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Fiction

from “With Absolute Passion”

By Carol Zardetto
Translated from Spanish by D. W. Coop Allred
Carol Zardetto’s dreamy narrator returns to Guatemala and her previous life.

Days drift away slowly and quietly deep inside Guatemala. No inner musings. No pondering or ideas. Just a numbing silence, which reminds me of Buddhists and their thoughts about beginners’ minds that are forever capable of wonder.

There’s something here that eludes my grasp . . . But in the snapshot instant when the plunging frigidity of Lake Atitlán pitches me into the arms of another reality, I suddenly understand. Perhaps the Mayas really do suspend this land from a tenuous thread of magic. Perhaps we tread irreverently over an altar chock full of incense and ritual flowers, candles of jaundiced tallow and cries from hoarse, inexhaustible throats that jangle one’s nerves and even rattle one’s bones. A land woven on ageless looms, made not of soil, but from pieces of cloth on which the design of the universe is painted in ululating color.

The volcanoes were the first thing I saw, on that dawn straining through the breath-frosted window of the airplane. The tips of their perfect cones broke through the cover of clouds as if to drink in the rarefied air above it. The very irregularity of the countryside awoke me from the moody sourness that had ridden me all night. There was fuming Pacaya; then there was serene Agua, tall and massive, like a big mother. Further ahead, Tajumulco and Tacaná . . . I was about to land in Guatemala, a place to which I never wanted to return.

 I see myself with the eyes of remembrance. Retracing my steps, I am again present in the moment I choose to call “back then.” And since I am now “back then,” the past becomes present. What game is this?

Stamped passport in hand, I step out and feel suddenly overwhelmed by the street. I regret not having told anyone of my arrival, since I am loaded down with baggage and  harassed by scary fellows doing all they can to get my attention with a cacophony of mixed shouts. All talk at once, offering to summon me a taxi. Finally I give in, reasoning that the heaviness of my luggage would dissuade anyone from running off with it.

Too many ramshackle taxis line up; few tourists exit the bowels of the airport. After some heated haggling over the fare, I am overcome by the distance that my absence has carried me: the taxi drivers quote their fares in dollars now, but even in dollars they seem overblown. I express my doubts about the price. He replies with a bitter remark and I receive that as an unofficial welcome to Guatemala.

The streets open in front of my eyes, which see too much at once: billboards overrun  with English phrases, with an ugliness which bowls over the senses; people dressed in the screaming colors that I am no longer used to, but which match the grating sunlight; buses vomiting clouds of smoke, crammed with passengers oozing from the doors into the path of cars and motorcycles, swarming like flies. A din of noise and disorder.

I suddenly realize that coming back is impossible.

There is no going back to the way things were, and, indeed, we are not the way we were. The streets I knew as a child are buried underneath these alien ones, too small to contain the chaos that fills them. Sepia-colored dust stains everything. The face I wore back then is lost too, under the new lines that mark my expression, behind this other gaze on things.

I go in and out of memories as one fighting to stay awake.      

We lived in Zone 6. I had all I desired,  as I rode my tricycle in endless circles over the red and yellow tiles of my mother’s beauty parlor on 15th Avenue.

She and my aunts cut hair, filed nails, and sculpted permanents on the ladies’ heads with an electric gadget. I loved to hide my own head under the hairdryers and feel my hair waving with rapturous abandon. Back on my tricycle, I would roll over the clumps of cuttings on the floor. I took care to flatten each little peak as I half listened to the chatter of the ladies. My happy intimacy was frequently interrupted by the robust laughter of Auntie Ibis and the bits of trifling chatter from the women.  Added to what I heard in Grandmother’s kitchen, those loose threads were slowly knitting the strands of my world.

Fashion ordained complicated coiffures that had to be held up by a big bunch of hairpins and lots of spray. I never ceased to be surprised by the monstrous faces of women with their teased hair standing up, the giant heads they had to bear when in curlers, the unnerving odor of hair tints and permanents. But there was nothing I hated more than the hairstyle called the “Italian boy.” The long and beautiful manes of hair, the splendid braids, would disappear with a blow of scissors, and the nude and whitish necks would be shaved, leaving bits of hair looking like the legs of a dozen flies trapped in a milk bowl.

I loved the bounce of soft curls, the rose-scent of the manicure cream, the nail polish that I tried out on my own fingers and toes, which betrayed the amateur manicurist in me.

Activity at the salon varied with the calendar: the Candelaria, carnival, Holy Week festivals, graduation week, first communions . . . and, of course, Christmas, when we had todelay dinner so that my aunts could join us. Still warm from the hairdryer or with still-sticky gel in their hair, the lingering clients would leave on the run to get home before midnight.

My aunts were teenagers then. The neighborhood boys were always on the prowl, seeking to catch their eyes. My aunts obliged them by standing in the doorway “to watch passersby” (or so they said) with their young bodies sweating out the lethargy and heat of the afternoon.

Each of them had her own clientele. The most chatty and gossipy women went straight to Auntie Ibis. Fibbing and outgoing with hair dyed red, she favored skin-tight attire and also smoked. New or timid clients, or more serious ones, sought out Auntie Aura-or-the-Violets. With her slender, dexterous hands and long nails, she could, like no one else, convert mounds of amorphous hair into splendid “buildings.” Quiet and slight, wrapped in a long ebony mane, she always seemed a little absentminded, as if nothing could perturb her.

My mother did special treatments and watched the till. Even so, my aunts’ purses filled to the brim with a rain of coins. I was always noting  this, since they often shared them with me. I could then run to the corner store. There café au lait bonbons, honey-filled butterscotch, sugar cookies, flaky tortes, and other treats were always waiting for me.

Mother and her sisters weere all christened in honor of the heroines from the novels Grandmother used to read. Sitting in the corridor she re-read those novels endlessly, never failing to cry at the right moments. In an effort to console her, I would tell her, “but Abuelita, those stories are not real.” She would then retort, with a glassy stare, “believe it or not, Irenita, these stories happen to real people all the time.” Her collection of books boasted, at one point, the works of Vargas Vila (who was banned in those days), whence came the given name Aura-or-the-Violets for my Auntie Viole, the one with the long nails.

The taxi driver cuts my train of thought with his small talk. From the window of the car, I see the city’s Central Plaza. It looks forlorn without its iron lamps and old benches. Now it’s just a lake of liquid cement over which the Guatemalan flag, in faded blue, flutters wildly alone in the wind. From the radio a commentator nasally recounts the news. I don’t speak a word, so the taxi driver looks for a new tack. He complains about the government. Then he says he is curious about something. Am I from here?  No, I answer, a lie that does nothing to encourage further exchange. Just then, we enter the Cerrito del Carmen neighborhood. The hills of the old park are now bare and choking among the crowded streets.

It was here that they took my picture with that old doll I used to have. It was a present from my father, one of many that always came at Christmas. He sent them with his secretary, Don Carlos, a nervous little mouse of a man. Giant dolls in big boxes. I could hardly play with them, so, year after year, their static presence increased the silent population inside the armoires. I remember how I was back then, skinny and pale, like I appear in a silly photo they took one day, trying to get me to mount the photographer’s hobby horse. On Sundays kids would climb into its saddle, their ankles stuffed into shiny boots and their round noggins into wide-brimmed vaquero hats. But not me—no, I just clung tighter to Auntie Ibis’s leg. Clever and ingratiating, the photographer persuaded her to pose me with the big doll that they thought I liked so much. So, we sat down on the grass. I was squinting from the sun. The luminous and transparent blades of grass stamped my memory with the perfume of green, sweet, vegetable ink.

On the hills of the Cerrito del Carmen the tall grass my mother used to call “illusions” sways with the wind.  I can still feel how the blades would under the old cardboard pieces we used to toboggan down the hills. Grandmother’s dog would go with us. Chocolate, as we called him, was the only dog she ever allowed in her house full of canaries.

Chocolate would bark at my brother and me as he watched us hurtle to the bottom, where the descent left us sprawled in the dust. There, he always caught up with us, licking away at our ears and noses, tickling and wet. Our giggling and his barking sealed us off in privacy in a place that was yet very public. The wind rocked our kites with muted insouciance. From below we could watch their fragile, crepe wings twitch in the permeating blueness of the November skies. The kite looked back at us with its fixed stare. With our backs wedded to the ground, the afternoons sped past.

The taxi turns onto the Avenue, and then flies down it.

Not just any avenue, mind you, but the one we call Willow Avenue even though the willows are long gone. I used to love traipsing over the cracked sidewalks, dodging the crevasses which were the riverlike abode of lizards, or wrinkle lines in the face of some cosmic monster with the world in its embrace, or even the partitions in a vast pineapple upside-down cake over which I glided, taking care not to fall over the unsteady cliffs into the abyss below. Happiness in those days was easy, and not a dubious promised land.

My old trike was a hand-me-down from my bother. Mother told me once that when they finally bought me a new one of my own, I no longer wanted either, the old one or the new. I have no memory of the new one; maybe it was all just some made-up story, the kind that always starts with “when you were a child . . . ” but for which we never achieve confirmation. Whatever it was, Mother inadvertently smothered the delight of a unique tricycle which at times had even been a horse, and which displayed a golden drop on the chipped steering wheel.

The streetlight brings us to a stop, right in front of the house where we used to live. I peer out pf the taxi window.  On the red door, the old iron knocker with its fingers gnarled into rings hangs with tireless loyalty.  At night, that door at the end of the long and dark corridor, with a beam crossed over to secure it, would put an end to parties, visits, and romances. It was a curfew. Minutes later, the lights would go out and the house retreated into its envelope of shadows.

At that hour, bundled under night shawls with Grandmother, I would give an eager ear to the stories she loved to retell. There was the ciguanaba, the horse-faced river medusa who avenged women by pursuing the rakes who jilted them. There was the llorona, the weeping spirit who haunted the washerwomen of the river because she believed that women  like them had stolen her own children. There was the cadejo, the amber-eyed canine caretaker of drunkards, whom he led home after they staggered out of the cantinas. There was even the sombrerón, a gnome who serenaded long-haired women in order to seduce them. He made them wither to death, and then escaped, leaving a trace of his visit by braiding the manes of the horses in the pastures.

I would listen to her for hours, with bottomless patience, and revisit again and again those barely trodden estates that I had come to know from memory. Paths through a lost world with a watershed into my mind.

“Grandma, if they are real, why don’t they come out anymore?”

“Because of the electric light, my dear. It scared them away.”

She then ruminated for some time, unintelligible phrases that spelled her disagreement with reality. “Nothing works these days,” she kept saying. “Everything is  upside-down.”

The taxi reaches my destination in the Parroquia District. The heavy red block letters shout the presence of the Rondolino Hardware Store. It is here that my mother lives with her other family.

I never thought I would come back. When I left, it was forever. I was dressed in my wedding gown, just as Mother wished. Years later, she thanked me for this allowance: to see me walk out of her house in the white wedding gown. I laugh at myself: luck was on my side, I learned about delusion. Marriage could be full of emptiness, a space full of nothing.

And so I had come full circle. I fled this house and this country, only to return to this country and to this house—Don Asunción’s gloomy fiefdom.

One day when I was five and gamboling about the street in front of my house, an old woman, obviously a beggar, came up to me. Her face was etched in deep folds that at first gave me a shock. Then, this gave way to fascination at her toothless gums. She spoke of the approaching Christmas, and invited me to go with her to play with many children. She spoke of a room full of presents. The falseness of all this should have been evident even to me, since she herself was stamped with misery and filth in the extreme. But I believed it nonetheless. She offered me a hand with long blackened nails, which I accepted without hesitation.

Grandmother used to fix lunch for some traffic cops from a nearby precinct. One of them happened to spot me with the old woman. After entering the house and requesting his meal, he casually mentioned this. Grandmother was alarmed; the policeman, suddenly aware of what this meant, left his soup on the table and took off on his bicycle in a furious effort to find me.

I often wondered how things would have turned out had he not rescued me that afternoon. Perhaps the wretch really would have turned me into soap, as Grandmother insisted. In any case, that same policeman wound up marrying my mother. It was all rather paradoxical, when I came to think of it, how on that day near Christmas my rescuer would be Don Asunción, who later would shatter the crystal cocoon of my protected childhood.

I get out of the taxi feeling insecure. The jumble of suitcases taxes the dignity I want to amplify at the threshold. I am gravid with anticipation, and after an almost interminable moment, Emiliana, a servant with many years working for Mother, answers. She flies into a grand fuss on seeing me, sending two parrots into a commotion of their own, vexing the silence of the patio. She lets go a nervous laugh and, still amazed at the sight of me, rubs my arm with enthusiasm. Then she remembers to cover her mouth, lest I count the teeth now missing from it. But to me, it’s more evident how she has lost the bulk and vigor of her arms, chest, and back. She has shrunk inside a thick bag of wrinkled hide.

I ask for Mother. She answers in Spanish with her heavy Tzutuhil accent, which alternately shortens or whistles words.  She proffers up myriad excuses, from which I finally surmise that Mother is not in, that she went to bring Grandmother home from the hospital.

“Doña Toya can stand it no longer,” Emiliana warns me in her customary melodramatic tone. “She wishes to die in her own bed.”

In the end, she brings ushers me in and offers me coffee.

I almost recoil from this house, alien as it is without Mother’s presence. If not for the seriousness of Grandmother’s condition, I would not even be here. Of her I had nothing left but her last photograph.  She was sitting in the parlor, reading a book with such elegant poise that you would think that this is how she wanted to be remembered. Her hair was neatly cut and curled; her dress was fresh and flowery. Her long earrings, her crimson lips, and her sharply-defined eyebrows. That is how I recalled her: a svelte presence emanating benevolent and clear order to the world. All this belied the troubled stories told about her. The passionate woman, the rigid woman, the violent woman . . . those were all images of a stranger.

Grandmother had sent me the photo with the customary scolding. Why was I so far away? Didn’t I realize I would never see her alive again? And the same question I could never answer, not even when I asked myself: why do people have to leave?  I never heeded any of this; but in the end, it was her that brought me finally back. Through the thread of the telephone line, Mother’s voice warned me: “If you don’t come now, you’ll never see her again.”

The house is silent, but the smell of food cooking is everywhere. How odd it is, I think, that women cook all morning: homemade entrées, sauces of every permutation, a routine that lasts half a day or more. The benign kingdom of women is in the kitchen.

Don Asunción shows up, his figure framed in the jamb of the parlor door.

“Have you seen your Mother?” he asks me without even the barest of salutations.

Confused, I get up from the armchair I had found rest in. I remember—though the memory is indistinct, as if coming from a distant planet—that even before going away I had hardly spoken to him in years. Words between us are scarce and numb.  All I am able to mutter, dryly as I could have wanted: “No, I haven’t seen her.”

