MY UNCLE CARLOS brought his wife, Lucinda, and their three sons from Puebla, two boys who walked and one still suckling. The two walkers spent their first days in Contepec yelling, “Daddy, Daddy!” wherever they went.

The older one, Julián, shared so many of his parents’ features that whenever they saw him people remarked, “He’s got his father’s eyes,” “His mother’s eyebrows,” “His father’s chin,” “His mother’s nose,” “His father’s ears.”

The second son, César, went around touching the hen, the wall, the table, a guest’s dress, the dog’s snout, in an insatiable appetite for testing the consistency of things with his hands.

Augusto, the baby, carried about by my uncle in a white blanket, protruded from his arms like the branch of a tree. Patiently, he showed him the world: “Glass,” “Mirror,” “Foot,” “Shoe,” “Boy.” And he opened Lucinda’s boxes on the dresser for him, revealing before his eyes rings and necklaces, buttons and needles.

Lucinda dressed all three in the same fabrics as her dresses, so it seemed they were in uniform, and you had only to look at them to know whose children they were.

A week after arriving, Lucinda told my uncle she would probably never get used to life in such a small village. This prompted my uncle’s immediate exaltation of Contepec’s virtues: “Such pure air!” “Such a clear sky!” “Such clean water!”

If he saw her looking despondent, he tried to convince her, in an imaginary discussion in which only he became impassioned and aggrieved, working himself into anger at her silence. Whenever she was silent he felt she was far away, hungering for men, and to intrude on her daydreaming he badgered her with pronouncements such as, “What decent men there are in Contepec!” “Women in small towns are so faithful!” “What tranquillity!”

But she made no answer and went to wash the dirty dishes, dragging her feet as she did.

Julián would follow her, while César watched from the kitchen door; his only worry was that my uncle might lose sight of him. He was always racing after him, yelling to him in the street to wait, convinced that if his father got a few steps away, he would abandon him.

In the afternoons my uncle stood in his doorway bargaining with the campesinos over the nags he wanted to sell. However, he never set foot outside unless he thought someone was going to buy one.

He carried on him the smell of his cows, his goats, and his mules. His dogs, old and scrawny, small and ugly, toothless and skittish, prowled the streets and stood guard at his door, or pressed their snouts to the window.

Animals were always present in his conversations. When he told the baker about a young man who’d slept with the policeman’s wife, he said, “The bull mounted the cow”; and when he saw the doctor go by with his girlfriend, he remarked, “The nag and his mare.” About his son Julián’s hair, he said, “It’s as soft as lamb’s wool.”

No sooner did he learn that my father had started selling groceries in his store than he stocked them too. When he heard we were including hardware, he ordered hammers, nails, and locks. When he found out that my father had been successful with his movie theater, he proposed to a group of storekeepers from a neighboring village that they open a theater that would rival ours. Chatting with his neighbors, he sought information about my father’s projects and went pale and short of breath when he heard business was good. His wife shouted at him to stick to his mules and oxen and stop competing. But earning money in a transaction in which he didn’t rival my father did not satisfy him. It was better to earn little or even lose than to stop what he was doing. Only rage, resentment, and revenge motivated him. He was seen rising early, going about the village streets, talking to people, traveling to other towns, promoting the sale of animals, all spruced up in his best suit. His eyes shining with rage or narrowed by meanness, he persisted in his attempts to ruin my father with stupid ventures and by bad-mouthing us.

Meanwhile, he complained to the baker that his wife oversalted the soup, and that the desserts she made were tasteless and the cakes always burnt. When they had guests in the living room and she sat with parted legs facing some man, pretending to be cold he would say, “Close the window, Lucinda.” But there was no window in the living room.

In time, she turned violent and reacted to everything he did with fury, even before she knew what the matter was. She called him an idiot for selling an old horse for seven hundred pesos, although it wasn’t worth two hundred. She turned down plans for their sons’ education with disdain, calling them provincial. She took his forgetfulness as a deliberate ploy to annoy her. Nearly every night, Lucinda’s shouting escaped through the windows of the house, and blows were heard.

But what most irritated my uncle was her habit of sitting Julián on her lap and telling him, “Your father is a good-for-nothing,” “Your father is a cretin,” “We can’t depend on him.”

