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not enough to make him rich, but enough to nourish his dreams.
On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows.
she still found time for her daydreams, and here no one bothered her or interpreted her silences as wondrous gifts.
she eased herself to the exact position, and then moved cautiously, like a young wife accustomed to making love to an elderly husband. Soon he tumbled her over and embraced her with the urgency dictated by the proximity of death; even the shadows in the corners were transformed by their brief joy. And that is how I was conceived, on my father’s deathbed.
She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea.
Words are free, she used to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.
my mother accepted God, because now she visualized him seated on his celestial throne gently mocking mankind, and to her this god was very different from the awesome patriarch of religious books. Perhaps one manifestation of his sense of humor was to keep us in a state of confusion, never revealing his plans and proposals to us. But every time we remembered the miracle of the rain, we would die laughing.
Light and shadow created fundamental changes in the nature of objects: books, quiet during the day, opened by night so their characters could come out and wander through the rooms and live their adventures; the mummies, so humble and discreet when the morning sunlight poured through the windows, at twilight became stones lurking in the shadows, and in the blackness grew to the size of giants.
His marriage was one of convenience: romantic love had no place in his plans; he considered romance barely tolerable in opera or novels, and totally inappropriate in everyday life.
First he looked for work, and then a wife. He had chosen her because he liked the sudden gleam of terror he saw in her eyes, and he approved of her broad hips, which he considered necessary for begetting male offspring and for doing heavy housework.
acted as if the war were a remote nightmare that had nothing to do with her;
the theory that human beings are divided into anvils and hammers: some are born to beat, others to be beaten.
attention that I still remember her every move. “There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,” my mother explained shortly before she left me. “If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”
She walked with defiant grace, head high, to the rhythm of the secret music she carried inside.
“Do you touch yourself with your hands?” “Yes . . .” “Often, daughter?” “Every day.” “Every day! How often?” “I don’t keep count . . . many times . . .” “That is a most serious offense in the eyes of God!” “I didn’t know, Father. And if I wear gloves, is that a sin, too?” “Gloves! But what are you saying, you foolish girl? Are you mocking me?” “No-no,” I stammered in terror, at the same time thinking how difficult it would be to wash my face, brush my teeth, or scratch myself while wearing gloves. “You must promise not to do that again. Purity and innocence are a girl’s best virtues. You will
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he left instructions in his will for his remains to be sent to the distant city of his birth. He did not want the local cemetery to be his final resting place, to lie covered with foreign dust beneath a merciless sun, and in promiscuous proximity with who knows what kind of people, as he used to say.
like her irrational hatred of blond foreigners,
When I first met him, he was still a boy, but if I had observed him more carefully I might have seen a sign of the man he would become; even then he had ready fists and fire in his heart.
“You have to fight back. No one tries anything with mad dogs, but tame dogs they kick. Life’s a dogfight.”
Elvira warned me with explicit clarity that men have a monster as ugly as a yucca root between their legs, and tiny babies come out of it and get into women’s bellies and grow there. I was never to touch those parts for any reason,
don’t believe in machines. This business of copying the gringos’ ways is bad for the soul,”
Nobody dies of hunger here—you reach out your hand and pluck a mango. That’s why there’s no progress.
Whenever he fell into the vice of nostalgia or tortured himself thinking about the evils of mankind, she restored him with her magnificent desserts and steady stream of little jokes.
two qualities he considered particularly manly, but in truth he was an incorrigible dreamer. He was disarmed by the slightest gesture of sympathy and outraged by injustice, and he suffered the ingenuous idealism of youth that never withstands confrontation with reality.
the ability to sense intuitively the dark side of situations and people, with a clairvoyance that flared before him like a powder flash, but his pretense of rationalism kept him from giving credence to those mysterious warnings or following his impulses.
The idea of seeing her girls married to dark men with the rhythm of the rumba in their hips seemed disgraceful to her.
God had something obvious in mind when He created two sexes. The girls were cheerful by nature, and accustomed to sharing a bedroom, bathroom, clothes, and almost everything else, so they saw nothing wicked in sharing a lover.
I want to know what’s going on in the world, Uncle.” “The less you know, the better,
“The poor thing had two fathers, that’s for sure,” said Elvira, with a grimace of disgust. “A horror like that happens only if you sleep with two men on the same day.
You won’t catch me letting the juices of two men mix in my belly. The fruit of that sin is circus freaks.”
She always brought a cord with seven knots in it to measure my skull, a surefire way, someone had told her, to verify whether I was still a virgin. That’s your only treasure. As long as you’re untouched, you’re worth something, she would say; but when you lose it, you’re nobody. I did not understand why the part of my body that was so sinful and forbidden could at the same time be so valuable.
“Don’t worry, no one is born pretty, it takes patience and hard work to get that way. But it’s worth it, because if you’re pretty, all your troubles are over. To begin with, lift your head, and smile.”
It’s better to say yes to everything and then do whatever you please.”
“Don’t you love me?” “I take care of you, that’s enough.”
When homosexuality ceased to be taboo and showed itself in the light of day, it became fashionable, as people said, to “visit the queers on their own turf.”
There, even for someone as disinclined toward profit as he, he found it easy to sell any trinket, but he had a soft heart and could not make himself rich at the expense of the ignorance of others.
way to pay because only rarely did they have money in hand. They were, in fact, suspicious of the paper money that today was worth something and tomorrow might be withdrawn from circulation,
There was no reason to pay for something that the good earth gave away.
because in spite of her beauty she still did not have a husband, and was already twenty-five years old when the marriage broker spoke to her
Her mother convinced her that physical appearance is not important at the hour of forming a family, and that any alternative would be preferable to ending up an old maid and becoming a servant in the house of one of her married sisters. Furthermore, her mother said, you always learn to love your husband, if you really try.
His position as husband had made him Zulema’s master; it was not proper that she should know his weaknesses, because she might use them to wound or dominate him.
finally she swung astride him, smothering him with her voluptuousness and the wealth of her hair, completely obliterating him, absorbing him in her quicksands, devouring him, draining him, and leading him to the gardens
what is not voiced scarcely exists; silence would gradually erase everything, and the memory would fade.
He was too softhearted to slice off his unfaithful wife’s breasts or to hunt down his cousin, cut off his genitals, and stuff them in his mouth, in keeping with the traditions of his ancestors.
he who pays has the say.
“None of these peasants are right for you, my girl. We’re going to get you a husband who’s well placed, who will respect you and love you.”
“Have you ever seen a rich Indian? Or a black general or banker?”
but there was a part of her that no sorrow, no violence had touched.
“Man and woman, there’s no difference between them in this theory. They are models, on a reduced scale, of the universe, and therefore every occurrence on the astral plane is accompanied by manifestations at the human level, and each person experiences a relationship with a determined planetary order in accordance with the basic configuration associated with him or her from the day breath is drawn,”
and from that moment we have never had a problem, because when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars.
