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Antonio
On the third day of his life, Antonio Borjas Romero was abandoned on the steps of a church in a street that today bears his name. No one could be sure of the precise date on which he was found. All that is known is that every morning, a destitute woman would sit there, always in the same spot, put down a gourd bowl, and hold out her fragile hand to the passersby on the parvis. When she first set eyes on the infant, she pushed him away in disgust. But her attention was suddenly caught by a little shiny box hidden in the folds of his blanket, which someone had left with him as an offering: a tin rectangle, its silvery surface engraved with fine arabesques. It was a cigarette rolling machine. She filched it, put it into the pocket of her dress, then lost interest in the baby. But she noticed during the morning that the infant’s timid wailing, his hesitant cries were so endearing to the churchgoers, who thought the two of them were together, that one by one they soon filled the bottom of her bowl with copper coins. When evening came, she took the baby to a farmyard, stuck his mouth to the teat of a black goat whose udder was covered in flies, and kneeled under its belly to make him suckle the thick warm milk. The next day, she wrapped him in a kitchen towel and hung him at her hip. After a week, she started saying that the child was hers.
This woman, whom everyone called Mute Teresa because she had a speech impediment, must have been somewhere in her forties, although she herself was incapable of giving her exact age. There was something Indian about her face, and on the left side, a slight paralysis caused by an ancient fit of jealousy. She carried nothing more than spongy skin on her bones, her hands were covered in sores that never healed, and her dirty white hair fell flat beside her face like the ears of a basset hound. She had lost the fingernail on her left thumb when a scorpion hiding in the back of a drawer had stung her hand one day. This did not kill her but formed a kind of sausage of flesh at the end of her thumb, a dead growth, and it was that flap that the child sucked before falling asleep during his first weeks.
She named him Antonio, for the church where she found him was placed under the patronage of Saint Anthony. She fed him with her own rage, with her silent pain. During his first few years, she had him lead a disorderly, shameful, indigent life. She convinced herself that if he should survive this misery, no one other than himself could kill him. At one year old, he could barely walk but could already beg. At two, he spoke sign language before he could speak Spanish. At three, he looked so much like her that she started wondering whether she had actually found him on the church steps, or might in fact have brought him into the world herself, in the backyard of a hovel, in the hollow of a hay bale, between a gray donkey and a lamb. She dressed him in filthy rags, and, to gain sympathy from the passersby, would hold him tight in fake tenderness, drenching him in acrid sweat that the heat turned into a kind of greasy yellow gelatin. She fed him goat cheese rolled by hand, slept with him in her shelter made of faded newspapers at the back of a makeshift sheep pen, and perhaps no woman ever showed so much courage in looking after a child she did not love.
Nevertheless, for Antonio, this lying, miserly, scurrilous, and thievish woman was the best possible mother to whom he could aspire. He took the roughness she showed him and the venomous love that poverty had woven between them to be tenderness. He grew up with her at La Rita, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, in a place that was so dangerous that it was called Pela el Ojo, “Keep your eyes peeled.”
When Antonio turned six, he no longer believed in miracles but sold jet pebbles as lucky charms and knew how to read cards, for Mute Teresa was adamant that this was the only science that people could be convinced by without it having the inconvenience of being true. When he turned eight, she taught him to recognize the crooked aguadores, the water carriers who sold dirty water from the lake passing it off as clean rainwater. But also the grocers who tipped their scales with a bent paper clip, the workmen who resold screws from the formwork on their building sites, and the trainers who, in the cockfighting pits, hid razor blades under the claws of the roosters’ spurs. She had prepared him for this hard life, full of caution and necessity, of battles and suspicion, to the point that if a pastor suddenly announced during mass that a saint had burst into tears, Antonio was the first to raise his eyes to the church ceiling to see where the water leak was coming from.
In those days, Pela el Ojo was a kind of vast swamp crushed by the heat, with damp shores populated with little houses on stilts whose doors were always open. The dwellings were erected over that murky water, with open-air kitchens, blackened old stoves, and floating trash cans that the city had dumped on its outskirts. Bread was baked there, fuel was trafficked. The children lived naked on the boards, moving over this skeleton of thousands of tree trunks, which were constantly being patched up, wading on the surface of the lake as did the palaces in Venice, a sight which had made the Venetian navigators of long ago, arriving with their fragrances of vellum and sealing wax, say that they recognized it as a “little Venice,” a venezziola, a Venezuela.
However, the immobility of these landscapes no longer conjured dreams of the ancient cities of the Caribbean, of Tamanaco and Mara, populated with women dressed in cotton gowns and mantles embroidered with gold, or young men whose chests were covered in fine silver dust, or newborn babies swaddled in jaguar skins. It was no longer a vision of a nation before all nations, of men dressed as eagles, of children who spoke with the dead and women who transformed themselves into salamanders.
At the time, it was no more than a township lacking in poetry, with roofs of hot palm fronds and teenagers wearing sandals cut out of old pickup-truck tires. The hovels were built from the hoods of old Indiana Trucks, the window handles from tin cans, the chair seats from aluminum posters for Shell. And since the rains were torrential and the palm-frond roofs needed to be protected, people bought old advertising billboards for Chevrolet, stolen at night along the highways, so that all the cladding of the shacks in the shantytowns, where people who could not drive slept, carried the words: “No happiness without Chevrolet.”
Those rains, which were called palo de agua, often made the lake swell and burst its banks. The water flooded the plain in slow advances, drowning the countryside. The downpours could lash away continuously for forty furious nights, covering the fields with dead parrots, and when the tide reached the farms and submerged the crops, thousands of crayfish swam up from the gulf into the cornfields and enjoyed an underwater banquet that decimated the entire year’s harvest in two weeks. People cursed the crayfish in Maracaibo as they cursed the grasshoppers in Egypt.
It was in this world that Antonio grew up, fishing on the lake, swimming through the pondweed and the mangroves. His diet was composed only of catfish, white-fleshed stone bass, blue crabs, and giant freshwater shrimp, to the point that Mute Teresa started to believe, in her most intrepid dreams, that Antonio would grow gills and start breathing underwater. One day when he was eleven years old, he put his hooks and lines into a bag, went to the village dock, and stole a canoe. Some children saw him and snitched on him. It did not take long for the owners of the vessel to appear in the distance. These were the rich men of La Rita, those who held power, those whose word was law on that side of the lake: Manu Moro, a tall fellow more than six foot seven, as wide at the waist as he was at the shoulders; Hermès Montero, an agitated little man who was red with anger; and Asdrubal Urribarri, a mixed-race man with green eyes and a clubfoot, wearing a white undershirt and waving his arms with a napkin in his hand, as if he had hastily stood up from the table.
“Antonio, I recognize you!” he shouted. “Come back here!”
On the shore, they were pacing furiously back and forth through the trash littering the beach, casting impetuous looks at Antonio as he paddled away. Asdrubal Urribarri disappeared, then came back again with a rabid dog with foaming jaws, which he threw into the water. The dog swam to the boat as if possessed and with an ease and energy that surprised everyone, climbed onto the boards and sprang at Antonio’s neck. But Antonio had time to dodge it by jumping overboard and escaped by swimming against the current. The dog followed him, letting the boat float off to the horizon as Asdrubal yelled, “The boat! Don’t let it get away!”
The dog persisted in its chase, barking feverishly, biting the waves, growling like mad. Antonio redoubled his efforts, dove underwater, and disappeared. After half an hour, when he felt a strong cramp pull at his thigh and his arms started stiffening with pain, he realized that the dog’s barking had softened to whining, to the wails of the shipwrecked, and after a few minutes there was nothing but its little nose poking out of the water. It was only when the dog properly started to drown, yapping like a puppy, that Antonio decided to slow down. In a last gasp for survival, the dog caught up to him, and instead of biting him, eagerly clasped his shoulders. It was six in the evening. The owners of the boat, holding leather straps and belts, were watching keenly from the shore.
“You’ll get tired in the end,” they shouted. “We’ll be waiting for you here.”
Exhausted, with the dog on his back, Antonio let himself be carried by the current until he arrived at Punta Camacho, and resigned himself to waiting for darkness before getting out of the lake. Night fell only half a mile farther on, at Puerto Iguana, and when at last he was camouflaged by the light of the moon, protected by the darkness, he swam up to a little dock and ran, accompanied by the dog, toward the gates of Camino Real by the free pathway that led to Pela el Ojo.
As he was sighing with relief at the familiar sight of the lights of his hovel, reassured to have arrived home safe and sound at last, he got a sudden fright when he saw the silhouette of Asdrubal Urribarri, with his limping gait, talking to Mute Teresa, still waving his napkin and gesticulating wildly. Although Antonio was about to faint with exhaustion, he thought it was too dangerous to show himself. He found a solid palm tree, climbed up to the top, and waited for the night to be over.