Their arguments, regardless of what triggered them, always ended with a battle between Contepec and Puebla; they attacked each other as a Contepecan and a Poblana, as if the places were responsible for their own defects, or as if it were a defect to have been born in one of them. In their mouths, these two places came to be not two towns in Mexico but two entire countries, whose citizens were so fiercely nationalistic that their differences always ended in a border war. And in each of these confrontations they threatened one another with separation and slaughter, a reminder that they were not twins, Siamese or otherwise.

My aunt often gave him a little kick or scratch. She threw stones, shoes, and spoons at him. With his face clawed, my uncle defined his marriage as a “bitter draft,” and avoided his wife by taking long walks on the mountain, by engaging in endless chats with the baker or in tedious perusal of The Swineherd’s Manual, Horse Illnesses, and The Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison.

Nevertheless, he tried not to tire out his body or his mind and to fill his days with intermissions. He never got fat or thin, his weight never varying. His expression was always the same, like a dirty shirt that’s been worn for a long time.

At night, the masculine odor of angel’s trumpet wafted through the open window into my aunt Inés’s bedroom. All eyes and silence, she let herself be penetrated by its perfume while she lay in bed reading “Abandoned women.” From a photograph on the wall, my grandmother looked towards the bed, her face still young and with my aunt seated on her lap. Between the childish face and my aunt’s present aspect, there had been a fearful gust of wind: time.

A mirror hung alongside Grandma’s photo, and near the mirror was a calendar from 1954, still open at the month of May, with the twenty-first circled in red. Both photograph and mirror had belonged to my grandmother. And the calendar commemorated her death.

The only current items in the room were a copy of Confidencias magazine, turned to the letters page, and the light of the moon, which entered white through the window.

To save Inés money on food, my mother sent her a bite to eat every day. Her only income was the rent from a cantina next door to her house.

Every day when our maid returned from there she brought with her the previous day’s plates and the invariable message that I should visit.

On the way to her house I liked to feel the afternoon sun on my face, its luminosity seeming to lift the village into the air. As I leaned against a parapet of the stone bridge, the only sound I heard was of things opening to the heat. People, houses, and hills appeared to ascend in a golden sphere. At this hour, one was most conscious of Contepec’s altitude.

When I reached my aunt’s house, if it was August, she offered me figs; if it was October, pears. She wanted me to cut them myself from the trees in her orchard so I could choose the ones that appealed to me.

Beside a crumbling adobe wall a climbing plant, its stake broken, grew by spilling over the ground, like a desperate hand that blindly searches for some means of support to cling to. But not finding anywhere to climb amid the worm-eaten beams and clumps of earth, it was nearly always dry.

Seated in the living room, my aunt would show me postcards with moving parts and the front cover of El Mundo, and tell my fortune with a deck of cards. Card in hand to predict my future, she foretold travels and weddings, betrothals and separations, paying little attention to chronological order or to contradictions in the events. She said I would have my first girlfriend after my wedding and told me I was going to spend my entire life in the village right after saying that I was destined to travel for twenty years. She also brought out photos of her female friends when they were girls around my age, remarking, “She’s very pretty and has a birthmark on her thigh,” “She’s passionate but still doesn’t know about men,” “She has big breasts and just came here from Uruapan.”

One day at dusk, as we drank hot chocolate in the garden, she told me that a general from Nogales wanted to come see her. The letters he’d been sending her over the past two years, with pages ripped out of the Cancionero Picot, arrived in blue and pink envelopes. Photos of himself at different ages were enclosed in many of them, as if he took pleasure in alternating his recent faces with others from when he was eight, fifteen, twenty-four, or forty years old; or perhaps by showing my aunt his previous faces he wanted her to know his whole life and meant to suggest there was nothing from his past he needed to hide.

While she spoke, she tore a roll in two from the bag of bread on her lap and dipped a piece in the hot chocolate. The jug was leaking onto the bare table, forming a dark puddle.

As I listened to her, the hole in the jug stoked my anxiety, as if my very being, ostensibly stationary, were escaping through a gap in the day, my life shrinking with every passing second.

