The Enlightened Army 9781477317785

Citation preview

the enl ightened arm y

LAT I N A M E R I CA N L iterat u re in tran s lati o n s erie s

the enlightened army david toscana Translated by David William Foster

Uni v er s it y o f T e xa s P re s s Austin

Original Title: El ejército iluminado © 2006, revised edition 2013, David Toscana By arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh., Nicole Witt e.K. Frankfurt am Main, Germany. English translation © 2019 University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Toscana, David, 1961–, author. | Foster, David William, translator. Title: The enlightened army / David Toscana ; translated by David William Foster. Other titles: El ejército iluminado. English Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018012649 ISBN 978-1-4773-1777-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4773-1778-5 (library e-book) ISBN 978-1-4773-1779-2 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities—Fiction. | AntiAmericanism—Fiction. | Mexico—Fiction. | Texas— Fiction. Classification: LCC PQ7298.3.O78 E5413 2018 | DDC 863/.64dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012649 doi:10.7560/317778

ther e is a doc tor ’s office at 467 Degollado Street. Its façade has been remodeled in such a way that it’s impossible to make out the old house where Ignacio Matus and Fatso Comodoro lived. It’s now painted blue and white and a lighted sign announces treatment for respiratory ailments. In the living room, where so many skirmishes were recounted, where there’d been cigar smoke, games of domino, beer and laughter and silence, you can today find a woman who asks How may I help you? to anyone who walks in. There was a monument erected by Matus’s friends until the remodeling took place. It was a mound of concrete, perhaps meant to emulate Saddle Mountain, crowned by a metallic plate with the legend The Enlightened Army, 1968. Two men pounded away at the mound with picks and axes, reducing it to rubble to make way for three parking spaces. No one was interested in saving the plaque, which was probably melted down in a pile of scrap metal. The last car of the train disappears around a curve near the Monterrey station. Although the screeching of the wheels and the clacking of metal can still be heard in the distance, as far as Román and Santiago

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are concerned things quiet down once the machinist stops blowing his whistle over and over. What to do in such cases? Santiago asks. I don’t know, Román says and scratches his head in a gesture of doubt he thinks that moments like this require, maybe we should wait for the police or an ambulance or the press. There’s a body sliced into three or four pieces lying on the tracks a few feet away. It’s night and colors have turned to gray and black. Impossible to distinguish between the oil the trains spill and blood: the dead man’s skin is leaden; the olive green of his pants brownish gray. Only his boots are as black as in the daylight. What happens if another train comes? Santiago asks. Román twists his lips and arches his eyebrows. I’ve heard that soldiers’ boots come off when they die. That’s a myth, Santiago says, what happens is they get stolen and then someone comes along and sees them barefoot and ends up fabricating a story. They’re both sitting on the ground. What about a grenade? asks Román, throwing a rock in the direction of the nearby avenue. Every so often a car or truck comes by, but none of the drivers notice them. Santiago nods and sits up in a slow process, his legs creaking on him. Things change when a grenade is involved. Your boots, pants, and piss go flying. He picks up the smell of the nearby cigar factory and decides to change the subject because he’s never seen anyone who’s died from a grenade. It smells like tobacco, he says, just as it always does, as though this were any other day. A dozen yards beyond the body there’s a white

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flag made from rough cotton and a broom handle, planted in the ground. Santiago walks over and yanks it out. On his way back he goes by the dead man and counts out five railroad ties. Then he replants it, leaning his weight on the pole. No one can say he didn’t reach the finish line. Román gets to his feet and takes a medal from his pocket. He attained it, he says, there’s no doubting that. He looks at the medal in the moonlight: the round bronze shows two naked men shaking hands, one standing and one sitting on the ground. The other side shows a diffuse image that Román is unable to make out, but he discerns the inscription in a mixture of French and Roman numerals. VIIIth Olympic Games, he reads in a whisper, Paris, 1924. That medal has traveled half the world in a lifetime and finally, forty-four years later, it will hang from the rightful winner. He goes over to the body. For the first time he observes it up close and discovers with relief that it hasn’t been decapitated, that there’s still a good, strong neck to hang the medal from. Nevertheless, the man’s face is lying in the dirt and Román doesn’t want to turn him over, so he pulls the loop hard between the ground and the forehead, nose and mouth. He leaves the medal resting on the severed trunk, taking care the naked bronze men are facing up. It’s an honor for me, in the name of the Mexican people and the international Olympic movement, to award you this medal enshrining your numerous merits in sports, education, and social and military causes, and I order you to wear it with the humility of the vanquished

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and the glory of a champion, since often greatness is borne by the loser and ignominy by he who comes in first. So be it. He motions to Santiago to stand alongside him. They each raise their hand to their chest and begin to sing the national anthem, knowing that in many places in the country the tricolor flag is waving and that throughout the world the word Mexico is being pronounced in different languages with varied accents. They sing off-key but with more gusto than in long-ago school assemblies. They sing because the man on the tracks, who gave his all for the nation, deserves it. They sing as they imagine a full stadium around them, with tens of thousands of voices in accompaniment. They sing and in the second verse they need to increase the volume because a squad car with red lights and the frantic scream of a siren is approaching at full speed. There are three domino tiles lying on the table. A cloud of smoke rises up around the four players; it’s going nowhere, no breeze comes in through the windows. Someone huffs impatiently. Fatso Comodoro looks back and forth between his seven tiles and the three lying on the table. It’s his turn, but he doesn’t make a move, he’s afraid of a wrong play; he’s seen these men play and knows they put a lot of effort into each game, they concentrate, they raise their arms if they win, they spin the orphan tiles on their metallic centers, they anticipate their opponent’s moves, they barely talk because the game is for drinking, for smoking, not for talking about the

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events of the day or work. It can’t be all that difficult, there are seven tiles and I’ve got to choose one. He likes the white one for its purity, because it’s the easiest to interpret; but Fatso Comodoro knows it’s not a question of taste. The game has a logic, rules, and they’ve got to be respected. He feels better going to the kitchen and bringing some beers, emptying the ashtrays, asking if they want anything; he prefers to sit in a corner and watch, just watch. But one of the men, Mr. Ibáñez, left town and this is a game for four people, Matus told him, you’ve got to learn. Matus spent all Sunday morning explaining the science behind these twenty-eight tiles to him. Never let your opponent see them, don’t even let him imagine them. That’s difficult because Comodoro’s hands are clumsy and several times while practicing he knocked a tile over and left it exposed to enemy eyes; which is why he now dries the sweat from his fingers on the leg of his pants. Santiago blows a cloud of smoke toward the center of the table. This isn’t chess we’re playing here, Fatso. Matus raises his hand to silence him, asks for his patience and then turns to Comodoro. Remember how you did it this morning: if there was a three at the end of the row, you matched it with a three, if there was a four, you matched it with a four. You’re not supposed to talk, Román rises from his drowsiness, you’re giving him tips. Damn Ibáñez for deciding to go off to his ranch, he’s telling us to go to hell, Santiago says, what are we going to do now? There ought to be a law against people leaving their friends in the lurch,

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this was a four-way agreement, and what’s the upshot? Ibáñez is likely sitting right now on a bench with nothing to do, somewhere where everything goes dead right after dinner. Comodoro can’t hear anything, he’s studying the white tile, the Immaculate Mother of God tile and pray for us blessed art thou among all tiles and women and damn the obligations of this game because I want to play the white tile and sometimes you’ve got to do what you want and not what everybody else wants, and maybe with a bit of luck this is the right move to make, the one an expert winner would play. He raises his hand and slowly advances his thumb and forefinger to pick up the chosen tile. Finally, Santiago says, although at this rate we’ll be here until tomorrow. Comodoro places the tile next to the row ending in three with a forceful smack to the table, as he’s seen the men do when they’ve won a game. No one speaks; the vision of the two tiles that don’t match leaves them thunderstruck. Comodoro guesses he’s made a masterful play and now it’s the others’ turn to meditate about the next move as they wipe sweaty hands on their pants. It’s stillborn, Santiago says, all this waiting and it’s stillborn. Comodoro looks at the men’s eyes; they are not directed at the game, but at him and they’re looking him up and down. He would like to take the tile, put it back with the other six and pretend no one saw it, choose again, maybe this time getting it right, with the Immaculate Lady left for a later move; but they saw it, and Matus told him about the secrets they had to keep. Maybe he could

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just flee, he thinks about fleeing, leaving the men, going far away like Mr. Ibáñez, if only the brave had the right to flee. Matus takes a swipe at the tiles and knocks some of them to the floor. Jerk, he gets up and goes over and yanks Comodoro by his wispy hair, what’s the use of everything we talked about? The ashtray also bites the floor. They’ve got to sweep it up, look for the butt that was still burning. Comodoro tries to say something, he doesn’t like being called a jerk, his teacher told him he shouldn’t take insults from anyone. Now not only are his hands sweating, his forehead is covered in sweat, his neck is wet; it’s hard for him to articulate when he’s angry. He falls to the floor and crawls around until he finds the Immaculate Lady; there she is, next to the leg of a chair. He picks it up and stands up. He tries once again to say what he’s feeling and can barely pronounce the word unfair. Unfair, he repeats, unfair and the tile is a communion wafer that Comodoro raises with both hands. Fatso Comodoro walks down Hidalgo Street, holding Matus’s hand. They haven’t spoken since last night, they suppose that the brotherly gesture of one holding the other’s left hand with his right one is more eloquent than any explanation, recrimination, or apology. In any event, Comodoro, to compensate for his dishonor, got even. As usual, he cleaned the house after Santiago and Román left and Matus went to bed; he picked up the empty bottles, swept up the ashes from the floor, and emptied the gar-

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bage. When it came time to store the domino tiles in the wooden box, he only put twenty-seven away. He put the Immaculate Lady in his pocket and just now, as he hurries to cross the street, he squeezes it with his free hand. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with it, whether he should throw it away, hide it, or give it away as a gift; he’s only certain he won’t return it. Matus’s step is firm, he’s always in a hurry. Comodoro tries to keep up, his body sways with his short gait, wearing thin his pants between his legs. You’ve got to do exercise, Matus says, or you’ll end up exploding. When I was your age. . . . I’ve already heard that story many times, Comodoro interrupts, but the teacher told us no one’s ever been our age, that our age is something different, another thing we the enlightened share with each other. So don’t go telling me again about what you did when you were young or calling me a jerk like last night. They let go their hands. In the end, holding hands didn’t keep them from speaking. Comodoro looks at the house in front of them; it’s old, with two floors. He thinks about tossing the Immaculate Lady up on the roof so no one can ever find it, but he’s afraid he’ll miss and he’ll see it hit the façade of the house and bounce on the sidewalk. I’m sorry, Matus says, I won’t call you that again. And it might break and that’d be worse than losing it forever, worse even than putting it back in the wooden box with the other twenty-seven. OK, Comodoro says, don’t call me that again, and he puts the tile back in his pocket. A few steps farther along, they’re holding hands again.

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That’s not manly, a voice says behind them, you should have a beautiful girl on your arm. Comodoro turns around and Azucena offers him her hand. I’m running late, Matus says, I think the two of you together can find your own way, and he breaks into almost a sprint. He’s not running late, it’s barely seven-thirty, and the school where he teaches is five minutes away. But he has no desire to deal with Comodoro this morning or much less engage in conversation with Azucena. Why does her mother let her go out alone? Doesn’t she consider the risks? Perhaps yes, her mother considers the risks and that’s precisely why she sends her out alone, with a little bit of bad luck she’ll cross the street wrong or run into an open ditch. Matus greets the custodian at the entrance and sees him head toward the principal’s office. He walks into his classroom and settles into a chair. The back wall shows an ancient map where you can see an enormous territory north of the Rio Grande as part of Mexico. He bases his most passionate history classes on it, striking his finger against a series of cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and he asks his students why do you they think they have Spanish names? And he points to the Monterey Bay and says that place has the same name as our city for the same reason, to honor Don Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo, Count of Monte­rrey, Viceroy of New Spain, a Spanish, not an English, count, although the gringos dropped one of the r’s

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because they don’t know how to pronounce the two of them together. Every year the director scolds him for the way he rants on about the subject, and because he applauds the way General Santa Anna finishes off the wretched defenders of the Alamo, some in battle and the rest by slitting their throats, die you dogs, because surrender is no reason to pardon the bums who steal our country; and he narrates with relish how the Mexicans stack the gringo corpses, piling them like firewood and lighting an enormous bonfire where their hair is the first thing to go up in flames; and Matus observes how his students fall into groups, the timorous, the majority, and the enthusiastic, barely three or four. He knows he’s going to have some problems this morning because on Friday he called his students cowards and traitors; you youngsters today are born defeatist, he told them, with your pants down around your feet, incapable of taking up a rifle if it isn’t a toy. One of them, named Arechavaleta, stood up and said that in the United States the streets were not full of potholes and the clothes were better and cheaper and electronic appliances really worked and the government did not steal and they would have been better off not to have set the border at the Rio Grande but farther down, south of Monterrey, and that way we’d be gringos and wages would be paid in dollars and. .  .  . He stopped because Matus grabbed him by the ear and threw him out of the classroom. Now, precisely on that map he can see the first reprisal. Someone has drawn in thick red ink the bor-

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der that runs through the Rio Grande, with a text that reads: Understand, Matus, this line is where Mexico ends. The good handwriting, the commas in the right place, there’s no doubt in Matus’s mind that Arechevaleta wrote it. Disillusioned, he props his elbows on the desk. He thought he’d start the day with a quiz, only one question: who does Texas belong to? On the basis of the answers he’d be able to distinguish between the servile and the dreamers, between the fearful and the heroes, or instead, he’d end up finding the answer was the same for all of them. Matus hears footsteps. He doesn’t need to look up to know that it’s the principal. Santiago and Román finish singing the national anthem and move away from the body. The squad car parks to the side of the avenue and two policemen hurriedly get out, leaving the doors open. They have no trouble finding the deceased, at the point where there’s no moon shining on the rails. They move toward the spot, saying something to each other neither Santiago nor Román can make out. One of the men in uniform lets out a laugh and draws his pistol as though pretending to give the coup de grâce. Now they’re both laughing. Santiago curses the Mexican trains, which creep along like piles of junk, he wishes a Japanese train would appear on the track at that very moment and surprise the men, killing their laughter. One of the two policemen squats down and takes the medal between two fingers. Don’t touch

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that, Román draws close and immediately regrets his authoritarian tone, he knows it would’ve been better to ask him please. The policeman puts his pistol away and walks toward Román and Santiago. Do you know this man? Román nods with no desire to waste words on a lowly policeman; he would prefer to talk to the press, in front of a microphone, so his voice would be heard from coast to coast. Who was he? the policeman asks. You really don’t recognize him? Santiago says, goading him, letting a few moments go by before continuing: it’s Ignacio Matus, General Ignacio Matus, a native of this city, the defender of our country, the last of the national heroes, the savior of the fatherland. The policeman changes his attitude, he’s no longer smiling or looking arrogant, and although the doubt on his face shows he’s never heard of General Matus, he turns to his companion and begins to give orders: don’t touch a thing and call an ambulance to come for the general’s remains, tell them to hurry up because another train might be coming. They’ve been given green jello today. Comodoro wolfs it down in three spoonfuls and lets the plastic plate fall to the table to show he’s the first one done. Milagro hasn’t even tasted his; he made two attempts and both times he dropped the quivery serving before it reached his mouth. Move your head closer to the plate, Azucena tells him, it doesn’t matter if you eat like a dog, what’s most important is not to end up hungry. I’m all done, Comodoro an-

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nounces. I used to be able to do it, Milagro sets the spoon on the plate, I didn’t use to drop things. Now they won’t even let me use a glass or scissors. Fatso Comodoro picks up the spoon and offers the jello as if feeding a baby. Milagro presses his lips together tight and says no. Everyone finds jello difficult. Azucena goes over to Milagro and pinches his nostrils shut with her fingers so he’ll open his mouth. Comodoro inserts the jello, sad because he thought he’d end up with two desserts. You ate bread without any problem on Friday. I know, but bread doesn’t require any special skill. It’s not quite the same as cutting meat. Milagro eats the rest of the jello without their having to pinch his nose. Comodoro is comforted by the thought that his friend would not even have been capable of picking the domino tiles up; someone’s got to bring up the end of the line and he’s glad it’s not him. Matus would have given up on Milagro with the first explanations, because what difference does it make if the guy knows his numbers and black dots if he’s incapable of arranging seven tiles with their backs toward his opponent, if dominos demands steady hands more than a privileged mind. The three are in the courtyard because they don’t want to listen to the daily story. They manage to see the teacher inside the classroom waving around an imaginary sword with her right arm; most are paying attention, Cerillo is drooling with his eyes shut. The three walk over to the front gate to see what’s going on out on Hidalgo Street. A route one bus stops to pick up a woman with grocery bags and

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pulls away spewing white smoke. It’s going to catch on fire, Comodoro says, and the woman is not going to be able to get out. What’s she carrying in the bag? Azucena asks. A half kilo of ham, ten sausages, a container with cream and another one with coffee, sugar, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce. A notebook, too, Milagro says. And you’re not going to save her? There’s no way I can, Comodoro answers, because the bus has already pulled away and by the time I get to her, the woman’s going to be sizzling grease. She tries to escape like everyone else, but she never lets go of her bags, which is why she takes up so much space in the aisle, people get desperate and a man slugs her and knocks her down so the others can climb over her back. Her huaraches are the first thing to burn and she screams but can’t get up because her hips are jammed between the seats; then her dress catches fire and the people outside the bus hear her calling for help, and so that her death won’t be so sad the woman thrusts her hand in one of the bags and begins to eat a cucumber. It seems sadder to me if she eats a cucumber, Milagro says; at first it seemed like a good idea to me that the woman burn, but now with half her body engulfed in flames and her eating a cucumber, I want to cry. That’s what I think too, Azucena grips the fence facing the street, if you’re not going to save her, let her burn without chewing on anything. Fatso Comodoro is not listening to them because he’s just discovered Matus across the street. He’s walking with his head down and not with his usual

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arrogant and rapid pace. Perhaps he’s sad because he is in love with the woman on the bus. Matus dials Santiago’s number and gets a busy signal. He takes a swig from his bottle of brandy even though this uncertain hour strikes him as too early to get drunk. He tells himself he’ll try to call one more time; if he gets the busy signal again, he’ll dial Román’s number. He makes a mistake while turning the dial and his index finger slips before it can complete the number. Santiago’s number has two nines and a zero in it, he’s got to pull the dial almost all the way around three times; it’s normal for his swollen and sweaty finger to slip out of any of the slots. He once told Santiago the man who designed telephones couldn’t count because the zero comes after the nine, and that is as much a problem of time as order, since it takes about a second to dial a one, considering the back and forward movement of the dial, while the zero takes five seconds; and since all the numbers of service telephones in this country begin with zero, the end result is that millions of hours are lost every year waiting for the dial to stop turning. Even for emergencies, instead of a short number, like one one, you’ve got to dial zero six and, depending on what is happening, the person wounded might bleed to death or the house burn down or the thief flee while the dial is still completing its trip. Before trying Santiago one last time, he dials zero three. The woman’s voice tells him it’s eleven seventeen. He takes a swig from the bottle and observes

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how much more tranquil he is. It’s nice to listen to a woman. Just to test the certainty of his finger, he dials the number again. The same voice informs him that it’s still eleven seventeen. Sign on the left line, the principal says, pointing to the place with his index finger. Matus looks at the line, a black two- or three-inch stripe; he would at least have expected to see his name typed below, even without the title of teacher. He doesn’t need to read the documents; he can discern their meaning in the way the principal looks at him, in the formality with which he asked him to step into his office, and especially in the friendliness with which he offered him a seat. Is that all? Matus draws a line on the newspaper on the table, wanting to make sure that the ink is flowing from the beginning of his signature. What did you expect? That I would chew you out just like every year? I thought we had an agreement; you’d pretend to get upset, and I’d promise to mend my ways. This year is different, Mr. Matus, the principal stands up and turns his back to him. The last thing we want to do at this time is to rile the children. Monterrey is a peaceful place, hardworking, with values, not harebrained ideas; we don’t want what goes on in the capital happening here, where a lot of students don’t study and take to the streets shouting slogans. He walks around the desk and stops behind Matus to place his hand on his shoulder in a gesture meant to seem fraternal. It makes Matus uncomfortable and he shakes his body

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to free himself from the contact. The principal’s tone turns less friendly. Your ideas are out of step with the times, it’s no good awakening violent impulses in the children. They’re not my ideas, Matus says, they’re in the national anthem and every Monday we make them swear that they are soldiers ready to fight against the enemy, all I ask them to do is to keep their word; I wish I could awaken some impulse in them, but I’ve spent half my life going over the loss of Texas, and every year the students are more apathetic. Arechavaleta said in class on Friday . . . It was precisely Arechavaleta’s mother who called me, the principal interrupts. You’ve gone overboard in your history class, you should stick to dates, names, events; whatever’s not in the textbook is politics and the children don’t come to school to engage in politics. Mrs. Arechavaleta accused you of turning the school into a den of communists. You didn’t have to talk to them about that war or make the United States look like our enemy, all you had to do was tell them Santa Anna sold them the territory; it’s better to hate a dead president than our neighbors to the north. Matus raises his voice in a burst of dignity. I am of the belief that it is my duty to inform the students . . . But the principal raises his even more. School is a place of formation, not information, so sign once and for all and face the fact that, like Mexico, you lost the war. Matus scrawls his name angrily, his hand wavering so much he doesn’t recognize his own signature. The bell rings. The shouting of the children running to get in formation comes through the window.

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Matus observes the front of his classroom when the curtain rustling in the wind allows him to; Arechavaleta is first in line. He’s glowing, looks proud, very conscious of how he and his mother have managed to get Matus fired, there’s no question about that because the group is not left orphaned, Miss Domínguez is already ordering the children to be quiet, stand up straight, march into the classroom in an orderly fashion. I’m going to say goodbye to the children, Matus says. The principal smiles. That won’t be necessary, Miss Domínguez is at this moment explaining to them that you will not return. Then I’ll just go to the classroom and collect my things. Everything is waiting for you at the exit gate, including your ancient map. Matus strode out of the office. He guesses the principal knows him well, because he had no intention of saying goodbye to the students but was going to grab Arechavaleta again angrily by the ear. I saw you walking around at midday. Yes, Comodoro, I left school early today. You looked sad. Yes, a little sad. Is it because of the woman who died on the bus? Matus strokes his hair. They leave Hidalgo Street, turn right and walk down Degollado. There’s a gas station farther along in this block, so they change sides, because the sidewalk disappears and there’s nothing but cars coming and going and drivers in a hurry requesting red, green, or yellow gasoline. Once they get past the gas station, they go back to the sidewalk on the right and enter the market.

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Comodoro thinks this must be the last place the woman visited because there’s no other place nearby where they sell groceries. He walks between the rows while Matus places various products in a basket. He smiles when he discovers boxes of powder for making green jello: the jello in the photograph is rigid, Milagro could eat it without any difficulty. He picks up a box and takes it over to Matus, who immediately says no. Hard times are coming, we’ve got to economize. Fatso Comodoro nods, says okay, but I guess we’ve got enough money for a couple of cucumbers. He pretends he’s going to return the jello and, halfway there, with no one looking, he slips it into his pants. Protect me, Immaculate Lady, from anyone seeing me. Matus returns to the area where the vegetables are, checks to see that the cucumbers are inexpensive and places two in the basket, wondering when Comodoro began to like such an ugly-looking vegetable. The gas station is still there, on the corner of Padre Mier and Degollado; the market isn’t. They closed it in the seventies, when the big commercial chains came to Monterrey. And although the majority of the houses in the area ended up being converted into offices, schools, restaurants, or doctor’s offices, there are still people there today who remember Matus. Some of them never knew him by his name; they only say that for many years, almost every day, they saw a man running through the neighborhood and doing one or two or more turns around the

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street that encircles Obispado Hill. Running wasn’t popular in those days, says Mrs. Olivia Muguerza, a neighbor from Degollado Street, which is why the poor guy had to put up with jeers and insults and sometimes things thrown in his direction. I felt sorry for him, even though one day I shouted something nasty at him, something about his legs. I was just a girl, it must have been in the fifties, I was with a group of friends and you’ve always got more courage when you’re part of a crowd. But he didn’t care, some people even said he was deaf because he never responded to the provocations. One day he stopped coming; they said he’d died, but I don’t remember when that was. Eduardo Espina, who also lives in the neighborhood, was more concise. His name was Ignacio Matus, he said, and he was not simply a runner, but a marathon athlete, the first we had in this city. I think he went to the Olympics. It’s already dark when Comodoro hears the soft knocking on the door and runs to answer it. It’s about time, he says as he takes Matus by the arm to help him in, I thought you had a heart attack or someone ran you down. On the contrary, Matus says, I haven’t felt this good in a long time; I ran like a boy, or better, today I was a boy while I was running. Comodoro looks him over, unable to find any trace of that boy. Apart from his new and mysterious smile, Matus looks like the same old man as always, on the verge of collapse. Yes, he says, you

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look younger than usual. They both walk down the hall toward the living room. The two cucumbers and a bottle of beer are on the table. I think it’s warm by now, Comodoro says, I took it out an hour ago. Matus drags himself because his muscles are tightening up, and he sinks to the sofa with a groan. The next time you go out running, Comodoro points to the cucumbers, take one of these. If you really have a heart attack, you should bite into it. Maybe your legs will loosen up and you’ll fall on your face, but don’t try to put your hands on the ground, maybe you’ll be dead by then. The first thing is the cucumber. Matus drinks the beer down in one long continuous gulp, feeling exhausted and happy. At times, Comodoro, I’m invincible when I run, at least for a few moments I enjoy the certainty that I’m invincible, that I’m twenty, that I’m loved; when I run I can put up with the gibes of the pedestrians and car drivers because I know my fists can smash their faces in. For a few minutes, after the effort of the first kilometer, my muscles become light and I stop panting, then I become someone different from Matus the teacher, I’m a champion, I become light-headed, I’m powerful and my acts have no consequences; I can kick Arechavaleta, stomp on him and enjoy his cries, I cross through traffic and make the cars stop and I hear more insults and honking and, in contrast to the effects of alcohol, so much grandeur comes not through my clogged brain but through the clarity of my thoughts. Those moments pass, my body becomes tired and I’m once again small, old, weak, and

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every joint aches more than before I went out to run; and yet it was worth the effort because I’m left with the memory of my youth and the promise that any day, tomorrow perhaps, I’ll do it again. For just a few moments, Comodoro, I’m young and strong, for just a few moments. There’s already another bottle on the table and Matus downs it in a few swigs. He pats the couch for Comodoro to sit down alongside him, but Fatso rejects the offer. Today those moments lasted longer, today I kept my gaze steady so I could ignore the flesh of my legs, the skin on my arms, and I even managed ten or twenty strides with my eyes closed; then night came and it was all much easier. Today the minutes stretched into more than an hour, Comodoro, and maybe two, and I didn’t kick Arechavaleta nor did I go to bed with a girl with nice plump legs or smash any faces. Today I saw myself heading up an army of thousands of men; we were on our way to Texas, our boots muddy, humming a song. Comodoro knows it’s time for the third beer and goes to the kitchen for it. The cucumber, Matus shouts, can it save my life? The answer doesn’t come right away; first the refrigerator slams shut and a bottle cap falls to the floor. No, Comodoro says, you will collapse in the street and will be quickly surrounded by the curious; it’s better to bite the cucumber. The beer goes untouched. Matus closes his eyes and leans back with the same smile he had when he returned, his fists clenched, his breathing peaceful. Are you still seeing it? Comodoro asks and turns the light off. He knows the old man will stay on the

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couch until dawn. We’re crossing the Rio Grande, Matus says in a whisper, and this time we won’t lose. Matus finishes making his poster and pins it up with two tacks on the dining room wall. He backs along the hall toward the main door. He knows it’s eight yards from this point; he’s satisfied that the heading and the ending are legible. He calls Comodoro and when he’s standing next to him Matus asks him what he thinks about the poster, does he think it’ll be a success? The lack of tacks at the bottom makes the poster start to curl. Comodoro looks at it for a few seconds, without paying much attention. Are you making fun of me? I’m not asking you to read it, just like I wouldn’t ask you how much five times five is; I’m talking about art, the colors, the proportions, the size. It’s only words, so don’t ask me if it looks pretty; there’s no beauty in words, even if some are written in black and others in red, and not even in the o, which is the perfect letter. You’re right, Comodoro, it looks like the announcement for a union meeting, what do you suggest? An invitation to war should include a nuclear mushroom cloud, but you didn’t leave any room, just a thin strip for a sword or a hunter’s rifle. Matus goes over to the poster and draws along the top a sword that looks like a machete. There now, Comodoro says, anyone who won’t enlist is a fairy and deserves to die cut to ribbons by the machete, and the sword is better than the rifle because it signifies hand-to-hand combat; a rifle makes me think of dead pheasants. Matus dis-

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covers another bit of empty space on the poster and draws an elongated rectangle with a fuse. Why do you want a candle? Matus writes the abbreviation TNT inside the rectangle and Comodoro still doesn’t understand. What do the red letters mean? The ones above say Mexicans, heed the call to war, the ones below, the fatherland needs you. There’s no denying literature is nothing in comparison to painting; the sword gets to me, but the handful of words does nothing to make me want to follow at your side. Matus steps back a few yards and smiles. Now we’ve got an army and we fight whenever the government says so, which is never; in the past it was by invitation and there was war whenever the people didn’t like the president or the emperor of the day or they were upset over some matter like taxes or religion. Can I go? Comodoro has taken his time to ask the question, it was in his mind from the moment he heard Matus talk about the army marching toward Texas; he goes to the mirror, strips and repeats a dozen times to himself that his is the body of a warrior. He supposed he would be invited, but now they ask him to judge a poster in which anyone is invited, not just him. Can I go? I want to go, he insists. No, Comodoro, you’ve got to stay here and take care of the house, because that’s where the fatherland begins. The answer, so certain in Matus’s head, sounds stupid when it’s uttered. Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, tell me the truth. You’re not going because someone who messes up in dominoes is hardly the stuff of military chess. That answer does in fact work

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for me, Comodoro says. He picks up a red marker to light the fuse and runs upstairs to vent his anger. Román drives around Zaragoza Plaza without finding a parking place. It’s only on the second time around that he finds a place in front of city hall. From there he can make out Matus, sitting on a bench near the kiosk. The poster has become warped with the sun and the wind, and Matus has done nothing to straighten it. What’s the use, he must have thought, it’s enough for me to be here, even though among the thousands of men in this city I can’t find one with any guts. The night before, Román and Santiago attempted to dissuade him. What do you want to prove? That they were right when they fired you from the school? But then the alcohol began to flow and the three ended up singing the praises of the fatherland. Still not even the valor of the verses was enough for them to agree to take part in that adventure; no, Matus, we’re too old and broken down and our legs can’t run like yours. Phrases of war and ideas about old age alternated several times with euphoria and sorrow. When morning came they called Mr. Ibáñez and persuaded him to sell them his old rifles. They’ll pay me a good price at the school, Matus said to win his confidence, and in case I don’t come back alive, I’ll sign a letter allowing you to cash my check. Román descends from the car and walks over to where his friend is sitting, bored. Did you have any luck? That guy has been staring at me all day, Matus

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points to a man who looks like a gendarme, I bet he’s scared away my clientele. Maybe some other time, Román says, perhaps when the Olympics are over and all this business about peace and brotherhood among the nations of the world falls out of fashion. Matus tears down the poster and rolls it up. Two boys run by and they can hear one of them laughing. Matus is certain they’re making fun of him. One hundred and twenty-some years ago this plaza was full of well-armed gringos in uniform; luckily I didn’t see it, because it must be humiliating to have an invading army giving orders in your city. That’s right, Matus, humiliating, but that was so long ago that no one remembers it and few learn about it, so forget the matter and let’s give Fatso Comodoro another chance; maybe today he’ll play the right tile. A man gave me two pesos, Matus says, and he reaches into his pocket to take out a couple of coins. Bringing some money in is something, it’s the patriotism of cowards. He said, here, my good man, this’ll cover two bullets, although not just any bullets, give me assurances I’m buying ones that’ll hit the gringos in the forehead. I should have thrown the coins at him, but after so many hours of people just walking by, it seemed to me a win that someone took me seriously. Two pesos is not taking you seriously, Román says, it’s more of an insult than just ignoring you. They’re just getting into the car when the gendarme comes over. Are you planning on coming tomorrow? Matus shakes his head no. So much the better, the man says, because they would send me to keep

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an eye on you for the entire day. My boss ordered me: Leave him alone if no one pays any attention to him, he’s just deranged, but if he recruits anyone you’ll have to arrest him because then it would be sedition. Are you threatening me? There is no hint of the anger in Matus’s voice such a question demands. The policeman shrugs, sedition, what a word, I’ve arrested drunks, thieves, and an assassin once, but yours is a crime I’m not familiar with. Take this, my good man, Matus gives him two pesos, for the trouble I’ve caused you. It’s unimportant whether the money was a joke or a donation, in any event the guy who gave it to me won, and even if I ran into him on some other occasion, he could make a point of saying: I gave you two pesos and what did you do with them? I saw nothing in the news about any invasion of the United States, I read nothing about two dead soldiers, both of them with a real-life silver bullet in them from the Bank of Mexico. No, sir, because the war never happened. So give me my money back, with interest and a commission for the trick, and the least I’ll take is an Olympic coin. They’re worth twenty-five pesos, sir, don’t you think that’s too much? And don’t you think it’s too much to have let those two gringos live? Matus lowers his head in shame. Now he’s beat, in war and life there’s nothing left for him but to come in last. He’s got no students, no soldiers, not even a starting shot. It bothers him to think that in a few days the Olympics will begin and, as usual, the gringos are going to walk all over their rivals and then once again their flag will be waving in the wind in the Mexican capital,

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just like it did with their army in 1848, and they will raise their voices over and over again in their national anthem, making people stand up and salute, and the other countries will have to make do with second place and worse, with Mexico more toward the bottom where the crumbs are handed out. Not today, Matus says, no dominos nor second chances for Comodoro. When the car pulls away, the policeman is left smiling, gripping the coins in his fist. The rumble of the car is heard, along with the slamming of a door. Comodoro pushes the curtain aside to look out. The car drives away, leaving Matus standing in the middle of the street, with his sign rolled up under his arm. He remains standing there, a dark, languid silhouette, until the lights from an approaching vehicle cause him to walk toward the curb. Did the fish bite? Comodoro asks from the window. Matus goes in and drops the sign on the hallway floor. He walks toward the living room, gliding along on his dust-covered shoes, and leans back in the armchair with one foot in the air, the other on the ground. Comodoro goes over to him and kneels next to him. Are you going to want to get drunk? Matus kisses his hand and caresses Comodoro’s cheek with it. It’s time now to applaud, to kill a calf and celebrate, he says, blessed art thou, fat Comodoro, because Heaven gave you the certainty of not getting old. The teacher asks them to keep quiet, she has some business to take care of over in the main office, they

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can take their crayons and color something if they want, or they can take a nap, no eating or chewing gum or telling ghost stories. As soon as she disappears from sight and you can’t hear her high heels anymore, Fatso Comodoro goes to the front of the room with Matus’s rolled-up sign. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re done for, there’s nothing left for us to do but to catch gringos, and with the thumb and index finger of his right hand he picks up the Immaculate Virgin, the double-blank tile. Most of them are talking, only a few are listening to Comodoro’s speech about the need to take up arms and defend the country from the band of barbarians that live north of the Rio Grande. They’re not like us, he talks, waving his arms like a preacher, he points to his chest when he says us, nor like the others, his hands now trace a semicircle in the air, there are no enlightened ones over there because they use them for experiments, and if any of us were to cross the border he would have be to conscious of how he might die, or even worse, be taken prisoner and end up in a lab where they will attach cables to his head and feed him radioactive milk. Azucena puts her doll down and asks Ubaldo to pay attention. Now that’s a real man, she tells him; this very night, before I fall asleep, I’m going to think about how Comodoro’s in my bed, dressed in green and wearing a metal helmet, and he’ll be whispering words in my ear like barbarians and defense of the country and prisoner. That’s because you’re a woman, we men can’t be led around with words; if the fat one wants to convince

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us, he’s got to show up with a pistol and fire several shots into the roof. We’ve got to be ready to give our lives, Comodoro says, and Azucena raises her eyebrows and asks Ubaldo if he’s capable of saying things like that. He picks up a box of crayons and rapidly draws a picture of a fat boy lying among the trees; his eyes are two crosses and red is gushing from his abdomen. Mortis Comodoris, he says when he’s done, circa 1968. Milagro has climbed up on a bench and his arms are extended like the arms of a cross, his eyes closed, he’s intoning a maestoso hum. His airplane drops five projectiles: three of them fall in the forest and a scramble of branches and leaves fly through the air; the other two fall in the middle of the city and the women scream; a man waves a banderole in the air and cries. Comodoro holds the sign in the air without unfolding it, showing only the drawing of the sword. Raise your hand, anyone who’s ready to offer himself for a cause better than spending the day listening to stories and rhymes. Azucena, Caralampio, and Milagro immediately raise their index fingers on high. Ubaldo tells Azucena that he is ready to follow them as long as the fat one doesn’t let it go to his head. Only three? Comodoro asks, caught between disillusionment and anger. Ubaldo as well, Azucena says, and I’m sure that if Cerillo were awake he’d have raised his arm. Then grab his finger and raise his arm. We are a happy few, Comodoro says, but the fatherland prefers a handful of courageous men over a bunch of cowards. Maintain our scheme in the utmost secrecy until we receive

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orders from higher up. Azucena can’t stand it any longer and goes over to Comodoro and gives him a hug. Applause is heard and teacher returns to tell them to keep quiet. The telephone is ringing and Matus goes to answer it; nevertheless Comodoro appears in the doorway of the kitchen, hurrying toward the phone. It might be for me, he says, putting his hand on the receiver without picking it up, letting the ringing sound flood the house. No one ever calls you, Matus says, go ahead and answer it. If it’s Román or Santiago, tell them I don’t want to see anyone today, or give it to me, I can tell them myself. The hands of both join in a weak struggle for the receiver; finally Comodoro yanks it away. Hello, hello, he says into the phone with a severe voice, any news? Matus leans on the door jamb, his arms crossed, he still thinks the phone call is for him. Sure, Comodoro says, all the weapons you can get ahold of, all the better if they’re long-range, and don’t forget to bring along something for the hand-to-hand combat. Matus, intrigued, walks toward him. Who is it? he asks. Who do you know to talk to about things like that? Comodoro tells him to shush with a finger on his lips, quiet, please, this is important, go sit on the couch, I’ll tell you all about it later, and he returns to paying attention to the voice on the other end of the line. Roger, he says, it’s not a bad idea to take a dose of poison along. I don’t know, I suppose rat poison’s fine, just make sure it’s in powdered form,

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there might be an accident with liquid poison, one of us might drink it even though the label has a skull and crossbones. Who are you talking to, Comodoro? Have you done something behind my back? Where’s my poster? Roger, it’s got to be as soon as possible if we want to have the element of surprise on our side; no, I’m not familiar with the road, but it’s got to be on the map; yes, that territory is ours, everything called Texas belongs to us, I’ve got it on good faith. Comodoro smacks his forehead with the palm of his hand. That would be our downfall, he says and relaxes his body, he dries the sweat from over his lip, in that case our plans would go to hell. I don’t know anything about such things, but Matus is right here, I’m going to ask him. Comodoro covers the receiver with his hand and turns to Matus with a trembling voice. Is it true you need a passport for Texas? That night Matus and Comodoro feel closer than ever. They hold each other in silence for several minutes, until it’s time to go to bed. Each one in his own bed, separated by the length of a dresser at the end of the beds, they’re holding hands, tickling each other with their fingers which at times are ants and at other times play the keys of a piano or a typewriter, until one of them, you never know which one, lets the other hand go and falls asleep. Their hands come together again as they walk to the institute. Both of them are busy making plans, they imagine their triumphs, counting the bodies on the

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opposing side. This is the last time we hold hands like this, Comodoro says, it doesn’t look right among comrades in arms. There are no streets to cross on the battlefield, Matus says, besides you need to keep your hands busy holding your rifle or a dagger. Comodoro swells his chest when he hears the last word; knives are for cutting tomatoes, daggers end up buried in enemy bodies. Just be sure that people don’t know, our mission must be carried out in secret, none of your friends are to discuss it with their parents or with the teachers. Comodoro makes the sign of the cross. I give my word for my silence and for that of the entire regiment. The two cover the remaining blocks with their hands in their pockets. When they cross Venustiano Carranza, Matus can’t help but think about the fat boy under the wheels of some car. I’ve just found out that you’re planning on taking my son on that stupid adventure. Although Matus doesn’t recognize the woman on the other side of the door, he surmises that it’s the mother of some friend of Comodoro’s. He clenches his teeth and swears in silence; I was deluded to think those imbeciles would be capable of keeping a secret. Come in, ma’am, Matus turns the light in the hallway on and stands there next to the door until the woman comes in. I know you asked the guys not to utter a word, but my son tells me everything, he always does, so don’t take it as a betrayal. Once they sat down in the living room facing each other, the seconds tick by without

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them saying a word to each other, they move their hands, their gazes wander, their feet and toes shift in their shoes. Let me get us something to drink, Matus gets up and goes to the kitchen. He stands in front of the open refrigerator, contemplating a jar of mayonnaise. He starts to think about the mothers looking for their children, perhaps crying, anguished or relieved. It hadn’t occurred to him that one of them would show up at his house, that she would address him calmly, because the woman had not engaged in recrimination, she hadn’t yelled at him or slapped him as he might have expected, she hadn’t come with her husband or with a policeman to give him a scare; she had only offended him by calling his mission a stupid adventure which, even though it might not lead to a military triumph, hardly deserved to be described in that fashion. He closes the refrigerator only to realize he’s holding the jar of mayonnaise in his hand. He goes over to the sink and fills two glasses with water. He walks into the living room, having made the decision to tell the woman that his mission is not harebrained and that signing up for it is voluntary. The woman takes the glass and begins to drink. It’s voluntary, Matus says, if you don’t want him to . . . I’m Cerillo’s mother, the woman interrupts, and even though people think he’s weak in the head, I love him more than my other children. The teachers at the institute are good people, but they tell them children’s stories, they talk to them like stuffed monkeys, they organize games that don’t challenge them, they ask them to imitate the sounds of farm animals,

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they teach them to moo instead of teaching them poetry; I don’t know if they’re the ones who are making my son atrophy and drool. The teachers won’t let them change a lightbulb because they say they’ll electrocute themselves and now I come to find out that you want to give them firearms and military orders and the chance to kill the enemy: a plan of attack instead of coloring books, a trench instead of cushions. The woman crouches next to Matus and takes his left hand. Can you make him into a hero for me? Can you arrange for a statue to Cerillo to be erected someday in Monterrey’s city square, a bronze or a marble statue or any kind of material incapable of drooling? Matus crouches down too and hugs the woman. Your son is a hero from the moment he decided to be a recruit, but I have no power over the statues in the plazas or the names of the streets; I can’t even assure you that we’ll come back alive, and in any case you know that dead heroes are greater than wounded and that wounded are greater than those who are safe and sound and that those who are safe and sound are greater than the ones who stayed at home. Matus squeezes her arm and asks her do you want him alive? The woman pulls herself free and jumps back, only to land back in the chair. Of course I want him alive, I don’t want you to think I’m like Azucena’s mother who dreams of the day a car runs her down, don’t go thinking that I’m handing him over to you so that in the middle of the night in some empty lot you’ll shoot him and come to tell me that Cerillo was a dashing soldier. I want you to

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swear something to me right now. Matus is still sitting on his heels when he nods in agreement. Swear to me that if my son comes back dead, it will be because he died fighting against the enemy, because he had a rifle in his hands and his hands on fire from having fired his gun so much, because he said Long live Mexico before he gasped his last breath on the battlefield drenched in blood and that newspapers and historians and authors of textbooks will spill so much ink because of him. Matus stretches his legs and walks around the room. If I weren’t talking to a mother, I would be offended, but it’s impossible to be harsh with words that do not spring from reason, so, ma’am I say yes to you, I swear it, your son will die on the battlefield or return alive, your son will be chopped to bits by sabers or squashed by a tank or he will return safe and sound and proud; I must tell you more than once that undoubtedly he will have to perish, since the enemy is cruel and numerous and vengeful. My other children feel superior, the woman says, getting good grades, fattening their women or counting their money, with no more service to the fatherland than paying their taxes and voting every six years. None of them will get a statue. I thought Cerillo might be an opera singer, that’s what I was training him to be, and now I come to find out that you are offering him a better opportunity to do something glorious with his life. The woman takes a wallet out of her pocket and takes a picture from it. Look, this is Cerillo. Yes, ma’am, I know him, I often see him at the institute. Tomorrow I’m going to

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take a lot of pictures of him, with different clothes, in different poses, also in military poses, standing at attention or as if holding a rifle or throwing a grenade, I need an image the sculptor can use; also an image of Cerillo sleeping for the person who’ll be making his funeral casket. Matus goes over to the woman and kisses her on the forehead. Take all the pictures you want, but he needs to be at the institute by 11 a.m. or we’ll leave without him. He takes her by the arm to lead her to the door. He’ll be there by 8 a.m., just like he is every day. When the woman has gone, Matus double-locks the door and smashes his fist into the wall. Tomorrow is the big day, Matus says, and their bottles touch in a toast. October 2, 1968, will not be forgotten, and within a couple of years it will enter into the textbooks and they won’t have to fire the teachers who talk about the war against the gringos, because now it will be a memorable war, and those professors who tomorrow will demand their students write an essay on those valiant men will base their grades as much on the historical precision of the facts as on the epic tone of their words; and the children will go to the bookstore to buy stickers for their assignments and they will say give me a General Matus, someone else a Fatso Comodoro, someone else a Cerillo, and they will paste them in their notebooks, writing below them the birth and death dates and glorious deeds, because there are a lot of different stickers, and the saleslady will have asked

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the child if he wants a Fatso Comodoro in profile or firing at the enemy or in the trenches or raising the Mexican flag, and of course the most popular sticker is the one of Comodoro with his smoking rifle, which recounts on the back the number of enemies killed by his marksmanship, assuring that the gringos give him the nickname of the invincible bean. By contrast, the sticker of Fatso Comodoro with the flag will not be in such demand at the bookstores, because the history book will carry it on its cover. Yes, sir, tomorrow will be remembered as the day on which a group of strapping men went forth to offer their lives so Mexico could once again be called what it one day was. Comodoro returns from the kitchen with three cold beers; he sets them down on the table and picks up the empties. Matus watches him walk into the kitchen again and his enthusiasm goes up in smoke: he looks nothing like the man on the sticker, he can’t imagine him with a rifle or with a flag or, much less, invincible. Santiago notes that a pall has settled over the room. He climbs up onto a chair, raises his bottle and shouts long live the enlightened army. Viva, Ramón says. Matus regains his smile, but not his enthusiasm. The crystalline sound of the three bottles being thrown into the trash comes from the kitchen. Santiago gets down from the chair and whispers: it’s not too late to call it all off, Matus, find another job in another school. That’s what you’d like, both of you, to see me a failure, cowed, just like you and Arechavaleta. Santiago looks at his watch; it’s time to go. Just promise me that this adventure

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is for the fatherland, and not revenge for the medal the gringos stole from you. Matus gulps down the last of his beer and his gaze gets lost in the holes the tacks left in the wall. They look like two bullet holes. Sunday, July 13, 1924: another date that Matus can’t forget. The clock on the cathedral shows 7:59 a.m. and the Olympics program says that within the next minute the shot will be fired in Paris that will start the marathon runners on their race. A columnist from the local newspaper stated in the Friday edition that that race was not only the most difficult challenge faced by any athlete but also by any human being, since by contrast to others that end in a few seconds or in a couple of minutes, this one lasts for more than two hours, which means that only certain cycling events last longer; the marathon runners, by contrast, have no seats to rest on on the downslope nor do they have any bananas to dull their hunger. The extenuating challenge of the marathon, the columnist concluded, is that it is not a competition of speed but of endurance. Fortunately, the Mexican government had joined the world time zones two years previously, and so Matus has the certainty of acting simultaneously with the Olympic runners. He looks around him and is disappointed that neither Román nor Santiago have shown up, nor, of course, Ibáñez, who refused to participate from the outset. The clock shows 8 a.m. and, together with the first striking of the bell, Matus fires a shot into the air and turns his chronometer on. He wants every-

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thing to be like in that faraway Paris, which he only knows thanks to a book of photographs in which he saw the Eiffel Tower and other monuments. In the images taken from the book you can see that it’s a flat city, friendly to runners; this is why he decided to avoid the hills of Monterrey, its mountains, and looked for a stretch as flat as in those photographs, and that’s why there is no better route than the train tracks, constructed by engineers and workers to be a completely flat surface. Nevertheless Matus knows that the equality is an illusion, because the athletes in Paris will have set off amidst applause, while in Monterrey people are looking at him with scorn. Who’d ever think of dressing up in children’s shorts and firing off a shot like he was half-drunk? Why is he running? Who’s he running from? You’d think he was a thief, waving a pistol threateningly at an upright business man so he can rob him blind, including the nice Swiss watch. The watchmaker assured him it was one of the finest instruments ever made and that even the prancing of a horse could not affect its ticking, which is why artillerymen, the only ones in the military for whom precision means something, prefer it. That instrument loses no more than three minutes a day. Three minutes more or three minutes less? Matus asked. The man shrugged. There’s no way of knowing, but since Monterrey’s climate is warmer than in Switzerland, I guess it runs slow. Matus paid for it and thanked the man. The watchmaker’s words were no comfort to him; a daily three-minute deviation

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is equal to almost twenty seconds in two-and-a-half hours. He progresses north down Zuazua Street; he knows the first kilometer is difficult, his legs are still stiff and his mind is fixed on the huge stretch he still has to run. He measured the distance on his bike from the cathedral to the Golfo station, counting the revolutions of the wheel; beginning at the station, the railroad tracks provided him with the exact distance necessary to complete the 42 kilometers and 195 meters that ended a little beyond Villa de García. He’s anxious to leave Monterrey beyond to run through the open fields, where there is no automobile traffic and no horses, people, or carts, where there are no jerks to make fun of his fleeting passage. Only when he gets to Tapia Street is he thankful for the dead weight of the pistol, because a drunk man is standing there with his arms outstretched. Matus takes aim at his head and the drunk moves to the side before they run into each other. Laughter and some catcalls can be heard; also the drunk’s insults. While he scrutinizes each pedestrian, Matus feels envy for the runners in Paris, with the course clear and with officials minding the pace, each wearing a number and the flag of their country on their chest. When he reaches Isaac Garza he can hear a horse trotting behind him. I’m running late, Román says when he catches up with him. You’ve left me to run carrying the pistol, Matus gasps out, that gives the others an advantage, and it would be just my luck to have a policeman stop me. Román

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stretches his arm out to take the pistol. It’s not my fault, it was your idea to have a starting gun when all you needed was the hand on the cathedral clock. It’s got to be just like Paris, he says and gulps in air before continuing, even though the girls along the curbside aren’t blowing me kisses. The Saturday newspaper claims that the favorite to win is a gringo named Clarence DeMar, and Matus imagines seeing in front of him a pair of pale white legs, gleaming shoes kicking up the dust for him to swallow, a proud ass, a ramrod-straight back and the swinging arms of a dancer. When that back pulls well ahead of him, Matus redoubles his efforts to catch up. It doesn’t matter that the girls are blowing the gringo kisses, that the little French whores are allowing themselves to be seduced by a design with stars and stripes, more suitable for a cabaret than a country, it doesn’t matter that the man, a millionaire, is running with a smile on his face, it’s Matus’s idea to dog his steps for the entire race, and in the end overtake him with rapid strides. I’ll see you at the finish line, shitty gringo, I’ll tell him, and he’ll draw on his remaining strength to leave the little French girls disenchanted, because the olive branches and the gold medal will fall to a stinking Mexican without a penny to his name, and then we’ll see who the hell comes to hug me and kiss me and dampen her Sunday dress with my sweat, posing for a photograph with me and tumbling into bed with a savage from the Antilles or Central America or the Caribbean or wherever the hell Mexico is.

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He reaches the Golfo station and continues from there along the train tracks. His idea is that the sunken ties give the ground a texture similar to that of the racetrack at the Colombes stadium, which the newspapers describe as resilient and delicate, covered with various layers of gravel. He looks to the left as he crosses Pino Suárez. There’s the Independence Arch, perhaps Clarence DeMar is seeing the Arc de Triomphe. He supposes he’s still part of the pack, surrounded by a group of runners called the Flying Finns; to his left two Englishmen are marching and close behind, he can hear the footfalls of the rest, including the French team and a couple of Latin Americans, one from Chile and the other from Ecuador. How can I beat out invisible enemies with an advantage over me of a hundred lengths? He doesn’t know if he’s got the right stride and decides to speed it up a bit. He laughs to himself over the ignorance of the journalist who called the marathon a test of endurance. That would be equivalent to running until they all except for one dropped dead and in that case Matus had no doubts about his winning. Come on, Clarence, run all you want with your shining sneakers, because here I’ll be, behind you, rain or shine, until you finally collapse; and yet the marathon, like the 100-meter dash, is a test of speed, you’ve got to achieve the greatest quotient of distance over time. What is the ideal speed? Matus asks himself, incapable of providing an answer. If I go too fast, I’ll be wiped out halfway through; and if I slack off, not even a Parisian old maid will applaud me.

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He gestures with his hand for Román to come up alongside him with the horse. Here, he says, and gives him the chronometer, you handle this. Although the watchmaker assured him there would be no problem, he’s waving his arms around too much with each stride; his sweat is dampening the gold finish, the face, and it’s better to maintain its precision. He can feel the breath of a bunch of runners; he bumps his stride up until he realizes that it’s Santiago on his horse, complaining, saying where’d he get the idea for a race on a Sunday morning beneath the blazing summer sun? When it’s just five to eleven Matus is leaning against the school gate. From there he can keep his eye on the car that Román lent him and that he’d parked a few meters down the street, on the corner, to ensure that no vehicle would block his path. He takes note of the fact no one is waiting for him and curses the idea that the recruits would be ready before the appointed hour. A woman walks by who looks at him with nothing special in her eyes, but he’s ready to distrust any passerby. Although he doesn’t smoke, Matus wishes he were holding a lighted cigarette between his fingers, that way he could keep himself busy doing something instead of standing there as what he is: a man who’s waiting, and anyone could ask who he is, how long he’s been there, how much longer he’ll be there, if he is meeting someone or just hanging around; someone could call the police and accuse him of feeling the schoolgirls up and then it

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would all go to hell. By contrast no one thinks twice about people smoking in the street, leaning against a wall, with one foot on the ground and the other propped up behind; he’s smoking, the passersby say, and it’s no use trying to remember his face if the police ask for a description. With no cigarette or even some gum to chew noisily, he spits to the left; that seems to him a good gesture to generate respect from anyone looking at him. His saliva forms a dark amoeba-like splotch on the curb, and Matus crosses his arms with satisfaction. It’s already eleven and there isn’t a trace of Fatso Comodoro or any of his friends. A young lady looking like a secretary walks by. She changes her route a bit so as to avoid the gob of spit. Matus wishes it would finish evaporating, nevertheless the amoebas multiply in his mind. After a few minutes, another pedestrian approaches, a man wearing a tie but no jacket. Matus asks him for a cigarette. The man ignores him and walks on by. Comodoro is the first one to arrive. So much the better, Matus says, I was beginning to suspect that none of you could tell time or that you had chickened out. The others won’t be long, Comodoro says with a gesture of extreme formality; he would have preferred to say it wearing a black beret and a camouflage uniform. What are they waiting for? We were asked to paint a landscape and no one wanted to leave it only half-done. Cerillo’s is a scrawl; Ubaldo’s has mountains and a rabbit; Ubaldo is an artist. I don’t want to stay here too long and have

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people see us talking, so I’m going to walk around the block. If you guys are ready when I get back to the institute, wink at me and I’ll open the gate. Tell your friends that they are to walk out, silently, with no shouting or running that might attract attention. Check, Comodoro says, over and out. Matus looks at his watch and starts his walk, he wants to measure the time it takes him to go around the block. He would prefer to run, show these kids that at his age he’s capable of physical deeds, but he decides against it when he thinks that later, jammed together in the car, someone would complain that he stinks like a sweaty old man. As he rounds the first corner, he imagines fifteen enlightened ones walking single file toward the automobile. Ten will have to pile in back with five in front, no more, or I won’t be able to handle the steering wheel and work the pedals and I’ll have to avoid any street with a light because if I hit a red one it’ll be impossible for anyone not to see us. Someone might think it’s funny to see so many people in a car, someone else might think it’s suspicious and write down the license-plate number. And if there are more than fifteen? And what if the fifteen don’t even fit into the car? Now the scene is one where Matus is saying I’m really sorry to the two or three who don’t fit in, it’s a door you’ve got to slam shut and a car that pulls away leaving adrift the dreams of glory of those who showed up late, take me, one of them is crying; someone says better to kick Cerillo out and take any one of those two or

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three, and Matus wonders what his primary responsibility is: to comply with the mission or with the promise he made to Cerillo’s mother. He sighs as he realizes that he would throw Cerillo out the window. So sorry, he’d manage to say, the fatherland comes before your statue, and my duty trumps my word, and I can always lie to your mother, tell her that you died fighting and not because you got thrown out of a moving car, and because we would never know if you lost your life as you hit the pavement or when the route one bus rolled over your body. As he turned the last corner and walked toward the institute, he could see Fatso Comodoro’s arm waving from between the bars of the gate. Matus quickens his pace, and as soon as he gets there, he slaps Comodoro. I told you to wink at me. Comodoro looks at his flesh turning red from the smack. Are you all ready? Matus whispers, with his back toward the institute, leaning against the gate as though smoking, making sure there are no witnesses in the street. Ready. How many are you? We’re six, counting me. Only six? More are coming? Matus unlatches the gate and leads the way to the car; he opens the back door and right away the front one. He doesn’t look behind to see if the last one closed the gate; all he does is sit down at the wheel and await the signal. First Ubaldo and Milagro, between the two of them they’ve got Cerillo by the arms; Azucena follows and, last, Fatso Comodoro, each one with his schoolbag. Matus turns the key in the ignition. Ubaldo knows that

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in tight situations cars never start, you’ve got to try three or four times as the enemy draws closer and closer, but this time the motor starts right up and he can’t see any of the teachers from the institute running toward them. We’re all here, Comodoro says from the back seat and, at the very moment that the car starts to advance toward Hidalgo Street, there’s a burst of laughter and applause. Three blocks from there as he passes in front of what had been his school, Matus mutters an insult at the principal and especially at Arechavaleta. Fatso Comodoro is not comfortable in the back seat; it’s not right for him to be treated like all the others, when he was the one who took it upon himself to recruit volunteers, to inform his mates that it was their duty to fight the enemy. No, sir, my place is in the front seat. He slips the schoolbag off and, after struggling a bit with his weight and ignoring Matus’s orders to keep still, at the moment when he’s about to cross the barrier the car brakes at a crosswalk. Inertia makes Comodoro fall and bang his head on the instrument panel. A rivulet of blood springs from his nose. Although the recruits would like to burst out laughing, they remain silent when they see the impatience in Matus’s face. They proceed down Hidalgo Street and then turn north on Cuauhtémoc. It’s not until they reach the highway to Laredo that Matus calms down and stops seeing every car as a possible pursuit vehicle. Then he hands his handkerchief to Comodoro, who’s still

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trying to stop his nosebleed. Here, he says, cover your nostril with this and lean your head back. What time will we get there? Azucena asks. Matus recognizes the voice and moves the rearview mirror to examine the backseat. He finds her seated to the far right, looking out the window. The car reduces its speed and comes to a stop in a vacant lot to the right of the road. Matus rests his forehead on the steering wheel; he gives the appearance of being worn out, of having fallen asleep. A woman, he says softly; we’ve got to go back to the institute. Caralampio is sitting on the toilet and hears the whispers coming in through the window and although he recognizes Comodoro’s voice he can’t make out what he’s saying; then he hears some hurried footsteps, and someone silently opening and closing the gate. No, he mutters to himself, no, please, and reaches for the roll of toilet paper. When he doesn’t find it where it should be, he guesses it’s behind him, on top of the toilet, but under the circumstances it strikes him as a luxury to use it; he stands up and barely pulls his underpants and pants up his legs, enough for him to run out onto the patio. He finds it empty and quiet. Private Caralampio, take roll, and he answers himself in a martial tone: present. He dashes over to the gate, looks out to the street without seeing any of his buddies. For a moment he lets go of his pants to wipe the sweat from his brow; he reaches down and pulls them up

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to his thighs. Now he runs over to the classroom. He sees how some of the seats are empty. Where’s Comodoro? he asks with a trembling voice, Comodoro, where are you? The teacher scolds him. Fasten your pants, she tells him, and tells everyone to close their eyes. Caralampio ignores her. Where’s Azucena, Ubaldo, Cerillo, Milagro? He goes over to the middle of the patio and looks around but can’t find any of the others who’d raised their hands after Comodoro’s speech. He sees that they’ve abandoned him, and glory has slipped away from him in the wink of an eye, in the time it took him to take a dump; the ship set sail leaving its most valuable cargo behind at the dock. He looks at himself in the reflection of a windowpane and decides to close his eyes like the students hadn’t closed theirs, as the whoop of their laughter now rings throughout the building. Caralampio is crying, he knows no one will remember him for his bravery in battle but for the time he stood stock-still in the middle of the patio, with his pants slowly slipping down his legs to bunch up around his ankles, his T-shirt riding above his belly button, his member dripping. Of course I remember Caralampio, the crybaby with the dirty underwear. And there’s no consoling him, not even when the director yanks him by the hair to drag him into the office and lock him up, and everybody’s attention centers on what the psychologist will call pure exhibitionism, which is why none of the teachers notice the absence of the other five, not until Ubal-

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do’s mother shows up around a quarter past one and asks, where’s my son? What matters is valor, determination, military capability, marksmanship; and as our general you shouldn’t forget it, it’s not right to cast aside one of your soldiers only because she dreamed one day of becoming a princess. Take a good look at her, she’s wearing pants like the rest of us, and so what if she hasn’t grown a moustache yet? That’s true for the rest of the troop. And if that weren’t enough, the members of your army have sworn to treat her as an equal, and we won’t lay a hand on her, without our manhood snapping to attention, and we’ll not discuss any other kind of love with her except the love for the fatherland, or maybe brotherly love among comrades. We’re going to give you a demonstration of Azucena’s worth as part of our team. Fatso Comodoro bends down to pick up an empty beer can, one that’s been thrown to the side of the road from a passing vehicle; he dusts it off, shoos off the bugs living in it, and sets it down on a rock. Azucena, Comodoro yells out, come show General Matus the stuff you’re made of. She looks around nervously, her eyes all teary, not knowing what to do. Pick up a rock, Comodoro tells her, and now imagine that that can is the exact point where some gringo’s nose ends and his forehead begins, we’re all defenseless, and that man is approaching us with his bayonet fixed to rip our guts out. Azucena checks around on

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the ground until she finds a round stone; it feels just right in her hand, its weight seems ideal to split an enemy’s head open. Ten steps separate her from the beer can, ten steps from here to glory, the distance between returning home and crossing the border. Azucena, Comodoro insists, there’s an enemy right in front of you, my rifle’s jammed, Ubaldo’s out of bullets, Cerillo’s dozed off, Milagro is gripped with a fit of trembling, only you can save us; take the greeneyed dumb-faced gringo out, and save the lives we are about to lose. Azucena doesn’t doubt her capacity to hit a beer can, she’s done it in the vacant lot near her home, but now she needs more than good aim; she needs composure, to find just the right moment to pull the trigger at a moving target. Come on, Azucena, save us and save yourself, too. A truck comes roaring down the road and the gust of wind kicks up a cloud of dust. Comodoro lets out a groan and crouches down because he can see the gringo taking aim at him, he’s just a few steps away and it’s only a matter of seconds before he can feel the bayonet in his guts. Hurry up, Azucena, your lack of decision means death for me, Comodoro whispers; and the metal rips through the flesh, penetrates the layer of fat. The gringo knows he needs to plunge it in at least ten times if he’s going to polish off this tough Mexican; he stabs him over and over again in a movement that’s like whipping butter. Comodoro is unable to get up and fight, so he stretches out on the ground and rolls downhill, toward the highway, and the gringo follows after him, jabbing his blade

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over and over again in the soft whiteness of a body clamoring for mercy or at least a shot to the neck, please. Do something, Azucenca, I’m bleeding to death. She finally makes up her mind, pulls her arm back, and throws the projectile as though imitating a baseball player. Die, you miserable scum, she says at the very moment she releases the deadly stone. The stone veers off to the left of its target, it’s not a straight line but a well-defined parabola and it ends up hitting some brush. The can gleams intact and Comodoro shuts his eyes. He’s no longer fighting for his life, he only manages to beg them to bury him in Monterrey, in the Dolores pantheon, don’t leave my body to rot in Texas, in the middle of shopping centers and oil wells, consumed by those heathen green worms you find in enemy territory; let Azucena take care of the transport costs. Ubaldo approaches the body. He’s dead, he was a good man, and now he’s too heavy a mass to carry to Monterrey. It was my fault, Azucena says, and the group gathers around the deceased. That’s how it goes in war, Milagro adds, people die, but it’s nobody’s fault, not even the gringo’s who killed him. Ubaldo takes Comodoro by the ankles and tries to drag him; he gives up when he feels the veins in his forehead throbbing. Better to bury him here, he says, we can mark the spot well, we won’t lose track of it, and before a year’s out, when we can fit him in a grocery bag, we’ll come back for him. Comodoro opens his eyes, upset. Respect my last wishes, you can’t refuse that to anyone. Matus picks up a rock and throws it at the can; he

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also misses. Azucena goes over to him and takes him by the arm. If we are all willing to spill our blood, somebody’s best who has been taught to spill it every month, she sighs deeply. Matus feels happy, that’s what he needs: resolute people who’ve made up their minds, courageous persons, very different from those sissy-pants students who complain about him to their parents. There’s going to be no preferential treatment, he says; and Azucena nods in agreement and replies that she wouldn’t have it any other way, except when she needs to go to the bathroom. They return to the car. Cerillo’s waiting for them asleep on the back seat, wearing the face of someone who’s dreamt about clouds and gaudy balloons, his arms crossed, his mouth open and a line of spit stretching from his mouth to his chest. After following along for a half hour on an unpaved road, Matus parks the car next to a corral and honks the horn. A bunch of chickens scurry away, others don’t move or go about pecking for food. Where are we? Comodoro asks. A man exits a nearby house, raises his arms in greeting and says something that’s inaudible inside of the car. Is he friend or enemy? Milagro sticks his head out the window. We’re here at our training ground, Matus says, you’ll leave here as soldiers in the service of the fatherland, warriors in mind, body, soul. You took us from the institute to have us do more lessons? Ubaldo asks, just hand me a howitzer to begin shooting, I don’t want to color soldiers or recite poems about the war. Bravery is the

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first characteristic of every combatant, Matus says, and you’ve already given more than enough proof of it by the simple fact of being here. You need to know now that courage is worthless without marksmanship, without tactics, without ethics, without survival. Despite the fact that the car has become an oven since it stopped under the sun, no one gets out while Matus is saying they should not be surprised when they hear the word ethics. Yes, men, you’ll have time to memorize and swear your oath of the soldier’s manifesto, a list of precepts that bestow goodness on the act of killing, so that neither our conscience nor the Holy Mother Church can make any claims on us. Comodoro wants to pay attention to Matus’s speech, but he can’t. Ever since he heard the word training, he’s assaulted by his own image, wearing ballet tights, sweating, running various times around a plaza; people are carrying switches and they strike him every time he lets up his pace. Come on, fatty, you’ve still got a hundred more turns to go. Azucena interrupts Matus when he’s about to declare the first precept of the manifesto. We’ve got to find some shade, she says, poor Cerillo is pretty sunstruck. Matus gives in, sure, you deserve a good cold lemonade, and everyone gets out and heads over to the man who’s still greeting them with his arms in the air. They go into the house and see that, in effect, there’s a pitcher of lemonade with sparkling ice cubes. The man greets them, calling only Comodoro by his name, and picks up the pitcher to serve them in aluminum glasses. Except for Cerillo, the others

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discourteously refuse to accept the lemonade, saying they prefer water, since it seems to them more soldierly. Anyone strolling those days along Hidalgo Street to the east, using as a point of departure Fatso Comodoro’s institute, would come across four schools in a five-block stretch: the Colegio Francomexicano, the Escuela Serafín Peña, the Colegio Panamericano, and the American Institute of Monterrey. Matus worked at the first one of these, located at 856 West Hidalgo. In the yearbooks prior to the 1968–69 school year, Mr. Matus appears under various subject headings. One photograph is taken from inside the classroom, in it you can see on the wall in the background a chart of the digestive system and an ancient map of the Mexican Republic. In the 1968–69 yearbook, in the B section of the sixth grade, whose homeroom teacher at that time was Miss Domínguez, you can see a student whose name was Arechavaleta. The photograph shows a child with short slicked-down hair and a haughty face, hardly likeable if you go by just the image, in spite of the spiffy way he wears his jacket and tie that makes him stand out from the others. The same yearbook informs us that the principal at that time was Juan Francisco Hinojosa, known simply as Brother Francisco, who would die in 1981 in Guadalajara. In 2005 the school turned one hundred years old, and the yearbook described the festivities celebrat-

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ing the anniversary, featuring four students from grade 6B in 1968. Three of them provided general comments of little importance about Matus, contradicting each other, perhaps confusing him with some other teacher. Obliviousness like this is natural, if we take into account that he was barely their teacher for a month, since there is no doubt he was dismissed at the end of September. Only one of them recalled how excited Matus would get when he spoke about the war against the United States. I think he retired, he said, he was an old man. Do you know what this is? Matus is holding an antique rifle, you can see how old it is by how worn the butt is and by the dullness of the metal, which even shows some rust on the barrel. The enlightened ones exchange glances that eventually land on Ubaldo as a way of telling him that he’s supposed to respond. Let’s skip the first lesson, he says, and go do some shooting, war’s not about theory but rather practice. Comodoro pats him on the back, he thanks him for the reply. I was wondering whether it was a shotgun or a carbine and whether they’re the same thing. Matus lowers the gun, rummages around in Ibáñez’s shelves until he finds a bottle he thinks has a big price tag: a Spanish brandy. This is worth more than the life of a gringo. He goes out into the vacant lot, followed by the enlightened ones, and places the bottle on a low slate wall. We aren’t going to throw rocks but fire bullets now. Who wants to go first? Four put their hands up and say me, Cerillo smiles and takes

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a step forward. Matus sees a greater decision in this than in the raised hands, so he chooses Cerillo. He asks him to stretch out on the ground and explains the importance of not sticking his head up too much so it won’t get caught in the enemy’s line of fire, besides your marksmanship is better if you rest your gun and your arms on the ground. When he’s done explaining how to line your sights up, Cerillo has dozed off. Matus kicks him in the ribs. A sleeping soldier is a dead soldier, either because he’s shot by the enemy or his superior orders him executed. Aim and fire, you have three chances, if your sights work and at least one finger, you can do it. Teary-eyed from the pain of the kick in his side, Cerillo tries out the trigger with his index finger. Stay alert, comrade, Ubaldo says, the brandy leaped over the wall and is coming toward you; he’s well equipped, with a full uniform that blends in with the vegetation, but here in the desert it makes him stand out all the more, so you have no reason to miss like Azucena’s rock did. He’s carrying a couple of tanks on his back and his weapon shows a tongue of fire. It’s an unequal match, Milagro says, I would gladly trade my rifle for his flamethrower and I’d even put in some coins. Fire, Azucena yells, he’s going to shoot you. Cerillo fires for the first time and the bullet disappears in the landscape. Imbecile, Ubaldo says, never listen to women, no matter how much you’re dug into the ground you’ve given your position away, you only get a little bit of time before you find yourself enveloped in flames. Two shots quickly follow and the bottle

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of brandy remains standing on the slate wall like a curse. The enemy spurts out his burst of burning petroleum and Cerillo lowers his head and stops moving. Help him, Azucena shouts, and throws herself on top of him to smother the flames. Today we’ve come across two gringos, Milagro kicks a chicken to release his anger, and both of them have prevailed against us. Is he dead? Ubaldo asks. Comodoro examines Cerillo with disgust and determines that he’s still breathing. Too bad, he says, his face will remain forever disfigured. No matter, Milagro says, war is not a beauty contest. Of course not, Azucena helps him get up, dusting his white suit off, but perhaps the man survives and returns home, and even if history gives him a privileged place, women will lower their gaze when he passes and he will know no other love than his mother’s. Comodoro picks up the rifle and says it’s now his turn. He knows he’s got to eliminate the enemy because he won’t be as lucky as Cerillo; he would immediately turn into a burning ball of fat and there wouldn’t be anyone volunteering to put it out. His destiny would be as lacking in dignity as that of the cucumber lady, or worse, because his friends would be busy frying sausages and singing and dancing around the inextinguishable bonfire of his body. Matus feels relieved when he sees how Comodoro misses his first shot, and he wishes he would fail in his next two attempts; he prays for the failure of Azucena, Ubaldo, and Milagro, because in that moment there’s nothing he’d like better than to suck

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on the bottle and play a last game of dominoes with his friends. Unquestionably, this is the last time we’re together, Matus says, and pats Ibáñez and Román on the back; Santiago’s sitting in front of him so he only smiles at him. The table holds the half-full bottle of brandy that’s survived the bullets; there are four glasses, ashtrays filled with smoking butts, ice cubes in a bucket and, in the middle, the full splendor of the wooden box containing the domino tiles. Ibáñez is partners with Román, Santiago chews on his cigar and begins to slide the top off the box. As soon as it’s open, you can see a piece is missing. Román drains his glass and gets to his feet. Fine last game, he says, I wouldn’t have bothered to come from so far away. Comodoro has been looking at the men from a corner, waiting for the moment when Matus will shout his name. But he’s surprised to hear a calm voice. Where is it, fat boy? He digs his hands into the pockets of his pants and caresses the Immaculate Lady with his left hand. I don’t know, he answers, I put all the tiles away. He would have returned it under other circumstances; now he can’t, he’s off to war and needs to commend himself to someone. Matus takes a swig of brandy and walks over to where the nervous Comodoro is cornered. Azucena hurries to place herself between the two men. Don’t touch the boy. Ubaldo shows up on the scene and says that he’s not against fatty getting a good beating. What bothers me is that Matus doesn’t have an alternative

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strategy. There’s a piece missing, so what? It’s only a soldier who dropped dead from malaria before a battle; we’re going to have to get by without him. He walks around the table holding his hands behind his back. Give me your word that that’s not you in the first real battles, that you won’t sign the armistice at the first drop of spilled blood, that you know how to play with twenty-eight tiles and just as well with less. I can take care of myself in battle, Matus says just to say something gutsy, because he’s not going to let that impertinent kid pester him, but do me the favor now of explaining how you can play without one of the tiles. Ubaldo asks Ibáñez and Santiago to give up their places for the enlightened ones, so the partners are made up of Comodoro and Milagro first, and by Azucena and Cerillo second. He dumps the tiles on the table and mixes them up. I learned how to count playing this game, Ubaldo says, first up to six, then up to twenty-eight, and finally by counting every black dot I reached one hundred and sixty-eight. No one at the institute has matched that feat. Comodoro raises his eyebrows, astonished; Azucena takes her shoes off so she can rub feet with him under the table; Milagro says that there was a time when he could handle numbers in the hundreds and in the thousands, and even in another language, and he assures them that he’ll soon get his skills at math back. Yes, gentlemen, once again I’ll be able to calculate the price of a dozen eggs if each one costs fifty cents. I swear it. Ubaldo asks each player to pick up his tiles. They do so and, after they have been dis-

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tributed, Cerillo only has six. No reason to get upset, friends, it’s just a matter of imagining you came late to the game and Cerillo’d already put down the first tile. Can you figure out which one it was? The men examine their pieces and it’s Matus who speaks up. I should have imagined which one. Milagro is seated to the right of Cerillo; it’s his turn. The four men examine their tiles and know there is no alternative: they put down blank-five. Now they look at Azucena’s and unanimously choose the double-fives. When there is no other choice, they play the only admissible tile or pass; when they’ve got to make a choice, they invariably agree on what needs to be played. This makes them proud. You can see we’re experts, Román says when the game is over, the four of us made the same decisions. The result makes Cerillo the winner, but he doesn’t wake up until Azucena hugs him. We won, she tells him between kisses, you’re a genius. We can leave out more tiles, Ubaldo says, and the game is still the same, you just have to imagine you came even later to the hand. I’m bored, Santiago says and begins to drink. You only need four tiles for four players, Ubaldo continues, and you’ve only got to count the black dots; the one with the most wins. That’s a different game, Román says. It’s the same one, you don’t win more and you don’t lose less, Ubaldo scrambles the tiles on the table, but surely you save some time. Azucena’s still happy, hugging Cerillo. It’s been a while since I’ve won anything, she kisses him on the forehead, the last time was when I found the hidden vowels. Ma-

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tus goes out for some fresh air. As he contemplates the black sky he understands that between Ubaldo and Comordoro he has been robbed of a good part of his life. He shrugs his shoulders. Maybe it’s not important, he says to himself, maybe that was really the last game of my life; with more pieces or fewer pieces, I can’t play if a gringo puts a bullet through my brain. Wake up, soldiers. It’s time to go. Comodoro opens one eye and sees there’s no light coming in through the window. Darkness is no time to be waking up or going anywhere, darkness is only for dying in your sleep if you’re an old person, and I’m still quite a way from that. He rolls over on the mattress and falls back asleep. Ubaldo leaps from the bed and asks Matus if he wants him to prod the others, although he’s seen that the troop always wakes up to a bugle played outside the barracks, on a hillside where you can barely make out the silhouette of the bugler. We haven’t got a bugle or a drum or a tambourine either, so go shout in their ears, shake them and pull their feet; in ten minutes I want them in the dining room because their breakfast is going to get cold. Ubaldo does a good job, because before the ten minutes are up they’re all seated around the table, properly dressed, except for Comodoro, who out of habit shows up wearing only his underwear. He realizes his mistake when Azucena doesn’t touch her food and sits there staring at him. Ok, he says, but don’t let anyone touch my food. He goes back to the

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bedroom and finds his clothes scattered all over the floor. He had undressed in a hurry to get the best bed, a tall one with a thick mattress, a wooden headboard, and a wool cover. His efforts proved fruitless, because when he was all comfortable and wrapped up in the sheets, his companions insisted that that was Cerillo’s bed; the others could make do with thin mattresses they had arranged on the floor and Azucena could use the sofa in the front room. Comodoro reluctantly took one of the thin mattresses and there, before the light was turned out, with his face even with the floor, he managed to see under the bed a pair of black rubber boots. He didn’t go to sleep right away, praying that they were his size. He saw himself running across all the battlefields in the world, squeaking with each synthetic step, bringing down soldiers whether they were armed with a gun, a sword, or a scimitar. Matus and Azucena had managed to get Cerillo into his yellow cotton pajamas, and Azucena softly sang him a song until she was sure he was fast asleep. Now Comodoro dresses hurriedly, because he knows that it’s risky to leave a plate of ham and eggs near his companions; someone could empty a saltshaker on them or spit on them or, even worse, eat them up. Gray socks, a blue shirt, and brown pants pulled tight with the belt, with a heavy buckle riding somewhere between his belly button and his breasts. When it comes time to put his shoes on, he reaches his hand under the bed and pulls the boots out: shiny rubber on the outside and lined on the inside with a

The Enlightened Army

white gauze, and with an outline of imitation stitching. Comodoro crosses himself and sticks his feet in. They’re too big; nothing that can’t be solved with three layers of socks. He goes over to the mirror and admires how much he looks like a stable groom; he’s convinced that these boots that reach up to his knees have made him a different man, worthy of crossing his arms and inducing silence in everyone because he’s probably got something to say. Ladies and gentlemen, Comodoro would say with a deep voice, and he would start walking around in circles so his audience could admire the elegance of his footsteps, the manliness of his stride. Ladies and gentlemen, Comodoro says, and crosses his arms in front of the mirror and he has to fall silent, just like his audience, because expectancy is precious and words are worthless. He returns to the table and wolfs down his breakfast because the dining room is empty and you can hear the noise coming from outside and the cry of let’s go. When he gets outside he can see his friends on a cart. Matus strikes the mule with his whip and the mule begins to walk. Comorodo clumsily runs over to them, his face red and a piece of ham caught between his teeth; he grabs Azucena’s and Ubaldo’s hands, and they help him up into the conveyance. He collapses next to Cerillo, next to the schoolbags and various rifles wrapped in wool blankets. He rests his head on a sack of fruit and provisions. The squeak of the wheels diminishes with each rotation until it disappears completely. Comodoro assumes that if it

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weren’t for his rubber boots, he’d never have made it into the cart. I thought we were going by car, he says when he catches his breath, or by bus or train, armies travel by freight train. Ubaldo nods without saying a word, and even though the sun’s just come out, Comodoro can see the anger and deception in his face. There are blank pieces of paper and a ballpoint pen in Comodoro’s schoolbag because he wants to ask Azucena to write him a letter, since no soldier should go to the front without letters from his girl; he’s also got four pairs of socks and five pairs of underpants, which if you count the ones he’s wearing come to seven and six, respectively, since he’s put on three pairs of socks to make his boots fit tight. Comodoro’s schoolbag is not military green, nor does it have pretend leaves to provide camouflage in the forest, nor pretend sand to blend in with the desert; it’s made of thick leather dyed blue, with a large compartment meant for notebooks and textbooks, and two external pouches in which you can store pens, pencils, erasers, a compass, a protractor, and chewing gum. A label hanging from one end says O’Brien Fine Schoolbags, Olympic model, made in Mexico, one hundred percent cowhide. Since he has no textbooks, Comodoro’s carrying the box of green gelatin and the two cucumbers; he knows that gelatin provides energy and the cucumbers can be eaten as a substitute for water when crossing the desert, although he’d like to hang on to one of them for the

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moment of his death. When the Immaculate One is not to be found in one of his pants pockets, she’s traveling comfortably in the pouch on the right, because Comodoro carries his money in the one on the left, a few bills and coins he saved up, including a commemorative coin from the Olympics, worth twenty-five pesos. He’s got it just in case of an emergency, because he has no intention of spending it; he’s become fond of the museum Indian stamped on it, dancing over five hoops with a round object in his hand that could well be a grenade. If the bullet that’s going to kill him doesn’t do so instantly, he will have time to take out Azucena’s letter and recite an amorous verse and then close his fist over the piece of paper and inform the world that, no matter how you die, it’s always from a broken heart. Then he will bite into the cucumber. Rest in peace, Comodoro, your widow will remember you, your widow will collect your belongings consisting of some underwear, rubber boots, some spending money, and a coin she should hold onto as a keepsake. Comodoro has a few more things in his schoolbag. Before leaving for the institute that morning he went through the house taking everything he thought might be useful. A box of matches to set a field of sorghum on fire or to heat a pot of food in the campground; some aftershave lotion, although now he doesn’t know why he thought that might be useful; a knife, fork, and spoon; a pack of fifty napkins; and a bar of soap. Finally, to hide the contents just in case someone scrounges around among his

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belongings, he placed an open book on top like a double-pitched roof, a book whose cover shows a chicken with a crown and scepter. He’d stolen it the afternoon before from the institute’s bookshelf and, to judge by the illustration, it contains a story they’d read a month before and that Cerillo had liked very much. Azucena’s schoolbag is pink with the image of a blonde girl ice-skating. It has a handle to carry it by hand and a strap to hang it from your back. It contains a fine-tip pen, a box of crayons, and a loaf of bread. It didn’t occur to Azuena to pack at least one change of clothes, not even underwear. But she did put in a needle and thread just in case something got torn. She included a doll that is rigid except for her synthetic hair and the way she closes her eyes when you lay her down, but a snarky comment from Comodoro made her leave the doll behind at the institute, on the shelf of the classroom. She misses the doll and it makes her mad to think someone else has got her now. It’s impossible to suppose that some classmate hasn’t stolen her. She’s got a pencil sharpener, two pencils, and a ballpoint pen that clicks. She’s got a stenographer’s notebook that has only two pages with writing: the first says horse, dog, cat, elephant; the second, in green ink, says Comodoro is handsome, handsome is what Comodoro is, he’s handsome, that Comodoro, not a lot, not so much, not at all. For the day of the battle, Azucena grabbed some of her mother’s makeup. If death comes to her, she wants to look pretty lying there on the ground

The Enlightened Army

or on the floor of the fortification, her lips good and red, with long false eyelashes, her face wellpowdered to avoid unwanted shiny spots in the photographs, her cheeks rouged so she won’t look like a cadaver, although she couldn’t be sure of this, since an imbecile, thinking she was still alive, might administer a coup de grâce that would only serve to deprive her of any semblance of beauty. She also is carrying some lily-scented perfume, so she will be the only one among the dead not smelling of carrion. She still needs to have Matus sign a declaration. In it she will request that the enemy, no matter how attractive she looks, not cart her off as a trophy, but please send her back to her country. Milagro is carrying nothing worthy of mention in his schoolbag, just everyday stuff, including the skin of a banana he ate before Matus came for them. Cerillo is used to taking a woven bag to the institute, one that is almost feminine, which hangs from his shoulder by a thick wool rope and fastens with a yellow button the size of a silver dollar. He didn’t put anything in, his mother took care of that. He’s carrying two letters addressed to Matus; one that says he should open it as soon as possible, the other that he should read right before they enter into battle. Matus won’t pay any attention to the second order and will open it along the way, whenever he chooses to. Cerillo has a purple cushion and a small blanket, a book of prayers for children, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb and hair cream, a change of clothes identical to what he’s wearing though perhaps a

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little whiter, a pair of yellow pajamas, underwear, white cream for his shoes, a bottle of mint-flavored mouthwash, cologne, a roll of toilet paper, a pair of nail clippers, baby talcum, and baby lotion. The only sign that his mother was sending him off to war is a roll of bandages. Only Ubaldo seems to have fully realized his mission when he went to pack his schoolbag the morning they left. He put in three knives for slicing meat, two knitting needles, a corkscrew, a slingshot, binoculars, and a pound packet of tacks, most of them rusty. He dreams of the moment when he’s being pursued by a horde of northern barbarians; he will toss the tacks in their path and listen to their shouts as they each jump around on one foot. He also included a bilingual dictionary, seeing how it might be necessary to make himself understood by the enemy, where he’d underlined words to make them easy to find, words like surrender, execution, prisoner, truce, and amnesty. Although to be fair, one must make clear that Caralampio was also aware of his mission. Besides a two-pound bag of rat poison, he is carrying a pistol, which he fired into the air in the midst of the uproar produced at the institute when they finally discovered the absence of five of the enlightened ones. That’s why the first thought of the people was that Caralampio had shot them, and they looked for the bodies in the bathrooms, in the dispensary, and on the roof. The second thing they thought, once they got over the fright of the gunshot, was that Caralam-

The Enlightened Army

pio had threatened to kill his comrades, which is why the five of them had fled the institute. So there’s no reason for alarm, it will only be a question of minutes before we can find them a few blocks from here. Matus examines his five soldiers; he’s no longer bothered by having a woman in his ranks, he’s now concerned about how Cerillo looks, dressed all in white, wearing short pants, socks that come up just to his knees, a lace shirt with a ruffle around the neck, and a clear blue tie. Patent leather shoes. Dressed for a nineteenth-century piñata party or for immediate burial. I could shoot you in the head right now, Matus says, put the barrel of the gun to the back of your neck and tell you to say a Bless Me, O Lord and that would be the end of it: the bullet enters and exits with no mess, and I send you, a stiff, back to your mother with a note explaining how you were the bravest of my men, women, and children; I could leave you under the shade of a tree and we would all pile into the cart and I would poke the mule to get it going; night will fall there and you’d be standing still, all clean and white under the moon because it’d be a shame to take you into war where you’d get your clothes dirty; I could carry you over and set you down on the side of the road and before you’d know it a woman would come along and cover you in kisses and say this is the child I always wanted to have and she’d put you in her car and you would grow up in the bosom of an aristocratic family worthy of your lace blouse, have tea and cook-

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ies right on the dot, the kind that crumble to dust when you bite into them, and be careful the child doesn’t get too much sun because we don’t want him looking like an Indian. I can imagine a lot of things but I can’t imagine you on a battlefield with bombs coming down and kicking up mud, because even Azucena looks like more of a man than you do; she fires a gun and you sing a Christmas carol like a Vienna boy, she can wield a dagger and you put a blindfold on and turn around three times before pinning the tail on the donkey, she bleeds and you drool. What kind of hero does your mother want? A paladin who endorses some brand of detergent? No, Cerillo, I want to see you dressed different: in a way that inspires fear or respect in your opponent. Is he always dressed so fancy? Matus asks the others. No, Ubaldo says, he came this time dressed for a party, and maybe that’s fine, in accord with how he sees the war; the harmony would be broken if we put a rifle in his hands, but if we give him a nuclear warhead he would be the living image of the seraph of death. Let’s see if you brought any other clothes, Matus says as he rummages around in his schoolbag. He makes a face when he finds another identical suit of clothes and a whole hygiene and beauty collection. He takes out the two letters and sees that they’re addressed to him, the Honorable General Matus. He puts the one he’s supposed to open before the battle in his pocket, and tears open the other envelope.

The Enlightened Army

Matus leaves the railroad to Saltillo behind and takes a righthand turn, following the tracks to Piedras Negras. He knows he still has five kilometers and three hundred meters to go and if he wants to have the chance to win he needs to reach this point within two hours. His right shoe has been bothering him ever since he reached Villa de García, his laces are loose and the rubbing of the leather against his threadbare sock has produced a bleeding wound on his ankle. By his calculation he concludes that adjusting his shoe will cost him twenty seconds; he can’t afford this luxury with Clarence DeMar breathing down his neck. Twenty seconds are a hundred meters or even more because those incidents serve to make the enemy pick up speed, leaving Matus frustrated as well as exhausted. Let my feet bleed, my toenails fall out, blisters and callouses and bruises appear, let my body complain all it wants to because I’m not going to listen, so don’t go claiming victory, Clarence, I’m right here beside you, one step after another until you collapse. How are we doing for time? he gasps out. Ramón checks the hands and spurs his horse to catch up with Matus. Two hours and three minutes. Matus receives the notice nervously. Three minutes over budget, that means Clarence DeMar’s back has diminished, almost can’t be made out because of the distance, he is very certain of raising his hands in victory. In addition to everything else, Clarence is enjoying the Paris breeze that comes off the river and rustles the thick vegetation. It’s after five o’clock

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over there and the summer sun will be beating down. It’s only a little past ten o’clock in the morning over here, the sun’s not beating down yet, and nevertheless he’s sweating freely even though there’s already a patch of salt on his skin. Matus speeds up and his breathing becomes a sob; he feels like a board, his hands are clenched and his arms move with wooden clumsiness. The wind is blowing and swirling the dust being kicked up by Clarence DeMar, the flying Finns and who knows how many other runners who didn’t waste three minutes on something insignificant; the Chilean Manuel Plaza is undoubtedly among the group because the newspapers claimed he had a chance to win a medal and called him the Latin American hope. Although Matus pushes himself to the limit, it’s obvious to Santiago and Román that his speed has diminished; they both think their friend is going to collapse with each stride. Santiago brings his horse up alongside and pours water from the jar on Matus’s head. Are you going to allow a damn gringo to win? The water flows fresh and salty and irritates his eyes. The French girls along the track no longer are clapping, they got tired of doing it after the first runners, the ones from the civilized countries; they watch Matus silently, compassionately, because his useless efforts inspire pity. He’s a Mexican, one says, and another makes the comment that Mexicans smell bad. The minutes go by, perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps a half hour or more. Matus is thirsty: his mouth has become gummy, unable to spit. The dis-

The Enlightened Army

comfort through his whole body is so much, he’s so upset, that he’d willingly confess to a crime. Yes, I killed him; please don’t make me run anymore. Yet he continues on and imagines the Colombes Stadium, he’s certain he can see it there where the train track curves to go around a hill, crosses over a bridge spanning a nameless and waterless river. He still has to do a lap around the track. There are photographers and a judge who will tell him how important it is to compete, that it’s best to show determination until crossing the finish line and if not the judge will send two Samaritans to help him and in the process give them a good reason to disqualify him, but don’t worry, Mr. Matus, we’ll give you for your effort a diploma signed by Baron de Coubertin himself, many are called and only one is the winner. Matus stumbles on one of the ties. It’s hard for him to regain his rhythm, he’s not sure he can hang on. The torture continues and he has got to confess. I killed him, he says, panting, I killed him to steal his high-precision Swiss watch. Esteemed General Matus, I am sending you these lines to give you some instructions regarding Cerillo; I don’t wish to trouble you with this, my intent is for you to find him always a ready and willing combatant. And since you know a soldier who doesn’t sleep well is not an alert soldier, I implore you to cover him well at night with his blanket and make sure he never forgets his purple cushion, because not every pillow will make him rest well; shoo the mosquitoes

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away and use the cologne as a repellent. I thought of sending some storybooks with him, but they’re very heavy and I suppose you know some stories worth telling; please avoid those in which dwarves appear, because these will keep Cerillo awake until dawn. I did put a book of prayers in his schoolbag; it’s got color illustrations and can help raise my son’s spirits and those of the rest of the troop if the trek becomes tedious. I’m thinking especially about page seventeen. As for his clothes, I included a change of uniform and five pairs of underwear. Please check to be sure he changes his socks every other day. You’ve got to wash them with bleach, preferably in boiling water for forty to fifty minutes. Matus sighs and takes a look at Cerillo. The boy is smiling broadly as he admires from the driver’s seat the mule’s haunches. He shouldn’t eat spicy food, the letter goes on, and you’ve got to cut his meat in small pieces. Matus reads no farther, he throws the pages away without even imagining what follows. After whirling around a bit in the air, the pages come to rest in the scrub. Comodoro and Azucena are riding on the back of the cart, their feet kicking in the air. They see the pages that fall behind, moving gently with the wind. Your death certificate, Comodoro says. Yes, Azucena comes back, I was a great lady. The cart comes to a stop next to a pathway. Toward the end you can make out blinking colored lights. Matus turns around to address his sleeping cargo.

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From the time of the Romans there’s a military law that every soldier must drink, dance, and make out before going into battle, that’s to ensure, in case of death, that he leaves this earth with the sensation that his life was not in vain, but more than anything else it infuses an enormous desire to go on living, which translates into a feeling of fortitude when the time for battle comes. Alcohol is the tonic of warriors, the potion of a good death. Matus watches them rub their eyes, yawn, scratch their balls, and knows that it’s going to be hard for him to make them into real soldiers, because boys always lose wars. It’s the real men, those with a woman waiting for their return, who are the only ones capable of finishing off a rival, because in the end, wars are not won for the fatherland, but for the women we left behind, and it seems like the only woman these boys have dreamed of is the one who’s riding next to them, lying face down, showing a broad soft backside, held in by synthetic pants with bursting seams, and any fantasy about being with her would have to be about a spin on the carousel and nothing more. Have we gotten to Texas yet? someone asks. Corporal Azucena, Matus says firmly, it’s your job tonight to watch over the cart and the arms, and with this mission I am confirming that I see no difference between you and the rest of the troop for reasons of sex, age, religious belief, or physical beauty: we’ll be back a little before dawn and you put your life on the line for our goods and possessions. Roger, Matus, Azucena replies and she snaps to attention with

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her hand over her heart. The rest of you follow me in silence. Without arms? Comodoro asks. The first three jump down, then wait for Cerillo’s slow movements. In the darkness, he’s an enormous viscous blob that eventually manages to fall from the cart to the ground. We can’t wait for you and we can’t carry you, Matus tells him, so get this straight. You see that sign going on and off? That’s where we’re headed. Cerillo smiles and sets out walking behind the backs in front of him. A few steps from the entrance they hear accordion music. Comodoro imagines a lively place with women dancing and wearing hats covered in fruit and men singing with their arms around the shoulders of their closest buddies. He’s surprised at Matus’s assured manner as he walks in without knocking or without calling out a password. The music comes from a jukebox in the corner. A man is at the bar drinking, head down. Ubaldo whispers to Comodoro that he already knows this kind of place. You’ve got to watch your step, he says, for no reason at all they’ll smash you in the head with a whiskey bottle. There are five tables to choose from, and Matus points to the one farthest from the door, under a burned-out light bulb. The jukebox stops playing and you can hear the rattle of the ceiling fan. What surprises me, Ubaldo continues, is to not find a player piano with a woman sitting on top of it. Service, Matus yells out, and a fortyish woman wearing an apron comes over. He stands up and gives her a hug, she says I thought you were dead; they both laugh out loud.

The Enlightened Army

Soldiers, this is Luz, and she’s going to serve us some drinks that will make you men. Comodoro imagines himself swilling on a bottle: he’s wearing a bowtie and well-shined shoes. He utters a sentence that contains the words economics, politics, and diversity. There’s a young woman opposite him wearing a short skirt whom he addresses as Miss; she calls him Sir. There’s a typewriter that no one uses, desks, and blue-and-green striped wallpaper. Miss, you’re very pretty. Thank you, sir. Miss, it’s better to write on lined paper. Yes, sir. Miss, when economics is politics it becomes diversity. You know a lot, sir. Comodoro slams his fist down on the table. I need a drink. Luz comes over with mezcal and fills four glasses. Do you want lemon and salt? As soon as he tastes it, Comodoro makes a face of disgust. Milagro is afraid he’ll spill some and asks for a straw. Only Ubaldo adopts a proper pose and with his hands on his waist says he thinks it tastes great. Luz nevertheless realizes she’s made a mistake and brings over four beers. Miss, Comodoro says after taking a sip, this is much better. Everyone’s had two and a half beers when Cerillo shows up at the door. The man at the bar puts another coin in the jukebox and the music starts again. Matus goes over and whispers something to Luz. Alcohol’s not enough to make them men. How old are they? she asks as she gives them the once-over with her eyes. I have no idea, it’s hard to tell with these people, but anyone who’s ready to die should

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also be ready to love. When Matus sees Luz smiling at Ubaldo, he takes her by the arm. Go with Fatso, he tells her. Why? She doesn’t lower her voice, confident the music will drown out her words. He’s the least appetizing. Perhaps, Matus says, but you’ll see how he’ll say sweet nothings to you. Matus is still drinking mezcal and Luz takes a sip from his glass and offers her arm to Comodoro. He takes it with his left hand while he sticks his right one into his pocket to caress the Immaculate Lady; he knows Luz is the incarnation of his lucky tile and he’ll follow her wherever she asks him to go. Where? he says to say something. Upstairs, we’ll be alone there. Nervous, he nods. He’s drunk more than he ever has before in his life, which is why, as much as he wants to be a real man, he takes a few dance steps as he climbs the stairs. Matus fills Ubaldo’s glass with mezcal. Comodoro tells me you’re an artist. Yes, I’m one of the great ones. He tells me that you painted a landscape with mountains and a rabbit. It wasn’t a rabbit, Ubaldo says, Fatso’s eyesight is bad, it was a tank, it had a cannon, not ears, and if we can’t defeat the enemy, at least we can steal a lot of their cows and make them stampede so women, old people, and children will flee screaming. And blow up their dams, Milagro joins the conversation, and plunder the stores and cut the telephone lines. Before I drew rabbits; now that I’m a military man I no longer have time to think about animals, except maybe horses. Would you like for me to draw you a tank? I could do it on a napkin.

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Matus shakes his head. There are some engravings from when the gringos invaded Monterrey; they drew the bishop’s palace as though it were a medieval castle, I’m sure you would have done a better job, you’d have given more realism to Saddle Mountain and you wouldn’t have placed an enormous gringo flag in the foreground. I’d put the Japanese one, because it’s the only one I know how to draw. Well, I’d put in the Mexican one, Milagro says. No one knows how to draw the Mexican flag, it’s impossible, and even more so at the institute where they only give us a twelve-box of crayons; and because you are saying falsehoods I’m going to draw you dead from having stepped on a landmine, and Cerilllo will be standing next to you, staring at you, drooling. Cerillo starts in his seat when he hears his name; he stretches his hand out to take a bottle of beer. Ubaldo takes a pen out of his pocket and draws a face without eyes; he puts in a body on the ground, disproportionately small, the feet with three toes each. Here lies Milagro, infantry corporal in the Mexican army, let his father ram his car into his tomb, and may the tears of his dead mother dampen his body, may his aunts cast a carnation on his grave, may the teachers from the institute tell him the story of the soldier that everyone thought was dead but who returned home after living ten years in a cave. I know that story, Milagro says, an explosion causes him to lose his memory and he goes into a cave and paints buffaloes on the walls and hunts to stay alive; one day a coconut falls on his head and he recovers his memory, and since

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he believes everything happened only yesterday, he looks for his companions but finds a peasant who tells him no, sir, you’re wrong, the war was over long ago. I don’t know the story, Matus intervenes, but I’m sure the peasant’s the one who’s wrong. Milagro raises his glass and says cheers; the tremor in his hand gets worse and he spills beer on Cerillo. You’d better go check to see how Comodoro’s doing, maybe he needs help. The three climb the stairs, Cerillo in the middle helped along by the other two. Once upstairs, they push open the door of the room into which they saw their companion go. Through the crack they can make out two naked bodies on the bed. How much good there is in the world, Comodoro is whispering, and he falls asleep in a fetal position. The enlightened ones are drunk, they’re also sleepy. They stand by the bed waiting for Luz to invite them to climb in, but she just keeps staring at the ceiling. The image of Comodoro passed out and making a whistling sound with his breath fascinates them; perhaps it’s their last chance to sleep in a bed, even if they’re going to be crammed together. Ubaldo crawls over the covers and finds a soft place between Luz and Fatso, resting his head on the woman’s thigh. Later, in the middle of a dream, there are no barriers or differences of flesh, and he’ll end up hugging the whitish stomach of his friend. Milagro stretches out in the space between the six feet and the end of the bed, and he falls asleep caressing the woman’s ankles. Cerillo finds a space in a narrow groove Luz has left on her left

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side, and he wraps his arm tightly around her so he won’t fall off. Luz’s delighted, she’s never felt more loved in her life, and she herself has never loved any of her customers as much; she can adore these enlightened ones like men, like sons, like humanity. Little by little she too falls asleep, with the certainty that tonight she’s not going to make a dime, and that makes her happy. It’s well past midnight when she wakes up. She opens her eyes and spies Cerillo, dozing contentedly, sucking her left breast. No one has ever nurtured himself with so little sensuality at her breast and yet never before has she been possessed so categorically. The minutes go by, perhaps a half hour, and Cerillo continues his libations; and though Luz starts to hurt, she cannot deny the will of someone dressed in white with a light blue tie and patent leather shoes, in whom she sees something of a depraved soul and a child god. Azucena is holding on to one of the mule’s legs. She left her place when she heard a far-off howl. She misses her nightlight, which illuminates the pink curtains in her room and casts mysterious shadows, her door half-ajar so she can go to the bathroom or the kitchen whenever she wants, the tick-tock of her clock with the phosphorescent hands. The howl is repeated insistently and Azucena swears that it sounds closer each time. She closes her eyes and holds on harder. It won’t be long now, she tells the mule, the sun is about to come up.

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When it dawns, they are all ready to go; Cerillo’s the only problem, since he refuses to let go of the warm nipple that gave him as much peace as an ethereal lullaby. The cart bounces along over the bumps in the road. The jolting causes Cerillo’s body, stiff with slumber, to inch toward the edge. Pull that child back in or he’s going to end up falling off, Matus says from the driver’s seat. Comodoro and Ubaldo grab him under the arms and drag him over to the opposite end of the cart. Be gentle, Azucena says, and nestles his purple cushion under his neck. Milagro is sitting next to Matus; he’s been wanting to ask him for the reins for a while now. It looks like it’s easy to drive a cart. As far as he can see, all you have to do is take the reins in one hand, shake them now and then, something his trembling arms would do automatically, and send the mule sporadic kisses. Can I drive? Matus nods yes and hands him the reins. Keep them loose or the mule will stop; if you want the mule to go to the left, pull the reins to that side, and work it out for yourself how you get him to go right. Comodoro looks up irritably. It was already bad enough for Milagro to be sitting up front, and now he’s driving. He hopes the wheels hit a rock so the cart stops like a car at a traffic light and Milagro lurches forward against the invisible dashboard, his head bleeding rather than his nose, with an enormous gash that lets you see his skull. So, why do they call you El Mi-

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lagro? Matus asks. Azucena gestures for silence by placing a finger to her lips, but it’s too late to pretend the question hasn’t been asked. And maybe you can’t tell, old man? Milagro’s voice is harsh, angry. Ladies and gentlemen, we have here the man who questions the origin of my name as though it weren’t obvious to friends and strangers alike, because the world knows the story of that gray car whose brakes failed, some say, or whose driver fell asleep, according to others, it doesn’t matter, since what is essential is that the car ran off the road from Tula to Victoria City at the thirty-six-kilometer marker and rolled down an incline with father, mother, sister, and brother: the whole Margáin family thrown against the bottom of the mountain. I’m a miracle because even though in the first rollover the voice of the mother could be heard crying save us, good God, the two women and the other adult were to die from being banged and smashed and knifed by pieces of metal, and by contrast here I am, safe, sound, and sensible, talking about that remote accident. I’m a miracle because while it was necessary to place three Margáins in finely etched coffins, I only spent a month unconscious in bed and one day I awoke all in one piece just as we had been at the kilometer thirty-five post: intact except for this scar on my forehead, for this trembling in my arms and hands that gets worse day by day, intact although even though my friends no longer come looking for me and I never again could get an A, not in language nor in numbers nor maps nor memory of remote things, and the teachers told

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my aunts, we’re very sorry, this child does not belong in a school like ours, we can give you the address of a suitable place for his development; intact because even though there are some adult things I don’t understand, I’m smart enough to realize I’m a living miracle, because a miracle is a rollover in a gray car without consequences, it’s to see the Margáins die among shrieks and screeches and to only sleep for a month or exactly twenty-nine days, which is every now and then equivalent to a month. Ladies and gentlemen, a miracle is being an enlightened one, because before, I was blind and thought my destiny was to follow in my father’s footsteps: becoming a lawyer who defends property owners against their tenants and ends up throwing the poor out who don’t pay. That’s not the way it was, my friends, because today I fly higher and I will go by martial law, the one standing above all the other laws, to notify the gringos that in twenty-four hours they must abandon Texas without looking back, or we will proceed to evict them with force, something my father would never have accomplished, not even by paying off the judges. He stands up on the driver’s seat and shouts I’m a miracle, and he keeps his balance with the reins because he’s riding atop a gray automobile that’s plunging down the incline at demon speed toward that luminous infinite to which very few are called. Matus opens the children’s prayer book to page 17. Have you hugged someone today? the heading asks,

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with simple verses that explain the importance of hugs to transmit affection. Matus guesses that Cerillo’s mother made a mistake when she recommended this page, which is completely bland for someone marching off to the slaughterhouse. He fervently hopes that she made a mistake. He tosses the book to the side of the road, just as he had done with the letter. Are you asleep? Azucena’s whisper reaches Fatso Comodoro’s ear along with her warm and humid breath. He says no, that he was thinking with his eyes wide open. They are both stretched out on the grass, watching the blackness of the sky. The rest of the troop is sleeping within a three-meter radius. About what? she asks. Comodoro was thinking about the pleasure of sleeping out in the open, much nicer than sleeping at home and looking at the chipped paint of the ceiling: an idea he doesn’t want to share, so he makes something up. Listen to this, Azucena: if the two of us survive this expedition and the war, and if our egos can overcome all the applause and celebration, it would be nice for us to get married. Is that an idea or a proposal? Azucena’s eyes sparkle. Matus begins to snore. It’s a prolonged grunt that blends in with the other sounds of the night: crickets, wind, leaves, and tree branches; fortunately, no motorcycles or train whistles or couples fighting. I accept, Azucena says, for my whole life. Comodoro covers her mouth. You can’t say those things when someone’s snoring. He goes over to Matus’s profoundly sleeping body and drops

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a stone into his open mouth. Matus coughs a couple of times and changes position. Did he choke? He never chokes and he doesn’t wake up, the key is to use a small object, never larger than an orange seed; and if it’s larger it needs to be of a different consistency, like phlegm. I accept, Comodoro, until death do us part, which could be very soon. Although Comodoro has never seen Azucena naked, it’s obvious to him that there’s quite a distance between her flesh and Luz’s, but maybe with time they’ll become identical or similar. Maybe the teacher lied to him, and some day they’ll be adults, at least Azucena, as far as curves and overflowing breasts go, and him with a beard and a deep voice that can command respect on the telephone. Miss, connect me with Mr. Mendoza; Miss, it would be a good idea to invest in tin mines; Miss, his voice is deep and sensual, I’ll be waiting for you outside, we’ll go to the woods and Azucena will never find out. Mr. Comodoro, you’re a real man. No question about that, he answers, you can see it in my war wounds and the way I pronounce the word Miss. Azucena goes over and kisses him on the shoulder. Listen, Comodoro, Cerillo is crying. Go see what’s the matter. It’s up to women to quiet nighttime crying, that’s why you were born with a tender voice and soft hands. Azucena caresses Cerillo’s hair and begins to sing something about a lost apple. It’s the first time Comodoro has heard her singing alone, without the off-key voices at the institute. Her voice reminds him of the women’s Olympic chorus that they keep playing on the radio. If I die, Comodoro

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says, and you stay on in the world to fulfill my last wish, I don’t want stone on my grave but glass, even if it’s like the bottom of a bottle. That way the newspapers can report on the process of decomposition of the hero of the nation: he’s ceased to be Fatso Comodoro to become skinny Comodoro; today he lost a lock of hair, today you can see the first bones of his chest, today a phalange fell out, now we can discern that his skeleton is just like that of the most prestigious artists and thinkers of humanity. Bury me naked, wearing only a rubber loincloth resistant to time and climate, because if it’s noble to conceal your manhood while you’re alive, it’s venerable to conceal it when you’re rotting. Promise, Azucena? She doesn’t know what to answer; she thinks the idea of a window to show Comodoro consumed by worms is absurd. Matus hacks and coughs until he spits the stone out. Off in the distance, behind a hill, you can make out the cross that tops off a belltower. Fatso Comodoro stands up on the moving cart with difficulty, opens his arms to keep his balance and lowers his head. Fatso Comodoro, pray for us, Azucena says, Fatso Comodoro, have pity on us. Comodoro’s hands go about bestowing blessings. My body has room for more soul than yours do, and not even then have I been saved. Are we going to die, Matus? Yes, Comodoro, more than likely. Then we should visit that church there in front of us with the inviting cross, we should find the priest and beg him to say the Mass

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for the dead for us in advance because this army is traveling with neither a chaplain nor an altar boy. Matus is getting tired of them using his name, they should address him as General or General Matus or Brigadier Matus, making it clear that they recognize his authority and don’t see him as merely a cart driver they can order around to take them here and there or to market or to church; nevertheless, when he brings the mule to a stop and turns around to talk to his soldiers, he catches Comodoro raising the white domino tile. Azucena, Ubaldo, and Milagro are kneeling around him. When our bodies are annihilated, may the soul of each one of us go to heaven, collecting two hundred pesos if it goes through Mexico. So be it, the three enlightened ones say, and Milagro moves Cerillo’s lips with his finger to make it look like he said it too. The late afternoon sun comes in through the stained-glass windows and produces the effect of colored shadows. The doors of the church are closed. On the floor, in front of the altar, lie the bodies of the five enlightened ones, a sheet covering each of them. Kneeling, Matus contemplates the bundles, thinking that if a magician were to jumble them up, he could easily recognize Comodoro and Azucena, because even though their proportions are similar, she is of shorter stature; Cerillo would also be easy to point out, something all together small, a body, head, and size three shoes. Matus chose not to inquire about his age. But it’s impossible to identify

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Ubaldo and Milagro. Where’s the small pea? Where’s the little miracle? So he would have to make a blind choice. Here, Matus would say, jabbing his finger where he guessed the belly button would be; and when they pulled the sheet aside, so sorry, my friend, you guessed wrong, check the other bundle out so you know no one’s cheating you, here’s where you can find Milagro good and dead, arms crossed so they won’t shake, you owe me ten pesos and you’re welcome to try again. Matus shakes his head no, he knows Milagro will never be where he jabs the belly button. Lord, the priest says from the pulpit, You were stingy with Your graces with these children, now it’s up to You to be generous with their souls. Receive them whether stained or pure, victorious or vanquished, because they are persons who were always ready to offer the utmost sacrifice: their lives for the fatherland which meant life for nothing because their valor was useless against the trusty artillery of the half-atheist and half-Protestant enemy, which really means one and the same thing; because the flaming sword of faith is of little use against a bullet to the back of the head and You neither made the sun stand still for these ill-fated boys nor did You open the floodgates of the Rio Grande, much less did You beat down the Alamo with trumpet blasts nor with any of the tricks You used to help your proselytes in times gone by. Receive, Oh Lord, these five souls through the front door because they’ve earned it. Hallelujah, Comodoro shouts, and turns over on

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his face because the ground is uneven and hurts his back. Matus approaches him and smacks him on the back of the neck, telling him to lie still and shut up. The priest says no problem, besides the Mass is over. He walks toward them and sprinkles them with holy water. Just let me advise you, fellows, from this moment until that of your death, you must keep an eye on the gravity of your sins or the ceremony loses its effect. What no one saw was that while the priest was giving his sermon, Comodoro reached out under the sheets to take Azucena’s hand. Will you have me? he whispered. Yes, she responded. In sickness and in health? In good times and in bad times? I’m a woman, she said, I only make assurances in good times, but as for all the rest, whatever, my answer is yes. Comodoro slowly pulled his hand back and heard the priest’s warning about the sins of the flesh. When they exit the church, the intensity of the sun makes them squint their eyes. Some of the townspeople look at them with curiosity; an old lady points to Cerillo and crosses herself. We’re good and dead now, Fatso Comodoro says, let’s take up the spade and the rifle, let’s get aboard our cart for Texas, where the infidels live, where the infidels must give up or succumb. There’s nothing left to fear, there’s no body left to care for, only a soul for which we’ve got to pray. So be it, Azucena says and raises her hands. Let us also pray for Cerillo.

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He crosses the finish line that he’d marked himself with a white wooden cross. There’s no festivity, he feels defeated; his exhaustion and his weakness are not those of a winner. Maybe there are a few more runners yet to reach Colombes Stadium, no doubt some had dropped out halfway through or at kilometer thirty, but he can’t feel comforted by not being the last to come in nor by the few ladies and gentlemen who applaud without enthusiasm: they admire anyone who covers the distance because they are incapable of running even 100 meters in their high heels or spats. Matus is unable to admire himself, not without a medal, a man who’s bent over, palms resting on his thighs, on the verge of vomiting. I need to throw up to put an end to this spectacle. The ladies wearing crinoline and carrying parasols will avert their faces. I knew Mexicans smelled bad, but this is too much. It’s better not to finish than to end up this way. The shaking in his legs gets worse and Matus is obliged to sit down on the railroad tracks. How was my time? The judges don’t answer, they look at him reproachfully, muttering in an incomprehensible and effeminate language. How was my time? he repeats, raising his voice. Santiago gets down from his horse and shows him the chronometer stopped at the moment of his arrival. Matus seeks an angle at which the reflection of the sun will allow him to check the hands. 2:47:50. Is that good? Román asks. Matus is puffing, he doesn’t want to be questioned, he wants a blanket because he’s so exhausted he’s cold, he wants a beer, an entire barrel, at least a hot

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chocolate with a piece of bread. You ask me if it’s good? Better you should talk to me about the climate, the name of your horse, go on, fetch a mug of chocolate for us to dunk our bread in, because drinking chocolate around the table is for discussing trivial things, how much did you pay for that shirt? Is it for sure it’s going to rain tomorrow? I’ll answer any one of these questions for you, but don’t ask me about my time, because I ran something like fifteen minutes over. He drinks chocolate and Clarence DeMar champagne. He hears intermittent applause and supposes that it corresponds to the arrival of other runners, the remains of the Latin American hope. Water, he says, and Román hands him another jar. The first sips hurt until his tongue and the roof of his mouth become lubricated. He sees Clarence DeMar in the distance, smiling, proud, his medal hanging on his chest, and yet his happiness is not intense, because all he’s done is accomplish what he already expected, what he deserves for being a gringo, white, and Protestant, and how is it possible that a miserable Mexican could even think for a moment or for two hours and forty-seven minutes and fifty seconds that he could snatch this medal from me. No, friend, the best thing you could do is keep lying on those tracks until the Piedras Negras express passes through. The train fails to appear, and Matus sees the flag of the United States begin to be raised. It’s time to go home, Santiago says, and Matus nods in agreement, he knows that the forty-some

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kilometers back to Monterrey on the haunches of a horse will be worse than taking a steamship across the Atlantic, from Le Havre or Marseilles to Tampico or Veracruz. Months previous he’d checked on the price of a ticket at a maritime agency, and he couldn’t even afford a ticket in the lowest class. Besides, he told Santiago, the only option is to travel first-class, that way I can run around the deck. Jammed into a communal stateroom I’ll get to Paris with tuberculosis and stiff legs. Román finds him weak, incapable of riding a horse on his own. He offers him a hand and Matus is embarrassed to be treated like a lady. Instead of accepting the courtesy, he stands staring at the pistol in the saddle’s holster. Why not? he asks himself, after all pistols were made to change your luck. He takes it and aims for a point beyond the wooden cross. The shot puts some frightened bird to flight. Clarence DeMar takes a step back, his legs give out on him as they hadn’t in the race and he falls to the ground; his medal is a stone around his neck. A man goes over to help him, thinking that he’s fainted from the sun, but when he turns him over he finds the gunshot wound in his chest and yells out for a doctor. Matus is not proud of his act, but rage gives the orders. He continues shooting at the other competitors, anyone with the face of triumph, any possible second- or third-place winner, any Latin American promise, shooting at the miserable Chilean or a Japanese with an innocent face, at the proud Finns, he fires even when the hammer of the pistol clicks on empties, and even though only a

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loud click emerges from the pistol, the runners grab their guts and collapse. Nine athletes and a couple of trainers are lying on the ground when two men subdue Matus. He drops the gun and says to himself, after all, maybe it was a test of endurance. One of those who subdues him is a swimmer of Germanic origin with three medals on his chest; he strikes him with his fist on the ribs. If they were Jews, OK, but these men did nothing wrong to anyone. Let’s go, Matus, Santiago insists, and together with Román he helps him mount the horse. Ubaldo says he was fascinated by the priest’s story about the body that dies and releases an invisible puff of smoke that flies up to a place of blue clouds and happy faces where it will live forever. Didn’t you see he was serious? That priest needs to be sent to the institute. The mule is walking as slow as it can and Matus does nothing to spur it on; it’s better to go at a slow pace if you want to avoid surprises along the way. I thought you’d be singing the whole way, he says, after all, war is a long party that gets interrupted now and then to shoot, and sometimes not even then, unless you let go of the bottle of liquor. That’s why in the war against the United States the Irish came over to our side. Historians assure us that it was because of religion; I know that it was also because of the booze and the songs. We’ve only learned songs about pigs, ducks, ants, and other animals, Comodoro says,

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I don’t think they’re any good for fighting valiantly or for attracting deserters from the other side. Matus strikes the mule with the whip. A few minutes go by before he speaks again. It’s time to tell you about the soldier’s manifesto. Four heads are raised in interest. Yes, Ubaldo says, that sounds to me like a better idea than the songs. You must take a solemn oath on the manifesto, which demands two things: first of all, the will to keep your word, something I don’t doubt because I see you are all honorable and reliable people; and in the second place you’ve got to have a good memory, because when enemy artillery is booming, people tend to forget promises and loyalties. Matus is satisfied, he knows these enlightened ones are paying better attention to him than was ever the case with his students in 6B. The first point of the manifesto says: you will never leave your companion, sound or wounded, in the hands of the enemy. I swear not to, Milagro says with his hand over his heart. Comodoro is bothered by his friend’s need always to go first; with his arms crossed he also murmurs his oath. I have a question, Ubaldo says, let’s suppose that my companion is mortally wounded, does someone have to waste time and effort saving him from the enemy? As long as he’s still alive, Matus replies, you’ve got to carry him out. As soon as they hear the word carry, three enlightened ones instinctively turn their heads to look at Fatso Comodoro. Even though he only has one minute left to live? Ubaldo insists. Yes, that’s right, Matus replies, it’s not just an act of piety toward the dying, but one

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of security: a half-minute more of life in the hands of an enemy torturer might be enough to reveal a top secret. Azucena agrees to the oath, takes Cerillo’s hand and places it over her own chest. Ubaldo only agrees to it after insulting Comodoro, commenting on how unjust it is to put the whole operation at risk just to carry out a wounded person who is obese and who would soon be an equally obese corpse. If you can’t resist a half-minute of torture you should carry a lethal pill with you; you hide it in your gums and chew if you are tempted to reveal some secret. The second point of the manifesto, Matus says, but before he can go on Milagro interrupts him. Could you stop the cart? I have to go to the bathroom. When the mule stops, Comodoro pulls his thin hair. Caralampio, he says, told me he was going to the bathroom and for us to wait for him, no matter what, Comodoro, don’t leave without me, it’s an emergency, I won’t be long. What are you talking about? Matus asks. It’s a classmate, Azucena says, he had signed up and he was having cramps. I think we left him behind. Milagro runs off and takes refuge behind some rocks. And what’s that Caralampio like? A valiant and generous guy, Azucena replies, he’s got the top score in doing puzzles, he’s the pride of psychomotor development, he reads twenty words per minute, he’s mastered the order of the months of the year and he can make out four shades of blue, he’s among the top three in socialization and he once recited a complete poem about a bishop who ate oranges; we all clapped hard for him. Don’t leave

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without me like you did Caralampio, they can hear Milagro’s voice coming from behind the rocks. Matus speaks without a trace of the festiveness that was heard when the topics were songs, the Irish, and alcohol. You hadn’t sworn to the manifesto then, Comodoro, but you’d already abandoned one of our boys, and as long as we don’t have him among us we can suppose that he was the best of the warriors, the difference between triumph and defeat; think about him when the enemy sword begins to penetrate your guts, think that that would not be occurring if you hadn’t abandoned that boy in the bathroom. Comodoro tries to utter a word in his defense, a word that will make them all share in the guilt; instead he ends up talking about the rat poison Caralampio was carrying in his schoolbag, with which they could contaminate the entire water table north of the Rio Grande. Milagro runs up, his pants dragging, and jumps up into the cart. They resume their ride in silence; almost an hour has gone by when Matus speaks again. The second point of the manifesto establishes: with reference to the enemy, I will treat the prisoners with dignity, I will provide medical aid to the wounded, and I will give them a Christian burial or a worthy shroud for transporting them to their own country. Better to leave the second point for tomorrow, Azucena says, there are people here who get upset with more than one idea per day. Milagro is kneeling, bent over, banging his head against the wood bottom of the

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cart; he’s covering his ears with his hands while he curses the old man who is trying to make his head burst. Don Beto had a hundred chicks, Matus begins to read, and he sighs and wonders if a general ever had to go so low in order to maintain the esprit of his soldiers. He continues reading because Cerillo is looking at him with dancing eyes, enchanted, and now it really seems unfortunate to him that a child with that look and that little blue tie should have to die. One chick wasn’t like the others, one chick wanted to be king . . . They’ve been drinking at the Lontananza. They chose that bar because the offices of the newspaper are two blocks away and after every couple of beers Román and Santiago take turns going over to its offices to ask if the cable from Paris has come in. Matus isn’t much interested in the results; he knows that his time was a long way away from the medal times, but perhaps he would be interested to know if Manuel Plaza, the Latin American hope, could be nipping at the heels of Clarence DeMar. In one of his trips over there Román comes back with a piece of paper. Matus notes the yellow sheet in his friend’s left hand and his incipient state of drunkenness vanishes. Who won? Román shrugs his shoulders. Don’t know, the information is delayed. I just got some news on the beginning of the race. It says that as some runners passed out the day before

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in the cross-country race, they decided to postpone the marathon until five in the afternoon. And even when the time came, the race didn’t begin because the sun was still beating down hard and the little pansies didn’t want to sweat. They suspended it? Santiago asks. It was delayed twenty-three minutes more, during which time the heat broke or there were some clouds or who knows what. It must have been one of the gringos’ tricks, Matus says, that’s how they keep Clarence DeMar from sweating too much. The waiter sets three full bottles on the table without removing the empties. So that means we didn’t start the race with the same shot. Matus leans back in the chair, he runs his fingers through his sweat-stiffened hair. When I reached the finish line, they had started just less than a half hour before. What matters is that if you were on time, Ramón alleges, you ran with the rising sun, and they did it in the shade, you deserve a thirty-minute bonus. A photographer enters the Lontananza and goes from table to table offering his services. Here, Santiago calls him, come over here, my friend has just run a marathon, a manly feat few accomplish, and you’ve got to immortalize this moment. The photographer aims his lens toward Matus, who sits indifferent, lost in his thoughts, as the man gets ready. Matus pays no attention when they ask him to turn toward the camera and smile, sit up straight. He ignores Román when he pins the chronometer around his neck, as though it were a medal. The place lights up with a magnesium flash and some customers clap while the

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white smoke dissipates. The man at the newspaper told me that the news will come in at dawn, we’ve got to wait for the sun to come up in Paris so someone will send the news. Minutes later, after doing his stuff with the chemicals, the photographer hands over the image and collects his five pesos. You can see Matus in black and white, arms crossed, staring off into space. Anyone looking at him closely will discover, with the help of a magnifying glass, that the hands of the chronometer are stopped at 2:47:50. Matus’s forehead and his sideburns show signs of a whitish substance, clearly the salt of his sweat, which shows he didn’t even wipe his face after the race. His expression is a mixture of sadness and drunkenness. No one else appears in the image, and the effect of solitude is sharpened by all the bottles scattered on the table and the overflowing ashtray. It is, unquestionably, the image of a defeated man. How do you win a war, Matus? Azucena asks absentmindedly, as she wets her fingers to wipe a spot off Cerillo’s shoes, do you have to kill all of the gringos? Matus brings the mule to a stop; he wasn’t expecting that question that no soldier should ask. He turns around and notes that Azucena and the rest of the troop are staring at him. His impulse is to answer that they should stick to following orders and the rest, triumph or defeat, is extraneous; yet he sees himself as the first to die in the battle and concludes

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that a good general must prepare his subordinates to carry on with the fight. I think he doesn’t know, Milagro whispers. Matus imagines himself once again in the classroom and searches for the words a teacher would use to answer Azucena’s question. You don’t have to kill everyone, he finally says, you’ve got to distinguish between a war and extermination. We Mexicans have lost innumerable wars and here we still are, ready to lose even more. War is like chess, it’s not necessary to eliminate all the pieces, just the king. His pupils still look doubtful and Matus understands that chess lies outside the enlightened universe. See, Milagro insists, I told you he didn’t know. Conquering a country is like conquering a woman, you don’t have to take control of her whole body, only that exquisite region between her legs; that’s enough to win her mind, her heart, and her favors. Ubaldo stands up in disgust. Don’t give us that stuff about how you can only beat the gringos by whispering cajoleries in their ears, forget the dumb comparisons and tell us how things really are. Comodoro’s face turns red as he looks at Ubaldo; he would never dare to talk that way to a superior. I’m not talking dumb, he says, I was about to tell you that the place between Texas’s legs is called the Alamo and whoever owns the Alamo owns Texas. Matus describes it as an ancient adobe house, something time has brought to ruin, inhabited at one time by friars and that still has a religious aura. We will leave not a single person alive in the Alamo, just as they did more than a hundred years ago

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when our forefathers finished them all off, even the most cowardly among them, a poor devil who hid shaking under a bed, and who when they found him begged for forgiveness on his knees. But there is no pity for those who steal the fatherland, and the metal entered his flesh and the little gringo screamed and cried and collapsed, writhing. So when we take the Alamo, we’ll have to check carefully under the beds, because that’s where the cowards hide. Comodoro is hardly paying attention, he doesn’t understand Matus’s comparisons and keeps his startled eyes fixed on the space between Azucena’s legs, still with a religious aura. Come on, Azucena, come on. Comodoro keeps whispering the sentence as he caresses her hair, which barely reflects the moonlight; he knows that if he says it enough times she will begin sleepwalking with her arms stretched out in front of her, and he can give her orders and she will be in his complete power. Ubaldo gets up and approaches some bushes, and Comodoro wonders if his words have reached the wrong person. After losing Ubaldo in the dark, Comodoro hears a weak stream falling on the ground. Comodoro wants to set up camp and sleep next to the liquid but more abundant sound of the river, the cries of the careless as they drown. Life is on this side, war is on the other, and the enlightened ones cut bamboo tubes so they can breathe underwater, their knives drawn in case there are crocodiles or piranhas. Comodoro in the lead, always in the lead.

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Because the plan was developed long before they dreamed about being soldiers. Their teacher at the institute showed them a book of photographs: there were long fish and flat fish, with lively or sad colors, and they had to raise their hand if they liked the fish or say the color if they recognized it, and all the fish looked better than in the market under ice. The teacher read the information at the bottom of each plate, giving out forgettable facts about what kind of waters each one lives in, its name, and some irrelevant data about its natural enemies or the period when it mates. Only when she came to an image of a mean-faced one with ferocious teeth did the teacher stop reading and speak from memory. The piranha, she said, is the most feared of all fish, it annihilates everything in its path, we know it’s devoured many explorers and Indians who have attempted to cross the river. And although the teacher tried to go on with other pages in the book, everyone’s mind remained fixated on the piranha. You could hear grunts and biting sounds and cries of anguish in the room. Tell my mother I’ve always loved her, Caralampio cried, before he sank into the waters. Azucena said she was safe because she was neither an Indian nor an explorer, and only when Ubaldo opened his arms to simulate enormous jaws chewing on defenseless Cerillo did the teacher declare that the piranha was a small being that attacked by the hundreds and thousands, its bite barely felt like being pinched, and when you got around to asking who pinched me, you were already nothing but bones.

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They continued to play piranha during recess and pinched each other until Cerillo was shedding copious tears. It was then they discussed what the best strategy was to cross a river and Ubaldo’s won out among the many ideas. They would have to impale Comodoro and make him lead the way; no matter how fast the piranhas were, they would have their work cut out for them with so much fat and flesh that the rest of the people would reach the other side safe and sound. I’m ready for the sacrifice, Comodoro said, but not the impalement. If you’re going to be a sacrifice, you don’t get to choose the method, Milagro said. Azucena, however, was willing to give in. The important part is that Comodoro be stiff and manageable, so if the piranhas come from the left, we can move him to that side, if they come from the right, we shift the pole to that side, and if they attack us head on, Comodoro is a battering ram; what I mean is that it doesn’t matter if we impale or crucify him, and he’s got the right to choose which one. Comodoro stood up and, as he walked away, he managed to say: it makes me happy to know that I will never cross a river with you guys. But now they were on their way, with no way out, to the Rio Grande and his well-being depended on the forgetfulness of his friends. Come on, Azucena, come on. She opens her eyes. What do you want? Are you awake or hypnotized? What do you want? We’re man and wife, Comodoro says, you’ve got to follow me and do what I say. They hug each other and dance off in a clumsy waltz; she’s

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humming a song and he’s keeping silent. They’ve quickly distanced themselves from the group. Comodoro takes his shirt off and casts it to one side. He leans aganst the thickest tree he can find and raises his hands. The moon spreads out over the pale smoothness of his chest and stomach. Gratify me, he says quietly, with the manliest voice he’s capable of. Since Azucena doesn’t move, her face blank and her eyes empty, Comodoro raises his voice. Gratify me. Gratify me. She turns around and looks for the warm grass where she’d been resting a moment before. Gratify me, woman, that’s an order. The voices awaken Matus, who says to himself that Comodoro still has a few things to learn. It’s morning when the three exit the Lontananza drunk. They go over to the offices of the newspaper, on Guerrero Street, and begin to call for the editor, insulting him, damn lazy lout, yelling that they want the results of the marathon, that’s why there’s a transatlantic cable, so we don’t have to wait for ships to arrive with the news. Finally, a journalist who’s about fifty years old comes out in shirtsleeves, a halfsmoked cigarette in his right hand. Did the results come in? Román asks. The journalist throws his cigarette on the street. If all people were as impertinent as you are, we’d have to shut down the newspapers, what’s the purpose of printing and learning how to write if it’s enough to go out on the balcony to advise the city who’s died, who won the elections, and the details of the murder last night? You don’t want to

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see me as town crier. Did they come? Santiago raises his voice. The journalist goes inside and comes back out on the balcony a few seconds later. He studies a sheet of paper he’s holding in his hands. There’s no light here, he says and goes back inside, so that when he begins to speak he’s invisible to the drunken men who are craning their necks looking up. Albin Stenroos was the first to come in, with a time of 2:41:22, second place went to an Italian named Romeo Bertini, whose time was 2:47:19. It begins to strike them that the voice of the invisible man is not coming from the open door above them but is coming from the heavens, with a layover in Paris. The three friends hug each other, filled with nervousness and hope. And the third-place winner was a gringo by the name of Clarence DeMar, 2:48:14. The journalist completes his reading of the news release and returns to the balcony. There he sees the three men yelling and jumping up and down and grabbing each others’ hands in the air. Third place, Santiago says; a bronze medal, Román says, and one of them seizes a gun and shoots into the air. Go for the glory, gentlemen, let the games begin; run until you drop dead, don’t make your country ashamed of you. I’m the flying Finn, Santiago says and begins to run in circles; I’m the Italian, Román adds, the one with the flag without the eagle, and begins racing in circles. Matus finally joins in with equally drunken steps. I’m the Mexican, the long-distance runner from the north, the immortal racer from Monterrey, and there’ll be no gringos in our gold, silver, and

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bronze party. Long live Italy and may Finland fly. They open their arms and wave them around as they run and no one bats an eye when Román accidently shoots a bullet into a wall. Long live the Latin American hope who plowed through the Olympic course where only locomotives dare to go. The circle begins to close and soon they are colliding with each other and end up on the ground, hugging, laughing, blending their alcoholic breaths. The journalist looks at them fascinated and senses that there’s a great story here, he feels the urge to run to his typewriter and inform his hundreds or thousands of readers that something marvelous has happened that night in Monterrey, but nevertheless he’s got to resign himself to the fact that, except for the three drunks in the street, no one can figure out what the great happening is. His sheet of paper will remain blank, and he will be incapable of finding the words, true or false or prudent or excessive, to turn the story into a news item worthy of being read in the next edition. Now we’ve got to decide who’s going to carry the Mexican flag during combat, the greatest privilege among living soldiers, as I don’t need to say that the supreme honor is that of ending up inanimate in the middle of a battle, though not without having taken a fistful of the enemy with you. And to die carrying the flag? Azucena asks. There’s nothing higher in the scale of honor, especially if the bullet that pierces your body first tears through the national standard: dying rigid and gripping the flag so that no

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enemy dares to touch it, being at the same time a docile and yielding cadaver that allows a fellow soldier to recover the patriotic ensign and to take over carrying it, because the battle has not concluded while the green, white, and red continues to wave in the wind, does not end as long as the eagle goes on devouring the serpent, because in the end war is not a matter of statistics showing who’s killed more of the enemy, but who’s left standing, face forward without running away. I deserve the flag, Comodoro says, because I was the first soldier to enlist, because that’s how the Immaculate One has decided it should be. It should be mine, Milagro comes back, because I’m a miracle. Ubaldo thinks the same of himself, although he can’t find an argument to support his cause. I’ll decide later, Matus says, I’ll be observing everyone’s conduct and I will evaluate your merits with the greatest impartiality, I just warn you that our flagbearer will not be like those of other armies, which because of the number of soldiers allow themselves the luxury of having a man with nothing else in his hands but the flagpole; no, sir, our flagbearer must also carry a rifle, a sword, a knife, and fists, which is why he’ll have to carry the flag over his shoulders like a superhero’s cape. The desire to bear the flag increases with these words. And if you’re lucky everyone will have the honor, because you will all be assigned a number from one to five, which means that if the first flagbearer dies, number two will yank the flag from him and carry it; this is why it is important not to tie a blind knot or a

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hangman’s knot, but rather one with a loose end that allows you to easily undo it from around the neck of a dead body. That’s no problem, Azucena says, I brought a needle and thread, I can tie an elastic band at the end of the flag so it’ll slip easily on and off, I only need to know if the elastic band should be green or red. Or you could make a slit in the middle, Milagro says, and we can use it like a poncho. That would be a sacrilege, the flag should not be slit by its own children. The idea of the elastic band is good, but impractical, because the road we’re on has no sewing notions stores on this side of the river, and on the other side we can’t go into any store, not until after we are victorious, when we undertake the sacking. Comodoro brought various pairs of underwear, Milagro says, we can cut up one of them. Four heads nod in agreement, one head shakes no, and Cerillo’s doesn’t move. Okay, then it’s all decided. Decided by whom? Comodoro asks without anyone paying any attention to him. Ubaldo is certain he’ll be chosen and, while he’s not enthusiastic about a size 42 elastic band around his neck, he can see himself high on a hillside, the wind tossing his hair and making the tricolor flap like a kite, a symbol of the unity of our fathers and our brothers; the enemy advances to the right and to the left, but he’s unfazed, harkening to the whistling of the projectiles that will never dare touch him. Mr. Clarence DeMar, Matus writes, incapable of beginning with the word Dear or Esteemed, I hope you

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are able to read Spanish, as I do not know how to write in your language. I am sending you these lines to clarify a mistake. On July 13 of this year, it was not 84 runners who participated in the Olympic marathon, as the organizers have claimed and the media have repeated; there were 85, since the gunshot in Paris also served for the undersigned to set his legs flying in the city of Monterrey and pursue the same distance as you others did. The attached photograph was taken that same day, and as you can observe, the chronometer stopped at 2:47:50, that is, 24 seconds before your arrival. By contrast to other sports, full of tricks, low blows, and trip ups, by contrast to those that allow for errors or ill will on the part of the judges, ours is pure and gentlemanly. The fact that my government had no interest in paying for my ticket to Paris does not render invalid the recognition due me, since I beat you out in speed, although you may have defeated me in dollars. By the same token I request that you send the bronze medal to the address I give below. With no further reason to extend this letter, I send my best wishes and look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Ignacio Matus, long-distance runner, Olympic medalist, 467 South Degollado St., Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. Although he was unable to find Clarence DeMar’s address, they were able to give him at the gym of the Merchants Club that of the organizers of the Boston Marathon. They will certainly get it to him, the person who ran the sports club told him, Mr. DeMar is almost the owner of that race.

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Matus affixes more postage than necessary to the envelope and hands it to the clerk at the post office. How long will it take to get there? he asks. Two weeks, more or less, the man answers without even looking at the address. A month later, Matus begins keeping an eye out for the postman. Sometimes he sees him walk on by, other times he hears his whistle. The man brings invitations, receipts, or cards, nothing with the solidity of bronze. In every army it’s good for there to be an artist among the soldiers. As a general I can write my military reports, these only serve to give an account of the courage or the cowardice of my people, to provide information about the statistics of dead and wounded, or pieces of artillery that have been lost or taken; one says something about the strategy pursued in battle and whether some territory has been seized, attempting to exaggerate its importance even if it’s just a settlement with three adobe houses. It’s considered bad taste in a military report to speak of the show of pain by the wounded, the grotesque position of the bodies, the gallant look of the mortarman at the very instant he activates his cannon, the precise manner in which a flag unfurls in the wind and smoke. No, Ubaldo, that all belongs to your art, to line and color and if it’s called art it’s because you have to forget reality a bit: you don’t have to draw Comodoro as fat as he is, nor always wearing the same polyester pants, nor his reddened cheeks each

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time he exerts himself, even less with those damned rubber boots, because that’s not how heroes are. They require a fine head of hair and broad sideburns, a body that’s both graceful and steely, like a dancer who’s not a homosexual. I know all that, Ubaldo says, say no more because I’m the artist here, and I already have an idea of how I’m going to represent each one of you, including my own self-portrait, which will be titled Ubaldo Contemplating the Dead from a Window at the Alamo. I will be leaning against the frame, resting on my shoulder; there’s the smoke outside of the recent ceasefire and there are fourteen bodies in my field of vision. My hands are in my pockets and the cuffs of my jacket are large and red. My expression reveals triumph but not happiness, because Comodoro’s among the fourteen dead. Matus pats him on the back, raises his head and makes out a succession of hills and no mountains, which means they are now a very long way from Monterrey. Obispado Hill and Saddle Mountain will be absent from your engraving, but the Alamo and the plains will be there, and please no gringo flag. Don’t worry, Matus, my art is in good taste, because there’ll only be one Mexican among the fourteen dead, and although there will be an enemy flag it’s because in the background you can make out a goat chewing on it. I’ll paint Azucena in another picture, the maja of the Alamo, lying naked on the divan, among purple pillows; Cerillo will be in another one wearing no shoes, floating white and winged over the field of death; it’s difficult to paint Milagro because he can’t

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stand still, so I’ll do a miniature of him and that’ll have to do. Each one will have his painting, Matus, you included. Could you make me look younger? Of course, you’re giving the orders. Can you make my hair black and put a bronze medal around my neck? Esteemed General Matus, I give up a son to you and you receive a warrior; that’s a good deal for you, because for me it’s body and blood and soul while for you it’s cannon fodder. But it’s not my goal to overwhelm you with the lamentations of a mother, because we have always been made for tears when war calls to our men, which gives these events their catastrophic tone and softens the spirit of the heroes. We wait behind a window for the arrival of those who have gone or, in some cases, we are ravished by the enemy, something that isn’t so bad because it injects rage and daring in our combatants, and once the war has been won we will be able to say that, among the women, only those who have been besmirched did something for the fatherland. That’s why I want you to whisper to Cerillo, right before the decisive battle, that his mother was split from head to toe by a band of vultures from beyond the Rio Grande, tell him my resistance was useless because there were a lot of them; that way he and I will fight together as always, holding hands, mother and son, and I will have the right to be mentioned in his biography: Cerillo and his mother, a team of valor, the hero and the heroine, and they should be proud of each other, as the country is proud of both of them.

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Taking advantage of how the moon is like a street light, Milagro walks among the sleeping bodies and hides behind a tree. With a trembling hand he fishes in his pocket and takes out a sheet of paper that he unfolds after several attempts. Large black scrawls display a mathematical operation. You have to multiply eight by eleven. Milagro hates that eleven because it’s more than his fingers and try as he might it’s harder and harder for him to count with these hands that won’t stay still. He looks at the numbers long and hard and is sure that there was a time in which he could give the correct solution in an instant. But his father fell asleep at the wheel and damn it, now he can’t keep the numbers straight. Eight by eleven. He rubs his forehead, tries to concentrate. Eight by eleven. Come on, it’s supposed to be easy, it’s a number you write with two circles and two numbers consisting of sticks. He closes his eyes and squeezes his eyelids. One, two, three . . . he loses count at six. One, two, three . . . now he loses it at five. He notes that eight and eleven begin with the same letter, maybe that’s the key, although he vaguely remembers that numbers and letters have little to do with each other. One, two, three, four . . . His anxiety increases his trembling, and when Milagro sees he’s on the verge of a nervous collapse he decides to guess a number, forty-two, and accepts that as the correct answer. Eight by eleven, forty-two, he says in a whisper, eight by eleven, forty-two, and then he raises his voice to announce the result, yes,

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sir, forty-two, ladies and gentlemen, forty-two, and he starts to run around the tree, happy, triumphant, while he tosses out more mathematical operations, including subtractions and divisions, which also come out to forty-two, and he jumps up and down shouting and takes advantage of his swinging arms to execute a jubilant dance and, a little bit later, as he exclaims he’s a miracle, a mathematics genius, the master of numbers, Ubaldo raises his head to ask him to shut up once and for all. The cart stops in an area with trees to the side of the road and the mule rushes to feed on the fresh grass. I’m going into town, Matus says, you all wait for me here. Can we go with you? Comodoro asks as he straightens his hair, we can leave Azucena again to take care of our stuff. Not this time, I’m only going to buy provisions. And what if you don’t come back? Ubaldo is holding a rifle in his hands, he realized a while back that it was a good idea to be on guard, who would be in charge? Of course I’m going to come back; I’ll go into town, go into a store, buy food and beverages, and when I retun it’s impossible for me to lose my way because this is the only patch of green in the middle of so much desert. People come and go to grocery stores in peacetime, Ubaldo insists, but during wartime you can go out for milk and end up with a hole in your head; you’ve got to take precautions during such times, like giving belltowers a wide berth because that’s where sharpshooters like to hang out, and from what I’ve seen, if

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leaders leave their subordinates, they first give them instructions and establish a time period; if I’m not back by such-and-such a time, consider me dead and carry on with the mission, blow up the bridge, tell Beatriz it was done to give her a better future. Matus snorts; okay, he says, if I’m not back in three hours, you can carry on without me, none of you will be in charge because you’ve got to function as a co-op, and tell that Beatriz that it would have been a pleasure to know her. He departs and walks unhurriedly toward the town, three hours are more than enough to pick up the groceries and have a drink. The breeze under the trees is inviting. Azucena wipes Cerillo’s sweat away and helps him turn over on his other side, as his right cheek shows the marks of the wrinkled blanket. What are we going to do? Comodoro asks. We can whistle, Milagro says, I know armies whistle while they march. Ubaldo shakes his head no. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen it too, but only when they’re in the barracks; if they whistled in the middle of the jungle, some Oriental would slit their throats. I could read you a story, Azucena says. Cerillo smiles without opening his eyes, the others make a face. We only brought the one about the chick who wants to become king, and we already know that in the end they put a crown on his head and everyone acclaims him with their cackles. Cerillo twists around under the covers and begins to flutter his arms. No one has any other idea about how to pass the time waiting for Matus to return. After a while the five are all stretched out on

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the floor of the wagon bed, watching the tops of the trees rustling in the wind, the birds flying overhead without stopping; one by one they fall asleep. The last thing Azucena thinks about has to do with her teeth: the dentist told her they are strong. It’s been some time since I brushed them, perhaps no one will want to kiss me when I get back to Monterrey. Comodoro’s thinking about a shot heard from on high; people start to run and a puff of smoke emerges from the belltower. Milagro awakens with the sun on his face. Gentlemen, we are the most imprudent army of contemporary history; we fell asleep without at least designating a sentry. We’ve got to thank Providence that we haven’t all been stabbed in the chest or had our throats slit. Except for Cerillo, who remains still, the others halfway open their eyes and begin to stretch to wake up. Everybody deserves a nap, Azucena says. A nap? Milagro demands, his voice growing louder, I dreamed about my whole life, ever since I got my first toy, a yellow dump truck, up to when Matus went into town for groceries; it’s a long dream with details that, in order to see it in its entirety you need Saturday night and the freedom to sleep to noon on Sunday. Ubaldo jumps up. Is it already tomorrow? We’ve got to get on with the march. I felt like I fell asleep for only a few minutes, Azucena says, I haven’t even digested my food. That’s because women don’t digest well when they travel, Comodoro explains, I suspect that Milagro is right, I didn’t have

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a dream but rather a vision in which an emissary of the foreign government shot our general from the belltower. I could see the smoke of the gunpowder, but not the body or the assassin. Only audacious men go among the people of the town without an escort. Let us pray for our unfortunate general. There’s little to decide. Milagro whips the mule and it trots off without hestitation. Ubaldo keeps watch for the front and Comodoro covers the rear. Azucena is on her knees, she utters two prayers, one for Matus’s soul and the other for the star of good fortune to guide them north. Mr. Clarence DeMar, we all know that the winner of the Olympic marathon in London in 1908 was Dorando Pietri, an Italian who despite getting the roads wrong and passing out more than once reached the finish line before anyone else. So much will, so much nerve and it turns out the man ended up without any medal, not gold, not silver, not bronze. Why? What was his sin? It was his misfortune that the man who came in second was neither Czech nor Belgian nor French nor Finnish nor from any other country that would have taken its hat off in the face of Pietri’s superhuman effort; to the detriment of the sport, the second-place runner was John Hayes, a gringo who, like all of you, sought gold above all else. I don’t know how the US government pressured or bribed the judges so they would change their original decision and hand the medal over to the Hayes guy despite it being obvious that he was

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in second place. For all of you the Olympic motto is citius, altius, fortius, robius, it all means the same as long as it all adds up, in the end reports show numbers and a picture of the medals, which is why what is important is not who got in first but who got the gold. Nevertheless, it turns out that it’s not all a question of numbers, and while Hayes is lost in the darkness of oblivion, Dorando Pietri has grown and turned into the incarnation of the Olympic ideal. If Hayes had any shame, he would have asked Pietri to forgive him, he would have returned the medal to its rightful winner. But Hayes is a gringo and he had to exhibit his metal in a glass case and tell anyone who asked that he was the winner, that he was number one. Poor Mr. Hayes, poor gold-plated devil. Mr. DeMar, don’t make the same mistake as your countryman and send me the medal right away. Yours, Ignacio Matus, long-distance runner, Olympic medalist, 467 South Degollado St., Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. Matus returns to where he’d left the cart parked. Comodoro, he shouts, Milagro, where are you? His question is useless, but it’s not hopeless, he doesn’t discount the possibility that they’re watching him from behind some bushes and will quickly come out laughing. We fooled you, Matus, you thought we’d left without you, and he, although mad as can be, would shake his head no, all the time smiling and calling them dears or darlings or some other insincere word when what he truly wants to do is grab

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a switch and beat the hell out of them. I’m going to teach you to go around hiding on your general. Azucena, Ubaldo, where are you? he shouts, at the same time seeing a switch adequate to the task and forgetting about calling out to Cerillo. The dusty trail has not preserved the tracks of the cart, they probably disappeared with the first breeze. Thirty meters ahead there is a fork in the road. Matus throws the bags of groceries away and he sees an apple roll out; the ground turns damp from the milk he’s brought for Cerillo. He rolls his pants up, takes his shirt off and wraps it around his head in an improvised turban to protect him from the afternoon glare. Before he takes off, he utters the required oath: I, the undersigned, declare on my honor that I am an amateur according to the Olympic rules of amateurism, and that I’m a citizen of the country whose colors I wear in the Olympic Games. He signs it and puts down the date; crosses himself and the gunshot is heard. Now Clarence DeMar is a mule pulling a cart, and Matus has less than thirty meters to decide if he’s going to turn left or turn right. Comodoro wakes up on his back in the cart and says that the life of a soldier is beautiful. It’s been days since a teacher has given him an order, since he picked up empty beer bottles, since he’s washed dishes; he opens and closes his eyes whenever he wants to and he gazes wherever he wants to and he walks along without having to look both ways to make sure he won’t be run over by a route one bus.

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Yes, to be sure, you never know when they’re going to plunge a sword in your back, but I won’t say it wasn’t worth the trouble. He notes that the cart isn’t moving forward and, judging by the clear and sunless sky, he guesses that it’s dawn or nightfall. He hears the sound of running water and proceeds to lift his head. He makes out a river a few meters away. He can see Cerillo, Milagro, and Azucena on the edge of the river, holding hands. Comodoro gets down from the cart and asks, where are we? Can you guess? Is it the Rio Grande? Milagro nods yes. We’ve got to risk our lives to cross, and what for? Just to reach the other side and put our lives in even greater danger, what a sinister lot is ours. Comodoro looks at the ground he’s walking on, looks at the ground on the other side, and it’s hard for him to imagine that each piece of terrain belongs to a different country. Matus is right, he says, what’s on the other side is also Mexico, it will always be Mexico no matter how many wars get lost. Or get won, Milagro says to him, because I didn’t come this far to lose. Cerillo drops to the ground, crawls to the riverbank and begins to drink. Azucena thinks about the sudden appearance of a crocodile that only leaves behind a little white shoe as evidence that Cerillo was there. Don’t get so close, better to fill your thermos and take a drink like normal people. And how are we going to get across? Comodoro asks. Do you have a plan? Yes, fat boy, Milagro replies, we drew up the plan a long time ago, when we saw the photographs of the fishes.

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Comodoro turns around indignantly; he’d like to insult them, but just then he sees Ubaldo emerging from the bushes with a two-meter-long stick he’s carefully filed to a point. No, Comodoro cries out, I’m not ready for that, and he races off to the other side of the river; he manages to achieve eight or ten leaps before the water comes up to his knees and causes him to trip. Run, Fatso, swim, jump, don’t stand still in that fateful torrent. Come over here, Ubaldo yells at him, but Comodoro is not in any mood to turn back. He gets up and keeps advancing, red with fear and the effort, with steps that weigh twice as much because of his liquid-laden boots. The river deepens until the water comes up to his waist; he puts his feet down gingerly, he feels the different kinds and sizes of the rocks beneath his feet and he realizes that if he stumbles again the current will carry him like a buoy out to the Gulf of Mexico. Save me, Immaculate Lady, if you’re ever going to work a miracle, let it be now. He takes a few more steps and the waters weaken. Now they drop from his waist to his thighs, to his knees, and finally, to his ankles. Comodoro reaches firm ground and drops down, first on his knees, then on his stomach; his boots release liters. He remains lying on the ground thinking about his courage. He’s survived what few men have, and now he can feel like a hero. Now it’s up to his companions to repeat his deeds, which are certainly not to be matched because only he came in first, only he deserves the gold. While Comodoro remains fully dressed, he imagines himself without

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a shirt, barefoot, his pants in shreds, lying flat on the ground on sand quite different from this dirt, with crabs tickling his back. I’m alive, he mutters to himself, and it bothers him not to hear any cheering from the other side of the river. He finally gets up and notices the solemn faces of his four companions. Ubaldo is still holding the pointy-tipped stick and Comodoro is overwhelmed with satisfaction: he saved himself in a single moment from being impaled and eaten by the piranhas, and from the treacherous waters of the Rio Grande. I’m immortal, he says to himself, now I’m ready to take on any hairy-chested heathen horde. What are you waiting for? he calls out to them defiantly, aren’t you going to cross over? Not right now, Azucena replies, making her hands into a horn, it’s about to get dark. Fatso Comodoro sees to his right the pale glow of the sun, which has dropped below the horizon. It took me a minute to cross, it makes no sense for the approaching night to make them stay on the Mexican side. They must have made an agreement among themselves, they want to punish me for going on ahead alone, or even worse, it’s to con me into going back over to them and then that will be the end for me, I’ll be mounted on a spit and devoured, I’ll be submerged flesh and bones, I’ll be blood that will stain my country’s border. They stand staring at each other for awhile, in silence; only the flow of the waters indicates that it is not a photograph. After a while the stars come

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out. It’s time to get back in the cart because the dark brings with it serpents and coyotes, scorpions and tarantulas. Midnight will come, dawn, and the moon will be reflected in the waters of the river and in the wideopen eyes of Fatso Comodoro. The river stretches threateningly before them, brilliant in the morning sun. It’s time to go, Ubaldo says, there’s no reason to put off our destiny. Milagro urges the mule forward until it’s within a foot of the riverbank. If we capsize it’s every man for himself, no women and children first. Too bad we don’t have an inflatable mattress, Azucena says, with my last breath I would inflate it to place Cerillo on it and let him float away safe downriver, down there where the river becomes a crystalline lake and where a group of fishermen would haul him into their boat and offer him a glass of warm milk. What time are you going to cross, cowards? Comodoro shouts from the other side. His rubber boots are still wet on the inside and his feet give off a dense odor of dampness; his toes are raisins. Better for him to drown, Ubaldo says: fishermen are unscrupulous types, they would palm him off as a salmon in order to sell him by weight to the packing house that bid the highest. Azucena smoothes Cerillo’s hair and whispers to him not to worry because they’re going to cross the river without a hitch. I’ve heard that there are very large stores on the other side where everything is prettier and cheaper than in Mexico, and my husband Como-

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doro has the money to buy you whatever you want. Milagro smacks the mule on the haunches and orders it to move forward. Come on, don’t stop until our country is behind us, forget about home and move forward, head up, show us the vigor in your stride, run toward the American dream. The legs of the mule and the wagon wheels are soon in the current. Move it, animal, the piranhas have sensed your presence and are on their way. The mule pauses happily to drink and not even Milagro’s most forceful blows keep it from gulping the water they long ago forgot to provide. Ubaldo grabs the pole and plunges it at random into the river; each time he thinks he’ll pull out a piranha he’s caught. Comodoro abandons his haughtiness and begins to cast stones with the goal of zinging any malign creature that might threaten to devour the feet of the mule. It’s the worst kind of death, Azucena moans, and it’s all Comodoro’s fault, once again he forgot his oath and he didn’t abandon just one comrade but the whole regiment to the jaws of the enemy. We wouldn’t be in this jam if courageous Caralampio had come with us. The mule sits down on its haunches and rolls its eyes with the pleasure of the water that covers its back. What’s the distance from here to the Mexican shore? Azucena asks. Ubaldo stands up on the edge of the cart and extends his arms. I don’t know, three or four meters. Do you think we could manage to throw Cerillo that far? You grab him by his arms and I’ll take his legs and we’ll swing him back and forth three times before letting go. Us-

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ing all our combined force we can get him back to Mexico, although he might hit his head, bashing it and ending up a mental case. Comodoro on the other side kneels down, begs forgiveness for the arrogance of the enlightened army, which refused to cross the river by bridge with a visa and passport, like everybody else. Where are you headed? the immigration official would ask. Just around here, sir, to invade the Alamo. He fishes around in his pocket to find the Immaculate Lady. He looks around when he can’t find her. He quickly understands that he lost her in the river, that she sacrificed herself to save his skin. Now the enlightened ones are on their own, no one is looking out for them, no one will die for them. He gets up from his sore knees and goes as far down to the edge of the river as his courage and prudence will allow. Azucena, he yells, do you love me? She realizes that this is the time for her to put her will in order. My colored pencils, my blanket, and my flashlight are yours, the rest are women’s things, I ask you to arrange a ceremony in the basilica, invite everybody from the institute and the teachers, and since there’ll be no body of me to bury, place on the altar the photograph that’s on my dresser, the one where I’m wearing the green dress, and if you can, include the green dress too; but if the government sends a deep-sea diver to collect our skeletons, and if maybe it’s impossible to make out who was a woman and who was a man, Azucena pulls down the neck of her blouse so her left shoulder is visible, make a note of how mine’s the one with the protruding

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clavicle, and refrain from any woman until you’ve mourned me for a year. I swear, Comodoro yells, and he wonders about the existence of a widower’s manifesto that he would have to violate in the next town if he finds a young woman worthy of his love. Ubaldo looks at the wrapped bundle of rifles, but he recalls that the teacher told them that the piranhas attack by the thousands; it’s a lost cause, not even a machine gun would be enough to finish them off. He thinks for a moment and then proposes another solution. I’ve seen that fire can be used to get rid of this sort of threat: a well-built fire, and the ants disappear, the bison move away, the pygmies give up, and in the end you adjust your hat and look over the devastation from the security of a hilltop. With the right amount of gasoline you can even set fire to the waters of the river, but not everyone is saved, there’s always an obese and badly shaved traitor devoured by the beasts or by the flames. Comorodo runs his hand over his cheeks and feels their tautness. And the woman? Azucena asks. The woman is the daughter of the expedition’s doctor or scientist; she’s flighty, irresponsible, but she matures fast. She’s always beautiful, and is always screaming and in the end survives intact, except for having twisted her ankle. Use the gelatin, Comodoro hollers, there’s some in my schoolbag, the river will become stiff and you can walk across to the other side. Azucena sets to immediately; she opens the packet and casts some of the powder behind the cart. She sees it blow away with the wind. The small amount that falls into

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the water briefly turns it green, it immediately gets diluted and vanishes with the landscape. Comodoro is upset that they planned to use the gelatinous ford to turn back. Milagro, seated silently on the shaft of the cart, looks before him; he knows his situation is worse than rolling over in a gray car. It’s time to get Cerillo back to the land that gave him birth, Azucena says. Ubaldo sees him snuggled down in the wool blankets. We’ll tie the flag around him like a cape, she says, that way we’ll throw him gently, he’ll fly away from the water’s edge and come down slowly, without waking up. Comodoro casts another stone with such accuracy that it hits the mule in the mouth; the mule gets up and begins to walk toward the riverbank. The enlightened ones stare in astonishment at its legs, free of bites. Minutes later everybody’s on board the cart. The sound of the river can no longer be heard. They travel along a road that points north. They look at the landscape as they move along in silence; they will never speak of that episode in which they felt death so close. The office is dark, thanks to some thick, closed curtains that keep the midafternoon sun out; the noise and the clacking of typewriters increases every time someone opens the door, something that hasn’t happened for a while. The metal desk contains a half-consumed glass of pop, a grease-stained paper plate, and a balled-up napkin; there’s also a

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lighted cigarette in an ashtray. The walls are hung with newspaper clippings about robberies and assassinations; one of them shows a photograph of a facedown bleeding body in black and white. Agent Álvarez is resting his elbows on the desk and leans forward to instill fear in Caralampio. They tell me I shouldn’t interrogate someone like you, that only a psychologist should ask you questions, that following normal procedure with you can lead to serious problems in your development, but nevertheless it’s your fault there are some kids missing and it’s my responsibility to find them safe and sound, although right now I’m not sure whether that’s possible. Caralampio is not paying much attention, because for some time he’s been watching the cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. Agent Álvarez took only one draw on it after he lit it; now it has a long tail of ashes that threatens to break apart at any moment. The speech of Agent Álvarez, about justice, which should treat everyone equally, is barely an echo in the office. It’s not going to do you any good to hide behind that innocent face, understand that your classmates could now be in the hands of a pervert, understand that anything that happens to them is as though you were doing it, and understand most of all that your classmates include a young girl and the worst things could happen to her. Caralampio closes his eyes for a few seconds; he tells himself when he opens them the ash will have fallen. He counts from one to ten and opens them. The smoke continues to rise in a straight line for a few centimeters and then

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fades into a cloud. The cigarette is now half ash. Caralampio wonders about a world record. His father also smokes and sometimes he forgets and sets his cigarette down wherever, but the slightest breeze comes along and breaks up the ashes, or Caralampio gets anxious and breaks it with his finger. He supposes that the office must be closed tight and, although he attempts to control his impatience, in an instant of weakness, he reaches his hand toward the ashtray. Sit still, Agent Álvarez tells him, cross your arms, you only have permission here to tell me where your classmates are, why you had a pistol in your schoolbag, what you intended to do with it, if you already had someone in mind or you were only going to shoot at random to see what you’d hit, what was the purpose of the bag of rat poison. Too many questions, Caralampio thought, and rudely put, without a hand resting on his shoulder or pushing back the shock of hair that fell over his forehead, without the kind voice of the teacher who gave him complete freedom to express himself; tell me what you’re thinking, Caralampio, and he tells her about a man who made himself invisible on television and drank tea, and you could see the cup in midair; draw a picture for me of the place where your friends are, and he draws a battlefield with explosions and various dead bodies. The teacher picks up the drawing and speaks in a whisper to the director of the institute; look at this atrocity, it’s obvious Caralampio is going through a crisis, maybe his mother hits him, the battle scene represents family violence, the ex-

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plosions are the verbal insults, and this man who’s giving orders must be his father; look at the boy in the trench, it surely must represent himself, beaten down, belittled, attempting to hide from the world. The teacher smiles and tries for a soft voice and says, very well, Caralampio, I’m now going to give you a word and you tell me the first thing that comes to your mind; she says cat, he replies guitar. But Agent Álvarez does not attempt to play friendly, he smells of onion and smiles like the bad guys in the comic books when he says we can stay here all day and all night and you won’t see your mother until you answer my questions. Caralampio can’t stand it any longer; he starts jumping around to make the floor vibrate; he jumps as high as he can and locks his legs stiff when he comes down. After several attempts, the ash crumbles. Yes, Caralampio cries out, I did it, better than since the beginning of time, and starts to run in happy circles until he gets dizzy and falls. He moves his arms and legs on the floor like a runner, which makes him keep twirling, using his hips like an axis. He hums a happy song and keeps going even when his head bangs into the walls and the feet of the furniture. Agent Álvarez sucks on his cigarette and admits that this kid can’t be interrogated in due and proper form. Milagro nods off with the reins in his hands, it’s hard for him to keep his eye on the road and he wonders if this is his responsibility or if the mule on its own takes on the details of the journey. The answer

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comes with a jab to his arm. Wake up, Ubaldo tells him, you’re just like your father, you want us to fall down a ravine at the kilometer thirty-six post, in the end we all die and you experience a second miracle, and once you’ve demonstrated that plunging down a ravine leaves you without a scratch you’ll earn a living going over waterfalls in a barrel. The champion of the fatherland turned into a circus performer: more’s the pity for our fatherland. I need someone to take over, Milagro says, Cerillo isn’t the only one who has to sleep. Ubaldo takes the reins nervously, thinking about all kinds of risks, like a runaway mule who kicks up so much dust that it’s impossible to follow the road; the wheels beginning to crack, making imminent the point at which they will crumble; a sprawl of bodies lying on the road; the mule reaching the Alamo alone and the unhappy Milagro raising his fists and shouting I’m a miracle. But those aren’t the risks that most bother him. He turns around and calls out to Comodoro. I’ve seen that someone should lead the way, thus discovering firsthand the dangers that threaten the troop; in case of an ambush they only shoot at him, he notifies us if there’s a bridge that’s out before it’s too late to brake and, above all else, he’s the first to fall into the quicksand. Comodoro is on the verge of refusing. Although he trusts in his boots he doesn’t consider them so prodigious that they would leave his feet unwounded in the event that he stepped on a mine; nevertheless he discovers that Azucena is following the conversation and looking at him with dreamy

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eyes. He grabs a rifle and sits down on the back edge of the cart; one, two, three he counts and flexes his backside so he can jump off the cart. He stumbles as he hits the ground, but succeeds in keeping himself upright. He immediately hastens his squeaky trot until he’s in the lead. Hurry up, Azucena tells him when she sees the mule is about to catch up with him. Comodoro speeds up for a few seconds, but only for a few seconds because exhaustion overtakes him and the animal is once again nipping at his heels. Move over, Ubaldo shouts at him, unable to brake. This rifle is heavy, Comodoro babbles. Taking advantage of how close he is to Comodoro, Ubaldo gives him a piece of advice: if you fall in quicksand, stay still, don’t try to jump out because you’ll only sink deeper; wait for us to toss you a rope. Even if you sink in over your head, hold your hands up, don’t lose hope. Comodoro tries once again to overtake the mule. He’s upset his rubber boots don’t make him go any faster or put him beyond reach. It must be a horrible death, Azucena says under her breath so that only Ubaldo can hear her; he never uses the handrails at the institute because his hands can’t sustain his weight. No matter how much rope we throw him, Comodoro will sink. The moment in which the sand swallows him up we’ve got to shoot him, thereby saving him from darkness and despair, since nature will have saved us from providing a grave. Five minutes later, Comodoro has been hopelessly left behind by the cart, which second by second pulls farther ahead; he feels himself passing out while begging for some-

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one to take note of his absence, someone to stop the mule or, for the love of God, someone to remember the oath they took to the soldier’s manifesto. Fatso Comodoro opens his eyes when he hears some nearby feet; he feels his mouth dry, his breath burning his chest. He’s gone beyond the moment in which his heart was about to stop. I’m not dead yet, comrades, but almost. And the rifle? Ubaldo asks. I had to drop it back there, I don’t know how far back. Milagro goes for it while Azucena pours water on Comodoro’s forehead. He’s lying on his back in the middle of the road, his arms outstretched and his face flushed, especially his cheeks. I’m going to count to ten, Ubaldo says to him, if you don’t get up we’ll leave without you. Comodoro rolls over because he’s got to get on his hands and knees before he can stand up. Once he’s resting on his hands and knees, he maintains that position while he breathes in and gathers his strength. Yet his muscles feel like jello, incapable of completing the task. Please, Azucena, ask Ubaldo to count slowly. In the distance they make out a man advancing toward them. What do we do? Milagro says. Ubaldo evaluates the situation and makes a plan. Don’t stop the cart, just keep going like nothing’s happening, hum a tune, read a magazine, perhaps we can go unnoticed, like tourists; the point is not to call attention to ourselves or shed blood until we reach the Alamo,

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but if the guy turns aggressive, we can jump him and discreetly strangle him. Cerillo has to go to the bathroom, Azucena says. Tell him to hold it, Milagro orders. The distance between them is shrinking little by little; Comodoro begins to sweat because he knows he’ll be the one to have to jump the man. He’s carrying something on his arm, Ubaldo sharpens his sight, maybe it’s a gun. Milagro feels tempted to yank the reins, to order the mule to change course; he doesn’t want to meet up with the man because now he thinks he must be a more advanced soldier, one doing what Comodoro was incapable of doing, and behind him there are three infantry regiments at the ready. Cerillo can’t hold it any longer, Azucena insists. Tell him to pee over the edge, because we’re not going to stop. Fortunately the road is flat and Cerillo is able to keep his balance as he stands to the far right and lowers his white shorts. Comodoro clenches his fists and his teeth in the face of the imminent encounter with the man. Ubaldo rummages around in his schoolbag until he finds his corkscrew; you grab him by the neck and I’ll twist this into his head. The moment comes when their paths cross. The man comes upon the peeing white cherubim from the San Sebastián church, casts aside his hoe and falls to his knees with his head bent over. Shall we kill him? Comodoro asks. The cart passes on by, Cerillo’s stream becomes intermittent, and the man remains in his pious pose. Let him live, Ubaldo says, he looks like a man of peace.

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Today Arechavaleta works for a textile company, where he calls himself chief of operations and speaks with satisfaction about being in charge of more than three hundred employees and says that last year he was responsible for implementing a new weaving process; he’s married to a woman whom he calls my life and who gave him three children, none of whom attend the Colegio Francomexicano. The problem is they don’t teach English, he explains, and these days English is more important than Spanish, it’s the language of business, and he utters the phrase with all the self-satisfaction of a wise man, just as he did when he used to utter stupidities in class. He says he vaguely remembers Matus and claims he has no idea of why he stopped teaching. He sees his cup is empty and presses a button to ask his secretary to bring him coffee. Where were we? he asks, and after remaining silent while the secretary comes in and serves him, he answers himself. Oh, yes, Matus, he was a good man. Despite having aged prematurely, the chief of operations retains a marked resemblance to the child in the yearbook. And just like back then, you want to smash him in the face. Milagro stops the cart on a path lined with mesquites and whistles for his companions, who are dozing in the back of the cart. There’s a large old two-story house with crumbling walls at the end of the path. The enlightened ones emerge from their lethargy and lift their heads up. The building is sym-

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metrical, with a double door in the middle, a balcony over the door, and a pair of grated windows on each side, two above and two below. On the roof, over the balcony, there’s a concrete cross that’s been weathered by the years. Comodoro studies the house and swears he can hear a chorus of hallelujahs descending from the heavens. The Alamo, he says, we’ve made it. And what did you expect? Milagro demands, I’ve been driving the cart. Cerillo looks around him, he sees that it is too early to get up and snuggles back down. What do we do now? Azucena asks. Milagro shrugs. Ubaldo climbs up on the driver’s seat and addresses the others. I’ve seen this many times. We’ve got to send two volunteers to surround the Alamo on opposite sides, they can’t carry firearms, only knives. You’ve got to take the guards from behind and strike them with the edge of your hand on the shoulder so they pass out, or in extreme cases, cover their mouths and drag them off into the shadows to stab them to death. Once we’ve cleaned the exterior, we can charge the door and shoot right and left. Who’s coming with me? Ubaldo asks and Comodoro hesitates as he imagines a gigantic guard with shoulders beyond his reach. Milagro raises his hand and Azucena kisses him on the cheek. The rest of you get your rifles, Ubaldo says, and only go into action if something goes wrong. Azucena hands a rifle to Cerillo, who hugs it like it was a stuffed bear; she takes his index finger and puts it on the trigger. Comodoro puffs his chest up and takes aim at the door. He watches the two valiant warriors walk off.

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He’ll have to shoot if something doesn’t go right, but if that something is the soundless death of his comrades behind the Alamo, his firing will come too late and miss the mark. He knows he needs to keep looking straight ahead, his obligation is to provide cover for his companions, and yet he is assaulted by the image of a man behind him, drawing a dagger from its sheath. Help me, Immaculate Lady, help me, goddess of just wars. Ubaldo is the first to go all the way around the building and he motions to Comodoro and Azucena to join him. The three meet and agree in whispers that the next step must be the assault on the Alamo. Milagro had an emergency out in back, Ubaldo explains; he’ll join us right away. Now the plan is to take advantage of Fatso Comodoro’s weight. He’ll slam into the door and as soon as he gets it open, the rest of the squad will go in and shoot anyone who’s moving. Remember not to say things like hands up or drop your arms, you leave out those police formalities in war. They wait for Milagro to appear; then Comodoro takes a deep breath and trots without elegance toward the door, his legs spread wide to keep his thighs from rubbing together. Each step brings a groan from the effort of running. Eleven bounds and he runs into the door without thrusting out his hands, stomach and chest first. The air is crushed out of him and Comodoro emits an effeminate moan, accoding to Ubaldo, as he bounces back and lands on his buttocks.

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My speed and weight were just right to smash in the door, he says when he rejoins his comrades, the problem was my puffiness. That’s why I want to give it another try, but with a rock. He looks over the terrain until he discovers a flat melon of stone. He brings it up to the level of his chest and hurls himself again at the obstacle; nevertheless the overload is too much for his arms and so when he slams into the door he’s carrying the rock at the level of his groin. This time the blow is solid, like that of a sledgehammer, and Comodoro does not bounce back but remains pinned to the wood. You can hear a soft crunch and the hinges begin to creek. The door swings open and Comodoro and the rock are flung to the ground. Fight with gallantry, men, Milagro yells as he enters, eight by eleven, forty-two. Ubaldo follows him. One goes to the right and the other to the left. Azucena remains in the entrance, watching the stairs, she’s the brothel madam ready to shoot whomever tries to leave without paying. After a few seconds of reconnoitering and inspecting they accept the fact that the ground floor is empty, except for dust, broken glass, some weed or other growing in a corner, and a wooden bed without a mattress. They go upstairs, check out the three bedrooms up there, and return to the ground floor. The report is the same: not a sign of the enemy. Azucena peeks between the boards of the bed to make sure no cowardly gringo is hiding there. By the time they finish checking out the patio, the kitchen, and the storage room, Comodoro is still ly-

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ing on the floor, tearful with pain, his hands lost in his groin. At the institute they say that Caralampio is no longer the same person. He doesn’t want to draw, he doesn’t sing. They assure him he’s been forgiven, that the matter of the pistol has been forgotten. You were responsible for them fleeing, not for them getting lost. They beg him to try to remember where they ran, east or west. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t talk to anyone; he spends his mornings with his head stuck through the fence, looking out, and he only smiles hopefully when he sees someone fat walk by. Cerillo has spent hours stretched out on the balcony keeping watch. On the wall next to him Ubaldo is drawing an enormous rectangle with a black crayon. The Immaculate Lady, Comodoro says and points with his finger as he jumps a couple of times. Ubaldo shakes his head and divides the rectangle into three vertical bands, more or less of equal size. The flag, Azucena says, and receives as a prize a red crayon and a second green one to color in the left and right stripes. All that’s missing is the national shield in the middle, Fatso Comodoro says just to put in his two cents’ worth. Ubaldo takes several crayons and adds, below, the half moon of leaves, and above, some ovals to round out the nopal bush. Milagro claps; it’s one of the few activities made easier for him by the trembling in his arms. Ubaldo stands

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stock-still, contemplating his audience in silence. We’ve got to leave the artist to himself, Azucena says, and the three go downstairs. They go out to the back patio, which is surrounded by a wall made of the same adobe as the house; along the entire top of the wall there are broken beer and pop bottles fixed in the cement. An impregnable fortress, Comodoro says because he’s been wanting to use that word for a long time. There’s a pool in the middle of the patio; all three wish it were full of water so they could dive in and splash around. The mule is resting under a tin covering. They decided to install it and the cart there, taking advantage of the width of the front door; and since nobody knew how to undo the cinches, the animal remains a slave to its burden. A half hour later Ubaldo calls to them. They rush upstairs, pushing and shoving, each one wants to be the first to see the completed standard; of course, Comodoro is the last one up. There, where there’s supposed to be the eagle devouring the serpent, there’s a chicken wearing a crown, eating a worm. It’s our battalion’s insignia, Ubaldo says, and I’m going to go ahead and explain it before the experts begin with their stupidities. We’re the chicks, and I don’t need to say who the worms are. And why the crown? you may ask. Why, rather than a soldier’s cap or a helmet or a hat, a tricorn or another type of cap, does the chicken wear a crown? And the three nod yes although none of them had asked themselves that question. I don’t want to corrupt you, Ubaldo goes on, but the moment has come for you to know

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the truth. The conquest of Texas does not suppose that its whole territory, people, flora, and fauna will automatically become part of Mexico, no, sir, ours is an independent expedition that the Mexican government doesn’t yet know anything about; that’s why the crown, because for now we’re the owners of the Alamo and, therefore, the owners of Texas; at this moment we are on neither Mexican nor US territory, but on a piece of land with absolute independence; and we, being the nobles and lords of this land, possess full power to negotiate its annexation to Mexico or give in to the temptation of keeping it for ourselves, imposing our own system of government and expelling undesirable minorities. Of course we’re going to negotiate, Azucena says. Ubaldo huffs, disillusioned, and agrees. Of course, we’ll negotiate, it’s just that you can’t go to the president of the Republic of Mexico and say to him I’m Azucena and I want to present to you a small piece of land north of the Rio Grande; you need a title that gives you grandeur, that swings wide the doors of the national palace and lets you take your seat in a leather chair in the presidential office and allows you to choose between coffee or tea, so decide who you want to be, what title you want to take. Azucena advances toward Ubaldo to speak without feeling herself part of the audience. I want to be the Baroness Pendergrass, and I choose tea, with two lumps of sugar. I don’t know from what story you took that name, and even if it’s from a masterpiece, let me warn you that names in Spanish are preferable. You’re right, she says, and

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without giving it much thought she comes up with an alternative: the Baroness González. Much better, that way we don’t get you confused with a gringa and end up shooting you one of these days. As for me, Comodoro says, but Ubaldo interrupts him, let’s go in order; and although Comodoro doesn’t understand what the order is, he remains silent while Milagro says that he can’t imagine any title more noble than the one he has. Mr. President, I am Milagro, I am a miracle, and I’m here to offer you a deal, and I prefer some pop, thank you, because I don’t like tea and coffee increases my trembling and makes me more irritable. There’s the chance, Ubaldo looks off into the distance, that the president says no thanks, I don’t want any more Mexico to govern, and thus we’re left with Texas forever, or at least until a popular revolt demands democratic elections. Now it’s Comodoro’s turn and, with a haughtiness that makes him purse his lips and raise his eyebrows, he pronounces the title of young master of Condestable. You sound like the court eunuch with that name, Azucena says, but Comodoro is in no mood to be teased, he feels proud of his title; he takes the flag and places it around his neck. He goes to the balcony, opens the doors so as not to step on Cerillo, and receives the fresh breeze that wipes the sweat from his upper lip. He sees himself decked out in a uniform of green mail and red leggings, sporting the national shields of the eagle, not the chicken, over each nipple. Fatso Comodoro, present; young master of Condestable, present; Captain Mexico, Lord of all

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the Texases, present; master of the Alamo, taker of the maidenheads of baronesses, invicible bean, present, always present for God and country. He smiles happily, knowing that no Mexican has ever reached such heights, and he will not allow, no, sir, a handful of gringos to bring him down from his pinnacle. The war is about to begin, Milagro whispers and points with his quivering finger beyond the balcony. Ubaldo and Azucena come out and can make out at the end of the path two men leaning against a tree, enjoying the shade it provides them. One of them is wearing a hat and the other a brightly colored scarf tied around his neck. They are sharing a bottle from which they’re taking short gulps. They’re gringos, Ubaldo says, we’ve got to get rid of them. Comodoro hurries downstairs to fetch the binoculars. They’re obese, dark-skinned, with thin moustaches, Azucena says, they look like Mexicans to me. You don’t know the faces evil can take on, the traps the enemy might set for us; look at them, they’re drinking, it’s obvious they’re trying to seduce us with alcohol, we won’t fall in their trap like common Irishmen. When Comodoro returns and approaches the balcony, Ubaldo grabs the binoculars; give those to me, he says, this is an instrument of espionage, it can be used to read the enemy’s lips, and there’s no one better for that job than a woman. I’ve never done it, Azucena protests, and Ubaldo tells her not to get all upset, it’s something you learn right away, it’s much easier to read lips than

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letters. Watch my mouth, take a close look at the position of my lips and teeth and tongue, pay attention to the movement of my cheeks and my chin when I talk. Azucena looks at him while Ubaldo silently says the alphabet, and she’s satisfied to see that she can make out perfectly each one of the letters, even the subtleties, like the widening of the nose with the letter ñ. There’s no question I have unsuspected talents. War brings out the best and the worst in every human being, Ubaldo says with authority, we’ll see if it brings out pus or amber in our case. Lying with her chest flat on the ground, Azucena spies on the two men. Remember that h is silent, Comodoro says. She observes their dialogue for a few seconds and shakes her head. I can’t, she says; it looked easy but I can’t make out a single sentence clearly. The one on the left said abangorte; the other replied simolende argusón simensal. Good job, Ubaldo says, you read them perfectly, it’s just that they speak a different language here. Do we need any further proof to open fire? One of the two men gives out a laugh that can be heard all over. There’s not a shred of doubt, Ubaldo says, anyone who laughs like that not only thinks he owns Texas, but is also planning on taking over the entire world. I’ll shoot, Comodoro raises his right hand with the index finger pointing to the sky, I’m sure to hit the target. Okay, Ubaldo hands him a rifle with a solemn gesture, for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours. Before hastening to shoot, Comodoro kisses the flag. Ladies and gentlemen, let the party begin. He rests

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the barrel on the left window frame and goes down on his knee; he soon has the head of one of the men perfectly aligned with the sight. Aim for the chest, Milagro suggests, and Comodoro explains that his intention is something else. I want to put the bullet through the opening of his ear. I don’t know if that’s a law or chance or simple gentlemanliness, Ubaldo says, but I’ve never seen anyone in war aim for the head, the bullets enter the body when they’re lethal, and the legs and arms when the intention is only to wound them. The Germans die roaring and shaking all over; the gringos, if indeed they die, do it with dignity and in silence; and I don’t know much about the Japanese because they’re always flying planes. Comodoro doesn’t change his plans, he wants to kill him good and clean, so all you’ll see is a thin line of blood exiting his ear; I don’t want the other man even to know, let him continue to drink happily and think that the sound he heard was the thunder of a nonexistent rainfall, which will give me the necessary time to readjust the sight and shoot again. Two bullets, two dead men. Azucena, come and wipe the sweat from my brow, Azucena, wish me well, Azucena, pray for the souls of those who are to perish. He runs his fingertip over the trigger, counts from one to three and shoots at the new bottle of brandy, the sister to the one that burned Cerillo with a flamethrower. The blast shoos away the birds in the mesquite bushes and leaves Comodoro with a buzzing in his ear like a poorly tuned radio. A thin, gray smoke emerges from the barrel of the rifle. The man

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with the scarf lies still on the ground, his bottle gently spilling out its contents. Fatso Comodoro doesn’t get to shoot again; he’s waiting for the congratulations from his comrades, the pats on his shoulder, Azucena’s kiss. He missed the bottle on several attempts, but when aiming at a human being, he sends the bullet just where he wants. And nevertheless, he doesn’t rejoice; a soldier takes no pleasure in killing the enemy, he’s only following orders. I suppose he has a family, Milagro says, three dark ugly children who were used to saying loving things to him before going to bed. Comodoro turns around annoyed and offers him the rifle. You shoot the other one, and when he falls dead I will speak to you of his beautiful wife who was going to tell him tomorrow about her pregnancy. Ubaldo can see with the binoculars that the man wearing the hat first threw himself to the ground, then hid behind a tree, and finally went to shake his motionless friend. The rifle trembles in Milagro’s hands like a machine gun going full steam. And what if I miss? If you miss we’ll be in trouble, if you miss they’ll have to decorate me as the best sharpshooter, if you miss the fetus won’t be born an orphan. Milagro pulls the trigger five times. The man adjusts his hat and sets off running until he’s lost in the distance. Comodoro puts his hands on his waist and shakes his hips. With your five shots I would have hit him in one of his legs, then in the other, and finally three to his neck. Ubaldo keeps looking through the binoculars. Now

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we can start the pillaging, he says, who’d like to volunteer? We’ve got to respect personal effects, but we can take any firearms, munitions, or piece of war equipment, money, belts, boots, transmitters, and maps; we’ve got to distinguish between a personal diary and a combat log, and leave the photos of his three dark-skinned children in his wallet. I’m of the opinion that it’s best to carry off everything, Milagro says, impossible to distinguish between the personal and the official, a letter from a girlfriend might be a coded message from a superior; dear John might mean wipe out the Mexicans, and who knows what kind of malevolent plans are hidden in a sentence like I haven’t written you because I was very busy. I killed him, Comodoro says, I get to skin him. Can I go with you? Azucena caresses his pallid and spongy face. He nods yes, and on his way to the stairs grabs a knife. Sometimes fingers refuse to give up rings, he explains; and despite feeling drunk with his manliness, he doesn’t have the courage to take his shirt off or take the knife in his teeth. Outside the breeze strikes him forcefully and Comodoro’s happiness turns boundless when the flag lifts like a kite behind him. If my statue is made of bronze, I want it to show the flapping cape in the form of a sheet of metal; if it’s made of marble, I prefer there be no cape, because any vandal could break it off by hitting it with a rock. When they’re halfway to the body, Azucena motions for them to stop. They hear the stifled sobbing of an adult, a fainthearted voice begging for water. I can’t pillage him like that,

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Comodoro says, better we wait, he’s surely going to be cold in the morning. No, Azucena says, I remember the second point of the soldier’s manifesto concerning treating prisoners with dignity and the need to give medical assistance to the wounded and make the sign of the cross over the dead. The man is begging for water, we’ve got to give him some because in his situation he can’t do us any harm; he is, at the same time, a prisoner and a wounded man. Without going any closer, Comodoro stands on tiptoe and stretches his neck to see the wounded man better, he can’t make out where the bullet entered, although he supposes it wasn’t through the ear. I can’t believe the gringos are so stupid or cowardly or traitorous, I imagine his comrade ran off for a doctor and the best thing would be to leave the wounded man here because we only have bandages. You can’t deny anyone a drink of water, Azucena replies, so either you take some over to him or I will. The both return to their fortification, disillusioned because they had no chance to pillage. What’s going on? Ubaldo receives them at the door. He’s wounded, Azucena answers, and he begged us for water. Milagro asks them from the stairs if the normal thing to do would be to stab him with the bayonet until he completely shuts up, and Azucena replies by reminding him of the soldier’s manifesto. I don’t understand, Milagro says, it’s fine to kill him when he’s healthy, but it’s wrong to kill him when he’s wounded? Ubaldo explains that giving him water is not the same thing as giving him

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medical assistance and you’d have to define what each person understands as treatment befitting a prisoner. If they tie me by my wrists and ankles and insult me and hit me a little, I still feel like I’ve got some dignity left, Comodoro says, all I ask is that they do not use me for laboratory experiments. Just a moment, Ubaldo interjects, how do you know the miserable dog was begging for water? Because he kept repeating that word. Then we’ve got to check the dictionary, remember that he speaks an unknown dialect. He goes for his schoolbag and takes out a small bilingual school lexicon. He turns the pages back and forth, until he finds the letter a in the English-Spanish section: Milagro draws close because he can make out the black-and-white photograph of an airplane. Ubaldo wets his fingertips and slowly advances through the alphabetical order. He turns a page when he can’t find the word he’s looking for, and starts the process again of pointing to each word one by one. My idea is that agua must be a universal word, Comodoro says, after all it’s the same thing you drink the world over. Fifteen minutes later he’s gone through the whole section without any success; perhaps he blinked and missed the word. Are you certain he didn’t say egua, ogua? He spoke very clearly, Azucena affirms. Ubaldo makes a deep sigh and begins to check again, but at a certain point he’s sure that he won’t find the word and decides to cheat. Here it is, he says, jabbing the middle of the page with his finger, agua, agua, an insulting expression in northern countries that means abom-

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inable fat bastard. Comodoro goes over with raised eyebrows, let me see that; but Ubaldo slams the dictionary shut. What good is it to you, you can’t even read your name; you want to help him and the guy insults you, abominable fat bastard. It must be an efficient language, Azucena says, if with only two syllables they say what we need eight for. And the gringo must have the eyes of a lynx to see who shot him. What we haven’t taken into account, Comodoro says, is that there are only two explanations for his insult: either he’s blowing off steam in the face of his imminent death, or his pride comes from the certainty that hundreds and thousands of his comrades will soon be here to take us prisoner and help him. Maybe they’re here already, Milagro says, and we’re wasting our time with minor details of a foreign language. Ubaldo puts his dictionary back in the schoolbag. Don’t worry, if the enemy were nearby, Cerillo would have sounded the alarm. Despite his having lost any sense of distance, Matus believes that he ran a marathon the previous day, and that this afternoon he is about to complete a second one. A real man’s task he hadn’t even done when he was a boy, although he no longer has the speed he had then and now has to trot for a few minutes, twenty at the most, and walk for the next twenty. He’s always behind Clarence DeMar, sometimes he sees his back to keep himself going, sometimes he watches the ground to search for evidence that the enlightened ones have come this way. Now DeMar

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is an old man full of aches and pains, bald, living off a pension; coughing when he goes uphill; sweating profusely and frequently spitting. Every so often he says enough already, but Matus kicks him and makes him go on. Give me my medal, you damn gringo. He’s surprised to realize he’s not the only one running on this road. There’s a man with a hat in his hand who’s coming in the opposite direction. Both stop when they meet; the man stops dead in his tracks, Matus continues to work his legs so they won’t cramp on him. Don’t go that way, the man says after gasping a couple of times for breath, there are some guerillas who shot my buddy. Where are they? Matus asks and finds it impossible to contain his show of impatience. Don’t tell me you’re one of them. Do you think at my age I’d be joining up with guerillas? You can continue along this road without any problem, the man informs him, until you come to a fork that’s about two kilometers from here; don’t even think about going to the right. Matus is pleased to know he’s almost reached his goal, that once again he’ll beat out Clarence DeMar. What about your buddy? The man shrugs his shoulders. We were going to celebrate his birthday tomorrow, now I’m looking for an ambulance or the police or the army, someone to take charge of these things. I appreciate the information, Matus says, I’ve got to be on my way. Before leaving he asks one last question. What if they weren’t guerillas? The man looks at him in disbelief and Matus adds: it might be a hunter, a stray bullet, an accident. You’re with them, the man says, and runs off toward the nearest village.

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Right on, Clarence, Matus says, the race is to the buddy, and for the first time in forty-eight hours I’m not running to beat you, but to make it there before the army. Azucena takes the makeup out of her schoolbag and begins to fix herself up by looking at a doorknob, the only reflecting surface she’s found. She picks out a carmine lipstick and adds the same color to her cheeks. For her eyebrows she prefers black. And her greatest pleasure comes from choosing the false eyelashes from among four kinds; she chooses ones that are long, thick, and upturned. The doorknob is small and distorts her face. As careful as Azucena tries to be, it’s difficult for her to stay within the lines, but what can she do if the same thing happens to her with her coloring books, if the same thing happens to her when she painted the red and green of the enlightened flag. The result is that her lips look twice as thick and her eyebrows look like magpie tails. The false eyelashes are uneven, affixed to the middle of her eyelids. Finally she rubs her face with a talcum-covered pompon and applies two drops of perfume behind the ears. Great, she thinks, now not even if I’m dead will they confuse me with a corpse. Comodoro has been standing there and can’t believe his eyes. You look like a harlot, he tells her, I never found you that attractive. Reaching the finish line of the 1924 marathon had not taken as much out of him as right now, as he

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swings to the right, precisely where the man had told him not to go. He sees the big house in the distance, that’s where the enlightened ones must be, he says to himself, and he can make out in the middle of the road the fallen body of the buddy who perhaps will not get to celebrate his birthday. He enters through the marathon tunnel and sees the entire audience on their feet, applauding; he makes out a handful of Mexican flags among so many from other countries. He’s lived this scene before, and it makes him happy to know that he has enough advantage over his pursuers to kneel and make the sign of the cross a few meters before the finish line. He does it this time to look closely at the man who halfway opens his eyes and says water, water; my need to have something to drink is greater, Matus tells him, don’t moan, they’ll soon be here to rescue you. He gets up and takes off again. His legs have gone stiff on him and refuse to advance, but his spirit is stronger. He pummels his thighs a couple of times and plows at top speed down the mesquite-lined path, which for him is the track of the Paris stadium in Colombes. It’s time for the final lap, time to pour on the last bit of energy remaining. From the other side Comodoro takes aim at his neck, with his finger ready to pull the trigger, until Ubaldo smacks him on the back of the neck. It’s Matus, you imbecile. They all run down to the ground floor and open the door just in time for the Olympic athlete to

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charge in without having to break his stride. He thrusts his chest out as he crosses the threshold; he comes to a stop in the vestible and raises his arms in a sign of triumph. Rejoice, he says, we conquer, and he falls to the ground like a log, pale, and the enlightened ones sincerely believe he’s died. After a couple of hours, Matus awakens; he tries to move his legs but they’re cramped tight. Agua, he says, water. I hope he’s speaking our language, Comodoro says. Matus drinks deep from the bottle Azucena offers him and then he crawls over to a wall he can lean on that will prop his body up. We should get out of here as quickly as possible, he says, the army won’t take long to get here. I think the old man is raving, Ubaldo whispers to Comodoro, and he adds in a loud voice: that’s why we’re here, to stand up to the enemy army, why would we flee now that they’re getting close? We’re not waiting for the enemy, but rather the heroic Mexican militia, because someone went and told them that we’re guerillas; you should not have fired a shot until we reached the United States. Azucena crouches down and lays her rifle on the ground, Milagro points the barrel of his gun at Matus. You’re lying, he says to him, you’re a traitor. How much did they give you to desert? We crossed the piranha-infested Rio Grande yesterday, and we crossed it only once, one way with no return ticket. We’re now in a territory at war, and the laws are much stricter here for someone who defects; or

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if it’s a question of cowardice, you should know that here in the Alamo we have a bed you can hide under until the battle is over. Let me know what you want to do with this old man, Ubaldo says, for the time being I’m going upstairs to give Cerillo backup, it’s not right to leave him there in charge of the four cardinal points. Mr. Matus, Comodoro says, in my capacity as the group chief of the enlightened army, and as the young master of Condestable, I demand that you decide right now if you’re on our side or if you prefer to put cheap feelings before the fatherland, or tell me if you lost track of reality when they shot at you from that town’s bell tower. Matus examines his boys with pride, a bunch of valiant fellows. Who am I to deny you your wishes, I’m not going to turn you over to a national army that’s worse than the enemy because they would strip you of every shred of dignity, only to send you back to that institute in which the goal of your lives is to learn some verses about a jumping frog or to color a sun always with eyes and a smile and sometimes with dark glasses; the gringos, at least, would put a bullet between your eyes. Mexican soldiers, Matus says, heroes of the nation, I wish to inform you that you have taken the Alamo, that we are about to be surrounded by the base army of the stars and stripes, and that our civic and moral duty is not to lose this place, even though we forfeit our lives. You’ve heard him, Comodoro exclaims, everyone to his post. And Matus sees them run off with enthusi-

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asm, like children playing blindman’s bluff, and he drags himself over to a corner and closes his eyes waiting for the first blast. Comodoro and Azucena are trading riddles when a shrill voice coming from a megaphone interrupts them. We know you’re in there, come out unarmed and with your hands up. They can make out from the balcony three green trucks parked at the end of the road; men wearing the same color are half-hidden behind some gullies, trees, and rocks. Ubaldo begins to move from one end of the house to the other like a street hawker, repeating everyone ready, war is just around the corner, everyone ready, protect your honor first and then your life. The moment we’ve been waiting for, Milagro says, this will be more moving than falling into the abyss in gray cars; if I make it I’ll be a double miracle, and double miracles are demigods. Don’t go filling your heads with pipe dreams, the megaphone says, our government wants no more martyrs, so we won’t shoot, we’re patient, we can wait here for days, weeks, or months until hunger obliges you to come out. What do they mean they’re not going to shoot? Ubaldo demands, what kind of war is this? What kind of army is this? Comodoro collapses and rolls around on the floor. For God’s sake, fight like men, slit my throat, shoot me, but don’t starve me to death, Matus knew what he meant when he said the enemy was soulless. Free us, Lord, from this evil; protect me, Immaculate

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Lady. The excess of panic leaves Comodoro trembling and showing the whites of his eyes. From the outset Ubaldo knew that one of them would go mad, yet he thought it would be Milagro; the suffering, the tremors should belong to Milagro. He had a speech ready for him about valor and the survival of the fittest, which he would have recited to him while he gripped him firmly by the shoulders and demanded Milagro look him straight in the eye. Comodoro required a different approach. Azucena, will you please slap him. She diligently fulfills her task two, three, five times, until Comodoro falls silent and stops shaking; he adopts the lotus position and wipes away his sweat. It wasn’t cowardice, he says with a choking voice, it’s just that we all have a secret terror in life. He thinks the others will agree, pat him on the back and in turn confess their horror of spiders or the dark or dogs or old ladies or whatever. Ubaldo and Milagro march over to their posts; Azucena wants to tell him that she was ashamed to see him such a sissy, but decides that it’s not the right moment to speak. Ubaldo calls Comodoro to come over by the wooden bed. After your show of cowardace it’s imperative that you burn that bed, that you reduce it to ashes. In this defense of the Alamo there’s not going to be anyone bawling and crying under a bed; that’s a part of history and it was on their side. Comodoro nods in agreement and fishes around in his schoolbag until he finds the box of matches. He recognizes the

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brand and knows that the text on the back speaks of the future; he’s happy he doesn’t know how to read because at this moment, with the threatening army surrounding them, he prefers uncertainty to any prediction about the future. It was customary for him to find an empty matchbox like this left by Santiago on the nights they played dominoes. Comodoro would pocket it and, after picking up the ashtrays and empty bottles and washing the dishes, he would ask Matus to read it to him. You’ll go on a long and splendid trip, Comodoro, you will earn an award at the office, a distant relative will come to visit you, your good humor will cause you to win the sympathy of those around you, someone will return from your past to tell you that she loves you. The future on those boxes was always glowing, death was waiting for no one, but what could the box he was taking a match from tell him now? He strikes it and holds it close to one of the boards of the bed until the heat is too much for him and he drops it. The wood is barely scorched. You’re going on a trip, Comodoro, one that will last forever, with no return; someone will come to visit you, she’ll take your hand without human or divine power to allow you to escape, she’ll bear you from here to a dark place and shovels full of dirt and salt will drown out your cries, will close your eyes. The second match works no better than the first. Ubaldo plucks the chicken that wished to be king and tosses the pages next to the wood. Try again, he says. This time the small paper bonfire is success-

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ful in setting the wood on fire. Comodoro eyes with regret how the flames set about consuming the image of the chicken kissing his mother, just when he’s telling her he’s decided to leave home and that the two will not live together until they both can live in a palace on the rooster’s hill. Ubaldo hurries to the patio and brings back some dry branches to keep the fire going. It begins to turn dark. The smoke and the crackling flames attract the other enlightened ones, who enter one by one and make a circle around the burning bed. They watch the flames in silence for a few minutes, they watch the flames in the eyes of the others. When the bonfire reaches its maximum height, Milagro stands up and bows. Ladies and gentlemen of all ages, he says, the human being came into the world to face the universal elements and, only then, to grow and multiply. He begins to run and jumps through the flames. The others clap when they see him land on the other side, unscathed, with his arms outstretched, almost smiling. Milagro acknowledges the ovation and repeats his feat. For an instant, Milagro and the fire are a single entity: light and fire and bravura and humanity; but before you can blink, the illusion is broken, there is no more burning flesh nor embodied flames, except in the memory of those present. OK, that’s enough, Ubaldo exclaims, we don’t want to lose a soldier through useless incineration, much less allow the flames to kill with piteous cries that will warm the hearts of the enemy encampment, and if you need

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proof, Cerillo can attest to the horror of fire, because there’s no difference if it comes from the bed or from a flamethrower. No sooner has he spoken than he feels embarrassed by his words, he knows that sanity will find no place among the greater souls. Please go on, Azucena says, with a yellow and scarlet glow to her face, go on until what has to happen happens. Milagro runs and takes another leap and lands on the other side and jumps again and makes time stop every time he crosses through the pyre from hell that is the wood of the bed that bit by bit is turning into ashes. Jump, Milagro, dream, Milagro, jump and somersault in the air, in the flames, because tonight you will know no fear or disappointment, and the trembling in your arms is the fluttering of a falcon and eight times eleven is forty-two. Milagro hears the call and repeats his feat over and over again, losing count, until the boards become a pile of serene and smoky embers. Then he falls to his knees, exhausted, his arms twitching more than ever; and the enlightened ones applaud without stopping, sweaty from so much heat, coughing because of the smoke, inebriated, happy and dazed, with tears in their eyes, celebrating the man who mastered fire. The night stretches out when you can’t shut your eyes. Comodoro checks each window but all he can see are the orange embers of some lighted cigarettes. He knows that there’s more than one rifle out there pointed at his belly, his chest. Confronting enemy fire is fine, but what do you do against an army de-

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termined to sit and wait for you to starve to death? There’s not a box of jello left and only one cucumber, and who knows what happened to the provisions Matus went into the village to buy. If things don’t change the day will come in which they’ll argue whether the mule is included in the soldier’s oath or if they can sacrifice it for its meat. Life at the institute was boring but at least on Friday mornings the director brought them a basket of bread. Only one piece, Comodoro, or you’ll get worms. And there where orange lights are moving around, there are sure to be tacos and drinks, there’s a pig slowly roasting. Although Matus has partially recovered movement in his legs, he still hasn’t wanted to stand up; he’s embarrassed to take the clumsy steps of an old man and he is frightened by the chance of falling down to laughter or, worse, the pity of his soldiers, who are incapable of believing the story about the Mexican who beat Clarence DeMar by much more than a nose. Fatso Comodoro goes over and caresses his cheek. I lost the Immaculate Lady, he says, she drowned in the Rio Grande to save me. That’s what happens, Matus says, one for another. The set of dominoes will never be complete, Comodoro’s voice grows thin, it sounds like a woman’s when he resumes talking; we’ll never be back home again, seated around the table, deciding which tile will let us win the game, and I’ll never fetch cold beer from the kitchen and you’ll never smack me and call me an imbecile. Matus stretches out his arms and Co-

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modoro accepts the invitation despite his smell, that of a long-distance runner. He would like to go on speaking, he feels the need to recall the good times, the day when he brought home the piece of paper with his name written on it in his own handwriting, and Matus smiled and kissed him on the forehead, any story that will keep him from thinking about the orange lights that draw close to burn every fold of his skin; and yet his throat freezes up and he becomes incapable of getting a word out. There’s something about this place that makes him feel fragile: he thinks it must be the naked walls, without portraits, without electric switches, without gas knobs; there’s no doorbell on the outside to announce visitors. Comodoro sobs softly, trusting in the old man’s discretion; no one else needs to know about these tears he has such good reason to be spilling, because every death is sad, but saddest of all is the death of a fat person. Matus, you told us that there are people who fight with the enemy who share our values, Azucena says, we’ve got to invite them to come over to our side. Good idea, Azucena, get a piece of paper and write down what I’m about to dictate to you. She takes the supplies out of her schoolbag and says she’s ready. Esteemed Irish friends, Matus begins, and it takes Azucena half a minute to trace the four lines of the first letter. Give me that, Matus impatiently reaches out, my legs have rendered me unfit for hand-tohand combat, but not mind-to-mind. Esteemed Irish

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friends, for the love of our holy Catholic and Roman Church, we beg you most affectionately that you lay down your arms and join in the defense of the Mexican people. Ubaldo witnesses the drafting of the letter and protests. Cross out the part about laying down their arms; we want them with bazookas in their hands. Matus agrees to the observation and asks if anyone has anything else to add. Yes, Azucena says, you begin by saying that among equals, religion is the least part. Those are wise words, Matus says, we too like to sing and drink and start throwing punches at the slightest provocation. Put that in, then, as well, and add that there are prettier women in Mexico. He does this and signs off with the slogan religion, soul, and libation: one and the same nation. Add a PS, Azucena says, ask them to bring apples. The Irish eat potatoes, Matus explains. Have them bring well-cooked potatoes, then, because we’re about to suffer from a great famine. Matus copies out four identical texts and wraps them into balls around stones the size of eyeballs. Azucena rummages around in Ubaldo’s schoolbag until she finds the slingshot; then she asks where Comodoro is, this is a job for him. I saw him going out to the patio, Milagro says. Azucena goes to look for him and finds him stretched out in the dry pool, in his underpants, sunning himself. I’m very white to be a Mexican, he says. She grabs him by the ear and pulls him inside. At least let me put my clothes on, he protests, but her pulling becomes more intense. Your arms are the most robust ones, you’ll get the petitions into

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the hands of the Irish. Comodoro climbs up to the balcony reluctantly, red from the sun and the indecency of his underwear. Here, Ubaldo hands him the four projectiles, send each one to a different place, because we don’t know where the Irish battalion is concentrated. Comodoro pulls back the slingshot made from rubber inner tubes and forgets about his shame; now he is filled with great pride because his arms were the chosen ones. He’s got to be sure not to miss. He plants his naked feet firmly, the left one forward, the right one to the rear in a perpendicular position, he flexes his knees a little and straightens out his chest. He stretches his left arm forward, his fist gripping tightly the handle of the slingshot. He uses his right hand to pull the sling back. Now he has to decide on the exact point, the exit angle. He loosens his right thumb and index fingers, there’s a snap and the seductive message is off, from the Alamo to the conscience of Dublin, pray for us, Holy Mother, we are one and the same, on the cross and on the bottle, long live St. Patrick, let’s drink until we lose our way and wake up ready to run someone in with a saber if he says anything against our mother, if someone spits on a saint or refuses to share his alcohol, may equally tricolor Ireland come unto us and help this poor fat boy from being ashamed of his whiteness. With each shot, Comodoro tenses his arms as much as he can and holds his position for a few seconds; he dreams of volcanic biceps, overwhelming flanks, and a long black head of hair. Admire me, ladies and gentlemen, adore me, I am a

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Diana seeking to be immortalized in marble by the greatest sculptor. Cerillo is sleeping on the balcony. It’s no time for dreaming, Azucena says as she shakes him; at any moment the gringos will decide to assault the Alamo and it’s important all personnel be alert. He opens his eyes for an instant, yawns and points in a straight line to the mesquite-lined path. Azucena watches him lower his face, rest it on his right arm, and he’s quickly back asleep. It’s no use, she says, we’re going to have to make do without him, he’s been worse since that matter of the flamethrower. Matus approaches the balcony and assures them he can make Cerillo into the best of soldiers. He lies down alongside him and gently pulls his hair. Cerillo, listen to me, your mother wrote me a letter, in it she told me that one night the enemy entered her bed and forced her, do you understand? He forced her. Cerillo opens his eyes without a trace of sleepiness in them and pulls the trigger. The shot causes the rifle to recoil and fall from his hands. He picks it up again, stands up and, resting the rifle on the railing of the balcony, begins to empty its clip in whatever direction he thinks he sees the foul-smelling enemy wrapped in his mother’s sheets. Hold on, Cerillo, this is the time to keep watch, not to attack. But his ears hear no one. The detonations increase, with no quarter given, and with each one Cerillo’s body shivers and shudders; finally, after firing so many times, a response starts to come from the outside. The rifle of the enlight-

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ened ones is soon without ammunition and clicks. Matus takes Cerillo by the waist and leads him inside. Are you OK, my boy? Cerillo continues to pull the trigger until Matus yanks the weapon from him and shoves him toward safety. Both lean against the wall and feel the thud of the answering submachine gun against the adobe; some of the bullets come in through the windows and raise dust from the crumbling lime walls. Azucena runs up to them, thrilled, and begins to smother Cerillo with kisses; you made them shoot, she tells him, now they’ll kill us with bullets rather than starving us to death. The exchange of gunfire goes on for a couple of hours, sometimes sounding like the fireworks on a national feast day, and then stretches of silence come, in which Azucena visits each soldier to ask him if he’s alive, if he’s okay, if he needs for her to take care of a wound. Fatso Comodoro answers her that he needs nothing, leave him alone. More than once one of the enlightened, usually Milagro, stands before a window, lets off a shot, and bends over. The gunshots from the other side begin again for a few seconds. If one of us dies, Ubaldo says, we’ve got to immediately throw him over the balcony, because dead bodies transmit the plague, malaria, and homosexuality. Comodoro hasn’t fired his gun for quite a while; his clip is empty. He hasn’t recharged it because his head is telling him that no battle is worth being recounted for all eternity if all you can see is the valor of both sides; an indelible battle requires

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scenes that can pass from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, anecdotes that transcend the mere exchange of munitions, stories about the man who kept fighting despite the eight bullets to his body or about the brave soldier without legs who climbed the wall of the fort or about the kid who with his last breath blew up the dam whose waters would drown hundreds of the enemy. And that’s why I’m here, the illustrious Comodoro, the survivor of the Rio Grande, the survivor of piranhas, the young master of Condestable, and the favorite one of the Inmaculate Lady, I’m here to provide history with stories. He stops for a few minutes to meditate. I should do something, quickly, before the stronghold falls or the enemy surrenders; but his creativity is out to lunch and he can’t come up with a grandiose, sublime, heroic act, he can only engage in childish behavior to demonstrate his courage, so he goes out on the balcony and raises his munitionless gun with both hands. I am immortal, he yells, and he stands without moving, despite the thunder of enemy gunpowder, I am immortal, he replies and the townspeople gather in the main plaza once a year to commemorate such a heroic occasion, I am immortal, he raises his voice as much as he can and someone decides that they’ve got to add a stanza to the national anthem that will speak of the undying warrior Comodoro, and he would have repeated his cry for a fourth, fifth, and sixth time if it weren’t for the fact that he feels a stabbing sensation in his belly that makes him unsteady on his feet, twists his ankles,

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and topples him on his back, beaten down, done in, with no more ideas of immortality. They’ve killed Comodoro, Milagro shouts; but when he gets to him and looks into his teary eyes, hears his accelerated breathing and sees the buckets of sweat pouring off his matted hair and his struggle to say something he can’t, he corrects his report, this time without shouting because the new piece of news is not so dramatic, and he barely murmurs that he’s not dead, only wounded, with a bullet in his gut, the sort of wound no one dies from, not suddenly, because any wound below the chest allows for the arrival of a doctor, or at least it gives enough time to speak in a whisper with the beloved, to say something amorous to her, to arrange the details of the inheritance, ask for some water, say an Our Father and feel guilty for your sins of a lifetime; and if you’ve got a dog, he will show up to lick away your sweat and stretch out at your side, where he will remain for a long time even after your body has ceased to breathe. Comodoro is not dead, my friends, but that does not make him a miracle. Matus grabs the fallen by his wrists and drags him far away from the balcony and the danger of being finished off. Azucena rushes to his side with the idea of embracing him, although she changes her mind when she sees the blood stain on his shirt. Are you okay, Comodoro? He looks at her without replying. She raises her voice to ask if there’s a doctor in the house. As she expected, all she hears is silence, but

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she’s satisfied to have complied with her duty. We’ve got to see how serious this is, Matus says, we’ve got to turn the wounded over. They hold on to him on one side and turn him to his left until he’s face down. Comodoro groans without offering resistance. There are no bloodstains on his back. Bad sign, Matus says, there’s no exit wound. Milagro arches his eyebrows and understands how fat his friend is, he looks in astonishment at his ass and asks how they would have been able to impale him. When they get him back in his original position, they see that the ground is stained with blood and that the wound is covered in dirt. Didn’t anyone bring cotton and alcohol in their schoolbag? Matus asks, staring at Azucena, and since there is no answer, he adds, what, doesn’t a young lady like you always travel with a wad of cotton? She remains silent. In any case, you’re the one who’s got to take care of the wounded, Matus says, so take his shirt off, get some water and wash away the blood and dirt, and then immediately blow on it so it’ll dry. At that point Ubaldo rushes up and explains that they’ve run out of bullets. I left some in the kitchen, Milagro says. Ubaldo rushes down, and soon detonations from both sides can be heard, only for a few moments, because once again Ubaldo is left without bullets and this time, when he returns and asks where more are, all he gets in reply are shrugs. It no longer hurts as much, Comodoro says, I think I can go back to my post. Without ammunition, with someone wounded, with inferior numbers, Matus says, I think it’s best to negotiate

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a surrender, does someone have something white he can lend me? They look at Cerillo, sleeping with his mouth open, with his impeccable clothes and it takes them a while to bring themselves to raise him from his slumber. His other change of clothes is in his schoolbag, Azucena says. We’re never going to surrender, Milagro clenches his fists, if you want, lower your arms, declare yourself incompetent, beg the enemy for forgiveness, save your skin at the cost of your pride. We’re in it until the end. Ubaldo applauds his words, he knows that this kind of thing is said close to the decisive moment, before demolishing the bridge or blowing up the enemy laboratory, when all you can hear are some distant drums and a gentle trumpet. Matus thinks the time has come to tell them they’ve fallen into a trap, that they are still in Mexican territory; he is in agreement that they should forfeit their lives on the other side of the border, but to do so on this side would be a waste, they would go down in history as some rabble-rousing traitors, like rebels without a cause. Until a few minutes ago he had to give them the opportunity to be heroes; now with the gunpowder gone and a boy lying wounded on the dusty ground, the circumstances have changed. And yet, what seems to him most reasonable becomes unpronounceable when he gazes at the faces of the enlightened ones, the faces of those who have nothing to lose, of individuals who could sit down at a negotiating table and say agreed, we’re ready to sign off on our defeat, but in exchange for

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what? Matus knows he has to leave them alone: he has to go find a corner, give up his command, accept the fact that he cannot, nor should he, fire on the honorable army of Mexico. But they have the right to live and die and shoot wherever in the world their illusion tells them to, and thanks to a majority of votes we’re in the Alamo, and thanks to a majority of guts we must fight to the end, and thanks to a majority of illusions we have not yet lost because the St. Patrick Irish Battalion will not delay in getting here. We’re aware of how our situation is desperate, Milagro says, the munitions are gone, the enemy is all around us, the reinforcements have not arrived, we have a fallen soldier, another one is sleeping, and our general is requesting retirement. We’ve got to do one of those things that is done once in history. Do you mean burn down the Alamo and immolate us all? That’s not a bad idea, Milagro says, although I was thinking about breaking the blockade, escaping with our lives and regrouping in Mexico, and organizing another attack. Comodoro looks at him with tears in his eyes, he wished his mind was not so concentrated on the blood staining his shirt so he could then design a plan surely superior to the one Milagro’s about to propose, but with half his mind compromised by his wound all he can think of is a scene in which the enlightened ones have wings and depart by air; he doesn’t know why his are like an eagle’s, while Cerillo’s are like those of a hummingbird. There’s only one way to break the blockade, Milagro says, and he

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orders Azucena and Ubaldo to place the wounded and the sleeping in the cart. Comodoro knows that he must climb in on his own, so he goes over to the edge of the bed of the cart, sits down and rolls over to where the schoolbags and the blankets form a soft area. Azucena and Ubaldo arrive a few seconds later with Cerillo in their arms; they put him down softly, taking care not to wake him. Comodoro calls to Azucena with a whiny voice, do you love me even though I’m wounded? I thought you were going to take care of me, she tells him, I came along because you begged me to. Comodoro understands that the bullet to his belly put him down a notch; now the world is divided into the useful and the useless, and he’s a burnt-out lightbulb; the time will come to be thankful for the light it provided us, but for now throw it in the garbage. Cerillo wakes up and lifts his head; Azucena immediately goes over to rub his shoulders. It’s better for you to sleep, believe me you don’t want to see what’s about to happen. When I give you the order, Milagro says, open the door, then get on the cart, count to ten, and dash after me as fast as you can, straight ahead, without looking back. I’ll clear the way of enemy soldiers with my bayonet; you prick the mule because it’s going to have to turn into a gazelle to catch up with me. Then, once out of danger, I’ll climb into the cart and no one will be able to get us. Do you agree with my plan? Do you understand it? Matus looks at them with pride, what would have become of the fatherland with a dozen like them in other times? Now he knows that so much running around the city in his tennis

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shoes and shorts once again has a practical utility: he will be the final spearhead, he will run behind the cart to keep the blockade from closing, to give his troops a few seconds or minutes of advantage, running and running so he leaves behind not one Clarence DeMar but a hundred like him armed with something more than a pair of sports shoes. He approaches Milagro contritely, now he feels like a demoted general. If I may, I would like to offer myself as the rearguard, you open the door, and I will hold it to keep the wind or an enemy soldier from shutting it again. We can load the cart with rocks, Azucena says, I’ll drive and Ubaldo can throw them. That’s a good idea, but only a few, or the mule could end up with its tongue hanging out halfway down the road. Let Matus carry the package of tacks, Milagro says, he can strew them as he goes so the enemy can’t follow us on foot or in a car. Ubaldo fishes around in his schoolbag and hands the package to Matus, making a sound as though it were a bounty in gold. I’ll stay behind, Comodoro says, I’m nothing but dead weight. Milagro approaches him and looks at him stretched out alongside Cerillo, they’re two clay figures in a market stall. Your offer sounds reasonable, he says, but it’s too bad we already took the soldier’s oath and that obliges us to take you with us as long as you’re still breathing. Comodoro thanks in the silence the unknown author of that manifesto, although he knows that respect for the oath will last only as long as there’s a cart; a split wheel or a mule with a bullet in its head and who the hell is going to fling him over his shoulder? The axle is jammed, Azu-

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cena would shout, what are we going to do? And the order would undoubtedly come from Milagro: carry Cerillo and make sure Comodoro stops breathing, and immediately two arms would smash a colossal rock on his cranium. Azucena, Comodoro says, if you want to leave me behind, I only ask that you do not bash in my head. Move away from Cerillo because you’re going to stain his clothes and blood doesn’t come out. Comodoro tries to formulate a resentful reply, since they’re certainly making his blood come out, but he can’t come up with anything ingenious so he prefers to keep quiet. Nobody is going to get rid of you, Azucena goes on, so consider the idea of jumping out of the cart, that way the mule will go twice as fast and none of us will violate our oath because we won’t realize your sacrifice until we’ve crossed the river and set up camp at a rest stop, and while we’re roasting marshmallows on the campfire someone will ask: by the way, what happened to that guy Comodoro? And just then we’ll realize you’re gone and will look all around for you in vain until it dawns on us that at that very moment you are probably being tortured in some gringo barracks, and you’ll be thinking that it would have been better for you to die impaled among the piranhas. Comodoro’s lower lip is trembling just thinking about a gringo jabbing his finger in the bullet hole and scratching his liver with a long and dirty fingernail: Ok, Fatso, tell me where your friends are hiding. Azucena and Ubaldo open the doors full of bullet holes and Milagro observes the mesquite-lined road that separates them from freedom. He knows

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he should choose the straight line, even though only the circle will keep him safe. Bring me my gun, I feel so bold, bring me my bullets set to fire, bring me my knife, lo and behold, watch me combat and not perspire, won’t see me cry, won’t see me fly, nor shall I stop my trembling hands, till we have seized this Lone Star state, to make it home and fatherland. He crosses himself with one knee on the ground, stands up, breathes deeply, and wishes there were a photographer present to capture the instant in which he initiates his race. The instant in which Milagro undertakes his glorious onslaught, it would say at the bottom of the photograph, observe the strength with which he holds the bayonet, the veins of each muscle protruding, the decision on his face, the dashing stance that will inspire every forthcoming generation of Mexicans; observe also, behind our hero, the admiring gaze of Azucena and the resigned gesture of Ubaldo; observe, finally, on the bed of the carriage, the lamentable promontory of Fatso Comodoro, who is holding on high in his fist a crumpled Mexican flag. I’m a miracle, Milagro cries with his threatening rifle and bayonet as he dashes forward impetuously, I’m a miracle. And the enemy launches a barrage of bullets that miss their mark because Milagro, with his clumsiness and his shaking, jerks forward in a zigzag and provokes admiration for his evasive ability. I’m a miracle and Texas is ours and anyone who raises his weapons against the enlightened army be damned and let whoever put a bullet in Comodoro’s belly be damned a thousand times. Azucena and Ubaldo has-

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ten to climb into the cart and it’s only then that she realizes that she doesn’t know how to count to ten. The doorway allows for the entry of a blinding sun barely eclipsed by Milagro’s ever-smaller silhouette. It’s getting late, Ubaldo says, let’s get the mule going. Azucena smacks its haunches with a stick, but the mule fails to move forward, rather it startles back from the thunder of the gunpowder. I order you, Ubaldo deepens his voice, out of the humanity that lies in every animal, to move forward with alacrity and majesty. Nothing. The firing has stopped because someone giving orders on the other side has concluded that the kid with the bayonet is out of bullets, and as he draws closer, he also concludes that the kid with the bayonet is not a regular mortal. And Milagro continues to run and proclaim that he is a miracle, and threatens with his bayonet and comes over with the intent of breaking the enemy blockade until the blow from a fist knocks him to the ground. Comodoro doesn’t realize any of this because he’s closed his eyes tight to get his courage up and he imagines that the cart is advancing at the speed of a cruiser. When he thinks it’s just the right moment, or perhaps when he’s gotten up his courage enough, he decides to sacrifice himself so his friends’ lives are assured; he stands up and jumps with open arms shouting, Remember the Alamo. Matus sees him coming and decides it’s best to move aside. Azucena also doesn’t realize any of this, and she tries talking to the mule with affection.

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Cerillo will never realize any of this. It’s nighttime when they get them into the large metallic bed of a green vehicle. Wooden benches run along both sides, with no type of cushion, where the soldiers sit resignedly, their rifles resting on their butts and aimed toward the sky. Ubaldo counts seven rivals, plus two traveling in the cabin. Milagro also wants to count them, but he loses count because his hands are jammed into his pockets; there his fingers are trapped in fists and it’s hard for him to touch them one by one with his thumbs, nevertheless his hands are fine there, lessening the trembling of his arms, which can nevertheless still be seen. It’s not because he’s afraid, he would like to explain to his enemies, nor is it because of the cold. He’s seated between two foul-smelling types, with rough and scratchy uniforms, with helmets undoubtedly full of ticks. He sees Ubaldo up front, also between two of them, and Milagro makes signs to him and moves his shoulders to communicate with him; he wants to tell him that among so much military gear they never gave a thought to helmets, maybe if they had been better fitted out their destiny would have been different and now he would be sitting in the cabin of this vehicle, full of prisoners, attempting to decipher the procedure to start the motor. Ubaldo sees his companion’s gestures and understands them in his own fashion: we can take them on, we’ve got to eliminate them and flee. This is why he makes him a sign with his hand, wait, this is not the moment,

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let the vehicle start up and get going down an unmarked road and the enemy is dozing off; then we’ll steal their weapons and at gunpoint we’ll rescue the girl and Cerillo and jump down to freedom, and the ones who are driving will never know what happened until they get to their quarters and discover their companions tied and gagged in the bed of the truck. That is if Azucena doesn’t scream like all girls do, because he knows when the time comes to cast themelves from the vehicle in motion she will probably hesitate; he’ll take her by the hand so they can fly through the air together. The normal thing would be a slow fall with her screaming throughout the trajectory, but then there would be a change of plans because the men traveling in the cabin would hear her and stop the vehicle, and they would have to kill them, not directly but with grenades. Azucena only has a man to her right, because the cabin is to her left; her efforts not to cry are obvious. The vehicle pulls away and the group moves its body to one side in unison. Comodoro is not traveling with them, he was put into a van that departed immediately. Matus didn’t get on board either, and Azucena supports his version of events: he’s our leader, it’s only natural that they take him to an interrogation room. Or maybe he sold us out, Milagro says, maybe he informed them of our position, how many of us there are, the quantity and type of arms, and now instead of being interrogated he’s seated at a table with a red cloth, drinking wine and cutting a slice of ham. Shut up, Ubaldo orders them, haven’t

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you realized that the enemy has mastered our language? The pair of soldiers escorting Cerillo soon get tired of keeping him upright, seated in his place. Wake up, do you want some candy? Where’d anyone get the idea of bringing a kid like this to business among men with callouses on their hands? Help me, Vicente, one says to the other, and with great care they place him in the middle of the bed, next to their dirt-covered boots. Be careful, don’t step on him, and the one named Vicente takes his shirt off and makes a pillow for Cerillo’s head. I always wanted one like this, he whispers to his companion, and he gazes at Cerillo’s white shoes sticking up in the air, outside the bed, and he thinks, I hope the laces are tight. Ubaldo is humiliated by the fact that the soldiers haven’t tied their hands behind their backs, with an ankle cuff and a gunny sack over their heads, making breathing difficult, and that they don’t punch them in the ribs every five minutes. He can’t take his eyes off the pistol the man to his left has. He’s wearing it on his waist in an unfastened leather holster, in such an ostentatious fashion that it’s impossible not to fall into the temptation of going for it. And if he still hasn’t it’s because he hasn’t decided if he should grab it with a rapid or slow movement. Rapidity has the advantage of anticipation, but it’s uncertain as regards the details: your hand can end up completely wrapped around the butt, with no index finger left to close around the trigger, or worse, you can make a bad move and the pistol ends up on the ground,

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such that any soldier can place his boot on top of it; it fell next to you, Cerillo, grab it and finish them off, the kid opens his eyes and tries to find a more agreeable position in which to go back to sleep. Slowness, on the other hand, has stealth in its favor and certainty of movement. You can’t do it whenever you want, you’ve got to take advantage of the soldier’s distraction, his lethargy, his mind drifting off to the full-breasted woman who visits him through the fence at the military base; they start with kisses, caresses, and just when he’s unbuttoning her blouse, Ubaldo will have the pistol in his hand, with the barrel pointing at the forehead of some enemy, carefully exercising control over his words: drop your guns and close your eyes. If he doesn’t pull the trigger it’s because he’s heard that pistols have a safety lock, and it would be mortifying to produce a click rather than the thunder of gunpowder. Azucena and Milagro grab rifles and now they can go on with their plans, or better yet, he will knock on the window of the cab to ask the driver to stop. The enemies will all soon be face down on the ground, with their hands behind their necks. Before escaping, he’ll ask what hospital they took Comodoro to; he doesn’t expect an immediate reply, so he’ll threaten to kill the lot of them, one by one, until they talk; after placing the first one against a tree and taking aim at him, one of them will weaken, okay, you win, and he will give the name, address, telephone number, and he will swear by his mother that he does not know the room number. Ubaldo doesn’t need that many details, he

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knows that it’s easy to distract the receiving nurse to find in her papers Comodoro’s exact location, and he’s seen how easy it would be to rescue him if you hide him in a dirty laundry basket. He decides how he’s going to get hold of the pistol: with a chameleon-like movement, slow in its approach and then rapid in the final stretch. He pretends to scratch his crotch as the starting point for then moving his hand to his thigh; he continues by lifting it up over his waist and, when he’s about to dart it toward the pistol, the enemy soldier turns around and slaps him. Sit still, he tells him, and he returns to his relaxed position, without even snapping the holster shut. Ubaldo is humiliated by the fact that he’s not bound and gagged, but he’s even more humiliated by the slap and by the look on Azucena’s face: she can’t contain her laughter. The green truck comes to a stop and the enlightened ones arise from their lethargy. Where’s Cerillo? Azucena asks. Who? one of the soldiers says. The one dressed in white, Ubaldo replies, the one wearing a light blue tie and lying on the floor. The soldiers look at each other with surprise, then accuse each other of not paying attention, blame each other. One of them runs over to where the vehicle came from; perhaps the accident occurred in the final meters and they can find him where he fell out, with a bump on his head. Cerillo became a ghost and disappeared, Azucena says. And he’ll come to punish all of you,

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Milagro adds, pointing to his rivals with a trembling finger. A soldier strikes him on the back of his neck with his open hand and tells him he’s in a military base and he can only speak when ordered to. Comodoro grips the back of his bed and refuses to be operated on without first seeing Azucena. The nurses attempt unsuccessfully to reason with him; they discuss using force or sedating him. Why don’t we let him have his way? one of them proposes. After all, Dr. Azael Delgado has not arrived and the operating room isn’t ready yet. The two soldiers who brought him remain in the doorway. Who’s Azucena? one of them asks. She’s part of my army, Comodoro says, you can easily recognize her because of her beauty. The commentator on the radio announces that the prizes will be awarded to the winners of the two-hundred-meter dash. He speaks about the winners, two gringos and an Australian, about the times, which were good but without breaking any world records, and then he announces that they will observe two minutes of silence out of respect for the national anthem of the United States, which they are about to hear. Matus gets up and shouts from his cell, gripping the bars like a common criminal, turn that thing off, change the station. The guards look at him with sarcastic smiles. One of them goes over to the radio and turns the volume up. Matus covers his ears with his hands once he hears the first six notes, but he still can’t stop the sound, and he drops

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his hands because he accepts that the ear is submissive, it hears what it wants to and what it repudiates, what a woman whispers in bed and what the neighbor lady shouts to her kids; the ear awakens in the morning because a motorcycle rider decides to go down the street. Blessed are the eyes and mouths that remain shut, the touch that is evasive, the nose that can be pinched shut. When the music finally stops, Matus collapses again on his cot. The commentator is talking about the two colored Americans who climbed barefoot up onto the podium, he speaks about how they lowered their heads and each raised a fist wearing a black glove during the national anthem. Matus bursts out laughing, poor boys, it’s one thing to use Jesse Owens as propaganda against Nazi racism, and it’s something else when a couple of blacks want to denounce homegrown racism. He feels sorry for them, although he knows it would be impossible to win them over with drink and song. Captain Argüelles comes in with a friendly gesture. He approaches Matus’s cell and greets him. The last time we had a prisoner here it had to do with a woman. The wife of a sergeant was seeing a lieutenant, and as you can imagine it wasn’t the lieutenant who got locked up. Matus looks at him without saying a thing, until the captain exchanges his expression for a serious one. I’ve got good news for you, he says, I’m going to let you go. It seems like you chose the best time for your adventure, because with all that’s going on in Mexico City what we least want is for the army to continue to attract attention. We are not after peo-

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ple with ideals, like you and your kids, we are only attempting to maintain order. Do you understand me? Matus shrugs his shoulders. It would be best for you to forget that you were jailed here, forget that you saw us and everything we talked about, and above all else forget the gringos. Think about how we saved your life, because if you’d crossed the Rio Grande you’d find yourself in a coffin, and you can be sure no one would be talking about a heroic militia that set out to recover the fatherland but rather a group of illegal workers looking for a job, some starving bastards who were riddled with bullets by the police for attempting to rob a hacienda. Matus grits his teeth, he’s not uttered a word about invading Texas and he asks himself which of the enlightened ones must have sung; he guesses it was Comodoro, because a bullet to the body softens your character, especially when you find yourself surrounded by doctors who are injecting you with serum and drugs. He puts his shirt on without buttoning it. And Cerillo? he asks, disheartened, are you still looking for him? The ones we’re looking for are the real guerillas, but if we find your little soldier, we’ll give him back to you safe and sound. You have no open accounts with the army, but it remains to be seen if the parents of one of those kids files a complaint with the civil authority. We’ll turn over to you their schoolbags and other possessions, which contain nothing banned by our laws, nothing that threatens the general peace. Matus puts his feet into his boots without lacing them. Can I go? It’s not that easy, Mr. Matus, we’ve still got to take care of the

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question of the dead guy, we’ve still got to see what or whom we attribute it to. What dead guy? No one told you? Captain Argüelles replies, and Matus prays that it was the man who was about to celebrate his birthday. Tell Matus that a bullet didn’t kill me, but that it also wasn’t my status as one of the enlightened ones because he knows it wasn’t my turn yet, but how, after staying until victory, can I return defeated to this swamp-filled world that I attempted to leave behind; how, after having conquered the Alamo, can I be reduced to picking up ashes and cigarette butts and empty beer bottles and to losing my freedom even to cross the street; how, after having taken up a rifle, can I be willing to take a smack on the head, an order to return to the institute, a box of crayons to draw trees and cats and clouds and suns and houses always with chimneys; how can I listen to more stories about little chicks that want to be kings with the only goal of informing us that even chicks attain things we can’t, because where is my crown, where is Matus’s medal, where is the monument to Cerillo, where are the gowns of Baroness González, where is the real story of the indomitable enlightened army that terrorized its enemies with bloodthirsty chavalry charges, where are the maps of the Mexican Republic with the border inland from the Rio Grande? I won’t accept it, I have lost the will to be like other enlightened ones, I won’t allow them to humiliate me for nothing, for the domino tile I don’t know how

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to play, because I didn’t know how to duck before the other side’s artillery, because of my triple layer of fat, for my pants all worn out in the crotch? Not after having dedicated myself to a task in which I offered my blood, not after having been greater in spirit and guts than all the others who will want to judge me, classify me, condemn me. So long, Comodoro, Azucena says, blessed are you with the bullet in your belly. Azucena sees them taking Comodoro off down a white hallway on a bed with wheels. A nurse comes up and offers her a piece of candy. I heard what your little friend said, but don’t worry, his condition is not serious, it’s a routine operation and Dr. Azael Delgado is the best surgeon in the city. Azucena goes down the stairs until she reaches the first floor. She finds a lot of chairs there, the majority of them occupied by people who are waiting. She supposes that this is her job: to wait. She settles into a plastic chair and hands the piece of candy to a child who is staring with curiosity at her. In the chaotic files of the Regional Hospital of the city of Monterrey, a medical report can be found that was signed by Dr. Azael Delgado, duty physician, from which one can piece together the following information: the patient Comodoro arrived at the institution with a bullet wound with an epigastric entry point. The bullet split into two fragments, one of them lodging in the transversal colon and the other

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in the hepatic tissue. Both of them were life-threatening, for which reason the possibility of removing them in separate operations was discarded. The procedure lasted a little more than three hours and was complicated by the thick layer of fat that had to be dealt with in order to reach said fragments. An illegible sentence follows in the report, in which the only recognizable word is anesthetic. At the end of the document, in a different handwriting, there is a note to the effect that eleven units of type O negative blood were required. Azucena will never talk to Matus again, she has no intention of revealing to him Comodoro’s words because she was the one to see him fall at the Alamo, she saw him cry in pain, she saw the blood staining his shirt; she knows that her husband will not leave her a widow out of anger over their defeat, for not having brought them back to a place where they assemble twenty-four-piece puzzles and on Fridays get to take a piece of bread from the basket; she knows full well that her husband died from a bullet wound, which kills, equally, a national hero or a drunken troublemaker. There’s a complaint dated October 15, 1968, in the files of the Judicial Police of Nuevo León. In it, Mr. Luis Evaristo Dávila Sánchez reports that his ranch house, located in the area of the El Perico district, town of Anáhuac, was vandalized by unknown individuals. The damage done to the building included

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multiple bullet holes that impacted the front of the house, broke glass, and shattered the wooden doors and windows; one of the interior walls also had a drawing of an adulterated Mexican flag with an imperial chick instead of an eagle, which, as he understands, is a federal crime. It’s obvious that the complaint went nowhere, since the major part of the damage was caused by the Mexican army itself. One can suppose that Dávila Sánchez made it under the advice of a lawyer: that way you wash your hands of any responsibility, you explain that you did not turn your property over to those rebels. The document, nevertheless, is useful for placing the enlightened ones, who were still some forty kilometers from the border. In this case, the river they crossed must have been the Camarón Creek, which is now dry most of the year. In the account of the damage, Dávila Sánchez does not mention the bed reduced to ashes. Ever since Matus found out about Comodoro’s death he imagined his burial in a gray and rainy setting, not a drizzle but a full downpour with thunder and lightning that muffled the crying and the praying; nevertheless, the sky is blue and the sun beats down without pity, as if the city had not lost the most valiant of its sons. Matus and Román go in front of the coffin; Santiago and an employee of the funeral home in back, because Ibáñez refuses to take part. Comodoro gives his life for his country

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and he doesn’t even earn the gratitude of four pairs of arms to bear him. So how can Cerillo’s mother expect a statue for her son? Just like the others she will wait in vain for a brief paragraph or even two lines in chapter 8 of the history of Mexico textbook. A portrait of the five enlightened ones next to that of the boy soldiers of the Mexican-American War. Tell me, teacher, who was Fatso Comodoro? Who were Cerillo, Ubaldo, and that individual named Milagro? Matus imagines himself once again in school, now with receptive students who admire him unstintingly, without complaining to their mothers. And he devotes special attention to teaching them about the sacrifice of Fatso Comodoro, who kept on shooting until the rifle melted in his hands; and he spins out the legend of Cerillo, and says that where he fell there is a walnut tree as solid as a rock; that woodsmen have destroyed more than one ax attempting to fell it, until, vanquished, they decided to build an altar around the roots; and before he speaks of the other soldiers, a student interrupts him: teacher, who was Azucena? Don’t tell me that our national history includes another woman and not just Doña Josefa? And Matus, who now signs his name as General Matus, knows that it’s time to give Azucena her place of privilege, the first page of an episode dedicated to women. Doña Josefa is in history because it’s crucial to make a place for women, even though in the end she was nothing more than a meddlesome old lady who ended up doing nothing, and only God knows if it was her inclination to gossip that condemned

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the fathers of the country. For that reason she will be left out, we don’t need her anymore, just like we don’t need Margarita Maza de Juárez, another useless woman who only represents the white woman defiled by the Indian. Now Azucena can be the one to fill these fundamental pages so that no one can say that history is only made by men, and it’s Azucena’s profile we will see on the five-cent coin. I can’t go any farther, Román says, and they look around for a tomb to set the coffin down on. I’ve heard that the dead weigh less than the living, but Comodoro contradicts the law. I’m sure it’s because of the lead he’s still carrying inside him, Santiago says. I can ask for help, the employee of the funeral home says, who acts like he’s in a hurry to get back to the funeral home. Please, Román says, my back is breaking. Matus look reprovingly at his friends. What would be normal would be a procession of hundreds or thousands of mourners taking oneminute turns as honor guards, and hundreds of words of admiration recited by friends, politicians, and union leaders, with a sepulchre on which you cannot cast any dirt because it’s filled with flowers; what would be normal would be to not be in this cemetery in Monterrey, but in the capital, in the rotunda of illustrious men. But Matus is not interested in lamentations, the mere fact of finding himself resting on this unknown grave is a triumph, because after an extended exchange of words with Captain Argüelles he was able to save Fatso Comodoro from the unmarked common grave they had set aside for

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him at the military base. He never thought he’d have to debase himself in this fashion; Matus spoke softly, he promised the captain that everything would be discreet, with no announcement in the newspapers nor invitations over the telephone; he lowered his head every time he said please, there’ll only be the four of us needed to carry the coffin. Captain Argüelles pretended to think it over, because Matus knew that the decisions were made by a superior whose face he never saw. I’ll give you an answer later, he said, and later the answer was affirmative. All right, the captain agreed, but we’ll be keeping an eye on you. That’s why when the employee of the funeral home tells him that he found two guys to help them, that it would only take a minute because they were praying for their deceased mother, Matus knows that they’re two soldiers sent from the military base to ensure the discreetness of the burial. Talk about the soul of the departed, Captain Argüelles said, and avoid patriotic speeches. The two guys arrive and they take the coffin by the front, the heaviest part; Matus and the employee take the other end and start the procession. Just so they won’t feel useless, Santiago and Román steal fresh flowers from some of the niches. When they reach Comodoro’s grave, two gravediggers are waiting for them. They have removed the cover and unroll a pair of leather straps that will be used to lower the deceased; even though they’re dressed like workers, Matus nevertheless distrusts them and thinks that they’re two disguised soldiers.

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It was a pleasure to be of assistance, one of the two guys says, if you need anything else, we will be saying a few more prayers at my mother’s grave. Matus gives them a cynical smile and only because he’s not completely certain, out of the remote possibility that they might really be visiting their mother’s grave, he refrains from spitting in their faces. He wishes he had questioned the funeral home’s procedures; perhaps he could have requested that the burial be later, at dusk, so that the pale light of the moon could have produced the effect of old historic photographs, something that could dignify such a charmless event, since the present never accords either substance or grandeur. The present seems to him simple and banal. In one of those presents, the teacher at the institute scolds Comodoro because he’s throwing crumbs, or Matus scolds him because he doesn’t put the tile down just right. And when Comodoro becomes part of the past, tile and bread are of no concern; what’s important is the bullet in Comodoro’s body and his faded breath because, yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this warrior wanted to ennoble the fatherland, he dreamed that he was ennobling it. The present minimizes, since a man does not go forth to explore the world because his wife asks for money for household expenses; the young do not sign up for the army because they have a test in geography tomorrow; history is not taught because it is worthless for adding and subtracting; a wife doesn’t do what in any event she would never do because she’s got to fetch the vegetables. The demands of the present have nothing to

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do with history, Matus tells himself, and Fatso Comodoro is the history of Mexico in four volumes, from the fall of Tenochtitlán to the present. Leave me alone, Matus requests, and he kneels down at the edge of the grave. It wasn’t in vain, Comodoro, the Alamo is ours, Texas speaks Spanish and the gringos are still running and hiding, trembling under the wooden beds. The fatherland salutes you, Comodoro, Mexico sleeps soundly today, safe from vultures. Blessed be you, soldier. He gets up and joins his friends. He doesn’t stay to see the workers set the cover of the tomb in place. Rest in peace, Fatso Comodoro, young master of Condestable, invincible bean; rest in peace with your eyes firmly shut against the eternal darkness because we didn’t have a glass cover. Dear Señor Matus, perhaps you know that my husband died ten years ago, or perhaps you did not get this news in your barbarian country. Although we never answered your letters, you were always in our minds, more than we would have liked, since after 1924, every time Clarence ran the Boston Marathon he was competing against you. He used to tell me that he not only needed to win against all the participants, but against Señor Matus as well. Sometimes he called you by name, sometimes he referred to you as the Mexican or the runner from Monterrey. Clarence was a runner his whole life, people called him Mr. Marathon, and he won seven times in Boston, where the course is more demanding than the one

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in Paris; there’s a steep incline at the end known as Heartbreak Hill, and I assure you you wouldn’t endure it. History says that no Mexican has ever won in Boston and I know that none will. I’m telling you this because, no matter what you have accomplished in your life, you never did as much as my beloved Clarence. He ran his last marathon in 1954, at the age of seventy-five; then he got sick, a cancer that filled his insides with worms. One night, prostrate in bed, he told me: if the Olympics are held someday in Mexico, send Señor Matus my medal. I never knew if he was joking or if he was delirious; there was no time to find out because he died the next day. So, I’m obliged to comply with my husband’s last wish. Enjoy the medal, enjoy your false triumph, enjoy the empty place in my display case; tell your friends, if you have any, or your wife, if somebody ever loved you, to call the newspapers, let’s see if they’re interested in the comic book story of a washed-up man, because I haven’t the shred of a doubt: if you’re alive, you must be a miserable old man, unable to cross a finish line one last time with your arms in the air. Here you are, Señor Matus, enjoy your third-place medal, raise your cup of cheap liquor. Affectionately, Margaret DeMar Aren’t you going to open the box? Of course I’m going to open it, Matus says. Mrs. DeMar’s ironic words are unimportant; this medal is mine, it always

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has been. He slowly folds the letter and puts it back in the envelope. He stares at the box on the table, the leather exterior, the golden clasp, and asks himself if the original medal is within or if Clarence’s wife, in her resentment, has decided perhaps to send him a replica, or not even a replica but a medal she got at some trophy store, after all the stupid Mexican won’t catch on and for him all that glitters is bronze, and at this point Matus realizes anyway that he has no idea of what the medals handed out in Paris look like, and he has no other choice but to open the box and trust in the integrity of that woman whom he does not know nor ever will, who sends her affectionate regards that are anything but affectionate, to trust, for the first time in his life, someone born in and residing north of the Rio Grande, to trust a woman named Margaret whose greatest merit would have been making Sunday pancakes for her church’s fair and applauding from the sidelines her husband’s steps. Let’s see, dear Margaret, if you are worthy of my trust. Matus opens the box; there is no snap of the clasp nor any creak from the small hinges, and behold: there is the enormous coin with the image of two naked men, one on foot, the other seated on the ground, shaking hands, and below them the Olympic rings. Matus would have expected there to be a hole at the top for the ribbon to go through, he would also have expected the ribbon to be blue. Santiago turns the medal over. Both of them admire it briefly and agree that they prefer this side. Sporting equipment is portrayed: balls, a discus, a small hammer, a

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javelin, a puck, and other unidentified implements; there’s the word Paris and the number 1924, there are not two homosexuals clutching hands. Matus says to himself that it’s authentic, that Margaret had not tried to fool him. Although he can’t identify the bronze, he can see that it’s not gold or silver. I waited forty-four years and I receive it, thanks to the instructions of a dead man, someone who can’t be more than crumbled bones beneath one of those simple gringo headstones in a cemetery that’s green in the summer and white in the winter; here lies Clarence DeMar, who came in fourth in the Paris Olympics, he let himself be passed by a Finn, an Italian, and General Ignacio Matus, who in the end, displaying great courage, resisting pain, delivering orders to legs that were unable to go on, passed in front of the American competitor considered the favorite by so many, and succeeded in shaving off a twenty-four-second advantage to come in third. Ladies and gentlemen, long live General Matus, long live that great sportsman who came from Monterrey, who gave our country its first medal in an Olympic joust. Matus raises his arms and Santiago picks up the medal. It is for me a cause for pride and satisfaction to award you this precious token that through the diligence of your legs and the valiant struggle of your heart you will wear for the rest of your days, for your personal pleasure and for the prestige of your country. Since there is no ribbon, Santiago offers it to him between his thumb and forefinger, as though he were giving alms to a beggar. Matus crosses his

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arms and refuses to take it. No, he says, forty-four years is a long time, and I must demonstrate to the world that I am still worthy of such an important recognition. The telephone rings several times but Matus has no desire to answer it; if he believed that it was the woman who gives the time of day he would pick up the receiver. Hello? Who’s speaking? It’s 12:30, it’s 4:15, it’s 10:00 on the dot. A voice that neither questions nor reproaches nor threatens, only capable of articulating 720 replies to the same question, what time is it or what’s the hour, or any such variant which is, in the end, the same thing, and Matus can’t think of a question that does not refer to the time and whose reply that woman could provide. He drinks the last of his beer and shouts to Comodoro. Bring me another bottle, Comodoro, why didn’t you answer the phone, Comodoro? If you weren’t so fat the bullet would have entered and exited and you would be alive and I wouldn’t be alone and early tomorrow I would take you by the hand to the institute so you’d learn some rhymes and choke on jello, so the teacher would repeat to you that you’re not an idiot but still treat you as though you were, frightened because one day you went to war instead of reciting that grape begins with a g. The telephone rings again, eleven rings before it stops. It doesn’t seem strange to him that the telephone was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, an age of tyrannies, when no one could dream that the device might

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announce itself with the soft sound of a harp, it had to be overwhelming, destroy your nerves, be able to stop a game of dominoes, a conversation, an act of love; you could more easily ignore the screeching voice of Arechavaleta’s mother. Metal striking metal would be enough for me, a single blow, a sound like the one that will come in a few weeks, months, or years from Comodoro’s tomb. His body will be eaten away until it releases the bullet that killed him; it will fall with a dry sound of lead against the wood and scare some bugs that have made Comodoro their home. They’ll be the only ones to hear, because the sound will not be loud enough to escape from the tomb and be heard by a widow who is passing by and thinks that there must be a child down there trying to get out. I’m Fatso Comodoro, get me out of here, I asked for a glass tomb. The telephone starts ringing again and Matus gets up because the sound is stealing his imagination. He decides to go to the kitchen for another beer. And what if it’s the woman who tells the time? What if for the first time she breaks with her routine and calls me? Mr. Matus, it’s 8 or 9 or 10 and I love you and excuse me for always having been so abrupt with you, it’s 11 and I want you in my bed, it’s 12 for the rest of our lives, 12:01. He runs to the phone and picks up the receiver. After a few seconds of silence he asks what time is it? A few more seconds and it’s 10:15, a female voice says, softer and more hesitant than usual. Are you the woman who tells the time? I just told you what time it is, Mr. Matus, I’m Cerillo’s mother. Matus’s first impulse is to

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hang up: he’s thought a lot about the time when he’d speak to this woman, but he still hasn’t worked out a coherent, worthy explanation. He would like to turn into the male who tells the time, never to answer any more questions from military men or mothers or the enlightened, unless he can answer them with the time. It’s 10:16, he tells the woman. I know, she says, and I also know that three of the children returned to the institute, I found out that Comodoro will not be coming back and I suppose my son won’t be either. Matus leans against the wall and relaxes his legs so that he ends up sitting on the floor. I’m not ready yet for the details, just tell me if Cerillo fell like a hero. Matus thinks that the verb to fall has another meaning for the woman, since for him it evokes the moment when Cerillo fell out of the military vehicle as it was bumping down the road; he imagines starving coyotes savoring that sobbing and immobile piece of flesh dressed in white who wanted a lullaby and got chewing teeth instead. Yes, ma’am, there has rarely been seen so much valor in a combatant. The conversation ends and Matus leaves the phone off the hook. It’s 10:17. There’s a lot of night left for Cerillo to fall hundreds of times, for Comodoro to be perforated by infinite shrapnel. Dr. Azael Delgado’s medical report also failed to mention that when they thought the anesthesia had taken effect and they were preparing to make the incision, Fatso Comodoro took a cucumber out from his gown or some fold of skin and bit into it noisily.

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A nurse hastened to yank it out of his hand. In the end no one asked about what to do with the body, since everyone in the hospital knew the procedure. The question from the nurse was what do I do with the cucumber? Dr. Delgado shrugged and said I don’t know, throw it in the garbage or eat it. The nurse placed it on top of the pile of refuse, bloody pieces of gauze and cotton balls and sutures, and she didn’t know why the vision of that gnawed cucumber upset her more than the fat sheet over the operating table. Azucena has spent the day shut up in her room; she hasn’t wanted to eat or watch television. Her mother is in the living room having coffee with some friends. She’s talking about her daughter’s latest whim. She asked me for a black dress, she says she wants to wear it every day for a year. The women smile. One of them drinks her coffee and says that such a pretty girl shouldn’t wear sad colors. Mr. Matus, now I’m ready for all the details. He would never have thought that this conversation would take place by phone, he imagined it would be in a restaurant, in a chapel, on a bench in a deserted park at night, and yet he prefers it this way: she’s a few kilometers away, with no other choice but to hear his voice, no fuss; maybe some crying, but minus the tears, perhaps angry but without wounding glances, perhaps furious responses without the possibility of using her fingernails or slapping him. The

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details are painful, ma’am, are you sure you want to hear them? Isn’t it enough to know that Cerillo was valiant? I don’t need a war to know about bravery, Mr. Matus; now I want to know his story. You have the obligation to inform mothers of the fallen about the facts, especially since you didn’t even return his body to me, because my imagination might be worse, an imagination that sends everyone fleeing to save their skin while my son remains in his smelly trench firing until his ammunition is gone; then he falls prisoner and is tortured to death without uttering a word, it’s all to protect a group of cowards who ran off with the first bursts of fire. Of course, ma’am, I only hope you’re not standing. Matus sets the receiver down while he goes to the kitchen for a bottle; he returns to the telephone and unhurriedly takes two drafts. Are you still there? There is only a huff from the other end, enough for Matus to begin. We crossed the Rio Grande without incident, in general Cerillo was at the head of the convoy, he had won this position due to his sharp sight and his always attentive senses. He had besides demonstrated that he was the best sharpshooter in the group, since Milagro’s hands trembled, Ubaldo was very impulsive and fired before taking aim, and Fatso Comodoro sweated so much that his vision would be cloudy. I’m telling you this because even though Cerillo’s attributes are very much appreciated in a soldier, they also cost him his life, since it fell to him to assume the most dangerous missions. He takes another pull on the bottle and closes his eyes. Are

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you still there, ma’am? and there’s another huff for a reply. After forced marches, starving, dying of thirst, and exhaustion, we came within one hundred meters of the Alamo, and we hid ourselves in an abandoned house from where we could mount our decisive assault. The plan was very simple, but yet not without danger; your son had to climb up to the roof to reconnoiter the land leading up to the doors of the Alamo; we would precipitate ourselves like arrows toward the door that General Santa Anna opened many years ago and, if any gringo showed up, Cerillo would wipe him out with a bull’s-eye shot. The problem was that we would be leaving a soldier behind, even if it didn’t mean abandoning him. As soon as we had entrenched ourselves in the Alamo, the roles would be reversed, then we would cover from the balcony Cerillo’s race toward his comrades. The first phase worked out perfectly, and we saw a number of the enemy fall before us, but the gunfire was not discreet and quickly aroused the entire North American military base. If I’d had radio contact, I would have notified your son of a change in plans, I would have had him go into the mountains and do the work of a partisan and eat acorns for as long as was necessary. It was impossible for us to communicate with each other, and someone like Cerillo is made to respect orders. He’s my son, the woman interrupted, and I raised him to obey. There was an exchange of lead for several hours, and although their casualties could be counted by the dozen, fresh and ready and better-equipped brigades were arriving by

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the minute. And one of them showed up equipped with a flamethrower. Azucena put her hands over her face and began to pray; and I, ma’am, if my aim had been the one needed, I swear to you that I would have shot your son between the eyes, after all he had complied with his sacred duty and a general distinguishes when the better part of valor is to execute his own people. No sooner did he see this man coming but Cerillo left the roof and ran down into the abandoned house, most certainly having decided to reach the ground floor, exit to the street, and shoot his way through a breach. Too late. The man with the flamethrower fired at the door and you could see tongues of fire emerging from all of the windows. Seconds later Cerillo appeared. There was no white left on his little white suit and the rubber soles of his shoes gave off a thick smoke. He walked with the rifle still in his hands, taking slow steps, his hair already gone and his eyes looking like the only things left intact, two eyes that no longer blinked. He continued advancing toward us and in part he accomplished his objective because we soon smelled the burning flesh, but the opposing general was little interested in the honor or the human effort, and gave the order for a second blast of flames. The soldier went wild with Cerillo, he emptied his tanks at him, and by the time the fire went out, all you could see on the ground was what’s left of a campfire after a day in the woods. The battle continued and your son would have been carried off by the wind, and now his ashes are part of that land that you and I know

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is Mexico. I feel better now that I know the truth, Mr. Matus. I want you to know I hold no grudge against you for giving that mission to my son; and if there’s no body, what are we to do? Luckily I took some photos that last day, of him looking like a real man with his neatly combed hair. Now I can love his photographs, especially the one where he’s waving goodbye to me through the institute fence, and I will be able to auction off his toys at one of the London houses. Yes, ma’am, now let me have some peace, I’ve worn myself out as much recounting this story as living it; your son burned up again, and again I lost a soldier. Just tell me something else, Matus, did you tell Cerillo what those gringos did to me? Yes, ma’am, I told him just before I left him alone on that roof. Then, I was there too, the woman says and hangs up. Matus takes another drink and goes for the worsted bag that Cerillo used as a schoolbag. He sees his underwear there, the mint-flavored mouthwash, the white polish for his shoes, the talcum and baby cream; he also finds, laundered and well pressed, the second white uniform. He takes out the pale blue bow tie and and fastens it to his own collar. I’m an agile and quick-witted soldier, I’m the son of an extraordinary woman, I’m the most unfortunate of creatures. He kisses the bottle until he finishes the last of the beer. No music is needed for him to spend the rest of the night dancing. The bronze medal is currently in the possession of the Monterrey Sports Museum. They do not exhibit

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it publicly; it’s kept in its box in a drawer in the basement. A cardboard label says simply: Ignacio Matus, marathonist, 1903–1968. An old man brought it in some time ago, the director explains, and told us that a friend of his, this Matus, had won it in the Paris Olympics for coming in third in the marathon. The medal seems to me in bad taste; the ones they’ve given out since Amsterdam up to the ones in Mexico are much better, all the same, designed by an artist from Florence. Asked if this is the reason she doesn’t have it on display, the director smiles. I’m not running an art museum; my decision is strictly based on sports. She explains that the Mexican delegation that participated in the 1924 games returned empty-handed. We sent sixteen competitors, she says, and none of them ran the marathon. There were four individuals registered for the cross-country run, and the four stayed in the hotel because the temperature seemed very hot to them. In the end only one Mexican competed in the long-distance race, the ten thousand meters, and he came in well behind the flying Finn who won, because at that time the Finns won all the races of fifteen hundred meters and more. I don’t know why our government sent such a pack of losers so far. If you’re going to lose you might as well stay home. The director of the museum lowers her voice when she says: I’m sure the medal belongs to Johnny Weismuller; we know he won a bronze one in water polo in the same Olympic Games, and as you know he died an alcoholic and out of his mind in Acapul-

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co. No question that the old man who brought it to us hung out on the beach there and got it in exchange for a bottle of whiskey; then he made up the story about his friend Matus coming in third in the marathon, but all you have to do is read the official report to know that no one named Matus competed for Mexico, and that the third place in that race went to the American Clarence DeMar. A lawyer is doing the paperwork to formalize the medal as the property of the museum and as soon as he gives us the papers we’ll put it on display. I’ve already had a showcase made with the photographs and the biographical information for Weissmuller. A lot of people will come to see it because it has to do with such a famous gringo--many more people than if it really belonged to a runner from Monterrey who’d won it in Paris on the strength of his legs. Matus empties Cerillo’s schoolbag. He hangs his white suit from a nail sticking out of the wall, where years before there’d been a mirror. The window is open and every now and then a breeze comes in and ruffles the light blue string tie and puffs up the short pants and shirt a little. Matus wonders how much he’d have to pay for a mannequin the size of the clothes or if it would be a good idea to ask someone who makes religious images to carve him a holy child, also in Cerillo’s size. A new game of dominoes, which Santiago bought to replace the one with the missing Immaculate Lady, is lying on the floor. Is that really what you

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want to play? Matus asks. Román shrugs his shoulders. You go to war, you race in the Olympics, but we watch the clock. They got up from their chairs a while ago and have made themselves comfortable on the floor. A bottle is making the rounds among the three; one of them takes a drink and passes it to his companion on the left. Santiago puffs on his cigarette and stretches out on the cool floor tiles. From where he is he can see Cerillo’s ruffling string tie. We can use that in place of the blue ribbon for your medal, with any luck it was made in France. Matus picks up the box of dominoes, opens it and spreads the tiles out on the floor. After Ubaldo’s revelation I don’t want to have anything more to do with this game, he says, we were all in agreement about the order in which the tiles were to be played, we coincided in our decisions. Of course, Román takes a drink before going on, that shows we’re experts. Matus gets up and takes down the white suit, he places it against his chest; he imagines a Matus from the past, small, running in London holding on to Dorando Pietri’s hand. It’s dawn, the city is submerged in a dense fog and it’s impossible to find the finish line in so many empty winding streets. Don’t worry, child, Dorando comforts him with a breaking voice, maybe we’ll find it on the next corner, if we turn right or left; we’ll find it before they disqualify us. When you’re clumsy, Matus tosses the suit on a chair, you can choose between various plays, but when you’re an expert you know what the right play is, there’s no choice or alternative, the game has

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been decided since the tiles were distributed, and that’s what’s called chance. Ubaldo never said that, Santiago picks up the double fives and puts it back in the box. For years we’ve played odds and evens, Matus says; we do it only because tradition says that dominoes is a man’s game, a game for getting drunk and assuming that you’ve got to be smart to play a tile. Comodoro was right, smart people break the rules and play whatever tile they want. Time passes in silence. The three of them take small sips from the bottle, until the phone rings. Matus’s first reaction is to look at the clock. Who’d be calling after midnight? As soon as he picks up the receiver, he recognizes Luz’s tired voice. When are you going to come for your little boy? I’m sick and tired of him, you’ve got to bathe him in oil, wash his clothes just right, fasten his buttons, comb his hair with gel, wipe him every time he goes to the bathroom, and all he wants to do at night is suck my nipple. The line goes dead and Matus goes over to the chair where he tossed Cerillo’s white suit. He covers it with kisses and, above the collar, as though there were a head there, he caresses the void over and over again. Azael Delgado? The best surgeon in the city? Dr. Bernardo Coindreau makes himself comfortable in his chair and laughs out loud. We went to medical school together, and no one knew how he got his degree; some say it was because of strings he pulled, that he was the nephew of an important government

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official. He worked for a while at the military hospital at the end of the sixties, but they fired him for his shoddy work. I never heard from him again. Matus parks on the corner of Juventino Rosas and Ángela Peralta, as usual he’s driving the car Román has lent him. I know we’re near your house, can you tell me which way to go? Cerillo sticks his head out the window and smiles. Sit up straight, did they ever tell you about the kid whose head was chopped off by another car? Matus turns left on Ángela Peralta and he sees that his passenger’s smile is beginning to fade. He never could figure out the sort of language Cerillo used to tell his mother about the invasion of Texas, but perhaps he can use his smile as an indication of how close they are. So you’ve already forgotten about the small-town nipple and you want to go home? He returns to the corner and stops. He turns on Juventino Rosas and advances slowly, just enough to make out that Cerillo’s expression has lost intensity. He backs up again and this time turns on Ángela Peralta going the other way. Immediately the smile turns into laughter, and before they’ve gone a hundred meters Cerillo grabs the door handle. Let go of that, you don’t want to fall again like you did from the truck, and I can’t make up another story for your mother about a flamethrower because one of the neighbors will tell her she saw you broken and bleeding in the middle of the street. He parks the car in the first place available and turns off the engine. Come on, he says, take me to your mother.

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He takes him by the hand and the two of them walk along the sidewalk past three houses. Cerillo stops full of anticipation in front of the fourth one. Matus checks the boy’s hair and straightens his shirt collar, as white as the day they set out. Although the tie is loose, he doesn’t tighten it, he doesn’t want to suffocate him on this warm evening. He rings the bell and hears someone running to answer the door. The face of a young man appears and all Matus says is good evening. The face disappears and a few seconds later Cerillo’s mother appears with a fork in her hand. Matus repeats his greeting, now with the pride of someone expecting applause. Cerillo skips around a little bit as if doing a tap dance; he doesn’t go to his mother, he stands on the sidewalk, squeezing Matus’s hand. The moment never comes that Matus had projected, a scene of hugs and tears. Cerillo stops dancing. The woman finishes opening the door and takes a step back. You deceived me, she yells, unconcerned about attracting the neighbors’ attention, he’s alive, he’s more alive than when you took him away. She drops the fork on the ground, Matus understands that he has caught them eating dinner, but what does it matter if some beans get cold, he wants to talk to her about Cerillo’s heroism, point to the burns on his face from the flamethrower. You tricked me, my son is alive. An uproar comes from inside the house together with some off-key singing. Cerillo grips Matus’s hand harder; Matus pulls it away. He pushes the child by the shoulders toward the door, toward his mother, and leaves with-

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out saying goodbye. Damn you, the woman shouts, she picks up the fork and throws it into the street, he’s alive and dressed in white. The singing increases in volume. Matus climbs in the car and, without looking in the rearview mirror, roars off at full speed. He feels the need to flee faster than he would if a regiment were hot on his heels. Fatso Comodoro, tomorrow is the day of the race. Forty-two kilometers in Mexico City. There’ll be gringos and Finns and Latin American hopefuls; there’ll also be Africans from Kenya, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania, and, of course, Ethiopia. I’ve got my runner’s uniform, my tennis shoes, Comodoro, but perhaps I’ll wear a military uniform because the Olympics are another war where you also bet on life and the pride of nations is in play. Fatso Comodoro, patron saint of the marathon runners, pray for us. You can sometimes see a bald and disheveled individual in the house at Tapia 406. He insults the people going by from inside the grates on the window, no matter whether they’re men, women, or children. The owners of the house are relations of his and they apologize and are embarrassed and they lead him to the interior of the house; they put him in bed and cover him with a blanket of synthetic material even when it’s summer. Don’t move, they tell him, and they turn the TV on to keep him entertained. The guy somehow manages to return to the window the

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next day and resume his insults. An old lady who lives down the block says she’s gotten so used to his shouting that she doesn’t even hear him. The poor guy has been that way for many years, since he was a child. The one who’s most bothered by the situation is the owner of a notions store on the corner; he insists that it scares his customers away. The bald guy yells at us that we’re cowards, not worth a penny, while he is precious, because he fought for our country. He yells that he’s a miracle. A few things haven’t changed in forty-four years, Román says: the same chronometer, the same pistol, and the same runner. The chronometer is working like a marvel, the pistol only makes a metallic click, and we’ll see if the third one is still able to cross a finish line. There’ll be no doubt this time about the moment when the starting shot will come, whether it’s punctual or delayed by two hours and twentythree minutes, because the radio that’s turned on in Román’s car is receiving live the details of the Olympic marathon. The announcer affirms that this race has become the private property of Abebe Bikila, who today plans on winning his third consecutive gold medal; he mentions the names of the Mexican competitors and announces a commercial break. Imbecile, Matus shouts, the runners can start off in the middle of a soap advertisement. Santiago calms him down, there’s still a minute to go, Matus, plus the time the judges add if the sun hasn’t gone down. Then after a shirt ad the voice on the

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radio announces the start of the race in the same tone that is used at the horse track. Matus begins to run and Román starts the chronometer. Santiago acts surprised and it takes him a few seconds to pull the useless trigger. This time the route has been flipped: the starting point is at Piedras Negras railroad track and the finish line for the race will be in Monterrey. When they reach Villa de García, Matus will trace a four-kilometer circle that he designed so that the finish line would not be in front of the cathedral, as the traffic has increased in the city since 1924; and this time, rather than jokes coming from the passersby, he would find cars threatening to run him over and red traffic lights. He placed the white banner serving as the finish line twenty meters short of the cigarette factory, next to the train tracks; a few meters from there he would come to the first dangerous crosswalk, one of the first ones to have a stoplight. Although he’s wearing a tank top, he is not dressed like a runner: he’s wearing military boots and an olive-green pair of pants. Forty-two kilometers, Matus said that morning, exactly the distance we fell short of reaching the Rio Grande; that’s why today I’ve got more at stake than the athletes in Mexico City. They will reach a finish line; I will conquer a territory. Matus’s steps are short and unsteady, like those of a racewalker. He marches free of worry, he knows that there are no gringos among the favorites, no heir of Clarence DeMar; and this time all he needs

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to do is to cover the distance to receive the medal, it doesn’t matter if he comes in last, the physical condition in which he arrives doesn’t matter either. No one can ever claim he doesn’t deserve the bronze medal hanging from his neck. Once again I’ve got the disadvantage, he’d said to Santiago. Whose idea was it to schedule a marathon for 3:30, as though they hadn’t learned the lesson in Paris? The temperature might be agreeable in the capital; here the sun is going to fry me. They’re running at an altitude of two thousand meters, Santiago replies, maybe that’ll erase the advantage. Matus recognizes that the circumstances are equivalent, but now that he thinks about his skinny legs, slow and dried out, he concludes that the runners that by now will have departed from the Olympic stadium have years of advantage over him. According to what he read, Abebe Bikila is the oldest of the group, and even with him there’s almost a thirty-year difference. This time they don’t accompany him on horseback, but in a car; they will not follow alongside him the whole way because the terrain can’t be traversed and because at this speed the motor will quickly overheat. They’ve agreed to meet at every point where the tracks cross a street or highway; that way Román and Santiago will give him news about the advance of the competition and they’ll offer him water. So long, Santiago says, we’ll meet up in Villa de García, and he steps on the gas. Matus doesn’t reply, he’s concentrating on his stride, he tries to make out

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any of the seventy-six runners who left him behind, far behind. In the society pages for October 20, 1968, the same day as the marathon, there’s a photo of Arechavaleta: he’s wearing his dress uniform from the Colegio Francomexicano and, as always, he looks haughty and his hair is all slicked back. Gold medal, the headline says, and the text explains that a jury composed of teachers from different institutions agreed to award him first place in the school Olympics, as this outstanding student recited without stumbling and with patriotic fervor the first five articles of our Constitution. There was, nevertheless, an instant in which the future leader had to fall silent, when the audience interrupted with their applause the conclusion of the third article. Halfway through the news item there is a phrase from the president of the jury, who asserts that what our country needs is more citizens like Arechavaleta. A breeze kicks up the dust between prickly pears and thistles. Matus thinks the setting is a long way from the charm of an Olympic route, and perhaps he could compare it to where the Africans train. Nevertheless Matus isn’t there, in the Monterrey desert, but in Mexico City; at this very moment he is accompanying one of the runners who is advancing through anonymous streets, with potholes, with the aroma of tortillas and chiles and communal bathrooms, streets lined with hawkers and shouting

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women and flags with five rings, alongside monuments to heroes without ideals, very different from the enlightened army; but at least there’s room to run. If one day the Olympics take place in Monterrey, they would have to build a traffic circle measuring a kilometer around; the imposing statue of Fatso Comodoro would rise up in the middle. Very good, gentlemen, forty-two turns and one hundred and ninety-five meters, on a 13th of July, at 40 degrees centigrade. Upon the completion of the first half hour, Matus reaches the highway to Villa de García. He sees Román’s car off to one side. He feels calm, no pain, his breathing is not heavy; he knows his speed will not make him pant, but he can’t go any faster, not at his age. After all, today he’s running an endurance race. Santiago tenders him a sponge bathed in water. Matus takes it and drinks from it; then he squeezes it over his head. He turns to the left onto the highway to begin the four-kilometer circuit. Román starts the car and follows behind his friend. Thirty-three minutes, he sticks his head out the window and tells him, and I’ve got some bad news for you: Kenneth Moore, from the United States, is in first place. He’s followed by a Belgian and a Mexican. Matus is huffing; he knows that this time the gringo will beat him irremediably, he’s not after him but another one of the runners. Román turns the volume of the radio up. It looks like Abebe Bikila is off his game this afternoon, because he’s not even

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among the front-runners, but what should interest us, dear listeners, is that the Mexicans are doing a great job. This is followed again by ads for soap and shirts, and Matus asks his friend for a favor: if the gringo remains in first place, run over him with the car. With pleasure, Román says and makes his sixcylinder engine roar. Seconds later the commercials are over, and with a voice of alarm the announcer says esteemed listeners, a tragedy has just occurred, the North American athlete Kenneth Moore was run down by a drunken driver who appeared out of nowhere, with the result that the Mexican Ignacio Matus has taken the lead. The traffic light has three colors, the teacher says. Does anyone know what red means? A hand goes up with the index finger pointed up at the ceiling. What does it mean? she repeats, and a voice from out of the blue answers that yellow is like the sun or like urine or like old pages or the hair of a Swedish woman or the dress . . . The teacher interrupts and explains that she is not talking about the yellow light and she’s not looking for comparisons. I’m asking what red means, and it’s important for you to know, it’s a detail that can save your lives. The same voice from a few seconds before speaks of blood, of some cars, other dresses, and tomato juice. Once again the teacher interrupts and, when she sees no hands are raised, she directs her question to the face that she thinks is paying the least attention. Tell me,

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Caralampio, what happens if you’re going down a street and the traffic light turns red? He looks at the picture the teacher is showing, the rectangle with the three colored circles, and is sure he knows its meaning, how many times have they told him about the traffic light? Almost as many times as they told him about the trunk of the elephant or the vowels you use to shout. He crosses his arms, holding them as tight as possible, and leans his head forward on the table. He knows his life will take place at an eternally red intersection, and he hates the teacher for not doing a review of the vowels, right at this moment when he needs them so badly. The gringos are falling behind, Santiago informs him, and Abebe Bikila has already dropped out. The news cheers Matus up and, although it’s imperceptible to his friends, he knows that he’s sped up his pace. I’ll beat the Rome and Tokyo champions, and I’ll also beat anyone who, no matter how young he is and how many trophies he has, lacks the tenacity to cover this distance, and of course at least one gringo will fall, overcome by a pain in his knee, or by a grating ankle, or by a knotted leg: pains that in war would be nothing, that would never have defeated Fatso Comodoro. There are dozens of pictures of a dead fat boy hanging on the walls of Ubaldo’s bedroom. In some of them you see the body just lying down, in others there’s blood or mutilations: in all of them, the eyes

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are crosses. Ubaldo’s mother is worried about her son’s new artistic phase, which is why she’s torn up some of the pictures, the ones she calls the bloodiest, and she suggests he return to his days of drawing rabbits and cows and trees. He refuses and spends hours admiring his letter-size masterpieces. He feels a special pride in the one that shows Comodoro stretched out face down in a bloody pool of water; hundreds of colored fish swim around him or nibble on him, and a stake emerges from his behind. His hands and feet are those of a skeleton; his cheeks are purple. In the center, over the waters, Cerillo hovers like a dove. A little before the midpoint Matus receives more water and more news. The winner has come in, Santiago informs him, once again from Ethiopia. Matus smiles to himself. Another Ethiopian: undoubtedly, just like Bikila, another military man under orders from his emperor, another military man who wins his stripes by running for his country rather than defending it. The terrain is flat and the car can runs alongside the tracks for a few minutes. Santiago is seated next to the window ledge and is calling out more news. Mamo Wolde is the winner’s name, and a Japanese with an unpronounceable name is about to come in. Matus anxiously awaits the arrival of the third-place winner; he can consider it a triumph if there are no gringos on the podium. Michael Ryan, Santiago tells him, and Matus waves his hand as though asking the

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public to rise to their feet: a senseless sign for that moment, but he can’t get any words out, he’s only got enough breath left to breathe. Román finally understands. Matus wants to know where he’s from. New Zealand, Santiago shouts, and Matus smiles despite the pain he’s feeling in his left ankle. He read someplace that marathon winners become heroes as a consequence of the many hours devoted to training; the day of the race, on the other hand, the heroes begin to arrive after four hours. Today, Matus says to himself, I’ll be a hero. In the course of the following minutes a Turk will come in, two Brits, another Ethiopian, another Japanese, a Canadian, and two runners whom Román simply identifies as Europeans. Shoulder to shoulder a gringo and a Mexican come up to the finish line, Matus picks up his pace when he hears this news and he has no doubt as to who’ll get there first. Román stops the car because the road is broken by an electrical substation next to the tracks. The tone of the radio commentator is neutral, no one gets excited by the arrival of more runners, and his words regarding the recognition of the effort and the determination of the sportsmen sound scarcely sincere; he barely raises his voice when the second Mexican comes in in twenty-sixth place. The number of ads increase and Santiago asks himself when they will break off the transmission. He can see the bobbing head of Matus through the front window; it’s after 6 p.m. and the sun is casting shadows into infinity.

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Román turns up the volume when an Irish runner comes in, one Michael Molloy, with a time of two hours and forty-eight minutes. Matus’s Paris time would have given him forty-first place. The runner slowly disappears into the distance. Román opens the medal’s box and contemplates it under the afternoon’s reddening sun. And with the time Matus is going to do here, he says, he wouldn’t even take the false bronze. Farther along they will tell Matus about the Irishman’s time, and he will see himself reaching the finish line alongside him, singing, drinking, praying, and he will know that the messages shot out by Comodoro did reach the glorious St. Patrick’s battalion. Wearing a gown, Cerillo is lying face down on a wooden table in the living room of his house. His mother strikes five notes on the piano with her index finger and turns around to face him. Ave María, she mutters through clenched teeth, Ave María, gratia plena. Cerillo tries to smile and only succeeds in twisting his lips. His mother abandons the keyboard and puts her hands over her face. It’s almost nine at night and Matus is approaching the finish line. He didn’t doubt for a minute he’d make it because at his age pain is no longer an obstacle; what in the past seemed to him a cramped thigh is the thigh he wakes up to every day. At his age, to give in is the same thing as dying. Perhaps

The Enlightened Army

he feared that he would dislocate a knee, but he still might be able to drag himself or jump on one foot. He’s no longer running, Santiago says when he sees him go by, he’s not even walking. Matus has stopped pumping his arms, he holds both of his fists close to his chest, one next to the other, as though he were carrying a rosary in his hands. He crosses Gonzalitos Avenue which puts him four hundred meters from the goal post. That point is the marathon gate, now all he has got to do is greet the public, throw kisses, and complete a turn around the tartan track. Did the Tanzanian come in? Matus asks. Can’t you see him? Román says, he’s right at your side, if you don’t pick up the pace you’ll be the last one in. Don’t disappoint the public that’s shouting your name and the name of your country. Matus uses a burst of energy to straighten out his stride; his speed increases very little, but at least he now looks like a man in full. Román as well as Santiago know that the runner from Tanzania came in almost two hours ago, also limping his way in, amid the fraternal applause of those who had the patience to wait for him, among bored judges, yawning, wishing he had dropped out halfway through so they could all go get a beer. Nevertheless the lie is necessary, they’ve got to get Matus to increase his rhythm because they can make out far down the line the light of a locomotive and what they can hear is not the ovation from the public but the whistle that warns of its crossing through another intersection, one that Matus left behind a few minutes ago. They climb into the car, and San-

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tiago, once again seated next to the window, yells to him to speed it up, he can’t let a feeble African leave him behind in last place. Matus knows that several runners already dropped out of the race: Abebe Bikila dropped out before the halfway point, a Mexican barely made it past the tenth kilometer, and a Finn was the first to give up, as though to show that Mexico is not Paris and that the world is not what it was forty-four years ago. Altogether nineteen athletes have fallen, among them two Latin American hopes; but I’m no longer competing with those who throw down their weapons and ask for amnesty at the first cramp or blister or hemorrhage or sign of exhaustion, because someone who gives up on a marathon shows that he has no idea what a marathon is all about, no matter how many medals he has on his résumé. Hurry it up, Matus, run, fly, because the black man from Tanzania is catching up with you. And Matus recognizes, two hundred meters in front of him, the broomstick with the cloth banner: the finish line five hours later, forty-four years and a war later; the finish line and the definitive triumph over Clarence DeMar, my dear Clarence, stiff in his grave without a cross; the goal post and Comodoro jumping down from the cart to offer himself in sacrifice because we’ve got to break the siege and recover the Alamo and our honor, and long live the enlightened army that gave us the fatherland and dignity; the finish line and the bronze that is likely not worth all that much. Run, Matus, fly, because the black man from

The Enlightened Army

Tanzania is nipping at your heels and the feeble black man from Tanzania weighs tons and roars and squawks and gives off smoke as black as his skin; run, Matus, it’s the least you can do because Azucena is holed up in her room and Ubaldo now draws dead boys and Milagro yells eight by eleven, forty-two, always forty-two, your eternal distance, the distance of man; and run, Matus, because Cerillo sleeps motionless dressed in white next to a sobbing mother, and he no longer slobbers, he has become a white tile Comodoro brings out at the right moment to win the game. Run, Matus, fly like those Finns of the past. Only one hundred meters left, Román or Santiago shouts or the two of them together, and one of them shows the bronze medal hanging from the light blue ribbon. Look, Matus, your trophy, your immortality for the wars you have won and the kilometers you have run, your perpetual remembrance of the Alamo. The spell works and the runner on the train tracks turns into an agile boy, from time gone by and with an enlightened expression, and he’s pumping his arms with elegance, breathing rhythmically, and lengthening each stride with his knees rising high in the air and his chest thrust out, down the streets of Paris and Athens and London and Rome and Mexico; and despite the strident whistle of the locomotive and the screeching of metal, Santiago and Román will later swear that above all else they could hear the laughter of the immortal runner from Monterrey, the cackle of that Ignacio Matus, who

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kept his elbows up and showed his fists and bore his rifle and commanded his troops toward that white flag and dead-eagle finish line, toward that frontier, so unreachable, absurd, and eternal as the Rio Grande.