Burnt Water (3 page)

*   *   *

Sept. 20. In this house I feel very far removed from the “parasitical ills” of Mexico City. For less than twenty-four hours I've been inside these walls that emanate a sensitivity, a flow, suggestive of other shores. I've been invaded by a kind of lucid languor, a sense of imminence; with every moment I become increasingly aware of certain perfumes peculiar to my surroundings, certain silhouettes from a memory that formerly was revealed in brief flashes but today swells and flows with the measured vitality of a river. Amid the rivets and bolts of the city, when have I noticed the change of season? We don't notice the season in Mexico City: one fades into another with no change of pace, “the immortal springtime, and its tokens.” Here the seasons lose their characteristic reiterated novelty of parameters with rhythms, rites, and pleasures of their own, of boundaries about which we entwine our nostalgia and our projects, of signs that nurture and solidify consciousness. Tomorrow is the equinox. Today, in this place, I have with a kind of Nordic indolence noted, not for the first time, the approach of autumn. A gray veil is descending over the garden, which I am observing as I write; overnight, a few leaves have fallen from the arbor, carpeting the lawn; a few leaves are beginning to turn golden, and an incessant rain is fading the greenness, washing it into the soil. The smoke of autumn hovers over the garden, as far as the walls, and one could almost believe one heard, heavy as deep breathing, the sound of slow footsteps among the fallen leaves.

*   *   *

Sept. 21. I finally succeeded in opening the French doors in the library. I went out into the garden. The fine rain continues, imperceptible and tenacious. If in the house I seemed to caress the skin of a different world, in the garden I touched its nerves. In the garden those silhouettes of memory, of imminence, that I noticed yesterday make my nerves tingle. The everlastings are not the flowers I know: these are permeated with a mournful perfume, as if they had been gathered from a crypt after years among dust and marble. The very rain stirs colorings in the grass I want to identify with other cities, other windows; standing in the center of the garden, I closed my eyes … Javanese tobacco and wet sidewalks … herring … beer fumes, the haze of forests, the trunks of great oaks … Turning in a circle, I tried to absorb the totality of this quadrangle of vague light that even in the rain seems to filter through yellow stained glass, to glimmer in braziers, made melancholy before it became light … and the verdant growth of the vines was not that of the burnt earth of the plateau; this was a different, soft, green shading into blue in the distant treetops, covering rocks with grotesque slime … Memling! Between the eyes of a Virgin and reflections of copper, I had seen this same landscape from one of your windows! I was looking at a fictitious, an invented landscape. This garden was not in Mexico! This misty rain … I ran into the house, raced down the hallway, burst into the salon, and pressed my nose to the window: on the Avenida Puente de Alvarado, a blast of jukeboxes, streetcars, and sun, the monotonous sun. A Sun God without shading or effigies in its rays, a stationary Sun Stone, a sun of shortened centuries. I returned to the library: the rain still fell on the old, hooded garden.

*   *   *

Sept. 21. I've been standing here, my breath misting the door panes, gazing out at the garden and the reflection of my blue eyes. Hours perhaps, staring at the small, enclosed space, fingering my beard absentmindedly. Staring at a lawn that minute by minute is buried beneath new leaves. Then I heard a muted sound, a buzzing that might have come from within me, and I looked up. In the garden, almost opposite mine, another head, slightly tilted, its eyes staring into mine. Instinctively, I leaped back. The face in the garden never varied its gaze, impenetrable in the deep shadows beneath its brows. The figure turned away; I saw only a small body, black and hunched, and I covered my eyes with my hands.

*   *   *

Sept. 22. There's no telephone in the house, but I could go out on the Avenida, call up some friends, go to the Roxy … After all, this is my city; these are my people! Why can't I leave this house; more accurately, my post at the doors looking onto the garden?

*   *   *

Sept. 22. I am not going to be frightened because someone leaped over the wall into the garden. I'm going to wait all evening—it continues to rain, day and night!—and capture the intruder … I was dozing in the armchair facing the window when I was awakened by the intense scent of the everlastings. Unhesitatingly, I stared into the garden—yes, there. Picking the flowers, the small yellow hands forming a nosegay. It was a little old woman, she must have been at least eighty. But how had she dared intrude? And how had she got in? I watched as she picked the flowers: wizened, slim, clad all in black. Her skirts brushed the ground, collecting dew and clover; the cloth sagged with the weight, an airy weight, a Caravaggio texture. Her black jacket was buttoned to the chin, her torso was bent over, hunched against the cold. Her face was shadowed by a black lace coif which covered tangled white hair.