One midday in January, a skinny little man got off the bus that came from the station with passengers from the Mexico City train. The blond toupee, shiny boots, and navy blue jacket made him look as if he’d just come out of a shop. The wrinkled seat of his trousers revealed that he’d been sitting for a long time.

After a few moments of indecision, doubtful about which way to walk, he came into the store and asked for Rayón Street.

He smiled at my father’s reply, as if the information obtained brought him closer to something he wanted, and set off in the direction of my aunt’s house.

He was going to propose matrimony to her.

He had with him two one-way tickets to Nogales.

There he would give her a wardrobe and put a house in her name.

His friend the judge had everything ready for the ceremony.

Another friend, the owner of a restaurant in Nogales, had all this for the banquet:

a dozen turkeys

50 kilos of rice

a sack of chiles

twelve pigs

six ducks

100 kilos of corn

twenty cartons of beer

fifteen bottles of tequila

seventeen crates of soft drinks

bananas, pears, apples, peanuts, tangerines.

His honorable mother, his honorable father, his worthy sisters, and his honorable son had made arrangements with the priest at the church.

But not only did my aunt not want to marry him, she didn’t even want to see him. The most she agreed to after their first encounter was a meeting in the store the following day at nine in the morning.

Consequently, the Generalito, as we already called him in the village, sat for many hours that night on a bench in the square holding an umbrella, though the sky was clear. He looked towards Rayón Street, and behind the shawl of every passing woman he saw my aunt’s face. Ricardo el Negro, my brother, and I went over to talk to him. Laughing heartily, my brother and Ricardo el Negro listened to him tell how he’d become a general during the Revolution. And, once he discovered that my brother and I were Inés’s nephews, he interrupted his stories to praise her: “There’s no woman like her!” “She’s definitely one of a kind.” And when he happened to mention a romance with someone else, he excused himself with, “I was very young,” or, “One’s only human.” Unforgettable women weren’t lacking in his conversation, women glimpsed once on some village street as he galloped past with his fellow troops.

The following day he showed up at the store with the face of someone who’s had a bad night and stood outside, the sun fracturing his shadow on the stones, while sparrows at his feet pecked at the earth, sending up dust.

He was wearing white trousers and the navy blue jacket. He’d powdered his cheeks to cover up his wrinkles and seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open in the blinding light.

My aunt arrived at nine. Quickening her step she entered the store and went to the back without turning around, until she was nearly hidden behind the counter. Nothing was farther from her offended face, so like that of a neglected patient, than a smile.

Resembling an unpenned bull ready to charge, she ignored me and my father, mindful only of the door.

Her face half covered by a black shawl, she leaned on her elbows next to the cookie cabinet, where two yellow cats were watching her.

The Generalito came inside looking for her but turned pale when he saw her glaring at him.

Nevertheless, he drew near. He leaned on the counter and spoke to her in a rush, like someone who wants to say everything he’s been thinking about for months during the first meeting:

“You must know that I can’t live without you any longer … And that I spend sleepless nights in Nogales … And that I receive every letter of yours with a trembling hand,” etc.

My aunt, her intent reader’s eyes fastened on the opening and closing of his lips, not missing a word, interrupted him in the loud voice of the deaf:

“This is just what I want to talk to you about. It’s embarrassing me how ridiculous you are. Remove yourself from my presence, because I don’t love you.”

She pulled the shawl over her mouth angrily, indicating she had nothing further to say. And strode out of the store, her eyes throwing sparks.

The Generalito continued to lean on the counter, his hair unkempt, his jacket wrinkled, his shirttails hanging out, and his face pasty, the confusion of the moment having completely disheveled him.

My aunt Marta was withering away, like those fruits people leave out to age for later use in preserves, or store behind glass once they’ve dried.

Everything around her was ancient, frayed and faded, like wallpaper peeling off the walls. The living room and dining room furniture creaked if you merely looked at it, and the chairs seemed to mutely cry fragile! The dresses and wardrobes exhaled a humid breath when opened and whatever items were taken out of them smelled of confinement. If you pulled open a door or a drawer, the wardrobe groaned or the handle came off. Even the fancy stationery lying on the little desk had seen better days and ninety years earlier a youthful hand must have used it to write letters. The little bottles of perfume and jars of cream on the dresser seemed to be saving themselves for a special night outside of time, a night that would never arrive, or to be kept as mementos of a wedding that never took place. The tablecloths, the bedspreads, so much larger than the table and the bed, were like the ghosts of objects lost, and in their dimensions appeared to mourn for another bed, another table. The uninhabited dresses gathered dust, turned brittle, were nibbled on, eaten away by implacable silent hours. Jewelry, gifts, purses remained in their cases and original boxes. Blue coats smelling of camphor hung from the hangers on which they had been bought by my mother or grandmother.

