Ramifications Read online

  I’d never before been completely awake at dawn. Once, when we left home very early to go to Acapulco on vacation, my father carried me, still asleep in my pajamas, to the back seat of the car, and in that drowsy state, I’d had a glimpse of something like this piercing, almost false light that was weighing down on the sheets of colored origami paper scattered haphazardly across the floor.

  In the hallway, I noticed that both my sister’s and my father’s doors were open, and inside each room reigned the same calm and dwindling light: there was no one upstairs.

  I rubbed my eyes with the backs of my hands (new, still tenuous shapes exploded behind my eyelids) and went down to the living room to check the clock. I was disoriented; the Zero Luminosity Capsule had functioned all too well on this occasion, isolating me from the world, from noise and the passing of time. Perhaps several years had gone by; perhaps I’d woken in a future world where my father and sister were dead, along with my friend Guillermo and everyone one else I knew.

  I mulled over this possibility as I made my cautious way downstairs (the Bogeyman might have been in the house), feeling the cold floor under my bare feet. At the turn in the stairs, by peering stealthily over the bannister rails, I was able to see the living room clock: the hour hand was pointing to seven. Probably seven in the evening: at that time in the morning we’d usually be leaving for school—when it wasn’t vacation—and the light never looked anything like what was in my bedroom at that moment. But there was still no way to be sure of what day, month, or year it was. Perhaps Teresa had returned from Chiapas, bringing with her the man with the pipe and balaclava, plus a bag of presents for me. Deep in that improbable fantasy, I jumped the last three steps, suddenly excited.

  But the living room was empty. And of course Teresa wasn’t there, nor was the man with the pipe and balaclava. Mariana wasn’t there either, nor my father. The TV was on but with the volume turned down, and the images on the screen seemed really weird, otherworldly, as if the programming had also been infected by the strange aura floating between things.

  As I turned toward the kitchen, a voice shook me from my dreamy lethargy, giving me such a shock that I almost wet my pants: “Where the hell have you been?”

  Against all the odds, that voice belonged to Rat, who was stretched out on the couch. I thought it odd that I hadn’t spotted him before. Perhaps he had the power of making himself invisible. Perhaps the use of poor-quality temporary tattoos had given him that power, like some kind of abnormal superhero. I didn’t reply because I wasn’t sure how to address him; it occurred to me that I’d never actually spoken to him before: I’d only ever talked to my sister in his presence, never directly to him. My father had often told me that I should never address older people I didn’t know well by their first names, but that didn’t quite seem to fit for Rat. I didn’t even know his real name. Should I call him Señor Rat? That didn’t seem right either. Moreover, he might be under the influence of temporary tattoos. He might even have killed my father and sister while high and locked them in a Zero Luminosity Capsule or in the garage among the boxes where Teresa stored her university books (“We can’t have them in the living room,” my father had once said. “They gather dust.”).

  “Mariana asked me to stay here in case you came back. She thought you’d run away and went out to find you before your old man gets back. You killed the party, kid.” I had absolutely no idea what Rat was talking about. What party could I have killed when all I’d done was fall asleep in the closet? I looked around carefully for any sign of a party. Had Citlali been there with her reedy voice and smell of bubblegum?

  Rat noted my confusion and added a little more information: “Mariana was real worried, she almost burst out crying when we found your room empty. Where the fuck have you been?”

  I suddenly understood that Rat was something like my sister’s boyfriend, and I felt dumb for not having realized this earlier: all the clues were there, but I’d passed them over. What other truths was I missing? My detective skills had let me down. I was a bad detective, a bad origamist, and even a bad brother. Giant cracks were appearing in my megalomania.

  The revelation that Rat was in some way part of my extended family was a shock, but I decided to keep my opinion to myself until Teresa came back: she’d never allow such a relationship. My father, on the other hand, was completely unaware of the sort of person Rat was, and had neither the instinct nor intuition needed to understand that the relationship was bad news, that it presaged my sister’s undoing, her addiction to temporary tattoos or membership in a gang of neighborhood lowlifes.

