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Fiction

Young Aurora and the Captive Child

By Dante Liano
Translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead
Dante Liano exposes the shocking truth behind a woman’s innocent pose.

Every time I go back to Guatemala City I make a stop at Avenida Bolívar, the capital’s main thoroughfare, with all the reverence of a mourner at a cemetery. The ravenous traffic, and the blue, green, and red houses, whose doors swing open and shut as the busy, hot-blooded people come and go, are all nothing but shadows; other figures, more substantial, more alive, emerge within me. I feel the urge to cry out, but go along quietly, and if on occasion I have wept then it’s been in front of ironmongers, high street stores, electrical goods stores, cinemas, dentists, sugar warehouses, grocers, pharmacies, tortilla shacks, clothing stores, raincoats, and passing buses—doleful, all.

I used to be happy to come back. But when you’re into your thirty-fifth year and all the USA has given you is a good salary that gets immediately sucked up by luxury cars and color TVs, along with the humiliation that goes with being Latino, the belief that every knock on the door will be immigration officials, and the knowledge that life is a job you hate, one you only want a break from, and you return home, carry out an inventory of the friends you’ve lost, confirm you’re now a foreigner there, too, then your stomach and head go empty. The volcano’s there, but it’s different now: less authentic.

My first time back from New Orleans was in 1960. They threw a big party at the house. My sister Nicolasa said: “We’re going to hire a marimba band.” We spent an afternoon clearing rooms, stacking up the furniture at the back of the house. Then, while my mother sweated over the tamales at the old stone cooker, we sprinkled the floor with pine chips and put up bright tissue paper and balloons. It was a party like any other: perspiration, inebriation, and desire filled the gaps in the crazy clamor of voices as people tried to make themselves heard over the noise of the marimbas. The whole thing seemed like make-believe; like a space that had been created to last only as long as the marimba, the rum, and Coca-Cola lasted.

It was at this party that I met Aurorita—young Aurora. She was petite, and she dressed well but not fashionably; she did her hair as though the 1940s had never ended. Nicolasa introduced us: “This is our landlady’s daughter,” she said. I ran my eye over her spectacles with their golden frames, her perfect white teeth, tiny hands, snub nose, and myopic eyes. I saw hesitation in her, a yearning for happiness, and the worn-down unhappiness of having no one in your life. I must be some kind of degenerate, given that it was precisely these marks of innocence that made me want her. When she said yes to a dance and we made our way side by side to a gap near the front of the dance floor, she knew, and I knew too, that our ultimate destination was bed. It was never to be. As we danced a 6/8, I tried to bring her body close to mine. Her spindly bones yielded, and I felt godlike: earthbound, shaggy-headed, far from fair, but godlike all the same.

The following day Nicolasa interrogated me over my propositioning of Aurorita. I acted cynical, making a show of haughtiness as though it was only a matter of time before a weak woman was mine, when what I really felt was a tenderness bordering on pity for the little old woman. I spent the trip, the idea of which had been to spend time with my family, courting Aurorita, incurring no small loss of money on my part. Things went as far as a kiss, I remember. But I’ve kissed Aurorita time and again in my dreams, and the saliva on her tongue has a taste like bitter roses. I find it impossible now to distinguish: is it a dream I remember, or a memory I dream? When the time came for me to head back to New Orleans we bid a hasty farewell, like we were being snatched from one another—like the farewells we’d seen between lovers in the movies. I went back to the U.S. all set to save up the money to marry her.

Nico’s first letter floored me. “Strange rumors” had, she said, been going around the neighborhood, to do with Aurorita. My sister was obviously itching to tell me more, so I wrote straight back urging her to do so, to tell me everything, “sparing nothing.” The reply, which by its considerable length betrayed how happy Nicolasa was to be telling me these things, for all its length, held no great revelations. Nico said that the woman who owned the shop on the corner had warned me to take care with that “shitty little sparrow.” The butcher changed the subject when Nico mentioned Aurorita, but the old woman in the bakery said that Aurorita had a boyfriend already. Though later reports were to be far more grievous, this initial one was, for me, the most brutal, as it stood for the distance between Aurorita and me, her ring-laden hands, her pale skin, her timid air.

Nicolasa’s second letter contained a further discovery: Miss Aurorita didn’t have a boyfriend. It was more delicate than that: she had had a lover, and because of the affair had been written out of her inheritance. I wrote back to my sister saying that my time in the U.S. had changed my thinking. Reaffirming my intentions, I revealed to my sister my wish, come the following vacation, to marry Miss Aurorita.

The third letter was written in a flat, police-report-like style. My sister, according to my wishes, had been going around the busy shops and the living rooms lined with comfortable wicker armchairs, and begun letting slip the news that I could well be about to marry. In response to people’s stony faces, and their exceeding concern over when precisely I’d be back, she’d smile and give vague answers. The butcher took the bait. He waited for all the customers to leave and told my sister he’d make a formal visit that evening. I experienced what he said, in the letter, acutely; I had the sense that my feet truly existed, that my brain was smaller than my vocal cords, and that my eyes were rolling about in my head. According to the meat seller, Aurorita’s story was more complex still. He began by saying he was revealing these things for my own good, out of the affection he’d had for our family ever since we arrived from Chimaltenango. I hated him then for a different reason from why I hate him today: I hated him for the shame he caused me, because the story he told made a fool of me, and a cuckold and an idiot, all at the same time. All of which I was, truly, but to hear it from someone else hurt. Young Aurora, said the butcher, wasn’t Miss Aurora at all: she had a child, fruit of relations she’d had with a member of her own family. This I found impossible to accept. I wrote back to my sister begging her to “get to the bottom of things.”

Letter number four sealed it. Over the course of several frank conversations with shopkeepers throughout the neighborhood, my sister had managed to fill in the gaps in the butcher’s account. The outlines changed, but not the core of the thing: Aurora had borne a stranger’s child, and this child was still alive, passing its days sequestered in a room off her building’s inner courtyard, the child’s contact with the world restricted to the docile hound whose barks were heard constantly from deep within the edifice. Everyone pretended not to know about the child, thus deceiving young Aurora, who thought she was the one deceiving everyone else.

So I decided it was over between Aurorita and me. I stopped replying to her letters and began drinking. On my next trip to Guatemala, it wasn’t hard to find the man, the one everyone fingered as young Aurora’s lover. Anyone listening in on our even-tempered conversation about a woman we’d both loved and both ended up losing, would have thought neither of us very manly. And maybe they’d have been right. But you get to an age, or you should, in which tests of manhood become tests of weariness, bullfights featuring domesticated animals. So it was that, one night, he accepted my offer to buy him a beer, to have a drink and tell his story—like mine, not the saddest story ever told. That night I was a different person: I lived, through his words, other people’s lives. My character—the fact I’m meek and solitary as a person—is in some measure the result of this conversation. The man before me, glancing around, his fingers twitching as though he were saying the rosary, was well past his prime, very dark in complexion, with an oily black mustache covering thick lips. Someone kept coming back to the jukebox and obsessively selecting the same song again and again. The sound emerged twirling from the machine, edging forward between the tables and presenting itself to this man, this balding, long-sighted man, to whom I was an excuse to delve into memory. It was quite an effort to stay tuned in to what he was saying, given that the noise, his thick-tongued speech, and the alcoholic fumes clouding my brain, combined to form a clotted mush out of which I had to pick what I wanted to hear. Or perhaps I misremember; perhaps it was that the act of attention, my straining to listen, clouded my intelligence. I do remember this: the man told me his name, and then proceeded with the tale:

“I was born on the coast,” he began. “Near Retalhuleu, there’s a town where the Indians go bare-chested. There. It’s so backward they still go down to collect water from the river in buckets, and they only have electricity for lighting between six and nine at night. I was born there but I hated the place—tried my hardest in school, got myself top of the class. And I didn’t stop there—when I got into high school in Retalhuleu, I was the top student. People from Retalhuleu think it’s the center of the universe, you know, even though it was full of ignorant tyrants. For me it was a surrogate for the world I’d created in my mind, one that, to this day really, I’m still trying to find. Before too long, I won myself a scholarship and came to the capital to study.

“And this is where she enters, young Aurora, as my cousin’s always been known, and always will be, I suppose. My aunt was a widow, and my family was alive to the fact she was all alone in the enormous house her dead husband, a wealthy trader, had left her—just her, her two daughters, and a Cadillac. My parents wrote her a fawning card, the long and short of which was a request to put me up.

“How was my aunt to know that by saying yes she’d also be ruining her life? She couldn’t have, least of all from the sight of me when I walked through the door, such as I was, my suitcase stinking of raw hide and a suit that might have been elegant down in Reu but was pretty shabby to city eyes. Both she and my cousins laughed at the sight of me. I was given a room overlooking the inner courtyard, along with a dent in my self-confidence. And so it remained: I was the poor relation, and they, in the finery and perfume of their dead father’s trade, simply turned up their noses.

