7

Lorenzo had been oblivious to Leticia’s roundness, but not to her creativity. His younger sister had become a woman very quickly, like street children who age from living always on the defensive. She filled the house with her exuberance, her unbroken health, and the ease with which she shared her affection. She kissed everyone, and when she said good-bye, you could still hear her crystalline voice softly singing to the sound of the five fingers of her hand, from which she threw kisses: “Kisses! Kisses!” She was an arrow of kisses, her reddish hair following behind her like the train of a bishop’s robe.

“Hey, your sister has gotten really good-looking,” Diego had said to him one day. At that moment Lorenzo saw her in a different light.

As proof of her favoritism, Aunt Tana had decided to look for a private tutor for Leticia from the Marist order, a saintly male to instruct her, to communicate his piety and his temperance, and to lead Juan down the right path as well, for who knew where that boy wandered. The “good” families generally have faith in the heavens; all solutions fall from there, and Tana accepted the novice like he was the Savior. Raimundo was included in family life. He was charged with saying the blessing at the table, delivering the thanksgiving, and assembling the community of patrons and servants for the Rosary ceremony.

Besides, impressed in the evenings by Juan’s notable talent for math and for abstract thought, Raimundo was, himself, edified. It was almost like a communication with God. He would wait excitedly on the street for Juan to arrive. That quiet and sneaky boy knew all the answers. “He could be an inventor,” the tutor told Aunt Tana. “He has extraordinary ability.”

“An inventor of what, evil? Because I’ve had several things disappear, and Juan is the only one who always has money in his pocket.”

“Dona Tana, I assure you, he has a privileged mind.”

It surprised Leticia when Tana answered, “But not more so than Lorenzo, of that I’m sure.”

Raimundo’s presence at Lucerna was beneficent because the whole family lived at the mercy of events, and since Don Joaquín was incapable of making a decision, Raimundo became a substitute paternal figure. They lived “by what God dictated, what God said,” and they prayed, devoid of all free will. Anyone with gall who came to 177 Lucerna could become captain of the ship without even intending to. “Whatever Raimundo says … Raimundo knows … Raimundo’s in charge.”

Raimundo decided to take all the children—even Santiago, the youngest, whom he carried with ease—on an excursion. “So you’ll know about the countryside, see the sunset, hear the tolling of the bells, and study the baroque artwork created by Indian hands in the village churches. We’re going to leave the city to breathe the good mountain air of the great volcanoes, Iztá and Popo.” Everyone liked the proposition, even Lorenzo, who would have gone with them if his presence hadn’t been required at the Beristains’ on Saturdays and Sundays.

Preparing the knapsack … what fun! Above all because Ray (as they now called him) warned Aunt Tana, “If we’re not back by Saturday night, it’s because we’re spending the night at a farm.”

They came back, their arms loaded with fruit and wildflowers, talking about truncated, inverted, pyramid-shaped supports; about the Mudejar style; about open chapels and baptisteries; about virgins brought from Spain and dressed in silk by the devout church mice of the village. They could distinguish Saint Francis’s rope belt in the heights of the churches, and they learned which order had constructed each section. Santi collected butterflies, river rocks, little idols found at archaeological sites. On the bus, they sang Spanish songs, led by Raimundo, who had asked them not to call him Father or Brother, but just Ray. He even taught them a few poems that were a little unorthodox, like the one about the Virgin of Begonia:

Virgin of Begonia,
grant me another husband,
because the one I have,
because the one I have,
doesn’t sleep with me.

No one noticed the influence the tutor began to exercise over Leticia, except for maybe her brother Juan, who was as abstract as physics, and for whom Raimundo felt a special partiality. Maybe Juan thought there was nothing you could do about those things. Women are pretty at fifteen merely because they are young, but Leticia was pretty because she wanted to be, and she wanted everyone to notice. The only one who could have controlled her natural impulses was her eldest brother, but Lorenzo spent all his time at calle Bucareli, at the courts, at the Milenio newsroom, at Dr. Beristain’s library, or who knows where the hell else. He wanted to think, to reflect, to live in the world of ideas, and thanks to the presence of the future priest, he could focus on himself with a clear conscience because the future of his brothers and sister was in the hands of a guider of souls, a man of the Church.

