Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin (10 page)

She chose one that was going to Chihuahua and would leave in half an hour.

She went up to the front of it, looking at it knowingly, as if just getting off rather than about to get on. She imagined herself already in the dining car, having breakfast with Joaquín the next day. And the money to pay for it? And how to explain when asked about their parents? But that was not important now. Anyway, she would see. As she would have to see what kind of work she could get in Chihuahua, and where she could leave Joaquín meanwhile. Surely she could find someone to trust . . . Passing by a small window in which some silhouettes were outlined, she imagined how it would be to sleep there, hugging Joaquín close, frightened by their aloneness but happy, raising the shade in the morning to see the landscape, the cities they were passing.

She looked up and saw beyond the roof of the platform, a piece of the sky, impenetrable, intact.

That was when she heard Joaquín's cry: “Papi, Papi!”

24

Her heart stopped
when she realized what was happening, and then beat rapidly, more rapidly than ever, when she dared to turn around and look where her brother's finger was pointing. She gulped a mouthful of air and let it out with a sharp wail as she dropped the sweaters. Papá was
running toward them, smiling and calling them by name. Joaquín went to meet him with open arms:

“Papi, Papi!”

Cristina raised her hands up to her cheeks as if she were going to scratch them and looked all around everywhere, sure there was still an exit. She ran toward the end of the platform, shoving people and sobbing with, at times, a muffled Noooo! Papá was coming ever closer, calling her:

“Cristy, my darling little girl!”

A woman tried to stop her, but Cristina gave her a kick and ran faster. Every time she turned around, she was sure that Papá was no longer there, no, the nightmare would end by going away, that nightmare like a bird of doom that had always followed her, and was now taking the most horrible of its forms, the only unbearable one. Because in spite of the fact that she had managed to jump from the platform to the gravel and was running down one of the tracks, stumbling on the railroad ties, skinning her knees, but getting up immediately to continue into the darkest part of the night, Papá had finally reached her, and her kicks and cries of no, I don't want to, I don't want to, no, would be useless because Papá knew how to control her, to carry her, to press her against him, hold her legs with one hand, and make her lose strength little by little while saying:

“My darling, Cristy, it's all over, all over.”

SERAFÍN

Deserted streets, monocular lighting.

At a corner,

the specter of a dog.

He searches, in the refuse, for

a phantasmal bone,

—
Octavio Paz

For Matilde Aidée

1

Serafín watched sadness
move into his house the night Papá left. Papá had been drinking all afternoon, as usual in those days, and as soon as night fell, he got up with difficulty, took his poncho from the spike that served as clothes rack, and said, I'm going to Mexico City to see if things go better for me there because here they are as bad as they can get. In the heavy silence his kiss on Mamá's forehead sounded more like a complaint than a caress. Serafín and his brothers were watching, sitting on some torn, lumpy straw mattresses. A hazy light from a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling swung back and forth, creating long shadows like tall phantoms on the adobe walls.

After he left, the only sound was Mamá's crying, deep, slow, guttural. Bent over the table, her distorted face in her hands, her eyes that seemed to follow Papá wherever it was he had gone.

“Your papá has gone away, Serafín,” she said in a voice like a thread interlaced in her crying.

“Yes, he's gone.”

“And there's nothing to do.”

“Yes, Mamá. There's nothing to do.”

With that nothing to do, she reacted. She passed her hand in front of her eyes as if removing a shadow and went with her children to pray below the picture of Jesus with His Heart in Flames that she had inherited from his grandmother, who had died in that same house of an illness called fright.

Serafín had felt more loving warmth from his grandmother than he had ever felt from his mother or father. But his grandmother had died of fright and now his father had gone away. The wind outside brought noise from a long way off, and he felt sadness expanding.

.   .   .

In Aguichapan the people were best at growing corn, but that year the crop had been very poor. They ate what they could and struggled along. Serafín's papá had walked all over the area looking for work until he was worn out. He sold chickens and straw hats in the market, worked as a peon building a dam and drilling a tunnel. He even went as far as Tierra Blanca to cut cane. From one place to another, following the hopes and rumors of work.

“They say there's something over there, I'd better go, even if it's far away.”

Or:

“Right here in the next town, some streets are being paved.”

Serafín went with him because he had stopped going to school ever since his father had a fistfight with the teacher in the cantina after a bitter discussion about politics, one of those in which no one agreed.

He had hardly begun to make out the meaning of letters, but he liked the mystery that surrounded them. It was much more entertaining and less tiring than working in the soil. Who would enjoy and not get tired of carrying a basket full of sombreros on your back for hours and hours? Or walking and walking along the grassy foothills on the way to possible jobs, better than the ones before but almost always nonexistent, the mirages of bad times. And returning by the same empty road, with more dust in your eyes than going, just the two of them, father and son, their only company the occasional passage of a drove of pack animals, as forsaken in the world as they were.

Papá would say:

“I'm not going to let myself rot here in Aguichapan. Better to die right now.”

So he looked for work outside. His hope was always outside of Aguichapan, away from the people of Aguichapan. A dumb bunch, he used to tell them.

.   .   .

One starry night when they were crossing a river on a barge, sitting on the boxes they had to carry to the other shore, Papá said:

“I have to go to Mexico City to see what's there.”

It was the first time Serafín heard that such an idea had occurred to his papá.

“Lots of people go and never come back,” Serafín told him, taking refuge against his father's strong chest, trying to get inside.

“And the reason is there's work to spare there.”

Serafín tried to imagine Mexico City while he breathed in the air of the stars falling over him. And a strange sensation, close to happiness, invaded him, as when he spent too much time looking at the star-filled sky. The barge proceeded slowly across the dense water.

When he was tired, his father felt the need to drink. Even the little money Uncle Flaviano lent them went entirely to drink. He collapsed on the table of unpolished pine that stuck splinters in your clothes when you brushed against it, looking at things only he could see.

.   .   .

Days later—without Papá the days got mixed up, sadness made them all seem the same—Mamá explained to him and his brothers that it was not true that Papá had left with another woman, as they were saying in town. He went in order to better himself. There in the city there was lots of work, and soon he was going to come back with a lot of money and presents.

“He's thinking about us,” Mamá said in a voice not even she believed. “Even though he's far away, he's thinking about us.”

Serafín felt a red flush rising to his cheeks and, although he did not want to say so, said:

“He took Cipriano's daughter with him. On his way to the highway, he went by for her and took her with him. Leo told me.”

“It's gossip,” she replied, putting a sharp note in her voice.

He just put his face down to hide.

Not until he was alone could he cry while looking at a sad afternoon.

In the distance the horizon was no more than a smooth line of copper wire.

.   .   .

The strong winds went away, it rained, and there was a calming, iridescent light, with the earth smoothed out, covering itself with dry leaves. But contrary to what Mamá thought, Papá did not come back. Things were getting worse for them. And nobody would lend them anything. It was the same for all the people in Aguichapan, because they all asked each other but no one had anything to lend.

So he decided to go to the city to find his father. He was the oldest son, so he was the one to do it.

At first Mamá did not want him to go.

“I've already lost your father. Now I'm going to lose you.”

Then she agreed, as if by then everything seemed to be the same to her. Or maybe because she knew where her husband was living in the city and she hoped if his oldest son arrived looking for him, he would change his mind.

“Here, look for him with this man, at this telephone.”

She prepared a bag for him with a little food and a letter in an envelope.

“Give this to your papá yourself.”

It was some time later before Serafín knew what the letter said, but he held it up before his eyes so much he almost guessed what was in it.

2

One morning at dawn
Mamá crossed the thick layer of frost, stepping firmly on the polished flagstones, holding Serafín by the hand. The burro drivers were lining up their animals in pairs to transport water, and the crestfallen branches shed drops of dew. The crowing of the cocks scared away the darkness. In some windows Mamá felt the presence of eyes spying on her. In others she saw them clearly, looking out through a crack in the curtains, ashamed, luminous in the ashy light that was dawning. Damned people, she thought, and continued thinking damned people until they reached the highway and stopped near a tall pine that seemed to pierce some transparent clouds galloping very low. Serafín clutched the plastic bag to his chest, his sleepy eyes red, making him see things in a thick, unreal
haze. He saw how the sun came up suddenly between two hills, already in its fullness, with the rapid flight of the immense darkness.

Two buses passed without stopping. Serafín told his mother none was going to stop, but now she was the one who had decided her son should go. Her expression hardened and she assured him one would stop, there was always one that stopped.

“They've already seen us come here to wait for the bus. Now you have to go.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing. I'm not going to tell them anything. I didn't tell them anything when your papá left, and I am going to tell them even less now that you're going.”

“They're going to ask you.”

“But I'm not going to say anything. And I'm going to stay so far away from them, they won't be able to ask me, and if they ask me, they are going to get tired of asking.”

“And Uncle Flaviano?”

“The same thing. Nothing.”

“You're going to need him to lend you some more money.”

“We'll see.”

“You're not going to talk with anyone, Mamá?”

“With your brothers and sisters. Why talk with anyone else until you and Papá get back?”

“We're going to come back, Mamá,” he emphasized it to get rid of his doubts.

“Of course.”

She was quiet for several minutes, as if she were somewhere else, already settled into the silence she would be living in for the coming days. As if past, present, and future had already started getting confused.

The sun was rising, brilliant, completely round, hastening the morning.

“There comes another bus,” she said taking a few steps toward the highway, ready to stop it however she could. And she stopped it. Maybe it was going to stop anyway, but just in case she went out onto the highway and waved a white handkerchief high, like a dove.

She cried, telling her son good-bye. But she cried more inside than she showed. She embraced him, hugging him more closely than she had for many years, while the driver yelled as hard as he could,

“Come on, come on! Hurry, Señora, or I'll leave . . .”

Really, she shed hardly any tears. She was going to say something, but just pressed her lips tight and put them on her son's cheek in something meant to be a kiss. Her lips were cold, and Serafín felt that the coldness in his mother's lips was the real goodbye. Why at that moment did he remember the little girl who had died in the river years before? The driver revved his engine without moving and said, “I mean it, Señora, I'm leaving.” Mamá said a blessing behind Serafín, but could not make the sign of the cross on him because he went up the first step with his back to her, went off thinking about the little girl who had died in the river.

“God bless you, Serafín!”

.   .   .

He got on the bus and looked at the aisle dividing the seats as if it were an aisle in a dream. From the back pocket of his pants he took out a bill and, staggering, gave it to the driver. Then he stumbled over the packages on the floor, crossed the hurdle of sharp looks and took a seat in one of the back rows. They had left him a seat with a window, and when he looked back through it, he saw only a piece of land and underbrush left far behind. He thought his mother would already be far away and felt the urge to get up and yell to them to let him get off, where was he going without her, but settled for hugging the plastic bag against his chest and clenching his teeth. Now there's nothing else to do, he told himself.

But he could not stop thinking about the girl in the river. Why did she die? She just slipped on a rock and fell on her back, hitting her head. Can people die because of something like that? Only a moment before they were sitting on the bank. She was barefooted with her legs stretched out, her feet very white, like two little shining fish. Serafín's mamá and the girl's mamá were in the water with their chemises white and floating out like balloons.