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  “And do you mind telling me why you ended your reading twenty minutes early?”

  I told him that the lucid brother had criticized the way I read, not by facing me head-on but by using his mute brother, who’s a total dimwit. Father Clark didn’t understand what I was talking about and I had to explain what happened in detail.

  “Señor Carlos is a ventriloquist and he spoke to me as if it were his brother who was speaking. The brother, the dimwit, moves his lips like a fish, while Señor Carlos speaks through him. The mute doesn’t understand a thing, because if you speak to him, he doesn’t even look at you.”

  The priest stood up suddenly, pushing his chair back and hitting the wall where there was already a mark in the plaster, an indication that this was his usual way of getting out of his chair, and he walked to the window with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Eduardo,” he said in his gringo accent, “you should have reported everything you are telling me when it happened. Now you find yourself at a disadvantage, because there is a complaint against you, you are accused of aggressive behavior. I am going to have to take matters into my own hands.”

  He looked outside. He was clearly excited, and I thought that behind his bland appearance he hid a belligerent side. It must have been this that made him so attractive in Ofelia’s eyes. However, as organized as she was, I had my doubts that she’d tolerate her house filling up with marks on her walls, like those the priest left when he got up from his swivel chair.

  “I am going to talk to the Jiménez brothers, to see if I can convince them to withdraw their complaint,” he told me. “You were lucky they spoke with me and not with the people on the city council. A formal complaint would not look very good for you right now, Eduardo.”

  He put out his hand to signal that the meeting had ended, and he told me that he’d keep me informed. I thanked him and left his office. I ran into Ofelia at the entrance to the building. I asked what she was doing there, and she told me she’d come to see Father Clark. If you wait for me, I’ll drive you home, she told me, and I asked for her car keys so I could wait for her in the parking lot. Inside the car, seeing that she was taking a while, I started it up. I hadn’t started a car engine since my driver’s license had been taken away four months earlier. The place was empty, so I put it in first gear and let out the clutch. I drove one lap around the parking lot in second, then another one, and continued making laps in second gear. I thought that my own life seemed to be stuck in second gear; I hardly saw anyone and spent my mornings in the Sanborns de Piedra restaurant chatting with Gladis and the other waitresses. My few friends had distanced themselves from me or I’d distanced myself from them, which one wasn’t clear yet. In a way, I took pleasure in that distance and was trying to extend it, because I hoped to transform myself in some way that would surprise them when we saw each other again. However, since I hadn’t received the slightest indication from them that they wanted to reconnect, I started to believe that their separation was real, not contrived like mine, and that I was really going to end up alone, going in circles, the way Ofelia found me when she finally appeared in the parking lot. I stopped and got into the passenger seat so she could take the wheel. Since she didn’t ask me anything about my interview with Father Clark, I suspected that he’d told her everything already, which annoyed me.

  “Why didn’t you ask me what we talked about instead of asking the priest?” I said.

  “I didn’t ask him anything,” she snapped.

  “I bet he told you about the Jiménez brothers.”

  “He only told me that they were canceling your readings.”

  “And did he tell you why?”

  “No, I was going to ask you that.”

  I didn’t know if I should believe her, so I kept quiet.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?” she asked.

  Instead of answering I asked, “How can you like him?”

  “Who?”

  “Father Clark.”

  She blushed. “Who told you I like him?”

  Her eyes were shooting fire and for an instant I saw the Ofelia of my childhood, when we got along so well.

  “It’s obvious, because of how you talk about him.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  We didn’t speak to each other the rest of the drive home. She stayed for dinner because she had to look over a few bills with Celeste and, while we ate, I recounted what had happened at the Jiménez brothers’ house. I did it hoping I might amuse my father with an interesting story, but even though he watched me the whole time, his expression remained absent and I doubt he followed a single word I said. Celeste was the most impressed; she didn’t know that such a thing as a ventriloquist existed. Ofelia and I explained that these people are capable of speaking with their stomachs and we gave her a little demonstration, me taking the role of the ventriloquist and Ofelia the puppet that opens its mouth, but our little show was so bad that Celeste ended up more confused than before. Papá didn’t laugh even once, and when we finished, he nodded to Celeste that he wanted to go to bed.

  Once the cancer set into his legs, he suffered from bouts of severe pain that was even more acute when he made certain movements, like getting into bed, and on this occasion Ofelia and I heard him moan in agony. The TV was on, so we concentrated on the screen, waiting for Papá to stop moaning.

  “This is no way to live,” I told her.

  “We can’t do anything about it.”

  “There has to be some way to end this.”

  “Sometimes you scare me when I hear you talk,” she said.

  “You come two or three times a week, you stay for a while and then you leave; I’m always here, I hear him when he whimpers because of his bones or when he can’t shit, and then he starts to insult Celeste. Every day it’s the same. After all that moaning, he stops being your father and turns into something else.”

