Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

“Hi,” I tell her. “I’m your neighbor to the back.”

  “Oh, so you’re the one who moved in! Nice to meet you!”

  Wondering what Don Patricio might’ve said about me, I blush. “Here,” I say, pointing. “I brought guayabas.”

  “Wow,” she says. “We love guayabas. How did you know?” I look at her like Are you serious?

  “Pato!” she screams. “Pato!” A barefoot boy wearing mesh shorts and a soccer jersey scampers forth from one of the compartments.

  “M’ijo,” says Chela, “take the guayabas to the kitchen and wash them so that we can give the lady back her bucket.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I say. “I don’t need the bucket right now. When you’re done, just leave it by the gate.”

  “Wow, thank you!” She grins.

  “No problem,” I say and turn, waving over my shoulder. I hurry past the cherub that can’t hug me.

  Guayabas are strafing our driveway. Horseflies are pigging out on their explosions. It’s necrophilically erotic. The yellow fruits crack open in a sexy and explicit way. Like autopsies, their cotton candy pink cores turned inside out and glistening. Their odor delights flies, ants, cockroaches, and Mexicans. I cannot spell Mexican with Me.

  I spend September peeling splattered guayaba grenades off the driveway and chucking them into my cactus garden. The pretty dead feed my prickly living. Heat cooks some of the guayabas. Carbs bind these to the cement. I pick at them with my hoe till they crack loose and crumble.

  The guayaba tree is trying to touch its knees with its branches but our car is getting in the way and the guayaba won’t give up. It scratches the paint. When you get out on the passenger side, you are in the forest. I skip to the garage, fish my machete out of my red toolbox, and skip back to the tree. I hack my tool against a young branch, and it’s left holding on by almost nothing. With my hand, I yank on the mutilation. It comes off like that.

  A hummingbird bursts out of the leaves. He tzintzuntzans around my head. His tiny pissed off eyes glare at me. He twerks close enough to sit on my blade.

  I keep hacking and yanking. He swirls like an atomic diagram around my head.

  I grip the trunk and keep hacking. Ants parade from gray bark to my hand. Their march tickles. Theirs mouths sting. I pause, slap a few of them dead, and shake off their carcasses. I resume my hatchet job. Sawdust trickles. My nostrils suck some in and the urge to sneeze dances in my loins.

  A dark toothpick tries to stab my eyeball. The hummingbird thinks I’m a pincushion or something. I wave my machete in his face.

  “Leave me alone,” I say. “Beat it!”

  Blurry wings lift the fighter backwards and high. He exits the jungle. Silhouetted against the sky, he looks at me one more time and flies away.

  I keep chopping. Falling branches create a rainforest floor. The bigger branches need extra hacking. I skip to the garage and trade my machete for a saw. With this tool dangling from my forearm, I wheel the trashcan to my mess.

  I flip open the lid. I heave and set a thick branch across the maw. I chop. As I dismember, twigs fall. They’re tinder.

  Tzin. I look up. Black needle comes at my cheek.

  “I told you to go away,” I say, but foreboding wrinkles my soul. My saw clatters to the driveway. I lift the branch I’m in the process of annihilating. A nest that could host three Jordan almonds is fashioned to the bark.

  “Oh no,” I mutter.

  Tzin, insists the hummingbird. See? Do you see? Do you see what you’ve done?

  I trot up our front steps and burst inside. My lover is sitting cross-legged on our baby blue couch, lost in her laptop. I say, “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “I just chopped down a hummingbird nest. I feel like the apocalypse.” My voice cracked at the word “feel”. Tears are stinging me, same as they did the time pigeons fucking on our balcony annoyed me and I threw a hairbrush at one. After it bounced off of her, she limped. I couldn’t deal with the fact that my impatience had maimed a wild thing. I wanted to jump off the balcony without so much as an abandoned mattress to cushion my fall.

  “You have to be more careful out there!” shouts my lover. As she shuts her laptop, I look down at my feet. I see green feet. I’m an ogre. I really need to cut my toenails.

  “I know,” I mumble.

  “Did you touch it?” she asks.

  “No,” I lie. My index finger grazed it.

  “Bring it in here.”

  I hop outside, fetch the branch, come back, and hold the twig before my lover. She peers at it, examining it.

