Later that evening, Mariana came out of her room with red eyes and the three of us sat together again in the living room. My father started to reassure us that everything was going to be fine, but realized how stupid that sounded and turned to more practical matters, which he was much better at. He announced that we’d have to stay in the house alone for a couple of days, while he went to Chiapas “to bring her back.” In hindsight, the idea of leaving us alone after imparting such news seems eloquent proof not only of my father’s profound ignorance of childrearing but, more importantly, his lack of empathy. But at that moment both my sister and I were in shock; neither of us knew what to say.
Mariana asked if Teresa had died in the war and he said she hadn’t, that apparently she’d been living in downtown San Cristóbal and her brakes had failed on a nearby highway.
My eyelids suddenly began to droop, as if my whole body was asking for a respite after the awful news, and at some point I fell asleep on the couch. My father and Mariana also slept in the living room that night, if they did in fact sleep at all.
6
MARIANA CALLED MY CELL PHONE just when I was starting to clear my father’s room—Teresa’s room, because, for me, it had never stopped being hers. While we were talking I walked into the bedroom where my sister had spent so many hours listening to music, and then into mine, where I’d spent so much time folding sheets of paper or drafting theories.
She wanted to know how much longer it would take to empty the house, as there was a potential buyer interested in viewing it. This news annoyed me: it hadn’t even been two weeks since the meeting and Garmendia had already found someone.
My sister wanted to dispose of the house as soon as possible so that she could put her share of the sale price to use. I could understand her urgency, had even come to share it, but once I was installed in the house, surrounded by boxes, piles of paper, and clothes, the idea of passing some time there, as a sort of personal farewell to my past, had begun to grow on me. Once the house in Educación was sold, Teresa would have finally departed, and my father too. The spaces in which they had loved, in which they had fought, and where they had watched us growing up would belong to other people. There was every possibility that the new owners would knock down a wall or completely remodel the whole house.
The single mattress on my old bed was now lying on the dusty floor. Rat had come by the day before, accompanied by a man to help with the heavy work, and had taken a good part of the furniture. While they were coming in and out of the house, I stood by the doorway, leaning against the wall, just as Teresa used to do when she was smoking. Rat and his assistant passed me carrying furniture, which they loaded into the pickup. My former Zero Luminosity Capsule was among those items.
At some point, Rat asked me if I wanted him to remove the stuff from Teresa’s room as well. For a second I was tempted to say yes, that he could take everything before I’d even had time to look through it. Perhaps that would have been better: to close my eyes at the right moment. But common sense deserted me, and I said no, that I hadn’t had time to check that room yet, but he could come back the following day.
“And what about the big bed in there?” he asked. He was referring, of course, to my father’s bed; Teresa’s bed. He was also referring to the double bed from which I’m now writing, in which I’ve spent a good part of my time over the last two years. “No. I’ll hang on to that,” I told him.
While Rat was tethering the precarious pile of large items of furniture onto the pickup, I thought that the living room, where he’d consumed beer and pizza and unsuccessfully courted Mariana during the summer of ’94, must have sparked some memory in him. Maybe the speed with which Rat loaded everything onto the pickup had to do with an incipient sense of remorse, the early signs of a guilty conscience or at least of nostalgia: a tacit acceptance that the past had weight and meaning—that a walk to Taxqueña two decades before had, in some way, seeped through to his inner core too.
When he held out the roll of bills in payment for the goods, I looked into his eyes for some echo of that other moment: his hand—less callused in those days—holding out a few crumpled bills in the Autobuses del Sur terminal, before he abandoned me to my fate. But Rat looked away and drove off in his vehicle, leaving behind a trail of black exhaust fumes.
The floor of my former—now unfurnished—bedroom was littered with a variety of objects and papers that would have to be thrown out when the garbage truck came by. Before mustering the energy to check my parents’ bedroom, I sat there for a moment, among the remaining rubble of my childhood.
At the other side of the room, on top of my old elementary school notebooks, I spotted an attempt at an origami frog. In comparison with all my other mediocre efforts, that frog wasn’t too bad. I thought I’d eliminated all traces of my hobby with the move from childhood to adolescence, but I’d apparently overlooked the frog, which had survived two decades of oblivion with admirable dignity. It wasn’t one of the figures I’d made from the colored paper that came with the manual Teresa had given me, but a white frog, constructed from the ruled page of a school
