Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  The public thieves of the public goods go unconvicted. We all know they’re guilty but that’s not enough, nor is the proof of their theft. If one of them is imprisoned it will be for some other crime—something that can’t be proven and with overtones of improbability. That’s how Raúl, the ex-president’s brother, will finally be put behind bars—for some crime he might have committed while infatuated with the star of a tragic telenovela, a crime of passion. But for clear cases of abuse of public goods, nobody will be imprisoned.

  These two acts of violence are not simply crimes. They are political phenomena: models of unpunished larceny, committed by those in power.

  The devils walk free because no one is in control of this chaos anymore. In addition to these two crimes, there are killings carried out in certain parts of the Republic that are “political” and are not (it goes without saying) punished either.

  Nobody keeps up appearances, nobody bothers with appearances, nobody tries to, or even wants to, fix the evils that plague us. “Gobierno ratero,” they used to say when I was a young girl, now they should say, “gobierno podrido,” except that they haven’t lost the thieving component, or the ratero, of the “Gobierno ratero,” they have simply perfected it to the point that it is completely rotten and corrupted, completely podrido.

  Poverty is on the rise. (Yesterday I read in the newspaper that they found an infestation of fleas in Guadalajara and had to evacuate thirty-six homes in order to deal with the problem. And I’m forgetting the funniest detail: this infestation followed an earlier one of cockroaches. This is the story of a city fallen into poverty). There is overpopulation, a complete lack of opportunity for the younger generations, economic downturn, a decrease in production, etcetera, etcetera…None of the evils mentioned here can fully express the horror that the people of my generation feel. There hasn’t been a coup d’état, instead we’ve suffered a blow dealt by the radicals. They have thrown us out of our own country without giving us another one in exchange. We’re strangers in our own country. Unmanageable and wild, our faithful country prospers in the shadows.

  Slosos keston de Estelino

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  My alarm rang more than five times during the night. I don’t think this was just a stupid mistake, or to put it more graciously, the error of someone who was simply distracted. I was asleep, I didn’t provoke the ringing by doing anything wrong, and I say this with absolute certainty because like everyone else, if I’m asleep, I’m not doing anything. At least right now, the alarm doesn’t ring in my dreams. The bad thing was that it took me a long time to get back to sleep after being woken up by the ringing. It rang so much last night that I wasn’t able to fall back to sleep between three of the times I heard it, even during the pauses that seemed interminable, time passed excruciatingly slowly. Every time I felt like I was finally about to fall into the deep well of sleep, the alarm started ringing again. This is bad enough, but the worst is that the musings that preoccupied me during my nighttime vigil, and that I wasn’t able to let go of during the day, reminded me of the dark period when we tried to eradicate dreams. During that time, we rang the alarm to try to stop ourselves from dreaming.

  It all started because there was some friction in L’Atlàntide and we decided to launch a serious and radical campaign in order to improve the quality of our life together. We attempted to do away with the intangible because when we analyzed the friction, it didn’t seem to arise from anything concrete and the most obvious intangible thing was the dreamworld. I don’t know whose idea it was (it might have even been mine, “That’s my trouble. Dreaming”). That’s why we decided to eradicate dreams. We didn’t try to extract them once they were already in process, but instead we woke ourselves up when our brainwaves indicated that we were about to enter the dreamstate. It was a disaster. Not only were we not completely rested, but we were beyond irritable, we were all just bundles of nerves. The body, master of itself during sleep, seemed to be unable to slip into a completely relaxed state. While it’s true that nobody actively performs in their sleep, it’s also true that the body surrenders completely to restore itself during sleep. Tired of the pinch of the girdle of reason, at night the body is at ease. This is when the body rules.

  During the prohibition against dreaming, our bodies were exhausted and something strange happened to our powers of reason. Some people swore to have seen things, which were normally part of their dreams, pass over the earth’s crust and someone even had the audacity to say that he had seen them in L’Atlàntide proper, where there is not, couldn’t be, and has never been anything other than air and our bodies. Of course we didn’t give any credence to these things, but recognizing the disastrous effects, we ceased the campaign against dreams because our ability to reason was the most affected by their absence.

  As mine definitely is today. The loud ringing of the alarm in the middle of the night has interfered with my ability to reason. I keep thinking the strangest things. Even though I’m thinking, or what you’d call thinking, I’m not thinking clearly. The first time the alarm woke me up and I couldn’t go back to sleep, I tried to lull myself to sleep by playing around with rearranging some lines from various poems by Quevedo:

  The soul is of the world of Love; Love is the mind

  Among my crowned shadows.

  He who does not fear attaining his desires

  Gives haste to his sorrow and satiety.

