Ramifications Read online

      RAMIFICATIONS

  Also by Daniel Saldaña París

  TRANSLATED BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY

  Among Strange Victims

  RAMIFICATIONS

  Daniel Saldaña París

  Translated by Christina MacSweeney

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  Minneapolis

  2020

  First English-language edition published 2020

  Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Saldaña París

  Translation © 2020 by Christina MacSweeney

  Cover design by Kyle G. Hunter

  Book design by Rachel Holscher

  Author photograph © Ángel Valenzuela

  Translator photograph courtesy of the translator

  First published in Spanish as El nervio principal (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2018)

  Images on the front cover are from iStock.com: antique children’s book © ilbusca; camouflage pattern © Laures; tropical leaves © pernsanitfoto; and origami bird © Kuliperko.

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Saldaña París, Daniel, 1984– author. | MacSweeney, Christina, translator.

  Title: Ramifications / Daniel Saldaña París ; translated Christina MacSweeney.

  Other titles: Nervio principal. English

  Description: First English-language edition. | Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020. | “First published in Spanish as El nervio principal (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2018)”—T.p. verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020002758 | ISBN 9781566895965 (trade paperback)

  Classification: LCC PQ7298.429.A43 N4713 2020 | DDC 863/.7—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002758

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  For Ana Negri

  I too had a summer and I burned myself on its name

  ANTONIO PORCHIA

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  RAMIFICATIONS

  ONE

  1

  TERESA WALKED OUT ONE TUESDAY AROUND MIDDAY. I can’t remember exactly which month, but it must have been either the end of July or the beginning of August, because my sister and I were still on vacation. I always hated being left in the care of Mariana, who systematically ignored me for the whole day, barricaded in her bedroom with the music playing at a volume that even to me, a boy of ten, seemed ridiculous. So that Tuesday, I resented it when Mom got up from the table after lunch and announced she was going out. “Look after your brother, Mariana,” she said in a flat voice. That was the way she generally spoke, with hardly any intonation, like a computer giving instructions or someone on the autism spectrum. (Even now, when no one else is around, I sometimes imitate her, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that writing this is, in some form, an effort to find an echo of that monotone voice in the written word.)

  Teresa, my mother, kissed the crown of my head and then turned to Mariana, who received her farewell peck on the cheek without the least show of emotion or any attempt to return the gesture. “When your dad gets home, tell him there’s a letter for him on his night table,” she said from the door, in the same robotic voice. Then she left, turning the key behind her. She had no luggage besides the large tote bag my father used to make wisecracks about whenever we went somewhere together: “Just what have you got in there? It looks like you’re going camping.”

  When he got back that evening, my father read the letter. Then he sat with us in the living room (my sister was watching music videos while I was trying to make an origami figure) and explained that Mom had gone away. “Camping,” I thought.

  One Tuesday in July or August 1994, she—my mother, Teresa—went camping.

  My interest in origami had begun that same summer, not long before the events just mentioned. At school, during recess, I used to perch on one of the planters and pull leaves off the shrubs. I’d fold each leaf down the middle, hoping to achieve perfect symmetry. Then I’d attempt to extract the petiole and the midrib. (I liked calling the stalk of the leaf the “petiole” and the central axis, from which the veins branch out or ramify, the “midrib”; I had just learned those terms in class and thought that using them made me sound mature and knowledgeable.) I’d remove the midrib and the petiole, put them in the pocket of my pants, and forget all about them. In the afternoon, when I was back home, I’d empty the contents of my pockets and line up the petioles and midribs on my table. Sitting before my booty, I’d take out my sheets of colored paper and my origami manual and, with a patience I no longer have, start folding. I saw my compulsion to fold the leaves of those shrubs as a form of training for origami, a ritual practice I could carry out in secret that would help enhance my manual skills.

  But the truth is that I was never much good at origami. For all the effort I put into it, I made no progress at all. Teresa had given me that book with ten basic designs a few weeks before she went camping—before disappearing with her enormous tote bag that Tuesday after lunch. The book included the colored squares of paper, and among the figures it explained how to make were the iconic crane, the frog, and the balloon. In all three cases, my lack of skill was notable. I remember thinking when Teresa handed me the book, wrapped in fluorescent paper, that it was a strange time to give me a present as my birthday was months away and my mother didn’t go in for surprises. But I said nothing. I wasn’t going to complain about an unseasonable gift.

  It would be unfair to lay the blame for my failure on the book: I tried using other origami manuals, and the result was just the same. Even now, twenty-three years afterward, I’m still incapable of making that stupid crane. I was never able to work out the diagrams: for me they were indecipherable riddles, with their dotted lines and curved arrows. I never learned to distinguish when they were referring to the front and when the reverse side of the sheets. Now that I’m an adult who never leaves his bed, I’m tempted to say that I still suffer from that problem and that it permeates my understanding of the world: I always confuse front and reverse. But that metaphor isn’t valid, it seems empty of meaning even though it indicates something true. In 1994, everything was charged with meaning, but my confusion of front and reverse was simply the confusion of a boy trying to make origami figures and repeatedly failing in the attempt. And neither can I say that the tenacity I exhibited in continuing to practice origami in the face of constant failure has made me adept in the exercise of patience. What is certain is that origami was a school for being alone: it taught me to spend many hours in silence.

