Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Eight days later, my father had been admitted to the hospital and was connected to a morphine drip. Although he’d always said he wanted to “die peacefully at home,” as soon as he found out about the cancer, the pain kicked in, as if the illness had been waiting to be given a name to proliferate and demonstrate its brutality. It was immediately apparent that he’d spend the rest of his days—which would surely be few—in that bed in a hospital in Colonia Roma. And no one wants their father to die alone, when the nursing staff are changing shifts, with Jell-O stains on his clothes, and a game show on the TV in his room, so I began to spend my days with him at the hospital, making occasional trips to the house in Educación to bring him fresh clothes, magazines, and his address book.

  To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to share the burden with Mariana. I thought she’d turn up at normal visiting hours, sometimes alone, sometimes with Katia, and would promise to keep an eye on text messages so she could help me with the funeral arrangements when the time came. But on the first night, she appeared carrying a gym bag containing a toothbrush and a change of clothing, and told me we could do shifts—she’d warned them at work that she wasn’t going to be around the whole day—and I could go home. I didn’t go. That evening, we stayed together in the hospital, and during the night went down to the cafeteria a few times, where the flame of our relationship was rekindled. We spoke of everything except Teresa. Unlike me, Mariana preferred not to touch on delicate subjects.

  During the following three months, that hospital became the living room of my house, and the cafeteria, my office. My father’s insurance policy covered the expenses of a private room, and no one was hurrying him to vacate his bed (to go home when he was a little better, or to the grave when he could no longer bear the pain). In that bed, my father was slowly consumed by the cancer, while Mariana and I aged, either in the chair at his side or walking the corridors of the hospital when insomnia sank its teeth into our backs.

  My father got hooked on the morphine in a matter of hours. He passed so quickly into an idyllic state that I was surprised he hadn’t already developed some other addiction—apart, that is, from his obligatory tequila before dinner and, in recent years, his nighttime Valium. The doctors did their best to keep the dosage low, first arguing that he might accidentally take too much and then, when they realized the weakness of that argument in such circumstances, that my father’s insurers would be unwilling to pay for such large quantities of opiates.

  As had always happened when life attempted to prohibit him something, my father’s solution was high-handedness: he sent me off to collect a wad of bills he’d stashed in the house and ordered me to use the money to bribe “the damned head nurse” or go to a drugstore and buy the stuff. I explained that we’d need a prescription, and he spent the following days insisting to the downy-cheeked physician that he had to have that document because the hospital morphine cost an arm and a leg. The doctor finally gave way and I was able to buy two types of morphine: injectable and in pill form (to cover all eventualities), so that my father could enjoy that last pleasure life had conceded him as he himself saw fit.

  I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for the morphine, my father would have died in a matter of weeks. Instead, he survived for almost three months, floating on an ever higher and denser cloud of opiates until any distinction between sleep and death was hairsplitting. Only then did he have the courage to finally die.

  Two and a half years on, my existence is, like his during those months, restricted to the width of a bed. From here, in the tangle of my sweat-stained sheets, accompanied only by these notes—by these notebooks in which I scribble as a form of salvation, and these words I weave together in search of meaning—I’m able to understand the infinite pleasure my father must have experienced on discovering, after a whole life of work, the sweet honey of immobility.

  One evening at the hospital, while waiting for the arrival of the doctor to carry out his daily examination, I asked my dad why he’d continued going to the office during those months, when he was already feeling tired and ill, had found blood in his stools, and had to take cabs everywhere because he got dizzy when he drove himself; why he hadn’t visited the doctor earlier or called me to say that he wasn’t well, that he had symptoms; why he hadn’t asked me to go with him to the hospital. “I don’t know,” he responded grouchily. “I had a lot of outstanding business.” I imagine that when he did finally consult the doctor, someone else immediately replaced him at the bank and took over the outstanding business that couldn’t be put off and weighed so heavily on his mind. He was a wholly dispensable employee. Perhaps the only way my father had of feeling important was to behave as if he actually were.

  A number of his colleagues came to see him in the hospital while we were waiting for him to get around to dying, but none of them seemed particularly close to him. They used to tell him dull stories, pretending they were funny, pass on best wishes from the secretaries, bring flowers that would probably remain fresh longer than his body, and then depart, leaving behind the smells of aftershave, tequila, and dry-cleaned shirts.

  Apparently, during his fifty-nine years of life, my father had never formed any close relationships or had intimate friends who could, in those final days, have helped him swallow the bitter pill of truth, or just in some way accompany him. Until that moment his isolation had always seemed quite natural, something that happened to all men of a certain age and so couldn’t be put down to his personality. I myself had no friend I’d want to see at my deathbed. But when I saw my father’s happy, relaxed expression after a dose of morphine—his brow clear for the first time, the querulous twist of his lips finally erased—I understood that his lack of friends was, in fact, a personal defect; a stain on his character that possibly indicated some deeper turbulence; a fundamental blemish that I, as everything seemed to indicate, had inherited.

