The Revolutionaries Try Again

by Mauro Javier Cardenas

  I trudged back inside the church, which was now empty, walking around it and peeking out of every exit, and when I reached the third door I found them. They were alone now. My father, with his arms crossed, kept his gaze down while listening to my uncle’s instructions. My uncle was smiling, insouciant, as if telling a story at a cocktail party where everybody knew him. He was saying don’t waste any time, Antonio. Resign first thing Monday morning and don’t worry about a thing. Take a long vacation, in Miami, for instance, and before those bastards get a chance to issue you a prison order we’ll have it all sorted out.

  My father noticed me first. He tried to discern whether I had heard what my uncle had just said. He must have concluded that I did because he closed his eyes and crossed his arms further, as if trying to wake himself up by squeezing his chest. These motions did not last. He opened his eyes and said what were to be his last words for the rest of the night: What the hell do you want? What is it, Antonio José?

  They’re waiting for you.

  Come, my uncle said in a conciliatory tone. Let’s join them. We’ll chat more after the gift exchange.

  V / ANTONIO IN GUAYAQUIL

  To sleep, Antonio thinks, so exhausted by the long flight from San Francisco to Guayaquil that he doesn’t roll down the window of his Taxi Amigo to examine what has changed about his miserable hometown in the last twelve years (plus he doesn’t want the horrendous humid air outside to wade through the air conditioner vents inside), doesn’t wonder too much about why Leopoldo didn’t show up to welcome him at the airport (or rather why was he expecting Leopoldo to show up to welcome him at the airport), doesn’t think about the two old indigenous women who were embracing each other and crying as the plane landed, isn’t disheartened by the familiar images of El Loco on every telephone pole and every billboard along whatever this airport road is now called, on the contrary, feels embarrassingly reassured that while he was away, his country has remained as backward as ever, El Loco for President becoming less ubiquitous as his Taxi Amigo approaches his old neighborhood, where no one has ever voted for El Loco, and whether anyone here will vote for El Loco this time, if he manages to return from his exile in Panamá, wouldn’t be difficult for Antonio to predict, although since this is the first time in twelve years that Antonio has been back to Guayaquil he doesn’t yet know whether the neighbors who used to pile on El Loco for being an uncultivated thief still live in the neighborhood where he grew up, or whether they would still be alarmed to see a caravan for El Loco just like the one they’d seen on Bálsamos Street the first time El Loco ran for president, or perhaps it was the second time El Loco ran for president when the caravan for this self proclaimed leader of the poor alarmed the neighbors and his mother but not him, although of course in retrospect he’s likely to downplay any threatening aspects of that unfortunate caravan, and as he unloads his luggage from his Taxi Amigo, a private car service his mother suggested for security reasons, it occurs to him that without the unfortunates of his country, without the 60 percent of Ecuadorians who live in perpetual poverty (why always sound like a demagogue when invoking the poor?), he would have had to fabricate a new reason as to why he thought he was different from his fellow Saks Fifth Avenue shoppers in San Francisco, oh, but unlike you materialistic North Americans, I’m going back to Ecuador to help my — nice scarf, Drool — and yet by returning to Guayaquil he has ruined it for himself: he could’ve spent the rest of his life in San Francisco thinking of himself as the boy who once taught catechism to the poor, or as the teenager who once vowed to return to save the poor, and it would’ve been okay, yes, from the corporate headquarters of Bank of America during the week, or from an armchair inside his neighborhood coffee house during the weekend, his bountiful inner life would have shielded him from his bountiful inaction, and perhaps he still has time to fly back to San Francisco and pretend his return to Guayaquil never happened, and as he enters the apartment on Bálsamos Street where he lived with his mother until fleeing to the United States, he’s relieved that nothing has changed since he left, although so much time has passed that perhaps it’s not possible to claim that nothing has changed, or perhaps he wants to believe that nothing has changed to avoid the onrush of nostalgia he imagines most emigrants feel upon returning to their hometown after a long absence, or perhaps he wants to avoid thinking about all those years his mother had to live alone in this apartment after he fled to the United States — the light left the house after you left, Antonio — or perhaps he’s too exhausted for onrushes of nostalgia or to start thinking about that one Christmas when his mother visited him in San Francisco and shared with him what had happened to her in Guayaquil, disrupting the convenient emptiness of all those years his mother lived alone by telling him about the first time she was robbed right in front of our apartment on Bálsamos, Antonio José, recounting the robbery for him with a voice attuned to a peace that was foreign to him and that surprised him more than any details about the robbery (during her visit to San Francisco his mother had also revealed to him that not only was she involved with transpersonal yoga and the Catholic meditations of Father Davila but with Reiki and rebirthing, too — I knew this was what they called an express hijacking, his mother said, where they take you with them until they’re done robbing others because normally those big Land Rovers have a tracking device —), and perhaps the elegant air conditioned cabin of the Land Rover had made it easier for his mother’s friend to believe she was safe to parade her luxury car through the miserable streets of Guayaquil, or perhaps he’s entertaining such embittered thoughts