When they went on excursions, Leticia started to take Ray’s hand on the steep paths, and to hold on to it longer than necessary. Then, with the insolence and impetuosity of youth, she threw herself into his arms one day until he hugged her back in a distinct embrace—that of a man and a woman who desire each other. Aunt Tana noticed that something was happening. Leticia always placed herself near the instructor, her eyes too bright or tearful. Aunt Tana had read Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma in French, and this seemed like the most brazen debauchery. She returned the seminarian to his order. At a family meeting she warned Lorenzo, stunned, that his sister was shameless and that from now on, he would be responsible for her future. “I wash my hands of this. I did everything for you orphans, but nothing has turned out the way I planned. You run away from the house, Juan steals from me, and now Leticia loses her head. I can’t take any more.”

Lorenzo looked at Leticia with true horror. He wanted to rationalize his hatred for “that fucking little priest”—which is what he called the banished cleric—but if he had come across him, he might have beaten him to death. Leticia’s weakness was also repugnant. Of course, men were opportunists, and none of the family had known how to take care of his younger sister, including him. But Leticia was contemptible. He protested to Juan, who showed up every now and then.

Juan replied dryly, “You who study all the time. Haven’t you read anything about human nature?”

It turned out that Juan knew a lot more about life than Lorenzo did. He went to the damned brothels, to Plaza Garibaldi and to calle de Organo; the prostitutes held no secrets for him. He was their soul mate, he did them favors, he had power over them, and they looked to him to keep their money, because somehow Juan would double it. The world suddenly confronted Lorenzo. Not only was Leticia a loose woman; Juan, his brother, with such an aptitude for abstract thought, had dedicated himself to something very concrete—the dens of iniquity. Practically a pimp, Juan’s low-life friends had dragged him to the depths, while he, Lorenzo, read The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment in Dr. Beristain’s shadow.

 

 

“Mr. de Tena, you’re not giving a speech. This is demagoguery.”

“Me, a demagogue?” Lorenzo choked out.

“Yes, Mr. de Tena, yes, absolutely. Knowledge inherited from centuries ago is absolute. Questioning everything is a provocation. Please, come down from the podium and return to your seat. At this institution we demand that beliefs that are thousands of years old be respected—”

“You are the demagogues and opportunists,” Lorenzo interrupted, at the height of indignation. “This is just a breeding ground for public office. No one discusses anything, because they all aspire to power and they fear they will not be considered if they rebel. A government post is a fountain of riches, and in order to drink from it, subservience and corruption are indispensable. Power in Mexico denigrates the individual. Lack of discussion or research is an obstruction of scientific progress. We have to go back and question everything. You’re just social climbers, opportunists, third-rate politicians.”

“Mr. de Tena, I ordered you to get down.”

“If we don’t think with our own heads,” he shouted, “we’re never going to progress. If we let ourselves be used, we’ll not know how to apply our conclusions to the reality of the country. I just want to use my head—”

The professor raised his hand in the air. “Mr. de Tena, I’m going to have to call the director.”

Lorenzo definitely had not adjusted to the Libre de Derecho. Something like that would never have happened at the university, where there was freedom in the courses. Each teacher could teach the material he wanted. Lorenzo had already provoked another controversy when he affirmed that knowledge and faith were two different things.

“If your classmates have faith, I don’t see why you subject them to interrogations that don’t concern them. Planting doubt in people’s minds seems to be one of your goals, Mr. de Tena, and we’re here to learn, not to take the wrong path. There is also an inflection of arrogance in what you say, which many of us teachers particularly dislike. In any case, I’m sure that life will take care of bringing you down a peg.”

