Painting Their Portraits in Winter

by Myriam Gurba

  In an unfazed voice, she replied, “I got out my phone and started doing this.” She motioned taking pictures.

  Who Gives Birds Haircuts?

  Ofelia and I are driving to the flower stands across the street from the cemetery. We buy an arrangement composed of palm fronds and white roses, nestle it in the backseat, and drive to the funeral home. We go to the showroom and choose a coffin, and slide Abuelita’s birth certificate and a rosary across the undertaker’s desk. Ofelia tells the undertaker, “Put the rosary in her hands.” The undertaker nods. Her lipstick is unflattering.

  Ofelia and I stand in the pretty much empty mortuary parlor where the wake will happen. We watch a guy unlock Abuelita’s casket, pull back the wooden lid, and — no lie, no exaggeration — Abuelita looks drop dead deathly gorgeous and relaxed. Dying totally Botoxed her forehead. Ofelia leaves to go take care of more business, there’s so much bureaucracy when you die, and I spend time alone with Abuelita, gazing at her through a pane of glass that is the window to her face. I admire her cartilage and cheekbones so miraculous that they died for our sins. Once the wake gets underway and professors and gastroenterologists and businessmen and AAunts arrive to hug, kneel, pray, take pictures, eat cookies, and sip coffee, I wander to the rear of the funeral home, to a patio even the moonlight is afraid of, where birdcages big enough to be buried in stand in the four corners. Certain sections of me are always on the patio, in that special darkness, hanging out with the birds that have the strangest little haircuts. Haircuts like Buddhist dykes.

  Even This Title Is a Ghost

  Ghosts don’t need anybody to believe in them. They just are. Like pimples, autism, and steam. My dad’s dad, who was and will be my only American grandfather ever, didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in beer, and he believed in eating people’s house pets. He traveled to México during the Great Depression, which is México always, and he was wandering through a forest filled with owls, which were actually shape-shifting brujas, witches, when he heard somebody singing a pretty and sad song.

  My grandfather tiptoed to the owly forest’s edge and peaked around a needly tree trunk. He spied a village’s outskirts and on these outskirts was the thing you want outside your skirt, a cemetery. (This village, its outskirt, and the forest exist only in the story I’m telling. Sundown was upon them.)

  Grandpa leaned on the tree’s hip, watching Mexicans. It seemed that all the Mexicans who lived in this village were congregating there in their graveyard, which is creepy. Very goth. Muy goth. Which Mexicans can’t say. The th sound escapes them. They got goth. Got goth?

  The singing that drew Grandpa was coming from a big-ass biscuit of a minstrel whose bloatedness was straining his white shirt and pants almost too much. The guitar he was playing seemed a toy thanks to his William Howard Taftness. His mustache and moist, moist chin were parting and wagging while he crooned a tragic melody about a black dove. The song was so sad that it didn’t verge on ridiculous, it was ridiculous, and it was so ridiculous that it was a tragedy, and it was such a tragedy that it was ridiculous, and I could go on like this for the rest of the story, but then you might want me to die, and I enjoy living too much.

  Billows of baby’s breath cushioned the earth between graves, creating a flower fog, and marigolds bunches dotted the fog hither and hither, and each headstone had been transformed into an altar honoring the likes, and not the dislikes, of that particular dead villager.

  Flower wreathes woven together with ribbons were hanging from tombstones, and pictures of the dead and little trinkets that must’ve meant something to them when they were breathersa pet rock here, a tube of half-used lipstick there, a blunt here, a negligee therewere draped from the wreathes or arranged just beneath them. Also, at these gravesite altars, foods breathed odors and heat. Bowls of pozole were stabbed with spoons, and womanly papayas were chopped into wet and ready halves, and piles of guayabas smelled of ripe jock strap, and there was even a roasted rabbit with a mini-mango shoved in its mouth and gooseberry eyes making it a representative of Satan.

  There milled a few women dressed like great ladies, with hair wound into high buns, but most of the women praying rosaries at the graves were hobbity peasants who knew more about plows and standing child birth than those light-skinned bitches. These darker women embraced the rainbow and it embraced them: they wore its colors woven through their blouses, skirts, shawls, and ribbons streaming along their braids. The cemetery men wore white unless they were the bitchy snobs’ husbands. The bitchy snobs’ husbands wore charcoal-colored three-piece suits and mild grimaces.