  9

  WHILE MY CLOTHES WERE DRYING IN THE SUN on the small clay-colored patio, Mariconchi switched on the TV and told me that I could watch whatever I wanted. She was going to prepare quesadillas for us both: “You must be starving, sweetie.” I asked if she’d managed to get through to my father or sister, and she nodded before disappearing into the kitchen, from where, as if avoiding eye contact, she shouted, “Your daddy will be here in the early evening, sweetie. I’m going to take you to the airport so the two of you can get the next flight home.”

  All the TV channels had poor reception, except for one, which was showing a telenovela. I moved the rabbit-ear antenna around in vain and after a while switched the set off. On the telephone table, from where Mariconchi must surely have called my father, I found a small square message pad. I tore off one of the sheets and settled down to making an origami figure on the flowered dining room tablecloth, although I would have preferred a harder surface to obtain sharper creases. I only knew the basic folds by heart; for any animal I’d have needed to consult my instruction manual. But folding pieces of paper in half calmed me down, even when the activity had no actual end in view.

  My great adventure was about to draw to a close, and it had been a failure. During the last fifteen hours, I’d become friends with Rat, one of the neighborhood celebrities; I’d made my debut as a smoker and had, for the first time, crossed over into forbidden territory, going beyond Taxqueña and Miramontes without the supervision of a responsible adult; I’d boarded a bus on my own, confronted a soldier with evil intentions, and now I was on a planet called Villahermosa, trying to do origami while the adoptive mother of my fantasies was preparing quesadillas. But all those incidents had served for nothing: I hadn’t reached Chiapas, I hadn’t found Teresa, and I hadn’t sacrificed myself for her in the nascent revolution. And now my father had an excuse to punish me for the rest of my life: I’d never again see the sun or visit Guillermo’s house after class.

  I might even have to change schools, and instead of going back to Paideia in September, I’d be sent to a military academy, as I’d heard happened to uncontrollab
le children. In military school, all the staff would, of course, be like the adolescent soldier at the checkpoint on the highway, more interested in humiliating me and touching my legs than in teaching me how to do multiplication with decimal numbers or to memorize the history of the Mexican Revolution. My Choose Your Own Adventure books, my origami paper, and even my Zero Luminosity Capsule would be confiscated, and I’d be forced to sleep like a dog at the foot of my father’s bed or sit in the living room with him, watching reruns of the Mexican team playing soccer until the 1998 World Cup in France came around.

  In fact, there was no reason to assess the failure of my adventure in terms of the punishment that would be meted out to me. Not having reached Chiapas, not having found Teresa, not having become a hero in the eyes of my father, my sister, and her friends was its true measure. Reality had been too much for me. The world was vaster and more sinister than I’d imagined when I crossed Avenida Taxqueña, despite the presence of kindly figures like Mariconchi or less kindly ones like Rat. My failure consisted of having believed, in an arrogant, self-obsessed way, that growing up was a matter of undertaking grand projects and triumphing over adversity.

  We ate the quesadillas in silence—I stoically tolerated the habanero chili sauce Mariconchi had added. Although I was still overexcited due to everything that had happened, weariness was beginning to get the better of me.

  After eating, I lay on the couch while Mariconchi watched her telenovela. I didn’t feel able to rest. Every time I began to nod off, something jolted me awake: an image or the sensation of falling, or the fear of missing something important. A few hours later Mariconchi touched my shoulder and told me I could put on my pants (it seemed to me that the strong Tabasco sun had left them not just bone dry but also paler). Then, in a matter of minutes, we were leaving for the airport.

  THREE

  1

  MY FIFTH-GRADE SCHOOL NOTEBOOKS—I still keep one or two, together with other documents from my childhood, in a cardboard box under my bed—should have been covered in red, glossy paper, with my name and class written clearly on the front. Of course neither my father nor I remembered that until the last minute (seven in the evening on Sunday), and despite driving around all the stationery stores in south Mexico City, the best we could find was a roll of paper in a color described as “peach red” that, in the eyes of any boy, was without a shadow of doubt pink. After three frustrated attempts to cover one notebook himself, my father knocked on Mariana’s door and passed the task on to her, promising as a reward to take her to Tower Records in Zona Rosa the following weekend to buy an album. As Mariana covered my notebooks in pink paper, I foresaw the awful effects that stupid color would have on my daily life.

  The first tragic discovery of the academic year was that I’d been transferred to the B group of fifth grade because my father, overwhelmed by Teresa’s disappearance and my later flight, had paid the school fees late, by which time my usual class was full. This meant that I was no longer able to sit next to Guillermo and, in spite of having already spent five years at Paideia, was forced to make a new group of friends, as if I’d just joined the school. Although I could still see my former companions during recess, it wouldn’t be the same, since I’d have missed out on the classroom anecdotes that underlay the dynamics of the group.

  The first days were disorienting. I couldn’t shake off the sense of unreality that had taken hold of me since the journey to Villahermosa. A rumor was going around the school—I guess it must have been started by some friend Mariana had fallen out with—that our mother had joined the Zapatista uprising. Stories portraying my mom as an international terrorist, an underground heroine, or a downright liar spread around the schoolyard and among the groups of children waiting for their parents when class had finished for the day. The most outlandish versions of the legend attributed several killings to Teresa and promoted her to leadership of a rebel army.

