The revelation that Rat was in some way part of my extended family was a shock, but I decided to keep my opinion to myself until Teresa came back: she’d never allow such a relationship. My father, on the other hand, was completely unaware of the sort of person Rat was, and had neither the instinct nor intuition needed to understand that the relationship was bad news, that it presaged my sister’s undoing, her addiction to temporary tattoos or membership in a gang of neighborhood lowlifes.
“I was in my Zero Luminosity Capsule,” I proudly replied as if challenging him to believe me.
“Hell, you’re a crazy kid,” he retorted, smiling for the first time.
In the dining room, a slanting light entered through a gap in the window frame. The living room was a little darker. With the exception of my and Mariana’s bedrooms, the house never caught the sun.
I asked Rat what day it was; his response was to light up. The whole house smelled of cigarette smoke. Mariana normally opened the windows when she smoked indoors, and then lit a scented candle before my father returned (he probably noticed anyway, but chose to ignore the problem). On this occasion there had been no escape route for the smoke, and the smell was repulsive. Rat was an anxious smoker; he used to take rapid drags on his cigarettes, seemingly feeling that it would be bad luck to let them burn down on their own.
Teresa used to smoke now and again, but always outside the house, leaning against the wall by the garage door; I remember seeing her there when I came home from school, hunched under the weight of my backpack. Teresa smoking with an absent air, giving me a distracted kiss, looking toward the end of the cul-de-sac (a dead-end street, like her marriage, like the whole country, like the obsession with writing everything down that, twenty-three years later, has me bedbound.)
Rat stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and went to the kitchen to put the butt in the trash. I was surprised by this action, which displayed a level of care I hadn’t thought him capable of. He usually left his butts ground on a plate, and it was my sister or Citlali who collected them up, worried about keeping the house presentable.
In spite of the urgency of the situation (at that very moment, my sister might be finally convinced that the Bogeyman existed and had kidnapped me), Rat was keeping his cool, perhaps—I thought—because at heart he didn’t take it seriously, or maybe it was just that the alcohol he’d consumed had affected his tongue.
“I’m going to my room to do origami,” I said, in no mood for acting friendly. My sister would get tired of looking for me and return home. I was ready to start toward the stairs, but as soon as I’d turned my back on Rat, he detained me, grasping my shoulder with a firm, heavy hand. “No way, knucklehead. You’re coming with me. We’re going to look for your sis.”
9
WHEN RAT HAD BANGED THE GATE SHUT BEHIND US, I was able to confirm that it was not early morning, as I’d believed for an instant, but evening. That was a shame: going out early in the morning to scour the streets of Educación in the company of the legendary Rat would have heightened the drama when I told my story to Guillermo and everyone else in the class.
At that hour, the street was completely deserted. But then my street was always deserted, at any hour. Groups of children playing soccer in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the goalposts marked by bundles of backpacks and sweatshirts, was a rare sight. But there were no children, backpacks, or sweatshirts there now, the street was empty, or almost empty: in the distance, at the junction with the main avenue, I could just make out the figure of the man from the fruit store closing the metal grille of his premises.
This may sound like exaggeration, but the truth is that, at the age of ten, I was deeply concerned about the subject of consciousness. That’s to say, I frequently had that sense of disquiet and estrangement that is the basis of philosophy—but also of all angst—and that causes us to question why we’re thinking what we’re thinking, why we’re alive, why being rather than nothingness, and so on. According to my childish theology, which I’ve already outlined above, any god directly involved in my upbringing was or should be in charge of all that stuff. But he was sometimes absent or at others seemed slightly less plausible than usual, and then a sense of absurdity, gratuitousness, and imminent disaster closed in on me. True, I didn’t then have the words to express all this. I was simply moving through the world with a confidence that would suddenly evaporate, making me feel vulnerable, small, at the mercy of any peril.
That evening, walking beside Rat through the neighborhood streets, I suffered one of those episodes of metaphysical angst: an unfolding of my being (reverse origami) and a profound sense of helplessness. There was no raison d’être underlying anything. However many letters I stole, I’d never know the real reason for Teresa’s departure. However many Zero Luminosity Capsules I constructed, and however many hours I spent inside them, I’d never succeed in disappearing completely or making myself invisible to the agents of evil. And however many leaves and sheets of paper I folded down the middle, origami wasn’t going to give meaning to anything at all, because symmetry wasn’t a material state but an invention of the mind; half a sheet of paper was always imperfect and, therefore, the cranes, frogs, pagodas, and kimonos made of folded paper had a lie at their very cores, as do, of course, flesh-and-blood humans: we, too, are formed from a fundamental lie, or at least a