Lorenzo delivered blows left and right. He felt Lucía’s death in his own being. His lover’s decomposed flesh covered him in filth. Leticia’s pregnancy was also indecent, and the comments people made about the crime at the house on Insurgentes plagued him. This high-class woman’s intimacy fascinated the aristocracy. Boccato di cardinale, what a juicy tidbit, said Uncle Manuel, placing a petit four into his big mouth at the bridge game, and that pedestrian gesture in a reserved man submerged Lorenzo in confusion. How disgusting. If Manuel reacted that way, what must the rest have thought? Now that Lucia was not alive to defend herself, her most innocuous gestures were torn to pieces, and what Lorenzo had to hear on the street, at the courts, at the Milenio newsroom, plunged him into a stupor. He felt as if his body were stained—and everyone else’s as well. If someone put his ugly face close to Lorenzo’s to gossip, he would back up, as if he had suddenly discovered that men sweat, defecate, become shapeless and bloody masses. The pavement on the street also smelled of urine. The horror of Lucia’s death accompanied him, and he asked himself, shooing away nonexistent flies, if he was going crazy.

 

 

Several blocks from the house on Lucerna, Lorenzo settled in with his sister in a building on calle Marsella that seemed to disintegrate each time someone pulled a toilet chain. Lorenzo sank into a depression as he regarded the three measly rooms, their dimensions and the fact that the windows looked out onto a wall. He did not attend the Libre de Derecho any longer, and although it exasperated him to have to show up at the law office of Rosendo Pérez Vargas, who exploited him, the salary was even more indispensable now that he had to pay rent and support his sister.

At 35 Mesones, he bought a Smith-Corona with a double tabulator so the margins would stay vertically aligned, and with the help of another legal assistant, Jose Sotomayor, who was an excellent typist, he wrote up the complaint briefs.

“De Tena, go collect what’s due from El Rápido Fleet Company today. The insurance company already came to see me about it.”

“Those bills can’t be collected. They’re so small and old,” protested Lorenzo.

“Go today. Do you have the written complaints?”

“No. There’s nothing worse than writing up these complaints,” Lorenzo said anxiously.

Jose Sotomayor got him out of the mire. “Give them to civil court. They work fast there and don’t ask for much in the way of a tip.”

Lorenzo became furious. “Since I came into this office, the only two words that I hear are tip and bribe.” The law office always put him in the worst mood. He would start boiling as soon as he arrived in the vestibule and would grumble his rancor during the long hours of waiting for the judge’s signature.

Accompanied by the clerk, agreement in hand, he went to notify El Rapido, the freight company on 64 Moneda, of the complaint. They didn’t find the building, but there was a surprise waiting for them. On the sidewalk in front, piano and violin music could be heard through the windows of the academy run by maestro José Montes de Oca at the House of the Seven Princes. Why didn’t I ever study music? Lorenzo thought. If I had learned to play the violin, I’d be inside there and not here collecting on beggarly invoices. Several trucks were parked in front. “Son, there is no such number,” said one of the drivers, “but maybe Saul with the freight company on the corner would know.” Saúl’s fleet was the Mercury, and farther ahead was the Arrow. They had never heard of El Rapido. The owners of the trucks had invoices printed with fictitious names—Pegasus Freight, Rapid Transport, Reliable Moving, Condor Fleet, Greyhound, Thunder—all of which disappeared at the speed of light. The clerk looked at Lorenzo. Embarrassed about wasting the clerk’s time, Lorenzo offered to treat him to the white and airy tortilla-like garnachas from the woman who made quesadillas on the corner of Moneda Street. This was where the drivers and loaders fed their faces. Lorenzo dipped his garnacha in green sauce; the clerk preferred red.

Crestfallen, Lorenzo accompanied the clerk to Donceles and said good-bye at the door to the courthouse. “As soon as I find something out, I’ll let you know,” Lorenzo said. “Please forgive the waste of time.” How inexperienced he was, and how corrupt the fleet owners were, and how infuriating this life of a legal assistant—pencil pushers! How did Diego and the rest of the gang tolerate it?

