THE SUN WAS WELL UP IN THE SKY when the driver made a stop and explained that we had fifteen minutes to purchase provisions and use the restrooms. The fact that we took this break made me think that it was still a long way to Villahermosa, but, guessing my concern or reading it in my face, Mariconchi assured me that we were nearly there, with at most two hours to go.
My spirits had flagged after the episode at the military checkpoint—I still wasn’t completely sure it had actually happened. In the light of day, I was convinced that my journey made no sense. I’d never find Teresa. First, because I didn’t know where she was; my plan to search for the man with the pipe and balaclava until I discovered her too—there, in the warzone of the Chiapas jungle—began to seem embarrassingly naive. I was hungry, I wanted to change my clothes and leave behind the smell of piss.
Mariconchi asked me if I had enough to buy something for breakfast, and I extracted from my pocket what little remained of the money Rat had given me. “You hold on to that, sweetie. This is on me. After all, we’re old friends now,” she said, and it gave me a tremendous sense of peace to corroborate that my perception of time was shared: we’d just passed through the longest night in history. Even the military checkpoint (the chemical smell on the soldier’s breath, the echo of his laugh) felt like a distant memory, like something that had happened during the previous school year—an old story everyone already knew and no longer mentioned.
While Mariconchi was standing in line to buy food, I went to the restroom and locked myself in one of the stalls. The toilet was blocked and there was shit-stained paper on the floor. Being very careful not to touch anything, I took off my pants and then my briefs. The moment I threw the briefs into a corner of the stall, I remembered that they had a name tag: a name tag Teresa had sewn onto the inside of the waistband. I considered retrieving them, taking them with me. It would be a mistake to leave a clue to my identity in that stall. As my life appeared to have become a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it was time I started thinking like one of the heroes of those stories.
On the other hand, the briefs were revolting, and I was ashamed of them. The urine had dried, marking out strange continents on the white fabric. A compromise solution occurred to me: I picked up the briefs, pulled off the name tag, and put it in my pocket. Then I threw them back down among the filth. I left the stall and washed my hands with the satisfaction of knowing that I’d acted wisely. I’d covered my tracks. No one would be able to trace me. True, my pants were still a little stiff and smelled of dry piss, but I felt freer. I had neither briefs bearing my full name nor a definite destination. I had no home, no family, no friends. The distinction between vacations and school had lost its meaning. I could have started afresh at that point, changed my identity and persuaded Mariconchi to adopt me: her hugs were warm and she used terms of affection that would have been impossible to imagine on Teresa’s lips. I could have invented a new life for myself, made to the measure of my desires and frustrations. A life in Villahermosa, Tabasco State, in the humidity and tropical sunlight.
If I’d been able to choose a name for my new self, I wouldn’t have had to give it a second thought: Úlrich González. That was the name of a boy who had turned up in Paideia in the middle of the academic year only to then disappear, just as unexpectedly, two weeks later. Úlrich was pale and sickly. The rumor was that his parents traveled a lot. No one at school had managed to become either a friend or rival of Úlrich González, and everyone seemed to forget his existence the moment he stopped coming to class, but his name remained on the register for several months, and some absentminded teachers would read it out as if he were still one of us. That repetition had caused the mysterious appellation to be etched deeply in my memory, and I even sometimes repeated it to myself quietly as a sort of invocation: “Úlrich González, Úlrich González.”
If I took on that new identity, if I became Úlrich González of Villahermosa, I’d do things differently. To start with, I’d try to play soccer properly, take more interest in sports, be one of the group of students everyone wanted to be friends with, the celebrities of my school. In the afternoons, I’d return home smiling and excited, bursting with stories to tell my adoptive mother, Mariconchi. Úlrich González would be the most popular boy in Villahermosa, perhaps even in the whole of Tabasco State. I’d finally have a girlfriend, and it would be to her alone, in a moment of blind passion following our first kiss, that I would reveal the truth about my past: that I wasn’t Úlrich, that I’d assumed that name at the age of ten in the shit-strewn restroom of a service station, after running away from my home in Colonia Educación, Mexico City, on a secret mission to rescue my mother, who was trapped in a cruel, bloody war that she had joined from pure, unadulterated heroism. My girlfriend would gaze at me incredulously for a few seconds, but then she’d put her arms around my neck and say that she’d always known, or suspected it; said that beneath the personality of the likeable, sporty Úlrich González of Villahermosa lay a dark, indecipherable secret that had captivated her from the instant we’d met.
Mariconchi’s voice broke into my daydreams: “Here you are. I don’t know if you like spicy food, but I bought you a tamal with green chili sauce.” I didn’t in those days eat spicy food, couldn’t stand it, and disliked the color green. At mealtimes, Teresa always used to say that adding sauce to food was a bad habit as it masked the taste of everything else. It was, fundamentally, another of the ways she drew a line between herself and my father, who used to smother any dish from eggs to rice in industrial quantities of habanero chili sauce. I, of course, used that disagreement to take Teresa’s side, the side I always took. But maybe Úlrich González could stand or even positively liked spicy food, and that was a good moment to start to behave the way Úlrich would. “Thanks,” I said, and tried to grasp Mariconchi’s hand, but she drew it away as if she was beginning to weary of taking responsibility for me, or was frightened by that unexpected familiarity.
Her snub didn’t really bother me. Quite the reverse: the fact that my traveling companion was displaying a degree of hostility made her much more interesting. Suddenly Mariconchi had ceased to be the soft-hearted, chatty mother who goes around calling everyone “sweetie” and had become a woman of moods and nuances, a brave woman—like my mother, like Mariana—who had challenged the irrational violence of the adolescent soldier in order to care for a strange child, some unknown Úlrich.
We boarded the bus again and took our seats. The shawl Mariconchi had lent me at the checkpoint lay screwed up in a ball on my seat, like a reminder that everything that had occurred at the checkpoint had been real, not a nightmare.
We ate our tamales in silence, picking away at them with plastic forks and scattering crumbs around us. I found it almost impossible to eat the chili. It felt as if my tongue were being scalded, but in some way that self-inflicted pain seemed purifying, redemptive, soothing. My nose was streaming and I began to hyperventilate. Mariconchi seemed to be aware of my distress but said nothing. I noticed that she was even making a conscious effort not to look at me, to stare across the aisle at the obese couple on the other side who had bought enormous quantities of snacks, cookies, and sodas.
The bus advanced more rapidly, as if the sun and the imminence of our arrival had raised its spirits. The reality of my situation began to hem me in on all sides: it wasn’t now viable to change my identity: Mariconchi wouldn’t accept me into her life as Úlrich González, and I would never have a good, empathetic girlfriend in Villahermosa, Tabasco State.
And I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to continue my journey to Chiapas. The episode with the soldiers had changed everything. The adult world was more brutal and terrifying than I’d supposed in Taxqueña, before embarking on the most perilous adventure of my short life. If I continued to Chiapas, new checkpoints would await me, new humiliations. I was unready for any of that. Deceived by a rather portable conception of Mexican geography, I’d undertaken that journey without the necessary preparations. I hadn’t even brought my backpack. I hadn’t even brought my Choose Your Own Adventure book or my water bottle.
“Your mom’s not going to be there to meet you in Chiapas, is she?” asked Mariconchi out of the blue when she’d finished her tamal. It was a rhetorical question: she knew I’d lied to her. Mothers know these things. I shook my head in shame. “Have you run away from home?” she asked in the same wary tone. I said I had. I tried to explain that my mom was in fact in Chiapas, but Mariconchi gestured me to be silent. She stared again at the obese couple on the other side of the aisle, weighing up her options. Finally she came to a conclusion: “When we get to Villahermosa we’re going to talk to your mommy and daddy, sweetie. Let’s see if they can come to collect you.”
I imagined the scolding my father would give me: he’d look grave, attempt to reason with me, speak very slowly and clearly, explain the risks I’d run in going off like that. But the longer he spoke, the more fired up he’d get; he always did. From explaining, he’d quickly progress to shouting. The patient, carefully thought-out language would warp into an explosion of uncontrolled emotion. I knew his tones of voice well, the registers of his language. They were mine too: I was also incapable of having a sensible discussion (as Teresa had been able to, as Mariana still can). I couldn’t at that time—and still can’t—tolerate someone thinking differently to me or doing something that annoys me. I’d get steamed up, lose my grip. So my father’s shouting didn’t alarm me: it was my shouting, and it was also my unstable, explosive irrationality.
If Teresa had been at home, I’d have been much more scared of the payback. She’d have taken her time, carefully chosen the words that would most profoundly shake me: “I’m disappointed in you,” or “I’m very sad to see that you can’t be left alone, even for a moment.” Devastating words that always went straight to the mark, that would wash away my fragile construction of pretexts like a wave that reduces the most complex sandcastles to nothing. Would I ever achieve that level of precision in my own use of words, that ninja state of language Teresa used to brandish before us, her children, like a light, finely honed sword?
Maybe Teresa had in fact returned home that very night, while I was wetting my pants on the bus, I thought. Such magical coincidences were always occurring in the books I read: a child who rescues his best friend from a cave at the precise instant that the roof is about to collapse on top of him; the prince who, after years away at war, arrives at his father’s deathbed at the very moment he’s uttering his last words.
I allowed that fantasy free rein: if Teresa had returned, there would be no scolding or “I’m disappointed in you”—it would be a long, long hug. My mom’s voice would finally sound affectionate, it would quiver with emotion, and then I’d excitedly show her the progress I’d made in the Japanese art of origami; I’d tell her about Mariconchi, and how I’d courageously protected that frightened woman from the bullying and humiliation of the soldiers on a godforsaken highway in the middle of the night. And Teresa would listen to my stories as never before: with genuine interest, with the respect of someone listening to an equal.
My father, in the meantime, would be serving us lemonade like a diligent butler; or he’d be watching TV, absorbed like the infant he really was, and I’d finally be the adult male in the household: I’d move into Teresa’s bedroom despite Mariana’s irate protests, despite the protests of my father and the man with the pipe and balaclava.