A stream of urine fell onto my pants, around my rump, splashing my T-shirt slightly. Then the warm dampness filtered through to my briefs, wetting my asshole and my shrunken testicles. The boys who had stood watching these proceedings continued to laugh or contributed to the herd response by whooping jubilantly.
It was only then that I stopped struggling, let myself go limp, closed my eyes, and savored the taste and texture of the earth beneath the grass. I could no longer hear the laughter. Silence pervaded everything around me, and for a moment I had the impression of being inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule, far from all the noise and lights of the world.
When I opened my eyes again, Guillermo and the others had gone. Sound returned and I made out their voices in the distance, playing soccer in another area of the large garden. I stood up, wiped my face, and brushed off the front of my T-shirt. My eyes were stinging, as if I were going to cry at any moment, but no tears came. My neck hurt and I had a pain in a bone in the center of my chest I’d never been aware of before. The smell of urine rose to my nose and I remembered my own urine, my own smell on the way to Villahermosa, when I’d torn the tag bearing my full name from my briefs. I noticed that I was wearing the same pants as I had on that day—the same pants Mariconchi had washed in her house in Villahermosa while I was taking a shower—this time stained with urine that wasn’t mine.
I put my hand in my right pocket, and there it was: the fabric tag bearing my full name, reminding me that it would always be the same, that those two surnames would stalk me to the end of my days: son of my father and son of my mother, in that order.
At that instant I’d have given anything to be Úlrich González.
Guillermo’s mom didn’t ask what had happened. She seemed disgusted to see me in her living room stinking of piss. There was another woman with her; they were drinking coffee and eating cookies. The host apologized to her guest and forcefully grasped my wrist. She dragged me upstairs and left me standing in the hallway. “Don’t move an inch, you’ll get everything dirty,” she said and went into a room, closing the door behind her. I heard her speaking to my sister on the phone. My father hadn’t even had time to return home. Guillermo’s mom was extremely anxious to get me out of the house before any other guest could see the state I was in. She told my sister that she wanted to protect me from the children, who would give me a hard time if they found out about what she termed my “accident.” I didn’t have the courage to tell her that her son and his friends were a bunch of shits.
She finally agreed to send me home in a cab, with a driver who acted as the family’s ad hoc chauffeur. Guillermo’s mom lent me a pair of her son’s old pants and put mine in a grocery bag that, to my extreme embarrassment, I had to carry with me.
During the whole journey home, I stared through the window of the cab. My rage had abated and I was left with a profound sense of sadness. Mexico City seemed grayer, more fractured, dirtier than usual. At a traffic signal, a fire-eater asked for money and the cab driver rolled up the window without even responding to the request.
4
A FEW YEARS AGO I READ AN ARTICLE in a specialist magazine about memory function. I’ve never been a big consumer of popular science, but for days afterward I was left thinking about the findings of that particular study. The subheading was eye-catching and grandiloquent: “Every time you remember something that happened in the past, your brain distorts it.” This conclusion had been drawn by a group of neurologists in an English university who had charted the nerve impulses of a large sample of people.
The authors explained how the memories we return to most frequently are the most inaccurate, the least faithful to reality. When we recall a specific event, what we often remember is the experience of having remembered it before, not the original event. So, every time we remember a scene, that scene has a more tenuous relationship to the lived experience. Details are added, certain colors intensified, interpretation is superimposed on fact. Of course, in the article, this had a neurological explanation that I’ve forgotten, and all I have now is the metaphor.
Remembrance is destructive. Not just in terms of the memory, as the neurologists claim in that article, but also for the subject who remembers—I’m adding that part. The memory and the subject wipe each other out in the exercise of remembering, until the memory becomes an invention and the subject is more alone than before, because the thing recalled no longer exists, is just a replica of a replica of a replica.
The day my father died is irretrievable, lost in some tangle of neural circuitry that I’ll never be able to access. What I’m left with is a replica of a replica that says this: my father lost consciousness at around one in the morning. I rang Mariana to let her know, but the answering machine cut in, so I left a message. I sat on a stool by his hospital bed and began to talk to my father. Although I was initially hesitant—embarrassed in case the nursing staff should overhear or anyone should see me—my words eventually began to come more easily. By about half past three I was speaking fluently, only occasionally lapsing into silence for a few minutes at a time.
I spoke to him about the past: told him about the time Teresa fainted outside the market and when I kicked a pigeon. I told him that when I was ten, Rat had accompanied me to the Taxqueña bus station, and also that I’d seen Rat again, a few weeks before, having an argument with his teenage daughter not far from the hospital. I told my unconscious father about the restroom in the service station on the way to Villahermosa, where I’d left behind my briefs, and about the bathroom in Mariconchi’s house.
I also used those hours to communicate certain focuses of resentment that had been smoldering in my chest for some time. I reproached him for his narrow-mindedness, the way he’d distanced Mariana, his violent rages, his need to control everyone around him. I’d never have dared to say any of that if he could hear me. Unlike my sister, who’d been openly challenging his authority from the age of fifteen, I’d borne my father’s abuse in absolute silence. When my patience was reaching its limits, I’d try to tell myself that Teresa’s death had been as painful for him as it had for us, even more so, because he’d known her longer.