I could see nothing but her bloodless lips, the paleness of her flesh repeated in the firm line of a mouth arched slightly in the faintest, saddest, eternal smile devoid of any motivation. She looked up; her eyes were not eyes … what seemed to emerge from beneath the wrinkled lids was a pathway, a nocturnal landscape, leading toward an infinite inward journey. This ancient woman bent down to pluck a red bud; in profile, her hawk-like features, her sunken cheeks, reflected like the vibrating planes of the reaper's scythe. Then she walked away toward…? No, I won't say she walked through the vines and the wall, that she evaporated, that she sank into the ground or ascended into the sky; a path seemed to open in the garden, so natural that at first I didn't notice it, and along it as if—I knew it, I'd heard it before—as if treading a course long-forgotten, heavy as deep breathing, my visitor disappeared beneath the rain.

*   *   *

Sept. 23. I locked myself in the bedroom and barricaded the door with everything I could lay my hands on. I was sure it would do no good, but I thought I could at least give myself the illusion of being able to sleep with tranquillity. Those measured footsteps, always as if on dry leaves; I thought I heard them every moment. I knew they weren't real, that is, until I heard the faintest rustle outside the door, and then the whisper of something passed beneath the door. I turned on the light; the corner of an envelope was outlined against the velvety floor. For a moment I held its contents in my hand: old paper, elegant, rosewood.

Written in a spidery hand, large, erect letters, the message consisted of one word:

T
LACTOCATZINE

Sept. 23. She will come, as she did yesterday and the day before, at sunset. I will speak to her today; she can't escape me, I will follow her through the hidden entry among the vines …

*   *   *

Sept. 23. As the clock was striking six, I heard music in the salon; it was the magnificent old Pleyel, playing waltzes. As I approached, the sound ceased. I turned back to the library. She was in the garden. Now she was skipping about, pantomiming … a little girl playing with her hoop. I opened the door, went out, I don't know exactly what happened; I felt as if the sky, as if the very air descended one level to press down on the garden; the air became motionless, fathomless, and all sound was suspended. The old woman stared at me, always with the same smile, her eyes lost in the depths of the world; her mouth opened, her lips moved; no sound emanated from that pale slit, the garden was squeezed like a sponge, the cold buried its fingers in my flesh …

*   *   *

Sept. 24. After the apparition at dusk, I came to my senses sitting in the armchair in the library; the French doors were locked, the garden solitary. The odor of the everlastings has permeated the house; it is particularly intense in my bedroom. There I awaited a new missive, a new sign from the aged woman. Her words, the flesh of silence, were struggling to tell me something … At eleven that evening I could sense beside me the dull light of the garden. Again the whisper of the long, starched skirts outside my door; and the letter:

My beloved

The moon has risen and I hear it singing; everything is indescribably beautiful.

I dressed and went downstairs to the library; a veil-become-light enveloped the old woman, who was sitting on the garden bench. I walked toward her, again amid the buzzing of bumblebees. The same air, void of any sound, enveloped her. Her white light ruffled my hair, and the aged woman took my hands and kissed them; her skin pressed against mine. I
saw
this; my eyes told me what touch would not corroborate: her hands in mine were nothing but wind—heavy, cold wind; I intuited the opaque ice in the skeleton of this kneeling figure whose lips moved in a litany of forbidden rhythms. The everlastings trembled, solitary, independent of the wind. They smelled of the grave. Yes, they grew there, in the tomb: there they germinated, there they were carried every evening in the spectral hands of an ancient woman … and sound returned, amplified by the rain, and a coagulated voice, an echo of spilled blood copulating still with the earth, screamed:

“Kapuzinergruft! Kapuzinergruft!”

I jerked free from her hands and ran to the front door of the mansion—even there I heard the mad sound of her voice, the drowned dead echoing in the cavernous throat—and I sank to the floor trembling, clutching the doorknob, drained of the strength to turn it.

I couldn't; it was impossible to open.

It is sealed with a thick red lacquer. In the center, a coat of arms glimmers in the night, a crowned double eagle, the old woman's profile, signaling the icy intensity of permanent confinement.

