ONLY A HANDFUL of the streets had names, and the letters that arrived bore the words “Domicilio Conocido” (known residence) rather than our address. Our house stood on the main square, the public garden directly in front. From any point in town you could see the steeple of the old church. But what truly provided the landscape to our village were the hills, green or blue depending on the distance from which they were glimpsed.

The taller hill would spread its wings, always on the verge of taking flight.

The streets were few and long.

I had the impression the real village began in the air, above the rooftops of the houses in the blue that emerged from the end of every street as if in a celestial finale, varying in tone depending on the hour.

Stores were closed on Wednesdays. If there were never many people in Contepec on weekdays, Wednesday the village was virtually uninhabited.

The day would pass with nostalgia and, dazed by its inertia, its interminable hours made me fear that Thursday, when the shops reopened, would never come again.

Nevertheless, in the afternoon after lunch my parents, my brother, and I would set out on a walk to one of our orchards. On the way my father and my brother talked about ways of improving the house and modifications to the orchard that would never get done, amusing themselves each Wednesday with the same conversation, as if it were a ritual of the walk itself to make plans and worry about the state of our properties.

We would pause by the edge of the dam, between the magueys and a ravine. From there we had a view of the horizon, with its solitary paths and dark pines, and, in the background, the hills. And there my brother would point to a spot and say, “That would be a good place to build a house.”

My father would look at him, as if he saw in his face the spot with the house already built.

Later they’d discuss the number of rooms the house would have, what color they would paint them, who would sleep where … And they’d get so lost in their digressions that they never noticed that they’d drifted from the topic. It’d surprise me, the way their faces quickly turned from serious to laughing after any joke at all, or how they got caught up in new plans after the mention of a certain person, place, or merchandise, their boredom showing, however, in periodic absentmindedness or yawns … In the middle of a grand project they would abruptly fall prey to bouts of melancholy, looking as if they were about to cry. And they talked any which way the words came out, not really pursuing a special topic. They drifted away from Contepec, the orchard, or whatever seemed to be exciting them at that particular moment, moving on to the matter of the movie theater or customs in other countries.

Not far from us, amid the magueys, a few buzzards repeatedly swooped down to feed on a dead dog whose stench could be smelled from meters away, as if enclosed within a fetid circle. Black and solitary, like gloomy emissaries or birds from the beyond, they would peck at the dog.

Before, like a silent scream, the stench had summoned them, proclaiming the carcass through the air.

At dusk we started home, resuming our conversation about house building and new business ventures. If fruits were in season, we would return with baskets full of peaches and figs.

Once home, my brother would go off to play pool and we would remain in the garden. My father read the newspaper, my mother watered the plants, and I sat on a step and watched my parents, sensing an indefinable sadness in them that made me sad too, as if it were in the very air, in the hour, in ourselves, in the funereal nightfall.

One morning they attacked the rummage room, a jungle of objects that seemed to defend its clutter. The maids would pull out tricycles with missing pedals, deflated balls in whose rubber a residual red still lingered, a token of bygone days; sparse brooms, chipped mirrors, wobbly tables, chairs without backs; clothes wistful for the shapes of my mother and father in irretrievable years; benches whitened by pigeons.

Dust rose from corners, walls, and things, as if secreted from the hollows, folds, and hours.

Then, once the floor was swept, the shelves dusted, the shared past of the house set here and there, so that a coat belonging to my father when he first arrived in Mexico in 1927 was brought blindly face-to-face in the present with a sweater worn by my mother a few years ago (the two made contemporaries only through finding themselves in the same derelict room), the things went back to the wardrobes, not to be restored to everyday life but to gather dust all over again, cloistered in a future of disuse. Preserved as tangible survivals of our own selves, perhaps to remind us of the unreality of our bodies and our ages, the shifts in our fancies and the ghostliness of our days in a torn shoe or in a record that was like the song to our games. Or to bear witness in the different-sized trousers and the variety of shirts we had worn to the growth of our bodies and the transformation of our faces, forever linked to certain overcast afternoons or to certain desolate days on which we could cry, or did cry, prey to a nostalgia so general or to a solitude so physical, we felt ourselves forgotten by everyone.

