soldiers interrogate me? The possibility sent a shiver down my spine. Somehow, they must have found out about me. Was it illegal for a child to travel unaccompanied? Maybe Mariana had called the police or the army to tell them that I’d run away from home and they had mobilized their forces on land and sea until they found me in that ordinary bus, traveling through the night from dusk to dawn.
One of the soldiers boarded the bus. The aisle lights were still on and were bright enough to give a clear view of the passengers. Yet despite this, the soldier shone his flashlight on the sleepy face in the front seat. He inspected the face carefully and then moved his flashlight to the one beside it. The soldier continued along the aisle, illuminating the bleary-eyed visage of each passenger. At the third row, he lingered to order the man in a baseball cap off the bus. The man in the cap attempted to protest or ask for an explanation, but the soldier looked at him derisively and repeated his command: “Get off and wait for me outside.” Another four passengers suffered the same fate before he reached us.
When he finally arrived at the row in which Mariconchi and I were sitting, I couldn’t help but press myself against her. The soldier moved the beam of his flashlight from my face to hers as if comparing our features. “Is she your mom?” he asked, scrutinizing me. I tried to make my voice sound as solemn as possible before replying, “My aunt,” but my mouth was dry and what came out of it was more like a hiccup or a grunt. “Both of you, outside for a check, please,” said the soldier, and for a moment I thought that it was my fault, that if I’d been capable of speaking clearly, of articulating my reply with adult assurance, he wouldn’t have asked us to do that.
4
THE COLD WIND ON THE HIGHWAY enveloped me as soon as I stepped onto the gravel. The bus had pulled into a rest stop, next to a shack with a sign indicating that it was a restaurant; by the look of the place, it was either closed or, more likely, abandoned. A few yards away, the headlights of an official-looking pickup were shining through the darkness. A number of passengers were already waiting, lined up on one side of the bus. They all seemed calm, joking and taking advantage of the break to stretch their legs and make small talk. That relaxed atmosphere didn’t make me feel any easier; what I felt was more like pity: those poor people didn’t know what they had coming, I thought. They were like cattle walking to the slaughterhouse.
I imagined the punishment that would be meted out to Mariconchi if it was discovered that we’d lied to the soldiers, if they found out that she wasn’t my
aunt, my mother, or any other relative. She’d surely be locked up in a dungeon like the one described in the Choose Your Own Adventure novel that I had left half-read in my bedroom. I imagined Mariconchi imprisoned in a remote tower where no one could hear her shrill cries for help. I saw myself in a jail with cold stone walls, serving a life sentence for running away from home, missing my sister, Teresa, my school friends, and Hawaiian pizza until the end of time. In my half-baked fantasy, I consoled myself by thinking that, there in the jail, I might be allowed my multicolored squares of paper to practice making the origami cranes and pagodas that had so far only ended in failure. It occurred to me that origami had been invented that way: a Japanese monk, incarcerated in some pagoda with bars on the windows, alone in his stinking cell with only a sheet of paper, which he had to fold and unfold with infinite care, aware that if he tore it, his own sanity would be rent in two.
Three more passengers carrying backpacks descended from the bus and lined up next to us. Mariconchi realized that I was shivering, so she took off her shawl and wrapped it around my chest and arms. I was no longer suspicious of her kindness. She wasn’t a stranger by then; I’d known her for a few hours, which, in the context of my adventure, suddenly seemed forever.
One of the soldiers started to explain that it was a routine check, that we would be asked for our IDS and our final destinations, and that our belongings would be searched. Each of us should take our things from the baggage compartment and briefly show the contents to one of the soldiers. At the end of that explanation the officer who seemed to be in charge added, “If you aren’t a guerrillero, you have nothing to worry about.” Mariconchi pressed me a little closer to her thighs and leaned down to whisper in my ear in a mocking tone: “You’re not a guerrillero, are you?” Those words immediately had a soothing effect. If Mariconchi was capable of cracking a joke, it was most likely that there was no danger. I wrapped the shawl a little more tightly around myself as the soldiers began to check documents and luggage.
The cold seeping through the fabric of my clothing reminded me of one Saturday, not so long before, when Teresa had decided that we should spend a few days in Lagunas de Zempoala, in Morelos State. The plan was to set off early in the morning so as to miss the worst of the traffic—the congestion used to drive my father crazy and caused arguments with Teresa that would sometimes ruin our holidays. The sensation of my father carrying me in his arms to the car woke me, but I pretended to be still asleep so I could enjoy the ever-rarer luxury of letting things happen, of being a bundle looked after by others. Forty minutes later we stopped in Huitzilac for a breakfast of quesadillas, and although—at Teresa’s insistence—I’d been wrapped in a jacket, I could still feel the cold air seeping in through my pajama bottoms. My father ordered atole for us all and we sipped the thick liquid in silence. While we were eating our quesadillas, a man approached our table offering postcards of extremely poor quality, showing scenes from the Mexican Revolution, among them the famous image of Pancho Villa sitting on the presidential throne, with Emiliano Zapata beside him, after the triumphal entrance of the revolutionary troops into the capital. Teresa bought a postcard from the man, paying more than he asked (provoking a look of reproof from my father), and during the rest of the meal, she told us stories associated with that photo, describing Villa’s rough-hewn character and the respect Zapata inspired in the campesinos who fought at his side.
Wrapped in Mariconchi’s shawl, standing beside the bus that would take me to Villahermosa, with the beams of the soldiers’ flashlights passing back and forth, I thought of that breakfast in Huitzilac, which all of a sudden seemed a blurred memory belonging to some far-distant era. In a certain sense it was a memory outside of time, as if my life were not a straight line capable of stretching back to its point of origin but something discontinuous, with ruptures that scattered the recollections across distant hills, shreds of a period that no amount of effort could faithfully reconstruct.
The beam finally rested on my face and I drew back a little, hiding in the shawl like an animal that, caught in the headlights of a car on the highway, curls up, awaiting the impact. In this case, the impact came in the form of a question, directed not at me but at Mariconchi, whose turn it was to have the flashlight shone in her face. “How old is the little girl?” The soldier in charge of the searches had a nasal twang. “Eleven,” Mariconchi improvised, “and he’s a boy not a girl.” Beneath the shawl, I smiled, happy that she had added a year to my age and corrected the soldier in relation to my gender. But that smile quickly faded. The soldier gave a coarse, rather dissolute laugh. I’d heard a laugh like that before, but couldn’t at that moment remember where. He was no more than a teenager, but his laugh was older than his years. “Wow, so he was born a fairy. Right down to the shawl!” Then he laughed again.
In the Paideia School, “fairy” was the most offensive thing one boy could call another. I’d had the bad luck of hearing it often, especially in relation to my lack of ability at sports, but I was always very careful not to react with anger: I’d force myself to ignore the insult and, at most, would smile and give my persecutors the finger, which seemed to disconcert them.
Víctor Flores, on the other hand, was an easy target. Fairy, queer, homo: there was no variant of that insult that wasn’t thrown at him at least once a day. And, invariably, Víctor Flores would cry with rage, swipe his aggressor’s schoolbooks to the ground, scream an interminable string of curses, and then, when it was all over, he was the one to be sent to receive his punishment from the principal—a Frenchwoman who had a perpetual smile on her face and was always dressed in red.
The image of Víctor Flores, his face smeared with snot and disfigured by rage, flitted through my mind when I heard the nasal twang of that soldier calling me a fairy. But I didn’t have time to feel hurt by that insult: still riding on the crest of his inappropriate laughter, the adolescent crouched down so that his face was on a level with mine. “So, you a boy or a fairy?” His question frightened me less than the smell of his breath, something like burnt plastic or those weirdly colored liquids my father kept in the garage and every so often poured into the engine of the Tsuru. The teenage soldier looked straight at me, smiled, and I suddenly thought I remembered where I’d heard that laugh before. It was my father’s laugh, the one he gave sometimes when sitting watching TV, and that I’d hear from my bedroom, from my Zero Luminosity Capsule, or while I was organizing the leaves I’d collected during the day.
Mariconchi sensed danger and tried to move me away from the soldier, hiding me behind her back. The soldier straightened up and slapped her lightly, more to sow the seeds of fear than to inflict pain. Mariconchi raised both hands to her face. One of the passengers who had already been checked attempted to intervene, but a second soldier approached with a menacing expression, raising his rifle as if he were going to hit him with it.
The adolescent soldier crouched down again in front of me, breathing his solvent smell in my face. “Let’s see if you’re a girl or a fairy.” I was petrified, and Mariconchi, frozen with impotence, was crying silently without moving a single muscle, like those miraculous Virgins in churches.
The adolescent soldier unwound Mariconchi’s shawl and proceeded to frisk me from the calves upward, as if checking for a weapon. At that moment, there wasn’t a single thought in my head. For the first time, my mind was a blank, like a sheet of paper with absolutely no creases. The second soldier, who stood watching a few steps away, intervened in a tone intended to sound casual but that held a clear note of tension: “That’s enough.” The adolescent soldier removed his hands as if he were coming out of a trance or had been burned. He straightened up once more and advanced toward the next passenger in the line, whom he searched mechanically before asking for his ID.
I didn’t hear his laugh again so was never able to confirm that it was similar to my father’s, but that notion—or rather, that intuition—secreted itself in a dark corner of my being, like an animal lying in wait to pounce on
its prey.
Everything suddenly seemed more silent, like an engine had been turned off somewhere. Mariconchi hugged me as tightly as she could, wrapping her shawl around me again. That hug was slightly painful. I closed my eyes and allowed her to continue, but there was a rigidity in my body that made any real embrace impossible, as if I’d been converted into a piece of splintered wood. I wanted to be inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule, or lying on my bed surrounded by failed origami cranes, with the sound of Mariana’s music filtering through the wall. I wanted to be in Huitzilac, eating a breakfast of quesadillas with Teresa; listening to her monotonous voice, barely rising to enthusiasm as she spoke of the illustrious men of the past. Most of all, I wanted to be with her in Chiapas, walking through the mist along a path, guided by the man with the pipe and balaclava.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in my seat on the bus, next to the window. We were once again traveling at a steady speed, and it suddenly occurred to me that it had all been a nightmare. I had no clear memory of how the whole episode at the checkpoint had ended, no memory of boarding the bus with Mariconchi and falling asleep, and no idea of how much time had elapsed since then. What seemed most likely was that it had been a horrible dream, induced by sinister stories about the Bogeyman, by the Choose Your Own Adventure novels, by Teresa’s disappearance, and by the grave tone in which Rat had warned me about the war in Chiapas.
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