to avoid considering that in that same elegant cabin his mother was probably terrified, and so the one thief on his mother’s side pressed the unlock button so that the other thief could open the door on the driver’s side, and Monsi became hysterical, not again, Monsi was saying, not again, screaming at them hijueputas, malparidos, leave us alone, jostling with the thief on her side who was pulling her up by her hair and beating her with the butt of his pistol so she would stop shrieking (no, Antonio thinks, to him that caravan for the self proclaimed leader of the poor hadn’t looked like a threat but like an outburst of celebration, as if earlier in the day El Loco had announced that if he became president not only was he going to provide the people with jobs, as he had promised in his ads, but with meals and free housing too, and in their excitement at this incredible news they had rallied up their neighbors, had rounded up their motorized belongings, had set out all over town to flap their signs and shout their hymns and bounce on their flatbeds, eventually losing their way and ending up on Bálsamos Street, a mere block from León Martín Cordero, carajo, the one ex president his mother still rooted for, the one who had been anointed by Reagan because of his strong arm tactics and his free market packages and who would have had no qualms about outfitting his grandson with a BB gun to shoo El Loco’s people off his street), and as he sets down his luggage in the living room of the apartment on Bálsamos Street where he lived with his mother until fleeing to the United States he remembers his mother emerging onto her balcony to find the caravan for El Loco blasting its songs of hope from a megaphone fastened to a Datsun’s roof with rope — the force of the poor / Abdalá / the clamor of my people / Abdalá — and on her balcony on that day like in those years before she steeped herself in transpersonal yoga and the meditation exercises of Father Davila, his mother seemed ready to order everyone to shut the hell up, which was exactly what Antonio refused to do in those days, although sometimes after he argued with her he would refuse to talk to her for three, six, seven days in a row, or until she would threaten to send him to military school, and in those days he would often hear his mother complaining about how even people with only a smattering of education knew that El Loco was a joke, and whether Manuel, our domestic, was in on the joke worried my mother so much that from her balcony she was checking to see if Manuel looked enraptured by El Loco’s caravan, but no, Manuel wasn’t, although later my mother was to assume so, Manuel was just hosing the parking spots in front of o
ur apartment building, and yes, El Loco was a joke, but what wasn’t a joke were the alternatives, because our cultivated ministers and prefects and mayors and even my own father had been too busy defrauding our government to care about the poor, and what was even less of a joke was the precarious conditions in which so many people in Ecuador lived, and so I raised my hand and gave the caravan a thumbs up, a gesture that confused them because they seemed to be trying to determine if I was mocking them, although it’s possible they were just observing me because I happened to be sitting there, a lanky teenager sporting his Emelec soccer uniform, and yet Antonio wasn’t mocking them, he was smiling and clapping and ignoring his mother on the balcony who yelled come inside right this second, Antonio José, and as he opens the empty fridge rusted along the edges in the apartment on Bálsamos Street where he lived with his mother until fleeing to the United States, he considers how loud his mother must have yelled at him because the people in the caravan heard her, hesitating as to whether to heckle her because on the one hand her voice carried an authority they acknowledged, and on the other hand she was a woman, either way Manuel diverted their attention by waving at them, water splashing on his feet and sprinkling on his stone colored jeans, which he had rolled up to his knees as if he were about to catch carp at a rough river, wiping his hand on his tee shirt and waving at them again, which to me seemed innocuous enough, as if Manuel was greeting a traveling circus, a circus that then surprised him by returning his greeting, some raising their fists as if promising to fight for him, others stretching their arms toward him to shake his hands, and as the last pickup passed him he did not take the three or five steps required to shake their hands, which should have counted in his favor but didn’t because later that night Antonio’s mother said I want you to watch him, or perhaps she said keep an eye on him, or perhaps she didn’t say anything and in retrospect her statements have surfaced as manifestations of what he didn’t know then that he was intuiting about her fears about El Loco, we need to be careful, his mother said, we need to keep all entrances locked, his mother said, and as he contemplates the empty walls of the apartment on Bálsamos Street he thinks of all the fistfights at San Javier that his mother had to account for when Father Ignacio would call her to inform her that her son had been suspended or placed on probation yet again (and once, during semifinals, Antonio swiped the yellow card from the referee and tossed it at his face — red card! you’re out! — fighting for the ball with elbows and knees and taking off through the outermost flank at an incredible speed, the goalkeeper yelling stop him, Antonio yelling ábranse hijueputas, propelling the ball to the goal minimally when the ball was inflated maximally so that from afar his mean sprints looked like pranks — pata floja —), and what Antonio said to his mother after she told him to keep an eye on Manuel was I don’t know what you’re talking about, or leave me alone, or whatever he used to say to her when he wasn’t ignoring her, don’t play stupid, his mother said, because of course she knew that Antonio knew she was worried about El Loco, the self proclaimed leader of the poor who was talking the class