Abandoned On the Street That Will Bear His Name

An excerpt from The Dream of the Jaguar by Miguel Bonnefoy

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.

The stars were enormous in the sky, and the world seemed flooded with silt. A group of men started tracking him. At the top of his palm tree, Antonio cried, not out of fear but out of rage. Alone and chilled by the wind from the lake, disturbed by the rustling of the fronds from which he had dislodged two rats nibbling at stalks in the crown, he took two hours to fall asleep while listening to the frogs copulating, and in his dreams he confused their croaking with men’s voices.

He was awoken in the early morning by blows from a stick on his feet. He looked down to see Mute Teresa. She had searched for him all night in every shrub, in every sea grape tree along the shore, in vain. The dog, against all expectations and unbeknownst to its owner, had led her to him out of gratitude at having been saved from drowning. Mute Teresa put two cornmeal arepas and some grated cheese on a napkin on the ground. In her restricted language, she signaled for him to stay up in the tree for another night, maybe two, for Asdrubal Urribarri was keeping watch around their shelter. Antonio hunched over in anger.

“One day I will be a man, and I will no longer be afraid,” he said from the top of the palm tree. “I’ll teach him who’s boss.”

But Mute Teresa did not answer. Seeing him perched up there in that tree, hidden away and forgotten by every­ one in the desolation of the world, she felt a pain in her soul, for she could conceive of no other future for Antonio than one as a street ruffian, born in the wrong place, dragging his loneliness until his death in the miserable rum joints where only vagrants and delinquents stray, desperate men who expect nothing from beauty and no longer know whom to die for. She imagined him as one of those brutes who was looking for him, who wanted to beat him, those nasty, arrogant men, raised on the lake’s violence and by miserly fathers, whose hearts were thorns without a flower. Worse still, she imagined him like herself, living a life of disasters and frustrations, sitting on the steps of a church holding out a bony hand to strangers, ruminating on the humiliations and errors of her youth, having survived a childhood with no home nor refuge, with no love nor protection, a childhood when no one had taught her how to live.

That was the reason why, three days later, when everyone had forgotten the incident with the boat and Antonio was able to return home, Mute Teresa greeted him with patient gentleness. She was waiting for him there, perched on a little stool, doing her laundry, leaning over a tub, and when she saw him, so pale with hunger and exhaustion, trembling with fear and cold, she could not help wondering how humankind had managed to survive amid so much cruelty. She sat him on the ground in silence, took off his clothes, and gave him a summary wash in the laundry water, rubbing down his body, filling the tub with scraps of lake weed and palm bark, and they never said so much as a word about this incident for the rest of their lives.

The next day, she searched the recesses of her hovel and put a package into his hands. Antonio, who had never received a present before, opened it quickly. It was the little cigarette rolling machine she had found, eleven years earlier on the church steps, in the folds of his blanket. These letters were engraved on the back: Borjas Romero. She looked Antonio straight in the eye, and it was one of the rare occasions he heard her voice.

“If you want to become the boss, don’t steal,” she muttered. “Work.”

And so Antonio got it into his head to sell cigarettes. He got his first handful of tobacco thanks to his cunning. One September morning, a few days after the episode with the boat, he crossed the only square in La Rita and with a determined step entered the La Pioja grocery store belonging to Henri Reille, a fine fellow in his forties with no shady dealings, full of health and vitality, the son of immigrants from Nantes who had come at the beginning of the century and whose French lineage had endowed him with the bold art of commerce. Antonio offered him the following deal: “Give me some tobacco and some paper. I’ll come back this evening with double its price.”

Antonio left Henri Reille with ten grams of tobacco, rolled thirty cigarettes, and went to the port of Santa Rita, where dozens of men arrived every day from the south of Lake Maracaibo, the mountains of Mérida, and the backwaters of Santander, Trujillo, and Táchira, disembarking on the dock from their dinghies hewn from a single tree trunk and canoes filled with animals whose cries echoed throughout the bay. He sold everything he had until nightfall, handling his machine as if it were a Venetian lute and calculating each gram of tobacco with the care of a goldsmith, economizing each sliver of paper. At around seven, he returned to the grocery store and set down the bounty of the day on the counter, under Henri Reille’s astonished eyes.

“You are richer this evening than you were this morning,” he said. “And so am I. Let’s keep going.”

For three weeks, in the suffocating heat of the coast, he went tirelessly back and forth from Pela el Ojo to La Rita, persuading anyone he crossed paths with on the port to have a smoke. With savage obstinacy, he mingled with the vast community of sellers of crushed ice and guarapo, the cold drink made from sap, sugar paste, and pinole, until the day when a goods porter offered him three pennies to help him unload some sacks of coconuts from a boat.

Antonio, who at that age already had wide shoulders and a muscular back, threw one of the sacks onto his spine with the help of two leather straps, surprised himself with the strength of his arms and the solidity of his legs, then hunched forward and walked off under the weight toward the truck, with a blind tenacity that the other porters ascribed not to his strength but to his youth. Despite the excessive weight that compressed his lungs, he managed to unload everything, and earned in one hour with his arms what it would have taken all day to earn with his cigarettes. From that day onward, he never set foot in Henri Reille’s grocery store again. The following day, he came back to the same spot on the dock, convinced that he would make a fortune with the strength of his muscles, but he quickly understood that there was a hierarchy in all things, even in the world of porters.

He was introduced to an old boatman called Alfaro who was in need of laborers, a hawk-nosed man from Panama whose fingers were covered in rings and was notorious for his abrupt mood swings and choleric character. Antonio was a model of discipline and flexibility, uncomplaining, obedient, and selfless. He was happy to do whatever was assigned to him. In the stifling air of the port, where the docks were covered every day with crates of fragrant spices and cages of flowers, Antonio learned to read, to count, to recognize the maritime flags that the smugglers modified to thwart the coast guard, to calculate by touch alone the worth of the coins he was given, and to file away in his imagination not only all the accents he heard around him but also all the fabulous stories that came to him with the arriving goods and that blended together in his head as in a great ancient novel.

This is how he learned of the existence, in the south, of a village that moved around, a shifting village that gravitated around Barinas as a planet around a star, and that could only be found by chance. He heard about the legend of the solid-gold Virgin of Benito Bonito, about the opera house in Manaus built in the middle of the jungle, about the thirty-eight-minute-long war in Zanzibar and the story of an Andalusian settler who brought four hundred elephants from Nepal to fill his stables in the middle of a desert in the dunes of Coro. These marvelous tales remained etched so profoundly in the marble of his memory that, many years later, when the plaque was unveiled in the street that bore his name, Antonio was able to relive with acute precision that stifling morning in the little port of Santa Rita when all at once, in the middle of the tumult of ropes and heavy chains, he saw the statue of the libertador Simón Bolívar arrive at its port of call in Maracaibo.

It loomed up one Tuesday in November. The lake dwellers saw it in the distance, on the promenade covered in crushed mangoes and rotten fish, an imposing statue four yards high made from six tons of bronze cast in Tuscany. It was of a man on horseback in nineteenth-century dress, looking straight ahead and pointing his sword at the future with an authoritarian air. His elegance was so striking to the children on the beach, boys in rags who had never seen Simón Bolívar, that they ran into their shacks yelling, “God has come down to Maracaibo!” After a perilous traction with iron pullies, weights, and straps, Simón Bolívar was unloaded from the ship and set down between the chicken cages and crates of plantains and dried meat, surrounded by sacks of coffee. The bronze stank of guavas. The statue had come a long way, having made a voyage on the ship down the course of a tumultuous river and survived rust and oxidation as well as the tropical rainstorms that had broken out several times and fifty miles of crocodiles and howler monkeys. It was supposed to stay a few days in Maracaibo before continuing its journey up the Rio Escalante to reach the port of Santa Bárbara del Zulia, across from the city of San Carlos where, one day in 1820, Simón Bolívar, making the most of the abundance of wood in the area, had ordered the construction of five ships to attack the Spanish.

By two o’clock, the whole town had heard about the visit of the libertador. People were crowding around the statue in a carnival of acclamation, carrying children on their shoulders and bringing the elderly out of their rooms to see it, and there were even some Guajiro on the dock, who had come down barefoot from the Sierra de Perijá with birds in their hands and a ruckus of tiny bells, attracted by the rumor that a metal man had been discovered in the middle of their lake. It was not long before the local authorities made an official appearance, with the governor of the province of Zulia at their head, along with other town dignitaries, to render homage to the hero of the nation, by trampling the jumble of rotten fruit.

Eventually the speeches were so long and pompous that, over the course of the ten days that the statue was standing by on the port of Maracaibo, people ended up losing their curiosity. At night, some men who were roaming around the docks tried to paint the horse’s rump, while others threw avocados as big as melons at the libertador’s head, and still others tried to steal his sword by cutting it with a lumber saw, but they managed only to leave a notch an inch deep in the palm of his hand, such that three days later, when the statue was examined, this was believed to be the mysterious trace of a Christlike stigmata.

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