“When I pray to be granted a favor, it is granted,” he told me one day, singing to himself proudly.
I told my aunts what he had said, and they commented on it at length. They attributed Cornelio’s devotion to the strong impressions made on him by the catastrophes that had afflicted our town. When a boy our age had seen so many deaths in such a short time, it had to make some impression on his soul. If these events had not affected my own character, it was because I was by nature insensitive and a bit perverse. Cornelio’s mysticism had begun before the flood and the epidemic; hence, it was absurd to attribute it to those circumstances. I hinted broadly at the mistake all the adults were making but as usual kept quiet and accepted what they said. So I embraced my role as a perverse child, unlike Cornelio, who was the personification of sensitivity and goodness. I never failed to feel jealous, and was surprised by the guilt I felt due to my inferiority. I’d often shut myself up in my room and cry for my sins, asking God to grant me the favor of making me more like my friend once again.
The power Cornelio had over me was great: I never wanted to disagree with him, or displease or hurt him, yet he forced me to disagree with him, displease him, and hurt him.
One day he became annoyed because I had taken his penknife. I had to play tricks like that on him so he would not despise me. Another day I took his toolbox; he hit and scratched me.
“If you ever touch any of my other things, I’ll pray for your death,” he said. I laughed. “You don’t believe me? Wasn’t there a flood and an epidemic a while ago? Do you think it was by chance?”
“The flood?” I asked.
“I caused it. It was my doing.”
He may not have said these exact words, but he spoke like a man and his words were deliberate.
“Why?”
“So as not to have to go to school. Why else? What else could one pray for?”
“And the epidemic?” I murmured, holding my breath.
“That too. That was even easier.”
“Why?”
“So the teacher and my aunt would die. I can make you die too, if I feel like it.”
I laughed, because I knew he would despise me if I didn’t. In the mirror of the wardrobe, across from us, I saw myself frowning. I froze with fear, and as soon as I could went running to my aunts to recount my conversation with my friend. My aunts laughed at my distress.
“It’s just a joke,” they said. “The boy’s a saint.”
But Rita, my cousin, who looked like an old woman and always listened in on other people’s conversations, said, “He’s not a saint. He doesn’t even pray to God. He has a pact with the devil. Haven’t you seen his missal? The cover is the same as every other missal but the inside is different. Nothing printed in those horrible pages makes sense. Do you want to see it? Bring the book,” she ordered me. “It’s in the drawer of the bureau, wrapped in a handkerchief.”
I hesitated. How could I betray Cornelio? Secrets are sacred, but finally weakness won out. I snuck into Cornelio’s room and, trembling, took out the missal, which was indeed wrapped in a handkerchief. My aunt Claudia untied the corners of the handkerchief and took out the book. Pages were pasted on top of the original pages. I saw the incomprehensible signs and devilish drawings that Rita had described.
“What are we to do?” my aunts wailed.
Cornelio’s mother returned the book to me and demanded, “Put it back where you found it!” Then addressing Rita, she said, “You deserve to be sued for slander. Would that we were in England!”
My aunts hissed like owls that have been disturbed.
“The boy’s a saint. He may have his own language to speak to God,” my mother declared, staring severely at Rita, who was choking on a mint.
“And if he causes my death?”
All of the women laughed, even Rita, who a few moments before had asserted that there was a pact between Cornelio and the devil.
Were adults ever serious when they spoke? Who would believe me or take me seriously? Rita had made fun of me. So, to prove the veracity of my words, I went up to Cornelio’s room and, instead of putting the missal back in the drawer, I put it in my pocket and took the object that he most treasured: a plastic watch with moving hands. I remember it was late and the whole family had gathered for dinner. As it was summer, after dinner I strolled into the garden with my aunt. No doubt Cornelio had not yet gone into his room or noticed that anything was missing.
What power could Cornelio possess for his prayers to be answered? What sort of death would he demand for me? Fire, water, blood? All of these words crossed my mind until I heard steps in the corridor and in his room. I couldn’t distinguish the muffled sound of the steps from that of my heart. I was about to flee, to bury the watch and the missal in the garden, but I knew I couldn’t fool Cornelio, since he was in league with some power greater than our own. I heard him call me: his cry was a roar, tearing my name apart. I went up the stairs to his room. I stopped for a moment on the landing, observing his movements through the half-open door; then I went up the creaky, broken ladder to the attic. Cornelio questioned me from the other landing and I, instead of answering him, threw the book and the watch at his head. He didn’t say anything. He picked them up. He knelt down and eagerly read the pages. For the first time Cornelio was not ashamed to be seen praying. The step where I was standing creaked and then suddenly gave way: when I fell I banged my head against the iron bars of the balustrade.
When I came to, the whole family was gathered around me; Cornelio sat still in a corner of the room, his arms crossed.
I had no doubt I was going to die, as I could see the faces peering over my own as if looking down a well.
“Why don’t you ask God to save your little friend? Didn’t you say that God grants you everything you ask for?” my aunt Fermina dared to whisper.
Cornelio prostrated himself on the floor like a Muslim. He banged his head against the floor and answered, speaking with the voice of a spoiled child, “I can only bring sickness or death.”
