by John Rechy
“Route the girls, Clarita!” Doña Lupita, Clarita’s sister and the mother of the pretty girls, ordered. Lupita was a beautiful woman who might have aroused Villa’s lust herself except that he preferred young girls.
“Clara!” Lupita’s husband, father of the girls, summoned Clarita. “Take them to the hills, and then come right back so Villa won’t suspect anything.” The three pretty girls fluttered about, excited and terrified.
That day, Clarita’s back ached, and so she released the withheld question, “Why me? Why shouldn’t I run up to the hills and stay hidden from danger?”
“Ay, Clarita,” Doña Lupita said, not meanly, “Pancho Villa would never bother with you, my dear.”
“No one would look at you twice,” the husband said. “Even if his men caught you, you’d be safe.”
It was during that sulking incursion into the hills that the Blessed Mother granted Clarita spiritual powers. Having safely hidden the three pretty girls—who giggled during the ordeal—she was on her way down the dusty hills when she stumbled on a rock and hit her head. She saw bursts of bright light, then only solid darkness. When she opened her eyes again, the light gathered into one brilliant flash within which stood the Holy Virgin Guadalupe.
“How pretty you are, my dear,” the Holy Mother said and touched her on the throbbing lump.
Clarita knew that not only was she being granted magical powers—after all, the Holy Virgin had touched her!—but she had become pretty, uniquely so because after the harsh fall she developed a misty eye—her “deer’s eye.” She was so secure in her feeling about the transformation brought about by the Holy Mother that she was not affected when she returned to the rancho and Lupita’s husband said, “What are you talking about? You look exactly as you did before, you’re as plain as ever.”
She understood a grudge—and so what he said did not faze her. Even if somewhat moderately, Lupita did graciously acknowledge the fact. “Well, there is something different about you, Clarita, my dear sister. Your eye is smudged.”
The next time the cry came up that Villa was raiding the village for the prettiest girls, Clarita was the first to take off and not come back to the rancho until it was entirely safe.
Years later—after the turbulence of the Mexican revolution when from day to day you didn’t know who was the enemy and who was not and the family fled to the border town of Juarez, Mexico, with trunkloads of money that was now worthless and they were penniless, the loaded suitcases kept for a time that would never come, when the money would again have value—the currency having collapsed—years later, several years later, when the family had crossed the border into the United States without even knowing they had—they had just kept fleeing—years later, when they had settled in the city of El Paso, in Texas, years later, years of sorrow—loss, deaths—and joy—marriages, children born—years later when the Depression struck the new country, years after that, and to survive poverty, Clarita, by then a grown woman, opened a small establishment which she called, in English, the Such Is Life Café. Soon after, she was arrested for bootlegging.
3
A pause in Clarita’s recollections. An unwelcome question occurs to Sylvia Love.
Sylvia had succeeded in listening attentively, so tired, hoping she wouldn’t doze off during the tearful saga, glad she had been able to say, at the crucial point in Clarita’s story, “But of course you’re pretty, Clarita,” although she wasn’t—or, well, she was in her own way. As if to signal his next action, the newborn child drew attention to himself by making a series of gurgly sounds. With powerful kicks, he threw off the sheet covering his body and smiled at Sylvia.
“He wants your breast,” Clarita said, standing over the bed, her misty eye clouded further by the warmth of tears. “Here,” she coaxed Sylvia to bare her breasts to feed her son.
When Sylvia felt the little mouth attached to her flesh, she welcomed a tingling sensation. She had felt the same when Lyle Clemens the First made love to her breasts! She tried to urge the child away, but his little mouth insisted. When she surrendered the nipple to him, she thought she heard him purring. Lord, he was a strapping child, with a shock of already-brown unruly hair, just like Lyle the First’s, and his eyes—his eyes? Difficult to tell. What if they were brown, like Armando’s? What if Lyle really was the son of—? Impossible!
Nudging the child closer to his mother—Clarita continued her saga, warning that she might jump a bit ahead, because: “The journey back is wearying and time darkens like a bird in flight.”
4
An injustice at the Such Is Life Café.
The Such Is Life Café—a phrase Clarita had borrowed from a Jeannette MacDonald movie she cherished, the singer being her second favorite star, the Mexican siren Maria Felix her first—was located on a corner not far from railroad tracks. The unit, in which she also lived, consisted of the restaurant, her quarters, and a room she rented out—to her everlasting regret, because how could she know—how?—that the woman who took the rented room was making alcohol contrabando?
A highly intelligent woman, Clarita was aware of the skepticism that development might arouse in some, about the brewing of alcohol occurring without her locating the smell. The woman, Concha, was canny; she explained the smell came simply from the fact that she was developing arthritis and constantly rubbed her joints with alcohol. Who would question a sick woman tending to her illness? Besides, despite the miraculous granting of powers by the Holy Mother Guadalupe in the hills of Chihuahua, Clarita’s powers of divination had not yet been refined.
Having gotten wind of a possible raid, Concha fled, leaving her implicating implements behind. When the Liquor Commissioners arrived, there it all was, the bootlegged alcohol in tin cans. That was very serious, especially in Texas—trains riding through had to close their bars as they crossed the State.
