Caramelo

by Sandra Cisneros

* In the times of love and peace, an invasion of illegal aliens descended into Oaxaca, land of the siete moles, and ascended into the clouds of Huautla de Jiménez because of the magic mushrooms Ndjixito, “that which makes one become,” which the locals had used in their religious ceremonies and healing rituals for thousands of years and which took one to trippier trips, it was said, than LSD. Hippies and vagabond anthropologists, artists, students, foreigners, the spoiled children of the rich, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the wives of politicians, the devout and the curious, anyone who was somebody and a whole string of nobodies came to see María Sabina and gain a shortcut to nirvana. Some leapt from the windows of hotels lost in the Age of Aquarius, some became a public nuisance, getting evicted from their hotels or falling asleep in the market like lopsided sacks of sugar, some chased each other around the zócalo bandstand naked, causing such a scandal, ay, what a nuisance, and some camping carelessly in the woods caused a terrible fire that burned thousands of acres of forests and fields and threatened half a dozen Indian villages, and all because that María Sabina gave those fools the mushrooms, the townspeople said. As a consequence, María Sabina became infamously famous, so famous that the sister of a Mexican president would come and visit her, and everyone would have their picture taken beside her as if she were a holy relic, and restaurants named “María Sabina” with even napkins carrying her name would profit from her celebrity, but María would live just as poor after everyone from professors to writers and politicians to television crews, absolutely everyone ran off, and would die penniless and almost naked as the day she was born, thanks to a lot of good-for-nothing offspring, not to mention the evil from the envy of neighbors—because her fame made them terribly aware of their own unhappy lives—who raised a ruckus because the confidentiality of the spiritual mushrooms had been betrayed to strangers who did not understand that the mushrooms were medicine and, like any medicine, only to be taken when ill, and therefore muddied their purpose on this planet, which in turn lessened María’s powers, until finally she was acabada, finished, worn, done, so that at the end of her remarkable life, María Sabina was quoted as saying, —Was it all right that I gave away the mushrooms?

  Tú, what do you say? Tú, reader, she is asking you.

  42.

  Born Under a Star

  The baby was as bald as a knee, with a head like a peanut and limbs like chorizo, but to Soledad he was exquisite. —Isn’t he beautiful? Mi rey, my king, she cooed, smacking one fat foot with a loud kiss. —Someday you’ll grow up to be a person of category, my fatty. Yes, my life, you were born under a star. You won’t go barefoot like I did when I was little. No, not you. You’re a Reyes, right? Aren’t you? Aren’t you, my heaven. You’re destined to be a king. You’ll see. Right, mi chulito, right? Who’s my beauty? Who’s my little treasure? Who loves you the best? I’m going to swallow you up, you fat little sweetness. You little tum-tum of caramelo. Yum, yum, yum, yum. What’s the matter, my heaven? Don’t cry. Mamá loves you, and you’re going to be a king.

  Baby Inocencio wore a lace bonnet with a huge fluted trim like a sunflower, like a star, and scowled as if he knew just how silly he looked. —Precioso, his mama said to him and to no one in particular. —Precioso.

  Once, a long time ago it seemed, Soledad had lain awake watching Narciso sleep, marveling at her husband’s profile, his sweet snoring, the thick eyelashes, the delirious constellation of moles sprinkled on his man shoulders, the sensuous down on the nape of his neck. —Precioso, she’d whispered to herself, fascinated by the very elements that made Narciso a man. His stiff whiskers, the swirl of sideburns, the strength in his wrists, his jaw, the hard shield of his chest. She made an inventory of his charms. People complained and complained about marriage, it seemed, but no one mentioned the gift of sleeping beside another. —Precioso.

  Now she watched Inocencio sleep beside her. How is it God could pour so much beauty into one little being, she wondered. Maybe God made babies beautiful because they needed so much care. Maybe God parceled out equal portions of beauty and of trouble, and that’s how it was Narciso arrived with his enormous beauty and his equally enormous load of need.

