The Mutations Read online

  In the year 5252 of the Hebrew calendar, the king and queen of Castile and Aragon decided to expel the infidels. They gave them four months to leave or renounce Judaism. Perhaps among the wretched converts was an elderly woman, Lorenza, a resident of Soria, mother of eleven, and widow of a man named Manuel. Just before turning seventy, she began to feel burning in the tips of her drooping breasts. Weeks passed. The fire spread to her armpits. Lorenza sought the help of Herminia Tavares, a converted Christian and sorceress, for a cure for the pain and swelling. In exchange for three silver coins per dose, Herminia prepared her a tincture to heal her unbalanced humors.

  When she began to treat herself with that salve of garlic and nightshade, the cancer had already spread to her brain. She was plagued with headaches and hallucinations. In the straw of her bed, she searched for a knife to decapitate herself. Then an angel of the Lord appeared before her, to torment her for betraying her tribe. She cried out her renunciation of the false messiah: “Lord, have mercy upon me, wash away my sins.”

  Her neighbors went before the court of the Inquisition. An infidel possessed by the devil, a sinful old hag; God the Father had punished her with a vicious affliction of the breast. Her children took her to an orchard far from the city and muzzled her cries. Herminia prepared an opium brew to ease her suffering. She died in early winter. They buried her beneath a lime blossom tree in the countryside and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish in whispers.

  From then on, Lorenza’s family was marked by suspicion. People spat at them in the street as they passed by. Fernando, the youngest son, was the first to flee. He arrived in Cádiz in February. He had never been to the coast before. The ocean reminded him of a scorched wheat field.

  In early March, he set sail on one of the humblest boats in the West Indies fleet. It was bound for New Spain, where, word was in the taverns, gold and silver sprang like turnips from dry earth. He spent forty days at sea, suffering from fevers and constant hunger. He passed the time playing cards and watching the largest galleons in the fleet sail unflaggingly ahead, their sails billowing to the west, leaving a trail of tumultuous foam in their wake. Thus, his fantasy, a ship loaded with ambition, sailed toward the forgetting of his blood. But on board the galleon was his semen, the essence of memory and mutation.

  Fernando disembarked at the port of Veracruz. He fled the pestilent coast on a cart bound for the capital. After three toilsome years, he took a common-law wife, the illegitimate mestiza daughter of a man from Asturias and an Indian woman. Half a world was erased in that meeting of genes from Judea, Asturias, and Texcoco—but thirteen generations later, Teresa’s body remembered it.

  * * *

  She didn’t bother with the unnecessary transaction of seeing her usual doctor. She looked up the number of the oncologist who’d treated her mother and called to make an appointment. The result of the mammogram was clear: three adenocarcinomas in the mammary ducts, which had never known the reprieve provided by breastfeeding.

  After surgery and ten rounds of radiation, Teresa went back to seeing her patients. During her treatment, she had met several women struggling not to succumb to depression in the face of their illness. She offered them psychological support at no cost, and thus began to specialize in psychotherapy for women with cancer. The news spread from hospital to hospital that Teresa could help women grieving the loss of their feminine attributes. Some men also began seeking her services. The first, a survivor of cancer of the esophagus, needed help quitting smoking. The second had tried to kill himself when he was diagnosed with cancer of the penis. The third had lost his twin brother to an osteosarcoma. In this way, her range of patients broadened until it included cases as diverse as childhood leukemia and bouts of hypochondria triggered by the TV series House. “Why me?” asked most of her patients, as they tried to comprehend the scale of their misfortune, but Teresa, who years earlier had consigned that narcissistic question to the garbage, tried to lead them down a different path, into the basement of unfulfilled desires that fed their fear of oblivion.

  3

  Carmela wondered how to break the news to the children, forgetting that Mateo was already eighteen, and Paulina fifteen. By the beginning of the new millennium, adolescence had become a self-absorbed extension of childhood. Yet armies of spoiled brats—among them Mateo and Paulina—had still, by varying means, managed to trade their innocence for angst and their cuteness for acne.