Like the time I walked, in a certain pair of trousers, to the railway station to wait for my brother, who was arriving from Mexico City, without asking my father for money to take the bus; and once the train arrived and my brother had alighted, I didn’t dare approach him and headed home without his knowing I had been there. Until on the way, when the bus driver told him I was returning to the village on foot, he made the vehicle stop and got off to help me on, asking why I hadn’t come up to say hello, and I, without knowing what to answer, had remained silent and cried.

There were wandering dogs in the village, scrawny, dirty, and hungry. They would attach themselves to the first person who walked by, and for a while had an owner, until a door closed in their face and they’d go back to being no one’s dog. They’d forage among scraps, prowling around houses or roaming the hot streets, their shadows nearly vaporized.

They barked their way through the night hours, when the sky is full of silences, distances, and stellar solitudes, and every noise reaches us with a din of urgency and abandonment, and voices from the street sound as if something terrible were happening.

I couldn’t imagine where so many dogs had come from, and why they didn’t have an owner. Many of them would gather in front of the butchers’ stalls at the market, monitoring purchases, watching the cutting up of carcasses, staring at the bloody cows hanging from hooks, licking the blood from the floor, and fighting over skins and bones. Sometimes, though, the butchers would subject them to butcher humor, tying strings of empty cans to their tails and lighting firecrackers that’d go off in a blast, and the howling dogs would take flight, the cans clattering against the cobblestones, pursued by the noise of their own making. They’d run past me, terrified, and if they managed to get into a house, they’d seek refuge under a bed or table, trembling violently, as if they were about to explode.

The dogs were the color of the sun, of a yellow that seemed sprouted from the fields. You could see them from the train, running over the plain alongside the cars, until, exhausted, they’d fall behind.

In the dog days some caught rabies and a policeman or a butcher would kill them with a bullet or a blow of the machete.

Around that time my brother used to buy pocketknives at a shop, selling them on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who then sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro, he never paid my brother back either. My brother then embarked on a trade in wallets, which he bought at a shop and sold on credit to Ricardo el Negro, who sold them on credit to his friends; but since no one paid Ricardo el Negro back, he didn’t pay my brother. My brother then embarked on a trade in pocket diaries …

Around that time someone lent my brother a shotgun and he would go hunting with Ricardo el Negro; although they fired many shells they didn’t kill so much as a hare. They spent more time carrying the shotgun here and there than standing in wait for the animal they were after. We’d see them heading for the hill early in the morning, or in the afternoons sitting and smoking in the shade of an ash tree on the edge of the village, or at the playing field, clutching the shotgun, watching a soccer match. Until one evening my brother, tired of carrying it around, propped it against a wall in his room and left it there, forgotten, for months.

One afternoon as we played soccer, the ball, kicked hard, hit me in the face, and Arturo, who was also playing, began to laugh.

With half my face smarting, the burn of the leather on my cheek and dirt in my mouth, I went for him to wipe off his laughter and avenge my pain, but he merely pointed at my face and made a joke for the others, insulting me.

Then I motioned to indicate that he should prepare to fight. He moved away from the rest of them and rushed at me, his long arms and hard fists pummeling my head.

Hurt and humiliated because he was hitting me on the head, I went at him, pursuing him as he retreated, throwing punches to his face and belly until I knocked him to the ground.

Then, his nose bloody and his head cradled in his arms as if to hide or feign sleep, he cried out, in tears:

“No more.”

My hands were damp with his blood and dirt was stuck to them. My friends laughed and discussed the blows, mentioning a hard elbow in his ribs which I didn’t remember giving. I still had the feel of the fight on my hands, and the taste of his face.

There he lay on the ground, his eyes open, staring at me as if taking me in, while the others tried to help him up but he refused, so they left.

