Burnt Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought he looked like a desert plant. Green, rubbery, dry as the plains of the north, a deceptive ancient cactus harboring the sparse rains in its entrails from one summer to the next, fermenting them: moisture seeped from his eyes but never reached the white tufts on his head, wisps of dried corn silk. In his photographs, on horseback, he loomed tall. As he scuffed along, purposeless and old, through the marble rooms of the huge house in Pedregal, he looked tiny, lean, pure bone, the skin clinging desperately to his skeleton, a taut, creaky little old man. But not bowed, no sir, I’d like to see the man who dared …
    Once again I was beset by the same uneasiness I felt every morning, the anguish of a cornered rat, the feeling that seized me every time I saw General Vergara purposelessly wandering the rooms and halls and corridors that Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed on their knees, rooms that at this hour of the morning smelled of soapy scrub brushes. The servants refused to use electric appliances. They said no with great humility and dignity, in the hope that it would be noticed. Grandfather thought they were right; he loved the smell of soapy scrub brushes, and that’s why, every morning, Nicomedes and Engracia scrubbed meters and meters of Zacatecan marble, Mexican marble, even if the honorable Agustín Vergara, my father, did say, with his finger to his lips, that it had been imported from Carrara—don’t tell anyone, it’s against the law, they’ll hit me with an ad valorem, you can’t even give a decent party any more, if you do, you end up on the society page and then you pay for it, nowadays a man has to live the austere life, even feel ashamed to have worked hard all his life to give his family the things …
    I ran out of the house, shrugging into my Eisenhower jacket. In the garage I climbed into my red Thunderbird and started the motor, the door rising automatically at the sound, and gunned out blindly. Something, a flicker of caution, told me that Nicomedes might be there on the driveway between the garage and the massive door in the wall surrounding our property, moving the garden hose, manicuring the artificial-seeming grass between the flagstones. I imagined the gardener flying skyward, torn apart by the impact of the car, and I accelerated. The cedar entrance door, faded by summer rains, swollen and creaking, also opened automatically as the Thunderbird passed the twin electric eyes embedded in the rock and zoomed out; the tires squealed as I swerved to the right. I thought I saw the snowy peak of Popocatepetl, but it was a mirage. I accelerated. It was a cold morning, and the natural fog of the high plateau was rising to meet the blanket of smog imprisoned by the ring of mountains and the pressure of the high cold air.
    I kept accelerating until I reached the access to the ring road around the city. I breathed deeply, and drove calmly now. There was nothing to worry about: I could circle the city once, twice, a hundred times, as many times as I wanted, driving thousands of kilometers with a sensation of never moving, of being simultaneously at the point of departure and the destination, seeing the same cement horizon, the same beer ads, billboards for the electric vacuum cleaners Nicomedes and Engracia detested, for soaps and television sets; the same squat, greenish, miserable buildings, barred windows, protective steel curtains, the same paint shops, repair shops, small refreshment stands with the box at the entrance filled with ice and carbonated drinks, corrugated tin roofs, and, occasionally, the dome of a colonial church lost among a thousand rooftop water-storage tanks, a smiling, stellar cast of prosperous characters, rosy and freshly painted, Santa Claus, the Blond Queen of Beers, Coca-Cola’s little white-haired elf with his bottle-cap crown, Donald Duck, and, below, a cast of millions, extras, vendors of balloons and gum and lottery tickets, young