  “Your dad has something a little more serious than we thought … He has a tumor in his tongue, and unfortunately the only way to remove it is an operation that…”

  There was an excruciating silence.

  “What?” said Paulina.

  “They have to remove the whole tongue,” Carmela went on, in tears. “We’ve seen three different doctors, and they all think there’s no way around it. The tumor’s in a dangerous place, and they have to make sure they get it all out. They said if they could, they’d shrink it with radiation … but there isn’t time for that, right?”

  Ramón had been in his own world, his eyes fixed on the carpet. He nodded.

  “No way,” said Mateo. “Rafa had his gallbladder removed through a couple of little holes. Like, no big deal. How come they can’t do something like that?”

  “That’s what we asked the doctors, but…”

  “So how are you going to talk?” Paulina asked her father. Ramón looked at her with the weariness of someone already and continually facing that very mystery.

  “There are some speech therapies that might help,” said Carmela.

  “How?” asked Paulina.

  Carmela couldn’t begin to know how to answer.

  “Can’t they give him a fake one? Like, made of plastic?” Mateo asked. “That would be awesome.”

  Ramón was exasperated by the way his son spoke—loud and moronic, just like the trashy music he was always listening to. “You’ll go deaf,” he’d often warned him, but he hadn’t foreseen that long before that happened, he himself would be mute. Ramón tried not to think about it, since the woeful scenes he pictured made him regret having agreed to the surgery. It seemed like a simple choice, life or death, but in his situation, as a self-employed lawyer with no health insurance or retirement plan, who made a living from his way with words and from manipulating the law in court, it was anything but. To stifle his worries, he turned on the TV at night and cranked the volume all the way up. “You’ll go deaf,” his son might reasonably have admonished, and Ramón would have ignored him like a teenager convinced of his immortality and eternal youth.

  * * *

  Carmela didn’t hesitate to tell Elodia, the family’s maid, that Ramón had cancer of the tongue, and would soon go into the hospital for a serious operation. Elodia knew immediately that this was a test sent by God to restore Señor Martínez’s faith.

  When Ramón came downstairs for breakfast, Elodia went to greet him and blessed him ceremoniously, slowly drawing the sign of the cross in front of his face.

  Ramón was a staunch atheist, but he tolerated Elodia’s piety, since the pair enjoyed a long-standing complicity. Whenever Carmela discovered an offense committed by one of them—a towel hung incorrectly, a stained tablecloth, a rumpled rug—each took the blame for the other, so as to bask in the glory of domestic martyrdom.

  Elodia was six years younger than Carmela, who had hired her soon after the couple moved into their first house. When Elodia got pregnant with the gardener’s child, Carmela urged her to have an abortion.

  “I’m the one who sinned, señora. It isn’t the baby’s fault,” Elodia answered, outraged by the suggestion that she murder her child.

  “It’s not that anyone’s to blame, but you’re too young to be a mother.”

  “The Virgin Mary had little Jesus when she was fifteen. Imagine if Joseph had said, ‘That child isn’t mine, now run along and get rid of it at the clinic.’ It’s not right, if you think about it.”

  Six months pregnant, Elodia married Salvador, the gardener, in the groom’s ho
metown of Atlacomulco. He turned out to be a disreputable, philandering, drunken, and belligerent husband. Elodia endured ten years of marital torment, until the day Salvador “got carried away” and knocked her unconscious.

  When Ramón saw her black-and-blue face and her toothless mouth, he was possessed by a bitter thirst for revenge, and promised Elodia that he would make sure that criminal never set foot in her house again. He went to see his contacts at the district attorney’s office, slipped them an envelope full of cash, and asked them to go forth and mete out justice. “Tear him a new asshole,” he specified. Neither Elodia nor the neighborhood gardens ever heard from Salvador again.

  One morning, several years later, Ramón found Elodia crying in the kitchen. Someone had called from her village to say that her mother, who had kidney disease, could no longer get out of bed.

  “They told me her legs are swollen and her blood needs cleaning, but it costs a fortune.”

