65
The Return
Stop, please. I need air. Pull over. I want to get out for a minute. Just a minute. To be honest, I never thought it’d be so tough coming home, and for me, my home always started on this road my ancestors made, now bordered with dying and dead trees.
They must’ve thought they’d be eternal, that they’d never age, that they’d never die. Now look at what’s left of them.
66
See, Listen, Understand
Francisco Morales, who until the age of seven they had called Francisco Junior, climbs out of the taxi that collected him that morning from his house, as quickly as his body allows, tangled as it is by age and disuse.
The young taxi driver looks at him with confusion and alarm.
He is afraid that someone of such an advanced age might decide to die in the car—because, first off, at his young age, he has never seen a dead person, and second off, he does not know and wonders how dirty death would be if it arrives. He decides that it might be very dirty, so he prefers that, if the old man is going to die, he should do it out of the car, which does not even belong to the driver. He does not want to have to explain to the owner or have his pay docked for the cost of cleaning, so he responds immediately to the elderly gentleman’s request to pull over.
Protecting the integrity of the vehicle is his priority, but what makes him get out after his passenger is curiosity: he cannot leave things as they are. He has to know the end of the story, even if he hears it with the old man’s final breath.
That morning, Francisco Morales had called the taxi company that, whenever there was a need, was normally called by Hortensia, a woman hired by his children when he was widowed, to act as housekeeper and nurse. He did not feel that he needed a nurse, since he was still capable of meeting his most basic physiological needs without help, but he would never object to having someone to take care of him.
He did not call Hortensia “Nana”—at his age it would have been ridiculous, but what difference was there between her and his nana Pola?
Just affection. A minor thing.
He’d made the call obeying a rare impulse for someone his age. That morning he had woken ready to follow the routine that had bound him to Hortensia for more than fifteen years. A routine of distant friendship: she in the kitchen and he in the comfortable La-Z-Boy, a gift from his children one Christmas, which he had gradually tamed and molded to the contours of his body. Now he spent all day in the permanent, soft embrace of his seat, getting up only when he began to feel the pressing and pinching of his elegant reclining rocking chair, which tired long before he did of the constant proximity.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if he were turning into a marble statue by Rodin, the one called The Thinker that he had seen once in Paris, sitting for eternity in the same position, because he could not be bothered even to recline the seat a little or use another feature of the La-Z-Boy, which was for elevating the legs.
In this way the hours passed of their own accord and without warning. They faded away. There, with the curtains closed and in the dark, between visits from a child, grandchild, or great-grandchild, he closed his eyes and ears, though the television was always on as a window into the world. What could he see or hear on that glowing cube, on that idiot box, that he did not already know? In his long life, he had seen it all, and he did not want to watch reruns of anything. Because sometimes it was as if everything were a repetition: the same mistakes, the same warning signs, and the same governments, even if the faces changed.
No surprises. Ever.
He closed his eyes and ears, and he locked himself away in the past to remember, because the only repetition he could tolerate was that of the memories with which he had filled his life.
But that day, he had lifted the receiver and called to request a taxi like an expert. He had filled his wallet with money, and without saying anything to Hortensia, who was as ever in the kitchen making one of her aromatic soups, he went out into the midday sun to wait for his ride, which promptly arrived. He did not sit in the back seat, as any paying passenger is expected to do; he sat in the front, to see everything with his eyes wide open.
“We’re going to Linares.”
He silenced the young driver’s objections, assuring him that he had enough money to pay for the return trip as well as the gasoline. He had enough to cover the cost of the entire day, if necessary.
Sitting in the front, seeing the road unimpeded, he started to tell the story that he wanted to tell, the story that none of his children or grandchildren, prisoners of the hurried pace of modern life, had wanted to hear other than in bits and pieces, because they always interrupted.
Is it true you threw yourself off a bridge once because a train was coming? they must have asked him once or twice.
Yes.
And what happened? How did you survive?
A nopal patch saved us.
And what was it like? his interviewers asked, before, as usual, immediately losing any real interest in the question and then losing the thread of the conversation, because their cell phone rang with a call or beeped with a notification that they had been tagged in that thing called Facebook, or with a message that included a kindergarten’s photo of the day, in which a member of the new generation of the family appeared.
Look. Do you want to see it?
I don’t have my glasses, but thanks.
That day, he decided to tell it from start to finish, even if the taxi driver was not interested in an old man’s story. He had always remembered, but since life had been put on hold by his widowhood; by his old age; by the silence, the immobility, and the isolation, the details of his story had grown ever-more vivid, more colorful, more present. As always, he tried to contain them, control them, but his memories had surprised him that day, requesting freedom, air, light. Let us out, some asked him. Others took him by storm and said, Let us in now. It was as if, that day, they had all decided to assail him at once, to flood his senses—the five that convention acknowledges, and the others that he knew existed but that he had never been able to access, use, or even understand: the ones of which Simonopio had spoken to him when he was a boy and that he had never had the patience or time to study and develop.
Tired of resisting so much, Francisco had surrendered to the battering.
Now he had to let the memories that whirled around him in or out, or he would explode. Now he understood that they spoke to him, that they called to him, that something had been calling to him for many years, but he had resisted seeing or hearing, or it had been impossible for him to do so, surrounded by the busy everyday life of an enormous city.
That day it was imperative that he listen to the come-come-come-come that called to him and that he relive the story in which he never, even when he was young, thought he was the protagonist. Now, at last, he managed to fill and understand the hidden gaps in the story he had thought he knew in full.
He climbed out of the car because he needed air, even though he had the window open.
But going out does not improve his condition, because Francisco Morales still needs air, as he will continue to need it until he reaches his destination. As he will continue to need it until he finishes telling the story like he has never done before: with the new spherical vision that Simonopio had tried with such enthusiasm to teach him and that he has only just started embracing. The vision that is now enabling him to understand and to feel tenderness for a new, experienced, and older mother of an irrepressible child. That helps him sympathize with Carmen and even with Consuelo, and understand the crosses that his father had to bear—understand them in his belly and in his cells and no longer just as a simple, if bitter, anecdote. To understand, if not forgive, the envy and resentment that drive one to kill, and also to decipher and finally embrace Simonopio’s world as his own.