  “I was in my Zero Luminosity Capsule,” I proudly replied as if challenging him to believe me.

  “Hell, you’re a crazy kid,” he retorted, smiling for the first time.

  In the dining room, a slanting light entered through a gap in the window frame. The living room was a little darker. With the exception of my and Mariana’s bedrooms, the house never caught the sun.

  I asked Rat what day it was; his response was to light up. The whole house smelled of cigarette smoke. Mariana normally opened the windows when she smoked indoors, and then lit a scented candle before my father returned (he probably noticed anyway, but chose to ignore the problem). On this occasion there had been no escape route for the smoke, and the smell was repulsive. Rat was an anxious smoker; he used to take rapid drags on his cigarettes, seemingly feeling that it would be bad luck to let them burn down on their own.

  Teresa used to smoke now and again, but always outside the house, leaning against the wall by the garage door; I remember seeing her there when I came home from school, hunched under the weight of my backpack. Teresa smoking with an absent air, giving me a distracted kiss, looking toward the end of the cul-de-sac (a dead-end street, like her marriage, like the whole country, like the obsession with writing everything down that, twenty-three years later, has me bedbound.)

  Rat stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and went to the kitchen to put the butt in the trash. I was surprised by this action, which displayed a level of care I hadn’t thought him capable of. He usually left his butts ground on a plate, and it was my sister or Citlali who collected them up, worried about keeping the house presentable.

  In spite of the urgency of the situation (at that very moment, my sister might be finally convinced that the Bogeyman existed and had kidnapped me), Rat was keeping his cool, perhaps—I thought—because at heart he didn’t take it seriously, or maybe it was just that the alcohol he’d consumed had affected his tongue.

  “I’m going to my room to do origami,” I said, in no mood for acting friendly. My sister would get tired of looking for me and return home. I was ready to start toward the stairs, but as soon as I’d turned my back on Rat, he detained me, grasping my shoulder with a firm, heavy hand. “No way, knucklehead. You’re coming with me. We’re going to look for your sis.”

  9

  WHEN RAT HAD BANGED THE GATE SHUT BEHIND US, I was able to confirm that it was not early morning, as I’d believed for an instant, but evening. That was a shame: going out early in the morning to scour the streets of Educación in the company of the legendary Rat would have heightened the drama when I told my story to Guillermo and everyone else in the class.

  At that hour, the street was completely deserted. But then my street was always deserted, at any hour. Groups of children playing soccer in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the goalposts marked by bundles of backpacks and sweatshirts, was a rare sight. But there were no children, backpacks, or sweatshirts there now, the street was empty, or almost empty: in the distance, at the junction with the main avenue, I could just make out the figure of the man from the fruit store closing the metal grille of his premises.

  This may sound like exaggeration, but the truth is that, at the age of ten, I was deeply concerned about the subject of consciousness. That’s to say, I frequently had that sense of disquiet and estrangement that is the basis of philosophy—but also of all angst—and that causes us to question why we’re th
inking what we’re thinking, why we’re alive, why being rather than nothingness, and so on. According to my childish theology, which I’ve already outlined above, any god directly involved in my upbringing was or should be in charge of all that stuff. But he was sometimes absent or at others seemed slightly less plausible than usual, and then a sense of absurdity, gratuitousness, and imminent disaster closed in on me. True, I didn’t then have the words to express all this. I was simply moving through the world with a confidence that would suddenly evaporate, making me feel vulnerable, small, at the mercy of any peril.

