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By Root 1116 0

“What’s more, she’s pissing all over herself.” It was true: the wife of the economist-historian (who had crossed La Colmena and disappeared amid the crowd milling about outside the doors of the Bolívar bar) was leaving a yellow trail behind her. When we reached the corner, I had no choice but to pick her up and, a gallant, spectacular cynosure of all eyes, carry her the remaining fifty yards, amid drivers honking, policemen whistling, and people pointing at us. The little Mexican lady writhed violently in my arms without letting up for a second and went on making faces, and my hands and nose told me that she was probably now doing something worse than urinating. From her throat there came an atrophied, intermittent sound. On entering the Bolívar, I heard someone curtly order me: “Room 301.” It was the important man, half hidden behind some drapes. The moment he’d given me that order, he made off again, heading nimbly for the elevator, and as we went upstairs he did not deign to look at me or his consort even once, as though he did not wish to appear to be intruding. The elevator operator helped me carry the lady to the room. But the minute we’d put her down on the bed, the important man literally shoved us to the door and slammed it in our faces, without saying either thanks or goodbye: there was a sour look on his face at that moment.

“He’s not a bad husband,” Pedro Camacho was to explain to me later. “He’s simply a very sensitive person with a great fear of looking ridiculous.”

That afternoon I was to read a story that I’d just finished, “Aunt Eliana,” to Aunt Julia and Javier. El Comercio never did publish the story about the levitating kids and I had consoled myself by writing another one, based on something that had happened in my family. Eliana was one of the many aunts who appeared at our house when I was little, and she was my favorite because she brought me chocolates and sometimes took me to tea at the Cream Rica. Everyone used to make fun of her fondness for sweets, and at our tribal gatherings there was much tongue-wagging about how she spent all her salary as a secretary on gooey pies, crusty croissants, fluffy sponge cakes, and thick chocolate at the Tiendecita Blanca. She was a plump, affectionate, jolly, talkative girl, and I used to come to her defense when people in the family would remark to each other behind her back that she was going to be an old maid if she didn’t watch out. One day Aunt Eliana mysteriously stopped coming to visit us and the family never mentioned her name again. I must have been six or seven years old at the time, and I remember being suspicious of the answers I got from my parents when I asked about her: she’d gone off on a trip, she was sick, she’d be dropping by any day now. Some five years later the entire family suddenly appeared in mourning dress, and that night, at my grandparents’ house, I learned that they had been to the funeral of Aunt Eliana, who had just died of cancer. I then learned what the mystery had been all about. Just as it appeared that Aunt Eliana was doomed to be a spinster for the rest of her life, she had unexpectedly married a Chinese, the owner of a grocery store in Jesús María, and the whole clan, beginning with her own parents, had been so horrified by this scandal—I had the impression at the time that what was so scandalous was the fact that the husband was Chinese, but I have now deduced that his principal taint was that he was a grocer—that they had decided to pretend she no longer existed and had never visited or received her from that day on. But when she died they forgave her—at heart, we were a sentimental family—attended her wake and her funeral, and shed many a tear for her.

My story was the monologue of a little boy lying in bed trying to unravel the mystery of his aunt’s disappearance, and, as an epilogue, her wake. It was a “social” story, full of anger against the parents and their prejudices. I had written it in a couple of weeks and talked about it so much to Aunt Julia and Javier that they finally capitulated and asked me to read it