“I was seventeen, and my cousins just a little younger—Aurora sixteen, Margot fifteen. What was I supposed to make of them? I was studious, but restless at the same time. I was already doing a few odd jobs for the Communist Party by then, and Fridays I’d head down to Seventeenth Street—this was before all the whores were cleared out. I fell for lots of other girls, but never anything that stuck, partly because I thought they were all stupid pinheads in their bright lipstick.

“Our hands touching, a glance, some misunderstanding. I don’t remember . . .

“In fact, I remember it very well. We were listening to the news on the radio one day, our arms touched, and I felt suddenly breathless. She blushed, and my last thought was: she’s your cousin. Lots of sneaking around behind the old woman’s back after that. People say I also had something with Margot, but that’s simply not true.

“We created a kind of gloom in that house, it came to have the kind of sticky air you get in very busy bars on the coast. I didn’t know Aurora was pregnant. All I remember was my aunt screaming at me, insulting me, quite rightly when someone’s bitten the hand that feeds them, and I was out on my ear. I never asked myself how she knew Aurora was expecting. I can’t remember. My aunt sent her and Margot on a nine-month vacation to Antigua.

“I remember plucking up the courage to go and show my face again. My aunt listened to the offer of marriage—her answer being to kick me straight out again, hurling abuse after me. I never went back. I took an oath that day, one I’ve followed through on. My aunt has remained cold. What she did was despicable, forcing Aurora to lie, to pretend she was still Miss Aurora. The worse thing, which I’ll never forgive them for, is having hidden the child away all these years, leaving it to rot in myinner courtyard room with only the dog to talk to.”

Who knows what else he said. I don’t want to remember now, now that I’m back on Avenida Bolívar, standing in front of the mansion, which today has become a store. The young man working there shows all the mean tics of the average small business owner. Entering the store, I see how similar he and I are, and feel a profound disgust, as though the boy were a twin cockroach; his head must be teeming with the empty, isolated days that formed his childhood. I see him: my seed repulses me. It shouldn’t have been this way. But what to say to him, when the only thing the block brings to mind, this mansion with all its brown smells, is young Aurora, white, hands crossed in front of the dress she wore to her first communion, after which she was found floating in the bath, having bathed in rose essence, and in tepid water, the steam having risen and steamed up the mirrors, the medicine bottles, the jars of cosmetics, and the small, bitter eyes of the mother who murmured: “This was how it should have been, bitch, this was how it should have been”?

“La joven Aurora y el niño cautivo” © Dante Liano. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2014 by Thomas Bunstead. All rights reserved.  

English Spanish (Original)

Every time I go back to Guatemala City I make a stop at Avenida Bolívar, the capital’s main thoroughfare, with all the reverence of a mourner at a cemetery. The ravenous traffic, and the blue, green, and red houses, whose doors swing open and shut as the busy, hot-blooded people come and go, are all nothing but shadows; other figures, more substantial, more alive, emerge within me. I feel the urge to cry out, but go along quietly, and if on occasion I have wept then it’s been in front of ironmongers, high street stores, electrical goods stores, cinemas, dentists, sugar warehouses, grocers, pharmacies, tortilla shacks, clothing stores, raincoats, and passing buses—doleful, all.

I used to be happy to come back. But when you’re into your thirty-fifth year and all the USA has given you is a good salary that gets immediately sucked up by luxury cars and color TVs, along with the humiliation that goes with being Latino, the belief that every knock on the door will be immigration officials, and the knowledge that life is a job you hate, one you only want a break from, and you return home, carry out an inventory of the friends you’ve lost, confirm you’re now a foreigner there, too, then your stomach and head go empty. The volcano’s there, but it’s different now: less authentic.

My first time back from New Orleans was in 1960. They threw a big party at the house. My sister Nicolasa said: “We’re going to hire a marimba band.” We spent an afternoon clearing rooms, stacking up the furniture at the back of the house. Then, while my mother sweated over the tamales at the old stone cooker, we sprinkled the floor with pine chips and put up bright tissue paper and balloons. It was a party like any other: perspiration, inebriation, and desire filled the gaps in the crazy clamor of voices as people tried to make themselves heard over the noise of the marimbas. The whole thing seemed like make-believe; like a space that had been created to last only as long as the marimba, the rum, and Coca-Cola lasted.

