From the perspective offered by the intervening two decades, I now guess that when she got off the bus, Mariconchi wasn’t exactly angry with me. True, my lie had put her in an awkward position, but I imagine that to some extent she considered herself responsible for my fate. What’s more, she may perhaps have felt guilty that an unnamed soldier had traumatized me for life while I was in her care, as would appear to be indicated by the fact that I’d pissed my pants at the age of ten. How was she going to explain to my father that his son was with her, five hundred miles away, on a planet nearer to the sun where the force of gravity was different?
After leaving the bus terminal, we took a cab to Mariconchi’s house, and I remember being surprised that it was a normal car, with four doors, and not one of the ubiquitous Beetles with no front passenger seat that abounded in the streets of the capital.
Mariconchi’s house was painted in the most surprising colors. The front door was navy blue, the living room walls were apricot, the kitchen was a pale green, and there was a small interior patio with clay-colored tiles. The large number of ornaments on every available surface made the house a kitsch baroque nightmare. On shelves, porcelain dolls stood beside small vases commemorating weddings and baptisms. It was completely unlike any other house I’d ever entered. I immediately assumed that this was the predominant style in Villahermosa.
Over and above the excessive ornamentation, there was a disturbing element in that house; it seemed to be preserved like a museum rather than being a lived-in space. I knew from her first monologue, when we were just leaving the Taxqueña terminal, that my host’s sons lived in Mexico City, but I didn’t remember hearing anything about a partner, and I posed my question with the innocent directness typical of those days: “Where’s your husband?” Mariconchi stroked my hair before replying, and it was as if she’d called me “sweetie” for the umpteenth time, but on this occasion with a gesture rather than words. “He passed on three years ago.”
I’d always envied children who felt relatively confident around adults, who spoke the full range of the polite language of social encounters and were praised by teachers and aunts for having “very good manners.” Teresa had never trained us to avoid awkward questions, repeat formulaic courtesies, or utilize the blandest euphemism to suit the occasion. That is the only explanation for the fact that, despite my relatively morbid taste in reading matter (including the Choose Your Own Adventure books) and my reasonable performance in the language class, I still, at the age of ten, had no clear notion of the meaning of the verb “pass on.” At home, we simply said “die”: my father’s father had died before I was born, and Kurt, Mariana’s red-eared terrapin, had died a few months before the death of the singer it had been named after, but no one around me had ever, as far as I knew, passed on. From Mariconchi’s tone, I could tell that passing on wasn’t something good, yet by a process of association I would find impossible to reconstruct today, it seemed to me that her husband must be some form of vegetable in a wheelchair whom she visited from time to time in a hospital.
While I was lost in those linguistic conundrums (omitting to express any form of condolence or regret), Mariconchi produced a pen and paper from a drawer and asked me to note down my home phone number, which I did without hesitation, since I had an inkling that her generosity and patience were reaching their limits. She then disappeared for a moment and returned with a towel, a T-shirt, and a pair of shorts that looked six or seven sizes too large for me. “Give me your clothes and go take a shower. I’ll talk to your daddy and then wash your things so you’re clean as a new pin when he comes to get you.” I immediately realized that carrying out her request would imply standing naked in front of her, and I felt myself blush. Mariconchi must have spotted that blush because she laughed. It made me a little less nervous to see the worried expression she’d worn since early that morning fleetingly disappear.
I took off my clothes in the bathroom and, after wrapping myself in the towel she’d given me, handed my pants and T-shirt to Mariconchi. I was worried that she might ask about my briefs—discarded among the filthy litter of the service station restroom—but either she didn’t notice their absence or guessed it was a sensitive topic and said nothing.
Back in the bathroom, I imagined the telephone call that was about to be made. My father would be desperately searching for me. He’d surely have brought in the police or would be in jail for accidentally killing Rat while torturing him for information about my whereabouts. Mariana would be feeling guilty, like the time when she tied me to the gate with a bicycle lock and then lost the key. The house in Educación would be filled with reporters, and my smiling face would appear that day, along with those of other missing children, on the public-service break-bumpers on Channel 5.
Whatever the case, the phone would scarcely have time to ring in the tense silence of the
