3

ONE SATURDAY I woke up early on that immense mattress. He wasn’t in the room, so I tenuously followed his scent. I walked down the dark hallway and ended up at the back door in the kitchen, open for the first time. And there was the garden, a wild superimposition of bushes and trunks and fruit trees around which grew tall buildings: I stand in the shadow one of those trees casts, I recognize my smallness before an order of things that compels me to enter. The garden has a lemon tree, several tamarillo trees, the tomatoes hang like this man’s testicles, with certain slackness, waiting for a hand to gently squeeze them. I grab a tomato, pluck it, bite it, and the acid burns the cut on my lip. They have tall stalks. Dried flowers I pinch off also hang from them. A grinding stone. On that big rock a series of stones in various shapes and sizes. Black sacks containing plants that seem to be aromatics. I want to smell them, but I hold myself back. A twisted mound from which emerge roots that, like long worms or snakes, erupt from the ground, cradling pools of water. I crouch down. The roots form the face of a girl, her hair is parted down the middle, the part splitting her skull. My grandmother combed my hair every day, sitting me on top of the toilet: she’d perfectly divide my hair in two, use a comb to draw a straight line across my head, dip the comb in water, then firmly press it into my hair to smooth it out, secure the two pigtails with hair ties, and squeeze them with a severity unlike anything but the tenderness contained in her heart. She, combing my hair. I, imagining people, cars, little rats, and family members traveling along that perfect line dividing my head. Worms or herbs beautifully sprouting from the orifices of that girl’s face drawn among the rhizomes and dirt. From her nose and mouth. Her face smoothed out by a goodness it too contains. To one side of the root mound, a plant with magenta flowers flutters; on the other side are more shriveled stalks and a trunk that, like an open hand, holds a pot with a little plant sprouting a single leaf, outlined with a crimson that gets more tenuous toward its center. Another vulva. I want to pluck it, too. Surrounding the plant are a series of white flowers, calla lilies with yellow stalks populated by mating ladybugs and visited by bees. I watch the ladybugs clamber over one another on that erect floral organ and I dare to tug on a stalk. The ladybugs fall and this time I wildly grab the fleshy organ and hull it, feeling something evil in that crumbling while wondering how it survives its fragility. I study my feet with the yellow crumbs and brush myself off. A little rose bush, an agave, useless mule fats, the famous purple fuchsias appear and, scaling the wall, bougainvillea.