talk, demonizing those people with money, those oligarchs who steal from the poor, those aniñados, and what worried my mother and her clients at her nail salon wasn’t that El Loco was known for disregarding the sensible limits of public fraud but that our domestics might take El Loco’s rhetoric to heart and revolt against us, rumors circulating among them about servants lurking inside our houses to slash our throats, and what Antonio said to his mother that night was you, all of you, are overreacting, raising his voice and saying something about our country needing a revolt, anyway, to rid us of thieves, sensing or thinking he could sense that his mother wanted to nod in approval because what he’d said was an oblique swing at his father, who’d fled the country for defrauding the government during the administration of León Martín Cordero, but instead his mother admonished him for raising his voice, an admonishment interrupted by a telephone call, or perhaps the call came later, and as Antonio heads toward his old bedroom he wonders what they could possibly have said to each other in that interval between her admonishment and that telephone call — the light left the house after you left, Antonio — and it occurs to Antonio that he had never noticed how empty the walls looked in the apartment where he grew up with his mother, how emptied one feels after a long plane ride, how easy it is to assume he has never noticed something before instead of considering that what has become an absence in his past might include an evening in which he noticed the empty walls of his apartment when he was seven or fifteen or twelve years old (when Antonio was twelve he made a vow of silence to atone for whatever had been prescribed by the Jesuits as sin), how reassuring it was to find the old rotary phone on his way to his bedroom, not ringing now as it had rung that night when his mother admonished him for raising his voice, the phone ringing and reminding his mother that she was too exhausted to squash his bluster, ringing and announcing that one of her clients (Marta de Rosales or Veronica de Arosemena or one of the wives of our dignitaries whose proximity allowed my mother and I to pretend we were the kind of people with money El Loco was railing about and not the kind of people who would have slipped to a faraway low income neighborhood if my grandfather hadn’t allowed us to stay in the apartment building he’d built before our neighborhood became a good one) was probably calling to request a last minute appointment to swap a broken acrylic nail before heading to a social function we hadn’t been invited to, and yet even after all these years in which he has amassed what he considers to be an inordinate amount of memories that have interposed themselves between that time and this time, he’s almost sure his mother didn’t end their exchange that night by saying you’re supposed to be the man of the house, Antonio José, start acting like one, no, he’s almost sure she simply picked up the phone and waved him away, and as Antonio heads to his old bedroom he wonders if his scapulars are still there, his poster of our Madre Dolorosa, his handwritten pamphlets with his interpretation of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, which included the presentation of jesus in the temple, the annunciation of Gabriel to Mary (one summer when he was sixteen he didn’t incur a single bad thought that could mar his love for Mary), his comic books about San Bosco, his comic books about El Chapulín Colorado, a parody of a superhero from a popular television show brimming with catchphrases that everyone at San Javier used to repeat to each other — recontra qué? — chiro — chanfle — his pocket edition of the Imitation of Christ, his rosary with the sunflower sized beads, all of which was stored inside a long row of cabinets that had been built by a carpenter who looked like Cantinflas, a sunburnt sixty five year old Cantinflas who would show up drunk at their apartment on Saturday mornings, ring the bell, and greet my mother gently and ask her if there was any work this week, Doña Ceci, I could really use the work, how’s niño Antonio, is he still growing like a tree, and it surprises Antonio to remember his mother addressing their carpenter without scorn, maestro, you’ve been drinking again, she would admonish him playfully, un poquitín nomás, Doña Ceci, he would say, and while Antonio still lived in Guayaquil their carpenter installed the iron gates by the glass doors in his mother’s balcony, the sturdy cabinets in Antonio’s bedroom, his bed and the sliding bed underneath his bed where Leopoldo would sleep when he stayed over, and perhaps by his old bed the immense poster of The Cure that used to spook his mother is still there, spooking no one now (although perhaps his mother still sometimes thinks about that black poster with the phosphorescent eyes and remembers those Saturday mornings when she would open the door to his bedroom and complain about his room reeking of whiskey, or about those Saturday mornings when she pretended she was or wasn’t heartbroken because of him, as if he’d slighted her somehow, and I would plead after her in the kitchen and ask her what’s wrong, Mom, and she would eventually tell him that when she opened the door to his bedroom that morning he had insulted her, had cussed at her, but he didn’t remember, Mom, he’d been asleep, or perhaps she still thinks about those Saturday mornings during th
