With Mariana, I managed to keep up the charade for longer. I used to answer her texts almost immediately; told her that I was happy with my new job and new girlfriend. In any case, she was always busy and rarely asked questions. But Josefina, who cleans Mariana’s apartment on Tuesdays, told her that I was always at home, in pajamas, doing nothing. When my sister phoned to ask me about this, I invented a story, said that my hours had been cut and that I now had Fridays free, but something in her voice gave me the impression that she didn’t believe me. A few days afterward, I told her I’d been fired. She asked if I was looking for work and my reply was, “not for the time being,” putting an end to the issue.
For the most part of the last two years, my life has been confined to this bed. I sometimes sit up, resting my back against the wall, and look through the window at the only view: the office building across the street.
In the beginning I used to think about Teresa a lot: I was trying to recall as clearly as possible the unvarying tone of her voice, the color of her hair, the way she smoked, leaning against the wall of the house in Educación. But the truth is that I only lived with Teresa during the first ten years of my life, so I don’t have many memories of her. I’ve set down here the three or four that are clearest (Teresa fainting on the edge of the market, Teresa walking behind me as I chased pigeons, Teresa arguing with my father, Teresa going camping one Tuesday at midday) in order to fix them in some way, to see if my memory finally stops distorting them, and the replica of the replica of the replica halts its slow but certain decay.
The image of my father, by contrast, has more points of reference: two more decades of meetings, silences, and meals eaten together. The memory of him in 1994 is frequently superimposed by the memory of my ailing father, sedated in his hospital bed, a morphine-induced smile on his face. I occasionally manage to forget that he’s dead, and I imagine him sitting in an armchair in the living room, shouting at a rerun of a soccer game. In my imagination, I’m sitting beside him, but instead of looking at the TV set, I’m carefully observing each of his features—searching for myself in them, terrified by the acceptance that they are also mine.
One part of me knows that I can’t stay in this bed forever. Lately I’ve been thinking of making drastic changes. Perhaps I’ll go to San Cristóbal de las Casas. Or better still, I’ll take a bus to Villahermosa, where I can start a new life, with another name (Úlrich González, for example). The new life of someone who had no father, no mother, who didn’t kick a pigeon in a square in Mexico City or lose anything in September 1994.
Perhaps, before boarding the bus, I’ll take a walk through the area around the Taxqueña terminal, the streets of Colonia Educación, attempting to understand the nuances of the unspeakable answer that has been growing inside me, devouring me. Perhaps, before changing my name, I’ll also walk to the cemetery where I buried my father, to scream at him in a way I was never capable of screaming when he was alive—the way my sister and my mother used to scream at him when he was still a part of their lives. But before doing anything, before thinking about getting out of bed, before finally becoming the person I always should have been, I’d like to finish writing this.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for their support in the writing of this book.
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