It was at this party that I met Aurorita—young Aurora. She was petite, and she dressed well but not fashionably; she did her hair as though the 1940s had never ended. Nicolasa introduced us: “This is our landlady’s daughter,” she said. I ran my eye over her spectacles with their golden frames, her perfect white teeth, tiny hands, snub nose, and myopic eyes. I saw hesitation in her, a yearning for happiness, and the worn-down unhappiness of having no one in your life. I must be some kind of degenerate, given that it was precisely these marks of innocence that made me want her. When she said yes to a dance and we made our way side by side to a gap near the front of the dance floor, she knew, and I knew too, that our ultimate destination was bed. It was never to be. As we danced a 6/8, I tried to bring her body close to mine. Her spindly bones yielded, and I felt godlike: earthbound, shaggy-headed, far from fair, but godlike all the same.

The following day Nicolasa interrogated me over my propositioning of Aurorita. I acted cynical, making a show of haughtiness as though it was only a matter of time before a weak woman was mine, when what I really felt was a tenderness bordering on pity for the little old woman. I spent the trip, the idea of which had been to spend time with my family, courting Aurorita, incurring no small loss of money on my part. Things went as far as a kiss, I remember. But I’ve kissed Aurorita time and again in my dreams, and the saliva on her tongue has a taste like bitter roses. I find it impossible now to distinguish: is it a dream I remember, or a memory I dream? When the time came for me to head back to New Orleans we bid a hasty farewell, like we were being snatched from one another—like the farewells we’d seen between lovers in the movies. I went back to the U.S. all set to save up the money to marry her.

Nico’s first letter floored me. “Strange rumors” had, she said, been going around the neighborhood, to do with Aurorita. My sister was obviously itching to tell me more, so I wrote straight back urging her to do so, to tell me everything, “sparing nothing.” The reply, which by its considerable length betrayed how happy Nicolasa was to be telling me these things, for all its length, held no great revelations. Nico said that the woman who owned the shop on the corner had warned me to take care with that “shitty little sparrow.” The butcher changed the subject when Nico mentioned Aurorita, but the old woman in the bakery said that Aurorita had a boyfriend already. Though later reports were to be far more grievous, this initial one was, for me, the most brutal, as it stood for the distance between Aurorita and me, her ring-laden hands, her pale skin, her timid air.

Nicolasa’s second letter contained a further discovery: Miss Aurorita didn’t have a boyfriend. It was more delicate than that: she had had a lover, and because of the affair had been written out of her inheritance. I wrote back to my sister saying that my time in the U.S. had changed my thinking. Reaffirming my intentions, I revealed to my sister my wish, come the following vacation, to marry Miss Aurorita.

The third letter was written in a flat, police-report-like style. My sister, according to my wishes, had been going around the busy shops and the living rooms lined with comfortable wicker armchairs, and begun letting slip the news that I could well be about to marry. In response to people’s stony faces, and their exceeding concern over when precisely I’d be back, she’d smile and give vague answers. The butcher took the bait. He waited for all the customers to leave and told my sister he’d make a formal visit that evening. I experienced what he said, in the letter, acutely; I had the sense that my feet truly existed, that my brain was smaller than my vocal cords, and that my eyes were rolling about in my head. According to the meat seller, Aurorita’s story was more complex still. He began by saying he was revealing these things for my own good, out of the affection he’d had for our family ever since we arrived from Chimaltenango. I hated him then for a different reason from why I hate him today: I hated him for the shame he caused me, because the story he told made a fool of me, and a cuckold and an idiot, all at the same time. All of which I was, truly, but to hear it from someone else hurt. Young Aurora, said the butcher, wasn’t Miss Aurora at all: she had a child, fruit of relations she’d had with a member of her own family. This I found impossible to accept. I wrote back to my sister begging her to “get to the bottom of things.”

Letter number four sealed it. Over the course of several frank conversations with shopkeepers throughout the neighborhood, my sister had managed to fill in the gaps in the butcher’s account. The outlines changed, but not the core of the thing: Aurora had borne a stranger’s child, and this child was still alive, passing its days sequestered in a room off her building’s inner courtyard, the child’s contact with the world restricted to the docile hound whose barks were heard constantly from deep within the edifice. Everyone pretended not to know about the child, thus deceiving young Aurora, who thought she was the one deceiving everyone else.

