Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

“I don’t want you to have anything to do with her any more. Remember what happened to her daughter. You, more than anyone, ought to remember.”

“I never knew her daughter.”

“She wants you to take her place. I won’t have that, that would be the last straw, the old witch.”

“She’s the only one who ever takes me out. Everyone else is always too busy.”

“Your little sister’s big enough now. She can take you.”

* * *

So, following his directions, Rosa María pushed little Luisito in his wheelchair, wherever he wanted to go. Toward Tacuba Street if what he wanted to see were the old stone and volcanic rock palaces of the Viceregency, wide porticos studded with nail heads as big as coins, balconies of wrought iron, niches sheltering stone Virgins, high gutters and drains of verdigris copper. Toward the squat, faded little houses along Jesús Carranza Street if, on the other hand, it was his whim to think about Doña Manuelita. He was the only one who’d ever been in the old woman’s room and kitchen, the only one who could describe them. There wasn’t much to describe, that was the interesting thing. Behind the doors that were also windows — the wooden kitchen door hung with sheer curtains, the door to her room covered by a sheet strung on copper rods — there was nothing worthy of comment. Just a cot. Everyone else decorated their rooms with calendars, altars, religious prints, newspaper clippings, flowers, soccer pennants and bullfight posters, paper Mexican flags, snapshots taken at fairs, at the Shrine of the Guadalupe. But not Manuelita. Nothing. A kitchen with clay utensils, a bag of charcoal, food for her daily meal, and the one room with its cot. Nothing more.

“You’ve been there. What does she have there? What’s she hiding?”

“Nothing.”

“What does she do?”

“Nothing. Everything she does she does outside her room. Anyone can see her — the flowerpots, the shopping, the dogs and the canaries. Besides, if you don’t trust her, why do you let her water your geraniums and cover your birds for the night? Aren’t you afraid your flowers will wither and your little birds will die?”

It’s hard to believe how slowly the outings with Rosa María go. She’s thirteen years old but not half as strong as Doña Manuelita. At every street corner she has to ask for help to get the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. The old woman had been able to do it by herself. With her, if they went down Tacuba, Donceles, and Gonzales Obregón to the Plaza of Santo Domingo, it was little Luisito who did the talking, it was he who imagined the city as it had been in colonial times, it was he who told the old woman how the Spanish city had been constructed, laid out like a chessboard above the ruins of the Aztec capital. As a little boy, he told Doña Manuelita, they’d sent him to school, it had been torture, the cruel jokes, the invalid, the cripple, his wheelchair tipped over, the cowards laughing and running away, he lying there waiting for his teachers to pick him up. That’s why he’d asked them not to send him, to let him stay home, kids can be cruel, it was true, it wasn’t just a saying, he’d learned that lesson, now they left him alone reading at home, the rest of them went out to work, except his mother, Doña Lourdes, and his sister Rosa María, all he wanted was to be left to read by himself, to educate himself, please, for the love of God. His legs weren’t going to get well in any school, he swore he’d study better by himself, honest, couldn’t they take up a collection to buy him his books, later he’d go to a vocational school, he promised, but only when it could be among men you could talk to and ask for a little compassion. Children don’t know what compassion is.

But Doña Manuelita knew, yes, she knew. When she pushed his wheelchair toward the ugly parts of their neighborhood, toward the empty lots along Canal del Norte, turning right at the traffic circle of Peralvillo, it was she who did the talking, and pointed out the dogs to him, there were more dogs than men in these parts, stray dogs without masters, without collars, dogs born God knows where, born of a fleeting encounter between dogs exactly like each other, a male and a bitch locked together after the humping, strung together like two links of a scabrous chain, while the children of the neighborhood laughed and threw stones at them, and then, separated forever, forever, forever, how was the bitch to remember her mate, when alone, in one of a hundred empty lots, she whelped a litter of pups abandoned the day after they were born? How could the bitch remember her own children?

“Imagine, little Luis, imagine if dogs could remember one another, imagine what would happen…”

A secret shiver filled with cold pleasure ran down little Luisito’s spine when he watched the boys of Peralvillo stoning the dogs, chasing them, provoking angry barking, then howls of pain, finally, whimpering, as, heads bloody, tails between their legs, eyes yellow, hides mangy, they fled into the distance until they were lost in the vacant lots beneath the burning sun of all the mornings of Mexico. The dogs, the boys, all lacerated by the sun. Where did they eat? Where did they sleep?

“You see, little Luis, if you’re hungry, you can ask for food. A dog can’t ask. A dog must take his food anywhere he can find it.”

But it was painful for little Luis to ask, and he did have to ask. They took up the collection and bought his books. He knew that a long time ago in the big house in Orizaba they’d had more books than they could ever read, books his great-grandfather had ordered from Europe and then gone to Veracruz to wait for, a shipment of illustrated magazines and huge books of adventure tales that he’d read to his children during the long nights of the tropical rainy season. As the family grew poor, everything had been sold, and finally they’d ended up in Mexico City because there were more opportunities there than in Orizaba, and because his father’d been given a place as archivist at the Ministry of Finance. The building where they lived was close to the National Palace and his father could walk every day and save the bus fare. Almost everyone who worked in the office wasted two or three hours a day coming to the Zócalo from their houses in remote suburbs and returning after work. Little Luis watched how the memories, the family traditions, faded away with the years. His older brothers hadn’t graduated from secondary school, they didn’t read, one worked for the Department of the Federal District and the other in the shoe department at the Palacio de Hierro. Of course, among them they made enough money to move to a little house in Lindavista, but that was a long way away, and besides, here in the old building on La Moneda they had the best rooms, a living room and three bedrooms, more than anyone else had. And in a place that had been a palace centuries ago little Luis found it easier to imagine things, and remember.

If only dogs could remember each other, Doña Manuelita said. But we forget, too, we forget other people and forget about our own family, little Luisito replied. At dinnertime he liked to remember the big house in Orizaba, the white façade with wrought-iron work at the windows, the ground behind the house plunging toward a decaying ravine odorous of mangrove and banana trees. In the depths of the ravine you could hear the constant sound of a rushing stream, and beyond, high above, you could see the huge mountains ringing Orizaba, looming so close they frightened you. It was like living beside a giant crowned with fog. And how it rained. It never stopped raining.

The others looked at him strangely; his father, Don Raúl, lowered his head, his mother sighed and shook hers, one brother laughed aloud, the other made a circling motion at his brow with his index finger. Little Luisito was “touched,” where did he get such ideas, why he’d never been in Orizaba, he was born and bred in Mexico City, after all, the family’d come to the city forty years ago. Rosa María hadn’t even heard him, she just kept eating, her shoe-button eyes were as hard as stone, and held no memories. How it pained little Luisito to beg for everything, for books and for memories. I don’t forget, I collect postcards, there’s the trunk filled with old snapshots, it’s used as a chest, I know everything that’s inside.