His handshake is an exercise in forced courtesy. The hand is limp, callused, and dirty. He parts from my presence more abruptly that he might have wanted. Then he saunters to the kitchen and shouts something at Emiliana; I imagine him unloading on to her the awkwardness he feels, the answerless questions, the sourness occasioned by my presence. I am taken aback by his appearance: small and skinny, white-haired, with thick glasses that make his eyes overblown and prying. He was once a Tarzan of the tropics: swarthy, vulgarly muscular, prone to show off his strength by picking up and carrying others. He toted my mother over his shoulder throughout the house while she, from on high, batted the air with her legs and whipped it with indignant protest.

Son of an Italian peasant who came to the Americas at the beginning of the last century, Asunción passed his childhood in privation. His father traveled often to the great farmlands of the coastal plains in search of opportunity. His absences were extended and hard, since there was a chronic lack of everything in the house. Asunción’s mother had to figure out how to survive with the children until his return. But one day his father took another woman and never came back.

Asunción, as the eldest, felt it was his duty and privilege to be the  substitute father, although he was a mere adolescent. To support his family, he sold bread from his bicycle. He balanced a big basket of his wares on his head, a chore few would consider manly; probably, it shamed him. But he idolized his mother. When she became deathly sick, while still young, she became sacred. There was nothing that Asunción would not have done for her.

When she died, Asunción left the house to his brothers and rented a dirt-floored room near the train tracks, in a quarter of town haunted by the cheapest and most pathetic prostitutes.

But he was not there for the women. He bought an encyclopedia and read it at night under a dim lone bulb. He filled himself with knowledge and assimilated it in an original fashion. From all this he dreamed up apocalyptic universes, eccentric perspectives on the world, wild but oblique observation on no small number of things.

This newfound wisdom gave him a new sense of who he was. With insufferable authority, he expounded on his theories, in all their layered detail, to anyone who stumbled into his trap. Anything he might overhear could trigger him. Once started, he allowed no interruptions, nor did he mind, for his listeners’ sake, the clock.

Destiny marked him for a career in the police barracks, and for this Asunción never forgot his lucky star. The police force existed for his sake, to establish his worthiness before the world. Vested in his smart uniform and this authority, Don Asunción discovered joy insurmountable.

My mind drifts back outside, to the street and its throb of activity. Now that Don Asunción is here, his presence transforms this house and thickens the atmosphere within it. And that old feeling comes back, impelling me toward the door with an urge to leave. That is probably the real reason I married. That union was doomed, and I knew it. But it was, if nothing else, my ticket out of this house.

Instinct prompts me to squelch imaginings about things that cannot be resolved with proper logic, thoughts which can wear you out with their dead weight. It is a hot day, and this place is very quiet. The notion of that street lying beyond the iron door exerts a seductive tug. The house I grew up in is just over there, at the end of the next block, as helpless as a rotting shipwreck among the incessant pummeling of the tide around it.

I make a quick passage through the garden. Go out through the door. Right on the sidewalk, an audacious woman works a flimsy charcoal grill that fills the air with smoky rancidity. These little packing-crate businesses line the streets, unchanging eminders of intransigent unrelenting poverty. The odor and the image sicken me: the woman, stuffed with meat, tossing shredded cabbage in a yellow plastic bowl, serving cups of watery atol to her customers, who eat on  splintery wooden benches and force passersby to detour around them.

“Buenos días, sister,” the woman says to me. She must be Protestant.

The  businesses on the block have increased in my absence. Now one finds a printer, a baker, a coffinmaker, a stationer. The noise, the motion, the tedium of traffic is all enough to make me dizzy. The dust and the exhaust fumes conspire to form withering clouds of suffocation. Propped in doorwells, drunkards sleep in a thicket of their own stink.

I approach the corner with hesitation. There used to be a pharmacy there; now it is Serra’s photo studio, complete with a window display of portraits: newlyweds in strained poses, plump (and mostly naked) babies, debutantes sporting drooping curls and corseted skirts.        

Near the corner, the Mexico Elementary School marked the limit of how far I was once allowed to wander. The headmaster’s daughters, Beatriz and Catalina, lived there. I would see them from afar, walking hand-in-hand with Don Chus, their father. He was a tall man with a regal paunch that spilled over his belt, yet his pants always looked about to drop. He was a man designed in two parts: the top half was bald, bushy-whiskered, and crabby; the bottom half was transplanted from a clown. It was almost as if each half wanted to say of the other, “I don’t know him!” His wife, Doña Estela, was so hefty she looked like a jug with a spare tire around its midriff. The bun of gray hair that sprouted from the back of her tiny head to shade the back of her neck only amplified her odd physique.

One afternoon, we were walking past the school. Doña Estela was in the entrance with her daughters. She and Grandmother chatted as the girls and I looked on in curiosity, imagining what adventures we might have.

Grandmother and Doña Estela agreed on a first visit for me to play with the girls for a couple of hours one afternoon. She adorned my hair with ribbons and I wore my best dress. To demonstrate my cooperation I toted one of my best dolls.  For their part, Catalina and Beatriz were allowed, just this once, to take down the heirloom tea service, which was normally kept at a Do Not Touch height in the cupboard.

We had such fun that Grandmother and Doña Estela, happy with their peaceful days without us bugging them, agreed to the next visit, and then the next, until I would come to their house every day.  My presence in that household chipped away, bit by bit, its rigid character. By the end of the month, I was arriving in the morning and staying till dusk.

On school days, Doña Estela made popsicles to sell to the students. The little balls of frozen, sweetened nance fruit, bars of grated coconut, or the puckering sourness of tamarind yielded their perky aromas and were the stumbling block to my early intentions to make a good impression and behave well, as I was ordered every day.

Since the treats were for sale only, they had the additional allure of being forbidden. So it was that we compulsively stole them. We would promise to eat only a few, but temptation drove us to sin again and again. We opened the freezer and filched the popsicles with stealth, until the whole place was littered with their wax-paper wrappings.

When Doña Estela finally discovered the theft, her enormous body came barreling out of the kitchen, brandishing a wooden soup paddle in menacing arcs. Beatriz, the oldest among us, took her role as our protector seriously; at such times, she grabbed our wrists and jolted us into a furious escape, running for dear life, for the full length of the corridor. Catalina and I, our cheeks red with emotion, cracked up together over the thrill of the escape.

When vacations came, the school itself became the ideal playground. Long halls, patios, blackboards, and colored chalk were all ours for the taking. It was one giant erasable slate on which each day we could etch our fantasies anew. Every twist of its topography hid a secret and a place to hide from the grownups who ruled the rest of the world. There were taboo sanctums, such as the locked offices, or the boys’ bathrooms which, even during vacation, were heavy with the pungent reek of urine. There were scary spots, like “off-limits” passageways and cobwebby, barely-lit rooms where old desks were piled in high stacks.

In the middle of this universe, unpopulated yet endowed with countless doors for our imagination to wander into, silent yet full of voices that whispered in our ears, we snapped the tethers of reality and became the incarnation of our wildest desire.

One day chance rewarded us with the discovery of the most magical place of all: the drama stage and, on it, a scene set. From that day on, no other place existed.

We began our careers as singers, trying out our off-key voices on bits of drinking songs and weepy rancheras borrowed from the radio. We mixed and murdered the lyrics, as we remembered or understood them. In time we became actresses. Then we moved into broader fantasies and ephemeral plots which in time became our substitute lives.

Things began disappearing from Grandmother´s house: necklaces, formal shoes, linens, stockings, lipsticks, hats, and anything else that might serve as a prop to our fantasies. Every performance began with a divvying up of the goods and a debate over who was going to use the black slip that had to be girded from the middle of our flat chests. We also had to decide who would get the fluffy bloomers that rustled when we walked, and who would wear the long strings of fake pearls, the loudest jewelry, the high heels, the green sandals, and the best-fitting hat. We picked the reddest red for our lips, applied rouge in layers, and added beauty marks near our mouths. For the role of leading man, we were naturally short of casting resources; but we at least had an old tie, a beige hat, and a bottle of Old Spice to add ambience.

We crossed the Atlantic among elite society, recreating characters from the black-and-white movies on Channel Three. The transatlantic was, of course, full of handsome gentlemen with whom we invented simmering Hollywood romances. One of us always had to play the leading man.

There was always in this game a devilish seducer. The leading man and his prey practiced a romance with real kisses and caresses. I always wanted to be the lady with Beatriz as my lover, because she kissed so well. Her wet and fierce kisses and full lips had a force that subdued my timidity and sparked my desire. In any case, Catalina was  losing her teeth and I had no great desire to smooch with a toothless lover.

The game was, of course, secret. We knew we were treading forbidden ground, and this gave us a fascination that could not lose its luster. It was not so for the doll my father sent from France that spoke French with the pull of a string, or for the toy dishes, and the little battery-operated blender. Such toys were soon abandoned, tossed here or there with indifference, in favor of our acting game.

The years passed, but the imprint remained. I would forever put love on a stage, wrapped in the intrigue and melodrama of the make-up and attire. I made it a stage like no other, whose execution construction demanded the subtlety of a sinuous curtain. It was a foray into fantasy, a path whose mysteries could course beneath the thin ice of ambiguity and transvestism (was it then that I started loving you?).

I stopped seeing the girls before vacation ended. That day, early in the morning, an unusual activity woke every one. Airplanes flew overhead, the radio cackled on: another government had fallen. The voice urgently announced the curfew. I was not allowed to leave the house for long days that became stagnant. When, after a week, I finally got permission to go out, I took off running to the school. But the gate was locked and no one came to answer my endless knocking and pounding.

By now the rumors had started. Don Chus and his family had gone away; in fact, some were saying, they had run away. “Don Chus,” Grandmother speculated, “was an Arbenzista”—partisans of Jacobo Arbenz were being persecuted during those days, suspected of planning a coup. “That’s why folks never tire of saying that it’s good to steer clear of foolishness” was the only comment I heard from Grandma.

Years went by with no word of the girls. I would discover Beatriz, decades later, reclining in a Turkish bathhouse. She  had turned into an obese woman who, from behind, summoned attention by her very hugeness and rollicking flabbiness. Yet when she rolled over, that old smile, the one worn by the leading man of my youth, redrew itself on her face for me. I felt the pang of the old desire. In her eyes was a spark of taboo camaraderie that briefly rekindled the memory of a precious freedom that, with age, I had unknowingly drowned under compromise.

The house on Willow Avenue now looks feverishly old, as if houses, like people, could become settled and decrepit with age. But it was already falling apart back then, when we lived there. The doors, tunneled and combed by moth larvae, were already patterned into cliff-bound passes and mountain ranges. I gave up studying this miniature geography the day I peeled away at a crack and exposed one of the tubular creepies responsible for this magnificent gravure.

Worn walls, I mused, reveal many layers of paint.

You could peel away this dead skin by trailing a heavy palm over the walls while running down the hall. Each time you did, the wall answered by tickling your hands and yielding a wake of woody confetti.

In the center of the patio, the great hulking pila sink is now mottled with mildew.

With a rod you could trace wild drawings through these spreading nevi, while next to me, Grandmother washed the clothes, wringing them with florid hands, then shaking blasts of fresh rinsewater into my hot face before hanging the garments in the sun.

Yet as soon as the rains came, the house became different.

The afternoon brought a tide of gloom. The corrugated roofing was pelted by thousands of leaden soldiers firing on us from the heavens. My brother and I stayed in, glued to the TV. I would draw on the walls with a pencil, then examine the result. He would regiment hosts of matchsticks into warring armies, without ever giving me a moment of attention. From the kitchen, Grandmother would serve us mashed beans with garlic spread on French rolls and hot chocolate. And so it was that our confinement became our pleasure. With my feet made dirty by my shoeless wandering among the riot of toys on the floor (which I never had to pick up), I was the queen of this little monarchy. In the hair salon, rain seeped in and drops fell without respite.  

We had to find old paint cans to catch the rain that found its way through the roof. You could hear the distinct sound of every drop into the rhythm. They raised a harmony that framed my dawdling, my fantasies, my worlds—all sheltered by the affirming presence of Grandmother, there in the kitchen, or there sewing, or there, at day’s end, waiting for me to join her in bed and tangle my legs around her. Then she would  my nighttime fears with bits of soothing chatter until I wafted over the threshold of slumber.

I reach for the doorknocker and, with certain timidity, knock softly. Round silence answers; I knock again, but harder.

“No one lives there,” calls the newspaper seller from the shade of the tree in front of the house. He hardly needed to bother. I peek through a crack into the ancient parlor, now lit only by a trickle of moribund light that has managed to squeeze through a skylight.

The beauty salon closed one day. The furniture remained, draped under sheets, like ghosts with fathomless pasts. In secret, my brother and I would sneak in to play. We filled the place with commotion as if driven to exorcise its gloom. We took turns spinning each other on the rotating chairs, fired up the massive hairdryers, and wrote in the dust coating the mirrors.

Auntie Ibis was the first to jump ship. One day a mulatto with a French surname showed up and parked his red sports car on the curb in front of the salon. With some excitement, Ibis ran to open the door for the visitor, who came asking for her. He did so again the next day, and the next, and the next. Grandmother grew increasingly uncomfortable over all this. She would not have the mulatto in the house. “Don’t you dare bring him inside,” she scolded Ibis. “Very well, then,” she would give in, “stand around with him, if you must, but outside.” And then, she would  protest again: “As it is, you are practically blocking the doorway! Get inside before you spoil your reputation.”

But Ibis, always the black sheep of the family, paid her no mind. She starting going out with the mulatto and was seen getting into his car even at night, unthinkable for a straight-laced young lady. Occasionally, they even went away together. I overheard the secret that they had even “gone all the way to the beach.” 

Grandmother never came to approve of the visits of “that darkie.” But Ibis was obstinate. She sneaked away, hid herself, whipped up alibis, and lied through her teeth to see him. Grandmother locked horns with Ibis in brawling arguments. The scolding could even culminate in violence; when her anger annealed beyond words, she lifted her ancient switch from its nail and gave Ibis a sound whipping. Nothing riled her like sassiness in her children. But after these drubbings, my aunt gained ground; she got permission to go out, as long as she took along company. This was, almost always, my brother and I. We two used this opportunity that Providence dropped in our laps to get special treatment, such as going to Pecos Bill to gobble hamburgers, fries, and chocolate milkshakes while Ibis and her beau necked nonstop.

