“I know a nurse is coming to take care of the boy. If you like, I’ll bring some flowers.”
“There’s no need,” Maria Egipciaca replied severely. “Nobody died.”
“It’s to cheer up this tomb a little,” the servant said in a bad humor and left.
I must admit to those who survive that my taking to a sickbed made me very happy. I saw it as an opportunity first of all to devote myself to “the unpunished vice,” reading, and second, to oblige Maria Egipciaca to serve me with no pleasure, irritated, making an unnecessary racket but obliged, beyond any other consideration, to tend to me for reasons that had nothing to do with the affection or duty a mother owes her child, but merely to remain in the good graces of “the senor,” that mysterious patron to whom the doctor had referred with unqualified severity and categorical words.
I should confess that the allusion to “the senor,” which I heard for the first time on that occasion, produced a conflicted feeling in me. I realized that Maria Egipciaca was not the source of my material existence or physical comfort but simply followed the orders of a person who had never been mentioned before in this house. Was the physician’s indiscretion really an indiscretion? Or had the good doctor intentionally put Maria Egipciaca in her place, revealing that far from being the lady of the house, she too, like the weekly maid, was an employee? I wanted to gauge the effects of this revelation on my guardian’s attitude. She was careful not to vary in the slightest the behavior I already knew. If I was sick and sentenced to rest, she would heighten, without modifying in its essentials, her irreproachable conduct as a senora charged with lodging me, feeding me, dressing me, and sending me to school.
But since at the same time the doctor had announced that the nurse would come to take care of me on the instructions of the senor who “pays for everything, pays well, and pays on time,” Maria Egipciaca had on the horizon of her suspicions a new and weaker propitiatory victim. The nurse and I. I and the nurse. The order of factors etcetera. The outcome foreseen by Maria Egipciaca was a relationship that excluded her from her good governance of the house and care of my person. How to reaffirm one and prolong the other? Sometimes the questions that pierce our spirits escape through our eyes, just as my encephalic mass spills out of my skull today, when I woke up dead on a Pacific beach.
Fourteen years ago Elvira, if she did not prevent my death, did renew my life. My routine as an early adolescent in secondary school promised, in my young but limited imagination, to repeat itself into infinity. It is curious that at a time of such great physical changes, the mind insists on prolonging childhood, since the belief that adolescence itself will be eternal is only the mirror of the tacit conviction (and convention) of childhood: I’ll always be a little girl, a little boy, even though I know I won’t. But I’ll be an adolescent with the mentality of a little boy, that is, of a survivor. In the end, what age belongs to us more than childhood, when we truly depend on others? Everything is longer when we are children. Vacations seem deliciously eternal. And class schedules too. Though subject to school and especially the family, at that time of life we have more freedom with regard to what binds us than at any other period. It seems to me this is because in childhood freedom is identical to imagination, and since here everything is possible, the freedom to be something more than the family and something more than school flies higher and allows us to live more separately than at the age when we must conform in order to survive, adjust to the rhythms of professional life, submit to rules inherited and accepted by a kind of general conformity. We were, as children, singular magicians. As adults, we will be herd animals.
Can’t we rebel against the gray sadness of this fatality? I evoke this feeling because I believe it is what joined Jerico and me as brothers. And I’m also of this opinion because it was the nurse Elvira Rios who came before anyone else to break the habitual formations enclosing me in the house on Calle de Berlin under the tutelage of Maria Egipciaca. It isn’t that the nurse had proposed to “free me” or anything like that. It was simply a question of a presence different from everything I had known until then. Maria Egipciaca constantly praised the Caucasian race, the “whiteys,” almost assigning to them the destiny of the world or, at least, the monopoly on intelligence, beauty, and strength. She suffered from an unfortunate mental confusion that led her to say things like “If whites governed us, we’d be a great country”; “Indians are our burden”; “See, the Americans killed the Indians and that’s why they could be a great nation”; “Those blacks are only good for dancing.” When she leafed through my history books, she would sigh over the blond Emperor Maximiliano de Habsburgo and deplore the triumph of “that Indian” Juarez. She didn’t know much about the war of 1846-48 with the United States, though her prejudices were enough for her to wish that North Americans had taken over the entire Mexican territory once and for all. When I dared to remark that then we would be a Protestant country, she was confounded for the moment and not until the next day did she come up with an answer: “The Virgin of Guadalupe would have converted them to religion,” because for her, Protestantism was, at most, “a heresy.”
The arrival of the nurse Elvira Rios, very dark-skinned and dressed in white with a black valise in her hand and an active professional disposition that would not tolerate insolence or interruptions or jokes, became a challenge to Dona Maria Egipciaca. I felt it from the moment the nurse prohibited my jailer from entering my room.
“And the tray with his food?” Maria Egipciaca said haughtily.
“Leave it outside.”
“Better yet, you carry it up.”
“With pleasure.”
“And if you like, cook it too.”
“That’s no trouble, Senora.”
Each of Elvira’s responses seemed to corner Maria Egipciaca a little more, and in the end she prepared the meals and brought them to the door of my bedroom, attempting to cross the threshold, not counting on the nurse’s will.
“The patient needs rest.”
“Listen, Senorita, I’m not going to-”
“That’s an order.”
“We’ve lived together his whole life!”
“That’s why he has a nervous ailment.”
“You’re arrogant!”
“Just professional. My job is to protect the young man from any nervous disturbance and restore his tranquillity.”
“It’s my house!”
“No, Senora. You’re only an employee here, like me. Please close the door.”
“Arrogant! Presumptuous Indian!”
From this delicious exchange (which avenged all the years of tension in the house on Berlin) was born my admiration for the small, agile, slender nurse. I attempted to converse with her in a less professional manner. She wouldn’t allow it. She was here to take care of me and restore me to health, not to chat. I looked at her with a look I did not recognize but the mirror confirmed as “the eyes of a lovesick calf.”
My gaze obtained only one response: Elvira placed a thermometer in my mouth with a gallant gesture.
The truth is that this agile, self-assured presence in a young, small body excited me more than if Elvira had shown herself naked. I learned right then, during the first few days of my nerve cure, first to guess at and then immediately to desire the flesh hidden behind the nurse’s snow-white uniform. What would she be like naked? What kind of underclothes would a senorita like her wear? Was she still a senorita? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she married? And as young as she was, did she have children? All these questions resolved, eventually, into a single image. Elvira naked. My eyes stripped her of clothing, and she did not resemble the paper dolls in the magazines that had first excited me. I understood one thing: Seeing her dressed, all in white, moved me more than seeing her without clothes, because the uniform stimulated my imagination more than nudity.
The earlier routine disappeared. It was replaced by a new routine joined to the presence of the nurse, my imagination whirling between her slender hips and the succession of thermometers, pills, checks of blood pressure, and conversations that revealed my juvenile lack of experience and vague desire to prolong childhood without showing my dread of adulthood.
She seemed to observe it all with an intelligent gaze that Maria Egipciaca, intruding from time to time, called (from behind the door, like a ghost that no longer frightened me) “black squirrel eyes,” or “her with the little mouse eyes,” words that did not disturb the young professional, no doubt accustomed to things worse than a muttering, rabid old woman displaced by the facts of life from her customary dominant position. I was grateful to Elvira that her presence had translated into my liberation. The house would not be the same again. The tyranny of my childhood lost its powers with every passing hour.