  The presidential elections had taken place just before the new school year, and a sort of political frenzy took hold of the children, who openly declared their affiliation to either PRD or PAN and were unhappy about the victory of the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo. In a middle-class, progressive school like Paideia, the majority of the pupils tended to repeat the social-democratic opinions of their parents and teachers. And that was why the preponderant theory was that the defeat of the Left could be blamed on the Zapatistas, who hadn’t backed the PRD candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and had formed a distraction with all their “fuss in the jungle,” as the civics teacher had called the National Democratic Convention that had taken such a powerful hold on Teresa’s political imagination.

  At first none of my new classmates had the courage to ask directly about my mother, but the veiled allusions and smirks—eager to humiliate and greedy for gossip—were eloquent enough to make it clear that my social life was going to be fucked up for quite a while. To top it all, my best friend from previous years, the peerless Guillermo, decided that any association with me would have negative consequences for his public image.

  “Cut,” in school jargon, was a magic phrase, expressed by the symbolic act of making a circle with the thumb and forefinger and then dramatically separating them in the face of another child; from that moment, diplomatic relations between the two children were broken off and could only be restored, after mutual consensus, by means of the reverse symbolic act, termed “paste.” Guillermo gave me the cut one recess in the first week of class and, as if by contagion, the gesture spread through the other children, my former playmates, during the following days until I was left isolated. This adept maneuver placed Guillermo at the peak of his popularity, making him the indisputable leader of both fifth-grade groups, while I was relegated to the marginality of a pariah, alongside Rodolfo Casillas, the caretaker’s son (discriminated against on grounds of class) and Viridiana Lombardo, a girl from Guadalajara, newly arrived in the capital, whose accent and regional idioms made her an easy target. That is to say, as usual, the whiplash of childhood orthodoxy fell on those in any way different, and my status as “son of a guerrillera,” as I began to be called by some, located me on the side of the oppressed.

  What I found hardest about my lack of school friends was having no one to tell about the things that had happened to me during the vacation. In the safety of my Zero Luminosity Capsule, I’d fabricated a version of the story (excluding the episode of the briefs abandoned in the filthy toilet) that, I calculated, would even impress the most cynical and abusive of the sixth-grade children.

  Now, during recess, I wandered from one side of the playground to the other, hoping against hope that someone would ask me what I’d done during the previous months so that I could show my true worth. But no one ever asked, and when I tried to buddy up with Rodolfo Casillas and timidly broach the topic of vacation, he told me that he’d spent his helping his father to make a piece of furniture, and then walked off before I could say anything.

  Things weren’t any better inside the classroom. Until then, if not an exemplary student, I’d at least been consistent. I compensated for my innate inability to do math with long hours of study at home under Teresa’s cold gaze, and with top marks in history and language. Without my mother there to make me do my homework, and with the added emotional stress of having no friends, my attention span plunged drastically, and I came close to failing the diagnostic test we were given at the beginning of each year. As a consequence, my father grounded me in the evenings, which meant that my hopes of meeting Rat and telling him the whole of my Tabascan odyssey were also frustrated.

  In that pitiful scenario, confined to my punishment-room, without the will to open fresh investigations into Teresa’s whereabouts and activities, I turned again to origami.

  I found it boring. Not only were the paper animals that resulted from all my efforts still unrecognizable, but the very activity of folding pieces of paper in two had lost all meaning. Suddenly, it felt like a childish whim that had engrossed me in some very remote past. I wondered
how I could possibly have spent so many hours on such a silly pastime, angry at myself or at that version of myself that had ceased to exist at some point between Taxqueña and Villahermosa.

  Perhaps in reaction to my origami period, as a sort of sequel to the exercise of folding leaves to extract the midrib from the ramifying veins, I began to create a general theory based on the differences between the two hemispheres. It suddenly seemed that everything I did with my left hand had a different, almost magical meaning. My right hand, reserved for the practical things of life (like doing homework), was a worldly extremity, while the left seemed to me to be invested with greater dignity. The expression “starting out on the wrong foot,” with its implicit understanding that the wrong foot was the left, was a fallacy: everything that started out on the left foot had a stronger connection to the spiritual world, to the sacred, even.

  And for precisely that reason, folding the leaves of bushes down the middle and making origami pagodas were impossible, fallacious activities: the hemispheres of reality were not, as in the Cartesian plane, equivalent or neutral, but charged with hidden attributes and meanings.

  It’s unlikely that I came up with that idea on my own. In those days, theories about the lateralization of brain functions had filtered through into many areas of popular culture, and it’s possible that I’d seen reports on the TV about the functioning of the brain that particularly stimulated my imagination. I do remember overusing the word “hemisphere” in class, thus gaining a reputation for nerdiness and deepening the chasm of hatred that separated me from my fellow pupils. I guess I learned the term from the same program that suggested the basic principles of my rudimentary cosmology.