My mother looked at him with horror, kneeling down next to him, tugging on his hair as if he were a dog, and saying, “Try, my child. You won’t lose anything if you pray. God will have to hear you.”
For days I floated in a pink and blue limbo, between life and death. The voices were far away. I could not recognize any faces—they were floating at the bottom of the water. When I recovered, two months later, they gave Cornelio credit for my good luck: according to my aunts and our mothers, he had saved me. Once again I heard them singing the praises of Cornelio’s saintliness. They no longer remembered the tears they had shed for me, nor the fondness that the gravity of my illness had inspired in them. Once again I found myself the insensitive and somewhat perverse child, wholly inferior to my friend.
Through my aunts, the seamstress, and some friends of the household, contradictory details about what had happened reached the people in town. There were comments on Cornelio’s mystical tendencies. Some people thought that my friend was a saint, others that he was a sorcerer and that it was better not to come to our house due to his maledictions. When my aunt Claudia got married, no one came to the reception.
Was Cornelio a sorcerer or a saint? Night after night, flipping my pillow over, searching for a cool place to rest my feverish head, I thought of Cornelio’s saintliness—or was it witchcraft? Had even Rita forgotten her suspicions?
One day we went fishing at the Arroyo del Sauce. We brought a picnic basket full of food, so as to spend the day there. Our neighbor Andrés, who loved fishing, was already standing on the bank with his rod. A dog ambled over and jumped around, playing cute tricks as lost dogs often do. Andrés said he would take the dog home, but then Cornelio said he wanted to, and the two of them started to argue. They eventually started to punch each other and Cornelio fell down, defeated. Andrés, conceited as could be, picked up his rod, took the dog in his arms, and left. Lying on the ground, Cornelio began reciting his curses: the noise his lips made was like that o
f a liquid about to come to a boil. Andrés had walked only about twenty paces when he fell down, foam pouring from his mouth. The dog, now free, ran toward us. We later found out that Andrés had suffered an epileptic seizure.
When Cornelio and I walked down the street, people whispered: they knew he was a sorcerer and not a saint as some of our family described him. One Good Friday the children wouldn’t let us enter the church and threw stones at us.
What could I do to punish Cornelio? Would my death achieve something meaningful and serve as evidence of my truthfulness and his perversity? For a moment I imagined his life ruined forever, pursued by my memory, as Cain was by Abel. I sought out some means of infuriating him. I had to make his curses fall on me again. I lamented that death would prevent me from bearing witness to his remorse, after his will had been accomplished. Would remorse stop him from repeating those accursed prayers? We were on the banks of the Arroyo del Sauce. We watched a kingfisher plunge into the water over and over with dizzying speed. Each of us had a slingshot. We aimed: Cornelio at the kingfisher, I in the air, so that my shot would go astray. Cornelio, who was a good shot, hit the bird on the head, and it fell down, wounded. We jumped in the water to retrieve it. Then, near the shore, an argument broke out over who had killed the kingfisher. I firmly insisted that the catch was mine.
There was a very deep place in the stream, where we couldn’t stand up. I knew where it was, because it looked like a sort of eddy. My father had pointed it out to me. I picked up the bird and ran along the bank until I reached the place where I could see the mysterious stirring of the water. Andrés was nearby, fishing as always. I stopped, throwing the kingfisher into the whirlpool. Cornelio, who was chasing after me, threw himself down on his knees. I heard the terrifying murmur on his lips—he was repeating my name. A cold sweat bathed the back of my neck, arms, hair. Fields, trees, ravines, the stream, Andrés, everything started shaking, spinning around. I saw Death with his scythe. Then I heard Cornelio utter his own name. Such was my surprise that I didn’t hear him jump into the water. He didn’t know how to swim, nor did he try to reach the bird, but flailed in the water and slowly sank. Andrés, calm as could be, shouted at him with a bitter voice, like a parrot, “Idiot! What good is your sorcery to you now?”
For some reason I didn’t understand until many years later that at the last moment Cornelio changed the words of his last prayer: instead of continuing to pray for my death, which had perhaps already been granted, he asked for his own death and saved my life.
REPORT ON HEAVEN AND HELL
FOLLOWING the example of the great auction houses, Heaven and Hell have galleries full of objects that will surprise no one, since they are the same things that usually fill the houses of the earthly world. But it is not enough to speak only of objects: in those halls there are also cities, towns, gardens, mountains, valleys, suns, moons, winds, seas, stars, reflections, temperatures, flavors, perfumes, and sounds, for eternity gives us all sorts of spectacles and feelings.
If the wind roars like a tiger, or the angelic dove, and looks at you with the eyes of a hyena; if the rich man crossing the street is dressed in lascivious rags; if the prizewinning rose they give you is faded and ordinary, less interesting than a sparrow; if your wife’s face is an angry bare stick, then your eyes, not God, made them that way.