My friends and I then headed back, playing with the ball as we did.

He stayed behind, in the dark field.

I remember him the morning I came to his house when he left me waiting in the dining room while he went to the kitchen for a glass of water. As I sat there studying the calendars on the walls, his grandmother arrived, hobbling in on her cane, a very small woman, shrunken by age; and she took me by the arm, pleased to see me, and called me by a name I couldn’t catch … Until she realized I wasn’t the person she thought I was, and she asked whether I wasn’t so-and-so (another name I failed to catch) … but on seeing that I wasn’t that person either, someone she knew, she began reciting in a low, choked voice a list of names among which, she thought, would be mine. Until I told her I was a friend of Arturo’s and this was my first time in the house, repeating the words to her several times, which seemed to amuse her, and she left the room with the expression of someone who has already forgotten what was said to her and the person to whom she was speaking … Later, when Arturo and I came across her standing in the door to her room, she looked at me with curiosity (or rather, ignorance), as if trying to figure out who I was and match my face to some memory or name. But we went away before she relapsed, leaving her sitting in a chair, her gaze fixed on the open door.

Arturo lived with his uncle, who made him work in the pigsties because Arturo’s father had killed a man and fled the village. Arturo liked soccer, and would come to the field to play with us.

But his uncle would come looking for him, spying on him first through the small jagged wall bristling with chunks of glass bottles. And then he would creep up on us, and lunge at Arturo through the doorless entrance.

Once he had him he began shaking and kicking him, giving himself over fully to the wrath his nephew kindled in him.

Bloodied and bawling, Arturo would look over at us. His uncle would throw him to the ground, hold him down with a foot, then remove his belt and start whipping, making him crawl out of the field on all fours. Nearly every time he came to play with us, his uncle would show up.

If one of us spotted him, he’d shout, “Run, here comes your uncle!” But Arturo never ran, he stood there hypnotized, watching him draw near.

And then the show began again, and we heard the uncle’s usual threat:

“You lazy bum, someday I’m going to kill you.”

Yet he never did. One day Arturo drowned. He was walking along the edge of the dam and slipped in and wasn’t able to get out.

Straight away, delighting in the temperature of the day, the placement of cobblestones in the street, the youthfulness of a passing woman, as if they were all topics that interested me, each time I went over to see his son, don Pedro, Juan’s father, would open the door and say he wasn’t home but meanwhile begin telling me about the adventures of the Pardaillan, with each sentence entangling me even more in an episode which, at ten in the morning, and on a Monday, I didn’t want to hear about. Gradually imprisoned by his unrelenting voice, which ignored my excuses to leave and my fidgeting, he made me see the houses as squashed, the hills as flattened, the passersby as misshapen, while my face grew long from boredom.

My sole desire was to flee, while in his sleep-deprived face the features softened, and his expression livened up in the enjoyment of an unintelligible joke. But when my drifting attention signaled that in the first pause I would try to take my leave, he circled around the same anecdote to avoid any silences, telling it over and over in different words. And, scrutinizing my eyes as if to make certain I was following his story, he would suddenly tell me about some harebrained event.

When a boy near us began banging on a post with a stick, don Pedro pretended not to hear so I wouldn’t be distracted from his tale. Without interrupting himself, he searched for the source of the noise with his eyes. Then he stopped, as if the sequence of the episodes had suddenly become scrambled and he didn’t know how to continue, holding up a raised finger that bid me wait.

And then he went on, as if he’d memorized the episode line by line, savoring each word in his mouth before uttering it, taking time to find the next one. And engaged in establishing the relationship between one of the Pardaillan and a lady, he lost himself in the description of her sensual features, but noticing that it bored me, he quickly said, “And then he pushed her away from him and with his dagger pinned a man to the door.”

He called characters in books by their first names, as if he and I knew them personally or were somehow intimate with them; and, as if sharing a secret with me, he announced, “Nevertheless, Pardaillan had conquered the princess.”

