The rules of the game

                                          *almaguer*

These are the rules of the game. I walk through the darkness until I come across the corpse, and although tonight I have decided to take the alternate route home, I did not anticipate such a situation. First, I stumble over something and feel the elasticity of the body. I am in the dark because the boys have destroyed the streetlight bulb, but I can sense the post-mortem ritual that must descend upon each of us. Second, I ran far away, not reporting this body, and now the roosters, in their morning delight, begin to announce the first light.

I just got out of jail and I have to find a dead body. I woke up around eleven in the morning and can barely remember the incident. I open one eye with the effort of half a ton of willpower. It would be impossible for me to open the other before noon, but from my position I can see the old woman's vase shattered on the floor, the shards forming a sinusoidal planetary orbit. I remember perfectly the day I gave her the vase. I had just finished enlisting in the militia. They told me it was to fulfill an internationalist mission in Afghanistan. I began to pray to each of my mother's saints, but in the end I failed the psychometric test. When I came down that same street, I found the vase at a small stall and couldn't resist spending the only fifty pesos I had for transportation and food. But here was the gift, which was more of a line in the memory of that day that could have changed me. Now the old woman is gone; she died of cancer. Even so, she never stopped smoking and putting on weight for her saints. Death came slowly, as if appreciating her life, the indelible mark that came to supplant me and Gregor, my fucking little brother. Now was not the time to hide my hatred. Now I had nothing to reproach each of my loved ones for, but I could get up and collect the trash like every day and imagine that no one existed.

My head hurt terribly, I took a few beastly swigs to recover my pulse and to forget, above all to forget, the asphalt, the people, the city.

The bed seemed to suck me in and the sweat was tormenting me, but despite everything, I wasn't going to get up, even though they were fucking with the few things left in the house, which were disappearing to eat and drink, and the others ended up like the porcelain vase. I managed to turn over with some effort, and this time the wall with its childhood drawings took my breath away. My brother's scribbles were like the first and last interval I checked. And there was my name and Alice's, the best mulatto girl who walked around the neighborhood before and after the party and the uniforms. I had her half hooked at the time, with a dress clinging to her skin, one-piece and very short, but you could see her nakedness, you could touch her like thunder fragmenting in the sky, and she was mine in the rain, at night, away from the city and its people.

I swear that as soon as I can stand up and walk to the kitchen, I'm going to vomit all the asphalt in the world, I'm going to vomit the daisies and the Sunday cakes with Aunt Zulema, the steaming chocolate coming out of the freshly opened coffee pot, chocolate cake, chocolate candies, and chocolate-filled cookies. She was obsessed with chocolate. she had the chubbiest face I know and eyes like the waves, fickle and unpredictable, capable of seeing right through you. When she drank her chocolate, she could predict your future. That was her secret. On Sundays, we would gather to taste it and wait for the ritual of serving it in a set of special cups of Indian origin. He would run his neat finger three times around the rim and pour the liquid at a twenty-five-degree angle, then let the little cloud settle into its new shape in the cup and proceed to fan the magical scent in one direction, then his gaze and body in a trance, suffocating the world around him, until the premonitions came with the necessary weight, in the end, he would place his hand on my head as if it were the crystal ball used by fortune tellers, and I would feel the sanctity of his act, and he never wanted to talk to me about my future.

Aunt Zulema was already blind, but even when she drank her chocolate she could still listen to people, telling them their ailments and treating them. To me she was more of a rag than a woman. Perhaps the use of her power condemned her to rot from the inside out, and everything around her stank of her nightmare. She was able to move (barely) to a wooden house far away from people, to wait for autumn and death, which, if it happened, I would mark on my hateful wall.