Lost in the City: Tree of Desire and Serafin

by Ignacio Solares

  When she finished the letter, Alma’s eyes were a brighter green. She went to the front door with Serafín on her tiptoes, hardly touching things, as if caressing them, and there she decided, “I’ll walk a few blocks with you. I hope the Señora doesn’t catch me.”

  She stopped when they got to a boulevard with a median and palm trees.

  “I’ll go back now. At the next street, turn to the left. Do you know which way is left? That’s it. Then find number ninety-seven. It’s very close. I wrote it on the paper. If you see someone, ask them. Don’t get lost.”

  But Serafín was in such a hurry, he did not hear her final words. He waved good-bye and started running, wrapped in the cloud of vapor that came out of his mouth.

  As he ran, he felt the cold of the night like a huge wave suspended over him, crowned by a misty foam, that lowered very slowly and from one moment to another burst just at his side. He had to run faster, to get out of the clutch of the intense cold . . .

  . . .

  “The worst thing, Serafín, is to despair, give in to the weight of fatigue, or the discomfort in your stomach, or the urge to curl up in some doorway, like a dog—that’s what they’ve called you, filthy brat, you look like a dog. Would it matter to you now if your body were allowed to collapse, your muscles to relax, your eyes to close? In any old corner or at the foot of one of those palm trees in the middle of the street, which at this hour casts a shadow as if to ward off the terrors of the night. You know it, but today is not like any other day and you have to keep yourself going because you’re finally going to see your papá. Pull yourself together. Tell yourself it’s not so cold. You’ve always been good at thinking things are not what they seem.”

  “But why is the cold hurting me more today? I’ve been walking here for so many nights, and it never hit me so hard.”

  “It’s the emotion, Serafín, that makes the body weak. And on top of your own, you’re carrying my feelings, which are no less than yours.”

  “You knew I was going to see Papá today?”

  “I’ve known everything along with you. At times I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to see him.”

  “Why didn’t you answer me? I talked and talked to you, and you didn’t answer me.”

  “Don’t carry me with you all the time, Serafín. Me, with all my troubles, my complaints. Why do you want to carry me along with you? Someday I’m going to die and if you’re used to carrying me inside you, you won’t let me go. I’m no use to you. I’m just a nuisance. And when I’m already dead, you won’t let me rest. What the dead need is rest.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want me to keep on talking to my grandmother?”

  “That’s why. The poor thing didn’t recover her soul completely; she left part of it here with us and came back to look for it.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “To go on. It was going to hurt you to spend so much time with the dead. You were very little, and I was worried. So I told her to go, even though she had to continue her way with an incomplete soul.”

  “And why are you talking to me now, Mamá?”

  “Because I’m really afraid for you. You don’t know how much I’ve regretted sending you. But also I wanted you to see your papá. To find out once and for all if he still loved us.”

  “But you’re alive, aren’t you, Mamá?”

  “Yes, Serafín, I’m alive and waiting for you.”

  . . .

  He knocked timidly on the metal security curtain, but the only response was the distant barking of a dog.

  The night was growing deeper, finally hiding the stars, covering them with cold.

  He kept knocking on the metal curtain harder and harder until his knuckles could no longer stand it, with the cold spreading deeper as he waited. He turned his face down and felt a hot tear. A single, unexpected tear. Papá, he said in a low voice.

  Then the metal curtain began to go up.

  It was as if the curtain was lifting on a long-expected dream.

  There was Papá, standing in the night, so overwhelming Serafín had to step back and clutch his bag against his chest.

  “What are you doing here?” Papá asked while pulling up the zipper on his denim pants.

  “I came to find you.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Alma told me.”

  “Alma?”

  “Yes, Alma.”

  “And how did you find her?”

  “She saw me in the street. I was looking for you around here. Mamá gave me a telephone number to call you, but you weren’t there anymore. So they told me to look for you around here.”

  “Come on in.”

  They went in, and Papá turned on the light and lowered the metal curtain. The small shop had a rickety showcase and a rack with five shelves. The meagerness of the stock—jars of fruit preserves or honey, cigarettes, matches, bags of brown sugar, bunches of aromatic herbs, candies inside the showcase—indicated a business that was just starting out or not very prosperous. Tapers and votive candles were hanging from nails. A door at the back was half open.

  Looking stubborn, Serafín’s papá went to sit on a wooden bench and leaned his elbows on the showcase, wearing the red and blue plaid shirt that Serafín remembered seeing in Aguichapan.

  “Your Mamá told you to come to look for me?”

  “Yes, she wanted to know if you’re going to come back to us someday.”

  “Did she give you some money?”

  “Very little. Just enough for the bus fare and a little more. It was gone soon.”

  “Who would have thought.”

  “She sent you this letter.”

