by Myriam Gurba
“That doesn’t matter!” cried Abuelita. “My father gave me that piano as a wedding gift! You and your husband KIDNAPPED IT!”
“That’s because your irresponsible husband would have sold it! That was one of the few things our father gave us when we lived in the orphanage!”
“THAT DOESN’T MATTER! My father told me I could have that piano. You and your husband kidnapped it on my WEDDING NIGHT.”
Under gelatina breath, Caridad whispered, “Which wasn’t the night you got pregnant.”
Rage atrophied Abuelita’s lower lip. It quivered.
Instead of comforting her, I rose. I faked intestinal distress.
“Excuse me,” I said. “My gelatina is in a hurry.”
I had turned fifteen two months prior and was, according to this birthright, a full-blown woman. My parents had gifted me a birthday trip to Guadalajara where I would stay with different relatives and go deep into my Mexicanity. Mom and Dad had talked to me about issues like how to avoid being kidnapped and never asking a policeman for help, but they had not coached me about how to deal with hearing an abuelita called a slut. They had not coached me about how to deal with an abuelita’s tears. Nothing inside me knew what to do about a wounded abuelita. Seeing an abuelita cry and being unable to comfort her made me certain I wasn’t really a woman. I was still becoming one. Hardening into one. Hardening into that kind of seed.
Unsure of where Caridad’s toilet was, I wandered hallways. Humidity was yanking their wallpaper free. Long silky folds drooped and reached for tile floor, undressing the plaster. Water damage stained it yellowish and rusty, like urine was seeping through the walls. They were stained that color and gave off that smell, but it must’ve been plain water, the water that surprises you everywhere in Guadalajara, in the air, your hair, your mouth, the sewers, the jicama, your skin, the gutters, and the clouds.
Peering into each room I passed, I saw evidence that supported Dad’s accusation that Caridad was a hoarder. Sneering rocking horses wearing cobweb veils. Hand-painted wardrobes bursting with wedding dresses, christening gowns, and bathrobes. Statues of bearded and tonsured saints without hands and feet. A crib fit for Rosemary’s heavy baby. Empty birdcages and empty birdcages and empty birdcages and empty birdcages and empty birdcages. A lace parasol whose original color could’ve been anything. Louis XIV style armchairs. Mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. A room jammed with grandfather clocks.
Occasional squeals from the piano war found me. The hall dead-ended in a bathroom. Leaning against the doorway of the room before the john, I saw pelt draping the back of a rocking chair.
“Nacho…” I whispered.
Dad had once told me that the love of Caridad’s life wasn’t her husband, a peanut magnate named Pánfilo, but a cocker spaniel named after a chip. Caridad’s maid modified their love affair when she left the front door open. Realizing her mistake, the maid marched outside to see if Nacho had gotten out and of course he had. A bus had hit him but only knocked the life out of him. He had retained his canine shape. He hadn’t exploded and rained like an over-the-hill tomato hitting the dirt.
“Senora!” cried the maid. “Nacho!”
Caridad sprinted into the street, scooped dog corpse into her arms, and drove it to a man whose art relied on death. The man fashioned Nacho into décor Caridad could still stroke. A little rug. A pelt. The spaces where he’d had eyeballs puckered with emptiness.
I wanted to touch him as badly as I’d wanted to touch my murdered cousin in his coffin. Tiptoeing into his room, I stood by his chair. The room’s disuse stank very particularly. Nacho’s blindness stared at me. So did the maid. She was looking at me in the way that ghosts stare. Both were waiting for me to say something, something that would acknowledge their continued presence.
I wondered if Nacho licked the hands of the spirits that stayed in the house.
Dad had told me about one. He had lived with Caridad, Pánfilo, and their daughters when he was in twenties, and Caridad gave him a room in her hallway of spares. She fed Dad, too. Helped him practice his half-Mexican Spanish.
