The Child Poet

My mother’s footsteps in the corridor. A door opening or closing. Rain on the roof.

My thoughts drifted towards my father in his store. I imagined him entering the room, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and remaining by my side.

But he didn’t. And all of a sudden I would find myself calling out “¡Papá! ¡Papá!” knowing well that as soon as he heard me he’d drop everything and come at once.

And he did. He would sit down by my side and I would watch him, in his fabulous existence, until I fell asleep again.

In darkness I would awaken, not knowing on which side of the bed I was lying. And, feeling the emptiness before me, I would grope around, in search of another comfortable position.

Finding the pillow meant finding the place where my head should have been. But just when I thought I had, I found myself touching the other end of the bed.

I felt battered, full of shadows and confusion, unable to wake up altogether, unable to fall back asleep.

Until the window loomed into view, scarcely lighter than the dark walls. And I would slowly pronounce my own name, as if reassuring myself, adrift in the vast expanse of my bed, that I was still the same person.

I would remember, in the distant, distant past, the moment when my father left the room and I wasn’t able to stop him, filled with a sleepiness more powerful than my desire to bid him to stay. And, clutching the pillow so as not to lose myself, I would finally drift off, in the knowledge that when I woke I would see my father once again.

Awake the next morning, I’d postpone the actual moment of rising from bed. Out in the corridor the goldfinches chirped in their cages and the curtains and walls held a drowsy clarity.

As if inside a luminous sphere, I traveled within the day that brightened my room and, all eyes, would observe from bed the things that surrounded me, feeling an arousal of these things in myself.

In that clarity I could hear my mother’s footsteps, the maids’ voices, the flight of insects … And all of a sudden the house would fall silent, as if everyone had left, except the light.

I did not want to speak. An immense shyness hid the words from me. Moreover, I would think and rethink a sentence so many times that the moment for saying it passed, or it lost its meaning after so much repetition.

I felt fine within myself, and to explain or discuss anything implied a certain decanting of that self and was as tiring as taking a lengthy walk without water. I didn’t need to convince or be admired. I was happy as I was, keeping quiet, watching the sun illuminate the grainy, whitewashed walls and the frayed broom in the backyard.

It was difficult to emerge from myself. To express one wish entailed a long journey, as did the exposition of an idea or having to supply answers to questions put to me. Shyness made me twist inside like a rope, until I reached such extremes of pain that it was impossible to give it one more turn. My face burned scarlet, my features were overpowered by the heat, the ground gave way, my eyes betrayed my helplessness. I did not know where to turn and, ablaze with shame, took refuge in my own interiority like an armadillo in its carapace.

I’d remain within myself, inert, as if walled in, until my mother would say, “Come on, let’s go.”

And if there were others around, I followed her, anxious to disappear, like an actor who has made an entrance on the wrong stage and the audience, noting his bewilderment, discovers his mistake because he panics, and in his haste makes his exit all the more difficult and is unable to find the right door.

Thus was I bewildered by anyone who sensed my shyness, while I hid behind my mother, trying to not be seen, not be there.

From the moment we’d arrive at the home of one of her friends, and the woman or her daughters took notice of me, my main concern was to discourage everyone from addressing me in any way, for my mother was the best person to provide information about my tastes and reply to questions; even those which referred to my age, name, mood, and so forth, were best answered by her. I tried to prevent their curiosity from catching me off guard by feigning interest in a girl’s face or a dog in the room, which would lead inevitably to, “Do you want to play with Anna?” or, “Do you like the dog?”

I was surrounded by a magic circle, which no one should enter. This circle protected my intimacy, with its baggage of thoughts, fears, and desires. What I felt mattered only to me. To reveal my thoughts would mean revealing myself, to exhibit my desires meant exhibiting myself. And if I asked for something and it was denied me, my entire self felt rejected, for I had disclosed one of my soul’s necessities and placed it at someone else’s mercy. For this reason I did things on my own. And if someone went off because I didn’t show my interest, I would let that person go: their being remained within my being, in my thoughts.

I liked going for walks alone and being alone, traveling through the day as through a reality as wondrous as the imagination, where the mountain was beautiful at every instant, shaped like a bird flying over its nest, and where the people I saw transmitted something divine through their very existence.

But when someone spoke to me, I soon felt overwhelmed and listened without listening, tired of having to think about each sentence said; with one word I would run off, or remain there absently, isolated by the curtain of my thoughts.