e last months before he was to flee to the United States in which something changed between them and they were at peace), the immense The Cure poster in his bedroom that he’d purchased in Gainesville, Florida, where he spent the entire summer before his senior year at San Javier scrubbing dishes at a restaurant near his maternal grandparents’ house so he could afford to bring back a suitcase filled with impressive sneakers and jeans, mopping floors for a frumpy ladies’ man who would sniff Antonio’s bucket to check for the pine fresh (the grease on his hands wouldn’t come off), vacationing with his maternal grandparents in Florida was what he told his classmates he had been doing during the summer so on the first day of school they were not surprised to see him sporting aerodynamic sneakers and Iron Maiden tee shirts with hirsute monsters that were later banned by Father Ignacio, and as Antonio enters his old bedroom he finds that his room has been emptied, that yoga mats have been spread on the floor, that nothing remains on the walls except a photograph of Paramahansa Yogananda, that on the other hand at least the ceiling fan is still there (during the rainy season mosquitoes would buzz his ears despite the breeze of that poorly installed fan that spun like a turbine set on unhinging itself), and as Antonio considers switching on the fan, or opening the curtains, or approaching the photograph of Paramahansa Yogananda to maybe draw a mustache on it, or lying down where his bed used to be to listen to someone practicing scales, although that’s ridiculous because no one has ever practiced scales in his grandfather’s building, or perhaps not so ridiculous because he’s sure he can lie down where his bed used to be and imagine he’s hearing someone practicing scales and to him that imagining would be just as real, well, it doesn’t matter, he’s exhausted from the long flight from San Francisco to Guayaquil and just needs a bed and a room with an air conditioner so he switches off the light of the bare, warm room that used to be his bedroom and shuts the door carefully, as if trying not to wake himself, and then climbs up the wooden stairs to his mother’s room (when he was little the stairs had no handrails or balustrade so his mother worried about him falling down to the storage floor that during the rainy season would flood to the waist like a pond, and when he was seven or eight or twelve he would sleep in the guest room next to his mother’s room and at night he would hear rats scraping his door as if trying to burrow inside, and in the dark he would shoo them away with a clap and the rats would scramble down the stairs so often that even now he can evoke the sound of their nails clacking down the wooden stairs), and in the week or weeks after the caravan for El Loco appeared on Bálsamos Street the rats returned, although my mother assumed it was something else, we were having dinner or about to have dinner, and before or after she defrosted a bag of lentils, we were startled by the sudden noises coming from the patio, which sounded as if someone was searching for something among our plants, but this someone couldn’t have been Manuel because Sunday was his day off, and of course I could tell that my mother was thinking that Manuel had come back to rob us, or that he had brought back people with him who could rob us, or that he had told people who could rob us that despite the locks and bolts and metal bars on every one of our windows the service door facing Bálsamos Street could be jumped (his mother had been meaning to ask their carpenter to install longer spikes atop that door because it led to a passageway that led to the patio that led to the dining room, where his mother was rushing to the front door to call his Uncle Jacinto, who lived in the apartment upstairs — your Uncle Jacinto rescued us from your father, Antonio José —), and when his mother visited him in San Francisco she told him that when they were still living with his father in the Barrio Centenario his Uncle Jacinto had showed up one night in his jeep with his fellow firemen because his father had barricaded the house and wouldn’t let us leave him — your uncle banged on the door and your father screamed at us and when it was over I found you trembling under your little bed, Antonio José — and what surprised Antonio that night in San Francisco when his mother seemed determined to confess everything wasn’t that he didn’t remember any of it but that his mother was telling him all of it as part of a transpersonal project she seemed to have been planning for years, because after she underwent something called holotropic breathwork therapy, she said, after she underwent Gestalt and rebirthing and constellation therapy at Centro Pachamama in Chile, she had liberated herself from what the two of them had gone through and now it was time for him to liberate himself too, and although he doesn’t remember what he went through when he lived with his father, he does remember what he went through when he lived with his mother (Antonio’s not going to think about that now (one morning during recess when he’s seven or six or eight years old and still at Jefferson Elementary School he’s running through a park that looks like an island planted with green bushes like gnomes and he’s discovering a scrap of plastic like something knifed from the edge of a refrigerator, a long scrap of plastic that has hardened and bent like a bow, cutting the air like a boomerang when he wields it, running back to his classroom and hiding it inside his desk, running back to his mother after school and presenting it to her as a gift and saying look at this funny stick, Mom, perfect for you to beat me with)), and although he doesn’t remember his Uncle Jacinto showing up to rescue them in his jeep, he does remember driving with his Uncle Jacinto in that jeep one morning and stalling because of the downtown traffic, his uncle banging on the steering wheel and saying the hell with this, switching on the siren on top of his jeep so the two of them could speed through, arriving to our apartment immediately after my mother called him on the night we heard noises outside, armed with a flashlight and his rifle, my mother clinging to his arm and saying out there, ñaño, out there, my uncle shrugging her off with his elbow and saying don’t be hysterical, Cecilia, my uncle unlocking the sliding fence rail and unbolting the door to the patio, his flashlight barely catching a glimpse of the runaway culprits, rats, which were scurrying away and there, right up there on the wall, a rat was climbing on a pipe so my uncle aimed his rifle and shot, warning us, as he held the fallen rat by its tail, that more of them would turn up, as in fact they did, sneaking inside our