“Ay, qué injusticia!” Clarita cried. “What have I done, tell me? Who has ever been hurt by a small sniff of a drink? My customers need something to get them through hard times—”
5
An adjustment of memories.
“—and those were very hard times. People needed a traguito to get them through, and I provided it—” Clarita’s memory had run away beyond her control. When she heard an echo of her words, and saw Sylvia’s reaction of surprise, she shrugged, “Son cosas de la vida. Matters of life. So it was me, yes, and I was making some very good liquor. So what? (Of course, I intended to tell you all this.) I went to jail for a year,” she confessed flatly. “But I came out with refined powers, and a determination to educate myself. I have a diploma, you know, from night school,” she said proudly. “Still, that arrest, ay!—that’s why I work as a cleaning woman instead of teaching,” she rued.
“What an unfair arrest,” Sylvia managed to console her friend, although her body ached, an ache soothed by the mouth still nibbling at her breast too delightedly.
“So long ago,” Clarita extended her lamentation, “and I still remember it so well, remember the raids of Pancho Villa, the hills, back in 1920. What a memory I have.”
Sylvia frowned, baffled by the story she was now concentrating on to lessen the pangs in her body. If all that had occurred so far back, then how old would she be, her friend? Impossible. She ventured cautiously, “Clarita, that would make you almost eighty years old.”
“What?” Clarita was aghast. “It would not! It’s true all records of birth were lost, but eighty years old? Of course not!” Trying to hide what she was doing, she gathered her fingers on her lap and figured. She laughed. “I can understand your being baffled. You thought that had happened to me, didn’t you?”
“That’s what you said.”
“Haven’t you ever heard a story told so vividly that you absorb it? Especially when it’s told to you by your mother?”
“I hardly ever spoke to my mother.”
“La loca? I don’t blame you. … The flight into the hills happened to my mother; she told it to me. It’s become so real—”
Nothing surprised Sylvia for long about Clarita. “Did any of that happen to you, really to you?”
Clarita’s voice was firm. “The part that happened to me was the miracle. And the bootlegging.”
Sylvia had no problem believing the part about the bootlegging.
6
The present moves on. Lyle the Second grows up quickly and speaks an unwelcome word.
Clarita—although she had never married—taught Sylvia how to care for the child, insisted she not run away from him when the new presence overwhelmed her. Lyle Clemens the Second still baffled Sylvia at times when she looked at him—and at times she was frightened, not of him, but of the thought that she was a mother and he was her son.
At times, she sat—it seemed—for hours watching what she had created, at times giggling at the thought. After all, she was hardly nineteen. Other times, looking at her child, she felt an icy fear, the reason for which eluded her.
She began saying this to Lyle, while tickling him fondly: “Do you think I’m pretty?”
Lyle the Second would giggle, nodding his head—or so Sylvia would swear to Clarita when she returned with that day’s groceries for some special enchiladas she was concocting, with sour cream, for dinner.
“Mujer,” Clarita would shake her head. “He’s too young to notice such things.”
“Oh, I’m not sure,” Sylvia Love said.
The child took steps, walked, ran—and he learned to say something that sounded very much like, “Yes, yes!” every time Sylvia asked him the familiar question: “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Yes!” He threw his arms about her and kissed her neck.
“You’re surprised I’m so young, aren’t you?”
“Yes!” Lyle answered.
She held him at arm’s length before her, marveling at how handsome he already was.
“Mamma—”
“What did you call me—?”
“Mamma—”
She sat him back down on the floor where he had been playing. “What?” She shook her head.
“Mamma—”
Sylvia Love stood abruptly. “No!”
“Mamma—”
“I said, no. Don’t call me that. My name is Sylvia, call me Sylvia.”
“Mamma—”
“I said, no!” Sylvia tapped him lightly on his hands, one and then the other. He must have heard the word from Clarita. She tested another word, only in her mind. Son. She did not speak it aloud.
She saw the child’s hurt look. She hugged him. Then she hummed the song that had been powerful enough to draw her out of hiding at the Pentecostal Hall, the song she had sung at the Miss Alamito County Pageant, her favorite song. She sang it now to her son, but the joy of the song kept stumbling on still-open wounds and hurt bled into its joy.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. …”
Lyle listened attentively each time she sang her song, so sweetly, so tenderly, a sad note now and then. Eventually he could conjure up the regal figure of the black woman she told him about, who had sung the song, the woman with a golden crown and a golden voice.
More time flew. Lyle was seven. In the boy’s walk, Sylvia avoided detecting the beginning of his father’s swagger. Impossible! Too soon. This had become apparent: Lyle’s complexion was darker than hers—a light-brown tinge, and his eyes were brown, not blue like Lyle the First’s. So what? The growing child was becoming a replica of Lyle the First. Sylvia dismissed any silly doubts about Armando.
As she stared at the child, she wondered what she would do when Lyle the Second grew up to look exactly like the man she had loved. To put an end to her silly conjectures—about what, about what!—she took a sip of her private bourbon, before the early-evening hour she had set for herself now that she had discovered its soothing qualities.
