Naturally, I didn’t think all that at the age of ten, I’m projecting these reflections onto the inexpressible concern I experienced then as a sort of bubble stuck at some indefinite point within my sickly rib cage.
It isn’t always easy for me to make that distinction, to know for sure if my memories are simply a projection of what—lying here on the left side of a double bed, surrounded by packets of pills and notebooks full of crossings-out—I think now, twenty-three years later. Memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past, as if the cord holding it to life itself is fraying until one day, it snaps and the memory bolts, runs free through the fallow field of the spirit, like a liberated goat taking to the hills.
Rat took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim jacket and offered me one. To be polite, I took it. He then moved the flickering flame of his lighter close to my face, and I took a deep suck. I coughed, the flame went out, and at the exact instant when it disappeared, it occurred to me that Teresa might be dead. It was a fleeting thought, one I hadn’t had since the time my mother fainted on the edge of the market, by the stand selling piñatas and themed costumes. And although that idea darkened my mood like a cloud suddenly casting a shadow over everything, I didn’t share my thoughts.
Rat lit his own cigarette and took a long drag, expelling the smoke simultaneously through his nostrils and mouth, while I made careful note of the process, eager to learn how to smoke like my improbable hero.
The streets of Educación were, and still are, identical: cul-de-sacs branching out from a secondary avenue that leads to a wider one. There was the Rec, with its rusty goal and, in another small park behind an elementary school, a couple of slides—also rusty.
Originally constructed to house workers affiliated with the union of state-owned oil company employees, the neighborhood later became the territory of the teaching equivalent, which immediately wanted to put its own stamp on it: the streets are all indicated by letters and the avenues by numbers. Some of the main avenues bear the names of union bosses, as if the alphabet included their heroic deeds.
In Educación, it was always necessary to refer to the block you were talking about, because two streets might have the same name. The blocks, for their part, were shown in Roman numerals. By the age of six, I’d memorized my address (No. 23, Calle H, Block III, off Avenida 2) at the insistence of Teresa, who invented a jingle to make it easier to remember and repeat that uninspiring alphanumerical sequence. My friend Guillermo was very surprised that places in my neighborhood sounded like moves in a game of Battleship, where you sink enemy ships by giving their location using the Cartesian coordinate system. He used to say that it was like I’d learned the coordinates of my house instead of my address. I hadn’t the faintest idea what coordinates were but, too ashamed to ask, would just give a forced laugh.
The cigarette that Rat offered me and the episode of metaphysical angst joined forces to leave me suddenly dizzy; I experienced a sort of feverishness, with a simultaneous sense of clarity that perhaps derived from nausea. I thought I was going to throw up, but luckily nothing emerged from my mouth. Rat glanced in my direction and laughed quietly. He gave me a friendly punch on the back, which didn’t hurt and made me feel grown up, his equal. Could it be that Rat was now my friend? Then he plucked the cigarette from my mouth and took a drag on it while still smoking his own. The two cigarettes hung from his lower lip as if by magic, kept there by some unknowable force. He took them from his mouth with his right hand and exhaled the smoke, a lot of smoke, through his nostrils and mouth, just as he’d done before. I watched him in stupefaction, unable to understand why anyone would want to smoke two cigarettes at the same time. As if reading my mind, he murmured, “Waste not, want not. You wouldn’t have been able to manage the whole thing.” I was annoyed by that insinuation, but had to accept—and concede through my silence—that he was right.
We walked along Avenida 3, passing the arcade and Los Orgullosos, inside which rotated the reddish meat of the tacos al pastor. The smell of scorched meat mingled with the less pleasant odor rising from the sewage system. I didn’t ask Rat where we were going because just following him was exciting, and, in any case, the whole scene had a dream-like quality that held me in suspense, as if I were expecting to wake at any moment.
We reached Canal de Miramontes, which for me was the midrib of the cosmos, from which branched out the other half of the planet: the part that wasn’t Colonia Educación, and within the confines of which my imagination grouped such diverse places as Taxqueña, Cuernavaca, Chiapas, and the United States. All those unfathomable destinations had to be a thousand or ten thousand times the size of Educación, according to my