Enraptured, he seemed to speak an incomprehensible language, thanks to the saliva in which his words swam and because so many of his sentences were drowned and inaudible.

When one of his friends went by he looked at him suspiciously, as if reading an opinion in his eyes about his being with a boy. But once his distrust of the man had passed, he turned back to the Pardaillan, like a moth circling a lightbulb.

All of a sudden, saying to myself, “That’s it,” I ran off, leaving him in midsentence.

Bedridden with tonsillitis and drawn by the shouting of teenagers and kids, I peered out the window of a room facing the main square and saw Ricardo el Negro playing hide-the-belt.

Six boys, squeezed onto a bench with their hands behind their backs, passed the belt around while my brother, chosen by lot, tried to guess where it was.

When he attempted to grab at the belt from someone on the far left, someone on the far right swatted him with it.

Ricardo el Negro hit him the hardest, laughing out loud whenever he did, and even louder when he saw my brother tightly clamping his lips to hold back the tears.

He and my brother had killed a cat that used to relieve itself in the kitchen. One evening they came home and the stench wafting up from next to the stove had annoyed them.

With nauseated faces and a determined expression, they began looking around. Before long they came upon the cat, fast asleep on a chair; they grabbed him by the fur and carried him to the backyard. There, they set him on a wooden washtub, against a wall, and fired at him with a .22.

They killed him with three shots.

In those days, I hardly spoke to my brother. He went around with Ricardo el Negro and other friends who were older than me. Besides, he liked guns and pocketknives, of which I knew nothing.

One afternoon I followed him around the building site at our house because I was afraid something would happen to him.

I sensed a presence threatening him, entangling him in the snares of death.

I examined the rims of the walls to see if a brick or plank wasn’t about to fall on his head, and the floor, to make sure he wasn’t about to trip on a hole or step on a rusty nail.

I refused to part from him, as my nearness was what saved him from what might kill him.

He went from room to room, stepping on beams and leaning against loosely fitted windows, and jumped onto the mortar, his feet sinking in. With a melancholy air, he looked at me as if from a different space, as distant as people seem in a dream … I felt it was urgent to tell him to take his First Communion; he was already a teenager and still hadn’t taken it.

“To watch someone wash a glass, handling it carefully to feel its shape, and in its shape its fragility and in its fragility the glass of which it is made, and in the glass its transparency … To hold the glass between your hands, feeling its substance, its availability, its fate depending on your wish, which can be to smash it or make it shine … To treat things well, insignificant as they may seem, reveals a spirit in harmony with that which surrounds it, in a relationship of love.”

In a soft voice, Father Felipe shared a secret with me, a secret only I should hear; and although we were alone in the room, which smelled of wood and myrrh, he lowered his voice even more until he was only moving his lips, as if continuing to speak within himself.

After wanting for so long to make the trip, our mother had brought me and my brother to Temascalcingo for our First Communion. She wanted Father Felipe to be our confessor.

He had waited for me in the room, praying, while the nuns prepared me for our meeting, because before receiving anyone, he would pray. When I came in he watched me close the door and draw nearer to him, crossing the floor without feeling it beneath my feet.

Kneeling and wordless, I looked up at him, waiting for the miracle which, they’d told me, could take place. For he was a saint, and had performed miracles for the Indians and peasants in the region; he had soothed the conscience of men who had killed men, whom neither time nor imprisonment could console, the punishment being lesser than the crime.

But he only gazed at me in silence, from the height of his seventy-five years, or were they eighty-seven. And I gazed back, taking in the white beard lying against his chest, which would bleed, people said, if it were ever cut.

Outside the door, my mother talked about me with a nun. In a room off the corridor another nun prepared my brother for his meeting.

Father Felipe seemed to be and not be at my side, and in order to finish coming nearer or going, he would half close his eyes.

I searched for a wish within me, something I could ask for and have come true.

But I couldn’t find any, as I was happy without them.

