The cats shifted and stirred, the fire creaked in the stove. Outside in the abandoned village the profoundest silence.
What is the story? the boy said.
In the town of Caborca on the Altar River there was a man who lived there who was an old man. He was born in Caborca and in Caborca he died. Yet he lived once in this town. In Huisiachepic.
What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.
The boy looked into the dark disc of liquid in his cup that was not coffee. He looked at the man and he looked at the cats. They seemed to be sleeping to a cat and it occurred to him that the man’s voice was to them no novelty and that he must talk to himself in the absence of any godsent ear from the outer world. Or talk to the cats.
What about the man that used to live here? he said.
Yes. This man’s parents were killed by a cannonshot in the church at Caborca where they had gone with others to defend themselves against the outlaw American invaders. Perhaps you know something of the history of this country. When the stones and rubble were cleared away the boy lay in the arms of his dead mother. The boy’s father lay nearby and he tried to speak. They raised him up. The blood ran from his mouth. They bent to hear what he would say but he said nothing. His chest was crushed and he breathed blood and he lifted one hand as if in farewell and then he died.
The boy was brought to this town. Of Caborca he remembered little. He remembered his father. Certain things. He remembered his father lifting him in his arms to see puppets performing in the alameda. Of his mother he remembered less. Perhaps nothing. The particulars of his life are strange particulars. This is a story of misfortune. Or so it would seem. The end is not yet told.
Here he grew to manhood. In this town. Here he married a wife and all in God’s good time was himself blessed with a son.
In the first week of May in the year eighteen eighty‑seven this man takes his son and sets out on a journey. He will go to Bavispe and there leave the boy in the care of an uncle who is also the boy’s padrino. From Bavispe he will continue on to Batopite where he will arrange for the sale of sugar from certain estancias to the south. In Batopite he will stay the night. This is a journey I have thought of many times. This journey and this man. He is youthful. Perhaps not thirty years of age. He rides a mule. The boy rides in the bow of the saddle before him. It is in the springtime and the wildflowers are blooming in the meadows along the river. He has promised to return with a gift for his young wife. He sees her standing there. She waves goodbye to him as he sets out. He has no likeness of her other than that which he carries in his heart. Think of that. Perhaps she is crying. Standing there watching him out of sight. Standing in the very shadow of this church that is doomed to fall. Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.
The man had arched his fingers above the table to place the scene. He passed one hand from left to right to show where things had been and how it must have been with the sun and with the rider or with the woman where she stood. As if he’d shape out in the present air the spaces where such things had been.
At Bavispe there was a fair. A traveling circus. And the man held his young son aloft under the paper lanterns as his father before him so that the child might see. A clown, a magician, a man who held up serpents in his naked hands. The next morning he departed alone for Batopite as told, leaving the child behind. And there in Bavispe the child died, crushed in the terremoto. The padrino held the boy in his arms and wept. The town of Batopite was spared. Even today you can see the great crack in the mountain wall across the river like an enormous laugh. And that was all the news they had of disaster in Batopite. Nothing else was known. Returning to Bavispe the following day this man met a traveler afoot who told him the news. He could not believe the man’s words and he urged the mule on and when he arrived at Bavispe all was in ruin as the traveler had told and death was everywhere in great abundance.