  That evening, walking beside Rat through the neighborhood streets, I suffered one of those episodes of metaphysical angst: an unfolding of my being (reverse origami) and a profound sense of helplessness. There was no raison d’être underlying anything. However many letters I stole, I’d never know the real reason for Teresa’s departure. However many Zero Luminosity Capsules I constructed, and however many hours I spent inside them, I’d never succeed in disappearing completely or making myself invisible to the agents of evil. And however many leaves and sheets of paper I folded down the middle, origami wasn’t going to give meaning to anything at all, because symmetry wasn’t a material state but an invention of the mind; half a sheet of paper was always imperfect and, therefore, the cranes, frogs, pagodas, and kimonos made of folded paper had a lie at their very cores, as do, of course, flesh-and-blood humans: we, too, are formed from a fundamental lie, or at least a fiction (a redemptive lie). If the fold that is the basis of origami rests on a false premise, the same can be said of the innermost fold of our personalities, the fold no one can ever access, the fold of our selves—the dolorous reverse side we hide, conceal like a secret letter in the night table of life; that fold, I’d tell myself, is also an optical illusion, and in fact our only essence is our fears, our only identity our frustrations, our only meaning our cry in the deep shadows of time.

  Naturally, I didn’t think all that at the age of ten, I’m projecting these reflections onto the inexpressible concern I experienced then as a sort of bubble stuck at some indefinite point within my sickly rib cage.

  It isn’t always easy for me to make that distinction, to know for sure if my memories are simply a projection of what—lying here on the left side of a double bed, surrounded by packets of pills and notebooks full of crossings-out—I think now, twenty-three years later. Memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past, as if the cord holding it to life itself is fraying until one day, it snaps and the memory bolts, runs free through the fallow field of the spirit, like a liberated goat taking to the hills.

  Rat took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim jacket and offered me one. To be polite, I took it. He then moved the flickering flame of his lighter close to my face, and I took a deep suck. I coughed, the flame went out, and at the exact instant when it disappeared, it occurred to me that Teresa might be dead. It was a fleeting thought, one I hadn’t had since the time my mother fainted on the edge of the market, by the stand selling piñatas and themed costumes. And although that idea darkened my mood like a cloud suddenly casting a shadow over everything, I didn’t share my thoughts.

  Rat lit his own cigarette and took a long drag, expelling the smoke simultaneously through his nostrils and mouth, while I made careful note of the process, eager to learn how to smoke like my improbable hero.

  The streets of Educación were, and still are, identical: cul-de-sacs branching out from a secondary avenue that leads to a wider one. There was the Rec, with its rusty goal and, in another small park behind an elementary school, a couple of slides—also rusty.

  Originally constructed to house workers affiliated with the union of state-owned oil company employees, the neighborhood later became the territory of the teaching equivalent, which immediately wanted to put its own stamp on it: the streets are all indicated by letters and the avenues by numbers. Some of the main avenues bear the names of union bosses, as if the alphabet included their heroic deeds.

  In Educación, it was always necessary to refer to the block you were talking about, because two streets might have the same name. The blocks, for their part, were shown in Roman numerals. By the age of six, I’d memorized my address (No. 23, Calle H, Block III, off Avenida 2) at the insistence of Teresa, who invented a jingle to make it easier to remember and repeat that uninspiring alphanumerical sequence. My friend Guillermo was very surprised that places in my neighborhood sounded like moves in a game of Battleship, where you sink enemy ships by giving their location using the Cartesian coordinate system. He used to say that it was like I’d learned the coordinates of my house instead of my address. I hadn’t the faintest idea what coordinates were but, too ashamed to ask, would just give a forced laugh.

  The cigarette that Rat offered me and the episode of metaphysical angst joined forces to leave me suddenly dizzy; I experienced a sort of feverishness, with a simultaneous sense of clarity that perhaps derived from nausea. I thought I was going to throw up, but luckily nothing emerged from my mouth. Rat glanced in my direction and laughed quietly. He gave me a friendly punch on the back, which didn’t hurt and made me feel grown up, his equal. Could it be that Rat was now my friend? Then he plucked the cigarette from my mouth and took a drag on it while still smoking his own. The two cigarettes hung from his lower lip as if by magic, kept there by some unknowable force. He took them from his mouth with his right hand and exhaled the smoke, a lot of smoke, through his nostrils and mouth, just as he’d done before. I watched him in stupefaction, unable to understand why anyone would want to smoke two cigarettes at the same time. As if reading my mind, he murmured, “Waste not, want not. You wouldn’t have been able to manage the whole thing.” I was annoyed by that insinuation, but had to accept—and concede through my silence—that he was right.

