Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Maybe Teresa had in fact returned home that very night, while I was wetting my pants on the bus, I thought. Such magical coincidences were always occurring in the books I read: a child who rescues his best friend from a cave at the precise instant that the roof is about to collapse on top of him; the prince who, after years away at war, arrives at his father’s deathbed at the very moment he’s uttering his last words.

  I allowed that fantasy free rein: if Teresa had returned, there would be no scolding or “I’m disappointed in you”—it would be a long, long hug. My mom’s voice would finally sound affectionate, it would quiver with emotion, and then I’d excitedly show her the progress I’d made in the Japanese art of origami; I’d tell her about Mariconchi, and how I’d courageously protected that frightened woman from the bullying and humiliation of the soldiers on a godforsaken highway in the middle of the night. And Teresa would listen to my stories as never before: with genuine interest, with the respect of someone listening to an equal.

  My father, in the meantime, would be serving us lemonade like a diligent butler; or he’d be watching TV, absorbed like the infant he really was, and I’d finally be the adult male in the household: I’d move into Teresa’s bedroom despite Mariana’s irate protests, despite the protests of my father and the man with the pipe and balaclava.

  7

  OF VILLAHERMOSA, I REMEMBER LITTLE. I’d never before experienced anything like the heat that hit me when I descended from the bus, not even in Acapulco. The change from the air conditioning of the vehicle to the dense humidity of the terminal was so extreme, it was as if we’d passed from the atmosphere of one planet to another. Even the force of gravity seemed different: it took more effort to lift your feet from the ground. For an instant I considered the possibility that Villahermosa was, in fact, another planet. A planet on which everyone said “sweetie” and “mommy and daddy” and which was considerably nearer to the sun than Colonia Educación.

  When Mariconchi had extracted her shapeless, unwieldy bag from the luggage compartment, she looked at me with a touch of hostility. Perhaps she wasn’t used to lying, and so she thought it had been unforgivable of me to have told her that Teresa would be coming to meet me in Chiapas, to have given her to understand that my journey had the complete approval of my parents. By contrast, in my home, lying was just something that came naturally to us. For Mariana, Teresa, and me, lies were no more important than, for instance, alliteration—and were employed with much greater frequency. This was not, however, the case with my father. It annoyed him when we told lies; whenever he discovered us being untruthful, there would be an eruption of anger that lasted several days.

  Mariana’s lies were, I have to admit, the best. I’ve always admired her ability to instantaneously come up with a really complex series, often in the form of pretexts.

  On one occasion, my sister was planning to go to a party where there would be no adult supervision, organized by some students in their final year of high school. I knew about it because I used to eavesdrop on her telephone conversations, my ear pressed to the wood of her bedroom door. In order to gain permission, she told Teresa that her friend Citlali was hosting a pajama party. At nine in the evening, Teresa decided to call Citlali’s house to see how everything was going, and of course my sister wasn’t there, and hadn’t been there at all that day. Half an hour later, Mariana herself called, and an extremely annoyed Teresa dropped one of her emotional bombshells of the “I’m disappointed in you” variety. But my sister didn’t break under the pressure. She invented the tale that there was another Citlali, whom she’d never before mentioned. She was a younger, quieter girl who had had polio in her childhood and so walked with a bad limp due to a dislocated hip. As a triumphal end to the pack of lies she’d just produced, she passed the phone to a man who claimed to be the disabled Citlali’s father, and told Teresa that everything was fine.

  I don’t know if Teresa believed that or any other of Mariana’s many falsehoods, but she pretended to, and my theory is that she was training us to lie effectively: she only scolded us if the lie didn’t hold water, lacked detail, or was frankly idiotic. (Mine were generally all three. When I later decided to study literature, it was with the secret desire to improve those lies, even though by then it was already too late.)

