Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  We followed Ofelia to a booth and rented skates from a short man in a Dodgers cap. Ofelia glanced at the boutiques as we sat on dark benches threading eyelets, lacing the skates up our shins. I double-knotted my bow and watched Ofelia lift her Rolex to her nose job.

  “While you guys skate, I’m going shopping. I’ll be back in an hour. Don’t go anywhere.” Seduced by the promise of intensely expensive retail therapy, she floated away. The stink of Chanel No. 5 went with her.

  I shuffled to the edge of the self-healing black floor. My feet scooted onto the ice, and my blades slid across it. It felt similar to roller-skating, and that I was bomb at. We had a roller rink in town at the fairgrounds, and I could skate to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” till my toes bled. I couldn’t skate backwards but I could skate squatting, in the position I imagined female slaves in the American South had probably been forced to give birth in. America, the horror. Sometimes, when I skated squatting, I imagined a fetus half-dangling out of me. I watched my breath puff out of my mouth. Ghosts. Raising two fingers in a backwards peace sign, I pretended to smoke. All the sophisticated people I knew smoked and pounded tequila shots, and I skated faster, feeling Alpine. Canadian. I knew I had it in me to play hockey. I was American. I was superior to all these mango-eating fuckers trying to glide on the ice. I moved my arms back and forth in imitation of the athletes in Chapstick commercials. I lapped everyone over and over, grinning as I passed them. In spite of the block of ice that buoyed me, I sweated. My calves and hamstrings burned. My perm frizzed. I would get fitter than the teddy bears doing aerobics on my sweatshirt.

  I glanced and saw Ofelia leaning on the edge of the rink, Gucci bags dangling from her forearms. I tasted sadness; it tasted like bird shit. The stores were shutting. I could see shop lights blacking out and girls pulling metal cages around storefronts. Ofelia’s bony, manicured hand motioned for us to come. We skated back to the benches and unlaced. We traded skates for tennis shoes and put them back on.

  We walked out of the pyramid and into the ethnic armpit of night. Ganzita and Ixchel and I climbed into the backseat. Rosita rode shotgun. We rode across town. Strands of white lights glimmered along the avenues. Pedestrians bustled with shopping bags and tacos. The smell of carne al pastor, car exhaust, and unrequited longing blew at us through the open windows. A red light made us stop before entering the roundabout. A statue of Christopher Columbus fondling a globe would’ve cast its shadow across us had it been noon. I looked to the lane left of us. The cars seemed strange. Nobody was in the driver’s seats. Nobody was riding either. Everyone in the Continental realized this emptiness at once. In unison, our heads scanned the lanes. To the right, another car ghost town. Everyone had abandoned the intersection and there we were, a car full of Chicanas, Mexicans, and Gucci bags.

  Men came running up the lane. One wore white jeans. One wore tan jeans. One wore blue jeans. All wore leather jackets. They carried AK-47s. They looked ugly enough to be extras or character actors. The men surrounded a gray sedan and beat their hands and rifles against its doors and windows.

  “Open the doors, you fucking bitches!” screamed the man with squinty eyes.

  There was a car with people.; one car with two women in it. A youngish woman sat in the driver’s seat, looking from man to man. A woman in the backseat, maybe her mother, looked from man to man. Her face wore an expression that was both terrified and uncertain. I glanced at their door locks to see if they were up or down. The little knobs were down. Their sedan was their cage. The older woman grasped rosary beads in her left hand. The younger woman threw her hands in the air and wrung them. She wailed, but from where we were, it was only a mouth moving. No voice.

  “Bitches!” the men screamed. “Open the doors!”

  The men seemed ready to crack open windows, drag the bitches into the street, and slaughter them at Christopher Columbus’s feet, a human sacrifice for an Italian god.

  “Mommy,” said Rosita. “Drive!”

  “But the light is red,” said Ofelia.

  “Go!” we all urged, and Ofelia sped through the unusually long red light.

  “Get down!” shouted Ofelia. Everyone did except me. I stared through the rear window as the men, the women, the rifles, and Columbus shrank. Cousins muttered prayers to assorted saints, and after two blocks we spotted a motorcycle cop with gut flopping over his belt. He wore aviator shades. He sat as comfortably as a fart in a bathtub. He might’ve been sleeping.

