Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  We went inside. The other angel—the little one—cried weakly on her mat. When the ray of light came in through the open door, she did not make the slightest effort to increase the volume of her cry, or to stop it. Just like last time, the Mama—my beauty—did not pay her any attention. I did not ask, I went to the little one and picked her up. She quit crying immediately. She was even dirtier and sadder than the last time, now the dirt extended to her limbs. The angel said:

  —I forgot something. I will leave you this for the girl—she gave me a tortilla she had hidden in her hand—break it into little pieces so she does not choke. I will be right back, I won’t be long.

  She left. There I was, in an empty room that belonged to a woman who made her living by dancing and singing in the fiestas, and not necessarily the sacred ones, taking care of her daughter. I decided to bathe the girl. I took an empty container that was on the floor and, with the little one in my arms, went to the Salto del Agua. The women there helped me fill the jug. I went back to the house, which as I have already said, was only a few steps from there, and began to bathe the little girl there, in front of the door. She stood up between my legs, holding tightly to my thighs and knees. She was very small in size, but maybe not so young if her legs could already support her. She very happily let herself be bathed; everything amused her, and my clumsiness, since I was anything but an expert in bathing children, did not seem to bother her. I left her there, cleanly bathed, and went inside to find a change of clothes on the mat that was not too dirty, and then dressed her. Seated in the doorway, I started to give her the little pieces of tortilla, breaking off bits of the cooked corn masa with my fingers. She devoured it. She was happy, and even so, one could feel her profound sadness, forged perhaps by so many hours spent alone.

  Her Mama—my earthly angel—returned, more lovely even than when she left. As soon as she saw me, I started making excuses:

  —I am just now giving her something to eat because I bathed her first. I put a change of clothes on her that I found on the mat.

  The little girl made as much of a fuss over her Mama as I did.

  —But why did you bother, Don Hernando, I do not know what to say—she said to me, returning to the more formal form of address, as if I were older than she.

  She took the girl from my arms, or better said from between my legs since she was leaning against them, and gave me an order.

  —Come inside—she said, jumping directly back to the familiar form of speech.

  We went inside and she closed the door behind her, breaking the promise she had made me. She lay down on the mat, with the girl in her arms, raised her torso to take her blouse completely off, and lay back down, and then, twisting and wiggling around to get comfortable, she began to nurse her little girl. The little bit of light in the room illuminated her body, which was practically naked since, in settling herself to get comfortable, her skirt had slid up her thighs.

  I had never seen a body stretched out like that, practically uncovered, and even if I had seen it before, it would not have had the same savage beauty. As the minutes passed and my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, I found her more beautiful each moment, more complete, more naked. Unclothed like that, she lost nothing of her innocence or virginal appearance; but even though she retained that air of purity, it awoke something in me I did not recognize. The two bare breasts, the bare belly, the bare legs—the folds of the skirt on her lower belly and the little one were the only things that were covered because the little girl was lying on the mat, instead of on her mother’s body, and the skirt had inched up with her wiggling movements, so there was practically nothing covering her. I knew I should go, but I could not move. Her beauty had me fixed to the dirt floor, as if I were made of a hard stone.

  The little girl nursed, ceaselessly and motionlessly. The Mama turned over to nurse her on the other breast without moving her. In doing so, she turned her beautiful bare back and buttocks (which were nearly revealed by the raised skirt) to me, leaving her long legs stretched out and exposed before me.

  What was I doing there? I momentarily gathered my strength and said:

  —I’m going now.

  —What are you going to do?—She turned her lovely little face toward me, giving a face to her savagely beautiful back, making her even more cruelly beautiful. —The paper still hasn’t been delivered; he said he would leave in two hours, which have not passed yet. It makes sense that his trip would be slower than yours, because he’s carrying a load and you’re not, and anyway, I don’t know if he is going directly to the Colegio, he might have other errands…Don’t go.

  Her “don’t go” was enough for me to abandon my good intentions of leaving.

  —Come here, sit here beside me. Let’s talk. There’s another mat rolled up over there—she said pointing to one side of the door. —Unroll it and let’s talk. Remember, there was something that I wanted to ask you.

  I obeyed. I took the mat and unrolled it, my eyes had gotten used to the darkness and I did not need the light of day to see well. The little baby slept, but continued nursing. As soon as I was seated, the beautiful angel looked straight into my eyes.

  Thank you for keeping me company—she said—since I don’t have a husband, only a Franciscan would be able to keep me company while I feed my little one. I always do this alone. I don’t like it.

  The little girl, asleep, nursed more slowly. With one slight movement of her torso, without touching her (which she had hardly done, lying down as she had with the baby at her side), the Mama took her nipple out of the little one’s mouth. And that’s how she remained, nude before me, staring straight at me. Getting up from the mat, without saying a single word, she took her skirt off too, she rolled the little one onto her back, and sat there in front of me, so close I could touch her because I had recklessly placed my mat very close to hers. She smiled at me with her usual innocent expression.

  —What I wanted to ask you, Franciscan brother, is if you would give me a kiss. But I didn’t dare. Franciscans don’t…

  Without saying anything more, she threw herself into my arms. She kissed me. She put my hand on her breast. She raised my cassock. With one hand she grabbed my lustful member. She did not give me time to think, to say yes or no, or do anything.