Dad worked teaching English and music at a private school. One day, he came home to find his belongings mildly rearranged. He thought a servant might’ve done it. Forgot about the subtle weirdness.
Next day, when he came back from teaching, instead of being mildly rearranged, Dad found his belongings moderately rearranged. A guitar that had stood in one corner was standing in the corner diagonally across from its home base. An army jacket that had been hanging in the closet had been tossed to the floor. A brown blanket had been pulled from the bed and draped over desk and its chair, as if children were playing fort. The alarm clock told time two hours too fast.
Dad stomped around the house, looking for Caridad. He found her on the living room sofa, stroking Nacho’s remains.
He said, “I think your daughters are playing with my stuff when I’m out. Can you tell them to stop?”
Caridad looked up from her love. “Why would they do that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“I’ll talk to them,” she said.
Next day, Caridad told Dad, “I talked to your cousins. They didn’t touch your stuff. I don’t know who did.”
Dad furrowed his billboard forehead.
“If you’re so worried about it, get a lock for the door,” she advised.
Dad walked to a hardware store, bought a lock, and installed it. His stuff remained undisturbed for three months. On the fourth month, Mom fell in lust with his long hair. She came to the house and delivered a bouquet to him. Feminism.
After work one evening, Dad slid his key into his extra lock. Turned it. Opened his door. Stepped into a brand new level of chaos. His crap was everywhere. His sheets and blankets had been stripped from his bed and flung at the four corners of his room. The closet doors, dresser drawers, and desk drawers hung in various states ranging from kind of ajar to flung the fuck open, their contents scrambled. Dad’s guitar lay on his flat bare mattress. Two snipped strings curled and claw marks scratched along the lacquer.
Dad stormed off, in search of Caridad. This time, he found her in the kitchen, burning something. Her daughters were chopping chayotes on a pine cutting board. A cauldron filled with water burbled on the stove.
“Yes?” asked Caridad.
“Somebody came into my room, opened everything, and threw it on the floor! Somebody snipped my guitar strings and scratched it!”
Caridad stared at him. The girls slowed their chopping. Knives went still.
Caridad tapped a wooden spoon against the cauldron’s lip. She asked, “Have you considered that maybe it’s not a person who’s doing this?”
Dad’s moustache curled.
Caridad said, “It could be something else.”
Caridad’s pretty daughter (the assessment is subjective) whispered something to her prettier daughter (even more subjective). The prettier daughter looked at Dad and said, “There’s a lady who works by the cathedral who can tell you if it’s human or something else. Do you want us to take you to see her?”
Caridad answered, “Yes,” for everyone.
Instead of finishing the dinner, Dad, Caridad, and the subjectively pretty and prettier daughters rode in a Pontiac to an apartment building where the special lady they’d discussed lived and received her clientele. She worked at a bitty, round, purple felt-covered table in her living room. As Dad sat across from her, smoothing his hippie combover, Caridad hissed, “Tell her.”
“I’m staying with my aunt,” Dad explained, gesturing at Caridad. “It started so slowly I thought it was them.” He pointed at his cousins, who huddled near a fringed lampshade. “First, I noticed that a few things would get moved around my room while I was away at work. Like a pencil or a sweater would be in a place I knew I hadn’t left it. Then bigger things started moving, like my guitar. Then, just, everything. It went for everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. It likes chaos.”
The special lady smiled and asked, “May I hold the ring that was your father’s?”
She pointed at the jewelry Dad wore on his right hand. He’d received it after his mom, Grandma B, went to check on Grandpa. He was tinkering in the suburban driveway after Thanksgiving dinner, and Grandpa had enjoyed his food so much that it was killing him. Grandma B watched as Grandpa’s shoes and pants, poking out from under the Studebaker’s front bumper, started to writhe. Wrench clattered against concrete, like punctuation. Period. The heart attack was finished as paramedics pulled up to the curb. Grandpa stiffened extra fast, marbleizing thanks to all the cholesterol.
