Steven Garfield

The Crutches

 

By Flavio Herrera (Guatemala, 1898 – 1968)

Translation by R. Steven Garfield

 

I ran into Alicia on the street.  She was a childhood friend whose parents had sent her to Belgium some fifteen years back to complete her education in a convent. Alicia immediately recognized me, but I had to pause in the face of that splendid-looking girl who hardly resembled the bony, skinny girl she had been. Her first question was, “And what about your brother Manuel?”  Manuel was my younger brother. They had been classmates in the mixed school we had in our neighborhood. He had died ten years before from some sickness I couldn’t recall. I shocked her: “Manuel died a long time ago. But you still remember him?”

 

            “Of course I remember him. He had a face you couldn’t forget. He was a cripple, wasn’t he?”

 

            It felt as if she had stuck a pin through my heart when she said, “He was a cripple, wasn’t he? He had a face you couldn’t forget…” Her words bore a sort of pious, annoying tone that offended me; and right then and there I began to hate Alicia.  I cut our chat coldly short and got away from her, yet again feeling that indefinable desolation that comes over me whenever I remember Manuel. As soon as I got home, I went straight to the attic and bolted the door. I felt as if I were hallucinating and feverish, wanting to be alone and remember. Then, I recalled there was that trunk in the attic, a fat trunk with peeling paint. It was one of those steamer trunks where, after Manuel’s death, my mother, in a sort of bitter fetishism, kept storing away, as if they were relics, her dead child’s last clothes and toys. Many times my father wanted to open the trunk and burn the clothes and give the toys away to the poor kids in our neighborhood, but my mother was always against it, her eyes glassing over with tears. And so, there “HE” was, in the corner with his trinkets; thinking and engrossed in himself, the cloth upholstery moth-eaten and the metal straps eroded by leprous rust.I needed to open that trunk.  Why had Alicia’s words provoked this decision?  In the trunk I suspected that….but my memory was bad, I was unsure, but still a sadistic sentimentality affirmed my need to savor so many pain-tinged memories.

            When I grabbed hold of the trunk, I had the feeling something moved inside of it. I don’t know why but I thought Manuel could be inside and when I opened it I would see his little white face contorted in that last suffering grimace, just like he had stayed forever that morning in the arms of my mother. But, the key?  I didn’t have the key. Who would possibly have it?  Who could have hidden it away? My mother maybe? I had never heard her speak of it, and didn’t know if she had even opened it for many years. The trunk was there like a sacred tomb. Like an arc that hid a secret and no one should dare defile it. I was going to have to break the clasp. I found a rusted dull chisel. I put it into the slot of the latch. The wood creaked as if alarmed, as if the trunk had been asleep and the chisel woke it up. Just then I heard footsteps outside the door. Was it my mother who had a dark feeling warning her of my defilement? I stopped and waited, not moving, holding my breath; but whose footsteps were those? My mother didn’t come up to the attic because her rheumatism kept her from using the stairs. Whose footsteps were those? I knew the strong rhythm of my father’s. I recognized the hurried rhythm of the maid’s. The rest of the servants went barefoot, but these were soft, sumptuous footsteps, like rubber soles or like when walking on an oily floor—light, winged…you might say.

 

            They were close but yet far away. An illusion? An auditory hallucination? My temples throbbed, but I wasn’t afraid. Why is it that dead children don’t frighten? For a minute I was discouraged and wanted to dismiss my task, and then Alicia’s words rang in my ears again: “He was a cripple, wasn’t he?” I had doubts. What I was looking for, was it in the trunk?  In Manuel’s last days he didn’t any longer…. Suddenly my hands went to work breaking the bonds of my will. My eyes didn’t see what was in front of them, just a grey cloud speckled with little lights that flickered like microcospic fireworks. Not more than a second. Out of the opaque column flying towards my face were little clinging specs. Mice. My brain was stung by the smell of mouse, decay, sadness. Then my eyes saw….

 

            Greasy, dirty clothes that fell apart in my hands giving off stinking waves of mothballs and rottenness. I moved the rags around and then there surfaced a little drum with its leather pitifully rotted. A little trumpet full of keys, and I remembered when Manuel would play it, gathering the neighborhood kids on the corner to play war, Romans against Carthaginians. Then, the little lead soldiers. There were so many of them, by the dozens, paint peeled off, twisted, many of them headless, others with a sword or the barrel of a rifle broken or twisted, and finally at the bottom, there at the very bottom, some crutches.  His crutches. They wore their bright blue arm cushions, just like brand new, and the sticks were intact and varnished. The crutches were almost cute, like the bitter, uncertain cuteness of expensive shrouds or those surgical and orthopedic appliances, things that punish the degradations of the flesh in life; but these crutches that were all brand-new looking in the midst of that ruin of rags and dust suggested, I don’t know, something absurd, as if they had been used a moment before…as if Manuel…, yet I definitely remember that the child did not use them in the last days of his life. But he had used them. Alicia saw him using them…I remembered. The pain of a childhood memory burned again in my heart. I remembered: Alicia lived opposite our house. She was awkward and rather skinny, she wore that sad smile of a sickly little girl, and Manuel would await her in the mornings, and they would go off to school together. Going behind them there was always Alicia’s pious nanny, a kind and strong woman like those sumptuous mahoganies of the tropics whose shade shelters the thousands of sickly, delicate sprouts the harshness of the sun would destroy.

 

            One day they punished Manuel for being careless and lazy. He was forgetting to do his homework, and the monthly conduct report raised a scandalous uproar in our house, filling it with juvenile alarm signals. They suspected me of complicity and an investigation into how we were wasting our time began. I could prove my innocence with notes from school, so they turned me into the family detective to keep an eye on Manuel. The boy would lock himself in our room, avoiding my company. Once, I spied a violet-colored paper in his exercise book. Seeing he had been found out, he handed the paper to me and said, “It’s this.” What was this? I looked at it but did not understand. Upset, stuttering and forcing a smile, he said, “It was a letter for Alicia, I am in love with her.”

 

            Why had Manuel taken notice of Alicia? Why had he picked her out from among the other girls in his class? Alicia was insignificant, sickly, ugly.  She had lots of freckles. Now at school the first signs of our instincts had us noticing the charms of the other girls. There were some splendid ones in their untouchability, opulent, like succulent fruits. But, Manuel was a cripple.  He was a handsome child, but…he was “a cripple.” Did his feeling of incompleteness make him need to be close to that ugly girl? His feeling of imperfection? The feeling of mutual deficiency? An inferiority complex as they call it now?

 

            Manuel took the paper back without letting me read it, and later showing a very serious expression on his face he added, “This is just between the two of us, don’t say a word to Papa.”

 

I added, “Not even to Mama?”

 

“Not even to Mama, I forbid it, do you hear? I forbid it. If you give my secret away, I’ll take back the stamps I gave you and I’ll beat you up too.”

 

In a show of threat he lifted one of his crutches.  Laughing and mocking him, I caught it in mid-air. Manuel raised the other crutch. I stopped it the same way. I pulled violently and yanked both crutches from his little hands, throwing them aside. Manuel screamed with rage. He stood there on one foot, shaking, his twisted ironic scrawl of a sick leg. I saw him take a little hop and he looked like an insect, a cornered insect, one of those crickets we would chase into the corners. I saw him turn red in the face, and across his face passed a cloud of bitterness and abandonment, and while he was trying to reach me with his little hops he began to sob. It was then that he fell down head first and hit his forehead on the corner of a piece of furniture.

 

The remorse I felt diminished the pain of the punishment. They kept me and Manuel apart for a number of days. The first time I sneaked into his room I saw him stretched out on the bed—he was very pale and wore a cotton bandage on his forehead. He looked at me at length, a good long while, not with anger but with a desolation so great it would not fit into his child’s soul.

 

“Come in,” he said, and then he offered his hand to seal our reconciliation. I approached him shaking, contrite, like a coward. I put his head in the hollow of my shoulder and crying, I blurted out, “Do you forgive me? I’ll sell my stamp collection and buy you some new crutches.” His eyes shot me a flash of anger and reproach. They filled with tears. I could feel him trembling and finally his knotted little voice managed, “I don’t need them. I don’t need to use them any more. Alicia doesn’t love me because I’m a cripple.” And then he began to sob strangely.  I felt that at that moment Manuel had ceased to be a child…so that he could feel pain.

 

A long time has gone by. Manuel died ten years ago. I can see him now at some crossroads of Eternity, supported by his little blue crutches and waiting for Alicia, who did not love him in life, waiting for her.  Perhaps in death….

 

 

For information about the author: 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavio_Herrera