  Moths fluttered against the glass of the balcony doors, but they could not get in. The old man in the room next door coughed and spit up, as he always did before sleeping. A street vendor’s whistle moaned from the plaza. In the distance a dog yap-yapped. The yellow eye of the moon peered through one pane of the French doors. It was night. Where was Narciso? Somewhere vague and far away, but it no longer mattered. She had made this little human being. This little human had grown inside her and now here he was, just as perfect as you please. How do you do? Oh, I’m very well, very fine indeed.

  Very fine. Very. She looked and looked at her son, not remembering once what the tamal vendor outside the church had said about falling in love again that day she had been so sad. Tanta miseria. So much misery in the world. But so much humanity too. Just enough. Not too much. Just enough, thank God.

  43.

  El Sufrido

  He was never happy unless he was sad. To tell the truth, his name should have been el Sufrido. But, no, it was Inocencio Reyes. In another life, he might’ve been a philosopher. Or a poet. He liked to think and think, a skinny youth who enjoyed examining life at length. He would walk around the block if things he saw were worth looking at more than once. A waitress with a thick forest of underarm hair. A black man with a white woman. A drunkard who had shit in his pants. These items deserved consideration. So taken was Inocencio with his thinking, he forgot he was mortal and not invisible to the eye, and was always startled whenever anyone stared back.

  —He’s a daydreamer, complained his schoolteachers.

  —He’s a thinker, said his mother in his defense. She liked to remind them how as a baby he had been colicky. —Cried and cried, day and night, crying and crying and crying, as if even then he knew his destiny. Not like my other babies.

  True. Unlike his younger siblings—Fat-Face, Light-Skin, and the Baby—Inocencio’s head was filled with too much remembering. Things he thought he remembered, and things invented for him to remember. —Before the revolution, when the family Reyes owned railroads … his mother would begin.

  The Mexican revolution had tossed and tumulted everything, including everyone’s memories. It was as if the revolution gave everyone from the most beggarly and poor an excuse to say, —Before the revolution when we were moneyed, and thus, to excuse their humble present. It was better to have a gallant past, because it made one’s present circumstance seem all the more wretched and allowed one the liberty of looking down condescendingly on one’s neighbors. Or, if there was no recent wealth, one could always resort to the distant past, —Remember our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Nezahualcóyotl, the poet king? No such thing, but it sounded bonito.

  Inocencio’s family was neither rich nor poor, but part of a wide middle class that flourished in Mexico City while the U.S. suffered through the Depression. Boys like Inocencio were encouraged to strive for an education at the national university, especially if their fathers wanted them to avoid a military career. But a career of any kind, military or civilian, seemed the last thing on Inocencio’s mind.

  God had been kind and bestowed an aura of melancholia about Inocencio Reyes, and this coupled with his intense eyes, dark as Narciso’s but shaped like his mother Soledad’s, like slouching houses, would bless Inocencio with the air of a poet or a martyred Sebastian without having had to undergo either torture.

  He did not choose to be unhappy. Who would choose to be unhappy? He was simply a boy without the words for what he was feeling, someone who felt most comfortable in the company of his own thoughts.

  It would be a lifelong habit. When he wanted to become invisible, when he felt like leaving a room, when he couldn’t bear being around the people he was around, the house he was housed in, the city where he was citizen, he left the premises without leaving the premises. Into the he, within-the-h
e, within-the-he. Without the body, that bad actor. Simply his soul, pure and unencumbered, oh!

  It could be said Inocencio Reyes lived the life of a person in self-exile, happiest when he could devote himself to his daydreams. Love inspired him to think, as it inspires so many fools. He dedicated his life to this interior inquiry. He did not know he was continuing a tradition that traveled across water and sand from nomadic ancestors, Persian poets, Cretan acrobats, Bedouin philosophers, Andalusian matadors praying to la Virgen de la Macarena. Each had in turn influenced their descendant Inocencio Reyes. A low-ranking Baghdad vizier, an Egyptian cheesemonger, an Oulid Naid belly dancer wearing her dowry of coins around her hips, a gypsy holy man, a goose herder, an Arab saddle-maker, a scholar nun carried off by a Berber chieftain the day Córdoba was sacked, a Sephardic astronomer whose eyes were put out in the Inquisition, a pockmarked slave girl—the sultan’s favorite—couched in a gold and ivory seraglio on the shores of the Abi Diz. Tunis. Carthage. Fez. Cartagena. Seville. And like his ancestors he attempted his own treatise on that enigma of enigmas. What is love? How does one know one is in love? How many different kinds of love are there? Is there truly a love at first sight? Perhaps he was going as far back as our graffiti-artists grand-others of Altamira who painted on the walls of caves.