  A priest was dawdling at a grave. Its head stone was chiseled with the name Jesús de Jesús. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers. The small white stain near his crotch represented…innocence.

  Curious about what was up, Grandpa let go of his tree. He walked up to an ageless Mexican kneeling in dirt, playing with a cricket. His cricket appeared trained to respond to his hand signals and hopped to the right when the man snapped his right hand. The cricket hopped to the left when the man snapped his left hand. In fact, the man looked a bit like the cricket, but this is not unusual. Human and pet often come to resemble one another as do husband and wife, master and slave, and babysitter and babysittee.

  In New Jersily-accented Spanish, Grandpa pleaded, “Excuse me.” The man and the cricket stopped their game and looked up. Grandpa asked, “What’s going on?” He gestured at the ado. “Why aren’t the people eating the food?”

  The Mexican bent his right hand, lowered it, and the cricket hopped on for the ride. The cricket man took a luxurious amount of time standing up, and once he was erect, he petted his insect.

  “Tonight,” the guy explained, “after all these living people have gone back to their big or little houses, they will go to sleep. When they are asleep, and deep in the place where dreams happen, the spirits of the dead will crawl through a funny keyhole that only turns tonight. When these visitors come, believe me, they’re hungry.”

  Grandpa’s smirk told the cricket stroker all he needed to hear.

  The cricket man and his bug stared him down. “Stay,” the guy challenged. It was apparent from the cricket’s stare that it was challenging him, too. “You’ll see.”

  Wanting to prove the bug man a pendejo, Grandpa decided to stay. As the sky turned black, black, black, black, black, the Tafty guitarist quit strumming. Women rounded up their cheeky kids. Old ladies lifted their fingers to bless themselves with the sign of the cross and then ran these same fingers along their goatees. Young and youngish women pulled their shawls tightly around their chichis. Nobody likes a chilly chichi.

  A breeze stirred marigolds, fallen pine needles, and tissue paper decorations strung from tomb to tomb. These featured precisely cut flowers or skulls and skeletons in action, riding horses and playing cards. These images reminded everybody that they’d better get home and get in bed and quit looking delicious: The dead were coming to town and they were bringing mortal appetites.

  Families, orphans, lovers, and the priest emptied out of the cemetery and flowed down various roads. Talented brats sucked their fists and snorted, and a doe watched from a bramble thicket, glad that her immediate family wasn’t in any of the tamales in the graveyard. Those were beef, pork, possum, and stray puppy. The doe turned her pretty butt and pranced into the owl/witch pine forest.

  Mexicans abandoned Grandpa with his fear, which was small, an ember. Grandpa wadded his poncho and wedged it between a headstone and earth. He rested his platinum hair and giant Slavic forehead on it. Candles on a nearby tequila baron’s tomb flickered. Wax dripped. Flames gave up and joined the dead. Grandpa wanted to keep vigil but his blonde eyelashes were a bitch. They got in they way. Mexico blackened. He snored.

  Gluttonous sounds were crawling into his ears, and it wasn’t a trick. He smelled the flowers and remembered those were for the dead, and his fingertips scratched against the tombstone he was hugging. He remembered, “I’m in Mexico, I’m in a cemetery, and I�
��m here to prove that that Mexican with the cricket is a fool.”

  His heart was beating faster than my hamster’s in the seconds before she was murdered, but Grandpa didn’t want to die lying down so he knelt and snaked his face up along the letters D-E-P, the Hispanic world’s equivalent of R-I-P. He peeked across initials. His breath stopped as his blue eyes adjusted to darkness interrupted by the glow of a few tenacious votive candles. He saw them.

  One was shoving his tongue down a cognac glass and lapping brandy. Two were tearing a tortilla into snowflakes. One was chewing an unwrapped tamal, and her neighbor was chomping the soft, good part out of a bolillo and leaving the crust like the trash it is. One was belching and hadn’t developed a language to apologize with, and one was biting, BITING another’s pink nalgas. The one being bitten squealed and dropped her macaroon. The bully swooped in and snatched the fallen food, scarfing it.

  Three little pigs times three little pigs times three little pigs equals many more pigs. These pigs weren’t in shape enough to be wild. Their cellulite, blonde hair, and complexions gave away their domesticity. They were somebody’s. A herd of future lunches and breakfasts.

  Grandpa’s fear melted like nuked Velveeta.

  He watched the pigs tear it up and party till the earth’s rotation lightened the night. Sky grayed, and then came a greenish tint, like when sewer gas casts a romantic haze over the ghetto. This evil color is particularly pretty when it appears in the human iris. The pigs glanced at the horizon and took the changing sky as a warning. They lifted their snouts and turned their butts to their mess. Ears bounced, ears that would’ve been delicious fried, as they trotted away. They must’ve been headed back to the pens they’d escaped from. They must’ve been looking forward to sleeping off their crudas. Los hangovers. Hangover de puerquito. Oink-oink, barf-barf, oink, barf, dream.

  Something was wagging Grandpa’s foot. He opened his eyes and saw sun backlighting a human form.

  “Gringo!” the form boomed. “Hi!”

  Grandpa sat up. Monarch butterflies tangled in the lovemaking act humped past. The human form leaned left. Now Grandpa could see him. It was the cricket stroker.

  “What did I tell you?” he asked. “Look! The food is gone!” The cricket stroker puckered his lower lip at the graveyard mess. Since he was missing his front bottom teeth, his chin crumpled inward.

  Grandpa smiled. He felt proud that he had the ultimate neiner neiner neiner to toss at the fool. “There aren’t any spirits!” Grandpa cried. “Pigs came to eat the food! I saw them! They came and ate your offerings! Your ghosts are bacon.”

  The cricket stroker shrugged, smiled, and asked, “Can’t chorizo and a memory of something you loved be the same thing?”

  My grandpa realized, the man’s cricket… was gone.

  Be Hoof, Behave, Behoove (and Be Hooves): A Four-Legged Triptych Featuring Pigs Both Chauvinist and Piloncillo

  I. Be Hoof

  Los cochinitos ya están en la cama

  muchos besitos les dió su mamá

  y calientitos todos con pijama

  dentro de un rato los tres roncarán…

  Between the Sunday morning that she stopped moving her hands as if pulling invisible strings from her mouth and the early Tuesday evening that is this sentence, three people have lain in the place where Abuelita lived her last five years, what looks like an anemic bed.

  Tío Rafael, a “used car salesman” who flew in from Tijuana, slept in it after her wake. I worried his girth was going to break it. The bed survived. It must be very strong.

  Walking past Abuelita’s bedroom door some hours ago, I glimpsed my asshole tío lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling fan. It was clear that he was thinking. Probably about how sad it is that he’s an orphan now and what kind of poison he should use to kill his wife.

  Now I have the bed to myself. Everyone else has left to attend the first in a trio of nighttime masses that will be held for Abuelita’s soul, to help it get to where it should be, which isn’t here. I’m not kneeling with the rest of my family, pretending to pray, sitting out holy communion, because after we watched four gravediggers in mom jeans and long-sleeved t-shirts lift Abuelita’s casket by rope, lower it onto Abuelito’s, shovel dirt over it, nestle bricks over the dirt, spread mortar over the bricks, shovel more dirt on top, watch us fling white roses down the hole, shovel the last of the dirt on top, and plop my great-grandparents’ graham cracker of a headstone over the mound (they’re somewhere in that plot, too), all dusty we drove to a restaurant by that roundabout where a big-ass statue of Minerva holds a spear that could shish-kabob rhinos.

  Ofelia’s husband, Tío Ramon, called the owner ahead of our arrival so that when we entered through the restaurant’s back door, a black taffeta bow hung over heads. A hostess led us to three tables pushed together. Our grief attracted mariachis with womanly thighs. They clustered around our emotions. Miguel creaked out of his seat to join them in song. “Llorar y Llorar!” he insisted. He screamed and wept through the ranchera. His skinny voice drowned the fat voice of the square-faced mariachi, “…cry and cry, it’s useless now that I’ve lost you! I want you back! Come save me, wake me, rescue me from this suffering…”

  Tears wept down Miguel’s Miguel Hidalgo face. Got stuck in the creases leading to his lips. Never exited these canyons. In English, the lyrics of “Llorar y Llorar” sound melodramatic. In Spanish, they sound patriotic. Histrionics fuel Mexican-ness.

