“How did he leave?”
“Like a soul chased by the Devil.”
“Why did he leave?”
“Please, ask him.”
It didn’t surprise us that he had gone. We were interested in his reasons. The small apartment in the shadow of the great revolutionary gas station was bare of furniture, just a mattress on the floor, a table, two chairs, a bathroom with the door half open, our friend Errol, whom we sometimes envied and sometimes felt sorry for. The guitar we already knew. A new drum set, a neglected saxophone.
Did rage drive him away? he asked us rhetorically, sitting on the floor, his arms crossed, with his long hair and shortsighted eyes. No, fear drove him away, no matter how justified his anger with his parents. Fear of becoming, in the company of his family, what his father and mother already were: two backward, spectral, avaricious beings. Two enemy ghosts who left a dead smell behind them. Estrellita with that eternal face of someone going to a wedding who does not renounce the happy ending regardless of all evidence to the contrary. Her inconsequential bliss. Her weeping out of sheer habit. The imaginary coffin waiting for her in the hallway to the bedroom. Yes, what’s my mother good for? Distrusting the servants? Is that her only affirmation? Weeping when she imagines the death of others, a vague
“But I’m here, Mama.”
He strummed the guitar.
“When my father scolds her, she goes into the bathroom and sings.”
Her only devotions are to death, the only certain thing in life, and the Virgin. She doesn’t consider the fact that faith brings her closer to the despised maid. How is it possible to be a Christian and despise believers who have the same faith but are socially inferior to us? How do you reconcile these extremes, shared faith and separate social position? Who is more Christian? Who will enter heaven through the eye of the camel? Who through the lock of the strait gate?
Jerico and I looked at each other. We understood that Errol needed us in order to give external words to his internal torment, which transcended his relationship with his parents and settled, eventually, in the relationship of Errol to Errol, of the boy to the man, the sheltered to the homeless, the artist he wanted to be to the rebel that, perhaps, was all he could be: a rebel, never an artist, because personal insurrection is not a sign of esthetic imagination. And he immediately referred to his father.
“What can you think of a man who travels abroad with a money belt filled with silver pesos around his waist to make certain no one steals them? A man who travels with a special case filled with chiles to season insipid French cooking?”
He was silent for a moment. He didn’t invite us to comment. It was clear his diatribe had not yet ended.
“Do you remember when I told you how my father made his way? The man of action, the faithful husband, the strong head of the family? First a carpenter, in a poor district of the city. A furniture maker. Selling chairs, beds, and tables to various hotels. Furniture stores, hotels, movie houses. Remember? The modern Saint Joseph, except that his Virgin Mary didn’t give birth to a savior but to an informer. I didn’t tell you everything that time. I skipped over the link that joins the chain of my revered father, like the key ring in his pocket that he rattles with so much authority. Between the furniture store and the hotels are the brothels. The first chain of my fortune is made of whorehouses. That’s where the mattresses went, that’s where the beds were used, that’s where the Catholic, bourgeois, and respectable fortune of a couple who insult their servants and ignore their son was founded. In a brothel.”
What could we say? He didn’t expect anything. His confession didn’t affect us. It was his business. For him, obviously, it had been transformed into an open wound, and that was when we knew that because of our disinterest in this matter, the value Jerico and I shared with regard to the geographies of families or the supposed “crimes” of individuals, it did not concern us. Right then Jerico and I confirmed something we already knew, the necessary product of our readings assimilated to the philosophical and moral leap that the instructive friendship of Father Filopater signified. A lesson for us, for him the recognition of losses and gains in the ancestral game between parents and children, forebears and descendants. About whom could I speak except women who weren’t related to me, Maria Egipciaca, my nemesis, and Elvira Rios, my nurse? And Jerico, who remained silent about family antecedents about which he may have been completely ignorant? And about whom except ourselves could we speak, he and I, Jerico and Josue, regarding the familial relationship that in our lives was ultimately identical to the relationship between friends? This apparent solitude was the condition of our absolute solidarity. The small saga of Errol and his family confirmed in Jerico and me the fraternity that was a sure sign of the orientation of our lives. Brothers not in blood but in intelligence, and knowing this, we realized (at least I did), joined us early on but perhaps put us to the test for the rest of our lives. Would we always be the intimate friends we were now? What would the twelve strokes of noon leave us? And what the prayer murmured at the end of the day?
Perhaps it was unfair to call us what Filopater named us-Castor and Pollux-simply in contrast to the real orphanhood of our friend Errol Esparza, voluntarily estranged from his parents though perhaps more devoted than we were to the eternal struggle between talent and solitude.
Then he came out of the bathroom, naked, his head wet, the young man who greeted us and sat in front of the drum set while Errol picked up the guitar and the two of them began their rock version of “Las Golondrinas.”
A few mariachis to the wise.
I ALWAYS KNEW she would spy on us. The presence of Elvira Rios was offensive to Maria Egipciaca, even before the nurse set foot in the house adrift on Calle de Berlin. In the mind of my caretaker, this enormous residence had room for only two people, her and me, in the chastely promiscuous relationship I have already told you about. It was as if two enemy animals occupied, with no other companion, an entire forest, and one fine day a third animal appeared to throw into confusion a couple that in fact did not love each other. Was there hatred between my guardian and me? I suppose there was, if the perpetual dissimilarity of affections and sympathies determines an antagonism that moves people in conflict to do what they have to do only so the other, as soon as he is aware of what is going on, will occupy the adversarial position. If I complained or woke up in a bad mood, Maria Egipciaca lost no time in asking what is it? what’s wrong? what can I do for you? If, on the other hand, I woke brighter than the sun, she hurried to wield a poisoned rapier, it’s clear you don’t know what the day holds in store, have you thought about your assignments for today, why didn’t you finish them yesterday? now you’ll have more obligations and since you lack not only time but also talent, you won’t get anywhere: you’ll always be a
“How silly. That’s the name of a bolero singer.”
“Isn’t it just that you’re Del Rio and she’s Rios? Does that irritate you?”
“From current to current, let’s see who drowns first.”
The days preceding the arrival of the nurse were perhaps the worst of a confinement that previously, at least, had doors open to the street and school. Now, confined by doctor’s orders and waiting for the imminent arrival of the nurse, my “stepmother’s” manias were exacerbated to the point of cruelty. She found a thousand ways to make me feel useless. She prepared meals making so much noise it could be heard all through the house, she came up to my bedroom with the tray resounding like a marimba orchestra, she sighed like a tropical hurricane, deposited the meal outside my door with a groan of cardiac exertion, picked it up, came in without knocking as if she wanted to catch me at the solitary vice that, since the incident of my undershorts, had fixed her opinion of my impure person. If she didn’t drop the tray on my lap it was because her vocation of service would have obliged her to pick up and clean without asking me to do the same, since that would have denied Maria Egipciaca’s sacrificial function in this house where, however, all the dirt accumulated for seven days until the competent maid came in once a week, drew the curtains, opened the windows, aired out and let in the sun, washed and ironed, filled the dispensers for the necessities of the next few days, and left as she arrived, without saying a word, as if her work did not depend in any way on the apparent mistress of the house, Maria Egipciaca. On only one occasion did the cleaning woman speak to my caretaker to say:
