“Imagine, little Luis, imagine if dogs could remember one another, imagine what would happen…”
A secret shiver filled with cold pleasure ran down little Luisito’s spine when he watched the boys of Peralvillo stoning the dogs, chasing them, provoking angry barking, then howls of pain, finally, whimpering, as, heads bloody, tails between their legs, eyes yellow, hides mangy, they fled into the distance until they were lost in the vacant lots beneath the burning sun of all the mornings of Mexico. The dogs, the boys, all lacerated by the sun. Where did they eat? Where did they sleep?
“You see, little Luis, if you’re hungry, you can ask for food. A dog can’t ask. A dog must take his food anywhere he can find it.”
But it was painful for little Luis to ask, and he did have to ask. They took up the collection and bought his books. He knew that a long time ago in the big house in Orizaba they’d had more books than they could ever read, books his great-grandfather had ordered from Europe and then gone to Veracruz to wait for, a shipment of illustrated magazines and huge books of adventure tales that he’d read to his children during the long nights of the tropical rainy season. As the family grew poor, everything had been sold, and finally they’d ended up in Mexico City because there were more opportunities there than in Orizaba, and because his father’d been given a place as archivist at the Ministry of Finance. The building where they lived was close to the National Palace and his father could walk every day and save the bus fare. Almost everyone who worked in the office wasted two or three hours a day coming to the Zócalo from their houses in remote suburbs and returning after work. Little Luis watched how the memories, the family traditions, faded away with the years. His older brothers hadn’t graduated from secondary school, they didn’t read, one worked for the Department of the Federal District and the other in the shoe department at the Palacio de Hierro. Of course, among them they made enough money to move to a little house in Lindavista, but that was a long way away, and besides, here in the old building on La Moneda they had the best rooms, a living room and three bedrooms, more than anyone else had. And in a place that had been a palace centuries ago little Luis found it easier to imagine things, and remember.
If only dogs could remember each other, Doña Manuelita said. But we forget, too, we forget other people and forget about our own family, little Luisito replied. At dinnertime he liked to remember the big house in Orizaba, the white façade with wrought-iron work at the windows, the ground behind the house plunging toward a decaying ravine odorous of mangrove and banana trees. In the depths of the ravine you could hear the constant sound of a rushing stream, and beyond, high above, you could see the huge mountains ringing Orizaba, looming so close they frightened you. It was like living beside a giant crowned with fog. And how it rained. It never stopped raining.
The others looked at him strangely; his father, Don Raúl, lowered his head, his mother sighed and shook hers, one brother laughed aloud, the other made a circling motion at his brow with his index finger. Little Luisito was “touched,” where did he get such ideas, why he’d never been in Orizaba, he was born and bred in Mexico City, after all, the family’d come to the city forty years ago. Rosa María hadn’t even heard him, she just kept eating, her shoe-button eyes were as hard as stone, and held no memories. How it pained little Luisito to beg for everything, for books and for memories. I don’t forget, I collect postcards, there’s the trunk filled with old snapshots, it’s used as a chest, I know everything that’s inside.
Doña Manuela knew all this, too, because little Luisito had told her, before they’d forbidden her to take him out for a walk. When she was alone in her room, lying on her cot, she tried to communicate silently with the boy, remembering the same things he remembered.
“Just imagine, Manuelita, how this building must have looked before.”
That was little Luisito’s other memory, as if the past of that big house now shared by twelve families complemented the memory of the one and only house, the house in Orizaba, the house that belonged to only one family, his family, when they’d had an important name.
“Just imagine, these were palaces.”
The old woman made a great effort to remember everything the boy told her and then imagine, as he did and when he did, a majestic palace: the entryway before there was a lottery stand, the carved marble facade stripped of cheap clothing stores, the bridal shop, the photographer’s shop, and the soft-drinks stand, free of the advertisements that disfigured the ancient nobility of the building. A clean, austere, noble palace, a murmuring fountain in the center of the patio instead of the clotheslines and washtubs, the great stone stairway, the ground floor reserved for the servants, the horses, the kitchens, the grain storerooms, and the smell of straw and jelly.
And on the main floor, what did the boy remember? Oh, great salons smelling of wax and varnish, harpsichords, he said, balls and banquets, bedchambers with cool brick floors, beds draped with mosquito netting, mirrored wardrobes, oil lamps. This is the way that Doña Manuelita, alone in her room, spoke with little Luis, after they’d been separated. This is the way she communicated with him, by remembering the things he remembered and forgetting about her own past, the house where she’d worked all her life until she was an old woman, General Vergara’s house in the Roma district, twenty-five years of service, until they’d moved out to Pedregal. There hadn’t been time to win the friendship of young Plutarco; the new mistress, Señora Evangelina, had died only a few years after marrying the General’s son, and her mistress Clotilde before that; Manuela had been only fifty when she was fired, she reminded the General of too many things, that’s why he fired her. But he was generous. He continued to pay her rent in the tenement on La Moneda.
“Live your last years in peace, Manuela,” General Vergara had said to her. “Every time I see you I think of my Clotilde. Goodbye.”
Doña Manuelita chewed on a yellowed, knotted finger as she remembered her employer’s words, those memories kept intruding into the memories she shared with little Luisito, they had nothing to do with them, Doña Clotilde was dead, she was a saint, the General had been influential in Calles’s government, so in the midst of the religious persecution Mass was celebrated in the cellar of the house; every day Doña Clotilde, the servant Manuelita, and Manuelita’s daughter, Lupe Lupita, went to confession and received Communion. The priest would arrive at the house in lay clothes, carrying a kit like a doctor’s bag containing his vestments, the ciborium, the wine and the hosts, a Father Téllez, a young priest, a saint, whom the sainted Doña Clotilde had saved from death, giving him refuge when all his friends had gone before the firing wall, shot in the early morning with their arms opened out in a cross; she’d seen the photographs in El Universal.
That’s why she’d felt so bad when the General fired her, it was as if he’d wanted to kill her. She’d survived Doña Clotilde, she remembered too many things, the General wanted to be left alone with his past. Maybe he was right, maybe it was better for both of them, the employer and the servant, to go their own ways with their secret memories, without serving as the other’s witness, better that way. She again gnawed at her finger. The General still had his son and grandson, but Manuelita had lost her daughter, she would never see her again, all because she’d brought her to this accursed tenement, she’d had to break her little Lupita’s solitude, in her employer’s home she’d never seen anyone, she had no reason ever to leave the ground floor, she could get around quite easily in her wheelchair. But in this building there was no escape, all the overhelpful people, all the nosy people, everyone carrying her up and down stairs, let her get some sun, let her get some air, let her get out on the street, they took her from me, they stole her from me, they’ll pay for it. Doña Manuela’s few remaining teeth drew blood. She must think about little Luisito. She was never going to see Lupe Lupita again.