Diana, who’s been battling with Guadalupe’s hypochondria for years, and has had enough of it, says sharply:
“You need to get out of bed.”
Mónica and I look on in silence.
It’s not as bad as all that, I think: she’s only sixty-five. After fifteen or twenty minutes stroking her hair, I propose taking her to see the doctor. She says no. It’s not necessary. She’s fine now, and will be even better after my visit. She’s being melodramatic, but not lying: she loves me. And I love her, although with that ambiguous passion of the Judas who flees from the story carrying with him, untouched, the small purse of silver coins …
(Is that why I’m relieved not to have to take her to the doctor? Is it a good son or a sociopath who, at that moment, walks with my bones …?)
We head home and turn in early because the plan is to be away before dawn. I dream all night that I’m leaning over a toilet bowl, spitting out gobs of black saliva and trying to relieve my pain with a natural remedy, the label of which reads: Hiel Ayudada.
Days pass with no change in Mamá’s condition. I phone Aldo Reyna, our family doctor, and ask him to visit her while I’m there. Aldo examines her with exasperating thoroughness. A look of alarm spreads across his face even before he’s finished. He goes to the laboratory on the corner, asks for a kit, and, there and then, takes the necessary samples for a full blood and urine count.
“Why didn’t you consult me earlier?” he reproaches me as we descend the staircase designed for a dwarf.
I don’t know how to reply: I’m making sure he doesn’t crack his head against the hobbit-height ceiling of the landing.
The results come back at about six. Aldo has had to attend a family dinner (it’s National Doctors’ Day), so Mónica goes to pick them up. Before talking to me, she rings him. Aldo asks her to read out two of the figures: leukocytes and platelets. There’s a moment of confusion, anxiety, delay …
He then orders:
“Tell Julián we have to have her admitted immediately. Tell him to cancel any commitments for the next few weeks.”
Falling ill possesses a daltonic perceptive range that spans from ruining your weekend to horror. The most acute station this train passes through is not to be found at the extremes but in some indefinite zone on its route: pain polished to the condition of a sacred diamond. Someone suddenly connects you up to a cable that intensifies everything. It’s the sublime thunderclap of Kant deprived of lyrical frills and postprandial constitutionals; just damp cavern. A sensitive sphere. Except that spheres are a symbol of perfection. And to call what my mother is about to undergo perfection would be pure evil.
She was admitted to the ER and spent four hours in a long hall, punctuated by curtains, where someone is crying every two meters. They told me I could stay there, but should keep out of the way, so for a long time I ricocheted between nurses, doctors, desks, and oxygen tanks, listening to her scream, “What are you doing? Don’t do that to me, please,” and, “Twenty inches, twenty inches.” After a while, Aldo came out from behind one of the curtains accompanied by another young doctor, whom he introduced as Valencia.
“She’s not going anywhere,” said Valencia. “Better get your head around the idea of a long stay. Drink plenty of water, eat bananas, have some comfortable clothes brought in. You’re going to need blood donors. A lot of them. Your initial instinct will be to donate your own blood. Don’t. How good are you at giving bad news?”
Outside the ER a small audience had already gathered: Mónica, Diana and Gerardo, Saíd and Norma. I joined them and we spent a few minutes smoking and drinking coffee while I brought them up to date. Then I completed all the necessary formalities and returned to the ER to look for Lupita. She’d gone: they had taken her to internal medicine. I spent almost two hours trying to find her.
In the meantime, the newly rechristened Guadalupe Charles was admitted into the male medical ward: there weren’t any beds available in the female wing. As no family member was present, the nurses attempted to obtain the details needed for the register directly from her. Guadalupe responded to everything with “twenty inches, twenty inches,” the whites of her eyes showing and her head drooping to one side. They undressed her, put on a gown that left her butt uncovered. They sat her on a plastic wheelchair-cum-commode and pushed her to the toilet, which was occupied. As no family member was present, the nurses decided to leave her in the corridor for a while, with her ass there for all to see. When they finally showered her, they elected to do so without removing her from the wheelchair: using a long hooked pole, they slid the body under a stream of cold water, removed it, scrubbed it down, and then put it back under the shower for as long as they judged necessary to rinse off the soap.
When I managed to find her, she was in room 108 (the following day she was transferred to 101 to isolate her). She was lying next to an octogenarian emphysema sufferer, separated by nothing more than a transparent green curtain. Her hair was damp and spread on a towel. I touched her forehead and she half-opened her eyes. She murmured:
“We all have a space. I don’t know where, but I’ve got twenty inches to rest in. I’m so glad you brought them, my son.”
I began believing the earth was round when I started high school. My school was on the other side of the tracks, almost on the outskirts of the northern town we were then living in. By then we were poor enough to consider the daily public transportation costs beyond our means, so I had to walk some three miles every morning. The school bell rang at a disgusting hour: six forty-five. But at least I enjoyed the freedom of choosing between two routes for making the journey. I could take a half-mile detour to the south and cross the tracks separating my neighborhood from Federal No. 2, using the pedestrian bridge. Or I could sleep in for fifteen minutes longer and make the journey hanging between the carriages in the classification yard, with the additional adrenaline rush of leaping (wearing my backpack, like a parachutist in the U.S. Army) from trains moving deceptively fast.
It didn’t take me long to celebrate the luck that, as a child, brought me into contact with Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, a heap of scrap iron whose rolling stock and speeds had varied little since the time of the Revolution. The trains were like horses: lethal, raging wild animals, but at the same time fainthearted and lined up, tameable. Maneuvering between the wagons and watching the sun coming up on the other side was my way of getting out of Plato’s cave. I understood it wasn’t natural for a piece of steel to stand for a spike in my heart rate. Or at least that’s what I imagine now, as the nurse sticks a needle into me and checks if I’m eligible to serve as a platelet donor.
One day I leapt from the moving coupling between two maize wagons and, when I came down on the other side and stumbled, simply knew it. What an idiot, I told myself. Why hadn’t I seen it before? A sensation copied from Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy when, while escaping from his father, Michelangelo goes into ecstasies at the sight of that miraculous Polaroid named Creation: a small cloud stretching out toward another small cloud. In that same meeting of surfaces, floating like a silk or gauze anime from the moving train to the crystal-wind boundary of open space, feeling happily out of focus, I perceived it with Saiyanian lucidity:
The earth is a sphere.
Obviously.
I don’t have much experience of death. I guess this could eventually become a logistical problem. I should have rehearsed with some junkie friend or grandmother with heart problems. But no. I’m sorry, there’s been a gap in my education. If it happens, I’ll make my debut in the major league: burying Mamá.
One day I was playing guitar at home when someone came to the gate. It was a neighbor. She was sobbing.
“Would you mind not playing your guitar? Cuquín was knocked down by a Coca-Cola truck. It killed him. We’re holding the vigil right now.”
I was fifteen and loud.
I extended them the courtesy of keeping quiet. Instead of playing, I got my Walkman and put on Born in the U.S.A.
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After a while they came back and rang more insistently. It was my namesake, the neighbor’s son, brother of the dead boy. He said:
“Come with me to buy some ice.”
I put on a shirt—it was summer: in the 116-degree heat of the Coahuila desert, you don’t wear much indoors—jumped over the railing, and walked to the beer store with him.
He explained:
“He’s beginning to smell. But Mom and Dad are trying to ignore it.”
We bought four bags of ice. On our way back, my namesake stopped on the corner and began to cry. I hugged him. We stood there like that for a while. Then we lifted the bags from the ground and I went to his house with him. Wails and cries were coming from inside. I helped him take the bags onto the porch, said good-bye, and returned to my headphones.
