The Revolutionaries Try Again (9 page)

when she opened the door to his bedroom that morning he had insulted her, had cussed at her, but he didn't remember, Mom, he'd been asleep, or perhaps she still thinks about those Saturday mornings during the last months before he was to flee to the United States in which something changed between them and they were at peace), the immense The Cure poster in his bedroom that he'd purchased in Gainesville, Florida, where he spent the entire summer before his senior year at San Javier scrubbing dishes at a restaurant near his maternal grandparents' house so he could afford to bring back a suitcase filled with impressive sneakers and jeans, mopping floors for a frumpy ladies' man who would sniff Antonio's bucket to check for the pine fresh (the grease on his hands wouldn't come off), vacationing with his maternal grandparents in Florida was what he told his classmates he had been doing during the summer so on the first day of school they were not surprised to see him sporting aerodynamic sneakers and Iron Maiden tee shirts with hirsute monsters that were later banned by Father Ignacio, and as Antonio enters his old bedroom he finds that his room has been emptied, that yoga mats have been spread on the floor, that nothing remains on the walls except a photograph of Paramahansa Yogananda, that on the other hand at least the ceiling fan is still there (during the rainy season mosquitoes would buzz his ears despite the breeze of that poorly installed fan that spun like a turbine set on unhinging itself), and as Antonio considers switching on the fan, or opening the curtains, or approaching the photograph of Paramahansa Yogananda to maybe draw a mustache on it, or lying down where his bed used to be to listen to someone practicing scales, although that's ridiculous because no one has ever practiced scales in his grandfather's building, or perhaps not so ridiculous because he's sure he can lie down where his bed used to be and imagine he's hearing someone practicing scales and to him that imagining would be just as real, well, it doesn't matter, he's exhausted from the long flight from San Francisco to Guayaquil and just needs a bed and a room with an air conditioner so he switches off the light of the bare, warm room that used to be his bedroom and shuts the door carefully, as if trying not to wake himself, and then climbs up
the wooden stairs to his mother's room (when he was little the stairs had no handrails or balustrade so his mother worried about him falling down to the storage floor that during the rainy season would flood to the waist like a pond, and when he was seven or eight or twelve he would sleep in the guest room next to his mother's room and at night he would hear rats scraping his door as if trying to burrow inside, and in the dark he would shoo them away with a clap and the rats would scramble down the stairs so often that even now he can evoke the sound of their nails clacking down the wooden stairs), and in the week or weeks after the caravan for El Loco appeared on Bálsamos Street the rats returned, although my mother assumed it was something else, we were having dinner or about to have dinner, and before or after she defrosted a bag of lentils, we were startled by the sudden noises coming from the patio, which sounded as if someone was searching for something among our plants, but this someone couldn't have been Manuel because Sunday was his day off, and of course I could tell that my mother was thinking that Manuel had come back to rob us, or that he had brought back people with him who could rob us, or that he had told people who could rob us that despite the locks and bolts and metal bars on every one of our windows the service door facing Bálsamos Street could be jumped (his mother had been meaning to ask their carpenter to install longer spikes atop that door because it led to a passageway that led to the patio that led to the dining room, where his mother was rushing to the front door to call his Uncle Jacinto, who lived in the apartment upstairs — your Uncle Jacinto rescued us from your father, Antonio José —), and when his mother visited him in San Francisco she told him that when they were still living with his father in the Barrio Centenario his Uncle Jacinto had showed up one night in his jeep with his fellow firemen because his father had barricaded the house and wouldn't let us leave him — your uncle banged on the door and your father screamed at us and when it was over I found you trembling under your little bed, Antonio José — and what surprised Antonio that night in San Francisco when his mother seemed determined to confess everything wasn't that he didn't remember any of it
but that his mother was telling him all of it as part of a transpersonal project she seemed to have been planning for years, because after she underwent something called holotropic breathwork therapy, she said, after she underwent Gestalt and rebirthing and constellation therapy at Centro Pachamama in Chile, she had liberated herself from what the two of them had gone through and now it was time for him to liberate himself too, and although he doesn't remember what he went through when he lived with his father, he does remember what he went through when he lived with his mother (Antonio's not going to think about that now (one morning during recess when he's seven or six or eight years old and still at Jefferson Elementary School he's running through a park that looks like an island planted with green bushes like gnomes and he's discovering a scrap of plastic like something knifed from the edge of a refrigerator, a long scrap of plastic that has hardened and bent like a bow, cutting the air like a boomerang when he wields it, running back to his classroom and hiding it inside his desk, running back to his mother after school and presenting it to her as a gift and saying look at this funny stick, Mom, perfect for you to beat me with)), and although he doesn't remember his Uncle Jacinto showing up to rescue them in his jeep, he does remember driving with his Uncle Jacinto in that jeep one morning and stalling because of the downtown traffic, his uncle banging on the steering wheel and saying the hell with this, switching on the siren on top of his jeep so the two of them could speed through, arriving to our apartment immediately after my mother called him on the night we heard noises outside, armed with a flashlight and his rifle, my mother clinging to his arm and saying out there, ñaño, out there, my uncle shrugging her off with his elbow and saying don't be hysterical, Cecilia, my uncle unlocking the sliding fence rail and unbolting the door to the patio, his flashlight barely catching a glimpse of the runaway culprits, rats, which were scurrying away and there, right up there on the wall, a rat was climbing on a pipe so my uncle aimed his rifle and shot, warning us, as he held the fallen rat by its tail, that more of them would turn up, as in fact they did, sneaking inside our kitchen and hiding behind our stove, where we could hear them
struggling against the heat and the wiring and where, days later, the stench of their decay would prompt my mother to order Manuel to remove them, banging on the side of the stove to check if any of them were still moving, and after my Uncle Jacinto packed his rifle and left, my mother stood still by the dining room table, or perhaps she stood still by the stove, or perhaps she didn't stand still at all but paced around the living room, considering whether it was prudent to finish our dinner and risk hearing noises again, eventually saying let's go watch television, Antonio José, to which I probably replied something like there's nothing on, Mom, nothing at all, and as Antonio enters his mother's bedroom in the apartment on Bálsamos Street he doesn't remember if that night his mother rushed to her bedroom to turn on the television, or if she waited for him to come along with her, either way he remembers following her and finding her checking the locks to the balcony, drawing the already drawn curtains and fastening them with a pin, sitting on her bed without removing her Egyptian sandals, her back upright against the headboard as I pulled her dresser bench next to her bed, careful to not bump her dresser and disrupt her collection of perfumes, which are no longer there, some of them with only a mist left, water lilies and carnations and marigold all jumbled into one soothing scent (one evening when she couldn't find the scrap of plastic he'd gifted her she pulled the curtain rod from the guest room's wall and used that to beat him instead), and as his mother flipped the channels she chided herself for not anticipating that with only a few weeks left before the presidential elections the political ads had of course usurped most of the evening's programming, some of them showing El Loco promising to fight the oligarchy and free the land, others showing León's candidate promising sound macroeconomic policies, others showing El Loco returning to save his people in a helicopter, others warning viewers about El Loco by showing El Loco pouring a glass of beer over his head, others showing El Loco addressing thousands of followers, mops and brooms and cardboard signs alive and wild everywhere and is there a parent in the crowd?, El Loco asks, please raise your hand, let's see you, gentleman, here with your son, let's talk the truth, no
tales, I'm going to demonstrate to you that you are not the same for León, sir, with the greatest respect, if your eighteen year old son falls in love with León's daughter would they let him in their house?, no, no, no, but if León's grandson were to leave your daughter pregnant, oh, ha ha, it's just our boy being a rascal, is this not the truth, yes, yes, yes, or she would be imprisoned and forsaken with a bastard child like they have forsaken and imprisoned my beloved country, and as Antonio tries to rest on his mother's bed he cannot recall which ad finally drove his mother to fling the remote control across the room, the triple A batteries crashing against the
TV
stand and rolling on the floor, and although he knew others would have been alarmed at her violence he stood up as if nothing had happened, turning off the television, picking up the remote, and not finding the batteries anywhere, searching for them under her bed, sticking his whole body in there, casting away spiderwebs and crawling on his elbows and finding the batteries by a stack of books on transpersonal psychology, yoga, meditation, discovering for the first time she owned these kinds of books, which he was to secretly read in the last months before he fled to the United States (the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, for instance, which contains scientific footnotes underscoring the legitimacy of levitation and out of body migrations), and as he resurfaced with the batteries his mother smiled at him, a steady, gentle smile that she seemed to be trying on and that she seemed unwilling to unsettle by wiping the sweat off her eyelashes or swatting away her red locks of hair from her cheeks, resting her warm fingertips on his wrist and smiling and saying thank you, Antonio José, next time I'll have to remove the batteries beforehand, and as Antonio lies down on her bed and closes his eyes, unable to remember the warmth of his mother's body when he would bunch next to her in her bed but able to imagine her warmth by placing his hands flat on his chest, feeling at last how exhausted he really is from the long flight, he irrationally expects different of himself, as if perhaps this time he could become the one who could console her, no, he's yanking his arm away from her, tossing the batteries on the empty side of her bed and saying, before slamming the door on his way out,
