When not working, I spent as much time as possible with my daughter. I had got into the pleasant habit of telling her a story every afternoon, and of course I told her such tales as would have most interested me when I was her age: stories replete with action and violence and high adventure. In fact, most of them were true accounts of my own experiences. Or a slightly embellished truth, or a slightly diluted truth, as the case might be. Such tales required me frequently to roar like a maddened jaguar or chatter like an angry spider monkey or howl like a melancholy coyote. When Cocóton quailed at some of the noises I produced, I prided myself on my talent for telling an adventure so vividly that a listener could almost share it. But one day the little girl came to me at the accustomed time for my entertaining her, and she said most solemnly:

"May we speak, Tete, as grown persons would?"

I was amused at such grave formality from a child only about six years old, but I replied just as gravely, "We may, Small Crumb. What do you have on your mind?"

"I wish to say that I do not think the stories you tell are the most fitting for a young girl to hear."

Somewhat surprised, even hurt, I said, "Do tell me your complaint about my unsuitable stories."

She said, as if soothing a petulant child even younger than herself, "I am sure they are very good stories. I am sure a boy would like very much to hear them. Boys like to be frightened, I think. My friend Chacalin"—she waved in the direction of a neighbor's house—"he sometimes makes animal noises and his own noises frighten him into crying. If you like, Tete, I will bring him each afternoon to hear your stories instead of me."

I said, perhaps a trifle peevishly, "Chacalin has his own father to tell him stories. Doubtless very exciting tales, the adventures of a pottery merchant in the Tlaltelólco market. But, Cocóton, I have never noticed you crying when I told a story."

"Oh, I would not. Not in front of you. I cry at night in bed when I am alone. For I remember the jaguars and the serpents and the bandits, and they come even more alive in the dark, and they chase me through my dreams."

"My dear child!" I exclaimed, drawing her to me. "Why did you never mention this before?"

"I am not very brave." She hid her face against my shoulder. "Not with big animals. I suppose not with big fathers either."

"From now on," I promised, "I shall try to appear smaller. And I will tell no more of fierce beasts and skulking bandits. What would you prefer that I tell about?"

She pondered, then asked in a shy voice, "Tete, did you never have any easy adventures?"

I could think of no immediate answer to that. I could not even imagine such a thing as an "easy adventure," unless it was something of the sort that might happen to Chacalin's father—selling a customer a jug with a hairline crack, and not being caught at it. But then I remembered something, and I said:

"I once had a foolish adventure. Would that be acceptable?"

She said, "Ayyo, yes, I would enjoy a foolish tale!"

I lay down on the floor on my back, and bent my knees to a peak. I pointed and said, "That is a volcano, a volcano named Tzeboruko, which means to snort with anger. But I promise, I will do no snorting. You sit up there, right on the crater of it."

When she was perched on my kneecaps, I said the traditional "Oc ye nechca," and I began to tell her how the volcano's overflow had caught me sitting stupidly in the middle of the ocean bay. During the course of the story, I refrained from making the noises of lava erupting and steam boiling, but, at the story's high point, I suddenly cried "Uiuioni!" and waggled my knees, then bumped them upward. "And o-o-ompa! I went away with the water!" The bounce dislodged Cocóton so that, at the ompa, she slid down my thighs to stop with a thump on my belly. It knocked the breath out of me and made her giggle and gurgle with delight.

It seemed I had hit on a story, and a form of story-telling, eminently suitable for a little girl. Every afternoon for a very long time thereafter, we had to play the Volcano Erupting. Even though I managed to think up other unfrightening tales, Cocóton insisted that I also tell and demonstrate how Tzeboruko had once flung me off The One World. I told it over and over and over, always with her participation—tremulous atop my knees as I drawled and drew out ever longer the suspense of the preliminaries, then gleeful when I bounced her, squealing as she slid, then heartily laughing at my whoosh of breath when she came down with a thump. The Volcano Erupting went on erupting every day until Cocóton grew old enough that Béu began to disapprove of her "unladylike behavior," and Cocóton herself began to find it a "childish" game. I was somewhat sorry to see my daughter growing out of her childhood, but I was by then well wearied of being jolted in the belly.

Inevitably, the day came when Cozcatl called on me again—in a pitiable state: his eyes red-rimmed, his voice hoarse, his hands interlaced and twisting as if they fought each other.

I asked him gently, "Have you been crying, my friend?"

"Doubtless I have reason to," he said in that gravelly voice. "But no, I have not. What it is..." He unlaced his knotted fingers to gesture distractedly. "For a while past, my eyes and my tongue both seem somehow to have been—thickening—filming over."

"I am sorry," I said. "Have you consulted a physician?"

"No, and I did not come to speak of that. Mixtli, was it you who did it?"

I made no hypocritical pretense of ignorance. I said, "I know what you mean. Béu remarked on it some time ago. But no, it was not my doing."

He nodded and said miserably, "I believe you. But that only makes it harder to bear. I will never know who it was. Even if I beat her half to death, I do not think she would tell. And I could not beat Quequelmíqui."

I consider for a moment, then said, "I will tell you this. She wanted me to be the father."

He nodded again, like a palsied old man. "I had supposed so. She would have wanted a child as much like your daughter as possible." After a pause, he said, "if you had done it, I would have been hurt, but I could have borne it—"

With one hand he stroked a curiously pale patch on his cheek, almost silver in color. I wondered if he had again absentmindedly burned himself. Then I noticed that the fingers of his stroking hand were almost colorless at the tips. He went on, "My poor Quequelmíqui. She could have endured a marriage to a sexless man, I think. But after she came to have such a mother love for your daughter, she could not endure an unfruitful marriage."

He looked out the window, and he looked unhappy. My little girl was playing with some of her friends in the street outside.

"I hoped—I tried to provide a substitute satisfaction for her. I started a special class for the children of the servants already in my charge, preparing them to follow their parents into domestic service. My real reason was that I hoped they would divert my wife's yearning, that she could learn to love them. But they were other people's children... and she had not been acquainted with them from infancy, as with Cocóton—"

"Look, Cozcatl," I said. "This child in her womb is not yours. It never could have been. But, except for the seed, the child is hers. And she is your beloved wife. Suppose it had happened that you married a widow already the mother of a young child. Would you suffer torments if that had been the case?"