  I practiced that kind of mental gymnastics when the shadow that hovers over people who are awake during the night, when they should be sleeping, did not completely overtake me. As the hours passed, I did little things in my mind that became a bit more absurd. For example, when I no longer had any control over my “thoughts,” I visited some of the people Mutis dedicated his literary texts to. Casimiro Eiger, the Polish Jew who helped the young Mutis revise his first poems, was conversing with Ernesto Volkening, a truly great man. They were discussing literature (in my imagination, that is), sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in French, seemingly without preference for either of the two languages. They also talked to me, but it wasn’t quite clear if I answered them or if they attributed their arguments to me. For some reason they started to argue about Heinrich Heine, and Don Casimiro Eiger lost patience when Volkening told him that his opinion wasn’t valid because it was only hearsay and that, because he must have read Heine in the bad translations done by Florentino Sanz, he had missed the essence and that by reading Heine that way he had read little more than a bad Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

  —Yes, yes, that is what you must have read. How can you call someone—who writes in a poem Wir haben viel für einander gefühlt, / Und dennoch uns gar vortrefflich vertragen / Wir haben of “Mann und Frau” gespielt / Und dennoch uns nicht gerauft und geschlagen—“syrupy?” Only by having read that dreadful version that ignores the dennoch in order to make the poem lighter, more idiotic. Because Florentino translates it like this: Truly, we both felt it: / you for I, and me for you…and we lived / so well together!…And we played / husband and wife, without a scratch / we never even scuffled with each other…The dennoch doesn’t mean yes even though you insist to the point of idiocy that it does. We have felt so much for each other, despite which we have gotten along very well. We have played husband and wife and despite that we have not scratched each other or beat each other…What wisdom in the “despite”! What a writer’s eye! So if you dare call the great Heine “syrupy,” forgive me, but in your reading there was not a single dennoch. Don Casimiro, you cannot express an opinion on this.

  —Listen, you cannot—Don Casimiro replied to Volkening—you cannot talk to me like that. You do not have the right to call me an idiot because I have a different opinion, well for what…

  Seeing how infuriated he was, I said “why would he need to read it in translation, if Heine writes in Don Casimiro’s mother tongue?” They both looked at me with a deadly silence for a few seconds, continuing to regard me coldly before breaking the silence with: “And this one, tell me—
said the deep voice of Volkening—who invited her to speak?” And then they continued talking as if they had never been on the verge of arguing. They walked away from me with quick steps so that I couldn’t follow them. They left me sitting next to Carmen, Álvaro Mutis’ Catalonian wife (of whom my poet said—and now I know that he was describing her perfectly—“her smile, with that slight sadness softens her”) observing everything, with an expression that was neither warm nor cold, but rather something in between, and next to her I saw Jaramillo Escobar, who had an unusual grace, despite his extreme ugliness, arguing who knows what nonsense with Santiago Mutis, who was also there…I looked back at Carmen, who was now talking to the Feduccis…All of this in their houses, with their things, next to the gardens or cafés or automobiles, their entire earthly lives, as they were before. They smoked and drank, one of them making noises while he sipped his cocktail. Such amazing visions! And there was El Gaviero talking to Gabo, Mutis with García Márquez. Both so magnificent!

  We’ve lost all of that! We still have their books, but those have been rejected by the people of L’Atlàntide. The voices of El Gaviero and Gabo have been weakened to the point of becoming inaudible and their images have begun to dissolve before my eyes, as if they were made of a frozen substance that was melting in the heat. I wanted to go back and listen to them and watch them, but my imagination didn’t provide me with a rope by which to hold onto them. They disappeared before my eyes. I saw them so clearly, I was there with them, I could even smell them, but then they vanished and I couldn’t get them back.

  Alone in the night of L’Atlàntide, I cried because I lost them; I was seized by feelings of misery and abandonment that now, by the light of day, seem illogical.

  I’m not going to allow myself to be swept away by a melancholy that was provoked by a fantasy that came from being unable to sleep at night. I’ll break away from my fantasies. I’ll send a message asking the reasons for the alarms, I’ll clear this situation up. Goodbye to Álvaro Mutis’ navy blue blazer, goodbye to Carmen’s white dress, goodbye Casimiro and Jaramillo Escobar and Volkening and Santiago Eiger. Goodbye Gabo, goodbye, I’m losing you but not entirely because I’ve got your books here with me. And so gentlemen, I return you to your tombs.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  I felt nothing for the first two weeks. I did not pay attention to the road that took me straight to the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco (which had already been operating since the middle of 1535), or notice the building that received me, or how the students and the friars lived, or what my companions were like, or how many there were, or whether they noticed my arrival, or whether I was the only new one brought in for the inauguration because I was crying the entire time and, consumed by my tears, I did not pay attention to anyone or anything except my own misery. I cried at night, in the afternoon, off and on in the morning, and every time I looked at my disgusting bowl of revolting food, but nobody paid us (me or my tears) any attention because everyone, teachers and children alike, were working frantically on the preparations for the inaugural festivities. Two full weeks passed (time stretches out when it is submerged under water) during which time I observeds myself being fit with a purple cassock, given a book, a trunk, and a pretty blanket—all paid for by my false father.

