Three Messages and a Warning (6 page)

I thought that the most sensible thing was for Fermín to sit beside me, that way no one would suspect anything. I pulled Fermín out, slowly. Then I tried to open the passenger-side door, but I couldn’t while sustaining his body. After a few tries, I laid Fermín on the floor, opened the car door and hoisted him up until he was sitting in the passenger seat. But Fermín wouldn’t stay seated upright. I had to secure him with the seat belt so that he wouldn’t fall over. When I was finally able to close the door, I got into the car as quickly as I could. I wanted to get going before someone saw us. When I turned on the car, I realized that I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. I observed my brother. He looked calm. It was as if he knew he was in good hands.

“I’m sorry, Fermín, but I’m going to have to take you back to Mexico City. Please forgive me.”

Adela

The afternoon breeze started to air out the house, carrying away the veil of heat that smothered everything. The sound of the telephone broke the monotone tranquility of the house by the abandoned harbor. It rang various times until Adela heard it and went to answer it. She was soaked because she had been washing clothes. On the other line a voice emerged, like that of a child, distant and sad.

“Adela? It’s me, Silverio. It happened too soon.”

Distracted, she responded, “What happened too soon?”

Silverio remained quiet for a few seconds until he said:

“My brother, Fermín, died. I wanted to take him to the harbor, so he could die there, in his hometown. It was his last wish. I promised to take him, you know, but I never thought he would die on me along the way. I’m just an hour outside of Mexico City. If I go back there, his children aren’t going to let me take him to his hometown. But if I keep on driving to the harbor, they’ll resent me for traveling thirteen hours with his dead body in the car.”

He stopped talking while he considered the best way to continue. Adela waited.

“So I wanted to ask you if I can take him to your house
today. . . and tomorrow we can say that he died there.”

She didn’t answer right away.

“Uh, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my aunt Esther.”

Esteban

At ninety-eight, my grandmother Esther was still extraordinarily perceptive. She spent her life traveling, visiting her family scattered throughout Latin America. Wherever she went it only took her a few days to organize her life, to get a job, a house, and friends whom it seemed she had known her whole life. But ten years ago the idea occurred to her that death was lingering, and she went back to her hometown, never to move again. Fear overwhelmed her, and she didn’t even want to leave her own house. Since then I’ve made it a habit to come each year to visit her. I came to believe that, if I didn’t come, she would die of sadness. I realized later that, perhaps, I would be the one to die if my visits to her were suspended. Her outbursts of laughter, her swearing, and her stories had become fundamental in my life. I was already accustomed to taking the bus from Mexico City. Fourteen hours of travel to arrive at the harbor that was once massive and now seems like a fragile memory. I was exhausted but always happy to be able to see her at last. When descending from the bus, a tropical heat enveloped my body and I felt at home, even though I never lived there and even though I’m really not from there. I would walk down the street that leads to the central park, strolling slowly, reacquainting myself with my surroundings, wondering where my fascination with this empty, forgotten town came from. When I arrived at my grandmother’s house, I was already soaked with sweat. I grew excited at the sight of Adela and her jumping dogs on the other side of the fence, and I ran the remaining half block to get to her house. I greeted Adela and then I dodged the dogs on my way to my grandmother’s room. I opened the door and greeted her warmly.

“It’s high time you came back,” she told me.

I found her lying down in her bed. Strangely, she lay in the opposite position from the normal one: with her feet positioned by the headboard and her head at the foot of the bed.

When I asked her why she was lying down like that, she told me, unhesitatingly, “Because the headboard is farther away from the door, and, when I die, I want my head to be the first part of my body they carry out. I don’t want to leave my room feet first.”

“Oh, Grandma, you and your weird ideas.”

I started to sing her a song imitating a Chinese opera. It would be better described as shrieking rather than singing. She started to laugh. It was amazing to see my grandmother, so elderly, laughing wholeheartedly. Later she told me, while still laughing,

“I missed you coming over here and pestering me.”

Adela entered the room hastily and asked me,

“Did your grandmother tell you?”

“What?”

“That they’re going to bring a dead body here in a little bit.”

She told me so nonchalantly that I didn’t quite know how to react.

“No, but whose body arewe talking about?”

“An acquaintance of your grandmother,” Adela responded.

My grandma looked at me with a peculiar gaze: the look of a child awaiting the reaction of an adult so as to take advantage of the opportunity to laugh, or beg forgiveness, or admit defeat.

“It’s that the poor fellow died before getting here,” she said coyly.

“But a dead body! What kind of mess are you getting yourselves into?” I asked as seriously as I could.

My grandma responded curiously:

“You know, the other day Doña Victoria told me that in a town near the mouth of the river, they’ve just built a new cemetery. The problem is they don’t have any bodies to inaugurate the cemetery with, so they had to come here, asking around, wanting to know if we had any bodies to lend them.”

Adela chimed in, “In that case, why don’t we send them the one that’s on its way here? If they’re so desperate for bodies that they have to borrow them, I’m sure they’d be more than happy to accept our donation.”

Such was the discussion, when the doorbell rang. Adela went immediately to the door ,and I stayed put, not knowing what to do. Without hesitation, I turned off the light and hid behind the door. Adela left, and just as I was going to show myself, she returned with a male guest. They were carrying a sack with blankets wrapped around it. I was nervous, it was the first time I had seen a dead body. I tried to keep quiet, but one of Adela’s dogs came over and it started to sniff me. I had to push it away. The man glanced toward the door, where I was hiding, while he placed the dead body on the center table.

“Is Esther awake?”

Adela answered him while she cleared the glasses that were next to the sack.

“Yes, but her grandson is here too.”

“What?” the man said, alarmed.