When you die, the demons and the angels are equally eager, knowing that you are asleep, still in one world and partly in another, and will come in disguise to your bed, stroke your head, and ask you to choose the things you had preferred during your life. First, they will show you the simple things, as if opening a book of samples. If they show you the sun, the moon, or the stars, you will see them in a ball of painted crystal, and you will think the crystal ball is the world; if they show you the sea or the mountains, you will see them in a stone and will think the stone is the sea or the mountains; if they show you a horse, it will be a miniature figurine, but you will think the horse is a real horse. The angels and the demons will confuse your spirit with pictures of flowers, glazed fruit, and candies. Making you think you are still a child, they will seat you in a chair formed from their hands called the queen’s chair, or the golden seat, and in this way they will carry you with their hands clasped through those hallways to the center of your life, where your favorite things are hidden. Be careful. If you choose more things from Hell than from Heaven, you may be sent to Heaven; on the other hand, if you choose more things from Heaven than from Hell, you risk going to Hell, because your love of celestial things could be a sign of greed.
The laws of Heaven and Hell are flexible. Whether you’re sent to one place or the other depends on the slightest detail. I know people who because of a broken key or a wicker birdcage went to Hell, and others who for a sheet of newspaper or a glass of milk went to Heaven.
from
THE GUESTS
THUS WERE THEIR FACES
Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies.
Ezekiel 1:11
HOW DID the younger children come to know it? That will never be explained. Besides, one would need to clarify what it was that they came to know, and whether the older ones already knew it. One assumes, nevertheless, that it was a real event and not a fantasy; only people who didn’t know them, their school, or their teachers could deny it without question.
At the hour when the bell was rung—uselessly, routinely, ritually—to announce the milk break, or later, during recess, when they ran to the back courtyard, they surely came to know it, slowly, unconsciously, without distinction of age or sex (I say “came” because various signs revealed that up to that moment they were waiting for something that would allow them to wait again, and once and for all, for something very important). We know for certain that from then on (from that moment I am referring to, now the subject of thousands of conjectures), when they lost the indifference (but not innocence) so characteristic of childhood, the children could think of nothing else.
After long reflection, one can only assume that the children discovered it simultaneously. In the dormitories, as they fell asleep; in the dining hall, as they ate; in the chapel, as they prayed; in the courtyards, as they played tag or hopscotch; at their desks, as they studied or were being punished; on the playground, as they played on the swings; or in the bathroom, as they devoted themselves to keeping clean (important moments when worries are forgotten), with the same sullen, withdrawn look on their faces, their minds, like little machines, were spinning the web of a single thought, a single desire, a single expectation.
People who saw them walking by in their Sunday best, neat and well-groomed, on national or religious holidays, or on a Sunday, would say, “Those children all belong to the same family or to the same mysterious society. They’re identical! Their poor parents! They must not be able to recognize their own children! These modern times, the same barber must cut all their hair (the little girls look like boys and the boys look like girls). Oh the cruel, unspiritual times.”
In fact, their faces did resemble one another to a certain degree; they were as lacking in expression as the escarapela* they wore on their lapels or the portraits of the Virgin of Luján they wore on their breasts.
But in the beginning each child felt alone, as if enveloped by an iron carapace, stiffening their bodies in isolation. Each child’s pain was individual and terrible, as was their happiness, which made their happiness itself painful. Humiliated, they imagined themselves different from one another, like dogs of various breeds, or like prehistoric monsters in illustrations. They thought the secret, splitting at that very moment into forty secrets, wasn’t shared and could never be shared. But an angel arrived, the angel who sometimes attends to multitudes; he came with his shining mirror held high, like the image of the candidate or hero or tyrant that is carried aloft in demonstrations, and showed the children that their faces were identical. Forty faces were exactly the same face, forty minds the same mind, d
espite differences in age and lineage.
No matter how horrible a secret may be, when it is shared it can stop being horrible because the horror of it gives pleasure: the pleasure of perpetual communication.
But those who suppose it was horrible are jumping to conclusions. In reality, we don’t know whether it was horrible and then became beautiful, or whether it was beautiful and later became horrible.
When they felt surer of themselves, they wrote letters to one another on sheets of colored paper with lace borders and pasted pictures. At first the letters were laconic, then gradually grew longer and more confused. They chose strategic hiding places to serve as mailboxes, dropping off and picking up in secret.
Since they were now happy conspirators, the everyday difficulties of life no longer troubled them.
If one of them planned to do something, the others resolved immediately to do that very thing.
As if they wanted to become equal, the shorter ones walked on tiptoe so as to look taller; the taller ones stooped over to look shorter. The redheaded ones reduced the brilliance of their hair and others lightened the color of their warm bronze skin. Their eyes all shone with the same brownish-gray color characteristic of light-colored eyes. Now all at once none of them chewed nails or sucked thumbs.
They were also linked by the violence of their gestures, by their simultaneous laughter, by a boisterous and sudden feeling of sadness in solidarity hidden in their eyes, in their straight or slightly curly hair. So indissolubly united were they that they could defeat an army, a pack of hungry wolves, a plague, hunger, thirst, or the abrupt exhaustion that destroys civilizations.
At the top of a slide, out of excitement not wickedness, they almost killed a child who had slipped in among them. On the street, in the face of their admiring enthusiasm, a flower vendor almost perished, trampled with his merchandise.
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