Dad slid off the ring and handed it across the felt. He asked, “How did you know it was my father’s?”
The special lady took the ring, squeezed it, and explained, “I know the same way that I know that it is not these girls who are rearranging your belongings.” As she gestured at the sisters, they huddled closer so that their ears touched. “Neither are the servants. I know who it is.” She leaned across the table, closer to Dad’s facial hair forest. “Do you want to know who it is?”
Dad froze. Caridad cried out, “Yes!”
With her free hand, the special lady gestured, Pay me.
Caridad reached into her purse, pulled out a wad of paper money, coins, lint, stray hairs, and peanut shells. She placed the entity on the table. She whispered to Dad, “You’re welcome.”
The special lady stared at the wad, shrugged, and began, “The thing that is moving your things is a spirit that belongs to a man who used to live in your aunt’s house. His religion was bachelorhood, and he realized his mistake in his old age, but by then, well, the lifestyle was irredeemable. An affliction. He withered away alone, a miser. Since he knew he was going to watch the light die without anyone to pat his hand, he did. He left this world without leaving his fortune to any creature. It remains hidden on your aunt’s property, in the ground, with no one to claim it. This man’s spirit likes that you’re in his house. He likes that there is a young, musical gringo in love. He likes that he has somebody son-like to watch over. He feels like a father towards you as much as a ghost who never had children can. In his dead way, he loves you. He thinks you’re a decent person, and he’s unaccustomed to decent people.” Caridad raised her eyebrows.
“He knows that your girlfriend will ask you to marry her and that you’re going to be a good husband and that you’ll have three children who you will raise in the United States. You’ll take your Mexican wife up there just like your father took his Mexican wife up there. The spirit would like to help you. If you wait in your room tonight, he will come to your door. He will knock. Let the bachelor in and let him sit on your unmade bed. He will tell you where to find his fortune, but you have to be curious enough to let the damned, the forsaken, and the lonely in.”
One dead father was enough for Dad. He moved out that night.
I telepathied, “This might’ve been my dad’s room,” to Nacho’s fur. My fingers itched for his empty eye sockets. To get rid of the itch, I inhaled. I visualized myself grabbing Nacho’s remains and flinging them into the room where the piano war was happening. I’d follow on Nacho’s heels, burst into the room, and yell, “Did you see that?”
Would the presence of a fake ghost, a practical joke haunting, be enough to make Abuelita and her sister knock it off? Could I scoop Nacho off the living room floor by his eye holes while we all laughed, glad that a dead dog sailing across plates of burnt gelatina had reminded us what bullshit family heirlooms are because bugs and bacteria will inherit every heirloom and its heir someday? Termites will shit the world’s finest pianos. Even prime ministers’ eyeballs will jelly.
Somebody was shouting. She sounded like a turkey ready to get it on.
Grandma B had had a relationship with a turkey. She met Grandpa in a park that had used to be penitentiary grounds. After dynamite leveled the prison, masons installed its fountains and cobblestone paths. Landscapers planted grass, shade trees, and shrubbery. American expats convened around the gargling water to talk shit about the war that had claimed their lungs, eyes, feet, legs, arms, hands, or sanity. Dad’s dad wasn’t exactly an expat, he’d come to Mexico intact to learn Spanish, and he was rubbing elbows with the American who still had arms, reminiscing about home, when a green-eyed Mexican girl approached him. In Spanish, she asked him, “What’s your name?”
His name and hers are inconsequential. What matters is that she was fifteen and a native Spanish speaker. He was thirty-two and blonde enough to be an Aryan poster boy.
They married and worked on making babies in an apartment near the park. Grandpa got a job as a livestock inspector, checking animals for foot and mouth disease. One afternoon, he came home from work with a turkey. Its unpredictable wattle charmed Grandma B. His cocky, yet cognitively challenged walk, charmed her as well.
“Moco,” she decided. “This bird’s name is Moco.”
