I should explain that my poor mama had never seen Simonopio shed a single tear, so you can imagine the fright his coulrophobia gave her, especially since she didn’t know that such a condition even existed. And if we now know that a word exists to describe someone who’s scared of clowns, I think there should also be one for the clown who enjoys his victim’s suffering. That day, it was as if all those clowns had a special radar for detecting easy prey for their torture, especially when it was a rich kid who’d paid a full peso to see them from up close.
Whenever she retold the anecdote, my mama would say that they went straight for him, and that she hadn’t known what to do: whether to console Simonopio, apologize to the other people in her section for the racket, or beat the clowns with her parasol to get them away from the boy. She opted for the parasol, and to leave the place immediately with a sobbing Simonopio who, terrified and inconsolable, wouldn’t stop crying for the rest of the night and until the next day, when my mama said to him, “All right, Simonopio, stop crying now: if we leave right away, we’ll make the train to Linares.”
On the way back, when they were passing through Alta—and without being aware of it—my mama lost the thread of the monologue with which she was trying to console Simonopio, and fell silent.
She knew, of course, that nothing remained of my grandfather who was executed by firing squad. If anything of him did remain in the world, she had no desire to find it. Furthermore, she had no desire for any remnants of him to linger in the place where he was shot. Why would he want to be there, when there were places he had enjoyed much more, like his haciendas or the library in his house?
Yet each time the train that took her to Monterrey passed through Alta, she couldn’t help but peer through the window, fearing she would see an army lying in wait on the horizon, ready to attack the train as it had so many times before. Years later, she admitted to me that she also did it because of a strange fascination: to see if there were any signs of her father, to feel some kind of shudder produced by the force of the hatred and terror that must have gathered in the trees and the land itself, as silent witnesses to the violence and unwilling recipients of the spilled blood.
She never saw anything out of place, and she felt nothing but relief. On the several journeys she had already made, nobody had stopped them.
My papa had explained to her that, tactically speaking, the Alta hill was the perfect place for ambushes, which was why it had been used by various sides to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy. Though it was the scene of many clashes, my mama never found any evidence of violence there, and the trees seemed as dry or as green—depending on the season—as any others: their leaves hadn’t changed shape, and their hidden roots hadn’t mutated in any way from being irrigated with blood and bodily fluids.
She would always look through the window there, she knew, and she would never lose the now-gentler grief that she felt at her father’s absence.
Simonopio took her hand softly, distracting her from her contemplation and melancholy.
When they were back on Linares soil, it was as if the visit to Monterrey had never happened. Simonopio returned to his new routine as an explorer. Regardless of how much they told him not to go, that something might happen to him, Simonopio continued to disappear into the hills without warning.
My papa continued to hope that the boy would turn up to visit, but the days went by, and Simonopio never appeared in the fields. Seeing that my mama’s plan to take Simonopio to Monterrey had backfired, my papa thought he would invite the boy on one of his trips to Tamaulipas—if what Simonopio wanted was fresh air and adventure, there was plenty of that on the cattle ranches.
Although the invitation excited him, Simonopio turned this one down as well. My parents’ mistake was to think that Simonopio went wandering with no fixed destination in mind. Eventually, they would learn where he went and what he was searching for, but that wouldn’t happen until many months later.
They had tried to have Martín go with him on his outings, thinking Simonopio would like the idea, but every time he tried to follow the boy, Martín returned frustrated.
“There we both were, then suddenly, when I turned around, the kid was gone.”
After that, it was my father who offered to go with him, though he was very busy with his efforts to save the land. But Simonopio just looked at him fixedly, and my papa understood: I don’t want you to. My mama told me that they even tried, unsuccessfully again, to get Nana Reja to talk him out of going alone; his nana squeezed her eyes shut. She never wanted to be involved in the matter, which my parents, at a loss, took as a sign that it was best they left Simonopio in peace to his expeditions.
With nothing else he could do, my papa gave Simonopio a light, easily packable sleeping bag, as well as a penknife that his grandfather had given him as a child. He also gave him a canteen and a flint with which to light fires to ward off the cold, darkness, and wild animals. If the boy was intent on spending so many nights out in the open, the least they could do was make sure he was well equipped.
“And no more walking off with the blankets from your bed, eh?”
Not even with time and effort did they manage to completely stop worrying. On one occasion, they saw him add a machete to his camping equipment, but now they said nothing. They didn’t even discuss it between themselves. Each of them would just say, Look after yourself, and send as many blessings as they could think of with him.
The next time my mama returned to Monterrey by train and it went through Alta, she peered out the window as always. She didn’t see the ghost of her father or any army lying in ambush. The trees were the same, and so was the land. The only thing different in the scene was that, in the distance, standing on a rock, she saw Simonopio waving goodbye with his arm in a wide arc that almost touched the clouds.
The same thing would happen every time she passed through there, in both directions.
How did Simonopio manage to travel so far on foot? How did Simonopio know when she was going to be a passenger on the train if sometimes she didn’t even know in advance herself? My mama never found out. This was Simonopio. There was no explanation.
After the first time she saw him standing on the rock through the window of the moving train, my mama never searched for her papa or the armies again. Peering out through the window of the moving train, she looked only for him, and when she invariably found him there, her fear and nostalgia were banished.
30
Where Does the Devil Go When He’s Lost?
“Where does the devil go when no one can find him?”
The boy’s existence bothered Anselmo Espiricueta. It bothered him that the boy enjoyed the good life as a spoiled child of the señor and the señora. He had been born and arrived just a couple months after Anselmo’s own daughter, and nobody gave her anything: neither regular meals nor a warm bed. She had nothing but her little girl’s face. Nothing. And the boy, with his face kissed by the devil, had everything, from clothes to free time.
The boy did not want for anything.
If the kid decided he wanted his own room, they simply gave it to him. If the kid got lost, they searched for him, without understanding that the devil never gets lost. That the devil hides. That he plans, he waits, and then he ambushes. He takes you by surprise.