His eyes opened immediately, showing no surprise.
“Let’s go to the orchard,” I said.
“We can’t. You have to stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to learn to speak properly, like everyone else.”
I went back into the house intrigued. Was that it? Speak properly?
My mama assured me that a miracle happened that day, for after waking from what she assumed had been a peaceful nap, I emerged from my bedroom cured, and surprised everyone.
“Mama, I want to go to the orchard with Simonopio to look for my papa.”
In this complete and clearly enunciated sentence, I said the words mama and papa in the language that they understood for the first time.
Of course, that afternoon when I learned to distinguish between Spanish and “Simonopio,” we went to look for my papa without impediment, without Simonopio returning to the silence that my mama had imposed on him, and therefore without depriving me of everything he taught me in his own language.
Then I became his translator. Although almost everything Simonopio said was just for me—in the moment, things that you had to be there to understand—some things were useful to others.
“Papa, Simonopio says the bees say it’s going to rain tomorrow.”
It didn’t matter that the sky was completely clear. Simonopio was adamant that the drought of several months would come to an end and that we had to believe him, because it was true: the next day it would rain. I don’t know whether my papa received the prediction with surprise, skepticism, or complete acceptance, because as soon as I translated the message, I ran off thinking about what the rain would be like.
That was the first rain in my living memory. That’s the nice thing about that age: experiencing every event as if it were the first time. By the age of three, I must’ve already witnessed rainy months before, though at that age, the months are endless and the brain doesn’t retain the memory of something as fleeting as rain, which my mama might have forbidden me from going out to play in.
I can just imagine her now: The boy mustn’t get wet or he’ll get sick. It’s curious how we sometimes forget something as simple and as immediate as an appointment with the dentist or a birthday, yet never forget something as ephemeral as feeling a drop of cold rain bouncing and rolling on our faces for the first time.
In all my years, it has not rained again without me remembering that day and the pressure and silence in the atmosphere before the rain. The fat drops of water soaking my eyelashes and hair in an instant. The aroma of the countryside wet not from irrigation but from rain, which isn’t the same. Going from the intense heat of the inside of the house to the immediate cool of wet clothes. Seeing—and hearing—the water finding the best way to come together, first running in brooks and streams, then reaching a tributary of the river. Ignoring my mama’s warnings of Francisco, don’t get wet or you’ll get sick and ruin your shoes and clothes. The tremendous feeling of having something to be excited about: Simonopio had promised he would take me to the place where, with the earth moist at last, the toads that had spent months submerged to protect their delicate skin would come out.
Hours later, I returned soaked and covered in mud. They wouldn’t let me in the house in that state, so Lupita undressed me and washed me in the laundry. I don’t know where the clothes I wore on that adventure ended up, but my mama had been right: my shoes were beyond repair and no good even as a gift for the workers’ children. I remember that, as she lectured me—Spoiled child. Why won’t you listen? You’ll get sick and then you’ll see, and look at your ruined shoes, what will you wear tomorrow?—she made a point of sighing, so loudly it was more like a snort, before throwing the shoes in the trash.
My mama knew exactly how to add drama to her admonishments. Even now, I still don’t know which sound rings most loudly in my ears: that fatalistic sigh or the emphatic clang of my shoes meeting their end at the bottom of the metal trash can.
Contrary to my mama’s prediction, that night I didn’t fall ill, but I did drop down exhausted. I slept deeply, happy with my memories and also lulled by a sound, because on my bedside table, in a box, the toad I’d adopted croaked for me—contentedly, I wanted to believe. A toad that, at the moment of emergence, had seemed confused by his sudden freedom in the boundless world.
Turn here. Slowly, we’re almost there now.
43
Unrequited Desire
More than seventeen years wanting it. And the land would not come to him.
More than four years searching for her, looking at her, waiting for her, but the woman still did not so much as say hello or send a smile in his direction. He looked at her, and after doing it so often, he had noticed how she looked elsewhere, always elsewhere. Never toward him. For years, he had suspected that a lot of it had to do with the influence exerted on her by that parasitic demon she had helped raise from the day he arrived.
But Espiricueta knew that, with Simonopio, all he had to do was intercept him at the right moment so that he could erase him from his life. He was trying: he searched for him, he listened, he planned. He would find out where the demon went with the boss or the child that was always entrusted to him now, and he hurried out to find him. The problem was that he never did. By the time he arrived, the demon had gone. When Espiricueta waited for him on a road, between two points, he never appeared.
It was as if, sensing Espiricueta nearby, the boy created another path out of nothing.
The devil was the devil, but a woman was just a woman. What could the problem there be? What obstacle? What resistance? But there was. He felt it. Espiricueta had never been a womanizer, but he knew from experience that, with women, making eye contact was enough. Not with this one—she didn’t even turn around to see him. What was it? What did she see when she turned away, when she refused to look at him?
The angle at which Anselmo had positioned himself that night enabled him to see precisely where she was looking. She stared as if trying to shoot an arrow, as if she could send a message to her love interest with the force of her gaze: I’m here, come get me. But it was an unrequited love, Espiricueta noted with satisfaction, because the elusive man ignored her and looked purposely elsewhere, always elsewhere—in whatever direction, provided she was not there, provided their eyes did not meet.
The woman did not seem to grasp it. She did not seem to want to give up.
Anselmo Espiricueta had been patient with this ungrateful woman, with her devotion to the boy and his tricks, but he did not forgive her devotion—even if it was only in a simple look with her big eyes—to any other man. The devil was the devil, but a man was just that: a man. And if she was looking for one, then he, Anselmo, would be adequate, just as the efforts to which he had already devoted too much time must be adequate for her. He waited for her on the road when she returned from town on her day off. He followed her when she walked through the dark on the nights when the señor and señora allowed her to go to Villaseca to dance in the pavilion to the music of the tambora. He also paid for a ticket so that he could go see her, even if from a distance, while she waited for someone to ask her to dance.
She was asked to dance less and less, and never by the man she most wanted to press her body against to the rhythm of a song, however much she tried to send him a message of love with her gaze.