Some say, isn’t Doña Manuelita the most peaceful person you’ve ever known? What makes people say bad things about her? Old, and all alone, she never does anything out of the ordinary, never calls attention to herself. The flowerpots in the morning, the bird cages in the evening. About nine, she goes out to do her shopping at La Merced market, and on the way back she stops in the big square of the Zócalo and goes into the Cathedral to pray for a while. Then she comes back to the old palace, a tenement now, and fixes her meal. Fried beans, warmed-over tortillas, fresh tomatoes, mint and onion, shredded chilis: the odors wafting out of Señora Manuela’s kitchen are the same as those borne on the smoke from all the meals cooked over old charcoal-burning braziers. All alone, she eats, and stares at the black grate awhile, and rests, she must rest. They say she’s earned it. All those years a servant in a rich man’s house, a lifetime, you might say.
After the siesta, about dusk, she goes out again, all stooped over, her basket filled with dry tortillas, and that’s when the dogs begin to gather. It’s only natural. As she walks along she throws them the tortillas, and the dogs know it and follow her. When she can get enough together to buy a chicken, she saves the bones and throws them to the dogs as they follow her down La Moneda Street. The butcher says she shouldn’t do it, chicken bones are bad for dogs, they can choke on them, chicken bones splinter and pierce the intestines. Then all the bad-mouths say that’s proof that Doña Manuelita is an evil woman, look at that, luring the dogs just to kill them.
She returns about seven, soaked to the bone in the rainy season, her shoes gray with dust when it’s dry. That’s how everyone always thinks of her, bone-white, shrouded in dust between October and April, and between May and September a soppy mess, her shawl plastered to her head, raindrops dripping from her nose and trickling down the furrows of her eyes and cheeks and off the white hairs on her chin. She comes back from her adventures in the black blouse and flapping skirts and black stockings she always hangs out in the night air to dry. She’s the only one who dares to dry her clothes at night. What did I tell you, she’s mad as a hatter, what if it rains, then what good does it do? There’s no sun at night. And there are thieves. Never you mind. She hangs her soaked rags on the communal clotheslines that stretch in all directions across the patio of the building. I’ll let them hang in the night air, the gossips imagine Doña Manuelita saying. Because the truth is, no one’s ever heard her speak. And no one’s ever seen her sleep. Suppositions. Doña Manuela’s clothes disappear from the clothesline before anyone’s up. She’s never been seen at the washtubs, kneeling beside the other women, scrubbing, soaping, gossiping.
“She reminds me of a lonely old queen, forgotten by everyone,” little Luisito used to say before he’d been forbidden to see her, or even speak to her.
“When she’s coming up the stone staircase, I can imagine how this was a great palace, Mother, how a long time ago very powerful and wealthy gentlemen lived here.”
“I don’t want you to have anything to do with her any more. Remember what happened to her daughter. You, more than anyone, ought to remember.”
“I never knew her daughter.”
“She wants you to take her place. I won’t have that, that would be the last straw, the old witch.”
“She’s the only one who ever takes me out. Everyone else is always too busy.”
“Your little sister’s big enough now. She can take you.”
* * *
So, following his directions, Rosa María pushed little Luisito in his wheelchair, wherever he wanted to go. Toward Tacuba Street if what he wanted to see were the old stone and volcanic rock palaces of the Viceregency, wide porticos studded with nail heads as big as coins, balconies of wrought iron, niches sheltering stone Virgins, high gutters and drains of verdigris copper. Toward the squat, faded little houses along Jesús Carranza Street if, on the other hand, it was his whim to think about Doña Manuelita. He was the only one who’d ever been in the old woman’s room and kitchen, the only one who could describe them. There wasn’t much to describe, that was the interesting thing. Behind the doors that were also windows — the wooden kitchen door hung with sheer curtains, the door to her room covered by a sheet strung on copper rods — there was nothing worthy of comment. Just a cot. Everyone else decorated their rooms with calendars, altars, religious prints, newspaper clippings, flowers, soccer pennants and bullfight posters, paper Mexican flags, snapshots taken at fairs, at the Shrine of the Guadalupe. But not Manuelita. Nothing. A kitchen with clay utensils, a bag of charcoal, food for her daily meal, and the one room with its cot. Nothing more.
“You’ve been there. What does she have there? What’s she hiding?”
“Nothing.”
“What does she do?”
“Nothing. Everything she does she does outside her room. Anyone can see her — the flowerpots, the shopping, the dogs and the canaries. Besides, if you don’t trust her, why do you let her water your geraniums and cover your birds for the night? Aren’t you afraid your flowers will wither and your little birds will die?”
It’s hard to believe how slowly the outings with Rosa María go. She’s thirteen years old but not half as strong as Doña Manuelita. At every street corner she has to ask for help to get the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. The old woman had been able to do it by herself. With her, if they went down Tacuba, Donceles, and Gonzales Obregón to the Plaza of Santo Domingo, it was little Luisito who did the talking, it was he who imagined the city as it had been in colonial times, it was he who told the old woman how the Spanish city had been constructed, laid out like a chessboard above the ruins of the Aztec capital. As a little boy, he told Doña Manuelita, they’d sent him to school, it had been torture, the cruel jokes, the invalid, the cripple, his wheelchair tipped over, the cowards laughing and running away, he lying there waiting for his teachers to pick him up. That’s why he’d asked them not to send him, to let him stay home, kids can be cruel, it was true, it wasn’t just a saying, he’d learned that lesson, now they left him alone reading at home, the rest of them went out to work, except his mother, Doña Lourdes, and his sister Rosa María, all he wanted was to be left to read by himself, to educate himself, please, for the love of God. His legs weren’t going to get well in any school, he swore he’d study better by himself, honest, couldn’t they take up a collection to buy him his books, later he’d go to a vocational school, he promised, but only when it could be among men you could talk to and ask for a little compassion. Children don’t know what compassion is.
But Doña Manuelita knew, yes, she knew. When she pushed his wheelchair toward the ugly parts of their neighborhood, toward the empty lots along Canal del Norte, turning right at the traffic circle of Peralvillo, it was she who did the talking, and pointed out the dogs to him, there were more dogs than men in these parts, stray dogs without masters, without collars, dogs born God knows where, born of a fleeting encounter between dogs exactly like each other, a male and a bitch locked together after the humping, strung together like two links of a scabrous chain, while the children of the neighborhood laughed and threw stones at them, and then, separated forever, forever, forever, how was the bitch to remember her mate, when alone, in one of a hundred empty lots, she whelped a litter of pups abandoned the day after they were born? How could the bitch remember her own children?