  “Tell the policeman!” we screamed.

  Ofelia pulled up to the cop. Rosita rolled down the window. Ofelia screamed, “There are men with machine guns attacking women by the statue of Christopher Columbus!”

  The policeman’s body didn’t shift. He said, “Thank you.” He was waiting for us to leave.

  Ofelia’s heel hit the gas. We sped away. Adrenaline kept me high as we passed the park where Dad’s parents had met and the city’s best churro shop. We passed the cemetery and came to Abuelita’s neighborhood. Ofelia parked the Continental at the curb and I burst across Ixchel’s lap, out of the car, and rattled Abuelita’s gate.

  She speed-limped outside to unchain it. I tore past her and into the front hall. I darted into her bedroom and flew onto her bed. I leaned over to switch on the TV. I flipped channels, looking for the news or newsflashes.

  My grandfather, wearing a three-piece suit accented by a pocket square, shuffled into the room. Turning to look at him, I caught a glimpse of myself in their mirror. My cheeks were rosy. My eyes bulged. My perm was out of control. Abuelito moaned, “Why are you so excited, m’ija?”

  With breathless pride, I explained, “On the way here, we saw men with machine guns attack women by the statue of Christopher Columbus!” I felt I was the harbinger of news, NEWS, and I knew that what I’d seen was the kind of thing that was supposed to be on TV. “I’m trying to find the news report about it!”

  Abuelito chuckled. He shuffled to me. His liver-spotted hand reached for my head. It patted my tropically induced ’fro. I smelled perfume that was not Abuelita’s.

  “That’s not going to be on TV,” he said. “It’s not going to be anywhere.” He creaked away, chuckling.

  I didn’t believe Abuelito. I flipped through the TV stations for hours but the asshole was right. There was nothing about men with machine guns attacking women at the statue of Christopher Columbus. Since nobody put it on the news, I guess it didn’t matter.

  E = MaChismo2

  Abuelito interrupted me as I was updating my Facebook status. He’d been dead for over a month. I could sense he wanted me to shut off my uncle’s computer and go to sleep. He didn’t want me to be sleep-starved for Abuelita’s death.

  In life, Abuelito was a vain misogynist. In death, he became a mostly invisible ghost.

  This must drive his ghost crazy. In Pedro Páramo, the seminal novel by Abuelito’s nemesis, Juan Rulfo, Mexico’s most notable surrealist, the vain don’t inherit the earth. Ghosts do.

  Ghosts colonize the imagination. Imaginations are the ultimate haunted houses.

  In the haunted house where I was Facebooking, I’d heard the doorknob turn. I’d turned to look. I quit breathing while I waited for one of my uncles — the nice one, Miguel, or the asshole, whom I’ll just call “the asshole” — to appear in the doorway. Neither did. Nothing appeared in the doorway. A feeling of supernatural narcissism engulfed me. Abuelito was announcing himself.

  “Go to bed,” he whispered into my mind.

  I felt terrorized. I wanted to obey Abuelito’s ghost, but that meant shutting off the lights. I shut off the computer. I got up and walked from the bed to the door. I poked my head into the hallway to see if there was anybody alive outside.

  Darkness and the smell of moldering newspapers greeted me. That’s the smell of Abuelito. When he was alive, he worked primarily as a publicist. He claimed to have named most of the places in Guadalajara. For example, there is a place named Plaza Del Sol, Shopping Center of the Sun, and Abuelito explained to me that while w
alking through it, as it was being built, a sun-shaped light bulb lit up over his head. Gestalt.

  “There is a lot of sun here!” he exclaimed. “We shall call this place ‘Plaza del Sol’!”

  If Abuelito discovered the sun, Rulfo discovered the moon.

  I came back to bed and sat on the bedspread. I looked at my uncle’s carpentry books lining the brown shelves and a trophy won by a hairless dog, a xoloitzcuintli, Samson. I looked at Abuelita’s painting of my uncle Miguel, and thought that in it, he looked a little like a fag. He’s not.

  I was sitting at the dining room table, listening to birds squawk. I could smell the ground beef Abuelita was stirring around a pan on the stove. Miguel was sitting at the table with Abuelito and me.