  “Try to reattach it.”

  “With what?”

  “Rope, I guess.”

  I swish back outside to the garage, and snatch some rope off a shelf. I head back to the scene of the crime. I press the twig flat against a muscular branch and wind rope around both, binding them together. I loop and pull tight three big knots that blend into the wood. I stand back. I try to think of my creation as a tree house, Swiss Hummingbird Family Robinson, but it looks like what it is. Like a human without an engineering degree destroyed something fragile and tried to put it back together. Humpty Dumpty.

  Each morning, after my coffee, I scoop the newspaper off the driveway and check out the nest. November rains come. They drench the little home, turning it into a soggy cereal that poops onto the ground. The eggs never hatch but the ground gobbles them up so I guess they mulch my cacti. I watch hummingbirds dart towards anything sweet. They suckle at the sage. They still come to eat Mexican, but they aren’t as perky. They treat the guayaba the way Mom and Dad treated Tzintzuntzan, as romantic ruins.

  Bird Hair

  Life is a Prologue

  and then you die.

  I hope you enjoyed that

  mango pie.

  I’m sitting at Abuelita’s dining room table, chewing pink tamal. My greedy bitch-ass uncle and the woman he’s in the process of making his ex-wife shuffle into the room. They enter with very, very ______ steps. (Sometimes, if there’s no adjective to describe something, leave it alone. Wait for someone else to invent the word.) Greedy tío’s face works with his wife’s. They’re Greek chorus masks telling us something is the matter.

  In flattened voice, greedy tío announces, “My mother died.”

  Everyone in the dining room, Mom and Dad and Tío Miguel and Tía Ofelia, get different looks on their faces, but the looks communicate that their feelings are coming from the same place: the spring where horrible feelings come from.

  We leave whatever stupid thing we’re doing — sipping atole, stirring atole, dipping pastries in this doughy drink, dough, dough, dough dough, dodo birds — and we rise and fly up the tiled hall, past Abuelito’s office and into the room where we fed Abuelita apple juice with a dropper and changed her diapers while never commenting on how her ancient pussy hair spilled like a unicorn’s beard. Those last weeks we watched her move her hands in front of her mouth, and, you know, it seemed she was pulling invisible stings from it. That’s what everyone kept commenting. “Why is she pulling strings? It looks like she’s pulling strings from her mouth?”

  Isn’t that what the Fates did in Greek mythology? Spin, measure, and snip the thread of life? Abuelita’s room reeked of the Mexican dying process. The Mexican dying process smells of pulled strings, and pulled strings are the thin soul of a lady who enjoyed painting things far more ordinary and real than Frida Kahlo’s lifestyle.

  Abuelita was an artist of everyday strings.

  Greedy tío and Tío Miguel shuffle around Abuelita’s bed, a hungry baby and a good baby. Their lips quiver an orphan quiver that seems extra pathetic in light of their middle age and prostate problems.

  Tía Ofelia positions herself to the left of the bed. She shuffles inside herself. Spiritually. Outlined in permanent makeup, her tattooed eyes turn upward toward our heavens, a ceiling fan, and Ofelia’s voice invokes, “God!” so hard and painfully that her humanity molts and falls away, useless as feathers. She turns into one of the birds Abuelit
a used to keep caged in her dining room. Somewhere in the past, Abuelita is shuffling towards a cage, hands outstretched, stale cookie crumbs in her palm.

  Ofelia’s head bobbles. Now bird, she screeches in tongues we understand. She screeches God’s name over and over in undiscovered languages.

  I’m trembling not like a leaf but like someone who has never sat at someone’s bedside after her heart has set down its weapon. Pulled the final string and let it fall dental-flossily.

  The panic attack I’m suffering is happening so mildly it’s flying under the radar.

  I press my thighs together. I’m wearing gray shorts without underwear, and I don’t want anyone to see my pubes. I’m sitting on the bed beside Abuelita’s. On this bed, two months ago, Tío Miguel woke up beside Abuelito the day he became a dead Mexican.

  Later On

  Abuelita’s doctor happens to be the asshole’s wife. Her manicured hands are winding gauze from the top of Abuelita’s head, down her cheek, along her chin, up her other cheek, and repeating this trajectory, framing her face with a white O. The dressing reminds me of Jacob Marley’s ghost, but I don’t dare share this Dickensian connection with anyone.