  While other young men busied themselves with serious preparations for their profession, Inocencio took to staying up late at night, —Like a vampire! his father complained, and in these hours of darkness and light he indulged himself in what he loved to do most—dream. Asleep dreaming or awake dreaming, this is what Inocencio did best.

  He was thinking how is it a woman can collapse so comfortably with her legs folded beneath her like a cat. The seduction of the eyelids drooping when someone lit a cigarette. The charming tac tac tac of a high-heel shoe across tiles. Or a million and one observations cataloged as either nonsensical or brilliant, depending on your point of view.

  To tell the truth, his mother sometimes thought him a little crazy, and in reality he was. A little crazy to be so happy alone putting thoughts together and taking them apart, and thinking over and over of what he should’ve said, and what someone meant by what they didn’t say, the minute details of life, living his life turned around backward, living his life, reliving life and examining it to an unhealthy indulgence.

  His first obsessions were about those things that overwhelmed and frightened him precisely because there was no language to name them. And he would seek out a quiet space and think until that smudge of emotion clarified itself. The fear and allure of the wind that set the trees and the arteries in his body trembling. The sunsets watched from the azotea when Mexico City was still smog-free and one could watch a sunset. The face of a blond, three-quarter profile, with the sun behind her and the down of her cheek ablaze.

  Things like this filled him with a joy akin to sadness or a sadness akin to joy, and he found himself unable to explain why he was blinking back tears with an uncontrollable desire to laugh and cry all at once. —What?—I don’t know, nothing, he might’ve said. But that was a lie. He should have said, —Everything, everything, ah, everything!

  44.

  Chuchuluco de Mis Amores

  I don’t know, but I keep asking myself, don’t we need to see Narciso and me together more? To feel the passion we had? To believe in it? Don’t you think? Just a little love scene? Something sweet would be nice. Come on, don’t be bad.

  Ay, qué fregona. All right. All! Right! Just one scene, but you’ve got to promise to quit interrupting. After this, no more noise from you! I can’t work like this. Not another word until I’m finished no matter how the story turns out.

  Not even if God commanded it! You won’t even know I’m here. Te lo juro.

  A dream is a poem the body writes. Even if we lie to ourselves in the day, the body is compelled to speak its truth at night. And so it was with Narciso, who cluttered his daytime hours with so much noise and distractions he didn’t know his own heart, but was plagued with listening to its babbling all night.

  —Ábrazame, he’d say to his wife when she climbed into bed with him. —Hug me.

  And hug him she would. That’s how he was accustomed to falling asleep.

  One night he dreamt this dream. They were asleep the way they always slept, his body nested inside hers, her arms around him. This is why the dream frightened him, because he wasn’t aware he was dreaming. He was asleep with her holding him. At first it was a pretty feeling to be asleep inside the circle of someone’s arms. But here is when he realized there was a third arm wrapped around him, and that’s when he began to scream. On his side of the dream he was hollering and screeching, flailing and yelling, but on the other side, the body simply wheezed and whimpered as if it wanted to sneeze.

  —There, there, it’s only a dream. I’m here. Then Soledad snuggled closer and wrapped her arms around him tighter. A knot of frustration and fear, like a woolen sweater neither on nor off but tangled on one’s head. She tugged him toward her, heat of her words in his ear. —There, there, there, I’m here.

  It made him miserable, cranky, and mean toward her. Long after the stint in Oaxaca was over, and he had a family and was living in the capital, suddenly he dreamt a dream that surprised him. A dream of the other one, the sweetheart from the hotlands.

  —You betray me every night, he heard himself tell her.

  —Betray you? she said laughing. —You’re married! Who are you to hold the word betrayal to my throat?

