25

When Fausta invited her mother to the opening night of the play, she didn’t warn her what it was about, but she felt pity as she saw Cristina leaving, livid, at the end.

“This just can’t be,” her mother murmured.

“It is, Mother.” Fausta took her by the arm.

She shook her head. “No, no.”

“Don’t start to cry. If you do, I’ll die.”

“Just like your father, like your father,” she mumbled.

Suddenly Fausta noticed that Cristina was old and bent over. She put her arm around her shoulders, which were covered by a beautiful alpaca wrap, and moved her head close to her mother’s. “You don’t want to see things the way they are. It’s been like this for months.”

“Months?”

“Maybe years, Mother.”

“Do you live with that girl?”

Cristina must have realized that Fausta didn’t only sleep with the girl, but that they displayed themselves publicly, to the disgrace of the family. In one scene, her daughter kissed a woman and undressed with her—Fausta, her daughter with black braids, naked, her small breasts next to the other one’s bigger breasts; her sex, black triangle on top of the lighter triangle of the other one, the other one, the other one, the other one. Fausta, so quiet, so sneaky. Fausta, her eyes downcast, asking for a peso to buy candy at the store.

“The world isn’t like you think it is, Mother. It’s different. If you want to keep seeing me, you have to accept my homosexuality.”

“But don’t you have any conscience?” she screamed.

“I’ve never lived like it was a sin. My body is wiser than I am. My body takes me where it wants. My neurons—”

“Fausta, what will people say?” interrupted her mother.

“I don’t think anyone needs to have any opinion about what I feel. It’s my territory. My body is my freedom, my independent university, and besides, it fascinates me.” Suddenly she said what she never thought she could say to her mother: “You’re not going to do to me what you did to my father.”

Alfredo, who had accompanied them, feigned absolute indifference, or maybe he was already past the evil he had instigated years earlier.

“Go get the car,” Cristina ordered. “I want to go home.”

Fausta was first attracted to women in elementary school. Although she had a boyfriend, they were never intimate. The intimacy with Raquel, her first lover, on the other hand, took her to another dimension, as if she were giving birth to herself.

Thin as a rail, Fausta won the athletic contests at school through sheer energy. The first to take risks, she responded to any dare. Death was always in the back of her mind, because she feared adults. She was afraid to acknowledge that they didn’t love her. She lived with memories of a childhood of fear and deception. Her family had loved her, but not the way she wanted. No one gave her what she wanted.

Exercise drained her so that she would lose herself in it. It was a great relief.

When Raquel left her, she suffered the greatest shock of her life. At that time it didn’t hurt her to think of spinsterhood. On the contrary, she took refuge in it. Until another girl said to her, “Come on.” And not only that, this girl, Marta, had left a man to be with Fausta. Recovered, Fausta immersed herself in her new love’s poems. Tall and slender, Marta opened the windows to the sea for her: “Look.” At first Fausta couldn’t see anything. Tears of self-pity blinded her. Within a year Marta finally confessed that she preferred men. “We’re adults. It’s not a matter of analyzing if you’re a dyke or gay or bisexual. You’re a person who loves, and that’s that. Love will devastate you, no matter who you’re with.”

When Fausta separated from this lover—who always said “and that’s that,” the way the old telegraph operators said “stop”—Fausta sank into an exhausting routine backstage, behind the scenes, in the dressing rooms. She swept and picked up. Whatever anyone didn’t want to do, she made part of her daily routine. It was vital to be of service to everyone, to keep a low profile, as the gringos say, not to have high expectations. She still acted, but she shunned the gaze of the others. What a contradiction. Above all, she rejected any possibility of success. “No, I’ll stick with what I do. I want to serve, not stand out. It’s not about me; it’s about everyone else, what will happen to them if they don’t succeed. I don’t want to hurt the unity of the chorus.”

The theater impresario told her, “They’re mediocre; you’re not. Think of yourself. I’m choosing you.”

Irate, Fausta responded, “I’m not doing anything without them.”

“Ah, then there’s no deal. Stay with them. If you want to be the cause of your own misfortune, no one will stop you.”

In a fiercely competitive world, Fausta forced herself to think of others first.

“What you do is more like social work than theater,” Martin, her brother who most looked like her father, had told her. “You should stop killing yourself in that useless place. Do some traveling. Get to know your country, other countries.”

“How can I leave them, Martín?”

“Just don’t go back. I assure you, it will be harder on you than it will be on them.”

With a pack on her back, a sleeping bag, an Everlast flashlight, blue jeans, and her Chiconcuac cap, Fausta took to the road. She would return to the city in September without the circles under her eyes, and not as thin. On the Mexico City–Puebla bus, the floodgates to the landscape of air and earth opened up to her. The green got into her eyes, her nose, her ears. By the time she arrived at the San Martin Texmelucan bus station, she was breathing deeply, and the smell of apples reached her. After three hours in Puebla, which was beautiful and big, she decided to look for the town where Salustia—the girl who had worked in their house for years—lived. She had told Fausta that she would always be welcome in Tomatlán.

 

 

As if in a fairy tale, Salustia opened the door herself. When Fausta asked if she could stay awhile, the girl said, “You can’t sleep on the floor, Miss. I’ll find a cot somewhere.”

The family’s entire life revolved around corn—planting it, harvesting it, eating it. Getting up at four in the morning was disorienting. In the dark, suspended in time, Fausta would ask herself, Where am I? Who am I? I am the creator of the world. I’m up even before the rooster has crowed. At night, after shutting in the animals, the family went to sleep, as there was no television. Adjusting to their lifestyle was easy. The daily repetition gave Fausta a sense of peace she had never had in the city. At five in the morning Don Vicente led his flock from the corral; Pedro, the twelve-year-old son, went to the field with the sheep, accompanied by the barking of Duke, the dog. Their relationship with the animals was like human to human; they seemed to read one another’s minds. The birds were the greatest discovery for Fausta. At dawn their trilling welcomed the new day. Some were serious, others sharp, others shrill—hundreds of thousands of birds gathered under a piece of sky, singing their own particular happiness. The chirping was continuous, and it stopped magically when the sun came up. They aren’t singing anymore? Where did they go? Why did they stop? Do they remember? What goes on in their little brains, in their bird heads? Some repeated the exact same brief melody; the songs of others were linear, a whistle broken only to take a breath. Did they take breaths? Fausta asked herself. If you taught them another tune, would they learn it? It made her want to learn more about their small and gallant humanity.

“It’s the heat that makes them sing,” Salustia informed her. At night, from the branches of the trees, the bevy of grateful songs arose. According to Salustia, it was instinct.

According to Fausta, they traveled in time, remembering what they had sung, and that’s why they did it again with the setting of the sun. They’re human, Fausta thought to herself, and they store their songs in a little dot the size of a mountain climber seen in the distance.

“Their brain is a little dot?” asked Salustia.

“It must be the size of their eyes,” Fausta concluded.

The men went out to the fields to plant, plow, or dig up the cornfields, depending on the season, while Salustia and the other women went to the river with their tubs on their heads to wash clothes. Fausta went with them and watched how they put fleshy maguey leaves under their knees and then folded them up over their skirts to keep from getting wet. After beating the clothes on a rock, they bleached them, all soapy, in the sun. “That’s the only way to get the stains out,” Salustia explained to her. Once the clothes were rinsed, the women wrung them out and hung them from the branches of the tree, on the thatched stone wall, or on the tips of maguey plants.

Salustia would say to the sheets, “Dry! Hurry up and dry!” She would call to the sun, “Where are you? Don’t be lazy; come dry the sheets.”

How had Salustia tolerated the difference between life in the country and the city? To Fausta, the contrast was like a slap across the face. What relationship was there between the metal washer and dryer and the maguey leaves under the women’s knees? What had the Rosales family offered Salustia in exchange for the tall pine trees she had given up?

Fausta adapted to their way of thinking. Why haven’t I always lived this way? she wondered.

At one in the afternoon the women took lunch to the men in the fields. They protected themselves from the sun with their rebozos, the same ones they used to flirt with coming out of mass, the same ones they used to carry their children. It was a lovely hour when the men, women, and children sat in a circle to eat. Some went farther away to lean on a tree trunk and get some shut-eye—the worker’s siesta. Seeing them, thinking about them, gave Fausta an intangible feeling of well-being, like an abstraction, a theorem, a theory.

Salustia, her mother, and her sisters treated Fausta with deference. “Wouldn’t you like some tea, Miss? What would you like in your taco?”

“No, Salustia, I’m fine, better than ever.” If she had accepted, she would have been the only one. Not even the children ate between meals. They worked hard, the same as their elders, and were thrilled when they could accompany their father, who left with his acocote—the long gourd used to extract the juice of the maguey. He would put the sweet water in his bucket with a little rag ball for it to ferment. The children participated in the different stages of making pulque. Later, Don Vicente would cure the pulque with prickly pear, with celery, with guava.