That episode is on my mind now because something similar happened the other night. I went out to buy water in the OXXO store opposite the hospital. On my way back, I noticed a pedestrian making hard work of weaving through the traffic on the avenue. At some point, just before getting to where I was, he stopped between two cars. Horns were very soon honking. I deposited my bottles of water, went up to him, and tugged him back to the sidewalk. As soon as he felt my hand, he slid both arms around my chest and began to cry. He was murmuring something about his “little one”; I wasn’t sure if he was referring to his daughter or his wife. He asked if I could let him have a telephone card, and I gave him mine. There’s something repulsive in the embrace of a person crying for a loss of life: they grab hold of you like you’re a slab of meat.
I know nothing about death. I only know about mortification.
In the last year of my adolescence, when I was sixteen, there was a second corpse in my neighborhood. And neither then did I have the courage to view the coffin, because I feel—and this hasn’t changed—I formed part of the unforeseeable chain of circumstances leading to the death. He was called David Durand Ramírez and was younger than me. He died one September day in 1987, at eight in the morning, from a shot fired from a .22-caliber pistol. This tragedy was partly the reason for my family migrating to Saltillo, my decision to study literature, my choice of career, and, eventually, the fact that I was sitting in the leukemia ward narrating my mother’s story. But to explain how David Durand’s death marked my life, I have to begin earlier: several years before.
This all happened in Ciudad Frontera, a town of some thirty thousand inhabitants that had sprung up in the shadow of the steelworks in Monclova, Coahuila State, where my family experienced its most comfortable years, but also a catalog of humiliations.
We’d arrived there after the closure of the brothels in Lázaro Cárdenas. Mamá went in search of sympathetic magic: she thought in that other city where a steel foundry was also under construction, our household would again experience the bonanza of the Lázaro Cárdenas years.
In the beginning, she wasn’t wrong: in a brothel called Los Magueyes, she met Don Ernesto, an elderly local cattle rancher. He started frequenting her as just one more whore, but as the months passed, he began to realize my mother was no fool: she read a lot, had a rare talent for arithmetic, and—crazy as this may sound—was a woman of very firm principles. She was, above all, incorruptible when it came to other people’s money, something that, in this country, almost makes you a foreigner.
Don Ernesto took her on as his eyes and ears in a couple of businesses: another brothel and the town’s gas station. He offered her a fair wage and affectionate treatment. None of which stopped him turning up from time to time, having had one tequila too many, and putting his hand under her skirt, a maneuver she had to dodge without losing her job or her composure.
Marisela Acosta was happy. She organized her children to look after one another so as not to squander more money on neurotic childminders. She rented a house with three bedrooms and a small yard; acquired some furniture and a dilapidated sky-blue Ford. She brought humus-rich soil from Lamadrid and planted a small plot of carrots that never grew. The name of our neighborhood was ominous: El Alacrán, the scorpion. But however schmaltzy it may sound (and will sound: What else can you expect from a story that takes place in the Sweet Nation?), we lived on the corner of Progreso and Renacimiento, at number 537. There, from 1980 to 1982, between progress and renaissance, we spent our infancy: my mother’s and mine.
Then came the massive devaluation of the peso, known as the “Dog Crisis”—after the president had promised he would defend the currency like a dog—and, in my childhood pantheon, José López Portillo entered posterity as (in my mother’s words) the Great Son of a Bitch. Don Ernesto’s out-of-town businesses went bankrupt. He returned to his cattle and sacked Marisela. We held on to the house, but began making seasonal migrations again: Acapulco, Oaxaca, Sabinas, Laredo, Victoria, Miguel Alemán … Mamá attempted, for the umpteenth time, to earn a living as a sewing machine operator in the Teycon bonded assembly plant in Monterrey. The pay was so low it was criminal, and she was hired at piece rate, two or three shifts a week. She always ended up going back to the daytime brothels on Calle Villagrán, squalid dives crammed by midmorning with soldiers and cops more interested in the clothes than the women, which added a tinge of violence and wretchedness to the air.
