“Where have I been, Flavio?” Felix asked, and this time, though his words were still harsh, they came out of his mouth in a way Flavio remembered.
“Felix,” Flavio said, and his voice broke. “Are you back, Felix?”
“I don’t feel so good, Flavio.”
“I can’t believe my ears,” Flavio said. “You’re talking, Felix. It’s like a miracle.” He grinned and suddenly felt like running in small circles about the room. “Wait until Pepe finds out. Wait until the village hears. It’s so good to see you again, Felix.”
“Where have I been, Flavio?’ Felix asked again.
Flavio looked down at him. “When?” he asked.
“When?” Felix asked. His eyes moved away from Flavio and went nowhere. “I don’t know when,” he said. Then he began to cry silently. Tears ran down his face and, mixed with blood and dirt, dropped to the floor.
Flavio took the two steps back to the sofa and sat down. He put his hand on Felix’s leg and gave it a little pat. “It’s okay, Felix,” he said. “Quiet yourself now. You’ve been sick for a long time, but now you’re better. I don’t blame you for being so upset.”
Felix shook his head. He opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a cough so deep and full of phlegm and tears that Flavio clenched his teeth and shut his eyes until it passed.
“A little water,” Felix said. “I could drink a little water, Flavio.”
“Oh sí,” Flavio said. He picked up the glass from the floor and held it to Felix’s mouth. “There,” he said, “but don’t drink too much, my friend,” and he took the glass away.
Felix sat there swallowing water and air. Then he turned his head, and the two men looked at each other. “I’m so happy to see you, Felix,” Flavio said, his own eyes filled with water.
“IT WAS A POT THAT MADE ME SICK,” Felix said. “The big pot that my grandmother had cooked in. This pot had been in my family since before I was born, and it was one I always trusted.”
Felix talked staring straight ahead, his words not much more than ragged air. Sometimes, as he told his story, he began to tremble so badly that Flavio would put his arm around his shoulder as if to hold him together.
It was early on a late winter morning that Felix had his stroke. It was still dark out and the only one in the café was Paco Duran, who was sitting by himself, smoking and drinking coffee by the front window. Outside, old snow was crusted along the side of the road and the moon was shining in the melted ice on the highway. Felix’s son, Pepe, was rolling out tortillas in the kitchen, and Felix had just begun to prepare his beans. A small radio on one of the counters was turned on low, and as Pepe sprinkled flour, he sang a little with the music.
Felix had slept badly the night before, dreaming of things that disturbed him and that he couldn’t remember. He could feel grit beneath his eyelids and his shirt felt too heavy and too close to his skin. He thought that after he put on a large pot of water for his beans, he would step outside to feel the cold air on his face.
As he took the pot down from the hook on one of the vigas, he glanced inside it to make sure that Pepe had cleaned it well the night before. The light from the ceiling danced on the bottom of the pot, and in that instant, with the sound of Pepe’s singing in his ears, Felix’s life passed before his eyes.
“It was like eating,” Felix said to Flavio, “and in one bite is your whole life.”
He saw his grandparents, bent and stiff and always arguing about anything, walking together on the path that led to the church. He saw his mother and father cooking beans and tamales and canning chiles in their own kitchen, and he understood the look his mother would sometimes give his father when she would bend over to pick up something she had dropped. He saw his wife, Belinda, as a young girl in school before he had ever kissed her or touched her face and then, later, on their wedding night when he knew in his heart there was no such thing as death. He even saw his sad little baby with the twisted foot that Belinda had lost giving birth to, and he remembered the sound of Belinda’s crying, which he had worried would never end.
Felix saw things that he thought he had forgotten. Then, with the pot still in his hands, he turned to his son. “Pepe,” he said, “my life is too full”—although the words his son heard him say were, “Your mother’s breasts, hijo, are the reason I cook so well.” Then, as Pepe stood shocked into silence, and without even the thought of catching himself, Felix fell to the linoleum floor.
FELIX STOPPED TALKING AND LOOKED UP at Flavio. “That’s what happened to me, Flavio,” he said. His head was going through such a myriad of motions that he appeared to be shaking it. “I can still see my grandmother cooking chickens in that pot.”
Flavio didn’t know what to say. He had never seen anything in the bottom of a pot but rust and old food—which, it now occurred to him, was probably a blessing. He also thought that if he saw all of his life at once, there would be little to see.
“You said eight years?” Felix asked.
“Sí,” Flavio told him. “Eight years, Felix, and in all that time you never said a word.”
Felix looked down at his hands. They were filthy and marked with scratches and dried blood. He turned one over. “This doesn’t even look like my hand.”
Before his stroke, Felix had been a solid man. His hands had been thick and callused from cooking and his arms strong from lifting. If his hands had ever been dirty, the dirt had come from food, which bothered no one. There was little that resembled that Felix in the one now sitting beside Flavio.
“What was it like, Felix?” Flavio asked.
“How should I know?” Felix said. “I was asleep. You should be telling me these things. What’s happened here since my stroke?”
For a moment Flavio was quiet. He thought that in the eight years Felix had been somewhere else nothing had changed. “A lot of the viejos are gone now,” he said slowly. “And my sister, Ramona, died también. And Martha. Many of our old friends.”
Felix looked down at his hands without speaking. Finally, he said, “This is too hard, Flavio. I’m sorry you had to go through that alone. Martha was a good friend to my wife, and she could cook biscochitos like no one else. They were so soft I remember they tasted like warm snow. Eight years is a long time. And what of the village?”
“The village?” To Flavio, the village was not a thing that ever really changed. It was something that just was and always would be. But not even he was blind to all the things that had been happening in Guadalupe and in the hills around the village.
People from other places had begun to move north out of Las Sombras and into the mountains surrounding the valley. From the center of town you could look into the foothills and on the ridges, where the land was full of rocks and there was never enough water, stood sprawling adobes. No one knew who these people were or what had brought them to such a place, and sometimes there was talk, especially at Tito’s Bar after too many beers, that all of these outsiders should be burned out and sent back where they came from. They had no respect for the old ways and drove through the village as if it were just a stretch of highway to get somewhere else. Besides, the men in Tito’s Bar would say, that land was once ours. It was where our grandfathers cut fence posts and firewood and picked piñon and hunted deer and elk.
But Flavio had lived his whole life in the village, and he knew that what he heard people complaining about could also be said about many of them. It was obvious to him, too, that the hills would still be empty if the people in Guadalupe had not sold their land.
On top of all that was the copper mine that sat just five