  That Tuesday evening, once Mariana and I were in bed, my father went to his room and spent hours talking on the phone. I know because I was awake, unsettled, trying to make sense of an environment that seemed emotionally charged, even if I couldn’t say why.

  At eight the following morning I emerged from my bedroom to find the house in a state of tense calm.

  The three of us—my father, Mariana, and I—had gotten by on our own before, when Teresa visited a cousin in Guadalajara, but on those occasions the transition was always smooth: my mother left us precise instructions for lunch and dinner as well as suggestions for entertainment, aware that my father wa
s a complete waste of space when it came to even the most basic elements of our upbringing. This time, however, there was a lie involved—implying to my sister and I that she would be back soon—and, despite his attempts to disguise it, my father’s reaction had been quite violent (his tone of voice on the telephone that first night signaled critical levels of exasperation). And that’s why, when I emerged from my room the following morning, I understood that the silence I encountered was just one more of the new experiences that awaited me, changes I’d have to adapt to now that Teresa had gone camping with an enormous tote bag hanging from her shoulder.

  I poured cereal into a bowl, added milk, returned to my bedroom, and closed the door. The communal spaces in the house suddenly felt cold, unfamiliar, like those of the hotel in Acapulco where we’d once stayed. With Teresa’s departure, the house in Colonia Educación became a hostile territory that my father, my sister, and I avoided at all costs, taking refuge in the sanctuaries of our respective bedrooms. It was in that solitude, littered with failed origami figures, petioles, and midribs without their ramifying veins, that I spent the first part of the morning—of the first morning of orphanhood that now, twenty-three years later, glimmers in my memory like the first morning of history, as if until that point my life had belonged in the realm of myth, and someone had, without warning, expelled me from paradise, making me fall down a rusty chute into the dirty, violent realm of history.

  Through the wall separating my sister’s room from mine, I could hear the same cassette that had been playing nonstop for the last week: a mixtape that one of her best friends had made for her. All the songs sounded the same to me: frenetic guitar riffs and lyrics screamed in an English for which my classes (where we repeated ridiculously enigmatic phrases like “the cat is under the table”) left me unprepared. But that morning, the first morning of history, I understood, or thought I understood, the expressive power of those screams, those clearly furious noises in which Mariana took refuge so as not to hear the suffocating silence of the house.

  At around two in the afternoon, my father knocked and, putting his head around my bedroom door, announced that he was going to order pizza. I begged him for a Hawaiian because I knew that, given the exceptional circumstances, he’d give way to almost any of my whims. He agreed to my request with a benevolent nod, and I was pleased, not just because Hawaiian was my favorite pizza but also because my sister hated it. My father was unaware of that; as a rule, he didn’t know much about us.

  My sister protested. “Mom always orders half and half,” she complained angrily, and I thought about my frustrated attempts at origami. However hard I tried, I couldn’t manage to fold either the sheets of paper or the leaves of the shrubs exactly down the middle. The middle seemed to be a utopian concept, accessible to the understanding but not applicable to real things. I wondered if it was possible to fold a pizza down the middle, exactly down the middle, and came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t.

  I wolfed down two slices of pizza without uttering a word. My father didn’t say anything either, or my sister. I thought that the silence would continue until my mother returned, if she ever did, from her camping trip, with her giant tote bag on her shoulder, unseasonable gifts for everyone, and new origami books that would finally reveal to me the elusive secret of symmetry.

  That night, after brushing my teeth, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror over the sink; it was a bit high for me and, as usual, I had to stand on tiptoe to see my whole face. I inspected it carefully. One ear bigger than the other. The septum of my nose angled slightly to the left. An eyetooth had come out crooked—Teresa had warned me that I’d need to have braces fitted, possibly the following year. It would have been impossible to fold my face down the middle, to make a more or less respectable origami figure with it.

  I think it was the next day, with the remains of the pizza still lying on the dining room table, when I came up with the idea of stealing the letter that my mother had left. It clearly wasn’t, as she’d said when she was going, something that had arrived for my father, but a letter Teresa herself had written by way of an explanation or a farewell. Even for a boy of ten, this was relatively simple inductive reasoning.

  Since the beginning of the summer vacation, I’d been reading one of those slightly schematic mystery novels published in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books in that collection invited the reader to make decisions at the end of each chapter, choosing between different story lines. The one I was reading at that time was about a boy of my age who had to rescue his best friend from a cave, where he’d been held captive by a mysterious person whose identity had yet to be revealed. It wasn’t, of course, the first novel in the series I’d read. I’d already finished another that involved a similar mystery but was set in ancient Egypt, and one that addressed the disturbing possibilities of life in the year 2000: flying cars, extraterrestrial invasions, and so on. They all started with the same caveat that, among other things, said: “The adventures you take are the result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose.” I loved that emphasis on you, adored the idea that the book was speaking directly to me, that I was the hero of the story. The structure of those novels varied very little: the front cover announced the number of different endings (as many as thirty) the reader could achieve during the course of the book: some happy, others unhappy, and others just plain crazy.