kitchen and hiding behind our stove, where we could hear them struggling against the heat and the wiring and where, days later, the stench of their decay would prompt my mother to order Manuel to remove them, banging on the side of the stove to check if any of them were still moving, and after my Uncle Jacinto packed his rifle and left, my mother stood still by the dining room table, or perhaps she stood still by the stove, or perhaps she didn’t stand still at all but paced around the living room, considering whether it was prudent to finish our dinner and risk hearing noises again, eventually saying let’s go watch television, Antonio José, to which I probably replied something like there’s nothing on, Mom, nothing at all, and as Antonio enters his mother’s bedroom in the apartment on Bálsamos Street he doesn’t remember if that night his mother rushed to her bedroom to turn on the television, or if she waited for him to come along with her, either way he remembers following her and finding her checking the locks to the balcony, drawing the already drawn curtains and fastening them with a pin, sitting on her bed without removing her Egyptian sandals, her back upright against the headboard as I pulled her dresser bench next to her bed, careful to not bump her dresser and disrupt her collection of perfumes, which are no longer there, some of them with only a mist left, water lilies and carnations and marigold all jumbled into one soothing scent (one evening when she couldn’t find the scrap of plastic he’d gifted her she pulled the curtain rod from the guest room’s wall and used that to beat him instead), and as his mother flipped the channels she chided herself for not anticipating that with only a few weeks left before the presidential elections the political ads had of course usurped most of the evening’s programming, some of them showing El Loco promising to fight the oligarchy and free the land, others showing León’s candidate promising sound macroeconomic policies, others showing El Loco returning to save his people in a helicopter, others warning viewers about El Loco by s
howing El Loco pouring a glass of beer over his head, others showing El Loco addressing thousands of followers, mops and brooms and cardboard signs alive and wild everywhere and is there a parent in the crowd?, El Loco asks, please raise your hand, let’s see you, gentleman, here with your son, let’s talk the truth, no tales, I’m going to demonstrate to you that you are not the same for León, sir, with the greatest respect, if your eighteen year old son falls in love with León’s daughter would they let him in their house?, no, no, no, but if León’s grandson were to leave your daughter pregnant, oh, ha ha, it’s just our boy being a rascal, is this not the truth, yes, yes, yes, or she would be imprisoned and forsaken with a bastard child like they have forsaken and imprisoned my beloved country, and as Antonio tries to rest on his mother’s bed he cannot recall which ad finally drove his mother to fling the remote control across the room, the triple A batteries crashing against the TV stand and rolling on the floor, and although he knew others would have been alarmed at her violence he stood up as if nothing had happened, turning off the television, picking up the remote, and not finding the batteries anywhere, searching for them under her bed, sticking his whole body in there, casting away spiderwebs and crawling on his elbows and finding the batteries by a stack of books on transpersonal psychology, yoga, meditation, discovering for the first time she owned these kinds of books, which he was to secretly read in the last months before he fled to the United States (the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, for instance, which contains scientific footnotes underscoring the legitimacy of levitation and out of body migrations), and as he resurfaced with the batteries his mother smiled at him, a steady, gentle smile that she seemed to be trying on and that she seemed unwilling to unsettle by wiping the sweat off her eyelashes or swatting away her red locks of hair from her cheeks, resting her warm fingertips on his wrist and smiling and saying thank you, Antonio José, next time I’ll have to remove the batteries beforehand, and as Antonio lies down on her bed and closes his eyes, unable to remember the warmth of his mother’s body when he would bunch next to her in her bed but able to imagine her warmth by placing his hands flat on his chest, feeling at last how exhausted he really is from the long flight, he irrationally expects different of himself, as if perhaps this time he could become the one who could console her, no, he’s yanking his arm away from her, tossing the batteries on the empty side of her bed and saying, before slamming the door on his way out, I told you there wasn’t anything on, Cecilia, yes, he’s really exhausted, he should try to sleep (and on Saturday afternoons during their last year together she wouldn’t turn on the television but would lie down quietly on her bed, sick from the methacrylic acid she was using to glue those acrylic nails, although he didn’t know then or pretended he didn’t know then that she was sick), and on those Saturday afternoons Antonio used to dispatch his mother with a curt goodbye Mom, I’m off to play soccer at school, which wasn’t true, every Saturday afternoon Antonio boarded a bus to San Javier, where he boarded Don Alban’s bus to Mapasingue, where along with the other members of the apostolic group he taught catechism to the poor (don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, the Jesuits had taught him, and yet even after all these years in which he likes to believe he has disavowed anything that sounds like a precept, he still can’t share with others anything remotely good about himself: no one at Stanford knew that he taught catechism in Mapasingue for four years, no one in San Francisco knew that, despite barbing his memories of Mapasingue with inquiries like do you really think that your paltry exposure to the poor has marked you instead of just serving as an excuse to feel like a