There’s another very early memory I return to every so often. It must have been after the time Teresa fainted by the piñata and costume stand in the market. The three of us were walking across a cobbled square. With hindsight, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been the main square of Coyoacán, but there’s really no way of knowing. My mother had bought us each an ice cream, but I’d thrown half of mine to the ground, and Mariana was teasing me by licking hers with exaggerated pleasure. By the pavilion in the square, fifteen or twenty gray pigeons were moving about, pecking at crumbs of bread and fluffing out their breast feathers. Partly as a distraction from Mariana’s vexatious behavior, I let go of Teresa’s hand and ran toward the pigeons.
It’s a game as old as the concept of the city, one played by every child who has ever crossed a public square anywhere: attempting to kick the pigeons and then watching them fly away. One of the attractions of that game for a miniature human is, I guess, the sense of being dangerous: the power wielded over those who are weaker than us—which at that age is only birds. I used to like feeling the fluttering of wings around me, the frenetic flight that left me excited and triumphal in the middle of a cloud of dirty, flea-infested feathers.
On this occasion, however, something was different. One particular pigeon, plumper and less agile than the rest, was my chosen target. Before starting my dash, I contemplated it for a moment. It looked as stupid as any other pigeon but moved more slowly than its companions, as if its instincts were atrophied or dormant. I ran toward it as fast as my short legs would carry me. The other pigeons rose up in flight as I passed; I heard the beating of their wings and sensed the movement of their shadows on the ground. But the plump pigeon stayed exactly where it was, indifferent to its fate.
When I was halfway there, the pigeon showed signs of taking off, but didn’t quite make it. There was, in that aborted attempt, a yearning for the sky, common to so many bipeds, but also a real-life inability to fulfill it.
The impact of my foot fell on one of its sides, just below the wing. If I hadn’t been a rather scrawny five-year-old, I’d probably have killed the pigeon, but it just rolled over like a rag doll, making two or three turns on its unstable axis. Then it got to its feet again.
I’d done it. I’d kicked the fattest pigeon in the square, thus fulfilling the secret ambition of every child my age who was in the habit of chasing dumb birds. The desire to exercise cruelty had been unexpectedly satisfied. I’d managed to kick the pigeon but, paradoxically, something had broken inside me. That kick had hurt me too.
When I turned to my mother and sister, some fifteen or twenty yards behind me, looking on in stunned amazement, I understood just what I’d done, the gravity of my transgression. And I began to cry.
What I remember most clearly about that whole episode is Teresa’s coldness: she refused to comfort me when I reached her, my face smeared with tears and snot. “Let’s go,” she said, and the three of us walked back to the car without saying another word.
Sitting next to Rat in waiting room No. 2 of the Terminal Central de Autobuses del Sur, crying, I remembered the sensation of that kick to the pigeon’s soft flank, near the pavilion in the cobbled square. And although the memory made my tears even more bitter, they also became more adult, tears that—for the first time—weren’t the result of a specific, immediate situation, but of the vague consciousness of having lost something I could never again recover.
Rat got to his feet. It was as if my sobs were the last straw, as if he had no idea how to deal with a public expression of emotion. There was fear in his eyes: fear of being judged by others, but also the fear that my tears would trigger something inside him he’d held in check throughout his whole life: fear of crying with me, for me, beside me, like two lost children in a bus terminal.
Rat hurriedly took a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket and held them out to me unceremoniously. “You go,” he mumbled, and walked quickly away toward the noise of the traffic on Avenida Taxqueña without looking back.
TWO
1
THE BED IN WHICH I’M WRITING IS DISGUSTING. The sheets are stained with layer upon layer of dried sweat—the geological strata of my sedentary life. It’s a double bed. I can usually be found on the same side, so the left half of the mattress looks a little more worn, sags a little more deeply than the right. Symmetry is an impossibility, even here.
It’s the only bedroom in the apartment—also the only room besides the bathroom to have a door. The rest of the place is a continuity: a single space that crams in a small kitchen, a living room, and a table with two chairs.
I rarely venture beyond the bedroom, unless it’s to use the bathroom, warm up food in the microwave, or, in exceptional circumstances, buy something in the grocery store on the first floor of the building.
On Fridays, Josefina, a woman in her sixties, comes to give the apartment a desultory dusting and to cook a few meals: tinga de pollo, meatballs in chipotle, arroz a la mexicana, rajas con crema. Most of these dishes give me indigestion, but I look upon the discomfort as a well-deserved punishment: I’ve never complained to her.
Josefina in fact works for my sister, but
