My dad is always saying that he’s ready to die, that he’s more than achieved all his goals, even though he hasn’t brought about a revolution, though my mother’s left him and he’s lived with blindness for many years. He claims that his only regret is not having grandchildren. But you can’t regret that, I tell him, because it’s my decision, not yours, but he thinks that’s a technicality and brushes it aside with a wave of the hand and a melancholy half smile. It’s not important, he says; other than that, I’ve had a splendid life.

That kind of suicidal vitality, coming from someone who, despite being pretty healthy, proclaims himself ready to go while simultaneously gloating over his passage through the world, is one of the many traits of my father’s personality that I’ve never completely figured out. From an objective viewpoint, his life seems rather sad: a not particularly brilliant career as a historian of the conquest and the early colonial period in Morelos State, a marriage that ended in unfaithfulness, and a son—me—who’s never shown the faintest sign of leaving home and whose only ambitions are to earn enough to buy marijuana, feed the local stray cats, and order pizza on Tuesdays to take advantage of the 2-for-1 offer.

But I both admire and am bewildered by my father’s unjustified, self-destructive happiness; it’s an optical illusion whose hidden mechanism makes me want to believe, if only for an instant, in magic.

There’s a kind of justice in the fact that he has, over the years, succeeded in inspiring that form of incredulous admiration in me. For a long time he seemed the dullest of men, and that resigned joy of his, which today feels worthy of a mystic or a dervish, up until not so long ago was like a sign of tacky conformity that I wanted no part of.

Among my friends’ parents, Dad was always the oldest, and when we were small, other kids used to tease me that he looked more like a grandfather. Our parents’ lives before our birth exist in a kind of mythic time preceding the separation of land and water, like the lives of those original pre-Hispanic gods—often associated with amphibians—on whose death other deities were born to reign over worldly things.

In Dad’s case, the story of that long, convoluted prehistory claims that he was active in a small Maoist-inspired student group, doomed to failure, that hoped to bring about a revolution in three or four municipalities of Morelos during the seventies. They were a bunch of sixteenand seventeen-yearolds who borrowed their grandfathers’ shotguns to do target practice in the Chalchihuapan ravine; their hair was just a little long, their pants a little dirty, and their idea of justice included killing a few thousand people to atone for centuries of ignominy.

He doesn’t talk about it much, but from certain things my mother let slip when she was still living with us, I’ve managed to gather that two of his comrades were disappeared, another spent a few years in prison, while, on the other hand, nothing happened to Dad. When, as a teenager, I told Erre all this he came to the rather hasty conclusion that in order to get away scot-free, the old man must have been a government informer, but I suspect that in fact his innate cowardice kept him, by the grace of Marx, slightly on the margins of direct action and more on the side of convoluted revolutionary debate (a practice he still enjoys, now on the telephone, when he’s had a few too many drinks).

First the university and then blindness took the edge off his contentious nature, and it’s only when he’s arguing with me (usually over nothing at all) that I begin to fear muscle memory will come to his aid and he’ll beat me to a pulp or dust off an old revolver and point it at the area of shadow from which my screams are coming, brandishing his weapon with the same determination he once employed to defend Rosa Luxemburg while a wounded comrade in arms was bleeding to death at his feet in a garage in Xochitepec.

Fortunately, things have never gone that far. Once or twice, I had to seek asylum in Erre’s apartment in Mexico City until the old man cooled off, but that was all. Our reconciliations tend to include tequila, hugs, the odd tear, and a bunch of bilateral agreements: I’ll wash the dishes more often and he won’t demand that I drive him wherever he wants at the very moment he thinks of it (for example, to check if some botanera he used to frequent in the nineties is still there, as he did not long ago). Then our routine returns to its natural course: he retires to his office and I go to my bedroom, and although our tastes in music couldn’t be farther apart, we tolerate each other’s noise in the neutral spaces of the dining and living rooms, where we occasionally coincide, cordially ignoring each other, just as the chords of the Latin jazz he likes coexist with the raging guitar solos of my music.

Lately, since the wildfires started, we’ve been spending more time together. Our shared wonder at the fragility of the world leads us to make coffee after coffee, staring into space and musing that “it’s all gone to blazes,” an expression he taught me when I was small and that functions as a kind of parent-child mantra. The echo of my own pessimism in his fatalism offers a modicum of relief, just enough to see us through to the next cup of strong coffee.

The city my father lives in isn’t exactly Cuernavaca, it’s more like a palimpsest of personal and collective stories that occupy the space of Cuernavaca. As his blindness advanced and the outlines of things blurred until the things themselves vanished, a mirage rich in detail replaced cars and buildings with temples, patches of pre-Hispanic times, plus the cantinas of his youth, so that sometimes, as he’s sipping his coffee, Dad says things like: Don Hernán Cortés had his sugarcane mill nearby; right here in Tlaltenango. And then, as if speaking of a recent past he himself had experienced, he goes on to tell me about the extractive logging process Cortés set up in Santa María Ahuacatitlán, somewhere around 1500, to make the machinery for his mill. Then he pauses and it’s clear that the unstable time machine in his head has randomly switched again and, in the most natural manner imaginable, he adds: And in the eighties, a girlfriend of mine lived here, just behind us. We nicknamed her Floating Garden because she always had two or three crates of fruit in her Beetle, mostly chayote; heaven knows why.

In my view, the old man’s historian’s compulsion is not so much a professional defect as an evasive strategy: time stretches back to the past like a wall that extends up a humid, benevolent elevation with creeks and bottomless caves. In terms of the future, however, that wall passes through the flames. But that metaphor is in fact traitorous, an oversimplification my father rejects. For him, time isn’t that line dotted with events that we were made to draw in elementary school, but a monolithic, all-inclusive presence. And that’s why Hernán Cortés and Floating Garden greet each other as they cross Avenida Emiliano Zapata, a hundred and fifty meters from where my father, locked in his office and his blindness, laughs aloud as he learns to read Braille with the help of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”