  Diverticulitis

  Tía Ofelia calls the funeral home to arrange for them to come pick up Abuelita’s body. She tells them, “No, no, you don’t have to come immediately. Wait a few hours.” Abuelita’s youngest daughter, my Tía Pancha, is wincing in a hospital bed, waiting to have some of her colon scooped out, so she’s going to have to sneak out in order to come say goodbye.

  This is the AAunt Who Lives for Alcoholics Anonymous, Cigarettes, Fried Food, and Enya’s Music. Somehow, She Became Convinced That Enya Committed Suicide in the Name of Love, But Enya Didn’t, and Honestly, I Think That’s Why Enya’s Music Seems So Sweet to Her

  Tía Pancha’s daughters drive her to Abuelita’s. The taller of these two beauties with close-set eyes is standing in front of me. Pre-Colombian masks hanging from a small strip of wall by the spare bedroom appear to listen to us.

  “I feel relief,” my cousin whispers to me. “Don’t you?”

  Her eyes, which blur together as one, stare down my conscience. I remember a conversation we had two weeks ago in the dining room. A fly had buzzed as I’d whispered, “Sometimes, when no one is looking, I want to put a pillow over Abuelita’s face so that she’ll stop suffering.”

  My cousin’s eyes had bulged closer together. “Me, too,” she said.

  White Sox

  “She needs socks,” Ofelia is murmuring. “When my daughter died, we had to put socks on her.”

  Dad, who wears size EEE, disappears from the doorway. He reappears with a pair of socks we could use as a coffin.

  “I think I have some that’ll fit better,” I say. I walk to the bedroom where Abuelito’s ghost interrupted me while I was facebooking. My suitcase is plopped onto the desk, and I reach in and grab a pair of white anklets. No one has ever worn them. Abuelita is going to take their virginity. My lover’s mom gave them to me as a stocking stuffer.

  With giant awareness that I’m bringing socks to my dead grandmother’s feet, I carry them to her bed, lean over her body, and pull her white sheet towards her knees. Mom and I lift her swollen foot. I slide white cotton past curled toes and broken blood vessels. Mom holds the leg while my fingers make sure that elastic fits the right way around the ankle. The sock needs to fit right. Abuelita will be wearing it when forever ends.

  Family Business

  I’m standing by the nosy Pre-Colombian masks again, this time with Pancha’s shorter, but still beautiful, daughter.

  “We had to smuggle my mom out of the hospital because we haven’t paid her bill, yet,” she whispers. Grinning in spite of the smell, she adds, “She was contraband!”

  Her family, which includes a Colombian sister-in-law, has experience keeping cargo in motion.

  Dressing Up

  Ofelia and I are crossing the street. We are walking into a women’s clothing store named after feminine sin: Vanity.

  We stop among metal racks. Ofelia orders, “Find a white blouse.”

  All the clothes look black or colorful until a flock of white sweaters catches my eye. “White sweaters,” I say, pointing.

  “My mother was small,” Ofelia mumbles. “Find one in small.”

  We migrate to the white sweaters and flip through them. I say, “I think the littlest is medium.”

  Ofelia takes the littlest sweater from me, holds it up, and scrutinizes it. We turn to see the asshole and his wife standing among frocks. From her finger, she dangles the white sweater. Ofelia asks them, “What do you think?”

  “That’s not her,” says the asshole. “My mother doesn’t wear things like that.”

  He’s right. It’s an ugly sweater. It’s nerdy and too hot for August. The asshole’s frown surveys the store. He points at a lace dress. He says, “What about that beige thing?”

  Ofelia steps over to the beige thing, and reaches for its price tag. She reads it. I think about how the dress seems slightly slutty, but since the bottom half of Abuelita’s coffin will probably stay shut during her wake, it might be okay. A salesgirl smiles at us. “For whom are you buying this dress?” she asks.

  “For our mother,” answers Ofelia. “She just died.”

  The salesgirl’s smile runs in our opposite direction.

  “Yes, this is the one,” says Ofelia. “This is the dress. Do you have it in small?”

