Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin (16 page)

He watched a dove fly up to perch on a high cornice; there it was, concentrated in the clarity of the day. He wondered how old or how young it was and thought that a dove, young or old, could go wherever it wanted to go. It would always look at the world from above, and only when it got tired would it come down to see it from below.

He put his hands behind his neck. He was bothered only by the shadow of someone passing by too closely or an especially insistent horn.

“More likely it's a young dove.”

.   .   .

“I was talking to the devil, and that made her mad. She was praying, and I told her it was useless, that the God she was asking for things sent only grief to earth. To get out of poverty, you have to ask the devil. Then I yelled, O Satan, king of the underworld, if you exist, get us out of misery. She carried on like you've never seen, tried to scratch me and burst into tears. I couldn't help laughing, and she got worse, trembling, so your grandmother had to carry her to bed and cuddle her like a child. The way they looked at me, I preferred coming here to sleep.”

“Don't you want me to bring you another cover?”

“No, this is enough. How was your mamá when you left the house?”

“Asleep, but my grandmother says she cried a lot because of what you said to her.”

“I tell you it was only because of the part about the devil.”

“Did you call to the real devil himself?”

“Yes, to the very one himself. The only one.”

“Mamá is terribly afraid of the devil.”

“Your mamá is afraid of everything.”

“Do you think the devil really exists?”

“No, you can see we're as poor as ever.”

“And if he really did exist? Imagine.”

“By now, it doesn't matter. I'd ask him to give me some happiness for a while and pay later with my soul. Anyway, I can't be any more damned somewhere else than I am here on earth. And they say the fire puts the body to sleep and then you don't feel it so much.”

“Could you do it?”

“There's nothing to that, understand? It's nothing but lies invented by women's fears. There are only clouds in the sky, and under the earth only more earth. And we'll keep on dragging our misery along until we reach the end of the rope. No one is going to come down to help us, and no one is going to give us a prize for having endured like burros.”

“And what if there is a heaven?”

“If that's where your mamá and your grandmother are going, I'd rather stay here.”

“You wouldn't want to be with them forever?”

“I wouldn't want to be with them at all.”

“Mamá says when you're dying, you're going to repent of all the things you say about God and you'll go to heaven, too, and we'll all be very happy together forever.”

“I can't even stand them here, where I can escape at times; imagine it there. They talk about jails made of clouds with guardian angels.”

“Why can't you stand them?”

“Because they're so afraid and so ugly, that's why.”

“She's my mamá. And my grandmother.”

“Of course . . . but as soon as you and your brothers and sisters grow up a little more, I'm going—why wouldn't I leave?”

“Where will you go?”

“Wherever it is, it'll be far away from them. You should have seen the way they looked at me a little while ago. They're fed up, too, even if they don't say so. I'm going to a place where the people are different from the ones here. Where you don't have to pray and work from sunrise to sunset in order to get a little bit of bread.”

“Do you still want to go to Mexico City?”

“One of these days I'm going to go there. They say it's hard, but at least there are opportunities. Here it's hard, and there's nothing. Everything is dry and it's going to get even drier.”

“Can I go with you?”

“You're getting to be old enough to go by yourself. I left home when I was twelve and there was no way I was going back. My papá begged and begged, arguing that my mamá was crying for me a lot. But it's better for them to cry than to have you hung up by the neck. Go away and you won't be caught by one of these nagging women here, like your mamá and your grandmother. There's no way to deal with them, and if you think there is, it's worse, because you'll end up with poison inside you, just like me. Go by yourself. Why do you want to go with me?”

“Uncle Flaviano says it's better not to go.”

“Because his wife already has him beaten down, and he always talks the way she wants him to. When he takes a couple of drinks, just see how she carries on. He says he doesn't drink because it's bad for his soul. What soul. It's his damn bitterness that comes out and wipes away the happiness. Who made him marry your Aunt María just so she could have him at her beck and call? What are they going to do with so much time together? She just takes advantage of him, and he lets her do it. That's all there is to it.”

“Can I sleep here with you?”

“Yes, but bring your own cover. While you're at it you can see how your mamá is getting along.”

“If I go, she won't let me come back.”

“What a nuisance you are, too, you scamp. Come closer, you're going to die of cold, with this threadbare cover. Have a shot of tequila. It'll do you good.”

14

As soon as he saw her
behind the counter in the pharmacy, he knew she could help him. Short, very fair, with a face like a doll. He went in and told her what he needed, showing her the paper.

“You think your papá is still somewhere around here instead of going away with this man on the slip of paper or back to your village?”

“I'm sure, Señora.”

“We can ask.”

There were rosettes on her porcelain cheeks, just like a doll's. She dialed the number while Serafín's anxiety made his hands open and close as if he were squeezing limes.

“Yes, Señora . . . he just arrived in the city . . . a very good-looking boy, if you could just see him . . . with eyes to make you lose sleep.” And she winked at Serafín. “He has the name and number of this man on a piece of paper . . . his Mamá sent him . . . yes, terrible . . . so many, Señora, so many . . . but, Holy Mother, what can we do? . . . if you'd be good enough . . . I'm not taking too much of your time? . . . of course, I understand, I'll wait.”

She put her hand on the mouthpiece and turned to wink at Serafín.

“She's going to ask her servant.”

Then she continued:

“Yes? . . . Oh, fine . . . don't tell me . . . how awful . . . that's the way these people are, you put your trust in them and look what happens . . . but it could have been worse . . . I appreciate it so much . . .”

She hung up the phone with a glowing smile and said,

“Look, the man on the paper really didn't go back to his village with his relatives. He went to jail because he stole some jewelry in that house. This woman says that, in fact, a few months ago he
brought a friend to work for her as butler and gardener, but he had a woman with him, and she already had a woman working for her, so she couldn't take them both. This same servant later found out from the man on the paper that they had found work nearby, at a house in the same neighborhood, but she didn't know exactly which one. Would it be your papá who came with the woman?”

