IT WAS A SLOW PROCESS. At first I behaved as if nothing had happened. After all, it could have been an error, there were a thousand explanations. I finished clearing out my father’s house. I hired a van to transport the double bed and a few other things to my apartment. I called Garmendia and, two days later, gave him the keys to the house in Educación—all three extant sets.
One weekend I took a cab to my sister’s, bringing with me the photographs I wanted to give her. Katia, her wife, laughed at the shots, but Mariana wasn’t really amused. I also attempted to give her half the sum Rat had paid for the furniture, but she insisted I keep it: I’d need it more than she did now that I’d packed in my job.
In a matter of weeks, the house was sold: apparently Educación has become a trendy area, with most of the residents working in the business and retail zones of Coapa.
Throughout the following five months, I got on with my life as if nothing had happened. It could even be said that things improved, at least on the surface. I bought this apartment and moved in. Not having to pay rent was a great weight off my mind: I became a more cheerful person. I found a job in a company that produced educational diagnostic tests that was more lucrative than the Spanish classes. Each weekday morning, I put on a shirt I’d sent to be dry-cleaned and took the Metrobus to the modern building where I worked. I’d spend the day revising the grammar of questions for examinations in such diverse fields as mechatronic engineering and international law. The benefits were very good for such a simple task. I had paid vacation, health insurance, and a performance-related bonus if I checked more exam questions than my colleagues, which wasn’t difficult because most people did very little work.
Mariana and I sometimes talked on the phone, and during the week we’d send text messages about trivia or to communicate the highlights of our daily lives.
During those months I also met a really nice woman, and we started dating. The fact that we worked near each other made it easier for us to meet. We went to the movie theater in the shopping mall or ate salads together at lunchtime. She was kind and seemed genuinely interested in me, an attitude I found—and still find—incomprehensible. She had a tinkling laugh, wide hips, and her left eye was slightly narrower than her right.
But I wasn’t made for that life. It was as though I’d woken in someone else’s body and was temporarily acting as a stand-in for that person.
I never mentioned the red folder to Mariana. I didn’t tell her about the second letter or Teresa’s plan to bring her to Chiapas to live with her. And of course, I didn’t mention the death certificate, didn’t mention the fissures that had opened up in the story my father had told us for years—the story we’d believed to be true, and from which our adult lives had ramified, like the veins from the midribs of my childhood leaves.
I kept the letter and the certificate in my own folder of important documents, which is green rather than red. A folder that I now keep under this bed, along with the elementary school notebooks and my passport.
I don’t now remember what I was thinking about during those months. Nothing, I guess. I concentrated on functioning, on imagining a perfect future. My dry-cleaned shirts smelled the same as my father’s used to, but I pretended not to notice.
One Sunday afternoon I took out the folder and contemplated it for a while. I extracted the contents and scattered the papers on top of my unmade bed. I didn’t have the courage to read Teresa’s letters again. The death certificate was folded in half, and I couldn’t bring myself to open that either. I put everything back and returned the folder to its place under the bed.
That Sunday night I was unable to sleep. I wanted to force myself to cry, the way you make yourself vomit by sticking your fingers down your throat. I wanted my father to be alive so I could ask him what the hell had gone on in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in that small apartment where Teresa had chosen to remake her life. Ask him just exactly what had happened between September 23 and 25, 1994, while Mariana and I watched TV, while I vomited, had diarrhea, and drank cup after cup of chamomile tea, devastated by the news of Teresa’s death.
But no one could respond to those questions then—no one can now. It’s possible that the answer to them all has been forming in my subconscious during the past two years.
Maybe my father wanted me to find the answer alone, wanted the horror of that answer to grow inside me at its own pace, like a carnivorous plant that initially looks like clover and gradually reveals its true nature.
The following day I didn’t go to the educational diagnostic test company. I was tired and upset, lacked the energy to continue pretending that everything was fine. The woman I was dating sent me four text messages, but I didn’t reply to any of them. I convinced myself that I was ill, despite having no other symptom than a slight headache, probably due to a bad night’s sleep.
On Tuesday, I returned to the office wearing my freshly laundered shirt. I found the Metrobus journey very difficult, but thought that once I got to work everything would be fine, that it was just a brief crisis. I told my boss that I was feeling better and said the usual good mornings to my colleagues. It occurred to me that I could perhaps make use of my untouched health insurance to consult a psychiatrist, a professional who would explain that what was happening to me was normal, a sort of delayed-action grief. I’d be prescribed something to help me sleep and that would be that.