At four in the morning my father briefly recovered consciousness and muttered something I couldn’t make out due to the tubes connecting him to life. Whatever it was, they were his last words. I’m not sure why, but I’m convinced they weren’t important.
Three or four times during the following forty minutes I believed he was dead and called the nurse, who felt his pulse and shook her head, looking me straight in the face without compassion or ceremony. Finally, at seventeen minutes past five, he did die. When his decease had been confirmed, I held his hand for a moment, as a sort of farewell, and then left the room, following the doctor.
Mariana arrived just before six. I’ve no idea if she was sorry to have missed that final moment. The truth is, I guess, that she’d said her goodbyes long ago.
Neither of us cried. We’d had time to assimilate, even desire, the death of the man who had, to a great extent—against his will, against ours—brought us up.
My father’s will stated that the vigil was to be held in a funeral home; a gray, airless place that offered substantial discounts to the staff of the bank where he’d worked.
Someone had left a yellow bucket containing a dirty rag in one corner of the room where the coffin stood. At some point I thought of asking for it to be removed, but then told myself that it wasn’t worth the effort. My father’s former colleagues and their wives must have had the same thought. His boss of the previous ten years, a man his own age, told me a few of the anecdotes about my father that everyone always remembered: the time he bought a cake for his secretary, convinced—wrongly—that it was her birthday; another occasion when he’d accidentally made a pun on a client’s name; and yet another when it had taken three or four of them to prevent him from punching someone in a cantina. They were silly stories that portrayed him as a simple, bad-tempered, but to some extent likeable man.
Mariana had a hard time masking her disdain of those people. She shook hands, smiled occasionally, and then went outside to smoke, taking Katia or one of her female friends with her. For my part, I hadn’t invited anyone; I’d felt no need for moral support. It was all the same to me if I had to spend the night in the company of account executives, area managers, and second cousins.
A week after the funeral, Mariana and I had a meeting with the lawyer. Victor Garmendia was one of the few of my father’s acquaintances who neither worked at the bank nor were members of the club. I’ve never understood how they got to know each other, and he was never invited to our house, but my father used to refer to Garmendia with a degree of warmth that was rare in him.
On meeting the lawyer in the flesh, however, I had the impression that the feeling wasn’t mutual: he spoke of my father as a long-standing client with whom he’d had the occasional beer, but little else.
We agreed that Garmendia would take charge of the sale of the house in Educación—in exchange for a percentage of the purchase price—as soon as we handed over the keys. My task was to clear out the house: to sell or give away everything it contained. Mariana preferred not to be involved.
I’d left my job teaching Spanish as a foreign language to be with my father during the last months of his life. It was a badly paid job that had involved tolerating intolerably spoiled gringo students. The truth is, I’d been looking for an excuse to pack it in for ages.
Without the income from my classes, and given the need to empty the house in Educación, I felt that the most sensible course of action would be to move in there for a few days, and so also save the long daily commute from the apartment I was then renting in Santa María la Ribera.
Before I’d even gotten the door fully open, the smell hit me with the clarity, the physical reality, of an image. It was difficult to believe that the house in Educación could still smell exactly the same in spite of the fact that it was now uninhabited, that my father was dead, that Teresa was dead, that Mariana hadn’t lived there for years, and that I myself, to the extent that time allowed such stunts, was a different person from the one who had once dwelled between those walls.
I dumped my backpack in my old bedroom and contemplated the titanic task that lay before me. Nothing seemed to have changed since the time I lived there. My father had hardly moved anything in the house, as if he’d been holding his breath for years, fearing to the last any trace of change.
I decided to organize the contents of the house into three broad categories: things to be sold, things to be given away, and things I’d prefer to talk to Mariana about before taking any action.
I began in the living room, where everything was saleable: the couch with its ineradicable stains, the ten volumes of the Encyclopedia of Mexico, a box of movies on VHS. The only thing my father had updated was the television set: I could probably get a good price for that immense, brandnew flat-screen.
After quickly sorting out the living room, I decided to move on to the kitchen, postponing the inspection of my former bedroom for a moment of greater spiritual equanimity. My father’s room would come last: the mere sight of its drawn-curtain half-light caused my breathing to accelerate.
That first night I was unable to sleep. My old bed was too short and the dust I’d disturbed in the living room had floated through the whole house, causing me an allergic reaction. Standing at my bedroom window, I watched the sun rise over Educación.
On the second day of the clear-out I went to get something to eat at a nearby street market and, among the food stands, saw an old pickup truck with flaking paint and a banner reading, “Furniture, clothing, and trinkets bought.” It seemed as good an option as any. When I approached the window of the pickup, I found the vehicle was empty. I looked around and inquired at a fruit stand, where I was told that the “junkman” would be back shortly. I leaned up against the dilapidated bodywork of the truck to wait in the sunlight.