chosen one, he still thinks of himself as that pious boy standing on the hills of Mapasingue atop the stairs that lead to Guayaquil), and it occurs to him, as he tries to sleep, no, how can he sleep without first taking off his clothes and turning on the air conditioner, which is revving up and canceling the noise of the utility vehicles speeding along Bálsamos Street and of the people watching television upstairs, the decrepit air conditioner that used to consume so much electricity that his mother wouldn’t switch it on unless the heat was as unbearable as it is now, and as he lies down again and tries to sleep he wonders if perhaps the reason he thought his mother was overreacting about El Loco turning Manuel into a threat to them at home was that he rarely interacted with Manuel, rarely saw Manuel, barely remembers anything about Manuel except sometimes, during dinner, the sound of his dinner plate vibrating on top of the dryer when the dryer was on, or Manuel’s soft voice saying yes, Doña Ceci, right away, Doña Ceci (one day when his mother was out Antonio sent Manuel on an errand to rent pornographic videos featuring Ginger Lynn), or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because it was convenient to behave as if nothing threatening was happening in Guayaquil since he was leaving this miserable place anyway, or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because Manuel, who must have been fourteen or thirteen years old and was even skinnier than Antonio had been back then, looked harmless, or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because at school everyone portrayed El Loco as a coarse loony who couldn’t even incense fruit flies into revolting, a coarse loony with a raspy bus driver voice who flaunted his chest hair and said ridiculous things like León has watery sperm, and one day during recess what the Fat Albino said about that coarse loony was if that pest wins we’ll have him out in less than a week, to which we all hooted and clapped because the Fat Albino was the grandson of León Martín Cordero, carajo, the ex president my mother still rooted for, the one we’ve seen that week or the week before or the year before on television saying that only prostitutes and junkies have ever voted for El Loco, and yet as everyone hooted and clapped the Fat Albino turned toward Antonio and said I don’t know why the Drool here’s laughing, we’re talking about ousting his dad, to which everyone hooted and laughed, relishing the opportunity to pin El Loco to Antonio as some of them had already tried to do by linking Antonio’s erupted face with El Loco’s pockmarked face, calling him La Baba Loca or La Baba Bucaram to see if those nicknames would stick, and yet Antonio thought he’d succeeded in squashing those nicknames with threats to beat up his classmates, but no, that day during recess everyone was waiting to see if Antonio would threaten the Fat Albino or leave himself wide open so of course Antonio said shut up Yucca Bread, or perhaps he said shut up you lazy piece of crap, to which the Fat Albino replied something like watch what you’re saying, hijueputa, which is what everyone expected the Fat Albino to say because he was the kind of fellow who liked imparting mockery but not receiving it, which was the same kind of fellow Antonio was, and so the pushing and shoving began, the pushing and shoving that everyone usually attributed to freshmen who feigned a willingness to fight but never did, goddamn cowards, and although neither Antonio nor the Fat Albino wanted to look like cowards they were both on probation, whatever, probation or no probation, as everyone crowded around them yelling grab that caraeverga by the neck, Yucca, kick that fat ass in the balls, Don Buca, they had no choice but to end their freshman sideshow and fight, not that they didn’t hate each other to begin with, during their sophomore year they’d both made the soccer team and because they lived close to one another, and because Antonio’s mother didn’t have a car and soccer practice started at six in the morning, their coach had suggested that the Fat Albino give Antonio a ride, to which the Fat Albino had agreed to earnestly, putting on a show of being so happy to help the team, coach, driving Antonio grudgingly three times a week until the morning when the Fat Albino asked his chauffeur to race up on Bálsamos Street to pick up Antonio in reverse (why did that backwards driving feel like such a putdown?), and as everyone crowded around them Antonio lunged at the Fat Albino and the Fat Albino swung at Antonio and Antonio stumbled and Father Ignacio broke up the fight, and although both of them were on probation only Antonio’s mother received a call from Father Ignacio informing her that he needed to talk to her in person because this time he was really going to expel Antonio, and that night his mother said I’ve had it with you, A
ntonio José, I’m not finding you another school, after all the sacrifices I’ve made to keep you there, now you’ll end up graduating from some antro in El Guasmo, looking defeated by what she heard herself saying because she knew that Antonio loved San Javier, knew that when their green cards had gone through during his sophomore year she’d asked him if he would rather stay and wait to graduate with his friends before moving to the United States and he’d say yes, Mom, please, Mom, and what he said to her that night after Father Ignacio called her was I think this time Father Ignacio is serious about expelling me, Mom, help me please, tell him it had something to do with my father, tell him my father came back and we had an altercation, anything, please, tell him anything, Mom, and the next day in Father Ignacio’s office his mother did lie to him so Antonio could stay in school and graduate with honors but without medals and then leave her, and when his mother visited him in San Francisco she told him that after he left Manuel started bringing her soup, that Manuel learned to cook so she would have more time to rest, that Manuel had volunteered himself when she needed someone on whom to practice the nonordinary