I

nopportune as hail they arrived one early morning while everyone slept. Their faces tear-streaked, sad, maybe sobbing. With difficulty they dragged their feet. They carried suitcases inflated like horses’ bellies and toffees wrapped in bugambilia twigs. The branches of lemons in their hands shone like blazing funeral candles.

They were old friends of my parents and always showed up like that. My mother hurried to install them in the best guest room, with mystifying sweetness. I never understood why she was so happy for them to take over the house.

But this time, strangely evasive, they locked themselves in with my parents without acknowledging our words of greeting and without any consideration for the ten-year old who, piglike, may well have been expecting a lemon.

A sudden stillness took hold of the house. Afterwards, only for an instant, I heard the wail of my mother. Then the sharp, long silence between the ropes of water that streamed on non-stop.

The clouds formed grey and endless manes. From so much waiting I fell asleep. The voice of my father boomed above those faces I could not see:

‘He shall stay here, whatever happens! Be it as God wills!’

They entered my bedroom still dripping and in great distress. The little old lady tall and solemn. The favorite son trailed behind her with a walk he had never had before, downcast, and his eyes flitted behind their lids like a wolf trapped between bars. No longer strong, nor tall, nor a big laugher. He had been struck down with a single blow by some secret sadness.

His sister Asunción entered behind him with her grimace of nun without virtue: she no longer had a place in the world and couldn’t do the convent. Next Samuel, the idiot, damp and unsteady, who rummaged through the wardrobes as though he could find something in there that belonged to him. Hideous with his disgusting string of spit.

They were extremely rich, although to me they never looked it. They talked about how their grandfather used to lay out wicker baskets full of gold that one day he up and buried, and no one ever found out where.

The fool always frightened me. One time I saw him twist like a leech in an epileptic fit. He brought down the curtains in an effort to stop his fall and then lay quiet in the middle of the mosaic, stretched out and opened up like a great bat. His mouth was full of foam like thick cotton. I can still see it today when I close my eyes.

The sister was a nun whom I never saw in the convent. She always was going to go, but then ended up staying. She busied herself with useless things learned in the cloister: banging the piano, painting watercolors, crafting depressing boughs out of crepe paper, putting together little embossed boxes, and making cushions with silk borders covered with beads to toss around the parlor by the dried tortoise. She sang the mysteries in the parish church in her shrill voice, and had unlimited potential for holding grudges. When I first met her she had gone six months without speaking to her mother and three years without looking at her kind and intelligent brother. Maybe she was jealous of his beautiful soul, wonderful body, or maybe avoided loving him because she had figured out how to hoard up her own happiness.

He was in love with a beautiful girl whom he wrote to long distance. He used to read her letters to me. I was his favorite. He enjoyed my pranks, tolerated my fits, and promised to take me to see Europe. But this time he was not the same as he was.

Mommy saw me crying and explained: they are in terrible distress. He had helped the Cristeros. In his cellar they found a complete arsenal and took him prisoner. He was three months in the dungeons of Morelia alongside other criminals. There they inoculated them against tuberculosis. He watched his companions’ lifeblood drain away while the pestilence consumed his throat and left him a scar like a strangling frost. Before his escape he know he was a dead man. Like a sapling under an eruption of pests, that is how the illness took him. His forehead bulged and an obstinate fever set his eyes on fire.

When he fled the prison, wishing he had died with his companions, he spent fifteen days with the coyotes, subsisting on roots, and walking barefoot got as far as Yurécuaro. From there he traveled to Mexico City to hide in my house and wait for death, which he brought with him, which was gnawing at his tissues minute by minute.

The instant I saw my mommy separate his dishes and washing to keep from contaminating us I threw myself into the arms of my friend, I kissed him and made him understand that I felt neither fear nor disgust. Moved, he pushed me away, and smiled sadly at my exaggerated tenderness.

Since that day I was with him every afternoon.

The best doctors attended him in his room. Months and months of torture, analysis and opinion. Not a pore on his body escaped the torment. All for nothing! He bled ceaselessly, his cheeks were the color of jícama, his eyes became frighteningly large, and he completed the agony by crumbling away every single hour.

The fiancée stopped writing, but he never mentioned it.

I saw him divorce himself from every human support with such burning serenity it made my blood run cold, and there came a moment when he had become such a stranger to this world that he even forgave the pigheaded silence of his sister.

He talked to me and made me believe that for him life was good. He only became harsh when his mother sobbed over his ever-impending death. At those times he would talk of shame and cowardice and in a dry voice order the little old lady to be quiet.

I never thought he would die. During the year his roof and mine were the same I accustomed myself to his symptoms as though they were harmless facts, and supposed death could never touch a youth so wholesome. But one day, the day that always comes, the doctors gathered for the umpteenth time. One of them proposed they kill him, as a just and pious act. My patient, who could no longer even turn pale, with a kind smile, said that he would accept such a death if the father confessor would absolve him. The priest spoke of crime and roundly rejected the unspeakable solution. Shrugging, the doctor left him to his torment.

He was a forest on fire that was going out trunk by trunk.

I did not completely understand the drama about that man. I survived on what he invented for me: I would be beautiful, happy, free. He built me a future full of fantasies that never came to be. Happiness never ever came, but the dying man painted it with breathtaking brushstrokes, for he had firm hope in the eternal plan.

The day of his passing was for me pain that only the day of my own death shall surpass.

That week they had reprimanded me and he hadn’t taken my side. I got my revenge by not visiting him. I hummed around my room so that he would hear me. Through the wall I heard his eager breathing, like a long-expected death rattle. During the night his fatigue seeped into my room and I was cruel enough not to call out to him.

The inevitable afternoon I arrived from school at the moment when the last rites were being urgently administered. They were applying Extreme Unction to feet already treading the celestial path. I looked into his eyes overcome with sadness, and when the voice I knew told me I had denied him his final week of comfort, I hugged at his body in a frenzy. But stronger than my piety was the terror produced by the ice block that was his flesh. I immediately shrunk back. He noticed and said, calm:

‘The cold is already at my knees. But touch my hands, they still have a bit of life in them.’

His mother begged me to get out—I didn’t pay her the least notice. I placed my mouth above the face of the dying man and began to recite bitter prayers I did not even know. He repeated them.

There was no strength on earth that could have separated me from the head of his bed—I was there as he died. He told me in a firm voice that he would wait for me in heaven. My father dragged me out into the corridor and that was when I saw Asunción, the one with the boundless hate, the one that would never forget, vomiting up her soul’s arrogance in a fury of screams. I joined in, joined her shrieks for forgiveness that death would stampclosed beneath the marble lid.

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Publication of this translation authorized by the Mexican Fondo de Cultura Económica, with special thanks to Guadalupe Lira Montes, Subgerencia de Gestión Editorial, and everyone at the FCE Mexico City offices.

Títulos originales: “El moribundo”, incluidos en Obras completas, 2ª ed., de Guadalupe Dueñas, pp. 70–74, D. R. 2017, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Carretera Picacho-Ajusco 227, 14110 Ciudad de México. ePub