They waited seven hours to see him (for such was his well-deserved fame that orders from all over the realms came directly to him—for festivals, celebrations, consecrations, funerals, regatta launches, and such) and did not speak to each other. Maria Isabella was thinking hard about the little plan in her head and the butcher’s boy was thinking of how he had just lost his job for the dubious pleasure of a silent young woman’s company.
He spent most of the time looking surreptitiously at her shod feet and oddly wondering whether she, like the young ladies that figured in his fantasies, painted her toes blue, in the manner of the circus artistas.
When it was finally their turn (for such was the nature of Melchor Antevadez that he made time to speak to anyone and everyone who visited him, being of humble origin himself), Maria Isabella explained what she wanted to the artisan.
“What I need,” she began, “is a kite large enough to strap me onto. Then I must fly high enough to be among the stars themselves, so that anyone looking at the stars will see me among them, and I must be able to wave at least one hand to that person.”
“What you need,” Melchor Antevadez replied with a smile, “is a balloon. Or someone else to love.”
She ignored his latter comment and told him that a balloon simply would not do, it would not be able to achieve the height she needed, didn’t he understand that she needed to be among the stars?
He cleared his throat and told her that such a kite was impossible, that there was no material immediately available for such an absurd undertaking, that there was, in fact, no design that allowed for a kite that supported the weight of a person, and that it was simply impossible, impossible, impossible. Impossible to design. Impossible to find materials. No, no, it was impossible, even for the Illustrados.
She pressed him then for answers, to think through the problem; she challenged him to design such a kite, and to tell her just what these impossible materials were.
“Conceivably, I could dream of such a design, that much I’ll grant you. If I concentrate hard enough I know it will come to me, that much I’ll concede. But the materials are another matter.”
“Please, tell me what I need to find,” Maria Isabella said.
“None of it can be bought, and certainly none of it can be found here in Ciudad Meiora, although wonder can be found here if you know where to look.”
“Tell me.”
And so he began to tell her. Sometime during the second hour of his recitation of the list of materials, she began to take notes, and nudged the butcher’s boy to try to remember what she couldn’t write fast enough. At dawn the following day, Melchor Antevadez stopped speaking, reviewed the list of necessary things compiled by Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy, and said, “I think that’s all I’d need. As you can see, it is more than any man could hope to accomplish.”
“But I am not a man,” she said to him, looking down at the thousands of items on the impossible list in her hands. The butcher’s boy, by this time, was asleep, his head cradled in the crook of his thin arms, dreaming of aerialists and their blue toes.
Melchor Antevadez squinted at her. “Is any love worth all this effort? Looking for the impossible?”
Maria Isabella gave the tiniest of smiles. “What makes you think I’m in love?”
Melchor Antevadez raised an eyebrow at her denial.
“I’ll get everything,” she promised the Kitemaker.
“But it may take a lifetime to gather everything,” the artisan said wearily.
“A lifetime is all I have,” Maria Isabella told him. She then shook the butcher’s boy awake.
“I cannot go alone. You’re younger than me but I will sponsor you as my companion. Will you come with me?”
“Of course,” mumbled butcher’s boy drowsily. “After all, this shouldn’t take more time than I have to spare.”
“It may be significantly longer than you think,” the artisan said, shaking his head.
“Then please, Ser Antevadez, dream the design and I’ll have everything you listed when we return.” She stood to leave.
That very day, Maria Isabella told her parents and both sets of her padrinos that she was going off on a long trip. She invoked her right of Ver du Mundo (when women of at least sixteen years, and men of at least twenty years, could go forth into the wideness of Hinirang, sometimes to seek their fortune, sometimes to run from it). They all gave her their blessings, spoke fondly of how she used to dance and sing as a child, saluted her new right as a woman and full citizen of Ciudad Meiora, accompanied her all the way to the Portun du Transgresiones with more recalled memories of her youth, and sent her on her way. As for the butcher’s boy, he waited until she was well away and then joined her on the well-worn path, the Sendero du’l Viajero, along with the supplies she had asked him to purchase.
“I’m ready to go,” the butcher’s boy grinned at her. He was clad in a warm tunic in the manner of city folk, and around his neck, for luck, he wore an Ajima’at, a wooden charm fashioned in the form of a wheel.
“What did you tell your kinfolk?” Maria Isabella asked him, as he helped her mount a sturdy horse.
“That I would be back in a month or so.”
It took almost sixty years for Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy to find all the items on Melchor Antevadez’s impossible list.
They began at Pur’Anan, and then trekked to Katakios and Viri’Ato (where the sanctuary of the First Tree stood unmolested by time).
They traveled north to the lands of Bontoc and Cabarroquis (where the Povo Montaha dwelt in seclusion).
They sailed eastwards to Palao’an and the Islas du’l Calami’an (where the traders from countries across the seas converged in a riot of tongues).
They ventured westwards to the dark lands of Siqui’jor and Jomal’jig (where the Silent Ones kept court whenever both sun and moon occupied the same horizon).