  Ramón had just upgraded his car and bought plane tickets for a family vacation to California.

  “Bring her to Mexico City,” he said, choking down a certain amount of selfishness. “I’ll help you pay for it.”

  That was how Ramón became benefactor to an elderly diabetic who survived eleven months longer at a cost of two dialysis sessions a week and a dozen brand-name medications. He also footed the bill for her body to be transported back to the tiny cemetery in her hometown.

  From then on, Elodia’s gratitude toward her employer transformed into open veneration. She placed a photograph of Ramón on her homemade shrine, just to the left of God. Yet despite his holiness, Ramón never tired of blasphemy, proclaiming religion to be a scam, the Catholic Church a cadre of child molesters, and atheism the only path to Mexico’s salvation.

  Once, when Ramón’s gold watch went missing, Elodia found herself accused of theft. Before confronting her, Ramón gave his daughter the task of spying on the suspect’s every move. He bribed Paulina with a doll’s house in exchange for any valuable information. After a week in this role, the only odd behavior Paulina could report was that every day, Elodia spritzed the family’s beds with a clear liquid she kept in a spray bottle. When interrogated, she confessed that it was holy water.

  “And what if it’s dirty?” Carmela asked.

  “How could it be? The sacristan fills the font with bottled water.”

  In the end, the watch turned up in Ramón’s desk drawer, where he had stowed it a few weeks earlier before going out to lunch at a cheap restaurant in Tepito.

  When Ramón got sick, Elodia went to the city center to buy an image of San Peregrino, the patron saint of cancer patients, and stuck it to the Martínezes’ fridge door with a souvenir magnet from Acapulco. Beneath the picture of San Peregrino was a prayer Elodia recited every time she took something out of the fridge:

  OH! SAN PEREGRINO:

  YOU who are called the Wonder-Worker,

  Because of the numerous miracles God has bestowed upon you,

  YOU, who bore in your own flesh the cancerous disease and who had recourse to the source of all Grace when the power of man could do no more.

  YOU were favored with the vision of Jesus coming down from His Cross to heal your affliction.

  Ask of GOD and OUR LADY the cure of the sick whom we entrust to you.

  (Insert name of patient)

  Amen!

  (One Our Father, Hail Mary, and Gloria)

  In exchange for Ramón’s miraculous recovery, Elodia was willing to give up avocados, her favorite food. Perhaps if she’d had any true vices, she might’ve been in a better position to bargain with God the Father. As the date of the surgery approached, Elodia increased her sacrificial offerings: in the end, she gave up tamales, soft cheese, and chile de árbol. She also begged her mother’s spirit to put in a good word on her boss’s behalf, imploring her to remind God how kind Ramón had been to her before she died.

  * * *

  Magical thinking took hold in the Martínez household. Despite Ramón’s anticlericalism and Carmela’s lukewarm religious feelings, their children went to a Catholic school, where they were exposed to mass on a regular basis, took the required catechism classes, and attended talks about the perils of premarital sex. Paulina began visiting the school chapel every day. Mateo had a feeling that his daily masturbation habit might interfere with his father’s recovery, so he resolved to stop watching Internet porn and touching himself. Carmela began calling the bank compulsively to check her balance, as if some miracle might multiply their savings overnight, thereby solving the problem of how to pay for the upcoming surgery plus two weeks of postoperative care in the Metropolitan Hospital. It was so blatantly reckless of them not to have health insurance that she was ashamed to admit it in front of her friends and family. Her sister Angélica spared no words in reprimanding her when Carmela turned to her for a loan.

  “We can lend you fifty thousand pesos, but that’s all.”

  They needed twenty times that much, equivalent to Ramón’s annual income, from which they had to subtract tuition and the monthly payments on the car, the truck, and the three computers that Ramón had bought in January for his children and secretary. Ramón had invested all his savings in remodeling his offices and was too proud to request a loan from anyone outside the family. His only hope was his younger brother, Ernesto, a self-made millionaire with a Styrofoam packaging factory.