  Then he tried to strangle her, but when he reached for her she turned into a fish and slipped through his fingers. When he woke he found himself filled with sadness.

  He’d fallen in love with a mermaid. With her scent of the sea. The sweaty, gritty stew of lovemaking he loved. Her silver laugh. The purple orchid of her sex. That heat he remembered, even the sand flies, because they reminded him of her, the woman who did not care for him, unlike his mother and wife, who adored him. Men take women’s love for granted. All his life he’d been cooed and coddled. It startled him to find this mighty, huge, and holy woman who didn’t care for his approval. Of course, because of this, he loved her even more.

  He could not forgive her. To forgive her for sex is bad enough, but it was not the sex that he could not let go. It was the love. After how many moons and suns had waxed and waned, plunged and plummeted into blackness, worn themselves bony and empty, and fattened themselves full again, yet the pain was still there, leaving him sharp-mouthed and cross and thin-eyed. The horn of a Guadalupe moon, the whalebone of the word lodged itself in the soft, fleshy part of his heart. Love.

  Day sleeping or night sleeping, he lived his life like this, plagued by some annoyance he couldn’t name, like a hair on his tongue. One day walking the streets of the capital he found himself suddenly with a craving for sweets. He couldn’t explain why he felt an urge for chuchulucos. He was like a man sleepwalking until he came upon the candy shop Dulcería Celaya on Cinco de Mayo Street. He bought pumpkin-seed-studded obleas—transparent pastel wafers, pink, white, yellow, pale green, Ave María blue. He bought marzipan hens, cajeta from Celaya, guayaba paste, sesame seed candy, burnt-milk bars, candied limes filled with coconut, candied sweet potato with cinnamon and cloves, glazed orange rinds, candied pumpkin, tamarind balls, coconut bars, those cone-shaped suckers called pirulís, lassos of membrillo, almond nougats, Mexican delicacies dubbed Fatties, Harlequins, Queens, Joys, Alleluias, Glories, and those sublime meringue drops named Farts of a Nun. He bought everything he pointed to, and stumbled out of the shop with his sugary purchases, toward where?

  It was an extraordinary day, sun-dappled, tepid, as clean and soft as a cotton dish towel used to wrap the fresh tortillas. He wished he had a room alone he could go to to wash his face. Perhaps he should rent a hotel room? But the thought of a hotel room. Hotel rooms depressed him. They were filled with memories of other bodies, of sadnesses, of joys no amount of copal or pine-scented disinfectant could flush out. No, he could not bring himself to rent
a room filled with someone else’s emotions.

  Narciso meandered toward the green of the Alameda and in the curly flutes and spirals of an iron bench he finally found refuge. The ashes and willows never seemed so transparent and cool as at that moment, as if the world were underwater and everything set in motion by distant whirlpools and currents.

  A street dog with rusty fur sniffed at his left shoe, and instead of kicking it away, he watched himself feed it a yellow marzipan chicken. Membrillo, burnt milk, pink-edged coconut bars, Narciso and the rusty dog ate it all. He filled himself up with sugar, oblivious to the splendors of pork rind vendors, indecent lovers, and the exuberance of clouds.

  Narciso ate the chuchulucos, but they tasted like the food in dreams, of air, of nothing. He wasn’t even aware he was eating in just the same way he was not aware the light was dimming, clouds tearing into gauzy shreds across the sky, the dog trotting away satisfied.

  Sadness was gathering where it always gathered, first in the tip of the nose, and then in the eyes and throat, and in the twilight sky running like a ruined cloth, not all the sugared sweets in the world could stop it. He chewed slowly the last bit of caramelo, carefully, the molars grinding, the jaw working, great gobs of saliva washing down his throat. His teeth hurt, but, no, that wasn’t it. His heart hurt. And something else. Exaltación Henestrosa. He said her name. A deep root of pain. The little wall he had built against her memory crumbling like sugar.

  45.

  ’Orita Vuelvo

  Why did I think I could expect any understanding from you? You have the sensitivity of an ax murderer. You’re killing me with this story you’re telling. Me maaataaas.