Nevertheless, on the way home, Lorenzo was compensated for his trouble. A little fat man wearing a felt hat had set up a telescope, and he was stopping pedestrians in front of the Guardiola building on the corner of 5 de Mayo: “Come talk to the stars …”

Lorenzo stopped. He adjusted the telescope, carefully focusing it, and the moon appeared through the lens. The street hawker kept yelling out, “Come see the moon. Come on up. There’s enough for everyone.”

At times there were as many as three or four people and even a dog in line. Then the asphalt astronomer would let loose with his spiel. “See the moon for fifty cents. Visit the moon, get to know her better; make her your own. You never know, there’s a chance you could see God!”

The idea that a biological God existed, who intervened in everyday life and directed organic evolution, permeated the corner of 5 de Mayo. Lorenzo was about to contradict the man and assert that biology, astrophysics, and other sciences proved the opposite, but the street hawker would have resisted the explanation, just like Lorenzo’s buddies and fellow students at Libre de Derecho, as well as Aunt Tana. When the real world of space, time, and substance was discovered, what would happen to the men genetically predisposed to accept only one truth? He, Lorenzo, gave almost everything cosmic importance, including the most common daily events. Maybe he was the crazy one. Many times he had thought he would like to melt into something bigger than himself, maybe into the cosmos that was observed by this deficient telescope. Perhaps that’s what happiness was.

On his fourth visit, the sidewalk astronomer recognized Lorenzo. “You, young man, really do like walking on the moon.”

 

 

Leticia’s presence and the magnitude of her belly did nothing to help his frame of mind. She weighed him down. As she got heavier and heavier, she made him fatter as well. They ran into each other in the hallway, in the bathroom. I’m sorry. Excuse me. I didn’t know. There’s no lock on this. I’m sorry. Leticia didn’t sing anymore. Her corpulence confronted them at every instant. They were no longer the winged and transparent brother and sister in front of the mirror, but two sweaty and embarrassed bundles that restricted air circulation as they expanded. They listened to each other’s footsteps with apprehension. Here he comes … he’s leaving … he closed the door. They anticipated the sentences they would interweave with resentment. Lorenzo stayed out of the house as much as possible. Sometimes, in order not to see his sister, he sat on a bench on avenida Alvaro Obregón.

Leticia served him lunch on a small wooden table in the kitchen, and unlike the blessed Tila, she didn’t do it particularly well. Besides, it nauseated him. One morning Lorenzo interrupted her endless string of comments about the workings of the building. “Leticia, just shut up. I can’t even think!” When he heard her crying behind the closed door to her room, rage pierced him. Determined to be through with her, he yelled ruthlessly, “You had your fun, right? So don’t cry now.”

His younger sister never acted offended. One of the rules of women of her class was to overlook incidents, without establishing a connection between good and bad and without drawing any conclusions. The same mistakes could be repeated until death, without a lesson ever being learned. Leticia’s restless and senseless conversation revolved around the subject that affected Lorenzo the most—Lucia’s murder. With the meticulousness of a certified public accountant, she made it her business to know everything. It turned out that Lucia was not who everyone thought she was, but just the opposite. “Lucía—and you should know this better than anyone—had a dreadful secret life.”

“Why should I know that?”

“Because you walked her home every time she came to play bridge with Aunt Cayetana,” Leticia answered maliciously.

The milk that was forming inside Leticia, the streams that were born under her breasts and furrowed through them like a poisonous system, formed an atrocious net that trapped Lorenzo the same way it had trapped Leticia. Taking responsibility for Leticia was like taking responsibility for Lucia’s murder. Concentrated in this fatherless child were the deception and the abandonment to which he and his siblings had been subjected. In this child lay Santiaguito, with his devoted “Papa, can I bwing you your slippews?”; Juan’s stealing; Lorenzo’s rage. The only survivor was Emilia, in the United States.

In order to avoid his sister’s verbosity, Lorenzo would say, “I’m leaving now,” or “I’m here.” Every now and then, when he’d return home, he would stifle the impulse to tell her, “I was offered this job …” Maybe if he hadn’t stifled it, they would have fallen into a familiar conversation, the kind that nurtures intimacy, but when he saw her, the desire would vanish. At first, when she served his coffee, Leticia would sit at the wooden table with him. Now she went back to her room, her gait heavy with pregnancy, her legs separated. Wearing a robe, always the same one, Leticia awaited childbirth. Once she was free, her luck would change.

Lorenzo began to lie. He hid his sister’s whereabouts, and he lied about everything. He didn’t even tell Diego that Leticia was going to have a child. Something like this would never happen to the Beristain sisters. They had too much self-respect; they hadn’t been degraded by their mother’s death. Lorenzo repeated to himself that hiding the truth was not lying; many truths were hidden in the universe. If men debated in a swamp of moral and aesthetic judgment, what in hell could a measly lie matter? Besides, to whom did he owe the truth?

Surely, if he went to Dr. Beristain, the doctor would help him, but his pride wouldn’t allow it. Ask someone for something? The very suggestion made him sick. But he was strapped for money. Leticia did the impossible in keeping his shirts and trousers in fairly good condition. Should he write to Emilia in the United States and ask for her help? Now a newlywed, she would have to ask her husband, and they were already responsible for Santiago, whom she had sent for, as promised.

In his rage, Lorenzo committed himself to destroying everything he had once loved. He magnified his buddies’ faults, exaggerating their traits to the point where they became worthless. How easy! I’m like the illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada, he thought. I capture men at their most unfortunate moments. He pictured the gang members in front of his eyes—grotesque, dislocated puppets—and he stopped them right at the edge, the better to push them into the abyss. He repeated the motto that they had touted with such jubilation: “May the weak and those who have failed perish. And let us help them to disappear. May this be our first principle of love toward our fellow man.” He fulfilled it literally. No one was spared.

His friend Diego threw himself into law with a vigor that Lorenzo didn’t share. Although they had been very young at the time, they had both heard Alejandro Gómez Arias request autonomy for the university. “I hate this career more and more,” Lorenzo told Diego, “and I want out of it more than anything.”

“You’re crazy. That’s where our future lies. We’re going to be rich and happy. We’ll do great things for Mexico. Lawyers are the ones who matter the most.”

“I’m not interested in being like the ones who matter.”

“Don’t be an idiot. They run the country.”

“That’s why we’re going straight to ruin.”

“Lorenzo, please …”

It was really better for the friends to avoid Lorenzo. “Brother, you’re going through a bad time, but you’ll make it. Maybe, without realizing it, you miss your aunt Cayetana,” Chava said.

Lorenzo was about to kick him, but his friend cracked up laughing, and for a moment they were back to the way they had been before—two boys, arm in arm.

Lorenzo had divorced himself from Diego ever since the night they were walking along avenida Alvaro Obregón in front of the Catroviejos’ French-like house, through whose tall windows they could see gigantic mirrors, chandeliers with hundreds of lights, soft parquet floors, and golden chairs worthy of Versailles.

“You have to marry a rich woman!” exclaimed Diego.

The house was just that—a marble woman covered in lace and fluff. The daughters of the family, accompanied by a good dowry of beams and fine wood, were of marriageable age. The young men had to catch them. Lorenzo turned into a panther, and for the first time in his life, he remembered his French.

“Macros, that’s what you all are. Pimps!”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You’re kept whores.”

“Listen to me, Lorenzo.”

“You make me sick.”

He was so angry that the others stopped, except for Diego’s colleague Alberto, who, full of fury, threw himself on Lorenzo. Before he could raise his hand to strike, Diego took his friend by the arm. “Let’s go, Lorenzo. Come on.” He took him straight to his car. “Calm down, buddy of mine! With remarks like that, you’re going to end up all by yourself. Alberto was just joking.”

“It was no joke. Everyone knows he’s after the richest girl. That boring Sandra Orvananos!” Lorenzo yelled.

“Lorenzo, you need to calm down, or your reputation is going to be the end of you. I’m telling you this because I’ve known you for years. The guys have been saying that you’ve become unbearable. There’s going to come a time when no one will want to have anything to do with you.”

“I don’t want to be around those freaks anyway.”