Fausta began to go with the children to deliver the pulque to La Marimba. On the road, the puddles were enormously attractive to the children. They loved throwing stones and seeing the tiny circles that formed in the coffee-colored water or just jumping right in and then suffering through the scolding. “Look what you’ve done to your shoes! You’re not getting anything to eat for that!” They ran to the field to play tixcalahuis while the donkey, loaded down with small barrels of water, walked slowly along. The game consisted of sitting on a maguey leaf with the thorns removed and sliding down the hills, which were covered with pine needles and oak leaves. They hid their leaves when they were done so other children wouldn’t take them. At night, after watering the animals, they did their homework by the light of a petroleum lamp, the smoke stinging their eyes. Then Fausta would tell them stories. Alice in Wonderland came up. It didn’t surprise the children that the animals talked, since they themselves asked the donkey, the cow, the dogs, even the buds that flower in the pasture for answers. Making yourself bigger or smaller at will by ingesting a minuscule cake with raisins wasn’t incomprehensible to them either. Little by little, Modesta, Estela, Chabela, Lucía, Silvestre, Eulogio, Vicente, and Felipe started confiding in her. One of Chabela’s classmates had a boyfriend who took her riding on his horse, and they stopped in front of the classroom. All the jealous ones ran to the window to see it. He was Prince Charming.

When Fausta realized that her savings had diminished, she talked with Salustia about the possibility of working.

“Uy, it’s hard here.” Salustia told her. “There is work for someone like you at the Uriarte’s Talavera factory in Puebla. And they say that there’s a new observatory in Tonantzintla. One of those where you see the stars. They’re looking for secretaries—”

“Observatory?”

“Miss, I see a sparkle in your eyes.”

Fausta picked up her things. They gave her apples and a rebozo, and she hugged everyone and promised to return. Salustia walked her to the road to catch a bus to Puebla and another to Tonantzintla, with its church at the foot of the observatory.

 

 

The neurasthenic director’s bad mood hadn’t mattered to her as he looked at her with aversion from behind his glasses. She knew that in the long run she’d win him over. She had crossed the threshold and was inside the sanctum sanctorum, a few steps from the telescope. “He hates hippies,” Luis Rivera Terrazas, the assistant director, informed her, extending his hand. “Maybe he mistook you for a Mexican hippie. There are a lot of them around here ever since they established the University of the Americas. They have contaminated the peasants, who now wear necklaces and grow their hair long.”

During the first few days, Fausta got a good idea of what Lorenzo Tena’s personality was like. She found out that Rivera Terrazas studied the sunspots, and at five in the afternoon he returned to Puebla, like the two secretaries, Graciela and Guillermina González; the librarian; and Braulio Iriarte and Enrique Chavira, the astronomers. The rhythm at the observatory wasn’t hard to learn, and when she finished helping Guarneros, she could go into the library and read. At night Enrique Chavira allowed her to accompany him to the Schmidt to observe. She even went alone on Saturdays and Sundays because Chavira had shown her how to work all the instruments. “Listen, this girl is as smart as a whip,” Chavira told Terrazas. “She learns faster than I do. At dawn when I close the cupola, she asks disconsolately, ‘So soon?’ Even my wife has been after me about why I’ve been getting home so late. Before, I left at twelve at the latest; now it’s two in the morning, and it’s all because of her. How strange she is. Who could she be?” Without knowing anything about her, they accepted her because her goodwill was obvious.

“She’s as light as a feather,” Tonita commented. “She offered to change the flowers at the church altar for the sexton, and Don Crispin says she hasn’t missed a day.”

The passivity at Tonantzintla was conducive to introspection, and Fausta had time to think about what her life had been so far. Her present life filled her with joy. She had found a room in the town. She loved the tolling of the bells, the transparency of the air, market days, the townspeople, whom she greeted religiously. But there wasn’t anything she loved as much as accompanying Chavira to the Schmidt.

Luis Rivera Terrazas supported her completely. They had shared tea together on several occasions. Once, Lorenzo heard her burst out laughing in the cafeteria. What could she be telling him? he asked himself. She had also made friends with the González sisters.

Rivera Terrazas casually told him, “I took her to Puebla two weeks ago. She needed shoes. You should have seen hers; there were holes in both soles.”

“Did you pick them out for her?” Lorenzo asked sarcastically.

“Almost,” said Luis, smiling. “She really needed very heavy boots. It took her entire salary. You should give her a raise. That girl is a genius. It would be good for her to take classes at the University of Puebla. Although they’ve never heard the word Marxism there, and from what I’ve seen, she’s read Marx.”