Carlos Fuentes - Burnt Water

“I’ve got it made, nephew. They’ve hired me as flute player and I’m off to Acapulco with the band. To prove I keep my word I want you to go with me. To tell you the truth, I think I owe it all to you. My boss wants to meet you.”

EL GÜERO

He didn’t have to go to Acapulco with his Uncle Richi because the Chief gave him a job on the spot. Bernabé didn’t meet him immediately, he only heard a deep and unctuous voice, like on the radio, from behind the glass office doors. Tell the boys to take care of him. In the dressing rooms they looked him up and down, some thumbed their noses at him, some gestured up yours and continued dressing, carefully arranging their testicles in close-fitting undershorts. A tall dark-skinned youth with a long face and stiff eyelashes brayed at him and Bernabé was about to take a swing at him but another man they called El Güero because of his light hair came over and asked him what he would like to wear, the Chief offered a new wardrobe to new arrivals and he told him too that he shouldn’t pay any attention to the Burro, the poor thing only brayed to say his name, not to insult anyone. Bernabé remembered what Martina had said in Puebla, Join the army, Bernabé, they’ll give you an education, you’ll learn to take orders, then they’ll promote you and if they discharge you, you buy a gun and go into business for yourself, she joked. He told El Güero that a uniform would be fine, he didn’t know how to dress, a uniform was fine. El Güero said it looked as if he was going to have to look after him and he picked out a leather jacket, some jeans still stiff from the factory, and a couple of checked shirts. He promised that as soon as he got a girl he’d get him a dress suit, but this would do for now and for the workouts a white T-shirt and watch out for your balls, eggs in a basket because sometimes the blows fell hot and heavy. They took him to a kind of military camp that didn’t look like a camp from the outside, with a lot of gray trucks always waiting in front and sometimes men dressed in civilian clothes who tied a white handkerchief on their arm as they entered and removed it when they came out. They slept on campaign cots and from the crack of dawn went through training exercises in a gym that smelled of eucalyptus drifting through the broken windowpanes. First were the rings and parallel bars, the horizontal bar and box horse, the weights and the horse. Then came poles, rope climbing, tree trunks across barrancas and sharpshooting, and only at the end of the training, bludgeons, rubber hoses, and brass knuckles. He looked at himself naked in the full-length mirror in the dressing room, as if sketched with an iron nib, hair that curled naturally not with curling irons like poor straight-haired Martincita’s, fine bony mestizo features with a real profile, not like Martincita’s pushed-in face, a profile to his face and his belly and a profile between his legs and a green pride in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. The Burro went by braying and laughing at the same time, with a lasso longer than his, and both things angered Bernabé. Again El Güero held him back and reminded him that the Burro didn’t know any other way to laugh, that he announced himself with his braying the way that he, El Güero, announced his presence with his transistor, with the music that always preceded him, when you hear music, that’s where your Güero is. One day Bernabé felt the earth change beneath his sneakers. It was no longer the soft earth of Las Lomas de Chapultepec, sandy and sprinkled with pine needles. Now all the training exercises were held in a huge hand-ball court, where they learned to run hard, fight hard, move on hard pavement. Bernabé concentrated on the Burro to work up his anger, to turn nimbly and land a karate chop on the nape of the enemy’s neck. He jammed a knee into the tall lanky youth with stiff eyelashes, which put him down for the count, but after ten minutes the Burro came to, brayed, and continued as if nothing had happened. Bernabé felt as if the moment for action was near. El Güero said no, he’d done well in training, worked like all get-out and he deserved a vacation. He sat him in a coppery Thunderbird and said have a good time with the cassettes, you can choose the music and if you get bored turn on this small TV, we’re off to Acapulco, Bernabé, I’m going to give you a taste of what life’s all about, I was born to dance the rumba, down in Veracruz, I was born in silv’ry moonlight, I play it fast and loose, choose anything you want. Not really, he said to himself later, I didn’t choose anything, they chose for me, the blond American girl was waiting for me in that big bed with the glittery bedspread, the bellboy dressed like an organ grinder’s monkey was waiting to carry my suitcases, and another just like him to bring my breakfast to my room and fill my refrigerator, the only thing they didn’t give me were the sun and the sea, because they were already there. He looked at himself in the hotel mirrors but he didn’t know whether they looked back. Other than Martincita, he didn’t know whether or not women liked him. El Güero told him if he wanted to pay he’d have to make a lot of money so it wouldn’t feel like he was receiving a tip; look at this Thunderbird, Bernabé, it may be secondhand but it’s mine, I bought it with my own dough, he laughed and told him that they wouldn’t be seeing so much of each other now, it was time to turn him over to Ureñita, old Dr. Ureñita himself, what a drag he was with a face like a sour old maid and ugly as a constipated monkey, he wasn’t like El Güero, who knew how to enjoy life, hey, baby, ciao, he said, spitting on each hand and then slapping the saliva on the hood bright as a new coin before he roared off in his Thunderbird.

UREÑITA

“What rank did you reach young man?”

“I don’t seem to remember.”

“Don’t be asinine. Second? Third?”

“Whatever you say, Señor Ureña.”

“Oh yes, Bernabé, I’ll be having plenty to say. That’s why I’m here. We get knuckleheads like you by the ton here. Well, never mind. That’s our raw material. We’ll see what we can do to refine it, to make an exportable product.”

“Whatever you say, Señor Ureña.”

“Presentable, I mean. Dialectics. Our friends think we have no history and no ideas because they see dolts like you and they laugh at us. So much the better. Let them believe what they will. That way we will occupy all the history they vacate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No, maestro.”

“They’ve filled our country’s history with lies in order to weaken it, in order to make it putty, then they tear off a little piece and then another and at first no one notices. But one day you wake up and you no longer have the great, free, unified nation you dreamed of, Bernabé.”

“I dreamed of?”

“Yes, even you, though you don’t know it. Why do you think you’re here with me?”

“El Güero told me to come. I don’t know anything.”

“Well, I’m going to make you understand, you simpleton. You are here to assist at the birth of a new world. And a new world can only be born of tumultuous, hate-filled beginnings. Do you understand? Violence is the midwife of history.”

“If you say so, Señor Ureñita.”

“Don’t use the diminutive. Diminutives diminish. Who told you to call me Ureñita?”

“No one, I swear.”

“Poor muddlehead. If I wanted I could analyze you blindfolded. This is what they send us. We owe that to John Dewey and Moisés Sáenz. Tell me, Bernabé, do you have a fear of getting buried in poverty?”

“I’m already there, Señor Ureña.”

“You are mistaken. There are worse things. Imagine your poor old mother scrubbing floors, still worse, imagine her streetwalking.”