Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

Doña Manuela knew all this, too, because little Luisito had told her, before they’d forbidden her to take him out for a walk. When she was alone in her room, lying on her cot, she tried to communicate silently with the boy, remembering the same things he remembered.

“Just imagine, Manuelita, how this building must have looked before.”

That was little Luisito’s other memory, as if the past of that big house now shared by twelve families complemented the memory of the one and only house, the house in Orizaba, the house that belonged to only one family, his family, when they’d had an important name.

“Just imagine, these were palaces.”

The old woman made a great effort to remember everything the boy told her and then imagine, as he did and when he did, a majestic palace: the entryway before there was a lottery stand, the carved marble facade stripped of cheap clothing stores, the bridal shop, the photographer’s shop, and the soft-drinks stand, free of the advertisements that disfigured the ancient nobility of the building. A clean, austere, noble palace, a murmuring fountain in the center of the patio instead of the clotheslines and washtubs, the great stone stairway, the ground floor reserved for the servants, the horses, the kitchens, the grain storerooms, and the smell of straw and jelly.

And on the main floor, what did the boy remember? Oh, great salons smelling of wax and varnish, harpsichords, he said, balls and banquets, bedchambers with cool brick floors, beds draped with mosquito netting, mirrored wardrobes, oil lamps. This is the way that Doña Manuelita, alone in her room, spoke with little Luis, after they’d been separated. This is the way she communicated with him, by remembering the things he remembered and forgetting about her own past, the house where she’d worked all her life until she was an old woman, General Vergara’s house in the Roma district, twenty-five years of service, until they’d moved out to Pedregal. There hadn’t been time to win the friendship of young Plutarco; the new mistress, Señora Evangelina, had died only a few years after marrying the General’s son, and her mistress Clotilde before that; Manuela had been only fifty when she was fired, she reminded the General of too many things, that’s why he fired her. But he was generous. He continued to pay her rent in the tenement on La Moneda.

“Live your last years in peace, Manuela,” General Vergara had said to her. “Every time I see you I think of my Clotilde. Goodbye.”

Doña Manuelita chewed on a yellowed, knotted finger as she remembered her employer’s words, those memories kept intruding into the memories she shared with little Luisito, they had nothing to do with them, Doña Clotilde was dead, she was a saint, the General had been influential in Calles’s government, so in the midst of the religious persecution Mass was celebrated in the cellar of the house; every day Doña Clotilde, the servant Manuelita, and Manuelita’s daughter, Lupe Lupita, went to confession and received Communion. The priest would arrive at the house in lay clothes, carrying a kit like a doctor’s bag containing his vestments, the ciborium, the wine and the hosts, a Father Téllez, a young priest, a saint, whom the sainted Doña Clotilde had saved from death, giving him refuge when all his friends had gone before the firing wall, shot in the early morning with their arms opened out in a cross; she’d seen the photographs in El Universal.

That’s why she’d felt so bad when the General fired her, it was as if he’d wanted to kill her. She’d survived Doña Clotilde, she remembered too many things, the General wanted to be left alone with his past. Maybe he was right, maybe it was better for both of them, the employer and the servant, to go their own ways with their secret memories, without serving as the other’s witness, better that way. She again gnawed at her finger. The General still had his son and grandson, but Manuelita had lost her daughter, she would never see her again, all because she’d brought her to this accursed tenement, she’d had to break her little Lupita’s solitude, in her employer’s home she’d never seen anyone, she had no reason ever to leave the ground floor, she could get around quite easily in her wheelchair. But in this building there was no escape, all the overhelpful people, all the nosy people, everyone carrying her up and down stairs, let her get some sun, let her get some air, let her get out on the street, they took her from me, they stole her from me, they’ll pay for it. Doña Manuela’s few remaining teeth drew blood. She must think about little Luisito. She was never going to see Lupe Lupita again.

“Take me out to the empty lots where all the dogs gather,” little Luisito directed Rosa María.

Some masons were constructing a wall on the vacant lot along Canal del Norte. But they’d just begun to raise the cement partition on one side of the lot, and little Luisito told Rosa María to go down the other side, away from the workmen. There were no children today, but a gang of teenagers in jeans and striped jerseys, all laughing, they’d caught a dog as gray as the wall. The workmen were watching from a distance, wielding trowels and mortar, watching and elbowing one another from time to time. Beyond them, the sound of the armada of trucks choking the traffic circle of Peralvillo: buses, building-supply trucks, open exhausts, smoke, desperate horns, implacable noise. It had been in Peralvillo that little Luisito had been hit by the tram. The last streetcar in Mexico City, and it had to hit him. The teenagers clamped the dog’s muzzle shut; while a few held its legs, one of them laboriously cut off its tail, a mass of blood and gray hairs, better to have chopped it off with a machete, quick and clean.

They hacked at the ragged stump, leaving threads of flesh and a jet of blood spurting into the animal’s throbbing anus. But the other dogs of this pack that gathered every morning on the empty lots where the workmen had begun the wall hadn’t run away. They were all there, all the dogs together, at a distance, but together, watching the gray dog’s torture, silent, muzzles frothing, dogs of the sun, look, Rosa María, they’re not running away, and they’re not just standing there stupefied waiting for it to happen to them next, no, Rosa María, look, they’re looking at each other, they’re telling each other something, they’re remembering what’s happening to one of their own, Doña Manuelita’s right, these dogs are going to remember the pain of one of their own pack, how one of them suffered at the hands of a bunch of cowardly teenagers, but Rosa María’s shoe-button eyes were like stone, without memory.

About one o’clock Doña Manuelita peered through the curtains on her door as the girl returned, pushing her brother in his chair. Even from a distance she could see the dust on the girl’s shoes and she knew that they’d gone to the empty lots where the dogs gathered. In the late afternoon the old woman covered her head with her shawl, filled her shopping bag with dry tortillas and old rags, and went out to the street.

A dog was waiting for her in the doorway. It stared at her with its glassy eyes and whined, asking her to follow. When they reached the corner of Vidal Alcocer, she was joined by five more dogs, and all along Guatemala, by dogs of every breed, brown, spotted, black, about twenty of them, milling around Doña Manuelita as she portioned out pieces of dry tortilla, already turning green. They surrounded her and then preceded her, showing her the way, they followed her, nudging her softly with their muzzles, their ears erect, until they reached the iron fence before the Sagrario, the chapel of the Metropolitan Cathedral. From a distance, the old woman could see the gray dog lying beside the carved wooden door beneath the baroque eaves of the portal.