Battles in the Desert & Other Stories
Language: English
Pages: 117
ISBN: 0811210200
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Intense, despairing accounts of life in Mexico City.
Seven stories depict harsh realities of life in urban Mexico and the tragedies of childhood innocence betrayed.
nice. She’s pretty even though she is a little fat and has some gold teeth. Her name is Candelaria and she works in Los Portales Pharmacy. We took her home and on our way back I told Durán about Ana Luisa. He said, “You should have told me sooner. I’m going to help you out. The four of us can go out together.” I haven’t written because nothing important has happened. Ana Luisa still hasn’t come back. How could I have fallen in love with her when I don’t even know her? Candelaria and Durán
cat jumped onto the bed and settled in among the pillows. Then Florence kissed Arthur and tenderly picked up the cat. The boy was disgusted, terrified at the thought that the gray hairs that shone against the sheets’ whiteness would creep into his mouth and slither down his lungs. That cat is horrible. I don’t know why Aunt Florence loves it. “Did you give her something?” Rafael asked. “Are you crazy? She just got sick. She doesn’t want to eat, and she screeches all the time. My aunt thinks a
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
the press gangs. I did not understand anything: war, any war, seemed to me to be the stuff of which movies are made. Sooner or later the good guys win (who are the good guys?). Fortunately, there had been no wars in Mexico since General Cárdenas squelched the Saturnino Cedillo uprising. This was difficult for my parents to believe, because their childhood, adolescence, and youth were spent against a background of constant battles and executions. But things seemed to be going well that year.
sisters and my mother that had never even entered my head. Then they made me draw every member of my family and paint trees and houses. Next they gave me the Rorschach test (is there anyone who doesn’t see monsters in those ink blots?) with numbers and geometric figures and questions I was supposed to answer. The questions were as silly as the answers I gave. “What I like most”: to climb trees and scale the walls of old houses; lemon sherbet; rainy days; adventure movies; Salgari novels. No,