states of consciousness therapies she was learning, and what Antonio didn’t tell her then or later is that one Sunday in the weeks or months after the caravan for El Loco appeared on Bálsamos Street he’d ventured to the patio outside to check on Manuel, knowing that on Sundays all domestics in the neighborhood had the day off, sneaking inside the cement box that had been built into the patio for live in domestics and that seemed to have been forgotten long ago because the bottom part of the door, hollowed by mold or rain or moths or mice, no longer reached the floor, because the door had a hole instead of a handle, because inside someone had stored piles of bathroom tiles and splotched cans of paint, because the mattress on the squalid bed was as thick as a straw mat, because squashed mosquitoes blotted the walls, because the whole place wasn’t bigger than a tool shed, and as Antonio tries to sleep and free himself of the caffeine he ingested on the plane from San Francisco to Guayaquil he cannot remember if the miserable conditions in which Manuel lived moved him, no, they didn’t, he was too focused on his salacious pursuit, although even if he hadn’t been so focused on finding pornographic magazines he probably would have found a way to overlook the implications of this sight, searching through Manuel’s things without disrupting them, as if demonstrating to whoever could be watching that he had good manners, and what doesn’t amaze Antonio is how easy it was for him to actually believe he was searching for posters or placards or any evidence that Manuel was a Bucaram subversive, searching and finding a black and white photograph of an old woman who could have been Manuel’s grandmother or his mother or an aunt, searching and finding a bundle of letters written with the same meticulous calligraphy and the same florid language that did not detract from the wistfulness of the contents, all of them mailed from Calceta, a small town in Manabí, searching and finding under the mattress a page that had been ripped from Diario Extra, a sensationalist tabloid, and yes, a picture of El Loco was on one side, but the kind of picture he’d hoped to find was on the other (a voluptuous woman in a green bikini who was nestling her forehead on a palm tree, holding it with both hands as if it were a placeholder for her lover to be, you, inviting you to admire the tan of her thighs and the flow of her hair, which Antonio did, then and later in his room), returning the ripped page from Diario Extra before Manuel came back that evening because Antonio liked to think of himself as the type of person who wouldn’t have just used that scrap of picture without returning it or praying the rosary right after he was done, and although Antonio doesn’t remember if a rosary prayer was part of that Sunday afternoon, or that Sunday evening a week or two later when Manuel was supposed to come back but didn’t, Antonio does remember that while he was worrying about whether through the mysterious hand of god Manuel had found out that he had searched through his things and had therefore decided not to come back, his mother was worrying that with only a week or two left before the election Manuel had defected to join a group of Bucaram subversives, although on the Monday or Tuesday after Manuel didn’t come back she tried to make it into a joke by saying that Manuel was probably inflating balloons for the caravans for El Loco in Esmeraldas, and yet by Wednesday or Thursday the joke was over because someone had informed her that two or three other domestics down the block hadn’t come back either, and then on Saturday morning Antonio heard the bell ringing, the door opening, his mother saying where the hell have you been, Manuel, less as a question than as an accusation, as if him being anywhere but here was an outrage, her voice as hoarse as always, careful not to reveal that she might be scared, holding on to the doorknob in case she had to slam the door shut, although the brass chain was still fastened, my grandmother, Manuel was saying, she couldn’t get out of bed, Manuel was saying, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stop sobbing, Doña Cecilia, at the bus stop on Sixth Street the domestic for Doña Elena had been waiting to tell him that his grandmother was sick, that his grandmother was asking for him, and it was only when he was already on the bus to Calceta that he’d realized he didn’t know our phone number, hadn’t memorized it, and while Manuel spoke Antonio approached his mother but she did not acknowledge him, you’re lying, his mother said to Manuel, relieved by the finality of her verdict, didn’t they teach you not to lie in school, you never said anything about a grandmother in Calceta, which was true, of course, except that Manuel had never said anything about anything because we’d never asked, in fragments Manuel repeated himself, perhaps hoping to make his sad journey more real to her, sensing that my mother wasn’t listening because his voice started to lose conviction, you can’t come in, she said, you don’t work here anymore, and as I stood next to her, expressing my solidarity with her decision, Manuel said talk to the señorita, niño Antonio, tell her I’m not lying, and yes, I had leafed through enough of his letters to at least confirm he had an ailing grandmother in Calceta, and yes, Manuel did look as if somewhere along his return here he had declined to exist and what remained of him stood before us, a skeletal child of fourteen or thirteen who was clearly grieving, and although it is easier for Antonio to imagine himself pushing Manuel away and slamming the front door and saying don’t come back, you hear, which allows him to distance himself from the pathetic thing he actually did by deploring the violent thing he didn’t do, what actually happened was that Antonio said he does have a grandmother in Calceta, Mom, he does, which made his mother wince, as if Antonio was interrupting a scene in which he didn’t belong, and perhaps anticipating her reaction he had said what he had said without much conviction, less as a fact but as a distant