Homero Aridjis - The Child Poet

In order to garner interest in the personals of Confidencias , she depicted herself as young and beautiful, cultured and virginal, sad and forsaken, swapping photographs from fifteen years earlier with her suitors, along with intimate stories and promises of marriage. And if she hadn’t advertised herself in a certain issue she would go out and buy it at once, anxious to be one of the first to reply to the personals.

Her correspondence was kept in a padlocked drawer so my uncles and cousins wouldn’t find the letters and read them.

She finagled money from her suitors, who were anxious to meet her. Worn down and aroused by so many letters, they pleaded for a rendezvous and sent money orders for her to travel to Tampico, a place to which at the very last minute my aunt would never go, due to fragile health or an ailing brother, postponing the trip to the following year.

Busy with her correspondence and deaf to the world, she went down the street beside noisy trucks. She read by the window, bringing the book closer and closer to her eyes, frowning if anyone she knew walked past, for she had trouble recognizing their features. A smell of dust, animals, and plants had settled in the backyard of her house. From my grandmother she’d inherited pots of geraniums, roses, and pansies, and a donkey, a goat, and a dozen hens, who’d lay their eggs in the kitchen and in the bedrooms on the beds.

The train would stop at the station, a few kilometers from Contepec. Passengers disembarked from two coaches while porters unloaded crates of oranges and sacks of flour from one of the boxcars. A mail pouch, full of letters and newspapers, was dropped between melons and bananas, and women briskly peddled their chicken mole through the railway cars. Yellow in the midday sun, a dog came running over the plain, while other canines fought over scraps of food passengers threw out the windows. A venerable ash tree served as a parasol for two old men, who witnessed in silence the activity on the train; in one of their dark, skinny hands a cigarette seemed to burn endlessly, flaring up every now and then at an occasional puff. All of a sudden, the train’s whistle and its lurching march forward brought all the activity to a halt and voices fell silent. In the landscape once again visible in the train’s wake, those of us who remained behind saw the plain, warm and lazy, surge up once more until only the dust was to be seen, dancing from one side to another like a blond figure, inconsistent and remote, engaged in a drunken dance in which she seemed to dissolve.

MY EYES PRACTICED on the sacred morning’s shadows and I learned to tell them apart by their darkness and their light

they seemed fashioned from penumbra and time and to be perishable or perfectible depending on the sun’s brightness and the location of beings and things

leading a perilous existence where the chance encounters that caused them to shimmer destroyed them

although some lasted beyond the day, for when nightfall came another light was lit next to the object that cast them, causing them to move slightly

some were very limpid and silence encompassed them in a clarity like an expanse of water that seemed to bathe them

my eyes ran over them, whether they were standing, lying down, or bending over as if to drink drops of light from the sun-drenched grass and among them my being composed its song

shadows, I thought, confer reality on objects by serving as their negatives or ghosts and dragging themselves across the floor or sliding down the wall as insubstantial doubles; there’s something servile about them, or inscrutably humble

they are the secret world, the counterweight, and the other landscape of the radiant day

I could tell the age of some and whether they were newly born or old by their condition on the dust and others were so riddled with holes that they were pale remains or ruins of shadows

on them the day narrated its variety, displayed its temperature, and revealed the hour

and suddenly in the afternoon there were unending shadows singing on the ground at the same time

spilled next to unending beings and things in the quiet landscape singing at the foot of a mountain or beside a black dog or a white chair or a little girl

here and there pointy and round in silent music

they intertwined, they intermingled, they piled up or, terribly solitary,

were cast by the root of a lone tree on the hill

or they walked at a man’s feet like an anchor to keep him from flying off the earth

and to remind him at every moment of his ghost

there were shadows of mountains and of clouds on mountains

fleeting shadows of insects

and shadows racing among horses’ feet

green shadows of willows swaying in the water

and shadows of a sparrow that shrink as the bird soars

and once it is in the air open out their wings flying over the ground

trees and beings had their voice on earth and their duration on a wall

and I

made my poem

and I recited it trembling.

ONLY A HANDFUL of the streets had names, and the letters that arrived bore the words “Domicilio Conocido” (known residence) rather than our address. Our house stood on the main square, the public garden directly in front. From any point in town you could see the steeple of the old church. But what truly provided the landscape to our village were the hills, green or blue depending on the distance from which they were glimpsed.

The taller hill would spread its wings, always on the verge of taking flight.

The streets were few and long.

I had the impression the real village began in the air, above the rooftops of the houses in the blue that emerged from the end of every street as if in a celestial finale, varying in tone depending on the hour.

Stores were closed on Wednesdays. If there were never many people in Contepec on weekdays, Wednesday the village was virtually uninhabited.

The day would pass with nostalgia and, dazed by its inertia, its interminable hours made me fear that Thursday, when the shops reopened, would never come again.

Nevertheless, in the afternoon after lunch my parents, my brother, and I would set out on a walk to one of our orchards. On the way my father and my brother talked about ways of improving the house and modifications to the orchard that would never get done, amusing themselves each Wednesday with the same conversation, as if it were a ritual of the walk itself to make plans and worry about the state of our properties.

We would pause by the edge of the dam, between the magueys and a ravine. From there we had a view of the horizon, with its solitary paths and dark pines, and, in the background, the hills. And there my brother would point to a spot and say, “That would be a good place to build a house.”

My father would look at him, as if he saw in his face the spot with the house already built.

Later they’d discuss the number of rooms the house would have, what color they would paint them, who would sleep where … And they’d get so lost in their digressions that they never noticed that they’d drifted from the topic. It’d surprise me, the way their faces quickly turned from serious to laughing after any joke at all, or how they got caught up in new plans after the mention of a certain person, place, or merchandise, their boredom showing, however, in periodic absentmindedness or yawns … In the middle of a grand project they would abruptly fall prey to bouts of melancholy, looking as if they were about to cry. And they talked any which way the words came out, not really pursuing a special topic. They drifted away from Contepec, the orchard, or whatever seemed to be exciting them at that particular moment, moving on to the matter of the movie theater or customs in other countries.