Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin (20 page)

“No, please, Papá.”

“No, what?”

“I don't want to sleep with them. Please.”

“Hurry.”

“Don't be stubborn, Serafín. It's only one night. Tomorrow you're going back to Aguichapan.”

“Please.”

“Hurry.”

“Then where are you going to go?” he said, raising his voice, hitting Serafín with it.

“I'm going to Alma's. She's waiting for me. It's very close.”

“It's very cold, you know.”

“Don't make me sleep with them, Papá. I'm begging you.”

“Go on then! You'd think they smelled bad.”

“Can you imagine sleeping with them, Serafín?”

“I just don't want to.”

“Is that what you came from Aguichapan for?”

“I'm going now. I'll come back tomorrow.”

“But you'll spend tonight here.”

“No,” and he slipped his hand free, regretfully.

“Look, I already have enough problems. You'll do me a favor if you leave right now. Go on!”

He opened the metal curtain just enough for Serafín to crawl out, like a small animal escaping from a trap about to spring.

.   .   .

Serafín went into the depth of night. He was suffocating but felt that if he stopped moving, grief would catch up and sink its fangs into him like a wild boar.

“Where are you going, Serafín?”

By now the streets were dark and empty, completely empty, with holes in the pavement and stretches of pure dirt. Only the cold was rattling around.

“Stop, Serafín. Ask somebody where the street with palm trees is.”

“There's nobody here, Mamá. Nobody.”

.   .   .

He had been in a deserted place once before, but with the advantage that it was not nighttime. Although when it's so empty, it feels almost the same, by day or by night, whether in that small village near Aguichapan or in Mexico City. He arrived with his papá one morning, but the people had gone on one of those long pilgrimages and there was no market. Only a few people had stayed scattered around as if trying to hide the shame of being so few.

“Damned people,” Papá said to the man who had explained it to him, smoking on the corner with his foot set squarely against the wall. “So much walking for this.” And he let the maguey bag with the sombreros fall to the ground.

“I didn't go. What for? A complete loss of time. Right?”

They started talking and Serafín crossed the empty plaza with the dry fountain, cracked benches, and a few capulin trees swaying in the wind, as if by the sadness of solitude.

When he turned around, he no longer saw his papá, and there felt the same sensation that had not come back until now, in Mexico City. He walked down a stone-paved street with white rock dust that reawakened his desire to cry. He walked the distance of the whole street and got to the end of the village, where the houses were flimsy and blackened, made of tin and wood. Because he felt so nervous he knocked on a door, but no one answered. Looking through the bare windows, he saw a few pieces of dusty furniture and something like the shadows of the people who lived there. Instead of having gone on a pilgrimage, they seem to have died, and the shadows did not leave the bodies. They were the souls themselves.

He sat down for a moment on a stone trough and started to cry. Everything he saw was menacing him with its solitude—the wide, yellow expanse of cornfields, the hill of huisaches and mesquites, a tree right in front of him shedding tears of resin.

He went back to the plaza by the same street. An old woman in a rebozo was saying her rosary, making a noise like the droning of bees in a flower. He asked her about his papá.

“Who is your papá, child? There's hardly anyone in the village today. Look, even the church is closed. Only the really old people or the really lazy ones are still here.”

“My papá was with a man, but suddenly they disappeared.”

“Then they probably went to the cantina. But no, the cantina is also closed. They must be in some house drinking.”

“And what shall I do?”

“Sit here close to me. If we pray together, you'll feel calmer.”

“Maybe my papá went back to Aguichapan.” And fear welled up in his throat, in the voice that went deep inside him.

“Without you? No father would do that. He has to be drinking in some house. When men don't have anything to do, they always drink. If he's trying to find you, he'll come to the plaza. Give me your hand, like this.”

And in a while his papá found him there, sleeping on the old woman's lap.

.   .   .

“I'm with you, Serafín. Don't give up. The sun will be coming up soon.”

“But I'm very cold, Mamá. And very sleepy. I can't go on with the sleepiness and the pain in my stomach.”

“Go back to your father. It's better for you to spend tonight there.”

“I don't even know where the store is anymore. And the glow I saw a little while ago has gone farther away from me instead of getting closer.”

“But in that street you're not going to find anything or anyone or anywhere to sleep.”

“I'm going to sit down on the sidewalk for a little bit. I really can't keep going.”

“If you sit down, you're going to go to sleep, Serafín, and the cold will get you. Keep on walking. You'll see the sun really will come up soon.”

“For a little while. Don't you think that glow is just a mirage, Mamá? Maybe part of the night itself.”

“It's probably not as far away as you think.”

“I saw it getting farther away all the time, even though I was running toward it.”

“Don't go to sleep, Serafín.”

“I'm just going to close my eyes to rest them.”

“Serafín, forgive me.”

“Forgive you for what, Mamá?”

But the voices, also, were dissolving in the rising tide of deepest sleep.