Of course, I already knew that there was a war in Chiapas, I’d seen it on TV. For months it had been the only thing anyone anywhere talked about. At school, we’d been assembled in the auditorium, and it was explained that nothing was going to happen in the capital, but Guillermo’s elder brother had told him that the Zapatistas were going to kill the president and take away rich people’s houses. Even though Guillermo’s brother wasn’t generally a reliable source of information, my friend and I had gotten steamed up by just the idea of all that. Teresa was constantly muttering insults about the president (“that bald murderer,” she used to call him), and at the beginning of the year the promise of his overthrow had excited me for a few weeks. Then, in March, someone had shot Colosio, the PRI presidential candidate—in Teresa’s view, he was just as bad as “that bald murderer.” The shooting had taken place in Tijuana, which, as we were told in geography class—geography wasn’t my strongest subject—was more or less on the other side of the country. That was when the war and generalized fraying of nerves took up permanent residence in the house in Educación. The arguments between Teresa and my father about the situation in Chiapas and the forthcoming elections grew in intensity and volume. Only the soccer World Cup had managed to calm things for thirty days, distracting my father from current affairs.
The clamor of war and politics was amplified at school. During recess, the children in sixth grade sometimes made a game of frightening us, saying that they had seen Zapatistas or—even worse—soldiers behind the co-op, in the vacant lot that the principal had promised to transform into a small soccer field at some point in the future.
One day, a boy in my class turned up wearing a red balaclava with a pompom on top, and fights were organized between the two most aggressive pupils, one representing the insurgents in balaclavas and the other the forces of law and order—who were booed by the naturally rebellious children, the ones who were always talking in class. Later that afternoon, when I told Teresa about those small-scale reproductions of the political tension in the country, she attempted to explain something about the indigenous peoples. Before she could finish, my father interrupted to drag me off to watch a soccer game in which the Mexican team was playing. On another occasion, he commented over breakfast that Chiapas was a beehive. I didn’t understand the metaphor then, but the idea of a gigantic beehive containing whole cities and enormous bees gave me a nightmare.
All those scenes (the scraps at school, the noisy domestic arguments, the red balaclava with a pompom, the mutant bees) came back to flood my mind when I heard Rat mention the war, the tanks, the possibility that Mariana had followed in Teresa’s footsteps and run away to Chiapas.
I felt betrayed. It hurt me that, knowing where Teresa was, my sister hadn’t sat down and talked to me, explained what was going on in our family. In fact, she’d left me to investigate on my own, to steal letters and spend whole days inside a dark closet when we could have been coming up with a plan—a sibling plan to get our mother back—or running away together. It felt unfair that Mariana had gone, leaving me alone with my father, abandoning me to a life of boredom while she was having an adventure.
Now Rat was trying to drag me into the bus terminal, or the war, to save my sister and maybe even my mother. It wasn’t particularly clear why he needed me as his shield carrier, but at that moment I had no intention of asking questions. It was that, or go back home to watch reruns of the soccer World Cup with my father, eat Hawaiian pizza, and make non-figurative origami figures until the end of the summer vacation.
Although I was eager to start, I was also sorry not to have come better prepared. If I’d known that we were setting out on an expedition of that caliber, I’d have brought my jacket with secret pockets, and my Choose Your Own Adventure book to act as a sort of guide. But I understood that at certain critical moments life offers the opportunity to really choose our own adventures and decided that following Rat to war would make me the envy of every boy in my class; if, that is, I managed to stay alive until the new school year.
By the time Rat and I had passed through the doors of the Autobuses del Sur terminal, the only outcome to that adventure my imagination was capable of coming up with was personal triumph. I heard a bubblegum-scented Citlali laughing and saw Ximena doling out over-the-top gestures of affection while I told them how I’d found their best friend, my sister, who by then was allowing me to choose whatever pizza I wanted, and was asking—as if she really cared—how the Zero Luminosity Capsule worked. I saw my grateful father comparing me to Bebeto or Romário. I saw, more clearly than anything else, Teresa smoking in silence by the door, secretly proud of her son.
10
RAT INQUIRED ABOUT MARIANA at a number of counters in the terminal. He inquired timidly, as if defeated in advance. Not having a photograph, he attempted on each occasion to describe my sister, but his linguistic tools were, to say the least, limited: he’d simply say that she was a girl with black hair, wearing a checked shirt knotted at the waist. One of the assistants from the line that serviced Ixtapa said a girl of that description had bought a ticket for a bus leaving at 8 p.m., but we checked the waiting room and didn’t see Mariana there. What’s more, Ixtapa