  Serafín’s papá trembled angrily, as if the words he was reading were making him come apart. At the end he gave a nervous laugh, which contrasted with the look of fury in his eyes. “Your mamá is crazy. You see how crazy she is? You see why I can’t live with her anymore? You see why anything is preferable to living with her? You see why I was telling you I was about to go crazy if I stayed with her? You see why I preferred to come to the city to look for something else? Anything except her.”

  He leaned back on the bench and opened his hands to Serafín, as if to show his unhappiness, his helplessness.

  Serafín recovered the letter abandoned on the showcase. He put it in his bag and took out the one from Alma.

  “Alma also sent you a letter.”

  His Papá took it with his fingers like burning tongs. Now his lips showed something like shame. A fly was hovering and buzzing around between the glasses of honey.

  “They can really screw you.”

  “Are you living here?”

  “Yes, with the owner of the store and her children. She’s an older widow and has been nicer to me than you could imagine.”

  “Could I go in there?” Serafín pointed to the partly opened door.

  “What for?”

  “To go to the bathroom. And you can read the letter from Alma, OK?”

  “But don’t make any noise. One of the children has been kind of sick.”

  As Serafín went in, he had the feeling that started when he heard the metal curtain going up. A feeling he should experience completely, that began when he left Aguichapan. Or maybe before. Maybe the night when his papá left home. Or possibly even earlier. The time of his grandmother’s terror. Or when the rainy nights started to frighten him. Something that embedded itself within him like a fundamental doubt, ever since his first visions of the world.

  The orange light from the store barely reached the surprised faces. The woman, the boy, and the girl squeezed together like a single three-headed body, in the two joined beds, with the cover pulled up to their chests. What were they afraid of? Of him, of Serafín? How would he look to them from their hiding place in the bed? And who were they?

  20

  “There are two children, Mamá. A boy about my age and a younger girl. And a really skinny woman. At least to me she seems very thin, worn out. Or is the light fooling m
e?”

  “Get out of there, Serafín.”

  “Would Papá rather be with them than with us?”

  “Hurry, Serafín, get out of there.”

  . . .

  “I’m going to the bathroom, Señora.”

  But the woman did not answer; she only pulled the edge of the sheet a little higher, up to her bony neck, perhaps afraid of covering her face completely.

  “Is that the door to the bathroom?”

  Serafín heard a tiny voice hardly breaking the silence, probably from the boy.

  “Yes, it’s there, over there.”

  Groping his way through things, he dodged chairs, tables, and a pile of boxes to reach the door. He left the door ajar and managed to urinate in the dimness. If they heard him, so what. He felt a kind of tear in the thin membrane of sentiment that had motivated him until then. In his eyes flickered the fear of what he had sensed in his inmost being, there, in complete darkness.

  “Hurry, Serafín, get out of that place.”

  He tore the letter from Mamá to Papá into as many bits as possible and threw them into the toilet.

  Going back, he was guided by the beam of light, brighter when looking right at it. It seemed like the exit to a labyrinth in spite of the nearness of the door. He no longer paid attention to the shadows of the beds and wall; now he himself was avoiding the faces of the woman and the children. He tripped over a box and almost fell to the floor, and heard a small soprano voice:

  “Be careful, Serafín.”

  “I heard him clearly call me by my name. What do they know about me, or you, or my brothers and sisters? What has Papá told them?”

  And the small voice, that came from the darkest part of the room, impossible to place at that moment, added:

  “There are some other boxes farther along.”

  “Yes . . .” he was going to say thanks, but the word stayed in his mouth, changing into a light croak.

  He emerged into the light and blinked.

  “Hurry.”

  Papá was sitting bent over on the bench under the glare of harsh light, his chin in his hand and his eyes looking away, with a newly opened bottle of tequila at his side, which Serafín thought he was imagining or dreaming until Papá gave it life by lifting it with his free hand, his position unchanged, holding it to his lips.

  “Papá, I’m leaving now.”

  There was a silence during which the light became clearer along with the wavering buzz of a fly moving around among the glasses of honey.

  “Serafín, my son,” Papá finally said, swinging the bottle like a pendulum, hypnotizing himself. “If you only knew the situation I’m in. I’ve even had to rob gas tank caps from cars . . . But I saved this money . . . I’ve been saving it for a while to send to your mamá, and now you can take whatever you need to return and to buy something for yourself and something for your brothers and sisters . . . It’s not much, five thousand pesos, but I don’t have any more . . . You understand, don’t you?”

  “Hurry.”

  “Papá, I’m going now. Really.”

  “Put that money away carefully.”

  Serafín obeyed and begged his papá to let him leave. But his papá stood up and, taking him by the hand, told him to spend that night there whether he wanted to or not. Outside it was very cold and tomorrow he himself would take him to the bus station. Also, he was going to send a letter to Mamá. Serafín saw himself taken helplessly to the room, but as soon as he felt the darkness in his face, he stopped.

  “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.