My aunt, in her taffeta dress and bows, looked as if she’d come out of a box or been gift wrapped. The coat she wore had belonged to my great-grandmother, in the days of Maximilian’s court. Her finery returned to the creaking wardrobe after visits to doña Cuca, her friend from the Colonia Roma.

Like a magnet that attracts random iron bits, my aunt now drew two old ladies to her home.

Stray old ladies, who smelled like a room where cats live and who had often traveled from boardinghouse to old people’s home and old people’s home to boardinghouse.

One afternoon, after reading the “Room for Rent” sign outside, they had knocked on my aunt’s door. The price was right.

These ancient ladies had lost the fortunes their parents left them by eating up their inheritance without earning a cent. Time had inflicted hardships without altering their status as virgins. First it took away their piano, then the mirror, next the mantilla, the painting by Velasco, the table, the chest of drawers, the bed, the carpet, the jardiniere: a plundering that would end not with their shoes, but with their death.

And so in their twilight, and in this state, the sisters Nacha and Natasha came to the room at the back of my uncle Sebastián’s house. With their faces like wizened mannequins, they listened from behind the door to their room, suspecting my uncle had plans to throw them out, although he wasn’t talking about the boarders but about how wonderful it was to have the soul of an artist … Sensing they were spying, he would open the door abruptly, and the gust of air and the surprise made them lose their balance.

Seeing them caught unawares, too weak to raise their heads, so waxen and flabby, made the peach I held in my hand feel mushy and rotten.

But minutes later trying to enliven their existence, they tiptoed to the bathroom and came into the living room with powdered cheeks, lipsticked mouths, false lashes in place, and penciled brows, as if on their way to the theater.

“A lady can skimp on bread but never on her quality,” Nacha would say, even willing to sell her underwear so she could buy powder, while Natasha, plumped in a chair like one more dusty cushion, stared at my uncle.

On their birthdays, they donned dresses from their youth and perfumed themselves heavily for the luncheon my aunt prepared for them.

Seated at the table, the three spoke of old times as though the people they mentioned were still alive. They alluded to Ricardo, Francisco, and Porfirio as if they’d seen them yesterday; they named Plateros, San Francisco, and Santa Teresa Streets as if they’d walked down them that morning and their names and physiognomy hadn’t changed at all. They talked about promenades down Reforma on horseback and the recent construction of houses now razed, and the dance and singing classes their father had enrolled them in, as though they’d just come from class with their teacher. They recited verses by Juan de Dios Peza and the young Amado Nervo, never forgetting so much as a period or comma.

As they spoke their cheeks quivered, their eyes sank deeper into their sockets; everything about them seemed to converge in a longing to be, to cry out for an irretrievable life.

After lunch they showed each other things that looked as though they were under threat from light, air, human contact. They themselves were like garments taken out of a decrepit wardrobe that might break into flakes, pill, come apart at the seams. I don’t know what was so decayed, disillusioned, dissimilar, or deficient in their faces, their arms, their legs, that made it seem that their very bodies were about to weep. Meanwhile they complained about the mailman who hadn’t brought them a single letter and the plumber who hadn’t fixed their bathtub and the rude taxi driver who’d dropped them off two doors down from their home, and about the price of sardines and about the girls in the apartment next door who made fun of them. A litany of offenses that grew at the pace of their contacts with other people.

In every old man they ran into on the street, they saw not only a survivor and a contemporary but also an affirmation of the reality of their own existence and their past. As soon as they saw one their eyes screamed, “Look at Francisco, he was born in the nineties.” “Look, the times we talk about did indeed exist.”