Grandma B squatted beside Moco and stroked his wing. He followed her around the house as she swept. He groomed himself while she painted her fingernails red. He napped with her everyday at two o’clock. Bird and teen woman dreamt near an open window, basking.
In November, Grandpa told Grandma B, “Go to the market. Pick up stale bread, potatoes, carrots, and celery.”
Grandma B carried shopping bags to the market, bought requested groceries, and came home.
“Mo-co!” she called. She heard no bird claws clacking against tiles. No flapping. No gobbling. No clucking. Nothing Turkish. “Moco!” she cried again.
Hearing commotion in the kitchen, she hurried to it. From kitchen doorway, she observed Grandpa from the waist up. He was standing at the chopping block, wearing his undershirt. His Polish face mashed with concentration and pleasure as he nestled bird corpse into tray. On the wood beside it, a bloody feather mountain. Beside this pillow stuffing, Moco’s head. His regretful eyes looked at Grandma B. Had Marie Antoinette’s eyes been open? Jayne Mansfield’s?
“Assassin!” screamed Grandma B.
Unshaken, Grandpa looked up at her. In Spanish, he flatly announced, “Feliz Thanksgiving.”
III. Behoove
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
Uno soñaba que en el mar
en una lancha iba a remar
mas de repente al embarcar
se cayó de la cama y se puso a llorar…
I sit beneath that dining room light bulb that keeps fizzling out. It makes sizzling sounds as it dies and reincarnates. My forearms press against cloth placemat. Holly patterns repeat across it. Perfect for August. I’m still staring at the piano.
Raindrops plink against hollow roof. Dull bullets from a failing revolution. I look to my left through the windows at the backyard. Darkness obscures white lilies and moss that grows wherever it feels like. Rancid newspaper piles and empty birdcages stacked against glass. Birds tweet somewhere.
Abuelito liked to sit on the chair against the window closest to me, the one by the empty easel. He’d cross his legs in ladylike fashion so that you could see his trouser socks and hungry ankles. A beige dot moves in the air there. I peer at it. It hovers above the chairs’ twine seat. I inch my eyes closer as lights flicker and thunderclaps strengthen the cliché.
My head keeps moving closer so that I can get a better look at the mosquito or gnat blurring in figure eights. My neck keeps craning and craning till I have to stop or I will get a Moco neck. The thing isn’t a gnat. It’s not a mosquito ready to suck blood from gringa eye. What waves is a solitary hand that’s been buried. Nobody’s attached to it. Liver spots dapple its skin, and its fingers gnarl with hate and wisdom. Its knuckles are knobs that don’t open a thing.
The hand is so desiccated it’s almost a monkey’s paw, and it gestures over and over. It gestures universally. The gesture speaks, and the gesture writes, and the gesture writhes. It writes for those who can, can’t, and would prefer not to. It writes for those who won’t, and it writes for those who will never say, “Never say never.” Never say never say never.
Go away. Leave. Get out. Shut the door. Did you forget something? Human fingers curl in towards the palm and uncurl, pointing at the door. Inhuman fingers curl in towards the palm and uncurl, pointing at the door.
This is not a feminine hand.
This is not a masculine hand.
This is a hand saying goodbye to its humanity.
This is a hand that wants you to leave. Take the rest of your life with you. Shut the door. Inhale every sound. Taste everything that trembles beneath the rabbit on the moon. Dunk it in milk first, like a child drowning un puerquito de piloncillo in a glass of hot chocolate.
puerquitos de piloncillo puerquitos de piloncillo puerquitos de pilonicillo
little piggy cookies little piggy cookies little piggy cookies
sugar cane sugar cane sugar cane
behoove behoove behoove
hoof hoof hoof
bienvenido
a
la
muerte
.
(Be Hooves
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
Otro soñaba que en el mar
en una lancha iba a remar
mas de repente al embarcar
se cayó de la cama y se puso a llorar
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
