Yuri Herrera: Signs Preceding the End of the World

Most important were the ones awaiting her without caring what tongues she spoke or how she couriered. Her kid sister, who’d press close up beside her to eavesdrop on adult troubles, eyes round with attention, hands on knees. Makina could feel her absorbing the world, storing away the passions that came and went along the phone cord. (Of course I still love you, Very soon, Any day now, Hold your horses, Did you get it? Did she tell you? When was that? How did it happen? How in the name of God is that possible? His name is so and so, Her name is such and such, Don’t get me wrong, I never even dreamed, I don’t live here anymore.) She was growing up quickly, and in a man’s world, and Makina wanted to educate her as to the essentials: how to take stock of them and how to put up with them; how to savor them. How even if they’ve got filthy mouths, they’re fragile; and even if they’re like little boys, they can really get under your skin.

And the boyfriend. A boyfriend she had and who she referred to that way though they’d never discussed it and she didn’t feel like anyone’s girl, but she called him her boyfriend because he acted so much like a boyfriend that not calling him so, at least to herself, would have been like denying him something written all over his face. A boyfriend. She’d shucked him for the first time back during the brouhaha about the mayors. The day it all ended Makina felt a little like getting wasted, but she didn’t so much feel like liquor, it was more an itch to shake her body, so she’d been reckless and gone and shucked him as she had others on a couple of trips to the Little Town; what’s more, it had been an entirely forgettable foray. And, no question, she’d shaken off the exhaustion of an ordeal that was now over; but even though she hadn’t wanted to be fawned over, just wanted a man to lend himself, he had touched her with such reverence that it must have been smoldering inside him for ages.

She’d seen him before at the door of the elementary school where he worked, had noticed the way he wouldn’t look at her, looking instead at every other thing around her; that was where she picked him up, sauntered over saying she needed a shawl so that he’d put his arms round her, took him for a stroll, laughed like a halfwit at everything he said, especially if it wasn’t funny, and finally reeled him in on a line she was tugging from her bedroom. The man made love with a feverish surrender, sucked her nipples into new shapes, and when he came was consumed with tremors of sorrowful joy.

After that the man had gone to work in the Big Chilango, and when he came back months later he showed up at the switchboard to tell her something, looking so cocksure and so smart that she guessed what it was that he wanted to say and fixed it so she wouldn’t be left alone with him. The man hovered in silence for hours on end until she said Come back another day, we’ll talk. But when he came back she asked him about his gig and about his trip and never about what was going on inside. Then she asked him to stop coming to her work, said she’d seek him out instead. And she did: every weekend they’d shuck, and whenever she sensed he was about to declare himself, Makina would kiss him with extra-dirty lust just to keep his mouth shut. So she’d managed to put off defining things until the eve of the journey she was being sent on by Cora. Then, before she could silence him, he threw up his hands and though he didn’t touch her she felt like he was hurling her from the other end of the room.

You’re scared of me, he said. Not cause of something I did, just cause you want to be.

He’d stood and was facing her, straightening his sky-blue shirt; he was leaving without making love, but Makina didn’t say anything because she saw how hard it had been for him to get up from the bed; she could play dumb — I don’t know what you’re talking about — or accuse him of making a scene, but the slight tremble betrayed by his lips, the bottled-up breathing of a man barely keeping his composure, inspired in her a respect that she couldn’t dismiss; so she said It’s not that, and he raised his head to look at her, the whole of him an empty space to be filled by whatever it was that Makina had to say, but she stammered We’ll talk when I get back and then … Before she was through, he’d nodded as if to say Yeah, yeah, just sticking your tongue in my mouth again, and then turned and versed with the weariness of a man who knows he’s being played and can’t do a thing about it.

Three years earlier one of Mr. Aitch’s thugs had turned up with some papers and told Makina that it said right there that they owned a little piece of land, over on the other side of the river, that a gentleman had left it to them. On the paper was a name that might have belonged to the man who had been her father before he disappeared a long time ago, but Makina took no notice and instead asked Cora what the deal was, what that was all about, and Cora said It’s nothing, just Aitch up to his tricks. But in the meantime the thug took Makina’s brother out drinking and washed his brain with neutle liquor and weasel words and that night her brother came home saying I’m off to claim what’s ours. Makina tried to convince him that it was all just talk but he insisted Someone’s got to fight for what’s ours and I got the balls if you don’t. Cora merely looked at him, fed up, and didn’t say a word, until she saw him at the door with his rucksack full of odds and ends and said Let him go, let him learn to fend for himself with his own big balls, and he hesitated a moment before he versed, and in the doubt flickering in his eyes you could see he’d spent his whole life there like that, holding back his tears, but before letting them out he turned and versed and only ever came back in the form of two or three short notes he sent a long while later.

Two men ogled her in the bus ticket line, one pushed his face close as he passed and said Lucky’s my middle name! He didn’t brush against her but he felt her up with his breath, the son of a bitch. Makina wasn’t used to that sort of thing. Not that she hadn’t experienced it, she just hadn’t let herself get used to it. She’d either tell them to fuck right off, or decide not to waste her time on such sad sacks; that’s what she decided this time. But not because she was used to it. She bought her ticket and boarded the bus. A couple of minutes later she saw the two men get on. They were hardly more than kids, with their peach fuzz and journey pride. Since they probably had no notion of the way real adventures rough you up, they must’ve thought they were pretty slick adventurers. They jostled each other down the aisle to their seats, a few rows behind Makina’s, but the one who had spoken to her came back and said with a smirk Think this is me, and sat down beside her. Makina made no reply. The bus pulled out; almost immediately Makina felt the first contact, real quick, as if by accident, but she knew that type of accident: the millimetric graze of her elbow prefaced ravenous manhandling. She sharpened her peripheral vision and prepared for what must come, if the idiot decided to persist. He did. Barely bothering to fake it, he dropped his left hand onto his own left leg, languidly letting it sag onto the seat and brush her thigh on the way back up, no harm intended, of course. Makina turned to him, stared into his eyes so he’d know that her next move was no accident, pressed a finger to her lips, shhhh, eh, and with the other hand yanked the middle finger of the hand he’d touched her with almost all the way back to an inch from the top of his wrist; it took her one second. The adventurer fell to his knees in pain, jammed into the tight space between his seat and the one in front, and opened his mouth to scream, but before the order reached his brain Makina had already insisted, finger to lips, shhhh, eh; she let him get used to the idea that a woman had jacked him up and then whispered, leaning close, I don’t like being pawed by fucking strangers, if you can believe it.