  Abuelito smoothed his hands across his vest and pocket square. He slid a fedora onto his head.

  “M’ija,” he said to me. “How many children do you want to have when you get married?” He smiled paternally. Mexican paternalism evokes the scent of chorizo.

  “None,” I answered. “I’m never getting married.”

  It was the first and only time I saw Abuelito look astonished.

  “Why?” he asked in a tone of voice people usually reserve for the question How did the accident happen?

  “Because I am a feminist,” I answered. I was twelve years old.

  Abuelito burst out laughing. He leaned over and petted me on the perm.

  “Don’t think so hard, m’ija,” he said and left to see his mistress, taking his chorizo scent with him.

  When Mom sat down Abuelito at the dining room table and told him, “I want to go to college to study chemistry,” his answer was “No. Women get married, they go to the convent, or they become secretaries. I’ll pay for you to go to secretarial school but not university. That’s a waste of an education.”

  Years later, he paid for his mistress’s daughters to go to university.

  Perhaps, his chorizo actually did evolve.

  Abuelito unlearned his peasant roots at the seminary he attended with Rulfo. There, priests imbued him with fake class. They taught him how to write well enough. He became interested in poetry but not for the muse’s sake. Abuelito saw poetry as a vehicle for his chorizo. Seduction. Narcissism. His sonnets smell of pork, moldering newspapers, secretaries’ vulvas, and clichés.

  In grade school, Mom read one of his poems — a love poem about a thorny rose — in an oratory contest. She lost.

  Somewhere in my imagination, Abuelito is sitting at his dining room table. Because my imagination is cold, below eighty degrees, for a Mexican’s, Abuelito wears a beanie, scarf, and earth-toned serape. A purple scab dots the bridge of his nose. His gray moustache is its own animal; it’s about to jump off his upper lip and run away. Go join the other moustaches and hamsters that live together in a hole in the wall.

  In front of Abuelito, on a placemat, rests an unpublished manuscript. A dedication appears under the title. I can’t quite read it.

  In a voice that’s more moan than groan, he asks, “Have I told you about when I was in seminary? With Rulfo? Mexico’s greatest novelist? Well, in my opinion, and I am a writer, too, Rulfo doesn’t deserve that title. His writing is about dirt. Worms. Ghosts. Bricks. Bad weather. Things that don’t honor anybody. And it doesn’t make any sense, you don’t even know who’s talking or telling the story. Rulfo was, to put it politely…”

  Abuelito’s ghost keeps talking. Jealous ghosts never shut up.

  Mom attended private schools. One was near the orphanage where Abuelita lived with her sisters, and Mom was so bony that as their teacher was walking them through the yard, she didn’t notice Mom had veered left while her classmates continued forward. Mom slipped between the iron fence bars and came face to face with downtown Guadalajara. It became hers.

  Wearing her uniform, she strolled around the plaza and its gazebo where young men and women congregated at night to flirt. Women swam in circles around it, and if a guy liked her, he brought her a flower and saved her from the orbit.

  Coins clinked in Mom’s vest pocket. She scurried to a man manning a white cart. She told him, “A mango with lime and chile, please.”

  From his cart, he lifted the fruit impaled on a stick. He grabbed taut citrus, held it over, and squeezed. Clear juice bled. Droplets caught sunlight and looked like sparks. The vendor grabbed a bottle, held it over the mango, and red dabs fell, coating the marigold meat. He handed the spear down to Mom, and she thanked him with a thin-lipped grin. Juices dripped down her fingers and wrist while she nibbled, and she wandered along rosebushes, gnawing, wasps carrying a masonic tune nearby. Mom grabbed the mango with her other hand and flicked her juicy fingers at them. Her potion sprinkled them. Instead of attacking her, they sailed away.

  Mom looked up at the broken clock crowning the gargoyle-laden Governor’s Palace. The Mexican flag slumped above it. Supposedly, an ancestor had aimed his rifle at the clock and shot it in the face during a major or minor war over something like land or god, and his hole had remained. His hole reminded everyone that violence was always ready. His hole also reminded everyone that violence makes holes. Mom tossed her spear and mango stone at the rose bushes. Surprised bees evacuated. They droned for their queen’s comfort.