And that night I heard behind me—I did not know I was to hear it for all time—the whisper of skirts brushing the floor; she walks with a new, ecstatic joy; her gestures are repetitious, betraying her satisfaction. The satisfaction of a jailer, of a companion, of eternal prison. The satisfaction of solitude shared. I heard her voice again, drawing near, her lips touching my ear, the breath fabricated of spume and buried earth:

“… and they didn't let us play with our hoops, Max; they forbade us; we had to carry them in our hands during our walks through the gardens in Brussels … but I told you that in a letter, the letter I wrote from Bouchot, do you remember? Oh, but from now on, no more letters, we'll be together forever, the two of us in this castle … We will never leave; we will never allow anyone to enter … Oh, Max, answer me, the everlastings, the ones I bring in the evenings to the Capuchin crypt, to the Kapuzinergruft, don't they smell fresh? They're the same flowers the Indians brought you when we arrived here: you, the Tlactocatzine …
Nis tiquimopielia inin maxochtzintl
 … Remember? Lord, we offer you these flowers…”

And on the coat of arms I read the inscription:

Charlotte, Kaiserin von Mexiko

Mother's Day

For Teodoro Cesarman

Every morning Grandfather vigorously stirs his cup of instant coffee. He grasps the spoon as in other times my dear-departed grandmother Clotilde had grasped the pestle, or he himself, General Vicente Vergara, had grasped the pommel of the saddle now hanging on his bedroom wall. Then he uncorks the bottle of tequila and tilts it to fill half the cup. He refrains from mixing the tequila and the Nescafé. Let the clear alcohol settle by itself. He looks at the bottle of tequila and it reminds him how red was the spilled blood, how clear the liquor that set the blood boiling, inflaming it before the great encounters, Chihuahua and Torreón, Celaya and Paso de Gavilanes, when men were men and there was no way to distinguish between the exhilaration of drunkenness and the recklessness of combat, sí, señor, how could fear creep in when a man's pleasure was battle and the battle was his pleasure?

He almost spoke aloud, between sips of the spiked coffee. Nobody knew how to make a
café de olla
any more, the little jug of coffee tasting of clay and brown sugar, no, nobody, not even the pair of servants he'd brought from the sugar plantation in Morelos. Even they drank Nescafé, invented in Switzerland, the cleanest and most orderly nation in the world. General Vergara had a vision of snowcapped mountains and belled cows, but he said nothing, his false teeth still lay at the bottom of the glass before him. This was his favorite hour: peace, daydreams, memories, fantasies, and no one to gainsay them. Strange, he sighed, that he'd lived such a full life and now memory should come back to him like a sweet lie. He sat and thought about the years of the Revolution and the battles that had forged modern Mexico. Then he spit out the mouthful of liquid he'd been swishing between his lizard tongue and his toughened gums.

*   *   *

Later that morning I saw my grandfather in the distance, shuffling along in his carpet slippers as he always did, down the marble halls, wiping with a large kerchief the bleariness and involuntary tears from his cactus-colored eyes. Seeing him from that distance, almost motionless, I thought he looked like a desert plant. Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains in its entrails from one summer to the next, fermenting them: moisture seeped from his eyes but never reached the white tufts on his head, wisps of dried corn silk. In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall. As he scuffed along, purposeless and old, through the marble rooms of the huge house in Pedregal, he looked tiny, lean, pure bone, the skin clinging desperately to his skeleton, a taut, creaky little old man. But not bowed, no sir, I'd like to see the man who dared …

Once again I was beset by the same uneasiness I felt every morning, the anguish of a cornered rat, the feeling that seized me every time I saw General Vergara purposelessly wandering the rooms and halls and corridors that Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed on their knees, rooms that at this hour of the morning smelled of soapy scrub brushes. The servants refused to use electric appliances. They said no with great humility and dignity, in the hope that it would be noticed. Grandfather thought they were right; he loved the smell of soapy scrub brushes, and that's why, every morning, Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed meters and meters of Zacatecan marble, Mexican marble, even if the honorable Agustín Vergara, my father, did say, with his finger to his lips, that it had been imported from Carrara—don't tell anyone, it's against the law, they'll hit me with an ad valorem, you can't even give a decent party any more, if you do, you end up on the society page and then you pay for it, nowadays a man has to live the austere life, even feel ashamed to have worked hard all his life to give his family the things …