  After failed incursions into importing third-rate Spanish wines, and manufacturing fruit jams for diabetics, and low-fat tamales, Ernesto threw in his lot with Styrofoam, the pure-white miracle of the petrochemical industry that had revolutionized fast-food packaging and classroom dioramas. He began to manufacture disposable packaging just as takeout became widespread, and demand for his products skyrocketed overnight. In a little less than a decade, Ernesto’s business, Styromex, Inc., had come to dominate the Styrofoam market all over the central plateau of Mexico.

  From the beginning, Ernesto had asked Ramón to take on all the legal aspects of his business: contracts, lawsuits, severance packages. Unlike his older brother, Ernesto was a ruthless boss, a dishonest competitor, and a chronic tax dodger. After winning countless crooked cases in his brother’s favor, Ramón had decided to stop working with him.

  “Your problems don’t leave me enough time for my own clients. I’m finding you another lawyer.”

  “Family first,” Ernesto answered.

  “Right, but you don’t listen to me. You’re always cheating your suppliers, firing people, forging receipts … I can’t work like this.”

  “How much do you want?”

  The argument ended in a string of insults peppered with truths—that Ernesto was an alcoholic and Ramón suffered erectile dysfunction—and lies—that Ernesto was illegitimate, and Ramón a homosexual. When Ernesto claimed that Ramón was just rotten with envy and called him a fucking hypocrite, Ramón hung up on him. Over a year passed, and they hadn’t spoken since. Carmela was determined that if they weren’t going to ask for a loan, they should at least let him know about the surgery, and wait and see if he offered to help. Ramón was convinced that he wouldn’t make any such offer and only allowed Carmela to call Ernesto so he could prove himself right.

  “Tell me how I can help,” Ernesto said, genuinely distraught by the news of his older brother’s cancer.

  Carmela explained the situation and Ernesto agreed to lend them the money, on one condition.

  “To avoid any misunderstandings,” he told his sister-in-law, “we’ll draw up an IOU for the amount of the loan and use your house as collateral. It could be mortgaged if necessary, right?”

  Ramón was outraged by this miserly proposal. That little shit didn’t even know the meaning of work until after he finished college. And who paid his way until then? Who bailed him out when he got arrested for drunk driving in Mom’s car? I did. And now he asks you to sign an IOU, like I’m a fucking stranger. He should loan me the money and take me at my word, as a sign of trust and to show a modicum of gratitude.
I’m not letting you sign shit. I’ll sign it myself, and if I die, he can go fuck himself.

  With the help of a handwritten note, and using a different vocabulary, Ramón let Carmela know his decision.

  “Don’t you think he’ll back out?”

  He doesn’t have the balls, thought Ramón.

  4

  Eduardo went to therapy every Saturday at eleven sharp, armed with an aluminum bottle of ozonated water and a clean sheet to cover the promiscuous couch where he had to recline during the session. He was Teresa’s favorite patient, not for his extravagant phobias, but because he was young, and because he had sought her help not to come to terms with the idea of having cancer, but to free himself from its hold on him. He’d had leukemia between the ages of nine and twelve and had been cured by multiple rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. Despite his successful treatment, though, he had never recovered any sense of himself as a healthy young man. Now, at nearly twenty, he was convinced the disorder must still be lurking in at least one of his two hundred and six bones. Along with his acute fear of microbes and contagious illness, this prevented him from leading a normal life. He had braved high school in latex gloves and a surgical mask and been taunted and made the target of endless pranks. On one occasion, a gang of troublemakers had taken a bag of dog feces to school and emptied it into Eduardo’s backpack during one of his frequent trips to the infirmary. When Eduardo returned to the classroom and opened his pack, he keeled over in fright. He awoke besieged by the smell of shit and the sound of his classmates’ merriment and was paralyzed by a fear so corrosive that his teacher had to carry him back to the infirmary. He never went to school again. In just two years, he completed his high school diploma online, and passed the university entrance exam in Hispanic literature with the highest possible score.