  “So, you’d be able to do it,” she said.

  “He’d thank me for it, but I don’t have the nerve.”

  We sat in silence, not taking our eyes off the TV. Then I reminded her about the cat.

  “What cat?”

  “The one they set on fire,” I told her.

  We were kids and I’d found the cat in a vacant lot close to our house, beneath some rocks, hairless and in agony, its skin dark and translucent from the burn, its pure white teeth in stark contrast to its partially charred body. It hardly moved, though, incredibly, it was still alive after the torture it had received, most likely at the hands of some hooligan kids in the neighborhood. They’d thrown gasoline on it, because the place reeked of it, and I thought they must have been the ones who’d hidden it under the rocks, because the sight of the animal writhing in its last spasms of life must have scared the hell out of them. Don’t look, Ofelia had ordered, and I moved back a few steps, obeying her, the way one obeys a goddess. She picked up the biggest rock she could find, lifted it with both hands, and I heard the crinkle of its skull when it broke; then she put the rock back in its place, sealing that rudimentary grave, and for the next several days I’d walk by the lot and stop for a few seconds, long enough to make sure that the little mound of rocks was still there.

  “How can you compare that with this? Sometimes I think you’ve lost it,” she said without looking at me.

  I didn’t say anything, knowing that the memory still tormented her just like it did me, and because of that neither of us could ever have a cat.

  After she separated from Rodolfo, her husband, she’d had an attack of Catholic fervor that led her to join a Bible circle, and since then she carried a Bible with her everywhere she went, and she’d open it at the slightest excuse to read one or two verses. Since you’re so hooked on that book, you should let me read it when you’re done with it, I’d say, mocking her. She started to read passages to Celeste, who listened attentively to her explic
ations. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when someone lectures another with the book open in her hand, while the other listens with her head bowed, and seeing Ofelia given over to that labor of proselytizing made me sick to my stomach. Where had that intrepid Ofelia gone, the one who’d meant the world to me, who was more important to me than my father and mother? Don’t look, she’d told me that morning in the abandoned lot, moving me away so I wouldn’t see the animal as it continued breathing, and part of me still adored her for doing that. Since her marriage we’d become strangers, and her divorce, instead of bringing us back together, had pushed us further apart. Bible circles infested our city as much as, if not more than, swimming pools, which we had more of than any other city in the world, as we’d been told with a certain sense of pride since we were children, as if it were some honorary title. Bibles and swimming pools were the two bastions of our desolately uncultured community.

  * * *

  —

  SINCE PAPÁ WOULD soon be unable to sign any official documents, Ofelia and I decided to put his bank account in my name. I went to the Banorte branch office early one day and Rosario, the director, greeted me with a hug and asked about my father. She knew him well, so I told her the truth: “He’s depressed, distant, and he’s losing his hearing.”

  She shook her head and told me that one of these days she’d come by to say hello.

  “He always asks me about you,” I lied. Papá didn’t ask about anyone these days, but I knew a visit from Rosario would lift his spirits, because he was always a little smitten with this short, constantly moving, middle-aged woman who painstakingly managed his scarce savings. He liked short women who were quick to laugh.

  Rosario took me to the cubicle of Señorita Consuelo Mijares, who was going to take care of my paperwork, and that’s where I spent more than an hour signing forms. When I finished, I went by Rosario’s cubicle to say goodbye and take her picture, because I knew Papá would love to have a picture of her, but she wasn’t there, and Mario, the manager in the cubicle beside hers, told me she’d left the office.

  I left the bank and went to the furniture store, where Jaime showed me the merchandise that had come in from Querétaro: three mahogany desks and three build-in wardrobes ready for installation. It was time to take the delivery truck in for its annual inspection, so I gave him a five-hundred-peso bill. Before they took away my driver’s license, I was the one who handled the truck inspection.

  “Did Güero come by?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  I hadn’t intended to ask him about Güero, but I couldn’t help myself. Güero stopped in to collect his protection fee (that’s what he called it) at the beginning of every month, more punctual than Benito Juárez’s birthday, and I tried to show my only employee that such a thing didn’t keep me up at night. Jaime had been working in the furniture store for six years, he’d become indispensable and the thought of him quitting made me sick to my stomach.

  We’d hidden the envelope with the money for Güero in one of the crossbars of the Swiss bunk beds so it wouldn’t come into contact with the money in the cash register. There was no other reason for this separation than it being dirty money, not because we’d earned it that way but because it was going to wind up in dirty hands, and I preferred to keep it away from the clean money, the money that allowed Jaime and my family to make a living.

  That afternoon I had two home readings: The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, with the Vigil family, and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, with Colonel Atarriaga, who’d fall asleep like clockwork after I read three pages.