And then he opened his eyes, smiled, and asked me to fetch my brother.

The following day we took Communion; the burning candles made me dizzy during Mass.

Afterwards we had breakfast in the convent’s dining room with the two nuns who had readied us for our Communion. These women spent the entire time discussing Father Felipe’s physical condition with my mother while consuming multiple helpings of jello and cake and several mugs of hot chocolate.

“His teeth often bother him when he eats,” they said, “if the meat is tough or the bread is stale.”

“Whenever he works too hard he gets tired, and has trouble hearing and mumbles his words.”

“If he doesn’t sleep enough the weather really affects him, his bones ache and he gets the shivers.”

“When he walks he has to go slowly and put his foot down firmly; a false step might cost him his life.”

After breakfast we returned to Contepec. That morning thousands of monarch butterflies were crossing the village. The air, like a river, bore currents of butterflies.

Through the streets, above the houses, between the trees and people, they made their way south.

In a room without a door in the backyard my dog lay dying.

The day before, while we were in Temascalcingo, he had gone out alone into the street and someone had given him yerba.

Lying on the floor, between convulsions and frothing, he was slowly claimed by death.

In vain my parents tried to save him. My mother asked the maids if it hadn’t been the butcher, who for some reason resented my father and had wanted to take revenge.

Rintintin no longer recognized me; futilely, I called out his name. He had been dragged away by death, and his days now seemed unreal and his existence foreign to mine.

Tomorrow, I told myself, he will be dead, and they’ll throw him to the outskirts of the village, where he’ll be fodder for the vultures.

On Sundays the peasants from the farms wandered our village drunk. They crawled on all fours over the cobblestones, or hugged the walls to get around.

After going to Mass and doing their shopping, they headed for the cantinas or drank pulque in the market.

Some would stagger past my father’s store, stopping at the lamppost to regain their balance and avoid falling “snout first,” as they said.

In the square an old man peed in front of his daughters, while the sun set in the distance over his back.

A few steps away a youth was being dragged by a horse that barely moved, and the boy spoke calmly to passersby from the ground.

In the store a woman was trying to say something to my father but couldn’t get the words out because her tongue was thickened from drinking. Faced with her incoherence my father attended to other customers, and the woman stumbled out snorting.

Outside the cantina an old man and a young man threw punches at each other, surrounded by an audience of men, women, children, and other drunks who’d just emerged from other cantinas.

A while after the tongue-tied woman had left the store my brother and Ricardo el Negro found her sprawled near an unwalled well on their way to the playing field. She lay sleeping on her back, her arms and legs splayed wide, her woven dress hiked up above her navel. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, exposing her dust-covered genitals.

My brother and Ricardo el Negro placed withered flowers on her forehead and in her mouth and bottles between the fingers of both hands. Then they shook an empty flour sack over her body and turned her white. Their guffawing woke her up and they broke into a run, pursued by the woman’s loud curses.

In our garden at dusk, amid the plants, my cousin and her friends, in colorful dresses and with their parents’ features pasted on their faces, were pretending to prepare supper.

Coriander, parsley, and watercress lay on the plates; candy and tangerines in the fruit bowl.

With a blue bucket on her head, my cousin, looking like a dunce and brandishing a bunch of spearmint, gave her two friends a lesson on how to brew tea, while they sat by her side with open legs. Catching me watching, they called out for me to join them, so I could play the husband who returns home.

But I didn’t care to.

So my cousin came over to me and stuck her hands in my pockets, feeling around to see whether I had any chocolates or pesos on me, although before long she unzipped my fly. And rolling her eyes towards the bathroom, she led me with murmurs to “you know where, to do what you like to do.”

Leaning against the wall she lifted her dress and made me run my hand across her bare stomach, sliding it down until she clamped it in her fissure.

A few weeks later as I played with soldiers in my room I had the urge to pee. On my way down the corridor I realized I was alone in the house, and sensed a presence around me that froze my steps and kept me from moving.

