Mariana and I sometimes talked on the phone, and during the week we’d send text messages about trivia or to communicate the highlights of our daily lives.
During those months I also met a really nice woman, and we started dating. The fact that we worked near each other made it easier for us to meet. We went to the movie theater in the shopping mall or ate salads together at lunchtime. She was kind and seemed genuinely interested in me, an attitude I found—and still find—incomprehensible. She had a tinkling laugh, wide hips, and her left eye was slightly narrower than her right.
But I wasn’t made for that life. It was as though I’d woken in someone else’s body and was temporarily acting as a stand-in for that person.
I never mentioned the red folder to Mariana. I didn’t tell her about the second letter or Teresa’s plan to bring her to Chiapas to live with her. And of course, I didn’t mention the death certificate, didn’t mention the fissures that had opened up in the story my father had told us for years—the story we’d believed to be true, and from which our adult lives had ramified, like the veins from the midribs of my childhood leaves.
I kept the letter and the certificate in my own folder of important documents, which is green rather than red. A folder that I now keep under this bed, along with the elementary school notebooks and my passport.
I don’t now remember what I was thinking about during those months. Nothing, I guess. I concentrated on functioning, on imagining a perfect future. My dry-cleaned shirts smelled the same as my father’s used to, but I pretended not to notice.
One Sunday afternoon I took out the folder and contemplated it for a while. I extracted the contents and scattered the papers on top of my unmade bed. I didn’t have the courage to read Teresa’s letters again. The death certificate was folded in half, and I couldn’t bring myself to open that either. I put everything back and returned the folder to its place under the bed.
That Sunday night I was unable to sleep. I wanted to force myself to cry, the way you make yourself vomit by sticking your fingers down your throat. I wanted my father to be alive so I could ask him what the hell had gone on in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in that small apartment where Teresa had chosen to remake her life. Ask him just exactly what had happened between September 23 and 25, 1994, while Mariana and I watched TV, while I vomited, had diarrhea, and drank cup after cup of chamomile tea, devastated by the news of Teresa’s death.
But no one could respond to those questions then—no one can now. It’s possible that the answer to them all has been forming in my subconscious during the past two years.
Maybe my father wanted me to find the answer alone, wanted the horror of that answer to grow inside me at its own pace, like a carnivorous plant that initially looks like clover and gradually reveals its true nature.
The following day I didn’t go to the educational diagnostic test company. I was tired and upset, lacked the energy to continue pretending that everything was fine. The woman I was dating sent me four text messages, but I didn’t reply to any of them. I convinced myself that I was ill, despite having no other symptom than a slight headache, probably due to a bad night’s sleep.
On Tuesday, I returned to the office wearing my freshly laundered shirt. I found the Metrobus journey very difficult, but thought that once I got to work everything would be fine, that it was just a brief crisis. I told my boss that I was feeling better and said the usual good mornings to my colleagues. It occurred to me that I could perhaps make use of my untouched health insurance to consult a psychiatrist, a professional who would explain that what was happening to me was normal, a sort of delayed-action grief. I’d be prescribed something to help me sleep and that would be that.
But at one in the afternoon, just before the lunch break, I went to the restroom, shut the door, and stayed there for several minutes, feeling that I was about to scream or punch someone in the face. I left a message for my boss with his secretary and took a cab home. I never went back to that job. The people from human resources wrote repeatedly, asking what I wanted done with the things I’d left in my cubicle, but I never replied. I guess they must have thrown them out.
At first I used to go for short walks around the neighborhood, but as the days passed I spent increasing amounts of time in the apartment. I stopped taking showers, put on four or five pounds, began to order delivery meals—Hawaiian pizza. On Fridays, when Josefina came, I’d pretend to be working at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t ask too many questions. But apart from those few hours, I was almost always in bed. Lying on the left side: Teresa’s side.
After a couple of weeks, the woman I’d been dating began to show signs of annoyance. I told her I was ill, but when she offered to come by to see me, I stopped answering her messages. She continued calling but I didn’t pick up. My ring tone was the chirping of crickets, so it didn’t bother me.
One Saturday night she sent me a text saying that she was downstairs, at the entrance to the building. I let her in for fear she’d try to locate the caretaker or call the police. She was clearly concerned.
We