I took advantage of the confusion to appear before them as if nothing had happened. The man looked at me, and I told him good afternoon. He approached me and I held out my hand. I told him that my name was Esteban. He returned my gesture, and he told me that his name was Silverio. Adela uncovered the body while Esteban and I exchanged greetings.

“Now what do we do?” asked Adela.

When I saw the dead body it surprised me. Even though I knew it was there, it’s not the same to know something as to see it. He appeared asleep and very much at peace. The strange part was that, even though he was lying on the center table, his legs were stiffly bent upwards. It took me a moment to realize that his legs were in the sitting position, suspended in the air, but still sitting. Adela attempted to rearrange the body, while saying:

“Let’s lie him down more comfortably.”

Silverio tried to help her, but they couldn’t adjust his posture. I realized that the blanket was caught on one of the chairs. I felt obligated to help them, and I began to approach the body, but Adela said that we should put him in bed. I protested. I reminded them that that was where my grandmother was. But it was too late. Adela led the way. When we entered my grandmother’s room, she stared at the body very attentively without saying anything. We placed him on the opposite side of the bed from where she was. My grandmother, struggling to sit up, said:

“Oh, how nice that Fermín made it.”

Esther

I was straining to hear the voices in the dining room. No one had mentioned Fermín, but I knew that he had arrived already. When they entered the room, I grew excited. It had been a long time since I had seen him last, and he and I were always very good friends. They brought him to the bed and tried to lay him down, but he was stuck in a sitting position. Rigor mortis had set in. Silverio mentioned that they would have to break his bones. I refused to let them do it. I told them that he was always sitting on the porch of his house, which was his favorite position, and if he had chosen that position we would have to respect it. Everyone looked at me with surprise, and Silverio intervened with the information that that was not the position he had chosen. Fermín died lying down, and Silverio himself was the one who put him in that position. I grew angry, and I told him that if he hadn’t chosen that position, then that position had chosen him, and that was the way he must remain. I would not permit them to break his bones. I neglected to tell them, however, that ever since I had fallen and broken my hip bone, I had been having recurring nightmares about the terrifying sound of bones breaking. These nightmares occurred not too often; but, when they mentioned the idea of breaking Fermín’s bones, the horror from my nightmares came flooding back to me. I had a flashback to the moment of my fall, as if I were reliving it all over again. I cut my reverie short and protested again: “No way, he’s staying just the way he is!” Silverio tried to reason with me, saying that there weren’t coffins for people in sitting positions and that it had to be done. Esteban, noticing how troubled I was, suggested that they could give him a bath of hot water to try to loosen up his joints. He had studied medicine, which is probably why no one argued with him when he invented that preposterous idea. Adela took a bucket and went to the bathroom to fill it. As they were preparing everything, they left me alone with Fermín, sitting in his favorite position. His back was facing me, so I had to make quite an effort to stand up and go around the bed to sit beside him. He looked younger than I.

“Oh, Fermín, you’re a lucky man. For so long I’ve waited here with the certainty that death was coming for me. But what’s the use of waiting when death always comes without a warning? In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that death has forgotten all about me.” I took him by the hand. It was stiff and cold. I was overwhelmed with sadness, and my eyes filled with tears. It had been many years since I had cried.

Adela

Ever since Fermín was brought to our house that afternoon, my aunt Esther changed completely. She never divulged the secret of how she had made Fermín’s “sitting legs” match the prone position of his body without breaking his bones. We had left them alone to heat up the water, and after a while, when we came back, he was already lying down in bed, perfectly straight from head to toe, and she by his side. When we asked her how she did it, all she said was that it had been over half a century since she had lain in the same bed with a man. Before we carried Fermín out, she fixed his shirt and brushed his hair. After the funeral, she started to say that she wanted to get out of the house again. The fear had left her. She wanted to go and visit her friends, to see the ocean and the river. I reluctantly informed her that almost all her friends had died, including those who where twenty or twenty-five years younger than she. But that didn’t seem to dissuade her. After a few days of traveling around town, visiting tombs and relatives of friends whom we had never met before, she asked me to take her to El Brujo Beach. That was her ultimate desire. We took a taxi because she didn’t want to go with anyone else. When we arrived, it surprised me to see two palm trees in the ocean, standing very upright. She also looked at them for a long time. Then she told me that the water was devouring the earth, that when she was a little girl the beach extended past those two palm trees. She asked me to undress her. It wasn’t quite warm enough and I worried she might catch cold. But when she gets an idea in her head, she demands obedience. I undressed her completely, with the exception of her diaper. Without a word, she took her walker and started ambling toward the ocean. Her body appeared especially fragile against that immensity of the harbor. “Shit, she’s going to die on me and then what will I do?” I said to myself. I thought about Silverio and how Fermín had died on him in similarly awkward circumstances. Fermín had obliged Silverio to bear witness to his death. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions about Esther’s intentions, but at that moment it seemed quite plausible. I went over to her and tried to convince her to desist. She told me that she needed to go on alone: that she was talking to her dearly departed, to all the dead that the ocean and the earth had swallowed up, particularly my deceased mother. I backed away a few meters. But I stayed attentive in case she tried something foolish. My anxiety was heightened by the fact that even though I had grown up on the banks of the Grijalva River, very close to the ocean, I had never learned to swim. To make matters worse, the waters had taken my mother from me, forty years ago, when I was just a girl. My mother was Esther’s sister. I think that’s why she loved me so much. She knew that what united us was a grief larger than any love. The ocean roared, and it seemed like the voices of multitudes inhabiting the water. I closed my eyes and tried to remember my mother. My attempts were in vain, as always. I couldn’t remember her face. For some reason, I thought I might have better luck being so near the water. When I opened my eyes, my aunt was staring at me. Her eyes were swollen with tears and she said: