Forgive me: it’s not true that I returned to the car. To say that would imply that I did so voluntarily, but no. Martín took me back there. He carried me all the way in spite of my flailing legs. I think I would’ve bitten him like a wild animal had I not continued with my screaming. He put me—kicking—in the car and then the train.
My mama tried to calm me down. But anything she said was futile; I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want comforting or explanations, because there were none. I think I was still looking around me, then, in the hope that Simonopio would arrive at the last minute. I think that, despite all the evidence, deep down I still believed it was impossible that Simonopio had abandoned me. When the train started up without him, I clutched my chest. When the train’s wheels began to turn, all hope died.
And with the strength of my chest, and perhaps also my stomach, I contained my sobbing. And the contained sobbing turned into nausea. I vomited all the way. I vomited so much and for so many days that my poor mama thought I’d die. And I did, too, but boys don’t cry, and how proud I felt that I would sooner have a brush with death than allow myself to live crying over him, missing him, remembering him, talking about him.
It was a trick; saved-up tears come out sooner or later, and mine came in an explosive crying fit that evening at the performances, as I listened to Marilú Treviño sing the same repertoire as ever, the one I’d liked to hear so much in her voice and in Simonopio’s: the songs I’d only ever listened to in my brother’s company. The first notes of the music transported me to giant-height on Simonopio’s shoulders, to warm days swimming in the river, to the toads that croaked at nightfall, to the summertime cicadas, to the orange-tree mazes, to the footsteps of a bee on my face, and to its sound when it flew off. It transported me to his peculiar and beloved smile and to his stories, to the mysterious lessons to which I always enjoyed listening, though I never understood, then to the space in my chest, to the lost rifle, to my papa’s involuntary absence and the premeditated absence of the person I always thought loved me like a brother.
So, from a distance, in his total absence, I punished Simonopio with my silence: my mouth would not utter his name again for years, and slowly but surely, my mind stopped thinking about him, because I made it.
I began to talk about him again, with a nostalgia that outweighed any bitterness I had harbored, when I had my first—and only—girlfriend, during that period of newfound love when one wants to know everything and share everything, without limit.
She asked me about my life in Linares, and I told her, at first trying to create an edited version of events. I spoke to her about my cousins, about their house-turned-school, about Thunderbolt, about the orange wars, the river, the nopal thorns, but none of these anecdotes seemed interesting. They all fell short. I soon realized there was no way to address those themes, to tell the stories well, to inject emotion, if I refused to acknowledge Simonopio’s existence.
Thanks to him, I had anecdotes to tell, and that was the reality that I understood during that exercise in narration. Without Simonopio as a protagonist in the story of my life, there were only loose threads. To talk about Linares was to talk about Simonopio. I accepted, with resignation, that talking about myself, openly and honestly, necessarily meant talking about Simonopio. And it was in talking about him, remembering him, that I realized I’d never forgotten him; that I’d never stopped missing him, though I could never forgive him.
My mama found us talking about her godson one day. She hadn’t heard me mention him for years and hadn’t spoken to me about him, either, sensing that it was a painful subject. She even came to think that her son had forgotten her godson over the years. She was surprised and glad that this wasn’t the case.
Memories are a curious thing: while I always felt fortunate to have a few photographs of my father, they ended up contaminating my memories of him, because I looked at them so much, they gradually replaced the flesh-and-blood man whose body had a smell, whose voice had a timbre, whose hair would ruffle, and whose smile, when he unleashed it, was more contagious than the flu.
In those old photographs, people were almost always captured at a forty-five-degree angle: looking into the distance and never at the camera; always serious; and for some reason, mostly in their formal clothes, in black, with every hair in place.
I kept memories of my papa, sure, but from looking at those cold, impersonal photographs printed on paper, before long I erased his smell from my nose, his voice from my ears, his warmth from my skin, and his face in motion. The wrinkles that formed at the corner of his eyes when he smiled or exerted himself, like when he dug five holes with me for five trees, faded from my mind. I remembered the holes, I remembered the trees, but my papa was always rigid, at a forty-five-degree angle, like the image recorded on paper.
Forgetting him in this way was very painful, especially during my teenage years, when I felt most guilty for my failure to remember his essence, when I tried to dream up a time machine like H. G. Wells’s—if not to save him, then at least to retrieve him.
We didn’t have a single photograph of Simonopio, though. And like I said, for a long time I refused to think about him. Nonetheless, when I opened myself up to doing so, out of love for my girlfriend or whatever it was, Simonopio remained intact in my memory: his smell, his voice, his warmth, his laughter, his eyes, his gestures when he spoke to me, his songs, his stories, his lessons, his words in that other language I learned from the cradle, his hand when I held it, his back when he carried me, his resignation when he found me wandering, his serene company when I was unsettled.
Life got in the way; routine interrupted me; the years caught up with me. And while I no longer had so much time to spend talking about him, or such an eager listener, I never lost Simonopio. And while, at first, the memory of him was more bitter than sweet, as I became an old man, the bitterness gradually faded.
It took me a long time, but I believe that, with age, I managed to understand Simonopio’s motives for leaving me: What would’ve become of him living in Monterrey? In Monterrey he would have slowly died of sadness, of weariness, of loneliness, of incomprehension.
In Monterrey he would’ve died before he died, like that circus lion he had seen as a boy.
92
A Heap of Masonry
I was born inside this heap of ashlar masonry, plaster, and paint a long time ago—it doesn’t matter how long.
In that time, the stones retained the order the original builder had given them, and one on top of the other and side by side, they formed the home of several generations. Look at them now, just strewn everywhere. When they demolished the house, they did so without consideration for what they might have been destroying with it: anecdotes and smells, memories and echoes.
My essence.
This town became a city and was reinvented, and without giving up agriculture—preserving the oranges that the men of my papa’s time grew there to save the land from strangers’ hands—it was also filled with industry. And so it was transformed, it grew. It became a city, and eventually there was no longer space for the last orchard still within the urban area: La Amistad. The orchard that my papa created from some blossoms that reached him after a long journey.
I suppose the new owner will build a residential or commercial development here. It’s no longer a place for a house built large out of necessity, but also simple, without luxuries or grand adornments. A house without historical value for anyone other than me, the last of the original owners.