But at one in the afternoon, just before the lunch break, I went to the restroom, shut the door, and stayed there for several minutes, feeling that I was about to scream or punch someone in the face. I left a message for my boss with his secretary and took a cab home. I never went back to that job. The people from human resources wrote repeatedly, asking what I wanted done with the things I’d left in my cubicle, but I never replied. I guess they must have thrown them out.
At first I used to go for short walks around the neighborhood, but as the days passed I spent increasing amounts of time in the apartment. I stopped taking showers, put on four or five pounds, began to order delivery meals—Hawaiian pizza. On Fridays, when Josefina came, I’d pretend to be working at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t ask too many questions. But apart from those few hours, I was almost always in bed. Lying on the left side: Teresa’s side.
After a couple of weeks, the woman I’d been dating began to show signs of annoyance. I told her I was ill, but when she offered to come by to see me, I stopped answering her messages. She continued calling but I didn’t pick up. My ring tone was the chirping of crickets, so it didn’t bother me.
One Saturday night she sent me a text saying that she was downstairs, at the entrance to the building. I let her in for fear she’d try to locate the caretaker or call the police. She was clearly concerned.
We had an awkward conversation, with her sitting on the edge of my bed, and me with the blankets pulled up to my chin. She asked if I still wanted to go on seeing her, I said I didn’t, but I spoke the words very quietly and don’t think she caught them; she asked me what I’d said. I didn’t have the guts to repeat myself: I told her that I was going through a rough patch, but would be better soon and would get in touch then. Her tone was cold when she said good-bye (I don’t blame her: I’d behaved like an asshole).
With Mariana, I managed to keep up the charade for longer. I used to answer her texts almost immediately; told her that I was happy with my new job and new girlfriend. In any case, she was always busy and rarely asked questions. But Josefina, who cleans Mariana’s apartment on Tuesdays, told her that I was always at home, in pajamas, doing nothing. When my sister phoned to ask me about this, I invented a story, said that my hours had been cut and that I now had Fridays free, but something in her voice gave me the impression that she didn’t believe me. A few days afterward, I told her I’d been fired. She asked if I was looking for work and my reply was, “not for the time being,” putting an end to the issue.
For the most part of the last two years, my life has been confined to this bed. I sometimes sit up, resting my back against the wall, and look through the window at the only view: the office building across the street.
In the beginning I used to think about Teresa a lot: I was trying to recall as clearly as possible the unvarying tone of her voice, the color of her hair, the way she smoked, leaning against the wall of the house in Educación. But the truth is that I only lived with Teresa during the first ten years of my life, so I don’t have many memories of her. I’ve set down here the three or four that are clearest (Teresa fainting on the edge of the market, Teresa walking behind me as I chased pigeons, Teresa arguing with my father, Teresa going camping one Tuesday at midday) in order to fix them in some way, to see if my memory finally stops distorting them, and the replica of the replica of the replica halts its slow but certain decay.
The image of my father, by contrast, has more points of reference: two more decades of meetings, silences, and meals eaten together. The memory of him in 1994 is frequently superimposed by the memory of my ailing father, sedated in his hospital bed, a morphine-induced smile on his face. I occasionally manage to forget that he’s dead, and I imagine him sitting in an armchair in the living room, shouting at a rerun of a soccer game. In my imagination, I’m sitting beside him, but instead of looking at the TV set, I’m carefully observing each of his features—searching for myself in them, terrified by the acceptance that they are also mine.
One part of me knows that I can’t stay in this bed forever. Lately I’ve been thinking of making drastic changes. Perhaps I’ll go to San Cristóbal de las Casas. Or better still, I’ll take a bus to Villahermosa, where I can start a new life, with another name (Úlrich González, for example). The new life of someone who had no father, no mother, who didn’t kick a pigeon in a square in Mexico City or lose anything in September 1994.
Perhaps, before boarding the bus, I’ll take a walk through the area around the Taxqueña terminal, the streets of Colonia Educación, attempting to understand the nuances of the unspeakable answer that has been growing inside me, devouring me. Perhaps, before changing my name, I’ll also walk to the cemetery where I buried my father, to scream at him in a way I was never capable of screaming when he was alive—the way my sister and my mother used to scream at him when he was still a part of their lives. But before doing anything, before thinking about getting out of bed, before finally becoming the person I always should have been, I’d like to finish writing this.