They visited the fabled cities of the south: Diya al Tandag, Diya al Din, and Diya al Bajao (where fire-shrouded Djin and the Tiq’Barang waged an endless war of attrition).
They entered the marbled underworld of the Sea Lords of Rumblon and braved the Lair of the M’Arinduque (in whose house the dead surrendered their memories of light and laughter).
When they ran out of money after the third year of travel, Maria Isabella and the butcher’s boy spent time looking for ways to finance their quest. She began knowing only how to ride, dance, sing, play the arpa, the violin, and the flauta, embroider, sew, and write poetry about love; the butcher’s boy began knowing how to cut up a cow. By the time they had completed the list, they had more than quintupled the amount of money they began with, and they both knew how to manage a caravan; run a plantation; build and maintain fourteen kinds of seagoing and rivergoing vessels; raise horses big and small, and fowl, dogs, and seagulls; recite the entire annals of six cultures from memory; speak and write nineteen languages; prepare medicine for all sorts of ailments, worries, and anxieties; make flashpowder, lu fuego du ladron, and picaro de fuegos artificiales; make glass, ceramics, and lenses from almost any quality sand; and many many other means of making money.
In the seventh year of the quest, a dreadful storm destroyed their growing caravan of found things and they lost almost everything (she clutched vainly at things as they flew and spun in the downpour of wind and water, and the butcher’s boy fought to keep the storm from taking her away as well). It was the last time that Maria Isabella allowed herself to cry. The butcher’s boy took her hand and they began all over again. They were beset by thieves and learned to run (out of houses and caves and temples; on roads and on sea lanes and in gulleys; on horses, aguilas, and waves). They encountered scoundrels and sinverguenzza and learned to bargain (at first with various coins, jewels, and metals; and later with promises, threats, and dreams). They were beleaguered by nameless things in nameless places and learned to defend themselv
es (first with wooden pessoal, then later with kris, giavellotto, and lamina).
In their thirtieth year together, they took stock of what they had, referred to the thousands of items still left unmarked on their list, exchanged a long silent look filled with immeasurable meaning and went on searching for the components of the impossible kite—acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable to leave), winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the three eldest brothers of Duma’Alon, assembling the pieces of the lower edge connector while fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq, solving the riddles of the toothless crone Ai’ai’sin to find what would be part of a wing tip, climbing Apo’amang to spend seventy sleepless nights to get the components of the ferrule, crafting an artificial wave to fool the cerena into surrending their locks of hair that would form a portion of the tether, rearing miniature horses to trade to the Duende for parts of the bridle, and finally spending eighteen years painstakingly collecting the fifteen thousand different strands of thread that would make up the aquilone’s surface fabric.
When at last they returned to Ciudad Meiora, both stooped and older, they paused briefly at the gates of the Portun du Transgresiones. The butcher’s boy looked at Maria Isabella and said, “Well, here we are at last.”
She nodded, raising a weary arm to her forehead and making the sign of homecoming.
“Do you feel like you’ve wasted your life?” she asked him, as the caravan bearing everything they had amassed lumbered into the city.
“Nothing is ever wasted,” the butcher’s boy told her.
They made their way to the house of Melchor Antevadez and knocked on his door. A young man answered them and sadly informed them that the wizened artisan had died many, many years ago, and that he, Reuel Antevadez, was the new Maestro du Cosas Ingravidas.
“Yes, yes. But do you still make kites?” Maria Isabella asked him.
“Kites? Of course. From time to time, someone wants an aquilone or—”
“Before Ser Antevadez, Melchor Antevadez, died, did he leave instructions for a very special kind of kite?” she interrupted.
“Well…,” mumbled Reuel Antevadez, “my great-grandfather did leave a design for a woman named Maria Isabella du’l Cielo, but—”
“I am she.” She ignored his shocked face. “Listen, young man. I have spent all my life gathering everything Melchor Antevadez said he needed to build my kite. Everything is outside. Build it.”
And so Reuel Antevadez unearthed the yellowing parchment that contained the design of the impossible kite that Melchor Antevadez had dreamed into existence, referenced the parts from the list of things handed to him by the butcher’s boy, and proceeded to build the aquilone.
When it was finished, it looked nothing at all like either Maria Isabella or the butcher’s boy had imagined. The kite was huge and looked like a star, but those who saw it could not agree on how best to describe the marvelous conveyance.
After he helped strap her in, the butcher’s boy stood back and looked at the woman he had grown old with.
“This is certainly no time for tears,” Maria Isabella reprimanded him gently, as she gestured for him to release the kite.
“No, there is time for everything,” the butcher’s boy whispered to himself as he pushed and pulled at the ropes and strings, pulley and levers and gears of the impossible contrivance.
“Good-bye, good-bye!” she shouted down to him as the star kite began its rapid ascent to the speckled firmament above.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” he whispered, as his heart finally broke into a thousand mismatched pieces, each one small, hard, and sharp. The tears of the butcher’s boy (who had long since ceased to be a boy) flowed freely down his face as he watched her rise—the extraordinary old woman he had always loved strapped to the frame of an impossible kite.