possibility, and so Antonio didn’t insist and walked away, and so his mother shut the front door and that was it for Manuel, and a few weeks later El Loco lost the elections by an alarmingly small margin, and a few months later Antonio graduated from San Javier and fled this miserable place, and in the next twelve years more of our cultivated prefects and ministers embezzled our country and fled, and more people were forced to live in the most precarious conditions, and more children of the self proclaimed Ecuadorian elite who barely managed to graduate from third tier American universities bestowed upon the country the useless wisdom that we must not give the poor the fish but teach them how to fish, and twelve years after leaving this miserable place Antonio decided to return because Leopoldo called him and said come back and let’s run for office, Drool, and a few years before he decided to return his mother told him about the night two armed men robbed her outside their apartment on Bálsamos Street, Antonio José, the thief on the driver’s side was pulling Monsi up by her hair and beating her with the butt of his pistol so she would stop shrieking, and the next thing I remember is the car speeding us away from the city, and the man in the backseat next to me pointing his pistol at me, and Monsi insulting them and me trying to calm her down, she didn’t want to budge so she was stuck between the two front seats, I was trying to calm her down and then one of them yelled at me to shut up already, I am trying to calm her down because I want t
o avoid a tragedy, I said, I was very calm, following Father Davila’s advice that in times of need one should invoke one’s ancestors and becalm oneself by inhaling, exhaling, in those days I was meditating at least three hours a day, Antonio José, saying to Monsi come back over here, my dear Monsi, pulling her to the backseat because the man up front was hitting her, don’t let him hit you, my Monsi, come back here, hugging her so she would calm down but she kept screaming not again, I’ve had enough of this, and then the thief next to me asked for my handbag and I said to him this bag is old so if you want to take it, take it, but I am not going to give you my documents because they’re tough to reissue, give me your wallet, he said, no, I said, I am going to give you my money, I have money that I took out of the bank this morning that’s going to benefit you, because I know what interests you is the car but also the money and the others that dropped you off are not going to know you are going to have this cash, but leave us some money for the taxi for the way back because otherwise how do we get back, and please don’t leave us somewhere dangerous, we’re two women alone, so I gave him my money and he let me keep enough money for the ride back, I think he was more scared than I was, they were both between sixteen or seventeen, apparently they hire these kids from the street and they make them do these robberies for a little bit of money, the newspapers recommend not fighting with them since they are likely to be nervous and can inadvertently shoot, plus we’ve heard they are often given drugs to bolster their courage, and the next thing I remember is the car speeding us away from the city as I held Monsi’s hand and I was saying to her it’s okay Monsi, they won’t hurt us, right?, you won’t hurt us, they just want the car, Monsi, there’s no need to point that gun at us, and then, as if tired of listening to me, the thief in the driver’s seat stopped the car and said take off your shoes and get out, viejas del carajo, and of course we did, exiting as fast as we could and finding ourselves in a barren field where someone must have detonated something because it was strewn with shards of glass and broken rocks, walking for at least an hour before we encountered a small house where an old man who made a living by scavenging metal scraps committed himself to driving us back to the city, Monsi’s feet were permanently damaged, Antonio José, sleep now, Antonio, sleep since tomorrow you’ll be meeting with Leopoldo for the first time in twelve years, and after I arrived home the memory of the robbery settled on me and I couldn’t sleep in my room anymore, his mother said, I had to switch to the guest room where I felt more protected even though the panic attacks didn’t ebb, and in San Francisco his mother told him that a year after El Loco lost the elections Manuel showed up at their apartment on Bálsamos Street again, pleading for a second chance, this time I won’t disappear, Doña Cecilia, I promise I won’t disappear, and soon after she agreed to give him a second chance Manuel started bringing her soup, learning how to cook so she would have more time to rest, volunteering himself when she needed someone on whom to practice the nonordinary states of consciousness therapies she was learning at Centro Pachamama, and what surfaced during these therapies astounded me, Antonio José, when Manuel was born his mother had to abandon him by the side of the road because his father had vowed to drown him, I don’t know, Antonio José, maybe that man thought the child wasn’t his, thankfully a good soul picked him up and tried to raise him, Grandma Angela, Manuel called her, poor Manuel, his troubles didn’t end there, somehow his father found them and burned Grandma Angela’s house, little by little Manuel began to liberate himself from the past, Antonio José, Manuel and Grandma Angela had to escape and find refuge in a different province, little by little I began to encourage him, he was seventeen years old and hadn’t even finished elementary school, Antonio José, I offered him meditation lessons, Reiki, Bach flower remedies, and one day Manuel enrolled himself in night school and bought himself a pair of dress pants and said to me I’ve always wanted to wear pants like these, Doña Cecilia, and before I was to leave he was almost done with trade school, Antonio José, before I was to leave Guayaquil for good he had tears in his eyes and said what am I going to do without you, Doña Cecilia, what am I going to do without you now.