So I decided it was over between Aurorita and me. I stopped replying to her letters and began drinking. On my next trip to Guatemala, it wasn’t hard to find the man, the one everyone fingered as young Aurora’s lover. Anyone listening in on our even-tempered conversation about a woman we’d both loved and both ended up losing, would have thought neither of us very manly. And maybe they’d have been right. But you get to an age, or you should, in which tests of manhood become tests of weariness, bullfights featuring domesticated animals. So it was that, one night, he accepted my offer to buy him a beer, to have a drink and tell his story—like mine, not the saddest story ever told. That night I was a different person: I lived, through his words, other people’s lives. My character—the fact I’m meek and solitary as a person—is in some measure the result of this conversation. The man before me, glancing around, his fingers twitching as though he were saying the rosary, was well past his prime, very dark in complexion, with an oily black mustache covering thick lips. Someone kept coming back to the jukebox and obsessively selecting the same song again and again. The sound emerged twirling from the machine, edging forward between the tables and presenting itself to this man, this balding, long-sighted man, to whom I was an excuse to delve into memory. It was quite an effort to stay tuned in to what he was saying, given that the noise, his thick-tongued speech, and the alcoholic fumes clouding my brain, combined to form a clotted mush out of which I had to pick what I wanted to hear. Or perhaps I misremember; perhaps it was that the act of attention, my straining to listen, clouded my intelligence. I do remember this: the man told me his name, and then proceeded with the tale:

“I was born on the coast,” he began. “Near Retalhuleu, there’s a town where the Indians go bare-chested. There. It’s so backward they still go down to collect water from the river in buckets, and they only have electricity for lighting between six and nine at night. I was born there but I hated the place—tried my hardest in school, got myself top of the class. And I didn’t stop there—when I got into high school in Retalhuleu, I was the top student. People from Retalhuleu think it’s the center of the universe, you know, even though it was full of ignorant tyrants. For me it was a surrogate for the world I’d created in my mind, one that, to this day really, I’m still trying to find. Before too long, I won myself a scholarship and came to the capital to study.

“And this is where she enters, young Aurora, as my cousin’s always been known, and always will be, I suppose. My aunt was a widow, and my family was alive to the fact she was all alone in the enormous house her dead husband, a wealthy trader, had left her—just her, her two daughters, and a Cadillac. My parents wrote her a fawning card, the long and short of which was a request to put me up.

“How was my aunt to know that by saying yes she’d also be ruining her life? She couldn’t have, least of all from the sight of me when I walked through the door, such as I was, my suitcase stinking of raw hide and a suit that might have been elegant down in Reu but was pretty shabby to city eyes. Both she and my cousins laughed at the sight of me. I was given a room overlooking the inner courtyard, along with a dent in my self-confidence. And so it remained: I was the poor relation, and they, in the finery and perfume of their dead father’s trade, simply turned up their noses.

“I was seventeen, and my cousins just a little younger—Aurora sixteen, Margot fifteen. What was I supposed to make of them? I was studious, but restless at the same time. I was already doing a few odd jobs for the Communist Party by then, and Fridays I’d head down to Seventeenth Street—this was before all the whores were cleared out. I fell for lots of other girls, but never anything that stuck, partly because I thought they were all stupid pinheads in their bright lipstick.

“Our hands touching, a glance, some misunderstanding. I don’t remember . . .

“In fact, I remember it very well. We were listening to the news on the radio one day, our arms touched, and I felt suddenly breathless. She blushed, and my last thought was: she’s your cousin. Lots of sneaking around behind the old woman’s back after that. People say I also had something with Margot, but that’s simply not true.

“We created a kind of gloom in that house, it came to have the kind of sticky air you get in very busy bars on the coast. I didn’t know Aurora was pregnant. All I remember was my aunt screaming at me, insulting me, quite rightly when someone’s bitten the hand that feeds them, and I was out on my ear. I never asked myself how she knew Aurora was expecting. I can’t remember. My aunt sent her and Margot on a nine-month vacation to Antigua.

“I remember plucking up the courage to go and show my face again. My aunt listened to the offer of marriage—her answer being to kick me straight out again, hurling abuse after me. I never went back. I took an oath that day, one I’ve followed through on. My aunt has remained cold. What she did was despicable, forcing Aurora to lie, to pretend she was still Miss Aurora. The worse thing, which I’ll never forgive them for, is having hidden the child away all these years, leaving it to rot in myinner courtyard room with only the dog to talk to.”

Who knows what else he said. I don’t want to remember now, now that I’m back on Avenida Bolívar, standing in front of the mansion, which today has become a store. The young man working there shows all the mean tics of the average small business owner. Entering the store, I see how similar he and I are, and feel a profound disgust, as though the boy were a twin cockroach; his head must be teeming with the empty, isolated days that formed his childhood. I see him: my seed repulses me. It shouldn’t have been this way. But what to say to him, when the only thing the block brings to mind, this mansion with all its brown smells, is young Aurora, white, hands crossed in front of the dress she wore to her first communion, after which she was found floating in the bath, having bathed in rose essence, and in tepid water, the steam having risen and steamed up the mirrors, the medicine bottles, the jars of cosmetics, and the small, bitter eyes of the mother who murmured: “This was how it should have been, bitch, this was how it should have been”?