  It occurred to me that, with my mother’s sudden disappearance, life was offering me a not dissimilar mystery, one that I could do the detective equivalent of defusing, just as in the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The logical point of departure was, naturally, to steal the letter my mother had left on my father’s night table, lock myself in the bathroom to read it, and then return it to its place without anyone noticing. The main difficulty was finding the right moment to steal the letter. I thought the best idea would be to wait until my father went out to buy something. My sister would stay in her room listening to music, I guessed, and with Dad out of the way, I could open his bedroom door—it creaked—without risk of attracting attention. I could take my time reading Teresa’s letter and unraveling the mystery of her disappearance.

  More than two decades later, what surprises me about the chain of audacious decisions I took at the age of ten is the fact that I never, not even for an instant, considered the option of asking either my father or my sister what the hell was going on.

  While waiting for the ideal moment to steal the letter, I could, in true detective style, develop my hypothesis about my mother’s dis appearance. “Investigation is using your imagination to follow clues,” said the Choose Your Own Adventure book somewhere or other, and that definition felt inspirational, so I gave my imagination free rein in the almost total absence of clues on which to base my deductions.

  Maybe my grandfather had died, I thought, and Mom had gone to be with my grandmother. My best friend Guillermo’s grandfather had died earlier that year. When he returned to school after the sad event, Guillermo had incredulously described his parents’ abnormal behavior: lies, secrets, unexpected departures in the middle of the night.

  At the age of ten, I believed that bad things usually happened on Tuesdays. (Now that I’m an adult, I know bad things can happen any day, and even on a daily basis: they are ever present, the fabric that forms the backdrop of exceptional or positive events.) My grandfather might have died that Tuesday. It wasn’t a completely harebrained idea. Maybe Teresa was burying him at that very moment. I imagined her digging the grave, her favorite skirt all muddied and her nails black, like mine when I’d been playing in the park. Teresa was always scolding me for kneeling among the bushes, scratching holes with my nails and getting everything dirty. But now that I come to think of it, the problem wasn’t so much that I was dirty as that, she said, rats lived in the bushes, and they might bite me. Maybe my mom was burying Grandfather in the park, with her skirt muddied, her nails black, and her fear of rats in suspense until she finished her onerous task.


  I took a break from the investigation to consider my progress. Something didn’t fit. If my grandfather had died, why had Teresa left a letter for my father? The previous year, when my sister had gotten her finger caught in the car door, Teresa had paged my father before dragging the two of us to the nearest hospital (where the vacant gaze of an elderly woman in a waiting room left me with a profound, almost animal sense of fear that I’ve never quite shaken off). If my grandfather had died, the usual, the expected thing would have been for Teresa to page my father, as she’d done then, or leave a message with his secretary at the bank. Instead, she’d taken the time to write a letter—a letter I had to read if I wanted to understand the reasons for her departure.

  2

  MAYBE I NEED START EARLIER. Before 1994, I mean, before that stupid Tuesday. Writing about the past is, as I’m beginning to realize, writing inward, not forward. Rather than continuing the narrative, it makes more sense to focus on detail, clarify the scene while it, in turn, becomes clearer in my memory.

  My first memory, my oldest, is this: I’m five years old and am walking, holding her hand. My sister hasn’t come with us that day. Teresa and I are walking along the edge of a market, doing the rounds of the stands on the sidewalk: we pass one with themed costumes and piñatas. I stop to look curiously at the brightly colored textiles and she, Teresa, raises the hand that had been holding mine to the back of her neck. Without warning, she falls to the ground. It can’t have lasted more than two minutes: the woman serving in the market stand notices and shouts to her husband, in the adjoining stand, for help. Almost immediately, a number of people arrive, offering assistance. But during those interminable moments, before the woman in the market stand notices, I look at my mother lying on the ground, her eyes closed, and think that she’s dead. I let out a desperate wail and look at her jeans, which are blurring as my eyes fill with tears. Finally, someone among the people assisting her brings a vial of alcohol and revives her by wafting it under her nose. Teresa, my mother, rubs her hip, which she’s hurt in the fall. My wails falter and then dissolve into a sensation of surprise, relief, disbelief. Teresa has been resurrected before my very eyes. She reaches out her hand to me and, still sitting on the ground, dizzy and being attended to by strangers, strokes my hair. It’s a miracle, but to me, at that age, miracles still feel natural. Teresa’s resurrection seems no more miraculous than, say, the appearance of a tiny plant on the damp cotton wool where my sister had, a few weeks previously, made me hide a seed: the laws of physics don’t exist: the world is a more or less painful system of arbitrary events in which Teresa’s resurrection outside the stand selling piñatas and costumes on the edge of the market is just one more example. But why is that my first memory and not something else? Maybe because I was then forced to understand that people die, even though they might later come back from the dead and live apparently normal lives for several years.