  The salesgirl nods and walks to the front of the store. She steps into the window display, reaches for the hem, and pulls our requested dress up over the head of a shiny, white mannequin lacking distinct facial features. Draping the dress over her arm, the salesgirl carries it to us. More salesgirls flock to the counter.

  “Who are you buying this dress for?” asks a salesgirl with a bony face.

  “My mother,” answers Ofelia. “She died about an hour ago. She lived in that house over there.” Ofelia lifts her hands and points with a finger wearing a ring so gaudy it must be an apology.

  The salesgirl’s grin falls. It splatters on the floor. She nods, reaches for tissue paper, and sets the dress on it. As she wraps it, the salesgirl cries without making any noise. None of her tears fall on the tissue paper or the dress. Why is she crying? It’s not like her abuelita just died.

  Photographing the Imaginary

  Ofelia sets the dress on the bed where Abuelito’s soul stepped out of his body. She leaves me alone with Abuelita’s body and the beige dress. I point my camera at the dress, tap the button, and take a picture that is as good as a ghost.

  Photographing Things That Tell Time So That They Become Stuck in a Certain Place in Time

  I’m taking pictures of everything because when something meaningful dies, everything you look at, whether it does so nicely or cruelly, reminds you of the difference between alive versus its opposite. I say to Ofelia, “I feel like I have to take a picture of everything.”

  She nods and holds radishes under the kitchen faucet. We are going to eat pozole for dinner. You can’t have pozole without radishes.

  I snap pictures of the kitchen clock and the microwave clock; it has special buttons for warming tortillas, chilaquiles, and other traditional foods, . I think about poetry that tells time, mostly W.H. Auden’s. Auden wasn’t Mexican, though, you can take his name and sound out a Mexican state: W-H-aca.

  Photographing Virgins

  An albondiga of a man and a crow of a man have climbed out of a black van they parked in the driveway. They unlatch metal legs and leave their gurney near the bathroom. The albondiga peers into Abuelita’s room. Miguel comments, “You must have a lot of experience handling people’s loved ones with delicate care.”

  The albondiga answers, “Yes, we are always delicate with… people.” While he continues reassuring Miguel of his expertise, I think about Miguel’s prostrate cancer, which my mind adds an R to, prostrate cancer. I remember how when Ofelia and her daughters picked us up at the airport and drove us to
Abuelita’s a few weeks ago, Ofelia was gossiping in the backseat about how Miguel’s cancer medicine might make him sprout chichis. Looking out the car windows, I saw yellow squares against black. Windows at night. I asked Ofelia, “Isn’t it better to have chichis and be alive than the other alternative?” She lit a cigarette, rolled down her window, and changed the subject to whether or not Abuelita might be possessed and should we shop for an exorcist.

  The albondiga and the crow stand at the foot of Abuelita’s bed, staring at her death, listening to Miguel who is still talking. He’s always talking. He’s dead right now but he’s still talking. I’m sitting on the wood and twine chair beside Abuelita. A headshot of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs from the white wall above us. She Mona-Lisa gazes upon both of us. I have finally put on calzones. Dad looks through his camera lens and snaps a photo of Abuelita, the Virgin, and me. He leaves out the crow, the albondiga, and Miguel.

  Photographing People Being Grief-Stricken Weirdoes

  As we’d screamed and wept and invoked God as a family right after Abuelita quit pulling strings, the asshole had gone and fetched his camera, too. He’d gotten to work taking pictures of our spectacle.

  Somebody always takes the pictures while somebody else makes the spectacle, and if they’re alive, Abuelitas paint pictures of what’s happening and sing and feed the birds.

  Photographing Colombians

  I’d found out through email that one of my friends had died two days before Abuelita. This friend, a Colombian Sappho — una poetisa increíblemente lésbica — had told me a story that helped me understand that my family was less sick than I felt we were for documenting Abuelita’s dead body and our reactions to it.

  My friend had confessed to me that once in Bogotá at an aunt’s funeral, she’d watched a cemetery worker jimmy open a dank mausoleum in order to rearrange the caskets. He was preparing to accommodate the woman sleeping in the coffin near everyone’s feet, but the man’s grip on a casket holding a long-dead aunt turned to margarine. Her box plummeted, hit brick, and crashed open. Pieces of long-dead aunt and beetles puffed and drizzled everywhere, a morbid pepper, and I asked her, “What did you do?”