  We walked along Avenida 3, passing the arcade and Los Orgullosos, inside which rotated the reddish meat of the tacos al pastor. The smell of scorched meat mingled with the less pleasant odor rising from the sewage system. I didn’t ask Rat where we were going because just following him was exciting, and, in any case, the whole scene had a dream-like quality that held me in suspense, as if I were expecting to wake at any moment.

  We reached Canal de Miramontes, which for me was the midrib of the cosmos, from which branched out the other half of the planet: the part that wasn’t Colonia Educación, and within the confines of which my imagination grouped such diverse places as Taxqueña, Cuernavaca, Chiapas, and the United States. All those unfathomable destinations had to be a thousand or ten thousand times the size of Educación, according to my hasty calculations. That’s to say, a space so large you could be lost in it forever: an inferno deeper than the sack into which the Bogeyman dropped stolen children.

  Rat was chain-smoking as if he found Earth’s atmosphere toxic and only tobacco fumes were keeping him alive. (And the truth is, he wasn’t the only one to find the atmosphere at that time and place highly toxic: with air pollution levels at about 200 on the Metropolitan Index of Air Quality, during the summer of 1994, breathing was an extreme sport.) He smoked every cigarette right down to the end, until the smell of the burning filter reminded him that it was time to light the next. His voice was nasal and, being on the point of breaking, fluctuated between the deep baritone it would become a few months later and the squeakiness of childhood. Maybe that’s why he rarely said much. He glanced at me suspiciously, as if he had something important to say but was thinking the better of it even before opening his mouth. When we got to the corner of Taxqueña and Miramontes, Rat seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second. He threw down his cigarette, this time only half-smoked, turned to face me, and, putting his hands on my shoulders as if to prevent me from being distracted by the chaos of vehicles and ambulant street sellers, asked: “Do you know where the fuck your mom is, child?”

  I was finally able to show Rat that I
wasn’t a child, that I knew what was going on, knew even more than Mariana. “Yes,” I said, sure of myself for the first time that night. “She’s in Chiapas. She’s gone camping.”

  Rat’s face was transformed. He clearly hadn’t expected that reply. Just as his voice sometimes betrayed his former age, his astonished expression brought back the face he must have had years before—before the beer, cigarettes, and temporary tattoos. He attempted to recompose his degenerate-maudit teenage features and scrutinized me as if trying to work out whether I was conscious of the implications of my reply.

  “I want something to eat,” I said in an attempt to change the subject, but also because the pangs of hunger had suddenly returned. “I fell asleep in the capsule and haven’t had anything all day.” The peseros and trolleybuses were forming a solid wall along Avenida Taxqueña. Rat went to a street cart, leaving me a few steps behind, and bought a can of Coca-Cola and some Japanese cracker nuts. The woman pushing the cart had no change for the two-hundred new-peso bill that Rat proffered her, and he had to rummage in his pockets for coins. He handed me the plastic bag containing the booty: “Here you go, crackbrain.”

  I was beginning to weary of his offhand manner, but the adventure of going beyond the bounds of my neighborhood in the company of someone more popular than any of my friends made me swallow my pride: there was something bigger at stake.

  Rat beckoned me to follow him and hurled himself between the trolleybuses and peseros without waiting for the traffic signals to change. I thought we were going to die, but followed him anyway, because the idea of being left alone on Avenida Taxqueña was even more frightening. We crossed the street to the sound of polyphonic horns, dodging weary pedestrians laden with packages and suitcases, and arrived on the outskirts of the Terminal Central de Autobuses del Sur. In front of it, the Taxqueña market engulfed the pesero stop and the entrance to the metro, stretching out like an ocean of junk.