Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

  Your mother. Your mother and I were once very young, just like you. And we used to think like you, believe it or not. Yes, we did. But your behavior is like a dog, worse than a dog, not befitting a Reyes.

  You know about your grandfather Hipólito Eduviges Reyes, don’t you, mijo?

  Narciso cleared his throat.

  Good, I knew you would remember me telling you about him. He would always say a man has got to be feo, fuerte, y formal. Yes, your grandfather always said that. A man’s got to be ugly, strong, and a gentleman. Above all else he must be a gentleman.

  Now this happened some time ago, remember, when I was not the old man you see sitting here now. I was quite elegant back then …

  Narciso snickered at something he was reading.

  It’s laughable, I know, only because it’s true. I don’t like to take a bath now, but back then, well, I was un catrín, if you can believe it.

  Narciso bowed his head and burped.

  You can believe it? Good. Well, your mother and I have stayed together as man and wife for over twenty years because we gave our word to each other we would do so, which sometimes seems like a silly reason. Especially if someone is accustomed like your mother to her peasant habits. There are bound to be problems. But that’s how she came to me, your mother, with her ranch ways.

  Of course, there are fights. There have to be fights. There are always fights. But at least we believe in honor. Not like now when no one believes in anything. Back then, all of us, wise and foolish, we believed in something, which is what kept us from turning into dogs.

  Something I’ve never told you … When I met your mother I couldn’t think of anything but my own pleasure. And in this blindness, son, you were conceived. When your mother told me she was with child, I packed up my things and took to the road without looking back, and eventually headed back to the country of my birth, Spain. I ran off and abandoned your mother.

  Narciso slouched on the table, burying his face in his arms.

  Oh, I should’ve expected you’d react like this, son. I’m as ashamed of myself as you are. But wait, the story gets better. Don’t give up on me.

  Propped up on one elbow, Narciso was now concentrating on a huge mosquito whining in the room.

  When your grandfather learned I had left a woman with child, he waited till we were alone after dinner, just like we are, and he told me this.

  Narciso plucked himself up, nervously twisting his newspaper.

  He said, Eleuterio, we are not dogs! That is all he said. We are not dogs. His words filled me with so much shame I knew immediately what I had to do.

  Narciso’s newspaper came crashing down on Eleuterio’s shoulder.

  Don’t abuse me, son, though I deserve it. It wasn’t easy convincing a proud woman like Regina to marry me. At first she wouldn’t have me, and who can blame her? But perhaps she realized that if she did not marry the father of her child, nothing but a life of difficulty would be her destiny.

  Satisfied, Narciso eased back into his chair and buried himself in his newspaper again.

  But thanks to God she finally forgave me, and that’s how it was we married. And years later, years and years I’m talking, because I never told her, years later she would learn it was her father-in-law whom she had to thank for saving her honor, a man whom she never met, on the other side of the ocean. How ironic is life. Her father-in-law, who would’ve forbidden the marriage if we were living in Seville.

  A huge yawn erupted from Narciso’s throat.

  We are not dogs. We are not dogs, Eleuterio continued. That was all that was needed to be said, and I turned around and came back and fulfilled my obligation as a gentleman. And that is how I turned, that day, from a dog into the gentleman I was raised to be.

  Suddenly Narciso looked up and locked eyes with his father.

  The Devil knows more from experience, Eleuterio repeated in his thoughts. Narciso blinked. He was getting through to the boy! We are Reyes and must behave like Reyes. Promise me you will always remember this, son. Promise?

  When his father stared at him like that so intensely, Narciso almost believed there was still a small fire of intelligence left in him. But on second thought … No, he was probably just suffering from indigestion.

  What I mean to say is shall I tell your mother what I’ve witnessed …? Eleuterio Reyes stopped in midthought and blinked excessively, a nervous habit since the Seville days of his youth. He remembered only too well how his own clacker had gotten him into trouble. Permit me to take a detour in our story, because the detour often turns out to be one’s true destiny …

  * “It was said of old, ‘He who is preserved from the evil of his clacker, his rumbler and his dangler, is saved from the evil of the whole sublunary world.’ The clacker is the tongue, the rumbler is the belly, and the dangler is the privy parts.” The Ring of the Dove, Ibn Hazm

  35.

  The Detour That Turns Out to Be One’s Destiny

  Till the end of his days Eleuterio Reyes had the nervous habit of clenching his eyes into tight stars as if he had soap in them. But that was because of what his eyes remembered. A murder. Yes, a murder! A long time ago, in his other life, when he still lived in that country of his birth …

  In that Seville of his times, not ours, more dusty, less tourist-filled, yet just as blindingly hot, the young Eleuterio Reyes worked the bars playing piano tunes that made the patrons alternately happy and sad. As often happens on days of murder, it was a payday, and again as often happens, the murderer and the victim were friends. They had been laughing and hugging each other, buying each other drinks, and then, just as Eleuterio was beginning a cheerful mazurka, the two leapt at each other like cats, rolled, danced, and sparked across the room, burst out the door like a flamenco act, and tumbled onto the cobbled street with a trail of chairs, tables, and glass crashing behind them.

  Everyone else had the good sense to duck or run for help. Only Eleuterio watched transfixed as a sleepwalker; he was by nature a nosy man. This was why all his life he was able to remember so clearly the murderer’s face. He had seen it all, from the beginning embrace, from the round of drinks, the jokes, the laughter, the sudden explosion of anger, the startling glint of the knife blade, the dark blood the color of autumn dahlias bubbling from the nose and mouth.

  It was only when a crowd of onlookers began to gather that Eleuterio came to his senses and, like an injured animal, suddenly had the instinct to run. But it was too late, the police arrived.

  —Who did this? Did anyone see anything?

  —No, said the wise. —I don’t know nothing, I saw nothing, don’t even ask me.

  But Eleuterio, who was not gifted with wisdom, spoke up. —Yes, it was him, pointing to the one who had done it, because by now the murderer had come back and was standing there among the curious. In an instant the police were on the fellow, forcing him into horrible contortionist positions and adding a few extra thumps to his body, that human drum, for good measure. Then they ordered Eleuterio to accompany them to the station, since he was the star witness.

  There was a lot of commotion, everyone walking over to the police station, the murderer, Eleuterio, the police, and a huge crowd, since by then it was like a parade, and by the time they arrived to the chaos of the station house, Eleuterio, who was simply a musician, was so terrified by the prospect of being yanked into history, his mind began to panic and then doubt whether this man was truly the murderer, and this frightening thought brought on a fierce urge to pee.

  As providence would have it, at that very moment two women entered the station who had been hauled in for fighting, one still grabbing the other by the hair, and the other without one shoe, and an even bigger mob had come in to watch these two, because two women fighting are more exciting to men than two pobres killing each other, and with the excitement and commotion of all those people, the murderer and Eleuterio took advantage of the situation and ran out without anyone noticing.

  And that is why my great-grandfather Eleuterio
could no longer live in Seville, you see, but to be fair to the truth, I must explain his other motive. He had married into a family too good for him. His first wife, a woman of exceptional memory, was especially adroit at reminding Eleuterio of his humble origin and his subsequent mediocrity. It was with no regret and only the clothes on his back that Eleuterio abandoned this wife, Seville, and that life without life. —I’ll be right back, I’m going for cigarettes. Then, like countless partners who have gone out for cigarettes before him, he marched to where the land met the sea, boarded the first vessel headed across an ocean, and began his life anew.

  His destination—Tierra del Fuego, the end of the earth, where no one would ever find him, or at least to Buenos Aires, where everyone has a past they’d just as soon forget. But it was Eleuterio’s destiny to stop first at Veracruz, Mexico, to work a little and raise funds. Eleuterio was not proud. He worked at what he could find, playing the piano in the “cabarets of the bad death” and the houses of assignations. The carpas, too, he knew, accompanying a mismatched chorus line of ladies with short legs and wide tree-trunk waists outfitted in terrible costumes—little Mexican flags, coconut shells, strings of papel picado—getups so cheap and pathetic they gave one lástima to look at. Once Eleuterio even accompanied an indecent version of the jarabe tapatío performed with a Tenancingo rebozo the colors of the Mexican flag, a hermaphrodite, and a burro—a filthy finale that brought down the house.

  Like all immigrants, Eleuterio Reyes did what he had to do, working the worst shifts in the roughest parts of towns at public bars and private parties where someone was sure to die, though no one would notice till the next morning when they came to clean. And so with necessity prodding him forward, Eleuterio meandered his way through the sleepy provincial villages, some mere mirages of civilization so forgettable and forlorn there was only one way to enter and one way to leave.

  Eleuterio Reyes was not a handsome man, but he was born under a good star. He had a fine little mustache that twisted up nicely when he thought to wax it, and small, even teeth, as tiny and square as if he were still a baby. The hands, too, were sweet and childlike, even though the rest of him was huge and rumpled, as if the clothes he wore were not his, or as if he roomed in places without a mirror, which often was the case. This is not to say Eleuterio Reyes was without appeal. Women like men like this, to tidy and take home for improvement. So it was with this lumbering flour-sack body and his soft piano player’s hands that Eleuterio Reyes made his way finally toward that city in the middle of the world, halfway between here and there, between nowhere.

  The move to the capital raised his social standing. By the time he finally sent word to brothers in Spain as to his whereabouts, he held the respectable position of teacher of music at an elementary school. He became a family example. Younger unsuccessful siblings, good-for-nothing cousins, and layabout godsons were sent in hopes the New World would allow them to begin their lives over again. So that when Narciso Reyes was born, there were already several rotten branches of the family Reyes scattered across the Republic of Mexico, some reminding los Reyes too much of their lowly beginnings. Say what they say, their blood was Spanish, something to remember when extolling their racial superiority over their mixed-blood neighbors. And even if these ne’er-do-well Reyes had not inherited anything but an overdose of pride, the family Reyes was still española, albeit mixed with so much Sephardic and Moorish ancestry, all it would have earned them in an earlier Mexico was a fiery death at the Plaza del Volador.

  So, as is always the case, a detour turns out to be our destiny. That is how Eleuterio Reyes arrived in Mexico City, where he taught at an elementary school and once played the national anthem when the president dictator, who had elected himself to office eight times, came to the inauguration of a new building. Except the descendants would remember it wrong and say it was at the Presidential Palace that great-grandfather Eleuterio played, though he wasn’t a brilliant composer and had only mediocre skills as a musician. Like all chronic mitoteros, los Reyes invented a past, reminding everyone that their ancestors had been accustomed to eating oysters with mother-of-pearl forks on porcelain plates brought over on the Manila galleons.* It was a pretty story and told with such fine attention to detail, neighbors who knew better said nothing, charmed by the rococo embroidery that came to be a Reyes talent.

  * The truth was they had only recently learned to eat with knives, spoons, forks, and napkins. Their ancestors had eaten food cooked with sticks, served on clay dishes, or on that edible plate, the tortilla.

  36.

  We Are Not Dogs

  A very telling statement of the times came from the mouth of that philanderer painter Diego Rivera, who, after learning of his wife’s vengeances, exclaimed, “I don’t want to share my toothbrush with anybody!” By which we can infer women were toothbrushes. If that be the case, when Soledad’s belly began to swell, there was no doubting whose toothbrush was whose.

  It so happened that Narciso returned to his homeland at a time when Mexico was trying to build itself into a modern nation. So much of the railroads had been destroyed in the war, there was an urgency to unite the country with paved highways for the newly invented automobile. The government created the National Roads Commission, and the National Roads Commission created a desk job for Narciso as bookkeeper to its Oaxaca unit, thanks to his perfect penmanship, a Reyes aptitude for mathematics, and the excellent qualification of having a godfather who was the director-in-chief. The little paper that certified Narciso had been loyal to the Constitutional Government during the Ten Tragic Days of 1914 and a note from a physician who owed Regina a favor allowed Narciso’s reentry to Mexico with no disgrace or suspicion, and his bandaged chest only attested to his patriotism.

  It was a time of intense nationalism, and Narciso caught the patriotic fervor of the nation. He remembered his childhood history lessons. Oaxaca was where the last strongholds of the Zapotec and Mixtec royal houses had held out successfully against the Spanish invaders, their resistance assisted as much by their own ferocity as by that of the terrain, with its cold in the high mountains and its steamy isthmus jungles.

  No paved roads existed in the state then, only dirt paths pounded hard by oxcarts. To make matters more difficult, the Oaxacan landscape was overwhelmed with tropical canyons, valleys, rivers, and mountains. It is said that when the king of Spain asked Cortés to describe the terrain, Cortés crumpled a sheet of paper, tossed it on the table, and said, —Like that, Your Majesty. Like that.

  Similarly overwhelmed with canyons, valleys, and mountains was the state of Regina’s nerves. She was a confusion of emotions now that Narciso was home. What good was having the love of her life back if he was to be sent away again? Her migraines returned, as did the shadow of grief—rage. And rage, unlike grief, will make do with any convenient target. This was most often Soledad. A knuckle, a fist, a wooden spoon, a bad word, all these were thwacked against the poor girl without a second thought.

  It’s amazing how blind Mexican sons are to their mothers’ shortcomings. A meddlesome, quarrelsome, difficult, possessive mother is seen only as a mother who loves her child too much, instead of the thing she is—an unhappy, lonely person. So although Regina made Soledad’s life hell, Narciso saw in his mother only an example of absolute devotion. She was weepy and cross, she locked herself in her room and refused meals. Her boy was home but being taken from her again. It wasn’t fair. At the oddest moment she burst into rages and then into tears. Ah, see how much she loves me, Narciso thought, and who can fault her for that?

  In his honor, Regina decided to organize an elaborate farewell supper to demonstrate to all how much she loved her boy. It gave her something to do and, though it doubled Soledad’s chores, at least it lessened the beatings.

  Soledad’s body was already showing changes. Like a dusty house cat, she stretched often and rubbed her lower back, and when she was lost in thought, she stroked her belly unaware she was stroking her belly. The body spoke and said just enough
, but not too much. Only Señor Eleuterio took the time to listen. Like him, she was a sad, frightened creature whom everyone was so used to seeing they didn’t see her. Least of all his wife, Regina, who was busy with mijo’s farewell party, oblivious to anything but the preparations.

  On the night of the party, the table was arranged with treasures that could rival Cortés’ plunder—porcelain vases overflowing with flowers, handmade lace tablecloths, silver candelabras, etched crystal, gold-rimmed Sèvres china, and linen napkins monogrammed with a rococo “S.” They were, after all, objects from Regina’s inventory.

  A prestigious list of nobodies was invited. The relatives and important acquaintances of Regina’s commerce. People she wished to impress more than people who were close to Narciso. In fact, most of them hardly knew the guest of honor. But that never stopped anyone from attending a Mexican feast.

  And what a feast! All of Narciso’s favorites foods. Pickled meats, sweet tamales and hot tamales; roast leg of pork; stuffed chiles; black, yellow, and red mole; creamy soups; chorizo and cheeses; roasted fish and roasted beef; fresh ceviche and red snapper Veracruz style; platters of rice the colors of the Mexican flag; salsas of several hues and potencies; and drinks of all kinds—punch, wine, beer, tequila. All through the meal the girl Soledad served platters and took away plates, a pathetic creature with a sad face made sadder by her circumstances. No one took notice of her except Eleuterio, who watched her dragging trays of food in and dragging them back out again.

  Soledad was serving the last course when Eleuterio decided enough was enough. Soledad had just finished placing a bowl of capirotada in front of him and was moving on to the next guest when Eleuterio grunted and tugged her back. He rose slowly from his chair. At first Soledad thought he was tired and needed her help getting up. The guests jabbered and laughed and ignored him, as they had all evening, until he raised his cane and brought it smashing down over Regina’s expensive merchandise.