As she rose, he sighed and reflected on the absurdity of life, the heaviness of loss, the cruelty of hope, the truth about quests, and the relentless nature of a love that knew only one direction. His hands swiftly played out the tether (that part of the marvelous rope they had bargained for with two riddles, a blind rooster and a handful of cold and lusterless diamante in a bazaar held only once every seven years on an island in the Dag’at Palabras Tacitas) and he realized that all those years they were together, she had never known his name.
As she rose above the city of her birth, Maria Isabella took a moment to gasp at the immensity of the city that sprawled beneath her, recalled how everything had begun, fought the trembling of her withered hands, and with a fishbone knife (that sad and strange knife which had been passed from hand to hand, from women consumed by unearthly passion, the same knife which had been part of her reward for solving the mystery of the Rajah Sumibon’s lost turtle shell in the southern lands of Diya al Din) cut the glimmering tether.
Up, up, up, higher and higher and higher she rose. She saw the winding silver ribbon of the Pasigla, the fluted roofs of Lu Ecolia du Arcana Menor ei Mayor, the trellises and gardens of the Plaza Emperyal, and the dimmed streets of the Mercado du Coristas. And Maria Isabella looked down and thought she saw everything, everything.
At one exquisite interval during her ascent, Maria Isabella thought she spied the precise tower where Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore, the Stargazer, must live and work. She felt the exuberant joy of her lost youth bubble up within her and mix with the fiery spark of love she had kept alive for sixty years, and in a glorious blaze of irrepressible happiness she waved her free hand with wild abandon, shouting the name that had been forever etched into her heart.
When a powerful wind took the kite to sudden new heights, when Ciudad Meiora and everything below her vanished in the dark, she stopped shouting, and began to laugh and laugh and laugh.
And Maria Isabella du’l Cielo looked up at the beginning of forever and thought of nothing, nothing at all.
And in the city below, in one of the high rooms of the silent Torre du Astrunomos (where those who had served with distinction were housed and honored), an old man, long-retired and plagued by cataracts, sighed in his sleep and dreamed a dream of unnamed stars.
Alberto Chimal (1970– ) is a Mexican writer, editor, and translator and the author of the novels La torre y el jardín (2012) and Los esclavos (2009) as well as various short story collections, plays, graphic novels, essays, and children’s books. He has won numerous awards, including the National Short Story Prize and the Bellas Artes Prize for Narrative, and his work has appeared in English in the Kenyon Review, Asymptote, and World Literature Today. He lives in Mexico City, where he teaches creative writing at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. “Mogo” first appeared in the anthology Nuevas voces de la narrativa mexicana (2003) and was included in Chimal’s collection La ciudad imaginada y otras historias (2009), which also included “Table with Ocean.” This is the first appearance of this story in English.
MOGO
Alberto Chimal
Translated by Lawrence Schimel
“BETO? BETO, where are you?” my grandmother called. “Beto, Come here!”
And I went: to eat with the rest of the family, to do my homework, to buy things from the store, to find one of my siblings or cousins.
“I’m coming, Mamá,” I told her. No one in our family ever called her anything other than Mamá, no matter who they were. She was like the mother of us all. And it never would have occurred to me to disobey, to remain quiet, to not go right away to wherever she was. I think that’s why I became her favorite: nobody obeyed her as quickly or reliably.
I don’t remember when she began to ask me to put her cream on her. Later I learned that she only asked this of very few people (and before me, only of my cousin Fabiola, my aunt Lilia, and my real mother, Carlota) and that it was a kind of honor. On the other hand, I remember very well the first time I did so, next to he
r chair (seated on a bench to reach her, with one hand holding the jar and the other traveling smoothly from her cheeks to her forehead) she decided that I was:
“Beyond compare,” she said. “Truly, you are a master. And you have very delicate hands. An artist’s hands. I could spend my whole life like this with you…Will you stay with me?”
“Yes, Mamá.”
“Caressing me as nice as this?”
“Yes, Mamá,” I told her, as I finished anointing her brow and reached one hand to her lap to grab a Kleenex from the box she held.
I guess I told her the truth. It was never spoken of, but at home we all understood that it was my grandmother, being our Mamá, who was in charge; everyone, from my uncle Rafael, the one who never married, down to my cousin Queta, the only one younger than me. We all lived together, went to church together, watched the Cruz Azul matches together (my grandmother was a fan), went out together on those few times we went out…
I did my homework watched over by my grandmother, together with my siblings and cousins; I played in the yard under her window; I told her what I heard the others say; clenched my teeth every time she berated me:
“Did you think I wasn’t going to find out, Heriberto?” she yelled at me, and although she only used my full name when she was angry, she always cried. And I, like everyone, felt really bad for having done that to her, for making her voice crack and her tears flow.
* * *
—
When I was seven years old and had just moved from first grade into second, my grandmother berated me for not having showed her an eight on an exam. She was furious.
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