It was soon impossible to keep up with the rent for the house. At the end of ’83 we were evicted, and all our possessions seized. Almost all of them: at my express request, the clerk of court allowed me to remove a book or two before the police loaded our things onto the van. I took the two thickest: the complete works of Wilde in an Aguilar edition, and volume 13 of the Nueva Enciclopedia Temática. Literature has always been generous with me: if I had to go back to that moment, knowing what I know now, I’d choose the same books.
We spent three years in absolute poverty. Mamá had acquired a plot on disputed common land, but there was nothing there besides dwarf sand dunes, dead cacti, half a truckload of gravel, three hundred blocks, and two sacks of cement. We erected a small room with no foundations that came more or less as high as my shoulders, and added a roof of cardboard sheets. To get in, you had to go on all fours. There was no running water, no drains, no electricity. Jorge left high school and found a job mixing nixtamal in the tortilla section of an industrial canteen. Saíd and I sang on buses for money. Mamá—who by then had given birth to Diana, my little sister—was always away on trips.
Within a year, Jorge had had enough: he grabbed some clothes and left. He was seventeen. We next received news of him on his twenty-third birthday: he’d just been appointed duty manager at the Hotel Vidafel in Puerta Vallarta. He added in his letter that it was a seasonal post.
“I was born in Mexico by mistake,” he once told me. “But one of these days I’m going to put that right once and for all.”
And he did: at the age of thirty, he emigrated to Japan.
I can’t talk about my mother or myself without referring to this period. Not for its sad, pathetic aspects, but because it’s our version of spirituality: a hybrid between Buñuel’s The Young and the Damned and The Dhammapada. Or better still, and less run-of-the-mill: Pedro Infante’s Nosotros los Pobres in mystic karate master costumes; The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Three years of dire poverty don’t destroy you. Just the reverse: they awaken a certain visceral lucidity.
Singing on the interurban buses that transported the staff of the AHMSA foundry back to the dry archipelago of neighboring towns (San Buenaventura, Nadadores, Cuatro Ciénegas, Sacramento, Lamadrid), Saíd and I saw almost crystalline sand dunes, black-and-white hills, deep walnut groves, a river called Cariño, pools of fossil water with stromatoliths, giraffe-necked box turtles … We had our own money and ate whatever took our fancy. The refrain we finished all our performances with went: “I do what I do / ’cause I don’t wanna steal.” We learned to think like artists: we sold a stretch of the landscape.
At times, our Coahuiltec version of the Arabian simoon would blow in. It was a strong wind that used to take off the sheets of cardboard covering the shack. W
hen that happened, Saíd and I would go running after our roof, which would be twisting, turning, and flying low down the middle of the street.
From 1986 (the year the World Cup was held in Mexico) to 1987 (the year David Durand died), things got quite a lot better: we rented a house, bought some furniture, and gradually rejoined the class of the “poor but respectable.” Except that Marisela Acosta, unbeknownst to most of the neighborhood, had to go four nights a week to the brothels of the nearby city of Monterrey to earn the money for our schooling.
I was in the first year of high school and, despite the stigma of having been a beggar in the eyes of half the town, had slowly managed to renew my friendship with the Durands, a fair-haired family of French descent that had little money (the father was a truck driver) but were very popular.
One night, Gonzalo Durand asked me to go to La Acequia with him. He wanted to buy a pistol.
Gonzalo was a sort of alpha male for us members of the street-corner gang who met up in the evenings to smoke marijuana and flirt with the girls coming out of the high school. Not only was he the oldest: he was also the best fighter and the only one of us with a good job, an operator in the no. 5 hot metal furnace at AHMSA. He was just nineteen. The age of armed illusions.
The elite chosen to accompany him on his rite of passage were Adrián Contreras and me. We made our way in an unregistered ’74 Maverick to the adjoining neighborhood. First they offered him a Smith & Wesson revolver (“It’s a Bone Collector,” said the assistant in a syrupy voice, most probably pumped to the ass with cough mixture). Then they showed him the small automatic pistol. He fell in love with it straight off and bought it.
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