But when I couldn’t find the words to slip away, or a view to distract me, then, unmoving and subdued, I would summon up my forces to hide my boredom or my secret desire to slap that person in the face and depart.

And if, when with friends, I grew excited by the sight of some sunflowers or an ash tree, or if I discovered the shadow of a cloud cast onto the mountain, or if, gazing at a chestnut tree, I saw a drop of water on a slanted leaf sliding from center to edge, slowly descending as if on a slope, I would realize, thanks to the near deafness with which they listened to me, that I was moved by things that did not interest them, and that my words to them made a pointless journey, as pointless as an elevator in which someone has pressed all the buttons so that it stops at every floor and opens its doors without anyone ever getting on or off.

Whenever my parents left on a trip I’d do nothing but wait for their return. In vain I told myself they would be back in a few days, I felt their absence in my very being, in the house and in the village, and in my brother’s face, as if they were never going to come home. Every act of mine was carried out without them. Every thought missed them. I played knowing they weren’t around. I wandered the streets with a sense of all that was lacking. And if I went with my friends to the orchards to pick fruit or throw stones at lizards, from the hill, amidst the trees, I would hear the midday train and the afternoon train, telling me that today was Wednesday and that my parents would not return until Saturday, that there were still Thursday and Friday to get through.

Like a sleeper who suddenly feels the void surrounding him and instinctively throws himself towards the edge of the bed to hold on and not fall out, I trusted in the movement that from darkness and solitude made its way towards my father, for he circumscribed my body like the black line that outlines a colored-in figure in a drawing, and nothing could happen to me while I was magically surrounded by him. Due to this attachment, I despaired each time he went away and believed I’d never see him again.

The night was full of noises. I could hear the silence of the corridors, the moisture on the walls, the roof’s decrepitude, women’s moans traveling through the air, foxes springing from the rooftops onto the plants below, yelping, and the barking of dogs, which would start far off, then be taken up by dogs nearer by. The darkness weighed down on me as if it were physical. I had to thrust aside the shadows to move. And if I felt oppressed and wanted to turn on the light, I had to push away the night as though heaving a great stone.

I’d pluck leaves from the trees or collect them from the ground; some were still swollen with rain, others perforated by insects; some were like green stars in a puddle and others had withered, their edges ochre like wounds. Somehow, these leaves let me bring the entire tree indoors, as their forms stood for the tree and one leaf was enough to recall it, and all of a sudden a miniature oak was there in the palm of my hand.

Some were the greenish-red of an apple, others the color of lemon. From the branches they would stretch out their rhythmic hands towards me, their weight pushed forwards by the air. During my walks I would visit a certain linden tree, observing it from afar and then from up close; it was my linden, the tree that resembled me in form, in character, in desire.

There were days when, to no matter what, I would answer no. My being would seal up and an indescribable weariness burdened my movements. Walking tired me. Spending time with friends. Hearing them. Seeing them. Eating. Following my parents’ orders. Going. Coming. I would remain in my room, lying in bed, watching the sun come in through the open door or, when a cloud covered it, the wall cast in shadow. I looked at the furniture, knots in the wood, splinters. Out in the corridor I could hear my mother talking to a woman who’d come to see her, or my father passing by.

At night, lights out, I could feel my soul possessed of a flexibility that could either fill space with its expansiveness or else concentrate itself into one small point; able, like some kind of spiritual entity, to go wherever it pleased or visit the person of whom it was thinking, without moving, without making a sound, simply out of desire.

Sometimes, drawn by my parents’ laughter, I would go to them with open arms, but an unexpected ill humor would greet me, and instead of a kind word an order to leave at once would be issued in a harsh voice … And I’d withdraw without understanding why this wrath was concealed within their apparent joy, as confused as someone who attends a celebration in a country whose language he barely understands, and thinks he hears the revelers using words that in reality they’re not using, and sees in their faces a contentment which is not really there, and when he thinks that the spectacle has ended, he goes up to congratulate one of the most enthusiastic-looking participants, only to discover that that beaming face isn’t laughing but is, instead, irate, and, banished with a shout and a shove, he realizes that what he thought was a party was in reality a brawl.

Alone in my room, I would put off turning on the light to follow on the wall the final moments of the day, which for me were like the first rays of night’s dawn.