After a few minutes, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to find myself face-to-face with Rat. He was the same older man who had appeared a few weeks before in the vicinity of the hospital. This time he was alone, without the teenage girl I’d seen him arguing with in the street.
Rat didn’t appear surprised to see me, but neither did he give the least sign of recognition. “What can I do for you?” he asked. He had the raspy voice of a chain-smoker of unfiltered Delicados. “Don’t you remember me? I’m Mariana’s brother … No. 23, Calle H.” Rat made a vague gesture, as if saying that he couldn’t care less about the past, as if the fact of our having met twice—after twenty years during which we’d scarcely heard word of each other—just before and just after my father’s death, had no importance. “And what can I do for you, Mariana’s brother from Calle H?” he asked in a sarcastic tone, making his indifference clear. I gave up the attempt to be friendly. Maybe I was the only person who cared about the summer of ’94. Nobody, not Mariana, Rat, or anybody else, seemed interested in reviving the story. “My father died not long ago, and I’m clearing out his house. There are a lot of things I could sell you.”
Rat didn’t offer his condolences or show the least contrition. He told me that he’d swing by later to check how much there was, if it would fit in his pickup, and how many trips he’d need to make. He gave me his card: “‘Rat,’ Dealer in Antique Furniture,” it said; below was a drawing of a giant rat in dark glasses, driving a moving van. We shook on it; Rat’s hand was rough, callused, hard as concrete.
On the way back to the house I bought two cans of beer and a disposable dust mask. Drinking the beer, surrounded by the cardboard boxes scattered around the living room, I wondered where Rat would take all that stuff. He probably had a partner who would resell it all. It pleased me to think that there was a place in La Lagunilla or the antique market in Portales that would display all the material goods that had filled my father’s life: trophies of an existence dedicated to the accumulation of hand tools. Someone would stop one Saturday to ask the price of a monkey wrench and around him, solemnly silent, would be what remained of my father, his pillaged mausoleum of junk. There was some form of poetic justice in the fact that Rat was to take on the task. As if, in spite of his reticence and unnatural aloofness, he were doomed to accompany me, one more time, on that rocky transition out of Colonia Educación.
I don’t consider myself to be particularly attached to material goods. Throwing out the dreadful seascape that had adorned the hallway during my whole childhood didn’t involve the least sacrifice. And it was just as easy to get rid of the electric appliances and the ornaments that had populated the shelves of my youth. I even began to think that the clear-out was going to be a relatively simple process, that in a matter of days I’d have disposed—without consequences or regrets—of a past that had been weighing me down for so long.
That afternoon, I finished in the kitchen, and in a burst of energy also classified everything in Mariana’s former bedroom, now converted into a junk room. Rat turned up later, at about eight o’clock, and cast a professional eye over the collection of boxes in the living room and kitchen. I told him that there was more stuff upstairs, but he decided that it wasn’t necessary to look it over: he already had an idea of what he’d need for the job.
The following morning I went to the market in search of more cardboard boxes, and within a couple of hours had decided on the fate of everything in my bedroom. I set aside a few of my elementary school notebooks, two or three novels, and some CDS from my teenage years that had nostalgia value. Everything else could be sold.
To cut a long story short, the clear-out progressed without incident until I got to my father’s bedroom: the room that had once also been Teresa’s. There was the bed that my mother had slept in until that Tuesday in July or August 1994; the desk in the corner at which she’d most likely written the farewell letter to my father; the night table on which I’d found that letter under a ridiculous porcelain dog.
For me, there was a touch of the museum about t
hat room. In some way it resembled one of those houses of historical personages, preserved intact for the delight of tourists. Except that there, I was able to become a tourist of my own history. Since it was the area of the house I’d entered least frequently during all those years, for me it preserved more clearly than any other the memory or ghost of my mother: I could imagine Teresa reading, arguing, getting dressed in that room, suspended in a time before everything happened, like a hologram projected by my grief and fatigue.
5
ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1994, six days after the incident at Guillermo’s party, my father said he needed to talk to us. Mariana and I were just coming in from school, and we were surprised to find him in the house at a time when he still should have been at the bank. His hair was tousled and he hadn’t shaved; he was wearing his Sunday pants. The atmosphere had been exceptionally tense for the whole of that week.
I’d taken it for granted that he was annoyed with me because of the party, but had no idea how to scold me since the whole situation was so odd: a child of almost eleven wetting himself at a party inspired more pity than rage, and my father tended to have a very hard time dealing with complex emotions.
At school, the regime of jibes and humiliations to which I’d been subjected continued, although never reaching the nadir of the party. Retreating behind a planter during recess, sitting with my knees drawn up and my glossy-pink-paper covered notebook open at the back pages, I passed the time writing my Left Hemisphere Theory as a means of evasion and philosophical consolation. I filled several of those pages in my spidery handwriting, explaining the magical associations of the left side, and the merely practical (“concrete,” I wrote) ones assigned to the right.
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