  I sinned. I sinned some more. I kept on sinning. God forgive me, I would do it again today if I could—in the half-light of that very room where desire illuminated my eyes with the clarity of the sun, I would keep on sinning.

  I left her house when the little girl’s babbling woke me up, because I had inexplicably fallen asleep. Her body had something that put the people who were close to her to sleep: she put the little girl to sleep by nursing her, she put me to sleep by possessing me—she possessed me by playing with me as if the day would never end, and then she put me to sleep when neither my spirit nor my body could satiate her. She slept too. I did not say goodbye to her or to her little one. I practically ran out of the room.

  That long day was not over. I started to run toward the Colegio, far enough away to distance me from her, from my angel, and I might have arrived at the Colegio by the skin of my teeth, if the smell of the girl had not stopped me. I do not know why, but while I was running I raised my hand and when it passed in front of my face the smell of her stopped me short. In that moment I did not feel any remorse for having sinned. But what I noticed, with astonishing force, was the stench of my cassock. Touching her had given me back my hands, the ones I had lost as a child when I entered the Colegio de la Santa Cruz, and along with them, my sense of smell. The cassock stank. Inside of it I smelled like friars smell—of filth, of confinement, of books, of cooking smells—and all of this was accumulated along with many days worth of the sour sweat of chastity because the routine of the Colegio did not allow us the bath except very occasionally, and since we wore the same cassock every day I do not think it would surprise anyone that we would smell so horribly bad.

  The Indian boys called us stinkards, in Nahuatl they c
alled us stinkards, that is what they called the little Indian friars. But even though I had heard the word they used to refer to us thousands of times, even though in my first years I had been clean like all Indians, even though my clothes had smelled of flowers and herbs, even though that is what my life had been like before, I never thought I was a stinkard. The odor became part of everything else—the way of life was inseparable from it. It did not bother me as something apart, because it was not separate. It was (like the robe, the book, the ink, the little trunk at my feet that kept me company) the life to which they had brought me.

  When I quit bathing, what hurt me was not to lose cleanliness, because I was quite carefree, but rather something that was associated with the bath. Not the water and the herbs with which I was scrubbed, but rather the brilliant pure light, those sheets of horizontal light that enveloped me, that did not come from the sun or the sky, but radiated from the body that leaned over to wash my body, and that, once the bath was finished, governed and protected my naked body with the rule of her love. In that moment I was not little or big; a boy or a girl; or Indian or white, but rather a perfect being. The aura of her love filled me with radiance and the two of us illuminated each other like two celestial bodies in their private heaven.

  It is hard to imagine that I could have lost this paradise by not bathing, that not bathing made me dirty. Like one plus one equals two, not having Mama with me left me without the sense of touch that the heavenly moment of the bath gave me, but it did not add up to the two of filth and the odor of dirtiness. Moreover, when my backside was chafed for lack of cleanliness, when I had irritated and open wounds, it did not occur to me that a bath would remove that discomfort. Why would I think that being scrubbed with water and herbs would not have any other effect than of taking me to love’s paradise, to the paradise of Mama’s pure and chaste love? She did not touch my body to arouse sin or lust, and scrubbed me only to intensify the spark of her luminous love.

  How could I think that not bathing would not make me a stinkard? Even worse: I did not notice the disgrace of my odor until the smell of another person brought to life what I had been carrying around for years. The source of this smell was not the heavenly power of water and herbs, but rather the flame of lust. It was the smell of a woman mixed with the smell of my body, which was inflamed by her. The two created an unknown, but familiar, smell. It struck me like a blow—it entered into my olfactory awareness with a single blow—and I was suddenly weak. My legs refused to keep walking and threatened to refuse to support me. I sat on a polished stone on the side of the road that I do not know how I, or which part of my body, discovered, since I could not see through my blurred vision, and my sense of smell was otherwise occupied and so could not be of any service even if stones had a smell, and my sense of touch was also impaired by the blow of the odor.

  My position, seated as I was on the stone, made the odor even stronger and kept me from seeing anything at all. It was as if my eyes were tracking the back of a horse that was spinning around wildly, drunk or crazed. My eyes stopped for a moment and I saw a child with his mother at bath time and I felt the weight of her hands on me and my heart fell and broke into a million pieces on the ground. I burst out crying. At that moment I could finally reconcile with Mama. I forgave her for having abandoned me on Sundays because even though the prohibition against seeing me was not hers, my heart had experienced it as if it had been hers. And more than forgiving her for nothing, I felt again what it was like to be with her and again the pain of losing her.