“Yes.”

“But you still want to find him?”

“Yes.”

“And if he doesn't want to go back with you? Now that he has another woman here.”

“I have to give him the letter Mamá sent him. And I want to see him. I . . . since I left Aguichapan I've known about Cipriano's daughter.”

“About who?”

“The girl he has with him is Cipriano's daughter.”

His solemn air made her smile fade, but not disappear completely. She rounded her lips and firmed her voice, but the brilliance of her eyes and the rosettes in her cheeks betrayed her.

“Lord, Lord,” she said and looked for a notebook and pencil in a drawer of the counter. “I'm going to write down the name of the neighborhood for you. Go over there to see what you find.”

“Thank you, Señora.”

She also gave him a hundred-peso bill, which Serafín carefully folded in half and put in the back pocket of his pants. As he was going out, he turned for a moment—why were the real good-byes always from a distance?—and she, elbows on the counter, gave him a wide smile, like a floating slice of a small moon.

.   .   .

Papá was right; after feeling hungry for so long, you almost stopped feeling it. Although he'd said it about fire, not about hunger. But it must be the same, to die of hunger or burn up in flames. The body goes to sleep and turns into wood. It was difficult for him to walk, to lift one foot and then the other, as if he were on stilts. Since he had arrived in the neighborhood where he supposed his father was, he had not stopped walking. From one end to the other, in all
directions, in front of the same stores, the same doors, the same cantinas (which he always looked into), the same people, even the same dogs.

But the days were passing and he wondered if he was going to last. As he wondered, the question made him dizzy. He looked up high, and that new fear returned to chill his bones.

How would it be to die?

So he preferred walking to sleeping. Even though sleep might overcome him anywhere, in front of the door of a house, or next to some tree.

One morning he was awakened by a kick in the ribs. It was a fat man, who said he did not like to have beggars sleeping outside his house. And although Serafín was already awake, he gave him another kick.

“You look like a dog, you filthy brat. Don't you have a home?”

Serafín picked up his sweater and bag clumsily as if he was really already dead and was picking up his own remains. When he stood up, he finally saw the fat man's eyes, like knives, and he ran away. The fat man might call a policeman, and then he would never find Papá.

.   .   .

“I knew you were staying around here, Papá. Something told me. That's why I started playing at walking with my eyes closed. I played it a lot in Aguichapan, and here it helped me with the fear. As if I were seeing more clearly. Feeling the wall or with my hands sticking out in front of me. Now I'm going to run into a man who is my Papá, I was thinking . . . And I ran into a whole lot of people and even a pole, but not you. Why, if you were also thinking of me, didn't we find each other?”

15

He also enjoyed
looking at the city's stars. Because he slept so much in the street, under the open sky, he ended up learning them by heart, barely twinkling when they dared appear among the clouds and smoke. There was one he liked the most because it was the first one to appear. The
most brilliant and the bluest. He watched it as if drinking it, excited to know one of the city's stars.

The rain, on the other hand, hurt him more than hunger. It plunged him into the earth, making him smaller, not letting him sleep and therefore making him remember his hunger more. One afternoon he walked under a fine rain that was like needles piercing his cheeks. And he had to sleep in wet clothes, curled up against a metal door that had a protective ledge above. The wet clothes made him feel he had been trapped in flypaper. He shivered and turned over on the concrete, using his sweater as a pillow.

Actually he had never liked rain, and thunder even less. It was because once when it was raining hard, Papá had come home infuriated to complain to Mamá about something they'd said about her in the village. Something from when they did not even know each other and she had another boyfriend. Papá yelled at her to wake up and then they began quarreling.

“Yes, I liked him a lot. So?”

“What did he do to you? What else did he do? Where? Tell me or . . .”

Within the bluish darkness, the blow was swallowed by the noise of the storm, like Mamá's smothered moan and Papá's yelling.

“You knew about him . . . Why are you doing this now?”

“How did he do it to you? Tell me. Here? This way? Or harder?”

“The children are going to hear us, Román. No.”

“This way?”

In a moment a flash of lightning showed Serafín his papá's eyes, like rubber balls. Then they were embracing and moving around in the bed, with Mama's moans each time more smothered and flat, guttural, as the cover over them formed the crest of a dark, throbbing wave.

So the nights when it rained were longer. Some of them did not ever stop because it kept on raining after dawn, making day into night. Not even the daylight could calm the bitterness of the rain that was born at night. It was different if it started raining when it was already day, and there was no thunder. A rain that started in the afternoon had the advantage of carrying some of the light left
from morning, so the bitterness did not come until later. Sometimes it didn't come at all if the rain stopped early.

.   .   .

Alma found him on one of those nights when he slept wherever he was. Wondering how they could let a child sleep like that, lying right in the street, she looked at him and recognized Serafín. She squatted down and moved his shoulder.

Although he was sitting up, it was as if Serafín were still dreaming, with a familiar face in front of him. Who was it? And really, to see the face of a person he knew in those circumstances seemed to sink him even deeper into the dream. Where did he come from? And where did she come from? He rubbed his eyelids and looked at Alma bleary-eyed.

“Don't you remember me? I'm Alma, Cipriano's daughter. Cipriano. You do remember Cipriano, don't you?”

He stretched out his hand and felt her as if he were feeling the dream itself.

“I think you saw her even though she wasn't right in front of you, like me . . . You saw her because you only saw what you had within you . . . Pretty soon the rumor began going around and Serafín heard it . . . Someone even said that you killed Cipriano to get his daughter . . .”