“Mama, your husband is a savage.”
“Shut up, you bum, don’t butt into what doesn’t-”
“Drop it, son, you know how-”
“I know, and I can smell the vomit in the mouth of this old bastard. He stinks like a cave-”
“Shut up, go back to your asshole friends and keep drinking my champagne free of charge. Damn freeloaders! Dummies!”
“Leave us alone. This is between your father and me.”
Nazario Esparza’s eyes were as glassy as the bottom of a bottle. He put his hand in his pocket and took out (why?) a ring with dozens of keys.
“Get out, you’re a curse,” he said to Errol.
“I’d like to imagine you dead, Papa. But not yet a skeleton. Slowly being devoured by worms.”
These words not only silenced Don Nazario. They seemed to frighten him, as if his son’s curse resonated with an ancient, prophetic, and in the end a placating voice. Dona Estrella put her arms around her husband as if to protect him against their son’s threat.
Errol returned to the room and his parents dimmed like an empty theater. Jerico and I followed with wooden faces.
“You see,” said Errol. “I grew up like a plant. I’ve lived outdoors, like a nopal.”
It was obvious: Tonight was his and he wasn’t going to let us slip in a word.
He was as insistent as a rainstorm.
“Do you know the secret? My father wants to get rid of himself. That’s why I behaved the way I did. I have him all figured out and he can’t stand it. He’d like to be the product of his own past, denying what happened earlier but taking advantage of the results. Understand?”
I said no. Jerico shrugged.
“Who were those people?”
“Ah!” Errol exclaimed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Do you know why my father forbids photographs at the parties he gives at home?”
“I have no idea,” said Jerico.
“You can’t imagine. Why do you think he gets all these people together, offers them champagne, but bans photographs? I can tell you because I secretly go through his papers and tie up loose ends. It just so happens that Don Nazario deducts-that’s what I said-he deducts these so-called ‘parties’ from his taxes. He classifies them as entertainment expenses and ‘office expenses,’ business meetings disguised as ‘cocktail parties.’ ”
“Who comes to a cocktail party to be ‘deducted’?” I insisted, interested in not having my sentimental education cut short.
“Everybody,” Errol said with a laugh. “But only my father is so clever that he bans publicity and closes the deal.”
His laughter sounded hollow and sad.
“I’ve got the old man by the balls! The old fucker!”
I managed to squeeze in a question: “Do you think you’re going to negate your father’s offenses?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I only want to push my differences with him to the limit. Understand? I’m rich, you’re poor, but I have more misery to overcome.”
He emptied his glass in one swallow.
“You should know you’re born with privilege. You don’t make it.”
And he looked at us with an intensity we had never seen in him before.
“Everything else is robbery.”
I TOLD YOU, my dear survivors, I went to the Esparza house that night to avoid my own home, if it can be called that. Dysfunctional and all the rest of it, Errol’s family was in the
My first memory is of Calle de Berlin and a three-story house with parapets and towers proclaiming its lineage, a meager stone courtyard, no plants, and only two residents: the woman who took care of me from my infancy, and myself. My name is Josue Nadal, something that readers have known since my decapitated head began to ramble, resting like a coconut and lapped at by the waves on a beach in Guerrero. The name of the woman who cared for me from infancy was Maria Egipciaca del Rio, a name with Coptic resonances that should not be surprising in a country where baptisms are a fertile part of the popular imagination: In Mexico there is an abundance of Hermengildos, Eulalios, Pancracios, Panfilos, Natividades, and Pastoras, Hilarias, and Orfelinas.
Her name being Maria Egipciaca and mine Josue should not attract any particular attention if we recall the biblical names that North Americans had from the very beginning: Nathaniel, Ezra, Hepzibah, Jedediah, Zabadiel, not to mention Lancelot, Marmaduke, and Increase.
Attribute this nomenclature, if you like, to the naming vocation of the New World, baptized once at the dawn of time with indigenous names and rebaptized with Christian and African ones throughout its history.
I’m saying all this to situate Maria Egipciaca in a sovereign territory of proper names that go beyond the designations “mother,” “stepmother,” “grandma,” “aunt,” “guardian,” or “godmother,” which I didn’t dare use for the woman at whose side I grew up, but whose identity she always hid from me, tacitly forbidding me to call her “mother,” “godmother,” or “stepmother” because the mixture of attention and distance in Maria Egipciaca was like an alternating current: When I displayed mistrust indulgence overflowed from her, and when I showed affection it provoked a hostile response. I’m explaining this game since there is something ludic in every close, solitary relationship that constantly has to choose between amity and enmity; it became clearly established only as I grew and situated in my surroundings this small, severe woman, always dressed in black with a belt and a wide, starched white collar, though her hair was styled coquettishly with short reddish curls in what used to be called a “permanent” (and was repeated like a temporal oracle on the head of Errol’s mother). The severe dress did not go well with the high-heeled shoes Maria Egipciaca wore to disguise her short stature, though this was more than compensated for by the energy she displayed in the huge house on Calle de Berlin, which was like an elephant’s cage occupied by two mice, for it had three floors but she and I lived only in a space bounded by the vestibule at the entrance, the living room, the kitchen, then two bedrooms on the second floor and a kind of mysterious ban on the third floor, where neither one of us went, as if the madwoman in the attic lived there and not the odds and ends left by previous residents in the course of a century.
Furthermore, the house on Berlin had suffered a great deal in the 1985 earthquake and no one had bothered to repair the cracked walls or restore the airy garret that served as the mirador and crown of the residence. So that when I came to live there, while I was still an infant, forgotten, forgetful, and forgettable (I suppose), its condition was not so much abandoned or forgotten as adrift, as if a house were a stream lost in the great tide of a city that had always been ravaged by military destruction, poverty, inequality, hunger, and revolt, and in spite of, or because of, so much catastrophe, determined to come back more chaotic, energetic, and brazen than ever: Mexico City would give a gigantic finger to the rest of the country, which was attracted to it like the proverbial fly to the spider’s web where it will be trapped forever.
Were there two Maria Egipciacas? I don’t remember the moment my life began in the light green mansion on Calle de Berlin, because no one remembers the moment of my birth, and lacking other references, we situate ourselves in the environment where we grew up. Unless in a fit of sincerity or imaginary health, the person who shelters us says:
“You know something? I’m not your mother, I adopted you right after you were born…”
Maria Egipciaca never did me a favor like that. And yet I recall her with the passing affection that gratitude imposes. It’s one thing to be grateful for something and another to be grateful forever. The first is virtue, the
