Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

She hands me a covered plate and I uncover it. It’s my favorite treat, natas.

“The cook told me you like it very much.”

“Thank you, Aunt,” I say, very serious.

We eat in silence and finally, when it’s time to have our coffee and milk, I tell her I’m bored with living in Morelia and that I wish she would let me go back to live with Grandfather, which is where I like to live.

“Ingrate,” my aunt says, and dries her lips with her handkerchief. I do not reply. “Ingrate,” she repeats.

And she gets up and walks toward me, repeating that, and takes my hand and I’m sitting there very serious and she slaps me in the face with that long, bony hand and I swallow my tears and she slaps me again and suddenly she stops and touches my forehead and opens her eyes wide and says I have a fever.

It must be one of the world’s worst, because I’m getting weak and my knees feel wobbly. My aunt takes me to my bedroom and says I must get undressed while she goes for the doctor. But really, all she does is flutter around while I take off the blue suit and white shirt and undershorts and get into bed, shivering.

“Don’t you wear pajamas?”

“No, Aunt. I always sleep in my undershirt.”

“But you have a fever!”

She rushes out like a madwoman and I lie there shaking and try to go to sleep and tell myself the fever’s bad just to say something. The truth is that I go right to sleep and all Grandfather’s birds come flying out together, stirring up a great commotion because they’re all free at last: the blue sky fills with orange, red, and green lightning flashes, but this lasts only a short time. The birds are frightened, as if they wanted to return to their cages. Now there are real lightning flashes and the birds are stiff and cold in the night. They’re not flying any more, and they’re turning black. They are losing their feathers, no longer singing, and when the storm passes and the dawn comes, they have become the file of seminary students in their habits on their way to church and the doctor is taking my pulse and Aunt Benedicta seems very upset and I see the doctor between dreams and my aunt says: “All right, now. Lie on your back. I have to rub this liniment on you.”

I feel the icy hands on my hot skin. Grandfather shakes his cane and shouts cuss words at the priests. The liniment smells very strong. He sics the dogs on the priests. Of eucalyptus and camphor. The dogs just bark, frightened. She rubs hard and my shoulders begin to burn. Grandfather shouts but his lips move in silence. Now she’s rubbing my chest and the smell is stronger. The dogs bark but they don’t make any sound either. I’m bathed in sweat and liniment and everything burns and I want to go to sleep but I know that I’m asleep at the same time I’m wanting it. The cold hand rubs my shoulders and my ribs and under my arms. And the dogs run loose, furious, to sink their teeth into the seminary students, who turn into birds at night. And my stomach burns as much as my chest and my back and Aunt rubs and rubs to make me better. The seminary students bare their teeth in a snarl and laugh and open out their arms and fly away like buzzards, dying of laughter. And I’m so happy I laugh with them, the sickness fills me with happiness and I don’t want her to stop making me better, I ask her to make me feel better, I take her hands, the fever and the liniment burn my thighs and the dogs run through the fields howling, like coyotes.

When I woke up, one night had passed and a morning and the sun was just going down. The first thing I saw was the shadows of the patio through the curtains on the door. And then I realized that she was still sitting next to the head of the bed and she asked me to eat a little and put the spoon to my lips. I tasted the stewed oats and then looked at my aunt, with her hair falling over her shoulders and smiling as if she were grateful to me for something. I let her feed me the cereal as if I were a child, spoonful by spoonful, and I told her I was better and thanked her for making me feel better. She blushed and said that at last I was finding out that they loved me in this house, too.

I was in bed about ten days. First I read a mountain of novels by Alexandre Dumas, and ever since then I’ve thought that novels go with bronchitis like rain goes with planting time. But the curious thing is that my aunt went out to buy them as if setting out to commit a robbery and then hid them when she brought them to me, and I just shrugged my shoulders and as fast as I could began reading that wonderful story of the man who gets out of prison by pretending to be dead and they throw him in the sea and he washes ashore on the island of Monte Cristo. But I had never read so much before and I got tired and bored and lay thinking and counting the hours by watching the lights and shadows that came and went on the walls of my room. And anyone looking at me would have thought I was very calm, but inside me things were happening that I didn’t understand. The thing was that I wasn’t as sure as I had been before. If earlier they’d given me the chance to choose between going back to the ranch and staying here, I would have been way ahead of them, I would have hightailed it right back to be with Grandfather. And now I didn’t know. I couldn’t decide. And the question kept coming back no matter how I tried to avoid it and distract myself by thinking about other things. Of course, if anyone had asked me, I know what I would have answered: I’d be on my way back to the ranch. But inside me, no. I realized that, and also that it was the first time something like that had happened to me: that what I was thinking outside was different from what I was thinking inside.

I don’t know what all that had to do with my aunt. I told myself, nothing. She looked the same, but she was different. She only came in to bring me my tray herself, or to take my temperature, or to see that I took my medicines. But I watched her out of the corner of my eye and I realized that the sadder she looked, the happier she was, and the happier she looked, the closer she was to crying, or you could see something was bothering her, and when she was sitting in the rocking chair fanning herself — when it seemed she was resting, quite free from care — the more I felt there was something she wanted, and the more she busied about and talked, the more I felt she didn’t want anything, that she would have liked to leave my room and close herself up in her own.

Ten days passed and I couldn’t stand the sweat and dirt and the grimy hair any more. Then my aunt said I was well and I could take a bath. I jumped out of bed very happy but, oh, boy, I almost fell from the dizziness that came over me. My aunt ran to take me by the arm and led me to the bathroom. I sat down, very dizzy, while she mixed the cold water with the hot, stirred it with her fingers, and let the tub fill up. Then she asked me to get into the water and I told her to leave and she asked me why. I said I was embarrassed.

“You’re just a child. Pretend I’m your mother. Or Micaela. Didn’t she ever give you a bath?”

I told her yes, when I was just a kid. She said it was the same thing. She said she was almost my mother, since she had taken care of me like a son while I was sick. She came to me and began to unbutton my pajamas and to cry and say how I had filled her life, how someday she would tell me about her life. I covered myself as best I could and got into the tub and almost slipped. She soaped me. She began to rub me the way she had that night and she knew how I liked that and I let her do it while she told me I didn’t know what loneliness was and repeated it over and over and then said just last Christmas I had still been a child and the water was very warm and my body felt good, soapy, and she was cleansing me of the exhaustion of my illness with caressing hands. She knew before I did when I couldn’t take any more and she herself lifted me from the tub and looked at me and put her arm around my waist.