  Mom skipped along cobblestones, thrilled to be ditching. Everything looks more decadent when you’re ditching, peanuts and cigarettes taste better, too, and Mom skipped to the Garden of Letters. Writers set up shop there, in rosewood shade and under brick arches. At their card tables, they spread blank paper and whittled pencil points with paring knives. They wrote for people who couldn’t and could. They wrote for full-blown illiterates and crappy communicators. A day’s work could include an eviction notice, a lilac-scented love letter, and an essay about Sancho Panza’s supporting role in Don Quixote.

  Mom blocked the sun with her hand to see if her dad was at his usual post. She saw someone else working there, a man without her father’s honker or patriotic mustache. Mom crept closer and meandered the periphery of the square, scouting for her father. Not seeing him among the scribes, she turned to leave. She headed in the direction of a bookstore when her father’s profile appeared against a window displaying three mannequins dressed as brides.

  Mom sped up her walk and followed a few yards behind him. She tailed him along the row of cantinas where the city’s most ground-up hookers worked and Death hung out — she’s a creature you should save your last kiss for — and then Mom followed Abuelito around the orphanage and beyond, to a row of buildings hundreds of years old with hand-of-Fatima door knockers.

  Standing on a stone step, Abuelito grabbed one of the hands. He rapped its fingertips against wood. Chocolaty door swung open. A petite former secretary stood at the threshold. Abuelito leaned in and kissed her on the lips. A baby girl with her father’s nose straddled the lady’s secretarial hip.

  Georges Bataille, Look Into My Eye

  I opened my eye. It was not confronted by pussy. That onslaught only happened in Tío Miguel’s room.

  If Abuelito was hogging the bathroom, the only other toilet you could use was Miguel’s, and to earn relief you had to journey through the labyrinth of pornography that filled his bedroom.

  Even on his toilet, Miguel treated you to muff. On the door across from his commode hung a life-size poster of a lady in a see-through blouse splaying herself, Georgia O’Keefing you as things shot out of your own flower. I minded all the pussy but, at the same, part of me welcomed it.

  Hopping out of bed, I left Mom and Ixchel and made my way down the hall where Abuelita had painted our portraits. I padded into the space where the piano nobody played sat against a moldy wall. Nearby, Abuelita’s caged birds blinked, twitched, and called.

  Abuelita was standing at her round kitchen table, holding a dainty machete. She hacked into an infant-sized papaya, halving it, exposing seeds that were black pearls capable of making papayitas. My appetite was turned on by the fruit’s aroma: part feet in July, part bubblegum, part cotton candy, a dash
of crotch. What a feminine breakfast.

  Abuelita looked from the black pearls to me. She gasped and then pointed her machete at my face. “What happened to your eye?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t bothered me much when I’d woken up, but now that Abuelita mentioned it, I reached up and touched my blind spot, my right eye. My fingertips rubbed skin swollen smooth and shut. The flesh pulsed with uncharacteristic warmth. My blindness was running a temperature.

  “Before you eat,” said Abuelita, “go show your mom.”

  I left Abuelita and her fruit behind. I returned to our room. I knelt beside Mom’s twin bed. I reached for her shoulder. I shoved it.

  “Mom,” I said.

  She made noises that might scare you if you were alone in the woods.

  “Mom,” I repeated.

  She made more of those noises, but also groaned, “What?”

  “Abuelita says you have to look at my eye.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it scared her.”

  Mom opened her eyes. She looked at me but didn’t flinch. “Get me my glasses,” she said.

  I walked to the corner desk, grabbed her glasses with the big squarish lenses, and delivered them to her veiny hands. She slid the glasses on and examined me.

  Her expression changed from curious to concerned yet revolted. “Something bit you in the eye,” she said.

  I scratched the heat. With the warmth and the slit and the swelling, it was not unlike scratching myself, the Georgia O’Keefe between my legs.

  “Stop scratching,” said Mom.

  “But it itches.”

  “You’ll go blind,” she said. Isn’t that what they tell people who constantly touch themselves for fun? So that I’d be obeying Mom, I slapped my eye instead.