“La joven Aurora y el niño cautivo” © Dante Liano. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2014 by Thomas Bunstead. All rights reserved.  

La joven aurora y el niño cautivo

Siempre que regreso a Guatemala, voy a visitar la avenida Bolívar, con la misma reverencia del que visita un cementerio. El tránsito avorazado, las casas azules, verdes, coloradas, cuyas puertas se abren y cierran dejando salir gentes activas y sanguíneas, sólo son como sombras, porque dentro de mí surgen otras gentes más vivas, más consistentes. Me vienen ganas de gritar, pero callado, y si alguna vez yo hubiera llorado, sería delante de ferreterías, tiendas, electrodomésticos, cines, dentistas, depósitos de azúcar, abarroterías, farmacias, tortillerías, ventas de ropa, impermeables y autobuses dolientes.

Antes venía contento. Pero cuando has cumplido 35 años, y los Estados Unidos sólo te han dado el privilegio de un salario alto derrochado inmediatamente en automóviles de lujo, televisor a colores, la humillación de ser latino, la paranoia de la migra y la creencia de que la vida es un trabajo odioso del que urge descansar, entonces regresás a tu país, hacés el inventario de los amigos que ya no tenés, constatás que también allí sos extranjero y se te vacían estómago y cerebro. Hay un volcán, pero ya no es el mismo; es menos verdadero.

La primera vez que regresé de Nueva Orleans fue en el 60. Hicieron una gran fiesta en la casa. Mi hermana Nicolasa me dijo: “Vamos a alquilar marimba”. Pasamos la tarde vaciando habitaciones y amontonando muebles en el último cuarto. Luego, mientras mi madre, sudorosa, cocinaba los tamales en el viejo poyo, nosotros regábamos pino en el piso y colgábamos papel de china y vejigas de una pared a otra. La fiesta fue igual a todas: sudor, embriaguez y deseo circulaban entre las conversaciones enloquecidas de los que alzaban la voz para ser oídos sobre el ruido de la marimba. Parecía todo de mentiras: parecía un espacio creado sólo para subsistir mientras durasen la marimba, el ron, la Coca‑Cola.

Fue en esa fiesta cuando conocí a la joven Aurora. Era pequeña, vestía bien, pero fuera de moda y se peinaba como si los años cuarenta hubieran sido definitivos. Me la presentó Nicolasa: “Es la hija de la dueña de esta casa”, me dijo. Yo vi las molduras de oro de los anteojos, los dientes blancos e intachables, la minucia de sus manos, la breve nariz, los ojos miopes. Vi la irresolución, el ansia de estar contenta, la infelicidad mordida a solas. Debo de ser un degenerado, porque esos atributos inocentes me la hicieron deseable. Cuando aceptó que bailáramos y mientras a codazos nos abríamos paso hasta un claro cerca de la marimba, ella sabía, yo sabía también, que un lecho nos esperaba. Nunca lo alcanzaríamos. Mientras bailábamos un 6×8, traté de empujar su cuerpo contra el mío. Los huesitos cedieron. Yo me sentí un dios; pedestre, moreno y espinudo, pero dios.

Al día siguiente, la Nico me interrogó acerca de mis avances con Aurorita. Yo fingí cinismo, la altanería del que siente próximo el sometimiento de una mujer débil: sentía, en cambio, una ternura que era casi compasión por la mujercita antigua. Esas vacaciones, que había pensado pasar junto a mi familia, las invertí, con gran pérdida de dinero, en cortejar a Aurorita.  Yo recuerdo que llegamos a besarnos. Pero muchas veces, en mis sueños, he besado a Aurorita y su saliva tiene un amargo sabor a rosas. Así que ahora no puedo distinguir entre el recuerdo de un sueño y el recuerdo de la realidad. Al final de las vacaciones, nos despedimos arrebatados, como a tirones, como en las películas habíamos visto que se separan los amantes. Yo regresé a los Estados Unidos dispuesto a acumular un capital para casarme con ella.