  In some way, Teresa’s disappearance was one more lesson in that everlasting fiction class that was her life. She’d played the role of the spouse, mother, and suburban housewife for sixteen years: a lie she’d clung to with tooth and nail, with her whole body, until she herself believed it. I don’t know if it was due to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the naturally downward slope her marriage was on, or—more generally—the advent of a Truth with a capital T, but during that summer of ’94, Teresa’s lie fell apart. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it had been silently disintegrating for many years and finally, that Tuesday at midday, came tumbling down.

  From the perspective offered by the intervening two decades, I now guess that when she got off the bus, Mariconchi wasn’t exactly angry with me. True, my lie had put her in an awkward position, but I imagine that to some extent she considered herself responsible for my fate. What’s more, she may perhaps have felt guilty that an unnamed soldier had traumatized me for life while I was in her care, as would appear to be indicated by the fact that I’d pissed my pants at the age of ten. How was she going to explain to my father that his son was with her, five hundred miles away, on a planet nearer to the sun where the force of gravity was different?

  After leaving the bus terminal, we took a cab to Mariconchi’s house, and I remember being surprised that it was a normal car, with four doors, and not one of the ubiquitous Beetles with no front passenger seat that abounded in the streets of the capital.

  Mariconchi’s house was painted in the most surprising colors. The front door was navy blue, the living room walls were apricot, the kitchen was a pale green, and there was a small interior patio with clay-colored tiles. The large number of ornaments on every available surface made the house a kitsch baroque nightmare. On shelves, porcelain dolls stood beside small vases commemorating weddings and baptisms. It was completely unlike any other house I’d ever entered. I immediately assumed that this was the predominant style in Villahermosa.

  Over and above the excessive ornamentation, there was a disturbing element in that house; it seemed to be preserved like a museum rather than being a lived-in space. I knew from her first monologue, when we were just leaving the Taxqueña terminal, that my host’s sons lived in Mexico City, but I didn’t remember hearing anything about a partner, and I posed my question with the innocent directness typical of those days: “Where’s your husband?” Mariconchi stroked my hair before replying, and it was as if she’d called me “sweetie” for the umpteenth time, but on this occasion with a gesture rather than words. “He passed on three years ago.”

  I’d always envied children who felt relatively confident around adults, who spoke the full range of the polite language of social encounters and were praised by teachers and aunts for having “very good manners.” Teresa had never trained us to avoid awkward questions, repeat formulaic courtesies, or utilize the blandest euphemism to suit the occasion. That is the only explanation for the fact that, despite my relatively morbid taste in reading matter (including the Choose Your Own Adventure books) and my reasonable performance in the language class, I still, at the age of ten, had no clear notion of the meaning of the verb “pass on.” At home, we simply said “die”: my father’s father had died before I was born, and Kurt, Mariana’s red-eared terrapin, had died a few months before the death of the singer it had been named after, but no one around me had ever, as far as I knew, passed on. From Mariconchi’s tone, I could tell that passing on wasn’t something good, yet by a process of association I would find impossible to reconstruct today, it seemed to me that her husband must be some form of vegetable in a wheelchair whom she visited from time to time in a hospital.

  While I was lost in those linguis
tic conundrums (omitting to express any form of condolence or regret), Mariconchi produced a pen and paper from a drawer and asked me to note down my home phone number, which I did without hesitation, since I had an inkling that her generosity and patience were reaching their limits. She then disappeared for a moment and returned with a towel, a T-shirt, and a pair of shorts that looked six or seven sizes too large for me. “Give me your clothes and go take a shower. I’ll talk to your daddy and then wash your things so you’re clean as a new pin when he comes to get you.” I immediately realized that carrying out her request would imply standing naked in front of her, and I felt myself blush. Mariconchi must have spotted that blush because she laughed. It made me a little less nervous to see the worried expression she’d worn since early that morning fleetingly disappear.

  I took off my clothes in the bathroom and, after wrapping myself in the towel she’d given me, handed my pants and T-shirt to Mariconchi. I was worried that she might ask about my briefs—discarded among the filthy litter of the service station restroom—but either she didn’t notice their absence or guessed it was a sensitive topic and said nothing.

  Back in the bathroom, I imagined the telephone call that was about to be made. My father would be desperately searching for me. He’d surely have brought in the police or would be in jail for accidentally killing Rat while torturing him for information about my whereabouts. Mariana would be feeling guilty, like the time when she tied me to the gate with a bicycle lock and then lost the key. The house in Educación would be filled with reporters, and my smiling face would appear that day, along with those of other missing children, on the public-service break-bumpers on Channel 5.

  Whatever the case, the phone would scarcely have time to ring in the tense silence of the living room before my father leaped to answer it. I imagined his surprise on hearing Mariconchi’s kindly voice, her speech peppered with diminutives, the tale of our bus journey, the revelation that I was safe in her house, taking a shower, and, perhaps, the treacherous accusation that I’d wet my pants. I imagined the haste with which my sister would try to grab the handset from him, the police officer advising caution as his team traced the call. But what I couldn’t imagine was any possible ending to that conversation. What plan would be agreed on? Would my father take a plane to Villahermosa, Tabasco State, before noon to personally drag me back home? Would they arrange for Mariconchi herself to put me on a bus back to the capital, thus exposing me to the risk of the adolescent soldier with chemical breath humiliating me again that night? Would Mariana attempt to assuage her guilt by offering to come to Villahermosa to fetch me? After all, she’d supposedly been looking after me when I disappeared. And the most important question of all: Would they ask Mariconchi to tell me that Teresa had come home?

  I stood for quite a while under the tepid stream, stronger than in Educación, without soaping myself down, feeling the water massage my back.

  I recalled an occasion when I’d woken up feeling ill, with a cough, difficulty breathing, and an indefinite pain in my chest. The pediatrician I usually saw was on vacation, so Teresa took me to another, recommended by someone who worked with my father at the bank.

  The doctor was an elderly man with a military bearing and brusque manner. After examining me and scrawling a prescription for cough syrup, he turned to Teresa and, in a grave tone, said: “What this child needs is for his father to wake him up at six in the morning and put him under a cold shower. If he gets into that habit early in life, he’ll never fall ill and will be a stronger, more hard-working boy.” Teresa smiled, thanked the doctor for his advice, and left his office. I was pretty surprised by the proposed regimen, which had very little resemblance to the remedies prescribed by my usual pediatrician.

  Once we were in the car, Teresa looked solemnly into my eyes and, imitating the doctor’s voice, said, “What this child needs is to shower in ice-cold water.” Then she let loose a laugh that she appeared to have been holding back for some time. I’d never before seen her do anything like that; imitating someone and then laughing, I mean. It was in complete contrast to the absolute seriousness she normally projected. I laughed too; nervous rather than genuinely amused.

  When Teresa had pulled into traffic, changing the mood, I asked why the doctor had said that I ought to shower in cold water, and Teresa’s answer only served to further disconcert me: “Because he believes that if we get you out of bed early and put you under a cold shower, you won’t deplete your energy levels masturbating. He must be a religious fanatic.” I made no reply. What could I have said? I was ashamed by the doctor’s insinuation and annoyed with my mother for having explicitly voiced it.

  8

  A PART OF ME KNOWS that my situation is unsustainable. After two years of living on the inheritance I received after my father’s death (or at least what was left of it when I bought the place where I now live), it’s beginning to be clear that I’ll have to look for a job, go out into the world, and take up my life where I left off when, in the uninhabited house in Educación, surrounded by cardboard boxes, I searched through my father’s papers and read Teresa’s two letters. But for the moment there’s no way I can even think of facing up to the frenzied activity of the city’s streets. The very idea makes me feel more ungrounded than usual.