Clarita affirmed her early prophecy. “You’re going to become a heart specialist, little Lyle, just like in my vision.”
“A heartbreaker,” Sylvia said. Bitterness seeped into her voice.
7
A disturbing question.
“Who is my father, Sylvia?” Lyle had begun asking that question to himself sometime ago, but he had not spoken it—not wanting to offend his mother, who winced every time he began, “Who is my—?” He verbalized it only now, when he was eight and bolder every day.
“You don’t have one.” Sylvia had rehearsed her answer, and so it came easily. Why should he know about his father? She had never needed one.
“At school everyone has a father,” Lyle said.
“I doubt it,” Sylvia said.
“Who is my father?” Having spoken the question, Lyle was not thwarted by the dark look that crept over his mother’s face.
“A son of a bitch,” she said, and closed her lips tightly, but opened them only to add, “A goddamned son of a bitch.”
“What did the goddamned son of a bitch look like?”
“You’re the spittin’ image of him.” Except for his coloring. Except for … his cruelty?
Lyle rested his head on her chest. “Did he ever see me?”
“Doesn’t know if you were born.”
Lyle closed his eyes, to shut away any vision of a father.
Clarita had been listening, wondering where all this would lead. She pretended to have just walked into the room. She herself had come to detest Lyle the First for how deeply he had hurt her Sylvia, but it was much too cruel to tell him what Sylvia was saying, words Clarita wished she could have thwarted. Looking away from Sylvia, she soothed Lyle’s frown. “Your father was a very handsome cowboy, very handsome, like you,” she said.
Sylvia laughed, coldly. “He sent me money, Lyle. You know what for?”
“Sylvia, no!” Clarita cautioned.
“So you wouldn’t be born.”
Lyle touched Sylvia’s chest, because from the way she had placed her hand there, he supposed she might have a pain in her chest. “I won’t be a goddamned son of a bitch like him,” he told her. “I would never be mean to you,” he added, perplexed.
“Won’t you?” Sylvia asked vaguely. She kept his hand on her chest, warming her flesh with it.
8
A gift and a vow.
For his twelfth birthday, Sylvia impulsively bought Lyle a pair of cowboy boots—Tony Lama cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. Oh, and he looked handsome.
“What the hell is the matter with you, Clara? Every boy wants a pair of boots and a cowboy hat,” Sylvia said when she was alone with Clarita.
That did not lighten Clarita’s glower.
“Here. Let’s have a small drink to cheer you up,” Sylvia forced a light tone. “I happen to keep some liquor for—”
Clarita retained her sternness. “You don’t have to hide your bourbon from me. I know you take a traguito now and then. I’ll have one with you, only one, because no one should drink alone.” She added, “It might even sharpen my visions.”
After Sylvia had silently poured the two “short nips” from the bottle she kept in the pantry.
Clarita said, “Some day, you’re going to have to tell Lyle more.”
“About what?”
“Everything. Not only about the cowboy. But about your mother.”
“Why?”
“So he can understand you.” She had decided to approach this matter now when Sylvia would have been mellowed by her bourbon. Clarita knew how wrong she’d been when she saw Sylvia’s warning expression, eyes narrowed.
“Tell him everything?” she said bitterly. “He knows as much about his goddamned son-of-a-bitch father as he needs to know. You told him he was a handsome cowboy, and I told him he was a son of a bitch. What more is there? And about Eulah? Tell him everything? About that woman, about my mother? About how she cursed me?” She was breathing harshly, even a discussion of the possibility enraging her. “Tell him about what she did to me? The humiliation, in front of all those people, laughing at me?—tell him that?” Never would she want to see him looking at her and know that he w
as imagining her during that time, imagining the echoes of degrading laughter, hearing Eulah’s vilification.
She stood only one foot away from Clarita now. “Tell him all that? Never! Not as long as I live—and I demand that you honor that.”
“I promise,” Clarita said somberly.
9
About the unique nature and manifestations of intelligence.
“He jist don’t wanna larn!” Mr. Bean, a despairing assistant principal, told Sylvia after she had stomped into his office in response to his written summons, brought to her by Lyle—who had smiled on presenting it, as if he had brought her a gift. The inked note was enclosed in an envelope that had been opened, with no attempt made to reglue it even cursorily.
“He’s my son, and so he’s bound to be smart,” Sylvia said, “and he’s only thirteen.”
“Dammit, ma’am, I know he is smart, can’t deny that, but he’s inattentive—”
“For a good reason perhaps.”
The assistant principal ignored that. “Do you know, ma’am, that sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, he stands up and walks out in those cowboy boots he says you bought him?—it’s like he’s turned invisible and someone’s calling him.”
“Hmmmm.” Sylvia needed time to figure out what to make of that. “Where does he go?”
“To a vacant lot near the school grounds. I’ve looked out and seen him myself, and there he is just starin’ around like he’s tryin’ to understand everythin’—and then starin’ up at the sky like he realizes he don’t. I think, ma’am, if you’ll pardon me, that the young man has problems.”