I followed the falling of dusk on the floor, like the dampness on cardboard that has gotten wet and darkens as it grows wetter. The sun reverberated in some of the windowpanes, lending the air an orange tonality while gilding the roof of a house, and cast the shadow of a pigeon onto a wall.

Within the room, countless eyes were closing and the light’s brightness was becoming more ethereal, depending on the view from the window. White objects were clothed in a darkness that seemed to emanate from within, as they shrank in size like melting ice.

A visual silence dominated the horizon and, in the room, a geometric quietude. The falling dusk welded distances, blended differences, blurred the borders of objects, joined heaven and earth. Remoteness was abolished through the act of erasure.

Ill in bed, I listened to voices on the street, trying to recognize among them the voice of a friend, but in the din the shouts became indistinct and I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child calling or speaking. They all seemed to come from the same place, questioning and answering among themselves, although perhaps the voices were in reality far from one another and did not seek each other out, and it was only due to the silence of my room that my ears united them and gave them a conversation in space; on the wall, meanwhile, the light darkened or brightened depending on the movement of the clouds outside, veiling and unveiling the sun.

And so I would remain, hearing and watching the hours pass by in all their heaviness and penumbra, feeling a loneliness not just in time but in space, and a certain inexistence … Until I’d finally rise from bed, weary of showing misfortune on my face and, crossing the corridor, I would go outside, in defiance of my despondency and unease.

There were days when the day itself was one incessant and varying prohibition, imparted in my mother’s voice that followed me everywhere, like someone maintaining control from afar with the help of a magic leash: “Don’t drink that water.” “Don’t eat from that plate.” “Don’t throw away that peel.” “Don’t cut those flowers.” “Don’t go outside.”

At the market with her, seeing fruits proffer their flavors to the eye – as if through their shapes and hues they could express their singularity in the universe – sensing the fleshy pulp beneath the texture of their peels and, having decided on a plum, my eyes would then wander towards a peach, or discover a tangerine, slipping from one fruit to the next as if on a scale of colors and flavors that attracted me through sight, smell, and touch at the same time, not knowing to which of the three impulses to surrender; no matter which fruit I ultimately chose, it would embody all fruits at once.

Like a child who goes about in the company of old folks, quickening his step at every moment, displaying his impatience through his hurried gait, I would go for walks with my grandmother: imagining monkeys suspended from branches by their tails and parrots that climb around hanging by their beaks, watching sparrows hopping along, pecking at crumbs or digging in the dust for insects.

We would pass beneath the shadow of a great oak, cross a dusty bridge that looked as if it had been abandoned no sooner than it was built. Our dog chased pigeons, who took flight as soon as they felt his breath. A mockingbird perched on a branch conveyed, through his very being, an entire region, climate, and time.

Before long my grandmother would grow tired and we’d sit down on a rock that commanded a view of the village. Immersing herself in its landscape, she would say, “Those houses didn’t used to be there; the highway used to run elsewhere; there didn’t used to be a train; there were only bandits and a few families; I can scarcely remember – I must have been eight or so – your father hadn’t yet arrived at our village; your mother still hadn’t been born; it was the year eighteen hundred and something; before the Revolution, before you were born; that bridge you see down there, those stores didn’t used to be there …”

As her voice dropped it confined her within herself, until the memories carried her so far back that she became inaudible.

To me she looked wrinkled, old, dried up, leaning on her cane, entangled in a thicket of faces and events from which she could not extricate herself. Then abruptly she would stop talking and rise from her spot, and we’d resume our walk while her lips continued to move as if telling herself something, or she’d start adding up a sum in which all the numbers got jumbled; growing paler and dustier, her legs more bent than before as if at any moment she might sit down on the air, but no, she didn’t sit down, she was only very slow.

I’d kick along a stone with my foot, listening to it bounce off the cobbles. But just when my feet found a pace, we’d stop again for another rest, and looking as if each wrinkle stood for a different memory, my grandmother seemed to bid me have patience.

All of a sudden I would catch her watching me, with thoughtful eyes that tried to take me in before aligning me with the image in the photo she held in her hand; but, hesitating, the sparkle in her gaze flitted elsewhere … before quickly returning to fix on my face, finding in my features the ancestral traces of my aunt Hermione in the photo.

I could feel her, my aunt Hermione, and my mother and father and my paternal grandparents, all harmonized within my very being; and I thought about her own parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and of the endless line of the dead that lay behind her and me, and I accepted them all in my face and body, in my thoughts and words, without resistance and with love.