  My father’s phone call, two and a half years ago, had taken me by surprise. We’d gotten into the habit of exchanging text messages approximately one Sunday a month, using only the innocuous formulas that rule fleshless father-son relationships: “How are things?” “Just chilling out over here.” “Are you going to watch the game?” “No, I don’t even know who’s playing,” and so on.

  A call from him, at ten in the evening, and to top it all on a Thursday, was an anomaly that presaged problems.

  After a little beating about the bush, he told me that for months he’d been feeling unwell, constantly tired. His condition had gotten much worse in recent weeks: he no longer had the energy to go for a morning run before his eight-hour shift at the office. I made no response, sensing that his news hadn’t finished there: my proud father wouldn’t have called to tell me that he was getting old, weak, and sickly.

  There followed further digressions—the farce that was left-wing politics in Mexico City and the price of gas—until he worked himself up to continuing his confession. A few weeks before, he’d visited the doctor and had been sent to have several tests done. That very morning he’d gone back with the results and had been told that he had cancer.

  He didn’t say “a tumor,” he said “cancer.” His tone in pronouncing that word sounded deeply strange, as if he’d been repeating it aloud for hours, until he’d emptied it of all meaning.

  I was standing in the kitchen of the rented apartment where I lived at that time, when I still had a job, personal projects, and ambitions. I asked my father to give me a moment and went to my bedroom. My roommate wasn’t home; in fact there was no one else in the whole house, but I felt the need for greater privacy, so I closed the door behind me and sat on the bed.

  I asked my father if they were going to operate, or start with chemotherapy. He sighed and said, “There’s no point.” I had the feeling that he was going to add something further and waited, but he’d already said everything he had to say. He’d never been much of a conversationalist.

  “Have you spoken to Mariana?” I managed to ask before he hung up. “What for? She’s not interested. She’s fine as she is, with her girlfriend, her job, and her stuff.” The anger in his voice covered a cry for help: he was asking me to act as an intermediary, to give the news to my sister.

  Naturally, that wasn’t a phone call I had any desire to make. Mariana and I weren’t very close at that time. But whereas my father hadn’t been invited to her wedding the year before, I had. And Katia, her wife, had treated me with warm familiarity, constantly demonstrating that Mariana had told her a lot about our childhood, about how important we were to each other after Teresa’s death.

  And my father was, and had always
been, a troglodyte. I’d become inured to his lack of tact, his rather brusque way of saying just what was on his mind, but Mariana found it almost impossible to grin and bear it. My father’s manner drove her crazy, gave rise to a form of rage bordering on disgust. Any conversation between them about the cancer might go horribly wrong if I didn’t intervene. My father was capable of using the call to complain about her coldness, about not being invited to her wedding, being refused the recognition he deserved for having single-handedly put his two children through college (public and free, but he wouldn’t mention that). And Mariana was capable of lashing out and saying that she hadn’t invited him because she didn’t want to feel ashamed of him in front of her friends; in the heat of the argument, my sister might even have been capable—and not for the first time—of insinuating that my father was alone because neither Teresa nor anyone else could stand him, which was, when you came down to it, true.

  When I rang, Mariana was more upbeat than usual. She spent several minutes telling me about the vacation she and Katia were planning to the nature reserve on Isla Holbox. I asked if they had already made a hotel reservation, anticipating the disappointment of having to cancel the trip if my father were to die just before they left. The reservations had been made.

  Plucking up my courage, I finally broached the subject. “I spoke to my father just now.” “So what did the fascist pig have to say for himself?” However harsh it might sound, “fascist pig” was the almost affectionate term we used between ourselves to refer to him. “He’s dying. He’s riddled with cancer.” After a few moments’ silence, Mariana replied in a flat voice, similar to Teresa’s monotone: “I’ll have to cancel the trip.” I guess she was hoping that I’d contradict her, say, “Don’t worry. You go ahead, I’ll sort everything out and take you to the cemetery when you get back so you know the location of the grave you’ll never visit.” But I said nothing, and Mariana and Katia canceled their vacation.