  The cassock was put on my body. The trunk was put at the foot of the mat I would sleep on. The blanket was to cover me at night. And the book they put under my arm to indicate that I was a child of the Franciscans was, like the cassock, part of the outfit for the inaugural festivities. Which book was it that I carried so securely under my arm? I do not remember, and it is not that I have forgotten, but rather plain and simple ignorance, because I never knew which book was traveling next to my chest. It was only mine to carry in the procession, along with the other students who were dressed as I was in cassocks and carrying books, toward the Colegio. The book later became part of the library collection. Though I did not give it a single glance or a single second of my attention, it had the character of my book, however briefly, as I read it with my blind arm. I had too many other things to focus on. First, as I have said, there were my tears, and when they left, there was an empty space, and then my sadness, and when my attention was tired of spending so much time on its sad preoccupation, it deigned to recognize one of the many new things around me that were demanding its attention. It is one of these I want to write about.

  I had been at the Colegio de la Santa Cruz two or three days, or more, when they took me to one of the friars—brought in from who knows where to help organize the fiesta—who was to cut my hair as another part of the preparations for the inaugural ceremony. Up until this day, it had always been my mother who had cut my hair with great care. For years I wore the little tail down my back that in other times was the mark of the warrior who had not yet been taken prisoner or the young man being initiated into the art of war who had not yet met his fate even though he had already gone out to fight several times without dishonoring his people. My mother let me wear the little tail many years; even though we no longer had any wars to fight or honor to defend like we used to in the old days, we continued to uphold our traditions. When I went to the friars for the first time, she cut it off with a single stroke. Since that time, I had worn my hair all one length. I am not saying that I especially liked my hair, but I had some attachment to that way of wearing it so when I saw the friar with the gleaming razor in one hand and the basin in the other, I started to cry even harder; I felt such panic and sadness and emotion. The friar barber said to me: “Shush, muchacho, shush. Be quiet. I may not be an expert in the art of the barber’s razor and basin, but there are advantages. Look, muchachito, I do not know how to take blood. In my steady hands you will escape that. Let’s see now…Have you never had your hair cut? It is quite obvious that you have because it is not very long. Why don’t you come over here and let me cut it without drawing everyone’s attention with your crying. Do you know what St. Francis used to say when they gave him a tonsure? Answer. Do you know?

  I stopped crying to respond properly (like my mother taught me) that I did not know what St. Francis used to say when they gave him a tonsure and that I also did not know what the word tonsure meant.

  “Tonsure, little one, means to shave the hair here, on the crown of the head, like mine is. Didn’t anyone ever tell you what he said when it was his turn to approach the razor? Well, if he saw that they took care in cutting his hair, he would say: Do not cut the fringe perfectly or precisely. I want my brothers to treat my head without any special consideration, without any kind of consideration at all. And you, muchacho, you go around making such a fuss that not even the saint of all the saints did…Come here, muchacho, sit here in front of me, I have very little time to get all of the little boys’ hair ready for the celebrations. Sixty heads are waiting for me and that is not even counting my own head. What with so much fuss and so many preparations, we look less like Franciscans and more like members of the Court who celebrate amid gold and…” He did not stop talking the entire time he was cutting my hair or when he was shaving the others, and I think that as much as people complained that the Franciscans were not as self-controlled or poor as the order demanded, the Order of the Friars Minor did not know how to observe the order regarding measuring their words. I never saw him again. It is possible that he might have left with the others who were preparing to go to the Philippines or that he was assigned to distant lands—to Guaxaca, or to Nueva Galicia with Fray Francisco de Lorenzo, and later he might have joined Fray Marcos de Niza on his expedition to Cíbola if he was a traveling friar, something I cannot confirm because I did not know anything about him, not even his name; my spirits were so low that I could not even ask.

  Of those first days, just as I remember the friar barber, also engraved in my memory was the bad food, the sad bowls, and the place where we slept. When I saw the dormitory for the first time I cried even harder and the more I cried, the sadder it l
ooked. I slept with all the other boys in a large room where the mats that served as our beds lined each side of the room and were placed on top of some wooden pallets because of the humidity. How sad was I when I saw the dormitory, when I first laid eyes on it? Did I realize from that first moment that Mama was not there for me to sleep next to? I did not think about anything, but I can still remember the disgust I felt, although now it is hard for me to connect that disgust to the place I have lived for so many years and that, in the end, was neither a nightmare nor a river of sorrows. The day set for the inauguration of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz arrived. We began our procession from the church of San Francisco in Mexico City, where Doctor Don Rafael de Cervantes, treasurer of the Church, preached. I will recount it as if it were happening right now: