Battles in the Desert & Other Stories by José Emilio Pacheco

Author:José Emilio Pacheco [Pacheco, José Emilio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811225496
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

AUGUST AFTERNOON

You will never forget that August afternoon. You were fourteen years old and in your last year of junior high school. Your father had died before you could remember; your mother worked in a travel agency. She always woke you up at seven o’clock. You would leave behind a dream of battles along the coast, disembarkments on enemy islands, attacks on jungle forts. And you would slowly enter the day, therein to live, eat breakfast, go to school, grow up, painfully grow up, abandon your childhood.

At night, when your mother returned from the agency, you would eat dinner together in silence, and then you would close yourself up in your room to study, listen to the radio, read novels from the Bazooka collection: stories about World War Two through which you experienced a heroic era replete with silent battles without defeat.

Because of your mother’s work, you always ate lunch at her brother’s house. He was a surly man who never showed you any affection and demanded monthly payments for feeding you. Every day you had to put up with an aridity you never bargained for, a conversation that freed you, by excluding you, from having to talk about the same topics again and again, from having to repeat sentences and postures gleaned from movies and television. Forced to accept you, they made no effort to relieve the discomfort of the involuntary intruder.

Nevertheless, Julia’s presence compensated for everything. Julia, your first cousin, your unattainable first cousin who turned twenty that August afternoon. Julia studied chemistry and was the only one who paid any attention to you, but not out of love as you then imagined. Perhaps she felt pity for a child, an orphan who had no rights at all.

Julia helped you with your homework, she let you listen to her twenty records, music that will always make you think of her. One time, Julia took you to the movies; another, she introduced you to her boyfriend, the first of her boyfriends who was allowed to visit her at home.

And you never hated anyone as much as you hated Pedro—Pedro, who was irritated by your cousin’s compassion for you; Pedro, who thought of you as a witness, a pest, perhaps never as a rival.

Julia turned twenty that August afternoon. After the birthday lunch was over, Pedro invited her to go to the movies or drive around the outskirts of the city. You did not hear her response. But you did obey the order to accompany them. You got into Pedro’s car. You sank deep down into the back seat.

And Julia leaned her head on Pedro’s shoulder while Pedro steered with his left hand so he could embrace Julia, and the music vibrated on the radio, the afternoon sizzled away in that city of stones and dust,

until you saw the last houses and the barracks and the cemeteries disappear from the window. Then (Julia kissed Pedro and let him caress her; blinded by the sun, you did not exist) cypresses, oyameles,

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