Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

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I’ve been living here for four months now. Benedicta asks me to call her “Aunt” in front of everyone else. I get a kick out of slipping down the hallway mornings and nights and yesterday the cook almost caught me. Sometimes I get very tired of it, especially when Benedicta cries and yells and kneels before her crucifix with her arms spread out wide. We never go to Mass or take Communion now. And nobody’s said anything again about sending me to school. But just the same, I still miss my life with Grandfather and I have written a letter in which I ask him to come after me, that I miss the sawmill and the birds and the happy mealtimes. The only thing is, I never send it. But I do keep adding things every day, and I drop sly hints to see if he catches on. But I don’t send the letter. What I don’t know how to describe very well is how pretty Benedicta has become, how that stiff woman in mourning who came to the ranch has changed. I’d like to tell Micaela and Grandfather that they should see, that Bendicta knows how to be affectionate, too, and she has very smooth skin and, well, different eyes — bright and very wide — and that she’s very white. The only bad part is that sometimes she moans and cries and twists so. We’ll have to see whether I ever send the letter. I got scared today and even signed it, but I still haven’t sealed it. Just a while ago Benedicta and my Aunt Milagros were whispering in the living room behind the bead curtain that rattles when you go in and out. And then Aunt Milagros, with her trembling eyelid, came to my room and began to stroke my hair and ask me if I wouldn’t like to come stay a while in her house. I just sat there, very serious. Then I thought about everything. I don’t know what to think. I added one more paragraph to the letter I’m writing to Grandfather: “Come get me, please. It seems to me there’s a lot more morality at the ranch. I’ll tell you about it.” And I put the letter in the envelope again. But I still can’t decide whether to send it.

I

Once Mexico City had been a city whose nights held the promise of the morning to come. Before going to bed, Federico Silva would walk out on the balcony of his house on Córdoba Street at two o’clock in the morning, when one could still smell the dampness of the earth of the coming day, breathe the perfume of the jacarandas, and feel the nearness of the volcanoes.

Dawn brought everything near, mountains and forests. Federico Silva closed his eyes in order to smell even better that unique odor of dawn in Mexico City: the sapid, green trace of the long-forgotten mud of the lake bed. To smell that odor was to smell the first morning. Only those who can perceive the nocturnal scent of the lost lake really know this city, Federico told himself.

That was a long time ago. Now his house stood only a block away from the huge sunken plaza of the Insurgentes metro station. An architect friend had compared that anarchical intersection of streets and avenues — Insurgentes, Chapultepec, Génova, Amberes, and Jalapa — to the Place de l’Étoile in Paris, and Federico Silva had had a good laugh. Actually, the Insurgentes intersection was more like a giant-sized stack of tortillas: a busy thoroughfare, at times elevated above the flat rooftops of the bordering houses, then streets blocked with cement posts and chains, then the stairways and tunnels communicating with an interior plaza jammed with seafood restaurants and taco stands, itinerant vendors, beggars, vagrant troubadours … and the students, shocking numbers of youths lolling around while shoeshine boys polished their shoes, eating sandwiches, watching the slowly drifting smog, whistling and calling veiled obscenities at passing round-breasted, round-bottomed, skinny-legged girls in miniskirts; the hip world, girls with feathers and blue eyelids and silver-smeared mouths, boys wearing leather vests over bare skin and yards of chains and necklaces. And finally, the entrance to the metro: the mouth of hell.

They had destroyed his morning-scented nights. The air in his neighborhood became unbreathable, the streets impassable. Under Federico Silva’s nose — between the wretched luxury of the Zona Rosa, a gigantic village’s pitiable cosmopolitan stage set, and the desperate, though useless, attempt at residential grace in the Colonia Roma — they had dug an infernal, unsalvageable trench, a river Styx of gasoline vapors circulating above the human whirlpool of the plaza, hundreds of young men whistling and watching the smog drift by, sweating, loafing, sitting in the filthy saucer of the sunken cement plaza. The saucer of a cup of cold, greasy, spilled chocolate.

“Infamous!” he exclaimed impotently. “To think that this was once a pretty, pastel-colored small town; you could walk from the Zócalo to Chapultepec Park and have everything you needed, government and entertainment, friendship and love.”

This was one of the standard tunes of this elderly bachelor clinging to forgotten things that no longer interested anyone but him. His friends Perico and the Marqués told him not to be so pigheaded. It was one thing, as long as his mother had been alive (and God knows she took her time in going), to respect the family tradition and keep the house on Córdoba Street. But what was to be gained now? He’d had stupendous offers to sell; the market would top out; he ought to take advantage of the moment. He should know that better than anyone; he was a landlord himself, that was his living: real estate.

Then they’d tried to force his hand by constructing tall buildings on either side of his property; modern, they called them, although Federico Silva insisted that one can call modern only that which is built to last, not what’s slapped together to begin to disintegrate in two years’ time and fall down in ten. He felt ashamed that a country of churches and pyramids built for eternity should end up contenting itself with a city of shanties, shoddiness, and shit.

They boxed him in, they stifled him, they blocked out his sun and air, his view and his odors. And, in exchange, they gave him a double helping of noise. His house, innocently imprisoned between two cement-and-glass towers, began to tilt and crack under the excessive pressure. One afternoon, while he was getting dressed to go out, he watched a dropped coin roll until it came to rest against a wall. Once in this same bedroom he’d played with his toy soldiers, marshaled historic battles, Austerlitz, Waterloo, even a Trafalgar in his bathtub. Now he couldn’t fill the tub because the water spilled over one edge.

“It’s like living in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but without the prestige. Just yesterday plaster fell on my head as I was shaving, and the whole bathroom wall is cracked. When will they learn that the spongy soil of our ancient lake bed cannot support the insult of skyscrapers!”

It wasn’t a truly old house, but the kind of mansion of supposed French inspiration that was popular at the beginning of the century, and no longer built after the twenties. Actually, it more closely resembled a Spanish or Italian villa, with its flat roof, capricious stone designs on pale stucco, and grand entrance stairway leading to a foyer elevated above the dampness of the subsoil.

And the garden, a shady, moist garden, solace against the burning mornings of the high plateau; during the night a natural collector of the perfumes of the morning to come. What luxury: two large palm trees, a small gravel path, a sundial, an iron bench painted green, burbling water channeled toward beds of violets. With what animosity he regarded the ridiculous thick green glass with which the new buildings tried to defend themselves against the age-old Mexican sun. How much wiser the Spanish conquistadors, who had understood the importance of convent shadow and cool patios. Of course he would defend all this against the aggression of a city that first had been his friend and now had become his most ferocious enemy! The enemy of Federico Silva, known to his friends as the Mandarin.