I imagined the punishment that would be meted out to Mariconchi if it was discovered that we’d lied to the soldiers, if they found out that she wasn’t my aunt, my mother, or any other relative. She’d surely be locked up in a dungeon like the one described in the Choose Your Own Adventure novel that I had left half-read in my bedroom. I imagined Mariconchi imprisoned in a remote tower where no one could hear her shrill cries for help. I saw myself in a jail with cold stone walls, serving a life sentence for running away from home, missing my sister, Teresa, my school friends, and Hawaiian pizza until the end of time. In my half-baked fantasy, I consoled myself by thinking that, there in the jail, I might be allowed my multicolored squares of paper to practice making the origami cranes and pagodas that had so far only ended in failure. It occurred to me that origami had been invented that way: a Japanese monk, incarcerated in some pagoda with bars on the windows, alone in his stinking cell with only a sheet of paper, which he had to fold and unfold with infinite care, aware that if he tore it, his own sanity would be rent in two.
Three more passengers carrying backpacks descended from the bus and lined up next to us. Mariconchi realized that I was shivering, so she took off her shawl and wrapped it around my chest and arms. I was no longer suspicious of her kindness. She wasn’t a stranger by then; I’d known her for a few hours, which, in the context of my adventure, suddenly seemed forever.
One of the soldiers started to explain that it was a routine check, that we would be asked for our IDS and our final destinations, and that our belongings would be searched. Each of us should take our things from the baggage compartment and briefly show the contents to one of the soldiers. At the end of that explanation the officer who seemed to be in charge added, “If you aren’t a guerrillero, you have nothing to worry about.” Mariconchi pressed me a little closer to her thighs and leaned down to whisper in my ear in a mocking tone: “You’re not a guerrillero, are you?” Those words immediately had a soothing effect. If Mariconchi was capable of cracking a joke, it was most likely that there was no danger. I wrapped the shawl a little more tightly around myself as the soldiers began to check documents and luggage.
The cold seeping through the fabric of my clothing reminded me of one Saturday, not so long before, when Teresa had decided that we should spend a few days in Lagunas de Zempoala, in Morelos State. The plan was to set off early in the morning so as to miss the worst of the traffic—the congestion used to drive my father crazy and caused arguments with Teresa that would sometimes ruin our holidays. The sensation of my father carrying me in his arms to the car woke me, but I pretended to be still asleep so I could enjoy the ever-rarer luxury of letting things happen, of being a bundle looked after by others. Forty minutes later we stopped in Huitzilac for a breakfast of quesadillas, and although—at Teresa’s insistence—I’d been wrapped in a jacket, I could still feel the cold air seeping in through my pajama bottoms. My father ordered atole for us all and we sipped the thick liquid in silence. While we were eating our quesadillas, a man approached our table offering postcards of extremely poor quality, showing scenes from the Mexican Revolution, among them the famous image of Pancho Villa sitting on the presidential throne, with Emiliano Zapata beside him, after the triumphal entrance of the revolutionary troops into the capital. Teresa bought a postcard from the man, paying more than he asked (provoking a look of reproof from my father), and during the rest of the meal, she told us stories associated with that photo, describing Villa’s rough-hewn character and the respect Zapata inspired in the campesinos who fought at his side.
Wrapped in Mariconchi’s shawl, standing beside the bus that would take me to Villahermosa, with the beams of the soldiers’ flashlights passing back and forth, I thought of that breakfast in Huitzilac, which all of a sudden seemed a blurred memory belonging to some far-distant era. In a certain sense it was a memory outside of time, as if my life were not a straight line capable of stretching back to its point of origin but something discontinuous, with ruptures that scattered the recollections across distant hills, shreds of a period that no amount of effort could faithfully reconstruct.
The beam finally rested on my face and I drew back a little, hiding in the shawl like an animal that, caught in the headlights of a car on the highway, curls up, awaiting the impact. In this case, the impact came in the form of a question, directed not at me but at Mariconchi, whose turn it was to have the flashlight shone in her face. “How old is the little girl?” The soldier in charge of the searches had a nasal twang. “Eleven,” Mariconchi improvised, “and he’s a boy not a girl.” Beneath the shawl, I smiled, happy that she had added a year to my age and corrected the soldier in relation to my gender. But that smile quickly faded. The soldier gave a coarse, rather dissolute laugh. I’d heard a laugh like that before, but couldn’t at that moment remember where. He was no more than a teenager, but his laugh was older than his years. “Wow, so he was born a fairy. Right down to the shawl!” Then he laughed again.
In the Paideia School, “fairy” was the most offensive thing one boy could call another. I’d had the bad luck of hearing
