“It’s my house!”
“No, Señora. You’re only an employee here, like me. Please close the door.”
“Arrogant! Presumptuous Indian!”
From this delicious exchange (which avenged all the years of tension in the house on Berlín) was born my admiration for the small, agile, slender nurse. I attempted to converse with her in a less professional manner. She wouldn’t allow it. She was here to take care of me and restore me to health, not to chat. I looked at her with a look I did not recognize but the mirror confirmed as “the eyes of a lovesick calf.”
My gaze obtained only one response: Elvira placed a thermometer in my mouth with a gallant gesture.
The truth is that this agile, self-assured presence in a young, small body excited me more than if Elvira had shown herself naked. I learned right then, during the first few days of my nerve cure, first to guess at and then immediately to desire the flesh hidden behind the nurse’s snow-white uniform. What would she be like naked? What kind of underclothes would a señorita like her wear? Was she still a señorita? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she married? And as young as she was, did she have children? All these questions resolved, eventually, into a single image. Elvira naked. My eyes stripped her of clothing, and she did not resemble the paper dolls in the magazines that had first excited me. I understood one thing: Seeing her dressed, all in white, moved me more than seeing her without clothes, because the uniform stimulated my imagination more than nudity.
The earlier routine disappeared. It was replaced by a new routine joined to the presence of the nurse, my imagination whirling between her slender hips and the succession of thermometers, pills, checks of blood pressure, and conversations that revealed my juvenile lack of experience and vague desire to prolong childhood without showing my dread of adulthood.
She seemed to observe it all with an intelligent gaze that María Egipciaca, intruding from time to time, called (from behind the door, like a ghost that no longer frightened me) “black squirrel eyes,” or “her with the little mouse eyes,” words that did not disturb the young professional, no doubt accustomed to things worse than a muttering, rabid old woman displaced by the facts of life from her customary dominant position. I was grateful to Elvira that her presence had translated into my liberation. The house would not be the same again. The tyranny of my childhood lost its powers with every passing hour.
“Wakes earlier.”
“Gets up crazy.”
“No flies come in.”
“Shuffling.”
Elvira completed the interrupted proverbs of María Egipciaca, who listened to them hiding behind the door, betrayed by a moth-eaten sigh. She was defeated.
A week went by. Ten days went by. The period of my convalescence was growing short, and one night, when the famous peace of the graveyard reigned, Elvira said to me:
“Young man, you need only one thing to settle your nerves.”
And immediately she undressed in front of me and I could bear witness to my own imagination. What one thinks can be superior or inferior to reality. I feared, when Elvira unfastened her shirt, that her breasts would not be as I had imagined them. That her belly, her pubis, her buttocks, would contradict my fantasy. This was not the case. Reality surpassed fiction. Elvira’s silence during our fifteen minutes of love was barely broken by an earthly little sigh from her and a prolonged ay! from me, which she stifled, with delight, by covering my mouth with her hand.
Better than my pleasure was the feeling that I had given it to her. No matter how Elvira picked up again not only her clothes but her nurse’s attitudes, I knew from then on that I could give pleasure to a woman and believed at that moment it was the greatest wisdom in life and everything I learned from then on would not be better or wiser than this, although this, I also found out, would never be repeated exactly the same way. There would be in my life loves that were longer, shorter, more or less important, but none would replace my sexual dawning in the arms of Nurse Elvira, healer of my youth and quadrant of my maturity.
And so it happened that on the same day I got up from bed and Elvira very seriously said goodbye, I went into the bedroom of my almost forgotten jailer Doña María Egipciaca and found an unmade bed and an abandoned mattress.
FATHER FILOPÁTER HONORED us with his friendship. Of all the assholes running loose in the schoolyard, he selected Jericó and me to talk, discuss, and think with him. We knew it was a privilege. We didn’t, however, want to be seen as something exceptional, enviable, or, by the same token, laughable or open to ridicule by the mass of students more interested in dozing or kicking a ball than in demonstrating that man is a being who thinks when he walks. Because our conversations with Filopáter were all peripatetic. With absolutely no desire to evoke Aristotle, Filopáter made it clear that in the act of walking, one establishes an active friendship without the hierarchies implied when we sit at a table or receive the lesson from the altar-civil or religious-of the teacher-priest (or as Filopáter would say, not without a touch of pedantry, the magister-sacerdos).
I suppose that speaking while walking was the intuitive way in which the teacher put himself on our level and invited us to speak without his looking down at us from on high. Sometimes we stayed after class in the yard. Other times we walked the streets of Colonia Roma. Rarely did we reach the Bosque de Chapultepec. The truth is that in the act of holding a dialogue, the city tended to disappear, changing into a kind of agora or academy shared through the word. And the word, what was it? Reason or intuition? Conviction or faith? Provable faith? Rational intuition?
The first thing Father Filopáter set forth for us was what he considered a danger. He knew about our readings and intellectual enthusiasms. From the very first, he warned us:
“Be careful of extremes.”
The invitation to debate was formulated from the moment the priest proposed that we talk to him. We respected him enough-and I suppose we respected ourselves enough-not to question his right to think, ours to refute him, and his to respond. Moreover, I confess that Jericó and I wanted and needed this, I at the age of eighteen and he at nineteen, and both of us fertile ground for receiving another’s seed in the mental fields we had been cultivating at least since sixteen and seventeen with impassioned readings, debates between ourselves, and a feeling of enormous emptiness: Why did we think, for whom did we think, who would dispute our proud youthful knowledge, who would put it to the test?
Because nothing inspires pride comparable to that of a young person’s intellectual awakening. The darkness dissipates. Day dawns. Night is left behind. Not because the earth moves around the sun, but because we are the sun, the earth is ours. We knew it.
“Drinking from the same fountain, you and I can be left dry, Josué, we can turn into intolerant individuals without someone to put us up against the wall and make us doubt ourselves…”
I am transcribing and fixing these words of Jericó’s because I will have occasion to invoke them very often in the future.
Now, as if he had read our thoughts and deciphered our disquiet, Filopáter approached us in the schoolyard, tacitly asked us to join him in his slow walk among the arches of the building, without attracting attention, with pensive references to the weather, the changing light in the city, the quality of the day, the ability to hear and take pleasure in urban music, and thought.
“I’m not mistaken if I say you’re very involved in two authors.”
He saw our books, hidden sometimes in our book bags, sometimes displayed defiantly on our desks or read with youthful ostentation at recess, when the presence of my friend Jericó defended me against the old assaults on my innocent nose and we were both consigned to a kind of student limbo. We were “strange” and didn’t know how to get a ball into a hoop.