The altar boy served the vegetables. He set out chips with escabeche, cous cous tacos marinated in guajillo, and morita chili spiced with epazote and yerba santa. A detective brought cognac and Coca-Cola. The last bit of smoke from the incense slithered from the confessional.
“Only for a brief time are we on loan to each other, said the elders, back when this was a lake and the volcanoes had to always be watched. My penance will be the pain of remembering happy times during the misfortune, but you won’t even have that.” Father Diego Tonatiuh paused to catch his breath, then continued: “My loan was never complete, but during the bank robberies I had moments of happiness, even if I was only stealing for love. Your loan was never approved, and you were always unhappy. So go do your penance. You will never find the child you’re looking for. You don’t have your commander anymore, they’re going to cut you to pieces during your table dance, and you won’t have any way to make a living other than becoming a street walker. You certainly won’t be able to afford your hormones. When your beard starts coming in again, no one’s going to give a shit about you.”
Mimicry flows like beauty from Mexico City’s faucets, space and time are relative, and instead of the usual floral-and-stone façade, there’s dahlia and obsidian. In the course of time, what was yesterday a lake of water becomes asphalt today, and the past is a perpetual duplication that drowns the future. Yesterday’s omens come back, the same substance in a different shape. The city is a nagual that becomes a wall of skulls, an intelligent domotique structure: the Huitzilopochtli temple in a cathedral and Castile roses in cactus bouquets. Time is measured simultaneously with the Aztec, Julian, and Gregorian calendars and the cesium fountain atomic clock; the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.
Father Próspero died from toluene inhalation. Father Diego Tonatiuh catechizes monks in the mountains of Songshan in China. The altar boy with the small brazier has grown a beard and moved east. More than five hundred years ago, Emperor Moctezuma was brought a heron with a mirror on the back of its head. In the reflection, the tlatoani saw bearded white men on red deer coming from where the sun rises. The altar boy returned mounted on a Harley, ordained a Franciscan in Cantalapiedra.
Through the west door’s empty vestibule comes a ragged bearded woman with a turbid glance, shedding dirt like those thin pigs that don’t eat anything but mud and grass. Her skin is a sallow olive. She sits on the floor, ignores the glue-addicted kids with vacant expressions, raises her eyes toward San Fernando, purses her lips with each breath, and shrugs off the tightness that causes such sorrow in her hormone-free chest. She smiles with a thin line of spit at the little winged angels that offer San Fernando to the winning king of the pagans in Úbeda, Jaén, Baeza, Cordova, Seville, defeated by the spirits of New Spain. None of the angels in the temple façade is the boy child she’d hoped to find. Behind the threshold, a different altar boy in a ragged habit sets down the small brazier; the incense drowns in the nave. The boy moves up to the tower, rings the bell, and tolls for the dead.
OF CATS AND MURDERERS BY VíCTOR LUIS GONZÁLEZ
Colonia del Valle
It’s hard to write about cats after Cortázar’s Teodoro W. Adorno; Kipling and his cat who walks by himself; Poe’s black cat; Hemingway’s, who runs in circles in the corner; Lewis Carroll’s cats. Therefore, since I’ve set out to write about cats in the next few hours of confinement, I will touch upon some facts involving my own cat: Wilson (that’s the name I imagine represented by the W. before Adorno in Julio Cortázar’s story) was yellow and big. Despite being fixed, he covered a lot of ground and would disappear for days at a time. When he returned, after he ate and drank plentifully, he’d sleep eighteen hours in one stretch. I imagined him telling me where he’d been and who he’d seen, including these four cases: Sinué, the Egyptian cat who lived with a neighboring family and had been run over at the corner of Patricio Sanz and Popocatépetl, torn in half when he tried to expand his territory. Did I remember the gray cat from the house across the street, the one with the gemstone necklace? He probably disappeared, precisely because of the necklace, after he sniffed a female and set off toward Félix Cuevas, where he then took a little jaunt down Amores Street. It was perhaps best that he not tell me what they say happened to the chunky little kitty from the corner, the one who used to like to cross Insurgentes Avenue and then Manacar theater and beyond. Good thing Wilson was fixed: no females and no territorial ambitions.
Then there was the fourth cat, the one belonging to a neighbor who was a foreigner-like me-an old and lonely American. During my stay in the snooty district called Colonia del Valle, this guy didn’t talk to any of the other neighbors and actually had some sort of problem with most of them. It was during the early ’80s and he had been there almost twenty years. He had a Mexican wife, who left him after more than a decade and a half of ill treatment, and they had two tall blond children who, because of their looks, acted untouchable and could have become telenovela actors. I began to know too much about this neighbor just before my return to the United States. Events in Mexico had conspired to destroy me in three short years, and they were about to complete the job when I filed for bankruptcy and my responsibility with my family’s businesses ended.
After Papa’s death and during my mother’s supposed terminal illness, I was forced to leave my academic life in Dallas and return to Mexico City. Alice wanted to go with me because she wanted to find out about my family’s businesses. According to our divorce agreement-which wasn’t yet final-she would get half of whatever I inherited. To be frank, we should never have gotten married. It happened because, as it turned out, Alice always believed that if she were going to marry, it should be to her best friend. Over the course of time, only our friendship survived.
As soon as we got to Mexico City and Colonia del Valle, she got the house in order, prepped rooms for both of us, discovered that most of the neighbors wanted to get to know her (as usually happens with foreigners in this country), and began to work on her Spanish. She bought Wilson from the veterinarian at the San Francisco street market. The kitten struck me as too big to be a newborn, and I am pretty sure I saw him smile after his first bottle of milk at our house. In a year, he had become the evolutionary link between the sabertoothed tiger and the domestic cat.
From the start, Alice got in the way of my having women friends, in spite of her easygoing demeanor. I told her, “I don’t understand what you’re doing here, in Mexico, with me, in this house; if you were a drunk or a drug addict it would make more sense.” Her answer was always the same: it had to do with our friendship and her interest in finding out how much she was entitled to of “man’s earthly goods,” or, in this case, woman’s. She said she’d finish dealing with my parents’ businesses and properties in Mexico and then we could each go to our own sancho. “Santo, Alice, the word is santo.” She said she’d heard that you could say sancho too. Well, yes, but that was something else entirely.
In fact, the only person on our street, and on any streets for that matter, with whom our foreign neighbor maintained friendly relations, was Alice, whether it was because she was also a gringa, or whatever. It was like she was the only person the neighborhood mad dog wouldn’t bite, something doubly strange given the antagonism between them: for example, one day, annoyed by the loud music coming from the neighbor’s house, she called him and, after identifying herself and asking him to stop his “scandalous behaviour,” she insulted him in English for several minutes. This rant-at times completely incomprehensible to me, thanks to my being from a higher social class than Alice-began with the phrase “With all due respect” and finished off with the old American favorite, “Have a nice day.” As soon as she hung up, she said, “Stupid old man,” but she wasn’t angry anymore; she was on the verge of laughter. Quickly, she added, “Better watch out, he told me he was going to break my husband’s face.”