The sky was darkening, the walls and the floor had a muddy hue, and my parents’ room, seen through the window, had been emptied of its furniture; I felt like someone who returns home after many years and the loved ones he expects to find have already died or gone away, and the house to which he returns has undergone so much change that, although he’s in it, he feels he is elsewhere.

And so, as in one of those dream scenarios in which the participants are dead, the setting is antiquated, the air that envelops us is phantasmal, and the seconds we live through make us feel so unhappy in that space that they seem longer than they really are, I walked without walking, spoke without speaking.

And with my body stilled and my self troubled, I tried to move my tongue in an “Our Father who art in heaven, ha, ha, ha …,” but I couldn’t pronounce “hallowed” until I drew out from within me an enormous, magical

HA

that stood for “HHHHHHHHH​AAAAAAAAA​LLLLLLL​LLOWED.”

And once I said it I could move again, and I ran out of the house in terror.

Upon waking the following day at midnight I saw a ghastly woman at the window of my room.

Disheveled, she cried silently, her half-parted lips fogging up the glass panes. Her features were those of the drunken lady, the one my brother and Ricardo el Negro had made mischief with, and those of a young prostitute who had been raped and killed by a madman. This young woman had gone to Mexico City and lived in a brothel. The madman, who happened to be her cousin, had fallen in love with her when she returned to the village. One afternoon he attacked her in the kitchen, and thinking he was embracing her, hugged pots, brooms, and chairs, sating himself with them. One night, however, he pierced her throat with a knife.

Mute words and thwarted groans seemed to emerge from the hole in her neck. Her breasts were like the heads of pigeons and turtledoves.

“Don’t believe in her,” I told myself, “because you’ll keep seeing her. Look, she doesn’t exist.”

And I dropped my eyelids so as not to see her. And I tried to wake up, though I was already awake.

And when I opened my eyes to see whether she had gone, she was still there, watching me now with the face of my aunt Inés, who would visit me at the clinic after I was born. As a two-months-early baby I was put in a glass box and Inés would press her nose to the glass to gaze at me.

The light in her eyes was beautiful, passing through the window’s dirty panes unmuddied, and an internal brightness made her face radiant.

One morning in the kitchen, as I sat on a chair watching my mother make lunch, I saw three differing scenes through the three windows, each with its own quality of light, as if the present hour also held the hues of hours past and present.

With a deft hand my mother was sifting sugar over a peach cake, or cutting a vegetable, suddenly saying, “Let’s see …,” as she placed a piece of leftover peach in my mouth.

But I’d barely seen her face near mine, her arm extended towards my mouth, when I’d see her lifting the lid off a pot which, hot and uncovered on the stove, gave off warm clouds of steam that I inhaled.

My mother followed an exact rhythm, picking up the frying pan in a certain way and shaking it gently … if I had wanted to replicate her movements I would have mixed up both the chronology and the way they should go, doing a thing after the one it was meant to precede.

But while a willow’s branches filled the entire space of one window’s panes, and in another the sun-drenched morning seemed to mass into a cloudless blue, watching my mother I would tell myself, “Take a good look at her so you’ll be able to remember her later …”

And as I listened to the noise of pots, the wheeze of the small door to the pantry opening, and the sizzling of oil and peas as they came into contact with the frying pan, and as I saw the bright clear bridge of water pouring out of the jug, I repeated to myself: “So you never forget her …”

For I loved her movements, her way of pointing to a plate, her expression as she prepared meat or a sauce, brushing off my caresses without even noticing she did, or as if she were keeping a bothersome creature at bay. And then, abruptly, she would seem upset by a thing she’d suddenly remembered and startle me, as though it were quite serious, but it’d turn out it was only time to remove the flan from the oven.

To follow her gestures was to feel the rhythm of her being; and to feel it was to divine her inwardness; and to divine that was to remember her one day in a particular attitude, with such and such a face. And to remember her was to have her always in my own past, in the memory of my being, united, inseparably, to my self.