But what astonished me most during my visits to my uncle’s house was not only that I didn’t hear their tread but that I hardly saw them be. They sat so imperceptibly on the couch at the far end of the living room that you forgot they existed and you went in and out without noticing them. Furthermore, my uncle contributed to their invisibility by never addressing them or turning to look at them. What made their situation worse was, just as there are beings so pleasing to the eye that the mere sight of them affords visual satisfaction to whoever looks at them, these women when looked at seemed to emanate a kind of rancid perfume, which was simply the expression on their faces.

Whenever my father went to Mexico City on business he deposited me at my uncle’s house. As I sat reading Góngora they observed me from the end of the living room like cats with lackluster eyes perched on the sofa. Absorbed in my reading, I’d forget about them at times, only to find them watching from between a display case and a painting of The Death of Manolete whenever I raised my eyes. And when I walked past them to the bathroom or kitchen their eyes followed me.

The sight of them made me want to open the windows to dispel the mood they provoked in me, but when they were in the living room I couldn’t open them on account of the drafts, drafts they immediately felt even from another room or the bathroom.

Then, when they saw I was nervous, in compensation for the unopened windows they offered me a candy they’d slowly select from a little box labeled Lágrimas Poblanas, which I’d never tried and which tasted as if it had been stored for fifty years.

Only one afternoon did I see them lose their composure, seized by an ire so complete it made them stumble, spit, tremble, and shed the powder on their cheeks all at once. This was when my uncle addressed them as “madams” rather than “mademoiselles.” An omission of syllables that transformed them from virgins into whores, an assault on the chaste motive for their solitude.

Despite the fact my aunt enjoyed a much better financial situation than her guests, she followed a hunger diet in a state of euphoria. She was so used to it that had anyone told her she ate poorly she would have been surprised, insisting that, on the contrary, she ate in the most refined way possible in Mexico, basing her cuisine on forgotten recipes that had been preserved thanks to the pedigree of her parents.

Nevertheless, she appeared to be hungry all the time, and would tear off bits from a roll or nibble on an apple, making them last all day.

A way of eating without eating, which gave others the impression that she had the appetite of a bird. And one didn’t know which was the greater punishment: my uncle’s neglect or the tyranny of her own diet. At the store she was the little old lady of 50 grams of sugar, 25 grams of coffee, 50 grams of noodles, and a quarter liter of milk; at the butchers’ she was the scraps-for-the-cat-and-bones-to-boil-for-broth lady. Yet her hungry condition stood in contrast with her happy face and pride at being married to my uncle.

For his part, he tended to eat in those restaurants where you don’t know which is worse, ordering a particular dish or having to eat it since you ordered it and will have to pay. The diner wonders whether it might not be better for his health to lose the money spent on the dish rather than add to the loss the unpalatability of the meal and the chance of getting sick. He’s seated at a shared table, next to one of those elderly couples where the wife talks about food while she eats and the husband eats in silence without listening, a habit that apparently followed them out of the house and into the street.

Ruedas was the painter who helped my uncle. Or rather, he carried out the commissions my uncle received. His arrival was announced by a loud ringing of the bell at around eleven every morning.

My uncle ran out immediately, with canvases under his arms, clutching brushes and tubes of paint to leave in the studio for Ruedas.

Once he had explained the job, my uncle locked him up in the room so Ruedas wouldn’t disappear with the canvases, paint, or brushes, for he was a heavy drinker, and when he had money at his disposal or something to sell he would slip away to get drunk, leaving behind the feet of the Juan Diegos or the Virgins of Guadalupe, for he had learned to paint from the bottom up, as if saying a prayer on his knees.

Ruedas had a red nose and swollen eyelids, and the paintbrushes trembled in his hands; sleep-deprived, or still tipsy, he occasionally took blue for pink or painted a virgin’s face green.

At two o’clock sharp, he started pounding on the studio door with his fists, although my uncle often went out and he had to stay until five to be released. Forced to wait, he intermittently kicked, punched, and butted the door, without managing to open it.

His enraged banging terrified my aunt, who from time to time went to the door to calm him down, as my uncle had phoned to say he was on his way, but all she got were insults, which she feared would translate into blows to her husband.

Finally, my uncle went to open the door, money in one hand and the other brandishing a stick, as if he were letting a wild animal out of its cage. From her half-open door, my aunt monitored the situation ready to hurry over to defend her husband should Ruedas attack him with a palette knife.