If Teresa had been at home, I’d have been much more scared of the payback. She’d have taken her time, carefully chosen the words that would most profoundly shake me: “I’m disappointed in you,” or “I’m very sad to see that you can’t be left alone, even for a moment.” Devastating words that always went straight to the mark, that would wash away my fragile construction of pretexts like a wave that reduces the most complex sandcastles to nothing. Would I ever achieve that level of precision in my own use of words, that ninja state of language Teresa used to brandish before us, her children, like a light, finely honed sword?
Maybe Teresa had in fact returned home that very night, while I was wetting my pants on the bus, I thought. Such magical coincidences were always occurring in the books I read: a child who rescues his best friend from a cave at the precise instant that the roof is about to collapse on top of him; the prince who, after years away at war, arrives at his father’s deathbed at the very moment he’s uttering his last words.
I allowed that fantasy free rein: if Teresa had returned, there would be no scolding or “I’m disappointed in you”—it would be a long, long hug. My mom’s voice would finally sound affectionate, it would quiver with emotion, and then I’d excitedly show her the progress I’d made in the Japanese art of origami; I’d tell her about Mariconchi, and how I’d courageously protected that frightened woman from the bullying and humiliation of the soldiers on a godforsaken highway in the middle of the night. And Teresa would listen to my stories as never before: with genuine interest, with the respect of someone listening to an equal.
My father, in the meantime, would be serving us lemonade like a diligent butler; or he’d be watching TV, absorbed like the infant he really was, and I’d finally be the adult male in the household: I’d move into Teresa’s bedroom despite Mariana’s irate protests, despite the protests of my father and the man with the pipe and balaclava.
7
OF VILLAHERMOSA, I REMEMBER LITTLE. I’d never before experienced anything like the heat that hit me when I descended from the bus, not even in Acapulco. The change from the air conditioning of the vehicle to the dense humidity of the terminal was so extreme, it was as if we’d passed from the atmosphere of one planet to another. Even the force of gravity seemed different: it took more effort to lift your feet from the ground. For an instant I considered the possibility that Villahermosa was, in fact, another planet. A planet on which everyone said “sweetie” and “mommy and daddy” and which was considerably nearer to the sun than Colonia Educación.
When Mariconchi had extracted her shapeless, unwieldy bag from the luggage compartment, she looked at me with a touch of hostility. Perhaps she wasn’t used to lying, and so she thought it had been unforgivable of me to have told her that Teresa would be coming to meet me in Chiapas, to have given her to understand that my journey had the complete approval of my parents. By contrast, in my home, lying was just something that came naturally to us. For Mariana, Teresa, and me, lies were no more important than, for instance, alliteration—and were employed with much greater frequency. This was not, however, the case with my father. It annoyed him when we told lies; whenever he discovered us being untruthful, there would be an eruption of anger that lasted several days.
Mariana’s lies were, I have to admit, the best. I’ve always admired her ability to instantaneously come up with a really complex series, often in the form of pretexts.
On one occasion, my sister was planning to go to a party where there would be no adult supervision, organized by some students in their final year of high school. I knew about it because I used to eavesdrop on her telephone conversations, my ear pressed to the wood of her bedroom door. In order to gain permission, she told Teresa that her friend Citlali was hosting a pajama party. At nine in the evening, Teresa decided to call Citlali’s house to see how everything was going, and of course my sister wasn’t there, and hadn’t been there at all that day. Half an hour later, Mariana herself called, and an extremely annoyed Teresa dropped one of her emotional bombshells of the “I’m disappointed in you” variety. But my sister didn’t break under the pressure. She invented the tale that there was another Citlali, whom she’d never before mentioned. She was a younger, quieter girl who had had polio in her childhood and so walked with a bad limp due to a dislocated hip. As a triumphal end to the pack of lies she’d just produced, she passed the phone to a man who claimed to be the disabled Citlali’s father, and told Teresa that everything was fine.
I don’t know if Teresa believed that or any other of Mariana’s many falsehoods, but she pretended to, and my theory is that she was training us to lie effectively: she only scolded us if the lie didn’t hold water, lacked detail, or was frankly idiotic. (Mine were generally all three. When I later decided to study literature, it was with the secret desire to improve those lies, even though by then it was already too late.)
In some way, Teresa’s disappearance was one more lesson in that everlasting fiction class that was her life. She’d played the role of the spouse, mother, and