  Fountain gargling in the patio behind me teased my bladder. My eyes wandered after a rogue mariachi straying towards purple geraniums. He lifted his leg and planted boot heel against flower planter. Bow poked out of his back pocket. Violin lackadaisically dangled from his left hand. From the lap of his skintight pants, he slid a phone. Flipped it open. Fingered a text. I love it when mariachis text. It’s like watching tradition text.

  As the other mariachis strummed, growled, and blew, and my asshole uncle rose to out sing Miguel, I turned to examine the items on the terracotta tray a waitress was sliding before me. I grimaced. I pointed and asked, “What’s that?”

  My cousin laughed at me. “A pig’s foot,” she answered.

  I didn’t need to say “gross.” My American bitch face said it.

  She laughed. “You’ve never eaten foot before?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve never had hoof.”

  “Try it. Come on.”

  I reached for the foot. Its sliminess felt chilly but not cold. Were we shaking hands?

  My other cousin instructed, “Eat it. Eat the foot.”

  To show them what I’m made of, that my DNA is as sick and earthen as theirs, I slid the foot between my front teeth and nibbled the tip. I imagined I was chewing my fingernails, and it felt like that, like gnawing cuticle skin. I reached for my coffee cup, brought it to my bitch face, and chased the pork with bitterness. Caffeinated claw.

  The foot had tasted so unpedicured. Barnyard. It began bucking this morning. Momentarily, its squirms, quivering. My stomach wants to go for a walk.

  Hoof is my wandering companion. The thing that calls us is Abuelita’s bed. We go and lie in it. With unkosher thing tracing my stomach lining, I see what Abuelita saw everyday for the last five years. Ceiling fan.

  There is a sensation of her hereness and his hereness, and their teasing each other and a shawl. Abuelita never wrote stupid poetry like he did. She sewed clothes. She made living and dead babies. She also made kindness.

  She was a vessel but she was everything in her vessel, too. Perfections and imperfections and wrinkles and veins overflowed from her. She could be mean sometimes. Once when my brother annoyed her, she grabbed him by the elbow, dragged him to Abuelito’s study, shoved him in there, and locked the door. A legit punishment. There was no TV in there. Only books, lust, and dust.

  A white string dangles from the ceiling fan. My hands float to my mouth and pull invisible string from my throat. This string unfurls from an infinite spool that winds inside me and you, and connects us to every
important work of art.

  I look across my ribs and see my feet curled at the foot of her bed. I slid socks identical to the ones I’m wearing over Abuelita’s bare feet while they were warmish but stiffening, becoming hooves. I think about moving my big toe. Decide not to.

  Some piece of linen smells of her life and death. These yin and yang scents are something you can’t and don’t necessarily want to rinse away. There’s something horribly cathartic in their coexistence. Yin and yang. Hoof and mouth.

  II. Behave

  Los cochinitos ya están en la cama

  muchos besitos les dió su mamá

  y calientitos todos con pijama

  dentro de un rato los tres roncarán

  Uno soñaba que era rey

  y de momento quiso un pastel

  su gran ministro hizo traer

  500 paseteles nomás para el…

  Sun has set behind the ice cream parlor, the pharmacy, the Center for the Study of Down Syndrome, the chiropractor’s office, the ladies clothing store where we bought Abuelita’s last dress, and moldy square homes guarded by metallic gates.

  Shoulders hunch below light bulb flickering over dining room table. Being in Abuelita’s bed after dark hadn’t felt right. Once darkness overpowered, it felt as if she was still in the bed, pulling strings. The hoof and I retreated.

  I stare at the chocolatey piano by the sliding glass door. I once heard Abuelita and her oldest sister, Caridad, exchange words over a piano. I don’t know if this is the one that inspired their tête-à-tête.

  “That’s mine,” Abuelita had accused, pointing at the piano in Caridad’s living room.

  With dentures coated with burnt gelatina, which is pig bone ground into dessert, Caridad argued, “It wouldn’t still be in the family if it wasn’t for me.” She lifted her lipstick-stained napkin to her mouth and made it even more feminine. As she daubed, her frizzy curls didn’t move.

  My plate of burnt gelatina clicked as I set in on the table. My butt cheeks tensed. I was ready to watch two old broads duke it out.