Una primera carta de la Nico me dejó sobresaltado. Me hablaba de “extraños rumores” que corrían en el barrio acerca de Aurorita. Como era evidente que mi hermana estaba esperando mi autorización para soltarme el chisme, le escribí una carta urgida y apremiante, en donde le suplicaba que me contara todo, “hasta en los mínimos detalles”. La respuesta, cuyo volumen mostraba cuán feliz era Nicolasa en contarme esas cosas, con su mucho decir no revelaba mayores cosas. En ella, la Nico me decía que la señora de la tienda de la esquina la había advertido de que yo debía de tener cuidado “con esa mosquita muerta”. El carnicero le desvió la conversación, pero la viejita de la panadería le había dicho que Aurorita ya tenía novio. Ese conocimiento fue, para mí, el más brutal de todos, porque, si bien lo que sabría después era abundantemente peor, ese primer hecho significaba la lejanía de Aurorita, de sus manos anilladas, de su piel pálida, de su aliento tembloroso.

En la segunda carta, Nicolasa me contaba que había averiguado algo más: la señorita Aurora no tenía novio. La historia era más delicada: había tenido un amante y por eso había sido desheredada. Respondí a mi hermana que la estancia en los Estados Unidos había modificado mi mentalidad. Reafirmaba mis intenciones hacia la señorita Aurora y le revelaba mi propósito de casarme con ella, en las próximas vacaciones.

La tercera carta de mi hermana estaba aplanada por un estilo policial. Acuciada por mis deseos, comenzó a soltar, en los negocios llenos de gente o en las salas de apacibles sillones de mimbre, la afirmación del probable matrimonio. En medio de rostros inexpresivos, demasiados ocupados en verificar la exactitud del vuelto, ella sonreía y decía: “tal vez”, “es probable”. El carnicero cayó en la trampa. Esperó que se vaciara el local y le anunció su formal visita esa noche. Cuando leí lo que el el carnicero dijo, sentí profundo, tuve la sensación de que mis pies realmente existían, de que mi cerebro era más pequeño que mis cuerdas vocales, de que mis ojos giraban en blanco. Según el hombre de las sangres, la historia de la señorita Aurora era mucho más compleja. Dijo que revelaba todo eso por mi bien, por el cariño que le tenía a mi familia desde que habíamos emigrado de Chimaltenango. Yo lo odié esa vez por un motivo diferente al que me hace odiarlo ahora. Lo odié porque me puso en vergüenza, porque su historia me hacía aparecer tonto, cornudo e ingenuo. Yo lo era, en verdad, pero dicho por otra persona me hizo infeliz. La joven Aurora, dijo el carnicero, no era señorita: tenía un hijo, fruto de una relación con un pariente. No me pude conformar. Le escribí a mi hermana suplicándole que “averiguara la verdad hasta el fondo”.

La cuarta carta de mi hermana fue definitiva. Había corregido y pulido la versión del carnicero a través de francos diálogos entre ella y los tenderos del barrio. Aunque variaban en la apariencia, todos coincidían en la sustancia: la señorita Aurora había tenido un hijo con un desconocido; el niño existía, escondido en el segundo patio, sin más contacto humano que con el manso perro que siempre se oía ladrar en el fondo de la casa. Todos fingían ignorar su existencia; engañaban a la joven Aurora que creía engañarlos.

Con esto, decidí romper con Aurorita. No le respondí sus cartas y me dediqué a beber. La siguiente vez que regresé a Guatemala, no me fue difícil encontrar al que todos señalaban como el amante de la joven Aurora. Quien nos hubiera oído hablar tranquilamente acerca de una mujer que habíamos amado y, luego. perdido, pensaría que éramos poco hombres. Tal vez. Pero hay una edad, o debe haberla, en que las pruebas de virilidad parecen torneos de cansancio, fiestas de toros para animales domésticos. Así que, una noche, aceptó ir conmigo a una cantina, a beber y  a contar su historia, de menuda infelicidad, como la mía. Esa noche fui otro; a través de las palabras de aquel hombre viví otras vidas, no la mía. En parte, mi solitaria mansedumbre se debe a esa conversación.

El hombre que, delante de mí, se miraba y  estrujaba los dedos como si recitara un rosario, era ya maduro, muy moreno y con los labios gruesos, cubiertos de un bigote graso y negro. Alguien ponía, obsesivamente, la misma canción en la rockola. La canción salía, girando, del aparato y se retorcía entre las mesas, entre los ojos del hombre lleno de calvicie y presbicia que me tomaba como pretexto para recordar. Yo debía hacer un gran esfuerzo para ponerle atención, pues el ruido, su lengua pastosa y mi cerebro lleno. de alcohol eran una masa de grumo sobre lo que yo quería oír.

Puede ser que la memoria me falle; es más probable que la misma atención haya nublado mi inteligencia allí, en el momento preciso de escuchar. Recuerdo esto: el hombre me dijo cómo se llamaba. Luego me contó su historia.

