Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

They say that Aunt Benedicta isn’t married because she’s very demanding and no man suits her; also that she’s very old, she’s already thirty-four. While we eat, I look at her to see if it shows that she’s twenty years older than I am, but she goes right on sipping her soup without looking at me or talking to me. She never talks to me, and besides, since we sit so far apart at the table, we couldn’t hear each other even if we shouted. I try to compare her with Micaela, who is the only woman I’ve ever been around, since my mother died when I was born and my father four years later and after that I lived with Grandfather and “that woman,” as my aunts call her.

The thing about Señorita Benedicta is that she never laughs. And the only time she says anything it’s to tell me something I already know or to give me orders when I’m already way ahead of her and doing the things she wanted without her telling me. She really gives me a hard time. I don’t know whether the meals really are long or if they just seem long, but I try to entertain myself in different ways. One is to put a Micaela mask on my aunt’s face, and this is very funny, I imagine her laughing her loud laugh and her head thrown back and her eyes always asking whether things are serious or a joke — that’s Micaela — all this coming out of that high-buttoned collar and black dress. Another is to talk to her in the language I invented myself, say, to ask her to pass me the coffee: “Hey-yeh, aunt-tant, asspay the offecay.”

My aunt sighs and she must not be so awfully dumb, because she does what I ask, and only adds a lesson in manners: “One says please, Alberto.”

But, as I was explaining, I get her goat in everything else. When she comes all serious to knock at my door to scold me for not being up yet, I answer her from the patio, all bathed and slicked up, so then she covers up her anger and says to me, more serious still, that it’s time to go to church and I smile and show her the prayer book and she doesn’t know what to say.

But she finally caught me one day, about a month after I’d been living with her, and all because of that tattletale priest. They’re preparing me for my First Communion and all the kids in catechism classes laugh that such a big boob doesn’t know the first thing about who the Holy Spirit is. Besides that, they laugh just because it’s me who’s the big boob. Yesterday it was finally my turn to have a little talk alone with the priest to prepare me for confession. He talked a lot about sin and about how it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know anything about religion or had grown up in such an immoral atmosphere. He said not to worry but to tell him everything, because he’d never before had to prepare a boy as full of sin as I was, for whom perversion was an everyday thing, who couldn’t even distinguish between good and evil. I racked my head trying to think what my worst sins could be and how the two of us were there in the empty church staring at each other without knowing what to say, and I started thinking about all the movies I’d seen and then I poured it out: how I had raided a ranch and carried off all the money and a few chickens besides, how I had grabbed and beat up a poor old blind man, how I had stabbed a policeman in the back, how I had forced a girl to strip and then bitten her on the face. The priest threw up his arms and crossed himself and said the worst anybody knew about Grandfather was nothing, and ran out as if I were the devil himself.

Well, my aunt really tore into my bedroom before I woke up. I thought the house was on fire. She slammed the doors open and shouted my name. I woke up and there she was, her arms in the air. Then she came and sat down on the bed next to me and told me that I had made fun of the priest and that that wasn’t the worst. I had told all those lies in order to hide my true sins. I just looked at her as if she were out of her mind.

“Why don’t you admit the truth?” she said, taking my hand.

“What do you mean, Aunt? Honest, I don’t understand.”

Then she ruffled my hair and squeezed my hand. “How you’ve seen your grandfather and that woman in improper postures.”

I guess my dumb look didn’t convince her, but I swear I didn’t understand what she meant and even less when she kept on in a half-strangled voice, halfway between crying and screaming: “Together. In sin. Making love. In bed.”

Oh, that. “Sure. They sleep together. Grandfather says that a man should never sleep alone or he’ll dry up, and the same for a woman.”

My aunt covered my mouth with her hand. She sat that way for a long time and I was on the point of suffocating. She looked at me in a real strange way, and then she got up and walked out very slowly, not saying anything, and I went back to sleep, but she didn’t come back to get me up to go to Mass. She left me alone and I stayed in bed all morning until time for lunch, looking at the ceiling, thinking about nothing.

There are lots of lizards in the patio. I already know that when you look at them they turn the color of the stone or the tree to disguise themselves. But I know their trick and they can’t get away from me. Today I’ve spent an hour following them, laughing at them because they think I don’t know how to find them: you look for their eyes, shiny as painted pins. The whole point is not to lose sight of the eyes, because they can’t disguise them, and since they open and close them all the time, it’s like a signal turning on and off at the crossroads and that’s the way I follow one and then another and when I want to — like now — I catch them and feel them throb in my fist, all smooth underneath and wrinkled on top and tiny, but with life, the same as anyone else. If only they knew I wouldn’t hurt them, their throat wouldn’t throb so, but that’s the way things are. There’s no way to make them understand. What scares them pleases me. I hold this one tight in my hand and my aunt is watching me from the corridor upstairs, not understanding what I’m doing. I run up the stairs and get there out of breath. She asks me what I’ve been doing. I act very serious so she won’t get wind of anything. She’s sitting fanning herself in the shade, since it’s very hot. I stretch out my closed fist and she tries to smile; you can see it’s an effort. She opens her hand to take mine and I put the lizard on her palm and force her fingers closed over it. She doesn’t scream or get scared as I thought she would. She doesn’t scold me or throw the lizard down. She just closes her fingers and her eyes tighter and looks like she wants to say something but can’t and her nose trembles and she looks at me like nobody ever looked at me before, as if she wanted to cry and would feel better if she did. I tell her that the poor lizard is going to suffocate, and Señorita Benedicta leans toward the floor but can’t let it go and finally opens her fingers and lets it run off along the paving stones and climb up the wall and disappear. And then her expression changes and her mouth twists and I see she’s mad, but not really, so I smile and bury my head in my shoulders, try to look real innocent, and run back down to the patio.

I spend all afternoon in my room doing nothing. I feel tired and sort of sleepy like I’m getting a bad cold. It must be the lack of sun and fresh air in this dark old house. I begin to get sore about everything. I miss the sawmill, and Micaela’s desserts, Grandfather’s birds, the fun when the priests go by and the laughing at dinnertime and in the mornings when I go into their bedroom. I figure that up to now life in Morelia has been like a vacation, but I’ve been stuck here for a month and I’m getting tired of it.

I come out of my room a little late for dinner and my aunt is already sitting at the head of the table with her black handkerchief in her hand and when I take my place she doesn’t scold me for coming in late — even though I did it on purpose. Just the opposite. She seems to be trying to smile and be pleasant. All I want is to throw a fit and go back to the ranch.