The man selling snacks walked up and down the aisle, repeating his list of products every so often, and then got off the bus with a friendly wave to the driver. The sound of the pneumatic doors of the bus closing startled me out of my reverie. The woman traveling beside me took advantage of that distraction to speak again: “Are your mommy and daddy coming to meet you in Villahermosa?” I looked at her without replying. It was impossible to calculate her age. Her smile seemed a little overdone, almost false, and she had pronounced crow’s-feet around her eyes. No one was coming to meet me in Villahermosa. I’d bought the ticket at the last moment for fear that Rat would return, repenting his generosity and asking for his money back. The young man at the counter had explained that from Villahermosa it would be easy to find a bus going to San Cristóbal de las Casas or any other city in Chiapas. There was no other bus leaving from Taxqueña for Villahermosa, he said. According to him, it was my only chance of starting out for Chiapas at that time of night, unless I crossed the city to the Estación de Autobuses del Oriente.
My neighbor repeated her question, this time in an extremely familiar tone: “Are your mommy and daddy going to be there to meet you in Villahermosa, sweetie?” Her voice ascended toward the end of the sentence to an almost operatic pitch. Again, I made no reply. I was thinking that it might be a trap. The kindness of strangers had always seemed to me suspicious. Teresa had often warned about the risks of talking to people I didn’t know. To ensure that the message got through, my mother had even enlisted the figure of the Bogeyman, one of whose techniques was precisely that: talking in a kindly way to children until he hypnotized them and put them in his bottomless sack. And if that didn’t do the trick, there was also a TV campaign about such dangers that regularly bombarded our impressionable minds, interrupting the cartoons. Mariana would sometimes tease me by imitating the menacing gestures of the mustachioed man who, in those public service broadcasts, grabbed a child’s shoulders with evil intentions. On such occasions, I’d remove her hand, give her a look of pure hatred, go to my bedroom, and close the door. Could the Bogeyman be a woman of uncertain age traveling after dark to Villahermosa, Tabasco State?
The woman was staring at me, a little surprised or annoyed that I hadn’t answered her questions. “Cat got your tongue, sweetie?” she asked, trying to get a reaction. That term of affection sounded like an insult, and I decided to break my silence. “My mom will be waiting for me in Chiapas,” I proudly declared. “Oh, so your journey’s longer than mine. Poor little mite. You should have accepted those potato chips. It’s about twelve hours just to Villahermosa.” I attempted to disguise my disappointment on hearing that. Hoping to soften the blow, the woman added, “But not to worry, the bus makes two stops so we can buy food and use the restroom.” I felt the urge to ask her if Villahermosa was farther away than Acapulco, my only point of reference in relation to long road trips, but then thought it would be wiser to make out I was no greenhorn and told her I was used to traveling by bus and never got hungry.
Ignoring my hostility, after a few minutes’ pause, the woman started to tell me the story of her life. I tried showing my lack of interest by staring straight ahead, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She’d been born in Villahermosa and had two sons living in Mexico City, whom she visited frequently. She always brought them plastic tubs of home-cooked food. Her oldest son had studied engineering and was now selling automobile parts, while the younger one was still at college, doing something related to design. They were sharing an apartment in Colonia Obrera, but the oldest was thinking of getting married and moving with his wife to a small house out in Atizapán.
As if lulled by the place names and the woman’s voice—high-pitched without being irksome—I was gradually falling asleep. I made an effort to keep my eyes open but at some point that became impossible, and my head kept nodding until it finally came to rest on my neighbor’s arm. She folded her sweater to make a pillow for me. I struggled against this new expression of unjustified tenderness, but sleep got the better of me and I stopped resisting, even when I felt the back of the woman’s hand stroking my hair.
3
NOWADAYS, I RARELY REMEMBER MY DREAMS. Although I spend many hours in bed, my waking and sleeping lives have turned their backs on one another. Nothing of what happens while I sleep filters into my waking existence, except for a sense of angst that seems to issue from that dark place to which I escape every so often on an unfixed schedule. Maybe that’s because my sleep, generally induced by narcotics, is a blind sleep. But even before I was in this condition—lying in my bed, sunk in a somnolence without boundaries or defined shape—I rarely remembered my dreams. So I’m surprised that I can recall, with such a wealth of detail, many of the important dreams I had during my childhood, particularly during that summer of 1994. It’s almost as if I used up all my symbolic resources at the age of ten, and since then have had to make do with the crude literalness of the world.
That night, on the bus heading for Villahermosa, my head resting on the arm of a stranger who was stroking my