“Nací en la costa”, comenzó. “Cerca de Retalhuleu, hay un pueblo en donde las indias andan desnudas de la cintura para arriba. Allí nací yo. Es un pueblo tan atrasado que todavía ahora el agua la van a traer al río, en cubeta, y la luz eléctrica viene a las seis de la tarde y se va a las nueve de la noche. Yo odiaba ese hoyo en el que había nacido, así que me apliqué en la escuela, hasta ser el primero de la clase. No contento con eso, me fui a Retalhuleu, en donde fui el abanderado del instituto. Usted sabe que los retaltecos dicen que su ciudad es la capital del mundo. Para mí, ese mundo de déspotas vacunos era el sucedáneo de otro que yo había creado en mi imaginación y que todavía busco. Para no hacerla larga, me gané una beca y me vine a estudiar a la capital.

“Y aquí es donde entra la joven Aurora, que es como le decían a mi prima hasta después de muerta. Mi tía había enviudado de un comerciante rico de la capital y mi familia no ignoraba que vivía encerrada con dos hijas y un cadillac en su casa enorme. Mis padres le escribieron una carta servil, en donde, en resumidas cuentas, le pedían que me diera posada.

“¿Qué iba a saber mi tía que al responder afirmativamente se estaba desgraciando la vida? No podía saberlo y menos viéndome llegar, corno me vio, entre las risas de ella y de mis primas, cargando una valija que olía a cuero crudo y un traje que era elegante en Reu, pero triste en la ciudad. Me dieron un cuarto cerca del segundo patio y poca confianza. Yo seguía siendo el pariente pobre, mientras ellas se echaban encima, en perfumes y joyas, las ventas del comerciante muerto.

“Tenía diecisiete años. Mis primas eran apenas menores. Aurora tenía dieciséis; Margot, quince. ¿Cómo iba a pensar en ellas? Yo era estudioso, pero también inquieto. Ya hacía pequeños trabajos para el partido comunista y viajaba los viernes a la diecisiete calle, antes de que sacaran de allí a las putas. Yo enamoraba a otras muchachas, pero con distracción, un poco por feo, otro poco porque me parecían tontas de boca pintada.

“Sería un roce, una mirada, una equivocación. No me acuerdo.

“Para serle sincero: sí me acuerdo. Un día, mientras oíamos las noticias del radio, mi brazo se quedó junto al de Aurora y se me fue el aliento. La vi que estaba colorada y lo último en que pensé es que fuera mi prima. Todo fue jugarle las vueltas a la vieja. Sé que le contarán también cosas de mí con Margot. No las crea.

“Creamos, en esa casa, un aire caliginoso, como las pegajosidades de las cantinas de la costa en donde se soban las gentes. Yo no supe que había embarazado a la Aurora. Sólo me acuerdo que mi tía me gritó, me insultó como se debe insultar a un malagradecido, y me puso en la calle. No me pregunte cómo supe que Aurora esperaba un hijo. No me acuerdo. La tía mandó a mis primas a la Antigua, en vacaciones de nueve meses.

“Recuerdo que un día reuní todas mis fuerzas y me presenté a mi tía. Ella me escuchó la propuesta de matrimonio y lo mismo me echó a la calle, entre insultos y vociferaciones. Ya no volví. Fue un juramento y lo he cumplido. Mi tía ha seguido endurecida. Lo que hizo fue infame. Obligó a la joven Aurora a mentir, a seguir fingiéndose señorita. Y lo peor, lo que yo no les perdono, es haber tenido escondido a ese niño durante tantos años, pudriéndose en mi habitación del segundo patio, hablando sólo con el perro.”

Quién sabe qué otras cosas me dijo. Ahora no quiero recordarlas, porque he vuelto a la Avenida Bolívar y me he parado frente a la casona donde funciona un pequeño comercio. El joven que lo atiende tiene todos los tics de la mezquindad del pequeño comerciante. Yo entro y lo veo igual a mí y siento un asco profundo, como si ese muchacho fuera una cucaracha repetida; pienso que su cabeza estará llena de los días vacíos que pasó aislado en su infancia. Lo veo y mi semilla me repugna. Debía de ser diferente. ¿Pero qué decirle, si lo único que me recuerda esta cuadra, esta casona llena de olores marrones, es a la joven Aurora, blanca, con las manos cruzadas sobre el vestido de primera comunión, después de que la encontraron flotando en la tina, donde se bañaba con esencia de rosas, en un agua tibia cuyo vapor empañaba los espejos, los frascos de medicina, los potes de cosméticos, los ojos pequeños y cerreros de la madre que murmuraba: “Así debía de ser, perra, así”?

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