  The odor was still on me, or the two odors—the stench of the stinkard, the odor of intercourse—and my eyes once again tracked the back of the drunk and crazy horse and I cried some more and my motionless knees, though bent, trembled. The horse started to kick, but did not spin around anymore. As if they were riding on a pendulum, my eyes revisited the familiar odor of intercourse. I knew men and women who were anointed by that odor when I was a boy. And from the weight, or bob, of the pendulum on which my eyes rose and fell I saw them again, one-two, one-two, their eyes glowing with lust, their mouths stamped with kisses, their rumpled clothing impregnated with that odor, and of nothing else, one-two, but they did not come in even numbers. The vanquished and the widows consoled themselves for their losses—the dead, poverty, lost land, and men taken as the property of others and subjugated—fornicating untiringly, inflamed by that light that does not envelop, like that of my childhood bath, but rather blinds. Better to enjoy themselves blindly than to see themselves enslaved. And that is how the Indians continued, in desperate fornication, searching for the blindfold, the momentary oblivion, the fire that would consume them once and for all, turning them into ash that the air would take away, free in the winds and the heavens. I saw all of this from the throne my dizziness had converted that stone into. And I heard a man and a woman moaning, as I heard them one time as a child, when I did not understand the source of their black moaning. And I heard her, the one I had just finished having, and I heard myself in her, having her, and I felt my wretched intestines start to rise again even though they did not surpass either the dizziness or the spinning.

  The horse suddenly stopped, tossing back to me the eyes that had been tracking his back. Here. There you are. There I was. I had just finished committing the sin that the friars said I did before I actually did. At that moment I deservedly lost the habit that I had already lost, and I lost it by my own merit. I was now expelled from the Franciscans, finally legitimately thrown out. I was no longer one of them, nor did I belong to my own skin. I was returned to myself, to my people, to those with whom I had passed the first years of my life. Except that they were already gone. Mama was dead. The copulators were now surely no more than ash ruled by the mistress of the winds, finished off by pain and loss. To what could I return? If I paid attention to what I had between my legs, I could only go back to the heartless woman who had snatched me from the Franciscan friars.

  But she was not a person who would take care of anyone. Not even her own daughter received any succor from her bosom. She was a selfish and cruel angel.

  I felt I would gain little by returning to the Colegio, and I knew that I did not have anywhere else to go. How would my false father receive me?

  So I went directly to the river to wash my filthy clothes and wash away the odor that upset my intestines, which made them feel like they were little living creatures in the bottom of the river.

  I still do not understand why, if the Franciscans had taught me to distinguish good from evil and to fear punishment, and in spite of having committed an ugly sin, I do not understand, I say again, why I did not feel remorse on the way to the river. It did not even occur to me that bathing myself would wash away the odor in which others might be able to read my sin. On the one hand I wanted to rid myself of the stench, and on the other to settle my little animal, which was uneasy again, by soothing it with water. Not for one instant did I think about reprimanding it or myself. Remorse did not enter into my heart. The sweet, selfish angel had poisoned me completely.

  I reached the river. I pulled the filthy clothes over my head, I folded them in my arms and, holding them, I went into the water naked with them. It was cool, almost cold. It was just what my body needed. At its contact, my blood revived, and a jolt of happiness hit me. I tied the purple cassock to a submerged trunk so that the flowing water would cleanse it. I could not do anything else for it, since I had never washed a single piece of clothing with my own hands.

  I walked along the riverbed, feeling the water wash over my skin, caressing it. What happiness I felt. Living in the friars’ world had cheated me into an old age that was not mine. The water’s touch purified me of them. Hernando could run, shout, dance, and fly from time to time. I reclined in the water and began to swim like I did when I was a child. I quit thinking. I was a fish, I used to be a fish, my gills had inflated and I did not want to return to the frying pan. The selfish angel had inadvertently been generous to me. She had taken me out of the frying pan
and I was back in the water. Angel, little angel, I will turn around and come back to put my penis inside your little body. Now I will be the child who sucks on your nipples. I quit swimming. I walked on the sandy bottom. On your nipples, I repeated, and I imagined them between my fingers and in my mouth. I put my hand on my penis, and this time not because I was afraid. It was hard, standing erect in front of me. I moved my closed hand up its shaft, I moved it down, up, down. I opened my eyes. A few meters away by some giant reeds, waist deep in water, like I was, a couple was wrapped around each other. How did I not hear them? She was moaning and gasping. Her beautiful unbraided hair bobbed, the ends dipping in the water. I saw them in profile, I could see one of his hands across both of her breasts. I saw their open mouths, saw them swaying, her fingers searching for his hand and my enormous penis, between them and me, blessing us. Were they two demons, these copulators? Were they merely a mirror reflecting my lustful thoughts? After emptying it, I let go of my penis, and along with it, my moorings. I swam back, retracing my steps. I untied my cassock. I got out of the water.

  Miserably naked on the bank of the river, I felt cold. I recognized my smallness in the weariness of my flesh. But I did not have a single regret. A pompous and arrogant silence settled in the core of my soul.

  I wrung out my cassock as best I could, twisting it with my hands. I hung it over the giant reeds and sat next to it. The couple kept moaning. They were certainly demons because time did not pass for them. Maybe they had been wrapped around each other for a hundred years. Maybe more, and they did not know that the Aztecs had won the islet on which they raised their empire. Maybe more, and they did not even know about the arrival of man in these lands. Maybe even more, and they fished for the serpent in these waters, and they were urging it toward the earthly paradise, pulling it along with a little stick or calling it with whispers and whistles.