I can imagine the freemasons’ bewilderment when they arrived at their secret lodge and found that Member A’s sword was now where Member B’s should’ve been, or that one was missing because we’d left it under the table. They must’ve felt like the three bears after Goldilocks broke in. It did not take the freemasons long to deduce who their furtive visitors were and to complain to my uncle Emilio, who of course forbade his children from returning and threatened them with a beating.
While I had a great deal of fun at my cousins’ house, I also spent some of my most boring times there, because when the time came for me to go to school, the Catholic ones had closed by legal order, so we children of good families went to clandestine schools set up in houses. By pure coincidence, due to my age and because I was a boy, mine was based at the Cortés cousins’ house.
I think that’s why it took me a long time to settle into studying. I was always confused by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to do the same things as before when I went to school there—I was used to visiting a house where it was perfectly acceptable for me to mount the banister and slide down it, yelling; to bump down the stairs on my backside; to run in and out as I wished so that I could hear the various vendors going by; to attack the kitchen when I had a twinge in my belly; to go to the bathroom without having to ask permission from anyone; or to go into my cousins’ room to fetch a toy. As a cousin, I could do anything; as a pupil, I had to learn to stay seated, without speaking, eating, or even going to the bathroom, until the teacher told us it was time to answer, eat, or go to the bathroom.
Becoming obedient was no easy task. I took any opportunity to escape, and knowing every suitable nook and cranny, I did not find it hard to go from hiding place to hiding place until I reached the front door and escaped into the freedom of the street to set off for my home on La Amistad. Of course, my intention was never to reach my house, because I knew what would happen: they’d send me straight back—forcing me, what’s more, to apologize. No: my plan when I fled school was to lose myself among the orange trees. What would I do there all day? I didn’t know. What would I eat? I didn’t know. By that time, I had overcome my fondness for eating beetles. With luck there would be ripe oranges on the trees. Otherwise I would go hungry.
And how would I return home afterward? My plan wasn’t a very elaborate one, and I hadn’t thought that far.
I never found out what would have happened at the end of the school day when my mama sent Simonopio to collect me. I didn’t even get to the stage where I felt hungry. I never had the chance, because my adventures as an escapee never lasted more than two hours. However much I tried to hide, Simonopio always knew somehow, without being told, that I wasn’t where he had left me early that morning, and if he didn’t find me on my way back, he would navigate through the orchard’s trees like a bee searching for the only flower until he reached the tree that I’d climbed in order to hide.
Invariably, he took me straight back to school, without allowing himself to be persuaded by my complaints about how boring it was to be kept in all day with the teacher’s endless blah-blah-blah. With a single disapproving look, he made me be quiet and go obediently with him. I didn’t like him looking at me like that, displeased, or talking to me with the tone that the adults in my life used. He wasn’t an adult: he was Simonopio.
“Never go out alone. It’s very dangerous. Something could happen to you.”
“What?”
“Something.”
“Like what?”
“Like running into the coyote.”
By then I knew what fear was, and the figure of the coyote was the root of it, so going out the front door, alone, at six years of age, was an act of courage in which each step took effort.
If I was so afraid, why did I never listen? Why did I run away from school again and again?
Now I think I kept reoffending because I knew Simonopio would drop everything to come find me. I think that’s what I wanted. School bored me, I admit, but I easily could’ve found some other mischief to get up to right there, something that would keep me busy without needing to leave the building. But by then I belonged to the outdoors, and Simonopio had made me just another bee in his swarm. The clumsiest, yes; the most annoying, sure; but my days didn’t feel complete if I didn’t spend them with him, buzzing in the open air, playing the games that he and I played.
At school, my disappearance was always detected. The first time, they wasted a lot of time searching for me in every hiding place they could think of, but once they realized it was a breakout, they immediately sent a message to my mama, repeating the same thing each time thereafter: Your son has disappeared.
My mama told me much later that, the first time she received the note, she felt her heart stop from the fright, though by the time she had run to confront the negligent teacher and ask for more information, Simonopio had already returned me to my place. On subsequent occasions, she would take the news of my absence more calmly—after learning that what the school lost through neglect, Simonopio would find without fail.
I don’t remember the spanking that first time I disappeared, which she gave me while she repeated everything that Simonopio had already said. No doubt it hurt, but I never learned anything by dint of a spanking, which was why, when one of my cousins asked to be included in my next escape, we didn’t stop to pass the time in an orange tree. Emboldened, me by his company and he by mine, we went all the way to the tracks, hoping to watch the train go by. But since it was taking a long time, we decided to press our ears against the iron to hear it coming. Step by step, without realizing it, we went and made ourselves comfortable where the track bridged a ford. Maybe it was because of our age: bored of waiting, we forgot our lookout duties, and by the time we realized the train was approaching, it was almost on top of us. Not knowing where to run to save ourselves from the steamroller charging toward us like an enraged bull, we held hands, and emboldened once again, me by his company and him by mine, we leaped. It was not a great height, but we would have earned ourselves a fracture or two had we not landed on the padded softness of a nopal patch. When Simonopio found us—the first and only time he didn’t return me to school—we were pricklier than the nopal, which we had left half-ruined, half-bald. Though in pain, we had no choice but to walk to my house.
The spanking my mama gave me that time—on impulse, without even waiting to extract the prickles from my backside—I will never forget. My only consolation was that, in the hours she spent trying to remove them one by one, she cried with me.
My duty-bound, long-suffering, and prickly schooling—it would be years before my skin was as smooth as before—was not yet a reality when I spent three glorious days at the Cortés cousins’ house after Lupita’s death. I must have been around four then, so as you’d expect, no one involved me in the tragedy. I simply learned, to my delight, that my stay—a simple invitation to sleep over that was originally to last one night—would be extended to a vacation of three days, though even that seemed very short to me.
By the time I returned home, everything had passed: there were no flowers, relatives wearing black, or traces of wax that trickled from the candles that must have been lit. The house had restored its order, but it had not returned to normal. When I asked after Lupita, Nana Pola ran to get my mama so she could give me whatever explanation she considered appropriate.