Then one day the mulatto didn’t show. Weeks went by with no sign of him. Ibis, in her growing desperation, fell back on the only support she could think of: visits to the occult clinic. Doña Paula, the witch in residence, smoked stinky fat cigars, working them like a flute to summon the mulatto, pausing between puffs to call his name. The two of them even went under the Rodriguitos Bridge and endlessly repeated the litany, “May that rotten son of a bitch come back and throw himself at her feet!”

I came to know every detail of all this. The witch’s sibilant murmur had a way of lingering in women’s ears as they yielded to her with glazed-eyed devotion. I observed their faces with commensurate fascination and tried to assess the turbidity their secrets whipped up in their souls.  I hoped to see, in their countenances, cryptic and forbidden things.

But the day of the mulatto’s return came, as if prophesied. He had come to say good-bye. As this ugly truth become obvious, a scene became inevitable. Well before the mulatto reached the end of the speech he had prepared with obvious care, Ibis began to rock the parlor with her shouts. When we heard this all the way in the kitchen, we went running to witness the commotion. There, with our customers in observance, we found her with puffy eyes, a reddened nose, and her mouth drawn in a savage lament. “Don’t let him go!”  “Don’t let him go!” And then, with resignation, she added, “I’m pregnant.”  

No one knew what to say. My brother and I were driven from the room by a forceful stare from our mother. The few clients who remained in the parlor—those who had not already fled in consternation—had to be shown to the door. The parlor was summarily closed that day, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

The hastily called family conference with the mulatto lasted hours, yet my brother and I discerned nothing about what had really happened. But eventually I learned that the adults in the family were unanimous in their condemnation of the whole affair. My aunt’s reputation was threatened or endangered, so she and the mulatto would just have to marry—that’s all there was to it. The sentence was pronounced over the sinners, to whom it was made clear what was expected of them: that they undergo the necessary formalities in order that people wouldn’t talk. And then, if he didn’t love her, he was free to return home. But the rest of the sentence was non-negotiable.

The neighbors lent Grandmother a hand cooking pots of chicken in onion broth that clouded the house with a bouquet of thyme. They chopped up whole vats of Russian salad with assembly-line efficiency, brandishing their cleavers against parades of carrots, string beans, and potatoes, which they passed through a bath of salt and vinegar on their way to a dousing in mayonnaise.

Ibis looked beautiful the day of her wedding, in spite of the bulge that, six months after conception, was barely concealable within her airy vestments. The party took place in the house, with a lively marimba and the floor carpeted in pine needles. While everyone danced, I hid out under the table and watched the pine needles stick  to everyone’s feet. 

The guests made frequent pilgrimages to the barrel of rum and Coca-Cola, even though this meant a long wait in line to get their share of the well of dark liquid propping a flotilla of ice cubes and lemon wedges. As the afternoon progressed and many became drunk, the laughter and the voices grew increasingly raucous. Some tumbled into a full stupor; my brother in fact would up slumbering under the tables, curled up on a mattress of pine needles.           

It was late at night before the last guests were escorted out. With the house now emptied, Auntie Ibis changed clothes and went out. She looked frail and bewildered, with one hand clutching her little suitcase while the other absently stroked her bulging belly.

The mulatto never loved her. He kept her like some worthless object that no one could want. For him, the obligation to marry her was a humiliation, for which he would make everyone pay, but especially Ibis and the child about to be born to her. His revenge was a violent and endless wickedness which blighted their lives like the tireless pounding of ocean waves on the rocks.

 Aura o las Violetas found a job that paid well enough that she could buy all she had ever wanted. Soon she was hanging out with new friends from outside the neighborhood, daughters of army officers. She developed a creeping contempt for the things of home. She griped that we had no car or telephone, things which were routine for members of that higher class she envied.

She finally left and rented a neat and lovely room in a better guesthouse. Its window had space to nurse a pot of her namesake violets—a touch that she fancied original but which in fact signaled her bond to cloying platitudes. It revealed, in spite of her desire to conceal it, an anguished need for acceptance.  She never figured out that her striving was useless; our society was, and remains, classist and exclusionary.

The parlor shut down soon afterward. Its appearance now appalls me: a form of order preserved under neglect: the mirrors clouded with dust, the perm machine old and disassembled, the heavy-headed dryers like petrified statues, the drawers where skittering roaches have replaced tubes of scented conditioner, and the galling presence of the shampoo sink, lamely retired to a corner.

I was there, back then, when—on my feet behind the counter where we kept the hair care products, the manicure and facial supplies—I saw my brother come in. He stood in the doorway, looking at me through his glasses. He was tense and fatigued, with his backpack still on and his cheeks red. It was almost evening. All afternoon the household had been in a panic because he had not returned from school.

After taking several walks to find him and arguing with Grandmother, Mother had felt bold enough to go over to the little grocery store to borrow their telephone. Normally, we only did this during real emergencies.

“Yes,” they told her when she called the school. “He was given detention, but he left over an hour ago.”

Even so, the hours passed without his return. Grandmother kept saying, “Why did they punish him?  Nasty people . . . How they leave us to wring our hands with worry!”

Mother was going outside, walking all the way to the Cerrito del Carmen Park, and then coming back. She couldn’t calm down. Yet, of all people, it was I, playing in the parlor, fiddling with the contents of the drawers, whom fate appointed to see my brother first. I could hardly believe it: there he was.

Mother’s relief was such that she pounced on him and locked him in a hug while he related how the priest had extended his punishment to the end of the day. It seemed that my brother had refused to give up the postage stamps he had been absently toying with during history class. I listened in on all this and noticed his nervous fingers, stained with ink.

I understood, like no one else could, my brother’s defiance of the priest. At times I felt I was the only one who noticed his retreat into that mysterious private world that only he could inhabit.

He went on about how, with no money to pay for the bus, he had to walk all the way home from the Liceo Guatemala.

“How did you manage to find your way back, all alone, from there?” Mother wanted to know.

I looked at him in awe. I knew I would never be like my brother, defiant and fearless. I would never be able to stand up to the priest, or walk home alone all the way from the Liceo.  Such stunts were beyond my doing. And yet, I began to love him with such tenderness, that even though I was younger than he, I wanted to protect him, because behind his boldness, behind his craven drive for independence, I saw that vulnerability that marks pure beings, those who find it difficult to make transactions with life.

From then on, he was my hero. And beginning with that moment that I saw him framed in the doorway, where I can still see him behind his thick glasses, triumphant in his misadventure at school, spitting in the face of all authority, a million images of his life click past in galloping succession.

Twenty years have passed since the sluice shut on our shared words, leaving a dry channel. It was a strange ending, one in which masons stirred sand and cement with a paddle. When they flung it to the floor, it made a noise that rattled my teeth.

“Will they ever be finished?” I wondered.

Meanwhile, the bricks sat nearby, stacked, each awaiting its turn to join the wall that was being built. For your friends at the medical school your coffin was almost too heavy to bear.

No. I did not want to return; yet I did so, and a year has already passed. I bear the exhaustion of one who has returned from a very long trip. I wear a layer of dust and lug a chest of strange things from different places. And everyone sees in me a stranger. But while I sit up at midnight, in the midst of a chorus of croaking frogs, whose guttural mating chant recalls a tribe of hunters around a bonfire trading stories and epics, in this moment, I feel I belong.

From Con Pasión Absoluta.  © Carol Zardetto. By arrangement with the author. Translation ©2014 by  D. W. Coop Allred. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

Days drift away slowly and quietly deep inside Guatemala. No inner musings. No pondering or ideas. Just a numbing silence, which reminds me of Buddhists and their thoughts about beginners’ minds that are forever capable of wonder.

There’s something here that eludes my grasp . . . But in the snapshot instant when the plunging frigidity of Lake Atitlán pitches me into the arms of another reality, I suddenly understand. Perhaps the Mayas really do suspend this land from a tenuous thread of magic. Perhaps we tread irreverently over an altar chock full of incense and ritual flowers, candles of jaundiced tallow and cries from hoarse, inexhaustible throats that jangle one’s nerves and even rattle one’s bones. A land woven on ageless looms, made not of soil, but from pieces of cloth on which the design of the universe is painted in ululating color.

The volcanoes were the first thing I saw, on that dawn straining through the breath-frosted window of the airplane. The tips of their perfect cones broke through the cover of clouds as if to drink in the rarefied air above it. The very irregularity of the countryside awoke me from the moody sourness that had ridden me all night. There was fuming Pacaya; then there was serene Agua, tall and massive, like a big mother. Further ahead, Tajumulco and Tacaná . . . I was about to land in Guatemala, a place to which I never wanted to return.

 I see myself with the eyes of remembrance. Retracing my steps, I am again present in the moment I choose to call “back then.” And since I am now “back then,” the past becomes present. What game is this?

Stamped passport in hand, I step out and feel suddenly overwhelmed by the street. I regret not having told anyone of my arrival, since I am loaded down with baggage and  harassed by scary fellows doing all they can to get my attention with a cacophony of mixed shouts. All talk at once, offering to summon me a taxi. Finally I give in, reasoning that the heaviness of my luggage would dissuade anyone from running off with it.

Too many ramshackle taxis line up; few tourists exit the bowels of the airport. After some heated haggling over the fare, I am overcome by the distance that my absence has carried me: the taxi drivers quote their fares in dollars now, but even in dollars they seem overblown. I express my doubts about the price. He replies with a bitter remark and I receive that as an unofficial welcome to Guatemala.

The streets open in front of my eyes, which see too much at once: billboards overrun  with English phrases, with an ugliness which bowls over the senses; people dressed in the screaming colors that I am no longer used to, but which match the grating sunlight; buses vomiting clouds of smoke, crammed with passengers oozing from the doors into the path of cars and motorcycles, swarming like flies. A din of noise and disorder.

I suddenly realize that coming back is impossible.

There is no going back to the way things were, and, indeed, we are not the way we were. The streets I knew as a child are buried underneath these alien ones, too small to contain the chaos that fills them. Sepia-colored dust stains everything. The face I wore back then is lost too, under the new lines that mark my expression, behind this other gaze on things.

I go in and out of memories as one fighting to stay awake.      

We lived in Zone 6. I had all I desired,  as I rode my tricycle in endless circles over the red and yellow tiles of my mother’s beauty parlor on 15th Avenue.

She and my aunts cut hair, filed nails, and sculpted permanents on the ladies’ heads with an electric gadget. I loved to hide my own head under the hairdryers and feel my hair waving with rapturous abandon. Back on my tricycle, I would roll over the clumps of cuttings on the floor. I took care to flatten each little peak as I half listened to the chatter of the ladies. My happy intimacy was frequently interrupted by the robust laughter of Auntie Ibis and the bits of trifling chatter from the women.  Added to what I heard in Grandmother’s kitchen, those loose threads were slowly knitting the strands of my world.

Fashion ordained complicated coiffures that had to be held up by a big bunch of hairpins and lots of spray. I never ceased to be surprised by the monstrous faces of women with their teased hair standing up, the giant heads they had to bear when in curlers, the unnerving odor of hair tints and permanents. But there was nothing I hated more than the hairstyle called the “Italian boy.” The long and beautiful manes of hair, the splendid braids, would disappear with a blow of scissors, and the nude and whitish necks would be shaved, leaving bits of hair looking like the legs of a dozen flies trapped in a milk bowl.

I loved the bounce of soft curls, the rose-scent of the manicure cream, the nail polish that I tried out on my own fingers and toes, which betrayed the amateur manicurist in me.

Activity at the salon varied with the calendar: the Candelaria, carnival, Holy Week festivals, graduation week, first communions . . . and, of course, Christmas, when we had todelay dinner so that my aunts could join us. Still warm from the hairdryer or with still-sticky gel in their hair, the lingering clients would leave on the run to get home before midnight.

My aunts were teenagers then. The neighborhood boys were always on the prowl, seeking to catch their eyes. My aunts obliged them by standing in the doorway “to watch passersby” (or so they said) with their young bodies sweating out the lethargy and heat of the afternoon.

Each of them had her own clientele. The most chatty and gossipy women went straight to Auntie Ibis. Fibbing and outgoing with hair dyed red, she favored skin-tight attire and also smoked. New or timid clients, or more serious ones, sought out Auntie Aura-or-the-Violets. With her slender, dexterous hands and long nails, she could, like no one else, convert mounds of amorphous hair into splendid “buildings.” Quiet and slight, wrapped in a long ebony mane, she always seemed a little absentminded, as if nothing could perturb her.

My mother did special treatments and watched the till. Even so, my aunts’ purses filled to the brim with a rain of coins. I was always noting  this, since they often shared them with me. I could then run to the corner store. There café au lait bonbons, honey-filled butterscotch, sugar cookies, flaky tortes, and other treats were always waiting for me.

Mother and her sisters weere all christened in honor of the heroines from the novels Grandmother used to read. Sitting in the corridor she re-read those novels endlessly, never failing to cry at the right moments. In an effort to console her, I would tell her, “but Abuelita, those stories are not real.” She would then retort, with a glassy stare, “believe it or not, Irenita, these stories happen to real people all the time.” Her collection of books boasted, at one point, the works of Vargas Vila (who was banned in those days), whence came the given name Aura-or-the-Violets for my Auntie Viole, the one with the long nails.

The taxi driver cuts my train of thought with his small talk. From the window of the car, I see the city’s Central Plaza. It looks forlorn without its iron lamps and old benches. Now it’s just a lake of liquid cement over which the Guatemalan flag, in faded blue, flutters wildly alone in the wind. From the radio a commentator nasally recounts the news. I don’t speak a word, so the taxi driver looks for a new tack. He complains about the government. Then he says he is curious about something. Am I from here?  No, I answer, a lie that does nothing to encourage further exchange. Just then, we enter the Cerrito del Carmen neighborhood. The hills of the old park are now bare and choking among the crowded streets.

It was here that they took my picture with that old doll I used to have. It was a present from my father, one of many that always came at Christmas. He sent them with his secretary, Don Carlos, a nervous little mouse of a man. Giant dolls in big boxes. I could hardly play with them, so, year after year, their static presence increased the silent population inside the armoires. I remember how I was back then, skinny and pale, like I appear in a silly photo they took one day, trying to get me to mount the photographer’s hobby horse. On Sundays kids would climb into its saddle, their ankles stuffed into shiny boots and their round noggins into wide-brimmed vaquero hats. But not me—no, I just clung tighter to Auntie Ibis’s leg. Clever and ingratiating, the photographer persuaded her to pose me with the big doll that they thought I liked so much. So, we sat down on the grass. I was squinting from the sun. The luminous and transparent blades of grass stamped my memory with the perfume of green, sweet, vegetable ink.

On the hills of the Cerrito del Carmen the tall grass my mother used to call “illusions” sways with the wind.  I can still feel how the blades would under the old cardboard pieces we used to toboggan down the hills. Grandmother’s dog would go with us. Chocolate, as we called him, was the only dog she ever allowed in her house full of canaries.

Chocolate would bark at my brother and me as he watched us hurtle to the bottom, where the descent left us sprawled in the dust. There, he always caught up with us, licking away at our ears and noses, tickling and wet. Our giggling and his barking sealed us off in privacy in a place that was yet very public. The wind rocked our kites with muted insouciance. From below we could watch their fragile, crepe wings twitch in the permeating blueness of the November skies. The kite looked back at us with its fixed stare. With our backs wedded to the ground, the afternoons sped past.

The taxi turns onto the Avenue, and then flies down it.

Not just any avenue, mind you, but the one we call Willow Avenue even though the willows are long gone. I used to love traipsing over the cracked sidewalks, dodging the crevasses which were the riverlike abode of lizards, or wrinkle lines in the face of some cosmic monster with the world in its embrace, or even the partitions in a vast pineapple upside-down cake over which I glided, taking care not to fall over the unsteady cliffs into the abyss below. Happiness in those days was easy, and not a dubious promised land.

My old trike was a hand-me-down from my bother. Mother told me once that when they finally bought me a new one of my own, I no longer wanted either, the old one or the new. I have no memory of the new one; maybe it was all just some made-up story, the kind that always starts with “when you were a child . . . ” but for which we never achieve confirmation. Whatever it was, Mother inadvertently smothered the delight of a unique tricycle which at times had even been a horse, and which displayed a golden drop on the chipped steering wheel.

The streetlight brings us to a stop, right in front of the house where we used to live. I peer out pf the taxi window.  On the red door, the old iron knocker with its fingers gnarled into rings hangs with tireless loyalty.  At night, that door at the end of the long and dark corridor, with a beam crossed over to secure it, would put an end to parties, visits, and romances. It was a curfew. Minutes later, the lights would go out and the house retreated into its envelope of shadows.

At that hour, bundled under night shawls with Grandmother, I would give an eager ear to the stories she loved to retell. There was the ciguanaba, the horse-faced river medusa who avenged women by pursuing the rakes who jilted them. There was the llorona, the weeping spirit who haunted the washerwomen of the river because she believed that women  like them had stolen her own children. There was the cadejo, the amber-eyed canine caretaker of drunkards, whom he led home after they staggered out of the cantinas. There was even the sombrerón, a gnome who serenaded long-haired women in order to seduce them. He made them wither to death, and then escaped, leaving a trace of his visit by braiding the manes of the horses in the pastures.

I would listen to her for hours, with bottomless patience, and revisit again and again those barely trodden estates that I had come to know from memory. Paths through a lost world with a watershed into my mind.

“Grandma, if they are real, why don’t they come out anymore?”

“Because of the electric light, my dear. It scared them away.”

She then ruminated for some time, unintelligible phrases that spelled her disagreement with reality. “Nothing works these days,” she kept saying. “Everything is  upside-down.”

The taxi reaches my destination in the Parroquia District. The heavy red block letters shout the presence of the Rondolino Hardware Store. It is here that my mother lives with her other family.

I never thought I would come back. When I left, it was forever. I was dressed in my wedding gown, just as Mother wished. Years later, she thanked me for this allowance: to see me walk out of her house in the white wedding gown. I laugh at myself: luck was on my side, I learned about delusion. Marriage could be full of emptiness, a space full of nothing.

And so I had come full circle. I fled this house and this country, only to return to this country and to this house—Don Asunción’s gloomy fiefdom.

One day when I was five and gamboling about the street in front of my house, an old woman, obviously a beggar, came up to me. Her face was etched in deep folds that at first gave me a shock. Then, this gave way to fascination at her toothless gums. She spoke of the approaching Christmas, and invited me to go with her to play with many children. She spoke of a room full of presents. The falseness of all this should have been evident even to me, since she herself was stamped with misery and filth in the extreme. But I believed it nonetheless. She offered me a hand with long blackened nails, which I accepted without hesitation.

Grandmother used to fix lunch for some traffic cops from a nearby precinct. One of them happened to spot me with the old woman. After entering the house and requesting his meal, he casually mentioned this. Grandmother was alarmed; the policeman, suddenly aware of what this meant, left his soup on the table and took off on his bicycle in a furious effort to find me.

I often wondered how things would have turned out had he not rescued me that afternoon. Perhaps the wretch really would have turned me into soap, as Grandmother insisted. In any case, that same policeman wound up marrying my mother. It was all rather paradoxical, when I came to think of it, how on that day near Christmas my rescuer would be Don Asunción, who later would shatter the crystal cocoon of my protected childhood.

I get out of the taxi feeling insecure. The jumble of suitcases taxes the dignity I want to amplify at the threshold. I am gravid with anticipation, and after an almost interminable moment, Emiliana, a servant with many years working for Mother, answers. She flies into a grand fuss on seeing me, sending two parrots into a commotion of their own, vexing the silence of the patio. She lets go a nervous laugh and, still amazed at the sight of me, rubs my arm with enthusiasm. Then she remembers to cover her mouth, lest I count the teeth now missing from it. But to me, it’s more evident how she has lost the bulk and vigor of her arms, chest, and back. She has shrunk inside a thick bag of wrinkled hide.

I ask for Mother. She answers in Spanish with her heavy Tzutuhil accent, which alternately shortens or whistles words.  She proffers up myriad excuses, from which I finally surmise that Mother is not in, that she went to bring Grandmother home from the hospital.

“Doña Toya can stand it no longer,” Emiliana warns me in her customary melodramatic tone. “She wishes to die in her own bed.”

In the end, she brings ushers me in and offers me coffee.

I almost recoil from this house, alien as it is without Mother’s presence. If not for the seriousness of Grandmother’s condition, I would not even be here. Of her I had nothing left but her last photograph.  She was sitting in the parlor, reading a book with such elegant poise that you would think that this is how she wanted to be remembered. Her hair was neatly cut and curled; her dress was fresh and flowery. Her long earrings, her crimson lips, and her sharply-defined eyebrows. That is how I recalled her: a svelte presence emanating benevolent and clear order to the world. All this belied the troubled stories told about her. The passionate woman, the rigid woman, the violent woman . . . those were all images of a stranger.

Grandmother had sent me the photo with the customary scolding. Why was I so far away? Didn’t I realize I would never see her alive again? And the same question I could never answer, not even when I asked myself: why do people have to leave?  I never heeded any of this; but in the end, it was her that brought me finally back. Through the thread of the telephone line, Mother’s voice warned me: “If you don’t come now, you’ll never see her again.”

The house is silent, but the smell of food cooking is everywhere. How odd it is, I think, that women cook all morning: homemade entrées, sauces of every permutation, a routine that lasts half a day or more. The benign kingdom of women is in the kitchen.

Don Asunción shows up, his figure framed in the jamb of the parlor door.

“Have you seen your Mother?” he asks me without even the barest of salutations.

Confused, I get up from the armchair I had found rest in. I remember—though the memory is indistinct, as if coming from a distant planet—that even before going away I had hardly spoken to him in years. Words between us are scarce and numb.  All I am able to mutter, dryly as I could have wanted: “No, I haven’t seen her.”

His handshake is an exercise in forced courtesy. The hand is limp, callused, and dirty. He parts from my presence more abruptly that he might have wanted. Then he saunters to the kitchen and shouts something at Emiliana; I imagine him unloading on to her the awkwardness he feels, the answerless questions, the sourness occasioned by my presence. I am taken aback by his appearance: small and skinny, white-haired, with thick glasses that make his eyes overblown and prying. He was once a Tarzan of the tropics: swarthy, vulgarly muscular, prone to show off his strength by picking up and carrying others. He toted my mother over his shoulder throughout the house while she, from on high, batted the air with her legs and whipped it with indignant protest.

Son of an Italian peasant who came to the Americas at the beginning of the last century, Asunción passed his childhood in privation. His father traveled often to the great farmlands of the coastal plains in search of opportunity. His absences were extended and hard, since there was a chronic lack of everything in the house. Asunción’s mother had to figure out how to survive with the children until his return. But one day his father took another woman and never came back.

Asunción, as the eldest, felt it was his duty and privilege to be the  substitute father, although he was a mere adolescent. To support his family, he sold bread from his bicycle. He balanced a big basket of his wares on his head, a chore few would consider manly; probably, it shamed him. But he idolized his mother. When she became deathly sick, while still young, she became sacred. There was nothing that Asunción would not have done for her.

When she died, Asunción left the house to his brothers and rented a dirt-floored room near the train tracks, in a quarter of town haunted by the cheapest and most pathetic prostitutes.

But he was not there for the women. He bought an encyclopedia and read it at night under a dim lone bulb. He filled himself with knowledge and assimilated it in an original fashion. From all this he dreamed up apocalyptic universes, eccentric perspectives on the world, wild but oblique observation on no small number of things.

This newfound wisdom gave him a new sense of who he was. With insufferable authority, he expounded on his theories, in all their layered detail, to anyone who stumbled into his trap. Anything he might overhear could trigger him. Once started, he allowed no interruptions, nor did he mind, for his listeners’ sake, the clock.

Destiny marked him for a career in the police barracks, and for this Asunción never forgot his lucky star. The police force existed for his sake, to establish his worthiness before the world. Vested in his smart uniform and this authority, Don Asunción discovered joy insurmountable.

My mind drifts back outside, to the street and its throb of activity. Now that Don Asunción is here, his presence transforms this house and thickens the atmosphere within it. And that old feeling comes back, impelling me toward the door with an urge to leave. That is probably the real reason I married. That union was doomed, and I knew it. But it was, if nothing else, my ticket out of this house.

Instinct prompts me to squelch imaginings about things that cannot be resolved with proper logic, thoughts which can wear you out with their dead weight. It is a hot day, and this place is very quiet. The notion of that street lying beyond the iron door exerts a seductive tug. The house I grew up in is just over there, at the end of the next block, as helpless as a rotting shipwreck among the incessant pummeling of the tide around it.

I make a quick passage through the garden. Go out through the door. Right on the sidewalk, an audacious woman works a flimsy charcoal grill that fills the air with smoky rancidity. These little packing-crate businesses line the streets, unchanging eminders of intransigent unrelenting poverty. The odor and the image sicken me: the woman, stuffed with meat, tossing shredded cabbage in a yellow plastic bowl, serving cups of watery atol to her customers, who eat on  splintery wooden benches and force passersby to detour around them.

“Buenos días, sister,” the woman says to me. She must be Protestant.

The  businesses on the block have increased in my absence. Now one finds a printer, a baker, a coffinmaker, a stationer. The noise, the motion, the tedium of traffic is all enough to make me dizzy. The dust and the exhaust fumes conspire to form withering clouds of suffocation. Propped in doorwells, drunkards sleep in a thicket of their own stink.

I approach the corner with hesitation. There used to be a pharmacy there; now it is Serra’s photo studio, complete with a window display of portraits: newlyweds in strained poses, plump (and mostly naked) babies, debutantes sporting drooping curls and corseted skirts.        

Near the corner, the Mexico Elementary School marked the limit of how far I was once allowed to wander. The headmaster’s daughters, Beatriz and Catalina, lived there. I would see them from afar, walking hand-in-hand with Don Chus, their father. He was a tall man with a regal paunch that spilled over his belt, yet his pants always looked about to drop. He was a man designed in two parts: the top half was bald, bushy-whiskered, and crabby; the bottom half was transplanted from a clown. It was almost as if each half wanted to say of the other, “I don’t know him!” His wife, Doña Estela, was so hefty she looked like a jug with a spare tire around its midriff. The bun of gray hair that sprouted from the back of her tiny head to shade the back of her neck only amplified her odd physique.

One afternoon, we were walking past the school. Doña Estela was in the entrance with her daughters. She and Grandmother chatted as the girls and I looked on in curiosity, imagining what adventures we might have.

Grandmother and Doña Estela agreed on a first visit for me to play with the girls for a couple of hours one afternoon. She adorned my hair with ribbons and I wore my best dress. To demonstrate my cooperation I toted one of my best dolls.  For their part, Catalina and Beatriz were allowed, just this once, to take down the heirloom tea service, which was normally kept at a Do Not Touch height in the cupboard.

We had such fun that Grandmother and Doña Estela, happy with their peaceful days without us bugging them, agreed to the next visit, and then the next, until I would come to their house every day.  My presence in that household chipped away, bit by bit, its rigid character. By the end of the month, I was arriving in the morning and staying till dusk.

On school days, Doña Estela made popsicles to sell to the students. The little balls of frozen, sweetened nance fruit, bars of grated coconut, or the puckering sourness of tamarind yielded their perky aromas and were the stumbling block to my early intentions to make a good impression and behave well, as I was ordered every day.

Since the treats were for sale only, they had the additional allure of being forbidden. So it was that we compulsively stole them. We would promise to eat only a few, but temptation drove us to sin again and again. We opened the freezer and filched the popsicles with stealth, until the whole place was littered with their wax-paper wrappings.

When Doña Estela finally discovered the theft, her enormous body came barreling out of the kitchen, brandishing a wooden soup paddle in menacing arcs. Beatriz, the oldest among us, took her role as our protector seriously; at such times, she grabbed our wrists and jolted us into a furious escape, running for dear life, for the full length of the corridor. Catalina and I, our cheeks red with emotion, cracked up together over the thrill of the escape.

When vacations came, the school itself became the ideal playground. Long halls, patios, blackboards, and colored chalk were all ours for the taking. It was one giant erasable slate on which each day we could etch our fantasies anew. Every twist of its topography hid a secret and a place to hide from the grownups who ruled the rest of the world. There were taboo sanctums, such as the locked offices, or the boys’ bathrooms which, even during vacation, were heavy with the pungent reek of urine. There were scary spots, like “off-limits” passageways and cobwebby, barely-lit rooms where old desks were piled in high stacks.

In the middle of this universe, unpopulated yet endowed with countless doors for our imagination to wander into, silent yet full of voices that whispered in our ears, we snapped the tethers of reality and became the incarnation of our wildest desire.

One day chance rewarded us with the discovery of the most magical place of all: the drama stage and, on it, a scene set. From that day on, no other place existed.

We began our careers as singers, trying out our off-key voices on bits of drinking songs and weepy rancheras borrowed from the radio. We mixed and murdered the lyrics, as we remembered or understood them. In time we became actresses. Then we moved into broader fantasies and ephemeral plots which in time became our substitute lives.

Things began disappearing from Grandmother´s house: necklaces, formal shoes, linens, stockings, lipsticks, hats, and anything else that might serve as a prop to our fantasies. Every performance began with a divvying up of the goods and a debate over who was going to use the black slip that had to be girded from the middle of our flat chests. We also had to decide who would get the fluffy bloomers that rustled when we walked, and who would wear the long strings of fake pearls, the loudest jewelry, the high heels, the green sandals, and the best-fitting hat. We picked the reddest red for our lips, applied rouge in layers, and added beauty marks near our mouths. For the role of leading man, we were naturally short of casting resources; but we at least had an old tie, a beige hat, and a bottle of Old Spice to add ambience.

We crossed the Atlantic among elite society, recreating characters from the black-and-white movies on Channel Three. The transatlantic was, of course, full of handsome gentlemen with whom we invented simmering Hollywood romances. One of us always had to play the leading man.

There was always in this game a devilish seducer. The leading man and his prey practiced a romance with real kisses and caresses. I always wanted to be the lady with Beatriz as my lover, because she kissed so well. Her wet and fierce kisses and full lips had a force that subdued my timidity and sparked my desire. In any case, Catalina was  losing her teeth and I had no great desire to smooch with a toothless lover.

The game was, of course, secret. We knew we were treading forbidden ground, and this gave us a fascination that could not lose its luster. It was not so for the doll my father sent from France that spoke French with the pull of a string, or for the toy dishes, and the little battery-operated blender. Such toys were soon abandoned, tossed here or there with indifference, in favor of our acting game.

The years passed, but the imprint remained. I would forever put love on a stage, wrapped in the intrigue and melodrama of the make-up and attire. I made it a stage like no other, whose execution construction demanded the subtlety of a sinuous curtain. It was a foray into fantasy, a path whose mysteries could course beneath the thin ice of ambiguity and transvestism (was it then that I started loving you?).

I stopped seeing the girls before vacation ended. That day, early in the morning, an unusual activity woke every one. Airplanes flew overhead, the radio cackled on: another government had fallen. The voice urgently announced the curfew. I was not allowed to leave the house for long days that became stagnant. When, after a week, I finally got permission to go out, I took off running to the school. But the gate was locked and no one came to answer my endless knocking and pounding.

By now the rumors had started. Don Chus and his family had gone away; in fact, some were saying, they had run away. “Don Chus,” Grandmother speculated, “was an Arbenzista”—partisans of Jacobo Arbenz were being persecuted during those days, suspected of planning a coup. “That’s why folks never tire of saying that it’s good to steer clear of foolishness” was the only comment I heard from Grandma.

Years went by with no word of the girls. I would discover Beatriz, decades later, reclining in a Turkish bathhouse. She  had turned into an obese woman who, from behind, summoned attention by her very hugeness and rollicking flabbiness. Yet when she rolled over, that old smile, the one worn by the leading man of my youth, redrew itself on her face for me. I felt the pang of the old desire. In her eyes was a spark of taboo camaraderie that briefly rekindled the memory of a precious freedom that, with age, I had unknowingly drowned under compromise.

The house on Willow Avenue now looks feverishly old, as if houses, like people, could become settled and decrepit with age. But it was already falling apart back then, when we lived there. The doors, tunneled and combed by moth larvae, were already patterned into cliff-bound passes and mountain ranges. I gave up studying this miniature geography the day I peeled away at a crack and exposed one of the tubular creepies responsible for this magnificent gravure.

Worn walls, I mused, reveal many layers of paint.

You could peel away this dead skin by trailing a heavy palm over the walls while running down the hall. Each time you did, the wall answered by tickling your hands and yielding a wake of woody confetti.

In the center of the patio, the great hulking pila sink is now mottled with mildew.

With a rod you could trace wild drawings through these spreading nevi, while next to me, Grandmother washed the clothes, wringing them with florid hands, then shaking blasts of fresh rinsewater into my hot face before hanging the garments in the sun.

Yet as soon as the rains came, the house became different.

The afternoon brought a tide of gloom. The corrugated roofing was pelted by thousands of leaden soldiers firing on us from the heavens. My brother and I stayed in, glued to the TV. I would draw on the walls with a pencil, then examine the result. He would regiment hosts of matchsticks into warring armies, without ever giving me a moment of attention. From the kitchen, Grandmother would serve us mashed beans with garlic spread on French rolls and hot chocolate. And so it was that our confinement became our pleasure. With my feet made dirty by my shoeless wandering among the riot of toys on the floor (which I never had to pick up), I was the queen of this little monarchy. In the hair salon, rain seeped in and drops fell without respite.  

We had to find old paint cans to catch the rain that found its way through the roof. You could hear the distinct sound of every drop into the rhythm. They raised a harmony that framed my dawdling, my fantasies, my worlds—all sheltered by the affirming presence of Grandmother, there in the kitchen, or there sewing, or there, at day’s end, waiting for me to join her in bed and tangle my legs around her. Then she would  my nighttime fears with bits of soothing chatter until I wafted over the threshold of slumber.

I reach for the doorknocker and, with certain timidity, knock softly. Round silence answers; I knock again, but harder.

“No one lives there,” calls the newspaper seller from the shade of the tree in front of the house. He hardly needed to bother. I peek through a crack into the ancient parlor, now lit only by a trickle of moribund light that has managed to squeeze through a skylight.

The beauty salon closed one day. The furniture remained, draped under sheets, like ghosts with fathomless pasts. In secret, my brother and I would sneak in to play. We filled the place with commotion as if driven to exorcise its gloom. We took turns spinning each other on the rotating chairs, fired up the massive hairdryers, and wrote in the dust coating the mirrors.

Auntie Ibis was the first to jump ship. One day a mulatto with a French surname showed up and parked his red sports car on the curb in front of the salon. With some excitement, Ibis ran to open the door for the visitor, who came asking for her. He did so again the next day, and the next, and the next. Grandmother grew increasingly uncomfortable over all this. She would not have the mulatto in the house. “Don’t you dare bring him inside,” she scolded Ibis. “Very well, then,” she would give in, “stand around with him, if you must, but outside.” And then, she would  protest again: “As it is, you are practically blocking the doorway! Get inside before you spoil your reputation.”

But Ibis, always the black sheep of the family, paid her no mind. She starting going out with the mulatto and was seen getting into his car even at night, unthinkable for a straight-laced young lady. Occasionally, they even went away together. I overheard the secret that they had even “gone all the way to the beach.” 

Grandmother never came to approve of the visits of “that darkie.” But Ibis was obstinate. She sneaked away, hid herself, whipped up alibis, and lied through her teeth to see him. Grandmother locked horns with Ibis in brawling arguments. The scolding could even culminate in violence; when her anger annealed beyond words, she lifted her ancient switch from its nail and gave Ibis a sound whipping. Nothing riled her like sassiness in her children. But after these drubbings, my aunt gained ground; she got permission to go out, as long as she took along company. This was, almost always, my brother and I. We two used this opportunity that Providence dropped in our laps to get special treatment, such as going to Pecos Bill to gobble hamburgers, fries, and chocolate milkshakes while Ibis and her beau necked nonstop.

Then one day the mulatto didn’t show. Weeks went by with no sign of him. Ibis, in her growing desperation, fell back on the only support she could think of: visits to the occult clinic. Doña Paula, the witch in residence, smoked stinky fat cigars, working them like a flute to summon the mulatto, pausing between puffs to call his name. The two of them even went under the Rodriguitos Bridge and endlessly repeated the litany, “May that rotten son of a bitch come back and throw himself at her feet!”

I came to know every detail of all this. The witch’s sibilant murmur had a way of lingering in women’s ears as they yielded to her with glazed-eyed devotion. I observed their faces with commensurate fascination and tried to assess the turbidity their secrets whipped up in their souls.  I hoped to see, in their countenances, cryptic and forbidden things.

But the day of the mulatto’s return came, as if prophesied. He had come to say good-bye. As this ugly truth become obvious, a scene became inevitable. Well before the mulatto reached the end of the speech he had prepared with obvious care, Ibis began to rock the parlor with her shouts. When we heard this all the way in the kitchen, we went running to witness the commotion. There, with our customers in observance, we found her with puffy eyes, a reddened nose, and her mouth drawn in a savage lament. “Don’t let him go!”  “Don’t let him go!” And then, with resignation, she added, “I’m pregnant.”  

No one knew what to say. My brother and I were driven from the room by a forceful stare from our mother. The few clients who remained in the parlor—those who had not already fled in consternation—had to be shown to the door. The parlor was summarily closed that day, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

The hastily called family conference with the mulatto lasted hours, yet my brother and I discerned nothing about what had really happened. But eventually I learned that the adults in the family were unanimous in their condemnation of the whole affair. My aunt’s reputation was threatened or endangered, so she and the mulatto would just have to marry—that’s all there was to it. The sentence was pronounced over the sinners, to whom it was made clear what was expected of them: that they undergo the necessary formalities in order that people wouldn’t talk. And then, if he didn’t love her, he was free to return home. But the rest of the sentence was non-negotiable.

The neighbors lent Grandmother a hand cooking pots of chicken in onion broth that clouded the house with a bouquet of thyme. They chopped up whole vats of Russian salad with assembly-line efficiency, brandishing their cleavers against parades of carrots, string beans, and potatoes, which they passed through a bath of salt and vinegar on their way to a dousing in mayonnaise.

Ibis looked beautiful the day of her wedding, in spite of the bulge that, six months after conception, was barely concealable within her airy vestments. The party took place in the house, with a lively marimba and the floor carpeted in pine needles. While everyone danced, I hid out under the table and watched the pine needles stick  to everyone’s feet. 

The guests made frequent pilgrimages to the barrel of rum and Coca-Cola, even though this meant a long wait in line to get their share of the well of dark liquid propping a flotilla of ice cubes and lemon wedges. As the afternoon progressed and many became drunk, the laughter and the voices grew increasingly raucous. Some tumbled into a full stupor; my brother in fact would up slumbering under the tables, curled up on a mattress of pine needles.           

It was late at night before the last guests were escorted out. With the house now emptied, Auntie Ibis changed clothes and went out. She looked frail and bewildered, with one hand clutching her little suitcase while the other absently stroked her bulging belly.

The mulatto never loved her. He kept her like some worthless object that no one could want. For him, the obligation to marry her was a humiliation, for which he would make everyone pay, but especially Ibis and the child about to be born to her. His revenge was a violent and endless wickedness which blighted their lives like the tireless pounding of ocean waves on the rocks.

 Aura o las Violetas found a job that paid well enough that she could buy all she had ever wanted. Soon she was hanging out with new friends from outside the neighborhood, daughters of army officers. She developed a creeping contempt for the things of home. She griped that we had no car or telephone, things which were routine for members of that higher class she envied.

She finally left and rented a neat and lovely room in a better guesthouse. Its window had space to nurse a pot of her namesake violets—a touch that she fancied original but which in fact signaled her bond to cloying platitudes. It revealed, in spite of her desire to conceal it, an anguished need for acceptance.  She never figured out that her striving was useless; our society was, and remains, classist and exclusionary.

The parlor shut down soon afterward. Its appearance now appalls me: a form of order preserved under neglect: the mirrors clouded with dust, the perm machine old and disassembled, the heavy-headed dryers like petrified statues, the drawers where skittering roaches have replaced tubes of scented conditioner, and the galling presence of the shampoo sink, lamely retired to a corner.

I was there, back then, when—on my feet behind the counter where we kept the hair care products, the manicure and facial supplies—I saw my brother come in. He stood in the doorway, looking at me through his glasses. He was tense and fatigued, with his backpack still on and his cheeks red. It was almost evening. All afternoon the household had been in a panic because he had not returned from school.

After taking several walks to find him and arguing with Grandmother, Mother had felt bold enough to go over to the little grocery store to borrow their telephone. Normally, we only did this during real emergencies.

“Yes,” they told her when she called the school. “He was given detention, but he left over an hour ago.”

Even so, the hours passed without his return. Grandmother kept saying, “Why did they punish him?  Nasty people . . . How they leave us to wring our hands with worry!”

Mother was going outside, walking all the way to the Cerrito del Carmen Park, and then coming back. She couldn’t calm down. Yet, of all people, it was I, playing in the parlor, fiddling with the contents of the drawers, whom fate appointed to see my brother first. I could hardly believe it: there he was.

Mother’s relief was such that she pounced on him and locked him in a hug while he related how the priest had extended his punishment to the end of the day. It seemed that my brother had refused to give up the postage stamps he had been absently toying with during history class. I listened in on all this and noticed his nervous fingers, stained with ink.

I understood, like no one else could, my brother’s defiance of the priest. At times I felt I was the only one who noticed his retreat into that mysterious private world that only he could inhabit.

He went on about how, with no money to pay for the bus, he had to walk all the way home from the Liceo Guatemala.

“How did you manage to find your way back, all alone, from there?” Mother wanted to know.

I looked at him in awe. I knew I would never be like my brother, defiant and fearless. I would never be able to stand up to the priest, or walk home alone all the way from the Liceo.  Such stunts were beyond my doing. And yet, I began to love him with such tenderness, that even though I was younger than he, I wanted to protect him, because behind his boldness, behind his craven drive for independence, I saw that vulnerability that marks pure beings, those who find it difficult to make transactions with life.

From then on, he was my hero. And beginning with that moment that I saw him framed in the doorway, where I can still see him behind his thick glasses, triumphant in his misadventure at school, spitting in the face of all authority, a million images of his life click past in galloping succession.

Twenty years have passed since the sluice shut on our shared words, leaving a dry channel. It was a strange ending, one in which masons stirred sand and cement with a paddle. When they flung it to the floor, it made a noise that rattled my teeth.

“Will they ever be finished?” I wondered.

Meanwhile, the bricks sat nearby, stacked, each awaiting its turn to join the wall that was being built. For your friends at the medical school your coffin was almost too heavy to bear.

No. I did not want to return; yet I did so, and a year has already passed. I bear the exhaustion of one who has returned from a very long trip. I wear a layer of dust and lug a chest of strange things from different places. And everyone sees in me a stranger. But while I sit up at midnight, in the midst of a chorus of croaking frogs, whose guttural mating chant recalls a tribe of hunters around a bonfire trading stories and epics, in this moment, I feel I belong.

From Con Pasión Absoluta.  © Carol Zardetto. By arrangement with the author. Translation ©2014 by  D. W. Coop Allred. All rights reserved.

from Con Pasión Absoluta

         Los días pasan suaves y lentos en las entrañas de Guatemala. Siempre se apodera de mí el silencio. No más diálogo interior.  No más elucubraciones, ni ideas. Sólo un enorme silencio que me hace recordar a los budistas y sus reflexiones sobre la taza vacía…  la mente del principiante que  reencuentra el asombro.

              Hay algo aquí que no arribo, que no arribaré nunca a comprender… excepto en ese milimétrico instante en que una zambullida en el lago de Atitlán me arroje inesperadamente en los brazos de otra realidad y  quede enmudecida, ensimismada.

              Quizá los mayas mantienen sostenida esta tierra  del tenue hilo de la magia  (y ésa es su última esperanza). Quizá caminamos con pasos sacrílegos sobre  un enorme altar impregnado  de inciensos y flores rituales, de veladoras de sebo amarillo, de sonidos profundos o estridentes que tocan las cuerdas de los nervios hasta golpear los huesos. Una tierra tejida en telares milenarios, hecha no de tierra sino de  lienzos con el diagrama del universo en colores chillones.

              Los volcanes fue lo primero que vi, esa madrugada desde la ventanilla empañada del avión. Las puntas de los conos perfectos salían a respirar por encima del encierro difuso de las nubes. El paisaje insólito me sacó del malhumor de esa mala noche.  El Pacaya humeante, el de Agua,  sereno, como la enorme madre de los otros. El Tajumulco, el Tacaná… venía yo a Guatemala a la fuerza.  No quería regresar.

 

Me veo con los ojos del recuerdo.  Mis pasos recorren otra vez  el camino de regreso: soy testigo de mí  misma. Estoy presente en ese momento al que escojo llamar “entonces”.  Y  porque estoy “presente” deja de ser  pasado. ¿Qué juego es este?

              Al finalizar los trámites migratorios salgo a un súbito encuentro con la calle. Me arrepiento de no haber avisado de mi llegada, pues estoy sola  con mis maletas a merced de un grupo de hombres dudosos que hacen esfuerzos por captar mi atención con distintas voces.  Hablan al mismo tiempo, ofreciéndome un taxi. Al fin escojo uno cualquiera, con un  recelo que se desvanece al darme cuenta que el peso  de mi voluminoso equipaje será suficiente  para desmotivar cualquier intento de fuga.

              Los taxis destartalados hacen fila esperando a los turistas que escasean. Al discutir el precio del viaje, constato que la larga ausencia me ha mantenido ajena a los cambios de los últimos años: el precio dolarizado me parece una exageración y ocasiona mi reproche. Recibo del taxista una respuesta agria,  inesperada bienvenida al país.

              Las calles se van abriendo a mis ojos que escudriñan cuanto va apareciendo: anuncios  plagados de expresiones en inglés, de una fealdad que asalta los sentidos;  transeúntes con  ropas estampadas de colores fuertes a los que estaba ya desacostumbrada y que  encajan bien con la luz insidiosa;  camionetas infestadas de  pasajeros  colgando de las puertas  que escupen chorros de humo  sobre los motoristas zigzagueando como moscardones entre el tráfico desordenado y ruidoso.

              Me doy cuenta  de que regresar es una imposibilidad.

               No se vuelve nunca a lo mismo, ni somos ya los mismos.  Las calles de mi infancia desaparecieron sepultadas bajo estas otras, demasiado pequeñas para contener el caos que las abarrota. El polvo tiñe de sepia el ambiente  pesado. Mi rostro de entonces desapareció también,  bajo otras líneas, en esta otra mirada.

              Entro y salgo de un pretérito anterior como quien lucha contra el sueño.

              Vivíamos entonces en la zona seis, lo cual no me creaba ningún conflicto, mientras daba vueltas en círculo con un  triciclo sobre el piso a cuadros, amarillos y rojos, del salón de belleza que mi madre tenía abierto en la 15 avenida.

               Ella  y mis tías cortaban el pelo, hacían manicure y permanentes con una máquina eléctrica  que conectaban a las señoras. Me gustaba meter la cabeza bajo el aire caliente de las secadoras y sentir que mis cabellos volaban libres y en desorden.  Daba incansables vueltas en el triciclo sobre las montañas de pelo que caían al piso. Pasaba metódicamente encima de cada promontorio, mientras escuchaba a medias las conversaciones de las mujeres.  La risa desatada de mi tía Ibis interrumpía a cada rato mis pensamientos, se enredaba con los pedazos sueltos de conversación que yo  añadía a los que escuchaba en la cocina con mi abuela. Hilos sueltos, impresiones recortadas que iban tejiendo con paciencia el mundo.

              Estaban de moda  los peinados altos, sostenidos con horquillas y ganchos sandinos, el tizado y una generosa aplicación de laca. Me sorprendían las caras esperpénticas de las señoras con los pelos parados y llenos de nudos, las cabezas agigantadas con los tubos de colores, el enervante olor  de los tintes y de la permanente.  Pero a nada le tenía tanta aversión como al corte italian boy,  pues las enormes trenzas, las cabelleras largas, terminaban en el suelo de un  tijeretazo.  Las nucas descubiertas eran entonces rasuradas con una Gillette, dejando unos pelos  hirsutos parados al aire, como patas de mosca atrapadas en aquellos cuellos blancuzcos.

              Me agradaban las anchoas que dejaban los cabellos rizados y suaves, el manicure por la crema perfumada con olor a rosas,  las pinturas de uñas que yo ensayaba en mis propias manos y pies y que delataban mi condición de manicurista aficionada.

              Las actividades del salón variaban en intensidad conforme el calendario: las fiestas de Candelaria, el carnaval, la Semana Santa,  la época de graduaciones, primeras comuniones y Navidad, cuando esperábamos con la cena servida a que mis tías sacaran a las clientas rezagadas. Calientes todavía de la secadora o con la gomina fresca, salían corriendo para llegar a su casa  antes de las doce.

              Por aquellos tiempos, mis tías eran  adolescentes.  Rondaban el salón  los muchachos del barrio,  tratando de enamorarlas.  Para facilitarlo, ellas se paraban en la puerta —a ver pasar gente, decían   con sus jóvenes cuerpos sudando la lentitud y el calor de la  tarde.

              Cada una tenía su clientela.  Las más escandalosas y conversadoras iban directo con Ibis.  Mentirosa y exagerada, tenía el pelo pintado de rojo, usaba vestidos ceñidos y fumaba. Las clientas nuevas, las más tímidas, las serias, iban con Aura o las Violetas. Con sus manos pequeñas, eficientes y de largas uñas, elaboraba las complicadas edificaciones de pelo que ella podía elevar más que ninguna. Callada y taciturna, de figura finita y envuelta en su larga melena negra,  parecía siempre un poco ausente…  como si nada  pudiera tocarla.

              Mi madre hacía los tratamientos especiales y cuidaba la caja.  No obstante, las propinas llenaban siempre los bolsillos de mis tías con incontables monedas.  Yo me mantenía muy pendiente de ello, porque con frecuencia me daban plata para ir a la tienda de la esquina, donde en grandes frascos de vidrio esperaban los café con leche, las bolitas ámbar de miel, las salporosas, las milhojas…

              Las tres tenían nombres sacados de   novelas que  emocionaban a mi abuela.  Sentada en el corredor,  las leía y releía con los ojos llorosos. Yo le decía tratando de evitar su llanto: “pero abuela, si allí cuentan historias de mentiras” y, ella me replicaba con la mirada vidriosa: “aunque usted no lo crea Irenita, esas cosas… hasta a uno le pasan”.  El repertorio incluyó, en su momento, a Vargas Vila, por entonces proscrito, de donde sacó el nombre de Aura o las Violetas para mi tía Viole, la de las uñas largas.

              El taxista corta mis pensamientos con un par de observaciones, quiere entablar conversación. El Parque Central luce desmantelado, sin sus candiles de hierro, sin las viejas bancas de piedra. Es ahora una ancha torta de cemento líquido donde la bandera azul-desteñido se agita al viento. Comenta las noticias una voz nasal que sale de la radio. El taxista insiste: se queja del gobierno, tiene curiosidad de saber si soy de aquí.  Contesto que sí y eludo  la conversación que se marchita, mientras nos acercamos al viejo barrio del Cerrito del Carmen, que aparece con sus lomos desnudos, ahogado en medio de las calles populosas.

              Allí me tomaron la foto con aquella muñeca. Era regalo de mi padre, como otros que llegaban siempre en las navidades. Los llevaba don Carlos, su secretario, pequeño y nervioso como un ratón. Cajas enormes con muñecas gigantes. No podía jugar con ellas debido a su desmesura y quedaban abandonadas como estáticas presencias que con los  años fueron poblando los roperos. Puedo recordarme,  pálida y delgada, como en aquella foto. El fotógrafo de los domingos con su caballito de palo. Los niños se montaban en él, luciendo unas botas viejas  y  el sombrero  vaquero.  Yo no quise. Me abracé fuerte a la pierna de mi tía Ibis. Listo y labioso, el fotógrafo la convenció de retratarme con la muñeca que tanto parecía gustarme. Nos sentaron  en la grama. Tenía los ojos cerrados por el sol, pero las briznas iluminadas y traslúcidas de la hierba me quedaron grabadas  con una tinta de olor verde, dulce y vegetal.

              En las colinas del Cerrito del Carmen brillan las matas de ilusiones de tallos suaves.  Siento cómo se plegaban bajo los cartones sobre los que nos deslizábamos cuesta abajo. El perro de la abuela nos acompañaba. Se llamaba Chocolate y fue el único que admitió en la casa llena de canarios.   Ladraba al vernos derrapar con los cartones  hasta llegar abajo, donde la caída nos dejaba revolcados entre el polvo. Nos alcanzaba entonces para lamernos, haciéndonos cosquillas en las orejas y las narices. Nuestras risas y sus ladridos recortaban un espacio donde siempre nos encontrábamos a solas aunque hubiera mucha gente. Mi hermano y yo. El viento  mecía con suavidad los barriletes.  Desde el suelo,  veíamos temblar sus alas frágiles de papel de china sobre el azul penetrante de los cielos de noviembre. Nos miraban de regreso con sus grandes ojos fijos.  Tirados en el monte, dejábamos que la tarde pasara.

              El taxi cruza y se precipita por la avenida.

              A esa calle le dicen la Avenida de los Árboles, aunque árboles ya no quedan. Me gustaba caminar en las aceras agrietadas, jugando a no pisar la rayita. Las rayas eran ríos  poblados de lagartos, o las líneas de la cara de un monstruo que abarcaba todo el universo, o cortadas sobre un gran pastel de piña sobre el cual yo paseaba cuidándome de no caer en  los tajos, donde adivinaba inmensos precipicios. Entonces la felicidad era  fácil  y no una incierta tierra prometida.

              Tenía un triciclo  muy viejo, heredado de mi hermano.  Dijo una vez mi madre que cuando me compraron uno nuevo,  ya nunca quise usar ni el nuevo, ni el viejo.  No me acuerdo del  nuevo. Quizá no fuese  más que un mito, de esos que  nos cuentan de cuando éramos niños  y que nunca se llega a saber si son verdad. En cualquier  caso, sin percatarse, mi madre rompió  el encanto de un triciclo único que a veces era caballo y  tenía una gotita de oro sobre el timón descascarado.

              El semáforo marca un alto,  justo frente al viejo portón rojo de aquella que fue nuestra casa.    Me acerco a la ventanilla del auto.  Aquella mano de mujer con los dedos largos y finos,   cada dedo un  anillo, cuelga su imperturbable lealtad sobre la puerta.

              Por las noches, el portón se cerraba  con una tranca  atravesada  al fondo del zaguán largo y oscuro.  Sabíamos que  marcaba un término inapelable: la hora en que se cerraba la puerta. Ponía fin a las fiestas, visitas y romances. Era un toque de queda. Minutos después las luces se apagaban y la casa se dejaba envolver por las sombras.

              A esa hora, metida en las chamarras con mi abuela, oía las historias que  le fascinaba contar: la ciguanaba,  cara de caballo,  se ganaba a los hombres mujeriegos;  la llorona, con su cuerpo de tusa, bajaba a lavar la ropa al río amedrentando a las mujeres; el cadejo, un perro de ojos  como brasas, guardián de los borrachos  a  quienes acompañaba hasta su casa cuando salían de las cantinas;  el sombrerón, un pequeño hombrecito que llevaba serenata a las mujeres de cabellos largos antes de seducirlas, era el causante de que ellas enflaquecieran hasta la muerte  y de las crines trenzadas con las que amanecían los caballos en los potreros de las fincas.

              Pasaba horas escuchándola y ella, con infinita paciencia,  repetía una y otra vez los vericuetos y senderos  que me sabía de memoria.  Caminos de un mundo perdido que traían  su vertiente a mi mar.

              —Abuela, ¿por qué ya no aparecen los espantos?

              —Porque llegó la luz eléctrica, m´ija. Y se quedaba rumiando su creciente desavenencia con una realidad cada día más ajena: —Ahora ya nada sirve.  Ahora, todo es al revés…

              El taxi llega a mi destino en el barrio de La Parroquia.  Ferretería Rondolino, anuncian las letras rojas y pesadas. Allí vive mi madre con su otra familia.

              Nunca pensé volver.  Me fui para siempre el día que me fui. Vestida de blanco, como quería mi madre, quien me agradeció oficialmente años después esa condescendencia. Salir vestida de blanco, cumplir con tanta hipocresía. Quería cumplir…   Me río de mí misma: la suerte me acompañó: sufrí un desengaño. El matrimonio podía ser un conjunto vacío, un espacio lleno de nada.

               He dado una perfecta vuelta en círculo. Salir de esta casa,  de este país,  para regresar a este país,   a esta casa,  feudo tenebroso de Don Asunción.

              Cuando tenía cinco años, en las correrías por la calle frente a mi casa, se me acercó una mujer harapienta. Tenía el rostro profusamente arrugado  que luego del susto inicial, me fascinó por sus encías sin dientes.  Habló de la Navidad cercana, me invitó para ir con ella a su casa,  a jugar con muchos niños,  habló de un cuarto lleno de regalos.  La falsedad de la historia era  evidente: su aspecto llevaba impresas la miseria y la suciedad más extremas, pero  le creí. Me extendió una mano de largas uñas negras que   tomé sin reparo.

              Mi abuela daba de comer por esos días a los policías de tránsito de un cuartel vecino.  Uno de aquellos comensales me vio  con la vieja.  Al entrar y pedir el almuerzo,  se lo mencionó de paso.  Ella se alarmó. El policía, al darse cuenta de que el asunto era grave, dejó la sopa servida y salió corriendo. Tenía una bicicleta, en la que  raudo y veloz fue  a  buscarme.

              Me he preguntado muchas veces cuál hubiese sido mi historia si las cosas  no hubieran sucedido de esa manera. Quizá me hubiesen hecho jabón como dijo mi abuela.  En todo caso, el policía que me rescató esa tarde fue después el marido de mi madre y existe algo de paradójico en que ese día, cerca de Navidad, mi salvador fuese Don Asunción, quien habría de hacer añicos el tenue cristal que resguardaba  mi infancia.

              Me bajo del taxi insegura. El lío de maletas me resta la dignidad que  deseo exagerar frente a la puerta. Después de un largo momento lleno de impaciencia,  abre Emiliana, la sirvienta  que lleva  años con mi madre.  Hace un gran alboroto al verme, reproducido por dos loros que en una jaula hostigan  el silencio.  Se ríe con nerviosismo, asombrada me soba con fruición el brazo.  Se cubre la boca para ocultarme que ha perdido algunos dientes, pero más que eso, ha perdido aquella lozanía de los brazos, del torso, de su cuello.  Pareciera que se agacha, que se retrae dentro del saco grande y arrugado de  piel.

              Pregunto  por mi madre.  Contesta con su marcado acento kak´chiquel que corta y sibila las palabras. Me brinda mil explicaciones, de las que  logro rescatar que  mi madre no ha llegado, fue a recoger a la abuela al hospital. “Dice que ya no  aguanta, Doña Toya quiere morirse en su cama”,  repite con el tono melodramático de costumbre.  Finalmente, me hace entrar y me ofrece un café.

              Me resisto a esta casa, ajena, sin la presencia de mi madre.  Si no fuera por la gravedad de la abuela, no estaría aquí.     De ella no me quedaba sino ese último retrato. Sentada en el corredor,  leyendo un libro con una pose muy elegante, como  quería que la recordara.  Su pelo corto, rizado, un vestido fresco y floreado,  unos largos aretes, los labios pintados de rojo, las cejas bien delineadas. La conocí así, pulcra, trayendo con su presencia un orden benevolente y claro al mundo. Esta imagen contradecía las historias complicadas que de ella contaban mi madre y mis tías. La mujer pasional,  la rígida,  la violenta, eran para mí rostros  de una desconocida.

              Envió la foto acompañada por los reproches de costumbre, que por qué estaba lejos, que ya no la iba a ver viva. Y la misma pregunta a la que  nunca puede responder: ¿por qué la gente se va?          Nunca escuché sus reclamos, sin embargo  fue ella quien me trajo  de vuelta.  La voz de mi madre  anunció por el hilo del teléfono: Si no venís ahora, no vas a volver a verla.

              La casa está silenciosa. Llegan de la cocina los aromas del almuerzo. No deja de parecerme curioso  que aquí se cocine desde media mañana.  Platos elaborados, salsas de mil matices, un rito que ocupa por lo menos media jornada.  El reino benigno de las mujeres es la cocina.

              Don Asunción llega y su figura queda recortada en el dintel de la puerta.

              “¿Ya la vio su mamá?”,   pregunta por todo saludo.

              Me levanto confusa del sillón donde me había acomodado.  Recuerdo —y el recuerdo es borroso,  como si llegara de un lugar muy lejano— que antes de irme tenía muchos años de no hablarle. Las palabras están entumecidas entre los dos.  Alcanzan para poco. No atino sino a pararme y decirle más secamente de lo que hubiera querido: “No”.           

              Incómodo,  estira la mano con  forzada cortesía. Con levedad, rozo su piel  callosa y manchada de grasa.              Se aparta de nuestro contacto con más brusquedad de la que hubiera deseado. Camina hacia la cocina, vocifera a Emiliana, y yo pienso que desquita con ella su incomodidad, sus preguntas sin respuesta, su malestar por mi presencia. Me asomo a verlo: es ahora un hombre pequeño y delgado, con el pelo encanecido y unos gruesos lentes que hacen que sus ojos se vean desmesurados y punzantes. Era  un Tarzán de los trópicos, moreno, exageradamente musculoso, le gustaba exhibir su fuerza  cargando a la gente.  A mi madre la colgaba sobre el hombro y la paseaba por toda la casa. Ella, desde lo alto, pataleaba y gritaba indignada.

              Hijo de un campesino italiano emigrado a América hacia principios del siglo pasado,  Asunción vivió una niñez miserable. El padre viajaba a la costa, en busca de oportunidades en las grandes fincas. Sus ausencias eran largas y agónicas, porque entonces todo faltaba en la casa. Su madre tenía que  acudir a cualquier subterfugio para sobrevivir con los hijos hasta que él regresaba. Pero un día se hizo de  otra mujer y no volvió.

               Asunción era el mayor.  Sintió que era su deber y  privilegio  ocupar el lugar del padre. Era apenas adolescente. Para mantener la casa repartía pan en bicicleta, balanceando un gran canasto sobre la cabeza… oficio difícil  que muchos podrían considerar poco viril. Quizá lo haría sentirse humillado.  Pero él idolatraba a su madre.  Cuando  enfermó  muy joven aún,  se volvió sagrada.  No hubo  bajeza que   no soportara por ella.

              Cuando murió, Asunción dejó la casa a sus hermanos para rentar un cuarto con piso de tierra  en  una vecindad cerca de la línea del tren,  barrio lleno de las  prostitutas más miserables y   más baratas.

              Sin embargo, no eran las mujeres lo que le interesaba. Compró una enciclopedia que leía por las noches a la luz de una bombilla pálida y solitaria.  Se armó de conocimientos que asimiló de una forma excéntrica. De allí nacieron universos apocalípticos, delirantes explicaciones del mundo, extravagantes y sesgadas concepciones de cómo eran  las cosas.

              Su recién adquirida sabiduría le dio un nuevo sentido de sí mismo. Con extrema autoridad, exponía sus teorías con lujo de detalles a cualquiera que cayera en la trampa de oírlo. Cualquier comentario podía ser el detonante. No admitía interrupciones, ni se fijaba en el   tiempo,  exasperante, que demandaba de sus oyentes.

              El destino quiso que consiguiera una plaza en el cuartel de policía y  Asunción reverenció su buena estrella.  La Policía  habría de servirle para reivindicarse frente al mundo. Vestido con uniforme, investido de autoridad, Don Asunción encontró  un  goce profundo.

              En mi mente repaso la calle que pulula afuera.  Ahora que  llegó, su presencia transforma la casa y la atmósfera se vuelve densa.  A mí me pasa como entonces: tengo ganas de irme. Quizá por eso me casé,  proyecto fallido que de antemano sabía  terminaría en  ruptura.  Sólo para irme de una vez por todas.           Trato de aniquilar  elucubraciones sobre cosas que  nunca  sabré a ciencia cierta. Los pensamientos  agobian con su peso muerto. Hace calor y esto está muy quieto. Me seduce la idea de la calle  extendida más allá de la puerta de hierro.  La casa donde crecí está allí,  al final de la otra cuadra, quieta  como un barco que ha naufragado.

              Atravieso presurosa el jardín y salgo.  En plena acera,  una señora ha instalado una hoguera de carbón  con la que cocina e impregna el ambiente de  olor a grasa rancia. Los negocios informales  llenan las calles. Son las  llamadas de atención de una  pobreza que desborda. Me repugna el olor y la fealdad de la imagen: la señora rellena de carnes prepara repollo en un tazón amarillo, sirve vasos de  un atol blancuzco  a la clientela.  Los comensales se  sientan en  bancos de madera, interrumpiendo el paso de los peatones. Me saluda  “Buenos días, hermana”; evangélica, pienso.

              Los negocios de la cuadra se han multiplicado: una imprenta, una panadería, una funeraria, una librería…  El bullicio, el movimiento, el tráfico agobiante,  marean. Polvo y humo entran en connivencia. Forman una nube difusa que no deja respirar.  Recostados contra una  puerta  cerrada,  dos borrachos duermen  malolientes.

              Camino con incomodidad y desconfianza hacia la esquina.  Antes estaba allí la farmacia; en  la vecindad,  la Foto Serra con la vitrina llena de retratos: novios tiesos,  infantes regordetes, con frecuencia desnudos,  quinceañeras con canelones y amplios vestidos.

              Cerca de la esquina, la Escuela México era el límite permitido a mis correrías. Vivían allí Beatriz y Catalina, las hijas del director de la escuela. Las veía de lejos caminar de la mano de Don Chus, su padre. Era un hombre alto, con una impresionante barriga que colgaba por encima de su cinturón.  Los pantalones parecían a punto de caérsele. Parecía un tipo dividido: por arriba calvo, bigotudo y malgenioso, por abajo el remedo de un payaso, como si una mitad quisiera desdecir a la otra.        Su mujer, Doña Estela, era tan gorda que parecía un cántaro, inflada por en medio.  De cabecita pequeña, el moño de canas que recogía su nuca no hacía sino acentuar esa peculiaridad.

              Pasamos una tarde frente a la escuela. Doña Estela estaba en la puerta, con sus hijas.  Ella y mi abuela se pusieron a platicar, mientras las niñas y yo nos mirábamos con curiosidad, intuyendo un mundo de juegos pendientes.      El día llegó.  Mi abuela me alistó con moñas y vestido elegante. Llevé en signo de buena voluntad una de mis mejores muñecas. A ellas se les permitió, excepcionalmente, sacar sus juegos de té, guardados con pulcritud arriba del armario.

              Nos entretuvimos tanto que, entusiasmadas porque las dejábamos hacer oficio en paz, mi abuela y Doña Estela acordaron que la visita se repitiera el día siguiente y luego el otro día, hasta que ya no dejé de venir. Mi permanencia en esa casa se  alargaba y perdía su educada rigidez cada día. Ya para fines de mes, venía por la mañana y me iba al anochecer.

              La madre hacía helados que  vendía a los estudiantes.  Las pelotitas de nance, congeladas y dulces, los pedacitos de coco rayado, el ácido punzante del tamarindo, eran sabores alucinantes y fueron la piedra de tropiezo en mi inicial intención de causar buena impresión y de portarme bien, como me dejaban recomendado  cada día.              Como eran para negocio —según se nos advertía—  tenían el atractivo adicional de ser prohibidos, y por lo tanto, los hurtábamos con compulsión. Prometíamos tomar uno solo, pero la tentación nos incitaba a pecar otra vez.  Abríamos el congelador  y sacábamos los helados a escondidas, hasta que los envoltorios de papel de cera quedaban desparramados por todas partes.

              Al darse cuenta Doña Estela, salía de la cocina con su enorme figura y  una paleta en  mano. Sofocada por la cólera y la obesidad, gesticulaba de manera amenazante.   Beatriz, consciente de ser la mayor y por tanto protectora nuestra,  nos arrebataba la mano con brusquedad, haciéndonos correr  con atropello y al tope de nuestras fuerzas por el largo corredor. Catalina y yo, con las mejillas  coloradas,  reíamos con  histeria  por la emoción de la huida.

              Durante las vacaciones, la escuela vacía era  ideal para  jugar.  Los grandes corredores y patios, las pizarras y yesos de colores, estaban a nuestra  disposición.  Era un territorio inmenso que nos hacía crecer las fantasías, con sus recodos para contar secretos  y sus escondites liberadores de la omnipresencia de los mayores. Tenía lugares prohibidos, como las oficinas cerradas con llave o los orinales de uso exclusivo para varones, que aun en vacaciones apestaban a orines rancios y pungentes.  Lugares aterrantes, como los zaguanes largos e inciertos o las aulas iluminadas apenas, pobladas de telarañas, donde los escritorios viejos se amontonaban  en altas pilas.

              En medio de ese universo vacío de gente, pero dotado de infinitas puertas a nuestra imaginación, silencioso, pero lleno de voces que nos hablaban al oído, podíamos transformarnos a nuestro arbitrio, descubrirnos como la encarnación del más  desatado deseo.

              No fue casualidad que el azar nos premiara con el encuentro de  algo  mágico: el salón de actos, y en él, un escenario. A  partir de entonces  fue  el único lugar que  existía.

              Comenzamos por ser cantantes, trayendo a escena con voces destempladas, retazos de boleros, canciones rancheras que oíamos en la radio, olvidando y revolviendo letras que comprendíamos a medias. Con los días vino el teatro. Lentamente, pasamos a una fantasía más compleja que, de una trivial historia, se transformó en una vida sustituta.

              De la casa fueron desapareciendo collares, zapatos de fiesta, lencería, medias, lápices de labios, sombreros y cuanta cosa pudiera apuntalar nuestra fantasía. Todo empezaba con la repartición de las prendas, la discusión de quién iba a usar la combinación color negro que nos colgaba hasta la mitad del pecho plano, los fustanes predilectos con muchos holanes que hacían ruido al caminar, los collares largos de perlas de plástico, o los aretes más llamativos;  a quién le tocaban los zapatos de tacón alto, o las sandalias verdes,  el único sombrero.  Las bocas pintadas de rojo, la exageración del colorete,  un lunar cerca de la boca. Para el papel de galán no teníamos muchos recursos: una corbata vieja, un sombrero beige, una colonia Old Spice para la ambientación.

              Viajábamos en un trasatlántico repleto de  gente sofisticada,  reiteración de los personajes que aparecían en la tele en las películas en blanco y negro del canal tres.  Gente sofisticada, pero sobre todo hombres, con quienes inventábamos apasionados romances al estilo Hollywood.   A una le tocaba ser el galán.

              Había en ese juego algo profundamente seductor: el galán y la vedette de turno tenían  un romance que incluía besos y caricias reales.  Yo quería ser siempre la vedette y que Beatriz fuera mi novio, porque ella besaba rico. Sus besos mojados e intensos, sus labios carnosos, poseían una fuerza que vencía mi timidez y le abría la puerta a mi deseo. Aparte, Catalina estaba perdiendo los dientes y no tenía ninguna gracia besar a un galán desdentado.

              El juego era secreto. Sabíamos que caminábamos terrenos prohibidos y ello nos producía una fascinación  que no pudieron opacar,  ni  la muñeca enviada desde Francia por mi padre,  aun cuando daba besos y hablaba en francés tirando de una cuerda, ni los trastecitos de cocina y la licuadora de baterías  de  las niñas.  Los juguetes pronto fueron abandonados por cualquier parte, desplazados por el juego favorito.

              Los años pasaron, la huella quedó: siempre colocaría el amor en un escenario, envuelto en la intriga y el dramatismo del maquillaje y los ropajes que visten para el amor. Una escena aparte que, para abrirse, precisaba la indefinición y levedad de la sinuosa cortina.  Un paso en falso, un sendero cuyo misterio podía transitarse sólo bajo el amparo del equívoco, de lo fantástico, del travestismo.   (¿Sería entonces que empecé a amarte?)

              Dejé de visitar a las niñas antes que terminaran las vacaciones. Los aviones daban vueltas en el cielo. La radio anunció el estado de sitio.  Había caído otro gobierno. No me dejaban salir de la casa y los días se estancaban. Cuando al fin me dieron permiso, fui corriendo a la escuela.  La puerta estaba cerrada y nadie salió a abrir en respuesta a mis interminables toquidos.

               Los rumores empezaron a correr. Don Chus y su familia se habían ido, la gente dijo que  huyendo.  Mi abuela elucubraba:   “Don Chus   era arbencista… Por eso no se cansa uno de decirles  que no se metan a babosadas…”

              Pasaron años sin saber nada de las niñas. Fue en un baño turco donde encontré a Beatriz.  Resultó ser la señora obesa que de espaldas me había llamado la atención por su enorme cuerpo, fofo y gelatinoso. Al voltearse, se dibujó en su cara la misma sonrisa de muchacho de entonces. Recordé mis deseos  claros y fuertes de aquellos días. Una chispa de complicidad en sus ojos pareció encenderse sobre la memoria de una  libertad preciosa que al crecer fueron engrilletando las condescendencias.

              La casa de la Avenida de los Árboles se mira vieja,  con una manera absoluta de ser vieja.  Por aquellos días, se estaba cayendo a pedazos.     Las puertas con hoyos de polilla, describían paisajes de riscos y montañas inconmensurables.  Terminé por ya no examinarlos el día que descubrí una de las larvas responsable de las poderosas esculturas enroscarse con viscosidad entre las hendiduras.

              Las paredes descascaradas revelan varias capas de pintura.

               Esos pellejitos se podían  arrancar despacito, o pasando velozmente la mano por encima de las paredes, corriendo por el corredor, sintiendo un cepillo de cosquillas en la mano y dejando una estela de confeti sobre el suelo.

              A medio patio, la  enorme pila  se llena de moho.

              Con un palo se podían dibujar verdes paisajes silvestres, mientras la abuela lavaba sobre la piedra la ropa, la retorcía con las manos coloradas,  la sacudía mandando los chisguetes de agua sobre mi cara caliente y los tendía sobre los lazos al sol.

              En cuanto viene la lluvia,  la casa cambia de tono.

              Las tardes se volvían graves.  Los techos de lámina eran sacudidos por los miles de soldados de plomo que caían del cielo.  Mi hermano y yo nos quedábamos encerrados viendo la tele.  Yo dibujaba con un lápiz en las paredes y lo veía de reojo.  Armaba enormes ejércitos de fósforos que hacía enfrentarse por horas, sin concederme  un segundo de atención. Mi abuela nos llevaba de la cocina franceses con frijoles y chocolate caliente. El encierro se volvía placentero.  Con los pies sucios de andar descalza en medio de los juguetes tirados que nunca tendría que recoger,   era yo la  reina de aquel  reino.

              En la sala, las goteras caen sin misericordia.

              Nos hacían buscar botes viejos de pintura para ponerlos a recibir el agua de lluvia que se escurría por el techo.  Cada gota tenía un sonido que caía en distinto momento, formando un ritmo, una armonía que acompañaba mi tiempo, mis inventos, mis mundos, cobijados por el amor de mi abuela que siempre estaba allí en la cocina, o allí cosiendo o allí en la noche, dispuesta a que me metiera a la cama con ella, dispuesta a que enredara mis piernas entre las suyas, dispuesta a espantar mis miedos, dándome conversación, arrullándome hasta que me deslizaba despacio al sueño, sin sentir.

              Me acerco al tocador y casi con temor golpeo la puerta. El silencio es rotundo. Vuelvo a tocar y el sonido metálico resuena contundente esta vez.

              “Allí no vive nadie”,  anuncia el vendedor de periódicos recostado en el viejo árbol  frente a la casa, reiterando una verdad que ya presentía.  Miro por una hendidura: el viejo salón vacío, la luz mortecina entra apenas por un tragaluz.

              El salón se cerró.  Los muebles permanecieron, tapados con sábanas, como fantasmas de un tiempo pasado.  A escondidas, mi hermano  y yo entrábamos a jugar. Llenábamos el lugar de bulla como queriendo exorcizarlo: dábamos vueltas a los sillones giratorios, poníamos a funcionar las secadoras,  escribíamos cosas en la superficie polvorienta  de los espejos.

              Ibis  fue la primera en irse.  Un convertible rojo trajo a un mulato de apellido francés frente a la casa una tarde. Alborotada, fue a abrir la puerta. La visita era para ella.  Lo mismo el siguiente día y los restantes.  La abuela se fue incomodando.  No soportaba la presencia del mulato y —“no entrés a ese hombre a la casa”—  la mandaba a la calle con él.  Luego

—“parece que estás deteniendo la puerta, entráte ya, vas a agarrar mala fama”—, la regañaba por estar afuera.

              Pero ella (la oveja negra de siempre) le desobedecía.  Se salía con el mulato y se subía al auto estacionado a la sombra de la noche, cuestión  absolutamente prohibida para una señorita respetable.  En algunas oportunidades, a escondidas,  hasta se iban juntos.  Una vez, la oí contar en secreto  que  habían ido hasta el puerto.

              Mi abuela no terminaba de aceptar las visitas del morado ese. Pero Ibis estaba empecinada.  Se escapaba, se escondía, inventaba historias, mentía para verlo. Mi abuela se enredó con ella en una batalla campal de gritos y reclamos, de regaños y hasta violencia física: cuando la ira la rebalsaba,  bajaba del clavo el viejo chicote y la latigueaba. Nada la incomodaba tanto  como la desobediencia de sus hijos. Después de estas golpizas, mi tía ganaba terreno, le sacaba salidas: bajo la condición de que llevara algún acompañante, que casi siempre éramos mi hermano y yo. Aprovechábamos la circunstancia que nos caía del cielo para pedir gustos, ir a Pecos Bill, por ejemplo, donde nos atorábamos de  hamburguesas, papas fritas y batidos de chocolate, mientras ellos se besaban  interminablemente.

              Un día de tantos, el mulato no vino. Desapareció por largas semanas.  Ibis se desesperó y  recurrió al mejor remedio que conocía: el centro de brujería donde Doña Paula le fumaba al mulato flautas de puros gruesos y apestosos, mientras lo llamaba por su nombre. Se iba con ella bajo el puente Rodriguitos  y repetían una y otra vez la letanía: “que el hijo de puta regrese arrastrado a mis pies…”

              Yo la oía contar estas cosas sin perder detalle. Su voz   susurraba al oído de las mujeres, sibilante. Ellas asentían en silencio con los ojos encendidos. Yo me quedaba atenta, escudriñando rostros, tratando de adivinar el efecto del secreto, queriendo ver a través de sus miradas las cosas ocultas e irresistibles.

              El día llegó en que el mulato apareció como fuera vaticinado.  Venía a decir adiós. Se armó un escándalo mayúsculo cuando se lo hizo saber.  No había terminado el discurso que tenía preparado, cuando Ibis empezó a gritar en el salón. La escuchamos hasta en la cocina, desde donde  acudimos alarmados.  En medio de la clientela,   mi tía, con ojos manchados de pintura, con la nariz colorada y abriendo la boca en una gigantesca mueca de llanto, repetía a gritos: “¡No dejen que se vaya!  ¡No dejen que se vaya!” Luego,  añadió con la voz vencida: “Estoy embarazada”.

              La estupefacción nos mantenía callados. Mi hermano y yo tuvimos que retirarnos ante una mirada imperativa de mi madre.  A las pocas clientas que permanecían en el salón —otras habían salido asustadas al iniciarse el escándalo—,  las sacaron  a la fuerza. El salón se cerró a pesar de que era apenas media tarde.

              Se reunieron durante horas, y nada pudimos averiguar de lo que acontecía. Más tarde nos enteramos: la condena de la familia había sido unánime. La reputación de mi tía estaba en peligro y tenían que casarse.  La sentencia fue enunciada  a los transgresores, a quienes se hizo saber lo que harían: se cumplirían las formalidades para que la gente no hablara y luego, si no la quería, la podría devolver a la casa.  La condena era inapelable. 

              Las vecinas del barrio ayudaron a mi abuela a cocinar ollas de pollo encebollado que inundaron la casa de olor a tomillo, enormes apastes de ensalada rusa, para lo cual la factoría improvisada,  enarbolando sus  cuchillos, cuadriculó cientos de zanahorias, güisquiles y papas que sumergieron primero en el sancocho de vinagre y sal y luego en mayonesa.

              Se veía preciosa el día de su boda, a pesar de la barriga de casi seis meses que disimulaba el vaporoso vestido blanco. Se hizo  una fiesta en la casa,  con pino en el piso y marimba. Las parejas bailaban  y yo, debajo de una mesa, me entretenía viendo cómo el pino se les enredaba en los pies.

              Los comensales visitaban con asiduidad el tonel de ron con Coca-Cola y no les importaba hacer una larga fila para servirse el líquido oscuro donde flotaban los cubos de hielo y los cuartos de limón. Avanzada la tarde, muchos estaban borrachos. Las risas y las voces eran cada vez más bulliciosas. A algunos se les pasó la mano, como a mi hermano, que terminó dormido bajo las mesas, acurrucado sobre un volcán  de pino.

              Los últimos invitados se fueron ya entrada la noche. Cuando dejaron la casa desierta, mi tía se cambió el vestido y salió.  Se miraba frágil y desconcertada con una pequeña maleta en la mano, mientras  la otra sobaba  inadvertidamente su barriga.

              El mulato nunca la quiso y se la tuvo que llevar como un objeto desvalorizado que ya nadie quiere. Él  tomó la exigencia de cumplirle como una humillación, algo por lo que haría pagar a todos —pero especialmente a ella y al  hijo que estaba por nacer—, con una maldad violenta y perpetua que moldearía sus vidas, como a la roca la persistencia de las olas del mar.

              Aura o las Violetas consiguió un empleo. Su salario podía comprar las cosas que siempre había querido. Empezó a frecuentar amigas de fuera del barrio, hijas de militares. Las cosas de la casa empezaron a disgustarla. Se quejaba de no tener carro o teléfono, cosas imprescindibles para asegurar la pertenencia a ese otro rango social.

              Llegó el momento en que decidió irse. Alquiló una habitación en una casa de huéspedes, limpia, pulcra, donde en una  ventana mantenía una mata de violetas, detalle que a ella le parecía original —mantener una maceta de las flores que tenían su nombre— y que más bien tendía a subrayar su adhesión a los más almibarados lugares comunes. Reflejaba, sin que ella pudiera ocultarlo, su angustioso deseo de tener cabida.  No podía  comprender   que  sus esfuerzos serían inútiles. La  sociedad que anhelaba era —y lo sigue siendo— clasista y excluyente.

              El salón se cerró. Me asalta su imagen, nítida, en medio de la ausencia que el tiempo depositó en él: los espejos nublados de polvo,  la máquina de la permanente desarticulada y vieja, las grandes cabezas de las secadoras como estatuas petrificadas, los cajones, donde las cucarachas presurosas sustituyeron a los tubos, y esa presencia implacable del lava-cabezas parado inútilmente en una esquina.

              Estaba allí el día aquel que de pie, tras el mostrador que guardaba los productos para el cabello, las uñas, los faciales, vi entrar a mi hermano. Se quedó detenido en el dintel de la puerta, mirándome desde sus grandes anteojos.  Estaba tenso, cansado, con su pesada mochila en la espalda, las mejillas rojas.  Era casi de noche.  Toda la tarde la casa había sido un revuelo… no había regresado del colegio.

               Después de darle muchas vueltas  y discutirlo con mi abuela, mi madre se atrevió: fue a la abarrotería a prestar el teléfono, —“Sí, se quedó castigado,  pero se fue hace ya una hora.”

              Sin embargo, no llegaba y no llegaba.  Mi abuela no cesaba de repetir:       —“¿Cómo así  que lo dejaron castigado?,  y uno aquí tronándose los dedos…”         

              Mi madre, salía a la calle, caminaba hasta el Cerrito del Carmen y regresaba. No podía estar quieta.  Jugando por allí, revolviendo las cosas del mostrador, fui la primera en verlo aparecer.  No lo podía creer… Allí estaba.

              Mi madre se abalanzó  para abrazarlo.  Él contaba que el cura lo dejó castigado al final del día, porque no había querido entregarle los sellos postales con los que jugaba abstraído y que lo tenían ausente de la clase de historia. Yo lo escuchaba, atenta, viendo sus dedos nerviosos  manchados de tinta.            Comprendía como nadie su resistencia con el cura. A veces me parecía que sólo yo podía verlo cuando desaparecía encerrado en el misterio de sus inescrutables mundos.

              Él continuaba el relato,  no tenía dinero para la camioneta, así que se había venido caminando solo desde el Liceo Guatemala.

              “¿Cómo que viniste caminando solo desde allá?”  

              Yo, lo admiraba muda. Comprendí que nunca sería como mi hermano, rebelde y valiente. Capaz de cosas  enormes como resistir al cura, o caminar desde el Liceo Guatemala hasta la casa, sin miedo. No, yo nunca podría ser capaz de  un gesto así.  Curiosamente, empecé a quererlo de otra forma: con una ternura tal, que a pesar de ser yo más chica, quería cuidarlo y protegerlo porque detrás de sus rabiosos ímpetus de libertad y osadía podía ver la vulnerabilidad de los seres puros, incapaces de  hacer transacciones  con la vida.

              Fue desde entonces mi héroe. Y desde ese momento en el dintel de la puerta, donde lo vuelvo a encontrar con sus anteojos gruesos, victorioso de su aventura escolar,  escupiendo de frente a cualquier figura de autoridad, se desdoblan las mil imágenes de su retrato.

              Hace veinte años que cerré el libro de palabras compartidas con él. Fue una curiosa manera de cerrarlo, porque un albañil revolvía mezcla de cemento y arena con una cuchara que al golpear en el cemento del piso, hacía  un ruido desolado que me destemplaba los dientes.  “¿Cuándo terminarán con todo eso?”, pensaba. Al lado, los ladrillos apilados esperaban su turno para incorporarse a la pared. A tus compañeros de la Escuela de Medicina les costó trabajo cargar tu ataúd.

              No, no quería regresar, y estoy aquí hace un año, cansada como si recién hubiese regresado de un largo viaje, llena del polvo del camino, con un montón de artefactos extraños de otros lugares. Ya nadie me siente de aquí, y yo sólo a veces, como ahora, sentada en medio de la noche en este muelle donde  se oye a las ranas cantar ese extraño canto de tribu alrededor de una fogata, de tribu contando cuentos ancestrales, en este momento, me siento de aquí.

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