However, after Simonopio stopped visiting him, after he decided to stay close to the house and then, later, to go on his solo expeditions, his absence was always a surprise. My papa did not comprehend why Simonopio, after ending his period of reclusion, had not come to find him.
That night, he was sure the boy had not gone astray. My papa had searched—as much as the darkness allowed—for any indications of where Simonopio might’ve gone, hunting along the path that led to the maize fields near Espiricueta’s, where my papa had spent most of that day. He was certain the boy would’ve had no difficulty finding him. Simonopio always found the way.
No. That night, my papa hadn’t been searching for a beloved child: he had been searching for his lifeless body. The lights shining in the house were a waste of electricity, but he didn’t have the heart to take the hope or the good intentions away from my mama. Days later, he admitted to her that, when the boy didn’t appear, he was overcome with the certainty that the boy had died, because what would prevent Simonopio from coming home for dinner and to sleep in his shed?
My papa filled his belly with my mama’s coffee so he was awake and alert at sunrise, when he had summoned every able-bodied person to continue the search. At the agreed-upon time, he went to his bedroom to splash cold water on his face.
My mama had fallen asleep in the parlor, because not even for the sake of putting on a brave face had she been able to continue drinking the poor imitation of coffee she had prepared. I think it would have been better had she spent the night with her sewing, though I wasn’t there to suggest it to her. Instead, she spent it either worrying about Simonopio or being surprised at my father, who served himself cup after cup without once grimacing in disgust.
My papa opened the front door without waking her, and the first thing he saw in the semidarkness was Simonopio waiting for him on the porch.
Do you have children? No? When you do, you’ll understand what motivates any parent of a child who decides to go missing or disappear on an adventure to say, When I find him, I’m going to throttle him, or When he comes down from that tree, I’m going to kill him. I never understood it when I was the recipient of such affection, though I heard it a lot from the lips of my usually calm mother.
You must be a parent to understand that from great love there also comes a great violent impulse. You must have feared for a child’s safety in order to comprehend and forgive the violence that hides or bubbles behind the anguish of anyone who, after giving up a son for dead, finds him playing at a neighbor’s house or with his buttocks full of thorns from falling on a nopal. Or in this case, returning from an adventure on his own two feet, having suffered no apparent harm.
If you were a parent, you’d understand why my father’s first impulse was to go up to Simonopio, take him by the arms, shake him, and keep shaking him until the boy fell to pieces—while screaming at him until he was deaf. But after two or three rough movements, my papa’s shaking turned into a hug. A huge hug.
That was how my mama found them. She immediately felt the same impulse, which she must have contained because the job had already been done and because, after drinking so much coffee, she had to run off to the bathroom to empty her bladder.
As I was saying, my mama regretted allowing her godson to move to the shed. I suppose my papa did too. For as much as they tried, they could not understand why Simonopio would give up his role as a constant companion to my papa and go off without telling anyone, sometimes for up to three nights in a row. That same day when my papa gave him such a huge hug, Simonopio escaped again to wander unknown paths. They noticed that there was no blanket on his bed. Nana Reja, in her eternal place outside the shed—now his sleeping quarters—didn’t open her eyes even to blink. She didn’t seem anxious, which my parents took to be a sign that the boy knew what he was doing.
Yet they could not help continuing to worry about him. On one occasion, my mama said to him, “We’re going to Monterrey on the twelve o’clock train tomorrow to visit the girls.”
By dawn the next day, Simonopio had already left his shed.
My mama would always invite him along to stop him from straying when she was in Monterrey and my papa was on his ranches, but Simonopio refused and made his refusal known by disappearing. Before another trip to Monterrey, she said, “Come on, Simonopio, come with me. There’s a circus with elephants, clowns, lions . . . I’ll take you.”
It was the only time Simonopio accepted the invitation. The temptation had been impossible to resist. But in the end, he had to return earlier than planned, because he couldn’t abide being and sleeping in a strange place, far from the hills and his bees. I can imagine my sisters didn’t help: Carmen because, with her romance, she had no mind to think of anything or anyone else, and Consuelo . . . because she was Consuelo, and perhaps because by then she, too, was in love. She never looked at Simonopio with kindness, let alone said anything friendly to him or devoted any time to a boy who was unsettled by all the new things in the city.
Simonopio waited for two days in Monterrey so that he could go to the circus. He endured those days only for the joy he imagined he’d feel when he saw real lions, he would tell me years later. But on the day when he went to the circus, people looked at him as if he were part of the show, like an interlude between the bearded lady and the man with six fingers on one hand.
What are you looking at? I can imagine my mama snapping at them, protecting her little guest and taking him to his seat in the front row.
First the elephant came out.
While the audience applauded, my mama noticed that Simonopio was gradually losing his vitality and excitement at being there, at seeing an animal that—he had assumed—would be monumental.
And it was indeed the largest animal that Simonopio had ever seen, but as big as it was, as Simonopio told me later, in truth what had a profound impact on him was that the elephant was dying, that it barely moved. That its color was not what it was supposed to be and that it was showing more ribs than one would expect. The elephant was dying from sadness and imprisonment. And the worst thing was that nobody seemed to notice. They kept making it raise one leg and then the other. They made it complete a lap of the ring with a woman fooling around on its bony back. And then balance on its hind legs while its trunk caught and threw a ball to its trainer.
Next up was the lion, with its tamer carrying a whip and a torch that he used to make the beast jump through hoops of fire. The tamer managed to get the lion to leap from bench to bench and roar now and then, but it was all a pretense, because in the big cat’s eyes there wasn’t the faintest trace of his fierceness. He lived, he moved, he roared a little, and—awkwardly—he did whatever the tamer requested with his whip, but he was dead inside.
That was when Simonopio’s eyes welled up.
Then the clowns came out like a herd, because although the circus had only one elephant and one lion, it had more than a dozen clowns of all sizes, from a tall one to a dwarf.
Have you heard of coulrophobia, an excessive and irrational fear of clowns?
Simonopio proved to be instantly coulrophobic. Seeing those painted beings, with their strange physiognomies, parading in the ring near him and doing what they were paid to do, which was simply to behave like clowns, Simonopio burst into tears.
Not a whimper or a weep—no, a violent explosion.