I told you there wasn't anything on, Cecilia, yes, he's really exhausted, he should try to sleep (and on Saturday afternoons during their last year together she wouldn't turn on the television but would lie down quietly on her bed, sick from the methacrylic acid she was using to glue those acrylic nails, although he didn't know then or pretended he didn't know then that she was sick), and on those Saturday afternoons Antonio used to dispatch his mother with a curt goodbye Mom, I'm off to play soccer at school, which wasn't true, every Saturday afternoon Antonio boarded a bus to San Javier, where he boarded Don Alban's bus to Mapasingue, where along with the other members of the apostolic group he taught catechism to the poor (don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, the Jesuits had taught him, and yet even after all these years in which he likes to believe he has disavowed anything that sounds like a precept, he still can't share with others anything remotely good about himself: no one at Stanford knew that he taught catechism in Mapasingue for four years, no one in San Francisco knew that, despite barbing his memories of Mapasingue with inquiries like do you really think that your paltry exposure to the poor has marked you instead of just serving as an excuse to feel like a chosen one, he still thinks of himself as that pious boy standing on the hills of Mapasingue atop the stairs that lead to Guayaquil), and it occurs to him, as he tries to sleep, no, how can he sleep without first taking off his clothes and turning on the air conditioner, which is revving up and canceling the noise of the utility vehicles speeding along Bálsamos Street and of the people watching television upstairs, the decrepit air conditioner that used to consume so much electricity that his mother wouldn't switch it on unless the heat was as unbearable as it is now, and as he lies down again and tries to sleep he wonders if perhaps the reason he thought his mother was overreacting about El Loco turning Manuel into a threat to them at home was that he rarely interacted with Manuel, rarely saw Manuel, barely remembers anything about Manuel except sometimes, during dinner, the sound of his dinner plate vibrating on top of the dryer when the dryer was on, or Manuel's soft voice saying yes, Doña Ceci, right away, Doña Ceci (one day when his mother
was out Antonio sent Manuel on an errand to rent pornographic videos featuring Ginger Lynn), or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because it was convenient to behave as if nothing threatening was happening in Guayaquil since he was leaving this miserable place anyway, or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because Manuel, who must have been fourteen or thirteen years old and was even skinnier than Antonio had been back then, looked harmless, or perhaps he thought she was overreacting because at school everyone portrayed El Loco as a coarse loony who couldn't even incense fruit flies into revolting, a coarse loony with a raspy bus driver voice who flaunted his chest hair and said ridiculous things like León has watery sperm, and one day during recess what the Fat Albino said about that coarse loony was if that pest wins we'll have him out in less than a week, to which we all hooted and clapped because the Fat Albino was the grandson of León Martín Cordero, carajo, the ex president my mother still rooted for, the one we've seen that week or the week before or the year before on television saying that only prostitutes and junkies have ever voted for El Loco, and yet as everyone hooted and clapped the Fat Albino turned toward Antonio and said I don't know why the Drool here's laughing, we're talking about ousting his dad, to which everyone hooted and laughed, relishing the opportunity to pin El Loco to Antonio as some of them had already tried to do by linking Antonio's erupted face with El Loco's pockmarked face, calling him La Baba Loca or La Baba Bucaram to see if those nicknames would stick, and yet Antonio thought he'd succeeded in squashing those nicknames with threats to beat up his classmates, but no, that day during recess everyone was waiting to see if Antonio would threaten the Fat Albino or leave himself wide open so of course Antonio said shut up Yucca Bread, or perhaps he said shut up you lazy piece of crap, to which the Fat Albino replied something like watch what you're saying, hijueputa, which is what everyone expected the Fat Albino to say because he was the kind of fellow who liked imparting mockery but not receiving it, which was the same kind of fellow Antonio was, and so the pushing and shoving began, the pushing and shoving that everyone usually attributed to freshmen who