“A joker put red coloring in the office water cooler, naturally interrupting our duties. I had to report him to the director, who simply thought it was funny. So all day the bastard’s been going around making fun of me, with cracks about water. Motherfu…”
“Today, Sunday, I had time to go out to La Lagunilla. I found the Chac-Mool in the cheap little shop Pepe had told me about. It’s a marvelous piece, life-size, and though the dealer assures me it’s an original, I question it. The stone is nothing out of the ordinary, but that doesn’t diminish the elegance of the composition, or its massiveness. The rascal has smeared tomato ketchup on the belly to convince the tourists of its bloody authenticity.
“Moving the piece to my house cost more than the purchase price. But it’s here now, temporarily in the cellar while I reorganize my collection to make room for it. These figures demand a vertical and burning-hot sun; that was their natural element. The effect is lost in the darkness of the cellar, where it’s simply another lifeless mass and its grimace seems to reproach me for denying it light. The dealer had a spotlight focused directly on the sculpture, highlighting all the planes and lending a more amiable expression to my Chac-Mool. I must follow his example.”
* * *
“I awoke to find the pipes had burst. Somehow, I’d carelessly left the water running in the kitchen; it flooded the floor and poured into the cellar before I’d noticed it. The dampness didn’t damage the Chac-Mool, but my suitcases suffered; everything has to happen on a weekday. I was late to work.”
* * *
“At last they came to fix the plumbing. Suitcases ruined. There’s slime on the base of the Chac-Mool.”
* * *
“I awakened at one; I’d heard a terrible moan. I thought it might be burglars. Purely imaginary.”
* * *
“The moaning at night continues. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it makes me nervous. To top it all off, the pipes burst again, and the rains have seeped through the foundation and flooded the cellar.”
* * *
“Plumber still hasn’t come; I’m desperate. As far as the City Water Department’s concerned, the less said the better. This is the first time the runoff from the rains has drained into my cellar instead of the storm sewers. The moaning’s stopped. An even trade?”
* * *
“They pumped out the cellar. The Chac-Mool is covered with slime. It makes him look grotesque; the whole sculpture seems to be suffering from a kind of green erysipelas, with the exception of the eyes. I’ll scrape off the moss Sunday. Pepe suggested I move to an apartment on an upper floor, to prevent any more of these aquatic tragedies. But I can’t leave my house; it’s obviously more than I need, a little gloomy in its turn-of-the-century style, but it’s the only inheritance, the only memory, I have left of my parents. I don’t know how I’d feel if I saw a soda fountain with a jukebox in the cellar and an interior decorator’s shop on the ground floor.”
* * *
“Used a trowel to scrape the Chac-Mool. The moss now seemed almost a part of the stone; it took more than an hour and it was six in the evening before I finished. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I ran my hand over the outlines of the stone. With every stroke, the stone seemed to become softer. I couldn’t believe it; it felt like dough. That dealer in La Lagunilla has really swindled me. His ‘pre-Columbian sculpture’ is nothing but plaster, and the dampness is ruining it. I’ve covered it with some rags and will bring it upstairs tomorrow before it dissolves completely.”
* * *
“The rags are on the floor. Incredible. Again I felt the Chac-Mool. It’s firm, but not stone. I don’t want to write this: the texture of the torso feels a little like flesh; I press it like rubber, and feel something coursing through that recumbent figure … I went down again later at night. No doubt about it: the Chac-Mool has hair on its arms.”
* * *
“This kind of thing has never happened to me before. I fouled up my work in the office: I sent out a payment that hadn’t been authorized, and the director had to call it to my attention. I think I may even have been rude to my coworkers. I’m going to have to see a doctor, find out whether it’s my imagination, whether I’m delirious, or what … and get rid of that damned Chac-Mool.”
* * *
Up to this point I recognized Filiberto’s hand, the large, rounded letters I’d seen on so many memoranda and forms. The entry for August 25 seemed to have been written by a different person. At times it was the writing of a child, each letter laboriously separated; other times, nervous, trailing into illegibility. Three days are blank, and then the narrative continues:
* * *
“It’s all so natural, though normally we believe only in what’s real … but this is real, more real than anything I’ve ever known. A water cooler is real, more than real, because we fully realize its existence, or being, when some joker puts something in the water to turn it red … An ephemeral smoke ring is real, a grotesque image in a funhouse mirror is real; aren’t all deaths, present and forgotten, real…? If a man passes through paradise in a dream, and is handed a flower as proof of having been there, and if when he awakens he finds this flower in his hand … then…? Reality: one day it was shattered into a thousand pieces, its head rolled in one direction and its tail in another, and all we have is one of the pieces from the gigantic body. A free and fictitious ocean, real only when it is imprisoned in a seashell. Until three days ago, my reality was of such a degree it would be erased today; it was reflex action, routine, memory, carapace. And then, like the earth that one day trembles to remind us of its power, of the death to come, recriminating against me for having turned my back on life, an orphaned reality we always knew was there presents itself, jolting us in order to become living present. Again I believed it to be imagination: the Chac-Mool, soft and elegant, had changed color overnight; yellow, almost golden, it seemed to suggest it was a god, at ease now, the knees more relaxed than before, the smile more benevolent. And yesterday, finally, I awakened with a start, with the frightening certainty that two creatures are breathing in the night, that in the darkness there beats a pulse in addition to one’s own. Yes, I heard footsteps on the stairway. Nightmare. Go back to sleep. I don’t know how long I feigned sleep. When I opened my eyes again, it still was not dawn. The room smelled of horror, of incense and blood. In the darkness, I gazed about the bedroom until my eyes found two points of flickering, cruel yellow light.
“Scarcely breathing, I turned on the light. There was the Chac-Mool, standing erect, smiling, ocher-colored except for the flesh-red belly. I was paralyzed by the two tiny, almost crossed eyes set close to the wedge-shaped nose. The lower teeth closed tightly on the upper lip; only the glimmer from the squarish helmet on the abnormally large head betrayed any sign of life. Chac-Mool moved toward my bed; then it began to rain.”
* * *
I remember that it was at the end of August that Filiberto had been fired from his job, with a public condemnation by the director, amid rumors of madness and even theft. I didn’t believe it. I did see some wild memoranda, one asking the Secretary of the Department whether water had an odor; another, offering his services to the Department of Water Resources to make it rain in the desert. I couldn’t explain it. I thought the exceptionally heavy rains of that summer had affected him. Or that living in that ancient mansion with half the rooms locked and thick with dust, without any servants or family life, had finally deranged him. The following entries are for the end of September.
* * *
“Chac-Mool can be pleasant enough when he wishes … the gurgling of enchanted water … He knows wonderful stories about the monsoons, the equatorial rains, the scourge of the deserts; the genealogy of every plant engendered by his mythic paternity: the willow, his wayward daughter; the lotus, his favorite child; the cactus, his mother-in-law. What I can’t bear is the odor, the nonhuman odor, emanating from flesh that isn’t flesh, from sandals that shriek their antiquity. Laughing stridently, the Chac-Mool recounts how he was discovered by Le Plongeon and brought into physical contact with men of other gods. His spirit had survived quite peacefully in water vessels and storms; his stone was another matter, and to have dragged him from his hiding place was unnatural and cruel. I think the Chac-Mool will never forgive that. He savors the imminence of the aesthetic.