Then she stood up, trembling on her cane as if about to lose her balance, and walking as fast as her legs allowed sought the shadows cast by trees and the shady side of the street.

On Sundays the campesinos would descend into the village with their wives and children, with wheat and corn to sell. Wild cherries and prickly pears, sapodillas and peaches, were paraded through the streets in baskets and boxes. Sitting amidst the hats in my father’s store, I would observe the people who came in to buy clothes.

During the rainy season clouds often appeared out of nowhere and rapidly darkened the sky and a sudden downpour would drive the crowd from the street into our store. Lightning bolts blanched the day, thunder drummed on the mountain. In hurried threads the rain dispersed a delicious-smelling fog. Then, a few minutes later, the sun came out again, the village floating on the fragrances of earth and wet plants.

Some of the campesinos who’d congregated in our store bore the essence of the region in their faces; gathered there, watching the rain fall, they seemed possessed by a pluvial individuality that lent them an intimate weightlessness, as they observed the sacred falling of water with millenary resignation.

Among them were girls whose complexions looked scraped from the earth, watching furtively as if they were their own shadows.

My mother believed our house was full of treasures, buried by the bootleggers who once lived there or by their predecessors, who inhabited it during the Revolution. The house was altered when my father remodeled it; what was once the kitchen was now a corridor, and there was a bedroom where parapets had stood in case the house came under attack. After weighing rumors against her own fantasies, my mother would undertake the excavation of a room or the corridor, sending a workman down several meters below ground.

Souls in torment would appear to the maids and disclose the location of the treasure, or else snatch them from bed in the middle of the night and drag them along the ground before depositing them at the exact site. Treasure seekers arrived from Mexico City with their instruments for detecting hidden objects, and for several days many large holes were dug in all the rooms.

Only once did my mother own a house with a treasure, but that treasure was discovered by others. My father had rented this house to three poor, spinsterly sisters; each night, the eldest, the ugliest and skinniest of the three, was pulled out of bed by the hair and pinned to a dead sapodilla tree. This gave them the idea – the only one they ever had in their lives – of digging up the ground around the sapodilla, and there they found three coffins brimming with coins, which my mother later assumed were of gold. But since the house belonged to us, the three sisters left the village at the crack of dawn with two donkeys loaded down with sacks, heading for an unknown destination … My father discovered the excavation from the holes in the ground where the coffins had been, and realized there’d been coffins from the bits of old wood mingled with the earth heaped next to the tree. My mother continued to buy houses, which she would then demolish, digging beneath walls and tearing up foundations, but all her hunches came to naught.

There were days when the table was being eaten away by woodworm, our clothes by moths, our bread by mold.

Plates were chipped, the door unhinged, the chicken plucked and quartered.

A neckless bottle and a broken chair would appear in the poultry yard, and the fins of a recently eaten fish emerged from the garbage can like a sign.

The entire house was like a window without panes, and man in time, like sugar dissolving in water.

The days extracted shadows, scraps, and splinters from things, exposing their hollows and their chaff; they wrinkled faces and devoured animals.

Bloodied butchers would walk past the store leading cows to the slaughterhouse, where in one blow they’d be killed.

Drawn by the blood and warm flesh, dogs ran after them barking.

The bellowing of cows filled the streets as they refused to move along.

But after a while, all that remained where they’d been was the quiet of the afternoon.

The next day the executioners would pass by again, this time in the direction of the butcher shops, accompanied by assistants carrying large slabs of meat on their backs and donkeys laden with chines and legs.

Whenever my father brought me to Mexico City I was afraid of getting lost. The crowds seemed to press forward to trample me, and the whirlpool of people created a confusion into which I strayed.

Worst of all, there might be a very wicked person who would kidnap me and keep me from ever seeing my parents again, forcing me to beg on the streets.

That’s why my father carried me on his shoulders, from the warehouse to the toy store, from the hotel to the movie theater.

Within me there existed another, a boy who would enjoy getting lost, who yearned to live in a dark place with no outdoors or suffering, who was drawn to the crowd, desiring to lose himself among the faces and feet, in order to no longer be me.

But I loved my father, and nothing would’ve consoled me had I stopped seeing him; and so it was he carried me on his shoulders.

Upon hearing the sound of my cousin roller-skating down the corridor, I’d run to see her.

