"Look, we're running out of wax; the priest will be mad," said Lunero.
A strange breeze made the hanging wicks collide; a startled macaw shrieked out her midday alarm.
Lunero stood up and waded into the river; the net was set halfway into the current. The mulatto dove under and came up with the little net draped over one arm. The boy slipped off his shorts jumped into the water. As never before, he felt the coolness on every part of his body. He went under and opened his eyes: the crystalline undulations of the first layer of water ran swiftly over a muddy, green bottom. And above, and back-he let himself be carried along like an arrow by the current-was the house he had never entered in all his thirteen years, where the man he'd only seen from a distance and the woman he only knew by name lived. He raised his head from the water. Lunero was already frying the fish and cutting open a papaya with his machete.
Midday had barely passed: the rays of the sun in decline passed through the roof of tropical leaves like water through a sieve, pelting down hard. The time of paralyzed branches, when even the river seemed not to flow. The naked boy stretched out under the solitary palm tree and felt the heat of the sun's rays as they cast the shadow of the trunk and the crown of leaves farther and farther. The sun began its final race; even so, its oblique rays seemed to rise, illuminating his entire body, pore by pore. First his feet, when he leaned back against the naked pedestal. Then his spread legs, his dormant sex, his flat stomach, his chest hardened by the water, his long neck, and his square chin, where the light was opening two deep clefts, like two bows aimed at his hard cheekbones, which framed the clarity of his eyes, lost that afternoon in a deep and tranquil siesta. He was sleeping, and nearby, Lunero, stretched out, face down, was drumming with his fingers on the black frying pan. A rhythm was taking hold of him. The seeming languor of his body at rest was actually the contemplative tension of his dancing arm as it drew concentrated tones out of the utensil. He began to murmur, as he did every afternoon, having recovered the memory of a rhythm that grew ever more rapid, the memory of childhood song, of a life he no longer lived, when his ancestors crowned themselves, around the silk-cotton tree, with caps decorated with bells and rubbed their arms with liquor: a man would be seated in a chair with his head covered by a white cloth, and everyone drank the mixture of corn and bitter orange down to its black sugar lees. Children were taught that they shouldn't whistle at night:
All Yeyé's daughters
like husbands…that belong to other women… all of Yeyé's daughters like husbands that belong
to other women
Allyeyé'sdaughterslike
They rhythm was taking control of him. He stretched out his arms and touched the edge of the muddy bank, and went on pounding his fingers against it and rubbing his stomach in it and a huge smile flowered on his face and broke his cheeks, which s e e m e d s t u c k t o t h e w i d e b o n e s: likehusbandsthatbelongtootherwomen…The afternoon sun fell on his round, woolly head like hot lead, and he couldn't rise from that position, the sweat pouring off his forehead, his ribs, between his thighs, and his canticle became more silent and deep. The less he heard it, the more he felt it, and the more he glued himself to the earth, as if he were fornicating with it. Allyeyésdaughters: his smile was going to explode, the memory of the man with the black frock coat, the one who was going to come that afternoon, which is already this afternoon; and Lunero was lost in his song and his prostrate dance, which reminded him of the tomb, which reminded him of the French tomb and the women forgotten in the prison of this burnt-out mansion.
Behind, the branches and the ruin of the hacienda mansion he dreams about, dreaming away, the boy bathed in sunlight. Those blackened walls set on fire when the Liberals passed through in the final campaign against the Empire, Maximilian already dead, and found the family which had lent its bedrooms to the Field Marshal of the French forces and opened its larders to the Conservative troops. At the Cocuya hacienda, Napoleon III's troops took on supplies, to go out, their mules loaded with canned food, beans, and tobacco, and destroy Juárez's guerrilla forces. From the mountains, the bands of outlaws harried the French encampments in the flatland and in the forts they held throughout the state of Veracruz. And in the neighborhood of the hacienda, the Zouaves found little bands with guitars and harps that sang Balajú went off to war and wouldn't bring me along, cheering up their nights, as did the Indian and mulatto women, who soon gave birth to fair haired mestizos, mulattos with blue eyes and dark skin named Garduño and Alvarez, who, in fact, should have been called Dubois and Garnier. Yes, on that same afternoon, prostrate in the heat, old Ludivinia, locked forever in the bedroom with its absurd chandeliers-two hanging from the whitewashed ceiling, one left in a corner next to the bed with its fluted posts-and curtains made of yellowed lace, fanned by the Indian Baracoa, who lost her original name only to get this slave name from the plantation's blacks, a name completely incongruous with her aquiline profile and greasy hair: old Ludivinia, her eyes wide open, hums that damned song which, even if she realized she was doing it, she would not remember, but which nevertheless she must enjoy, because it mocks General Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, who was at first a friend of the house and an intimate of the deceased Ireneo Menchaca, Ludivinia's husband, and part of the satanic court. Later, when the Savior of Mexico and great protector of the Menchacas-their lives, their haciendas-tried to come back from the last of his myriad exiles and disembarked and was recovering from an attack of dysentery, he renounced his old loyalties, and Ireneo had him arrested by the French and shipped out again: San Juan de Nepomuceno: The Bare Truth. Ludivinia remembers Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, son of the thousand poxy women of the priest Morelos, and she twists her toothless, sucked-in mouth when she remembers the burlesque words of that damned song the followers of Juárez sang when they humiliated General Santa Anna to death:…and what would you think if some thieves in the night took your old lady and pulled down her drawers…Ludivinia cackles out her laugh and gestures to the Indian to fan her more rapidly. The faded, whitewashed bedroom smelled of the shut-in tropics, disguised as cold. The old lady liked the moisture stains on the wall because they made her think of other climates, those of her childhood before she married Lieutenant Ireneo Menchaca and linked her life and fortune to those of General Antonio López de Santa Anna and received from his hand the rich black lands along the river, as well as other extensive contiguous holdings adjacent to the mountains and the sea. Over the sea in France, diddy-dee-diddy-dee-diddydum, Benito Juárez died, and so did our freedom. And now her grimace pursed in disgust, and her entire face collapsed into a thousand powdered layers, all held together by a fine net of blue veins. Ludivinia's trembling claw dismissed Baracoa with another gesture and shook her black silk sleeves and shredded lace cuffs. Lace and crystal, but not only that: carved poplar tables with heavy marble tops on which rested clocks under glass domes, with heavy cabriole feet clutching a glass ball; on the brick floor, wicker rockers covered with bustles she never wore again, beveled card tables, bronze nailheads, chests with inset panels and iron keyholes, oval portraits of unkown Creoles-rigid, varnished, with puffy sideburns, chests held high, and tortoiseshell combs-tin frames for the saints and the Holy Child of Atocha-he in old, moth-eaten needlepoint which barely retained the first layer of gold leaf-the bed with its silver foliage and fluted posts, repository of the bloodless body, nest of concentrated smells, of sheets stained by running sores, of tufts of stuffing that poked their way through the splitting mattress.