Víctor Flores, on the other hand, was an easy target. Fairy, queer, homo: there was no variant of that insult that wasn’t thrown at him at least once a day. And, invariably, Víctor Flores would cry with rage, swipe his aggressor’s schoolbooks to the ground, scream an interminable string of curses, and then, when it was all over, he was the one to be sent to receive his punishment from the principal—a Frenchwoman who had a perpetual smile on her face and was always dressed in red.
The image of Víctor Flores, his face smeared with snot and disfigured by rage, flitted through my mind when I heard the nasal twang of that soldier calling me a fairy. But I didn’t have time to feel hurt by that insult: still riding on the crest of his inappropriate laughter, the adolescent crouched down so that his face was on a level with mine. “So, you a boy or a fairy?” His question frightened me less than the smell of his breath, something like burnt plastic or those weirdly colored liquids my father kept in the garage and every so often poured into the engine of the Tsuru. The teenage soldier looked straight at me, smiled, and I suddenly thought I remembered where I’d heard that laugh before. It was my father’s laugh, the one he gave sometimes when sitting watching TV, and that I’d hear from my bedroom, from my Zero Luminosity Capsule, or while I was organizing the leaves I’d collected during the day.
Mariconchi sensed danger and tried to move me away from the soldier, hiding me behind her back. The soldier straightened up and slapped her lightly, more to sow the seeds of fear than to inflict pain. Mariconchi raised both hands to her face. One of the passengers who had already been checked attempted to intervene, but a second soldier approached with a menacing expression, raising his rifle as if he were going to hit him with it.
The adolescent soldier crouched down again in front of me, breathing his solvent smell in my face. “Let’s see if you’re a girl or a fairy.” I was petrified, and Mariconchi, frozen with impotence, was crying silently without moving a single muscle, like those miraculous Virgins in churches.
The adolescent soldier unwound Mariconchi’s shawl and proceeded to frisk me from the calves upward, as if checking for a weapon. At that moment, there wasn’t a single thought in my head. For the first time, my mind was a blank, like a sheet of paper with absolutely no creases. The second soldier, who stood watching a few steps away, intervened in a tone intended to sound casual but that held a clear note of tension: “That’s enough.” The adolescent soldier removed his hands as if he were coming out of a trance or had been burned. He straightened up once more and advanced toward the next passenger in the line, whom he searched mechanically before asking for his ID.
I didn’t hear his laugh again so was never able to confirm that it was similar to my father’s, but that notion—or rather, that intuition—secreted itself in a dark corner of my being, like an animal lying in wait to pounce on its prey.
Everything suddenly seemed more silent, like an engine had been turned off somewhere. Mariconchi hugged me as tightly as she could, wrapping her shawl around me again. That hug was slightly painful. I closed my eyes and allowed her to continue, but there was a rigidity in my body that made any real embrace impossible, as if I’d been converted into a piece of splintered wood. I wanted to be inside my Zero Luminosity Capsule, or lying on my bed surrounded by failed origami cranes, with the sound of Mariana’s music filtering through the wall. I wanted to be in Huitzilac, eating a breakfast of quesadillas with Teresa; listening to her monotonous voice, barely rising to enthusiasm as she spoke of the illustrious men of the past. Most of all, I wanted to be with her in Chiapas, walking through the mist along a path, guided by the man with the pipe and balaclava.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in my seat on the bus, next to the window. We were once again traveling at a steady speed, and it suddenly occurred to me that it had all been a nightmare. I had no clear memory of how the whole episode at the checkpoint had ended, no memory of boarding the bus with Mariconchi and falling asleep, and no idea of how much time had elapsed since then. What seemed most likely was that it had been a horrible dream, induced by sinister stories about the Bogeyman, by the Choose Your Own Adventure novels, by Teresa’s disappearance, and by the grave tone in which Rat had warned me about the war in Chiapas.
I felt a coldness in my legs and thought that it was due to the air conditioning, but when I looked down I realized that my pants were wet. The odor of urine was slight but unmistakable, and even though I was ashamed of that smell, I consoled myself with the thought that it was familiar and organic, unlike the chemical smell of solvent on the adolescent soldier’s breath.
At my side, Mariconchi was staring straight ahead, apparently ignoring me, as if we’d never exchanged a single word. Or rather, as if she were sleeping with her eyes open—Mariana had told me about similar cases: sleepwalkers whose unblinking eyes were always wide open.
A little later, I noticed a lightening of the horizon outside the window, and after a while the sun came up. By that time the urine on my pants had dried,