  The Vigils were a family of tailors. They were devout in how they arranged themselves on the sofa: The father, the mother, the grandmother, and the three little boys always sat in the same order, and they always observed absolute silence. On my first visit the mother opened the door for me, the rest of the family was already seated, and mounded on the dining-room table were several pieces of fabric and three sewing machines. They greeted me by nodding their heads, and when I finished reading, the mother thanked me and walked me to the door. The following afternoon the electricity went off while I was reading. Although it was beginning to get dark outside, there was still enough light coming through the window, so I continued. Yet I noticed that they weren’t really listening to what I was reading. I asked what was wrong. The mother raised a finger to her lips and told me that they needed to see my lips in order to understand what I was reading. That’s how I realized the whole family was deaf. I told Ofelia what had happened, who then told Father Clark, who then spoke to the city council to look into whether the family of tailors was ideal for the home reading program. He found out that the grandmother was the only one born deaf, while the father and mother weren’t mute because they’d become deaf when they were children and already knew how to speak, and the same had happened with their three boys. In short, all of them could read lips, including the grandmother, so they could understand what I read perfectly, providing that I clearly articulated each word. And that’s what I started to do, emphasizing each word, each sentence, which meant I was exhausted by the time I finished those sessions.

  When I arrived at the Vigil house the mother opened the door, as usual. The grandmother and boys made their gesticulations of hello, and I noticed the father was missing. His wife told me he was sick, but I didn’t know if I should believe her because the week before I’d had a disagreement with him, and I thought it was an excuse not to see me. It happened like this. Because of the effort required to read in that house, after half an hour I requested a five-minute break and asked for a glass of water. The eldest boy went to get it, and shortly after, we heard something crash on the floor. I said we heard, because the two kids and I turned toward the kitchen. The parents and grandmother were unfazed, but they could see from our reaction that something had happened, and the mother got up and went to the kitchen, followed by the grandmother. I stayed with Señor Vigil and the two little ones.

  “So they do hear,” I said, pointing to his children.

  He didn’t say anything. The boys had lowered their eyes and didn’t dare look at their father, as if they’d done something terribly wrong showing me that they could hear. This made me angry because I was torturing my throat for this family and I thought I deserved an answer, so I insisted: “Your children can hear, can’t they?”

  “They can hear, but they’re deaf.”

  “If they can hear, they’re not deaf,” I countered as politely as I could.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I decided not to argue, we resumed the reading, and later, on my way home, it occurred to me that the three boys, as children of deaf parents, had adjusted their lives around the deafness of their parents and grandmother. They knew how to read lips and they were fluent in sign language; therefore, they lived like deaf people, perhaps even communicating with each other that way, even though they could hear and, most likely, they could also speak. But had they ever spoken? Or had they grown accustomed to their mother speaking for them, hardly opening their mouths like their father and preferring to speak in sign language, like deaf people? They were fake-deaf, and I wondered if they were aware of this.

  The mother was smiling when she opened the door, something peculiar for her, and I noticed that Señor Vigil’s absence contributed to a more relaxed interaction among the family. While I read they laughed on a few occasions, something that had never happened before, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask if they liked the Verne novel or if we wanted to read a different book. The mother said that once you start a book you have to finish it.

  “Yes, but if it’s boring, you should read something else,” I said.

  The grandmother, who was the only mute and had never said two words to me, so the expression goes, made me understand, through her gestures, the same thing as the mother, that is, that one should never stop reading a book halfway through, and I suspected that t
his dogma came down from the father, and it occurred to me that if the prejudices of parents in the average household are difficult to eradicate, in a deaf family’s home it’s even more so because it’s a home much less exposed to outside opinions. I asked them, then, what school the kids went to.

  “They don’t go to school,” the mother said.

  “But who teaches them to read and write?”

  “They don’t know how.”

  I closed the book, astonished. “And what are you waiting for?”

  “None of us can read and write. We’re deaf.”

  “There are schools for the deaf,” I said enthusiastically.

  The grandmother got up and left the living room. I imagined that she was going to talk with her son, the father of the boys, and that he’d come out in a minute and ask me to leave. I could see myself summoned by Father Clark again, another complaint against me. But the boys’ father didn’t appear, and the mother, faced with my prolonged silence, asked me if I was going to continue reading. I wanted to tell her that they couldn’t deny their children the opportunity to go to school, much less force them to be deaf when they weren’t, but instead I opened the book again and continued reading. I was so upset that I lowered my head unintentionally, blocking their view of my lips. I noticed that they were looking at each other and I asked them what was wrong.

  “Your lips, please,” the mother said.

  I apologized and asked them to tell me at what point they’d stopped seeing my lips.

  “Where Axel’s hat falls off,” they answered.

  I started looking for the episode they mentioned on the previous page.

  “It’s further back,” the mother said.

  I went back another page and looked for the word hat. I didn’t have the slightest idea where it could be. I not only didn’t remember Axel had lost his hat but I also didn’t remember who Axel was.