He was never happy unless he was sad. To tell the truth, his name should have been el Sufrido. But, no, it was Inocencio Reyes. In another life, he might’ve been a philosopher. Or a poet. He liked to think and think, a skinny youth who enjoyed examining life at length. He would walk around the block if things he saw were worth looking at more than once. A waitress with a thick forest of underarm hair. A black man with a white woman. A drunkard who had shit in his pants. These items deserved consideration. So taken was Inocencio with his thinking, he forgot he was mortal and not invisible to the eye, and was always startled whenever anyone stared back.
—He’s a daydreamer, complained his schoolteachers.
—He’s a thinker, said his mother in his defense. She liked to remind them how as a baby he had been colicky. —Cried and cried, day and night, crying and crying and crying, as if even then he knew his destiny. Not like my other babies.
True. Unlike his younger siblings—Fat-Face, Light-Skin, and the Baby—Inocencio’s head was filled with too much remembering. Things he thought he remembered, and things invented for him to remember. —Before the revolution, when the family Reyes owned railroads … his mother would begin.
The Mexican revolution had tossed and tumulted everything, including everyone’s memories. It was as if the revolution gave everyone from the most beggarly and poor an excuse to say, —Before the revolution when we were moneyed, and thus, to excuse their humble present. It was better to have a gallant past, because it made one’s present circumstance seem all the more wretched and allowed one the liberty of looking down condescendingly on one’s neighbors. Or, if there was no recent wealth, one could always resort to the distant past, —Remember our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Nezahualcóyotl, the poet king? No such thing, but it sounded bonito.
Inocencio’s family was neither rich nor poor, but part of a wide middle class that flourished in Mexico City while the U.S. suffered through the Depression. Boys like Inocencio were encouraged to strive for an education at the national university, especially if their fathers wanted them to avoid a military career. But a career of any kind, military or civilian, seemed the last thing on Inocencio’s mind.
God had been kind and bestowed an aura of melancholia about Inocencio Reyes, and this coupled with his intense eyes, dark as Narciso’s but shaped like his mother Soledad’s, like slouching houses, would bless Inocencio with the air of a poet or a martyred Sebastian without having had to undergo either torture.
He did not choose to be unhappy. Who would choose to be unhappy? He was simply a boy without the words for what he was feeling, someone who felt most comfortable in the company of his own thoughts.
It would be a lifelong habit. When he wanted to become invisible, when he felt like leaving a room, when he couldn’t bear being around the people he was around, the house he was housed in, the city where he was citizen, he left the premises without leaving the premises. Into the he, within-the-he, within-the-he. Without the body, that bad actor. Simply his soul, pure and unencumbered, oh!
It could be said Inocencio Reyes lived the life of a person in self-exile, happiest when he could devote himself to his daydreams. Love inspired him to think, as it inspires so many fools. He dedicated his life to this interior inquiry. He did not know he was continuing a tradition that traveled across water and sand from nomadic ancestors, Persian poets, Cretan acrobats, Bedouin philosophers, Andalusian matadors praying to la Virgen de la Macarena. Each had in turn influenced their descendant Inocencio Reyes. A low-ranking Baghdad vizier, an Egyptian cheesemonger, an Oulid Naid belly dancer wearing her dowry of coins around her hips, a gypsy holy man, a goose herder, an Arab saddle-maker, a scholar nun carried off by a Berber chieftain the day Córdoba was sacked, a Sephardic astronomer whose eyes were put out in the Inquisition, a pockmarked slave girl—the sultan’s favorite—couched in a gold and ivory seraglio on the shores of the Abi Diz. Tunis. Carthage. Fez. Cartagena. Seville. And like his ancestors he attempted his own treatise on that enigma of enigmas. What is love? How does one know one is in love? How many different kinds of love are there? Is there truly a love at first sight? Perhaps he was going as far back as our graffiti-artists grand-others of Altamira who painted on the walls of caves.
While other young men busied themselves with serious preparations for their profession, Inocencio took to staying up late at night, —Like a vampire! his father complained, and in these hours of darkness and light he indulged himself in what he loved to do most—dream. Asleep dreaming or awake dreaming, this is what Inocencio did best.
He was thinking how is it a woman can collapse so comfortably with her legs folded beneath her like a cat. The seduction of the eyelids drooping when someone lit a cigarette. The charming tac tac tac of a high-heel shoe across tiles. Or a million and one observations cataloged as either nonsensical or brilliant, depending on your point of view.
To tell the truth, his mother sometimes thought him a little crazy, and in reality he was. A little crazy to be so happy alone putting thoughts together and taking them apart, and thinking over and over of what he should’ve said, and what someone meant by what they didn’t say, the minute details of life, living his life turned around backward, living his life, reliving life and examining it to an unhealthy indulgence.
His first obsessions were about those things that overwhelmed and frightened him precisely because there was no language to name them. And he would seek out a quiet space and think until that smudge of emotion clarified itself. The fear and allure of the wind that set the trees and the arteries in his body trembling. The sunsets watched from the azotea when Mexico City was still smog-free and one could watch a sunset. The face of a blond, three-quarter profile, with the sun behind her and the down of her cheek ablaze.
Things like this filled him with a joy akin to sadness or a sadness akin to joy, and he found himself unable to explain why he was blinking back tears with an uncontrollable desire to laugh and cry all at once. —What?—I don’t know, nothing, he might’ve said. But that was a lie. He should have said, —Everything, everything, ah, everything!