She skated clumsily, opening and closing her legs too much and in danger of falling each time she picked up speed; and in an effort to keep her balance she’d stop short, or one foot would go in the wrong direction. Yet the movement of her hands, which she raised as if fending off a danger from above, and her closed eyes as if to avoid witnessing the disastrous end of her sprint – she seemed always on the verge of something happening to her, though nothing ever would – revealed an inner rhythm expressed in movements and gestures in which I divined a certain placidity that calmed me, just by watching her. It was a placidity undercut only by a fine line of impudence in blossom, which lay upon her lips like a crooked grin, betraying on her face a habit of spending too much time in the bathroom touching herself in private.

It was hard to escape when my brother chased me. He could run twice as fast as I could, and hit harder as well.

In the house, down the corridor, through the garden, from room to room, he ran after me and I could never find a place to hide.

I would search for my father (who wasn’t there), and my mother (who had gone out), and the maid (who never defended me), until I’d find myself pinned against the wall, forced to confront him, and the tussle would make me cry.

Eventually my father would arrive (always after my brother had hit me) and scold us both, and I never understood how I was guilty, since all I had done was receive the blows. But I was guilty, he said, of provoking them, or of putting myself in the way of being hit.

On the first Sunday of October the mummers would appear in the streets, begging for money at shops and houses; masked and dressed as women, they danced in worn sandals around the villagers and made grotesque movements with their bodies. Even before they reached our house we heard their drumming, their laughter, their flutes. They circled around my father, who’d give them coins and cigarettes, and made fun of me, waving their hands around their masks, which I believed were the actual faces of pigs, hags, and devils.

Children ran away at the sight of the mummers stomping their feet and groaning. My father would reassure me, pointing out that those hideous crones were really men in disguise.

The town fair would take place a few days later. The merry-go-round, the hoopla, the Caterpillar. Men set up games, heavily made-up women arrived. People played cards and threw dice. Outside the tents, the eagle woman and the snake woman were advertised.

Love songs drifted out of speakers everywhere, and at night a firework bull, carried on a mummer’s back, would be set alight, launching blue balls into the air, until the bull, in a burst of pure light, burned away entirely, leaving a gunpowdery-smelling frame on the mummer’s back.

I detested my cousin who visited us from Morelia and danced La Bamba. From the very first night, his father would make him dance in the corridor.

But I’d never play with him. He went around with my friends during his stay in Contepec. What’s more, he had a reputation as a crybaby, after once getting into a fight and having his nose punched, which resulted in blood and tears. He was always with his father, or with my cousin, my aunt from El Oro’s daughter, whose too-short dress showed off her growing thighs; my brother used to seat her on his lap and stroke her breasts.

I had a great urge to set off firecrackers in my cousin’s ears. But my parents laughed each time he danced, and the adults claimed he was very intelligent.

I preferred my female cousin, who would share the bedroom with my brother, my cousin, and me, and though I felt jealous at night when she and my brother kissed when I wanted to kiss her myself, I went to sleep without being able to prevent it.

With her we climbed to the school to view the village from above. Or when my brother wasn’t around we played married couples in the garden, because when he was home he would take her to his room to play alone. And if my male cousin ever tried to interfere, my brother punched him in the stomach and made him cry.

Like one who dreams the air around him has turned to stone and wakes up to find that it’s only his hard pillow, sometimes the oppressive darkness would produce a feeling of death in my body, which would then vanish with the magical act of turning on the light.

Perhaps because of this fear of dying I never liked nights that were too dark, nor did I like it when my room was too white, for the painted door reminded me of the coffins in which children were buried.

The funeral processions passed by our house, and all of a sudden in the morning the bells would start tolling and a devastating cry, an exaggerated shriek, would cross the sunlit streets making the silence resound, as when a pistol is shot into the clearest blue sky. Shortly afterwards a woman in black would appear on the corner, weeping. Behind her several men carried the coffin, dressed as if they’d been asked to help on the spur of the moment while working in the fields. And alongside them other women, peasants as well, accompanied the grieving woman in clothing, gait, and lamentations.

In the rear, lagging behind as though headed elsewhere, to judge from the distance between them and the procession, came the children, whose expressions suggested they were more interested in playing than in this march, bearing their imposed mourning like people who have recently been wounded in the face and whose features have yet to adjust to the scar, presenting two expressions at once.

The poverty of their clothes and the archaic quality of their features lent these campesinos an aura of solitude and abandon, as if they were participating in a rite taking place in some remote setting and were only present in time through their suffering.