In the afternoon, Rufina and I go to the garden in the traffic island and sit on a bench. Soon after, a man slips in beside her. Rufina and the man exchange kisses that detonate like an exploding tire. I only mention it because a lot of cars drive by on the Paseo de la Reforma, and on Tuesday one had a flat. The driver pulled up onto the sidewalk and bragged, “I didn’t lose control.”
“Don’t make me lose control,” Rufina complains in a low voice.
The man squeezes her.
“You want to go play over there?” Rufina asks me sweetly, politely.
Humiliated, I get down from the bench. Rufina must know how much I like to listen to thundering kisses. To pass the time, I look at the bronze statues along the Paseo. “Murdering heroes,” according to my uncle Artemio. I stare at them suspiciously. The cypresses are much taller. Their enormous branches spread out and form a protective vault. They are something worthy of aspiration. My little eyes, however, are only pulled in the direction of the bench. No tall ahuehuete cypress, no bark you could strip from it, no razor grass wields as much power as two people embracing.
Amid a cluster of thunderclaps, I notice that the bench has been surrounded by a group of people. People who came from nowhere, from the Paseo de la Reforma maybe; and people keep coming from neighboring streets and crowd together. I hear a woman yell, “Pull her dress down!”
I’m afraid. I don’t know whether to run home like lightning and crawl under my bed to hide my embarrassment, or go see what’s happening.
Again, I hear the same high-pitched voice, “Someone pull her dress down.”
I’m such a coward. I love Rufina. I love her dresses, the one with the little flowers, the hound’s tooth one, the percale one, especially the argyle one, her morning dress, the one she washes with soap and water on the terrace. I cut a path across the wall of onlookers’ legs. It’s a good thing I’m small and can squeeze through. There, next to the bench, in the middle of the circle, lying on the ground, Rufina. Alone. The man’s gone.
The circle closes around Rufina like spectators in a bullring, some with front row seats, others in the stands, all of them waiting. She convulses. A thrust, a second one, then the banderillas. Her dress higher, her legs open, her panties for everyone to see. What an ugly color salmon is. What a horrible color for underwear. Why do they even make them in that color? Mother says underwear should be white like socks. Rufina’s hose are fastened above the knee with a garter.
“Isn’t anyone going to pull her dress down?” the voice asks, imperious.
“It’s a disease sent by the devil,” a man says.
A woman crosses herself. I get close.
“This little girl knows her.”
“Put a handkerchief in her mouth.”
Put a handkerchief in my mouth? No, not mine, Rufina’s.
“Look at her. She’s biting her tongue. She’s going to chew her tongue to pieces.”
“Ask the girl where they live.”
I’m about to say Berlin Street, number 6, when the woman who seems to be in charge yells out, “She just bit herself. She’s bleeding!”
At that moment, I dare to look at Rufina. Her braid is undone. Blood is running out of her mouth. Yes, she bit herself, I think and fight back the tears. Rufina is a rag doll, a wreck. Her arms are covered in dirt; her mouth, a frown; her chest moves up and down like a bird whipping itself against the walls of a cage, trying to be free. Her breasts have become bellows, gales rising inside her. I can almost see them, poor thing, how it must hurt her. Her breathing is so hard it hurts her. Her hands, marionettes with broken strings, hurt her. Her dislocated legs hurt her. I see her during her most embarrassing moment. She’ll never know that I saw her.
All of a sudden, the woman who was giving orders said she had to go, “I’ll call the Red Cross from home; the epileptic is coming to. It’s all over.”
And little by little, as quickly as the Paseo de la Reforma was crowded with curiosity seekers drawn to Rufina’s horrible stunt, it began to empty. The show is over. Women pick up their shopping bags, grab their unwilling children. Men go back to their business. Some people go to the bus stop, others go back to where they came from: their store, their refreshment stand, their job as a street sweeper, ice cream man, lottery ticket salesman.
I can’t bear to look at Rufina. I chew my nails and wait for her to get up. I go to the tree and I hug it. The bark of the cypress cuts into my arms, my armpits, my chest. It wounds me. But strangely, I too want something to wound me. For a second, I have a sharp feeling of emptiness, but it’s just a lightning strike that the horns of the cars driving by silence. I look back at the bench. Something moves. From here I can see she’s sitting up, fastening her paisley sweater.
The evening sun warms her, I think. I pray a little sun enters her mouth to dry her pasty saliva, absorb the blood, and heal the wound. A little sun will calm her heavy breathing, the hoarseness that came from deep inside. I hope it burns her legs so she’ll notice and lower her dress.
“It’s a disease sent by the devil.”
I cry quietly, hoping she doesn’t see me, that she doesn’t hear me. I can’t help it. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the devil. Several buses go by. People get on, get off. People have obligations, Rufina told me, lots of obligations. The traffic light turns red countless times. The buses start up, they leave. I hear shrieking engines roaring away, tires abruptly braking. I don’t have a single fingernail left to chew. I’ve chewed them all down to the quick. The sky has grown dark and I’m cold.
I see Rufina arrange her dress, fasten her stockings. I don’t approach her. She uses the sleeve of her sweater to clean her mouth. I’m sure she straightened the grimace of her face. She struggles to stand up. She wipes off her dress, fixes her braid halfway and, like a broken piñata, turns her aching head. She looks in my direction. She hasn’t forgotten me. Or is she looking for someone else? I walk toward her.She doesn’t look at me. All she says is, “Let’s go, child.”
On our way home, I don’t look up. She’s still struggling with her dress, throwing her braids back. I like it when she wears them forward. On Milan Street, she leans down in my direction and I smell the sour corn on her breath.
“You’re not going to say anything to your mother, Fernanda child.”
“No, Rufina.”
We get drunk together, each of us alone, you with me, then me with you. You pour wine between my breasts, on my stomach, and you taste it. Then you spill it on my tongue with your mouth. We have all the time in the world, our time to love. The only thing that gets heavy between us is this sober bed, slow, made of polished wood, intractable on the floor. The broom, that is if anyone sweeps here, must move around its elephant-like legs. The bed is what grounds us. If not for it, we’d move through space. After all, love is made in a bed, right? We’ve spent hours and hours kissing, crying, then kissing again. Our love is a hidden treasure. We dig it up, snorkel it, make it wait. We kissed so much in the beginning that we don’t know what else to do, except kiss. There’s always something new on our lips, on my palate, on your spit, on your tongue beneath mine, on your tongue above mine, rummaging between my gums. My forehead is feverish and you run your tongue along it. You put your fingers on my eyes and press. Then you kiss them. We close our eyes. I see stars. I don’t ever want to forget the room that we’ll leave behind.
“You’re so young!” you tell me, “nothing about you has gone harsh.”
Immediately, I rebel. Who are you comparing me with? Who are the other women? Why are you thinking about someone else’s body gone harsh during our time alone?
“What marvelous skin. How sweet, you’re a tender little animal!” you repeat.
I seek your caresses like a puppy. I put myself under your hands. I delve, entangling myself between your legs. If you were standing up, you’d trip; I might make you fall. How funny. I hide my laughter cuddling in your arms. I’m portable. I curl like a cat. Your body is my siege. Embrace me. I fit in the length of your body multiple times, five, maybe seven. It’s good to be small, isn’t it? We intertwine our fingers. I hang from you. “I’m going to discover everything in you,” you say. “You’re a woman to be discovered.”
It frightens me. I’ve been your woman since always, day and night. I’m your everyday woman, of bread and figs, the circle that we both travel. I’m what you already know. What do you want to discover?
Jorge and Fernanda are a happy couple, their friends say. They complete each other. They have the same tastes. They rise in concert. Sometimes, when they’re together, they look like sleepwalkers. She presses against him; he kisses her and puts his hand on her breast, squeezing it in front of everyone. Sometimes they’re shameless.
On Friday or Saturday night, when they invite people over for dinner or to listen to music, he claws her with the same hands he uses to prepare succulent dishes, except the salad, of course, because she makes delicious salads. Their house is like them, warm, inviting. Their guests sit on the floor and open books about byzantine art, about Acatlán pottery, about Celeste, the woman who took care of Proust. A warm fire burns in the fireplace.
“We wanted a fireplace because the best love is made in front of a fire. My wife is an ember,” he says.
“This is a house on fire”, a naïve guest says, “and when we go home, Jaime always makes love to me. That’s why I like coming here.”
Apart from the fireplace, the best thing about their house is the ahuehuete. No other house in Mexico City has an ahuehuete like this. The rest of Montezuma’s massive cypresses are in Chapultepec Forest. Jorge and Fernanda found a house with such tree in Colonia Del Valle. Fernanda is the one who found it. The house would have been dreadful without the cypress.
Jorge was against buying it, “It’s ugly, humid.”
“Just wait and see how I fix it up, my love. You’ll see. You won’t be able to live anywhere else.”
So Fernanda covered the house with bougainvillea, plumbago, and honeysuckle. And when they bloomed, the entwined flowers masked the ugliness from the walls. Only two windows remained like two eyes in a Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting, but with flowers instead of vegetables.
Little by little, inside that house in Colonia Del Valle, Fernanda arranged sofas, bookcases, books, records and rugs from Teomaya, her only luxury apart from the sound system. The broom, the mop, the sink, and the cleaning brush belonged to her. She enjoyed them as much as putting handfuls of wallflowers and snapdragons in vases, or gigantic agapanthus and delphiniums, depending on the season. She also grew accustomed to talking to the ahuehuete. Even though she didn’t reach around the circumference of the trunk, she’d hug it gathering the pieces of bark that were about to fall off the tree like dead cells from a human body. Sitting under its canopy to read and looking at the sky between the branches became a daily ritual.
“Perhaps two lovers embraced here before us,” she would explain to their guests. “Perhaps a little girl dressed her doll beneath this shade. Perhaps, hidden by the foliage, a woman dried her tears leaning against this trunk. Perhaps this is the tree where Cortez cried The Night of Sorrows, as he fled Tenochtitlan.”
Fernanda’s love for the cypress infected Jorge in such way that every time he left for the university and came home he would greet it, “Good morning, tree, I’m leaving now.” “Sleep tight, tree.” Between him and his wife, the two were able to reach around the tree in a circle of love; their arms stretched out, encompassing its waist. They didn’t etch in its bark the delight of their kisses, or their initials, because Fernanda said that to do so would be cruel.
Jorge and Fernanda built a blazing happiness between them, nurturing their unbounded love. They sat at the table, threw themselves on the plates, making the forks and spoons shake. Once objects made contact with their love, they began to release themselves from the prison of their own skin, covering themselves in bittersweet fragrances. Ultimately, Jorge’s supremacy was more evident than even that of the delphiniums.
At dinnertime, it’s not uncommon for Jorge, master and gentleman, to crawl the length of the table with his body, “Kiss me,” he demands.
“My lord, master and gentleman, king of the universe,” she responds.
And time stands still while everyone stops eating and watches. Glasses, tablecloth, filets, salad bowl, breadbasket, they generate steam like the vapor that comes out of the mouth of ovens.
“Those napkins are fans. Do you hear me, Fernanda?” The naïve girl notes with a slight pout, “Your things give off shocks.”
And Jorge surprises the husbands saying things like, “There was a full moon last night. Did you open the windows so your wives could bathe in its light?”
The wives become ecstatic, “You’re so lucky, Fernanda. You won the lottery with your husband!”
Jorge is the affectionate one, flesh of Fernanda’s flesh, her bleeding flesh, rare on the table and never medium. He is the chef, the cordon bleu; she is his helper, the one who chops, slices, and boils. He gives everything his magic touch; she, in the meantime, races to open the door.
“Don’t you recognize me, Miss?”
“Not really.”
“You don’t know who I am?”
A defeated woman looked at Fernanda, salt and pepper hair, bent shoulders, her expression bitter, her abdomen wrinkled, her breasts fallen beneath her apron. At her side, however, a girl with brilliant braids contrasted her neglected mother. She was a fawn.
“Honestly, Fernanda child, you don’t remember me?”
The word “child” sounded familiar but painful. “I’m sorry…”
“Child, it’s Rufina…”
A mass struggling on the ground with her dress pushed up assaulted Fernanda’s memory. It was a memory that she had buried because of its ugliness, its sadness.
The woman insisted, “Rufina, I took care of you when you were a child.”
Who had taken care of whom?
“I’m at my wit’s end, child. So I thought about you. Only you who were so kind would accept me and my girl. We wouldn’t be any trouble. I’ll do your housework; she studies dressmaking in the evenings.”
Before anyone knew what was happening they were inside. Jorge said it was okay, that it didn’t matter. The deer-like child moved him; the restless way she stretched her head on her long neck.
“You’ll have time to do things you want to do,” Jorge told Fernanda.
It didn’t work out that way. To cook, Rufina used all the dishes they had. After every meal, plates and silverware lay in the sink next to the cookware for hours while Rufina went to her room to rest and the fawn escaped to dressmaking school. Why did she have to pick that time to rest? Fernanda didn’t dare ask. Everything that had once been easy for her, was all of a sudden complicated. The detergent ran out. The blender broke. The gas, light, telephone, water and trash, all increased. Fernanda ran into Rufina everywhere and at all hours. “I need another frying pan.” “I need a deeper casserole dish.” Rufina needed another broom. Fernanda felt the woman’s breath on the back of her neck, in her ear. The acrid smoke of her presence penetrated even the smallest space. Book pages smelled of Rufina. In the street, a dog threatened her with its barking and Fernanda thought immediately: Rufina. Every day it became more of a pain to go downstairs to the kitchen and tell her very own Frankenstein to please not save used oil in a greasy jar.
“It’s for us, child,” Rufina responded with resentment, building a wall as straight as her teeth.
One evening Fernanda found herself walking in circles in her bedroom, repeating to herself, “It’s not possible. It can’t be.” She couldn’t even gather enough strength to go down to the library to avoid hearing the tedious drum roll of Rufina’s omnipresence, old and mechanical, mysteriously invading every nook and cranny of the house.
“I’m going to tell her to leave.”
Jorge interrupted her. “What will happen to the girl? It’s not that big of a deal. You’ll get used to it.”
Finally, one night, Fernanda insisted that Rufina’s presence had defiled the house. “She’s stronger than me. Rufina has inserted herself into my life like a poison nail in my head, in my arms, in my heart, in my hands. I can’t stand her anymore. When I look at her, I’m paralyzed with fear. I can’t eat anymore. She makes me vomit.”
To her surprise, Jorge didn’t empathize with her; he didn’t take her in his arms. “I support you, honey, do whatever you think best.” His response displayed a foreign and cordial indifference, “You’re nervous. You wouldn’t think this way if you weren’t tired.”
“Tired from what? You yourself said that Rufina came to lighten my housework. What I’m tired of is her. I hate her.”
“Why don’t you go away for a few days? To Cuautla or Ixtapan de la Sal? I hear they have an incredible spa and that the women who go there come back totally refreshed. It’s expensive, but I’ll pay for it. In fact, I’d go with you but I can’t leave the university during final exams.”
Fernanda left for Ixtapan completely overwhelmed with anguish. It did her good to get away, however, to see the countryside from the bus, breath a different air, get in the sulfurous water, the mud baths, to feel the impersonal hands of the masseuses that wrapped her body in large white towels when they were done. “Missus is very well preserved, with such a flat abdomen!”
Preserved? She hadn’t entered the age of preservation yet. Preserved like what, a peach in syrup? What is there to preserve?
At dinnertime, when the fat-free meal was served, as the grand windows of the hotel revealed the countryside beyond them, Fernanda wondered, “Are these glass walls my Mason jars? Are they preserving me like fruit?”
And suddenly she knew with certainty that the one who needed preserving was Jorge. At that sudden realization, she returned earlier than planned.
“I felt so much better that here I am,” she would say upon entering. Then, they would make love all night.
I opened the door with my key. It was Jorge’s day off. Today, Thursday, he didn’t go to university. “You were right when you said it wasn’t that big of a deal, Jorge,” she would say. “My support, Jorge, my god, Jorge, my reason for living, that which I want most in the world, there, in the solitude of Ixtapan, I forgot Rufina. I reduced her to her proper proportion, Jorge.”
I entered my sexy house joyful, my safe flowering house, my home with a fireplace like the ones children draw. I looked for my beloved in the library, in the living room, in the bedroom. He hadn’t left; his car was there. I didn’t want to call him because I didn’t want Rufina to come out. I walked through the house and when I opened the door to the guestroom, I recoiled, fatally wounded. For a moment I thought, it’s not true. I didn’t see anything. I wanted to rewind the movie, run, go out into the street, let a car run over me. But instead I opened the door again. Jorge and the fawn, naked on the bed, lifted their heads in unison, speechless. Their slanted eyes turned back at me were the eyes of an animal unfairly wounded. I caught them. I had them in my snout. I could sink my fangs into them, cut their heads into pieces. Still, it surprised me to see them so similar, “You are both the same!” I said. They began to shake. The fawn hid her face against Jorge’s hairy chest. Then I heard Rufina’s gruff voice behind me, yelling at her daughter: “Cover yourself up. Put your dress on. Cover yourself up!”
I was slapped by the memory of the emptiness from years before, when I saw Rufina humiliated on the Paseo de la Reforma. As I stood at the door, the balled-up dress Rufina threw at her daughter flew over my shoulder. And just like that, the girl slid it on over her head of loose braids, her shoulders liquid and shaking. As I stared at her petrified, the dress got caught on the tip of her black nipples, so Rufina ordered again, “Go on, señor, help her! Pull her dress down!
I’m recalling all of this now sitting on the same bench on the Paseo de la Reforma and time has started to spin again. I’ve been coming here from the old-age home on Berlin Street for years because it’s close enough for me to walk. I don’t live for myself any more. I’m like a puppet that does, says, and obeys without knowing who she is. I look closely at the girls in miniskirts that show their thighs and panties as they sit down, that is if they’re wearing panties. I see them and dismiss them in advance. They’ll never find themselves in the difficult situation I found myself in, having to pull down the dress of the two women who destroyed my life. Because when Jorge didn’t pull down the dress over the fawn’s breasts, I was the one who stepped up. I pulled her from the bed, screamed, and, who knows how, put child and mother out on the street. Jorge didn’t even move. I picked up the same suitcase that I brought back from Ixtapan de la Sal and put my key on the kitchen table. I took a knife, closed the door, and went outside. At the last minute, I threw my suitcase and ran to the garden to tell the cypress to please forget what it had seen, that it was our last moment, that we wouldn’t see each other again because if I had stayed, I would have plunged into Jorge’s naked back the knife that I was now thrusting, over and over, into the tree. After all it was a tree, a tree, I told it, “You’re a tree,” while I covered it with wide, bloody gashes. “Tree, tree, tree,” over and over, steel inside, “Tree!” until I raised my eyes and saw the ahuehuete’s tall branches, up there in the sky, looking at me with infinite dismay.